Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 155

Trump Can’t Change Coal’s New Reality

America’s coal industry has struggled mightily over the past decade and has watched its share of the power market steadily decrease. President Trump promised to revive U.S. coal during his campaign and has made overtures towards following up on that promise in 2017, but he hasn’t yet accomplished anything of real value. If you believe the CEO of CSX, a railroad company responsible for hauling vast quantities of American coal, the energy source doesn’t have much of a future. The FT reports:

CSX, a freight railroad company with origins in the bituminous coal seams of Appalachia, will not buy a single new locomotive to pull coal trains, chief executive Hunter Harrison told analysts on Wednesday. […]

Lance Fritz, chief executive of the Union Pacific railroad, said in a recent interview that Mr Trump’s move to scrap Clean Power Plan regulations was unlikely to grow its coal business. “It takes away a headwind,” he said.

None of this will come as a surprise to regular readers, though it will certainly dishearten Trump’s base, which has been hoping for a much-needed domestic victory in the President’s war on what he calls the “war on coal.” But of course the truth is that coal hasn’t faltered because of overregulation or overzealous green initiatives put in place by Trump’s predecessor. No, this shift in our national power mix has come courtesy of market forces.

The shale boom unleashed a flood of new natural gas supplies, and that glut has driven prices of that fossil fuel to a point low enough where many coal producers can no longer compete on price. For everyone not intimately involved with the coal industry (the vast majority of Americans), that’s a welcome development—burning natural gas doesn’t pollute the local environment nearly as much as coal, and emits roughly half as much greenhouse gases. Moreover, this inter-energy source competition is helping keep electricity prices down for consumers.

If the President wanted to revitalize coal, he’d have to go after fracking. That seems implausible, even for him. Trump won’t back down from his “war on coal” rhetoric because it scores political points, but those with a real financial stake in what happens next to the industry can see the writing on the wall. For proof, look no further than the rail industry.

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California’s Green Policies Are Going Haywire

Environmentalists cheered a California vote earlier this week that extended the state’s broken carbon market until 2030. The BBC reports:

California legislators have voted to extend a law to cut carbon emissions, weeks after President Donald Trump said the US would withdraw from the Paris climate accord. The policy, which requires firms to purchase permits to release pollutants, will be extended to the year 2030. California Governor Jerry Brown said Republicans and Democrats had taken “courageous action” with the move.

Jerry Brown can label this extension as “courageous” as he wants, but it won’t change the fact that this is merely extending the life of a broken policy.

Let’s take a look at the current state of California’s carbon market. The system ostensibly works by auctioning off carbon credits to emitters, but these auctions have been resounding failures. Credits have been selling for the bare minimum price allowed by the scheme, and emitters are buying the bare minimum of credits required by the state. In other words, companies aren’t buying into the plan (literally), which doesn’t just reflect poorly on the outlook industry has on the state’s carbon market, it also dilutes the price of carbon to levels too low to actually incentivize heavy emitters to change behaviors.

Implementing this regional carbon market was always going to be difficult. The state is rightfully worried about producing a carbon price that’s too high for businesses, because that might force them to relocate out of California (and bring their emissions with them), losing the state money without actually mitigating climate change in a process known as “carbon leakage.” Europe’s carbon market is facing the same problem, and it doesn’t have any good solutions at hand. This is a structural weakness of assembling carbon markets in a piecemeal fashion, but simply extending the system—with all of its faults—until 2030 is hardly something you could call a solution.

Speaking of solutions, California’s love affair with solar power—one of the key pieces of its drive to reduce its emissions—is producing unintended results. As the FT reports, a glut of solar power during parts of the day is overloading the state’s power grids and actually producing negative electricity prices:

At noon on clear spring days, too much solar power courses through the state’s electrical grid. Generators must pay customers to take excess supply — a condition called “negative prices” — or unplug their plants. Still, California consumers have some of the highest electricity rates in the country.

Note that these “negative” prices aren’t bringing down the average rates for consumers in the Golden state, which are still among the highest in America. No, these occasional negative rates are symptoms of renewables’ biggest deficiency—their intermittency—and this volatility in supply is as much of a problem when solar panels are producing too much electricity as it is when they’re producing too little.

Between its carbon market and its growing solar industry, little is going according to plan in California.

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How to Turn the “Ultimate Deal” into the Ultimate Failure: Ignore the Past

Seventeen years ago this week, the leaders of Israel, the United States, and the putative state of Palestine gathered at Camp David to try their collective hand at what President Trump is now aiming to achieve: the “ultimate deal”—a conflict-ending solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The July 2000 Camp David summit was unique. No subsequent peacemaking effort has brought together two empowered Israeli and Palestinian leaders and a U.S. President willing to mediate at a high stakes summit. And yet they failed.

As one of the Americans at the summit during those fateful 13 days in July, I’ve spent a good deal of time sorting through the reasons why it failed. And as a trained historian, I’m particularly embarrassed to admit that, caught up in the moment, we didn’t pay enough attention to the past, particularly to those lessons we might have drawn from the only successful Arab-Israeli summit a U.S. President has ever brokered: the September 1978 Camp David summit between Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin.

This is not an abstract history lesson: If the Trump Administration wants to avoid a costly and embarrassing failure, it would be well advised to examine the three key reasons we failed and thus learn the lessons that the second Camp David summit still holds for would be U.S. peacemakers.

First, are both sides ready, or at least do they share some sense of urgency? At Camp David the answer was a double no. Convinced that a violent explosion was coming that fall, frustrated by his failure that spring to cut a deal with Assad, and determined to take advantage of the remainder of Clinton’s term to reach at least one peace agreement, Barak was in a hurry to convene a summit with Arafat.

Arafat on the other hand, wasn’t. The PLO leader feared an Israeli-U.S. squeeze play, and had warned us in June of the risks of failure. In the end, he came because Clinton asked him to come, but he arrived profoundly suspicious of Israel even while he saw the significance of being invited to Camp David. I’ll never forget meeting him that first night he arrived and his reminding me that Sadat had been at Camp David, too.

Still, Arafat certainly wasn’t looking to follow the path of the assassinated Egyptian President and would remark several times that we wouldn’t be attending his funeral. The PLO leader was persuaded correctly that Barak needed an agreement more than he did; thus he had a distinct advantage during the summit: the willingness to hold out for what he wanted and to pocket concessions without making many of his own. That asymmetrical sense of urgency made success almost impossible.

Second, is a deal possible? At Camp David, it wasn’t. I don’t care how committed an American President is to reaching an agreement, if the two parties aren’t within striking distance of one, failure is guaranteed. And in the summer of 2000, the gaps between Arafat and Barak on the core issues required to reach an accord, even a partial one, were as wide as the Grand Canyon, well beyond any mediator’s capacity to bridge.

Of course, this was the conundrum of a leaders’ summit. Israel’s logic—accepted by Clinton and his team—was that only in the pressure and urgency of the summit would Arafat and Barak be willing to make the key trade-offs on the big issues: borders, refugees, Jerusalem, and security. Neither leader would share his bottom line before getting into the very thick of the negotiations. In a galaxy far, far away that would have made some sense. But on Planet Earth in 2000, given the suspicions between Arafat and Barak and the gaps on the core issues, there was simply no possibility of a deal, if the goal was a conflict-ending accord.

That May we had participated in secret talks in Sweden (one of only two times that I entered a country anonymously) between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators. Maybe it was the Swedish midnight sun, but I left persuaded that neither side was ready or able to reach an accord based on where they seemed to be on the big issues, especially Jerusalem. Instead, Barak seemed to believe that the only way to find out where Arafat stood was an action-forcing presidential summit that would allow the President to broker the necessary concessions. Serious Israeli-Palestinian violence weeks later only deepened his concern that a summit was necessary to prevent a far more serious and sustained convulsion.

Barak was right about the possibility of violence, and at the summit he was bold, going further on some of the issues, especially borders and Jerusalem, than any of his predecessors had gone. But for Arafat, who could afford to wait for better terms (which he would get by December 2000 in the “Clinton parameters”), there was no urgency. Equally important, three months earlier, Barak had offered Hafez Assad 99 percent of the Golan Heights; there was little chance of Arafat accepting Barak’s proposal for 92 percent of the West Bank. As painful as it is to admit now, we—and certainly the Israelis—trivialized, even disrespected, the issues on the table and somehow believed they could be resolved. The bottom line at Camp David was pretty grim: No agreement was possible on any issue, let alone an accord that would end their conflict.

Third, make sure the U.S. government runs the summit. At Camp David, the summit ran us. We didn’t have a sustained strategy, partly because we really had very little sense of how far the parties were prepared to go; and it wasn’t until late in the summit that Barak shared some of his final positions. Moreover, unlike the Carter-brokered 1978 Egyptian-Israeli summit, where the U.S. side controlled the text, (which went through more than twenty drafts), we were whipsawed by both Barak and Arafat. Our no-surprises policy, in which we agreed to clear language with Israel in advance, made it very hard to maintain the independence necessary to develop our own bridging proposals. On the summit’s third day, we put a paper on the table intended to start narrowing the gaps; Barak hated the text; the President wouldn’t push him. So we pulled and revised it. And this time Arafat rejected it, too. My own conclusion was that the summit basically came to an end that day.

History, said Mark Twain, doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. The circumstances of 1978 were different from those of 2000, and certainly different from today. There may be no repeats or strict parallels in peacemaking, but there are clearly rhythmic patterns worth considering.

For the Trump Administration the past offers up some very bitter truths and cruel realities that shape the current climate for Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking. And while the Administration may actually have several elements going for it—an unpredictable President; a close relationship with Israel; and an emerging alignment between Israel and the Arab states—the lessons of the past would seem to outweigh them.

What we ignored—or at least didn’t have the benefit, let alone luxury of, at the second Camp David summit—was what made the first Camp David summit work. Two strong leaders in Sadat and Begin, who were masters of their political houses and not complete prisoners of their ideologies; and the former in particular, a larger-than-life heroic figure who ten months before the summit astounded the world with an historic visit to Jerusalem. What’s more, we had a doable deal—returning Sinai for a peace treaty with none of the religious or identity baggage associated with refugees or Jerusalem. And finally, in 1978, the United States had a President driven, disciplined, and dedicated enough to push and pull the two sides to an agreement, and to broker a follow-up peace treaty six months later in March 1979.

We had none of that at the second Camp David, and we were dealing with issues far more complex than the ones Carter had encountered 13 years earlier. Even so, the circumstances of 2000 were in many respects far more advantageous for peacemaking than the ones the Trump Administration faces today.

Then, we had a risk-ready Israeli Prime Minister; today, we have one who’s risk-averse and doesn’t see his mission as fathering a Palestinian state which will require major concessions on borders and Jerusalem.

Then, we dealt with a popular Palestinian leader who had the legitimacy to reach a deal if he wanted one; today, we have a Palestinian leader who is weak, unpopular, and who presides over a national movement that looks more like Noah’s Ark, with two of everything: statelets, constitutions, security services, and visions of where and what Palestine should be.

Then, we had a relatively stable Middle East; today, we confront a broken, angry, and dysfunctional region where Iran is rising; four Arab states are in various phases of chaos, conflict, and disorder; and ISIS, while on the verge of losing its Caliphate proto-terror state, is by no means a spent force (not to mention the rise of al-Qaeda and its affiliates). And while Saudi Arabia and the Emiratis seem more risk-ready when it comes to dealing with Israel, it’s hard to see how they can compensate for the absence of a serious Israeli-Palestinian negotiating process. Indeed, those same Gulf States would almost certainly argue that no deal is preferable to a bad one or an agreement that produces another weak or failing Arab state.

None of this is intended to persuade the Trump Administration to hang a “closed for the season” sign on the peace process.

The recent agreement on water—apparently brokered by Trump’s envoy Jason Greenblatt—shows that if the two sides are ready to do business on interim, functional, and practical issues, a U.S. mediation role can be important. And the recent terror attack on the Haram/Temple Mount—and Israel/Palestinian efforts to de-escalate them—is reason enough for Washington to pay attention, particularly for an Administration that was initially prepared to move the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

This walk down memory lane is intended more as a note of caution to a new Administration that seems far too often caught up in its own version of reality. If President Trump continues to see the world of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking the way he wants it to be rather than the way it is, he will almost certainly fail.

It’s unclear what kind of gains the Trump Administration can achieve on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. But at least for now, barring some unanticipated, unpredictable, and unforeseen development, the so-called ultimate deal won’t be one of them.

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The Private Putin Meeting and Trump’s Legitimacy

At a dinner at the G20 summit, President Trump got up and walked over to Vladimir Putin for a one-on-one conversation, with only Putin’s interpreter present, that lasted for anywhere between a few minutes (White House version) and as long as an hour (reported by Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer, citing other leaders who remarked on the exchange). The New York Times notes why this is a problem:

“We’re all going to be wondering what was said, and that’s where it’s unfortunate that there was no U.S. interpreter, because there is no independent American account of what happened,” said Steven Pifer, a former ambassador to Ukraine who also specializes in Russia and nuclear arms control.

“If I was in the Kremlin, my recommendation to Putin would be, ‘See if you can get this guy alone,’ and that’s what it sounds like he was able to do,” added Mr. Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

This all may have been as perfectly innocent, as the White House is claiming. But Trump’s willingness to meet with Putin without even an American interpreter present was at best a sign that he hasn’t mastered some of the most basic elements of his job; whatever happened in that meeting, the impossibility of knowing what was said there will further diminish the President’s ability to lead the country.

It is news stories like this that will endanger the legitimacy of the Trump presidency; the naive belief that something like this could be concealed is almost as troubling as some of the more sinister interpretations Trump’s most inveterate critics will place on this mysterious and unsettling encounter.

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California Wakes Up to Housing Cataclysm

Stifling building restrictions in one of America’s most progressive states have choked off access to housing for people of modest means, making homeownership the preserve of the state’s corporate elite even as low-income people are forced into homelessness or back-breaking commutes. The New York Times reports:

A full-fledged housing crisis has gripped California, marked by a severe lack of affordable homes and apartments for middle-class families. The median cost of a home here is now a staggering $500,000, twice the national cost. Homelessness is surging across the state. […]

The extreme rise in housing costs has emerged as a threat to the state’s future economy and its quality of life. It has pushed the debate over housing to the center of state and local politics, fueling a resurgent rent control movement and the growth of neighborhood “Yes in My Back Yard” organizations, battling long-established neighborhood groups and local elected officials as they demand an end to strict zoning and planning regulations.

Now here in Sacramento, lawmakers are considering extraordinary legislation to, in effect, crack down on communities that have, in their view, systematically delayed or derailed housing construction proposals, often at the behest of local neighborhood groups.

Wealthy communities in the superheated economic zones of California—the Bay Area and parts of Los Angeles—have successfully managed to block necessary construction for decades, usually using progressive appeals to anti-developer and pro-environmentalist sentiment. But the end result is merely to entrench power in some of the most privileged areas of the country, driving up home equity for the well-off while blocking middle-class families from moving in.

California’s surging living costs have also changed the political character of the state, heightening inequality and probably making it more liberal as the white working class left for cheaper states elsewhere in the Southwest. The problem has perpetuated itself because as people in the middle left for greener pastures, the constituency for affordable housing got smaller. Now things have reached a boiling point.

It’s good to see that Sacramento is taking this urgent problem seriously. Other big urbanized states should take note, so that they can head off a similar crisis before it hits.

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Are Millennials Having More Sex or Less Sex? Both, Says New Report

There is a curious contradiction in breathless media dispatches about millennial sex lives. On the one hand, dozens of reports have highlighted supposed sexual libertinism among young people: Reports of Tinder rampages, campus hookups, and casual dating.

More recently, though, this narrative has been called into question by a new set of articles insisting that actually, contrary to the caricature, millennials are having less sex than previous generations. What gives?

New data from the polling firm Ipsos helps to reconcile these two competing narratives. According to Ipsos, yes, millennials have fewer partners on average than Boomers or GenXers. But this conceals significant variation. Ipsos writes: “There is a divergence between extremes where more Millennials are not having sex at all, but also those who are having sex are more likely to have more sexual partners or to have started earlier.”

On the one hand, millennials are more likely to have been abstinent for the past month than their predecessors were at the same age. “In the US, a third (32%) of Millennials say they haven’t had sex at all in the past four weeks (when they are on average 27 years old) compared to a fifth of Generation X (19%) when they were 27.”

On the other hand, they are more likely to be playing the field: “16% of US Millennials have had three or more sexual partners over the past year, compared with 13% of Generation X at an equivalent point in 2000,” Ipsos reports. 

Millennial sexual habits are understandably of keen interest to the media, but they are tough to generalize. Both the “hookup culture” narrative and the “sexually isolated” narrative communicate part of the truth.

Apps like Tinder and loosening sexual norms might be encouraging hookups even as some millennials delay serious dating for financial reasons, and others turn away from casual sex altogether. The Ipsos data provides ample room for speculation. In the meantime, though, it’s interesting to note that millennials are experiencing a certain kind of sexual inequality: On the high end, young people really are prolific, even though as a whole they are more restrained.

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The Iran Deal Survives—For Now

The Trump Administration on Monday evening re-certified that Iran is in compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal.) They did so only over strenuous objections from the President, as the New York Times reports:

Administration officials announced the certification on Monday evening while emphasizing that they intended to toughen enforcement of the deal, apply new sanctions on Iran for its support of terrorism and other destabilizing activities, and negotiate with European partners to craft a broader strategy to increase pressure on Tehran. Aides said Mr. Trump had insisted on such actions before agreeing to the consensus recommendation of his national security team. [….]

At an hourlong meeting last Wednesday, all of the president’s major security advisers recommended he preserve the Iran deal for now. Among those who spoke out were Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson; Defense Secretary Jim Mattis; Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the national security adviser; and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to an official who described internal discussions on the condition of anonymity. The official said Mr. Trump had spent 55 minutes of the meeting telling them he did not want to.

Mr. Trump did not want to certify Iran’s compliance the first time around either, but was talked into it on the condition that his team come back with a new strategy to confront Tehran, the official said. Last week, advisers told the president they needed more time to work with allies and Congress. Mr. Trump responded that before he would go along, they had to meet certain conditions, said the official, who would not outline what the conditions were.

As we’ve written before, a strategy to confront Iran’s non-nuclear bad behavior is necessary—and appears to be in the works. Following the re-certification, the Administration imposed new sanctions related to Iran’s ballistic missile activities. To the President’s defenders, this will look exactly like Trumpian deal-making applied to Iran: make the Iranians believe that we’re serious about walking away from the deal entirely, don’t do anything overly rash to actually the cancel deal so long as they comply, and try to de-facto renegotiate via new sanctions.

Unfortunately, if reports of yesterday’s events are to be believed, it does not appear as if the Trump Administration is playing so complex a strategic game. There’s no indication that the President has even attempted to lay the groundwork, either in Congress or with our European allies, as to how to re-impose sanctions in the event of a sudden withdrawal, or even how to go about confronting Iran with further sanctions related to their non-nuclear activities. In fact, if the reporting on the President’s last-minute objections is accurate, his own National Security Council don’t seem to have fully formulated such an approach.

It’s a pity, because it wouldn’t be a bad time for the President to learn to walk and chew gum at the same time. He still has allies on Capitol Hill who are willing to confront Iran, even though they are admittedly currently more focused on healthcare reform and whatever portions of the domestic agenda will follow. And while Europe as a whole remains deeply skeptical of confronting Iran so long as it remains nuclear compliant, some more hawkish European leaders may be willing to help. For example, France’s President Emmanuel Macron, meeting with Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu over the weekend, said he shared many of Netanyahu’s concerns about Iran and Hezbollah.

There are meaningful ways that the Trump Administration could work with Congress and our allies in Europe and the region to put pressure on Iran. But precipitous withdrawal from the nuclear deal without a clear strategy or support would be a bad way to go about it. Indeed, it might just play into Iran’s hands.

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The Mirror of Justice in Russia

Few would argue with the propositions that Russia is an authoritarian, personalized, and centralized state managed through corroded and changeable structures. If, as again most observers, Russian or not, suppose, President Putin secures a further term in the Kremlin in March 2018 and therefore in principle remains the linchpin of the present order of government until 2024, how might the Russian state change?

Whatever happens over the next half a dozen years, the issue of who or what is to succeed Putin and/or Putinism will come increasingly to the fore. It has been argued that he has already taken some steps to put at least some new and effective persons of the next generation in place.1 It is often suggested that whoever comes next will be cast from the same mold as Putin himself, for better or worse. The apparent implication of that would seem to be that the transfer of a new person to the center of a system like the one now prevailing would probably be carried off relatively smoothly.

There is a certain comfort for the West in making such assumptions. The abrupt turn away from the possibility of reform on Putin’s return to the Kremlin in May 2012 in favor of domestic repression and foreign adventure ought, however, to remind us that what we may imagine to be in the interests of the Russian state will not necessarily turn out to be seen that way by the directors of its fortunes. A relatively smooth trajectory towards a reasonably stable outcome over 2018–24 would depend above all on the way that the central authorities manage their relationship with Russian society as a whole.

Dispensing justice is a central duty of the rulers towards the ruled. My conversation with the wife of Ildar Dadin at the beginning of this year formed a vivid reminder of the failure of the Russian state to provide it. There is a difference between a foreigner knowing something as a mental construct and a sudden sense of its reality by an unexpected encounter of its meaning at a personal level.

Dadin was convicted in December 2015 of what the court held to be repeated violations of public assembly rules under a law introduced in 2014 designed to punish even one-person protestors such as him. He has so far been the only person so charged and found guilty. The fact of such a law being introduced and then used against him was yet further proof of the determination of the Russian state to suppress all opposition. But it was the regular, brutal, and life-threatening beatings Dadin received at penal colony IK-7 in the Republic of Karelia from the moment of his arrival on September 16, 2016 that caught public attention and drove home the lesson that once a person is trapped in the Russian penitential system he or she can expect to lose all rights to be treated as anything other than a defenseless victim.

Other examples of the refusal of the Prosecutor General’s Investigative Committee as well as the Courts to deal with cruelty amounting to torture of prisoners in a significant number of Russian penal colonies2 led President Putin to instruct the State Office of the Public Prosecutor on January 11, 2017 to ensure that access to health care and other rights of prisoners are fully respected throughout the Russian Federation. The evidence suggests that if the Prosecutor General is meant to take this instruction seriously, he will have his work cut out for him.

Dadin was released from prison on February 26 with his sentence quashed, but has since been detained and charged with violating laws on taking part in rallies. There is no evidence that prisoners’ rights are now being respected, or that those in charge of prisons or centers where persons held for interrogation are from now on to be accountable for their treatment. Former Governor Nikita Belykh for example, arrested on charges of accepting a bribe and duly photographed on June 24, 2016, with an open suitcase of money in what looked like a setup, is still being held in Moscow with very limited outside contact and inadequate attention to his serious medical condition. He is reported to be under pressure to give evidence against Navalny, whose organization dedicated to exposing corruption (including some corruption tied to the Prosecutor General), and whose role as a major opposition figure, could trouble Putin’s plans for re-election next year.

Whatever the formal legal provisions may be, the wider truth is that Russia’s judicial system is, as those involved in its execution well know, to ensure the survival of the present regime. That does not mean that justice is always denied, only that, when the interests of the powerful are involved, it will be. It also means that those responsible for investigating alleged wrongdoing or punishing those convicted of it will know not just what it is that they must achieve but also that excess on their part will not be held against them. Such factors have a damaging dynamic. Reports of police beatings, and the threat of prosecution being used to persuade successful business figures to fork over their assets to state figures whose duty it is to enforce law and order (raiderstvo) are regular occurrences. The abuse of the law against extremism is notorious, Jehovah’s Witnesses being a recent addition to the list of official targets. Non-governmental organizations without state backing are routinely classified and subsequently penalized as foreign agents. Russia’s Courts can be relied upon to sentence anyone deemed inconvenient by the authorities. Virtually all of the reported 1,720 persons arrested on June 12 for participation in the marches against corruption, for example, were sentenced to punishment of one sort or another, without even the pretense of adequate trials.

These and other instances of the abuse of power at all levels of the Russian Federation by those charged with the enforcement of law and order are familiar to many. But their corrosive effect on the state itself, and its agents, has increased over the past five or six years and is likely to intensify over the next Presidential term.

The Kremlin’s Extra-Legal Forces

One of the difficulties inherent in writing about Russia for any foreign observer is the inadequacy of the terms that the effort entails. There are laws—lots of them, and often enough both mutually contradictory and intentionally vague enough to be open to different interpretations. There are constitutionally established institutions—but their power and meaning are shifting phantoms. We speak of a state—but cannot say where it begins or ends, or even how far Putin and his closest associates are part of it, or to whom or what they are in reality answerable, if they are answerable to anyone. The establishment of a National Guard responsible to the President through its commander Zolotov is governed by a set of formal rules but its purpose is essentially to act as Putin’s personal enforcer, and probably to balance competing security organizations. It is not hard to imagine circumstances in which it would be used in an effort to compel obedience to the President or a successor congenial to the Guard, irrespective of the rest of the Russian “state.”

The sheer variety of unofficial and unacknowledged enforcement agencies and groups acting on behalf of the Kremlin, if not always on the instructions of President Putin, or on behalf of regional power structures, is striking. Donald Jensen’s analysis of the way that Russian armed forces operate in eastern Ukraine and the effects of that in Russia itself is a prime example of a reality still denied by official Russia, and the association with that campaign of quasi-independent Russian and Donbas groupings. The role of Chechnya in the Russian Federation is similar in its range and ambiguity. Chechens were duly found guilty3 of the murders of for example Politkovskaya and Nemtsov but despite Putin’s promises of full investigations and just punishment no answers have been given as to who gave the orders or how those or other executions may have been linked up with other government agencies. Ramzan Kadyrov remains free to enforce brutalities in Chechnya itself without effective control from the center, pretty much regardless of the hostility of for example the FSB, something its KGB predecessor would not have tolerated. President Putin promised, for example, Chancellor Merkel that reports of violent action against homosexuals in Chechnya would be investigated with determination. The capable officer charged with the task was reassigned after two weeks in an apparent attempt to push the question to the side. The Novaya Gazeta paper has since reported that some 55 Chechens were executed without trial on various pretexts during the night of January 25-26, and published the personal details of 27 of them, to help, it said, the investigation team.

The Russian Orthodox Church is a key Kremlin ally with its own share of vigilantes. A Popular Front has been set up with a wide membership . It claims to pursue officially supported purposes as an expression of Russia-wide solidarity, but, it seems to me at least, it lacks significant concrete political or propaganda effect. Cossack groups are active in some areas of the country in trying to enforce conservative values as the center would see them. There have been Putin endorsed youth groups engaged in similar intimidation in the past. Groups like the Night Riders and anti-Maidan, together now with individuals using green disinfectant spray—mixed sometimes with dangerous chemicals—have also benefited from the (presumably) centrally directed tolerance of the FSB freely to target particular occasions or individuals. The offices of Navalny’s anti-Corruption organization have been under such pressure recently. One in the Krasnodar region was recently demolished by a group calling itself Putin’s Babushki (Grandmothers).

A state which allows non-state actors to use violence under its state umbrella should generally be regarded as showing symptoms of degradation.

Stable Order or Frozen Anarchy?

If there is one principal expression of the Putin system, it is the FSB, the successor of the Soviet era KGB. The FSB has recreated what the KGB was unable to maintain: a network of repression, blackmail, and cooptation. It is not alone as prosecutor of what the Putinist system sees as misdeeds: the Ministries of the Interior and Justice, together with the Investigation Committee, for example, share responsibility for that. There are clashes between the FSB and other security agencies. But the FSB, together with the Patrushev-chaired Security Council, is the main instrument of central control. Unlike its KGB predecessor, which answered to the Communist Party in Soviet times, the FSB works outside the formal political structures of Russia. The FSB also shares the features of the institutions sketched out above: Its purpose is to suppress potential as well as actual opposition to the regime; and it is not in practice bound by legal niceties. Its growing role in trying to police the internet is a clear instance of both characteristics. The FSB has developed a fruitful relationship with cyber criminals, who have developed their trade on an industrial scale in Russia—an ironic example of the benefits of free enterprise, if you like.

Putin has been consistent from the start of his rule in asserting the role and right of the state over the roles and rights of individual citizens.4 His conception of what the state may be has, equally consistently, narrowed in practice to equating it with the will of its ruler, articulated through the loyal support of his—or her—instruments of power. There is much in Russian history to support such a view of what the country demands, and Putin has overseen a long campaign to sanctify tyrants of the Russian past. The view that the state, not its citizens, must be seen to be the deciding factor in governing Russia also goes with a fear of what can and has happened when central control has eased. Putin returned to the Kremlin in May 2012 after a period of unrest as the Medvedev presidency neared its end, despite the leadership role that Putin, too, played in it. It has not therefore been surprising that he opted for tightening the screws from the start.

If justice is, however, a central duty of the rulers towards the ruled, then the question is now whether Putin and his followers have provided for it in a sustainable fashion. The system is arbitrary, particularly in matters that touch on political order. The range of such politically charged issues is now wider than it was even during the Medvedev interlude, and the private space of Russian citizens has been eroded. Government by “understandings” (ponyatie) instead of clear and accountable law has a pathology of its own which could well progress more clearly into a contest between Russia’s institutions of power and her broader society over the course of 2018 to 2024. Putin and his colleagues understand that moving beyond what they have built could have uncontrollable consequences, as might, for that matter, tightening repression still further. 

1For instance, see Andrew Monaghan, “Putin’s Removal of Ivanov as Chief of Staff Is More About Rejuvenation,” Chatham House, August 15, 2016.

2Details available at zaprava.ru

3The accused of course pleaded “not guilty.” To paraphrase the Vichy Police Chief in the 1942 film Casablanca, there is always a slight flavor of “Round up the usual Chechens” on such occasions. It also however seems to be the case that Chechens are regularly recruited when deniable dirty work is to be done.

4Russia on the Eve of the New Millennium, published in the run up to his election as President in succession to Yeltsin, asserts: “For Russia, a strong state…is the source and guarantee of order, the initiator and the main driving force of any change…. In Russia, a collective form of life has always dominated over individualism…. The majority of Russians associate the improvement in their lives not so much with their own endeavours, initiative, or entrepreneurship but with the help and support of the state.” (Translation taken from Chapter 1 of Russian World Views recording the highlights a workshop organized by the Academic Outreach program of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service on March 20).

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Renewables Aren’t Perfect

Here’s a message greens need to hear loud and clear: every energy source has its problems. The modern environmental movement holds renewables like wind and solar power as quasi-mythical solutions to all of the eco-woes we humans have brought down on ourselves, but like any other energy source, they have their problems. The World Bank has a warning for the growing clean-tech industry: moving away from fossil fuels is going to create new environmental problems. The FT reports:

Technologies needed to meet the Paris climate agreement from wind, solar, and electricity systems are “more material-intensive” than our current fossil-fuel supply systems, a report by the bank said. The mining or extraction of metals and rare earth elements could create environmental problems in terms of energy, water and land use, the report said. […]

“Simply put, a green technology future is materially intensive and, if not properly managed, could bely the efforts and policies of [resource] supplying countries to meet their objectives of meeting climate and related Sustainable Development Goals,” the bank said. “It also carries potentially significant impacts for local ecosystems, water systems, and communities.”

This isn’t the first we’ve heard of this.

This also isn’t to say that renewables are just as good for the environment as nuclear power or just as bad as coal. Each and every one of these options has upsides as well as downsides, and it’s important to take all of those into consideration when planning for a sustainable national or global energy mix.

The veneration greens have for renewables blinds them to the nuance that underpins any of these energy policy discussions, though. We’re far better off acknowledging the tough trade-offs that come with these decisions: coal may be terrible for local environments and greenhouse gas emissions, but it’s dirt cheap and can lift millions out of poverty; renewables may be able to provide a secure source of power without forcing climate change, but they’re generally expensive and have their own environmental impacts; natural gas may be a fossil fuel, but its recent boom is behind the drop in American emissions over the past few years.

“All of the above” has the ring of a political platitude, but it gets to the point: all of these energy sources have roles to play, and they also all entail risks that need to be minimized. Renewables aren’t perfect, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have transformative potential. Environmentalists could advocate for them better if had a firmer grasp on what wind and solar are, and what they can (and cannot) do.

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Opposition Leader: No Sex Until the Votes Are Counted

Kenya’s elections are almost upon us, and opposition leader Raila Odinga is championing an unorthodox strategy, according to All Africa:

“We are going into a war and we must fully conserve our energies before the day of battle which is August 8,” he said in Homa Bay on Monday.

“None of us should have sex on the eve of the polls.”

He especially asked men to abstain from sex, saying it would result in some of them failing to vote on August 8.

Women, he said, should not consent to lovemaking with on the night of August 7.

“All women should deny their husbands conjugal rights on the eve of voting,” he said.

Kenya’s upcoming elections, once assumed to be an easy cruise to reelection for incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta, are looking closer by the day. With Kenyatta and Odinga representing two different ethnic coalitions, some analysts fear a reprisal of the violence that marred the 2007 elections. Post-election violence left upwards of 1500 dead and as many as 600,000 displaced, and international mediators had to midwife a power-sharing government.

In the run-up to this election, journalists have faced anonymous threats and intimidation, amply documented in a sobering Human Rights Watch report released this May. The opening of the new Chinese-financed Mombasa-Nairobi railroad that same month seemed auspiciously timed to boost the incumbent’s reelection campaign. And the government is warning that it will crack down on WhatsApp if it determines that the social media platform—far more popular in Kenya than its closest rival, Facebook—is responsible for the spread of “hate speech.”

Against this backdrop, Odinga’s comments make for a light-hearted headline in an otherwise ominous campaign season. But the male, septuagenarian opposition leader isn’t the only one in the opposition calling for strategic sexual abstinence. Again, All Africa:

During mass voter registration in January, Mombasa County Women Representative Mishi Mboko urged women in opposition strongholds to deny men sex if they don’t list as voters. […]

“It is the best since quick and effective results are guaranteed. Deny them sex until they show you their voter’s card.”

She, however, excluded her husband of the sex ban as he had already registered as a voter.

“My husband already knows his patriotic duty as a citizen determined to effect change through the election and has already registered to vote. He will be spared the boycott,” she said.

Lysistrata could not be reached for comment.

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