Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 157

European Arms Markets Heating Up

Earlier this year Estonia teamed up with its neighbor Finland to buy used howitzers from South Korea. It’s not a massive deal: the Estonians are buying 12 howitzers; the Finns, 48. But it illustrates a new development in Europe: second-hand weaponry is becoming scarce.

And that’s a good thing, both because the increased demand shows that Europeans are increasingly taking defense more seriously, and because it is likely to serve as a spur to more innovation.

“25 years ago we had nothing—no weapons, no military infrastructure—so we bought a lot of things government-to-government,” says Kusti Salm, Estonia’s chief defense procurement officer, using the official term for second-hand defense equipment. “Some of the equipment was extremely cheap because it was reaching the end of its life-cycle. And some things, like vehicles and personal equipment and arms, were even donated to us. The nineties were like Christmas for countries in Central and Eastern Europe.”

The equipment was sold or donated by Western European countries including Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands who no longer deemed it necessary as Europe entered a post-history era. Ex-Warsaw Pact countries such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, who needed to move their armed forces away from Soviet equipment, eagerly bought the materiel. Indeed, buying used equipment from the West is usually the first step for any country trying to rise to Western armed forces quality. “Government-to-government sales are popular because they usually form part of much deeper defense arrangements that allow for greater interoperability and/or technology transfer partnerships,” said Daniel Fiott, Security and Defence Editor at the EUISS (the European Union Institute for Security Studies).

25 years later, the former Warsaw Pact countries are still buying weaponry: last year Poland spent 26 percent of its defense budget on equipment, while Lithuania spent 28 percent and Romania 26 percent. Lithuania needs more howitzers and infantry fighting vehicles, while Poland’s needs include combat helicopters. Unsurprisingly given these needs, last year Lithuania bought 200 military vehicles from the Dutch government. “The Latvian MOD [Ministry of Defense] has been and is very interested in the defense materiel surplus market,” Aivars Purins, the Latvian defense ministry’s deputy secretary of state for logistics, told me. “It helps us acquire a certain capability in a short timeframe, using equipment with a proven track record at an affordable price.”

But buying conditions have changed. In fact, the European market for second-hand defense equipment is drying up. “It began several years ago when the leftovers of the last defense cuts from the early 2000s were sold,” Purins said. NATO’s latest statistics show equipment taking up a growing share of many NATO members’ defense budgets. That percentage increase does, of course, not fully capture the increasing equipment spending as countries are also growing their defense budgets.

The big change is happening in Western Europe. Countries such as Germany are no longer selling off usable equipment but are instead buying such equipment themselves. This spring the Bundeswehr bought back 104 of its used tanks from the defense contractor Krauss-Maffei Wegmann. “In Europe the supply of government-to-government equipment has essentially dried up,” Salm said.

Indeed, so many European countries want to buy used F-16 fighter jets from the Pentagon that the US government has run out of them. “There’s a demand for excess F-16s out there from a lot of our European partners,” Heidi Grant, deputy undersecretary of the Air Force for international affairs, said this month [June], adding that the “demand and interest is greater than I have ever seen”. In fact, Grand said, there aren’t enough F-16s to satisfy the European demand. Instead Lt. Gen. Arnold Bunch, the Air Force’s military deputy for acquisition (who like Grant spoke at the Paris Air Show), suggested that “not every country needs an F-16. Sometimes we work with them to come up with other alternatives”.

Suggesting alternatives is a commendable strategy in any sale, but in particular in defense acquisitions. While second-hand weaponry fulfills a need in European armed forces, the shortage of it will force countries to at least buy some new equipment. That’s good news, not just for defense companies’ immediate sales. “The problem with government-to-government sales is that they don’t really promote new innovation, even if such sales may result in tech transfer,” said Fiott. “The truly innovative breakthroughs occur when new systems development is underway.”

True, the loop from sales to innovation is not always clear, and it depends on the system or piece of equipment in question. Still, Fiott said, “equipment sales that are accompanied with technology transfer may certainly lead to more innovation”. And innovation is needed. While much of armed forces’ equipment remains essentially the same over the years, today’s hybrid warfare and territorial defense is very different from the out-of-area missions – primarily Iraq and Afghanistan – over the past decade. “That meant that, for example there was little focus on the development of vehicles, which is unfortunate because in this part of Europe the terrain requires very tough vehicles,” Salm told me. A terrain vehicle is, of course, far from a weapons system. But with countries going far beyond used howitzers and even new terrain vehicles, defense companies will be inspired to innovate more.

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China Gains Ground In Latest Pew Poll

Depending on how you look at it, the latest Pew Global survey presents a glass-half-full narrative of enduring American influence, or a glass-half-empty narrative about declining American prestige. The good news? The U.S. is still considered the world’s top economic power by a comfortable plurality of the countries surveyed. The bad news? China is catching up, including among top American allies in Europe. More :

Across 38 nations polled by Pew Research Center, a median of 42% say the U.S. is the world’s leading economy, while 32% name China. […]

But in seven of the 10 European Union nations in the study, China is considered the leading economic power (it is tied with the U.S. for the top spot in Italy). A plurality in Russia also holds this view. And China leads the U.S. by a two-to-one margin in Australia – a longtime U.S. ally, but also a country whose top trading partner, by far, is China.

Those trend lines are certainly dismaying for those who worry about the U.S. losing its soft power edge to China. But the growing recognition of China’s economic might doesn’t necessarily translate into growing respect for its leadership or political model. Tellingly, 53 percent of those surveyed expressed “no confidence” in Xi Jinping’s ability to do the right thing in the world, and only 25 percent of respondents believed that the Chinese government respected its citizens’ personal freedoms—compared to 54 percent who held this view about the United States.

If value judgments about China trend negative globally, though, they are quite positive in significant swathes of sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. Publics in countries like Nigeria or Peru, where Beijing has made significant strategic investments, positively embrace China:

The most favorable views of China are found in sub-Saharan Africa – a region where China has invested heavily in infrastructure and development. Positive opinions surpass negative ones by a more than four-to-one margin in Nigeria, Senegal and Tanzania. […]

In Latin America, positive sentiment toward China is highest in Peru. Roughly half in Brazil, Venezuela and Chile also have positive feelings about the Asian economic giant.

This is a significant finding, suggesting that China’s massive investments in Africa and Latin America have changed some hearts and minds in its favor. But that conclusion does not apply in every case. In Ghana, for instance, favorable views of China have dropped 31 percent since 2015, as tensions have sparked over China’s intrusive involvement in its mining sector. Where they once welcomed China as an economic lifeline, Ghanians are beginning to resent China’s outsized role in their economy: a cautionary tale for those in Beijing who assume that throwing money at underdeveloped countries is enough to endear their populations to China.

Overall, it was a better year than not for China’s global stature, but this hardly implies unstoppable momentum towards global leadership. History is long, and unpredictable.

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There Are Smart Biofuels, and There Are Dumb Ones, Too

To meet mandates set out by a 2007 law, American refineries are blending in progressively larger amounts of ethanol distilled from food crops, specifically corn. On paper, that may sound great—we’re boosting domestic production of transportation fuels through agriculture, a seemingly green process—but in practice corn-based ethanol is a policy disaster. Because it competes with corn’s primary use (feeding people), it raises global food prices, starving the world’s poor. Worse, it’s contributing to greater monocultures in our heartlands, killing off honeybee populations and eroding soil quality. Maybe most damningly, corn biofuels have been shown to actually increase greenhouse gas emissions, destroying their “green” justification. No wonder so many stakeholders want to see this farce ended.

Corn-based ethanol isn’t the only food crop used to create ethanol. Over in the UK, they use wheat to meet their “green” targets. As the BBC notes, a recent study from Britain’s Royal Academy of Engineering found that “fuel based on [wheat] was worse for the environment than regular petrol or diesel.” The biofuel boondoggle spans continents, apparently.

But wheat- and corn-based ethanol give biofuels a bad name. There are alternatives, belonging to a so-called “second generation” of biofuels, that don’t rely on food crops. These better biofuels can strengthen energy security while helping the environment. More:

[The] report suggests that renewed emphasis be placed on developing waste. In the UK we produce 16 million tonnes every year, enough to double our current biofuel supplies. A third of that waste is called green waste, a quarter of it is agricultural straw.

The authors believe there is great scope for expansion in the use of unavoidable waste, such as used cooking oil, forest and sawmill residues, the dregs from whisky manufacture, even so-called “fatbergs” from sewers could play a role.

Agricultural waste can be used to create ethanol, but farmers can also do more to grow cellulosic crops on marginal land—that is, land not currently being used for crops. Unlike food-based options, cellulosic biofuels are the real thing.

Decades from now we’ll look back ruefully at this time period and shake our heads at these well-intentioned but poorly thought-out green policy schema. The world’s current approach to biofuels deserves plenty of scorn in the present, though, and the quicker we move away from this shambolic strategy towards one that actually works, the better.

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Hands Off the Antiquities

Collecting antiquities is morally and legally problematic. The recent civil complaint the Justice Department filed against the Green family, the owners of Hobby Lobby, demonstrates just how problematic it is. Long accused of illegally importing Iraqi antiquities into the United States to increase their already massive collection, the Greens have now agreed to forfeit thousands of objects, mostly cuneiform tablets, and to pay a $3 million fine.

The case brings American cultural heritage policy—how the U.S. government understands, supports, and defends cultural heritage, including antiquities sites and cultural property—into the spotlight once again. It also highlights the fact that cultural heritage policy is far more than a matter for law enforcement.

Indeed, cultural heritage policy is tied to both foreign and security policy. Intelligent foreign policy demands deep understanding of how culture shapes conflict, including those cultural artifacts that can be removed from their places of origin. Meanwhile, both terror groups and transnational criminal syndicates often loot and smuggle antiquities to finance their operations. Non-state actors operate globally, thriving in corrupt, weak or collapsed states, where such activities are relatively easy. The cultural costs are the destruction of archaeological and heritage sites, the weakening of local economies, communities, and nations, and the erasure of humanity’s common narrative.

The U.S. government has responded to ISIS’s looting across the Middle East and North Africa with legislative and executive moves to restrict the import of stolen antiquities and other cultural property, stricter monitoring by customs and law enforcement, criminal prosecutions, programs to document looting and destruction, and the training of local cultural heritage specialists. One new approach is to use the civil forfeiture provisions of the Patriot Act to seize looted artifacts when they come to market.

But more can be done, including placing antiquities dealers and buyers with documented terror connections on U.S. Treasury and travel watch lists, seizing their assets, and sanctioning banks, auction houses, and other firms involved in illicit trade. New government requirements to include cultural property in the financial industry’s anti-money laundering training would also be useful. The U.S. government should also, along with NGOs and academic organizations, raise public awareness about the damage done by the sale of antiquities: One television spot with Kim Kardashian could put looted antiquities into the same category as baby seals.

For its part, the U.S. military has focused on immediate issues, namely antiquities looting in the context of countering terror financing, and the perennial problem of protecting heritage sites from harm during operations. But the problem of cultural heritage will become acute for both military and civilian authorities when stability operations in places like Afghanistan and Syria turn into post-conflict reconstruction.

Here the U.S. government (and the international community) will be confronted by a series of problems, such as irreconcilable claims regarding the possession of cultural heritage sites and property from different ethnic, religious, and local groups. To whom do sites belong? What should be rebuilt and by whom? Will, for example, Shi‘a and Yazidi shrines and mosques destroyed by ISIS in northern Iraq and Syria be rebuilt? Who has responsibility for restoring ravaged antiquities sites in northern Iraq, like Nimrud—the Kurdish or Baghdad government? Cultural heritage problems will do much to shape post-conflict politics and landscapes.

Local consensus will be difficult, and the international NGO and development communities will inevitably weigh in. The process is likely to cause further conflict, opening the way to more looting and destruction. Furthermore, the immense piles of money that are a part of post-conflict reconstruction will encourage looting. These will be policy issues for the United States, whether we like it or not.

Figures are already being floated for Syrian reconstruction, but who profits and at what cultural costs? The fate of Beirut after the Lebanese Civil War is instructive. Beirut’s core was reconstructed largely by Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s company, which expropriated huge tracts, displaced thousands, demolished traditional architecture and antiquities sites over local protests, and created glitzy residential, shopping, and business districts. Some archaeological research was undertaken but overall the international community complained little.

The reconstruction of Syria will receive international money, perhaps even including American dollars. Paving over Syria’s cultural heritage should not be an option, nor should paying the perpetrators of mass murder to do so. As the Assad government crushes its opponents, with Russian and Iranian help, should the U.S. government help with reconstruction? Should cultural specialists inside (and outside) the government even participate? The same questions will arise in Libya, Yemen, and other places. A task force should be convened now to recommend policy options going forward.

Cultural policy is about our relationship with other countries and their pasts, which help shape their futures. But it is also about values, those we share and those that we, and perhaps we alone, prize.

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Mens Sana in Corpore Sano

Since the nomination of Donald Trump, the Right has been embroiled in an ongoing debate over the correct roles of nationalism and idealism in America’s governing ideology. Our own Nicholas Gallagher, over at National Review, joins in with a piece focusing on the historical tensions between Jacksonianism folk-nationalism and America’s idealistic patriotism.

Despite the problems this causes for our politics, the answer ultimately, Gallagher concludes, must not consist of declaring one or the other anathema, but of working to balance the two:

[T]he evidence of both history and our present moment strongly shows that immigrants themselves are looking to join the folk group, not to abolish it.

In every wave of immigration, vastly more people return home than popular legend acknowledges — as many as half of all Italians in the early 20th century, for instance. Those who stay do so because they love America — both her ideals and her people. Often, they fall in love with a quite literal person: Intermarriage rates are currently the highest they’ve ever been, and on closer inspection this appears to be driven by intermarriage between and among our two largest immigrant groups (Hispanics and Asians) and “native-born” Americans. My Italian-Irish grandparents would be proud. As John Judis highlighted after the 2014 election, this assimilation is starting to seep into the political realm, too, as second-generation half-Hispanic immigrants vote more and more like the general population, just as other immigrant groups throughout history have done. Despite elite left-wing rhetoric saying it’s a dirty word and elite right-wing worries that it’s stopped, assimilation is happening beneath our noses.

The vast bulk of immigrants don’t want to join an ideological commune but a living breathing community — and are in fact doing so. That doesn’t mean they don’t feel an attraction to American ideals, just that in real life, it’s a mix. Think of the soldiers of the Greatest Generation or of this one, immigrant and seventh-generation Americans, fighting both for ideals and out of fellowship with the citizens beside them.

We cannot, in other words, square the circle simply by abolishing nationalism. Nor can it be something we put in a glass box marked, “Break only in case of war.” We need it in our daily lives — but we need to make sure that it’s the right kind. Ditto idealism. There’s a kind of American nationalism that wraps each citizen in a love of, say, the First Amendment because it’s our First Amendment, just as the flag is our flag and the land is our land. This is a much surer guarantee of our liberties — of our ideals — than relying only on those who’ve read Milton and Mill and been convinced by them. There’s a kind of idealism, too, that while it seeks to treat all men as brothers, recognizes the primacy of those men who are our brothers here, whether immigrant or native-born, black, white, or Hispanic, and is careful not to put more stress on our system than it can bear in the name of ideals. Then there’s a nationalism that is insular to the point of denying the Constitution — of defending President Trump’s call to “open up the libel laws,” for instance. And there’s an idealism that is suicidal in its insistence upon itself. The former sorts of idealism and nationalism are plainly preferable, and compatible with one another; the latter are inferior and incompatible — and unfortunately, lately we’ve been getting too much of them.

We recommend you read the whole thing.

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Russia Scandal Looks Different Outside of Washington

As the scandal over the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia continues to consume all of the oxygen Washington—with issues like healthcare only getting the chance to breathe during short interregnums between news dumps—it’s important for those of us holed up in Dupont circle offices to remember that things are playing differently outside the capital.

A new Huffington Post/YouGov poll (which the Hill summarizes here) offers two pieces are information that help understand the political impact of the Russia revelations in the public at large. First, more Republican voters think the meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a lawyer with Kremlin ties was appropriate than inappropriate, by a more than 2-1 margin (47 to 22 percent).

If you live in Washington and get your news from Twitter, you will have noticed a major shift after the Trump Jr. revelations. From the beginning of Trump’s presidency, most elite conservative writers and commentators—even those who did not support Trump during the election—had been for the most part putting the brakes on the more extreme Russia allegations. There was some cause for concern, sure, but no actual evidence of collusion, and Democrats were leaning way over their skis.

Elite conservative opinion has shifted markedly. Andrew McCarthy, the former prosecutor who had consistently and compellingly defended the Trump administration against Russia allegations, wrote a powerful piece in National Review raising the prospect of impeachment after it surfaced that high level Trump staff had met with a Russian lawyer and lied about it. The Federalist, which had consistently highlighted and mocked Russia hysteria, ran a piece calling the meeting “shady as hell.” Ross Douthat, a Russia conspiracy skeptic, wrote in the New York Times that he could no longer give the President the benefit of the doubt. Outside of avowed Trump loyalists, the anti-anti Trump arguments on journalist Twitter have been few and far between. It would be hard to find a Republican in Washington who actually thinks that Trump Jr.’s contact with Russians is no big deal. Even the Breitbart staff was shocked.

And yet despite this unmistakable, watershed shift, Republican voters appear to be (mostly) unmoved. This is a reminder of how marginal D.C. media is when it comes to shaping the opinion of the mass of actual conservatives in the heartland—a lesson learned during the primary election, but worth keeping in mind during this tumultuous time as well. The D.C. media environment is a simply a different world from what most conservative voters are exposed to. As long as the GOP controls both houses of Congress, its possible for a scandal to play out 24/7 for months on virtually all mainstream media platforms without it actually moving the needle politically.

Second, voters as a whole aren’t nearly as concerned with the Russia issue as those of us in Washington might think. Just 12 percent of Americans—20 percent of Democrats, 12 percent of Independents, and 2 percent of Republicans—rate Trump’s relationship with Russia among the top two issues they are concerned about. The Russia issue is dwarfed by healthcare, the economy, and immigration. Meanwhile, for virtually every person who does politics for a living in Washington, Democrat or Republican, Russia is number one.

Taken together, these are a reminder that the relevant divide when it comes to Russia isn’t so much between Democratic and Republican voters—even though most Democratic voters think there was Trump-Russia malfeasance, it is not a particularly high priority—but between people in Washington and people outside. In a recent interview, Trump said of the Russia scandal, “I think what’s happening is, as usual, the Democrats have played their card too hard on the Russia thing, because people aren’t believing it… a lot of the Democrats feel — they say, we’re putting all our money into this Russia stuff and it’s making Trump stronger.”

As disturbing as the latest revelations are—and there are surely more to come—Trump may not be so far off the mark. He has not been dealt anywhere near a fatal blow—at least, not yet.

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North Korea Crisis Is Even Worse Than It Looks

Surprise! New imagery suggests that North Korea has even more nuclear fuel than commonly thought. Reuters:

Thermal images of North Korea’s main nuclear site show Pyongyang may have reprocessed more plutonium than previously thought that can be used to enlarge its nuclear weapons stockpile, a U.S. think tank said on Friday.

The analysis by 38 North, a Washington-based North Korean monitoring project, was based on satellite images of the radiochemical laboratory at the Yongbyon nuclear plant from September until the end of June, amid rising international concerns over North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs.

The think tank said images of the uranium enrichment facility at Yongbyon could also indicate operation of centrifuges that could be used to increase North Korea’s stock of enriched uranium, its other source of bomb fuel.

In addition to the extra supplies of uranium and plutonium, 38 North observed an increase in thermal activity over an Experimental Light Water Reactor, which could also be cause for concern.

Estimates vary on how many nuclear bombs Pyongyang actually has—anywhere from 6 to 30, depending on whom you ask, and possibly more given the latest revelations. Discerning the exact status of North Korea’s nuclear program is always an inexact science, but the data here from the enrichment sites (which are much harder to conceal than the delivery systems) suggests that the program has, if anything, been underestimated.

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration’s options to deal with the threat remain as poor and limited as ever. Rumor has it that Trump may introduce more secondary sanctions next week, in an attempt to squeeze Chinese businesses that have aided Pyongyang’s nuclear program. Perhaps that will help slow its further growth—but barring a miracle, it is hard to see how North Korea’s nuclear genie can ever be put back into the bottle.

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The Paradoxes of Trump’s Russia Strategy

It has been a full week since Donald Trump met Vladimir Putin in Hamburg at this year’s G20 meeting—and what a week it’s been. The revelations regarding a meeting the President’s son had with a shady Russian lawyer this past year have cast a pall over his Administration. At the very minimum, the campaign betrayed a profoundly reckless and callow attitude toward the prospect of actively cooperating with a country that wishes us ill. While Trump Administration surrogates are furiously arguing that there was nothing strictly illegal about the meeting, and even trying out various “what about” counter-narratives, it’s clear that President Trump is in Bill Clinton territory with his denials (“it depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘collusion’ is”). And there is an unmistakeable feeling in the air in Washington that the scandal has only just begun.

That said, the outlines of the actual Russia policy put together by Trump’s cabinet remains a cause for cautious optimism. As I wrote a week ago, Donald Trump and Rex Tillerson went into the talks with a much stronger hand than almost anyone noticed, and they walked out without having given away the house.

This is not to say that the Hamburg tête-à-tête went smoothly—it didn’t. And driving the car into rocky terrain with reckless abandon was nobody else but the Commander in Chief. Still, things could be worse. Much worse.

Most journalists focused on the exchange between Putin and Trump on election meddling—on whether President Trump did or did not “accept” Putin’s denials. Overall, Trump came off as weak and conciliatory in the exchange, making every effort to de-personalize the confrontation by couching the questions to Putin in terms of the “concerns of the American people.” Tillerson, relaying details of the meeting to journalists afterward, tried to characterize the exchange as an intractable difference of opinion, and argued that both sides wanted to “move on.” But what came of this attempt to “move on” was telling.

Coming out of the meeting, two concrete things were announced. One was a limited ceasefire in the southwest of Syria (apparently negotiated without input from the Pentagon) the details of which remain either ill-defined or unannounced. The other was the possibility of creating something President Trump dubbed an “impenetrable Cyber-Security Unit.” A week later, the former is holding, more or less; the latter collapsed within hours of President Trump’s jubilant initial tweet announcing it.

Exactly what Trump and Putin actually discussed on cybersecurity remains a mystery. Smart Kremlin-watcher Leonid Bershidsky pointed out that creating a kind of established channel for mooting cyber issues may have been what Putin was driving at—not an insane idea, given how few norms exist regulating cyberwarfare. An overenthusiastic Trump, giddy at the prospect of “moving on,” may have read more into the proposal, but was told in no uncertain terms by his intelligence chiefs that it was a non-starter as described.

On other issues, however, Trump held his ground. There was some speculation ahead of the meetings that the United States would return the so-called “dachas”—Russian properties in the United States impounded by the Obama Administration in its waning days in retaliation for election meddling—as a gesture of good will. That notably did not happen.

As for the lifting of sanctions over Russia’s behavior in Ukraine, it appears the subject was broached but not discussed at any length, and remains tied to some kind of final resolution to the crisis. As widely noted this past Friday, the appointment of Kurt Volker as Special Envoy suggests that the Trump Administration is going to drive a hard bargain. And indeed, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson traveled to Kyiv after the G20, where he met with President Petro Poroshenko, and stated that “sanctions on Russia will remain in place until Moscow reverses the actions that triggered these particular sanctions”—an unambiguous reference to the return of Crimea.

So what’s going on behind the scenes? There is clearly a faction in the White House, which most likely includes the President himself, that is determined to normalize relations with Russia as much, and as quickly, as possible.

Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s deputy assistant, was on CNN yesterday saying that the Administration was still weighing giving back the “dachas” to Russia as a sweetener. Why this is on the table is hard to comprehend. The Russians do not need further inducements; after all, we have many things they want, while the reverse is not really true. In the fight against ISIS in Syria, help would be nice but at the end of the day is not required. (Stabilizing Syria afterwards will necessarily involve Moscow, so warm relations are strictly optional.) With regard to Afghanistan, North Korea, and the Western Balkans, the Russians have been nothing but irritants and spoilers. For years under President Obama and for six months under President Trump, the United States has shown admirable forbearance in the face of such provocations. If the Russians want to start talking about improving relations, the good-will gestures ought to come from the Kremlin.

It’s increasingly difficult not to impute dubious motives to President Trump in his quixotic attempts to play nice with Putin. Even Rex Tillerson, a cabinet member with a warm personal relationship with the President, was apparently taken aback by Trump’s “let’s get this out of the way” opening in discussing election meddling with Putin.

Yet despite all this, some sort of hard line on Russia is holding despite the President’s apparent predilections. Tillerson’s trip to Kyiv left little wiggle room for a subsequent selling-out of Crimea. A 40 percent increase in military spending on the Obama-era European Reassurance Initiative is in the 2018 budget, and insulated from the sequester. The Administration is committing itself to helping Europe diversify its energy imports away from Russia, both by encouraging the development of LNG infrastructure through efforts like the Three Seas Initiative, and through sanctions targeting the expansion of new Russian pipelines to the Continent. To put it in terms Putin understands, the Trump Administration has all but declared that Europe, including Ukraine, is a U.S. “privileged sphere of interest.”

And the message has not been lost on Moscow, where initial enthusiasm over the Hamburg summit has cooled. The Kremlin is preparing to expel some 30-odd American “diplomats” and seize some diplomatic property in Moscow. A last-ditch attempt to discuss the issue is scheduled for early next week, but a petulant Kremlin is demanding an immediate and unconditional return of its properties before any further talks can occur. There’s even talk of Russia vetoing the looming North Korean sanctions proposal in the UN, on the grounds that Russian analysts do not believe that the most recent missile tested by Pyongyang was an ICBM.

It should go without saying, especially to a transactionally minded Administration, that we should not give into these kinds of childish demands. As Trump himself said when discussing Ukraine sanctions with journalists the other day, “Why would I take sanctions off without getting anything?” And yet here we are, discussing making unilateral concessions in a different context.

The paradox is that Donald Trump’s cabinet has managed to construct a pretty solid strategy, perhaps despite their leader. No less a critic than Obama’s Russia hand, Ambassador Mike McFaul, praised the recent op-ed by General H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn in the New York Times: “Wish it was ACTUAL policy,” he tweeted. As a matter of fact, it does appear to be actual policy. Whether Donald Trump abides by it—well, that’s another question altogether.

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Indonesia Stakes Its Claim in the South China Sea

With the stroke of a pen and the release of a new map, Indonesia just made the South China Sea a little more complicated. Reuters:

Indonesia renamed the northern reaches of its exclusive economic zone in the South China Sea as the North Natuna Sea on Friday, the latest act of resistance by Southeast Asian nations to China’s territorial ambitions in the maritime region.

Seen by analysts as an assertion of Indonesian sovereignty, part of the renamed sea is claimed by China under its contentious maritime boundary, known as the ‘nine-dash line’, that encompasses most of the resource-rich sea. […]

Indonesia insists it’s a non-claimant state in the South China Sea dispute but has clashed with China over fishing rights around the Natuna Islands, detaining Chinese fishermen and expanding its military presence in the area over the past 18 months.

The renaming of the sea does not carry any legal weight, but it is an intriguing political signal of where Jakarta’s policy may be heading. Under President Joko Widodo, Indonesia has had a fairly accommodating stance to China. Apart from the occasional public spat when Chinese ships have encroached on Indonesian fishing waters, Widodo has preferred to minimize the dispute, positioning Indonesia as an “honest broker” while courting Chinese investment and seeking a balance between Washington and Beijing.

Is Jakarta now preparing for a tougher stance, as Chinese interference grows more brazen? Beijing already sounds angry and alarmed by what Indonesia’s move may portend. “Certain countries’ so-called renaming is totally meaningless,” said the Chinese Foreign Ministry in response to the news, urging Indonesia to “meet China halfway and properly maintain the present good situation in the South China Sea region, which has not come easily.”

And Indonesia isn’t the only country China has to worry about these days: several other rivals around the South China Sea have also made a pointed show of resistance of late. Vietnam, for instance, just gave the green light approving two oil exploration projects in defiance of China’s claims. And even the Philippines, which has been one of Beijing’s most acquiescent neighbors under President Duterte, is preparing to re-start several energy exploration projects in the sea, according to Reuters:

Drilling for oil and natural gas on the Reed Bank in the South China Sea may resume before the end of the year, a Philippine energy official said on Wednesday, as the government prepares to offer new blocks to investors in bidding in December. […]

He said a directive from the Department of Foreign Affairs directing the Department of Energy to resume oil and gas exploration in the South China Sea was already in the works.

Things have been relatively quiet in the South China Sea over the past 12 months. But that could be about to change, as China’s neighbors assert their sovereignty rights more forcefully and Indonesia joins the anti-China resistance.

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Why Aren’t Greens More Worried About the Budget?

The latest report on the status of our entitlement programs shows that Medicare will run out of money in 2028 and Social Security just six years later—a reminder that our society is gliding majestically towards crisis even as our political system is dominated by scandals and circuses. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The overall financial health of the entitlement programs hasn’t improved, according to the report. If Social Security’s retirement and disability funds are combined into one program, their funds will be exhausted in 2034, unchanged from last year. […]

“If our leaders act soon, modest policy changes can be phased in gradually, allowing time to plan and adjust,” said Michael Peterson, the president of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation which advocates for reduction of the nation’s debt. “But the longer we wait, the more difficult the problem becomes.”

One of the many interesting paradoxes here is the silence of the environmental activists in the face of a massive threat to their agenda. After all, if the United States (and the other developed countries in similar straits) are pressed to come up with the money their seniors depend on, those countries aren’t going to be sending massive cash infusions to the Third World for climate solidarity funds. Nor will they have the money to subsidize green technology and electric cars. Indeed, the flight from fiscal realism that is a cornerstone of today’s left-liberal politics is a greater threat to the green climate agenda than the rightwing climate denialism greens blame for their troubles.

If they were smarter, greens would be the meanest deficit hawks of all, fighting like rabid wolverines against non-green discretionary spending and unsustainable entitlement programs. Their failure to grasp, much less to oppose, the planet-killing consequences of Democratic Party economic policies is one of the many signs that the climate movement is less skilled at reading the future than it would have us believe.

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