Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 159

By Attacking Western Civ, the Left Empowers the Alt-Right

Donald Trump’s speech in Warsaw last week defending the achievements of Western civilization was met with an astonishing response on many quarters of the Left: That his remarks amounted to an endorsement of white nationalism or the alt-right.

In the Washington Post, our own Jason Willick takes apart this reaction—showing that it is not only logically indefensible, but that it is deeply destructive to liberalism itself. A taste:

What is at stake now is whether Americans will surrender the idea of “the West” to liberalism’s enemies on the alt-right — that is, whether we will allow people who deny the equal citizenship of women and minorities and Jews to lay claim to the legacy of Western civilization. This would amount to a major and potentially suicidal concession, because the alt-right — not in the opportunistically watered-down sense of “immigration skeptic,” or “social conservative,” but in the sense of genuine white male political supremacism — is anti-Western. It is hostile to the once-radical ideals of pluralism and self-governance and individual rights that were developed during the Western Enlightenment and its offshoots. It represents an attack on, not a defense of, of the West’s greatest achievements.

If free societies are going to survive this period of economic dislocation and political upheaval, their elites will need to offer a robust defense of the Western political tradition. The left’s response to Trump’s address in Warsaw suggests that it is not up to the task.

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Tech Companies Aren’t Different

The Wall Street Journal has a bombshell piece on… wait for it… something not Trump-related. Apparently, America’s biggest internet company has been operating a well-funded under-the-table influence campaign aimed at encouraging academics to write papers supporting its political and regulatory interests.

Google operates a little-known program to harness the brain power of university researchers to help sway opinion and public policy, cultivating financial relationships with professors at campuses from Harvard University to the University of California, Berkeley.

Over the past decade, Google has helped finance hundreds of research papers to defend against regulatory challenges of its market dominance, paying $5,000 to $400,000 for the work, The Wall Street Journal found. […]

The funding of favorable campus research to support Google’s Washington, D.C.-based lobbying operation is part of a behind-the-scenes push in Silicon Valley to influence decision makers. The operation is an example of how lobbying has escaped the confines of Washington’s regulated environment and is increasingly difficult to spot.

These revelations highlight the fact that traditional talking points for regulating corporate influence in politics—curbing formal lobbying or campaign finance contributions—are too limited and perhaps even increasingly irrelevant to our current challenges. Wealthy people and corporations can fund magazines and think tanks and non-profits and even academic research. The influence that flows from these endeavors equals or exceeds the influence from direct campaign contribution or registered lobbying outfits. Activists and politicians interested in making the system fairer and less vulnerable to plutocratic takeover need fresher and more innovative ideas than campaign contribution limits.

Also, Google’s campaign is a reminder of the fact that, as Walter Russell Mead noted in 2014, “Silicon Valley has turned from a hipster refuge for quirky nerds into the home of some of the world’s biggest and most aggressive corporations.” Contrary to the idealistic “save the world” ethos that it (increasingly unconvincingly) tries to project, technology is just like any other sector—energy, finance, or medicine—that is interested first and foremost in maximizing its profits, and, to that end, winning over the levers of the state.

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Mosul Mourns Its Minaret, Sort Of

The grinding battle to liberate the remaining kilometers in Mosul is all but completed, but the victory has been bittersweet, and the sour taste intensifies the closer we approach the ruins of what was once Mosul’s primordial Old Town. Its unique, leaning minaret was doomed to share the fate of the old neighborhood, but when “al-Hadba‘a” could no longer be seen from the other side of the Tigris, it was as if time had stopped. From now on there would be two eras in Mosul; one with al-Hadba’a and one without it.

The Grand al-Nuri Mosque and its adjoining minaret became unwitting accomplices the day that self-proclaimed Caliph Ibrahim ascended the pulpit to consecrate what ISIS’s spokesperson had announced days earlier: the resurrection of the Caliphate. Between al-Baghdadi’s first and only public appearance and the mosque’s much-scrutinized history as the inspiration for Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi’s jihadi surge, the Hadba‘a had seemingly lost its primary association with Mosul, a city often described as the “Hunchback” because of the minaret.

One of the earliest legends about al-Nuri Mosque was that the abandoned areas near the Tigris had been haunted. Early settlers had avoided these lands because of a widespread superstition that anyone who attempted to build a home or grow crops would die soon after. The mosque’s presence assuaged the initial misgivings of locals, who established nearby the first neighborhoods of the “Old Town,” a densely populated residential area on Mosul’s west side that resembles a maze. Today, most of it is rubble.

The narrow alleys are but a little more than two meters in width. Along them crowd Levant-style houses in which rooms are arrayed around a central courtyard. After the establishment of Mosul’s east during the first quarter of the 20th century, many families relocated to larger homes in the newly developed east neighborhoods. The Old City gradually lost its vitality and never recovered; despite dating back to the 13th century, it had the lowest real estate values in the area. Both the paternal and maternal branches of my own family tree originated from the same alley opposite the minaret, and kept ownership of those properties even after moving to middle-class neighborhoods.

Mosul is known by two epithets: Umm al-Rabe‘ain, or the City of Two Springs, and al-Hadba‘a, which is the female adjectival form of “hunchback.” There is a consensus that the tilted minaret inspired the name, which has stuck even though the attribute itself is not a pleasant one. With the ruins of the Assyrian Empire still buried under Mosul’s uninhabited east side , and the ancient cities of Hatra and Nimrod on its outskirts, the Hunchback Minaret remained the most prominent piece of Moslawi history to which one generation could introduce the next. Therein lies its importance: It has “always” been there.

A popular legend claims that as the Prophet Mohammed passed through Mosul, the minaret bowed to him, inspiring its unique if unflattering sobriquet. Since the minaret was built at least six centuries after his death, that would have been impossible; but chronology is a mere plaything for the religious imagination and its homily-rich folk narratives.

Beyond this myth, the religious significance of the mosque is nil. The mosque was never as noteworthy as the minaret, which occupied a special place in Mosul’s image of itself that remains hard to understand. One common explanation is that the minaret stood out for not being especially aesthetic, as mosque architecture goes. An unattractive symbol can be, under the right circumstances, a particularly pithy badge of collective honor, as in: It may be a weird, tilted minaret, but it’s our minaret and it always has been. So there.

That sort of thing seems to have appealed to the population of Iraq’s also-ran city, never as famous, never as grand, never a capital as has been Baghdad. And so Iraq’s schoolbooks made no mention of Mosul’s famous minaret even though it graced the cover of almost every notebook printed in Mosul, and can be seen in several versions of Mosul University’s logo. While the ancient Assyrian ruins, Nabi Younis mosque, and even the Old City’s Bash Tapia Castle were staples of local history as ordained by the national authorities, al-Hadba‘a was usually ignored. Schoolchildren often frequented the ancient Christian monasteries of Mar Matti and Rabban Hormizd, but the Hadba‘a was left off the list of popular educational trips, probably because, other than being old and a bit odd, there was nothing particularly educational about it.

The most compelling story about the minaret revolves around a brilliant Christian artisan named Aboodi Tanburchi, who helped patch a hole in its structure that required urgent repair in the early 1930s. The story highlights the ingenuity of Mosul’s manual workers, gained through practice instead of academic discipline. Then there is the famous line uttered by Tanburchi when he refused to be compensated for his work: “I will get my wage from the owner of this home,” he said, referring to God. This story was often used to illustrate generosity and brilliance, not so much to promote coexistence and religious tolerance—which is itself perhaps a comment on Mosul’s character.

As for the Nuri mosque itself, apart from a few historians the population was largely ignorant of its origin. Its founder was the 12th-century Seljuk ruler Nuridin al-Zenki. In Mosul, Nuridin’s name is kept alive by his decedents, known as “House of Nuri,” who are considered nobles. His battles and political disputes, however, were neither a source of pride for Mosul nor relevant to the minaret’s sentimental value. He may have ordered the building of the minaret, but he was not part of its story, at least for my generation and the one before it.

Indeed, the mosque’s fame is not historic at all—it is very recent. In ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror Hassan Hassan and Michael Weiss mention that Zenki “destroyed the Frankish forces in southern Turkey and defeated the Christian prince Raymond of Poitiers in Antioch.” Will McCants describes Zenki in The ISIS Apocalypse as the “ruthless medieval ruler of a dominion stretching from Aleppo in Syria to Mosul in Iraq who had driven the crusaders from Syria.” Both books cite Nuridin’s impact not on typical Moslawis but on Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi, the founding father of the Islamic State via al-Qaeda in Iraq. Allegedly, Zarqawi was so impressed by Nuridin that some believe he chose Iraq—and specifically Mosul—to be the starting point of his regional jihad to defeat the weak apostate regimes of the Muslim world and establish an Islamic state. Hence, al-Baghdadi’s speech on June 29, 2014 at the Nuri mosque was a huge deal to jihadists, and to the niche academic world concerned with them.

Ironically, if Nuridin was little known, his prodigy, Salahudin al-Ayoubi (a.k.a. Saladin, in the West), was a revered figure in Iraq. His name figures in Iraq’s 1981 National Anthem; no one missed the point that Salahudin’s victory over the Crusaders was a metaphor for the Iraqi Republic’s victory over the imperialists. And his Kurdish ethnicity helped reinforce Ba‘athi efforts to create a maximal, trans-Arab identity for Iraq. Could that have played a role in the decision to deprive Nuridin (and the mosque named after him) of public glory? Would his Turkic as opposed to Kurdish or Arab roots undermine the nationalist formula that the Ba‘athis endorsed? National history is often selective, and Iraq’s has been no exception.

On April 13, the head of Iraq’s elite counter-terrorism forces, Abdul Ghani al-Asadi, stated that there were “very few areas still to be liberated [in west Mosul] but the ones that remain will be the hardest.” The remaining few kilometers exhausted more than two months and hundreds of lives. Reporters documented horrible stories of civilian and army casualties in the ruins of west Mosul. Despite announcing the end of battle, some narrow alleys are still contested, with civilians trapped inside the few remaining standing homes, or under the rubble.

Losing the minaret to the fierce fighting was a possibility, and one to which the people of Mosul had become numb. More than twenty significant monuments in or near the city were destroyed, including some dating back a few millennia.

But with the heavy death toll in Mosul’s west, and with hundreds of thousands of people dispersed to refugee camps and other Iraqi provinces, each with a horrifying story to tell and a much-needed recovery to achieve, the emphasis on buildings seems rather vain. The Moslawi reaction to the demolition of the Nuri mosque and Hadba‘a Minaret has varied. Peak lamentation came from Mosul’s older diaspora, some whom had left Iraq in the 1970s. But for today’s residents, the loss of the famous landmark is the least of their current worries.

Besides, the landmark had been hijacked before it was destroyed. The day Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi walked up to the pulpit in the Nuri mosque, he changed its meaning forever. A new wave of Nuri mosque enthusiasts was born, watching on computer screens around the world and energized by the advent of a modern caliphate. These devotees will never believe that the Islamic State blew up the mosque that is tied indelibly to the announcement of its crowning (if temporal) achievement. The damning video evidence does not appear to be enough to quell the conspiracies, and at the core of their arguments lies a logical question: If the mosque and minaret were indeed symbols of great Islamic importance pre-ISIS and for ISIS, why would they blow it up?

Well, unlike the Nabi Younis mosque, al-Nuri did not have a shrine, and therefore would not trigger Salafi condemnation. That eliminates religious ideology as a motive. The argument most analysts and Iraqis agree on is that ISIS simply could not stomach the humiliation of ceding an intact mosque to Iraqi forces, who would most certainly gloat from both the minbar and atop the minaret. Still, this analysis does not convince those who would rather blame the Iraqi government for sectarian reasons, or the United States for general and highly popular reasons.

But, as we know, insult often tags along behind injury. Reading the coverage of the minaret’s collapse left many from Mosul, including myself, very confused. A New Yorker article dated June 23, written by Robin Wright, describes the minaret as a “fabled landmark in the Middle East,” an interesting statement given the lack of concern, let alone enthusiasm, that the mosque and minaret received from the Arab and Muslim world prior to Al-Baghdadi’s speech. Other outlets described the “enormous symbolic importance” of the mosque to ISIS, which is true enough. But no one seemed to care about what the mosque and minaret meant to Moslawis.

Western coverage, suspended as it seems to be between junk history and an unquenchable thirst for the contemporary “angle,” is no surprise to the locals. Since the fall of Saddam’s regime, Mosul has been lumped in with the rest of Sunni Iraq, considered by Westerners to be a monolith. The city’s diversity, complex social dynamics, proximity to the Levant and Turkey, and variety of Islamic practices have all been ignored—since few Western observers ever knew of them in the first place. As for Americans, they have proved repeatedly that you don’t have to know hardly anything about a place in order to invade it. And so now that it has been destroyed, the Hadba‘a Minaret was either a grand monument in the Muslim world or a catalyst for jihadism—as if it the city in which it stood is irrelevant.

Can’t the requiem for al-Hadba‘a be a bit more honest? It was an odd-looking, leaning minaret that quietly symbolized the antiquity of Mosul and the memories of our ancestors, forgotten and otherwise. It stood many tests of time: wars, invasions, and sieges aplenty. But it could not survive the ruthless Islamic State, a metaphor perhaps for the fate of many Sunnis who endured this horrible experiment in (mis)governance.

A better, anecdotal elegy for al-Hadba‘a would compare it to an elderly relative or neighbor, whom we know was wise albeit bent with age, but never felt the need to really engage. He was just always there, and in always being there testified to the possibility of stability if not serenity. When he is suddenly gone, he leaves behind a void, and we regret not having known him better. The Nuri Mosque, with its Hadba‘a Minaret, was like that.

The fact that people can acutely miss something they never really paid that much attention to is an interesting observation about human nature, perhaps. We might give it more thought later on, but for now, there are many thousands of desperate people who need our help.

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Significant Oil Discovery off Coast of Mexico

An international consortium of oil companies has struck oil in shallow waters off the coast of Mexico in what could be one of the five largest discoveries in the past five years, and among the top fifteen in the last two decades. The find could be good for 1.4 to 2 billion barrels of light crude.

The Financial Times:

“What really makes this unique is that this is truly an exploration project,” Tim Duncan, president and chief executive of Talos, the block’s operator, told the Financial Times. It was what the industry terms a “wild cat” drill — in an area that had never before been explored. The nearest well drilled was 20km away and had come up dry. […]

Zama is twice as big as Trion, a deepwater field in the north of the Gulf that BHP Billiton partnered with Pemex to develop, in the first joint venture in the Mexican company’s 79-year history.

Investment in Trion is estimated at more than $11bn, and Zama is expected to cost “a fraction” of that because it is in easier-to-access shallow waters. “It’s a win-win to have something this big,” said Mr Duncan. Once the block enters production, the government will take a 68.99 per cent share of the profit from each barrel produced.

This is a big win for Mexico, which two years ago decided to allow private companies to participate in energy projects. If this find turns out to be as significant as early indicators seem to have it, expect even more international companies to get interested.

It’s also yet another reminder of just how off the “peak oil” prognosticators have been. This is a substantive find of easy to process light crude in shallow waters; no fracking or next-gen technological requirements will be necessary to exploit it. Greens may not love it, but the age of oil appears to not quite yet be over.

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Trump Scandal Festers While Country Burns

The latest revelations in the ongoing Trump-Russia saga confirm what most sentient beings have long understood: that there is more than an adequate basis for investigations into the relationships between important figures in the Trump presidential campaign and the shady underworld of people tied (tightly or loosely) to Russian business and government.

Reactions to the latest news follow the established patterns. Diehard Trump supporters are doubling down on denial, entrenching themselves in conspiracy thinking and otherwise constructing an alternate reality. Trump’s most embittered Democratic foes are counting the days until impeachment, and constructing fanciful scenarios that include Vice President Pence’s resignation after the 2018 midterms put the Democrats back in charge of the House, so that as Trump is forced out, Nancy Pelosi becomes President of the United States.

Meanwhile the press hunt for smoking guns and Pulitzer scoops continues, and much of the country’s available bandwidth continues to be consumed by the scandal.

At Via Meadia, we are disappointed but not surprised by the whole sorry spectacle. On the one hand, it is good news that, despite the overwrought fears of the anti-Trump zealots, the American Constitution and our basic institutions continue to work. President Trump can neither block the investigations or silence the press. We continue to live in a republic of laws.

But otherwise, the scandal is a disaster and whatever the implications legal and otherwise for the Trump campaign and its key operatives, it emphasizes America’s divisions without overcoming them. And it distracts the news media and the intelligent public opinion on which this country ultimately depends from underlying problems that grow more urgent. For both the Left and the Right, the ever-Trumpers and the never-Trumpers, the scandal is a bright shiny object that distracts. Our national house is on fire, and we are all focused on a particularly challenging level of a hot new video game.

The national disaster that the 24/7 scandal frenzy distracts us from isn’t that President Trump may have colluded with the Russians. It is that our national life is in such a state that tens of millions of voters voted for Trump in the spirit of lobbing a grenade into the national establishment. President Trump has his die hard supporters, those who think he is a genius or that he is being guided by God to deliver America, but that group was not large enough to give him the Republican nomination, much less put him in the White House. The critical mass of support for Trump came from those who saw many of the defects which energize his opponents—but who nevertheless believed that this man, with all his flaws, was a better choice than any of the slick nonentities and earnest wonks who would labor to maintain the status quo.

Too many Democrats think that the Trump scandals, pushed to their logical conclusion, will bring an end to troubles that have seen the party sink to its lowest national ebb since the 1920s. By personalizing the problem, by thinking of Trump as a uniquely unscrupulous, uniquely insightful, but also uniquely incompetent demagogue, Democrats construct a reality for themselves in which his impeachment, or at least his humiliation, will leave upper middle class technocrats back securely in control of the regulatory state, the haute educational establishment and the media that really count. The rebels, abashed at the demonstrated unfitness of their leader, will disperse, the districts will demobilize, the Hunger Games will relaunch, and life in the Capital will go on as before.

Perhaps unfortunately, life is not that simple. The problem the Democrats face has never been the Republican Establishment, the Tea Party, or the Trump insurgency. The Republican disarray of 2017 is nothing new; Republicans do not know how to fix health care or to solve the fiscal problems of local and state governments without raising taxes or cutting services anymore than Democrats do. What drives Republican success isn’t public confidence in Republican policy ideas, but a public belief that given a choice between a party committed to the status quo and a party open at least to reforming it, dumb reformers are a better choice than clever custodians of the status quo.

Back in 2004 I wrote that the choice between John Kerry and George W. Bush was a choice between a good driver who offered a smooth ride towards a direction in which the public did not want to go, and a bad driver who had a propensity to drive into the ditch, but would at least face the car in the direction more people wanted. To a depressing degree, this is still where we are. The core political problem in America today isn’t that evil Democrats in collusion with an all powerful MSM are crushing noble Republicans with brilliant governing ideas. It isn’t that evil Republicans are colluding with Russians, gerrymandering elections and suppressing the vote to prevent wise and humane Democrats from building utopia. It is that our politics and our public sentiment oscillates between two parties that, between them, do not really know how to govern the United States under our current conditions.

If there is a single basic guiding insight here at Via Meadia that shapes our coverage overall, it is this: that the basic social model of post World War Two America, the model that shaped our key economic, educational, social and political institutions, is functioning less and less well as the world moves away from the mid-twentieth century conditions that enabled it to flourish. The Information Revolution is disrupting our stable post-war social order the way the Industrial Revolution disrupted societies all over the world.

Democrats by and large remain committed to defending and extending a governance model and social order that no longer fits the conditions of our time. Republicans, who were never as happy with the post-war order as the Democrats were, have been quicker to understand that the old world is passing away but have not yet developed the ideas that can guide us to a new form of social organization that will enable us to surf the disruptive waves of the Information Revolution rather than being pounded and smashed by them.

Trump’s election from our perspective was both a manifestation of this underlying deadlock and an escalation of the political and social tensions that result from our society’s inability to navigate the currents of our changing times. Our society is becoming more dysfunctional; neither Democrats nor Republicans have real answers, so our politics is becoming more embittered, and quackery flourishes in the absence of serious reform.

Meanwhile, we note with alarm that more and more of America’s energy goes into the endless process of two year presidential campaigns immediately followed by nonstop relitigation by scandal. We now cluster around our screens to catch the latest scandal mini-scoop the way we used to look at Iowa polling numbers before the caucus. Our intellectual and political energy is being consumed by the ephemeral at ever greater rates even as we run low on time to address genuinely vital issues. We are thinking about horse races, not the historic challenges that the United States faces at home and abroad.

Via Meadia was born out of a belief that journalism can do better and indeed must do better in times like these. We have tried to focus on the big picture—on issues like the growing challenge to world order posed by a potent mix of revisionist powers and western illusions; on the growing and increasingly insupportable costs of failing American systems (education, health, state and local government, among others) that are ill equipped to meet the needs of 21st century society; on the tragic mismatch between the policy vision of the green movement and the needs of the environment, and on the struggles of the younger generations on whose shoulders all these problems are falling.

We will not and cannot ignore the Trump scandals completely, but our coverage will continue to reflect our conviction that one of the worst consequences of these scandals, and of the underlying behavior that gave rise to them, is that it increases America’s distracted polarization at a time when we need to think hard and think deeply about the most comprehensive and consequential challenges to world peace and American order since the 1940s.

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GM Bananas Could Help Blind Children See

Out in Australia, scientists are using genetic modifications to grow gold-orange bananas that could save the lives of hundreds of thousands of children around the world. Newsweek reports:

The “biofortified” bananas were developed by taking genes from a species of banana from Papua New Guinea, which is high in provitamin A but only produces small bunches, and combined it with that of a Cavendish banana, the high-yielding species most people are familiar with. Provitamin A is converted by the body into vitamin A. […]

Researchers from Queensland University of Technology have been developing the bananas over the last 10 years thanks to $7.6 million funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

These new super bananas worked in a field trial in Australia, and now they’re being sent to Uganda where they’ll undergo further tests. The goal is to create a better version of the fruit, one that’s capable of producing the high yields of the standard yellow ‘Cavendish’ banana we all know and love, but also that can impart higher concentrations of Vitamin A.

Newsweek has more about why this specific vitamin is in high demand:

It is estimated up to 750,000 children die from a deficiency in vitamin A every year, with hundreds of thousands more going blind as a result. Researchers said that while there have been “significant inroads into reducing” vitamin A deficiency in children aged between six months and five years worldwide, its prevalence in Uganda has increased, increasing from 20 percent in 2006 to 38 percent in 2011.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen genetically modified foods crop up as a solution to vitamin A deficiencies. So-called Golden Rice has been cultivated in south and southeast Asia with a similar characteristic: high levels of vitamin A.

Many greens (most prominently, Greenpeace) have opposed Golden Rice on the grounds that it’s somehow “unnatural.” One wonders if these eco-zealots will have a similar view on golden bananas, and if they’re capable of understanding their own hypocrisy as they bite into an apple from their local Whole Foods that has undergone centuries of (lower tech) genetic modifications in the form of selective breeding.

Genetic modifications represent one of the most important group of technological advances humanity has to look forward to. They can not only ensure future food security, they can also improve public health, especially for the world’s poorest. Environmentalists who oppose them on moral grounds, despite the repeated assurances from scientists that GMOs are safe to consume, have blood on their hands.

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Merkel Sets Her Sights on Africa

With the curtain closed on the G20 Summit in Hamburg, Angela Merkel is hoping to keep up the momentum on one of its core priorities: boosting investment in Africa to slow long-term migration trends. Politico EU explains:

Under pressure to stem the numbers of migrants making their way to Europe, Merkel is looking to make fostering economic ties between the world’s richest countries and its poorest continent one of her legacy issues — and Africa has received the message. […]

Merkel’s plan? Pushing private investment in Africa through individual one-on-one contracts between rich nations and African countries, with the aim of boosting a sluggish economy. Sub-Saharan Africa’s growth was 3 percent in 2015 falling to 1.3 percent in 2016, according to the World Bank — the region’s worst economic performance in two decades. […]

African Union Chairperson Condé, whose own country is not among the seven initial partner countries, applauded the initiative, adding that “the compact is a new form of financing that will better help us solve the issue of migration.”

Merkel’s new interest in Africa reflects a belated acknowledgment of a basic political reality: Europe’s migration problem can’t be fixed without a viable Africa strategy. Two years after her disastrous open-door experiment, Merkel seems to have come to grips with that fact. And two months before she goes up for re-election, she has a clear political incentive to show German voters that she is taking steps to deal with the underlying economic causes of the migrant crisis.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that Merkel has all the answers. As always, the happy talk and virtue signaling that comes out of G20 communiqués should be taken with a grain of salt, and Merkel’s initial steps on the issue—a series of investment compacts with seven African “partner nations”—hardly sounds like the transformative “African Marshall Plan” that her government has talked up. It remains to be seen whether the private sector will buy into Merkel’s Africa priorities—and whether those investments will redound to ordinary Africans’ benefit, rather than lining the pockets of their leaders.

Still, it is encouraging to see European leaders connecting the dots between Africa’s economic blight and their own migration challenges. With Africa’s population expected to double by 2050—and the disruptive effects of automation likely to close off traditional development paths for many African countries—the economic pressures driving migration into the EU are only going to rise. The need for a forward-looking policy to create economic opportunities in Africa has never been greater. Let’s hope that Merkel’s initiatives are only the start of that conversation.

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Trump DHS Weighs Restricting Foreign Students

Trump Administration immigration hawks seem to be getting cocky in the wake of their partial travel ban victory at the Supreme Court. The Washington Post reports that the Department of Homeland Security is now considering ramping up security and regulatory hurdles for foreign students studying at U.S. colleges and universities, a draconian measure that would drive away talent from our shores and probably not produce any security benefits:

Senior officials at the Department of Homeland Security are floating a proposal that would require foreign students to reapply for permission to stay in the United States every year, a controversial move that would create new costs and paperwork for thousands of visa holders from China, India and other nations, according to two federal officials with direct knowledge of the discussions.

Officials caution that the plan is in the preliminary stages and would require regulatory changes that could take a minimum of 18 months. The plan may also require agreement from the State Department, which issues visas. The officials say the proposal seeks to enhance national security by more closely monitoring the students.

Americans are more on board with the Trump Administration than with the Democrats when it comes to enforcing immigration laws, scrutinizing people from high-risk areas before they enter the United States, and reducing the flow of less-skilled labor. But making life harder for talented young people who come to study in the U.S. does not fall into any of those categories.

This measure under consideration (if the Post reporting is right) seems like overreach from an administration that is giddy about having beaten the establishment on one highly charged immigration fight. The Trump people are right that America’s immigration system needs to be carefully regulated and controlled to safeguard security, encourage assimilation and protect less-skilled native labor markets. But targeting foreign students is gratuitous and would poison the well for any future, more well-considered reforms the administration might want to try.

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The Brown Costs of Green Cars

Electric vehicles are the Next Big Thing in transportation. Car enthusiasts are fans of their instant acceleration, and the fledgling driverless car industry sees some natural synergies between fleets of autonomous vehicles and batteries. But their biggest cheerleaders have to be environmentalists, who laud EVs’ lack of tailpipe emissions want to see them wean the world off of oil.

But the green credentials of the electric car industry deserve further scrutiny, in particular the environmental impact of the batteries that power these vehicles. The FT reports:

Mining companies are already positioning themselves to meet the increased need for raw materials that go into lithium-ion batteries, but there is growing concerns over their environmental footprint especially as a host of new mining companies start production to meet rapid rises in demand.

Lithium is currently extracted from brines beneath the deserts of South America and evaporated using the energy of the sun. But an increasing proportion is coming from crushing rock in Australia and processing the mineral in China, which is more energy intensive. Goldman Sachs expects capacity addition by hard rock to be equal to brine by 2020 in order to meet demand from electric vehicles.

In addition, most of the new supply is coming from smaller mining companies rather than established players, according to Francis Condon, an energy and mining analyst at fund manager RobecoSAM. “We’re starting to see new sources being found and smaller mining companies and also non-mining companies getting involved,” says Mr Condon. “Some of these opportunities are arising where environmental codes are not as strong and social settings not as protective or inclusive. It’s a combination of risks.”

The last point raised there is particularly troubling, and it’s one that applies to many industries with “eco-” or “clean-” prefixes. As demand for a product grows (in this case the lithium ion batteries), increasing stress is put on supply chains which raise quality control concerns and, if you’re in the business of peddling products that are supposed to be good for the environment, can undermine that eco-friendly marketing.

Calling electric vehicles green is a great way to move product, but it doesn’t necessarily make it so. As this industry grows and demand for the materials that make up batteries ratchets up, companies are going to start looking to less environmentally friendly sources. This is an opportunity for unscrupulous firms: attract customers with some snazzy aspirational eco-marketing without doing any of the work to back those green claims up. It happens a lot more than the average customer knows, and electric vehicles are just the latest example.

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China Denies Responsibility for North Korea

China has made its strongest statement yet suggesting it won’t play ball with American efforts to pressure North Korea. Reuters:

Asked about calls from the United States, Japan and others for China to put more pressure on North Korea, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said it was not China ratcheting up tension and the key to a resolution did not lie with Beijing.

“Recently, certain people, talking about the Korean peninsula nuclear issue, have been exaggerating and giving prominence to the so-called ‘China responsibility theory,'” Geng told a daily news briefing. […]

“I think this either shows lack of a full, correct knowledge of the issue, or there are ulterior motives for it, trying to shift responsibility,” he added.

China has been making unremitting efforts and has played a constructive role, but all parties have to meet each other half way, Geng said.

“Asking others to do work, but doing nothing themselves is not OK,” he added. “Being stabbed in the back is really not OK.”

It is no secret who Geng is addressing here: the so-called “China responsibility theory” has been the consistent centerpiece of Donald Trump’s thinking on North Korea. The President’s approach has evolved tactically over time—with an initially solicitous approach toward China turning lately into a screws-tightening campaign—but all along, it has been animated by the belief that China holds the unique leverage that can “solve” the North Korean crisis once and for all.

The Chinese have rejected that thinking before, and it would seem that Trump’s recent imposition of secondary sanctions has not changed their mind. Beijing seems to be holding out hope that Trump will come around to their preferred formula: the removal of the THAAD missile defense system and the suspension of U.S.-South Korean military exercises, in exchange for Pyongyang halting nuclear tests and coming to the negotiating table.

But the Trump administration is unlikely to agree to those terms: if anything, it is only growing bolder in its pressuring of China and its muscular demonstrations of the THAAD system. Today, the U.S. announced that it had successfully shot down an intermediate-range ballistic missile in a first-of-its-kind test:

The test was the first-ever of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system against an incoming IRBM, which experts say is a faster and more difficult target to hit than shorter-range missiles. […]

“The successful demonstration of THAAD against an IRBM-range missile threat bolsters the country’s defensive capability against developing missile threats in North Korea and other countries,” the Missile Defense Agency said in a statement. 

China is not going to like that message. And with Beijing and Washington remaining at loggerheads over who is to blame for North Korea—let alone how to handle the crisis—we are likely in for some tense and turbulent times in the U.S.-China relationship.

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