Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 162

How To Read the Trump-Putin Meeting

As the first clips of Putin and Trump’s face-to-face meeting emerge ahead of their sit-down at 9:45 AM EDT, the commentariat is ready to pounce:

Now in video. “I *LOVE* this guy!” https://t.co/E9SukZZUHn

— David Frum (@davidfrum) July 7, 2017

This is but the beginning of what is sure to be a day of obsessive body language analysis and a near-hermeneutical attention to every syllable uttered by the two leaders. While we remain skeptical that any kind of meaningful cooperation with the Russians is possible—the level of spiteful cynicism coming out of the Kremlin lately is staggering—President Trump clearly decided a long time ago that a diplomatic opening needed to be tried. That is his prerogative as Commander in Chief. He certainly won’t be the first post-Cold War President to attempt such a thing.

And while the paranoids still convinced that President Trump is some kind of puppet installed by the all-powerful spymasters in the Kremlin won’t be able to see past the ominous significance of back-slapping at what has always been a vain and empty diplomatic confab, for the rest of us it’s useful to try to get past the surface optics to see what might really be going on.

Rumors have it that President Trump may offer to give back the Russian properties in the United States—most likely used for intelligence gathering activities and impounded by the Obama Administration in its waning days as a sign of displeasure over Moscow’s election-meddling—as a gesture of good will in an effort to kick-start negotiations. But behind that sweetener, the Trump Administration’s policies are looking anything but Russia-friendly.

Last week, ahead of his trip to Warsaw, President Trump spoke at an event at the Department of Energy:

In what he called a policy of “energy dominance,” Trump re-branded efforts to export liquefied natural gas (LNG) to markets in Eastern Europe and Asia that had been set in motion during the previous presidential administration.

The United States also will offer to export coal to Ukraine, where energy consumers often have suffered from cuts in natural gas supply by Russia.

“We are here today to unleash a new American energy policy,” Trump said at an event at the Department of Energy attended by oil and coal executives and union members who build pipelines. “We will export American energy all around the world.”

Global “energy dominance”, with an explicit effort to undermine Russia’s own local energy hegemony in its near-abroad and in Europe? That’s certainly not music to the Kremlin’s ears. If Trump were the Putin puppet some think, he would be undercutting the United States’ energy weapon. He would have embraced the Paris Accords, limited U.S. production and export of fossil fuels, stopped pipeline projects wherever he could, and tightened regulations on oil and gas exploration—to say nothing of limiting the use of coal in U.S. power plants.

Then, speaking in Warsaw yesterday, President Trump had more pointed words for the Kremlin:

Today, the West is also confronted by the powers that seek to test our will, undermine our confidence, and challenge our interests. To meet new forms of aggression, including propaganda, financial crimes, and cyberwarfare, we must adapt our alliance to compete effectively in new ways and on all new battlefields.

We urge Russia to cease its destabilizing activities in Ukraine and elsewhere, and its support for hostile regimes—including Syria and Iran—and to instead join the community of responsible nations in our fight against common enemies and in defense of civilization itself.

Some dismissed this as merely perfunctory, while others completely glossed over it while fulminating over the supposed racism and bigotry hiding in the President’s paean to “the West”. That’s a mistake. The President made it as clear as day that he sees the Russians as aggressive rivals, not as partners or allies. And it wasn’t just rhetoric: this little growl comes after the President OK’d a 40 percent funding increase for the European Reassurance Initiative, an Obama-era project for deterring Russian aggression along the EU’s eastern flank. A workable relationship is perhaps possible, the President seems to think, but he no longer seems to be under the illusion that Putin’s Russia is a potential friend.

Finally, this morning brought news that former NATO Ambassador Kurt Volker—no Russia dove—has been appointed as the State Department’s Special Envoy for Ukraine. He will likely serve as the back channel interlocutor with whoever Russia offers up—a channel set up under Obama, and manned by Victoria Nuland and Vladislav Surkov. For a taste of Ambassador Volker’s opinions on the folly of the Minsk Agreements—a set of documents dear to the Kremlin—click on over to this 2015 essay of his.

None of this means that Vladimir Putin didn’t try to help Donald Trump in the campaign last year. But at a minimum, it means that Putin’s interference doesn’t appear to have given him a docile American President.

That’s how we’re looking at these negotiations, in any case. We suspect the Russians will pocket whatever sweeteners we give them out of the gate, and then continue to cause all the trouble they can, until they feel they have hit a real wall. That kind of meaningful push-back was never forthcoming from the Obama Administration. President Trump, in contrast, is poised to deliver.

The post How To Read the Trump-Putin Meeting appeared first on The American Interest.

Vietnam Goes Bold In the South China Sea

Vietnam continues to be China’s feistiest rival in the South China Sea. Earlier this week, BBC News broke the story that Hanoi had allowed oil drilling to proceed in the South China Sea, setting off a diplomatic row with China:

An oil industry consultant told the BBC that a drilling ship on contract to international firm Talisman-Vietnam was working off Vietnam’s south-east coast.

This appears to be why a senior Chinese general cut short an official visit to Vietnam last month. […]

According to Ian Cross, of Singapore-based Moyes & Co, the drillship Deepsea Metro I, began to drill in an area of sea about 400km (250 miles) off the Vietnamese coast on 21 June. […]

The piece of seabed in question is known as Block 136-03 by Vietnam, but China calls it Wan-an Bei 21 and has leased out the same area to a different company.

Block 136-03 is not the only site where Vietnam is pushing China’s buttons. Reuters reports today that Hanoi has given an Indian company the go-ahead to proceed with oil exploration in block 128, another area of contention:

Vietnam granted Indian oil firm ONGC Videsh a two-year extension to explore oil block 128 in a letter that arrived earlier this week, the state-run company’s managing director Narendra K. Verma told Reuters. […]

A senior official of ONGC Videsh … said interest in the block was strategic rather than commercial, given that oil development there was seen as high-risk with only moderate potential.

“Vietnam also wants us to be there because of China’s interventions in the South China Sea,” the official said.

The timing here does not seem accidental. Vietnam renewed the Indian oil deal just after Vietnam’s Foreign Minister concluded a four-day visit to India, where he talked up greater security and economic cooperation. The same week, India’s External Affairs Minister was singing to Vietnam’s tune at an ASEAN event, insisting that countries uphold “freedom of navigation and respect for international law” in the South China Sea, while forecasting a greater Indian role in cooperating with ASEAN. Those signals add more data points to a growing picture of Indian-Vietnamese alignment as both countries cooperate to turn up the heat on China.

To top it all off, Vietnam also kicked off joint drills with the U.S. Navy yesterday. Those exercises were previously scheduled, but they came just days after an American warship by a China-claimed islet in the South China Sea, provoking furious denunciations from Beijing. Taken together with recent promises of U.S.-Vietnamese intelligence sharing, China may swiftly conclude that the U.S. is about to more aggressively counter China’s claims and support Vietnam.

Until recently, China has enjoyed a substantially free hand in the South China Sea, making major progress without sufficient pushback. As Vietnam acts more boldly to defy China’s claims, and larger powers like the U.S. and India step up their commitments, could that be about to change?

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Reading Putin in Hamburg

George W. Bush famously looked Vladimir Putin in the eye and “found him very straightforward and trustworthy.” That’s the “business pragmatism”—and naïveté—Russia’s ruler undoubtedly hopes for when he meets President Donald Trump at the G20 summit in Hamburg this week. John McCain says when he looks into Putin’s eyes he sees “a K, a G, and a B.” Angela Merkel, Germany’s Chancellor and a former East German, sees Stasi. Though he may not like to, President Trump ought to take note: Putin is no businessman. He is a manipulator, through and through.

The Staatssicherheitsdienst, the intelligence service of communist East Germany known as the Stasi, was notorious for its extensive spying on fellow citizens. The KGB’s star pupil maintained files on 6 million of the East Germany’s 17 million citizens—with the tiniest of details right down to samples of sweat and body odors. A spied-upon East German friend of mine liked to say back then that it was the GDR, the so-called German Democratic Republic, that really deserved the designation, “land of unlimited possibilities,” so unfathomable were the methods and the extent of communist repression.

But the Stasi was equally zealous and systematic in its attempts to penetrate and undermine West German democracy. We know this because, unlike the KGB, the Stasi files were opened after East Germany disappeared with German unification in 1990. It’s in the vast Stasi archives that we find clues today about the possible extent of Putin’s activities against the U.S. and our western partners. If history is any guide, Putin’s treachery almost certainly extends beyond mere interference in elections.

For example, in the early 1960s, East Germany mounted a vast anti-Semitic campaign in the West, financing and coordinating with various Nazi nostalgic parties and organizations to demoralize a young democracy and undermine the credibility of Bonn. “You Jewish pig, we forgot to gas you,” was one of the sample letters discovered in Stasi material after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Many like it were sent, signed by a cut-out calling itself “Veterans of the Waffen-SS”, to prominent Jewish leaders and their families. Early on, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer believed the Stasi was behind these provocations, but worried about raising the issue with allies for fear of being seen as paranoid. Undeterred, communist agents ran these kinds of campaigns for over four decades, vandalizing synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, sending hate mail and death threats to Jewish leaders in West Germany.

It wasn’t just active measures, either. The Stasi practiced the classic art of espionage, with exceptional patience. Infamous spymaster Markus Wolf created his “Romeo network,” training Stasi agents to dupe sources into long-term relationships. Gabriele Kliem was one of dozens arrested for espionage after unification. She was a translator for the U.S. embassy in Bonn, and had supplied her fiancé, Frank Dietzel—a noble peace advocate, she had thought at the time—with a steady stream of classified documents during their seven-year relationship. Dietzel, it turned out, was a Stasi agent dispatched from the get-go to seduce Kliem. Another female “Romeo” worked her way into the office of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. Before that, Stasi agent Guenter Guillaume, sans sex, became a top aide to West German leader Willy Brandt.

The tentacles reached everywhere. The Stasi maintained more than 12,000 informants across West Germany. Josef Frindt, a pastor in the west German town of Dorsten, 50 miles north of Cologne, turned out to have been an outstanding Stasi source. His parishioners were stunned to learn this, so trusted and beloved was Father Frindt. Among the dozens of dossiers Frindt prepared, one detailed the activities of fellow priest Joseph Ratzinger who would later become Pope Benedict XVI.

Did the Stasi decide West German history? In 2009, researchers in the Stasi archives discovered that West Berlin policeman Karl-Heinz Kurras, whose killing of a peaceful protester in Berlin in June 1967 helped touch off the West German peace movement, had been a Stasi agent. Two years later, another revelation: Horst Mahler, who represented the widow of that same murdered 26-year-old protestor in a civil suit brought over her husband’s death, had Stasi ties. Mahler became cofounder of the terrorist Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader Meinhof Gang.

We don’t know everything about this period, or how all the dots connect. The Stasi destroyed countless documents in the regime’s waning days. Thousands of bags of damaged files—including an estimated 33 million shredded pages—are still being reconstructed.

We do know this, however: Putin came of age marinaded in this culture of blackmail, bribery, pathological manipulation and duplicity. Putin’s German biographer, Boris Reitschuster, says his early years in Dresden—it was in East Germany that the young KGB man spent his formative years—would later inspire Putin to build “some kind of East Germany in Russia.”

How far is Putin’s reach today into the west and the U.S.? On Inauguration Day in January, when some 200 black clad protestors a few blocks from the White House began throwing rocks and bottles at D.C. police, I was sitting at a restaurant nearby, watching the melee on television with a young Ukrainian civil society activist and friend whose immediate reaction was “Russians!”

FSB provocateurs in our midst? We shouldn’t get too carried away. But the jumpy reaction from my colleague who has direct experience with these people tells you to what lengths they might go. If we want to take proper stock of Vladimir Putin, revisiting relevant history would seem hardly a low IQ, dumb-as-a-rock thing to do.

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Breaking at NYT: Communists Were Anti-American Soviet Tools

As part of its weekly essay series on the legacy of the Russian Revolution, the New York Times has earnestly broken the news to its readers that the American Communist Party wasn’t a principled and well-meaning organization but an anti-American espionage operation:

From its founding in 1919 in the wake of the Russian Revolution until the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Communist Party of the United States of America was an instrument of Soviet foreign policy. […]

The C.P.U.S.A. dutifully spread the lies put out by Moscow. The party thus insisted that the show trials during Stalin’s purges had uncovered a vast capitalist plot against the Soviet leader. Party members dutifully repeated Soviet fabrications that Trotsky had been in the pay of the Nazis. Worst of all, many Communists applauded the execution of tens of thousands of Soviet comrades, denouncing those who were executed as bourgeois spies and provocateurs.

It will be interesting to read the pieces that come out 25 to 50 years too late, as the august Gray Lady awakens to other important news:

The Muslim Brotherhood hated Western ideas of freedom.

Iran was a committed enemy of the United States.

Cuban communists were anti-democratic thugs.

Abortion was an unspeakable tragedy that led to millions of unnecessary deaths.

Press bias and lack of self-awareness plus elite policy failures made the Trump presidency possible.

Social programs like Medicare were actually bankrupting the country.

Public service unions blighted the prospects of generations of immigrants and poor people of color in American cities.

Anti-Asian discrimination dominated college admissions offices under the guise of ‘racial justice’.

The collapse of free speech on college campuses was abetted by cowards and time servers who betrayed fundamental American principles.

Better late than never, we suppose…

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Tutsi Officers Purged from Burundi’s Military

Hundreds of assassinations and forced disappearances are eliminating Tutsi officers from Burundi’s military. It’s an ominous sign for a country that, like neighboring Rwanda, has seen cataclysmic ethnic violence in the last quarter-century. Reuters reports:

Now authorities are systematically targeting former members of the Tutsi-dominated Burundian Armed Forces (FAB), which battled mostly Hutu rebel groups, including Nkurunziza’s CNDD-FDD, during the civil war, the report said.

The report is from the Worldwide Movement for Human Rights (FIDH), a French human rights group that has been closely following the crisis in Burundi. The UN has also corroborated the forced disappearances of Tutsi officers, which in turn have spurred defections by active-duty Tutsis afraid of what will happen to them if they continue their careers.

“This … risks leading to the breakup of the army and pushing a number of soldiers toward a military opposition, which would be synonymous with a new civil war,” the report said. […]

Drawing on a network of underground rights activists, the report offers a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the military in a country where many journalists and activists have been banned or fled.

Since November 2016, the federation documented more than 120 cases of assassination, attempted assassination, arbitrary arrest, torture and forced disappearance by authorities against ex-FAB soldiers.

The steady erosion of Burundi’s power-sharing government is now accelerating. The 2000 Arusha Accords and the 2005 Constitution both stipulate a robust system of power-sharing between Hutus and Tutsis in cabinet, parliament, the bureaucracy, and the military. Accordingly, Burundi’s military is interethnic, with Hutus and Tutsis making up nearly equal numbers in the officer corps.

During Burundi’s 1993-2005 civil war, the FAB was the mostly Tutsi army of the state; the CNDD-FDD was a Hutu insurgent group. Now, the CNDD-FDD is the ruling party, and it views the ex-FAB soldiers as a security threat. The ongoing violent transformation of Burundi’s military from a multiethnic force to a mono-ethnic Hutu army represents perhaps the gravest threat to peace in Burundi.

Pushing Tutsi soldiers out might reduce the risk of a coup from the ex-FAB Tutsi officer corps (It should be noted, however, that the leader of the May 2015 coup attempt was Hutu and a member of the CNDD-FDD). But reducing the risk of a coup by purging the Tutsi officers only increases the risk of mass defections of Tutsi soldiers, which would all but precipitate a return to civil war. And, as we have seen in the region over and over again, a civil war is the usual pretext for genocide.

A closing thought: Reliable information on Burundi is increasingly difficult to come by. Foreign journalists and NGOs find it almost impossible to operate in Burundi these days, where President Pierre Nkurunziza has clamped down on civil society and independent media, both foreign and domestic. Despite these major hurdles, the FIDH has put together a credible, well-researched report on the current situation. If you’re following the crisis in Burundi, it’s worth reading the whole thing.

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Russia Still Has Many Friends in Europe

It’s been a good year for Russian influence abroad, if you believe the polls. First this year came the annual Arab survey, showing a notable increase in Russia’s prestige in the Arab world. Now, a recently released Pew Research survey of Orthodox-majority countries in Europe shows broad support for a Russian role to balance against the West:

Roughly a quarter century after the end of the Soviet era, Russia retains substantial influence throughout many parts of Central and Eastern Europe. Indeed, Russia is widely viewed by the region’s Orthodox Christians as an important counterweight to Western influences and as a global protector of Orthodox and ethnic Russian populations, according to a new Pew Research Center survey of 18 countries in Central and Eastern Europe. Majorities or pluralities in nearly all Orthodox-majority countries surveyed agree that a strong Russia is necessary to balance the influence of the West, and that Russia has an obligation to protect Orthodox Christians and ethnic Russians outside its borders.

This sentiment prevails even in the three Orthodox-majority countries surveyed that are members of the European Union: Bulgaria, Greece and Romania. But pro-Russia sentiment tends to run strongest in former Soviet republics that have Orthodox majorities and are not in the EU, including Armenia, Belarus and Moldova.

Predictably, the countries who have been most directly exposed to Russia’s compatriots policy—Ukraine and Georgia—have much less sympathetic views about Moscow’s place in the world. A narrow 52 percent of Georgians say a strong Russia is necessary to balance against the West, while a mere 22 percent of Ukrainians hold that belief. Moscow’s heavy-handed interventions in those countries have hardly endeared their populations to the idea of Russia as the principled protector of their interests.

Elsewhere, though, the results show relatively strong popular support for the idea of a strong Russia responsible for “protecting” Orthodox Christians:

Putin has often justified his adventurism both on the grounds of balancing against the West and protecting Russian compatriots. But foreign support for those positions does not seem to come from a consistent embrace of Putin’s foreign policy aims. Majorities in these countries also favor good relations with the U.S. and EU, for example.

Rather, pro-Russia sentiment seems to come from a perceived cultural affinity with Russia’s Orthodox heritage—and is seen especially among those who see a clash between current “Western” values and “traditional” ones. This is a fault line that Putin has also cannily exploited in recent years, couching his own restrictions on LGBT rights, for example, as part of Russia’s defense of “traditional values” against decadent Western liberalism. The Pew survey suggests that many European Orthodox find that characterization credible.

Of course, none of these findings excuse or justify Russian policy, which often applies pious justifications to Moscow’s domestic repressions at home and its cynical realpolitik abroad. But the Pew survey nonetheless should serve as a sobering read for all those advocating some kind of simplistic public diplomacy response to the so-called “fake news” push being spearheaded by Russia in Europe. It’s all too often assumed that Russian talking points can be easily rebuffed with more and better talk of liberal values, when in fact Russia’s message is far more resonant across parts of Europe than many would care to admit. For better or worse, a kind of cultural affinity for Russia exists, with large populations that identify—for ethnic, religious, or linguistic reasons—with the course that Putin is charting for the country. Any serious U.S. strategy will have to take that fact into account, not deny it.

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Making a Better Leaf

As the world casts about for greener, cleaner technologies to allow future sustainable development, scientists are increasingly turning to the very thing we’re trying to save—nature—for ideas. Biomimicry, as this nature-inspired technologies are called, seeks to capitalize on the products of untold generations of evolution by emulating systems that have already gone through quality control testing more robust than anything a laboratory could cook up. The FT reports:

Laboratory-based efforts are attempting to go one better on nature by generating not plant food but fuels that can be stored for later use. Such projects offer the promise of making new forms of energy while mopping up carbon dioxide, an unwanted greenhouse gas, from the atmosphere. That makes artificial photosynthesis one of the potentially cleanest technologies on the energy horizon.

Daniel Nocera and Pamela Silver, from Harvard University, have taken early steps along this road. Their system — the “leaf” is actually a container — uses a catalyst, activated by sunlight, to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen molecules. The container is home to hydrogen-eating bacteria, which feast on the newly liberated molecules plus carbon dioxide to churn out liquid fuel.

Artificial leaves are especially attractive because, by aping photosynthesis, they aim for a double-whammy: produce energy while storing carbon dioxide. The former is and always will be a primary concern for civilization, and the latter is shaping up to be one of the defining challenges of this century. It’s no wonder, then, that a potential solution that seeks to marry energy security with better environmental stewardship is attracting the attention of so many researchers.

Policymakers rarely get it right when it comes to green ideas, but it’s hard to go wrong when it comes to funding energy research and development. Technologies like the artificial leaf hold incredible potential to remake our entire energy landscape with a single breakthrough (or series of breakthroughs, as we’ve seen with still young shale boom). President Trump wants to defund America’s energy moonshot technology program, ARPA-E, and that’s a major mistake. Many of these technologies won’t ever see the light of day, but the possibilities of transformative realizations make this one green policy arena in which governments can play an important role.

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Why Talking to Putin Won’t Work

White House national security adviser General H.R. McMaster told reporters last week that there was “no specific agenda” for the upcoming meeting between President Trump and Russian President Putin at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany. Trump will emphasize “whatever the president wants to talk about,” McMaster said.

Press reports indicate President Trump has tasked his staff to compile steps he could offer to Putin, presumably to demonstrate that nothing—neither investigations back home nor concern about the threat that Putin poses—will keep him from trying to strike a deal with his Russian counterpart. The media hasn’t always gotten the story right on how the Trump bureaucracy operates, but there’s plenty of reasons to suspect that the President himself is still keen to give dealmaking with Moscow a ago. After all, throughout the campaign last year and into his Presidency, Trump has consistently expressed his desire to find a way to get along with Russia and Putin.

So why shouldn’t the President give it a shot? The best way to answer that question is to ask a different one: Is it possible to work with the Putin regime? The answer to that question is decidedly “no”. A brief look at recent events ought to convince any open-minded individual that Russia simply can’t be a partner—and indeed has no desire to be one.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if we got along with Russia? Wouldn’t it be great if we and Russia got together to knock the hell out of ISIS?” President Trump has mused on numerous occasions. Well let’s not forget that when Russia intervened militarily in Syria in late Sept 2015, it did so not to battle ISIS but to prop up that country’s murderous Assad regime. And the vast majority of Russian strikes in Syria have been not on ISIS but on moderate opposition forces in Syria, including ones the United States has trained, and against civilians and humanitarian convoys. The risk of a clash between Russian and American planes over Syria is real, as we disagree over who is a terrorist versus who represents the moderate opposition. Deconflicting both Syria’s airspace and its battlefields is important, but we should have no illusion as to how much help Russia will be in the fight against ISIS. Indeed, the Trump Administration’s fight against ISIS is proceeding just fine without any help from Moscow, with the so-called Caliphate increasingly looking as if it’s on its last legs.

Need more evidence of Putin’s mercenary attitude towards terrorism? In Afghanistan, Russia has been actively supporting and arming the Taliban in its attacks on U.S. forces. And as General John Nicholson testified to the Senate earlier this year, that means Moscow has been knowingly aiding Al-Qaida, which uses the Taliban insurgency as a “medium” for its own operations.

Maybe Putin can help with North Korea? Not likely. Russia has nowhere near the influence over the murderous Kim regime in Pyongyang as China does. And where Moscow could conceivably be helpful on the margins, it has instead opted for the opposite tack. Case in point: A new ferry link between North Korea and Russia was opened for the first time, despite U.S. calls for countries to downgrade relations with Pyongyang over its nuclear and missile-testing programs.

How about Iran? Yes, Russia played a role in facilitating the 2015 nuclear deal, but it also sells Iran advanced missile defense systems and other technology and weapons and is working closely with Tehran to support the Assad regime in Syria. Tehran’s relationship with Moscow is not profoundly deep, and is plagued by mutual mistrust, but it also has a long history stretching back into the Cold War. Much like with Assad in Syria and with the Taliban in Afghanistan, Putin likes propping up regional U.S. opponents in order to maximize his leverage elsewhere.

As for cyber, Russian security services were responsible for the worst foreign interference in an American election in our history. These same people do the same thing in countries throughout Europe. Given that the Russians still firmly deny any and all responsibility for their behavior, what could we possibly expect to achieve through sitdowns with Moscow on cyber?

More broadly, Putin’s regime simply doesn’t abide by agreements it has signed or inherited. It has been violating arms control agreements by developing and testing missiles in violation of the INF treaty. It has never abided by the ceasefire deal following its invasion of Georgia in 2008. It has never complied with two Minsk ceasefire deals following its illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 and ongoing invasion of and aggression against Ukraine in that country’s east. It has violated the Budapest memorandum of 1994, the Friendship Treaty with Ukraine in 1997, and the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity. It didn’t respect any ceasefire deals in Syria. And it grossly abuses the human rights of its own people despite being a member of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Council of Europe as well as a signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Putin, in other words, is a wholly untrustworthy interlocutor. His regime is thoroughly corrupt and authoritarian and poses a threat to its own people, its neighbors, and the West.

Every single Administration since the Cold War has thought it could do better than the previous one when it comes to relations with Russia. Every single Administration has come away disappointed. Maybe this endless cycle of dashed hopes just needs to play out once again, but in today’s increasingly dangerous world, it would be much better if the Trump Administration would forego the “learning curve” period. By the end of his term, President Obama’s spine had started to stiffen in the face of repeated Russian provocations. President Trump would do well to pick up where his predecessor left off:

Ramp up, not simply maintain, existing sanctions.
Ramp up support for reform-minded forces inside Russia.
Bolster Russia’s neighbor: provide lethal assistance to Ukraine to help it defend itself against Russian aggression, and beef up the defense of NATO allies along Russia’s borders.
Work to prevent the import of corruption from Russia, which infiltrates and infects our own systems.
Support diversification of energy supplies in Europe and unleash the export of American energy.

Trump should avoid personalizing relations with the Russian leader or appearing over-eager for improved ties with Moscow. He should speak out about Russia’s deteriorating human rights situation and reject any moral equivalence between Putin’s Russia and the United States. He should not consign Russia’s neighbors to a Russian sphere of influence through any grand deals, accommodation, trade-offs or general neglect.

The sad truth is that Russia simply needs to viscerally understand that its probing, destabilizing behavior is hitting hard limits and actively backfiring. Dialogue simply won’t work with Putin’s murderous, treacherous, kleptocratic regime.

The next time President Trump asks, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we and Russia got along?” answer with the following: How many more Russian liberal activists need to be killed or poisoned? How many more countries does Putin need to invade? How many more Ukrainians need to die? How many more civilians need to be killed in Syria? And how many more elections does he need to interfere in—before we understand the existential threat the Putin regime represents?

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Bullish European Bourses Bounce

A rash of good news from some Club Med countries appears to be making big dough for some hedge funds. One chipper executive speaking to the Wall Street Journal highlighted the underlying trends:

“It appears the mood in Europe is improving, the economic data is showing strength, corporate earnings are exceeding expectations,” said Robert Duggan, partner at New York-based SkyBridge Capital, which invests $11.4 billion in funds. Mr. Duggan said that he has been adding to holdings in funds that bet on European stock events and that some of these have gained 10% to 20% this year.

We’d be more than happy to see the back of Southern Europe’s long economic slump, but are we there yet? It’s complicated.

For one thing, people want to make money, and will keep trying even under unfavorable conditions. The profit motive is strong. Clever investors will try to work around currency problems, excessive regulations and other obstacles; hedge fund types in particular often show great ingenuity and creativity because they thirst for success.

Of course, reforms have been happening, albeit unevenly and in fits and starts. In some countries, like Spain, more has been done, and as a result there is more growth. In others, like France, there is a feeling that things can’t get worse and may well get better—maybe much better. (For France in particular, the big tell will be how far President Macron gets with reforming the labor market.)

And, frankly, when compared to the rest of the world, even Italy, Portugal, Spain and France have their charms. There’s a burgeoning arms race in Asia, with the Norks pushing the envelope; both the United States and the Britain are beset by political crises; and the Gulf and the broader Middle East are melting down. While Europe is no paradise, comparatively it’s much more attractive.

But is the momentum sustainable? As the Journal notes, bigger uncertainties linger: Europe remains a blue model bastion, with aging populations still politically wedded to unsustainable pension schemes, and the precise fallout from Brexit still impossible to gauge. Hedgies, for their part, appear to be convinced that this rally will have legs, as former skeptics come around to their way of seeing things. But if not, they collectively shrug their shoulders: their investment strategies are not about long-term bets anyway.

The barriers to a lasting boom in Club Med countries are still real, and persistent. But even the slow and partial recovery there is a refreshing reminder that capitalism can bring gains even in suboptimal conditions.

 

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South Korea Seeks Security Cooperation With India

South Korea is calling for greater security cooperation with India, Yonhap News reports:

South Korea’s Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha expressed on Tuesday hopes for increased cooperation with India on political and security issues in a meeting with a former Indian national security adviser.

During the meeting with Shivshankar Menon, who is visiting Seoul to attend a conference here, Kang also said North Korea’s continued military provocations, including the latest missile launch earlier in the day, pose a serious threat to the international community, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said. […]

South Korea is seeking ways to amplify its engagement with India, Kang also told the former Indian official, stressing that the country hopes for increased “strategic cooperation” with India in politics and security, according to the ministry.

This meeting builds on early moves from the Moon Jae-in administration: soon after his inauguration, Moon quickly named a special envoy for India, whom he promptly dispatched to a meeting with Prime Minister Modi; the same week, an Indian representative met with Moon. “I am very pleased to see that our two countries are so actively exchanging ranking officials,” Moon said at the time, “and I believe that shows how fast our countries’ bilateral relationship is developing.”

So far, that relationship has largely been underpinned by economics: the two countries signed a free trade agreement in 2010, and they recently inked a $10 billion funding deal to support infrastructure in India, including Modi’s “smart cities” initiative. But there have lately been glimmers of greater security cooperation as well. In April, Seoul and New Delhi signed a mutual cooperation agreement on defense shipbuilding; the same month, India cut off virtually all trade with North Korea to help tighten the screws on Pyongyang (it was previously its third-largest trading partner). The first phenomenon may have been caused by mercenary economic interests, and the second by pressure from the U.S.—but regardless, they both add up to a recent pattern of Indian-Korean alignment.

Of course, there is another obvious reason why South Korea and India may want to deepen their security ties: both share an intimidating and expansionist neighbor in China. Under Modi’s leadership, India has made a big show of deepening security cooperation with Beijing’s rivals (like Japan and the United States) to balance against a rising China. South Korea is likely to become a bigger part of that equation in years to come.

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