Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 168

Seoul: We See “Eye to Eye” With Trump on North Korea

South Korea’s new foreign minister sought to smooth over differences with the Trump Administration on Monday, as the WSJ reports:

South Korea’s foreign minister said a review of a controversial U.S. missile-defense system ordered by President Moon Jae-in “does not mean we’ll cancel or reverse our decision” to host it, striking a conciliatory tone ahead of Mr. Moon’s White House visit this week. […]

“My government has no intention to basically reverse the commitments made in the spirit of the ROK-U.S. alliance,” Ms. Kang said. […]

“President Moon and President Trump see eye to eye on North Korea nuclear and missile issues,” Ms. Kang said. “My administration’s position mirrors that of ‘maximum pressure and engagement,’” she said, employing a phrase used to describe the Trump administration’s North Korea policy.

Kang’s statement comes ahead of Moon’s visit with Trump, a crucial test of whether South Korea and the U.S. can get on the same page after early signs of disagreement about how to handle North Korea. And it follows Moon’s statement last week that Beijing should do more to pressure Pyongyang and rein in its nuclear program.

Has the Trump administration’s pressure, and the threat of escalation, pushed Moon to adopt a tougher stance toward Pyongyang? It is too soon to say for sure, and there are still many variables that could drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington—including the EU’s offer to mediate peace talks. For now, though, the two sides are starting to sing the same tune, despite the early displays of friction. We’ll see if the united front lasts after Moon and Trump meet this week.

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Inside Putin’s Echo Chamber

“Let him speak,” Oliver Stone told CNN in defending his four hour documentary on Vladimir Putin, during which the acclaimed American director frequently seemed to avoid obvious follow-up questions. Stone’s reticence on some matters was so glaringly obvious that some commentators began suggesting the movie would be used to kick off Putin’s campaign for his 2018 run, given that Stone’s film would be broadcast on national state TV all across Russia.

And Putin did speak, at length, largely unchallenged. For most Russia watchers, he didn’t reveal anything particularly new, or even interesting. But there was one important moment in Stone’s film that was more revealing about the real nature of Putin’s regime than hours of aggressive questioning could likely have surfaced.

Starting at 49:10 in Part 3 of the series, Putin appears to be proudly showing Stone a video of what are purported to be Russian air strikes in Syria. (Skip to 0:08 in the teaser, here.)

It turns out that the actual footage was from American Apache helicopters hitting Taliban fighters in Afghanistan in 2009. The footage featured audio of pilots speaking Russian. That, too, was tracked down: it’s from a video of Ukrainian pilots (speaking Russian) fighting over Donetsk, in Eastern Ukraine. The video Putin showed to Stone—footage of an American strike, with audio of Ukrainian pilots—was actually uploaded to YouTube in March of last year. The proud author of the video has already jokingly changed its title, renaming it to “A bombshell video!!! Putin personally downloaded it!”

Funny, but far from the truth. Vladimir Putin is a notorious luddite. Despite what Stone’s documentary shows, Putin doesn’t have a smartphone. He doesn’t use email, he doesn’t have any social network accounts—indeed, he does not appear to use the Internet at all. Of course, it might be that it’s all just misdirection, and that at night the Russian President is busy hacking the DNC, all while cutting propaganda videos in his spare time. But in truth, it’s literally almost impossible to conceive of Putin actually downloading the video himself.

Asked about the bizarre screwup, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied that there was any mistake, and said that the video had been provided to Putin by Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu. “This is part of a report to the President,” Peskov argued. “The Minister gave this to the President.”

Oliver Stone was also asked about the video. His answer had all the macho swagger of the dictators with whom Stone sympathizes: “Are you gonna start with this blogging bullshit?” he asked. “The bloggers say this, the bloggers say that, we’re gonna be in here all day.” But he went on to ask a very fair question: Why would Vladimir Putin lie if Russians have achieved “so much success” in Syria?

Indeed, why would he? And did Putin lie knowingly, or did he literally not know what he was showing Stone? In other words, was the Russian Commander in Chief, the leader of a formidable nuclear power, actively dissembling, or was he misled by his own generals?

Lying comes easily to Vladimir Putin. Maybe it’s sociopathic, or maybe his spy training has just made it second nature. He lies deliberately all the time, and is never ashamed of doing so, especially on camera. The most memorable recent example of such lying had to do with Crimea. In March 2014, asked by a journalist if there were Russian military forces in Crimea, Putin replied that the “little green men” were local self-defense forces, and that their Russian uniforms might have been bought in a military surplus store. A month later, Putin said that “Of course, our military stood behind the self-defense forces in Crimea.” By November 2014, Putin was boasting: “Yes, of course, I’m not hiding it, it is a fact. We have never hidden that our military, let’s put it bluntly, blocked Ukrainian forces stationed in Crimea.” By March 2015, the Kremlin released a documentary on the anniversary of the operation that features Putin describing the details of the Crimea annexation operation—dates, exact times, etc.

With Crimea, however, Putin had every reason to lie, at least at first. Initially, confusion was of paramount importance; the world was caught completely flat-footed, and the less world leaders knew, the better. As time went on, the Russian President was most probably trying to maintain plausible deniability, in hopes of escaping retribution from the international community, as he did in Georgia in 2008. And after the international sanctions were put firmly in place, he saw no further benefit from dissembling, and began to openly boast about the annexation.

So why show Stone fake footage, especially since there should be plenty of real footage of Russian operations in Syria? Lying like this is borderline silly, and serves no purpose.

Perhaps we have to take Peskov at his word, and assume that what really happened is that Russia’s Defense Minister provided his President with the fake video. Perhaps some thoughtless subordinate included it in a report, and it passed unnoticed all the way to Shoigu, and on to Putin. Maybe it was just deep incompetence and carelessness at work. But the very fact that it got all the way to the top like this, and surfaced embarrassingly in international media, shows a more troubling reality of Putin’s centralized and yet disconnected management style: the Russian President lives in a bubble.

Putin gets his understanding of the outside world in large part from a set of briefings tucked away in special folders. These briefing papers are ultimately the work of the various state bureaucracies, including daily reports from the various intelligence services, filtered through the President’s own personal bureaucratic machine, the Presidential Administration. (Putin also gets briefed in person by various officials, but that access, too, is mediated through his personal bureaucracy. And the frequency of his contacts with other officials ebbs and flows, ultimately depending on Putin’s preferences and mood.)

Having a “gatekeeper” bureaucracy to the chief executive is not in any way unusual in governments. But given Russia’s extreme, almost monarchical personalization of power in the role of the President, this leads to all sorts of cronyism and preferential treatment. I personally know how at least once, Peskov, who is in charge of compiling news clippings for his boss, did a favor for a friend and put a news item reported by a state-owned news agency on top of the President’s reading pile.

Of course, Putin to some extent understands the failings of the system he has built for himself. He certainly doesn’t trust his own media to report objective facts, for example. The privately-owned TV-Dozhd channel recently reported that reporters employed by the main state-owned TV station in Russia’s regions are obliged to write up special weekly reports on the local problems and concerns they see on the ground. Those reports are not for broadcast, but are instead sent to the Presidential Administration directly.

And these news reports are important for Putin, as he doesn’t even fully believe any of his competing intelligence agencies. As Mark Galeotti noted in an ECFR report from last year:

Given that Putin is notoriously suspicious of being led by his officials, there is also an imperative to cite multiple sources, and thus a highly-classified cable from an agency may be juxtaposed with, and implicitly given similar weight to, a newspaper report or a paper from a think-tank (which, as will be discussed below, may well have been written to order).

What’s notable in all of this, however, is that when Putin tries to get an alternative conduit for information, he still relies on the system itself to provide it, rather then reading opposition or foreign newspapers or think tank reports. And he still remains captive to his various courtiers and close associates, who organize his information flow.

Peskov is not the only one who has power over what Putin sees or doesn’t. Indeed, he is at the end of the day just a (highly paid) clerk. A more important gatekeeper is the head of the Presidential Administration. This used to be Putin’s close friend of 17 years, Sergey Ivanov, a man who has long held paranoid and aggrieved views about the West. Ivanov was forced into a strange kind of retirement last year, and was replaced by the much younger Anton Vaino, a largely faceless bureaucrat wholly beholden to the President, with his own set of colorful theories about how the world works.

Then there is the close circle of advisors that Putin generally trusts and listens to, among them people like his Defense Minister, Sergey Shoigu, who appears to have embarrassed his boss by slipping a fake YouTube clip into his briefing. He is also known to listen to his former director of the FSB and current head of the Security Council Nikolay Patrushev, a man who has said in public that a psychic had told him of Madeline Albright’s plans to take Siberia away from Russia.

Cut off from objective reality by a firewall he has built himself, Vladimir Putin is always in danger of being profoundly misinformed. The artificial world he inhabits is constructed for him by his subordinates with various agendas and ideas about reality. On the one hand, the subordinates have an interest in the system working as well as possible, and in thus getting the best possible information to the man in charge. On the other, there are countervailing forces: temptations to cronyism and doing favors for one’s friends, fears of “bringing bad news to the tsar’s table”, and even opportunities for outright manipulation.

A number of important questions thus arise: Does Vladimir Putin know the real state of the country’s economy? Does Vladimir Putin know his real approval ratings? Does Vladimir Putin know the real capabilities of the Russian Army? A funny little episode about a YouTube clip conceals a much deeper rot in the system.

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The Minimum Wage Carnage Hasn’t Started Yet

Maybe conservatives who warned against the potential downsides of unprecedented minimum wage hikes weren’t just shilling for big business and the wealthy after all. A reputable new working paper from researchers at the University of Washington shows that the latest round of minimum wage hikes in Seattle has slowed hiring and measurably reduced the economic well-being of the city’s most vulnerable workers. The Washington Post reports:

When Seattle officials voted three years ago to incrementally boost the city’s minimum wage up to $15 an hour, they’d hoped to improve the lives of low-income workers. Yet according to a major new study that could force economists to reassess past research on the issue, the hike has had the opposite effect.

The city is gradually increasing the hourly minimum to $15 over several years. Already, though, some employers have not been able to afford the increased minimums. They’ve cut their payrolls, putting off new hiring, reducing hours or letting their workers go, the study found. […]

On the whole, the study estimates, the average low-wage worker in the city lost $125 a month because of the hike in the minimum.

To be sure, this is just one study (even if it is by most accounts an especially rigorous one). Another recent paper from UC Berkeley, which looked only at the effects on the Seattle restaurant industry, did not find a comparable drop off. Economists will almost certainly produce further dueling studies as the great minimum wage experiment moves forward.

But if the findings hold up, they suggest that the minimum wage could devastate regions less wealthy than the Emerald City, which has one of the highest median incomes in the country, strong economic growth, and an unemployment rate hugging three percent.

Both California and New York, for example, are in the process of phasing in $15 minimum wages statewide. Many regions in inland California and upstate New York are economically depressed and struggling to attract business investment. If a $13 minimum forced layoffs in a place as expensive and prosperous as Seattle, what will a $15 minimum do in Merced, California, whose median income is less than half of Seattle’s and whose unemployment rate is more than three times as high? It will be a tremendously disruptive change, essentially implementing a command-and-control wage-setting system for the entire bottom half of the labor market.

Incremental minimum wage increases, tailored to specific cities’ needs, may be a viable anti-poverty tool in some cases. But radical and arbitrary hikes (the $15 benchmark seems to have been chosen at least partly for its alliterative value in the “FightForFifteen” slogan) increasingly appear to be mostly counterproductive, pushing large groups of people out of the labor force without achieving big enough wage gains to compensate.

That’s the verdict even from studies on wealthy cities with relatively few workers earning less than the minimum wage and enough economic momentum to survive regulatory headwinds—and that haven’t even been exposed to the full $15 minimum yet! When this experiment is attempted with an even higher floor in struggling regions further away from the coasts, the results are likely to be much uglier. In light of the Seattle study, the California and New York laws seem like a plan to pummel poor localities and consign thousands to permanent welfare status on behalf of a utopian ideological design that has failed even in an ideal testing ground. Hopefully the “evidence-based” policymakers in Sacramento and Albany will reconsider.

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The Next Car on the Bankruptcy Train

Congress’s 2016 legislation allowing Puerto Rico to declare bankruptcy has thrown into question the integrity of debts held by other U.S. territories facing underinvestment and ballooning pension obligations. The New York Times reports on the fiscal crisis now brewing in the Virgin Islands:

The public debts of the Virgin Islands are much smaller than those of Puerto Rico, which effectively declared bankruptcy in May. But so is its population, and therefore its ability to pay. This tropical territory of roughly 100,000 people owes some $6.5 billion to pensioners and creditors.

Now, a combination of factors — insufficient tax revenue, a weak pension system, the loss of a major employer and a new reluctance in the markets to lend the Virgin Islands any more money — has made it almost impossible for the government to meet its obligations.

The fiscal strains in places like Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Guam are more acute than in most U.S. states. But comparable crises may be coming soon to the mainland. Illinois recently faced devastating debt downgrades. California’s pension system is cutting payments to retired workers for the first time. Actuarial projections show that even as states funnel more and more money in to their pension funds, they are falling deeper into the red.

That’s the bad news. The really bad news is that all this is happening after years of strong investment returns. What happens when the next recession hits is anybody’s guess.

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Pakistan Deploys 15,000 Troops to Defend Chinese Workers

After recent attacks on Chinese nationals in Pakistan, Islamabad announced that it is deploying thousands of troops to protect Chinese workers, reports the South China Morning Post: 

Pakistan has deployed a 15,000-strong military force to protect Chinese nationals working on energy and infrastructure projects in the country, the president said on Sunday, after the abduction of a Chinese couple raised safety concerns.

President Mamnoon Hussain told visiting Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Islamabad that the protection of Chinese citizens working in Pakistan was the “top priority” of the government, according to a statement issued by the presidency.

Beijing is investing about US$50 billion in its South Asian neighbour as part of a plan unveiled in 2015 to link its far-western Xinjiang region to Gwadar port in Balochistan with a series of infrastructure, power and transport upgrades.

Hussain’s announcement comes after Islamic State terrorists kidnapped and reportedly killed a Chinese couple this month. And it is hardly the first incident of its kind: this past year, Islamabad similarly dispatched army troops and a heavy police presence to protect workers at the Chinese-managed Gwadar port, which had come under threat from Baluchi insurgents.

Both countries clearly have a lot at stake in this relationship: Pakistan is the lynchpin of Beijing’s belt-and-road infrastructure initiative, and China is becoming an essential security partner and economic lifeline for Pakistan as the United States seems poised to drift away. But if events on the ground are any indication, both sides have underestimated the risks of over-reliance on one another, and the costs of protecting their mutual investments. As Pakistan’s tribal insurgencies continue to threaten Chinese assets, both Beijing and Islamabad may find themselves committing more troops and treasure than they first expected.

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Berlusconi’s Comeback in Italy

So, about that EU-phoria… The Financial Times reports from Italy:

Italy’s centre-right opposition clinched an emphatic victory in municipal races round the country on Sunday, bolstering its hopes of a political resurgence and dealing a blow to Matteo Renzi’s ruling centre-left Democratic party.

According to final results, candidates from the centre-right — led by Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister, and Matteo Salvini, the leader of the far right Northern League — won key run-off contests for mayor in Genoa, a leftwing bastion, and Verona, in the industrial north-east.

Berlusconi’s resurgence is coming as the poll-leading Five Star movement has faced voter skepticism in the latest municipal elections. On the one hand, that should be heartening to Matteo Renzi and his Democratic Party: this might signal a split in the right wing vote ahead of the next year’s general elections. On the other, it hardly signals a vote of confidence in his own pro-European leadership. Salvini wants Italy to exit the euro, while Berlusconi is advocating some kind of novel and perhaps whimsical “dual currency” proposal for his country.

And really, this latest outcome shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody: Italy, the third largest economy in the eurozone, is, after Greece, Europe’s most deeply troubled member. And Italy’s voters have been paying attention to how things have worked out for the Greeks.

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SPD Trolls Merkel for Appeasing Trump

Rattled by an election that doesn’t seem to be going their way, Germany’s Social Democrats are attacking Merkel at what they see as her weak point: her agreement to raise defense spending to 2% of GDP—specifically in accordance with the wishes of President Donald Trump. The WSJ:

Mr. Trump’s demand would mean “a Germany—surrounded by friends—that has armed itself to the teeth in the middle of Europe,” Social Democratic chancellor candidate Martin Schulz told an arena in Germany’s industrial heartland, at the party’s convention. “I ask you: Do we want this? We know from our history: More security does not come with more weapons.”

Politically, this may make sense. Trump is about as popular in Germany as cholera, and if the SPD can make the defense pledge look like Merkel is appeasing Trump, then some German voters could swing to the Left.

For Americans, this is a healthy reminder that voting for candidates that many of our allies loathe and despise is not a cost-free exercise. All over the world, Trump’s global unpopularity makes it harder for leaders to cooperate with the U.S.

But the SPD turn also says something about Germany. The most recent socialist to serve as chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, shocked and appalled the world by taking a job as the head of the shareholders’ committee of Nord Stream AG, a company controlled by Russia’s Gazprom set up for the construction and operation of an important Baltic undersea pipeline that Schroeder strongly supported while in office. Keeping Germany weak as Russian pressure on Europe grows, and as Turkey shifts away from NATO and a pro-Western orientation, is exactly what the Kremlin would like to see. It would also weaken the Western alliance and raise doubts in Eastern Europe and elsewhere that German socialists are looking for a deal with Russia at the cost of the transatlantic relationship.

Schroeder won an election running against George W. Bush; now his party hopes to make headway by running against the even less popular Trump.

Presumably it’s not a sign of electoral confidence that the SPD is aligning itself so clearly with Putin’s key foreign policy goals. And one can hope that the common sense of German voters that never rewarded appeasement of Moscow during the Cold War will reassert itself. But the Social Democrats are one of the great parties in German, and indeed in European political history. It is sad to see a great party like this taking the Russian bait.

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An Unsung Foreign Service Hero

Jerry Weaver died in May 2016, at age 77. I only learned about his passing through an old friend the other day. I learned as well that there wasn’t even a public funeral service for him in his hometown of Newark, Ohio. He literally vanished in utter obscurity. So no one was reminded, and few of his neighbors ever knew, that Jerry Weaver was a hero. Some 10,000 Beta Israel (Falasha) Jews owe their lives to Jerry Weaver, an American Foreign Service Officer who led a rescue operation in 1984 and 1985 that fused together elements of Entebbe and Schindler’s List.

I was a reporter in Sudan at the time. I met him and got to know Jerry Weaver as I interviewed the principal actors in this amazing story. Though Weaver himself was a rebel within the Foreign Service, “Operation Moses,” as it came to be called, demonstrates just how important an operationally minded State Department is not only to American security but to doing good in the world.

In 1984, due to a famine of biblical proportions in neighboring Ethiopia, the Falashas were among millions of starving Ethiopian peasants who migrated to refugee camps in Sudan. Because they were Jews, they were treated even more miserably in that Arab League member country than the other refugees. But also because they were Jews, they actually had a country in the Middle East willing to take them in. The question was how to get them out of Sudan and to Israel without the Israelis having to stage a rescue operation that would have blown up diplomatic relations between the United States and Sudan, a strategically located country straddling the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa.

Enter Jerry Weaver. Jerry was a big game hunter who insisted on loading the powder itself into each individual cartridge. He hunted gazelles in eastern Sudan and lions and leopards in southern Sudan. He was also a former high school football star who gave up an opportunity to play for the Ohio State Buckeyes in order to join the U.S. Army. When I met him, he was a man in his mid-forties who happened to speak passable Arabic. He was big, with a trimmed beard, and a devouring expression. He looked more than a little like Ernest Hemingway.

Weaver was already in Sudan for six years by 1984 as the U.S. Embassy’s refugee coordinator, and had made many undercover forays as an American official across the border into famine-wracked Ethiopia. He was awkward at diplomatic cocktail parties. He didn’t drink, but he did smoke marijuana. He also had unmatched social gifts for dealing with peasants, truck drivers, Greek ivory traders, local Pakistani merchants, and almost any kind of smuggler.

The U.S. Ambassador to Sudan at the time, the late Hume Horan, himself the best Arabic linguist in the State Department, described Weaver to me like this: “I knew he had his problems. He was living in the wrong century, a gun-in-pants-type fellow. His personal life was messy, sure…. But Weaver had enough swash and buckle in him to break through any barrier.”

Horan, himself the product of boarding schools, Harvard, and the State Department Arabist elite, essentially deputized Weaver to rescue the Falashas. Horan was backed up crucially by then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, who took a keen personal interest in the operation, but, in the elder Bush’s typical, self-effacing style, never took credit for it afterwards.

Weaver helped convince the Israelis at a meeting in Geneva in October 1984 not to attempt a rescue mission on its own. Instead, he recommended moving roughly 10,000 Falashas from the refugee camp of Um Raquba to Gedaref, and from Gedaref to Khartoum airport, with the full cooperation of the Sudanese security services—and he would more or less arrange it all. From there, chartered planes would fly the Falashas to Tel Aviv by way of Brussels.

Weaver, acting as a go-between for the Israelis and Sudanese state security—backed by Horan, who negotiated the arrangement at a higher level with Sudanese dictator Jaafar Nimieri—arranged safe houses for the air crews, the communications gear, vehicles, armed escorts, mechanics for both the trucks and the aircraft, gifts for the cooperating Sudanese, and food, potable water, and blankets for the refugees waiting in the trucks and on the tarmac. He even flew to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to buy spare parts for the Toyotas and took suitcases full of cash from Israelis in Geneva to purchase everything he needed.

Between November 21, 1984, and January 5, 1985, 35 Boeing 707 flights, carrying 240 Falashas each, left Khartoum: some 8,400 refugees. The remainder of the 10,000 would leave in March in an operation also planned by Weaver but, this time, executed by the CIA. (Operation Solomon, a covert Israeli operation, rescued the remainder of the Beta Israel community in 1991.) Vice President Bush gave Weaver a Superior Honors award for his work.

Those refugees and their descendants in Israel today owe their lives to Jerry Weaver (as well, of course, to others, notably Associate U.S. Coordinator for Refugee Affairs Richard Krieger). But Weaver was, in effect, pushed out of the Foreign Service soon afterward. People like him simply do not thrive in bureaucracies. (Weaver went on to running a farm in Licking County, Ohio.) That’s why it is to Horan’s credit that he took the risk of giving Weaver such a long leash in the operation.

One night Horan went out to Khartoum airport at 1:30 a.m. to witness the dark sea of humanity streaming into the planes. Entering one plane with Weaver, Horan saw the silent passengers, clothed in rags with no suitcases, with three Israeli doctors going up and down the aisles ministering to them, while Sudanese security forces waited outside on the tarmac. Weaver looked at Horan’s face and told me afterwards: “The Ambassador’s eyes were lit up in shock and amazement, as if the whole thing was a revelation to him [even though he had helped plan it]. He seemed to be saying, ‘Hey, this is neat; we’re really doing something here’.”

While this story may represent the Foreign Service at its very best, there are many hundreds of lesser stories from around the world of Foreign Service officers making small miracles happen in the service of their country and humanity. Theory—the world of ideas, with which the policy elite is obsessed—only gets you so far. Jerry Weaver was not a man of ideas. Ideas only matter in their execution.

But keep in mind that Horan and Weaver could not have done what they did outside the context of a robust State Department that emphasized language skills and area expertise. And they could not have done it without the firm, quiet backing of the elder Bush, a man who, even as President, believed in understatement and giving the credit to others—the real heroes who labor in obscurity out in the field while the Washington elite bathe in the klieg lights.

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Demonizing Democracy

The recent passage of a “foreign agents” law in Hungary is a disturbing reminder of the determination of the world’s autocracies to crush civil society activism. While Prime Minister Viktor Orban has justified the new measure on transparency grounds, the law’s clear purpose is to neutralize NGOs and think tanks as sources of independent thought about democratic renewal. The fact that an EU state adopted a law modeled on Russian legislation makes the matter all the worse.

Authoritarian regimes everywhere have sought to neutralize precisely those institutions that serve as the key instruments of democratic change. Civil society is one of a triad of institutions—free markets and the internet are the other two—that many believed would break down the structures of political repression in those parts of the world that had been bypassed by the democratic revolutions of the late 20th century. Instead, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and other strongmen have shown an impressive ability to suppress, regulate, and co-opt these institutions.

Historically, most civil society activists have been young, with little prior involvement in politics, and prone to neither corruption nor compromise. Some predicted that civil society organizations would play a more important role in securing democratic change than traditional political parties, which were often susceptible to both. In 2000, civil society activists organized a campaign that brought about the downfall of Serbian President Slobodan Milošević. In Ukraine, young reformers played a pivotal role in ensuring that the 2004 elections were not stolen.

But since Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, civil society has come under relentless persecution. With Russia as the model, country after country in practically every region has taken steps to limit civil society to social work and humanitarian missions and to silence its calls for honest government and civil liberties. Leading NGOs have been subjected to raids by the tax police, restrictions on foreign funding, and threats against domestic sources of funding. At the same time, autocracies have developed their own version of civil society through the establishment of amply funded government-controlled NGOs, known as GONGOS.

The second pillar of democratic change, free markets, has come under threat by autocratic regimes. During the Cold War’s waning years, many commentators asserted that it was “democratic capitalism”—a system that combined markets and free institutions—that had toppled the communist dictatorships. With communism’s end, there was no longer a bloc of countries that rejected capitalism, and practically every country sought to deepen its participation in the global trading system. However, in China, Russia, and elsewhere, the new leaders found ways to embrace state-propelled market approaches. They developed a form of managed capitalism, with a new class of oligarchs who were allowed to enrich themselves as long as they used their economic muscle to advance the political leadership’s strategic goals. Among other things, this hybrid form of capitalism allowed the authorities to ensure that the needs of the state and its leaders took precedence over the rule of law.

The introduction of the internet, the last of our triad, took place amid an explosion of all forms of independent media during the 1990s. But the internet in particular was seen as an irresistible force that could render censorship of any kind impossible. In 2000, President Bill Clinton famously compared China’s efforts to control internet content to “trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.”

While critical voices can still be found on the internet in China and other dictatorships, the authorities have been highly successful in suppressing material that might lead to any broad form of online protest or collective action. In addition to intrusive laws and regulations, the Chinese regime deploys armies of paid and volunteer commentators to flood social media with pro-government remarks, influence online discussions, report or attack those who make anti-government comments, and sow confusion about particular incidents that might reflect poorly on the leadership. Russia has rejected Beijing’s system of near-total control, instead shutting down sites or punishing online commentators who cross certain red lines. Both Chinese and Russian methods have succeeded in thwarting opposition that seeks to mobilize via the internet. After years of intense pressure, the Chinese internet is drawing closer to Xi Jinping’s ideal of a medium that is “clear and bright.”

There are, of course, downsides to the suppression of democratic institutions. By rejecting economic diversity, Russia has ensured that its economy will never rise above second-class status. China’s obsessive internet censorship has alienated a younger generation in nearby Asian societies, not to mention within China itself. But authoritarian powers are willing to tolerate these costs. Above all else, modern autocrats insist on domination of the economy’s commanding heights, suppression of critics before they form an organized opposition, and control over the political message.

The United States and other democracies need not accept modern authoritarians’ repressive features as immutable. We could, for example, impose trade sanctions on China for its restrictions on U.S. technology firms. But as we take action to advance our values, we should recognize that today’s autocrats understand that pluralism and dissenting ideas pose as serious a threat to their rule as they did to the one-party state of the previous century.

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Scientists Warn Against Fuzzy EU Carbon Math

Europe has a long history of playing fast and loose with its emission numbers, especially when it comes to carbon captured by forests. The EU considers burning biomass (read: wood chips) to be carbon neutral, under the logic that if felled forests are replanted, there’s “no harm, no foul” in the long run. That’s a problematic assumption, though, for a long list of reasons. For one, the mere acts of cutting down trees, transporting them, and then processing them into wood pellets all produce emissions. For another, oftentimes the trees that are cut down aren’t replanted, and those purchasing this “green” biomass often don’t do their due diligence to ensure they’re sourcing their wood from responsible foresters.

But as the BBC reports, a group of scientists say that those accounting problems have deeper roots:

Leading researchers have condemned attempts to change the way carbon from trees will be counted in Europe…As the European Union tries to put in place wide-ranging plans to restrict future carbon emissions, officials want to ensure that accounting for the impact of forests on the atmosphere should be based on sound science.

To this end they want to cap the use of forestry at the levels seen between 1990 and 2009. If countries want to harvest more trees in future than they did during this period, the loss of carbon would count towards the country’s overall emissions. However several countries including Austria, Finland, Poland and Sweden want a change in these rules so that increased harvesting in the future should not be penalised. […]

[Accounting] for carbon contained in trees is a fiendishly difficult task. Forests can both soak up and emit carbon depending on how old they are, and how they are managed and harvested.

Forests have long life cycles, and it’s hard to pick a baseline by which to judge the “correct” amount of forestation for a given region. Certain EU members are asking Brussels to relax requirements based on when their forests were originally planted, but that’s giving rise to worries that total tree cover might shrink, and with it the continent’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) from the air.

If this sounds like a complicated mess, well, it is—both on a regulatory level, and even on a scientific level as well. It’s a problem that’s only exacerbated by the EU’s foolhardy insistence that biomass is a carbon neutral renewable energy source—a convenient point of view that’s allowed the bloc to meet the green targets it set for itself.

But biomass isn’t the green energy of the future. One environmentalist called it “disastrous” for the environment, and even its most ardent advocates have to admit that the carbon accounting underpinning its case for being green is dodgy. So while Europe continues to posture itself as the global green leader (especially in the wake of President Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement), remember that the bloc’s latest emissions data recorded an annual rise of 0.5 percent, and that much of its “renewables” growth is coming from burning wood.

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