Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 186

Americans Will Enjoy Cheap Gas This Memorial Day Weekend

The average gas price in the U.S. this holiday weekend will be ten cents higher this year than it was in 2016, but don’t expect many American drivers to complain—this is the second cheapest gas has been over Memorial Day since 2009. The EIA reports:

Despite the year-over-year increase, 2017 marks the second-lowest price ahead of the Memorial Day weekend since 2009, when the national average price of retail regular gasoline was $2.31/gal. Relatively low crude oil spot prices, weaker year-over-year gasoline demand, and high gasoline inventories have contributed to relatively low gasoline prices.

There’s a quick chain of events drivers should keep in mind as they save money at the pump: cheap gas is the result of cheap oil; cheap oil is the result of global supply well exceeding demand; that oversupply is largely the result of surging supplies of U.S. crude.

So as American drivers hit the road for their three-day weekend, they should be thanking fracking for the extra cash in their pocket on their journeys. America’s energy renaissance affects all aspects of the economy, but there’s nowhere its effects are more evident for the average consumer than at the gas station.

Pumphrett in Trump’s Labyrinth

The anonymous instructions on a folded piece of pink paper pushed beneath my condo door specified a one a.m. rendezvous at a parking garage on K Street. If I agreed, I was to move a pot of geraniums from one side of my balcony to the other. Intrigued, I did so.

The deserted garage was bathed in a neon gloom, and I was beginning to regret my decision to come when I noticed a glowing cigarette and two inches of amber holder protruding from behind a concrete pillar. As I moved toward it, a muffled command rang out to stop where I was! The speaker was attempting to disguise his voice. Unfortunately for him, that voice—high, piping and infused with a syrupy prep school drawl—was impervious to disguise, so I wasn’t surprised when my old Choate classmate and rising White House star, Pumphrett, emerged from behind the pillar. “I had you going there for a moment, didn’t I, Cushy?” he chuckled. (For the benefit of new readers, I should mention that “Cushy” had been my school name at Choate for reasons my lawyer has forbidden me to discuss.)

“I was hornswoggled, Pumphrett,” I told him, my voice oozing with sarcasm. “But what on earth are you doing? Why all the mystery?”

“I wanted to tell someone the truth in case anything happens to me. I’ve been frightened to death ever since I got Comey fired.” It astonished me to think that the Comey business was Pumphett’s doing. And what was this about something happening to him. Did he fear violence? I told him my credulity was painfully strained.

“Don’t be so sure,” he objected. “Have you gotten a load of this Schiller fellow?” I summoned a mental picture of the President’s hulking enforcer and hatchet man, Keith Schiller. Perhaps Pumphrett had a point. “I’m convinced he carries a truncheon,” Pumphrett gabbled, “you know, from his days on the NYPD. And people say he isn’t afraid to use it. He took Spicer to the basement for a little ‘talk’, and Spicer was walking on tiptoe for a week afterwards.” A shiver ran through my friend. “That was for some minor mistake. My sin is much greater. I am the man who knows too much.”

I decided to chivy him along: “And just what do you know?”

“Before I tell, Cushy, can I count on your friendship and discretion, old school ties and so forth?” Pumphrett was calling on the binding hoops of steel forged at Choate, where we had not only been school chums but also, briefly, fellow members of the Publius Decius Mus Society (see footnote). I assured my friend that, barring his death and/or dismemberment, he could rely on me never to disclose what he was about to say—and as token offered the Choate handshake. This—to the uninitiated—seems quite a normal handshake, but is in fact a great deal more self-assured. He was convinced, and began to unspool a truly astonishing skein of circumstances.

“As you know, Cushy, the President is obsessed with loyalty. This is just one element in a swirl of psychoses, but with a firmer foundation than most. In fact, it’s eminently rational: He simply can’t bring himself to believe that anyone would be foolish enough to be loyal to someone like him.”

“Doesn’t he realize that loyalty is reciprocal?”

“Realize’ might be a trifle strong. He senses it in some elemental way. That’s exactly the problem. Since he bestows no loyalty, he expects none, and no amount of groveling will convince him otherwise. The more abject you are, the more he’s convinced you must be sneaking something by him.”

“You were always a champion groveler.”

“I thought so, too, until I attended my first senior staff meeting. I tell you, Cushy, Uriah Heep himself would have trouble keeping pace. Trump despises the toadies and distrusts the rare exception, like McMaster. That leaves him with Ivanka. But she goes home in the evening. I, on the other hand, have been sleeping in my office since the eviction, so one night Trump sent Schiller down to goose step me up to the quarters.”

“Just a moment, there, Pumphrett.” I was incredulous. “Surely you can’t mean Trump has taken to confiding in you. But you’ve always been a speck, a mote, hardly a perturbance in the space-time continuum.”

“It’s because of my obscurity. As Schiller growled in my ear on the way up: ‘I wouldn’t be missed.’ At any rate, there I was. Trump got straight to the point. He was surrounded by enemies, he said, who were trying to destroy him. I was thinking that whoever these enemies were, they were making an excellent job of it, but I kept my face blank. He went on to say that precisely because I was a nonentity and no one was sure what I actually did, and also because he could crush me like a grape (‘and it would be so easy, believe me’) he valued my opinion. Then he asked about members of the staff.

“Did he ask about Spicer?”

“He started to, but then he said he knew about Spicer. Spicer was making him look bad. Of course, he was too quick for Spicer. He was too quick for all of them.

At that juncture he cackled maniacally and rubbed his absurdly small hands together. I thought this might be a good time to make my excuses, but Schiller tapped me on the shoulder with something that felt heavy and wooden so I sank back in my chair. Trump wasn’t through with me.

‘Well, how about Cohen-Whatsis?’ he inquired.

‘You don’t to worry about him, Mr. President. Without you he’d be flipping burgers at Denny’s.’

‘And Miller?’ he wanted to know

He’d be working the counter.

‘OK, how about Cohn?’

“No problem there. You’re money in the bank to him, literally.

“‘Well then, how about Comey at the FBI?’ Here, Cushy, I hesitated. I had heard that Comey had a childish preoccupation with the law, and, of course, the pesky FBI was hot on the trail of Flynn, Manafort, Stone, and the rest of that odious crowd. But, on the other hand, we were in the President’s private quarters. Who knew who might be listening in? So I was about to vouch for Comey, but I had hesitated a beat too long.

’Aha! Just as I thought,’ he ejaculated, slapping a Federal period side table so hard it cracked. My mind was racing. I could see where he was going with this and wanted to head it off. An idea struck. Why not have Comey to dinner, just the two of them, and ask him if he’d be loyal? Trump could make some kind of record of the conversation—perhaps a tape—just to keep Comey honest. Of course, he’d want to keep that part strictly secret.

‘That’s just what I’ll do,’ he shouted. ‘That’s brilliant, Pomfritts. I’ll say he asked for the dinner. Maybe if he thinks he’s keeping his job, I can get him off Flynn’s back, and stop the G men breathing down my neck on this Russia business.”

“Well, Mr. President, I wouldn’t…,”

‘I’ll get that on tape. Then I’ll can him.’ At this point he stood and paced back and forth, rubbing his chins. ‘But how to explain it?’ Finally it was if a bulb had gone off and he turned his gaze to me. ‘Pomfrites, I’ve got it!’ He was all enthusiasm. ‘You write a memo to me and recommend Comey be fired.’ I asked what reason I could give. He said it could be some legal thing—maybe how Comey screwed up the Clinton email business. Well this struck me as purest fantasy, and I tried to tell him that nobody would swallow something as ham-fisted as that, but he was seized with the idea. ‘Just don’t say anything about the Russians. No Moscow! No Collusion! Got it?’”

Well, Cushy, all I know about the law I’ve learned from conversations in various holding cells over the years, and I told Trump so. He was forced to agree. I suggested Sessions, but he waved that away saying he needed somebody with a reputation for integrity. I racked my brain. Didn’t Sessions have a deputy of some kind? Neither of us knew. Schiller was still there in the corner, cracking his knuckles and guarding his bowl. Trump sent him out to get the name, he grunted and came back after a few minutes with the name Rosenstein. ‘Good,’ said Trump.

But what if he refuses? I asked.

‘He’s new. He’ll do it,’ pronounced Trump, and that seemed to end the matter. Now, he was all smiles. ‘You know, Pomfrites,’ he told me as I went out the door. ‘You’re smarter than you look.’”

“I suppose that must be gratifying—in its way,” I commented

“Yes, I suppose,” answered my friend. “Still, I couldn’t help wishing that the same were true of him.”

Footnote: The Mus society was anonymous, so there is no record of it in Choate archives. By rumor, it was open only to those who considered participation in petty intellectual squabbling the moral equivalent of demonstrating bravery on the battlefield. Pumphrett and I resigned together when we became aware that, according to the Roman historian Livy, when the eponymous Mus fatally charged the enemy lines during a battle near Capua, he was in command of the left wing of the Roman Army.

Is ASEAN Enabling North Korea?

When it comes to North Korea, President Trump has consistently sounded a core message: Beijing is the regime’s top economic enabler, and the Chinese have not done enough to ratchet up economic pressure over Pyongyang’s nuclear program. That assessment has been the centerpiece of Trump’s North Korea policy and his early attempts to compel China into turning up the heat.

But as a new Peterson Institute analysis shows, China is hardly the only Asian country whose trade, illicit or otherwise, is giving Pyongyang a lifeline:

Is the overall ASEAN-DPRK trade picture part of the problem too? As we noted in March when looking at DPRK-Malaysia trade, licit trade is not the main story. Indeed, DPRK-ASEAN trade is relatively small pickings, but $181 million per year is not nothing. More, in the Philippines case there is actually a trend upward, and as Greitens noted, the Philippines is North Korea’s third largest trading partner after China and India—even eclipsing Russia. But beyond simply looking at the overall trade figures, the trade deficit that North Korea is running every year with ASEAN countries is noteworthy…. That North Korea can regularly fund such large trade deficits suggests greater inflows into North Korea than show up in the trade data. Although it is unclear exactly how North Korea can sustain these deficits, it is clear that illicit trade is a crucial part of the equation and an area where ASEAN countries are a hub.

To be sure, North Korea’s trade flows with ASEAN are tiny compared with China, which accounts for about 90% of trade with Pyongyang. But the insights here about unreported illicit trade—and the upward trend in the Philippines—are significant, and help to explain some of the Trump Administration’s other recent moves.

Earlier this month, Rex Tillerson called for ASEAN members to crack down on funding streams to North Korea, threatening further sanctions if they did not take action. The same week, Trump invited Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte to the White House, saying that he would seek the Philippines’ cooperation against North Korea. That claim generated skepticism, if not ridicule, in the media. But Trump has a point: China is not North Korea’s only economic pressure point, and his Administration is trying to leverage relationships with other Asian countries in isolating Pyongyang.

It remains to be seen whether this full-court press to tighten the screws will produce results. But given China’s dubious record in squeezing Pyongyang so far, it’s worth not putting all one’s eggs in one basket.

Zbigniew Brzezinski (1928-2017)

We are greatly saddened here at The American Interest to hear about the death of our friend, colleague, and mentor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who passed away yesterday at the age of 89. He was a founding member of our Editorial Board, and contributed to our magazine many times throughout the years. Our thoughts are with his family.

Beijing Wants to Build a New Cairo

Credit where credit is due: China’s plans for its One Belt, One Road (OBOR) infrastructure initiative are nothing if not ambitious. According to Nikkei Asian Review, Chinese state firms are finalizing a formidable, $20 billion project to construct a new capital for Egypt:

A project by Chinese state companies to help build a new capital for Egypt is back on track after running aground earlier in a dispute over contract terms.

The Egyptian investment and housing ministries have begun talks to finalize an agreement with Shanghai-listed developer China Fortune Land Development under which the company is to invest up to $20 billion to build an upmarket residential district, an industrial zone, schools, a university and recreational centers in the new capital, along with supporting infrastructure, according to a statement issued by the investment ministry on May 15. Officials estimate the final agreement could be reached by year-end, with construction beginning the following month.

China Fortune and fellow state company China State Construction Engineering signed preliminary agreements with Egyptian authorities in early 2016 to develop parts of the as-yet unnamed city about 60km east of Cairo.

Of course, tentative agreements are a far cry from tangible investments, and this has the potential to turn into a massive boondoggle. Some Egyptians are already warning of a real estate bubble in the area selected for the new capital, and there is plenty of reason to remain broadly skeptical about China’s OBOR projects, as Christopher Miller has explained in these pages.

Caveats aside, though, the Egyptian project does tell us something about the scope of China’s ambitions, and why Cairo might be eager to play along. Beijing’s motivations with OBOR have always been both geopolitical and mercenary, with an aim to expand the ranks of countries that are friendly to (and dependent on) China, while exporting the excess capacity of its industrial sector. The Egyptian project kills both birds with one stone, helping to grow China’s foothold in the Middle East while deploying the capabilities of its industrial firms to foreign markets.

And from Cairo’s perspective, Beijing must look like a tempting benefactor these days. Egypt’s economy has been seriously struggling of late, and help from the IMF has been contingent on painful and politically unpopular economic reforms. President Sisi has been trying to change the conversation by investing in infrastructure mega-projects to stimulate growth. With that aim in mind, China surely looks like an appealing partner with its supposedly “no-strings-attached” credit line.

Beijing Wants To Build A New Cairo

Credit where credit is due: China’s plans for its One Belt, One Road (OBOR) infrastructure initiative are nothing if not ambitious. According to Nikkei Asian Review, Chinese state firms are finalizing a formidable, $20 billion project to construct a new capital for Egypt:

A project by Chinese state companies to help build a new capital for Egypt is back on track after running aground earlier in a dispute over contract terms.

The Egyptian investment and housing ministries have begun talks to finalize an agreement with Shanghai-listed developer China Fortune Land Development under which the company is to invest up to $20 billion to build an upmarket residential district, an industrial zone, schools, a university and recreational centers in the new capital, along with supporting infrastructure, according to a statement issued by the investment ministry on May 15. Officials estimate the final agreement could be reached by year-end, with construction beginning the following month.

China Fortune and fellow state company China State Construction Engineering signed preliminary agreements with Egyptian authorities in early 2016 to develop parts of the as-yet unnamed city about 60km east of Cairo.

Of course, tentative agreements are a far cry from tangible investments, and this has the potential to turn into a massive boondoggle. Some Egyptians are already warning of a real estate bubble in the area selected for the new capital, and there is plenty of reason to remain broadly skeptical about China’s OBOR projects, as Christopher Miller has explained in these pages.

Caveats aside, though, the Egyptian project does tell us something about the scope of China’s ambitions, and why Cairo might be eager to play along. Beijing’s motivations with OBOR have always been both geopolitical and mercenary, with an aim to expand the ranks of countries that are friendly to (and dependent on) China, while exporting the excess capacity of its industrial sector. The Egyptian project kills both birds with one stone, helping to grow China’s foothold in the Middle East while deploying the capabilities of its industrial firms to foreign markets.

And from Cairo’s perspective, Beijing must look like a tempting benefactor these days. Egypt’s economy has been seriously struggling of late, and help from the IMF has been contingent on painful and politically unpopular economic reforms. President Sisi has been trying to change the conversation by investing in infrastructure mega-projects to stimulate growth. With that aim in mind, China surely looks like an appealing partner with its supposedly “no-strings-attached” credit line.

Changing the Tune About a United Jerusalem

While Israelis were celebrating Jerusalem Day, marking the jubilee of the reunification of the city in the 1967 Six-Day War, something strange—and largely unnoticed—occurred in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s official rhetoric: He stopped promising to keep Jerusalem united. On no fewer than three occasions in the week of this anniversary, Netanyahu eschewed his regular promise to retain the whole city; instead, he repeated verbatim that the Temple Mount and Western Wall would remain under Israeli sovereignty. Such a glaring omission, from a premier who so carefully guards his words, can hardly have been accidental. Rather, it hints that the Prime Minister is seeking to create the necessary ambiguity for a change in policy on the outlines of Israel’s contested capital. Indeed, if media reports are to be believed, such a plan is already on the agenda.

Netanyahu’s multiple Jerusalem Day speeches all carried the same carefully calibrated message. At the opening ceremony for the week’s festivities, Netanyahu declared, “Jerusalem was and always will be the capital of Israel. The Temple Mount and the Western Wall [my emphasis] will always remain under Israeli sovereignty.” (He signed off by calling Jerusalem Israel’s “eternal and united capital forever,” almost as a perfunctory platitude.) At a special Knesset session, Netanyahu used the same formula: “The Temple Mount and the Western Wall [my emphasis] will forever remain under Israeli sovereignty.” And at the official ceremony on Ammunition Hill that evening, Netanyahu rejected the “far-fetched notion that we should turn back time” to a divided Jerusalem, before repeating: “The Temple Mount and the Western Wall [my emphasis] will forever remain under Israeli sovereignty.”

On one occasion this Jerusalem Day, Netanyahu did promise to keep the capital united. The repetition of the same formula, however, arguably qualified what the premier meant by “united.” “We shall relinquish neither the Temple Mount nor the Western Wall [my emphasis],” said Netanyahu at the Merkaz HaRav Yeshiva, “and we won’t return to dividing the city.”

This rhetoric constitutes a major departure from previous years’ declarations. On Jerusalem Day 2016, Netanyahu declared, “We shall never return to the reality of a divided, wounded city.” On Jerusalem Day 2015, he announced, “We will forever keep Jerusalem united under Israel’s sovereignty.” On Jerusalem Day 2014: “We will never divide our heart—never…it must be united.” And so on. But not this year. These statements were also a departure from the bread-and-butter pledges of Netanyahu’s political rivals. Education Minister Naftali Bennett, chairman of the far-Right Jewish Home Party, urged U.S. President Donald Trump to be the first President to recognize a united Jerusalem. Prime-ministerial hopeful Yair Lapid, of the centrist Yesh Atid, vowed a week earlier that “Jerusalem will forever remain united.”

Logically, the shift in rhetoric opens the door for Netanyahu to approve some sort of division of Jerusalem within its current boundaries. Those municipal borders encompass the territory annexed after the Six-Day War, including what was then East Jerusalem (mostly the Old City) and another 28 surrounding Arab villages. These impoverished neighborhoods suffer from chronic underinvestment, and were home to many of the attackers in Israel’s recent wave of lone-wolf stabbing attacks. Devastatingly, eight of these neighborhoods—containing tens of thousands of Arab Jerusalemites—are behind Israel’s Security Barrier, turning them into a lawless no-man’s land disconnected from municipal services, and a no-go area for Israeli police.

Indeed, many Israelis argue that relinquishing those villages—now contiguous neighborhoods of the city—would not constitute a division of Jerusalem at all. The Movement for Saving Jewish Jerusalem, founded by several former legislators and ministers, argues that most of these villages were never historically part of Jerusalem—and calls for transferring most of them to the Palestinian Authority, while retaining the Old City and the surrounding Holy Basin. The Commanders for Israel’s Security, a group backed by former premier Ehud Barak, calls for Israel to unilaterally transfer these suburbs to a new “umbrella municipal authority,” retaining control on a provisional basis only until they can become part of Palestine in a permanent accord. It argues that “East Jerusalem” is only the 6 square kilometers of the Old City and its immediate environs, while the surrounding 70 square-kilometer envelope was never part of historical Jerusalem.

In light of this, what could be behind Netanyahu’s decision to repeat the carefully scripted and nuanced pledge to keep the Temple Mount and Western Wall under Israeli sovereignty, when invoking the perennial vow to keep Jerusalem united would have been more straightforward—and more consistent with previous policy?

One answer is: Trump. The unpredictable American President is serious about brokering the “ultimate deal”—a diplomatic Holy Grail that he will only covet more intensely as his domestic woes intensify. As former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro warned in Haaretz, Trump has leverage over both Israelis and Palestinians, and “neither will want to get caught saying no to him.” Toning down the rhetoric on the eternal unity of Jerusalem—a non-starter for serious final-status negotiations—could signal willingness to negotiate on all the core issues in good faith. The White House claims that “President Abbas noted that he was ready to begin negotiating immediately,” and i24NEWS reports the Trump Administration has proposed a direct meeting between the leaders for as early as July.

More immediately, however, the Israeli government is reportedly considering a plan to cede certain Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. Israel’s Channel 10 has just reported that Israel’s National Security Council—a department of the Prime Minister’s Office—is exploring a “secret” plan to exclude Kafr Aqb and the Shuafat Refugee Camp from Jerusalem’s municipal borders. The plan would place both areas—already on the “wrong” side of the Security Barrier—under an independent local council. They would still be considered part of Israel—just not part of Jerusalem. It is unclear whether this plan is connected to a detailed initiative presented to the Prime Minister months ago by Likud legislator Anat Berko to sever Arab neighborhoods from the Jerusalem municipality. According to the Jerusalem Post, not only did Netanyahu not dismiss the plan out of hand, he asked to retain a copy of the map and that Berko not reveal it to the media. Diplomatic sources privy to Netanyahu’s recent discussions with President Trump, continued the report, said that both Jerusalem and Washington have proposed transferring municipal responsibility for some of these areas to the Palestinians.

The fact that Netanyahu repeated the same phrase verbatim in three speeches suggests the wording was no coincidence. The reports of plans to relinquish control over certain Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem suggest the timing appears to be no coincidence either. The Israeli government has zero interest in dividing the core of Jerusalem, or abandoning the Temple Mount and Western Wall. But as for stepping away from formal responsibility for Kafr Aqb, the Shuafat Refugee Camp, and similar neighborhoods—Netanyahu has just very subtly kicked the door slightly ajar.

How Trump Affected Political Correctness

A major theme—the major theme?—of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign for the presidency was his relentless assault on socially-enforced standards of speech and opinion that those on the Right tend to refer to as political correctness and those on the Left tend to refer to as politeness or propriety. And a new paper from the National Bureau of Economics Research suggests that this assault was at least partly successful: By “updating” peoples’ preferences about the popularity of anti-immigration views, Trump’s unexpected victory made people more willing to express anti-immigration views publicly than they were before Election Day.

The authors (Leonardo Bursztyn of the University of Chicago, Georgy Egorov of Northwestern, and Stefano Fiorin of UCLA) summarize their methodology like this: In the run-up to the 2016 election, they offered subjects a dollar “if they authorized the researchers to make a donation to a strongly anti-immigration organization on their behalf.” Some of the participants were told that their donation would be anonymous. Others were told that they researchers might ask them about their decision later. Those who thought their donation would be anonymous were significantly more likely to authorize it than those who thought they might need to discuss it in the future, “suggest(ing) the presence of social stigma associated with the action.” After the election, however, this social stigma disappeared; people were just as likely to authorize a donation to an anti-immigrant group even if they were not assured that the donation would be anonymous.

It’s not that Trump’s election increased anti-immigration sentiment, the authors say—it just made people already inclined toward restrictionism feel less of a need to conceal their preferences.

Regardless of whether Trump actually builds a wall or successfully gets his travel ban through the court system, it seems that his rhetoric has created a fundamental shift in the way Americans talk (or don’t talk) about immigration policy—and probably other sensitive issues, as well. That the president survived the Access Hollywood tape, the Megyn Kelly feud, and his remarks about the Khans (to give a few examples) might have also had an “emperor has no clothes” effect on certain social taboos.

In some ways, the “Trump effect” on P.C. has probably been positive. To the extent that critiques of the elite consensus on immigration and globalization and social liberalism had become off-limits, creating a stifling and anti-democratic environment where people were afraid to even express their concerns lest they be ostracized and condemned by their social betters, it is healthy that Trump’s election loosened limitations on acceptable discourse.

At the same time, civilization rests on a certain set of social norms, which are far more powerful than laws in shaping behavior. If everyone made all of their private opinions public—if dinner guests always told the host how they really felt about the food, if drivers always shared with police their opinions on being pulled over, if Supreme Court justices announced that their opinions were based as much on guesswork and intuition as the text of the Constitution—many of our institutions would work less well. Moreover, when informal norms erode, blunter tools like laws and bureaucratic codes have a tendency of taking their place.

So even as Trump has made some debates more open by taking a wrecking ball to political correctness, there is also a legitimate concern that his freewheeling rhetorical style has “unearthed some demons,” as the Republican Rep. Mark Sanford put it to the Washington Post. “I’ve talked to a number of people about it back home. They say, ‘Well, look, if the president can say whatever, why can’t I say whatever?’ He’s given them license.” That is not cause for celebration. The President’s election was a sign that prevailing social stigmas and taboos were unsustainable. The solution isn’t to tear them down altogether, but to build new ones that are more broadly supported and in line with the interests of an open society.

Trump’s Transactionality on Display in Brussels

It was a day full of mixed signals and tense handshakes in Brussels on Thursday. President Trump began the last leg of his world tour, making the rounds at NATO, where he failed to articulate a strong U.S. commitment to Article 5, while at the same time lecturing allies for not living up to their commitments to defense spending over the years.

Perhaps more jarring than Trump’s seeming ambivalence was the image of his staffers immediately jumping in to clarify that the United States was, in fact, fully committed to NATO’s collective defense clause. One GOP national security official felt he had to apologize to his European counterpart for Trump’s behavior. “I’m sorry, he’s an idiot,” the official reportedly said. One has to wonder what’s worse from the Europeans’ perspective: that a key ally is resolutely changing its longstanding policy on NATO, or the realization that divisions in DC are so deep that the President is immediately being undercut by his staff. Is anyone at the wheel in Washington?

We here at TAI think the case for NATO is strong and needs to continually be made; the brilliant Kori Schake makes as good a case as any in our pages today. But yesterday’s events give one the sense that any case made on the merits will not really move the needle for this President. Leaving aside the current lack of message discipline and what it means for the chain of command in the White House, it’s worth pondering what is behind our President’s antipathy for our European allies and collective defense in general.

A passage from Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy’s excellent book-length analysis/profile of Russia’s Vladimir Putin is suggestive:

In Putin’s conception, there were two categories of countries. First was a handful of genuinely sovereign countries—countries that were strong enough in terms of history, culture, and identity, as well as economically and militarily, to assert their own interests independently. Then there was everyone else. As Putin saw it, Russia was, of course, sovereign, and unequivocally so after 2006. China was sovereign, for certain. The United States was clearly sovereign, but it also had obligations, entanglements, and responsibilities that infringed on its sovereignty. Beyond Russia, China, and the United States, everyone else had more or less limited sovereignty.

Germany, France, and Britain, for instance—the big three of Europe—not only depended on the United States for their security as part of NATO, they had also sacrificed some sovereignty to the supranational European Union.

A lot of ink has already been spilled about how bad it looks that President Trump was so solicitous of the Saudis and so dismissive of our allies. Even more has been written about how he has had nothing but warm words for Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and how he has gone out of his way to praise Putin himself throughout the campaign. Few have gone the extra step to try to understand the President’s viewpoint on its own terms.

This isn’t Trump in the thrall of foreign powers; he is no puppet, no Siberian Candidate. Rather, his is a kind of brute understanding of sovereignty that casts NATO as a liability for the United States—even if, when leveraged correctly, it can be a huge force multiplier. The mere fact of having to herd cats to get anything done looks to Trump like a colossal waste of time. If the Alliance can show itself to be useful in helping address his priorities—fighting terrorism at the moment—then maybe it’s worth keeping around. But short of that, it’s useless.

And worse than useless, he sees the Alliance’s pious adherence to “liberal” shibboleths as needlessly limiting. There are real issues to be dealt with (again, global terrorism), and in President Trump’s view, Russia’s help could be enlisted in meaningfully addressing them. The West’s pedantic insistence on browbeating and sanctioning Moscow over its behavior in Ukraine—an issue Trump assured Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was of little concern to him personally—is standing in the way of an alliance between Great Powers that could resolve most of the world’s thorniest problems. Who knows, maybe President Putin could even be persuaded to get tough on North Korea?

Evidence of this kind of thinking leaked out through the Financial Times yesterday, in its report on Trump’s meetings with the EU’s Donald Tusk and Jean-Claude Juncker:

One diplomat briefed on his talks with EU leaders said Mr Trump referred in breathtaking terms about the potential to deal with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president who stands accused of covert interference in the election campaign that brought him to the White House.

If President Trump even hinted at what we have outlined above in our analysis, we are certain that some Europeans were short of breath.

Frequent readers should know by now that we don’t share the President’s optimism for this approach. We think it needlessly squanders advantages we have painstakingly built up since the end of World War II. This Russian regime will forever see us as peer competitors and has been working to undermine the sources of our strength for at least the past decade. For a businessman who professes to be a tough negotiator, the President seems to be giving away a whole lot and getting precious little in return.

But that said, we take the President’s arguments seriously and suggest more analysts do too. As Thomas Wright compellingly argued in an interview published the day before the elections, Trump has for decades thought ill of alliances and preferred to “get things done” with strongmen. Indeed, he openly ran on the premise, to the horror of the foreign policy establishment but to the delight of his base. This is not about corruption, but conviction. The transactional worldview is here to stay. If you disagree with the approach, it’s time to engage with it on its own terms.

One More Massacre of Egypt’s Copts

At least 28 people have been killed in an attack on Coptic Christian pilgrims in Minya, Egypt about 85 miles south of Cairo. As Al Ahram reports:

The death toll from an attack Friday morning by unknown gunmen on a vehicles carrying Coptic Christians to a monastery in the east of Egypt’s Minya Governorate has risen to 28, with 23 injured, the governor announced. [….]

Egypt’s interior ministry released details on the attack, saying in an official statement that unknown assailants driving three 4×4 wheelers attacked by “randomly shooting” the bus carrying the Copts.

The ages of the victims ranged from children to over 60, the bishop of Minya told Egyptian private-owned TV Channel DMC. Many victims were children, only three children survived the attack, a source from the church told Al-Ahram.

President Sisi has called for an “emergency security meeting” following the attacks, though with a state of emergency already in place after the Palm Sunday bombings, color us skeptical that any new measures will be any more effective in protecting Copts than the old measures. No group has yet claimed responsibility for the attacks, though the most heinous attacks against Egypt’s Christians in recent months have been carried out by ISIS.

After the bombings in Manchester, we noted the particular barbarity of targeting children in a terrorist attack. While noteworthy, ISIS’ ideology of slaughtering the innocent is not new. Christians in the Middle East are intimately familiar with an enemy that wants them eliminated completely. The State Department has already declared that ISIS’ attacks against Christians in Iraq and Syria constitute genocide. Their intentions in Egypt are no different.