Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 191

China Taps Fire Ice in South China Sea

Methane clathrates (also called methane hydrates, flammable ice, and fire ice) are gas deposits trapped in a lattice of ice that can be found along the bottom of the ocean all around the world, and over the last few years there’s been a big push to drill for these deposits to capture the natural gas trapped within. Thus far that effort has been led by Japan, which has had great need to find new sources of domestically available energy resources after its decision to shut down its nuclear power fleet following the 2011 Fukushima disaster.

Now, as the BBC reports, China is joining the hunt as it announced this week that it successfully extracted some of this fire ice from the South China Sea:

China describes its latest results as a breakthrough and [Associate Professor Praveen Linga from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the National University of Singapore] agrees. “Compared with the results we have seen from Japanese research, the Chinese scientists have managed to extract much more gas in their efforts…So in that sense it is indeed a major step towards making gas extraction from methane hydrates viable.”

It’s thought that there is as much as 10 times the amount of gas in methane hydrates than in shale for instance. “And that’s by conservative estimates,” says Prof Linga.

It’s hard to wrap one’s head around an energy development that might have the potential to be an order of magnitude larger than the shale boom, but those are the numbers that we’re working with. But this is a vastly more complicated endeavor than fracking shale rock, not least because it occurs offshore and at great depths. Japan made headlines with its own breakthrough more than four years ago, and since then has made only middling progress. Earlier this month Tokyo announced that it had successfully tapped methane hydrates for the second time, which, coupled with China’s own breakthrough, indicates that activity in the industry is heating up once again.

China’s entrance adds an interesting geopolitical wrinkle to the energy story, as well. We’ve been following its territorial aggression in the South China Sea for many years now, during which time we’ve seen precious little material justifications necessary for Beijing’s actions. If China can pioneer a way to successfully drill commercial quantities of methane hydrates, it will add more fuel to the fire that is the South China Sea.

Connecticut Fiscal Woes Highlight Blue Model Decay

In deep-blue Connecticut, a hard truth is setting in: another round of tax hikes on the wealthiest is not a sustainable fix for the state’s unaffordable public sector pension crisis. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The wealthiest state in the U.S. is having trouble collecting enough money to pay its bills, and the Democratic governor doesn’t think taxing the rich is the answer anymore. […]

Gov. Dannel Malloy has twice before bet that taxing the wealthy would help solve the state’s fiscal problems. But neither increase resulted in sustained revenue growth, according to his administration, which says it would be a mistake to do it a third time. […]

The state projects a $5.1 billion budget deficit over the next two fiscal years, fueled by increases in fixed costs over that period including pension obligations, health-care expenses and debt servicing.

Connecticut is among the U.S. states with the largest unfunded pension liabilities. It is also home to a wealthy cohort of hedge fund managers who pay high tax rates to fund a large portion of those obligations. But income tax revenue from the wealthy tends to be volatile and unreliable—in Connecticut’s case, as the WSJ notes, the hedge fund industry’s decline has led to lower-than-expected tax receipts (states like California have run into similar problems when taxing their own economic elite). Moreover, financiers are mobile, and can move to other states if rates get too high.

It’s tempting for blue model partisans to see the state and local pension crisis as a temporary problem that can be papered over with high-end tax hikes. And while the rich may well need to pay more to address the problem, it won’t be enough. The forces that have brought about the blue model crisis are structural: Overly-powerful public sector unions, dishonest accounting practices, chronic political can-kicking, and a defined-benefit pension model that doesn’t work in the 21st century. These are deep-rooted problems that will require major reforms in the way government runs and the way the civil service is organized. As Connecticut Democrats are realizing, the Bernie Sanders approach to government deficits—tax the millionaires and billionaires, then tax them some more—is simply not adequate to the scope of the crisis.

Through the Mist

The Mist Procession: The Autobiography of Lord Vansittart

Hutchinson, 1958

“A sure way of seeing ahead is to look back.” A cliché, perhaps, yet coming from a memoir by Lord Robert S. Vansittart, top British diplomat and resolute anti-appeaser of Hitler, it carries a powerful message. Principal Private Secretary at Number Ten from 1928 to 1930 and head of the Foreign Office till the eve of war, then Chief Diplomatic Adviser to the government, his book The Mist Procession, published in 1958, has a lot to tell us not just about the 1930s but about the world today.

The title refers to an incident when, caught in a spreading mist, he imagined famous faces emerging briefly and then disappearing into the gloom of inevitable mortality. Vansittart was to meet many of the great European faces of his day, though his recollections are more sharp than misty. The dominant theme is his premonition that Germany would thrust the world into barbarous wars, and his determination to prevent them. He was also an early and fierce opponent of communism—the “twin barbarians,” he called Stalin and Hitler. As a former diplomat and Cold War specialist on Russia and China, I am reminded by his warnings about German revanchism in the 1930s of the troubling atmosphere in Moscow today.

Scion of a well-established English family of Dutch descent, Vansittart was educated at Eton and knew Germany and France well enough to prefer the latter. In Germany he had encountered anti-British hysteria generated by the South African “Boer” War and was appalled by what he saw as its tradition of militancy and brutalism. “Only Nietzsche had been indisputably mad,” he wrote later, “but so lucid as to be un-German.”

He entered the Foreign Office in 1903, serving in Paris, then Tehran and Cairo, before getting the job he wanted: Predicting as early as 1910 that the crunch with Berlin would come in the Balkans, as the war approached he was transferred to the department handling Germany. When it came he was responsible for prisoners, an experience from which his fears about the country grew.

Churchill’s first impulse after the World War ended was to help the fallen foe, and when he accused Vansittart of being rigid on Germany and communism, the latter took it as a compliment. “One can talk of the skill, the strength of the German army, but not of its honour. . . . I felt my hand on the collars of those German camp-commanders, and of the brutes who had sunk our hospital ships.”

When Germany sought to weaken the Versailles Treaty, and the British government succumbed, Vansittart complained that the British were incapable of sustaining a mood of bitterness. He himself did: An idolized brother had had half his head blown off in 1915, and he had also lost most of his cousins and school friends. He never forgot these things. Impatient with what he saw as a tendency toward national guilt on the liberal left (“Mmc-ism”—Mea maxima culpa—he called it), he was outraged by the charge that, in warning others of Germany’s not-so-covert rearmament, he was seeking war.

After Hitler came to power in 1933 and Britain’s defense estimates were reviewed, Vansittart asked for 23 more air squadrons. He got three. For him, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s talk of armament control was complacency in a teacup. Agreed reductions were possible, if only to provide a breathing space; Vansittart did not trust Hitler to stick to any agreements, and he was proved right.

All this might suggest that Vansittart was a hard man. In fact he was an accomplished author with a sardonic sense of humor who wrote novels and poetry, staged a play he wrote in French in Paris, and, under a pseudonym, composed lyrics for Alexander Korda’s Thief of Baghdad. More cultivated than the average Foreign Service Officer then or today, when frustrated by accusations of Germanophobia, he was tempted to resign and write. But the rise of Hitler kept him at his post.

He worked closely with the intelligence services, nurturing something of a private detective agency. The view of his chief recruit, Wolfgang zu Pulitz, First Secretary at the German Embassy, coincided with his own: that the only way to handle Hitler was to stand firm. The Nazi leader, he wrote, “dished out that boiling swill of militarism, radicalism, and nationalism that best warmed Germans.” As for his treatment of Jews, for Vansittart it was “jealousy pure and simple.” A mere 2 percent of the population, they had cornered many of the top professional jobs from medicine to theaters, which was why “the Herrenfolk”—the “master race”—so loathed them.

Rightly concerned about the flightiness, ignorance, and irresponsibility of the British upper classes about the impending disaster, when the Oxford Union voted in 1933 that “this house will in no circumstances fight for King and Country” he joked that one of the strengths of the British was in never quite growing up. Indeed, he believed that the episode was a symptom of decay. He was equally upset by the thoughtlessly pro-Hitler Edward, Prince of Wales, who privately said it was no business of ours to interfere in Germany’s internal affairs whether it be for the Jews or anyone else, and that “dictators were very popular these days, and we might want one in England.”

These were the years of the smart and frivolous Cliveden set, a time when writers like George Bernard Shaw found indulgent things to say about Mussolini and Hitler, and about Stalin during the man-made Soviet famine of 1933. Rather than continue to push the Germans to comply with Versailles, some said we should disarm them with generosity. David Lloyd George, the British wartime leader in 1914-18, became a leading light among the pro-Germans, and after an interview with Hitler the historian Arnold Toynbee emerged convinced of his sincerity.

The British were not alone in their delusions about dictators. This was the time when the French Communist Party organ L’Humanité defended the Stalinists’ execution of children along with their parents on the grounds that Soviet children matured quickly. And the American Ambassador to Moscow at the time, Joseph E. Davies, defended the 1937 Moscow trials.

It was May 1937 when Neville Chamberlain, appeaser in chief, became Prime Minister. In Vansittart’s tart words he was “a good man, unlucky in appeasement’s sudden change of meaning from virtuous endeavor to craven immorality.” Unsurprisingly the two men didn’t gel. In the words of the historian Norman Rose:

Vansittart’s techniques worked against him. His memoranda, drafted in a convoluted, epigrammatic style, faintly condescending in tone, warning of terrible dangers if his advice went unheeded, all too often irritated his political masters.1

In 1938 he was given the title of Chief Diplomatic Adviser to the government, which is to say he was kicked upstairs.

One of the reasons for reading Vansittart now is that many of his perceptions are so relevant today. In apportioning guilt for the origins and conduct of the war where it belonged, he was an early opponent of what we now call moral equivalence, which recently enjoyed a startling recrudescence in President Trump’s casual comparison of brutal repression by Putin with the United States, where “bad things happen, too.”

A suggestion of “mea maxima culpa” in the theories of John Maynard Keynes about the origins of the war conditioned Vansittart’s view of him (“I liked him, but not much. He smelled of Bloomsbury.”) It wasn’t excessive reparations that had made a second war inevitable, he insisted: Even when Germany went broke it built pocket battleships against the British, who had loaned it the cash to do it. War came because Germany was broken morally and politically, and because of our feeble stance in negotiations, “encouraging the Germans to vindictive recalcitrance.”

Vansittart never met Hitler, which is a pity, but his encounters with Joachim von Ribbentrop revealed his descriptive powers. The vain and vapid German Foreign Minister was “pale and empty as a drum, with the sore vanity of a peacock in permanent moult.” The plausible and elegant but talentless opportunist was as immaculately suited as a champagne salesman, which indeed he had been. Vansittart had few regrets over the Nuremburg executions, though for him Ribbentrop was not even worth hanging.

In 1941 Vansittart got into trouble when he published Black Record: Germans Past and Present, and resigned from public service. Thereafter he continued to vent his anti-German passions in the House of Lords. The Mist Procession was published posthumously, and its final sentence is striking: “Mine is a story of failure, but it throws light on my time which failed too.”

It is impossible to read The Mist Procession without thinking of dangers that confront us today. The threats from Islamism or North Korea are clear and present, yet with Putin’s Russia we continue to talk, complacently it seems to me, about a “reset in relations.” For Vansittart, Stalin and Hitler, “two predatory pariahs,” represented not just malign leaders but the permanent menace of their countries. To his eyes there was “never any mystery about the people or their plans.”

He was not surprised by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 any more than he had been by Germany’s collusion with Lenin’s efforts to get back to Russia during World War I. Berlin was “up to its neck in financing the triumph of communism…not only the most evil but the most short-sighted trick ever played upon mankind. It is less for total absence of scruple than for sheer stupidity that the Germans deserved the world’s animosity.”

Today, though Russian communism has gone, he would doubtless point to the willed paranoia of the Putin regime, its spiraling defense build-up, its re-imposition of controls on a subservient people whose adulation of their leader holds echoes of Stalinist primitivism, and its striving to reconstitute the empire and influence it lost by other means.

As with Germany he would encourage us to look at Russian history, and its image as a kind of perpetually failing state. Here is a largely European country that until a century and a half ago bought and sold serfs publicly, whose progress toward democracy lasted a mere few years before the 1917 revolution, which itself engendered new forms of serfdom. And when communism collapsed in 1991, after a decade of chaotic freedom under Boris Yeltsin the country is again relapsing into a new type of semi-criminal authoritarianism, less total but in some ways more threatening than what went before.

As a diplomat I remember seeing intelligence reports about a KGB operation designed to sow fear and confusion in Britain, which the Politburo shot down on the grounds of how bad it would look for Moscow if its origins were discovered. It was a small but comforting example of how collective leadership functioned, and of how much we owed to the bureaucratic sobriety symbolized by all those homburgs atop the Lenin mausoleum, and by the subordinate status of the KGB.

Today there is no collective leadership, only a single capo di tutti capi who comes from the KGB himself, and whose cult of personality and air of cool, quasi-gangsterish menace commends him to the post-Soviet public. For me the West’s disappointment is personal. In the 1990s I went back to Moscow State University, where I had been a postgraduate in 1961–62, and was encouraged by the ambitious, open-minded students I talked to, who reveled in their new freedoms and looked forward to traveling abroad. Later I was cheered by the transformation of drab and forbidding Moscow into a modern city, the free talk, the bars, the fun.

Now Russian brutalism is back in slightly different forms, which one can detect in the crudely politicized popular culture, the viciousness of the official media, the ubiquitous anti-Westernism and paranoia, and the difficulty of holding a rational conversation. Whether it is the militant sarcasm of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman, the lying machine known as Russia Today, or the government shock-jocks on TV and in the press, as in Soviet times mendacity is the key. Which takes us back to Vansittart’s insistence on the persistence of national characteristics.

Today such talk is frowned on (one mustn’t stereotype), yet for him nations are not composed of men and women without qualities or history: “Countries do have selves in constant flux like the souls who compose them.” In Germany’s case he meant “Hunnery,” namely brutality and a willing submission to authority and militarism, which prepared the ground for Nazism “before Hitler sowed the dragon’s teeth.” Why was it wrong, he asked, “to regard a nation with unalterable suspicion if that nation continues to give unalterable cause?”

The least-attractive aspect of the Russian soul, observers have noted over the years, is a loose association with the truth. This is not the recent phenomenon of “fake news,” in whose manufacture Russia excels, but has been noted for centuries, most glaringly in Gogol, both of whose major works, Dead Souls and The Government Inspector, revolve around surreal fibs.

Mendacity, official or otherwise, exists the world over, but to many visitors to Russia it appeared as a distinctive national trait. In his famous Lettres de Russie, the record of his trip in 1839, the Marquis de Custine had hoped to counteract the success of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America by applauding a benign Czarist autocracy. Instead he was appalled by the blatant and sometimes pointless deceits he encountered wherever he went, as well as by the connivance of the serfs in their own slave-like condition.

The threat from Russia in our day, it appears to me, is that, like interwar Germany, it is becoming a profoundly sick country. It is enough to read the remarkable book by a former Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times, Charles Clover, Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism. It shows how deep-seated xenophobic myths about the country’s unique Eurasian destiny have blended with the resentment of its ideological defeat into a poisoned doctrine of postmodern, quasi-fascistic truth-denial.

The intellectual corruption has penetrated the media, education, the foreign ministry, the army, and the Kremlin itself. To preempt insurrection, secure the power of a mafia-ridden state, stoke nationalism, and erode human rights, Putin manufactures foreign threats. The result is a level of cynicism and mendacity in public affairs without parallel in any developed country.

The reaction to date has been a soaring popularity for Putin and a paucity of opposition, which is not explained by official repression alone. (Vansittart records how he saw a minimum of resistance to Hitler in the German Foreign Ministry and army: The assassination attempt on Hitler came only when the country was headed clearly for defeat.)

I witnessed some of this decline first hand. Having once chaired the English Booker Prize for Fiction, I, as a Russian speaker, was recruited to chair its Russian offshoot, the Russian Booker, now the most prestigious prize for fiction in the country. Going there several times a year could be stimulating and entertaining, though also depressing. I know about the Russian people’s intelligence and talents, but I have also met sophisticated folk with access to the truth, intellectuals included, who applaud and support Putin for old-fashioned “tough guy” reasons, usually with the excuse that in Russia only tough guys can get things done. Resignation to the eclipse of such democracy as exists, in other words, is very widespread.

Of course the West made mistakes after 1991, yet the notion that we could have got on well with Putin had we been more attentive to Moscow’s needs and fears is an illusion. Certainly we should have taken greater account of its feelings amid talk of Ukrainian accession to NATO and the EU—not because Ukraine didn’t have a right to both, but because a beaten Russia remained neurotically resentful, and further humiliated by the rejection of its fellow Slavs.

Russian nervousness about “encirclement,” moreover, goes further. I worked for three years in Beijing (1966–69) during the Cultural Revolution, including the time of Moscow’s near-attack on China over the Damansky Island incident on the Ussuri River. Russian racial contempt for the indigent, Mao-crazed Chinese was something to behold, recalling what I had seen earlier in Moscow University, where Chinese students were sneered at as limonchiki—little lemons, small and sour.

Today they are not so little, economically speaking, and it is Russia’s Eurasian pretensions that are a sour joke. To its West, for all the EU’s disarray, Italy’s GDP is greater than Russia’s, while China’s dwarfs it and the New Silk Road thrusts westward through what used to be Russia’s Central Asia.

The difference between Russia and China, I decided after decades of involvement with each, is that the first is suffering from an inferiority complex and the second from the opposite—both of them with reason. Today Russia’s twin-headed eagle points nowhere. While alienating itself from Western Europe it has nothing more in the east than an alliance with China based not on historic friendship (never forget the hunks of Siberia that Russia stole, for the Chinese won’t) but on anti-U.S. sentiment. Watching the miraculous rise of its eastern neighbor’s wealth and fleet won’t do much for Moscow’s self-confidence.

The implications for the foreign policy of 140 million hard-up Russians sandwiched between an (as of now) 500-million strong EU and more than a billion Chinese are as you would expect. Spleen, mischief-making, and destructiveness are its main drivers, while in China we find optimism and expansion: Beijing works closely with the EU; Moscow strives to smash it. As living standards decline and Russia steps up its compensatory self-assertion abroad, it is clear we should expect problems.

How should we treat this poor, sore-headed and dangerously over-armed giant? Where we went wrong on Russia was a lack of imagination on two questions. The first was the psychological impact of the USSR’s epochal failure. Unlike Germany in 1918, in 1991 Russia didn’t lose a war but something almost worse: It lost its very idea of itself, its philosophical raison d’être and global delusions, not to speak of an empire accounting for half its population. Our second failure, linked to the first, was to underestimate the depth of the corruption, criminality, and impulse for control embedded in the Soviet psyche and transmitted to post-communist Russian security and military organs, along with a desire for revenge.

We ought to have treated Russia with more wariness, yet also more understanding. If a country nursing a centuries-long sense of inferiority emerges deeply wounded and humiliated from an ideological, strategic, philosophical, economic, and cultural defeat—then watch out, for its sake and your own. Instead we advised them to dust themselves down, brisk up, and install democracy and the free market, as we thinned down the ranks of our Russian experts and turned our attention to other matters.

In Weimar Germany a morally and financially bankrupt nation demanded to be treated with the “dignity of a great power.” Today the antipathetic Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov pleads angrily for more respect for his country, a respect that its regression to Soviet-type norms and intimidation of its neighbors has failed to earn. Hence the vicious circle in our foreign policy. Talk of re-booting relations, under a know-nothing Donald Trump or somebody smarter, is essentially phony; yet we are obliged to pretend because no alternative Russia is in the offing, and none will emerge as a result of more respectful treatment alone. Of course we can and must deal with Putin, but the idea of trusting him is absurd, which limits any deals.

We will stay where we are not just until Putin goes, but until the entire blockhouse of securocratic politics he embodies goes with him. We can imagine him being edged aside following a failed foreign policy adventure coupled with a financial crisis, to be replaced by a more human face, such as Medvedev or someone similar. But the blockhouse would remain, and the replacement would only be its more genial frontman. What it is hard to imagine is anything like the “color” revolution that so terrifies Putin; the chances of its success are currently nil. So with the best will in the world, also likely to be lacking, it could be decades before this perennially aggrieved nation becomes more amenable.

Where does that leave Western policy? In a nuclear age—and this is where any parallel with the Germany Vansittart knew breaks down—an old-fashioned conventional war followed by a sanitized country is patently no “solution.” So we are in for the long haul. When the Berlin Wall was being built, the joke I heard from Russian students was, “comrade, the situation looks dangerous, will there be a war?” “No,” comes the answer, “no war, but such a struggle for peace there won’t be a stone left standing.”

So it could be with Russian revanchism: its striving for an illusory parity with the United States and China, its nihilistic policy on Europe, the status-seeking schemes in the Middle East it cannot afford, and accumulation of weaponry it can’t afford either. Lamentable as it is, a Cold War style nouveau is close upon us, albeit without any pretense of ideology, and all we can do is what we did during the real Cold War: engage with Moscow stubbornly while keeping our guard up. As Vansittart recommended with Germany: “Tie them up with paper bonds” (as with naval limitations in the 1930s), if only to provide a breathing space, while having no illusions about Russian reliability.

Meanwhile, we should go easy on the mea maxima culpa—our guilt, handwringing, and self-denigration. I am sorry the Russians feel cruelly deceived by Trump in Syria, at least temporarily, but they should have thought of that when they schemed and lied to help secure his election. We could also do with fewer books telling us “how we lost Russia,” and more like Charles Clover’s. With the KGB to ensure continuity at its core, a benign post-communist Russia was never likely to be found. Whatever our sins, ultimately it was the new Russia that lost itself, in cynicism, in thieving, in nationalism, and in neo-autocratic yearnings. With apologies to Gogol, you don’t retrieve 140 million lost souls in a hurry.

1Rose, Vansittart: Study of a Diplomat (Heinemann, 1978).

Another Impeachment Scandal in Brazil?

Talk of impeachment is sweeping Brazil once more, as an explosive bribery allegation threatens to bring down President Michel Temer. The Wall Street Journal has the background:

A leading newspaper, O Globo, reported Wednesday that prosecutors had recordings of Mr. Temer purportedly encouraging payments allegedly intended to silence former speaker of the House Eduardo Cunha, who was jailed in October awaiting trial on charges of corruption and money laundering.

The recordings were made by Joesley Batista, the chairman of meatpacker JBS SA, as part of a plea deal with prosecutors, according to O Globo. […]

The alleged payments supposedly made by Mr. Batista were meant to keep Mr. Cunha from cutting a plea deal in which he potentially could reveal incriminating information about Mr. Temer, according to O Globo. […]

An official impeachment request was filed Wednesday in the Lower House by opposition party Rede after the news broke. Opposition politicians including Sen. Lindbergh Farias and Sen. Vanessa Grazziotin have called for Mr. Temer’s resignation or impeachment, and Podemos, a party formerly allied to Mr. Temer, announced its break with the government.

So far, Temer has denied the allegations that he paid hush money to his former ally, and is rejecting widespread calls for his resignation. But the markets have been much less sanguine about his future: the Ibovespa stock index dropped 10 percent in morning trading, and the Brazilian real has declined by 7 percent against the dollar since the Globo‘s report dropped. With allies abandoning the president, protesters taking to the streets, and a potential leadership crisis looming, Temer’s already unpopular economic reform agenda is almost surely dead in the water.

Sadly, this kind of thing has become par for the course in Brazil. Temer, after all, only attained office after last year’s impeachment of his leftist rival Dilma Rousseff, and fallout from the “Car Wash” corruption scandal that led to her downfall has continued to plague many in Temer’s own government. Nor does the immediate future hold much hope that Brazil’s political rot can be speedily cleaned up: if Temer goes, the next in the line of succession is the speaker of the lower house of Congress, Rodrigo Maia, who is himself under investigation for graft.

With both Brazil and Venezuela mired in political and economic crisis, Latin America is in a sorry state these days—and the turmoil shows no signs of abating any time soon.

Republican Defends Wind Power from Rick Perry

A month ago, Energy Secretary Rick Perry unveiled a review studying the ways in which intermittent renewables are affecting grid stability. Immediately Democrats jumped on it as an example of the Trump administration going after clean energy. Now, Iowan Republican Senator Chuck Grassley is lending his voice to that chorus of boos as he criticizes what he sees is a policy “meant to undermine” wind energy, a major industry in his home state. Reuters reports:

“I’m concerned that a hastily developed study, which appears to pre-determine that variable, renewable resources such as wind have undermined grid reliability, will not be viewed as credible, relevant or worthy of valuable taxpayer resources,” wrote Grassley, whose state is home to a booming wind energy industry.

In the letter, Grassley also asked Perry which grid-reliability organizations and experts were involved in the study, how much it would cost taxpayers and whether the report would be open for public comment.

Unlike many of the Democrats that have criticized this review, Grassley isn’t doing so to placate his environmentalist base, but rather his constituents that rely on the fast growing wind energy industry for work.

Still, Perry is right: this is something that needs further scrutiny, especially if we’re going to see renewables take on a larger share of the national energy mix. Wind and solar energy rely on the vagaries of weather to supply power, and as a result they place a lot of strain on electricity transportation infrastructure that was designed with more consistent power sources in mind.

We can’t ignore the politics behind this, but neither should we pretend that we’re ready for the sorts of wind and solar growth most analysts are now predicting in the coming years as they become more cost competitive. Rick Perry comes from the biggest wind producing state in the country, so he understands what renewables are capable of. As Energy secretary, he’ll need to look out for our grids if he wants to be a good steward of these fledgling power sources going forward.

U.S. Launches First Airstrikes Against Syrian Ground Forces

U.S. coalition forces on Thursday launched a series of airstrikes aimed at halting the advance of pro-Syrian regime ground forces against U.S.-backed rebels near the U.S. base at al-Tanf in the far east of Syria near the Jordanian and Iraqi borders. These are the first coalition strikes against pro-regime ground forces, and the first anti-regime strikes since the missile attack on Shayrat airbase last month. The initial statement from the coalition:

May 18 #Coalition struck #Syrian pro-regime forces advancing in a de-confliction zone near At Tanf posing a threat to #US partner forces1/3

— Inherent Resolve (@CJTFOIR) May 18, 2017

This was despite #Russian attempts to dissuade pro-regime movement towards At Tanf, #Coalition aircraft show of force, & warning shots2/3

— Inherent Resolve (@CJTFOIR) May 18, 2017

#Coalition forces have operated in the At Tanf area for many months training & advising vetted partner forces who are fighting #ISIS.3/3

— Inherent Resolve (@CJTFOIR) May 18, 2017

Initial reports suggest that the strikes took out a number of tanks and other vehicles, destroying lead elements of a convoy which was advancing down the Damascus-Baghdad highway after initially defeating U.S.-backed rebels. Iranian news media are reporting that “thousands” of Hezbollah troops have been deployed to the area against the rebels.

At a tactical level, the Syrian army (and its Iranian, Hezbollah, and other militia partners) have been pushing east for some time. With Aleppo secured and the southern front relatively stable, Syrian forces have been looking towards making gains around Raqqa and their besieged outpost in Deir ez-Zour.

Strategically, however, this advance and the U.S. response are a preview of the chaotic scramble we can expect as the threat from ISIS recedes in Iraq and Syria. Officially, U.S.-backed forces in Syria are anti-ISIS, not anti-regime. Our base at al-Tanf is there to support the much maligned and at times laughably ineffective effort to have a U.S.-trained force of Arab fighters in Syria. Against Russian advice, Iran and Syria tested our willingness to defend our partner forces and to gain control of a vital highway which would link up Baghdad and Damascus—and by extension Beirut and Tehran. 

These latest strikes are yet another example of the weirdness of the U.S. position in Syria. In the north, U.S. forces are side-by-side with Syrian troops to prevent Turkey (our NATO ally) from attacking our Syrian Kurdish partners, while in the south we’re now defending rebels against Syrian troops with Russia acting as a helpless intermediary.

The coalition have said that these latest strikes were defensive and don’t represent a change in policy, but that statement belies the fact that we have never had a coherent Syria policy to begin with. And until we imbue it with some coherence, we may find ourselves fighting skirmishes on a chaotic battlefield over territory we don’t really even need to hold.  Given that our adversaries in Tehran and Moscow will look to test American resolve whenever and wherever they can, we should not expect these first strikes to be the last.

Japan Hits a Growth Streak

After four years of lofty promises and limited returns, could Abenomics finally be working? Japan’s latest economic data certainly gives reason to think so. FT:

Japan has recorded its longest run of sustained growth in more than a decade as stimulative policy and a healthier global economy lead to a period of robust progress.

Growth for the first quarter of 2017 came in at an annualised 2.2 per cent, according to the Cabinet Office, marking five quarters of continuous expansion in gross domestic product.

The figure beat the consensus analyst forecast of 1.7 per cent and is far above Japan’s long-run growth potential of roughly 0.7 per cent. That suggests the economy is using up spare capacity and unemployment will keep on falling.

Some of Japan’s growth is being driven by factors beyond Prime Minister Abe’s control: since Trump’s election in November, for example, a weakening yen has helped make Japanese exports more competitive.

Regardless, the data is good news for Abe, who came to office promising that his cocktail of monetary easing, fiscal stimulus and structural reforms could reverse decades of stagnation and deflation. Tokyo is still struggling with inflation; prices and wages are rising slower than expected. Still, the real growth figures are trending in the right direction, and an uptick in Japan’s perennially low consumer spending is a promising vote of confidence in the economy.

Domestically, the rosy forecast could strengthen Abe’s mandate to pursue his economic agenda more aggressively. Recent signals from the Bank of Japan suggest that Abe’s easy monetary policies and ultra-low interest rates are here to stay, and the Prime Minister has lately turned his eyes to reforming Japan’s rigid labor laws. If Japan can sustain its positive growth and see prices and wages respond in kind, Abe’s political capital for pursuing such reforms will only increase—and he could redeem a policy that many have prematurely written off.

Japan Hits A Growth Streak

After four years of lofty promises and limited returns, could Abenomics finally be working? Japan’s latest economic data certainly gives reason to think so. FT:

Japan has recorded its longest run of sustained growth in more than a decade as stimulative policy and a healthier global economy lead to a period of robust progress.

Growth for the first quarter of 2017 came in at an annualised 2.2 per cent, according to the Cabinet Office, marking five quarters of continuous expansion in gross domestic product.

The figure beat the consensus analyst forecast of 1.7 per cent and is far above Japan’s long-run growth potential of roughly 0.7 per cent. That suggests the economy is using up spare capacity and unemployment will keep on falling.

Some of Japan’s growth is being driven by factors beyond Prime Minister Abe’s control: since Trump’s election in November, for example, a weakening yen has helped make Japanese exports more competitive.

Regardless, the data is good news for Abe, who came to office promising that his cocktail of monetary easing, fiscal stimulus and structural reforms could reverse decades of stagnation and deflation. Tokyo is still struggling with inflation; prices and wages are rising slower than expected. Still, the real growth figures are trending in the right direction, and an uptick in Japan’s perennially low consumer spending is a promising vote of confidence in the economy.

Domestically, the rosy forecast could strengthen Abe’s mandate to pursue his economic agenda more aggressively. Recent signals from the Bank of Japan suggest that Abe’s easy monetary policies and ultra-low interest rates are here to stay, and the Prime Minister has lately turned his eyes to reforming Japan’s rigid labor laws. If Japan can sustain its positive growth and see prices and wages respond in kind, Abe’s political capital for pursuing such reforms will only increase—and he could redeem a policy that many have prematurely written off.

After Mueller, Trump Critics Worry: Maybe There’s No Scandal

Eli Lake is right: The DOJ’s appointment of widely-respected former prosecutor Robert Mueller to lead the special inquiry into the Trump campaign’s potential collusion with Russia is a reprieve for a Trump Administration in crisis—a reprieve that it will almost certainly squander, but a reprieve nonetheless.

How do we know? Because the responses from Trump’s most dogged critics on the Russia question betray a kind of anxiety about the Mueller appointment—an anxiety that the no-nonsense law enforcement wise man will lower the temperature in Washington without actually uncovering enough damaging material to bring down the President.

Take, for example, Josh Marshall declaring that while he has confidence in Mueller to identify and expose any criminal activities undertaken by Trump or his associates, he won’t be able to prosecute the real Trump-Russia wrongdoing: a labyrinthian “conspiracy” which may not even involve any illegal behavior.

It is critical to understand that the most important details we need to know about the Russian disruption campaign and the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with it may not be crimes. Indeed, I would say that the crimes we’re likely to discover will likely be incidental or secondary to the broader actions and activities we’re trying to uncover. Just hypothetically, what if Russia had a disruption campaign, Trump campaign officials gave winks and nods to nudge it forward but violated no laws? That’s hard to figure but by no means impossible. (Our criminal laws are not really designed for this set of facts.) The simple point is that the most important ‘bad acts’ may well not be crimes. That means not only is no one punished but far, far more important, we would never know what happened.

And here’s David Frum in the Atlantic making a similar objection:

The special counsel will investigate whether people in the Trump campaign violated any laws when they gleefully leveraged the fruits of Russian espionage to advance their campaign.

By contrast, what happened in plain sight—cheering rather than condemning a Russian attack on American democracy—will be treated as a non-issue, because it was not criminal, merely anti-democratic and disloyal.

Since the summer before the election, Trump’s critics have been suggesting or sometimes stating outright that Russia is involved with a criminal conspiracy that reaches to the highest levels of Trump’s inner circle. But now that an unimpeachable bulldog prosecutor has been named to probe these very allegations, the critics seem to be trying to move the goalposts, saying that the real problem isn’t criminality, but the sleaze and outlandish behavior of the Trump campaign more generally—behavior that was already obvious to voters when they went to the polls in 2016, and will be even more obvious when they go to the polls in 2018.

Trump’s outrageous and indefensible conduct around the Russia investigation—his firing of Comey to attempt to quash the inquiry, along with the subsequent allegations that he demanded Comey’s loyalty early on and leaned on him to drop the investigation of Mike Flynn—cries out for a special counsel, and Mueller, by all accounts, is a consummate choice. Any wrongdoing related to the Trump campaign, from the President himself to bottom-feeders like Carter Page, should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

But the Trump-Russia hounds now seem to be realizing the limits of the scandal they have been pursuing—yes, maybe someone like Manafort will go down for money-laundering, and yes, Trump had shady deals with Russian banks as a real estate tycoon in the 1990s. But this is simply not as big of a scandal as they would like it to be.

Mueller seems well-equipped to do what the country sorely needs right now: Determine if there was criminal collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and hold any wrongdoers accountable. He is not, however, equipped to do what Trump’s most relentless critics seem to want: Launch a wide-ranging and essentially political investigation into Donald Trump and his associates with the aim not of bringing the matter to a resolution, but of creating a steady stream of media frenzies that paralyzes an administration they loathe.

The Macedonian Crisis is Far From Over

On the afternoon of April 27 several hundred Macedonians stormed the parliament building in downtown Skopje. Most were state employees, some wrapped in Macedonian flags, others wearing balaclavas, a small number armed with knives and handguns. They had spent their mornings driving busses or grading papers or directing traffic. One of their leaders, Igor Durlovski, managing director of the Macedonia Ballet and Opera, was scheduled to put on Cleopatra at the theater that evening. “Revolutions begin in Macedonia!” ran the cheers. “Throw out the occupiers!” The enemy today was not the Ottoman Empire but the Open Societies Foundations. Durlovksi and tens of thousands of others are convinced George Soros is behind a slow-motion coup in Skopje that is replacing an elected center-right government with a coalition of leftists and Albanians bent on destroying the Macedonian state. Spotting the throng, police units tasked with guarding the parliament opened its doors, ushered them in, then locked the building. In the ensuing two hours more than 100 were injured, including three MPs. “This attack was planned out days in advance,” Ljupco Nikolovski, the ex-Deputy Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Water who took a camera tripod to the head, told me.

The Republic of Macedonia is the ongoing catastrophe at the heart of the Balkans. Its former prime minister, Nikola Gruevksi, would be sitting in a jail cell today were he not still stage-managing his former state as a private citizen. Two years ago he resigned from office following revelations that he and his spy chief cousin had overseen the most extensive surveillance program in Europe since the dismantling of the Stasi. Among the 20,000 handpicked Macedonians swept up in Gruevski’s surveillance net was his own inner circle, the so-called Familija. The transcripts, made available to the public by a whistleblower, are color commentary for a near-decade of mafia rule that drove Macedonia beneath Qatar on the World Press Freedom Index (“(Boškoski, a political opponent) was lying down for 40 minutes, everybody was watching. The police cuffed him with his head on the toilet. I fucked him right, didn’t I?”), clinched electoral majorities by sending hundreds of thousands of deceased Macedonians to the polls (“Their ID cards are already printed, but there’s one tricky thing: We need more addresses. We can’t have 50 people claiming to live in a 40-square-meter apartment”), and captured a fattened public sector with ruthless efficiency (“You don’t need to persuade state employees to vote for us. Just sack them if they don’t”).

Gruevki’s most contentious achievement remains Skopje, a capital which can now make a strong case for being the most bewildering city in Europe or any other continent. Picture Pompeii retrofitted for the Las Vegas Strip. The banks of the Vardar River are now overrun with a glittering Classical theme park of faux-marble porticoes and choreographed fountains-cum-light shows and bronze statuary. Among the admissions of murder and racketeering and nepotism, the wiretaps also revealed the architect of the new Skopje to be none other than Gruevski himself; failures at professional boxing, acting and spycraft have exposed his true calling as a visionary of Olympian-scale totalitarian kitsch. (“The columns we saw on our trip to Washington were Classical columns. I want Baroque for Skopje.”) Hundreds of pseudo-Hellenistic statues, many equipped with cameras to observe passersby, blast Wagner across city squares layered with black and white bathroom tiles. Near a statue of a teething Alexander the Great suckling his mother’s breast, a replica of the London Eye emerges out of the Vardar, moored in turn by three concrete pirate ships. Beyond infuriating the Greeks, and deliberately making the ethnically-Albanian quarter of Macedonia’s population feel like foreigners in their own capital, Skopje’s Disneyfication has vastly enriched Gruevski and friends: hundreds of millions of euros in construction kickbacks, most now stashed away in Central America, will indebt Macedonia for generations to come. “Now we really are Greece,” a street cleaner called Jovan told me as he picked leaves out of a fountain watered by four vomiting gilded horses.

A year ago, when I met Zoran Zaev, the head of Macedonia’s center-left and the leading light of the anti-Gruevski resistance, the crisis appeared to be tilting to his advantage. The wiretapping scandal had forced Gruevski, at least ceremoniously, out of power; each night some 50,000 Macedonians took to the streets demanding his imprisonment; they threw buckets of paint on his monuments in a “Colorful Revolution”; ethnic Albanians who had rarely ever shown any interest in the politics of their Slavic counterparts were coming out in droves on Zaev’s behalf, convinced that their own political elites had enriched themselves under Gruevski while overlooking his party’s racism (“Why not make a war on the Albanians? We can crush them in an hour”); the European Union, which for years had nothing to say as Gruevski used their cash handouts to dismantle an already pseudo-democracy, demanded that fair elections be held. Even most of Gruevski’s supporters believed that Zaev would be in power before long.

Two weeks ago, when I met Zaev again, he looked exhausted. Gashes, courtesy of a pro-Gruevski folding chair launched his way at the parliament brawl, ran across his forehead; his lip was stitched up. Electoral lists insufficiently cleared of illegal voters—tens of thousands of Macedonians had a ballot but no pulse—had denied him a December election victory by fewer than 15,000 votes. The failure of Gruevski’s party to form a coalition had swung the opportunity back in Zaev’s favor, but his mandate to form a government was now being illegally upheld by rightwing loyalists still crammed within the state. Gruevski had instructed his following to organize themselves into street groups that were now marching around the city each night. “De-Sorosization” had begun. Every morning, Gruevski’s people were barging into the offices of dozens of NGOs across Skopje and confiscating hard drives; a worker at the Open Societies Foundations told me they were scouring for any clues they could find that Zaev and Soros had been in communication. Meanwhile, the Albanian politicians Zaev relied on to form a common anti-Gruevski front had taken the remarkable step of convening in Tirana and issuing a manifesto of their demands: Albanian flags raised above all public buildings; Albanian language taught in all schools; the abolition of all border crossings into Albania and Kosovo.

Yesterday, after months of obstruction, Zaev was finally granted the mandate and took power. His challenge now is to dislodge from the state a cartel regime that half the Macedonian population believes is the state. This requires unclipping all the networks of power forged during the Gruevski decade—everything from the smuggling entrepreneurs that work the borders to the crony village mayors out in the countryside to the labyrinth of secret services in Skopje, tens of thousands of political appointees infused into the bureaucratic patchwork, many of whom may lose their positions or worse and so are more than willing to answer Gruevski’s call to violence. When I last talked to him, I had asked Zaev if he had any historical models in mind for how to de-colonize a captured state. There were plenty of examples, he said, many right here around the Balkans. But the trouble with Macedonia is that it isn’t anything like those states.

Beyond the corruption lies the ethnic problem. The notoriously uncertain identity of three quarters of Macedonia’s population—the Slavic Macedonians—and the visceral ethnic pride of the other quarter—the Albanian Macedonians—guarantees a kind of kinetic volatility to the country’s politics. If one thing is clear, for Macedonia to resolve its present crisis it will be necessary to destroy downtown Skopje even as it continues to be built. The identity it espouses—a brazen Greek imperial one that Gruevski has pumped into everything from textbooks to text messages informing arriving tourists they have reached the cradle of civilization—makes the country a pariah with its larger and more powerful member to its south, and alienates a quarter of its population. Nothing will change unless the bronze muses and priestesses and charioteers go the way of their creator. Already in Skopje you hear talk of which monuments might be auctioned off abroad as antiquarian trinkets and which might be melted down to stave off creditors of the ballooning debt. A 1963 earthquake destroyed more than three quarters of the city; some Macedonians are holding out for a repeat performance.

For Gruevski’s supporters, many of whom have been convinced of their Alexander the Great heritage, Zaev masks a still greater threat. It comes from Albania. It is one thing that the Albanians, Europe’s poorest and fastest growing population, want equal representation in Macedonian police forces, quite another that schools all across Macedonia, even in swathes of the country that have zero Albanians living in them, ought to be teaching Albanian to their students. If you are a Slavic Macedonian—denied a distinct ethnic identity by every single one of your neighbors—the present moment must feel like a final assault. Today it means hoisting up the Albanian flag. When the Albanians become the majority population in Macedonia, it may mean pulling down the Macedonian flag. This could happen sooner than anyone anticipates, but it’s hard to tell—no census has been held since 2002.

With the Albanians, the implicit threat is always Kosovo’s experience at the hands of the Serbs in 1999. They took up arms there; they could in Macedonia as well. I took a bus out to the Šar foothills along the Albanian-Kosovo border. Here the short-lived uprising of 2001—when several thousand local Albanians and Kosovo veterans nearly succeeded in forging their own state—still consumed café gossip. Graffiti scrawled out emblems of the National Liberation Army; on this street, a group of teenagers in the city of Tetovo told me, a Macedonian state police car was blown up. But there was also much talk here of the Albanians’ own failures in Macedonia since independence. Their elites had never had any qualms about collaborating with Gruevski; Ali Ahmeti, the one-time Leninist who led the National Liberation Army, ruled in coalition with him. Was it worth it? Though they were no longer the second-class citizens as they had been throughout the 1990s, the Albanians in places like Tetovo were also not convinced their circumstances were improving. Across the mountains, Albania was a success story, entering NATO in 2009 and now on track to enter the EU; their own villages by contrast lay in disrepair even as their tax dollars got funneled to Skopje to prop up a pseudo-Greek identity they wanted nothing to do with.

The interethnic conflict is the lesser aspect of the Macedonian crisis, but it absorbs the brunt of the international coverage. Gruevski wants this. He stands his best chance at avoiding a jail sentence if he convinces Macedonia and its observers that the present conflict is a looming civil war that only he can help avert. He has already demonstrated what lengths he is willing to go to give this impression. Two years before last month’s parliamentary attack, while mass protests against the wiretaps were ongoing in Skopje, he appeared to manufacture the most violent episode in the Balkans this decade: Albanian drug dealers and Slavic state police officers dispatched from Skopje clashed under extraordinarily suspicious circumstances in the city of Kumanovo. Eighteen were gunned down; Gruevski took to TV with claims that a second uprising was in the works; Macedonia’s problem was the Albanians, not the wiretaps.

The Albanian political elites often manage to play right into this narrative. The demands issued from Tirana were so preposterous that many Macedonians contend that Gruevski’s people covertly authored them. “The Albanian looked lifted from Google Translate,” a worker in the Helsinki Foundation told me. The April 27 assaults was triggered by Zaev’s decision to designate Talat Xhaferi, an ethnic Albanian, as Speaker of the parliament. Xhaferi has a controversial past—the United States declared him a terrorist in 2001 for commanding a National Liberation Army regiment—but the nationalists’ outrage at his appointment conveniently overlooked the years Xhaferi served as Gruevski’s minister of defense. When the chaos from the parliament attack had subsided and Xhaferi did take the podium, he seized the first possible opportunity to raise the Albanian flag in parliament. The indignation was shared by the pro-Gruevski Macedonians as well as many pro-Zaev ones: Why the blatant provocation? Such stunts undermine Albanians’ insistence that they are Macedonians before they are Albanians.

Vaulting Zaev into power is not going to be enough to resolve a crisis whose roots date back at least to the 1990s, when Zaev’s own party embarked on a massive colonization of the state that Gruevski’s party countered through replication. The pendulum is just as likely to swing back again. The one critical difference is that, today, the stakes are much higher. Competing realities have cut through the very fabric of everyday Macedonians’ lives. Your professor and doctor and neighborhood traffic cops are appointees of the Gruevski regime; by night you march at Zaev’s rallies to have their bosses brought to justice. The country has become an exaggerated example of what’s now happening to electorates across the West: two voting blocs whose worldviews have become so fundamentally irreconcilable that they can no longer agree even on the basic terms of their differences.

In Macedonia, both sides insist that fascist elements have infiltrated the state. For Zaev’s supporters, these are the smoldering last cogs of the Gruevski regime. For Gruevksi’s supporters, these are the NGOs, who are conduits of foreign interests masquerading as arbiters of human rights. For years they have been funding opposition newspapers, emphatically assisting the non-Slavic minorities, cleaving fissures through the very societies they purport to be helping. If Soros has become the archetypal expression of this process, not just for Gruevski but reactionary regimes all across Eastern Europe today, it owes to the fact that he is at once the most shadowy and most recognizable figure associated with it. Like Viktor Orbán, Gjorge Ivanov, Gruevski’s puppet President, began his academic career with Soros funding.

More and more throughout the Greater Balkans, from Bosnia to Ukraine, “regime change” has become a byword for replacing one set of elites with another. Macedonia is the region’s next test case. Too often the response of the “international community” takes the form of damage control—dispatching a team of regional experts, withholding new rounds of funding—instead of addressing the deep-rooted defects within the state; as late as 2014, EU reports were deeming Macedonia’s democracy “efficiently administered.” If the United States and European Union can do anything for Skopje right now, it would be to broker the terms of Gruevski’s permanent sidelining in the least ham-fisted way they can manage. This probably means amnesty and exile, and not, as many Macedonians would prefer, a stiff jail sentence. He cannot be an embers-still-lit figurehead in a state whose judiciary, police and media he still overwhelmingly controls. Gruevski understands this. The April 27 attack, undoubtedly launched on his orders, shows how willing he is to outsource his strangle on power to the streets.