Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 196

Moon to Xi: Let’s Talk

South Korea’s new president Moon Jae-in broke eight months of top-level silence between Seoul and Beijing today, placing a phone call to Xi Jinping that offered an emerging glimpse of his North Korea strategy. Reuters has :

“The resolution of the North Korean nuclear issue must be comprehensive and sequential, with pressure and sanctions used in parallel with negotiations,” Moon’s spokesman, Yoon Young-chan, quoted Moon as telling Xi.

“Sanctions against North Korea are also a means to bring the North to the negotiating table aimed at eliminating its nuclear weapons,” Yoon told a briefing, adding that Xi indicated his agreement.

Moon has taken a more conciliatory line with North Korea than his conservative predecessors and advocates engagement. He has said he would be prepared to go to Pyongyang “if the conditions are right”.

Moon’s message here about the need for negotiations is sure to please Beijing, since it largely echoes the Chinese position. A few days before Moon’s election, the Chinese ambassador to the U.S. penned an op-ed arguing that Beijing had already “done its utmost” to restrain Pyongyang, and that any further escalation of sanctions must be combined with direct talks. With Seoul now sharing the latter view, Beijing will feel even less pressure to seriously tighten the screws on North Korea, as Trump has been urging.

That said, it is not clear that Seoul and Beijing can immediately get on the same page and put bad blood behind them. As the FT’s account of the call suggests, the THAAD missile defense system could be a sticking point:

In the first conversation in eight months between the leaders of the two countries, Mr Xi reiterated China’s opposition to the controversial deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence system in South Korea. Mr Moon acknowledged Chinese concerns about the system but said that Beijing should address the “restraints and restrictions” punitively imposed on South Korean companies operating in China.

Moon, of course, is a longtime critic of THAAD who believes the system has soured relations with Beijing. But even Moon knows that THAAD is not realistically going anywhere, at least not in the immediate term.

Regardless, talks will happen; Moon has reportedly tapped a special envoy to China to begin discussions, to include THAAD and the nuclear crisis, as soon as Saturday.

Legal Weed in the Green Mountain State?

Vermont is one of the states that has been hit hardest by the opioid epidemic during the past several years. But its legislature is moving ahead with a more laissez-faire drug policy nonetheless. Governing Magazine reports:

Vermont’s Legislature has become the first in the nation to approve a recreational marijuana legalization bill.

Vermont’s bill, which would legalize small amounts of marijuana possession in 2018 and anticipate the possibility of a taxed and regulated legal marijuana market, was approved by the Vermont House of Representatives on Wednesday afternoon by a vote of 79-66. The bill has already been passed by the Senate and will go directly to Gov. Phil Scott.

Other states have legalized marijuana following a voter referendum, but no state has yet legalized marijuana solely through the legislative process, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Legalization advocates said bills were pending in other state legislatures.

It’s not clear yet whether the Governor will sign the bill. What is clear is that the nationwide momentum for marijuana legalization appears to be gathering, apparently unaffected by the opioid crisis that has led some drug libertarians to re-examine their view about the social consequences of easily accessible mind-altering substances.

We have said before that de-criminalizing marijuana in some form is probably the worst policy, except for all the others—provided that the drug remains heavily regulated and relatively pricey. Unfortunately, many states, like California, are moving forward with a much more relaxed form of legalization, where potent weed will be available for cheap, promoting a windfall for the industry at the expense of a small number of heavy users.

If the Vermont measure passes, hopefully the state takes a more conservative approach. But we’re not counting on it.

The Trump Cult?

Religious cults and political cults are not exactly the same, in part because theology and ideology are not exactly the same. Both are creedal systems shaped to culture, but while theology is structured to be non-falsifiable, ideologies are ultimately perishable as history arcs to and perhaps fro. As creedal systems they nevertheless overlap for many practical analytical purposes, one of which perhaps concerns a phenomenon called President Donald J. Trump. Is the Trump movement to one extent or another a political cult? That is not the only question of the hour in the wake of the President’s firing of FBI Director James Comey, but it may soon become one.

I’ll get to explanatory mode in a moment, and in so doing I will be keeping a promise made in February. In an essay I wrote that,

I stress the pairing of man and movement because, in my view, there has been too much focus on the psychological/psychiatric aspects of the man, and too little social-psychological focus on the movement. . . . Trump is endlessly interesting from a clinical point of view, true, but the movement is no less so. It is also potentially more important . . . since it may outlast Trump’s own White House tenure. Let me start here with the man and, except for a very light hint, leave comment on the movement for another time.

The light hint came many paragraphs later: “Big Lies that turn perceptual frames or paradigms on their heads” and pull “false lesser-associated non-‘facts’ . . . in train behind the flipped central premise . . . is the very economical technique used by cults both religious and political.”

In other words, three months ago I was already wondering if at least an aspect of the Trump phenomenon is cultic—and I mean the term in the way scholarship has attempted to describe it (of which a bit more below), as a more-than-occasional appurtenance of political religion or political theology, from about the time of Eric Voegelin (Die Politischen Religionen, 1939) to that of contemporary exegetes like Mark Lilla (The Stillborn God, 2007) and Emilio Gentile (Politics as a Religion, 2006).1

I did not feel compelled to redeem my February promise until stimulated by Max Boot’s April 18 Foreign Policy essay, “Is Trump’s Axis of Adults Beating Down the Cabal of Crazies?” In that essay, Boot accurately observed that:

Trump’s most ardent supporters are . . . remolding their own views to keep pace with their leader. . . .
This shows the extent to which Trump’s rise was not based on any particular positions or views. It was and remains a cult of personality. Trump’s followers worship him—and he worships himself, too. They are bound by a conviction, rooted in basically nothing but quasi-religious faith, that he is a singularly tough and savvy dealmaker who will protect American interests in a way that no previous president has done.

The key words here are “cult,” “worship,” and “quasi-religious,” bringing Boot, whether he realizes it or not, into the Voegelin/Lilla/Gentile et al. orbit, and to some extent into the orbit of Max Weber before them all. I refer of course to Weber’s famous distinction in “Politics as a Vocation” between charismatic and both formal/institutionalized and traditional authority. The phrase “cult of personality” to which Boot makes reference, of course, has long since been detached from serious political sociology and used casually to describe particularly nefarious 20th-century individuals—Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao—and somewhat less gruesome ones—Franco, Perón, Tito, Ataturk, Castro, Ceausescu, Saddam Hussein, and others.

That casual reference point is not my interest here; my interest is in posing a question about the application of political religion as a serious construct of political sociology to the Trump phenomenon. To get from the casual to the more serious, we may observe that the idea of a cult of personality, if not the actual phrase, applies to a great many pre-modern political leaders as well, perhaps most of them. The key point of Weber’s distinction was to indicate that in more institutionalized modern political settings some combination of law, custom, and more or less egalitarian norms tends to diminish or at least limit the personalization of political orders. When cults of personality happen anyway in post-patrimonial political cultures it indicates some invasion of culturally sacred space by what is supposed to be cordoned off from it in a secular age.

Why does this happen? Lilla and others have suggested that political cults tend to fill religious vacuums; that is, they tend to arise when people lose faith in the efficacy of the religious status quo to manage their problems. In other words, in times of confusion and fear, people will vouchsafe unto symbols of the nation, the state, the race, the leader, and so on what they used to reserve for God and related religious symbols. Political religion therefore always competes in some form with preexisting religious organizations and beliefs, giving rise to a range of outcomes that include cooptation, intimidation, repression, and other possibilities as well. This precisely is what led Voegelin to insist on similarities between authoritarian and totalitarian systems and religious systems, a notion that has since become so common that now it is the distinctions between the two that usually get overlooked. He observed Italian Fascist and Nazi rituals in the 1930s in that light, and later Communist ones as well, as the worship of secular gods and their presumed priesthoods.

But, more important, because conventional religious institutions generally make their peace with the contemporary, the burgeoning of political religion usually indicates an urge to regress from a contemporary mean—to go back to a purer, simpler, nobler, or somehow better life. In the 20th century the urge to regression invariably involved a demeaning of modernity, which first established the secular divide. Both fascist and communist varieties of political religion sought to: efface individual agency and smother it in the superior collective, hence the disdain for the cacophonous messiness of democracy; dissolve the line between politics to the one side and the sacred (and all the arts that ministered to it) to the other; and replace the rationalist, Whiggish idea of progress with a mystical promise to create a “new man,” to overturn human nature itself in order to reach some sort of supposedly permanent utopian condition.

Not all forms of political religion are cultic. A good case can and has been made that American ideology is based on religious antecedents and that the symbolic stuff of those antecedents translated seamlessly into the development of the American Civil Religion, famously defined in a 1967 Daedalus essay by Robert Bellah and since adumbrated by many others.2 (The only mystery here is why it took so long for someone to define it; it must have been a fish-as-the-last-to-discover-water sort of thing.)

In civil religions far short of cults there is often if not always some concrescence of religious and political energies, yet enough of a separation between the spheres of the political and the religious remain to qualify the society as a modern secular one. That separation tends to thin in times of relative political polarization, as in the dozen years before the American Civil War and the dozen most recent years, when manifestations of cultish behavior become observable—to those paying attention, at least.

To see that concrescence with original American characteristics, just study the back of a dollar bill. Aside from the motto “In God We Trust,” which dates only from 1957, you see the pyramid, God’s eye above the sacred triangle, and the two phrases from Virgil: Novus Ordo Seclorum and Annuit Coeptis. For the Founders to have called the United States a “new order of the ages” and to have claimed that “He has approved our undertakings” calls to mind the language of Roman (Republic-era) prophecy and suggests that, like the coming of Christ, the birth of the United States will in due course redeem mankind. The God referred to is only tacitly and hence vaguely the God of the Bible, but He is certainly the God of America. The ambiguity was meaningfully significant, as it has remained all these years since.

The whole field of political religion is endlessly fascinating, but my general discussion of it here is now at an end, the basics having been adequately laid out to any reasonably educated person for whom these may be new thoughts—and I’ve left enough of a paper trail here for the ambitious to pursue if they wish. What is left is to zero in specifically on the characteristics of a cult, and then to apply them to the Trump “movement” to see the extent to which it may qualify.

What Is a Cult?

As already suggested, religious and political cults are not identical. Aside from differences between theology and ideology, another key difference is what may be called necessary effective scale. A religious cult can be fairly small, and it can stay that way for a long time and have some influence within a demarcated religious domain. A political cult in the era of territorial Westphalian states can in theory also stay small for a long time, but no one will care; a political cult has to at least threaten to envelop or reshape the national political system to make much difference. If Hitler had not been able to grow his 1923 beer hall putsch into the chancellorship within a decade, for example, he’d barely be an historical footnote today.

Much of the social science literature on cults we have today, at least in English, seems to reflect a moonie echo from the late 1970s and 1980s. The Moonie cult grew so fast that it generated great interest, fear in some quarters, and hence efforts to deprogram presumably brainwashed victims. But to deprogram someone presupposed you understood how they got hooked, and by what, in the first place. Those understandings are now caught as in amber in the extent literature, whose scholarly merits I am not qualified to judge.

That said, what that literature offers in a quick pass-through seems good enough, as they say, for government work. The characteristics of a cult are said to break down into basically two broad categories: the structure of the group, and its beliefs.

With respect to structure—just to keep it simple—four characteristics are prominent:

First, there is sharp differentiation between the in-group of believers or adepts and outsiders, who are demonized as enemies. So loyalty is a first-order virtue, and ritualized loyalty oaths often exist in one form or another.
Second, there is a charismatic leader.
Third, the group has a strong hierarchical organization.
Fourth, information is strictly controlled in order to ensure conformity and the veneration of the leader.

With respect to beliefs, seven characteristics are common:

First, the symbols of the belief system, whether conventionally religious or political, are relatively few but clear, and are designed to serve as an intersubjective template for in-group cohesion. The symbols usually make some kind of contrived sense within a narrative myth of origins; this narrative usually develops more detail over time as it evolves with circumstances.
Second, there is a strong repugnance for theologies or ideologies that are different, and a special absolute rejection of theologies or ideologies that are close but not identical. Deviations from the belief system are rarely accepted as genuine or honest doubt, but are treated either as heresy or alien-group infiltration.
Third, the belief system is utopian.
Fourth, in-group members aver that the group’s beliefs are obvious or natural, and that anyone who rejects them is “blind” or somehow diseased. Conspiracy theories that tend to unify all opposition to the group are common.
Fifth, members proselytize upon opportunity.
Sixth, members believe that any means is justified by the end—including deception, outright lying, theft, physical intimidation, and often violence.
And seventh, in-group members believe in the inevitable triumph of the belief system; they are incurable optimists.

Some religious cults display all eleven of these characteristics. Few if any political cults do, so the characteristics listed here ought to be thought of as a repository of possibilities: the more that apply to any given case, the more cult-like it is.

The Trump Movement

Is the movement that elected Donald Trump President of the United States a cult? In other words, how many of these four structural and seven belief attributes apply to it?

By “it” I do not mean the Republican Party. The Republican Party in 2015-16 was a near hollow shell, poorly led and programmatically incoherent. Its sad state is what allowed Donald Trump-cum-insurgent to seize its nomination for President, over 16 other candidates, through a highly democratic open-primaries system that is relatively new to the party. Trump is also not well described as a Tea Party candidate: The Tea Party was an earlier insurgency that also made use of democratic methods, but Trump is in most respects several country miles to the left of Tea Party orthodoxy (and of today’s so-called Freedom Caucus). Since Trump won the election, the Republican Party has largely fallen into line, often in paroxysms of convenient amnesia, thanks to the power of incumbency and the shallow intellectual roots of most congressional members.3 But this is not the “movement.”

No, the people who volunteered at the local and state levels to support Donald Trump’s candidacy were not by and large political professionals, anymore than those who mobilized to support Bernie Sanders were. These people were and are the movement, even if we do not know many of their names, they are not mainly in Washington today, and they have neither a “headquarters” nor a corporate existence of some formal, legal kind. The question is, are they also cult-like?

To some extent, this is an empirical question. It might be possible to operationalize these eleven attributes and collect data on them among Trump true believers. It would not be easy, but I encourage enterprising scholars and their students to design the experiments and then go out and try to collect the relevant data. But for the time being, the best we can do with the understanding we have is to use it as a sort of heuristic Ouija board.

So let’s go down the list and briefly look for “fits.”

Structural

Differentiation and loyalty as a first-order virtue: differentiation yes, but there are no loyalty oaths or anything of the sort.

Charismatic leader: yes, but an important qualification is in order. Mussolini, Hitler, and the other high priests of 20th-century political religion actively manipulated the masses through rigorous propaganda machines. Karl Kraus summed up the process best: “The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so that they believe they are as clever as he is.” I do not think Trump is manipulating a movement; he is as encyclopedically ignorant as he seems.

Strong hierarchical organization: no, unless it is secret—highly unlikely.

Information is strictly controlled: no, because hierarchy is lacking.

Beliefs

Symbols few but clear: unclear. There is no banner or coat-of-arms of a Trump movement, no anthem or other special regalia. There is only the “make American great again” and “America first” slogans, and recognizable if varying images of big border walls, skyscrapers, and murderous, raping, illegal Mexican immigrants. But no set of policy symbols can be clear when the leader keeps changing his views by the week, day, or hour.

Repugnance for different ideologies, especially those close but not identical: yes, especially in the Bannon wing of the movement, which dominates the movement insofar as anything does. Certainly one can see this trait in the highly popular campaign tactic of wanting to lock Hillary Clinton up.

Utopian: for some, yes;“making American great again” is nostalgia on a utopian scale. The fact that utopia is behind us, in some lost golden age, is common to cults as it is to many normal, institutionalized religions. It is not the same as Reagan’s “morning in America,” which looked forward, or the same as many other political slogans associated with presidential candidates.

Belief in obvious or natural correctness: yes, and the Trump movement’s penchant for either hatching or believing in conspiracy theories that unify all imagined opposition to the movement is beyond doubt.

Proselytizing upon opportunity: no, it’s not distinctly different from standard politicking in other organizations and movements.

Means justified by the end: unclear, depends who you ask; certainly there is no Trumpean paramilitary force in evidence. But a willing to dissimulate or outright lie on behalf of the movement’s fortunes seems undeniable, as does the White House’s demeaning of the courts whenever there is a difference of view.

Inevitable triumph; optimism: unclear, probably not.

This brief thought experiment yields the tentative conclusion that the Trump movement is more cultic that other recent political movements, though not (yet) a genuine cult—and it has perhaps become less so since November 8. Since the Leader became President, a falling off of some cult-like characteristics due to the leader’s own vacillations and seeming outright betrayals of the Trumpenproletariat has to be reckoned as significant, as does the inevitable if still very awkward and incomplete enmeshing of the man and movement into the institutional structures of American government. Rather like the Millerites, perhaps, who became the Seventh Day Adventists, the core of the cult is getting more concentrated as untrue believers fall away. But that more concentrated core is still there, even if hordes of opportunistic joiners and hangers-on seem now to dilute their significance.

If the Trump movement is to some low to middling extent cultic or pre-cultic, does it follow that it is a potential form of political religion that is competing or will complete in some nontrivial way with conventional American religious institutions? Is there an inviting vacuum in the latter that is turning or could turn many worried Americans to political religion to assuage their fears?

My answer is “not yet,” but some potential is indeed there. That is because most self-avowed Christian religious fervor one sees today in the United States, especially of the Protestant sort, is not born of traditional, innocent faith. Much of what professed fervor there is, it seems to me, reflects a deep desire for community and identity in an alienating hyper-commercial culture that is best at manufacturing material fetishism and emotional insecurity. A good deal of it, in reaction, is intellectualized (neo-fundamentalist) religion that often seems to lack the power of the real thing in a pinch.4 And that small but influential shard of it known as the evangelical movement is itself already highly politicized, so can be seen as an element breaking down the divide of secular arrangements moving from the religious side toward the political. This seems the most persuasive way to explain evangelical support for Trump—as a form of political transactualism—a man who in no way resembles the model of a pious Christian.

Will the Trump movement, to the middling extent that it is cultic, upset the ambiguous balancing act between political faith and religious faith in the American context? Will the God mentioned on the dollar bill rebalance to become significantly less the God of the Bible and more the God of a national enterprise? In other words, how will the relative stabilities of America’s civil religion and its formal secular habits be affected by the working through of the Trump presidency?

I don’t know, and at this early point no one can know, not least because this President is neither a predictable nor stable character. But for that very reason, if not others, it bears watching. After all, we are barely passed a hundred days into this adventure. Anyone who assumes that, since the worst did not eventuate, the prospect of sharp future reversals away from relative normalcy is unlikely is assuming too much. We do not know how this President will react to political crises born of seemingly baked-in scandals—of which the Comey firing seems an ominous portent—and the various fruits of his incompetence. But whatever happens, we would be well advised to watch not just the man but also the movement. To the extent it is more cult-like than its recent predecessors, the “excitement” may be just ahead of us as the movement circles the wagons.

1Many other scholars have boarded this same train in one way or another. Paul Hollander’s career obsession with understanding why so many intellectuals end up adulating totalitarian and authoritarian political figures elides usefully into the politics-as-religion template. See his latest book, From Benito Mussolini to Hugo Chavez: Intellectuals and a Century of Political Hero Worship (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

2For two recent examples, one on the domestic and the other on the foreign policy aspects of the American Civil Religion, see Philip Gorski’s American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present (Princeton University Press, 2017) and Walter A. McDougall’s The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How American Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest (Yale University Press, 2016). McDougall reviews Gorski is the forthcoming issue of TAI.

3See Claire Berlinski, “Not with My Book, You Don’t!” The American Interest (May-June 2017).

4Anyone who may be unclear what is meant here is directed to Peter Berger, “Between Relativism and Fundamentalism, The American Interest (September-October 2006).

Israel Deepening Ties with India and China

After agreeing a historic weapons deal last month, Israel and India’s arms relationship is getting even cozier, Defense News reports:

Firearms manufacturer Israel Weapon Industries and India-based private sector firm Punj Lloyd have begun to jointly produce a variety of small arms from the Israeli company’s product line, of which some are for use by Indian armed forces.

The new venture, named Punj Lloyd Raksha Systems, or PLR, was formally opened last week, and it’s expected to tap a solid chunk of India’s small arms market estimated at more than $5 billion.

PLR is the first private manufacturer of small arms in India that produces equipment for both use by the Indian defense forces and for export.

Expect more where this came from: Israel’s superior weapons technology is increasingly prized by India, and these joint initiatives help Modi upgrade India’s defense capabilities, deepen ties with Israel, and create new manufacturing opportunities at home in line with his “Make in India” initiative.

Meanwhile, Israel’s economic clout is helping it make friends with the other rising superpower in Asia. As new regulatory roadblocks hamper Chinese investment in the United States, Reuters reports that Chinese capital is finding a welcome home in Israel’s burgeoning tech sector:

Last year, Chinese investment into Israel jumped more than tenfold to a record $16.5 billion, with money flooding into the country’s buzzing internet, cyber-security and medical device start-ups. These investments surged in the third quarter just as the U.S. regulatory crackdown began to bite, Thomson Reuters data shows.

In contrast, Chinese bidders scrapped a record $26.3 billion worth of previously announced deals from the United States in 2016, the data shows.

Israel is preparing itself for a new era, and its progress in building links with the two emerging Asian superpowers is an important global story that mostly flies under the radar.

Obamacare Is Still Failing

It’s worth remembering amid the brouhaha over the GOP’s tumultuous efforts to come up with a replacement: Obamacare still isn’t working. Many of its most valuable achievements are not sustainable. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Aetna Inc. said it will pull out of the Affordable Care Act exchanges in Delaware and Nebraska next year, confirming that the insurer will exit all of the marketplaces where it currently sells plans. […]

Aetna said its individual plans are projected to lose more than $200 million this year, and “those losses are the result of marketplace structural issues that have led to co-op failures and carrier exits, and subsequent risk pool deterioration.” The insurer said that “at this time [we] have completely exited the exchanges.”

In any case, the thing that is slowly killing Obamacare, with or without Republican help, is the same thing that is making it so hard for the GOP to come up with an alternative: American health care costs too much. Solving this problem isn’t just about litigating the merits of Obamacare or Trumpcare; it’s about ensuring that the American people have access to the health care they want and need while keeping the country solvent.

We can’t do this all at once by some mighty government fiat—or, for that matter, through a blind faith in private markets. It took two generations for us to work ourselves into our present mess, and it will take time to work our way back to a sane and sustainable system.

Some promising areas for future policy innovation include: regulatory reforms that encourage disruptive forms of health care delivery, tort reform that eliminates the distortions that “defensive medicine” imposes on the system, and efforts to “push competencies down”—with help from computer assisted diagnostics, for example, registered nurses (RNs) can do more things that only doctors could do well in the past, and licensed practical nurses (LPNs) can do things that used to require RNs.

Policymakers should also study expanding immigration preferences qualified medical personnel: We don’t need more immigrants who compete with unskilled American workers at the low end of the job market, but we could definitely use well-educated physicians to help lower costs for Americans in all income brackets.

The economic unsustainability of the current American health care delivery system isn’t just a menace to the federal budget, and a menace to poor people who can’t get good coverage: it is a threat to public health. The NIH and other research institutions should study health care delivery systems with the same focus and energy they bring to the quest for new drugs and other technologies—in the long run, reducing costs in a sustainable way will save as many lives as almost any new drug.

Until we make care less expensive, we will be stuck in the same debate we are having now, with each party offering plans that distribute resources in different ways but that leave too many people with inadequate coverage or without coverage at all.

How to Make Recycling a Business

Reduce, reuse, recycle. That phrase has become the motto for any responsible steward of the environment in the modern day, but it’s always had a moralistic bent to it—it’s something you ought to do. But a UK company has a plan to make money off of that green mantra by recycling plastic back into usable oil. Bloomberg reports:

At a garbage dump about 80 miles west of London, Adrian Griffiths is testing an invention he’s confident will save the world’s oceans from choking in plastic waste. And earn him millions. His machine, about the size of a tennis court, churns all sorts of petroleum-based products — cling wrap, polyester clothing, carpets, electronics — back into oil. It takes less than a second and the resulting fuel, called Plaxx, can be used to make plastic again or power ship engines. […]

Factoring in a cost of 3 million pounds to install and 500,000 pounds annually to operate, Recycling Technologies expects revenue of 1.7 million pounds per year per machine, thereby recovering its initial investment in 2-1/2 years, he says.

“That was always the objective, to make a machine that could pay for itself, because then people will make the investment decisions and it can scale very quickly,” said Griffiths, 48, who aims to have 100 RT7000s up and running by 2025.

If we’re going to tackle the issue of plastic waste—a problem that environmentalists promise us is going to trend towards dire levels in the coming decades—this is our best bet for doing so. Greens are most comfortable when they’re moralizing at a skeptical public, encouraging others to don the hair shirt they so proudly wear, but there are real limits to that approach, and they hamstring the ability of the modern environmental movement to achieve its stated goals.

But if companies like Griffiths’ can find a way to make money while simultaneously accomplishing these green targets, then sustainability suddenly becomes, well, sustainable. It’s not enough to point to a problem and demand a solution, just as it’s not enough to settle for a solution that requires people to sacrifice creature comforts or accept a lower quality of life. Economic growth and responsible environmental stewardship aren’t mutually exclusive, and in fact the latter can be best looked after when solutions are framed in the context of the former.

Here’s to Griffiths’ plastic recycling business, and all it represents.

One Belt, One Road, One Boondoggle?

World leaders will gather in Beijing on Sunday for a summit on One Belt, One Road (OBOR), Xi Jinping’s ambitious effort to develop a Chinese web of infrastructure and investment along the old Silk Road trade routes. But for all the initial hopes about the so-called Chinese Marshall Plan, Beijing’s lending to the project has so far been underwhelming. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Four years after Mr. Xi launched the One Belt, One Road megaproject, domestic economic realities—slowing growth, mounting debt and fleeing capital—are catching up with the plan.

Undeniably, real projects are forging ahead: Chinese bulldozers and cranes are at work on a high-speed rail line from China to Laos, port facilities in Sri Lanka, power stations in Vietnam and Pakistan and an international airport in Nepal.

Adding it all up, Louis Kuijs, head of Asia research at Oxford Economics, tallies annual Chinese lending to the several dozen belt-and-road countries at around $130 billion in recent years. However, the bulk of that is from commercial banks. The two development banks that finance infrastructure projects relevant to One Belt One Road account for about $40 billion.

That’s not small change. Yet it’s out of step with soaring official rhetoric: Expected beneficiaries are still waiting for the gusher of Chinese infrastructure funds to open up.

China’s surprisingly modest commitment to OBOR is partly a factor of changing economic realities. When the project was announced in 2013, the abundance of Beijing’s foreign reserves meant it had greater luxury to shovel money into politically appealing foreign infrastructure projects. But since then, China’s foreign-exchange reserves have plummeted, capital flight has accelerated, and economic growth has slowed. Under those circumstances, China’s investment priorities have turned inward, and it is more difficult to justify diverting mass capital to foreign projects while the domestic economy is struggling.

Meanwhile, the capital that is leaving China is largely going to markets that are safer, richer, and better developed than those under the OBOR framework. According to data cited by the WSJ, Chinese companies have invested more in the United States since 2014 then the 60-plus countries of the Silk Road combined. In other words, Xi’s regional investment priorities have not translated into a shift in private investors’ decision-making.

For that reason, OBOR may remain dominated by the kind of state-driven, politically motivated, and commercially dubious deals that have backfired on Beijing in the past. China is no better at picking winners than anyone else, as its past boondoggles in Venezuela and Africa remind us. And as The Economist notes, major belt-and-road projects in Pakistan and Kyrgyzstan are already running into trouble and causing Beijing headaches.

None of this means that Xi’s signature foreign policy initiative should be prematurely written off as a white elephant. But China’s past record of boondoggles and its hesitancy to invest wholeheartedly in the project do complicate the picture. Chinese media are predictably preparing for the summit by casting OBOR as a visionary effort that will reshape global supply chains and spread prosperity throughout Asia. Perhaps it will all pan out that way—but the program’s slow start provides plenty of reason to doubt.

The Kremlin Is Not a Victim of Hackers

The Wall Street Journal yesterday published an article titled “In Russia, Leaked Documents Rattle the Kremlin“, the main thrust of which is to suggest that the Kremlin is as besieged by hackers as any Western state getting ready for elections. The opening passage of the WSJ piece:

Russian domestic politics are being influenced by hacking tactics similar to ones Russia is accused of using to try to weaken its foreign opponents.

Documents found in email accounts hackers said are linked to Russian officials helped fuel recent protests across Russia against corruption. The documents were released by a shadowy group called Anonymous International—also known as “Shaltai Boltai,” which is Russian for Humpty Dumpty.

Alexei Navalny, an anticorruption activist who mobilized the protests, featured some of the documents in a video released beforehand alleging that Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev used a network of friends to help hide his wealth and property.

The article goes on to portray the Kremlin as fighting a desperate battle with the forces that these hackers have unleashed, forces harnessed by Navalny’s upstart political movement that resulted in widespread protests around the country a little over a month ago. The message is clear: These are the ugly realities of today’s politics, where “shadowy” anarchist groups (or maybe just morbidly obese people living in their parents’ basements?) repeatedly compromise government officials and try to disrupt democratic elections.

As if to underline the point, the Journal goes on to point out that Russian President Vladimir Putin “vigorously” denied having had any hand in the leaking of hacked emails purloined from the Macron campaign, and that he has no intention to sway any vote in the West. “It wasn’t us!” Putin seems to be saying. “We, too, are victims!”

The usually reliable Journal really dropped the ball. The story is misleading at best, partly because the known details of the Anonymous International/”Shaltai-Boltai” story are never discussed, but mostly because it paints an incomplete picture of how Russia’s special services operate. In getting this critical framing wrong, the piece unwittingly ends up playing defense for a Kremlin doing damage control after what is widely believed to be a badly botched intervention in last weekend’s French election.

Eagle-eyed readers may have connected the WSJ‘s brief mention of “Shaltai-Boltai” to news earlier this year that Russia had successfully completed a counter-intelligence operation, mopping up several Russian hackers and even a few of its own security personnel in the process. The only reason that rather obscure story got any play in Western media is that Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov, obviously aware of the uncomfortable timing of the arrests, went out of his way to preemptively deny that they had anything to do with allegations of Russia hacking U.S. elections. But since the story is so bizarre and the details are so sketchy, Western media quickly lost interest.

Here’s what’s known with a reasonable degree of certainty: the “Shaltai-Boltai” group had been publicly active for around three years until late 2016, and throughout that time had hit upon a profitable formula: leak mildly embarrassing (but ultimately not incriminating) snippets of stolen correspondence from various Kremlin apparatchiks and officials online as proof of hack, and then have people anonymously bid for the rest of the haul. The idea was to set up a competitive marketplace between the affected players trying to buy back their kompromat, and those that want to have something on their enemies.

Then, last October, one of the founders of the hacking group, Vladimir Anikeyev, was arrested. Under questioning, he appears to have given up two of his other colleagues in the organization, whom the security services then lured to Moscow and arrested the very next month.

Finally, a few weeks later, three more notable arrests occurred: Sergei Mikhailov, the head of the Informational Security Center of the FSB, his deputy Dmitry Dokuchaev, and Ruslan Stoyanov, an employee of the cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab. The FSB officials were nabbed in spectacular fashion—arrested at a gathering with their colleagues, accused of treason, and hauled off to the clink with bags over their heads.

Lots of hard to pin down speculation and innuendo accompanied the “official” news. One Kremlin-friendly outlet wrote that upon arrest, Anikeyev immediately cooperated with authorities, and mentioned Mikhailov’s name in connection with “Shaltai-Boltai”. Another Kremlin-allied television station, known for its conspiracy-mongering, went further, suggesting that the CIA was behind “Shaltai-Boltai”, and that Mikhailov was a mastermind U.S. spy running the whole operation, whose ultimate goal was to interfere in Russia’s Presidential elections next year. No less an authority than Mark Galeotti also got in on the speculation: “I have long assumed there has to be some human resource for U.S. intelligence [claims of Russian interference in the 2016 elections]” he told the AP.

End of story? Not quite. First, one of Anikeyev’s co-conspirators, still at large, started giving interviews to various news outlets in early February, and filling in some important blanks. He revealed that though he and Anikeyev had initially set up their little extortion scheme independently, they were approached by the FSB in the first half of 2016 with an offer they couldn’t refuse: “Shaltai-Boltai” would be allowed to continue to exist and they would not be prosecuted; in return, their handler would get a veto over any material considered for posting on the exchange, and in addition, the FSB could use their organization to leak information. “[Anikeyev] told me the FSB knew who we were, but wouldn’t touch us if we cooperated,” Anikeyev’s collaborator said.

Then, last month, Kaspersky’s Stoyanov unexpectedly began singing like a songbird while in jail, sending a slew of letters through his lawyers to the media. His letters confirmed a longstanding FSB policy on recruiting and coopting hackers. Namely, the FSB offers them blanket immunity from prosecution for cybercrimes committed abroad, especially financial crimes, in exchange for access to their expertise—and, presumably, some kind of kickback.

The details of the exactly relationship between “Shaltai-Boltai” and the FSB remain murky. For one, it’s not a given that the rolling up of the hacker group had anything at all to do with the arrest of Mikhailov, Dokuchaev and Stoyanov, as the notoriously unreliable Russian rumor mill has framed it.

But what is clear is that the most prominent Russian hackers are by now, in mid-2017, very much part of the system, and are not likely to be acting in any way that is not in some way approved by another part of the system.

The key to understanding what’s going on is to let go of the idea that Russia’s security state is a massive, well-functioning bureaucracy. It is, of course, at its very heart bureaucratic, but what is euphemistically called a “turf war” in the United States is in Russia more akin to a real feudal struggle for territory, or a competition between rival mafia clans. The overall structure of the system is guaranteed by Vladimir Putin himself, but the hierarchy below is beset by, and determined through, vicious and often deadly infighting.

So while it’s possible that the compromising material on Medvedev included in Navalny’s documentary came from Anikeyev’s group as the WSJ article implies, it’s also clear that it’s not a matter of shadowy anarchists trying to “rattle” the Kremlin. Rather, it’s almost certainly an inside job, as our own Karina Orlova has been reporting for months now. To think the Kremlin is a “victim” in this situation is akin to believing that the Kremlin was “victimized” by the executions of Stalin’s notorious hangmen Yezhov and Beria.

Palace intrigue has always been deadly serious in Russia.

Putin’s Isolation on Display at Victory Day

Yesterday Russia celebrated its main holiday, Victory Day—the anniversary of the Soviet Union’s triumph over Nazi Germany in World War II. Victory Day has of course been celebrated since Soviet times, but upon taking power, Putin set out to revive the day’s significance, refashioning it to be a constant source of national pride for Russians. By focusing attention on the critical role played by the Soviet Union in WWII, Putin sought to get approval, by analogy, for his own efforts to raise the profile of modern Russia on the international stage. The massive military parades in Red Square, overseen by Putin and a coterie of visiting world leaders, were always meant to communicate both the military power and the political influence of Russia—and its proud President.

Yesterday, the desired effect was diminished. Vladimir Putin enjoyed the parade almost all alone, as no world leaders apart from Moldovan President Igor Dodon chose to come to the parade.

Putin’s Victory Day guest list has been steadily shrinking for the past few years. In 2010, when the world marked the 65th anniversary of the end of WWII, then-Prime Minister Putin had with him German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Chinese President Hu Jintao, as well as the Presidents of Israel, the Czech Republic, Serbia, Croatia, Latvia, Estonia, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan. The militaries of the countries comprising the anti-Hitler coalition all participated in the parade.

Five years later, after the annexation of Crimea, with all Western leaders deciding to boycott the spectacle, Vladimir Putin, now once again Russia’s President, shifted his sights to new shores. President of Venezuela Nicolas Maduro, the Cuban leader Raul Castro, President of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe, Egyptian President Abdel al-Sisi, as well as the dictators of Tajikistan and Turkmenistan all honored Putin with their visit to mark the 70th anniversary of victory.

Most post-Soviet countries celebrate the big round-figure anniversaries with more gusto. Belarus’ Aleksandr Lukashenko didn’t come to Moscow in 2015, saying that he had to tend to his own country’s massive celebrations that year, at home in Minsk. Lukashenko however also chose to sit out last year, leaving Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbaev the sole guest attending. At least his attendance was noted by Russian media, and he was officially honored. Moldova’s Dodon didn’t even get the courtesy of any media mention this year. In the broadcasts, he looked as if he was just another one of Putin’s bodyguards.

To add insult to injury, yesterday’s weather was poor and the planned air show was cancelled, even after Moscow spent 90 million rubles ($1.5 million) on the cloud crackdown. (Russian officials not only crack down on opposition demonstrations, but on clouds too. The job is not being done by Putin’s brand new National Guard, but rather by his air force, which sprays liquid nitrogen into the air from its planes.) The cloud crackdown is the brainchild of former Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov, who first hit upon the idea to ensure sunny skies during Moscow Day celebrations, which fall on the first Saturday of September each year. The budget line item turned out to be a good opportunity for stealing from the state by padding costs, so Moscow new mayor Sergey Sobyanin, who has already handily outperformed Luzhkov when it comes to corruption, not only kept this tradition alive, but literally tripled it: these days, clouds are cleared three times a year: on Victory Day, on Moscow Day, and on Russia Day (in June). To get a sense of the scale of theft, consider that last year Moscow spent 450 million rubles ($7.5 million) on cloud control, while with this year’s budget constraints, the city will only spend 260 million rubles for the same three holidays. If the cloud control budget can be halved without blinking an eye, just imagine what the actual cost of the service runs…

International media like to portray Putin’s maneuvering in Ukraine and Syria as having wrested him a seat at the big boys’ table, with Russia sitting as a peer among international great powers. To a certain extent, that’s true: Moscow is now regularly consulted for cleaning up the very messes it helped to make in the first place. But the fact that it is consulted frequently masks a deeper truth: Russia is increasingly isolated. The next “round figure” Victory Day parade is in three years’ time. If present trends continue, Vladimir Putin may soon find himself in a Kim Jong-un-like situation, proudly obsessing over his military, all alone.

Is the Comey Firing Proof of a Smoking Gun?

In Politico, Cass Sunstein notes that there are two possible reasons Trump fired FBI Director James Comey. “The first is that in light of the multiple controversies that came to surround Comey, he was rightly fired.” The second is “that Trump does not want an independent FBI director”—that Comey was fired because Trump wanted to kill the investigation into his campaign’s alleged ties to Russia.

Trump’s Administration has staked its credibility on the first explanation. The DOJ came up with a relatively compelling letter explaining the decision on those lines after the White House reportedly asked it to find a justification for Comey’s ouster. But few impartial observers believe that it is an honest portrayal of the President’s reasoning.

The second explanation—or some version of it—seems to be becoming the consensus view among a growing bipartisan group. If true, this would amount to a serious indictment of the President’s judgment that demands a thorough accounting. What it does not amount to—at least not right now—is a smoking gun pointing to high-level malfeasance between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, as many of the more adamant propagators of this theory are fervently insisting once again.

Many of us remember when, in 2003, Saddam Hussein kicked international inspectors out of Iraq—and, of course, turned out not to have weapons of mass destruction after all. It could be that Trump is simply contemptuous of the investigation into him, and in a fit of pique demanded the scalp of the man running it—even if he wasn’t in a panic about what the investigation would ultimately find.

Whatever the rationale, Trump’s decision is a deeply regrettable one if for no other reason that it looks set to kick off an even more intense round of introversion, infighting, and chaos in Washington. For example, take a look at self-satisfied smirks on the lips of both Sergey Lavrov and Vladimir Putin, as they field questions on the Comey affair. You can imagine that the moment is being similarly savored in Beijing and Pyongyang. All these leaders know the United States is about to stop being able to pay much attention to what’s going on beyond its borders. With the world in a particularly parlous state at this very moment, this was the last thing we needed.