Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 197

Blue Civil War in California as State Jacks Up Traffic Fines

Pressed to come up with the money to stave off its public employee pension time bomb, the state of California is jacking up the cost of traffic tickets. Reuters reports:

California legislators have raised fines for traffic infractions to some of the highest in the United States to generate revenue, and the poor are bearing an unfair burden, losing cars and jobs because they cannot pay them, civil rights activists said on Friday.

The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area said in a new report that the $490 fine for a red light ticket in California was three times the national average. The cost was even higher if motorists wanted to attend traffic school in lieu of a conviction or were late paying.

This is a variation of what we call the “blue civil war”—the way the tightening fiscal vise around state and local governments end up pitting Democratic constituencies against one another. In this case, poor and minority Californians, who tend to need to drive further to work, are paying the brunt of the increased traffic fines—which are going to cover the retirement hole for unionized public employees.

In the long run, California’s growing pension liabilities will also likely force cuts in education and welfare programs that vulnerable citizens depend on, creating a further conflict between the interests of unions and the interests of the poor.

As the blue model becomes fiscally unsustainable, the political coalition that holds it together will come under strain as well. The big question is whether Republicans or reform-minded Democrats can take advantage of this looming schism.

What Is Sophistication?

Let me begin with a joke, which in America would likely be called sophisticated: Sam, a young Jewish New Yorker who certainly considers himself to be sophisticated, is on a vacation trip in New Mexico. In a tourist trap selling “authentic Navajo folk art” (most of it made in Taiwan) he meets Sally, a young woman who was born and raised on the reservation that owns and operates the tourist trap. She is immediately captivated by Sam’s elegant worldliness, he by what sees as her magical otherworldliness. The inevitable happens: They fall in love, he prolongs his stay, he takes her back with him to New York. They get married at a fancy midtown hotel, by a somewhat reluctant guitar-playing Reform Rabbi. After a few months she visits her parents back home. They had been a bit worried about her: Is she happy so far from home? Are his folks nice to her? We have heard that Jews don’t much like their children marrying outsiders. Do you feel anything like this?

Definitely not, replies Sally. Not only have they welcomed her warmly into their family, but they have given her an affectionate nickname. She is now called “Sitting Shiva!” The message of the punchline is very clear: Not only is Sam’s family unhappy about Sally’s marriage to Sam, but it is occasion for mourning! In order to understand this joke, one must know two facts: Sitting Bull (1831-1890) was a Sioux holy man and one of the last leaders of a large-scale rebellion against the United States (his warriors killed Colonel George Armstrong Custer and his men). Sitting Bull maintained his dignity during his rather degrading career acting as a noble savage in Buffalo Bill’s itinerant show about the “Wild West.” Sitting Shiva is the mourning ritual practiced by Orthodox Jews upon a death in the family.

I think that one of the traits of sophistication is the capacity to cross borders between different cultural relevancies. Humor is often, intentionally or not, the result if not the very technique of such border-crossing. Much of Jewish humor reflects a long history, perhaps all the way back to the Exodus, of Jews migrating between cultures. Woody Allen is a very interesting case of this. His sense of the comic reflects the highly distinctive Jewish culture of the Upper West Side of Manhattan—conceived at Zabar’s and born on the pages of the New York Review of Books. Yet the most unlikely people laugh at Woody’s jokes! I have been to several events full of young versions of what Samuel Huntington used to call “Davos man”—young men and women in their late twenties to late thirties, in every shade of skin color, aspiring to the international corporate elite, speaking fluent American-accented English—who laughed at these jokes. I should think that this is Woody Allen’s core audience. I once went on a walk in Tokyo, entered a theater in which one of Woody’s films was playing, in a dubbed Japanese version. The audience was almost all Japanese—perhaps a first training course. They laughed at all the right places. Did they understand the film and know what was funny, or were they coached? Either way, American Jewish humor functioned as a marker of insider sophistication.

I had encountered this before. My first full-time teaching job was at the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina. Residents of the state paid little tuition, so most of the students came from small towns in North Carolina. (At the time there was nothing that could be called a metropolitan area.) The English department was the hub of local sophistication. Young faculty and students sat together in the student union, talking loudly about matters that nobody outside the little group could understand. Inevitably some shacked up. This was quite dangerous—then as now the faculty person risked job and career (though the rationale of course was different—then overlapping bourgeois and Christian morality, now gender exploitation. If you stick around long enough everything comes back). I knew the illicit couple: She came from a small town on the Piedmont and was also in one of my sociology classes; the young English professor was from New York (Columbia) and was not Jewish, but might pass. As this drama continued, I could observe a strange transformation in the language of the student: Her local dialect persisted, but it acquired a strange overlay of quasi-BBC English, with a Jewish intonation (dim communal memories of long-vanished yeshivas), and bits and pieces of Yiddish vocabulary.

Sophistication has always been the product of cities, more or less synonymous with urbanity. The Greek spoken in the great cities of the Hellenistic period put the rustic yokels in their place as soon as they opened their mouths. The same sophisticated urbanity flourished in modern Europe in the great salons of Paris (all those magnificent royal mistresses) and London (think of Oscar Wilde and perhaps of English gay culture in general, on the road through public school and Oxbridge to the glittering capital), and in the coffeehouses of the large cities of the Habsburg monarchy. The American critic Leslie Fiedler (1917-2003) wrote about the place of Jews in the American imagination. Fiedler thought that the marginal perspective characteristic of Jews had spread throughout American society—and, so to speak, made America ready for Woody Allen. Claudio Veliz, the Chilean history, has argued that European settlers in Latin America from the beginnings avoided the frontier existence of the British colonists in what became the United States (urbane sophistication came later). They preferred to live in cities where elite sophistication could be cultivated. He quoted an Argentinian who was asked why he never left Buenos Aires to explore the wide expanses of the country over which the Gauchos roamed—he explained: “That is where chickens march around alive.” Gauchos were actually proud of being uncouth. They knew how to tame wild horses, but they were intimidated by aristocratic ladies lisping erudite Castilian.

Snubbing Turkey, Trump Backs the Kurds

Days ahead of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s visit to the White House, the Pentagon announced yesterday that it will arm the Kurds in the offensive to take ISIS’ capital Raqqa. As the New York Times reported:

President Trump has approved a plan to provide Syrian Kurds with heavier weapons so they can participate in the battle to retake Raqqa from the Islamic State, the Pentagon said on Tuesday. [….]

While the Kurds are combat-hardened fighters, American officials have said that they will need antitank missiles, heavy machine guns, mortars and armored vehicles to take on Islamic State fighters in Raqqa, who are well equipped and have fortified their positions.

It is not clear how the Trump administration plans to avoid a backlash from Turkey. But American military officials have previously suggested that the United States might provide the Kurdish fighters with just enough weapons to take Raqqa while restricting the supply of arms and ammunition they would receive after that operation ends.

The move will likely be infuriating for Erdogan, who had sent a parade of senior officials to Washington ahead of his visit to try to convince the administration to back a Turkish push on Raqqa. As we wrote last week, Syria’s Kurds were always going to be the major sticking point in any meeting between Trump and Erdogan. Now even more so after this frankly embarrassing failure of Turkish diplomacy.

While this will ruffle Turkey’s feathers, it’s the logical move to take on ISIS. In fact, it looks a lot like the plan the outgoing administration proposed to Trump several months ago, after reaching the same conclusions about America’s options in Syria. Backing Turkey’s plan to take Raqqa would have involved dumping the Kurds in favor of Turkey’s woefully less competent “Free Syrian Army” rebels. While some Trump administration officials reportedly favored a massive U.S. troop deployment in Syria, Trump apparently balked at the idea. That left the Kurds.

If the progress in Mosul is any indication, it will be some time before ISIS is extirpated from Raqqa. In the meantime, managing the fallout with Turkey will be the cost of keeping the Kurds marching in the right direction.

OPEC Has a Libya-Sized Headache

It’s been a hard couple of years for petrostates, and 2017 isn’t looking any kinder. A glut of crude sent oil prices crashing, and though they’ve rebounded from a nadir below $30 per barrel back above $50 in recent months, the petrostate plan to right the ship—a production cut organized by OPEC and eleven other countries for the first six months of the year—hasn’t produced the intended results. Now, as that collection of oil-reliant regimes prepare to negotiate an extension to those cuts, Libya is doing the one thing no one in the cartel wants to see right now: it’s adding production. Bloomberg reports:

The North African country’s production has reached 796,000 barrels a day, Mustafa Sanalla, the chairman of state producer National Oil Corp., said Monday in a statement. Libya was producing about 700,000 barrels a day at the end of April, Jadalla Alaokali, an NOC board member, said at the time.

A revival in Libyan output adds to the challenge that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and other major producers face after agreeing last year to pump less crude to stem a glut and shore up prices…Libya and Nigeria were exempted from OPEC’s cuts because both countries continue to suffer production losses from militant attacks and political instability.

Libya’s production is a real unknown—it’s been up, then down, and now back up again. There’s still plenty of room for output to increase, because its current level of just under 800,000 barrels per day (bpd) is roughly half of what the country was producing before the 2011 uprising.

The petrostate cut amounts to just under 1.8 million bpd, so Libya’s resurgence is, in that context, important. It makes the task of eating away at the oversupply that precipitated the bearish crude market that much harder. But the real enemy of this plan is the United States, whose oil output is once again rising as the shale industry takes advantage of the slight uptick in prices and the ceded market share. This all adds up to a major headache for the countries trying to extend cuts in Vienna later this month.

A Dark Day for Pluralism in Indonesia

The Christian governor of Jakarta has been sentenced to two years in prison for blasphemy: a chilling capstone to a scandal that has revealed rising intolerance in Indonesia. The Wall Street Journal has more:

The sentence for Jakarta Gov. Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, a close ally of President Joko Widodo, signaled that his defeat in an election last month didn’t end tensions simmering in the Southeast Asian country since mass protests against him more than six months ago—the biggest in the capital in decades. Prosecutors had recommended two years’ probation and no jail time. […]

“The tension will continue,” said Tobias Basuki of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta. The battle, he said, is over who will define Islamic politics: hard-line or more-mainstream groups. […]

“There’s now a legal precedent that non-Muslims can be prosecuted for blasphemy if talking about Islam,” said Andreas Harsono, an Indonesian researcher for Human Rights Watch. “It’s frightening.”

When this whole affair got started in November, investigating the blasphemy complaint was seen by some as a way to placate the hardline Islamists who demanded it. Instead, they were emboldened. Mass rallies against Purnama persisted throughout last month’s election, and his opponent won in large part by pandering to the most hardline Islamic factions. Their growing influence hardly bodes well for a nation supposedly committed to religious pluralism and tolerance. If well-organized extremist groups can now successfully topple and jail officials over a passing Qu’ran citation, such tactics are likely to be deployed again ahead of national elections in 2019.

Purnama is appealing the decision, and the national government has lately been making moves to crack down on certain extremist Islamist groups, like Hizb ut-Tahrir. But it may be too late to put this genie back in the bottle: intolerance is gaining ground in the world’s most populous Muslim country, and the country’s democratic and pluralist traditions are suffering for it.

Russia’s Imperial Amnesia

In a provocative March 27 column in the Financial Times entitled “Brexit and Imperial Amnesia,” Gideon Rachman chided the English for, as one reader put it, “a serious misunderstanding of [Britain’s] oppressive imperial past.” Aside from generating a lively and entertaining discussion of the issue, Rachman’s piece gave me a framework for understanding an even more remarkable article I had just read in the March 17 edition of Nezavisimaya gazeta. It was entitled “Главное—не повторять ошибки” (“The main thing is not to repeat mistakes”) and was penned by Aleksandr Khramchikhin, the Deputy Director of the Institute for Political and Military Analysis in Moscow.

The “mistakes” referenced in the title are what Khramchikhin considers to be glaring historical errors committed by Russia (including in its Soviet incarnation) to the country’s long-term detriment. Interestingly, his list of faux pas does not include such tragic episodes as the deportation of the Circassians, the suppression of Polish independence, Stalin’s excesses, or the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. No, Russia’s grievous historical mistakes arose precisely from an excess of generosity and the consequent failure to exploit opportunities. Examples of this foolhardy Russian restraint include the following:

During the Seven Years’ War Russia occupied East Prussia in 1758 and was poised to knock Frederick the Great’s Prussia completely out of the ranks of major European powers. However, the Czar who assumed the Russian throne in 1762, Peter III, idolized Frederick and pulled his country out of the anti-Prussian coalition, abandoning East Prussia. Khramchikhin regrets that Russia missed a golden opportunity to prevent or hobble German unification and avert World War I. Alternatively, if the war had occurred in some form anyway, the former East Prussia would have already been a Russian province, and Russian troops would have had a short and easy march from there to Berlin.
Per Khramchikhin, in 1833 a Russian show of force saved the Ottoman Sultan from his rebellious vassal, the Egyptian Pasha Muhammad Ali. Rather than sparing Russia’s traditional Ottoman antagonist, posits Khramchikhin, Russia should have exploited the Turks’ weakness to seize all of European Turkey and a hefty chunk of Anatolia, “leaving the rest to the Egyptians.”
Similarly, in 1848 Russia saved the Austrian Empire by quashing the Hungarian uprising. Russia could instead have used the occasion to annex Austria’s Ukrainian-inhabited territories of Galicia and Bukovina (“which were not then Russophobic like now, but completely pro-Russian”), or could have demanded them as payment from Vienna for services rendered.
As the Communists seized power in China in the late 1940s, Stalin shortsightedly handed over to them the nominally Chinese but Soviet-controlled province of Xinjiang, which “sought at a minimum independence, and at a maximum incorporation into the USSR.” Even more regrettably, believes Khramchikhin, Stalin failed to pursue a “Korean scenario” that would have divided mainland China more or less equally between “reds” and “whites,” creating a permanent standoff that would have precluded any Chinese “external expansion.”

In a recent essay, the Carnegie Moscow Center’s Andrei Kolesnikov commented on the mindset of Russians convinced that “ice ages in Russia’s history—periods when cold-blooded leaders ruled with an iron fist—were good for the country. Thaws—periods of democratization and modernization—were bad, characterized by disruption and violence.” Khramchikhin’s essay suggests a foreign-policy corollary to this rule: The territorial expansion of the Russian state has always and everywhere been an unqualified good, and failures to expand are to be deplored.

It is always curious, to say the least, to hear Russians—whose country has been the largest in the world since at least the conquest of Siberia in the 16th century—complain about the quirks of history (not to mention the wicked machinations of their enemies) that have deprived the Russian state of still vaster territories. By contrast, it is difficult to conceive of an English analyst today regretting that the British Empire had failed to establish even more colonies (for example Tibet, Afghanistan, or a slice of Persia), or an American bemoaning the failure to absorb Canada or to seize broad swaths of Mexico when the latter was torn by civil war in the early 20th century. Just try to imagine the reaction if a German analyst were to regret his country’s inability to implement the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, arguing that it would have ensured the long-term security of Germany’s eastern approaches, precluded the emergence of a strong Soviet state, and averted World War II. Alternatively, if the war had occurred in some form anyway, the Baltic States, Belarus, and Ukraine would have already been German dependencies, and German troops would have had a short and easy march from there to Moscow.

It’s enough to make Rudyard Kipling blush. After all, former imperial powers are supposed to be ashamed of their conquests, not feel sorry that their territorial aggrandizement had not been even more extensive than it was.

Khramchikhin largely glosses over the not-inconsequential matter of popular opinion in the territories that could (nay, should) have been added to Russia. Well might the Ukrainians of Galicia and Bukovina have embraced Russian rule in 1848—at least initially – but I find it hard to believe that the Germans of East Prussia gave the Russian army a particularly rapturous welcome in 1758, any more than in 1914. The numerous Turks in the Balkans and Anatolia would have made especially difficult subjects for the Czar, but even Balkan Christians would have proven restless. They spent the 19th century resurrecting and consolidating their own nation-states and would have found the Russian Empire, no less than the Ottoman, an unwelcome impediment. Admittedly, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when most Europeans east of the Rhine lived either in multinational empires or subnational statelets, territories were routinely transferred with no regard for the wishes of their inhabitants. This practice became increasingly problematic with the 19th-century rise of nationalism, and quite untenable thereafter—which is precisely why the major empires unraveled. It would be curious for anyone to imagine that the Russian Empire might have dodged this bullet by becoming still larger and taking on even more sullen, aggrieved non-Russian subjects than it already had.

The topic of imperial collapse raises another important point. I hope I am not reading too much into Khramchikhin’s analysis, but it would seem to have a subtle but chilling implication. It would appear pointless for someone to bewail missed historical opportunities to add further provinces to the Russian Empire if those territories would eventually have become independent anyway in 1917, 1991, or at some other date. Regrets about the phantom loss of territories that never even belonged to Russia suggest a much more poignant longing for the empire that actually was. Khramchikhin’s essay therefore strikes me not so much as an exercise in “what if” speculation as an implicit reproach against the collapse of Moscow’s empire, and the subsequent post-Soviet decolonialization of the Russian borderlands—in other words, as a clinical case of imperial nostalgia.

Moreover, once you head down the path of regretting missed historical opportunities (often seen only in lengthy hindsight), there is no end to the arguments you could contrive against the moderation of your imperial appetites. Khramchikhin could have lamented Russia’s abysmal and incomprehensible failure to use its positions in Alaska and California in the 18th and 19th centuries to throttle the North American imperialist entity in its cradle, or at least to deny the Americans (and their Canadian lackeys) access to the Pacific Ocean. And how inexplicably shortsighted was Czar Alexander I when he pulled the Russian army out of occupied liberated Paris after the defeat of Napoleon?

More to the point is the question of where such vulnerabilities exist today—the situations where Moscow’s shortsighted restraint and inordinate gentleness threaten the long-term interests of Russia. Where, nowadays, is Russia in danger of repeating its mistakes?

Interestingly, Khramchikhin has little to say about Russia’s relations with the perfidious West, where there is presumably not much danger of undue sentimentality in the Kremlin’s current approach. He is wary instead of the Russo-Chinese “strategic partnership,” decrying the lack of more fulsome Chinese support for Russia in Crimea, Ukraine, and Syria, and urging Moscow to follow Beijing’s example of rigorously pursuing its own national interests. Precisely because China is Russia’s new BFF, a word of caution about Russia’s lamentable proclivity to get shortchanged by its allies would appear to be in order.

However, it is in the post-Soviet space, and particularly Ukraine, where Khramchikhin sees a critical imperative to adopt a strict “no more Mr. Nice Guy” approach. He maintains that “the idea of an independent Ukraine is Russophobic by definition. That is, either Russia and Ukraine are one country, or they are enemies.” Khramchikhin decries Moscow’s supposed pre-2014 policy of meekly “funding Ukrainian Russophobia”; only the “openly anti-Russian” coup in Kyiv in February 2014 bestirred Moscow to give Ukraine the treatment it deserved. Even then, Russia contented itself with half-measures—“we should have acted with the Donbas precisely the way we did with Crimea.” Now, concludes Khramchikhin, it is time to cease the mindless twaddle about “fraternal peoples” and treat Ukraine as an outright enemy. Russia should not gratify the Kyiv regime with a direct invasion, but simply give the tottering Ukrainian government a timely push and allow the enemy’s internal contradictions to take their course. “Our goal,” he concludes, “should be the collapse of the current Ukrainian state and its regime, and their consequent complete political and territorial reorganization.”

A few observations are in order.

Khramchikhin, like many Russians, appears to assume that Ukrainian hostility toward Russia (exaggerated by many Russians, but a fact nevertheless) is utterly gratuitous—the ungrateful reaction of a selfish, stubborn, backward peasant people (khokhly) to centuries of unstinting Russian benevolence. The key to understanding this seemingly inexplicable behavior, however, lies not in some defect of the collective Ukrainian psyche, but precisely in Russian imperial amnesia. For instance, Khramchikhin notes correctly that the Ukrainians of Galicia and Bukovina were thoroughly pro-Russian in the 19th century, but are antagonistic toward Moscow now. He betrays no indication, however, that he has the slightest idea how this transformation in Ukrainian attitudes came about. Perhaps he believes, as many Russians evidently do, that Ukrainians have simply been brainwashed by anti-Russian propaganda. As regards Galicia and Bukovina, an honest historical examination of the period following the incorporation of these territories into the Soviet Union in 1939 would clear up any mystery about the local population’s change of heart toward Moscow.

Russian imperial amnesia finds its counterpart in the sheer ignorance about the war’s historical Russo-Ukrainian context on the part of many Western analysts, who can only perceive the conflict through the distorting prism of great-power rivalry or some hackneyed “Great Game” analogy. I was struck by one Western commentator who noted, in an inept bow toward evenhandedness, that there is, after all, ample historical precedent for Russian troops tromping about Ukraine. One should hasten to add that there is also precedent for American forces tromping around the Caribbean, or German armies tromping through Belgium. Moscow doesn’t deserve a pass for reverting to malevolent historical type in Ukraine, and no one should consider Russian intervention in Ukraine, any more than these other “precedents,” as representing any kind of normative—and therefore excusable—behavior.

Incomprehensible, both to such Western analysts and many Russian observers, is the notion that Ukrainians might value their national identity and be prepared to defend it. Ukrainians are, in fact, fighting a belated war of independence to preserve the statehood that landed peacefully and unexpectedly in their collective lap in 1991. The only surprise here is that anyone would find Ukrainian patriotism surprising.

Either Russia and Ukraine are one country, or they are enemies. This is emphatically a Russian, not Ukrainian, sentiment. It is Russians who have defined Ukrainian statehood—indeed, the very idea of a Ukrainian ethnos—as intrinsic and unjustifiable Russophobia. For their part, prior to 2014, Ukrainians remained persistently and irrepressibly well disposed toward Russia and disinterested in, or even hostile to, NATO membership. Analysts who claim that Russia intervened in Ukraine to stop NATO enlargement have gotten the causality exactly backward. Russian policy is not to keep NATO out of Ukraine, but to eliminate any Ukrainian national entity that NATO could ever possibly receive as a member. The goal is “the collapse of the current Ukrainian state and its regime, and their consequent complete political and territorial reorganization.” And it was not any near-term prospect of NATO enlargement (there wasn’t any) that triggered an urgent and justifiable Russian response; rather, it is Russia’s opportunistic invasion that has driven so many Ukrainians to view NATO membership as an attractive proposition. Moscow’s role as NATO’s chief recruitment officer is a recurring historical error that Khramchikhin curiously fails to identify, even though it fits perfectly with his narrative of Russia abetting its own adversaries.

Khramchikhin is being disingenuous when he urges Moscow not to give the Kyiv regime the satisfaction of a direct Russian invasion. Russia’s current military engagement in Ukraine is no less direct by being limited and sub rosa. Moreover, Russia’s failure to pull off its Crimea gambit in the Donbas was not due to a lack of resolve or an untimely bout of traditional Russian tenderheartedness. Rather, in the decisive “Russian” spring of 2014, Moscow was cruelly hampered by the sheer lack of personnel who could be readily deployed at short notice to Ukraine. With Crimea given priority, there simply weren’t enough “polite green men” to go around. Russia seeks to remedy this problem by building or rehabilitating a number of military bases near the Ukrainian border. In the not-so-distant future, tens of thousands of “polite green men” will already be deployed in the proximity of Ukraine to serve as the driving force in the “spontaneous, indigenous” uprisings that Moscow will instigate against the “fascist junta” in Kyiv.

Many Russians seem to fantasize that a gentle fraternal nudge is all it will take to topple the government in Kyiv, destroy the Ukrainian state, and end the whole unseemly Ukrainian national project. However, Moscow’s Novorossiya fiasco in 2014 ought to give Russians pause. The Kremlin conjured up a mythical entity that it dubbed “Novorossiya” (“New Russia”), complete with a flag, to serve as the vehicle for a hoped-for mass separatist movement by Russian-speaking Ukrainians. The project flopped when most Russophone Ukrainians, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, opted to stick with Ukraine instead. By analogy, if one judged the fervor of Irish sentiment for rejoining the United Kingdom by the amount of English heard in the streets of Dublin, one would fall very wide of the mark. Moscow made a similar error with Novorossiya, and it is not clear even now that Russians have drawn the requisite conclusions. The flag of Novorossiya still flies in the occupied Donbas, suggesting that the Novorossiya project is being held in reserve, to be trotted out again should a favorable moment present itself.

Indeed, we can anticipate numerous and vigorous pushes from Moscow over the coming years to topple the wobbly but preternaturally tenacious Ukrainian state. From the Kremlin’s perspective, it would be foolhardy—indeed, it would be another of Khramchikhin’s classic Russian mistakes—to cut a deal now that leaves Ukraine still standing, when the country’s chronic corruption, toxic politics, and fragile economy provide so much fodder for Russian optimism. Truly, one should never underestimate Ukraine’s capacity for self-inflicted injury. Could Ukraine’s Russophone population, filled by revulsion and despair at the country’s sorry state of affairs, yet be induced to abandon Ukraine and embrace Novorossiya? It is a tempting supposition, and one likely to animate Russian policy for the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, even as it lurches from one crisis to the next, Ukraine has, by most accounts, succeeded at least in consolidating the population’s sense of national identity. And certainly the Ukrainian army will never again present as feeble an opposition as it did in 2014. Dream what they may, Russians will not find Ukraine a pushover.

They say that opportunity knocks but once, and 2014 might prove to have been Russia’s last chance to obliterate Ukrainian nationhood. The war in the Donbas has become one of attrition—a waiting game driven by the Russian hope that opportunity might yet be cajoled into knocking a second time. Even if Russia can’t drive a stake through the heart of the Ukrainian national project, can it at least cripple Ukraine by tearing away the fairy-tale land of Novorossiya? Or can the unruly but wily khokhly, proverbial for their stubbornness and guile, contrive to outsmart or outlast the richer, more powerful, more numerous Russians? It will probably be many years before we find out.

In the meantime, the Russian belief in Ukrainian Russophobia is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. The war is having the entirely predictable effect of replacing, in Ukrainian minds, warm thoughts of Russo-Ukrainian brotherhood and solidarity with images of the darker pages from their shared history: restrictions on the Ukrainian language, forced Russification, Soviet-era repressions, and above all the holodomor—the catastrophic famine of 1933. Largely oblivious to these realities, the mass of Russians perceives only an inexplicable ingratitude by the khokhly toward all of Russia’s selfless acts of kindness and generosity—above all, the noble effort to free Ukraine from the fascist junta imposed by Western intelligence services. The consequent sense of wounded righteousness will inspire redoubled Russian efforts to put an end to the noxious Ukrainian national project once and for all, and bring surly, shambolic Khokhlandiya back into the bosom of Russia where it belongs. And so the vicious circle will perpetuate itself.

Not at all in the way Khramchikhin imagines, Russia indeed appears condemned—thanks to imperial amnesia—to repeat its mistakes.

Moon Wins in South Korea

After nine years of conservative rule and a months-long political vacuum, a left-of-center president will be taking power in South Korea—and that could spell trouble for Trump’s Korea policy. Financial Times reports:

Exit polls showed Moon Jae-in, a former human rights lawyer, with over 41 per cent of the vote in Tuesday’s historic election, almost twice the share of his closest rival.

“Today’s sweeping victory is the result of our people’s desperate wish for a regime change,” the 64-year-old Mr Moon said as the result become apparent. “I will realise the two main tasks people desire — reform and national unity.” […]

While Donald Trump, US president, has warned of the risk of a “major, major conflict with North Korea”, Mr Moon, a former special forces operative, has promised a new approach to North Korea, based on engagement with Mr Kim’s regime as well as increased pressure.

On Tuesday, he said that South Korea needed to play a more active diplomatic role on North Korea — an issue on which it has been increasingly marginalised by the US and China amid a power vacuum in Seoul.

Moon’s foreign policy views are already sparking fears of an abrupt rift with the United States.  Moon is an advocate of the old “Sunshine Policy” of economic engagement with North Korea, a skeptic of U.S. hawkishness toward Pyongyang, and an opponent of the THAAD missile defense system. He recently wrote that Seoul needs to “learn to say no to America,” and the events of recent days—with the U.S. military controversially rushing THAAD into place while Trump grandstands about making the South Koreans pay for it—no doubt helped his case.

Still, it is unclear whether Moon can make a full return to the engagement policies of a decade ago. For one, the installment of THAAD is a fait accompli; although Moon has promised to review the deployment, he has shied away from promises to reverse it. And in the nine years since the liberals last held power, public opinion has shifted alongside the deteriorating security situation. As Scott Snyder notes in Forbes, South Korean polls reveal high support for the U.S. security alliance, high anxiety about the relationship with China, and low expectations about the prospects of engaging with the North. As a more practical constraint, Moon’s cabinet choices will be subject to the approval of a National Assembly his party does not control; it is unlikely, then, that he will select anti-U.S. ideologues who would fundamentally change course.

This does not mean that the U.S. should be unconcerned about Moon’s posture. He will certainly explore deeper engagement with Pyongyang, potentially undermining Trump’s push to turn up the heat via increased sanctions. And any more conflicting signals from Trump are likely to be exploited by the new administration to argue that Seoul should go its own way rather than following Washington’s lead in confronting Pyongyang.

Moon is set to be inaugurated tomorrow, so whatever changes he may bring could come quite soon. Let’s hope that the Trump administration is already building bridges.

College Bubble Threatens the American Dream

Getting millennials on the home-ownership ladder is the single most important thing we can do to create a more stable and prosperous future for the United States—but our overpriced higher education system is getting in the way. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Americans continue to default on student loans at a “stubbornly high” rate, and a small share of borrowers are unable to buy homes due to high levels of student debt, according to a new report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. […]

The report notes that homeownership rates are far higher for those who graduated from college than those who never earned a degree. But it also shows that “those with significant student debt are much less likely to own a home at any given age than those who completed their education with little or no student debt.”

Homeownership encourages family formation; it strengthens civil society; and it is the best vehicle for middle-class families to save for retirement.

Older millennials have already been set back from entering the workforce at a time of slack labor markets. That is beginning to change, but the combination of relatively low wages, relatively high student debt and high home prices thanks to anti-development policies have seriously damaged the prospects of millions of young and youngish Americans.

Making housing work for the rising millennial middle class should be job number one for policymakers. And finding cheaper alternatives to the bloated higher education system—by breaking the accreditation cartel, fostering vocational education, and making colleges have skin in the game—is an important part of the answer.

Merkel’s Tough Message to Macron

So much for a post-election honeymoon. Angela Merkel is already sending a tough message to Emmanuel Macron after his presidential victory: thank you for beating Le Pen, but no, you can’t have any money. Financial Times:

Angela Merkel has dismissed the idea of helping Emmanuel Macron by relaxing eurozone spending rules, quickly putting the onus on France’s next president to implement economic reforms after his election win.

A day after Mr Macron scored a decisive victory in France’s presidential election, the German chancellor, the most powerful national leader in Europe, said she wanted to help France but said: “German support cannot replace French policymaking.”

The chancellor pledged to help France fight unemployment and improve its economy, and to co-operate closely with the youthful president-elect. “Emmanuel Macron carries the hopes of millions of French people and also of very many people in Germany and in the whole of Europe,” she said.

But Ms Merkel said: “I don’t see why — as a priority — we should change our policy.”

Merkel’s Christian Democrats show no signs of relenting on their tough line on eurozone reforms—certainly not before the German elections in September, and maybe not even then. This is a reality in German politics: the CDU/CSU believes that tough Euro policies are popular with the voters. And they seem to be right.

That’s going to make life harder for Macron than it need be: he will have to win the legislative elections without any evidence that he can soften German positions on the austerity issues that matter so much to French voters. And he will clearly face an uphill climb in altering German thinking on other orthodoxies: both Merkel and her challenger Martin Schulz have already rebuffed Macron’s criticism of the German trade surplus, which he has justifiably identified as a threat to the Eurozone.

In the best case scenario, Macron and the Germans will quietly work out a set of reforms that are mild enough for the French to accept but that look tough enough to the Germans that public opinion is prepared to back some concessions on deficits and economic policy. Dressed up as the kind of “Grand Compromise” between France and Germany that in the past propelled much of the EU’s progress, such a deal just might offer the EU the chance for a fresh start.

Ready for Better GMOs?

Population growth isn’t the apocalyptic problem Malthusian greens once spent so much time making it out to be, but even though growth rates are slowing down, feeding our planet’s billions remains one of the biggest challenges for humanity. That task becomes even harder when you consider that our warming planet and its changing climate are going to create new challenges for farmers. Threats to food security are proliferating even as the demands placed on our agricultural system grow along with the global population.

But there’s hope yet, as scientists are continuing to refine the techniques by which they can genetically modify crops to make them hardier, less reliant on pesticides, and capable of producing higher yields. But as the WSJ reports, we’re looking at GMO 2.0, as companies are developing ways to do more than genetically modify. Now, we’re genetically editing:

Gene editing is different from the genetic modifications that Monsanto and other companies pioneered in the 1980s.

Gene editing allows scientists to make changes to a plant’s already-existing DNA with the same precision that word-processing programs can edit text, scientists say. In the crop-seed business, genetic modification up to this point mainly has involved inserting new genes from bacteria or another plant. That difference can mean a shorter review by U.S. regulatory agencies for gene-edited crops. […]

Dr. Robert Fraley, Monsanto’s chief technology officer, said gene editing could help corn plants thrive in dry conditions, or produce tastier bell peppers. “It’s a breakthrough technology,” he said. “It’s going to create just a wave of innovation.”

We’ve continued to refine our understanding of genomes, and that knowledge, coupled with advances in computing, is now creating new opportunities for us to make the best possible versions of the food crops on which we rely.

Greens will invariably decry the “unnatural” aspects of these “GEOs”, just as they did with GMOs, and they’ll be able to sway certain sections of the public. But those Luddite concerns ignore the fact that we’ve been working to create better versions of our food since we started planting crops those many thousands of years ago. Gene editing is a far cry from selective breeding to be sure, but it’s still a variation on the same basic concept: human ingenuity adapting nature to better serve our needs.

These new editing techniques will undoubtedly be subject to the same scientific scrutiny that GMOs have been over the past few decades, but thus far research has shown genetically modified crops to be perfectly safe for human consumption. That’s good news, because we’re going to need every trick in the book if we want to not just feed every human on our planet, but help them thrive (with tastier peppers, even) as well.