Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 201

India Showing How Little Paris Was Worth

India has a coal problem, and the solution won’t come as quick as its government has promised. The country burns massive amounts of the fossil fuel because it’s one of the cheapest ways to provide power to the hundreds of millions that need it, but is now paying for that choice by having to contend with some truly dire pollution problems. In response, the government’s environment ministry directed its state-owned coal plants to significantly reduce the local air, soil, and water pollutants being emitted, but as the FT reports, these facilities are behind schedule in cleaning up their act:

The new rules, which affect stations differently depending on how old they are but require cuts of up to two-thirds in particulate matter, were intended to “minimise pollution”. But Piyush Goyal, the power minister, told the Financial Times that the country’s coal power stations, three-quarters of which are owned by the government, “will take some more time” to upgrade their technology and cut emissions.

That won’t be well received by the citizens of New Delhi, who have to endure some of the world’s worst air pollution as part of their daily urban lives as a direct result of the country’s heavy reliance on coal. Nor will it be well received by global greens, because this isn’t just a matter of local pollution—coal plants emit more CO2 than nearly any other power source, making this a climate change problem as well.

On that front, the Indian power minister sounded downright defiant, telling the FT that “India is not a polluter. It’s America and the western world that has to first stop polluting . . . India is doing its bit far more than we are responsible.” This was a major subtext at the Paris climate negotiations in December 2015: the developing world were holding the West responsible for the majority of the emissions to date, even as everyone knows that countries like India and China are going to make up the bulk of emissions going forward. How to divvy up responsibilities for climate change adaptation and mitigation in the face of all of that is complicated, to say the least.

That’s one of the reasons why the eventual agreement was non-binding, and therefore unenforceable: The West was unwilling to agree to anything that legally obligated it to sign on to what might be a blank check to the developing world to help with climate change issues, while the developing world itself was unwilling to pay for someone else’s actions at the cost of their own development.

For India, it’s clear that economic growth is a higher priority (the highest, you might say) than environmental stewardship. Case in point, from FT:

Priyavrat Bhati, head of the CSE’s energy unit, which tracks India’s power stations, says lack of government pressure means companies have taken no steps towards meeting the rules.

“None of the plants have done anything to improve anything,” he said. “Very few plants have even floated a tender that we need new technology — none of the plants have gone anywhere close to installation.”

New Delhi can do this because it knows the UN has no power to sanction it, just as each and every signatory of that so-called treaty has the ability to emit as much or as little CO2 as it so pleases.

Today’s College Freshmen Are…

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a new web tool for exploring trends in the attitudes and opinions of incoming American college freshmen as measured by UCLA’s nationwide freshman survey. During the survey’s lifetime, the demographics of higher education have changed significantly—a larger share of high school graduates (especially women) attend college today than in 1972. So it’s impossible to say for sure which changes are the result of the UCLA survey’s changing sample composition, and which are the result of broader cultural shifts among young people. Nonetheless, few of the changes say particularly encouraging things about the future of America’s middle and upper classes. Here are some of the results we found interesting.

More polarized:

Fewer students identify as “middle of the road” politically than at any time in the survey’s history; “far right” and “far left” identifications, while still marginal, are at their highest ever. And while Obama-era prognosticators said that today’s young generation would inaugurate a permanent liberal majority; it’s noteworthy that the share of students identifying as “liberal” today is lower than it was in the early 1970s, in the heat of youthful Boomer protest movements. The Boomers, of course, moved significantly to the right as they grew older. It’s impossible to predict the future, but these trends don’t give any reason to think that we can avoid continued polarization and division.

More stressed out:

The share of freshmen who say they were “frequently overwhelmed” during the past year nearly doubled from 18 percent in 1985 to 34 percent in 2015. This might be evidence for Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s “coddling” thesis about how young people are raised today—ordinary problems might be pathologized with greater frequency; once-routine responsibilities might be seen as excessive. It’s also possible that the rising stress among young people is related to family breakdown or social atomization or hyper-competition at elite high schools.

Less interested in the humanities:

Interest in a humanities major among freshmen has declined gradually over the course of the survey, from 17 percent in 1971 to 11 percent today. (The number who actually go on to get a humanities major is much lower; according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, just 6.1 of BAs awarded in 2014 were in humanities fields, “the lowest level since record-keeping began in 1948.”) Some of this might be a healthy adaptation to the skills demanded in the workforce; the number of physical and life science majors, for example, has soared in the past several years. But the intellectual impoverishment and politicization of the liberal arts has probably also played a role in turning students away from them.

And…

More confident in their open-mindedness: In 2008, 65 percent of incoming freshmen said they rated themselves “above average or better in terms of … ability to see the world from someone else’s perspective”; today that number is 77 percent. Similarly, there has been seven point uptick in the share of freshmen who say they are more tolerant than average of people with different beliefs. Needless to say, the self-assessment of these students has been … called into question by some of the campus antics of the past few years.
More confident in their academic ability: 73 percent of students said they were above average academically in 2016, compared to 69 percent in 2006 and 67 percent in 1996. It’s probably true that most people going to college do have above average academic skills compared to everyone else their age, but the steady increase testifies to a cultural shift.
Less spiritual: 36 percent rated themselves at least “above average” in terms of spirituality, a figure that has been more or less consistent since 2010. But around the turn of the century, it was significantly higher; 45 percent rated themselves more spiritual than average in 2000. This tracks the decline in religiosity in America as a whole—a decline that, as Peter Beinart argued last month in the Atlantic, has probably made our political debates more corrosive.

Abe Has 2020 Vision on Changing Constitution

Shinzo Abe has set a 2020 deadline for his legacy goal of revising Japan’s pacifist constitution, according to the Financial Times:

“I want to make 2020 the year that a new constitution comes into effect,” Mr Abe told a private symposium in a video message whose contents were reported by Japanese media. “We have reached a point where we have to start discussions in more concrete terms in order to present the public with a proposal for revision to the constitution.”

Earlier in the week, when he pointed to the gravity of escalating tensions over North Korea, Mr Abe told a cross-party group of parliamentarians that only a small minority of the Japanese public “think of the constitution as an immortal tome”. […]

The amendment, which would mark the first change to Japan’s constitution in 70 years, will focus on Article 9, the so-called peace clause in which Japan renounces the threat or use of force in settling international disputes and vows that land, sea and air forces “will never be maintained”.

Abe has been doing interpretive gymnastics on Japan’s post-war constitution for years now, twisting its limits to allow Japan to provide “collective self-defense” to allies. But he has long hoped to throw off Japan’s pacifist shackles more definitively, and he has lately been using the North Korea crisis to drum up support for a more militant posture, including a first-strike capability.

Even in Japan’s changing threat environment, though, scrapping the peace clause remains a divisive prospect. According to the , 46% of Japanese want to keep the constitution the way it is, while 45% favor a change. Those numbers are trending the right way for Abe—the past year has seen a five percent increase in favor of amendment—but he will still face an uphill battle in overcoming opposition from the pacifists.

This is likely to be a long and bruising debate: any constitutional revision requires majority support in a referendum and a two-thirds majority in both Japanese houses of parliament. And investors are concerned that Abe’s controversial drive to change the constitution could suck the energy out of other priorities, especially his stalled Abenomics reforms.

Evidently, though, Abe feels confident enough in his position to re-focus his energies on the constitutional issue. With three years to convince the public, Abe has good reason to believe he can bend the debate his way—or that China’s expansionism and North Korea’s saber rattling will make the case for him.

The Right Way to Pursue Social Justice in Academia

This is a big deal for higher education: Purdue University, a major research institution in Indiana, has acquired Kaplan University, an online education company that caters to non-traditional students. From the press release:

“Nearly 150 years ago, Purdue proudly accepted the land-grant mission to expand higher education beyond the wealthy and the elites of society,” President Mitch Daniels said. “We cannot honor our land-grant mission in the 21st century without reaching out to the 36 million working adults, 750,000 of them in our state, who started but did not complete a college degree, and to the 56 million Americans with no college credit at all.”

Many colleges today are focused on dismantling inequality within their student bodies through diversity bureaucracies and safe spaces and boutique cultural liberalism. A far more productive approach would be to do what Purdue is attempting here: Invest more in the public at large, and expand educational offerings to the vast swaths of the population who have thus far been left left behind by the K-12-to-elite-college meritocratic escalator. Hopefully other university presidents learn something from Mitch Daniels.

EU to UK: All Your Money Are Belong to Us

A cool €100 billion is the new estimated Brexit tax that the EU may ask Britain to pay, according to the Financial Times:

Although over coming decades Britain’s net bill would be lower than the €100bn upfront settlement, the more stringent approach to Britain’s outstanding obligations significantly increases the estimated €60bn charge mentioned by Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president.

It also reflects the steadily hardening position of many EU member states, which have abandoned early reservations about the bill’s political risks to pile on demands that will help to plug a Brexit-related hole in the bloc’s common budget. […]

The hefty bill represents one of the biggest early obstacles to a smooth Brexit. To the alarm of the EU side, Theresa May bluntly rejected the notion of an exit bill at a recent dinner with Mr Juncker, saying any financial terms would be tied to securing a trade deal by 2019. On Tuesday, she promised to be a “bloody difficult woman” in talks.

These are going to be some interesting negotiations. From a U.S. point of view there are three things to think about: we don’t want a negotiating process so bitter that it further weakens the western alliance system; we want the future UK-EU trading relationship to be as open as possible, because it is in our interest that both the EU and the UK prosper. And we don’t want the UK to split up.

The U.S. has a lot at stake in these negotiations. With both the NSC and the State Department still staffing up, we must hope that some wise heads in Foggy Bottom and 1600 Penn are working out the basics of an American approach.

Who Killed the Liberal World Order?

At last September’s G-20 summit in Hangzhou, China, Barack Obama put the fear of God into Vladimir Putin. Or at least he tried. Two months earlier, American intelligence officials informed the President they had “high confidence” it was Russian hackers who had broken into computer servers belonging to the Democratic National Committee and transmitted some 20,000 stolen emails to WikiLeaks, which posted the messages on its website. The internal correspondence, revealing institutional favoritism for the party’s eventual presidential nominee Hillary Clinton over her insurgent challenger Bernie Sanders, and released on the eve of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, threw the Democrats into disarray, swiftly leading to the resignation of party Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz amid accusations that the nominating process was “rigged.” And they were seized upon by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who days later said he hoped Russia was “able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing” from Clinton’s private server.

Frustrated that Russian meddling might throw the presidential election to Trump and thus put his legacy in jeopardy, Obama confronted Putin at the sidelines of the conclave. “Cut it out,” the American President told his counterpart, or face “serious consequences.” It was not reported what, if anything, Putin said in response. But we can gauge the seriousness with which he regarded the titular leader of the free world’s threats by the actions his government took just weeks later, when WikiLeaks dumped a trove of emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, also pilfered by Russian hackers.

What had been hidden in plain sight throughout the campaign was later established with “high confidence” in a report issued by the Director of National Intelligence on January 6: that “Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election,” an “unprecedented” effort that utilized hacking and strategically-timed leaks, disinformation outlets like RT (formerly “Russia Today”), and internet troll farms devoted to amplifying false stories about the Democratic nominee. “Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency,” the Intelligence Community concluded. “We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”

Obama did not wait for the public release of the report to punish Russia. A week prior he had expelled 35 suspected Russian intelligence operatives and shut down two waterfront properties owned by the Russian government in Maryland and New York. “All Americans should be alarmed by Russia’s actions,” Obama said in a statement, adding that Washington’s actions followed “repeated private and public warnings that we have issued to the Russian government, and are a necessary and appropriate response to efforts to harm U.S. interests in violation of established international norms of behavior.” But by then, obviously, it was too late.

As his critics never tire of pointing out, Donald Trump indeed won the American presidency with the open connivance of a hostile foreign power. This is a ghastly thing to contemplate, particularly as the Russians are now employing similar means of subterfuge to influence critical elections across the West, most importantly in France and Germany. Many of the president’s conservative defenders, when not outright denying Russia’s role, insist it had minimal effect. But the degree to which Russian meddling aided Trump’s victory is beside the point: the mere fact that Moscow even attempted anything so audacious, and got away with it, should alarm all Americans, regardless of party.

Equally worth considering, however, is a question the new President’s detractors, stricken with a case of highly selective amnesia regarding Obama’s eight years in office, are too blinded by partisanship to ask: What was it about the last President’s foreign policies and general approach to the world that led Vladimir Putin to believe he could get away with his shenanigans, even after a direct threat from Obama himself?

This obliviousness towards the role that Obama’s peculiar approach to leadership and power politics—the essence of which is captured in such well-known phrases as “leading from behind” and “the long game”—might have played in last year’s events manifests itself most blatantly in the anguished handwringing over the state of the “liberal world order”—the global architecture of alliances, treaties, norms, and institutions that America and its allies established after World War II to ensure free trade, the nonviolent settlement of interstate conflict, and the prevention of great power war.

Lamenting the fate of this international system—which has indeed ensured unprecedented global peace and prosperity under American hegemony—has become a key element in the talking points of Obama staffers as they make their way outside the corridors of power. “The new phase we’re in is that the Russians have moved into an offensive posture that threatens the very international order,” former Obama Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes told the New Yorker. “Putin regime seeks disintegration of the EU, NATO and 70 years of [international] order,” he later tweeted. “GOP cannot look away from hard truth.” In her first public address as a private citizen, former United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power warned of how Putin is “taking steps that are weakening the rules-based order that we have benefitted from for seven decades.”

Obama and his sympathizers are right to worry about the state of the liberal world order, and not only because of the boldness displayed by Putin and other authoritarians. On the campaign trail, Trump’s active disdain for the international system and America’s role upholding it—for NATO, for our allies, and for the shared values that link our nation with like-minded democracies around the world—was breathtaking. Even with the President modulating his stance in the past few weeks, the system has been profoundly shaken.

But what many defenders of the liberal world order would rather ignore is that this order was unraveling long before Donald Trump descended the escalator in his gaudy Manhattan tower. When exactly its collapse began will be something for future historians to decide, but the Obama presidency weakened it substantially—perhaps even fatally. Members of the last administration, far from the faithful custodians they imagine themselves to have been, set in motion some of the crises they now decry as threatening long-established agreements and norms. Indeed, Trump’s posture of global retrenchment and coolness towards alliances is in some ways just an outgrowth—a more pungent, nationalistic outgrowth—of Obama’s own doctrine, passive-aggressively described by him as “don’t do stupid shit.”

Today’s liberal sleuths, who prior to this summer could not have told you the difference between Putin and Pushkin, are beside themselves speculating about Trump’s relationship with Russia and how it threatens to undo several generations’ work in structuring the postwar world. And yet paradoxically it’s the Obama Administration’s irresolute relations with Russia that have more than anything else shaken the foundations of the global order.

The Obama Administration’s first major diplomatic initiative upon assuming power in early 2009 was the Russian “reset,” a rapprochement aimed at repairing relations with Moscow in the wake of the August 2008 Georgia War. Predicated on the assumption that its “unilateralist” predecessor, and not the territorially expansionist and increasingly authoritarian Russian regime, was chiefly responsible for a deterioration in relations, the reset’s main plank was a nuclear arms reduction treaty, negotiated with Putin’s handpicked successor, Dmitri Medvedev. Many Obamans saw Medvedev as a “modernizer”, and they sought to bolster him, hoping that if he succeeded, Russia could perhaps turn some sort of corner. They failed to see the extent to which Putin was still pulling all the strings from his position as Prime Minister during the much-discussed “tandem” period.

To be sure, every new American Administration comes into office thinking it can “fix” relations with Russia. In this respect, Obama’s efforts were of a piece with his predecessors since the end of the Cold War. But it wasn’t long into the reset when it became painfully apparent that its high aspirations would not be met. Just months after the policy was announced in Geneva with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pressing a gimmicky red button (with the wrong Russian word printed on it), the FBI rolled up one of the largest Russian espionage networks in the United States. The Kremlin continued to harden its position in the occupied parts of Georgia as the Obama Administration looked the other way, and it secretly began testing cruise missiles in contravention of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

Putin’s return to the Russian Presidency in 2012, following massive demonstrations against his rule, was reportedly greeted with dismay inside the White House. But Obama seemed intent on not revealing these feelings too broadly in the hope that he could still make things work, especially on the question of nuclear disarmament, Obama’s own pet cause. Caught on a hot mic with the lame duck Medvedev in Seoul that March, he asked that he be given some “space” by Putin through the end of the year. “This is my last election,” Obama pleaded. “After my election I have more flexibility.” “I understand,” Medvedev responded. “I will transmit this information to Vladimir.”

Putin got a good read of Obama, and decided that he would withhold his cooperation. He forbade USAID from operating in Russia by September, and in a deliberate kick at Obama’s priorities, he backed his country out of a bilateral accord on nonproliferation assistance by October of the same year. In early 2013, Putin instructed his government to start strictly enforcing a draconian law about foreign funding of NGOs in Russia. By June, he offered asylum to Edward Snowden, the greatest pilferer of American national security secrets in history, and his government initiated a crackdown on the LGBT community.

Throughout all this, Obama’s responses were half-hearted at best. Case in point: in late 2012, Congress finally passed the Magnitsky Act, slapping travel and financial sanctions of various Russian officials thought to be connected with the death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who was imprisoned as part of a larger plot to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from a Western investment fund. Though Obama signed the bill in December, it wasn’t with any enthusiasm; his staff had fought its passage every step of the way because the White House judged it would interfere with bilateral relations. By the second half of 2013, the best Team Obama could muster was a “postponement” of a U.S.-Russia Presidential summit, citing the Snowden asylum as an important precipitating factor.

The next year, things kicked up a notch, but the pattern remained. Russia stealthily invaded and subsequently annexed the Crimean Peninsula, and proceeded to launch a war in Eastern Ukraine that continues to this day. In response, the Obama Administration did manage to slap a suite of sanctions on Russian officials, but it pointedly refused to do much more—namely, provide defensive weapons to the Ukrainians. For a President who had staked so much of his legacy on denuclearization, he did nothing to live up to U.S. commitments under the Budapest Memorandum—a set of security guarantees made to Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine on the occasion of their giving up their nuclear stockpiles in 1994.

Then, in 2015, Russia intervened military in Syria, ostentatiously claiming it was launching a campaign against the Islamic State in what was the first battle in a global war on terrorism, but instead devoting most of its efforts to bombing the Assad regime’s moderate opponents (some of whom were CIA-equipped and trained). It was a transparent bid to preserve Russian basing in the country, as well as a signal to the region that Moscow was ready to fill the power vacuum left by the Obama Administration’s slow recessional from the region. All the Obama Administration could bring itself to do was have Secretary John Kerry issue toothless demarches against Moscow’s indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets and humanitarian aid convoys and gravely intone that Russia’s intervention would eventually drag it into a Vietnam-style “quagmire” in Syria.

With Donald Trump holding out the possibility of a strategic alliance with Russia and possibly even the Assad regime to fight ISIS, Obama partisans have engaged in some serious historical revisionism, acting as if it was not until 2014, when Putin annexed Crimea, (and thus well into Obama’s second term), that the Russian leader had revealed his true face. “When the history books are written, it will be said that a couple of weeks on the Maidan is where this went from being a Cold War-style competition to a much bigger deal,” Rhodes told the New Yorker. “Putin’s unwillingness to abide by any norms began at that point. It went from provocative to disrespectful of any international boundary.”

This, like the “echo chamber” Rhodes admittedly created among compliant journalists and supposedly non-partisan “experts” to sell the Obama administration’s Iran nuclear deal, is self-serving spin. Putin’s viciously anti-American speech delivered at the 2007 Munich Security Conference—before Barack Obama even announced his presidential candidacy—clearly signaled a sea change in Russian foreign policy. And while Western leaders could perhaps be excused for thinking it all bluster coming after more than half a decade of relative quiescence, the next year’s attack on Georgia should have dispelled any illusions.

And while any Administration can perhaps be forgiven for thinking it could pull off a reset that has steadfastly eluded all of its predecessors, there were no shortage of warnings from friends and allies who clearly knew better. Consider the 2009 open letter penned by 22 Central and East European worthies (including Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa), published shortly after Obama’s reset kicked off, warning that “Russia is back as a revisionist power pursuing a 19th-century agenda with 21st-century tactics and methods.” A prescient paper published the following year by the late Clinton official Ronald Asmus and several of his European colleagues reported on the security concerns of NATO’s new member states in Eastern Europe. “Many of them feel that NATO has been neglecting the possibility of ‘old fashioned’ conflicts like ethnic strife or a clash between states, possibly involving Russia,” they wrote.

The Obama Administration, undeterred by these warnings, pressed on with its reset, cancelling plans to build missile defense capabilities in Poland and the Czech Republic, drastically reducing the American military footprint in Europe, and proclaiming, in the words of Obama, that, “The traditional divisions between nations of the South and the North make no sense in an interconnected world, nor do alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War”—an unsubtle dig on the Atlantic Alliance. And yet now, in their analysis of Trump and Russia, Democrats and liberals who for years ridiculed their critics as provincial “Russophobes” are beginning to sound like Joe McCarthy. Similarly, it is a bit rich to read of former German Foreign Minister (now President) Frank-Walter Steinmeier’s “astonishment and agitation” at Trump’s repeated dismissal of NATO, this being the man who just a few months earlier had derided NATO training exercises in Eastern Europe as “loud sabre rattling and warmongering.” When pop international affairs guru Ian Bremmer tweets that “Trump’s Russia policy is his single greatest departure from Obama foreign policy,” it is an attempt to whitewash eight years of being soft on Russia.

Former Obama officials like Rhodes like to paint Ukraine as a game-changer—the moment when the Administration stiffened its spine against Moscow. But it wasn’t. Illustrative was its response to Russia’s hacking and leaking of a phone conversation between Victoria Nuland, then the State Department’s top Europe official, and the American Ambassador to Ukraine, in which Nuland said, in passing, “fuck the EU.” Moscow didn’t even bother to wipe its fingerprints; an aide to a Russian Deputy Prime Minister was the first person to link to the clip on Twitter. While wiretapping conversations between diplomats is hardly a new (or rare) element of intelligence collection, publicizing them is. And in retrospect, Moscow’s leak of the Nuland phone call was a foretaste of the tactics it would deploy two years later in the U.S. presidential campaign. Asked if the Administration penalized the Russians for this unprecedented breach of diplomatic protocol, reset architect and former Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul told the New Yorker “To the best of my knowledge, there was none. I think that was a mistake.”

Of more consequence was the decision not to supply Ukraine with defensive weaponry against its much more powerful neighbor. “We just ignore everything the Russians do in Ukraine because, well, that’s Ukraine and the stakes are so high for Russia there,” is how Evelyn Farkas, the Pentagon’s senior policy official for Russia, characterized the White House reaction to her arguments in favor of arming the Ukrainians in an interview with the New Yorker. Nor was it just in the realm of conventional weaponry where Washington allowed Russia to have the upper hand. “Cyber was an area where we were trying to work with Russia,” Farkas said. “That’s the irony. We were meeting with their big spies, trying to develop some kind of arms control for cyber,” all the while Russia was honing its cyber weapons to be used against the West. This is the context in which Putin would just shrug his shoulders at Obama’s imploration to “cut it out.” Farkas quit the administration in October 2015.

As was the case with Russia, when the United States overlooked a raft of nefarious behavior in order to protect its “reset,” the Obama Administration sacrificed several constitutive components of the liberal world order on the altar of the Iranian nuclear deal. Liberals who criticize Trump’s reluctance to endorse the NATO mutual defense clause, rightly noting how this weakens the alliance’s deterrent credibility against Russia, do not like to be reminded of Obama’s “red line” fiasco, when he explicitly swore to take action against Iran’s client, the Assad regime in Syria should it use chemical weapons and then failed to do so. Nor do they like comparisons of Trump’s castigation of NATO allies for not “paying their bills” with Obama’s calling them “freeloaders. In the failure to back up words with action, Obama’s red line moment did more harm to American credibility than anything Trump has said with regard to NATO. When Iranian hackers launched a series of distributed denial of service attacks on American banks and financial institutions from 2011 to 2013, the United States did not respond because it didn’t want to risk its deal with Iran. “If we had unleashed the fury in response to that DDoS attack, I don’t know if we would have gotten an Iran deal,” the director of cybersecurity at the National Security Council at the time told the New Yorker.

Trump is reaping the whirlwind Obama sowed. The two men may have come to their worldviews from utterly different ideological perspectives—for Trump a belligerent nationalism, for Obama a utopian universalism—but both in their own ways reject America’s traditional role as upholder of the international liberal order. Obama was hesitant to act in Syria or in defense of Ukraine because his ultimate concern was extricating the United States from the Middle East and finding a modus vivendi with Moscow. That it took a direct intervention on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s opponent to wake so many liberals up to the threat Russia poses suggests that their newfound hostility to the Kremlin is a form of partisan special pleading—that they only see Moscow as a problem insofar as it affected their ability to retain the White House. This does not discount the gravity of Russian subversion of American democracy. But it’s become frankly tiresome listening to people who joined in Obama’s mockery of Mitt Romney (the 1980s “want their foreign policy back”) now attempting to outdo each other with Scoop Jackson impersonations without any acknowledgement of how naive and wrong they were.

This inability to draw the proper lessons from the past eight years—to recognize that it was the Obama Administration’s mistaken assumptions and failed policies and not a sudden, 11th-hour transformation on the part of Putin that is to blame for the deterioration in relations between Moscow and Washington—goes a long way toward explaining the penchant for Russia-related conspiracy theorizing among so many liberal Trump critics. To paraphrase a certain someone, “lots of people are saying” that “there’s something going on” between President Trump, his acquaintances, and the Russian regime. The term “Manchurian candidate” is being bandied about quite a bit, as are accusations that the Russians began cultivating the Manhattan real estate developer as far back as his first visit to the Soviet Union in 1987. An ongoing FBI investigation into alleged contacts between Russian intelligence services and several Trump associates, as well as a dossier compiled on Trump by a former MI6 officer, has provided fodder for no end of lurid hypotheses.

There are indeed many unanswered questions about Trump and Russia. (As to the possibility that the Russians have kompromat on Trump related to his 2013 escapades in a Moscow hotel room, how do you sexually blackmail a person incapable of shame?) But all this speculation as to how many times then-Senator Jeff Sessions or Jared Kushner met with the Russian Ambassador obscures the fact that what we already know—what is not disputed—about Trump and Russia, indeed, what we have known since he started running for President in the summer in 2015, is bad enough. Every public statement Trump made about Russia on the campaign trail, from calling Putin a “great” leader to speculating that the annexation of Crimea could be legal, was horrifying. His erstwhile campaign manager Paul Manafort spent years on the payroll of the corrupt, mobbed-up, pro-Russian President of Ukraine. Trump more or less begged the Russians to leak Clinton’s emails, and he repeatedly praised WikiLeaks, a Russian intelligence front, for publishing pilfered DNC communications. What the Intelligence Community revealed to the public in its unclassified report earlier this year should be enough to make anyone who supported Trump pause and reflect upon their unwitting collaboration with a Russian “influence campaign” directly ordered by Vladimir Putin.

The real scandal, the real cause for concern, is what has been staring us all in the face. Donald Trump, regardless of whether or not he is “the Siberian candidate” (as the Times’ Nicholas Kristof labeled him), represents an authentic strain of American politics going back centuries. It is a neo-Jacksonian populist nationalist isolationism, one that harbors a ruthlessly unsentimental view of the world and America’s role in it. It is also, incidentally, a worldview broadly consonant with Russia’s chief foreign policy objective of carving out a regional sphere of interest in its near abroad, something to which neither Ronald Reagan nor Harry Truman nor John F. Kennedy nor Richard Nixon would have acceded. Trump’s attacks on American alliances, indifference toward NATO, contempt for the European Union and disregard for the promotion of human rights and democracy—sincerely held views dating back decades—align closely with Kremlin objectives. One does not need to entertain claims that Putin had Andrew Breitbart killed (one of the more fantastic tales to emerge from the Trump-as-secret-Russian-agent genre) to divine Moscow’s intentions in the 2016 presidential election.

But this reading of Trump also implicates Obama. Because if the former’s Jacksonian isolationism can accommodate Russian revanchism, so too can the latter’s “interconnected world” without American power to back it up. For Obama also sought a reset with Russia, tried to improve relations with adversaries at the expense of allies, oversaw a reduction of American influence in the world, and generally weakened the vaunted “liberal world order.” Democrats have difficulty making the grand strategic arguments about Russia that need to be made because they spent so many years refuting them when Obama was in office.

And it should not go unremarked that in just over three months as president, Trump has managed to launch a missile strike at Putin’s client regime in Syria, approved Montenegro’s accession to NATO, rejected a request from Exxon-Mobil (Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s former haunt) to grant a waiver on energy exploration in Russia, and have a senior U.S. military officer call out Moscow for arming the Taliban. In just 100 days, President Trump has arguably done more to frustrate Russia’s global ambitions than Barack Obama did in eight years.

The West won the Cold War because leaders of both parties convinced Americans that we were engaged in a twilight struggle with a strong ideological component. During his two terms in office, Barack Obama repeatedly told the American people that the very notion of inter-state conflict was a thing of the past, and that only small cabals of “hardliners” – foreign and domestic – stood in the way of enduring global harmony. Many Americans, conditioned to believe Obama’s lofty rhetoric that “alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War” were, to use a word favored by his successor, “obsolete,” thus had little understanding of how or why Russia would favor Trump and why that was even a bad thing. And so only by spinning yarns about a Manchurian Candidate can the last administration’s partisans exempt themselves from blame for the shambolic world order they bequeathed.

Islamophobia?

The term is commonly used now to describe the anti-Muslim animosity that is currently sweeping across Europe and the United States in the rhetoric and the policies of so-called “populist” movements and governments. We live in a world in which North Korea seeks to develop nuclear-tipped missiles capable of reaching the American homeland, and in which both China and Russia assert their status as world powers challenging U.S. interests in one place after another. Do “populists” like Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders really stay awake at night worrying about an “existential threat” from militant Islam? Or are they simply reviving the old strategy of mobilizing resentful masses by directing their hatred against an allegedly evil religious enemy? Temporarily at least, especially in America, Jews are less plausible in this role than they used to be. Muslims will do just fine.

Yet the term “Islamophobia” is problematic. “Phobia” is a psychiatric term applied to an irrational fear—such as entomophobia (a.k.a. insectophobia), the fear that one is about to be attacked by swarms of huge, poison-spewing insects. Is fear of Islam quite as irrational? Comparable, therefore, to the anti-Semitic fantasies of the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a tract produced in Russia in the late 19th century, depicting a fictitious conspiracy by Jewish leaders to establish a world government? (By the way, an Arabic translation of the tract has recently been circulated by a radical Islamist group in the Middle East.) Some time ago a (rather brave) Egyptian journalist wrote that, while of course most Muslims are not terrorists, most terrorists are Muslims these days.

If one wants to get a vivid sense of the global reality of contemporary terrorism by radical Islamists, an easy way is to look at the daily online bulletin of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. It was established in 2008 by the former British Prime Minister (an engaged Christian, lately converted to Roman Catholicism) “to counter extremism in all six leading religions—Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism and Sikhism.” Although this alphabetically organized list was obviously put together with interfaith politeness in mind, this must have required a degree of effort. The “leading” religion, as in the one with the most adherents, is probably Chinese folk religion. There are perhaps a dozen of fanatical Israelis who go out shooting Palestinians at random (usually in retaliation against many more fanatical Palestinian Muslims randomly attacking Israelis), but that’s it under the rubric of Judaism. There is a remarkable shortage of Christian suicide bombers. Just a few days ago the Blair Foundation’s bulletin, in addition to the attack on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, had items on Islamist acts of terror in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Somalia, Nigeria, Pakistan, India, and Britain.

The Obama Administration avoided any mention of Islam in connection with terrorism (not easy to do when many acts of terrorism are performed by individuals who shout “Allahu Akbar!” during the attack). The rationale for this politesse is that we need the help of the millions of Muslims who detest terrorism in the name of their faith and who should not think that we are engaged in a war against that faith, which is just what the terrorists want them to think. That is a persuasive idea and one can only hope that eventually it will penetrate the minds of Donald Trump and his advisers. But those of us who continue to think of Islam as one of the great faiths, with immense contributions to human civilization, have more than tactical reasons for opposing the idea of war against it. In 1996 the Harvard historian Samuel Huntington published his book The Clash of Civilizations, in which he predicted that future wars would be fought over issues of religion and cultural identity, rather than political ideologies or economic interests. He explicitly mentioned “the bloody frontiers of Islam.” In an interview after 9/11 he was asked whether he did not feel vindicated in his prediction. He said that yes, but that we must do everything we can to prevent its actual coming about. That is still good advice.

Pew Study: U.S. Middle Class Smaller But Richer Than Europe’s

The Pew Research Center recently released an ambitious study tracking the changing fortunes of the middle class in Western Europe and the United States from 1991 to 2010. Among the findings: the American middle class is smaller than Europe’s (and declining), but it nonetheless remains substantially richer than almost any other European country’s. More:

Compared with Western Europe, the U.S. middle class is smaller. Among the countries examined, the U.S. is the only country in which fewer than six-in-ten adults were in the middle class in 2010. Meanwhile, compared with many Western European countries, greater shares of Americans were either lower income (26%) or upper income (15%).  […]

Incomes of middle-class households in the U.S. are greater than the incomes of most Western European middle classes. Financially, the American middle class is ahead of the middle classes in the Western European nations in terms of disposable (after-tax) household income, with the exception of Luxembourg. Middle-income households in Luxembourg lived on $71,799 annually in 2010, at the median, followed by $60,884 in the U.S. The middle class in Italy lived on a median income of $35,608, the most modest means among the countries analyzed.

The results are worth exploring in full. While the Pew study does offer catnip to those concerned about income inequality, it also reveals how prosperous the United States remains by comparison with Europe. With the exception of Luxembourg, for instance, the U.S. tops every western EU country when it comes to disposable income for the middle and upper class:

The Pew study does not break down U.S. income data on a state-by-state basis, complicating any direct comparisons between American states and EU countries along its methodology. But a look at 2010 U.S. census data reveals the general trend: even the poorest U.S. states beat the poorest European countries when it comes to median household income, while only Luxembourg tops the richest states.

In 2010, for instance, the median household income in Mississippi (in 2011 inflation-adjusted dollars) was $37,838; the equivalent in Maryland was $70,976. By comparison, the average Italian household took home $35,608 that year, while a middle-income Norwegian household earned a median income of $56,960. Put another way: average households in states like Maryland, Connecticut, or Massachusetts are richer than those in Norway, Denmark, or the Netherlands, while residents of Mississippi or West Virginia are better off than the Spaniards and Italians.

For all the talk about rising inequality and a shrinking middle class, then, we Americans should count our blessings: when it comes to disposable income, you are still better off living in Mississippi than Italy.

Can US Solar Cope with an Eclipse?

We’ll find out on August 21st, when an historic solar eclipse will throw much of the continental United States into darkness and deprive solar power producers of their source of energy in the process. As the FT reports, grid operators are readying for this event as a kind of stress test:

California’s grid operator on Monday estimated the eclipse would boost its net demand by 6,000 megawatts, enough power for the city of Los Angeles, as solar output nosedives.

Eclipses are among the latest factors utility managers must consider as renewable energy becomes a bigger part of the generation mix…Grid operators already handle supply vagaries every day, from glitches at power plants to the effects of cloudy days on solar facilities. The challenge from the eclipse will be keeping the lights on during a rapid decline and rebound in solar power.

This was a problem for Europe back in 2015, when a near-total solar eclipse threw the continent’s solar power supplies into disarray. As the FT put it, that was the “first major eclipse of the solar power era,” but as America’s example will show in August, it wasn’t the last.

These events highlight the central failing of renewable technologies today: namely, that we lack the ability to store the power they produce for use when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. Without scalable and cost-effective storage options, we’re left to the whims of weather, which on a day to day basis involves cloudy forecasts and windless days but can take the more extreme form of eclipses, as the United States is now preparing itself for.

Thankfully, here in the U.S. solar power accounts for less than one percent of our electricity generation, so the impact of the eclipse will be somewhat muted. But if greens want to see renewables take on a greater share of power mixes, they’ll need to cheerlead complementary technologies like smart grids and energy storage just as ardently as they support wind turbines and solar panels.

On a different note, this total solar eclipse is going to be quite the spectacle, and it ought to be well worth going out of your way to find a good vantage point for it. Here are some resources about the path of the eclipse, what to expect, and what safety precautions you might need to take.

Andrew Jackson Needs Alexander Hamilton

Our own Walter Russell Mead is in the Wall Street Journal today arguing that “nationalism” and “globalism”—two words that are often deployed in opposition to each other these days—are actually mutually reinforcing when done right. America’s “globalist” project—providing the conditions for international order and economic growth—requires a strong and united population at home, and a leadership class attuned to its wants and needs. Meanwhile, fulfilling America’s “nationalistic” objectives—keeping Americans secure and their standards of living rising—requires engagement with the wider world. An excerpt:

Mr. Trump is learning that some of the core goals of his Jacksonian program can be realized only by judiciously employing the global military, diplomatic and economic statesmanship associated with Alexander Hamilton. Bringing those two visions into alignment isn’t easy. Up until the Civil War, the American party system revolved around the rivalry of the Jacksonian Democrats with the Hamiltonian Whigs. Abraham Lincoln fused Jacksonian unionism with Henry Clay’s Hamiltonian vision when he created the modern Republican Party. Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan revitalized the party of their times by returning to the Jacksonian-Hamiltonian coalition that made the old party grand. […]

For the coalition to work, Hamiltonians need to realize that the health and cohesion of American society is fundamental to the world order that allows corporations and financial firms to operate so profitably in the global market. In other words, Peoria matters much more than Davos. It was American power and will that built the present world order and ultimately must sustain it. A divided society with an eviscerated middle class cannot provide the stable, coherent leadership that is required.

Effective American statesmanship would reconcile the spirit of Jackson with the spirit of Hamilton, navigating the global order to protect America’s national interests. Read the whole thing to get more of a sense of how this synthesis might look.