Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 205

EU Officials State The Obvious On Libya

Shocker! According to new EU reports, Libya has neither the strategy nor the capacity to slow migrants from streaming into Europe this summer. :

Libya’s U.N-backed government has no clear plan to help prevent more migrants reaching Europe’s shores this summer, European Union officials said on Thursday, citing confused requests for equipment to patrol its shores.

Libya’s newly trained coastguards lack a strategy on where to deploy or how to detect and intercept smugglers, officials told Reuters, basing their analysis on two documents prepared for EU defense ministers meeting in Malta, the route to Italy on which thousands of people drowned last year.

It turns out, contrary to the most fervently held wishes of ostrich-like officials, failed states are not great at deterring migrant flows. But let’s not heap the scorn too heavily on feckless eurocrats in charge of managing the mess: this is not all their doing. This one is ultimately on the consciences of Western leaders, including President Obama, who thought they’d have a tidy little humanitarian intervention in Libya.

Publicly, some EU leaders are still trying to convince the public that the Libyan coast guard is up to its task, but the spin is more comical than anything. According to an EU spokesman quoted by Reuters, we should be reassured simply because its Libyan trainees are showing up to work in the first place: “So far, those newly trained members have returned for duty after rest periods, which is a sign of their commitment.”

Meanwhile, an increasingly anti-European Turkey has been threatening to renege on its end of the EU-Turkey migrant deal, raising fears of resurgent migrant flows on another front. Taken together, these developments hardly inspire much optimism that the migration problem is under control.

Following the Trail of Dead Russians

Former FBI special agent Clint Watts, testifying at the Senate Intelligence Committee’s hearing on Russian meddling in last year’s elections, had an arresting message for his interlocutors: “Follow the trail of dead Russians”, he said. Watts, who admits to not being much of a Russia expert, was probably referring specifically to the death of Oleg Erovinkin, a former KGB general shot twice in the back of the head on December 26 in Moscow. Erovikin was said to have cooperated with former British spy Michael Steele in compiling the notorious “dossier” alleging various connections between the Trump team and Russian intelligence.

Most of the coverage that followed Watts’ pronouncement went through the litany of Russian diplomats that have turned up dead recently. In addition to Erovinkin, most included the death of Russia’s Ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, Russia’s Ambassador to India, Alexander Kadakin, the Russian consul in Athens, Andrei Malanin, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs official Peter Polshikov, and an officer at the Russian consulate in New York, Sergei Krivov.

It would be a mistake to assume that all of these deaths were somehow related. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s vaunted “Power Vertical” resembles more a mafia family than some kind of well-structure corporation, and as such leads to all sorts of gangland score-settling up and down its ranks that rarely require approval from the very top.

That said, the various unexplained deaths and random assassinations do sometimes suggest the outlines of a broader plot. Case in point: the mysterious death of Russia’s long-serving Ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin.

When Churkin passed away on February 20 from what was officially declared a heart attack, Russian commentators noted that his death closely followed on the heels of explosive testimony by exiled Russian Duma lawmaker Denis Voronenkov, who earlier that month confirmed to the Ukrainian Attorney General that Vladimir Putin had in fact received a letter from former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych begging Russia to send troops to Ukraine in 2014. The letter in question, the commentators noted, had been presented by Ambassador Churkin to the United Nations Security Council in March of that year, days before the Crimea annexation. Putin asked for (and received) permission from the Russian Senate to send armed forces abroad on that same day that Churkin appeared at the UN.

Surprisingly, two days after Churkin’s death, Viktor Yanukovych was interviewed on state-run TV, claiming for the first time that he hadn’t written any such letter to Vladimir Putin. “It was not a letter but a statement. I haven’t committed treason. I was trying to protect my people and to do so within the limits of my authority”, Yanukovych told reporters.

The broadcast of Yanukovych’s most recent statement was quickly followed by an endorsement from the Kremlin. On March 16 of this year, Putin’s Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that there was “no official letter registered by Russia’s Presidential Administration”. Answering the question about Churkin reading the letter at the UN, Peskov said he didn’t know anything about this. (Putin himself publicly mentioned Yanukovych’s request in 2014.)

Then, a month after Ambassador Churkin’s death and Yanukovich’s statement, Denis Voronenkov was shot dead in broad daylight in Kyiv.

As noted above, this could just have been a coincidence.

For one, violent score-settling in Russia has been a fact of life since the end of the Cold War. Indeed, the 1990s, people being shot in broad daylight on the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg was a commonplace. Not infrequently, people were even assassinated by rocket-propelled grenade.

And Denis Voronenkov had an impressive number of enemies among the Russian siloviki who could conceivably want him dead. Before he met his untimely death, Voronenkov, a member of the Russian Communist Party, was widely known as the “Pokemon catcher” for calling for the FSB to ban the Pokemon Go in Russia at the height of its craze. He memorably called it “an American security services’ product aimed at Russian homeland security”. But to those paying closer attention, Voronenkov was also known as a ruthless corporate raider who worked with and for a particular group of the siloviki. Voronenkov was involved in the notorious Three Whales case, a huge smuggling and money laundering scheme that ended up with a nasty fight breaking out among the various stakeholders. It was around this time that Voronenkov self-avowedly made a powerful enemy of an allegedly former (and quite possibly still active) FSB General, Anton Feoktistov, a protegé of Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin. Voronenkov fled Russia last year after a criminal investigation was opened against him; he publicly blamed Feoktistov for the investigation being initiated. After Voronenkov’s murder, his ally, another Russian Duma member in exile Ilya Ponomarev fingered Feoktistov for having hired the hitman.

Beyond Feoktisov, there were plenty of other security services types who might want to see Voronenkov silenced. As Ponomarev also said, “[Voronenkov] knew a lot about what is the weakest spot of the Putin’s regime—about their financial flows.” One of the projects he was pursuing while an exile in Kyiv, Voronenkov confided to Ponomarev, was to found a private center for investigating money laundering by Russian siloviki. As regular readers know, money laundering is a big business for these guys. Everything from the Magnitsky case to the more recent Moldovan scheme is being run through the FSB.

Ambassador Churkin, for his part, at 65, died at just the actuarial “expected” age for a Russian man. It really could have been a heart attack, as official sources indicate, and keeping the results of a diplomat’s autopsy secret is indeed correct according to protocol. Nothing to see here.

But maybe it wasn’t a coincidence. Maybe it had something to do with Crimea after all.

We can’t rule out that Churkin was poisoned. Removing unwanted persons by poisoning has been a favorite tactic of the Russian secret services for a long time. The poisoning of FSB officer Aleksandr Litvinenko by a radioactive isotope of polonium was only discovered by accident. And British authorities are still investigating the suspcious circumstances behind the demise of a crucial witness in the Magnitsky case—Russian businessman Aleksander Perepilichny, who died in 2012. (Toxicologists claim they found a rare poison in the man’s body, residue from the poisonous plant Gelsemium elegans. The symptoms of Gelsemium poisoning are similar to the for cardiac arrhythmia. The hearings in the case are scheduled for June of this year.) In addition, two Russian generals who played key roles in the annexation of Crimea and the war in Eastern Ukraine, Aleksandr Shushukin, 52, and Igor Sergun, 59, died a month apart the winter before last due to sudden heart failure.

As for Voronenkov, his willingness to testify as to the existence of the letter could have sealed his fate. The way he was murdered—not a silent heart attack, but a very public, telegenic execution—might indicate that the Kremlin wanted to send a message. With the Russian economy contracting over the past three years, the fight for a place at the money trough has gotten more pointed. The nastier the fight, the more losers there are; some of these bitter losers might be tempted to turn to the West, and give up what they know in exchange for some kind of amnesty. The message is simple: don’t.

But still, why does the Yanukovych letter matter to the Kremlin? After all, if it does exist, the only person it directly threatens is Viktor Yanukovych himself. The former Ukrainian President is under several criminal investigations in Ukraine, including embezzlement, ordering the killing of protesters on the Maidan, and treason. Last month, treason charges against Yanukovych were brought to court. If he is found guilty, his property and assets could be confiscated in absentia.

But beyond that, progress in Ukrainian court is likely to get Yanukovych summoned to the Hague. In 2014, the International Criminal Court refused to open a case on the Maidan crimes because it didn’t see them as “systematic”. But since then, cooperation between Kyiv and prosecutors in the Netherlands has kicked up a notch, with the ICC getting access to the Ukrainians’ files on Yanukovych. And Ukraine’s Attorney General said in November of last year that the ICC concurred that the crimes on Maidan—using deadly weapons against protesters—were part of criminal chain of responsibility that “led to an aggressive war by Russia and Russian-backed separatists against Ukraine”.

That kind of language represents a big brewing headache for the Russians—and Putin personally. The Russian President is doubtlessly aware that most international prosecutors would love to get any purchase to open a case that implicates him. Once an investigation starts, who knows where it will go? And an official request for foreign military intervention would presumably be crucial evidence in any such investigation.

Would Yanukovych, a man now without a country, sing for foreign prosecutors in exchange for some kind of clemency? Probably not, especially if the Kremlin sets him up properly in some fancy dacha and refuses to extradite him. But with his own retirement appearing on the horizon, Putin almost certainly doesn’t want this can of worms opened at all. Any big international trial that implicates him represents a threat to him properly enjoying the fruits of his service to his country into his dotage.

And when something or someone threatens Russia’s President, he usually takes care of it.

Education’s Taxing Problem

Since 1647, when the Massachusetts Bay Colony first required any town of more than fifty families to hire and support a local teacher with funds from the “general inhabitants,” local and state governments have primarily funded public education through locally levied property taxes. The result has been an increasingly impoverished public education system with wide—and educationally harmful—disparities between wealthy and poor districts. States are increasingly unable or unwilling to use state funds to compensate for shortfalls in property tax revenue, and these funding disparities have, with growing frequency, become the subject of state court litigation. Courts in several states have found that funding inequities and deep educational cuts violate state constitutional guarantees of “through and efficient education” or “sound basic education.” In short, every state is wrestling with the issue of educational funding inequity.

Nowhere is this issue more apparent than in Pennsylvania. Upper Darby School District, a diverse working-class and majority-minority suburb immediately outside the city limits of Philadelphia, spends approximately $13,000 per student, whereas its wealthier, and whiter, neighbor five miles away, Marple Newtown School District, spends $22,000 per student. By virtue of zip code alone, one student will receive $9,000 dollars in extra education spending. While per student spending is not the only measure of educational success, it is fundamentally unfair that the resources available to educate students are predicated on the wealth of their community. Amplifying this unfairness is the racial and economic segregation that underlies property tax disparities. For a variety of reasons, including the legacy of redlining in the home mortgage loan industry, minority families are often concentrated in the communities with the lowest property values—and therefore attend schools with the least resources.

State government cannot remedy this disparity because most states face serious budget shortfalls. Pennsylvania, which currently ranks 45th in state education spending and faces a $1.7 billion budget deficit, has no new dollars for education spending. It is not alone; 35 states currently spend the same as or less than they did in 2008.

Taking aim at this problem in an unorthodox way, the Pennsylvania legislature is considering abolishing property taxes altogether. Under the Property Tax Independence Act (PTIA), all school property taxes would be phased out over two years except for a percentage levied to pay school districts’ long-term debt. (According to proponents of PTIA, this amount would be less than 10 percent of the current property tax.) Public schools would be funded instead by an increase in the state sales tax—from 6 to 7 percent—and in the state income tax—from 3.07 to 4.95 percent. The state sales tax would also expand to include goods currently exempt, such as food, non-prescription medication, and public transportation fares.

If Pennsylvania abolished local property taxes, it would become the first state where all school funding would come from the state government. Under the proposed legislation, the state would be required to fund school districts at their 2016 property tax level. For example, if school district A raised $1 million in school property taxes in 2016, the state would be required to provide $1 million in sales and/or income tax revenue to that school district. Future funding increases would be tied to inflation and the state would not be required to distribute a penny more.

Given the problems associated with property tax-based education funding, abolishing property taxes would seem like a logical solution. However, it’s not—it’s a disaster.

The proposed legislation is a classic bait and switch; it is advertised as an improvement in school funding yet it codifies the status quo funding inequities. Property tax revenue is insufficient to support all public schools because of wealth disparities between communities, but its removal and substitution with a similarly unequal revenue stream is not the answer. For example, Mount Carmel, a town in rural, central Pennsylvania, spends $8,659 per student; Lower Merion, a wealthy suburb of Philadelphia, spends $22,962 per student. PTIA does nothing to address this funding inequity, and it provides no mechanism to increase education spending statewide or provide under-funded schools with additional dollars. Instead, the legislation expressly limits any funding increases to yearly inflationary adjustments. When, as in the last eight years, inflation is low or non-existent, Pennsylvania schools would receive little to no additional funding.

Another consequence of the legislation is that it redistributes money from urban commercial centers, which have the highest sales tax volume and weakest property tax revenues, to wealthier suburban communities. These wealthier communities would receive the highest share of future state education dollars because they had the highest property tax revenues. Thus, PTIA would reinforce and subsidize the advantages that the wealthiest districts enjoy instead of increasing investment in the urban school districts that desperately need additional education dollars.

Proponents of PTIA promise they will fund school districts dollar for dollar for lost property tax revenue; however, an analysis of the legislation by the Independent Fiscal Office (IFO) disputes that claim. The IFO, a non-partisan state organization that reviews the financial impact of proposed legislation, concluded that the legislation would miss its proposed revenue target by $1.15 billion for fiscal year 2017-18. Unless the sales or income tax were increased even more to close this shortfall, school districts would receive less money than they do from property tax revenue.

The IFO also notes that sales and income tax are more volatile revenue sources than property taxes because they are tied to the health of the overall economy. While properties, and therefore property taxes, tend to hold value even during a recession, any economic downturn will immediately affect sales and income tax receipts. Education funding, like the rest of the state budget, would be linked to the health of the overall economy, inviting deep and perhaps legally problematic educational cuts.

Even worse, PTIA places all school funding under the control of the often-ineffective and legendarily corrupt Pennsylvania legislature. In this decade alone, eight of its former leaders, including two former House Speakers, have been convicted on corruption charges. Without any ability to rely on local revenues, school districts will have to trudge to Harrisburg to beg for additional monies for capital projects, teacher salaries, or books for students. The barometer of local school funding will become the effectiveness of your local state representative.

Finally, PTIA shifts the burden of funding education onto younger wage earners, mainly millennials, and renters. According to the IFO’s report, working-age (21-44) renters will see a tax increase of 11 percent and working-age families (renters and homeowners) will see a tax increase of 4 to 5 percent, while retired homeowners will see a 38 percent tax decrease. PTIA’s increase in the sales tax hits working-age families particularly hard because they consume more than retired homeowners. Plus, the broadening of taxable items includes a number of products familiar to any young family, including diapers and baby food. PTIA also shifts the burden of supporting education entirely onto individuals by eliminating all property taxes for corporations. There is no evidence, either cited by PTIA proponents or in the IFO report, that shifting the burden to fund education onto millennials, who are themselves burdened with historically high levels of education debt, is a sound funding strategy.

Proponents of PTIA are right to point out that property taxes are too high in too many parts of the commonwealth and hurt older residents disproportionately. Seniors should not be forced to bear alone the cost of educating the next generation, but neither should younger workers and renters. PTIA is bad policy because it is aimed at mollifying one segment of the electorate, retired homeowners, while burdening the remainder.

Instead of adopting PTIA’s one-track approach—focusing exclusively on property tax abolishment—proponents of education funding reform should develop a coherent and comprehensive approach that increases state education funding for underfunded urban and rural districts, provides limited property tax relief, and protects the ability of local communities to support their public schools. A good start for Pennsylvania would be to apply its new fair-funding formula to all education spending, not just new education spending, and to reduce the number of school districts from the currently absurd number of five hundred—for 67 counties—to a more manageable number. Larger districts provide a wider tax base to support public schools, freeing poorer communities from the burden of funding their schools alone. If, for example, Upper Darby School District and Marple Newtown School District became part of a Delaware County School District, the $9,000 funding disparity between them would be erased and students from both communities would benefit from the greater resources of the entire county.

Supporting public education is one of the oldest and most important responsibilities of state and local government. Our ability to meet that commitment for future generations of students is threatened by tight state budgets and the inadequacy of property taxes. PTIA’s property tax abolishment approach is not the answer. Comprehensive education-funding reform, including addressing systemic funding inequities, is critical to the continued vitality of public education. Our commitment to public education dates back to the 17th century; our education funding approaches should not.

100 Days in and the Reichstag Hasn’t Burned Yet

With President Trump’s 100 day mark approaching, those prophesying apocalyptic doom under have not come out looking so good.

There have been no mass arrests of peaceful protestors. Federal judges rule against presidential orders, the President sputters in indignation—and the rulings stand. Putin hasn’t been offered the code to the nuclear football. Late night comics excoriate the president and the Gestapo doesn’t knock at their door. The grifters and mountebanks who hopped on the campaign wagon back when nobody in the establishment was willing to help the Trump operation are either learning to play in the big leagues or being edged toward the exits. The stock market is strong; the economy hasn’t tanked. An avalanche of leaks hasn’t exposed the collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign that so many people were sure was going to lead to impeachment.

In other words, life in our constitutional republic is still rolling on much as usual—or at least, closer to usual than any of the hyperventilators predicted. Congress and the courts are functioning as they did before; the powers of the President are still limited by the rule of law.

That doesn’t mean that the Trump Presidency is off to a roaring start. It isn’t, and there have been some expensive misfires and mistakes. Critics of the Trump Administration have plenty of things to point to, and friends of the Administration still look nervous and jumpy.

But the Trump-Hitler folks made buffoons of themselves with paranoid fantasies and steamy, overheated scenarios of impending doom. Some will be big enough to admit their mistake, look hard at what they got wrong and why, and emerge as smarter and more creditworthy participants in the national conversation. Others, many others, will try to act as if nothing has happened, and will wonder why nobody listens the next time they cry “Wolf.”

Gazprom Gloats over Its European Dominance

Fresh off the news this week that Gazprom’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline secured 50 percent of its funding through loans from five European companies, the CEO of the Russian state-owned natural gas firm was positively glowing. “Today, in 2017, we are beating our 2016 record highs by around 10 percent. So we can expect new records this year and Gazprom’s European market share is poised to rise,” Alexei Miller said in an interview with Reuters. “A decrease in the North Sea gas production, as well as in other EU countries, is becoming a very important factor… Given that, Russia’s market share will be rising,” he added.

Miller has a point here. However much Europe has agitated for diversifying away from Russian natural gas supplies, the continent has in fact increased its reliance on Gazprom since the annexation of Crimea. That shift has come about because of economics more than geopolitics—Gazprom’s natural gas contracts are linked to the price of oil, and the collapse in crude prices has suddenly made Russian supplies very attractive to buyers.

As Reuters reports, Miller tried to spin the over-dependence angle as a mutual thing:

“I don’t think it is fair to talk about dependence,” said Miller. “Our dependence is mutual: when we invest in developing fields and building pipelines, Gazprom relies on future demand and de facto depends on the European market as much as Europe depends on Russian gas.”

This is true: just as Europe needs Russia as a supplier, so too does Russia rely on Europe as a buyer. But Gazprom holds the trump card in this relationship, as it has shown both the capability and the willingness to shut off supplies mid-winter in order to express its displeasure with its customers. Europe’s best recourse has been to build out liquified natural gas import infrastructure so that it too might snub this relationship by looking elsewhere for natural gas, but those LNG supplies remain relatively expensive and are as yet having a hard time supplanting Gazprom.

“Pipeline gas is winning against LNG and is set to continue doing so in the future,” Miller boasted. It’s hard to argue with this for now, but times they are a-changing. As we’ve noted elsewhere, the U.S. fracking boom is driving global gas prices down at a remarkable rate, making pricy pipeline bets less of a sure thing. We’ll see how this one look in a few years’ time.

The Trouble with NATO Burden Sharing

In the early days of his administration, President Trump has made it clear that NATO allies—and Germany in particular—should take on a greater share of the alliance’s costs. And by many measures, Germany’s defense commitments are trending in the right direction: Germany recently put boots on the ground to lead a NATO task force in Lithuania, Merkel has pledged to move toward the 2% of GDP spending target, and the defense budget is up 8% this year from last, bringing a welcome windfall to Germany’s arms manufacturers.

As the Financial Times suggests, however, those indicators are a fig leaf hiding the glaring truth: Germany has neither the intention nor the ability to dramatically increase its security commitments in line with American expectations. More:

This year’s planned military spending is 8 per cent up on 2016. But the draft 2018 budget envisages a further increase of only 4 per cent. With the economy growing, defence’s share of GDP could drop, leaving Berlin short of the 2 per cent goal. And a Forsa agency poll this year showed a majority of Germans still oppose boosting defence budgets. […]

Political sensitivities are compounded by practical problems. Hans-Peter Bartels, the parliamentary commissioner for the armed forces, says a pared-down defence ministry is ill-equipped for expansion. With labour scarce, Germany is unable to recruit its full complement of 170,000 soldiers, let alone the extra 12,000 to be hired by 2024, he adds.

Ursula von der Leyen, defence minister, is already struggling with widespread shortcomings in weapons programmes. A 2014 parliamentary inquiry found that only 41 out of 190 helicopters, 42 of 109 Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft and 280 of 406 Marder armoured cars were operational.

A government economic adviser says bluntly: “Gabriel is right. There is no way to absorb a big defence budget increase.”

The FT gets at a crucial point: harping on an arbitrary and politically untenable 2% spending target will hardly fix the institutional dysfunction of Germany’s military complex. Certainly Berlin should be encouraged to spend more on defense; its failures to do so have been on embarrassing display in recent years. But the problems for both Germany and NATO go much deeper than a failure to spend adequately.

And as several scholars have noted, NATO-set guidelines are a poor rubric for determining actual contributions to the alliance. John Deni provides a classic example: Denmark has consistently lowballed the official targets, and only spent 1.14% of its GDP on defense last year. But the Danes have pulled above their weight elsewhere: sending over 750 troops to Afghanistan at the peak of the surge, for example, and providing seven aircrafts to the 2011 Libya mission. By contrast, Greece—a country twice as populous as Denmark, and one of the five NATO allies to meet the 2% goal—provided 160 troops in Afghanistan, and only five aircrafts in Libya. Under current guidelines, however, Greece is seen as a more responsible ally, even though nearly 70% of Greek defense spending goes to personnel costs like pensions: proof of bureaucratic bloat more than a meaningful commitment to NATO’s security.

None of this is to excuse the Germans, or anyone else, for their underspending. But the reductive debate about sheer defense outlays misses the nuances of individual cases, while encouraging allies to dissemble about their intent to reach an impossible target. A better way to address burden sharing might take risks and efficiency into account: acknowledging the outsized contributions of countries like Denmark in high-risk missions, while pushing to reform bureaucratic regulations (like Germany’s absurd military overtime rules) that impede NATO’s operational abilities.

Such an approach—more balanced, more realistic, and more strategic than merely demanding that allies cough up 2%—might truly help make NATO great again.

Another Big Step Toward the Turkey-EU Divorce

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) adopted a resolution on Tuesday that reintroduces a monitoring process for Turkey’s human rights progress for the first time since 2004. The resolution, which focuses on the purges and emergency legislation following the July 2016 coup attempt, calls on Turkey to:

38.1. lift the state of emergency as soon as possible;

38.2. in the meantime, halt the publication of emergency decree laws which bypass parliamentary procedures, unless strictly needed under the state of emergency law, and put an end to the collective dismissal of civil servants through emergency decree laws;

38.3. release all the detained parliamentarians and co-mayors pending trial;

38.4. release all the imprisoned journalists pending trial;

38.5. establish and launch the work of the Inquiry Commission on State of Emergency Measures to ensure an effective national judicial remedy for those dismissed through emergency decree laws;

38.6. ensure fair trials with respect for due procedural guarantees; [….]

Although PACE is not a body of the EU, the resolution makes Turkey’s failure to meet the Copenhagen criteria for EU accession quite clear. In what has now become a cliché of Turkish political discourse, an adviser to Erdogan has responded to the resolution by turning it back on against Europe saying: “This is a political operation. It is the EU countries that need monitoring.”

However formulaic the back and forth between Europe and Turkey may be, the resolution comes at a critical juncture for Turkey’s relationship with the West more generally. While President Trump called Erdogan to congratulate him on his referendum win, for Europe the referendum looks like it may be an end to the EU accession charade. The EU’s Ankara negotiator has called for an end to the long-standing talks, as have a host of European politicians. Erdogan, for his part, is still maintaining play-acting for now. In an interview with Reuters on Tuesday he claimed “There is not a single thing that we are not ready to do, the minute [the EU asks] for it. Whatever they wish, we do.”

While the Turkish rejection of the PACE resolution makes that claim plainly untrue, Turkey arguably has greater leverage over the EU than the EU has over Turkey. For the Turks, an end to accession would be an end to talks that they’ve known have been doomed for the better part of a decade and that had been at a nadir even before the referendum. For Europe, a breakdown with Turkey could mean the end of the EU-Turkey migrant deal and potentially a full-scale resumption of the refugee crisis. Turkey has already named visa-free travel as their price for maintaining the deal, but it seems likely that this is only the first round of the divorce proceedings between Turkey and Europe.

Another Big Step Towards the Turkey-EU Divorce

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) adopted a resolution on Tuesday that reintroduces a monitoring process for Turkey’s human rights progress for the first time since 2004. The resolution, which focuses on the purges and emergency legislation following the July 2016 coup attempt, calls on Turkey to:

38.1. lift the state of emergency as soon as possible;

38.2. in the meantime, halt the publication of emergency decree laws which bypass parliamentary procedures, unless strictly needed under the state of emergency law, and put an end to the collective dismissal of civil servants through emergency decree laws;

38.3. release all the detained parliamentarians and co-mayors pending trial;

38.4. release all the imprisoned journalists pending trial;

38.5. establish and launch the work of the Inquiry Commission on State of Emergency Measures to ensure an effective national judicial remedy for those dismissed through emergency decree laws;

38.6. ensure fair trials with respect for due procedural guarantees; [….]

Although PACE is not a body of the EU, the resolution makes Turkey’s failure to meet the Copenhagen criteria for EU accession quite clear. In what has now become a cliché of Turkish political discourse, an adviser to Erdogan has responded to the resolution by turning it back on against Europe saying: “This is a political operation. It is the EU countries that need monitoring.”

However formulaic the back and forth between Europe and Turkey may be, the resolution comes at a critical juncture for Turkey’s relationship with the West more generally. While President Trump called Erdogan to congratulate him on his referendum win, for Europe the referendum looks like it may be an end to the EU accession charade. The EU’s Ankara negotiator has called for an end to the long-standing talks, as have a host of European politicians. Erdogan, for his part, is still maintaining play-acting for now. In an interview with Reuters on Tuesday he claimed “There is not a single thing that we are not ready to do, the minute [the EU asks] for it. Whatever they wish, we do.”

While the Turkish rejection of the PACE resolution makes that claim plainly untrue, Turkey arguably has greater leverage over the EU than the EU has over Turkey. For the Turks, an end to accession would be an end to talks that they’ve known have been doomed for the better part of a decade and that had been at a nadir even before the referendum. For Europe, a breakdown with Turkey could mean the end of the EU-Turkey migrant deal and potentially a full-scale resumption of the refugee crisis. Turkey has already named visa-free travel as their price for maintaining the deal, but it seems likely that this is only the first round of the divorce proceedings between Turkey and Europe.

Russia’s Oil Cuts Are About to Get Harder

No petrostate is excited about voluntarily constraining their production, but those limits can often be useful if they help push oil prices up. OPEC and a collection of eleven other oil producing nations agreed last November to collectively reduce their output through the first six months of this year, and Russia played a big role by agreeing to join those cuts. However, as the end of that first cut looms large and its participants begin to discuss extending that strategy through the end of the year, Moscow’s ability—or maybe more accurately its willingness—to play ball is going to be tested. That’s because, as Bloomberg reports, the seasonal vagaries of Russian oil production make it easier to cut supplies in the first half of the year than in the second:

Cuts so far this year came alongside the traditional seasonal stagnation in Russian production, meaning the country made relatively few sacrifices in exchange for an increase in crude prices of more than 10 percent. For the powerful Russian oil bosses who plan to discuss the OPEC accord with Energy Minister Alexander Novak this week, a decision by the government to extend the cuts beyond June would stymie plans to boost output, creating many more headaches than the initial agreement.

In other words, Russian output is going to surge in the second half of this year, which means any supply limitations it agrees to will bite harder.

The Saudis remain the lynchpin of this agreement, but Riyadh knows how important Moscow is to the plan, whose intent is to reduce the global glut of crude. Saudi energy minister Khalid Al-Falih told Bloomberg that petrostates are working towards a consensus, but acknowledged that “we still need to talk to all countries…a very important country to talk to, of course, is Russia, the biggest non-OPEC exporter.”

The stakes are high for these producers—if they don’t agree to continue their production cuts, analysts believe the price of oil could drop back down to $40 or below. No oil producer wants that, but it may be asking too much of Russia to put a cap on its seasonally surging production to join in on round two of these cuts.

The THAAD Controversy Won’t Die

With two weeks to go until South Korea’s presidential elections, the United States is moving swiftly to install the THAAD missile defense system, but the system’s opponents are still putting up a fight. Reuters reports on the controversy as the U.S. military moves key components of THAAD into place:

The liberal politician expected to win South Korea’s election, Moon Jae-in, has called for a delay in the deployment, saying the new administration should make a decision after gathering public opinion and more talks with Washington.

A spokesman for Moon said moving the parts to the site “ignored public opinion and due process” and demanded it be suspended.

Television footage showed military trailers carrying equipment, including what appeared to be launch canisters, to the battery site.

Protesters shouted and hurled water bottles at the vehicles over lines of police holding them back.

The Pentagon said the system was critical to defend South Korea and its allies against North Korean missiles and deployment would be completed “as soon as feasible”.

The picture here is not a pretty one, creating the impression that the Pentagon is rushing THAAD into place over the objections of the populace. But as we’ve suggested before, that is only a partial picture. There has always been a domestic constituency within South Korea that resents the U.S. military role there and is inclined toward dovish engagement with the North. And many of the protesters here are local residents upset that the THAAD equipment is coming to their neighborhood, suggesting that this is in part a simple case of NIMBYism.

It is true that Moon Jae-in, who favors engagement with Pyongyang, has been growing his lead in the polls and becoming more outspoken against THAAD. But even he is walking a fine line, objecting to the timeline of its deployment and calling for more consultation with Washington, not demanding it be scrapped outright. Moon likely realizes that his hands will be tied on the issue, hence his hesitation to call for a full reversal. As a former presidential adviser tells NK News, “South Korean candidates are aware that the deployment is irreversible, and so is Beijing.”

That said, the U.S. could certainly stand to improve its optics on coordination as it braces for a new government in Seoul. Even Ahn Cheol-soo, a more U.S.-friendly candidate, has objected to the late-night THAAD deployment; meanwhile, South Korean media have raised concerns that Trump is “freezing out Seoul” by talking with Japan and China’s leaders on Monday, but not South Korea’s acting president. The U.S. may well succeed in creating facts on the ground before South Korea heads to the polls, but Trump will need to build trust and goodwill with the next government if he hopes to resolve the escalating crisis.