Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 209

China Tightens the Screws—on South Korea

Despite symbolic shows of solidarity, China has largely been dragging its feet and making excuses for not turning up the heat on North Korea over its nuclear tests. But the Chinese have shown no such reluctance in pressuring South Korea over its deployment of the THAAD missile defense system. According to the Wall Street Journal, they have apparently led a cyber campaign in retaliation:

In recent weeks, two cyberespionage groups that the firm linked to Beijing’s military and intelligence agencies have launched a variety of attacks against South Korea’s government, military, defense companies and a big conglomerate, John Hultquist, director of cyberespionage analysis at FireEye Inc., said in an interview. […]

While FireEye and other cybersecurity experts say Chinese hackers have long targeted South Korea, they note a rise in the number and intensity of attacks in the weeks since South Korea said it would deploy Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense, or Thaad, a sophisticated missile-defense system aimed at defending South Korea from a North Korean missile threat. […]

One of the two hacker groups, which FireEye dubbed Tonto Team, is tied to China’s military and based out of the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang, where North Korean hackers are also known to be active, said Mr. Hultquist, a former senior U.S. intelligence analyst. FireEye believes the other, known as APT10, may be linked to other Chinese military or intelligence units.

It is no secret that the Chinese are displeased with THAAD and have sought to retaliate economically, with heavy-handed measures targeting the Lotte retail conglomerate and South Korea’s tourism and entertainment industries. But the WSJ‘s reporting adds another layer to the story, backing up earlier claims that Beijing was using cyber coercion behind the scenes to punish and pressure Seoul.

The irony is that China has long resisted calls to squeeze Pyongyang, economically or otherwise—but it has shown no such compunction about Seoul. This hardly bodes well for the Trump Administration’s hopes to enlist Chinese support in tightening the screws on North Korea.

That said, there have been some signs that the Chinese could change their tune. China’s boycotts and cyber attacks have arguably backfired, failing to prevent Seoul from deploying THAAD while turning South Korean public opinion against China. And the two countries have lately been discussing new joint measures they could take against North Korea; perhaps Beijing will come to realize that engagement with South Korea would be more productive than outright intimidation.

Still, the juxtaposition between China’s fervor in pressuring South Korea and its reluctance in pressuring North Korea shows where Beijing’s priorities really lie. It will be no easy task for Trump to make the Chinese a more productive partner in resolving the Korean crisis.

Why Pick on Middlebury?

More than 4,725 colleges and universities, public and private, exist in the United States. They enroll more than 20 million students. Each year, more than 1,870,000 students graduate from them, earning degrees in subjects ranging from business (363,799 graduates and by far, at almost 20 percent, the most popular) to library science (99 graduates). Other popular disciplines include the health professions and related programs (199,000 graduates), social sciences and history (173,000), psychology (117,000), biological and biomedical sciences (105,000), and education (99,000). Areas of undergraduate specialization have proliferated: homeland security, law enforcement, and firefighting (62,723 graduates), and transportation and materials moving (4,711). Many schools, many students, and many ways to graduate.

Higher education in the United States is an enormous industry, older than the nation itself and one of its dominant creations. With each passing year, millions of Americans and others benefit from its powerful resources to enhance their careers. But that power comes with controversy. Admiration of the schools is mixed with suspicion about what they do. They attract critics of every kind, and from every political position. Since so many people in this country have been college students, and since very few have forgotten the experience, opinions about them abound. For many graduates, it is easy to admire one’s alma mater; an even easier step is to love alma mater while finding fault with all the other schools. Perhaps “my” school has done well, but that does not mean that the others have. One last step to take is to take aim at the entire culture of higher education, both “my” school and yours.

Thus the story of Middlebury College in Vermont and Charles Murray. The college’s enrollment of some 2,450 students represents 0.012 percent of the national enrollment. Those students, none of whom will study either homeland security or transportation and materials moving, gained admission to the school in a process so competitive (16 percent of applicants admitted) that it renders them highly unrepresentative of American college students in general. Middlebury professors, all 270 of them, are similarly unrepresentative of American college teachers, of whom there are 1.5 million. They teach small classes, most of them enjoy the privileges of tenure, and they are better paid than most of their national colleagues. Middlebury is small, prestigious, and remote.

But when the controversial and itinerant political scientist Charles Murray was invited by some Middlebury students to speak at the college in February, he was angrily denounced by other students and was prevented by denunciations and threats from giving his talk. Protected by public safety officers, he was ushered away from the lectern; the professor whom he was scheduled to debate suffered an injury in the melee.

In the weeks thereafter, Middlebury (founded 1800) became, for the first and only time in its history, the face of American higher education.

Almost no one defended what had gone on with Murray. Given what he had written or said in the past, some critics on the Left said that he never should have been invited. Others, on the Right, said that he should have been allowed to give his talk but had not been provided sufficient protection to do so. Many proclaimed his “First Amendment” rights to talk; others said he enjoyed no such rights, given that he is, in their view, a racist and white supremacist. The event prompted comments of every kind and from every quarter, on and off the campus.

But the angriest and most sustained of the commentary erupted from those who proclaimed that the Murray/Middlebury debacle was a revelation. It showed just how badly disoriented higher education had become in this country. In the Wall Street Journal, Professor Jonathan Haidt of NYU’s Stern School of Business is quoted as observing the rise of “a new religion” on campus made up of “very intimidating” fundamentalists who have cowed administrators “who won’t stand up to them.” Peter Wood of The Federalist, seeing the same Orwellian specter, denounced Middlebury’s president, Laurie Patton, saying that “those who were planning to disrupt Murray had just been handed a permission slip, a smiling indulgence from the college administration.” Like Haidt, Wood saw the events at Middlebury as a dramatic exposure of the rot within the nation’s colleges and universities: “Middlebury is in trouble. It is not alone. Many colleges and universities are in similar trouble. They have lost the key to open intellectual debate.”

The denunciations were soon cascading wildly in different directions. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times rendered his judgment, writing that “the lack of ideological diversity on campuses is a disservice to the students and to liberalism itself, with liberalism collapsing on some campuses into self-parody.” Jonathan V. Last of The Weekly Standard angrily declared that Murray was not only worth heeding, and the student protesters wrong, but “Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you can sit and listen to Murray for an hour and not learn something, then you’re an idiot.” According to Robert Schlesinger of US News & World Report, what went on at Middlebury was “depressingly familiar: A highly controversial speaker was invited to campus, prompting objection from students and faculty, and things went sideways from there.”

Sideways? Yes. Familiar? No. After appearing at Middlebury, Murray went on to speak, and to be heard with only minimal commotion, at Duke, Columbia, New York University, Notre Dame, Villanova, and Indiana University. The Middlebury debacle was not repeated. At Duke, Murray’s talk proceeded peacefully before an audience of 50. At Columbia, 150 faculty members expressed their support of Murray’s right to speak; 60 people attended the talk. The lecture at NYU prompted protest, but those in the audience, all 50 of them, heard it. At Villanova three protestors were removed after some four minutes of sustained objection before Murray spoke to about 100 people. Murray spoke peacefully to a small crowd at Indiana while, outside the room, there was some protest. But since these events had nothing spectacular on show, the commentators had no “revelations” to announce.

When mulling over Middlebury and these other institutions, it is helpful to keep in mind the remaining 4,600 American colleges and universities, public and private. What to make of their calmness? When characterizing American higher education, why turn to Middlebury and Charles Murray? Why is it easy to imagine that what happened in Vermont summed up the state of American higher education? What, if anything, did Middlebury “reveal”?

Edmund Burke, writing about genuinely revolutionary events in 1789, said, “Because half-a-dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.” On most campuses, most of the time, most students are doing what students mostly do: study, talk to friends, waste time, worry, think about the future, party, and behave as young people always behave. They rarely involve themselves in calamitous events. Nor, indeed, do most Middlebury students. Only a small number of them joined the anti-Murray crowd. But a small percentage of a small percentage ballooned into “the American college student.”

This distortion of campus reality has been in the making for some time. An abiding theme for some impassioned critics, indulging their suspicion of higher education, is that the students have become the intellectual captives of the faculty, and that “the professors, not students” have created a “liberal bubble on campus.” A left-wing professoriate has helped to “shake the students’ minds and set the tone for the intellectual climate.” Or so says Samuel J. Abrams, a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His views are shared by many. After the professors have had their baneful way, they argue, students have become their captives. But this notion, assuming faculty coercion and student passivity, neglects the reality that entering students do not appear to be innocent, conservative sheep vulnerable to faculty pressures. Yes, there is substantial evidence, gathered by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, that the American professoriate is “left-of-center” and that incoming freshmen are somewhat closer to that center. But with each new year, those students have become more liberal than those in the past. The Institute observes:

Roughly one-third of the students (33.5%) who entered a four-year institution in the fall of 2015 identify as “liberal” or “far left,” 1.8 percentage points higher than in 2014 and 3.9 points higher than in 2012. This figure represents the highest proportion of left-leaning students since 36.4% of students identified as liberal or far left in 1973.

Students are less docile, and more left-wing, than Abrams assumes. They seem, before even meeting professors, to be catching up politically with them.

A more debilitating problem with Abrams’ argument and others like it is the failure to establish any empirical connection between a professor’s political attitudes and that professor’s pedagogy. Nothing beyond the anecdotal demonstrates that the American classroom or lecture hall has become a center of indoctrination. Use your imagination to understand what might well happen in a classroom taught by a leftist ideologue: Would every student simply surrender to the presiding dogma? Might that dogma, on occasion, be so badly promulgated as to create opposition to it? Or might it prove so boring as to be ignored? On what grounds do commentators outside the classroom understand the peculiar dynamics within it—an arena bringing together older people and younger, some politically committed and some politically indifferent, an arena including the ever-present inclination of the young toward iconoclasm, as well as the ever-present likelihood of the adult misjudging the mind of the post-adolescent.

Or consider those thousands of classes in which ideology of any kind simply is not present. How could “Introduction to Chemistry” (keep in mind those many students majoring in the health professions and related programs or biological and biomedical sciences) be constructed to achieve an ideological end? Or how, if you believe that the American professoriate has been busy creating an “ideological bubble,” to explain the fact that one-fifth of college students major in business? If this is coercion, its successes are hard to detect. One ideological consequence of attending college is, on the other hand, easy to track: how graduates vote. When and if they vote (the current generation is less likely to vote today than older generations) they mirror the voting behavior of the general public.1 Exit polls conducted after the 2016 presidential election show that 49 percent of them voted for Hillary Clinton while 45 percent voted for Donald Trump (the nation in general went 48.2 percent for Clinton and 46.1percent for Trump).

The truth about American college students is not that they are “turned Left” by their professors but that they seem upon graduation ready to join up with mainstream America. Before one charges that the American campus has become a “liberal bubble,” one must instead confront its prevailing atmosphere. It is not one of ideological frenzy or of straitjacket-like political correctness. One of its chief features is career ambition fueled by anxiety about student loan debt. Ideology does not exert anything equivalent to the force of worry about the prospect of a job.

But such sober realities do not figure large in the minds of those convinced that the “Left,” in the form of liberal faculty members, has taken over the campus. For them, little Middlebury speaks for the nation. Such commentators are given some support by evidence that the “leafier”— the more exclusive and prestigious the campus—the greater the likelihood of a Murray-like event. Such disruptions are more likely to take place at, say, Amherst than at the University of Nebraska. The Economist, with data gathered by the Brookings Institution and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, notes that such highly selective institutions, populated by richer students, are more likely to see protests. But such protests are not inevitable and some schools happily thrive without them. In any case, the “leafier” places can’t stand for American higher education in general. We thus return to consider those thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of that British oak.

If a link between professorial coercion and student vulnerability cannot be established, at least one melodramatic commentator has discovered that this is because everyone has been looking in the wrong direction. The campus situation is direr than anyone has suspected: The students are coercing the faculty! In the American Scholar, William Deresiewicz writes that “relations of power have been reconfigured” on the campus and that “students have a lot more power than they used to.” By being the source of tuition payments, they have created a “customer-service mentality in academia.” The result is what he sees as the “proletarianization of the faculty”: “[I]n the inevitable power struggle between students and teachers, the students have gained the upper hand.” The consequences are an avalanche of trigger-warnings, the policing of “micro-aggressions,” and a politically correct atmosphere, rigidly controlled by the students, that makes Deresiewicz think first of the terror tactics of the National Rifle Association and then of…Stalinism!

On what evidence is his sensational account based? It comes from his teaching twelve students in one course during one year at Scripps College. Scripps has 989 students (0.005 percent of all college students). Deresiewicz sees no reason to think that his experience was anomalous or the school anomalous. He believes instead that the situation “is broadly similar across the board.” In his almost comically skewed account, we are asked to see little Scripps as a microcosm of the larger world of American higher education. What could cause such hysterical myopia?

For one answer, we can return to the suspicion of the entire enterprise of higher education in this country. This suspicion is not an affliction confined to the uneducated or the envious. The commentators I have mentioned, and others like them, have gone to good schools. Yet they have little complimentary to say about any campus, their own included. One could argue that they suffer from what many alumni of many schools suffer: the belief that “things were better when I went there.” Such nostalgia, wedding genuine affection for campus life with permanent removal from it, is hard to remedy. Or, for another answer, one could observe that higher education has become so various, complex, far-flung, and deeply interwoven with everything else constituting the bewildering picture of American life that it is easy, using scattered and anecdotal evidence, to castigate an entity so large that it cannot be seen whole. Or, at last, one could consider the possibility that a malady now afflicting large segments of American life—the aversion to evidence and the flowering of apocalyptic scenarios—has entered the thinking of commentators not just on the Right but also on the Left.

Despite such myopia, the spectacle of American higher education in this country—millions of students, hundreds of thousands of teachers, campuses everywhere, and graduates pouring into the economy each year—continues to make its resounding impact upon the nation. It remains a stunning creation. And little Middlebury in Vermont, founded in 1800, having braved its storm, survives.

1Millennials (those between 18 and 35) have the lowest voter turnout of any age group. 46 percent voted in the most recent presidential election, compared to 72 percent of the Silent Generation.

Mattis Wants a Political Solution in Yemen

Speaking in Saudi Arabia, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis called for a political solution in Yemen—but he also left the door open to backing a controversial Arab bombing campaign against Houthi rebels. The New York Times:

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis called on Wednesday for a political solution in Yemen between Sunni Arabs, supported by a Saudi-led coalition, and Iranian-backed Houthis, but he stopped short of publicly warning America’s Sunni allies against a planned bombing campaign targeting the port city of Al Hudaydah. […]

American officials hinted at additional military and intelligence support for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in Yemen. They said a stepped-up military campaign against the Houthi fighters who have taken over the capital and portions of the country may be necessary to bring the group and its ally, former President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen, to the negotiating table. […]

American officials acknowledged concern about the effects of a sustained bombing campaign, but they also said both sides would be more likely to compromise after one more military fight.

The headlines are touting Mattis’s support for UN-backed negotiations, but by the sound of it, he still thinks an intensified military campaign might be the way to get there. As we explained this past month, there are good reasons why Mattis would be tempted by that prospect: Helping the Saudis and Emiratis retake Hudaydah could dislodge an Iranian proxy and re-establish credibility with our Sunni Arab allies in one fell swoop. And from a tactical perspective, that objective could theoretically be achieved with minimal U.S. commitment.

Indeed, Buzzfeed confirmed this week that the Defense Department is making this argument behind the scenes, arguing that the Saudi-Emirati campaign to retake Hudaydah could be a “clean,” 4-6 week operation that would put teeth into Trump’s pledge to roll back Iranian influence.  That optimistic assessment is being questioned by the State Department and USAID, who are concerned about exacerbating the famine in Yemen. But such dissent may fall on deaf ears given the leeway granted to the Pentagon in the early days of the Trump Administration: Trump has spoken of giving the military “total authorization,” and it is Mattis who has apparently taken the lead both in crafting a Middle East strategy and conducting diplomatic outreach to the Sunni Arab allies estranged during the Obama years.

So far, Mattis has done a capable job, but there are risks to the short-term military thinking that could dominate the decision-making in Yemen. Unconditionally backing the Saudis could lead them to push a limited campaign too far and try to win the war outright, with the humanitarian situation deteriorating in the meantime. And any diplomatic solution will need buy-in and coordination from an understaffed State Department and other agencies that are reportedly resisting the Pentagon’s arguments.

Still, Mattis’s latest comments suggest that he has his eyes on a political endgame, and thinks the United States can play a mediating role in forcing the Saudis and Houthis to make compromises they otherwise would not on their own. If Mattis can pull this off—delivering a credible show of force to Iran while re-establishing U.S. credibility as an indispensable Middle East mediator—his stock within the Administration is likely to rise even higher.

The High-End Tax Break That Needs to Go

The Trump Administration has reportedly gone back to the drawing board to decide how to approach tax reform, scrapping the candidate’s supercharged supply-side campaign platform and mulling a variety of more unorthodox ideas. Among them, according to Axios‘s Jonathan Swan, is capping or eliminating the state and local tax deduction, which disproportionately benefits people earning over $200,000—especially those in high-tax blue state metropolitan areas like New York City, and Chicago and San Francisco.

This is a savvy move by Trump’s economic advisers. Capping the SALT deduction offers a path to raising revenue without raising rates and thus distorting incentives further. As Reihan Salam has suggested, the new revenue could be used to pay for a sizable tax cut for working and middle-class families. This would amount to a transfer of resources from a loyal and well-heeled Democratic constituency—blue state professionals—to Trump’s (what are elections about if not delivering benefits to your voters?) even as it puts Democrats in an awkward position if they decide to go to the wall to protect what amounts to a regressive tax subsidy for high-earners.

But putting aside the national politics and budgetary considerations, reducing the federal write-off for state and local taxes could help improve state governance as well. One reason states like California and New York are in such dire fiscal shape, and so beset by special interests obstructing reform, is that their talented high-earners don’t have much of a stake in improving their quality of governance. Albany and Sacramento can degenerate into kludgeocracies that demand bigger and bigger revenue streams to pump into failing schools or top off public sector worker pensions and the business elite in Hollywood or on Wall Street don’t need to worry—thanks to SALT, they won’t see as much as 40 percent of tax hikes handed down from statehouses and city halls. Capping this deduction would give a new urgency the blue state government reform project among people with the power to actually make a difference.

In other words, putting SALT on the chopping block is a win win win, as far as the GOP is concerned—it raises revenue in a way that is relatively inoffensive to Republican voters, it helps pay for the tax cuts Trump has promised, and it will lean on blue states and cities to reform in a way that improves the quality of governance overall. It would be negligent of the White House—as a matter of politics and policy—to put forward a tax reform package that keeps SALT intact.

Antarctic Meltwater Isn’t the Crisis We Thought It Was

Liquid water formations on top of Antarctica’s ice sheets aren’t the harbinger of climate doom scientists believed it to be, according to new research from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University.

Meltwater collects on top of Antarctic ice during the summer, and the weight of that liquid water can fracture the underlying ice, cleaving off sections of the sheet. These sections then tumble into the ocean, contributing to sea level increases in the process. But according to geophysicist Robin Bell, this meltwater doesn’t always pool up in these ice-top lakes—after studying years of satellite imagery, it was determined that much of the meltwater forms a vast system of streams and rivers culminating in waterfalls that cascade into the surrounding ocean, alleviating the pressure on the underlying ice sheet. The WSJ reports:

Since the river Dr. Bell’s paper describes diverts meltwater off the ice shelf instead of letting it collect in ponds, it potentially could mitigate the fracturing effects of meltwater, says Alison Banwell, a glaciologist at the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge who wasn’t involved in the research. The ice shelves will “still become more unstable as the climate warms,” Dr. Banwell says, but they might not break up as rapidly as otherwise thought. It is unknown whether rivers and waterfalls form on other ice shelves, she says. […]

The movement “changes the way we think about the impact of meltwater,” Dr. Bell says. “Meltwater is still a bad thing,” she says, but it’s “not always going to be a death to ice shelves.”

Good climate change news is hard to find, but this is a clear-cut example of it, and it’s worth highlighting because it reminds us of the extraordinary intricacy of the planet’s climate. In the face of this nearly incomprehensible complexity, we ought to be humble about our current scientific understanding, and acknowledgement that climate research is—like any scientific endeavor—still very much a work in progress.

Climate models will need to incorporate this new twist in Antarctic meltwater, and their predictions should become less dire than they currently are. But this isn’t the first wrinkle in climate science, and we can say with absolute certainty that it won’t be the last. Climate change is a real phenomenon, and its link to human activities is at this point well understood, but the details of the system and the ways in which its countless variables interact with one another are much less clear to us.

There’s an urgent need to push the boundary of climate science beyond where it is today; this is a subject that demands much more scrutiny than it’s currently getting, and more funding as well. But greens that haughtily declare this branch of science to be somehow “settled” at once betray their ignorance of the way the scientific method works and undermine their own cause—how foolish over-confident environmentalists look time and again when stories like this one crop up! The truth is, this is far from settled, and we can acknowledge the basic consensus of anthropogenic climate change while still pushing for further study of the issue.

In the meantime, take those predictions of climate models with a healthy grain of salt.

Why Beijing Pussyfoots Around Pyongyang

In all his statements and tweets on North Korea, President Trump has repeatedly returned to one theme: China should be doing more to squeeze Pyongyang economically in response to its nuclear program, lest the United States take matters into its own hands. Financial Times offers a look at why North Korea is not yielding to economic pressure—and why the Chinese are disinclined to push further:

“We don’t like the North Korean regime or Kim Jong Un,” says a senior Chinese academic and foreign policy adviser with close ties to decision makers in Beijing. “But if [Pyongyang and Washington] continue to confront each other even emotionally, it gets in the way of solving the problem. China has suffered the most from the sanctions. We are making the biggest sacrifice. But the North Koreans’ primary concern is security, which can only be offered by the US.” […]

“North Korea is a special country and will not collapse easily,” warns the senior Chinese academic and foreign policy adviser. “They have very strong willpower and cohesion. People should think twice before taking a [military] leap. North Korea is not Syria, Iraq or Libya. There would be chaos in north-east Asia as a whole. If that happens, [Mr Trump’s] dream of making America great again will be only a dream.”

This is a succinct summary of the typical Chinese line on North Korea, highlighting the main analytical difference between China and the United States. China assumes the long-term stability of the regime and also believes that any regime change would be ugly, messy, and dangerous—if it happens at all. The Chinese think of Kim, in some ways, as a much more determined and effective Assad.

The United States, on the other hand, often sees the regime as unstable because it is founded on such anti-liberal principles. On both the Right and the Left, Americans tend to believe that non-democratic regimes cannot last, despite thousands of years of history suggesting otherwise.

Trump may be coming around to an understanding of the Chinese view: “After listening for 10 minutes, I realized it’s not so easy, ” he famously said about his discussions with Xi over North Korea. Whether he can alter Beijing’s deep-rooted assumptions, let alone change Pyongyang’s calculus, remains to be seen.

Russia Conducts Joint Drills with the Philippines

For the second time this year, Russia has made a port call in the Philippines, this time leading joint naval exercises. :

Russian navy vessels arrived in the Philippines on Thursday for joint exercises as part of a drive for new security ties under President Rodrigo Duterte’s revamped foreign policy of courting the traditional foes of Manila’s top ally, Washington.

The guided-missile cruiser Varyag, accompanied by the fuel tanker ship, Pechenge, are on a four-day goodwill visit to the Philippines, the second port call by Russian warships in three months. […]

Russian commander Captain Alexsei Ulyanenko said the port call would make a “significant contribution” to strengthening relations and maintaining stability in the region.

Moscow wants to help Manila combat extremism and piracy, stepping up cooperation and training in areas where the Philippines has traditionally worked closely with its former colonial master the United States.

Moscow and Manila have been making friendly noises toward each other for some time now; when the two countries made their first navy-to-navy contacts in January, the Russian Ambassador to the Philippines celebrated the occasion by trolling the Obama Administration for its criticism of Duterte’s human rights record and the withholding of arms sales to his government. Then as now, Moscow’s message to Manila has been loud and clear: Unlike Washington, we will help you crack down on extremism and sell you weapons without handwringing over human rights.

President Trump, by contrast with Obama, has not made humanitarian concerns a priority, and Duterte has openly praised Trump as a “realist and a pragmatic thinker.” That said, the Administration has not devoted much attention to repairing ties with Manila either, and Moscow still sees an opening to exploit Duterte’s invitation for “re-alignment” at the expense of the United States.

So far, Russia has offered arms sales, intelligence sharing, and defense cooperation to the Philippines; expect even more overtures when Duterte and Putin meet for a summit in Moscow next month.

The Makings of a Trump Administration Iran Policy

One day after the State Department confirmed to Congress that Iran is abiding by the terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the Iran nuclear deal), Secretary of State Rex Tillerson made forceful remarks about Iran’s wider regional meddling. The BBC:

The US secretary of state has accused Iran of “alarming ongoing provocations” aimed at destabilising the Middle East and undermining America’s interests.

“An unchecked Iran has the potential to travel the same path as North Korea and to take the world along with it,” Rex Tillerson said.

The US has ordered a review of the Iran nuclear deal, although it admits Iran is complying with its commitments.

Tillerson’s statement went on to describe some of those provocations, including support for terrorism, interference in Iraq, backing the Assad regime in Syria, support for the Houthis in Yemen, harassment of U.S. navy ships in the Persian Gulf, and cyber-attacks against U.S. interests and allies.

The “comprehensive review of…Iran policy” that Tillerson is describing points towards a U.S. strategy that recognizes the non-nuclear issues at stake. The nuclear deal granted Iran a number of short term strategic advantages in exchange for compliance on the nuclear issue, and the Obama administration was willing to accept the separation of the nuclear issue from Iran’s other activities in order to get the deal signed and subsequently was unwilling to confront Iran in its pursuit of regional hegemony for fear of undermining the deal. From what we’ve seen of how this Administration is approaching the world, the “comprehensive review” likely will take steps to change that calculus.

And more than likely, the Trump Administration’s response to Iranian meddling will lean towards kinetic action, as opposed to hoping to somehow re-impose sanctions while the world is busy opening its doors to Iran’s beleaguered economy. We’ve already seen Trump launch the first U.S. strikes against the Russo-Iranian proxy the Assad regime. While he’s since distanced himself from the suggestion, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster reportedly favors a much larger U.S. troop presence in Syria. Secretary Mattis met with the Saudis this week ahead of a planned Saudi/UAE assault on the Houthi-controlled Red Sea port of Hodeidah. While Mattis publicly stated that the U.S. seeks a diplomatic solution in Yemen, privately he has advocated for greater U.S. support to the Saudi-led coalition and has long-warned of the threat that Iran’s non-nuclear activities pose to U.S. interests. Mattis’ agenda in Israel, where he’ll land Friday morning, is reported to be “Iran, Iran, Iran.”

This will all come as welcome news for American allies across the region who finally have an administration that sees the Iranian threat the way they do—and is willing to do something about it.

Russia Works Around Western Energy Sanctions

Back in 2014, a raft of Western sanctions stifled Russia’s Arctic oil ambitions, but three years later Moscow is looking to kickstart its own homegrown oil renaissance to try and match America’s shale boom.

At the time, those sanctions were carefully calculated to hamstring Russia’s future energy production without immediately decimating its economy—allowing the West to express its displeasure over the annexation of Crimea without throwing a wrench in the global economy. And, for a time, the sanctions appeared to achieve their stated effect. Russia was slow to acknowledge its own shale reserves in the Bazhenov formation, located in middle of Siberia, and of the relatively few projects it did have running to take advantage of its Arctic reserves, many relied on Western companies.

(Some Western companies like Exxon Mobil were hit particularly hard. The shelving of a joint venture in the Black Sea with Rosneft, which included projects in the Russian Arctic as well, reportedly cost Exxon $1 billion. This week, the energy giant appealed to the Treasury Department for a sanctions waiver—a terrible optic, given that its former CEO Rex Tillerson is in the Administration.)

But though industry consensus once seemed to be that Russia would end up spinning its wheels in these unconventional projects without the necessary technology and expertise from the West, that assessment is starting to shift. The FT reports:

[Energy] companies have found ways round the restrictions. Indeed, 2,000km south-west of Tsentralno-Olginskaya-1 in western Siberia, Gazprom Neft, Russia’s third-largest oil producer, is showing few ill effects.

Late last year, it became the first Russian company to demonstrate shale oil fracking expertise with a 1km-long horizontal well 2.3km below ground at a site in the vast Bazhenov field, estimated to be the world’s largest shale oil deposit. Gazprom Neft was able to use homegrown technology that it was forced to develop after the sanctions prompted its international partners to walk away from the project. “We are like a snowball,” says Sergey Vakulenko, head of strategy and innovation at the company, a unit of gas giant Gazprom. “The harder you squeeze, the harder we get.”

If these state-owned Russian oil companies are indeed like snowballs, then we might expect their success to build upon itself. But only time will tell. Arctic drilling is an entirely different beast than the conventional operations Russia relies upon for the vast majority of its current oil and gas production.

And Moscow isn’t just battling Western sanctions in its attempt to shore up its future energy security. The collapse in oil prices has hurt the country’s budget revenues—Russia’s breakeven oil price is $72 per barrel, and current prices are hovering between $50 and $55—and the current market environment makes more technically challenging projects a lot less attractive. So while sanctions may not be constraining Russian energy options as much as the West might hope, cheap oil certainly is.

Still, however successful Rosneft is in developing these unconventional reserves, this whole situation is a testament how the whole nebulous concept of “sanctions”—which more than anything have been used to paper over the uncomfortable fact that there is little else that the United States or its European partners were willing to do to Russia over Ukraine—can have unintended consequences.

Liberals Are Just as Biased as Conservatives, Study Finds

For decades, many social scientists have promoted the view that conservatives are particularly closed-minded—that people on the political Right are more tribal in their thinking patterns, more vulnerable to propaganda that confirms their pre-existing ideas, and more skeptical of inconvenient facts. But a new paper reviewing dozens of relevant studies on this topic finds that this view is not supported (indeed, one might wonder if this consensus is not itself a product of liberal bias in the social sciences). Political bias is not a conservative trait, it turns out, but a human one, and it afflicts both sides in equal measure. An excerpt, with added emphasis:

The clearest finding from this meta-analysis was the robustness of partisan bias. The tendency to find otherwise identical information more valid, persuasive, and compelling when it confirms rather than challenges one’s political views was shown not only by participants in every individual study, but this pattern was found consistently across a wide range of studies using different operationalizations of political orientation, different manipulations of belief-consistent and belief-inconsistent stimuli, and across multiple political topics. […]

Contrary to a longstanding view in psychology that political conservatives are particularly prone to defensiveness and cognitive rigidity (Adorno et al., 1950; Jost et al., 2003), our meta-analysis found that when partisan bias was aggregated across studies, topics, and methodological details, both liberals and conservatives were biased in favor of stimuli that confirmed their political beliefs, and to a virtually identical degree.

This finding helps add credibility to (a version of) the frequently-articulated conservative concerns about the liberal tilt in important U.S. institutions like the prestige press and academia and professional organizations. If the desire to see one’s own political beliefs confirmed is hard-wired into the human psyche, as the paper suggests, then there really is real reason to worry about the fact-finding competency of politically-involved institutions whose members overwhelmingly favor one side or the other—and there is no dispute that conservatives are vastly underrepresented at the most high-brow media outlets and the most prestigious social science departments relative to their presence in the general population.

To be clear, the fact that influential media and academic and professional institutions may be “biased” does not imply any deficiency on the part of the people who work there. It merely implies that these people are overwhelmingly liberal, and that liberals—like conservatives—are almost certainly more likely to pursue stories or research questions that flatter their sensibilities and dodge those that do not. Because both journalism and social science research depend on a process of scrutiny and revision and peer review, the ideological uniformity within these institutions means that the final product is more likely to be favorable to views the overwhelming majority of members already find agreeable.

Bias is a fact of human nature; we won’t be able to beat it out of our opponents by berating them sufficiently, and we wouldn’t want to. What we might be able to do is retool our institutions so that bias can be put to good use. In an ideologically diverse environment, bias could impel partisans to fact-check each others’ contravening claims and come up with something closer to the truth, rather than merely amplifying the point of view that everyone held to begin with.

Not all institutions should try to become politically-neutral. Liberal and conservative (and libertarian and socialist) activist groups are fundamental to civil society. But when the intellectual landscape fractures into homogeneous ideological groups, with leftwing institutions trying to promote one agenda, and rightwing institutions trying to promote another, with no genuinely intellectually diverse intermediary that offers a forum for the competition of ideas … well, then as we are seeing now, the machinery of quality governance and of cultural solidarity seems to start breaking down.