Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 214

The Case for Placebo Politics

Last month in these pages, Tyler Cowen coined the term “placebo President” to describe the possibility that Donald Trump would largely fail to achieve the radically populist policy objectives he campaigned on but maintain the support of his white working class base by symbolically affirming their dignity and cultural status—offering his supporters “a public voice and the illusion of more control without the control itself.”

This presidency is too young, and the President too erratic, to say whether this thesis will hold in the long run. But it has never looked stronger than now, when, if the press reports are accurate, the populist firebrand Steve Bannon is rapidly losing influence in the White House and the gang of moderates led by Jared Kushner is tightening its grip. Meanwhile, the President is maintaining the inimitable aesthetic that drives his critics up the wall, but his stated policy preferences increasingly resemble those of an ordinary GOP establishmentarian: After deferring to the view of the Washington foreign policy “blob” and attacking Syria last week, Trump praised NATO and backed off his pledge to name China a currency manipulator. Though the administration continues to fight court rulings against the travel ban (its chief populist initiative to date), DACA has not been repealed, no tariffs have been implemented, and there are no signs of a looming “deconstruction of the administrative state.”

The pivot is already setting off alarm bells among Pepe partisans and paleoconservatives who were hoping for a revolutionary strongman, as well as reform-minded Republicans who worry about a Kushner-piloted White House drifting too far to the left and pursuing bad policies. Liberals are largely using the opportunity to attack Trump as a hypocrite and a flip-flopper who isn’t good for his word.

Nonetheless, there are not many signs (yet) of Trump’s core support base losing confidence in their man. And while some of the concerns about the administration’s pivot are well-founded, its also worth considering the potential virtues of Donald Trump’s placebo populism, if that is in fact what his presidency is going to deliver.

Educated people often imagine that politics is, or should be, a coolly rational exercise in distributing resources and regulating institutions to create the best possible outcomes for the greatest number of people. But it is not, and has never been. Contests over status and claims to representation are always lurking below the surface. As Walter Russell Mead observed during the primary, Trump’s appeal flows from his pattern of behavior as much as his policy priorities. “By flouting PC norms, reducing opponents and journalists to sputtering outrage as he trashes the conventions of political discourse, and dismissing his critics with airy put-downs, he is living the life that—at least some of the time—a lot of people wish they had either the courage or the resources to live.” This is at the core of Cowen’s idea of a placebo presidency: telegraphing cultural solidarity with a constituency that feels belittled and disrespected, in part merely by infuriating their ostensible social adversaries.

The degree of adoration a certain kind of liberal heaped on President Obama also reflected, in part, a similar kind of placebo effect. He advanced progressive policies, yes, although with the exception of the burst of legislation in his first two years, these were mostly modest—and, in any case, Obamacare, didn’t do much to materially benefit the urban upper-middle class professionals who made up a particularly loyal constituency. His political appeal among that group was not so much about “delivering” them concrete policy wins, but about embodying in his personal life their norms and values: academic rigor, social liberalism, devoted fatherhood, high-brow cultural tastes and preferences.

At a time of explosive cultural and ethnic and class division, when consensus on virtually any kind of major policy reorientation seems out of reach, it may not be the worst thing for some of America’s political energies to be redirected to the realm of style and symbolism while a centrist establishment puts the brakes on radical change. That is, it can be healthy for political leaders to offer their supporters a kind of placebo politics, rather than the full-dosage treatment. Donald Trump’s presidency will surely fail if the only thing he can offer his voters is the pleasure of watching academics and the media squirm. But the significance of this type of cultural combat as an outlet for pent up status resentments should not be dismissed. Indeed, it just might turn out to be part of a formula for adequate governance in an age of polarization.

“Mother of All Bombs” Used for First Time in Afghanistan

The Trump administration made another high-profile show of force today, this time in Afghanistan, by dropping a 21,600-pound bomb on an ISIS cave-and-tunnel complex in Nangarhar province. CNN reports:

The military is currently assessing the damage. Gen. John Nicholson, commander of US forces in Afghanistan, signed off on the use of the bomb, according to the sources. The authority to deploy the weapon was granted to Nicholson by the commander of US Central Command, Gen. Joseph Votel, Stump said.

This is the first time a MOAB has been used in the battlefield, according to the US officials. This munition was developed during the Iraq War.

Most headlines about the strike jumped on what makes the Massive Ordinance Air Bomb (MOAB) unique—that it’s the “largest non-nuclear bomb” in the U.S. arsenal and this is the first time the MOAB has been used in combat. But the MOAB was also designed for “psychological operations”, and while it should scare the pants off ISIS fighters on the Af-Pak border, it also sends a signal further afield—something the Trump Administration appears to be increasingly fond of doing lately.

But was this overt signaling to the North Koreans? It’s hard to tell. From a purely tactical perspective, knocking out ISIS bunkers and caves in remote, dangerous places like Nangarhar is exactly the kind of mission this weapon was designed for. White House press secretary Sean Spicer declined to clarify whether or not President Trump or other Administration officials were specifically briefed in advance or gave approval for the strike, referring questions to the Pentagon.

Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter, as it’s beyond doubt that the big explosion in eastern Afghanistan was heard loud and clear in Pyongyang.

China Getting Nervous About Systemic Risk

The People’s Bank of China looks seriously concerned about systemic risk in the country—and is taking matters into its own hands to step up oversight, according to Reuters:

China’s central bank has been quietly boosting its policy independence and regulatory reach as it seeks to contain risks to the financial system, policy insiders said, to help ensure stability ahead of a five-yearly leadership team transition this year. […]

And by broadening the scope of the tools it uses to assess and limit the accumulation of risky assets in the banking system, it has expanded its oversight powers without getting embroiled in the kind of bureaucratic infighting that has beset plans to create a financial super-regulator.

That has given the PBOC room to maneuver at a time when it needs to contain speculative bubbles and risky lending while avoiding abrupt tightening measures that could hurt the economy.

One of the most visible examples of this trend was the PBOC’s decision to raise short-term interest rates on March 16, just hours after the Federal Reserve did so. That move was seen as an urgent attempt to help stave off capital outflows from China and ease pressure on the yuan. The central bank has also been expanding its ability to scrutinize individual banks’ books to crack down on shadow banking and new high-risk financial products.

Meanwhile, China’s political leadership has also been scrutinizing the financial sector more closely, as Xinhua notes:

In remarks published Sunday, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang pointed out that the country’s financial sector was vulnerable to risks such as bad assets, bond defaults, shadow banking and Internet financing, with frequent illegal and corrupt activities.

To put the market in order, the premier urged for efforts to crack down on bank violations on giving credit, insider trading in securities market and fraud of insurance companies, as well as to relentlessly punish internal supervisors and company managers who collude with major players in the market and steal and sell confidential information.

Taken together, the stories suggest that the Chinese are getting seriously spooked about the risky lending going on in China’s financial sector.

Apathy and Abstentions Could Decide the French Race

In ten days, the French will go to the polls in a closely watched election that could decide France’s commitment to NATO and its future in the European Union. Despite the high stakes, however, many undecided French voters can barely muster the enthusiasm to show up. Reuters:

Opinion polls show around a third of France’s 45.7 million voters might abstain, an unprecedented number in a country with a long tradition of high turnouts. Even among those who intend to vote, about one third have yet to make up their mind on how to cast their ballot. […]

Across France, voters of all political stripes have been telling Reuters they’re not sure what to make of it all.

“I don’t even know if I will vote at all this time,” said Lungeri, the 38-year-old carer from Nice who was traditionally a mainstream right voter. “They’re all corrupt.” […]

“This election is just unbelievable,” a minister in the Socialist government said on condition of anonymity. “What strikes me, even beyond the high abstention, is how impossible it is to make forecasts: people waver between Fillon and Melenchon, between Le Pen and Macron, based on the most bizarre reasoning.”

Turnout in the second round has long been considered a decisive factor in this election, the wild card that could propel Marine Le Pen to an improbable victory. But the picture painted here is even more worrying, suggesting that apathy, voter abstention and protest votes could eliminate her mainstream opponents in the first round.  The current scenario spooking markets is that soft support for Macron and Fillon would lead to a runoff between Le Pen and Mélenchon: a showdown between two Euroskeptic populists on opposite fringes of the political spectrum.

That is still not the most likely scenario, but a decade ago it would have been considered unthinkable; France’s two-tiered electoral system, after all, was designed to prevent the rise of extremist candidates. Whether or not such safeguards hold this time, the French electorate is in a decidedly pessimistic mood—and it will take more than a narrow win by Macron or Fillon to convince disillusioned citizens that elites have their best interests in mind.

When Rex Met Sergey

Yesterday’s summit between Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and his counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, was judged to have ended in failure before it even began. Before the two had even met, the New York Times ran a piece criticizing the Trump Administration for having failed to pull off a quick rapprochement with Russia. The article cited various specialists, all marveling at how quickly Trump was transformed into a Russia hawk. Angela Stent, the author of an indispensable history of U.S.-Russian relations since the end of the Cold War, put it most succinctly:

I was skeptical from the beginning that it would be possible for the United States and Russia, after all that happened in the last few years, to engage in a successful reset. What’s surprising is how quickly we returned to the status quo ante we had at the end of the Obama administration.

David Sanger’s postmortem, published hours after the meetings ended, continued the theme in a different register: “If a few weeks ago critics of the Trump administration feared that Mr. Tillerson would simply fold on the sanctions imposed after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, they need not have worried.”

The Times’ two glosses, dinging both “Trump the Putin patsy” and “Trump the Putin hawk” for having failed to achieve a breakthrough, stand in for much of the commentary circulating about U.S.-Russian relations these days. By substituting lazy caricatures for an attempt at understanding the Trump Administration on its own terms, commentators are missing the real story.

Yes, there were no breakthroughs, but the meetings were productive. Consciously or not, Donald Trump is carrying out a “reset” of sorts with Russia, just not necessarily on the terms analysts, historians, and foreign correspondents immediately grasp. These are but the opening moves in a long game—moves that are successfully rewriting the rules under which the game will be played.

People can of course be forgiven for feeling some whiplash. It has been a disorienting few months in Washington, and Donald Trump’s attitude towards Russia has in various guises been at the root of much of the turmoil surrounding his Administration. But through all the chaos, a pattern appears to be emerging—a discernible approach to dealing with allies and adversaries. It’s not fully formed yet, but we may have caught our first glimpse of it in Moscow this week.

Throughout his election campaign, Donald Trump promised more cooperation with Russia and pointedly refused to criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin, raising expectations in both Moscow and in Washington that some kind of grand bargain was all but inevitable. A cordial telephone conversation between Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Trump on January 28, shortly after the inauguration, ended with vague plans for the two leaders to try meet before too long, perhaps in Slovenia.

What followed instead was an unprecedented two months of political fireworks in the United States that all but made such a meeting a non-starter. Allegations that Team Trump had colluded with Russian intelligence to help their man win the election have been probed by journalists from all possible angles. An ongoing federal counterintelligence investigation against Russian meddling in the U.S. elections is still said to target at least one member of the Trump campaign’s inner circle. Trump’s own defiant stance through it all has egged on partisan speculation for weeks, even as definitive evidence of collusion has stubbornly refused to materialize.

Then, last week, in response to a gruesome chemical weapons attack on civilian areas in rebel-held Idlib, President Donald Trump unleashed a salvo of Tomahawk missiles against an air field controlled by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al Assad. The retaliatory strike took place less than a week before Tillerson was scheduled to head to Moscow. It signaled a real sea change.

Some of us here at TAI thought the Trump Administration’s move had little to do with Syria, and was meant to signal a renewed willingness to resort to violence in its foreign policy—an attempt to redefine the vocabulary of international relations after eight years of President Obama. We wrote that although “Russia was the big power most directly challenged by the strike, Putin was perhaps not even the primary intended recipient of the message.” The Administration saw North Korea as the primary emerging crisis; Assad’s revolting transgression provided an opportunity to make a broader point about how the United States would treat rogue nations flaunting international agreements on weapons of mass destruction. Obama had damaged American credibility with his “red line” fiasco in Syria. Trump’s advisers wanted to restore it.

We were at least partly right. Yes, Syria really was about North Korea. But it was not only about North Korea. Over the weekend, Administration principals fanned out to the various talk shows and started turning up the heat on Moscow as well. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster said that the removal of Bashar al Assad—notably by political means rather than by decapitating strike—was now Trump Administration policy, and called on Russia to think strongly about abandoning its Syrian ward. UN Ambassador Nikki Haley said the United States would hold Russia accountable for Assad’s attack against civilians, hinting that the United States had classified intelligence directly linking Russia to the attacks.

On Monday, the onslaught continued. Unnamed U.S. officials appeared to back up Haley’s claims, alleging that Russia knew the chemical attacks were coming and may have helped Assad regime planes cover up the attack by providing intelligence that led to the bombing of a hospital treating victims. By Tuesday, the day of Tillerson’s departure for Moscow, the Trump Administration had issued a blistering attack on Russia’s attempts to cast doubt on Assad’s culpability, based on specific declassified intelligence. “Moscow’s response to the April 4 attack follows a familiar pattern of its responses to other egregious actions; it spins out multiple, conflicting accounts in order to create confusion and sow doubt in the international community,” the unclassified report concluded.

Just ahead of his departure for Moscow, Tillerson himself mocked the Kremlin: “It is unclear whether Russia failed to take [its] obligation [to rid Syria of chemical weapons] seriously or Russia has been simply incompetent in its ability to deliver on its end of that agreement,” he said at a meeting of the G7 in Lucca, Italy. “This distinction doesn’t much matter to the dead.” He seemed to offer a kind of ultimatum to the Russians: “We want to relieve the suffering of the Syrian people. Russia can be a part of that future and play an important role,” he said. “Or Russia can maintain its alliance with this group, which we believe is not going to serve Russia’s interests longer term.”

A hostile tone for the meeting was unmistakably being set. And yet Tillerson also let the mask drop a little. At the same G7 meeting on Tuesday, he pointedly asked his counterparts why U.S. taxpayers should care about the conflict in Ukraine. French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault took credit for setting Tillerson straight. “It is in the interests of the U.S. taxpayers to have a Europe that is secure and is strong politically and economically…. You don’t want a weak Europe, broken into bits and feeble,” he said.

Maybe it was a rookie mistake to think that such an offhand remark delivered among preening diplomats wouldn’t immediately leak. Or maybe Tillerson didn’t much care if it did.

Over in Russia, Trump’s Tomahawks had in fact shaken things up. One of the first narratives to take hold—trotted out by the Ministry of Defense and then dutifully repeated by all the pro-Kremlin defense experts—was that the American strike had been a dismal failure, since less than half the Tomahawks had supposedly reached their target. Russian journalists flocked to Al Shayrat air base and posted photos and videos showing that the runway was left mostly intact. Defense Ministry Spokesman General Igor Konashenkov described the strike as “inefficient,” saying a total of only 23 missiles had hit the base.

The reason for the Kremlin’s initial messaging was embarrassment. As Pavel Felgengauer, a Russian military expert who writes a regular column in the independent Novaya Gazeta, noted: “the good General [Konashenkov] had better keep quiet, lest his words confirm that the brand new Russian radars installed across Syria are not capable of intercepting old (though modernized) Tomahawks—missiles that have been in production for forty years, lacking any of the countermeasures found in more modern American systems. In other words, when a Tomahawk is launched above the sea it is easy to spot, but when it is flying low to the ground and hugging the terrain, Russian systems are confused and lost.” Michael Kofman, an American military analyst who confirmed that 59 of the 60 Tomahawks launched had in fact hit their intended targets, offered a slightly less scathing assessment of why the Kremlin’s vaunted radars and rockets failed to stop the Tomahawks: “The short answer is that their air defenses were meant to defend Russian forces, not Syrian assets, and probably not armed to take on a 60 cruise missile salvo anyway.”

Either way you look at it, the American strike was a black eye for a Kremlin that had heavily invested in demonstrating to the Russian people that it was a formidable world power able to stand up to the mighty United States. When S-300 systems were installed in Syria in October of last year, Kremlin-friendly media incessantly repeated boasts from MoD officials as to how Syria’s skies were now officially “closed” to American attacks. The same General Konashenkov had called any suggestion that U.S. cruise missiles could evade Russian air defenses a “fantasy of dilettantes.” Not only had 59 missiles gotten through, they had done so with full warning ahead of time from the United States. Not good!

Putin reacted to the strike by immediately suspending the agreement over deconflicting procedures with the United States in Syria. More broadly, he set the tone over the weekend by calling the American strike an “aggression against a sovereign state, against international law, made under false pretexts.” In Putin’s Russia, the President speaks and the apparatchiks quickly parrot; the language on “false pretexts” was soon repeated word for word, most notably by Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin. Several wry Russian commentators noted that the statement accurately described Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, but that sentiment was not relayed by the Kremlin-loyal mass media most accessible to average Russians; it dutifully continued singing Putin’s refrain, which quickly became the “line” ahead of the summit.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev also got in on the act, posting a message on Facebook, thundering that the United States was “on the verge of a military clash with Russia.” Perhaps more tellingly, Medvedev observed that President Trump had shown an “extreme dependency on the opinion of the Washington establishment”—a confession that the Kremlin thinks it has probably lost the fight over hearts and minds inside the White House, at least for now.

By the time Tillerson had landed in Moscow, the Russians appeared rattled from the torrent of criticism flowing from U.S. officials. Putin went on a state television station to furiously spin on the question of chemical weapons in Syria. “Where is the proof that the Syrian government forces used chemical weapons? There is no proof,” Putin said. He went on to float two alternative scenarios, notably not fully endorsing either. “The first is that the Syrian bombs hit a secret chemical weapons facility,” the Russian President said, describing this scenario as “quite possible.” He then went on to darkly suggest that it also could have been “a staged provocation, a deliberate incident designed to create a pretext for increasing pressure on the legitimate Syrian authorities.” This time, he more explicitly spelled out what he had only alluded to in previous statements: “The same thing happened back in 2003, when a pretext was concocted to justify sending troops to Iraq.”

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova appeared on the independent TV-Dozhd and tried to go on some kind of offensive, criticizing the Trump Administration for its slow start in staffing the State Department. “It is not clear what they will do in Syria and not only there,” she said. “Nobody understands what they will do in the Middle East because it is a very complicated region, forgive me for saying such a banal thing. Nobody understands what they will do with Iran, what they will do with Afghanistan. Nobody understands what they will do with North Korea.”

But despite all the bluster—and perhaps because they sensed an opening—the Russians also left the door open a little. The day of the meeting, as Tillerson and Lavrov began their dialogue, the Kremlin had still not announced if Putin himself would receive the American Secretary of State. Journalists read this as either a snub of historic proportions or as Putin playing his classic power games. They missed what the Russians had actually said: Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declared Putin would see Tillerson if progress was made on negotiations earlier in the day.

And lo, Putin and Tillerson did meet, and for two hours at that—a sign that the Russians were eager to telegraph that they were pleased with how things had gone. Though several outlets ran headlines implying that Putin had made the Secretary “wait,” there’s little evidence that Putin pulled any of that alpha male stuff this time around. (Tillerson left his hotel at 5:30 p.m. local time and was received by the Russian President half an hour later.)

So what was achieved? As we noted, if media reports are anything to go by, the answer is “not much.” The talks were said to have been frank, with both sides digging their heels in over facts surrounding the use of chemical weapons in Syria. The Russians wouldn’t budge; Putin refused to abandon Assad as Tillerson had urged him to do the day before. Tillerson himself was widely quoted as saying that relations between the two countries were at a “low point.” A narrative was emerging: Trump’s neophytes had gone in full of hot talk after a telegenic strike that had failed to appreciably change the balance of power on the ground in Syria—and had come back embarrassingly empty-handed.

In truth, however, the meetings did yield some results. Though rhetoric over Assad remained sharp, both sides in effect agreed to disagree and instead to focus on fighting “terrorism”—which is exactly what President Trump had wanted improved U.S.-Russian relations to hinge on. Lavrov announced that bilateral backchannel communications over Ukraine, which were an open secret under Obama (the fabled “Surkov-Nuland” channel), would be recreated under Trump. And Lavrov also identified defusing the North Korea crisis as an area where the two countries might cooperate.

Angela Stent’s analysis is not therefore completely wrong: From a pure policy standpoint, we are back at the status quo ante that the Obama Administration left for the Trumpies. But the changed circumstances matter. For example, in announcing the joint focus on fighting terror, Lavrov suggested that the suspended deconfliction agreement could be reinstated in short order; Tillerson had gotten the Russians to back off on the only retributive step they had taken since the Tomahawk strike against their proxy Assad. In return, Tillerson had agreed to reinstating a bilateral backchannel that Kyiv was never particularly keen on and that Moscow prizes—after letting it be known to allies that the United States is skeptical about unconditionally backing Ukraine. Also, three weeks after a very muted response by the United States over widespread arrests of peaceful anti-corruption protesters across Russia, human rights was not mentioned once by Tillerson, and he didn’t meet with any opposition leaders in the country—a notable break with precedent that the Russians surely appreciated.

President Obama had found himself at an impasse with the Kremlin after two terms in office. His Secretary of State, John Kerry, appeared to enjoy working with Lavrov but was getting nowhere. Obama and Kerry both saw diplomacy as an ongoing discussion about how to build a better world—about how people can reach a positive-sum outcome through dialogue. Obama himself was a man who put his faith in rationality, and as a consequence his diplomacy prioritized confidence-building gestures of goodwill and eschewed the use of force.

Team Trump is very different. The President may have initially thought that some gestures of goodwill toward Russia (in his case, compliments paid to Putin) could yield an easy deal. But due to both domestic political realities and exposure to the ideas of the people he has chosen to surround himself with, Trump appears to have abandoned such hopes and instead fallen back on his business instincts. Of all the President’s men, Rex Tillerson is probably the most like-minded on these matters. Unlike the garrulous John Kerry, he was all terseness and scowls in Moscow. But also unlike his predecessor, he appears to have taken the first halting steps toward a working relationship with the Russians.

There is little doubt that the Trump Administration is improvising on the details of its policy. But it’s also clear that it intends to pursue the negotiations in a very different manner from previous Administrations. This was not classic diplomacy we watched unfold this week, where summits are the culmination of hours of behind-the-scenes staff work. This was an attempt to set the language in which an understanding could eventually be reached—a language of threats and coercion, yes, but also of transactions and mutual respect. Only those who seriously thought Donald Trump would roll over and hand Putin everything he wanted on a silver platter on Day One of his Presidency are missing this changed landscape. Trump’s transactional approach to foreign policy may or may not work out in the end, but this is what it looks like.

And from what we’ve seen so far, the Russians appear to have recognized this new landscape for what it is—and they don’t seem to be too disappointed. President Trump is, more or less, speaking their language.

The Sadness of Princes

Through this work hardly appears in the most recent bibliographies, I believe that the following work by the German historian Friedrich Meinecke is still a very important study of a concept that has dominated political thinking for many years—The Idea of State Reason (German original 1957, common English version titled Machiavellianism). The concept, usually quoted in its French translation as raison d’etat, does indeed derive from the work of the Italian author Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), whose handbook for rulers, The Prince, has been plausibly interpreted as the first textbook of modern political science—self-consciously written not as a treatise in political ethics but as an empirical description of what a ruler must do in order to achieve certain practical results, including many which must be morally condemned. I think the saddest sentence written by Machiavelli is this: “In order to save the state, the prince must be willing to risk the eternal salvation of his soul.” Meinecke was well aware of this tragic relation between ethos, the moral principles that apply to the exercise of power, and kratos, the necessary actions dictated by the autonomous logic of raison d’etat. Sadness is the unavoidable condition of a political actor who is not completely cynical and yet who understands the empirical realities of his field of action.

Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, impresses me as a prototypical case of this moral dilemma. Her entire political career in the Federal Republic was an exercise of prudent, practically oriented action—no absolute moral enterprises, no great moral crusades, no adventures. Then, like out of the blue, Merkel embarked on a reckless adventure of opening the borders to more than a million refugees, a majority of them Muslims from the Middle East. Why did she do this, in sharp deviation from her customary political practice? She must have known what she was doing, and what price she might have to pay for this politically irrational policy. I can think of no clear political motive. Almost from the beginning she put her job on the line—and it still is. I can actually imagine that I saw on television the moment in which she was overcome with reckless compassion. She was visiting a refugee camp, talking with a young girl who spoke quite good German. She begged Merkel to let her stay in Germany—she liked it here, all her friends were here. Merkel was evidently at a loss for what to say. She said nothing, rather helplessly patted the girl’s back. Merkel them uttered the politically senseless sentence—“wir shaffen das”/“we’ll manage this.” Well, they didn’t quite. The exhilarated “welcome culture” has survived (consistently supported by the churches and other institutions of civil society), and Merkel is still favored to win the coming election—but domestic opposition to her migration policy has intensified in Germany, including in her own party, while most EU countries refused to cooperate. Finally Merkel traveled to Turkey and got the Erdogan government to agree to help stop the immigrant invasion at the “outer border” of the European Union—in fact entrusting the fate of the refugees to the tender mercies of the Turkish police. Another, even more dubious partner in stopping refugees from reaching the borders of the EU was the conglomerate of Libyan gangsters who organize the often lethal transport in leaky vessels across the Mediterranean (in the hope that the heroic Italian Navy will be there to pick them up. (“Willing to risk the eternal salvation of her soul?”)

It is clear that Merkel could not continue to preside over the mass influx of migrants into a pretty much uniquely welcoming Germany. State reason had to kick in sooner rather than later. The question has been raised whether Merkel was influenced by the morality of the Lutheran parsonage in which she was raised in the hostile environment of the Communist regime in East Germany. Merkel, like most European politicians, rarely talks about faith. Around the time of the onset of the migration crisis Merkel remarked that she always prays before important political decisions. Perhaps something stuck from the Lutheran catechism of her childhood—that there are no Christian saints, only sinners justified by faith.

I’m also intrigued by two women who served in succession as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations—Samantha Power and Nikki Haley. Power, the child of Irish Catholic immigrants, was a young journalist reporting on the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. In 2002 she published a much-discussed book—A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide. It was a sharp criticism of states, including the United States, that stand by while terrible crimes against human rights are being committed and an argument for what is now called “humanitarian intervention.” She joined the Obama campaign in 2008, though that engagement was somewhat marred when, in an interview with a British publication, she called Hillary Clinton “a monster.” I don’t know what triggered this characterization. In any case, Power apologized for the remark, blandly stating that Clinton was a not a monster. I doubt whether the two women then became good friends (“meet my friend Hillary, who is not a monster”), but they evidently made up sufficiently to collaborate for the remainder of the Obama Administration, including her term as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Power was credited as a strong influence in getting Obama to intervene against the Qaddafi regime in Libya (hardly a convincing case of humanitarian intervention). Perhaps I was thinking of Machiavelli when it seemed to me that Power looked sadder over the years. What must she have felt serving Obama, whose main criterion for intervention was “no American boots on the ground?” What must she have thought of the threat to intervene in Syria if the Assad regime crossed the “red line” of using chemical weapons against its own civilians—and then of Obama doing nothing when the line was indeed crossed and inviting Russia to take care of the problem (“Vladimir, over to you!”).

And now Nikki Haley is U.S. Ambassador to the UN, representing Donald Trump who, until two days ago, maintained that any American interventions in the Middle East were contrary to U.S. interests (“America first!”). Haley, a child of immigrants from India, has become a prominent Evangelical and is known as a moderate Republican. As Governor of South Carolina she played a role in removing the Confederate flag from the state capitol. While the drama of Trump’s relations with Russia continued to rage in Washington, Haley continued at the UN with Power-like denunciations of Russian misdeeds in Ukraine and Syria. Will she now have to scramble in order to catch up with Trump’s sudden attack of humanitarian empathy with Syrian victims of their own government? And for how long? And with Trump’s following Obama in his willingness to send American bombs if not boots against evildoers in far-away countries?

Trump Plays the Trade Card for Help on North Korea

According to his new interview with the Wall Street Journal, President Trump is offering up an unconventional deal to China: concessions on trade in exchange for cooperation on North Korea.

Mr. Trump, in a wide-ranging interview with The Wall Street Journal, said he told Mr. Xi when they met for the first time last week that his administration wouldn’t accept a continued large trade deficit with China. He added that he told Mr. Xi: “‘But you want to make a great deal? Solve the problem in North Korea.’ That’s worth having deficits. And that’s worth having not as good a trade deal as I would normally be able to make.”

Mr. Trump also said his administration won’t label China a currency manipulator in a report due this week, despite a promise he made on the campaign trail to do so. He said that China has stopped manipulating its currency, and that it was more important to focus on cooperation with Beijing on North Korea.

Trump’s willingness to use trade as a bargaining chip with China for help with North Korea is a good window into his overall approach to foreign policy, and helps explain his frequent remarks that his predecessors have been getting “bad deals” on trade.

Trump primarily sees trade as a political instrument; he thinks about it like a politician rather than an academic economist. He thinks that the huge American market, the largest single-country consumer market in the world, should be used to advance key American interests—both economic and political. Trump believes that his predecessors, especially since the end of the Cold War, haven’t grasped the value of access to the American market, and so have thrown away one of the nation’s most important negotiating tools.

Since World War II, American trade policy has essentially reflected the belief that America’s key goal is the creation of a liberal global order. Promoting a global trading system would help the American economy in three ways: cheap imports raise American consumer living standards while reducing operating costs for American businesses; global competitive pressure helps sharpen the performance of American companies, making the U.S. economy more dynamic at home even as more efficient American companies get better results in global markets; open foreign markets give American companies larger opportunities to grow, and more opportunities to invest their capital for the best returns. All this redounds to the benefit of American consumers, corporations, and investors.

Politically, there are other advantages. By integrating the world’s economies, war becomes less likely. Thus the Marshall Plan, in addition to supporting Europe’s growth through financial aid, also required European countries to begin to integrate their economies in ways that would make another major European war very difficult. Since World War II, the United States has pushed free trade in agriculture not only because this is in the interest of American farmers, among the most productive in the world, but also because ensuring that other countries depended on global sources for their food also made it much less likely that countries like Germany, Japan, or China would risk wars that cut off their peoples’ food supply.

To move toward these goals, American negotiators and Presidents since the 1940s have been willing to accept trade treaties that are not strictly reciprocal. Developing countries, for example, could benefit from lower American tariffs on their exports even as they kept their own tariffs and barriers against U.S. goods high. Moreover, by agreeing to negotiate in multilateral forums and to set up a rules-based global system, American negotiators reduced the benefits that the unique size of the American market might offer in bilateral negotiations.

In Trump’s view, that may have been good policy in the 1940s and 1950s, but beginning with the recovery of Europe and Japan, to say nothing of the rise of developing countries on the basis of export-led growth worldwide, America should have changed strategies, looking to bilateral negotiations.

For Trump, this strategy has several advantages. First, because the U.S. market is so huge and so attractive, other countries are likely to pay a high price to gain access to it. Second, the multilateral rules-based system, as opposed to a bilateral approach, makes it harder for the United States to mix trade and political negotiations. To be able to say to China, “Help us on North Korea and we will give you a better trade deal,” can help the United States avoid wars and gain other important objectives. Throwing that advantage away, Trump believes, is the equivalent of going into a fight with one hand tied behind your back.

For those who believe that the creation of a liberal global order is America’s best and indeed only hope of remaining prosperous and safe, Trump’s approach is madness—like burning down your house to drive out a mouse. Trumpian nationalists respond by saying that the security of any world order rests largely if not entirely on the economic and therefore the military supremacy of the United States. If your visionary program of order-building weakens the ability and erodes the will of the United States to remain the strongest superpower out there, it will fall to the ground.

Can Trump make his new strategy work? We’ll see. The North Korea crisis is the single most dangerous flashpoint in the world today. As for China, preserving its ability to trade freely with the United States is its single most important economic interest. America has played every other card in its hand to try to get more cooperation from China against this dangerous threat; Trump is now going to see what the trade card will do.

China Shores Up Its Overland Energy Supplies

Beijing has an energy problem. The Chinese economy may have slowed down somewhat recently, but the country still has great need of energy imports to meet its growing energy demand. Those imports open China up to geopolitical risk, and that’s especially true for energy sources that are shipped in over water policed by the U.S. Navy. It’s not surprising, then, that Beijing has placed a high priority on securing new lines of supply for overland energy imports, which means building thousands of miles of pipelines. As the FT reports, China just reached a final agreement with neighbor Myanmar to open up an oil pipeline route:

The twin crude and gas pipelines on the route are key to China’s “two oceans” strategy to diversify energy supply away from the chokepoint of the Strait of Malacca and vulnerable shipping lanes through the disputed South China Sea. Once fully operational, the pipeline from Made island in Rakhine state can supply almost 6 per cent of China’s crude oil imports. The gas line is already in use.

China has been moving to secure more oil and gas pipelines elsewhere too, having worked to develop a pipeline connection with Russia to secure Gazprom hydrocarbons. The two countries inked a preliminary agreement for a 30-year supply deal reportedly worth $400 billion back in 2014, though Moscow has scaled that deal down due to falling global oil and gas prices and concerns over instability in the Chinese economy.

That said, China is still going to have to look abroad to meet its energy demands, and in Beijing’s eyes, the fewer of those supplies come by ship, the better. This new Myanmar oil pipeline is just one piece of that larger puzzle.

American Drivers Will Enjoy Another Summer of Cheap Gas

The weather’s getting warmer, and many U.S. drivers are looking forward to another summer of road trips thanks to relatively cheap gasoline. Bloomberg reports:

The EIA in its Summer Fuels Outlook sees prices averaging 23 cents higher this summer than a year earlier, primarily because Brent crude oil is forecast to be $8 a barrel more than in the summer of 2016. […]

“Usually gas prices between mid-February and Memorial Day increase somewhere from 25 cents to 70 cents,” [Patrick DeHaan, senior petroleum analyst for GasBuddy] said. “But this year we may not even see a point where gas prices get up to a 35-cent increase because utilization is already looking good and most refinery maintenance has peaked, so that is good news for motorists.”

Prices are slightly higher than they were at this time last year (and are, in fact, at nearly a two-year high), but they still remain far below what they were even three years ago, when a gallon of gas averaged well above $3.50. Today, that average is just $2.41, thanks to relatively low oil prices and an abundance of U.S. crude inventories.

It doesn’t take long to become accustomed to the status quo, but let’s remember that from 2011 to 2014, it was commonplace to be paying more than $4 per gallon at the gas station. Cheap gasoline isn’t just helpful for Americans planning their next vacation, it’s also helpful for any worker who relies on driving for his or her daily commute. The shale boom precipitated the global crude price collapse, and is therefore one of the main reasons why gas is so cheap today. Remember to thank fracking the next time you fill your tank up.

The Strange Selectivity of the Godwin Police

Sean Spicer’s blundering press conference yesterday, in which he defended the President’s newly activist posture towards Syria on the grounds that “even Hitler didn’t use chemical weapons,” was particularly obtuse. But it wasn’t the first time that the Administration has been consumed by a cycle of outrage over the applicability of Holocaust analogies to the carnage wrought by Bashar al-Assad.

In fact, less than three months ago opponents of the Administration were invoking the Holocaust with abandon to attack the President’s new policy banning Syrian refugees from the United States. Activists created a Twitter account named after a ship of European Jewish refugees that the United States turned away and who were later murdered; journalists shared its materials far and wide. Democratic politicians, like Tim Kaine, and TV pundits, like Rachel Maddow, hammered the point home: Turning our backs on the people caught in Syria’s civil war is a moral disgrace comparable to standing by and allowing Jews to be murdered in the Holocaust.

The irony of the latest Spicer scandal is that the hapless press secretary’s botched Hitler analogy was clearly an attempt to do the exact same thing: Invoke the ultimate example of evil in Western history to moralistically defend a more humanitarian Syria policy. It’s hard not to question the authenticity of Spicer’s outraged critics when they too were indulging in reckless reductio at Hitlerum on Syria when it suited the anti-Trump agenda.

Of course, there are differences between the two instances. It’s almost certainly true that more Syrians would be saved by a generous resettlement policy than by a one-off airstrike. While refugee advocates were merely suggesting that the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria was just as bad as the Holocaust, Spicer seemed to be suggesting that it was in some ways worse. And while the administration’s Holocaust-invoking critics on refugee resettlements were not exactly careful with historical facts, Spicer’s misstatement was particularly cringe-inducing.

The truth is that Godwin’s law exists for a reason: Hitler comparisons are almost never productive in political arguments; invoking Nazi crimes has a tendency to obscure the current issues really at play while minimizing the scope of that regime’s crimes. But that standard should be applied consistently, not only against an administration whom much of the liberal establishment has foolishly convinced itself represents the second coming of fascism.