Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 215

The Deconstruction of the West

To say that the world has been getting progressively less stable and more dangerous is to state the obvious. But amidst the volumes written on the causes of this ongoing systemic change, one key driver barely gets mentioned: the fracturing of the collective West. And yet the unraveling of the idea of the West has degraded our ability to respond with a clear strategy to protect our regional and global interests. It has weakened the NATO alliance and changed not just the global security calculus but now also the power equilibrium in Europe. If anyone doubts the scope and severity of the problem, he or she should ask why it has been so difficult of late to develop a consensus between the United States and Europe on such key issues as defense, trade, migration, and how to deal with Russia, China, and Islamic jihadists.

The problem confronting the West today stems not from a shortage of power, but rather from the inability to build consensus on the shared goals and interests in whose name that power ought to be applied. The growing instability in the international system is not, as some argue, due to the rise of China as an aspiring global power, the resurgence of Russia as a systemic spoiler, the aspirations of Iran for regional hegemony, or the rogue despotism of a nuclear-armed North Korea; the rise and relative decline of states is nothing new, and it doesn’t necessarily entail instability. The West’s problem today is also not mainly the result of the economic decline of the United States or the European Union, for while both have had to deal with serious economic issues since the 2008 meltdown, they remain the two largest economies in the world, whose combined wealth and technological prowess are unmatched. Nor is the increasingly global instability due to a surge in Islamic jihadism across the globe, for despite the horrors the jihadists have wrought upon the peoples of the Middle East and North Africa, and the attendant anxiety now pervading Europe and America, they have nowhere near the capabilities needed to confront great powers.

The problem, rather, is the West’s growing inability to agree on how it should be defined as a civilization. At the core of the deepening dysfunction in the West is the self-induced deconstruction of Western culture and, with it, the glue that for two centuries kept Europe and the United States at the center of the international system. The nation-state has been arguably the most enduring and successful idea that Western culture has produced. It offers a recipe to achieve security, economic growth, and individual freedom at levels unmatched in human history. This concept of a historically anchored and territorially defined national homeland, having absorbed the principles of liberal democracy, the right to private property and liberty bound by the rule of law, has been the core building block of the West’s global success and of whatever “order” has ever existed in the so-called international order. Since 1945 it has been the most successful Western “export” across the globe, with the surge of decolonization driven by the quintessentially American precept of the right to self-determination of peoples, a testimony to its enduring appeal. Though challenged by fascism, Nazism, and communism, the West emerged victorious, for when confronted with existential danger, it defaulted to shared, deeply held values and the fervent belief that what its culture and heritage represented were worth fighting, and if necessary even dying, to preserve. The West prevailed then because it was confident that on balance it offered the best set of ideas, values, and principles for others to emulate.

Today, in the wake of decades of group identity politics and the attendant deconstruction of our heritage through academia, the media, and popular culture, this conviction in the uniqueness of the West is only a pale shadow of what it was a mere half century ago. It has been replaced by elite narratives substituting shame for pride and indifference to one’s own heritage for patriotism. After decades of Gramsci’s proverbial “long march” through the educational and cultural institutions, Western societies have been changed in ways that make social mobilization around the shared idea of a nation increasingly problematic. This ideological hollowing out of the West has been accompanied by a surge in confident and revanchist nationalisms in other parts of the world, as well as religiously inspired totalitarianism.

National communities cannot be built around the idea of collective shame over their past, and yet this is what is increasingly displacing a once confident (perhaps overconfident, at times) Western civilization. The increasing political uncertainty in Europe has been triggered less by the phenomenon of migration than it has by the inability of European governments to set baselines of what they will and will not accept. Over the past two decades Western elites have advocated (or conceded) a so-called “multicultural policy,” whereby immigrants would no longer be asked to become citizens in the true sense of the Western liberal tradition. People who do not speak the national language, do not know the nation’s history, and do not identify with its culture and traditions cannot help but remain visitors. The failure to acculturate immigrants into the liberal Western democracies is arguably at the core of the growing balkanization, and attendant instability, of Western nation-states, in Europe as well as in the United States.

Whether one gives the deconstruction of the Western nation-state the name of postmodernism or globalism, the ideological assault on this very foundation of the Western-led international system has been unrelenting. It is no surprise that a poorly resourced radical Islamic insurgency has been able to make such vast inroads against the West, in the process remaking our societies and redefining our way of life. It is also not surprising that a weak and corrupt Russia has been able to shake the international order by simply applying limited conventional military power. Or that a growing China casts an ever-longer shadow over the West. The greatest threat to the security and survival of the democratic West as the leader and the norm-setter of the international system comes not from the outside but from within. And with each passing year, the deconstruction of Western culture, and with it the nation-state, breeds more internal chaos and makes our international bonds across the West ever more tenuous.

Libya’s Oil Surge Lasts Just One Week

Well that didn’t last long. Last week we noted that Libyan oil production jumped 160,000 barrels per day after its biggest oil field reopened. That resurgence was short-lived after that field was shut down again this week, and Libya’s oil output fell 30 percent to a six month low. Bloomberg reports:

The North African nation’s output dropped to 490,000 barrels a day from 703,000 a day after the Sharara field shut, a person familiar with the situation said, asking not to be identified because of a lack of authorization to speak to media. Sharara pumped about 213,000 barrels a day before halting on April 9, the person said. The country is currently producing at its lowest level in more than six months, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

The pipeline that transports crude from Sharara in western Libya to the Zawiya refinery also stopped operating on April 9. The National Oil Corp. declared force majeure the same day on loadings of Sharara crude from the Zawiya terminal, according to a copy of the NOC’s decree obtained by Bloomberg.

Moscow won’t be happy at this latest delay, as the Russian state-owned oil company Rosneft has recently gotten into business with Libya’s National Oil Corp. (NOC). The fact that NOC is still having this much trouble getting production up and running again will be concerning to the Kremlin, which has been making significant energy investments around the world in recent months.

OPEC’s other members, however, won’t mind seeing Libya continue to struggle to regain its 1.6 million barrel per day production capacity (last seen in 2011, before the NATO intervention and toppling of the Qaddafi regime). After all, the name of the game for petrostates these days is reducing output in order to erase a global glut and hopefully nudge prices upward.

The Magic Disappearing $100 Billion Climate Fund

Shocking news—the magic $100 billion climate fund appears not to be taking shape! Even optimistic estimates sat the fund is $40 billion short, and developing countries say that understates the problem. The Financial Times:

Climate ministers from Europe, India, Brazil and South Africa have gone to Beijing in recent weeks, hoping to sustain momentum from the Paris talks despite the Trump administration’s dismantling of US regulations meant to limit American emissions.

But discussions have quickly run up against the issue of financing.  “Developed countries have not met their commitments. In their reports a lot of their commitment is in the form of development aid. That doesn’t meet the commitment to contribute to new funds,” China’s top climate change negotiator, Xie Zhenhua, told a briefing on Tuesday. “A lot of countries don’t want to chip in. I said to the European minister: that’s your problem as developed countries. It’s your responsibility to work together and sort it out.”

First world donors have been busily relabeling other foreign aid as contributions to the climate kitty. For developing countries, this is a cheat—they expect $100 billion in new money.

Or, to put it more accurately, they are not nearly stupid and naive enough to believe the lies Western diplomats tell when trying to bamboozle naive green voters at home that they are “Doing Something” about climate change. So they don’t really expect all that money, but hope to use these commitments to pry something out of the West. Also, since the West will certainly default on these bogus commitments, developing countries have all the justification they need to blow off their own commitments when the time comes.

This, one notes, is the house of cards that the last Administration claimed was a big piece of its legacy.

In any case, China, who the clueless Western press has tried to spin as the new hero and leader of the climate movement, is craftily working to widen the north south rift, piously calling on the selfish northern countries to make good on the $100 billion in new money. This failure will, of course, provide China with justification to walk away from any targets it wishes. After all, the West welshed first.

Climate diplomacy has become the leading forum in our time for hypocritical posturing and the politics of pretense. Until the green movement wises up, develops a serious and pragmatic agenda, and pursues a strategically sound political approach, this sorry state of affairs is likely to continue.

China Turns Back Norks’ Coal Cargoes

China has sent coal-filled North Korean ships back from whence they came, reports Reuters:

A fleet of North Korean cargo ships is heading home to the port of Nampo, the majority of it fully laden, after China ordered its trading companies to return coal from the isolated country, shipping data shows.

Following repeated missile tests that drew international criticism, China banned all imports of North Korean coal on Feb. 26, cutting off the country’s most important export product.

To curb coal traffic between the two countries, China’s customs department issued an official order on April 7 telling trading companies to return their North Korean coal cargoes, said three trading sources with direct knowledge of the order.

We already knew that China was suspending its coal imports from North Korea, but timing is everything: the April 7 order to turn back the ships came just as Xi Jinping and Donald Trump were meeting at Mar-a-Lago. This certainly looks like a goodwill gesture to Trump, who had repeatedly demanded that the Chinese use their considerable economic clout to get tougher on Pyongyang. As an added bonus, China had already increased coal imports from the U.S. to make up for the decrease in North Korean imports.

But even this move remains firmly in the realm of the symbolic. As with trade, Beijing may be calculating that it can get away with a few low-cost, high-visibility moves to defuse tensions with the United States. With the Trump Administration starting to execute more forcefully on its promised agenda in international relations, something tells us they won’t get away with half-measures.

No One Is Covering the Big Apple

The journalism professor Greg David highlights the remarkable collapse in reporting on America’s largest city:

For the week beginning Jan. 29, The New York Times published 48 stories on New York. That’s less than half the 109 stories for the same week in 2009 and less than a third of the 153 stories in 2001.

Meanwhile in Queens, with 2.3 million residents, 35,000 major crimes a year and 200,000 criminal cases annually, the pressroom at the courthouse is locked because no one wants to use it.

The shift away from local coverage has a lot to do with the changing market pressures that define the modern media landscape. But the political and ideological ethos of the people who work in news is probably also at play. That New York City is dominated by Democrats might make the urban corruption stories less interesting to the left-leaning press corps, for example. And the fact that journalists, like most college-educated professionals, are often more cosmopolitan in their orientation can create blind spots about local issues.

Regardless of the underlying causes, this is a serious institutional failure that is bad for New Yorkers and Americans at large.

South Korea Reacts To Trump’s North Korea Moves

When the U.S. dispatched an aircraft carrier group to the Korean peninsula on Sunday, the move came as a clear challenge to Beijing and Pyongyang, but it’s causing some jitters in Seoul too. The New York Times reports:

South Korea’s government said on Tuesday that there would be no American pre-emptive military strike against North Korea, with a leading presidential candidate warning that no foreign countries, including the United States, should bring war to the Korean Peninsula.

Although officials in South Korea said the United States would never attack the North without first consulting the South Korean government, a confluence of events in the last week has led some people to fear that the Trump administration might launch military strikes against the North’s nuclear and missile facilities.

“I make this clear to the Americans,” said Moon Jae-in, a leader of the main opposition Democratic Party, in a Facebook post that was widely cited in South Korean news media on Tuesday. “The safety of South Korea is as important as that of the United States. There should never be a pre-emptive strike without South Korean consent.”

Is Seoul going into full-scale panic mode because of the U.S. action, fearing an imminent pre-emptive strike? The Western headlines would seem to suggest so, but the reality is more complex and nuanced.

In truth, there’s little fear in the corridors of power in Seoul that the Trump Administration would act against North Korea without ample consultation. The only people suggesting otherwise are opposition figures like left-leaning, dovish presidential candidate Moon, who has lately been slipping in the polls to Awn Cheol-soo, a centrist candidate who has staked out a more hawkish stance on Pyongyang. Seen in this light, Moon’s warning about U.S. unilateralism looks more like political grandstanding than a reflection of prevailing public sentiment.

In fact, something like the opposite may be closer to the truth: South Korean sentiment toward both Beijing and Pyongyang may be hardening. According to a March poll, South Koreans now regard China even less favorably than Japan, the result of Beijing’s heavy-handed campaign to economically squeeze Seoul over its deployment of the THAAD missile defense system.

Having failed to sway Seoul through bullying, Beijing appears to now think it needs to try active engagement. And indeed, that’s the context in which to view the other significant piece of news being reported today by the Wall Street Journal: China dispatched its top envoy on North Korea to Seoul the very day after Trump sent the carrier strike group north from Singapore, to discuss “strong, additional measures” the two countries could take to deter North Korea.

Time will tell, of course, how serious Beijing is about cooperating on North Korea. But the initial signs suggest that Trump’s tougher posture, far from producing panic in South Korea, might in fact be seen as pivotal to bringing China around to Seoul’s way of thinking.

Daycare Credentialism in the District

As of 2014, the average annual cost of childcare for a single 4-year old in the District of Columbia was $16,908—the highest in the country. But the local government is determined to make it even more unaffordable. Inside Higher Education reports:

A new regulation in Washington sets an associate degree as the minimum credential for a lead teacher in a child-care center. The District of Columbia’s child-care providers have until December 2020 to meet the new regulation. Child-care directors must also earn at least a bachelor’s degree, and home-care providers and assistant teachers must have a child development associate credential, which is an entry-level certificate for providers.

This regulation will have a similar impact to licensing requirements that have proliferated across other service jobs, forcing manicurists, florists, and personal trainers to go through thousands of hours of expensive and often gratuitous training to be able to work. That is, it will artificially raise the price of services, entrench established businesses, and shut less-skilled people out of the labor market.

Proponents of the policy argue that it will help level the playing field for low-income children. But the evidence that forcing daycare teachers to earn degrees will on its own meaningfully improve children’s outcomes is shaky. And it seems more likely that the regulation will simply force working class parents who don’t qualify for subsidies to pull their children out of daycare altogether as the decline in competition jacks up prices.

We will await results in the coming years, but this policy seems like dead-end credentialism that will hurt aspiring teachers, working parents and their children for the benefit of high-end daycare facilities and the community colleges who will be able to charge tuition from a wave of involuntary new enrollees.

Rosneft Could Soon Control Citgo, Senator Warns

The Russian state-owned oil firm Rosneft could soon possess a majority stake in the Houston-based oil company Citgo, Senator Bob Menendez warned this week. Menendez penned a letter to Secretary of Treasury Steve Mnuchin in which he expressed concern that Venezuela’s economic death spiral could cause it to default on loans that would ultimately give Rosneft a controlling stake in Citgo shares. The Hill reports:

Petróleos de Venezuela, Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, used 49.9 percent of Citgo’s shares as collateral for a loan. If Venezuela’s economic crisis continues and the company defaults, Menendez said Rosneft may take control of the shares, which would combine with the Russian company’s other interests in the company to give it majority control.

“This could leave Rosneft, a Russian company controlled by oligarchs with close ties to [Russian President] Vladimir Putin, in control of critical energy infrastructure in the United States,” Menendez told Mnuchin in a letter.

Venezuela’s own state-owned oil company has become increasingly desperate in recent months to find financing to stay afloat. Bargain crude prices have crunched what was an already mismanaged organization and Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) has on multiple occasions been unable to pay oil services companies for, well, their (much-needed) services. Venezuelan roughnecks are literally going hungry as their wages go unpaid.

Into this mess, enter Rosneft, which has of late begun to play the role of emergency financier to the beleaguered Venezuelans. For their help, the Russians have gained access to potentially lucrative joint ventures and are of course gaining the influence that only money can buy in the South American country. If things go from bad to worse, as they have a habit of doing in Caracas, Menendez’s worries about Rosneft’s “potential acquisition of Citgo” could become a reality.

Most Young Germans Opt for Merkel

More good signs for Angela Merkel: according to a new poll, the German chancellor is strongly outperforming her rival Martin Schulz, especially in the youth demographic. :

Among all potential voters, Merkel had 43 percent support, compared to 32 percent for Martin Schulz, the chancellor candidate for the center-left Social Democrats (SPD). But that lead extended to 47 percent against 29 percent among young voters aged 18 to 21, the poll showed.

“Young people know Chancellor Merkel, with whom they grew up, but not the candidate Schulz,” said Manfred Guellner, who heads the Forsa institute. He said the latest data showed that “especially young people are looking for stability and continuity in these uncertain times.”

Of course, young Germans have good reason to value stability: unlike many European youth, Merkel’s policies are working for them. Youth unemployment in Germany is a mere 6.6%, compared with 23.6% in France and 35.2% in Italy. It’s small wonder, then, that anti-establishment fervor has failed to capture German youth the way it has young voters in France and Italy.

In any case, Merkel’s strong showing should be welcomed by Washington—if only because her rival is already signaling that he would be less than cooperative with the Trump administration. EU Observer:

Martin Schulz, the centre-left contender to become Germany’s next chancellor, said he would not pursue policies to achieve an increase of defence spending as agreed with Nato allies. […]

“That can definitely not be the goal of a government led by me,” said Schulz at a press conference on Monday (10 April).

There are reasons to doubt that even a Merkel-led government can speedily increase its defense spending, but given Merkel’s stated commitment to the 2% spending goal and Schulz’s disdain for it, President Trump may find himself quietly rooting for a Merkel victory come September.

Most Young Germans Opt For Merkel

More good signs for Angela Merkel: according to a new poll, the German chancellor is strongly outperforming her rival Martin Schulz, especially in the youth demographic. :

Among all potential voters, Merkel had 43 percent support, compared to 32 percent for Martin Schulz, the chancellor candidate for the center-left Social Democrats (SPD). But that lead extended to 47 percent against 29 percent among young voters aged 18 to 21, the poll showed.

“Young people know Chancellor Merkel, with whom they grew up, but not the candidate Schulz,” said Manfred Guellner, who heads the Forsa institute. He said the latest data showed that “especially young people are looking for stability and continuity in these uncertain times.”

Of course, young Germans have good reason to value stability: unlike many European youth, Merkel’s policies are working for them. Youth unemployment in Germany is a mere 6.6%, compared with 23.6% in France and 35.2% in Italy. It’s small wonder, then, that anti-establishment fervor has failed to capture German youth the way it has young voters in France and Italy.

In any case, Merkel’s strong showing should be welcomed by Washington—if only because her rival is already signaling that he would be less than cooperative with the Trump administration. EU Observer:

Martin Schulz, the centre-left contender to become Germany’s next chancellor, said he would not pursue policies to achieve an increase of defence spending as agreed with Nato allies. […]

“That can definitely not be the goal of a government led by me,” said Schulz at a press conference on Monday (10 April).

There are reasons to doubt that even a Merkel-led government can speedily increase its defense spending, but given Merkel’s stated commitment to the 2% spending goal and Schulz’s disdain for it, President Trump may find himself quietly rooting for a Merkel victory come September.