Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 482

Greeks out in the Cold

Austria last week announced that it would hold a meeting of the various stakeholder states on the Balkan migrant route to discuss the evolving crisis. The meeting, taking place today, was scheduled to directly precede an all-EU ministerial-level meeting, taking place tomorrow.

Greece, however, was not invited to the Balkan confab. The Greeks were none too pleased:

Greece’s foreign ministry said that being left out meant that the conference was “an attempt to take decisions in Greece’s absence that directly affect Greece and Greek borders.”

Greece has also accused Austria of undermining efforts to reach a joint European response to the migration crisis by siding with hardline EU members who refuse to take any refugees.

Vienna, however, is unrepentant:

“These meetings (of western Balkan states) take place within a format and with fixed participants,” interior ministry spokesman Karl-Heinz Grundböck told AFP.

“A summary of the meeting will be provided at talks between (EU) interior and justice ministers on Thursday in Brussels,” he said.

Harsh!

The bigger ministerial meeting tomorrow should make for some compelling reality-TV-like drama as these tensions play out in real time. EU leaders, however, have already lost all hope that the meeting will be at all substantive, if leaks like these are to be believed:

While EU interior ministers meet Thursday in Brussels to improve the implementation of an existing policy that’s widely considered a failure, leading EU officials, including the presidents of the European Commission and Parliament and leaders of the Parliament’s two main political groups, who make up the so-called G5 group, will gather Monday to discuss alternatives.

That’s sure to fix things: another high-level EU meeting. This time they’re sure to sort things out.

What Is God’s Name?

On December 15, 2015, Wheaton College, a prestigious Evangelical institution near Chicago, put a tenured faculty member on administrative a leave pending an investigation on alleged heresy charges. Larycia Hawkins, a political scientist, had put on a hijab (the Muslim kerchief that covers the hair but not the face) for the duration of Advent, as a sign of solidarity with Muslims feeling threatened by Islamophobia. In explaining her action, Hawkins said that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. (Oddly, for one who defined herself as an “orthodox Protestant”, Hawkins cited Pope Francis who had said the same.) I don’t think that the administration was greatly troubled by the kerchief (Wheaton, founded in 1860 by abolitionists, has a record of combining conservative theology with progressive causes); it was the statement about common worship that led to the charge that Hawkins had violated the declaration of faith that she had signed as a member of the faculty (a common practice at Evangelical colleges). That faith has a Biblical foundation in the speech made by the Apostle Peter before the High Priest of the Temple in Jerusalem (Acts 4:12). With reference to Jesus, Peter said: “There is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”

There have been protests from some faculty and students. I don’t know what pressures came from the outside. (Wheaton has had some influential alumni, including Billy Graham.) In any case, on February 8, 2016, in a joint statement Hawkins and Wheaton’s President Philip Ryken said that they had reached a confidential agreement that Hawkins would voluntarily resign from her position. At least for the moment this is the end of the story. But, curiously, a panel of Muslim judges in southeast Asia recently agreed with some Evangelicals in Illinois that Muslims and Christians don’t worship the same God. On June 23, 2014 the highest court of Malaysia upheld a ban that a Catholic publication may not use the name “Allah” when applying it to the Christian God. The reasoning behind the ruling was that this usage would confuse innocent Muslims and make them vulnerable to “proselytism” (which is illegal). The ruling allowed the naming of “Allah” in worship or other intra-Christian settings, with no confused Muslims being dragged into baptism. But lower-level authorities have nevertheless used the ruling to confiscate Bibles and other Christian publications: Thus, broadly speaking, only Muslims are to be allowed to pray to “Allah” by that name. Already in the Quran a major offence is shirk, idolatry or polytheism—a concept coined  specifically to reject Christianity, which denies the central Quranic affirmation that God has neither offspring nor associates.It is instructive to know that this rejection of Christianity has a Jewish antecedent. When the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem first turned against the followers of Jesus, this was probably because of the claim that he was/is the Messiah. But as his followers developed the full-blown Christology of the doctrine of the Trinity, it was this that led to the rejection of Christianity by rabbinical Judaism. The Hebrew synonym for shirk is shituf,  precisely the idea that God has “associates”. The term is first used in the Babylonian Talmud, which was compiled over the first few centuries of the common era (by about 500 CE—over a century before Muhammad). One must observe that the Christian Church had quite some difficulties reconciling its claim that Jesus and/or the risen Christ had both a human and a divine nature. For the Christian idea of redemption to be plausible—God in Jesus taking upon himself all the sin and suffering of creation—just the right balance between the two natures had to be found: Too much divine, and Christ would be a god coming to earth like a Greek or Hindu avatar; too much human, and Jesus would just be a great teacher, like Socrates or Confucius. The historian Philip Jenkins (Baylor University) recently published a very useful summary of this struggle, from council to council, in his book Jesus Wars (2010).Thus Judaism resembles Islam in many ways, but especially in the absoluteness of its monotheism. The Shema, the basic Jewish confession of faith, proclaims “Hear, o Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.” “The Lord” is the Hebrew Adonai, the substitute (along with Hashem, “the Name”) for the four-letter secret name of God, never to be said aloud except once a year by the High Priest in the holiest place of the Temple. The Shehada, the basic Muslim confession of faith, is equally stark in its monotheism: “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger.” (Be careful: Just saying it once before witnesses makes you a Muslim, making you guilty of apostasy if you in any way recant your submission.) The Nicene Creed (still recited repeatedly in churches at the celebration of communion) also declares that “We believe in one God”, but then qualifies this in a way that to Jewish or Muslim ears must sound like an exact definition of shituf or shirk—“Jesus Christ… the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, begotten not made, of one being with the Father.”If one steps back from the important theological differences between these three west Asian religions, one may look at them from the perspectives of south and east Asia, especially those of Hinduism and Buddhism. The similarities between the three “Abrahamic” religions stick out more visibly than the differences. To be sure, the religions that emerged from the Indian subcontinent, especially in their most sophisticated versions, also point to an underlying unity beyond the many gods or boddhisatvas—the ultimate unity of the Brahman or the divine cosmos and the deepest reality of the self or Atman, as taught by the Hindu Upanishads—and the blazing reality revealed upon the attainment of Enlightenment or Buddhahood. This unity transcends the many gods of Hinduism (sometimes given as 33 in number, sometimes as 300,000 or even 330 million), or the assembly of many thousands of boddhisatvas, each in charge of a vast world or Buddha-field. But this unity, disguised by the illusions endemic to the endless wheel of reincarnations, rebirths and re-deaths, is far removed from the view of all reality as created by the one God whose promise is eternal glory.Do Christians and Muslims worship he same God? The present interfaith etiquette answers yes. This is certainly useful politically in the confrontation with radical Islamism, and I would not deplore this use against a dangerous and utterly evil movement. But one can also answer the question with a yes for analytic rather than political reasons. Muslim tradition (hadith) has maintained that the Quran reveals 99 names of God. Perhaps this was in the mind of Al-Ghazali (1058-1111 CE), the great thinker who sought to integrate the insights of mainstream Islamic thought with the insights of Sufi mysticism, when he wrote: “Deliver me, o Allah, from the sea of names!” But the 99 names of God, do not belong to 99 gods. All of them refer to the one God, whom Muslims, Jews, and Christians worship (even when they don’t like the idea).

The End of SCOTUS?

In a piece on the future of the Supreme Court as Washington gears up for a bruising battle over Justice Scalia’s replacement, New York Magazine‘s Jonathan Chait predicts that, if the parties can’t arrive at some sort of compromise on nominations to the Court, the institution’s very legitimacy will eventually wither away:

A world in which Supreme Court justices are appointed only when one party has both the White House and the needed votes in Congress would look very different from anything in modern history. Vacancies would be commonplace and potentially last for years. When a party does break the stalemate, it might have the chance to fill two, three, four seats at once. The Court’s standing as a prize to be won in the polls would further batter its sagging reputation as the final word on American law. How could the Court’s nonpolitical image survive when its orientation swings back and forth so quickly? And given that the Court can affect the outcome of elections directly (like it did in Bush v. Gore) or indirectly (by ruling on the legality of partisan redistricting schemes, laws designed to inhibit voting by marginal constituencies, campaign-finance regulations, or labor’s ability to organize politically), with every election, the stakes will rise and rise.

In some ways, Chait’s dire prognostication is probably premature—nomination fights have been intensely political for at least three decades, and as Kyle Kondik has noted in this magazine, there have been two instances since the Civil War when a sitting president has been unable to fill a Court vacancy. But Chait is right that the Supreme Court was designed to embody some kind of super-democratic consensus that would be more durable than temporary political majorities, and that escalating trench warfare over nominations threatens to puncture that image in the long run. So if we do ever get to a point where justices can only be confirmed when the same party holds both the White House and the Senate, the role and standing of the Third Branch will likely be called into question more aggressively than it is now.

Indeed, the prospects for the Court could be even more grim than Chait suggests. Polarization and congressional dysfunction are eroding the old system of judicial nominations (where near-consensus confirmation votes were common) but they are also, paradoxically, investing the Court with ever-more power. As Congress retreats from its traditional role as the “center of political life in the United States,” the Court is asked to declare the final answer to broad range of fundamentally political questions. The Congress’ failure to amend the Voting Rights Act, for example, led to an intensely controversial decision striking it down in 2013, and the justices’ belief that Congress would be unable to negotiate a fix to the Obamacare exchanges may have contributed to the Court’s decision to uphold the law in its entirety in King v. Burwell. Congressional dysfunction is part of the reason that modern Courts have invalidated laws (both state and federal) at a historically unprecedented rate, and choices made by Congress are also part of the reason that, according to Francis Fukuyama, America’s system of government has undergone “judicialization.” When Congress—unpopular, gridlocked, and cowed by interest groups—declines or fails to act, or acts sloppily, the demand for an active judiciary increases.In other words, its possible to imagine a scenario where the Court gradually hemorrhages legitimacy even as it accumulates more and more power. Highly politicized confirmation rituals would undermine the judiciary’s pretension to be a regal guardian of the nation’s founding ideals, immune from temporary political passions. Meanwhile, the same congressional gridlock that makes it so hard to confirm justices would thrust more political authority into the Court’s lap. This combination—rising power but declining legitimacy—would be dangerous for any institution, but it is especially dangerous for the judiciary, which, having “no influence over either the sword or the purse” (in Alexander Hamilton’s words), lacks the ability to enforce its will. It’s possible that this won’t be a problem—that people will passively accept the Court as a kind of de facto legislature. If something doesn’t give, however, there is a risk that the bubble will burst—that Americans decide that they are ruled over by an illegitimate council of philosopher kings, and that they start openly defying its decisions.

China and U.S. Spar Verbally over South China Sea

Secretary of State John Kerry criticized the militarization of the South China Sea ahead of his meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi today. Reuters:

The United States is “encouraging the peaceful resolution of competing maritime claims in the South China Sea – a goal that is definitely not helped by the militarization of facilities in that region,” Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The United States last week accused China of raising tensions in the South China Sea by its apparent deployment of surface-to-air missiles on a disputed island, a move China has neither confirmed nor denied.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry, for its part, compared Beijing’s island fortifications in the Spratlys to U.S. military outposts in Hawaii.

Meanwhile, satellite image analysis released by the Center for Strategic and International Studies suggests that China could be placing sophisticated radar systems on its artificial islands in the Spratly archipelago. Reuters:

“Two probable radar towers have been built on the northern portion of the feature, and a number of 65-foot (20-meter) poles have been erected across a large section of the southern portion,” the report said.

“These poles could be a high-frequency radar installation, which would significantly bolster China’s ability to monitor surface and air traffic across the southern portion of the South China Sea.”

As we commented yesterday, Beijing doesn’t seem to fear backlash from Secretary Kerry or anyone in Washington at the moment. On the contrary, Chinese officials have been ramping up their militarization of the South China Sea, seemingly intent taking advantage of a cautious and lame duck President Obama’s final year in office.

Why OPEC Hasn’t Cut Production

Speaking at a conference in Houston this week, Saudi oil minister Ali Al-Naimi said of the recent proposed petrostrate production freeze that “The freeze I’m sure will give people in the market some hope, that something will happen and it will happen – but we are not banking on cuts because there is less trust.” Meanwhile, OPEC’s secretary-general on Monday had this to say about American shale, via Bloomberg:

“Shale oil in the United States, I don’t know how we are going to live together,” Abdalla Salem El-Badri, OPEC secretary-general, told a packed room of industry executives from Texas and North Dakota at the annual IHS CERAWeek meeting in Houston.

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which controls about 40 percent of global oil production, has never had to deal with an oil supply source that can respond as rapidly to price changes as U.S. shale, El-Badri said. That complicates the cartel’s ability to prop up prices by reducing output.“Any increase in price, shale will come immediately and cover any reduction,” he said.

El-Badri’s comments relate to the reality that it doesn’t take much time to restart shale operations, which means U.S. producers can quickly respond to any significant price rebound by increasing production. Couple that with situation that these shale firms are finding ways to turn a profit at lower and lower price levels, and it’s not hard to understand why OPEC has been so hesitant to cede any market share by restricting its supply.

However, merely freezing production won’t do much to eat away at the global glut. As one energy analyst told Reuters, “[i]f they freeze production at January levels when you’re already over supplied by around a million barrels per day it just prolongs that situation of oversupply.” And Naimi’s explicit rejection of production cuts has already all but erased the gains made in the oil market yesterday on the news that the IEA expects U.S. output to dip over the next two years. WTI is down 4.46 percent on the day, with Brent crude falling nearly 4 percent itself.The world’s petrostates are feeling the pinch, but due in large part to U.S. frackers, they find their hands tied this time around. A production freeze seems the most they’ll be able to manage for now, but that won’t be enough to kick off a real price recovery—and even if it did, American shale output would be there to blunt the rebound.

“Raise High the Banner” Xi Tells State Media

Xi Jinping has paired his escalating crackdown with a propaganda offensive that is blanketing Chinese state media, as the New York Times reports:

Front-page headlines across the nation trumpeted Mr. Xi’s visits to the headquarters of the three main Communist Party and state news organizations on Friday. Photographs showed fawning journalists crowding around Mr. Xi, who sat at an anchor’s desk at the state television network. One media official wrote the president an adoring poem.

The blanket coverage reflected the brazen and far-reaching media policy announced by Mr. Xi on his choreographed tour: The Chinese news media exists to serve as a propaganda tool for the Communist Party, and it must pledge its fealty to Mr. Xi.

Though the party has been tightening its control over the media since Mr. Xi became the top leader in late 2012, the new policy removes any doubt that in the view of the president and party chief, the media should be first and foremost a party mouthpiece. Mr. Xi wants to push the party’s message domestically — and internationally — across all media platforms, including advertising and entertainment, scholars say. That is a shift from his predecessor, Hu Jintao, who stressed the need for the state-run media to become more responsive to the modern digital environment and shape or channel public opinion.

We’ve written before about the Chinese government’s mounting panic about the loyalty of its citizens. There’ve been purges of high-level corrupt officials (and presumably some political opponents), crackdowns on human rights NGOs, lawyers, and Christians, and a renewed emphasis on ‘patriotic education’. Xi Jinping has even extended his reach abroad, as Chinese covert agents traveled the world this year, rounding up hundreds of supposedly corrupt Chinese “economic criminals”, five Hong Kong booksellers (including several citizens of Western countries), and a Chinese human rights activist in Thailand.

As ominous signals about an upcoming slowdown make everyone apprehensive, the state-owned China Daily offers this rationale for intensified Party control of the media:

It is necessary for the media to restore people’s trust in the Party, especially as the economy has entered a new normal and suggestions that it is declining and dragging down the global economy have emerged.

Xi Jinping is making doubly sure that the state media will either say nice things about himself and the Communist Party, or they won’t say anything at all.

Ceasefire or Bait-and-Switch?

Oh dear, another day, another “cessation of hostilities” in Syria that is likely to be anything but. How come?

As news reports make abundantly clear, the main external protagonists are supposed to deliver their clients and proxies to a cessation of hostilities (legally distinct from a “ceasefire.”) That means the U.S., Saudi, and Turkish governments have to deliver their guys, and the Russians and Iranians have to deliver their guys—the Assad regime, such as it is, Hizballah, and a rat’s nest of Shi’a militias.The real problem, however, and the essence to understanding what is probably going on, forces one to grasp the military geography of the civil war at this point. The Russians say that all anti-regime forces are “terrorists,” and we do not agree—but we do agree that al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra is a terrorist organization. Unfortunately, while in most of the country anti-regime forces are geographically isolated enough to distinguish in terms of targeting from the air, in the northwest of the country, defined as all the territory north of Hama and west of the Euphrates—specifically, around Aleppo and eastward toward Idlib—they are not. Nusra is mixed in with other groups in this fight, the fight that will likely determine the outcome of the war.That means that the Russians and the regime will likely prosecute the war where it matters strategically, while using any cessation of hostilities elsewhere in the country to do three things: shift more forces to the key battle; prevent the rebels from gaining territory in the south and around Damascus while the fight for Aleppo and Idlib goes on; and by allowing dribs and drabs of humanitarian aid to reach places of minor strategic importance, to let the Obama Administration and other credulous types delude themselves into thinking they’ve done something noble. Humanitarian relief as political eyewash, in other words.Loyal readers will recall, perhaps, that in “Follyanna?: A Coda,” written right after the earlier “truce” was agreed, I predicted that the Russians would delay clarification and hence implementation pending the fall of Aleppo. Check that box, folks: February 12 came and went, and nothing happened. Well, same goes for this newest “partial” truce: February 27 will matter or it won’t matter depending on how the fighting goes. And on this score we have some decidedly mixed news.The regime, with bounteous Russian and Iranian proxy help, has been making steady gains. Those gains have taken the form of a version of migratory genocide: bomb and starve civilians, weaponize refugee flows, in this case aimed first at Turkey, and accelerate the movement by destroying all hospitals and other medical facilities. But just yesterday Da’esh forces cut an important supply line road, for the second time since October, that connects regime-associated forces in Aleppo with the rest of regime-held territory. (Unfortunately, severing that connection also makes it near impossible to get food into the city for civilians.) The regime-associated forces can take the position on the road back, of course, but that may take some time—hence yet another question mark looms over the February 27 implementation date.Unlike the ill-fated February 12 “agreement,” this time the Russians, in the person of Vladimir Putin himself, initiated the contact, and in a telephone call yesterday he and President Obama directly negotiated details. The Russian rhetoric about the agreement has been voluble; the White House has said little and the State Department spokesman is clearly in no celebratory mood. Neither is Secretary Kerry, not this time around. No Follyannish tomfoolery is to be seen anywhere along the Potomac on this rainy Tuesday.Why did the Russian leadership do this, and why in this manner? Well, of course we don’t know for sure. But one fact is beyond dispute (I should hope): If the Russians really want a ceasefire, they can deliver the Assad regime to it and the whole business can be over and done with within five days or less. They don’t need us for this purpose. All the opposition groups influenced by the U.S., Saudi and Turkish governments are willing to stop fighting, because all the groups and governments want to prevent Aleppo from falling into regime hands. If Aleppo is de facto outside of the deal, they have other reasons to cease hostilities, namely to get food and medical care to tens of thousands of innocent victims of this horrid war.So again, why did Vladimir Putin wish to drag the U.S. government into this business when, strictly speaking, it is not practically necessary? Several possibilities spring to mind—my mind, anyway.First, it could be that Putin simply wishes to humiliate the Administration again…..when the hostilities do not in fact really cease and the Russians gain ground militarily in the interim. He does this sort of thing for its own sake, and because it is useful to him domestically. Everything Putin does he does looking over his shoulder at Russian opinion, broadly construed, since he has been such a disastrous steward of the Russian economy and political system.Second and more likely, Putin may wish to show all parties—and I suspect especially the Turkish leadership—that the Obama Administration is both weak and utterly unreliable as an ally. Putin’s initiative comes amid deeply strained U.S.-Turkish relations—it’s strained partly over the Kurds, but the agenda is chock full. By making it seem that the U.S. government is partnering with the Russian government, it tells the Turks that they are all alone and hence better bend the knee in Moscow’s general direction.This, in turn, is part of a broader Russian strategy that at all points endeavors to weaken U.S. ties with allies, not to exclude NATO allies beyond Turkey. And this is why hopes for the success of the so-called Minsk process are about as delusional as hopes for the Vienna process. Not going to happen, folks; free and fair elections cannot be held in a conflict zone, and the Russian leadership has no intention of rendering eastern Ukraine anything but a conflict zone for the time being.And still the Russian leadership seeks to weaponize the refugee flow out of Syria, with the first target being Turkey and the next targets being the core member states of the European Union. The aim here, among several, is to turn European politics sharply to the right, and by so doing to undermine NATO’s capacity to resist Russian policy in Ukraine and beyond, further to the west. The Russian leadership sees the Syrian and Ukrainian fronts as politically intertwined, and leverages each against the other. Putin can walk and chew gum at the same time, in other words. This doesn’t sound like much of a skill, or much of an advantage, but it can be when your counterparts are unable to do the same.So is it a mistake for the Obama Administration to be pursuing ceasefires or cessations of hostilities or whatever you want to call them in Syria? As Secretary Kerry has said, it usually takes three or four bites at the apple before you succeed at these things—but if Kerry thinks the Minsk process, from which the U.S. government essentially excluded itself, ranks as a success, then one can only wonder how he reckons a failure.It’s a tough call. Of course we want to alleviate as much suffering in Syria as possible. Decent people will be willing to swallow pretty hard to get that done. But at what price? At the price of turning the other cheek to let a mass murderer stay in power? At the price of letting a thuggish and kleptocratic Russian regime essentially oust the United States from the Levant, with the surcharge of degrading all U.S. alliance relationships in and beyond the region in the process?Alas, again one can forgive Secretary Kerry his optimistic obsequiousness before the ministrations of Sergei Lavrov. What other option does he have with a President who refuses to put any real skin in the game? He could resign, of course, and he might. But how that would help the situation is unclear. So the question at this level ends up being roughly as follows: How many bait-and-switch ceasefire agreements can one Secretary of State endure without becoming a diplomatic eunuch? Well, we’re going to find out, it seems.Syria is a godawful mess, no matter how you look at it. The meaningful moving parts are irritatingly numerous, and mainly unfriendly.First, we have a budding Iranian-Russian strategic alliance that promises nothing but trouble. Note that, as I have indicated before, the Russians can just as easily return Iranian nuclear materials in the context of a verification crisis as they carried the stuff away, and they have recently contracted to help Iranian nuclear science and engineering efforts. They seem in this matter to be sticking their boot directly up the July 14 nuclear agreement’s posterior. They have also very recently contracted to sell lots of weapons—main battle tanks, fighters, air-defense systems, and more—to Iran in violation of both the nuclear deal and UN Security Council prohibitions. And what do they or anyone else expect the Obama Administration to do about it in its last 10-11 months in office? Absolutely nothing of any consequence.Second, we have continuing and massive state collapse—in Libya, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria—and the emergence of still inchoate successor entities, notably among the Kurds, but it does not and will not stop there. Looking a bit ahead, the sun is not about to shine in Lebanon, Egypt, Algeria, and Jordan, to name just the four most vulnerable candidates for the next huge Hobbesian mess in the Arab world.Third, the unprecedented U.S. rescission from the region itself constitutes a major moving part of the scene, and it in turn gives rise to the fourth: All U.S.-aligned Sunni states are in near panic as a result of American self-deterrence. The wriggling about of the Saudi government, one day seeming to resolve to send troops into Syria, the next backing off when the intended diplomatic tripwire fails to ensnare the Americans, is one case in point. The Turks are in an even deeper pickle. They desperately need to staunch the refugee flow from the south, but the Obama Administration refuses the idea of a humanitarian zone on the Syrian side of the border. If the Turks try to create that zone by themselves, and get into a fight over it with the Russians, they have no expectation now that the United States will have Turkey’s back. That completely deflates the credibility of Turkish threats, and everyone knows it: Erdogan cannot do anything. He can’t even turn to ISIS for help, because ISIS and a variety of Kurdish groups are now busy setting off bombs inside Turkey.Fifth, and maybe the most depressing of all, it has become clear that only Sunni political Islam is capable of mobilizing Arab politics at the popular level, whether in Syria or anywhere else in the Arab world. This is not terribly surprising: In a war, any war, political moderates tend to become rapidly extinct, one way or another. But it is a most unhappy state of affairs, to be generous about terminology.This is the broader context within which we must answer the forgoing question: Is this ceasefire dance with the Russians a good idea? Well, it might be if after the fifth bite at the apple we get some relief, whatever the price. But the price keeps getting higher with every bite, and we may end up drowning with no apple in hand. Put a bit differently, the longer-term costs of following this path could end up being more than we should be willing to bear. Now, realists have no problem dealing with the devil; we’ve done it before because we had to, and it is right to identify lesser as opposed to greater evils because, as Amos Oz once said, “Whoever ignores the existence of varying degrees of evil is bound to become a servant of evil.” This is true, of course. Hence, there is nothing realistic about giving mass murderers and their supporters a pass if the murdering goes on and on. There is nothing realistic about becoming a servant of evil, and that is the danger here.The biggest bait-and-switch proposition the Russians are dangling before us may be the most dangerous one of all. It is one that has yet to be stated in so many words, but President Putin is hoping, I think, that we will eventually figure out what is supposedly on offer. It is, in simplified form, this: We Russians will take care of your ISIS problem for you—we will seize Raqqa and kill these crazy bastards in due course—but only after and if you allow us to save the Assad regime in all the territory of Syria the regime wishes to control, and if you stay out of the way of the developing Russian relationships with Iran and the Kurds.Is this a proposition the Obama Administration should embrace on its way into the history books? It’s tempting. Nothing else the Administration will do promises to defeat ISIS, and in their private honesty all Administration principals have to know that by now. Anything kinetic the Administration might do raises the specter of a confrontation with Russia, with all the morbid scenarios one can imagine ruining everyone’s sleep. And if ISIS can be destroyed before November, the Administration might even be able to portray the outcome politically as a masterstroke of multilateralism and “leading from behind.”But what if we sign on and then the Russian leadership doesn’t follow through? What if it is content to leave a divided Syria divided, and not stoke to excess the ire of the entire Sunni world against Russia? What then?Wait and see: This mega-sized Russian bait-and-switch offer will likely take a more explicit if still largely private, diplomatic shape in coming weeks. And if President Obama falls for it he will go down in history as the most gullible and gutless American President since James Buchanan. That’s not company he should want to keep.

Armed U.S. Drones over Libya

After a year of secret negotiations, Italy agreed last month to allow the United States to fly armed drones over Libya, the Wall Street Journal reports:

But Rome’s green light came with the kind of caveat that has crimped U.S. attempts to win allies’ help in fighting the extremist group: The Italians granted permission for the drones to be used only defensively, to protect U.S. special-operations forces in Libya and beyond, the officials said.

U.S. officials are still attempting to persuade the Italian government to allow the drones, based at Naval Air Station Sigonella on the island of Sicily, to be used for offensive operations like one the U.S. conducted Friday against a training camp near Sabratha, Libya, targeting a senior Islamic State operative from Tunisia.But in private conversations over the past year, Italian officials have balked at that step, the American officials said, fearful of igniting domestic antiwar opposition, especially in cases in which the Italians could be blamed for civilian casualties. In addition, the Italians say they want any drone strikes to target only non-Libyans to avoid inflaming political tensions there, the officials said.

Military intervention in Libya is also a hot-button political issue in America: with Hillary Clinton still the presumptive Democratic nominee, both Benghazi and the broader war will likely be live issues in the general election. And despite the darkening international scene, Americans are not going to be wild about another Middle Eastern war.

But as a Pentagon spokesman said yesterday, seem to be streaming to Libya as the terror group suffers in a war of attrition in Syria. And while we’ve long argued that the 2011 intervention in Libya was unwise, it’s unrealistic to think that America and its allies can now let Libya burn indefinitely just across the Mediterranean from Europe without consequences.In the absence of firm leadership, though, the plan seems to be  mission creep by design, starting with the Italian insistence that the U.S. have boots on the ground if it’s going to have planes in the air, you’re not alone. The WSJ also provides a glimpse of what may yet come:

All this takes place as the U.S. and its allies await the outcome of talks in Libya on forming a unity government—a necessary step for creating a viable partner with which to fight Islamic State.

The Italian government has said if a unity government were formed it would send a stabilization force to Libya of 5,000 or more troops. Both the French and the British have suggested they are willing to provide support to the Italian lead mission. The U.S. is expected to provide air assets, including surveillance and transport aircraft, for such a mission.

If this enters the American electorate’s national conversation, it will have significant and interesting consequences. Libya is badly broken, and putting it back together again is not going to be easy—if possible at all.

Will California Lead the Way on Licensing?

One of the more insidious ways that insiders with political power have rigged the economy against less-skilled workers over the past generation is by imposing licensing requirements for working class professions, restricting the job supply, raising prices, and squelching competition. As Sen. Mike Lee noted in an important op-ed last month, “security guards, florists, barbers, massage therapists, interior decorators, manicurists, hair stylists, personal trainers, tree trimmers and auctioneers work in just some of the many, many professions that state legislatures have seen fit to cartelize.” So it’s encouraging to see that the largest state in the union is mulling over rolling them back. Reason reports:

In an election year, it’s hard to imagine any substantive issue transcending the din of partisan bickering and resulting in meaningful proposals embraced by members of both parties. Yet such an issue is emerging in California. Many Democrats and Republicans are recognizing the role that overly restrictive “occupational-licensing laws” play in limiting opportunities for the poor, ex-convicts and veterans.

… California’s Little Hoover Commission, an independent oversight agency, recently held a hearing in Sacramento to evaluate the situation. It eventually will make some recommendations to the Legislature. Panelists pointed to the myriad inconsistencies and counterproductive elements in California’s array of occupational-licensing laws.

To be sure, amending these laws so that they work in the interests of workers and consumers—rather than a coterie of established insiders—will be an uphill battle. The organized guilds protected by licensing laws (think: dentists who don’t want one of their services threatened by less-credentialed teeth whiteners) will fight to keep their racket in place. But if the legislature can tame the guilds in deep-blue, interest-group dominated California, then there is hope for similar efforts in states across the country. We’ll be watching.

Abe Ignores Obama’s Request to Postpone Russia Trip

President Obama is worried about Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s upcoming trip to Russia, according to the Asian Nikkei Review:

[S]ources quoted Obama as urging Abe to give up his Russia trip for now, citing Russia’s differences with the United States over the handling of the Ukrainian and Syrian issues. […]

One source said Abe “will push through with his trip to Russia in May whatever the United States says” and that Abe told Obama that resolving the territorial dispute will contribute to stability in the East Asian region.

Abe has been working on improving relations with Putin, hoping to achieve some sort of agreement over the longstanding Kuril islands dispute. Abe currently chairs the G-7, and, last month, he used his position to suggest the influential economic consortium consider restarting talks with Russia. The Kremlin has been making friendly noises toward Tokyo as well: In a move seen as designed to appeal to Japan, Moscow condemned North Korea’s January nuclear test in unusually harsh terms.

But the real story here is simply this: lame duck President Obama isn’t commanding much respect from America’s allies.