Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 483

The Kurds, the Kremlin, and the Ceasefire

The Obama White House sounded uneasy after the President got off the phone with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin yesterday. In announcing that the two had agreed to the terms of a ceasefire in Syria, which is set take hold this upcoming Saturday and will not apply to ISIS or the Nusra Front, White House press secretary Josh Earnest warned that “this is going to be difficult to implement.” Indeed, though Assad appeared to be falling in line (after a public rap across the knuckles by Russia’s special envoy to Syria), and the badly battered opposition sounds resigned to give it a try, important questions remain.

Many analysts are focusing on whether the Russians will use the intervening five days to make a decisive push to hobble the opposition in Aleppo and thus further cement the Assad regime’s gains on the ground. Others are wondering whether Russia might use the fact that Nusra forces are operating in Idlib, southwest of Aleppo, as an excuse more broadly to target opposition figures in the area.But a third, potentially even thornier, issue is coming into view. Here’s British FM Philip Hammond addressing the British Parliament earlier today:

What we have seen over the last weeks is very disturbing evidence of coordination between Syrian Kurdish forces, the Syrian regime and the Russian air force which are making us distinctly uneasy about the Kurds’ role in all of this.

The reason this is such a troubling issue is Turkey. Just last week, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu that the U.S. support Turkey “with no ifs or buts” in its fight against Kurdish separatists. He blamed the Syrian Kurdish group, the YPG, for working with the outlawed PKK in Turkey to plan last week’s bombing in Ankara. The YPG is, however, being backed by the United States as its proxy ground forces in fighting ISIS. Even after an 80 minute call between President Obama and Turkey’s President Erdogan, the U.S. State Department obliquely indicated that it would continue to support the YPG.

The YPG denied involvement with the bombing in Ankara, but raised the stakes significantly last week. Speaking from a newly-established special interest section in Moscow, a YPG spokesman warned of a “big war” if Turkish ground forces directly intervened across the border. “Russia will respond if there is an invasion. This isn’t only about the Kurds, they will defend the territorial sovereignty of Syria,” the spokesman said. The Kremlin did not directly endorse the sentiment, but it also did not bother to talk it down—potentially a significant signal, given that the statement was made in Moscow.Hammond’s concerns, therefore, are warranted. Turkey is a NATO member, and Russia’s foreign policy for the past two years has had the undermining of the NATO alliance as one of its persistent goals. While bright minds in the White House are focusing on securing what they hope is a lasting peace in Syria, there’s plenty of mischief to be made over the division within NATO over the YPG. We certainly won’t be surprised in the slightest if President Putin chooses to rise to the occasion.

Backlash

The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America

by Barry Latzer Encounter Books, 2016, 424 pp., $27.99

One December night in 1984, a white electrical engineer named Bernard Goetz took a seat on a New York subway next to four young black men, who, it would later emerge, were on their way to steal coins from video arcade machines. One of the young men, Troy Canty, walked up to Goetz and said, “give me five dollars.” Canty and his friends would later testify that they were just panhandling, but Goetz, who had been brutally mugged on the subway three years earlier, believed he was being attacked. He pulled a .38 caliber pistol from his pocket and unleashed a barrage of bullets, hitting three of the four men. He then approached the fourth, who was uninjured, shot him in the back, and fled. (All four would survive, though one was paralyzed).

After the 2013 trial of George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin, a number of journalists compared Zimmerman to Goetz. Both had shot unarmed young black men, both offered at least somewhat dubious claims of vigilante-style self-defense, and both were ultimately acquitted by a jury of their peers. But there was at least one important difference: while public opinion about Zimmerman’s actions was sharply divided along on racial and party lines, polls consistently showed broad sympathy for Goetz. One survey conducted shortly after the shooting even found 72 percent support for “the subway vigilante” among African Americans in New York City. And while the Zimmerman affair lent further momentum to ongoing efforts to reform the criminal justice system and reduce racial disparities, the Goetz affair presaged the intensification of the law-and-order crackdown in the Big Apple and around the country.One major reason for the difference is the dramatic disparity between the crime rates of the latter half of the 20th century and those of today. As Barry Latzer, emeritus professor of criminal justice at John Jay College, documents in his accessible new history, The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America , U.S. cities were very nearly torn apart by an unprecedented and still partially-unexplained crime wave between the mid-1960s and the mid-1990s. This outpouring of violence transformed American politics, poisoned race relations, and generated a law-and-order backlash that gave us both militarized policing and mass incarceration. When we argue about policing and prison reform today, we are arguing about the legacy of the Great American Crime Wave and the politics it produced.At least, that’s one interpretation of our current debates. With violent crime rates near record-lows (despite an uptick this year) a different argument is increasingly gaining traction among some liberal intellectuals: namely, that the hardening of the U.S. criminal justice system had very little if anything to do with the breaking of the crime wave—and, indeed, that it was never intended to. In a powerfully argued Atlantic cover story, “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” Ta-Nehisi Coates (echoing Michelle Alexander and others) contended that mass incarceration is first and foremost a means through which whites perpetuate their long history of state-sponsored domination of African Americans. In the wake of the civil rights movement, instead of trying to amend the crimes they had perpetrated against the black population over the course of hundreds of years, American whites moved to continue their assault through mass incarceration—“the warehousing and deprivation of whole swaths of our country.” The criminal justice system, in this view, is not and was never about crime—it was always about racism, or at least so polluted with racism that any other supposed purpose is almost irrelevant to the debate.The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America can be read as an extended rebuttal to the emerging progressive understanding of crime and punishment in the 20th-century United States. It’s also a textbook of sorts, offering a range of facts and figures that should be broadly interesting to students of U.S. social history. I was surprised to learn, for example, that throughout the 19th century, crime in the United States was actually lower in cities than in the countryside, and that Chinese immigrants had sky-high murder rates in the 1920s. Less surprising was the fact that crime fell sharply during World War II and the Korean War because so many young men were sent abroad. But these and other historical tidbits are tangential to Latzer’s primary aim: to offer a history of the crime wave that contradicts many of the theories of the progressive criminal justice reform movement—about culture, about poverty, about discrimination, and about race relations.Some of these efforts are useful and persuasive, such as Latzer’s documentation of the extent to which street crime rattled the American psyche. “The frequency of violent confrontations between 1970 and 1990 reached the point where the word terrifying was not inapt,” he writes. Based on crime rates between 1975 and 1984, according to one study, “83 percent of all Americans aged 12 at the time would, in their actuarial lifetimes, be victimized by an attempted or completed violent crime, and 40 percent would be injured as a result of a robbery or assault.” The numbers were even grimmer for African Americans. So while law-and-order appeals of that era may have been racially coded at times, they were not manufactured out of thin air as a means of rolling back the gains of the civil rights movement. To urban residents of all races cowering in their apartments for fear of being assaulted on their way to church or the grocery store, U.S. society really was dissolving into a sea of violence and disorder.Latzer is less persuasive when he asserts that the disproportionate rates of violent crime (and crime victimization) among African Americans were the products of cultural norms rather than external factors like poverty and racism. The relative role of culture versus structure in shaping behaviors is a long-running, and probably intractable, debate between liberal and conservative intellectuals, and while Latzer makes room for the role played by structure, he also makes a point of arguing that culture is an independent phenomenon with a life of its own. “Impoverished African Americans shared in the southern culture of violence and transported it to the North during their migrations,” he says. “There, social isolation and discrimination perpetuated a version of this culture among lower-class blacks, accounting for the high rates of black-on-black violence.” The fact that Haitian immigrants to Florida in the 1980s had lower-than-average crime rates, he says, supports his cultural hypothesis: “Something about Haitians—call it Haitian culture—enabled them to transcend economic and social disadvantage.”For his repeated insistence that “culture trumps adversity,” progressive readers are sure to accuse Latzer of “blaming the victim.” This is always a lazy critique. But Latzer really is too loose with his cultural theorizing, too certain of his historical conjectures, and insufficiently attentive to the possibility that systematic ghettoization and neglect of African American communities in Northern cities made social stability virtually impossible. When he asserts, for example, that “few serious analyses have proved that the imprisonment rate differentials between whites and blacks were due to systematic race discrimination,” relying on studies showing that racial sentencing disparities for most crimes are smaller than is often assumed, he demonstrates a frustratingly narrow conception of what “race discrimination” might mean. After all, we know that discrimination in housing, employment, education and other institutions had profound effects on the life prospects of black people arriving in Chicago and New York in the 1960s and 1970s—stacking the deck against many defendants long before they set foot in a courtroom.Latzer’s various findings—that the crime wave was the product of demographic and cultural changes, rather than poverty and social failures, that it was devastating to the social order, and that the criminal justice system is essentially colorblind—naturally lead him to conclude that the ensuing law-and-order backlash was salutary and appropriate. “It is very unlikely,” he writes, “that the cost of the reinvigorated system of justice would outweigh the terrible price of failing to act aggressively.” Tougher policing and the dizzying growth of the prison system were not the only factors in the sudden decline of crime in the mid-1990s—the aging of the Baby Boom Generation, the end of the crack epidemic, and “positive social contagion” (that is, the spread of good healthier attitudes and habits) in high-crime communities also played a significant role—but Latzer insists that law-and-order policy changes were a “big gun in the crime-reduction arsenal.”There are now signs that our society is starting to roll back some of these policies. A bipartisan consensus in favor of criminal justice reform has been building throughout the Obama era; liberals have often led the charge on civil rights grounds, but budget-conscious libertarians and social conservatives have also signed on, leading many states, red and blue, to start modestly reducing their prison populations. After increasing fivefold since 1970, the ratio of Americans behind bars has been falling since 2009. The racial disparity in incarceration rates is also starting to narrow. Last October, a bipartisan group of Senators introduced legislation easing federal sentences for some nonviolent offenses. Though modest and mostly symbolic, such a bill would have been unimaginable had crime not declined greatly over the past twenty years.Though Latzer doesn’t explicitly condemn these efforts or link them to this year’s highly publicized and hotly contested rise in violent crime in certain cities, he warns obliquely that making the criminal justice system less punitive could jeopardize the relative peace America’s cities have achieved since crime started to fall in the mid-1990s. “There are signs that the social controls on crime are weakening and will continue to do so,” he says, citing the Obama Administration’s early release of federal drug offenders, as well as the heightened scrutiny of law enforcement in the wake of recent police shootings. While he suggests that the aging of the population is likely to hold down the crime rate in the long run, he leaves readers with the possibility that episodes of violent crime may be cyclical, quoting a criminologist who speculates that “when the murder rate ebbs, control efforts get relaxed, thus creating multiple conditions causing the next upswing.”One problem with Latzer’s approach is that he tends to treat the criminal justice system as a one-dimensional institution—one that is either relaxed and forgiving or robust and punitive. He doesn’t give much consideration to a second dimension, highlighted by National Review’s Reihan Salam and others: the extent to which criminal justice is experienced as a legitimate institution—as opposed to an arbitrary force—in those communities most affected by it. Some successful crime control efforts—like Ceasefire, an early-intervention program for gang members that makes use of law enforcement, community leaders, and ex-convicts—focus on reinforcing the legitimacy of the criminal justice system without softening it. Mark Kleiman’s idea of a “graduated re-entry” program for prisoners similarly aims to make the system more rehabilitative even as it remains relatively unforgiving of transgressions. These and other initiatives, if implemented with due care, could make the system more effective without compromising public safety or locking more people up.It’s tempting to hope that technocratic policy fixes like these could resolve the entanglement of race relations and criminal justice, and obviate the need to make difficult tradeoffs between mercy and public safety. It’s even more tempting to hope, as Coates and a growing number on the Left do, that criminal justice reform is a relatively straightforward proposition—that dramatically reducing the prison population will have little-to-no-effect on the violent crime rate (since the hardening of the U.S. justice system was never really about fighting crime, anyway). The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America is a flawed book, but it offers a bracing account of how we got here that complicates any illusion that the situation can be easily remedied. The toughening of the criminal justice system beginning in the 1970s was not just a function of racism or misguided drug laws, and it was not thoughtless or irrational. It was a response to a long-running crisis—a devastating tsunami of violence that made parts of U.S. cities almost unlivable—and it probably played an important role in finally bringing the violence under control.I use the term “under control” deliberately, as the tough-on-crime crackdown did not make the violence disappear. Rather, it controlled it—moving violent young men away from urban centers and into penitentiaries, out of view of the rest of society. In addition to being inherently coercive, these institutions witness rape and inmate-on-inmate violence on a shocking scale. The United States conquered one urgent social crisis, in part, by creating another. And even as we try to reform the system in a way that keeps crime low while putting fewer people behind bars, it’s important to remember that no matter what causes crime—broken families, racism, poverty, or culture—the criminal justice system, as Ross Douthat has written, is nothing more than “a tourniquet on what remains a gaping wound.”

Beijing Hurries to Cash in on Perceived U.S. Weakness

Amidst reports that last week was not the first time China has deployed missiles to the South China Sea, Reuters is saying that the move is part of a broader buildup in the Paracel island chain—and beyond:

From listening posts to jet fighter deployments and now surface-to-air missiles, China’s expanding facilities in the Paracel Islands are a signal of long-term plans to strengthen its military reach across the disputed South China Sea.

Diplomats and security experts in contact with Chinese military strategists say Beijing’s moves to arm and expand its long-established holdings in the Paracels will likely be replicated on its man-made islands in the more contentious Spratly archipelago, some 500 kms (300 miles) further south.

Meanwhile, in a separate piece, Reuters also on a surge in weapons exports from—and a telling fall in imports to—China over the past five years:

China has almost doubled its weapons exports in the past five years, a military think tank said on Monday, as the world’s third-largest weapons exporter pours capital into developing an advanced arms manufacturing industry.

In 2011 to 2015, China’s arms imports fell 25 percent compared with the previous five year period, signaling a growing confidence in the country’s homegrown weaponry despite key areas of weakness, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said in a report on global arms transfers.

The Wall Street Journal explains that SIPRI’s analysis suggests both that China’s military strength is growing and that it is willing to allow, and even to support, a regional arms race—one that the United States is not happy to see.

Alas, it’s not surprising to see that China has become increasing aggressive under President Obama’s tenure. It isn’t all his fault. Many Chinese read the 2008 financial collapse as a sign of the coming end of American hegemony. And, on the other side of the ledger, the pivot to Asia was launched as an attempt by the administration to assert an American presence in the area.But as the Obama presidency has progressed, and particularly since Chinese President Xi Jinping’s rule began in 2012, it’s become clear that China’s leaders don’t consider Washington’s repeated threats very threatening. U.S. dithering on the South China Sea last year made the eventual freedom of navigation operations near Chinese-claimed islands less effective than they could have been, and it didn’t help that the first attempt may have implicitly acknowledged China’s territorial claims. Meanwhile, Beijing has been watching America’s (lack of a) strategy in the Middle East, and getting the sense that this U.S. administration isn’t any more likely to respond to challenges from Beijing than it is likely to respond to direct challenges from Moscow.To be sure, the Obama administration hasn’t merely sat by doing nothing, and it has worked to strengthen alliances in southeast Asia (although not with Thailand) and with Canberra, Seoul, and Tokyo. And, of course, it’s difficult for any president to change course in a lame duck year. Nevertheless, as the events reported on in the first Reuters story suggest, Beijing appears to believe that this final Obama year is a critical opportunity for them to strengthen their territorial claims and build up their military capacity.The next administration will likely be less cautious about Beijing. Whatever else he or she believes, Obama’s successor likely won’t share his belief that America should loosen its hold on the tiller and let the tides of history carry the world to happier shores. In other words: We expect things to change in January 2017. Until then, however, we may see more stories like this one.

The Western Pragmatists Explain Russia

Editor’s Note: How do Russia and the West see one another? What are the experts’ views on the confrontation between Russia and the West? How do the pundits explain the Russo-Ukrainian war and Russia’s Syrian gambit? What are the roots of the mythology about Russia in the West, and why has the West failed to predict and understand Russia’s trajectory? This is the sixth essay in a series that seeks to answer these questions. Read part five here.

Let’s turn back to the Western pragmatists. By the end of 2014 many of them were forced to admit, as did Samuel Charap, senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, that the “‘narratives’ on Russia and relations between Russia and the West were not adequate. They need to be dumped and new approaches have to be found…. U.S. perceptions of Russian objectives in the post-Soviet Eurasia are distorted.” Paul Saunders (executive director, the Center for the National Interest): “America’s dominant narratives about Russia have been inaccurate since the collapse of the Soviet Union.” These admissions, which have become a popular refrain in the pragmatist community, sounded encouraging, since they could be interpreted as a step toward a rethinking of past misjudgments. But the follow-ups disappointed. Here is how Charap assessed the inadequacy of previous narratives: “[They] create an impression of a neo-imperialist Russia bent on subjugating its neighbors at all costs.” But isn’t that, in fact, what the Kremlin wants to do—subjugate them? How else can we interpret the Kremlin’s policy toward Georgia and Ukraine, Moldova and Armenia? A mutual romance?Saunders presented a similar analysis, stating that the narrative of a “revanchist Russia” is wrong. Why is it wrong? Because “Moscow in reality appears profoundly reluctant to launch a large scale invasion of the region.” I take this statement as meaning that the Kremlin didn’t do enough to merit an accusation of aggression or even assertiveness. What would it take to make Saunders admit that “the invasion” in Ukraine took place? Russian soldiers in Kiev? These quotes point to the pragmatists’ attempts to cling to their old premises while somehow acknowledging that their previous assessments don’t reflect reality. What is their new narrative about, then?Western pragmatists (like their Russian soul mates) keep repeating arguments straight out of the Kremlin’s playbook. I want to believe that perhaps they don’t realize that’s what they’re doing. If they do realize, how one could call what they do analysis?Let me turn my attention to the leading voices in the pragmatist chorus: John Mearsheimer and Stephen Cohen, who, like the majority of the pragmatists, argue that the West—more precisely, NATO expansion—is to blame for the confrontation. Both are very helpful because by their clear cur arguments and their insistency they present the pragmatists’ position in its most articulate form.I will turn to Kirk Bennett, the American analyst, for response. He argues,

Central European countries have not been dragged or lured into NATO by the West; they’ve been pushed by Moscow. Russian revisionism and great-power chauvinism constitute the finest NATO recruitment tool ever devised…. If Moscow doesn’t like NATO enlargement, it might usefully stop creating the conditions that make NATO membership such an attractive proposition for so many of Russia’s neighbors. An exaggerated fear of hostile encirclement drives Russian policies that antagonize other states, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy; by definition, Russia can never have secure borders as long as it keeps making enemies of its neighbors.

“The United States and its allies unknowingly provoked a major crisis over Ukraine,” Mearsheimer argued. This is Cohen’s position as well. “Putin did not begin or want this crisis”, Cohen kept saying. Really? What about Putin’s own admission that he ordered the Crimea annexation and was personally in charge of it? Or is this annexation not a sufficient cause for crisis?

I am focusing on these arguments because they still are quite common in the expert community. I will let Michael McFaul and Stephen Sestanovich respond to Mearsheimer. Here is what McFaul said: “[Mearsheimer’s] explanation of the crisis in Ukraine demonstrates the limits of realpolitik.” Mearsheimer, McFaul said, fails to explain “why Russia kept its troops out of Ukraine for the decade plus between NATO’s expansion, which began in 1999, and the actual intervention in 2014.” Really, an excellent question: why? Here is one more of McFaul’s arguments: “In fact, in the five years that I served in the Obama Administration, I attended almost every meeting Obama held with Putin and Medvedev, and for three of those years, while working at the White House, I listened to every phone conversation, and I cannot remember NATO expansion ever coming up.”1Let’s listen to Stephen Sestanovich now. The problem with Mearsheimer, he says, is that “he takes everything that political leaders say—whether Obama’s pieties or Putin’s lies—at face value.” By the way, all pragmatists evince the same tendency. This is quite ironic: in their efforts to be pragmatic and world-weary, they come off as rather naive: they do believe the Kremlin’s propaganda! Sestanovich is right: “Had NATO not grown to its present size and borders, Russia’s conflict with Ukraine could be more dangerous than what is occurring today.” I also agree with the following argument: “In proposing to turn Ukraine into a ‘neutral buffer between NATO and Russia,’ Measheimer offers a solution to a crisis that ignores its real origins and may make it worse…. Why should anyone think that declaring Ukraine a permanent gray area of international politics would calm the country down?” Really, why?I will contribute my own thoughts to this discussion. Mearsheimer (like many other pragmatists) believes Putin to be “a first-class strategist.” Even the Russian political class has its doubts about this today. Can the leader who pushed Russia toward economic crisis, the leader who constructed one of the most corrupt post-communist regimes, the leader who started two wars—in Ukraine and Syria—and one confrontation with Turkey and does not know how to end them, the leader who brought Russia to international isolation be considered a strategist? Mearsheimer must be joking!2Regarding Mearsheimer’s idea “to make Ukraine a neutral buffer state between Russia and NATO,” I will let the British historian Timothy Garton Ash respond:

Well, thank you Professor Realist. Perhaps you would like to seal the deal yourself? We have the perfect location for your realpolitik summit: Yalta, where in 1945 Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill gave an ambiguous legitimacy to the Soviet occupation of eastern Europe. That’s Yalta in now annexed Crimea.

One can’t avoid thinking that such an open declaration by Mearsheimer is useful because it so thoroughly discredits itself.

I will cite another example from the wealth of pragmatist arguments: “When the West ignores Russia’s interests, as it did in the lead up to the Ukrainian crisis, confrontation reigns.” Why should the West identify the Putin regime’s interests with Russia’s interests?One more version of the same arguments. Samuel Charap and Jeremy Shapiro, a Brookings senior fellow, wrote of the causes of the confrontation during 2014 in the following way. “The Euro-Atlantic institutional architecture had increasingly become a source of friction between Russia and the West”; NATO and EU “could never fully integrate Russia.” This is a favorite song of all Russian pro-Kremlin analysts.Those who blame the West for failing to integrate Russia should be asked whether an illiberal system can be integrated into the framework of a liberal civilization. And what would have happened to the West if such an attempt had indeed been made? But if such a scenario were actually possible, what should the West have done to make Russia reform itself? In fact, the pragmatists have always opposed interfering in Russia’s internal affairs. Hence, we can assume that the “integrators” are talking about the inclusion of authoritarian Russia into the Euro-Atlantic structures—an intriguing experiment, indeed. Are the “integrators” ready to see collapse of the West?Here is yet another explanation of the origins of the confrontation between Russia and the West during the crisis around Ukraine. Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jack Matlock: “The tensions between Russia and the West are based more on misunderstandings, misrepresentations, and posturing for domestic audiences than on any real clash of ideologies or national interests.” Matlock is trying to soften tensions by reducing the general problem to specifics. But, first, can’t the Ambassador, who lived in Russia, see the difference between liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes? Second, attempts to avoid discussing conceptual differences between Russia and the West will only create fertile ground for new misunderstandings. And finally, this approach is a perfect case of misjudgment that left the West unprepared for Russia’s “shock and awe” project.Stephen Sestanovich, pondering what went wrong and whether Moscow’s fears of encirclement have any ground, reminds us of the West’s “historic and ongoing demilitarization of the European continent” after the Cold War. During the Cold war, hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers were deployed in Europe; today, only 28,000 remain. The U.S. also allocated billions of dollars (via the Nunn-Lugar program) to improve the security of Russia’s military-industrial complex. This means that what the pragmatists label as expansion in reality has been NATO backtracking and even losing its mission.Today even some convinced Russia pragmatists have started to review their old axioms regarding NATO. Thus, Fiodor Lukianov recently wrote, “Let’s imagine another scenario—Central and Eastern Europe is left outside of the NATO alliance…. In this case most probably the geopolitical conflict between Russia coming to senses after the shock of the ’90s and self-assured West would have taken place, but not on the territory of Ukraine, but in the same Europe….”3 This truth was apparent a long time ago, wasn’t it? And here is what Lukianov is thinking on the chances of Russia’s joining NATO: “…Russia did not liberate itself from its historic tradition and psychology of a great power. And it would have been too tough an effort to subordinate itself to the alliance discipline under the US leadership….” I hope Lukianov would explain this to his Russian and Western colleagues who continue complain about the West rejecting Russia.Jan Techau, director of the Carnegie Europe center, came up with a response to the pragmatists who accuse the West of ignoring Russia and disrespecting its interests. He stated that “contrary to common myth, the West went out of its way to establish a cooperative relationship with Russia after the end of the Cold War”; all Western institutions—from the Council of Europe to EU and NATO—“bent over backwards to invite Russia in and to accommodate Russia.” And how did Moscow react? Moscow’s position amounts “to demanding a veto right over all institutional arrangements and political forums while trying to avoid all possible limitations on Russian power.” Techau speaks about another Western illusion: “that a firm position vis-à-vis Russia will inevitably be seen as a provocation by Moscow and will lead to a deterioration of relations.” Meanwhile, the Western soft approach did not prevent this deterioration.Here is what Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum has to say on the issue: “Constant efforts were made to reassure Russia.” She reminds us that no NATO bases were placed in new member states; until 2013 no exercises were conducted there; and no nuclear installations were moved there. The NATO-Russia Council was set up in 2002. Ukraine and Georgia were denied NATO membership action plans in 2008. Russia preserved a great power seat in the Security Council and joined the G-8. But, as we know, all this was not enough to satiate the ambitions of the Kremlin, whose goal is to participate in Western forums while playing by its own rules.Two former Swedish Ambassadors to Moscow (Tomas Bertelman and Johan Molander) and an Ambassador to the EU (Sven-Olof Peterson) gave their interpretation of the causes of the confrontation between Russia and the West:

The current crisis in Russian-Western relations has its roots in internal developments in Russia. Russia’s tragic failure to democratize and implement the economic reform agenda of the 1990s had many causes, but none of them can be blamed on the West…. This image of a Russia encircled by hostile forces, including an aggressive and growing NATO and European Union, was created to legitimize the regime’s actions… Conflict with the West simply serves a vital function for the current Russian leadership.

Still, we need to reflect on the question of why Russia didn’t join NATO. One of the reasons Sestanovich mentions is worth quoting:

For Russia to embark on this condition-strewn path was just as unthinkable as it was for NATO to offer membership unconditionally. Russian officials would have had to endure insufferable Western bossiness…and reviews of whether Russia was abiding by its ‘membership action plan.’ NATO did not want to start down that road any more than the Russians did.

Thus there were two ways to solve the problem: Either Russia had to be whisked into the alliance without meeting the qualifications of membership (and expect that Russia in NATO will undermine it from inside), or it would have to suffer even more humiliation by having to abide by Western rules—an unpleasant prospect for the Russian elite! This seems like a sufficient response to those who lament that Russia was not integrated into the Euro-Atlantic structures.

One more brushstroke to the pragmatists’ landscape: The pragmatic narrative on Russia is usually based on an idealized portrait of Russian domestic developments. When looking at Russia’s internal scene, the pragmatists simply cannot recognize the decline of the Russian System, because doing so would ruin their foreign policy concept: how does it make sense to accommodate a regime in an advanced state of decay? Therefore they must find evidence of the Russian regime’s capacity not only to solve problems but even to modernize itself. Russian political reality isn’t uniformly rotten, say the pragmatists. The Putin regime still has the potential to reform itself. Don’t bury it quite yet.Let’s see how Richard Sakwa described Russia in 2014: “The regime was forced to make concessions through liberalization of the political system…. [The] ‘Medvedian line’ in Russian politics remains alive—the soft-liner strategy of gradual ameliorative change.” What country is he talking about? This is the same period in which Putin hardened the regime and actually eliminated political pluralism. Where does he see this soft “Medvedian line”? It never existed, and the Kremlin has even stopped pretending that it does exist: Why go to the trouble of faking it, when the West is just as interested in keeping up appearances as the Kremlin is?Here is another example of an expert seeing a Russia that does not exist. Writing about popular misconceptions of Russia, Andrew Weiss, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an expert at ASG [Albright Stonebridge Group], offered his view of Russia, “Many outsiders would be surprised at how much freedom the average Russian enjoys. Today the majority of Russians take for granted the ability to travel abroad, own property, build businesses, read what they want on the internet, and basically, be left alone by the state.” It’s certainly true that the regime mostly leaves people alone as long as they keep to themselves (although this is no longer a given!). But the Russian state does not protect private property rights, and in fact constantly violates them; it encroaches on Internet freedom; and it treats “travel abroad” as a way of ridding the country of dissidents. The area of Russians’ personal freedoms has been shrinking constantly. What “freedoms” is Weiss talking about? It does not look Putin’s Russia today!The pragmatists have been spending a lot of effort to prove that the Russian regime is both solid and enjoys popular support. They cannot recognize that the regime is vulnerable, and that its prospects are uncertain. “The President manages to stay in touch with ordinary Russian people”, writes a pragmatist. Indeed, the situation may seem this way to inattentive observers, since the polls still indicate mass support for Putin. How much credit should we give polling in a country that has been shifted to a wartime footing and that has an aversion to telling the truth?Apparently, the pragmatists (not only in Russia) are still captivated by Putin’s approval ratings and the images of optimism and unity transmitted on television. Russian reality, meanwhile, is moving in the opposite direction, toward a deeper crisis, greater public discontent, and a clearly befuddled government. By falling for the mediated reality of Russian television, the Western pragmatists repeat the same basic errors made by the Sovietologists.And finally, on how the Western pragmatists are viewed by the Russian liberal democratic community. Let me turn to an essay by a popular Russian analyst, the former chairman of the Russian Union of Journalists, Igor Yakovenko: “The Munich Seed.” In the essay he analyzes a recent interview for the Russian media by Matthew Rojansky, director of the Kennan Institute, which has made a splash in the Russian liberal debates on how the West views Russia. Needless to say, Rojansky’s comments did not increase the Russian liberal community’s trust toward the West. Rather it proves that the Western pragmatists would prefer to have cozy relations not with the Russian liberals or civil society, but with the Kremlin. Here are segments of Yakovenko’s analysis of Rojansky’s interview:

‘Classical American mistake: an attempt to enforce on Russia our perception about her ideal statehood,’ declares Rojansky…. No doubt his view has the right to exist; moreover, such a position…flourishes among the Kremlin propagandists who, exactly in the same way, accuse the U.S. of interference in the domestic life of other countries….

Rojansky explains his position in the following way: ‘I am mentioning the phenomenon that exists today: Americans want others to enjoy the same rights and freedoms that they have themselves. This is a very strange instinct. Imagine that, walking in the park, I saw another family and demanded that its father give his child as much freedom as I give mine.’ Rojansky may have not noticed how clearly he pointed to the gap not only between him and George Kennan, but between him and Woodrow Wilson, Reagan, Churchill, Thatcher…. Returning back to the park where we left Rojansky having a walk, we’ll specify his example…. Imagine the father of that family beats his kid viciously or publicly rapes him…. Would you, Mr. Rojansky, insist … that one can’t demonstrate one’s ‘strange instinct’ and rush to save this kid? This is exactly the same Putin is doing with his citizens… Matthew Rojansky is so consequential in his pro-Kremlin position, he expresses it so fully and clearly, that one can get an impression that the Kennan Institute is the department of the Russian presidential administration and Rojansky himself is getting salary in the Kremlin’s accounting office.Here is his position on Syria: ‘I think that compromise on Syria and struggle with the ISIS could be pursued successfully: in order for this to happen an agreement is needed that the future of Assad will be discussed as the last issue.’ If this is a compromise, I don’t know what total surrender is because this is the articulation of the Kremlin’s position. On Ukraine: ‘I hope that we’ll see positive changes in Eastern Ukraine: the local authorities with the support of Russia will hold the elections and will return the border control to Kyiv.’ Here Sovietologist Rojansky outdid the Kremlin. Because even there no one demands that the elections on territory that still is recognized as Ukrainian should be held ‘with support of Russia’…Maybe, here we have a certain analog of the Stockholm syndrome in which the observer accepts the value system of the object he analyses… This syndrome—let’s call it the ‘Rojansky syndrome’—is a pretty nasty thing, because U.S. politicians still listen to Russia experts’ advice.

End of quote. No further comment.

1Also, McFaul: “ Russian foreign policy did not grow more aggressive in response to U.S. policies; it changed as a result of Russian internal dynamics”; “The only alternative policy that could have plausibly given Russia pause: granting NATO membership to Ukraine many years ago.” I agree with both points.

2One more of Mearsheimer’s arguments: that Russian thinking about NATO enlargement “was motivated by fear.” What fear? And why fear now, but not earlier? And why is fear even mentioned at the time when everyone in the Russian elite has suddenly started talking of Western decline.3Fiodor Lukianov, www.forbes.ru, Potieria Vremieni, N1, 2016.

Will Twitter Narrow the Overton Window?

The right-wing internet is up in arms over Twitter’s decision to suspend the account of an outspoken critic of feminism. From Reason‘s Robby Soave:

Remember a few days ago, when Twitter elevated anti-GamerGate leader Anita Sarkeesian to its “Trust and Safety Council,” an imperious-sounding committee with Robespierre-esque powers to police discussion on the social media platform? The goal, according to Twitter, was to make it easier for users to express themselves freely and safely.

One user who won’t be expressing himself at all is Robert Stacy McCain: a conservative journalist, blogger, self-described anti-feminist, and prominent GamerGate figure who was banned from Twitter on Friday night. Clicking on his page redirects to this “account suspended” message that encourages users to re-read Twitter’s policies on abusive behavior.

Before going further, two caveats: First, it may be that McCain is guilty of some genuine Twitter-related misconduct that no one is aware of, and that Twitter suspended his account for non-political reasons. Second, it may be that McCain’s suspension represents overreach on the part of an overzealous underling at the San Francisco company, not the deliberate implementation of a new policy, and that his account will be swiftly restored (though that looks increasingly unlikely).

If there is no more to the McCain case than meets the eye—that is, if Twitter is really breaking with its past policy of protecting users from targeted harassment and abuse and instead moving to systematically disfavor certain political views—then this could be the start of a truly significant moment in the online speech wars, and in the evolution of the media landscape more broadly.Social media was supposed to democratize the flow of information. In a provocative Twitter essay on the ways that outlets like Twitter and Facebook weaken old-fashioned political establishments, Clay Shirky wrote: “Social media is breaking the political ‘Overton Window’ — the ability of elites to determine the outside edges of acceptable conversation.” In other words, now that the barriers to entry in the political conversation are lower, elites ostensibly have less ability than before to control the narrative.Twitter’s decision to move against McCain is, in a sense, a challenge to Shirky’s thesis—a gamble that it is still possible for elites to aggressively delineate “the outside edges of acceptable conversation.” We’re just talking about a different set of elites: socially liberal Silicon Valley executives rather than centrist newspapermen and party establishmentarians.Twitter may be right that it has a lot of room to maneuver here. The notion of social media as a “great liberator” that would inherently empower ordinary people at the expense of their rulers was always overblown—just ask the citizens of free and democratic Egypt. At the same time, it really is true that the Internet has changed the way that ideas are distributed. A person like McCain can gain access to the ears and eyes of people on the mainstream right in a way that similar iconoclasts might not have been able to two decades ago. It remains to be seen whether the genie can be put back in the bottle, or whether the backlash will be too powerful for social media companies to bear.

IEA Predicts a Bad Two Years for Shale, Prices Rebound

Oil prices are mounting a comeback today, riding the release of the International Energy Agency’s medium-term outlook to post multiple-dollar gains. Brent crude is up nearly 5 percent, and America’s West Texas Intermediate benchmark jumped $1.79—over a 6 percent increase. It’s a rare rally in a market that for the past twenty months has seen prices tumble from more than $110 per barrel down eventually to below $30. The rebound comes on the news that the IEA expects American oil production could drop by 600,000 barrels per day (bpd) this year and by a further 200,000 bpd in 2017. Reuters reports:

The markets began the week with a rebound in Asian trade, reacting to Friday’s U.S. rig count data, which showed the number of oil drilling rigs in operation falling to a December 2009 low after nine straight weeks of cuts. Prices got a further boost after the International Energy Agency, the world’s oil consumer body, said U.S. shale oil production could fall by 600,000 barrels per day (bpd) this year and another 200,000 bpd in 2017.

But the report is far from fodder for oil market bulls. Rather, it’s just the opposite: As the IEA says, “it is hard to see oil prices recovering significantly in the short term,” pointing to the reality that crude supplies appear poised to outstrip demand into next year. According to the report, “[o]nly in 2017 will we finally see oil supply and demand aligned but the enormous stocks being accumulated will act as a dampener on the pace of recovery in oil prices.” And while this year and next aren’t expected to be kind to U.S. producers, the IEA sees big things ahead for American oil output. According to the report, “. . .a gradual recovery in oil prices, working in step with further improvements in operational efficiencies and cost cutting” will in time prompt “a gradual recovery” for U.S. output. More:

Anybody who believes that we have seen the last of rising LTO production in the United States should think again; by the end of our forecast in 2021, total US liquids production will have increased by a net 1.3 mb/d compared to 2015.

Russia and Saudi Arabia proposed freezing production at current levels last week, but that agreement didn’t have anywhere near the kind of positive effect on the oil market that this week’s IEA report is having. U.S. production is a big reason for that, because due to the relatively short life-cycle of shale operations, American firms will be able quickly to grab any share of the global market that petrostates might vacate. In fact, companies have been busy preparing for the day when prices increase by drilling but not yet fracking wells until it’s once again profitable to do so (creating what’s come to be known as a “fracklog“).

But if U.S. producers are able to play spoiler to proposals for global supply reduction, the IEA’s prediction for their decline this year and next is nevertheless enough to kick off a price rebound, as we’ve seen in trading today. That the IEA expects the U.S. to hit record production levels in 2021, then, ought to be keeping oil ministers in petrostates around the world awake at night.

What Chaos Looks Like

Talk about a slow-motion car crash: As countries up and down the Balkan migrant route, from Austria to Macedonia, start to tighten controls on how many people they admit, ugly scenes are starting to crop up. In :

About 5,000 people massed at two locations in northern Greece, close to the border with Macedonia, while aid groups urged another 4,000, who arrived on the Greek mainland from outlying islands, not to head to north for fear of creating a bottleneck.

“Our biggest fear is that the 4,000 migrants who are in Athens head up here and the place will become overcrowded,” said Antonis Rigas, a coordinator of the medical relief charity Medicins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders).

Meanwhile some are trying their luck  into Hungary:

Police detained 501 migrants over the weekend who cut their way through Hungary’s steel border fence, the highest number since Hungary sealed off its southern borders in mid-October [. . .]

The fence diverted the flow of migrants away from Hungary toward Croatia and Slovenia last year when hundreds of thousands crossed the Balkans en route to Austria and western Europe.However, as the weather improved in recent weeks, the number of migrants increased, and more began to cut through the fence despite a heavy police presence.

Austria has capped its daily intake of migrants at 3,200, and will allow 80 to claim asylum each day. It has threatened to whittle those numbers down even further in the coming weeks if it deems it necessary to do so. Croatia’s interior minister warned that his country would completely shut down the corridor the very moment Austria and Germany close their doors.

If the Balkan route ceased to be an option, migrants would likely once again take to the seas in attempts to reach Italy. Austria has warned that if this eventuality comes to pass, it would consider closing one of its major border crossings with Italy. Italy’s PM Matteo Renzi said the move would be “absolutely wrong” and would strike at the “heart of the very idea of European integration.”Countries along the Balkan corridor are set to meet in Vienna on Wednesday, ahead of yet one more Europe-wide ministers’ summit aimed at addressing the issue. Optimism going into the summit is not exactly the dominant mood.

Beijing Makes It Harder to Trigger Smog “Red Alert”

Beijing issued its first-ever “red alert” over toxic air pollution back in December, warning its citizens to stay inside if possible, wear masks if venturing out into the smog, and ordering half of the city’s cars off the road. The Chinese capital followed that warning up with a second red alert less than two weeks later, and rounded out the month by cautioning children and the elderly against going outside. Now, the Chinese government is tightening the standards for issuing these red alerts, making them at least potentially a little bit fewer and farther between. Reuters reports:

In future, the highest alert will only be issued when the daily average air quality index (AQI) is forecast to exceed 500 for a day, 300 for two days in a row or 200 for four days, Xinhua reported, citing Beijing’s environmental protection bureau.

At present, a red alert is issued when the AQI is forecast to exceed 200, a level the United States deems “very unhealthy”, for at least three days.

These red alerts have a large effect on the local economy, closing schools (and forcing parents to figure out a childcare solution on the fly), making it difficult for people to commute, and postponing construction projects. The decision to make the qualifications for these shut downs a little bit more stringent shows China is still struggling to find the balance between pursuing urban development and managing the rampant pollution incurred by its rapid recent growth.

The country’s recent economic stumbles will make any growth-constricting actions taken in the name of clearing smoggy skies that much more painful. But this isn’t just an economic issue, it’s a political one as well. The Chinese public has become increasingly vocal in its criticism of the government for pollution problems in recent years. But while smog may be fomenting dissent, it’s going to be a bit harder for it to trigger a red alert in Beijing in the future.

Hindu Nationalism on the Rise in India

Tensions have risen in India since Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi came to power, with complaints about “growing intolerance” filtering through the media. A recent flashpoint: the arrest of a student on allegations of sedition, relating to meetings at Jawaharlal Nehru University about the 2013 execution of Afzal Gurul, a separatist from the India-controlled section of Kashmir. A former lecturer from Delhi University was also picked up on sedition charges related to a different event at the Press Club on India. These cases have roiled India, upsetting more moderate and left-wing Indians, and after the arrests, according to the Wall Street Journal, the government launched a campaign to promote patriotism:

The three-day “mass awareness” campaign by members of Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party included hundreds of candlelight vigils across the country, the world’s largest democracy. At one of them here in the capital, participants shouted “long live mother India” and “hang separatists” while snaking through the crowded lanes of a residential neighborhood. The event ended with a loyalty oath.

“It is our moral duty to spread the spirit of nationalism,” said Kiran Chadha, a BJP leader in New Delhi. “No one who lives here has the right to speak against the country.”

Prime Minister Modi has not himself spoken about the protests or the detentions. Modi has always had two sides: the reformer and the nationalist. We, along with many others, have hoped he would emphasize the former and not as the latter during his tenure. But the reality has been more mixed. Much of Modi’s economic reform agenda remains stalled, and his party’s nationalist urges—if not his own—have been let out of the cage. In a multiethnic country there will naturally be a desire on the part of the country’s leaders to find some unifying national identity. But the Hindu variety isn’t one that will work well for many Indians—particularly the 180 million Muslims. We hope tensions get under control before the situation gets too ugly.

Kerry and Lavrov Close on Syria Deal?

Secretary of State John Kerry announced today that he and his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, had hammered out the outlines of a ceasefire for Syria, claiming that the two sides were as close as ever to an understanding. At time of writing, the specifics of the agreement have not yet been released, but only a day before, some signs began to emerge among the warring factions that a fragile break in the fighting might be arranged. :

Assad said on Saturday he was ready for a ceasefire on condition “terrorists” did not use a lull in fighting to their advantage and that countries backing the insurgents stopped supporting them.

The Syrian opposition had earlier said it had agreed to the “possibility” of a temporary truce, provided there were guarantees Damascus’s allies, including Russia, would cease fire, sieges were lifted and aid deliveries were allowed country-wide.

Those are some big “ifs” there. Secretary Kerry on some level still seems convinced that the Russians are playing it straight here and genuinely want to see the fighting stop, rather than merely playing for time. As Adam Garfinkle wrote a week ago when the first ceasefire deal was announced (whose deadline came and went earlier this week):

The “ceasefire” is not well defined. We know it leaves out the Salafis, ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, for example, so that we and others can keep bombing them. But more to the point, remember that the Syrian regime and its Russian “lawyers” insist that all rebel groups are composed of “terrorists.” There is therefore much uncertainty, to put it generously, that the regime and the Russians will cease attacking rebel groups trying to hold onto Aleppo even after a “ceasefire” goes into effect.

We will see what happens. But color us surprised if the Russians and their client sign onto any kind of agreement that doesn’t put Assad’s opponents at a meaningful disadvantage, merely out of humanitarian scruples.