Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 490

The Biggest Reason to Fear Economic Trouble in China

China has been working to instill more patriotic values in its students, the New York Times reports:

Chinese students, already immersed in classes and textbooks that promote nationalist loyalty to the Communist Party as a bedrock value, must be made even more patriotic and devoted to the party, even when they are studying in universities abroad, according to a new directive sent to education officials.

The directive, issued by the Communist Party organization of the Ministry of Education, calls for “patriotic education” to suffuse each stage and aspect of schooling, through textbooks, student assessments, museum visits and the Internet, which is the chief source of information for many young Chinese.

This story points to the biggest reason to fear economic trouble in China: not the gloom and doom from outside analysts, but the mounting evidence that the Chinese government is in some sort of panic about the loyalty of its citizens. We’ve had the purge, we’ve had trouble for foreigners, we’ve had crackdowns on human rights NGOs and Christians, and the propaganda at last week’s New Year’s Eve celebrations was noticeably shriller than usual.

Meanwhile, the people who know China’s situation the best, who have access to inside information that the rest of us don’t, have been giving pretty clear signals that they are terrified of unrest. And while the accelerating capital flight from China has a lot to do with the economy, it is another sign that insiders want out for other reasons, too.Something big seems to be happening in China, and the increasingly desperate attempts by the regime to assert power suggest that the people who run the country are losing their confidence in the future. Even more than collapsing equity prices or a volatile currency, the political situation in China should make everyone very, very worried.

Why a SCOTUS Decision Imperils the Paris Climate Deal

The Supreme Court made a surprising decision on Tuesday, voting 5-4 to suspend President Obama’s signature emissions reduction policy—the Clean Power Plan—until its fate is decided in district (and likely the Supreme) court. Under this set of regulations, the EPA requires states to cut enough carbon emissions from power plants to reduce by 30 percent the national average amount of emissions per megawatt hour generated in 2030 as compared to 2005 levels. Immediately after the EPA finalized this plan last June, states began fighting back against it in court (27 states in total have filed lawsuits), bucking what they perceived as a federal overreach.

The DC district court is hearing these challenges and oral arguments are scheduled for the beginning of June. But the Supreme Court stepped in this week to say the EPA can’t enforce these regulations until their fate has been decided in court. This is a huge blow to what was supposed to be one of the President’s signature policies meant to combat climate change, but it has broader implications than just Obama’s green legacy. It could also imperil the UN climate agreement signed in Paris this past December, as Reuters reports:

The Paris accord requires countries to set and meet their own national targets to reduce carbon emissions, and the United States presented the Clean Power Plan as a major step to shrink power plant emissions to 32 percent below 2005 levels over the next 15 years [. . .]

Outgoing French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who was praised for his smooth chairmanship that brought about a deal in Paris, was quoted by French government officials saying the Supreme Court’s move was “not good news.”

President Obama knows he can’t rely on legislation to craft climate change policy—that dream died in the summer of 2010—and he has attempted to circumvent the resistant Republican-controlled Congress by piggybacking on the EPA’s ability to regulate CO2 as part of the Clean Air Act. This is Obama’s only play, and was the only way he could demonstrate to the Paris delegates that the U.S. was committed to cutting emissions. But its major flaw—that these regulations are subject to legal challenges—has been exposed by the Supreme Court this week.

The White House has already come out reassuring the world that the U.S. can still reduce emissions through other policy tools, chief among them a long-term tax credit extension recently given to renewable energy producers. In an attempt to downplay the severity of the court’s decision, White House spokesperson Charles Schultz said that “[the] inclusion of those tax credits is going to have more impact over the short term than the Clean Power Plan.”However, realistically, America’s climate commitments look awfully meager without the Clean Power Plan, and the developing world (and the rest of the developed world, for that matter) has to be watching what’s happening to this regulation with great concern. The Paris agreement was already a watered-down compromise, and the fact that the United States is now stumbling in its attempt to meet the climate commitments it made is a bad omen.Moreover, if the Clean Power Plan ends up a bust, the U.S. won’t face any international consequences for its failure to keep its emissions reduction promises. It took all of a month and a half to see why the Paris deal’s lack of an enforcement mechanism is so problematic.

The Once and Future War?

The afterparty from the 2011 intervention into Libya turns out to be even more crowded than we thought. CNN reports:

There may now be up to 6,500 ISIS fighters in Libya, twice the number previously thought, according to several U.S. intelligence officials.

They attributed the increase to the U.S. analysis that ISIS is diverting more fighters to Libya from Syria — and from Turkey when they cannot get into Syria.

“ISIS is investing heavily in Libya,” one U.S. official said.

While White House spokesman Josh Ernst insisted to CNN that the Administration wasn’t considering adding a Libyan front to the fight against ISIS, indications from elsewhere in the Administration is that it could indeed be Obama’s next war.

When the President looks to Libya, he’s likely to see some of the same bad options he’s familiar with from Syria. His military options will be bad, ranging from ineffective bombing to an unpopular ground invasion. Backing a local strongman (in this case likely Gen. Haftar) to take “necessary measures” would likewise be hard to sell and not guaranteed to succeed. But if he lets the problem fester, it will continue to draw in jihadi radicals and worsen the refugee crisis in Europe. While Libya’s population is not equal to that of Syria, it serves as a gateway for Africa’s poor and oppressed: As long as Libya has no government, “the Backway” stays open. Just as concerning, it could either spread to or draw in neighbors such as Algeria or Egypt, which are already experiencing problems with stability.

As we’ve noted many times here, we should have left Libya alone in 2011 (while taking action in Syria). But there’s no use (just) crying over spilt milk. Unfortunately, mopping it up is going to be a long, messy, and uncertain operation.

Pinch Yourself—a Gallon of Gas for Less than a Buck?

For most Americans, sub-$1 gas prices are nothing but a distant memory, and younger generations will find it hard to believe that anyone ever paid so little at the pump. But analysts believe that drivers in certain Midwest markets might enjoy that blast from the past in the very near future, as Bloomberg reports:

Average Illinois retail gasoline prices have dropped 34 percent in the past year to $1.57 a gallon, while Oklahoma motorists can fill up for a $1.36 a gallon, according to GasBuddy Organization. If gasoline supplies keep growing, 99-cent fuel is not out of the question, said GasBuddy, which tracks prices at filling stations. […]

The chance for 99-cent fuel is possible during the next few weeks before the summer driving season begins, Michael Green, a spokesman in Washington for AAA, said in a phone interview. “We may have some stations offering gas below $1 per gallon for marketing purposes, but the chances of a station offering under $1 are going to decrease pretty soon.”

This, of course, is a direct effect of the global oil glut. Awash in supplies, the oil market has seen prices collapse over the past 20 months, and during that time gasoline prices have edged steadily downward. Just last month the national average dipped under $2 per gallon for the first time since 2009.

But depending on where you live, prices still vary considerably thanks to differences in state taxation. Drivers in the Midwest might be giddy at the prospect of paying for their gasoline with loose change in the coming months, but these cheap prices won’t be coming to California: High taxes and regulations ensure that Californians will continue to pay too much for gas no matter how much crude U.S. shale producers pump, or how crazy the OPEC price war gets.For others of us, and especially those of us living in the Midwest, filling up is feeling a lot less like a chore these days.

Follyanna?

Eleanor H. Porter’s 1913 classic, Pollyanna, bequeathed to the English language a new and concise term for oblivious, overweening optimism and its dangers. Barbara Tuchman’s flawed but popular 1984 book, The March of Folly, described what happens when a political elite’s failure to B-team its own complacency leads to catastrophic violence. Put them together and one gets Follyanna—a dangerous inability to see the world and its bad actors for what they are because idealist illusions blur and color one’s metaphorical eyesight. That is possibly the best description yet of the Obama Administration’s general orientation to U.S. foreign and national security policy.

Or possibly not. Even after more than seven years we still cannot be sure how the President and his closest advisers think about the global environment and how the United States fits into it, or if their thinking has changed through experience over the past seven years. Some writers refer to an Obama Doctrine, but there is no such thing. Even short of declaring non-existent doctrines, many observers think they have the Administration figured out, but they have it figured out in mutually incompatible ways because the evidence is ambiguous. So some are led to label him a liberal internationalist (evidence: his multilateralist inclinations, his faith in the United Nations), some to label him a realist (evidence: his supposed leanings toward offshore balancing and his downplaying of democracy promotion), some to label him an idealist (evidence: his “no nukes” campaign), and some even to label him a neocon (evidence: his extensive use of Predator drones and special forces against Islamic extremists, his soft-peddling of supposed NSA enormities, and, most recently, on February 9, his all-but-strident lecture to Middle Eastern leaders at the Dubai World Government Summit that they should move toward “inclusiveness” in government).For those who prefer the simpler biographical approach, some have likened Obama to Carter, but others have pointed instead to Nixon, FDR, Reagan, Eisenhower, Johnson, Kennedy, and even George W. Bush. That probably means either that Obama is much more nuanced and sophisticated that most people think, or that he is a strategically incoherent improviser of last resort—or that he began as the latter but has evolved into the former. Which is it?We will probably have to await more memoirs, archives, and wise-man retrospection before we can say with any surety. But from the evidence to hand so far, it seems to me that the answer, however improbable it may seem, is “all of the above.” Let’s look at U.S. policy in the Middle East for a test case, and let’s look particularly at the current state of the Syrian civil war and the U.S. approach to it.With your kind permission, dear reader, let me start with a story. Back in mid-December, I prepared and presented a paper on Russian motives for its major military intervention in Syria for a program of the Atlantic Council. In some 7,000 words of copious analysis, I barely mentioned the so-called Geneva process designed, in theory, to produce a political settlement to the civil war. When the chairman of the program, my former State Department colleague John Herbst, asked me why I did that, I replied that it seemed to me that the Geneva process would not produce definitive or even remotely acceptable results, anymore than an earlier UN-sponsored mediation by Kofi Annan did. In both cases the Syrian regime and its allies—especially the Russians—were merely lulling gullible Westerners to sleep, stringing them along, while they used the diplomatic show to buy time to establish friendly facts on the battlefield.At that program, some of my fellow paper-delivering participants—notably Dennis Ross and Fred Hof, two very experienced and knowledgeable people—averred that the test of Geneva’s seriousness was the capacity of the process to achieve a widespread and stable ceasefire to ameliorate the humanitarian disaster in Syria. Only the regime and its Russian ally were in a position to declare and enforce such a ceasefire, which was an agreed outcome of November discussions in Vienna. But now the Geneva session has come and pretty much gone, and Geneva flunked the test: There is no ceasefire.Indeed, we now see instead a sharply accelerated tempo of violence perpetrated against civilians in and around Aleppo in what is becoming the most critical battle of the war. The Russians have no intention of taking the Geneva process seriously until they have reshaped the battlefield and the atmosphere around it—using, respectively, tactics of migratory genocide and very big lies—in such a way that the outcome is foreordained: Assad stays, Russia and Iran retain their ally and forward base in the Arab world, the rebels left alive and in-country are reduced to nuisances living in the gray zones of the eastern desert, and the Islamic State is left to menace the Sunni Arab state establishments to the sheer delight of rulers in Damascus and Tehran.This has been clear for months to those not afflicted with Follyanna tendencies. But if there were any lingering doubts about this, note that a Russian diplomat said yesterday in response to Western pressure for a ceasefire that March 1 “perhaps” might be a prospective date. The press has over- or misinterpreted this remark as “Russians propose March 1 ceasefire,” but the actual language suggests something very different: “Maybe March, I think so.” Only a Follyannish fool would take this, from a Russian, to indicate a promise or even an honest intention. The battle for Aleppo is intense and its conclusion will most likely be rapid. The Russian, with their Syrian friends, are seeking a surrender that they will then call a ceasefire. It is easy to cease firing when no one is shooting back because they are mainly dead.And the U.S. role in all this? Well, not so long ago Secretary of State John Kerry waxed very optimistic that his efforts were bearing fruit. After November talks in Vienna, when the Russians and others agreed to negotiations in January, and agreed further that those talks would be accompanied by a ceasefire and culminate in elections after an 18-month transition process, the Secretary declared: “We’re weeks away conceivably from the possibility of a big transition in Syria.”That obviously did not happen and it isn’t going to happen via the Geneva process, even if it reconvenes as scheduled on February 25. And one of the reasons is that a series of U.S. concessions doomed the talks before they ever got started [see here]. Most important, the U.S. position on Assad’s future softened and then effectively caved. That crushed rebel morale, or what was left of it, and made it almost impossible to persuade the moderate opposition to attend. But that concession rendered it inevitable that the opposition would interpret U.S. intentions going forward as a betrayal. It has already caused massive leakage from the Free Syrian Army toward Jabhat al-Nusra and other more effective fighting forces, at least for those who could escape the killing zone of Aleppo, which will soon begin to look a lot like Grozny after the Russian army was done its work there.The Saudi government, meanwhile, exerted itself to organize and deliver the rebels to Geneva—but only on the entirely reasonable condition that the pledge of a ceasefire be fulfilled before earnest political dealing began. But the pledge was not fulfilled; it turned out that the Russians were less than honest back in November, just as they are being less than honest now about March 1. So the moderate opposition showed up, sort of, but refused to discuss politics until the humanitarian siege was ameliorated. It wasn’t, and Staffan de Mistura, to his credit, knew better than to press a conference forward against the grain of reality, for it would only provide a propaganda forum for the Russian defense of a regime guilty of mass murder. That is the same problem he faces if he reconvenes the farce on February 25.The Administration not only made concessions to the Assad regime and the Russians (and by indirection, then, to the Iranians), but also to Turkey. That concession was the refusal to invite any Kurds to Geneva. Anyone can see that there is no way to achieve a political settlement in Syria without the Kurds, but one could excuse the concession as a temporary expedient if the Administration planned to lobby and enlist Turkish military help to blunt the regime and Russian surge in the Syrian north. But the Administration still refuses to buy into the idea of a humanitarian keep-out zone on the Syrian side of the Turkish border, which would obviously have to be defended at least in part by dint of Turkish military force, so it remains unclear what the concession to Ankara achieved.After the collapse of the conference the Administration did send a senior envoy to the semi-independent Kurdish enclave of Rojava, presumably to ameliorate the snub and to make sure Washington does not get outflanked by Moscow on the Kurdish issue. Apparently, the Administration felt a need, too, to show that the Turks could not bully us, that our choice of tactical allies was ours and ours alone to make. But the Administration felt no need for a similar demonstration of backbone aimed at Moscow, Tehran, or Damascus. There’s a pattern here that we’ve gotten used to seeing over the past seven years: The Administration is willing to diss its allies, but never its adversaries. It “engages” the latter, but it enrages the former on a pretty regular basis.In any event, that gesture set President Erdogan on fire, leading him to challenge the Administration to choose between its Turkish NATO ally and the “terrorists” of the PYD. The result was, first, an undermining of the potential for Geneva ever to achieve anything, even if it reconvenes—but that is over-determined anyway by the Russians. And, second, it sparked a mostly gratuitous public spat between the Administration and the Turkish leadership. We could not have parleyed usefully in private with the Kurds? Brett McGurk had to haul Old Glory all the way to Rojava for that purpose?Such a spat is not entirely harmless. Since President Erdogan got more than he bargained for after the Turkish military foolishly shot down a Russian jet overflying Hatay province in November, the Turks have been rushing back into American (and Israeli!…..the Turkish leadership is very Jewcentric in all the wrong ways) arms for protection. The spat runs the risk of persuading the Russians that the Administration does not really have Turkey’s back after all, anymore than it has had the back of the Syrian rebels or, for that matter, any other ally or proxy lately. That adds to the likely Russian assessment that the Administration, given its refusal to commit American power in any serious way in Iraq or Syria, is not now and will not be over the next eleven months any obstacle to the implementation of Russian war aims—even if those aims include further efforts to intimidate the Turks.As if to cap off a feckless and counterproductive recent America diplomacy, Secretary Kerry committed a gratuitous error not long ago that just takes one’s breath away. On February 2, Kerry described the leaders and followers of the Islamic state as “apostates.” Apostasy is a theological term, and the one thing—one of the only things, too—that everybody agrees on, and has agreed on since not long after 911, is that non-Muslims have no business making pronouncements about the character of Islam and arguments that go on inside the Muslim tent. It is wildly counterproductive for us and for our Muslim friends and allies. The President should never have said that the Islamic State is “not Islamic” in his big September 10, 2014 speech that announced the U.S. bombing campaign against ISIS, but that’s so long ago now that most people have forgotten all about it. So why did John Kerry go out of his way to remind them?It is easy to criticize this U.S. performance, and it deserves criticism. But sometimes Presidents and Secretaries of State end up doing the right things for either the wrong reasons or for non-obvious reasons, and this may be a case in point. Let me explain.It is fatuous, usually, to glibly compare a sitting President to any of his predecessors. By the same token, reasoning by historical analogy is a mug’s game unless excruciating care is taken to account for differences in context [see here]. Even then, it makes a lot less sense to try to analogize directly from one case in the past to a case in the present than to distill out some general themes from a lot of history and try, again very carefully and in full awareness of different contexts, to apply those themes. So, for example, while analogizing the situation that led to war in August 1914 to the present situation in the Levant is, contra Margaret Macmillan and many others, indeed fatuous, thinking about the structure of interlinked decision-making under conditions of time pressure and information deficits may not be.One of the observations that comes out of a study of the descent into war in August 1914 is that the more actors that are entwined in a strategic competition, the more complicated it gets to look ahead in order to assess the consequences of one’s behavior. A good chess player can think ahead several moves, but he would not be able to do so readily if instead of one opponent he faced five or seven, if the fixed rules and number of pieces were not actually fixed, and if his opponents did not have to wait their turns to move—if, say, they could make three or four moves before he made any. That’s a pretty good schematic description of reality in tight strategic interactions and, depending on the stakes, it is wise to be humble about the extent to which one can predict and control outcomes.European statesmen in 1914 screwed up. And one of the reasons, the scholars of this period tell us, was overconfidence that crises could be ended short of general war. Several such crises had preceded August 1914, and war did not break out. Too many leaders became too Follyannish at the same time to avoid the deluge.Now let’s look at Syria, and at U.S. policy, in the same general spirit. Aside from us there are several state actors with non-trivial interests engaged in or around the war: the Assad regime, Russia, Iran, and Turkey. Just outside this inner circle are Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the Emiratis and Qataris, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel. Because Turkey is engaged so on the margins are the Greeks and other Europeans. Because Saudi Arabia is engaged so, for different reasons, is Pakistan on the margins, and the Paks drag along the Indians. One cannot assume that all these state actors behave as a decision monolith.There are as well external militia proxies involved in Syria either directly or indirectly, at present or potentially: Hizballah and several Iraqi Shi’a groups, for example. There are so many Arab and Islamist groups inside Syria that it almost defies description. And of course there are the Kurds, and among them there are at least three distinct decision-making foci: The Barzani leadership in the Kurdish Regional Government; the leaders of the PYD in Rojava; and the PKK inside Turkey. There are also Kurdish political forces inside Turkey that are separate from the PKK. And if things were not complicated enough, there are Turkomans, Druze, and Syria’s myriad Christian minority communities to consider as well.Every one of these actors, on all of these levels, is capable of doing things to change the overall strategic picture. Every actor has distinct interests and looks ahead, sideways, and over its shoulder at other actors with sometimes compatible and sometimes incompatible interests. If one could present the full matrix of overlapping interests and capabilities graphically it would be extraordinarily complex to try to take in. Obviously, some actors are more powerful than others, in some cases vastly so. But the interactive nature of the strategic engagement is such that smaller powers can have outsized influence if they can identify and act on sensitive torque points. Taken all together, the result is a kind of quantum mechanical Rube Goldberg machine—a very complicated interactive system but one that nobody designed, nobody fully understands and, hence, whose kinetics no one can predict.The upshot of all this is that the Syrian civil war is an accident-prone environment for the United States. Syria has always been a hard problem, but over time—and especially with the Russian intervention—it has gotten harder still and it has also become much more dangerous. There was a time when the situation was less complex and much less blood had been spilled, and U.S. policy could have possibly headed off the full-frontal disaster that Syria has become. President Obama was extremely sensitive to the dangers of acting—“don’t do stupid shit”—but he was regrettably insensitive to the dangers of passivity. Now all his options are worse and all the dangers are greater, including the dangers from continued passivity.What if, just to toss out one scenario, the Assad regime with the Russians look to actually win the civil war, and what if they are then willing, for their own reasons, to empower the Kurds for use as leverage against the Turks? What if, too, it were to be revealed that the Russians were secretly aiding and arming PKK cadres inside Turkey, perhaps through both PYD and Chechen intermediaries? Under such circumstances President Erdogan might believe that he has no choice but to order the Turkish military into Syria, to prevent both the fall of the north to the regime and the consolidation of PYD control adjacent to the Syrian-Turkish border. That could spark direct Turkish-Russian hostilities, and it’s hard to think of two leaders we would less like to see in a situation like that than Putin and Erdogan.That in turn could lead the Turks to invoke Article V of the NATO treaty. Then what? We would know that coming to the aid of the Turks under such circumstances could presage a U.S.-Russian fight, and if that occurred no one could glibly rule out escalation—either horizontal escalation that could activate a front in Europe, or vertical escalation, up to and including the use of nuclear weapons. No, the Syria crisis is not directly analogous to the pre-World War I situation in Europe. But even if it shares only a single thematic feature in common, it’s enough to give one pause.Now folks, if I can postulate a scenario like this, so can people inside the Administration. Under such circumstances, responsible U.S. decision-makers could be expected to put a very high premium on ending the civil war before its escalatory potential gets any more real. Since we have little to no skin in the game, the only leverage we have is on allies and proxies, and it could well be that the Administration is willing to betray them all to avoid the dangers inherent in this scenario…and a few others I can think of.We could of course try to rectify the imbalance on the ground—and suggestions that even at this late hour we support and actively set up a “humanitarian” zone inside Syria is an example of that aim. But it may be too late if Aleppo falls this month. And even proponents of such a zone admit that it would be harder and more dangerous to do it now, with the Russians active in the nearby skies, than it would have been one, two, three, or four years ago. They also admit that they can discern no signs that the President is willing to go forward. The fear of Syria’s escalatory potential, combined with an acute absence of U.S. leverage on the ground, would explain John Kerry’s behavior over Geneva, in which case his public optimism was only a cover for genuine and justified anxiety. Maybe he’s no Follyanna after all.If this is so, then U.S. policy toward Syria and all it encompasses bear certain similarities to U.S. policy toward Iran and the nuclear deal. The Administration’s single-minded pursuit of that deal seems to have owed much to the fear that a pell-mell Iranian breakout would lead to a disastrous multi-sided nuclear arms race in the region that could only end in blood and tears. The way the Administration went about grasping that brass ring arguably made its policy counterproductive in the longer run; that remains to be seen, but in any case that’s not the point here. The point is that the President and his advisers may believe that a coldblooded accounting of core U.S. interests required both the deal with Iran—almost any deal that promised to delay the program—and now requires a deal over Syria—almost any deal that promises to allay the escalatory potential rising from that crucible. The breakage with allies, proxies, and reputation experienced along the way can be reckoned as just the cost of doing business, so to speak.So while the Administration, and particularly its Secretary of State, may look follyannish over Syria, it could be that it is instead very wary and extremely conservative in a situation where it believes important but not vital U.S. interests to be at stake. I have not been particularly kind to John Kerry in my writing over the past few years. But I am reconsidering his file, at least with respect to the Syria portfolio. Besides, with a President who, wisely or mistakenly, has not and will not put skin in the Syrian game, what choices does Secretary Kerry have? He might believe in the time-honored American delusion of a free-standing diplomacy divorced from power and reputation, but then again he might be trying to just do the best he can in a war zone with a quiver empty of arrows. Maybe instead of criticizing him I should be wishing him lots of luck. Perhaps I should do both.

How the West Misjudged Russia, Part 5: Peaceful Coexistence, Round Two

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 fifth essay in a series that seeks to answer these questions. Read part four here.

After their litany of complaints against the West, the Russian pragmatists as a rule conclude that the old world order ceased functioning because it did not grant Russia the role it deserved. Thus we need a new world order, one that will finally resolve the “unfinished” Cold War. Now, here is an interesting coincidence: this is exactly the idea that the Kremlin is promoting! This was the central message of the Kremlin-organized 2014 Valdai Forum, which attracts both Russian and foreign experts yearly. This time the discussion was entitled “The New Rules or the Game with No Rules?”1 Here is the main idea of the Valdai debates: the Cold War ended (or maybe it didn’t end) without any concrete agreements or rules; hence, there is a need for agreement on new principles for the global order. This is precisely the message the Russian authorities needed to be delivered to create the intellectual backdrop for Putin’s speech, which expressed the same ideas more bluntly: The Cold War “did not end with making peace and understandable and transparent agreements,” he said, so there is a need for a “new system of mutual agreements and obligations.”But which principles will this new world order be based on? The Kremlin’s statements make it clear: The new world order has to be built on the West’s rejection of its civilizational mission and the recognition of other actors’ (that is, Russia’s) right to interpret the global rules of the game; and the old international norms are not valid any more. Should the West agree to this? Interestingly enough, even the experts who are considered pro-Western in Russia today argue that the world order cannot rest on international law.Academician Alexei Arbatov: “The international relations system does not rest on international legal norms and institutions but rather on the actual balance of forces of the leading powers and their alliances, as well as on their common interests.” Apparently, Arbatov is arguing for the elevation of Russia’s role in the international relations system. But if Russia’s decline continues, the “balance of forces” principle will push Russia to the periphery of the international system.True, in mid-2015 the Kremlin gradually started to look for a more flexible way to implement its survival doctrine. This does not mean that its architects were so worried about Russia’s growing isolation and piling problems for the well-being of the rent seeking elite, which needs personal incorporation into the West, that they decided to look for an exit solution. No, the political regime, having shifted toward the “enemy search” logic, can’t leave it without creating the impression of being defeated. Hence, one could see the Kremlin attempts to build a dual-track course: On the one hand, its apologists continue to scare and blackmail the West and Russia’s neighbors if Moscow is denied “deliverables;” on the other, experts with reputations as serious scholars have started to look for ideas that could persuade the West to agree to a new status quo (hence allowing it to lift the sanctions that are crippling the Russian economy).Here is the example of the dual-track approach. Fyodor Lukyanov, stating that “the Kremlin does not want to provoke the West into applying greater pressure, but it will refrain from doing anything to reduce the current pressure,” suggested that the situation is moving into “a phase of ‘peaceful coexistence’.” This argument from a pro-Kremlin expert means that at least part of the Russian political class and business community have started to worry about what confrontation and isolation would mean for their interests. The idea of “peaceful coexistence” found supporters among German experts. Markus Kaim, Hanns W. Maull, and Kirsten Wesphal (The German Institute for International and Security Affairs—SWP) suggested looking for a new modus vivendi, understanding it as “a peaceful coexistence and ‘coevolution’ between Western ideas of domestic political order and those of Russia.” The proposed new status quo has to give the Kremlin the possibility of softening the Western stance while at the same time allowing it to demonstrate a feeling of victory over the West: “They have lost, not us!”The concept of “peaceful co-existence” was elaborated by Vladimir Lenin in the 1920s. (Lenin used the term “peaceful co-habitation.”) It had the same duality of purpose: to secure use of Western economic resources to serve the needs of the Soviet state, and to continue “the class struggle” with capitalism. In the early 1950s Stalin returned to this idea, having in mind the same agenda. He also underlined the principle of “equality” as the basis for this coexistence (thus there is historical precedent for the pragmatists’ calls for equality). However, Stalin’s “peaceful co-existence” didn’t prevent the Cold War; nor did it prevent Soviet militarization from exhausting the Soviet Union and accelerating its demise. One can’t be sure where Russia and the West will strike the balance between mutual containment and dialogue this time, given that the Kremlin has begun to seek legitimacy on a militaristic/patriotic basis.Pivot to China?One can’t avoid impression that the Russian pragmatists have started a desperate search for any idea that could justify the Kremlin’s policy or help the authorities to bring Russia back to the role of global importance. Their latest initiative is to demonstrate the need for Russia’s pivot to China.“Rejected by the West, Russia has pivoted to Asia and found in China its leading partner”—this has become the new pragmatist song. Looking at the global chessboard, one can’t help but be puzzled. Only yesterday, Russia was dating Europe; today, the Kremlin is trying to persuade the world (and itself?) that it has fallen in love with Beijing. The same experts who recently viewed Russia as part of Greater Europe, now with the same gusto sing of Russia as a part of Greater Asia.China is ready to invest huge resources into the construction of Eurasian infrastructure, which will bind Russia tightly to the East,” hopes Lukyanov.2 He is convinced that parallel to the “New West” the “New East” is emerging “under the leadership of China and Russia.” “Russia is tilting toward China in the face of political and economic pressure from the United States…. With China’s economic might and Russia’s great power expertise, the BRICS group…will increasingly challenge the G-7 as a parallel center of global governance”, argues Trenin. Sergei Karaganov tries to persuade us that “Europe has last the post war world” and the “Community of Big Eurasia” is emerging around Russia and China that will promote the idea of the new world order.However, massive Chinese investments so far have not come. Moreover, Beijing refused to finance the Russian pipeline “Sila Sibiri” that was to be the jewel of the Russo-Chinese friendship. Russia’s hopes that the Chinese will help them relieve the pressure of Western sanctions with loans have already proved unfounded.3The shrill hurrahs in Moscow for “the intertwining” of Putin’s pet project (the Eurasian Union) with China’s ambitious “New Silk Road Economic Belt” (now the “One Belt, One Road” project) could be perceived as another attempt at concealing the fakery. “Intertwining” may take place, but only as a means for China to develop the infrastructure that will connect it with Europe. Is Russia ready to serve as China’s “bridge”? The irony is that, when China wants to “bridge” itself with Europe, Putin’s Kremlin wants to push Russia in the opposite direction, which makes the whole “intertwining” a mess.Russian and Chinese animosity toward the West and the United States cannot serve as a strong cementing factor, especially given that Beijing is interested in constructive relations with Washington. “Even though Xi and Putin might be in the same bed against the West, their dreams are clearly different”, warns China expert Huiyun Feng.Trenin disagrees with this pessimistic assessment, arguing that “Sino-Russian Entente,” as he calls Moscow’s emerging partnership with Beijing, “does not mean that China in this tandem will be a hegemon—most probably Moscow will find ways to create a ‘special relationship’ with its partner.” This is hardly persuasive. Why should Beijing massage the vanity of a fading empire?On the Chinese side, one does not see any proof that Beijing is speaking the same language as Moscow. “The world’s center of gravity is shifting from Europe to East Asia, and the international system appears to be moving toward bipolar dynamics involving China and the Unites States”, writes Yan Xuetong (Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy). And what might Russia’s role in these “bipolar dynamics” be?But if “pro-pivot” experts are right and the Chinese side shows some readiness to accommodate the Kremlin in order to build a stable alliance, then I would argue that this would be the worst possible option for Russia. Why? For one reason: China’s rejection of European norms. As former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd states, “Chinese leaders see their traditional hierarchical values as being in deep contrast with those of the liberal democracies.” The Russian experts also admit that “the convergence of the outlooks” of Russian and Chinese establishments is “preservation of the current regimes in both countries.” The Russo-Chinese tandem, if it came to be, would become an anti-modernist force aimed not only at preserving their domestic authoritarianisms but also at containing liberal democracy globally.The U.S. China expert Andrew J. Nathan warns that China “will surely have greater motives and greater capacities to exercise international influence.” He lists some of the things China might use its influence to achieve: promote authoritarian values abroad; encourage the rise of the anti-liberal lobbies in democratic countries; spread “authoritarian techniques” to help other states “emulate” the strategies developed by China for using law to support repressions; “roll back the existing democratic institutions” to help to ensure the survival of the authoritarian regimes that are its key economic and strategic partners (such as Russia); and “shape international institutions” to make them “regime-type neutral instead of weighted in favor of democracy.” From the liberal point of view, such a Russo-Chinese partnership looks threatening indeed. Russia’s pivot to China in the current context (irrespective of whether Russian is an equal partner in the tandem) would be a devastating blow to the European dimension in Russia.However, today, one could conclude, that “the China Factor” has already failed to live up to expectations. The Moscow adventure in Syria only proves that the Kremlin has started to look for other ways to return to the global scene.As for the BRICS group, one can only marvel at how all its members are trying to use one another in order to gain preferential treatment from the West. As the Chatham House report “The Russian Challenge,” published in June 2015, warned,

Most Russians are deeply uncomfortable with the possibility of becoming dependent, as a junior partner, on China. The Kremlin has raised expectations of the BRICS group and of pivot to Asia and the Pacific that cannot be fulfilled. As a tactics in his battles with the United States and Europe, Putin is trying to put himself at the head of a cabal fighting against a “unipolar” and liberal world and for a new international order. The bedfellows he has assembled are ill-assorted and the thesis is unconvincing.

Hopefully, the Kremlin’s dreams of Sino-Russian entente, or of the BRICS as a new pole of the global government, will amount to as little as the pragmatists’ other ideas.

1President Putin in his Valdai address praised the authors of the paper for the discussion: “I would like to point out that the Valdai Club, with the participation from Professor Fyodor Lukyanov and Ivan Krastev, has prepared an excellent paper for the discussions that took place yesterday and in the course of these few days.”

2See Ulrich Speck’s criticism of Lukyanov’s position here.3In the first half of 2015 Chinese investments in Russia plunged 25 percent and trade fell a third. By comparison, China’s trade volume with the United States amounts to $343 billion, versus $95 billion with Russia (2014).

Pakistan and Russia, BFFs?

President Vladimir Putin is moving to strengthen Russia’s relationship with Pakistan, Bloomberg reports:

Cold War foes Russia and Pakistan are set to hold their first joint military drills on land, a sign that neighboring Afghanistan may avoid becoming the site of another proxy war between global powers.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, in need of cash, is seeking to shift away from his country’s decades-old relationship with India — which is also buying more weapons systems from the US. In doing so, Putin is embracing an old adversary that helped Mujahideen insurgents expel Soviet forces from Afghanistan in the 1980s.“Russia is increasingly concerned about the security situation in Afghanistan and recognizes the critical role that Pakistan would have to play in the reconciliation process between the Taliban and Afghan government,” said Michael Kugelman, a South Asia expert at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Russia isn’t Islamabad’s only new great power friend; China has been investing heavily in Pakistan too. It’s a shifting balance of power that India won’t like. In the past, India and Russia cooperated in Afghanistan, both working to limit Pakistan’s influence. If China and Russia are moving to support Pakistan, it’s going to have consequences for India’s ability to play the kind of role it seeks in Afghanistan, and could lead to greater India-Iran cooperation as neither country really wants to see a government in Kabul that is allied with Pakistan. Responding to this new regional dynamic will require serious strategic thinking in Washington.

The SAT Will Always Be Unfair

Critics have charged for years that the SAT is an elitist exam—that its emphasis on advanced vocabulary and challenging math problems favors rich kids with access to good schools and fancy tutors. So in 2014, in direct response to these concerns, the College Board announced that it would overhaul the test to make it more comparable to standard high school curricula, and, supposedly, more difficult to “game” with test prep courses.

But with the first test date for the “new” SAT set for next month, the critics are back, arguing once again that the new test favors privileged students. The New York Times reports:

For thousands of college hopefuls, the stressful college admissions season is about to become even more fraught. The College Board, which makes the SAT, is rolling out a new test — its biggest redesign in a decade, and one of the most substantial ever.

Chief among the changes, experts say: longer and harder reading passages and more words in math problems. The shift is leading some educators and college admissions officers to fear that the revised test will penalize students who have not been exposed to a lot of reading, or who speak a different language at home — like immigrants and the poor.

The push to change the SAT because of fairness concerns struck us as silly, and these new complaints strike us as silly as well. Of course the SAT favors, and has always favored, wealthy who went to good schools, and of course it penalizes students who went to bad schools, or whose parents are undereducated, or who don’t speak English well. We have the terms “privileged” and “disadvantaged” for a reason: Some people are born into more fortunate circumstances than others. Tinkering with the SAT won’t change this fundamental fact of life.

Of course, a just society should take steps to level the playing field. But that means beefing up educational rigor and quality for everyone, not dumbing down a college admissions test. As one New York Times commenter said, “if the poor can’t read as well as the rich, then that’s the problem that needs to be addressed.” We’re all for a fair and effective SAT, but critics should drop the pretense that test-makers in Princeton, New Jersey, can somehow make privilege disappear.

Shale’s Not Done Booming

Skimming headlines lately, you’d be excused for thinking that America’s shale boom might be close to running its course, with stories about U.S. frackers being put under immense pressure by bargain crude prices coming thick and fast. But while it’s true that $30 oil seriously challenges the profitability of most shale wells and American crude production has tapered off in recent months, the future doesn’t look quite so bleak. In fact, according to a new BP report, U.S. shale production is set to double over the next 15 years. Reuters reports:

[American shale production] is set to grow from around 4 million barrels per day (bpd) today to 8 million bpd in the 2030s, accounting for almost 40 percent of U.S. production, according to [BP’s 2035 Energy Outlook]…”We see U.S. tight oil falling over the coming years but thereafter tight oil picks up,” BP Chief Economist Spencer Dale said [. . .]

According to the report, “technological innovation and productivity gains have unlocked vast resources of tight oil and shale gas, causing us to revise the outlook for U.S. production successively higher”. Globally, tight oil production will rise by 5.7 million bpd to 10 million bpd but remain primarily concentrated in the United States.

American oil output has climbed above 9 million barrels per day on the back of the shale revolution, and it’s clear that there is still plenty of oil and gas to be tapped from those rock formations, despite the unfavorable market conditions. It doesn’t matter how low prices drop—those reserves of oil will still be down there, and when prices rebound or shale firms find ways to produce more efficiently, U.S. output will swell. Already American producers have defied analysts’ expectations with their ability to keep output up despite bargain prices, and our overall production numbers are only slightly down from their recent high water mark last April.

That resilience can be put down to the shale industry’s remarkable ability to innovate its way out of a corner, which should come as no surprise given that this whole phenomenon came about through the clever deployment of two different technologies—hydraulic fracturing and horizontal well drilling—to tap rock formations previously thought unsuitable for drilling. When you put that sort of inventive spirit together with America’s prodigious bounty of natural resources, you’ve got an equation for decades of strengthened energy security. Hail shale!

College Major Choices Increase Racial Wage Gap

Many racial justice initiatives focus on giving more minority students the opportunity to go to college. This is a worthy goal, but as a new Wall Street Journal report suggests, it’s not sufficient. Black students tend to major in lower-paying fields, meaning that the wage gap would persist even if whites and blacks attended college at the same rate:

Although African-Americans are more likely to go to college than in the past, they are overrepresented in majors that lead to lower-paying careers, according to a new report by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce that examined their share of bachelor’s degrees in 137 detailed majors.

African-Americans make up 12% of the U.S. population, but represent 8% or less in some of the highest-paying majors, such as engineering, pharmacy and computer science. By contrast, they make up 17% or more in the lowest-earning majors, including human services and community organization and social work.

One thing this suggests is that colleges aren’t doing a good enough job of helping young African Americans think through their education plans. Several initiatives that encourage African American students to go into computer science—like YesWeCode—already exist. But starting in high school, the educational establishment should double down on this kind of effort. A concerted effort by teachers, mentors, and community leaders to ensure that college-bound African American students have the skills and confidence to go into fields like mechanical engineering, petroleum geology, and pre-med could make a real dent in the wage gap.

The author of the Georgetown report gets it right, as quoted in the article, when he says, “it’s about the right church, wrong pew.” Years of credential inflation mean that in the 21st century, it’s no longer enough to go to college: You need to be smart about what you study once you get there.