Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 500

Fighting While Blind

The Navy has an intelligence chief who doesn’t have a security clearance. The Washington Post reports:

Vice Adm. Ted “Twig” Branch has been barred from reading, seeing or hearing classified information since November 2013, when the Navy learned from the Justice Department that his name had surfaced in a giant corruption investigation involving a foreign defense contractor and scores of Navy personnel.

Worried that Branch was on the verge of being indicted, Navy leaders suspended his access to classified materials. They did the same to one of his deputies, Rear Adm. Bruce F. Loveless, the Navy’s director of intelligence operations.More than 800 days later, neither Branch nor Loveless has been charged. But neither has been cleared, either. Their access to classified information remains blocked.Branch can’t meet with other senior U.S. intelligence leaders to discuss sensitive operations, or hear updates from his staff about secret missions or projects. It can be a chore just to set foot in colleagues’ offices; in keeping with regulations, they must conduct a sweep beforehand to make sure any classified documents are locked up.

So we have an intel chief who can’t read intelligence—and everyone has more or less put up with it for two years. We are fighting the sort of enemy that makes intelligence (as well as special forces) even more valuable than it is during normal conflicts—and the Joint Chiefs, Secretary of Defense, and the national intelligence apparatus have allowed this farce to go on and on. Think of every situation—from SEAL deployments to the brief Iranian capture of our sailors in the Persian Gulf this January—that Branch couldn’t be briefed on. Think of the inefficiencies that must have resulted. Think of the message that this must have sent to the intelligence community and those reporting to Branch.

Sadly, this news is of a piece with Pentagon culture, which in many ways is as bureaucratic and defensive as any other federal agency. Some combination of employment rules, cronyism, and bureaucratic ineptitude has kept the Admiral at his post, while the unresolved question of his guilt has lingered well beyond the “speedy trial” standard of justice. After this long, either Branch should be free from wrongful stigma, or if guilty, he should have been tried and by now be out of his post and/or in jail. The slow-walking which has let him remain at his post, combined with the suspended security clearance that keeps him from doing his job, is egregious.As Walter Russell Mead wrote this fall, after a series of scandalous DoD revelations:

When Robert Gates was Secretary of Defense, he found that the Pentagon was ruled by a culture of bureaucratic delay and careerism. This culture affected even such vital issues as getting effective armor to military vehicles, leading to many unnecessary deaths and mutilations by IEDs. In the middle of war, that is, the Pentagon was still in a peacetime military mode, a mode in which buck-passers, bureaucrats, and time-servers push paper, and award one another certificates of merit. One hand washes the other as everybody gets trophies, medals, and promotions at the end of the year.

The pathetic failure of the Pentagon’s efforts in Syria indicate that if anything, this culture of self-congratulation and failure is getting more entrenched.[..] The U.S. is running a vast, multi-country war effort that has become unhinged from any serious strategic vision, and we have a military system in which the commanders who see the futility and try to do something about it (and there are plenty) are sidelined. Go along to get along is the way things work in Obama’s Pentagon, and both the White House and the Congress are more interested in making the military look pretty on the parade ground than making it perform effectively in the combat zone.

It’s hard to imagine a better example of this culture than everyone tolerating this Branch fiasco. Historically, American military leadership has been known for its rapid (indeed, sometimes impatient) removal of under-performing commanders and zero-tolerance, cut-through-the-red-tape approach to bureaucracy during wartime—and the opposite during peace. Unfortunately, while the war against terror is plenty real for the enlisted men and first lieutenants out on the line, the Pentagon brass has made it clear for some time now that they intend to keep working by peacetime rules.

As Lt. Col. Paul Yingling famously wrote in 2007, “As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.” It would appear that, 9 years on, an intelligence chief who loses a security clearance, is in good shape too. And that suggests the principle as a whole still stands.

Schools Aren’t Preparing Students for a Post-Blue World

Blue model education systems were built on the assumption that most middle-class Americans didn’t have to be especially proactive about their retirement planning. In the blue heyday, it was often the norm for Americans to work at the same company for their entire careers and retire with a defined-benefit pension. But in today’s economy, where most people switch employers every few years and depend on 401(k)s for retirement security, it’s increasingly important that public education systems equip students to take charge of their own financial fate. Unfortunately, according to a recent report, schools don’t appear to be making much progress on this front. CNBC reports:

The number of states that require high school students to complete a course in economics has dropped over the last two years, and mandates for personal finance education in the upper grades remain stagnant, a new survey shows.

The biennial Survey of the States by the Council for Economic Education, released exclusively to CNBC.com, found 20 states currently mandate that high school students take economics — two fewer than in 2014.… At the same time, the Council for Economic Education survey found the number of states that require high school students to take a course in personal finance has remained unchanged at 17 since 2014.

America is currently in the midst of a transition from an employer-driven retirement model to a self-driven retirement model. This transition must be managed in part by individual workers, who will need to become more proactive in their financial planning, and in part by corporations, many of which should auto-enroll more workers in retirement plans (as some already are), matching employee contributions more generously. But there’s also a role for the government: Financial services firms that deal with 401(k)-type accounts will need to be regulated and overseen with these broader social trends in mind. And even more critically, schools must prepare students for the economic landscape that awaits them. Policymakers who are interested in facilitating the post-blue economic transition should make beefing up financial education a priority.

Russia Ready to Talk Oil Cuts with OPEC

When Leonid Fedun, the vice president of the Russian state-owned oil company Lukoil, said earlier this week that he thought that, if Moscow assented, “Russia should jointly work with OPEC to cut supply to the market,” we pointed out that embarking on such a strategy would be Putin’s decision, not one of his oligarchs. But now, Russian energy minister Alexander Novak is admitting that Moscow is willing to entertain the idea of joint production cuts with OPEC, and is looking to set up a meeting next month. The Telegraph reports:

Forward contracts for Brent crude soared as high as $35.85 on Thursday after Moscow’s oil minister Alexander Novak said his government was willing to engage in “coordination” with Opec [. . .]

“We had these sorts of consultations before, when the situation was somewhat different. As we see, prices have fallen,” Mr Novak told the Interfax news agency.

Novak suggested that the proposal up for discussion would be a 5 percent cut in output from both Russia and OPEC, which according to the FT  “would remove more than 2m barrels at day of production and help rebalance an oversupplied market.” As the quote above notes, the market has already responded, with Europe’s Brent crude benchmark spiking more than five percent in trading earlier today before erasing some (but not all) of those gains and settling now above $34 per barrel.

This talk points to the reality that Russia badly needs prices to go back up. But conditions currently don’t look very favorable: U.S. shale producers have surprised analysts with their resilience in the face of cheap prices, and Iran is ready to ramp up its own production as Western sanctions are lifted. Moreover, Russia can’t keep Iran from following through on that eagerness to raise output to pre-sanctions levels as quickly as possible—and it wouldn’t want to, anyways, for concern over what it would do to the two countries’ relationship.Therefore, Moscow’s prime target has to be Riyadh. Unable to stop Iran, Russia hopes to erode the Saudi determination to keep the product pumping no matter what it does to the price. But for its part, though Riyadh has followed a strategy that’s been motivated by the hope of undermining Iran, Tehran’s ally Iraq, and U.S. shale producers, punishing Moscow is a feature, not a bug, of its approach. Realistically, then, there is no way the Russians could get the Saudis to even think about cutting production unless Moscow is also willing to accept some limits on its own production—hence this newfound willingness to discuss ceding its ever-important market share.Taking all this into account, it’s nevertheless hard to say right now if all of this noise is just squeals of pain or is part of a serious strategy. We do know that there exists an axis of hawks within OPEC that would fight for a price rise, and as we’ve seen today, just talking about a meeting raised prices a little. So, Moscow might think, why not set up a meeting with the cartel—especially given how bad it is hurting? On the other hand, consensus still won’t be easy to reach, especially with Iran so keen to quickly regain its oil exporting clout that was hit by sanctions.And then there’s the U.S. As Russia and OPEC maneuver in response to the prolonged glut, the U.S. should be thinking ahead. If we had a president interested in playing the game, he’d be looking for ways to strengthen the shale industry right around now, perhaps by reducing licensing fees or opening up more production on federal lands, as a way of underlining the message that U.S. production will indeed rise when prices do.Keep in mind that shale producers have amassed an enormous “fracklog” of drilled but not yet completed wells ready to start producing the minute that prices return to levels that make it profitable to do so. Even if the petrostates of the world manage to reach an agreement to scale back production, upstart American producers will be there to blunt the impact of any significant rebound.

After Nuke Test, South Korea Warms to U.S. Missile Shield

After North Korea conducted some sort of nuclear test early this month, we’ve watched as South Korea and Japan hug each other—and the United States—tighter. Well, that process looks poised to continue, according to the Wall Street Journal:

South Korea is leaning toward introducing an advanced U.S. missile defense system to guard itself against threats from North Korea following Pyongyang’s recent nuclear test, a bulwark strongly opposed by China.

Current and former American officials who have recently spoken with top South Korean policy makers say the country hasn’t decided yet whether to adopt the system that the U.S. has offered but that informal talks between Washington and Seoul had increased recently [. . .]A former U.S. official who recently met with senior South Korean officials said a consensus appeared to be forming in Seoul. “Behind the scenes it looks like Thaad is close to a done deal,” this person said.

Although the defense shield would very much be aimed at protecting South Korea from the DPRK, China can’t be happy about deepening ties of this sort between Seoul and Washington. As we said after the test occurred, the biggest loser from the fallout is Beijing. Every time Pyongyang misbehaves, the rationale for a U.S.-led alliance in northeast Asia gets stronger.

Why Sudan Is Suddenly Playing Nice

A week after the news broke that Sudan was considering opening formal diplomatic relations with Israel, its President has declared that it will start to play nice with the breakaway state of South Sudan. The BBC reports:

Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir has ordered the opening of his country’s border with South Sudan for the first time since the latter seceded in 2011.

The move comes days after reports that South Sudan had ordered its troops to withdraw a short way from the border.Disputes over the border remain unresolved and the two countries fought over the Heglig oilfield in 2012.

And yet the country’s President, Omar al-Bashir, a man not exactly known for his reputation as an easy-going guy, is backing away from the boundary. Why?

Quite possibly for (one of) the same reasons that the Sudanese government was considering an opening to Israel: Sudan may be looking for a way out of its isolation, and thinks that these two steps could get it back into the good graces of the United States and our allies.U.S. sanctions are still biting in Khartoum and the effect is even more serious in a time of oil bust and China crash. Meanwhile, the times, they are a’changing with regard to Israel. Saudi Arabia’s increasingly friendly relationship with Jerusalem gives cover to other Sunnis who are making overtures. Under the circumstances, these two gestures become a feasible way to propitiate the U.S., in hopes of a welcome back in from the economic and geopolitical cold.On one level, this push could be a huge headache for the Obama Administration. Do you forget Darfur? Can you forgive the war crimes that Bashir and his cronies have committed? Would the American public even let you?On the other hand, South Sudan is now free, the Sudanese people are suffering from the sanctions, and it looks like there could be a real chance to advance the cause of peace and reconciliation on two important fronts here. And having another state, whatever happened in the past, joining the fight against radicalism and lawlessness in Africa would be a solid gain.These steps should be met, cautiously, with a sympathetic response. If Sudan is looking for ways to normalize relations with the United States and its neighbors, Washington should sit down with the leadership to see what they have in mind.

Why Sudan is Suddenly Playing Nice

A week after the news broke that Sudan was considering opening formal diplomatic relations with Israel, its President has declared that it will start to play nice with the breakaway state of South Sudan. The BBC reports:

Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir has ordered the opening of his country’s border with South Sudan for the first time since the latter seceded in 2011.

The move comes days after reports that South Sudan had ordered its troops to withdraw a short way from the border.Disputes over the border remain unresolved and the two countries fought over the Heglig oilfield in 2012.

And yet the country’s President, Omar al-Bashir, a man not exactly known for his reputation as an easy-going guy, is backing away from the boundary. Why?

Quite possibly for (one of) the same reasons that the Sudanese government was considering an opening to Israel: Sudan may be looking for a way out of its isolation, and thinks that these two steps could get it back into the good graces of the United States and our allies.U.S. sanctions are still biting in Khartoum and the effect is even more serious in a time of oil bust and China crash. Meanwhile, the times, they are a’changing with regard to Israel. Saudi Arabia’s increasingly friendly relationship with Jerusalem gives cover to other Sunnis who are making overtures. Under the circumstances, these two gestures become a feasible way to propitiate the U.S., in hopes of a welcome back in from the economic and geopolitical cold.On one level, this push could be a huge headache for the Obama Administration. Do you forget Darfur? Can you forgive the war crimes that Bashir and his cronies have committed? Would the American public even let you?On the other hand, South Sudan is now free, the Sudanese people are suffering from the sanctions, and it looks like there could be a real chance to advance the cause of peace and reconciliation on two important fronts here. And having another state, whatever happened in the past, joining the fight against radicalism and lawlessness in Africa would be a solid gain.These steps should be met, cautiously, with a sympathetic response. If Sudan is looking for ways to normalize relations with the United States and its neighbors, Washington should sit down with the leadership to see what they have in mind.

Occupy Higher Ed?

A tiny number of superstar colleges are getting the lion’s share of endowment contributions—making them immune to the disruptions reshaping the higher education sector—while middle- and lower-tier colleges are getting squeezed tighter and tighter. From Inside Higher Education:

College endowments may have grown last year by the smallest amount since 2012, as reported elsewhere on this site today, but institutions got some good financial news in the 2015 fiscal year: charitable contributions to colleges and universities rose to a record level, $40.3 billion, the Council for Aid to Education reports in its annual Voluntary Support of Education survey.

Even so, a small and exclusive coterie of institutions is disproportionately benefiting from donors’ largesse. The top 17 colleges and universities — less than 1 percent of the total universe of about 3,900 institutions — accounted for more than a quarter of the contributions, $10.42 billion. And 60 colleges and universities, under 2 percent of all institutions, received $20.15 billion, half of the total.

This is partly a downstream consequence of income inequality: As alumni of the top colleges see faster and faster wage growth, their (tax deductible) donations to their alma maters will also increase. But it’s also a cause of income inequality, for it means that the educational, extracurricular, and economic resources available to Stanford and Harvard students will continue to expand, while the resources available to students at West Texas University or Cal State Chico stagnate. Yes, some of the endowment money at elite schools goes toward financial aid for disadvantaged students, but “the proportion of raised funds that are committed for financial aid has held relatively steady for the last two decades,” according to IHE.

Despite all the progressive rhetoric about equality that emanates from the Ivy League, elite education is one of the key vehicles by which America’s upper class sustains itself. People who are really interested in leveling the educational playing field need to think of more creative solutions than simply constructing more social justice centers on elite campuses. For instance, they could explore the possibility of creating a system of national exams so that students from lesser-ranked colleges have a better chance of competing for jobs, or, as Glenn Reynolds has suggested, the idea of capping the tax deduction for endowment contributions.

What? Me Worry?

Around our 1844-built house in the Washington, DC suburbs, which we affectionately call Antebedlam, my wife and I observe a strict division of labor. When she cooks, I clean up; when I cook, she cleans up. I handle all the bills; she creates the reason for most of the bills. And it’s my job to worry, hers to generate calming reassurance. She is from old New England stock, and in my experience these folks are sparse when it comes to showing emotion. Some members of her family are stoic enough to embarrass an ice cube.

Performing my assigned task as worrier-in-chief is not always easy. Sometimes there’s just not much I can manage to worry about, at least nothing new. But the other evening I hit upon something that fills the bill, and the more I have thought about it, the more anxious I have become. I’m worried about the possibility that the Russian regime under Vladimir Putin is becoming, or perhaps already is, a “crazy state,” as the Israeli scholar Yehezkel Dror described it in a January 1980 monograph.Crazy states are dangerous. Normal statesmen cannot reason with their leaders, so deep into paranoid conspiracy theories are they. They tend to start wars. Crazy states with nuclear weapons are, presumably, even more dangerous, but—North Korea aside—that’s just theoretical musing because there’s never been a major-power nuclear-armed crazy state…yet.Why did I end the foregoing paragraph with “yet”? Earlier this month—January 12 to be specific—my friend Ivan Krastev published a short essay in the New York Times entitled “Why Putin Loves Trump.” In this article Krastev describes what he calls a two-hour-plus manifesto-style documentary called Myroporyadok (“World Order”) that ran on Russian state television last month. The first frame of the film includes this line: “Vladimir Vladimirovich, is war coming?” And the rest of the documentary is stuffed with, as Krastev describes it, “diplomats, policy analysts, conspiracy theorists, and retired foreign statesmen” attempting to provide an answer, which comes out in not too fine a point as “yes.” NATO and the United States “are fundamental threats to Russia’s future, and, if nothing changes in the coming months, the Big War could be imminent.”As Krastev reports, just days after the film ran the Kremlin released its new national security strategy, which leans explicitly and heavily on nuclear weapons. One can interpret the documentary as a kind of softening preparation for public acceptance of this new strategy. In other words, one can see it as pure manipulative propaganda and not, as Krastev suggests, “a powerful expression of the Kremlin’s present state of mind,” which views the world “as a place on the edge of collapse, chaotic and dangerous, where international institutions are ineffective, held hostage to the West’s ambitions and delusions.” Then again, maybe the Kremlin really does believe its own propaganda, as Krastev avers. If so, it wouldn’t be the first time that a highly top-heavy, reactionary authoritarian regime believed its own guff—of which more anon. Maybe Putin really does see himself as a global-scale righteous populist, standing defiant against the hypocrisy and frilly postmodern moralism of the arrogant West; “the West may carry on about values and principles,” Krastev describes Putin’s mind, “but all of that masks a realpolitik aimed at world domination.”We have grown used to new post-Soviet Russian versions of the “big lie” in recent years, and we know that this sort of thing is designed to deflect domestic failures and growing panic about their cumulative impact. We typically resist taking it seriously, and we certainly and properly resist responding in kind. But here we have something new, and this is what launched my worry antennae: Krastev points out that Myroporyadok belies a central contradiction. It cannot “reconcile its insistence that America is a declining power with the tendency to explain everything that happens in the world as resulting from American foreign policy actions. Is Washington failing in its effort to bring stability to the Middle East? Or is keeping the region unstable the real objective of White House strategy? Improbably, Moscow believes in both.”“Believes in both, believes in both,” I muttered to myself at least seven or eight times, trying to coax out of my fuddled memory where I have encountered this same symptom of craziness in high places before. And then it hit me: This penchant for contradiction within a conspiracy theory replays, pretty much exactly, the fulminations of Josef Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, and Adolph Hitler about the Jews. Is America Putin’s scapegoat as the Jews were Hitler’s?If so, we’ve got plenty to worry about, and here is why. When you detect the mental derangement of scapegoating at high levels of state, you can be sure that something decidedly nefarious is about to happen. Jonathan Sacks, among others, describes the phenomenon in a Girardian frame, as follows:

…the particular combination of conspiracy theory and substitute victim involved in the creation of a scapegoat requires a difficult mental feat. You have to believe at one and the same time that the scapegoat is both all-powerful and powerless. If the scapegoat were actually powerful, it could not longer fulfill its essential function as the-victim-of-violence-without-the risk-of-reprisal…. But if the scapegoat were believed to be powerless, it could not plausibly be cast as the cause of our present troubles…. The simultaneous presence of contradictory beliefs is a sure sign of the active presence of a scapegoat mechanism within a culture.1

America under Barack Obama serves as the perfect foil here. Yes, the United States is very powerful—powerful enough to humiliate the Russian people. But it is also feckless and passive, unable to resist the assertion of Russian values. This enables the toggling mechanism essential for the scapegoat syndrome to work: When you need the enemy to be scary, he can be; when you need him to be weak, he can be that, too.

Sacks describes the full blossoming of the scapegoat mechanism—whose actual purpose is always to ward off intra-group recrimination and violence over things having gone very wrong—as the culmination of a process that begins with the dehumanization of the would-be scapegoat and then moves on to include a victimization narrative about the self. As to the latter, listen to how Krastev describes Putin as seen in Myroporyadok:

…the film is a challenge to the widely accepted view of Mr. Putin as a coldblooded realist, a cynic who believes in nothing but power and spends his days poring over maps and checking his bank statements. In “Myroporyadok,” we find Mr. Putin the angry moralist who, similar to European populists and third-world radicals, experiences the world through the lens of humiliation and exclusion. As Mr. Putin’s close adviser, Vladislav Surkov, once wrote: “We still look like those guys from the working part of town suddenly finding ourselves in the business district. And they’ll swindle us for sure if we keep stumbling backward and dropping our jaws.”

Finally, in Sacks’s analysis, the scapegoat mechanism is characteristic of dualism, of a radical division of the world into good and evil. Dualism, a heresy of ethical monotheism, is the predicate for what he terms altruistic violence, which is based on the belief that killing other people is an act of self-defense, and that the dehumanized other is so vile that killing him is a service to the godhead. In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote that in exterminating the Jews, “I am doing the Lord’s work.” And he really believed that. So do the dualist fanatics of the Islamic State when they behead, burn, and otherwise slaughter their enemies. The question is, is Vladimir Putin, he with a finger on the trigger to launch at least 1,900 nuclear warheads in our general direction, capable of believing something like that, too? Perhaps the more precise question is this: Could a man with nearly absolute power but no solutions for his nation’s sharp decline become a prisoner of his own propaganda?

I don’t know, and I don’t know how I could know. But just think: Americans and Russians (and others, of course) endured the nuclear arms race in the midst of the Cold War and, despite a few close calls, nothing went big bang in the night. Wouldn’t it be the height of irony if now, with the ideological guts of the old days dried and shriveled up, and with the arsenals of both sides vastly reduced in volume, the danger of a nuclear exchange were much higher than most of us think?Well, as E.M. Cioran wrote in A Short History of Decay (1949), “History is irony in motion.” This is true, as any student of history knows. And so, perhaps, the worst imaginable irony actually becomes a pretty good bet. Me, I worry about it. It’s my job. My wife? Ha!—not in the slightest.

1Jonathan Sacks, Not in God’s Name (Schocken, 2015), p. 76, emphasis in original. I made my way through the same literature, and came to the same general conclusions, in Jewcentricity (Wiley, 2009), chapter 3.

Betraying Magnitsky

Last week, an official British inquiry concluded that the 2006 murder of the exiled Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko by polonium poisoning was ordered by the head of the FSB, “probably” with the approval of President Vladimir Putin.  Despite the dramatic accusation, the report, by Sir Robert Owen, added little to what was already known—that a state sponsored assassination was carried out on British soil, exposing hundreds of others to nuclear contamination.

Justice for the perpetrators of crimes against Putin’s critics, as well as other abuses, must wait for a democratic Russia. Until then, other states have the obligation to enforce in other ways the values they profess, and which define the international institutions to which they and Russia belong.Great Britain will not lead that effort. It will, as its response to the Owen report showed, carry on much as usual, going only so far as to freeze the financial assets of the “trigger men,” assuming they have any in the UK, and warn allies to beware of similar actions on their soil. From Davos, Prime Minister Cameron said he would continue to work with Russia on Syria, even though Moscow is protecting the mass-murdering Assad regime and attacking its opponents, and in so doing fomenting the growth of ISIS and the refugee crisis in Europe.As for the U.S., immediately following the Owen report on Litvinenko, Secretary of State John Kerry began talking about lifting Ukraine sanctions. It is as though the Administration’s strategy of cooperation on discrete issues needs continually to be reinforced with evidence of Putin’s outrageous behavior in other areas that it can then ignore. Indeed, President Obama’s desire for cooperation has moved Washington closer to Putin’s position, not the other way around. The U.S. has acquiesced to Assad staying in power. Barring a complete change in course, the Obama Administration will continue to pursue illusive cooperation with Putin on Ukraine and Syria at the expense of democracy and human rights.Putin does not make distinctions of this kind.  His foreign aggression is the outgrowth of domestic matters, especially his desire to distract his citizens from the economy with military adventure and imagined foreign enemies. This in turn enables a resort to “patriotism,” calculated to bolster his political position by casting his critics as traitors.Russia’s citizens, especially those brave enough to pursue democracy and human rights, pay the price. Throughout 2015, civil society and human rights organizations faced mounting legal harassment and intimidation. An independent television station was raided. The Kremlin kept pro-democracy politicians off the ballot in regional elections through the invalidation of signatures. The same tactic was used in the Moscow Duma elections of 2014 and likely will be again in national parliamentary elections scheduled for September. In an impressively malevolent move calculated to remind Russians of the perils of opposition, prosecutors detained Ivan Nepomnyashchikh in February 2015, three years after the May 6, 2012 protest, and later sentenced him to two and a half years in a penal colony.Of course, the most chilling event of 2015 was the murder of Boris Nemtsov on February 27. Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister and co-chairman of Parnas, the leading democratic opposition party, was shot within steps of the Kremlin on the eve of a planned march against war in Ukraine and for democracy in Russia. Although no state responsibility has been established, Nemtsov’s colleagues, Mikhail Kasyanov, a former prime minister, and Vladimir Kara-Murza argue that state propagandists who relentlessly smeared Nemtsov as a “traitor” engaged in “swallowing, strangling and dismembering Russia” deserve censure by the United States. About a month after visiting Washington to make this case last April, Kara-Murza himself came close to death from an unexplained illness with symptoms of poisoning.Despite all of this, throughout 2015, the Obama Administration did not impose the asset freezes and visa bans for gross human rights abuses called for by the Magnitsky Act. Perhaps sanctions are imminent, slowed by bureaucratic haggling and the holidays. More likely the process has been sidelined as the Administration continues to imagine breakthroughs in one meeting after another with top Russian officials. In any case, the damage has been done. A signal has been sent to both Putin and to Russia’s democracy movement: the U.S. did nothing, not even enforce its own law.The Obama Administration is hardly the first to resist obligations to levy pressure on dictatorships over human rights. Even at the height of the Cold War, implementation of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which used trade leverage to force the Soviets to allow emigration, mainly of Jews, needed the help of its namesake, Senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson. “Every year Scoop would sit down with various East European ambassadors and negotiate freedom for people whose names had become known to us,” a former Jackson staffer told an audience at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in 2011. Jackson “invariably came back with promises of visas for everyone on the list, in some cases hundreds of people. Only when those promises were fulfilled would a waiver be granted.”It’s important to remember that the idea behind the Magnitsky Act was well received among ordinary Russians. The targeted penalties on abusive, corrupt Russians replaced the Jackson-Vanik trade pressure with something relevant to life in Putin’s Russia. When Congress adopted the Magnitsky Act it ensured that human rights would continue to be one of America’s priorities in Russia policy. Unless Congress gets more involved, its members, like the President, will be perceived as insincere and weak when it comes to democracy and human rights in Russia.

Militarization Can Help Japan Build Its Own Silicon Valley

Japan unveiled a fancy new stealth fighter prototype yesterday, The Wall Street Journal reports:

The Ministry of Defense showed off a test aircraft called X-2 in a heavily guarded hangar at a factory here that is operated by Japan’s biggest military contractor, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. Ministry officials said the plane would perform its first test flight as early as mid-February.

At 14 meters (46-feet) in length, the ¥40 billion ($340 million) red and white-painted X-2 is smaller than a standard jet fighter. It is unarmed and its engines are underpowered. Analysts say it would take many years for Japan to develop it into an actual warplane.But that may not be the point. Rather than aiming to build its own plane, they say, Japan may be signaling its hopes of joining the U.S. or other allies in developing a fighter through an international partnership—a way for allies to develop ever more expensive weapons systems. By joining the small club of countries that possess stealth technology, including the U.S., Russia and China, Japan can show that it brings something to the table.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government may still be struggling to get the economy moving, but its acceleration of Japanese defense spending and weapons development is showing significant results. The X-2 is more than just a significant element of Japan’s aviation strategy. Although it is certainly that, it’s also a sign of how committed Japan is to using a revived military research and development program to turbocharge its high tech sector as it seeks a new era of economic dynamism.

Japan is learning from America here. U.S. defense budgets have helped Silicon Valley, pumping research money and creating a large market for high-tech products. Increasingly, tech is fungible—tech developed for military purposes is applicable to other uses and vice versa. Thanks to large military budgets, the U.S. has enjoyed a major advantage for decades now, and the dynamism of Silicon Valley and of the whole tech sector in the U.S., plus the advantages that gives the civilian economy, is a major factor in continued U.S. economic predominance. (Note: the key element in a lot of military tech these days is related to information gathering and processing; while other military tech has industrial applications — lighter materials developed for aircrafts can be used in civil planes and automobiles — info tech is at the heart of many civilian products).Lots of countries have observed that, and China in particular has been thinking about how to replicate America’s success. Israel has also stunned the world with its very similar strategy. Israeli high tech, based also on military spending to a large degree and boosted by close relations with the US, has helped keep Israel’s armed forces ahead of the regional competition, supported Israel’s economic strength, and significantly increased Israel’s diplomatic clout and leverage with the United States. Japan, where military budgets were long cramped by pacifism, has only recently been able to make significant progress down this road.But that progress is happening now. As this continues, look for the following: an accelerating cascade of new Japanese military tech, a growing push to export military products—especially into the bullish weapons markets of Asia and the Middle East, and spillover as Japanese tech companies look to use the military tech in civilian applications.Many analysts thinking about the future of Japan make the mistake of focusing too much on GDP. GDP matters, but raising GDP numbers immediately isn’t as important to Abe’s strategic vision for the country as getting the new defense and tech-based strategy successfully launched. That is what can drive a future economic revival, even as it bolsters Japan’s military power vis-a-vis China, and its alliance power vis-a-vis the US—making it a more attractive partner and ensuring that Japan remains central in American strategic thinking.Right now, Xi’s dream of a new kind of international relationship between the U.S. and China would institutionalize the greatest fear of Japanese strategists: that the U.S. would routinely do a lot of its global business with China without taking Japan into account. “Japan passing,” as this used to be known, with Japan becoming a kind of flyover state on the route between Washington and Beijing. Japan believes, and it is probably correct in this, that it can and must fight this development. Making itself an ever-more significant force in the world of military tech is one of the ways it can achieve this goal.There’s a significant downside here from the world peace point of view. China resents Japan’s militarization, and its response will not necessarily make the world a calmer place. A tech-fueled arms race in East Asia between two great powers who hate and fear one another is probably not a recipe for the dawn of world peace. More fundamentally, the growing linkage between military spending, diplomatic standing, and national economic strength is likely to fuel this kind of behavior worldwide.The naifs who thought that the internet and the coming of the tech economy would erode the power of the state and accelerate the move to a liberal world order in which military strength would matter less and less are heading for some unpleasant learning experiences.