Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 507

When Pensions Crowd out Infrastructure

The enterprising blogger Greg Branch has an interesting explainer on the origins of the Flint water crisis that doubles as a rebuttal to those (mostly on the left) who are trying to turn it into a crude bludgeon against their political opponents. As Branch explains, the disaster was caused by a cascade of failures at multiple levels, implicating people in both parties as well as non-partisan bureaucrats. One passage:

So Flint’s water department is asked to start treating its own water – something it hasn’t done in at least 50 years, if ever. The water guys told the mayor and Council and the EFM (by this time, Darnell Earley), “sure, we can do that.”

Apparently, they couldn’t. I’m speculating here: They had no experience in treating raw water. I don’t know if they read a book, took a seminar or watched a how-to on YouTube, but either way, they started treating the water as if it were being run through a modern distribution system of plastic and copper pipes.It’s not. It’s running through a 100-plus-year-old system of cast iron mains and lead service lines.

The crisis may have been averted if the authorities understood the need to treat the water properly given their aging water distribution infrastructure—but it would also have been averted if that infrastructure was up to date. The reality is that revenue-hungry city governments had been systemically starving basic infrastructure maintenance for decades while scrounging every dime to meet the demands of unions, feed the greed of crooked politicians, pay exploding health care and pension costs, and fund other “urgent” priorities. As a result, little things like maintenance and upgrades for century-old water systems were apparently out of the question.

Sound principles of public finance and administration, like the laws of arithmetic and the logic of cause and effect, are neither Republican nor Democratic. And when a society like ours ignores basic principles for decade after decade, the consequences start to build up.

A Great Green Hope Stalls

One of the most promising eco-friendly technologies at hand is having a bear of a time getting off the ground. As the FT reports, carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies are struggling to prove their worth as a cheap way to help heavy emitters go green:

While there are 22 projects operating or under construction worldwide, capacity is tiny compared with what is needed to meet a target of curbing global warming levels to a 2 degree centigrade target, let alone the 1.5 degree aspiration agreed at Paris climate talks. […]

“Coal will play an important role in the world’s energy mix for years to come, so if we are going to meet our climate targets, CCS is essential,” [said World Coal Association head Benjamin Sporton].Yet others argue that focusing on CCS for power generation is the wrong approach . . . CCS for large-scale power generation does not make sense, [says the Carbon Tracker Institute’s Anthony Hobley]. “There are multiple risks including competition from new technologies such as renewables and energy storage.”

One of the attractive benefits of carbon capture systems is their ability to mitigate emissions from power production and industrial activities that don’t have cheap alternatives. If CCS can be commercially scaled in a cost-effective manner, developing countries interested in cheaply providing power to their citizens wouldn’t have to ditch coal-fired plants in favor of more expensive renewable options. They could instead install CCS systems and continue to burn the cheap, sooty energy source. Then too there’s the issue of emissions from heavy industry, a problem that despite green wishes can’t be solved with lavish subsidies for less efficient, eco-friendly alternatives—for the simple reason that such alternatives don’t exist. To cut that category of emissions, you either have to stop production (not a realistic option, unless we’re willing to stop using raw materials like steel), or use carbon capture systems.

But the technology isn’t there yet, and the CCS industry finds itself struggling to prove itself a viable option. There would be smoother sailing if there was a robust market for the carbon being captured, but that isn’t the case. Environmentalists likely won’t want to hear it, but one of the few parties interested in captured carbon market is the oil industry, which has been using CO2 to boost drilling output, one of the many innovative techniques producers have employed to stay profitable in today’s bear market.Basing predictions about the future on the technologies available at present day is a sure way to get those prognostications wrong, and just because CCS isn’t thriving now doesn’t mean it won’t find a path to success on the back of a research breakthrough. Policymakers keen on greening the global economy would be much better served diverting money away from the subsidization of inefficient current-gen eco-friendly solutions, and instead spending that cash and political capital on the development of something that could actually work. Carbon capture may not be there yet, but that doesn’t mean it should be written off, either.

“Assad Is Winning”

While the US rearranges chairs around the table for another round of diplomacy over the fate of Syria in Geneva, Russia, Iran and their allies are rearranging the armies on the battlefield, undermining the very basis for the negotiating process the Americans are counting on. The AP reports:

In November, government troops broke a three-year siege of the Kweiras air base in the northern province of Aleppo, and in December they captured another air base, Marj al-Sultan, in an opposition stronghold near the capital, Damascus. Allied fighters from the Lebanon’s Shiite Hezbollah group, as well as Iranian military advisers and pro-government militias, have helped the army take several areas in and around Latakia province, the heartland of Assad’s minority Alawite sect, which dominates the military and government.

The latest victory came last week with the capture of the town of Salma, one of the most significant government advances since the Russian air campaign began. Overlooking the coast, it is only 12 kilometers (seven miles) from the border with Turkey, a key supporter of rebels in the area.“The Syrian army has shifted from a defensive mode to offense,” said Gerges. “Before the Russian intervention the army was bleeding, it was desperately trying to maintain its position, but now it has achieved major tactical gains on many fronts.”This does not bode well for the Geneva talks, as neither side will be interested in making compromises while the front lines are in a state of flux, Gerges added.

Noted Syria expert Joshua Landis put it more bluntly in an interview with the LA Times:

“Assad is winning. Russian air power [has] changed the entire dynamic of what’s going on, and it just gives the Syrian army an incredible boost. […] What I’m hearing from Damascus is that it has taken time to digest the new technology, for the Russians to get well situated, get the intelligence they require and know what they’re doing.”

It’s almost as if the Russians aren’t trying to help us—and it’s almost as if diplomacy disconnected from policy doesn’t really get you anywhere.

Promised Heaven, But Given Hell

The longer ISIS is in control of territory, the more it becomes clear to ordinary Syrians and Iraqis that underneath its promises of a return to the Age of Mohammed lie corruption and abuse of a sort with which they are all too familiar. The AP reports:

“It’s a criminal gang pretending to be a state,” [refugee and former prisoner of ISIS Mohammed] Saad said, speaking in Turkey, where he fled in October. “All this talk about applying Shariah and Islamic values is just propaganda, Daesh is about torture and killing,” he said, using the Arabic acronym for IS.

Syrians who have recently escaped the Islamic State group’s rule say public disillusionment is growing as IS has failed to live up to its promises to install a utopian “Islamic” rule of justice, equality and good governance.Instead, the group has come to resemble the dictatorial rule of Syrian President Bashar Assad that many Syrians had sought to shed, with a reliance on informers who have silenced a fearful populace. Rather than equality, society has seen the rise of a new elite class — the jihadi fighters — who enjoy special perks and favor in the courts, looking down on “the commoners” and even ignoring the rulings of their own clerics.Despite the atrocities that made it notorious, the Islamic State group had raised hopes among some fellow Sunnis when it overran their territories across parts of Syria and Iraq and declared a “caliphate” in the summer of 2014. It presented itself as a contrast to Assad’s rule, bringing justice through its extreme interpretation of Shariah and providing services to residents, including loans to farmers, water and electricity, and alms to the poor. Its propaganda machine promoting the dream of an Islamic caliphate helped attract jihadis from around the world.

Instead, they wound up with an unbridgeably wide gulf between what the group promises and what it delivers. ISIS’ brutality extends from its much-hyped executions down to savage abuses for even banal offenses:

One sign of the distance between the claims and realities is a 12-page manifesto by IS detailing its judicial system. The document, a copy of which was obtained by the AP, heavily emphasizes justice and tolerance. For example, it sets out the duties of the Hisba, the “religious police” who ensure people adhere to the group’s dress codes, strict separation of genders and other rules.

A Hisba member “must be gentle and pleasant toward those he orders or reprimands,” it says. “He must be flexible and good mannered so that his influence is greater and the response (he gets) is stronger.”Yet, the escaped Syrians all complained of the brutal extremes that the Hisba resorts to. One woman who lived in Raqqa said that if a woman is considered to have violated the dress codes, the militants flog her husband, since he is seen as responsible for her. When her neighbor put out the garbage without being properly covered, she said, the woman’s husband was whipped.

Delusional, ignorant bigots and thugs somehow fail to build paradise on earth? Color us shocked. This is something we’ve been covering for a while, but really can’t be stressed enough. The Middle East is in a grave cultural crisis, and it’s not altogether surprising that a group that promised a magical return to the Age of the Prophet, enforced through violence and strict readings of scripture, might have been given a hearing by some. But it is for the same reason vital that ISIS fail and be seen to fail by the peoples of the Middle East.

No, failures of governance won’t in and of themselves kill off the Islamic State. Force will be needed for that, very much including someone’s boots on some ground at some point. But it’s also vital that the idea of the Islamic State die. And failures of implementation have discredited more than one utopian dream.

How China Can Hurt India

If Beijing devalues the yuan, India suffers. So warns Delhi’s G-20 negotiator, Arvind Panagariya, in an interview with Reuters:

“India has to be certainly very concerned if a massive or very large devaluation of the yuan happens,” Panagariya said in an interview after returning from a visit to China to discuss preparations for this year’s G20 summit.

“In the end, that not only makes Indian goods less competitive in the Chinese market but also India’s ability to compete with the Chinese in third markets is impacted.”Panagariya, appointed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi a year ago to run his government’s Policy Commission, said he doubted China would allow the yuan to crash: “The Chinese are not going to let the yuan devalue excessively.”

With the Indian rupee appreciating against many currencies (although not the dollar), India watchers should keep a close eye on Beijing’s moves. The downsides of currency devaluation aren’t so great at the moment, and the upsides are clear. A weaker currency makes raw materials more expensive to import, while making exports more attractive. In an era of dirt cheap commodities, raising the cost of raw materials imports isn’t so much of a concern. But the need to keep exports competitive remains a key challenge.

Asia watchers often miss the extent to which officials in Tokyo, Beijing, Delhi, and elsewhere are making decisions in order to gain a competitive advantage and not simply in response to domestic concerns. So while we don’t know whether a big yuan devaluation is coming, we do know this: China wouldn’t mind if India struggled a bit.

Prisoner’s Dilemma

Several American citizens unjustly incarcerated in Iran have been released in return for the release of seven Iranians held in U.S. jails for violating the terms of congressionally mandated trade sanctions on Iran, and the revocation of warrants against a dozen or so others not in custody. This occurred in tandem with Implementation Day of the July 2015 nuclear agreement, for the IAEA testified this past week that the Iranian side has met its obligations under that agreement.  It also occurred just days after the Navy sailor arrest-and-quick-release incident, and scant weeks after the Iran missile tests/new sanctions business erupted into political play. How (if at all) are these events connected, and what does it mean?

The answer is twice “we don’t know.”  The first aspect of “we don’t know” is simple and literal, and it applies to you, typical but still dear reader, and me both. There are aspects of all these puzzle pieces about which we remain in the dark. The second aspect is interpretive and longer range: What does this entanglement mean for the future of Iranian politics and policy, of U.S.-Iranian relations, and the broader security of the Middle East?  We don’t know that either.Don’t Know, Type IAs to the prisoner exchange, how long have these negotiations been going on in secret? Apparently, about 14 months. Knowing that helps us recreate the sequence of juxtapositions with the other issues, which might help us infer something about their connectedness. But it helps only a little, as it turns out. So what else do we know?Press reports suggest that it was the Iranians who wanted to accelerate the swap, leaking a few weeks ago that such a deal might be possible. That jives with the statements in the press that the details of the swap were agreed only very recently to coincide with Implementation Day, that the Iranians were pressing for a larger number on their side, something like 19 or 20, but President Obama reportedly refused to include anyone who had been involved in any violent or terroristic behavior—and the Iranian side relented.Maybe. One U.S. national in Iranian custody was not released, suggesting that the exchange was partial: If we demurred on some names, the Iranians demurred on at least one other. Ah, but maybe they demurred on more than one other, because one of the Americans citizens released had not been previously known to be in Iranian custody. Maybe there are more.Secretary of State John Kerry said that the prisoner exchange was not part of the nuclear deal, despite the parallel discussions that apparently were going on before July 14, but that they were related in that the nuclear deal talks normalized relations at least enough to allow the other negotiation to get traction. This sounds like typical diplomatic obfuscation: not “part of,” but “related”? It reminds me of President Clinton’s hilarious and infamous parsing of what “is” is, but this is part of what diplomats actually and sometimes usefully do—deploy ambiguity for good purposes. So the entertainment value here is more limited than it might at first seem.Now what about the Navy incident, which occurred just hours before the President’s State of the Union address this past Tuesday? Well, the Defense Department has still not explained what happened with those 10 U.S. sailors on those riverine boats that, everyone seems to agree now, were within Iranian territorial waters. What were they doing there anyway? Who were these particular servicemen—in other words, what if any was their special training?—and how did they get caught? We don’t know, leading one to wonder whether they were on some kind of intelligence collection adventure. One sort of hopes so.That possibility is made more likely by the fact that they were apprehended by the IRGC, not the regular Iranian Navy and, as we all know, they were released very quickly. That might suggest that the Iranian side did not want to mess with the prisoner exchange talks or the optic of Implementation Day. We don’t really know.Some, including Secretary Kerry but also others, have crowed about this quick release, suggesting that it validates the investment of all those hours Kerry spent talking up Foreign Minister Zarif. What they don’t say is that the whole catch-and-release episode could have been avoided if the IRGC had simply warned the sailors away, as ordinary etiquette in such matters might have called for—but admittedly that depends on the specific circumstances of the encounter, and we don’t know enough about the details to say. Nor do they say that using photos of detained uniformed American military personnel for propaganda purposes—which they did—is a violation of the Geneva Conventions—which it is. Clearly, some key facts are missing here, as far as normal people not privy to the intel are concerned, so we just cannot be sure about the sequence of events and hence their interconnectedness.Some connections are clear, however. It seems the Iranian side, long before a few weeks ago, wanted to connect more explicitly the prisoner exchange business with the nuclear negotiations and we, for very good reasons, rejected the linkage. In short, we were faced with a prisoner’s dilemma…  When some journalists asked why back in July, the President explained it well: “Think about the logic that creates. Suddenly, Iran realizes, ‘You know what? Maybe we can get additional concessions out of the Americans by holding these individuals.’”Other American officials at the time rejected the linkage and the very idea of an exchange because of garden-variety moral hazard risks. The Iranians in jail in the United States broke the law and were convicted by real courts, while the American citizens held in Iran had violated no laws, were (supposedly) not involved in any espionage or other illegal activity, and were incarcerated by a judiciary firmly in the hands of hardliners whose respect for any rule of law they do not dominate and cannot manipulate at will is modest, to say the least. To equate the two kinds of prisoners was simply beyond the pale, and do to so would only encourage the IRGC or others to grab other innocent Americans for future leverage.That was and remains true, which is why the U.S. government went out of its way on Saturday to fend off expectations of moral hazard. One senior official said for public consumption that the exchange was a “one-time arrangement because it was an opportunity to bring Americans home” and should not be considered something that would “encourage this behavior in the future” by Iran, or, presumably, any other actor. But if you have to say it, it means it’s a problem, and it’s not clear that saying it helps or hurts to avoid the problem in future. (PD: Whatever the case, within hours of my writing this paragraph, news broke that Americans have been taken hostage by Shi’a militias in Iraq. Its great to be proven correct so quickly, but for it to happen so fast that I could not even get into print beforehand is a little deflating, truth to tell).This is not a new issue. Some people (and U.S. officials) who have preferred to wear human rights on their sleeves have been guilty of a similar kind of moral hazard. For example, the more we used to berate the Chinese in public about heir egregious human rights violations, the more incentive we gave them to beat and arrest dissidents, so that these poor pawns could be used as leverage—as part of some supposed “humanitarian gesture”—the next time some Sino-American meeting or summit popped onto the diplomatic calendar. It is not good statecraft to encourage the other side’s cynicism, and eventually we learned to be more careful about this sort of thing. The Obama Administration got the essence right here: Don’t link the issues and drag innocent Americans into the middle of a muddle because it does make it harder, all else equal, to walk away from an unequal deal.So then why did the Administration agree in the end to this exchange? It was a judgment call. “After the Iranians raised the prospect a few weeks ago,” one American official (probably Ben Rhodes) said, according to the press, “it was clear this would be the only way.” A “window opened” and as President “you have to make a decision: Would it be better to leave these Americans there with sentences that stretched on because we don’t want to make a reciprocal humanitarian gesture? . . . Our determination was that it was a better decision to get our people home.”That account is not hard to credit as sincere and accurate, since in the U.S. government the circumstances of what are calls Amcivs ranks very high in government priorities, as well they should. If one insists on being a moralist in office, then one does not deal with “evil” and one does not equate lawful prisoners in U.S. jails with innocent hostages in Iranian jails, and so on. But if one is a realist about these things, as we generally were when we dealt with Soviet officialdom for decades and as we have been in dealing with the Chinese government for decades too, one takes for granted that the other side will lie, cheat, steal, dissemble and in any way possible seek a unilateral advantage. But we still have our interests and we still have to deal with them as they are, as opposed to how we wish they were. One does what one can and has to do under the circumstances. The world as it is is multi-hued, not two-toned. These are hard choices and no one should pretend otherwise.In what amounts to very short-term retrospect, then, it seems clear that the Iranians wanted to get rid of this problem of holding Americans for having done nothing wrong except to have dual citizenship, which the Iranian government does not recognize as valid. Why? Hard to say.Maybe, as with the embassy hostages many years ago, the Iranians figured that these people had exhausted any possible value to them and that it was becoming counterproductive to keep holding them. Perhaps it had something to do with Iranian domestic intrigues that are more or less opaque to us—not just “us” out here in ordinary land but also to our intelligence community. Our releasing seven Iranians and revoking indictments on a dozen or so others was just a sweetener, it appears, to help the Iranians save face and make Rouhani’s government look good. Maybe we figured that this was in our interest as well as Rouhani’s. It wasn’t much of a concession in any case, since the law under which they were arrested goes by the boards anyway with the lifting of nuclear technology-related trade sanctions anyway, thanks to Implementation Day.Finally on “we don’t know” type I is the connection between the prisoner release and sanctions we mooted but then pulled back after two Iranian missile tests violated the July 2015 accord—that according to the UN Security Council. Here there clearly is a connection, and the Administration has admitted it: We did not want to screw up the prisoner exchange by spraying lemon juice into the atmosphere until that deal was done and consummated. There were also, it is worth noting, some sensitive exchanges just shy of Implementation Day about the nature of centrifuge research Iranian scientists can and cannot do during the next decade or so. So the Administration did pull that new sanctions punch—but at the time it was hard to know if it would be temporary, or not? That question is a perfect lead-in to the second and grander aspect of the “we don’t know” theme.Don’t Know, Type IIEven before all the facts are known about recent incidents and their connections established (if ever), many observers claim to know what it all means in larger strategic terms. The Administration, as may be expected, has been spinning wildly about the value of diplomacy and the wisdom of the nuclear deal in having prevented an Iranian nuclear breakout and hence another war. The President’s language on this in this past Tuesday’s State of the Union address constitutes the fastest spin of all.But lots of commentators, not all of them Administration supporters or shills, have claimed that the Iranian meeting of the technical demands of the nuclear deal before we expected them to be done, the “catch-and-release” episode, and now the prisoner exchange are all manifestations of a new era in U.S.-Iranian relations and even of a new Iran, an Iran headed speedily toward Thermidor, to use Crane Brinton’s classic terminology—normalcy in the aftermath of the Iranian revolution. Of course, these observations come with the usual self-protective caveats, but the trajectory of the comments is clear enough. The Administration claimed that the transformation of Iranian politics in the aftermath of the deal was not a condition or even a relevant expectation, but the logic of the situation declared otherwise. And now some observers are ratifying these unclaimed expectations, leaping forth to say, as it were, “See, we told you so.”Not everyone is convinced. Critics contend that the Administration is still, as ever, giving away the store. Some Republican candidates for President have said that the exchange makes us look weak and that we should not have negotiated with these jerks in the first place while they were illegally holding innocent U.S. citizens as hostages. Their release, some say, should have been a precondition of the negotiations. That’s a great applause line, but what if we tried this and it didn’t work?A negotiation between states that do not like or trust one another is not a favor one does for the other. If there is nothing in a prospective negotiation for the U.S. side, we should not be negotiating, preconditions or no preconditions. So it comes down to whether any preconditions we might wish to insist upon will fly, and if there is anything we can do on the side to make their fulfillment more likely. If not, then insisting on preconditions is merely a demonstration of petulance without much of a practical purpose—or, as is the case with the almost inevitable Palestinian Authority demand for preconditions for negotiations with Israel, is a sign that there is no interest in an actual agreement to start with. It is easy for someone like Donald Trump to make such statements, and for his supporters to enthusiastically endorse them, because he has never been near any consequential government decision on such matters, and so has no idea what he is talking about.Other critics, like Marco Rubio, have pointedly raised the moral hazard problem, and rightly so. And it’s not just the Iranians who will notice. So we shall see if other U.S nationals soon get snatched for purposes of collecting leverage. I would not be surprised. (PD: See aforementioned PD)But all these peregrinations over the prisoner swap, both in support of it and in criticism against it, are mostly overblown. What really are we taking about here? We’re talking about a few unlucky people who got caught up in machinations they knew little to nothing about, probably on both sides, who have now been released from their nightmares. This is a human-interest story that is ultimately of very minor strategic importance.It is highly spinable, however, and that’s why many media mavens are claiming that this swap marks a major Administration triumph. Alas, our celebrity culture has become very outsized and our mainstream press’s pandering to it tends to reward optics rather than substance. It tends to reduce all issues to biography, to the who’s-up/who’s-down metric that obscures the actual news and what it means. It all about “flaps and chaps,” Owen Harries used to tell me, all about scandal and personalities and, preferably, some combination of the two that produces high outflows of intrigue, innuendo, and moral umbrage. That’s what people like to read about, and it is so much easier for jaded journalists to write that way than to tackle genuinely complex and often abstract issues about which they may understand rather little.In this case one can forgive the highly personal and parochial nature of the Washington Post coverage, since one of the released prisoners is a Washington Post employee. But otherwise, we are better served by keeping our eye on the strategic ball. And if we do that, a lot of the suggestions and claims put out there over the past 48 hours start to look a little distended.To return to the matter of the Iranian missile tests for a moment, is the punch that the Administration pulled to seal the prisoner exchange temporary or not? (Another PD: When I wrote this sentence a few hours ago, the matter was still not resolved; now it is: New sanctions have been invoked.) Well, Bill Burns, who was Under Secretary of State for Policy when the sanctions regime against Iran got launched during the Bush Administration, defends the nuclear deal in terms that do not entirely pass my credulity test. He claims, as many do, that the deal effectively freezes Iran’s nuclear ambitions for ten to fifteen years, that this “is a real advantage to us,” and that it was “achieved by tough-minded diplomacy and not war.” But I and others have laid out a plausible path for Iranian cheating on the verification scheme and reneging on the deal well before a decade has passed, having first copped the front-loaded financial gains and the advantages, if any, of the cheating. Hillary Clinton agrees with Burns, who worked closely with her when she was Secretary of State, but even she admits that it is in the Iranian “nature” to try to cheat. She would know, because she read all the intel about that nature and past cheating while she was in office. So in this context it is noteworthy that Burns urged Obama to issue new sanctions against Iran over the missile tests to demonstrate that we will keep up the pressure in what will inevitably be a mixed relationship going forward, with lots more pushing and shoving than “humanitarian gestures” and other niceties.  He wants to keep the diplomacy tough-minded, and here he is certainly correct. Happily, the President agreed with him.But that does not a happy ending necessarily make. Several benchmarks that optimists point to lately as evidence that things are going well with the implementation of the nuclear deal strike me as much more ambiguous.First, yes it’s true—if we believe the IAEA—that to reach Implementation Day the Iranians have shipped 98 percent of their enriched uranium out of the country, in this case to Russia. I’m not sure I do trust the IAEA’s judgment, seeing as how this is the same underfunded organization that agreed to let Iran supply its own soil samples from Parchin and elsewhere for testing, and passed on the PMD (possible military developments) portfolio in a way that did not make me feel all that warm and cozy. But even putting that aside, who thinks that the Russian government, which has recently contracted to build more Iranian nuclear power plants and which hopes to pierce the Iranian arms market in a serious way, is beyond shipping some or all of that enriched uranium back to Iran during and just after a future verification crisis? Pardon me for buzzing the ointment, but the current Russian government is not our friend, and the fact that Russia is the repository for this material gives them more leverage, and the Iranian government more options, than I would prefer they have. There was no other way to get agreement on this aspect of the deal—that’s clear. Still.Then, second, there is the Arak reactor, the plutonium route to a bomb. The Iranians claim they have disemboweled the core, and the IAEA has testified to same. They did this, and other technical tasks, faster than the CIA and the Energy Department thought they could. They did so supposedly because they have been in a huge hurry to get their hands on their money, and some argue that Rouhani’s sensitivity to the calendar turns on an upcoming, late-February parliamentary election. Maybe so.But what the speedy engineering work also demonstrates is that if Iranian engineers can denature the core of the Arak reactor quickly, they can reconstitute it quickly as well.  Same goes for mothballed advanced centrifuges. So what many look to for evidence that all is well with the deal or even better than well, others see as evidence that all may not be so well after all. People tend to see what they expect to see—by dint of what cognitive psychologists refer to as “the evoked set”—and when expectations merge with partisan political alignments, predictably conflicting certainties emerge. That’s politics, often enough.Those of us whose interests, training, and experience are not in partisan politics but in social science analysis tend to be more focused on explaining why what happens happens before we go running off to chase down heroes and villains and, in the process, satisfy our own evoked desires and expectations. But the truth of the matter is that we rarely can know for sure why what happens happens and what the longer-term strategic implications may be. Events rarely provide clean test cases to score who turns out to be right and who turns out to have been wrong even in retrospect. That’s because situations get overlaid with new factors that make teasing it all apart in a postmortem very difficult.So not only do we still not know how the larger, strategic bets will play out, of which this prisoner swap is just a tiny and marginal part, we may never know, even if we live long enough for the dust to (mostly) settle. Alas, the question “What just happened?” turns out to be a lot easier to ask than to answer.

Flint’s Blue Model Crisis

Where there’s a crisis in a modern American city, blue model failures—in particular, bankrupt pension funds or intractable public unions—are probably lurking not far below the surface. That is certainly the case for the water contamination disaster in Flint, Michigan, which is traceable to the city’s desperate efforts to save money by switching its water source from the City of Detroit’s water system to the Flint River. As the Daily Caller‘s Blake Neff reports, the city made that decision under heavy budgetary pressures, caused, in part, by its untenable public pension system:

Flint’s problem is fundamentally one of money. The city was the birthplace of General Motors and once had a thriving economy based on the auto industry, but those days are long gone and Flint is now known for its deep poverty (40 percent of the population is impoverished), urban blight, and high crime. As a result, Flint’s population has fallen sharply from about 200,000 in the 1960s to under 100,000 today. The economic downturn combined with a drop in population has unsurprisingly severely restricted Flint’s tax revenues.

What hasn’t been restricted much, though, are the pension demands of Flint’s former workers. Flint has about 1,900 government retirees, who outnumber actual city employees three to one. A glance at the city’s financial forecast from spring 2015 shows that, within the city’s general fund, pensions and retiree health care dominate 33 cents of ever dollar spent, with the figure expected to hit 37 percent by 2020.… Pensions by themselves didn’t cause Flint’s current crisis. But they played a substantial role that should not be ignored, especially by other struggling cities that could find themselves in similar situations in the future.

Does the emergency in Flint point to the politics of the future, in which tapped out blue cities will increasingly be unable to supply the basic needs of their citizens, and be forced to appeal to the federal government for help? As other blue cities face increasingly serious crises of governability, there are reasons to worry that it might.

The Democratic presidential candidates earned applause last night for denouncing Michigan Governor Rick Snyder’s handling of the Flint situation. But have any of them offered a plan for addressing the underlying cost problems plaguing Flint and other Democratic-controlled urban areas? As we’ve written before, the federal government will likely need to get involved, at some point, with the deepening budgetary disasters plaguing these cities. But this involvement must be guided by the concept of relief-for-reform, in which the bankrupt cities get limited assistance in exchange for real changes to the policies that led to this mess. Those policies include, but aren’t limited to, high wages and pension promises (usually underfunded) for unionized public employees, zoning restrictions, enterprise-killing regulations, unrealistically high levels of tax combined with “exemptions” and carve-outs for crony capitalist special interests, and an overstuffed bureaucracy to give jobs to the politically well-connected.The Democrats are comfortable talking about more money for American cities, but not so much about that whole reform idea—at least, not yet.One thing a smart think tank might want to do while this crisis brews: develop a set of model policies and reforms that could be used as a starting point to work with burnt-out blue cities. We may be headed toward the biggest crisis in American local government since the race riots of the 1960s; it’s time to think about what comes next.

Political Correctness Collides with Reality in Burundi

Things are worse in Burundi than reported: An initial estimate about attacks in early December put the death toll at 87, but the UN has said that it was at least 130. And the kind of violence reported is both tribal and deeply horrifying. The AFP:

“The pattern was similar in all cases: security forces allegedly entered the victims’ houses, separated the women from their families, and raped – in some cases gang-raped – them,” [UN Human Rights Chief Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein] added.

Police and army forces had also arrested “considerable numbers of young men, many of whom were later tortured, killed or taken to unknown destinations,” Zeid said.

He voiced particular alarm at testimony from residents in various neighbourhoods indicating that the search operations following the December 11 violence had targeted Tutsis in particular.

One woman was told she was being sexually abused because she was Tutsi, and in Bujumbura’s Nyakabiga neighbourhood, a witness claimed Tutsis “were systematically killed, while Hutus were spared,” Zeid’s office said.

In other words, after weeks and weeks of being told that the violence in Burundi wasn’t tribal, we’re now hearing that the security forces are raping and murdering Tutsis because of their identity.

This mix of political correctness and cluelessness on the part of the media makes it hard for readers to understand anything about regional politics. Those in the area aren’t so confused. Rwandan President Paul Kagame and his backers in his country have likely been focused on the ethnic side of the story right from the beginning—and the prospect of more tribal conflict in a neighbor is likely part of the reason why Kagame has blown past his term limit (with, it should be noted, the support of the voters).The media may now be waking up to the realities in Burundi, but given how long it has taken for that to happen, what WRM noted—when the news about Kagame’s decision to ignore his term limit broke—still rings true:

Nothing is more common among the elite and the cognoscenti than to hear tales about how poorly informed ordinary Americans are about world events. Maybe so, but much of this ignorance reflects the failures of the elite; people who don’t understand the world very well themselves are usually poor at explaining it to others, and too many members of the self-appointed American media and journalistic elite are so immersed in conventional thinking, the globaloney of the Davoisie and pious human rights fantasies that millions of their fellow citizens no longer pay attention to anything they have to say.

Indeed.

Rumors Swirl Around the Saudi Throne

Unnamed U.S. diplomats are said to be speculating that the Saudi King Salman will abdicate in 2016 in favor of his son Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the current Defense Minister. The Sunday Times (of London) reports:

At present Salman, 80, is due to be succeeded by his nephew, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, 56. A report by the Washington-based Gulf Institute, supported by Saudi dissidents, claimed last week that the king could change the rules and install his son.

Suggestions of the change — which the institute claimed could be within weeks and US officials have said is more likely to be in the summer — have unsettled advisers to Mohammed bin Nayef, known as MbN, the interior minister.It has alarmed American officials, who fear it could trigger further instability in the Middle East, especially as Saudi Arabia already has tense relations with Iran.

If true, this would be a revolution: the Saudi succession has gone from one septuagenarian to the next in a ritualized pattern for decades. Putting a young and vigorous 30-year-old in the top spot would change the way the country works and, potentially, would make the new king one of the most powerful people in the world.

U.S. officials are clearly hoping this doesn’t happen. The defense minister has been associated with the recent line of Saudi policy that has been shaking up the region, and it is predicated on a belief that, with the U.S. no longer a reliable ally, the Saudis have to take their destiny in their own hands.In the opaque world of Saudi politics, it’s quite possible that these rumors are being floated by diplomats and others in the hope of forestalling the change. Among other things, the change would sideline the current Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Nayef (56), who the Americans seem to favor—to the degree that the London Times story can be believed. He and his allies would be unlikely to sit on their hands while power in Saudi Arabia was snatched from under their noses.In any case, this is one more sign pointing to massive upheavals inside the KSA. Obama’s Iran diplomacy is destabilizing the country that for decades has been the keystone of American strategy in the Gulf. As the oil price falls, Iran reaps the rewards of the nuclear deal, and the sectarian war heats up across the Middle East, a pillar of geopolitical stability that presidents going back to FDR have seen as a cornerstone for American policy is beginning to shake and sway.Given this administration’s record at anticipating and managing political developments in the Middle East, it seems unlikely that the White House has a clear vision and a solid plan for dealing with the new situation.We do indeed live in interesting times…

Andrew Jackson, Revenant

Not since he fought with Nicholas Biddle over the future of the Bank of the United States has Andrew Jackson been this controversial or this central in American political life. Jacksonian populism, the sense of honor-driven egalitarianism and fiery nationalism that drove American politics for many years, has never been hated and reviled as often as it is today, and many American academics and intellectuals (to say nothing of Hollywood icons) are close to demanding that Jacksonian sentiment be redefined as a hate crime.

For President Barack Obama and his political allies in particular, Jacksonian America is the father of all evils. Jacksonians are who the then Senator had in mind when, in the campaign of 2008, he spoke of the ‘bitter clingers’ holding on to their guns and their Bibles. They are the source of the foreign policy instincts he most deplores, supporting Israel almost reflexively, demanding overwhelming response to terror attacks, agitating for tight immigration controls, resisting diplomacy with Iran and North Korea, supporting Guantanamo, cynical about the UN, skeptical of climate change, and willing to use ‘enhanced interrogation’ against terrorists in arms against the United States.He hates their instincts at home, too. It is Jacksonians who, as I wrote in Special Providence back in 2001, see the Second Amendment as the foundation of and security for American freedom. It is Jacksonians who most resent illegal immigration, don’t want to subsidize the urban poor, support aggressive policing and long prison sentences for violent offenders and who are the slowest to ‘evolve’ on issues like gay marriage and transgender rights.The hate and the disdain don’t spring from anything as trivial as pique. Historically, Jacksonian America has been the enemy of many of what President Obama, rightly, sees as some of America’s most important advances. Jacksonian sentiment embraces a concept of the United States as a folk community and, over time, that folk community was generally construed as whites only. Lynch law and Jim Crow were manifestations of Jacksonian communalism, and there are few examples of race, religious or ethnic prejudice in which Jacksonian America hasn’t indulged. Jacksonians have come a long way on race, but they will never move far enough and fast enough for liberal opinion; liberals are moving too, and are becoming angrier and more exacting regardless of Jacksonian progress.Just as bad, in the view of the President and his allies, Jacksonians don’t have much respect for the educated and the credentialed. Like William F. Buckley, they would rather be governed by the first 100 names in the phonebook than by the Harvard faculty. They loathe the interfering busybodies of the progressive state, believe that government (except for the police and the military) is a necessary evil, think most ‘experts’ and university professors are no smarter or wiser than other people. and feel only contempt for the gender theorists and the social justice warriors of the contemporary classroom.Virtually everything about progressive politics today is about liquidating the Jacksonian influence in American life. From immigration policy, touted as ending the era when American whites were the population of the United States, to gun policy and to regulatory policy, President Obama and his coalition aim to crush what Jacksonians love, empower what they fear, and exalt what they hate.Jacksonian America is many things; well organized isn’t one of them. Jacksonians are found in both political parties; most are habitually indifferent to national politics, seeing all politicians as equally corrupt, equally useless. Other than the NRA, there are not many national organizations organized around the promotion of a Jacksonian agenda. In the world of think tanks and elite media, the Jacksonian voice is seldom heard and never heeded.It is hard for Jacksonians to mobilize politically. Neither party really embraces a Jacksonian agenda. Combining a suspicion of Wall Street, a hatred of the cultural left, a love of middle class entitlement programs, and a fear of free trade, Jacksonian America has problems with both Republican and Democratic agendas. Any Jacksonian political movement will start as a party insurgency, and the Jacksonians will on the whole be less well funded, less experienced and less institutionally powerful than their party opponents. Jacksonians are neither liberal nor conservative in the ways that political elites use those terms; they are radically egalitarian, radically pro-middle class, radically patriotic, radically pro-Social Security. They are not, under normal circumstances, joiners in politics; they are individualists who organize in response to threats, and their individualism goes to their stands on what outsiders sometimes think are the social issues that unite them.Many Jacksonians, for example, are not evangelicals and not even Christian at all. While some are strongly anti-abortion, others believe that individual freedom makes abortion nobody’s business but their own. Some stand strongly behind the drug war; many indulge in recreational drugs and some Jacksonians grow or manufacture them, much like the moonshiners who have been evading ‘revenuers’ since the Washington administration.There’s another obstacle in the face of a Jacksonian rising: Jacksonians have been hard hit by the changes in the American economy. The secure working class wages that underpinned two generations of rising affluence for the white (and minority) industrial working class have disappeared. That isn’t just about money; the coherence of Jacksonian communities and family life has been seriously impaired. These are the points Charles Murray makes in his harrowing Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010; they have been recently reinforced by studies documenting a holocaust of lower and lower middle class whites.These devastating changes, utterly ignored by an upper middle class intellectual and cultural establishment that not so secretly hopes for a demographic change in America that will finally marginalize uncredentialed white people once and for all, make Jacksonians angry and frustrated, but they also make it harder to develop an organized political strategy in response to some of the worst and most dangerous conditions faced by any major American demographic group today. Strong in numbers (though not a majority), awakening to a new sense of anger and endangerment, Jacksonians are still groping for a movement and a program.What we are seeing in American politics today is a Jacksonian surge. It is not yet a revolution on the scale of Old Hickory’s movement that transformed American politics for a generation. Such a revolution may not be possible in today’s America, and in any case the current wave of Jacksonian activism and consciousness is still in an early and somewhat incoherent phase. In the past, moderate leaders on the center left and center right alike have found ways to capture Jacksonian energy. FDR was able to steal the demagogic energy of Huey Long; Richard Nixon marginalized George Wallace even as he responded to some of Wallace’s concerns about bussing and crime. (He did not, however, give way to Wallace on the core issue of racial equality.)Donald Trump, for now, is serving as a kind of blank screen on which Jacksonians project their hopes. Proposing himself as a strong leader who ‘gets’ America but is above party, Trump appeals to Jacksonian ideas about leadership. Trump’s Jacksonian appeal has left the Republican Party in deep disarray, demonstrating the gulf between contemporary conservative ideology and Jacksonian nationalism. Indeed, one of the reasons that Trump hasn’t been hurt by attacks that highlight his lack of long term commitment to the boilerplate conservative agenda (either in the social or economic conservative variant) is that Jacksonian voters are less dogmatic and less conservative than some of their would-be political representatives care to acknowledge. Jacksonians like Social Security and Medicare much more than most Republican intellectuals, and they like immigration and free trade much less.Whatever happens to the Trump candidacy, it now seems clear that Jacksonian America is rousing itself to fight for its identity, its culture and its primacy in a country that it believes it should own. Its cultural values have been traduced, its economic interests disregarded, and its future as the center of gravity of American political life is under attack. Overseas, it sees traditional rivals like Russia, China, North Korea and Iran making headway against a President that it distrusts; more troubling still, in ISIS and jihadi terror it sees the rapid spread of a movement aiming at the mass murder of Americans. Jacksonian America has lost all confidence in the will or the ability of the political establishment to fight the threats it sees abroad and at home. It wants what it has always wanted: to take its future into its own hands.The biggest story in American politics today is this: Andrew Jackson is mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it anymore.