Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 509

We Still Need NATO

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, critics have questioned U.S. membership in and support for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). They have argued that NATO successfully accomplished its original Cold War mission and thus is no longer needed. The charge that NATO is obsolete, however, overlooks the fundamental importance to U.S. international security interests of a standing multilateral organization with strong and flexible core military capabilities that can be calibrated to respond both to a wide range of 21st-century security challenges and the recent resurgence of Russian expansionism.

That said, U.S. administrations over the past quarter-century, and their counterparts in most of the major European allied states, have allowed significant military deficiencies to develop within NATO. Some of these deficits reflect a growing political dis-alignment among the allies in the absence of a Soviet adversary, some of them are the product of excessive thrift in service of welfare-state budgets, and others are the result of old-fashioned neglect and lack of leadership. Whatever the mix of reasons, the true test for NATO’s relevance in the coming months and years will be whether NATO member-states provide sufficient resources to deter or if necessary prevail against significant threats such as Russia now presents, as well as to fulfill its other important missions. If the member-states, and especially the United States, fail this test, they will provide an opening for those who argue that the United States need not and should not be in the business of supplying global common security goods. This would be a very unfortunate outcome, as it could undermine the ability of the United States to protect its vital interests.NATO was established in 1949 as a defensive alliance to deter or prevail against a military attack by the Soviet Union. At the height of the Cold War, the U.S. government expended hundreds of billions of dollars on relevant military capabilities, based over 400,000 U.S. troops in Europe and was prepared to use nuclear weapons if necessary to respond to Soviet aggression. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO adjusted its military capabilities downward, and the U.S. military substantially reduced both its presence in Europe and the share of military resources it allocated to the Alliance. Many hoped that the NATO-Russia relationship would deepen into some sort of quasi-partnership. NATO reached out to the new Russia and in 2002 established the NATO-Russia Council to serve as a framework for the relationship. At its height, the Council provided a mechanism for regular dialogue and developed cooperative activities, including a missile-defense research project. Russia also cooperated with NATO’s Afghanistan-related logistics requirements, and Vladimir Putin actually attended the 2007 NATO Summit in Bucharest.But the NATO-Russia relationship lacked all warmth; it constituted at best a workmanlike accommodation. Even during this relatively calm period, Putin asserted that there should be a Russian sphere of influence over former Soviet-dominated nations. Consistent with this thinking, Moscow in due course initiated a cyber attack on Estonia, seized control of Georgian territory, and later more or less bloodlessly annexed Crimea. As a result, relations with NATO deteriorated. More recently, Russia has started a shooting war in Europe—specifically in Ukraine, raising concerns that Moscow might use force against NATO members by deploying the same so-called hybrid warfare techniques it has deployed against Kiev.1 Further, Russian bombers and submarines have also been making approaches very near the territory of NATO members. Moscow has increased its nuclear exercises, boasted about the development of new nuclear weapons, and may expand its nuclear-capable ICBM force. The recent Russian expeditionary deployment of military forces in Syria is also of concern.This recent Russian expansionism has caused NATO to assess Russia as a significant potential security threat. The result has been a downturn in relations dramatic enough that NATO suspended all cooperation with the NATO-Russia Council in April 2014. Subsequently, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen denounced Russia’s annexation of Crimea as “the gravest threat to European security for a generation.” More recently NATO condemned Russia’s October 4, 2015 air incursions over Turkey, pledged to assist Turkey in protecting its airspace, and stated that the deployment of substantial Russian military assets to the Middle East in a direct combat role raises serious concerns. The U.S. military shares this assessment; the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, has said that “Russia presents the greatest threat to our national security.”NATO has begun to develop a military response to Russia’s actions. As a starting point, NATO has approved a threefold increase in the size of its rapid-response force from an initially planned 13,000 to upwards of 40,000 personnel, and plans to ensure that selected units are ready for deployment within two days. NATO is also deploying command-and-control centers to areas on Russia’s flank: the Baltics, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria, and Hungary and Slovakia. By coincidence, a long-planned NATO Mediterranean region exercise (Trident Juncture) involving some 36,000 troops, ships, and aircraft took place this past October. Until recently, the Obama Administration, despite concerns expressed by military commanders responsible for Europe, has been steadily drawing down forces in Europe. However, it has now indicated that it will allocate special operations forces, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and other high-end military assets to NATO; that it will pre-position heavy equipment in Central and Eastern Europe; and that it will rotate U.S.-based forces into Europe on a regular basis for exercises and training.Beginning in the 1990s, new international security threats unrelated to Russia and NATO’s traditional mission arose. NATO responded to these emerging challenges in a variety of ways, most of which were not anticipated by its founders. Adopting a new strategic concept, NATO gradually assumed new missions, undertook unprecedented military operations, expanded its membership and developed a much wider range of global relationships than was true during the Cold War.NATO’s most significant new mission has been combatting terrorism. Beginning in 2003, NATO deployed thousands of troops to Afghanistan through its International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), and a residual force remains at present. For the first time, NATO was engaged in sustained military operations over an extended period and, to top it all off, in a distant region. Separately, NATO deployed maritime capabilities in Operation Active Endeavour to deter terrorist activity by monitoring shipping in the Mediterranean.A second new mission has involved military actions that, while couched in terms of European security, have been motivated primarily by humanitarian concerns. In this regard, NATO’s mid-1990s military intervention in the Balkans set several precedents: NATO had taken military action outside of its traditional geographical scope for the first time, and the action had nothing to do with defending against an attack on a member’s territory. NATO’s more recent involvement in Libya fits within these new parameters as well.A third new mission for NATO has been missile defense. Perhaps surprisingly to those who may recall earlier European skepticism or hostility to missile defenses, NATO has allocated substantial resources to developing a core capability that can protect its bases and logistics sites while also providing the framework for broader national territorial and population defense capabilities. As a part of this capability, the United States is deploying within a NATO framework sea-based missile defense capabilities that would protect Europe. Unlike the Bush Administration approach, which focused first on protection for the United States, the current plan would provide initial protection for Europe only and subsequently add land-based systems (if and when they are built) that would protect both Europe and eventually the United StatesNATO has assumed other responsibilities in a diverse range of areas, including implementation of a cyber-defense capability as a response to the Russia-linked cyber attack on Estonia in 2007. NATO is also monitoring potential threats that could disrupt the flow of energy resources, through for example Central Asia. Separately, the security concerns arising out of the potential for conflict over competing territorial claims in the “High North,” where significant energy resources are located, constitutes an additional NATO mission. Finally, the threat of piracy on the high seas has re-emerged and NATO has taken on anti-piracy responsibilities utilizing its maritime capabilities.Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has expanded exponentially its security relationships not only within Europe but elsewhere. NATO has developed close security ties with non-member nations, and established structured relationships with key nations and international organizations.As is well known, in the mid-1990s NATO established the Partnership for Peace (PFP) as a membership organization that would link the Alliance to the former Warsaw Pact nations and Soviet republics, as well as to non-NATO Western European nations. The PFP now has 22 members located in Western Europe, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. It has served as a pathway to NATO membership for some but now also includes states that either do not wish to become NATO members or are ineligible for membership.With the PFP as a pathway, again as is very well known, NATO has added 12 more states to its 16 Cold War members since 1997. The debate over the merits of NATO enlargement has yet to end as history unfurls, but in the meantime there is little question that enlargement has brought significant ancillary benefits. For example, the prospect of NATO membership was a key catalyst in ending longstanding territorial disputes that could have undermined European stability. With admission to NATO contingent upon the renunciation of extra-territorial claims, Hungary, for example, gave up territorial claims against Romania. In addition, NATO insisted that only nations that had consolidated their democratic institutions and practices, including civilian control over the military, would be considered for membership and all new members agreed to sign on to the principles of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).Recognizing that threats to NATO could emanate from other regions, NATO subsequently expanded its security connections to the Middle East, North Africa, the Persian Gulf, and Asia. First, NATO established the Mediterranean Dialogue (MD) in 1994, which has seven North African and Middle Eastern nations (including Egypt, Jordan, and Israel), and in 2004 launched the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative (ICI), which incorporates Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAE. Additionally, NATO works with a loose grouping of Asia-Pacific nations, referred to as global partners, that includes Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea. NATO also has established bilateral structures, including the NATO-Ukraine Council and the NATO-Georgia Commission, and maintains ongoing dialogue with other key nations including China, India, and Pakistan.An unintended but important result of this trans-European effort has been NATO’s emergence as the focal point of a global security network. NATO’s activities with members of this security network cover a range from political-military dialogue to military capacity-building programs designed to raise militaries to NATO standards and develop equipment interoperability. Both developments can help interested states to become useful associates of NATO or even ad hoc members of military coalitions.Two independent but very important NATO relationships have developed between the Alliance and Sweden and Finland, which have moved definitively away from their Cold War neutralism. These nations have developed close ties with NATO and participated in various NATO programs and operations. Among other things, Sweden was the first nation to join the NATO-managed multilateral Strategic Airlift Capability (SAC) program, in which Finland is now also a participant. NATO has also established a working relationship with the European Union. While NATO is clearly the organization of choice for most European states, NATO has recognized that at times at least some European governments may wish to work through the European Union to accomplish limited security objectives. Thus, for example, in the aftermath of the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris, the French government elected to invoke EU-based obligations and not to activate NATO’s Article V guarantee.Doubts about U.S. involvement in NATO are as old as NATO itself.2 The questioning emanates from several sources. First, there are those who support an active U.S. international security role but view NATO as obsolete, and even as an obstacle to building a more relevant alliance structure. Second, there are of course those on both the Right and the Left who, for different reasons, believe that the United States should pull back from its international commitments and global responsibilities. Third, there are hawkish internationalists who believe that NATO unnecessarily constrains U.S. international freedom of action. Still others have objected to NATO’s humanitarian operations as unwisely exceeding its mandate, thus potentially vitiating the core missions that constitute its raison d’être. A separate group of critics argued that NATO as it was worked fine, and constituted a sound insurance policy against the revival of Russian imperialism, but that NATO’s expansion to include nations that had been part of the former Soviet empire was provocative to Russia and hence counterproductive to ensuring Russian acceptance of the post-Cold War settlement.As already noted, questions concerning the wisdom of NATO’s expansion remain in play, but as time passes the only way to discuss it is though the competitive flinging of counterfactuals. This of course cannot resolve the issue. Of course, for those “offshore balancers” who believe in principle that the United States should not be in the business of providing global security goods in its own long-term interest by means of any permanent alliances, or for the hawkish unilateralists who believe that the U.S. government should never be potentially constrained by an organization such as NATO, then by definition NATO is not a U.S. national security asset.But beyond those who reject the premise of longstanding U.S. strategy, the argument that NATO is obsolete holds no water—and one reason the argument persists is the widespread lack of awareness among casual observers of how NATO has adapted itself to the post-Cold War world. These efforts, sketched above, rarely make headlines. They involve patient institution-building and require an in-depth focus to genuinely appreciate. Nonetheless, the transformation of NATO over the past two decades has enhanced U.S. and allied security and strongly undermines the claim of NATO’s obsolescence.If that were not enough, a newly assertive Russia presents a clear potential threat. The argument offered since 1991 that NATO need not be concerned about Russia, questionable even at an earlier time, has clearly been overtaken by events.As an historical aside, the argument of some NATO critics that Russia’s recent adventurism is a direct result of NATO enlargement is highly questionable.3 Obviously, Putin did not welcome NATO enlargement, and, almost as obviously, the plausibility of that argument has given Moscow a wedge with which to seek to fracture Transatlantic relations. But the proposition that Putin would not have engaged in bullying behavior, or annexed Crimea or subverted Ukraine or ordered Russia forces into Syria, if NATO had not expanded is implausible on its face. Putin is motivated by several factors, including a desire to dominate the “near abroad,” an ambition to be seen as a serious factor in world politics, and a need to retain popular support by distracting the Russian public from domestic problems. Indeed, even if NATO had not expanded, Putin could well have been tempted to meddle in a perceived vacuum in Central and Eastern Europe, with the result that the current zone of instability in and around Ukraine might by now have spread all the way to the German border.There is finally this interesting contention: “If NATO didn’t exist today, would anyone feel compelled to create it? The honest, if awkward, answer is no.”4 Actually, NATO exists today precisely because all of its members wish it to exist and, especially in light of recent Russian behavior, all current members would undoubtedly want to create and be associated with a multilateral security organization with a strong standing military capability if NATO no longer existed. Not only has there been not the slightest hint from any member of an interest in withdrawing from NATO, but states with capable military forces, such as Sweden, Finland, Australia, and New Zealand, have in recent years become de facto members—and there is even growing interest in Sweden and Finland in formally joining NATO.5 As discussed earlier, many states and international organizations have sought to establish security relationships with NATO short of membership. The test of any good or service on offer lies in the demand for it, and there is certainly no lack of demand for NATO. Perhaps the most striking example is that France, which under Charles de Gaulle thumbed its nose at NATO and for decades sought to marginalize the Alliance and the U.S. role in Europe, concluded that a strong NATO was essential to its own security and, after 43 years, rejoined NATO’s military command in 2009.Not only does NATO remain relevant, but more importantly it continues to support and advance U.S. security interests—though again, often in ways that do not make headlines and that casual observers rarely appreciate in full. Most fundamentally, NATO provides a standing multilateral military capability that can deter or be deployed should a significant security threat arise. Because NATO has a military capability in place, the core elements for mobilization, deployment, and sustainment of substantial multilateral military forces already exist. The ongoing training, exercises, and regular communication among the national militaries of NATO members allows them to jump-start preparations and actions when needed without very lengthy preparatory work. This can allow the U.S. government to proceed in shaping and leading military coalitions more quickly, at less cost and with greater effectiveness, than if NATO did not exist and its functional equivalent had to be invented from scratch at a moment’s notice. While the U.S. government retains the capacity and the right to act unilaterally if and when necessary, it makes sense for it to act with others whenever possible, whether through NATO or ad hoc coalitions of the willing. A multilateral framework can provide both political cover and military resources, and the United States very much can benefit from both.The United States also benefits significantly from NATO’s logistics capabilities. Pontificating about grand strategies sounds impressive, but for military effectiveness and success, logistics capabilities are what really count. For example, while NATO did not formally participate in the 1991 Gulf War, NATO resources, supplies, bases, and other infrastructure provided crucial support prior to and during the U.S.-led coalition military action to force Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. The coalition in effect borrowed NATO capacities already in existence, and benefitted greatly from equipment compatibility and common training and resources. Other coalitions of the willing assembled under U.S auspices and utilizing NATO resources can follow the same approach.In addition, the U.S. government has access to the numerous military facilities and resources that member nations make available to NATO. A good example is Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, now being used against ISIS in what is not a formal NATO operation. As importantly, working through NATO usually makes it relatively routine for host governments to agree to U.S. requests to use facilities within their territory for military-related purposes. Without NATO, in order to fulfill its security responsibilities, the U.S. government would need to develop and maintain a complex network of bilateral and multilateral security agreements and arrangements that would seek to maintain the kind of connectivity and flexibility that NATO already provides. Further, the U.S. government would need not only agreements to access such military facilities but also would likely need to obtain specific approval from the host nation for each use and perhaps even in some cases legislative approval. In general, it is much simpler, faster, and easier politically and otherwise for nations to grant the United States the use of their facilities within a NATO framework than it would be to have to grant permission to the United States on their own.Over recent decades NATO has, as noted above, developed a global security network that reflects formalized relationships with non-NATO nations. For the United States, this brings the advantage that it can work through NATO to develop or enhance security relationships with states that belong to the PFP, the MD, the ICI, and NATO bilateral security relationships. Working through NATO provides an extra dimension to U.S. efforts to enhance the military capacities of friends and allies in various regions who, with training and assistance, can provide supplementary support to NATO or U.S.-led operations. NATO also supports U.S. interests by providing a multilateral framework for a U.S. presence in nations where the U.S. government wishes to help train and also enhance its military contacts, but where unilateral U.S. military involvement might be politically contentious.For all these reasons, protecting U.S. security interests in a world without NATO would be considerably more challenging. But if the advantages for the United States of NATO membership are clear, equally clear ought to be the need to invest in this asset. In this regard, recent trend lines raise serious concerns.NATO’s military strength understandably has declined significantly since the end of the Cold War. However, many NATO member-states have recently instituted sustained reductions in military capabilities over and above their immediate post-Cold War “peace dividend.” France is a good example: French military manpower declined about 25 percent during the Sarkozy presidency, and then another 25 percent during the Hollande period, leaving this critical NATO ally with roughly half the manpower it had a dozen years ago—and with, at last reckoning, nearly a third of that depleted force stationed overseas. Throughout the Alliance (including America’s closest ally, the UK), weapons stockpiles are generally declining, maintenance is being deferred, and in some instances entire classes of military capabilities are being eliminated. These reductions undermine overall military readiness. In addition, modernization programs and new weapons acquisitions are being reduced or delayed while research and development for future systems has also been constrained.NATO itself owns or operates only a small number of weapons systems, the great majority being the capabilities of NATO members that are designated for use by NATO. Thus, reductions in the national forces of NATO members inevitably diminish NATO capabilities. For the Alliance, national reductions result in slower response times and greater difficulty in engaging in operations over long periods, projecting power, and undertaking more than one sustained military operation at a time. Further, many NATO member-states have no clear blueprint for developing needed capabilities.NATO needs to take a number of steps to ensure that allied nations sustain necessary military capabilities in spite of their constrained economies. Among other helpful steps, NATO member-states should enhance sub-regional military structures and relationships that can pool resources and also enhance overall defense cooperation to ensure the most effective military spending. For example, the Scandinavians have established the Nordic Defense Cooperation organization (NORDEFCO), the Central Europeans have put together the Visegrad Group, and the Baltic states routinely engage in informal defense cooperation among themselves. Very recently, the Nordic states not only have agreed to a significant enhancement of their defense cooperation, but also to the integration of the Baltic states into these efforts. In addition, bilateral partnerships, such as the British-French Defense Co-operation Treaty, can provide real cost-savings.7 NATO should also explore in-depth the potential for connecting sub-regional missile defense networks in Central Europe, the Baltics, and Scandinavia, along with a network including Persian Gulf nations and others, including Israel.NATO should increase cooperation with non-NATO states such as Finland and Sweden, which possess strong military capabilities, and it is time for NATO and the United States to indicate that they would be welcome as new members. NATO needs to bring Asia-Pacific democracies such as Australia and New Zealand into a closer long-term military relationship, find ways to make them de facto “associate members,” and take advantage of the advanced technologies of these non-member allies. In addition, NATO should take advantage of U.S. training areas in Europe to enhance the military capacity of selected developing nations. Finally, NATO, utilizing Article IV of the NATO Treaty, needs to regularly discuss security challenges, such as Iran, that do not necessarily involve an immediate threat.NATO should establish a permanent presence in Central and Eastern Europe, update its contingency plans and its logistics system for response to a Russian contingency, including a hybrid warfare attack, and increase its role in Ukraine. NATO also needs to ensure that it retains a meaningful nuclear doctrine and capability as an added layer of deterrent. Given Turkey’s proximity to the Syrian conflict and Russian military actions in the region, as well as general Western security interests, NATO also needs to prepare for any possible Middle East contingency, including by developing an enhanced naval presence in the eastern Mediterranean. NATO should also build on the success of its Special Operations Forces Command Center.While NATO can work with non-democratic nations when necessary for its security interests, the Alliance should whenever possible also encourage the growth of a democratic security culture in such nations, as well as further developing its own unique role as a security coalition of democracies.Essential for NATO effectiveness is renewed U.S. leadership both at NATO and globally. The Obama Administration has been reactive, content for the United States to act as merely one among equals, and has also downgraded the U.S. relationship with NATO. A striking example occurred in March of last year, when NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg requested a meeting with the President, as is traditional for NATO Secretary Generals when they visit Washington, well in advance of his arrival. Yet even though Stoltenberg was to be Washington for several days, he was told that no meeting could be arranged. NATO requires strong U.S. leadership to be truly effective and it has always been the case that when the United States does lead at NATO others follow. This also necessarily means reinforcing the U.S. military presence in the European theater.While there are some encouraging signs regarding NATO’s response to Russia, it remains to be seen whether NATO’s members will take the necessary steps to ensure its military effectiveness over time. If recent Russian adventurism does not stimulate a rethink of recent trends, NATO could eventually hollow itself out and become of marginal value to the United States. The eventual result would be a serious reassessment of U.S. involvement in NATO, and would play to the advantage of those who wish the United States to renounce its role as provider of common global security goods. The argument would predictably run as follows: We cannot afford to do this alone and be effective at it, so let’s not try to do it at all.The next NATO Summit to be held in Warsaw this July provides an opportunity for NATO nations to formally commit themselves to continuing NATO’s adaptation to contemporary security threats. In addition to mandating the enhancements described above, NATO should promulgate a common unifying vision that can be understood and supported by both policymakers and the general publics of NATO nations. Given the reality that NATO comprises a community of democratic nations, NATO should highlight its role as the focal point of a global democratic security network that embodies both a shield and, where necessary, a sword, not only ensuring this community’s security but also safeguarding its shared democratic values. The United States, for its part, should take the lead at this Summit in developing and implementing NATO’s continuing adaptation. This means leading from the front while not only halting but also reversing the downgrading of U.S. military capabilities in Europe.After playing a key role in the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO has transformed itself into a multi-mission organization addressing 21st-century security challenges while adding new members, establishing global security relationships, and responding to Russian adventurism. NATO has thus demonstrated in the post-Cold War era that it is an organization with the capacity to adapt and even to reinvent itself. But, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates put it a few years ago, there remains a “real possibility of collective military irrelevance” if NATO fails to address current military deficiencies.Only strong U.S. leadership, which has been absent in recent years, can catalyze and organize that revival. Perhaps beginning in January 2017 we will again see that kind of leadership.

 

1 Hybrid warfare is a recent buzzword that refers to the simultaneous use of a variety of approaches to waging war, including unconventional, conventional, and cyber and information warfare.2 In 1949, 13 senators voted against the United States joining NATO, including Senator Robert Taft.3 John J. Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,” Foreign Affairs (September/October 2014).4 Richard N. Haass, “Why Europe No Longer Matters,” Washington Post, June 17, 2011.5 A recent poll in Sweden showed 41 percent support for Sweden becoming a full NATO member. This is up from a low point of 17 percent in 2012, with an increase of 10 percent since Russia’s intervention in Crimea and Ukraine.6 For a detailed discussion of allied defense cooperation efforts, see W. Bruce Weinrod, “Pooling and Sharing: The Effort to Enhance Allied Defense Capabilities,” American Enterprise Institute, August 11, 2014.

A “Poverty Preference” in College Admissions?

The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, a philanthropic organization that awards scholarships to low-income, high-achieving high school students, is earning some well-deserved media attention for its comprehensive report on how and why colleges should attract more kids from disadvantaged backgrounds. The National Journal reports:

As the Su­preme Court grapples with wheth­er to ban the use of race in col­lege ad­mis­sions, a new re­port calls in­stead for a “poverty pref­er­ence” as a way of en­sur­ing that stu­dents of all back­grounds have an equal chance to at­tend elite schools.

The na­tion’s eco­nom­ic and cre­at­ive vi­tal­ity hinge on our abil­ity to find the bright­est young people to fill lec­ture halls at the best uni­versit­ies, Har­old Levy, executive dir­ect­or of the Jack Kent Cooke Found­a­tion and former chan­cel­lor of New York City pub­lic schools, told a hand­ful of re­port­ers at a roundtable this week. But right now, even the smartest low-in­come stu­dents make up just 3 per­cent of en­roll­ment at elite schools.… One crit­ic­al com­pon­ent of get­ting more high-achiev­ing, low-in­come kids in­to these schools is con­vin­cing the in­sti­tu­tions them­selves that it should be a pri­or­ity. Most schools say they want stu­dents from all back­grounds. But many have taken just mea­ger steps to make that a real­ity.

The report draws attention to some very important defects in the way opportunities and benefits are distributed in this country. There really are structural barriers in place that prevent poor students from accessing elite education. And a “poverty preference” is a much more coherent way to level the playing field than affirmative action, at least as affirmative action is currently practiced by campus diversity bureaucracies.

At the same time, we worry that philanthropic efforts to expand opportunity for poor people often focus too narrowly on funneling them into elite colleges. To be sure, this is a worthwhile effort—we should be focused on making college admissions as fair as possible. But we should also be approaching a problem for the other end—that is, making an elite education matter less when it comes to determining a person’s life prospects.As we’ve written before, the existing college-to-employment pipeline is deeply unfair. Many of the biggest employers, in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, use university prestige as a proxy for intellectual ability, severely harming the prospects of students who either weren’t academically focused at age 17, or who, for personal or financial reasons, didn’t want to be a part of the elite education bubble. There are a number of ways to take on this problem, including creating a system of post-college national exams, or changing corporate recruitment policies, so that students from West Texas University and Chico State have a fair shot at competing with students from Princeton and Yale.The populist tone of the 2016 campaign may suggest that ordinary Americans on both sides of the aisle feel that elites are hogging opportunities and privileges, and shutting them out from the best of the American dream. Our society should address this—not only by further opening access to elite schools, but by creating more paths to success that bypass the those schools entirely.

Testing the “War of Ideas”

Part II: The Futile

Now that we have examined in Part I of this essay the nature of the exaggerations, misunderstandings, and falsely placed policy hopes with respect to warring against Islamist “ideology,” it is time to examine the advice that we should somehow revive liberalism.Here is Frank Furedi, the Hungarian-born British writer, explaining the undercoating of the “war on terror” in The American Interest back in 2009:

[T]he attraction to jihadi violence is not just about charismatic Muslim entrepreneurs preying on marginalized immigrant communities; it’s also about the many living in the West who feel alienated from Western values and from modernity itself. And their alienation, in turn, is deepened partly because the cultural and political elites of those countries seem uncomfortable articulating the settled virtues of their own civilization. In other words, not only do many Western elites have trouble talking about who the “bad guys” are in this conflict, they have trouble defining and defending the “good guys” as well. Not only do many in the West seem not to understand our adversaries’ ideas; we rather too often seem not to understand, or believe in, our own.

A few pages later, he added:

[F]ormidable homegrown cultural influences disparage the West’s historical achievements, its belief in progress and its devotion to the principles of the Enlightenment—the very hallmarks of modernity. … Even before 9/11, there was more than a hint of defensiveness about the capacity of Western values to prevail over those of hostile opponents. William S. Lind gave voice to this sentiment, concluding that “protecting Western culture from foreign assault requires domestic revival.” A decade before 9/11, he warned that “the twenty-first century could once again find Islam at the gates of Vienna, as immigrants or terrorists if not armies.” Today there is little evidence of domestic revival. Indeed, Western governments, again particularly in Europe, are sensitive about their very limited capacity for inspiring their own publics. … The truth is that any enemy can seem formidable if one’s own self-confidence is low enough. But since it is very difficult to admit this, and even harder to figure out what to do about it, it is convenient, if not inevitable, to blame others instead. … Maybe what we need is not better rhetoric about the struggle of ideas between Islam and the West, but more scrupulous attention to what constitutes a way of life worth defending.

If this elemental point has been put more eloquently, I don’t know by whom or where. As to the tendency of those lacking self-confidence to project their consequent anxiety onto others, I spoke of that recently in current context: “My contention … is that the ambient anxiety that so many Americans feel about life at home today is the source of their fear of the Islamic State, not the other way around.”

Of course Furedi was correct, but what to do about the deficit of self-confidence on our side? One can “require” a domestic revival all one wants, but how exactly does one produce it? Simply pointing “more scrupulous attention” at the problem hasn’t done much good. Some European statesmen have learned to use the bully pulpit for the purposes of moral rearmament in recent years. (For three recent examples, see here.) American statesmen, alas, have not been so eloquent. But speeches alone cannot solve this problem, which goes very deep into the nature of liberal universalism itself, and which centers, to recall Furedi’s words, on the “formidable homegrown cultural influences” that “disparage the West’s historical achievements.”It wants pointing out, first, that Western liberal universalism is an odd sort of political doxy. Where most others have been totalist in their presumed scope and certain of themselves, liberalism is deliberately self-limiting, humble, procedural more than substantive, and disposed to raise self-doubt as well as self-criticism into virtues. Indeed, its tendency to self-criticism through open debate has a knack for generating its own antitheses, especially from those “last men” who are bored by liberalism’s equanimity and seek the heroic. (See here in particular.) It is a belief system not particularly amenable to its own martial defense.But even this is not the gist of the problem. It lies instead in the simple observation that it is easy, relatively speaking, to believe in the virtue of one’s own political and social values if they promise a happy ending. If they once did but do no longer, there is a problem.At its best, Western liberalism is not only an optimistic social-political doctrine, but it is linked, by and large, to an historical/cultural context steeped in an optimistic theology. To a considerable extent, Western liberalism as a secular doctrine takes its tone from the then still-youthful Protestantism from which it, in many respects, emerged. Liberalism’s origins are bound up in the idea of progress, in the Whiggish bias that moral and material progress go hand in hand, in the grand Enlightenment assumption that reason could lead humanity to a new and better place—and above all, perhaps, in the relatively novel belief in that time and place that humanity was truly free to search for that place if it so wished. But all these ideas are, in one way or another, secularized versions of Protestantism’s novel claims.Now—and here things get a bit complicated—it would be too much to claim that Protestantism, in all or most of its forms, is itself an optimistic theology. Some of its forms are rather hellish-bent, as it were; you are blessed with God’s grace, through no doing of your own, or you’re not, and if you’re not, you’re in deep and very long-lasting trouble. There is nothing cheery about a doctrine involving eternal damnation about which you as an individual are helpless to affect. But as Max Weber famously showed, theology is one thing and religious sociology quite another. Protestantism early on acquired a this-worldly dimension associated, especially in Britain and Holland, with rising middle-class achievement and material progress, a bouyant empowerment of national identity, and freedom from both an overbearing state and an ecclesiastical tyranny.That was the broad connotation of Protestantism that came ashore in the New World, and the optimistic bent of liberalism and Protestantism have been mutually reinforcing in American culture ever since—at least until around the early 1970s. Both pointed to a better world, to a better life for one’s children and grandchildren—and, as a former boss of mine liked to say, optimism is a force multiplier. Optimism permeated American society, but not only or even mainly because material reality supported that point of view. Indeed, life was often nasty, brutish, short, and, worse, unfair, diseased (particularly for infants and children), impoverished, and riddled with racism and bigotry. But a man and a woman could go to church, or to a community gathering of one kind or another, raise their eyes, and see happiness in prospect, whether here on earth below or in heaven above and beyond.Today, in the salon culture of American chic, we have exactly the opposite situation. Life is not nasty, brutish, or short for most people, and is it not nearly so riddled with oppression, sickness, poverty, and bias as it was a century or two ago. Yet we are no longer optimistic. We are grimly sophisticated. We see though the evanescence of our culture’s youthful mythos, and we are earnest as can be in and about our long since desacralized public spaces.Many of us, too, have become wanna-be special interest victims, with groups of self-defined victims competing over who has been most grievously harmed—mainly by dead and living white males. Such a mental disposition vitiates optimism, and the will to engage one’s own freedom as well.Our clergymen are often enough ashamed to assert publicly the beliefs of their own seminaries; they bend with market-blown winds, and so alienate the most faithful remnant among them. Thanks largely to the deterioration of communal religious life, we are also increasingly atomized, hemorrhaging social trust in buckets, living alone more than ever, and hardly delighted about it. Our politicians ritually invoke God, and anyone who believes in their sincerity is taken for a fool, probably with good reason. We are, in a word, dispirited.Things are not different in Western Europe; indeed, they are by most measures more “advanced” there. So then ask yourself: Why would a young first- or second-generation Muslim living within the European Union (or, increasingly, just a normal idealistic European or American), confronted with a self-condemning, aimless, material fetishist, and pessimistic ethos, prefer that brew to the simple and optimistic Islamist sales pitch that promises purposefulness, heroism, community, and bliss in a heavenly reward? Not only that, the Islamist alternative promises freedom from complexity and excessive choice. It promises not just community, honor, and heaven, but a single, simple route by which to get there.We might scoff at the simplemindedness of such blather. And we might, if it were not so politically incorrect, more often confide in each other that Islamic as well as Islamist supremacism is so primitive, so pre-Enlightenment, so childish, so embarrassing, really. It might be all those things. But as Max Frankel pointed out years ago, simplemindedness is not a handicap in the competition of social ideas—nor is it, he might have added, in the competition of political ones.It is an open question whether it’s possible anymore to revive the optimism inherent in a liberalism that was so closely associated with a society steeped in particular religious values. Let me again quote John Adams, for he said it best: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” In other words, if people do not regulate their own behavior and communities do not provide their own boundaries for proper conduct, liberal forms of governance cannot work.We Americans are no longer the moral and religious people Adams spoke of. Many ordinary folk are, to be sure, but our elites tend to treat our inherited moral codes as antiquated embarrassments, as they bow down to the god either of the omniscient market or of the imperial self. Case in point: However one comes down on the gay marriage issue in all its complexity, the extraordinary speed with which the conjugal definition of marriage, the product of millennia of experience, fell among Western elites before the postmodern altar of undifferentiated and absolute egalitarianism is stark testimony to how weakened the foundational liberal ethos of the West has become. If that plinth of the Western moral edifice, one predicated on our deepest protective instincts toward our own children, can be jettisoned in such a cavalier and relatively thoughtless manner, anything can. It was always possible to ensure equal rights in law for homosexual relationships without redefining marriage itself, but that was never good enough for the ideologues whose main purpose was to destroy that definition and assault the institutions that stood behind it.The new American idols, alas, may make some people feel noble, but they have made us neither happy nor optimistic, for they are bereft of any real meaning that can transcend the isolated individual. They are mute on the purposes of our passions, and so have severed the threads that weave the fragile but essential fabric of inter-generational responsibility. And just as a woman cannot be twice a virgin, a culture cannot be twice innocent. There’s no such thing as a workable used mythos. Once any key pillar of that mythos is objectified, criticized, and expunged from favor, the mythos as a whole cannot be resumed as if nothing has happened.So it may therefore not be possible to prevent the burgeoning of ever more scoundrel cascades in a society that no longer holds itself to moral standards beyond its own changeable devising. (For the definition of a scoundrel cascade, see here.)The Founders’ ideal of political liberty cocooned within a social order is now rapidly giving way to a radical interpretation of individual rights without concurrent responsibilities. That interpretation threatens rather than supports political liberty because it invites the state to engage in soft despotism to ensure the implementation of the new secular catechism, one whose core is defined not by a belief in any intransient verity, but rather by the impossibility of any such thing. How long will it be before the anti-foundationalists among us persuade enough people that “a way of life worth defending” isn’t even a coherent statement?Let me close with a story that illustrates the likely futility of adjuring Western society in general to regain its spirit of self-worth and optimism. On NPR’s “Science Friday” show of January 1, 2016, some scientists, joined by Cormac McCarthy via his association with the Santa Fe Institute, expressed in confident, even glib tones, the now common view that humanity as a species is not long for the world, that in “2,000, 20,000, or 200,000 years we’ll no longer be around,” and maybe the planet will be better off without us. Climate change and the failure of humanity to rise to its challenge was the stimulus for this comment, which it often is these days, but really any challenge will do to evoke this kind of remark.There is a deeper bias at work here, of course, which, as articulated on the radio, is that human life is intrinsically pointless, creation itself is meaningless, there is no purpose to anything and, most certainly, there is no sentient God behind anything we experience (or imagine). This view is uttered with the implied imprimatur of science itself. If scientists say such things so confidently on the radio—NPR, no less—how could they be doubted?This cant resembles a scientistic version of postmodernism whose tone vibrates with that intellectual tendency’s proximate 20th-century origin in warmed over postwar French existentialism. It is a form of anti-foundationalism, only the subject is not ethics (as with John Rawls’s ahistorical “original position”) or politics, but the material world itself. It reminded me of a different scientist on “Science Friday,” maybe a year or so ago, who had just published a book arguing that the universe could come into existence without any starting point, that it could just spontaneously be. (He failed to explain how matter or energy, which he simply assumed for purposes of his argument, could come into being ex nihilo, but a philosophical sophisticate he wasn’t. Mercifully for everyone, I forget his name.) Coming from a seemingly smart person, this argument struck me as more mystical than scientific, but Ira Flato, kind and unthreatening as he always is as the show’s host, let it pass without challenge.Clearly, the point in this atheist’s case was to negate the logical necessity of any first cause, of any creator, whether of conscious agency in our ordinary, plain sense of the term or not. But here, unlike the abstractionist Rawls or radical constructivists in the social sciences, was a natural “hard” scientist, a man pledged to respect the tenet of invariant causality in the world, asserting that this tightest of logics need not itself have a logical origin—and at the same time insisting even more fervently that it also could not have a purpose. Spinoza would not have been amused.Not all hard scientists are atheists or even agnostics. Einstein seems a good example of an exception, and there are plenty of others—perhaps they make up the majority, for all I know. Yet the chic attitude now among many natural scientists, especially among those who moonlight as media impresarios in their non-laboratory personas, is the one that Ira Flato hosted on his show a few Fridays ago. (Otherwise, the specter of a successful fiction writer with a very Irish name being congenitally pessimistic and dour is, what? … some kind of novelty?) These guys have no idea that they are playing any role in the vaunted “war of ideas” between Islam and the West, anymore than gay marriage advocates ever gave a thought to how the rest of the world would react to their triumph in the courts—but stuff like that absolutely does not “stay in Vegas,” and it absolutely has affected how Islamists and ordinary pious Muslims alike view the United States. But in an indirect way at the least, these stars of “Science Friday” certainly are playing a role, though not a helpful one.Western scientists during the original Age of Reason were the avatars of a better future, knights of progress, pioneers of human dreams, slayers of the dragons of fatalism, intellectual cowardice, and the arbitrary privilege associated with both. They demonstrated beyond any possibility of doubt that we could harness the meta-concept of causality for the betterment of society, and they proved the power of human agency. Their method, too, dovetailed with that of liberalism itself: humble and patient trial-and-error collective effort. Most also recognized that science and reason had limits, and although some became rabidly anti-clerical (mainly in Catholic countries), most were able to distinguish between being anti-religious in a spiritual sense and anti-ecclesiastical in a more worldly sense.Now, in a reversal that begs astonishment to the extent we pay attention to it, many natural scientists in the West have become slickster cynics, skunks in the attic, thieves of our hope. Perhaps worse, many have all but become determinists, pre-Abrahamic creatures posing as progressives, who tell us that there is nothing we can or at any rate will do to deflect the cosmic tragedies rushing toward us. Our freedom to act, they of the new predestination priesthood—geneticists—tell us, is an illusion. The fact that they have to go well beyond the evidence science itself can provide to posture this way doesn’t matter much in the end. They scent our air, which is thus rendered rancid with rotting spirit.Likely as not, Islamists will fall out among themselves, and so prime themselves for defeat and destruction. Likely as not too, the societies in whose midst they murder and maim, disgrace and degrade, will revolt and reconstitute themselves in due course to speed that defeat, probably with little help from us. It is starting to happen already. Maybe one morning fairly soon we’ll wake up and realize that, as with the plague of anarchist violence than wracked the latter half of the 19th century, the menace is pretty much gone, over with and done, burned itself out. We would be irresponsible to count on such an outcome, because a lot of bad things could happen before dawn—but it’s hardly far-fetched.And then what will we do? Will we celebrate? What, exactly, will we celebrate? These days one has to wonder if we would know what to do with a happy ending even if it smacked us in the face. With any luck at all, we’re bound to find out, but the prognosis is worrying. After all, look what we in the West, and particularly in the United States, did with victory in the Cold War. It made us not more appreciative of liberal universalism but loutishly triumphal about it, to the point that we became giddy with our own humility—a strange sight to be sure. And with the collapse of our “materialist” Marxist-Leninist foe, that bastard stepchild of the Enlightenment, we became more materialistic in practice than they ever were in theory. No wonder we’re rusty at the old “war of ideas” business.Let me not mislead you, dear reader. We do have a problem with Islamism and we therefore do have a stake in how the internal Muslim struggle now raging turns out. There are limits to what we can do to help the right side win, yes, but we are nowhere near reaching those limits yet. Yet it is still wrong and misleading, in my view, to characterize the struggle as one mainly about ideas that some yet-to-be-devised brilliant rational discourse can sway in our favor. In a way, that trivializes what the problem actually is. Yet it also means that we can ultimately prevail in this struggle even if we don’t manage an improbable “domestic revival” of liberalism. That constitutes at least a modest case for optimism, does it not?

Shale Is Making It Cheapter to Heat Homes This Winter

Thanks both to what has already been an unseasonably warm season and to bargain basement energy prices, Americans are saving a lot of money on their heating bills this winter. The EIA reports:

As discussed in the [EIA’s] October 2015 Winter Fuels Outlook, the winter of 2015–16 was expected to have lower expenditures than the winter of 2014–15. In the time since that outlook was released, the weather has been much warmer than expected, and prices have fallen faster than anticipated, resulting in even lower heating expenditures…At the national level, the 2015–16 winter is now expected to be 15% warmer than last winter. […]

Based on the most recent price and weather forecasts, EIA expects the average household that heats primarily with natural gas will spend about $110 (17%) less on that fuel this winter compared with last year…The average household that primarily heats with heating oil is expected to spend about $760 (41%) less on the fuel this winter compared with last year…[W]inter 2015–16 expenditures for households that primarily heat with propane are expected to be 24% lower than last winter in the Northeast and 31% lower in the Midwest.

The shale boom has a lot to do with these winter savings, as new supplies of fracked gas have helped push spot natural gas prices here in the U.S. well below $3 per mmBtu (read: cheap). But the shale boom has also done its part in pushing down global oil prices by adding to a global glut of crude, and that’s in turn had a knock-on effect in depressing petroleum-based fuels like heating oil.

These savings aren’t negligible, either. Natural gas-heated homes will save on average more than $100 this winter, and households that use heating oil will spend (again, on average) $760 less. These savings will be especially welcome in poorer households, whose heating bills might comprise a bigger slice of their monthly budget. Expensive energy can be seen as a kind of regressive tax, in that it disproportionately burdens the poor. If that’s the case, then it stands to reason that this mild winter’s low heating bills are nothing less than progressive.Americans might wonder how the recent price plunges in global natural gas and oil markets might affect them here at home, but already we’re seeing two concrete pieces of evidence in cheaper gasoline and smaller heating bills.

US Episcopalians Get Yellow Card from World Anglican Body

The Anglican Communion, in a decision released yesterday, has disciplined the U.S. Episcopal Church over its decision to bless same-sex marriages in church. WaPo:

The Anglican Communion’s announcement Thursday that it would suspend its U.S. branch for three years from key voting positions was seen as a blow to the Episcopal Church, which allows its clergy to perform same-sex marriages and this summer voted to include the rite in its church laws […]

“The traditional doctrine of the church in view of the teaching of Scripture, upholds marriage as between a man and a woman in faithful, lifelong union,” the leaders of the Anglican Communion, which represents 44 national churches, said in a statement during a meeting in Canterbury. “The majority of those gathered reaffirm this teaching.”

This three-year suspension is likely to be the beginning of a period in which the U.S. Episcopal Church, with 1.2 million members, and the Anglican Communion, with 80 million members, gradually drift apart. The dispute over same-sex marriage may be the immediate breaking point, but the tensions go much deeper. The Anglican Communion is a group of churches who trace their descent from the 16th-century Church of England as established under the Tudors. The American Episcopalians have been something of an outlier in the communion since the American Revolution in the 18th century when both “good” Anglicans like George Washington and Alexander Hamilton and “bad” Anglicans like Thomas Jefferson revolted against King George III. Most of the other branches of the Anglican Communion remained closer to the Church of England both financially and theologically.

In more recent times, the big news in the Anglican Communion has been the rise of post-colonial Anglican churches in countries like Nigeria and Uganda, with new converts flocking to church even as the older churches (like the Episcopalians and the Church of England) lost both members and influence. As a result, the center of gravity in world Anglicanism has been steadily moving toward more conservative positions on doctrines and moral standards, even as American Episcopalians have moved sharply toward the theological and social left.Unless something gives, it’s unlikely that the American Episcopalians will be able to hold on to a place in the emerging Anglican Communion. The two sides see the current dispute very differently. American Episcopalians see the church’s embrace of gay marriage and new kinds of theology as a matter of conscience and Christian witness. Their critics in Africa and elsewhere see Episcopalians as having lost touch with the faith’s historical sources of authority. Neither Scripture, Tradition, nor Reason, they claim, support the Episcopal positions within the Anglican world. Besides that, many of the conservative Anglicans are from the developing world, where the Episcopalian decision to chart its own course regardless of the views of other member of the Communion looks less like conscience and more like neo-colonial arrogance and racial pride.American Episcopalians often see the fight over gay marriage as akin to past fights over civil rights and the ordination of women priests. The same people, they note, who oppose gay marriage the most vociferously today, were often the same people who opposed equal rights for African Americans in the past. For many American Episcopalians, the move of their church toward a more inclusive and empowering approach to people of different races and sexual identities is all part of the Holy Spirit’s call to Christians in the contemporary world.Their more conservative opponents retort that if the Episcopalians are so repentant about past racist behavior, they might look a little harder at treating the theological convictions of tens of millions of African Christians as backward and primitive. A little theological humility on the part of privileged Americans, conservatives argue, might help keep the churches together.If history is any guide, both sides are part right and part wrong. Scholars of the future will find something to honor and something to deplore in the behavior of all of the factions in the family quarrel. God may ultimately be less interested in how people line up on the theological battleground than on how they work, in an atmosphere of contention and conflict, to follow the way of the Cross with an honest conscience and an open heart.But be all that as it may, the two branches of the Communion are likely to continue to grow apart. American Episcopalians are becoming more “progressive” both theologically and politically, and believe that a mix of progressive social, economic, and theological ideas offers the only hope for continuing Christian relevance for postmodern, millennial America. African Anglicans, competing with even more conservative Pentecostals and Muslims in an atmosphere of religious revival and awakening, are unlikely to think they have much to learn from the members of a rapidly shrinking church in an increasingly secular part of the world. Whether the Episcopalians walk out of the Communion in protest against their increasing isolation, are pushed out by their fellow members, or simply drift away, we are probably seeing the latest stage in the unfolding saga of the Reformation in the English-speaking world.The original Church of England set up by Henry VIII in place of the Catholic Church has been in a continuing process of fission and separation since the 16th century. The Puritans split off in the reign of Henry’s daughter Queen Elizabeth, and hundreds of new denominations broke away during the turbulent 17th century. Some of these denominations, like the Methodists and Baptists, have gone on to become large churches in their own right. Others, like the Quakers, have played an outsized historical role even if their numbers have not been large.The future of Anglicanism in the United States, and perhaps in other places, is likely to become more complicated. The Episcopal Church will survive, but new Anglican congregations will also spring up. As the Episcopal Church drifts gently toward the exit from full membership in the Anglican Communion, the Communion will likely authorize other Anglican organizations in the United States who will begin to compete with the old franchise. With immigrants from Africa and disgruntled conservative Episcopalians banding together, the new organizations will gradually increase the presence of a more conservative Anglican movement across the United States. The Episcopal Church has been shrinking and looks likely to keep on shrinking to a point of financial crisis. Many of its parishes can no longer afford to pay the salary of a full-time rector, and with a few exceptions, the institutional infrastructure of the denomination, from seminaries to diocesan headquarters, is falling rapidly into decay. Whether the upstart Anglican implants can replace that declining network with a vigorous new denominational life remains very much to be seen.

Saudis Look to Israel

Inspired by a mutual fear of Iran, Israel is taking a few more steps closer to Saudi Arabia—and Riyadh may be reciprocating. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Led by Dore Gold, director-general of the foreign ministry, Israel has stepped up efforts to mend and improve ties in the region—all in a bid to counter Iranian influence and the threat of Islamic extremism.

A long-standing hawkish ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Mr. Gold said Israel and Sunni Arab states face a shared threat in Iran.“Clearly there’s been a convergence of interests between Israel and many Sunni Arab states given the fact that they both face identical challenges in the region,” Mr. Gold told The Wall Street Journal.[..]“What we have seen in the past six months is an intensification of the relationship [with Sunni Arab states],” a senior Israeli official said. “Israel is on the same side.”

While the relationship is not yet—and may never be—overt, it is nevertheless very real. Commercial and diplomatic ties are increasingly being forged, though the main emphasis is on intelligence and military cooperation. In Israel, this is a bipartisan initiative (the Journal quotes opposition leader Tzipi Livni commenting favorably). Meanwhile, cooperation with the Saudis brings along the Egyptians and U.A.E. The Journal notes that Egypt’s government has returned its Ambassador to Israel for the first time since the Morsi government removed him three years ago. And the U.A.E. let Israel open an office in the International Renewable Energy Agency in Emirates last year, giving the Jewish state its first diplomatic representation in the Arab nation.

From the Saudi point of view, the hunt for strong allies against Iran running into trouble. The U.S. is cold, and will remain so at least until January 2017. The Pakistanis, long assumed to be in the Saudi pocket, have been looking very cool: the head of the Pakistani Army gave Deputy Crown Prince and Defense Minister Mohammed bin Salman a polite kiss-off during a recent visit, annoucning that the Pakistani Army would of course respond to any threat to Saudi Arabia’s territorial integrity—i.e., not the sort of threat Riyadh is worried about right now. (Predictably, Pakistani’s civilian government has been even cooler, declaring it won’t deploy Pakistani troops on foreign soil.) And though Turkey has been making surprisingly Saudi-friendly noises recently, there is too much historic rivalry between the two for leadership of the Sunni world—and Erdogan is still considered too personally ambitious to remake the order of the Middle East with himself at the top. The Saudis are not going to put trust faith in a life-and-death matter in help from Ankara. So there is really only one significant power left that really sees eye-to-eye with Riyadh: Israel.What that means is hard to say. But one thing to note about the new Saudi leadership: it is willing to run risks and take bolder stands than past Saudi governments, when the situation as seen from Riyadh was less dire, were willing to do. There are lots of reasons why both sides will want to keep any new relationship out of the public eye, but it’s rare world politics to see two countries whose interests align as closely as Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have now done and not see some kind of common action come out of it in a time of crisis.This group has already collaborated against Hamas in the last Gaza War, and Egypt and Israel today have better relations and closer communications than they have done in several years. Saudis and Israelis have a whole set of interests in common in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. As Saudi-Iranian tensions heat up in the region, keep an eye on this emerging alliance to push back somewhere.

China Lures Private Investors To Paracel Outpost

China will make a big push to get private investors interested in developing infrastructure for some of the disputed islands and atolls in the South China Sea, Chinese media reported today. Reuters has the story:

China will invite private investment to build infrastructure on islands it controls in the disputed South China Sea and will this year start regular flights to one of them, state media said Friday, moves likely to anger other claimants.

China claims almost all of the energy-rich waters of the South China Sea, through which more than $5 trillion of maritime trade passes each year. The Philippines, Brunei, Vietnam, Malaysia and Taiwan have overlapping claims.
 In 2012 China set up what it calls Sansha city, based on Woody Island in the Paracels, to administer its islands there.

Though China calls it a city, its permanent population is no more than a few thousand, and many of the disputed islets and reefs in the sea are uninhabited.

“The city will also push forward the planning and construction of a maritime medical rescue center. Submarine optical cables will be laid and put into use this year, and WiFi will cover all inhabited islands and reefs,” Sansha’s mayor said.

China may have a tough time attracting large scale private investment to such a hotly contested and politically unstable place. Still, its efforts are as much as anything about signaling its seriousness to other countries with claims to the islands. Regular readers will recall that Vietnam was incensed after China recently landed several test flights on an air strip built on Fiery Cross Reef. That project was administered out of Sansha City. There was no immediate response from the U.S. or any of the other claimants to this latest news. The United States has generally been quieter about the Paracels than it has been about China’s activities in the Spratlys, which are to their south.Meanwhile, on Wednesday, the Philippine Supreme Court ruled that the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Act co-signed with the United States is constitutional, paving the way for more American troops to rotate through Philippine bases. That should make it easier for the United States to increase its presence in the region, much to Beijing’s displeasure.

US Entering a Rapidly Changing Global LNG Market

It’s been a big week for American energy exports, as tankers carrying the first U.S. crude cargoes in some 40 years have made their way across the Atlantic while the first-ever shipment of liquified natural gas (LNG) departed a Louisiana port. But while U.S. supplies of oil and gas have gotten a kind of turbo-boost in recent years thanks to fracking, their introduction to global markets isn’t coming at a great time. The price of oil has plunged since June of 2014 on a global glut, and we haven’t yet seen its floor. Similarly, demand in the world’s LNG market is struggling to meet the copious amounts of new supplies coming online.

In a recent review of the 2015 LNG market, Woods Mackenzie paints a picture of slack demand and burgeoning supply, and a corresponding drop in LNG prices. When U.S. investors were scraping together the considerable amounts of cash necessary to start construction on the massive LNG export terminals needed to send our shale gas abroad, they were eagerly eying Asian markets that were paying upwards of $15 per million British thermal units (mmBtu). Those spot prices were well above other regional markets, and were driven in large part by Japan’s sudden need to replace the power generation capacity it lost when it shuttered its nuclear reactors in response to the 2011 Fukushima disaster. Natural gas replaced some 44 percent of that lost nuclear power generation, and because the island nation isn’t itself rich in hydrocarbons, that only happened by dramatically ramping up LNG imports.But 2015 effectively erased the Asian LNG premium, as Japanese demand shrank by 4 percent from 2014 and its own LNG spot price hit a low of $6.90 per mmBtu. South Korean imports dropped by a whopping 11 percent, and China recorded its first ever annual decline in LNG demand, importing one percent less than in 2014. And even as Asian demand was shrinking, Pacific supplies of LNG grew significantly: Australia, already one of the world’s largest producers, increased LNG exports by 27 percent as compared to the year before. U.S. LNG boosters hoped Asia would be keen to buy our new exports, but that market is quickly becoming too competitive for Atlantic producers to justify the extra costs of sending cargoes halfway around the world—Atlantic to Pacific LNG flows fell by 16 percent.However, all is not lost for America’s fledgling LNG export presence. Europe is increasingly anxious to diversify away from its Russian supplies of pipeline gas, and LNG is the likeliest solution. In the past, the Asian premium precluded European buyers from attracting the kinds of supplies they might have wished at the right price, but 2015 changed that calculus. By February of last year, Europe had doubled its LNG imports as compared to the same period in 2014, and over the course of 2015, the UK increased its LNG imports by an eye-popping 27 percent, while the Continent’s imports ended the year up 14 percent. This is a market with room for growth as European policymakers continue to try to wiggle out from underneath Putin’s thumb, and geographically it’s one U.S. exports could serve.Even closer to home, the Americas could be an important market for U.S. LNG exporters to supply—this region accounted for nearly 9 percent of LNG imports in 2015. There’s a surfeit of LNG sloshing around our planet at the moment, but U.S. exporters can still carve out a share of the market.

A Promising Sign from the Academy

Over at Commentary, Jonathan Marks has a worthwhile essay on the American Historical Association’s rejection of an anti-Israel boycott resolution at its annual meeting on Saturday. Of particular interest is Marks’ observation that the resolution, which has been passed in various forms by a growing number of academic social science organizations, could not have been defeated without the support of many liberal and progressive historians:

Scholars on the left deserve credit for their work against these sorts of resolutions … Conservatives are greatly outnumbered in the humanities and social science fields in which these resolutions have been taken up. Associations like the AHA would long ago have been lost to the determined efforts of anti-Israel activists were it not for the willingness of scholars on the left to engage, year in and year out, in a strenuous and unpleasant fight against the ongoing campaign to use their organizations to delegitimize Israel.

… Conservatives should not give up on our colleges and universities. It does not typically make headlines when teachers and scholars demonstrate their integrity. But as the vote at AHA suggests, there is more integrity to appeal to than a reader of the headlines might guess.

This vote is a reminder that the problem with academic political culture is not that it is “too left-leaning,” though there might be benefits from having a more politically diverse professoriate. Rather, it is the way that academia has allowed a political agenda to penetrate into spaces that are supposed to be strictly scholarly—as evidenced, for example, by the tendency toward speech codes, linguistic revisionism, and officially encouraged ethnic segregation. Israel boycotts by academic organizations also fall into this category: As Jeffrey Herf has written in these pages, BDS resolutions considered by academic organizations represent an effort by activists “to collapse the distinction between scholarship and politics.” It’s encouraging to see that the distinction held, even at the left-leaning AHA. Here’s hoping that it can be rediscovered and strengthened in other academic institutions.

ISIS Strikes Indonesia

Several bombs and an extended gunfight convulsed downtown Jakarta, as terrorists carried out a successful attack in the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation. :

Islamic State said it was behind an attack by suicide bombers and gunmen in the heart of Jakarta on Thursday, the first time the radical group has targeted the world’s most populous Muslim nation.

Just seven people were killed despite multiple blasts and a gunfight, and five of them were the attackers themselves, but the brazenness of their siege suggested a new brand of militancy in a country where low-level strikes on police are common.

The attackers came from an ISIS-affiliated group from the city of Solo on the main island of Java, a group that had reportedly planned an attack in December that had been successfully thwarted. “We have detected communications between a Syrian group and the Solo group,” Jakarta’s police chief said.

It’s of course a very good thing that so few people were killed and injured given the scope and ambition of the attackers. But after months (even years) of concerns about radicalization in Indonesia, we can expect this attack to reverberate throughout the country and southeast Asia. Demonstrating a global reach helps ISIS encourage young men (and women) to join the cause, but it also helps draw more countries into the fight against it.Terrorism could cause real instability and chaos in Indonesia, which continues to build on the democratic institutions it established starting in the late 1990s. Indonesia’s stability is important for southeast Asia, and, as we’ve written about Myanmar and Thailand, the stability of southeast Asia is very important to the United States.