Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 514

Notes from the Edge

My Journey at the Nuclear Brink by William Perry

Stanford Security Studies, 2015, 276 + xxi pp., $16.00

The ancient Greek lives chronicled by Plutarch exhibit the perfidy of human beings in all its manifold guises. There are unprincipled turncoats like Alcibiades, self-righteous bumblers like Nicias, and shameless rabble rousers like Cleon—all deeply flawed but also indelibly etched in our cultural memory. Then there are largely forgotten characters like Aristides. If politics in democratic Athens was a blood sport, Aristides was its moral conscience. Plutarch says this of him: “Altogether admirable was his steadfast constancy amid the revulsions of political feeling. He was not unduly lifted up by his honors, and faced adversity with a calm gentleness, while in all cases alike he considered it his duty to give his services to his country freely and without any reward, either in money or, what meant far more, in reputation.”

It is an apt description of another man, born 25 centuries after Aristides, who has now produced a memoir of his life and times: My Journey at the Nuclear Brink . William Perry is—by the testimony of all who worked with him and by the witness of this autobiography—a thoroughly decent man. Not just that, he was a successful and consequential public servant, first as Under Secretary of Defense and ultimately as Secretary of Defense. If our military is technologically superior to its possible adversaries, if our non-commission officers are the best (and the best treated) in the world, if the “loose nukes” left behind as the Soviet empire receded have been turned into nuclear fuel for U.S. power plants, we owe all these achievements in large measure to Bill Perry.But whereas Donald Rumsfeld’s disastrous second tour as Secretary of Defense will be remembered as a cautionary tale by generations yet unborn, Bill Perry is already half forgotten. The wages of sin may be death, but as Plutarch teaches, the wages of virtue—in Washington as in ancient Greece—can often be obscurity. That has been Perry’s fate, and this memoir, for all its many virtues, is unlikely to change it.My Journey at the Nuclear Brink is meant above all to convey grim tidings about the growing danger of nuclear weapons, but it also recounts, inter alia, the life of its author, a man who in many ways lived the American dream. Fortune and timing favored him, but energy, intelligence, sound judgment, and a penchant for risk taking favored him even more. A newly minted mathematics Ph.D. in 1954, he began his professional career in what would become Silicon Valley just as the digital revolution was about to begin. His specialty was electronic surveillance and analysis of the Soviet nuclear missile threat. By his early thirties, he had risen to the directorship of Sylvania’s Electronic Defense Laboratories and become an acknowledged leader in his field.He tells of two formative experiences from these early years, both of which involved nuclear weapons. One of his first assignments was to assess whether electronic jamming would reduce casualties from a Soviet nuclear attack. He concluded that casualties would be reduced by two-thirds. Still, 25 million Americans would die immediately and many millions more in subsequent years. Then, in 1962, he was part of a small team that concluded from intercepted telemetry data that the newly discovered Soviet missiles in Cuba had the range to reach most East Coast cities, including Washington, D.C. This was the crucial bit of evidence in the lead-up to the Cuban Missile Crisis. His team did not know that the warheads for the Soviet missiles were already in Cuba, or that a Soviet submarine off the Cuban coast was equipped with nuclear-armed torpedoes. The situation was therefore far more perilous than government leaders realized, and it would have led to a disastrous nuclear war had not a prudent President Kennedy resisted pressure from his civilian and military aides who were urging an attack on Cuba.From these experiences, Perry seems to have drawn three lessons. First, there was no adequate defense against a determined nuclear attack; damage might be reduced, but what remained would threaten civilization. Second, even in the super-secret world of the Cold War, a degree of transparency was crucial to stabilizing the nuclear balance; without it, both sides would have taken the counsel of their fears, and the nuclear arms race would have been even more perilous than it was. And finally, the idea of using nuclear weapons was deeply morally repugnant. These would be the convictions that informed his later career, both in and out of government.By the mid-1960s, Perry and some colleagues had raided their savings to found Electromagnetic Systems Laboratory (ELS). Their idea was to apply emerging digital techniques to Cold War intelligence analysis. In hindsight, we know that they barged in at the ground floor of the digital revolution, but it was a considerable risk at the time for a young group of self-financed entrepreneurs. In the event, ESL prospered and Perry’s reputation along with it.Soon President Carter’s Defense Department came calling, and Perry (at considerable financial sacrifice) became Under Secretary of Defense for research and engineering. The man had met his moment. The U.S. military was transitioning from the vacuum tube to the digital era, and no one was better qualified to lead that transformation than Perry. His incumbency was marked by his push for advanced, technologically sophisticated conventional weapons to offset the Soviet advantage in numbers, and by his skepticism about the need for burgeoning nuclear arsenals. One concern played into the other. If conventional weapons could become an effective deterrent to a general war in their own right, the nuclear threshold would recede. The conventional edge, Perry thought, would come from stealth technology, precision guidance, GPS, and vastly improved satellite surveillance. These were all fruits of the computer age, which, grouped together, in due course became known as the Revolution in Military Affairs. All were either initiated or crucially advanced on Perry’s watch.There was opposition from those, including all-purpose pundit James Fallows andF-16 designer Pierre Sprey, who thought these and other new weapons would be too expensive, too complex, and unreliable in the “fog of war.” Perry had to compromise at the margins (fewer GPS satellites, for example) but argues now that the performance of the U.S. military in subsequent wars, beginning with the 1991 Gulf War Operation “Desert Storm,” validated his judgment. Still, his victory was not without cost. He sacrificed Pentagon acquisition reform, he writes, in return for the high-tech weapons he championed; he could take on the vested interests in one case, but not in both simultaneously. He was to return to acquisition reform as Secretary of Defense, but again with limited success. It turned out, though he doesn’t say so, that combining cutting-edge technology with a broken acquisition system could produce a toxic mix. That is what some claim best describes the F-35 program, which has stood accused of limited capabilities, ruinous cost overruns, and seven-million lines of computer code. Perhaps the proponents of simpler, cheaper, and more numerous weapon systems had more of a point than Perry is willing to grant them.Out of government in the Reagan years, Perry became a vocal critic of Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense program (the Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI). He had not changed his view that defense against nuclear weapons was a dangerous illusion, and he thought Reagan’s proposals went far beyond our technological capability. Perry regrets that Reagan’s hopes for an illusory nuclear “shield” prevented a broader agreement to limit nuclear warheads when Reagan met with Gorbachev at Reykjavik. Reagan, he thinks, sacrificed real reductions in nuclear missiles for imaginary defenses against them. But we know now that Gorbachev insisted that the U.S. limit its missile defense research even though his scientists had told him (as Perry was also arguing) that if the U.S. defenses worked at all, which was unlikely, they could be cheaply and easily overcome. The Soviet leader therefore might have made concessions on SDI without real cost to Soviet security. Still, Perry places the primary onus for missed opportunities on Reagan. Indeed, he tends in general to give Reagan less credit than he deserves for his effort to reduce and not just limit numbers of nuclear weapons, a policy that upset the hardliners in his Administration as much as the Reykjavik failure disturbs Perry. It is one of the great ironies of this era that the cause of those, like Perry, who hoped to contain the nuclear threat was advanced most effectively by a President who came to office as the supposed leader of the nuclear hawks.With Clinton’s election, Perry was back at the Pentagon as Deputy to Secretary of Defense Les Aspin. Perry is characteristically discrete about the circumstances of Aspin’s downfall, but the result was Perry’s elevation, half way through Clinton’s first term, to leadership of the Pentagon as Secretary of Defense.Perry was perhaps less suited to the top job than he had been to his first Pentagon tour. Leadership, especially on controversial issues, can sometimes be exercised more effectively from the anterooms of power, and Perry had not been Clinton’s first choice for the job. Perry had his successes. “Project Sapphire,” launched to reprocess the large stocks of nuclear material left over from the Soviet nuclear weapons program into nuclear fuel for U.S. reactors, was a notable one. But in other areas Perry played primarily an advisory, and sometimes a dissenting, role. He was involved in the events that led to the end of hostilities in Bosnia and the Dayton Accords, cautioning that Russian interests should also be taken into account. But his cautions were generally ignored, and he was beaten badly on an issue of even greater concern to the Russians: NATO enlargement.In a tense cabinet meeting that Perry requested, Dick Holbrooke made short work of Perry’s argument that acceptance of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary into NATO should be delayed until advances made in relations with a democratizing Russia could be consolidated. Perry considered resigning over the issue. In My Journey at the Nuclear Brink, he argues that Russian revanchism under Putin was not inevitable, but can be traced in large measure to the U.S. refusal to take core Russian interests into account on NATO, in the Balkans, on Test Ban Treaty ratification, and on anti-ballistic missile deployments to Poland and the Czech Republic. Perry understood far better than the Administration he served that failing to give a defeated power a stake in the post-conflict order was poor statecraft on a massive scale.The proudest achievement of his time as Secretary of Defense, Perry writes, is to have improved the living conditions and educational opportunities for non-commissioned officers—our “unfair competitive advantage,” as Perry’s military aide, Major General Paul Kern called them. Once alerted to the problem by General Kern, Perry proceeded with characteristic energy and dedication, eventually winning a $15 billion dollar grant for improved enlisted housing, as well as strengthening the G.I. Bill.In his long political afterlife, Perry has become a teacher, and an avid participant in “track two” discussions with the Russians and Chinese, among others. These discussions are meetings between ex- and would-be policy makers based on a peculiarly American idea that good personal relationships can ease policy differences. It’s an optimist’s response to a cynical world. Foreign participants generally play along.Perry’s judgment, experience, and common sense have also made him the obvious Democratic choice to serve on several bipartisan panels. He was part of the Baker/Hamilton-chaired Iraq Study Group that boiled the many absurdities of U.S. Iraq War policy down to three of conception and four of implementation. All this is recounted from Perry’s point of view, but without much that is new.Compared to the autobiographies of his successors, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, this “selective memoir” is a slight volume. That may be because, late in life, Perry has come, like Archilochus’ hedgehog, to put aside many small things and focus on one big thing: what he calls the “long backward slide” into nuclear confrontation. He predicts that the Russians will soon withdraw from the Test Ban Treaty and begin testing warheads for a new generation of intercontinental missiles. They have already reversed their longstanding policy of “no first use.” The result, Perry thinks, will be irresistible pressure on the United State to resume its own nuclear testing. All this is taking place in the context of new flash points between the nuclear powers in the Middle East and on the southern rim of the old Soviet Empire, with Putin channeling Soviet-era paranoia and his generals, with his backing, once again brandishing their nuclear weapons. The only morally acceptable response to these ominous trends, Perry thinks, is first to defuse the tension, and then to initiate a gradual reduction toward nuclear zero. He admits that many, even on the left, consider this impractical. But for Perry, practicality is not the first consideration; moral necessity is. It’s a conviction shared by his contemporaries, George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, and San Nunn, who together form the so-called “Gang of Four.” Their proposals aim to better secure nuclear materials, increase decision time for leaders, accelerate nuclear reductions, and increase transparency.The “Gang of Four” is aging. Nunn is the junior member at 78. Shultz is 94, Kissinger 92, and Perry himself is now 89. Theirs are no longer names to conjure with. The generation that might have taken their place was swallowed up in the Iraq fiasco and the loudest voices now seem to come from a perspective far different from Perry’s. Serious books are appearing about the role of nuclear weapons, even nuclear war, in national strategy. In this new atmosphere, Perry’s brand of moral indignation can seem old-fashioned—not at all the sort of thing to persuade a rising generation of steely-eyed academics.Perry hopes to change that. But he has the fatal weakness in a would-be best-selling author of being judicious and fair-minded. He speaks ill of no one, engages in no retrospective backstabbing, and presents the arguments of even his bitterest opponents with uncommon objectivity. His generosity of spirit is evident on nearly every page as he gives credit to colleagues and subordinates for each success, and blames only himself for failures. (A name that appears often as Perry’s collaborator and friend is current Defense Secretary, Ash Carter). The one time he departs from that practice—he thinks the opponents to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty were cynical, dishonest, and politically self-serving—he instantly regrets his inability to excuse their actions. Even then he names no names.The unfortunate result of this lack of sensationalism is a memoir unlikely to reach a wide enough audience to serve as the effective warning and exhortation Perry hopes it will be. A more polemical and less humble book might have served his purposes better. But that would have been out character for William Perry, and character—as much as nuclear weapons—is what this memoir is really about.

EU’s Turkey Deal Isn’t Stopping Refugee Flow

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which has been tracking refugee flows into Europe on a weekly basis, reported that while numbers were down from those measured in November and early December, at more than 3,000 a day this week, they were still overwhelming EU and Greek authorities. Reuters reports that, in the wake of these numbers, the EU is looking for Turkey to do more to reduce the flows. European leaders believed that, under the terms of the deal the EU signed with Turkey in November, Ankara was supposed to have helped stem the flow of refugees in exchange for a pledged €3 billion in aid. However, as we noted at the time:

Unfortunately, however, the chances are high that the agreement will not succeed in stopping the flow. Turkey has never been entirely in control of its southern border, where Kurdish militants have been active for many years. If the U.S. cannot control the Rio Grande, Turkey will have even greater difficulty with the wild and unsettled border it shares with Syria and Iraq.

Now, the Reuters report seems to show that, indeed, the deal has not so far worked as envisioned:

Frans Timmermans, the deputy head of the executive European Commission, told a news conference on Thursday that data showed arrivals in Greece in recent weeks had shown little change since the EU pledged cash and other concessions to Turkey on Nov. 29 in return for Turkish help in curbing irregular immigration.

“Over the last couple of weeks, the figures have remained relatively high, so there is still a lot of work to do there,” Timmermans said in Amsterdam, noting that he would travel to Turkey for talks on Monday to address a crisis that has divided EU governments and bolstered anti-EU nationalists […]“We have seen the first results which are encouraging but we are a long way from being satisfied.”

When Timmermans gets to Ankara, he’s likely to find that the Turks have a different understanding of the deal: The €3 billion was meant to help Ankara handle the refugees they already have, officials have said. Meanwhile, with the agreement, the Europeans gave a major boost in legitimacy to President Erdogan during a year in which the Turkish ruler had become more and more openly authoritarian. Again, from our November comments:

[T]he contrast between the arrogance the EU displays when it feels strong—labeling settlement-made Israeli goods, barring desperately poor farmers in Africa from using GMO crops to enhance their productivity and profits, imposing human rights sanctions on countries too small or too far away to retaliate—and the sweeping concessions it makes when it’s reeling, is highly instructive. The deal makes a mockery of European values, it will divide Europe further, and it rewards Erdogan’s bad behavior. Because Europe has no real policy on Syrian refugees and no means of developing one in anything like a timely fashion, it was reduced to paying virtually any price Turkey chose to name.

The EU is now finding out that, having done a deal with the devil, it hasn’t gotten what it asked for. To make matters worse, Brussels already promised results to an increasingly restive European populace. Whatever Europe does next (Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is advocating bringing Bulgaria into the Schengen Zone and then creating a unified land border, with extra fences), it had better make sure it works—or that it at least levels with its people about the realistic chances for success. Happy talk may keep things calm for a news cycle or two, but a pile of broken promises of progress on immigration are taking a long-term toll on the Continent’s political climate.

Fracking Is Making America Greener

Coal is on the wane in the United States. In 2006, the sooty rock made up nearly a quarter of America’s energy mix. Yet, through the first six months of last year, it met just 16 percent of our energy needs. 2015 was, as the EIA reports, a decidedly bad year for Old King Coal:

Since reaching a high point in 2008, coal production in the United States has continued to decline. U.S. coal production in 2015 is expected to be about 900 million short tons (MMst), 10% lower than in 2014 and the lowest level since 1986. Regionally, production from the Appalachian Basin has fallen the most. Low natural gas prices, lower international coal demand, and environmental regulations have contributed to declining U.S. coal production. […]

In the United States, almost all coal is used to generate electricity. Recently, coal’s share of electricity generation has fallen as its market share of natural gas and renewables increased. . . In April 2015, natural gas-fired electricity generation surpassed that of coal-fired generation on a monthly basis for the first time in history, and it did so again in each of the months from July through at least October, the latest monthly data available.

It’s no big secret what’s behind coal’s decline, either. Hydraulic fracturing and horizontal well drilling have transformed the American energy landscape in the space of a decade, unlocking huge new reserves of natural gas and oil that were trapped in shale formations and thought to be inaccessible. Fracking has therefore unleashed a flood of new supplies of hydrocarbons on the U.S. market, and that’s brought natural gas down to bargain basement prices.

As the EIA notes, we mostly use coal to generate electricity, but natural gas-fired power plants can accomplish that same task, which is why plunging natural gas prices are putting the squeeze on coal producers. For parts of the country that rely on the coal industry, this is a bitter pill to swallow, but for America’s environmentalists, this ought to be seen as something of a game changer. Coal is just about the dirtiest fossil fuel around, and burning it not only releases copious amounts of greenhouse gases, but also emits harmful air pollutants into the local environment. Natural gas burns much cleaner, emitting roughly half of those GHGs, and it’s growing momentum in this battle against coal can only be seen as good green news.But the modern environmental movement is loathe to give any sort of credit to the shale boom, preferring instead to stick to its doom-and-gloom prognostications and moralist chiding. That’s a shame, because America isn’t getting the credit it deserves for greening its economy without donning the eco-hairshirt: No other developed country is making more progress in moving away from coal than we are. We’ve said it before but it bears repeating (even if it does fall on deaf ears amongst environmentalists): Shale gas is fracking green.

In Germany, Reality Sets In

In 2015, as more than a million refugees and migrants streamed into Germany, many pundits and industry leaders initially praised Chancellor Angela Merkel’s “welcome policy” as not only being humane but also economically savvy. But now, as Politico reports, a new reality appears to be setting in as the German analysts have a closer look at just who the migrants are. The official government line continues to be that migrants could take some of the unoccupied jobs caused by Germany’s declining labor force (there are as many as one million such jobs). But the director of the Munich-based Ifo Center for the Economics of Education is quoted in the story that “[f]rom everything we know so far, it seems that the majority of refugees would first need extensive training and even then it’s far from certain that it would work out.”

The Politico story also notes that, according to the OECD, on average, an eighth-grader in pre-war Syria had a similar level of education to a third-grade student in Germany. And an official from the Association of German Chambers of Industry and Commerce is quoted as saying, “[s]omeone who comes from Eritrea and says he was an electrician might have repaired a radio or laid a cable there, but he might have never seen a fuse box, as we use it in Germany.”Our very own Adam Garfinkle anticipated this back in September, writing:

I will only note that many Germans seem to think that the Levantine Arabs now entering their country by the hundreds of thousands will act like their Gastarbeiter Turks. They are in for a shock. Many also think that they’re getting the cream of the educated crop from Syria. I heard several observers note that the people coming are young men, coming not directly from Syria but from camps in Jordan and Turkey. They are presumed to be engineers, doctors, and the like, and given Germany’s age-cohort imbalanced demographic picture, the consensus among the saintly is that they will boost the German economy in the not-too-distant future. This means that they know not the first thing about the real status of education in the Arab world. Only a tiny percentage of these asylum seekers are well enough educated to hold down a middle-class enabling professional job in an economy like Germany’s.

As these dynamics play themselves out, the nature of the challenges facing Germany will shift. Germany very much needs skilled workers, but unskilled workers suffer from higher unemployment. If you add un- or under-employment to the cultural clash between Germany and the newcomers, the challenges of assimilating the refugee inflow becomes more even more daunting.

Chinese Markets End Volatile Week

True to script, Chinese markets recovered today after a rout triggered an automatic suspension of trading yesterday—just like they did on Tuesday after a similar rout shut down trading Monday. The New York Times:

Stocks opened higher on Friday morning in China, but in the early volatility, a quick sell-off within 30 minutes was followed by another increase by midmorning. Shares continued to rise after lunch, and by the close of trading, the CSI 300 blue-chip index was up about 2 percent. The Shanghai composite index finished nearly 2 percent higher, while the Shenzhen composite index, which had been down as much as 4 percent, ended 1.2 percent higher […]

On Friday morning, the country’s central bank slightly raised the trading range for the renminbi and strengthened the currency, whose depreciation in the preceding three weeks had stoked concerns among investors. It was set at 6.5636 renminbi to the dollar, compared with 6.5646 on Thursday. It remains near its weakest point since early 2011.

The week’s biggest casualty, apart from the value wiped off of global bourses, has been the illusion of Chinese regulatory competence. In a stark admission of defeat, the automatic “circuit breakers,” which halted trading on Monday and Thursday, were removed by Beijing authorities for not achieving “the anticipated outcome.” The climb-down was characterized as “an incredible loss of face,” according to one China market-watcher speaking to the Financial Times. “The government response is a shambles and they have been shown to be completely out of their depth.”

China’s “governed” market model has long been the object of praise from some academics and policymakers around the world. Could 2016 be the year when the system shows its downsides?

A Racial Twist in the Campus Sex Wars?

Throughout most of the 20th century, American progressives often took the lead in strengthening due process and civil liberties protections for people accused of wrongdoing, well aware that minorities and the poor tended to suffer the most when these principles were abandoned. Over the last several years, however, on college campuses (and, to a lesser extent, in the larger discourse) the politics have shifted, and it is now progressives who have successfully weakened the due process protections available to people charged with sexual assault.

Progressives pushing the guilty-until-proven-innocent standards think they are fighting entrenched sexism, and maybe they are, on the margins. But the evisceration of due process has come at a cost—and, as 20th-century civil-liberties liberals might have predicted, that cost can perhaps be especially steep for minority students. At least, that’s the implication of a new lawsuit filed by two black students who were summarily dismissed from the University of Findlay in Ohio on a sexual assault charge. Ashe Schow of the Washington Examiner reports:

Two students expelled for campus sexual assault are suing their university, alleging racism played a role in their case.

The two accused students, identified in the lawsuit as Justin Browning and Alphonso Baity, II, are both African-American. They were accused by a white woman, identified in the lawsuit only as M.K., after an encounter at a party.Browning and Baity were expelled despite the fact that every witness interviewed corroborated the accused students’ story, and that witnesses came forward to say that M.K. bragged about the encounter as a consensual act. Not only were they expelled, but the expulsions came just two days after the accusation was filed, and campus procedures regarding sexual assault accusations were not followed.

Schow, a veteran chronicler of administrative malfeasance in campus sexual assault cases, goes on to describe the total lack of regard for basic fairness as alleged in the students’ complaint, describing it as “the most incredible I have ever seen.” To get a taste of how out-of-control campus tribunals have become, read her whole report. Reports of these kinds of incidents should also be treated carefully, and we have no first-hand knowledge of the case. But Schow’s report, if accurate, paints an ugly picture.

It’s tempting for those of us who oppose the campus war on due process to hope that cases like these will finally lead progressives—who control campus administrations, and (at least for now) the relevant federal regulatory agencies—to reconsider the wisdom of their campus sexual assault agenda. But that is the wrong way to win the fight. Basic liberal principles like due process should be upheld not because we feel particularly bad for this or that identity group, but because they are right and true for everyone. This is not about whether women or minorities are higher on the “privilege pyramid” that campus progressives have created. It’s about maintaining equality before a system in which race and sex should be invisible.

Turkey Takes Saudi Side in Embassy Dispute

Another day, another sign of hardening sectarian battle lines in the Middle East. The New York Times reports:

Turkey said late Thursday that it had summoned the Iranian ambassador to register its objections to reports in the Iranian news media that linked a visit by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, late last month with the kingdom’s execution of a Shiite cleric.[..]

Turkey’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement released late Thursday: “In a meeting today that took place with the Iranian ambassador at our ministry, we condemned the linking of our president’s recent visit to Saudi Arabia to the executions carried out in the country in articles published on media outlets linked to Iranian official bodies. We asked for such broadcasts to be terminated immediately.”

The diplomatic dust-up dragged Turkey into a crisis that has roiled the Middle East, rattled world financial markets and heightened sectarian tensions, the latest chapter in a longstanding power struggle between the regional players that has played out in the area’s many proxy wars, from Syria to Yemen to Iraq.

The growing specter of Iranian power, boosted by Russian intervention on the Assad side in Syria, is continuing to result in Sunnis warily coming together. Until recently, Qatar and Turkey were openly vying for influence against Saudi Arabia, supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and its Palestinian branch of Hamas against Saudi opposition, and opposing the Sisi government in Egypt, despite Saudi support. But Qatar and Turkey both seem to be edging toward the Saudi position in the dispute over the execution of Nimr and the embassy attack in Tehran.

This is not a sign of love and brother reconciliation, but of fear.It is also a sign of Saudi strategy at work. The Saudis have been working to bring two non-Arab Sunni powers into a coalition against Iran: Turkey and Pakistan. The Saudi foreign minister was in Islamabad Thursday trying to drum up support, but this met with mixed success: the politicians don’t like the idea of taking sides in a dangerous confrontation, and much of public opinion is also jittery. However, as we noted yesterday, on matters of state security, civilian politicians do not have much authority in Pakistan. The real decisions will be made in meetings that journalists and politicians don’t know much about.So chalk Turkey up as a “get” for the Saudis in this dispute, and Pakistan as a “maybe.” But above all, keep an eye on how, slowly but inexorably, the Sunni-Shi’a sectarian divide is starting to take precendence all other disputes in the Middle East.

De Blasio Bumps NYC Minimum Wage

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio yesterday announced a plan to raise the minimum wage for city employees to $15 per hour. The New York Times:

Under the mayor’s plan, which matches a similar increase for state employees enacted by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo last year, about 50,000 city workers — including crossing guards, prekindergarten teachers, custodial workers and others — would see their pay reach the $15-an-hour level by the end of 2018 […]

The majority of the city’s 300,000 employees already earn $15 an hour or more, officials said. Mr. de Blasio’s plan would affect about 20,000 unionized workers, mostly represented by District Council 37, and 30,000 employees of outside organizations — like day-care providers — whose services are paid for by the city.

The plan will cost an estimated $238 million over the course of the next five years. “We know that nothing does more to lift up working families and move our economy forward than raising wages, and the city is leading by example by doing just that,” the Mayor’s office said in a statement.

“The mayor has been lucky so far with the economy,” Nicole Gelinas of the center-right Manhattan Institute said. “If a recession comes, higher wages will have to mean more layoffs.” This is one problem with many preferred progressive policies: Wealthy cities like New York can often only afford them when the economy is booming. But the good times may be coming to an end in New York— or at least, the times there may soon be less good than they have been of late. If the tax base shrinks and the city has to cut its budget, this minimum wage increase could create pain for some of the very working families it is intended to help.

Oklahoma Fracker Rejects Anti-Earthquake Regulations

An Oklahoma oil company is rejecting an appeal from state regulators who have asked it to cease storing wastewater from its fracking operations in wells. Oklahoma has seen a sharp spike in low-magnitude earthquakes in recent years, and studies have tied this seismic uptick with the storage of wastewater in wells. But the company in question, Sandridge Energy, doesn’t think the science is settled enough for the state to deny it its cheapest option for discarding its fracking effluent. The WSJ reports:

Sandridge Energy Inc., which has complied with similar requests in the past, said this time it won’t stop using its wastewater disposal wells, which are part of the company’s oil-and-gas fracking operations…The Oklahoma Corporation Commission, which regulates energy companies, is working on legal action to modify Sandridge’s permits in order to force it to comply, said Matt Skinner, a spokesman for the agency. […]

How Sandridge fares in the inevitable legal battle ahead of it could have large implications for the shale industry. The studies mentioned above are part of a sizable body of evidence linking the disposal of wastewater in wells with increased seismicity, and while it may be too early to definitively draw a causal connection between the two phenomena, this is still a very serious issue that deserves the scrutiny it’s getting.

That doesn’t mean capitulating to Chicken Little pronunciations that fracking is going to swallow homes. That kind of breathless fear mongering may be the default state of the modern green movement, but it doesn’t lend itself to constructive policymaking or regulation. It’s important to put these earthquakes in context, because their magnitudes are so low that they often can’t be felt without specific instrumentation. Moreover, while some studies have linked the hydraulic fracturing part of shale drilling (the step from which fracking derives its name) with micro-quakes, the case is a bit stronger against disposing wastewater in wells—and that doesn’t pose an existential threat to the industry because, as the WSJ notes, there are alternatives available:

Some oil-field service companies load wastewater into trucks and haul it to special treatment plants, where it is cleaned for reuse—sometimes recycled back into oil-and-gas operations or, in some cases, used to water crops. But those options are usually more expensive than using disposal wells.

We’ve highlighted the industry’s drive to recycle its fracking fluid, a move that could not only prevent seismic forcing but, if it can be commercially scaled, could end up saving companies money.

There’s a fight brewing in Oklahoma, and it’s one worth paying attention to. Fracking has remade the American energy landscape in just a few short years, but its linkage with earthquakes demands sober analysis, just as its regulation requires consistent but not overly onerous oversight—enough to keep companies from acting irresponsibly but not so much as to stifle the industry’s ability to adapt to these new challenges. Finding that middle way is the perennial challenge for regulators, and it isn’t easy. We’ll be watching to see how Oklahoma manages.

Are the Germans Vindicating Orban?

In the wake of the New Year’s Eve attacks on young women by a mob of Middle Eastern and North African men in Cologne, is Orbanism having a moment in Europe? A roundup of columns in European papers would seem to suggest so. Look for instance at this article (trans.) by Jean Quatremer in Libération, a center-left French paper founded by Jean-Paul Sartre:

Six months after the refugee crisis started, there was indeed a true evolution or revolution in Europe. The Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban was the first who responded by building a fence, and everyone noticed him because it was pretty amazing that Hungary, the first country that had broke down the Iron Curtain in 1989, rebuilt a fence on its border with Serbia, then with Croatia.

Everybody named and shamed him by saying ‘this is no surprise from him, he is an [authoritarian] Prime Minister, etcetera.’ On the other hand everyone praised Angela Merkel for quickly opening German borders […]And six months later, everyone has reinstated border controls, countries have built fences and no one raised any objections. We let people die in the Mediterranean, because every day there are children, like Aylan, dying at sea, no one cares and some say that ultimately Orban may have been right before everyone else—this is the right model, the construction of the wall, watchtowers, electrified barriers, we do not want these Muslims.

Orban is a genuinely ugly character—see for instance this article by Charles Gati in our pages in 2014—who has taken advantage of the migrant crisis to entrench his power by passing a series of repressive laws in Hungary. And yet, the German establishment (and the European elites more generally) seem to be working very hard this week to vindicate him. In the wake of Cologne, the German center-right and center-left have exhibited such self-destructive reflexes that they almost seem to be trying to suggest to concerned citizens that the only solution to problems caused by the refugee crisis will come from Orban-like populism.

On Wednesday, as we covered, the Mayor of Cologne, supported by the CDU (conservative) and the Greens, hinted that it was, at least in part, on German women to learn how to avoid such assaults. Then today, an SPD (leftwing) minister of the state in which Cologne is located added this to the debate:

Ralf Jaeger, interior minister for North Rhine-Westphalia, said police had to “adjust” to the fact that groups of men had attacked women en masse.[ . . . ]

Mr Jaeger also warned that anti-immigrant groups were trying to use the attacks to stir up hatred against refugees.“What happens on the right-wing platforms and in chatrooms is at least as awful as the acts of those assaulting the women,” he said. “This is poisoning the climate of our society.”

At least as bad! And so German authorities and prosecutors are making a high-profile effort to censor comments on the events, including on social media. While some of the comments in question are indeed vile, the Washington Post reports on concerns that legitimate political comments are also being swept up.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Angela Merkel doubled down on her refugee policy, resisting cries from the CSU to implement caps on refugee intakes for the next year. Deutsche Welle:

“There exist some varying positions. That will probably not change in the discussion today,” Merkel said, referring to CSU chief Horst Seehofer’s desire to implement a natiowide ceiling of 200,000 refugees this year.

So in the wake of a high-profile, mass attack on women by refugees, an independent Mayor, a SPD regional minister, and a CDU Chancellor have all come out in ways that seem to be at least as concerned—at least—with protecting liberal pieties as addressing popular concerns. It’s the backlash, not the actual attacks, that seems to most worry some of these centrist politicians.

And this is precisely the recipe for getting people to look to Orban-style populism. After all, if even terrorist attacks such as Paris and incidents against women, committed on a large scale, in Cologne cannot get the centrists to focus on popular concerns about immigration, a German voter might wonder, what ever will? Whereas the populists, whatever else might be said about them, do. Which means the choice may indeed come down to Orbanism or Merkelism. And in this environment, that’s not one the elites can necessarily count on winning.