Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 524

POTUS v. PC, Part Three

In an interview with NPR yesterday, President Obama—for the third time this year—criticized the intolerance exhibited by some leftwing activists at college campuses across the country:

I think it’s a healthy thing for young people to be engaged and to question authority and to ask why this instead of that, to ask tough questions about social justice. So I don’t want to discourage kids from doing that.

As I’ve said before, I do think that there have been times on college campuses where I get concerned that the unwillingness to hear other points of view can be as unhealthy on the left as on the right. […]There have been times where you start seeing on college campuses students protesting somebody like the director of the IMF or Condi Rice speaking on a campus because they don’t like what they stand for. Well, feel free to disagree with somebody, but don’t try to just shut them up.

We are always happy to see the President stand up for free inquiry and open debate. America’s strength doesn’t just flow from the power of its navy or the size of its economy. It also derives from our country’s ability to sustain liberal norms in our major institutions. As such, campus intolerance is rightly an area of concern for the President, and it’s heartening that he has devoted some attention to it (at least in his public remarks) in the last several months.

That said, it would be even better if the Administration would also follow up on this kind of rhetoric. It could, for example, direct its Office of Civil Rights in Education to stop pushing colleges to infringe on the civil liberties of their students in the name of combating harassment. (The OCR could even explicitly remind college administrations of the importance of free expression, as it did in 2003).The Administration could also make an effort to be more open and charitable in its own political rhetoric. After the Paris attacks, for example, the President and his allies basically suggested that Americans who were worried about admitting Syrian refugees were bigots who weren’t worth engaging with. Displaying this kind of contempt for your own political opponents probably isn’t the best way to persuade your Millennial admirers to be more open-minded in campus debates.

Study: Federal Loans Driving College Tuition Hikes

In 1987, William J. Bennett, then former President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education, controversially speculated that federal student loan subsidies were helping to drive college tuition increases. “Increases in financial aid in recent years have enabled colleges and universities blithely to raise their tuitions, confident that Federal loan subsidies would help cushion the increase,” he wrote in the New York Times. “Federal student aid policies do not cause college price inflation, but there is little doubt that they help make it possible.”

A recent study by Grey Gordon of Indiana University and Aaron Hedlund University of Missouri provides support for what is now known as the Bennett hypothesis. (Thanks to Mark Calabria for the pointer). The economists constructed a sophisticated model of the higher education market “to test explanations for the steep rise in college tuition between 1987 and 2010.” Their result: Changes in federal student loan programs “account for the lion’s share of the higher tuition.” The model actually found that federal subsidies can explain all of the increase in tuition, but the authors caution that their estimate likely represents “an upper bound.”Moreover, according to the study, changes in federal loan programs have raised tuition so much that they have reduced the overall number of people who could get a college education: “The tuition response completely crowds out any additional enrollment that the financial aid expansion would otherwise induce, resulting instead in an enrollment decline from 33% to 27% in the new equilibrium with only demand shocks”Of course, this alone is just one study. But the bottom line, as our friend Instapundit has said, is that “when you subsidize something, the price goes up.” Ballooning federal loan programs, in addition to saddling students with debts that they increasingly can’t afford to pay back, may also be making college less affordable. This doesn’t mean that subsidized student loan programs should be scrapped entirely—it’s important that our society find ways to help students access the kind of education that will best help them succeed—but it does mean that they should be implemented more intelligently.College tuition has been rising faster than inflation—indeed, as the authors point out, faster than health care costs—for over a generation. The way to fix this is not (as many politicians are proposing) to simply throw more money at the colleges in the form of increased financial aid subsidies. It’s to break the federal monopoly on higher ed accreditation, cut regulatory costs, and, most importantly, experiment with new and innovative ways to deliver higher education at lower cost.

Texas Formation’s Shale Gas Estimates Doubled

One of America’s most productive shale basins has twice as much natural gas and a lot more oil than was previously estimated, according to a new U.S. Geological Survey report. The Barnett Shale formation is in north central Texas, and within it you can find hydrocarbons galore. The Texas Tribune reports:

The U.S Geological Survey says the 25-county region holds an average volume of about 53 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, according to its updated assessment released Thursday. That’s nearly twice as much gas as the agency estimated in 2003, before a mad dash of drillers transformed the landscape in North Texas.

The region’s shale also holds about 172 million barrels of shale oil and 176 million barrels of natural gas liquids, the new estimate says.More than a decade ago, the agency pegged the Barnett’s undiscovered holdings at about 26.2 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered gas and 1 billion barrels of natural gas liquids. It did not bother to assess how much oil was trapped in the North Texas rock — assuming it was minimal.

The previous USGS estimates were based on 2003 data, and much has changed in America’s energy landscape since then. In fact, the doubling of Barnett’s estimated natural gas reserves in just a dozen years is an excellent illustration of how hydraulic fracturing and horizontal well drilling have fundamentally transformed the U.S. energy landscape.

There’s been plenty of talk about the ability of U.S. shale firms to continue profitably to drill in today’s oversupplied bearish crude market. While output has flagged somewhat in recent months, it hasn’t fallen off to the extent that many expected, and the estimates of the reserves they’re plumbing are being revised upwards. That means the U.S. will be able to draw from this formation for longer than we knew. America’s energy future is still bright.

India–Russia Sub Deal Sinking Fast

India’s submarine deal with Russia is going under, according to the Economic Times:

Indian plans to lease a cutting edge nuclear attack submarine that would assist in technical knowhow for an indigenous project have run aground with Russia seen to be backing out on the deal. Senior officials in Delhi and Moscow have told ET that plans to lease a Yasen class attack submarine – two of which are in service with the Russian Navy – are being reconsidered after fairly advanced talks on the project.

India–Soviet military ties were very deep during the Cold War, and since then India has continued to work closely with Russia. India has stayed close with Russia partly because maintaining and upgrading legacy equipment requires working with Moscow. It is also because India, which remembers U.S. sanctions against its nuclear program and, in any case, fears becoming too dependent on the U.S., wants to keep its arms supplies diversified. But India’s waking great power ambitions are affecting relations with Russia. Apparently Delhi was hoping to use the expertise it would gain by working on and them operating a late model Russian submarine as a basis for building its own next generation fleet of nuclear subs. It seems likely that the Russians aren’t interested in putting themselves out of a job in quite this way.

With India set to become one of the most important markets for weapons and military tech in the 21st century, lots of people in lots of world capitals will be paying attention to this submarine saga.

The Winners and Losers of the Commodities Collapse

The story of 2015 can be told a few ways, but one of the most obvious ones is that this was the year the commodities boom officially came crashing down. Raw materials prices have been falling for a few years now, but in 2015, the bottom completely fell out as demand from manufacturing giants—particularly China—slowed. From South Africa to Brazil, the results haven’t been pretty.

Yet it’s important to remember that commodity prices are cyclical. When prices drop, producers stop investing in new capacity. At some point, demand will catch up to supply once again and commodity prices will lurch back up.These cycles are as old as the modern capitalist economy (going back to the first Dutch tulip bubble), but they still take people by surprise. They also confuse geopolitical analysts. Practically the whole profession mistook the last “up” cycle as a fundamental transformation of the world order. Commodity exporters like Russia, Brazil, and South Africa were seen as emerging new powerhouses—but now their economies are looking more like roadkill.The effects of the cycle are very real and they mean trouble for commodity producing countries that are under any kind of stress. That’s a long list, and some of these countries could experience serious instability — especially in places like Venezuela, where some of the world’s dumbest economic policies were causing trouble even when oil prices were high.On the other hand, the down cycle is good for China, a country that mostly imports commodities and exports manufactured goods. Oil, iron, steel, tin, copper, and just about everything else China’s factories need is on sale right now. That’s very helpful when China’s profit-strapped manufacturing economy needs every dime it can get.For the United States, it’s a wash. America produces a lot of oil, gas, minerals, and agricultural goods, but we produce plenty of other things. Low oil prices are bad for Texas, but good for Detroit. When gas is cheap, people tend to buy big honking cars that earn more profits for the car makers. Some sectors of the financial markets have been looking shaky; junk bonds issued by companies in the oil and gas business aren’t looking quite as safe as investors once thought they were. But on the whole, the U.S. is hedged better than most developed countries against high commodity prices—and hedged better than developing countries against commodity crashes. That’s one reason that the U.S. consistently remains one of the world’s top economic performers.

Communist Party Officials: Do as We Say, Not as We Do

China’s leaders send their own kids overseas to be educated, but don’t want hoi polloi getting in on the act. The Wall Street Journal reports:

China is tightening the reins on popular programs that prepare students to study in the U.S. and elsewhere, in the latest sign that Beijing is worried about the spread of Western values in its education system.

The new environment is evident at Beijing No. 4 High School in central Beijing. Like hundreds of Chinese schools, it has an international curriculum for students who want to earn degrees abroad after graduation.But officials recently urged Beijing No. 4 to relocate that program to the city’s suburbs and sever it from the public school, said Shi Guopeng, the program’s principal. The school agreed, and the program now plans to move next year and possibly raise tuition, two moves that may impede its ability to attract students, Mr. Shi said.“Some government officials don’t want to see so many students going abroad,” he added.

It will actually be hard for Beijing meaningfully to cut down the number of students who go abroad for their schooling, given how curious Chinese young people are about the wider world and how eager they are to see what goes on in other countries. Moreover, fluency in English remains a very valuable skill in Chinese life—and not just for talking to Americans. Chinese factory managers based in Europe and Africa will often use English to communicate with their staffs.

But if Beijing does succeed in keeping many more students home, expect one big consequence in the United States: Many colleges and some boarding schools that now depend heavily on tuition from Chinese nationals to balance the books will be in trouble. If a bureaucrat flaps his wings in Beijing, a college could close in the United States.

The Myth of Russia’s Containment

“There can be no alliance between Russia and the West, either for the sake of interests or for the sake of principles. There is not a single interest, not a single trend in the West which does not conspire against Russia, especially her future, and does not try to harm her. Therefore Russia’s only natural policy towards the West must be to seek not an alliance with the Western powers but their disunion and division. Only then will they not be hostile to us, not of course out of conviction, but out of impotence.”

These words, which sound like something Russia’s President Vladimir Putin might have said recently, were actually penned in 1864 by the Russian poet and diplomat Fyodor Tyutchev. The notion of perpetual Western antipathy runs in strong currents throughout Russian thought over the past two centuries. Indeed this is a well from which Putin has drawn deeply in recent speeches to mobilize the Russian populace and to justify the Kremlin’s policies in Ukraine and elsewhere. The West, according to this account, is both envious of Russia’s dynamism and moral superiority and eager to profit territorially at Russia’s expense. Putin has repeatedly alleged that the West has maintained a containment policy toward Russia since the 18th century; the Western reaction to events in Ukraine is merely the present manifestation of this policy. Indeed, so deep and consistent is the animosity toward the mighty Eurasian colossus that, even without Ukraine, Westerners would have seized on some other pretext, however flimsy, to try to keep Russia on its knees.It’s a tidy little narrative that seemingly explains everything, with a bit of historical perspective no less. It has the added advantage of absolving Russia from any responsibility for the current tense relations with the West. But how accurate is it?The 18th and 19th centuries were the golden age of Russian expansion. It was during this period that the Russian Empire absorbed vast areas in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Russia’s western borderlands that would later comprise most of the territory of the 14 non-Russian Soviet republics, of which Russia was supposedly deprived after the breakup of the USSR. If the Western powers had a policy of containment with respect to Russia during these centuries, then one could only call this policy a monumental failure. A Finn, a Latvian, or a Pole might well ask where containment was when they needed it.In the 18th century Russia dealt knockout blows to two Western powers, Sweden and Poland, and began the lengthy process of dismantling the Ottoman Empire. The year 1700 saw Peter the Great’s invasion of Sweden and the onset of the Great Northern War. Although the war dragged on until 1721, the outcome was decided at the celebrated 1709 Battle of Poltava, where the Russians annihilated a Swedish army led personally by King Charles XII. It has bequeathed to the Russian language the saying, “погиб, как швед под Полтавой” (“perished like a Swede at Poltava”), and it effectively eliminated Sweden as a major European power. Solzhenitsyn poignantly assessed the historical significance of the battle: Russia moved from one war of conquest to the next, while Sweden abandoned its imperial pretensions and resigned itself to neutrality, prosperity, and a dignified life for its citizens. Who indeed, wondered Solzhenitsyn, were the winners and losers at Poltava?Russia remained largely disengaged from the major 18th-century European wars, with the notable exception of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), in which Russian forces defeated the armies of Frederick the Great, occupied East Prussia, and even briefly seized Frederick’s capital, Berlin, in 1760. Frederick was saved by the timely death in 1762 of Russian Empress Elizabeth and the accession to the throne of her son, Peter III, who idolized Frederick and pulled Russia out of the anti-Prussian coalition. A decade later Peter’s wife and successor, Catherine the Great—herself a German princess—teamed up with the German powers, Prussia and Austria, to begin the dismemberment of Poland, a process completed with the Third Partition in 1795. Their mutual concern to prevent any resurrection of Polish statehood created a certain commonality of interest among the partitioning states, ensuring that the 19th century would be a time of almost unbroken Russian-German comity.The 19th century saw Russia much more engaged in European diplomacy and conflicts, beginning with the Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon’s ill-fated 1812 campaign is often cited as a prime example of Western aggression against Russia, but the really significant point about the period of 1812–15 is the fact that all the other major European powers were aligned with Russia against Napoleon, insofar as all of them were determined to prevent France from dominating Europe. Russia availed itself of the general state of European upheaval during the Napoleonic era to administer an additional drubbing to its old rivals Sweden and the Ottoman Empire, annexing Finland and Bessarabia in 1812. The awarding of further Polish lands to Russia at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 rounded out Russia’s western borders, which were to remain virtually unchanged—and unchallenged by any Western power—throughout the subsequent century.

The policy of containment was not invented yesterday. It has been carried out against our country for many years, always, for decades if not centuries. In short, whenever someone thinks that Russia has become too strong or independent, these tools were quickly put into use.

—Putin’s address to the Federal Assembly 4 December 2014

While it is difficult to discern in the 18th century even a single event that could be credibly construed as “Western containment” of Russia, there are clear instances in the 19th century of efforts by Western powers, with varying degrees of success, to check Russian expansion. The following are perhaps the most salient examples:

Notwithstanding Russia’s crucial contribution to the defeat of Napoleon, its effort to obtain the former Polish lands in their entirety was rebuffed at the Congress of Vienna. The other major powers were united in their desire to limit Russian penetration into central Europe, and Russia had to settle for Prussia’s and Austria’s booty from the Third Partition—a territory that was, moreover, organized as a quasi-buffer “Kingdom of Poland” with its own constitution and army.
Alarmed at the possible consequences of a Russian death blow to the tottering Ottoman Empire, Britain and France initiated the 1853–55 Crimean War—another highlight in the litany of Russian historical grievances with respect to the West.
Concerned by the prospect of a Russian client state dominating the Balkans, the major European powers acted in concert at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 to dismember the “big Bulgaria” Russia had secured at Ottoman expense with the Treaty of San Stefano.
In the latter half of the 19th century Britain and Russia engaged in the “Great Game,” in which the former, concerned about the security of its Indian possessions and the communication routes thereto, used diplomacy and material support to local forces to check Russia’s advance into the Caucasus and Central Asia—with only very modest results.

Besides these specific events, St. Petersburg’s devotion to preserving the established monarchical order won Russia the 19th-century sobriquet of “the Gendarme of Europe,” and consequent enmity from Western republicans and revolutionaries. In addition, during the Polish insurrections of 1830 and 1863, there was considerable public sympathy for the Polish cause in Western countries such as Britain and France—though certainly not in Prussia or Austria.

However, none of this even remotely amounted to “Western containment” of Russia. Western efforts to check Russian expansion in the 19th century were situational, episodic and largely inconsequential. Western powers did not seek to limit the Russian Empire’s territorial enlargement out of some intrinsic animus toward Russia, but because at least some Russian conquests, actual or mooted, threatened specific interests of other powers. Moreover, St. Petersburg enjoyed good relations with one or more Western powers at practically all times; the only brief periods of relative isolation were during the Crimean War, when traditionally friendly Prussia and Austria maintained neutrality, and in the late 1880s and early 1890s, as Russia’s entente with the Germanic powers withered, but before the alliance with France had been concluded. No Western country laid claim to any Russian territory; even Napoleon’s invasion was not intended to “detach juicy morsels” from Russia, but to force Russian adherence to his Continental System. Russia continued to conquer vast territories in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Far East, and only sporadic efforts were made by Western powers even to moderate Russia’s appetite, not to speak of attempting to hem the country in.

The events in Ukraine are the concentrated expression of the policy of containing Russia. The roots of this policy go deep into history, [and] it is clear that this policy, unfortunately, did not end with the Cold War.

—Putin’s speech to Russian diplomats 1 July 2014

In this historical context, the Kremlin’s “Western hostility” story begs a question: of which specific territories was Russia unjustly deprived by 19th-century “Western containment?” Should Russia rightfully have expanded deep into the Balkans? Should it have legitimately annexed the Turkish straits, large portions of eastern Anatolia, or perhaps southern Azerbaijan and the southern Caspian littoral? Was it Russia’s due, cruelly denied by malign Westerners, to expand into Afghanistan, India, Xinjiang, or Manchuria?

The 20th century saw major new developments in Russia’s relations with Western powers. The long period in which Prussia acted as Russia’s partner (and usually a junior one at that) drew to a close once Prussia morphed into Germany. The German invasion in the second year of World War I was the first attempt by a Western power to seize Russian territory in at least two centuries. However, the German success embodied in the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk proved fleeting, and was reversed with the collapse of the German monarchy, the November 11 armistice, and the Treaty of Versailles. The fitful, half-hearted Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War in 1918-21 was certainly anti-Bolshevik but hardly anti-Russian. The Western interventionist powers did not lay claim to any Russian territory and were even loath to recognize or support independence-minded groups like the Balts, Ukrainians or Georgians; indeed, the Allies were fighting with the White armies for a Russia “one and indivisible.”The 1941 Nazi invasion was a still more ambitious land-grab at Russia’s expense, but ended even more catastrophically for Germany than its eastern campaign in World War I. Once again, the seizure of Russian territory by a Western power was extremely brief, and on this occasion was followed by an unprecedented extension of Russian control deep into Central Europe – and, for the first time in history, a genuine Western policy of containment.Purveyors of the Russian victimization narrative portray the French and German invasions of Russia and the Cold War policy of containment as different facets of the same relentless, age-old Western antagonism toward Russia. All of these events do, in fact, reflect a pronounced tendency in European history, but it is not the anti-Russian monomania that some observers imagine. The most remarkable point is the fact that, when Russia was invaded in 1915–18 and 1941–44, exactly as in 1812, the other major Western powers were on Russia’s side. Whenever Russia defeated Western invaders, it was in broad alliance with other Western countries. Indeed, in the centuries prior to the Cold War, Western powers never once ganged up to wage war against Russia, but rather against whichever power was threatening to dominate Europe—France in the early 19th century, and Germany in the first half of the 20th. The Crimean War was the only conflict against Western powers in which Russia had no Western allies—but the Western coalition arrayed against Russia consisted only of Britain, France and Sardinia—not exactly a united Western front. The Cold War, which was the only authentic period of Western containment of Russia, fits the historical pattern exactly—not as a manifestation of animosity toward Russia, but as yet another example of European states uniting against any power attempting to control the continent. Western solidarity in the face of a real Soviet threat simply followed the familiar model of European balance-of-power politics, but people of a certain mindset discern instead an anti-Russian conspiracy—and even project it centuries back in time.But even if Putin has badly mischaracterized the historical context, surely Russians have legitimate grievances about collective Western behavior since the end of the Cold War, do they not? The dismemberment of the Soviet Union, the expansion of NATO, the serial humiliation of Russia, and Western disregard of its interests: Are these phenomena not sufficient evidence of the West’s perfidy and fixation on keeping Russia down?There is not enough space in an essay to treat all of these themes in detail, but a couple of points should provide some salutary perspective.The Soviets used to refer to the agencies of state power in the USSR as “organs.” Accordingly, one might say that the Soviet Union died of multiple organ failure. Its demise was the result of internal breakdown, not the hammer blows of Western military or even economic policy toward its Cold War adversary. Indeed, the collapse came precisely in the context of receding East-West tensions, when the Cold War had essentially ended and Soviet citizens were no longer mobilized by fear of foreign aggression—a fact perhaps not lost on the current Russian leadership.As for the post-Soviet borders that Russian nationalists find so grossly unjust, they were drawn not in Washington or Brussels, but in Moscow, and the West had no input into them whatsoever. There was no diktat like Versailles or Trianon. Victoria Nuland was not serving up sandwiches at Belovezha.Moreover, the great bogeyman of Western imperialism proved to be the dog that didn’t bark following the Soviet collapse. How is it possible that the covetous West, lusting for centuries after Russian land, failed to rush in for the kill at the obvious moment of Russia’s maximum historical weakness? Yet there were no Western vultures circling the Soviet carcass. Not one Western country annexed, or so much as laid claim to, a single square centimeter of Russian territory after 1991—not even regions like Kaliningrad or Karelia, wrested from Western countries a mere half-century before. Notwithstanding all the overwrought Russian angst about supposed U.S. designs on Siberia, Americans curiously failed to advance any scheme to reunify the Alaskan Eskimos with their Siberian kinfolk, or even so much as contrive a narrative about fraternal peoples cruelly separated by an artificial boundary capriciously drawn down the middle of the Bering Strait.This Western restraint is inexplicable from the perspective of the Russian victimization narrative, but is entirely comprehensible in light of actual historical reality. Russia did not become the largest country in the world by being the object of constant Western depredations or containment. In fact, the only Russian territory that has been permanently ceded to a Western power in the last three centuries is Alaska, which was voluntarily sold to the United States. The only existing claim on Russia territory is the Japanese pretension to a few miserable little islands. Frankly, the fear—verging on paranoia—that Western powers will jointly plunder and partition Russia if it shows the slightest weakness would seem to be based on Russia’s own historical practice toward Poland, Sweden, and the Ottoman Empire rather than on any actual experience at the receiving end of concerted Western aggression.The charge that the West reneged on a pledge not to enlarge NATO at the end of the Cold War has been authoritatively rebutted by a 2009 study that examined declassified Soviet and Western written accounts of key meetings in 1990 rather than relying solely on the memory of participants. Statements about NATO not moving “one inch to the east” were referring to the alliance’s military infrastructure in the context of a reunified Germany as a NATO member. Neither side at the time understood these statements as precluding Central European membership in NATO, for the simple reason that neither the Soviets nor the West could imagine such a prospect in early 1990.There is another vitally important aspect of NATO enlargement that its detractors gloss over: Central European countries have not been dragged or lured into NATO by the West; they’ve been pushed by Moscow. Russian revisionism and great-power chauvinism constitute the finest NATO recruitment tool ever devised. Just one interview by the likes of Aleksandr Dugin, or one conference by Konstantin Zatulin’s CIS Institute, does the trick better than the cumulative work of all the NATO information centers over the past 25 years. If Moscow doesn’t like NATO enlargement, it might usefully stop creating the conditions that make NATO membership such an attractive proposition for so many of Russia’s neighbors. An exaggerated fear of hostile encirclement drives Russian policies that antagonize other states, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy; by definition, Russia can never have secure borders as long as it keeps making enemies of its neighbors.Stripped of its massive overlay of mythology, pathos, and historical misinterpretation, the Russian victimization narrative nevertheless does contain a kernel of truth. Western powers have indeed pursued their own interests, choosing to advance them even when they clash with Russia’s, and have failed to consult or even inform Russia at key junctures. But to be honest, this is exactly what Russia has done with respect to the West. Western blindsiding of Russia on Bosnia, Kosovo, and Libya finds its counterpart in unilateral Russian moves such as the 1999 seizure of the Priština Airport in Kosovo and the invasions of Georgia and Ukraine. Supposedly generous, unrequited Russian gestures toward the West were either unavoidable, such as the withdrawal of Russian troops from the former Soviet satellite states, or clearly in Russia’s own interest, like support for the U.S./NATO campaign against the Taliban.An honest look at post-Cold War Western and Russian interests prompts us to ask two sets of questions. First, what specifically would it have meant for the West to accommodate Russian interests over the past 25 years? Acquiescing in ethnic cleansing in the Balkans? Watching Qaddafi’s forces drown Benghazi in blood? Cheering from the sidelines as Russia absorbed neighboring regions, or even entire countries, under the guise of supposedly indigenous, “popular” movements for Eurasian integration or reunification of the Russian World? Eschewing NATO enlargement and leaving Central Europe in a security vacuum, where the smoldering embers of old conflicts could burst once more into flames? Second, if the goals and interests of the West and Russia differ radically, as they clearly do in so many areas, then how, as a practical matter, are the two of them supposed to partner? How can they cooperate when they’re pulling in different directions?Unfortunately, when it comes to European security, Russian and Western interests are largely at odds. The post-Cold War Western effort to “export security” to the east runs directly counter to Moscow’s predilection for weak, divided neighbors that it can dominate. Russian great-power chauvinists persist in seeing 1991 as a historical aberration, tragic but reversible, while the rest of the world—and above all, Russia’s post-Soviet neighbors—perceive it as the new normal. Actually, for all the vilification of the West, Moscow’s effort to upend the post-Cold War order is not being thwarted by Western resolve (if only!), so much as by Russia’s own inability to re-gather the post-Soviet lands by either attraction or compulsion.The major division among Western observers of Russia is not between those who understand Russia’s perspective and those who do not. It is between those who accept the Russian narrative more or less uncritically, and those who find that narrative distorted, self-serving, and riddled with errors of fact and interpretation.

ISIS’ Ghost Fighters

We are shocked—shocked!—to read that there’s corruption in ISIS. You mean a lot of these murdering thugs are also hypocritical thieves? From the Financial Times:

A year ago Iraq denounced deep corruption within its army, alleging 50,000 “ghost” soldiers had been drawing salaries from the military without serving.

According to Omar, a rebel commander who fought with Isis for more than a year before fleeing and asked not be identified by his real name, the same thing happened on his side.“You’d have a frontline [Isis] commander apply for salaries for 250 people, but really he only has 150,” he said. “When officials discovered the schemes they started sending financial administrators to deliver salaries. Then the administrators started agreeing with commanders on scams, too.”

Corruption is a fact of life in the Middle East, and it appears that not even a heavy dosage of radical jihadism can get rid of it. As the FT documents, corruption in ISIS extends beyond “ghost soldiers” to everything from pharmacies to border patrol to outright theft. (One commander stole $25,000 in taxes and fled.)

This seems like an excellent time for some of that tough sharia law enforcement ISIS talks about. But we aren’t looking to see a lot of one-handed colonels anytime soon.

Ding, Dong, Doha Is Dead

For the first time since 2001, when the much-maligned Doha round of trade talks was inaugurated, the WTO’s members declined to reaffirm the round’s mandate this weekend in Nairobi. One senior trade delegate told the Financial Times that the Nairobi meeting represented “the death of Doha and the birth of a new WTO.” In abandoning a far-reaching agreement, representatives in Nairobi decided on a ban on agricultural export subsidies, and agreed to slash tariffs on 201 IT products.

This is good news, on the whole. The talks had become a quagmire, blocking global progress on the trade agenda. The leading hold-up was that some developing countries, including India, overplayed their hands, using their ability to veto progress and trying to hold out for unrealistic concessions. The developed economies worked around the stalled talks, pushing big Pacific and Atlantic deals like TTIP and TPP. The BRICS, who once thought they would be reshaping the world economic order, have been left outside, noses pressed against the windows.Still, the problems of the WTO-based trade negotiations will be with us long after Doha has gone to its final resting place. Much of the low-hanging fruit in trade liberalization has been picked, and there are so many WTO members that it is hard to get agreement on anything significant. And given that we are still in a period of slack global demand in which most of the world’s countries are engaged in promoting exports by keeping their currencies low, it seems unlikely that there will be widespread support to intensify global competition.The world’s trade agenda in many ways still reflects the assumptions of the 1990s when history was over and the world was flat. These days, things are looking more complicated. Developing a new and constructive trade agenda will be difficult. Even so, putting in the hard work is worth the potential rewards. Trade advocates should remember that the greatest beneficiaries of liberalized trade are the world’s poor. Opening the doors to world trade opens the doors to better jobs and lives for people who could really use a break.

Biafra Protests Turn Deadly

Identity politics are flaring up in an big way in Africa’s most populous country. The BBC reports that Nigerian security forces opened fire on protesters backing Biafran secession—a decades-old nationalist cause that has been staging a comeback in recent months:

Five people have been killed in south-eastern Nigeria after police opened fire on supporters of an activist who backs the creation of a breakaway state of Biafra, campaigners say.

An Abuja high court on Thursday ordered the release of Nnamdi Kanu, which prompted celebrations on the streets.The police in Onitsha city said shots were fired after officers were attacked and three people were “feared dead”.Mr Kanu was arrested by the authorities in October, accused of treason.He is the director of the banned Radio Biafra and heads the separatist Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) group.Biafran secessionists fought a three-year civil war in which more than one million people lost their lives. The uprising was eventually quelled by the military in 1970.

This escalating conflict poses a serious dilemma for policymakers in Nigeria, and for Africa watchers around the world. On the one hand, if the Igbo people claim and win the right to independence, other ethnic groups across the continent could follow. As we have seen throughout European history—and as we are seeing in the blood-soaked Middle East today—such independence movements can and do give rise to horrific civil wars. On the other hand, nobody in the West would doubt that the Igbo people are entitled to a state under modern Western ideas of self-determination. Moreover, states built around the culture and language of a smaller ethnic group may be more cohesive and peaceful in the long run than cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic federations.

Keep an eye on Biafra. The Igbo independence movement will have real consequences for the future of Africa, and for nations across the developing world.