Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 525

Hillary Moves Left on Education Reform

On education, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was supposed to be a centrist and a pragmatist, a Democrat who, like Secretary Arne Duncan and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, acknowledged that our public school system was in dire need of reform, and that ensuring the well-being of students, not meeting the demands of teachers unions, should be the overriding goal of education policy. But over the course of her campaign, Clinton has been increasingly adopting a stance in line with teachers unions, calling her reformer bona fides into question. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Democrats backing the effort to overhaul American education have become increasingly concerned that presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton isn’t committed to their cause, and some donors are holding back support for her campaign […]

Last month, she appeared to disparage charter schools, which are public schools operating outside of the traditional system. “Most charter schools—I don’t want to say every one—but most charter schools, they don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids, or, if they do, they don’t keep them,” she said in an interview with TV host Roland Martin at a town-hall meeting in South Carolina. […]Days later, Mrs. Clinton spoke at a union round table and expressed opposition to using student test scores as a way to evaluate teachers. “I have for a very long time also been against the idea that you tie teacher evaluation and even teacher pay to test outcomes,” she said. “There’s no evidence. There’s no evidence.”

These remarks may simply represent the type of triangulation and uneasy coalition-building we have come to expect from the Democratic frontrunner, who is, after all, running against a European-style democratic socialist. But they also reflect the reality that the entire Democratic party is in the midst of a pronounced shift to the Left, making it much more difficult for its candidates (at any level) to back changes to doctrinaire blue model thinking.

Our K-12 public education system, dominated by teachers unions and mostly bereft of accountability and meaningful competition, is a textbook example of the way sclerotic institutions favor well-connected insiders at the expense of the people they are supposed to serve—and the way that blue modelers prop them up, always fearful of new arrangements, always fighting the future. That more competition and higher standards would help students—particularly the most vulnerable students—is a no-brainer. Here’s hoping that Clinton’s remarks on this issue are just campaign season posturing.

Bad Dining Hall Food Becomes Racial Grievance

The horror of “cultural appropriation” has struck Oberlin, where dining hall staff have apparently offended the sensibilities of students by mixing various types of ethnic food. The New York Post reports:

Students at an ultra-liberal Ohio college are in an uproar over the fried chicken, sushi and Vietnamese sandwiches served in the school cafeterias, complaining the dishes are “insensitive” and “culturally inappropriate.”

Gastronomically correct students at Oberlin College — alma mater of Lena Dunham — are filling the school newspaper with complaints and demanding meetings with campus dining officials and even the college president.General Tso’s chicken was made with steamed chicken instead of fried — which is not authentically Chinese, and simply “weird,” one student bellyached in the Oberlin Review.Others were up in arms over banh mi Vietnamese sandwiches served with coleslaw instead of pickled vegetables, and on ciabatta bread, rather than the traditional French baguette.

Doing horrible things to foreign dishes is an authentic and time-honored American tradition. My Aunt Anne, now sadly gone on, had a cookbook from the Charleston Junior League of the 1930s. Its recipe for spaghetti called for a pound of noodles, a bottle of Heinz ketchup, and a one pound block of American cheese, cut into one inch cubes. The recipe: Boil the noodles until soft, heat the ketchup in a saucepan, add the cheese cubes, and stir until melted. Then, drain the noodles, pour the sauce, and serve.

That this was an terrible recipe, there is no doubt. But was it terrible because it is somehow immoral to borrow or “appropriate” the culinary products of another culture? Surely, the problem with the Junior League recipe was that it didn’t appropriate enough from Italy.Actually, that seems to be the problem with Oberlin’s Banh Mi sandwich as well. Students are complaining that the sandwich, among other defects, was made of ciabatta bread instead of a nice baguette. That this is an atrocity, I am willing to concede—but it doesn’t seem particularly sinister. In any case, I’m wondering why French students aren’t protesting Vietnam’s totally inappropriate and racist appropriation of the baguette.The point, of course, is that cultures, cuisines, and, yes, people of different races and ethnicities mix. That is what humans do, and they don’t always do it in accordance with the detailed rules of the avant-garde campus left. Amazingly, in trying to adapt the cuisine of one culture to another, people often go for weird compromises and invent dishes, some good and some bad, that didn’t exist in the “cuisine of origin.” If it’s a good dish, that’s a good thing—and if it’s a bad dish, well, it’s not necessarily a racial crisis.On the other hand, there’s a lot of huffing and puffing about young people on college campuses getting carried away with imaginary grievances. There are times when the students deserve to be mocked for their callow stupidity, especially when protest turns into bullying and efforts to silence opposing points of view. Society has to defend itself against this kind of youthful idiocy in order to preserve its freedom. But not every campus protest is an assault on the foundations of liberal order. Young people have been hot-headed and impulsive for a very long time, and if you can’t work yourself into a nice and foolish frenzy in college, what’s the point of being 19 years old?So: A Merry Christmas or, if they prefer, a Happy Holidays to all the kids at Oberlin and the other hothouses of cultural grievance and identity politics. You’ll all be in the real world soon enough when you have to deal with life on life’s terms. Until then, enjoy the ride—and try to learn a few things (and try a few new dishes) along the way. Some knowledge and perspective just might come in handy down the road.

Japan Fortifies Its Own Islands

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but Japan is hoping it will also be a good way to confront China. Reuters:

The United States, believing its Asian allies – and Japan in particular – must help contain growing Chinese military power, has pushed Japan to abandon its decades-old bare-bones home island defense in favor of exerting its military power in Asia.

Tokyo is responding by stringing a line of anti-ship, anti-aircraft missile batteries along 200 islands in the East China Sea stretching 1,400 km (870 miles) from the country’s mainland toward Taiwan.Interviews with a dozen military planners and government policymakers reveal that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s broader goal to beef up the military has evolved to include a strategy to dominate the sea and air surrounding the remote islands.

PM Abe likely believes he has had success thus far standing up to China. Remilitarization, building relationships with other Asian powers, and not shying away from tough rhetoric seems to be a winning strategy, as tensions with China have cooled a bit. Abe figures that’s because Beijing has started to give Tokyo more respect, so it’s not surprising that he apparently plans to double down on his strategy. The question is how China will respond, and whether its seemingly tamer attitude is here to say.

Russia Gains Ground in Syria, U.N.

As Russia makes gains on the ground in Syria, the U.S. gave ground at the U.N. Security Council. On Friday, the U.N. passed for the first time a resolution on peace negotiations in Syria. But there was a big omission, via the NYT:

The resolution makes no mention of whether Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, would be able to run in new elections, which it says must be held within 18 months of the beginning of political talks. That process will begin sometime in January at the earliest, Mr. Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, conceded. Privately, officials believe it may take significantly longer.

The remaining gap between the Russian and American sides became obvious at the very end of a news conference Friday evening that involved Mr. Kerry and Mr. Lavrov. Mr. Kerry noted that 80 percent of Russian airstrikes were hitting opposition groups fighting Mr. Assad, not the forces of the Islamic State extremist group. Mr. Lavrov shot back that for two and half months, Russia had asked the United States to coordinate military operations.

Meanwhile, Russian- and Iranian-aided Syrian government forces seem to have made significant gains in the country’s west. There are reports that the rebels have retaken an important mountain in Latakia, but, on balance, the government seems to have indeed made progress on the ground. In the absence of a coherent U.S. policy, Russia continues to lead in Syria.

President Pangloss and the Refugee Crisis

Here’s yet more evidence that President Obama is the best of all possible presidents with the best of all possible foreign policies: The U.N. stated on Friday that over 60 million people across the globe have been pushed out of their homes by wars. NYT:

At least five million people were forcibly displaced from their homes in the first half of the year, adding to the 59.5 million displaced people the United Nations refugee agency had recorded by the end of 2014. One in every 122 humans today is someone who has been forced to flee from home, the agency said.

Most of the people on the move in 2015 were displaced within their own country, but as many 839,000 people fled across international borders in the first half of the year, more than a third of them trying to escape the war in Syria.

There should be no mistake about this: If some kind of world order isn’t restored and, therefore, the refugee crisis isn’t brought to an end, pressure to prevent migration into the West will only grow. The West’s own geopolitical failures of nerve and execution, that is, are the cause of its deteriorating ability to live up to its values when it comes to the treatment of the victims of war. President Obama and the hand wringers generally think that the solution to the migrant crisis is to scold people for being unwilling to absorb ever growing numbers of refugees escaping from ever more disastrous failures of foreign policy. But this is a dead end. You can’t have an orderly world without a world order, and a world order can’t exist unless somebody is willing to do what it takes to defend it. President Obama’s Jeffersonian decision to let the Middle East burn without launching any American response is the direct cause of the flare-up in nativism, Islamophobia, and anti-refugee sentiment in both Europe and the United States.

That doesn’t mean the U.S. should be sending ground troops into every conflict zone on planet Earth. Our foreign needs to be politically and economically sustainable for the long term. We need allies, we need a prudent awareness about limits and costs, and we need a strategic approach to international politics that allows us to focus our resources and attention on the things that matter most.

But as one ex-Obama official after another has made clear, we haven’t been doing that over the last seven years—and one of the consequences is the weakening hold of exactly the values that President Obama cares most about over public opinion across the West.

Is That $20 Oil on the Horizon?

It’s been a terrible week for oil prices, the latest development in the long run of declining prices stretching all the way back to June of 2014, when Brent crude was trading above $110 per barrel. Today Brent is trading below $37 per barrel, while America’s West Texas Intermediate hovers around $34.50. There’s no great secret to today’s bearish market—supply still grossly outpaces demand. And, as the FT reports, it doesn’t seem we’ve seen the bottom of this slide quite yet:

Banks such as Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are among those that have said the oil overhang could push crude prices down to $20 levels.

“We still see high risks that prices may decline further, as storage continues to fill,” said Damien Courvalin at Goldman Sachs. Although growth in US production is weaker, it has not fallen enough, meaning the market will take longer to rebalance, said Mr Courvalin.Higher Opec production, including additional barrels from Iran, is another risk factor for 2016, he added.

No one in OPEC is willing to make production cuts—least of all Saudi Arabia, the only country capable of scaling output back enough to send prices upwards. In fact, with Western sanctions set to be lifted from Iran sometime in the coming months, we can expect even more supplies out of OPEC in 2016.

Outside of OPEC, suppliers are still drilling crude as fast as they can, with Russia hitting post-Soviet production records and U.S. shale producers defying expectations by avoiding a drastic drop in output. The impending end to the ban on U.S. oil exports will eventually help give American production a slight boost, too.Brent crude started 2015 out at $55 per barrel, and it looks to end the year well below $40. Thanks to copious supplies, it looks like 2016 could see prices plunge even further.

Rwanda to Drop Term Limit, Media Hardest Hit

In the least surprising announcement to come out of Africa in some time, Rwanda appears poised to allow President Paul Kagame to run for another term. The WSJ:

Rwandan voters are expected on Friday to approve a constitutional amendment that would allow President Paul Kagame to stay in office for nearly two more decades, the latest bid by an African leader to push beyond established term limits.

Mr. Kagame has effectively ruled Rwanda since his rebel force ended the country’s 1994 genocide. The current constitution says his presidential tenure that began in 2000 must end in 2017. Though he hasn’t said outright that he will run again, he has said that the country should follow the will of the people. State media routinely trumpet his popularity […]“This is the biggest challenge that we have across the continent: the challenge of saying, ‘Yes it’s time for this one to move on,’” saidYolande Bouka, a researcher with South Africa’s Institute for Security Studies whose coverage includes Rwanda, Burundi and Congo.

What’s happening in Rwanda is part of three developments that everybody who wants to understand global politics needs to grasp. The first is a pan-African trend away from the Potemkin village democracy movement that gullible Western NGOs and aid propagandists have been trying to sell as the “real story” in Africa for some time. The second is the continuing ethnic tension that has produced episodes of genocide and war in the Great Lakes region going back to the end of the colonial era in the 1960s. The third is Paul Kagame’s own effort to build an African Singapore where development comes well ahead of democracy.

On the first trend, the large aid lobby, which is constantly looking for ways to send Western money into Africa through aid pipelines that benefit first-world NGOs, contractors, and their local allies, has been promoting the “transition to democracy” motif for some time. Selling the idea of Africa as an emerging, but aid-dependent, human rights success story keeps the tax money flowing. But, while different countries are at different stages, in many places much of the “progress” has been insubstantial and superficial, and it is now reaching its sell-by date. In order to attract more aid and budget support (resources useful in building patronage and security machines that can they can deploy to tighten their grip on power), African leaders have been willing to sing and dance to the tune the human rights crowd wants to play. So they have solemnly written and enacted lovely paper constitutions that send thrills up the legs of the gullible and easily pleased human rights community. Beautiful elections have been held across Africa in observance of these sacred and inspiring ideals. At one point, helicopters were even air delivering ballots in a crooked Congo election as part of the charade.But a moment of decision awaited. When the presidents hit their term limits, they have to decide between respecting those beautiful paper constitutions or going on about their business in the traditional way. Since the 1990s, 24 African presidents have reached their term limits; 15 of them tried to amend their constitutions to stay in office and 12 succeeded. If anything, the trend against stepping down appears to be picking up speed; three of the next five African presidents facing term limits are expected to find ways to stay in office.For most of these leaders, it isn’t a hard choice. Their constitutions only came into existence because of foreign pressure and in many cases the documents don’t have deep roots in local power systems. Voters like the idea of term limits, but African leaders and the cronies and political machines who depend on them often don’t. For the many leaders who are both willing and able to hang onto power, managing Western outrage is merely a practical problem: How do you trample on the hopes of, and spit contempt in the face of, the democracy lobby without losing your access to all the juicy aid the West provides?The problem is not always as hard as it looks. In most cases, the democracy lobby is only one element of the coalition that extracts tax money from Western taxpayers and ships it, sort of, to poor countries around the world. (I say “sort of,” because much of the aid has a way of going into pockets back home—farm products bought as part of food aid programs, fat consulting contracts to employ development specialists, and so on.) Western governments also have their reasons for wanting to maintain their influence in various African countries. They want, perhaps, to defend the economic interests of home country investors, and are increasingly motivated by security concerns (the fight against terrorist groups). The increasing Chinese footprint in Africa has only made all of this more urgent. The democracy and human rights crusaders are often just the lipstick on the pig, the makeup designed to make the agendas of various lobbies look good to uninformed and careless voters and journalists. The pig still wants to be fed, whether it’s wearing lipstick or not. The farm lobby, the arms companies, and the beltway bandit consulting groups all want their contracts to continue regardless of how flagrantly some African ruler is violating some goody-two shoes, utopian constitution.Often, then, all or most of the aid keeps rolling even when a leader continues in power past his term limit. As this realization has spread across Africa, respect for paper constitutions has continued to deteriorate. Discovering that we too are only pretending to take them seriously has had a marvelously liberating impact on African potentates. And when you add to that their own awareness that China is prepared to keep buttering dictators like Mugabe for decades without asking him to pretend to believe in a bogus constitution at all, it’s not hard to understand why so much hot air seems to be leaking out of the African democracy balloon these days.So Paul Kagame’s decision to blow past his term limit is in part a reflection of this wider trend. But there’s more. Rwanda is one of the countries caught up in the bitter and vicious struggle between the Hutu and Tutsi peoples (the word “tribe” in this context is racist, condescending, and misleading). The Belgian colonists favored the Tutsi. After they left, violence between the much larger Hutu group and the much smaller Tutsis has been the most significant recurring feature of politics in Rwanda, Burundi, and the neighboring districts of the Congo. Paul Kagame is a Tutsi who came to power after his mixed Tutsi/Hutu army overthrew the Hutu extremists responsible for the worst (though not the only) episode of mass killing. Ever since, he has remained the Tutsi President of a majority Hutu country and every move he makes is guided by the knowledge that the literal survival of the Tutsi minority depends on his ability to do three things. First, he must stay in power in Rwanda. Second, he must manipulate the political and power situation in the neighborhood to prevent the emergence of another radical Hutu power center. Such a power center would undo everything he’s accomplished and unleash the killing process once again. Third, he must run Rwanda well enough so that over time tensions will diminish and the fragile ethnic peace can solidify into something more stable and enduring.Right now, neighboring Burundi is experiencing another surge in ethnic and political violence as the largely Hutu power base of the current President (who has also just blown past his term limit) confronts the kind of mixed coalition of Tutsis and Hutus that Kagame led in the Rwanda war. Some of the President’s supporters are echoing the themes of the Rwanda genocide, and the death toll is mounting. The journalists who keep trying to write about the region as if the ethnic conflict did not exist and has nothing to do with current events don’t come out and say this frankly and openly, but from photos and other comments that are slowly leaking out from behind the usual screen of denial, much of the violence appears to reflect traditional Hutu-Tutsi animosity. Again, the press is speaking a language of veiled allusion (the opposition’s arms are reported to be coming from “neighboring countries”), but Rwanda is clearly involving itself ever more deeply in Burundi’s crisis—as it has in the past both there and in the eastern Congo.Given that, it would be insane to expect Paul Kagame to step down now, and he clearly has no intention of doing so. Under the circumstances, anybody shocked or surprised by the demise of the sacred Rwandan constitutional provision for term limits needs a course in remedial statecraft.Finally, Kagame’s ambition has never been and indeed could never be to turn Rwanda into a nice Western democracy like Norway. A country with a recent history of genocide in a region still torn by unresolved ethnic conflict is not a good candidate for unguided majority rule. Rather, Kagame’s plan has been to aim for something like an African Singapore: a controlled political system that has some, but not all, of the features of democracy, and a strong, centralized bureaucracy focused like a laser on promoting rapid economic development. The hope is that economic growth will legitimate the political system in the eyes of the people. Lee Kwan Yew in Singapore had similar problems to those facing Kagame today. His resource-poor city state was riven by ethnic conflict, and the regional neighborhood was extremely dangerous. He chose an authoritarian path focused on economic development and since has served as a model for leaders from China to the Gulf to Rwanda.So those who expected Kagame to put term limits ahead of his strategic objectives were simply fooling themselves or advertising their naïveté. Trying to convert Rwanda into a human rights morality play is one of the examples of intellectually flabby and simplistically moralistic coverage that makes so much of the MSM so pointless. Understanding what Kagame is trying to do, on the other hand, provides the basis for analyzing a genuinely important story in an interesting way. Will his experiment in authoritarian developmentalism keep ethnic tensions at bay in Rwanda? How does the ethnic struggle play into his regional policies? How successful has he been at resisting the temptations of corruption (the curse of authoritarian rule)? To what extent is the ethnic truce in Rwanda turning into something more lasting than a truce? What are his objectives in Burundi? What impact is that country’s crisis having on the internal situation in Rwanda? And what does all this mean for the Congo, where Hutu-Tutsi violence has been the chief cause of well over a decade of conflict (including the conquest of the country by its current President), the most brutal post-colonial war in Africa, and continuing violence and instability?Any and all of this would be more useful and more interesting than the vague mush the MSM seems happy to serve up about a great many subjects. Nothing is more common among the elite and the cognoscenti than to hear tales about how poorly informed ordinary Americans are about world events. Maybe so, but much of this ignorance reflects the failures of the elite; people who don’t understand the world very well themselves are usually poor at explaining it to others, and too many members of the self-appointed American media and journalistic elite are so immersed in conventional thinking, the globaloney of the Davoisie and pious human rights fantasies that millions of their fellow citizens no longer pay attention to anything they have to say.

Ukraine in Dispute with the IMF

Ukraine’s lawmakers appeared poised to reject a long haggled-over tax overhaul plan today, after a compromise seemed within reach last week. Officials from the IMF warned that if Kyiv was unable to pass the measures, further disbursements from the Fund’s $17.5 billion bailout program could be endangered. The most recent $1.7 billion disbursement is already being held up by the ongoing impasse.

In other news, two days after the IMF ruled that Russia’s $3 billion bond to Ukraine was in fact sovereign debt, and that Kyiv must make a “good-faith” effort to renegotiate its terms with Moscow, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk announced that his country was ready to fight in the courts and would thus not be making payments on the debt until Russia accepted the terms previously offered. (The Finance Ministry sounded a slightly more conciliatory tone, saying it was still open to good faith negotiations with Russia.) The bond comes due on December 20, but Kyiv will not be in official default until 10 days later, when a grace period expires.A Ukraine–IMF dispute represents a big win for President Vladimir Putin. Those who think Putin’s goal has been to annex Ukraine or reinstate a pro-Russia government might think he has not been all that successful. But that’s not really what he’s trying to do. His goals are more limited: He wants to have the ability to create unrest at any moment. Russia can’t afford an expensive operation in Ukraine, but it doesn’t need one if the goal is influence and instability—and a dysfunctional Ukraine. And on that front, the Kremlin continues to succeed marvelously.

China Braces for a Smoggy Weekend

Fresh off the heels of issuing its first ever “red alert” over air quality concerns in Beijing, the Chinese government is warning its citizens to expect particularly sooty skies this weekend. Beijing’s residents are now living under another “red alert,” but across northern China people are being warned to stay indoors, wear protective masks, and brace for smothering toxic smog over the next few days. Reuters reports:

The National Meteorological Centre said the smog would stretch from Xian, home to the world-famous Terracotta Warriors, across part of central China, through Beijing and up into Shenyang and Harbin in the frigid northeast.

The air pollution would begin rolling in from about Saturday evening and last until Tuesday, with visibility in the worst affected areas such as Beijing likely to fall to less than 1 km (0.6 mile), it said.The pollution index would probably exceed 500 in Beijing and parts of Hebei province, which surrounds the capital, it said. Residents are encouraged to remain indoors at levels higher than 300, according to government guidelines.

Air pollution is an insidious thing, and as it blankets China this weekend it will force hundreds of millions of people to change habits. That’s going to levy a heavy economic toll in lost business. Smog has a big impact on public health as well, and all of these problems inevitably lead to a more restive population that, thanks to social media platforms, can more easily express its dissatisfaction with the ruling regime.

Smog is a problem across Asia, but the scale of it in China is unprecedented. With colder weather set to increase heating demand and therefore the need to burn coal, blue skies seem awfully far off.

Former SecDef Blasts Foreign Policy Failures

President Obama’s former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has blasted the White House in a far-ranging interview with Foreign Policy. Hagel criticized both the substance and the process of the Administration’s foreign policy decisions in passages such as this one:

While Hagel preferred smaller meetings and one-on-one phone calls, the White House often summoned him to large Situation Room sessions with last-minute agendas sent out overnight or on the morning of the meeting.

The White House’s policy deliberations on Syria and other issues run by Rice and her deputies seemed to lead nowhere, according to Hagel.“For one thing, there were way too many meetings. The meetings were not productive,” Hagel said. “I don’t think many times we ever actually got to where we needed to be. We kept kind of deferring the tough decisions. And there were always too many people in the room.”At larger White House meetings, with some staffers in the room he did not even know, Hagel was reluctant to speak at length, fearing his stance would find its way into media reports. “The more people you have in a room, the more possibilities there are for self-serving leaks to shape and influence decisions in the press,” he said.

Specifically, Hagel criticized the “red line” incident in Syria (“There’s no question in my mind that it hurt the credibility of the president’s word when this occurred”), the Administration’s handling of Russia (“I think we should have done more, could have done more,” with regard to Ukraine), and micromanagement. And as Micah Zenko notes on the CFR’s blog, sometimes what Hagel didn’t say was as damning as what he did. One of his comments makes it clear, for instance, that the Obama Administration had never reached a clear decision on whether we would defend friendly rebels in Syria before Hagel gave vital Congressional testimony on the subject.

Furthermore, as Foreign Policy notes, these are not isolated criticisms:

Hagel’s predecessors, Gates and Panetta, as well as Michèle Flournoy, the former No. 3 official at the Pentagon, have all criticized the White House’s centralized decision-making and interference with the workings of the Defense Department.

And other high-level officials, including Ambassadors Robert Ford and Martin Indyk, have also spoken at length about the Administration’s foreign policy follies. The sense that emerges from all the criticism by President Obama’s closest, most senior ex-officials is: The President is a terrible foreign policy president who has made serious and serial mistakes. Has any American president in the history of the Republic taken this much flak from ex-officials at the highest level?