Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 528

Kasparov Checkmated

Winter is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must be Stopped.

by Garry KasparovPublic Affairs, 2015, 291+xxviii pp., $26.99

Few are more qualified to testify to the sheer arbitrary power of Vladimir Putin’s political machine than Garry Kasparov. Long-time world chess champion, Kasparov was a huge celebrity in Russia and throughout the former Soviet Union (he was born in Soviet Azerbaijan). His decision to publicly challenge the Putin machine after the Beslan school massacre of early September 2004 alarmed the Kremlin, which feared that Kasparov’s huge name recognition might translate into a plausible presidential campaign to succeed Putin in 2008. While even many of Kasparov’s friends doubted his suitability to mount such a challenge, a point admirably acknowledged by Kasparov himself, Putin’s administration was taking no chances.

Wherever Kasparov went to speak out against Putin, his path was blocked, at times literally. For instance, when flying into the Caucasus, Kasparov often found the airport’s runway littered with boulders or cows. Once, in Stavropol, his hosts arrived at the airport too late: The traffic police had held them up until the crowd waiting for Kasparov at the venue went home. Auditoriums that had been booked for his speeches regularly experienced sudden power outages just before his arrival. In other cases, local authorities declared building-code violations that required the public to be evacuated. In one public library in Rostov-on-Don, a water pipe broke, resulting in the cancellation of Kasparov’s planned talk. Everywhere Kasparov went, Putin’s secret police followed, making no secret of their tail on him. He often found that all of the hotels in a city were booked, but only as far as Kasparov and his entourage were concerned. No one else seemed to have problems finding rooms.The state-controlled media either ignored Kasparov or presented truncated versions of his talks and interviews, so that it seemed he was only talking about chess. A tacit ban on live interviews with him was rigorously observed. The regime had successfully transmitted the message that Kasparov was persona non grata. One head waiter, alarmed that Kasparov had entered his restaurant for dinner, exclaimed, “In God’s name get out, or I’ll be in big trouble!”In the end, a frustrated and exhausted Kasparov—who had been arrested and briefly detained in the course of a political rally in Moscow in April 2007—abandoned his quest for the Russian presidency. Putin’s machine had checkmated the greatest chess master in the world. Gary Kasparov has a very personal interest in Vladimir Putin, understandably so.In Winter is Coming, Kasparov deploys his name and moral authority behind a cri de coeur to the Western world: Wake up and unite to combat the “evil” government of Vladimir Putin, as well as all “enemies of the free world,” including ISIS. Indeed, while Kasparov acknowledges that Putin’s foreign policy has no ideological foundations, that Putin is best seen as a capo-like broker of personal economic interests, that the erosion of democracy in Russia was well under way before Putin came to power in 1999, and that “[i]n the end Putin is a Russian problem,” he goes to some lengths to convince us that Putin poses a challenge to Western international order comparable to Hitler in 1937 or ISIS today.In short, Kasparov is making the case for a morality-based foreign policy, one that refuses to grant any kind of legitimacy—legal or otherwise—to non-democratic regimes, Putin’s and that of ISIS first of all. While stopping short of calling for military force, Kasparov nevertheless believes that nothing less than a unified West applying unremitting economic, diplomatic, and moral pressure against Putin’s Russia can satisfy core Western interests and values, as well as the true interests of the Russian people. “Listen to the dissidents,” Kasparov declares, so that the West may gird itself for the long winter twilight to come.In Kasparov’s view, the West is always too soft on and naive about Russia, Putin’s or otherwise. EU and U.S. economic sanctions against Russia after the destruction of the MH-17 airliner over eastern Ukraine in July 2014 do not figure in Kasparov’s account, though he had plenty of time to add them in before publication. Nor does the refusal of the United States to incorporate Yeltsin’s Russia in a post-Cold War security framework in the 1990s: It is as if the expansion of NATO to include all ex-satellite allies of the Soviet Union, as well as the Baltic states, by 2004 never happened; as if—whatever the merits of the specific cases—NATO did not use force against Russian clients in Bosnia (1995) and Serbia (1999), and eventually Iraq (2003), underscoring that the Americans saw Russia as outside the global security order and even the European one.In Kasparov’s account, it was insufficient NATO pressure on Russia that brought on the five-day Georgia-Russia war in August 2008. Had NATO approved a specific action plan to bring Georgia into NATO, Russia might have been deterred. Nowhere does Kasparov mention that NATO did formally declare at its April 2008 summit in Bucharest that both Ukraine and Georgia would one day join NATO (though without a calendar for admission). One senior Russian and two Georgian sources have confirmed to me that Putin twice proposed to withdraw Russian troops from the Georgian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in exchange for a written pledge by Georgia not to join NATO for forty years. In this light, the Georgia-Russia war cannot be dissociated from the expansion of NATO toward Russia’s most sensitive historical borderlands: The real story is thus one of interaction between Russia and the West, not simply Russian aggression and Western passivity, as Kasparov would have it.Kasparov justly notes that, historically, “great changes in the framework between nations have been necessary after a period of great conflict.” Yet throughout the post-Cold War period, as far as Europe is concerned, the United States has reinforced a Cold War institution—NATO—with Russia for all intents and purposes on the outside. In effect, no great change in the European security framework has taken place and a major power (Russia) with the capacity to disrupt it has unsurprisingly begun to do so. Keep in mind that the first major such disruption took place in June 1999, when Yeltsin was still President (and Putin was head of the Russian National Security Council): 200 Russian paratroopers, to be reinforced by 10,000 others, seized the Pristina airport in Kosovo in order to begin establishing an independent Russian peacekeeping zone. Only woeful local logistics (no food and water) and relentless U.S. pressure on Bulgaria and Romania to deny overflight rights to Russian aircraft compelled the Russians to cease and desist. But Russian-American relations were once again being transacted by Cold War methods; vectors of power rather than commonalities of values or interests were now shaping the relationship. If Russia was not going to be brought into the European security club, it had clubs of it own with which to get attention.The intricacies of post-Cold War geopolitics do not concern Kasparov, as he believes: “There are no complex national interests in [Putin’s] calculations. There are only personal interests, the interests of those close to him and who keep him in power, and how best to consolidate his power. . . . [T]he only way he can validate his power is with regular shows of force.”Without in any way wishing to discount the force of personal interest in Putin’s political machine, is there really no geopolitical context to the foreign policies of his government? For instance, Putin’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014 clearly followed a carefully designed contingency plan, yet why then and not years earlier? Russian politicians had been calling for such action ever since 1992. Nowhere does Kasparov mention the triggering event: The immediate collapse of the agreement for a transitional Ukrainian government negotiated with the Ukrainian government and its official opposition, as well as French, German, Polish, and Russian officials on February 21, 2014. It suddenly seemed that Ukraine might spin altogether outside of Russia’s orbit of influence toward the EU and NATO. Putin and his government were far from the only ones in Russia with that concern. Perhaps a Western policy that years earlier had seen Ukraine as connected to both Russia and Europe, instead of having to choose between them, might have avoided the crisis of the past two years. Likewise with Georgia.For Kasparov, such concerns ring hollow. Putin’s government is just “evil” and not a fit partner in international undertakings with democracies. Only a policy of what amounts to aggressive neo-containment can work. But to what end, and at what price? Kasparov’s preferred policies would shatter Western unity rather than reinforce it. The latest proof is French President François Hollande’s effort to forge a Russian-French-U.S. alliance against ISIS. Least of all will the NATO democracies commit to a policy of confrontation where Kasparov wants it most: along Russia’s most sensitive historical borderlands.In the end, Winter is Coming joins a long list of efforts by aggrieved foreigners to obtain the support of U.S. power—seen as a deus ex machina—for their domestic objectives. These include Ho Chi Minh seeking an audience with Woodrow Wilson in 1919 for the independence for Indochina; the Polish government-in-exile pleading with Churchill and Roosevelt in 1943 to confront Stalin over the Katyn Forest massacre; Chiang Kai-shek and his U.S. allies keeping Communist China out of the United Nations until 1971 and freezing U.S. policy toward that country; Ahmed Chalabi’s lobbying to induce a U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003; Georgian elites’ attempt to replace Moscow with Washington as its primary foreign policy link between 2004–8, and so on.Along these lines, Kasparov would have the United States and its (democratic) allies commit to regime change in Russia: “Putin is a lost cause and Russia will be a lost cause until he is gone.” He never considers the possibility that what comes after Putin might be even worse. And elsewhere Kasparov concedes that Putin is mainly a Russian problem with roots (which he does not adequately analyze) in the Russia of the 1990s. How far, then, can foreign influence—which failed when Russia had a sympathetic government in the early 1990s—succeed in leveraging what Russian society itself cannot?Moreover, Putin reflects a broad Russian consensus that the country should have a privileged position through the post-Soviet territories; on Crimea, the consensus that the peninsula is Russian and not Ukrainian appears to be unshakeable. Is it really within the capacity of Western governments to advance an anti-Putin policy that will win over the Russian people? One that would leave the country and its relationships with the outside world better off than before? Recent experience with so-called nation-building and regime change in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, not to mention Russia in the 1990s, suggests that the Western democracies have no idea of how to achieve such objectives.Finally, is it really true that Russia and the West have no substantial interests in common, in spite of major conflicts over core political values? As President Hollande admits, France, the United States, and Russia share a common interest in defeating the Islamic State. As a practical matter, Russia’s recent military intervention in support of the Assad dictatorship means that Syria (like eastern Ukraine) cannot be fully stabilized without Russia’s agreement. A maximally effective anti-ISIS strategy would require all parties concerned to subordinate their secondary interests, which are often in conflict with each other, to their seemingly primary interest in stopping ISIS. In effect, dictatorships, merely authoritarian regimes, and democracies would have to collaborate on grand strategy. Inevitably, success would reinforce Putin’s position at home, something anathema to Kasparov.There is precedent for such collective action, however. Immediately after the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union, President Roosevelt through executive action added Stalin’s Russia to the list of recipients of U.S. military supplies. By November 1941, a full month before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt prevailed on Congress to bring Moscow into the Lend-Lease program. For the subsequent three-and-a-half years, the Western democracies and Stalin’s terroristic dictatorship were strategic allies, not because Roosevelt was naive about Stalin’s domestic system but because he judged the threat from Nazi Germany to be qualitatively greater. By 1941, the accumulated mistakes of the past meant that Germany could not be defeated without a global coalition including the Soviet Union. Another way of putting it is that the Cold War was the price of winning World War II. But that was the choice at the time: Who regrets it now?

Turkey and Russia: Enemies Again?

The downing of a Russian Su-24 fighter near the Syrian border by a Turkish F-16 last month has put a chill on Russian-Turkish relations, ending an era of good feelings and burgeoning travel, trade, and educational contacts. In the ensuing war of words, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of facilitating and personally profiting from ISIS oil sales “on an industrial scale” and has levied a series of economic sanctions on Turkey. Erdoğan, far from apologizing, denied all wrongdoing and accused Putin of “slander.” Turkey’s patience, Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu pointedly warned Russia last weekend, “has a limit.” The Russians have a different understanding of limits; they have acted to suspend or curtail nearly all bilateral economic associations with Turkey. Visa-free travel, inaugurated in 2011, has also been suspended.

Because Turkey is a member of NATO, the Russo-Turkish clash has also affected U.S.-Russian relations, which were already tense due to Russia’s actions in Crimea and Ukraine, as well as disagreements over the Syrian civil war. These tensions have given rise to fears of a new Cold War or, worse, a hot war spiraling into World War III. So far the U.S. government has done little more than back Turkey’s claims as regards the Russian warplane’s flight path and the radio warnings it was given prior to the shootdown. This has been enough to convince Moscow that the U.S. government stands behind Turkey.Whatever the truth about the incident—and about Russia’s claims of ISIS oil sales in Turkey—Western statesmen should continue to tread lightly. For Moscow, U.S.-Turkish cooperation in support of the Syrian opposition remains serious business—and not just because Syria under Bashar al-Assad is a Russian client dating back to Soviet times. The dangers go much deeper than suggested by the facile notion of a new Cold War.From the Russian perspective, the Syrian story fits into a pattern of Western hostility dating all the way back to the Crimean War of the 1850s, when Britain and France (along with Piedmont-Sardinia) teamed up with the Ottoman Empire against Russia. Then as now, fears of Russian expansionism to the south spurred Western powers into a somewhat improbable (and reckless) embrace of an established Islamic power and its more extreme Islamist clients in the Caucasus.A close look at the history of the Crimean War (1853–56) reveals some uncanny parallels. The Russia of Czar Nicholas I (1825–55), like Putin’s increasingly illiberal Russia today, had an unsavory reputation in the West. Nicholas I’s reign was literally born in reaction, with the repression of the so-called Decembrist Uprising of liberal-minded army officers who had tasted European liberties during the Napoleonic wars. In foreign affairs, Nicholas I positively embraced his role as “gendarme of Europe” in the Metternich system, sending troops to suppress popular rebellions, most recently in 1849 to help Austria (already busy fighting Italian rebels) defeat an insurgency of Hungarian nationalists led by Lajos Kossuth. In this way the reactionary Czar helped, in his view, to restore peace, law, order, and the monarchical principle, or, in the view of European liberals, to snuff out the promise of the democratic “springtime of peoples” of 1848.As if obeying an unwritten law of geopolitics, the Western powers coupled the growing distaste of “respectable opinion” for reactionary Russia with a strange new respect for the Ottoman Empire, previously viewed as the “terrible Turk.” In 1839, Sultan Mahmud II had launched the Tanzimat, a series of reforms that partially (though not completely) dismantled sharia law, including the death penalty for apostasy from Islam, lifted in 1844. As if to put the finishing touches on Turkey’s diplomatic courtship of the Western powers, Mahmud’s successor, Abdul Mecid I, offered political asylum to Kossuth and other European exiles of the failed revolutions of 1848.In Britain and France, Turcophilia began to seem like the natural accompaniment to Russophobia. The Turks listened to Western advice, opened their economy to European imports and firms, adopted liberal reforms, and accepted refugees. Nicholas I stood for brutish reaction, crushing freedom fighters wherever they appeared (including in the Caucasus, where the anti-Russian holy war of Imam Shamil, the “Lion of Daghestan,” became a fashionable fundraising cause in English society). Thus was born the peculiar diplomacy of the Crimean War, which saw the leading “liberal” powers, Britain and France, goad the Ottoman Empire and its Islamist Caucasian allies, into holy war against Christian Russia.While Western literature on the conflict speaks of Russian expansionism, this is a misreading of causation. The diplomatic crisis began with a demand lodged by French Emperor Napoleon III that control of (literally, the keys to) the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem be transferred from Greek Orthodox to Catholic Christians. By sending a warship into Ottoman territorial waters, Napoleon III made perfectly clear that he was trying to provoke Nicholas I.The Czar took the bait. In March 1853, after sounding out the British Ambassador to St. Petersburg over a possible partition of the Ottoman Empire (it was during this conversation, leaked to London, that the Czar first spoke of the Ottoman “sick man”; contrary to legend he never actually said “sick man of Europe”), Nicholas I dispatched a diplomatic mission, led by the imposing Cavalry General Alexander Menshikov. Declaring, in an exaggeration of the truth, that a 1774 treaty gave Russia protection rights over all Ottoman Christians (in fact the treaty granted this right only in certain areas, like the Danube Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia and later Serbia), Menshikov demanded an imperial sened re-affirming these rights.The ensuing negotiations were complex, but their essence was captured when Ottoman Foreign Minister Rifaat Pasha warned Menshikov: “Do not push us to extremes, or you will compel us to throw ourselves into the arms of others.” Catching the hint of possible British or French intervention on the Turkish side, Menshikov dropped Russia’s demand for a binding diplomatic sened, saying that a “free but solemn engagement” from the Sultan would suffice. But the Turks, urged on by Britain’s ferociously Russophobic Ambassador Stratford Canning, refused, stacking the deck for war.Russia made the first move when the Czar’s troops crossed the Pruth River in early July 1853. But war enthusiasm rose on all sides. It was the Ottomans, not the Russians, who rejected a mediation plan brokered in Vienna. It was in Constantinople that Islamic holy war demonstrations erupted in September. It was the Ottomans, not the Russians, who first declared war. Even after taking the plunge four weeks later, the Russians, despite having crushing superiority on all fronts, delayed, unsure of British and French intentions. After receiving an ultimatum from London that Britain would not do anything unless Russian troops either crossed the Danube or attacked Turkey’s Black Sea coast, Nicholas I erupted, “This is infamous!” Not until the inferior Ottoman fleet taunted the Russians by cruising past the Russian base at Sevastopol did the Russian fleet, on November 30, 1853, bombard Sinop and thereby provide France and Britain their casus belli.In this slipshod way began the bloodiest Great Power conflict between 1815 and 1914. The Crimean War left virtually all sides embittered (except, perhaps, opportunistic Piedmont-Sardinia, which somehow leveraged the war into Italian unification). Embarrassed British statesmen, having come during the war, in the words of Lord Clarendon, “to know more about the united ignorance and stupidity of the Mahomedans” than they cared to, veered to the opposite extreme by 1876, with the publication of Gladstone’s anti-Turkish-atrocity polemic on the “Bulgarian Horrors.” Showing how complete the reversal was, Stratford Canning endorsed Gladstone’s Russophilic polemic—which was translated into Russian and sold “at cost,” helping pan-Slavists make the case for Russia’s “humanitarian” invasion of Turkey in 1877.Statesmen often have short memories. But we should not let them off the hook so easily. In 1853, Canning had ginned up a war with Russia, knowing perfectly well that Nicholas I had begged Britain to cooperate in finding a solution to the Eastern Question. Some 23 years later, Canning threw in with Gladstone’s Russophiles, who were urging a new Czar to invade Turkey to defend Ottoman Christians against Muslim atrocities. Will today’s Western statesmen come to feel similar regrets two decades from now if they goad Erdoğan into erecting a wall of enmity with Putin’s Russia, leading perhaps to much worse than a fighter shootdown?Many in the West view Putin today as Nicholas I was viewed in 1853. From his regime’s anti-democratic tendencies to its positions on gender and sexuality, Putin is an unapologetic reactionary. In his strategic moves in Crimea, Ukraine, and Syria, Putin has become a latter-day gendarme of Europe, who stands for raw national interest versus the wobbly internationalism of the EU and UN.And now Erdoğan is reprising the role of Abdul Mecid I against Nicholas I, playing on Western Russophobia as he goads Putin into a showdown in Syria. The existence of NATO, with all its attendant infrastructure linking Ankara, Brussels, and Washington, makes his work easier than it should be, considering the increasingly strident authoritarianism of Erdoğan’s Islamist government, which departs further every year from the democratic values of the other alliance member states. No matter how atrociously Erdoğan treats domestic opponents, Kurds, or anyone else who stands in his way, Western “Cannings” support his hard line against Putin.They should be careful what they wish for. Buyer’s remorse has already set in for many U.S. policymakers over the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and Qaddafi in 2011, with the chaos engulfing postwar Iraq and Libya helping fuel the growth of ISIS. In Syria, whatever the intentions of Western policy regarding the opposition, evidence suggests that it is extremist groups like like Jabhat al-Nusra (an al-Qaeda affiliate) and ISIS that have flourished, with the connivance, if not the direct encouragement, of Turkey. Erdoğan, in turn, has been operating on the belief that Turkish membership in NATO gives him carte blanche in Syria, and against Russia. If this belief is mistaken, it should be unequivocally and publicly contradicted.Putin’s Russia may be no more attractive as a partner than the Russia of Nicholas I. We would be fools, however, to repeat the mistake of the Crimean War by throwing ourselves into bed with just anyone who happens to oppose him. NATO or no NATO, the Cold War is over, and Russia is all but begging the West to cooperate in preserving what is left of Syria before it turns into another jihadi wasteland—or, at the very least, to refrain from taking sides once again in a Turkish-Russian dispute that, let’s be honest, has nothing whatsoever to do with NATO. Left to his own devices, Erdoğan would no more have provoked Putin to the brink of war than the Ottomans, absent Canning’s cheerleading, would have fought Russia in 1853. This is not our fight.

Congress Moves to Kill US Crude Export Ban

As part of a $1.15 trillion spending deal agreed upon in the House yesterday, U.S. lawmakers are reportedly moving to end a ban on crude oil exports that’s been on the books for the past 40 years. Reuters reports:

“Lifting the oil export ban is very important to our industry to enable them to compete on a global basis,” said Senator John Hoeven. The Republican from oil-producing North Dakota has pressured Congress to axe the trade restriction.

“If we always get a lower price than the rest of the world, that obviously gives the advantage to OPEC and Russia,” he said.

Why does this difference in regional pricing matter? Well, when producers are struggling to stay profitable in a bearish market, every extra dollar they can fetch for their supplies matters. That’s the idea underpinning the argument being made by Senator Hoeven—by lifting the ban on crude exports, the U.S. would enter the global market and free up regional bottlenecks that have historically been responsible for depressing the prices that companies plumbing American crude can fetch for their efforts.

That argument is holding less water these days, since the gap between America’s West Texas Intermediate (WTI) benchmark and Europe’s Brent price has narrowed as prices have taken a nosedive. WTI has typically traded at a discount to Brent, and this spring was more than $10 cheaper. But today WTI is trading at just under $36 per barrel, less than $1.50 cheaper than Brent.But though current market conditions weaken that argument, the political will has apparently materialized to end the ban. This policy was enacted in the 1970s, crafted in reaction to Arab oil embargoes, and it goes without saying that much has changed in the global oil market since then. America’s own oil fortunes have been fundamentally transformed in the last decade alone, thanks to shale. It seems like Congress will attempt to change policies to match these new realities.

U.S. and Taiwan Plan $1.83 Billion Arms Deal

The United States plans to sell Taiwan two warships, according to the AFP:

“Today, the administration notified Congress of a $1.83 billion defensive arms sale package for Taiwan,” David McKeeby, a State Department spokesman said, adding that the package included two frigates.

China watchers should keep an eye on this and similar stories. With elections around the corner, Taiwan is poised to elect a more nationalist government. Taiwenese pro-independence candidate Tsai Ing-wen visited Tokyo in October, drawing condemnation from the Beijing. It was a notable expression of goodwill towards Taiwan’s old colonial ruler, and suggests stormier times could be ahead for the tense Taipei–Beijing relationship.

Taiwan is a critical American ally as the U.S. seeks to balance China’s power in the Pacific, and the deepening ties between Taiwan and the U.S., as well as between Taiwan and Japan, are more signs that China’s behavior is pushing other nations closer together.

Coal Layoffs Unsettle Chinese Region

China’s struggling, large state-owned coal companies have been cutting jobs, and it’s taking a heavy toll on China’s northeast region, according to the New York Times:

The mine’s owner, the Longmay Group, the biggest coal company in northeastern China, announced in September that it planned to lay off 100,000 workers. The elimination of about 40 percent of the work force at 42 mines in four cities is the biggest reduction in jobs that anyone could recall in this steadily declining rust belt near the Russian border.

China has managed mass layoffs at creaky, state-owned businesses like Longmay before, averting the threat of strikes and unrest by suppressing protests and offering payouts and job training.But that was when the economy was booming and could readily absorb displaced workers. The test the government now faces in this depressed coal town and in other hard-hit areas across the country is whether it can head off labor discontent in a slowing economy.

This is China’s rust belt, heavily dependent on old fashioned state-owned mining and metal bashing companies. It is heavily subsidized by more dynamic parts of China, and it’s a base of conservative views on economic reform. It’s also the region that’s been in the news this week, as Beijing has  regional officials of falsifying the growth figures.

China, that is, isn’t just facing problems in a few coal towns. A whole region of the country needs to be reconstructed or even re-invented.

U.S. Sends Mixed Signals on South China Sea

U.S. officials yesterday announced that there would be no more “Freedom of Navigation” drills around disputed atolls in the South China Sea for the rest of the year. The United States sailed a guided missile destroyer within 12 miles of Subi reef in the Spratly island chain—an outcropping that is above water only at low tide, but which Chinese forces have built up into a military outpost—last October, and officials had been planning to do so again this month. No longer, via Reuters:

. . .The Obama administration, which is weighing the risks of raising tensions with Beijing at a time when the United States is focused on the fight against Islamic State, has not approved the next such patrol, said the officials, who asked not to be named.

One official said the next U.S. Navy sail-by was likely to come in January, in what would be the second direct challenge to the territorial limits China effectively claims around seven artificial islands in one of the world’s busiest sea lanes.

The Pentagon officially refused to comment.

The apparent discord between the White House and the Pentagon is deeply troubling. With naval officials signaling one thing, and the Administration signaling another, it’s hard to imagine that Beijing is taking the United States very seriously at the moment. It would be one thing if this were the first sign that military commanders aren’t on the same page as their civilian overseers. But it isn’t. Indeed, it really is remarkable that, after seven years in the White House, the President still cannot keep his ducks in line—whether one believes he is right to be cautious or not.

Counter-Terror Alliance—Or Counter-Shia?

Saudi Arabia has announced the creation of a coalition of 34 Islamic nations to fight against global terrorism. Reuters reports:

A statement carried by Saudi state news agency SPA said the new coalition would have a joint operations center based in Riyadh to “coordinate and support military operations”.

The states it listed as joining the new coalition included Egypt, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Malaysia, Pakistan and several African nations.The list did not include Shi’ite Muslim Iran, the arch rival of Sunni Saudi Arabia for influence across the Arab world. Tehran and Riyadh are ranged on opposite sides in proxy conflicts in Syria and Yemen.

While United States Secretary of Defense Ash Carter hedged that, “We look forward to learning more about what Saudi Arabia has in mind in terms of this coalition,” he also added that “But in general it appears it is very much in line with something we’ve been urging for quite some time, which is greater involvement in the campaign to combat ISIL (Islamic State) by Sunni Arab countries.”

For her part, German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen cautiously welcomed the announcement, even as she rejected calls by the United States for Germany to contribute more militarily in the fight against ISIS. Former British Foreign Secretary William Hague was also warm on the announcement, saying he hoped the coalition could with time transform itself into a NATO-style alliance committed to its members’ mutual defense.Multinational initiatives are a dime a dozen; ones that accomplish anything are much rarer. It remains to be seen what, if anything, this one will get up to. But the Sunni-centric nature of the force is worth keeping an eye on. The Sunnis, and particularly Saudi Arabia, have been terrified that the nuke deal with Iran means the U.S. is acquiescing to Tehran’s regional hegemonic ambitions. American passivity in Syria has served in Saudi eyes to confirm this. And when asked if the coalition would fight against ISIS, Saudi Arabia’s 30-year old Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said that the coalition would fight “any terrorist organization that appears in front of us.”We’ve quipped before that President Obama’s foreign policy has realized the unlikely achievement of bringing together Saudi Arabia and Israel—in opposition to Obama’s regional policies, and in fear of Iran. Now, the President may be uniting the wide world of Sunni Islam.

The Pipeline Dividing Europe

Though many expected the EU to renew sanctions against Russia for its incursions in Ukraine as a matter of course, Italy has delayed proceedings by asking for more discussion on the matter. Important to this discussion seems to be Berlin’s intention to move forward with the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which would increase Germany’s capacity to import Gazprom natural gas. The FT reports:

[Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi] last week blocked an effort to roll over the measures against Russia for another six months amid irritation at Germany’s insistence on moving forward with the pipeline, which largely follows the same path as the original Nord Stream pipeline, and its refusal to allow Brussels to review the project, known as Nord Stream 2. […]

In particular, the Italians believe that Nord Stream 2, backed by senior members of German chancellor Angela Merkel’s government, runs contrary to the spirit of the sanctions campaign and amounts to a powerful Germany putting its economic needs ahead of the bloc’s collective diplomacy. “We are strong on sanctions, but on the other hand a number of countries, or companies, are able to double [the size of] Nord Stream,” one Italian official said.

Nord Stream 2 is backed by a consortium of 6 energy firms: Gazprom (which has a 50 percent stake in the project), two German companies, a French company, an Austrian company, and Royal Dutch Shell. The project, if it goes through, will give Gazprom a link to Europe that bypasses the Baltic states, leaving out Ukraine and any potential transit problems therein.

Italy doesn’t like the project because its own pipeline deal with Gazprom—the so-called South Stream—was scuppered late last year after the European Commission pushed back against some of the project’s contracts. Eastern Europe is loathe to see an alternative route being floated that would cut it out of valuable geopolitical leverage and lucrative transfer fees. And for its part, on the other side, Germany would love to strengthen its own economy with a more stable supply of natural gas.The vagaries of the Nord Stream 2 project are throwing intra-European tensions into sharp relief. It seems the U.S. doesn’t have a monopoly on fractious pipeline politics.

Addressing Racial Isolation on Campus

College administrations have generally offered two responses to campus social justice protests: More diversity training, and more identity centers. The idea is that the best ways to address racism and prejudice on campus are to teach students to conform to the academy’s dominant political paradigm, and to create “safe spaces” for minority students to gather with members of their own identity group.

The problem is that neither of these solutions has much of a track record of success. In an interesting post at Heterodox Academy (a new website quickly making itself indispensable for campus-watchers), social psychologist Chris Martin surveys some of the academic literature on diversity training and self-segregation efforts. Neither of them have been shown reliably to work in combatting racism; some studies show that they actually exacerbate racial tensions. Martin then offers three approaches that colleges could pursue to address racial alienation that have a basis in social science and evidence:

First, colleges can attempt to tackle stereotype threat, which is what happens when people choke because they feel threatened by a negative stereotype. […]

Second, colleges can support a sense of belonging in school. It’s normal to feel like an outsider when you begin your college education. Unfortunately, students from minority groups may assume that incoming White students feel included and that feelings of exclusions are unique to minorities. Even worse, they may not realize that those feelings are transient […]Third, colleges can induce a common ingroup identity among students, creating a situation where each student views other students as members of a unified college community. Minority students often identify solely as minority students, and this tendency can be exacerbated by diversity programs. However, they can adopt a dual identity, so that they feel like their racial identity is complemented by their identity as an ordinary student. White students can also be induced to view the college community as a single community, rather than view minority students as an outgroup. […]

Read Martin’s whole post. He discusses concrete steps that colleges could take to advance these objectives, and cites academic studies demonstrating their efficacy.

Various forms of prejudice clearly persist on college campuses, just as they persist everywhere else in society. If colleges are interested in addressing this, they should try those strategies that have the best chance of working, rather than blindly acceding to an ideological project.

Study: Big Hospitals Contribute to High Prices

The role that hospital consolidation plays in contributing to high health care prices just got some new attention. Over at the Upshot, Kevin Quealy and Margot Sanger-Katz sum up the results of a new study in a piece entitled “The Experts Were Wrong About the Best Places for Better and Cheaper Health Care.” According to the piece, experts treated low Medicare costs in a region as a good proxy for lower overall health care costs. But that turned out to be a mistake, because some areas in which Medicare costs are low see high private sector costs. The study identified a mechanism behind the high costs:

“The reason why health insurance for the privately insured is expensive is because the prices from hospitals with a lot of market power are higher,” said Zack Cooper, an assistant professor of economics and health policy at Yale University, and the paper’s lead author. […]

Martin Gaynor, a health economist at Carnegie Mellon University and one of the authors of the paper, has spent many years studying how market competition influences the cost and quality of health care. He says the new data is strong evidence that the federal government needs to enforce antitrust laws vigorously to prevent health care markets from becoming monopolies.

Other experts say more aggressive price regulation may be necessary in markets that already have monopoly hospitals. Dr. Berenson suggested policy makers look to Maryland, where a government board sets standard prices for hospital services.

We have covered the issue of hospital consolidation and its effects for years now, thanks in part to the excellent analysis of the subject Right-of-Center commentators like Avik Roy. We’re glad to see it highlighted here—and the ACA’s role acknowledged. “In particular, they [the findings] cast doubt on the wisdom of encouraging mergers among hospitals,” the piece notes, “as parts of the 2010 health care law did.”

Applying anti-trust law is certainly one way to rein in prices—and regulators have gotten more aggressive here in some cases—but there are other developments to encourage as well. The growth of alternative care venues, like clinics in big box stores, is one; price transparency, and the resulting competition for consumers, is another. Rate-setting is of course a policy proposal congenial to some on the Left, but the evidence here is decidedly mixed. Maryland isn’t the only U.S. state to experiment with price setting. As Sarah Kliff at Vox has written, 10 states tried that approach in 1970s and 1980s, and all but Maryland dropped it in the absence of evidence that it was bringing down costs.

That debate aside, however, it’s good to see the wonk class drilling down hard on the question of prices for health care procedures. This has always been the key area on which reformers must focus, because the cheaper health care is as a whole, the easier it is to expand coverage.