Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 533

Fighting Fossil Fuel Subsidies

So many of the ideas of the global climate movement lead to such terrible policy, that it’s especially important to pay attention when climate activists support good objectives. The abolition of fuel subsidies in poor countries is one of the most important of these valuable green policy proposals. Nigeria’s former finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala—drawing on his own experience fighting it in his country—writes about the global subsidy problem for the FT:

Globally, government support for fossil-fuel subsidies will amount to almost $650bn this year. The cost of these subsidies far outweighs the benefits and burdens the middle classes. Reforming the system can make energy infrastructure more efficient, shore up public finances and allow more targeted spending on public services. […]

About 30 countries, including my own, Nigeria, have already made efforts to phase out fossil-fuel subsidies. In spite of the difficulties, it is well worth the effort. […]Using lessons learnt from Nigeria and other countries we can put together a set of best practices to follow. These include co-ordinated communication, implementation and redistribution efforts. Reform should also create a broad sense of political ownership, especially in fiscally decentralised countries.

These subsidies, intended at least in theory to help poor people manage the cost of energy, over time inevitably lead to serious distortions in the economy while encouraging wasteful and excessive use of fuel. The costs of these policies to developing countries becomes immense over time as the inefficiencies increase.

This is especially the case because middle- and upper-middle- class families often capture most of the economic benefit that comes from cheap energy. Doing away with energy subsidies can reduce wasteful energy use, improve the welfare of poor people in developing countries, and free up badly needed cash for investments in education, healthcare, infrastructure, and other priorities of the developing world.But this kind of reform is harder than it looks. For one thing, powerful political interests often derive great benefits from command and control subsidy policies. Black market smuggling and trade flourishes in many developing countries where governance is weak and life is complicated. Often, political bosses are involved in the trade. More, if you try to replace a general subsidy with a policy that targets poor families, you may be asking the administrative machinery of a developing country to undertake a task for which it is not equipped. Anyone who has visited the great informal settlements and slums that surround so many rapidly growing cities in the developing world can understand just how impossible it is for weak and poorly staffed governments to identify the recipients of subsidies, eliminate fraud, and make sure the right payments get to the right people.Helping governments in developing countries build the capacity to administer programs like this is one of the ways in which advanced countries’ aid can at least potentially play a positive role globally. It is also true that if more green “activists” spent their time and energy either developing the skills that would enable them to make a contribution to developing countries’ governance or learning other technical and administrative skills that are necessary if progress is to be made, and spent less time on anti-science campaigns like those against GMOs or nuclear energy, then the green movement might have a chance of getting closer to its goals.

Ben Sasse Shows How to Talk About Radical Islam

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) went to San Bernardino and gave a speech that deserves notice from everyone who is thinking about America’s decade and a half-old (and counting) conflict with radical Islam. It’s now up on YouTube:

The most important part (transcript via the Weekly Standard):

“I am not a Muslim but as an American I stand and defend the rights of American Muslims to freely worship even though we differ about important theological matters. In America we are free to believe different things and to argue about those beliefs. It matters what you think about the nature of God and whether he’s revealed himself, what you think about salvation matters, heaven and hell matters, but these things are so important that we don’t try to solve them by violence. And we come together as a community, a community of Americans who believe in the constitutional creed, to unite around those core American values like freedom of religion.

“We are most certainly though at war with militant Islam. We are at war with the violent Islam. We are at war with jihadi Islam. We are not at war with all Muslims. We’re not at war with Muslim families in Dearborn, Michigan who want the American dream for their kids. But we are at war with those who believe that they will kill in the name of religion.

If this speech were to change the way Americans talk about the war on terror, Sasse will have performed a service to the nation. To see how, look at two moments from seminal speeches since 2001.

After September 11, President Bush declared that terrorists “hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” Bush had touched on something vital: Radical Islamists hated those things because they see them not as freedoms, but as grave wrongs—as invitations to apostasy, atheism, and libertinism. The problem was, he never fully fleshed this out. As a result, this speech became easy to caricature in later years: That simpleton Bush couldn’t possibly imagine why anyone would have a beef with the U.S., so he invented a cartoon enemy.But just because Bush was inarticulate, doesn’t mean he wasn’t on to something. Radical Islamism identifies as good that which we identify as evil, and vice versa. In doing so, Islamic radicals are like many of America’s past enemies—Nazis, Communists—who also espoused a cohesive worldview diametrically opposed to America’s classical liberalism. And it is this moral and politico-religious frame that many Americans feel has been missing from this conflict. Bush left many legacies, but an enduring frame for the global conflict against radical Islam was not one of them. He spent much of his Presidency trying to fight particular states and terror groups. His Wilsonian belief that the desire for democracy dwelt in every heart, and that, given a chance to flourish, it would cure the Middle East’s ills, also caused him to underestimate just how deep the problems in the Islamic world run.President Barack Obama, for his part, has veered between downplaying the conflict as a whole (Matt Yglesias, as recently as this week, characterized the President as attempting “to meet the psychological needs of a frightened nation” while not engaging in actions that are “widely counterproductive”) and sweeping pronouncements on Islam (“ISIL is not Islamic.“) The damage that these tactics—which to many smack of deliberate obtuseness—have done to the public’s trust in the government is increasingly acknowledged by both Left and Right.But less recognized is how President Obama misses opportunities to present America’s viewpoint to the Islamic world. Take, for example, his 2009 Cairo speech. Heavy on rhetorical gestures that he (and, by extension, America) understood the Islamic world, the speech simply took for granted that the Islamic world understood America’s philosophy:

I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. Those are not just American ideas, they are human rights, and that is why we will support them everywhere.

But to radical Islamists, “the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed” is seen, as it was in Medieval Europe, as an invitation to error, misrule, and license. Similarly, freedom of religion, which Obama went on to extoll, is seen as the road to apostasy. Like Bush, but unlike Sasse, Obama did not explain why America believes these things. Instead, by acting like there’s shared ground (“all people yearn for certain things”) where none exists, Obama tried to pretend there isn’t a theological controversy where there is one.

This approach—pretending that everyone in the world (excepting perhaps a fringe minority) on some level agrees with America’s founding principles—has become a hallmark of Obama’s approach to the problem of radical Islam. But until the basic controversy over right and wrong is acknowledged, and America’s viewpoint fully explicated, it will be very hard for American leaders to persuade the majority of Middle Eastern Muslims, who are caught in a civilizational crisis, to understand what we are offering, what we are asking of them, and why. Just as importantly, to many Americans, the Obama approach seems like papering over a serious problem with platitudes.Sasse, who has a Ph.D. in history from Yale but also ran a small, Lutheran college in Middle America, is offering a way to thread the needle. On the one hand, his speech shows how to reassure a frightened American public while respecting our Constitutional obligation not to be sectarian. On the other, it demonstrates how to explain our worldview cogently and firmly to a Muslim world in turmoil. As Sasse explained, America’s freedoms, such as freedom of speech, are not libertine declarations that we do not care for higher truth, but rather are integral to the search for it. Knowledge of God is vital to human life, but impossible to find or enforce by the sword. Therefore, free examination and freedom of conscience are our best hope. This belief, born out of the wars of the Christian Reformation, was the tradition in which America’s founders, both Revolutionary and colonial, wrote the First Amendment and in which they framed our democracy as providing a chance to adhere more closely to what one thought was a good and true life, very much including a religious life. This wisdom has been confirmed by American history, as groups such as Roman Catholics and Mormons, whose religions had previously been thought to be incompatible with pluralism, have lived and prospered under this approach. And as Sasse rightly points out, millions of American Muslims today thrive in their faith under this same liberal tradition.Sasse is at once more humble in his ambitions than our current crop of leaders (he doesn’t claim to understand Islam better than many leading Islamic scholars, for instance), and more effective in his outreach. By connecting with America’s history and the importance of religion in ordinary Americans’ lives, the Senator reassures the country that he “gets” it.  From there, he builds a way of viewing the conflict that Americans of all faiths can understand and rally around. Finally, he provides fruitful ground for outreach, by establishing common ground—care for the questions that all religions try to answer—before expressing differences and concerns. Insisting that Islam doesn’t really matter (or is just a flag of convenience for crazies) hasn’t been working, at home or abroad. Perhaps it’s time to take a cue from Senator Sasse and try something different.

Clinton, Kennedy Protest Inaction on Iran Missile Test

After Iran test-launched another medium range ballistic missile on Tuesday, the American Ambassador to the United Nations stated simply that the U.S. was “conducting a serious review of the reported incident.” That’s a bit different than the reaction one would expect. The NYT:

Before the Iran nuclear accord, the White House regularly condemned Tehran’s tests. But now, officials say privately, they believe that the tests may be the work of angry elements in Iran’s military who hope to derail the nuclear accord and preserve their atomic infrastructure.

“We’re seeing a lot of infighting within Iran now,” one senior American official said.

Outside analysts seemed to have little doubt about what the Iranians launched on Nov. 21: a Ghadr-110, a version of the country’s Shahab-3 missile. That missile figured in the nuclear negotiations, because of evidence that Iran had conducted studies about how to shrink a nuclear device to fit into the Shahab’s nose cone.

The November test, if confirmed, would be a clear violation of Security Council Resolution 1929, which remains in force until the nuclear accord goes into effect — probably in January. After that, a new Security Council resolution will take effect, in which Iran is “called upon” to stop work for eight years on any ballistic missiles that could deliver a nuclear weapon. But the test would not violate the nuclear accord itself.

The Kennedy and Clinton dynasties both seem to be dissociating themselves from President Obama’s latest show of restraint:

“Ignoring violations of the agreement will send a troubling signal to not only Iran, but our allies in the region about our commitment to vigorously enforcing its restrictions,” Representative Joseph P. Kennedy III, Democrat of Massachusetts, said after writing a letter to President Obama with Representative Ted Deutch, Democrat of Florida.

Hillary Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, said in a speech on Sunday that there should be no tolerance for small violations of the nuclear agreement.

The President appears to think that Iran’s latest missile test is an evil plot by military hardliners against the friendly moderates with whom he has signed an agreement. Perhaps. The problem is that this kind of thinking, and the passive response to Iranian provocations that stems from it, may end up empowering hardliners rather than weakening them. After all, the hardliners are able to say, “Look, the Americans are so weak and confused that they don’t even respond to provocations with further sanctions.” That can be a strong argument in Iran in favor of pushing the envelope even further.

This is why many Democrats as well as Republicans are worried about President Obama’s continued passivity, or as he might put it, masterful restraint, in the face of the ballistic missile test.

Violence in Venezuela May Follow Opposition Victory

President Nicholas Maduro’s socialist allies lost big to the Democratic Unity coalition in Venezuela, as it has now been officially confirmed that a supermajority of congressional seats. An epic power struggle is now all but assured, as the WSJ reports:

President Maduro’s United Socialist Party, for its part, issued a call to defend its self-styled revolution, tweeting out images of former Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin and demanding “no whining” from its supporters.

The National Electoral Council reported that the opposition Democratic Unity coalition won 109 seats. Three indigenous representatives allied with the opposition were also elected, giving the opposition the two-thirds majority needed to remove Supreme Court justices, pass laws and draft a new constitution, a move that could end Mr. Maduro’s tenure.Since its drubbing in the midterm elections, the government has shown no inclination to tone down its rhetoric or change the statist economic policies like price controls that economists blame for the country’s deepest economic crisis since independence.

The news from Venezuela is both good and bad. The supermajority won by the Democratic Unity coalition shows that the Socialist government was unable to prevent (at least somewhat) free and fair elections.

But the bad news is that the power struggle has just begun. The Socialists have shown a willingness and ability to undermine opposition victories before. When an opposition leader won the mayoral election in Caracas in 2008, Hugo Chávez let him rule but transferred the purse strings of the mayor’s office over to himself. And with the Socialist Party tweeting out photos of those great and peaceful leaders Lenin and Stalin, the potential for violence in the Venezuelan politics is high. Indeed, with Venezuelan society deeply divided and with the army also in the pocket of a revolutionary government committed to holding on to power at all costs, a civil war in the oil-rich nation cannot be wholly ruled out.A conflict would inevitably affect the security and stability of its neighbors. The countries of the region need to begin to think about how to prevent anything like a civil war in Venezuela, and how to protect the democratically elected legislature. For an Obama administration that has far more on its plate then it can handle, this is terrible news. For the first time in many years, the United States faces a potentially serious security threat in the Western Hemisphere. That fact cannot be wished away.

President Obama’s Rights and Wrongs

The President’s speech this past Sunday has, as such speeches always do, evoked torrents of instant commentary—most of it in the now standard op-ed length. Some of that commentary has stuck narrowly to the subject of the speech, which was about terrorism and counter-terrorism policy. Some has waded more widely into the Administration’s Middle East portfolio, which is not logically subsumed by the terrorism issue but which certainly elides with it. And some commentary has ranged further afield still, commenting on the President’s foreign policy as a whole, as well as on the politics of the whole business. By coincidence, too, a few serious articles and studies on the Administration’s Middle East policy, the terrorism component included (and these are longer and more substantive than an op-ed), have recently appeared that were published and certainly had to have been written close on in advance of the speech. Taken together, all this stuff amounts to a veritable smorgasbord of delectations for a pokey, latecomer commentator like me.

There is also another way to typologize the commentary: the predictably partisan, the more subtly partisan, and the more or less objectively non-partisan—like this one, of course.Not that I’ve read every single remark proffered on the President’s speech, not even just in English, but I’ve seen enough to get the gist. The obviously partisan criticisms panned the speech as just an attempt to rewrap the same old failing policies, chiding the President for his stubbornness in the face of failure, his inability to learn from his own mistakes, his overweening passivity, lack of courage, lack of a coherent strategy, and, above all, for grievously underestimating the nature of the threat. Some of this criticism also mentioned the President’s earlier remarks, the day before the Paris attacks, which held ISIS to be contained, if not in eclipse.A few commentators remarked on the wider politics of the speech. TAI’s own Walter Russell Mead observed that the speech did not help the President’s approval ratings; it is as if lame-duckness has set in already, such that no one is really listening to or taking Obama seriously anymore when he talks of such issues. Another commentator—who happens to be a good friend and is someone with whom I usually agree—likened the speech to Jimmy Carter’s infamous “malaise” speech of 1979.In the face of an avalanche of criticism from Republicans, stalwart defenders of the President’s point of view were hard to come by. Perhaps the closest anyone came is Fred Kaplan, whose wide-ranging Foreign Affairs essay “Obama’s Way” was obviously prepared before this past Sunday evening. Kaplan’s essay is reportorial in style and is based on about two score interviews with present and former insiders, both happy and less-than-happy. He is not entirely uncritical of the President’s record, but he is pretty obviously sympathetic. To be welcomed by so many insiders in the first place marks Kaplan as a favored investigator, and one can almost hear the mutual back patting coming through the essay. In the course of that exercise Kaplan makes—or better, repeats—a few questionable assertions: “Tens of thousands of civilian lives” were “at risk” on the eve of the Libya intervention1; the Syrian regime under Russian pressure “surrendered very nearly all of his chemical weapons for destruction”2; keeping 10,000 troops in Iraq, with or without a SOFA agreement, was “extremely unlikely” to prevent the ISIS surge of 2014 because, Kaplan reasons, 175,000 troops had trouble with them earlier; and there are others. The wonderments of the Iran deal are simply presumed, for example; he doesn’t even bother to argue for it, or even to mention any of the substantive criticisms of it.Despite the subtle partisan flavor of the Kaplan essay, it does the reader a great service by recreating the complexity of the decision environment for these kinds of problems, and it paints a credible if not always flattering picture of how Obama thinks about these issues. He does not think in a systematic strategic fashion, but he does have strong instincts and a lawyerly skill at skewering weak arguments others may bring to him. And this brings me to my first general point: These issues are hard, and they are fraught with consequences. By the time any decision point gets to the President, it means pretty much by definition that it is very hard.It is therefore disingenuous for partisan critics to simplify these things and make it seem as though everything is really very obvious to anyone with a brain, and it is particularly disingenuous when it is done by those critics who have served in government and therefore know better. Were all of George W. Bush’s decisions simple and obvious? No. Did all his key advisers agree on the main points of contention? No. Was Bush a bold and decisive leader, or was his decision-making style, no less and probably more than Obama’s, “maddeningly episodic,” in the words of one then-friendly insider critic? Kaplan quotes Obama toward the end of his essay, and a part of it is worth repeating here. In an unspecified reference to his Libya decision, the President said:

In terms of decisions I make, I do think that I have a better sense of how military action can result in unintended consequences. And I am confirmed in my belief that much of the time, we are making judgments based on percentages, and…there are always going to be some complications.

That’s exactly right. It is right for Barack Obama, it was right for George W. Bush and all his predecessors, and it will still be right for Obama’s successors, no matter who they may be.

One of the first commentators out of the box on the Sunday evening speech was Peter Beinart, writing on The Atlantic website. Beinart’s point of view is similar to Kaplan’s: partisan but subtle in its reportorial tone. But it is narrower in its target: It’s focused on the speech, and all that Beinart claims he is doing is contrasting Obama’s understanding of the terrorism portfolio with that of his Republican critics. All in all, Beinart did a good job of laying out the basics in a fairly short space—longer than an op-ed, but not very much.Republican see a “war on terror” in grand terms—jihadis as the ideological heirs to the totalitarian menaces of the 20th century, and the threat as “civilizational.” Beinart quotes Marco Rubio as saying, after the Paris attacks, that the radical Muslims “literally want to overthrow our society and replace it with their radical Sunni Islamic view of the future.” In Rubio’s telling, writes Beinart, “the United States and ‘radical Islam’ are virtual equals, pitted in a ‘civilizational conflict’ that ‘either they win or we win.’” And Beinart writes, accurately I think:

Obama thinks that’s absurd. Unlike Rubio, he considers violent jihadism a small, toxic strain within Islamic civilization, not a civilization itself. And unlike Bush, he doesn’t consider it a serious ideological competitor. In the 1930s, when fascism and communism were at their ideological height, many believed they could produce higher living standards for ordinary people than democratic capitalist societies that were prone to devastating cycles of boom and bust. No one believes that about “radical Islam” today.

Next, Beinart contrasts the Republican view that ISIS and even al-Qaeda are strong and are growing stronger, while Obama thinks they are weak and getting weaker. The Republican view is showcased in a recent AEI publication, dated December 2015, and called A global strategy for combating al Qaeda and the Islamic State, 
authored by Mary Habeck with James Jay Carafano, Thomas Donnelly, Bruce Hoffman, Seth Jones, Frederick W. Kagan, Kimberly Kagan, Thomas Mahnken, and Katherine Zimmerman. But Obama stated on Sunday that terrorists now “turn to less complicated acts of violence like the mass shootings that are all too common in our society” because the “strategy that we are using now—air strikes, special forces, and working with local forces who are fighting to regain control of their own country” is gradually yielding a “sustainable victory.” And of course, like the AEI study, Beinart argues that, “the leading GOP presidential candidates reject that. They believe defeating the Islamic State requires some dramatic, if vaguely defined, new military and ideological exertion.”

Beinart doesn’t go into it, but the partisan critique of the President also considers the Paris and San Bernardino attacks as evidence that the policy has failed. But these kinds of attacks are not easy to prevent, especially the self-propelled, organizationally headless San Bernardino kind. Do Republican critics really think that sending a U.S. division or two to attack Raqqa and Mosul is going to prevent that sort of atrocity in the United States? It may actually make those kinds of attacks more likely. I doubt that better gun control laws can prevent them either—though I favor such laws on other, prudential grounds. But to cite the San Bernardino tragedy as evidence that Obama’s approach to terrorism has failed is wildly disingenuous.And now let’s talk about where the divide really shows up: President Obama is dead set against being “drawn once more” into an effort to “occupy foreign lands,” thus allowing the Islamic State to use “our presence to draw new recruits.” As Beinart concludes the point, Obama “believes the Islamic State is ideologically weak,” and so “he thinks America’s current strategy will eventually defeat it unless America commits a large occupying force, which would give the jihadists a massive shot in the arm.” Similarly at home, while Republicans are terrified that large enough numbers of Muslims in America will turn to terrorism so as to make the country fall to its knees, Obama doesn’t believe it will appeal to any but a small handful of American Muslims—unless of course we do very stupid things to alienate and demonize them.As I say, this is a usefully clarifying effort, and I think a basically accurate one. But who, then, is correct? Let’s go back and parse the differences and see what comes of it.When it comes to how ideologically threatening and “civilizational” in scale radical Islam is, I think President Obama is correct. Rubio’s characterization is absurd. It seems to me a garden-variety example of how fear grows out of ignorance. But Obama admitted in the speech that the threat “is real,” that we are “at war” with radical Islam, and that “an extremist ideology has spread within some Muslim communities.” So this is really an empirical question, around which dwells a thick layer of uncertainty, and which is well described by Obama’s comment that “we are making judgments based on percentages, and…there are always going to be some complications.” How many Muslims in various places—in various Muslim-majority countries, in the refugee flow into Europe, in the United States or coming to the United States—either are already or will be seduced by extremist ideologies and be led to terrorism? Well, no one really knows. It depends to some extent on how we react to the challenge, and to some extent it really doesn’t. Honest people differ on this.What about whether ISIS and al-Qaeda are stronger or weaker? After the Paris attacks the common wisdom stated that the “far enemy” tactics reflected setbacks in the Levant—and certainly there have been setbacks. IS territory in the region has not expanded lately. But the “far enemies” might well have been in the planning stages anyway. Again, we really don’t know. As for the “franchises” or provinces popping up in places like Libya, there is disagreement here too as to what it means. In many cases it looks like symbolic affirmation bereft of any material, financial, or strategic bonds between Raqqa and the “provinces.” But there is some new evidence of personnel and weapons flows.What about money? According to the best guesses, the Islamic State takes in about $80 million per month, half of which comes from draconian taxation, about 43 percent of which comes from oil sales, and the rest from “donations” from abroad. Very belated U.S. air attacks on refineries and tanker trucks have sharply reduced oil revenues in recent weeks, as will a more firmly closed Turkish-Syrian border—if that ever really happens. And no organization, no matter how brutal, can take taxes from a rock, so to the extent that local economic activity increasingly stalls—as it has to under current conditions—that source of money will diminish as well. There are also reports that IS is having trouble paying salaries and that its vaunted social media presence is flagging.We know, too, that from the start ISIS has been an ungainly coalition of true believers, Ba‘athi holdovers, thugs, criminals, and foreigners looking for whatever it is they are looking for. Again, there is enormous uncertainty here, and this, too, is to some extent an empirical question. But on balance, I think the AEI study is more wrong than right, and that Obama is more right than wrong on this point.What about the occupation point? Well, no one I know is contemplating an American-led occupation of Syria, or any crazy nation-building scheme there. So to some extent Obama’s remarks here have the smell and taste of straw. But you don’t have to be a liberal Democrat to appreciate the slippery slope problem, and that includes the slick spots that come with no-fly zones. I know plenty of hawkish Republicans, with experience, who admitted openly when this all started that Syria was indeed a very hard problem specifically in this regard.Now, that said, President Obama asked for options, and get got some that nearly all of his advisers were on board with—and he still demurred. Kaplan tells this story nicely, based on his insider interviews. And in a recent essay, one of those early insiders, Dennis Ross, tells it too. Those of us back when who argued that inaction was going to be more costly and dangerous than action have been proven correct, but again, no one was advocating a conventional American invasion and occupation of Syria. The notion that we never had options between doing nothing and doing it all is false now as it was false then.It follows still, at least to my mind, that an intervention that could really hurt ISIS and burst its public relations recruiting bubble could well be worth the trouble. The Administration is creeping toward the use of more military assets—like the special forces troops described a few days ago by Secretary of Defense Carter. In my view, it should either go heavy or not at all, because the kind of excessively meek, pinprick bombing we’ve been mostly doing since September 2014 has probably been counterproductive.The problem the Republicans have here is that while they accuse the Administration of not having a coherent strategy in Syria (and even Fred Kaplan acknowledges the point), they don’t either. Liberating Raqqa and Mosul by force of American-led arms is not a strategy; it’s just an instrument. Who will rule in those places after liberation? If you don’t have a credible answer to that question, you don’t have a strategy.So in short, Obama’s reluctance to go all in is understandable, because this is a very hard question to answer practically. On the other hand, unless the United States is willing to put some real skin in the game, it will never be able to recruit the allies it needs to answer this question, and it will cede influence to Russians, Iranians, and others who do not wish to have it answered in a way we will appreciate.So I find myself in an odd spot: I agree with the President’s judgment on many of the key abstract decision-points, at least when it comes to the terrorism portfolio, but I also think he has still managed to screw up the regional policy in which that portfolio is nested so badly that no one believes him, no one indeed is listening anymore, and no one who used to be a U.S. ally in the region trusts him any further than they can throw him. The list is long: the screwed-up-from-the-get-go Israeli-Palestinian dossier; the way the Iran deal was approached and the weak result as well; the premature exit from Iraq; the Libya debacle; the “non-strike incident” over the chemical weapons redline in Syria; the mixed signals and series of bad judgments over Egypt; misreading Erdogan; more recently the indulging of the Saudis in their stupid and dangerous war in Yemen; and one could go on.And so a second main conclusion leaps forth: No one, not even a President of the United States, can be solipsistically right in international diplomacy. No one can be effective in isolation, so even if Obama is mainly right on these “big” questions about terrorism, it hardly matters anymore. There is an important general lesson here: Getting the basics right does not ensure that somehow the details will take care of themselves. Some policymakers—and this goes for some Republican neoconservatives as well as for some starry-eyed Democratic liberal internationalists—like to live heroically. They like to ponder and pontificate, but they don’t really know much about implementation and they don’t particularly care. This is a big mistake. Details do not take care of themselves, nor somehow magically does the money always appear to pay for both sins of commission and omission.Allow me one epilogic comment I cannot resist. The President’s speech was a good speech insofar as speechwriting tradecraft goes, even if he delivered it without much spirit. It was short, pithy, and mostly clear. There was, however, one very weird sentence, at the end, that never should have made the final cut. “We were founded on a belief in human dignity—that no matter who you are, or where you come from, or what you look like, or what religion you practice, you are equal in the eyes of God and equal in the eyes of the law.”Okay, equal in the eyes of American law, yes. But equal in the eyes of God? How does Barack Obama or any other human being, even a credentialed theologian, know that? Pious Muslims do not believe that; they pretty much to a man and a woman hold that Islam is inarguably superior to all other religions. There are some Christian denominations, too, that hold, at least as far as eschatological matters are concerned, that all people—even all Americans—are not at all equal in the eyes of God; some are predestined for heaven but most are not. This is not the place to get into what Jefferson meant in the Declaration when he famously wrote about all men being created equal, but the President seemed to play very fast and loose with the Jeffersonian cadence. And when pious Muslims read those lines in Arabic or Farsi or Pushtu or Urdu translation, they will not be happy.

1Yes, Administration officials believed this at the time, but it was not true. See Alan Kuperman, “A Model Humanitarian Intervention? Reassessing NATO’s Libya Campaign,” International Security (Summer 2013).

2It is not clear what Kaplan means by “very nearly all” but even the organization in charge of the operation, the OPCW, no longer believes that to be true—and I never believed it, as I repeatedly insisted in print at the time. On Monday, November 30, the Syrian regime declared that it had never used chemical weapons—an outright lie that led the EU representative to OPCW, Jacek Bylica, to say the following: “Many uncertainties regarding the dismantling of Syria’s chemical weapons programme, notably the gaps and contradictions contained in Syria’s declarations. These uncertainties lead to doubts as to compliance by Syria with its obligations under the Convention, which makes it impossible to have confidence that its chemical weapons programme has been irreversibly dismantled.” Bylica quoted in Gulf in the Media, December 1, 2015. OPCW officials themselves expressed “grave concern” over the veracity of the Syrian declaration.

As Adjuncts Proliferate, University Presidents See Rising Paychecks

As low-paid adjuncts shoulder more and more of universities’ teaching responsibilities, those at the top of the academic pecking order are seeing their paychecks grow steadily. The Christian Science Monitor reports that private college presidents earned a 5.6 percent raise, on average, in 2014 (to a total average salary of $436,429), and that the colleges with the highest share of adjunct professors tend to pay their presidents the most. More:

“Adjunct” is a term used for non-tenured, part-time professors, who receive no benefits, no office and typically paid between $3,000 and $5,000 per course. In 2013, NPR reported that these itinerant teachers make up 75 percent of college professors, and their pay averages between $20,000 and $25,000 annually. And this trend may be long term, as three in four college professors are not on a tenure track, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) reports. […]

The private colleges with the highest-paid presidents also have the highest percentage of adjunct professors.A 2014 study by the Institute for Policy Studies found a similar trend among schools with the highest paid presidents: part-time adjunct faculty increased 22 percent faster than the national average.

The modern American university is typical of what we call the blue model world. It is organized around outmoded policies—generous federal subsidies, tenure-for-life, extensive regulation—that worked well for decades (and still works well today, for the privileged few who are on the right track, like tenured faculty), but which is growing increasingly difficult to sustain. Today, free-flowing student loans drive up costs and administrative salaries, the tenure-for-life system limits universities’ ability to shift professors and resources around, and extensive government regulation and mandates force universities to hire presidents who have more in common with CEOs than with educators. Universities are trying to adapt to these challenges both by contracting out more and more teaching work to adjuncts to cut costs and by hiring top-flight presidents-cum-executives to try to allocate scarce resources (and appease various campus political interests), all without really altering the underlying structure of higher education. And like other unreformed vestiges of the blue model (i.e., public sector unions), this system is contributing to unfairness and inequality. Just ask the adjuncts living on food stamps.

Policymakers and university administrators need to start implementing reforms that would make this system more fair, to students and faculty alike. Tenure and research designations should become rarer and harder to get, so that the large majority of college faculty would be paid primarily as teachers—but compensated fairly, unlike adjuncts. More introductory courses should be available through MOOCs to bring down costs. Federal accreditation requirements and other regulations should be loosened, and federal loan programs should be reined in so as to stop propping up institutions that aren’t equipping students with the skills they need.The data on adjunct compensation, especially as compared with administrator salaries, underlines the fact that in some ways, our universities really are bastions of exploitation—just not in the way the campus Jacobins may think. Fixing the system will require wholesale changes to the structure of higher education, not the addition of a few diversity centers. On the bright side, the illiberalism coursing through the academy might highlight to policymakers the desperate need for reform.

Paris Climate Summit on the Rocks

With just three working days remaining before Friday’s summit deadline, there’s still a long way to go before any sort of climate consensus is reached in Paris. While greens around the world will be loathe to hear it, a binding deal is off the table (and has been from the very beginning) for a number of reasons, chief among them that the U.S. Senate wouldn’t ratify any such agreement.

If a binding and enforceable Global Climate Treaty isn’t in the cards, what’s left for negotiators to work towards? There are three major items being discussed: first, getting the world’s rich countries to follow through on financial commitments to the developed world that would help them mitigate and adapt to climate change; second, establishing a way to verify the progress of countries in adhering to self-imposed emissions goals; and finally, putting in place a way regularly to update those emissions goals (Intended Nationally Determined Contributions, or INDCs, in UN parlance) in the future.But after more than a week of talks, climate delegates are finding it difficult to make progress in each of these areas of discussion. With regard to cash payouts to poorer countries, disagreement is cropping up over how to define the group of countries responsible for putting up the money for this climate financing. Reuters reports:

[T]he breakdown stems from 1992 when countries agreed on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change — and much has changed over the past two and a bit decades, including the rapid rise of Asian economies.

Back then, China was one-third its current economic size and it has seen its greenhouse gas emissions grow almost three-fold between 1990 and today, according to the International Energy Agency…And until the past year or so, a prolonged energy boom bolstered exporting nations in the Gulf.As a result, a re-reckoning is in order, richer nations argue. They want a new climate agreement in Paris to recognize a more diverse pool of climate finance “donor countries” who will contribute to the goal of raising $100 billion a year by 2020 and more in the years beyond to help developing nations grow and cope with the effects of climate change.

Unsurprisingly, Gulf petrostates and China are adamantly refusing to be categorized amongst the world’s richer countries, because in this context that would mean being on the hook for enormous sums of aid for the foreseeable future. But that’s not the only way Beijing is playing spoiler in Paris. As the FT reports, China is also resisting efforts to make INDC reviews transparent, and pushing back on five-year updates of those national commitments:

“It is very frustrating,” said one negotiator from a developed country after a meeting where he said Chinese officials had tried to water down efforts to create a common system for the way countries report to the UN on their carbon dioxide emissions and climate change plans. […]

Another envoy said Chinese delegates were also resisting a measure widely seen as crucial for a successful accord: a requirement for countries to update the pledges they have made to limit their emissions, preferably every five years from around 2020.

China was applauded by greens in the run-up to Paris for its high-profile (and widely reported) eco-friendly overtures, but now that delegates are actually sitting down to hammer out a deal, they’re being reminded that these talks have little to do with morality or some deep abiding love for Gaia. Even when mouthing green pieties, states come at issues like this as cynically as they come at everything else. While greens might have been able to kid themselves into believing the world was on track for some sort of breakthrough in Paris, the core calculus hasn’t changed, and a deal therefore isn’t in the offing. Not only that, but judging by the summit’s progress so far, it seems the three secondary objectives may be dead in the water, as well.

The Mess the Left Left

Argentina’s outgoing President, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, is doing her best to frustrate the plans of her successor and political opponent, Mauricio Macri. The New York Times reports:

In her last days in office, she has appointed ambassadors and signed decrees that will drain federal coffers. Her political appointees refuse to resign. She has even antagonized her successor with stinging remarks at public appearances.

After eight years as president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner clears out her office at the presidential palace on Thursday. But far from preparing the ground for Mauricio Macri, the president-elect, she is obstructing the transition in a final show of muscle, observers say.

“It is by no means a smooth transition,” said Dante Caputo, a former foreign minister. “And it’s not a transition that protects the well-being of the nation. Rather, Mrs. Kirchner seems irritated about having to hand over power, and she’s expressing it by taking decisions that jeopardize Argentina’s delicate economic situation.”

After the global commodities collapse and years of failed policies from the Leftist Kirchners, Argentina’s near-term prospects aren’t good. Further, the government’s systemic meddling with official statistics makes it impossible to estimate how bad things really are. Now, the poor economic conditions that propelled the centrist Macri to office will become his responsibility.

That is, of course, how elections go, but circumstances mean Argentina is a particularly thorny case. Kirchner is making Macri’s job considerably harder by the efforts the NYT story highlights, but his biggest challenges weren’t created by these last-minute hijinks. Instead, they come from the bureaucracy Kirchner has spent years engorging. Most government officials are going to be Kirchner appointees, or will have started their careers under Kirchner or her husband. The deep state of labor unions and state-owned enterprises run on corrupt clientelism. That system isn’t going to disappear quickly no matter how good of a politician Macri turns out to be. Moreover, the country’s Congress is still Peronist, and Macri will need its stamp of approval if he wants to start passing even basic reforms.

But there’s yet another challenge: The Kirchners came to power because Argentina wasn’t doing so well in the late 90s and early 00s. The center-Right politicians who ruled Argentina before the Kirchners didn’t deliver growth for most of their constituents. Indeed, this is generally the problem for countries like Argentina (Venezuela, which is experiencing its own rightward shift, should take note). The populists aren’t good at governing, but they come to power because their predecessors weren’t either. One reason that socialist leaders or parties appeals to voters is that the alternative parties failed to govern well. In Latin America, center-Right politicians often form oligarchical regimes.

So while Peronism must fall if Argentina is to see reform, Kirchner’s loss doesn’t guarantee that a better future is ahead. For things to improve, Macri will need to fight the deep legacy of Kirchner—and also develop a better version of market-based development than his center-Right predecessors ever did.

Germany’s Choice: Easy or Hard Asylum Integration

The circumstance that Syrians are coming in large numbers to settle in Germany raises a key series of questions, but not in the way one might think. The question in months and years to come will not only be whether the refugees become integrated into German society or whether terrorists merged with, or later arose from, the refugee stream of 2015. The more enduring issue is about the terms on which integration either will or will not take place, how easy or hard it will be. The question is all the more pressing given the historical connection between these two countries—and their utterly contrasting approaches since World War II to the conflict in the Middle East and to the State of Israel. How will Germany respond to people from a country that has been at war with Israel since 1948, was a Soviet ally during the Cold War, and which blended antagonism Israel with official hatred of Jews. How will the refugees respond to a Germany in which the memory of the crimes of the Nazi regime, not least the Holocaust, and support for the State of Israel have become core elements of a broad political consensus?

The “easy” projections about integration ignore these issues, looking only at the economic costs and potential of the immigrants, their role in German demographics over time, and other quotidian matters. The “hard” projections, on the other hand, would acknowledge these contrasting histories in order to preserve Germany’s best postwar political traditions and foster the successful integration of the refugees on terms Germans can accept.Following the attacks in Paris on November 13, the discussion in Germany, as elsewhere, has turned in part to whether terrorists used the refugee stream to enter the country. Berthold Kohler, the publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has criticized German government efforts to insist that the issues of terrorism and migration are not related. Kohler stated the obvious: It is entirely conceivable that there will be Islamists among the approximately 800,000 migrants that the German government expects to receive in 2015. Christopher Caldwell in the Weekly Standard has examined “the bloody crossroads where migration and terrorism meet” in Europe and Germany. Since Chancellor Merkel relaxed border controls in the summer, Caldwell writes, “migrants started pouring into the country without identity check or proper registration.”Today, the German government does not know for sure who has arrived. It does know that, regardless of how things resolve in the Middle East, hundreds of thousands of Syrians or people claiming to be Syrians will be living in Germany for some time to come. Especially after the Paris attacks, the connection between migration and terrorism is firmly established. What’s done is done. Now the challenge facing Germany is that the country must foster integration on terms that preserve its values and political identity. In other words, it must relinquish its earlier penchant for thinking “easy” about integration and begin to face the reality of “hard” integration.In 2008, in a remarkable speech to Israel’s parliament in Jerusalem, Chancellor Merkel stated, “Here of all places I want to explicitly stress that every German Government and every German Chancellor before me has shouldered Germany’s special historical responsibility for Israel’s security.” In August 2015, Merkel expressed her welcome to refugees from Syria, confident that her generosity was compatible with the commitments she had reiterated seven years earlier. If the two are to be compatible, however, the history of the Syrian government’s unrelenting hostility toward Israel since 1948, and of the two decades of alliance between the former East Germany and the Ba‘athi regime in Damascus, must become matters of public discussion in Germany.From its beginning in 1949, West Germany’s tradition of “coming to terms with the Nazi past” clashed with those who wanted to forget and to avoid discussion of the crimes of the Nazi regime. Over time, however, a consensus emerged in the German political establishment from center-Right to center-Left that an honest reckoning was indispensable to the establishment of liberal democracy in West Germany and to its integration into the Western Alliance. During those same years, the Communist dictatorship in East Germany initially purged those Communists whose anti-fascism made room for the memory of the Holocaust and who wanted close relations with the new State of Israel. Following its “anti-cosmopolitan” purge, East Germany took a very high profile position in the Soviet-bloc alliance with the Arab states, including Syria. From 1969 to 1989, the East German-Syrian military alliance became a cornerstone of East German—and hence Soviet—policy in the Middle East.Syria, both before and after the coup that brought the Ba‘ath Party to power in 1966 and on through Hafez al-Assad’s consolidation of dictatorial power in 1971, was the most implacable enemy of Israel among the Arab front-line states. Despite severe disagreements with Yasser Arafat and the PLO leadership in the 1970s and 1980s, notably in the context of the Jordanian civil war and later amid the shifting alignments in the Lebanese civil war, the Syrian regime remained a firm supporter of avowedly Marxist PLO splinter groups opposed to Arafat’s leadership—the PFLP and the PDFLP, for example—and their terrorist campaigns against Israel. Hafez al-Assad also led the Arab states’ “rejection front,” which opposed the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt.In the 1970s, too, Assad’s Syria became the lynchpin of Soviet-bloc policy in the Middle East. The Soviet Union and its East European satellites, including East Germany, became the primary source of arms and training for the Syrian armed forces. As I document in my forthcoming book, Undeclared Wars with Israel: East Germany and the West German Radical Left, 1967-1989, East Germany’s relations with the Assad regime became very close during the last decades of the Cold War. When the two established diplomatic relations in June 1969, the statement that accompanied the event extolled the shared antagonism of both regimes to American imperialism and to Israel, which it described as a regime based on racism and colonialism. In 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, when West German Chancellor Willy Brandt adopted an official policy of neutrality, Erich Honecker’s East German regime sent a squadron of MiG fighter jets and two freighters full of heavy weapons as part of the Soviet-bloc arms supplies to the Arab states.It stands to reason that at least some of the Syrian refugees who have arrived in Germany come with memories of their parents’ and grandparents’ stories about fighting against Israel. This family lore will have been reinforced by a steady diet of government-produced venom that for decades denounced the State of Israel and celebrated armed attacks against it. They will have heard the media outlets of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Damascus extolling terrorist attacks as examples of heroic resistance by great martyrs. They also will have read vicious anti-Semitic tracts from prominent members of the Ba‘athi regime. Perhaps some of the Syrian refugees had occasion to read The Matzo of Zion , published in the early 1980s by Mustafa Tlass, Syria’s Minister of Defense from 1971 to 2004. Tlass, a key figure of the East German-Syrian military alliance, placed medieval blood libels about Jews killing children to bake matzos for Passover into an Arabic and Islamic context.In the absence of a free press and amid unrelenting government hatred of Israel, Syrian refugees arriving in Germany this year have probably seldom or never heard the case for Israel’s legitimacy. So it is likely that at least some of them, even those who despise the regime of Bashar al-Assad and the terrorists of ISIS, will bring with them an intense antagonism to Jews. For them, Merkel’s speech in the Knesset would amount to a revolting defense of a regime they had learned to despise.An influx of people with such views will only add to an antagonism toward Israel that already exists in present-day German society. Many former members of the Socialist Unity Party—that is, the former ruling Communist Party of East Germany—became members of the Left Party in Germany after reunification, which has seats in regional and national parliaments. For many of them, hostility to Israel has been and remains a core political conviction. Anti-Zionism and antagonism to Israel among new refugees may also strike a chord among some members of the Green Party and in the leftwing of the Social Democratic Party. So for some Syrian refugees, one definition of integration into German society could be integration into the anti-Israeli mood that was state policy in East Germany and has come to define leftist politics in Europe since the 1960s and in unified Germany since 1991. Leftist parties could see the new refugees as an opportunity to expand their voter base. On the other hand, in light of the declaration of war on ISIS by French Socialist President François Hollande, the Left-of-Center parties in Germany may also now be more willing to speak frankly about the anti-Israeli ideas of immigrants with which they disagree.Ultimately, the events of the past four years in Syria may contribute not only to Syrian refugees’ integration but to a kind integration that is compatible with Germany’s best political and moral traditions. Many Syrians refugees undoubtedly feel gratitude to the German government and people for the welcome they have been offered this past year. They are aware that without that welcome, they would have been at the mercy of Assad’s armed forces or ISIS terrorists, or would be languishing in refugee camp cities in Turkey and Jordan. Relatedly, they must recall vividly the massive violence inflicted by the Assad regime since the start of the Syrian civil war four years ago. Reflection on the over 250,000 Syrians killed by that regime may lead them to reevaluate the messages that they, their parents, and their grandparents heard from the Syrian government since 1948 about West Germany, and perhaps also about Israel, the Jews, and the United States.To the extent that is the case, those Syrian refugees may link their voices to those of Arab liberals such as Fouad Ajami who examined the Assad regime’s responsibility for the slaughter in Syria. Or, in reflecting on both Assad and ISIS, perhaps they will read Hisham Melham’s recent incisive examination in Al Arabyia of the connection between Arab political culture and the “cancer” that is ISIS. Perhaps still others will know or will discover the work of Bassam Tibi, including his important 2012 book Islamism and Islam. Tibi, a great scholar who was born and grew up in Damascus, did his doctorate with the German-Jewish social theorist Max Horkheimer in Frankfurt/Main in sociology and politics in the 1960s and then went on to a distinguished career at the University of Göttingen, where he wrote about international relations in the Middle East and the intersection of Islamism and politics.Syrian refugees, that is, could become part of a grand contemporary tradition of European history: de-radicalization and disillusionment following the disasters brought about by decades of dictatorship and political fanaticism. Europe’s and Germany’s successes since 1945 have rested to no small degree on movement away from extremes, a willingness to learn lessons from past disasters, rejection of totalitarian ideologies, self-criticism, and the assumption of responsibility for building a different future. It may occur to some of the Syrian refugees that decades of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and hatred of Israel coming from the Ba‘ath dictatorship had something to do with the self-destruction that has now engulfed their native land. For this welcome outcome to occur, German intellectuals, scholars, and politicians must teach incoming migrants of the importance of Germany’s tradition of facing the Nazi past honestly and insist that most of what the Syrians have heard from their own government over many decades about Israel, the United States, West Germany, Zionism, and the Jews is false.That is hard, but only the hard path to integration can assure its success, defined as integration compatible with Germany’s best traditions. That path will also require that Germans themselves, especially those that came of age in East Germany, re-confirm their rejection of the worldview offered for decades by the Ba‘athi dictatorship in Damascus. Assad’s torture chambers, barrel bombs, and chemical attacks open the possibility of a reassessment of Ba‘athi policies against the West and Israel. The barbarism of ISIS also makes evident the inhuman consequences of radical Islamic ideology. That the refugees are fleeing both Assad’s nominally secular regime and ISIS may contribute greatly to an easing of Arab hatred of Israel and the West, like that experienced by many Europeans in the aftermath of Nazism and gradually in the decades before the collapse of Communism in 1989.Yet perhaps, the Syrians and the Germans will take the easy path, one of silence and the avoidance of difficult truths. That too is a well-trodden path in post-1945 Germany and one that, we must admit, the sudden shift of U.S. policy in 1946-47 from de-Nazification to anti-Communism did plenty to assist. Yet the path to an easy integration that does not challenge seven decades of dominant ideas in Syria would only add to the ranks of voters who do not want to hear any more about the German preoccupation with the Nazi past and the Holocaust. If so, Syrian migration to Germany could weaken the country’s traditions of coming to terms with its Nazi past, foster a growth of anti-Semitism in Germany and Europe, and thus stimulate a Jewish exodus out of the country.For this historian of the Nazi years, it was moving to see people in need seeking to move toward and not away from Germany. It was an indication of how much had changed in Germany since Nazism. Yet I also confess to uneasiness at the enormous enthusiasm with which these particular refugees have been greeted. Did the Germans welcoming them with open arms not know of Syria’s antagonism to Israel? It was hardly a secret. Was there some conscious or unconscious element of common cause in welcoming these people from a country that has been Israel’s most uncompromising enemy for so many decades? Probably not. But among former citizens of East Germany, were there fond memories of the East German-Syrian alliance of the Cold War era? I’d like to think probably not, too, and that the welcoming culture was simply the expression of elementary decency in the face of persecution and terror.Yet in a bitter irony of history, the American (and German) failure to intervene to stop the slaughter in Syria has led to a migration of Syrians to a country still haunted by its role in the murder of Europe’s Jews. Germany finds itself welcoming victims of the Assad regime and of ISIS, both of which would gladly destroy the Jewish state of Israel if they had the means to do so.Will Germans insist that the price of integration for the Syrian refugees is to accept and understand the German reckoning with Nazism and the related commitment to the safety and survival of Israel? Or will Germans somehow seek to meet halfway those newcomers whose parents and grandparents waged wars against Israel and the West? No one today has answers to these questions, but the two options must be discussed. The welcoming culture must express both pride in what Germany has come to understand about its own past as well as frank criticism of what the Syrian regime has said and done for the past seventy years. These Syrians have voted with their feet against the regimes and organizations that terrorized them. Hopefully there are Syrian refugees who are now willing to hear criticism that they were not allowed to hear in their native land, and perhaps some will take to heart a new understanding of Israel and the West and be encouraged to articulate it in their own words.Perhaps that articulation will even make its way back to the land they have left behind. But that will only happen if the Germans who have welcomed them refuse to squander their own hard-won lessons of frankly coming to terms with the past. The most generous kind of asylum Germans can offer their new countrymen may be asylum from an involuntarily inherited history of lies and hatred.

What Happens when Faculty Stand Up to Illiberalism

A free speech controversy at Yale that helped inaugurate the current wave of nationwide campus protests has ended in disgrace. The New York Times reports on the sorry end to a sorry saga:

A Yale lecturer who came under attack for challenging students to stand up for their right to decide what Halloween costumes to wear, even to the point of being offensive, has resigned from teaching at the college, the university said Monday.

The lecturer, Erika Christakis, an expert in early childhood education, wrote an email in October suggesting that there could be negative consequences to students ceding “implied control” over Halloween costumes to institutional forces. “I wonder, and I am not trying to be provocative: Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious,” she wrote, “a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?”

After the email, a group of students confronted [Chrstakis’ husband, the master of Yale’s Silliman College]. One student was shown in a video posted on YouTube confronting Dr. Christakis as he clasped his hands. “It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not!” the student was heard yelling. “Do you understand that? It is about creating a home here!”

In explaining her resignation, Christakis said in a statement to the Washington Post: “I have great respect and affection for my students, but I worry that the current climate at Yale is not, in my view, conducive to the civil dialogue and open inquiry required to solve our urgent societal problems.”

As KC Johnson points out, doesn’t appear that Yale made a great effort to change her mind. “It makes the decision more straightforward from a human resources point of view,” Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway said to the campus paper. “I don’t have much to add to her decision.” And, of course, the university has caved to many of the demands of the activists who effectively forced out Christakis with their bullying tactics.

The tragedy here is not that Yale students have been deprived of a competent and courageous educator, though that is deeply unfortunate. It is that other professors, at Yale and across the country, will now be much less likely to speak about against campus Jacobinism, lest they share the fate of Erika Christakis.