Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 536

What’s the Point of OPEC?

That’s the question on the minds of many of the cartel’s members, after OPEC’s semiannual meeting in Vienna ended without any agreement on how to coordinate efforts to drive oil prices back up. A barrel of crude goes for under $43 today, a far cry from the $110+ per barrel levels achieved 18 months ago. While in the past OPEC has acted to cut production in order to set a price floor to bearish markets, this time around Saudi Arabia has strong-armed its less productive fellow members into adopting a business-as-usual strategy, preferring to endure today’s low prices in order to compete with non-OPEC producers for market share.

But this approach hasn’t been well received by OPEC’s less wealthy member countries, many of which have publicly called for the cartel to curtail output. As the FT reports, the meeting did little to bridge the widening gap between Riyadh and the rest of the group:

After a marathon seven-hour session that ended in chaotic scenes outside the Opec secretariat in Vienna, the only agreement reached by the cartel members was to meet again in June. […]

“For the first time in many years Opec has failed to specify a production ceiling and has decided to wait on events in 2016 before making its next move,” said Neil Atkinson of Lloyd’s List Intelligence. “This is a holding decision.”

The cartel’s decision not to set any targets for output over the next six months reflects significant uncertainty over how much more oil Iran will be able to produce once Western sanctions are lifted, and how quickly. Iran’s oil minister said he “didn’t have any other expectation,” adding his hope that “at the next meeting we can reach agreement.” The president of Petroleos De Venezuela said his country is “really worried.”

OPEC’s smaller fish will have six more months to position themselves and trumpet their anxieties, but it’s clear that without Riyadh’s blessing, the cartel isn’t going to change its course. As Atkinson put it, OPEC has “formalised the decision taken a year ago to produce as much oil as necessary to preserve market share while leaving prices to the market place.”With the Saudis no longer willing to act as the global swing producer, OPEC lacks the capacity to cut production back enough significantly to affect prices, which leads to the obvious question: What purpose does the cartel now serve? We’ll check back in in June, but for now OPEC has resigned itself to letting the market set prices, which means crude is going to stay on sale.

A Preacher Without a Congregation

G.K. Chesterton once remarked that America was “a nation with the soul of a church.” This remark is frequently held up as an apt description of a country that remains relatively religious even as Europe secularizes, that’s still highly moralistic in its understanding of itself and its role in the world, with a history of producing cults and undergoing periodic spiritual awakenings. America does not have an officially established church, so Chesterton’s remark points to something different: an unofficial religion and system of values that pervades the country’s politics and culture and sensibilities, something often referred to as America’s civil, or civic, religion. But if Chesterton’s remark is true, and America’s soul is a church, what kind of church is it?

Marilynne Robinson is one of the most famous contemporary authors directly and persistently trying to explore that question, and her latest essay collection, The Givenness of Things, extends her inquiries. An instructor at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Robinson is primarily known for her fiction. Her gorgeous first novel Housekeeping was followed by a celebrated trilogy set in a small town in Iowa. The first of that trilogy, Gilead, won the Pulitzer Prize and has been highly praised by, for example, President Obama (earlier this month, the New York Review of Books published a two-part interview of Robinson conducted by the President himself.)With The Givenness of Things, however, Robinson has now produced more books of non-fiction than she has novels. As a whole, these works propose an answer to the question of America’s religious identity: The country’s unofficial religion often was and should continue to be Calvinist liberalism. The phrase may seem an odd one, but such a system of thought, as Robinson has it, has often undergirded the American order. Somewhere along the way, however, the country drifted away from its faith, to its great detriment. Her work is an attempt to call America back to a form of faith that’s deeply rooted in the Calvinist tradition but also broad enough to offer ethical and political guidance to people of many religions (or none at all).The attempt is, however, unlikely to be successful. For all her skills as a writer and a thinker, Robinson is a preacher without a congregation. If a coherent national ethos emerges out of the polarizing cultural upheavals America is currently experiencing, it is likely to be considerably more secular, or considerably more conservative, than Robinson’s project.Calvinist liberalism, in Robinson’s telling, is a system of thought that (obviously) takes inspiration from the Reformation theologian John Calvin. Calvin is often understood to be an intolerant purveyor of an inhumane theology, but Robinson contends that this perception is deeply biased and inaccurate. On the contrary, she argues, he taught an ethos of human sacredness. Every human has a soul—is made in the image of God—and that as a result we should therefore treat each other with respect, awe, and unconditional generosity. The Incarnation of Christ—God becoming man—only confirms this human sacredness.Robinson’s particular theology, however, poses several problems. First, Robinson’s use of the word “liberal” may trade on an equivocation. She means “liberal” simply to be “generous,” but also to imply political liberalism (in the American, not the British, sense). She herself politically leans Left, and seems to assume that the one implies the other, and vice versa, without acknowledging or arguing for it explicitly. This creates moments of dissonance in the essay collection.Second, it’s not clear what Robinson thinks about the other traditional doctrines of Calvinism—for instance, predestination. In The Givenness of Things, she indicates that predestination is a theological question that can’t be answered, and therefore seemingly not worth talking about much. Yet if you strip down Calvinism to the ideas that humans are sacred, that the Incarnation dignifies man, and that all people should be treated in light of those teachings, it’s not clearly what’s distinctly Calvinist about all that, as opposed to generically Christian.Robinson’s approach to untangling that last issue can roughly be described as historical, and is at least part defensible. Calvinism may not be the only system of liberal theology, she argues, but it is in fact that source that Americans have typically drawn from (“Calvinism is uniquely the fons et origo of Christian liberalism in the modern period,” she wrote in an earlier book). Religious awakenings, often inspired by Calvinist principles, have gone hand-in-hand with movements to reform the country. Robinson has stressed, for example, the central role that Christians steeped in Calvinist theology played in abolition and in establishing colleges in the Midwest like Knox, Grinnell, and Oberlin that furthered the cause.This Calvinist liberalism continued to influence American culture and politics up to the recent past. In an essay titled “Awakening,” Robinson argues that the Civil Rights Movement represented a kind of “third great awakening.” She writes that it is remembered as a civic, not a religious movement, but “the distinction between the civic and religious is never clear, and was certainly not clear in this case.” Martin Luther King invoked American civic religion when he made use of the famous words from the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” For Robinson, this is a religious statement, but it is also civic statement, because even non-religious Americans can accept its ethical content. And this shinning moment of reform-minded civic religion was deeply bound up with the role of Christian churches, in this case especially African American churches.The Civil Rights Movement therefore shows American religion functioning exactly as Robinson likes: Churches lead by an ethos of human sacredness launching a movement to better America—and doing so in such a way that large swathes of the nation could get behind it. Religious conversion renewed our love for the human person, unleashing energies that transformed society to the good.But at the moment, American religion no longer appears to works that way. “If American civil religion can be said to have a congregation,” she writes in the aforementioned essay “Awakening,” “I was a member in good standing—until certain shifts became apparent in the meaning and effect of religion in America.” By this, she seems at least in part to mean the replacement of Calvinist liberalism with conservative evangelicalism, motivated (in her view) by fear and fixated on the wrong issues. Robinson wants us to walk back that shift. But even if you accept her account of American history—she’s not the only one to see the Civil Rights Era as a golden Christian moment—the kind of Calvinism that Robinson offers cannot serve as a basis for the American order today because there is no broader constituency who identifies with it and few entrenched institutions that can advance it. Robinson pinpoints mainline Protestant churches as the traditional carriers of Calvinist liberalism, and wants them to reclaim the cultural place that she thinks rightly belongs to them.Mainline Protestants belong to the historic denominations of American Christianity such as Presbyterianism and Congregationalism, and stand in contrast to non-denominational evangelicals, compared to whom they tend to be more liberal politically and theologically. But the truth is that there aren’t many mainliners left—the mainline denominations have hemorrhaged members, and even those who remain are too theologically unmoored for Robinson’s taste. In her own words, they run “seminaries that a make a sort of Esperanto of world religions and transient pieties, a non-language articulate in no vision that anyone can take seriously.” Robinson wants mainline churches to be rooted in traditional language and serious theology even while being open to doctrinal innovations like same-sex marriage. There will always be some people who find that vision appealing, but on the whole it has proven to be a tightrope too difficult for any large body of American Christians to walk.Instead, it’s the groups at the opposite sides that are growing. At Five Thirty Eight, Leah Libresco has measured the current strength of religious groups (including the unaffiliated) by seeing what their net demographic change would be projected out, when today’s conversion, retention, and fertility rates are taken into account. The two biggest demographic winners on this account are evangelical Protestants and the religiously unaffiliated, while Catholics and the mainline lose out. The unaffiliated are growing faster than evangelicals, to be sure, but they lose some of that advantage when their below-replacement fertility rate is taken into account.Based on current evidence, then, America’s religious future belongs to one of those two groups. Perhaps a fourth great awakening will sweep America, giving renewed vigor to mainline churches and reversing disaffiliation. But in the meantime, Robinson’s Calvinist liberalism doesn’t have enough institutional or cultural support to reverse the trends apparent today. There are robust Protestant Churches in America—the ones filled with the demographically strong evangelicals Libresco points to. But Robinson fears at least some of these evangelicals have given Christianity a bad name, and she is not writing for them.Perhaps she should be. Many of these churches consider themselves to be in the Calvinist tradition, and many are more open to her focus on liberality than Robinson might know. In the end, she could probably do more good helping religious traditionalists rejigger their priorities than she could fighting a losing battle to rebuild the mainline or convert the disaffiliated.The Givenness of Things is not only a work about the intersection of politics and theology. Indeed, the book’s best parts don’t touch explicitly on that topic at all. The most compelling essays are those that explore a circumstance Robinson is much taken with: Based on what we’ve learned about fundamental reality—think Quantum Physics—we should expect the universe to behave much more strangely and inconsistently than it does. The order and regularity of the universe as we experience it therefore is a puzzle, and Robinson’s writing on it are the best parts of the collection.But it’s her theory of America’s Calvinist heritage that touches most directly on many of the questions currently being debated in the country’s conversation about itself, including the so-called “culture wars,” the debates about America’s history occasioned by the increasingly widespread rejection of figures from the country’s path, and the fight over what values and philosophies will govern American society. Unfortunately, the parts of The Givenness of Things that deal with those questions are the weakest series of essays Robinson has yet produced. Some passages shine, but those that do essentially repeat claims she defended at greater length in earlier works.Robinson’s themes are the same as they’ve always been, and, as themes, they have never been more timely. But to get her best writing, start at the beginning of her career, not with The Givenness of Things. 

Germany Votes to Engage in Syria

Germany’s lower house of Parliament voted today to participate in the military campaign against ISIS in Syria, 445-146. Germany will send a frigate to protect the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle stationed in the Mediterranean, 6 Tornado reconnaissance jets, a refueling aircraft, and 1,200 personnel to operate it all.

In taking this step, the German Bundestag joined the French and British Parliaments in voting for military action agains ISIS. On November 25, the French Parliament resolved to continue and intensify the country’s campaign against ISIS. The French military had already been conducting air operations in Iraq for a year and in Syria since September, under orders from President Hollande, who cited a U.N. Resolution and a local request as his basis for action.And on December 2, the British House of Commons voted 397 to 223 in favor of launching air strikes against ISIS in Syria. (Richard Aldous analyzed the impact of that vote for TAI here.) The vote stands in stark contrast to a 2013 Parliamentary vote against getting involved in Syria, a contrast which illustrates the important developments of these last two weeks. The three major powers of Europe have now all democratically acknowledged the need for military involvement in in the Middle East.This is, as anyone familiar with the history of the last decade or so knows, a big deal. In some senses, it marks a turning point. The decision is popular in Germany (58 percent support), France (81 percent), and Britain (48 percent, but only 31 percent disapprove). And that’s not undermined, but rather underlined, by the statements of German elites who concede they’re taking the action primarily because they feel obliged to help France. Military involvements to help allies and honor commitments are a crucial part of alliances and of a grown-up foreign policy.But, there are a few big buts. Military capacity is one: None of the European states in question really have the stuff to prosecute this war on their own. Germany will not directly participate in any bombing missions. After the British vote, four Tornado fighters took off from an airbase in Cyprus to bomb six targets in the al-Omar oil field in eastern Syria, and eight more aircraft flew out to help. U.S. Senator John McCain called the British contribution “token aircraft.” As we’ve noted, and as the Europeans surely know, their militaries have atrophied quite a bit. There have been various attempts—especially in Germany—to correct that, but there’s a long way to go.Which raises another question, this one political: Given that atrophy, how committed are France, Germany, and Britain to defeating ISIS and, in the long run, to reengaging with the world around them? Is the effort, as a whole, also only “token?”Likely, the answer to that question won’t be a straight yes or no so much as a series of conflicting impulses born out by political debates. But the opening is there. And that means, going forward, U.S. leadership will be key. If Europe is now more open to reengaging with the world, the U.S., as the biggest player in the Western alliance, must lead the way, whether now or in the next Administration. As Europe pivots to the world, America must pivot to Europe.

The Socialists’ Big Reversal

As of last week, Antonio Costa, the leader of Portugal’s Socialist Party, is a very happy man. Having lost the general election on October 4th, he was nevertheless able to reinvent himself, much to the shock of Portugal-watchers everywhere. Costa was expecting a very easy victory in the general; his opponents were staunch backers of austerity and, the conventional wisdom went, could not possibly hold on to power. But to the surprise of the Socialists, the center-Right coalition was able to win the elections, albeit falling short of an absolute majority.

Taking this into account, Portugal’s President, Aníbal Cavaco Silva, followed tradition and empowered the winners: the incumbent coalition began a second term, this time as a minority government. But Pedro Passos Coelho and Paulo Portas’ rule was short-lived and did not survive the rejection of its program by Parliament just six weeks after the elections.This rebuff was the outcome of Costa’s decision to reverse his statement that the Socialists would not lead a “negative majority”. In fact, he decided to take extreme measures and break with historical precedent: he extended the olive branch to the country’s far-Left. In doing so he was able to ensure his political survival, and as of today leads a minority government after having signed three separate agreements with parties his Socialists had never deigned to work with before.The decision of the President to now let Costa form his government was a difficult one, and was made only after many consultations with various political, labor and economic actors. It also led to a Presidential request for clarification from the incoming governing coalition that various international agreements on the euro, the EU and NATO will be honored, and for more general guarantees of stability.As the government was being cobbled together, there was increasing international concern regarding the Portuguese economy. Would Lisbon’s resolve for reforms unravel, leading to the very situation that caused EU intervention in the first place? Are any of these fears grounded? If one reads the three agreements that were signed to create the new Socialist “coalition”, there are two things that immediately catch one’s attention: The first is that it took three separate agreements rather than a single document to make this government viable, which speaks volumes as to its strength. What we have before us is less a coalition and more a shaky marriage of convenience—a temporary alliance against a common “enemy”. And the second is that while there are several points of ideological convergence between the “coalition” partners, the far-Left gave very few concrete guarantees to the Socialists regarding the really big issues: Portugal’s future in Europe and in NATO.But it is the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership—the European trade pact with the United States currently being negotiated—that is most likely to cause trouble for the shaky Socialist coalition in the near term. There are many domestic issues and actors within Europe and the U.S. that make these negotiations a complex process. Like all massive multilateral negotiations, they will not be all that easy to complete.Both the outgoing center-Right government and even the Socialists themselves had been on board with securing TTIP. But the Socialists’ new partners are dead-set against it, and have already stridently taken anti-TTIP positions in public. Their arguments hinge on the traditional selling points of far-Left platforms everywhere: a profound anti-Americanism and a distrust of market economies. And indeed, it should come as a not much of a surprise that both anti-European and anti-Atlanticist sentiments are profoundly entrenched in Portugal’s far-Left parties. Indeed, this in large part is why there has never before been a rapprochement between the Socialists and the Communists. Lust for power is a very powerful drug, but not even it can erase history and tradition overnight.The Socialists’ U-turn is thus not just unprecedented; it could well be lastingly consequential. Unlike in neighboring Spain, where political polarization has always been very high, elections in Portugal have traditionally been won at the center, both by the Left and Right. That pattern can no longer be taken for granted.In choosing tactics over strategy the Portuguese Socialists have put another nail in the coffin of the moderate European Left. For the far-Left this is a dream come true, but for the rest of us, it may be the beginning of a nightmare. The Chinese have an ironic saying: “may you live in interesting times”. We can indeed expect more polarized and unstable times in a country that is already facing many Herculean challenges.

Why the Gun Control Push Is Futile

Another mass shooting, another round of liberal venom hurled at people who oppose further gun control measures. In the wake of the slaughter in San Bernadino, the charges were particularly shrill. “Dear ‘thoughts and prayers’ people: Please shut up and slink away. You are part of the problem, and everybody knows it,” said one liberal Washington Post columnist, in a representative tweet.

Most gun control advocates know that the push for federal gun laws is futile. Public support for gun rights is near historical highs, the structure of the U.S. Senate favors pro-gun forces, and—as many observers pointed out at the time—if the tragedy at Sandy Hook couldn’t get gun legislation through the Congress, nothing can, at least for the foreseeable future. But liberal decision to make the San Bernadino massacre a story about gun control is more than futile—it is fundamentally disconnected from the role the Second Amendment has played in American political thought, and therefore might be even less effective than past efforts.There is of course wide disagreement about the proper scope of the Second Amendment in the 21st century. But there is no doubt that the chief historical purpose was to ensure that the civilian population had a means of protecting its political liberty at home. Since the founding, the idea that the citizenry should be able to provide for the common defense against “foreign invasions” and “domestic insurrections” (to use Supreme Court Joseph Story’s words from his 1890 commentaries) has provided the foundation of Americans’ enduring support for gun rights. Today, almost two-thirds of Americans see an armed citizenry as a protection against tyranny. The idea of citizens safeguarding their freedom with their own arms is hardwired into America’s Jacksonian character.That’s where the San Bernadino shooting comes in. There now seems to be very little doubt remaining that the mass murder in San Bernadino was an ISIS-inspired jihadist attack. This makes it fundamentally different from the massacres at Aurora and Newtown. Not any more tragic, not any more evil—but categorically different, from a political standpoint. It appears that this was not a random act of violence committed by a psychopath, but a carefully orchestrated attack by individuals who had pledged allegiance to a totalitarian political movement that is at war with the United States. As Ross Douthat has suggested, this kind of political violence, inspired by a global jihadi network, is so frightening in part because it “challenges the government’s monopoly on organized force.”The post-San Bernadino debate is different from previous fights over gun, crime, and self-defense. According to the Supreme Court, the Second Amendment does protect a right to self-defense, but this is tangential to its historical role in American political thought: not as a pragmatic tool for hunting and warding off criminals, but as a political tool to safeguard self-government in America. The attack at San Bernadino cuts to the core of what the Second Amendment—in the minds of many Americans—is all about. Liberals who believe that jihadist attacks in the homeland will persuade Americans to disarm are very likely deluding themselves.

To See Syria’s Future, Look at Chechnya

Having established Russia’s ability to project its military might in the Middle East and created the illusion that his country is a global power, President Vladimir Putin is now pivoting toward diplomacy in Syria.

It began with Bashar al-Assad’s surprise visit to Moscow in mid-October. Later the same month, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, as well as the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey, and Iran, in Vienna. Next, representatives of 19 countries convened in the same city, at Russia’s behest, to discuss a political solution for Syria’s future. That was followed by another set of talks on November 14, which resulted in an ambitious yet incomplete deal.All of this was designed to generate international support for Russia’s strategy, which seeks to turn the Syrian civil war into a counter-terrorist operation. And generate support it did. The November 14 deal drew heavily on an eight-point “peace plan” that Russia had circulated at the United Nations ahead of the talks. It involves the drafting of a new constitution with input from opposition groups and the organization of presidential elections, both by 2017.With this plan, Putin is giving the West what it wants—an orderly exit for Assad, potentially. But in return, Russia will gain considerable control over Syria’s political transition. The Kremlin will seek to harvest the maximum dividend from its role in Syria: the West’s agreement to turn the page on Ukraine and draw down sanctions, and its recognition of Moscow as an indispensable partner in global affairs.Putin has employed the tactic of turning a civil war into a counter-terrorist operation before—in Chechnya, where Russia launched a war in 1999 that lasted for almost a decade. The Kremlin regards its campaign in the small Muslim republic as a model of conflict resolution to be replicated elsewhere. Last year, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev called it “one of the business cards of Russia” and a “good, unique example in history of combat of terrorism.” In thinking about how Russia’s folly in Syria might develop, Chechnya provides a number of important lessons.Russia’s war in Chechnya was brutal. The Kremlin initially defined all those who opposed its military action as terrorist sympathizers, entirely indistinguishable from Islamic extremists. It bombed the Chechen capital of Grozny indiscriminately, killing hundreds if not thousands of civilians (official figures were not compiled) and forcing thousands more from their homes. Later, it began to target moderate Chechens; in 2005, the FSB murdered Aslan Maskhadov, the democratically elected leader of Chechnya’s independence movement. His predecessor, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, was assassinated by car bomb in Qatar in 2004. Though the Russian government denied any involvement in the attack, a Qatari court convicted two Russian security agents for their roles in the bombing.This was all part of Putin’s strategy to eliminate viable alternatives to his vision for Chechnya’s future as Russia’s most loyal vassal in the North Caucasus. To ensure this, the Kremlin oversaw a political transition in Grozny in which a new constitution was adopted and a dynastic dictatorship—the Kadyrov family—came to power via sham presidential elections. A bomb killed Akhmad A. Kadyrov, the first of Putin’s handpicked leaders, in 2004. His son Ramzan A. Kadyrov replaced him, and still rules today.Both Kadyrovs understood that, in exchange for Putin’s patronage, they had to ensure that Chechnya would cease to be a hotbed of terrorism. As human rights organizations and independent journalists have documented, Ramzan Kadyrov has achieved this through extreme and arbitrary violence: abductions, detention without trial, disappearances, collective punishment, extrajudicial executions, and the systematic use of torture. The “Kadyrovtsy”, his private militia, conducted some of these atrocities of their own volition, but the Chechen strongman oversaw many if not most of them himself.Today, after 15 years of bloody fighting that has left the Russian population traumatized and cost tens of thousands of lives, the Kremlin boasts that Chechnya has been “pacified.” This is the future that Putin sees for Syria, and his tactics there follow a similar pattern to those he used in Chechnya.Putin has accused those in the West who oppose his intervention in Syria as playing a “double game”—pretending to condemn Islamic fundamentalism without taking the necessary steps to eradicate it. The Russian President claimed that his country intervened militarily in Syria because of the Islamic State, but Russia’s bombing campaign has largely targeted areas that have no ISIS presence. Instead, Russia has bombed other members of the armed opposition, including a number of groups affiliated with the moderate Free Syrian Army, which poses the greatest threat to the survival of the Assad regime. Even after the destruction of Metrojet Flight 9268 over Egypt on October 31—for which ISIS claims responsibility, in revenge for Russia’s intervention in Syria —Russia’s targeting did not radically change.Tactically, Russia’s bombing campaign has followed the Chechen template. First, the campaign has focused on civilian areas without discriminating between civilian and insurgent targets, killing hundreds of civilians and hitting at least four hospitals to date. Second, a ground offensive has followed the shelling of civilian areas. In Chechnya, Russian troops made up the ground forces, while in Syria a combination of regime forces and their Lebanese and Iranian allies have marched in behind the Russian bombs.As the November 14 deal makes clear, Putin envisions the next step to be a political transition in which Bashar al-Assad, or whichever member of his family or clan replaces him, gains democratic legitimacy through the adoption of a new constitution and subsequent presidential elections. With the moderate opposition defeated and the regime’s future secure, he or she will then take on the extremist opposition, attempting to rid Syria of ISIS. All the while, Moscow will staunchly support Damascus’s actions. Syria, in short, will become an island of stability in the otherwise chaotic Middle East—and a loyal Russian vassal.Yet Russia’s “business card” is not all that it seems. Chechnya may appear to be orderly, but the Kremlin’s actions simply displaced terrorists into neighboring regions, destabilizing southern Russia. In 2007, the North Caucasus insurgency movement—originally based in Chechnya—declared an independent Caucasus Emirate ruled under Sharia law, from which the group will wage global jihad. In 2010, the Emirate carried out a series of terrorist attacks on Moscow’s metro system, and in 2011 targeted the city’s Domodedovo International Airport. Today, Dagestan, Chechnya’s eastern neighbor, is a hotbed of terrorist activity and regional ISIS recruitment.Meanwhile, the key issues that animated Chechen civil society 15 years ago—rampant corruption, clan hegemony, embezzlement, and state-backed brutality—remain unaddressed, and serve as recruitment tools for the Islamist fundamentalists.The same is likely to happen in Syria. No matter who emerges victorious from the presidential elections in Damascus, he or she will find defeating ISIS difficult if not impossible, even with Russia’s support. Furthermore, as other terrorist groups, including those in the North Caucasus, have demonstrated, ISIS does not need to control territory in order to pose a terrorist threat. As ISIS has faced increasing pressure on the battlefield in Iraq and Syria, it has shifted tactics, most notably carrying out a series of attacks in Paris, which killed at least 129 people. But even if ISIS were defeated in Syria, the group would likely move to solidify its hold over vast swathes of territory in Iraq—in which an estimated 3.9 million to 4.6 million people live.Furthermore, and as with Chechnya before it, the basic concerns that motivated Syria’s anti-government protests in March 2011 and led to the start of the civil war—anger over corruption, unemployment, state-orchestrated violence, and a lack of freedoms—remain.For most Russians, the first month of their country’s bombing campaign in Syria resembled an entertainment show. State-controlled TV stations showed Russian planes bombing ISIS-controlled areas and sophisticated computer graphics portrayed precision bombs slamming into ISIS strongholds. But then Metrojet Flight 9268 burst apart in mid-air.Until the crash, Russia’s bombing campaign in Syria had been nothing but positive for the Kremlin. Domestically, Putin’s approval ratings rose to unheard-of heights, topping 88 percent in one October poll, even as Russian exports dropped, imports plummeted, and Central Bank reserves slimmed. Internationally, Putin took the opportunity to present Russia as an indispensable power, not only in Syria but globally.The crash may have made the costs of the Kremlin’s Syria folly clearer to the Russian public. In October, opinion polls showed that most Russians supported the intervention, while over a third worried that it may become too costly, particularly due to terrorist attacks. But state-controlled TV has repeatedly demonstrated its extraordinary capacity to shape Russian opinion in a way the Kremlin needs. Already, the state’s propaganda machine has begun presenting the destruction of Flight 9268 as further evidence that hostile forces, from U.S. imperialists to Islamic terrorists, surround Russia—and that only Putin can keep it safe.Putin received his reputation as a no-nonsense leader following his forceful response to a series of highly controversial apartment bombings in September 1999, a campaign that led to the second Chechen war. Four buildings in three Russian cities were blown up, killing almost 300 people, and Putin quickly blamed terrorists from Chechnya. Less than a week after the fourth bombing, a fifth bomb was uncovered. It was disarmed before it could explode, and the bombers were arrested and identified. They turned out not to be Chechen terrorists, but instead agents of Russia’s Federal Security Bureau, or F.S.B.The numerous attacks by Chechen terrorists during Putin’s first years in power strengthened rather than weakened him. In 2002, terrorists seized the Dubrovka theatre in suburban Moscow, leaving 170 people dead. In 2004, female Chechen suicide bombers carried out twin attacks on the Moscow metro, killing 51 people, and another two on Russian domestic flights, killing 89. Later the same year, Chechen terrorists took more than 1,100 people hostage in a school in Beslan, North Ossetia. The attack left 335 civilians dead, many of them children. In each incidence, Putin fought violence with violence, appealing to the public’s sense of patriotism to win its approval.The destruction of Flight 9268 will only strengthen Putin’s resolve in Syria. Speaking in mid-November, Putin vowed revenge on the terrorists who blew up the plane, saying, “We will search wherever they may be hiding. We will find them anywhere on the planet and punish them.” This may sound much less emphatic than his famous promise after the 1999 apartment bombings—”if we find them [terrorists] in the toilet, excuse me, we’ll rub them out in the outhouse”—but the message is the same.However, Russia’s bombing campaign in Syria risks escalating into something far more serious than its campaign in Chechnya, against an enemy far more numerous—and murderous.Aided by a media controlled by the Kremlin and reaching a population deprived of alternative perspectives, Putin’s strategy for resolving the Syrian war, like his earlier strategy for resolving his Chechen problem, is convincing in Russia. It’s a vision that reflects Putin’s worldview: Stability and predictability are better than the uncertainties of democracy and revolution.In backing Assad, as with backing the Kadyrovs, the Kremlin is pushing back not just against the West, but also against the whole idea of a popular uprising against authority—what Putin fears the most. With Chechnya, he offers Russians a neat template of the advantages of his autocracy, albeit one that requires heavy editing. It is much less likely that he can offer even that with Syria.

Malaysia Stands Up to Chinese Aggression

Malaysia is getting more proactive about responding to China’s behavior in the South China Sea, reports the Diplomat:

The international community should expand a key naval protocol amid ongoing South China Sea disputes, Malaysia’s new naval chief said in the opening keynote address to a regional security forum December 1.

According to IHS Jane’s, Admiral Kamarulzaman Ahmad Badaruddin, the chief of the Royal Malaysian Navy (RMN), called for an expansion of the Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea (CUES) in his remarks delivered to this year’s Maritime Security and Coastal Surveillance Conference, which some have billed the region’s largest gathering of its kind this year. CUES is a series of protocols negotiated back in 2014 at the Western Pacific Naval Symposium for the safety of vessels meeting at sea.

Since the U.S. conducted its first freedom of navigation exercise in the South China Sea in October, other regional countries have started taking tougher stances against China’s territorial expansion. The Philippines, which has become one of China’s most vociferous critics, literally took China to court, and Japan made a show of encouraging South Korea to stand firmly by Washington’s side. But Malaysia has traditionally been more careful about balancing its relationships with Washington and Beijing. China is Malaysia’s biggest trading partner, and roughly twenty-five percent of Malaysians are ethnically Chinese. It is therefore notable that officials in Kuala Lumpur are standing up to China more firmly.

The aftermath of the U.S. exercises is a welcome reminder that even a little bit of American leadership can go a long way.

Will We See a Natural Gas Version of OPEC?

Hydrocarbons abound! While OPEC discusses what to do about oil prices that have dropped below $45 per barrel, another group of energy producers is considering coordinating its efforts to help stay afloat in a flooded market.

Like oil, natural gas is plentiful these days, with supply well outstripping demand, and prices are at bargain basement levels. Spot liquified natural gas (LNG) prices in Asia started the year out around $15 per million BTU, and now are less than half of that, with some analysts predicting a further price plunge below $5 next year. For buyers (like recently nuclear-less Japan) the good times are rolling, but sellers are having a difficult time adapting to the bearish market. As the WSJ reports, some natural gas producers are talking about restricting supply to set a price floor:

Leaders of Nigeria and Algeria, at a recent forum in Tehran, said gas producers should come together and intervene in prices. Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari called for “the formulation of a sustainable pricing mechanism that will guarantee fair and reasonable prices for both producers and consumers.”

…such practice is a novel idea for gas producers, where individual long-term contracts dominate and therefore supply cannot be altered easily by coordinating producers. But that’s changing with the increasing role of short-term sales in liquefied-natural-gas. Last year, almost 30% of global liquefied natural gas was traded on a short-term basis, compared with 5% a decade ago, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

It doesn’t seem likely that a natural gas version of OPEC could accomplish very much. For one, the two biggest gas producers (Russia and the United States) won’t play ball. Russia isn’t an OPEC member, so it’s hard to imagine it shaking up its energy export approach in the gas market. In the United States, a wide variety of private companies are driving the shale gas boom, which precludes the kind of price collusion Nigeria and Algeria seem to be advocating.

There also appears to be less of a desire on the part of producers to trim output to drive up prices these days. No one seems willing to play the role of swing producer in the oil market, and it’s hard to imagine any natural gas producer making the kinds of necessary cuts (ceding valuable market share in the process) to cut down on the glut.

Merkel: Refugees Must Reject Anti-Semitism

Chancellor Merkel has vowed that Germany’s new immigrants will have to respect German laws and customs—including those against anti-Semitism. Bloomberg reports:

Chancellor Angela Merkel said anti-Semitism has no place in modern Germany, including among the record influx of refugees arriving this year.

Addressing concern voiced by Germany’s Jewish community that asylum seekers from Syria and other Muslim countries may spread hatred of Jews, Merkel said “people have to respect our laws and our constitutional order wherever they may come from.”“That includes rejection of any form of anti-Semitism,” she said Wednesday in a speech at the Jewish Museum in Berlin, where she received a German rabbinical school’s award. “I will always take it seriously when you express your concerns about anti-Semitism.”

We wrote about those concerns last month, when the head of the German Jewish community asked for caps on the refugee intake out of concerns over anti-Semitism. The Chancellor appears to think, though, that she can have her cake and eat it too: The newcomers will be welcome, but they will be so rapidly assimilated that the anti-Semitism so prevalent in the Muslim world won’t be a problem in Germany.

Anti-Semitism, however, is deeply ingrained into the Arab worldview right now, and eliminating it would involve an extensive cultural makeover. Although good, recent data on Syrians is hard to find, roughly 2-3 percent of citizens in neighboring Arab countries hold favorable views of Jews, according to Pew. We wonder whether Merkel fully realizes the scale of what she’s asking. Moreover, anti-semitism is already present in Germany. To note this is not to raise the specter of Nazism, the crimes of which Germany has repented of. But it’s hard not to notice that during recent Israeli conflicts, protestors in major German cities have been seen chanting anti-Semitic, as well as anti-Israel, slogans.Anti-Semitism isn’t just a moral failing in its own right; it’s also a sign of sickness in a society. A society that blames “the Jews” for the state of the Arab world or the economy doesn’t understand how geopolitics or economics work. In those circumstances, wealth, peace, and success all become harder to obtain. So anti-Semitism among Arab refugees isn’t just an ugly prejudice. In addition, it’s a sign of just how hard it will be for many to adjust to life in the West—at least, that is, for as long as the West retains its own grip on reality. Clearly anti-Semitism is not currently as big of a problem in German society as it is in the Arab world (hence the Chancellor’s statement and the challenges facing assimilation). But the German anti-Semitism that does exist is a sign of Europe’s own crisis of confidence, on matters economic and even spiritual.So good for Chancellor Merkel for having the right impulses. But we hope that she realizes—or does soon—the scale of her request. Assimilating the new refugees is a huge, necessary, and by this point unavoidable task. Feel-good policies and quick fixes won’t solve these thorny cultural problems.

Taliban Resurgent in Helmand Province

Even amid a bloody leadership struggle between its competing factions, the Taliban remains a serious threat to Afghanistan’s government in Kabul. A 15-man delegation sent by President Ashraf Ghani to Helmand province reported back that Afghan National Army forces are barely holding on against relentless Taliban pressure, according to the Times of London:

The delegation found that police in Helmand “regularly” sold their weapons to the Taliban, before asking the Afghan government for more. The creation of “ghost soldiers”, which allows corrupt commanders in Helmand to draw the pay of non-existent troops, has added to the confusion. “The government is not completely sure how many security forces it has in Helmand, and how many casualties they are suffering.”

The corruption has penetrated every level of local governance and policing in Helmand: Dr Waziri found that some of those in his own delegation were corrupt, which delayed the release of its report. “I realised that some of the MPs in my delegation had secured their relatives jobs as district police chiefs and governors in Helmand, and were receiving kickbacks from the rackets,” he said. “Now, members of the same delegation I took to Helmand don’t want me to present all of my report to the president in case he learns the truth.”

The provincial capital of Lashkar Gah is reportedly in a state of panic as outlying towns and hamlets fall one-by-one to the Taliban. And the notorious town of Sangin, a hub in the regional opium trade and the scene of some of the fiercest fighting during NATO’s campaign in Helmand, was on the verge of falling until U.S. Special Forces were dispatched to it last month.

While pundits debate the merits of sending American soldiers to fight ISIS in Syria and Iraq, American troops already on the ground in Afghanistan have had their hands full this year with a resurgent Taliban. President Obama has already said he won’t be withdrawing troops on deadline, despite previously promising to do so. But as the Taliban continue to make advances despite the current American presence, we wonder what Obama’s goal is in Afghanistan, and how he plans to achieve it.