Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 539

Revolutions Without Benefits

On Sunday, November 15, officials at polling stations yawned while waiting for people to cast ballots for the mayor of Kyiv. The turnout in the latest local elections across the country marked a record low, indicating a widespread disappointment in politicians and politics in Ukraine. (Vitaly Klitschko, the incumbent mayor, won, with a plurality of less than 40 percent of the vote.) That disappointment is reflected in a joke making the rounds in the capital: Sociologists polled Ukrainians, asking which politicians they would like to spit at? An overwhelming majority marked the option, “Any one.”

In a recent real-life poll, two-thirds of Ukrainians said the country is headed in the wrong direction. The number is the same as before the latest “Maidan” revolution, which took place in 2013, and it’s a good indication of society’s frustration with its institutions and leaders. But this is natural. Ukrainians as individuals are free to read, think, discuss and hence rise to high levels of political awareness and sophistication. But functional institutions and competent, experienced elites cannot form quite so quickly. They are not easy to conjure up anywhere; they take time to develop.The deeper point here is that political attitudes and institutions must align at least to some extent for any governmental order to thrive. People expect to interact in the public domain in ways that reflect their value hierarchies, and the rules that govern those interactions are deemed legitimate and are affirmed through usage when they actually do reflect that values hierarchy. Misalignment can occur from either direction. Sometimes institutions outrun attitudes, such as when foreigners or bold leader impose a new order on a recalcitrant society—think the imposition of electoral democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the modernization campaign of Mustafa Kemal. Other times, however, attitudes outrun institutions, as in Ukraine today.It is easy for Westerners to forget that Ukraine is a very young nation; indeed, it never existed within its current borders before August 1991, or in any modern borders save for a very brief period in 1918 amid the chaos following the Russian Revolution. A few legendary attempts at statehood on the territory of modern-day Ukraine capture the popular imagination to some extent. The first one existed between the 9th and the 13th centuries. This medieval proto-state, called Kyivan Rus’, left a vibrant historical legacy in its capital Kyiv, not least through its choice of Orthodox Christianity as the religion of the land. It spread its influence and created civilizational offshoots far beyond its borders; indeed, Kyivan Rus’ was responsible for the rise of Moscow, and many of its leaders married kings and queens of Europe.The next attempt at Ukrainian statehood came in the 17th century with the rise of the Hetmanate, a wild militocracy that at its peak sprawled over about half of modern-day Ukraine, as well as parts of Russia and Poland. It was crushed by the Russian Empire, but left behind a trail of colorful folklore, and an historical memory of a distinctive Ukrainian identity. It was personified by the Cossacks, a brotherhood of tough but idealistic warriors who defended Ukraine’s independence in battles with the Russians, the Poles, the Turks, the Tatars, and even the Ottomans. At times, all of those enemies were allies as war coalitions shifted, disintegrated and reassembled.The brief independence interlude of 1918 gave way to Ukraine’s incorporation into the Soviet Union as one of 15 constituent “republics.” It was not an easy coexistence. Moscow often treated its “brotherly republics” as little brothers to abuse and bully. By far the most striking evidence of that in Ukraine was the Holodomor, the artificial terror-famine of 1932-33, malevolently induced by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in order to starve Ukrainians into submission. Somewhere between 2.5 to 7.5 million people died—estimates obviously vary according to who is doing the estimating. Regardless of the numbers, parents and grandparents whispered stories of that famine to children at bedtime lest it ever be forgotten. The remaining published images of gaunt, weed-eating survivors haunt Ukrainian popular conscience to this very day.But memories of suffering alone do not institutions make. Ukrainians stumbled into independence in 1991. On August 19 of that year, a putsch in Moscow, launched by elements of the Communist Party elite disappointed or frightened by his perestroika policy, sought to remove Mikhail Gorbachev from power. As a brief standoff ensued, Ukraine watched from a distance. Five days later, the parliament of the Soviet Republic of Ukraine proclaimed independence. The Declaration of Independence was still being edited literally minutes before coming up for a vote.The decision was basically opportunistic. Ukraine had developed a national political movement that was preparing the ground for this decision, but they were not the prime movers of it. It was rather Ukraine’s Soviet-era elite that chose independence in an attempt to preempt the political momentum rising beneath it. The vote evoked a national euphoria, and there quickly followed a December 1991 referendum in which more than 90 percent of the population supported the creation of a new and democratic Ukraine.But when the political adrenalin boost subsided, a harsh reality set in. Ukraine of the 1990s was mostly a land of the destitute. Everything was in short supply. I remember that my family, which lived in a residential district of Kyiv, had to queue before a shop for hours and hours just to buy eggs—the only thing that was supplied to the shop that day. Most of the shelves were empty. The Soviet planned economy had collapsed. Old ties between former republics were severed, but new market economies had yet to form.That also meant opportunity for others; state assets in gas and the metallurgy sector were up for grabs and could be had on the cheap. Many of Ukraine’s grand fortunes were made this way, starting in the 1990s and continuing all the way through the mid-2000s.One case that has given Ukrainians a glimpse at how exactly this murky privatization happened has been revealed thanks to the 2013 London lawsuit filed by Viktor Pinchuk against fellow billionaires Igor Kolomoisky and Gennadiy Bogolyubov. The asset in question is Kryviy Rih Iron Ore Enrichment Plant, a major ore mining company in eastern Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region. The asset was privatized in 2004 for some $130 million, and has grown in value tenfold since then. In his claim, Pinchuk, son-in-law to then President Leonid Kuchma, said that he had reached an agreement in July 2004 with Kolomoisky and Bogolyubov that they would purchase Kryviy Rih Ore Enrichment Plant on his behalf, and transfer it to his company later. They never did. They also failed to pay dividends, according to Pinchuk. (The claim related to dividends was settled earlier this year, but the ownership dispute is ongoing). The privatization of Kryviy Rih Iron Ore Enrichment Plant was part of a bigger deal among a small group of top businessmen to carve out a national ore producing holding comprised of ten plants. To achieve that, they teamed up to pass a special law in parliament that allowed them to buy these assets cheaply.Apart from the insight into privatization of former Soviet blue chips, this case also shows that quite soon after independence Ukraine’s nouveau riche acquired a lot of political savvy. They figured out a winning combination for Ukraine: money, power and media gives you more money and power (and you can have more media, too, if you like).  This was the beginning of Ukraine’s modern oligarchy, an intricate political system that came to dominate the country and that is proving resistant to change and reform.On the surface, Ukraine looks like a democracy. It has a publicly elected president and parliament, a ruling coalition that appoints the Prime Minister and Cabinet by consensus. There are judges and prosecutors, local governments and a multitude of political parties, diverse media and a thriving civil society. But all this is just a veneer. Underneath, the same small political and business elite has ruled the country since independence. Oligarchs have started or subsidized political projects, then gotten into power and taken decisions that benefit their businesses or that stifle competition. And the whole vicious cycle endlessly perpetuates itself. The degree of influence wielded by individual oligarchs has varied over the years, but the system overall basically remains the same.Ironically enough, many institutions of Ukraine’s young democracy have been deformed to serve this system. Take political parties, for example. There are 242 of them registered in Ukraine at the moment. You can buy one, just like a business, if you have the money. The package includes a completed government registration, regional offices and ready-made activists on a payroll ready to campaign on your behalf. You pay the current owner, rebrand and, voila!: You’re ready for a grand ceremony to elect you as party leader. Or you can install a proxy if you want. This is roughly what happened when the incumbent mayor of Kyiv and former legendary world boxing champion Vitaly Klitschko got his own party UDAR (Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform) in 2010. But he’s far from the only one.Many state institutions operate in the same way. They are tools used by the oligarchy. From issuing licenses for gas production to awarding sweetheart state procurement contracts, from setting up offshore companies that siphon off part of the profits from state-owned monopolies, to launching criminal prosecution of competitors—oligarchs large and small can buy all of those services. Ukraine has effectively become a country with different sets of rules and rights for different types of people. It’s a little like the temporary class system on an international flight, with first class, business class and economy divided. Except that in Ukraine those who fly first class get to determine where the airplane is going. By now, Ukraine has become the only country in the region that has had two revolutions in the decade preceding 2015. Probably the most important thing that these revolutions show is that beneath the existing system of governance, which continuously regenerates itself according to its own closed logic, a new Ukraine has been forming and evolving. And it’s quite literally beneath the old system, if one refers to sociological stratification of the society. The new Ukraine comes from the grassroots. It’s an effort of the underdogs who want to actually have the rights that they formally already possess.First came the Orange Revolution. It started on November 22, 2004, the day when the Central Election Commission announced that Viktor Yanukovych was the new president. But most Ukrainians knew they did not vote for him. Voting fraud was massive, and people took to the streets to defend their vote and their right to delegate power to the person of their choice. That revolution was quick, bloodless and idealistic. While thousands of people dressed in orange scarves sang songs in the freezing cold on Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kyiv, its fate was decided at a round table by all political sides, including outgoing President Kuchma, with foreign dignitaries as intermediaries.Yanukovych agreed to give up what he believed was his victory. He famously described his motives like this: “I didn’t want mothers to lose their children and wives their husbands. I didn’t want dead bodies from Kyiv to flow down the Dnieper. I didn’t want to assume power through bloodshed.” So by January 10, 2005, Ukraine had a new president, Viktor Yushchenko. By that time, this man, who had once been a sex symbol among Ukraine’s mostly faceless gray politicians, looked like a monster from a Hollywood horror movie because his face had been badly disfigured by an alleged dioxin poisoning. Strangely, the crime was never properly investigated and remains one of modern Ukraine’s great unsolved mysteries. (Yushchenko himself blamed the Russians, who were busy interfering in Ukraine and trying to prevent the election of an ostensibly democratic and ostensibly pro-Western candidate.)Yushchenko was possibly the nation’s biggest political disappointment, wasting his five-year term in office on squabbles with other Orange leaders—principally Yulia Tymoshenko—and failing to enact crucial reforms. He was mocked for his beekeeping passion and despised for allowing corruption and cronyism to thrive. Worse yet, his dismal performance as President set the stage for Yanukovych’s comeback. Yanukovych won the presidency in 2010 over Tymoshenko in what observers declared to be a free and fair election.A twice-convicted felon in his Soviet youth, Yanukovych was known for his lack of eloquence and polish, and was the unlikeliest of Presidents. He came from the mining region in the more Russian-speaking eastern region of Ukraine, where force counted for more than intellect. He swiftly rolled back freedoms, jailed political opponents—most famously Tymoshenko—and amended the Constitution and various other laws to gain control over all branches of power. His close circle, known as The Family, was busy “acquiring” assets and riches at the speed of light, often at the expense of both the nation and other (increasingly disgruntled) oligarchs.Oddly enough, as all this was going on, Yanukovych had also been negotiating with the European Union to sign an Association Agreement, which would move the nation closer to the EU and install European rules of the game in Ukraine. Then, at the last moment, under pressure from Russia, Yanukovych backed out of the deal. On November 21, 2013 the Cabinet announced that it had halted all preparation for the signing—and that pushed people onto the streets.The second Maidan was long, mean, and hopeless. The standoff between people and the Yanukovych regime grew increasingly more aggressive and turned deadly at the end. At least 106 protesters died during EuroMaidan, mostly from the hands of the police and sniper fire. At least 18 policemen were also killed. While the iconic images of the previous Orange Revolution were flowers that female protesters offered to police officers peeking from behind metal shields, EuroMaidan’s images were frozen barricades and burning car tires, Molotov cocktails and dead bodies laid out in rows. Then, on February 23, 2014, the revolution suddenly ended. President Yanukovych was gone. He packed up his vases and statues in his luxury mansion and took them to Russia, where he resurfaced a few days later. By that time the political leaders of EuroMaidan had taken key jobs in the government, and had set a new date for an early presidential election. But there was one crucial difference with the old revolution: people no longer trusted politicians to run things as usual. They wanted in; they wanted to fix the country themselves.So investment bankers became ministers. Civic activists became MPs. IT entrepreneurs ran for mayors of Ukrainian cities. When Russia annexed Crimea in February and started a war in eastern Ukraine in March, volunteers quickly moved in to replace non-existing or paralyzed institutions.For example, Ukraine had an army, but it had never been used in combat. In fact, the nation’s military doctrine assumed that Ukrainians had no enemies around the country’s perimeter. So the army was like a withered muscle. Its property was looted and sold off by its generals at a profit, its soldiers were demoralized and lacked the most basic supplies—even food. So volunteers stepped in to both fight and ensure supplies were procured and delivered. Eventually some of those volunteers even infiltrated the Defense Ministry to start designing new military uniforms and introducing modern logistics.Volunteering shot up to unseen levels. According to a UN study released in December 2014, some 23 percent of Ukrainians were volunteering in one way or another. Although this figure is on par with many EU countries, it is unprecedented for Ukraine, where one of the most famous proverbs goes like this: “My house is on the edge of the village, I know nothing.” Most Ukrainians famously mind their own business.Since the EuroMaidan, Ukrainians have made a notable leap from the old low-trust posture toward building a community bound by common values and goals. It is somewhat ironic that the policy of Russian President Vladimir Putin has helped to speed up the process. (But as a Romanian philosopher once said, “history is irony in motion.”) The need to fight a common enemy united the nation. Ordinary Ukrainians felt they had to participate, and that was the good news.The bad news was that those volunteers, despite their unprecedented numbers, were and continue to be badly outnumbered and outmaneuvered at every step by the old, corrupt elite that still controls key institutions. And what is worse is that the existing corrupt system is very seductive and lucrative, tempting many good people to the dark side. American billionaire and philanthropist George Soros, speaking in Kyiv on November 14, said he had lost some of the optimism about Ukraine that he had before the visit: “I have been in Ukraine for only a week, but I came to realize that the situation is not as promising as I had thought from the outside.”What struck him was how badly progress at reforms had stalled. His intuition as to why it had stalled was that corruption continues to eati the nation like a cancer. In a recent nationwide poll by IFES, 40 percent of respondents said that they had given a bribe in the past year. The majority of those cases took place in everyday situations, such during a visit to a doctor (32 percent) or at schools (8 percent). You come to the surgeon in an emergency, and they say that there are no spare beds in the hospital for someone in your condition. But the bed suddenly becomes available once a financial incentive is offered. Frequently financial contributions are even openly solicited in the form of a “voluntary donation” to the hospital, the school or a government agency where you seek assistance or service.In the same poll, 53 percent of Ukrainians said corruption is Ukraine’s biggest problem. It was only surpassed by the Russian-inspired war in the eastern provinces of the nation (70 percent), and high prices and inflation (56 percent).Petty corruption, however, represents just a fraction of a much larger issue. The real elephant in the room is the grand-scale political corruption—the old oligarch-driven system—less visible through polling data but much more damaging to the country as a whole. It directly robs the nation through the unfair distribution of the lion’s share of wealth among the ruling political and business elite. In the long term, it constrains business, infrastructural and human development, depriving the nation of its potential and its future. But perhaps the worst effect of this grand corruption is the creation of distrust and apathy in the society, a sense that there is no way out. Bohdan Vitvitsky, a retired U.S. Federal prosecutor and international expert on corruption, notes that people say that corruption exists in every country. Although true to a degree, it matters enormously whether the corruption is episodic or systemic:

In countries with systemic corruption there is no effective mechanism for preventing corruption and no effective law enforcement system. Also, people believe that it’s inevitable. In countries with episodic corruption, corruption is considered intolerable, and pretty much the opposite situation pertains.

At a recent conference in Kyiv, President Petro Poroshenko said that Ukraine is moving toward fighting systemic corruption. “We have already sharpened the ax,” he said. What he failed to mention is the fact that it took him 18 months in office to sharpen that ax. More importantly, there is massive resistance within the political elite against using it, because in a great many cases it would mean chopping your own head off. President Poroshenko, who owns a confectionery empire, as well as considerable assets in media, shipbuilding and other sectors, became Ukraine’s only oligarch in the top ten richest whose fortune actually grew (by a whopping 20 percent) in the past year amid economic recession and war raging the eastern provinces. The ranking of the richest was done by Novoye Vremya, a weekly magazine, in conjunction with Dragon Capital investment bank and released on October 29.

At least part of this growth might have come as a side-benefit of Poroshenko holding the country’s highest office. When his confectionery empire, Roshen, decided in July to expand by building a biscuit factory in the outskirts of Kyiv, it managed to rent a large land plot from the local community in Boryspil region, bypassing a land auction mandated by law. Existing tenants were kicked out prior to the deal. Roshen, however, insists that it is in full compliance with existing laws. And when his confectionery opened a new store in the city of Lviv in October, it put up a huge sign without any approval from city authorities in October. It was later taken down.But Poroshenko is by no means alone among those in power whose fortune is growing. Ukraine has seen the rise of a new wave of oligarchs, those who have been friends and business partners of the current political elite. They inevitably latch themselves onto any viable business with a healthy cash flow and any state procurement contracts. For example, the long-term sponsor of Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s party took over the lucrative duty-free trade in Ukraine’s main airport.Friendly oligarchs continue to get away with the illegal privatization of land and assets, setting up intermediary companies that provide non-existent services to state monopolies for various non-transparent fees, and engage in tax evasion on a breathtaking scale, and in hostile takeovers of other people’s business. All of these crimes should be investigated by the law enforcement system, but that rarely happens in practice. Moreover, harassment of journalists and opposition politicians has restarted in ways eerily reminiscent of the Kuchma era. The path-dependency of the system is reasserting itself.All this is happening under the watch of Western donors and diplomats who are dishing out unprecedented levels of technical and financial aid to Ukraine. In exchange, they are fed long laundry lists of laws approved and new anti-corruption agencies set up by the government, pushed through by civil society and by the conditionality of the international aid. But all these efforts merely scratch the surface of the existing system, and will go no deeper as long as Ukraine remains institutionally weak. Building those institutions in the absence of political will in much of the elite remains the main problem with which the nation is struggling. And Ukrainians are once again growing restive with the failure of their leaders to follow through on promises of change.Young Americans have this phrase, derived originally from an animated satirical television sitcom, “friends without benefits”, and it’s sort of funny. Ukrainians seem ready to invent a similar phrase: “revolutions without benefits”, but it’s not the least bit funny. It is as though the nation is caught in a classical double-bind: Ukraine needs responsive institutions to break the bonds of a traditionally low-trust society, but that legacy of low trust prevents those responsive institutions from forming and setting a firm foundation. How exactly that cycle gets broken is the key to a better future for Ukraine, if it ever achieves one.

EPA’s New Biofuels Targets Please Exactly No One

The Environmental Protection Agency finally unveiled biofuel targets for 2014, 2015, and 2016 this week, and no stakeholder is happy. Under the 2007 Renewable Fuel Standard, the EPA sets targets for the number of gallons of ethanol fuel refiners need to blend in to gasoline. That 2007 law sketched out a rough road map for those targets, but the EPA is supposed to provide year-to-year adjustments to those mandates to adjust to changing market conditions.

Unfortunately, the agency failed to do that for 2014 and 2015—until this week, when it set levels at what was already being produced. Next year, however, the EPA will require refiners to blend 18.11 million gallons of ethanol, an 11 percent bump from 2015’s levels (yet 18 percent lower than was initially envisioned by the 2007 law). As Politico reports, that has biofuel boosters steaming mad:

“I am extremely disappointed by the EPA’s choice to reduce volume requirements for corn ethanol, which flies in the face of original congressional intent and fails to provide any incentives for expanding alternative fuel availability for consumers,” said Sen. Joni Ernst, (R-Iowa), who had previously said she was philosophically opposed to all energy subsidies, though she supports the biofuels program. “The Obama administration is once again using the EPA to impose their agenda on hard-working Iowans by instituting biofuel volume requirements that are lower than originally mandated and in direct contradiction of the law.” […]

Brent Erickson of the Biotechnology Industry Organization slammed it as “a severe blow to American consumers and the biofuels industry.” National Farmers Union President Roger Johnson said the mandate “exacerbates the serious damage already done to the renewable fuels industry and America’s family farmers.”

But even for everyone that isn’t directly involved in the biofuel industry, any sort of mandated corn ethanol production is a bad idea for any number of reasons: devoting these corn crops to fuel raises global food prices, starving the world’s poor; consumers pay for this boondoggle at the pump; and to top it all off, corn ethanol isn’t even green. Here’s the New York Times on the dubious ecological credentials of our biofuels policy:

[T]he program is losing support among environmentalists who say that it does not reduce carbon emissions when compared with conventional fuel. The assumption that it does, John M. DeCicco, a research professor at the University of Michigan Energy Institute, said in a conference call with reporters last week, stems from a flawed accounting of the amount of carbon dioxide that is recycled by productive farmland through the normal growth of crops used to make biofuel.

America’s biofuel boondoggle is one of those rare policies that manages to find the sour spot, where it looks bad from any angle you choose to view it. President Bush made this green lark a reality, but the Obama Administration—perhaps loathe to alienate corn belt constituents—has dutifully carried on the farce. Now, eight years later, we’re still enduring the effects of one of our country’s most nonsensical energy policy mistakes.

Puerto Rico Narrowly Avoids Default—Sort of

Puerto Rico has narrowly avoided defaulting on its debt. Well, sort of. Reuters:

Puerto Rico avoided a default on debt maturing on Tuesday but warned that its deteriorating liquidity meant that future defaults loom.

There had been speculation that the U.S. territory would default on all or part of the $355 million notes issued by its financing arm, the Government Development Bank.

While Puerto Rico first defaulted in August, failure to make the payment on Tuesday would have been more significant because part of that debt was protected by the commonwealth’s constitution.

Yet while Puerto Rico managed to avoid defaulting on its most critical guarantees, it did default on other obligations:

Height Securities analyst Daniel Hanson said…Puerto Rico was defaulting on “instrumentality debt, not debt with a constitutional pledge.” General obligation bonds, along with GDB bonds that have constitutional guarantees, should be safe, he said, but bonds from entities such as highway authority PRHTA and infrastructure financing authority PRIFA are at risk.

In other words, Puerto Rico managed to avoid complete default because of the creativity of its politicians and bankers (“unsustainable financial gymnastics” as one Democratic Senator put it), not because it suddenly discovered some extra cash or figured out how to balance its spreadsheets. Over the weekend, we wrote that Puerto Rico needs “a policy mix that offers a real chance for recovery, both by forcing the necessary changes on what is clearly a failing approach to government, and in terms of creating conditions under which a refinanced and reformed jurisdiction can actually succeed. And we definitely need to be mindful of the precedents Puerto Rico ends up setting.” After today’s news, that’s as true as ever.

The Distorted Politics of Gun Control

The overwhelming majority of fatal shootings in America happen in our inner cities. They aren’t committed by mentally ill loners, but by gang members involved in petty disputes. About half of the dead are black men (who represent just six percent of the total U.S. population). The most common type of firearm used is a handgun.

And yet, gun controllers only spring into action in the wake of high profile mass shootings committed by psychopaths with scary-looking rifles (like the Planned Parenthood shooter from this past weekend), and they rarely propose measures that would meaningfully affect the urban violence that is the real source of America’s gun problem. Lois Beckett of ProPublica has an in-depth report arguing that liberal gun controllers “ignore black lives” by focusing on measures like assault weapons bans rather than on tried-and-tested community engagement and policing programs. Becket’s report focuses on one such program, “Ceasefire,” in which “police team up with community leaders to identify the young men most at risk of shooting someone or being shot, talk to them directly about the risks they faced, offer them support, and promise a tough crackdown on the groups that continued shooting.” An excerpt from the piece, which is worth reading in full:

[Pastor Michael] McBride wanted President Obama to make Ceasefire and similar programs part of his post-Newtown push to reduce gun violence. He had brought a short memo to give to White House staffers, outlining a plan to devote $500 million over five years to scaling such programs nationwide. His pitch to Biden that day was even simpler: Don’t ignore that black children are dying too.

In response, the vice president agreed urban violence was very important, McBride said. But it was clear that “there was not a lot of appetite for that conversation by folks in the meeting,” McBride recalled.Later, other ministers who worked with McBride would get an even blunter assessment from a White House staffer: There was no political will in the country to address inner-city violence.

The report suggests that gun controllers’ reluctance to address urban violence is partly motivated by systemic racism. But another (overlapping) angle worth thinking about is the particular political agenda that defines liberal gun control advocates. Liberals (and some libertarian-leaning conservatives) have been arguing for years that law enforcement has too large a presence in inner city communities, that it engages in racial profiling, and that the tough-on-crime policies that started getting put in place in the 1970s have done more harm than good. There is a good deal of truth to some of these charges—but they complicate efforts to turn around and crack down on gun violence in inner cities with new police programs. As we’ve said before, genuine gun control and tough-on-crime policy are two sides of the same coin. Both require a stronger police presence, and both have racially disparate outcomes.

Moreover, Democrats increasingly see gun control as a wedge issue, and are therefore may be more willing to identify gun violence as a problem associated with their political enemies—white men in red states. Talking about gun violence in communities that vote overwhelmingly Democratic would not rally the base as effectively.Gun control politics is a mess. We don’t know what the right solution is, but it’s time for policymakers to start speaking honestly about the issue and identifying solutions that work (balanced against civil liberties concerns, of course). The type of political triangulation gun controllers are currently engaged in does no one any favors.

The Pointless Paris Climate Conference

The moment is finally here: This week kicked off the much-anticipated two-week COP21 climate summit in Paris that greens hope will be looked back upon as a watershed moment for humanity’s approach to climate change. From where we’re sitting, that kind of game-changing outcome doesn’t seem to be in the cards. Here’s why.

The great green hope—a binding international treaty limiting global greenhouse gas emissions—is dead in the water. Indeed, it always has been. The EU is one of the few blocs of countries that would actually sign on to such an agreement (though even the green-minded group lacks consensus on this), but it wouldn’t do so out of the goodness of its heart. Rather, it would sign on out of a desire to see the rest of the world put in place the sort of economically damaging green policies Euro leaders have already rushed to enact. For Europe, these Paris talks are a way to erase a competitive disadvantage the Continent placed on itself.Unsurprisingly, moreover, the only way to convince other nations to sign on to a treaty isn’t by appealing to green morality, but rather by putting up cold, hard cash (or “climate financing” as it’s come to be known). This financing comes in the form of the Global Climate Fund, established at Copenhagen’s failed 2009 summit with the hopes of funneling money from richer countries to help the developing world mitigate and adapt to climate change. Here, too, the news is grim: The developed world hasn’t funded this project, leading poorer countries to look on this new summit with mistrust. And make no mistake, if the money isn’t there, the developing world loses all impetus to enact growth-restricting green policies.The U.S. Senate is the final nail in the Global Climate Treaty’s coffin. Secretary of State John Kerry explicitly said Paris wouldn’t produce a treaty last month because he knew President Obama lacked the necessary support in the Senate to ratify any formal deal. True to form, Senators have threatened to attach to an upcoming spending bill riders that would stop America from contributing to climate financing, and have promised not to ratify any Paris treaty.So we know what Paris won’t produce, but what can negotiators now accomplish? The key point of “progress” this time around has been the introduction of Individually Determined National Contributions (INDCs), a cumbersome moniker for national pledges to reduce future carbon emissions. True, most UN members submitted these plans ahead of the conference, but as Bjorn Lomborg points out, the sum of these INDCs would reduce global temperatures by just 0.048°C (0.086°F) by the end of the century. And that’s assuming that countries follow through with their promises, which is a big jump, considering there aren’t any enforcement mechanisms on the table.Thanks to Wired analysis, we know that the Paris conference will produce roughly 300,000 tons of CO2, and we can reasonably expect plenty of hot air over the next two weeks. But while delegates fruitlessly toil for a meaningless agreement, others on the outskirts of these talks are making concrete progress. Bill Gates has unveiled the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, which extracted promises from 20 governments to double research and development investment in the next five years.Gates gets it: Empty promises can’t save us from the effects of climate change, and today’s crop of renewable energy technologies aren’t up to the task either. Every dollar spent on staging these pointless summits or propping up current-generation wind and solar power is a dollar that could have gone towards the research of a breakthrough that could actually make a difference.

Russia Adds Troops to Syria, Opens New Air Base

In the coming days, reports in the Middle Eastern claim, Russia is contemplating almost doubling in the near term the number of its planes committed to the fight in Syria—from 35 to more than 50. Thereafter, Moscow could increase the number to 100. To accommodate them, it will be expanding a small presence at al-Sharyat air base near Homs, which features fortified hangars capable of withstanding direct shelling, where Russian attack helicopters are already based.

Russia will deploy “an intelligence and special forces brigade and support personnel, estimated to be about 1,000 troops in total” to al-Sharyat, which will be its second major airbase in Syria, reports the Times of London , citing local sources. Russia is also reportedly planning on deploying to the theater thermobaric rockets, which are fuel-air explosive weapons designed for high-temperature explosions and more devastating blast waves.Further reports suggest Moscow is insisting that its Iranian and Hezbollah allies commit to an offensive against the ISIS-held towns of Qaryatayn and Palmyra, both of which are located near the airbase. Yesterday, the White House confirmed that Russia had slightly ramped up its efforts against the Islamic State in recent weeks.And finally, there are rumors that Moscow is reaching out to the Syrian Kurds. The Turkish press is full of (shakily-sourced) reports that Russians are starting to provide air support to the PYD (whether de facto due to overlapping interests, or through outright coordination). According to al-Jazeera, Putin has called on  the PYD to accept a settlement with Assad. While none of these reports should be taken as gospel, we do know that the PYD has previously sent a delegation to Moscow to try to open diplomatic relations. That some kind of negotiations are ongoing is not unlikely.So what is going here? Vladmir Putin’s bid to keep his client, Assad, alive and gain a place at the negotiating tables as the future of Syria is working out pretty well, so it looks like he may be doubling down. Putin is a consummate opportunist. He may be trying to reach an accommodation with the Kurds that would accept Assad’s control over the part of Syria that Russia cares about—and tick off the Turks, to boot. He may also be considering boosting Russian commitment to fighting ISIS directly, rather than focusing exclusively on the rebels fighting Syrian government troops loyal to President Bashar al-Assad.It looks like Putin’s doubling down on three fronts: militarily, by increasing his presence in Syria; politically, by increasing his potential leverage with regard to the final settlement of Syria, and on the broader international stage, by positioning himself as a greater part of the anti-ISIS fight that matters to much of the West.

What to Do About Woodrow

The controversy over Woodrow Wilson’s place in America’s public memory, set in motion two weeks ago by Princeton University student protesters’ demanding that the school remove the twenty-eighth President’s name from its storied School of Public and International Affairs, is not going away anytime soon. The New York Times‘ Jennifer Schuessler has a sharp roundup of the state of play:

The debate comes amid a flurry of continuing renaming controversies on various campuses, including Georgetown, which that it was removing from campus buildings the names of two of its former presidents who had been involved in selling slaves, and Yale, which is hotly debating whether to rename a residential college named for John C. Calhoun, one of the 19th-century’s foremost defenders of slavery.

But the controversy over Wilson strikes closer to home for many liberal-leaning historians and scholars, threatening a symbol whose broader vision many would wish to defend, while raising the uncomfortable question of whether Wilson’s racism constitutes a blot on his record or an integral feature of the progressive tradition he helped to found.

“The irony here is that Wilson really is the architect of a lot of modern liberalism,” said Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton. “The tradition that runs through F.D.R. to L.B.J. and Obama really starts with his administration.”

Unlike most of the other demands we have been seeing from campus activists lately (for more diversity training, more race-based housing, and more speech-policing), this particular ask—that Princeton rename its Woodrow Wilson School—is not unhealthy or illiberal in and of itself. By condemning the twenty-eighth president’s record on race, these students are not infringing on free speech or academic freedom. To the contrary, they have sparked a rigorous and informative national debate about an important historical figure, with voices from all over the spectrum productively weighing in. All nations reckon (or fail to reckon) with their histories in part by arguing over their public symbols and monuments. This process can veer into a totalitarian scrubbing of the past (see Zedong, Mao) but it doesn’t have to, if the debate is undertaken openly and without intimidation. (Of course, on modern campuses, this is never guaranteed).

Second, in our view, purging Wilson from Princeton would be a mistake. That Wilson was a racist and that he still played an important role in American history (and the history of Princeton) is something that the university community needs to understand and process. As Damon Linker points out, the Founder of the League of Nations is being honored “despite his racism, not because of it.” (The flying of the Confederate Flag over State Capitols, for the record, told a different story). Also, unlike figures like George Wallace, Wilson was not so much an innovator in racist cruelty as someone whose views were, sadly, well within the mainstream for his time. Given these circumstances, knocking Wilson off his Princeton perch seems more likely to obliterate his imperfect legacy than to help students and faculty come to terms with it. American history is what it is, for good and for evil, and our institutions should reflect this.

Third, it will be interesting to see how the left-wing revolt against Wilson plays out in the broader Democratic Party. Unlike Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson (two other presidents who have recently fallen out of favor on the left), Wilson is in many ways the father of modern progressive thought. He thought the founding documents were outdated, believed strongly in the ability of government professionals to improve peoples’ lives, and—in so many words—said that opponents of his elite-approved, scientific agenda were on the wrong side of history. Perhaps an inadvertent effect of the anti-Wilson protests will be to dampen modern progressives’ crusading confidence that they are always and everywhere on the right side—but we’re not holding our breath.

The Middle East as It Will Be

Every so often, one should stop ascribing blame and prescribing remedies and put down exactly what one thinks is likely to happen. As George Orwell observed, this can be a humbling experience, because our predictions so often reflect our hopes or fears rather than careful analysis. Besides, castigating politicians one dislikes, and concocting policies that have no chance of encountering the test of practice, is much more fun than peering into the future. Yet no other topic could benefit more from a cold-blooded analysis of the probabilities than the current conflict in Syria and Iraq and the various burning cinders that it has spewed into other lands—Libya and, most recently, France.

It is safe to predict that, barring a calamitous attack on the scale of September 11 in the American homeland, the United States will not lead a coalition attempting to root out the Islamic State in its lairs, above all the city of Mosul. President Obama, in every possible way, has made it clear that he thinks such an effort misguided. Nor should one expect a President who has pledged himself to ending Middle East wars to conclude his term by sending tens of thousands of infantrymen back to Mesopotamia (a much better term these days than Syria and Iraq, which, for all practical purposes, no longer exist as states). A bit more bombing, a few more commando raids, some additional trainers and spotters, perhaps, but a ground force—no. He would be acting contrary to every instinct, every judgment, and, most importantly, his self-understanding were he to do so.This being the case, the Islamic State will continue to control territory in Iraq and Syria. The Kurds and Iraqi army may nibble at the edges and cut lines of supply; the Russians, Iranians, and Shi’a militias may do the same; but to take back any major city and, above all, Mosul will require lots of troops. To do it the American or Israeli way would mean surrounding it, persuading the population to leave, and then painstakingly working one’s way through the booby-traps, ambushes, bunkers, and tunnels using all the advantages of meticulously collected intelligence and persistent observation, as well as a wide variety of low-yield precision-guided weapons. Even so, the damage to infrastructure and loss of civilian life would be considerable, as would the casualties sustained by the forces going in. Mosul—a city of two-and-a-half million before the Islamic State invaded—would require a clean-up operation an order of magnitude larger than the clearing of Fallujah (prewar population roughly 300,000) or recent Israeli incursions into Gaza City (perhaps half a million), with tens of thousands of well-trained and -disciplined troops. Those are not on offer, and certainly not from the United States.To think that Iraqi troops and Sunni tribesmen will do what they did in 2006–2008 in taking down al-Qaeda in Iraq—the Islamic State’s smaller and less expert predecessor—is fantasy. Iraqi soldiers and tribal forces did indeed fight, and bravely, but they knew they were allied with what Bing West has dubbed “the strongest tribe,” i.e., the United States. They could see the tanks and attack helicopters, the confident soldiers and Marines going into battle with them. They will have no such support this time, and they know it. They can be terrorized, and the evidence suggests, have been.The Russian way is simpler, and Putin has done it before, most famously in Chechnya’s capital of Grozny, a largely Russian-inhabited city, in 1999–2000: flatten the city, shoot anything that moves, and rebuild it with a client governor in charge. But today’s Russia, as impressive at it has been strategically, may not have the resources and probably does not have the inclination to do something that will involve killing tens or hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs, thereby inflaming its own domestic Muslim problem.The Islamic State will not be easily strangled, either. It has shown itself remarkably capable of drawing money in from many sources, and it has no compunction about squeezing to the limit the population among which it resides. It is a tenacious parasite, and although it has suffered thousands of casualties, it still gets recruits and is adapting to the continuous aerial bombardment. There is no reason to think it will quit.So the Islamic State will continue to exist, and as recent reports suggest, put down roots in a number of countries. The appeal of its cruelty, religious purity, and apocalyptic faith will not be diminished. Indeed, just the reverse, the longer it appears to stand up to the unholy coalition of the United States, Europe, Russia, the Persians, and the Shi’a. At the same time, however, it is equally unlikely that the Syrian civil war will be resolved, and above all, that Bashar al-Asad will recover control of more than a fraction of his shattered country. He relies now on foreign arms and armies, his own Alawite base having been exhausted. His allies may be willing to send thousands of troops to keep him going, but are unlikely to commit the tens or hundreds of thousands to really restore him to power. Were that to happen, one should expect to see the Gulf states pump ever more military aid into his opponents, including the Islamic State and other jihadi movements. It is a lesson in the relative unimportance of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to compare the vituperative fear and hatred that many Sunni Arabs have for the Persian Shi’a with their equally sincere but distinctly feebler loathing of the Jews. Furthermore, in light of the breakdown in Russo-Turkish relations, and the presence of an increasingly arbitrary and dictatorial Islamist at the head of the Turkish government, Ankara may well ramp up support for the insurgents, including the Islamic State. For these reasons and more, the would-be Talleyrands who think that tacit American support for Russo-Iranian hegemony over this region in the name of stability is either desirable or possible had better think again. That kind of devil’s deal would simply brew even more violence, as even our current President seems to recognize.The upshot, then, will be large-scale mayhem across an increasingly large area, which will in turn breed more mayhem. We are in the early or, at best, early-middle stages of a vicious cycle of violence. Consider only the refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. What sorts of experiences have the teenagers in those camps had? What future can they expect? How many murders, maimings, and rapes might they wish to avenge? In those camps lie a well-nigh infinite pool of recruits for the jihadi cause, and they will make their way into the fight. To be sure, there will be some islands of stability in the Middle East. The Israelis will deter direct attacks, and will help the Druze carve out communal enclaves under their aegis. The Kurdish quasi-state will become ever more real, and the United States will quietly recognize that fact by arming it to the teeth. Jordan may hang on, although the Hashemite King may have to fight, yet again, for his monarchy’s existence.What we cannot predict are the sparks that could ignite other fires. A second Russo-Turkish incident—an S-400 missile taking down a Turkish F-16, another Russian jet shot down, raids on Russian or Turkish bases coming from areas controlled by the other sides’ clients—may not bring a shooting war, exactly, but it could lead to a much deadlier proxy war than we have seen thus far. Should Turkey then invoke Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty, and Russia choose to demonstrate the West’s vulnerabilities on other fronts, the winds of the Syrian war could blow as far away as the Baltic states. A more immediate matter: the refugee flow to Europe may be slowed but will not stop unless the unwieldy and befuddled European Union slams the gates shut. If it does, that may be one of the developments that helps end the EU as we know it. If it does not, the rise of seriously nasty rightwing parties in the European core may bring it to a different kind of end.The next American president will probably do more to take the lead in this crisis, but not much. It takes at least six months to fully staff up a government (which you want to do if you are going to go to war), but more importantly, what president wishes to begin his or her term by sending large forces to the Middle East? Even if the President did so desire, and even if we did wipe out the Islamic State and liberate Mosul, what would we do then—hand it back to an Iranian-controlled client state headquartered in Baghdad, while deploring the depredations of the Shi’a militias re-establishing control in Iraq’s largest Sunni city?It is amazing to consider what we now accept as normal politics in this part of the world. A quarter of a million civilians dead. Chemical weapons used routinely by a state and by insurgents. Millions of refugees. The eviction of Christians from vast areas they have inhabited very nearly since the time of Jesus. An apocalyptic religious sect that has constructed at least an embryonic state, revels in publicizing every kind of barbarity from crucifixion to partial beheadings, and now controls an area the size of a small European country. Murderous assaults on European capitals inspired and directed by that state. Russian forces engaged in combat in the Middle East on a scale not seen since the early 1970s. Iranian operatives openly waging war in countries that Iran does not even neighbor.The future will be ghastly for that part of the world, and all that borders it. The United States will be somewhat distant from this whirlpool of blood, but only somewhat—we, our allies, and our interests will increasingly be spattered by it. It is disheartening that at a time when countries are desperate for the United States merely to appear to want to lead them out of this, Americans are preoccupied on the one side with a braggart bully billionaire who knows little and cares less about civil liberties and on the other side with the contest between a marginal monomaniac and a terminally deceitful triangulator. Meanwhile, on the beautiful campuses of our oldest and wealthiest universities, mobs of the luckiest young people in the world are whimpering belligerently because they believe themselves to be victims—an obscene notion, if you think about their Syrian and Iraqi contemporaries. This may not be the early 1930s, but it is getting close. And as one might have said back then, this is not likely to get any better.

Abe’s Popularity Revives

Output and retail sales are up in Japan—and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s approval rating with them. Reuters:

Trade ministry data on Monday showed factory output rose 1.4 percent month-on-month in October, versus economists’ estimate for a 1.9 percent gain and 1.1 percent increase in September, led by general-purpose machinery, cars and electronics.

Separate data showed retail sales rose 1.8 percent in the year to October, more than a 0.8 percent annual gain expected, on sales of clothes, food and drink, cars and home appliances.Monday’s data underlines analysts’ expectations that the economy is headed for a modest rebound over the current October-December quarter, after it suffered a second straight quarter of contraction through September – a technical recession.

This doesn’t mean that Japan’s economy is out of all trouble, of course, just as the recent recession didn’t mean that the country’s economy was doomed. We shouldn’t judge the success of Abe’s economic program on the basis of month-to-month market fluctuations, which have a lot to do with what’s happening in China and are not a sure indication of whether Abenomics is working. The one thing we do know independent of the fluctuations: The long-term prospects of Japan’s economy are pretty good.

This story is more important, then, for the light it shines on Abe’s political future than for anything definitive it alone tells us about Japan’s economy. Abe’s push for remilitarization sent his poll numbers down a couple of months ago. Now those numbers have rebounded eight points since October, as Abe has refocused on his signature—and popular—Abenomics growth program.Opposition to remilitarization, it appears, has not been durable or strong enough to sink Abe. For all the noise made about remilitarization at the time, Japan seems to have moved on.

Pope Turns Attention to “God Wars”

Pope Francis visited one of the epicenters of Muslim-Christian violence in Africa this weekend, preaching peace. The AP reports:

Under heavy security, Francis crossed into the PK5 neighborhood where Bangui’s Muslims have been unable to leave for months because armed Christian militia fighters have surrounded its perimeter. The pope traveled in his open-air vehicle through the neighborhood despite the security risks. Armed U.N. peacekeepers stood guard in the minarets of the mosque.[..]

Francis had insisted on coming to the PK5 neighborhood to appeal for peace in a country where two years of Christian-Muslim violence has divided the capital and forced nearly 1 million people to flee their homes.[..]“Christians and Muslims and members of traditional religions have lived peacefully for many years,” he said. “Together, we say no to hatred, to vengeance and violence, especially that committed in the name of a religion or God.”

The Pope is right: In areas like the CAR, Christians and Muslims and animists (followers of traditional pagan religions) had indeed lived relatively peacefully for some time. What wars there were were largely about non-sectarian issues. But (as Francis also noted) that’s now changing.

For some time now, we’ve discussed Africa’s “God Wars”—the intermittent conflicts raging along the middle of the continent, where Muslim north and Christian south meet (and a once-substantial animist buffer has been worn away by successful proselytizing, especially by Christians). Tribal politics and religious radicalism combine to make this one of the bloodiest regions on earth. Often, the increased wealth and interconnectedness that modernity brings (in fits and starts) just raises the stakes.The violence in the CFR is one of the bloodiest episodes in Africa’s recent religious conflicts. In a fascinating long-form essay in Foreign Policy  this October, Ty McCormick explained the recent history there:

The east bank of the Ouaka is controlled by remnants of the Seleka, a largely Muslim rebel coalition that pillaged and raped its way across CAR before seizing power over the country for a brief period in 2013. The west bank belongs to the anti-Balaka, the knife- and machete-wielding Christian self-defense militias that sprang up to counter the Seleka but managed to make the Muslim rebel coalition’s abuses look relatively mild by comparison. “Muslims are too afraid to travel to the [west] bank,” the mayor of Bambari, Abel Matchipata, told me recently. “Some Christians are traveling to the [east] bank, but they are doing so with a lot of fear.”

Bambari’s stark divisions mirror those in the rest of CAR, a Texas-sized swath of rainforest and savannah that is sandwiched between Chad, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, among other troubled neighbors. Even before the latest crisis, CAR was “worse than a failed state,” according to the International Crisis Group. Now, after two-and-a-half years of turmoil stemming from the Seleka coup, the country is de facto partitioned: anti-Balaka in the southwest and former Seleka fighters in the northeast, where they fled after the coalition was disbanded and its leader stepped down under intense international pressure in January 2014. (They are now known as ex-Seleka, an umbrella term that refers to a smattering of armed groups lacking an organized central command.) Outside of CAR’s capital city, Bangui, virtually nothing is under government control. At least 6,000 people have been killed and 832,000 displaced — 368,000 inside the country and 464,000 abroad. About half of the country’s 4.7 million inhabitants are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance, according to the United Nations.

Now, a peacekeeping mission that was of dubious value to begin with (Francis’ trip was really brave, under those circumstances) is set to end, the government’s writ doesn’t run far beyond the capitol, and, as one of McCormick’s subjects says, “one day we will start a big war.”

That’s the real fear: a big war. In an age of international religious violence, policymakers need to make sure the bush fights of the God Wars, bloody as they are individually, don’t erupt into a regional sectarian conflict in one of the most densely populated areas on earth. It will take more than aid money to forestall this this—it will take attention, political capital, and benign religious influence. For that reason, good for the Pontiff, not only for bringing a message of peace to the CFR, but also for bringing the attention that his presence carries. Other Western leaders should take note.