Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 547

Why Did France Pass on NATO?

In his address to a special joint session of the French parliament yesterday, President François Hollande took the unprecedented step of invoking Article 42.7 of the EU treaty. The article states that all EU member countries have “an obligation of aid and assistance by all the means in their power, in accordance with Article 51 of the United Nations Charter” to any fellow member state that is the “victim of armed aggression.” The little-known clause was apparently written into the treaty at the behest of Greece, which wanted additional safety guarantees in case it went to war with fellow NATO-member Turkey. Experts claim it has not been invoked since the treaty went into force.

So why is France invoking Article 42.7 rather than reaching for NATO’s own Article 5? The WSJ has a partial explanation:

French officials have said they don’t want to invoke the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s mutual-defense clause, arguing the current U.S.-led coalition fighting Islamic State is more nimble. There are also concerns that invoking the NATO treaty, which was only done once, after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks in the U.S., could serve as a propaganda boost for Islamic State.

But there might be more to it than that. After all, Paris has wanted to build up a European defense identity as an alternative to NATO since Charles de Gaulle toyed with pulling France out of the alliance in the 1960s.

On one level, the move is purely symbolic. The French know their neighbors well. They don’t really expect EU member countries to contribute large numbers of troops to any joint military endeavor. Luxembourg’s contribution to the war will be minimal, and the French almost certainly don’t think that Germany will help that much either. And anyway, France is only considering limited military action. It isn’t looking to occupy Syria, and plans to drop just a few bombs here and there. It doesn’t really need massive EU commitments to reach that goal.But there are some tangible wins to this move as well. For one, the French get to watch the Germans squirm a little—a beloved sport in Paris. But more consequentially, it allowed Hollande’s ministers to declare that France would blow past the 3 percent budget cap the EU has imposed on it. This is very shrewd—it will be very hard for the EU to disentangle domestic from military spending, allowing the French to pump up their domestic economy a fair bit in a time of crisis.Finally, by putting some distance between itself and America, the move could build up France’s credibility a bit among the disillusioned Sunnis, while also holding the door open to deeper cooperation with Russia in Syria, should the opportunity present itself.All in all, a very canny bit of maneuvering. Chapeau, M. Hollande.

Could Democrats Break Ranks on the Refugee Fight?

NPR‘s Susan Davis reports that Senator Chuck Schumer may be breaking with the White House on Syrian refugee resettlement:

Schumer: A "pause" on refugees may be necessary. Waiting to see what admin tells senators tmw in classified briefing.

— Susan Davis (@DaviSusan) November 17, 2015

After the slaughter in Paris, the Obama administration’s plan for refugee resettlement has become a flashpoint. GOP governors across the country—plus, recently, the Democratic governor of New Hampshire—have said they would not help resettle refugees in their states unless further security precautions are taken. At the same time, liberals—from pundits to the president—have derided Republicans as xenophobic monsters with an unusual level of cynicism and condescension.If Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader in waiting, does end up defecting from the liberal line on this question, that could inspire more open opposition within the president’s own party. While GOP governors don’t technically have the power to halt refugee resettlement, Congress does have the potential to make resettlement much more difficult. But even if he doesn’t come down one way or the other, Schumer’s ambivalence (and he has surely been talking to constituents and looking at polls) shows that caution about the administration’s refugee policy isn’t as confined to the anti-immigrant right, despite what many liberal commentators seem to believe.

Wall Street Won’t Abandon U.S. Shale

Fracking’s finances got a lift this week as creditors were kinder than expected to shale firms beleaguered by bargain oil prices. An “autumn credit crunch” was predicted for these companies, but, as Reuters reports, something else happened instead:

The biannual process, known in the industry as redetermination, shaved only 4 percent off bank loans to oil and gas companies, according to a Reuters analysis of loan data, surprising experts who had expected deeper cuts because of a protracted oil price rout. […]

Of the 37 U.S. oil and gas producers tracked by Reuters that hold credit lines backed by their reserves, 15 had credit reduced, seven saw an increase and 12 saw no change. Two said they expected to keep their credit unchanged and one said it expected a reduction.

Thanks to the high depletion rate of shale wells (production drops off quickly), shale companies must constantly reinvest in setting up new drilling operations and in exploring new plays. That means they need deep pools of capital, which is why many analysts have been anxiously watching Wall Street for signs of any sort of fracking abandonment. This latest round of adjustments is therefore good news for the industry.

In some ways, it’s a sign that U.S. shale is still capable of surviving in a ~$40 per barrel oil market. As Reuters notes, “The cuts were less steep than many had expected in part because banks were encouraged by producers’ hedges that locked in higher prices, their ability to cut costs during a downturn and increases in production.” It’s this ability to cut prices and otherwise innovate in tough conditions that has already been keeping these companies afloat in a period of low prices, and now it has won them some much needed capital, too.To the extent that this resilience remains true going forward it should be deeply troubling to the rest of the world’s petrostates. Saudi Arabia has led OPEC down a dangerous road, choosing to wait out American frackers in the hope that cheap prices would necessarily force non-OPEC producers to cut supplies, but shale is proving remarkably adaptable. And while these American companies continue to find financing to keep drilling, petrostates run further and further into the red. Good news for the U.S. shale industry’s financing, that is, can have global significance.

Fighting Just ISIS May Not Be Enough

President Obama’s professed desire to contain the Islamic State is unlikely to succeed without a serious effort by the West and its Muslim allies to question the ideology and steady stream of conspiracy theories that feeds Islamist terrorism. Given the global nature and regenerative capacity of Islamist movements, limited action against one group will only result in the birth of another.

The Islamic State emerged out of al-Qaeda’s ashes just as the Obama Administration was celebrating its successful efforts to locate and kill Osama bin Laden. Military action against IS, though necessary, will likely result in a new mutation, just as al-Qaeda evolved as a violent strain of political Islam preached by groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood.The West, led by the United States, won the Cold War because it confronted Communist beliefs in addition to restraining Soviet expansionism. But Western leaders—including all candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination for 2016—are reluctant to acknowledge that the West might be at war with radical Islam, out of concern for the prospect of unleashing a wave of bigotry against all Muslims.But the falsified history and simplified explanations for Muslim decline that pass for discourse among Muslims has to be debunked if the West is to deny Islamists their raison d’être. The most practical way of denying further recruits to extremist Islamist groups is to systematically question and marginalize the outmoded theology of Islamic dominance at the heart of Islamist radicalism. A campaign to reject the dogma of Islamic supremacism would find many supporters among Muslims tired of the zealotry and self-righteousness of the Islamists.An ideological struggle against radical Islam does not mean treating 1.4 billion Muslims worldwide as the West’s enemy. This huge population will not quit Islam by listening to television pundits in Europe and North America; nor will a ban on immigration prevent Western converts to radical Islamism from swelling the ranks of ISIS. Rather, it requires Muslims to examine the Islamists’ core belief that they must somehow be forcibly united, and that they have a God-given right to lead the world.Soon after the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaeda ideologue Sayf al-din al-Ansari explained that the attacks were necessary to challenge the ascendancy of Western civilization. According to him, the Islamic community “cannot move in an orbit set by another.”The Islamic State’s statement claiming responsibility for last Friday’s attacks in Paris declared that the attackers sought to “cast terror into the hearts” of the West. The attacks in France, patterned on the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India, came within 48 hours of attacks in Beirut and Baghdad, reflecting the jihadis’ global reach.Islamists target other Muslims to eliminate pluralism within Islam; causing fear and panic in Western society is part of the jihadis’ strategy to weaken and defeat Western civilization. The origins of al-Qaeda, IS, and other similar groups lie in recent Muslim history and ideology, not Western foreign policy.Unlike Europe and North America, Muslim territories did not reach their contemporary status gradually. The British and the French in the Arabic-speaking lands, the Russians in Central Asia, the Dutch in Indonesia, and the British in India and Malaya brought new ideas and technology to Muslim lands as occupiers or colonizers.Some Muslim leaders, especially in the 19th and early 20th centuries, opted to learn from and imitate the West. Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, told a peasant who asked him what Westernization meant: “It means being a better human being.” Others, however, recommended “revivalism,” or a search for lost glory through rejection of new ways and ideas.Contemporary jihadis use modern means, including the internet and state-of-the-art weapons, to impose medieval beliefs in an effort to reclaim Islam’s global pre-eminence. The Muslim Brotherhood’s Egyptian founder, Hassan al-Banna, called upon Muslims “to regain their honor and superiority” in addition to recovering “their lost lands, their usurped regions and their occupied territories.”While seeking honor or securing self-determination might be valid political objectives, the belief in the superiority of one’s community of believers only fosters fascism. Muslim countries have nosedived into turmoil, with the rise of those wanting to Islamize the modern world coming at the cost of those hoping to modernize the Muslim world.There is a huge gap between the Islamist aspiration of dominating the world and the reality of the relatively poor political, economic, and educational status of Muslims in contemporary times. Muslims comprise 22 percent of the world’s population but account for only 7 percent of its economic output.The number of new book titles published every year in Arabic, the language of 360 million, is the same as those published in Romanian, the mother tongue of only 24 million people. The annual figure for new book titles in Urdu, spoken by some 325 million South Asian Muslims, is comparable to that for Danish, spoken by some 5.6 million.Muslim leaders and intellectuals have created a narrative of victimhood to explain Muslim debility, which in turn enables extremist groups to offer extreme strategies to change the circumstances. “We are weak and poor because we were colonized by the West” is a common refrain, whereas in reality colonization became possible because Muslim empires had already been weakened by failing to adopt new technologies and modes of production.The jihadi plan for regaining Muslim pride is to challenge Western dominance by striking fear and terror in the hearts of Westerners. They are aided in their endeavor by the absence of discussion among Muslims of why all major ideas that define the contemporary world—from the joint stock company, banking, and insurance to freedom of speech—emerged in the West, or how these ideas, not just conspiracies and superior military technology, made the West ascendant in the past several centuries.While the jihadis want a clash of civilizations, most ordinary Muslims are hesitant to examine their history or analyze their community’s prospects. Universities in most of the Muslim world focus on producing doctors, engineers, and people proficient in technical disciplines. As a result, even highly educated professionals embrace conspiracy theories about al-Qaeda and ISIS being Western puppets bent on dividing Muslims. Some who do not support the extremists still see value in their ability to at least challenge the arrogant West.Military defeat alone will not rid the Muslim world of this intellectual malaise. Islamist movements use the humiliation of fellow believers as an opportunity for the mobilization and recruitment of dedicated followers. The resort to asymmetric warfare—the idea that a suicide bomber is a poor man’s F-16—has followed recent Muslim military defeats.Yasser Arafat and his al-Fatah captured the imagination of young Palestinians only after the Arab defeat and loss of the West Bank in 1967. Islamic militancy in Kashmir can be traced to India’s military victory over Pakistan in the 1971 Bangladesh War. Revenge, rather than willingness to compromise or submit to the victors, is the traditional response of Islamists to the defeat of their armies.Islamists represent a strain of revivalist thought that perceives a battle without a specific frontline and not limited in span to a few years or even decades. They think in terms of conflict spread over generations. A call for jihad against British rule in India, for example, resulted in an underground movement that began in 1830 and lasted until the 1870s, with remnants periodically surfacing well into the 20th century.Western nations, together with Muslim allies, need a winning strategy for that generational conflict. They could encourage Muslims to recognize that success in the 21st century will not come from seeking restoration of the medieval order.Jihadists are incubated in the anti-Western and anti-Semitic conversations and conspiracy theories that pervade the Muslim world. Islamists murder secularists and force many of them to leave their countries because they fear the seductive power of liberal ideas. In the first half of the 20th century, secular nationalism served as the antidote to Islamism.But nationalist autocrats bred conspiracy theories themselves while strangulating freedom of thought. Instead of ushering in a Muslim enlightenment, authoritarian secularism only strengthened anti-Semitism and the search for the hidden hand manipulating Muslim nations and depriving them of their manifest destiny. Western nations and their Muslim allies embraced Islamists, who were rather weak at the time, in the context of their efforts to contain communism.Now may be the time to reignite debate in Muslim countries about the real causes of Muslim debility. Western governments and even private organizations and individuals could help with wider circulation in native languages of material produced by Muslims who question the narrative that aids the Islamists.Books and movies could be produced reflecting the ways that Muslim decline is caused not by Westernization but by poverty and ignorance, which cannot be over-turned by recreating the 7th century or sporadic attacks on Western cities. Support could be given to anti-Islamist political parties, just as non-communist groups were helped in several vulnerable countries during the Cold War. An international network of Muslim critics of radical Islam could reiterate and refine their message.Some Muslim governments, notably the United Arab Emirates, have initiated efforts to debate and dispute the radical Islamist worldview. That effort needs to expand to include Western countries with substantial Muslim populations, as well as Muslim countries, which tend to produce disproportionately larger number of Jihadi recruits.In countries like Pakistan (deemed a Western ally) the Jihadi narrative is sustained by the government and media to help groups that advance regional strategic objectives. But it inadvertently also advances the cause of jihadis that are out of the state’s control.By refusing to identify radical Islam (not all Muslims) as the problem, Western leaders end up reinforcing the Islamist view that they are succeeding in rattling or confusing the West. A concerted ideological campaign, like the one that discredited and contained communism, run by Muslim allies would be the Islamists’ worst nightmare. It would augment military action and counter-terrorist operations against jihadi safe havens and would prevent the breeding of future jihadis.

Russia Admits It Was a Bomb

Alexander Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s intelligence services, announced today that investigators have concluded that the crash of the chartered Russian passenger plane over the Sinai several weeks ago was caused by homemade explosives. Russian President Vladimir Putin followed up the announcement with a bloody-minded speech: “[Our anti-terror campaign] must not only continue, it must be strengthened in such a way that the terrorists understand that retribution is inevitable”, he said. “We are going to look for [the terrorists] wherever they are hiding: we will find them in any place on earth and punish them.”

Evidence has been building—independently—for several weeks now that the plane was brought down by a bomb. At some point, then, it was probably going to be impossible for Putin to pretend there was any serious doubt about the cause of the crash. Still, the timing of the announcement is convenient, as it affords Russia the optics of standing firm alongside France as it continues its strikes against ISIS targets in Syria. French newspapers reported that Russia launched cruise missiles into Raqqa—ISIS’ headquarters—earlier today. And, late this morning, the Associated Press reported that a Russian ship positioned in the Mediterranean Sea has been ordered to cooperate with French military on Syria operations.For the better part of the past year, Putin has been positioning Russia as a global power which cannot be ignored. He could not be happier to have countries like France—which has a GDP 30 percent greater than Russia’s—dialing up Moscow for much-needed assistance.

Is Liberal Internationalism Taming the Chinese Dragon?

News reports have already moved on from the historic meeting earlier this month in Singapore between China’s President Xi Jinping and Taiwan’s President Ma Ying-jeou. The summit may have been notable as the first encounter between the leaders of the two countries since Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan in 1949, but it also raised questions in scope far beyond the China-Taiwan relationship. Above all, Asia watchers should be intrigued whether Xi’s presence at the meeting indicates that Chinese foreign policy finally is evolving toward adoption of more liberal norms of international behavior on questions of core national interest.

After all, it was only 19 years ago that Beijing tried to influence the first direct Taiwanese presidential election by launching ballistic missiles near the island. That came after prior missile launches in 1995 over then-leader Lee Teng-hui’s visit to Cornell University, his alma mater. The blatant attempt the following year to intimidate Taiwan’s voters not to elect Lee, a pro-independence candidate, in the first open election in the island’s history prompted Bill Clinton to send two U.S. aircraft carriers through the Taiwan Strait.The effects of this crisis set the stage for the subsequent era of Chinese foreign and security policy. To the United States and many Asian regional states, a China that in the mid-1990s had just begun its economic and military ascent suddenly appeared both threatening and diplomatically immature, and therefore a potentially uncontrolled danger. Beijing’s response to the U.S. Navy’s intervention, on the other hand, was to embark on a major military buildup, fueled by annual double-digit increases in its defense budget, designed in no small part to field weapons that could target U.S. forces operating in Asia, and thus prevent a similar humiliation from ever taking place again.Two decades and four Taiwanese presidential elections later, China’s methods have evolved dramatically. Once again, a candidate not supported by Beijing is favored to win an upcoming election, but instead of showing brute force a dramatically stronger China is using the carrot. The subtlety fits the new conditions of China-Taiwan relations since Ma came to power in Taiwan in 2008. Ma has presided over a dramatic rapprochement with the mainland, one that many observers say has reduced the threat of cross-strait conflict; others have argued that the policy foreshadows a de facto “Finlandization” of Taiwan and its eventual absorption into China. Among the milestones of Ma’s tenure has been the signing of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) to reduce trade barriers between the two and the inauguration of direct cross-strait mail service and air flights. The ECFA, in particular, has been a controversial policy, hindered in its full implementation by Taiwan’s parliament over lingering fears that it will result in the island’s economy being overwhelmed by its giant neighbor.Ma is now preparing to relinquish power, and Taiwan’s voters will go to the polls in January to elect his successor. By all estimations, Ma’s ruling KMT party will lose the election, and the traditionally more independence-minded Democratic Progressive Party’s candidate, Tsai Ing-wen, will win. Tsai has pledged not to disturb the tranquility across the Strait, toning down any comments that indicate she might reverse recent trends in relations or move to reopen the independence issue. Nonetheless, Xi and the Chinese government clearly do not want to risk the progress they have made with Taiwan and thus decided to make a startling public show of support for Ma and his party. From one perspective, then, Xi’s decision to smile and shake hands for the cameras is exactly the type of modern China that Washington hoped would emerge eventually from the Mao era. The guiding assumption of U.S. policymakers since Richard Nixon opened ties with Beijing was that, as it integrated into the global political and economic system, China would adopt the norms of liberal international behavior that underpinned the postwar system. Jimmy Carter pursued this path by derecognizing Taiwan and opening formal diplomatic relations with China, while the George H. W. Bush Administration essentially ignored the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and Bill Clinton engineered China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. This mantra was repeated as recently as September by President Obama in his Rose Garden remarks with Xi, when he stated that “the United States welcomes the rise of a China that is peaceful, stable, prosperous, and a responsible player in global affairs.”From the perspective of liberal internationalism, then, the process has been a slow one, punctuated by unfortunate moments like the 1995–96 missile firings (not to mention 1989 itself), but nonetheless proceeding in a direction that brought Xi to Singapore earlier this month to meet Ma as all but equals. This view would suggest that what is needed is greater engagement, continued summits like that between Obama and Xi, and annual high-level meetings like the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, all of which will help the ongoing evolution of China’s external behavior, and possibly its internal behavior as well.Yet there is another view of Saturday’s summit, one that calls into question China’s adoption of liberal norms and instead suggests that Beijing is simply becoming more subtle in using its strength to shape regional and international relations in its favor.Xi’s willingness to meet Ma in person, and during the run-up to the presidential election, was shocking in its boldness. It sent as strong a message as possible of China’s expectation that its voice will carry weight in Taiwan’s most important decisions. The adoption of this tactic is itself a result of the past twenty years of Chinese growth. Beijing is today far more confident of its military strength and global standing than it was in 1995. Yet at the same time, it has just as little confidence that the Taiwanese people are moving closer to the mainland—and indeed, there is abundant evidence that pro-mainland sentiment is waning in Taiwan.China has not completely given up the threat of the stick. During the administration of the last DPP President it passed the 2005 anti-secession law that pre-justifies Chinese intervention if Taiwan even calls for a referendum on independence. The law remains on the books as a warning. Backing up its implied threats with muscle, it continues to place ballistic missiles, now more than a thousand of them, across the Strait from Taiwan, and its growing amphibious and air capabilities have now rendered uncertain Taiwan’s ability successfully to defend itself. Yet Xi understands that overt threats of action against Taiwan’s independence (if not survival) would likely unify Taiwanese public opinion against the mainland. But Ma’s unpopularity and growing Taiwanese concern over the growth of Chinese influence on the island mean that a new and more direct approach is required to swing the January election in a direction favorable to Beijing.This is not a form of behavior that liberal internationalism would recognize. This is realpolitik nationalism. Xi was mainly reminding Taiwanese voters that China still has a vested interest in the outcome of the election, the more so in that Beijing does not consider Taiwan a foreign country. The meeting was no less a veiled threat for being couched in smiles and handshakes. Its directness is breathtaking, but that, too, is part of Xi Jinping’s style.And that is the main takeaway from the historic summit: Asia lives in the era of Xi Jinping. None of his predecessors would have had the audacity or confidence to pull this sort of thing off. This is his style, and it is evident in everything from his direct involvement in the territorial dispute with Japan to his dealings with Barack Obama. He is like the ego to Vladimir Putin’s id. Subtle in his use of propaganda and the media, and sensitive to the levers of global power, Xi reflects a China that is at once confident and paranoid, deeply integrated externally into the global political and economic system, but internally resistant to liberal norms and suspicious of the designs of liberal states on it. The possibility of losing Taiwan to eventual independence remains unthinkable in Beijing, and until China’s naval power can stand off U.S. power and make Taiwan’s defense highly questionable, other modalities must serve.That is not the path that liberal internationalists have predicted from their engagement with China. No Chinese language equivalent of kumbaya has yet emerged. Xi’s domestic civil society crackdown, aggressive island building campaign in the South China Sea, and now the Taiwan election intervention rather reveal a regime committed to rewriting regional norms of behavior in ways that bolster its parochial interests. China still thinks zero-sum, not win-win. The battle for China’s soul is therefore far from over, and a few diplomatic photo shoots should not avert the world’s gaze from Beijing’s evolving strategy.

President Obama’s Cynical Refugee Ploy

The governors of 26 U.S. states signaled yesterday that they will not be willing to take in any Syrian refugees, following the lead of Michigan and Alabama, which announced similar objections this past Sunday. Governor Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire became the first Democrat to voice opposition to President Obama’s plan to accept 10,000 refugees from the war in Syria in the next year. Governors of Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Washington, and Connecticut, on the other hand, came out in explicit support of the initiative.

Goodhearted liberals have reacted with handwringing to the avalanche of dissenting governors. Some have earnestly quoted relevant Bible verses about taking in the poor and the afflicted, while the usual righteous tut-tutters have engaged in their usual righteous tut-tutting. “Everybody who disagrees with my proposal is a bitter-clinging xenophobe, not to mention a racist,” is the clear implication of the President’s supporters.That there are racist xenophobes in this country is clear to anybody who has ever perused the comments section of an internet news site, or has spent too much time on Facebook and Twitter. And many of these people are spewing ugly hate about Syrian refugees in ways that appall—or should appall—anybody with an open mind and a humane spirit. That said, the refugee issue is not, despite President Obama’s rhetoric, a simple morality play featuring Wise Liberals and Racist Jacksonians. It is something more complicated and, at least as far as President Obama’s own role in the debate, a bit uglier.To see the full cynicism of the Obama approach to the refugee issue, one has only to ask President Obama’s least favorite question: Why is there a Syrian refugee crisis in the first place?Obama’s own policy decisions—allowing Assad to convert peaceful demonstrations into an increasingly ugly civil war, refusing to declare safe havens and no fly zones—were instrumental in creating the Syrian refugee crisis. This crisis is in large part the direct consequence of President Obama’s decision to stand aside and watch Syria burn. For him to try and use a derisory and symbolic program to allow 10,000 refugees into the United States in order to posture as more caring than those evil Jacksonian rednecks out in the benighted sticks is one of the most cynical, cold-blooded, and nastily divisive moves an American President has made in a long time.Moreover, many of those “benighted” people were willing to sign up for the U.S. military and go to fight ISIS in Syria to protect the refugees. Many Americans who now oppose the President’s ill-considered refugee program have long supported the use of American power to create “safe zones” in Syria so the refugees could be sheltered and fed in their own country. If President Obama seriously cared about the fate of Syria’s millions of displaced people, he would have started to organize those safe havens years ago. And if he understood the nature of America’s role in Europe, he would have known that working with the Europeans to prevent a mass refugee and humanitarian disaster was something that had to be done.Not even President Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq has been as destructive for Europe or as damaging to the Transatlantic alliance as President Obama’s hard-hearted and short-sighted Syria policy. The flood of refugees is shaking the European Union to its core, and Obama’s policy has cemented perceptions among many around the world that the United States is no longer the kind of useful ally that it once was. France didn’t even bother to invoke NATO’s Article 5 after the Paris attacks; nobody really thinks of President Obama as the man you want at your side when the chips are down.The collapse of President Obama’s Syria policy is hardly a partisan issue. He has repeatedly overruled his own national security officials, top diplomats, and advisors, many of whom have been horrified by the President’s passivity in the face of onrushing disaster. His abrupt policy switch on airstrikes left many senior Democrats who had supported his apparent determination to enforce his “red line” against Assad twisting in the wind.To think that conspicuous moral posturing and holy posing over a symbolic refugee quota could turn President Obama from the goat to the hero of the Syrian crisis is absurd. Wringing your hands while Syria turns into a hell on earth, and then taking a token number of refugees, can be called many things, but decent and wise are not among them. You don’t have to be a xenophobe or a racist or even a Republican to reject this President’s leadership on Syria policy. All you need for that is common sense and a moral compass.And it’s worse. The Obama Administration’s extreme caution about engagement in Syria led it to insist on such a thorough process of vetting potential Syrian allies that years of effort and tens of millions of dollars resulted in only a paltry handful of people being found acceptable to receive American weapons and training. The refugee vetting process won’t be nearly this thorough; it’s almost certain that the President’s program will result in settling people in the United States who could not be certified to fight for the United States in Syria. Given our gun laws, uncertified Syrians living in the United States will soon have the opportunity to get weapons that the United States government would refuse to give them in Syria. To millions of Americans, this is a double standard they can neither understand nor accept. To call people troubled by these concerns racists and xenophobes is to divide and polarize this country in ways that will cost us all dearly down the road. We have enough hate, enough radicalism, enough mutual misunderstanding and distrust between left and right in America as it is. The President is adding to that distrust, and doing it in a particularly ugly and damaging way.If President Obama really had the superior moral insight and wisdom that he believes makes him so much more humane and far-seeing than the ignorant rednecks who keep on opposing him, he would have approached the refugee issue with less arrogance and more self-awareness. It is not given to the sons (or even to the daughters) of mortals to be right about everything all the time; Presidents make mistakes, even in the Middle East. A little humility, a little acknowledgement of responsibility, a little self-reflection could go a long way.For no one, other than the Butcher Assad and the unspeakable al-Baghdadi, is as responsible for the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria as is President Obama. No one has committed more sins of omission, no one has so ruthlessly sacrificed the well-being of Syria’s people for his own ends, as the man in the White House. In all the world, only President Obama had the ability to do anything significant to prevent this catastrophe; in all the world no one turned his back so coldly and resolutely on the suffering Syrians as the man who sits in the White House today—a man who is now lecturing his fellow citizens on what he insists is their moral inferiority before his own high self-esteem.From the standpoint of American interests and of the well being of the Syrians, the primary responsibility that the United States has toward the people of Syria is not to offer asylum to something like 0.25 percent of its refugee population. The primary duty of this country was to prevent such a disaster from happening and, failing that, to support in-country safe havens and relief operations. No doubt President Obama and the unthinking press zealots who applaud his every move prefer a conversation about why ordinary Americans are racist xenophobes to one about why President Obama’s Syria policy has created an immense and still expanding disaster.The “why are Jacksonians such xenophobes?” conversation, given the way so much of the country’s media works, is the conversation we are having. It is not the conversation the country, or even the President, needs. The Syria war has not finished creating refugees, undermining regional and even global security, putting WMD in terrorist hands, or spreading the poisons of radicalism and sectarian war across the Middle East and among vulnerable Muslims in Europe and beyond. Things can and will get worse as long as American policy continues to flounder; instead of arguing about how to shelter a few thousand refugees we need to look hard at how we are failing to address the disaster that has created millions, and that continues to grow.

POTUS v. PC

As the campus anti-free speech movement grows in strength and intensity, President Obama—for the second time in three months—has emphasized the importance of free and open debate at U.S. universities. Here are some excerpts from the president’s comments in an interview with George Stephanopoulos:

And it’s interesting, you know; I’ve now got daughters who—one’s about to go to college. The other one’s going to be on her way in a few years. And then we talk about this at the dinner table. And I say to them, Listen, if you hear somebody using a racial epithet, if you hear somebody who’s anti-Semitic, if you see an injustice, I want you to speak out, and I want you to be firm and clear, and I want you to protect people who many not have voices themselves. I want you to be somebody who’s strong and sees themselves as somebody who’s looking out for the vulnerable.

But I tell them, I want you also to be able to listen. I don’t want you to think that a display of your strength is simply shutting other people up, and that part of your ability to bring about change is going to be by engagement and understanding the viewpoints and the arguments of the other side. And so when I hear, for example, folks on college campuses saying, “We’re not going to allow somebody to speak on our campus… because we disagree with their ideas or we feel threatened by their ideas,” I think that’s a recipe for dogmatism and I think you’re not going to be as effective. […]And I do worry if young people start getting trained to think that if somebody says something I don’t like, if somebody says something that hurts my feelings, that my only recourse is to shut them up, avoid them, push them away, call on a higher power to protect me from that. You know, and yes, does that put more of a burden on minority students, or gay students, or Jewish students, or others in a majority that may be blind to history and blind to their hurt? It may put a slightly higher burden on them. But you’re not going to make the kinds of deep changes in society that those students want without taking it on in a full and clear and courageous way.

These comments are quite welcome, but it’s important to note two qualifications. First, the president has yet to acknowledge the very substantial role his administration has played in fomenting the PC movement, by using federal equal protection laws to order universities to restrict due process and freedom of speech (however much it may later have walked some of those efforts back). Second, his critique of campus illiberalism is not as strong as we would would like. His remarks suggest that the only problem with shutting down opposing viewpoints is that “you’re not going to be as effective.” In fact, the problems with the authoritarian strategies that activists have been employing run much deeper than that. These strategies violate other students’ fundamental rights and they obscure the fact that much of the underlying activist agenda is quite misguided.

Still, the president was clearly not aiming his remarks at critics of campus PC. He was aiming them at the overzealous left-wing students who have been making national headlines with their illiberal tactics over the last several weeks. Political leaders can often be effective when they take on members of their own coalition, so it’s possible that the president’s remarks will have a real impact on the campus crusaders. But we’re not getting our hopes up, either.

Moscow Puts Brave Face on Grim Oil Outlook

Russia produced more crude last month than at any other time in the post-Soviet era, but its medium- and especially long-term energy outlook borders on terrifying for the Kremlin. In today’s low-price environment, higher-risk explorative projects are among the first to get axed. That’s a major problem for Russia, whose existing fields are already maturing and whose newer projects are already beleaguered by the depressive effects of Western sanctions. But as Bloomberg reports, Russia’s deputy energy minister is hoping to increase output at existing fields to offset the lack of new projects coming online in the coming years:

“We’ve got a safety cushion until 2035,” Deputy Energy Minister Kirill Molodtsov said in an interview in Moscow. “The potential for output growth at oil fields already in operation is higher than in unexplored territories.” […]

Exploration drilling is first in line when companies trim spending, according to Molodtsov. Adding wells at existing fields or using chemicals or fracturing to push out more oil provide a quicker return than tapping new territories, he said, estimating steady annual output of roughly 525 million metric tons (about 10.5 million barrels daily) through 2035 even in a conservative scenario.

But that’s almost certainly an overly sanguine expectation. Alexei Texler, a different Russian deputy energy minister, told reporters that the Kremlin was expecting that a “[p]ossible reduction may come in 2017, with a potential decline of up to 10 million tonnes”, the equivalent of a drop of 200,000 barrels per day. The International Energy Agency doesn’t think Russia can continue to squeeze these recent record-levels of oil from its existing fields for much longer, either.

Russia’s domestic economy and in large part its clout on the global stage depends on its oil and gas sales, which makes any question of flagging oil production an economic, energy, and national security concern all at once. The country’s dim prospects for keeping crude flowing in a bearish market and under Western sanctions are one of Putin’s biggest problems—the sort of thing that would keep one up at night.

Keeping the Heat on Beijing in S. China Sea

U.S. President Barack Obama landed in Manilla today ahead of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit and immediately made his way to a Philippine navy frigate to address the press. :

Shortly after Air Force One touched down in Manila, Obama boarded the Gregorio del Pilar, a Philippines navy frigate that was a U.S. Coast Guard cutter until 2011 but on Tuesday flew the flags of the two allies.

“We have a treaty obligation, an iron-clad commitment to the defense of our ally the Philippines,” he said, flanked by about two dozen U.S. and Philippines uniformed navy personnel. “My visit here underscored our shared commitment to the security of the waters of this region and to freedom of navigation.”He did not mention China but the symbolism of his visit was hard to miss: the ageing vessel is now a mainstay of the Philippine Navy, operating around the Spratly islands in the South China Sea that are claimed by both Manila and Beijing.

The Chinese have been trying to keep the South China Sea off the APEC agenda, hoping instead to have the meeting focus on economic development. Moreover, ahead of the summit, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin struck a menacingly sour note in complaining that China was barely tolerating having dozens of its islands and reefs occupied by foreign powers. “The Chinese government has the right and the ability to recover the islands and reefs illegally occupied by neighboring countries”, he said. “But we haven’t done this. We have maintained great restraint with the aim to preserve peace and stability in the South China Sea.”

Manila has particularly irked Beijing recently by successfully persuading an international arbitration tribunal to hear its maritime territorial disputes, and the Philippines scored another victory yesterday when it formalized a military aid agreement with Japan. Slowly but surely, the multilateral U.S.-backed response to Beijing in the South China Sea is starting to take real shape. Let’s hope the White House stays the course.