Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 552

How Stable Is Iran?

In a reminder of the ethnic tensions lurking below the surface in Iran, large numbers of Azeris have taken to the streets to protest a children’s television station that broadcast a racial slur. Radio Free Europe reports:

The popular children’s program Fitilehha has been cancelled amid the controversy it caused when it aired an episode on November 6 depicting an ethnic Azeri brushing his teeth with a toilet brush.

But the outcry has continued to grow, with members of the country’s large Azeri minority staging large street protests on November 9 in the northwestern cities of Tabriz, Urmia (Orumieh), and Zanjan.

Many people overestimate Iran’s stability—they believe that it is somehow exempt from the ethnic and sectarian tensions ripping the rest of the region apart. In fact, restive minorities loom large (Azeris, Kurds, Arabs, and others make up almost half the population), and Iran is one of the multi-ethnic multi-confessional states whose implosion has been one of the principal features of world history for the last 150 years. The makeup of Iran means that the country’s leaders actually have good reason to believe that the loss of centralized power would imperil the state’s stability, and it can help explain why the mullahs hold tightly on to the theocratic basis of the state: More Iranians are Shi’a than are ethnically Persian.

We aren’t predicting a sudden collapse of the Ayatollah. But the potential for unrest is worth noting because, contrary to what some in Washington seem to expect, it would make regime change more likely to be messy and destabilizing than to be liberalizing and democratic.

Is the Saudi Oil Strategy Working?

To hear the Saudis tell it, their strategy of doing, well, nothing in the face of falling oil prices seems to be paying off. In the past OPEC has cut production when crude prices started falling, helping artificially to constrict global supply and set a market floor. But this time around Riyadh strong-armed the cartel into a different course of action: conducting business as usual. The hope was that low prices would pressure non-OPEC producers (in particular U.S. shale companies) to cut investments, which would then in turn lead to a decline in non-OPEC production, pushing prices to rebound without petrostates having to do anything.

So, how is that strategy working? In its annual energy outlook, released earlier this week, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported on “unprecedented” declines in global oil investment, and now, as Reuters reports, Saudi Arabia claims to be seeing evidence its idleness is producing results:

“Non-OPEC supply is expected to fall in 2016, only one year after the deep cuts in investment,” [said Saudi Arabia’s vice oil minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman]. “Beyond 2016, the fall in non-OPEC supply is likely to accelerate, as the cancellation and postponement of projects will start feeding into future supplies, and the impact of previous record investments on oil output starts to fade away.”

But as the WSJ notes, the IEA’s outlook also warns that oil could stay as low as $50 per barrel until the end of the decade:

In its World Energy Outlook, the International Energy Agency said “a lasting switch in OPEC production strategy in favor of securing a higher share of the oil market mix” could keep the price of Brent crude at around $50 a barrel through the end of the decade. Under a more bullish scenario, the IEA said oil could rebound to around $80 a barrel by 2020 as the oversupplied market begins to balance.

If that happens, the Saudi strategy will have to be deemed a failure. Most of OPEC’s petrostates require an oil price well above $50 per barrel in order to balance their national budgets, and the longer they run in the red, the less stable their regimes. And not every petrostate is happy waiting out the bearish market, either—Venezuela and Algeria have been outspoken with their criticisms of the OPEC strategy. Moreover, Oman’s oil minister said this week that the cartel’s inaction was “irresponsible”, adding that “[w]e are hurting, we are feeling the pain and we’re taking it like a God-driven crisis…I think we’ve created it ourselves.”

Even with investment cuts, there’s still a hefty global supply of crude. Dozens of oil tankers have taken to anchoring off the coast of Houston, physical evidence of the international glut. That’s not just an American phenomenon, either. “We’re seeing ships idling off the coast of China, Singapore, (the) Arab Gulf, and now the U.S. Gulf. It appears that the glut of supply in the global market is only getting worse”, said commodity analyst Matt Smith. Those ships are idle in large part because OPEC has been as well, and with demand looking unlikely to spike anytime in the near future, there’s little reason to expect a big resurgence in prices. It’s a bad time to be in the business of selling oil.

Russia’s Olympian Doping Scandal

Officials in Moscow are on the defensive after the World Anti-Doping Agency found widespread steroid use among top Russian athletes and recommended banning the Track & Field team from the 2016 Olympics, according to the Wall Street Journal:

The 323-page report released Monday by the independent commission described a secret doping program allegedly run for at least the past five years by Russian government officials, physicians, coaches, and track-and-field athletes to give the country a prohibited edge in international competitions. The report said Russian athletes unwilling to participate in the program faced expulsion from their team and other threats.

“It’s worse than we thought,” Dick Pound, chairman of the three-person commission that prepared the report, said at a news conference in Geneva. “We found coverups, we found destruction of samples, we found payments of money in order to conceal doping tests.”

This may seem like a sideshow—bad PR for Russia, yet largely unrelated to geopolitics. But it’s no coincidence that President Putin defended FIFA head Sepp Blatter over the summer. The tougher international investigators are on corruption and cheating, the more Russian wrongdoing they are likely to find. The U.S. should encourage more such investigations, recognizing that they make life much harder for Russian oligarchs and politicians. Investigating international rule-breakers is a more pleasant and less costly way to counter Putin’s influence than direct engagement.

Caesarism to the Supremes

The Obama administration has suffered a series of stinging legal defeats over its unilateral program for granting partial amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants. Now, it looks like the this Deferred Action for Parents of Americans program is likely headed to the Supreme Court. The Washington Post reports:

The Obama administration will ask the Supreme Court to overturn a lower court injunction that has held up a new program that potentially would shield up to 5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation. The decision to take the case to the high court comes a day after a federal appeals panel ruled against the administration, keeping the new program on hold nearly a year after President Obama announced it. […]

Administration officials said they hope the court will take the case in the spring and issue a ruling by June, which, if favorable, could allow the program to begin in the summer, with just months left in Obama’s term. Republican presidential candidates have said they would dismantle the program, adding urgency to the administration’s efforts to get it started.

We aren’t legal experts at Via Meadia, but the DAPA program has always struck us as deeply problematic—not only because we thought it was likely to further poison and polarize the immigration debate, but also because it set a dangerous precedent about the boundaries of executive power. As American Interest chairman Francis Fukuyama (who knows a thing or two about the workings of the administrative state) wrote last November, the president “is not simply exercising judgment in the implementation of a law passed by Congress” by implementing DAPA. Rather, “he is in effect making law unilaterally and flying in the face of the expressed will of the people.”

There are reasons to be sympathetic to President Obama’s efforts to overhaul America’s immigration laws. The system has been broken for decades, and political elites have proven unable or unwilling to fix it. Moreover, the presence of millions of illegal immigrants in our society is a human problem that demands a humane response. But the president is not Caesar, and he cannot unilaterally change the law on major domestic policy questions without real consequences for the health of our political system. Fixing immigration law is a job for Congress—just as reining in executive overreach is a job for the courts. Even if Congress isn’t doing its job, the courts have been doing theirs.

Will PC Spur Higher Ed Reforms?

For the past few years, Americans have been having two separate debates about higher education. The first debate is about economics and allocation of resources: Is it worth going into debt to get a college degree, especially in the liberal arts? How much should colleges be subsidized by the state and federal government? Can alternative educational models render four-year brick-and-mortar institutions irrelevant—or, at least, less central?

The second debate is about political culture: Why are students and increasingly demanding that campus administrators shield them from material that might make them uncomfortable? Why is far-left identity politics becoming increasingly dominant on campus?We may be approaching the point where these two debates converge. The student debt crisis is deepening, the payoff from the BA seems increasingly modest, and politicians are starting to talk more about alternatives to four-year universities, like apprenticeship programs. Meanwhile, the latest wave of campus political insanity seems to have reached a new intensity this week, with Yale students undertaking a collective, high-profile meltdown over, in part, Halloween costumes, and University of Missouri protesters forcing out their president and then harassing journalists who attempted to enter their “safe space.”It seems inconceivable that parents and voters watching these kinds of events unfold will not have some doubts about the wisdom of the current structure and norms of the higher education system. The University of Missouri media studies professor who called for “muscle” to expel a student journalist from the “safe space” in a widely circulated video turns out to be the author of such important academic works as “The Romanticization of Abstinence: Fan Response to Sexual Restraint in the Twilight Series.” As Dave Weigel noted on Twitter, “if I were a GOP politician arguing for cuts to liberal arts funding, I couldn’t have dreamed up Melissa Click.”In the same vein, taxpayers and parents must surely be wondering if it is wise to subsidize Yale university to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars (or more) per year when angry mobs of students, aggrieved at the university for not doing more to regulate (for example) Halloween costumes, scream things at their professors like, “it’s not about creating an intellectual space!”None of this is to say that higher education as we know it will end tomorrow. But it seems plausible that the increasingly unhinged campus political scene will make voters and parents think harder about whether the current system is spending their resources efficiently, or whether its time to make fundamental structural reforms that reduce the BA’s role as gatekeeper to elite status in America.Needless to say, this would be a good thing. The system currently in place is too expensive and too inefficient, and—on the evidence of the last few days—it is failing to achieve its most basic mission: prepare students for the real world.

Mixed US Messages in the S. China Sea

The Pentagon has been sending mixed messages about whether it recently conducted a full freedom of navigation operation or a less assertive “innocent passage” operation in the South China Sea. Reuters reports:

A U.S. official speaking to Reuters last week described the patrols as an “innocent passage” operation, but later said that had been a mistake.

Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis insisted to reporters on Wednesday that the patrol was not an “innocent passage.” Pressed further on the issue on Thursday, he declined to explicitly restate that position or elaborate.

According to Hostra University law professor Julian Ku, an “innocent passage” operation by the U.S. would implicitly recognize that “China is entitled to a 12 nm (nautical mile) territorial sea around its artificial island on Subi Reef” and thus undermine the whole point of the operation.

Far be it from us to parse out technical details about naval maneuvers. It’s the messy messaging that concerns us. After months of waffling about whether to conduct the operation at all, the White House appeared to finally have made a decision. Now, the picture looks blurry again. The whole point of sailing within twelve miles of the artificial islands was to send a clear signal, so that signal had better be clear. Even if the U.S. did in fact conduct a complete freedom of navigation operation, stories like these only make the operation less effective.Almost seven years into the current administration, you’d think the president would know how to make sure his officials are on the same page. The president and his advisors might disagree about the best course of action, but they would eventually come to work in concert. Yet that doesn’t appear to be how this administration operates.

Burundi Genocide Looming?

France has circulated a draft UN Security Council resolution amid reports that police killed a man in Burundi’s capital of Bujumbura in a “police disarmament” action. The death came after a disarmament deadline issued by the government of President Pierre Nkurunziza passed this weekend.

Nkurunziza, a former Hutu rebel leader, recently begun his third term in office in the face of stiff criticism at home and abroad. Opponents claim that he is in breach of the constitution and is abrogating an agreement that brought an end to a decade-long ethnic civil war that killed tens of thousands Burundians. International observers have been on high alert since Nkurunziza threatened that, if opposition figures did not disarm by this past weekend, they would “be considered to be enemies of Burundi and will be treated as terrorists.” The president of Burundi’s Senate sounded an even more ominous note in a recent speech to neighborhood chiefs: “You must not go into the bush because if you dare, we will not spare you. The bush is already mined and reserved for something else. You must stay at home. You will die here, at home. We shall settle everything right here, at home.”Opposition members, made up in large part by ethnic Tutsis, are said to have been stockpiling arms, with the help of neighboring Rwanda. Tutsis, who only make up around 10 percent of Burundi’s population, have been guaranteed 50 percent representation in the military, legislature, and other key institutions by the Arusha Accords of 2000, which in turn prefigured the peace agreement that brought the country’s civil war to an end in 2005. The worry is that if political instability leads to ethnic bloodletting in Burundi, the fight could spread to neighboring Rwanda, where a genocidal civil war killed 800,000 to a million people in the early 1990s.More on the French Security Council resolution from the  Times of London :

The draft UN resolution, which has been seen by the Associated Press, calls on Burundi’s government to start a dialogue “to find a consensual and nationally owned solution to the current crisis”. It also expresses the council’s intention to “consider alternative measures, including targeted sanctions” against any Burundian whose actions or words contribute to violence and impede peace efforts.

Russia and China may remain a stumbling block, however, after both countries, which have a veto on the council, expressed opposition to sanctions and reservations on interfering with the country’s affairs.“We have to realise that sanctions are not the panacea for everything,” said Liu Jieyi, Chinese ambassador.

China and Russia are clearly concerned with precedent here. But will Beijing and Moscow really end up backing Nkurunziza in the name of “sovereignty” if the situation spirals further out of control and a proper genocide gets rolling? Taking recent events in Syria as evidence, perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised.

AfD Rises to 10 Percent in Germany

The European refugee crisis is starting to take a toll on German politics. As Open Europe reports:

A new INSA poll for Bild puts Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) on a record-high 10%, while German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU/CSU alliance fell by 1.5 percentage points to 34%. The poll has Merkel’s junior coalition partner SPD on 24%, Die Linke on 11%, the Greens on 10%, and the FDP on 6%. Bild quotes the head of the INSA polling company as saying, “We are experiencing a serious mood swing due to the refugee crisis. The AfD and FDP benefit from the weakness of the [CDU/CSU].”

The flow of immigrants into Germany is expected to continue to increase—sharply—next year. If it does, we expect to see more polls like this.

That does not mean that Merkel will fall. The AfD is obviously not polling at levels that would put it in power, and Merkel has sworn not to allow the AfD to join a government she runs. And as the Economist outlines here, the traditions of postwar German government mean that the rise of AfD would in some ways strengthen Merkel’s ability to form a centrist coalition.But that doesn’t mean all will be well. 56 percent of Germans think there are too many refugees in the country already, with only a third approving of Chancellor Merkel’s handling of the crisis. And an overwhelming majority (83 percent) wants Germany to apply more pressure on its neighbors to help out with the crisis.If the German government continues to hew to a line that a majority of its people object to, and yet stays in power, it will not be a recipe for social stability—particularly if both the number of refugees and the number of people who object to the “welcome policy” continue to grow.

Officials Hedging Ahead of Climate Summit

We’re less than three weeks away from the start of the COP21 climate summit in Paris, and it seems the enormity of the task that’s now almost at hand is starting to dawn on officials. As Reuters reports, Sweden’s own environment minister is bracing for a slog when negotiators meet in France:

Negotiations to reach a climate change deal next month in Paris are likely to go down to the final moments with financing remaining one of the toughest subjects on which to reach agreement, senior Swedish officials said. […]

“A lot of ministers are not happy that the text is so full of brackets so close to the meeting,” Sweden’s Environment Minister Asa Romson told reporters late on Monday as ministers gathered for warm-up talks. […]Asked about the issue of nations promising financing and not yet delivering while developing nations hold back waiting for the cash, Romson said it was clearly “not very helpful” for negotiators when promises were not fulfilled.

Moreover, Sweden’s own chief climate negotiator conceded that talks would likely run all the way through the end of the two week conference, and while these sorts of comments may be realistic (and, judging by the general lack of progress clarifying the working draft document, they almost certainly are), they also betray a lack of confidence in and hope for the whole Paris process. Finally, these statements are a way for leaders to manage expectations: The only way anyone will be able to call whatever Paris produces a success is by deflating expectations now. Any way you slice it, leading officials don’t seem to think Paris will see meaningful success.

Greens hoping for a binding global treaty should start steeling themselves for disappointment, because such a deal just isn’t in the cards. And, with disagreements over climate financing—that is, money paid by the developed world to the world’s poorer countries to help them adapt to and mitigate climate change—already casting a shadow over negotiations, there’s a chance Paris won’t even be able to produce a non-binding agreement.For boosters of this process, it’s clear that the plan at this point is to hedge and equivocate as much as possible in the hopes of lowering the bar, so that they might have something to cheer five weeks from now.

Sultan Erdogan Acquires a New Palace

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is celebrating his party’s election victory by announcing plans to move into a sumptuous palace overlooking the Bosphorus in Istanbul. The Times of London reports:

A sumptuous palace built for the last Ottoman sultan is to become President Erdogan’s private Istanbul residence, a move that is likely to draw fierce criticism.

The Yildiz Palace, set in green parks overlooking the Bosphorus, was completed in 1880 by Sultan Abdulhamid II and comprises a residential palace and a series of buildings originally used as offices, factories and leisure areas.After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1922 it was briefly used as a casino before being handed to the ministry of culture in 1978. For the past two decades it has been open to the public as a museum but will now be refurbished and renamed the Istanbul Presidential Complex.Mr Erdogan, whose AK party secured a convincing election victory on November 1, has already attracted derision for his newly built presidential palace in the capital, Ankara, which has more than 1,000 rooms and cost $350 million.

The palace in Ankara, the Ak Saray, has four times the floor space of Versailles, and Erdogan uses it to greet foreign dignitaries with honor guards of dress-up Ottoman warriors. It was even rumored (probably falsely) to have a golden toilet. But it’s very modern; now, Erdogan will have a palace where the dress-up warriors will feel more at home.

As we’ve said before, when Erdogan wakes up in the morning, he goes to shave a Sultan in the mirror. Now, even the setting in the background will be accurate.