Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 576

Study: Democrats Moving Left Faster Than Republicans Moving Right

At least since the 2010 midterms, it’s been a liberal talking point that Republican extremism is to blame for political polarization and gridlock. In the old days, the argument goes, Republicans were a moderate party, but over the past generation the GOP has been gradually taken over by its far-right wing. Before the last GOP debate, for example, the Center for American Progress launched a “Right of Reagan” campaign to supposedly show “how the extremism of today’s Republican presidential candidates sets them apart from their conservative idol.”

But as the debates over issues like the $15 minimum wage, healthcare, and universal preschool have already shown, the Democrats have moved to the left at least as quickly as the Republicans have moved to the right. After all, Hillary Clinton has to renounce a good chunk of her husband’s positions to be competitive in the 2016 primary.Now, a paper on polarization and inequality released in August by political scientists from Princeton, Georgetown, and the University of Oregon (and highlighted this week in a Washington Post article) provides some empirical evidence that Democratic Party’s leftward drift is more pronounced than the GOP’s rightward drift, at least at the state level. The study’s overall argument is that income inequality has increased political polarization at the state level since the 1990s. But the authors find that that this happens more by moving state Democratic parties to the left than by moving state Republican parties to the right. As the Democratic Party lost power at the state level over the past 15 years, it also effectively shed its moderate wing. Centrist Democrats have increasingly lost seats to Republicans, “resulting in a more liberal Democratic party” overall. The authors find that the ideological median of Republican legislators has shifted much less.One study does not a thesis prove, but the paper is certainly interesting, and it coheres with the trends we’ve been seeing. So while Democrats from President Obama on down often give the impression that their party is moderate and in line with public opinion while Republicans have undergone a sudden jolt to the right, it may not be that simple. Our discussions about polarization need to reflect the fact that it is a bipartisan affair.

WATCH: Imam of the Holy Mosque in Mecca Fires Artillery into Yemen

The Imam of the Holy Mosque in Mecca, one of the most important religious officials in Saudi Arabia, has ceremonially fired Saudi artillery into Yemen. This YouTube video was tweeted out by Ali H. Soufan, the head of the Soufan Group, a New York-based security consultancy, earlier today:

The worst-case scenario for the Middle East is a regional sectarian war. When a prominent religious authority participates in military propaganda like this, it’s yet another sign that creeping, violent polarization could spread beyond the immediate situation in Yemen.

China Improving Its Ballistic Systems

China’s missile plans may be far more ambitious than many people realize. Last month, China paraded new long-range missiles through Beijing during its Victory Day celebration, drawing attention to its ballistic capabilities. That’s just the beginning, according to the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), which says China is planning a major ballistic shield project to frustrate the United States’ present deterrent power:

Ever since the end of the Cold War, U.S. security policy has largely assumed that only the United States would possess credible strategic ballistic missile defense capabilities with non-nuclear interceptors. This tacit assumption has been valid for the last quarter century but may not remain valid for long. Since 2010, China has been openly testing missile interceptors purportedly for BMD purposes, but also useful for anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons.

Meanwhile, the Jamestown Foundation notes that China has successfully launched several satellites in recent weeks:

While much of the media attention in September focused on the intercontinental and intermediate range missiles on display during the September 9 parade, the almost mundane regularity of space launches from Chinese satellite launch centers such as Taiyuan, Jiuquan and Xichang, herald China’s rapid expansion as a space power. The ability to launch a wide variety of satellites and spacecraft is important to China’s continued economic growth and national defense.

We’re generally skeptical of anti-missile efforts. The best example of a successful missile defense system is Israel’s Iron Dome, and it hasn’t had to contend with any particularly sophisticated projectiles. There’s a long history of promises about BMD systems such as Reagan’s infamous Star Wars, but the interception technology is difficult to develop, and often lags that of missiles themselves. Still, if FAS is saying we should take this seriously, that’s notable. And the bottom line is that China’s military is focused on technological catch-up and military expansion even while ours busies itself with polishing the Pentagon doorknobs.

What Is the Fate of Assisted Suicide?

When physician assisted suicide was legal in just four small states (Oregon, Washington, Montana, and Vermont), it made some sense to see it as an outlier in the culture wars—a laggard in society’s libertarian march on social issues like marijuana legalization and same-sex marriage. But now that assisted suicide has been legalized in California, roughly quadrupling the number of Americans who are legally permitted to kill themselves with medical help if they become terminally ill, it seems reasonable to wonder whether the practice will soon join the pantheon of “personal liberty” issues where a sea-change in public opinion quickly transforms public policy across the country.

There are clearly some good reasons for assisted suicide advocates (or, as they are euphemistically rebranding themselves, aid-in-dying advocates) to be optimistic. As David Leonhardt has noted, “the issues on which it’s easiest to predict the future of public opinion generally involve individual rights. Over time, rights—suffrage for women and blacks, job opportunities for Irish, Jews, Latinos and other ethnic minorities, marriage for interracial and same-sex couples—tend to expand in the United States.” The trend toward a more libertarian moral ethos has been central to American history, particularly since the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Walter Russell Mead has written that, like it or not, “the human movement toward less external constraint on individual freedom seems to be the essence of American life.” If the debate over assisted suicide—like the debate over same-sex marriage—comes to be seen as pitting the individual autonomy of a marginalized group of people against traditional notions of order and morality, then advocates of the practice are likely to score victory after victory.But there is no guarantee that the debate will be framed this way. There is more than one life-and-death social issue where the trend in recent years has been toward more state regulation, rather than toward more individual autonomy, narrowly defined. The most obvious example is abortion, where public opinion has been stalemated for decades, and where pro-life forces have actually made significant state-level gains in the last several years. As we have pointed out before, one reason for this is that when it comes to abortion, the autonomy argument cuts both ways—the fetus, as well as the mother, has a plausible claim to at least some basic rights.Interestingly, the left is also increasingly interested in curtailing individual autonomy on some social issues to protect the rights of the vulnerable. Witness the adoption of “Yes Means Yes” laws for regulating campus sex in liberal state legislatures across the country (including California’s). In our view, such laws are deeply misguided, but, like abortion restrictions, they reflect a sense that a libertarian free-for-all can sometimes increase the liberty of some people while infringing on the rights of others.The expansion of assisted suicide in the United States can probably only be arrested if its opponents successfully seize on the rights-based arguments that have proven so powerful in contemporary social debates. This would mean showing that while an assisted suicide regime superficially expands personal freedom, the net effect is insidiously to encroach on important liberties in ways that are more gradual and harder to detect. There is no shortage of evidence to make such arguments: Even with safeguards, assisted suicide regimes reshape the incentives for people who are sick and suffering, creating personal, emotional, and financial inducements for them to kill themselves. Moreover, unlike same-sex marriage, where opponents of that trend have been unsuccessful in pointing to slippery-slope consequences, there already exist right now European states that have expanded the practice of assisted suicide beyond adults with terminal illnesses. In Belgium, for example, dozens of people are euthanized each year for psychological conditions, and the country legalized the assisted killing of terminally ill children as well. So suicide opponents could argue that theirs is actually the side of individual rights, in that they are trying to prevent vulnerable people from being pressured or coerced into giving up the most important right of all.It’s too early, in other words, to tell how the assisted suicide debate will play out. California could be the last state to legalize the practice, or one of the first, as it was in the same-sex marriage revolution. But it seems more likely that the assisted suicide debate could follow the same trajectory that has defined the fights about abortion and “Yes Means Yes”, where both sides can claim the mantle of protecting individual rights—namely, ongoing debate and gridlock, with no clear winner anytime soon.

“Witnesses of Higher Oil Prices”

Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin drew the world’s attention with his speech at the UN General Assembly in New York. To most Russia-watchers, the speech was a continuation of his confrontational performance in 2007, when he lobbed a litany of accusation and grievances at the United States and its NATO allies at the Munich Security Conference.

Though in his UN speech Putin did make verbal gestures towards the creation of alliances against the threat of global terrorism—patterned on the kinds of pacts made to fight the Nazis—Russia’s actions right after the speech, like proceeding to fly sorties without giving more than an hour notice to the United States and its allies, betrayed his contempt for cooperation. And though the Kremlin still describes its operation as being in defense of a government that has asked for its help, the repeated violations of Turkish airspace by Russian fighter jets, and yesterday’s showy firing of cruise missiles from the Caspian Sea, all are meant to highlight Russian might, and to signal that Russia is not to be trifled with.I have argued before that the aggressiveness of the Russian authorities is directly linked to oil prices. This is a pattern typical of many petrostates. Studies have shown that petrostates tend to become more violent and start conflicts when oil prices rise sharply. On average if the price of oil is above the threshold of $77 per barrel (in 2008 dollars), petrostates become 30% more aggressive than non-exporters. And when oil dips below $33 per barrel, petrostates tend to be even more peace-loving than ordinary countries. Theories abound explaining the correlation: high oil prices insulate petrostates’ elites from the consequences of foreign misadventures by giving them the means to buy the loyalty of domestic constituencies should something go wrong. Oil money also helps fund the military, giving the elites the tools to pursue their ambitions abroad.During the recent oil price peak of 2008, Bolivian President Evo Morales and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez expelled their U.S. ambassadors, Venezuela mobilized for war with Colombia, and Iran backed Hamas attacks against Israel. During the sharp rise in oil prices in 1970 and 1980, Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, and Libya made repeated incursions into Chad.For its part, Russia has behaved just like any other petrostate. In the early 2000s, when the oil price was about $25 per barrel, Putin sought to cooperate with the West, even going so far as to speculate on the possibility of Russia eventually joining NATO. In 2002, when the price for a barrel of Urals crude was about $20 per barrel, in his address to the Federal Assembly, Putin spoke about prioritizing Russia’s European integration and about taking steps towards creating a common economic space with the EU. In 2014, when oil prices reached $110, Putin invaded Ukraine to punish it for an attempt to create the same common economic space with the EU. The unprecedentedly aggressive Munich speech was delivered in a period of sustained growth in oil prices—a period described by Russian nationalists as “Russia getting up off its knees”.The above theory, however, does not explain why the Russian leadership continues to behave aggressively and delivers Munich-style speeches under currently falling and volatile oil prices (~$40–50 per barrel in August-October 2015). One possibility is that Russia’s behavior on the world stage is a function of both current oil prices and expected oil prices. As Vladislav Inozemtsev recently wrote, “Russia’s government has realized that although the current crisis is longer than in 2008, the outcome will be the same. If in 2009 oil prices jumped back in eight months, today they will bounce back within three years.”If you pay attention to what they say when discussing economic matters, Putin and his top advisors are simply obsessed with the idea that oil prices will bounce back in the near future. Recently, LUKOIL vice president Leonid Fedun predicted that already in 2016, oil prices will return to the levels of $100 per barrel. The president of Rosneft and a known member of Putin’s closest circles Igor Sechin is similarly optimistic. Due to this oil price obsession, Russian politician Ivan Starikov likened the Russian leadership a religious order. In Starikov’s own words:

The Russian government, which chose the tactics of budget expense optimization without offering any (even short term) efficient measures to revive the economic growth, is a sect of ‘Witnesses of Higher Oil Prices’. They even dropped a three-year fiscal plans in favor of a one-year program for the year of 2016 by literally justifying such move with volatility of the hydrocarbons prices.

Such semi-religious faith is one of the regular excuses the Kremlin uses for persistently postponing economic reforms that are vital for Russia, and that are long overdue. The reforms aren’t needed, the reasoning goes; one just has to endure until the end of the oil price crisis.

However, the expectations of the future growth of oil prices held by Russian officials and businessmen (and, let’s be honest, mostly by them alone) could be based on something beyond their quasi-religious conviction. It is possible that such expectations also rely on their more informed understanding of the nature and long-term goals of the Russian military adventure that has just kicked off in Syria. Andrei Illarionov, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, did not rule out that the possible result of Russian military operations may be not so much the defeat of Islamic terrorists as the destabilization of the Middle East, which might eventually lead to an increase in world oil prices. (Andrew Critchlow from The Telegraph points out that similar considerations made Russia engage in Afghanistan back in 1979.)Some analysts stress that it seems counter-intuitive for Russia to back Assad—a Shi’a Muslim—in the conflict, given that Russia’s own Muslim population is almost exclusively Sunni and could get needlessly antagonized by the move. Yet if one of the Kremlin’s goals in Syria includes imposing costs on an increasingly overstretched Saudi Arabia—which supports the Sunnis in the conflict and currently is stubbornly holding oil prices down—that risk may be worth bearing. A meeting between Russian and Saudi officials to discuss energy prices is apparently scheduled for the end of the month. Could some kind of frank discussion ensue?This is of course all just a theory, and a difficult one to prove at that. Additionally, it’s all too easy to ascribe tactical genius to an actor who is merely improvising and having a temporary good run of luck. Is the Kremlin really seeing all the angles so well? But it’s an interesting model to think about, and if it is true, it holds an important caveat for policymakers: if Russia gets its way and oil prices jump in the near term, you should not expect a satisfied Vladimir Putin to seek to transform his country into a status quo power. On the contrary.

Iran Nixes Further Talks with U.S.

Lucy takes the football away, again: Iran’s Supreme Leader has reportedly banned any further talks with the United States. Politico has the story:

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei on Wednesday banned his country from any more negotiations with the United States, less than three months after Iran and six world powers reached a landmark agreement on Tehran’s nuclear program.

“There is a reason for our objection to negotiations with the U.S.; the U.S. engagement in talks with Iran means infiltration. They want to pave the way to impose themselves,” Khamenei was quoted as saying during a speech to Navy commanders from the hard-line Revolutionary Guards, according to the IRNA state news agency.

If this is a real statement of policy and not just rhetoric for the home folks, this is not good news for Secretary Kerry and President Obama. It would suggest that despite the nuclear deal, there’s no new relationship with Iran in sight. And it probably reflects Iran’s view that with the gains of the nuke deal pocketed, and the Russia alliance working brilliantly to limit U.S. options in Syria and Iraq, there’s not much to talk to the Americans about anyway.

Gallup Loses the Horse Race

Gallup Inc., the prestigious polling firm that has closely tracked presidential elections since 1935, has told Politico that it will not conduct any horse race polls during the 2016 presidential primary, and that it will not commit to tracking the general election, either. The organization, which was embarrassed after predicting a Romney victory in the 2012 election, says that accurate polling is increasingly difficult at a time when more people communicate through the internet and cell phones rather than through land lines. Horse race polling is important this primary season because it is used to determine which candidates qualify for debates, but media organizations (like NBC, WSJ, and FOX), rather than major polling firms, are conducting the bulk of these surveys.

We’re happy that Gallup is dropping the horse race. Every election cycle, we see lots of ink spilled on endless speculations about presidential prospects months and years out from the election. Even if we had good data, the sheer volume of this commentary, and the fact that so much of it is written so early, already makes much of it meaningless. And now here comes the oldest big firm in the business saying that the numbers themselves are flawed.

Gallup’s decision won’t stop publications from releasing stories about this or that candidate moving up or down a few points in the polls, but it is a strong illustration of the way that much of what the media presents as “serious news” and “hard news” is really infotainment. To survive the transition to the web, journalism needs to do more than develop better business models: It needs to get much smarter about what it is doing and why. Reducing horse race coverage would be a sign that publications are taking that problem more seriously—but we’re not holding our breath.

Self-Driving Cars to Hit the Market by 2020?

Mark your calendar: Five years from now, the long-awaited coming of self-driving cars to the consumer market could be upon us. So says Toyota, at least:

Toyota Motor Corp. plans to make some of its cars fully capable of self-driving on highways by around 2020, it said Tuesday, accelerating the rollout of its autonomous-drive technology and countering Silicon Valley rivals like Google Inc.

Toyota used the term “automated driving” to describe its new system, which allows vehicles to get on and off the highway and change lanes without driver input. That was a shift from its past approach, under which it preferred calling such technologies “advanced driver support.”“We were afraid that by using the term ‘automated driving,’ people would misunderstand that humans are not involved at all,” said Masahiro Iwasaki, an engineer involved in the development of the technology.

The transportation revolution is closer than you think. Google’s test cars have already logged close to two million miles, with all reported accidents ruled the fault of human drivers. The real question is when, both technically and legally, consumers can actually start buying self-driving cars. If Toyota is right, the answer is quite soon; if 2020 doesn’t sound so soon to you, consider that the average highway construction project in the U.S. takes six years to be approved. In other words, you could be relaxing on your commute to work in your new autonomous car before your local government green lights that much-needed extra lane.

And when self-driving cars do hit the market—whether its 2020 or sometime soon thereafter—the knock-on effects we can expect to see will be more transformative than many realize. Take this article in Popular Mechanics, which details five ways that self-driving cars will “upend the market.” The article discusses how autonomous vehicles will affect things like parking and insurance, but it misses a few important consequences. In the first place, we will see a fall in car sales. Services like Uber paired with self-driving cars will together reduce the number of people who need to own cars, as well as the number of cars families need to own. Traffic and infrastructure will also change: Self-driving cars will enable more rational and efficient driving, speeding up the flow of traffic and reducing need for expensive new infrastructure constructions.Autonomous vehicles will also lead to the privatization of a lot of public transportation. Why have a fleet of massively subsidized city busses when public or private vans can offer more convenient pick-ups and stops? And on longer range trips, there will be even fewer reasons for Americans outside the Northeast corridor to get on trains. Autonomous cars that let you work, sleep, and listen to music—not to mention taking you from point to point—perform much, much better than trains. Give those little suckers good Wi-Fi and comfy seats, and the age of passenger rail could come to a rapid end.When you consider all these consequences, self-driving cars can’t come soon enough.

College Debt Woes Point to Grim Future

Bad news for higher ed: The turmoil affecting the industry has those in the bond market wary of buying from certain kinds of colleges. The WSJ reports:

Moody’s Investors Service Inc. in September warned investors to expect closures at public and not-for-profit colleges to triple by 2017 from an average of five a year over the past decade, concentrated among the smallest schools. Some small schools have experienced several years of shrinking class sizes, which leaves fewer students paying for their relatively high fixed costs, and have lost market share to larger universities, Moody’s said.

Yet as many colleges and universities are eager to tap the bond market to take advantage of low interest rates, bond investors have grown wary of their debt […]“You can’t just buy bonds from your alma mater anymore, because you might end up getting the short end of the stick,” said Hugh McGuirk, head of the municipal bond team at T. Rowe Price Group Inc. He said his firm is generally avoiding small liberal-arts colleges and is sticking with schools that have national brands and strong student demand, either public or private.

The problems detailed in this article are real and important, but there’s a big one that’s not mentioned: Sooner or later, interest rates will go up generally, and that’s likely to price some colleges out of the bond market completely.

This should remind us that America is locked into an educational model, that, like our health care system, rests on foundations that drive prices up faster than inflation year by year by year. Education is important to Americans, and we do what we can to keep up, but ultimately we need to figure out how to deliver the education we need at a price we can actually pay. Sadly, it remains the case that the people who know the system best are, for the most part, less interested in helping think through and implement creative reform than in perpetuating the privileges that come with their jobs in the current, outdated system.

Saving the West

In an April 2001 letter to the editor of the Washington Post, Senator Jesse Helms, the then-firebrand conservative from North Carolina—irked by what he saw as an uppity and naive European Union—wrote that he was “heartened by the news that EU is willing to step in and fill the security void left by the United States on the Korean peninsula.” But “when precisely,” Helms continued, “did these EU leaders say that their new European Army would be ready to take up the posts of the 37,000 American troops stationed on the demilitarized zone?”

At the time, EU leaders were fretting about the Bush administration’s hard-line stance toward North Korea and voiced publicly their ambition to play mediator and peace maker. These were the days when, in some circles, it was still fashionable to talk about the era of geoeconomics replacing the “outdated paradigm” of geopolitics (Edward Luttwak had first coined the term geoeconomics and introduced the idea of the paradigm shift in 1990). Soft power was in, and hard power was seen by most European partners—and many a U.S. Democrat—as a relic of the Cold War. I recall a senior German diplomat around the time of the Helms letter arguing to me that, while armed conflict would indeed continue in the world, this would comprise “small brush fires” going forward. The real challenges ahead, he opined, would be found in commerce, and competition for resources and political influence in the world. British political scientist Mark Leonard was on this line. He authored the 2005 book Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century, contending a decade ago that “the classic 19th century idea of [military] power is coming unstuck in an interdependent, globalized world.”President Obama has never stopped drinking from this cup. During the 2012 campaign, the President mocked Mitt Romney for calling Russia a geopolitical threat (“The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back,” Obama taunted). In his recent UN General Assembly speech, our commander-in-chief sneered at Republican critics for their apparent belief “that the only strength that matters for the United States is bellicose words and shows of military force.” In separate remarks to world leaders in New York on the fight against extremism, the President contended that groups like ISIS will be destroyed not by guns, but rather “by better ideas.” Meanwhile, though, across the Atlantic, Russian aggression in Ukraine has actually been sobering Europeans. “Merkel knows Putin lies, and Putin knows she knows he lies,” a member of the German Bundestag tells me. Henrik Breitenbauch, director of the Center for Military Studies at the University of Copenhagen, says it’s finally dawning on Europeans “that geopolitics is back.” Indeed 2015 might have been the year when Europe’s holiday from history ended and EU foreign policy started growing up.Enter Europe’s migration crisis. There are several pregnancies within the EU’s current turmoil: the growth of radical Islam in the heart of Germany; the rise of the far right across the continent; the unraveling of the EU itself over the migration crisis coming on the heels of the Greek bailout turmoil. These are all very plausible. One thing appears absolutely certain though: The EU’s deepening turmoil and disarray means the next U.S. president will be dealing with a Europe whose problems and priorities are likely to be very different from ours.Over lunch in Copenhagen— I’m here for a conference with conservative members of the European parliament organised by EPP, the political umbrella group that comprises pro-Europe center-right parties from across the EU—a young German CDU politician does not conceal his alarm about the refugee crisis and the EU’s challenge. He thinks the migration crisis may well be the tipping point for the UK to opt for Brexit, and that Sweden and the Netherlands are likely to follow. But more pressingly, he worries about GermanyIn the month of September, Germany took in 200,000 asylum seekers (unofficial estimates go as high as 270,000). They come mostly from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The rate continues at 10,000 a day. My interlocutor says it’s worrisome—but not at all surprising—that Germany’s initially warm, empathetic welcome and an elated public mood inspired by doing good has already started to sour. An estimated 85 percent of the new arrivals, prominent media photos and footage of mothers and babies notwithstanding, turn out to be young men. Further, Germany’s minister of the interior Thomas de Maiziere says early assessments suggest that roughly 20 percent of the arrivals may be illiterate. This reality is dawning on people. How will Germany’s new Muslims integrate? What percentage currently hold, or will adopt in a matter of time, extremist views? Between now and Christmas the number of refugees in Germany is expected to grow to somewhere between 800,000 and 1,500,000.The tide of opinion has certainly not turned entirely. A CDU staffer tells me with considerable pride that Germany’s generosity has been wonderful for the country’s image in the world. There’s surely truth in TAI editor Adam Garfinkle’s observation:

Few people say it out loud, but it’s the image of Germans welcoming “others” on in-bound trains from the east—from Hungary, very telegenically, when I was there—that arrests their attention. What a contrast with the pictures of other Germans in an earlier time shipping “others” to the east, on out-bound trains, to places like Treblinka and Auschwitz.

How bitterly ironic it would be, if the unintended consequence of Germany’s current kindness turns out to be another cruelty to Jews? Oskar Deutsch, head of the Jewish community in Austria where, along with Sweden, tens of thousands refugees are also being taken in, has a very clear concern. Radical Islamists aside, “the hundreds of thousands of refugees from Syria or Afghanistan who are coming to Europe,” wrote Deutsch in a column recently, “were exposed while growing up to decades of anti-Semitism… Terrorism against Israel was celebrated—such as Islamic attacks on Jewish schools, synagogues and Jewish museums in the West.”

Angela Merkel has led German largesse (beaming newcomers have managed to snap a few selfies with the Chancellor and spread the image through social for millions to see). But these admirers are not German voters. Don’t be surprised if Angela Merkel—whose recent bailout of Greece was very unpopular inside Germany—is ultimately driven from power over her handling of the migration crisis. Another irony? If Mrs. Merkel, who supported this summer’s Greek bail out in order to save the European Union, goes down in history as the chief instigator of the EU’s demise.But first things first. Defense-minded Americans need to know that Europeans will likely have little time for the affairs of NATO in the foreseeable future. Nor at this point is there any appetite for a confrontation with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The EU’s participation in sanctions has been part of a Merkel miracle that will likely soon fade. Indeed, there are early indications from last week’s summit in Paris that the Europeans are heaping increased pressure on the Ukrainians to just get along with Putin.So what should a new President do to restore purpose and vitality to a flagging alliance and shore up tricky transatlantic ties? Here are five brief proposals for starters:First, don’t arrive with bluster and gratuitous muscle-flexing. Europe will be in no mood for finger-wagging-style leadership. Saber-rattling is often resented by those without sabers.Second, don’t overestimate European discontent with Obama. Yes, most in Europe have recognized that the President is feeble and feckless. But he’s still, ideologically and temperamentally, a European kind of guy.Third, don’t underestimate how badly Iraq has damaged the standing of America in Europe. The EU’s love affair with Obama faded quickly, but Europeans revere the pro-business realism of Bush 41, not the neoconservatism of Bush 43.Fourth don’t expect that the EU to be waiting for an American sheriff to round up its European posse to start restoring world order. In the 1990s, we said, “NATO, out of area or out of business.” The new tag line needs to be, “NATO at home, can’t live without it.” It’s essential we get back to basics with our European allies, and that’s in the first instance defense of the European order that Putin is seriously threatening.Finally, don’t arrive with schadenfreude and gloat about European disunity and dysfunction. Forget European smugness (we want them to overlook ours, after all). If there are ways we can help Europe with its internal problems, let’s do so. We need a stable, prosperous partner—and if we want to lead, someone has to want to follow us.