Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 590

China’s Army Getting Restive

President Xi Jinping’s announcement of troop reductions at last month’s 70th anniversary of the end of World War II has many soldiers in the PLA unhappy, according to a Chinese government official. “People are very worried,” he said. “A lot of good officers will lose their jobs and livelihoods. It’s going to be tough for soldiers.” Xi decided on the reductions, which amount to 13 percent of China’s fighting force, “suddenly” and with little input from anyone outside the highest commission governing the army, which the President heads.

The PLA has other reasons to be restive: Xi’s anti-corruption purge has targeted the highest levels of the military. In June, a PLA newspaper said Xi’s proposed reforms and earlier, smaller troop cuts would meet serious opposition, requiring “an assault on fortified positions” in order to change anything within the army.This unrest in the army, a body which is never perfectly under the control of the government even in calm times, should make Beijing officials a tad nervous. A coup may be unlikely, but it is “conceivable”, Sulmaan Khan argued in the March/April issue of our magazine. It’s never safe to antagonize the guys with the guns.China’s military needs to change; the revolution in military affairs is reducing the importance of boots on the ground and raising the importance of bytes on the chip. But that change is wrenching; officers and enlisted men don’t like to be laid off, and local governments hate it when bases close.President Xi does not seem fated to enjoy a quiet life in power.

Susan Brownmiller, Heretic

As author of the enormously influential book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, feminist writer and activist Susan Brownmiller has done more than almost any living person to combat the scourge of sexual violence. So when she critiques the excesses of today’s rape-crisis activists, you might think the activists would listen—that is, if today’s anti-rape movement were actually an open-minded, reality-based effort to combat a very real social problem rather than, as Christina Hoff Sommers memorably described it, “a panic where paranoia, censorship, and false accusations flourish.”

In an interview with New York magazine last week, the 80-year-old Brownmiller suggested that the campus rape movement is narrow, elitist, and “doesn’t accept reality.” Asked what advice she would give activists, Brownmiller said, “extend your focus to the larger percentage of women and girls who are in danger of being raped. They are more important than the college kids.” She also violated the well-known taboo against drawing a connection between sexual assault and the campus culture of binge drinking: “If you drink you lose your sense of judgment. Everybody knows that. You should know that when you are going into a fraternity party, something can happen.”The rape crisis crusaders contemptuously brushed Brownmiller’s views aside. Downgrading her to a “former feminist hero,” Amanda Marcotte wrote in Slate that Brownmiller is “downright victim-blame-y, sneering at girls today with their booze and their clothes and their asking-for-it,” a line echoed by writers at Salon and elsewhere. Jessica Valenti wrote in the Guardian that “the movement will go on without” outdated thinkers like Brownmiller. According to one feminist writer, Brownmiller’s views “seem to be straight from a 1970s chauvinist.”Ironically, Brownmiller’s swift exile from the shrinking tent that is third-wave feminism confirmed one of her other critiques of the current movement: that modern activists “think they are the first people to discover rape, and the problem of consent, and they are not.”

A Blow Against Cyberwar with China?

The United States and China are hard at work negotiating the early stages of a cyber warfare accord that could see both countries adopt a “no first strike” policy of attacking each others’ vital infrastructure, according to the New York Times:

While such an agreement could address attacks on power stations, banking systems, cellphone networks and hospitals, it would not, at least in its first version, protect against most of the attacks that China has been accused of conducting in the United States, including the widespread poaching of intellectual property and the theft of millions of government employees’ personal data.

The negotiations have been conducted with urgency in recent weeks, with a goal to announce an agreement when President Xi Jinping of China arrives in Washington for a state visit on Thursday. President Obama hinted at the negotiations on Wednesday, when he told the Business Roundtable that the rising number of cyberattacks would “probably be one of the biggest topics” of the summit meeting, and that his goal was to see “if we and the Chinese are able to coalesce around a process for negotiations” that would ultimately “bring a lot of other countries along.”

The putative deal may not be fully ready for an unveil during President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington this week. It seeks to have both countries publicly embrace the cyber code of conduct developed by a working group at the United Nations and published last month, and it would be only aimed at preventing a first strike of a certain kind. Many security analysts fear cyber warfare could create serious electrical outages and take down cell towers, leading to significant economic damage, and that’s the danger this accord seeks to forestall. But so far, hackers have focused on American businesses’ intellectual property and government databases. If the Times‘ description is accurate, this deal would do little to stop those attacks.

Last week, we noted that President Obama has repeatedly talked tough about cybersecurity, threatening sanctions against Chinese businesses that he promised would “get their attention.” If he inks this accord, we hope President Obama remembers that a “no first strike” agreement is just the beginning of a complete cybersecurity strategy.

VW: Not the First Green Cheat, and Won’t Be the Last

Volkswagen just got caught cheating by the U.S. EPA, and the scope of the allegations levied against the German car manufacturer—and the penalties it now faces—are virtually unprecedented. VW is accused of rigging software in its “clean diesel” vehicles to game emissions tests. “Put simply, these cars contained software that turns off emissions controls when driving normally and turns them on when the car is undergoing an emissions test”, EPA enforcement officer Cynthia Giles explained. The U.S. government can levy fines of up to $37,500 for each vehicle sold that wasn’t in compliance with emissions regulations, and with nearly 500,000 of these diesel vehicles on the road, that could add up to a whopping $18 billion.

But that’s not the only cost of VW’s rule-breaking. As Bloomberg reports, the company’s stock has taken a nosedive in trading today:

Volkswagen AG lost almost a quarter of its market value after it admitted to cheating on U.S. air pollution tests for years, putting pressure on Chief Executive Officer Martin Winterkorn to repair the reputation of the world’s biggest carmaker.

Top supervisory board members will convene on Wednesday, according to two people with knowledge of the plans, who asked not to be named because the meeting is private. Volkswagen plunged as much as 23 percent to 125.40 euros in Frankfurt, wiping out about 15.6 billion euros ($17.6 billion) in market value. The stock closed at 132.2 euros, its lowest in more than three years.

Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn apologized today, saying “I personally am deeply sorry that we have broken the trust of our customers and the public.” VW has moved to stop selling 2015 models of its diesel vehicles, pending an external investigation of the issue.

This isn’t the first time a European automaker has gotten in trouble for dubious approaches to emissions testing, though it’s certainly the most brazen example. We noted last December that Europe’s auto industry was fudging its emission numbers by testing vehicles in very specific (and quite unusual) conditions, using special engine lubricants, tires designed specifically for testing, taped-up panels, stripped-down interiors, and high-temperature conditions in order to boost mileage. The European Commission moved to introduce saner testing standards by September 2017, but the bloc’s auto industry lobbying group pushed back, saying it couldn’t “cannot envisage vehicle testing beginning before 1 January 2020.”Carmakers bombard consumers with marketing about how “clean” and “eco” their products are, but incidents like VW’s software cheating are a reminder that the auto industry has no abiding love for the green ideals it’s peddling. Volkswagen will pay dearly for its transgression, but you can be sure there are many more companies out there—both inside and out of the auto industry—that are taking advantage of the average consumer’s enjoyment of feeling environmentally friendly, without actually delivering the benefits promised.

Low Interest Rates Mask the Effects of Job-Killing Policies

Seven years of relaxed monetary policies have caused U.S. household wealth to soar, but for most Americans this tremendous accumulation of wealth has not translated into robust wage growth. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The net worth of U.S. households and nonprofit organizations—the value of homes, stocks, bonds and other assets minus all mortgages, debts and other liabilities—climbed by $695 billion to $85.7 trillion, according to a Federal Reserve report released Friday. […]

The buildup in wealth, though, has done little to boost the overall economy.Economists had hoped rising worth in U.S. households could induce—through what are known as wealth effects—enough spending and confidence to bring about a more robust economic recovery. That logic helped underpin the Fed’s decisions to hold interest rates near zero for nearly the past seven years, and to engage in repeated rounds of asset purchases, known as quantitative easing.But while the value of U.S. assets has shot upward in recent years—stocks have reached new highs and home values have regained much of what was lost in the housing bubble’s collapse—economic growth has been sluggish, and many households have seen little of this wealth flow into their paychecks.

In other words, while the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing has not led to the consumer price inflation that many feared, it has led to asset price inflation. (The WSJ concludes by noting, ominously, that wealth-to-GDP ratios have only come close to their current level of 4.8 during notorious bubbles). Soaring household wealth levels aren’t a bad thing per se, but job growth, not asset price inflation, is the best way to promote economic growth.

To grow the economy, cheap interest rates are not going to work as well as reforms that make business formation and job creation more attractive. Yet Democrats these days have ever-lengthening lists of job-killing policies they want to enact, from tighter environmental regulations to dramatic minimum wage increases (especially in cities where unemployment is high) to tax increases. Paradoxically, that leaves liberals cheerleading for Fed policies that increase inequality and concentrate wealth because only ultra low rates (or truly massive deficits, which can’t be rammed through a GOP Congress) can mask the effect of left-wing microeconomic policies on the economy as a whole.There is no shortage of capital today, but there is a dearth of attractive opportunities to invest that capital in ways that will stimulate employment. People who actually care about the living standard of the American people need to be thinking long and hard about the kinds of policy changes and innovations at the local, state, and federal levels that would rejuvenate the American labor market by making it easier and more rewarding to create new jobs.

Russia to Build Belarusian Base

Russia has announced it will build an air base in Belarus, the first to be placed in the country since the Soviet Union fell. The statement comes after a Friday meeting between Vladamir Putin and the Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, who previously had been reluctant to agree to the base.

Belarus borders two of the three Baltic NATO states, as well as Poland, all four of which have already been demanding a stronger NATO presence in the area to counter Moscow. In recent years, Russia has flown frequent missions over international airspace close to the Baltics in what some view as a test of NATO’s resolve. For a case that NATO should answer calls coming from Eastern Europe for a bigger presence, which will likely intensify after the latest Russian move, see Alan W. Dowd’s piece at TAI, “Answering the Baltic’s S.O.S.” A taste:

If Putin follows his Ukraine playbook and covertly violates the sovereignty of the Baltics, he will force the alliance to either blink or fire back. Neither alternative leads to a happy outcome. The former means NATO is neutralized and neutered; the latter means war.

One way to prevent that scenario is to base permanent NATO assets where they are most needed: on the territory of NATO’s most-at-risk members. That’s what the alliance did during the Cold War, and it kept the peace—as it will today. This is the best insurance against Putin. The goal here is not to start a war but quite the opposite: to prevent what Churchill called “temptations to a trial of strength.”

Read the whole thing.

Tsipras Wins Again as Greek Politics Tilts European

Amid record low turnout (56.6 percent), Alexis Tsipras once again won at the polls in Greece, with his Syriza coalition gathering 35.46 percent of the vote, compared to the 28.1 percent won by the center-right New Democracy. Tsipras immediately looked to form a government with the far-right Independent Greeks, his coalition partner since January.

The biggest loser in the election (apart from the group of pollsters who had been calling a tight race between Syriza and New Democracy for weeks now) was the far-left splinter wing of Syriza, which formed the new Popular Unity party. Popular Unity was calling for a return to the drachma, but it failed to clear the 3 percent threshold necessary to enter parliament. “My conditions are that we remain in Europe and nothing else, because under no circumstances can we exit”, one voter said. Another: “I voted, but with a heavy heart. The bailout is here and now we are only looking for a manager to implement it.”

The miserable performance by the left breakaway faction may be the biggest news of the election, and, as the quote above suggests, it means that the Greeks in fact prefer Tsipras’ policy of symbolic resistance to well…actual resistance. The left wanted Greece to dump the euro and strike out on its own, but Tsipras’ approach is to huff and puff and say how much he hates terms imposed by the troika— and then go along with them. He might sabotage and soften the bailout deal to the extent that he can, but he did not actually refuse it in the end. That seems to represent the attitude of many Greeks at this point. It’s not a very smart or constructive approach, and Greece would be in much better shape if Syriza hadn’t wasted most of 2015 fighting the EU even as conditions got worse and the terms got harsher. But that’s ultimately something that the Greeks have to decide for themselves.Syriza, then, is essentially replacing PASOK as the party of the Greek democratic left: It offers lots of symbolic socialism, anti-capitalist rhetoric, and grandstanding, but, in the end, it is part of the European system rather than part of the opposition to the system. That means that, for the moment, Greek politics is looking fairly normal from the EU point of view: The two biggest parties are center-left and center-right. There are, of course, radical factions, with the biggest threat to the system coming from Golden Dawn, the anti-immigrant party of radical nationalism. And Greek politics remains edgier than the politics of most European nations, a reflection of the traditions and divisions of Greek political history as well as the dire circumstances facing the country. But in the wake of Syriza’s capitulation to Brussels and the results of the snap election, Greek politics is looking more, not less, European.

70 New U.S.-Trained Fighters Enter Syria—And Are Detained

“Good” news: there are once again more than five U.S. trained fighters operating in Syria. A second batch of graduates—another 70 in total—from the much-ridiculed $500 million training program has made its way across the Turkish border near Aleppo in an armed convoy, with the U.S. providing air cover. The bad news, however, is that they were immediately detained by the Islamist Shamiya Front, a Turkish-backed anti-ISIS rebel outfit. A Shamiya Front spokesman announced the outfit was only briefly questioned, but a spokesman for the U.S.-trained outfit said the situation remained tense.

The training program follies illustrate that the failures of the Obama Administration in foreign policy haven’t been the product of some nefarious scheme but rather the inevitable result of the Administration’s making it up as it goes along. Loudly-announced plans to spend half a billion to arm and train rebels foundered on the grounds that there were few moderate rebels left to train, and even fewer cared to join a program that wasn’t fighting Assad. After the program failed to turn out more than 60 men (some of whom were captured in July), it was due to be shut down. Now, apparently, it’s still on—and men are still being captured.But at least in this matter of the “30th Division”, there’s some dark comedy to be had. Elsewhere, our clumsy improvisation could lead to much greater trouble. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter began direct talks with his Russian counterpart Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu last Friday, and while the goal of the talks was initially limited to ensuring that Russian and U.S. forces did not attack each other by mistake in Syria, Obama Administration officials openly hope they would eventually draw Russia into a political dialogue over the future of the country. We hope someone somewhere has a better-thought-out plan for those talks than anyone apparently did for the Syria training program.

Beware Nation Builders

“Goodness gracious. I don’t think any time we’ve ever gone anywhere and acted in the capacity of a policeman that we’ve been overly popular.”

—Lieutenant General Edward A. Craig, USMC (ret.)

“Where troops have been quartered, brambles and thorns spring up.”

—Lao Tzu

In the initial heady weeks of the April 2003 invasion of Iraq, a Washington Post correspondent embedded with a U.S. Army company in Baghdad asked the soldiers if they thought the Iraqi people wanted them to stay. “Oh yeah”, stated a twenty-year-old specialist from Louisiana. A staff sergeant answered the same question, “Maybe 10 percent are hostile. About 50 percent friendly. And 40 percent are indifferent.” The journalist then interviewed an Iraqi a block away who had his own estimation. “We refuse the occupation—not 100 percent, but 1,000 percent.”

The Invaded: How Latin Americans and Their Allies Fought and Ended U.S. Occupations

Alan McPhersonOxford University Press, 2014, 416 pp., $47.95

These Army imperial grunts were not the only ones with an optimistic sense of the American campaign. In September 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney told Tim Russert on Meet the Press, “I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators.” According to at least one account, the CIA was so confident the American forces would be embraced that one CIA agent suggested sneaking hundreds of small American flags into the country for the joyful Iraqis to wave at their liberators. We learned at the cost of enormous blood and treasure that much of the initial goodwill towards the American presence was replaced by resentment and mistrust. Polls throughout the war placed Iraqis’ desire to end the occupation at 75 percent.

Jump back almost a century to 1911 when a U.S. major general spying in Mexico reported on rumors of an American invasion. “Mexicans of the better classes did not hesitate to inform American residents that not a ‘Gringo’ would escape assassination.” When U.S. forces occupied the coastal city of Veracruz in 1914 for seven months, riots broke out across Mexico. “Eggs, rocks, and tomatoes rained on the main U.S. citizens who fled.” These two cases of American incursions into Iraq and Mexico are a reminder of the age-old truism that foreign occupations can be a lot like weekend guests who overstay their visit: Hospitality can quickly turn to resentment.In his timely and indispensible book, The Invaded: How Latin Americans and Their Allies Fought and Ended U.S. Occupations, young diplomatic historian Alan McPherson reminds his readers that some of America’s first experiences with nation-building were in Central America and the Caribbean in the first three decades of the 20th century. Equally, if not more, important for McPherson is that these now-mostly-forgotten Banana War episodes were also some of the “first laboratories for resisting US power” both in the occupied countries and on the American home front. McPherson reckons that, depending on how we define the term “intervention”, there were anywhere between 40 to 6,000 of them south of the Rio Grande between the Civil War and the 1930s. His book examines the three longest and most complicated, which started out as limited interventions but turned into protracted occupations with armed opposition: Nicaragua (1912-1933); Haiti (1915-1934); and the Dominican Republic (1916-1924).If nothing else, The Invaded is a bitter reminder of that nation-building maxim that we would have done well to have kept in mind before invading Iraq, and that should be kept in mind when future military actions are proposed: if you lie down with mangy dogs, you stand up with fleas. But to see why, the history of the Banana Wars that McPherson offers is crucial.At its respective height, each entailed a significant number (2,000-5,000) of mostly Marine Corps troops, but none of them were as large as the occupations of the Philippines after 1898, or later Iraq and Vietnam. U.S. officers and diplomats took over key functions of the state—less so in Nicaragua, more so in Haiti, and completely in the Dominican Republic, where the Americans led a military government. Washington’s costs were also very low, with less than 80 killed while 5,000 fell on the resisters’ side. The $100 million price tag for all three occupations far outweighed any profit from the investments they might have protected given that in 1913 the three countries comprised less than 1 percent of U.S. investments in the Caribbean Basin.A meticulous scholar who spent ten years examining documents in five countries and three languages, McPherson shows how Dominican and Haitian insurrections against American rule failed, while Nicaragua’s resistance, under the redoubtable guerrilla leader Augusto Sandino, outlasted the American presence. McPherson’s novel argument is that those who resisted were not motivated primarily by ethereal nationalism but more by local and regional political and social factors. As most studies of occupations by definition focus on the occupier, McPherson refreshingly tells much of the story through the “eyes of the invaded.”McPherson acknowledges that geostrategic motivations likely justified the initial U.S. interventions in its notorious backyard. With war percolating in Europe, the U.S. Navy wanted to control the key shipping passages in the basin, including those to the newly-opened Panama Canal. Washington bought Mexican oil and Chilean nitrates, for example, so keeping European powers out of neighboring countries was critical. Yet, McPherson contends, broader U.S. visions of political and cultural transformation eventually eclipsed these narrow national security imperatives. He argues, moreover, that this messianic urge to reshape Latin America’s political behavior created its own “unstoppable momentum”, embroiling the region in chaos; seven Haitian presidents were assassinated or overthrown, for example, in just four years of civil war.Contrary to what we might assume about the nature of these wars, in some cases the occupations were marked by their lack of military and political violence. McPherson describes, for example, how the first decade of the American occupation of Nicaragua was “largely bloodless.” In fact, between 1913–22 only about a hundred marines were stationed in the country in what today’s parlance would call a light footprint. One marine intelligence captain recalled, “there was no friction between the marines and the population other than small fights in canteens and an occasional rub between individual marines and police.” A navy captain wrote that there was “nothing for [marines] to do in town except to visit the numerous cantinas where prostitutes and vile liquor are cheaply obtainable.”As the three invasions turned into much more expansive campaigns, the frustrated American occupiers found their dreams of democracy and stability were up against entrenched partisanship, corruption, strict social hierarchies, and disrespect for the rule of law and a free press. One U.S. customs administrator privately bemoaned to a superior, “all ideas relative to assisting or advising [Haitians] in running their own government, which Ideas I was inclined to favor at first, I now regard as entirely hopeless. There is not a man in the Government who is concerned with anything except his private gain and finding places for his friends. Force and force alone can control the situation.” Or as marine company commander William Upshur described in a letter to his mother in March 1916, “The natives down here are all bad, and irresponsible and we are having trouble with them constantly.”McPherson reminds us that, contrary to how the story is sometimes told even today, a good number of locals—elite and otherwise—initially welcomed the interventions or even believed the occupations were preferable to the chaos that appeared endemic to their societies. There was also a good deal of resignation. One Haitian palace guard recalled how, when he saw the USS Washington and the flotilla of launches unloading troops, “Everyone fled. Me too. You only had to see them, with their weaponry, their massive, menacing appearance, to understand both that they came to do harm to our country and that resistance was futile.”In what might be a harbinger of contemporary counterinsurgency scholar David Kilkullen’s thesis about the “accidental guerrilla”, numerous insurrections of varying seriousness rose to challenge the American rule or that of its domestic allies. Augusto Sandino is easily the most-remembered insurgent allied against these American occupations. In the late 1920s, Sandino’s group refused to lay down its arms and sign the U.S.-brokered peace accord between the feuding Nicaraguan Liberal and Conservative political factions. Likely born in 1895 as the illegitimate product of a middle class coffee landowner and his Indian maid, the young Sandino traveled across Central America during the 1920s “toiling at working class jobs.” McPherson thinks his most ideologically significant experience was in 1923 in the oil fields of Veracruz and Tampico—sort of the Mexican variants of Louisiana— where he “imbibed a variety of intellectual and spiritual traditions”, even embracing yoga and vegetarianism. Interestingly, it was anarcho-syndicalism, more prominent than Marxism in Mexico at the time, that most influenced the young Nicaraguan. Sandino even borrowed syndicalism’s colors—red and black—for his flag in his campaign against the U.S. marines and their Nicaraguan lackeys.The Sandinistas called the U.S. marines “blonde beasts”, “degenerate pirates”, “morphine addicts”, and “the enemy of our race and language”, among other epithets. Sandino’s seal, used on his forged coins and letters, featured a Sandinista beheading a marine. One Sandinista poem celebrating a decapitation sarcastically referred to “Poor Mister Bruce,” a name for Lieutenant Arnold Bruce. “They stuck a wire in his nose and strung him up on the main road, so everyone could see him”, proudly recalled Sandinista fighter Calitxto “Muerte” Tercero.The Invaded shows the reader how new technologies and media allowed guerrilla foes to fight back in the court of public opinion. In Nicaragua, Sandino’s rebellion hoped to spark a “never seen before explosion of global publicity.” Like ISIS today, Sandino was fully aware of the propagandistic value of these mediums. “We learned the tremendous value of publicity in terms of world opinion,” he wrote. An acolyte of the guerrilla leader explained it this way, “every time there is a battle, every time marines are killed, the attention of the United States and the world is drawn to what is going on in Nicaragua.”McPherson believes these American occupations and the propaganda campaigns of the invaded sparked international solidarity movements that were as central to the struggle as the armed insurgents themselves. As one Dominican activist told a group in New York City, “On the international scene there has now appeared a new actor—solidarity. No nation, no people, can realize by itself its destiny.” Indeed, the progressive movement, the surge in higher education, and the vast improvements in communications and transportation all contributed to a proliferation of networks comprised of activists, writers, scholars, and religious leaders committed to ending the occupations—something they helped do sooner than otherwise.Haiti was a particular concern for many African American leaders, ranging from communists such as Cecil Briggs of the African Black Brotherhood to educator Robert Moton of the Tuskegee Institute. Feminists too were opposed, like those who in 1919 founded the International Council of Women of the Darker Races (ICDWAR) to investigate the plight of Haitian women and children. Visitors to the “black republic” included some of the “brightest lights” of the Harlem Renaissance and 1920s civil rights, like Langston Hughes, William Scott, and Zora Neale Hurston. Naval reservist physician James Blackwood wrote to the U.S. chief of the Haitian Gendarmerie to protest abuse. “I am an American citizen, though of colored race, which means that I am little, or not at all regarded at home; yet I cannot help to be loyal to the mother country.” The NAACP likely contributed the most to making Haiti a domestic American cause. From 1915 onwards, its co-founder, W.E.B. DuBois—whose grandfather was Haitian—railed against the occupation. DuBois even urged President Wilson to send African Americans instead of white troops if an occupation had to occur and called on “we ten million Negroes” to write the President.The anti-war movement’s increasing criticism of these three occupations resonated with an American public increasingly interested in Latin America. This was also partly a result of increased disillusionment with Europe as “spiritually and intellectually bankrupt” in the aftermath of the Great War’s carnage. In 1910, only 5,000 American high school students studied Spanish, a number that a decade later jumped to 260,000. The ever quotable Sandino also said to American journalist Carleton Beals, “tell your people there may be bandits in Nicaragua, but they are not necessarily Nicaraguans.” The Dayton, Ohio Journal even considered Sandino to be a combination of “Trotsky, Sitting Bull, and Aguinaldo.” Social critic and vaudeville performer Will Rogers best expressed the swelling anti-imperialist zeitgeist, “why are we in Nicaragua, and what the Hell are we doing there?” Americans would later ask the same thing about Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan—and most certainly future Americans will ask the same about our presence in locales that at present we cannot imagine.Over the course of 1920s, Washington came to believe that the costs of occupation were growing. One U.S. Ambassador remembered, “armed intervention in Haiti and Nicaragua kept us in hot water not only with other countries of Latin America but also with a sizable sector of our own public.” Even big business began to catch on to the fact that the occupations were bad for the bottom line. One American corporate chief lectured President Hoover, saying that “[Nicaraguans] do not want order maintained by marines any more than would Californians want order maintained by Japanese soldiers.” But despite this activism and the growing distaste for America’s presence in these countries, the majority of American opinion makers were still pro-occupation.McPherson reckons that an “expansive shift” in the U.S. awareness largely fueled by activism likely helped end the occupations far sooner than they otherwise would have ended. Another factor is that U.S. officials simply lost patience with the chronic instability that Washington’s enlightened handiwork could not correct. Or, as Wilson said after pulling troops out of Veracruz in 1914, “if the Mexicans want to raise hell, let them raise hell. We have nothing to do with it. It is their government, it is their hell.”McPherson’s largely critical interpretation of the U.S. interventions are bolstered by his willingness to acknowledge the good they also did—roads, sewers, hospitals, and schools were built and debt was managed responsibly. In fact, even some of the invaded populaces acknowledged the benefits of the American occupation. A Dominican told a visitor in 1928, “you taught us how to work.” A Haitian president, Sténio Vincent, divulged, “the Occupation very sensibly marked Haitian mentality. She impressed upon it a tidier and more practical conception of life, a more developed and surer taste for material comfort, a greater need for peace, security, and work.”McPherson explains how the political culture in all three countries continued to be “anti-democratic, self-interested, and ruinous to the nation” and “largely unchanged from pre-occupation days.” He believes that, on the whole, the occupiers “sabotaged the trajectory” for stable politics. What’s missing in his account, though, is more description of this presumably encouraging trajectory towards stable politics that would have continued had Washington not intervened. It might rather have been the case that the three nations were resigned to political chaos and tyranny with or without American occupations. And while it is certainly politically incorrect to say it, a longer annexation or more colonization-style approach could have produced more stable outcomes.Few readers will quibble much with McPherson’s painstaking research, but some will note that McPherson’s arguments are replete with what appears to be postmodern jargon. This language at times deadens or obfuscates what otherwise is a history loaded with vital lessons for America’s contemporary imperial missions. The reader might also ask why the three countries are lumped together as “the invaded” when in fact in the case of Nicaragua the first decade of intervention only involved 100 marines and saw a mostly bloodless campaign. And even at the height of the anti-Sandino bandit chase, marine numbers were only 5,000, much less than the numbers deployed in a case like America’s post-1898 presence in the Philippines. Maybe in the case of Nicaragua the lesson is that “the invaded” were not in fact invaded. And how do we make sense of the fact that by 1933 it seemed liked it was the invaders who wanted out of Nicaragua, while the invaded wanted the invaders to invade? After finishing The Invaded a reader might wonder why Dick Cheney did not appear to worry that a Sandino-like blowback was possible in Iraq following the U.S. invasion. It certainly turned out that way. The fiery Shi‘a cleric Muqtada al-Sadr might have been the best example of this sort of perilous outcome, but there were, of course, many candidates for Sandino’s role. And, painfully, this time around, the stakes were much greater. At peak strength, the U.S. had 170,000 men in Iraq. It spent roughly $2 trillion, a number that tripled over the four decades. Almost 4,500 Americans were killed in the country, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis lost their lives. The war ended with a strategic outcome that favored Tehran and left the country worse off than before we went in.It might have been that Cheney had read Max Boot’s portrayal of the Banana Wars in his 2002 tome, The Savage Wars of Peace . Instead of the depth and nuance that we get in The Invaded, Boot offers an account of a series of benevolent and almost comically easy marine occupations and bandit-chasing, and he is more charitable to the invaders than even the biased official marine histories are. Henry Kissinger was on to something when he said that great scholarship requires a degree of anonymity in order to allow the depth and focus of a study to mature. McPherson’s magisterial work is precisely that—and it’s sadly not a coincidence that he will remain far less known than Boot.So what should we take away from The Invaded? McPherson’s central lesson from the Banana Wars is that “occupation is a folly to be avoided at all costs.” But what about the post-World War II occupations of Japan or Germany, or, closer to home, the U.S. invasions of Grenada in 1983 and Panama six years later? These occupations didn’t result in quagmires. Today, would it automatically be unwise if we, say, occupied Syria to counter ISIS malignancy? The answer, I suspect, is that it depends on the circumstances.

We should be careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water. Had Dick Cheney and Max Boot—and this reviewer for that matter—approached Saddam Hussein’s Iraq with the same sobriety found in McPherson’s account of the Banana Wars, we might never have decided to make that fateful invasion that, despite our expectations, quickly became a long, painful occupation.

China Burned a Lot More Coal Than We Thought

File this under bad brown news: China burned a lot more coal this century than it reported, according to new analysis from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). The FT reports:

Based on revised data released by Beijing this summer, the EIA has concluded that the world’s largest polluter and consumer of coal burnt up to 14 per cent more of the fossil fuel between 2000 and 2013 than previously reported. It said this meant China’s energy consumption and production were also much higher.

The EIA’s analysis squares with the supercharged economic growth of the decade before 2013 and much slower growth now but throws into confusion the calculations on which climate change negotiators rely to determine the level of emissions produced by each nation. Talks this December in Paris will attempt to rein in those emissions, in the hopes of preventing dangerous global warming.

China was already reported to be burning roughly half of the world’s coal, so a 14 percent spike in consumption between 2000 and 2013 has huge implications not only for the air quality of the country’s megacities, but also for our global carbon budget (coal is just about the dirtiest fossil fuel around). If the EIA has it right, China has been emitting a lot more greenhouse gases than previously thought, which has a host of implications for climate change models and the push for an international treaty predicated on reducing global emissions.

This is disheartening news, to say the least. It’s also emblematic of a bigger problem for climate scientists. Our best models keep failing to accurately predict surface warming patterns, mistakes so far attributed to ignorance of those many “unknown unknowns” of our planet’s climate. That the world’s largest coal producer was emitting much, much more from burning the dirty stuff represents an entirely new kind of error. Even some of our knowns, it turns out, were unknowns.Uncertainty pervades climate science, once you start digging down into it. Generally, we understand that burning fossil fuels emits greenhouse gases, which in turn trap more solar radiation in our atmosphere and lead to rising surface temperatures, but beyond that we’re startlingly ignorant of our mesmerizingly complex climate. Greens will tell you climate science is “settled,” but that’s an outright lie. There remains so much we don’t know, and blustering past those blind spots does the enviromental movement no favors. Just the opposite, in fact—it sets them up for embarrassment when their bold, Malthusian predictions are eventually proved false. We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: overconfident greens are the number one cause of climate denial.