Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 591

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.

Is Putin Winning or Losing?

Pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine don’t think they’re getting enough support from the Kremlin, and are openly wondering if Putin still wants to help them win. Bloomberg has more:

Ukrainian separatist leaders say their hopes of full integration with Russia or greater independence are fading as the Kremlin tightens the reins on their rebellion.

Russian President Vladimir Putin appears unwilling to risk broadening his conflict with the U.S. and European Union over Ukraine, senior separatist officials said in interviews this month, meaning the rebel regions’ future is more likely to resemble Transnistria, the Russian-backed breakaway area of Moldova, whose fate is still unresolved more than two decades after fighting subsided.

Russian nationalists want to bring Ukraine back into the fold; there should not, some Russians feel, be an international border between Moscow and Kiev. Yet there’s little sign that Putin has ever made this his goal. For one thing, Ukraine’s economy is in such bad shape that Russia would have to subsidize it heavily. That’s not something Putin is eager to do. Even the nationalists’ fallback position—a Ukraine so committed to Russia’s version of the European Union (the “Eurasian Union”) that further EU integration is impossible—would require heavy Russian support.

On the other hand, Putin cannot tolerate a Ukraine that is fully integrated into the West. A democratic Ukraine that was traveling the road taken by Poland and the Baltic States to become increasingly economically successful, ultimately to join the Western institutions of the EU and NATO, would be a crippling defeat for Putin for two reasons: First, because the Russian nationalists who are an important part of Putin’s coalition would turn against him in anger and disappointment if Russia were seen to have ‘lost’ Ukraine in this way. Second, because the core arguments that Putin uses to defend his methods and regime would be gravely weakened.Putin’s argument to the Russian people is that Orthodox Slavs are part of a different civilization from the West: Russia isn’t like France or Germany, England, or even Poland. Western democracy, Western economic organization, and Western ideas about personal autonomy and freedom are foreign to Russia and don’t work. Look what happened in the 1990s when Yeltsin tried to move the country Westward, the argument goes. Russia almost fell apart! Then, when the kind of strong government that Russia needs was restored (by Putin) things got better. Western pressure to democratize is part of a plan to defeat, dismember and humiliate Russia. The West’s true hope, Putin contends, is for Russia to fall apart the way the Soviet Union did.The trouble for Putin is that a successful Ukraine, democratizing and Westernizing, undercuts this argument. If Ukraine were to start looking more like Denmark, or even Poland, that would be an important sign that an Orthodox Slavic culture (and remember, Russian nationalists consider Ukraine and Russia to be deeply similar) really can succeed on the basis of liberal economic and political ideas. Russia doesn’t have to be isolated, undemocratic and poor. If the Russians get rid of Putin and his cronies, they too could have a better life.Putin’s core concern with Ukraine, then, is defensive. He considers its Westward aspirations to be a serious danger to his power. His goal isn’t to conquer all Ukraine or even part of it; his goal is to spoil Ukraine—to prevent it from taking the Westward road with success. Conquest or integration of Ukraine into the Eurasian Union is something he can’t afford and doesn’t particularly want. But keeping Ukraine from assimilating into the West: that’s vital.Long term Russian control over Crimea and a poor, corrupt, Ukraine run by greedy and unpopular oligarchs is pretty much Putin’s dream scenario. And it’s better still if this crippled entity is subsidized by the West—if the EU and the U.S., for example, end up helping Ukraine pay its oil bill to Gazprom and otherwise have to prop up its staggering economy.That’s not a perfect situation for him; there are, for example, important defense plants in eastern Ukraine that Russia would like to have back under his control. But given that Russia is a weaker power, and that the oil price collapse has exacerbated Russia’s weakness, what we see now is pretty much a status quo that Putin can live with—as long as Ukrainian reforms fail and its economy flounders.So the important battle line in Ukraine isn’t actually in the east. The important battle in Ukraine is political and economic. Can the West and pro-Western Ukrainians reform the economy and build a competent, honest and modernizing state, or will the oligarchs and the legacy of Soviet corruption drag Ukraine down?Putin hopes (not without reason) that time and inertia are on his side. Ukraine has never been able to build a Western style state, and its oligarchs remain in charge. The West’s goals for Ukraine are harder to achieve than Putin’s goals; this is why Russia, a fundamentally weaker power than the West it opposes, has a chance at getting its way in Ukraine.Therefore, the purpose of the badly organized and poorly-led mafias and militias in the Russian dominated chunks of eastern Ukraine is to keep Ukrainian politics on the boil. By controlling when and whether Donetsk militias fight, Putin can create a political crisis in Ukraine at any moment. This frozen conflict (which Putin always has the option of unfreezing) helps deter foreign investors who fear the risk of renewed unrest. It pushes Ukrainian nationalists toward more radical politics in ways that Putin hopes will further unbalance Ukraine’s precarious political order. It forces Ukraine to borrow money for military defense. It confirms the impression of people inside Russia that their country is surrounded by implacable enemies and needs a strong leader to defend it.Meanwhile, Putin has other tools he can use to make the task of reform inside Ukraine harder. There are oligarchs whose loyalties are divided, and who want to keep on good terms with the Kremlin while keeping the EU and the reformers from changing the way they do business. Some members of parliament and of Ukraine’s government and security forces are susceptible to Russian bribes or blackmail. Some groups in Ukraine fear that reform will undercut their power and privilege (like the masses of corrupt civil servants and judges who will ultimately be sidelined and marginalized if the New Ukraine really takes shape). And there are others who, for reasons of sentiment or interest, want Ukraine to look East rather than West.For all these reasons, Putin doesn’t need military success in eastern Ukraine or further advances into Ukrainian territory to get his way. This is a political struggle for Putin more than a military one, and from his point of view, the situation in Ukraine looks reasonably good. Success isn’t guaranteed, of course, but the odds against a successful state building effort in Kiev remain long.

Refugees Have Cost $7.6B, Turkey Says

While Europe struggles to come to grips with a wave of Syrian refugees, new figures out of Turkey indicate just how much the crisis has cost the country. Hurriyet Daily News reports:

Turkey, which hosts the world’s largest refugee population, has so far spent $7.6 billion caring for 2.2 million Syrians who have fled strife there, Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmuş said on Sept.18.

Turkey has been on the front lines of the biggest refugee crisis since World War Two. It shares a 900-km (566 miles) border with Syria and has adopted an “open-door policy” towards those fleeing the civil war, now in its fifth year.

Many of the refugees, though not most, are then trying to head toward the European Union. But while Europe is paralyzed, Turkey has acted:

A record 300,000 or more Syrians and other migrants have arrived in Greece, mostly setting off from Turkey’s Aegean coast, according to the International Organisation for Migration.

“Our Coast Guard units have rescued 53,228 people, while 274 people have died” in Turkish waters, Kurtulmuş said at a news conference.

In the first place, this story underlines how, for all its faults (and there have been many lately), the Turkish government has for years dealt with the humanitarian fallout of the Syrian Civil War, often virtually unassisted. It would be hard to blame Turkey for not minding when some of the refugees want to make it to Europe—and yet, Ankara also goes to great expense to patrol the waters of the Mediterranean, something Europe has not yet been able to coordinate properly.

In the second place, the figures themselves, while reflecting the lengths to which Turkey has gone to assist its displaced neighbors, are also sure to serve as a disincentive to many European governments to take a bigger share of the problem on.Easy, cheap, or quick fixes to this crisis are not likely to come in any form. And the longer the West has delayed with engaging in Syria, the worse our options—and those of the Syrian people—have become.

What Good Is Liberal Education?

In Defense of a Liberal Education

Fareed ZakariaW.W. Norton & Company, 2015, 208 pp., $23.95

About a quarter century ago, during an earlier epoch of the American culture wars, the academy echoed with the cries of a debate over the nature of a liberal education. Should the canon be opened up to non-Western and feminist works, to comic books and rock music, to animal-rights and Gaia theory, or should it double down on the musty archives of dead white males? Should deconstructionism or logical positivism be the guiding lights of humanistic study, or should classical philosophy be its lodestar? Should students read Plato and Dante or the Mahayana Sutras and bell hooks? Allan Bloom famously hoisted the Jolly Roger on these subjects in his controversial 1987 bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind.

The debate came to an end not with a shattering rebuttal or heckling or a decision by the judges. It just faded away, ending “not with a bang but a whimper.” Oh wait, not with that either, because to understand the reference would require reading poetry—and who has time for that while boning up on advanced finance in b-school en route to Wall Street?The debate, in short, is no longer about what kind of liberal education to have but about whether to have a liberal education at all. Fewer and fewer students think they have luxury of reading Christine de Pizan or Kant or the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Ironically, a country whose youth twice emphatically voted for Barack Obama as President consists of college students who accept the credo of Calvin Coolidge that “the chief business of the American people is business.”Anyone who teaches the humanities in a university nowadays can tell you that baby, it’s cold outside. Student numbers are down, in some cases, precipitously. Many of the English, philosophy, or history majors of yesteryear are now studying STEM (that is, science, technology, engineering, and math—the new gold standard in public education), economics, or business. Opinions differ as to why this is so. The past decade has seen a boom in books and articles on the subject. As most of them point out, various causes are at work. Some blame the teachers, some the parents, some the students, some the necessarily amorphous Zeitgeist.So, for example, in “The Decline of the English Department,” William M. Chace writes that the expansion of the American college student population during the past forty or fifty years has meant the contraction of humanistic education, since most students want practical or pre-professional training. An English teacher himself, Chace puts the lion’s share of the blame on

the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself.

It’s the turn to identity studies, exotic theories, sexuality, and popular culture, writes Chace, that is the most serious cause of the decline of the humanities.

In College , Andrew Delbanco writes about the transformation of college faculty from moral educators into professional researchers and the metamorphosis of the students from seekers of truth into careerists chasing diplomas. In his Excellent Sheep , William Deresiewicz takes aim at high-flying students, their helicopter parents, and the college admissions officers who act as gatekeepers. Already primed to overachieve before they even get to elite universities, it’s no wonder that students head for the straightest path to a lucrative career in finance. In Beyond the University , Michael S. Roth stakes out the middle ground. Pre-professional education fails to teach students to think, and so leaves them unprepared for the inevitable changes in the workplace ahead. Liberal education is actually more practical because it renders students more nimble. Meanwhile, he defends the current emphasis on racial and gender diversity as the seedbed of intellectual diversity.Fareed Zakaria’s In Defense of a Liberal Education is a welcome addition to the genre. Like Roth, Zakaria is pragmatic and, at just 204 pages, he makes Roth’s concise 241 pages seem prolix. Zakaria is wise and pithy. He starts out with the recognition that we live in an unreflective era:

Because of the times we live in, all of us, young and old, do not spend enough time and effort thinking about the meaning of life. We do not look inside of ourselves enough to understand our strengths and weaknesses, and we do not look around enough—at the world, in history—to ask the deepest and broadest questions.

The solution, he says, is liberal education. He argues that one of the chief merits of a liberal education is that it teaches you how to think, speak, and write: “to read critically, analyze data, and formulate ideas.” His is a meaty work with hardly a wasted word. He doesn’t even need a subtitle or the all-but-inevitable colon. If this book is any indication of what he learned, Zakaria deserves three cheers for his university experience.

Zakaria tells his affecting personal story as it unfurls from from Mumbai to Yale. The old-fashioned phrase, “the promise of America,” comes to mind in the reading. So does the notion of the intelligent, ambitious, energetic, and adaptable immigrant.Zakaria displays a great deal of common sense. He has a fingertip feel for the realities of higher education. Among the features of the current scene that he highlights are the relative expense of even a state university (in 1960, the University of California at Berkeley was free; now it costs a non-state resident more than $55,000 a year) and the lack of places for applicants; the de facto Asian-American quota that is too often in place; the economics of rising college costs; the reasons why faculty too often teach obscure classes (not because they are left-wing subversives but because they tend to be promoted for zeroing in on a small area of research); the motivation for faculty to give out high grades (it’s easier); and the way the need to find efficiencies is making online learning attractive.Zakaria is entirely convincing when he says that more online education is inevitable. Its main advantages will be cutting costs and increasing access. But his optimism about the ability of big data to generate individualized education is perhaps too sanguine—mainly because those who interpret the data will need to separate it into little packages that may be a bad fit for real-life individuals. I prefer the old saw that the ideal education was Williams College President Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other. But logs are a luxury these days, as Zakaria shows. He argues persuasively that in the future only fifty or so colleges in the United States will be able to charge high tuition. Most people will need to make do with Digital U.After surveying the history of liberal education and the challenges facing today’s academy, Zakaria turns to contemporary youth. Refreshingly, he defends them. Millennials are not to be blamed for being anxious about making money, facing as they do global competition and the rising threat of displacement by technology. Unlike boomers, they don’t have the psychological luxury of presumed prosperity. To their credit, millennials also increasingly show a desire to help the community and give back to others, which is certainly better than the—how to put this?—self-actualization ambitions that some of us expressed when we were younger.Zakaria ends with a stirring call for self-examination via liberal education. But his real recipe for higher education seems to be a combination of learning how to write and speak and of studying the social sciences in order to face a world shaped by capitalism, globalization, and technology. The book has the feel of “PPE,” Oxford’s program in Philosophy, Politics & Economics, or “Sciences Po,” Paris’s Institut d’études politiques, that is, of the higher education of the European political elite, a kind of schooling that mixes social science with a touch of class. One could do a lot worse, but I would have preferred to see more of the humanities.Zakaria makes too much of big names, too, especially big American names. Although it is interesting to hear what corporate bigwigs, Nobel laureates, and university presidents have to say about liberal education and the humanities, it would be much better to find out what Aristotle, Sun Tzu, and Jane Austen think. They have stood the test of time. They have their place in a conversation about the nature and meaning of life that goes back to the ancients. However much the leisure time they enjoyed depended on exploiting the labor of others, they used that time to create masterpieces. And every journeyman should study with a master.Zakaria’s message is also very present-oriented. He is right to say that humankind is better off now than in the time of the ancient Greeks, when even a male aristocrat could be killed by a toothache. But he dismisses much too quickly the Greeks’ tragic genius. No one would wish to go to a dentist in Periclean Athens but, O, to be present at one of Aeschylus’s premieres! If we are so great today, where is the new Aeschylus, or Plato? While we want college graduates to be able to face today’s world, we also want them to feel at home in the past. A liberal education teaches us that our true country is not the one that we happen to live in. Our true contemporaries lived in other countries in other eras as well.A remarkable educational reform in 1972 recognized this truth. In that year of defeat in Vietnam, an American admiral made a bold decision. Admiral Stansfield Turner, President of the U. S. Naval War College, decided that the mid-career officers who spent a year of study there before promotion would have to read Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War. The addition of this long, dense, difficult, and often cranky work to the curriculum might not have been greeted with cheers, but in this, anyway, Turner knew what he was doing.1In his Convocation Address of August 24, 1972, Turner described his decision to change the academic study of strategy from a scientific to an historical approach. Bemoaning a tendency to focus on “the brief period of military strategy since the close of World War II,” Turner called for “a broader perspective” that would approach contemporary problems through the perspective of the past and so “ensure that we do not become trapped within the limits of our own experience.” Alluding to America’s sad recent history in Vietnam, he said:

We will start with Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. What could be more related to today than a war in which a democratic nation sent an expedition overseas to fight on foreign soil and then found that there was little support for this at home? Or a war in which a seapower was in opposition to a nation that was basically a landpower? Are there not lessons still to be learned here?

Turner’s classical scholarship was as off the mark as his understanding of then-contemporary America was astute. Athens lost in Sicily not because support at home was weak; in fact, it was strong. Athens lost because it badly underestimated enemy resources and resolve. But in America domestic support for the Vietnam War really did evaporate. Faced with a calamity, American military educators were well served by looking for a new paradigm in an old author. Whatever else Thucydides offers the reader, he also offers humility and a knowledge that, in war, things do often if not always go wrong.

This humble (and humbling) example of a turn to the past for inspiration recalls another, more famous case involving one of history’s greatest and most influential political philosophers, Niccolò Machiavelli. In addition to being a political thinker Machiavelli was also a politician and diplomat in Florence. He found himself on the losing side of a civil war and suffered imprisonment and torture before escaping into exile on his country estate. In a famous letter to Francesco Vettori in December 1513, Machiavelli described the drudgery of daily life in the countryside. The high point of his day came in the evening:

When evening comes, I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death.

Machiavelli was a student of the classical tradition; he had the finest humanist education that the Renaissance offered. So schooled, he had the tools to challenge the dogmas and unspoken assumptions of his age and to break through their low horizon. Machiavelli was able to measure the depth of the gulf between the way things ought to be and the way they were. He was not only thus rendered able to think, but to think broadly and creatively about things that mattered.

Zakaria is right: We all need more liberal education. But he is not right for the best right reason. The best right reason is not that a liberal education will give us a competitive edge in the marketplace. It’s that it will make our souls more beautiful—that’s why we need it.

1On Turner’s move see Andreas Stradis, “Thucydides in the Staff College”, in Christine Lee and Neville Morley, eds. A Handbook to the Reception of Thucydides.

Why We Need Oil Pipelines Like Keystone

American oil production has grown more than 80 percent over the past seven years, and that’s put an enormous strain on producers’ ability to get their product to market. The WSJ has a great explainer on the various ways the oil industry is accomplishing transport and it’s well worth reading in full. In the first place, it sums up the pros and cons of moving crude by pipeline nicely:

Pipelines are typically the cheapest, and in some cases quickest, way to move crude in the U.S., and they spill less often than other transport methods. In 2014, pipelines delivered 3.4 billion barrels of crude oil to U.S. refineries, according to Energy Information Administration data. The Association of Oil Pipe Lines says it has a 99.999% safe-delivery rate on these shipments. “On an apples-to-apples basis, pipelines have less accidents, cause less environmental damage and cause less harm to human health than do railcars moving comparable masses of oil and gas,” says [the Fraser Institute’s Kenneth Green]…[But] even though pipelines don’t spill as often as other forms of transport, when they do spill, they can unleash a huge amount if not caught in time.

Pipelines account for the majority of America’s crude oil transportation, and no wonder—the U.S. has the world’s most extensive pipeline network by a long shot. But most of those miles on miles of pipelines were constructed prior to the shale boom, the pace of which took virtually everyone by surprise. Because of that, other forms of transportation have experienced significant growth over the past ten years, and one of them has captured considerable attention for a number of high-profile accidents. The WSJ continues with a profile of oil-by-rail transport:

Trains tend to spill a smaller amount of oil than other forms of transport. An International Energy Agency study said that from 2004-12 there were six times as many rail spills as pipeline spills, but “the average pipeline spill was far graver.”…[But rail] accidents potentially threaten lives and can cause widespread property damage. Many people, in fact, use the term “bomb trains” to describe them, because of their potential to explode in an accident. Trains also travel straight through many cities at street level—as opposed to pipelines, which tend to be located underground and often far from populated areas.

What’s more, train routes and schedules often aren’t disclosed, in part to prevent possible terrorism. That leaves emergency responders less equipped to deal quickly with accidents that may occur.

In 2010, just 20 million barrels of oil traveled our nation’s railroads. In 2014, that number spiked to 383 million barrels, according to the EIA. But oil isn’t just traveling by rail in increasing volumes, it’s also being loaded onto trucks, though the WSJ notes that they are “the least preferred method in terms of safety, air quality, expense and other factors.”

No one method of transport is unequivocally preferable to every other in every situation, but in terms of price, reliability, and public safety, pipelines seem to make the most sense more often than not. The Keystone pipeline debate appears to have gone into a kind of bizarro-hibernation this summer, possibly due to the depressive effect low crude prices are expected to have on high-cost projects, like Alberta’s oil sands. Another possible explanation: The furor over ending the ban on crude oil exports has stolen Keystone’s thunder.But neither factor will be enough to kill the Keystone debate. For the former, the sheer size of investments that have already made in Canadian oil sands means that these projects will be going forward for years to come. Indeed, Alberta plans to boost production by 25 percent over the next two years. And as for the latter, Washington’s caprice won’t change the fact that the long-delayed project makes sense for all parties involved.

German Refugee Crisis Collides with Oktoberfest

Bavaria is used to hosting big crowds this time of year when tourists stream to Oktoberfest to hoist a Maß or two of an Augustiner-Bräu beer. This year, however, the southern state is the main point of entry for migrants and refugees streaming into Germany—and yet, the traditional festival is still going ahead as planned in Munich. As the Wall Street Journal reports, this is causing some problems:

This week, Munich police officials tried to reassure the public that they have matters under control. The biggest challenge, deputy Munich police chief Werner Feiler said, would be keeping order at the central train station, which could have large numbers of beer festival visitors and migrants passing through simultaneously.

“We have currently here in Munich a situation that doesn’t compare to any Wiesn operation before,” Mr. Feiler said, using the colloquial Bavarian term for Oktoberfest’s main venue in central Munich.

Even at the best of times, the Munich train station is a hot, crowded mess located in the middle of something of a red-light district. So the combination of large influxes of migrants and festival goers is bound to cause massive issues. And then there are the cultural, as well as logistical, issues:

“Asylum seekers in particular from Muslim countries aren’t used to encountering heavily drunk people in public,” Bavaria’s interior minister, Joachim Herrmann, said. “It could get out of hand.”[..]

On Munich’s main shopping street on Tuesday, women in abayas—the long robes worn by some Muslim women—were studying lederhosen and dirndls—the revealing shorts and dresses traditional in Bavaria—in the shop windows.

As far as cultural clashes go, these are funnier than most. And as the new immigrants are Syrian, not Saudi, we imagine they might have a beer or two themselves. (They’re more likely to have problems getting something to eat: an astonishing portion of the Bavarian diet is pork of some sort.) But not every cultural difference between Syrians and those at the festival will be as funny, and some could cause real tension. We hope the German government is prepared to deal with them when they arise. Prost!

Northern India Suffers High Unemployment

A recent civil service job posting for a few hundred tea boys and night guards attracted 2.32 million applicants, according to the Financial Times:

Officials said it would take up to four years to conduct interviews for the 368 junior posts advertised by the Uttar Pradesh state government even if candidates were processed at the rate of 2,000 a day by multiple interview boards.

The unprecedented deluge of applications is the latest confirmation of the grim employment prospects in the poor and densely populated states of north India despite an official national unemployment rate of less than 5 per cent.Narendra Modi, prime minister, promised to create jobs when he was elected last year at the head of the Bharatiya Janata party. His government has focused on programmes to develop workers’ skills, while party leaders have begged young Indians to become entrepreneurs.But India is struggling to create employment even for the 12m school leavers entering the workforce each year, let alone for the accumulated backlog of unemployed among the population of 1.3bn.

This story suggests that India’s economy might be doing worse than is commonly understood. Not only did the posting attract the undereducated applicants one might expect. It also drew Ph.D.s and 25,000 postgraduates.

When he was elected, Prime Minister Narendra Modi argued that his reform ideas would unleash Chinese-style economic growth in India. That hasn’t happened yet, and Modi has had to drop many of his proposals. A few days ago, we reported on Modi’s remarkable favorability numbers. That support could suffer if Indians continue to have such a hard time finding jobs.

Japan’s Remilitarization is Official

The Japanese Parliament voted in favor of a historic measure to reauthorize overseas military activity today. Passing the legislation was a priority for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and his push has led to significant backlash. Indeed, demonstrators rallied outside the parliament building after the law passed, the latest in a series of large protests over the past few months. Earlier this week, a physical fight broke out in Parliament itself, causing some news outlets to wonder if Abe had the necessary support.

We thought Abe was likely to succeed, which is why you’ve seen little coverage of the scuffles and demonstrations here. Parliamentary Fisticuffs is favorite Japanese pastime, as this excellent Wall Street Journal feature documents. Until major riots break out in the streets of Tokyo (or new elections change the balance of power), this has all been more or less par for the course.The more interesting story, which we have been doing our utmost to follow here on the site, is what this will mean for Asia-Pacific geopolitics. Abe and his allies want to bring back the Japan of the 1930s, a regional powerhouse that could stand up to China. Since World War II, the United States has cared for Japan’s security needs itself. Whether things remain that way or not—President Obama’s apparent unwillingness to commit American power to tackle crises in Syria and Ukraine has surely been noted by all of our allies around the world—Abe clearly believes that they should be so no longer.

Waking Up?

 

Clemens Wergin, the Washington bureau chief of Die Welt, laid bare some uncomfortable truths in the New York Times earlier this week:

In recent years two successive German foreign ministers have warned against engagement in Syria and against arming moderate parts of the opposition. The results were predictable: While Mr. Assad has been propped up by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, and while the Islamic State has seen radical Islamists from Europe and elsewhere rallying to its flag, the moderate forces, which should have been natural allies of the West, have been crushed.

Berlin has repeatedly argued that Western intervention of any kind would just make the situation worse. But Germany and the United States failed to understand that not acting was itself a form of action, and that it has led directly to the battlefield escalation and refugee outflows that the West tried to avoid.[..]

After World War II, Europeans grew accustomed to the United States’ taking the lead in addressing security threats in and around Europe. That has nurtured a complacency in Europe’s foreign and security posture, the dangers of which have now been fully exposed. With Washington unwilling to act, Europe could no longer pretend that someone else would step in, as happened so often in the past.

The Syrian conflict, and the resulting refugee crisis, should serve as a reminder that Germany’s foreign policy doctrine of recent decades, a much softer version of the Obama doctrine, urgently needs a reassessment.

Kudos to Mr. Wergin for raising issues others would rather not look at. And he is not alone—as Germany matures into a self-confident democracy, some of its leaders are starting to rethink whether the traditional embrace of pacifism—necessary after the Nazi horrors—should endure forever. Surely there is a line between total aggression and total passivity that powerful, fully-fledged democracies can and should walk.

But those thinking like Herr Wergin have a long way to go; conventional wisdom, we fear, remains firmly on the side of passivity.

The Politicization of Middle East Studies

It has been a while since the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the largest and most influential professional body for the study of the region, whose 2,700-plus members inhabit departments of Middle East studies throughout the world, dropped its original designation as a “non-political learned society” to become a hotbed of anti-Israel invective. So deep has the rot settled that the association seems totally oblivious (or rather indifferent) to the fact that its recent endorsement of the anti-Israel de-legitimization campaign, and attendant efforts to obstruct the containment of resurgent anti-Semitism on U.S. campuses, have effectively crossed the thin line between “normal” Israel-bashing and classical Jew baiting.

On February 15 of this year, a MESA referendum approved a resolution, passed by the membership during the association’s annual meeting three months earlier, which not only lauded the “calls for [anti-Israel] institutional boycott, divestment, and/or sanctions [BDS]” as “legitimate forms of non-violent political action” and deplored opposition to these exclusionary moves as an assault on the freedom of speech, but “strongly urge[d] MESA program committees to organize discussions at MESA annual meetings, and the MESA Board of Directors to create opportunities over the course of the year that provide platforms for a sustained discussion of the academic boycott and foster careful consideration of an appropriate position for MESA to assume.”Jews have of course been subjected to all kinds of segregation, ostracism, and boycotting from time immemorial and the BDS is but the latest manifestation of this millenarian hate fest. Those sponsoring it are obviously more interested in hurting Israel, if not obliterating it altogether (as many of its leaders have openly conceded), than in promoting human rights; otherwise they would be pushing boycotts of the numerous Middle Eastern dictatorships that are guilty of the most horrendous atrocities against their own peoples rather than targeting the region’s only democracy, and the only place in the Middle East where academics enjoy complete and unrestricted freedom of expression.There were, for example, no boycotts of Saddam’s Iraq, Qaddafi’s Libya, or King Hussein’s Jordan, the latter of which killed more Palestinians in the single month of September 1970 than Israel did in decades. Nor has there been a boycott of the Syrian regime, which slaughtered far more people over the past four years than those killed during the 100 years of Arab-Israeli infighting; or of its Iranian abettor, which, apart from torturing its hapless subjects for nearly four decades and triggering a war that claimed some million lives, is the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism and an open proponent of a genocide against an existing member of the international community; or of Turkey for its oppression of the vast Kurdish and Alevi minorities and the incarceration of thousands of political activists on the flimsiest and most dubious charges; or of Saudi Arabia for its political oppression and gender apartheid; or of the oppressive and corrupt regime in the West Bank and Gaza established by Yasser Arafat (the so-called Palestinian Authority). And so on and so forth.Nor do these boycotts, especially the academic one, reflect an honest sense of solidarity with the Palestinians in general, and the Palestinian universities of the West Bank and Gaza in particular, which for the past two decades have been under the control not of Israel but of the Palestinian Authority. Rather, they are an unabashed attempt to single out Israel as a pariah nation, to declare its existence illegitimate. As such, Israeli universities are to be ostracized not for any supposed repression of academic freedom but for their contribution to the creation and prosperity of the Jewish state of Israel, a supposedly racist, colonialist implant in the Middle East as worthy of extirpation as the formerly apartheid regime of South Africa.Given these circumstances, it was only natural for MESA President Nathan Brown to warn University of California President Janet Napolitano last month that its adoption of the State Department definition of anti-Semitism, as requested by some Jewish organizations, “would have a chilling effect on scholarly discussion of international affairs in California.” This is because, in his view, the definition “includes, as examples of anti-Semitism, certain kinds of philosophical and political criticisms of the State of Israel which are not only valid topics of academic discussion but are protected by the free speech guarantees of the U.S. Constitution and by the principles of academic freedom enshrined in California law and in University of California system policy.”It goes without saying that no state is above criticism and that faulting Israel for acts of commission or omission is a legitimate part of the political (and scholarly) discourse. But does the State Department definition of anti-Semitism seek to stifle this discourse as Brown claims? Quite the reverse, in fact: it takes care to stress that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as anti-Semitic.” At the same time, however, the definition makes a clear distinction between such legitimate criticism and the constant outpouring of outlandish anti-Israel diatribes (often masqueraded as “philosophical and political criticisms”) which it considers pure and unadulterated anti-Semitism; and it offers three main ways in which this bigotry is manifested:

Demonization of the Jewish State by using the symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism to characterize Israel or Israelis; drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis; and blaming Israel for all inter-religious or political tensions.
Double Standard for Israel by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
Delegitimizing Israel by denying the Jewish people its right to self-determination, and denying Israel the right to exist.

Had such abuse been meted out to any other state, religious community, or ethnic/national group in the Middle East (and beyond), it is doubtful whether MESA would have considered it a “valid topic of academic discussion.” Yet its leaders and luminaries have had no qualms about singling out Jews and Israelis for disproportionate and unique opprobrium and denying them—and them alone—the basic right to national self-determination while allowing it to all other groups and communities, however new and tenuous their claim to nationhood. The late Edward Said, who exerted immense influence on the association despite having done no independent research on the Middle East or Islam, was a vocal proponent of the “one-state solution”—the standard euphemism for Israel’s replacement by an Arab/Muslim state in which Jews would be reduced to a permanent minority. Past MESA presidents like Rashid Khalidi (holder of the Edward Said chair at Columbia University), Joel Beinin, Juan Cole, among others, have, in one form or another, publicly advocated the destruction of Israel as a state. This is not a legitimate “philosophical and political criticism of the State of Israel” but reiteration of the millenarian anti-Semitic myth of the “Wandering Jew”: a rootless nomad lacking an authentic corporate identity and condemned to permanent lingering on the fringes of history without an indigenous place he could call home.

MESA’s Jewish and Israeli members should therefore insist that their association reverts to its original mission to “foster the study of the Middle East, promote high standards of scholarship and teaching, and encourage public understanding of the region and its peoples” rather than endlessly obsess with Israel and Jews. Should this demand prove unavailing, as it most likely will, they should shun membership in the association. Fortunately enough, MESA is no longer the only professional venue in the field of Middle Eastern studies.