Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 601

Human Rights in Iran: Overlooked for Too Long

Those who didn’t catch Governor Scott Walker’s speech last Friday before The Citadel missed an impressive performance and thoughtful analysis linking together the problems of the Islamic State and Iran. “ISIS is a radical perversion of Sunni Islam,” Walker remarked, “but there is another face of Islamic extremism, and that is the Shiite regime in Iran. Today, the Islamic Republic of Iran remains the world’s leading state-sponsor of terrorism. Iran is not a country we should be doing business with.”

Indeed, the mullahs of Iran remain one of the gravest threats facing the United States around the world. The Iranian regime runs rampant over its own people’s human rights and destabilizes the region around it, while threatening to pursue nuclear weapons capability. “To believe that a stable and lasting Middle East can be built by working with Iran, any more than by working with ISIS, isn’t statesmanship,” Walker said. “It’s pure fantasy.”Since his first year in office, President Obama’s pursuit of a nuclear weapons accord has led him to ignore the appalling human rights situation inside Iran. His administration betrayed Iranian pro-democracy activists in 2009 when it shunned the democratic-oriented Green Movement, leaving protestors in the streets of Tehran asking Obama, in English, “Which side are you on?” The democracy movement in Iran was a distraction from the President’s focus on nuclear issues.“President Obama and Hillary Clinton refused to support those inside Iran who spoke out about the oppression of the regime, worrying it would undermine their outreach to the Supreme Leader,” Walker said in his speech. “This is wrong. America must always be a bright and steady beacon of hope for freedom.” Indeed, we should never leave in doubt that we stand with those who support democracy and human rights, whether in Iran or anywhere else around the world.And yet sadly, for the past six-plus years, the Obama Administration has looked the other way while the Iranian regime has ramped up its torture of political prisoners, imprisoned journalists, and bloggers, treated women and religious minorities as second class citizens, and imposed the death penalty with greater frequency (nearly 700 have been executed already this year alone). The United Nations has expressed “alarm” at the increasing number of death penalty cases. “Iran continues to execute more individuals per capita than any country in the world,” according to Ahmed Shaheed, UN special rapporteur for Iran. The pace of executions has increased since Hassan Rouhani’s election as president in 2013, undercutting hopes some had that he would ring in a more liberal regime. Just within the past week, a Kurdish activist, Behrouz Alkhani, was executed by Iranian authorities despite the fact that he was waiting on an appeal of his case before Iran’s Supreme Court.Due process is non-existent in Iran, reflecting a total lack of respect for human life and human rights. The way a regime treats its own people is often indicative of how it will behave on the international stage. Given the Iranian leadership’s brutal repression of the rights of its own people, it is an untrustworthy interlocutor in any international negotiations and a threat to the human rights of Iranians and people around the world.Beyond the abysmal treatment of fellow Iranians, the regime remains the lead sponsor of terrorism and holds at least three Americans hostage—Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, former U.S. Marine Amir Hekmati, and pastor Saeed Abedini; another American, Robert Levinson, was last seen in Iran eight years ago. This past Saturday (August 29) marked the fourth anniversary of the capture of Hekmati. His fate and that of the other hostages was never a factor in the nuclear negotiations. As Governor Walker rightly stated, “It is a stain on our nation’s honor that our countrymen languish in Iranian prisons while we are freeing up billions of dollars for the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism and legitimizing its massive nuclear program.” Indeed, money from the returned frozen assets will not benefit average Iranians but will instead maintain the system of repression and finance Iran’s support for terrorism.Average Iranians may admire and respect Americans and want normalization in relations, but going back to the 1979 revolution and the takeover of the American embassy for 444 days, the Iranian mullahs have had it in for Americans, to say nothing of Israelis. As long as the regime in Tehran keeps Americans hostage, we cannot expect it to treat its own people, let alone foreigners, with respect and decency; nor can we expect it to abide by the international commitments it undertakes, whether related to human rights or nuclear weapons. To think otherwise is, to borrow a phrase, “pure fantasy.”

Can Ukraine Salvage Its Shale Hopes?

Natural gas has been at center of Ukraine’s fractious relationship with Russia these recent years, and it’s had to contend with price gouging, take-or-pay contracts, and even mid-winter shut-offs from its eastern supplier Gazprom. But Ukraine sits on its own bountiful gas reserves, many of which continue to lie untapped. Late last year Chevron announced it was pulling out of a previously agreed-upon $10 billion shale gas exploration project, and this June Royal Dutch Shell followed suit. So what happened?

Obviously the conflict with Russia is factoring in to these decisions to abandon Ukraine’s shale plays, which count among Europe’s most promising. Then too plunging crude prices have oil companies abandoning experimental and potentially high-cost projects in an attempt to stop the bleeding. But Kiev has had a hand in pushing companies out too, as the FT reports. In order to increase revenue the country’s government last year decided to raise “the subsoil use tax, or royalty, on gas production to a crippling 55 per cent for wells up to 5km deep, and 28 per cent for those that are deeper.” As the story points out, these taxes are usually somewhere between ten and 20 percent throughout the world.Gouging foreign companies is a very good way to discourage investment, and Ukraine desperately needs to attract the interest of companies like Shell and Chevron. The good news is that the country’s finance minister seems to be acknowledging that need with her proposal to nearly halve the royalty rates on gas drilling. But the Ukrainian government also intends to levy an extra 30 percent tax on all profits from these wells, though discussions are underway about potentially postponing that decision.On the whole, then, Kiev appears to be taking something like two steps forward and one step back in its bid to lure oil companies to return to its sizable shale reserves—but at least that’s progress. The conflict with Russia highlights just how important energy security is to the eastern European nation, and boosting domestic production is about the best way for the country to strengthen its position there.

Hungary Passes Draconian “Emergency” Immigration Laws

Using the immigration crisis as a pretext, Hungary’s ruling party has passed a series of “emergency” laws that trample on several basic liberal values—and, probably not coincidentally, may not affect only immigrants. Reuters reports:

Hungary’s parliament passed a series of laws on Friday to control the flow of migrants into the country, giving police more authority and setting out strict punishments including prison terms for illegal border crossing.

Hungary is constructing a fence along its border with Serbia, hoping to stem an inflow of migrants after tens of thousands, mostly from places like Syria and Afghanistan, entered the country in recent months.New laws will make it a criminal offence to cross or damage the fence, and illegal border crossing will be punishable by up to three years in jail.

We wrote about the possible authoritarian turn in Hungary in Wednesday’s edition of our morning news digest “Seven in the Morning” (if you don’t subscribe yet, do—you’ll be days ahead of the news):

The Hungarian ruling right-wing Fidesz party introduced two contentious bills yesterday, using the migrant crisis as a pretext to fast-track them through parliament as early as Friday. The bills (one, two) declare a state of emergency and give the government all manners of extraordinary powers, including the authority to imprison migrants for a variety of activities currently permitted under EU laws, and to prosecute Hungarian citizens for aiding migrants. The bills would allow the police to conduct searches without warrants, and the army to use force if necessary. In addition, expansive surveillance measures appear to be a part of the bill, including the creation of a national database of all Hungarian citizens, as well as provisions mandating that telecoms grant the government broad access to their networks, allowing it to intercept data in bulk.

The immigrant crisis is of course real, and it’s legitimate for nations to reassert control over their borders. But history shows us that unscrupulous actors will gladly use legitimate crises to seize extraordinary powers.

As several Hungary-watchers have told us, this move by Orban’s Fidesz serves two purposes. First, it takes the issue away from the far-right Jobbik party, which has been surging in opinion polls. Second, it provides a handy cudgel with which to bludgeon its opponents on the left. Many opposition parties in Hungary have committed to helping migrants through grassroots efforts—as part of one such effort, the country’s former Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany has been taking in migrant families for one or two nights in his home. Early reads of the bills indicate that this kind of program may now be in trouble.One of the reasons we have so consistently decried the failure of the elites in regard to immigration is that it opens the door to illiberal politicians. Recently in the West, this has manifested itself as bluster—think Donald Trump’s calls for undoing the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship provisions, or any number of rants from the leaders of euroskeptic parties—like France’s Front National—that are out of power but popular in the polls.We’ll have to see how far, and to what ends, Fidesz wants to push its newly-acquired powers. But a new, uglier phase in European politics could be upon us.

Beijing Struggles With Tianjin Fallout

China is struggling to contain the political fallout from explosions in the port city of Tianjin (which has a population roughly equal to New York’s). The explosions damaged an estimated 17,000 homes last month, and, according to the New York Times, some 8,000 households have yet to receive any compensation:

Tianjin officials announced that as of midnight Thursday, more than 9,000 households, representing more than half of those affected, had signed agreements to settle their cases. Some chose to sell their damaged apartments to private developers, at 130 percent of the original price, while others decided to keep their homes and allow the government to make basic repairs for free.

As an added incentive, the local government, eager to quell public outrage over the disaster, offered bonuses of 20,000 renminbi, or more than $3,100, for those who agreed to settle their claims by Thursday night.Several Tianjin residents said on social media sites and in interviews that they had been pressured into dropping their cases.

As we observed after the explosions occurred, an insufficient response to this crisis would do serious damage to President Xi Jinping’s reputation for competence, particularly amidst deepening economic troubles. So far, Beijing has sought to minimize the damage by silencing critics: The government has jailed hundreds of people for “irresponsible” reporting on both Tianjin and the stock market, even as Xi was taking his lumps  on social media for the country’s economic troubles.

Beijing needs to make this all go away fast. Tianjin may not be a make-or-break crisis for Xi on its own, but as part of a broader storm that China is be sailing into, it cannot be ignored.

A Test for African Democracy—and International Commitment

With its presidential elections just over a month away, Guinea is moving quickly to a day of reckoning. The elections will either consolidate the major advance for democracy in Africa achieved earlier this year, when the continent’s most populous country and largest economy, Nigeria, had a peaceful transfer of power following the first-ever electoral defeat of an incumbent president in its history, or, conversely, deal a devastating setback to a fragile West African subregion just emerging from long years of conflict and still reeling from last year’s Ebola epidemic.

Guinea’s Alpha Condé won a five-year mandate as President in 2010 following polls which, while bitterly disputed amid allegations of vote-rigging by foreign intelligence services, were undeniably the freest in the country’s history. His ambitions—and the lengths to which the regime will go to secure them for him—lie at the heart of the potential crisis in this country. Even before the outbreak of Ebola, which started in the forest region of Guinea in late 2013 before spreading to neighboring countries, Condé was having a pretty tough time making a case for a second (and final) presidential term: Not only have gross domestic product growth and poverty reduction rates lagged behind even the sclerotic numbers under the dictators who preceded him (in fact, real GDP is expected to contract in 2015); the rates of urban and rural poverty both increased under the current regime, while access to basic services, including water and electricity, has declined.While the anemic socio-economic picture is often blamed on the impact of Ebola (it undoubtedly exacerbated the situation), the fact is most of the problems predated the emergence of the disease. Lengthy legal battles waged by the government to strip the mining rights to the world-class iron-ore deposits in Simandou caused the country to miss the global commodities boom a few years ago, leading to substantial harm not just to the country’s economy but to the people. Plans for major infrastructure improvements as part of the project have been shelved while the legal battles are waged. Experts now question if the mineral wealth can even be developed at all, given depressed prices and markets awash in supplies of the steelmaking component. The tragedy is that while Guinea’s extraordinary natural resources (among other things, it holds two-thirds of the world’s largest reserve of bauxite, and prodigious amounts of gold, diamonds, iron ore, graphite, manganese, and other mineral resources) make the country potentially one of the richest in Africa, the bulk of the resources have gone undeveloped, and most Guineans still live on less than a dollar a day. In the most recent edition of the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Index, Guinea ranks an abysmal 179 out the 187 countries surveyed.Moreover, this past year, in a major blow to the country’s reputation with desperately needed foreign investors, the Common Court of Justice and Arbitration, the highest tribunal of the 16-member African regional body on commercial law to which Guinea belongs, ruled that the Condé regime illegally ripped up a 25-year port management contract with a Paris-based cargo company, Getma International. The damage from the ruling goes well beyond the nearly €38.5 million judgment, coming as it does on top of the country’s score of only 25 out of 100 points on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index; this is hardly the stuff to inspire investor confidence. (And antics like those of the President, a leftist former professor who preened for a Washington Post style section piece and sent flower tributes to North Korea’s late dictator Kim Jong-il three years after the latter’s unlamented demise, don’t help either.)All of these factors meant that the current situation is that much more volatile—and this even as tensions continued to mount throughout this year.In February, Condé invoked the Ebola epidemic and the supposed need to “strengthen the mobilization of local authorities” more than a year after the disease outbreak to replace the civilian Minister of Territorial Administration with an army general considered one of his closest allies in uniform. As it happens, as Minister of Territorial Administration, General Bourema Condé (no direct relation) will also be responsible for providing the logistical and technical infrastructure for the country’s Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI), which is supposed to run the polls.Then, in March, the CENI announced that the presidential election would be held on October 11, but also that local elections, which have not been held since 2002 and have been postponed on one pretext or another throughout Condé’s presidency—notwithstanding an agreement brokered by United Nations envoy Said Djinnit in 2013 that guaranteed that the elections would take place within the first three months of 2014—would be pushed off again, this time until 2016. The problem with this delay is threefold. First, there is no basis in the Guinean constitution for these repeated delays and, consequently, as both opposition politicians and civil society leaders have pointed out in an appeal last year to French President François Hollande, none of those occupying local government offices actually possesses a legal mandate. Second, as many observers have noted, the criteria for which local officials have been retained without electoral mandate and which have been let go seem to have more to do with their perceived loyalty (or lack thereof) with respect to the incumbent central authorities than any juridical principle. Third, these same unelected local officials beholden to the incumbent for their livelihoods will be the very people—under the supervision of the newly ensconced praetorian minister of territorial administration—who will conduct the upcoming presidential vote.In April and May, protesters supporting opposition demands for free, fair, and transparent elections in conformity with Guinea’s constitution as well as the repeated commitments made by President Condé himself have been met by force, including tear gas and live bullets. Accordingly to an Amnesty International report just released, six people were killed and more than 100 others, including children, were wounded by security services. Other observers like Human Rights Watch, for example, have more broadly denounced the country’s security services for “having used excessive lethal force, engaged in abusive conduct, and displayed a lack of political neutrality.” Adding to the tension are the blatant appeals, especially by backers of the incumbent, to ethnic divisions, notably by stoking other groups’ fears of the country’s largest tribal group, the Peul, who generally back former Prime Minister Cellou Dalein Diallo, who suspiciously lost the 2010 runoff to Condé despite beating him by more than 25 percent in the first round. A number of analysts who, like me, have lived in or worked in Guinea over the years are in agreement that we have never seen ethnic tensions as high as they are today.Thus, it is no wonder that, in June, the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index rated Guinea’s government an “authoritarian regime,” ranking it 143 out of 167 countries scored, placing it in 36th place out of 44 countries in sub-Saharan Africa surveyed.Despite all of this, there has been a faint glimmer of hope that the country might just pull back from the precipice. Following two months of intense negotiations, the government agreed on August 20 to give opposition parties representation in the local governments of roughly one-third of the country’s districts as well as appoint members of the opposition to two vacancies on the CENI and that the latter would clean up the voter rolls. However, two weeks later, the accord has yet to be implemented amid disputes about the details of which local governments would be affected and who would have to make way for whom. And if the promised appointments are not made immediately, there is little chance that the newly minted officials will have much scope to impact the conduct of the polls—which may well be the intention behind the foot-dragging.However, time is running short. The international community not only did so much to bring about the elections that brought Condé to power (in 2011, President Obama even invited his Guinea counterpart to the White House as one of four African leaders representing the continent’s democratic progress), but has also kept the country afloat through the recent economic downturns and Ebola crisis with generous funding. But unless it steps up quickly to pressure the regime to meet the demands of the political opposition and civil society regarding some of the most basic conditions necessary for peaceful and credible polls, the ensuing crisis of legitimacy and very real threat of violence will constitute a giant step backwards for the country, the surrounding West Africa region, and, indeed, the entire continent.

EU President Proposes Fourfold Increase in Migrant Quotas

At his State of the Union speech next Wednesday, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker is set to propose an expanded mandatory migrant quota system. A plan initially proposed in June envisaged that 40,000 migrants would be spread across the continent. European leaders rejected this call for a mandatory quota of 40,000, and instead agreed voluntarily to accept 32,000 instead.

Now, leaked details indicate that Juncker intends to call for accommodation for 160,000 migrants. Analysts estimate that a full 55,000 of that number would go to nations that currently are opposed to the scheme. Sources inside the EC, however, remain confident that the new quota scheme will fare better than June’s more modest target.“The politics have changed”, one told the Times of London. “There is opposition but it is a minority now. Binding quotas are needed.”Though there was some indication that several eastern European countries are indeed softening their stances, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban continued to spit fire on the issue. “The problem is not European, it’s German. Nobody would like to stay in Hungary, neither Slovakia, Poland or Estonia”, he said yesterday. “All of them would like to go to Germany.” And in any case, the migrants would not be welcome in Hungary, he added. “We do not want a large number of Muslim people in our country.”So the Times’ source who believes that the politics have changed may be right as far as the politics in Brussels and many European countries go. But on the other hand, Orban is giving voice to what many in the Visegrad countries feel. They believe immigrants don’t want to live in their countries but in Germany, which is due to take 800,000 asylum applicants this year. So why fight too hard on trans-migration? On the other hand, they don’t want Muslims settling in their countries. This resistance to absorbing large numbers of Muslims is highly unattractive to liberal sensibilities, but there are parts of Europe where political correctness carries much less weight than it does in Brussels or Whitehall. And finally, many in these countries want Europe to control its borders and discourage immigration.Disgust with Orban aside, EU leaders will have to find a way to set quotas that neither totally overburden Germany nor press public opinion in other countries to the breaking point. It will be easier to strike a deal if it appears to be a one-off measure, rather than a new mechanism for an open-ended inflow of immigrants. Political and humanitarian concerns combine, therefore, to argue in favor of Europe regaining control of its borders.

Canada’s Oil Sands Can’t Afford to Stop Now

This morning, American benchmark WTI crude was trading at just above $46, while Canadian crude benchmark Western Canada Select was down under $33. Roughly speaking, Canadian oil sands projects need an oil price of $80 per barrel to break even. These aren’t, you might surmise, the headiest of times for oil sands producers.

But when the going gets tough, the tough must keep going, or at least that’s the thinking in Alberta, which expects to boost production by 25 percent over the next two years, despite the fact that the market is already oversupplied and that oil will be sold at a loss. Why? Well, with so much money invested in massive projects, the companies involved have little choice but to keep on keeping on. Bloomberg reports:

For companies stuck spending billions in a downturn, the time required to earn back their investments will lengthen considerably, said Rafi Tahmazian, senior portfolio manager at Canoe Financial LP. “But the implications of slowing down a project are worse,” said Tahmazian, who helps oversee about C$1 billion ($758 million) in energy funds at the Calgary investment firm. […]

Operators can more easily suspend projects in the “front-end” engineering phase, after which it becomes more painful because the money already in the ground produces zero return, said Labell. If a company has the capital available, it will tend to press ahead even though falling prices are eating into profits, he said.

In the longer term, Canada’s oil sands are in a considerable amount of trouble. Global oil supply continues to significantly outstrip demand, making it hard to envision a swift return to the $100+ per barrel market conditions producers enjoyed last summer. Or, as University of Calgary professor Bob Schulz put it, “[t]he economics have changed and there’s no promise things will come back to the way they were.” That’s bad news for any high-cost oil producer.

Russia into Syria?

A flurry of news reports recently have suggested that as the Assad regime falters, Russia may be pouring troops and weapons into Syria. The Daily Beast reports:

One report has even alleged that Russian pilots are gearing up to fly missions alongside the Syrian air force, dropping bombs not just on ISIS but on anti-Assad rebels who may or may not be aligned with the United States or its regional allies.[..]

On August 22, the Bosphorus Naval News website showed the Alligator-class Russian ship Nikolai Filchenkov, part of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, two days earlier passing through Istanbul’s famed waterway en route to an unknown location in the Mediterranean (hint, hint).But what was remarkable about the Filchenkov was that military equipment was visible on deck—namely, Kamaz trucks and, judging by the tarpaulin outlines, at least four BTR infantry fighting vehicles. (This doesn’t include any matériel that might have been stored in the ship’s below-deck cargo hold.)

Somehow, BTR-82As, a new Russian model less than two years old, have started popping up in crucial bits of Assad-held Syria, painted olive-drab without markings. Syrian military television also inadvertently broadcast some chatter among combat troops in Russian. What oh what could be going on here?

Meanwhile, the U.S. does not seem to be unduly concerned, leading one to suspect that there might have been advance warning. The Daily Beast’s reporting seems to indicate defense sources knew what was going on. And then there’s this:

Much discussed in U.S. defense circles is what the Israeli news portal YNet reported Monday: that a new “expeditionary force” of the Russian military has arrived in Damascus and converted a Syrian air force installation into its own forward-operating base. Russian pilots will also apparently start flying their own combat missions. “In the coming weeks,” YNet’s Alex Fishman wrote, citing Western diplomatic sources, “thousands of Russian military personal [sic] are set to touch down in Syria, including: Advisors, instructors, logistics personnel, technical personnel, members of the aerial protection division, and the pilots who will operate the aircraft.”

The goal is said to be purely counterterrorist in nature and conforms to a new period of bilateral cooperation between Moscow and Tehran in salvaging a common ally—Assad—while also amplifying the fight against ISIS. That war, as prosecuted by a U.S.-fronted coalition for a year now, has not been going so swimmingly.

That’s putting it mildly: the Assad regime, bled white, is teetering on the brink of collapse. Other interested parties are making moves—whether it’s the Russians and Iranians acting to prop him up, or the Turks and Saudis attempting to exert more pressure on him to fall. Meanwhile, Washington remains relatively uninvolved.

The U.S. has successfully kept Russia out of the Middle East (and therefore from having a say in the flow of oil to the gobal economy) for a generation. Within the last few months, due to the dynamics of the Iran Deal, that has started to change: both the Sunnis and the Shi’a are looking more warmly than ever toward Moscow. If—if—Russian troops wind up on the ground in a big way in Syria, while the U.S. is seen to do nothing, the shift in perceived power within the region could significantly accelerate.

Trump and the “White Resentment” Theory

You wouldn’t know from most of the commentary about Trump’s campaign of “white resentment” that, if he dropped out of the race today, 38 percent of his supporters would flock to either black or Hispanic candidates.

When pollsters for Public Policy Polling asked Trump supporters who their second-choice candidate is, three of the nonwhite candidates in the race topped the list. Ben Carson, the second choice of 16 percent of Trump supporters, does the best. Ted Cruz is second, at 12 percent. And Marco Rubio comes in third, at 10 percent.One common explanation for the rise of Donald Trump—accepted, in some form, in many quarters of the left and the right—is that he is a vehicle for white resentment of America’s growing diversity.There is clearly something to this. Various white nationalist individuals and groups support Trump. His immigration proposal is extreme. And as Ben Domenech has explained, “white identity politics” is a real phenomenon in democracies across the Western world.But this understanding—especially when collapsed into the more simplistic, “Trump is popular because racism” framing—is at best incomplete. It’s not impossible for racially resentful voters to support minority candidates, of course, but it seems unlikely that so many of Trump’s supporters would name Carson, Cruz, or Rubio as second choices if racial grievance was the really the foundation of the Trump candidacy.As WRM wrote last month, Trump is able to project a persona that signals his contempt for the political establishment and appeals to ordinary peoples’ desire to flout conventional norms of behavior. There may be an ugly racial component of Trump’s campaign—his endorsement by David Duke should obviously raise eyebrows in that regard—but it probably isn’t nearly as important as much of the commentary would suggest.

China Holds a Coming out Party

12,000 troops paraded through Beijing on Thursday to celebrate the 70th anniversary of China’s victory of Japan in World War II. They were accompanied by some of China’s latest ballistic missiles and a choreographed flyover of advanced bombers and fighters. One weapon on display has been dubbed the “Guam Killer”, presumably because it has been designed to hit the U.S. Pacific base on that island. And all of this bravado was accompanied by sightings of Chinese warships in the Bering Sea, reportedly the closest China’s navy has ever come to U.S. shores without being officially invited.

In his remarks at the parade, President Xi Jinping did a little counter PR, announcing that the military would cut 300,000 military personnel and proclaiming a commitment to world peace. Yet regional analysts don’t see his hollow rhetoric as a sign of real Chinese relaxation, according to the New York Times:

Rory Medcalf, the head of the National Security College at the Australian National University in Canberra, said the reductions were unlikely to ease regional worries about China’s growing military strength, because they were part of the modernization program to shift the People’s Liberation Army’s resources from traditional land forces.”

It would seem to be a pleasant surprise, because he’s clearly dressing it up as a signal of peace and good will,” Professor Medcalf said by telephone. “But China probably doesn’t need an army as large as it has.”

“Personnel are a massive cost in a military budget, and there’s been a lot of growth in military wages in China in recent years, so there are sensible capability reasons to cut personnel numbers without cutting effectiveness,” Professor Medcalf said. “This could also free up part of the budget for rebalancing the P.L.A. towards more advanced capabilities.”

This morning Australia asked to participate in joint military drills between India, Japan, and the United States. Japan is already a new addition to the planned exercises, which will be the first to include a third country since 2007. Don’t look for Xi’s announcement to do anything to ease these tensions in the region, or stop nations from coming together in a coalition to balance China’s power.