Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 610

No Peace in Our Time?

Yet another peace initiative between India and Pakistan is fizzling out. The Financial Times:

India and Pakistan blamed each other for the breakdown of a peace initiative just hours before their representatives were to have sat down for talks.

The Pakistani side withdrew after Sushma Swaraj, Indian foreign minister, said the talks could not take place if Sartaj Aziz, Pakistan’s national security adviser, did not drop plans to meet Kashmiri separatist leaders.

At this point, few should be surprised. The India-Pakistan quarrel has burned for generations now, occasionally erupting into violence, more often sullenly smoking and glowing. Americans and other liberal minded people around the world keep hoping for negotiating breakthroughs, pointing out that the quarrel is expensive for both countries and that they could both benefit from a solution. But the settlement never comes, and it’s unlikely to come anytime soon. Unfortunately, as both sides add to their nuclear arsenals, the chance that a clash could spiral out of control also rises over time.

And the struggle will likely continue; the Pakistanis hope that rising religious conflict in India (due both to the ascendancy of traditionally Hindu chauvinist parties like Narendra Modi’s BJP, and to the increasing militancy of Muslims worldwide, which is being felt inside India) will weaken its larger neighbor. India hopes that a growing economy and successfully-managed internal conflicts will propel it to a level of global power that leaves Pakistan choking in the dust. As that happens, Indians hope that the many ethnic and tribal rivalries inside Pakistan itself will continue to weaken the country and perhaps lead to its breakup.Both sides are patient, both sides are determined; neither side is in a hurry. Expect talk of peace, and talk of peace talks, to continue—but don’t expect real peace to break out anytime soon.

Saving America from a European Future

Ben Domenech, in a powerful Federalist column published Friday, identifies white identity politics as one of the driving forces behind the destructive appeal of Donald Trump’s populism. Trump’s success is a sign of a very great threat to the American right, Domenech says; it could transform the GOP from being a “fusionist ideological coalition with a shared belief in limited government” to a party that caters specifically and exclusively to the grievances and resentments of downtrodden whites. Such a path would be fatal to the cause of limited government, and would instead lead the GOP down the path taken by proto-fascist parties of the European right. One key passage:

“Identity politics for white people” is not the same thing as “racism”, nor are the people who advocate for it necessarily racist, though of course the categories overlap. In fact, white identity politics was at one point the underlying trend for the majoritarian American cultural mainstream. But since the late 1960s, it has been transitioning in fits and starts into something more insular and distinct. Now, half a century later, the Trump moment very much illuminates its function as one interest group among many, as opposed to the background context for everything the nation does. The white American with the high-school education who works at the duck-feed factory in northern Indiana has as much right to advance his interest as anyone else. But that interest is now being redefined in very narrow terms, in opposition to the interests of other ethnic groups, and in a marked departure from the expansive view of the freedoms of a common humanity advanced by the Founders and Abraham Lincoln.

Domenech is right that Trump and his immigration plan raise the specter of a GOP driven by white identity politics in a particularly vivid way. He is also right that the problem goes much deeper than Trump, who is, as he points out, merely benefiting from an anger and resentment that was already there. America is growing more and more diverse. Once the “cultural mainstream”, whites are becoming just one ethnic group among many. As that happens, the danger is that the GOP, which got 88 percent of its votes from whites in 2012, gives up on creating a coalition bound together by ideology and instead resorts to ginning up resentment among aggrieved members of its base.

If that transformation happens, Domenech argues, we would be faced with a European-style future, where the failure of the elites to respect the will of the large swathes of people creates an increasingly illiberal right-wing backlash, which in turn drives moderates to vote for the left, and so on in cycles.The best way to avert that future is to cut to the heart of the matter: immigration. The right must embrace and pass meaningful immigration reform that proves to the American public that it really does intend to enforce the nation’s borders. As Nick Gallagher argued in these pages on Thursday, reform does not have to be anti-immigrant or even anti-immigration. It could and probably should involve higher levels of legal immigration than we have right now and some form of amnesty. But the first, most indispensable steps must be to enforce the nation’s immigration laws and secure the borders.Until the GOP regains its constituents’ trust on this issue, the populist fervor buoying Trump will likely grow in intensity and scope. The way out of this mess is to outflank and isolate the Trumpians by tackling the immigration problem head on. GOP leaders must address Americans’ legitimate concerns about immigration, or risk seeing their party, and the country as a whole, slide down the ugly path that European nativists are taking.

What’s Behind China’s Devaluation?

The FT‘s Jamir Anderlini has a piece this week that’s required reading for anyone who wants to understand what’s going on with China’s economy in the wake of the Central Bank’s big devaluation of the renminbi, and how it fits into the context of recent Chinese economic history. As he lays out, China has long been stubbornly refusing to devalue its currency, even when the short term benefits of doing so become really tantalizing (so tantalizing that, at exemplary moments like the Dot Com bust and the global financial crisis of 2008, most of China’s East Asian numbers chose to devalue).

China, in other words, has had both the foresight and the leeway to ride out troubled times on the back of its explosive growth, confident that over the long term all signs pointed up. So, the fact that Beijing’s decided to devalue now despite the taboo means, then, that the growth model that’s been pushing China upwards is becoming outmoded. And, Anderlini suggests, the people who have access to China’s real economic figures—as opposed to the official ones, which are certainly inflated and which wouldn’t suggest things were bad enough to need to break with anti-devaluation tradition—know it. From the FT:

So why did China decide last week to break the great taboo and devalue its currency when there was no apparent crisis?

The answer is that China is already in the midst of its own creeping economic crisis and does not have enough tools to deal with it, according to analysts and even some Communist party officials speaking on condition of anonymity.

“Last week’s decision to move to a more flexible currency reflects the fact the underlying economy is much weaker than the official figures show,” says Rodney Jones, founder of Wigram Capital and one of the people credited with first predicting the 1990s Asian crisis. “After 30 years, China’s old economic model has broken down and actual growth is much weaker than anything we’ve seen before. The problem for China’s leaders is that their menu of possible policy options is more limited than in the past.”

The rest of the piece, which discusses the interesting and predictive facets of China’s massively government-boosted housing industry, an industry that on some readings of the latest economic news looks like a stone tied around the neck of a man being pushed into the water, as well as China’s sovereign debt—greater than Germany’s or America’s—is well worth a read in full this weekend. China’s evolving economic crisis will be the driver of much of what goes on in the world in the coming months.

 

Millions Late on Student Loan Repayments

Eye-opening statistics on student debt from the Wall Street Journal this weekend:

Nearly 7 million Americans have gone at least a year without making a payment on their federal student loans, a high level of default that suggests a widening swath of households are unable or unwilling to pay back their school debt.

As of July, 6.9 million Americans with student loans hadn’t sent a payment to the government in at least 360 days, quarterly data from the Education Department showed this past week. That was up 6%, or 400,000 borrowers, from a year earlier.That translates into about 17% of all borrowers with federal loans being severely delinquent, a share that would be even higher if borrowers currently in school who aren’t yet required to repay were excluded. Millions of other borrowers are months behind but haven’t hit the 360-day threshold that the government defines as a default.Severe delinquencies are rising despite the sharp drop in unemployment over the past year and a big push by the Obama administration to enroll borrowers in programs that lower their monthly payments. Delinquencies on other types of debt such as credit cards and mortgages have fallen. And shorter-term defaults on student loans have declined over the past year.The latest figures highlight how student debt—which has tripled over the past decade to $1.19 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York—has quickly become a crushing burden for more Americans.

The system we have built isn’t working. The investments we as a society are making in the higher ed system aren’t generating the returns needed to make the numbers add up: students just aren’t earning enough money as a result of their degrees to pay for the cost of getting them.

So what do we do? Basic blue theory says college and grad school are good in and of themselves, and so we should just pump more money into the system, which ends up meaning more loan forgiveness and more subsidies. Hillary Clinton’s “reform” blue stance appears to use federal oversight to try to put a lid on some of the more egregious sources of bloat in higher ed, but at the end of the day amounts to the same thing: pump more money into a broken system that won’t be changed very much through top-down enforcement. And red state populists, for their part, say screw the colleges, which are hotbeds of radical leftist thought anyway.None of these approaches really gets at the balance the country needs.The education mess is a lot like the health care mess: the combination of federally mandated costs and controls, runaway cost inflation driven by insiders who keep jacking up the price, perverse market incentives in a warped marketplace, dysfunctional mandates, guild controls and crony regulations, all have produced a system in which costs are increasingly out of line with true value—and with society’s ability to pay.Yet in both education and health, the United States has built systems that in many ways are the envy of the world. We don’t need to call in the bulldozers to destroy everything; our job is one of pruning and tending rather than clear cutting.But the pruning and tending itself cannot be superficial. And the longer we put off the process of real reform, or waste time with big reform efforts that don’t do enough to help (yes, Obamacare, we are looking at you), the harder the conversion process will be, and the longer it will take for us to realize the incredible gains when our education and health systems are actually living up to their potential in an economically sustainable way.

Insights From a Saudi General

The Wall Street Journal ran a fascinating interview with a former Saudi general tasked to test—or at least permitted to investigate—strategic alternatives in the Middle East. This is the same general, Anwar Majed Eshki, who appeared alongside the former Israeli ambassador to the United States, Dore Gold, at an event in Washington in early June after a long series of secret meetings.

It can be hard to read the tea leaves in a conversation like this—General Eshki no longer holds any official role in the Saudi government, and continues to insist that the dialogues with Ambassador Gold were a purely private undertaking. But several interesting points stick out in the conversation that are worth unpacking, and could give a careful reader at least a sense of how the notoriously secretive Saudis are strategizing.1) Israel as a regional ally.It seems clear that there is a lot of Arab-Israeli diplomacy going on that is not U.S. driven at this point—discussions of truce talks with Hamas just keep popping up. The assumption has to be that both sides are looking for some way of limiting the ability of the Palestinian issue to interfere with cooperation against the perceived major menace of Iran. Arabs need enough movement from Israel so that cooperation against Iran doesn’t totally play into Shi’a propaganda about Iran being the only true center of resistance to the evils of Zionism and the West. Israel’s right wing, pro-settler government is looking for concessions it can make that will satisfy the Arabs without enraging its base.It is not clear that this will be successful—both sides have a lot of red lines. But a fascinating sign of change in the Middle East — and potentially a historic opportunity; one hopes the Israelis will be ready to think big and think creative.2. Syria as the strategic focus.General Eshki doesn’t seem to be thinking about direct action against Iran, at least at this point. Instead, the focus is on Syria, where Eshki seems to have two objectives in mind. One is changing the Assad regime without “changing the system”, suggesting that the Saudis want Assad and figures close to Iran tossed out on their ear, without necessarily dismantling the structures of the Syrian state. As part of the plan to reduce Iran’s influence in Syria, he seems to envision Israeli and possibly Sunni Arab cooperation against Hezbollah. This would also have the consequence of making the Kingdom a much more dominant player in Lebanon, and restoring the power of the Sunni Arabs there.Eshki seems to be saying that the way to prune Iran back in the first instance is to attack its regional power. But conspicuously not mentioned is Iraq. It looks as if the general thinks that the operative trade here is a Sunni dominated Levant (Syria and Lebanon) in exchange for not challenging Shi’a power in Iraq. This is a reasonable compromise. If U.S. foreign policy were working in the region, this is pretty much what we should be aiming for.3. Yemen as a Saudi priority.General Eshki is giving a more hopeful reading of the consequences of Saudi intervention in Yemen than many Western analysts would support. His core point: Iran’s inability to ship weapons and other aid to its Houthi allies has exposed it as a paper tiger. If the idea animating the approach here is that the Saudi goal is to cut Iran out of Yemen and then negotiate some kind of deal among local entities with the Kingdom recognized (if not universally loved) as the most important outside power, then again it’s a reasonable view. It’s not clear if it can be achieved on the ground, or if the Saudis are capable of the self-denial and flexibility this approach will ultimately demand, but it’s hard to think of another approach to Yemen that would work better for them.4. Russia as a positive force.There have been lots of signals that the Sunni Arabs, as they come to terms with Washington’s new coldness and unreliability (as they see it), are looking for ways to bring Russia back into the regional equation to balance Iran. And there’s little doubt that Russia would desperately like to get more involved in selling weapons to the Gulf.Up until now, Russia has been aligned with Iran in the region. This is partly on general anti-American principle and partly because Russia fears Sunni jihad spreading to its own territories, with ISIS and Al Qaeda trained fighters returning to further radicalize Russian Muslims, and bringing arms and funds from the Sunni jihad zone into Russia. Finally, it’s partly because many of the Middle East’s remaining Christians are Orthodox with deep ties (in some cases economic as well as ecclesiastical) to Russia. Assad (like Saddam) for all his faults has protected the Christians in Syria. The Russians have a lot of reasons for wanting to see Christians protected going forward—not least because that would be an assurance that the Syrian government wasn’t becoming jihadi.If, as many think, Iran and the U.S. might be moving together, Russia will need new friends. There’s a potential grand bargain between the Sunnis and the Russians: Russia flips away from Iran, becomes an ally of the Gulf Arabs against it, and withdraws support from Assad. In exchange, the Gulf states agree to keep ISIS and its bloodied fellow travelers out of power in Syria, cooperate to keep jihad out of the Caucasus and other bits of Russia, and buy lots of Russian stuff.From the Russian point of view, there’s an additional angle here: the Russians and the Israelis are much closer than most Americans understand. The large Russian emigration to Israel since the fall of the Soviet Union has helped to create strong human and economic links; Putin has pursued a pretty pro-Israel diplomacy even as he’s kept up ties with Iran. Vladimir Putin might well hope to have a major role in the Middle East if he’s got good ties with both the Arabs and the Israelis—expanding Russian influence in one of the country’s historic zones of ambition, and substantially increasing Russia’s role in the world.This initiative is still more sizzle than steak, in that there are a lot of moving parts. Russian diplomacy, in part because its position is so weak, depends on a lot of razzle dazzle and keeping lots of balls in the air. But the Saudis don’t mind fingering the Russian card and, who knows? Something might eventually come of it.Interesting times, indeed.

Our Newest Climate Change Weapon: Nanofiber?

A team of researchers recently demonstrated a way to create carbon nanofiber—an ingredient in many high-end products—from atmospheric carbon. The BBC reports:

Their solar-powered system runs a small current through a tank filled with a hot, molten salt; the fluid absorbs atmospheric CO2 and tiny carbon fibres slowly form at one of the electrodes…the approach offers a much cheaper way of making carbon nanofibres than existing methods, according to Prof Stuart Licht of George Washington University. […]

…Prof Licht is confident his design can succeed. “It scales up very easily – the entire process is quite low energy…There aren’t any catches; there’s a necessity to work together, to test this on a larger scale, to apply some societal resources to do that,” he told BBC News.

On the one hand, this is a story about a potential breakthrough in materials science. The discovery could potentially be scaled up to source carbon nanofiber much more cheaply than current methods, according to the research team. But there’s also the unavoidable (and perhaps premature) hope that this could be a way to incentivize companies actively to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and, in doing so, help mitigate the greenhouse gas effect and climate change.

While it may be too soon to crown this the next great green hope (as is the case with so many “clean” technologies, profitably scaling it to a commercial level is the real test), this breakthrough points to humanity’s unceasing desire and ability to innovate. Malthusian environmentalists will talk at length of the problems that human development is unleashing on the planet without pausing to consider that this same pathway might provide solutions as well. As the pace of technological change accelerates, we’ll be seeing more stories like this one cropping up, and some of them will undoubtedly go on to disrupt current systems in ways we can’t now envision. And since so many of these advances involve doing or producing more with less inputs, Mother Nature should benefit as well.

Beijing: What Pivot?

A new report released by the Pentagon on Thursday throws into stark relief China’s stubborn refusal to back down from its aggressive territorial policies in the face of U.S. and regional protests. The Wall Street Journal has more:

Some U.S. military leaders have pushed the Pentagon to be more aggressive in countering China’s moves in the South China Sea, arguing for more assertive maritime and air patrols to fly within the 12 nautical mile territorial limit of some of the disputed islands that China claims. But some officials inside the Pentagon and at the White House say they have resisted flying such patrols for fear of provoking China. […]

China is ramping up patrols of the area, taking “small, incremental steps” in the disputed areas that avoid military conflict, but work to “increase its effective control” over the islands, the report said. The report also cites expanded use of the Chinese Coast Guard, which Beijing is using to enforce its claims in both the East and South China Seas. […]Washington fears that the islands will be used for military purposes and could create instability in one of the world’s biggest commercial shipping routes as China lays claim to what several other countries see as international waters. And, as China’s assertiveness grows, the risk of conflict with the U.S. and its allies grows along with it, defense officials have said.

Washington harbors doubts about China’s June 30 announcement that it had completed its land reclamation projects in the Spratly Islands, according to the WSJ. The article also makes clear that the Pentagon thinks China is still on track to militarize the artificial atolls (not excluding the suspiciously airfield-shaped one, notably). What’s more, the report highlights how Beijing has persisted in its strategy of expanding its territory incrementally. According to the Pentagon, as of May China had reclaimed 2,000 acres, and by June it was up another 900.

It looks like Beijing isn’t too worried that any U.S. pivot is going to get in the way of its regional ambitions. As we’ve said before, however, China may be gravely mistaken if it assumes that the U.S. won’t ever take more drastic measures to oppose its aggression. In the meantime, President Xi’s visit with President Obama in Washington next month may be rather tense.

Scary Signs from the Korean Peninsula

This is not business as usual: South Korea and the U.S. have called off joint military exercises due to soaring tensions between Seoul and Pyongyang. As we reported yesterday, North Korea and South Korea fired artillery shells at one another this week across the DMZ. The North started the shelling, saying it was provoked by loudspeakers placed at the border to blast anti-Pyongyang propaganda into its territory, a tactic Seoul once employed regularly but hadn’t used in 11 years.

South Korea, which argues that it was merely responding to the deaths of two of its soldiers earlier in August by allegedly North Korean landmines, then counter-volleyed with dozens of shells. Nobody on either side is reported to have been killed or injured, but in response to the artillery exchange, Kim Jong-un pronounced the North Korean military on the front to be in “a quasi-state of war.”As far as any two Asian countries shelling one another goes, this incident is comparatively unsurprising. Tempers, especially on the Northern side, flare up pretty regularly. Incidents of the DPRK firing shells across the border or at South Korean islands, not to mention its provocative missile and nuke tests and its wildly hyperbolic threats, are par for the course.But this sort of thing does represent a real danger, and Washington and Seoul, neither of whom are particularly apt to bend to North Korea’s whims, are clearly taking the situation quite seriously; the decision to call off the military exercises, which could be antagonizing Pyongyang, makes it look like people in the know think this is more than your average DPRK snit.

What Kind of Liberalism Won the Culture Wars?

The left-wing iconoclast Fredrik de Boer has a piece in the Observer contesting the conventional wisdom that social liberalism has won the culture wars in America. Citing the public’s widespread sense of amusement or indifference toward the hacking of Ashley Madison (a dating site for adults looking to have affairs whose users’ identities were exposed), de Boer argues that the culture remains overly moralistic and judgmental. He concedes that social conservatism is in decline, but doesn’t like what’s taking its place:

That social conservatism has lost seems inarguable… And yet I can’t help but feel that social liberalism hasn’t exactly won, either. Once, a central pillar of progressive attitudes towards love and sex was the right to be left alone, the right to have privacy, the right to undertake adult behaviors that others might not agree with but which nevertheless must remain permissible. That version of social liberalism—the one associated with tolerance and personal freedom—seems almost as dead as the religious traditionalism that we’re so eager to discard.

De Boer is clearly on to something here. The type of cultural politics currently ascendant on the left is not just about “the right to be left alone” when it comes to sex and romance. It’s far more complicated—and internally contradictory—than that. The new social liberalism is “at once radical and profoundly conservative”—a distinctive mix of cultural libertarianism on the one hand and cultural Victorianism on the other.

Consider, for example, the “Yes Means Yes” rules for campus sex currently spreading across the country with the blessing of such elite liberal cultural arbiters as the New York Times editorial page. The rules are born out of the progressive impulse to fight misogyny and protect sexual autonomy, but have the effect of giving authorities unprecedented leeway to regulate peoples’ romantic lives. As we’ve written before, “Yes Means Yes” (and the campus rape crackdown in general) is best understood as an effort to mitigate some of the unintended consequences of the sexual revolution—to impose formal restrictions on casual campus sex at a time when the cultural taboos against it have been swept aside.Or consider the culture war skirmish prompted by an activist group’s video showing a woman being catcalled as she walked along the streets of New York City last year. The controversy led progressives to argue that the government needed to take aggressive measures against the offending men (most of whom appeared to be poor or working class), which is yet another example of social liberalism meaning something quite different from “letting adults express themselves as they please so long as it is within the law.” Of course, “improving” the behavior of lower-class urban men, and protecting supposedly fragile women from unwanted encounters, were important Victorian projects in the 19th century as well.In other words, the type of social liberalism that won the culture wars has a different flavor from the libertarian, live-and-let-live movement de Boer identifies with—but it isn’t conservative, either. It’s about expanding personal expression in some domains but sharply restricting it in others.Conservatives generally doesn’t see much to like in the new social liberalism. They have argued that it is too heavy-handed, too authoritarian, and too prone to violating the civil rights of people who get in its way. But maybe they should look on the bright side: the Victorian quality of today’s liberalism means that the taboo against marital infidelity is still standing—and Ashley Madison users aren’t getting too much sympathy from our cultural elites.

Of Nationalists and Cosmopolitans

Among the many deplorable consequences of European elites’ failure to resolve their ongoing migrant crisis is the upsurge of nasty right-wing nationalism across the Continent. Politico reports that the nationalist backlash has been particularly acute in the Czech Republic:

The Czech Republic, a country that regards itself as intrinsically democratic and tolerant, is in the grips of a strong wave of anti-refugee and anti-Islamic hysteria. Motivated by fear of the unknown and fanned by openly racist media, the darkening mood has encouraged surprisingly extreme discourse on social networks like Facebook.

A certain amount of fear is perhaps understandable. After the deportation of a large German minority from Czechoslovakia in 1945 and after 40 years of communism, Central European countries such as the Czech Republic, Slovakia or Hungary are highly homogeneous and predominantly white. Historically, the Czechs and the Slovaks defined their nationality in terms of language, meaning that if you did not speak Czech or Slovak you were an alien, not to be accepted or trusted.Xenophobia and racism tend to be strongest where people have never met foreigners or persons of another skin color. But the intensity of the venom directed at immigrants — of whom there are very few in the Czech Republic — in public discourse is staggering.

There are ugly sentiments expressed in the article, but it’s important to do more than simply tsk tsk. The drive by Europe’s ethnic groups to set up states of their own where their particular cultural values and language could be both celebrated and protected is one of the great driving forces of modern European history. Nationalism was stronger than religion and ideology in modern Europe. It was also, for more than one hundred years, one of the chief building blocks of progressive social thought. The idea that each people should have the right to self determination, and that the rich members of a national community had a duty of solidarity towards the poorer members, helped bring both democratic politics and the welfare state to modern Europe. Without the power of nationalism—that sense of a ‘we’ that creates a political body—it is unlikely that either of these two ideas would have taken hold.

Nationalism is not unproblematic; German history tells us all we need to know on that score. And it is clear that the peace of Europe in the 21st century requires some kind of multinational form of political organization. But when European (or American for that matter) technocrats ignore the importance and validity of the social bonds, and miss the importance of the coherence that national identity gives to political institutions, then equally destructive problems can arise. Soviet history should show us what can happen when technocrats obsessed with ideological designs seek to remake societies without respect for the cultural and social values and traditions that have helped those societies cohere.Today, in both Europe and the United States, the technocrats and the cosmopolitans have leaned too far ahead over their skis. One of the consequences is the revival of the ugly side of nationalist politics. The answer isn’t to crush the nationalists and the traditionalists with ever more rigid policies of cosmopolitan integration and massive doses of immigration beyond what the body politic is ready for. That is not a way to fight ugly proto-fascist nationalist revivals; it is a way to stoke and empower them.