Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 621

The Sexual Revolution’s Unlikely Winners

Modern mobile dating applications are intensifying the hookup culture and tilting the sexual landscape in favor of shallow, boorish young men looking for no-strings-attached sex. That’s the picture that emerges from a long feature story by Vanity Fair‘s Nancy Jo Sales:

Marty, who prefers Hinge to Tinder (“Hinge is my thing”), is no slouch at “racking up girls.” He says he’s slept with 30 to 40 women in the last year: “I sort of play that I could be a boyfriend kind of guy,” in order to win them over, “but then they start wanting me to care more … and I just don’t.”

“Dude, that’s not cool,” Alex chides in his warm way. “I always make a point of disclosing I’m not looking for anything serious. I just wanna hang out, be friends, see what happens … If I were ever in a court of law I could point to the transcript.” But something about the whole scenario seems to bother him, despite all his mild-mannered bravado. “I think to an extent it is, like, sinister,” he says, “ ‘cause I know that the average girl will think that there’s a chance that she can turn the tables. If I were like, Hey, I just wanna bone, very few people would want to meet up with you …

“Do you think this culture is misogynistic?” he asks lightly.

For their part, the women quoted in the story are not quite as gleeful about the new opportunities afforded by the Tinder-powered culture of sex-on-demand:

“It seems like the girls don’t have any control over the situation, and it should not be like that at all,” Fallon says.

“It’s a contest to see who cares less, and guys win a lot at caring less,” Amanda says.

“Sex should stem from emotional intimacy, and it’s the opposite with us right now, and I think it really is kind of destroying females’ self-images,” says Fallon.

“It’s body first, personality second,” says Stephanie.

To be sure, the Vanity Fair story focuses (probably intentionally) on just one aspect of the modern sexual landscape. Men and women’s attitudes toward no-strings-attached-sex are not uniform—many women find it liberating, many men would prefer to opt out altogether, most people of both genders probably find it appealing some of the time, and most ultimately yearn for something more. But the thrust of Sales’ argument—that on the whole, this free-for-all sexual environment is more suited to male than to female preferences—rings true.

To a certain degree, this creates a problem for feminists, who have centered their agenda since the 1960s around loosening sexual strictures that limited the choices that women could make. Partly as a result of feminist-inspired social change, partly for other reasons, we’ve created an environment where young people have virtually unrestricted access to intoxicating substances ranging from alcohol to ecstasy, we’ve removed traditional prohibitions on premarital sex, and we’ve demolished traditional restraints on sexually adventurous behavior by both young men and young women. Yet somehow the sexual utopia has failed to arrive. Instead of creating a gender-blind paradise of sexual bliss, we seem to have constructed an arena of sexual competition that advantages—men.

This is the paradox helping to drive the sex wars on campus: “liberated” sex often works out better for young men than for young women, so efforts to free women from so-called repressive sexual norms sometimes reinforce male privilege rather than challenging it. Some of the more controversial steps by feminists on campus recently, like dramatically expanding the definition of sexual assault under “affirmative consent” policies, are best understood as efforts to compensate for the unintended consequences of past feminist efforts to create more space for free female choice.

These new efforts, clumsy, clunky, and controversial, aren’t likely to work. The core problem can’t be fixed by bureaucratic methods: The culture of no-strings-attached sexual encounters tends to reinforce gender inequalities even if, strictly speaking, consent is granted 100 percent of the time.

The gender wars are at least as old as the human race; the problems on display in the Vanity Fair piece aren’t going to be solved anytime soon. The Tinder generation will have to come up with its own sexual norms. They won’t be the norms of Mad Men, but they won’t be the norms of ‘Marty’, either.

In the meantime, though, it looks as if the big winners of the sexual revolution are the hordes of shallow, privileged men swiping through scantily-clad women on iPhone dating apps. This is not, it seems safe to say, what Betty Friedan had in mind.

The Big Sell

Over the past few days the Obama Administration has rolled out the big cannons to sell the Iran deal to a clearly nervous Congress. The main two salesmen-in-chief have been the President and the Secretary of State, the former by dint of a conventional speech, and the latter mainly through an interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. (Energy Secretary Moniz went off to Chicago to bang the gong, but, for better or worse, no one pays much attention to him because he’s not particularly charismatic and his formidable technical knowledge just makes most people’s eyes glaze over.)

In some ways it is a peculiar show. The way the Corker-Cardin (or Corker-Menendez, if you like the original label) law is written—which turns the Senate’s advise-and-consent function upside down and gratuitously sticks the House on for good, but probably unconstitutional, measure—the Administration should objectively have little to worry about. Both houses would have to override a Presidential veto to stop the deal, and given the regnant political geometry, that seems too high a hurdle to get over. But if that’s so, why is the Administration rushing to the ramparts?Well, several interconnected reasons seem either possible or plausible. The first is that Administration principals know the weaknesses of the deal and reason that if they do nothing while critics score points, they might actually lose the argument and the first vote—or at the least end up needing to use a veto to deliver the deal. That would be embarrassing and politically costly, so it’s worth avoiding if possible.Second, there is a possibility that Administration principals have an outsized Jewcentric fear that the “Jewish lobby”, working with the Israeli Prime Minister, is actually powerful enough to derail the agreement. They might point privately, within the inner sancta, to the fact that Chuck Schumer, the influential Jewish Senator from New York, and Steven Israel, the most senior-ranking Jewish member of the House, and both Democrats, have already come out against passage—though their opposition is probably less than meets the eye. So has David Harris and the board of the American Jewish Committee, an organization not generally known for kneejerk hawkish stances. We will return to the “Jewish” element in all this anon. Suffice to say for now that, if they really worry about this, they are delusional.Third, let it not go unmentioned that the big push is simply expected of them. This is what Administrations do. This is part of the political process, and part of the benign required ritual of a deliberative democracy. All the noise is a natural and healthy aspect of a genuine policy discourse.Except that there is something a little unhealthy, if not a bit fishy, about the “noise” of the past few days. The tone of the President’s speech, part of it certainly, was unpresidentially shrill. It violated Sidney Hook’s rule that a decent person first meet the arguments of his opponents before disparaging their characters. The President did not first meet and defeat the arguments of the critics. He first smeared the whole lot as, essentially, a bunch of neoconservative warmongers who gave us the disastrous Iraq War. His reference to “tens of millions of dollars in advertising” is especially noxious, as if opponents do not have a right to make their arguments, and as if Democratic politicians know nothing of political advertisements.He then turned to the critics’ arguments, which are all over the place. In some cases he merely asserted facts that, in my view, are not true. That does not mean he lied, anymore than Bush Administration principals lied about WMD stockpiles in Iraq before March 2003; someone can be both sincere and mistaken about something, after all, with no intent to mislead. In some cases his arguments hit home. Several others fell somewhere in between, which is to be expected when the subject is a complicated, somewhat technical, and hence a somewhat ambiguous can of worms. Let us take these three categories in turn.So what did the President say that, in my analysis, is not true? He claimed the deal “permanently prohibits Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon”, that it “cuts off all of Iran’s pathways to a bomb”, that “under its terms, Iran is never allowed to build a nuclear weapon”, and that “Iran will never have the right to pursue a peaceful program as a cover to pursue a weapon, and in fact this deal shuts off the type of covert path Iran pursued in the past.” How so?Because the verification system will work to catch any significant Iranian cheating. The President asserted that, “Inspectors will be allowed daily access to Iran’s key nuclear sites”, that there “will be 24/7 monitoring of Iran’s key nuclear facilities”, and that access is guaranteed, “even if Iran objects”, with “as little as 24 hours notice.” He claimed, too, that, “Under the terms of the deal, inspectors will have the permanent ability to inspect any suspicious sites in Iran.” And finally: “The prohibition on Iran’s having a nuclear weapon is permanent. The ban on weapons related research is permanent. Inspections are permanent.”With respect to the broader implications of the deal, the President also spoke an untruth or two. One was his remark that the Bush Administration “did not level with the American people about the costs of war, insisting that we could easily impose our will on a part of the world with a profoundly different culture and history.” The second untruth stands out in particular: “And by the way, such a strategy also helps us effectively confront the immediate and lethal threat posed by ISIL.”Let us now step back and address these claims.It is difficult for me to square any of the President’s claims that use the words “permanently” and “never” with a deal whose terms expire in ten, or fifteen, or in a few cases 25 years. Nor can I find the passages in the 159-page document that is the JCPOA deal that confirm these claims. If these statements are true by dint of side agreements between Iran and the IAEA, I would be surprised, but neither I nor the Congress has access to those side agreements—and it’s not entirely clear that the President does either.The fact is that Iran will be able to run some 6,000 centrifuges under the terms of the deal, it will be able to conduct research and development on various nuclear technologies, and it will be able to advance its human capital resources, as well. Increasingly as time passes, therefore, Iran will burnish its credentials as a nuclear-threshold state, so that by the time the deal expires its nuclear infrastructure, in many respects, will be far more advanced than it is today. The broader political implications of this fact are daunting: Rather than obviate a regional proliferation race, which the President yet again rightly stressed is the real problem here, it is likely to stimulate it. That is in the cards anyhow because the way the Administration approached the negotiations, by delinking them from Iran’s broader regional behavior, simulated enough anxiety among U.S. allies that they have already begun to vow efforts to achieve some form of parity.The claims about the foolproof capacities of the verification and inspection regime also strike me as wrong. I cannot find in the agreement any evidence that inspectors will be able to go anywhere they want within 24 hours. Note in this regard that on the same day that the President delivered the speech, the Wall Street Journal reported that the IAEA inspector-general Yukiya Amano expressed frustration that the Iranian government is still stiff-arming the IAEA with regard to access to Iranian scientists. Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported that U.S. intelligence has evidence that the Iranians are now sanitizing, in broad daylight, a suspected nuclear site at Parchin. Why is this important?The IAEA is now in the process of trying to resolve what is known as the PMD issue. PMD stands for “possible military dimensions” (not “past military developments”). Secretary Kerry promised in April, when the framework agreement was extracted from Wendy Sherman’s whiteboard, that the PMD issue would be settled before any signatures attached to an agreement. That did not happen. It still isn’t settled. The IAEA is supposed to report out on the PMD issue, by mutual agreement, on December 15, which is, please note, way beyond the period of congressional review. Again, why is this important? Because only if we know what past military activities the Iranians have been involved in can we establish a baseline against which to judge whether the deficiencies in the inspection/verification regime are acceptable on balance or not. So far, anyway, the Iranians show no willingness to settle this issue on acceptable terms, and cleaning up old messes seems designed to hide earlier military-related work from all possible means of intelligence exposure.Now, it is all well and good that television monitors will be set up at Fordow, Nantanz, and other known facilities. But what will go in does not represent the best technical craft the IAEA possesses, and worse, by definition this monitoring cannot see what is going on at undeclared sites. There has never been a time over the past two decades when Iran has not been violating the NPT with covert work, a fact the President referred to and a fact that is responsible for seven Security Council resolutions censuring Iran. Unless we have powerful national technical means to see inside of Iran, well over and above what the IAEA can do, we won’t know what we won’t know. This is why getting the PMD portfolio settled properly is so critical. But, alas, if the IAEA could not do its job before the deal while sanctions have been in place, it strains credulity to think that the Iranians will be more cooperative once the sanctions regime is gone. So the claim that “this deal shuts off the type of covert path Iran pursued in the past” seems to me untrue.The Bush Administration “did not level” with the American people? This is really below the belt. As already noted, being mistaken is not the same as lying or not leveling. The key Bush Administration principals actually believed the things they said about the so-called freedom agenda, although no one said, as far as I can remember, that “we could easily impose our will” on the Arab world. People, notably the President, spoke of “the work of generations.” I agree with President Obama that this was a fool’s errand, and have written as much many times over the past decade. But the insinuation that these errors were knowingly part of a con job of some sort is insufferable.As to the new strategy helping the effort against ISIS, this is nonsense. The reverse is true.ISIS arose from serial U.S. errors and ambient weakness and chaos in the region. Those errors include invading Iraq and shattering that state with no credible Phase IV and no Plan B in hand if things didn’t go well, and they certainly didn’t; then leaving too soon before social and political normalcy, or what passes for it in a place like Iraq, could be established; and, above all, passivity in the face of the Alawi butchery of some 200,000 Sunnis in Syria. ISIS arose to fight Alawis in Syria and Shi’a in Iraq; it was sucked into that vortex by fawning weakness not just in those states but in the whole Sunni Arab world.ISIS therefore is the radical Sunni pole that matches and feeds off of the radical Shi’a pole whose epicenter is Iran. Hence, ISIS has used fear of Iran and of Shi’a encirclement as a prime recruitment tool. Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, ISIS’s chief mouthpiece, has repeatedly warned of a Western plan to hand over the Muslim world to Iran. After the U.S. military seemed to act like the Shi’a air force, even sharing a base with a vicious Iranian-backed Arab Shi’a militia, the Administration’s deal with Iran will mightily reinforce this narrative. It’s the best thing that’s happened to ISIS’s recruiting effort since the Administration began its feckless, strategy-free air war against it, which managed to confirm the mantra that “the West is at war against Islam” without really hurting the bloody bastards all that badly. What did the President get right? To be fair and objective, plenty. In general terms, he did not equivocate about how nasty and dangerous the Iranian regime is or about how justified Israeli concerns with it are. He hit all the right notes on both scales. He stated that “there’s never been disagreement on the danger posed by an Iranian nuclear bomb”, and that “there are times when force is necessary, and if Iran does not abide by this deal, its possible we don’t have an alternative.” Maybe the Iranians do not believe him, but that’s now moot. The drama will not play out to that point while Obama remains in office. But these are fair statements, and whoever becomes President in January 2017 will retain these judgments and this sense of obligation to use force if it comes down to that.I therefore think the President is right to characterize the situation as either this deal or an ineluctable path to war. I have been saying for many years now that our real choice is learning to live with an Iranian bomb or removing the possibility by force; “learning to live with an Iranian bomb” now translates into living with the deal. And the President is absolutely right to say that the “send it back for renegotiation” ploy is just that: a tactical evasion and a non-starter.He is also right to say that if the Congress votes the deal down the sanctions regime will be dead in the water. But it will disappear if the deal is consummated, too. So either way, it’s toast. But the President is right to insist that sanctions alone, even were the full wall of constraint to persist, cannot stop an Iranian bomb. He is right, too, to claim that even more hurtful sanctions cannot be erected if this deal goes down, because it was the promise of a negotiated solution, or at least a full faith effort of the U.S. government to try for one, that enabled the sanctions regimes to be built in the first place. I wish he had avoided language like “are not being straight with the American people” and “are selling a fantasy”, but on the merits he’s right about this.Finally on this score, the President is right to claim that no one has a clearly better alternative right now. This is a point I have also made before: If you don’t like the deal, what’s your alternative? The alternative is indeed a high risk of war, and, as the President said, some are honest enough to say that it’s a risk worth running under the circumstances. But when the President talks like this he undermines the credibility of his own claims to be willing to use force if need be. So this introduces us to the ambiguous.And what about the ambiguous? Well, first, the President’s claim that taking the diplomatic track is what got Hassan Rouhani elected President of Iran is mere speculation. Lots of things determine the outcome of elections in Iran, not least the absurdly narrow qualification criteria to be able to run for office. The President’s remark that “the Iranian people elected a new government” seemed to bless Iran as a genuine electoral democracy, no different, really, from our own. This is odd, to say the least.Second, the claim that the deal is better able to limit the Iranian effort to get a bomb than a military attack is hard to assess from both directions. As I have written before, the Iranians have any number of exit ramps they can take between implementation and 15 years from now. They can, in my view, cheat repeatedly at the margins without much fear of being forced to relent, and in such a way as to accumulate real militarily applicable assets; and they can then walk out of the deal after copping the financial benefits. Read paragraphs 36 and 37. Now, the President said that sanctions can snap back at U.S. insistence alone: “We won’t need the support of other members of the UN Security Council, America can trigger snap back on our own.” So Iran’s financial benefits will be temporary and modest—that’s the tacit argument here. Well, we can snap back our own sanctions but we cannot unilaterally re-impose everyone else’s, which means the sanctions regime in its stronger form is not something we can bring back to life once it is deconstructed.As to the other end, how much damage a military strike can do depends on the particulars of the strike. I would not trust this Administration to undertake an effective strike, given what its anti-ISIS campaign looks like, but other Administrations might do a better job of planning and execution. Of course the President is right that “immaculate conception” strikes are impossible; the Iranians would respond and there are plenty of U.S. targets to hit, military and otherwise. Uncertainties and unanticipated consequences would abound, as always. But the categorical assertion that this deal will retard Iranian ambitions better than any conceivable form of military action strikes me as not proven, at best.At one point the President claimed that some people who criticized the November 2013 interim accord now use it as an excuse not to “support the broader accord.” Maybe he knows someone who fits that description; I don’t.And finally on the ambiguity scorecard—which will serve as a segue to Secretary Kerry—the President claimed that the Iranians will “have to get rid of 98 percent of its stockpile of enriched uranium, which is currently enough for up to 10 nuclear bombs, for the next 15 years.” Now this is a very slippery remark. It suggests that without the JCPOA the Iranians will be able to build “up to 10 nuclear bombs” essentially anytime they feel like it. Hold that thought while we visit the mind of Secretary John Kerry. Secretary Kerry made this same claim not once but three times in his interview with Jeffrey Goldberg: “They didn’t make the bomb when they had enough material for 10 to 12”; “They have mastered the fuel cycle; they have enough fissile material for 10 to 12 bombs”; and “They were really nudging into it. This was a dangerous place we were in. We were at two-months; we were at 10, 11 bombs-worth fissile material.” Kerry thus characterized the deal not a preventative, but as a rollback. We have, he said, “the mechanism to get rid of nuclear weapons.” And, “What we’ve done, and what no one else has succeeded in doing, is rolling back the program.”This is a very significant claim. Accepting the risks of JCPOA for buying time or arguably preventing an Iranian nuke is one thing; accepting them for actually achieving the rollback of all-but-existing nukes is something else again—a significantly more attractive proposition. (To my surprise, Goldberg failed to pick up on what he was hearing.) But is any of this true?I have been closely following this business for a decade or more, and I have never heard any American official—or any other official, for that matter—claim that Iran ever had or now has enough fissile material for 10, or 10-12, bombs. So what are the President and Secretary Kerry talking about?The best answer I can give goes like this: The Iranians had a lot of LEU (low-enriched uranium)—in the 3 to 20 percent range—by 2011-12. (They may also have obtained some ready-made fissile material from the collapsed Soviet Union at an earlier time, but this is not clear.) To get 10-12 weapons out of that material would have required something called batch enrichment to hike it to a level of around 90-percent enriched—that’s weapons grade. That is not easy to do. Besides, after Prime Minister Netanyahu did his September 2012 act at the UN General Assembly, displaying his famous Wile E. Coyote cartoon of the bomb with the line at 200 kilograms of 20 percent enriched uranium, the Iranians, according to the IAEA quarterly reports, down blended some of their 20 percent enriched stockpile to stay under the 200 kg limit. They were doing this, at least in part, before the interim JPOA was signed in November 2013. They may have been afraid of the Israelis at that point, if not of us. This means that they never got close to having what Kerry and the President suggest in their remarks.So, is this a lie? A matter of technological ignorance? Both? Far be it from me to judge. All I know is that the statement is perhaps true in some sort of vague, general way; but it is not true as intended. The Iranians never had enough 90 percent enriched uranium for 10 bombs. The deal is not a rollback. It is at best a buy-time preventative, and should be judged against that achievement and nothing more.One final comment about Secretary Kerry’s interview. At one point in the conversation Goldberg asks about whether the Iranians would walk away from a prospect of Congress-forced renegotiation. Kerry answers: “I know they would walk away for several different reasons. It’s not a ‘think’—it’s a ‘know.’ You need to talk to the intel community. You know, we had pretty good insight in the course of this process. Our evaluations out of the intel community informed us where reality was, what the market would bear.”This is not the first time Obama Administration officials have evoked classified material in public for political purposes. But it is wrong. It is always wrong to politicize intelligence like this, and it is disingenuous for Kerry to pull intel trump to make a public argument when those outside the SCI realm cannot judge for themselves what he’s talking about. Earlier in the interview Kerry expressed a reluctance to come across like an analyst in answer to Goldberg’s questions; he knows, at least, that doing so is not Secretarial. But using classified information in such a manner is far worse.Now let’s talk about the Jews. A rather inordinate amount of words got spilled by both the President and the Secretary about Israel. Why?Well, as the President said, Israel’s government is the only one that opposes the deal, and does so ferociously. This is a problem because Israel is a close ally, and it deserves special consideration. One does have to wonder about the specter of Jewcentricity, however. Just how much clout do Administration principals think “the Jews” really have? I cannot answer that question.The whole business is quite troublesome, however, for lots of reasons. First, there are plenty of experts who think the Iran deal is a bad deal who are not remotely Jewish. Second, the disagreement poses real dilemmas to those American Jews who have deceived themselves into thinking that U.S. and Israeli interests and perceptions are always synonymous. They are not and never have been, but it’s a comforting illusion and it’s not so hard to believe in during normal times. But these are not normal times. This is a wrenching, divisive issue at a politically polarized moment in both Israel and the United States. Both President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu bear responsibility for making a difficult situation much worse. It’s at best a toss-up whether U.S. support for Israel can ever again be a non-partisan issue.Secretary Kerry and the President both claim that Bibi is wrong, and that they know what’s best for Israel better than he does. The President, at least, said as much very plainly. They also claim not to understand his opposition to the negotiations, which sprang forth with all four paws bared in November 2013.The former claim reminds me of leftwing “progressive” consciousness-raising from the 1960s. The New Left types claimed to know what was in the best interest of laborers better than laborers themselves, even though the vast majority of these kids did not come from proletarian homes. I did, and so naturally they came across to me as a bunch of arrogant and cluelessly presumptuous jackasses. Even if the President thinks he knows what is best for Israel, more so than its own democratically elected leader, it is unwise to say so publicly.As to the second claim, well, there’s no secret about the reason for Netanyahu’s judgment as of November 2013, and in this most Israelis are of the same view: The November 2013 deal enshrined Iran’s right to enrichment. That is the crucial concession that changed the purpose of the negotiations from where they started to where they have ended up. Now, the President and the Secretary posture as though it’s the Holocaust that is to blame for all this anxiety and opposition. They profess to “understand” and “sympathize” with this. They therefore raise themselves up to the status of amateur psychoanalysts, with Israel the one lying there on the couch. This is condescending in the extreme, and it is also happens to be misleading sanctimonious bullshit.Israelis, and Jews around the world, are worried because they see the unfolding of a regional proliferation nightmare all around them. It is irrational to think that, once the Iranians had mastered the fuel cycle, any negotiation could have undone that reality. As I have tried to point out before, arms control diplomacy cannot significantly alter strategic realities, only modulate them a bit at the margins. For the Israeli government to have demanded the impossible, and then acted like a petulant child when the U.S. government could not deliver it, has not been pretty to watch. Israeli behavior has had the side effect of making it almost impossible for Sunni Arab regimes to oppose this deal publicly, even though they do oppose it privately—now how smart is that? But Israeli (and Jewish) fears are not at base irrational and they are not tied to a Holocaust syndrome. Had there never been a Holocaust the objective situation right now and going forward would not be one iota different.What Israelis and Jews are looking at is the possibility, just 10 or 15 or 25 years down the road—which is as if a few seconds in the long skein of Jewish history—that millions of Jews (and plenty of Arabs and others) could be killed in a single afternoon and the State of Israel rendered non-viable. What this means to thoughtful Jews is that the very continuity of the Jewish people could be called into serious question. What kind of future could the Jewish people have, and what could possibly be its character, after such a calamity? This is what is at stake deep in the hearts of Israelis and Jews, and for the President and the Secretary of State to fob it off as an irritating wisp of mere paranoia or irrationality is deeply unsettling, all the way, I think, to tragic.The big sell will continue, as will the naturally partisan big thumbs down campaign, until the Congress votes on the deal next month. The vote tally is unknown at present, but it is unlikely that the Administration will need to exercise a veto to get its way. It is even more unlikely that a veto, if there is one, could be overridden. Thereafter, the gears of implementation will begun to churn, the debates will narrow onto how the IAEA is faring with the Iranians, and a great deal of leather-lunged simplification is bound to populate the campaign season ahead. And then what?And then, unless a Republican President voids the deal after taking office in January 2017, nothing very dramatic happens for a good while. It will take time for the prognostications, optimistic or dire, to play out. It could take a decade or longer, or a mere few years. But by the time the bell rings for the next significant round, it will be another Administration’s problem, and no one can predict what the ambient political and strategic environment at the time will look and feel like. In a sense, then, the Iran deal is a little like a space probe—something launched not so much into space as into time, into the future. Someone once wisely said that the past is a foreign country. The future may as well be another planet. The Congressional vote, therefore, will mark not the end of this business, but only the end of the beginning.

Saudis Are “Hemorraghing” Cash as Oil Prices Plunge

Saudi Arabia’s foreign reserves are depleting at a staggering pace as Riyadh struggles to balance its budget at current oil prices. The petrostate saw its sovereign wealth fund balloon to three quarters of a trillion dollars last summer, but a bearish oil market now has it running a budget deficit of some 20 percent of GDP. As a result, those reserves have dropped more than $72 billion over the past year, and, as Bloomberg reports, they are expected to shrink even further:

Economists at Jeddah-based National Commercial Bank forecast in a July research note that Saudi Arabia’s net foreign assets will fall to $655.5 billion this year and drop $22.1 billion more in 2016.

The government plans to sell as much as 20 billion riyals ($5.3 billion) of debt on Monday as part of a wider plan to raise 90 to 100 billion riyals before year-end to help cover the deficit, two people familiar with the matter said.If that happens, government debt would increase to about 7 percent of economic output from less than two percent last year, the lowest ratio in the world, Jean-Michel Saliba, a London-based economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, wrote in a research note.

Riyadh has strong-armed its fellow OPEC nations into a strategy of inaction in the face of plunging oil prices this past year, choosing to weather bargain crude prices in the hopes of gaining market share against upstart non-OPEC suppliers (American fracking firms chief among them). The Saudis hoped that low prices would squeeze shale out of business before hitting the petrostates too hard. It was, essentially, a game of chicken of the highest stakes.

But the Saudi central bank itself now doesn’t believe the strategy is working, admitting in its latest financial stability report that “[i]t is becoming apparent that non-OPEC producers are not as responsive to low oil prices as had been thought, at least in the short-run.” In other words, shale firms have surprised the world with their resilience, and that’s very bad news indeed for petrostates both within and without the cartel.

Europe Paralyzed as Migrant Deaths Mount

The latest tragedy in the Mediterranean, where a fishing ship smuggling possibly as many as 600 people capsized on Wednesday with about 200 presumed dead, is a portrait in miniature of the mess of policy mistakes, unintended consequences, and human folly that’s turning the Mare Nostrum into a graveyard. (A mark of how bad things are: 200 deaths can be considered “a portrait in miniature”.)

According to the WSJ, many of those aboard the ship came from Syria. For four years, the West has refused and/or been unable to do anything about the plight of that war-torn country, and no wonder people are fleeing it. Meanwhile, the port of immediate departure was in Libya, where the West—at the urging of many European nations—did intervene, but without any intention to stick around or plan to deal with the aftermath. Even as it becomes increasingly clear that Libya’s disorder is at the root of the current immigration crisis, Europe has not the foggiest clue how to fix things there.For the short period of time during which they were on the fishing boat, the passengers appear to have suffered horrific but sadly unsurprising abuse at the hands of the smugglers they’d each paid thousands of dollars to. The tragedy was precipitated when an Irish patrol vessel came into sight, and those aboard the fishing boat rushed toward the side of the boat, causing the boat to capsize.The passengers who were rescued were only 75 miles off the coast of Libya, less than halfway to the first bit of Italian territory in the Med, the island of Lampedusa, which itself lies twice as far again from Sicily. Yet the rescued migrants were taken to Europe, not turned back. On the one hand, this is an understandable humanitarian reaction, given what these people must have been through. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that this reaction creates inducement in and of itself for people to take such risks, and indeed, previous capsizes are though to have been caused when people rush to get “caught” by patrol ships.Once ashore, though, while conditions are better than in Syria, the refugees face a legal and cultural morass that’s helpful to no one—not the natives, nor the immigrants. European law makes it very difficult to expel a refugee, or even someone claiming refugee status (immigrants from poor African countries such as the Gambia, fleeing wretched economic conditions but not a war or natural disaster are technically migrants, not refugees, even though most Westerners would see the conditions they’re escaping as deeply miserable).But while the newcomers are not sent back, Europe’s welfare states are nevetheless not set up, legally and culturally, to accept large numbers of immigrants. Nor are European economies by and large dynamic enough to provide employment for large numbers of new peoples. While many Europeans are personally welcoming, its getting harder to deny that immigration issues are driving the growth of extremist parties. Brussels has failed to make headway on mandatory redistribution (which would almost certainly inflame nativist feelings), while Italy and Greece, the main countries of first arrival, buckle under the strain.So why hasn’t something been done? Real change—change big enough to address the underlying problems—would be a slaughterhouse of sacred cows. Depending on the solution(s) they adopted, European leaders would have to address the failings of the social welfare state, their attitudes toward intervention in North Africa and the Middle East, P.C. pieties about immigration, and/or freedom of movement within the European Union.Yet something nevertheless must be done. While pieties are mouthed, hands are wrung, and nothing is done, hundreds will die and thousands suffer this year. Consider the scale of this latest tragedy: 200 people is roughly the passenger capacity of an Airbus A300. If one of those had gone down in the Mediterranean, it would dominate the news for a week; if one was crashing every few weeks or so for over a year, the sense of crisis would be overwhelming. How long can Europe avoid making hard choices while people die?

“Frack Now, Pay Later”

That’s the strategy being employed by some of the shale industry’s top oil services companies. Halliburton and Schlumberger are struggling to find and keep business in the U.S., where many fracking operations are quickly becoming unprofitable in the face of plunging crude prices. To keep the oil flowing and the potential for profit-making (even if it’s months or years in the offing) alive, the companies are trying different tacks, acting sometimes as lenders by extending credit lines to struggling shale producers, or playing the role of producer themselves by covering certain capital costs in exchange for a stake in the wells being drilled.

As Reuters reports, both are hoping to keep the wheels of the industry greased while they introduce innovative new techniques to find ways to turn a profit even with oil below $50 per barrel:

The services companies have made these special offers to producers in a bid to roll out the new business line of refracking, in which existing wells are worked over to lift output.

Halliburton and Schlumberger tout refracking as a cheap way of adding barrels because it avoids drilling new wells, which can cost several million dollars each.

This change in tactics comes at a time when smaller shale firms—a necessary ingredient in America’s fracking boom—find themselves in serious and even existential trouble. Wildcatters lack the cash reserves that their larger cousins the oil majors are falling back on, and with banks increasingly wary to extend lines of credit, the outlook is bleak. “For the weaker companies, it could be very, very painful. Some of them are essentially running on fumes,” said Jimmy Vallee, a partner at Paul Hastings, a Houston-based energy mergers and acquisitions practice.

Fracking shale isn’t cheap, but that’s not stopping the industry from trying anything and everything to keep up production in today’s bearish market.

Kerry Talks Tough on China at ASEAN

Speaking at the meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) conference in Kuala Lumpur, Secretary of State John Kerry doubled down on U.S. opposition to Beijing’s aggression in the South China Sea. Reuters reports:

Kerry’s blunt criticism of Beijing, in front of his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi, is likely to lift the South China Sea up the agenda when Chinese President Xi Jinping visits Washington next month, some experts said.

“Freedom of navigation and overflight are among the essential pillars of international maritime law,” Kerry told the East Asia Summit attended by foreign ministers from around the region.“Despite assurances that these freedoms would be respected, we have seen warnings issued and restrictions attempted in recent months,” Kerry said.“Let me be clear: The United States will not accept restrictions on freedom of navigation and overflight, or other lawful uses of the sea.”

The strong words back up the American policy rolled out in May, which calls for lawful arbitration of the many overlapping territorial disputes in the region and strictly opposes China’s attempts to interrupt freedom of navigation and trade by declaring exclusive economic zones or even an ADIZ.

Though the U.S. is not part of ASEAN, it holds a lot of sway with most of the organization’s ten member states, and many—though not all—of the countries around the region will be watching America closely and taking cues. ASEAN itself may once again fragment and fail to come up with a joint communique (as it did the last time it met) but China’s repeated antagonism is certainly not making those of its neighbors wary of its intentions any more at ease.

The First 21st-century Presidential Debate

The GOP’s prime time primary debate last night won’t be remembered for what the candidates said, but it will be remembered for how they said it. It was the first true 21st century presidential debate. It was not Lincoln-Douglas and it was not Kennedy-Nixon; it was a format that embraced reality television, short attention spans, and unscripted encounters. It embraced the Fox News format—overwhelmingly the most successful news format in America today—rather than echoing the hushed seriousness of the old Cronkite days.

For traditionalists, some of whom were venting on twitter last night, the new style of debate was yet another sign of America’s grim slide into terminal darkness, with the GOP leading the country into a new era of ever less literate and rational politics. One can hardly wait for the eloquent anguish of the New Yorker as it wrings its hands over the tsunami of GOP darkness plunging the Republic into an eternity of night.But was it really such a disaster? The format of sharp questions, calculated to elicit quick answers, and the moderators’ openness to unscripted exchanges advertised what promises to be a key Republican calling card in 2016: generational change. Neither Secretary Clinton nor Senator Sanders is a spring chicken; throw Joe Biden into the race and the age span of the three candidates, 215, is just one year shy of the 216 years since George Washington died. Viewers seemed to respond; the early ratings indicate that the debate was the most-watched primary debate, ever, and by a huge margin.Maybe the Republicans are crazy like a fox. Love it or hate it, this kind of debate format is part and parcel of the direction America is going. Its appeal, and the electability of candidates who learn to excel at this format, is one of those things that many members of the chattering classes, sunk in nostalgia for the politics of the 20th century, may miss.

Sen. Schumer to Oppose Iran Deal

One of the Senate’s most powerful Democrats has come out against the President’s Iran deal, making a statement that, despite some kind words for the President and the Secretary of State, the White House won’t like. Sen. Schumer (D-NY), the presumptive next Democratic Senate Minority or Majority Leader, wrote earlier tonight:

Using the proponents’ overall standard — which is not whether the agreement is ideal, but whether we are better with or without it — it seems to me, when it comes to the nuclear aspects of the agreement within ten years, we might be slightly better off with it. However, when it comes to the nuclear aspects after ten years and the non-nuclear aspects, we would be better off without it.

Sen. Schumer’s conclusion undermines one of the Administration’s main talking points, that the only choices are this deal or war:

To me, the very real risk that Iran will not moderate and will, instead, use the agreement to pursue its nefarious goals is too great.

Therefore, I will vote to disapprove the agreement, not because I believe war is a viable or desirable option, nor to challenge the path of diplomacy. It is because I believe Iran will not change, and under this agreement it will be able to achieve its dual goals of eliminating sanctions while ultimately retaining its nuclear and non-nuclear power. Better to keep U.S. sanctions in place, strengthen them, enforce secondary sanctions on other nations, and pursue the hard-trodden path of diplomacy once more, difficult as it may be.

For all of these reasons, I believe the vote to disapprove is the right one.

This is more than a break with the President’s political position; it is a repudiation of the President’s whole approach to the Iran debate. President Obama has pulled out all the stops to argue that opponents of his Iran deal are aligned with America’s enemies. Now one of the Senate’s most respected Democrats says that the country would be better off if Congress trashes the President’s signature diplomatic accomplishments. Does President Obama think Senator Schumer is in league with the Iran Revolutionary Guard? Or does he think he’s a secret Israeli agent who is disloyal to the United States?

Senator Schumer’s dissent will not, by itself, kill the deal. But it’s not good news for the White House. Schumer’s dissent will give cover to other Democrats; it shows that the core of the party is divided over the deal — and it means that other senators who break with the White House may not face severe punishment by Senate leaders. With over a month left on the Corker-Menendez vote clock, and the August recess ahead, this is not a statement that the White House wanted to see.

France Settles with Russia Over Mistrals

Much to the consternation of France’s allies, after Putin’s annexation of Crimea Paris looked for a while like it was still going to deliver two Mistral-class warships, designed to carry helicopters and to mount amphibious assaults, to Russia. We followed the story pretty closely both because it served as a test of European solidarity on the matter of Russian aggression and because the ships themselves would have been a big boon for Moscow’s ability to attack its neighbors. When France ultimately nixed the deal, we were among those cheering.

It’s not clear from the reporting how much Russia had prepaid at the time the contracts were canceled. The standoff between Moscow and Paris appears to have been about what kind of penalties France would be forced to pay due to breaking the contract. The final restitution figures have not been revealed, but the total appears to be less than the full cost of the contract. Reuters:

The total cost to France of reimbursing Russia for cancelling two warship contracts will be less than 1.2 billion euros ($1.31 billion), French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said on Thursday.

Le Drian said on radio RTL the initial price for the two Mistral helicopter carrier warships had been 1.2 billion euros, but France will have to pay less than that because the ships were not been finished and the contract was suspended.“Talks between President Putin and President Francois Hollande have concluded yesterday. There is no further dispute on the matter,” he said.

This story has been something of a saga, but it’s over now. The ships (at least one of which is complete) are French government property. The French navy may have difficulty commissioning and deploying the vessels for its own uses, as some reports indicate that the ships were heavily customized for use with Russian-made helicopters. But potential buyers are apparently expressing interest.

Wherever they end up, they’ll stand as a monument to the West’s stance on Ukraine’s still-deepening crisis: to its deep divides and its refusal to commit to anything more than half measures which, as Walter Russell Mead argued back in September, can be worse than nothing.

The Administration’s Iran Conundrum

Secretary of State John Kerry opened a window into the worldview of the Administration yesterday while trying to sell the Iran deal in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic, and it exposed perhaps more than the Secretary realized:

Goldberg: But does it bother you that money [from sanctions relief] will be going to [Syrian President Bashar] Assad and Hezbollah?

Kerry: Yes, but it’s not dispositive. It’s not money that’s going to make a difference ultimately in what is happening. We have huge mechanisms by which we can push back and make the counter-difference. And the biggest, most important thing this is doing is that it is galvanizing a stronger, more defined security relationship between us and the Gulf states, and it will with Israel. We have countless ways to push back against those activities.

Likewise, President Obama has defended the Iran deal by arguing, as recently as yesterday, that we should give it a shot because, if Iran cheats, the U.S. will still have “the same options available to stop a weapons program as we have today, including—if necessary—military options.” On the one hand, Secretary Kerry and the President are absolutely right: we have those options. But on the other, we have not used them—and many in the Middle East suspect this Administration never will. Many wonder, in fact, whether America is actually taking Iran’s side, throwing its weight behind the Shi’a in the ongoing conflict between Shi’a and Sunni.

That’s a dangerous perception. If you’re a Sunni right now, times look apocalyptic. With the Shi’a ascendent in Damascus, Baghdad, and Yemen, heretics seem to be everywhere. And if you think that America is putting its weight behind not only Israel but also the Shi’a, it looks like ultimate alliance of all evil has formed against the remnant of God’s faithful (Sunni) people. That strengthens groups like ISIS and fuels millenarian thinking throughout the region, the very thing that we need to tone down rather than tune up.As Walter Russell Mead testified yesterday before the Senate Armed Services Committee, changing this dynamic may be key to salvaging the most we can out of the Iran deal:

A robust policy of regional containment combined with other pressures on Iran could significantly reduce the negative consequences of the agreement on American interests. This would almost certainly involve a much more active American role in Syria, where the struggle between a variety of Sunni groups and the Iran-aligned Assad regime has transfixed the region and led to the worst and most dangerous outbreak of Middle Eastern violence since the Iran-Iraq War. For many countries in the region, including close historical allies of the United States, a strong American military commitment to the overthrow of the Assad government would serve as an acid test for American seriousness against Iran. […] Ironically, in order to balance the regional consequences of the agreement, the United States may well need to assume an increased risk of war in Syria and other frontline states.

Secretary Kerry and the other leading figures in this Administration will, in short, have to make much better use of those “huge mechanisms” that we have in the Middle East than they have so far if they want this deal to improve the region, rather than send it into worse chaos.