Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 627

When Does Farce Become a Threat?

During the night, Syria’s al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front attacked the positions of ‘Division 30’, a group of fighters said to have been trained by U.S. forces in Turkey, killing five. The attack comes on the heels of yesterday’s report that Nusra disarmed and kidnapped 18 fighters from the group, including its leader and deputy. That report was disputed by the Pentagon in somewhat vague terms—the spokesman claimed no members of the “New Syrian Force” were captured or detained—but today, U.S. forces sprung into action, launching air strikes against Nusra positions in Syria.

The Obama Administration launched a training program in May with the goal of recruiting up to 5,400 ‘moderate’ fighters to counter ISIS advances in Syria. The program encountered difficulties, however, and Secretary of Defense Ash Carter testified earlier this month that only 60 fighters had thus far been trained. If these latest figures are reliable, the total number of these reliable, moderate troops trained by the United States fighting in Syria now drops to 37.As our coverage throughout this week has reflected, these developments lend an element of farce to an otherwise gravely incoherent U.S. policy in Syria. After all, if the attrition keeps up, “Division 30″ could soon accurately be renamed “Division of 30 Guys.”But there’s a point at which the farce itself becomes a threat to U.S. interests. The Middle East is a region where perceptions of strength matter—almost as much as actual strength. And the image of a bloated, remote superpower that can only field 60 fighters (at the cost of millions), loses nearly half of them, and seems not to know it, is one that projects weakness and invites further attacks.Of course, one of the reasons Washington isn’t a-flutter about these developments is that we know they’re trivial—that we could change things in an instant on the ground if we really wanted to. But therein lies the rub: If the Administration never stirs itself to act, all our potential might adds up to nothing more than 60 (now 37) guys, and impotence.

Private Schools Saving the Day in the Third World

It turns out, inefficient public education isn’t just an American or even a Western problem. Across the world, public schools are failing kids, yet there’s some good news to be had: private schools are on the rise, even in the poorest of countries. The Economist reports:

“The failure of state education, combined with the shift in emerging economies from farming to jobs that need at least a modicum of education, has caused a private-school boom. According to the World Bank, across the developing world a fifth of primary-school pupils are enrolled in private schools, twice as many as 20 years ago. So many private schools are unregistered that the real figure is likely to be much higher. A census in Lagos found 12,000 private schools, four times as many as on government records. Across Nigeria 26% of primary-age children were in private schools in 2010, up from 18% in 2004. In India in 2013, 29% were, up from 19% in 2006. In Liberia and Sierra Leone around 60% and 50% respectively of secondary-school enrolments are private.”

Unfortunately, statist educators also seem to be a global problem:

Powerful teachers’ unions are part of the problem. They often see jobs as hereditary sinecures, the state education budget as a revenue stream to be milked and any attempt to monitor the quality of education as an intrusion. The unions can be fearsome enemies, so governments leave them to run schools in the interests of teachers rather than pupils. […]

By and large, politicians and educationalists are unenthusiastic [about private schools]. Governments see education as the state’s job. Teachers’ unions dislike private schools because they pay less and are harder to organise in. NGOs tend to be ideologically opposed to the private sector. The UN special rapporteur on education, Kishore Singh, has said that “for-profit education should not be allowed in order to safeguard the noble cause of education”.

Innovative private schools are part of the answer overseas as well as in the U.S. As the Economist says, “Governments that are too disorganised or corrupt to foster this trend should get out of the way.” We couldn’t put it better.

 

China’s Troubles Hit Home

July has been a bad month for authorities in Beijing. At the start of the month, Chinese stock markets began to tank, and despite Beijing’s best efforts to shore up the collapse—by targeting short-sellers, banning certain trades, and offering ample liquidity to traders—markets collapsed again earlier this week. China’s CSI300 index ended the month down 14.7 percent, and the Shanghai Composite Index was off by 13.4 percent. As a whole, markets were still up by more than 60 percent from a year ago, but the bloom was off the rose.

Beijing’s mid-month announcement that growth was still humming along at the predicted 7 percent in the second quarter was met with broad skepticism. Ever since then, we’ve seen a steady stream of data indicating that all is not well: In commodity markets, copper, considered a bellwether for global economic activity, was down 9 percent on the month. Oil continued its grim slide amid no sign of supply being cut back by OPEC despite the weakening global outlook. Emerging market funds have seen $4.5 billion in withdrawals last week alone—$14.5 billion in the past three weeks. The Russian ruble also took a drubbing and appears to be under serious pressure at time of writing.But perhaps the strongest signs of worry are coming from some of the world’s biggest companies, which announced warnings on profits for the second half of the year, citing weak demand in China. The  Financial Times :

Audi and France’s Renault both cited China as they cut their global sales targets on Thursday, with Christian Klingler, sales chief at Audi parent Volkswagen, predicting “a bumpy road” in the country this year. Peugeot slashed its growth forecast for China from 7 per cent to 3 per cent while earlier this week Ford predicted the first full-year sales fall for the Chinese car market since 1990.

US companies have also been affected. “In Asia, the China market has clearly slowed,” said Akhil Johri, chief financial officer at United Technologies, the US industrial group at the company’s earnings call last week. “Real estate investment, new construction starts and floor space sold are all under pressure.” […]In the consumer goods sector, brewer Anheuser-Busch InBev said on Thursday that volumes fell 6.5 per cent in China as a result of “poor weather across the country and economic headwinds”.Among industrial goods companies, Schneider Electric, one of the world’s largest electrical equipment makers, reported a 12 per cent fall in first-half profit and cut guidance because of “weak construction and industrial markets” in China. […]Siemens, the German industrial giant, on Thursday said sales in China fell 8 per cent in the quarter and Chinese new orders slid 2 per cent when adjusted for currency swings.

This could be a bumpy road for all. Western stocks aren’t immune to China’s troubles; major companies have depended for years on Chinese growth to boost revenue and profits. So if China continues to slow, the trading floor of the Shanghai market won’t be the only place where people are feeling pain.

Salem on the Thames

Academics like to think of themselves as autonomous thinkers, and academia—meaning literally the protected realm of free speech—gives professors not only the right to speak their minds but also, via the institution of tenure, protection against losing their livelihoods by displeasing those more powerful than themselves. The fact that civil polities treasure safe spaces for free speech attests to their progressive bona fides. Especially in our times, when new social networks can turn ominously feral, one would hope that academics and their institutions, especially small, face-to-face college communities, could return that investment and resist anonymous, predatory, crowd behavior.

Yet mob rule is precisely what happened this past semester at Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut, along the Thames River. Over the course of the past spring semester, philosophy professor Andrew Pessin was driven from campus based on a malevolent reading of a Facebook post in which he depicted “the situation” in Gaza as one in which the Israelis had confined a “rabid pit bull” to a cage, while animal rights activists protested for the poor beast’s release. Although Pessin didn’t specify in the text, he and a commenter did make clear that this metaphor referred to Hamas terrorists, not to the population generally.But in an attack spearheaded by a Muslim student who in high school had begun a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, and a Muslim professor, recently appointed head of the new Global Islamic Studies Program, a small group of activists, given the run of the school paper by its editors, accused Pessin of comparing all Palestinians to rabid dogs and calling for them to be “put down.” Pessin, they claimed, “directly condoned the extermination of a people. A member of our community has called for the systematic abuse, killing, and hate of another people.” The editor who arranged for the publication of all three letters did not ask Pessin for a response in the same issue.Shock and horror spread through the community, triggering among many traumatic memories of verbal, racial, dehumanizing abuse, and arousing heretofore silenced “marginal voices.” A great cry went up against racists and hate-speakers of all kinds. Racist graffiti, probably written by an outsider, found in the Student Center bathroom, added to the cries of hurt and indignation. Connecticut College President Katherine Bergeron accepted student demands that classes stop and that the entire campus turn itself to a mandatory discussion of racism and hatred. In that discussion those accusing Pessin had the conch, and proceeded to label anyone who disagreed with them “racists.”While the invigorated community found new meaning, Professor Pessin found himself amid a waking nightmare. He and his family were the ones who became unsafe. A previous explosion had made his house uninhabitable; his ailing wife and three kids had to find new accommodations as Pessin found himself the subject of a relentless campaign of vilification. Thanks to an accusatory petition sponsored by the news editor, the episode became an object of worldwide reproof online, reaching even places from which have issued fanatics who have threatened to assassinate those who insult Islam.At the same time, Pessin’s colleagues abandoned him. Indeed both administrators and colleagues urged him not to defend himself, lest he anger the accusing students further. One colleague asked him to stop making life difficult for other Jews still on campus by fighting back. The chair of his department threw him under the bus in deference to student crying because Pessin had tried to defend himself.Overwhelmed by the hostility and the lack of support, on March 23 Pessin took a medical leave of absence. The next day, the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) issued a formal condemnation of hate speech, citing “the Facebook post of a certain faculty member.” In rapid succession virtually every department, program, and institution on campus issued a similar pronouncement, marked primarily by mimetic and superficial piety about opposing hate-speech. Dissenters were pressured so that near total unanimity prevailed. During the entire episode, only one out of 200+ colleagues emailed Pessin to ask his side of the story.The college administration held an all-campus open forum on March 25 to allow students to speak about racism on campus, and to denounce hate speech. President Bergeron’s opening remarks, however, refused to name Pessin. This aroused the activists, who wanted to subject Pessin to “Red Guard” humiliation. Students opened their remarks with: “Fuck you Bergeron!” Complained one of the accusers, “How can we heal if Pessin isn’t denounced by name?” The next day, activists rammed two resolutions through the Student Government that targeted Pessin and demanded, in the name of solidarity, that the senior administration denounce him.Hence the “discussion” about race and hate quickly became intimidating and indoctrinating. The predictable tragedy of the whole affair was how, in the name of progressive goals, a revolutionary moment empowered some of the most anti-progressive forces on campus. The administration quickly appointed three interim Deans of Institutional Equity and Inclusion, all from CCSRE, who planned a series of events that, at least where Israel was concerned, systematically pumped hate propaganda into the campus community. Said one dissident faculty member to his colleagues: “Some of us will feel the emotion shame: shame at the way the faculty treated Andy. And I will be one of them.”How are we to understand what happened at Connecticut College? Orwell can certainly help, and Emile Zola, too. So can, it seems, William Golding’s irrepressible Lord of the Flies. But the most incisive insights perhaps come from a Girardian analysis of the sacred violence at the origin of all primitive religious solidarity. Kill an arbitrary surrogate victim, a scapegoat, and create solidarity among the guilty survivor-participants. That is why activist participants saw the Pessin Affair as a time of mobilization, deepening and enlarging the “inclusively excellent” community, a revolutionary time of courage, commitment, and democratic reform. Others, mostly outsiders and (rare) internal critics, saw Pessin as a scapegoat sacrifice. Of course, being a postmodern sacrifice, there was no blood.Is there a larger lesson, too? One can make a case that the entire incident resembles an unalloyed albeit small-scale victory in the cognitive war being waged by Islamists against Western democracy. To most of those prominently involved, especially in postmodern/post-colonial guilds like Race and Gender studies, such a claim seems outlandish, even paranoid: In their minds the Pessin business had nothing to do with jihad or Islamism, but everything to do with human rights, dignity, and democracy. They may genuinely believe as much, however, and still be useful dupes in service to those with different priorities.Anyone familiar with Islamist cogwar practices would see the Pessin Affair as a major success across the board. Consider: It served up extensive cooperation between the Global Jihadi Right (GJR) and the Global Progressive Left (GPL), all in the name of a common revolutionary desire to transform the nascent global community and oppose (U.S.) imperialism. It bonded the GPL/GJR alliance over their shared view of Israel as the Dajjal/Antichrist, the apocalyptic enemy in the battle for world salvation: Destroy Israel for World Peace! Once again, progressives not only fell silent while jihadis incite against Israel, but labeled those criticizing Islamic extremism “hate-speakers.” The same ideologues who reject Jewish complaints that it is anti-Semitic to compare Israel with the Nazis, consider criticism of jihadi depravities “Islamophobic.” Just to punctuate the post-colonial flavor of the times, one of Pessin’s faculty colleagues went so far as to dismiss calls for “due process” as “Eurocentric.”Both groups claimed victory in the Pessin Affair, but events clearly degraded the academy and favored the Islamists’ perception of Western secular globalization as a vehicle for global Islamic domination: Praeparatio califatae. Nor need even the Muslims in this affair be conscious agents of this process. They, like their progressive colleagues, may just think they fight for the honor of Islam and against perfidious Zionism. Nonetheless, they not only demonized and isolated Israel and its supporters; they shielded some of the most odious jihadi hate speech on the planet today from “Islamophobic” criticism.How did this happen? Those who organized the drive that chased Pessin from campus were demopaths. Demopaths systematically invoke principles of fairness, empathy, and concern for the “other” when claiming the protections of a progressive society for themselves. In other words, they demand protection from dehumanizing criticism but refuse those protections to others. In the Pessin case, they claimed a psychic trauma at the very possibility that a professor might have called for genocide, even as they protected, validated, and promoted the cause of a group, Hamas, that literally dehumanizes Jews (“descendants of apes and pigs”) and calls for their extermination.Demopaths excel at what Ashley Thorne of the National Association of Scholars, has identified as “staged emergencies.” In a staged emergency, supposedly outraged and wounded voices accuse a target of allegedly “racist” or “misogynist” speech and insist that their (often deliberate) misreading has caused a traumatic crisis that needs urgent and total attention. There is a common internet analog these days. John Gordon, a retiring Professor of English at ConnColl, has described the

on-line person whose whole point of existence is to be offended . . . because we are all in this “trigger-point” phase where being offended on-line and therefore being licensed to vent your offendedness, thus demonstrating your moral superiority to anyone not thus offended.

Thus, those who composed the petition argued that it was racist and dehumanizing even to compare Hamas to a pit bull, despite the fact that Hamas embraces precisely what the petitioners denounced: “dehumanization, genocide, colonialism, and hatred of others.”

Demopaths also try to ally with other causes, to enlist the collaboration of the naive and credulous. Thus, at the time of the Ferguson riots, Palestinian intifadists joined forces with the most radical of protesters in an attempt to graft their own parochial war onto the racial conflict in the United States. The Ferguson protests equaled an American Intifada. At Connecticut College, Global Islamic Studies teaches students about the (presumably favorable) “impact of Islam on the fight for racial equality in the United States.”Unfortunately, many self-styled liberals and progressives seem incapable of questioning the motives of the radical Muslims with whom they “dialogue”, and who reflexively attack anyone who questions them as paranoid and “Islamophobic.” One of the key elements in Pessin’s inability to defend himself was the rapidity and unanimity with which the faculty surrendered before this form of emotional blackmail. Alone among the non-tenured faculty, English Professor Jeffrey Strabone resisted the peer and student pressure to toe the mimetic line.Just as we subject banks to stress tests to see how they would hold up when challenged with a crisis, we might consider checking out our institutions of higher learning to assess their vulnerability to staged emergencies, especially of the jihadi sort. Just how far has the revolutionary fusion of the Global Jihadi Right and the Global Progressive Left penetrated teaching and aligned itself with an aggressive form of anti-Islamophobia and revolutionary activism? The results of these stress tests would be useful to administrators interested in assembling counter-forces prepared to defend the democratic public sphere in case of an attack, as well as useful to parents wishing to choose a campus that will do best by their children. There are real differences among campuses in this regard, and they should not be kept secret.Only when we can tell the difference between real pain and staged pain can we defend a tradition of freedom of speech that needs those people who wish to live free, including Muslims, to have seriously thick skins when it comes to facing criticism. So far it’s one way—“privileged,” “Eurocentric,” Westerners must be ferociously self-critical, while their critics freely brutalize them, without tolerating any criticism of themselves. It’s a catastrophic marriage of pre-modern sadism and postmodern masochism.As for the faculty and students at ConnColl, they are in an enviable position. Self-criticism and contrition from them could produce extraordinary learning curves in the life of their institution of “higher learning.” If any place could profit from a performance of The Crucible right now, it’s Salem on the Thames. If any student newspaper or student government organization could profit by hosting an searching (and possibly searing) discussion of what it means to run an elected body or a newspaper, it’s ConnColl’s SGA and the College Voice. Imagine the maturity of those who would have gone through that process. Imagine the resilience of the culture with people experienced in defending an open (inclusive) society. We, especially progressives, need not mime the blood sacrifices of old.A longer and extensively linked version of this essay is available at the Augean Stables, as is an archive of fifty-plus items relating to the Pessin Affair .

The Pension Reckoning Is Only Beginning

State senator Stephen Sweeney of New Jersey, home to one of the worst public pension crises in the country, has proposed a national solution to the mess: a trillion dollar federal bailout for state pension funds. NJ.com:

The government aid program — which Sweeney stressed would not be a bailout  — would allow financially strapped New Jersey to shed its $50 billion unfunded liability and cut the state’s required annual pension contribution in half.

“If it’s in the nation’s interest for the federal government to step in and keep Wall Street and General Motors afloat, it should be able to find ways to protect the pensions of middle-class teachers, police and government employees,” said Sweeney (D-Gloucester). […]“The simple fact is that we have a system where an NJEA member retiring in just a few years contributes just $126,000 to their pension and health benefit costs over 30 years and takes out $2.4 million in benefits. The math does not work at all. That is the fundamental problem that needs to be solved,” said Nicole Sizemore, Christie’s deputy press secretary.

The reason the math does not work is that states and cities mostly, but not entirely, run by Democrats have piled up huge, unconscionable pension fund debts over the years by making promises to workers that they then failed to honor by using dishonest accounting tricks to hide the true cost of these obligations from taxpayers. Now the bills are falling due and state and local governments are being squeezed. That’s going to continue.

One of the big fights in American politics now looming will be our own version of the EU fights between Club Med and the north. Indebted states and cities, who very often are solely responsible for their debts because of incompetent and selfish decisions, will want to be bailed out by federal taxpayers. Some help will have to be given—we are talking about the pensions of retirees who have no other recourse. But how generous will the relief be, and what reform conditions will be attached?Democrats are going to favor easy bailouts with no strings. Republicans, for their part, will want tough conditions on any aid: workers will have to pick up costs, state constitutions that guarantee worker pensions no matter what will have to be amended, public sector unions will need to be placed under controls or perhaps reformed as in Wisconsin, and all government pension funds placed under strict national regulations.One certainly feels that the pensions of politicians who voted for the policies that created this mess should be viewed a little more harshly than the pensions of public sector workers. Mr. Sweeney and his legislative colleagues might have to see their own pensions eviscerated as the price of helping their constituents.Sweeney’s call for a trillion dollar bailout fund is only the beginning. Blue model misgovernance has created a trillion-dollar disaster, and how America digs itself out of this hole will be one of the big questions of our time.

The Pension Reckoning is Only Beginning

State senator Stephen Sweeney of New Jersey, home to one of the worst public pension crises in the country, has proposed a national solution to the mess: a trillion dollar federal bailout for state pension funds. NJ.com:

The government aid program — which Sweeney stressed would not be a bailout  — would allow financially strapped New Jersey to shed its $50 billion unfunded liability and cut the state’s required annual pension contribution in half.

“If it’s in the nation’s interest for the federal government to step in and keep Wall Street and General Motors afloat, it should be able to find ways to protect the pensions of middle-class teachers, police and government employees,” said Sweeney (D-Gloucester). […]“The simple fact is that we have a system where an NJEA member retiring in just a few years contributes just $126,000 to their pension and health benefit costs over 30 years and takes out $2.4 million in benefits. The math does not work at all. That is the fundamental problem that needs to be solved,” said Nicole Sizemore, Christie’s deputy press secretary.

The reason the math does not work is that states and cities mostly, but not entirely, run by Democrats have piled up huge, unconscionable pension fund debts over the years by making promises to workers that they then failed to honor by using dishonest accounting tricks to hide the true cost of these obligations from taxpayers. Now the bills are falling due and state and local governments are being squeezed. That’s going to continue.

One of the big fights in American politics now looming will be our own version of the EU fights between Club Med and the north. Indebted states and cities, who very often are solely responsible for their debts because of incompetent and selfish decisions, will want to be bailed out by federal taxpayers. Some help will have to be given—we are talking about the pensions of retirees who have no other recourse. But how generous will the relief be, and what reform conditions will be attached?Democrats are going to favor easy bailouts with no strings. Republicans, for their part, will want tough conditions on any aid: workers will have to pick up costs, state constitutions that guarantee worker pensions no matter what will have to be amended, public sector unions will need to be placed under controls or perhaps reformed as in Wisconsin, and all government pension funds placed under strict national regulations.One certainly feels that the pensions of politicians who voted for the policies that created this mess should be viewed a little more harshly than the pensions of public sector workers. Mr. Sweeney and his legislative colleagues might have to see their own pensions eviscerated as the price of helping their constituents.Sweeney’s call for a trillion dollar bailout fund is only the beginning. Blue model misgovernance has created a trillion-dollar disaster, and how America digs itself out of this hole will be one of the big questions of our time.

Are the Planned Parenthood Videos Working?

When the pro-life Center for Medical Progress began releasing undercover videos of Planned Parenthood officials discussing, often in gruesome detail, how to perform abortions so that intact fetal parts could be provided to medical researchers, some Democrats dismissed the ensuing uproar as a manufactured controversy. “Let’s have an investigation of those people who were trying to ensnare Planned Parenthood in a controversy that doesn’t exist”, said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi last week.

Now that Hillary Clinton—the party’s presumptive presidential nominee—has begun to distance herself from the content of the videos, it’s hard to deny that there is, in fact, a real controversy here. Clinton commented on the videos in an interview with the New Hampshire Union Leader:

Calling them “disturbing,” Hillary Clinton said undercover videos showing Planned Parenthood officials discussing the sale of aborted fetal tissue raise questions about the process nationwide.

“I have seen pictures from them and I obviously find them disturbing,” the Democratic presidential hopeful said during a sit-down interview Tuesday with the New Hampshire Union Leader.


“Planned Parenthood is answering questions and will continue to answer questions. I think there are two points to make,” Clinton said. “One, Planned Parenthood for more than a century has done a lot of really good work for women: cancer screenings, family planning, all kinds of health services. And this raises not questions about Planned Parenthood so much as it raises questions about the whole process, that is, not just involving Planned Parenthood, but many institutions in our country.”“And if there’s going to be any kind of congressional inquiry, it should look at everything and not just one part of it,” she said.

Clinton has always been a strong proponent of abortion rights. She was among the 33 Senators who voted against the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act in 2003, and Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards tweeted last April that “there has never been a presidential candidate with as strong a commitment to women’s health & rights.” So Clinton’s remarks that the videos, if anything, “raise questions” about “many institutions in our country” and the “whole process” of abortion suggest that the pro-life sting is beginning to move the needle politically. She certainly wouldn’t have suggested, even in a qualified way, a broad federal inquiry into abortion practices last month or the month before.

Why are the videos effective? Not necessarily because, as the group releasing the videos alleges, Planned Parenthood’s activities are illegal or unusual. The evidence here is contested, and we will leave the legal debate to the lawyers. But whatever may be the legal status of the practices they capture, the videos are effective precisely because the activities they so vividly describe make many people uncomfortable—and it is policies supported by the Democratic Party that make many of those activities possible.After the first video came out, we wrote that while public opinion on abortion is stuck in the murky middle, with most people cautiously supportive of first trimester abortion rights but generally opposed to later term abortions, both parties tend to take positions along the extremes. Most Democrats take an absolutist pro-choice position and many Republicans, including the 2012 Vice Presidential nominee, take an absolutist pro-life position.Any event that draws attention to the gulf between a party’s position and public opinion is likely to put pressure on that party to change its tone. Just as Todd Akin’s 2012 “legitimate rape” remarks drew attention to the fact that many Republicans oppose rape exceptions to abortion bans, the Planned Parenthood videos—complete with their references to second-trimester abortions and their cavalier discussions of fetus-crushing—are drawing attention to the Democratic Party’s rather extreme stance on the issue.The videos may not provoke any dramatic legislative changes at the federal level in the near future. But they are forcing the public to think hard about a Democratic-supported practice that, by and large, makes Americans uneasy.

It’s the Deterrence, Stupid

The opponents of the July 14 agreement on Iran’s nuclear program say that it is, for Iran’s neighbors, the United States, and most of the rest of the world, a bad deal. The Obama Administration says that it is the best deal available. Both are correct, although each assertion requires a qualification: What makes the accord an unsatisfactory one for all countries except Iran itself is not any of the details set down in the 159-page document that the Vienna negotiations produced, flawed and worrisome though some of them are. The basic problem, rather, is the international approval of a full-scale Iranian program of uranium enrichment, which the United States conceded twenty months earlier, in the interim agreement of November 2013, on which the Vienna talks were based. As for the second assertion, the terms of the July 14 accord surely are the best available to this particular administration, given that it has never wielded a credible threat to use force against Iran, which is the necessary condition for keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of the Iranian mullahs.

Conceding, in November 2013, what the United States had previously insisted it would never permit—an Iranian infrastructure for enriching uranium—has had three powerfully negative consequences. First and most obviously, because uranium enrichment is the process for producing not only fuel for nuclear power reactors but also for the explosive material in nuclear weapons, it has allowed a regime that is by the account of the American State Department the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, that is underwriting Syrian dictator Bashar Assad’s murderous assault on the people of that country, that is directly or indirectly at war with virtually every country in the Middle East with which the United States has or tries to have friendly relations, and that has made a central and repeatedly proclaimed part of its international agenda the destruction of the state of Israel, to come perilously close to acquiring the world’s most destructive weapon.Second, the November 2013 accord abandoned a four-decade-long American and international policy of prohibiting the spread of enrichment technology even to friendly, democratic countries. In fact, since the 1970s the global non-proliferation regime—the agreements, understandings, organizations, and policies designed to restrict the spread of nuclear armaments—has had three main pillars: the Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968, which prohibits signatory countries that do not already have them from getting nuclear weapons; the even more important series of American security guarantees that have successfully persuaded countries capable of getting the bomb, such as Germany and Japan, that they do not need it because the American nuclear arsenal adequately protects them; and the various measures designed to limit the distribution of the technology for enriching uranium and reprocessing plutonium (another route to the bomb). Without public or Congressional debate, and as the result of the secret negotiations that yielded the November 2013 framework, the Obama Administration abandoned the third pillar. As a result, it will henceforth be extremely difficult to prevent other countries, at first in the Middle East but ultimately elsewhere, particularly in East Asia, from equipping themselves with the capacity for enrichment.The third dire consequence of permitting Iran to have a full-scale enrichment infrastructure is that this places an impossible burden on the program of international inspections to ensure compliance with the terms of the Vienna agreement. Inspections can work as confidence-building measures, when the country being inspected has no enrichment facilities, does not intend to build them, and is eager for the rest of the world to know this. When, as in the case of Iran, none of these conditions obtains, when inspection is an adversarial rather than a cooperative exercise, it becomes a game of hide and seek in which the hiders have an overwhelming advantage. They control the country in question and the inspectors’ access to it. For this reason much of the debate about the details of the July 14 accord is, in a sense, beside the point. Whatever the agreement says, the Iranian regime will decide what international inspectors will see and when they will see it; and “the regime” in this case means not the English speakers with advanced degrees from Western universities with whom the American and European negotiators have spent long hours in luxury hotels in Europe but rather the mullahs, terrorists, and thugs whose chief contact with the United States has been devising ways to kill American soldiers in Iraq. Having achieved the capacity to enrich uranium, Iran now enjoys, to borrow a metaphor from the world of sports, an overwhelming home-field advantage.In this way the nuclear negotiations with Iran resemble the other tension-filled international talks of this summer, the European Union’s negotiations with Greece to avoid that country’s formal bankruptcy and keep it within the continent’s common currency, the euro. In both cases the negotiations took place far too late to obtain a good result. Such a result might have been possible five or ten years earlier, before Greece had become encumbered with tens of billions of dollars of unpayable debt and suffered a disastrous economic decline; likewise a good outcome might have been possible before Iran had come so close to acquiring nuclear weapons. In both cases, moreover, the agreement reached does not solve the problem but merely postpones a reckoning with it. For having acquired the means to fabricate its own explosive material—the most difficult step in the weapon-making process—Iran now has what it needs to acquire nuclear weapons. What might prevent it from doing so?The Vienna agreement effectively removes the current disincentive, economic sanctions; and whatever the Obama Administration says about being able to make these sanctions “snap back” in the event of Iranian violations of that agreement, it is prudent to assume that, once lifted, they will not be re-imposed in any serious way.Other countries have refrained from obtaining nuclear weapons because, among other reasons, they have anticipated that their neighbors would get their own nuclear weapons in response, thus leaving them no better off strategically—and perhaps even more vulnerable to their neighbors than they were before. India, arguably, has had this experience: When it crossed the nuclear-weapon threshold it prompted Pakistan to do the same, erasing India’s considerable non-nuclear military advantage over its neighbor. Perhaps the Iranian government will make a similar calculation, although, having gone as far as it already has along the path to the bomb, it is probably too late to discourage its Middle Eastern neighbors, most of whom are its adversaries, from striving to match it.Alternatively, the current Iranian regime may fall and be replaced by a more democratic, less bellicose one. (President Obama has floated the idea that the current regime might modify its behavior in ways congenial to the West. This is unlikely in the extreme. A change of behavior will require a change of regime.) Given the choice, it seems clear, the majority of Iranians would not decide to be governed by the corrupt theocracy that now holds power in Tehran. But of course they do not have that choice, and whatever their shortcomings the ruling mullahs and militias have shown themselves determined and capable enough to ensure, by force, that they do not get it. The Obama Administration has sometimes suggested that the flood of money into Iran that the end of sanctions will unleash will weaken the regime by encouraging the forces within the country that are opposed to it. This is a curious position. Governments generally become vulnerable when they fail in one way or another. Relief from sanctions will count, for the masters of the Islamic Republic, as a considerable success.There is one more disincentive to an Iranian bomb, the most potent of all, indeed the only fully reliable one: the credible threat of the use of force by the United States against the Iranian nuclear program. That option—bombing Iran’s enrichment and other bomb-related facilities—has been, is now, and will continue to be at the heart of the issue of Iranian nuclear weapons.Barack Obama has said that the alternative to the agreement his negotiators reached in Vienna is war. That is, of course, not true: in foreign policy, since the time of the ancient Greeks 25 centuries ago, force and diplomacy have complemented each other. There is, however, a grain of truth in what the President said. All negotiations on vital issues between adversaries unfold in the shadow of war. Each side has to calculate two things: the likely outcome of a war; and the willingness of the other side to wage one. There can be no doubt that in an armed conflict with Iran the United States would prevail. Specifically, the United States could destroy the Iranian nuclear weapons program with a campaign of aerial bombardment and would not have to deploy a single American soldier on Iranian territory to do so. Whatever retaliatory measures the Islamic Republic undertook, such a war would not repeat the American experience in Iraq.If military capacity were all that mattered, Iran would never have dared to build the full-scale uranium enrichment capacity that it now possesses. Intentions matter as well, however, and here the Iranian leaders have calculated—correctly—that the American government would not use its military trump card to halt Iran’s progress toward nuclear weapons. As President, Barack Obama repeatedly asserted that, where that program was concerned “all options”—including, by inference, the use of force—were on the table, but the mullahs rightly surmised that this was a bluff and, by continuing to build the enrichment program that Obama had vowed not to tolerate, they called it. This is the sense in which the Obama Administration’s description of the deal as the best one available is correct. Given that it was negotiating from a position of self-imposed weakness, it is difficult to see how it could have obtained more favorable terms than the ones embedded in the July 14 agreement.The option to use force against the Iranian nuclear program was apparently also not on the table in the administration of the far less conflict-averse George W. Bush. The first, illicit, Iranian uranium-enrichment facility became known, after all, in 2002. While the Bush Administration did ultimately take the lead in imposing economic sanctions on Iran, at that point and thereafter it was preoccupied with Iran’s neighbor. To the extent that this prevented forceful action to stop the Iranian march to the bomb, that failure may be counted as yet another casualty of America’s war in Iraq.All of this is to say that, at this very late date, keeping Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, with all the catastrophic consequences that that would have, depends on a credible threat to use American military force. This is true even in the highly unlikely event that the process of inspections works as the Obama Administration claims it will. For if and when inspections in these circumstances detect violations, or the Iranian regime simply decides to withdraw from the agreement, as its thirty-sixth paragraph permits, what will the United States do? Nuclear nonproliferation in the Middle East ultimately depends, that is, not on the details of the Vienna agreement but on the familiar Cold-War policy of deterrence.If, as he clearly hopes, President Obama manages to leave office without Iran having taken the final steps to the bomb, the responsibility for conducting a policy of effective deterrence will fall on his successor. In the meantime, however, Congress can make the task of doing so somewhat easier. By passing a resolution of disapproval of the agreement, even if they cannot override the promised presidential veto, the House and the Senate can signal their support for more robust opposition to an Iranian bomb than the current administration has mounted. They can supplement such a message with a resolution authorizing the use of military force in the event of further Iranian movement toward obtaining the bomb. Legislation of this kind would strengthen the hand of the next chief executive, whoever he or she turns out to be.Of course, deterrence resides ultimately in the eye of the beholder, that is, of the party being—it is hoped—deterred; and in this case that party, the person with ultimate sway over Iran’s nuclear program, is the country’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The political fate of the Middle East, and perhaps a great deal more, now therefore rests on the opaque perceptions and calculations of an aging, provincial, autocratic, fiercely anti-Semitic, anti-Western, and anti-American Persian cleric. Whatever else may be said of the position in which the July 14 agreement and all that went before it have placed the United States, one thing is beyond dispute: that position is not a comfortable one.

India About to Surpass China as World’s Most Populous Country

India could surpass China as the world’s most populous country in as few as seven years, more quickly than demographers expected. The New York Times has more:

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In its 2015 revision report, the population division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs said China’s population was now 1.38 billion, compared with 1.31 billion in India. But in seven years, the populations of both are expected to reach 1.4 billion.

Thereafter, the report said, India’s population will grow for decades, to 1.5 billion in 2030 and 1.7 billion in 2050, while China’s is expected to remain fairly constant until the 2030s, when it is expected to slightly decrease.p;p++)u[p].apply(s,t);return s}function a(n,e){f[n]=c(n).concat(e)}function c(n){return f[n]||[]}function u(){return t(e)}var f={};return{on:a,emit:e,create:u,listeners:c,_events:f}}function r(){return{}}var o="nr@context",i=n("gos");e.exports=t()},{gos:"7eSDFh"}],ee:[function(n,e){e.exports=n("QJf3ax")},{}],3:[function(n,e){function t(n){return function(){r(n,[(new Date).getTime()].concat(i(arguments)))}}var r=n("handle"),o=n(1),i=n(2);"undefined"==typeof window.newrelic&&(newrelic=window.NREUM);var a=["setPageViewName","addPageAction","setCustomAttribute","finished","addToTrace","inlineHit","noticeError"];o(a,function(n,e){window.NREUM[e]=t("api-"+e)}),e.exports=window.NREUM},{1:12,2:13,handle:"D5DuLP"}],gos:[function(n,e){e.exports=n("7eSDFh")},{}],"7eSDFh":[function(n,e){function t(n,e,t){if(r.call(n,e))return n[e];var o=t();if(Object.defineProperty&&Object.keys)try{return Object.defineProperty(n,e,{value:o,writable:!0,enumerable:!1}),o}catch(i){}return n[e]=o,o}var r=Object.prototype.hasOwnProperty;e.exports=t},{}],D5DuLP:[function(n,e){function t(n,e,t){return r.listeners(n).length?r.emit(n,e,t):(o[n]||(o[n]=[]),void o[n].push(e))}var r=n("ee").create(),o={};e.exports=t,t.ee=r,r.q=o},{ee:"QJf3ax"}],handle:[function(n,e){e.exports=n("D5DuLP")},{}],XL7HBI:[function(n,e){function t(n){var e=typeof n;return!n||"object"!==e&&"function"!==e?-1:n===window?0:i(n,o,function(){return r++})}var r=1,o="nr@id",i=n("gos");e.exports=t},{gos:"7eSDFh"}],id:[function(n,e){e.exports=n("XL7HBI")},{}],loader:[function(n,e){e.exports=n("G9z0Bl")},{}],G9z0Bl:[function(n,e){function t(){var n=h.info=NREUM.info;if(n&&n.licenseKey&&n.applicationID&&f&&f.body){c(l,function(e,t){e in n||(n[e]=t)}),h.proto="https"===d.split(":")[0]||n.sslForHttp?"https://":"http://",a(... e=f.createElement("script");e.src=h.proto+n.agent,f.body.appendChild(e)}}function r(){"complete"===f.readyState&&o()}function o(){a("mark",["domContent",i()])}function i(){return(new Date).getTime()}var a=n("handle"),c=n(1),u=(n(2),window),f=u.document,s="addEventListener",p="attachEvent",d=(""+location).split("?")[0],l={beacon:"bam.nr-data.net",errorBeacon:"bam.nr-data.net",agent:"js-agent.newrelic.com/nr-593.min.js"... t(n,e){var t=[],o="",i=0;for(o in n)r.call(n,o)&&(t[i]=e(o,n[o]),i+=1);return t}var r=Object.prototype.hasOwnProperty;e.exports=t},{}],13:[function(n,e){function t(n,e,t){e||(e=0),"undefined"==typeof t&&(t=n?n.length:0);for(var r=-1,o=t-e||0,i=Array(0>o?0:o);++r

Over all, the report said, the world’s current population of 7.3 billion is expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050, slightly more than the 9.6 billion forecast two years ago. The number could reach 11.2 billion by the end of the century.

This story could be even more important than it looks. India’s population is younger than China’s, which means that its workforce will be growing much faster than China’s. That underlines the desperate need for India to become a manufacturing hub; high-tech jobs and calling centers won’t absorb this enormous population. On the other hand, that might not be all bad, because it suggests just what an opportunity lies in store for India to replace China as the workshop of the world. If it can pull off becoming the center of global manufacturing as the 21st century marches on, the future will be bright for the country.

The Administration’s Comedy of Errors in Syria

The al-Qaeda-allied Nusra Front has reportedly managed to disarm and kidnap 18 fighters returning to Syria from a U.S.-run train-and-equip program in Turkey. The Free Syrian Army is in negotiations with Nusra to secure the release of the fighters, who were members of a group called “Division 30.” The group’s leader, Nadim al-Hasan, and his deputy were among those captured.

The Obama Administration launched an effort in May with the goal of training up to 5,400 “moderate” fighters to counter ISIS advances in Syria. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter testified in recent weeks that only 60 fighters had thus far been trained.The Pentagon has issued a curious non-denial denial, telling Reuters:

The Pentagon had seen the reports but had no information to provide, spokeswoman Commander Elissa Smith said.

“While we will not disclose the names of specific groups involved with the Syria Train and Equip program, I can confirm that there have been no New Syrian Force personnel captured or detained,” she said.

But Reuters has more or less stuck to its original reporting.

As we mentioned yesterday, despite both the supposed freedom the Iran deal gives the U.S. and the new aggressiveness of Turkey, the Administration still does not seem to have a coherent Syria strategy. We don’t have a plan for a no-fly zone, clarity on how we want to handle Assad, or, it seems, the gumption to make hard choices. What we did have was 60 very dangerous men.Until yesterday. Now it may be just 42.