Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 628

Baltics Boost Defense Spending as Russian Threat Looms

Fearing Russia aggression, Latvia and Lithuania are boosting their defense spending after a meeting in Vilnius. Latvia, which shares a long border with Russia, is going up to 2 percent of GDP and Lithuania, which sits uncomfortably between Latvia, Ukraine, and Russia’s Baltic enclave (in which Moscow has been placing missiles lately), will commit 1.5 percent of GDP. Neither country was shy about naming names; they are worried about a Russian invasion, either conventional or, like in Ukraine, hybrid. Defense News reports:

Latvian Defence Minister Raimonds Bergmanis said that he and his Lithuanian counterpart, Juozas Olekas, also discussed sending Latvian military instructors to Ukraine to support that government’s battle against Russia-backed insurgents in the country’s east. Lithuania already has deployed military instructors to Ukraine.

Commenting on Latvia’s plan to raise its defense expenditure, Bergmanis said he hoped his country will “be able to take great strides ahead just like our neighbors did.” […]Other issues discussed by the two officials during a recent meeting included a project to set up a mid-range air defense system to be operated by Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.At the meeting, Olekas said some of the major areas for improving defense cooperation between the Baltic states include “countering hybrid threats and stepping up cooperation with Poland and the Nordic countries,” according to a statement released by the Lithuanian Defence Ministry.

Both of these countries are NATO members, and it speaks volumes that they are as worried about an invasion as they apparently are. It is good news, however, for both the world order and the U.S. balance sheet, if these commitments go through. If Latvia follows through on its decision, it will be merely the sixth NATO member to pass the threshold. More member countries need to start meeting their treaty goal of spending at least two percent of GDP on defense.

Paris Isn’t Worth a Climate Fund

With only ten days of negotiations left before a final document is set to be drawn up ahead of December’s UN climate conference in Paris, another pesky issue is raising its head: of the $100 billion per year pledged to be raised by developed nations by 2020 to help the offset costs of developing nations, only $10.2 billion has thus far been accumulated, with EU member states pledging around half of that amount. Finance ministers of the G7 are due to meet in Bonn in September to discuss the issue in a “structured form” for the first time. Politico reports:

In the failed climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, developed nations pledged to come up with $100 billion a year by 2020 to help developing countries fund efforts to cut emissions and strengthen resilience to climate-change risks.

The majority of that money will flow through the Green Climate Fund. So far, however, contributions total a mere $10.2 billion, forcing heads of state from the G7 nations in June to reaffirm their commitment to the goal.

Luxembourg’s General Director of the Ministry of Sustainable Development excused the delay, saying ministers have been “preoccupied with many other urgent issues recently.” Those words will come as cold comfort for the developing world, which is already approaching the negotiating table in Paris with deep reservations. For the world’s poorer countries, concerns are mounting that an international climate treaty might hinder development—particularly galling considering the industrialized world has been chiefly responsible for runaway greenhouse gas emissions over the past century. The annual $100 billion fund was meant to allay those concerns, and was one of the few tangible policies wrung out of the disastrous Copenhagen summit.

So what does it say about the state of climate talks that this pool isn’t even close to being funded? Nothing good. Remember that rich countries—the U.S. chief among them—will have to fork over this $100 billion every year. In today’s political climate it’s hard to imagine Congress willingly signing off on tens of billions of dollars for this even once, let alone annually. This fund was meant to paper over the gap between the first and third worlds, but the cracks in that compromise are already showing. Pity those Paris delegates: their task somehow continues to get harder.

Another ACA Argument Bites the Dust

The so-called “health care slowdown” has long been one of the key talking points for Obamacare supporters. From 2007 to 2013, health spending grew much more slowly—an average of just 4 percent—than it had since the government first started measuring it in the 1960s. Many on the left attributed this slow growth to the Affordable Care Act, even though the recession may have also played an important role in depressing spending. A key question was whether the slowdown was temporary or tied to more permanent changes the ACA made to U.S. health care.

We may now have an answer, and it doesn’t look great for the ACA apologists. U.S. healthcare spending surged in 2014, as CNN reports:

Thanks in large part to the expansion of coverage under Obamacare, health care spending in the U.S. is projected to have hit $3.1 trillion, or $9,695 per person, last year. That’s an increase of 5.5%, according to federal estimates released Tuesday. It’s the first time the rate would exceed 5% since 2007…

This year, spending growth is expected to slow slightly to 5.3% as these trends moderate. But it will pick up again to an average of 5.8% a year between 2014 and 2024 due, in part, to the improving economy and the aging of the population, with approximately 19.1 million people expected to enroll in Medicare over the next 11 years.

The 2014 spending acceleration won’t solve the great slowdown debate entirely one way or another, but it should give pause to anyone claiming that the slowdown proves that the ACA has been a grand success. In the meantime, for average Americans, health care is still too expensive—and appears poised to become more so. Insurers across the country are applying for, and winning, large rate increases. U.S. health care must become better and cheaper, and increasingly it appears that the ACA was largely a distraction from the kinds of reforms we desperately need.

More Magical Thinking in Syria

Just days after the Obama Administration told the New York Times it would be working with Turkey to drive back ISIS in Syria, it seems to have ruled out every practical means of doing so. As Josh Rogin reports at Bloomberg, officials have today clarified that the Administration has “no U.S. plans for a safe zone, a no-fly zone, an air-exclusionary zone, a humanitarian buffer zone or any other protected zone of any kind” in Syria. More:

The key difference between what the Obama administration is saying today versus the news reports earlier this week is not whether there is an area that the U.S. and Turkey will work to clear of Islamic State fighters. The dispute is whether that area will be “safe,” especially from air attacks. The White House is wary of any plan that could put it in military conflict with the Assad regime, and has made no decision to protect opposition forces or civilians from its air assaults. […]

In addition to tamping speculation about safe zones, the three senior administration officials said Tuesday that no U.S. or Turkish troops would be used to clear the border area of jihadists. “Moderate opposition forces” would do the job. They did not specify which opposition forces would be used, only that they would have to be agreed on by both Washington and Ankara.

That eliminates Kurdish forces and radical Islamists, who would be unacceptable to Ankara and Washington, respectively, leaving—who, exactly? The 60 fighters that we have so far trained and vetted in Syria?

This isn’t a plan but a list of contradictory desires, and there’s no indication we’ve given any thought to how to reconcile them. Rogin’s piece is well enough sourced that it seems to indicate this is not a messaging problem, but a strategy problem. Such muddled thinking is how you wind up with statements like this one:

“We’re not out there staking out zones and doing some things that I know have been discussed in years past — no-fly zones, safe zones.  What we’re trying to do is clear ISIL,” a senior administration official said. “I think it’s important not to confuse that with staking out these zones that you can identify with road signs and on big maps, and that’s just not what’s happening.”

The thinking here and in Rogin’s piece as a whole thinking flies in the face of several of the most important lessons the four year Syrian Civil War (and one-year fight against ISIS) has taught. Among them: Absent a credible ground force, air power alone cannot drive back ISIS; the Sunni powers, including Turkey, are highly wary of any plan that takes on ISIS but doesn’t touch Assad; and perhaps most importantly of all, putting off hard choices doesn’t make problems go away, but clears the way for others to act.

As if to prove this final point, Turkey has unleashed its deadliest attacks to date against the PKK, earlier today bombing targets in both Iraq and within its own borders. Only yesterday NATO leaders, in blessing Turkey’s new offensive, had asked Ankara to distinguish between ISIS and Kurdish separatist party in northern Iraq (the PKK) and to show restraint in fighting the latter. Kurds in Turkey are suggesting, not without reason, that the political machinations of President Recep Erdogan behind the recent military moves, while Iraq’s prime minister called the attacks on positions within his country a “dangerous escalation and a violation of Iraq’s sovereignty”. Meanwhile, the U.S. sits on the sidelines.As Walter Russell Mead wrote last week, Syria is the key to many of our problems in the Middle East. And for the first time in years, the U.S. holds some promising cards to play there, between the Turkish desire for revenge on ISIS, Assad’s waning strength, and the conclusion of the nuclear deal with Iran which, in theory, was supposed to untie our hands to act against regional aggression. But reports such as these indicate that the White House has not yet come to grips with what engagement will actually take.

Would Economic Populism Turn the White Working Class Democratic?

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders delivered a sharp critique of the state of the Democratic Party in an extensive interview, released yesterday, with Vox’s Ezra Klein:

I think it would be hard to imagine if you walked out of here or walked down the street or went a few miles away from here and you stopped somebody on the street and you said, “Do you think that the Democratic Party is the party of the American working class?” People would look at you and say, “What are you talking about?”

There was a time — I think under Roosevelt, maybe even under Truman — where it was perceived that working people were part of the Democratic Party. I think for a variety of reasons, a lot having to do with money and politics, that is no longer the case. In my view that is exactly what shouldn’t be happening. Instead of spending all of our time raising money, I think we should go out organizing people and getting them to unite around a progressive agenda which expands the middle class which tells the billionaire class that they cannot have it all, which says to corporate America, “You’re going to have to start paying your fair share of taxes,” which says we’re going to raise the minimum wage, we’re going to make college available to all regardless of their income, that we are going to have pay equity for women workers, that we are going to create millions of jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. You need a progressive agenda, then you need the ability to go out and organize people.

Sanders’ central insight—that the New Deal Democrats were a working class party, but the modern Democrats are not—is clearly correct, even if the party doesn’t like to acknowledge it. Blue collar workers were at the center of the New Deal coalition, while today’s white working class voters cast their ballots overwhelmingly for the GOP.

Why the shift? Sanders suggests that it has to do with “money and politics.” He doesn’t spell out what that means, exactly, but it seems to points to his belief that the Democrats have abandoned robust social welfare programs in favor of a more centrist, pro-corporate economic program. This contrasts with the rather more self-satisfied explanation that some on the elite left have offered—namely, that whites without a college education are a lost cause because conservatives trick them into voting Republican by exploiting their latent prejudices and resentments.

Sanders’ proposed solution to the Democrats’ poor showing among the white working class is well known: a hard-left economic populist agenda, complete with dramatic minimum wage increases, high-end tax hikes, massive government spending on and infrastructure and education, and invective against the superrich—in other words, a restoration of the blue model and then some. He’s not alone; the rest of the party is signing on to some of these economic proposals as well.

But would an economic populist program actually wrest the white working class from the GOP? Perhaps it will move the needle temporarily, but the genuinely working class party of Truman and Roosevelt simply cannot be resurrected in the foreseeable future. The economic model that existed in the New Deal era, and that the New Deal political coalition relied upon, is deteriorating—not only because of policy choices, as Sanders suggests, but also because of irreversible trends in technology, globalization, and demography. Private sector unions will never reattain the level economic and political might they wielded in the 1950s no matter how the Supreme Court rules on right-to-work statutes. And shoring up the public benefits system devised in the New Deal would require large tax increases—not only upper-end tax hikes, but middle-class tax hikes as well—that would risk splintering the Democratic coalition.

Then, of course, there is culture. As the white working class began to slip away from the Democrats in the 1960s, the party drifted leftward culturally—a process that is once again picking up steam today. In important (though qualified) ways, upper class liberals are further to the left culturally than working class voters. So in addition to economic populism, winning back blue collar whites would probably require adopting a softer tone on cultural questions—something that would not please culturally liberal constituencies (like Silicon Valley tycoons) that provide the Democratic party with critical support.

Matthew Continetti has perceptively written that “there are two Republican parties, an elite party of the corporate upper crust and meritocratic winners that sits atop a mass party of whites without college degrees whose worldviews and experiences and ambitions could not be more different from their social and economic betters.” In the same way, there are two Democratic parties; an elite party of affluent white urban cultural liberals that sits atop a coalition of identity groups—blacks, hispanics, LGBT people, single women, and young people. Bernie Sanders wants to win back some of the disaffected whites who currently find themselves in the Republican camp, and re-constitute the singular New Deal Democratic Party of yore. But given existing economic and social trends, we may be stuck with two Democratic parties—and two Republican parties—for the foreseeable future.

Is Turkey the Key?

The political history of Turkey has been dominated from the turn of the century by one powerful figure—Recep Tayyip Erdogan. (For some reason, the “g” in his family name is not pronounced, so the name is actually “Erdohan”—my knowledge of Turkish is nil, but I have discovered that people who do speak the language certify their cultural expertise by omitting the “g”. So there.) This g-deprived individual grew up in a rough neighborhood in Istanbul. He played semi-professional football until, early on, he entered politics. In 2001 he founded the Justice and Development Party (usually known by its Turkish acronym, AKP). His political rise has been meteoric. He was elected mayor of Istanbul, served as prime minister 2003-2014, then was elected to the presidency. The AKP is generally referred to as being “moderate Islamist”. It is true that its core constituency consists of moderately observant Muslims, especially in eastern Anatolia, where the party rejects the term “Islamist”, and describes itself as “conservative democratic”. However, from early on it has pushed for a legitimate role of Islam in the public sphere, which had been previously suppressed by the militant secularism of the republic founded by Kemal Ataturk in 1923. A party spokesperson had expressed this position eloquently: “We don’t want an Islamic state. We want to be good Muslims in a secular republic.”

Both great fears and great hopes were invested in the rise of the AKP, and particularly in the ideological posture of Erdogan. His religious and moral conservatism appealed to many Muslims; it frightened the Kemalist elite in the metropolitan centers, who suspected that the AKP had a secret agenda of establishing a sharia state. Erdogan reined in the power of the military and the bureaucracy, which was perceived as democratizing within the country and abroad. In the beginning, the AKP presented itself as pro-NATO (of which Turkey has long been a member), and eager to join the European Union. Its economic policies were frankly pro-capitalist, which particularly responded to the interests of a new provincial business class (half-seriously described as “Anatolian Calvinists”—shades of Max Weber!). Also, Erdogan entered into serious conversation with the Kurds, the largest ethnic minority in the country, and made concessions to their demands for language rights. Steps in the direction of “Islamization” were modest, though of symbolic significance. Most visible was the lifting of the ban on kerchiefs for women in public places, the positive support for explicitly Muslim schools, and restrictions on the sale of alcohol. As far as I know, the proposal to make adultery an offense under the criminal code was effectively dropped. (A big sigh of relief went through café society of Istanbul and Ankara.) As the AKP withstood some murmurs of rebellion in coup-inclined officer clubs, and its power became more entrenched, someone quipped: “We were worried that Erdogan wanted to become the Ayatollah Khomeini; we should worry that he wants to become Suleiman the Magnificent.”As the AKP continued in power, the worries deepened. Domestically, Erdogan became increasingly authoritarian, in foreign policy increasingly erratic. The government sought to intimidate critics and gain controls over the media. There were allegations of conspiracy on the part of military officers and others, leading to trials widely regarded as illegal. The government also took measures against another movement identified as “moderately Islamist”, that of a Fethulah Gülen, who had been a strong supporter of Erdogan some time ago. Gülen, who lives in exile in America, created an international network of educationally innovative schools. He was accused of plotting against Erdogan with the help of organized supporters in the bureaucracy. Journalists have been particularly targeted with legally dubious charges of subversion (it has been alleged that more journalists are in jail in Turkey than in China). It should also be mentioned that the Turkish government has continued to deny that the murders of massive numbers of Armenians during World War I constituted the crime of genocide. (In this, the AKP regime continued a tradition that goes back to the early days of the republic.) Erdogan had announced that he would seek to change the constitution by giving more power to the president (the office he now occupies); this project has been at least delayed by sharp losses of the AKP in the election of June 2015.Erdogan has also markedly changed the course of Turkish foreign policy. He has emphasized the independence of Turkey from its Western allies and muted the quest for membership in the European Union—partly, I would think, in reaction to widespread reluctance within the EU to embrace Turkish membership. In response to the so-called “Arab spring”, Erdogan has expressed an affinity with the wider Middle East, even making friendly gestures toward the brief rule of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Turkey did little to stop large numbers of would-be jihadists from Europe from going through its territory to join ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Erdogan ended what previously had been a close relationship with Israel and allowed a flotilla of ships to be launched from Turkey to attempt a breach of the blockade of Gaza. The Turkish crew resisted when Israeli forces tried to board and several were killed in the ensuing skirmish.All of this has led to the idea that the old quip about Erdogan wanting to restore the Ottoman Empire may not be far off the mark (though he himself has vigorously denied such an intention). In an article in The Atlantic on April 5, 2013, Cinar Kiper, a Turkish writer living in Istanbul, discussed this matter in great detail. There is indeed some evidence for such “Ottomania”: the popular TV show “Magnificent Century”, actually dealing with Suleiman the Magnificent; the film “Conquest 1453” about the capture of Constantinople by Sultan Mehmed; the popularity of Ottoman fashions (including colorful kerchiefs), extending to the uniforms of flight attendants of Turkish Airlines, and perhaps most convincingly Erdogan’s building of an extravagant presidential palace of truly Ottoman splendor. Nevertheless, Kiper suggests that, rather than playing up Ottoman themes, Erdogan had best be compared with the Meiji emperor, who presided over the synthesis of tradition and modernization in Japan in the second half of the 19th century. I think a more fruitful analogy is with the Putin regime in Russia, which has very directly wrapped itself in the traditional symbolism of imperial Russia. (There actually appears to exist some personal empathy between Putin as tsar and Erdogan as sultan).It seems as if the turmoil on Turkey’s doorstep in Syria is going to have an impact on the further course of the Erdogan era. The online Religion and Geopolitics (a very useful publication of the British Tony Blair Faith Foundation), in its issue of July 23, 2015, has described the dilemma posed by Syria to Turkey’s foreign policy. Three forces are locked in a complicated battle in northern Syria: the Assad regime in Damascus (weakened but still hanging on); the self-styled caliphate of the Islamic State/IS, holding sway over a large stretch of territory straddling the by-now meaningless frontier between Syria and Iraq [I will forego here the silly convention of always referring to this nightmare regime as “IS, also known as ISIS or ISIL or Daesh”]; and the de-facto Kurdish state carved out of Iraqi territory and now spilling over into Syria. Turkey has been working hard to overthrow Assad, probably because of his links with Iran, a rival of Turkey for regional power. IS, at first seemed no direct threat to Turkey, but increasingly does. The Kurdish autonomous region in Iraq is run by two factions, one of which has a long history of violent conflict with the Turkish state. This regional government is perceived as a serious threat because of the encouragement it gives to the political aspirations of its fellow-ethnics within Turkey.Very recent events have sharpened these contradictions. On July 20, 2015, ISIS bombed Suruc, a town just inside Turkey, which reacted fiercely to this violation of its sovereignty. Turkish forces bombarded ISIS targets inside Syria (a first—until then Turkey had strictly kept away from getting directly embroiled in the Syrian quagmire). It then allowed U.S. planes to use two Turkish airbases to launch bombing raids in Syria (another first—Turkey had not given this permission before, to the extreme annoyance of the Pentagon, which had to use airbases much farther away). On July 24 Presidents Obama and Erdogan had an extended telephone conversation about security cooperation in the Middle East (I don’t know who called whom—Erdogan was on a state visit in Romania). Since then, there have been daily reports of Turkey bombing ISIS targets inside Syria, but also targeting Kurdish positions in northern Iraq, and vowing not support Kurdish forces in Syria as ISIS gets pushed back. If all the reports are true, Ankara appears to not have yet figured out just who its most dangerous enemies are! (Has the Obama administration?)What of the future? Could it be that Turkey may yet supply the key prototype for a successful synthesis of Islam and democracy?I spent quite some time writing this post (frankly, because I myself followed the trajectory of hope and disappointment in the unfolding Erdogan story). In the current volume 18 of Current Trends in Islamist Ideology (a series published by the Hudson Institute) an article titled “The Prospects for Reform in Islam”, by Raza Rumi (a Pakistani scholar), gives a surprisingly optimistic picture of these prospects. The author proposes that there is a growing number of Islamic voices in different Muslim-majority countries favoring the application of ijtihad (independent reasoning) in Islamic jurisprudence. If correct, this would also affect the approach to the Quran and hadith (the body of traditions about the Prophet). It would certainly augur well for the relation between Islam and democracy (and indeed with modernity in general).Clearly this is a matter that will have to be argued out within the Muslim community. Yet if one looks for promising centers within that world, one inevitably comes to consider Turkey. Who else? Fragile Egypt, tottering between fundamentalism and military dictatorship? Iran and Saudi Arabia, hopelessly embroiled in the intellectually sterile Shi’a/Sunni conflict? Indonesia? The Muslim diaspora in the West (or in India!)? Turkey has the required intellectual class, a rich culture of popular piety, strong economic resources, and—last not least—the most effective military power in the region. (Often in history the fate of ideas, religious or other, is decided—may I say this?—by “boots on the ground”.)I may as well admit to a prejudice here. If I think of a center in Turkey, Istanbul first comes to mind—Ankara, that artificial place in the middle of nowhere, hardly ever. Hardly provincial Konya, even though it was the town of Jalaluddin Rumi, arguably the most profound Muslim mystic. Istanbul is one of my favorite cities, even though I have to imagine how it was before the various ethnic cleansings of the 20th century, of Armenians, Greeks, Sephardic Jews. This rich cosmopolitan past still hovers over what is the most beautiful boat rides in the world—on the Golden Horn, past the majestic skyline of mosques on the right, toward the Hellespont, on which one can turn right toward the Mediterranean or left toward the Black Sea. The Hellespont, that narrow waterway between Europe and Asia—a border often enough marked in blood, but also a border across which there were bridges of yearning, as when Leander yearned for Hero (the infinitely desired priestess of Aphrodite). I must stop myself before I become lyrical. But having come that far in disclosure of prejudice, I may as well turn back for a moment to one of these monumental edifices on the Golden Horn, the Sultan Ahmet Mosque, in which some years ago I found myself alone in that vast empty space (and had one of my few experiences of tangible transcendence).

Treasury Secretary on Puerto Rico: It’s Chapter Nine Time

As Puerto Rico continues to slouch towards crisis—the commonwealth is reported to be $72 billion in debt, and questions are now being raised about whether one of its debt-issuing entities will default on August 1st—U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew is loudly sounding the alarm. The Wall Street Journal reports on a letter from Lew to Senator Orrin Hatch, the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, in which Lew rules out a federal bailout but states that Puerto Rico urgently needs access to chapter 9 bankruptcy protection:

“Puerto Rico’s fiscal situation is urgent, and I believe it requires the immediate attention of Congress,” Mr. Lew said. Without an established legal option to restructure debts, the outcome would be “chaotic, protracted and costly both for Puerto Rico and more broadly for the United States,” he said […]

The Treasury Department said separately that Mr. Lew met Tuesday with Puerto Rico’s governor, Alejandro Garcia Padilla, to receive an update on its financial situation. Mr. Lew “said he would continue to work with Congress to build bipartisan support for a legal framework that helps Puerto Rico resolve its financial challenges,” a Treasury spokesman said.

It’s not clear that Lew will easily get his way. A bill extending bankruptcy protection to Puerto Rico is currently stuck in Congress. Two U.S. mutual funds—OppenheimerFunds Inc. and FranklinAdvisers Inc., the latter of which is also a big holder of Ukrainian bonds—between them hold as much as 15 percent of Puerto Rico’s outstanding debt. They are unlikely to roll over for a measure that could see them eat substantial losses. At the same time, if bailouts are ruled out, there appears to be little chance of squeezing more blood from this stone.

Puerto Rico has long been the poster-child of blue model governance gone awry—our very own Greece. Will the resolution of its crisis also involve a series of interlocking games of chicken, like in the Mediterranean, as both sides say the course while the situation goes from bad to worse? It appears we won’t have to wait long to find out.

Hallelujah for the Rains

El Niño was expected to bring dusty danger to India this year by stopping the country’s annual monsoons, which many of India’s 1.3 billion people rely on for their food to grow. Happily, the climate predictions were wrong, and India is getting its much needed rains, as Bloomberg reports:

The monsoon’s revival from mid-July has boosted rice and soybean crops, curbing food price gains and easing concerns of shortages. India’s central bank has said it’s closely watching the rains after identifying a monsoon shortfall as the biggest risk to the economy, where agriculture accounts for about 15 percent of gross domestic product. The country depends on rain to water half of its crop land. […]

Halfway through the four-month rainy season that began in June, the first El Nino since 2010 has failed to make much of a dent. Unusual warming of the Indian Ocean may have helped counter the impact of El Nino on monsoon and aided better rain, according to Commodity Weather Group LLC. The India Meteorological Department last month predicted monsoon rain would fall short, reaching 88 percent of a 50-year average.

It’s excellent news that fears of a crippling shortfall in India have proven ill-founded. Millions of people won’t go hungry, millions of parents will be able to pay school fees for their kids. It’s also good news for Modi, who will have a somewhat easier time getting reforms through parliament—a quest in which he could really stand to catch a break—if the economy is doing well.

Chinese Communists Losing the War Against Christianity

The East China province of Zhejiang is home to the city of Wenzhou, known as the “Jerusalem of China” for the large numbers of Christians who live there. It’s also the area where local officials have launched a crackdown on Christians, taking down crosses from the tops of churches or even demolishing the churches themselves. As unrest over these measures continues, the Chinese government says it is removing crosses for “safety and beauty” reasons. The Guardian reports:

An official from Zhejiang’s ethnic and religious affairs bureau told the state-run Global Times newspaper the government had “merely relocated the crosses out of safety concerns”.

“Generally speaking, the church staff and people are very supportive [of the removals],” the official added.

… So that’s all right, then.

In fact, Chinese Christians are not happy about the removals—the Guardian reported on street protests against them only last Friday. And when you look at the growth of Christianity in the country, you can see why officials are so uneasy about it. The article estimates that there are now more Christians in China than there are members of the Communist Party.  Chinese officials are trying increasingly desperate measures in their crackdown:

The “anti-church” campaign took an unusual turn this week after claims that officials had deployed groups of incense-burning Buddhist monks to “provoke” Christians who were trying to defend their cross.

“We are Protestant Christians, so by sending monks to chant sutras they were trying to get us riled up,” a member of one Zhejiang church told Radio Free Asia, a US-funded news website.The Christian added: “They were trying to make us angry so that we would retaliate against them. They think that anyone who opposes the government is a traitor, or someone trying to overturn the Communist party.”

Communists in China increasingly realize that the war against religion as such is a losing proposition, and are now looking to support “indigenous” Chinese religions and traditions—Confucianism, Buddhism, Chinese folk religions—against both Christianity and Islam, seen as dangerous imports with potentially destabilizing effects, and “new religions” like the cult of Falun Gong.

This turmoil over religion is one more sign that the cultural changes sweeping through post-Mao China are as dramatic and far reaching as the economic changes. Nobody, not even the Chinese government, knows where this great nation is headed or what lies before it.

Obama to Versailles

It’s time for a profile in constitutional courage from the Congress, from supporters and critics alike of the proposed nuclear deal with Iran as well as members yet undecided. Our legislative branch should embrace its duty to assess President Obama’s great venture in diplomacy, and do so in a civil and sober way, rather than quail at the charge that opposition to or skepticism about the deal is warmongering. It might help to reflect on the similarity between the President’s high-stakes effort in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the Iran nuclear deal) and the gambit of another ambitious president. Just as Woodrow Wilson did in 1919 regarding the League of Nations treaty, Barack Obama seeks American support for an agreement that would transform the international order—even while he and his advocates seek to pressure, even shame, Congress into endorsing (or not opposing) such a stratagem. Then as now, the presidential team warned Congress not stray from international opinion and the endorsement of other leading powers. Then as now, supporters warned Congress that to question the presidential-international diplomatic effort was to reject peace and embrace perpetual war.

A sober assessment of this proposed Iran deal should consider, therefore, that the better historical analogy is not President Nixon going to China—the precedent now on everyone’s mind. Obama is not just seeking détente with an enemy for mutual advantage; rather, just as Wilson went to Versailles seeking a treaty that would transform the international order, President Obama quietly seeks to revolutionize post-Cold War international affairs. The President can’t state such a grand strategy openly, since it would be too controversial or unpopular, but his actions strongly suggest it. His aim is to pivot away from American leadership of a liberal global order, with all its burdens on American blood and treasure. Instead we will have a global concert system in which great powers, and rising great powers, broker deals region-by-region in hopes of reducing major wars—thereby reducing the presumptuousness of (and burdens on) America. This is the fruit of the smarter diplomacy and anti-militarism Obama has promised since his first presidential campaign.Even if this deal is just about Iran’s nuclear program, as the President claims, it will have far-reaching consequences, as some of the plan’s more candid supporters acknowledge. If it also is about transforming America’s role in the world under a new global order, it is even more crucial that Congress debate the deal and facilitate a broad national understanding of what is at stake and where America is heading. This constitutional role is important, therefore, whether or not Congress disapproves of America’s role in the deal—and, if it disapproves, whether or not it then overrides the President’s veto of that initial vote.Of course, as with any historical analogy, there are important differences to observe. In Versailles 2.0, Obama seeks not to end all wars; he seeks to end American wars. To keep both Russia and Iran in these long negotiations, the President has looked away or withdrawn while these powers launched or provoked many wars—in Syria, Ukraine, Iraq, and Yemen most prominently. American acquiescence to Chinese provocations on Asia’s high seas is also a cost of this only-speak-softly strategy. Moreover, Versailles 2.0 does not aim to make the world safe for democracy; it aims to reduce the burdens on American democracy. Here it perhaps assumes (as Europe’s political culture does) that there is an historical inevitability to liberal principles and liberal democracy in world affairs, and militarism by liberals only gets in the way.In contrast to Wilson, therefore, Obama seeks transformation not through a utopian project of collective security by all states, making war illegal. Congress should consider, nonetheless, the utopianism in Obama’s vision that American withdrawal from forceful global leadership will reduce American wars, let alone great power wars. (So-called smaller wars, as in Syria and Libya—with hundreds of thousands killed and millions made refugees—are a distinctly secondary concern). In keeping with this vision, the Iran deal implicitly endorses American retrenchment from international responsibility by featuring the U.N. system and diplomacy to achieve a détente. The deal effectively allows the illiberal powers of the U.N. Security Council (Russia, China) and its passive liberal powers (France, Britain), together with the EU and its strategy of achieving peace by being peaceful, to ratify America’s retreat from being the leading power that supports, and enforces, a liberal global order of peace, international rules, and commerce.These are the rationales for accepting a deal that presumes Iran can be a responsible state with vast resources (for starters, up to $150 billion it will get as sanctions end) and with nuclear threshold capability at the very least (even if it observes every detail of the deal), even while it continues to be the world’s leading state sponsor of terror, threatens extermination of a fellow member of the United Nations, wreaks havoc across the Middle East (and beyond), and detains Americans on dubious grounds (more severe critics call them hostages). Even in the post-2001 era, Obama’s vision sees Iran and Middle Eastern order as not primarily America’s problem, and Iran’s revolutionary state as most likely to become reasonable through agreeable diplomacy, not any more forceful option.The JCPOA is therefore about much more than Iran’s fairly clear ambition for nuclear weapons, or even about the fate of the non-proliferation principle (given the prospect that other Middle East states will pursue programs to balance Iran’s). At stake is much more than a path out of the disorder engulfing the Middle East to a degree unprecedented even for that troubled region. When Nixon and Kissinger went to China they sought a realignment of great powers in order to pursue more effectively the bipartisan grand strategy of containment bequeathed to them. It was a change of tactics, if a big one. Obama, like Wilson, seeks a completely different grand strategy. Perhaps given the lessons of Wilson’s brazen confrontation with Congress (which he lost), one sparked in part by his statements about transformational aims, Obama and his advisers have been craftier. They succeeded in framing this deal as an executive agreement rather than a treaty, so it appears less transformational. This also permitted them to avoid the constitutional threshold for treaties of two-thirds support from the Senate; the JCPOA needs support of only one-third-plus-one member in either house. The price of shrewdness, however, is that support from American leaders and citizens for this “historic” deal (in the President’s words) is likely to be less widespread, bipartisan, and firm.The Administration also has succeeded in persuading elite opinion in America and Europe that the only alternative to recognizing Iran as a regional power and nuclear threshold state (eventually a nuclear weapon state)—which required canceling all sanctions and embargoes on Iran’s military programs and international terror network—is “another Middle Eastern war.” This means, of course, a replay of the 2003 Iraq war, and the supposed waste of American blood and treasure for no good result. What Congress instead should consider is the price of this new effort to reduce America’s “costs” in the Middle East and around the world. It should assess the risk involved in this risk-avoidance strategy, of seeking détente with an unreconstructed enemy of liberal principles and world order. Our allies in the region (Israel and the Sunni states alike) and members of both parties in Congress have stated that they see the likely costs and risks as very grave. Moreover, the long-term consequences portend a decline in the global order America has sought and supported, in a bipartisan way, since 1941.These are valid concerns even if the President is right. Perhaps, as he states, this deal is only about Iran’s nuclear program, and it is the most reasonable and peaceful option. Or, perhaps his unspoken grand strategy is right, and it is more reasonable to accept American retrenchment and thus a global concert of powers, liberal and illiberal, that in turn entails regional hegemons. If right on either ground, however, the President should not dismiss a Congressional debate. Several former Obama officials and supporters who cautiously support the deal have worried about the difficulty of achieving even modest results from it. Just as with Wilson’s stratagem to show America and the world that we really believe—along with other leading powers—in diplomacy and peace, Congress faces a difficult duty now. Just as it did with the alluring proposal to end all wars, pressed by a single-minded president with high regard for his own intelligence, Congress today should soberly assess this diplomatic venture so as to help prepare Americans for what comes next, whether or not it blocks U.S. participation.Indeed, both Congress and the President should want to sustain the constitutional balance and complex structure that undergirds America’s successful tradition of grand strategy, which has brought substantial benefits to us and the world through a more peaceful, prosperous, and interconnected globe. This is the constitutional and grand-strategic principle that calls both parties in Congress, and responsible public voices, to think not as partisans or about short-term promises, but rather to provide balanced consideration of such international agreements, especially one with all the weight of a multi-lateral treaty. Our constitutional order requires Congress to serve alongside the executive as the long-term custodian of America’s interests and ideals. This requirement for balance has enabled our rise as the leading liberal power, because, mistakes and all, we ultimately have better internal vetting for our policies and grand strategy than does the competition. Because the Obama strategy for détente with Iran will have major global consequences, unfolding in the short and long terms, it is all the more disconcerting that the President undertook the negotiations—as Wilson did with his great project—with the bare minimum of cooperation with bipartisan leaders in Congress, and now, in the end, is effectively trying to sideline them.Moreover, the failure of the League of Nations project should bolster Congressional resolve to examine this new game-changer calmly. Then, a single leader persuaded his Cabinet and leading states to adopt a grand scheme; even if Congress had endorsed the ceding of American sovereignty in 1919 in a plan for perpetual peace, the Kantian project of collective security likely would have failed. Human nature and the patterns of international affairs would not have conformed to Wilson’s ideas even with an American buy-in. Congress today should consider the sobering lesson that a grand diplomatic stratagem (especially one like the JCPOA with so many moving, interlocking parts) could be, upon consideration, too good to be true. In both centuries, a president’s attractive strategy was promoted as avoiding war and furthering peace through a low-cost, eminently reasonable plan. The earlier strategy assumed that all states, of whatever history and philosophy, could cooperate after a horrible war in order to prevent any others. The current scheme addresses America’s disgust with wars and the burdens of global leadership and assumes, in an echo of Wilson, that leading states with illiberal histories and philosophies could be equal partners in enforcing nuclear non-proliferation and other liberal principles, including curtailment of Iran’s program of terrorism and war. Congressional testimony and debate should help us to understand what we could be getting into, and whether this diplomatic hope is really plausible.The fact that the President long has dismissed concerns of both Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress—and, most recently, sought recognition of the deal from the U.N. Security Council before submitting it to Congress—gives grounds for wondering whether this current blend of presidentialism and internationalism can withstand scrutiny. That said, it would be best for our constitutional order and its record of successful grand strategy if members of Congress now strive for restraint. Congress would ratify the confidence placed in it by the framers if—no matter what the Administration has done or now says—it now resolves to soberly consider the plan’s costs and benefits, risks and gains. Such statesmanlike conduct might persuade future presidents and presidential aspirants not to pursue enlightened presidentialism and diplomacy without the reassurance, and sobriety, typically gained through a constitutionally balanced path.The broader point to consider is that while Wilson sought to remake the world in America’s image, Obama would curtail an American leadership he sees as possessing an arrogance that has served neither America nor the cause of global peace very well. Both presidential visions are significant departures from a prior American consensus. Today the quiet plan for American self-containment effectively reconceives the U.N. Security Council not as a body enforcing liberal principles but largely as a great-power balancing mechanism, a forum for regional hegemons. The Council’s illiberal powers are happy to ratify this détente with Iran, for it confirms a weakening of American stature and liberal principles. This would further confirm the Council’s illiberal shift—its acceptance of Russia’s protection of Syria and invasion of Ukraine and other states; its tolerance of China’s bullying on the high seas; its disregard for the horrors and nuclear ambitions of North Korea; and now, its embrace of the world’s leading terror state by absolving it of repeated violations of Council Resolutions. The EU and its members on the Council support the U.N. ideal of standing for liberal principles while also accommodating power realities, but more fundamentally support a project of self-fulfilling idealism­—that peace will arrive if liberal powers emphasize diplomacy and legalism. They won’t stop an American president from retrenching American power.Americans can hope that even if we are replaying elements of the 1910s, we won’t replay the 1920s and 1930s. Since 1941 a bipartisan consensus, difficult but possible to hold, has argued that America’s ideals would not again permit the oscillating extremes of utopian liberal peace and America-First insularism. America instead would pursue, with bipartisanship at home and allies abroad, a prudent internationalism that serves our own ideals and interests: peace, international law, and global commerce. Today the frustrating but impressive complexity of our constitutional order, its demand for balance in making grand strategy, calls us to move with open eyes into decisions that could recapitulate either the nobler or more tragic episodes of our past. President Obama is making a very big gamble, albeit one conveyed as calm and pragmatic. He proposes his own blend of realism and liberal idealism—a realism counseling retrenchment given our relative decline and excessive expenditures, and a liberalism envisioning history’s self-fulfilling trend toward reasonable, enlightened conduct in global affairs. Whether he succeeds or not in passing the low Congressional hurdle he has arranged, Congress could rise to its constitutional duty by making sure that we move into an unsettled future, and possibly a transformational grand strategy, with clarity.