Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 631

Why Did Russia Back the Iran Deal?

The Iran deal was particularly unfavorable to Russia, which stands to lose billions in oil earnings as Iran re-enters world markets. Moreover, the economic offset Moscow hoped for—sales of conventional weapons to Iran—is blocked for five years. So why did the country sign on? Brookings fellow Pavel Baev has an important part of the answer here:

As usual, the answer is far from simple and resides ultimately in the fevered mind of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Russian support for the negotiation process with Iran has been inconsistent and overall demonstrates some mixed emotions. From a narrow Russian perspective, the deal threatens to create yet another steady stream of oil and gas onto the world market at a time when depressed energy prices are already threatening the Russian economy. With that disadvantage in mind, the deciding factor was likely the Chinese one. The Chinese wanted the deal for their own reasons and Vladimir Putin, for all of his bluster, is in no position to resist them.

For Beijing, the Iran deal is excellent news. China plans to pump investment into Iran through lucrative business deals on everything from pipeline building to major infrastructure construction, and the deal is likely to keep oil prices low for some time—a major interest for China, which is the world’s largest importer and whose economy is being squeezed by falling prices for its manufactured exports.

That’s clearly part of the reason why Russia didn’t play more of a spoiler’s role in the negotiations. China really, really wanted the deal, and Putin, hit by western sanctions and low oil prices, is in no position to fight Xi.But great powers usually have more than one reason for the steps that they take, and Russia probably has another end in view also. Iran’s rulers may be radical Islamists as intolerant and imperialist as ISIS, but Russia sees the Shi’a Islamism of Iran as an ally against what it really fears: radical Sunni Islamist groups that start to operate inside Russia itself — in the still-restive Caucasus, as well as in other regions of great interest to Russia in the former Soviet Union countries of Central Asia. Iran sees Sunni jihadis as rivals and, Russians believe, has been helpful in preventing Sunni jihadis from entering Russian territory through the lower Caucasus. What’s more, Moscow and Tehran are also in agreement about the need to prevent a Sunni victory in Syria.Put the two considerations together—China and jihad—and Russia’s Iran policy makes sense from Moscow’s point of view. Still, it is an expensive policy, and the prospect of low oil prices and competing supplies of natural gas from Iran is bad news for the Kremlin.One likely result: Putin will crack down on domestic dissidents, keep tight controls on the press, and continue to maintain a hard line against western funding for NGOs and other groups on Russian soil. With hard times coming, he won’t want to give his opponents much space within which to operate.

The Fake Town That Could Be the Real Proving Ground for Autonomous Cars

Experts in association with the University of Michigan have set up a whole fake town outside of Ann Arbor to test self-driving cars. They’re calling it Mcity, and it comes complete with traffic jams, heavy rains, blind turns, multiple road surfaces, moving buildings to keep things fresh, and anything else that can put a car at a high risk of crashing. On the occasion its opening this week, the press release gave more details:

Mcity is a 32-acre simulated urban and suburban environment that includes a network of roads with intersections, traffic signs and signals, streetlights, building facades, sidewalks and construction obstacles. It is designed to support rigorous, repeatable testing of new technologies before they are tried out on public streets and highways.

“There are many challenges ahead as automated vehicles are increasingly deployed on real roadways,” Sweatman said. “Mcity is a safe, controlled, and realistic environment where we are going to figure out how the incredible potential of connected and automated vehicles can be realized quickly, efficiently and safely.”In particular, Mcity allows researchers to simulate the environments where connected and automated vehicles will be most challenged. Even seemingly minor details a vehicle might encounter in urban and suburban settings have been incorporated into Mcity, such as road signs defaced by graffiti and faded lane markings.

As regular Via Meadia readers will know, we think autonomous cars are going to revolutionize American society in ways most people haven’t yet dreamed of.

Most people, however, seem to mistrust the technology, and to hold it to a much higher standard than a car with a human behind the wheel. For example, after one of Google’s self-driving cars was rear-ended last week, a whole brouhaha kicked off over whether this disproves Google’s safety claims, even though a human driver was clearly at fault in this case. In fact, in the 1.7 million miles they’ve driven, all seven of the accidents that the cars Google has roaming Nevada and California have gotten into have been deemed to be caused by human drivers. (That predicts considerably fewer accidents per hundred million vehicle miles traveled than human drivers log.)This brings us back to Mcity. Both Google’s successful tests and the development of technologies that gradually have traditional cars making more and more autonomous decisions have gone a long way towards winning over the public. A very public proving ground, constantly collecting data as it pushes the cars beyond what they can safely do in the real-world tests, will add to the momentum. Years from now, when you can read or nap on the commute you probably don’t even have to make anymore, thank Mcity for paving the way.

Can We Turn CO2 Into Fuel?

The boundary between science and science fiction is blurring, as researchers are hard at work developing methods to capture the problematic greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from our atmosphere and turn it into diesel. Science Alert reports:

Scientists in Canada are developing an industrial carbon dioxide recycling plant that could one day suck CO2 out of the atmosphere and convert it into a zero-carbon e-diesel fuel. Developed by tech start-up Carbon Engineering and partly funded by Bill Gates, the system will essentially do the job of trees, but in places unable to host them, such as icy plains and deserts…[T]he CO2 recycling plant will combine carbon dioxide with hydrogen split from water to form hydrocarbon fuel. […]

Carbon Engineering is one of a handful of companies around the world that are now set on coming up with ways to suck enough carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to actually put a dent in the effects of climate change. There’s also the New York City-based start-up Global Thermostat, and Swiss-based Climeworks, which demonstrated earlier this year with Audi how its technology can capture carbon dioxide, and deliver it to German company Sunfire, where it was recycled into a zero-carbon diesel fuel.

When we look to the future, there’s a tendency to discount the possibility of radical technological leaps, to see humanity continue to grow and place a greater strain on its environment without taking into account our capacity to adapt to the new challenges we’ll soon be facing. That kind of thinking leads to the Malthusian hand-wringing characteristic of most modern green activism, but it’s a deeply distorted way of seeing the world.

The pace of technological change is accelerating, and that phenomenon isn’t just providing consumers with fancier phones—it’s also giving farmers the ability to grow more food while emitting less gasses and opening up vast new energy sources capable of reducing our reliance on some of our dirtiest supplies. The idea that we could not only capture carbon from our atmosphere—already a burgeoning industry in its own right—but also recycle that gas to produce fuel is a radical idea.There are so many different, potentially game-changing innovations being researched right now that, while it’s too early to pick and choose which will work out, it’s hard not to be optimistic about the future. At the very least, it’s difficult to look at the next fifty years with the kind of Chicken Little mentality environmentalists favor.

The Crazy Quilt of Public Pension Law

The challenges facing state-level pension reformers in the United States are both complicated and considerable. Even more bewilderingly, laws on whether state and city governments can cut pensions vary wildly between localities. Mary Williams Walsh has an excellent piece over at the New York Times detailing the variations:

“…for constitutional reasons, the federal law is not binding on states or cities, which has led to a patchwork of litigation and outcomes.

“It’s hard to keep it all straight,” said Josh B. McGee, vice president for public accountability at the Arnold Foundation, which tracks the litigation on a public website.Pensions can be cut in any number of ways, and challenges are brought on a variety of legal theories. A winning argument in one state may fail in another. To some extent, outcomes can be handicapped along red-state and blue-state lines — but not with pinpoint accuracy.State supreme courts in traditionally blue California, New York and Oregon, but also in red Arizona, have ruled that public workers’ pensions are set in stone from the first day on the job and cannot be reduced.But state courts in red South Dakota, blue Minnesota and variable Colorado and New Mexico have ruled that public pensions can lawfully be cut — even for people who have already retired. In the past, existing retirees’ benefits were considered inviolate.”

 

With pension problems driving cities across California bankrupt and states like New Jersey, Illinois, and Rhode Island—not to mention Puerto Rico—into states of crisis, pension reform is bound to become a hotter issue national issue. Walsh does a good job outlining the details; read her whole piece as a primer on the subject.

Red States Eat Blue States’ Lunch

The West and the South—not California or the Northeast—are apparently the places to move these days. In a piece on Denver’s economy, the WSJ provides a list of the urban areas that have been receiving the most in-migration since 2010. Houston, Dallas, Austin, Phoenix, Denver, San Antonio, Charlotte, Atlanta, Tampa, and Orlando make the top ten. Texas, North Carolina, Arizona, Florida, and Georgia are generally red states, and though Colorado is nominally a blue state, its business climate more closely resembles that of Texas than that of California.

You can see that resemblance in the article’s main subject, its profile of Denver. The WSJ reports that Millennials are attracted to the city’s atmosphere and its proximity to natural beauty, but most importantly to the economic opportunities Denver offers in Millennial-dominated fields like telecommunications and tech:

“Denver has long been a regional hub, with established industries such as oil and telecommunications that leaders have built upon to create thriving sectors such as energy information technology and digital health care.”

As Joel Kotkin has argued many times, red states are eating blue states’ lunch, stealing away talented young workers and innovative businesses by offering lower costs of living, higher qualities of life, and more favorable tax and regulatory environments than anything coastal blue citadels can offer. And this is happening despite blue cities’ attempts to remain culturally enticing.

To attract young people, it seems, the cities of America don’t have to worry about being hip. Instead, they need to create dynamic economic environments. That is what draws the talented young—and in turn, it seems, they do their part to make their new homes nicer.

Gazprom Doesn’t Think Turnabout Is Fair Play

If you’re a fan of irony, sit down, kick your feet up, and get ready: you’re in for a treat. Earlier this month, Turkmenistan called Gazprom out for allegedly not paying for any of its gas imports from the former Soviet country in 2015. This raised eyebrows because it’s normally Gazprom calling out one of its captive customers for non-payment (ahem…Ukraine), which in return would normally provoke an angry response from that customer. But dutiful to its part in this bizarro gas supply standoff, Gazprom is now taking Turkmenistan’s state-owned gas company Türkmengaz to court over a pricing dispute. Reuters reports:

Russian gas company Gazprom said on Friday it had lodged a case against Turkmenistan’s Turkmengaz at the international arbitration court in Stockholm over the price in a supply contract. […]

A spokesman for the Russian company said: “A lawsuit has been filed in Stockholm. The demand – a revision of prices.” The spokesman declined to elaborate.

In recent years Turkmengaz has watched its Russian exports drop off a cliff, falling roughly 75 percent since 2008, and Gazprom has threatened to halve those imports this year to just 4 billion cubic meters (bcm). To compensate, Turkmengaz has turned east towards China, selling some 30bcm now with the hope of expanding those exports to 60bcm over the next five years.

In that sense, Turkmenistan has beaten Russia to the punch. Checked in the West by sanctions and ever-less pliant European customers, Moscow has made Beijing a high-priority target. But though it signed a 30-year deal to send 38bcm China’s way, a second deal has languished as the two sides have so far struggled to iron out the details. Competition for China’s prodigious appetite for natural gas therefore hangs in the background of this latest supply spate between Turkmenistan and Russia.Putin has never shied away from leveraging Russia’s size and clout when it comes to energy contracts, and we’re now seeing that’s as true when he’s buying gas as when he’s selling it.

A Country Caught Under the Treads

President Obama’s plate already looked full for his visits to Kenya and Ethiopia, but after the release of a Human Rights Watch report earlier this week, his team will now be faced with another unsavory after-effect of American disengagement in Africa.

According to the group’s newest report, South Sudan’s ethnic violence is no longer resulting in just widespread starvation, but is also leading to systemic killings and deliberate displacement of women, children, and the elderly. From the HRW report:

A woman from Koch told Human Rights Watch she had seen fighters from government aligned Bul militia throw three elderly men into a burning hut. One elderly woman who had also fled Koch town said that Bul fighters attempted to hang her from a beam in her hut and that they killed an old man in this way in another hut. A 22-year-old woman from Koch described another attempted hanging, this time of her mother: […]

One man reported seeing a man shot as they fled the town, the bodies of a woman and two children, and the broken bodies of two brothers he knew, both in their 50s, who had apparently been crushed by tanks. He also reported seeing the bodies of six other men and women in the town after the SPLA had taken control of the area. A 30-year-old woman said that her nephew had been crushed by a tank. “He has no gun … I saw him … he was crushed before he reached the river.

The above is just a brief snippet of the forty-two page report, which includes countless accounts of lurid killings, beatings, sexual assault, abductions, and forced labor. The tragedy of the South Sudan is that it was built with the best intentions of American policy-makers and human rights activists—but hardly ever stood a chance. As Armin Rosen wrote for TAI, South Sudan’s struggles weren’t inevitable, but weren’t unforeseeable either.

The inability of the world’s youngest country to mature into a strong member of the African community was at first masked by the astounding growth seen in Juba. But when President Salva Kiir Mayardit fired his Vice President and “reshuffled” his cabinet in the summer of 2013 in what analysts called an “ethnic power grab”, the honeymoon of unity in South Sudan was over. In the time since, skirmishes have developed into all-out rebellion, and the HRW report now joins other reports in shining a light on Kiir’s war against the rebels.As President Obama meets with the leadership of a few of South Sudan’s neighbors in East Africa, the discussion will surely turn to the region’s newest neighbor who just can’t seem to keep its house in order. When the topic comes up, the President will have the choice to try his hand as peace maker in East Africa—or continue with the limited sanctions already in place and keep the administration’s distance from yet another African problem.

Fear and Loathing for Jews in France

Has the time come for Jews to say au revoir to France? In an article for the forthcoming edition of Vanity Fair, Marie Brenner examines the causes of and justifications for the exodus of France’s Jewish population.

Brenner weaves a narrative that includes testimony from police and government officials, activists, fellow journalists, Jewish watchdog groups, a posh luxury goods executive, witnesses from a wide variety of anti-Semitic incidents and assaults throughout France, a Parisian Imam, and an eighteen-year-old, well-heeled, university-bound high school senior who is heartened at the idea that, in America, she could outwardly display her Judaism and live unmolested.Among the key subjects is Sammy Ghozlan, a former police chief who, in retirement, established and still oversees a civilian advocacy group whose “purpose is nothing less than to protect the Jews of France.”From the piece:

Moving back permanently was out of the question, but it hasn’t been easy for Ghozlan to disconnect. “I am deeply French,” he told me. “I did my military service in the air force. I love France’s values, its culture, its history, its cuisine, philosophers, and artists. I never imagined that I would someday leave. I led the fight for 15 years and all our warnings made no difference.” In 2014, about 7,000 Jews left France for Israel, and this year the anticipated exodus is between 10,000 and 15,000. The Jewish Agency for Israel recently reported that, in 2014, 50,000 French Jews made inquiries about moving to Israel, an astonishing number. In many of France’s public lycées, Jewish students are insulted, classrooms are vandalized, books are defaced, and fights break out in the classroom with any attempt to teach the Holocaust. […]

But Jews make up less than 1 percent of the French population. Even so, according to the S.P.C.J., they are the target of 51 percent of all racist acts in France. The country has become Israel’s biggest source of immigrants.

The tone of the article is straightforward and bleak, and largely mirrors the conclusion of a similar piece in the April issue of the Atlantic, bluntly titled “Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe?” The author, Jeffrey Goldberg, concluded his essay with this thought:

I am predisposed to believe that there is no great future for the Jews in Europe, because evidence to support this belief is accumulating so quickly.

For Jews in France and the rest of Europe, emigration may be an appealing choice. A 2013 Pew poll revealed that, in that year, anti-Semitic hostilities had reached a seven-year high worldwide, Europe very much included. Last month, in Madrid, the head of the city’s culture department was forced to resign after he made a joke alluding to Jews in the gas chambers. In the thick of its financial meltdown, a poll revealed that 85 percent of Greece’s population believe that Jews have too much power over global finance. The list goes on. Yet for many, like Ghozlan, their European and national heritage is often as important to them as is their Jewish heritage (if not more). Brenner’s piece is a meticulously researched lens into these tensions. Read the whole thing here.

China Sends Russia Love but Not Money

While the recent gestures of affection between Russia and China has caught the international eye, it appears this marriage of convenience does not entail any financial promises. From The Moscow Times:

China’s direct investments in Russia shrank by 25 percent in the first half of this year, even as its overall foreign investment increased, according to Chinese Ministry of Commerce figures cited by Russian media.

China invested $56 billion in the non-finance sectors of 147 countries and territories around the world in the first six months of this year, marking a 29.9 percent increase from the same period in 2014, Ministry of Commerce spokesman Shen Danyang said Tuesday in Beijing, Russia’s Prime business news agency reported.

The partnership between the two revisionist powers was dubbed a “bad romance“ by TAI columnist Lilia Shevtsova earlier this month. As she put it, “[i]n this new entente, the Kremlin has but two choices: play the role of lap dog, or get ready to whine about how it is being humiliated all over again.”

With the economy beleaguered by the combination of Western sanctions and the persistently low price of oil, the present outlook for Russia is bleak. In January, writing in these pages, Swedish economist Anders Åsland predicted that Russia’s GDP would fall by around 10 percent this year. China’s not letting its feelings get in the way of good business.

Palestinian Students to Caracas Med School: You’re Too Dysfunctional

An academic exchange between Palestine and Venezuela has taken a turn for the worst as Palestinian students defect from the program to return home to the West Bank. The Associated Press reports:

The program to train young Palestinians as doctors was to be the latest addition to an array of international solidarity programs the late President Hugo Chavez established[…] But eight months later, about a third of the Palestinians have dropped out, complaining the program lacks academic rigor […] At least 29 already have gone home, while the other dropouts have stayed on living rent-free as they wait to receive plane tickets.

The Yasser Arafat Scholarship Program was to include seven years of room and board at the Dr. Salvador Allende medical school, staffed by primarily Cuban doctors. Initially, scholarship recipients were elated to flee refugee camps and the violence of Gaza to pursue their dreams of studying medicine. However:

The students who dropped out complain that their first year consisted only of Spanish language lessons and indoctrination about Venezuela’s 16-year-old socialist revolution. They say they were surprised when their teachers presented a curriculum centered on community health and worried when doctors from other institutions warned that their education wouldn’t meet international standards.

If there’s any sure sign of trouble in paradise, it’s when droves of young Gazans abandon free medical education for the horrors of the war-torn West Bank. In an attempt to save face, school officials in Venezuela have attributed the students’ dissatisfaction to mere homesickness. In a way, that wouldn’t be surprising. Venezuela recently registered a record breaking number of cases of tropical diseases such as malaria, Dengue fever, and Chikungunya. Factor in the homicide rate in Caracas, which is itself not unlike that of a war-zone, and it’s difficult to blame the Palestinian students for being homesick in the first place.

But while there’s room for speculation, the failure of the program certainly underscores the shortcomings in Venezuela’s socialized health care sector and the general tumult that has characterized the nation lately. Venezuelan opposition parties hope that National Assembly elections, scheduled for December 6th, will bring about substantive changes within the country. But if Venezuela’s history of dubious elections is any guide, they shouldn’t expect very much.