Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 632

A Quarter-Trillion Bucks Pours Out of China

On the latest news about capital outflows, some analysts are claiming that we should finally call this what it is: capital flight. In a brilliant piece in The Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard examines the question:

China is engineering yet another mini-boom. Credit is picking up again. The Communist Party has helpfully outlawed falling equity prices.

Economic growth will almost certainly accelerate over the next few months, giving global commodity markets a brief reprieve.

Yet the underlying picture in China is going from bad to worse. Robin Brooks at Goldman Sachs estimates that capital outflows topped $224bn in the second quarter, a level “beyond anything seen historically”.

The Chinese central bank (PBOC) is being forced to run down the country’s foreign reserves to defend the yuan. This intervention is becoming chronic. The volume is rising. Mr Brooks calculates that the authorities sold $48bn of bonds between March and June.

Charles Dumas at Lombard Street Research says capital outflows – when will we start calling it capital flight? – have reached $800bn over the past year. These are frighteningly large sums of money.

China is a fiscal totalitarian. It controls both the information and the facts about its markets, which is why it was seemingly able to stop that precipitous drop in its stock market earlier this month. But that being said, Beijing is trying to liberalize its economic policies, and it’s allowed private Chinese capital to do what capital always wants to do—take the path of least resistance to the destination of greatest reward. Often, that destination is outside China’s boundaries. In other words, as China liberalizes economically, you’d expect capital outflows; no global investor who isn’t crazy would want an all-China portfolio. But, as the Telegraph piece details, it sounds like smart people are saying it’s gone beyond that.

Read the whole thing, in which Evans-Pritchard echoes Walter Russell Mead’s latest thoughts on the issue. Both conclude that, in effect, China’s economy has already gone over the cliff. But like Wile E. Coyote, it will stay there hanging in the air, until it looks down.

Administration Won’t Take “Yes” for an Answer in Syria

Will Turkish willingness to act against ISIS be blunted by American inaction? After months and months of the Turks dragging their feet in acting against the terror group, it seems like the Obama Administration is now the reluctant party. TAI contributor Michael Weiss, writing at The Daily Beast, reports:

Is a no-fly zone about to be imposed over northern Syria? “No,” says U.S. State Department Spokesperson Mark Toner. Only don’t tell that to Turkey, which has, after months of contentious negotiation, agreed to allow the Incirlik air base at Adana to be used by the U.S.-led coalition to conduct both manned and unmanned airstrikes against ISIS. […]

The use of Incirlik in particular is being described as a possible “game-changer” in the iffy year-long war because now coalition warplanes and drones can take off from a location that is a mere 250 miles from ISIS’s de facto “capital” of Raqqa, as opposed to the 1,250 miles they currently have to fly from land or carrier positions in the Persian Gulf. Drones fly at relatively slow speeds, so dramatically shrinking their proximity to targets means more frequent sorties and spy missions.Yet Turkish media has also been awash with reports suggesting that as part of the agreement struck with Washington that Ankara would finally get its wish to ground the Syrian Air Force. Turkey’s Hurriyet newspaper, citing unnamed sources, claimed on Friday that a no-fly zone would be installed across a “90-kilometer line between Syria’s Mare and Cerablus will be 40 to 50 kilometers deep.”

It looks like Administration won’t take “yes” for an answer—at least not yet. It seems that it’s still at the very least ambiguous about a) getting involved in any meaningful way in Syria and/or b) taking any serious action against the Assad regime.

As Walter Russell Mead wrote this morning, asserting American influence in Syria is, despite the very real risks involved, the best way for the President to reassure our Sunni allies that the Iranian deal is not a dire strategic threat, and the best way to stabilize the region. It appears that (and we know you will be shocked) there are some in the Administration who do not fully agree with us.America can continue to sit on the sidelines, but that won’t stop others from acting, in ways that range from a bloody Turkish incursion into a Kurdish-heavy area of Syria to renewed Iranian assistance to Assad. History, as they say, is made by those who show up.

Syriza’s Shocking Coup Revelation

Details of a plot by leftwing members of parliament in Greece to seize the national mint and appeal to Russia for help at the peak of the euro crisis have just leaked. The Financial Times reports the details:

Arresting the central bank’s governor. Emptying its vaults. Appealing to Moscow for help. These were the elements of a covert plan to return Greece to the drachma hatched by members of the Left Platform faction of Greece’s governing Syriza party.

They were discussed at a July 14 meeting at the Oscar Hotel in a shabby downtown district of Athens following an EU summit that saw Greece cave to its creditors, leaving many in the party feeling despondent and desperate. […]Chief among them is Panayotis Lafazanis, the former energy and environment minister and leader of Syriza’s Left Platform, which unites a diverse group of far left activists — from supporters of the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez to old-fashioned communists. He was eventually sacked in a cabinet reshuffle after voting against reforms tied to the bailout.

It’s unclear as of yet whether the first step of this plan was to persuade the prime minister, stage a parliamentary coup, or stage an actual coup—but the FT reports the atmosphere in the room was “revolutionary.” And Mr Lafanzis certainly had firm plans in mind:

[E]ven hardline communists were taken aback when Mr Lafazanis proposed that the Syriza government should seize control of the Nomismatokopeion, the Greek mint, where the bulk of the country’s cash reserves are kept.[..]

Mr Lafazanis said the reserves, which he claimed amounted to €22bn, would pay for pensions and public sector wages and also keep Greece supplied with food and fuel while preparations were made for launching a new drachma.Meanwhile, the central bank would immediately lose its independence and be placed under government control. Its governor, Yannis Stournaras, would be arrested if, as expected, he opposed the move.

In this, the plotters went far beyond what even leftist figures such as recently-sacked Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis acknowledged would have been possible. As Varoufakis wrote in The Guardian earlier this month:

To exit, we would have to create a new currency from scratch. In occupied Iraq, the introduction of new paper money took almost a year, 20 or so Boeing 747s, the mobilisation of the US military’s might, three printing firms and hundreds of trucks. In the absence of such support, Grexit would be the equivalent of announcing a large devaluation more than 18 months in advance: a recipe for liquidating all Greek capital stock and transferring it abroad by any means available.

In fact, it would have placed Greece in total financial chaos—what one MP described as “a trip to hell.”

And their plan to escape that hell? Simple:

Even before the Oscar Hotel meeting, Mr Lafazanis, a former Greek Communist Party official, was pursuing desperate schemes to address the government’s financial woes.

Given the communist past of Mr Tsipras and other leading government figures, Athens believed it would be a simple matter to win $5bn to $10bn in financial backing from Vladimir Putin, the Russian president.Mr Lafazanis visited Moscow three times as Mr Tsipras’s envoy after Syriza came to power in January. In return for signing up to a new gas pipeline project, he hoped for at least €5bn in prepayments of gas transit fees, according to people briefed on the initiative. But the Russians rejected the deal the week before the EU summit.

Two notes: one, it’s something of a shock to see such a blunt statement of Tsirpas’ communist connections—but a beneficial one, given how they color the worldview. And secondly, Mr. Lafazanis badly misunderstands Mr. Putin, who’s schtick is taking money, not doling it out on that scale.

The fallout from these revelations remains to be seen. Reports abound that a split in Syriza is deepening, and an open breach with Tsipras is more and more likely in the coming weeks. And meanwhile, negotiations having resumed, Greece is up to its old tricks…

Pollard Release Much Ado About Nothing

Convicted spy Jonathan Pollard, a U.S. Naval intelligence officer who was sentenced to life in prison after spying for Israel, is due to be released. This news has been widely cited (whether in praise or condemnation) as an Administration sop to placate Israel in the wake of the Iran nuke deal. But while its true that Israel has long sought leniency for Pollard, in fact this would appear to be a fortuitously-timed bit of business as usual. According to Haaretz:

Contrary to previous years, in which Pollard’s release would have entailed an active shortening of his sentence, his release of November 21 is slated to go through – unless his parole board denies it. U.S. Federal law that was in force at the time of Pollard’s sentencing says that life sentences are due for release after 30 years, unless the parole commission determines a prisoner has significantly violated prison rules or concludes there’s a “reasonable probability” that he will commit a crime upon his release.

According to the WSJ, some Administration officials are pushing for an earlier release, but given the mandatory consideration in November, such an effort would be unlikely to have a substantial impact on Israeli thinking.

Figuring out the complicated international politics of selling the nuke deal (and making it stick) is going to be tricky enough for even well-informed readers. Whatever one makes of the politics of Pollard’s case, the release is the end of a long process that started in 1985—not of Administration efforts in 2015.

Madness and Skill

Since I last put fingers to keyboard (the contemporary version of “pen to paper”) on the Iran deal and debate on July 16, rather a lot has happened—not just as regards the deal but elsewhere in the region, as well. My TAI colleague Walter Russell Mead has captured some of the gist in a frog-and-prince metaphor that seems to make the whole business feel a bit like a fractured fairy tale. And he’s right to suggest that there is something, at the least, surreal about what’s been going on. Let me elaborate a bit before turning to rather more serious and sobering matters.

As the Meadian Oracle noted, the Supreme Leader did not respond to the Iran deal, at least in his public comments, in a way that Secretary of State Kerry appreciated. After weathervaning for a moment or two about whether Khamenei was merely waxing tactical or was sincere, Kerry said: “If it is the policy, it’s very disturbing, it’s very troubling.” He sounded wounded and, worse, surprised. This remark therefore ranks right up there with Kerry’s September 2013 assurance that an attack on Syria would anyway be “unbelievably small”, and locks in his status, as I’ve put it before, as the stupidest Secretary of State in my lifetime.If ever a public reaction were predictable, Khamenei’s was. He knew certainly Ali Jabari’s reaction to the deal before Jabari, the head of the IRGC, even opened his mouth. Just as predictable will be the harsh crackdown on all forms of dissent in Iran if the deal is ever voted through and actually reaches its implementation date. I now have no doubt that manifestations of this crackdown will surprise our Secretary of State, too. I can understand why my 22-month old granddaughter is surprised every time Jack pops out of his box, no matter how many times he does it within a ten-minute period. But John Kerry is not 22 months old, so what’s his deal?Which leads me to wonder just how far Kerry’s chin dropped toward his knees when he read (assuming he could bear it) the Entous and Bendavid piece in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal about how the Syrians lied and cheated on the chemical weapons agreement. He didn’t need to read the article, of course; he could have just read the recent classified intel about this. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. It’s for sure he never read my repeated warnings about how he and the Administration got fleeced on that business, to borrow Senator Corker’s verb from the other day when talking about the Iran deal.Speaking of Senator Corker, the hearings have already brought out some interesting points. Several witnesses have locked onto something I called attention to on July 16, namely, the minimally 24-day waiting period before IAEA inspectors can get in to check a potential violation. That has included prominently Olli Heinonen, a former IAEA deputy director, who has pointed out that, “A 24-day adjudicated timeline reduces detection probabilities exactly where the system is weakest: detecting undeclared facilities and materials.” Undeclared materials? This sounds almost Syrian, doesn’t it?Others have tried to show that the Iranians are likely to be able to stall the IAEA for much longer than 24 days, perhaps up to three months. I suspect next we will hear from someone who suspects not three months but four or five months. This reminds me of the part of the Hagadah—a rather lengthy part that every year keeps me that many more verses away from my dinner—where the rabbis are sitting around in Bnei Brak competing with one another over who can show how many plagues the Holy One, Blessed be He, brought upon the Egyptians at the Red Sea. Surreal, see what I mean? If a 24 days’ delay constitutes a fatal flaw—and it does—than what does it matter if it’s 48 days or 126 days?If one has a taste for humor, the verification argument just now can be downright hilarious. The Iranians are claiming that they and only they will be in charge of supplying soil samples to the IAEA from inside Iranian facilities. This is a little like a suspect in a police lineup asserting the right to declare that he’s not the guy. Where is Lewis Carroll when we need him? (I wonder if this surprises Secretary Kerry, too.) I think I have a pretty good idea what’s going on in my hometown these days, and I suppose it helps in this regard that Washington is the only city in the world where sound travels faster than light. But I confess to being a lot less sure about what’s going on in Tehran. Yes, it was no surprise to hear the Supreme Leader spew the usual red-meat juice for purposes of calming the animal spirits (apologies to Mr. Keynes) of the IRGC. And yes, it was no surprise that the Supreme Leader at the very same time, and in the very same speech, tried to have the back of his president and his negotiators. Here it’s not anything Lewis Carroll created but the Push Me-Pull You beast with whom Rex Harrison cavorted in “Talk to the Animals” that comes to mind.Does Khamenei want the Iranian parliament to vote “yes”, in which case red-meat juice may not suffice to keep Mr. Jabari at bay? Or does he want it to vote “no”, on which case no sanctions relief and no $150 billion? At least from what he has said in public, it’s not obvious what he wants, except to let the factions go at each other and behold who comes out on top.And with this I admit that now it’s my turn to be surprised. Let me explain.For quite a while before July 14 it seemed to me that the Supreme Leader could not afford to loose the demons he has now invited into play, and so would walk away from the table unless the P5+1 position caved pretty much entirely—and it didn’t cave entirely, merely sagged rather badly. I have already admitted to having predicted poorly, except that now I wonder if maybe I’ll turn out to be right after all—except that the Iranian “walk” could come after the signing but before the implementation. That remains to be seen, of course, but the way things are spinning in Tehran right now, it’s not that far-fetched a possibility.But why might Khamenei do something like that? We can only speculate. Perhaps he wants to mobilize the regime’s Praetorian guard by frightening it, and at the same time rid himself of some civilian politicians who have outlasted their usefulness, and have even begun to cause trouble by stoking rather too avidly rising expectations among the Iranian masses. Perhaps he wants to spin up the United States in order to embarrass it. Perhaps he wants to squeeze all the juice he can out of the wormwood of U.S.-Israeli and U.S.-Sunni Arab alienation. Perhaps he also wants to buy some time for a beleaguered Assad regime, to which the Iranians recently gave another $1 billion. Trying to know such things forces one into an epistemological cul-de-sac; I’m not Rex Harrison, so I don’t know how to talk to the Persian Push Me-Pull You. But a little well-grounded speculation is arguably better than nothing. At least it shows that Khamenei might actually know what he’s doing.The other possibility, as I (and others) have pointed out at the hearings and elsewhere, is that Iran may “walk” not before implementation but after, yet still well before ten or fifteen years have passed. The Iranians can walk out of their obligations at any time, as can the United States—note paragraph 36. And the Iranians can make up any cockamamie reason they want to justify it, after they’ve copped their $150 billion, after the sanctions regime is a shambles and, like Humpty Dumpty, cannot be put back together again, or after they’ve accumulated enough useful cheating to supercharge their path to a breakout in parallel to the end of the arms embargo at year five of the deal. They have lots of options, plenty of potential exit ramps along the way, which is why—as I argued before—we are the ones whom the verification procedures deter, not them. This is because despite having ritually stated over and move that “all options are on the table”, the President’s body language makes clear that it’s his diplomacy-or-war dichotomy that really seizes him of the matter. Now, maybe this situation doesn’t quality as surreal, and it’s definitely no fairy tale—but it certainly is a passing strange way to negotiate limits on a dangerous actor.I promised something more serious at the outset, and it’s now time to stand and deliver—and in so doing also justify my title.Just because we denizens of the postmodern West think someone in some other time or clime is mad does not mean he is innocuous. So Hitler was mad, they say—self-driven by a combination of obsessive Jew-hatred and a particularly virile form of paranoid idealism. But putting a stop to his madness took years and vast amounts of blood and treasure. Was Stalin mad, too? Mao? Pol Pot? The tag team duo of Tojo and Hirohito? If you are the cause of the death of millions of innocents among your own people are you by definition mad, or merely evil? Mustn’t forget the ladies—say, Elisabeth Bathory and Lucretia Borgia? Were they all more modern versions of a fiddling Nero or a paranoid Caligula? What about the most recent set of North Korean Kims or even Vladimir Putin? Apprentice madmen, perhaps, not yet graduated into full lunacy?When Western, supposedly secular, ears hear what comes out of the mouths of Caliph al-Baghdadi, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Ayatollah Khamenei, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, and kindred others, a certain nervous ambivalence clouds the air. Such people clearly do not share the normative dome that contains our sense of right and wrong, but it’s too easy—and not especially useful—simply to assume them insane. So what are they, then?Our culture’s favorite stigmata d’jour is simply to label them “terrorists.” In our secularized Manichean moral lexicon that’s equivalent to the old term “sinners.” Sinners used to be considered dangerous because they were allied with the Devil. That’s still the case, but there is something about our rationalist conceits that make it hard for us to take madmen seriously as adversaries if they happen to be non-Western and hail from societies that are, by Weberian social-science standards, pre-modern. This is a huge mistake. If that mistake can be summed up in one sentence it is this: We technological sophisticates radically underestimate both the fragility of our own societies and the strength of tribal societies—especially when the theater of conflict, however ill-defined it may be, is more in their back yards than it is in ours.Caliph al-Baghdadi knows his praxis if a recent New York Times synopsis of his modus operandi can be believed—and it can because it mimics almost exactly aspects of an essay, “Go Local”, from the current issue of TAI, by Howard Gambrill Clark. Ayman al-Zawahiri and Sheik Nasrallah are, unfortunately, both still using up oxygen after all these years, which may be all we need to know about their tactical skills. And as I have already suggested, the Supreme Leader may in fact know what he is doing, and at the same time effectively keep most observers guessing as to what it is. Now that’s skill.A bit more than a year ago I thought it prudent to keep U.S. powder dry to see if the very ungainly and poorly institutionalized coalition juggernaut that was ISIS could hold together long enough to become really dangerous. I don’t regret my judgment then, but now the trial period is over and the verdict is in: Damned right it’s dangerous, and I’m afraid that a feckless half-measures U.S. policy has helped it become more so. We ratified the ISIS narrative—“the West is at war against Islam”—without hurting the organization nearly as much as we might have.The current Turkish government is now regretting its succoring of ISIS, then presumed weak, as a tool against the Assad regime. Because of those regrets, spiced by mounting anxieties about the Kurds, it’s now finally willing to let the United States use one of its air bases. I doubt that will make much difference in U.S. behavior. Turkish regret resembles in some respects the regret of the Saudi regime (some of it, anyway) for having distorted the world of Sunni Islam with its cash-fueled proselytization of Wahhabism—the infant pabulum of the current mature salafi brew—over the past forty years. Were selected Turkish and Saudi leaders mad to do what they did? No, just unskilled looking at matters from beyond the short term.The point? Governments often make mistakes. They often act upon the pressures of short-term expediencies that cause longer-term trouble for themselves and others. In other words, those who are mad may be highly skilled, even farsightedly so, and those who are not mad may not be highly skilled, even in the short term. If this observation doesn’t count as serious, I don’t know what does.Now what does this mean? It means, as the Great and Powerful Mead hath said—and also Mick Jagger—that you can’t always get what you want. We can’t count on an arms control deal to make a partner out of Iran, and anyway we cannot be partners with Iran, friends with the Sunni Arabs, and passive about Syria all at the same time. We can’t count on Iran and company to solve our ISIS problem for us, because they are to ISIS what fuel is to a fire. We can’t count on Turkey to solve any of our problems unless they coincide with Turkish interests, and they pretty much don’t (unless the Turks are willing to occupy and stabilize virtually all of Syria….not bloody likely), especially as things stand with regard to the Kurds. We certainly cannot count on any dimension of current U.S. policy, including the part pertaining to Iraq, to make regional instability less expansive and hence war less likely.Rather the opposite, I’m afraid. The President seems to have wanted all along, so the current line goes, to get the United States out of the regional security competition suppression business of Cold War vintage, believing that it was unnecessary, expensive, and more dangerous than letting various and sundry regions find their own new equipoise. To the extent that is true, we may now bear witness to what cashing out of that business is really liable to cost us. We now have a Middle Eastern regional security competition the likes of which no one imagined a mere quarter of a century ago. The accident-prone hyperactivism of the Bush Administration followed closely by the mischief-spawning passivity of the Obama Administration has played no small role in this tragedy, not that the locals are themselves innocents at home.Moreover, the “discussion” here over whether Shi’a sectarian fanaticism is more dangerous than Sunni sectarian fanaticism is a mug’s game, and the notion that we can skillfully lead (from behind, no less) the two camps to destroy each other to our benefit is as strategically incoherent as it is morally obtuse. It is hard to see how another generation or two of vicious destructive warfare in the Middle East, complete with breakneck competitive WMD proliferation-in-the-round, can really be in the interest of U.S. national security.We can analyze all we want, and get nowhere practical. We had better start synthesizing instead, seeing the noxious parts as fractions of one very big, highly interactive—and oh yes, serious—problem. And how can we manage this serious problem? For now, just worry. I’ll tell you the answer next time.

UN to UK: No Spanking

It’s a good thing all the world’s serious human rights issues have been resolved. With more pressing problems out of the way, the UN Human Rights Committee appears now to have the leisure time to attend to a few loose ends here and there. The committee—which includes representatives from human rights bastions such as Uganda, Algeria, and Egypt—has released a report recommending that Britain fully outlaw the smacking of children at home. The Times of London reports:

The committee demanded that all smacking be “fully outlawed in the home”, adding that the government should encourage parents to use other methods to control their children…

A [British] government spokesman said: “Our policy on smacking is clear. We do not condone violence towards children. However, we do not wish to criminalise parents for issuing a mild smack.”

The UN beclowns itself on human rights issues with relative frequency—such as when, after combing the Middle East for discrimination against women, it decided to condemn Israel. But in an age of grisly human rights abuses from Syria to North Korea, it’s disconcerting that the UN Human Rights Committee feels it should devote energy to this. Yet another reason why the UN is as ineffectual as ever.

Defense Law Erodes Abe’s Approval Rating

Japanese PM Shinzo Abe has taken a beating in the polls lately as he attempts to remilitarize his country, pursuing a constitutional reinterpretation that would allow Tokyo to deploy its Self-Defense Force much more freely. The reinterpretation is unpopular: Japan’s post-World War II constitution explicitly “renounce[s] war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes” and pacifism has become an important part of the country’s political culture.

Trying to upend that has cost Abe dearly, as Bloomberg reports:

Spending hours defending his security policies on television, scrapping a $2 billion Olympic stadium plan and playing up concerns about China, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is battling to claw back a slide in support.

His approval rating plunged below 40 percent in polls taken after he pushed bills through parliament last week to expand the role of Japan’s military. While he’s at no immediate risk of being ousted, he must avoid dropping into the danger zone around the 20 percent mark at which successive premiers have been toppled at the ballot box or by their party.

It’s only half-right to say that Abe has pushed the defense bills through parliament. So far, they’ve just gone through the lower house; they still have to pass in the upper house before the legislative session ends on September 27. And as the Japan Times has detailed, the opposition Councilors can waste time there, dragging out the debates over other major issues, such as the TPP and construction of the infrastructure for the 2020 Olympics. Still, unless the opposition gets lucky, or unless Councilors within Abe’s coalition defy the prime minister, the bills are more likely than not to pass.

Abe’s military agenda, in other words, is teetering on the brink of victory, even as the prime minister himself comes uncomfortably close to the brink of defeat. Abe’s economic agenda—Abenomics, colloquially—is well liked; the snap elections the PM called at the end of 2014 were widely seen as a referendum on Abenomics, and he won. But his remilitarization agenda is making him unpopular enough that it could threaten his position. The stakes are high: Japan is the only country in China’s neighborhood with enough economic might to field a military that can challenge Beijing’s hegemony.

What an ACA Winner Looks Like

Premiums are high, copays are high, and both labor and business are unhappy about the way Obamacare is restructuring the American health system. But for those with the good sense to bet that insurers and hospitals would make bundles of cash from the new law, Obamacare has turned into an investment bonanza. The WSJ reports on Glenview Capital Management, a hedge fund run by Larry Robbins that invested in hospitals and insurance companies—and reaped over $3.2 billion:

Glenview’s flagship fund has averaged a 26% annual return since the beginning of 2012, people familiar with the matter said, much better than the industry’s 6% average, according to industry tracker HFR Inc.

The firm’s assets under management have increased from $4.5 billion in 2012 to $11.8 billion now, according to people familiar with the matter. It has about a third of that total invested in Aetna, Humana, Anthem and Cigna, plus hospital operators such as Tenet Healthcare Corp., according to the people.

It’s long been clear that hospitals and insurers are some of the biggest winners from this law, and now we can add Wall Street to the mix. Meanwhile, health care continues to be a financial burden on many Americans, even those who have insurance through the ACA, and that burden will only increase if structural factors like hospital mergers continue to inflate prices. Affordable, indeed.

Climate Summit Draft Document Still “Bewildering”

Ah, the wages of the UN treaty process: The current text of the climate change accord being negotiated by ministers of 200 countries ahead of December’s much-anticipated Paris summit is a “bewildering” 85 pages of various options and special pleadings, according to sources. Reuters reports:

The message from this week’s two-day gathering in Paris of around 40 countries’ delegations, including 26 with ministers, and an earlier meeting of the world’s major economies was that the negotiating text should be short – around 40 pages – and ambitious, de Brum said. […]

The co-chairs will find it hard to chop the text by half, as they have no mandate to weed out options.

Negotiators are hard at work to cut the document down, but are finding it difficult to do so. A climate change consultant is quoted in Reuters as saying, “the co-chairs have a very delicate balance to keep—they can’t cut large swathes of the text because they don’t want to alienate countries, but we do need manageable options for ministers to choose from.”

This isn’t a new problem. This spring, negotiators were already trying to pare down clauses and simplify the document, but they’ve clearly made precious little progress. With the talks just over four months away, everyone involved seems to be doing everything possible to lower expectations, from floating an alternative plan that legally binds member states to set targets but allows them to decide how they meet them, to abandoning the much-discussed 2C target, to the UN climate chief herself saying that whatever Paris produces will be more “enabling” than “punitive” (read: non-binding).Stalling momentum, a bloated document, and shifting goals? That seems like all the necessary ingredients for a Copenhagen-like fiasco. We’ll be watching.

Surprise! Assad Still Has Chemical Weapons

One year after the Obama Administration celebrated its singular Middle East achievement of forcing Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Damascus to give up its chemical weapons, U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that the regime was still in possession of various weaponized chemicals beyond the chlorine gas it has used on civilians in recent months. (Don’t look now, but our own Adam Garfinkle repeatedly told you so.)

Amazingly enough, having concluded that President Obama’s threats about bombing were hollow, it appears that Assad did not fully comply with his commitments.This won’t help the Obama Administration on Capitol Hill as it tries to sell the Iran agreement. Some of the parallels to what the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing focused on at the first Iran hearing yesterday are uncanny. Consider the following, from  The Wall Street Journal

Because the regime was responsible for providing security, it had an effective veto over inspectors’ movements. The team decided it couldn’t afford to antagonize its hosts, explains one of the inspectors, or it “would lose all access to all sites.” And the inspectors decided they couldn’t visit some sites in contested areas, fearing rebels would attack them.

Under the terms of their deployment, the inspectors had access only to sites that the Assad regime had declared were part of its chemical-weapons program. The U.S. and other powers had the right to demand access to undeclared sites if they had evidence they were part of the chemical-weapons program. But that right was never exercised, in part, inspectors and Western officials say, because their governments didn’t want a standoff with the regime.

And the Russians appear to have used their weight to impede accusatory reports, as well.

If Assad, an embattled ruler of a small state with his back to the wall, can thumb his nose at the U.S. on a WMD deal, what will Congress think are the chances that the mullahs in Tehran will abide by their accord? That we’ll be able to find and confirm evidence of such cheating, particularly in a timely manner? Or that the administration will take the necessary action to enforce the deal if cheating is found?As Walter Russell Mead wrote this morning, it’s now past time to pivot to a hard line on Syria—which action is not only overdue in its own right, but would also go far to balance Sunni concerns vis-a-vis the Iran deal and hence make it stick. If anyone thinks we need yet another reason to get rid of Assad, the Journal‘s report this morning seems suitable to us.