Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 640

Obama’s Prison Reform Moment

When Barack Obama was first elected, it did not seem likely that criminal justice reform would be a defining feature of his presidency. There was substantial disagreement within and between the parties over the proper path forward, and, in the context of the economic crisis and the healthcare debate, criminal justice reform was not high on Democratic or Republican agendas. All this has changed at an astonishing pace in the last few years, as a coalition of conservative evangelicals, budget-conscious libertarians, and civil-rights-conscious progressives have come together to champion an overhaul of the nation’s incarceration policies. Today, President Obama delivered a major address in Philadelphia calling for changes to the criminal justice system, and it looks like sentencing reform—once a secondary issue largely addressed at the state level, if at all—may actually turn out to be one of the few significant bipartisan accomplishments of the Obama era.

Obama’s speech—delivered to the NAACP convention a day after he commuted the sentences of 46 federal drug offenders, and two days before he is set to become the first sitting president to visit a federal prison—is part of a reinvigorated Administration campaign to give legs to reform proposals currently being considered in Congress. He proposed a wide range of changes to the criminal justice system, from softening policing practices in high-crime areas, to allowing ex-felons to vote, to cracking down on prison rape, to expanding publicly funded pre-kindergarten education. Some of the proposals are unlikely to go anywhere, but the centerpiece of the speech—sentencing reform for nonviolent offenders—looks like its time has come, and for good reason. Drugs are a major cause of social decay, and we should continue to penalize offenders—but mass incarceration as currently practiced is even more socially disruptive.As we’ve written, efforts to cut down on prison terms for nonviolent offenders are already underway, thanks in large part to Republicans. Deep-red Utah is a national model for sentencing reform, as is Chris Christie’s New Jersey. President Obama was wise to emphasize themes that appeal to religious conservatives, like redemption and forgiveness, and themes that appeal to traditional fiscal conservatives, like inefficient government spending, in his address—in addition to the more commonly aired arguments about racial disparities that appeal to his base. It seems increasingly likely, as Obama’s second term comes to a close, that comprehensive sentencing reform could make it through Congress. This would be significant not only because it would begin to put our criminal justice system back on track, but because it would rekindle the hope that bipartisan cooperation is still possible in Washington.

Bear Market Puts British North Sea Oil Production in Peril

Britain’s North Sea oil holding has for years shored up its energy security; offshore production helped turn the UK into a net exporter of crude in the early 1980s and eventually a net exporter of natural gas. But over the last decade or so North Sea production has tapered off, and the UK has once again become a net importer of fossil fuels, on which it relies for the vast majority of its power production. Now, as Reuters reports, bargain crude prices are tightening the vice on an industry in an already precarious position:

For years North Sea producers have delayed expensive decommissioning projects, supported by high oil prices that have helped paper over soaring operating costs.

But with oil prices halving over the last 12 months, some companies are faced with the unenviable choice of operating at a loss during a field’s twilight years, or limiting losses by bringing decommissioning forwards. Unsurprisingly, the industry is looking at the second option very closely. […]As more platforms and fields cease to operate, terminal and pipeline costs for neighbouring fields in the same chain are expected to rise. This is of particular concern in mature areas such as the Northern North Sea, where interdependence is high…”The domino effect is now a significant challenge. If some of these fields are shut in, it will affect the whole basin,” [said Gunnar Olsen, business development director at Total E&P UK].

This “domino effect”, wherein British offshore production sees costs rise as fields are abandoned, should be keeping London leadership awake at night. Britain’s only realistic domestic recourse—plumbing its sizable shale reserves—has hit the skids recently as staunch public opposition has put a halt to exploratory drilling.

David Cameron’s new government is arguably the most fracking-friendly administration Britain has yet seen. But if it can’t find a way to balance community concerns about the controversial drilling process with the strategic and economic benefits a shale windfall could bring to the increasingly energy-poor country, then Brits can expect their electricity bills to rise along with their country’s dependence on foreign suppliers.

The Real Deal

It seems there is a deal. We know that because the President has already begun his pirouettes as befitting his role as Spinner-in Chief, and because we have a leaked Russian version of the text that seems pretty realistically what it claims to be. Let me admit right off that I doubted that the Ayatollah Khamenei could bring himself to take “yes” for an answer, for reasons I have laid out several times before (most recently, in short, in “The Waiting Game” on July 9 in these pages). And I believe that there’s a good chance he has made a fateful error, from his point of view, in so doing (of which more below).

There will be torrents of commentary coming our way. Some people are actually capable of reading the text professionally, with the requisite political experience and technical background, to make sense of the deal. And some will comment despite not being able to do this. Arguments from authority are always to be suspected, but experience and competence are not to be dismissed either. So take care of whom you trust in this.Many will not take care, however, because their minds are already made up about the deal, text or no text or whatever text. Some will be for it just because they think it obviates the road to war. Not surprisingly, that is what the NIAC statement emphasizes, and you can tell it is a text-analysis-free statement because it was written before any text was available to read. I saw it at about 4 AM. It is fair, I think, to surmise that the fact of an agreement pushes any prospect of a U.S.-Iranian conventional military conflict way out into the misty future. But it is also fair to argue that it makes a nuclear war in the region, perhaps involving the United States and perhaps not, more likely, after approximately 15 years. More about that below.By the same token, some will oppose the deal, regardless of the text, because it represents the U.S. blessing of Iran as a threshold nuclear military power. That has ever been the Israeli position, very publicly—too publicly, actually, because the way the Israeli Prime Minister went about this leaves Israel with approximately zero influence on what happens next. We might as well note, too, that this Israeli government will probably again turn to its supporters in Congress in what is almost certain to be a futile attempt to derail the deal—which would require getting a veto-proof vote of rejection in both Houses—in a way that will only exacerbate the damage already done to the tradition of bipartisan U.S. support for Israel.But it’s not only the Israeli government that takes this view. So does the Saudi government, but it has been wise enough to keep its mouth more or less shut in public so that it might retain some influence behind the wizard’s curtain. That might be futile, too; yet the Saudis might at least rate a quid pro quo in the longer run for their approach. We shall see.But so do lots of serious American observers and analysts take this view, and the reason is clear: These negotiations started more than 20 months ago, during the Obama first term, with the aim of shutting off and shutting down any Iranian enrichment or reprocessing—the two technical routes to acquire fissile material for a nuclear weapon. The negotiations failed to achieve that as the Iranians worked hard to complete their mastery of the nuclear cycle. That is why many of the first-term officials involved in this effort left government disappointed in the President’s approach—Dennis Ross, Gary Samore, Robert Einhorn, for example—and signed onto the June 24 WINEP statement drawing, in effect, 11th-hour redlines on the kind of much-reduced deal still left to be gotten.Now, some such people and those of similar view may be persuaded that the deal gets over the bar, and that it is preferable to the alternatives at least for duration of the Obama Administration term. For those people, the tightness and reliability of the verification provisions will be the key. The terms of the rest of the deal are better than many of us expected, at least given the reduced parameters of expectation that have existed since November 2013—but I will leave it to others to write tomes about those details. It is clear, just in summary, that both sides made concessions in the past few weeks, and it looks to me that the Iranian ones exceed both in number and significance those of the P5+1 (which the agreement refers to as the E3/EU+3).But if one believes that no deal can be a good deal if it allows any Iranian enrichment, any Iranian centrifuge R&D, over the next 15 years, then the verification issues amount to a mere gratuitous mist of cordite on top of barrels of Sarin and VX. There has been and remains a good case for this view, what we might call, with apologies to John Rawls, the original position of no-enrichment. Every day that the U.S. government allows Iranian enrichment to go on is a day that counts as another bullet in the corpse of U.S. anti-proliferation policy.But this did not start with the Iranian portfolio. It started, going all the way back to 1994, with the North Korean portfolio. The 1994 Agreed Framework turned out to be a huge mistake. (I knew at the time it would not work just because of all the inane things Jimmy Carter said about it, but never mind.) It was a reasonable risk to have taken at the time, given the circumstances of the early post-Soviet collapse era, but at least a few prominent officials in the Clinton Administration—Bill Perry and a younger but already wise Ash Carter—argued within chambers that a military strike was the only real way to avoid piles of proliferation rocks from rolling down the mountain. They did not win the day, alas, and here we are.The problem with this view, however much I sympathize with it in the abstract, is that it argues more in and about that past, albeit it in an odd sort of way, than it is capable of doing anything in and about the present. What do I mean?Well, another good case can be made that the time to have begun negotiations with Iran over the nuclear program was just after the statue of Saddam Hussein came down in Firdos Square. We had at that time a shotgun pointed at Iran’s left temple from Afghanistan and another shotgun pointed (we thought, but not for long, as it turned out) at Iran’s right temple from Iraq. One could faintly hear sounds of “uncle, uncle” coming from Teheran, and indeed some in the upper realms of the U.S. government wanted to engage Iran over Afghanistan—where our interests aligned more or less against the Taliban, and they were offering—and over the nuclear business as well. We had leverage, they acknowledged it, and then, more than a dozen years ago, Iran was still far from having mastered the fuel cycle. So it is not whimsical to wonder whether a deal begun under such circumstances could have ended, years ago already, with zero Iranian enrichment and zero Iranian centrifuge R&D.I wondered enough to ask my old boss about this a month or two ago. I was not surprised by General Powell’s one-word email reply (he is a terse guy at times): “unanswerable.” Of course such a question vaults us into the airy world of the counterfactual. And maybe Iran’s long-term determination to get to where it has gotten today means that we could not have grasped the no-enrichment brass ring back then, no matter what. I suspect that would have been the case. But Powell is right: It is unanswerable and, indeed, we’ll never know. But some of the same folks now criticizing the deal for not doing what has become pretty much impossible over time are those who, in government at that time and out, were dead set against talking with the Iranians. Remember the line? “We don’t negotiate with evil; we defeat evil.” So this is why when I hear certain people rail against this deal on “original position” grounds, it tends to turn my ears red.This little exercise in history is not just decorative. It matters because it highlights the truth, which I have pounded on before, that arms control diplomacy cannot achieve inside a negotiating room what the parties are not willing to contest outside the negotiating room.Whatever the President has said about all options being on the table, and about the “fact” that Iran will not get a nuclear weapons under his watch—and he and other senior officials have said these things so many times to so many audiences over so many years that, if it’s all just a lie, it’s the biggest whopper in American history—if the Administration’s behavior led the mullahs to discount any prospect of American attack, arms control diplomacy never stood a chance of even budging strategic realities, for it had become thoroughly detached from those strategic realities. All it could ever do under such circumstances is affect matters of timing and tonality at the margins.And, again as argued before, it is rare historically for arms control deals among adversaries to really limit anything. More often they have frozen or redirected activity into other military areas, so that their strategic utility has been modest or even negative. There is no magical arms control pixie dust that makes real problems and dangers vanish into the ether. Let’s put it this way: You can’t affect the position of a shadow by doing things to the shadow; arms control negotiations are the shadows, and strategic realities cast them.In the case of these protracted negotiations, what that means is that short of a credible threat to use force, no agreement could erase the implications of the Iranian mastery of the nuclear fuel cycle. So it’s sort of ironic. Back in the spring of 2003, the U.S. threat to use force against Iran was very credible but we refused to deploy diplomacy to try to take advantage; over the past 20 months, we have deployed diplomacy but have been unable to credibly threaten force. In some ways this sounds like a very badly repurposed version of O’Henry’s “Gift of the Magi.” Or, if you’re statistically instead of literarily minded, like Type I and Type II errors passing in the night.Those who would parse the deal under the presumption that no-enrichment was not possible given the circumstances, and who will therefore focus on the verification package and inter alia the role of the IAEA, will probably end up being the swingmen in the coming debate. The no-enrichment purists will not change their minds, and the anything-is-better-than-war crowd will not change theirs either. So what does that vortex of debate look like?So far it does not look so good for the Administration. If the IAEA cannot achieve full-time high-tech monitoring, and if it is denied timely and unlimited inspection rights, then it vitiates all the recent concessions the Iranians have made about the number and nature of centrifuges, about what goes on in Fordow, Nantasz and Arak, and the rest. I do not have an authoritative text in hand yet, so I resist jumping to this conclusion. But from preliminary information, it looks like the old, highly unsatisfactory patterns of Iranian behavior with regard to the IAEA are more or less replicated.If that is the case, then it will prove very hard, if not impossible, to get enough goods on Iranian violations to trigger the 65-day snapback sanctions provision, which means that for all practical purposes that provision is voided. Note, too, that a prematurely fatigued verification regime means that new Iranian covert efforts will be off the agreement map—and this matters because there has not been a moment in the past 20 years, at least, that Iran has not had or attempted to have covert nuclear programs. In other words, if a resource-challenged IAEA has to spend nearly all its energy gaming around with cheats over Arak and Fordow, it’ll have meager resources left over to devote to uncovering entirely new modes of Iranian violations.Will doubts over the verification provisions sink the deal in the Congress? Maybe, but I doubt it. The provisions of the Corker-Cardin bill are such that both Houses would have to override a presidential veto with two-thirds of their members. That one can imagine happening in the House, maybe; it’s harder to imagine in the Senate. This is a strange hybrid arrangement in the first place, of course. Instead of the standard two-thirds for a “yes” to ratify a treaty, we have an inverted paradigm: We need two-thirds “no”, in both Houses, for a “no” to void what amounts to an executive agreement. That said, it’s probably the best that could have been arranged under the circumstances.Does any of this really matter? Yes, it does to a point. If Republicans and a few Democratic allies try hard to scuttle the deal and fail—and assuming nothing kinetic or otherwise strange happens in U.S.-Iranian relations in the meantime—it’ll arguably strengthen the Administration politically, and also make life a lot easier for Hillary Clinton going forward. The incentive to try is heightened, of course, by the advent of GOP primary season, whose de facto anthem seems to be the Looney Tunes theme song. White House political operatives are probably licking their lips over the useful GOP antics to come. (I, for one, can barely wait to hear Donald Trump expostulate on the separation-work-unit capacity of various kinds of centrifuges and related esoterica.) Could the GOP leadership recognize the danger and turn down the amplifier? Not this GOP leadership.The way things turn out will also affect U.S. relations with a range of allies, and not just Middle Eastern ones. The Japanese are watching this business very closely, as are Poles, Australians, and many selected others. But in a sense U.S. allies are already locked in a lose-lose proposition. If the deal goes through, the credibility of U.S. extended deterrence has to shrink in a world of mousetrapping Middle Eastern proliferation; if it is somehow improbably stopped by congressional action, it harms the power of the presidency, which allies tend to like even less under most circumstances.But the debate to come matters only to a point. Why? Because the strategic stake here is not just about whether or how Iran acquires a nuclear weapons arsenal. It is about what happens to the broader region and world as a result. To the Administration’s credit, it has long recognized and spoken clearly about the real problem several times. To its considerable credit as well, it has dismissed the irresponsible and lazy assertion that the deterrence model of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War experience could be easily superimposed on the Middle East (a point I took pains to stress nearly a decade ago and ever since). But the way it has gone about these negotiations—by delinking them from Iranian behavior; salivating to the point of embarrassment over the nirvanic transformation of U.S.-Iranian relations supposedly to come; and by going out of its way, it has sometimes seemed, to piss off close allies—has created such fear and insecurity that it is bringing about, through the advent of slightly orthogonal means, the very problem that the deal with Iran was supposed to obviate.In my view, deal or no deal, it’s too late now to stop the mousetraps from springing in a slow-motion arc over the next decade and a half. Iran is a nuclear threshold state come what may, and the U.S. unwillingness to roll that reality back, and even now to bless it, means that, certainly in 15 years if not before, several other states in the region will want to protect themselves against the consequences. That likely includes Turkey by and by as well as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and possibly others.U.S. efforts to dissuade these actors from proliferating will face grave obstacles. Great powers are in the protection business, and when a great power’s pledges of protection are not credible for one reason or another, clients will look to other protectors if they can be found, or to various forms of self-help, or to protective, anticipatory abasement before threats, otherwise known as appeasement. Some may try all three, which can be a highly accident-prone kind of activity—as with, for example, Saudi Arabia importing Pakistani nukes into the heart of the Arab world. And of course the problem of fissile material, or actual weapons, getting into the hands of terrorist groups from failed or failing states just gets worse as a multiple of how many nuclear-weapons programs and states there are.U.S. credibility in this regard is hampered by so many factors that it is, at present anyway, generously overdetermined. The President says he favors nuclear zero; the consequences for the credibility of extended deterrence are obvious and starkly negative. This Administration has failed to adequately modernize the triad, so our capabilities are coming into question. We have too small defense budgets tied down additionally by sequestration, and the optic there reinforces the general picture of declining will as well as power. We also have, it at least seems to many, a foreign policy theory of the case in the White House where allies are thought to be Cold War atavisms that are not U.S. strategic assets but impediments to a safer and less costly retrenched U.S. foreign policy.And of course, quite aside from the debased qualities of the American protector, we have a highly unsettled regional situation in which politics have been militarized and ideologies polarized. It is a situation that will not surcease anytime soon. So the Iran deal will pour itself into these contours, and its impact will to some extent depend on those contours. But it is not the shaping factor, and in itself it will not—because it cannot—really change those contours.Note, too, that the debate about whether the deal depends for its meaning or merit on whether the Iranian regime changes over the course of the next 15 years is both less and more than meets the eye. If there is to be an Iranian nuclear arsenal, it would be better if a less noxious regime had control of it. But that does not speak to the mousetrap problem, and it doesn’t guarantee that a “better” Iranian regime—by which we mean one that thinks more like us—would rid itself of that arsenal or even be a better steward of it. The Iranian program is in any event not by origin an Islamic program; it goes back to the Shah, and any strategic analyst who sits in Teheran looking out the window and swivels in his office chair 360 degrees can see why.So yes, Iran might change as a result of this agreement and that could be a good thing. But there is no reason it has to change or change for the better in a way that matters much to this problem. In a sense this entire line of argument, or reasoning, is a red herring. It wasn’t that way a decade ago, before the run on nuclear mousetraps around the region. But it is now.That said—and here is where the change postulate might be more than meets the eye—if sanctions relief is to come, it is probably in U.S. interest to rush as much of the roughly $150 billion involved into the Iranian economy as fast as possible. It is likewise in our interest to open the economy to all manner of foreigners as quickly as possible: sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll to the max. If we want to weaken the regime—and its emetic IRGC/Qods Brigade Praetorian guard—we should do our best to serve up maximum feasible Schumpeterean “creative destruction”, the same stuff that KO’ed the Shah. The more social change we help unleash, and generate from a new baseline, the more the inability of the current Iranian regime to adjust will doom it to oblivion.The regime fears its own people and is doubtless prepared now to crack down hard, lest melting glaciers of pent-up frustration get out of hand. How this will play out is hard to say; it may hurt Rouhani more than help him. In any event, we need to do what we can to undermine or overwhelm the crackdown, and being a little (or a lot) more voluble on Iranian human rights violations—which are massive and ongoing—is not a bad way to go about that given the limited means at our disposal to influence internal Iranian social trends.Looking ahead, what should the U.S. government be doing? Let me skip all the obvious near-term options that dozens of analysts will discuss and focus instead on just one relatively big idea—a stretch goal, so to speak (the dirty work that someone has to do).If 15 years from now we have an N+3 or N+4 or N+5 proliferation situation in the Middle East and environs, the prospect of preventing the use of nuclear weapons in anger over the long haul decreases as a geometric function of how many such states there are. As Henry Kissinger said long ago, before it was popular to talk about such things, it was hard enough during the Cold War to ensure deterrence between just two powers whose elites spoke more or less the same Western cultural language. The idea that a self-regulating nuclearized regional subsystem in the Middle East could reliably prevent nuclear exchanges more or less indefinitely into the future is therefore a kind of madness. We have to assume, if we err on the prophylactic side of safety, that there is going to be a nuclear exchange in the region—perhaps spilling over into South Asia and even elsewhere—unless something fairly novel is done to prevent it.Now, some may argue that preventing a nuclear exchange in the Middle East that does not involve the United States as a combatant or as a collateral victim is not a vital U.S. interest. I am not among them. The United States has an overwhelming vital interest as the first-resort provider of global order in preventing millions of innocent people from being killed in a nuclear exchange. We arguably have a special interest in preventing a nuclear exchange that might involve Israel. So let us put the question starkly and directly: Can the U.S. government sterilize the capacity of regional states from engaging in a nuclear exchange?Obviously, such an effort would have to have a diplomatic dimension. Over time we would be wise, to take just one example, to try to drag no-first-use pledges out of all relevant parties. But I am thinking about an actual technical capacity to interdict, suppress, or sterilize an exchange.Now consider: These young Middle Eastern arsenals would likely be fairly modest in size, not especially sophisticated for a good long while, and probably capable of being delivered only by tractable aircraft and missiles. Could we through a combination of conventional precision-strike munitions and cyber-ops—accompanied of course by space- and land-based intelligence assets for purposes of target acquisition—abort the attempt of 3rd and 4th parties, so to speak, from launching nuclear weapons against each other and/or their other neighbors? Might rapidly deployable forms of missile defense augment such a capability?We cannot reliably do any such thing right now, but there is no scenario for which such a capability is fully relevant right now. Looking to the future, yes we can do this, if we try. We should therefore begin now quietly developing the means to unilaterally sterilize, or suppress to the extent possible, the prospects for nuclear weapons exchanges within the Middle East, and do some serious thinking about how to integrate such a capability into U.S. military doctrine. Once we’re ready, it may be that announcing the capability will function as a disincentive to proliferation, but that’s a call that cannot be made this far out.Of course there will ultimately be the usual orgy of hypocrisy about America as an unbidden and unwelcome world policemen when word gets out about what we’re up to—as it surely will. There will also be the usual bleating about preemption, even though in this case we would be preempting a situation in which the United States is not a principal. I don’t care; the stakes are so high that they render such nuisances truly negligible.The Iran deal certainly is powerless to prevent the kind of future that calls for this capability. If anything, it accelerates that future coming into being by some non-trivial but incalculable degree. We will be consumed by technical assessments of verification provisions for weeks to come, and the airwaves and media outlets will be brimming with the political implications and other short-term Warholish obsessions. Wise people would do well to start looking beyond the froth to what really matters. What really matters looking out ahead is very scary, but it is not something we are powerless to affect. And we really need to affect it.

Greece’s Migration Crisis Is a European Crisis

For months, the world has been bombarded with headlines about “Grexit”—the possibility that Greece could leave the Eurozone, or even the EU altogether. Experts detailed the ramifications for European and global economies, the “European Project,” and Russia’s widening sphere of influence. Yet far little discussion has focused on how the Greece’s ongoing economic woes have impacted Europe’s ever-worsening migration crisis.

Europe is currently on the receiving end of the largest mass migration in recent history. Due to its geography, Greece has become a popular, and meagerly equipped, gatekeeper to Europe. Its proximity to the Middle East and North Africa, as well as its long and insufficiently guarded coastline, make it an ideal entry point for migrants and refugees in search of a better life in the EU. Dublin II regulations require migrants to claim asylum in the first point of entry into the EU. So while Greece is primarily a transit point, it also shoulders a majority of the burden in processing, monitoring, and housing new arrivals.Greece’s slide into economic depression coincided with an uptick in irregular migration through the Eastern Mediterranean. According to the Greek Coast Guard migrant arrivals to Greece by sea increased from 9,340 in 2013, and 34,442 in 2014, to 77,100 so far in 2015—a 725 percent increase in two years. More worryingly, it is possible this figure will more than double by year’s end, largely driven by displacements caused by the Syrian conflict. According to a July 9 press release by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), four million Syrians have already been displaced to Turkey, and an additional 7.6 million remain internally displaced within Syria.Ongoing bailout negotiations have been all consuming for the fledgling Greek government, and have seemingly diverted attention from migration during this critical time. This has strained an already dysfunctional border control and migrant reception system in Greece. Without urgent action to reform this system, the consequences could be felt across Europe.Consider first the impact of bailout negotiations on political will to prioritize the issue of migration. The Greek government has chosen to focus on the economy and its negotiations with lenders above all else, and there is indication that migration has been shunted to the backburner as a result.According to one report, the Syriza government has already ordered the Greek police to cease detaining undocumented migrants, which my contacts in the police force have already confirmed. Under the previous government, one regularly saw officers arresting migrants without papers across Athens, but today this is a rare sight. Police statistics reveal that arrests of migrant smugglers for the first four months of the year have decreased by more than 25 percent compared to 2014.Compounding the absence of political will are Greece’s struggles with corruption among police assigned to border protection and migration services. Greek newspaper To Vima recently reported on an investigation exposing Greek police collaboration with migrant smugglers. Several migrants who have made the journey through Greece into Europe told me it is easy to leave Greece without being stopped by the police at the border who “look the other way.”Absence of political will seems to have additionally impacted the government’s ability to allocate and manage funding for asylum and migration programs. While the European Commission pitches in, the Greek government’s management of such funding is proving insufficient. Greece’s coast and border guards experience fuel shortages and are unable to maintain vital equipment. Migrant detention centers have developed a reputation for their prison-like conditions and alleged human rights abuses.The International Organization for Migration estimates that 1,000 migrants are arriving on Greek islands off the Turkish coast each day. This is on islands with populations only in the tens of thousands. Last Friday, the UNHCR’s William Spindler told a briefing, “the volatile economic situation, combined with the increasing numbers of new arrivals, is putting severe strain on small island communities.”These islands are now on the brink of a humanitarian crisis. Refugees arriving are confronted with inhumane living conditions as they face extended waits to be processed—waits that will only get longer as more migrants arrive and resources dwindle.A darker consequence of such backlogs of migrants is a possible resurgence of anti-migrant sentiment. Recent speculation of a Grexit has spurred many tourists to cancel reservations for island holidays in the middle of the most lucrative busy season. Concurrently, there are fears that migrant arrivals may also deter tourism. This short-term damage to the industry could revive the vehement anti-migrant sentiment and violence seen in Greece in 2012, when the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party was elected to parliament.If European nations are not moved by humanitarian concerns to take action on migration, there is also a security angle to consider. In March, Defense Minister Panos Kammenos threatened that without additional bailout funds, Greece would send a wave of migrants and jihadists into Europe. While it is easy to dismiss his threat as an alarmist bargaining chip, it does not negate the underlying warning in his statement.Recently, the Islamic State (IS) claimed it is sending jihadists to Europe among migrants leaving Turkey for Greece. In 2014, the Greek Special Intelligence Service (EYP) identified six IS recruits traveling through Greece on their way to and from conflicts in Syria and Iraq, and the EYP suspects there are likely more transiting through undetected.With IS actively recruiting fighters from neighboring Balkan states, there is also concern that Greece is being used as a transit point for Albanian, Kosovar, and Bosnian recruits. There are at least 300 ethnic Albanian fighters known to have joined IS and the al-Qaeda-aligned Jabhat al-Nusra. On April 24, Greek police arrested an Albanian illegally entering Greece who was apparently on his way to join IS in Syria.Over the weekend, Greece appears to have had a breakthrough in negotiations, with both sides agreeing to a new bailout package. However, many in Greece view this package as containing concessions Syriza promised to avoid. Now the government is faced with a new set of challenges selling the bailout to the Greek people and even within its own ranks.As the Greek government forges ahead with the new package and struggles to maintain power, it is unlikely to prioritize securing Europe’s borders. With Greece preoccupied, there should be more discussion about what can be done, and by whom, to mitigate the humanitarian and security implications associated with Europe’s migration crisis.

The Left Goes Euroskeptic

From the late French President François Mitterrand, through the former social democratic President of the European Commission Romano Prodi, to the current head of European Parliament Martin Schulz, Europe’s political left has been a reliable defender of European integration against its right-wing critics. The Greek economic meltdown might soon change that, facilitating instead a rapprochement between the political left and the Euroskeptics.

A populist, anti-EU brand of leftism is not a complete novelty. A year ago, Costas Lapavitsas, a professor at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and an MP for Syriza, deplored “the conservative mechanisms at the heart of the EU” and expressed hope that the left would succeed in “sending a clear anti-capitalist message that combines radical policies with progressive Euroskepticism.”As the Greek economy falls apart, this line of thinking is gaining traction in mainstream social-democratic circles as well. Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, recently channeled technical arguments originally made by economists Milton Friedman and Martin Feldstein—and other early critics of the euro—and concluded that “the creation of the euro was a terrible mistake.” Until very recently, his advice to the Greek government, namely “if necessary, to leave the euro,” could hardly be uttered in polite company anywhere in Europe.The Guardian’s Owen Jones, in turn, speaks of Greece as “a society that has been progressively dismantled by EU-dictated austerity.” The British Green Party MP, Caroline Lucas, claims that “the Troika’s intransigence on austerity amounts to nothing short of an attempted coup.” The sentiment was echoed by numerous Twitteratis during the night of the negotiations on Sunday night, particularly under the hashtag #ThisIsACoup.Another Nobel laureate, Joseph Stiglitz, sounds just like former Czech President Václav Klaus, who took great pleasure in lambasting the EU’s democratic deficit, to the dismay of the EU’s intelligentsia. Stiglitz writes “[t]hat concern for popular legitimacy is incompatible with the politics of the Eurozone, which was never a very democratic project”; he hopes that “Greece, with its strong democratic tradition, might grasp its destiny in its own hands,” by escaping the diktat of Brussels.Distinguishing the voices on the left from the conventional conservative Euroskepticism is becoming increasingly difficult. A recent editorial in the Telegraph, a bastion of British Tory thought, could have been easily written by a disgruntled member of Syriza. It spoke of the “the humiliation now being heaped upon a proud and ancient country,” reminding Greeks that “without the power to make their own decisions they are always at the mercy of the unelected bureaucrats and financiers who run the institutions.” Joining the chorus on further on the right is Marine Le Pen, who applauded the outcome of the Greek referendum and called euro and austerity “Siamese twins, . . . attached at the hip.” As its deputy leader, Marton Gyongyosi, told me recently, even Hungary’s extreme right-wing Jobbik party supported Syriza’s defiant position towards its international creditors.Of course, euro critics both left and right make some valid points. As it currently stands, Europe is too diverse a continent, with too little economic flexibility, to be a well-functioning monetary union. The EU thus should abandon the dogma of ever-closer union and allow its member states to permanently opt out of joining the Eurozone, while enjoying other benefits that come with EU membership.But there is a flipside to this argument, uncomfortable for many Euroskeptics. Countries that do wish to be a part of the Eurozone have to accept tighter fiscal rules and a higher degree of political integration. And that will involve clear, enforceable fiscal rules—as well as those nosey, unaccountable “eurocrats” scrutinizing national budgets and perhaps even vetoing them.By itself, the rise of the left-wing critics of the EU is not a terrible thing. The Union needs reform, and the efforts to make it more open, accountable, and flexible are valuable. However, Euroskeptics of all ideological stripes are too often keen to throw out the baby with the bathwater, trying to replace the imperfect European institutions with a utopia.Lapavitsas, for example, wants the EU “dismantled and replaced,” in part by a system of “managed exchange rates and controlled capital flows”—thus putting an end to one of the EU’s fundamental freedoms. Others might be dreaming of a permanent system of fiscal transfers to the EU’s periphery, no questions asked—a political non-starter, regardless of what one thinks of its substantive merits.In turn, a devolution of the EU overseen by the largely nationalistic and protectionist Euroskeptic right, exemplified by the likes of Marine Le Pen, would almost certainly put an end to the free movement of people, not to speak of trade barriers and industrial planning, which her party, the Front National, is advocating.Notwithstanding the agreement reached between Greece and the rest of the Eurozone, it is becoming clear that the ongoing economic meltdown in Greece will lead to a backlash against the project of European integration, coming from both the left and right. While a deep rethink is necessary, let us hope that the peaceful postwar order in Europe does not fall prey to reckless populism.

An Important American Green Milestone

For the first time in our history, this April the U.S. supplied more of its electricity burning natural gas than coal. The FT reports that a combination of cheap gas and increased regulations on coal meant that gas edged out coal as 31 percent of our electricity against coal’s 30 percent.

This is, of course, unwelcome news for the coal industry, which is already facing a grim outlook as federal regulations force older plants to install expensive scrubbers to cut down on emissions. Those new rules, along with fierce competition from the new kid on the block—shale gas—have knocked Old King Coal off his throne, and the way things are going he may never return to it.For U.S. emissions and our country’s air quality, though, this is a positive development. Natural gas emits roughly half of the greenhouse gases as coal, making it a much cleaner and greener energy source. We’ve said it before, but given coal’s recent displacement it’s worth saying again: shale gas is fracking green.

Congress, Pundits, Allies React to Iran Deal

Diplomats announced the conclusion of a nuclear deal between Iran and the United States-led P5+1 earlier today. At 159 pages, the deal is weighty and complicated, and the devil(s) will likely lie in the details—which is to say, we’ll hold comment until we know more, and we encourage you to keep an eye out in the upcoming hours and days for commentary from TAI editors and contributors. But in the meantime, we’ve already seen commentary from politicians and pundits alike—and in many ways, these reactions are what will shape the fate of the deal going forward.

Unsurprisingly, President Obama hailed the deal, whereas Speaker of the House John Boehner, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and a slew of GOP Presidential candidates sounded notes of deep reservation. A Congressional fight is brewing, and the President has already vowed to veto any measure of disapproval passed under Corker-Menendez. Keep an eye therefore on hawkish Congressional Democrats, particularly these fourteen Senators, who will be heavily courted by both sides in the lead-up to an expected veto-override vote that Sen. Corker projects for early September (and, it’s worth noting, a 2/3 override vote in both houses is very tough).Pundits and former governmental officials are also starting to weigh in, though cautiously. Many, like Jeffrey Goldberg and Dennis Ross, have pieces establishing the parameters by which they would judge the package. These are worth keeping an eye on, for they’re being echoed by centrist Senators of both parties, and some standard reference points for evaluating the deal do seem to be congealing into a consensus among the U.S. foreign policy establishment. (One shouldn’t overstate the importance of intellectual yard-sticks though: the Obama Administration will be hard at work horse-trading—you want that bridge? air base?—and that this is often how politics actually ends up working.)Key allies in the P5+1, meanwhile, sound pleased, but with various degrees of reservation. The Brits, though the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, issued essentially platitudinous praise for the deal; Cameron’s administration has been small-c conservative in foreign policy matters and will be unlikely to object to an agreement the Obama Administration favors. The French, on the other hand, have grown closer recently to the Saudis and been more hawkish in the negotiations. Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius characterized the deal as a “stage agreement… still work to do” while President Hollande said France would be “watchful”. (Neighborhood troll Vladmir Putin declared that the world “breathed a sigh of relief.”)Most concerning to the U.S. so far should be the Saudi position. While the government has yet to make an official statement, Saudi diplomats are already making their feelings known—and they are not happy. The Washington Post reports:

One Saudi diplomat described the agreement as “extremely dangerous” and said it would give a green light to his own government to start a nuclear energy program.[…]

“If a green light is given to Iran, Saudi Arabia has the right to nuclear energy,” said the Saudi diplomat, echoing comments by other Saudi diplomats in recent weeks.

As Walter Russsell Mead wrote in March, the P5+1 actually has three silent partners—the U.S. Congress, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. Congress’ reaction as a whole will be revealed through votes in the coming months, while both the Saudi government and the Israeli government seem to be feeling out what their other options truly are. All three are outliers, for now, from a general international consensus that it’s time to take the deal—good, bad, or ugly—and get on with things. But as more details become known, will public opinion—particularly in the U.S.—shift their way?

This Is It: Japan’s Ruling LDP Readies Militarism Bills

The debate in Japan’s legislature, the Diet, has been fierce: For weeks, leaders and outside experts have been cross-examining one another over the implications of Abe’s reinterpretation of the officially (and, admittedly, pretty unambiguously) pacifist clause in the country’s constitution. Now, the Japan Times reports that the Japan’s ruling LDP is set to push through a vote in the lower house of the Diet on two bills that would authorize the use of military force. The crucial vote could come as early as Thursday. The opposition is trying to delay, boycotting a preliminary meeting on the vote today and calling for continued discussion through next week. But it doesn’t appear likely that they’ll stop the Thursday vote. The LDP has a majority in the lower house and it leads a coalition that comprises a majority in the upper house.

Japan has a major role to play in helping balance Chinese power in the region, and for that it needs strategic and military force at its disposal. But the Japanese people seem to have (quite understandably) internalized their country’s official post-war pacifism over the past seven decades. Though they reelected Abe this past December in a snap election that analysts took as a referendum on his push towards militarism, public opinion remains staunchly opposed to the bills. Protests were staged across the country over the weekend, and the latest poll shows a mere 26 percent in favor of the bills, with 56 percent opposed.Whatever happens in the Diet this week (or later, in the unlikely event that the opposition succeeds at playing for time) will have huge ramifications for the future of Asia, and the world.

Nigeria’s Holdover Generals Out of Luck

Following a series of military setbacks in the country’s fight against Boko Haram, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari has chosen to replace his entire military leadership, including the national security advisor he inherited from former President Goodluck Jonathan. The London Times has more on the shake-up, which has elevated leaders from Borno state, where Boko has a strong presence:

The move was part of reforms promised to revive the Nigerian army’s reputation as one of Africa’s best and to push back Boko Haram, which has carried out kidnappings, mass killings and suicide bombings during its conquest of swathes of the country. Nigeria’s army has been overrun in places, relying on Chad to fight its battles. N’Djamena, the capital of Chad, was the target of a suicide attack yesterday as a result.

The President has also shifted the base of military operations against the jihadi group to Borno.

Boko Haram, which is thought to be responsible for more than 10,000 deaths since 2009, has intensified its efforts following the election of Buhari. With a regional response force beginning to make progress against conventional Boko Haram forces, the terror group has once again resorted to attacks and suicide bombings against civilian “soft targets” in Nigeria as well as in neighboring countries such as Chad, Cameroon, and Niger.In addition to losing the initiative in the armed struggle against Boko Haram, many members of Nigeria’s military leadership have also been accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity in a recently released report by Amnesty International. Among the accused is the now-former chief of the defense staff, Air Chief Marshal Alex Badeh. A section of the report—about actions for which he is held responsible— reads:

More than 1,200 people have been extrajudicially executed by the military and associated militias in north-east Nigeria. The worst case documented by Amnesty International took place on 14 March 2014 when the military killed more than 640 detainees who had fled Giwa barracks after Boko Haram attacked.

Many of these killings appear to be reprisals following attacks by Boko Haram. A senior military official told Amnesty International that such killings were common. Soldiers “go to the nearest place and kill all the youths… People killed may be innocent and not armed,” he said.

President Buhari ran on a platform of fighting corruption within government, announcing during his inauguration that “We shall improve operational and legal mechanisms so that disciplinary steps are taken against proven human rights violations by the armed forces.” He now appears to be taking aim at the failures of the military establishment. For Buhari, the time for change has clearly arrived.

European Far Right Girds For a Fight After Greece

Even as everyone struggles to wrap their heads around today’s “big deal” announcement (we’ll have some commentary up soon), yesterday’s big deal between Greece and its creditors faces its first hurdle as Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras tries to push an immediate set of reforms through parliament on Wednesday. Rumors abound that several ministers will be sacked for their opposition to the deal. Both the Left Platform wing of Syriza and the nationalist right-wing junior coalition partner the Independent Greeks are in open revolt, and chances are that Tsipras may face a vote of no-confidence soon leading to new elections after the vote passes. Nevertheless, the immediate prospects for the vote in parliament appear to be good. Tsipras will likely to lean hard on his opposition parties for support, leaving him with needing only 50 votes from his 162-vote strong Syriza coalition to pass the deal.

The thing to watch beyond the immediate political repercussions in Greece is how this plays out in the broader European political context. As Bloomberg points out, the lesson being internalized by the resurgent far right populist parties across the continent isn’t that resisting the austerity demands of European creditors is futile. Rather, it’s that a grave historical injustice has been perpetrated. That will serve as a good recruiting tool for their purposes:

The Greek premier’s capitulation hands ammunition to those like Marine Le Pen in France and Beppe Grillo in Italy who see the EU as a totalitarian bloc that rides roughshod over national sovereignty and democracy.

Grillo, who wants out of the euro, said in a blog post that Europe “humiliated” Greece. Tsipras was “forced to capitulate to EU despotism,” National Front leader Le Pen said in a televised news conference Monday. The bloc’s common currency, she said, is “not sustainable and a catastrophe.” […]Grillo, whose Five Star movement is Italy’s second-largest party, and Le Pen, who leads first-round presidential election polls in France, lost no time in leading fresh attacks against the bloc’s focus on fiscal prudence after the Greek deal was announced Monday morning.Spanish party Podemos, which ousted Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s People’s Party in regional elections in Madrid in May on a similar anti-austerity platform to Syriza, took more time to digest the outcome.Podemos, which faces national elections later this year, will hold a press conference later on Tuesday. Leader Pablo Iglesias, who has in the past traveled to Athens to demonstrate solidarity with Tsipras, expressed his support for Greece “against the Mafiosos” in a Twitter post Monday.

The elections in Spain, scheduled for December of this year, will likely be the first real indication of how the Greek crisis has affected European politics. And if Podemos wins, expect a lot more turmoil. As Iglesias himself calmly noted before the Greek drama reached its latest denouement, “Spain has something like 13 per cent of European gross domestic product, while Greece has about 2 per cent. Our government is more able to resist outside forces that might stop us doing our own thing.” Translation: just try to do to us what you did to the Greeks.