Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 644

The Garbage Man Who Would Be King

The King of Kowloon: The Art of Tsang Tsou-choi

David Spalding, editor

Damiani, 225 pp., $50

In 1956, a garbage man living in the Kowloon neighborhood of Hong Kong, having reached the Dantean age of thirty-five, declared himself emperor. Tsang Tsou-choi grandly dismissed the powers that have made claims on Hong Kong—the Qing Dynasty in the nineteenth century, the British in the twentieth, Communist China in the twenty-first—and said (much to the alarm of his wife and children) that it had belonged by right to his ancestors and now belonged to him.

Graffiti was the eccentric means by which he pressed this grandiose claim. In every spare moment, the so-called “King of Kowloon” painted his imperial title (accompanied by family trees, insults to the Queen of England, and accountings of his ancestors’ deeds) all across the city. Tsang’s brush turned utility boxes, lampposts, and retaining walls into the stele of an imagined empire.His proclamations, ignored by the civil authorities, in time garnered the attention of the international arts community. Photographic essays, gallery shows, and tributes from the fashion world followed, as the King of Kowloon was deemed Hong Kong’s great artist-activist—a creative genius opposed to any outside power impinging on the city.The tendency to view Tsang as artist-activist began with a 1997 exhibition of his “work” organized by the Hong Kong art critic Lau Kin-wai. It reaches its fullest expression in the recent publication of the first monograph on Tsang, King of Kowloon: The Art of Tsang Tsou-choi. This handsome coffee-table book offers the most comprehensive collection yet of images of his writing and includes several insightful essays (the appendix of reprinted news articles on Tsang is especially helpful in filling out the scant record of his life).Tsang was born in 1921 in a village of Guangdong, the southern Chinese province that flanks Hong Kong. At sixteen, he migrated to the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, along with hundreds of thousands of other Chinese seeking entrée to the middle class in the dynamic port city. He fell in love with, and then lost, a girl whom he would memorialize alongside the lists of his ancestors: Mourning Sin Bou-Jan. He met and married another woman, started a family, and found work as a trash collector.A car accident suffered during a visit to a monastery seemed to change him. It was around this time that he came upon a document purporting to show imperial land grants made to his family. He also started receiving messages from his ancestors. His erratic behavior embarrassed his family and drove them away, but even as he began his tireless campaign of painting, he still worked to support them. (Art critic Lau Kin-wai reported in 1997, “his full earnings are often handed over to his wife.”) For himself, he lived as a beggar, on the edge of vagrancy. He spent his spare moments painting. He painted letters in vertical compound constructions, such as one may see on lamps hanging at the Three Mountains Temple.Tsang’s proclamations often took the form of jiapu, the ancient Chinese records listing generations of ancestors in columns. Alongside these genealogies, Tsang would note his family’s marriages and lands, and the wars in which its members played heroic roles. (The vanquishing of Japan, after it had occupied Kowloon during World War II, was sometimes reported, as was the mythical defeat of Elizabeth II.)One of the earliest profiles of this claimant to a forgotten throne was printed in 1970, in the Ming Pao Evening News:

The territory occupied by the King … is a small hill across from the Walden Hotel on Tai Po Road in the New Territories. There he has built a small wooden shack he calls the “palace,” where he receives visitors, while his imperial sleeping chamber is a small cave located below. …

On the hills outside of the palace are a few bamboo poles, and the cotton flags attached to them unfurl in the breeze. Under the flags there are two wooden notice boards. Some of the “notices” are incomprehensible, yet the four characters [the country is prosperous and the people live in safety] are written neatly.

Tsang was treated by the neighborhood with humane disinterestedness: “[T]he residents … see him coming and give him leftover food. Once he’s full, he returns to his sleeping chamber to rest. Over the years, he has never infringed upon others, nor does he speak to anyone.” In time, Tsang would move into a public housing apartment, which, if it lacked the fairy-tale charm of his shack, was no less consecrated to his cause: every surface displayed graffiti blazoning his imperial claim.

Disinterest has now given way to the unseemly desire to make Tsang either into an exemplary artist or into a mascot for one or another protest movement. Yet Tsang was not, as some suggest, concerned with critiquing British power or Beijing’s encroachments. His mission—vindicating the claims of an imagined empire—was too specific, too impractical to resonate with any cause but his impossible own. Other Chinese peasants have claimed to be emperors in order to spark social movements (one, Zeng Yinglong, is currently sitting in a Chinese jail for declaring himself emperor and leading a revolt against China’s brutal one-child policy) but Tsang had no apparent interest in revolution and reform.Equally implausible attempts to present Tsang as an artist lean heavily on the connection between his graffiti and the traditions of classical Chinese calligraphy. The connection is a dubious one: Tsang’s variable and sometimes sloppy writing, denigrated by calligraphic experts, is done more with an eye to quickly covering a surface than with fulfilling an artistic ambition. It proclaims the emperor—not the auteur. As Tsang told Colors magazine: “I don’t care about money and fame. … They should just give me back the throne. I am not an artist—I am simply the King.”What, then, explains Tsang’s hold on the imaginations of so many? One hint can be found in the career of Don Quixote. Both Tsang and Quixote took up quests that separated them from their dependents. Both were suspected of mental illness. Both dedicated themselves to impossible causes that elevated their own lives and transfixed thousands. The beauty of their delusions, and the sincerity with which they lived by them, made their falseness irrelevant. As the Chinese writer and activist Ou Ning writes:

Among the forests of skyscrapers, heavy traffic and densely packed crowds of the city, Tsang Tsou-choi’s brush fought a tenacious battle to carve out space for his ancestral lists, his charms and spells, his visions of kingly power—like some ancient, homeless forbear who sighed, raged and wept his way through a modern world where things might be the same but the people had changed.

By dedicating himself to an impossible quest, by seeking to recall the names of dead ancestors and bring to life a forgotten world, Tsang testified to memory in a time of forgetting and particularity in an age of abstraction. It is this great mourning for a lost world that makes Tsang the emperor, not just of his own imagination, but also of ours. We all know friendships grown cold, childhood homes destroyed, loved ones lost. These are the things that Tsang spent his life recalling, and they—not the quality of his brushstroke or the character of his political opinions—are why we remember him still. For all of life, and not only for Sin Bou-jan, Tsang was a man who mourned.

UK Surprise: 5 Year NATO Spending Commitment

Yesterday, the newly-reelected British government proposed a “red meat” budget that may the boldest since Margaret Thatcher. It also contained defense news that will be welcomed by the United States. The BBC reports:

The chancellor has pledged in his summer budget to meet Nato’s target of spending 2% of national income on defence every year, up to 2020. […]

As well as committing to meet Nato’s target, he announced:

Spending on defence to rise in real terms – 0.5% above inflation – every year during the Parliament
New £1.5bn Joint Security Fund for investment in military and intelligence agencies

This is a pleasant surprise. British defense spending has been declining for years, and the pledge to fix that was not in the Conservative manifesto. In fact, U.S. officials up to and including President Obama expected Britain to slip below the 2 percent NATO target that only five European nations meet at present. For the Conservatives to use their first major expenditure of political capital in part to right the situation—and not just now, but for the length of the next Parliament (5 years)—is very good news.

This move restores Britain to the forefront of European NATO countries that take defense seriously. And coming after German Defense Minister (and heir apparent to Angela Merkel) Ursula von der Leyen’s call for greater German defense spending, it is good news for the U.S.While we’re definitely the biggest partner in NATO, America’s defense does rely on our allies making real, if not equal, contributions. Unfortunately, since the Great Recession began, those same allies have all used their defense budgets as a piggy bank to be raided in hard times, in the process cutting the combined equivalent of the German Army out of NATO’s budget.We’ve not been shy at expressing our dismay about this, especially as Vladimir Putin has grown increasingly confrontational in the east. Three cheers, then, as the biggest economic power in Europe (Germany) and the nation that’s traditionally been our strongest European partner on defense (Britain) start to build back up.

India Buys Israel Flowers

The Israeli-Indian relationship continues to warm with a state visit this week by top Indian officials to Jerusalem. The visit comes on the heels of New Delhi’s decision to abstain from a recent vote in the UN Human Rights Council to censure Israeli. As a matter of policy and history, the country would have been expected to vote ‘yes.’  The Times of Israel reports on what it is calling an outright détente:

“The Israeli-India relationship has been growing steadily for many years now. Since the coming into power of the government headed by Narenda Modi there is a visible turn for the better, a moving from improvement to an upgrade,” said Mark Sofer, a deputy director-general at Israel’s foreign ministry and a former ambassador to India. “But there’s so much more that the two countries can and will do together for the benefit of the Israeli and Indian peoples.”

Modi, who is expected in Israel later this year in what would be a historic first visit of an Indian prime minister, has accelerated the rapprochement with Jerusalem. While strong defense and business ties existed before he came to power in April 2014, he made the relationship much more visible.

Israeli and Indian interests have aligned in a number of key ways for years now  not least over arms; Israel’s got ’em, India needs ’em. But the two countries have become increasingly vocal about their friendship, and the latest incidents highlighted by The Times of Israel show the leaders of the two countries offering some of their most public displays of geopolitical affection yet.

The Waiting Game

The drama of the U.S. (now P5+1) negotiations with Iran over its nuclear infrastructure has been ongoing now for more than a dozen years, if we date the inception point to 2002, when some dissidents leaked information about Iran’s nuclear weapons work. (They did not tell the U.S. Government much of anything it did not already know, but never mind.) Most of this period really had to do with pre-negotiation maneuvering and indirect pressures—like building up the sanctions regime and getting a series of UN Security Council resolutions on our part, and the Iranians rushing to master the fuel cycle on their part.

The current stage of negotiations goes back only about twenty months, but it’s twenty months that seem sometimes like twenty years. That’s partly because every time we approach a deadline both sides swear up and down is real and will not be extended, it gets extended. Lucy is everywhere; no one ever gets to kick the football.That’s what happened again Tuesday, July 7, following the extension from June 30. All that follows the framework agreement from April, but in point of fact that was just an extension too, since that supposed agreement was never put in a written form that both sides attested to and signed. All we had from April was Wendy Sherman’s whiteboard, and within days after that supposed agreement there emerged accounts from Teheran, Washington, and elsewhere of what it contained and what it did not that didn’t add up to anything resembling an actual agreement. The starting point for the April affair was the November 2014 extension of the only actual agreement that has been reached so far, which dates to November 24, 2013.Where do we stand now? Both sides in recent days have played down the significance of a deadline. The Iranian delegation claims not to have been cognizant in recent weeks of a serious one, despite having earlier sworn not to go beyond July 7. Secretary Kerry said more or less the same thing, after having sanctified the earlier deadline, too. What the agreement is, he said, is more important than when it is. One is reminded of Lenin, who reportedly said that promises are like piecrusts, made to be broken. So that now goes for negotiating deadlines, too.What is really going on here? It’s hard to say, since words do not mean what they normally mean when uttered by Iranian and American diplomats (or by some Supreme Court Justices, but never mind that for now). The best bet is that the U.S. side, having made by far the most and the most important concessions in the past twenty months, used talk about hard deadlines to get the Iranian side to finally make up its mind, which boils down to getting Ayatollah Khamenei to make up his mind. That’s how the November 2013 deal happened; we issued an ultimatum, the Iranians apparently thought we would actually walk away, and they came back with the concessions that made the deal possible. According to all reputable sources, too, they have kept their word, and doing so has frozen part of their program. They got some sanctions relief at the time, true; but the Iranians did pay a price to get and keep an agreement, leading to the reasonable supposition in Washington that perhaps a more significant post-interim, if not really “final”, deal can also be had.But this time it didn’t work, or at least it hasn’t worked yet. The Iranians did not deliver the goods, and we did not walk. That leaves the impression that we want a deal more than the Iranians, and/or that we are mindful that it just takes the Iranian system longer to come to a collective conclusion. We’re prepared to be patient because, as U.S. officials repeatedly say, it’s better to deal with this problem through diplomacy than it is though force (which, just by the way, conveys the false impression that between sanctions and bombs we have no options). Besides, as the President and those close to him have also made clear, we are by far the stronger power, so we can afford to go the extra mile, both by way of concessions and by way of time. We keep “all options on the table”, an idiomatic expression meaning that we will use force to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon if it comes to that—and no concessions we make will really change that reality. We lose little through the exercise of our own patience, and, as already noted, the Iranian program in the meantime is somewhat constrained, as is its sanctioned economy in the face of burgeoning popular expectations of imminent relief.There is, however, another way to look at this. Since April the Iranians, mainly though the words of the Supreme Leader himself, have made demands clearly incompatible with the April agreement-that-was-not-an-agreement. Some of these have to do with transparency/verification issues, some with the limits on Iranian research and development, some with the timing of sanctions relief, and, lately, additional matters such as UN resolutions concerning other sanctions, arms embargoes, and so on. If the Iranians conclude that the United States really wants an agreement more than they do, and that the presidential threat to use force in extremis is hollow, delay and prevarication are useful for drawing more concessions out of the United States. So it’s interesting: We think time works against the Iranians because it limits their program and puts off serious sanctions relief, and they think it works for them because it delivers more U.S. concessions. We don’t risk Iranian progress toward breakout capacity because their program has been limited, and they don’t risk getting bombed so long as they’re still at or near the negotiating table, or perhaps even if they’re not.This ensemble of perceptions could mean that a lot more time will pass without much of anything happening. Now that the whole notion of a deadline has been discounted, neither side can credibly use a new hard deadline as a benchmark against which to “walk.” Churchill famously said that jaw-jaw was better than war-war, but that was before Samuel Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot. Just how long could these negotiations go on? That depends on the larger concerns both leaderships have, and here we enter a domain beyond the four corners of any prospective document. It is a domain that is, if anything, even harder to nail down with precision.What is the Iranian leadership really thinking here? Well, we don’t exactly know. When Khamenei has alternatively spoken as though he were ready to walk away unless this or unless that, but that he supported his brave and faithful negotiators, giving them cover from on high, which Khamenei were we supposed to credit? Was he just posturing to arm his negotiators in pursuit of new P5+1 concessions, or did he actually mean what he said? We still don’t know.One of the truly irritating side effects of protracted negotiations like these is that it forces members of the punditocracy to repeat the same points over and over again in hopes someone will finally listen. There has always been, in my view, a significant chance that Khamenei could not take “yes” for an answer on a big deal that truly limited Iranian options, no matter how sweet the “yes” seemed to be. Why? Because hating America is part of the Mullahcracy’s raison d’etre. It is what enables the IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps) to command the sanctioned economy and hence fund and enrich its members. The IRGC reportedly owns about three-quarters of Teheran real estate, a phenomenon redolent of the modus operandi of “security mafias” in places like Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan, Algeria, and Burma—to mention only a few examples. The Qods Brigades, the IRGC’s military arm, trumps the Iranian military itself when it comes to resources and political access. If Khamenei makes a “big deal” with the Americans, he basically screws the regime’s own Praetorian guard.There is more. The Iranian population is young and does not like its leaders. It boasts one of the most pro-American populations in this western part of our galaxy. The leadership, fearing the longer-term power of this large generational cohort, has relaxed or simply has been unable to enforce many social rules laid down in earlier years of the Islamic republic—whether these concern alcohol consumption, unmarried couples living together, how women dress in public and what sporting events they go to, and so on. But expectations have continued to rise and the regime is running out of wiggle room. Things are sketchy enough right now, but there is no serious political opposition; a “big deal” with the Americans is very likely to be taken by a lot of Iranians as a signal of regime relaxations across the board. This Khamenei cannot afford, because no one can say where it would end. So if there ever is a “big deal”, expect a very harsh crackdown on a range of behaviors the mullahs do not like. The basij will go wild bashing heads. If you think the regime violates human rights (as we understand them) now—and of course it does—just wait.And there is even more. What would as much as $150 billion in unfrozen assets pouring into Iran do to that economy and society? One has to wonder if the mullahs understand the real reason the Shah fell. The Shah was a victim of his own success, and that of his father before him. The White Revolution basically worked. The clergy was dispossessed of its vast land holdings, along with significant land reform. Women were given the right to vote, an episode, in 1964, that catalyzed Ruhollah Khomeini’s first arrest. But when the money rushed in after the doubling of oil prices in 1974—a development that the Shah himself engineered more than any Arabs—it spawned massive corruption and social dislocation. Iran experienced a sudden overdose of Schumpeterean “creative destruction”, and one of the victims in the path of destruction was the regime, when the political system couldn’t or didn’t keep up with the pace of social change. If Khamenei understood this, the last thing he would want is $150 billion rushing into the arms of a pent-up, socially explosive Iranian political economy.In short, there are very good reasons outside the four corners of a prospective deal for the Iranian leadership to walk away. I still think that’s the most likely outcome, despite the fact that most experienced observers, a lot of them far wiser than me, disagree. Maybe they are right, because what Iranian leaders would get from a “big deal” isn’t insignificant. That would include the tacit but still very loud blessing of the United States on Iran’s becoming a threshold nuclear power. That is no small symbol. They would get a lot of money, and they would be fully open for business—not that the sanctions regime has not been quite leaky anyway, especially lately. They may think that they would become more popular among younger cohorts, siphoning off discontent with largesse. And perhaps above all, they would be consummate wedge drivers, giving their Sunni Arab adversaries multiple laundry problems. Certainly there would be money aplenty left over to feed the Assad regime, Hizballah, the Houthis, Shi‘a cells in Bahrain, and so on. At the very least, even if the Iranians did no more mischief than they are already doing, they would confirm the worst fears of America’s longstanding Arab allies, and Israel too: The Americans don’t care about you and won’t come to your aid if you get in trouble.There is a case to be made that the Iranians are acting foolishly in the region, that they are overextending themselves in a dangerous way, lured by Arab weakness and religious fantasies of the return of the Mahdi. Using Shi‘a militias to contain or defeat ISIS will never work; it’s more like fanning an already red-hot fire. ISIS poses a vastly more serious threat to Iran than it does to virtually any other country.And there are, again in my view, real limits to how strong Iran can ever be in the Arab world. There are anti-Shi‘a antibodies aplenty, and there are even more anti-Persian antibodies. We are not going to see a re-run of the Achaemenid, Sassanid, or Safavid empires, even despite the advanced level of dysfunction and institutional decay in an Arab world that today is just waiting to be plundered. The Iranians can raise hell and cause a lot of trouble temporarily, but chances are they will exhaust and deplete themselves trying to do more than reality will allow. But if, as an ego-wounded civilization, they think otherwise, let the Iranians screw the pooch on their own.I don’t know how the Iranian leadership sees all of these issues and problems. I don’t know for sure if, in the inner sanctum, there is realistic debate about these things. I do know that religion-addled fantasist leaderships are capable of making historic blunders. So much for the Iranians. What is President Obama et al. thinking? It would be nice to actually know the answer, and a lot of observers think they do. But to me what’s going on in the presidential mind is almost as mysterious as what’s going on in Ayatollah Khamenei’s mind.Now, let us dismiss out of hand the favorite conspiracy theories of the “birthers” and other American fantasists. No, the President is not a secret Muslim. No, the President is not an anti-Semite. No, the President is not secretly helping Iran get the bomb, because that would cut the Israelis down to size and enable Iran to police the region on our behalf. People who believe and say such things no doubt believe and say lots of other nutcase things, too. So what?No, the real mystery—to me at least—is how (or if, and the extent to which) the President thinks strategically about the region, and its relationship to the rest of the world. If the President has, and has long had, a genuine strategy—revisionist and close-held in character, but real and consistent all the same—that’s one thing. But if instead he has merely nursed certain impulses and convictions, but has never really melded them all into an overarching policy architecture, that’s something else again. If the former, there is a template that drives decisions downward. If the latter, then this way-too-White-House-centric foreign policy is basically a fire brigade, reacting to crises seen more or less as one-offs, with dots connected only episodically between the parts. Or maybe, as time has passed, we have something in between.Why is this relevant to the Iran negotiations? Because if the President’s foreign policy is strategic, coherent, and top-down in nature, then a normalization with Iran, midwifed by a nuclear agreement, probably plays a very large role in his thinking, and could explain why he wants a deal almost at any price. So, anyway, some very serious Obama critics argue. If, on the other hand, the President does not connect lots of dots, then these negotiations, while undeniably important, do not necessarily make or break the larger policy as a whole, such as it is. We can still “pivot” to Asia with or without an Iran deal. We can operate policy with respect to Europe, Ukraine, and Russia with or without a deal. We can double down on Israeli-Palestinian peace process talks with or without a deal, and so on. So which is it?If there is a coherent strategy, what does it look like? Well, in brief, it goes something like this, according to the common anti-Obama hymnal. The President thinks that the United States is overcommitted as a result of Cold War habit, and that we are neither necessary to nor can afford the world-order-provider role we have been playing since World War II. Big countries oppose us, in part, because we have allies whom they don’t like. So if we just back off, put more blue sky between ourselves and our allies, and generously “engage” our adversaries, we’ll be able to work out new arrangements that stabilize various regions and, cumulatively, the world as a whole. That will free up a lot of money for the necessary “nation-building at home,” which, in the President’s mind, includes some fairly vast big-government redistribution schemes in search of historic social justice.When it comes to the Middle East, this means that alliances inherited from the Cold War era are not seen as assets or vital interests, but impediments to a safer and more cost-effective foreign policy. It means that if we stop pandering to Saudis and Israelis, the Iranians will stop worrying about American-sponsored regime change and make deals with us, since they’ll see much less of a need for a nuclear deterrent to fob off U.S. expeditionary campaigns. That said, apocalyptical terrorism and WMD proliferation are serious problems—and the conjoining of the two especially so. These are America’s only really vital interests in the region in the post-Cold War era. So if a deal with Iran can head off these threats, then almost any set of concessions is worth making to achieve that. The President and other Administration spokesmen have said many times that the worst possible future for the region is a mousetrap-proliferation scenario, the seed for which would be an Iranian breakout. They are not believers in “living with” an Iranian nuclear capability via deterrence, and that, it has to be said, is a major point to their credit. Prevent that capability from coming into being, and everything else will be less-than-vital as a threat.Never mind for the moment that the way the Administration has pursued this goal—by delinking Iranian regional behavior from the nuclear talks and seeming almost to relish pissing off the Israelis and the Saudis—has by now made the mousetrap-proliferation scenario much more likely, whatever happens around the negotiating table. At issue here is not the ambient effects of this strategy, but whether it actually exists.It’s not hard to find evidence for the view that it does. One can go through the President’s speeches and find all sorts of hints about Cold-War legacy obligations that are obsolete, about the desirability of engaging adversaries from a position of strength, and so forth. One can argue that the Administration’s passivity in the Syrian crisis is tied to an unwillingness to irritate Iran. The case can be, or can be made to seem, quite strong. But is it right?When I ask people who have worked in the Obama White House, fairly high in the NSC structure, they all say the same thing: crisis management, one-offs mainly, no coherent top-down strategy. If there is someone with a full-bore strategic mindset, however impoverished, it’s not the President, it’s Ben Rhodes, the Deputy NSC Advisor and former chief speechwriter. But unless one assumes that Rhodes is actually running U.S. foreign policy for Barack Obama, and thus giving us in essence Lee Hamilton’s foreign policy, the not-exactly-a-strategy option wins in my mind. That doesn’t mean there is no sub-strategy regarding Iran: I think there is, and it’s based on the aforementioned view that Iranian nukes need to be prevented, one way or another, not deterred.I suppose maybe, when all is said and done, when all the memoirs are written and the FRUS is opened up, we’ll know the answer to the strategy question. But right now we don’t really know for sure, and we need to take into consideration that intellectuals have a tendency to see coherence and tight, right-angled patterns where they don’t actually exist.So how is all this going to turn out? Will there be a big deal, if not next week than next month or in the autumn? Nobody really knows. Is the President prepared to give away the store because he thinks no set of concessions can really undermine our ultimate trump: force if need be? Would he actually use force if the Iranians rushed to the goal line before he leaves the White House in January 2017? And perhaps more important, do the Iranians believe he would? Nobody really knows. Would dumping $150 billion into the Iranian economy be a boon for anti-Sunni destabilization, or would it lure Iran into disastrous overextension? Nobody really knows. Could we, in due course, use military force to throw back the problem several years if we have to, and would that be the best of all options at the time? We could, sure, but no one can possibly see that far ahead to know whether it would be the best option. Would Israel act before us, if its leaders doubted our verve? Could be, but no one knows that for sure either.Dear readers, there are a lot of people out there who claim to know the unknowable, understand the contingent, and be able to read the minds of people like Khamenei and Obama. I am not one of them. I wish I were half as certain about anything as many people claim to be absolutely certain about everything. Oh, these damned negotiations: What a long, strange trip it’s been.

The Case for Ending the US Oil Export Ban Weakens

The global oil market is nothing if not liquid. More than most any other commodity, crude has the remarkable distinction of fetching a similar price in virtually any region of the globe, the product of decades of work to build the most efficient system for suppliers to meet demand, regardless of geography. Prior to 2011, that held true here in the United States. The regional benchmark for America—the West Texas Intermediate (WTI)—tracked closely with Europe’s Brent benchmark, the most frequently used indicator for global prices. But four years ago, those two benchmarks diverged as burgeoning American production outstripped our pipeline capacity to bring shale-wrought oil to Gulf refineries. That bottleneck meant more oil in storage, and the resultant glut depressed the WTI significantly as compared to the Brent benchmark.

The U.S. doesn’t export unrefined crude thanks to a ban enacted during the days of the 1970s oil embargo, but the gap between the WTI and Brent was commonly cited as evidence that it’s high time to reconsider that ban. Such a market distortion was, critics of the ban argued, a blemish on America’s reputation as a leading proponent of free trade. Moreover, cheaper domestic prices hacked away at the margins of U.S. shale producers, a concern that’s only grown over the past year as the global market has taken a nose dive.

But lately the WTI and Brent crude benchmarks are more in sync as the gap has shrunk from double digits three months ago to less than $6 per barrel today. As the FT reports, this shrinking gap between Brent and WTI means that crude is trading at less of a discount stateside as compared to the rest of the world, and that’s knock against the argument for ending the export ban. A source quoted in the FT put it this way: “The lack of a domestic crude oil discount has the natural effect of defusing the political urgency of lawmakers or the administration having to do something to help producers.” 

This is far from a cut and dry issue, and it’s certainly a politically contentious one. Readers interested in a nuanced and creative approach to the subject would do well to read Arthur Herman’s excellent recent essay in which he advocates for the U.S. to roll back the ban strategically through bilateral supply agreements with our allies in order to “husband and exploit” the extraordinary strategic advantage shale production has provided us.

The Case For Ending the US Oil Export Ban Weakens

The global oil market is nothing if not liquid. More than most any other commodity, crude has the remarkable distinction of fetching a similar price in virtually any region of the globe, the product of decades of work to build the most efficient system for suppliers to meet demand, regardless of geography. Prior to 2011, that held true here in the United States. The regional benchmark for America—the West Texas Intermediate (WTI)—tracked closely with Europe’s Brent benchmark, the most frequently used indicator for global prices. But four years ago, those two benchmarks diverged as burgeoning American production outstripped our pipeline capacity to bring shale-wrought oil to Gulf refineries. That bottleneck meant more oil in storage, and the resultant glut depressed the WTI significantly as compared to the Brent benchmark.

The U.S. doesn’t export unrefined crude thanks to a ban enacted during the days of the 1970s oil embargo, but the gap between the WTI and Brent was commonly cited as evidence that it’s high time to reconsider that ban. Such a market distortion was, critics of the ban argued, a blemish on America’s reputation as a leading proponent of free trade. Moreover, cheaper domestic prices hacked away at the margins of U.S. shale producers, a concern that’s only grown over the past year as the global market has taken a nose dive.

But lately the WTI and Brent crude benchmarks are more in sync as the gap has shrunk from double digits three months ago to less than $6 per barrel today. As the FT reports, this shrinking gap between Brent and WTI means that crude is trading at less of a discount stateside as compared to the rest of the world, and that’s knock against the argument for ending the export ban. A source quoted in the FT put it this way: “The lack of a domestic crude oil discount has the natural effect of defusing the political urgency of lawmakers or the administration having to do something to help producers.” 

This is far from a cut and dry issue, and it’s certainly a politically contentious one. Readers interested in a nuanced and creative approach to the subject would do well to read Arthur Herman’s excellent recent essay in which he advocates for the U.S. to roll back the ban strategically through bilateral supply agreements with our allies in order to “husband and exploit” the extraordinary strategic advantage shale production has provided us.

Will Rejection Turn the Greeks Hard Left?

Greece officially applied for a three-year loan from the European Stability Mechanism yesterday, and has until the end of today to submit a detailed reform proposal. If the proposal is approved by “the troika” of creditors (the European Central Bank, the IMF, and the European Commission), it would trigger a further meeting of European leaders over the weekend where Greece’s ultimate fate would be decided.

Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, however, appeared to pour cold water on the proposal clearing that first hurdle, saying that “this time it’s really difficult.” Christine Lagarde of the IMF also sounded a note of caution, insisting that any deal will have to include debt restructuring for Greece—something that Germany and several Eastern European countries may find difficult to swallow. As for the Eastern Europeans, many just don’t trust the Greeks to follow through: “It is one thing to put a plan on the table, but implementation is something else. Why should people believe that the new [Greek] proposal will be for real?” the Latvian central bank governor said.Leaks in the Greek press, however, indicate that the proposal is significant: real cuts to sweetheart pensions and noteworthy tax raises appear to be on the table. And the fact that the far left wing of Syriza has started protesting loudly backs the leaks up, and suggests that Greek Prime Minsiter Alexis Tsipras is facing a revolt in his party by pushing the deal through.The deal has the support of Greece’s other parties, so it ought to pass the Greek parliament, if it comes to a vote. It’s a big if, however. If the deal is rejected by the Europeans, Tsipras will no doubt fall back on the more radical elements of his coalition, who are calling for measures such as the nationalization of banks, control of mass media, and the takeovers of major businesses. There are people in Syriza who want a forced exit from the euro; the hard left sees a serious economic crisis as an opportunity to build the kind of Venezuelan mess that communists somehow confuse with social progress.It’s not looking good for Greece these days. More and more Europeans believe that the country simply can’t implement the kinds of changes that would make its continued presence in the eurozone possible. They could well be right. But more and more people in Greece are so angry and so desperate that genuinely radical consequences of a Grexit cannot be ruled out.The root problem, as always, isn’t cold-hearted Germans or lazy Greeks. It is a monetary union that doesn’t fit the realities of European life, and the inability of Europe’s institutions to reform it.

One Nation, Under the Influence

“Spirited Republic: Alcohol in American History,” on exhibit at the National Archives through January 10, is a lot like a 2 a.m. barroom yarn: rambling, studded with odd and fascinating moments, but lacking the one thing that might make it all make sense.

The show is partly sponsored by the History Channel (which contributed some poorly-contextualized video clips) and the booze industry. It begins with an impressive reproduction of one of George Washington’s own stills. At the entrance to the show we get a reminder of just how sloshy the American past could be: Gallon jugs filled with water show how much “absolute alcohol” the average American drank per year at times ranging from 1830 to the late 1970s. In 1830 the average American drank 7.1 gallons of alcohol, almost all of that beer. We’ve never gotten nearly that boozy again, hovering between two and four gallons ever since, but we remain beery: Only in 1860, one of our least-sozzled years, do we approach a half-and-half split between beer and hard liquor.“Spirited Republic” is organized mostly-chronologically. The opening sections make creative use of the archival material to tell the story of alcohol’s role in early American civic history: A reproduction of George Caleb Bingham’s 1852 painting “The County Election” shows drunk men nodding off at the polls while a swing voter asks for a bribe; a medical dispensary’s records show the brandy, wine, and whiskey prescribed to soldiers.This show is a strangely official, utilitarian history of the world’s most beloved intoxicant. The benefits of alcohol explored in it are largely commercial and medical or quasi-medical. Alcohol pacified and motivated the troops, from the Founding through World War II. A 1780 petition from a man who rejoiced in the name of Gossinus Eketens asked the Continental Congress to provide the army with whiskey. Alcohol taxes fueled the new government—the Whiskey Rebellion gets a short and neutral depiction, with a letter from George Washington ordering strict prosecution of the rebellious farmers—and the show includes two letters from distillers asking for governmental help in opening up foreign markets for trade. (How does Kentucky liquor get to Oman and Samoa? This show answered a question I never thought to ask.)There are occasional sentimental appeals, mostly in the context of commercial or military success. The lovely 1864 label for “Simon Crow’s Pure White Wheat Whiskey” shows a pastoral scene of drinking in celebration of the harvest. And toward the show’s entrance there’s a striking black and white photograph of upstate New York champagne makers in 1906. Tippling men smile at the camera, some triumphant and others a bit dreamy; one man’s wedding ring gleams on his work-roughened hand as he watches his companion pour out for him. In the World War II section we get an ad depicting a soldier’s home-front fantasy: Our man lazes in his hammock as blonde beauty Hazel nuzzles him with a wildflower—while matching glasses of beer await them on a table in the background.Alcohol’s role as social lubricant makes it especially useful for Americans, with our national culture of universal and generic friendliness. A little booze makes a man a diplomat, and one of the most charming sections of “Spirited Republic” honors alcohol’s role in political alliance. We see a wooden beer cask topped with a tippling Cossack, a gift from a Russian mayor to Bill Clinton; there’s a History Channel video loop showing U.S. presidents toasting the Shah and the people of Iran (!), Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, and more.If the benefits of alcohol depicted in this show are largely economic and medical, with a sideline in social ease, the drawbacks of overdoing it are medical and moral. Concern about chronic drunkenness emerged early in our history.The show includes a reproduction of “A Moral and Physical Thermometer,” composed in the 1780s by signer of the Declaration Dr. Benjamin Rush. Drinking things like water, milk, or small beer would lead to “Serenity of Mind, Reputation, Long Life, and Happiness.” If you turned to cider, wine, or strong beer you could attain “Cheerfulness, Strength and Nourishment,” though only if you drank in moderation. The harder stuff would lead to vices such as “idleness, gaming, horse-racing,” as well as medical consequences like hand tremors and “puking.” Eventually you could end up stealing, perjuring yourself, or murdering; with epilepsy or dropsy; in madness or despair. The thermometer presented a linear progression: “Debt. Jail. …Hospital or Poorhouse.” And, at last, the gallows.This model, with only minor tweaks to reflect changing moral fashions, holds true throughout the rest of the show. The assumption is that everyone wants to drink enough to be cheery and healthy, but no more than that. Medical, moral, and legal discourses interweave seamlessly.A caption notes that temperance activists argued that men’s drinking “left women and children without financial support and promoted domestic violence, prostitution, venereal disease, and political corruption.” The tragedy of Prohibition—which illustrates the essential conservative insight into human weakness, our endless ability to fix a bad situation into a worse one—is that all of this was true. (The myth that Prohibition led to an increase in American drinking took hold so early that “Spirited Republic” shows John D. Rockefeller, Jr. retailing the falsehood even as he switches sides to support the 21st Amendment. The Archives note in a wall caption that Prohibition in fact reduced drinking.) Temperance activists even claimed that banning booze would reduce the prison population, by reducing crime overall. It turns out that locking up husbands and fathers did not make family life secure; tightening regulation rarely reduces political corruption; and making popular pleasures illegal didn’t empty the prisons.The show’s penultimate section focuses on a more effective counterweight to alcoholism: the recovery movement, which in this show (as in mainstream American culture) is represented exclusively by Alcoholics Anonymous. There’s a serenity medallion from the Betty Ford Center, which was given to Mrs. Ford herself upon the Center’s opening. There’s a letter to Mrs. Ford from Johnny Cash, in which the great man writes in poignantly plain therapy-speak: “I have been in recovery now for two weeks since I completed treatment….My love to the staff. I look forward to coming back next Christmas for my first birthday cake. Respectfully, Johnny Cash.”The Archives has offered a love letter to AA (“still the most popular treatment organization in the world”), including a very by-the-Big-Book explanation of the tradition of anonymity that sits oddly next to the ads and letters of Mrs. Ford and Mr. Cash. The curators may not have found much material on the most countercultural aspects of AA, such as spiritual surrender. Even the explanation of anonymity echoes the group’s language of placing “principles before personalities,” but doesn’t mention that anonymity also offers members practice in humility. As for people who haven’t chosen AA—I know the show is constrained by what it can actually dig up from its archives, but it was a bit odd that there was no mention of the presidential sobriety of George W. Bush.“Spirited Republic” is enjoyable and imaginative: the Prohibition-era ads for “free samples” from a winery; the capsule biographies of government agents, including a lady who pretended to faint outside a bar so she could arrest the Good Samaritan who revived her with whiskey; the model Drunkometer, a predecessor of the Breathalyzer and a surprisingly respectable contraption despite its name; the gorgeous Art Deco cocktail shaker owned by Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the caption describing the after-work parties he held throughout Prohibition—which “Eleanor, whose father and brother were alcoholics, rarely attended.” There are photos of prohibitionist slogans (LAW BREAKERS MUST NOT BE LAWMAKERS) and “Last Call” ads outside 1919 liquor stores.A black-and-white TV ad lays out the conventional wisdom most clearly: “There’s something about a drink that’s warm and cheerful,” that classic fatherly voice of the 1950s declares. “But there’s something about too many drinks that’s mean and ugly. Diluting the alcohol and spacing out your drinks are useful if you want to keep your drinking social and under control.”It’s a practical ad offering a technique for social success. What it won’t ever tell you is why so many people don’t care. Why doesn’t everybody just “keep their drinking social and under control”? In order to understand alcohol—and to represent its history honestly—you have to admit that people don’t just like drinking. They like getting drunk. Whether for relief after trauma, emotional release, or escape from the shackles of the self, human beings often prefer ecstasy to happiness, drunkenness to rationality, and danger to serenity.

For Modi, a Return to the Bad Old Days?

There’s a reason we’ve been following Narendra Modi’s prime ministership of a year and change closely. With India’s economy poised to start living up to its huge growth potential at a moment of great geopolitical ferment, a lot depends on how he steers the ship.

Modi’s two big projects, indeed the two things his political identity rests on, are a liberal economic reform agenda and the zealous Hindu nationalism that earned him condemnation when he was governor of his home state of Gujarat. Clearly, given his campaign’s success, this combination appeals to a critical mass of Indians.But while Modi has made some great strides in foreign policy and enjoys a warm rapport with several key world leaders, his two incarnations, Modi the reformer and Modi the nationalist, are sometimes at odds. Exhibit A: Even as he entreats foreigners to do business in India, Modi has been cracking down on NGOs, most notably the Ford Foundation. According to the foundation, it’s because he carries a grudge against the human rights groups for contending that he neglected and possibly even exacerbated Hindu violence during the 2002 riots in Gujarat. Now some claim he’s using the crackdown as a cover to go after critics, especially those close to the foundation. Reuters reports:

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) registered a case on Wednesday against a prominent critic of the prime minister for accepting foreign funds, amid concerns that overseas charities are interfering in the country’s domestic affairs.

An official at the CBI said Teesta Setalvad faces charges of fraud, misappropriation of funds and violation of the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act. […]A home ministry official said an investigation by government auditors revealed her non-governmental organisation, Sabrang Trust, was accepting funds from the U.S.-based Ford Foundation without government permission. […]Since the start of the year, the government has cancelled the registration of nearly 9,000 charities for failing to declare details of donations from overseas.Critics have argued that the government’s crackdown is an attempt to stifle the voices of those who oppose Modi’s agenda.

The move against foreign NGOs closely mirrors recent moves by both China and Russia. That has some commentators fretting that Modi is not as liberal as one might hope. For our part, those fears are cause for (cautious) alarm about where his Hindu Nationalist side will lead the country. Majoritarian nationalism in the leadership of a multiethnic, multiconfessional state like India is, after all, a divisive and dangerous thing. India’s minorities, primarily its 180 million Muslims, have every reason to be concerned.

So we have a dilemma. Modi the economic liberal is trying to build the institutions India needs to compete in the 21st century, while some of his domestic policies on matters of ethnicity and religious practice lead down a road more redolent of the 19th. If he chooses the latter, he may end up being, as we’ve worried in the past, the next Erdogan—an apparently liberal friend of the West who ends up becoming much less tolerant once it’s safe to let the mask slip.It’s much too early to know, and we dearly hope the people who think Modi is an authoritarian-in-waiting are just chasing shadows. But it’s something to watch out for, especially as his economic agenda runs into all sorts of difficulties.

The Great Green Promise of the Driverless Car

Being whisked from point A to point B in a robot-chauffeured vehicle has some obvious attractions: one can imagine reading, chatting, working, or even sleeping during the daily commute. Alternatively, picture retiring for the night in a sleeper car in one city, and waking up well-rested at your destination hundreds of miles away. Then too are the safety benefits sure to come from replacing the most unreliable part of the car—the driver—with a networked computer capable of syncing its speed with its fellow vehicles on the highway. The technology threatens to make a fundamental part of the modern human experience so much smarter, which, as Popular Science reports, could also yield extraordinary green benefits:

If a fleet of autonomous electric taxis were to replace everyone’s gas-powered, personal cars, we could see more than a 90 percent decrease in greenhouse gas emissions and almost 100 percent decrease in oil consumption from cars, all while saving money in the long run. Right now that may seem like a long shot, but a study earlier this year said that 44 percent of Americans would consider buying a driverless car in the next 10 years, even if it would cost $5,000 more. […]

A fleet about 15 percent of the size of all private cars could service the same population, if scheduled correctly, estimated Greenblatt. But the real savings would be found in the operating cost. Even when estimating that an electric, driverless car would cost $150,000 up front, researchers say that a car that could drive 24/7, not require a salary and use no gasoline would pay for itself before five years. The paper says that price will drop drastically, citing an IHS study that says autonomy will only add around $5,000 to a car’s current sticker price by 2030.

The idea behind the green potential of driverless cars can be distilled to this: today, most cars spend most of their lifetimes parked somewhere, waiting to be used for that commute or errand. Driverless cars could shake up the entire car ownership paradigm by allowing people to access cars on demand. Replacing the gas-powered fleet that crowds today’s streets with one composed of electric vehicles would further reduce emissions.

Of course, electric cars have so far failed to live up to the hefty expectations piled atop them by greens selling their utopian future, in large part thanks to their limited battery lives. The driverless green dream will rely on advances in storage technology and the build-out of charging infrastructure just as much as it will need the onboard systems that will actually be maneuvering these vehicles.We’re not there yet, but as the pace of technological change accelerates, we may be closer than you think. Uber has managed to upend the taxi industry with a simple on-demand app system. Imagine the disruption a driverless car revolution might bring.