Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 645

Spies, Lies, and the Power of Truth

“Where secrecy or mystery begins is where vice and roguery are not far off.”

—Samuel Johnson

Inside the old Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) building in Prague—the edifice once home to the Czechoslovak communist parliament—one cannot escape the feeling of tragedy and intrigue. Outside on the sidewalk just across the street atop Wenceslas Square there’s a plaque remembering Jan Palach, the Charles University student who lit himself afire in January 1969 as protest against the end of the Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. Fury was bottled up. Two months after Palach’s self-immolation, when their national ice hockey team defeated their Soviet counterparts in the World Ice Hockey Championships, elated Czechs—by some estimates as many as 150,000 people—exploded into Wenceslas Square to celebrate. That was, until a group of secret police agents provoked an attack on the local Soviet Aeroflot office, giving authorities pretext for crackdown and reprisals.There were a thousand forms of push and pushback between rulers and ruled in those days. I recall a visit to Prague in the mid-1980s when, apparently spontaneously, Prague citizens crossing the city’s iconic square began to place bouquets of flowers at the steps of the statue of King Wenceslas. The symbolism of their act did not go unnoticed. According to legend, the patron saint of the Czechs maintained an army of knights hidden inside a mountain ready to be awakened to fight for the Czech people in times of extreme danger. The flowers kept piling up, until communist officials removed them and placed a fence around the monument.I had occasion recently to be in the old RFE/RL building where I chaired a panel as part of a program commemorating RFE/RL’s move from Munich to Prague twenty years ago. It was at that time that a grateful Czech President Vaclav Havel gave the former communist parliament to the United States for use as the broadcaster’s headquarters. The playwright and dissident turned statesman, who credited the Congressionally funded media group for helping to end communism, charged the Americans a dollar a year for rent.In the 1990s, in this ponderous, plodding structure—an example of Czech “brutalist architecture” designed by Karl Prager in the early 1970s—RFE/RL adapted quickly. New Home. New technologies. New tyrannies to battle. Broadcasts, web, video and social media were soon rolled out to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran. And just as before, the tyrants pushed back. The Iranian regime surveilled Iranian journalists working in Prague for Radio Farda, the company’s Persian service. The Taliban threatened RFE/RL journalists in Afghanistan (the company maintains a bureau in Kabul and stringers in all of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces). Saddam Hussein pondered harsher measures. A year before 9/11, the Iraqi dictator ordered an attack on RFE/RL headquarters. Baghdad’s agents were prepared to use rocket propelled grenades, Kalashnikov rifles, and submachine guns in an assault launched from the window of a nearby apartment at Wenceslas Square rented as an office for a fake company. Czech police foiled the plot. But security concerns eventually forced RFE/RL to vacate its Wenceslas Square address.Not that the new, high security digs—the company moved to a location on the outskirts of Prague in 2009—ended all manner of harassment and danger. Recently, two individuals, on separate occasions, managed to sneak into the headquarters, surreptitiously recording footage used by Russian television programs in a smear of RFE/RL. The Russians never did play by Marquess of Queensberry Rules. Outside the old building in July 1997, a Latvian-born Russian language broadcaster was murdered—shot in the head at close range by an unidentified assailant—as she made her way to work through a deserted underpass by the State Opera, next to the RFE/RL building and Wenceslas Square. Molly Gordin’s case was never solved. In April 20, 2009, an ex-RFE/RL Georgian journalist still living in Prague—a former dissident who had spent five years in a Soviet labor camp in the 1980s—went out on foot one night from his apartment to buy cigarettes. Tengiz Gudava never returned. His body was found a twenty-minute drive away from his home in a secluded area. Czech police ruled the death a hit and run accident.RFE/RL is marinated in history, some of it dark and bloody. A good portion of it is relevant today as we think about how to respond to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s propaganda war. Here are four points to keep in mind:First, security. It’s paramount that journalists working for any part of U.S. international broadcasting—this includes Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcast Network—be well protected. RFE/RL headquarters in Munich was bombed in February 1981 by a group directed by the infamous terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal. A site like RFE/RL today may actually provide a more enticing target for a variety of villains than a U.S. Embassy, as the media organization’s hundreds of employees are mostly journalists/civil-society activists working for change in their home countries. In times like these, actors of dubious background and motive are likely to cozy up to groups like RFE/RL. Beware of posers, impostors, and front companies that seek links to U.S. international broadcasting. Some will pose security risks. Vetting and due diligence are as important as ever. Nor can concern about safety be confined to the physical integrity of a headquarters or bureau. In Baku, the 38-year-old RFE/RL journalist Khadija Ismayilova—awarded in New York this year PEN’s Freedom to Write Award—has been imprisoned by Azerbaijani authorities for her reporting since December. She now faces up to 12 years behind bars on trumped up charges. Sadly, American efforts to free Khadija have been conspicuously feeble. Some speculate oil and a robust Washington lobby stand in the way. Whatever the reason, U.S. passivity sends a ghastly message to American-sponsored journalists, as well as to would be jailers and jihadists. If the United States is to fund people like Ismayilova, it must be prepared to fight for them with full diplomatic weight when they land in trouble for doing their job.Second, purpose. U.S. international broadcasting is mission-driven. Times and technologies change, but the mission still comprises three chief goals: “to tell America’s story”; to explain American foreign policy goals; and to provide accurate and reliable news and responsible discussion to countries that either do not have free and independent media, or where decent, independent media do not yet properly exist (the third goal being the remit of “surrogate broadcasting” and the main focus of RFE/RL’s and Radio Free Asia’s work). None of this should be mistaken for “propaganda.” The cheesy sounding line about “telling America’s story”—traditionally the main purview of Voice of America—can and should be carried out with journalistic skill, intellectual honestly, and creativity. Informing the world about America—and, no, CNN, Twitter, and travel don’t do the trick—remains an important goal. Take the violence and tragedy that engulfed Ferguson and Baltimore recently. Police brutality is part of that story. Other aspects of the problem have emerged as well, including the growth of an African-American underclass, competition for jobs between poorly educated blacks and Latino immigrants, problems with our educational system and imperfections in our legal system. Why not share with international audiences something about how our grand juries work? Or how police forces in the U.S. are organized and trained? (Do even Americans know that there are some 18,000 jurisdictions in the United States?) Or how racial attitudes in the U.S. have evolved, yet remain exceptionally complex? Through intelligent reporting we can try to make a dent in the appalling simplifications and stereotypes about the United States prevalent in far too places across the globe. At home, our strength has always been our ability to self-correct. Abroad we’re at our best when we tell the truth, warts and all.Third, transparency—and credibility. Radio Free Europe was established in 1949 as a covert operation of the CIA. Its programming was jointly decided by the CIA, State Department, and RFE staff until Congress took over funding in 1972, and the media organization, while still moored to broad U.S. foreign policy objectives, became journalistically independent. Let’s keep it that way. It works. There’s talk today in some Washington circles of “alternative branding” for special initiatives (aka concealing from foreign audiences the true source of U.S. international broadcasting content); or of psy ops as a method to counter Putin’s propaganda. Some will even be tempted to set up our own versions of Russian troll factories. These are ghastly ideas, each and every one in its own right. Credibility is vital. And while we must employ the full range of technology at our disposal, it’s also critical that we never forget the difference between means and ends. Content is still king. You can’t win hearts and minds in 140 characters or less.Nor can you win hearts and minds overnight.Finally, we need patience. Putin’s has scored some early propaganda successes; his television station RT seems to be effective in promoting anti-Americanism around the world, and other outlets seem to be making progress in manipulating ethnic Russian populations in Russia’s “near abroad.” These apparent wins tempt us to look for short-term fixes. “We must answer Russian propaganda,” chants a growing chorus! But you’ll never beat RT by imitating RT (as one RFE/RL journalist puts it to me). What we need instead is clarity in projecting our own values, in advancing our own narratives, in telling our own story, and forcing Putin back on his heels. Putin’s brazen surplus in self-confidence must not be allowed to mask—neither for us nor for the Russian people—the manifold failings of the current Russian system and state. The future does not belong to this Russia. Speaking of which, let’s not overlook the role that parody and satire can play in all this. RFE/RL did this masterfully in the past.The latest from over there? A crackdown on yoga. Perhaps, asks a friend of mine, Russian authorities fear its practice will turn Russians into homosexuals?

Walker’s Higher Ed Cuts Take Effect

In February, Republican presidential candidate and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker proposed massive cuts to the University’s budget, and, as the AP reports, the lion’s share of them are now coming through:

The University of Wisconsin’s flagship campus in Madison will likely take a nearly $59 million hit this budget year to help reduce the state budget deficit, according to system documents released Monday.

The system’s 2015-2016 spending plan shows UW-Milwaukee would get an $18 million cut, while the remaining 11 four-year campuses will see cuts ranging from $851,000 at UW-Superior to $7.7 million at UW-Eau Claire.

The cuts total $140.6 million for the current budget year that started July 1, with the Board of Regents expected to approve the budget Thursday. The system needs to cut a total of $250 million for the two-year budget.

According to the AP, priorities for the cuts “include layoffs, program cuts, and downsizing and streamlining administrative and academic work.” Walker’s march through the academy will likely serve him well, especially with the GOP base. State budgets around the country are squeezed, and the public isn’t disposed to be convinced by proliferating armies of administrators and cadres of social science professors that there’s no room to make cuts to their institutions’ budgets. In particular, streamlining university administration is likely to be welcomed; administrative bloat is widely perceived to be wasteful and costly.

The existing university model is due for a massive overhaul, and public universities in GOP-controlled states are likely to be the first place for changes to take hold. If Walker’s policy is seen as successful, expect the momentum behind higher ed reform to pick up.

From Russia, with Malice

Russian state media have found a smoking gun showing that Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) is at the head of a secret American cabal that’s colluding with Ukrainian PM Arseny Yatsenyuk to pull the strings on a puppet government in Kiev. And oddly, this Machiavellian mastermind doesn’t know his own title, and he has only a mediocre grasp of English grammar and syntax.

Well, it’s either that or else the Russian media will use anything at all, even a shoddy and obvious hoax, to discredit the West. Because, as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty notes, the usual Russian suspects are reporting on a letter purportedly from Durbin to Yatsenyuk from which we can draw no other conclusions:

The hoaxer wrote to Yatsenyuk on what appeared to be U.S. Senate stationery, claiming to be Senator Richard Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate and a leading American voice on Ukrainian issues who traveled to Kyiv recently to discuss Russian aggression, said Ben Marter, a spokesman for Durbin, on July 6.

Durbin’s office told the CIA and FBI about the letter after being contacted by Russian state-owned media asking for comment.The forged letter was on paper that resembled U.S. Senate stationery, but with Durbin’s title wrong.It suggested that Yatsenyuk “invest every effort” to keep some officials in place, including the agriculture minister and the head of the country’s nuclear monopoly. But it said the U.S. Senate feels some others do not have the qualities necessary for their jobs.“This letter is a forgery and was obviously written by somebody with a tenuous grasp of the English language,” Marter said.

The Kyiv Post has a nice article detailing which Russian officials and media agencies ran the story before it was debunked. It’s more than a handful.

This episode is laughable because the hoax was so incompetently perpetrated, but it points to a bigger picture. Russia has invested heavily in propaganda to make sure that people in places from Belarus to Hungary to New York City are inundated with lies, counternarratives, half-truths, and whatever else the Kremlin’s “political technologists” can come up with. In places like eastern Ukraine, a Russian speaker may never get news from an outlet that isn’t in Moscow’s control. This investment, sadly, pays dividends. Russia’s misinformation campaign is global, and it’s no joke.

The Rainbow Flag Flutters over the U.S. Supreme Court—Now What?

On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court of the United States, by a slim majority, declared that same-sex marriage was a fundamental human right. The decision was hailed by jubilant crowds as a historic victory for American democracy, while grim-faced opponents saw it as day of infamy, yet another usurpation of power by a handful of unelected judges. One can be certain that this will not be the end of the matter. At least in the near future it is likely to further polarize the political scene. My two daily breakfast companions, The New York Times and The Boston Globe, ran banner headlines of jubilance. I looked at the bottom of page one for an item in much smaller print—“Fierce naval battle between NATO and Russia in the Baltic Sea”. Not yet, not yet.

I find myself unable to enter enthusiastically into the celebration, but neither do I share the dismay on the other side. I have an informed guess that this ambivalence probably characterizes a large segment of the electorate (not that on other matters I occupy this much-invoked middle ground). However, precisely because my own view of this issue is far from idiosyncratic, I thought it might be useful if I spelled out why I come out as I do.I don’t remember when I first gave any thought to homosexuality. I was not ignorant of it. I think it was on my thirteenth birthday that my mother, concerned that I be well-informed for the coming years of tumultuous adolescence, gave me a book written for this demographic, a rather dry overview of the varieties of sexual experience. I was intrigued by the chapter on homosexuality, since I was already then intrigued by the diversity of human behavior, but that particular topic neither attracted nor repelled me. Ever since then, when it comes to sex, I have been endlessly fascinated by women. But I had a rather formative encounter with homosexuality in the mid-fifties, when I had my first full-time teaching job in North Carolina. There was a much-publicized criminal trial in town. I dropped in at the courthouse on the last day of the trial. The defendant was a married man from a prominent local family, who had been caught having sex with a teenage boy. It was a first offence, with no indication of coercion, and I recall that the boy was well over the state’s age of consent. There were many character witnesses, including clergy, but the judge dismissed these, saying in a rich Southern drawl that, in his mind, this was “a right-terrible crime”. He then sentenced the defendant to twenty to fifty years in prison. As the sentence was pronounced, I happened to see the face of the man’s mother who was in court. I never forgot my revulsion at this scene. Subsequently I had a number of much less dramatic experiences, with gays and lesbians whose personal lives exhibited open-mindedness and kindness.Over the years the topic of same-sex marriage sometimes came up in conversations with my wife Brigitte, whose area as a sociologist was family, marriage and children. We agreed from early on: We were convinced that the overriding state interest had to be the wellbeing of children rather than the sexual behavior of adults. We were also convinced that same-sex partnerships required legal protection (though we would prefer that the unnecessarily divisive term “marriage” not be used—which by now is probably a lost idea). But we were also impressed by Andrew Sullivan’s proposition that there is a conservative case to be made for the term “marriage”, as denoting the values of stability and loyalty (especially as against the streak of bohemian anarchy, which had been a feature of the male gay subculture—lesbians have been typically more inclined toward child-friendly domesticity). As the so-called LGBT community was dancing in the streets after the multicolored banner was hoisted by the Supreme Court, I was predisposed to applaud if not quite to join in (I am reluctant to join any collective ecstasy).Why this predisposition? We live in an age of victimology, especially in America. Everyone wants to claim the status of victim, especially if there are practical advantages to go with the status. (This has led to an ironic reversal: Instead of blacks passing as white, there are now whites trying to pass as black.) Three groups of people have started movements around such a victim claim: African-Americans through the civil rights movement, women through feminism, gays and lesbians through what has lately been called the LGBT movement. There are some similarities and some differences between the three, also in terms of the empirical plausibility of the claim.There can be no doubt about the claim of African-Americans: slavery and its racist aftermath constituted the most horrendous crimes committed in this country. Feminism in America has been overwhelmingly a movement of upper-middle-class women, probably the most privileged group of females in human history. Their claim to victimhood is absurd, obscenely so when in many countries even now women are sold as sex slaves, brutally abused even in their own families, and deprived of the most elementary civil rights. I will not go further into this here. But when it comes to homosexuality, there is a very real record of oppression and persecution in the United States until very recent times. Some years after my aforementioned experience with such persecution in North Carolina, I wrote about the myths concerning race and sex as two prime examples of dehumanizing social fictions which the insights of sociology can help to debunk. At that time I received a visit by an official of the Mattichine Society, an early organization advocating for gay rights (it had been founded in 1950); he came to tell me that my writing on this subject had moved and encouraged him. I was greatly pleased at the outbreak of the famous Stonewall Inn riots in 1969, when the patrons of a gay bar in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village (a few blocks from my office at the New School for Social Research) turned on the police that had been routinely harassing and blackmailing them. Some of the policemen were beaten up and thrown out. The incident caused sympathy demonstrations all over New York City and is considered as the birth event of the modern gay movement. One can say that the recent Supreme Court decision solemnly validates this movement. When all is said and done, the movement has been a step forward in the realization of the American democratic experiment.Why then my reluctance to participate in the ongoing victory party? (Apart, that is, from my deeply rooted fear that any wildly celebrating crowd could turn into a lynching party at the drop of a hat.) There is first of all the little matter of reality. Most political movements have a myth that doesn’t fully conform with empirical reality. Thus the movement for same-sex marriage assumes that there is no significant difference between a man and a woman setting up a household with the child that they themselves have brought into being, and two men or two women in a household without a child or with one that came to be without their collaboration. But that is a relatively minor matter (though probably not to many grandparents who are happy to see physical resemblances to themselves in a newly arrived infant). Of more immediate importance is the tendency of the gay movement to coerce assent from anyone critical of their agenda. Many of the critics do so out of religious conviction. That is why the issue of the so-called religious exemption is very important, and not only for those who have religious reasons for opposing same-sex marriage (or for that matter who consider all homosexual behavior to be sinful). The LGBT moral police has become vindictive, threatening all sorts of penalties (up to and including deprivation of a business license) against individuals refusing to provide goods or services to homosexual events. It seems to me that a society that allows a right of conscience to refuse military service (even in times of war) should be able to give the same right to a baker who will not bake a cake for a same-sex wedding reception, or to a photographer who will not make pictures of the event. The vindictiveness has not even shied away from accusing clergy of a “hate crime” for preaching that homosexuality is a sin (I strongly disagree with such sermons). I agree with the view that religious freedom is a fundamental human right, so important that it trumps many lesser rights (such as the right of a same-sex couple to insist that a baker licensed to serve the public must cater the couple’s wedding reception).It is interesting that the ontological assumptions of gay advocacy have changed radically since Stonewall Inn. At that time the budding gay movement had no interest in proposing that same-sex attraction was congenital. The Mattichine Society simply argued that every individual had the right to choose his or her sexual lifestyle. More recently the LGBT movement has proposed that sexual identity is not chosen but fated—a strange return to the Freudian notion that “biology is destiny”, which previously had been considered a reactionary ideology by all sexual liberation movements. (Feminists have followed this trajectory. I remember a conversation with an in-your-face feminist. She said to me: “I am just like you. But with an extra hole”. This was before some feminists began to engage in rituals celebrating menstrual blood.) Why this change? Could it be that the transgender caucus in the LGBT alliance has converted the other factions in the alliance to its biological ontology?Maybe so. But I think there is a simpler explanation: All the sexual liberation movements have wrapped themselves in the mantle of the successful civil rights movement. Therefore, sexual orientation must be like skin color—not chosen, but given at birth. What is being demanded now is, not for society to recognize what you have chosen to become, but what you already are. Speaking of reality, which anthropology is empirically correct: The prototypically American one of always re-inventing oneself? Or the biologism of the pessimist Viennese sage? Specifically, is sexual orientation a matter of socialization? Or is there really something like a gay gene? I don’t know. But I don’t see why this has to be an either/or question. Like so much else in society, it’s a question of frequency distribution: there probably are some who are “cradle gays”, and some who are converted to gayness.This blog is supposed to deal with religion, which figures prominently in the current debate over same-sex marriage. Survey data clearly indicate that public opinion in America has shifted toward approval of same-sex marriage, especially among younger people. Religious opposition has mainly come from two groups, conservative Catholics and Evangelical Protestants (Orthodox Jews and traditional Muslims, much smaller populations, have agreed). Of course these demographics are not monolithic; lay people don’t always follow their spokespersons. Still, Catholic and Evangelical leadership has been unanimous on this issue, and this matters. The Catholic position, while it also relies on Scripture and Christian tradition, makes heavy use of the idea of natural law, supposedly installed in every mind and accessible by ordinary reason (not dependent on revelation). Given the immense variety of sexual beliefs and practices among human cultures, I have some difficulty with this idea. Evangelicals mainly base their sexual morality on the Bible. Supposedly what they have in mind is that the Bible only permits marriage between one man and one woman living in a separate household with their offspring, which in fact describes the Western bourgeois family, an arrangement that is at most three-hundred years old. As far as the Hebrew Bible is concerned, you don’t have to read through the legal provisions about sex in Leviticus and Deuteronomy (uncomfortably similar to those of Islamic law) in order to realize that the “Biblical view of marriage” is not exactly what most conservative Americans have in mind. Just turn to the end of the Decalogue:In the last of the Ten Commandments, a man is instructed not to covet his “neighbor’s house, wife, slaves, domestic animals, or anything that is his” (my italics). Jesus provided wine for the marriage in Cana and freed a woman about to be stoned for adultery, he did say that marriage is to be permanent and that it is not practiced in the hereafter). The Apostle Paul said that “it is better to marry than to burn”—hardly a ringing endorsement.I’ll leave it to Catholics to show that my skepticism about natural law is unwarranted. But Protestants may remember that the Reformation rejected the idea that marriage is a sacrament, in the sense of a divinely ordained means of grace. Rather, marriage is a prudent arrangement for the ordering of human life (no more a sacrament than any other part of creation that can witness to the glory of the creator). Such a view discourages legalistic dogma or fundamentalism of any sort (including LGBT fundamentalism). It encourages the sort of civility vital for democracy in a pluralist society.I think it is very helpful to perceive human sexuality in the perspective of the comic. It is profoundly ridiculous (I use the adverb advisedly). The story is told about Immanuel Kant, who apparently had no sexual experiences until he was a university student. He reluctantly agreed to visit a brothel, where he reacted quite normally, but afterward observed that he found the whole thing very inconvenient. What could be more inconvenient than a philosopher explaining the meaning of the universe—being interrupted by an erection? Sexuality debunks pretension, it humanizes. (I felt that about Bill Clinton, a man consumed by the quest for power, whose job description as President might involved blowing up the world—being distracted by a young woman flashing her thong at him.) Let me conclude on this note:The second chapter of Bereshit/Genesis (the first book of the Hebrew Bible) tells the story of how God created the first woman (Eve) and brought her to the first man (Adam). The Israeli ministry of antiquities will soon announce that yet another library of ancient scrolls has been found in yet another cave near the Dead Sea. One of the scrolls contains the Book of Genesis, with an intriguing addition to the canonical text about the creation of Eve. That text ends with the sentence, “And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed”. On the newly discovered scroll another sentence follows: “They looked at each other—and they could not stop laughing”.

Whose Armenia?

As the Electric Yerevan protests in Armenia enter their third week, the fate of the latest “people power” movement remains uncertain. While the numbers have ebbed and flowed, the protestors are still showing signs of vitality and resolve. Their relations with the regime, however, seem increasingly deadlocked, and the protesters are now looking to apply new pressure on the government to accede to their demands.

While the government has struck a conciliatory tone and won a few morsels of help from its wary patron Russia, a happy resolution to the conflict looks less likely by the day. The protesters may have kept their demands relatively narrow, while denouncing notions that they seek to emulate the watershed “Euromaidan” protests that toppled ex-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, but this has not kept Moscow from seeing all the ingredients of a color revolution in Armenia. It is not hard to imagine elites in both Moscow and Yerevan concluding that rewarding protesters with further concessions would only harm their positions in the long term. If that happens, an escalation is likely.But regardless of the near-term outcome of Electric Yerevan, the weeks of protest have revealed the fragility of Russia’s hold over its constellation of clients on its periphery. Armenian protesters may chafe at comparisons to the Euromaidan, and perhaps rightly so, but the events in Ukraine and Armenia nevertheless highlight the effects of the burden of Russian writ: creaking, post-Soviet systems beset by rent-seeking and graft. Making allowances for Russian domination may be politically expedient or even economically attractive to local elites in the short-term, but regional governments have little room for maneuver between domestic political demands and Moscow’s diktat.In the case of Ukraine, Yanukovych’s regime came under heavy domestic pressure after submitting to Russian demands to reverse its decision to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union. Not unlike Armenia’s protests now, the Euromaidan movement settled into a tense phony war after the initial outpouring of protest sentiment; only later did the anti-government tide crest, as Yanukovych’s security forces increasingly resorted to violence, egged on by Moscow (and, according to some reports, in spite of Yanukovych’s misgivings). The Yanukovych regime, increasingly autocratic but nonetheless dependent on domestic political stability, saw Moscow as the constituency most in need of accommodation—no doubt due in large part to Ukraine’s macroeconomic frailty and dependence on Russia—and thus sowed the seeds of its own undoing.In much the same way, Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan performed his own about-face in September 2013, breaking plans to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union and instead opting to join the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union, to which it acceded in 2014. While small numbers came out to protest Sargsyan’s announcement, the country was not as sharply divided as Ukraine; many Armenians saw it (albeit with a skeptical eye) as a pragmatic gesture, given the country’s comprehensive military and economic dependence on Moscow.The Electric Yerevan protests highlight the limits of Armenian faith in such “pragmatism.” Yerevan’s membership in the EEU was sold to the Armenian people as a fair exchange of some measure of sovereignty for the continuance of its military alliance with Russia, as well as a basket of economic benefits. This latter promise has been largely left unfulfilled, however. Russia did reward the Armenian government’s about-face on the agreement with the EU by offering dramatically improved gas prices, but this did little more than reverse a major price hike imposed by Gazprom earlier that year, when Armenia was still heading toward an EU Association Agreement. And the price increases that jump-started the Electric Yerevan protests were not isolated events: in July 2014, the Russian-owned Electric Networks of Armenia also pushed a 10 percent rate increase.From a broader perspective, Armenia’s economic ties with Russia have rapidly gone from vital asset to major liability over the past year. The Russian economic slowdown triggered massive currency devaluation, a sharp drop in hugely important remittances inflows, and a rise in consumer prices. Without Russia hovering suspiciously over its shoulder, the Armenian government might have acceded to popular demands and reversed the rate hike, punished the police who violently attacked protesters on June 23, and considered lowering prices—all in all, relatively reasonable requests. But the Armenian elite has been forced to view the protests through the prism of Russian paranoia over yet another “colored revolution.”For all of its oddities, there is a degree of internal logic to the EEU. For small, post-Soviet countries like Armenia, it is not unreasonable to see the EEU as a transnational club with real economic value. The EEU—Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Armenia, and soon Kyrgyzstan—represents a large and relatively prosperous internal market for which many post-Soviet states are already economically primed. But if the European Union’s integrity is increasingly challenged by a yawning accountability gap between a supranational bureaucracy and national governments, this problem is even more magnified in the EEU, which is dominated by Moscow and comprised of member states with, at best, highly problematic levels of accountability. Local populations have few outlets for expression as it is; they are left with even fewer as their countries codify the EEU (read: Russia) as the institutional hegemon.When the dust settles, the recent events in Armenia are bound to produce geopolitical repercussions. Win or lose, Moscow has probably already decided to tinker its near-abroad strategy to compensate for the increased risk of popular unrest. But the severe accountability gap produced by Russian geopolitical directives, on one end, and public expectations, on the other, can only be managed by increased use of coercion or even force. By Russia’s calculation, offering more than the slightest of concessions will merely encourage further unrest, and greater accountability or political liberalism will invite Western encroachment. After these options are excluded, the only thing left is force. And it is force—not Eurasian “values,” not some new economic perspective, and not some chimerical post-Soviet civilization—that is the lifeblood of Russia’s imperial project.

US Has Only Trained 60 Fighters in Syria

With Assad teetering and ISIS, al Nusra, and the Kurds jockeying for position after his fall, the U.S.’s preferred option still fields fewer fighters than a college football team. CNN reports:

The United States has only trained approximately 60 Syrian rebel fighters as of July 3, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, saying the number is “much smaller” than the administration hoped to train at this point.

“I said the number 60, and I can look out at your faces and you have the same reaction I do, which is that that’s an awfully small number,” he said.

Well, heck of a job we’re doing here. As Max Abrahms said on Twitter:

Imagine how much weaponry each of the 60 moderate rebels in Syria is now wielding. Those are dangerous men.

— Max Abrahms (@MaxAbrahms) July 7, 2015

But beyond the snark, a serious point: it’s well past time we admitted that the U.S. is either unserious about this force, unable to find fighters to fit our needs, or both. We had a chance earlier in the war to back a genuinely moderate, broadly “Syrian” rebel force; that time is past. With the Saudis and Turks supporting al Nusra, and the Turks threatening to invade the part of Syria that just happens to include Syrian Kurdistan, our ability to influence the endgame in that war-torn land is slipping by the day. Basing U.S. policy on a strategy of waiting for the fighters we’re training won’t cut it any longer.There are other options: we could more firmly back the Kurds (including supporting them through diplomatic channels with Turkey), or we might identify and help other powerful local groups, or we can become more pragmatic about whom we’re willing to work with, or all of the above. But hiding behind the promise that one day this tiny band will grow into an army big enough to make a difference in time is no longer credible—if it ever was.

China’s Three Bubbles

The sell-off in Chinese equities accelerated Wednesday as new government efforts to arrest falling stock prices proved ineffectual. Major indices closed down six to seven percent, with shares in 72 percent of companies now unable to be traded. Beijing’s efforts to force the market upward by pumping money into the stock of large state-owned companies are failing to reassure panicked investors. As the market seizes up, the panic is spreading from margin traders to mutual fund holders. The WSJ reports:

Contagion from the plunge in Chinese stocks spread Wednesday in a sign investors within China and overseas are losing confidence in Beijing’s ability to stem the slide in the country’s equity markets and manage its economic reforms.

Shares listed on the country’s main Shanghai market dropped 5.9%, deepening a slump that has seen the market fall by nearly a third since mid-June.The gloom is no longer confined to stocks. The yield on China’s benchmark government bonds rose sharply, while investors unloaded billions worth of dollar-denominated debt issued by Chinese companies. China’s currency, the yuan, fell to a four-month low in offshore markets, while a global selloff in commodities continued, with oil down in early Asian trading and metals such as copper trading close to six-year lows.

We don’t know, and no one knows, what the Chinese market will do tomorrow or next week. This could be the Big One, the correction that deflates the whole huge China bubble of overbuilt investment that has been accumulating for years and will, after lots of pain, put the Chinese economy on an ultimately sounder basis. Or it could be just another correction on the way up to a ceiling that hasn’t yet been reached. So this may or may not be the beginning of the major economic crisis that China is bound to experience at some point in the future.

Short of that, however, it is already a political crisis—the biggest challenge President Xi Jinping has faced since coming to power. The Chinese government plays a huge role in systematically managing the country’s economy, and it has staked its legitimacy on its ability to make the economy grow. Moreover, it has taken a very clear position on the stock market crash: this shouldn’t be happening and the government will make it stop. Therefore, the government’s failure to stabilize stock prices is going to be seen as a failure of official policy. Criticism of the stock market will turn into criticism of the political leadership, and it must be said that the political leadership hasn’t demonstrated great skill in the early days of the crisis. Premier Li has allowed himself to become identified with the efforts to stabilize the stock market. If those measures succeed, he looks like a hero. But after the latest rout, a lot of people in China don’t think the policies are working.This is going to be a difficult one to ride out. China’s government claims to be able to deliver the benefits of growth along with the blessings of stability. To get growth, China has had to allow more and more market-based economic activity to take place. But in the interests of stability, and to assure faster gains than an unmanaged free market might deliver, Chinese authorities have also interfered systemically in the economy. The banking system, particular, is largely politically driven. The allocation of capital is not very efficient, and many state-owned companies have long been on life support, with banks ordered to give them the credit they need. Moreover, local governments have systematically distorted real estate markets and become dependent for their financial health on a real estate and infrastructure bubble that must be seen to be believed.So China’s extraordinary years of lending and growth have surely created an economic bubble, but they have created two other bubbles as well. First, a political bubble based in the belief that China’s government techniques can defy the laws of economic gravity and create long-term, stable, above-market rates of growth in the developing world. Second, a geopolitical bubble based on the belief that China’s stellar economic record of the last few decades will continue indefinitely into the future with immense consequences for the international order. That is, the country’s success has encouraged authoritarian regimes and technocrats all over the world to believe that markets can be managed long term, and that market forces can be indefinitely held at bay.China’s hothouse growth has been the wonder of the world. But when the Big One comes, all three of the country’s bubbles are likely to burst. For China’s authorities, their stake in their current battle with the stock market are much greater than they might appear to outsiders. This isn’t just a crisis of China’s financial markets. It is a crisis of China’s political system and international strategy.

Are Ukraine’s Police Reform Efforts More than Just Hot Air?

As we’ve been saying for a while now, endemic corruption is the biggest obstacle to a truly open and westernized Ukrainian society. Yet even after the Yanukovych’s thugs martyred the “heavenly hundred” protesters and caused Ukraine’s Maidan movement to boil over into a real uprising that overthrew the dictator (and got a certain opportunistic Mr. Putin thinking about drawing some new lines on the map), Ukrainian civil service jobs are mostly still staffed by the same people who were there two years ago.

That, problematically enough, includes the police. So President Poroshenko, who successfully ran and re-ran on an anti-corruption platform, is making moves that are meant to turn what Ukrainians know as a militarized bribe-taking force into real police. :

The first 2,000 recruits of a new Ukrainian police force passed out in the capital Kiev at the weekend, intended by the government as a visible sign of its commitment to shake off a deep-rooted culture of corruption in public institutions.

Trained by U.S. and Canadian forces, and given less militaristic uniforms and the name ‘Politsiya’ to mark a break with the old, Soviet-style ‘Militsiya’, the young officers pledged to forsake the bribes associated with their job.President Petro Poroshenko told the force, which will first patrol big towns and then be deployed across the country, that it was their task not only to uphold the law but “also to make people believe that reforms are inevitable”.

If anyone actually does buy that the new uniforms and an oath will make reform inevitable, he may be getting duped. Though as it happens, Ukrainians don’t seem to be close to believing that law, order, and accountability are just around the corner:

…the new force, whose navy blue uniforms and caps would not look out of place on the streets of New York, will have its work cut out in a society where police and courts are widely seen as favoring the powerful, and bribes are used for everything from avoiding speeding penalties to getting into good schools.

In a poll released last month by the Razumkov Centre, an independent research group, respondents scored the progress of reforms at only two or three out of 10. Almost 81 percent thought the fight against corruption was not working.

Corruption has been the way things work in Ukraine for so long that the problem is more than just cultural. Salaries for state employees like police—and for that matter judges and MPs—are artificially low precisely because everyone assumes people will make the bulk of their actual take-home pay through graft. This is what people mean by “systematic corruption.”

So one piece of evidence we can use to determine whether the new police policies will amount to anything more than an empty gesture is how much the cops are being paid. In the reports we’ve seen, there’s no mention of a pay bump to keep the new boys and girls in blue honest. If they really aren’t being paid a proper living wage, this new force may be expected to be as incorruptible as Eliot Ness’s Untouchables based on nothing more than the honor system and some fancy new threads.

Some Common Sense From Jeb on Democracy Promotion

In an in-depth interview with The Daily Caller, Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush backed away from his brother’s Wilsonian vision about America’s role in promulgating democracy and human rights around the world:

Former President George W. Bush famously made human rights and democracy promotion a cornerstone of his foreign policy. “[I]t is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world,” he declared in his second inaugural address.

Talking to TheDC, Jeb Bush seemed to place less emphasis on democracy promotion than his brother did and some of the other 2016 Republican presidential contenders, like South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, have. While Bush said liberal democracy is “one of the values that we need to promote,” he added it is hardly the only, or even most important, one.It has to be tempered with the realization that not every country is immediately going to become a little ‘d’ democratic country,” Bush said. “Iraq would be a good example of that I think.”

Taking a leaf out of the late American Interest board member Samuel Huntington’s book, Bush suggested that political development is a gradual process, and that a strong political order is required before democracy can flourish:

“I think ultimately security will lead towards democracy and having an engaged America will help make that so, but you cannot have democracy without security,” Bush said when asked if he could imagine considering America’s missions in Afghanistan and Iraq as successes if those countries don’t end up as liberal democracies.

Presidential primaries are usually long on posturing and short on common sense, but these well-considered comments from Mr. Bush are an exception. In order to foster a safe and democratic world, America should not be disengaged, but nor should she engage in a crusading idealism that pretends democracy can be exported without certain preconditions.

China’s Uighur Catch-22

The war of words between Turkey and China continues over restrictions that have reportedly been imposed on China’s Uighur Muslims: the latest salvo comes from Beijing, which has responding to Turkish protests by playing down the turmoil in Xinjiang. Reuters:

China has no “ethnic problem” in its far west, and Muslim Uighur minorities there enjoy freedom of religion, the Foreign Ministry said on Monday, following anti-China protests in Turkey over Beijing’s treatment of the group. […]

“Uighurs live and work in peace and contentment and enjoy freedom of religion under the rules in the constitution,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told reporters at a regular briefing. “So the so-called ‘Xinjiang ethnic problem’ you mentioned that has been raised in some reports simply does not exist.”

Notice the difference between that and the rhetoric noted in a Reuters report last week:

China’s military must bring “modern civilization” to the restive southern areas of the Xinjiang region, where Muslim ethnic Uighurs are in majority, and help develop its economy, two senior army officers wrote in an influential journal. […]

“The struggle against terror and to maintain stability is severe and complex. It is a real war with knives and guns, a life and death war,” it said. “Strike early, strike at the small and strike at the roots.”

The Uighur issue puts China in a tough spot. The country wants to fight a very real threat of domestic terrorism (and reverts to its default authoritarian style to do so). But one of the biggest initiatives of China under Xi is the “One Belt, One Road” scheme to develop mostly transportation infrastructure across central Asia and the to Middle East. To do that, it has to prioritize good relations with its Muslim neighbors, especially Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Turkey. Beijing’s current diplomatic dust up with Ankara is a distraction from building up the China-Turkey relationship. What’s an aspiring regional hegemon trying to secure its strategic trade and energy supply routes to do?