Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 652

The Syrian Civil War Comes to the Druze

After more than four years of successfully evading the brunt of the Syrian civil war, the country’s Druze community, which constitutes some 3 percent of the country’s population, is now in danger of being drawn into the war’s horrors. The bulk of the Syrian Druze live in the area known as the Druze Mountain in the south of the country, close to the Jordanian border. Two smaller clusters can be found in the north near Idlib and on both sides of the ceasefire line in the Golan, in several villages under Israeli control, and in the village of Hadar in the area contested by the Syrian army and a variety of opposition groups.

Until recently Syria’s Druze managed to sit on the fence of the conflict, refusing to join the fight, adopting a mildly pro-regime attitude, and maneuvering skillfully out of the line of fire. This is hardly surprising for a heretical minority community that for centuries has managed to survive in a difficult region by dealing skillfully with a long list of central governments and difficult neighbors. Since the end of World War I, the Druze have lived In Syria, Lebanon, and Israel (previously Mandatory Palestine), and have played different roles in each of these polities. Recently, three ominous developments in Syria have put the community under threat and may well acquire a larger significance: one is a massacre perpetrated by Jihadis in a Druze village near Idlib, the other is the prospect of a Jihadi takeover of the village of Hadar, and the third is the danger of a major offensive by the Islamic State against the Druze Mountain.These developments should be understood in the larger context of Syria’s sectarian politics. In the mosaic of ethnic and religious communities in Syria, two groups, the Alawites and the Druze, have stood out as “the compact minorities.” Both have been territorially concentrated in mountainous regions. Both have also been cultivated by the French Mandatory authorities against the Sunni Arab Nationalists of the big cities. The French created Alawite and Druze statelets and recruited members of both groups into the local army. The Druze and Alawites statelets were only integrated into the Syrian state in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the process was not an easy or smooth one.Unrelated to this was the fact that many young Alawites and Druze were drawn in the 1940s and 1950s to the Ba‘ath Party. They were attracted by its secular brand of Arab nationalism, free of Sunni hegemony. Both communities, offshoots of Shi’a Islam, are not considered proper Muslims by Sunni conservatives and zealots; thus neither community is comfortable with the Sunni tincture of Arab nationalism.The disproportionate number of Alawites and Druze in the ranks of the Syrian officer corps and the Ba’ath Party endowed them also with a disproportionate role in the Ba’ath regime once a group of Ba’athi officers seized power in March 1963. Small wonder that the Sunni majority has viewed it as a minoritarian regime, and that the sectarian issue has dominated Syrian politics since that year. In time, the Alawites pushed the Druze out, and a minoritarian regime has become instead an Alawite-dominated one.Once the current civil war broke out and became essentially a Sunni rebellion against the Alawite regime, the Druze (as well as the Christians and other minority groups) have tended to act as passive supporters of the regime. They bear no great love for Bashar al-Assad and his cohorts, nor for his Iranian patrons or Hizballah, but they fear that a Sunni victory ,a Jihadi one in particular, would expose them to political harassment and physical danger.These threats are now manifesting prior to the regime’s apparent defeat, in fact. The potential repercussions go beyond Syria’s border. The Druze are no longer the fierce fighters they once were. An Islamic State offensive against the Druze Mountain could topple their stronghold and would bring the threat closer to the Jordanian border. The Druze community in Lebanon is agitated, and that country, already on the brink of disaster, could be further buffeted.But the main potential for change and risk concerns Israel. The Druze community is well integrated and quite influential, with representation in politics, the IDF, and other national security agencies. And it had begun a campaign to draw Israel in to support their Syrian brethren. The issue of Hadar is relatively simple; it is close to the Israeli lines, and the IDF can threaten, deter, and even intervene in a limited way. But should war come to the Druze Mountain, far from the Israeli border, Jerusalem’s dilemma would be much more difficult. There would be the domestic Druze pressure, and there would be the argument that Israel’s credibility as an ally of the community would be at stake. The counter argument would be that Israel has managed to remain out of the Syrian civil war and must not slide down that slippery slope. In the background would be the memory of Israel’s calamitous intervention in Lebanon’s politics in the 1980s. The challenge for the Israeli government, should matters come to a head on the Druze Mountain, would be to find the magic formula of extending help without being drawn in. This is a difficult prospect, but not an impossible one.

French Cabbies: No Égalité for Uber

The violent protests of French taxi drivers on Thursday, organized against the expanding presence of ride-sharing company Uber’s low-cost UberPop offering, exhibited again what has long been apparent: the country is not adapting easily to the new sharing economy. The AP:

French taxi drivers smashed up livery cars, set tires ablaze and blocked traffic across the country on Thursday in a nationwide strike aimed at Uber after weeks of rising, sometimes violent tensions over the U.S. ride-hailing company. […]

Despite repeated rulings against the low-cost UberPop service, its drivers continue to ply French roads and the American ride-hailing company is actively recruiting drivers and passengers alike. Uber claims to have a total of 400,000 customers a month in France.

A spokesman for Uber encapsulated the dispute in brief, saying “[t]here are people who are willing to do anything to stop any competition … [w]e are only the symptom of a badly organized market.” The over-regulation of the French economy, guided loosely by anti-market precepts, ultimately undermines the stability it aims to provide workers. That Uber provides an opportunity for the unemployed or underemployed to earn extra income—not to mention that it suits the preferences of 400,000 monthly riders—ought to be enough reason for the government to reexamine its stance (French unemployment currently stands around 10.5 percent).

The advent of the information economy will not be a cure-all for what ails the French economy, but clinging to regulations that preserve a system so clearly riddled with inefficiencies is no way to propel a society forward. Even France should understand that.

Massacre: More Than 100 Murdered in Kobani by ISIS

Despite recent territorial losses, like losing Tel Abyad to the Kurds, ISIS is back on the offensive and once more in the headlines. In a two-pronged attack, the Islamic State is threatening Kurdish control of Kobani, as well as regime control of southern Hasakeh, the capital city of the Hasakeh province and one of the Assad regimes last strongholds in northeast Syria.

Last year ISIS ran a fierce four month siege on Kobani that ended only after the arrival of American air support and Kurdish reinforcements from Iraq. Now ISIS has returned— with revenge on its mind. Reuters reports:

Islamic State fighters killed at least 145 civilians in an attack on the Syrian town of Kobani and a nearby village, in what a monitoring group described on Friday as the second worst massacre carried out by the hardline group in Syria.

Fighting between the Kurdish YPG militia and Islamic State fighters who infiltrated the town at the Turkish border on Thursday continued into a second day, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group and a Kurdish official said.Islamic State has a record of conducting large scale killings of civilians in territory it captures in both Iraq and Syria, where it has proclaimed a caliphate to rule over all Muslims according to an ultra-hardline vision of Islam.

Meanwhile, the fight continues to rage on in southern Hasakeh between ISIS and regime forces. The city of Hasakeh, which is governed by Kurdish forces in the north of the city, and Assad pro-regime forces in the south of the city, has long been a target of the Islamic State. Preceded by an overnight infiltration of ISIS saboteurs who claim to have beheaded a Syrian general, the ISIS offensive has regime forces on the back foot. NOW captures the situation on the ground:

At daybreak Thursday, fighters from the militant group breached the regime’s defensive lines in the southwest of the city and seized two neighborhoods as thousands of civilians began to flee from their homes.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported in the morning that ISIS had taken control of the Nashweh and Al-Shariaa quarters of Hasakeh, where the Syrian maintains one of its last two military bastions in the northeastern Syrian province that has fallen increasingly under Kurdish control in past months.ISIS announced in a statement that it seized the two areas in a surprise operation that involved its fighters infiltrating into the southwest of the city overnight, adding that regime forces were forced to withdraw to the center of the city “in a state of shock of collapse.”

Though Kurdish YPG forces are fully occupied in Kobani, they are keeping a close eye on the battlefield balance between their two rivals in the south. As cited in the NOW story, an Erbil news outlet reports that YPG fighters “have been on alert since the dawn” and added that “YPG will participate in the clashes in the event they encroach on areas populated by Kurds.”

A renewed offensive in Syria by ISIS appears to be an effort by the group to repudiate the narrative that Kurdish forces are rising in stature at the expense of the Islamic State. While the outcome of these latest engagements initiated by ISIS is uncertain, what is certain is the perilous journey of the Syrian refuge. This latest round of fighting in Hasakeh has already caused 60,000 people to flee the city, while the United Nations has warned that as many as 200,000 people may soon try to flee as well.

The Court and Gay Marriage

Another day, another important SCOTUS decision gets handed down, this time on gay marriage. Just like with the Obamacare decision, Via Meadia will not be providing legal commentary. Political and social commentary is where we think we have something to offer, so please don’t expect much from us here about whether this was, constitutionally, a good or a bad decision.

With that out of the way, let’s proceed. The big issue politically with a ruling like this is that it touches on fundamental social questions and institutions—and how should they be decided in a democratic republic. My own basic view is that ultimately the moral sense of the people expressed either directly through referendums or indirectly through their elected representatives is the only possible way to handle these kinds of things, simply because an abstract constitutional right that isn’t embraced by the majority will not stand no matter what judges say or write. So, for example, the anti-segregationist laws and constitutional provisions adopted after the Civil War became dead letters, more or less, when the political will to enforce them died away.So in theory I would prefer that a change like this be enacted through a law passed in Congress rather than handed down from on high as a judicial decree.However, it’s also true that if one looks at the polls and at the growing movement among states, the Supreme Court is operating here more as the voice of American opinion than as anything else. We are not set up for national referendums—and that’s a good thing, in my opinion—so the Court’s intervention is not the kind of problem it was in, say, in Roe v. Wade, or the school prayer decision, where it imposed a view on the country that the country wasn’t ready for.As to the specific question of gay marriage, I’m personally of the view that there is a major distinction between religious marriage and civil marriage. There are lots of civil marriages that various religious groups do not accept, and that is as it should be. Insofar as the question is whether gay couples should have a right under civil law to enter into a legally recognized and legally defined partnership, I would agree with the Court that the law should leave this choice to the people involved.At the same time, the civil law does not and should not have the power to compel religious groups to recognize as religious marriages civil unions that violate the canons of their faith. Nor should religious institutions be required to open their facilities for the use of wedding ceremonies that violate their ideas about what a marriage is. If a Catholic church only wants to hold Catholic weddings, that is the church’s decision to make, not the Court’s.As to social policy—whether providing legal recognition and social acceptance to same-sex couples is good for society or bad for it—that’s a question that we just can’t answer yet. The widespread acceptance of adult homosexuality is genuinely new in Western society. (The ancient Romans and Greeks would have opposed gay marriage between adult men as a terrible perversion.) We will have to see how it works out in practice.In the interim, social policy ought to focus on strengthening the non-gay marriages (without discriminating against or excluding gay marriages from social benefits or legal recognition). It’s clear that those marriages—especially for lower middle class and lower class people of all races—are in bad shape indeed. If it turns out that opening civil marriage to gay couples makes pro-marriage policy less contentious, then even hardcore religious opponents of gay marriage might end up taking some comfort from this ruling.One final thing to note: the two Obamacare decisions and this decision should do a lot to dispel the idea that the Supreme Court was becoming some kind of annex of the Republican Party or that the justices are totally and predictably divided on partisan lines. Strengthening the Court as an institution is something that great justices—like John Marshall—have always thought of as an important part of their mission. It’s important to do that, and, although people who disagree with the legal basis for these and other controversial decisions may be unhappy about the direction the court is heading in, it’s actually an important part of the Chief Justice’s job to enhance the legitimacy of the Court in American society. That is likely to be the result of the Obamacare and gay marriage decisions of this week. The Supreme Court, from a political and policy point of view, is doing its job. We’ll leave the arguments over whether it’s getting the Constitution right to the specialists who will, as usual, speak with great confidence and assurance as well-educated and experienced experts who totally disagree with each other.

Binding the Bear

Russia’s annexation of Crimea violated the foundations of the post-1945 global order and shattered the fundamental consensus that has so far sustained the Euro-Atlantic balance. In the face of the new uncertainty, we must rethink all major policy options for handling the ongoing Ukraine crisis. Several options are outlined below, in hopes of understand what each offers individually and in combination with the others.

Negotiations. The first option urges us to give more time for the diplomatic process and negotiations with Putin. EU officials and European leaders prefer this course of action, as it’s closest to their methods for managing conflicts within the EU. However, the simple message of the annexation of Crimea was that Russia does not belong in the same legal community as Europe. Pursuing further negotiations that deviate from the EU’s own standards for behavior would merely constitute, to paraphrase Clausewitz, a continuation of bureaucracy by other means.Certainly the West must continue to meet Putin at the negotiating table. Keeping Putin isolated carries high risks, as it increases the unpredictability of his behavior. But we shouldn’t assume negotiations can achieve much; Putin has long since stopped caring about negotiations, diplomacy, and all sorts of agreements.Sanctions. The West can continue to ratchet up the sanctions against the strategic circle of businessmen who represent Russia’s symbiosis of big politics, big business, government institutions, and security services. Putin role is that of Godfather of this unwieldy family. But we shouldn’t expect Putin’s oligarchic circle to crumble under the sanctions, or to change the nature of Russian politics on Ukraine. As the case with Mikhail Khodorkovsky demonstrates, oligarchs who try to play political reformer are treated like traitors and severely punished. Sanctions are, at best, an ambivalent policy.Aside from targeting the oligarchs, the sanctions have destroyed businesses, weakened the economy, and forced Russia into international isolation. But Russia in isolation is not less dangerous to the global order; indeed, its foreign policy profile becomes even more unpredictable.Eurasian Union. What if Putin succeeds in establishing a zone of Russian influence and ensures that Russia politically dominates a future Eurasian Union? The more important question: What guarantee is there that, having a dominion of this kind, Russia would give up future plans for expansion?The West, and the EU in particular, do not have the capacity to create a similar union, even if they agreed that such a project would blunt the force of Russian expansionism. The EU might decide not to oppose a similar project and even offer tacit support for it, but cannot bring it into existence. Were such a zone to be established, it would take a long time to make it work, and thus would not help solve the crisis in Ukraine even in the mid-term. In addition, if a real and strong Eurasian Union were to emerge, it would create entirely new dimensions in the international environment.Another President. If there were a change of leadership in the Kremlin, the new leaders would need a long time to reach the levels of stability and popularity that Putin enjoys today. Such a change is nonetheless possible. Events that might bring it about include sanctions and the collapse of oil prices; both of these developments affect a strategic group of oligarchs. The people in this group are most likely to believe that they have taken a hard, unjustified hit by the West.A sudden change in the Kremlin is unlikely to bring into power anyone dramatically different from Putin. It should not be ruled out, in other words, that Putin’s Russia would survive without her patron’s actual presence. This is highly probable as far as the sensitive realm of geopolitical gains is concerned, which, as Crimea’s annexation shows, is a source of immense national pride.Federalization of Ukraine. The essential part of the federal design lies not in what it offers, but rather in what is left unspoken and concealed. Federalism is a euphemism masking the de facto separation of the country, to be followed up some time in the future by the annexation of eastern Ukraine by Russia. The very term “federalism” is widely misused. It is not necessary to refer to the strong versions of federal contract as per Carl Schmitt or Judge Sutherland in U.S. vs. Curtiss-Wright Corp. to understand that federations have a center, which exercises sovereign rights over foreign affairs and armed forces. If these rights cannot be established and guaranteed, a Ukrainian federation is little more than a hypocritical construction.A disguised federalization will deepen the cracks in the postwar order and pose a challenge to the Westphalian system. There is no assurance that a Munich 1936-type concession would sate Russia’s growing imperial appetite. Tomorrow Moscow may hunger for the Baltic republics, with their large Russian-speaking populations.These are idealized ways for solving the crisis in Ukraine. None of them alone will provide a lasting solution. Nor can they be relied upon for preventing the continued destabilization of the post-1945 European order. Still, is there a best combination of these four options?Let’s imagine that Ukraine takes the federalization route; Russia has a new President; the sanctions have further weakened the positions of Putin’s crony circles; Armenia, Belarus, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and maybe others, too, have joined the Eurasian Union; and the diplomatic process goes on and on.Putting aside the unlikeliness of all these things happening, this scenario still would not ensure that Russia would suddenly start negotiating with the West in the same manner as Western countries negotiate with each other. What’s more, the West would still be ill equipped to handle a future Ukraine-like situation, if one were to arise.On the one hand, the West, represented by the EU, U.S., Canada, and Australia must continue the negotiations as if there were a possibility that Russia would self-contain. Indeed, this is what they have been doing thus far—Merkel most of all. Otherwise all communication with Russia would cease, which itself carries a high risk. On the other hand, the Western world has to admit to itself that reliable diplomatic communications have broken down, leaving us with a politically empty spectacle for which few hold out any real hope.In recent years, we have witnessed an escalation in Russia of what Kennan called the “neurotic view of world affairs” and the expansive atavism of the Soviet type. There are, of course, significant differences between the USSR and Russia that we should note. The Soviet utopia tended to transgress all conceivable limits—political, ethnic, national, demographic, environmental, and so on. The Soviets displaced entire peoples, reversed the paths of rivers, rejected genetics, invented impossible flora, and subjected its own people to systematic annihilation. This multidimensional expansion goes far beyond what Joseph Schumpeter defines as “objectless disposition on the part of a state to unlimited forcible expansion”.These expansive drives faded out after the collapse of the Soviet experiment. Russia’s economic growth during the first Putin government was significant. The country engaged in various international initiatives; ratified the European Convention on Human Rights, became a member of the G-7/G-8, and built a partnership with NATO, including even discussions of possible membership in the Alliance. Russia had parted with its universalist utopian project and agreed to live in a world of capitalist relations. These developments nurtured the impression that Russia had at last found a pragmatic way to secure its prosperity. There were signs of deviation from that new path of development, but they were taken as temporary and insignificant.However, Crimea and the crisis in Ukraine have broken that continuity. They indicate that Russia’s compliance with international order is rather an adjustment of the expansionist mentality to new political circumstances. These events have also prompted calls for a new understanding of developments inside Russia, the country’s behavior on the international scene, and the way in which this behavior should be understood by the West.First of all, in its internal affairs Russia has reproduced elements that remind one of the excesses of Soviet society. There is the grotesque figure of the oligarch, an excess of capitalist success. There is the rapacious exploitation of natural resources. The public adoration of the person of the President resembles the cults of personality from Soviet times. Extreme power is concentrated in the hands of one group, or even one person. The secret services have apparently been revived and have accumulated new powers. Opposition leaders are executed, even beyond the country’s borders. Freedom of press and expression are stifled and drowned out by a flood of propaganda. And so on.Second, precisely because Russia is parting with the utopian urges of the Soviet project, foreign relations and hard geopolitics are now emerging as a permanent field of pressure. We also see here the elements of a vicious circle. On the one hand, Russia had no pragmatic reasons for wanting the wars in Georgia and Ukraine. On the other, there is no compelling internal or external factor to trigger a critical examination of the reasons why these wars were waged. Furthermore neither foreign relations nor geopolitics are open for reflection, debate, or discussion. Thus the overall public significance of these campaigns is destined to remain unclear. The temporary winner is only President Putin’s national approval ratings.Third, the claims that Russia was provoked by the expansion of NATO presuppose uniform rationality in a continuum of international interactions. The very intention to predict long-term Russia’s behavior implies such a continuum. Yet to assume as much is to ignore the idiosyncrasies of Russian activities. In addition, this line of critique can hardly explain Russia’s actions in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the war in Chechnya, or interventions in other smaller conflicts. Actions like these seem to follow a uniform pattern, but that does not subsume them under uniform causality.The question of why Russia has undertaken these actions, for what reason and to what end, is doomed to remain unanswered. The question is open for academic discussion, but is of little value for policymaking efforts. Rather, the critical issue today is whether and under what conditions Russia’s drive for expansion can be restrained.Mikhail Gorbachev effectively led the Soviet experiment to an implosion by reversing the direction of Soviet expansion and turning it inward, to stir reflection, criticism, discussion, and openness. In the 1980s this was possible because Soviet society was exhausted. Such a development is highly unlikely today. The only thing that could force Russia to become a more reliable negotiating partner is if it were to regain a sense of limits—a sense that is rapidly slipping out of its grasp. Today’s Russia is certainly more aware of the limits of its politics than was the Soviet Union, which offered living proof that losing this basic intuition leads to self-destruction.If we were to construct a strategic package taking all of this into account, it would look as follows.First, the negotiation process would continue in order to prevent Russia’s further isolation, and thus further risk-taking behavior on Russia’s part. It would be supported by sanctions aimed at breaking Putin’s inner circle, which alone can bring about a change of power in the Kremlin. The Euro-Atlantic organizations would also endorse the establishment of the Eurasian Union and build future partnership relations with the new entity.Second, Donetsk and Luhansk would become temporary autonomous zones under international oversight. All other plans and efforts for administrative decentralization or even federation would be dropped. This type of partitioning cannot happen without the consent of Ukraine itself, of course, but the reality today is that there are de facto two Ukraines already.Third, the western part of Ukraine would begin a fast-track integration into the main Euro-Atlantic structures. Ukraine’s Western partners must commit to substantial, reasonable, and well-regulated support for restoring the country, which in 1990 enjoyed an economy roughly the same size as Poland’s but today is nearly bankrupt.Fourth, NATO must commit to protecting the new borders by securing a continuous deterrent presence of military forces in Eastern Europe. This is important for Poland, but is crucial for the Baltic Republics, which face the highest risk of a Russian invasion analogous to the invasion in Eastern Ukraine. The EU would also step in and commit to dealing with military-strategic issues and the partial militarization of Eastern Europe.Fifth, NATO and the EU would develop policies aimed at strengthening the “weak societies” in southeastern Europe. International cooperation within NATO and the EU would continue, following established rules. But it would be complemented by the introduction of new policy measures to strengthen the societal immunity of these vulnerable countries. It is imperative to increase these countries’ ability to resist Russia’s hybrid wars.The items in this package could be adjusted or even extended to include other strategic points. The essential core, however, should target Russia’s lack of a sense of limits in the international arena.Ukraine presents a special case in terms of the Euro-Atlantic order. As the name of the country suggests, this is a boundary area. Ukraine is historically and symbolically similar to the Krajina, the military frontier in the center of the Balkan Peninsula. For centuries the Krajina divided the Catholic Austro-Hungarian and the Muslim Ottoman worlds. The frontier’s stability provided guarantees that the adventurous policies of each side’s opposite number would not create chaos and destruction. Maintaining the credibility of this buffer required continuous and comprehensive efforts on the part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Today, the West must make similar comprehensive efforts to convince the Russian side to respect its western boundaries. This need not become a new Cold War. Russia has accepted the basic parameters of the global capitalist environment; a return to a pre-capitalist time does not represent a realistic prospect for Russia.The fifth point of the above set of policy measures requires special attention. The style of Russia’s expansion in Ukraine posed a much bigger challenge to traditional deterrence as stipulated by Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. Hybrid warfare mobilizes a variety of public resources far beyond the alliance’s current military capabilities.Hybrid warfare targets the weak areas in the economy, the institutional system and the entire public sphere. It includes corrupting political elites, capturing strategic businesses, buying media, financing propaganda campaigns (for example, against shale gas), supporting friendly right-wing nationalist parties, financing paramilitary groups, forging ties with criminal enterprises, and so on. As the conflict in Ukraine illustrates, hybrid warfare has been generally underestimated and requires serious rethinking at policy level.Some of the societies in the former Soviet bloc seem to be good candidates for Russia’s next hybrid war after Ukraine. Applying the metaphor of mafia states, analysts have argued that organized crime is an appendix of the state in Balkan countries like Montenegro, Bulgaria, and Kosovo. Assuming that this argument holds even partially, the impending question is: on which side of the border with Russia or a future Eurasian Union will each country choose to stand? While the Baltic States are directly exposed to militarily threat, the Balkan countries suffer from a toxic brew of institutions, politics, business, and network criminality. These countries are poor, with corrupt elites, and with media controlled by powerful economic groups. Public institutions are subject to constant pressure from criminal-political networks. State-backed infrastructure projects are channels of high-level corruption. And it is not uncommon for whole state institutions to be captured.The result is, for some of the countries in question, a weakening of their sovereignty in foreign affairs. Russian energy projects such as the South Stream Gas Pipeline (SSGP) are a prime example of how corrupt elites in one country work to support Russian expansion from the inside. In some of the participating countries they succeeded in raising the price of the project three times and tried to evade EU restrictions in a bid for further profits. Huge projects like SSGP are in fact a component of hybrid warfare, despite taking place in a non-crisis environment. To secure their implementation, Russia enters into closer relations with influential networks of the “mafia state”. It occupies strategic positions, allowing it to exercise control over the media, the political process, and big business.It is therefore necessary to help strengthen and sustain the societal immunity of the countries in question. The EU helps somewhat through its large portfolio of funding programs, but these programs are politically neutral and thus more oriented toward development; they are not designed to address the problems of weak states and state capture. While creating programs to meet these challenges should be neither too expensive nor too complicated, it will be something that the bureaucratic institutions in Brussels have little experience with. It may be a question of investment, too, but it is much more a matter of policy focus. Hybrid warfare doesn’t necessarily imply a need for a “hybrid defense” (whatever that would be). But it definitely requires hybrid deterrence policies.Vladimir Putin is most comfortable in a world of undefined coordinates, ambiguous negotiations, and plenty of room for expansive maneuver. That is why resolute measures are needed to restore his sense of limits. The West has already paid a high price for failing to develop such measures. If Putin begins to plot new hybrid expansions, he would likely find success in the Balkans, the Baltics, other parts of Eastern Europe, or the Caucasus. If the West doesn’t work to restore Russia’s sense of limits, it will pay an even higher price in the years to come.

China and Russia to Cooperate on Propaganda?

Many hands make light work—or so the saying goes. If it’s true, the world’s two biggest revisionist powers are going to be finding it much easier to spread misinformation around the world because, according to Chinese state media mouthpiece Xinhua, it appears that Beijing and Moscow are going to try to work together on their propaganda campaigns:

Liu Qibao, head of the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, met with a senior Russian official Thursday on media cooperation between China and Russia.

In a meeting with Alexi Gromov, first deputy head of the Presidential Administration of Russia, Liu said his department is willing to work with the Presidential Administration of Russia on the integrated development of traditional and new media.The two sides should look to the future and aspire to innovate bilateral media cooperation based on the integration and development of new media and traditional media, so that they can have larger say in the world’s mass media, said Liu, who is also a member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and of the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee.[…]Noting that Chinese President Xi Jinping, during his visit to Russia in May, decided with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, the future path of bilateral relations, Liu expressed the hope that his visit and participation in the media forum could help further implement the consensus reached in the fields of media cooperation and people-to-people exchanges.

It’s always fascinating and instructive to see the mask slip. China is more fully totalitarian than Russia is, though Putin’s regime has been playing catch-up. Both states have proven adept at producing anti-American and anti-Western propaganda, and it is often effective.

Putin, for one, goes to tremendous lengths to maintain plausible deniability when he misbehaves, so that he can introduce counternarratives that redirect and dull the world’s reactions. China, for its part, works tirelessly to make sure no one anywhere in the world can call Taiwan a sovereign state without being hectored and shouted down, and it is deeply aware of the importance of PR for its biggest projects, like Xi’s all-encompassing party purge and expansionism in the South China Sea.We just can’t wait to see what these two propaganda powerhouses come up with when they put their minds together.

What We Should Do Next on Health Care

The reactions to yesterday’s Obamacare decision keep coming. We can’t comment on legal reasoning, though for some analysis on that see Jonathan Adler’s piece at the Washington Post and Abbe Gluck’s entry at SCOTUSblog. However, though from a policy perspective we are unhappy about Obamacare—it is a deeply flawed and in many ways counterproductive intervention—the chaos that would have followed a Supreme Court ruling to throw out the exchanges would have been very far from ideal.

Now that the last substantive legal challenge has been settled, the conversation needs to turn to where it should have been all along: given that Obamacare exists, what is the next set of reforms that the health care system needs? Some of those reforms will involve undoing the damage that Obamacare does, but won’t amount to a complete, across-the-board repeal. Others will involve tweaks to Obamacare as the full effect of the law gradually takes hold. Even today some of the most controversial and life-changing features of the law have been delayed—largely because Democrats fear that they are too unpopular.

But the real business of the nation remains what it was before Obamacare was anything more than a line in a campaign speech: figuring out how to make American health care better, faster, and cheaper. The problems with U.S. medicine are well known, and remain true in the ACA era. We pay more than other countries without getting appreciably better mass outcomes. Americans, even with subsidies, have trouble accessing the kind of care they want. Prices are hidden, and many standard medical delivery systems are inefficient and outdated.

There are features in law and policy that makes these things worse, and the sooner we start on the work to transform those features the better. One key area of effort is to apply IT to medicine in order to transform diagnosis, record-keeping, and personal health care. That means updating national record-keeping to the information era, Uberizing health care with universal records so that a patient can walk into a clinic where practitioners can access your total medical history. We need to make much better use of health tracking, monitoring patients’ health and managing chronic conditions remotely. With help from computers, medical personnel with less extensive education and training can provide more complicated and sophisticated treatment without direct doctor supervision. New technology can even empower individuals to do more DIY health care for themselves.

There are other important areas of reform, too. We urgently need to disconnect insurance from employment in a world of shorter-term jobs and more part-time work. Price transparency is a low-hanging fruit, and gives consumers incentives to save and consume care responsibly. Other ways to promote thrift need to be explored. We should reform tort liability both to eliminate excessive and expensive lawsuits and to reduce the incentives to over-treat. Making it easier for foreign-trained practitioners to get U.S. licenses and work visas will lower the cost of care. Allowing, and even encouraging, long-term retirement abroad could help us save on eldercare as older Americans use Medicare to pay for (often cheaper) care abroad. Health care “tourism” to those cheaper locations for those who want it will also save money.

In a healthy medical system, health outcomes will be improving, the costs of most procedures and treatments will be falling, and it will be easier to offer universal access to more benefits because the benefits themselves are becoming more affordable. In a healthy health care system, fewer people should need subsidies to get health care, and the level of subsidy needed should come down as well. For most people insurance should be a method of financial planning (spreading your costs over time rather than paying them in big lumps) plus a safeguard against catastrophic events. It should not be a necessary, and necessarily subsidized, lifeline giving access to a system that is so grotesquely expensive than only the very wealthiest members of society can actually pay for what they need at the prevailing prices.

When you look at it that way, we still have a very long way to go to get to that kind of system. But the good news is we have many of the tools to get there already, if only we have the intelligence and will to use them.

China Thumbs Nose at Vietnam Again

Call it the “cabbage strategy” or the Chinese two-step: once again—slowly, surely, and slyly—Beijing is raising the temperature in the South China Sea after having backed off earlier.

China had sent an oil rig near the Paracels last year to do exploratory drilling, but had pulled it back last July amid rising clamor from its neighbors. Now it has sent another rig a hundred miles off of Vietnam’s coast to drill again. :

Experts estimate the drilling site is about 104 miles (167 km) east of the Vietnam coast. The $1-billion rig will remain there from June 25 until August 20, the statement said, telling ships to stay 2,000 m (6,562 ft) away for safety reasons.

Vietnam’s maritime authorities were monitoring the rig’s placement, the website of the country’s state-controlled Tuoi Tre newspaper on Friday quoted unidentified sources as saying.

Recall the official definition of the “cabbage strategy”, as explained by a top Chinese general in 2013:

…assert a territorial claim and gradually surround the area with multiple layers of security, thus denying access to a rival. The strategy relies on a steady progression of steps to outwit opponents and create new facts on the ground.

Much like with the island-building in the South China Sea, these kinds of moves are calculated to be just below the threshold of triggering a response from China’s adversaries. The key word here, however, is calculation: the strategy succeeds only insofar as the provocations are calibrated just right.

The head of Vietnam’s Communist Party is heading to Washington soon, and with these kinds of provocations fresh in his mind, he is sure to have China at the top of the agenda. Taken alongside the recent joint drills between Japan, the Philippines, and the United States around the Spratlys, as well as the noises coming out of Tokyo recently, we could be seeing the thousand tiny cuts administered by China add up to a wound that its neighbors can no longer ignore.

“Green” Germany Can’t Bring Itself to Spurn Coal

Berlin is caving to the demands of its coal industry, nixing a proposed extra charge on older, dirtier coal-fired power plants. The FT reports:

The levy was proposed in March as a way of pushing power producers into make deeper cuts in carbon emissions. Germany wants to cut CO2 emissions by 40 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020, including 22m tonnes in emissions from the power sector. […]

According to a person with knowledge of the discussions, Berlin will now looking at alternative ways of cutting CO2 emissions, including mothballing three gigawatts of its 49 gigawatts of coal-fired power capacity.

Germany has very publicly positioned itself as a green leader, touting its energy transformation (called the energiewende) as a cutting-edge, eco-friendly raft of energy policies. But for such a supposedly environmentally-friendly policy, the energiewende has produced some surprisingly brown outcomes. By shuttering its nuclear reactors (sources of baseload zero-carbon power), Berlin has had to rely more heavily on coal to keep the lights on. To make matters worse, the coal Germany mines and burns is of a particularly dirty variety.

True, heavy government subsidization has kick-started its fledgling renewables industry, but wind and solar can’t supplant nuclear as an energy source because they’re incapable of providing power round the clock. What good these renewables have done to lower German emissions has been largely offset by its burgeoning appetite for lignite, which is why Berlin moved to slap extra charges on its coal plants.Balancing the jobs and relatively cheap energy that coal production provides against the emissions reductions that shuttering those plants can accomplish isn’t any easy task for any government, but Germany’s problem is particularly notable because it’s one of its own making.

Japan: We May Patrol South China Sea

Shinzo Abe is facing determined opposition in parliament to his proposed laws authorizing a more assertive foreign policy. But to hear his top military brass talk, you wouldn’t guess it in a million years.

The Wall Street Journal ran an interview today with Admiral Katsutoshi Kawano, chief of the Joint Staff of the Japan Self-Defense Forces, who indicated that Japan might be induced to overcome its scruples and start regularly patrolling the South China Sea given China’s recent aggressive moves in the region. A few choice excerpts:

“Of course, the area is of the utmost importance for Japanese security,” Adm. Kawano said. “We don’t have any plans to conduct surveillance in the South China Sea currently but depending on the situation, I think there is a chance we could consider doing so.” […]

Troops from Japan’s navy have been conducting joint drills this week with the Philippine navy around Palawan Island, just a few hundred kilometers from the Spratly Islands, which are at the heart of a territorial dispute between Beijing and Manila. The session features Japan’s P-3C surveillance aircraft, which Adm. Kawano described as having “a superb ability for detecting submarines and other objects in the water.” […]“In the case of China, as we can see with the South China Sea problem, they are rapidly expanding their naval presence and their defense spending is still growing,” Adm. Kawano said. “Also because there is a lack of transparency, we are very concerned about China’s actions.” […]He said Japan would also like to conduct more joint exercises with Australia and India. “I believe the Japan Self-Defense Forces boast an extremely high level of proficiency,” Adm. Kawano said. “We can have a positive impact on other militaries.”

China’s ears just pricked up. This is precisely the kind of talk Beijing does not want to hear.