Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 653

The Producerist Bias

Not since Franklin Roosevelt threatened to pack the Supreme Court has New Deal legislation been handled so roughly. By an 8–1 vote this week the Justices knocked the heart out of a New Deal law aimed at raising the price of farm commodities by empowering the government to force farmers to keep part of their crop from the market. The case was brought by California raisin growers who were fined for trying to sell their raisins in defiance of the government restrictions. The growers argued that the government order limiting their ability to sell their raisins was a “taking” of their property (comparable to what happens in eminent domain when the government seizes private property to build a road or for some other purpose). Under the Constitution, the government must compensate property owners for such seizures. SCOTUS ruled for the growers.

A number of things limit the scope of the case. The majority decision did allow for the government to limit production in the first place (rather than taking crops after they are grown). And indeed, the WSJ reports that in the particular case at issue, “the [Raisin Administrative Committee’s reserve] program barely affected raisin prices,” but was aimed more at increasing exports. Those of our readers who don’t happen to be raisin growers may therefore be wondering why they should care.The answer is that the old farm laws (which affected a great many products, not just raisins) were one of the building blocks of the 20th century American system, and the SCOTUS decision, even in its limited scope, is one more sign of a deep social change. Here at The American Interest, we call the old system the “blue social model,” since defending what remains of it and enhancing it if possible is the core concern of the Democratic Party mainstream. Back in the days of the New Deal and the Great Society, the American economy was dominated by a relatively small number of very powerful companies. AT&T had a monopoly on telephone service, while the Big Three automobile companies dominated the car market—especially at a time when upstart Japanese and German competitors weren’t yet exporting cars to the United States. Airlines, banks, trucking companies, and most large industries were heavily regulated: Government officials decided the interest rates that banks could charge, the routes airlines could fly and the fares they could offer, and so on.Farm price-support programs were part of the system. When the prices of crops and livestock fell during the Great Depression, the U.S. government acted to inflate those prices by restricting the supply. The 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act paid farmers not to plant crops and compensated them for slaughtered pigs. With fewer crops and livestock available, the theory was, prices would rise and farmers would earn more money. The farmers could then spend that money (and the subsidies not to produce) on other goods, like farm equipment, and the whole economy would be better off.Support the income of farmers so they can buy more farm equipment and consumer goods. Support the wages of industrial workers (via minimum wage laws and the Wagner Act to make unionization easier) so they can pay higher prices for the food the farmers produce—and buy more consumer goods made by other well-paid factory workers. Restrict competition so the large industrial firms like GM and GE can pay workers the high wages that pump demand into the economy. Support the overall economy by deficit government spending so that the big industrial companies can keep their factories humming. That was logic of this system.Similar measures were adopted to restrict the supply and raise the wages of labor. Schooling was extended from eight to twelve years as much to keep adolescents out of the labor force and from driving down adult wages as because the nation’s factories and construction sites were crying out for workers with an extra four years of classroom learning. Laws restricting the practice of professions ranging from law and medicine to cosmetology and hair cutting were progressively tightened to require longer periods of formal classroom study and to protect the incomes of licensed providers by making it harder for new people to enter those fields.Producerist policy is inherently inflationary. Restricting the supply of goods and services, or the competition to supply them, is the whole point—the higher prices that result aren’t bugs but features. For an extreme example, look at the certificate of necessity laws, which require new companies to demonstrate to officials that existing providers do not already meet the need the new company plans to meet. Aspiring new competitors must also notify the existing companies, which then can make trouble for the proposed business in court. Licensing laws, which require everyone from florists to hair dressers to acquire licenses, are another example. Restrictions that exist on the number of doctors who can immigrate to America—or on how much work nurse practitioners can do without doctor supervision—are yet a third. There have even been reports of thousands of foreign-trained doctors already living in the United States who cannot practice—even as the nation struggles to pay high health care costs. These laws, of course, raise wages for producers in the guild, but they cost consumers heavily, reduce productivity, and slow innovation by keeping out aspiring entrepreneurs and service providers.Over time, the proliferation of producerist policies leads to perverse and increasingly destructive effects. Policies designed to keep food prices high to protect farm income create pools of low income people who can’t pay the high prices. Answer: food stamps—subsidize the purchasing power of people priced out of the market by government action. Taxpayers end up paying the government to raise prices at the same time they pay taxes to help poor people afford those artificially inflated food prices. At the start of 2015, more than 46 million Americans were on food stamps—but that didn’t stop all the producerist farm programs from trying to jack up prices.The madness doesn’t stop at the supermarket check-out counter. Look at health care. Health care wonks are almost obsessively focused on providing subsidized insurance, the health care equivalent of food stamps, to people who cannot otherwise afford health care. Fair enough in principle, since very few Americans want to see their fellow citizens die in the streets because they can’t afford treatment. But since health care prices are even more distorted and inflated by producerist subsidies and regulations than food prices, more and more people are priced out of the health care market and need “health stamps” from government to get the insurance they need.The real beneficiaries of these multi-billion dollar government subsidies are the producers, usually the most powerful and well-connected ones that are best able to influence government regulations and subsidy policies. In farm policy, it’s the giant agribusiness companies rather than the small farmers; in health care it’s the insurance companies and hospitals—and the politicians to whose campaigns they contribute handsomely—who make the big bucks.The average middle class family probably doesn’t care much that the food bill is a bit higher than it would be if the producer lobby hadn’t rigged the market, but health care costs are something else. Unaffordable health care is a leading cause of financial distress for many families. And despite high premiums, health insurance comes with enough limitations on how that coverage can be used, not to mention deductibles and loopholes, that “being insured” becomes less and less meaningful even as the costs of insurance eat up household budgets.Or take the other Great Bane of the American middle class: higher ed. Higher education, like health care, is too expensive for middle class families to afford. But instead of thinking about how to make it cheaper, or about how to reduce the rampant credentialism that forces many young people to spend unnecessary time and unnecessary money collecting empty certificates and vacuous degrees to get into the labor market, producerists want to make student loans bigger or expand “college stamps” to subsidize increasingly inflated costs.The Supreme Court’s decision in the Horne case isn’t going to bring down the whole producerist edifice of privilege, crony capitalism, and high prices. But it’s a step in the right direction, an acknowledgement that those disadvantaged by price fixing regulations have suffered a real loss which demands compensation. It’s an acknowledgement that an economic system based on crony capitalism and sweetheart influence peddling isn’t just inefficient; it is unfair. Courts across the country at both federal and state levels have been looking at producerist laws lately with new and skeptical eyes. Are “restraint of trade” laws unconstitutional infringements on the civil rights of Americans to engage in any legal business they want to try? Are laws that require long and expensive “courses” of “study” for people who want to cut hair really fair?Producerism looked to many Americans like a good bet back in the Depression. But these days the cost of such policies is becoming unsupportable. Government policy should stop helping producer cartels raise their prices, and instead aim to make it easier for competition and innovation to bring down the costs of the goods and the services the middle class needs. The United States government doesn’t have enough money to give everyone all the food stamps, health stamps, and college stamps they will need if something isn’t done.

How Iran’s Oil Artery Is Keeping Assad Alive

Direct transfusions of oil from Iran might be one of the few things keeping Bashar Assad on his bloody throne. Bloomberg reports:

New Bloomberg analysis of tanker movement  suggests Iran has sent about 10 million barrels of crude to Syria so far this year—or about 60,000 barrels a day. With oil prices averaging $59 a barrel over the past six months, that’s about $600 million in aid since January. […]

With most of Syria’s oil and gas producing regions controlled by either the Kurds or Islamic State, these crude shipments from Iran are vital to the Assad regime’s ability to hang on to power, says Andrew Tabler, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. This crude is likely being processed into fuel oil at the Banias refinery, he says, where it can be used for home heating oil, for power generation, and as fuel for what’s left of Assad’s military.“Iran is basically fueling the entire country,” says Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Sounds like a pretty straightforward case of the sort of thing American sanctions are designed to prevent, right? But the U.S., according to Bloomberg, can’t do anything to stop it. Why?

By simply giving oil to Syria rather than charging for it, Iran is able to skirt U.S. and European Union sanctions designed to limit Iran’s crude exports. Under the sanctions regime imposed in mid-2012 as a penalty for its nuclear program, Iran is allowed to sell oil to only six countries: China, India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Turkey. “This is just a blatant violation of U.S. sanctions,” says Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington and a supporter of tougher sanctions. “It’s allowing Iran to fund Assad’s war machine with no repercussions.”

This sounds like the sort of thing a creative Administration could figure out a way to stop—quarantines, port or safety inspections, or even more “creative” options. But then again, a creative Administration would have been keen to put pressure on Assad, rather than ostentatiously take its hands off him.

As each day goes by, the Iran deal is looking less and less likely to stick. We’ve said since the beginning we hope for a good deal, and we continue to wish (some would say, hope against evidence) that Secretary Kerry will emerge from Geneva with something effective. But we’re also realists, and we hope someone in the West Wing is making backup plans. This is exactly the sort of pressure point, useful against both Iran and Syria, that the United States will want to look to squeeze should negotiations fail.

Dilma Staggers To DC

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is a precarious position, as opinion polls released earlier this week showed. Her disapproval rating was measured at 65 percent, numbers not seen since former Brazilian President Fernando Collor de Mello received a disapproval rating of 68 percent, shortly before being impeached in 1992. Meanwhile, the corruption investigation into the activities of state-run energy company Petrobras during Rousseff’s tenure as its chairwoman continues to implicate prominent Brazilian executives.

Last month, Rousseff hosted Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and brokered a series of trade deals with Beijing worth about $50 billion. Now, she is turning toward Washington for help—two years after turning her back on the Obama Administration following the Snowden leaks.  Financial Times :

The meeting with her US counterpart, Barack Obama, is the first attempt at rebuilding a relationship that was hit hard in 2013 when Ms Rousseff cancelled a planned state visit to Washington after former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed his country had spied on Brazil.

At the time, Ms Rousseff was near the peak of her popularity, but she will now be coming to the US keen for foreign policy successes to make up for plummeting approval ratings at home with Brazil’s economy contracting and corruption scandals mounting.

“She will be making this visit at a very tough moment for her,” said Carlos Melo, political scientist at Insper in São Paulo. “She needs somehow to recover some of her support base, above all in the middle class.”

A lot has changed since 2013. Just two years ago President Rousseff was in her prime, leading Brazil in its ascendance as a world-conquering BRIC—and her poll numbers looked good. The times were so good that Dilma was even able to can her scheduled trip to DC.

Then things went awry. Now Dilma is coming back to Washington, hoping to boost her battered brand at home. DC should be polite—Brazil is an important country—but the message should be clear: Brazil’s latest troubles come from a failure of reform, and the corruption firestorm at Petrobras and connected companies is a serious problem for foreign investors, especially in the US.

Obamacare Lives!

In a 6–3 decision, the Supreme Court has upheld the legality of Obamacare subsidies for federally-run exchanges. At issue was language in the law that seemed to limit subsidies to Americans who enrolled in state-run exchanges—when about three dozen states did not set up their own exchanges but delegated that to the federal government. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority decision, arguing that the context surrounding the ACA should be used to interpret the contested language. NYT:

Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the words must be understood as part of a larger statutory plan. “In this instance,” he wrote, “the context and structure of the act compel us to depart from what would otherwise be the most natural reading of the pertinent statutory phrase.”

“Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them,” he added. “If at all possible, we must interpret the act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter.”

We at TAI were never too confident that SCOTUS would rule against the law. This will no doubt be a big PR victory for the ACA, and the nation might be growing weary of more debate about a law that has now twice survived the Court. That fatigue could very well work in the ACA’s favor.

But this legal challenge was always quite orthogonal to the main issues surrounding the ACA. The big metrics by which we should evaluate the ACA are how well it fixes the fundamental issues making U.S. health care unsustainable and how much it improves the health care experience of patients—and whether any gains made on either score could have been achieved with a different, less complicated reform. That is the conversation we should be having about the ACA, and with this case behind us we could now focus on it again—if we have the will to do so.

Will Venezuela’s Elections Be Fair?

Since the Maduro regime came to power in 2013 following the death of Hugo Chavez, Venezuela has seen its economy spiral downwards, and the political, social, and diplomatic climate grow increasingly tense. Now, with the country by some accounts teetering on the verge of collapse, the regime appears to have given in to one of the opposition’s demands. The Washington Post:

Venezuela will hold parliamentary elections on Dec. 6, officials in Caracas said Monday, setting a date for a contest that will offer the country’s long-suffering opposition a chance to make its most substantial gains in more than a decade.

With President Nicolás Maduro weakened by sagging oil prices, a financial crisis and rampant crime, his opponents have feared the government would attempt to cancel or postpone the vote to spare itself an embarrassing defeat.Maduro, the handpicked successor to the late Hugo Chávez, is not up for reelection until 2019. But if the opposition takes control of parliament, it would raise the chances of a recall referendum against him next year. In the latest public opinion surveys, Maduro’s approval rating is around 25 percent.

The announcement comes after the intervention of State Department counselor Thomas Shannon, a former assistant secretary for Latin America and former Ambassador to Brazil, who met with the president of Venezuela’s National Assembly, Diosdado Cabello—a man who appears to be the focus of a U.S. criminal investigation for drug trafficking. As Jackson Diehl noted in an excellent dispatch earlier this week, the intervention was prompted by a month-long hunger strike of imprisoned opposition leader Leopoldo López. With the elections announced and two political prisoners released, López ended his protest. So, score one for smart diplomacy?

Perhaps, though it’s still too soon to celebrate. Ambassador Shannon was also asking for international election observers in Venezuela come December, but no word on that from Caracas quite yet. And as Diehl noted, there are plenty of reasons for the thugs to not play it straight:

Maduro and Cabello want the lifting of U.S. sanctions imposed on Venezuelan officials for involvement in human rights abuses as well as drug trafficking. But the administration’s answer is that the visa denials and asset freezes were mandated by congressional legislation and won’t be revoked without Capitol Hill’s support. The only way to win that, Maduro and Cabello were told, was to release the political prisoners and agree to an election with international monitoring.

The U.S. criminal investigation of Cabello, too, is unstoppable — and the prospect of being ousted from his post at the National Assembly while he is subject to indictment gives him powerful reason to resist a fair election. Maduro and Cabello are known to lead different factions within an increasingly splintered regime, but it’s not evident that either is willing or able to meet Washington’s terms.

So that’s the thing to watch for next: international election monitors would be a big deal and could even signal a split in the regime. Until then, however, we’re not holding our collective breaths for huge official gains by the opposition.

Of course, December is reasonably far away, and six months is plenty of time for the situation to deteriorate even further in Venezuela. If things get bad enough, an egregiously rigged election might light a fire that the Chavistas could have trouble containing.

Ex-Admin Officials Disown Iran Deal

Five former Obama Administration officials and a host of foreign policy panjandrums have issued an open letter expressing deep reservations about shape of the emerging Iranian nuclear deal. The Financial Times reports:

The signatories include Robert Einhorn, who used to be one of the state department’s leading experts on non-proliferation, Gary Samore, who was the White House adviser on nuclear issues in Mr Obama’s first term and General James Cartwright, who became a close adviser to the president during the first term when he was vice-chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Other signatories include Dennis Ross, a former Middle East adviser at the White House and David Petraeus, former director of the CIA. […]

The letter comes after John Kerry, secretary of state, has signalled some flexibility over the issue of how Iran might account for past research into nuclear weapons under any final deal. The US was “not fixated on Iran specifically accounting for what they did at one point in time or another,” he said last week. “What we’re concerned about is going forward.” State department officials later insisted there had been no change in the US position.The letter argues that international inspectors need to be able to visit potentially sensitive military sites in Iran and to conduct an investigation into past work on nuclear weapons. Only once such work is completed, the letter states, should Iran gain “any significant sanctions relief”.

Success has a thousand fathers, they say, while failure is an orphan—and the Iran deal is beginning to run low on parents. The White House should pay close attention; if ex-Administration officials and people closely involved in the negotiations say the final result falls short of a minimally acceptable deal, a number of Congressional Democrats are likely to vote to kill it.

This is an extremely unusual step—not at all what people in these positions normally do. Beginning with the Kissinger-Shultz letter, more and more of the American foreign policy establishment has been voicing growing doubts about the direction of America’s Iran policy.One wonders what it will take for Captain Ahab to turn the Pequod around. In the meantime, the longer these negotiations go on, the more combustible the regional situation gets, the more doubts spread in Europe about the wisdom of our course, and the more allies of the President express their own growing concern.While nothing is yet written for certain, this is not what diplomatic success usually looks like. In fact, it’s hard to think of another moment in American diplomatic history in which so many warning lights from so many places have flashed so brightly.

The Grey Lady’s Brave Attempt to Defend Obamacare

The ACA is working. Or so Robert Pear and Margot Sanger-Katz suggest in the opening paragraph of a NYT news piece on ACA subsidies. The piece points out that more than seven million Americans have enrolled in the ACA, and 87 percent of them use subsidies. Many lower-income Americans who previously could not afford or did not have insurance now have it. And, apparently, enough young people have signed up for the ACA to “stabilize” premiums. But read further down into the piece and this victory lap seems to slowly turn into something much more…complicated:

By some other measures, the subsidies have not lived up to expectations.

Although they reduce the direct cost of buying insurance for many consumers, the subsidies do not by themselves hold down the overall cost of insurance, which is driven in part by health care costs […]

Many insurers have sought rate increases of more than 15 percent for 2016, saying that the cost of claims substantially exceeded what they expected when they set premiums. The rate increases are likely to be scaled back after reviews by federal and state officials. Health policy experts say the rates might have been even higher if the subsidies had not drawn in younger consumers […]

Though the NYT tries to put a brave face on the it, noting that increases probably won’t ultimately be as high as the insurers have requested, the fact is that we are dealing with large numbers here. One insurer in New Mexico, admittedly an outlier, requested a hike of 50 percent, and other insurers in other states also asked for quite large increases of around 25-40 percent. Even if those get “scaled back,” we’re still likely looking at serious inflation here. And that’s not all:

The marketplace plans have proved less popular among higher earners, raising questions for some experts about whether the subsidies are adequate.

“People are still expected to pay quite a bit,” said John F. Holahan, a fellow at the Urban Institute, which has developed detailed estimates on the effect of the subsidies. He said that the current sign-up and renewal numbers made him worry that the marketplaces might not provide a good enough deal to keep people insured.

“After people pay a fairly significant amount of money and then go to the doctor once, twice, three times, and it’s always on the deductible, at what point do they say it’s just not worth it?” Mr. Holahan asked.

In other words, the NYT ultimately reaches the same conclusion we have, though they might put it differently. Subsidies have been good for people priced out of the system in the short-term, but overall the system is expensive and dysfunctional, and is only getting more so.

That means that even with subsidies some people are priced out of getting care routinely, and rising premiums will mean that subsidies will be stretched even thinner in coming years—unless, of course, subsidies continue to increase to meet rising premiums, in an inflationary process that has no immediate or obvious end in sight. The ACA is a bandaid solution at best, but the fundamental forces pushing our health care system towards bankruptcy are still at work. And unless those forces are addressed, even a short-term solution like giving people subsidies is going to yield diminishing returns. If you understand the ACA to be a modest attempt to give people some degree of better access to health care, it seems to be working. If you understand the ACA to be a law that will ensure Americans have access to good health care in the long term, it is nowhere near the mark.

[Updated]

Time for Sweden to Join NATO

Last summer, during the annual political festival on the Danish island of Bornholm, Russia carried out a simulated attack against the island. This year, two U.S. Air Force B-52 Stratofortress bombers appeared in the sky over the festival, gliding silently at a low altitude over the city of Allinge—twice. These flybys were intended as a political and strategic message, a clear American response to last year’s provocations by Russia. The B-52s also patrolled near Swedish waters as part of BALTOPS, a large NATO military exercise in the Baltic Sea. While Danish F-16s regularly police Danish airspace and escort Russian jets, the B-52 visit was a welcome reminder that Denmark is not alone when it comes to security.

Denmark’s political festival on Bornholm is inspired by the Swedish “Almedalen” political meeting on the Island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea. Like Denmark, Sweden has the capability to police its airspace. But unlike Denmark, Sweden is not a NATO member. Would a comparable Russian provocation be followed up with an American response? We don’t think so.The comparison between Sweden and Denmark is a useful one, particularly because it highlights some important differences in the two Nordic neighbors’ institutional affiliations. As a NATO member, Denmark enjoys Article 5 protection. This means the other 27 alliance members are committed to respond should Denmark come under attack. Membership in NATO also allows Copenhagen to have a seat at the decision-making table and to influence the future direction of the alliance. Combined with active Danish contributions to various NATO operations, Denmark today enjoys high standing and open access to key policymakers in Washington and other important allied capitals.The importance of NATO’s security guarantee is further underpinned by the recent deterioration in Europe’s security environment in general, and in the Nordic-Baltic region in particular, following Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea. Russian military activity and deliberate provocations in the Baltic Sea have sharply increased over the past year. Even Denmark has been on the receiving end of threatening rhetoric from Russia about nuclear attack on its navy should it take part in U.S. missile defense plans. But in the face of such threats Denmark’s security remains strong. Since the Wales summit, NATO and the United States have taken bold and significant moves to reassure European allies in region, especially Poland and the Baltics. The message from the alliance to Moscow is crystal clear: NATO’s Article 5 is sacrosanct and its ability to respond to an attack in the region is stronger than ever.For Sweden, NATO’s recent reinforcements in the Baltic Sea region are of course a welcome development, as they contribute to regional stability. Nevertheless Sweden has a much different security outlook than Denmark. Lacking formal Article 5 protection, Sweden would stand alone in the face a foreign threat—a message that was reinforced by U.S. NATO Ambassador Douglas Lute during a recent visit to Stockholm. Many within the Swedish defense community still like to pretend that allied forces would probably come to the rescue if Sweden came under attack. But the ambiguity of this response is clearly not conducive to either Sweden’s or the region’s security. No amount of solidarity declarations or partnerships with NATO or other Nordic countries can change the fact that NATO is the only game in town when it comes to collective defense.All the while, Sweden, at least in the eyes of Kremlin, is viewed—and probably has been viewed for decades—as being aligned with the Western alliance. While power matters in foreign policy, so do ideas. Sweden is already de facto a part of the West. There is no inherent reason, therefore, why it couldn’t also become part of the Atlantic alliance. The traditional distinction in Swedish politics between Atlantic practice and rhetorical neutrality is ripe for change. The Cold War was a unique period in European history. Today, Sweden has an opportunity to make a decision that would enhance not only its own but also the region’s security. Nordic defense collaboration would greatly benefit from Swedish (and Finnish) NATO membership, as would NATO’s efforts to protect the Baltics.Fortunately, the public debate in Sweden over the NATO membership question is heating up. One major poll conducted by Gothenburg University shows support rising from 17 percent in 2012 to 31 percent in 2014. The precise results of polls differ, but the general trend line appears clear across them all: support for NATO membership is on the rise in Sweden, and opposition is dwindling. This trend, however, is not yet reflected in broad support for the issue among Sweden’s political parties. The ruling center-left coalition has repeatedly ruled out any discussion of membership. In a positive development, the leading opposition party, the Moderate Party, recently called for a roadmap for NATO membership after the next election in 2018.Since “Almedalen” is an ideas festival, and since no single foreign policy issue matters more to Sweden than Baltic Sea security at the moment, let’s hope that politicians and civil society gatherings there this summer will talk about the B-52s over Bornholm—as a precursor for Sweden’s full participation with its Nordic neighbors in the Transatlantic alliance for peace and security.

GMOs Have a PR Problem

It’s safe to say that the debate over genetically modified crops isn’t about facts—study after study has consistently shown GMOs to be safe—but rather about feelings, namely the discomfiting notion that genetically modified foods are somehow unnatural. The science here is clear, but as the New York Times reports, the public remains unconvinced:

In a Pew Research Center survey published in January, 88 percent of scientists vouched for the safety of G.M. foods, as they’re usually called, dwarfing the 11 percent who considered them unsafe. Among the American public, 37 percent judged the foods safe and 57 percent unsafe. […]

There is no meaningful distinction between [GMOs] and other foods, as far as genes, proteins and molecules are concerned…“From a genetic point of view, genes are genes,” said [University of Wisconsin professor Dominique Brossard]. “It doesn’t matter where they come from.”

This is a question of perception, not reality, and many people remain wary of what they see as tampering in Mother Nature’s realm. And, of course, greens are doing little to ease these concerns, frequently choosing instead to inflame them.

This makes little sense, but then, that’s what we’ve come to expect from the modern environmental movement. Greens will breathlessly describe the dystopian future that awaits us just around the corner, one characterized by overpopulation and food scarcity, by a planet ravaged by hotter temperatures and more severe storms, but in the next sentence muster the gall to attack genetically modified crops. If things really are as bad as they believe, why go after one of the likeliest solutions to feeding our world’s growing population in harsher conditions?Greens are well practiced at finding a new villain, but they’re demonstrably incapable of getting behind the right kind of hero. GMOs should be just that; they can feed more with less. Tackling the public’s negative perception of GMOs ought to be a top priority for green groups around the globe, yet we see the opposite in practice.

Clinton SecDef Catches Up to TAI

President Clinton’s former Defense Secretary William Cohen is sounding the alarm that the perceived weakness of President Obama’s upcoming nuclear deal may drive Sunni countries to acquire the bomb. Bloomberg‘s Josh Rogin reports:

The administration argues that a deal with Iran will remove the need for other regional powers to pursue their own nuclear enrichment and weapons programs. Cohen, who served under President Clinton from 1997 to 2001, said the region doesn’t see it that way.

“Once you say they are allowed to enrich, the game is pretty much up in terms of how do you sustain an inspection regime in a country that has carried on secret programs for 17 years and is still determined to maintain as much of that secrecy as possible,” he said.Other regional powers are further skeptical of the international community’s ability to enforce any deal with Iran because the Obama administration has lost credibility in the region, according to Cohen. He said America’s relationships in the region were damaged in 2013, when President Obama backed away from striking Syria after telling Gulf allies he would do so, even though the Assad regime had crossed his “red line” on chemical weapons.

Cohen, who follows a long tradition of cross-aisle service in national security posts (in his case, he was a former Republican Senator from Maine serving a Democratic President), has impeccable D.C. credentials. His remarks join a chorus of warnings about the same problem from former Obama Administration insiders that swelled to a crescendo in March before the interim agreement, died down in the wake of the President’s announcement, and now seem to be picking back up again as signs look increasingly poor for a good, enforceable deal at the end of the month.

As early as 2012 (and as recently as this morning) we at The American Interest have been warning about the Saudis’ deciding to go nuclear if they feel America has let Iran get too close to the bomb, either through outright purchase from Pakistan (to whom the Saudis have given $1.5 billion in “aid” the last year alone) or through (possibly assisted) domestic development. The Saudi actions over the past year, from forcing OPEC to tank the price of oil (which hurt Riyadh, but hurt Tehran more) to bombing Yemen to openly cooperating with Israel, should show how deadly seriously the country takes the Iranian threat. And those who hopefully take Pakistan’s denials in this regard at face value are, unfortunately, mistaken as to the structure of the Pakistani deep state. (All this is to say nothing of the idiocies, and continued costs, of the Syrian red line affair.)As Walter Russell Mead put it in March:

President Obama has only herded some of the cats who need to be corralled; he appears to assume that if the P5+1 and Iran are agreed, the +3 powers (Israel, Congress, and Saudi Arabia) have no choice but to fall in line. Bibi Netanyahu’s speech to Congress and the Cotton letter were very public statements by two of the +3 that they are unhappy and don’t intend to go along. This week, the third power is speaking out; news that the Saudis are stepping up their own nuclear program suggests that President Obama can’t end the nuclear arms race in the Middle East without their support.

The Administration is in an unenviable position now. Having come so far and labored so hard to draw thiiiis close to an Iranian nuclear deal, it finds itself caught increasingly tightly in a double bind: any significant move to accommodate the Iranians and seal the deal may (especially in light of the Ayatollah’s comments yesterday) drive the Saudis into a nuclear race, gut the deal, and create a Middle East littered with nuclear proliferation—but if we stiffen our backs now and the Iranians walk, they will do so from a much stronger position than when they began negotiations. Indeed, as the President has said, Iran is just a few months from breakout capacity.

So while critics of the Administration might gloat as their predictions start to come true, we should all also be fervently praying someone in the West Wing can figure out how to thread this nuclear needle. Because the options are bad on both sides—and the next administration, which Cohen mentions will have “to deal with” these problems, is still a long nineteen months away.