Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 90

Why Nord Stream 2 Will Not Be Built

Despite the recent decisions, first by Finland and then Sweden, to permit the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to use their Exclusive Economic Zones, it is unlikely that the project will be implemented. The battle right now over the controversial project, which would allow Gazprom to circumvent Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland in shipping gas to the West by delivering it directly to Germany, has focused on getting the approval of governments for the transit of their territorial waters and of the European Union for the overall project. But those are not the only obstacles that must be overcome for construction to start on the pipeline.

Over the past 10 months, the United States has introduced a critical new factor into the equation. In July 2017, in response to the Trump Administration’s dalliance with the idea of easing sanctions on Moscow, Congress passed a tougher sanctions bill that inter alia required the Administration to develop a list of individuals in Putin’s circle, implicitly making them subject to sanction for their association with President Putin’s aggressive policies. The list was compiled by January and used as the basis of initial sanctions on April 6, including sanctions against Oleg Deripaska and Viktor Vekselberg, an unnerving warning shot to Moscow’s financial elite.

These sanctions have the consequence of increasing substantially the difficulty of finding partners for the project. In part this is a result of the way that business is conducted in Russia today. The geopolitical goal of Nord Stream 2 is to allow Moscow to sell its gas in the West without relying on the pipeline systems in Ukraine. By design, this would deliver an economic blow to the government in Kyiv that Moscow is trying to destabilize, and would also prevent any interruption in the flow of Russian gas to Europe if it decided to widen its current war against Ukraine.

But President Putin also intends for Nord Stream 2 to serve his domestic interests, and this will make it much harder to build the pipeline for two reasons. First, he wants to use it to reward his cronies who were hit earlier by Western sanctions. Reports indicate that Arkady Rotenberg and Gennady Timchenko, oligarchs and long-time associates of the Russian President, will be principal builders of the pipeline. Rotenberg and Timchenko as well as their pipeline building companies have been sanctioned by both the United States and the European Union. This means that others involved in the project will be operating with Russian oligarchs, if not directly, then through some cut-out company, thus creating for themselves a significant risk of being sanctioned.

Second, President Putin is also using the current Western, and especially American, sanctions regime to bring his own oligarchs to heel. That would explain why the Russian Alfa Group appears to be emerging as the Russian financier of the project. It is about to purchase Wintershall, one of the five European energy companies that support the project in a consortium with Gazprom. In particular, following the recent sanctioning of Deripaska and Vekselberg, the Alfa partners must understand the risk of this undertaking. But it can hardly ignore the will of Russia’s powerful leader. Sanctioning Alfa Bank would likely send Western firms considering participation in Nord Stream 2 scurrying for the exits. The prospects for profit in Nord Stream 2 are dwarfed by the dangers of falling afoul of Congress’s sanctions legislation.

The supporters of Nord Stream 2, particularly in Germany, tried hard to politicize the congressional sanctions legislation. They declared it an unacceptable American effort to impose restrictions on their economic activity. But Congress at least partly offset this criticism by adjusting the language in the legislation regarding pipelines in response to European concerns. Those adjustments left in place the critical language about sanctioning entities cooperating with the Kremlin. That language is barely a political issue. It is simply part of the environment that any firm doing risk analysis needs to consider. But it is a brightly glowing warning light.

What is more, the German position in support of Nord Stream 2 is hardly popular in Europe. Pipeline champions have been unable to establish a unified EU position against the sanctions legislations because there are many in the European Union who would like stiffer sanctions, and there are many who oppose the project. Some, like Poland and the Baltic states, oppose it because they recognize it as a geopolitical project designed to make it easier for Moscow to pursue provocative policies in Eastern Europe. Others, such as Italy, which was soft on sanctions even before the new government, do not support Nord Stream 2 because they would prefer to see a gas pipeline from Russia in the Mediterranean.

Nord Stream 2 also faces serious opposition in the European Commission, which would like to see the implementation of a common EU energy policy consistent with the Third Energy Charter. Opponents there note the peculiarities of the German position. While Berlin normally insists on EU countries working in tandem on policies of mutual interest, it is pushing unilaterally for Nord Stream 2.

The final complication for initiating Nord Stream 2 is found in Germany itself. Yes, the Putinversteher, the Social Democratic Party and interested German business strongly support it. And Chancellor Merkel is formally in favor. She recognizes that after strongly championing sanctions on Russia, she needed to offer her business supporters something. Yet she demonstrated her appreciation for nuance recently when publicly acknowledging that Nord Stream 2 is also a geopolitical project, something its most fervent advocates deny. The Chancellor is a formidable politician, but she is not likely to use all her powers to ensure the success of this project.

Some observers believe that an idea first floated in negotiations between Chancellor Merkel and the SPD on the formation of a government after last year’s election would provide a compromise enabling agreement on Nord Stream 2. This proposal would offer guarantees to Ukraine that even after the building of Nord Stream 2, Gazprom would continue to send the current amounts of gas—90 bcm per year—through Ukraine’s pipeline to its European customers. The Germans have already broached this with Kyiv, which is unenthusiastic, among other reasons, because it remembers the Budapest Memorandum, in which Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in exchange for Western and Russian “assurances” of its territorial integrity and sovereignty.

This proposal is less a compromise and more a sign that the partisans of Nord Stream 2 recognize that their position is weakening.  The odds are growing that Nord Stream 2 will disappear, not with a bang, but with a whimper.

The post Why Nord Stream 2 Will Not Be Built appeared first on The American Interest.

The Medicalization of the Police

Police in the United States are caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. They are often accused of doing too much—being too violent, too racist, too militarized. On the other hand, when it comes to the opioid epidemic, police are often seen as doing too little. In truth, the opioid epidemic has had a profound impact on police forces around the country. Beyond adding new burdens to their jobs, it’s also changing their mission by forcing cops to become quasi-paramedics. This may not turn out to be a bad thing, however: If police departments can adapt to the challenges of the opioid epidemic and embrace their roles as the guardians of citizens’ well-being, they can do much to restore their public image and rebuild trust in law enforcement.

Shifts in the police’s missions are nothing new. These have evolved as societies have changed. Yesterday, Officer Friendly ambled along with his six-shooter and billy club. Today, small police departments rehearse terrorism contingency plans and casually drive military-grade, mine-resistant vehicles in local town parades. Tomorrow, a new brand of police officer might look more like a guardian and less like a warrior.

With respect to the medicalization of American police forces, long before the opioid epidemic police had to come to terms with mentally ill people at large. Until the Reagan Administration, expeditionary hospital emergency room personnel were more likely than police to respond to dangerous or troubled behavior in public. Changes in vernacular language give a hint of the shift: People used to speak of the “men in the white coats coming to take you away”—language no one under 50 uses anymore because reality provides no evidence or prompt for the meme.

The real question, then, is what should we want police to do? Where does law enforcement and medical care blur, and what is the best way to resolve the blurring? We can argue that police have been forced to pick up responsibilities that other institutions either do not or cannot any longer meet. It is inevitable that police will sometimes be first responders in situations in which illness, not criminal intent, shape the contingency. But do we want this to happen so often that police missions change, and hence that police end up being not only first responders but also second responders, and so on?

One is reminded of how institutional weaknesses have led over time to the U.S. military taking on by default the missions of other agencies of government. Should American soldiers be painting schoolhouses in Peru as part of a civil-military training program? Should we think of such things as good ideas in their own right, or as consequences of institutional dysfunction elsewhere? Mission definitions for police and soldiers alike should be made on the basis of sound professional criteria, not forced on them by default because other institutions have decayed or collapsed.

A closer look at how the opioid epidemic has changed policing can perhaps help us navigate such questions. That closer look must begin with an appreciation of how novel the opioid epidemic really is.

Unlike the crack epidemic of the 1980s or the methamphetamine epidemic in the early 2000s, the opioid crisis is not exclusively a big-city ghetto problem; it affects rich and middle-class homes as well as those of the poor. Grandparents and children are overdosing on this type of drug. Often enough, no discernable signs of addiction appear until someone needs to call an ambulance. This frustrates the police mission, which is designed to target problem areas or people before things go badly wrong. Many ordinary people do not appreciate how much police work focuses on prevention rather than on arresting law-breakers after the fact. With opioids, there are no back alleys to monitor, no vagrants to round up, no behavioral symptoms one can spot at a distance.

Not only is the opioid epidemic different, it is mushrooming so fast that all authorities, not just police, are struggling to adapt. Small towns with small police forces are often hit the hardest. Lorain County, Ohio, with a population of about 305,000, averaged roughly 12 overdose deaths per year from 2000 to 2009. In 2016, Lorain suffered 132 deaths from drug overdoses, drug-induced heart attacks, or respiratory failures, meaning the county experienced about a decade’s worth of drug-related fatalities in one year.

The Lorain County coroner said the county was on track to surpass 200 overdose deaths in 2017, which would represent almost 20 times as many deaths experienced in a year during the early 2000s. The crisis is so severe that medical examiners do not have the time or money to spend on the test to determine which drugs caused a given death—often they just assume it to have been opioid-related.

The crisis has changed the nature of policing. Departments are forced to divert time and resources to the range of problems that accompany drug addiction, including violence, property crimes, and child neglect. Officers who joined the force to solve crimes and protect their communities are increasingly becoming de facto nurses, social workers, and temporary guardians, frantically trying to plug a hole in a sinking ship with a naloxone needle.

Tragically, opioids have even claimed the lives of officers trying to fight the overdose problem. The news lately is riddled with stories of officers accidentally overdosing on fentanyl and other opioids during routine police encounters. Police dogs have overdosed, too, after exposure to the deadly drug. At the same time, mental health and addiction services for officers are being slashed, sending morale down to levels not seen since the Vietnam era.

As overdose rates continue to climb, it’s not uncommon for police to carry Narcan, the brand name for naloxone, in nasal spray form. Police officers often function as first responders in emergency scenarios, administering Narcan to those experiencing overdoses, both because time is of the essence in saving lives and because the black-market drug trade breeds violence—paramedics usually prefer to wait for police in volatile and perilous environments.

Some law enforcement leaders have decided that protecting the addicted must have limits. One Ohio sheriff announced that officers in his department will no longer carry Narcan because, in his words,  “All we’re doing is reviving them, we’re not curing them.” A city council member in a different Ohio city recently proposed a three-strikes policy under which officers and paramedics would refuse to respond to an overdose call if the individual has had repeated overdoses. The guiding idea behind refusing to revive, or limiting the revival of, opioid-addicted individuals is that the policy will deter drug abuse and compel addicts to clean up their habits.

That is wishful thinking. The nature of addiction renders a rational approach to decision-making improbable; instead of acting as a wake-up call, these kinds of policies will only increase deaths from overdose. Since there are evidence-based practices to combat the rising lethality of drug addiction, we have much better options.

No doubt policies like the three-strikes rule are encouraged by a severe lack of funding for Narcan use. The stuff isn’t cheap, but it works: Between 1996 and 2014, Narcan was able to reverse 26,000 opioid overdoses, even when administered by people without medical training. Maine alone experienced 208 deaths related to overdosing in 2015. But in that same year, police and other first responders saved 829 lives with naloxone. As long as police officers are increasingly responding to these kinds of emergencies, they must have access to lifesaving tools like Narcan.

Obviously, Narcan is just a band-aid, not a solution to the opioid epidemic—and no one should expect solutions to be the responsibility mainly of police departments. But policymakers at different levels of government are unlikely to find solutions anytime soon. Some frankly don’t care what happens to drug addicts, believing for whatever atavistic reasons that they are responsible for their own mistakes. Others simply don’t know what to do, or don’t want to risk their popularity by asking citizens to pay for solutions that will work to manage, if not eliminate, the problem. The short-term thinking of many politicians blinds them to the fact that solutions cost less than metastasizing problems left unattended.

In the meantime, law enforcement and emergency first-responders will play a role in harm-reduction efforts, if only by default. They will do so, for example, by diverting addicts away from jails and toward longer-term remediation programs. Officers will find themselves in a position to save thousands of lives. That’s heartening on one level, but over time, what does the suspension of police departments over the chasm of a larger public policy paralysis lead to?

No great public policy savior is coming to help strapped police departments facing the opioid crisis virtually alone. They will not be inundated with funding to hire more officers anytime soon, so many if not most departments will be forced to consider hiring recruits who care about the new landscape of policing. That could alter the array of personality types who become police, and open the profession to a new gender balance as well. The training for these new officers will have to go beyond instructions on how to administer Narcan, delving deep into how police should interact with communities where addiction is real, silent, and deadly. There will be a premium on emotional intelligence, arguably even beyond current demands, if tomorrow our officers will not only be chasing bad guys, but helping the sick and the troubled.

While new challenges for law enforcement are both complicated and pressing, the medicalization of the police is not necessarily a net-negative for society. High-profile controversies over police violence, racial bias, and militarization have widened the trust gap between police and communities, making officers’ jobs more difficult. It is crucial for law enforcement not to shy away from dealing with the opioid epidemic. The challenge for today’s police could result in newly mended relations now far down the road between the police and those they are sworn to protect and serve.

On the other hand, whether the medicalization of the police is the best way to handle the challenges posed by the opioid epidemic and related mental health issues that bleed over into law enforcement contingencies is another matter. The question is not a police question; it’s a leadership question in the broader political sense. Our hunch is that police chiefs throughout the nation are waiting and hoping for such enlightened leadership to arise. One wonders how long they will have to wait.

The post The Medicalization of the Police appeared first on The American Interest.

The Impacts of Immigration: Europe vs. America

Immigration, and the intense opposition to it, are roiling the political agendas of democracies on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. New technologies of transportation and communication, combined with the age-old plagues of war and poverty, have turned what was for most of the 20th century a relative trickle of people leaving their home countries into massive migrations. This has triggered political backlashes in both Europe and the United States, with populist anti-immigrant movements and political parties gaining strength from Great Britain to Hungary and Donald Trump becoming the 45th American President.

Beyond the similarities in the causes and effects of mass migration in America and Europe, however, its political, economic and social consequences in the Old and New Worlds differ in important ways. After Europe by Ivan Krastev, a Bulgarian who is a fellow at think tanks in Vienna and Berlin and has written widely on European affairs, is a brief, provocative, and generally pessimistic meditation on the continent’s future that offers a useful primer on immigration in Europe. The book thus provides the basis for comparing immigration’s impact and likely future there with its consequences on the other side of the Atlantic. The comparison suggests that those consequences will be harsher, and the problems to which immigration gives rise will become less manageable, in the 28 countries of the European Union than in the 50 states of the United States.

Some of the Transatlantic differences have to do with history. Beginning with the religious refugees from England who traveled to North America in the seventeenth century, immigrants have populated the United States for more than four hundred years. For Americans, the inflow of people from abroad, while often the cause of social tensions, is normal. While some European countries have occasionally accepted immigrants on an appreciable scale—in the 20th century France absorbed newcomers from Eastern Europe as well as from its former colonies, and Krastev notes that after World War I his native Bulgaria took in refugees amounting to fully one-fourth of its population—the members of the European Union have had far less experience with receiving and assimilating large numbers of foreigners than has the United States.

Geography also makes a difference. As a continent-sized country, the United States has plenty of room for newcomers. Of course, many settle in relatively crowded cities; but America has more of these than any single European state. “It may surprise the Bangladeshis and Pakistanis who come to live in South East England,” George Walden writes in his powerful 2006 book Time to Emigrate?, “that they’re emigrating to a place more densely settled than India.”

Demography counts as well. With its population of 325 million, the United States can experience even large numbers of immigrants as the proverbial drop in the bucket. For the far smaller European countries, some of them tiny by comparison with the colossus of North America, even lesser numbers can feel like a tidal wave.

Furthermore, the American economy has historically done better than those in Europe at generating the kinds of jobs that low-skilled immigrants can do, which makes it easier to absorb them. In fact, because welfare benefits tend to be more modest in the United States than in Europe, immigrants come to America to work. During economic downturns, when jobs are scarce, some return home and others who in booming times would have immigrated remain in their home countries instead. By contrast, a considerable number of immigrants in Europe do not work and draw social benefits of various kinds for which others have to pay, creating a potent source of resentment that is less intensely felt in the United States.

If Europe and America differ in their capacities to receive and absorb immigrants, their respective immigrant populations differ as well, and in ways that make them more disruptive in Europe than in North America. The largest cohort of migrants to the United States comes from Mexico and the smaller countries of Central America. Hispanics have lived in what is now the United States since the establishment of the city of Santa Fe, in modern New Mexico, in 1610. Relations between the United States and its neighbors to the south, and between the Hispanic and non-Hispanic populations north of the Rio Grande River, have not always been smooth; but the relationship is at least a familiar one. Moreover, the two groups and the countries involved largely share a common faith: Christianity.

A considerably greater social and cultural gap separates the indigenous population of Europe from many of the newcomers there, which aggravates—indeed stands at the heart of—the continent’s immigration problem. The bulk of the new arrivals come originally from North and sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South and southwest Asia, where the predominant customs, values, and beliefs differ more sharply from those of the countries of the European Union than the Central Americans’ do from the norms of the United States. In a largely Christian (or at least post-Christian) Europe many of the immigrants are Muslim, and lack the education and background that would ease their assimilation into the societies to which they have come.

Furthermore, a number of the countries sending people to Europe suffer from civil war and social and economic collapse. These conditions make the migrants from such places desperate to leave, regardless of whether jobs are available in the countries they seek to enter and of whether their customs and values align with those of the people among whom they aspire to live. Those desperation-inducing conditions also mean that migrants from such places are likely to descend on Europe in ever-greater numbers, even when they are not welcome. By contrast, Mexico and the countries of Central America, while hardly without problems, enjoy relatively greater stability, have better economic prospects, and are less likely to send huge flows of distressed people to the United States in the years ahead.

Moreover, immigrants to Europe have become associated with violence, especially terrorist violence, in a way that immigrants to the United States have not. The perpetrators of the attacks on New York and Washington, DC on September 11, 2001, although foreigners, were not seeking to settle in America. By contrast, the terrorist episodes over the last decade and more in Great Britain, France, Germany, Spain, and Belgium were the work of immigrants or the children of immigrants.

Another difference between American and European immigration bears on the future of the issue on the two sides of the Atlantic. What makes 21st-century immigration objectionable to many Americans is the fact that so many immigrants have entered their country illegally, the majority of them by sneaking across the country’s southern border. Immigration of this kind embodies not only lawbreaking but also unfairness, penalizing those from other countries who wish to live in the United States but abide by the established rules for doing so. Illegal immigration across the southern border also means that admission to the United States—a basic sovereign prerogative for any country—is partly determined not by the decisions of the duly elected representatives of the American people in Congress, but rather by the whims, the greed, and the guile of human traffickers. This is not, to say the least, consistent with democracy.

Precisely because what many Americans find objectionable about immigration is that much of it is illegal, however, makes it potentially easier to calm the political passions the issue has generated in the United States than in Europe. To the extent that Americans object to the way illegal immigrants reach their country, those objections can be reduced by eliminating the procedure that gives rise to them. If the southern border were to be secured to the satisfaction of the American public—and there may be more expeditious ways to do this than building a wall all along the length of it—then it ought to be easier to reform the nation’s immigration laws. This would involve finding a broadly acceptable status for those who have already entered the country illegally, many of them by now long-time residents. It might also involve adjusting the laws to provide greater access to the country for people with scarce, economically valuable skills, as some other Western countries now do.

Across the Atlantic, by contrast, no such theoretically satisfactory outcome seems available because it is the immigrants themselves to whom the Europeans object, rather than their method of reaching Europe. The wave of newcomers that arrived in Germany in 2015, for example, came at the express invitation of Chancellor Angela Merkel. Because Europe’s immigrants will not leave, the problems they create will persist. This makes for a final difference in the ultimate impact of immigration in the United States and Europe, the most important difference of all.

No matter how troublesome it becomes, immigration does not threaten America’s basic political structure. Some municipalities have declared themselves “sanctuary cities” from which immigrants, even if in the country illegally, may not be removed. This has annoyed the federal authorities, but hardly amounts to the kind of defiance of the power of the Federal government that led, in 1861, to the American Civil War.

In Europe, however, according to Ivan Krastev, the turmoil caused by popular resistance to the ongoing arrival of Asians, Africans, and Middle Easterners in unacceptably large numbers, in combination with the economic distress that the operation of the continent’s common currency, the euro, has inflicted on southern Europe, jeopardizes the survival of the European Union itself. For the United States, immigration is a problem. For Europe it is, in Krastev’s term, “a revolution,” and not one likely to lead to a brighter future.

The post The Impacts of Immigration: Europe vs. America appeared first on The American Interest.

The Russian Myth Machine

Russia has the uncanny ability to generate misconceptions about itself. In the past quarter century we have borne witness to a staggering array of errors, fallacies, and self-deceptions concerning what Russia is about and where it’s heading. The most spectacular fiasco was the failure of Sovietology, which asserted that the Soviet Union was as solid as a rock, right up to the moment it started to crumble.

After the Soviet collapse, Russia experts by and large missed the opportunity to discern the reasons behind the Sovietology disaster, and instead continued the myth-creation exercise. A wide array of different schools of thought (comparative studies, transitology, economic and historical determinism, liberal internationalism, neoconservatism, realism), all employing refined techniques and sophisticated concepts, failed to predict or explain Russia’s post-communist trajectory. Who could have foreseen that a member of the Council of Europe would suddenly breach the principles of the Helsinki Accords and upend the world with a confrontational agenda? Europe pursued its strategy of Partnership for Modernization with Russia just as Moscow had stopped reforms and started thinking about how to weaken the European Union. The United States offered Moscow a “reset” while the Kremlin was debating how to contain the United States. The Western community was confounded by Russia’s wars with Georgia and Ukraine and its gambit in Syria, and it was totally unprepared for the “Russian factor” in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. One can only guess what the authors of numerous books and essays on Russia’s democracy, Yeltsin’s liberal revolution, Russia’s integration into the West, and Putin’s modernizing leadership are thinking today. All of us have to eat our slice of humble pie and own up to the illusions we have created.

Russian political analysts are especially good at deception. They do it both wittingly, for political reasons and due to conformist tendencies, and unwittingly, because it is often difficult to understand particular phenomena when one forms a part of them. But why is it that these deceptions are then repeated by Western experts, and why are the latter still so ready to write up Russia’s fake narrative when the fakery became apparent?1

The Playbook of Russian Fallacies

I would suggest we go back several years and look at some then-popular views about Russia that proved to be either confusing or wrong. Here is a short list that should hopefully force us to ponder the errors and misjudgments that contributed to their creation:

Medvedev’s presidency “marks a transition from a phase of consolidation to a period of modernization. . . . We are witnessing one of the most promising periods in Russian history.” This citation belongs to one of the West’s most prominent political minds. Does it reflect naivety and lack of understanding, or something else?
Medvedev is “the most prominent spokesman for the modernization-democratization school of thought,” and his position marks “a milestone in Russia’s political evolution.” This quote belongs to a political thinker no less prominent than the first.
On the cause of war between Russian and Ukraine: “In some ways the EU has taken maximalist positions with the Russians and acted as if they were surprised that Russia took offense or got angry.” “[T]he EU precipitated matters by blundering into the most sensitive parts of Russia’s backyard.” One hopes the authors have changed their minds about this.
The Kremlin’s Syrian incursion “has helped Russia to return to the global scene as an aggressive Great Power.” The Kremlin goal was to return Russia to a dialogue with the United States and put Ukraine on the back burner. Instead of strengthening Russia’s great power role, the Syrian “project” began to undermine it.
Putin stands for “Russian resurgence.” “When was Peter the Great humble? When was Catherine humble? That’s not part of the role that they play.” To compare Putin to Peter the Great and Catherine requires a lot of imagination. As for resurgence, does Russia’s 1.5 percent share of global GDP confirm this analysis?
“Russians agree to be governed in an autocratic way.” This remains to be seen. Vladimir Putin’s victory in the presidential plebiscite and his skyrocketing approval rating could rather testify to the state control mechanism over society than to the mood of the people.
“Many outsiders would be surprised at how much freedom the average Russian enjoys.” The comment was made just as the Kremlin had begun a new repression cycle in 2012.

The list could go on and on, but I will stop here. This should suffice to demonstrate that what we are dealing with is a collective self-deception.

The most intriguing aspect of our analytical story is that many pundits who only yesterday were telling the West to “accommodate Russia” and accept the Kremlin’s understanding of reality have now shifted to the alternative view that Russia is incorrigible and will remain an archenemy of the West. The observers who recently blamed the European Union—and especially particular states like Sweden, Poland, and the Baltics—for “maximalist positions” and for provoking Russia are now talking about Moscow’s global mischief making. But if both of these sets of observations were true at the time, then what explains Russia’s sudden change of behavior? Left unexplained, both assessments look unconvincing. Can we trust Russia hands’ judgment if their views change so radically?

The Deception Game Goes On

What elements of the Russia narrative look dubious today? First of all, the pervasive Putiniana of the discourse in both academia and the media. I have in mind observers’ attempts to identify Russia with Putin, whereupon they play his shrink, trying to penetrate his brain and tell their audience his deepest thoughts and most secret agenda. Putiniana no doubt massages the Russian leader’s ego and allows him to view the rest of the world with condescension, but does it help us to understand Kremlin policy, the resilience of the Russian regime, or the mood of Russian society?

No, it does not! The armchair Putin psychoanalysts have been continually wrong in their predictions of Putin’s actions and explanations of his motivations. However, this hasn’t dissuaded them from chanting their mantras. He is, to wit, the “most powerful leader in the world”; “Putin understands Russia. He also understands the world. . . . Putin understands us very well” (Fareed Zakaria). “Who is the most influential being on the planet? My vote goes to V. Putin”; a “brilliant . . . figure” (David Brooks). Such open admiration for the Russian leader on the part of Western observers provokes consternation. How could it happen that the “most powerful leader” would allow his nation to be sanctioned? Does marginalization bring power? Are Russia’s isolation, economic woes, and declining living standards all signs of the Russian leader’s “brilliance”?

It’s difficult to escape the impression that Western observers continue to be drawn to the Kremlin’s dark power much in the same way that Western writers were in the 1930s with Stalin. Bernard Shaw, Theodore Dreiser, Romain Rolland, Mark Twain, Leon Feuchtwanger, André Gide were all mesmerized by the Russian or Soviet autocrats of their day. But there is one substantial difference between these observers and the Russia watchers of today: the past writers had very little access to what was happening in the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union of their times; Western observers today don’t have that excuse.

Why are Western minds so captivated by Kremlin power? (And note that even demonizing Putin is a form of captivation.) Is it a reflection of their frustration with liberal democracy, or is it evidence that they will settle for simple answers to complicated questions? Whatever the reasons for their fascination, it distorts their understanding of the Russian landscape.

Here are a few more examples of popular misconceptions about Russia.

“Russian policy is the result of Russians’ feelings of vulnerability and insecurity.” Objectively, a petrostate that is dependent on developed countries ought to feel vulnerable. However, Russia represents an interesting case: Its ruling team has succeeded in turning the asymmetry of resources and its weaknesses into strengths, compensating for a lack of traditional power by other means—namely, unpredictability and aggression (blackmail, disinformation, and cyber warfare). Moreover, the West often fuels Moscow’s self-assuredness by its willingness to be deceived (or co-opted). Thus, the Crimea annexation and Russia’s war with Ukraine resulted not from the Kremlin’s feeling of vulnerability but from its cockiness and conviction that the West would put up with Russia’s actions—a prediction that Putin arrived at as a result of long experience in dealing with the Western political class.

Does the Kremlin team feel vulnerable today in confronting Western attempts to contain Russia? I would bet they do. But judging from the Kremlin’s actions, the Russian political class apparently still hopes to find ways to outsmart the Western establishment (or at least part of it) and undermine its unity. And in European frustration with Trumpian America, Russia senses another opportunity to undermine the U.S. sanctions regime. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s and French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent visits to Russia, the latter’s desire to “return Russia into Europe,” the warm embraces of the Russian President by Austria, Italy, Bulgaria, and Hungary, EU high officials’ calls to stop “bashing” Russia—all of these are signs that Vladimir Putin has returned to the European scene and that his isolation is over. But this is the result not of Moscow’s smart foreign policy but rather the West’s confusion and disunity.

Western analysts argue that Russia’s revisionist stance only became apparent in 2012, or even later. It became popular to talk about “how Russia goes global,” expanding its “footprint” from Syria to Venezuela, Nicaragua, the Balkans, and Western Europe. But Moscow openly declared its rivalry with the United States much earlier; in 2007, it announced the end of the era of Western domination. And the shift toward this position began in 2003-04, not recently!

Moscow began dating Venezuela during Hugo Chavez’s reign, with Gazprom arriving in the country in 2004-05. (It is worth mentioning that this “love affair” did not prevent the U.S. reset with Russia in 2009.) Nicaragua has been an object of interest for Russia for decades. The Balkans, and especially Serbia, have never ceased to be a special area of Russian influence. As for Montenegro, Moscow made its “footprint” there in the early 2000s (by 2008, 32 percent of its businesses were controlled by Russians). Moscow has been supporting left- and right-wing organizations in western Europe for at least 10-15 years. Thus, Russia had already started to “go global” at the very time when the West was pursuing partnership and Western Russia hands were calling for the West to “accommodate” Russia. To fail to notice this globalization of Russia’s “footprint,” or to claim that Russian hostility only began in 2012, one must suffer from substantial analytical blind spots.

One more popular axiom: “Russia wants confrontation with the West.” Not exactly. Kremlin rhetoric intended for domestic consumption has to create the image of Russia surrounded by enemies; there is no other way to consolidate Russian society around the flag than by military patriotism. When it comes to external relations, however, Vladimir Putin has actually been unusually conciliatory during the past two years. It seems as though the Kremlin is ready to swallow some humiliation in order to forestall further confrontations with the West. Examples of this newfound Kremlin humility? Here you are: There has been no serious Russian response to the Western sanctions; Moscow hasn’t reacted to the U.S. and Israeli strikes against Russian allies in Syria; it was largely silent after the United States bombed hundreds of Russian mercenaries in Syria; there has been no reaction to Erdogan’s undermining the Russian Black Sea oil pipeline project; under pressure from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Putin has promised to continue to use Ukraine for transporting gas to Europe. The Kremlin’s reticence has provoked rage from the Russian nationalists and imperialists, who are now yelling, “Putin is betraying Russia!”

The Russian elite and oligarchs should be frustrated that the Kremlin hasn’t been ready to defend them when they have been rolled over by the Western sanctions bus. The Kremlin has been silent when Deripaska received a whipping from the United States and nearly lost his aluminum empire; when Vekselberg’s one billion Swiss francs were frozen in the Swiss banks; when Cyprus began to eliminate offshore companies (which serve as havens for Russian money); when London denied a visa to Roman Abramovich; and when the United Kingdom opened an investigation into the sources of income of 130 Russians who hold property there.

Of course, that there has been no sign of Kremlin retaliation does not mean that the Kremlin has been backtracking; it means that the Kremlin wants to restart, without losing face, a beneficial (to Moscow) dialogue with the West. Besides, Putin and his team now understand that dialogue with the West offers more opportunities for the Russian system to survive than real, not imitational confrontation.

The Kremlin has to take into account the changing public mood in Russia, too. Russian foreign policy is losing one of its key tools: anti-Western mobilization. Thirty-nine percent of respondents say that the President should put a priority on improving living standards, while only 5 percent say he should strengthen Russia’s role in the world and defend it from enemies, and only 2 percent consider security issues to be the President’s key agenda.

In another poll 59 percent of respondents think that the key goal of Russian foreign policy should be “guaranteeing the peaceful and secure existence of Russia,” while only 19 percent want a confrontation with the United States, and 14 percent support the expansion of Russian influence in the world. Russian society doesn’t seem that aggressive at all! Recently 54 percent of respondents said that Russia should strengthen its relations with the West (28 percent were in favor of increasing Russia’s distance from the West).

Here is one more Russian axiom supported by both Russian and Western pundits: “Russia’s great power status is the core of Russian identity.” Indeed, it would be unusual for Russians to think about their country as a normal state. However, we need to see the evolution of the Russian view of “Great power” status. The country is split on this issue: 42 percent of Russians say that they would like to see Russia as a great power that should be feared by the world; 56 percent would like to see Russia as a great power that would guarantee the people’s well-being, and they don’t think Russia should be one of the most powerful states in the world.

The cognitive dissonance of Russian society regarding the West is to a great degree the result of a split that the Russian political class has tried to manage: assertiveness toward the West and integration with the West. One can’t exclude the possibility that at some point the Kremlin may once again resort to Russia’s traditional gimmick: escalation to force the other side to agree to a “New Bargain.” But it looks like the Kremlin understands the limits of its confrontational stance and its growing problems with legitimizing itself through military patriotism.

The Kremlin’ s key goal today is to return things to the pre-Crimea situation, which will give Russia legitimate access to Western resources and will help the Russian system of personalized power to re-energize itself. But any new “normal” will be situational; sooner or later the system would try once again to expand its global impact; that is its way of existence. This existential pattern creates for the West an unsolvable challenge: neither containment nor cooperation can force the Russian system of personalized power to accept the Western vision for the world order.

A few other myths still persist. Pundits continue to discuss Russia as the center of the Big Eurasian Galaxy. Geopolitics and especially the Eurasianist project have been an escape route for analysts who did not know what to make of developments in Russia. However, with Ukraine jumping the Eurasian boat, and with Belorussia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan trying to warm up their relations with the West and pursue an agenda with China, the Eurasianist Project has lost its momentum, and Moscow has been forced to put it on the back burner. So much energy lost on something of so little value!

Another popular exercise of those who have been trying to find a new Global project for Russia is the idea of a “Sino-Russian Entente.” “Rejected by the West, Russia has pivoted to Asia and found in China its leading partner”—this has become the chief song sung by pro-Kremlin Russian analysts, and Western observers have been seduced by its tune. Meanwhile, all attempts of “the intertwining” of the Eurasian Union with China’s ambitious “New Silk Road” project (now “One Belt, One Road”) could be perceived as another bit of fakery. “Intertwining” may take place, but only as a means for China to develop the infrastructure that will connect it with Europe. Is Russia ready to serve as China’s “bridge”? Hardly! While China wants to “bridge” itself with Europe, Putin’s Kremlin wants to push Russia in the opposite direction, which makes the whole “intertwining” a conceptual mess. Besides, why should China go to any trouble to massage the vanity of a fading Great Power?

One more simplification: “Russia is becoming a totalitarian regime.” Indeed, the current Russian regime has been increasing the scope and number of repressions. However, could the regime successfully push Russia into the totalitarian corset? I doubt it. Russia lacks a consolidating idea like Communism and the loyalty of the elite—integrated into the West and accustomed to living in a globalized world—is fragile. These characteristics limit the appetite of the Russian regime for totalitarianism. True, an authoritarian regime in an advanced state of rot that rejects any rules could be even more dangerous to its own society and to the world as a whole.

Finally here is another favorite pastime of the Western political community: attempts to find a new “equilibrium” in Russian-Western relations. As Henry Kissinger said during his last visit to Moscow in 2016, “Russia should be perceived as an essential element of any new global equilibrium.” But what does “equilibrium” mean? I guess it means more or less constructive relations. Could the new equilibrium, as the pundits argue, “rest on NATO stopping further enlargement into the post-Soviet space”? I hasten to remind everyone that the end of NATO enlargement toward Russia’s borders did not prevent its relationship with the liberal democracies from souring.

The hostile nature of the Russian-Western relationship makes achieving any kind of equilibrium a difficult task. We have to accept the unpleasant conclusion that “equilibrium,” understood as a situation in which both sides accept the same rules of the game, is impossible so long as the Russian system insists on a different interpretation of these rules. Instead of hoping for an “equilibrium,” Russia and the West should learn how to find a better balance between animosity and cooperation than they have so far. If their goal is to freeze their mutual distrust and the differences in their understating of principles, then they will fail.

I can hear the voices now: “But that means that Russia is incorrigible!” This is not true. We are talking not about Russia but about an obsolete Russian system based on militarism and Great Power aggression—a system that must be radically transformed. However, the evolution of Russian society, including segments of the elite, demonstrates that hostility to liberal civilization are not immutable characteristics of Russia writ large.

The expert community (both Russian and Western) still has to understand the polychromatic nature of the Russian canvas, with its conflicting hues. Both the confrontationists and the accommodationists are describing only fragments of the Russian reality.

The misperceptions that inevitably result from these fragmentary visions not only undermine Western policy toward Russia; they disorient the Kremlin and the Russian elite regarding the West’s intentions. Recent developments prove that the Kremlin’s actions on the international scene have been motivated not only by the domestic agenda but also by the Kremlin’s view of what the West thinks about Russia and President Putin. These perceptions allowed the Kremlin to conclude that the West would pursue accommodation as the premise of its Russia policy. Both sides—Russia and the West—have paid the price for their misperceptions. They will pay again for new misperceptions that ignore not only the logic of the Russian system’s survival but the new moods prevailing in Russian society as well.

1Random attempts to understand the reasons for the confrontational relations between Russia and the West—and the role of “Russia hands” in this process—only make the picture more confusing. See: Keth Gessen, “The Quiet Americans Behind the U.S.-Russia Imbroglio,” New York Times, May 8, 2018.

The post The Russian Myth Machine appeared first on The American Interest.

Anti-Discrimination Eats Itself

Do laws against discrimination themselves discriminate? They might: When religious teachings include belief in a natural patriarchal order, hostility toward non-believers, and condemnation of homosexuality, anti-discrimination laws can conflict with rights to religious liberty, broadly defined. The Supreme Court confronted such a conflict in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission—a case involving a devout Christian baker, Jack Phillips, who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, Charlie Craig and Dave Mullins. The couple and the Colorado Civil Rights Commission argued Phillips discriminated on the basis of sexual orientation. Phillips countered that forcing him to create a cake that celebrated same-sex marriage would discriminate against him because of his religion, violating his rights to free exercise of religion and freedom of expression. Last week, the Court sided with Phillips in a narrowly worded opinion that was virtually limited to the specific facts of this case, disappointing advocates of both gay rights and religious liberty. But the Court had few good options in Masterpiece Cakeshop because overly broad conceptions of civil rights protections have turned these important laws against themselves, like an overactive immune system that consumes its host.

To understand how this has happened, we need to compare the expansive idea of discrimination (and of religious and expressive liberty) at work in Masterpiece Cakeshop with an older, more workable conception. The core idea of traditional anti-discrimination law is to prohibit discrimination on the basis of some ascribed status: Race is the paradigmatic example, of course, but sex, religion, national origin, age, and disability can all be thought of as social statuses that trigger prejudice and irrational discrimination. Obviously, most forms of behavior aren’t covered: Government is free to “discriminate” against pot-smokers, brawlers, and embezzlers; likewise employers who “discriminate” against tardy, belligerent, or dishonest employees are in the clear, legally speaking.

Of course, the status of being a religious adherent is inseparable from religious beliefs and practices, so to some extent anti-discrimination law must prohibit discrimination based on religiously based behavior. But until recently, courts have been careful to limit such anti-discrimination strictures in order to allow government and the private entities regulated by anti-discrimination laws the freedom to establish common norms of behavior unless those norms were designed to exclude or oppress religious groups.

Unsurprisingly, civil rights advocates, from both the multiculturalist Left and the religious Right, have attempted to expand the areas where the law prohibits discrimination based on behavior: the latter by arguing for broader definitions of religious practice and the former by drawing analogies that would apply the religiously based protections to a greater number of groups not defined by religion as such. For instance, as far back as the early 1990s, some multiculturalists and racial justice advocates have insisted that the definition of race discrimination should include discrimination because of racially associated traits and culture, so that employers, landlords, and government officials would be required to accommodate vaguely defined racial cultures just as they had to accommodate narrowly defined religious practices. These claims inspired and emboldened advocates of religious liberty to expand the definition of religious practice to include any action or refusal to act motivated by religious conviction—so that in a sense the narrow, workable idea of religious practice metastasized to become an unwieldy notion of a religious culture.

This strategy paid off in 2014’s Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, where the Court insisted that the free exercise of religion entitled an employer to refuse to comply with an otherwise valid health insurance mandate that covered forms of birth control that some religious faithful believe—against the weight of scientific evidence—induce abortion. On top of all this, the number of groups that enjoy protection from discrimination is also growing, for both good and questionable reasons. As to the good, not-so-long ago “gay rights” were a new frontier of anti-discrimination law; today we refer to the “LGBT” community, which indicates both an expansion of the size of the group and the scope of legal protection due to it. With respect to the questionable, state and local anti-discrimination laws increasingly prohibit discrimination because of things like height and weight, and a growing chorus of voices advocate new laws outlawing discrimination based on “appearance”—a category that can include both inherited physical characteristics and freely chosen ones shaped by attire and grooming.

Many of these new civil rights protections make sense in isolation, but in combination they constitute a recipe for unresolvable conflicts of absolutes. Overly broad religious liberties will inevitably clash with LGBT rights and with women’s rights, as in Hobby Lobby. As for the project to prohibit “cultural discrimination”—which inspired and was in turn inspired by the aggressive expansion of expressive and religious liberty—it is downright incoherent: Law—including civil rights law—is the product and reflection of culture; therefore all law discriminates on the basis of culture, enforcing some cultural norms at the expense of others. In his majority opinion in Masterpiece Cakeshop, Justice Kennedy complained that the Commission’s decision to reject Phillips’s request for a religious exception to the state’s anti-discrimination law was “based on a negative normative evaluation of the particular justification for [Phillips’ refusal to make the wedding cake] . . . and the religious ground for it.” But because all legal prohibitions are based on “a negative normative evaluation” of the conduct the law prohibits, this objection is really no objection at all.

Anti-discrimination laws necessarily discriminate on the basis of attitudes and views. They condemn bigoted, intolerant, and exclusionary beliefs and punish those who would act on such beliefs. To be sure, what counts as bigoted, intolerant, and exclusionary has and will continue to change along with changes in our culture, but once society and the law settle on a norm—as we seem to have done with respect to same-sex couples—we should defend and enforce it unapologetically. It’s a sign of today’s embattled, confused, and uncertain liberalism that we would try to tolerate intolerance, include exclusion, and outlaw discrimination against discriminators.

A resolute, coherent, and self-confident anti-discrimination norm requires that we define the scope of anti-discrimination rights both clearly and relatively narrowly, limiting civil rights protection to the most compelling cases. A good way to do this is to focus on the kinds of discrimination that reinforce deep and destructive social prejudices against vulnerable groups that are disadvantaged in the market and conventional majoritarian politics. This suggests greater protection for minority religions that suffer from stigma and stereotypes, such as Judaism and Islam; less for the religious majority—namely mainline and Evangelical Protestants (and I say this as the child of a Presbyterian minister.)

This doesn’t necessarily mean that Jack Phillips should be forced to bake cakes for same-sex nuptials. But if he shouldn’t, the reason can’t be that Colorado’s anti-discrimination law discriminates against discriminatory religious practices. It must be for more contingent, practical reasons. For instance, although University of Chicago Law Professor Richard Epstein has wrongly argued that religious liberty demands a broad, general exception to anti-discrimination laws, he makes a reasonable argument that in this case, with scores of other bakeries in town competing for Mr. Craig’s and Mr. Mullins’s business, they suffered little if any real injury—and after all, who wants someone theologically opposed to the union involved in their wedding?—while by contrast Phillips clearly had a sincere and personal religious motive for refusing to make a statement in favor of same-sex marriage (even if that statement took the form of a baked confection.)

But this is really a contextual weighing of costs and benefits disguised as an argument from first principles—it’s the kind of nuts-and-bolt analysis that rights talk, Constitutional law, and appellate courts can’t help us with. So it is with many of the normative and cultural conflicts now ill-advisedly fought out under the obfuscatory rubric of deontological rights. Anti-discrimination law doesn’t have to discriminate if we are discriminating in how and when we use it.

The post Anti-Discrimination Eats Itself appeared first on The American Interest.

The Great Sanctions Split

Ever since the West imposed sanctions on Russia in 2014, Vladimir Putin’s response has been based on the premise that sanctions are meant to divide Russian elites and eventually overthrow Putin himself. In this narrative, equating his cronies’ interests with the country’s, the Russian President has portrayed himself as the only one who can resist Western hostility and prevent the country from falling apart. Every new round of U.S. sanctions has been received by Russia in this light, with the assumption that they are intended to drive a wedge in the Russian elite.

When U.S. and EU officials talk about sanctions on Russia, though, they mention deterrence and punishing the Kremlin for military interventions and election meddling. If the question of creating an elite split ever arises, it does so only privately.

However, whether by mistake or design, a split in the Russian elite might have occurred anyway. When it comes to the current sanctions regime, at least two distinct interest groups have formed in Russia: those who benefit from Western sanctions (and the very helpful counter-sanctions the Russian government has imposed) and therefore welcome them, and those who don’t. In short, Western policy has not fallen evenly across the oligarchic class but has created both winners and losers within the elite—with potentially profound consequences for Russia’s future.

First, it helps to remember what Putin’s circles looked like a few years back, when an authoritarian regime in Russia had finally come into its own. In Putin’s closest circle were his personal friends from the 1990s Ozero cooperative in Saint Petersburg, consisting of the Rotenberg family, the Kovalchuks, Gennady Timchenko, and a few others who made their fortunes on state contracts in the late 2000s. The second tier was comprised of the billionaires who had built up their fortunes in the 1990s. They were oligarchs back then, meaning that their money still decided politics; with Putin they lost significant political influence but kept the money and continued profiting from the regime. And of course, there were the siloviki, members of the security services who have ascended to ever-greater heights of power during Putin’s reign and now control a large portion of Russia’s businesses, especially in the financial and banking sectors.

Essentially, Vladimir Putin shook up the system to create his own power groups that he could rely upon. And because the so-called Yeltsin-era oligarchs had already snatched up the most lucrative former Soviet property in the 1990s, and because Russia’s economy could not produce any competitive product, the only option Putin had left was to distribute the federal budget among his friends—to divvy out government contracts to particular groups of loyalists. Thousands of miles of pipelines that cannot be filled with enough oil and gas, massive sports stadiums and bridges—all these big-ticket infrastructure projects have been and continue to be built to line the pockets of Putin’s “friends,” as Putin once famously referred Yury Kovalchuk and Arkady Rotenberg. Those same gentlemen have hardly been hurt by Western sanctions. To make their lives even easier after they had been sanctioned, the Russian government started depositing federal funds and reserves into the banks they owned.

Russia’s self-imposed counter-sanctions, which banned groceries and medical imports to the country, also benefitted Gennady Timchenko’s business. And a big winner from the Western sanctions is the military production industry, which is fully controlled by Sergei Chemezov, the head of the gigantic state corporation Rostec and one of the most powerful siloviki in Russia.

Thus, in a way, sanctions against the Kremlin did help make some of Putin’s elites pull together around Russia’s President—particularly those who live comfortably off state contracts, like the Rotenbergs and Chemezov, and those who operate inside Russia, like the terrorizing FSB, which has become an instrument of frequent business raids. The number of businessmen put in jail or worse, murdered in prison while awaiting trial, has never been higher in Russia. Neither have the financial flows controlled by the FSB.

These groups do not just incidentally profit from Western and self-imposed Kremlin sanctions—they probably welcome them. Sergei Chemezov reported to Putin in 2017 that the military exports of Rostec, which controls assets worth 3 trillion rubles ($50 billion), increased. Acknowledging that Russia had lost the American gun market for Kalashnikovs, Chemezov said that Rostec nevertheless has expanded into Latin America and the Middle East.

The siloviki rhetoric is bluntly hostile towards the United States, almost isolationist in its suggestion that Russia can get by without any Western cooperation. The Security Council head and former FSB director Nikolay Patrushev recently talked once again about the hostile pressure from the United States on new power centers and the multipolar model of the world.

The Investigative Committee head Aleksandr Bastrykin, who miraculously survived resignation last year and has now been nominated to head the Constitutional Court of Russia, strikes a similarly paranoid and anti-Western tone. He recently called for banning Instagram because “it helped conduct a terror attack in Leningrad” in 2017. He apparently mistook Instagram, the popular social media photo service, with Telegram, the messenger service that the Russian court has stated to ban. Leningrad, of course, ceased to exist with the fall of the Soviet Union and has since been renamed Saint Petersburg.

But not all of the businessmen in Russia profit from the country’s isolation and want Moscow to break up with the West. Andrey Kostin, a top governmental manager and the head of the second-largest Russian bank VTB, which is 60.9 percent owned by the government, had this to say about sanctions in an interview with CNBC in May:

I think again it is unfortunate, a level of misunderstanding, maybe the lack of communication. […] The only good communication we have [is] between businessmen. That’s why we normally have a good context and I think most of the businessmen are against any sanctions. . .

I think Russian businessmen were always like, acted like a bridge between, between Russia and the West for example. And I think they did a lot of good things, like Mr. Abramovich by buying Chelsea and improving its performance. I think that [there are] so many fans in England who are fans of Chelsea. . . last weekend the Times, Sunday Times wrote an article that VTB Capital sponsored the Chelsea for a flower show and they said ‘oh this is Putin’s crony Kostin [who] is trying to do something wrong.’ I mean first of all I am not a crony of Mr Putin but secondly, what’s wrong in supporting the Chelsea Flower Show? […] I think Russian businessmen they are not politically involved…even if they meet [the] President and the prime minister quite often they’re doing it for their business purposes. . . and that’s the practice in Russia. But I think it’s the wrong decision. I think if the West will start to create specific problems, an obstacle for Russian business, I think [it] will be no good for both sides. My personal opinion.

Our readers might remember Kostin’s name from our reporting of his unofficial, semi-confidential visit to Washington, DC two years ago. VTB had already been sanctioned by that time, but Kostin himself had not. He came to persuade congressmen and Administration officials to lift sanctions from VTB. Two years later, in a new round of sanctions in April, Kostin was sanctioned as well.

When talking to CNBC, Andrey Kostin apparently represented not only the interests of his bank, but of his clients as well. The sanctioned Oleg Deripaska used to be a client of VTB and the bank had to stop financing him. Kostin admitted that if any other of VTB’s clients get sanctioned, the bank would have to stop dealing with them.

It’s quite difficult to operate as a successful bank without access to Western financing; it’s almost impossible to conduct business without large clients like Deripaska. That is why Kostin plays the part of the persecuted, Western-oriented businessman to argue against sanctions to gullible foreign audiences—even as he cozies up to the regime and indulges in Soviet nostalgia at home. (At a recent party for top investors, the VTB executive was spotted dressed in full Stalin regalia: a curious display of doublethink from one of Russia’s leading capitalists.)

Andrey Kostin is not a lonely warrior in this battle. Sberbank, the largest state-owned bank in Russia, has been hit hard by Western sanctions. And in recent months, the bank has aired some unusual criticisms against the oligarchs who have most benefitted from them, suggesting a latent rebellion among some parts of the Russian elite.

The bank’s audit branch Sberbank CIB issued a report in March, three days after the presidential election, saying that the main beneficiaries of Gazprom’s pipeline projects are not the company’s shareholders but the general contractors for the projects: namely, Arkady Rotenberg and Gennady Timchenko, whose companies were given the contracts for construction of the Power of Siberia, Nord Stream-2 and TurkStream pipelines.

The analysts said that given the projected cost of the Power of Siberia pipeline—$55 billion—it is unlikely to ever turn a profit, because it cost five times more than a proposed alternative pipeline. Nord Stream-2 won’t become profitable for at least 50 years, they said, and TurkStream not for another two decades. This is typical of the state projects that Arkady Rotenberg is involved in: They are all highly and needlessly expensive ones, like the bridge to Crimea, which has quickly become the most expensive bridge ever constructed, tripling the cost of the Chinese Jiaozhou Bay Bridge.

As to Sberbank CIB’s assessment of Gazprom, it was not the first time it had issued an honest report on a state monopoly. This past fall, the same authors wrote a report on Rosneft called “We need to talk about Igor,” referring to Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin. The report criticized Rosneft for not reducing its enormous debt accrued since acquiring TNK-BP with a roughly 40 percent market premium, and instead spending $22 billion on new acquisitions “without any clear focus.”

Both reports were meant for Sberbank’s clients only but were leaked to the media. The first time, Sberbank withdrew the personal criticisms of Sechin from the report. The second time, the author and his supervisor were publicly fired. Sberbank’s CEO German Gref apologized to Gazprom’s CEO Alexey Miller.

Despite the disgraceful ending, the story itself is a remarkable display of the divide between two distinct interest groups that have arisen in Russia because of the sanctions. Another example is the case of Roman Abramovich, who recently rushed to get an Israeli passport after having been denied a British investor visa, but chose not to come back to Russia. This, and the official data on Russia’s net capital outflow more than doubling in the first quarter of 2018, contests the Kremlin’s propaganda on how sanctions only make businessmen pull tight around Vladimir Putin. The effect of sanctions is not monolithic. And although Russian policy has cushioned the blow or provided new opportunities for the likes of Rothenberg and Timchenko, even some oligarchs who are unflaggingly loyal to Putin can feel the sting of sanctions.

Igor Sechin himself has been put in an interesting position. On the one hand, he is Putin’s closest ally, a silovik who maintains a strong alliance with the FSB. On the other hand, he is a corporate giant and the ambitious CEO of Rosneft, a company that Sechin wants to make the world’s leading oil company (as he has claimed on multiple occasions). Therein lies the rub: Despite the fact that Rosneft has always enjoyed the government’s largesse, it cannot develop as a global company under the burden of sanctions. Sechin confirmed as much in a rare interview to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung earlier this year. Rosneft’s CEO called the sanctions against the company illegal and said that he believes in the European market, and will continue to strengthen the company’s position within it. “The oil business is a competitive one. I’m utterly convinced that the main thing here is contractual obligations,” Sechin said. In the same interview, he again showed off his ambitions for Rosneft, claiming that if “you compare the global public companies in our sector, you’ll see that Rosneft is number one in terms of resource base. The net cost of crude production is very competitive as well.”

Describing the interview, the Russian pro-Kremlin newspaper MK called it a demonstration of Sechin’s openness to Western business. And he has signaled that openness in more concrete ways, too: In 2016, Rosneft acquired a major stake in an oil refinery in the eastern German town of Schwedt in Brandenburg. At the end of 2017, Gerhard Schroder was appointed Rosneft’s chairman.

In any case, the mixed effect of sanctions is no reason to make fine distinctions or offer relief to those who profess an openness to the West. Neither Kostin nor Gref ever thinks about the interests of Russia and its people. The only thing they care about is their profit margins, which is made abundantly clear when they whine to Western media outlets.

But such complaints only go to show that the Russia sanctions do work. True, there are no brave souls among Russia’s oligarchic elite who would dare to openly confront Vladimir Putin and his policies. But there is a clear confrontation of ideas and interests at play here. Ironically, the United States might have created a new field for competition in a country where Vladimir Putin has long sought to suppress it. And in the long run, such competition could be the only thing that might change an authoritarian regime like Russia’s.

The post The Great Sanctions Split appeared first on The American Interest.

Grinda’s War

Spain, politically, is far from the frontlines of Russia and the West.

However, when it comes to battling Russian organized crime it is at the cutting edge, with Spanish prosecutor José Grinda leading the charge. His partners in the FBI call him “relentless,” whilst the leading anti-Putin campaigner Bill Browder hails him as “the man who brought down the Russian mafia in Spain.” Slight and unassuming, he is a nightmare for organized crime. 

And now, potentially, a problem for Donald Trump. 

Grinda, like a Spanish Zelig, has questioned sanctioned oligarch Oleg Deripaska, jailed the mafia kingpin Zakhar Kalashov, played a walk-on role in the fall of the Russian defence minister Anatoly Serdyukov, and convinced Alexander Litvinenko to testify against the Russian mafia and its ties to the Kremlin only months before the former FSB agent was murdered in London.

“More should be encouraged to follow Grinda’s example,” said Ana Gomes, a Portuguese member of the European Parliament and Vice-Chair of the assembly’s Special Committee on Financial Crimes, Tax Evasion, and Tax Avoidance, who campaigns for sanctions on Russian kleptocrats. Grinda is as highly regarded in the J. Edgar Hoover Building, home of the FBI.

Maxwell Marker, Section Chief of the Transnational Organized Crime Section – Eastern Hemisphere, lauded Grinda’s “relentless” pursuit of mafia groups which “threaten national security not only in Spain, but in the United States,” in a statement to The American Interest. They are more than just friends. “The FBI has a longstanding partnership with José Grinda,” said Marker, who described the relationship with Grinda as “important” and “valuable.”

He has been so successful that in February 2016, France intercepted a mafia kingpin ordering Grinda’s assassination. “I don’t think they’re going to get it done,” Grinda says, adding that a second hit on him was ordered in March 2018.

“I have also been attacked by smears,” he says. Grinda has been accused of being a pedophile by a now-deceased Spanish lawyer, whom he claims to have evidence was acting on the instructions of a former Russian minister. “He was paid,” says Grinda nonchalantly. He is now pursuing a defamation case. To date, this allegation has been ignored by the traditionally more reputable Spanish press, but it has circulated online. Retaliation for his work, he says.

None of this has scared him off. Only two weeks ago, campaigner Bill Browder was briefly arrested by Spanish police in Madrid, due to an unlawful Russian-issued Interpol notice, on the way to give evidence to Grinda. “He’s such a powerful guy,” said a source familiar with the investigation, “that people go to give evidence to him, and things happen.”

The FBI is taking a closer interest than ever in Grinda’s war.

On this recent visit to Washington, DC, Grinda met with the FBI Organized Crime Unit. He says both the Organized Crime Unit of the FBI in the United States and the office of the FBI in Spain “are interested in some investigations in Spain” and “they said that those would be sent to Mueller.” But for the moment he is not aware if the information related to these investigations has been transferred to the Special Counsel or not.

Which investigations are these?

The first is the investigation against Alexander Romanov, a convicted Russian money launderer and a friend of Alexander Torshin, a Russian politician and Putin ally who has courted the NRA and U.S. lawmakers, including meeting with Donald Trump Jr. “Mr. Trump’s son should be concerned,” said Grinda on May 25 at a public event at the Hudson Institute, which hosted him in Washington.

The Justice Department is now deepening an investigation as to whether Mr. Torshin illegally funneled money through the NRA to financially support Trump’s 2016 campaign.  The gun rights body, which reported donating over $30 million, was Trump’s biggest donor.

Does Grinda have the smoking gun?

The FBI, Grinda explained, “asked us for information on Torshin, and what we gave was the following: wiretaps of phone calls between Romanov and Torshin, and we told them that Romanov has been sentenced and convicted but that the investigation against Torshin [has been] shelved.” Grinda says Torshin, now deputy head of the Russian Central Bank, is linked to Grigory Rabinovitch, whom he identifies as the leader of the Taganskaya Brotherhood.

Torshin, who denies mafia ties, did however attempt to broker a meeting with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in May 2016, and was scheduled to meet privately with the President at the National Prayer Breakfast in February 2017, before White House officials pulled it. The reason cited: Torshin was referred to in one of Grinda’s wiretaps, now with the FBI, as “godfather” by Romanov. Grinda confirms that is how Romanov addressed Torshin. 

The second investigation of interest to the FBI has to do with a case in a court in Barcelona which issued a European Arrest Warrant against the Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash. “Paul Manafort worked for Dmytro Firtash,” says Grinda. “We have shared information on Dmytro Firtash to do with economic crimes.” This trial has yet to take place. Meanwhile, Firtash is under house arrest in Vienna, fighting a U.S. extradition request. In 2017, he was indicted in a Chicago court for crimes including bribery, racketeering and money laundering.

Will Grinda’s war join up with the Mueller inquiry? The FBI declined to comment. Grinda himself would like to know what the FBI has done with his information. “I told the FBI,” he says, “that we can be more useful if we actually know where exactly we can useful.” 

Grinda’s war began 12 years ago, when the career prosecutor was assigned to work Russian cases in March 2006. “I had to crawl back home to my wife after I was assigned,” he said. She had warned him months earlier not to be “silly” and find himself fighting the Russian mob. His early cases were the tip of the spear.

Starting in 2005, Spain conducted three major operations—codenamed Avispa, Troika and Variola—against various Russian mafia networks in the country. His efforts led to over 80 arrests. Spanish officials compiled a secret list of Russian prosecutors, senior military officers, and politicians linked to organized crime, based on over 230 wire taps.

This, for Madrid, was a complete turnaround.

“For a long time Spain seemed wide open to dirty Russian money and brazen Russian gangsters,” said Mark Galeotti, the author of The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia. “Especially thanks to the works of José Grinda and his colleagues, Spain is arguably at the forefront of European efforts.”

But why, out of all the countries in Europe, is this happening in Spain?

“We have an advantage,” Grinda says. “We are not important geopolitically and we don’t have economic interests in Russia. This is what allows us to be freer. I haven’t received any directives from above, from the political class.”

This unique position, to go after the Russian mafia with few restraints, also flows from his country’s empowered anti-corruption unit, La Fiscalía Anticorrupción. “It was a marvellous accident,” he said, that it evolved this way. “If there weren’t a centralized organization, with all its powers, things would be very slow. Coordination between different agencies isn’t good enough.”

Success, he believes, has also come with the element of surprise. “We’ve always been down there in the sewers, with the sewer rats, without anyone knowing we were doing it, and lots of people would give us information without ever thinking we’d get anywhere with this.”

But Spain’s freedom to act has restricted Grinda’s personal freedom. When this interview took place at the Hudson Institute on Pennsylvania Avenue, after the prosecutor’s speech, his armed guard was never out of sight. He lives with round-the-clock protection for himself and his family.

Spain has dealt the Russian mafia a rare blow. But until Wikileaks, José Grinda was a man in the shadows. He shot to fame in December 2010 when an explosive U.S. Embassy cable from earlier that year was leaked to the public. It read, in part:

Grinda stated that he considers Belarus, Chechnya and Russia to be virtual “mafia states” and said that Ukraine is going to be one. For each of those countries, he alleged, one cannot differentiate between the activities of the government and OC [Organized Crime] groups.

According to the leaked cable, Grinda said it was an unanswered question whether or not Vladimir Putin is “implicated in the Russian mafia” and “whether he controls the mafia’s actions.” He also accused the Kremlin of having “organized crime groups do whatever the government of Russia cannot acceptably do as a government.”

Does he still think Russia is a mafia state? On the record, Grinda does not go as far as he did in the U.S. Embassy Cable.

“Russian organized crime is collaborating by corrupting specific politicians and specific public servants,” he says.

So, is Russia a mafia state? I repeat my question.

“It’s a thesis that can be asserted.”

Previously, Grinda has said that this was the theory Alexander Litvinenko laid out to him in a meeting in London in 2006—that a fusion had taken place between the world of Russian intelligence and the world of Russian crime under the direction of Kremlin operatives.

Who are they?

The Solntsevskaya Brotherhood, Grinda says, is the mafia group that has “the most links to the current Russian government.” The word mafia, conjuring up Hollywood movies of small-time chancers, fails to capture the sheer scale of this operation, believed to have a turnover of almost $9 billion. How are operations of this scale even possible?

“Mafia money,” says Grinda, “is believed to be laundered through major financial institutions.” The easier it is to launder money, the easier it is for mafia groups to convert the proceeds of crime into new sources of power and activity.

But what do they want to achieve with this?

Mafias like the Solntsevskaya, according to Grinda, do not want to destroy, but want to capture the state. This is not something uniquely Russian, he believes, but a strategy common to all mafia groups.

What mafias seek to do, Grinda explains, is to build up “three blocks”: social, political, and financial power. “If the mafia only had economic power,” he says, “it would be easy to stop.”

The weaker the state, the easier the mafia’s job.

It starts with what he calls reputation laundering. “The first thing they try and do after achieving economic profits is to try and legitimize themselves,” says Grinda. “In Spain, the people who are the most corrupt do two things: First, they buy an incredibly luxurious mansion to show they are there. Second, they buy a soccer team.”

A mafia builds up social power piece by piece, “first in their little town, and then [expanding] into creating foundations—charities, legal foundations, medical foundations. And then they will say they are philanthropists. They say that they take care of people.”

Once their social power is built up, explains Grinda, they build up a second block. “This is because they realize that the social webs that they are able to create and through which they bring people in are not enough.”

The key to political power, Grinda explains, is “the awarding of public contracts.” Mafias will seek out public contracts, such as road building, or other public works, not for their financial value, but because “this is how criminal organizations come into contact with politicians.”

Not only does chasing public contracts give the mafiosos an opportunity to bribe politicians; the high prominence and social value of flagship projects means politicians can come to depend on the mafia delivering them the smooth road building, trash collection, or public transport they need to get re-elected. Willingly or otherwise, politicians become compromised.

“In other words,” says Grinda, “they are insinuating themselves into the political world. And once there, they can get legislation changed.”

This is what happened in Russia. “We have detected in our investigations that Russian crime organizations, that this power has meant that criminals have been able to make officials purge their criminal records. And the worst is when they actually create their own political parties.”

Grinda points the finger at the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, a Kremlin-controlled political group that is notionally both in opposition and led by the ultranationalist tubthumper Vladimir Zhirinovsky, as having “members from organized crime.”

The final block is financial power. “This completes the legitimization process.” The Russian mafia, he says, are using “these large law firms and financial experts, alongside financial and banking insitutitions,” to hide dirty money. Meanwhile, offshore jurisdictions allow any mafia “to have hidden assets with their ownership obscured from the investigators of any country.” This is how mafias worth $9 billion, like the Solntsevskaya, store their loot.

The more powerful a mafia gets, the less it looks like a mafia. The Russian mafia, for example, no longer looks like it did in David Cronenberg’s 2007 movie Eastern Promises. Legendary post-Soviet gangsters, such as the heavily-tattoed “Thieves in Law,” are no longer what they were.

“The Thieves in Law,” he explains, “have become an endangered species.” These guys have been swept away by Russian authorities. Not so the mafiosos that have fused with the states. “The challenge we now face is from mafia groups that never had a tattoo and have legitimized themselves”—mafiosi indistinguishable from the Russian political class.

The rise of a Russian mafia, now interwoven with the Russian state, is not just a problem for Russian people. It is now exporting mafia power.

“They are seizing all kinds of assets in our country,” warns Grinda, “and that means they are going to gain power, economically speaking.”

As Russian organized crime has gone global, international, and in particular intra-European, attempts to stop it have lagged. Russia has not been the only country that has posed cooperation problems.

“We have a wonderful relationship with the United States,” he said. “However we have a very serious problem in fighting organized crime with the UK. We have very serious problems in getting them to cooperate—with the exception of drug trafficking [cases].” “It’s zilch,” he continued in exasperation, “it’s less than negative. It just doesn’t exist.” Britain, he says, is suffering from “economic contamination,” and the country is lousy with “oligarchs that have taken dirty money, taken money from a criminal organization.”

Belgium and the Netherlands, he says, are similarly problematic.

As we talk, Grinda is still smarting at Britain’s failure to arrest the Russian-Israeli businessman Michael Cherney in May 2009. Cherney is a man the Spaniards consider to be the leader of the Izmailovskaya Organized Crime Group, and there was an Interpol arrest warrant issued against him.  Grinda says he confronted the British representative over these failings at a 2012 Interpol meeting. At the end of the meeting the British representative menacingly stood up, himself a good bit taller than Grinda. “Everyone thought he was going to smash me.” Instead he said, “You’re actually right. I commit myself to changing this.”

Yet change was not forthcoming.

“The United Kingdom was not aware at the time of the danger these people represented,” said Grinda. “They were just not involved in fighting it.”

Have British politicians been compromised?

“We have observed that British politicians have been linked to oligarchs,” he said. “But the Brits themselves will have to speak to that.”

What about American politicians? Have Donald Trump and his associates ever come into his investigations?

“No comment.”

As our interview wraps up, I notice the tiredness in his eyes.

“In order to win the fight against organized crime,” says Grinda, “we have to try to be similar to or act like we are organized crime groups. In other words we will need to be consistent, organized and patient.”

The post Grinda’s War appeared first on The American Interest.

Do Not Revive the G-8 or Invite Putin to DC

With the world’s attention focused on the meeting between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, it’s important not to overlook a very disturbing development that occurred involving the disastrous G-7 meeting over the weekend.

On Friday, the same morning that President Donald Trump called for Russia to return to the G-8, media reports indicated that Russian airstrikes were responsible for killing dozens of people in a rebel-held village in Syria the day before. Almost nothing, it seems, that Russian leader Vladimir Putin does—killing civilians in Syria, poisoning Russians living overseas (the Sergei and Yulia Skripal cases in the United Kingdom being the most recent), killing Ukrainians inside that country, interfering in other countries’ elections—will deter Trump from treating Putin better than he treats America’s traditional allies (just ask Justin Trudeau).

“Russia should be in this meeting,” Mr. Trump said. “Why are we having a meeting without Russia being in the meeting? And I would recommend—and it’s up to them, but Russia should be in the meeting, it should be a part of it. You know, whether you like it or not, and it may not be politically correct, but we have a world to run and the G-7—which used to be the G-8, they threw Russia out. They should let Russia come back in because we should have Russia at the negotiating table.”

Trump’s recommendation, seemingly made on the fly in the driveway of the White House but then reiterated at the G-7 meeting on Saturday, was largely rejected by his fellow G-7 leaders. But Italy’s new Prime Minister, Giuseppe Conte, said he agreed with Trump, revealing divisions within the grouping. Putin must be happy to see the leader of the free world sowing dissension in the democratic ranks.

Defenders of Trump, and even critics like this author, have argued that his Administration’s policy has actually been quite good in addressing the threat from Putin. After an initial scare in January 2017 that sanctions against the regime in Moscow were about to be lifted by the White House, they have stayed in place and even been scaled up, thanks largely to pressure from Congress. The Administration approved the sale and transfer of lethal military assistance to Ukraine and Georgia to help those countries defend themselves against further Russian aggression, something the Obama Administration refused to do.

The United States, along with NATO allies, has beefed up its military presence in the three Baltic states and Poland. And remarks by Administration officials, from UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, Secretaries of State and Defense Mike Pompeo and Jim Mattis, and Vice President Pence, have been sharply and rightly critical of Putin’s behavior. It was as if the tough policy were being carried out without Trump’s awareness.

But then there’s Trump himself. From the presidential campaign to the present, Trump has consistently refused to criticize Putin’s actions or even to acknowledge that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. His unstinting determination to seek good relations between Moscow and Washington has always meant that the Administration’s tough line could be undone by one tweet, unscripted comment, or open invitation to Putin.

When, contrary to his staff’s recommendation, Trump congratulated Putin on his “re-election” in March, he also invited Putin to the White House, according to press reports. Such a Putin visit to Washington would undermine the West’s united stand against Putin’s egregious behavior. It would also renew questions about what motivates Trump’s soft position toward Putin.

Ever since being kicked out of the G-8 in 2014 for his illegal annexation of Crimea and ongoing aggression in Ukraine, Putin has failed to abide by the ceasefire agreements meant to resolve that crisis. He has launched massive interference in the U.S. and other elections, overseen Russian trolls weigh in on divisive issues in the West through social media, and launched the worst crackdown on human rights inside Russia since the break-up of the Soviet Union. Putin has done nothing—repeat nothing—to warrant a softer approach from the West and remains a serious threat to our countries.

In an interview published Saturday on Russian state television, Putin indicated a readiness to meet with his American counterpart. “Trump keeps the promises that he made in his campaign,” Putin said. “One of those promises was to improve Russian-American relations. I hope that this also takes place. At any rate, we are ready for this. I believe that the ball is in America’s court.”

Trump’s call for a return to the G-8 elicited strong negative reaction from several leading Republicans in Congress, as it should have. Should Trump follow through on an invitation to Putin to the White House, all of his advisers—to include National Security Advisor John Bolton, Secretaries Pompeo and Mattis, on down—who think this would be a grave mistake and an abandonment of U.S. principles should resign.

The post Do Not Revive the G-8 or Invite Putin to DC appeared first on The American Interest.

From Zuckerman to Zuckerberg: The Legacy of Philip Roth

The most Rothian of responses to Philip Roth’s death on May 22 came, most likely, from Jacques Berlinerblau, Georgetown University professor and one of the late master’s shrewdest Boswells. “When word came last Tuesday night that Philip Roth had passed away,” Berlinerblau wrote, “I reacted inappropriately. Gentle reader, would you think less of me if I confessed that upon receiving the sad news, I speed-dialed my agent and conferred with publicists?”

If the answer is yes, gentle reader, well, you just didn’t know Philip: Honoring the late writer’s spirit means not succumbing to the waves of encomia that washed our shores when news broke that our last “living giant” had succumbed. “One explanation for my muted response to Roth’s death,” Berlinerblau continued, his grin visible on the page, “is that I am, well, a Rothian. As such, I am allergic to so-called ‘normal,’ or ‘healthy,’ emotional responses.” Just as Mickey Sabbath masturbated on the grave of a dead lover, so did Berlinerblau pounce at the press, a slightly more sublimated way to relieve the same lively urges. It was a fitting, even brilliant tribute, for this is the world that Roth had wrought.

Which leaves the rest of us earnest schlubs with a conundrum: How might we do the memory of the dearly departed writer justice?

It’s a trick question. Knowing my distaste for the man and his oeuvre, a dear friend, her heart and mind both finer than mine, asked if I was at all moved by the outpouring of emotion from Roth’s grieving fans. I was, as anyone with even a dab of spiritual imagination and communal inclinations would have been. The trouble is that Roth lacked both, which made him—is it too early for judgment?—a uniquely pernicious presence in American, and particularly Jewish-American, life and culture.

To begin to understand him, look first at what Roth rejected. At the hands of a different writer, the journey of the Finkels and the Roths from Kozlov and Kiev to Weequahic, Newark might’ve contained multitudes. Settling in America, clawing for parnassah (a way to make a living), flirting with a foreign culture while at the same time helping to reshape it—that, to paraphrase another Jewish writer who looked at America with an infinitely greater measure of grace—is a story stuffed with stuff that is coarse and stuffed with stuff that is fine. Roth had an appetite for the coarse part only: His mother and his father, his neighbors and his relatives, his friends and their families—all were treated with cruel contempt and dismissed as too crude to merit the writer’s insightful gaze.

That is, when they mattered at all: Most often, the others in a Roth novel served as nothing but a shimmering screen on which to project the Greatest Story Ever Told, the story of young Philip emerging from the putrid muck of his debased community and letting his brilliance shine. To his credit, Roth was more or less honest about his predilections. In 1969’s Portnoy’s Complaint, he wrote in the introduction to the book that truly made him a star of “a disorder in which strongly felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature.”

The dime store Freudian language is telling. Like so many American Jews who brashly swore off the old ideas of their faith only to submit to newer and far flimsier ones with just as much egoistic gusto as their hunched-over and bearded ancestors had sought to nurture humility, Roth found in the spirit of Freud a machinery with which to flatten his emotional landscapes. And like so many American Jews who sighed with relief at being the first generation of Jewish men and women to enjoy America’s bounties without worrying too much about the pangs of hunger or the pricks of prejudice, Roth, too, took his newfound liberty as an invitation, if you’ll pardon the expression, to ejaculate often and freely.

All of that wouldn’t have been a problem if Roth were a mere cub instead of a literary lion, had he been a mewing little thing roaring playfully from time to time and, from his safe spot in the snug middle of the pack, scaring no one. But Roth, like the comedian he’d been as an adolescent, had impeccable timing: He arrived to precocious adulthood at the exact moment when the sacred spirits that had always animated this godly nation—the spirits that rocked revival tents and carried men to fight first the British and then each other—broke free of the synagogue and the church and began looking for different, more kaleidoscopic vessels. If you wanted to break on through to the other side in the 1960s, you didn’t kneel and pray; you listened to Morrison, you dropped acid, you read Roth.

And while other artists of his generation sometimes matured gracefully—listen to Dylan’s 1997 masterpiece Time Out of Mind to hear what a candid wrestling match with maturity and mortality sounds like—Roth dug deeper into his designer myopia. The exuberant youth who took pleasure at winning praise by, as he himself put it in his introduction to the 30th anniversary reissue of Goodbye, Columbus, handing over a “store of tribal secrets . . . the rites and taboos of his clan”—Goodbye, Columbus won praise via the 1960 National Book Award for fiction—had become a solipsistic adult who now imagined that all of history revolved around the same narrow and carnal axes from which he was neither able nor willing to break free.

In American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Plot Against America, Roth, often telling the story from a child’s point of view, narrates the souring of America’s promise. These books all begin with a childhood reminiscent of utopia and end with looming malice. That he himself had once been a prominent chronicler of a bitter American childhood seems to matter little to him; Roth the writer, like any true narcissist, was only interested in his present moment and had little patience for consistency, that old hobgoblin of little minds. As a young lad, childhood was the still bleeding wound that had to be healed with lust and scorn; as a middle-aged man, it was paradise seen from within, but amounted to a permanent adolescent whine seen from without—except of course by the legions of the other denatured Jews who were more or less doing the same thing as Roth, with less talent.

And because he could no longer rely on those trusty gargoyles, his parents and fellow Jews, to play the part of the now long since humiliated demons swiping at the tired, poor, young Philip yearning to breathe free—as if his parents and grandparents had sacrificed nothing to make that breathing possible—he welcomed in external threats to do the job once held by Sophie Portnoy. Whether they were Charles Lindbergh’s anti-Semitic goons or the hedonistic wreckers of the Weather Underground hardly mattered: What mattered is that the Roth character, the protagonist of every Roth book, was still blissfully unhappy.

Here, for example, is how Roth ends American Pastoral. Its protagonist, Swede Levov, begins life with a bloom: The star athlete son of a rich family, he marries a beauty queen and moves to a beautiful home in the country. By the time Roth is done with him, he’s huddling in a decimated ghetto in New Jersey with his daughter, a radical on the run and the emaciated victim of both rape and ideology (which often comes to the same thing). “They’ll never recover,” Roth writes in the book’s final paragraph. “Everything is against them, everyone and everything that does not like their life. All the voices from without, condemning and rejecting their life! And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?”

Roth never answers the question. He cannot. To understand the life of any family is to understand loyalty as well as leeriness, tenderness as well as contempt, sacrifice as well as scorn. These intricate and difficult emotions require one to be truly curious about the world that lays beyond the tip of one’s penis, which, to Roth, proved an unappealing proposition. This is not to say that he didn’t feel deeply, or better, acutely; he did, perhaps more finely than most writers of the second half of the 20th century. But like the protagonist of Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, Roth possessed a brilliant mind but no midot, no character virtues.

Roth also lacked patience for the silent, meditative process that turned pain into art. Most of America’s literary greats have been sublimators: Whitman, a closeted homosexual, tamed his libido and taught it poetry; Dickinson, a shut-in, pressured her anxieties into diamonds; Poe was a drug addict who somehow captured his fears and turned them into bone-chillers. Roth was too loose and too proud for such hard inner work. He was, as I noted in an earlier critique, “never in possession of the loom—so elegantly mastered by his contemporary, Saul Bellow—that lets a writer process his or her bales of bile into beautiful fabrics that keep us warm.”

Well, what of it? Not every writer is obliged to carry the burden of goodness, and those who settle for nothing but virtue are often the sorriest bores. But Roth’s outsized legacy, clearly visible long before his death, had an impact paralleled by few. Childless in life, he nonetheless sired a generation of young Jewish writers who attempted to replicate his drumbeat: Jonathan Safran Foer, Sam Lipsyte, and others are Roth’s wayward sons, like him mistaking exuberant tricks for real emotion and like him having little interest in anything but their own cravings and contempt.

Even more tragically, Roth’s ascent gave American Jews another identity marker with which to effortlessly telegraph meaning: Having cast off the difficult and demanding yoke of their tradition—all those restrictions and obligations! All that fear of and need to love God!—for the spiritual supermarket of American life, where they could cobble together a self by choosing the customs and cultural touchstones they deemed most attractive, educated and secular American Jews for decades defined themselves in part by pointing to Roth’s sensibility. Like the master, they too were smart and acerbic outsiders, critical of their own faith community and mildly mistrustful of the world around them. If you want to know what happens to a generation who lives in the light of such a man, pop into any non-Orthodox synagogue on a Sabbath and count the empty pews.

But if you want to take the real measure of Roth’s legacy, look not at Zuckerman, his famous long time alter ego, but at Zuckerberg. Facebook (and, to an extent, Twitter) has no more fitting patron than St. Philip of Newark.

An age in which we’re all urged to turn our attentions inward toward the idol of authenticity, to post whatever comes to mind without considering the impact it might have on those near to us, to advertise our secrets and the secrets of others and celebrate our appetites by sharing anything from candid snapshots of our genitalia to composed arrangements of our meals—such is the Age of Roth. Life, like literature, unfolds slowly and painstakingly, giving us the time and the assurances we need to trust each other and love one another. Light it all on fire, and you may end up famous, either for fifteen minutes on Facebook or for life on the cover of your own Library of America set of volumes. But Roth’s novels, like so many posts and tweets and Snap stories, were bursts of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Rest in peace, then, Philip ben Bess and Herman. You would have scorned the sincere sorrow of your admirers, for real emotions are frightening. But I hope that wherever you are, you’ll take some comfort in knowing that even though you’ve long since abandoned us, even having proscribed in advance all Jewish ritual at your funeral, we’ve never given up on you.

The post From Zuckerman to Zuckerberg: The Legacy of Philip Roth appeared first on The American Interest.

Mission: Kimpossible

Unless a Twitter storm intervenes, the “Little Rocket Man” and Donald Trump will meet in the flesh at Santosa Island’s 5-star Capella Hotel on June 12. A quarter-mile off the Singapore mainland, the island is appropriately named. In Malay, santosa means “peace and tranquility,” which should be a good omen. But don’t fall for heavenly signs; look at the hard-core realities instead. These do not presage a history-transforming grand bargain.

The Trump Administration keeps insisting on North Korea’s complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization—and with all due speed. Kim Jong-un naturally wishes to go slow, if he wants to move on his nukes at all, and to pocket plenty of goodies in the process—material as well as symbolic ones.

So Kim will flatter Trump and stroke his ego. He will offer piecemeal concessions and parcel them out over the long haul. Or both will agree to cobble together a grandiose framework flanked by the usual diplomatic boilerplate, such as overcoming ancient enmities and working hand in hand for peace and understanding.

The nitty-gritty, to be ladled out in small portions, would be left to the lower-level negotiators. Maybe, Trump will grant Kim liaison offices in both capitals so as to hold back on full-scale diplomatic recognition. Perhaps Kim will let some inspectors into the country, but only to carefully chosen places that do not reveal the true size of North Korea’s bomb and long-range missile program.

Whatever the scenario, there is one reasonable bet: Neither Trump nor Kim, who threatened to nuke each other not that long ago, will want to walk off Peace-and-Tranquility Island with nothing to show, let alone in a blaze of fury and recrimination.

But complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization? Don’t hold your breath, even though South Korea’s President Moon, after descending from his own summit with Kim, reported that Kim was indeed eager to please. Yes, he would accept  “complete denuclearization.” Credible this pledge is not.

First, look at history. Only one country has ever dismantled its autonomous nuclear arsenal: South Africa.1 Yet the only similarity between Pretoria and Pyongyang is the “P” in the names of their capitals. When South Africa announced in 1993 that it had scrapped its six primitive bombs, their strategic-political value had shrunk below zero. Whom were they supposed to deter? The USSR was gone, the Cubans had pulled out of Angola, and the African National Congress, previously the deadly enemy of the Boer regime, was now a partner in undoing the apartheid system. Pretoria had the bomb, but no targets. Why continue to suffer sanctions and international pariah status?

In all other cases, nations have yielded their nuclear assets only under duress. Whatever Saddam Hussein had assembled was undone by the American invasion in 2003. In the same year, Libya’s Qaddafi folded for fear of suffering Saddam’s fate. Can Trump scare Kim? No. North Korea already has the Bomb, and thus an iron law of the nuclear age kicks in: Never has a nuclear power been attacked directly by another such power. Add in Kim’s case that North Korea is being sheltered by its mighty Chinese protector next door.

Supposedly eying “complete denuclearization,” Kim will also recall the fate of Ukraine, which gave away 1,700 ex-Soviet warheads in exchange for the guarantee of its territorial integrity by the United States, Britain, and Russia. It was a treacherous deal. Since then, Moscow has grabbed Crimea directly, and Ukraine’s southeast with the help of its surrogates. Nor did Qaddafi profit from giving away his rudimentary nuclear facilities. In 2011, NATO bombed his country, and he was murdered by his domestic foes.

Compare such loss-leaders with the profits amassed by Kim Jong-un and his father Kim Jong-il. The “Hermit Kingdom,” not exactly a great power, bestrides the globe in the company of America and China. It basks in the attention of the world. Pyongyang has been able to turn blackmail into a strategic art, exacting, as in Bill Clinton’s days, fuel oil deliveries—plus the promise of normalized relations and efficient power reactors in exchange for scrapping the country’s plutonium-breeders that are all but useless as electricity generators.

Like father, like son. Kim père wrote the book, and Kim fils has proven a master of the dark art of converting weakness into strength. The pattern should be familiar by now. Project good will and rope the great powers, especially the United States, into negotiations. Pretend that your vows of denuclearization are sincere, gain global attention and material rewards—and keep building those nukes and their delivery vehicles. Don’t fret about sanctions. In the end, Big Brother in Beijing will blunt their bite. China has absolutely no interest in seeing North Korea collapse.

North Korea tested its first nuclear device 12 years ago, in 2006. Since then, five more tests have followed—sanctions and all. Why would Kim Jr. give away what has turned his country into a starring global player and blessed the regime with a nuclear life-insurance policy?

But set aside these realpolitik ruminations. Imagine instead a cheery outcome on Santosa Island. What exactly would “complete denuclearization” look like when America’s intelligence services argue over the exact number of Kim’s nuclear weapons? Some say “20,” others say “60.” How many nuclear facilities are spread across the country, 40 or 100? You would need an army of highly trained inspectors to get the answers right, assuming that they would be able to roam the country at will.

Does Mr. Trump know what he is talking about when he insists on verifiability? These negotiations will drag on forever. Meanwhile, Kim will have pocketed the Big Prize: his face-to-face with the mightiest man on earth, and on a global stage, to boot.

Diplomacy 101 says: Don’t go to a summit unless your subordinates have hashed out the details of a realistic deal. As a rule of thumb, such an agreement takes about a year to negotiate before the principals meet. It took 20 months to conclude the JCPOA with Iran, not to speak of so many failed attempts in the years before. Yet Tehran did not even have nuclear weapons; Pyongyang does.

Only one country, South Africa, has ever given away the Bomb—when Pretoria realized that it was a waning asset while the political costs kept rising. For Kim, the Bomb is like Christmas every day of the year.

1. Ukraine and Belarus, which gave up Soviet-era nuclear weapons stationed on their soil, don’t make for good analogies because the warheads were beyond their control. Triggering them required activating hard-to-crack and ever-changing“permissive action links” in the hands of the Kremlin.

The post Mission: Kimpossible appeared first on The American Interest.