Author Archives: jsh54

Climate of Fear I

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Climate change is an important, but testy, issue. It involves a number of distinct, but related, problems. The problems are more political than scientific or technological.

Burning carbon emits greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Coal, oil, and gasoline powered the previous Industrial Revolutions. Most of the greenhouse gasses of the past came from what are now wealthy Western nations. Now, non-Western nations have embarked on a headlong pursuit of industrialization as a way of raising the living standards for their people. Developing countries now produce two-thirds of all greenhouse gases, and China is the single biggest emitter. China accounts for 28 percent of all emissions. This is more than the United States and the European Union put together. The greenhouses gases of the present and future are chiefly the product of these late-industrializers.

First, how do we cut future greenhouse gas emissions without telling non-Western countries that they can’t industrialize? One answer appears to be heavy investment in renewable energy sources like wind and solar energy. Yet China and India have as much access to solar and wind energy as do Western countries. What they don’t have are well-organized, articulate environmental lobbies. Taking a coldly economic view, the rulers lean toward carbon. They aren’t very interested in developing alternative energy when they have a lot of coal.

Second, who pays for the adjustments caused by the climate change that is already underway? Much attention focuses on countries suffering from “a case of bad latitude.” Climate change threatens “nations” on coral atolls in ways that don’t seem so threatening elsewhere. The Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean and the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean are in danger of disappearing under rising seas. Bangladesh and the Caribbean Islands could face the same fate. (If we get lucky, so could Florida.)

The expectation in some areas is that the wealthy nations of the West will pay. “Don’t tell us you can’t cut emissions, you can’t give money, while you bask in the rich way of life you enjoy now. You know your emissions are damaging us. Help us out here.”—Ronald Jean Jumeau, the Seychelle Islands’ ambassador to the UN for Climate Change. He probably shouldn’t try that attitude on with the Chinese.

Third, people are afraid that the costs of stopping or—better yet—turning back climate change would cause a significant slow-down in economic growth. Alternative energy sources were estimated to cost more than our little friend, carbon, or to involve unacceptable risks (like Chernobyl). A heavy tax on carbon use offers the best means to shift consumption from carbon to non-carbon sources. Many enviro-friendly[1] people are willing to have someone pay it.

Who pays for the investment? Germany has tried taxing carbon to subsidize the development of wind and solar energy. First, they decided to exempt the export-oriented industries from the tax because these are often energy-intensive producers. Higher costs could reduce international competitiveness. German national prosperity through exports came before climate. Then the higher costs of carbon to subsidize alternative energy sources did not produce comparable supplies of wind and solar energy. Instead, energy prices went up. Now the German government has begun scaling-back the subsidies.

Justin Gillis and Coral Davenport, “Push for New Pact on Climate Change Is Plagued by Old Divide of Wealth,” NYT, 21 September 2014, p. 10.

[1] It’s too bad there isn’t some clever euphemism for this constituency in the way that “420 friendly” is a euphemism for dopers.

 

The economic mess

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Every–bored-to-tears–schoolboy knows who propounded the idea of a “social contract”: Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.  The idea of a social contract on the distribution of income has formed one of the pillars of “neo-capitalism” since 1945.  However, that basic idea has witnessed several successive versions.  From 1945 to the Reagan Administration in the 1980s, the US combined high tax rates on the wealthy with the channeling of the gains in productivity to employees.  Eventually, business people pushed back against what they saw an an unfair deal.  A new social contract emerged in which much higher incomes for the wealthy were accepted so long as the real incomes for the middle class continued to rise.  (All this is just my opinion.  In all likelihood, many of my historian friends would rain-down good-humored abuse on this interpretation.)  The financial crisis and the “Great Recession” then ruptured this second version of the social contract.

In 2007-2008 we had the financial crisis and the “Great Recession.”  In 2009 we started back up the road to prosperity.  American Gross Domestic Product (GDP, OK, cue Mort Sahl here) is up 6.7% over 2007.  Per-capita disposable income rose 4.2% between June 2009 and June 2014.  Well, some of us started back toward prosperity, but not all of us did.  In June 2009 the median family income was $55,589; in June 2014 it was $53,891 (in inflation-adjusted dollars).  That’s a 3.1% decline.

How can that be?  Well, the stock market is doing very well.  If you’re the kind of person who puts their  savings  into Vanguard accounts, then your the kind of person who probably has profited from the recovery.  (On the other hand, you’re also the kind of person who took a bath in the recession.  Not that the people at the New York Times give a rip about your experience.)  If you’re the kind of person who depends on wages or salary and your home is your chief investment, there is good reason to feel like the “recovery” is a joke.  (Like a bucket of water propped on top of a partly-open door.  “Hey, can you come in here for a minute?”)  Worse still, the 1999 peak in real household income was a little higher than the 2007 (pre-recession) peak in income.  Five years into the “recovery” and we aren’t even back to the 2007 level and the 2007 level wasn’t as high as the 1999 level.  In sum, we’ve actually had fifteen years of things not working right, rather than five or seven years of things not working right.  There’s probably something in the Bible about this.

One great challenge of the day is to figure out a new version of the social contract.  There has to be a way of achieving broadly-shared economic growth.  There isn’t much political consensus about what to do.  George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Republicans and Democrats all had or have high disapproval levels in public opinion polls.  A big chunk of voters seem to have swung from supporting Obama and the Democrats in 2008 to supporting the Tea Party faction of Republicans in 2010.  The 2014 mid-terms loom next month with no certain outcome.

Saying that there is no political consensus on action isn’t quite the same as saying that professional economists couldn’t come up with some solutions.  It’s just that neither the right or the left seems much interested in listening to what they have to say.  The flight from Keynesian solutions to the recession actually was widely shared.  It is inexplicable in rational terms, especially by Democrats who were going to be left holding the bag in future elections.  Yet it happened.  Probably the same goes for constructive policies aimed at building a better American future.

Paul Krugman, “How to Get it Wrong,” NYT, 15 September 2014.

Neil Irwin, “A Crisis of Faith in the Global Elite,” NYT, September 2014.

Neil Irwin, “Why the Middle Class Isn’t Buying the Talk About a Strong Recovery,” NYT, 22 August 2014.

International sex standards.

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According to a 2005 internet survey done by the Durex condom company—“Butch, I work for Mr. E. H. Harriman of the Union Pacific Railroad, and…”—the average respondent had sex 103 times a year and spent just under 20 minutes per time on foreplay. On the other hand, the mean is 109 times (twice a week) and 21 minutes on foreplay.

Who are the big losers in this international competition? Far and away, it’s the Japanese: they average 46 times a year. Less than four times a month. It must be like a subscription to a magazine: they call the January and July issues the January-February and July-August issues, but they aren’t any bigger. You’re just left wandering around the house looking at back issues of National Geographic.

The trajectory of Japan’s population has shifted from growth to decline. In 2007 Japan’s population reached its highest historical level at 128 million people, then it began to fall. If the country stays on this track there are projected to be only 87 million people by 2060. Of these, almost half will be aged 65 or over. Yikes! Projecting out to 2100, there might be no Japanese at all. That’s probably good news for the Council of the Learned Elders of Blue-Fin Tuna.

There are broad social and economic explanations for the change in Japanese demography. However, the issue has revealed several curious elements of Japanese culture as well. Social status and reputation are very important in Japanese society. Mess up in public on something and you can be tarred for life. So, lots of young men who have had some sort of embarrassment have become “shut-in” living with their parents and withdrawing from life. This is probably good for the on-line games and porn industries.

Interestingly, the Japanese are followed by Hong Kong (79 times a year), India (82), and China (90).   Why do Asians have less sex? A housing shortage that leads to a lack of privacy (self-conscious family limitation)? Government anti-natalism in societies threatened by over-population? Furthermore, if NPR finds out, will we have to listen to heart-rending stories about how people in western industrial countries are using up all the orgasms without concern for sex-starved Bangladeshis? Will environmentalists re-discover Wilhelm Reich and try to extend the Kyoto Protocol to cover an “orgone hole”?

Who are the winners? Inevitably, it’s the French (137 times a year). Two to three times a week, and almost 44 hours of foreplay. Americans and Israelis[1] clock in at 111 times a year and just under twenty minutes of foreplay per encounter. With stats like this to fall back on, American comedians and politicians (but I repeat myself) making fun of French military prowess just isn’t going to dent French national self-confidence.

Obviously, there’s a generational element here. It is young people who are most comfortable using the internet and least inhibited about answering questions on it, so the survey probably didn’t capture the experience of the middle aged. All the same, among the digerati, there is a big range of sexual practices. One suspects that the French are using the internet to access photos of Anna Kournikova falling out of her dress, while the Chinese are pirating industrial designs.

 

See: Atlantic Monthly, January/February 2005, p. 56; “Japan’s population crisis,” The Week, 17 January 2014, p. 11

[1] Apparently we have more in common than just a hatred of radical Muslims.

 

The heirs of Mustapha Kemal

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Turkey has been an emphatically “secular” country since its foundation. Mustapha Kemal “Ataturk” (“Father of the Turks”) wanted a secular state, not one of those messed up backward Arab countries. He prohibited the wearing of the fez for men and veils for women. He granted women equal rights with men (including the outlawing of polygamy). He insisted upon the separation of Church and State. This included banning the “sharia” (Islamic religious law).   Kemal was a general and the army he created has been the guardian of Turkish identity since its foundation. The army has overthrown governments from time to time when they strayed too far from honest or secular government. Explicitly religious parties have been banned from time to time.

A bunch of the religious politicians migrated from the banned parties to the Justice and Development Party, which was formally not a religious party. (Wink, wink.) In 2002 the Justice and Development Party (AKP) won a majority in the parliament and formed a government under prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Hostility soon mounted between the AKP and the army. In 2007 the generals were alarmed by the direction being taken by the AKP. They made a veiled threat of a coup. Many Turks took offense at the threat and voted for the AKP in the next election, increasing its majority. In 2008 the army tried to get the Constitutional Court to declare the AKP illegal on the grounds that it was trying to impose the “sharia” on the country. The Court rejected this charge. The AKP government then launched a hunt for conspirators among the ranks of present and—especially—retired officers. From 2008 to 2010 hundreds of officers were arrested and many were charged with conspiring to commit terrorist offenses. At the same time journalists, professors, and human-rights activists also were targeted. The government alleged a plot to provoke Islamists into violence, then to use that as a justification for a new military government in place of the AKP. The government leaked a huge file of documents to the press. The army’s response is that all the government has found are the records of contingency planning for an Islamist revolt.

“The struggle for Turkey’s soul,” The Week, 26 March 2010, p. 15.

The quarrel between the secularist military and the democratically-elected AKP has important implications. First, Turkey has been trying to get into the European Union. The Europeans are deeply concerned about Muslim immigration and Muslim fundamentalism. What Frenchman wants to see Notre Dame turned into a mosque? So the prospect of a fundamentalist government in Turkey does nothing for the country’s prospects of admission into the European Union.

Second, the United States sees Turkey as an important regional power in an area of American concern. The Greeks are nice, but the Turks are tough. The Turks offer a model of what other Muslim countries might become if they would just get their ten pounds in a five pound bag. Turkey borders on the Kurdish part of Iraq and contains its own large Kurdish population. The possibility of Kurdish nationalism messing up conditions in both Iraq and Turkey is very real. Turkey was the one Muslim state that was reasonably pro-Israel. American officials dread that “one man, one vote” in an Islamist Turkey might take place only one time, leaving the country in the hands of a pro-fundamentalist, pro-Iranian, and anti-American government.

Third, ISIS is on the southern border. So the Army will protect the Republic, right?

The Blood of Victory.

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Cotton may be the “fabric of our lives,” but oil makes everything run.

How much oil are we using? More and more each year: 60 million barrels a day in 1985, 84 million barrels a day in 2009; probably 114 million barrels a day in 2035. Oil use will probably accelerate as “developing nations” (Chinas, India), well, develop.

One problem is that there is a finite amount of oil in the earth. But how much is that? No one knows for sure. The current estimate is 1.2 trillion barrels. This is pretty hazy, actually. There may be lots more oil than people previously thought. Still, even “bullish” estimates suggest that we may have enough oil—produced at a rising cost—to provide oil for twenty or thirty or even forty years. So I’ll probably be dead before it runs out, but most people on the earth today will not. In the meantime, world demand for oil drives the exploration for new oil reserves into new areas.  As one oil company spokesman put it, “this is where nature put the oil.  You want to find oil, you have to go where it is.”

Some of the oil exploration sites are in extremely challenging environments.  There are undersea deposits in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Brazil, in the Arctic Ocean, and off the coasts of the United States. The American sites are problematic. People first started drilling for oil off-shore in the Gulf of Mexico in about 1950.  Success in the Gulf led to oil exploration elsewhere.  However, in 1969 there occurred a disastrous oil-rig blow-out in the Santa Barbara Channel in California.  The reaction put a stop to off-shore drilling wherever the oil industry was not already powerful.  Both the East Coast and the West Coast were soon out of bounds.  In contrast, Texas and Louisiana were already in the thrall of the oil industry.  Off-shore oil drilling became concentrated in the Gulf: there are about 4,000 oil rigs operating there now.

Since 2005 there has been a tremendous growth in the number of off-shore oil rigs world-wide.  There are about 2,500 off-shore oil and natural gas rigs around the world outside the Gulf of Mexico.  The number of the foreign off-shore rigs will expand.  Brazil claims a recently-discovered under-sea field 200 miles out in the Atlantic.  The oil deposits are estimated at 15 billion barrels.  Tapping into these fields would raise Brazil to the ranks of Canada and Nigeria among oil-producers.  For a rapidly developing economy with all sorts of needs and aspirations, this chance is too good for Brazil to pass up.  There are serious technical difficulties because the oil is four miles down.  The example of British Petroleum’s “Deepwater Horizon,” which blew up and blew out in Spring 2010, sends shivers down the spines of environmentalists.

Environmentalists go crazy over the risks. The “Deepwater Horizon” blow-out, and the resulting spill, gave them a lot of ammunition. How are you going to contain an oil spill four miles down if you couldn’t contain one a mile down? How are you going to contain a spill in the stormy Atlantic Ocean if you couldn’t control one in the comparatively tranquil Gulf of Mexico? Alternative oil sources don’t look much better. The Canadians have been extracting oil from “tar sands” in Alberta and the US is extracting oil from shale rock in the Western states. Getting oil out of tar sands requires six barrels of water for every barrel of oil produced. Water is nearly as scarce as is oil.

What to do? Well, if you’re running an oil company, you look in places that have weak environmental regulations and a corrupt government. “Nigeria is for drillers” bumper-stickers should start popping up all over the place. Ecuador, Peru, and Costa Guano should also start to figure in oil company reports.

See: “The search for oil,” The Week, 17 December 2010, p. 15; “Oil rigs: cities at sea,” The Week, 21 May 2010, p. 13.

Why don’t Americans trust their Government? I

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“Enemy of the State” (1998, dir. Tony Scott[1]). The NSA has been pressing for legislation that will allow it to slip the leash, but a Congressman is in the way. A top NSA official organizes his killing—meant to look like a suicide—only to discover that a remote camera dedicated to another, innocuous purpose, recorded the killing. HA! The hunt for the video record is on. The wildlife observer who had set up the remote camera—this is hilarious: he is astonished to find that government officials in a democracy are just as savage as wolves in the wild—ends up dead in an “accident.”   He had passed a CD of the scene to an unwitting acquaintance (played by Denzel Washington). So the full weight of the government’s information apparatus—all the CCTV cameras, phone taps, internet intercepts–falls on the acquaintance. It turns out that the government not only can listen to what you say and watch what you do, it can also plant information in the computer records of your life. Soon, the guy played by Denzel has been fired from his job, had his bank account frozen, and been tossed out of the house by his outraged wife. Eventually, a former government tech surveillance guy turned outlaw (played by Gene Hackman) saves the day by using the techniques of the NSA against the bad guys.

“Shooter” (2007, dir. Antoine Fuqua). Government agents get former Marine sniper Bob Lee Swagger (played by Mark Wahlberg) to come out of retirement to consult on a supposed plot to kill an important figure in Philadelphia. Turns out that they are setting up Swagger as the fall guy for a government-sponsored assassination done at the behest of big corporations—which own the US government. (See: “Citizens United” in the mythology of Democrats.) Swagger turns out to be hard to kill and hard to catch—Semper Fi—and he hunts answers. A newbie FBI agent (played by Michael Pena) gets staked out as sacrificial goat because he didn’t believe the stuff the bosses were saying, but Swagger turns him into an ally and they find the truth. After much shooting, the Truth comes out—within a restricted circle in the know. The rest of us are left in the dark, although it is implied that Survivalism isn’t as crazy as it sounds.

“The Bourne Legacy (2012, dir. Tony Gilroy). As anyone who has seen the earlier installments in the series knows, the US government created a bunch of psychologically-enhanced assassins to put a sharp edge on American action in the world. In this installment, a new generation of agents has also been chemically-enhanced into near-Marvel Comics characters. Scandal forces the government to burn down the program, but one of the agents, Aaron Cross, escapes and goes in search of answers. In pursuit of him, the US commandeers all sorts of surveillance systems from weather satellites to toll-booth cameras to CCTV security cameras in airports to credit card records to airline seating charts. In the end Cross (played by Jeremy Renner) and a rogue scientist from the program (played by Rachel Weisz), sail away, sail away, sail away on a fishing boat bound for the southern islands of the Philippines. Still, they’re careful to stay under an awning all the time, just in case of, you know, drones.

The conventions of these paranoid fantasies require a renegade product of evil covert government actions, a basically decent participant in those actions who is appalled to discover what s/he has been doing, and government officials who have been carried away in their pursuit of their duty to protect the dough-headed citizens of a fat, lazy America. (See: “Margin Call”; see: Edward Snowden—I mean “Edward Scissorhands”!)

[1] He purportedly committed suicide in 2012.

Putinium.

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Vladimir Putin was born in 1952 in Leningrad. He had impeccable Communist credentials; his father was a manual laborer, his mother was a school teacher. He studied law in university (like Mikhail Gorbachev), then took a job with the KGB. (See: irony.) Here he was an intelligence officer, operating in East Germany. When the USSR began to withdraw its forces from its East European empire Putin came home to Leningrad. Here he worked for a number of politicians in the new democracy. One of these was Boris Yeltsin.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 had not thrilled the Russians. Street crime and white-collar crime exploded, while the economy decayed, and Russia fell from the status of a superpower. People around Yeltsin piled up immense fortunes by seizing control of Russia’s natural resources, banking, and media. Mikhail Khodorkovsky got control of the Yukos oil company, which established a virtual monopoly on Russian oil production and exports. Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky created media empires. Generally, nobody paid taxes. A few people got rich while most suffered.

In 1998 Yeltsin appointed Putin to run the FSB, heir to the KGB. Two years later in 2000, when the ailing Yeltsin left government, Putin ran for President of Russia. During the campaign someone bombed an apartment building in Moscow, killing 200 people. The suspected bombers were Chechen separatists. Putin promised to wipe them out. He won the presidency.

In power, Putin turned on the “oligarchs” who had risen up during the Yeltsin era. Khodorkovsky went to jail and Yukos Oil was nationalized, Berezovsky and Gusinsky fled abroad. Taxes got collected. Street crime got squashed. Putin’s nationalization of Yukos Oil coincided with a sharp increase in demand for oil around the world. By 2007, Russia was earning about $170 billion a year from oil exports. Prosperity returned to Russia. Putin has distributed favors on a far more prudent basis than Yeltsin ever did. He uses them to build support for himself without harming the interests of the Russian people. At the same time, Putin has been ruthless in dealing with critics: he has used control of the media to prevent opposition candidates from getting out their message; and he is suspected of having prompted the assassination of dissidents Anna Politkovskaya and Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006. In the December 2007 elections voters had to mark the ballots in public view—of soldiers. This is a lot like mid-19th Century elections. Not exactly the Australian ballot. Still, it seemed to work. Public opinion polls showed Putin enjoying a 70 percent favorable rating among ordinary Russians. In December 2007 Putin’s United Russia party won 400 of 450 seats in the Russian parliament (the Duma).

Where is he headed? He appears to be aiming at a restoration of Russian power. He has begun a $200 billion rearmament program. He has tried to block the extension of an American anti-missile system into Eastern Europe. He has challenged the idea of America as the sole super-power. He is still fighting the Chechen war. He turns off the flow of oil to the Ukraine whenever it seems too independent. Then there’s the Crimea.

The question is not whether Russia could have been held down permanently after the collapse of Communism. It could not. But could Russia have become a Western-style democracy? Is a collision inevitable between a reviving Russia and the West?

“Why Russia Loves Putin,” The Week, 21 December 2007, p. 11.

The Weight of the Past in Iraq

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The Americans invaded Iraq in 2003. The Sunni minority, which had traditionally dominated Iraq, didn’t like the invasion or the empowerment of the Shi’a majority, so they fought a guerrilla war against the Americans. Then Al Qaeda in Iraq joined in as allies of the Sunni. Then, Al Qaeda in Iraq sought to foster a civil war between Sunnis and Shi’ites in order to a) make the American position in Iraq unsustainable, and b) punish the Shi’ites for being “in error” about religious truth. Death squads and suicide bombings and car bombings and deaths-by-power-drills abounded.

Then Al Qaeda in Iraq tried to force their Sunni allies to submit to “sharia” (Islamic religious law). The Sunni Iraqis living in Anbar Province didn’t much like this. In 2006 many tribal leaders began to turn against Al Qaeda in Iraq, forming “Awakening Councils.” They sought a truce with and help from the Americans. The Americans responded positively, then General David Petraeus made this a central part of his “surge” strategy in 2007. Awakening Councils spread from Anbar Province into the other areas with large numbers of Sunnis. With the US paying $300 a month and providing equipment to each “volunteer,” there were soon about 80,000 Sunni militia men fighting against Al Qaeda rather than against the Americans. Al Qaeda in Iraq took a savage pounding, while the Sunni component of the insurgency all but disappeared.

American politicians and even many in the media are prone to down-play the role of the “Awakening Councils” in the ending of the insurgency. Instead, they laud “the Surge” of American troops into Iraq. As is so often the case with American political discourse, the reality was different. In 2009 there were about 30 million Iraqis. About 20 million were Shi’ite Arabs; about 5-6 million were Sunni Kurds; and about 5 million were Sunni Arabs. US Army counter-insurgency doctrine held that 20 soldiers per 1,000 people were needed to defeat an insurgency. The US would need 100,000 troops, just to deal with the Sunni Arab part of the country, with many more troops required to garrison the Shi’ite parts. Thus, the “Awakening Councils” and their fighters made possible a radical shift in the balance of forces.

What did the future hold for the “Awakening Councils”? One problem is that the Sunnis have multiple hostilities. Al Qaeda had risen to the top of the list in 2007-2008, but next on the list were the Shi’ites and then the US itself. To take one example, the leader of a Baghdad neighborhood “Awakening Council” was a former officer of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard. In 2008, he saw the Iraqi government as a pawn of Iran. Another problem was that the Americans hoped to see the councils and their militias integrated into the police and military of the new Iraq. The Shi’ites always opposed this and wanted the militias disbanded as soon as possible. They foresaw a civil war following the American withdrawal. Finally, in the absence of a single strong leader among the Sunnis, the various Awakening Councils fell fall into conflict with one another as they struggled for turf, weapons, American aid, and control of the local economy.

Thus, by early 2008 it was possible to foresee ugly developments. It all depended upon what the Shi’ites did with power once the Americans departed. Now we know.

Putting the pieces back together again isn’t going to be easy. Islam allows “taqiyya” (dissembling) to avoid persecution. Long oppressed by the Sunni minority, the Shi’ites are regarded as habitual dissemblers. How to build trust once again?

“The Sunni Awakening,” The Week, 1 February 2008, p. 9.

Obama versus Putin.

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Russian-American relations broke down during the Russia-Georgia war of 2008. At the beginning of his first term, President Obama hoped that there might be a chance for improved relations with Russia. His national security advisor, Thomas Donilon, and his chief adviser on Russia, Michael McFaul, both believed that the opportunity existed. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates were doubtful. However the latter two took the view that it was worth a shot. What’s the worst that could happen?

In April 2009 President Obama met Dimitri Medvedev for the first time at the London G20 conference. The two hit it off, or at least Mr. Obama saw a sympathetic figure in Mr. Medvedev. Both were young lawyers who saw themselves as pragmatists rather than ideologues. According to Peter Baker, “Mr. Obama resolved to do what he could to build up Mr. Medvedev in hopes that he would eventually emerge as the real power.” The Americans pitched the Russians the idea of a new nuclear weapons reduction agreement. The two sides made progress on this topic during the following weeks. The two countries agreed that Russia would allow America to air-lift men and supplies to Afghanistan through Russian airspace. The United States also won Russian agreement for tougher sanctions against Iran, while the Americans facilitated Russian entry into the World Trade Organization.

In March 2011 the United States wanted to join in the air campaign against Libya. This would require a vote by the UN Security Council. Medvedev agreed not to block the vote. Very soon, it became apparent that President Obama had expanded the humanitarian mandate from the UN into a regime-change mission directed at bombing Colonel Ghadaffi out of power. According to then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, “The Russians felt that they had been played for suckers on Libya. They felt that there had been a bait and switch.” Putin became incensed. Putin himself saw the Libyan intervention as the latest instance of a strand in American foreign policy that ran from Kosovo in the Clinton administration to Iraq in the Bush administration. Not the least of his concerns sprang from the evidence that overturning regimes in Muslim countries led to the triumph of Islamic radicals like the ones Russia has been fighting in Chechnya. Moreover, the Russians have not interfered with the airlift to Afghanistan nor have the reneged on the nuclear arms agreements. Apparently, they feel that a promise is a promise.

By September 2011 it had become apparent that Putin would be returning to the presidency in Spring 2012. American officials speculated on what impact this would have on Russo-American relations. The State Department was not optimistic.

In May 2012, Vladimir Putin returned to the presidency of Russia. President Obama sent his national security advisor, Thomas Donilon, to explore relations with the Russian strong-man. Obama may have hoped for a cordial relationship, but Putin did not welcome the initiative. For one thing, Putin blamed Secretary of State Clinton for encouraging the mass street demonstrations that attended his re-election. For another thing, “In Mr. Putin’s view, the United States wanted only to meddle in places where it had no business, fomenting revolutions to install governments friendly to Washington.” An American diplomat recalled that “Putin was very dug in on this idea that we will never have another Libya.” “When are you going to start bombing Syria?” Putin demanded.

Putin took up the matter with President Obama himself at another meeting in Mexico in June 2012. Obama argued that the two countries should co-operate to achieve a negotiated settlement in Syria. [NB: Implicit in this was the idea that Assad would have to go.] Putin refused to agree. A bunch of tit-for-tat harassment followed. The White House came up with a plan for a second “reset”: they would take up a number of suggestions made by the Russians earlier on as the agenda for trying to improve the relationship. The list of things to be addressed were further cuts in nuclear forces, a data-sharing plan to relieve some of the Russian anxiety over American missile defense, and expanded American trade and investment.

After Obama won re-election in November 2012, he sent Donilon to see Putin once again. In June 2013 Obama and Putin met at another G8 conference in Northern Ireland. Putin declined to take up any of the American proposals for a new “reset.” Putin did agree to meet separately with Obama during a conference in St. Petersburg. However, when Obama made a speech in Berlin suggesting a new round of Russo-American nuclear cuts, the Russians did not respond. Soon afterward, they agreed to shelter Edward Snowden, the NSA “leaker” then in flight from American law. Already wondering if the meeting with Putin would be worth having, Obama reacted to the asylum decision by cancelling the meeting. Obama publically belittled Putin as the “bored kid in the back of the classroom.”[1] Later on, during the Ukraine crisis of early 2014, Obama would describe Russia as “just a regional power.”

There are several questions worth considering. First, Vladimir Putin is as Josef Joffe has said, “a nasty son-of-a-bitch.” However, is he just a megalomaniac? Or does Putin have real reasons for obstructing American action in Syria and Ukraine? Looking at the results of President Obama’s foreign policy in Libya, Yemen, and Egypt, is it possible that there are many other powerful people at the head of unpopular governments who think that Putin may have a point?

Second, is international relations the same thing as a Chicago Parks and Recreation basketball court? Is trash-talking an opponent a useful way of resolving a conflict or gaining an advantage?

[1] Peter Baker, “U.S. Feels Chill in Its Relations with Russians,” NYT, 3 September 2013, pp. A1, A8.

 

Buyer’s Remorse: Russia and Ukraine.

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Russian is a big exporter of natural gas to Western and Central Europe. During the life of the Soviet Union, the USSR had supplied natural gas to both the Ukraine region within the USSR and to Western Europe. The price charged Western European purchasers was below world market rate. Two of the USSR’s natural gas pipelines to Western Europe ran through Ukraine and carry 80 percent of Russia’s natural gas exports. After the Soviet Union broke up and Ukraine voted to secede, the Russians negotiated a natural gas agreement with Ukraine. The agreement provided that Ukraine would receive 17 billion cubic metres of natural gas per year as a fee for the pipelines that crossed Ukraine. This agreement also sold 8 billion cubic metres of natural gas to Ukraine at the prevailing world market price.

During the 1990s the Russians claimed that the Ukrainians had not paid for much of the gas that they received. They stopped deliveries of natural gas to Ukraine until they were paid, while continuing to ship gas through the pipelines across Ukraine. The Ukrainians then diverted some of the gas bound for Western Europe to make up for the suspended gas deliveries. (The government of Ukraine later admitted that they had done this.) The two countries finally settled this dispute in an agreement in October 2001.

Negotiations for a new agreement began in 2005. In the process, it was revealed that the Ukrainians had “misplaced” almost 8 billion cubic metres of gas that the Russian energy company Gazprom had stored in Ukrainian facilities in 2004-2005. When Ukraine balked at some of the Russian terms, the Russians cut down on gas deliveries in January 2006. Ukraine soon gave in. However, the Russians repeatedly claimed that the Ukraine of the “Orange Revolution” failed to pay for natural gas deliveries. Growing weary of Ukraine’s repeated “I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today” approach, in early 2008 the Russkies said Ukraine had to pay the whole 2008 bill up-front or no more gas starting immediately. Ukraine’s government, headed by Yulia Timoshenko, rejected that deal.

In late 2008 Ukraine caved-in and paid what they owed the Russians. Negotiations for a 2009 agreement immediately broke down. The Ukrainians wanted a subsidized price, the Russians wanted the market rate; the Russians insisted on payment up front. The Russians turned off the tap in gas supplies to Ukraine, so Ukraine resorted to a number of under-handed practices in response: the pressure dropped in the pipelines to Western Europe (indicating siphoning by Ukraine); the government called on the EU to involve itself; and the Ukrainian court voided Ukraine’s agreement to trans-ship Russian gas to Western Europe. The Stockholm Tribunal of Arbitration soon smashed Ukraine’s pretensions. Moreover, this was costing everyone a lot of money. Eventually, in late January 2009, the two countries negotiated an agreement to cover the period to 2019.

Later in 2009 the Russians agreed to revise the contract in light of the recession in Ukraine. Then in 2010, they agreed to cut the price of gas to Ukraine by thirty percent in exchange for an extension of the lease on the naval base at Sebastopol to 2042.

In late 2013, Russia offered Ukraine a further big cut in price if it would not sign the Association Agreement with the EU. The overthrow of the Yanukovych government put an end to this discount. The Russian seizure of Crimea put an end to the discount for an extended lease on the Russian naval base there. Why pay rent for what you now own?

So, the stuff in the news about an “80 percent price increase” isn’t fully accurate.

Also, Ukraine tends to cheat. The Russians already know this. The US soon will.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia%E2%80%93Ukraine_gas_disputes