Misconceptions

Let's clear up some misconceptions about the election.

First, this wasn't a great Republican victory.  Yes, the party may have won the election, but that was a byproduct of Trump winning it, and he's not a Republican no matter what label he was running under.  Trump shares few if any of the values the GOP has championed in the past thirty years - he's a sleazebag, not a religious conservative; he's a populist protectionist who wants to "renegotiate" or get rid of NAFTA, not a proponent of free trade; he's... well his foreign policy is dangerously incoherent, but he's pro-Putin and anti-NATO, instead of someone who wants to stand with our democratic allies.

At any rate, Trump won without the support of Republican bigwigs.  Former presidents couldn't bring themselves to vote for him - something you might want to pay better attention to next time, voters - and even House leader Ryan ended up cutting Trump lose and avoided even mentioning the candidate while campaigning for Congressional seats, because the man who is unfortunately our president-elect is absolutely toxic.  After Trump bombed the final debate, the GOP was in "check Hillary" mode, not "we're gonna win in a landside."

So the Republican win was a byproduct of Trump's win, when enough voters jumped ship from the Democrats, or independent moderates, or sane individuals, to gamble on a gibbering idiot because they felt he best represented a chance for change.  And to give that idiot the best chance of getting his policies through, they voted for the other people with little (R)s next to their name.  Which means that after eight years of obstructing the president and crippling Congress' ability to function, the GOP was rewarded for its behavior by voters who were tired of Congressional deadlock.  This country.

And let's not pretend this is the map flipping red, Fox News.  Trump lost the popular vote.  He only won the electoral vote thanks to razor-thin majorities in key states that are given artificial importance thanks to our stupid electoral system.  If we say Michigan or Florida or the like is now a red state because the Republicans barely won them, we should say the USA as a whole is a blue country because more people in it voted for Hillary.

Second, let's not pretend Trump is, despite all appearances, some sort of political genius for tapping into something nobody else saw.  Because while the pollsters may have made some extremely misleading assumptions about the loyalty of blue-collar workers in previously-Democratic states, and said workers were what gave Trump his win, they were not his target audience.

Yes, Trump made "you'll have so many jobs, you won't believe it" all part of his platform, but this was because he didn't have any other qualifications.  This is a candidate with absolutely zero political experience, who only joined his party right before the election he participated in.  The only argument Trump could make to show that he was even capable of running a country was claiming that his status as a yugely successful businessman  - but no, you can't look at his tax returns - meant he had the organizational skills and savvy to be president.  And only him, because all those other economic "experts" in Washington, they're all corrupt!  They passed NAFTA even though they knew it would suck jobs out of the country!  Only he has the patented negotiating skills to re-do NAFTA and take out the "export jobs" clause, or however it's supposed to work.  And that's what won over enough people to elect him, because - after the defeat of Bernie in the Democratic primaries - he was the candidate most paying attention to the blue collar worker's woes.

But no, these desperate uneducated workers are not the core of Trump's campaign.  Because he didn't get interested in politics after NAFTA was passed.  He didn't run for president to fix the economy after the Great Recession.  What started this sad tale is the election of President Obama, and Donald Trump simply could not believe or tolerate that.

So Trump started ranting about fake birth certificates and stolen elections, and other people who thought there was something wrong with the country if a black man could lead it took notice.  And when Trump barged onto the stage at the GOP primaries, bullying his rivals and frothing about what a terrible president Obama was, he won over some equally vocal supporters who felt that the other candidates were just too moderate for their alt-right tastes.  And these are the guys Trump spent his campaign pandering to, the people who feel threatened when their neighbors don't look like them, who feel like they've lost if minorities are making gains, who feel like the economic is rigged not to favor the rich but people of color, who will believe it when he talks about Mexican rapists infiltrating our country to steal our jobs or Muslim terrorists disguising themselves as refugees fleeing Syria, who are also nostalgic when Trump talks about police putting black protesters in the hospital. 

A lot of the people who voted for Trump don't like him, and are in fact alarmed when he talks like that.  But they voted for him anyway because they felt he had the best chance of changing the status quo and improving their condition, and were willing to gamble that our government's checks and balances could keep Trump from acting on all the hate and stupidity he was spewing on the campaign trail to placate his most fervent supporters.

For the sake of our country, let's hope that they're right.

This Fucking Country

And so we can set aside the frightened speculation over whether Trump might have a chance, no matter how small, at winning the presidency, and now embrace the dawning horror that, barring some end-of-year surprise or act of God, Donald "Grab Them by the Pussy" Trump will be the next President of the United States of America. 

Donald Trump is Killing Me

I haven't slept properly for over a week, not since an FBI director's decision to break protocol and possibly the Hatch Act unleashed a storm of speculation over what terrible discoveries may or may not be in a new batch of Clinton-related e-mails.  He's since declared that it was a false alarm and there's nothing new to talk about, but the damage has been done - suddenly Clinton's victory has changed from a sure thing to a merely probable thing, which in turn meant that Trump's odds of victory shot up from "nil" to "unlikely."

And it's a strange thing to admit, that your favored candidate being just "unlikely" to lose is so terrifying.  But, as we've heard repeatedly over the past year, this is not a normal election.

My political awakening was during the 2000 election, when I had my assumptions that the system worked and the electorate was rational torn to pieces.  When 2004 rolled around I thought that surely, after Iraq, after the torture, people would wake up and make the right decision at the polls.  I stayed up all night watching the election results come in and skipped class the next day partly from exhaustion, partly from depression.

The thing with George W. Bush, though - it was easy to hate what he was doing as president, but hard to hate the man himself.  He was the doofus who couldn't pronounce "nuclear" and introduced us to "enhanced interrogation techniques" and the "Axis of Evil," but for all the disasters he caused, he wasn't malicious.  There was something oddly endearing about the way he'd carefully deliver a patriotic speech from a teleprompter, ease back once the applause started, and seem vaguely surprised in a "I did good?" sort of way.  He was just someone who never should have gone into politics and got in way over his head, but never meant to cause any harm, and thought he was doing the right thing.  A fool, but an honest fool, to quote Tolkien.  Shame he spent his whole term listening to Wormtongue.

Dubya's successors were a lot better than him, and I never had any real problems with them.  I liked John McCain a lot more when he was a sensible maverick instead of someone who had to toe the party line to win the primary and picked a terrible vice president, but he would have been an okay president.  Romney was... forgettable, I suppose, but again, when I was watching the 2012 election, I wasn't losing sleep during the last week.  Either Obama would win and do things I supported (and some things I didn't), or the other guy would take over and do things differently.  I would prefer that my guy won, but there wasn't a sense of catastrophe if he didn't win.

Donald Trump, though...

It's not just that I disagree with his policies, though they are profoundly stupid.  Bully our neighbor into building a wall across the southern border, through some terrain so inhospitable that illegal immigrants don't even try to cross it, at a time when Mexican immigration is going the other way.  Ban any Muslims from entering the country, including refugees fleeing the disaster in Syria, to protect us from terrorism even though all the attacks on our soil have been committed by home-grown terrorists radicalized over the internet.  Repeal Obamacare and replace it with... well, I'm sure he'll come up with something, hmm?  And renegotiate all those terrible trade deals that sent US jobs overseas, like the section in NAFTA that... well, he must know what he's talking about, right?

In a worst-case scenario, in the event the electorate once again proves that democracy is only as good as the dumbest voters in it, none of that is going to be too crippling.  Congress is a check on the President's ability to enact domestic policy, and between the Democrats and the Republicans who are either sane or vengeful following all that Trump's done to the party, I'm sure he'd have obstacles when he tried to ruin this country.

This isn't to say that he needs to get legislation passed to make things worse, Trump's already causing a stock market panic from the thought that he could actually win - stocks have been sliding ever since Clinton's poll numbers began their plunge, and I've heard economists talk about stocks being worth 10% less than they'd be under a President Hillary Clinton.  I wonder if that makes a successful businessman like Trump start to wonder about his own campaign?  But I digress.

What really worries me about a Trump presidency is what he'd do to our foreign policy.  That's the prerogative of the president, something Congress has a much more limited ability to control, and Trump's proposals on that front are even worse than his domestic proposals.  "Bomb the shit out of" ISIS when they're rounding up human shields by the truckload, work with Syria and Russia to fight terrorism at a time when they're busy killing anyone who dared to oppose the Assad regime.  Reject NATO as a bunch of freeloaders at a time when Putin is doing everything short of open warfare to push against Russia's neighbors, then cozy up to the autocrat responsible for the ongoing crisis in the Ukraine and the slaughter of civilians in Syria.  Consider giving Japan nukes to balance out North Korea.  Make our allies wonder whether we're going to support them - this of course comes right after ripping Obama for abandoning Egypt's leader during the Arab Spring.

There's no guiding political theory there, no philosophy to back a coherent foreign policy.  Clinton's a pretty clear liberal institutionalist who likes to use treaties, trade and governance to promote America's interests and keep the world stable, but Trump seems to be envisioning a world where no one can be sure what America is going to do next, where traditional alliances are abandoned and America's espoused values can be cast aside as it pursues its objectives.  A world where America isn't leading, but leaving everyone in suspense over what it will do next - Trump likes that, he likes the attention and speculation he gets from stuff like refusing to say whether he'd accept the results of the election.

But that is dangerous on the world stage.  The key to conflict is uncertainty - if I know that you're stronger than me, I'm not going to pick a fight.  But if I'm not sure about your strength, or whether you're going to push back or retreat if I do something, or even what your interest in a given region is, that is where miscalculations happen that cost lives and destroy countries.  This is why delusional autocrats like the rulers of North Korea - which Trump so worryingly resembles - are so dangerous, because they're unpredictable.  And in a world with this many crisis zones, from Eastern Europe to the Middle East to Southeast Asia, we don't need more unpredictability.

I suppose Pence could try to temper this somewhat, or maybe that Trump would listen to a band of expert foreign advisors more than he listened to anyone on the campaign trail.  But I guess the fundamental problem I have with Trump is that when I imagine him in the Oval Office, my cheeks flush and acid rises in the back of my throat.

Look, I'm not going to pretend that the presidency is sacred and everyone who's occupied the office has been an exemplar of morality.  We've had adulterers, racists, genocidal tyrants, murderers, the works.  But when we have a candidate who has boasted about being able to sexually assault women, who cheers when black protestors are beaten at his rallies and reminisces about the good old days when the police would take such malcontents out in stretchers,  who "jokes" about 2nd Amendment fanatics "doing something" to deal with the rival candidate, who threatened to jail his political opponent, who refused to say whether he'd accept the results of the election before deciding he would if he won it, who has constantly denounced the election as rigged ever since he started sliding in the polls and without a shred of evidence, someone who has urged his supporters to go out and "monitor" polling stations in minority neighborhoods...

Someone who feels entitled to good press because his interviews get such good ratings, someone who can't give a solid answer on his policy positions but can gush about how many attendance and fundraising records his rallies are breaking, someone who will lie repeatedly and blatantly about what he said even when there's recorded evidence of him contradicting himself, someone who will ignore any poll results or studies he dislikes and cite conspiracy theories or unscientific surveys to support his statements, someone who's earned the support of Neo-Nazis and the KKK and foreign hackers who have led a constant campaign to embarrass his opponent through leaked emails...

Someone who built his financial empire with other people's money and turned billion-dollar losses into personal tax write-offs, someone who'd rather take his workers to court over unpaid wages than give them what they've earned, someone whose response to any criticism is an insult or lawsuit, someone who will rant on Twitter at three in the morning, someone who still refuses to release his tax returns when every presidential candidate in recent history has been willing to make that effort at transparency, someone who loses his temper and acts erratically if you call him by his first name too much...

I'm not crazy, am I?  I'm not the only one who's horrified at the thought of someone like that becoming president, right?  I'm not the only one who can see the very scary places this story could go?

I guess we'll see in a few days.  I can hope that sanity will prevail, that the system works, that this hysterical reaction to the mere potential of another Clinton email scandal will fade and her polls will bounce back at the very end of the election.  I can certainly have more hope that she'll win now than I could this past week.  And the odds are still in her favor, they have been this entire election.

But that does still mean that there is still a chance that Trump could win.  And I have been sorely disappointed by the American electorate before.  And after the last week or so, I'm so used to being afraid that it's hard to give up.

Orlando, Counterterrorism, Drama, and Elections

I don't usually watch the Today show - I like my journalism a little more sophisticated than Matt Lauer watching FBI agents marking shell casings and concluding that "the investigation is ongoing" - but it happened to be on this morning, magnifying the impact of the Orlando shootings with pictures of the victims and a tragic violin rendition of the show's theme music.  I didn't learn much about the massacre that I couldn't get from better news outlets, but I did catch the interview with Hillary Clinton, and heard the question: what kind of "dramatically different" actions would she take to make sure such an attack didn't happen again?

Not "effective" actions, or "sensible" actions, but "dramatic" actions.  Just by hearing the question asked, it's evident that Mrs. Clinton is at a disadvantage when it comes to addressing this situation.

Back in grad school I read a paper by Bueno de Mesquita, "Politics and the Suboptimal Provision of Counterterror."  As the author puts it, "when there is divergence between voters and government preferences, strategic substitution among different modes of attack by terrorists and agency problems between the voters and government create a situation in which the politically optimal counterterrorism strategy pursued by the government in response to electoral and institutional incentives is quite different from the security maximizing counterterrorism strategy."  This can be drastically shortened to "voters like style over substance."

When something like Orlando happens, we want our government to take action, to take the steps that will ensure that it can't happen again.  Unfortunately, we can only see some of the steps the government can take in response to this threat, such as beefing up the number of security forces out patrolling.  Other tactics such as infiltration of terrorist groups or freezing their financial assets, that's all undercover and out of sight.  Even more unfortunately, these latter steps are the more successful means of stopping terrorists, because if we can see those extra security guards, so can the terrorists, so they know to hit a different target.

But, since voters want to feel safe, they put more emphasis on these showy, less-effective attempts to stop terrorists than trusting that the government is doing all that it can in some covert struggle happening out of sight.  And since government officials want to get reelected, they might feel tempted to focus their resources on the tactics that will appease the voters.  And thus voters demand bad strategies because they're the most visible strategies. 

So this morning Mrs. Hillary Clinton got to answer some questions in what was mostly a forgettable interview.  She refused to "declare war on a religion," talked about government and non-government entities working together to combat the threat of lone wolf, self-radicalized killers, and called for restrictions on gun sales to people being investigated by the FBI.  Sensible steps.  Boring steps.

And in contrast, we have Trump, who even after learning that the shooter was a self-radicalized, American-born terrorist, still stuck by his campaign plank of banning Muslims from entering the country.  He's fighting for this policy that would have had absolutely no effect on the shooting, but boy, it sure is dramatic, huh?  It certainly seems to fire up a regrettable number of voters.  So what if it feeds the terrorists' rhetoric and gives American Muslims less reason to believe in the United States?

I guess you could compare terrorist attacks to a Twitter war.  It's not a perfect comparison, of course - when someone spews hate at you online, it's best to ignore it, while if someone murders your citizens, you bring them to justice.  But in both cases it's better to react with restraint than flip your lid and get drawn into a vitriolic shouting match.  You don't let some attention-seeking internet tough guys change who you are.

And this is why the current election, and how it's playing out in social media, is so troubling.  One of our candidates is attempting to stay above online mud-slinging, and her biggest foray into this war of words was the suggestion "Delete your account."  The other candidate thrives in such a domain, built his campaign on inflammatory rhetoric and outrageous accusations.

So, when - not if - another terrorist attack happens, who do you want in the White House?  Someone who wants a boring but practical approach to combating this violence?  Or someone advocating dramatic action, action that goes against America's principles, action that wouldn't prevent violence, action that gives people another reason to hate our country?

Interesting Times

This is simultaneously an interesting election year, because of how unpredictable it's been, and a troubling election year, because what this unexpected developments say about our country.

The Republican primaries were a jumbled mess, with candidates rising into the spotlight as potential winners before saying something stupid or tanking at the polls, until the most divisive and least Republican candidate in the race managed to surge to victory by railing against the GOP establishment.  On the other side of the aisle, Hillary Clinton seemed sure to coast her way to the nomination, only to be met with the surprising grass-roots success of Bernie Sanders, who is similarly lambasting the party's elites.

There's a lot of things going on here, the biggest of which may be the self-destruction of the Republican Party.  Not long ago, the GOP enjoyed a time where it had more or less total control of the government, when a national tragedy resulted in enormous popular support for the party's policies.  The result was the disaster known as the George W. Bush Administration, where we saw what happened when those policies were put into action.  The backlash to this helped propel Obama to the White House, and Republicans immediately dedicated themselves to opposing him at every turn.  I'm still not sure how they ended up passing Obamacare, though I'm starting to wonder whether they did it just to have something specific to rail against.

Anyway, for the past eight years the GOP has been the Party of "NO!"  The party of government shutdowns, the party that refuses to pay old debts unless Democrats repeal a law the Republicans don't have the votes to take down, the party that shoots down bipartisan attempts at immigration reform and then screams when Obama takes executive action.  It is the anti-party, a political group with nothing to offer beyond principled opposition.  Republicans want to repeal Obamacare and take health insurance away from millions of Americans, but have no alternative plan.  They froth in rage that Obama betrayed his country by signing a nuclear deal with Iran and normalizing relations with Cuba, and want to go back to the old tactic of sanctions that didn't stop those countries from doing what we didn't want them to.  They criticize Obama's actions in Iraq and Syria against ISIS, but when it comes to coming up with an alternative plan by drafting an updated authorization for the use of military force, they're strangely silent.

Voters seem to have noticed.  It's hard to get fired up for a conventional Republican candidate when all they can offer are old party planks about a strong military, tax cuts, and so forth, especially when a Republican-controled Congress hasn't been able to deliver on them.  So Trump can come in and court all those people who are sick of this dysfunctional, deadlocked legislature but aren't willing to vote for anyone with a (D) after their names.  Thus, the Republican nomination seems destined to go to someone who shares the party's values only in the sense that he's even less subtle than mainstream Republican candidates when it comes to using sexist, Islamophobic or xenophobic language in his campaigning.

So this talk about Trump trying to "make peace" with establishment Republicans in Congress or his former rivals for the candidacy is a bit strange.  It'd be odd for him to suddenly start palling it up with them, because again his campaign is against the political status quo, while Congressional Republicans are the ones most responsible for our broken, ineffective legislature.  He's shown that he doesn't actually need this establishment's support to get this far.  It might be that mainstream Republicans are hoping to ride Trump's coattails and raise some money and votes for their own campaigns this November.  Which would mean, if both are successful,that we'd end up with this unconventional Republican in the White House, facing down dogmatic and unresponsive hard-line conservatives, thus continuing our political stalemate even in the event that the same party controls the whole government.

The weird thing is that, as I was taught back in the days of my undergrad American Politics courses, the modern Republican party is an alliance between free-market fiscal conservatives, who want as little interference in their business as possible and aren't concerned with things like the environment or a living wage, and social conservatives, who are willing to support the aforementioned fiscal policies even if they end up being hurt by them, just so long as their representatives wave Bibles around and froth against gay marriage.  Except Trump supporters don't seem to be coming from either camp - the guy's as socially conservative as most liberal candidates, while his talk about economics centers more on his ability to make great deals than financial dogma, and in fact goes against what previous Republicans have pushed for.  So where did the old Republican base go?  Are they abandoning traditional candidates and backing Trump because they think he has the best chance of making a difference in this time of deadlock?  Has this base shrunk over the years due to disillusionment?  Or has it been shouldered aside by Trump's followers, who threaten to hijack the Republican Party?

There's something similar, if not as dramatic, going on in the Democratic camp.  A political heavyweight, former Secretary of State, and former presidential candidate like Hillary Clinton should not have any trouble clinching her party's nomination, yet here we have her some unexpected defeats in the last couple of primaries.  She'll probably still win, sorry Bernie fans, but the fact that it's even a race at this point just goes to show that Mrs. Clinton has some very specific weakness and not many specific strengths beyond the novelty of potentially being the first female President of the United States.  For his part, Senator Sanders is capturing some of the angry exasperation that has seen Trump come so far, a feeling that the party establishment isn't doing enough, is corrupt, is out of touch.  It's not quite as bad as the rift within the Republican Party, and at least Hillary and Bernie supporters agree on most issues, if not which are the most important and what's the best way to address them, and the two candidates haven't been flinging the sort of vitriol seen in the Republican race.  But there have been ugly incidents like that near-riot at the end of the Nevada primary, so while the Democrats aren't in as bad a shape as the Republican Party is, there is the potential for a schism if the rift grows too wide. 

What's surreal about this election is the overlap between some Sanders and Trump supporters, to the extend that some backing the former are threatening to vote for the latter if Clinton "steals" the nomination.  Because there's more than just a backlash against an ineffectual government happening right now, some notions that were taken for granted for decades are now being viewed with suspicion.

Free trade was something viewed as an economic ideal, despite some anger over things like NAFTA hurting American workers, and even though some Democrats opposed such treaties as unfair or harmful, even President Obama has been pushing for things like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.  But now both Sanders and Trump are railing against such deals and promising to bring jobs home.  It's an empty promise - these deals facilitate trade but don't cause it, and many of the jobs lost over the past few decades were due to technological innovation rather than overseas factories - but if you're hurting and desperate, it's the sort of thing you'd want to believe in.

America's international alliances have been the cause of some debate, in that they're largely relics of the Cold War, and depending on the international climate it can be hard to argue for the necessity of an American troop presence in Europe and Asia.  It's mostly been liberals who have talked about pulling back and focusing on America's internal affairs, but here we have Trump running for the Repulbican ticket and talking about reassessing or even terminating old pacts with NATO or Japan if he doesn't deem them profitable.  It looks like American isolationism may be making a comeback.

There's another backlash as well, though this one at least is confined to the Republican camp.  Over the past eight years, we've seen some major advances in civil rights.  Gay marriage has been legalized, alternative lifestyles are becoming more accepted, and while racism in the country hasn't been ended by any means, it's at least being acknowledged as a problem we still need to work on.  But some people aren't happy about these developments, leading to the "alt-right" movement that can be viewed as a counter-revolution of sorts opposing feminism and "Black Lives Matter," while more conventional conservatives are trying to regulate which bathrooms trasngender people can use. 

In short, this is what happens when people don't like where they are now but see nothing but gridlock ahead of them - they turn around and go backwards.

I'd like to be optimistic about the future, but there isn't a single candidate out there who can fix things.  Because the biggest problem in this country isn't who's in charge of it, but the people who are supposed to be crafting its laws.  If voters don't toss out the obstructionists and hard-liners and bring in some people willing to work together, compromise some of their values, and get things done, it's not going to matter if it's Trump or Clinton or Sanders in the White House. 

And voters... well.  They're feeling betrayed and angry right now because Congress isn't doing anything, but what were they expecting?  It's not like these Senators and Representatives ran on a platform of teamwork and betrayed it, they went to Washington vowing to oppose the President.  This is exactly the sort of "leadership" the electorate chose.

And call me a cynic, but I think a lot of the people who like Trump for his anti-establishment message are still going to vote for those establishment Republicans come this fall.  I would love to be wrong, though.

Where We Are Now and Where I Hope We're Not Going Next

State of the Union?  Not doin' so good.

The economy, well, people say it's getting better, and can dig up several indicators to prove it, but it still feels like we're in a recession.  Less people may be unemployed, but they might not have a good job either, and there's a sense that even that could be taken away in an instant.  The downside of this glorious global economy we've spent the last half century building is that you can get fired not because of any fault of your own, but because it's cheaper for your boss to pay someone on the other side of the planet to do your job.  Or your investments could take a hit because of what the Chinese or whoever is doing with their currency.  It's a time when it's hard to feel in control of your money.

The president's health care plan didn't work out like it was supposed to.  A lot of people have insurance now who didn't have any before, which is good, but everyone's paying more for their insurance too.  Something about not enough young, healthy folks buying into the system, only older people with big hospital bills.  Or so say the insurance companies.  It's not like they'd use an attempt at reform as an excuse to jack up prices so that either they make more money or public outcry convinces the politicians to repeal the reforms, right?

College is probably too expensive.  Start with a captive audience forced to buy overpriced textbooks, tack on tuition hikes to cover new student centers and sports stadiums, require them to pay for classes that have nothing to do with their major, and the end result is a degree which may or may not be entirely useless in the modern economy.  Though if you had to work a part-time job to support yourself during college, at least you have something to put on your résumé.

It feels like things are unfair, like the country isn't working the way it's supposed to.  It's a time when you'd want your elected officials to do something, to fix things, make things better.

Unfortunately, the government just doesn't function these days.  It's now an accomplishment not to pass a balanced budget, but any budget without some rogue faction shutting down the government over some grievance.  The party that pledged to oppose anything the current president tried to do is now in control of the legislature, and is unable to take action on the immigration crisis or the latest mass shooting because it would go against their conservative values.  Then they flip out when the president tries to do things with executive orders.

It'd be nice to get a better government, maybe elect leaders willing to pull the party plank out of their backsides, but there's three problems with that.  First, our electoral system sucks, it lets politicians stay in office indefinitely so long as their districts are drawn to marginalize the opposition party.  Second, the politicians suck, because again party planks, backsides.  And third, our electorate sucks because it's willing to vote those sucky politicians into office in the first place.  My district keeps reelecting the "pro-life conservative" who talked his wife and girlfriend into getting multiple abortions.

Democracy is the struggle to reconcile the idea that people should be able to rule themselves and control their own government with the creeping realization that people can be kind of stupid.

So take all this dissatisfaction, add the recurring bogeyman of terrorism, throw in concerns that Team America, World Police is losing control of global affairs, and you have a very dangerous situation.  People are scared, they're angry, and the normal means for dealing with these problems are breaking down.  When President Obama addresses gun control by executive action, a lot of people are furious with the abuse of power, but others shrug and say "well, if that's what it takes to actually do something..."  When Candidate Trump talks about banning Muslims from entering the country "until we figure out what's going on" - and it is terrifying to have a serious presidential candidate use those words as a campaign plank - many people are horrified at the betrayal of American values.  But others shrug and say "well, if that's what it takes for us to be safe..."

This is how democracy dies.

America is pretty special because, compared to a lot of presidential democracies, we've been both stable and liberal.  We had a civil war over slavery states' rights, but that was a way to resolve a divisive issue that had been festering since our country's creation.  Even the secessionists wanted to keep a democratic form of government, albeit a weak and ineffective one.  Other than that traumatic episode, there hasn't been a problem that we couldn't solve with our democratic system.  If one set of leaders couldn't handle things to our satisfaction, we voted in some who could.  That's the great strength of democracies, they schedule regular revolutions that allow citizens to change the government without tearing everything down.

But now, things aren't changing.  Our current government is demonstrating that it can't solve the problems facing the country, an election or two after the previous government proved the same thing.  So when the regular methods aren't working, other methods start to look more attractive, like an executive who goes beyond an "imperial presidency" to rule by decree.

And people are afraid.  The "war on terror" (another idiotic concept) has gone on for over a decade, and Americans are still dying in terror attacks, in our own country, even!  The economy is supposedly improving, but people are still afraid for their futures.  And since nothing our current government does seems to remove these sources of anxiety, some people need something to blame, a scapegoat whose removal will make everything better.  And so such people flock to candidates who promise to deport millions of Mexicans and forbid Muslims from entering the country.

Now, we haven't ever had a real tyrant in charge of America.  George W. Bush may have taken the first steps down the path to becoming a police state as he waged war on a tactic, but his heart was as empty of malice as his head was empty of wisdom.  Obama has been using his executive power in worrisome ways, but only when he can't get results from working with the legislature.  Trump... we'll see.

The point I'm making, and the good news, is that while we've had the components of a proper dictator, they haven't all been present in the same person.  We've had leaders willing to use disgusting methods in the name of security, a leader with a borderline personality cult and a willingness to take executive action when Congress won't respond, and now a candidate appealing to xenophobia by promising that by going after the right minorities everything can be made better.  We haven't had someone in the Oval Office willing to use torture and spy on American citizens, and rule by decree, and persecute a minority population to gain support from the majority.

The reason I'm worried, and the bad news, is that all those things have happened in sequence.  The precedent has been made.  A president can torture detainees, ship suspected terrorists to out-of-country black sites for even worse torture, imprison people without trial, all in the name of security, and as we've seen, that president can win reelection.  A president can try to reform by executive order when he feels Congress isn't doing enough, and as we're seeing, people will support him.  And now we have Trump, who is tapping into some of the worst sentiments in this country to fuel his campaign.

I'm not saying Trump is the next Hitler.  I'm saying that, if he's elected, he'll have all the pieces he needs to become one, if he chooses to assemble them.  So maybe now's the time to think real carefully about who to vote for.

Stimulus, Response

Thanks, ISIS, I really wanted my birthday to be forever associated with an atrocity.

Terrorism is violence with a political agenda, where the actual victims don't matter so long as the attack provokes the desired response.  Klansmen lynch an African-American to cow the rest of a town's black population, the Soviet Union puts on show trials to create an atmosphere of fear and paranoia even within the party leadership, al-Qaeda blows up a symbol of America's wealth and global prominence to simultaneously make America look weak and it look strong, and so forth.

But the attacks in France - well, they're only the latest attacks in France, and they're different from the ones that came before.  The attack on Charlie Hebdo, that was retaliation for satire, because when someone mocks your religion the only logical answer is to travel across the planet and kill them.  The attack on a kosher supermarket, you can link that to French support for Israel, and I guess ISIS was hoping that killing Jews would make the French less inclined to protecting the rest.  But the attacks in Paris on Friday, they weren't that specific.  A concert, a football game, even random people enjoying the weekend - this wasn't an attack on a symbolic target, this was more like an attack on the French themselves.

It's still terrorism, of course.  But it's an imprecise, unpredictable terrorism, like a white supremacist who doesn't target "uppity" African-Americans but instead picks a dark-skinned target at random.  You're not safe even if you keep your head down, you're in danger simply for being black.  Or in this case, French.

The other alarming thing is that, as I said, terrorism is meant to bring about a certain response, and the French response may be going according to ISIS' plan.  The French president is talking about being at "war," apparently having learned nothing from the presidency of George W. Bush.  French police are being given expanded powers to defend against terrorist threats, and the idiots at Fox News were positively excited about this, citing the French experience in Algeria aas proof that the country can crack down on malcontents.  No mention of "enhanced interrogation techniques," oddly enough, but like I said - morons.  And France is also launching air strikes in Syria now, because the ones the US have been doing for the past year have accomplished so much.

Or in other words, France has now bought into the ISIS narrative of a war between Islam and the West, even though President Hollande tried to explain that he didn't consider it a war between "civilizations" - I don't think that's going to do him much good when ISIS' PR machine spins his comments.  France will now be cracking down on its Muslim minority population, at a time when many are already feeling alienated as they try to reconcile their beliefs with modern Western society, thus giving them even more incentive to turn to ISIS and similar extremist groups.  And France is now militarily engaged in the Middle East, so ISIS can highlight how it's fighting with those "crusaders" to distract from how often it kills Muslims for not being Arab enough or Arabs for not being Muslim enough.  Just by launching the attacks in Paris, ISIS was able to display its power to potential recruits, and the magnitude of the French retaliation only makes them look like more of a credible threat.

So if France is doing everything wrong, what's the proper response to something like the 11/13 attacks?  You can't not respond, can you?

It's the dilemma of a kid seeking negative attention - if you respond you give him what he wants, but if you don't discourage him to continue he'll keep causing trouble.  But it's useful to have a sense of perspective about these things.  As tragic and horrible any terrorist attack is, you have to remember that they're rare, especially when compared to the more mundane dangers of modern life.  For instance, between 2001 and 2013, a total of 3,380 Americans died from acts of terror, a statistic which includes the extraordinarily lethal World Trade Center attacks.  In the same period, firearms killed 406,496 people on American soil.  So which is the bigger problem, the global specter of Islamic terror, or the fact that America is a trigger-happy society armed to the teeth?

Terrorism gets our attention because it's intended to get our attention - it's about creating a spectacle, building an atmosphere of fear, proving your might when in reality the fact that a group needs to resort to terrorism in the first place shows that they don't have the power to get what they want through conventional means.  Treating it as something more than violent crime, or heaven forbid casting aside your liberal values and transforming your society to wage "war" on it, is a way of conceding defeat. 

You fight spectacular, fearsome terrorism through inconspicuous, boring methods, the same you would use to deal with any other criminal organization.  And you don't expect to "win" against terrorism at any point, it's a tactic, not an enemy that can be defeated.  You can close your borders, but you'll still be in danger from home-grown extremists.  You can bomb ISIS out of Syria, but some other group will eventually take their place.  You can brutally crack down on potential converts within your borders, and now you have replaced the potential threat of insurgent terror with the more certain danger of state terror.

And you'll still lose more citizens due to traffic accidents, illness, or violent neighbors than to what you devoted so much time and energy to combating.

A Simple Plan

According to a recent poll, 71% of Americans don't think that their president has a "clear plan" about how to handle the disaster in Syria.  And hey, they might be right, and President Obama is just doing things at random, running out the clock until his term ends.  But I find that unlikely.  I think the reason people would even think that there is no Syria Plan is because their logic is as follows: "if someone has a plan to achieve victory, then they would use it to achieve that victory.  Therefore, if someone has not achieved victory, they obviously don't have a plan to win a conflict." 

Now I haven't snuck into the Oval Office lately and don't have the latest copy of Obama's Syria Plan on my desk.  But I have been paying occasional attention to what's going on in and around Syria, and from America's activities I can make a guess at what the president's trying to do.

First, US forces have been performing air strikes to hit ISIS targets.  Lots of air strikes, for more than a year now.  Air strikes are a tempting policy tool for leaders, especially in situations like this, because their results are impressive (boom!) and, against a low-tech foe like ISIS, low-risk as well.  It's not like those fanatics have an air force.

Second, America has been supporting ground forces in both Iraq and Syria to take advantage of the aforementioned air strikes and retake territory lost to ISIS.  This only makes sense - if the Iraqis and Syrians aren't willing to fight for their countries, why should the US put its own soldiers at risk?  Plus the local forces speak the language, know the terrain, don't have to tote supplies halfway around the world, and so forth.

Third, President Obama has been building a regional coalition to combat ISIS.  After all, the Islamic State is a revisionist power that made a big point about scuffing out the old colonial border that divided Iraq and Syria.  It aims to transform the entire region - or rather revert it into its idea of what the medieval Caliphate was - and therefore poses a threat to states beyond Iraq and Syria.

There you have it, Obama's mythical Syria Plan exposed.  But it's not very comforting, is it?  Because despite this plan, we're obviously not winning in the fight against ISIS, to say nothing of the fight to have a non-authoritarian leader in Syria.

The air strikes aren't working because you can't retake ground with planes.  They have a limited amount of fuel to stay in the air, and a limited number of bombs to drop.  They can't go house-to-house, clearing out insurgents, and they can't rebuild towns and comfort refugees.  If no one is able to follow up on an airstrike, the enemy can simply crawl out of hiding and wheel in a new artillery piece to replace the one you blew up.  Plus there's something fundamentally dissatisfying about sending a 150-million-dollar fighter jet to blow up a pickup truck with a machine gun mounted in the back.

The ground forces we're supporting in Iraq and Syria aren't accomplishing much because they suck.  The Iraqi Army in particular should be replacing the WWII French Army when it comes to military insults, and has shown itself capable of retreating despite outnumbering threatening forces ten-to-one.  $818 billion well spent, there.  There is no unified Syrian resistance, just a bunch of rebel groups that aren't aligned with Assad or ISIS, and of course our attempt to train a mythical "moderate" Syrian rebel army fell so disappointingly short that the Obama Administration has put the program on hold.  The exception to this bad news would be the Kurdish Peshmerga, which has shown itself capable of both holding the line and taking back territory.

The regional coalition we're building also sucks.  Sure, countries like Jordan and Saudi Arabia have pitched in when it comes to air strikes, but they all have their own agendas to look after as well.  The Saudis are distracted by the civil war in Yemen and have to prop up the government there against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels.  Turkey has been a major avenue for foreign fighters to pass through as they join ISIS, famously sat and watched the border town of Kobani get pounded by ISIS because it was being defended by Kurds, and even as it finally mobilizes against ISIS is also deploying against Kurdish forces fighting the same group.  And of course, nobody's sending in ground forces, and see my above point about airstrikes.

The only nation that seems eager to get involved in Syria is Russia, and Putin's fighting on behalf of its dictator.

In short, the American public is not so much upset that their president doesn't have a Syria Plan as they are upset because the Syria Plan isn't working.  Obviously Obama needs to change his plan, but there's a problem - part four of that plan, Do Not Get Involved In Another Ground War in the Middle East.  After inheriting miserable occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq from his woefully inept predecessor, President Obama has made it clear that he's eager to get Americans out of those countries as quickly as possible.  He actually succeeded in withdrawing from Iraq, only for the country to all but immediately collapse in the face of ISIS' assault, and our withdrawal from Afghanistan has been delayed because the Taliban is causing the same problems there.

And because our attempts to build stable democracies in those countries have gone so badly - hell, we'd settle for a illiberal but stable country capable of defending itself at this point - you can understand why the president is in no hurry to start another military adventure in the reason.  Because what would sending ground troops to Syria lead to?  The evidence suggests more years of US soldiers getting picked off during patrols, more years of tribal or religious violence, more years of bundles of dollars disappearing into the desert, and the result is a corrupt and ineffective government that collapses the minute someone pokes it with a stick.  It sure would be nice to think that this country has learned something after over a decade of occupation and nation-building, but since at least some of us are eager to try it again, I'm not that optimistic.

And yet, committing American ground forces seems to be the only thing that could turn this conflict around.  And there's the dilemma facing the president, and if they thought about it, the American public.  Either we stay our hand, refuse to put boots on the ground, and "lose" to ISIS, or we go all in yet again and probably end accomplishing very little at great cost over the next decade.

There's no clear route to victory, and that, I think, is what the disapproval about the Syria Plan is really about.  Americans don't like to lose, we like to think that we have the power and know-how to fix any problem.  But occasionally a situation comes along that humbles us, and it looks like Syria is one of them.

Structural the Same, Emotionally Drained

Once upon a time, the world was multipolar.  The great powers of Europe all competed to see who would dominate, but employed a shifting alliance system to balance out anyone who seemed to be getting too powerful.  When new players joined the game this system fossilized, leading to World War I and as a consequence World War II.  After that, the world was dominated by two superpowers with opposing ideologies, who led coalitions of like-minded governments to see whether communism or democracy would triumph.  The winner turned out to be democracy, and so with the Soviet Union's collapse, the United States became the world's sole superpower, a country with unrivaled military strength able to deploy anywhere on the globe.

Back in 1989, Fukuyama talked about the "End of History," since after all the great political debate seemed to be over, liberalism was ascendant, and the former Warsaw Pact countries were kicking out their communist regimes and clamoring for democracy.  Others looked forward to a Pax Americana, in which the United States would use its preponderance of power to protect the international system as a mostly benign overlord.  The original Gulf War seemed to vindicate this idea, and saw the US enforce a United Nations resolution to kick Iraqi forces out of Kuwait.  Everything seemed to be going well, and the future looked bright.

We are not living in that world anymore.  Global freedom has been in decline for nine years running.  The former Soviet satellite states are under threat by a resurgent, authoritarian Russia that's undermining their autonomy through means just short of outright war.  The United States went back to Iraq, defying the United Nations in doing so, spent nearly a decade there, and now tries to keep the dysfunctional "democracy" it created from being toppled by an Islamic State even worse than Saddam Hussein's despotism.  Everything seems to be getting worse, and there's little hope in sight.

Has the global distribution of power changed over the past quarter century?  I would say no, not substantially.  The world isn't multipolar, there's no "great game" being played on the global stage by a handful of major powers.  The United States is still supremely powerful, despite the exhaustion from decade-long deployments in two countries.  Russia is resurgent - that is, aggressive, it's still an economic time bomb and its army hasn't recovered from the USSR's collapse - but it still can't match the United States.  As I've said before, this isn't Cold War II, Russia has no ideological appeal.  At best Putin can try to start an "absolute power" club with the rulers of Iran and Syria, but nobody else is looking at Russia as a model government.

No, the world still seems to be unipolar.  What's changed is our understanding of what that means.  In Afghanistan and Iraq, we've seen that just because you have a state-of-the-art army capable of pulverizing any adversary doesn't mean that you'll be able to build something in the resulting ruins.  We've seen the international community picking and choosing when and where to live up to its ideals, intervening in Kosovo but watching the Rwandan genocide.  And we've seen a supposed bastion of freedom imprison people without trials, torture them as suspected terrorists, and turn into a surveillance state that spies on both its own citizens and its allies.

But rather than describing the world in terms of how power is distributed in the international system, an alternative is to name an era after something more intangible.  There were the Dark Ages that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, an era popularly perceived as one of ignorance and barbarism.  There was the Renaissance, when the Western world rediscovered the good parts of Greek civilization while skipping the pederasty.  There was the Enlightenment, in which liberalism blossomed and transformed political thought, laying the foundation for modern democracy.

And now?  I call the current era the Disillusionment.

The big difference between now and the end of the Cold War is not in the distribution of power, or the emergence of some rival to the liberal international order.  What's changed is us - we've seen the limitations and shortcomings of these things, but don't have a viable alternative to them.

We thought freedom and democracy would fill the vacuum left by communism, and while Eastern Europe was able to pick up the habit of letting people vote, in the rest of the world, that didn't happen.  China's one-party government has gotten so good at quashing dissent and controlling information that most of its subjects don't know anything happened in Tienanmen Square.  In Russia, when President Yeltsin's opponents objected to his power-grabbing, he had the army shell Moscow's White House; his successor Putin never leaves power, and when a rival politician is gunned down just outside the Kremlin, Russian state media is quick to decry the murder as an attempt to discredit their beloved leader.  In the Middle East, the Arab Spring saw the region rise up against its repressive and incompetent regimes, but only Tunisia can be said to be better off for its revolution; the others either failed or resulted in regimes that are at best as bad as the ones replaced.

And what of the democracies that won the Cold War?  America’s political system is increasingly partisan, its conservative faction is increasingly radical, and the national legislature is so dysfunctional that it is now an accomplishment to pass an unbalanced budget without the GOP's lunatic fringe shutting down the federal government.  The national debt is skyrocketing and neither party is willing to risk votes by properly fixing it, the country’s infrastructure is decaying, and attempts to reform America’s health care system - well short of the sort of comprehensive government health care seen in the Nordic countries - have been viewed as a socialist takeover and led to the aforementioned government shutdowns.  Voters aren't happy, Congress' approval rating is in the toilet, and yet the public keeps voting for politicians who exacerbate these problems.

It's rather telling that we set up parliamentary systems in Iraq and Afghanistan instead of the brand of federalism America currently fails to function under.

Across the pond, the socialist democracies of Europe have been peaceful since World War II and have come together in an unprecedented European Union, but this is showing signs of strain.  It’s easy to support a lot of social programs when America has effectively paid for your national defense, but with the current global economic downturn it’s getting harder to find the funding - plus Putin’s antics make defense spending more relevant than it’s been in decades.  The EU is struggling to deal with the economic malaises of its least successful members, leading countries like Great Britain to talk about dropping out.  And now there’s a flood of refugees from a war no one did anything about that is putting Europe’s welcoming, open-minded reputation to the test.

Global governance, the liberal international order, the same system that punished Saddam for invading his neighbor?  Helpless to do anything about Syria because Russia has its Security Council veto.  Capitalism, the free market system that maximizes wealth while minimizing government interference?  The gap between the rich and everyone else keeps growing wider, a global economy means you can lose your job simply because it’s cheaper to have a foreigner do it on the other side of the world, and the people ostensibly in control of the economy are willing to wreck it in pursuit of short-term profits.


All the systems and principles the West fought the Cold War for just don't seem to be living up to their potential.  And since the Cold War is over, there's no viable alternatives to them.  Communism was a failure, it was simultaneously naive and ruthlessly brutal.  The medieval society the Islamic State is trying to construct in the ruins of the Middle East lacks appeal to anyone but sufficiently sociopathic Muslims.  Nobody wants to live under an authoritarian regime like in Russia or China, and people outside of them would take democracy on its worst day over a dictatorship on its best, but it's going to be hard for a Russian or Chinese to get galvanized to stand against the system when they see the US government shutting down over Obamacare or Europe threatening to kick out Greece if it doesn't get its economy together, especially if those authoritarian regimes can deliver a similar standard of living.

So disillusionment, pessimism.  Recent events have done for politics and economics what World War I did for science, so I suppose you could say we've been living in one long Age of Disillusionment for a century now.

As gloomy as this situation is, there's a straightforward way out - if the system is broken, and we don't have an alternative, fix what we have.  Of course, "straightforward" isn't the same as "easy."  Can the American electorate support candidates who vow to bridge the partisan divide and solve their nation's problems, instead of politicians who stick to their principles and refuse to compromise?  Can Europe hold itself together and maintain its standards in the face of an uncertain economy, Russian aggression, and an influx of refugees?  Can we reform the international system so that disasters like Syria aren't allowed to happen, and have free markets that benefit more than the richest participants?

The Western world getting its act together is an important first step, but that in itself won't bring us back to the good old days of 1991.  Saddam's gone, but there's plenty of people like him out there.  But if we can't solve the problems at home, how can we expect to fix what's wrong with the rest of the world?

A Pound of Prevention or an Ounce of Cure?

They call it the "international community," as if all the nations of the world are homes in a village somewhere.  That'd be one messed-up looking town.

You'd have the sprawling, lavish mansion of the USA (purchased on credit, serious issues with the plumbing and foundation) on the same street as Latin America, whose homes have holes in the roof and bullet holes around the door.  The Koreas share a duplex, one of which is well-lit and prosperous, the other dark and boarded-up - and the owner occasionally takes potshots at the mailman.  Well-to-do and quiet Europe Street is just around the corner from the Middle East Road, which is currently on fire.

There are fire trucks and such in an enclosed parking lot that can only be unlocked when the right five households agree to do so.  The understanding is that if your home is burning down, it's only a matter of real concern if some sparks land on a neighbor's yard.  And if you happen to hear the sound of women and children screaming from a neighbor's house, mixed with muffled gunshots and the thump of something heavy hitting the floor, well... it's not really your business, or your problem.

Not a model community, in other words.

It does have its good points, however - if someone's home is ablaze, sometimes its neighbors will provide shelter for the residents until the fires go out and they can rebuild.  But other times, a neighbor will force a fleeing family to stand out in the yard without water or shelter, because they aren't wanted.  And then we have a crisis of people without adequate supplies, struggling to find a place of safety when what they thought was home became a roaring conflagration.

And it begs the question - maybe it would've been easier to douse the flames when they were first sparked.  Sure, it'd be hard work, and expensive, and you might even lose people.  You'd probably expend more resources and cause more grief preventing the crisis than you would by watching it happen but letting some refugees camp out on your property.  But while your individual share in the effort would be greater, the overall level of misery would be much lessened.  You'd be doing something good for your community.

But it's not a real international "community," is it?  Just a bunch of self-interested actors who happen to live next to each other.  And so we'll watch a disaster like Syria unfold, consider taking action, but decide it's not really worth the trouble.  It's not really our problem. 

At least until those refugees show up on our borders, asking why we aren't doing anything to help.

Bread and Circuses

I have a concern about the upcoming Iran nuke deal that doesn't actually have anything to do about Iran's nuclear capability.

During a trip to the gym, I had the radio on, not really to listen to but to provide some non-engine background noise.  The program had a story on Iran and its people's reaction to the potential for lifted sanctions, and mentioned that the country's rulers hoped that improved economic conditions would make the population less unruly.  And I suddenly had second thoughts.

See, one of the big theories I studied in grad school was the democratic peace theory, oftentimes called the "Kantian peace" after early proponent Immanuel Kant.  The short version is that democracies are very unlikely to go to war with each other, so it'd be great if every nation in the world let people vote for their leaders.  A book I read about it focused on three elements to this theory: democracy itself, economic interdependence, and shared involvement in international organizations, as mutually-reinforcing principles that could bring about this type of peace.

It's a nice theory, and sounds appealing.  So in Iran's case, its leadership being willing to negotiate with world leaders over its nuclear program could lead to it cooperating more with the International Atomic Energy Agency and the like.  These organizations have their own rules and protocols, and by participating in them, Iran would theoretically learn more about how to run a democratic government.  At the same time, eased economic sanctions and increased foreign trade would create financial ties between Iran and other nations, or in other words a disincentive to threatening those ties through behavior that might convince countries to impose sanctions again.  And I suppose copies of the Declaration of Independence are being smuggled in along with that increased trade, as another nudge towards democracy.

The book I read - Triangulating Peace by Russett and Oneal, if you're interested - used a lot of statistics and regressions and all that numeric stuff to prove their point, and I'm not the one to examine that sort of thing, I much prefer a concrete example.  And we can look at history and see the inverse of the theory playing out, when post-WWI Germany had an economic crisis and rejected international governance as it discarded democracy in favor of authoritarianism.  The problem is that when I examine the world right now, I don't see a strong positive example.

Consider China.  The country prefers to be an exception to rules rather than conforming with the international community's expectations regarding things like water boundaries, but it's certainly abandoned communism and become one of America's most important trade partners, which helps to take the edge off the crises caused by the aforementioned disputed water boundaries.  But is this trade helping the country become more democratic?

Not to my knowledge.  The events in Tienanmen Square in 1989 have been so heavily suppressed that most Chinese don't know those pro-democracy rallies and subsequent crackdowns even happened.  Dissidents issue Charter 08 and get detained by the authorities, websites discussing it get shut down, and of course the media isn't allowed to mention the thing.  Hong Kong held protests against voting restrictions just last year, but it's a Special Administrative Region with a history of democracy.  There's been no "Chinese Spring," no mass demonstrations against corrupt and authoritarian leaders.  China's government still sucks, and its people aren't taking much action to change this.

Here's my concern - back in the days of the Cold War, we had two systems of government competing to see which could create the best society.  And towards the end, when things loosened up a bit, one of the contributing factors to the fall of the USSR was its citizens could see that communism had created a country that couldn't even feed itself, while the capitalist pig-dogs in America had Coca-Cola, denim jeans and awesome music.  This created outrage that was usefully destructive.

But today, thanks to global trade, every nation can get the material benefits of a First World, democratic society.  American fast food chains span the globe, our Apple gadgets are being built in China, and Hollywood churns out Michael Bay movies to liquefy audiences' brains through excessive explosions and incomprehensible cinematography.  So even if you live in a repressive regime like China, you've got lots of ways to take the edge off it.  You may not be able to vote or browse the internet freely, but you can catch the latest Transformers garbage on your phone-puter.  And isn't that easier than taking to the streets to protest the latest round of arrests?

We're exporting bread and circuses to non-democratic regimes, in other words.  They can enjoy the fruits of a free and open society, and their subjects have less incentive to make their own countries the same way.

So back to Iran.  If all goes well and the country begins to behave less like a rogue state and reaps the economic benefits of doing so, is it likely to cast off its theocratic regime and become a peace-loving, human rights-respecting democracy?  I hope so.  The major difference between Iran and China is that the former was a functioning democracy until we Americans screwed it up, while China went from an imperial system to an illiberal "republic" to Mao's deranged attempt at communism.  Even today Iran is sort of democratic, it just has a religious government making sure the Iranian electorate don't vote for the wrong people.  Meanwhile in China, the only places with a democratic heritage are the former foreign holdings of Hong Kong and Macau.

Iran knows better than China what a democracy should look like, so they should have an easier time bringing one about - which is not to say that convincing all those security forces and religious militias to bow to the will to the people will necessarily be easy.  It'd be great if the increased prosperity from lifted sanctions allowed Iran's middle class to expand and grow strong enough to challenge its priest-tyrants.  But that would take a lot of effort, and it's so much easier to sit back and watch a movie on your smartphone...

Peace Talks

So Syria's government has recently stated that it's ready for peace talks, though given today's air strikes against a rebel city, apparently al-Assad's regime is also ready for more war.  Or maybe Syria's dictator and his cronies are aware that it probably isn't time to negotiate.

Now it's been a while since my Conflict Resolution class, but here's what I remember about a key concept without having to dig up my old notes.  "Ripeness" is the notion that there's a certain time over the course of a conflict that the belligerents will be open to a negotiated solution to it.  Despite what it sounds like, it has nothing to do with whether the bodies are being properly disposed of.

At the start of a civil war, everybody's all pumped for fighting.  They're sick of each other, they think violence is their only option, and they think they can win a conflict - otherwise they wouldn't be fighting it in the first place.  Trying to intervene and get everyone to try a diplomatic solution is most likely going to be a wasted effort.  It's only after the sides have fought for a while, seen the real cost of war, gotten a feel for their opponent's capabilities, and run into some setbacks, that they might change their mind.  If one side is clearly winning a civil conflict, then they'll see no reason to negotiate with the losing side, and probably go on to win it.  But if the sides are stalemated and they realize that they can't get all - or even most - of what they want through force of arms alone, then they may be willing to come to the negotiating table.  In short, a conflict has to "ripen" for a bit before there's a good chance of peacefully resolving it.

Now, the Syrian civil war has been going on since 2011, it's killed 200,000 people, displaced over 10 million people, and has spilled over into neighboring countries.  But is it "ripe" for a peaceful resolution?

Since Thursday's statement from the al-Assad regime doesn't seem to be going anywhere or been taken seriously, the answer is probably "no."  This seems to be either an attempt at good PR by a dictatorial government willing to bomb hospitals, or an admission that the war isn't going well for al-Assad and that these theoretical peace talks would be the only way for him to keep his head and stay in power.  A sign of desperation in other words.

Even if al-Assad is willing to use words for once, there's little indication the other sides share this interest in negotiations.  ISIS has said, if I recall correctly, that the powers arranged against them would have to treat with them eventually, but this was presumably bravado and an attempt by ISIS to gain legitimacy.  As for the other rebels - well, let's not make the mistake of assuming that the rebels are a unified faction.  There's those legendary "moderate" Syrians resistance fighters that are backed by the US, and who may have little reason to give up with such a powerful ally on their side.  Then there are others who apparently are willing to listen to Iranian delegates and hold a truce, though since I can't find a follow-up on that story I'm not sure how well it went.

More importantly, for negotiations to be successful there has to be common ground, and all of these three factions have mutually-exclusive goals.  Bashar al-Assad wants to stay alive and his cronies want him to stay in power.  The rebels want him gone and someone new in charge.  And ISIS rejects the notion of modern Syria in favor of a religious state under their control.  I suppose the best you could offer would be to divide Syria up among the three of them, except, well, we don't like doing that in a post-colonial country like Syria.  People in the rest of the Middle East might start getting the wrong idea.  Much better to pretend that the lines in the sand mean something.

All this to say, al-Assad's words of peace sound hollow, and the fighting in Syria is probably going to continue.  Because from what else I remember from my conflict studies courses, this civil war in Syria has all the signs of a nasty, protracted conflict.  We've got easily-captured natural resources (oil) that can be used to fund the fighting.  We've got an array of outside actors backing the factions within the civil war - Iran and Russia are propping up al-Assad, the United States and some of its regional allies are (officially) backing the Syrian resistance, and then there are fundamentalist Muslims all over the world lending financial or material support to ISIS.  And we've got goals that are more profound than disputes over representation in government or resource allocation, but a conflict over what type of government is acceptable.

But just because the sides in the civil war may not be interested in a peaceful resolution doesn't mean that the fighting has to go on forever.  The United States is supposedly going to step up its support of the Syrian rebels, and Turkey has recently gotten off its duff to contribute, even if they seem more interested in fighting Kurds than ISIS.  Hopefully with this support, the "good guys" - or at least the guys who aren't loyal to a dictator or a religious fanatics - will be able to tip the balance and resolve the conflict the hard way.  

If they do it fast enough, there may be enough of Syria left to salvage when they're finished.

Dealing With Iran

The tragedy of Iran is twofold.  First, there is the fact that its people are quite open-minded and moderate compared to the rest of the Middle East, and even took to democracy without America having to impose it on them - it is only its revolutionary Islamist regime that makes the country an enemy of freedom.  Second is the fact that Iran would still be a parliamentary system if the United States hadn't once again decided that as part of its global struggle to protect democracy from communism it should set up an authoritarian puppet regime, whose collapse set the stage for the aforementioned revolutionary Islamist regime to take over.

But there's no use bemoaning America's past mistakes (save for hoping that we'll learn from them at some point), so we have to look at the situation we have now, and figure out where to go from here.

Iran is not a friendly country.  Its leadership hates us for backing the Shah decades ago, hates us for backing its rivals in the Middle East now, and hates us for being a country where women can wear a bikini and men can skip church to watch Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.  Iran supports Bashar al-Assad, the tyrant who led Syria into civil war, and terrorist groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthi rebels in Yemen.  Its regime rejects notions of human rights in favor of religious fundamentalism, and when Iranians attempt to protest election results they’re suppressed by security forces and Islamic militias.  And its nuclear program has had ambitions to build a weapon in the past, and a history of ignoring international treaties and hiding things from nuclear inspectors

Almost as worringly, Iran is also a schizophrenic country.  It has an elected national government that at every level is checked by a fanatical religious regime, so even while Iran's negotiators try to work out a deal with us, the Ayatollah is posting taunts and threats on social media while his priests lead the "Death to America" refrain they've been singing for nearly forty years now.  It has a conventional military, as well as an Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution and its auxiliary Basij militias, which act on their own initiative when it comes to brutalizing or imprisoning citizens who dare to speak out against the religious regime.  This is not the sort of system that you'd want to have access to nuclear power, in other words.  Even if Iran doesn't build a conventional bomb with it, there's all sorts of mischief its glassy-eyed fanatics could get up to with a radioactive sample.

America's response to all this has been to try to isolate Iran diplomatically and, along with other countries, impose economic sanctions in an effort to punish and limit its misbehavior.  They haven't worked.  Even after the UN Security Council sanctioned the country for continuing its nuclear program, Iran was able to build a functioning reactor, step up production, even start a second underground facility.  As we've also seen in places like Iraq and Cuba, if a regime is willing to brutalize its own people to stay in power, imposing additional hardships on that population probably isn't going to get it to do what we want.

So the status quo isn't working, and the Obama Administration has done something pragmatic.  Rather than sticking to our current strategy and watching as Iran develops its nuclear program despite the sanctions, the president has attempted to give us some control over what the country does next, lifting some ineffective economic disincentives if Iran behaves itself and follows some instructions.

Naturally, the Republicans are outraged.  Iran will surely use the money it makes from lifted sanctions to back terrorist groups.  Israel, our 51st state, will be placed in mortal peril.  All our valuable allies in the region (whoever they are) will lose faith in America's resolve to stand with them, assuming they had any left after we watched our dictator in Egypt be replaced by another dictator, or ISIS run all over Iraq.  Even the American public doesn't have a whole lot of support for this triumph of years of patient diplomacy - it simply feels wrong to lift sanctions on a hostile, undemocratic regime that hasn't changed its tune.

But we don't have many alternatives.  If we stick to our principles, fold our arms, and refuse to deal with Iran, we miss out on Iran's agreement to let nuclear inspectors in, reduce its low-yield uranium stockpile by 98%, cut down on centrifuge production, and so forth.  It's an unhappy compromise, and dropping some of the sanctions against Iran means that a troublesome regime will have more money to spend on other projects we don't like, but at least it will have some restrictions on a program that has us very worried.  How else are we going to control Iran's nuclear aspirations?  Is anyone seriously proposing yet another American military operation in the Middle East, at a time that we're already reluctantly working with Iran against ISIS?

Optimistically, this deal could lead to further negotiations on those other things about Iran we find so objectionable.  And if nothing else, lifting some sanctions could help bolster Iran's middle class, that important ingredient for democracy.  So not only would we be helping out some people that already have enough problems just living under the Iranian government, we might be causing problems for that Iranian government when those people question why they're required to chant "death to America" every day.

This is not a deal that America would normally be proud of, but right now it might be the best option we have.

Terrorism, or Something

Nearly a year between posts?  Pathetic.

If you want to see the difference between CNN and Fox News' approach to journalism, look no further than their 5:00 headline news hours last evening, when they responded to the attacks in Chattanooga.

On CNN you could see Wolf Blitzer talking to journalists on the scene, basing the discussion on witnesses, authorities and other experts.  He focused on what was known and could be verified, and took care to describe Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez as "the alleged gunman" or "suspected gunman," even if everyone was pretty certain he did it.

Meanwhile on Fox News you had Bret Baier introducing the story, then turning to a panel of conservative pundits so they could give us their opinions on it.  This was mainly an opportunity for the perpetually-scowling Charles Krauthammer to complain that President Obama is once again describing the incident as a "lone gunman" situation because the president is too limp-wristed to immediately interpret the shooting as another battle in our eternal war against radical Islam.

One network deals with facts, the other opinions.  One is out to report on reality, the other to create a specific reality for its viewers to live in.

Was it an act of terror?  Hard to say at this point, we're still working out why someone who lived in a quiet neighborhood, got a degree as an electrical engineer, and brought up some kids would suddenly pick up a rifle and shoot up a recruiting center and Navy facility.  But the authorities are treating it as a potential terrorist attack, and it's not an unreasonable assumption to make.  The suspected shooter was a Muslim, if I heard the news right he hadn't been employed since 2012, and he made several trips to the Middle East over the past few years.  This would fit the pattern of "normal Muslim disaffected by life in America and radicalized into a murderer" that's going on these days.  But again, we haven't confirmed that yet, so for all we know he was radicalized by the Westboro Baptist Church and set off by the Supreme Court's ruling on gay marriage.

But back to the question - was it terror?  I've taken classes on the subject and can only rub my temple wearily.

Terrorism is supposed to be a dialogue.   There's a strong Group A, a country or government or something, and a weak Group B, a revolutionary movement or insurgency or the like.  Group B cannot get Group A to change policy on its own, but instead they target something else, like Group A's civilian population, or Group A's ally Group C.  "Do what we want," Group B says, "or more people will die."  The idea is that between Group A's desire to protect what Group B is attack and that population's outrage that Group A can't protect them, it will have no choice but to bow to their demands.

Now, this Abdulazeez fellow - a Muslim, yes, might have been radicalized by ISIS or whoever, yes.  But what was he saying?  What was his purpose behind shooting up these places?  We haven't found a video he made explaining his actions yet, or any social media posts warning of it.  I think I heard that ISIS' twitter account tried to take credit for it, but that hasn't been verified yet either.

If he was another ordinary citizen convinced to murder on behalf of ISIS, I guess he's a terrorist, since they're a terrorist organization trying to change the United States' behavior.  But if he was then he didn't do a very good job of advertizing it, and was annoyingly vague on what he wanted us to do.  Perhaps stop the airstrikes against ISIS targets?  Cease our support of the regimes ISIS is fighting against?  Cover up our bikini-clad supermodels? 

Another possibility is that Abdulazeez bought into ISIS' (and Krauthammer's) belief that America and Islam exist in natural conflict, that our respective values are incompatible and inevitably lead to violence.  In this case he would be killing Americans for the sake of killing Americans, because what, are we all supposed to renounce our citizenship and Western liberal values in favor of the extreme fundamentalist Islam ISIS espouses?

But if that's the case, why did he choose a recruitment center and Navy facility, as opposed to randomly opening fire in some public area?  Why these two military targets?

See, a uniform makes the question of whether a given act of violence was terrorism or not a bit more complicated.  Let's say Group B blows up a bunch of vehicles with a roadside bomb.  If they were buses belonging to Group A's civilian population as part of a campaign to get Group A to alter it's behavior, it's clearly an act of terror.  If they were tanks and humvees belonging to Group A's military that's occupying Group B's country, then it's an example of asymmetrical warfare - the point of a uniform is to announce that you're a valid target in the game of "War" you're playing. 

But in this case these military victims (condolences to the families of Thomas Sullivan, Squire Wells, David Wyatt, and Carson Holmquist) were in America, not currently fighting anyone or oppressing anybody.  They were arguably the instruments of American policy, but weren't executing it at the moment, so that puts them in a strange place - they're not quite like a civilian population terrorists attack to put pressure on a government, but they aren't active combatants in a war zone.  If Abdulazeez was at "war with America" or "punishing America for its crimes" or anything, he was unusually specific in how he expressed that.

All this to say, it's unclear if this was an act of conventional terrorism or not, but as we've seen in cases like the Fort Hood shooting, it's close to the sort of terrorism we get these days.  Really, we need to wait and get the whole story before making a judgment.

Hear that, Fox News?

Cold War Deux?

Tensions with Russia are... probably falling, actually, the violence in Gaza has been pretty distracting and no passenger aircraft have been shot down lately.  This doesn't mean that the situation in Ukraine is necessarily better - though the Ukrainian army has made progress against the secessionists, there's a lot of Russian soldiers hovering on the border, and it's easy to imagine them moving in to rescue persecuted Russian-speaking Ukrainians from those national socialists in Kiev, or responding to an attack that those treacherous Ukrainians claimed they never made.

So it's no great surprise that the cover of the previous issue of Time was mostly red, had Vladimir Putin on it, and was titled "Cold War Two."  The subject is so grave and important that of course the cover story of the issue that came in the mail Sunday was "Manopause" and contained a quote by Obama denying a second Cold War.  But let's humor the magazine anyway.

The Cold War was an exciting time for me - I learned to stop soiling myself, figured out how to walk, and was well on my way to tying my own shoes.  By the time I got to college, political scientists and historians had put together an autopsy report explaining how the previous era started, how it worked, and how it ended.  So it's pretty simple to compare current events to this model to see how accurate Time's Cold War II cover was.  The original Cold War's distinguishing characteristics were its bipolar structure, the ideological basis of the conflict, and the fact that said conflict never escalated to direct fighting.  Are these being repeated in this hypothetical second Cold War?

Bipolarity - Polarity refers to the distribution of power within a system.  Mutlipolarity has been the norm for the past couple of centuries, with a collection of great powers competing and balancing against each other so that no single player was able to totally dominate.  After World War II and the decline of the French and British empires, the world was left with the United States and the Soviet Union as a pair of superpowers that could check each other, but were leagues beyond anyone else.  With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR, we had the rare case of one state so powerful that no combination of rivals could challenge it, making it the lone superpower in a unipolar system.  And in America it's best to insist that this is still the case, that the United States is unstoppable and capable of anything, and certainly not suffering from imperial overreach or anything like that.

Since obviously the United States cannot not be a superpower, I guess the question then is whether Russia's caught up to the obscenely bloated US military.  A quick glance at GlobalSecurity's Russia military guide suggests that the answer is "no."

On the other hand, my Russian history professor made a good point when he was discussing the Cold War - at its onset, the Soviet Union's superpower status wasn't due to the might of its armies but where they were.  The Soviets didn't have the best generals, or the best weapons, or the best-trained soldiers, but what it did have it had in bulk, and at the end of World War II that bulk was sitting right between Eastern and Western Europe, positioned to swarm into the rest of the continent faster than you can say "blitzkrieg."  It took some years for the Soviet Union to build enough nukes to become a "legitimate" superpower, but even before that it was treated as one because the power it had was in place to do some major damage.

Today, the Russian army still hasn't recovered from the post-Soviet crisis, and isn't even up to the Soviet Union's standards.  More importantly it isn't sitting in East Germany, poised to defend communism by rolling into Paris or the capitals of its "allies."  It still has a bunch of vintage Soviet nukes, of course, but nuclear weapons are hard to work into calculations of power.  What conflict would be worth going to nuclear war for?  Would the threat of nukes deter conflict, or would Putin calculate that the United States wouldn't be willing to risk atomic retribution by nuking Russian forces liberating Ukraine from those awful Ukrainians?  For all the effort countries put into getting nuclear weapons, they've only been used twice, and most people are very happy for that fact.

The short version is that the Russian military is no match for the United States', and doesn't have the force projection capacity or infrastructure to counter it on a global level.  That said, Russia is more than a match for its neighbors, and is well-positioned to assert its dominance within its neighborhood of former Soviet satellites.  Which is bad news for any of those satellites that might want to move into a more democratic, pro-Western orbit, such as Ukraine.  And just because the United States would probably win a fight with Russia doesn't mean anyone should be looking forward to such a scenario.

Ideology - It wasn't just the distribution of power that made the Cold War unique, it was how those powers defined themselves.  After centuries of competing kingdoms and empires, the Cold War featured two competing political systems, democratic capitalism and communism.  These weren't merely rivals on the world stage, but saw themselves as mutually incompatible, turning the conflict into a struggle over the future of mankind's political evolution.  When the USSR collapsed, it seemed like the great political question of the century had been answered, that democracy was triumphant, leading Fukuyama to declare it the "end of history."  The world could look forward to a future of government by the people, for the people, and everyone would be rich thanks to free markets.

Obviously that isn't how it happened, and the world has in fact gotten less democratic in recent years.  With the expectation that other countries would have no choice but to democratize, the West has sat on its laurels.  But even if communism has been shown to be a dead end, the tyrants of the world are in no hurry to give up their power.  And it turns out that free markets don't necessarily require governments to have free and fair elections, or to stop controlling their people through fear and violence.

Russia is, technically, a democracy.  There are elections, and there are supposedly limits on its government's power.  It's just that the government controls something like 90% of Russia's media, and it's hard for opposition parties to get their message out, or even show up on ballots.  And people who criticize the government end up in jail, or beaten to a pulp, or dead from radiation poisoning under mysterious circumstances.  And Putin keeps rewriting the rules so he can bounce between the offices of President and Prime Minister, never leaving power.  And he owes a lot of his influence to browbeating the oligarchs who looted the country during the wild days of capitalismization into supporting him, with the help of his buddies from the KGB. 

In short, Russia is not a part of the Free World, and its leader views the democratic West as threats and rivals.  But unlike its communist predecessor, modern Russia has no alternative model to offer the world, no revolutionary government that would save it from capitalist exploitation.  Instead, what Putin is backing in places like Syria and Iran is something even older, Czarist notions of absolute sovereignty and governance free from interference by "human rights" organizations, international "law," or anything that limits the power of the state's ruler.  Communism appealed to the masses, what Putin believes in appeals to presidents-for-life and other tyrants.  This is why he (and other non-democracies like China) have to wave the nationalism flag around and find threats within and beyond the nation's borders to rally the people against - it helps excuse the measures he makes to stay in power, and distracts them from questioning why they let him get away with it.

So while the Soviet Union had the communist bloc to support it, Putin's network is much more diverse.  Syria is an illiberal Arab presidency, Iran a Persian theocracy.  Sometimes the "BRICS," the fivesome of up-and-coming states that are or are about to rival the major players of Europe when it comes to economic and military power, are described as some sort of Russian-led alliance, but take a closer look at it: Brazil, a Latin American democracy recovering from a dictatorship, Russia, described above, India, a subcontinent boasting the world's largest democracy, China, a one-party free market powerhouse, and South Africa, perhaps the most functional country in sub-Saharan Africa.  Most of these guys lean closer to democracy than Putinism, and the only thing any of them have in common is that they aren't part of the Western establishment.  The Warsaw Pact 2.0 this ain't.

Russia doesn't have anything to offer the world other than its markets and national resources.  It's not part of an ideological bloc anymore, Putin simply styles himself as the leader of a group of nations(' rulers) that are opposed to the West's domination (because it threatens their grip on power).  At the same time, the West isn't marching in step these days - Bush and Obama have squandered a lot of American soft power, and Europe can't agree on a continent-wide agenda, much less one encompassing the democratic world.  Even after the Malaysian Airlines disaster, France is selling Russia a pair of helicopter carriers.

In short, this current "Cold War" isn't really based on ideology, and there's much less unity within its "sides."

Indirect Conflict - The Cold War is called that because the United States and Soviet Union never declared war on each other, and never acknowledged the times their forces may have fought each other.  Instead they waged war by proxy, backing revolutionaries or governments that agreed with their ideology... or revolutionaries or governments that merely opposed the other guy.  Since both sides had enough combined nuclear weapons to cover the surface of the Earth several times over, it is a very good thing that the Cold War never went hot.  Turning the Third World into a battlefield full of puppet dictators seems a small price to pay for sparing the rest of the planet, hmm?

As recent events in Ukraine show (assuming you believe the capitalist imperialist non-Russian media), this sort of thing is still going on.  Russia has backed insurgents in eastern Ukraine, as well as Georgia, and before it had to back those Ukrainian separatists it was backing a pro-Russian regime in Kiev.  In response, the United States has pledged billions of dollars in aid to the new government in Kiev and is moving increasingly closer to providing military training and support.  And like during the Cold War, we're supporting these guys because they're talking about democracy and opposing Russia, and not really considering whether the east Ukrainian separatists have some legitimate grievances about being discriminated against, or being roped into a country they don't want to belong to due to arbitrary post-imperial borders.

On the other hand, we're not doing the same in Georgia or other Russian satellites, probably because Americans would have a hard time finding them on the map.  So unlike the Cold War "I push back wherever you push" mentality, we've grown a bit more discerning.  Ukraine is on Europe's doorstop, and after fifty miserable years under the Soviet Union's thumb, nobody in Eastern Europe wants Russia to start rolling west again.  Central Asia, meh.

So, to wrap things up:

This is not a second Cold War.  Relations between the United States and Putin's Russia are quite chilly, the rhetoric is nasty, Russian-backed insurgents are causing problems, and it looks like Russia may start invading its neighbors again.  But this isn't a global conflict, or an ideological conflict - I'd say it's closer to the United States' relations with Iran.  Our antagonist is once again a country that holds elections but is dominated by an autocrat and his cronies, who are backing insurgents and tyrants where it benefits them, and who happen to be sitting on a bunch of oil they can use as a bargaining chip.  The United States' response to this has not been direct confrontation, but sanctions and attempts to isolate them diplomatically, which are foiled when our allies decide to deal with them anyway.

During the Cold War we tried to contain communism, and since communism is a concept, that meant we got to fight it wherever someone with access to a Kalashnikov read about Marx.  Russia in contrast is just another country, so the scale of this Cold Skirmish is smaller, and the stakes are much lower.  And this should come as a relief, because the Cold War was a godawful period in human history, and the best we can say about it is that it didn't go hot and lead to mankind's extinction in a nuclear holocaust.  Nobody should be eager to return to such a dismal era.

The problem is that it sounds like Putin is.  As awful as the Cold War was, it was also Russia's time in the sun, when Europe's most backward country got to split the planet with another power.  Appealing to that faded glory is winning Putin a lot of support at home, and judging by interviews with Russian-speaking east Ukrainians, a lot of people in or around Russia are happy to fall into the old "the Americans are behind everything and we need to be strong" mentality.  Putin insists that the American-led West is trying to contain and gang up on a resurgent Russia... and unless we want to encourage more incidents like Georgia, or Crimea, or Ukraine, we might just have to.