Never interrrupt your enemy .....

"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake"
                                                                Napoleon Bonaparte

This advice seems appropriate today with respect to Putin's recent moves in the Ukraine.  The last thing he wants is a stronger, western-oriented NATO on his boarders. Yet that is precisely what his actions in the Ukraine are bringing about.  All the old Soviet colonial states on Russian's border are looking at this military incursion and thinking that they had better get closer to the West if they want to avoid a similar fate sometime in the future.

It is a little hard to see why Putin himself can't see that he is defeating his own long-term objectives, but then he is constrained by the mythologies of his own world view just as we Americans are constrained by our own mythologies.

The War on Drugs - Deja Vu

We like to listen to audiobooks and Teaching Company lectures on long driving trips. These days, on a recent trip to Arizona we were listening to Bill Bryson's  One Summer: America 1927, a truly wonderful book that explores the REAL history of America, as opposed to the sanitized mythology we all learned in high school.

When he discussed prohibition at some length, I was struck by how similar the tale is to today's "War on Drugs".  A valiant, high-minded but ultimately futile campaign that (a) hasn't reduced drug use, in fact has increased it massively, (b) produced well-funded smuggling cartels that now have incomes approaching that of small nations and violence approaching full-scale wars, and (c) produced a whole well-funded underground  industry genetically engineering more potent marijuana plants and building new designer drugs.  As a nation we apparently learned absolutely nothing from the disastrous and ultimately futile prohibition experiment.  All we have to show for it thus far are overfilled jails and decades of massive federal and state expenditures that could have been better spent on education.

The Ukranian Crisis

The developing confrontation in the Ukraine between the new Ukrainian government and Russia is fascinating to watch.  It is a high-stakes game of chess for all sides. From the Western viewpoint, the Ukrainians ought to be allowed to choose their own destiny.  From the Russian viewpoint, losing the Ukraine from its political/economic orbit would seriously weaken Russia.  And in particular, losing the Crimea would seriously impede Russia's access to the Black Sea.

Both President Obama and President Putin have a lot at stake in this confrontation.  For Obama, if he looks weak and ineffectual in the long term he reinforces the already widespread perception that Democrats are weak on military and foreign policy, and in the short term he jeopardizes his party in the upcoming midterm elections. President Putin always has to placate the strong nationalist and right-wing forces in his nation, and if he fails to hold the Ukraine his own hold on power is at risk.  So neither side is likely to blink early.  The European Union, by contrast, is probably largely ineffectual in this whole game. They really don't have much to lose whatever the outcome.

Russian does supply the EU with much of its gas and oil, and could always cut off that supply.  But that isn't as strong a card as it looks, since Russia's economy is only kept from going into free fall by the revenue it gets from its gas and oil exports. So cutting off exports to the EU would quickly produce an economic crisis in Russia.

In the long run, of course, Russia will lose this confrontation, since Russia itself is on an unsustainable downward spiral, beset with looming demographic problems, a highly inefficient kleptocratic government, a pervasive culture of corruption at all levels, an economy that is only sustained by its declining oil and gas exports, and increasing nationalistic tensions in all its old "colonial" holdings (including the Ukraine).  But Putin may well win this local battle and retain at least the Crimea in Russia's orbit for the time being, if for no other reason than (a) he has more leverage than the west (including a large military force already in the Crimea), and (b) the immediate stakes are probably higher for him than for Obama or the EU - he cares more about the outcome.  But winning will come at a high cost to Putin, who has tried to refashion Russia's image in the world community.  That image will be seriously tarnished if he is seen to crush the Ukrainians with military force.

For America in the short term, the real issue will be if and how President Obama reacts to this crisis.  He appears to have been outmaneuvered by President Putin several times recently, most recently in Syria - if he is perceived to have been outmaneuvered again in this crisis it will likely cost the Democrats dearly for years to come.  If, on the other hand, he appears to outmaneuver Putin this time, it will go a long way toward strengthening the Democrat's credentials in foreign policy.

It is a fascinating chess match to watch.

Recommended: The Myth of America's Decline

Josef Joffe, a German educated at Swarthmore and Harvard and now a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institute and the Freeman-Spongli Institute for International Studies, has written an interesting book about the perennial America angst about oncoming doom. As he points out, the history of of predicting America's downfall starts before the America revolution, and has continued ever since. Sputnik, the so-called "missile gap", Vietnam, the malaise of the Carter years, the predicted rise of Russia, then Japan, and then China as global powers overtaking us have all been used to justify the recurring prophecy of America's downfall, usually to the political advantage of one presidential candidate or another.

Joffe examines all the usual justifications for these predictions and shows pretty convincingly that on closer examination all show just the opposite - that America is so far ahead of the rest of the world (in economy, education, military power, economic power, demographics, etc, etc,) that our political system can afford to do really stupid things and still not imperil our position as the only superpower. I confess that I myself have expressed some of these worries about America's decline in this blog from time to time.  Joffe's book has made me reexamine those worries.

Coincidentally, I had occasion earlier this week to be part of a panel reviewing new start-up companies in the area for funding possibilities. The experience was sobering - I spent all day listening to one brilliant entrepreneur after another pitch their innovations, and came away thinking that this country has little to worry about yet if there are this many bright, energetic, smart people pushing the  limits of science and technology and starting new companies.

This book is well worth reading and thinking about.

Sometimes.....

Sometimes I am simply aghast at how stupid people can be.  We have had months and months of revelations by Edward Snowden about how the NSA has been listening in on phone calls between everyone in the world, including world leaders. One would think our own State Department people might have gotten the message, and might have assumed that if we can do it so can others.

No, despite all the evidence that phone calls are insecure,  senior State Department official Victoria Nuland (she is an assistant Secretary of State, for goodness sakes!) just made a very, very impolitic phone call to our ambassador in the Ukraine which was recorded (probably by the Russians) and released to the world.  How dumb can one get?

Recommended: The Crisis of Islam, Holy War and Unholy Terror

Bernard Lewis has written a number of very good books about the Middle East. This one, published in 2004, is especially important, because it is evident from the events of the past several decades that the American public in general, as well as the political elite in Washington, don't really understand the world view of the so-called "Arab street", and that has resulted in a number of expensive embarrassments and missteps in our foreign policy.  We tend (quite naturally) to think that the Arab world sees the world more or less the way we do.  But that is not the case - they see a very different world. Lewis does a good job of introducing us to that world view, and the historical antecedents that have shaped it.

Recommended: The Why Axis

The field of economics has been dominated for decades by academic theorists pumping out clever equations to explain economic activity and shape public policy. Gneezy and List represent a new, and probably much more promising approach – going out and doing real-world experiments to see how people actually behave, as opposed to how some theorist in an office thinks they behave. Ever wonder just why people are prejudiced – is it really animus or just economic self-interest?  Ever wonder what really would motivate ghetto kids to apply themselves in school? Ever wonder how to get people to give more generously to charitable causes? This book begins to give the answers, based on real data, not abstract theory.  This is a great book, and a welcome breath of fresh (data-driven) air in a field too often informed by ideology rather than reality.

Reminder: A full list of my recommended books, with their ISBN numbers, can be found in the book list on the sidebar to the right of this posting.