The Crises that Could Bring Down Putin - not so much.

http://www.mauldineconomics.com/this-week-in-geopolitics

"The Crises That Could Bring Down Putin"

Interesting, but (to me) ultimately unpersuasive.

Writing about a Russian dictator’s potentially “losing his grip on power” is a mug’s game: in the first place substantially underestimates that grip. 

Yeltsin, the example provided, was *not* a cutthroat climber in the sense of Russian leaders historically; no, he was the (Bill) Clintonesque sacrificial lamb shoved to the front of the group of annoyed Politburians in the late 80s as a domestic-protest-move.  I believe they probably expected he was – in the long-established tradition of Soviet politics – going to  disappear.  That he didn’t either signaled that Gorbachev was either strikingly different (still not sure that’s true) or astonishingly weak by that time.  In other words, the Politburo handed Yeltsin the reins when it looked like the stagecoach was about to crash, and he was stupid enough to hold them.  After they got through the bumpy bits, those same elites took the reins back away from him.  So he’s of nearly no use as an example.

In the second place, it discounts (as usual) the characteristically unique level of paranoia in the Russian psyche.  I’m not saying that this makes them impossible to predict, that would be silly.  But it’s typical of western analysts to begin their examination from a position of empathy: “how would I feel if I were a Russian, and what would be the consequences?”  Russians are NOT Westerners.  The term ‘inscrutable’ used to be applied to Oriental states whose motives & goals themselves were hard to understand.  Whenever a faraway country would do something completely baffling for reasons we couldn’t even rationalize after the fact, it was shrugged away with “well they’re just inscrutable”.  It’s declined in usage because of the quasi-racist overtones it eventually assumed, but I would posit that given our radically different cultures, history, and outlook: to Americans, Russians remain inscrutable.

No, the average Russian believes as a given fact every day that:

1)            Russia is in danger from its enemies, and

2)            As Russians, saving Mother Russia will require their personal sacrifice – certainly in comfort/quality of life, but up to and including their lives. (This isn’t to say that they are blindly patriotic and will sacrifice themselves for Putin personally; not at all.  But for Russia as a nation distinct from its government?  Pretty much so.) 

The only thing Russian leaders can do is highlight the immediacy of that danger to spur the Russian people to ‘hunker down’ through tough times as needed, and to prove that they (the leader) is the particular strongman that can shepherd Russia through (today’s) crisis.  The art, for a Russian leader (Stalin was a master, enabled by the existential crisis of the war) is to get “out of the direct path” of the threat to Matya Rossiya.  “The roof just started leaking, I just happened to be the guy standing here with a hammer and shingles”.  “Well of course we had to secure our bases in Crimea, the west had overthrown the democratically-elected leader of Ukraine and was trying to strangle the Russian Navy out of the Black Sea”.  Notice, Putin’s action isn’t the narrative – he’s just fixing another “goddamned problem”.

The replacement of governors with people from his coterie of hangers-on isn’t going to be seen as much of a signal; they all serve more or less at his pleasure anyway, and if any make a stink (they won’t, it’s …unhealthy) I’d imagine there are already ample volumes of leakable evidence of their corruption or selfishness.  Again, he’s just trying to fix the roof and Russians will recognize he needs a crew up there that he can trust.

More substantially meaningful here to American interests is the historical (apparent) rapprochement between Russia and Turkey.  They’ve been enemies with directly-conflicting interests since, well, forever.  I’ll say that again: these two nations have been in direct competition for at least FOUR CENTURIES and the US (as the standard-bearer for Western diplomacy) has managed to let them discover interests that may bring them into alignment.  That is a diplomatic failure (for us) of colossal proportions. If he can pull it off, Putin could turn the Black Sea into a Russian lake and win essentially unfettered control of Istanbul and the Bosperus.  That would be triumphal in the history of Russia, probably comparable (in US manifest-destiny terms) to Canada just dissolving and joining the US.

Here’s my $0.02 guess: the editor's mystification over ‘what was traded here’ between Russia and Turkey will become apparent perhaps as soon as the next 3-6 months.  Russians are chess-players; They certainly don’t have the ridiculously short attention span of American observers.  They don’t have 2-year congressional election cycles to satisfy, or 4-year re-elections to run.  They can seriously plan for 10-year results or even longer. 

What I expect is that Putin is trading his participation in Syria for breaking Turkey out of the west’s orbit, obligingly along the fissure created by the Turkish putsch.  Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if that ‘revolt’ was stage-managed by Russian agents (bonus points for them if they could convince Turkey/the world that they were Americans) directly for that purpose.

My guess is that could have been the point of the seemingly-pointless Russian military effort to prop up Assad from the start.  (That may be crediting Putin with too much prescience; more likely he was pushing a knight or rook out into the board as bait for what would opportunistically develop, but always in the knowledge that it really wasn’t there for function, but as a very-tradable sacrifice.)

I don’t even think which way the Russians and Turks jump matters all that much – whether Russia joins the fight against ISIS and abandons Assad, or whether Turkey pulls out of the fight against ISIS and (by negative act) ends up supporting Assad* - what matters to Putin and in the long game would be that Russia and Turkey would be working in parallel.

*I think the latter is less likely, given the personal enmity between Erdogan and Assad.  The former seems much more multi-valuable in terms of disarming criticism and undermining suspicion in the west.

The first hint will be the closure of US operations in Incirlik (the big US base in Turkey).  If that happens, I’d take that my prediction is likely happening.  (I just googled Incirlik to make sure I spelled it right and look what came up: http://sputniknews.com/military/20160816/1044330202/turkey-russia-incirlik.html “Turkey could provide its Incirlik airbase for the Russian Aerospace Forces jets in the anti-terrorist campaign in Syria, member of Russia’s upper house of parliament Igor Morozov said Tuesday”).  Well.

If you believe that police simply cruise the streets looking for black men to shoot, just stop reading. There's nothing for you here.

The PROBLEM isn't that we have too many cops shooting black men; that's the RESULT.

The problem is that there are too many angry, anxiety-laden confrontations between young black men and police. That many confrontations, with that much fear on both sides, a sizable percentage WILL end in violence. Such violence will generally logically end in the shooting/harming of the young black man because he's likely less well equipped, less trained, and likely outnumbered.

(Let me immediately dispense with the "skin color" thing; this isn't about skin color, it's about urban poverty which is altogether too easy to conflate with skin color. But that's not causal, obviously. We are basically talking about young black men, but it's not BECAUSE they're black.)

So there's two elements there: the confrontations, and the tension.

Let's be frank: the confrontations aren't because these young men are selling too many girl scout cookies, or mowing too many lawns.

The anxiety in these situations is twofold: the young men feel that the cops won't treat them fairly, and police are (justifiably) afraid that the confrontation will escalate into violence.

This comes from serious poverty. When young men (particularly) are really poor, there's a big thing about pride and "respect". It is a coping mechanism - if you have NOTHING else, and you recognize that you have little/no education, criminal record, maybe a kid or two, no stable home, you're aware your life is crap. They see the difference between their lives and what life "should be"*. It's human nature to rationalize by overcompensating your own self-image.

*I believe, tangentially, that our media culture hits them particularly hard in two ways. First, the gap for them between 'where they are' and 'where they should be according to the conventional wisdom' is nearly insurmountable. Worse (and this is probably the only place where skin-color does play a role), the lead figures they naturally identify with are celebrated (by white-owned media companies, let's not forget) as thugs, gangstas, and hoodlums. If you aren't the 0.01% with pro-caliber athletic talent, the ONLY other route to success (again, as presented is criminalism.

The problem is when this inflated sense of self-worth, bravado, machismo, whatever you want to call it, collides with the real-world situation of a police officer who HAS TO BE always conscious that his/her life is at risk. The tools that the urban youth uses to function in his environment with his peers - intimidation, fearlessness, aggression, posturing - are the only tools he's got (particularly when stressed). When deployed in a confrontation that's NOT the usually-fake-posturing that takes place between peers, these make everything worse.

So you can't tell the urban youth "don't act that way" - it's his ONLY TOOLBOX for his daily functioning. Likewise, we can't tell cops "don't care that much about your safety". How is a cop - particularly when we're talking about split seconds - supposed to distinguish 'empty brashness' from an actual threat? To Monday-morning quarterback those sorts of moments are, frankly, bull****.

An impasse of facts.

What we can say is this: poor, urban youth are living in an Hobbesian state of nature. The only way they're not going to do that is if we radically address that condition:

Either implement policies that truly encourage poor families to stay together & disincentivize fathers who abandon their children to an almost draconian degree, OR remove children from that environment. To the tangential point above about media companies, there needs to be a concerted, genuine effort by image-leaders to get out of the gutter. The gangsta-face makeup has done more durable, lasting, generational damage to young black men than blackface makup ever did.

NONE of these issues will be solved by throwing money at it. Frankly, I don't believe that activists for the left have the courage to face the catastrophic failure of foundational concepts behind their Great Society programs, and seriously work to fix them. Nor do I believe the right is willing to spend the money and time it's going to take (a generation or more) to tease out and address the root causes.

In that last context I think the militarization of the police is a part of the problem. As Democrats like to simply throw money at problems, in this case, it's more a GOP thing. If you have a rash of fires in your home, you're not going to try to solve it by giving the firemen more trucks and bigger hoses, would you? That would be absurd. Those things might help them put out the fires more capably but that's treating the result, not the cause.

Why is Donald Trump the GOP candidate for president?
I honestly don't think the GOP had any concept of how to deal with Donald Trump.

Since the latter days of the Reagan administration, in my opinion, the GOP has been hijacked (I'd call it an addiction) ever more to the right-wing evangelical vote.

THAT group, in particular, is particularly self-segregating (politically, if not socially and/or ethnically) and runs with blinders.  There's no reasoning with them.  They are lit by the fires of righteousness - not unlike many on the deep left-wing, that - so compromise is seen as weakness, not pragmatism.

I don't really get it.  Sure, there's a lock-in of a pile of votes if you're anti-abortion, but at what cost?  If the religious card could have been leveraged into breaking the lock the Dems have on the black vote through the Black southern Baptists, it might have been worth it.  If it could have further been leveraged into a big chunk of the hispanic vote through their strong Catholicism, again, probably worth it.

But if you're not going to fracture those two very natural demographics, then why the HELL would you tie yourself to southern religious conservatives?  Even if you ignore them completely, do you really think they'd vote for a Democrat?

The incompetent bunglers in the GOP party admin are too stupid to understand this.  They've managed to change the party of business and fiscal responsibility into the "narrow minded racist religious zealotry party" AND AT THE SAME TIME shown themselves to be just as fiscally [i]incompetent[/i] and self-interested as the Democrats.  So who are people going to vote for?

The Liberal agenda in the US is ascendant for lots of reasons from cultural to educational/indoctrinational.  I'd even say it's philosophical as per Plato's Republic or even Aesop - the grasshoppers are having a wonderful time, the ants look ridiculous for their concerns.  Them promoting a complete boob as their candidate for the highest political office displays either their complete lack of faith in the structures of our system (you might consider how monumental that is conceptually to a dogmatic conservative especially), or a troubling level of nihilism.  Probably both.

The US needs an opposition party; but that needs to be a CREDIBLE opposition party.  The GOP mandarins are far too busy in my opinion protecting their sinecure and personal wealth in Washington to perform that role any longer.

The point being that I think Trump's brand of populism isn't new; from the Gracchi in the Roman Republic to now, bomb-throwing crowd-pleasers have often riled the masses to their own benefit.

Where the GOP failed in this case is to understand the deep-seated and seething resentment in their core party over their failure to do anything in the last 16 years but kowtow to evangelicals, spending every cent of political capital on bullshit social issues that any *reasonable* conservative would consider NONE OF ANYONE'S BUSINESS.

Abortion?  Tragic, and sad, but very much an issue between a woman, her doctor, and her conscience.  As much as you may want to, one simply cannot legislate how women are going to value that unborn child.  Gay marriage?  Whether you "approve" of homosexuality is an intensely personal moral issue but in America, the foundation of this country is the premise that nobody has moral primacy over another.  Not a hereditary king, nor some suburban megachurch member.   In any case, the concept of marriage is one of stability and community - things conservatives used to consider important.

The resulting apathy of the core conservative mainstream means the nutters got to run the show...and thus you get a Donald Trump as a candidate.  Frankly, I'm doubtful he's even conservative; his anti-Establishment message simply 'sells' better within a party that is a) out of power, and b) nominally about reducing the power of government anyway.

OK, this is perhaps coming at it from a strange angle, but bear with me.

I was thinking about grief, and why it exists.  In particular, the agonizing grief of losing a loved-one.  It doesn't have an evolutionary benefit and in fact seems a detriment to survival, so why does it exist?

And where I went with that is that it may not have an evolutionary advantage, but it may be the unavoidable result of something that does have an advantage that outweighs the negative consequences.  Like bright light creates shadows or the dangerous snapping of a high-tension bungee cord, the affection we feel for our loved ones has the inevitable 'snapback' of grief when they're gone.

So that leads me to back to this question: is this uptick in mass shootings (when EVERY OTHER indicator of violent crimes is generally falling!) the inevitable 'result' of a self-absorbed, atomized, overindulgent society?  When everyone can have anything they want 24/7, whenever they want, when there are few (if any consequences) for counter-societal behaviors, how much of a stretch is it that some warped individuals decide to 'indulge' in mass violence?  The US is unquestionably the leader in narcissistic, shallow, self-indulgence in the western world.  What happens when a child gets everything they want, all the time?  They turn into a horrible, horrible person, commonly called 'spoiled'.  Why should we believe that's limited to children?

I'm not advocating anything here; I don't want to give up a self-indulgent way of life any more than anyone else.   I admire the Stoics, but honestly don't believe I have the strength of character to be one. (Besides, what's the logical conclusion of that path?  ISIS?)

What I wonder/fear is that the cultural path we're on has socio-/psychological implications consequences that haven't really been addressed seriously.
I'm not sure we ever can address them, as any substantive discussion veers off into politics, power, and protecting whatever indulgence happens to be "my own" priority.

Every time you hear about a shooting, simply replace the (agenda-motivated) gun reference with "killing" or "murder" because the DEVICE USED isn't (or shouldn't) be the POINT. Whether some dude killed two people on-air with a gun, a laser, or a claymore isn't at issue; the point is that some dude killed two people out of a twisted sense of victimization. The point isn't that some guy in Oregon killed 13 people with a GUN, it's that he killed 13 people and wounded many others out of a narcissistic sense of aggrievement. Our society is seeming to produce a prodigious number of narcissistic, practically solipsistic, nihilistic, violence-addicted (mostly men), who have a sociopathic lack of empathy for their fellow humans. One might comment on the atomisation of culture that's allowed that badly-damaged human to develop, despite our "enlightened" culture of compulsive, aggressive promotion of self-worth.

But no, we're focusing on the tools they happen to use.
If people are burning down houses all over town, do we give a crap that they're doing it with gasoline vs. kerosene?
If someone's chopping down all the forests, do we care that they're using a chainsaw or an ax?

Maybe we should focus on what matters?

KICKSTARTER is a “disaster”.

It was a great idealism, sure, but the ‘no visible means of support’ and ‘we’re blameless for whatever the project does’ bits all are now coming to maturity after the first heady flush of “oh let’s participate in this clever idea”.

I’ve found it fairly amusing that - in the midst of a so-called economic crisis - apparently a shit-ton of people have a shit-ton of spare money to naively throw at people they don’t know to pursue projects with no substantive business plan or even credible development program.

The entire thing doesn’t add up. I know, I know, “sharing economy” and all those nonsense buzzwords; well they don’t actually mean anything.

Certainly, it’s not impossible for some projects to reach fruition. But when we look back at this in 20 years and say “why did so many people dump so much cash on the basis of so little reason?” the successes are going to be a pretty small slice on the bell-curve of results.

I suspect that anthropologically, Kickstarter will be remembered like the Bacchanalia, Marie Antoinette, and Caligula writ large: an entire society with so much spare wealth that they can literally waste it on frivolity (when they’re not buying $8 coffees).

I don’t expect that these halcyon days will last.

I'm not getting paid $0.10/word to review Mr Obama's foreign policy, so rather than write a long exegesis, I'll confine myself to some of the fundamentals.

Certainly, it's worth observing from the beginning that Mr Obama inherited a complicated diplomatic landscape from Mr Bush; then again, there are few presidents that didn't have complicated situations; it's pretty much part of the job description.  Mr Bush inherited a hot-air economy and a security situation that would ultimately dump 9/11 on his watch: were those Mr Clinton's "fault"?  At a certain point, grownups understand that you can't keep blaming your parents for things that happen.  You can only cope, or not.  I'd argue that the bulk of Mr Obama's foreign-policy has been the latter.

First, the article tries to squeeze a lot of mileage out of vapid theorizing about his retrenchment and advancing the (classical) liberal world order.  This is a canard; foreign policy is about actions, results, and consequences.  Only intellectuals (and the sort of people who write long-drown-out apologias in erudite policy publications) have the luxury of steering their course by such ephemeralities.  In fact, Mr Obama's Wilsonian approach has caused at least as durable and persistent damage to the US's long-term global relationships as anything Mr Bush's blunders may have caused.

Let's review:
- the "pivot" to Asia:
has never actually happened, and frankly won't in the lame-duck years of the Obama Administration.  In fact, we have as revanchist and aggressive a China as ever, whose actions in the South China Sea have gone largely unchallenged, and a network of Asian allies that seriously doubting the US's willingness to defend our previous policy assurances.  I'm not saying that confrontation with China would be at all productive, but leaving allies to swing unsupported in the wind forces them to recalculate the value of distant allegiances when a restive, active, assertive China is on their border.  This is the WORST-possible outcome for the long term security of the US in perhaps the MOST IMPORTANT region of the world for the next century.  The US's economic and cultural dominance rests essentially on these proxies in the region, having them doubt the US commitment now is terrible.

- South Asia:
the Obama administration's strengthening of ties to India is about the only foreign policy success I can point to.  This was a positive move, at least checking if not outright calling the bluff on Pakistan's troublesome usefulness in the region.  I'm not convinced that India is a relevant counterweight to China - despite being neighbors, their spheres of interest don't really overlap - but coopting India out of a potential Russian courtship is at least militarily useful as it ever was during the Great Game.
Afghanistan is a mess, caused by a desperate flight of US involvement (if not yet quite all our military, as was promised).  I'm not saying that Afghanistan HAD a "winning endgame", but the festering decrepitude of our involvement there has solved nothing, and likely made it worse.  Mr Obama's campaign platitudes - as usual - were insufficient to address the subtleties of the context.  No progress, likely worse.
Iran...ah, Iran.  Mr Obama's desperate and recklass search for his legacy likely has provided breathing space to a regime entirely inimical to every American strategic goal in the region, alienated what few friends we had left, will dump at least $50 billion into Iran's extenisive terror-network, and to a group of cultures in which image and stature are everything, we have 'blinked'.  Far worse than the feeble flounderings of Mogadishu (which arguably invited Saddam's adventurism into Kuwait), the US has been shown to be spineless and craven, ceding regional dominance to whomever can take it and inviting the Gulf States to decide that the US is no longer the security guarantor it once was.  The result will almost certainly be a conflict between Iran's millions of people and Saudis billions of dollars to fill the vacuum of the now-absent superpower.

- The Mideast:
Israel: Mr Obama's obvious dislike of Israel has recently been overshadowed by the personal, mutual animosity he shares with Mr Netanhyahu.  The sole bulwark of Western liberal humanism in the region has not been an uncomplicated friendship, but it's been a durable one and will hopefully survive Mr Obama's tenure (and his deliberate efforts to harm it).  The US has, in essence, foregone the partnership meaning that Israel *must* now regard US interests with even less weight when choosing their course of action.  I cannot imagine that will be uniformly beneficial for US policy, as the Arabs still generally believe that Israel is a proxy for the US, no matter what they do.
Arab states: Mr Obama's vaunted idealims have utterly failed in the face of the Arab Spring.  His dithering intellectualism and relativism unmanned him in the moment when the US could have taken a role of moral leadership.  Either you lead morally, or pragmatically, but you can't do both and Mr Obama has done neither, leaving the popular movements to fester into the worst sort of internecine throat-slitting, where the most organized and brutal factions are winning, ie fundamentalist fronts whose success is anathema to long-term US interests in practical terms AND in moral ones.  By failing to lead, he's failed to secure either.
ISIS: I wonder if Mr Obama yet takes the "JV team" seriously?  Its astonishing that a US president can't even manage to take a stance or formulate clear policy against a medievalist, barbaric, brutal band of cartoon thugs that EVERYONE agrees needs to be eliminated?  Seriously, it's the only subject in US politics today that has NO domestic SIDE-BIAS: left, right, Democrats, Republicans, everyone agrees these guys are bloodthirsty animals...yet the US president, with the greatest bully-pulpit in history, can't even summon leadership on this issue.  Here is the perfect contrast between Mr Bush's approach, and Mr Obama's: yes, sometimes presidents can make bad choices, but failing to make any choice is a choice of its own, and often the consequences are even worse.  This is Syria and ISIS in a nutshell.  Conceding 'sphere of influence' to Russia in Syria was a quasi-19th-century move that even Mr Obama didn't seem like he believed he was doing, but was drowned out by the palpable sigh of relief ("At least it's someone else's problem now...") from the White House.  That's worked out great for the people of the region.

- Europe:
Russia was famously dismissed in a well-documented chat between Mr Obama and Mr Romney pre-election, Mr Obama has had to eat his words on this one, too.  Putin is an old-school thug of the KGB era, who personally witnessed the bankruptcy of Soviet power in East Germany.  He is utterly unafraid of the mealy-mouthed pronouncements from Washington, and in this lies the most dangerous threat of actual war: a Russian underestimation of US intentions in Europe and specifically in regard to the Baltic states protected by NATO Article 7.  We absolutely screwed Poland (who spent substantial political capital to host the ABM systems), and have now essentially "checked out" of any influence on the Ukrainian issue (that I believe we substantially created, if the arrogant US State Dept phone calls are to be believed).  We could have brokered a deal between Ukraine and Russia, playing a critical part in appeasing historical Russian paranoia and securing markets and peoples in Ukraine, but I suspect we got greedy and were naive about how Russia would react about the threat of NATO and the EU right on their border.  This shows a staggering disregard for history, culture, and a lack of empathy that beggars the imagination. Now, Ms. Merkel speaks with a far louder, more credible voice in Moscow than Mr Obama.
Further, we've routinely alienated long-time European allies, again dismissing multi-decade currents of history in favor of a sort of intellectual conceit from Washington about 'how the world works'.

No, while Mr Bush made plenty of policy errors, Mr Obama's tenure has been worse, in the long picture.