U.S. Midterm Races Heat Up

Is Going It Alone the Best Way Forward for Europe?

A Weekly Political News Magazine

A Blow to China’s Soft Power

Can the Pentagon Win the AI Arms Race?

Issue 1719 - October 26/10/2018

U.S. Midterm Races Heat Up

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A Weekly Political News Magazine

Issue 1719 - October 26/10/2018

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Police officers stand in front of stickers and placards left at the Cabinet Office during a march calling for a People's Vote on the final Brexit deal, in central London on October ,20 2018. Britons dreading life outside Europe gathered from all corners of the UK to London on Saturday to try to stop their country's looming breakup with the EU. (Getty)

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A wartime reenactor cuddles a ferret as they prepare to board a train during a reenactment-themed weekend, the annual 'Railway in Wartime' event held along the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, in Pickering, northern England on October 2018 ,14. (Getty)

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U.S. Midterm Races Heat Up In two weeks, American voters will decide whether Republicans maintain control over both houses of Congress for the next two years 8

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It has been noted that red rural states, where Republicans are strong, will in all likelihood determine whether the Republican majority in the Senate endures. In Congress, Democrats will need to win 23 new seats in order to win control.

69 battleground House districts suggested a narrow lead for Republicans. Meanwhile, of the 100 Senate seats, there are only 13 competitive elections, ten of which are in states President Trump carried in 2016. And in the course of the wrenching battle for confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, Republican senators appear to have convinced some voters that Democrats had engineered a dishonest campaign to tar Kavanaugh as a sexual offender in his youth. In two states in particular — Texas and Tennessee — polls taken following the Kavanaugh showdown indicated that the Democratic candidates had lost some support.

U.S. Rep. Beto O'Rourke (D-TX) (L) and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) face off in a debate at the KENS 5 studios on October ,16 2018 in San Antonio, Texas. A recent poll show Cruz leading O'Rourke 45-52 percent among likely voters. (Getty Images) 1052321742

by Joseph Braude U.S. Congressional midterm elections, slated for November 6, were widely viewed earlier this year as an easy opportunity for Democrats to regain a majority in Congress and perhaps even the Senate. But in recent weeks, Republicans have won back some momentum, and Democratic pollsters and pundits are manifesting less confidence. A new Washington Post/Schar School poll of

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It has been noted that red rural states, where Republicans are strong, will in all likelihood determine whether the Republican majority in the Senate endures. In Congress, Democrats will need to win 23 new seats in order to win control. They will be aiming to score wins in suburban swing districts that trended toward Hillary Clinton in the 2016 elections. They hope that high turnout among college-educated women in these areas can tip the scale in their favor.

A number of issues are being watched closely for their potential impact on election results.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 elections may galvanize Democrats — though some

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With respect to foreign policy matters, there are mounting tensions with China and the possibility of American withdrawal from a U.S.-Russian arms control treaty

Republicans may also feel motivated to vote in defiance of what they see as the unjust targeting of the president. A new promise by the White House for middle class tax cuts, for its part, may win over some voters. Meanwhile, as thousands of immigrants make their way in a caravan from Central America through Mexico toward the United States, President Trump has seized on the matter to energize voters supportive of his strident stand against illegal immigration. Evoking calls Trump made during his 2016 election, he Tweeted threats to cut off aid to several Central

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U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh attends his ceremonial swearing in in the East Room of the White House October 2018 ,08 in Washington, DC. 1054518482

American countries to punish them for failing to stop the movement of people toward the U.S.-Mexican border.

With respect to foreign policy matters, there are mounting tensions with China and the possibility of American withdrawal from a U.S.-Russian arms control treaty. It also bears noting that Vice President Mike Pence recently accused China of seeking to skew 2018 and 2020 election outcomes against Trump, in response to his policies on trade with the Asian power.

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Republican senators appear to have convinced some voters that Democrats had engineered a dishonest campaign to tar Kavanaugh as a sexual offender in his youth

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Is Going It Alone the Best Way Forward for Europe?

Why Strategic Autonomy Should Be the Continent’s Goal

by Benjamin Haddad, Alina Polyakova Since the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, Europeans have struggled to come to terms with his confrontational style and policies. From Trump’s tariffs to his

withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris agreement to calling the EU a “foe,” no American president since World War II has appeared so distant, even hostile, to European interests.

Early on, many European leaders attempted to cultivate a good relationship with Trump, hoping that a personal connection could

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To prevent a perverse version of European autonomy in which Europe pivots toward Russia with the false hope of replacing the U.S. security umbrella, Washington will have to support and encourage European autonomy in the right direction it took a figure as direct and undiplomatic as Trump to wake Europeans up to this new normal. Devising European strategic autonomy is now the new name of the game, but what does it actually mean for a European continent long used to following the United States’ lead?

U.S. UNTETHERING IS A LONG-TERM TREND

France's President Emmanuel Macron (L) and Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel (R) discuss President Macron's suit ahead of the G7 Outreach Family photo, on the second day of the G7 Summit, on 9 June, 2018 in La Malbaie, Canada. (Getty)

help calm the increasingly turbulent waters of the transatlantic alliance. Some, such as French President Emmanuel Macron and EU President Jean-Claude Juncker, succeeded, while others, such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Theresa May, fared less well.

In recent months, however, the tone coming from European capitals has changed. In a rather undiplomatic op-ed, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas expressed doubts that his country could just “sit this presidency out” and called for “a sovereign, strong Europe” in response to Trump’s hostility. Macron echoed this sentiment in his annual speech to ambassadors: “I do not honestly think today that China or the United States thinks Europe is a power with strategic autonomy comparable to their own. I do not believe it.” Invoking former U.S. President Andrew Jackson’s foreign-policy legacy, Macron warned his diplomatic corps not to see Trump as a fluke and to think through Europe’s own strategic priorities as the United States becomes increasingly untethered from its allies across the pond. Europeans are right to eschew nostalgia when it comes to the transatlantic relationship:

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The United States’ pivot away from Europe did not start with Trump. The end of the Cold War made Europe less central to U.S. national security interests, as evidenced by the 75 percent decrease in U.S. troop presence in Europe since then.

The ongoing tensions in transatlantic relations are first and foremost about a power imbalance. Americans are frustrated at Europe’s lack of defense investments and do not see it as a reliable ally; Europeans resent American unilateralism and disregard for their policy concerns. This isn’t new. With Soviet collapse, the United States became the sole superpower and was no longer hindered by concerns of provoking its old enemy. It was also increasingly willing to take unilateral actions, which Europeans were expected to accept. Under President Bill Clinton, the United States led the NATO air strikes on Yugoslavia, ignoring Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s objections. President George W. Bush ignored European protests when he chose not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Although France (alongside Germany) led the opposition to the Iraq war at the UN Security Council, even threatening a veto of the United States, Washington moved forward. And the centerpiece of U.S. President Barack Obama’s foreign policy in his first term was a strategic pivot to Asia, which inevitably meant a move away from Europe as the core of U.S. economic and strategic interests.

Reaffirming his view of imbalance in the U.S.-European relationship, Obama, frustrated with France and the United Kingdom’s absence from the post-conflict political reconstruction of Libya, famously called Europeans “free riders” in his outgoing interview with the Atlantic. Robert Gates, his first defense secretary, held the same view. As he put it, there will be “dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress, and in the

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American body politic writ large, to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources ... to be serious and capable partners in their own defense.”

Trump’s “America first” foreign policy is following this pattern of U.S. untethering from Europe. Through policies such as the successful use of extraterritorial sanctions to force European businesses into submission when it comes to Iran or Russia, Trump reveals Europe’s weaknesses, and, to be blunt, its hypocrisies. And, on a critical international crisis like Syria, which has far more direct consequences for European security than the United States, Europeans’ response has been mostly to plead for the United States to get involved.

Trump’s foreign policy vis-à-vis Europe in thus not a fluke: it is a continuation of a trend, which began when the Cold War ended, just without the diplomatic niceties.

WHAT STRATEGIC AUTONOMY LOOKS LIKE The European model of foreign policy is rooted in the ideal of multilateralism and peaceful cooperation, embodied in the EU’s aspiration of an “ever closer union.” Despite setbacks, the European project, which brought 70 years of unprecedented peace to a war-torn continent, has been a success. But it would not have been possible without the U.S. military umbrella and NATO, which, among other things, allowed Europeans to invest in their economies rather than in their militaries. This underlying dependency on U.S. power enabled Europe to become what it is today—an economically robust and politically integrated continent—but it has also left Europeans unprepared for a world of great power competition.

As Europeans begin to ponder the reality of strategic autonomy, they should heed the advice of Macron and Maas—there is no going back to the comforts of dependency after Trump. Strategic autonomy means, first and foremost, a vision for Europe as an actor on the world stage capable of defending itself at home and pursuing its objectives abroad. Although the current imbalances

A more autonomous Europe will cause some headaches for future U.S. policymakers, but European strategic autonomy will benefit Washington as well

in U.S. and European security and defense spending make such a Europe difficult to imagine, it should nonetheless be the guiding principle for long-term European stability.

In the short term, strategic autonomy means urgently shoring up European military capacities and capacities. The NATO commitment to spend two percent of GDP on defense should be the minimum benchmark. A broader rethinking of European capabilities, capacities, and readiness is already taking place with the framework of the EU-launched Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO), which will enhance pooling resources for acquisition and R & D, the creation of the European Defense Fund, and Macron’s proposed European Intervention Initiative, which aims to create a common European strategic culture through joint planning and exchange of troops. These initiatives go in the right direction and will compensate for Europe’s shortcomings today, but it will hardly suffice in case of a major security crisis on the European periphery if the United States decides to opt out: the priority should be to increase Europe-wide spending on defense and capacity building, regardless of the form it takes. These efforts would and should complement NATO. Europeans should also be more engaged in addressing conflicts on their periphery by matching U.S. military support for Ukraine to deter Russia and intervening in Syria with or without the United States.

Strategic autonomy should, however, not solely be based on defense and security. As the United States’ expansive use of extraterritorial sanctions has shown, Europeans are vulnerable to U.S. weaponization of its economic power. Inevitably, the economic imbalance will mean a reckoning by EU leaders with the role of the euro in the global economy. Taken as a whole, the EU is one of the world’s largest economies, accounting for 22 percent of world GDP. Yet the euro represents a much smaller share of global currency reserves and international trade than the dollar, a sign that investors still don’t trust the long-term future

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel (L), US President Donald Trump (2L), and French President Emmanuel Macron (R) participate in a working session of the G7 Summit in La Malbaie, Quebec, Canada, June ,8 2018. (Getty)

of the eurozone after years of crises and ad hoc responses to address the zone’s shortcomings.

Germany, as the economic powerhouse of the eurozone, should work together with France and the European Commission to take concrete steps to ensure the sustainability and competitiveness of the monetary zone.

Such a broad effort on economic and defense strategy will likely span generations. And it will mean overcoming the divisions between Europe’s integrationists and nationalists.

But what the European project sorely needs today is a vision for its future, which is no longer as clear cut as an “ever closer union.”

Strategic autonomy could be that vision that rallies both integrationists such as Macron and more conservative figures such as Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz without giving in to the illiberalism of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. If the integrationists can make the case that the EU can shield its citizens against an unstable geopolitical environment through investments in security, border control, and effective trade policies, it will undermine the agenda of illiberal forces.

HOW WASHINGTON BENEFITS U.S. leaders should not be wary of Europe going it alone. A more autonomous Europe will cause some headaches for future U.S. policymakers, but European strategic autonomy will benefit Washington as well. First, politically: the lopsided defense relationship has fueled resentment among U.S. policymakers and voters who wonder why rich European countries have to rely on the United States to fight wars closer to European shores than American ones. More important, as the United States shifts resources toward competition with Russia and China, a more autonomous Europe could contribute to global security and economic balancing, from the fight against terrorism to containing the rise of China.

Chinese foreign direct investment in Europe is nine times larger than in the United States. Some European capitals are concerned that Chinese investments, especially in central and eastern Europe and along the Mediterranean, give China too much political influence. Greece, for example, where China has invested heavily in ports, recently blocked an EU statement on China’s human rights abuses at the United Nations.

Europe should work with the United States to balance against China by curbing Chinese attempts to leverage economic investments into political influence in Europe. The European Commission already has a set of tools and regulations—including requiring that mergers and acquisitions of a certain size and nature be subject to commission approval—that it uses to ensure transparency and competition in the energy sector to curb Russian influence. It could use the same toolkit to curb Chinese influence.

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Some countries, such as France and Germany, have started to take such steps, while the EU commission under Juncker has adopted a foreign investment screening procedure to ensure investments don’t threaten strategic infrastructure, technology, or media independence. Europe should also aggressively pursue Chinese trade violations and theft of intellectual property, and phase out Chinese products used in defense and security operations.

U.S. policymakers, meanwhile, should help steer Europe in the right direction to ensure that Europeans remain part of the U.S. global agenda. The tumultuous relationship that three U.S. presidents—John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon—had with French President Charles de Gaulle could serve as inspiration. The leader of the French Resistance in World War II was a complicated ally. He withdrew from NATO’s military command in 1966, prompting the organization’s headquarters to move from Paris to the suburbs of Brussels, and openly criticized U.S. Vietnam policy. Yet de Gaulle never wavered in his support for Washington during the Cuban missile crisis, famously claiming he didn’t need to see evidence of Soviet missiles that the U.S. ambassador was offering. France’s acquisition of the nuclear deterrent, first tested in 1960, which initially troubled U.S. policymakers as decoupling the Alliance, was eventually seen as an addition to the continent’s deterrence. De Gaulle’s autonomous foreign policy, such as his recognition of the People’s Republic of China in 1966, opened the door to future U.S. initiatives. As a former French foreign minister put it: France was, to the United States, a “friend, an ally, but not aligned.”

There is no alternative: a Europe whole, free, and at peace means a Europe able to fend for itself on the world stage. A weaker and divided Europe will not weather the coming storm of geopolitical competition if it is too reliant on a United States preoccupied elsewhere and less engaged with European concerns. Greater European autonomy will inevitably transform the transatlantic alliance. There will, no doubt, be differences and disagreements, but it is a small price to pay for ensuring European presence on the world stage and Western balancing against China.

To prevent a perverse version of European autonomy in which Europe pivots toward Russia with the false hope of replacing the U.S. security umbrella, Washington will have to support and encourage European autonomy in the right direction.

After all, European strategic autonomy is not about building a counterweight to U.S. military power. It’s about Europe investing in its own security and the security of the transatlantic alliance.

And Europe will have to overcome its internal divisions while managing the political challenges of growing populism and working with the United States to counter common threats—no easy task, to be sure. Despite differences, leaders on both sides should be confident. In the face of a rising China, resurgent Russia and increasing security threats, there is much more binding the liberal democracies of the United States and Europe than dividing them.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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Can the Pentagon Win the AI Arms Race?

Why the U.S. Is in Danger of Falling Behind

by Michael Auslin When the stingray-shaped object took off and landed lightly on the deck of the USS George H. W. Bush in July 2013, some hailed it as a moment in aviation history to rank with the first heavier-than-air powered flight, at Kitty Hawk, in 1902.

The X47-B drone flew itself, decided its own flight path, and completed on its own a mission given to it by humans. The dawn of autonomous weapons systems seemed undeniable. Yet the drone was hardly independent, as humans still programmed all its possible decisions, leaving it to choose from a menu of options.

Half a decade later, experts are making new claims that the future of warfare is about to change. Today, artificial intelligence (AI) is the new frontier of military competition, and with China and Russia making headway in the field, the Pentagon is starting to rush, some say belatedly, into the new era.

THE NEXT WAVE OF AI In a move that reflects the reliability of current machine learning

capabilities, the U.S. Department of Defense recently awarded Booz Allen Hamilton a contract worth 885$ million over five years to introduce the first large-scale use of AI systems to analyze the flood of data provided by drones, as well as to diagnose diseases from medical data. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), meanwhile, is building the Machine-Assisted Analysis Rapid-Repository System (MARS), an information database to make the interaction between human analysts, the cloud, and automated data processing systems more efficient.

In September, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which helped kick-start the AI revolution back in the 1960s, announced an even more ambitious initiative: a 2$ billion program to foster the next era of AI technologies, or “third wave” of AI. Unlike the first two waves of AI, which made possible first narrowly defined machine-conducted tasks and later statistical pattern recognition based on large data sets, the new initiative, which DARPA is dubbing AI Next, will focus on making it “possible for machines to adapt to changing circumstances.” The goal, according to the agency, is to enable better decision-making

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The goal is to achieve the “far greater levels of intelligence” that machines will need in order to allow for more autonomous weapons systems, going far beyond the types of humancontrolled drones that have been part of the military arsenal for years The DARPA project is far more ambitious. According to DARPA Director Steven Walker, AI Next seeks “to explore how machines can acquire human-like communication and reasoning capabilities, with the ability to recognize new situations and environments and adapt to them.” The goal, as explained on the AI Next website, is to achieve the “far greater levels of intelligence” that machines will need in order to allow for more autonomous weapons systems, going far beyond the types of human-controlled drones that have been part of the military arsenal for years.

A General Atomics MQ9- Reaper stands on the runway during «Black Dart», a live-fly, live fire demonstration of 55 unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, at Naval Base Ventura County Sea Range, Point Mugu, near Oxnard, California July 2015. (Reuters)

in “complex, time-critical battlefield environments.” That could mean quicker identification of threats, faster and more precise targeting, or creating flexible options for commanders based on changing conditions on the battlefield.

Although half a century old as a concept, artificial intelligence is still at a relatively immature state of development. The Booz Allen contract focuses on the most proven level, what is known as “narrow AI,” where a computer program focuses on a particular task, often automating what humans previously did (think of a spam filter for e-mail). This type of AI has been transforming the health field, allowing for quicker diagnosis of disease and the world of surveillance, through facial and voice recognition.

The Defense Department is looking for cost- and time-saving measures that will free up human for more complex tasks. Yet this level of AI is still dependent on much human input, what is known as “supervised learning,” where the machines use preprogramed algorithms designed for carrying out a particular task. An example would be distinguishing from video footage a machine gun-carrying motorcycle rider from an unarmed civilian.

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The next generation of AI that DARPA proposes to develop— “contextual reasoning”—relates to what AI scientists call “unsupervised learning,” where algorithms themselves try to identify patterns in data. Neural networks (also known as “deep learning”) can carry out classification and prediction tasks by linking thousands of processing nodes that comprise machine learning programs and algorithms. The processes they follow are not pre-programmed, but allow them to learn from observation; for example, by comparing thousands of pictures of buildings with a known example, neural networks can learn what is a castle as opposed to a hut. Neuroevolution goes beyond unsupervised learning, to enable AI to develop more effective AI, as though Frankenstein’s monster were put in charge of creating his own bride. The holy grail for AI programmers is to move from correlative outcomes, which is essentially what all AI today does, to causative outcomes that in essence include intuition and cognitive insight. Indeed, DARPA’s objective is for the machines that spring from the project to become reliable colleagues to humans.

Washington is just now beginning to explore the policy implications of the next wave of AI, ranging from technological feasibility to human impact to ethical questions. Few in U.S. policymaking circles have any but the most rudimentary understanding of what AI is or how the field might develop. They are, however, keenly attuned to the threat of adversarial nations leapfrogging American AI capabilities. At the top of the list of concerns is China, followed closely by Russia. China is already

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considered a world leader in AI, has committed over 2$ billion to building an AI industrial park, and hopes to foster a 150$ billion AI industry in less than a generation; Russia, while seen as farther behind in the AI race, is beginning a comprehensive plan to increase automation throughout society and the armed forces, establish a national center for AI development, and begin a series of AI war games to understand the technology’s potential on the battlefield. Because of developments such as these, many worry that the United States is already playing a catch-up game on AI, especially with China.

As the U.S. government struggles to come up with a comprehensive national AI plan, the Pentagon is moving forward on its own accord. This summer, the Defense Department announced the establishment of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), under the direction of the Department of Defense’s chief information officer. With support from the advisory Defense Innovation Board, chaired by former Google head Eric Schmidt, the center will study the role of AI and machine learning in military systems. More specifically, it will coordinate work on high-priority AI initiatives, increase collaboration with the private sector and academia, and try to develop the next generation of AI talent. The council will also likely support the work of the Defense Innovation Unit—Experimental (DIUx), which was established near Silicon Valley in 2015 to partner with civilian companies to introduce high-tech, nontraditional approaches for DOD programs, many of which employ AI processes. Examples of DIUx partnerships include one with a company to identify, track, and autonomously remove rogue drones from the sky, and another to use algorithms to predict mechanical breakdowns in Army armored fighting vehicles for preventive maintenance.

WILL WASHINGTON MAINTAIN ITS EDGE? Given the rapid pace of development in the field, the key to U.S. success in AI may well lie with public-private partnerships of the kind fostered by DIUx. Yet opposition at Google and other tech firms to working with Washington could leave the U.S. government searching for willing partners. Google CEO Sundar

Opposition at Google and other tech firms to working with Washington could leave the U.S. government searching for willing partners

Pichai, for example, promised this summer that Google would never work on militarized applications of AI. This pledge arose in response to the backlash to the company’s cooperation in the U.S. Air Force’s Project Maven, an initiative to automate pattern recognition from the massive amount of moving and still imagery captured by drones and satellites. There is little question that the Pentagon’s ultimate interest in AI is to be able to operate more effectively and efficiently, and that means more destructively.

Although the counterculture that gave rise to Silicon Valley’s tech leaders may have mellowed into self-interested middle age, working with the U.S. military may remain a bridge too far.

Such reticence could become a devastating weakness for the United States. Silicon Valley above all knows that technology never sleeps, and the current lack of cutting-edge AI investment in the defense industry could leave Washington at a decided disadvantage in the next generation’s arms race. To avoid falling behind, the first priority for the Pentagon is to find or fund AI startups that are willing to work with the military and are doing cutting-edge research.

China may have access to the massive amounts of data needed to refine algorithms for faster targeting, pattern recognition, and decision-making, but it continues to lag on the basic technologies

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that power AI, including hardware development. This means that for now the United States retains a slim edge over China in the AI arms race, a period in which it can decisively integrate AI into emerging weapons systems. Thus, the second priority for the Pentagon should be to push ahead as quickly as possible on integrating well-proven AI technologies, such as in pattern recognition, into operational capabilities. A third priority, as DARPA proposes, is sponsoring basic research into the third generation of AI, so as to position the military for a potentially AI-centric future in certain areas in 20 or 30 years’ time.

China continues to lag on the basic technologies that power AI, including hardware development. This means that for now the United States retains a slim edge over China in the AI arms race

Absent these steps, Washington’s edge will diminish over time, and perhaps more quickly than most anticipate. As Chinese armed forces operate more widely within the Indo-Pacific region and beyond, its future AI prowess may make it an even more formidable force than it already is thanks to decades of conventional modernization. An AI-dominant Chinese military would in turn change the calculations of nations large and small, potentially leading them to embrace accommodation, so as to avoid confrontations with Beijing.

for more lethal militaries. Only those nations that are unable to protect their interests fail to adapt. The age of artificial intelligence is upon us, and in a world of ever more assertive authoritarian powers, the U.S. military will have to embrace and incorporate the new technologies into its arsenal as quickly and thoroughly as it can.

Arms races are ugly things, but throughout history, no one has successfully contained technological advances that make

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MICHAEL AUSLIN is the Williams-Griffis Fellow in Contemporary Asia at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author of The End of the Asian Century.

This article was originally published in Foreign Affairs.

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A Blow to China’s Soft Power Why Democracies Are Turning Against Belt and Road

by Christopher Balding China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), an enormous international investment project touted by Chinese President Xi Jinping, was supposed to establish Chinese soft power. Since late 2013, Beijing has poured nearly 700$ billion worth of Chinese money into more than sixty

countries (according to research by RWR Advisory), much of it in the form of large-scale infrastructure projects and loans to governments that would otherwise struggle to pay for them. The idea was to draw these countries closer to Beijing while boosting Chinese soft power abroad.

Today, however, China faces a backlash to BRI at home and abroad. Many Chinese complain of the initiative’s

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Many Chinese complain of the initiative’s wasteful spending.

Internationally, some of the backlash is geopolitical, as countries grow wary of Beijing’s growing influence.

Chinese President Xi Jinping speaks at the podium during the unveiling of the Communist Party's new Politburo Standing Committee at the Great Hall of the People on October 2017 ,25 in Beijing, China. China's ruling Communist Party today revealed the new Politburo Standing Committee after its 19th congress. (Getty)

wasteful spending. Internationally, some of the backlash is geopolitical, as countries grow wary of Beijing’s growing influence. But much of it is simply political. Unlike Western lenders, China does not require its partners to meet stringent conditions related to corruption, human rights, or financial sustainability. This no-strings approach to investment has fueled corruption while allowing governments to burden their countries with unpayable debts. And citizens of many BRI countries have reacted with anger toward China—an anger that is now making itself felt in elections. Far from expanding Chinese soft power, the BRI appears to be achieving the opposite.

THE BACKLASH TO BRI Malaysia’s election in May 2018 crystallized the sorts of concerns about Chinese power that have been building

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within BRI client countries. Mahathir Mohamad defeated the incumbent Prime Minister,Najib Razak by openly campaigning against Chinese influence. He criticized Razak for approving expensive BRI infrastructure projects that required considerable borrowing from China, which Razak used to create an illusion of development while he and his associates plundered state coffers. Since taking office in May, Mohamad has cancelled two of the largest Chinese projects in Malaysia—a 20$ billion railroad and a 2.3$ billion natural gas pipeline—citing his country’s inability to pay.

The backlash has not been limited to Malaysia. Pakistan has received an estimated 62$ billion in Chinese lending order to finance projects, including highway and rail infrastructure and a port in Gwadar, and has been bailed out by Chinese banks on multiple occasions. Pakistan’s growing inability to service its international debt, which has ballooned thanks to Chinese lending, has prompted some anti-BRI sentiment in the country—although this avoided becoming a major campaign issue during Pakistani elections in July. The new government of the populist Prime Minister Imran Khan has not followed Malaysia in breaking economic ties with China, but it is evaluating all options for repaying its debt, including potentially suspending or delaying repayment. Thanks to its BRI debt, Pakistan is now planning to enter negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a bailout, despite Khan’s initial opposition to doing so.

The Maldives, too, has recently brought heavier scrutiny to BRI projects. In September, voters ousted the country’s strongman president, Abdulla Yameen, in favor of the democratic reformer Ibrahim Solih. Solih’s election has brought a re-evaluation of Yameen’s heavy borrowing from China, which many worried had abetted official corruption and would leave the country effectively under the control of Beijing. Solih has vowed to revisit some of the Maldives’ BRI projects, and although he is unlikely to back out of major Chinese deals totaling 1.3$ billion— including a mile-long bridge to the airport in the capital,

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Male—he is clearly reassessing his country’s ties with Beijing.

Even where governments are not being thrown out of office, they have become warier of BRI lending. In August, Kenya began cracking down on corruption related to the Chinese-built railroad connecting Nairobi and Mombasa, arresting local officials who had used the project to line their pockets. Other countries, such as Uganda and Zambia, are starting to worry as well. In June, the Zambian think tank scholar Trevor Simumba warned that Zambia’s borrowing from China was rapidly becoming unsustainable and expressed concern about the “severe lack of transparency over many key terms” in the loans. These countries are beginning to worry not just about the costs of BRI projects, such as Uganda’s recent highway expansion—in which governments borrow Chinese money to pay Chinese companies to build infrastructure at above-market prices— but about the sustainability of their country’s debt loads and the supposed beneficence of Chinese investment.

WHAT WENT WRONG? How did China’s big soft power investment end up alienating the very countries it was supposed to help?

One reason is that countries have become wiser to the financial terms associated with BRI. In the early stages of the initiative, many countries perceived Chinese capital as free—or least low-cost—money. In reality, China often lent above market rates from concessional lenders, such as the World Bank, that had slowed lending because of their concerns about rising debt levels. In Pakistan, official interest rates (as set by the central bank) are upward of five percent on debt while some BRI projects are guaranteed returns of at least 30 percent.

BRI countries have also become concerned about how China behaves as an investment partner. In 2017, Sri Lanka turned granted the Chinese a -99year lease on one

In August, Kenya began cracking down on corruption related to the Chinese-built railroad connecting Nairobi and Mombasa, arresting local officials who had used the project to line their pockets.

of its ports in order to avoid defaulting on its BRI loans.

Since then, countries have worried about the possible ramifications of failing to repay Beijing. They have also become frustrated with the lack of due diligence on the part of local governments and with China’s heavy-handed insistence on single-bid contracts, which force countries to partner with Chinese firms, and sovereign guarantees, which shift risk onto partner countries rather than Chinese firms.

One of BRI’s primary weaknesses was its early selling point: China’s famed no-strings approach to partner governments. Developing countries had long griped about the difficulty of getting projects approved and funded by major Western lenders—including the IMF, the World Bank, and bilateral development agencies like USAID—due to safeguards such as financial sustainability requirements, environmental assessment reports, and anticorruption controls. BRI offered a way around these requirements. But the requirements existed for a reason: Western donor agencies had attached them over time, based on experience, in order to lower the risk of failure.

By contrast, China’s refusal to require reasonable safeguards for its BRI projects has nourished authoritarianism, corruption, debt, and the pursuit of economically unsustainable or nonviable projects. As strong evidence has emerged of corruption in major investment projects, citizens in BRI countries have come

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A Pakistani motorcyclist drives on a newly built Pakistan China Silk Road in Haripur, Pakistan, Dec. ,22 2017. (Reuters)

Mahathir Mohamad defeated the incumbent Prime Minister,Najib Razak by openly campaigning against Chinese influence.

to see China as both benefitting from and facilitating this corruption. In countries where there is at least some democratic oversight of government, such as Kenya, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Zambia, voters are holding leaders responsible. Governments that remain in power are more carefully scrutinizing projects, fees, and total debt levels.

In other words, with Chinese lenders unwilling to demand accountability, voters are doing it for them.

LEARNING TO LOVE DEMOCRACY International backlash is not the only problem for BRI. Within China itself, there has been increased grumbling about the largesse lavished upon BRI countries. With Beijing touting the billions of dollars it is spending abroad, many Chinese are asking why that money is not being used to address domestic issues, such health care, housing, and education. Data indicate that Chinese banks investing abroad are generally borrowing U.S. dollars internationally rather than drawing from official foreign exchange reserves, but Chinese critics can be forgiven for not understanding the finer points of global capital markets when their government publicizes China’s large overseas spending and investment.

Intellectuals, such as the Tsinghua University law professor Xu Xangrun, have also raised concerns about the perception that Beijing is promoting foreign aid ambition at the expense of domestic spending. Others, such as the

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political scientist Zheng Yongnian, have warned that the rhetoric around BRI is likely to make other countries fear that China is seeking hegemony. Still other Chinese analysts have criticized the lack of local standards covering everything from financial sustainability to environmental impact. Given the controlled media, it is possible that some of this public criticism of Xi’s signature foreign policy initiative may be a shadow critique of Xi himself.

Ironically, the program intended to promote Chinese soft power is prompting an unprecedented level of domestic and international concern.

Although Chinese leaders have given some thought to how they might improve the perceptions of BRI in partner countries, there is little evidence that they grasp the financial and political realities driving the backlash.

Lending in U.S. dollars forces the recipient countries to run dollar surpluses in order to repay Chinese loans, but many countries lack the capacity to run such surpluses.

Many of the investments are long-term infrastructure projects, which can take years to complete and require Chinese banks to roll over debt, but Beijing has demonstrated that it expects to be repaid on time or will take punitive measures, as it did in Sri Lanka. Finally, many BRI countries operate under government systems that allow citizens to voice their displeasure, whether through the press or the ballot box. Unused to democratic oversight and criticism, China is struggling to sell its soft power initiative in places where it cannot simply hide embarrassing or inconvenient details.

Since the beginning of BRI, Beijing has preferred to view criticism as nothing more than Western refusal to accept China’s rise. Today, however, the concerns are coming not from the West but from Africa and Asia, where governments are desperate to head off soaring debt problems and the wrath of their people. If Beijing seeks to export the Chinese model or burnish its reputation in the world, it will have to learn to work with democracies, whether it likes them or not.

This article was originally published in Foreign Affairs.

CHRISTOPHER BALDING is Associate Professor at the Fulbright University of Vietnam and a contributor to Bloomberg View.

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The Twilight of German Conservatism What Lies Ahead for German Conservatism in Post-Merkel Germany?

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Merkel seems increasingly embattled, and many speculate that her reign as the eternal chancellor is nearing its end. What this means for Germany or for conservatism as a whole is unclear with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives, but now polls at a meager 16 percent, the same as the environmentalist Green party and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). The German left’s fall from behemoth to sideshow has provided fodder for endless commentary: Did it fail to address the ills of globalized capitalism? Are all of its policy solutions obsolete?

Much less talked about, but just as brutal, has been the decline of German conservatism. For a long time, there was little to complain about: Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), have been in power for the last 13 years. Merkel herself is on track to become the country’s longest-ruling post-war chancellor, tied only with her onetime mentor Helmut Kohl.

But her party is hovering at an all-time low of 26 percent in national polls, with poor prospects in two crucial state elections and deep internal rifts.

Merkel seems increasingly embattled, and many speculate that her reign as the eternal chancellor is nearing its end. What this means for Germany or for conservatism as a whole is unclear. But coming at a moment when the aggressive nationalism, racism, and xenophobia of right-wing populists has put liberal values on the defensive across Europe, the crisis of German conservatism spells trouble for the continent’s project of transnational unity.

In this Oct. 2018 ,17 file photo German Chancellor Angela Merkel attends the weekly cabinet meeting of the German government at the chancellery in Berlin.

(AP Photo)

by Georg Diez

TRUE COLORS

Much ink has been spilled on the collapse of European social democracy, and Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) provides a perfect case study. Once a proud political heavyweight that raked in upward of 40 percent of the vote, the SPD still governs the country as part of a coalition

Polarization has not reached the same fever pitch in Germany as it has in some other Western societies.

Instead, much of the discontent with Merkel appears to have sprouted within her own party, where many have long questioned her credentials as a true conservative. Critical backbenchers accuse

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Merkel of pushing the CDU leftward, turning it into a center-left party virtually indistinguishable from the social democrats. Common complaints include that the chancellor’s liberal position on social issues such as gay marriage has scared away culturally conservative voters, and that her childhood in communist East Germany has always made her an imperfect leader for her party’s largely West German base.

Some of these concerns are valid, but most of them are not. Merkel is an enigmatic figure in part because she refuses to engage in arguments along openly ideological lines. Before you buy the idea that Merkel is a closeted liberal, recall her tough stance during the European Union's financial crisis, when her hawkish austerity policies defied the logic and advice of economists and foreign politicians alike. Recall, also, her claim in 2010 that multiculturalism had “utterly failed.”

At her best, Angela Merkel has proven a pragmatic ruler in unruly times, even though she tends to hold back until she knows in which direction the wind blows. At her worst, she makes rash, bolt-fromthe-blue decisions. The latter tendency was on display in 2011, when Merkel pushed for an end to nuclear energy following the Fukushima disaster, surprising her own government and sending the German energy industry scrambling. In the same vein, her decision not to close Germany’s borders to hundreds of thousands of refugees in 2015 caused a backlash inside her party and earned her the scorn of powerful tabloids. Merkel’s initially open embrace of refugees also hastened the rise of the right-wing AfD—unabashedly anti-refugee, openly xenophobic, and now leader of the opposition in parliament.

The identity crisis of German conservatism is leaving a vacuum at the center of Europe—one that bodes ill for the continent as a whole

CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTION But even if Merkel’s unorthodox decisions were a boon for right-wing populists, the recent rise of the AfD reveals a deeper tension within German conservatism as an ideological movement. Merkel favors fiscal and economic orthodoxy but remains open to liberal internationalist or “globalist” policies, such as supporting the EU and the IMF. In this way, she is the direct successor of Helmut Kohl, CDU chancellor in the 1980s and 1990s and in his day a driving force behind European integration.

A more aggressive and sometimes destructive conservatism, by contrast, has arisen in recent years.

This conservatism is driven by concerns about the preservation of values and national identity, and it harks back to the counterrevolutionary zeal of thinkers such as Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre.

The U.S. political theorist Corey Robin has written that “reactionary populism runs like a red thread throughout conservative discourse from the very beginning.” In Germany, that thread is increasingly

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel is seen while addressing young Carol singers next to a portrait of former chancellor Helmut Kohl at the Chancellery in Berlin on January ,8 2018. (Getty Images) 902567076

Critical backbenchers accuse Merkel of pushing the CDU leftward, turning it into a center-left party virtually indistinguishable from the social democrats coming in at an all-time low of 37 percent. The AfD, meanwhile, gained ten points. The CSU’s gamble did not pay off.

EUROPE'S HOLLOW CENTER

visible—running not only through the AfD but also through the rhetoric and policies of the CSU, the CDU’s offshoot in Bavaria, which has strong ties to the increasingly illiberal governments of Austria and Hungary. Take Alexander Dobrindt, a prominent CSU politician and former member of Merkel’s government. In an essay published earlier this year in the conservative newspaper Die Welt, Dobrindt invoked the Weimar-era notion of a “conservative revolution” and the need for a strong state to protect the moral fabric of society against the emancipatory gains and pluralist spirit of the 1960s.

The strategic question now facing German conservatives is whether copying the language and the policy solutions of the far right pays off or serves only to boost extremists at the expense of the center. At the moment, the latter looks to be the case. The CSU's leaders, for instance, did their best to outmatch the AfD in populist and nativist rhetoric, but they were still routed in Bavaria's regional election on Sunday, October 14, losing ten percentage points and

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Rather than reflexively vilifying or sheepishly copying far-right rhetoric, Merkel and her critics should reflect on the common origin of conservatism and far-right radicalism. The uncomfortable truth they will uncover is that the current crisis is only superficially connected to Merkel and her legacy.

On a deeper level, it is inherent to the conservative project, always torn between the simple preservation of “traditional” values and a more ambitious project of national grandeur and cultural homogeneity. The hope that Merkel’s eventual abdication will clear the way for some unifying conservative force or profile, often expressed through the rallying cry “Merkel must go!,” is wishful thinking. There is no credible replacement for Merkel in sight, much less a vision for the future of conservative politics in a modern Germany.

Perhaps the gravest consequence of this crisis at the heart of politics, in the most powerful country in Europe, is that it has led Merkel to turn inward and focus on domestic politics, dampening any hope for a reform or reinvention of the European project, so long held dear by German conservatives of earlier generations.

The memory of World War II, and along with it Germany’s sense of solemn responsibility within Europe, is fading. The identity crisis of German conservatism is leaving a vacuum at the center of Europe—one that bodes ill for the continent as a whole.

This article was originally published in Foreign Affairs.

Georg Diez is an editor for Der Spiegel and the author of Das andere Land (Another Country), about the rightward shift in German politics and society.

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Latin America Is Facing a Refugee Crisis How Venezuela’s Old Immigration Policy Can Help its Current Migrants and Refugees

by Dany Bahar Picture your salary and life’s savings depleted by hyperinflation. The local store is missing many basic food products, and the pharmacy has no stock of the medicines you need on a daily or weekly basis. The only hospital in town is nonfunctional because it doesn’t carry basic medical supplies and even lacks running water, and schools are closed because of a lack of electricity. You leave your hometown and travel more than 2,000 miles by foot to the capital of a neighboring country, entirely uncertain what your future holds. When you arrive, you’re greeted with a xenophobic speech by a local

politician, who accuses you of stealing jobs from locals and committing crimes.

This scenario has become all too familiar to migrants and refugees in Latin America, where 2.6 million Venezuelans, the vast majority of them since 2015, have poured into neighboring countries such as Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Peru as conditions at home have become unbearable.

Most governments—Colombia’s being the lead example—have welcomed the Venezuelans with open arms, hastening to help them integrate into the local

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Populist politicians such as Ricardo Belmont, a former candidate for mayor of Lima, Peru, stoke economic anxieties by spreading fear that the new arrivals will threaten locals’ livelihoods have become familiar the world over. The arrival of millions of Syrians in Europe since 2011 has occasioned populist resentment that largely feeds on linguistic, cultural, and religious differences. But Latin American xenophobia toward Venezuelan migrants cannot be explained in the same terms. Latin America is arguably the most culturally integrated region in the world.

Venezuelans largely share their hosts’ language, religion, holidays, and traditions. What, then, drives xenophobia toward Venezuelan migrants and refugees?

Populist politicians such as Ricardo Belmont, a former candidate for mayor of Lima, Peru, stoke economic anxieties by spreading fear that the new arrivals will threaten locals’ livelihoods. There is little basis for such claims: research shows that when they are allowed to work, migrants usually help local economies rather than hurt them.

THE VENEZUELAN EXAMPLE

Police officers walk among Venezuelan migrants inside a makeshift camp on October 2018 ,23 in Bogota, Colombia.

(Getty Images)

economy and initiating campaigns to combat xenophobia.

However, in some countries—Peru and Brazil, for example—local populations and populist politicians have stoked fear and prejudice. This summer, rioters in the town of Boa Vista on the border of Brazil and Venezuela chanted, “Out, out, out! Go back to Venezuela!” as they tried to block the road that thousands of Venezuelans have been using to cross into Brazil. Reacting to the news of a violent robbery committed by a small handful of Venezuelans, Brazilian rioters set fire to the belongings of hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees, forcing many of them to turn back.

Such stories of resistance and hostility toward migrants

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Evidence from different countries shows that the entry of new migrants into the labor force does not usually displace locals from jobs or hurt their salaries, except sometimes minimally and temporarily. In fact, migrants tend to be more entrepreneurial than locals, because the act of migrating is most common among “risk takers,” the same type of people who are likely to create businesses.

Businesses started by migrants in turn create jobs, many of which go to locals. Studies in Italy, the United Kingdom, and Malaysia also show that when migrants are able to work, they are far less likely to engage in criminal activity.

One Latin American country provides an excellent example of open-door migration policies that benefited both the migrants and the host country: Venezuela. In 1945, when Eduardo Mendoza Goiticoa—grandfather of the prominent opposition leader and political prisoner Leopoldo López—was appointed minister of agriculture

by President Rómulo Betancourt, he also took the lead in promoting immigration to help boost the economy.

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In fact, under his leadership, Venezuela was among the first countries that officially embraced the creation of the International Refugee Organization (precursor to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) to help Europeans who were searching for new homes following the devastation of World War II. During that period, Venezuela welcomed tens of thousands of European refugees.

The policies Betancourt and Mendoza put in place survived multiple governments. Venezuela became a magnet for migrants and a poster child for successful integration. In the 1950s, the dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez continued promoting European immigration.

By 1961, there were 530,000 foreigners in Venezuela, constituting about 7.5 percent of the population. They came mostly from Italy, Spain, and Portugal, but also from Germany, Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia; some came from the Middle East, primarily from Lebanon and Syria. The Venezuelan economy boomed in the mid1970s, drawing migrants from Latin American countries that included Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, and Peru. Many were simply looking for better opportunities than were available in their home countries, while others sought refuge from cruel military dictatorships.

While Venezuela offered a home to these newcomers, it also benefited from their hard work, thanks to integration policies established as early as the late nineteenth century. Guzmán Blanco, who served three separate terms as president of Venezuela between 1870 and 1887, foresaw that Venezuela would benefit from accepting diverse foreigners. His government invested in building “mixed colonies,” agricultural communities where migrants worked alongside natives. Isolated communities of migrants became the exception rather than the rule.

Thanks to such foundational policies, foreigners in Venezuela rarely experienced prejudice.

The policies Betancourt and Mendoza put in place survived multiple governments. Venezuela became a magnet for migrants and a poster child for successful integration

Today, most of the foreigners who arrived in Venezuela decades ago, together with their offspring, have left the country as a result of the disastrous policies Presidents Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro inflicted upon this once prosperous nation.

MIGRANTS OR REFUGEES? The lesson from Venezuela’s history is that the sooner receiving communities integrate migrants, the sooner migrants will be able to visibly contribute to those communities (which in turn should help inoculate against xenophobia). Successful integration requires the migrants to invest in themselves, their children, and their receiving communities. For this to happen, migrants need to know that they will be accepted and allowed to remain in the medium to long term, as well as get work permits and access to services such as health care and education. Most countries have found ways to give legal status to fleeing Venezuelans who have proper documentation, often only a passport. But the increasing number of Venezuelans who are crossing the border without any documents will face difficulties. Passports, for instance, are almost impossible to get in Venezuela because there are simply not enough resources to produce them. Desperate citizens often

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Freiman from Maracaibo, who is trying to bring his son to Colombia for treatment, shows is ID at the informal refugee camp called ‹El Bosque› on October 2018 ,2 in Bogota, Colombia.

(Getty Images)

One Latin American country provides an excellent example of open-door migration policies that benefited both the migrants and the host country: Venezuela Venezuelans—particularly the more vulnerable ones such as poor people, women, children, and vocal critics of the Maduro regime—lack basic freedoms and are victims of political persecution. They often suffer human rights violations, in the form of government crackdowns on protests, arbitrary detentions, and the use of torture. Moreover, their access to food, health care, and education has been severely curtailed by a manmade crisis that has resulted in malnourishment and often death. Maduro and his regime have refused to give the population access to humanitarian assistance that would alleviate its suffering.

pay up to 2,000$ as a bribe, over 68 times the monthly minimum wage, to expedite their passport issuance.

The Colombian government has gone above and beyond by making work permits available to most Venezuelan migrants, even to the 450,000 of them who entered the country illegally. But Colombia is the exception rather than the rule. Other countries (Peru, for example) are now demanding that Venezuelans submit passports instead of national ID cards before they may be permitted to enter, let alone stay.

For Venezuelans without documents, integration will be an uphill battle. But there is one way to bypass this constraint: recognize and accept fleeing Venezuelans as refugees, meaning that they were forced to leave Venezuela. But on what legal grounds?

In 1984, ten Latin American countries signed the Cartagena Declaration on Refugees, which defines refugees as “persons who have fled their country because their lives, safety, or freedom have been threatened by generalized violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive violation of human rights, or other circumstances which have seriously disturbed public order.”

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Many Venezuelans could even fit the narrower definition of a refugee: someone who flees as a result of a wellfounded fear of persecution based on personal opinions or political affiliation. The regime in Caracas, for example, has begun conditioning access to social programs and subsidies on having a document known as “the Fatherland ID,” which is also used to track and collect information related to the voting behavior of individuals.

As with other refugee crises, the millions of Venezuelans who have left their homes are not migrants searching for better opportunities but rather refugees fleeing for their lives. Recognizing fleeing Venezuelans as refugees would be an acknowledgment of a reality that can no longer be ignored.

When Betancourt and Mendoza created an international body to assist refugees back in 1948, they probably never imagined it would one day be busy assisting millions of Venezuelans trying to leave their collapsing country.

For decades, Venezuela welcomed millions of foreigners who contributed to, and benefited from, the country’s prosperity. The countries on the receiving end of today’s migration would be wise to reciprocate by opening their doors to Venezuelans. *DANY BAHAR is a David M. Rubenstein Fellow at the Brookings Institution and an Associate at the Harvard Center for International Development.

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The Howling of the Night Wolves How Putin’s Favorite Biker Gang Infiltrated NATO 32

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The Night Wolves, frequently referred to as “Putin’s Angels” for their ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, are effectively an arm of the Kremlin.

Motorcycle riders attend a rally for Russia›s motorcycle club Night Wolves in front of Russia›s embassy in Bratislava on July 2018 ,27. Russia›s pro-Kremlin Night Wolves motorcycle club opened their European base in Dolna Krupa, Slovakia and run it together with Slovak Defenders, paramilitary and nationalist group.

(Getty Images)

biker gang headquarters, a little over an hour from Bratislava, Slovakia—well within the borders of NATO itself.

In July 2018, the Slovak press reported that the Night Wolves, a nationalist Russian biker gang, had created an official European base of operations in the village of Dolna Krupa on a site owned by Jozef Hambalek, an entrepreneur with ties to rightwing Slovak militias. The base probably would have escaped international attention if not for aerial footage, published in the Slovak press, that showed not just motorcycles but tanks and armored personnel carriers, which Hambalek had borrowed from the Slovak Institute of Military History on the pretext of establishing a military history museum. (The director of the institute, who claimed that he was duped, was relieved of his post).

The vehicles turned out to be decommissioned and have since been returned to the Slovak Ministry of Defense. But the episode was nonetheless disturbing: The Night Wolves, frequently referred to as “Putin’s Angels” for their ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, are effectively an arm of the Kremlin. Indeed, the establishment of a Night Wolves base inside NATO is an extension of one of Moscow’s favorite strategies in recent years. Disguised proxies—PMC Wagner mercenaries in Syria, local paramilitaries in Ukraine, or “little green men” in Crimea—pursue Russian interests abroad while offering the Kremlin plausible deniability, which cripples the West’s ability to respond.

NIGHT WOLVES EUROPE

By Mitchell A. Orenstein, Peter Kreko Since Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, Europe has been on high alert against further Russian aggression, with military planners conducting joint exercises and calling for increased military spending.

This summer, however, Moscow’s hybrid war on the West took an unexpected twist: a pro-Russian paramilitary established a base, disguised as a

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The Night Wolves started as an independent, countercultural biker gang in Russia in the 1980s, and although their politics have grown more nationalistic in recent years, they still portray themselves as a private, patriotic club. A closer look, however, reveals their gang’s deep ties to the Kremlin.

Night Wolves Europe was established as an independent division of Wolf Holdings, a business

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empire whose interests stretch across Russia and Europe. Branches of this empire organize patriotic and educational activities; run night clubs, hotels, and a motorcycle center; and conduct security operations and training, including professional military training for civilians, police, and military forces in Germany, Hungary, Italy, Serbia, and Switzerland. As a report by the irregular warfare expert Matthew Lauder makes clear, Wolf Holdings is closely linked to the Russian state. The company’s president and primary owner, Gennady Nikulov, is a former military officer and current vice-president of Sevastopol’s proRussian “self-defense forces” who was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2017. The leader of the biker gang itself, Alexander Zaldostanov, has frequently appeared in photos next to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Lauder finds that the Night Wolves “exemplify a larger trend by the Russian government to outsource activities to non-state actors that are traditionally conducted by the state intelligence and defence entities,” including “intelligence collection, propaganda dissemination, agitation and provocation, combat operations and tailored violence.” During the Crimea conflict in 2014, for instance, the Night Wolves formed a small but important part of Russia’s paramilitary invasion force. Before the official start of the invasion, they collected intelligence, distributed propaganda, and organized pro-Russian militias in coordination with Russian Special Forces. After the invasion commenced, they became one of two paramilitary forces tasked with combat operations on behalf of the Russian military. The Night Wolves conducted a raid on a Ukrainian naval base, secured a natural gas facility, and captured a senior officer of the Ukrainian Border Guard Service on behalf of Russian forces.

In Europe, the Night Wolves are better known for

Before the official start of the invasion, they collected intelligence, distributed propaganda, and organized proRussian militias in coordination with Russian Special Forces.

their “patriotic” activities. Every spring, the Night Wolves take a highly publicized ride from Moscow to Berlin to commemorate Russia’s victory in the Second World War. For the past several years, Poland has refused entry to the Night Wolves, who have ridden through Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Hungary instead. The gang also visited Serbia and Serbian parts of Bosnia this March, despite the fact that Zaldostanov was banned right before the event occurred. In stating the ride’s purpose—to retrace “the pilgrimage routes of the distant past, with stop-offs in the ancient centres of Orthodox Christianity”—the group evokes familiar Russian propaganda themes, such as Soviet greatness, Orthodox Christianity, and pan-Slavism.

TIED UP IN KNOTS Slovakia’s response to hosting the Night Wolves Europe demonstrates that a NATO country can be too divided to effectively resist the establishment of a Russian paramilitary base within its territory. The Slovak Foreign Ministry said that it is looking into ways to prevent the Night Wolves from operating there, and the Defense Ministry took back its loaned

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Anti-Russia Czech protesters hold placard on May ,7 2018 in Prague before the arrival of riders of the Russian Night Wolves motorcycle club for a wreath laying ceremony at Olsany cemetery in the memory of Russian fallen soldiers. The placard (R) reads ‹When you go to nasty west world, ride on Russian motorbikes›. (Getty Images)

In addition to fighting for Russia, these groups have helped to push radical pro-Russian views into central Europe’s political mainstream. covert Russian influence” within NATO.

A BROADER STRATEGY

equipment. Yet the interior minister, Denisa Sakova, says that the government has no plans to take action against the Night Wolves for now. Sakova is a member of the left-wing nationalist Smer party, whose coalition partner,the right-wing Slovak National Party, is traditionally close to Russia.

Even if the Slovak government had the will to shut down the Night Wolves’ base, however, it would encounter legal obstacles. Russia exploits the fact that in the liberal democratic states of the West, nongovernmental organizations can generally own land and even conduct paramilitary training while enjoying broad legal protections for free speech and assembly. Unless the organization commits a crime— for instance, by violating weapons statutes, lying on government documents, or committing tax fraud—a government would be hard-pressed to shut it down.

Some Slovaks have thus found themselves wondering what, if anything, their government can do to repulse the Night Wolves. In an interview with the authors, Daniel Milo, an analyst with Slovakia’s GLOBSEC Policy Institute, likened the group’s base to a cancer cell. At the moment, he says, the base might seem small and insignificant. But left unchecked, it could metastasize, eventually becoming a “safe haven for

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The Night Wolves Europe is just the latest outgrowth of Russia’s strategy of using paramilitary groups in foreign countries to further Russian interests. In Ukraine, Russia helped establish paramilitaries that it later installed as “governments” in the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. Russia has also developed friendly paramilitaries throughout central and eastern Europe in an effort to polarize NATO publics and paralyze NATO political systems.

In Slovakia, Moscow has supported several proRussian paramilitary organizations, two of the largest being the Slovak Recruits and Action Group Resistance Kysuce. These Slovak paramilitaries promote anti-NATO and anti-EU views online while training their members in military skills and tactics.

Some of their members have received training in Russia from former Russian Special Forces, and a few have fought alongside Russian paramilitaries in Ukraine. Martin Keprta, a founder and a former member of Slovak Recruits, has been fighting for the 15th International Brigade of the Donetsk People’s Republic Army since autumn 2014.

In addition to fighting for Russia, these groups have helped to push radical pro-Russian views into central Europe’s political mainstream. In 2016, the openly anti-Semitic and anti-Roma party, People›s Party Our Slovakia, entered the Slovak parliament with 8 percent of the vote. The party’s leader, Marian Kotleba, has a close relationship with Action Group Resistance Kysuce, dating back to 2008. Kotleba was one of the first of Europe’s far-right politicians to express support for the deposed, pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych during the Maidan protests in late 2013. Throughout the Ukraine crisis, Russia has sought to undermine Kiev and weaken the EU and NATO by using friendly secessionistnationalist organizations to deliberately revive ethnic antagonisms within other central European countries, including Hungary, Romania, and Poland. Earlier this month, for instance, Hungary (whose government is close to Russia) and Ukraine expelled one another’s

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consuls after a video circulated of a Hungarian official handing out passports to ethnic Hungarians in the trans-Carpathian region of Ukraine and a Ukrainian nationalist organization published a list of Hungarian secessionists online.

Russian paramilitary organizations located inside of NATO countries may also be used to infiltrate governments and militaries. Since paramilitary organizations tend to draw their members from the armed forces, they can acquire military-grade weaponry from contacts and establish direct links with the official armed forces. Russia extensively infiltrated the Ukrainian army and security services prior to its 2014 invasion and may be using paramilitaries to do the same inside NATO. Leaders of the Slovak Action Group Resistance, for instance, have specifically called for their members to infiltrate the Slovakian army or police. The Slovak political experts Grigorij Meseznikov and Radovan Branik describe the group as “mentally and physically much better prepared for real armed conflict” than other paramilitaries.And as mentioned above, the Russian Night Wolves have helped train the police in Hungary and a number of other NATO countries.

In Slovakia, it appears that an entire high school has been created to develop close relations between Russians and the Slovak armed services. The Private Secondary Professional School for the Protection of Persons and Property, based in Bratislava, was founded in 2007 by Stefan Kurilla, a certified Russian Special Forces instructor, and is financed in large part by Russian banker and kickboxing entrepreneur Sergej Chepinoga. The school employs Slovak and Russian teachers and disseminates pro-Russia, antiWestern, and anti-NATO views among its students, many of whose parents work for the Slovak police, intelligence services, or the Defense and Interior Ministries. The school’s former head, Jozef Gandzala,

The EU should begin by following the United States’ lead and adding Wolf Holdings and other paramilitary organizations in Europe to its list of sanctioned organizations.

is a member of the Association of Slovak Soldiers, a pro-Russian veterans’ organization that accused the Slovak Defense Ministry of “treason” for supporting a NATO troop deployment to Latvia in 2017.

POLICY RESPONSES In the short term, the United States and other NATO countries must act decisively to shut down the Night Wolves’ base in Europe. But a longer-term strategy is necessary for confronting Russia’s habit of funding, organizing, and supporting paramilitary and extremist organizations abroad.

The EU should begin by following the United States’ lead and adding Wolf Holdings and other paramilitary organizations in Europe to its list of sanctioned organizations. All Schengen zone countries should likewise deny entry visas to non-EU Night Wolves members. Washington and Brussels should also consider using sanctions to discourage groups based within NATO states from getting training from those based in the Russian federation.

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Russia›s President Vladimir Putin (L) and Night Wolves motorcycle club leader Alexander Zaldostanov aka Khirurg [Surgeon] meet with participants in the Russian Reactor international motorbike show at the 35th Coastal Defense Battery Memorial Center.

Russia exploits the fact that in the liberal democratic states of the West, nongovernmental organizations can generally own land and even conduct paramilitary training while enjoying broad legal protections for free speech and assembly.

Sympathisers and members of the Russian biker group Night Wolves stand together on the grounds of the Federal Police near the BAB 17 highway in Breitenau, eastern Germany, on May ,7 2015 (text on the biker›s jacket in C reads: ‹Russian Bikers› and ‹Ways of Victory›).

Finally, Washington should pressure the Slovak and other European governments to expel the Night Wolves and pass legislation similar to the United States’ Countering America›s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, which provides Washington with broad discretion to sanction entities affiliated with the Russian government, to prevent Russia from supporting paramilitary organizations within NATO territory. Democratic governments cannot prevent associations of native individuals from exercising their rights to free speech and association. But they can find ways to prevent hostile governments from

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organizing opposition to NATO within its borders. *This article was originally published in Foreign Affairs.

MITCHELL A. ORENSTEIN is Professor and Chair of Russian and East European Studies at University of Pennsylvania and author of the forthcoming book with Oxford University Press, The Lands in Between: Russia vs. the West and the New Politics of Hybrid War (Oxford University Press, 2019).

PETER KREKO is Executive Director of the Budapestbased think tank Political Capital.

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What Would Happen to Gender Differences in this Utopia?

Study: The More Equal Women and Men Are, the Less They Want the Same Things

By Deborah Netburn* Imagine an egalitarian society that treats women and men with equal respect, where both sexes are afforded the same opportunities, and the economy is strong.

What would happen to gender differences in this utopia?

Would they dissolve?

The answer, according to a new study, is a resounding no.

The findings, published Thursday in Science, suggest that on the contrary, gender differences across six key personality

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Campaigners, some dressed as suffragettes, attend a rally organised

by UK Feminista to call for equal rights for men and women on October 2012 ,24 in London, England. Hundreds of women from around the UK congregated in Westminster to attend a rally and lobby their local MPs to demonstrate against any legislation that damages women's rights. (Getty Images)

traits — altruism, trust, risk, patience, and positive and negative reciprocity — increase in richer and more genderequal societies. Meanwhile, in societies that are poorer and less egalitarian, these gender differences shrink.

“Fulfilling basic needs is gender neutral,” said Johannes Hermle, a graduate student in economics at the University of California, Berkeley, who worked on the study. However, once those basic needs like food, shelter and good health are met and people are free to follow their own ambitions, the differences between men and women become more pronounced, he said.

The new work is based on data collected by the Gallup World Poll in 2012.

The survey was implemented in 76 countries that represented about 90 percent of the global population, the authors said.

As part of the poll, respondents were asked a series of 12 questions designed to measure the personality traits that influence economic decision-making. These include

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a person’s willingness to take risks, their ability to delay immediate gratification, their inclination toward charitable giving, the degree to which they assume that others have good intentions, and their interest in rewarding kind acts and punishing slights, even if it comes at a financial cost.

The questions were put to about 1,000 randomly selected people in each country. The study includes data from about 80,000 respondents, all 15 years old or older, the authors said.

In their analysis, the researchers controlled for age, cognitive skills, education level, household income and local cultural norms. Once they did that, they found that globally, gender differences were present in all six categories.

Overall, women were more altruistic and trusting than men, and also less patient and less likely to take risks. They scored higher in positive reciprocity (that is, an inclination to repay a favor) than men and lower in negative reciprocity (a desire to seek revenge for a slight).

Further analysis of the data showed that these gender differences were significantly more pronounced in both richer countries and countries with more gender equality.

“What we want to highlight here is that both factors matter,” Hermle said. “Both economic development and gender equality have an independent impact.”

The authors found that gender differences among the six traits were largest in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden and Australia. They were lowest in Ghana, Iraq, Tanzania, Pakistan and Iran.

While these findings were statistically significant, Hermle cautions that the size of the effect is not that large.

For each of these preferences, “there is a huge variation within genders,” he said. “If you randomly take a woman or man from the U.S. or some other country, knowing this person’s gender would tell you very little about their preferences.”

The work does not address why women and men overall scored differently on these traits — for instance, whether this gender gap is biological or if it is imparted by the culture.

But Hermle said the results do rule out a theory that suggests these personality traits are dictated entirely by genetics and evolutionary biology.

“We find enough variability across countries to indicate that people respond to the conditions in which they grow up,” he said.

Ultimately, Hermle said, the study highlights the importance of including women in high-level decision making, both in society as a whole as well as in corporate structures.

“Previous work has shown that higher female empowerment can improve child welfare and lead to a more democratic decision-making process,” he said. “It is important to have a plurality of preferences represented.” * Angeles Times This article was originally published Los Angeles TimesLos

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Mars Could Have Enough Molecular Oxygen to Support Life Scientists Figured Out Where to Find It

By Deborah Netburn* Modern-day Mars may be more hospitable to oxygen-breathing life than previously thought.

A new study suggests that salty water at or near the surface of the red planet could contain enough dissolved O2 to support oxygen-

breathing microbes, and even more complex organisms such as sponges.

“Nobody thought of Mars as a place where aerobic respiration would work because there is so little oxygen in the atmosphere,” said Vlada Stamenkovic an Earth and planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who led the work. “What we’re saying is it is possible that this planet that is so different from Earth

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In this handout provided by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, dark, narrow streaks on the slopes of Hale Crater are inferred to be formed by seasonal flow of water on surface of present-day Mars. These dark features on the slopes are called 'recurring slope lineae' or RSL. Scientists reported on September ,28 2015 using observations with the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer on the same orbiter detected hydrated salts on these slopes at Hale Crater, corroborating the hypothesis that the streaks are formed by briny liquid water. (Getty)

could have given aerobic life a chance.”

As part of the report, Stamenkovic and his coauthors also identified which regions of Mars are most likely to contain brines with the greatest amounts of dissolved oxygen. This could help NASA and other space agencies plan where to send landers on future missions, they said.

The work was published Monday in Nature Geoscience.

On its surface, the planet Mars is not what you would consider a hospitable place for most Earthlings.

Here on Earth, 21 percent of our atmosphere is made up of oxygen — thanks to the abundance of plants and other organisms that create oxygen as a byproduct of photosynthesis.

The Martian atmosphere, on the other hand, is made up of just .145 percent oxygen, according to data collected by the Mars rovers.

With no plants to make O2, the minuscule amount of oxygen on Mars is created when radiation from the sun interacts with CO2 in the planet’s atmosphere.

In addition, Mars’ atmosphere is extremely thin — 160 times thinner than Earth’s atmosphere. In addition, the temperature at the surface frequently drops to minus 100, making it extremely

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difficult for liquid water to exist on the planet’s surface.

Pure liquid water would either freeze or evaporate away on Mars, but salty water, or brines, could remain in a liquid state at or just below the surface of the planet, the authors said. That’s because water mixed with salts has a lower freezing temperature than plain water. (That’s why those unfortunate people who live in cold climates use salt to melt the ice on their sidewalks.)

In the first part of the paper, the authors use computer models to show that water mixed with salts already present on Mars could be stable in a liquid state at or near the surface.

Once the authors were convinced that these liquid brines could exist, their next step was to determine how much dissolved oxygen they could absorb from the atmosphere.

“If there are brines on Mars, then the oxygen would have no choice but to infiltrate them,” said Woody Fischer, a geobiologist at Caltech who worked on the study. “The oxygen would make it everywhere.”

To calculate how much oxygen the brines might absorb, the researchers had to consider their chemistry, as well as the temperature and air pressure at the Martian surface. Brines will absorb more oxygen when the temperature is lower and the air pressure is higher.

Their results showed that modern Mars could support liquid environments with enough dissolved O2 to support oxygenbreathing microbes across the planet. They also found that the oxygen concentrations would be especially high in brines found at the polar regions, where temperatures are cooler.

So far, this work has been done through computer modeling. But experts still said that the study looks robust.

“The best studies that rely on models for their results conduct a thorough review of the possible variables that can influence the model output,” said Kathleen Mandt, a planetary biologist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “This study does a good job at exploring a range of possible outcomes.”

What the study doesn’t do, however, is prove that there are indeed brines on Mars.

“What we know is that theoretically there should be brines on Mars, and that they would be able to dissolve enough oxygen to be biologically useful,” Stamenkovic said.

The next step, he said, is two-fold.

He hopes that researchers here on Earth will do experiments to put oxygen-breathing microbes in the brines that could occur on Mars to find out what type of chemistry they do and whether they can thrive. The other step would be to send a lander to Mars that can look for brines from the shallow to the deep subsurface.

“Amazing work has been done by NASA to look for evidence of past habitable environments,” he said. “I am a big promoter of looking for current habitable environments, and we can do that by starting to explore if there is liquid water on Mars.”

To that end, Stamenkovic is working to develop a new tool, no bigger than a shoe box, that could be used to find water on Mars and determine its salinity, no digging necessary. * Los Angeles Times This article was originally published Los Angeles Times

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Adil Adbul Mahdi Iraq’s New Prime Minister Majalla: London Following the 2018 Iraq parliamentary elections and the 5 months of political deadlock, newly elected President Barham Salih appointed veteran politician Adil Abdul Mahdi as the new prime minister designate.

Abdul Mahdi is considered as the “ideal compromise” candidate as he is the nominee of both winning blocs (Sadr’s Sairoon Alliance and al Amiri’s Fateh Bloc) and has close relations with both the US and Iran. As the new head of government, Abdul Mahdi is taskedwith the huge job of rebuilding Iraq after it endured a fierce war with ISIS, addressing the economic and material grievances of the Iraqi population and maintaining relations with international allies.

Abdul Mahdi was born in Baghdad in 1942 to a father who was a minister in Iraq’s monarchy government. His father also participated in the 1920 Iraqi revolt against British rule.

He attended Baghdad University, where he received his bachelor’s degree in economics in 1963. Two years after graduating, he was employed as a third secretary in the Iraqi foreign ministry. His first involvement in politics came during his youth in the 1960s, having been a member and supporter of Iraq’s Baath party

(the party that Saddam Hussein hailed from), which was still in its infancy stages. Eventually, growing ideological differences led to his departure from the party. He later moved to France in 1969 to pursue a master’s degree in political science at the International Institute of Public Administration in Paris. His academic pursuits did not end there, in 1972 he obtained another master’s degree from the University of Poitiers in France, but this time he studied political economy. Finally, he obtained a PhD in economics, also in France.

While in France he also became the president of the French Institute for Islamic Studies.

Moreover, he worked in think tanks and became an editor for many French and Arabic magazines. During his time in France, he was influenced by communist views. As such, he eventually joined the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP).

His loyalty to communist ideals would not last forever; in the 1980s he underwent another political conversion, this time embracing a Shia Islamist ideology. After the 1979 Iranian Revolution, he joined the Shiite Islamic revolutionary movement, going as far as joining and eventually becoming a leader in the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). He also worked closely with the

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former head of the SCIRI, Mohamed Baqir alHakim. He remained a member of the SCIRI until 2017, after its latest leader, Ammar alHakim, left the party to create a new one called the National Wisdom Movement.

He would return to Iraq after the ouster of the Hussein in 2003, from there he became an active member of Iraqi politics. As a member and representative of the SCIRI, he was appointed as Finance Minister for the Iyad Allawi government in 2004. During his tenure, he led negotiations with the US to cancel Iraq’s foreign debt. He also persuaded international creditors to reduce Iraq’s debt. Furthermore, he helped draft Iraq’s new constitution.

During the 2005 Iraq elections, he was one of the favourite nominees to be appointed Prime Minister, but he was instead chosen to become one of the Vice Presidents (a position that is shared with two other politicians, an arrangement that came about during the Iraqi interim government and the Iraqi Transitional Government and still exists today). His reign lasted 6 years, until he resigned in 2011.

Abdul Mahdi’s last political post before his premiership came in 2014 when former Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi appointed him as Oil Minister, a position he held until his resignation in 2016.

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To Keep your Blood Pressure in Check, Don’t Forget to Brush and Flos Struggling to Bring Your High Blood Pressure Under Control, Even with the Help of Medications?

By Melissa Healy* Struggling to bring your high blood pressure under control, even with the help of medications?

Open your mouth and say “aha!” if you see tooth decay or gums that are sore, bleeding or receding. You may have found the culprit.

Researchers reported Monday that in adults whose hypertension was being treated with medications, systolic blood pressure — which measures pressure in the vessels when the heart beats — got higher as the health of their teeth and gums declined.

Compared to hypertensive patients who had no signs of periodontal disease, those with inflamed gums were 20 percent less likely to have gotten their blood pressure within healthy limits. In addition, patients whose dental health was poor had systolic blood pressure readings that were 3 mm HG higher, on average, than similar patients with healthy gums.

The findings were published in the journal Hypertension.

An estimated one-in-three U.S. adults — that’s 75 million Americans — are thought to have high blood pressure, putting them at greater risk of heart attacks and strokes. Hypertension is a primary or contributing cause of more than 1,000 deaths a day in the United States. Yet only 54 percent of those with the condition have brought their blood pressure readings under control with some combination of

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ss

medication, diet and exercise.

The new study is in line with a mountain of research linking gum disease with higher rates of heart, blood vessel and kidney disease — all organs that are affected by high blood pressure. And it breaks new ground by detailing how poor dental health upends efforts to bring hypertension under control.

of inflammation throughout the body.

Nor does the study show that treating periodontitis will reduce high blood pressure.››

Indeed, the study found that people with untreated hypertension and healthy gums had blood pressure readings roughly equal to those of people who took medication for their hypertension but also suffered from gum disease.

Researchers from Italy scoured the records of 11,753 Americans who participated in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey between 2009 and 4 201 and were screened for periodontal disease.

Some 4,095 of the participants had been diagnosed with hypertension, of whom 88.5 percent were taking medication for the condition and 11.5 percent were not.

In other words, poor dental health largely negated the effects of taking blood pressure medication.

The new research doesn’t establish that gum disease causes hypertension and its negative health effects.

Many researchers suspect that, like stiff blood vessels, sore and bleeding gums are just one more manifestation

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But it does suggest that, when dental health is poor, the challenge of bringing blood pressure under control will be more expensive and is more likely to fail.

Rates of moderate and severe periodontal disease tended to be higher among study participants who were men, older, Latino, smokers, and those with less income and education. Participants who were 65 or older and had evidence of long-standing periodontal disease

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were much more likely than those with less severe and long-standing gum disease to have unchecked high blood pressure — a trend that was particularly evident among Latinos.

Both hypertension and periodontitis are more common among African Americans and Latinos in the United States. Those patient populations also have strikingly higher rates of the diseases linked to both, including heart disease, kidney failure and cerebrovascular diseases such as stroke and certain forms of dementia.

There’s some evidence to suggest African Americans may have a genetic vulnerability to high blood pressure, but it’s controversial. There’s little doubt that access to healthcare differs by race and ethnicity, and that impediments to good medical and dental care play a key role in racial and ethnic health disparities.

Moreover, many primary care physicians and cardiologists fail to ask their patients about their dental health, or to refer them to dentists unless they are undergoing cardiac procedures and have clear signs of tooth decay. And dentists don’t necessarily check their patients’ blood pressure.

The study authors wrote that patients with high blood pressure should have their gum health taken into account when they consider their treatment options.

“Our data suggest that all racial/ethnic subgroups, especially Hispanics, might benefit of such approach,” they wrote. “Conversely, ignoring the additional burden of poor periodontal status on blood pressure might translate into a higher cardiovascular risk in the long term.”

Charlene Niemi, director of health literacy for Care Harbor, a Californiab a s e d n o n p r o fi t

Dental care, especially, is expensive and far less likely than medical care to be fully covered by insurance. As a result, economic factors likely play a powerful role in influencing the health of a patient’s gums.

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charity that provides free medical, dental and vision care in massive “pop-up” health clinics across the state, said it’s “imperative that individuals are informed that good oral care and treatment of gum disease does play a role in blood pressure.”

While everyone needs regular dental checkups, “those with hypertension should understand the importance of having a dental home, seeking routine follow-up, and practicing good oral care,” said Niemi. Linking underserved patients to such routine care is a key mission for Care Harbor.

At a time when federal health insurance for the poor and disabled is being scaled back and the requirements

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of the Affordable Care Act are being whittled away, it’s unlikely that patients with gum disease will get better access to dental care any time soon.

But if they did, it might help, said Dr. Gregg L. Fonarow, a cardiologist at UCLA. “It’s suggested by this data, but would need to be proven,” Fonarow said.

In the meantime, he said, the existence of a link is clear: Patients with hypertension should make every effort to improve their oral health, and those with poor gum health should be vigilant for hypertension. *Los Angeles Times

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The Unheard Nerds How Economists Can Talk So Policymakers Will Listen

by Karen Dynan Advice and Dissent: Why America Suffers When Politics and Economics Collide. Alan Blinder. Basic Books, 368 .2018pp.

An uncomfortable truth for American economists is that they have limited influence on economic policy. Take trade, for example. Anyone who has studied introductory economics

knows that free trade benefits countries in the long run, by allowing them to specialize in producing the goods and services in which they have a comparative advantage.

Economists are in near-universal agreement about this point, although most also agree that it is important to help workers who lose their jobs in the short run because of trade.

Yet free trade has never been very popular in Washington. The

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Economic policy is too often shaped by officials and their advisers in accordance with political goals, with economists used after the fact to justify policies that have been chosen by others believe that it leads to overinvestment in housing and excessive mortgage debt relative to the social optimum. And in recent decades, U.S. states have greatly expanded occupational licensing—regulations setting minimum qualifications for entering a field—for florists, hair stylists, interior designers, and other professions for which the consumer protection benefits of licensing are doubtful. Most economists agree that this sort of occupational licensing hurts workers by restricting entry into a profession and hurts consumers by keeping prices high.

A man walks by the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on July ,12 2018 in New York City.

As fears of a trade war eased with China, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 140 points in morning trading.

(Getty)

administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has imposed costly tariffs on imports from Canada, China, Mexico, and the EU, but such restrictions are not a mere idiosyncrasy of Trump. President Ronald Reagan introduced quotas on Japanese auto imports in 1981, and the North American Free Trade Agreement faced opposition from both Democrats and Republicans when it was introduced to Congress in 1993. And many previous administrations have imposed trade restrictions on steel in order to support U.S. producers: Richard Nixon imposed import quotas, Jimmy Carter set price floors for foreign steel, and both George W. Bush and Barack Obama enacted steel tariffs during their presidencies.

Trade is hardly the only area in which economic policy goes against expert consensus. The Republicans’ 2017 tax reform left largely intact the mortgage interest deduction, which allows homeowners to deduct the interest on loans used to buy or build a home, even though the vast majority of economists

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Why don’t economists have more influence? This is the question posed by Alan Blinder in his new book, Advice and Dissent. And Blinder, a prominent macroeconomist who formerly served on President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and as vice chair of the Federal Reserve Board, is well equipped to answer it. Based on decades of experience in both economics and policymaking, Blinder argues that political incentives often force elected officials to ignore the best advice of economists, to the clear detriment of all. Although Blinder recognizes that there are no simple solutions, he provides clear and compelling, albeit modest, suggestions for how to design economic policy that takes account of political reality.

GET SMART Blinder, riffing on a famous quote often misattributed to the Scottish writer Andrew Lang, argues that politicians typically use economists “the same way that a drunk uses lamp-posts— for support rather than illumination.” Economic policy is too often shaped by officials and their advisers in accordance with political goals, with economists used after the fact to justify policies that have been chosen by others. There are enough economists that a politician can always find one to support almost any policy, even one that most economists reject.

The result is policies that make political sense but leave the country as a whole worse off.

The root of the problem, according to Blinder, is that politicians are dealing with a fundamentally different set of incentives

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and constraints than economists are. The framers of the U.S. Constitution designed a system in which it is difficult to make sweeping policy changes, meaning that politicians generally need broad popular support to do anything. Voters, in turn, have a limited understanding of many issues, especially those related to economic policy. And members of the media often privilege raising their own profile—or the market share of their employer—over fair and balanced reporting, limiting experts’ ability to better inform the electorate. Together, these factors produce a strong incentive for politicians to champion simple ideas that sell well over the more complex, less emotionally charged solutions preferred by economists.

The situation is made worse by political short-termism and the influence of interest groups. Politicians who face reelection every few years tend to adopt policies that will deliver gains in the near future, even if the costs will eventually outweigh the benefits. Conversely, economists favor bearing short-term costs in order to realize long-term gains. For example, Blinder notes that although “many economists favor a consumption tax over an income tax,” arguing that the former is more efficient, “the transitional problems that would arise” from enacting a consumption tax—such as the potentially steep penalty on retirees, who paid income taxes while working only to face higher consumption costs in retirement—are “enough to make a strong politician weep.” Likewise, a politician’s survival may require policies that disproportionately benefit small, well-organized groups yet impose significant costs on the rest of the population.

Advice and Dissent also explores how voters’ misconceptions and politicians’ devotion to special interests conspire to keep policymakers in Washington from applying economists’ knowledge in a number of hotly debated areas, such as inequality, international trade, and tax reform. On the topic

Economists often see their job as designing policies that get the economics right and delivering them to Washington, at which point it becomes someone else’s job to turn those ideas into law

of inequality, for instance, Blinder argues that if more people understood that “it is harder to raise taxes on mobile factors of production than immobile factors,” they would be more willing to “assign the job of redistribution to the federal government,” since “people are far less likely to change countries than to change cities.”

Yet even considering the conflicting incentives and uninspiring record, Blinder believes that there is room for improvement.

He points out that contrary to the popular impression, economists agree on a great many things: that people and companies are heavily influenced by incentives, that there is a tradeoff between the size of a country’s economy and how equally its wealth is distributed, and that simple policy fixes, such as congestion charges for car use, could help solve common problems that inconvenience everyone, such as gridlock. Against the populist, antiestablishment sentiment

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House Way and Means Chairman Kevin Brady (2nd L) (R-TX) and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R) (R-WI), joined by members of the House Republican leadership, introduce tax reform legislation November 2017 ,2 in Washington, DC. (Getty)

driving much of U.S. politics today, Blinder advocates giving technocrats a greater role in government, especially in areas that are more or less value neutral. “An issue is a good candidate for technocratic decision making,” he writes, “if it is technically complex, if it requires a long time horizon, and if it involves the apportionment of pain. It is a bad candidate if value judgments are central to the decision.” For instance, Blinder proposes the creation of a federal infrastructure bank and a nonpolitical federal tax board to redesign the details of the tax system, both of which would represent a significant change from current arrangements.

BIG LITTLE LIES Blinder deserves ample credit for taking the interaction between economics and politics seriously at a time when the challenge of making good economic policy has become

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even more acute. Politicians and the public now show less deference to expertise than in the past, a view encapsulated in the 2016 remark by Michael Gove, then the British justice secretary and a pro-Brexit campaigner, that people “have had enough of experts.” This likely has multiple causes, including the rise of the Internet, a collapse of confidence in the press, and understandable frustration over the role played by experts in the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the 8–2007 financial crisis, and trade policies that have led to unemployment in certain sectors of the economy. But although these examples show that experts can clearly be wrong, expert economic opinion is generally more right than political guesswork. For example, despite economists’ failure to predict the financial crisis, the Federal Reserve’s response to it—providing additional liquidity to backstop the financial system—generated a much better outcome than would have been achieved by following the advice of politicians who wanted to let the banks fail. As

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trust in experts has declined, however, it has become easier for politicians to offer far-fetched solutions regardless of their economic merit.

To make matters worse, the major U.S. political parties have been severely weakened in their ability to select their preferred candidates or target their financial resources. This has only exacerbated short-termism. Party leaders generally have longer time horizons than individual politicians because they are responsible for ongoing relationships with the other party and with voters. Concern for maintaining these relationships and protecting their party’s reputation gives party leaders an incentive to restrain their members from pursuing misguided policies that deliver enticing short-term gains. And traditionally, party leaders have gotten what they wanted.

In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, however, Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont ran insurgent campaigns directly challenging their respective party establishments, with Trump winning the Republican nomination and Sanders only narrowly losing the Democratic one. Insurgent candidates are, as a rule, less worried about longer-term reputational consequences than are those beholden to a party hierarchy and are thus more willing to make wildly unrealistic proposals.

MARGINAL EVOLUTION Blinder acknowledges that there is much more that economists could do to build bridges with politicians and voters. He urges his colleagues to speak in ways that nonexperts can understand and to recognize that “fairness is far more meaningful and important to most people than the economist’s cherished notion of efficiency.”

There are other ways that economists who want to influence policy could increase their own relevance. First, they need to take political constraints more seriously. Economists often see their job as designing policies that get the economics right and delivering them to Washington, at which point it becomes someone else’s job to turn those ideas into law. One problem with this attitude is that nearly all policy proposals require reworking before they can be put into action—and some need a great deal of reworking. Economists should keep this in mind and be more willing to develop what they call “secondbest” solutions, or policies that move in a desirable direction while getting the economics as right as possible given political and other constraints. For example, most economists agree that the most efficient way to cut taxes in order to stimulate a weak economy is to narrowly target the cuts at those who are most likely to spend the extra money. But it will usually be more politically feasible to enact a broad-based payroll tax

cut. This is a case in which it would be better to accept the less efficient policy if the alternative is having no fiscal stimulus at all.

More broadly, economists should view political constraints as potentially useful sources of information about people’s preferences. Although resistance to what economists regard as an ideal policy may sometimes reflect the entrenched influence of a powerful few, at other times it may represent a constructive form of popular feedback. For example, the second-best policy may be much easier to explain than the firstbest, and there is real value in having policies that people can understand. In other cases, such as the opposition to the TransPacific Partnership (a trade deal that Trump scrapped shortly after entering office), political resistance may reflect in part the fact that voters place greater value on equity than efficiency.

Economists need not become legislative experts, but everyone would benefit if they showed more interest in working with politicians to find workable compromises.

Economists could also increase their influence by developing more realistic models that account for institutional considerations, such as the complex linkages among different parts of the financial system, and for behavior that does not fit the simplifying assumptions of traditional economics, which hold that fully informed individuals will rationally pursue their preferences without any cognitive biases or limitations.

Making these changes will make economic research messier and less conclusive, but politicians and voters probably won’t support proposals based on analyses that only vaguely resemble the real world anyway.

The financial crisis was a wake-up call in this regard. Despite clear warning signs, economists were slow to recognize the inflation of a housing bubble in the years leading up to the crash because most were taught that markets were too efficient to overprice an asset for a long period of time.

Economists also missed the ways in which risky mortgagebacked securities linked the housing market to the broader

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financial system, causing them to vastly underestimate the impact of a wave of foreclosures.

Since the financial crisis, economists have made considerable strides in their understanding of financial institutions and how they are connected to the real economy. They are paying more attention to institutional considerations in other policy areas, as well. In student loan policy, for instance, economists are beginning to recognize the risks to students and taxpayers posed by for-profit colleges, many of which encourage students to borrow from the federal government to fund educations that are unlikely to result in high enough incomes to repay the debt. And in labor-market policy, there is a new focus on the challenge of developing institutions that can finance and administer benefits in the gig economy comparable to the arrangements, such as employer-provided health insurance, that have grown up over time with traditional employers.

Similarly, a thriving behavioral economics literature has emerged over the past two decades that incorporates more realistic assumptions about behavior than those embedded in traditional economic models. Consider retirement savings.

Economists used to assume that individuals decided how much to save by projecting their income and consumption needs into the future and then saving in order to maintain a preferred standard of living over their lifetime. Yet behavioral economics has shown that people are generally not so sophisticated: they make decisions using simple rules of thumb and often have self-control problems, consuming in the present even when they know they shouldn’t. This insight has led to policies designed to address these limitations, such as workplace retirement saving plans, in which people commit to saving a certain amount out of every paycheck. These are effective at encouraging saving, especially if employers “nudge” their workers into such plans by signing them up automatically and making them request to opt out. Although economists are still only beginning to understand the degree to which individual economic decisions can be explained by cognitive limitations and biases, rather than rational calculations based on preferences, advances in behavioral economics will pave the way for improved policy.

Finally, economists must develop more and better evidence about which policies work. Such evidence can be hard to come by, because opportunities to conduct experiments and collect data on outcomes, especially across longer time periods, are necessarily limited. But today, both the accumulation of evidence from previous policies and improvements in methodology are allowing economists to more rigorously evaluate what works and why. One particularly important line of research has examined the long-term effects of government programs aimed at providing better education, health care, housing, and nutrition to children in low-income families. The

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An uncomfortable truth for American economists is that they have limited influence on economic policy economists Hilary Hoynes, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, and Douglas Almond, for instance, have shown that access to food stamps in childhood leads to significantly better adult outcomes in health and, for women, economic self-sufficiency.

Politicians are likely to find policy proposals backed by hard evidence much more appealing than those that simply sound good on paper.

Such research may hold the potential to help move policy beyond the left-right divide. In 2016, Paul Ryan, the Republican Speaker of the House, and Patty Murray, a Democratic senator from Washington State, sponsored legislation creating the bipartisan Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking.

The commission, which includes many economists in its ranks, issued a report last fall with recommendations for how the federal government can improve its gathering and use of data to shape policy, including increasing the coordination of evidence-gathering efforts within the government and developing a uniform process for outside researchers to gain secure access to confidential government data.

There is no silver bullet for making economic policy better in the face of political constraints. Economists and elected officials will continue to face different incentives, and in many cases, political necessity will triumph over economic sense.

There is certainly some scope for increasing the influence of economists and other experts, through changes both in the policymaking process and in the way that economists do their work. But these changes need to go hand in hand with a commitment by elected leaders to communicate honestly and show respect for evidence. Political leaders need to recognize that they will ultimately get more support from voters by addressing their problems, which they can do effectively only with help from experts. Voters, for their part, need to hold their leaders responsible for outcomes. Otherwise, honesty, for a politician, will continue be a fool’s game.

KAREN DYNAN is Professor of the Practice of Economics at Harvard University. From 2014 to 2017, she served as Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy and Chief Economists at the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

This article was originally published in the November/ December 2018 issue of Foreign Affairs Magazine and on ForeignAffairs.com.