Greg Sanders

No entry tonight, data-mining for the League of Women Voters

A good cause, but it's keeping me busy.

The Ballad of the Whiskey Robber by Julian Rubinstein: Review

A Transylvanian named Attila Ambrus makes a daring escape from Ceaușescu's totalitarian Romania to try to make his luck in Hungary. Unfortunately, being a third rank goalie for a middling hockey club doesn't really pay the bills, especially as the Soviet Union falls apart and the nation begins a rough transition to a capitalist system. Fortunately, Attila is a charming and resourceful gentlemen and quickly finds ways to make end meet through pelt smuggling and a bit of bank robbery.

Rubinstein has found an amazing true story to anchor this non-fiction tale. Attila himself is fascinating and despite a variety of poor life choices has the pathos to provide this story its core. Critically, while no doubt a criminal, the man is a robber, not a gangster, which is why he became a widely adored Robin Hood-esque figure in his adopted land over the course of more than a score of often whiskey-fueled heists.

However, the book is more than just the superbly reported slice-life tale of a strangely compelling criminal. The book also follows the adventures of the police officers chasing him, but in a larger sense it tells of the triumphs and more often travails of Hungary and, to a lesser extent, Romania, as they chart a post-Soviet path. Suffice to say, Atilla is hardly the biggest crook in the country. This is a great story and an important one, as Prime Minster Viktor Orbán has been in the news in recent months for all the wrong reasons.

I would recommend the book for anyone with an interest in heists or contemporary Eastern Europe. But first and foremost, it is a character study of a fascinating man, by turns extravagant and self-effacing, who does extraordinary things in interesting times.

Source: Present from Moti, thanks Moti!

Some generals are undermining the U.S.'s bargaining credibility in Iraq

As ever, speaking strictly for myself and not my organization.

I was deeply troubled by news in the Washington Post today.

Retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, who served under Obama until last year, became the latest high-profile skeptic on Thursday, telling the House Intelligence Committee that a blanket prohibition on ground combat was tying the military’s hands. “Half-hearted or tentative efforts, or airstrikes alone, can backfire on us and actually strengthen our foes’ credibility,” he said. “We may not wish to reassure our enemies in advance that they will not see American boots on the ground.”

Mattis’s comments came two days after Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took the rare step of publicly suggesting that a policy already set by the commander in chief could be reconsidered.

Despite Obama’s promise that he would not deploy ground combat forces, Dempsey made clear that he didn’t want to rule out the possibility, if only to deploy small teams in limited circumstances. He also acknowledged that Army Gen. Lloyd Austin, the commander for the Middle East, had already recommended doing so in the case of at least one battle in Iraq but was overruled.

My hypothesis is that Gen. Mattis is missing the more important part of the picture. Over commitment can backfire on us, leading partners to avoid making hard choices because they know the U.S. will solve their problems for them. The outcome will primarily depend not on what the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, aka ISIS, aka, Islamic State) thinks about our credibility to escalate. Instead, what matters more is what the Iraqi government, the Gulf States, and to a lesser extent the Kurdish autonomous regional government, think about whether they can free-ride on us. Prime Minister Maliki was pushed out in  large part because Iraqi power brokers [knew we] would not bail him out. Unfortunately, P.M. Maliki was more a reflection than a cause of Iraqi sectarian problems and in the near future we'll likely need to keep the pressure up to control Shia aligned militias and to increase the chances of Sunni militias breaking with ISIL. Our Gulf State partners do appear to be genuinely horrified by ISIL, but [private funders] from their nations were directly complicit in its rise and you can bet that they'll be happy to slow walk their support if they the United States will just escalate if things get out of control. Bargaining credibility matters less with autonomous Kurdistan which has more at stake than even the government of Iraq, though presumably

But Greg, didn't you support similar calls when it came to the Iraq war?

Yes. Here's the big difference to me. If an invasion or conventional war is under-resourced the consequence can be large scale U.S. casualties or U.S. troops being stuck in a quagmire for years made worse by a badly implemented start. In this case, if air power isn't sufficient, we can reevaluate, but we won't be stuck in the midst of an occupation or facing large scale casualties.

But aren't the generals right that we may not be able to destroy ISIL without ground power?

Yes, but we also can't guarantee the destruction of ISIL with ground power either. Can we pacify portions of the country for a period at high cost? Sure, but unless you're willing to do a ground invasion of Syria they'll still potentially have a base. If you are willing to send U.S. ground troops into a three way civil war in Syria, then we have a bigger argument.

So how can President Obama assert that we'll destroy ISIL

That word is puffery, perhaps ill-chosen, perhaps a rhetorical excess common in war, quite possibly both. Regardless, Gen. Dempsey effectively tested the premise of which is the higher priority in the strategy, destroying ISIL or preventing the U.S. from being drawn into another Iraq or Afghanistan. President Obama has clearly made the strategic choice that avoiding another large scale U.S. war is the higher priority [Zach Beaucamp does a good job of laying this out in greater detail]. Weighing these fundamental priorities is a strategic choice, not a resourcing choice. It is entirely fair game to point out that the administration has made this choice and hawkish politicians are certainly free to argue for more wars, its a free country, that's there right. However, now that the priorities are clear, from a civil-military perspective this as primarily a debate about strategy, not about implementation.

[Update: Tuned wording slightly after posting. Second update added a few more links and some word changes in brackets.]

Osaka-jo and the Moti-Francis experience 2014-05-31

When the rest of the group went off to try tracking down the Transportation and Human Rights museums, Francis and I were taking our normal leisurely pace through the rest of the Living Museum, and we decided to branch off to try our own side trip. So after we finished up the museum, we took a walk to the nearest Osaka Loop Line station, Temma, and hopped over to Osaka Castle.

We came in the back of the castle area, where the JR station is, and walked up on a large number of people waiting around outside Osaka-jo Hall for a Porno Graffiti concert to start. It took a couple of beats to remember that this is a band, but they’re actually pretty good.

We made our way up past the concert venue area, and walked up towards the castle. Like many of the castles now standing in Japan, it’s a reconstruction, as the actual castle had been destroyed decades ago. Different from many other large castles in Japan, though, this one had been destroyed and rebuilt a few times over the course of its history. As the final main castle of the Toyotomi family, who briefly ruled over Japan before the Tokugawa shogunate, it has a lot of symbolic resonance.

  It’s also just stunning, rising up in the middle of Osaka in the middle of a still-open space. You can’t really tell that it’s a reconstruction from the outside. As you walk up the slopes and around the battlements, you can get clear views of the castle, and imagine how imposing it must have been to come there when it was still a seat of power.

Once we reached the castle entrance, we found out that the interior now is devoted to a history museum, largely focusing on the period immediately before the third shogunate and Toyotomi Hideyoshi himself. While I find Hideyoshi a very interesting historical figure – he was of very low birth and infamously ugly, so you can imagine how charismatic and skilled he must have been to become the leader of Japan – Francis was not very interested in seeing the inside of the castle, and the entry fee was fairly steep, so we just watched some buskers and had ice cream before heading out a different gate.

We then walked towards Dotombori to meet up with the rest of the group, and spotted some interesting buildings a  long the way, like the NHK building above and to the right, or this Luther hotel on the left, attached to the Lutheran church. The contrast between the castle and surrounding buildings, like the NHK station, is very striking, and both were different from Dotombori, where we ended up next.

No entry tonight due to Orioles game

They won, so we're pleased about that. It did break our streak of every game this year having at least one team get ten runs or more. But that's okay, as two of the four times, that team wasn't the Orioles.

Also we got free T-shirts with the O's playoff slogan "We Won't Stop" so that's neat. Everything they've managed this year has been a continual pleasant surprise to me.

Ticket source: Mom! Thanks Mom.

Osaka Human Rights Museum 2014-05-31

While my wife and mother were cooling their heels at the the closed Modern Transportation Museum, I was at a different station, searching for the Osaka Human Rights Museum. It was a bit of a walk from the station, made longer by my misreading of the map. I ultimately gave in and turned on data roaming to pull down some digital navigation assistance. Thankfully for you, dear reader, I'm not subjecting you to another post (primarily) about wars, past or present. This museum is primarily focused on the human rights situation in modern Japan and many of the displays, including AIDS quilts and rainbow flags, were instantly recognizable even though the displays were in Japanese.

The first zone of the single floor of exhibits was entitled Shining Light. This section could be a bit sign-heavy, but there were pictures to help and I got both an English audio guide and a printed notebook with translations to help. The displays were also rich in photographs and pictures taking on issues of gender discrimination, LGBTQ rights, the rights of the disabled, and even a significant section on children. My comprehension level wasn't quite high enough to grasp how some of the displays might have been different than their equivalent in the United States, although I know that the struggle for gender equality in Japan is very much ongoing.

I dwelled the longest in the second zone, Living Together/Creating Society which focused on ethnic minority groups within Japan as well as other communities facing human rights issues, often for health or environmental reasons. Displays included rich coverage of Korean and Chinese immigrants, the Ainu people, and native Okinawans. In the Korean section, I found particularly affecting a set of captioned home videos on the post-War Korean community in Japan including a celebration in Kyoto of the liberation of the peninsula on the first anniversary of Victory in Japan day. The section on the Ainu and the Okinawans both focused on their living culture, although of course in the latter case the U.S. military base adds a whole different set of issues to the discussion.

One piece that did particular catch my eyes was a flag that was both instantly recognizable and unfamiliar. To the left is a was the banner of a Christian group in Japan, a red crown of thorns on a black field. The museum really did do an admirable job getting at the history of a range of groups and the last section on Dreams/The Future as well as the staffers in the front office and bookstore all left me feeling good about the Japanese activist community.

I left a bit before closing, rushing back to the loop train to try to get a half hour in at the Modern Transportation Museum, which unbeknownst to me had been closed this whole time. I somehow managed to miss Kate and Mom on the platform and wandered around the building once before running into them. Happily, we did have one fond train story coming out of that particular excursion. At the transfer station on the way to meet up with Moti and Francis we spied the poster on the right, celebrating the 110th anniversary of Osaka's transit system. One of the booth attendants saw us doing that and rushed up, but gladly this was not a fusspot of the paranoid American-style. Instead, the gentleman had just recognized us as transit geeks and gave us three post card copies of the poster to send out as we wished. That encounter brightened our day and took some of the sting out of the missed connections at the museum.

Syria: What's the alternative?

Speaking for myself here, you know the drill.

My last post was fairly critical of the President's announcement, and I'm now satisfied that the critiques have been thoroughly covered. Similarly, the flaws in the legal rationale are being well reported. Thankfully these critiques have included debunking of some of the alarmist rhetoric, done here by a one-time colleague I admire;

Daniel Benjamin, who served as the State Department’s top counterterrorism adviser during Mr. Obama’s first term, said the public discussion about the ISIS threat has been a “farce,” with “members of the cabinet and top military officers all over the place describing the threat in lurid terms that are not justified.”

As disturbing as I find threat inflation by the administration, it's important to remember that the context is relentless alarmism from hawks, primarily in the opposition but not limited to that. So let me start with praising the way the President has handled Iraq. Marc Lynch discusses the details:

Obama did very well by acting to prevent the fall of Erbil or Baghdad, while conditioning additional U.S. military support on political change. He correctly understood that military aid prior to Maliki’s departure would simply enable his destructive, sectarian style of rule which played a key role in both the revival of the Iraqi Sunni insurgency, with ISIS as its vanguard, and the stunning collapse of the Iraqi army. His replacement by Haider al-Abadi, a similar Shia Islamist that has nevertheless committed to forming a more representative polity in Baghdad, was a necessary, but not sufficient, step to begin the engagement of deeply alienated Sunnis. U.S. diplomats must be prepared for the real risk that Iraqi politicians will revert to their destructive, self-interested and sectarian ways once the existential threat recedes.

This is one example of what it means to say that a problem doesn't have a military solution. There is a common phenomenon in legislative politics where final passage is preceded by a crisis and only when passage is imperiled can various members be convinced to stop free-riding and compromise their demands. Those that followed Iraq widely knew that P.M. Maliki was bad news, but it was only possible to push him out once it became clear that we would not be bailing him out. Unfortunately the challenge in Syria is just as political but even larger, increasing the unity, not just the firepower, of the opposition. Again, here's Marc Lynch with the Center for A New American Security's tourniquet strategy:

The immediate goal in Syria should be the securing of a strategic pause between the rebel forces and the regime in order to focus military efforts on ISIS.  Crucially, this strategic pause does not mean cooperation or alignment with Asad, or a retreat from the Geneva Accord principles of a political transition. It should be understood instead as buying the time to shape an environment in which such a transition could become plausible. As the administration clearly recognizes, an alliance with Asad against ISIS would cause more problems than it solves. Even setting aside the moral objections to aligning with a regime responsible for large-scale war crimes, working with Asad would almost certainly drive horrified opposition fighters and civilians toward ISIS and critically divide the regional coalition.  There is little chance at the moment of his overthrow by force at any rate, however. Indeed, like Slobodon Milosevic in the Balkan wars, Asad is less likely to survive a de-escalated but internationally penetrated political landscape than he is to cling to power against Syria’s insurgency.

The longer-term goal should be to translate this anti-ISIS tacit accord into an effective agreement by the external backers of both Asad and the rebels on a de-escalation of the conflict.  Rather than a military drive on Damascus, the international community should build upon UN Resolution 2165 authorizing cross-border aid to  support the delivery of serious humanitarian relief, security and governance to rebel controlled areas and refugees. And it should build upon UN Resolution 2170 sanctioning ISIS and focus upon the joint restriction of the flow of funds and fighters to all sides of the Syria conflict. Asad will not voluntarily agree to such an accord, of course, and would seek every opportunity to disrupt the process.

This aligns with what I've read of the political science (here's Dan Drezner's summary). This will be challenging, as the results of the air campaign will not give results that will be satisfying in the short term. I have critiqued the administration before and will again, but I think they are making a bigger picture strategic mistake by what Drezner calls "the consolidation of policy authority inside the White House." Part of this is just that the President's comparatively less interventionist instincts leaves him somewhat isolated in the policymaking community. However, this is a self-defeating response. Consolidating control reduces the pool of talent you can call upon and might help you in a single area - say the vital negotiations with Iran - but hurts you elsewhere. By comparison, respecting Congress's constitutional role in matters of war would add a veto point and force critics in the legislature to actually participate in the governing process rather than just pontificating. The downside - fewer interventions when the President does have a case - is manageable and looks appealing when you survey the Presidential field for 2016.

Strategic critique aside, successfully implementing the tourniquet strategy demands avoiding mission creep. To take an earlier wise comment from Sam Brannen, a current colleague I admire:

Much now remains up to the Iraqis, from the hard fighting on the ground to political reconciliation. And the White House must craft its Iraq strategy on the fly, reacting to a highly fluid environment, balancing doing too little or too much and always risking mission creep or mission failure. But so far, the use of force by the United States has shown strength in a part of the world where, unfortunately, the tip of the spear is the coin of the realm.

Military force is a coin of the realm in the Middle East, not because of intrinsic cultural characteristics so much as the fact that it always accompanies great power competition and widespread autocracy (or unconsolidated democracy). But to extend the metaphor, other powers will always be happy to have you spend your coin on their behalf but that doesn't make it good strategy. As a final note, to take one lesson from my classes in negotiation and past trips to China and Egypt, you haven't begun bargaining until you've threatened to walk away. That's not a lesson one should apply to marriages or treaty alliances, but thankfully in the Persian Gulf we're dealing with neither.

I am still unconvinced by the argument for direct U.S. intervention in Syria

As ever, speaking for myself and not my employer.

The New York Times editorial board and Kevin Drum do a good job of laying out the case that the President should seek Congress's approval before going to war in Syria.

In the end, aren't the president's personal convictions all that prevent any military operation from escalating?

It's a fair point, and I'm glad he brought it up. The answer, I think, lies in congressional approval for military action, and this is one of the reasons I think it's so important. If Obama is truly serious about not sending combat troops into ISIS-held areas in Iraq, then let's get a congressional resolution that puts that in writing. Let's get an authorization for war that spells out a geographical area; puts a limit on US troop deployments; and specifically defines what those troops can do.

Would this be airtight? Of course not... But nothing is airtight—nor should it be. It's always possible that events on the ground really will justify stronger action someday. However, what it does do is simple: It forces the president to explicitly request an escalation and it forces Congress to explicitly authorize his request. At the very least, that prevents a slow, stealthy escalation that flies under the radar of public opinion.

Presidents don't like having their actions constrained. No one does. But in most walks of life that deal with power and the use of force, we understand that constraint is important. Surely, then, there's nowhere it's more important than in matters of war and peace. And that's one of the reasons that congressional authorization for war is so essential.

ISIS did heinously execute two Americans that were already in Syria, and they should be punished for that. However, as Zack Beauchamp pointed out, the President implicitly noted that they are not a significant threat to the United States and there is no immediate crisis preventing getting congressional authorization. Syria continues to be an extremely challenging foreign policy problem and as Marc Lynch summarizes, the political science research on the civil wars does not support the idea that we could have just fixed it by intervening to a greater extent:

Would the United States providing more arms to the FSA have accomplished these goals? The academic literature is not encouraging. In general, external support for rebels almost always make wars longer, bloodier and harder to resolve (for more on this, see the proceedings of this Project on Middle East Political Science symposium in the free PDF download). Worse, as the University of Maryland’s David Cunningham has shown, Syria had most of the characteristics of the type of civil war in which external support for rebels is least effective. The University of Colorado’s Aysegul Aydin and Binghamton University’s Patrick Regan have suggested that external support for a rebel group could help when all the external powers backing a rebel group are on the same page and effectively cooperate in directing resources to a common end. Unfortunately, Syria was never that type of civil war.

So put me in the skeptic camp on the benefits of striking Syria. I was less skeptical with the war in Libya, but I take the same position now as I did then: if the President thinks this is a good idea, then take it to Congress. It's in the Constitution for a good reason and there aren't any circumstances that prevent it. Were I in Congress, I'd be inclined to vote no absent notable constraints. However, I'm in the minority there apparently, so what's the harm in asking?

No post tonight, working on proposals

On the upside, I've worked with Typepad technical support to slowly nail down the nature of some of the typographic glitches this blog has been suffering from. Looks like turning off smart quotes in livewriter will fix most of it going forward. However, I'm going to need to figure out the least painful way to fix things going backwards.

Review: She Kills Monsters; Rorschach Theater, D.C., through 9/14/2014

The role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) has finally been making its way into the larger culture in a salutary way. While any number of fantasy universes drawing inspiration from the game have been depicted, to the extent they touch on the experience of role-playing itself they tend to lean heavily on in-jokes or camp. As a result, even when they are good, the larger relevance is more limited. She Kills Monsters escapes that trap, as did two episodes of Community and an element within an episode of IT Crowd before it. I’d affirm positive reviews from Michael Poandl of DC Metro Arts and Peter Marks of the Washington Post that the play does a good job of sticking to its emotional core in a way that transcends any particular fandom. Critically, the play avoids wallowing in either nerd self-pity or triumphalism.  It is true that “some rudimentary knowledge of D&D” would help, but frankly if you lack it and are curious at all, this is a great way to explore it. If anything, a lack of knowledge of 1990s culture might prove more challenging than a lack of familiarity with role-playing games.

Questing to better know the sister she lost

She Kills Monsters (written by Qui Nguyen, directed by Randy Baker) focuses on two sisters, Agnes (Maggie Evans) and Tilly (Rebecca Hausman), separated by about ten years and by Tilly’s death, a tragic accident described in the prologue. Agnes is explicitly quite an average person and teacher at the high school Tilly and her friends attended while Tilly is described as that uncommon jewel for the time of a female player and dungeon master, not to mention one of extraordinary ability. Agnes finds a module that Tilly wrote and goes to seek out someone to run it with. She finds Chuck (Robert Pike), a one time compatriot of Tilly’s whose skill at running the game is only somewhat undercut by his mild lechery and difficulty describing his platonic relationship with an older woman.

The staging is clever, bringing in the excitement of fantasy conflict (chorography by  Casey Kaleba) while staying grounded in the emotions of the players. The set itself is fantastic, various real world and fantasy locations rest at the edges while the core is a game world map with hexagons of various elevations standing in for terrain. While in a sense, Chuck portrays all the non-player characters, in actuality each role has its own actor, or troop member in the case of the monsters. However, he still has sidebars with the characters, interacts with other people in Agnes’s life, and sometimes intercedes to explain a role playing choice, noting that there is some improvisation involved when defending Lilth’s (Emily Kester) line that violence makes her hot. The underdressed demon queen Lilith is one of the party written into the module, along with dark elf Kaliope (Tori Boutin) who has a Vulcan’s relationship to emotions, and slacker king of the underworld Orcus (Lous E. Davis) who is one of several reliable sources of comedy in the proceedings. Tilly herself has a self-insert character in her module, Tillius, the powerful and storied paladin and driving force behind the quest.

A surprisingly plausible campaign

Any role-playing gamers in the audience by now may have noticed that the module Tilly wrote violates any number of rules of good adventure writing by making the player character a sidekick to her favorite heroes. However, bad design can be good drama and this module was probably only intended for Agnes anyways. More important, Agnes increasingly drives the action as the story gets further along and she has to confront Tilly’s demons and her own. It should also come as no surprise that game mechanics don’t feature that much in the play - a key battle is resolved in an entirely improvised manner - but to me it all felt quite authentic. This is the story of a player who despite her newness was entirely willing to buy in and a skilled dungeon master collaborating with an author to give her the sometimes harsh story she needed.

I’d endorse this without reservation for role playing game fans, their curious friends and family, and anyone just curious. While the tale is heavy at times, the comedy also helps carry it through. This certainly won’t be starting a new subgenre; the setup is ingenious but also very specific to this tale. Instead, it addresses one particular part of the human condition: how games can both help us escape reality and how they can help us face it.

Image credit: Promotional photos from Rorschach Theater Company.

Don’t split the party! 2014-05-31

Since we only had one day in Osaka, we went our separate ways in order to better catch the things of most interest. This was complicated by the fact that our portable wifi hotspot hadn’t yet been delivered, so we were limited to the one working rental phone. Over the course of the trip we had trouble with meet ups a couple times, in part because I’d forgotten how to properly use public phones. Turns out you dial first then put in the money, which is not how pay phones in the US (used to) work. Regardless, Kate and Mom got off to go to the Modern Transportation Museum (MTM) and I went on to check out the Osaka Human Rights museum. Fun fact about the MTM: it’s moving and the current location closed on April 6th. This hasn’t merited mention on the English language website and it didn’t get planned in time to get picked up by our guidebook, although wikipedia notes it, so score one for the wiki model.  So they spent several hours hanging out on the platform at Bentencho, after attempting to check out a tea shop that was full and not accepting more customers.

On my end, I walked around a bit searching for the Human Rights Museum before realizing I was misreading the map by looking where the label text was written rather the connected dock. Fortunately once I found the place, it was actually open and will get a write-up next.

Traditional Osaka street life, eight stories up! (2014-05-31)

The Osaka Museum of Housing and Living is easy to reach off the subway. It is on the eighth floor of the Housing Information Center and well worth the price of admission. The tour starts by going up another two stories and giving you a view down on the reconstructed Edo-period 1830s village. It’s in the midst of a summer festival, so shops display their wares through fanciful displays, the streets are in their full regalia, and fireworks can be seen in the nighttime portion of the cycle of the hours. After the overview you go down a level to walk the streets yourself. The whole experience was enhanced by the people wandering in festival-appropriate yukata, but unlike the similar wanderers in Higashiyama, here you have a chance to don the outfits yourself. We sadly lacked the time to wait, but those that made the change seemed to quite enjoy themselves and enriched the experience for everyone else.

There was a mix of shops, baths, workplaces, and houses on display. The displays throughout the museum were predominantly in Japanese, only fair given that Commodore Perry hadn’t yet arrived to force the opening of Japan by 1830. I believe an audio tour was available although there was a lot you could get by just observing.

The lack of English is a bit more challenging after you return to the eighth floor, but the diorama of life in Osaka across the past two centuries by strength of the models alone.  The bustling commercial district of Kitasenba on the right could easily be mistaken for a Western city of the 1930s and that development by emulation is certainly not a coincidence.

While a far lighter visit than the Hiroshima Peace Museum, the dioramas also cover the post-war reconstruction period, with the Shirokita Bus settlement shown on the left. Each of the dioramas had both the wider overview and a more intimate scene like this one that gave more of a feel for what life was like in the period in question. After you finish seeing reconstructions and artifacts from multiple points in Osaka history there’s a rotating special exhibition to round out the visit. This time it was focused on a particular architect with Scandinavian ties if memory serves.

Afterwards, we split up to go on separate (mis)adventures, but that will have to wait until the next travel post.

International relations at a fraught moment: Ukraine

As ever, I speak for myself and not my organization in this post.

These are interesting times, in the perhaps apocryphal Chinese curse sense of the term, to attend the American Political Science Association annual meeting as news from the Ukraine was being tracked on many smart phones. First, a bit of perspective, as Jay Ulfelder notes, the worst world ever in the past five or ten years.

If you read those stories, you might infer that the world has become more insecure than ever, or at least the most insecure it’s been since the last world war. That would be reasonable, but probably also wrong.  These press accounts of record-breaking trends are often omitting or underplaying a crucial detail: the data series on which these claims rely don’t extend very far into the past.

It’s very good that we have these sources, but we need to remember their limitations.

Of the crises in Ukraine and Iraq/Syria, I’ll cover Ukraine in this post, as that’s the more dangerous one. Any great power confrontation between nuclear states, even via proxies, exercises, and economic measures should focus the mind. So how is this likely to play out? Robert Farley had a fairly cogent set of predictions back in early August based on analysis the motivations of each actors, and so far he’s been on the money.

My guess is that we’ll see a short, conventional war of maneuver between Russia and Ukraine, that the Russian will win, but will restrain its activities to Donetsk, Luhansk, and environs. It’s going to be very difficult for the Ukrainian military to restrain itself short of complete victory over the separatists, and the drive for victory will probably spur Russian intervention.  With luck, however, the war will be quick, only moderately destructive, and the political aftermath will be manageable.

This can correctly be viewed as a bad outcome, Russia is violating the UN charter and past agreements to respect the sovereignty of Ukraine. However, I do not believe that this merits military intervention to change this outcome. Why not? Because Ukraine is not in NATO and Russia is only using a fraction of its available forces. The last estimate I read was from Michael Birnbaum and Annie Gowen’s article “at least a 1,000 Russian soldiers.” Thus in a limited war Russia could easily engage in tit-for-tat escalation, this would raise the price for Russia, but also the price for Ukraine. There’s some forms of aid we can and often are providing Ukraine, most notably intelligence, but we should not provide false hope, which has proven historically that it can be as deadly as most weapons in the arsenal.

The Ukrainian government faces a very challenging political dilemma: how much are they willing to concede and how unified will they be in the fight for the rest? Their answer to the second question has been impressive so far despite remarkable problems in their parliament. Notably, the Ukrainian armed forces, after an initial reorganization, has been fairing far better than many sides that we have trained or been actively backing, which is an outcome worth pondering. While Ukraine will lose the war of maneuver, the question of how it loses and how much unity it can manage in the loss will be key determinants of how favorable the terms that end the war will be.

In the bigger strategic picture, this is a conflict about how much control Russia maintains over its sphere of influence. President Putin is not a grand chess master, he is instead a gambler who prefers playing for lower stakes but that keeps buying in every time he loses. His attempt to keep Ukraine primarily in Russia’s economic orbit through aid and debt failed, he lost his preferred elected proxy to popular protests and parliamentary action, he successfully took Crimea, his attempt to disrupt the Ukrainian elections failed, his arming of rebel groups backfired disastrously when they accidentally shot down an airliner, and the rebel forces he was backing were steadily losing territory. His doubling down through escalation has enabled a U.S. strategy of conditional containment. The center of gravity in this larger fight is economic support and political acquiescence that comes from trading partners in Europe. President Putin has faced significant losses on that front and the Russian economy and thus future Russian military capacity will pay the price. The coming NATO summit shows just how much he has lost, there will now be a rapid reaction force of 4,000 NATO soldiers capable, rotating through bases in Eastern Europe, and capable of responding within eight hours. That is on top of threatened further sanctions should the direct intervention of Russian forces continue.

Thus, to take a report that I do often find insightful, I disagree with Max Fisher of Vox in his evaluation of President Obama’s performance. Fisher rightly critiques U.S. policy in Egypt, but our relationship and options with a partner that we give substantial aid to is rather different than our relationship to Russia. Fisher’s complains that Obama “is steering a race car as if it were a cruise ship, and while history will likely thank him for keeping US foreign policy pointed in the right direction, it may not so easily forgive him for the damage taken along the way.” A race car is a bad analogy, there’s a reason the idiom is the ship of state, like a cruise ship, or an nuclear air craft carrier, big picture choices on course are made carefully because they’ll have long lasting consequences. The President has to make hard choices every day, as Fisher says, but one of the things that makes them hard is that the right course is often unsatisfying in the short term. This isn’t to say that there’s aren’t a series of important tactical choices big implications, an air craft carrier holds airplanes after all, but if there was a clear option that would have de-escalated this conflict rather than lead to an escalating Russian response, I’d like to hear it from Fisher.

There are certainly cases that would prove me wrong. If Russia makes a drive for Kyiv or broadens its current destabilizing campaign to other nations in the near term, that would demonstrate to me that attempts to preserve a face-saving way out for Russia may have unwisely trumped inflicting a near term price. However, while WWII also began with a great power accumulating territory from neighboring states in part by exploiting those locals that were sympathetic, the overall strategic picture is very different. In those days, the biggest economic power in Europe was the aggressor, Germany. Today, the aggressor is a natural resources dependent power in demographic decline and the biggest economic powerhouse is still Germany, and Germany has lost faith in Russia. Even though Piotr Buras in that piece argues that at present Germany is feeling helpless, I think Matt Yglesias is right when he argues that, Europe is slow, not weak.

Preview of coming attractions: Osaka Museum of Housing and Living

I ended up getting home late tonight and prioritizing some Purple Line logo work. To reward your patience, dear readers, here’s a picture taken at our next location.

In the meantime, I’ll put a help request to figure out why typepad keeps messing up apostrophes.

Osaka Underground and a ride on the Purple Line

Japan’s third largest city (second being Yokohama off Tokyo Bay), Osaka is a short bullet train hop from Kyoto. For train purposes, Shin-Osaka station works a bit like Chicago, one of the main meeting points for those heading west or east. Shin means new, the station itself is a bit out of town and so after arriving, and admiring a fancy new model train on a far platform, we quickly caught the train to the central Osaka station and the city’s loop line.

Our first destination was lunch and perhaps unsurprisingly, we settled on trying this vaunted Osaka-style okonomiyaki at the first available opportunity. That opportunity came via the tunnels that undergird the area around the station. Nearby department stores and a range of subway stations all are accessible without crossing a single street. The tunnels were quite well lit with waterfalls and natural light in sections. That said, navigating them can be a bit of a challenge and the distances aren’t trivial, so visitors would be well advised to keep an eye out for signs and to keep a map at hand.

Once we fed, we headed to the Osaka Housing and Living museum, which looks at what life was like at various point in the city’s past. To get there we took the subway’s Purple Line, which wouldn’t particularly resemble the planned Maryland light rail line except in color, but that didn’t stop us from taking a picture! For those readers that don’t know, that particular transit line has been in the works for a generation and I put in my volunteer time trying to get us a system with some of the easy connections between various lines that cities like Osaka have. It’s late enough, that I’ll put off the museum entry for tomorrow night, but if you’d like to know where the project stands I’d recommend Robert McCartney’s column in the Washington Post.