How North Korea made the Iran deal inevitable

The deal between Iran, the United States, and the European Union on Tehran’s nuclear program, if it becomes operationalized as scheduled, will ensure that Iran will have nuclear weapons by 2025, if not well before. As Michael Mandelbaum has explained , the Obama Administration’s unwillingness to credibly threaten the use of force against Tehran resulted in the abandonment of decades of U.S. nuclear principles designed to prevent the spread of uranium enrichment, combined with the removal of effective sanctions that squeezed the regime. By any account, the Vienna negotiations were an unqualified success for Iran. The reason for that is simple: America’s failed bipartisan North Korean policy set a model for would-be proliferators on how to negotiate one’s way to a nuclear weapon. Now, the unwillingness or inability of Washington to learn the lessons of the past appears to ensure that regimes desiring to proliferate have a proven roadmap to follow.

With U.S. diplomacy having midwifed one failed deal and generated a new flawed one, the future will almost certainly see the further spread of nuclear weapons to dangerous regimes. At almost every step of the Iran negotiations, the Obama Administration repeated past mistakes made by it, the Bush, and the Clinton Administrations. To paraphrase Barbara Tuchman, we are witnessing a nuclear march of folly. In order to prevent future similar outcomes, it’s of paramount importance that we understand the North Korean case.

The first mistake made by successive U.S. administrations, Democratic and Republican alike, in dealing with North Korea was perhaps the fatal one. Each set of U.S. negotiators assumed, or convinced itself, that a deal could be reached that would ultimately persuade Pyongyang to abandon its goal of achieving a nuclear or ballistic missile capability. Praising the 1994 Agreed Framework, which North Korea would cheat on, then-President Bill Clinton assured the nation that “North Korea will freeze and then dismantle its nuclear program. . . . The entire world will be safer as we slow the spread of nuclear weapons.” North Korea conducted its first nuclear test in 2006, even while it was engaged in negotiations with Clinton’s successor.

Similarly, in 2001, Wendy Sherman, who was the Clinton Administration’s policy coordinator for North Korea and became the lead negotiator with Iran, argued in favor of a summit between then-President George W. Bush and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il, writing that Pyongyang “appears ready to make landmark commitments about [its] missile program.” In December 2012, contrary to Sherman’s hopes, Pyongyang successfully tested a long-range ballistic missile potentially capable of hitting Alaska.

Clinton and Sherman’s remarks simply reflected Washington’s self-delusion. Perhaps even more egregiously, then-Bush Administration lead negotiator Christopher Hill hailed a supposed 2005 breakthrough in the Six-Party Talks, claiming that “it is the DPRK commitment to abandon all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs” that justified U.S. concessions such as giving light-water nuclear reactors, energy assistance, and economic cooperation. Of course, the DPRK tested a nuclear weapon in October 2006. To be generous, these were miscalculations of titanic proportions; to be critical, they were examples of wishful thinking that bordered on negligence.

A responsible U.S. policy should have begun from the assumption that nothing could be done to dissuade North Korea from abandoning its plan to gain the ability to build and use nuclear weapons, and that it would cheat on any agreement. While those committed to negotiations would have decried such a position as perhaps fatally undermining any dialogue, such a realistic outlook would have made U.S. negotiators far less willing to make repeated mistakes with Pyongyang.

Washington’s second mistake in dealing with North Korea was of almost equal magnitude—namely, that any deal, even a bad one, was better than no deal at all. U.S. negotiators convinced themselves that only by concluding some type of deal could America retain any leverage over the would-be proliferator. Chief Clinton negotiator Robert Gallucci repeatedly claimed, “We’d be better off with [an imperfect] deal than without it.” Yet in reality, just the opposite has proven true. Once bad deals abetted Pyongyang’s ability to attain nuclear weapons, as well as their means of delivery, in the form of long-range ballistic missiles, Washington instead lost any remaining leverage it had. North Korea essentially bought for itself permanent immunity, thanks to its new ability to threaten nuclear retaliation for any perceived threats to the continued existence of its regime.

Just as bad, Pyongyang understood that Washington was desperate to achieve a deal. That allowed it, one of the world’s most impoverished countries, to negotiate from a position of strength, ultimately gaining millions of dollars in aid. Meanwhile, the world’s superpower was reduced to the role of petitioner, all but begging for talks to continue. Similarly, Iranian envoys have repeatedly used President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry’s eagerness for a deal against them. It cannot be repeated enough that negotiating a bad deal is worse than achieving no deal, in no small measure because of the adverse negotiating environment it imposes on U.S. diplomats.

Pyongyang’s confidence during the years of nuclear negotiations was attributable, as well, to a third U.S. mistake: taking the threat of force off the table. The Clinton Administration pledged in the Agreed Framework that it would not invade North Korea, and Hill reiterated that position officially in 2005 in the Six-Party Talks. Any regime worried about its ultimate existence could only see such a U.S. promise as surrender; it would no longer fear the consequences of stalling or cheating on any agreements that are made. Once America rules out the ultimate sanction, building an illicit nuclear capability becomes a game of patience, which U.S. administrations, on a four-year electoral clock, are unable to deter. Based on his track record, President Obama ’s statements that “nothing is off the table” with respect to preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon simply were not credible, leading ultimately to the same result.

The fourth U.S. mistake is to commit to open-ended negotiations. This capitulation flowed naturally from abandoning the idea of using force. Having adopted that position, the Bush Administration gave Pyongyang all the time it needed to build a successful nuclear program. It took North Korea 12 years from the 1994 Agreed Framework to make its first nuclear test, and another six years for a successful long-range missile test. All the while, the Kim regime kept the Americans at the negotiating table, going through six rounds of the futile Six-Party Talks. In a related way, Iran has been toying with the international community since the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) demanded in 2003 that it stop all uranium enrichment and reprocessing. Just since Barack Obama agreed to join fully the P5+1 negotiations, in 2009, Tehran has increased the number of its centrifuges from 164 to 19,000. The Vienna agreement to cut the number of centrifuges to just over 6,000 is still more than 35 times the number Iran had when it began its diplomatic dueling with Obama.

The longer would-be proliferators can stretch out negotiations, the more likely they are to present their counterparts with a fait accompli that results in their original goal being achieved. U.S. officials must break out of the trap of missed deadlines, extensions, and almost infinite willingness to stay at the table in the hopes of getting a deal.

Just as worryingly, Washington appears unable to play hardball. The fifth mistake in dealing with Pyongyang was to give up its only means of pressuring the Kim regime. Most U.N. sanctions on North Korea were watered down by its allies China and Russia in the Security Council. North Korea simply ignored whatever sanctions remained. However, in mid-2005, the Bush Administration froze $24 million in personal assets of North Korean leaders held in Macau’s Banco Delta Asia. This was the most effective sanction levied against Pyongyang, and it forced the Kim regime back to the negotiating table. Yet just two years later, in a bid to reach yet another agreement, the Bush Administration agreed to unfreeze most of the assets. After receiving its cash, the Kim regime again failed to live up to its promises and the Six-Party Talks broke down shortly thereafter. Today, in agreeing to lift its sanctions against Iran and release the staggering sum of $150 billion, the Obama Administration is repeating the Bush Administration’s mistake and directly strengthening the Iranian regime while abetting its violent behavior abroad. “Snapback” provisions are a fig leaf for the U.S. surrender of meaningful pressure, as with Pyongyang.

The Vienna deal will be debated for years, not least because it changes nothing in Iran’s desire ultimately to develop a nuclear bomb, just as Pyongyang never relinquished its goal to build a nuclear force. In the same way as it did with North Korea, Washington is placing its trust in an Iranian regime that has repeatedly broken agreements with the IAEA, ignored U.N. demands that it not enrich uranium, and appears to be pursuing the reprocessing of plutonium as well. Even as the Iranian leadership sponsored parades chanting “death to America” while its negotiators sat in Vienna, Obama showcased the triumph of hope over experience and ignored the past 36 years of history by reiterating his belief that the Iranian system may evolve peacefully thanks to this deal, stating “it is possible to change.” It may well be, but it certainly is not in the interest of the Iranian regime to let that happen. This same myopia has pervaded U.S. thinking about North Korea, as successive administrations have convinced themselves that the Kim regime is too brutal and fragile to last. Now in their third-generation, the Kims and their supporters revel in spitting in the Americans’ eyes.

Historians will one day have to account for the fact that the diplomats of the world’s most powerful country are regularly bested by their opponents and repeat the same fatal mistakes. Whether out of hubris, ignorance, or naivety, top U.S. officials consistently misread the fundamental nature of illiberal dictatorships. The risk-averse nature of U.S. policy is faithfully replicated in its diplomacy, ultimately ensuring that the very goal it seeks to prevent is realized.

The repeated triumph of hope over experience has resulted in a de facto U.S. template for enabling would-be proliferators to successfully achieve their goals, all under the aegis of diplomatic negotiations. Having seen impoverished North Korea become a nuclear power, and Iran succeed in limiting the period of supposed restrictions on its nuclear activities, any future proliferator may be expected to study the five mistakes of U.S. negotiators listed above and plot their way to a nuclear future. The result will be a United States continually enmeshed in meaningless negotiations that contribute to the creation of a world in which nuclear weapons are increasingly common. Only by unlearning the bad habits of the past twenty years of nuclear negotiating can Washington hope to prevent more nuclear powers from emerging.

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Links and Quotes for August 3, 2015: Broken networks, robbed robots, the biases of machines, and more

Some lunchtime reading:

New Laws Explain Why Fast Growing Networks Break- Wired  

Last month, United Airlines grounded nearly 5,000 flights when its computer system crashed. The culprit: a faulty network router. Later on the same morning, another computer glitch halted trading on the New York Stock Exchange for over three hours…

Researchers usually think of network connectivity as happening in a slow, continuous manner, similar to the way water moves through freshly ground coffee beans, slowly saturating all the granules to become coffee in the container below. However, over the past few years, researchers have discovered that in special cases, connectivity might emerge with a bang, not a whimper, via a phenomenon they have dubbed ‘explosive percolation.’

8 innovations that will transform global health by 2030 – TechInsider – “A new report from global health nonprofit PATH looks into 30 emerging global health innovations that will further transform the healthcare landscape by 2030. Selected from over 500 ideas submitted by healthcare experts around the world (including many from low and middle-income countries), these innovations could save countless lives over the years.”

The Future of Work and Workers – Pacific Standard 

HitchBOT Gets Mugged in ‘City of Brotherly Love’ En Route to San Francisco- Re/code

Self-Driving Cars To Cause Car Insurance Industry Revenue Plunge – Future Pundit

A Robot Cambrian Explosion? – Arnold Kling

Machine Learning And Human Bias: An Uneasy Pair- TechCrunch  – “Like so many technologies, machine learning itself is value neutral, but the final applications will reflect the problems, preferences and worldviews of the creators.”

BoardVitals Raises $1.1 Million To Make It Easier For You To Become A Doctor- TechCrunch | “It’s not only about new technology, it’s about building a new ecosystem for Medical Education,” said co-founder Dan Lambert…”

Risk in the Viking Age – RealClearScience and the University of York – “Dr Ashby said: ‘I wanted to try to discover what would make a young chieftain invest in the time and resources for such a risky venture. And what were the motives of his crew? […] [Raiding] was an opportunity to build reputations for skill, reliability, cunning, or courage. Just as leaders of raiding parties stood to gain more than portable wealth, so too their followers could seek intangible social capital from participation.’”

 

 

Sarah Gustafson is an Editorial Assistant and blogger for the AEIdeas Blog. 

 

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5 questions every presidential candidate should answer: American leadership edition

Be on the lookout for the culminating report of AEI’s American Internationalism Project this fall, written by former Senators Jon Kyl and Joseph Lieberman, which will make the case for American leadership in terms that are relevant to all Americans.

A strong, bipartisan commitment to global leadership has informed America’s foreign policy since it emerged from World War II. Today, however, the global architecture conceived, built and maintained by the United States is in jeopardy. Without American leadership, the myriad challenges to international security posed by rising powers and terrorist groups alike will threaten the security, prosperity, and freedom of the United States and its allies.

 

NORMANDY, France — President Barack Obama, accompanied by the Prince of Wales, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Canadian Prime Stephen Harper and President of France Nicolas Sarkozy, returns a salute to an honor guard of U.S. and allied service members during the 65th anniversary commemoration of D-Day in the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial, June 6, 2009.

At the same time, some Americans are questioning both our capacity to lead on the world stage and the wisdom of doing so. US engagement abroad, at its core, has always been about helping the American people and protecting US interests. But ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, coupled with an uneven economic recovery, have led some at home to reassess the costs and benefits of American global leadership.

The next president will face a choice between reaffirming America’s leadership role in the international arena and abdicating that responsibility to someone else. The space created by American disengagement would be filled— and there is no way to guarantee that rising powers would share America’s values or interests. The time has come to reaffirm the importance of American leadership in international affairs, and we should ask all presidential candidates if and how they plan to do it.

1.) What will you do to restore America’s leadership role in world affairs?

America’s leadership role in international affairs is recognized and valued throughout the world. In a worldwide poll conducted between 2007-2014, Gallup found that an average of slightly more than 43 percent of respondents approved of American leadership in global affairs; a higher level than that enjoyed by any other country. Yet the United States has been reluctant in recent years to seize the opportunity to influence outcomes across the world in ways that benefit its own people as well as its allies. What will you do to change this?

2.) How will you reassure the American people that they are better off when the US takes a strong leadership role in world affairs?

The American people no longer seem so sure that the economic, security, and human rights benefits of American leadership, to both them and the world, are worth the costs. The inconclusive results of more than a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan have left some to question the efficacy of America’s foreign policy approach, and growing economic inequality has created anxiety and pessimism about America’s role in the world. As recently as 2013, a majority of Americans thought that the United States should “mind its own business internationally.” How will you convince them otherwise?

3.) Rank in priority the importance of more funding for the American military or complying with sequestration levels of funding.

Despite the growing number and variety of threats faced by the United States and its allies, the American military is facing funding levels and cuts that undermine its effectiveness to provide for the common defense. The Budget Control Act, for example, has wreaked havoc on the readiness and modernization efforts that our military needs to remain the world’s most powerful fighting force, and the US Army recently announced personnel cuts that will bring its number troops down to the lowest levels since before World War II. Many of the initiatives currently underway to increase funding for defense also involve increasing discretionary spending to levels that would require raising the spending caps caused by sequestration. Is that a tradeoff that you are willing to make? Why or why not?

4.) What is the highest priority for American national security funding?

Strategic decision-making requires allocating limited resources in a manner that increases the likelihood that goals will be achieved. The next president must decide which challenges are more urgent than others, and which tools are the most appropriate to address those challenges. With Russia’s increasingly brazen behavior in Eastern Europe, China’s assertiveness along its periphery, a metastasizing Islamic State, and an Iran whose ability to wield influence in the Middle East will only grow with its economy if the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is implemented, there is no shortage of threats to counter. How the next president plans to handle these challenges will tell us a lot about how he or she views America’s role in the world.

5.) How will you advocate the importance of international trade and free market capitalism to the American people?

The free trade system that America helped create after World War II has aided in bringing millions out of poverty across the world. It has also increased the vitality and dynamism of our own economy at home. Yet the consensus around the superiority of this economic system is eroding, both internationally and in the US. Abroad, other countries have used international economic institutions to their advantage, and alternative economic models, such as that of China, have gained popularity as alternatives to free market capitalism in some of the poorest regions of the planet. Here in the United States, the unequal distribution of gains from trade and the difficulty of retraining to remain competitive in a global economy have left some questioning the wisdom of not only of international trade, but also of free market capitalism. How will you explain the benefits of these systems to the American people, even though, in the short term, those benefits may not be apparent to all?

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Putinformation

Traveling recently in what might be called “new frontline” states—Estonia, Ukraine, and Moldova—I was struck by the depth of concern I encountered about Russian propaganda. And not just propaganda aimed at the Russian population and neighboring countries. At a conference in Tallinn, a Politico reporter and experienced Russia hand who had just covered the parliamentary elections in Britain told me voters he’d interviewed in Wales and Scotland had brought up clearly identifiable pieces of propaganda spread by Russia’s state-owned global television and radio network, RT. In the United States, the State Department and Congress have been sufficiently concerned about the Kremlin’s worldwide propaganda offensive to advocate increases in budgets for U.S. public diplomacy, which includes international broadcasting.

And for good reason. The Russian propaganda machine is being credited with almost magical powers of penetration and persuasion. NATO’s military commander, General Philip Breedlove, has called it “the most amazing information warfare blitzkrieg we have ever seen.” David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, who covered the last years of the Soviet Union for the Washington Post, calls RT “darkly, nastily brilliant, so much more sophisticated than Soviet propaganda.”

Indeed, the global reach of Russian propaganda is impressive. RT, the flagship operation, broadcasts news and talk shows in five major languages with a potential audience of over 700 million people in 100 countries. It also garners a significant following on YouTube. In December 2014, RT announced that its family of YouTube channels had racked up 2 billion total views, besting such media titans as CNN and Al Jazeera by sizable margins. Launched last year, the Sputnik news network plans to broadcast in 30 languages in 34 countries.

Then there is the shadow army of Kremlin-paid Internet “trolls” who closely monitor social media as well as major Western news sites, ready to pounce on critics of the Kremlin. The aim of the Kremlin’s messaging, as one expert put it, is “not to persuade (as in classic public diplomacy) or earn credibility but to sow confusion via conspiracy theories and proliferate falsehoods.” These outlets echo Kremlin narratives, while using conspiracy theories and anti-Western rhetoric to appeal to segments of their audience that are skeptical of official narratives, notably the far left and the far right.

Sold as an “objective” alternative to Western media expressing the Russian point of view, this is propaganda in the guise of factual reporting. “Question more” is RT’s official slogan. Naturally, RT never identifies itself as created and funded by the Russian government.

The overarching objective seems to be less to bolster the “Russia brand” than to degrade the reputation of the West and thus deny it the moral high ground. Yes, we are corrupt, yes, we are authoritarian, incompetent—but look at your own governments! At least we don’t lecture others! You won’t catch us pontificating about “democracy” and “human rights.”

Thus, when the CEO of the French oil company Total, who had vociferously opposed economic sanctions on Russia, was killed when his plane slammed into a snowplow operated by a drunken driver at a Moscow airport, Russian commentators asserted that he had been assassinated by the CIA.

Or try looking for information on the web about the growing presence of Russian nationals among ISIS fighters in Syria and Iraq. You’ll find your way quickly to one of Russia’s most popular Facebook-style sites, VKontakte.ru. There you’ll see, pictured in the sidebar at the top of the page, a cartoonish Uncle Sam holding a baby jihadist clad in the familiar black uniform with a Kalashnikov on its back. The caption: “ISIS is a creation of America’s two-party system.”

This effort is generously funded. This year the Kremlin bankrolled RT to the tune of $400 million, while the global news agency Rossiya Segodnya (Russia Today) received $170 million. For comparison, Voice of America’s budget this year is $212 million and that of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty $104 million—in a country whose GDP is nine times Russia’s.

Generously funded, slick, and unconstrained by moral scruples, Russian propaganda nevertheless owes some of its ostensible success to a powerful factor not of its own making.

After Russia invaded Ukraine, Secretary of State John Kerry complained that Moscow was guided by 19th-century ideas. But it turns out that when a 19th-century mentality clashes with a 21st-century one, it is the former that has certain advantages in the struggle to control the narrative—at least initially. This is because the dragon’s teeth of Russian propaganda fall into soil already prepared by postmodern attitudes, especially among the West’s political, media, and cultural elites.

Long before it got its name, postmodernism was anticipated by Friedrich Nietzsche’s two postulates: “God is dead” and “There are no facts, only interpretations.”

This is hardly a coincidence. For if God be dead (and Nietzsche used God as a metaphor for a universal system of ethical imperatives) and, as a result, we have to choose our own personal ethics, then by definition one choice is no better than any other. No one is right or wrong, just different—“diverse,” as we would put it. And truth, which used to be considered the foundation of both virtue and beauty, is also relative.

By now several generations of elites in the United States and Europe have been reared on notions of morality and truth splintered into myriad personal choices. Writing in the New York Times four months ago, an American philosophy professor complained that students do not, as he put it, believe in “moral facts.” They recognize only “moral claims”: opinions that are true or not true only “relative to a culture.” (This should not come as a surprise: History, which used to teach these “moral facts” by example, is now also suspect as “constructed narrative,” a form of fiction.)

Even as it has weakened its moral defenses against propaganda, the West has been made intellectually vulnerable by postmodern epistemology, which is just as uncertain about what sources of knowledge are valid. “The medium is the message,” Marshall McLuhan taught in the 1960s. Fifty years later, the message is increasingly detached from the medium, words from those who utter them. As postmodernism postulates, “There is no author, there is only the text.”

There are “two sides to every story,” both presumed equally valid. Asked why the privately owned First Baltic Channel had chosen to air Russian television’s main newscast, Vremya, in prime time, in Latvia and Estonia, while Euronews, founded by the European Broadcasting Union of public service broadcasters, was on at 6 a.m. and midnight, the spokeswoman for the channel replied, “There is no such thing as objective fact.”

Did the U.S. government orchestrate 9/11? Twenty-three percent of Germans thought so, as did 15 percent of Italians. Seven years after the fall of the Twin Towers, between a quarter and one-fifth of Britons, French, and Italians told pollsters they had no idea who was behind the attack. Well, then: Did the CIA help the Ukrainians shoot down the MH 17 Malaysian airliner (as suggested by Russian propaganda)? Plausible. Did the Russian opposition kill its own leader, Boris Nemtsov, to embarrass Putin? Conceivable. Almost one in three Germans were reported last month to find Russia not responsible for the violence in Ukraine.

Relations between states are similarly affected. Whether in Minsk or Lausanne, promises and treaties are divorced from the credibility of the regimes that sign them, as if the word of a dictator were just as valid as the word of the freely elected and accountable leader of a liberal democracy.

With right and wrong derided as subjective value judgments, entire concepts seem to disappear—concepts civilization has relied on for millennia. “Just” wars and “aggression” are all but gone from the vocabularies of the elite Western media. Only “conflicts” remain—with the obvious corollary that both sides are equally at fault. So wishing for the “victory” of one side is not done in polite society. By contrast, “peace,” no matter how short-lived, fraudulent, or beneficial to the aggressor, is to be sought at any cost.

This creates an enormous disadvantage for the postmodern West: It wants peace; the other side wants victory.

There is what might be called a belief imbalance in the East-West struggle to control the narrative of past and contemporary events: As Yeats put it famously, one side lacks “all conviction,” while the other is full of “passionate intensity.” For while Putin’s propaganda flourishes amid the fragmentation and provisionality of postmodern thought, the Kremlin admits no relativity to the credo that guides its leader in his historic mission.

Putin gives every indication of believing passionately that Russia has never been wrong, only wronged. The end of the Cold War, as he sees it, is Russia’s equivalent of the post-World War I Treaty of Versailles for Germany: the source of endless humiliation and misery. Following his favorite philosopher, Ivan Ilyn, Putin knows that the nefarious West plots against Russia, jealous of her incorruptible and saintly soul as well as her size, riches, and most of all exceptionalism, a God-given destiny and historic mission as the Third Rome, the light among nations. He believes that Russia’s very sovereignty is in danger, and Ukraine, in Putin’s words, is “NATO’s foreign legion.” With his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, he believes that he, Putin, is “the defender of Russians wherever they live,” and with his deputy chief of staff, Vyacheslav Volodin, he proclaims that “there is no Russia without Putin.”

True, we are not in Cold War II. We don’t face a centrally directed global network of states and movements guided by a coherent millenarian ideology. But we ought not deceive ourselves regarding the time and effort it might take to prevail in our current confrontation with an ideologically inflamed, even messianic, highly personalistic autocracy that seeks to correct alleged historic “wrongs” and expand its “sphere of influence,” if necessary by invasion and annexation, and armed with 1,582 strategic nuclear warheads.

After all, the elites who fought Cold War I believed in the superiority of their political, economic, and cultural systems. They believed in liberty, human rights, and democracy as the foundation of human dignity, and they affirmed it with a depth of conviction that might appear out of place today. More important, the millions of voters who lent these leaders their support—over decades, freely and democratically—believed in these things as well.

In the end, the West is likely to prevail in the new confrontation with Putin’s Russia, whatever label history attaches to it, because eventually dignity and truth tend to prevail over dishonor and lies. This is what happened to the Soviet Union when its people withdrew their support from the regime.

But we ought to be aware of the considerable handicaps with which we enter the battle.

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On innovation, redistribution, and the ‘veil of ignorance’

What kind of society would you desire if you had to enter it cold, sight unseen? The classic example: What would have been the opinion of antebellum slaveholders if there were an equal chance they would enter society as a slave owner or a slave? The “veil of ignorance” is a common philosophical thought experiment for helping determine the ethics of social arrangements or of an optimal social contract. More to the point today, what sort of modern welfare state would you want if you had an equal chance of possessing the sort of innate skills likely to gain you a high income in a particular society as of not having those skills? You might, perhaps, want a social contract that includes income transfers from high skill to low skill. A social contract with social insurance. But an interesting new paper out of the Minnesota Fed by V. V. Chari and Christopher Phelan wonders about incentive effects:

For instance, policy mechanisms that transfer income from highly skilled people to those with low innate skills frequently require progressive income taxes. Such policies affect incentives regarding the acquisition of skills through effort and education. If high incomes are highly taxed, high-innate-skills individuals may have less incentive to get, say, a medical degree. Economic arrangements seen as best using the behind-the-veil criterion typically trade off such output losses against the “insurance” or welfare gains associated with transfers. … A rich-country policy to tax high incomes will redistribute income (within that country) from those with high innate abilities (and, by assumption, with the ability to become highly skilled) to those with lower innate abilities. In so doing, that policy will reduce inequality within the rich country, but it will also create disincentives there to becoming highly skilled and thereby reduce the global supply of skilled workers. This reduced supply of skilled workers from the developed country then reduces opportunities for young workers in the poor country to become skilled. … We conclude that using the behind-the-veil-of-ignorance criterion to advocate for redistributive policies within developed countries while ignoring the effect of these policies on people in poor countries violates the criterion itself and is therefore fundamentally misguided.

Take the issue of trade. Many free trade opponents in advanced economies point out the economic impact on low-skill workers from having to compete with counterparts in emerging economies. But maybe this should count, too, as Chari and Phelan explain: “According to a World Bank Study, in the three decades between 1981 and 2010, the rate of extreme poverty in the developing world (subsisting on less than $1.25 per day) has gone down from more than one out of every two citizens to roughly one out of every five, all while the population of the developing world increased by 59 percent. This reduction in extreme poverty represents the single greatest decrease in material human deprivation in history.”

Likewise, what are the ethics of a certain set of policies that could make it less likely the US would generate innovative, risk-taking people and companies that (a) provide opportunity to low-income overseas workers and (b) technologies that can be spread to lower-income nations and boost economic growth? As the Financial Times recently noted, one study suggests that corporations only keep about 4% of the social value of their innovations.

 

 

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Has the Affordable Care Act increased part-time employment?

Abstract:

We examine the impact of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on part-time employment. Because the ACA’s employer health insurance mandate applies to individuals who work 30 or more hours per week, employers may try to avoid the mandate by cutting workers’ hours below the 30-hour threshold in order to avoid having to provide them with health insurance. Although the employer mandate only went into effect in 2015, many observers have argued that forward-looking employers began to shift towards a part-time workforce well in advance of the mandate. To test this hypothesis, we examine relative shifts across two categories of part-time workers (25–29 hours and 31–35 hours). We find some evidence of a shift from the 31–35-hour category into the 25–29-hour category after the passage of ACA in March 2010. However, that shift is not more pronounced among low-wage workers or among workers in industries and occupations most likely to be affected by the mandate. Thus, there is little evidence that the ACA has caused the shift across hours categories, or led to an increase in part-time employment. However, the ACA could cause a shift towards part-time work in the future as the mandate takes effect.

Read the full article in Applied Economics Letters

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How Feminism went awry

Bill Kristol: “I’m very pleased to be joined today by Christina Sommers, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, former philosophy professor. Once a philosophy professor, always a philosophy professor, right? Author of many important works, including most recently, Freedom Feminism, and, of course, star of the wonderful series of YouTube videos, “The Factual Feminist.”

Watch other featured films from “Conversations with Bill Kristol.”

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The Iran deal’s dangerous precedent

HAD anyone believed President Obama’s mantra that “all options are on the table” to deal with Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the Vienna agreement might have emerged less advantageously for Tehran. But no one took Mr. Obama’s threat of military force seriously — a credibility gap that Israel still fears and Iran still exploits. Even so, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is still trying to reassure nervous Democrats in Congress that the Vienna agreement does not preclude America’s use of force.

Despite its blasé confidence in the agreement, however, the Obama administration understands the near-certainty that Iran will break its word. Tehran’s potential violations were not merely one of many difficult issues for negotiators; they were the essence of the talks. The deal’s entire structure turns on the issue of how to detect and handle breaches.

If Iran is caught transgressing, Mr. Obama’s plan is not to use force, but to apply “snapback sanctions.” His administration has argued repeatedly that such sanctions (or even new sanctions) will deter or punish violations, keeping the deal on track and Iran clear of nuclear weapons. This rationale conforms to the underlying logic for the talks themselves: If sanctions brought Iran to the table, then sanctions will keep the deal viable once implementation begins.

Unfortunately, the mechanism to address violations is as flawed as the deal’s underlying logic. For the president’s predictions of Iranian behavior to come true (and they are central to successful implementation), Tehran must recognize the inevitability of the pain their country will suffer for straying from compliance.

Yet the very language of the Vienna deal demonstrates the opposite. In two provisions (Paragraphs 26 and 37), Iran rejects the legitimacy of sanctions coming back into force. These passages expressly provide, in near identical words, that “Iran has stated that if sanctions are reinstated in whole or in part, Iran will treat that as grounds to cease performing its commitments under this JCPOA” — Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — “in whole or in part.”

Thus the inexorable pattern will not be: Iran violates the deal; sanctions snap back; Iran resumes compliance. Quite the reverse. The far more likely future is: Iran violates the deal; sanctions snap back; Iran tells us, using a diplomatic term of art, to take our deal and stuff it.

Abrogating the deal, of course, would come only after Iran had reaped the economic benefits of having its assets unfrozen and the sanctions ended. The Europeans (among others) will have been suckered back into economic relationships that will cause as much pain to them as to Iran if they are abandoned. Sadly, the ayatollahs know the Europeans better than Mr. Obama does.

Even under ideal circumstances, the Vienna deal’s arduous “dispute resolution mechanism” provides so many opportunities for Tehran to obfuscate that “snapback” will soon become a slogan of derision. Alleged violations are referred first to a “joint commission,” which may refer the matter to their foreign ministers. In addition, the parties may ask an outside “advisory board” to consider the issue. The board’s nonbinding ruling goes back to the commission for consideration.

Although each stage has prescribed time limits, these can be “extended by consensus” — a United Nations-style formula for endless palavering before, finally, an aggrieved party convokes the Security Council to vote on snapping back the sanctions. But it’s hard to “snap back” when you’re trapped in a diplomatic La Brea Tar Pit. As with the deal’s dispute process, the snapback mechanism will not so much resolve disagreements as prolong them indefinitely.

Finally, Mr. Obama’s plan to prevent Russia or China from casting vetoes that block snapback poses hidden dangers for America. Under the deal and Security Council Resolution 2231, if a JCPOA party asserts that a significant violation has occurred, then the council must vote within 30 days on whether “to continue the sanctions lifting.” Thus, in theory, if Washington alleged a breach, Moscow and Beijing would have the burden of keeping the sanctions lifted, rather than Washington having the burden of reinstituting them. Absent a resolution “to continue the sanctions lifting,” sanctions snap back.

By concocting a procedure that elides the Russian or Chinese vetoes, Mr. Obama has surreptitiously accomplished a prized objective of the international left, which always disapproved on principle of the veto power. Through 70 years of United Nations history, one lodestar emerges clearly: Washington’s only immutable protection has been its Security Council veto. Mr. Obama’s end-run around the veto poses long-term risks that far outweigh whatever short-term gain is to be had from boxing in Russia and China now.

Dean Acheson, Truman’s secretary of state, made a comparable mistake in his “Uniting for Peace” strategy, trying to overcome Soviet vetoes during the Korean War by empowering the General Assembly. Acheson rejected British fears that the tactic might backfire; as he later wrote, “present difficulties outweighed possible future ones, and we pressed on.” We should not repeat the error.

Luckily, over the years, the lack of decisiveness in a General Assembly that has grown to nearly four times its original size has saved us from ourselves. But Mr. Obama’s device creates a harmful precedent that could be used to defeat the veto power of all five permanent members of the council, and especially the United States.

Unfortunately, snapback sanctions are just as likely to be empty political rhetoric as Mr. Obama’s incantations about all options being on the table. The list of reasons to oppose the Vienna deal is already long, but the pitfalls of snapback sanctions surely rank near the top.

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Google and the “right to be forgotten”: Where is the Obama administration?

It must be getting lonely for Google in the battle over Europe’s increasingly extraterritorial demands regarding the (misnamed) “right to be forgotten.” As Europe raises the stakes yet again, Google is still not seeing any support from the Obama administration.

To review, in May 2014, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that European citizens can demand that search engines such as Google delete information under their name that is out of date, irrelevant, or inflammatory. The ECJ calls this the “right to be forgotten,” but, as Google has pointed out, it is more appropriate to think of it as “the right to delist.” It should be underscored that this pertains not to private information, but information that originates in public records of some sort: newspapers, magazines, television or other media and public sources. It should also be noted that European officials then placed responsibility for administering the requests squarely on Google, a private corporation, rather than a public regulator. Reluctantly, and under protest, Google has taken up this duty, and has as of March 2015 reviewed some quarter of a million requests from politicians, criminals, public figures and ordinary citizens. It has accepted less than half (41 percent) of the deletion requests and removed them from European domains (Google.fr, etc.)

France’s new demand: Make “right to be forgotten” global

In the latest skirmish, France’s data protection authority, the CNIL, has raised the stakes and demanded that Google apply the delisting worldwide, on all versions of its search engines. It argues that “in order to be effective, delisting must be carried out on all extensions of the search engine and that the service provided by Google search constitutes a single processing.” In effect, the French government, extrapolating from the original ECJ decision, is mandating that a US-based multinational follow the extraterritorial dictates of a national regulator on a worldwide basis. Failure to comply would result in daily fines of about $330,000.

Google is pushing back. It has rejected the CNIL order, and has appealed to the body to rescind the decision. The CNIL responded that it would review the case and make a decision within two months. A CNIL spokeswoman stated: “We have noted Google’s arguments, which are in part political.” And then she added dismissively: “The CNIL for its part has relied only on legal reasoning. There is no effectiveness if the right is applied only in Europe.”

In a blog post Thursday, Google’s Global Privacy Counsel, Peter Fleischer, adopted a firm, but conciliatory stance. As a general rule, Google argued: “We believe that no one country should have the authority to control what content someone in a second country can access. […]As a matter of principle, therefore, we respectfully disagree with the CNIL’s assertion of global authority.”

For the company, Fleischer further pointed out the worldwide implications of the CNIL demands: “If the CNIL’s proposed approach were to be embraced as the standard for Internet regulation, we would find ourselves in a race to the bottom. In the end, the Internet would only be as free as the world’s least free place.” In specific support of this claim, Google noted “innumerable examples around the world where content that is declared illegal under the laws of one country would be deemed legal in others.” For example: Thailand criminalizes speech critical of the king; Turkey goes after any speech thought critical of Ataturk; and Russia outlaws speech deemed to be “gay propaganda.”

The missing response from the Obama administration

The key question is why the Obama administration hasn’t taken a stand and stepped in to defend the legitimate interests of a beleaguered US company – and more broadly the principle of allowing accurate, public data to move freely across borders, without encountering censorship or parochial restrictions. These are the goals for the Internet that the US is touting as essential for the proposed US-EU free trade agreement. And the EU’s escalating protectionist, extraterritorial demands on the “right to be forgotten” directly flout such ambitions.

Either on a separate bilateral basis, or in the context of the US-EU FTA negotiations, the Obama administration should take a strong stand against arbitrary “delisting” of accurate, already published data, and the fragmentation of the Internet inherent in French regulatory demands.

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Obama bets nuclear deal will change Iran’s regime — few agree

Faute de mieux. That means “for want of something better” in Secretary of State John Kerry’s second language. It’s also the best case made by its journalistic defenders for approval of the nuclear weapons deal Kerry negotiated with Iran. Or to be more exact, for rallying 34 votes in the Senate or 146 votes in the House to uphold a presidential veto of a congressional vote to disapprove.

It’s a measure of the weakness of the deal that such a grudging argument is needed to rally such an unimpressive proportion of members of Congress.

The New York Times’s Thomas Friedman, generally a supporter of Barack Obama’s policies, makes the faute de mieux argument explicitly. But he also adds some conditions — er, recommendations — to his endorsement that aren’t likely to be congenial to the president.

Put a tough military man in charge of seeking enforcement. Get Congress to pass an Authorization for Use of Military Force in case Iran cheats. Reach out to the Iranian people who, all indicators suggest, don’t like the mullahs’ regime. And in the Middle East don’t tilt too far toward either Iran’s Shia or the Saudis’ and others’ Sunni allies.

That last recommendation is hard to carry out. As The American Interest’s Walter Russell Mead argues, it’s only practicable to do two of the three following things: (1) reach a deal with Iran, (2) preserve alliances with the various Sunnis and (3) do nothing in Syria. Since (1) is done and (3) is clearly Obama’s preference, (2) seems doomed, despite Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s post-deal Middle East diplomacy.

Tough enforcement would be a volte-face (more diplomatic French) from the Vienna’s negotiators’ tactics and Obama would surely discourage an AUMF as he tried to discourage Congress’s push for strong sanctions against Iran.

As for reaching out to the Iranian people, Obama refrained pointedly from doing so when the Green protests against the mullahs’ election frauds broke out in June 2009. At the time that seemed a puzzling decision: Why not push, as Ronald Reagan did against the Soviets in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, in the direction of regime change?

Six years later it seems not so puzzling. As former Bush National Security staffer Michael Doran argued in a lengthy article in Mosaic magazine, Obama’s policy toward Iran seems motivated by a desire for rapprochement and an eschewal of any moves toward regime change.

We should unclench our fist, as he said in his first inaugural address, and approach adversaries with an open hand. The nuclear deal with Iran, as Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes explained this spring, would be as important an accomplishment in the president’s second term as Obamacare was in his first.

Friedman argues that the Iran deal gets the United States two good things. One is to prevent “Iran from producing the fissile material to break out with a nuclear weapon for 15 years.” But “break out” is an ambiguous term.

No serious analyst thinks the mullah regime is averse to cheating. It has done so before and been caught — belatedly. And the inspection process seems to be full of holes. Iran is not required to document previous nuclear efforts. It is supposed to provide soil samples from nuclear sites to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

There is at least a 24-day delay — quite possibly much more — between complaints of violations and inspections. And one does not have to impute bad faith or incompetence to the IAEA to note that its inspections processes involving hostile regimes have been flawed.

The prudent course is to expect violations, expect them to go undetected or unconfirmed for lengthy periods, and thus expect Iran to move farther toward operational nuclear weapons than the deal contemplates.

Moreover, under paragraph 36 of the agreement, Iran can abandon its obligations any time it complains that the other signatories have abandoned theirs. It’s not hard to imagine how such complaints could be concocted.

That’s not likely to happen in the remaining 17 months of Obama’s term. But it could any time thereafter. Unless the deal, as Friedman hopes, “creates a context that could empower the more pragmatic forces inside Iran over time.”

Obama’s entire Iran policy is based on the “conjecture” — historian Niall Ferguson’s word — that this deal will lead to beneficent regime change. That could prove right. But most American voters, most foreign policy experts and most members of Congress think not.

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