Category Archives: Foreign Affairs

Greece

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Last updated 7/6/2015.

Paul Krugman’s commentaries on Greece have been consistently sensible.   From his latest, Ending Greece’s Bleeding:

Imagine, for a moment, that Greece had never adopted the euro, that it had merely fixed the value of the drachma in terms of euros. What would basic economic analysis say it should do now? The answer, overwhelmingly, would be that it should devalue — let the drachma’s value drop, both to encourage exports and to break out of the cycle of deflation.

Yup. It worked for Iceland in 2008-9.  It might have worked for Greece too but, as they don’t control their own currency, going the devaluation route wasn’t an option for them.

It makes no sense to be locked in to a currency if you lack political authority to control it, e.g., to print more when the situation demands it, issue bonds when appropriate, etc.  It makes no sense to agree to debt payment terms if there is no rational basis for believing they can be met.  Given those things, “No.” was the right choice in Greece’s referendum today.  Vote to reject the raw deal.

Joseph Stiglitz called out the anti-democratic nature of the “troika’s” demands the other day in Europe’s Attack on Greek Democracy.

In an interview on NPR Brown Univ. economist Mark Blyth calls bullshit on the suggestion that the Greeks have profligate spenders or are just lazy, The (Perceived) Tragedy of Greece.

(If you’re only going to read or listen to one piece, listen to Blyth.)

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Dishonest mistakes

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The understanding is supposed to be that the troops serve on whatever mission is ordered, and the government doesn’t order them to risk their lives for a political folly.

– Unknown

On May 11 Paul Waldman had a piece in The American Prospect, Should We Relitigate the Iraq War in the 2016 Campaign? You Bet We Should.   In it he offered a list of questions for 2016 presidential candidates.  I noted it at the time.  Waldman’s questions force the issue of how the candidate would act on what they do know and how they would deal with uncertainty.   His questions are forward-looking – and that should be a good thing.  Unfortunately, we don’t appear to be ready for it.  If we were then statements to the effect of “knowing what we know now…” re Iraq would be immediately called out as bullshit by everyone within earshot.  They are not.  Today James Fallows summed up concisely why saying “knowing what we know now…” is bullshit:

  • The “knowing what we know” question presumes that the Bush Administration and the U.S. public were in the role of impartial jurors, or good-faith strategic decision-makers, who while carefully weighing the evidence were (unfortunately) pushed toward a decision to invade, because the best-available information at the time indicated that there was an imminent WMD threat.
  • That view is entirely false.
  • The war was going to happen. The WMD claims were the result of the need to find a case for the war, rather than the other way around.

He then gets into the details at length.

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Looking back on the Iraq War: Questions for 2016 presidential candidates

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Paul Waldman poses questions for 2016 presidential candidates:

  1. How do [you] view the extraordinary propaganda campaign the Bush administration launched to convince Americans to get behind the war?
  2. Does that make [you] want to be careful about how [your administration would] argue for [its] policy choices?
  3. Did Iraq change [your] perspective on American military action, particularly in the Middle East?
  4. What light [do the lessons learned from the war] shed on the reception the American military is likely to get the next time we invade someplace?
  5. What does it teach us about power vacuums and the challenges of nation-building?
  6. How [do the lessons learned from the war] inform [your] thinking on the prospect of military action in Syria and Iran specifically?
  7. Given the boatload of unintended consequences Iraq unleashed, how would [you], as president, go about making decisions on complex issues that are freighted with uncertainty?

Number 7 is of particular interest to me.   “If I knew then what I know now…” is all well and good but how will the candidate approach complex issues where there’s inherent uncertainty?  Do they acknowledge downside risk?  If so then how do they try to get a handle on it?

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The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – “Kill it with fire.”

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Updated 10/17/2015.

Current status of the TPP:  The agreement has been negotiated. Now it goes to Congress for an up or down vote.  It cannot be amended.  In theory, it could get voted down.  In practice, I’m not holding my breath.

News and posts:

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Change comes to Greece

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Syriza, the left-wing anti-austerity party, appears to have won a big plurality in the Greek general election.   From the BBC:

Polls suggested Syriza took between 35.5% and 39.5% of total votes. The ruling New Democracy party came a distant second with 23%-27% of the total vote.  It is unclear whether Syriza has enough votes to govern the country alone.  Syriza’s Alexis Tsipras has pledged to renegotiate Greece’s debt arrangement with international creditors.  He has also vowed to reverse many of the austerity measures adopted by Greece since a series of bailouts began in 2010.  The result is being closely watched outside Greece, where it is believed a Syriza victory could encourage radical leftist parties across Europe.

We’ll see how that shakes up the Euro zone.

Newsflash: Boko Haram Struggles To Find Victims People Give A Shit About

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From Duffle Blog:

BORNO, Nigeria — According to insider reports obtained by Duffel Blog, leaders for the terrorist group Boko Haram have called an emergency meeting to determine how many more murders, rapes and kidnappings it will take before anyone in the international community will start giving a shit.

“It’s frustrating,” complained Boko Haram Commander Abubakar Shekau. “We work extremely hard, and all we get from the rest of the world is phlegmatic indifference. I mean, what’s a warlord supposed to do?”

During a month in which the group has attacked hard targets in Cameroon, as well as orchestrated the slaughter of up to 2,000 civilians, international media outlets have largely focused on recent terror attacks in Paris. The carnage wrought by Boko Haram in the Belgium-sized swath of territory it now controls in the northeastern states of oil-rich Nigeria was designed to get attention.

Much to Shekau’s dismay, however, it hasn’t been enough.

“I’m turning this country into a fucking Lars Von Trier film,” Shekau told Duffel Blog via Facebook chat. “I’ve literally stolen hundreds of kids from their parents and sold them into slavery, and all I got was a Twitter hashtag from Michelle Obama.”

Read more: http://www.duffelblog.com/2015/01/boko-haram/#ixzz3P72Mo344

David Remnick, Vaclav Havel in Jerusalem

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David Remnick in The New Yorker, Vaclav Havel in Jerusalem:

Not long after his unlikely rise from Czech prisoner to Czech President, Václav Havel paid a visit to Moscow. Until that moment, the leaders of Eastern and Central Europe had arrived at the gates of the Kremlin as little more than nerve-racked supplicants. They came to receive instructions and to pay obeisance to the General Secretary. Now Havel was there to see Mikhail Gorbachev, but, with an air of modest self-confidence, he carried a set of demands and an ironic prop. As Michael Žantovský tells the story in his excellent new biography, Havel asked that the Soviet Union remove its troops from Czech territory, and that the two nations sign a statement declaring them equals. Gorbachev, who had already relinquished his imperial holdings, agreed, at which point Havel produced a peace pipe, telling Gorbachev that it had been given to him by the chief of a Native American tribe during a recent trip to the United States. “Mr. President,” Havel said, “it occurred to me right there and then that I should bring this pipe to Moscow and that the two of us should smoke it together.” Žantovský, who was Havel’s press aide at the time, recalls that Gorbachev “looked at the pipe as if it were a hand grenade.” Then the Soviet leader turned to Havel and stammered, “But I . . . don’t smoke.”

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Thought for the Day: 29 September 2014

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From Bill Moyers, “Buying the War“:

APRIL 25, 2007:

BILL MOYERS: [IN THE SPRING OF 2003] THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION TOOK LEAVE OF REALITY AND PLUNGED OUR COUNTRY INTO A WAR SO POORLY PLANNED IT SOON TURNED INTO A DISASTER. THE STORY OF HOW HIGH OFFICIALS MISLED THE COUNTRY HAS BEEN TOLD. BUT THEY COULDN’T HAVE DONE IT ON THEIR OWN; THEY NEEDED A COMPLIANT PRESS, TO PASS ON THEIR PROPAGANDA AS NEWS AND CHEER THEM ON.

SINCE THEN THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE HAVE DIED, AND MANY ARE DYING TO THIS DAY. YET THE STORY OF HOW THE MEDIA BOUGHT WHAT THE WHITE HOUSE WAS SELLING HAS NOT BEEN TOLD IN DEPTH ON TELEVISION. AS THE WAR RAGES INTO ITS FIFTH YEAR, WE LOOK BACK AT THOSE MONTHS LEADING UP TO THE INVASION, WHEN OUR PRESS LARGELY SURRENDERED ITS INDEPENDENCE AND SKEPTICISM TO JOIN WITH OUR GOVERNMENT IN MARCHING TO WAR.

OUR REPORT WAS PRODUCED AND DIRECTED BY KATHLEEN HUGHES AND EDITED BY ALISON AMRON.

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