The Atlantic: The Threat Within NATO

“Russia aims to weaken U.S. influence in the world and divide us from our allies and partners,” says the Trump administration’s 2017 National Security Strategy. The line, while accurate, reflects poorly on the strategy’s ostensible author, given that among other things it implicitly refers to Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election on behalf of Donald Trump. Left unwritten is that Russia’s goal of creating distance between the United States and its allies is part of what attracted it to Trump in the first place. As a candidate, Trump called nato “obsolete.” As president, he initially declined to reaffirm America’s commitment to the alliance’s mutual defense provision, before begrudgingly reversing course at the insistence of his advisers. [...]

The chances of such an outcome, however, are slim. Orbán and Kaczyński have made clear that they will ride to each other’s rescue, creating an emerging “axis of illiberalism” within Europe. The nato alliance thus faces a problematic odd couple. On one hand is a leader whose government openly seeks closer ties with the Kremlin. On the other is a Russia hawk whose government hosts one of four multinational “battlegroups” on nato’s eastern periphery, yet may be strengthening Russia’s hand in the long run by hollowing out his country’s institutions and backing his southern neighbor. [...]

Turkey’s slide into authoritarianism has coincided with a worsening diplomatic relationship with the United States. On March 13, Turkish prosecutors indicted American pastor Andrew Brunson on charges related to the failed coup, seeking life imprisonment. Brunson has been held in pre-trial detention for 18 months in what some analysts describe as a hostage-taking related to Turkish requests for the United States to extradite cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara blames for the failed coup. The Brunson indictment follows the conviction in February of dual Turkish-American citizen and nasa employee Serkan Golge, who was sentenced to 7 and a half years in prison in a trial the U.S. embassy in Ankara alleged lacked credible evidence. [...]

Yet the mounting authoritarianism in Hungary, Poland, and Turkey likely poses the greatest internal threat to the nato alliance in its history. Any alliance depends on its members sharing common goals. During the Cold War, nato served to keep peace in post-WWII Europe by “keep[ing] the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down,” in the famous telling of its first secretary general. With the raison d'etre of territorial defense essentially nullified by the collapse of the Soviet Union, nato has until recently largely justified itself through so-called “out-of-area” operations in places like Bosnia and Afghanistan, and by the presumed power of the alliance to bind its members around respect for democratic values and institutions. In 2016, the leaders of nato member states went so far as to say that its “essential mission” was “to ensure that the Alliance remains an unparalleled community of freedom, peace, security, and shared values, including individual liberty, human rights, democracy, and the rule of law.”

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The New York Review of Books: If Trump Blows Up the Deal, Iran Gets the Bomb

To create a nuclear weapon, two things are required: a design and a sufficient amount of “fissile” material. It is my belief that the Iranians have the design. One limitation of the JCPOA is that there is no provision for verifying this. Unless the Iranians tell us, or unless they come up with a bomb, we don’t know. But there are two reasons why I think they have the design. The first is the likelihood that they bought a design for a Chinese device from the Pakistani metallurgist and nuclear proliferator A.Q. Khan. But the second reason is more important because it has larger implications.

I use Pakistan as an example. With fewer than six physicists and computer facilities that were inferior to what any high school student now has, the Pakistanis designed their nuclear weapons using open-source information. Iran has a very sophisticated nuclear program and I feel quite certain they have followed a similar path. This means, I believe, that if they ever had enough fissile material, they could produce a bomb in very short order. Therefore, the focus must be on restricting this material; to that end, I turn to the JCPOA. [...]

One cannot say with any certainty whether the countries that will remain in the agreement will be able to constrain the Iranians, who have made absolutely clear that they will not agree to any modification of it. The notion that President Trump has of somehow getting a “better deal” is delusional. There is no better deal. The Iranians have everything they need to make nuclear weapons—including uranium. The JCPOA is our best, and perhaps our only, chance of preventing Iran from getting the bomb.

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The New York Review of Books: A History of Denial

The Portuguese explorer Diogo Cão first made contact with the Kingdom of Kongo in west central Africa in 1483. Over the next few years, as diplomatic relations were established, Kongo nobles were brought back to Portugal for conversion to Christianity, then returned to their country. The Portuguese quickly came to depend on the kingdom for a large portion of their slave trade, and the Kongo elite sent envoys to the Vatican and numerous students to European capitals. After an initial period of remarkably equal exchanges, however, conflict arose over Portuguese efforts to undercut rules in Kongo aimed at limiting what was fast becoming a bottomless demand for slaves. In 1526, amid a series of written entreaties to Lisbon to respect these rules, Afonso, the ruler of Kongo, composed a striking complaint to his Portuguese counterpart: [...]

The disaster that the unbridled slave trade inflicted on Kongo is emblematic of slavery’s effects on the economic and political development of Africa as a whole. From the earliest times, the scarcest resource of African kingdoms had been people. Population growth in Africa was severely depressed compared to other parts of the world because of the many life-shortening diseases and parasites that were endemic to its tropical climate. Beyond Africa’s historic challenge of underpopulation, its vastness made it difficult for kingdoms to get people to settle in one place, especially against their will. Africans had always practiced slavery among themselves, but slaves were usually war captives and the victors typically sought to absorb them quickly, through marriage, military service, or the manumission of their children. Without such assimilation the risk of flight or rebellion was too great.

As the demand for bonded African labor skyrocketed in the early eighteenth century, European traders sold firearms in large numbers to well-organized African states like Dahomey and Oyo, transforming them into single-product economies, i.e., mass slave exporters. These powerful kingdoms, typically situated near the coast, mounted seasonal razzia, or raiding campaigns, initially against weaker neighboring peoples but eventually far inland. This turned much of tropical Africa into what the Yale political scientist James C. Scott has called “shatter zones”—inhospitable places where fragmented groups fled the predations of the more powerful: the remotest swamplands of today’s Central African Republic, the inaccessible buttes of Mali, and many other semidesert and forest zones. Economists like William Easterly and Nathan Nunn have argued that there is a strong correlation, even 150 years later, between areas where razzia were most intense and contemporary African poverty levels, a correlation they attribute in part to the persistence of social mistrust, which limits trade and undermines the development of a business culture. [...]

James does not practice outright denialism about European behavior in Africa. But at almost every significant turn in his account, which spans the five centuries from early modern European contacts with the continent to its decolonization beginning in the 1950s, he tends to downplay its ill effects on Africa and wonders aloud why, as he sees it, non-Europeans don’t get held up for comparable scrutiny. Wherever possible, he emphasizes principled motives, particularly as a way of distinguishing the actions of the British from those of their European counterparts. In doing so, he puts the reader in mind of other writers, for instance popularizers of United States history, who likewise emphasize past virtue and decry more critical assessments as unwarranted self-flagellation.[...]

It is certainly true that Western notions about the innate inferiority of Africans were used to justify both enslavement and colonization. But this sort of justification, in addition to being inadequate—deeming a people “inferior” does not provide the grounds for enslaving or murdering them—is based on a false premise, underexplored by James and many other historians. A more curious observer might have also noted that the monumental architecture of the Mayans, the Incas, and the Aztecs gave no pause to Europeans and their designs of conquest. Early on, in any case, European explorers did encounter impressive signs of African achievement, from large and tidy cities to sublime art. They found precolonial African states that dominated entire subregions, controlled lucrative trade routes, and maintained elaborate structures of government. To take but one example, for six hundred years sophisticated kingdoms had succeeded one another astride the Niger River in the region of present-day Mali.

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Social Europe: The Troubling Transformation Of The EU

However, there are two quite different ways of thinking about the Commission’s proposals. For Macron, they were part of a vision for a “Europe qui protege” in which there would be greater “solidarity” between citizens and member states. In the context of this vision, the new European Monetary Fund would be a kind of embryonic treasury for the eurozone. But many in Germany, including Wolfgang Schäuble, seem to support the same idea for entirely different reasons. They see it as a way to increase control over EU member states’ budgets and more strictly enforce the eurozone’s fiscal rules and thus increase European “competitiveness”. If that vision were to prevail, “more Europe” would mean “more Germany” – as many of the steps that have been taken in the last seven years since the euro crisis began have. [...]

It is as if the EU is in the process of being remade in the image of the IMF. It increasingly seems to be a vehicle for imposing market discipline on member states – something quite different from the project that the founding fathers had in mind and also quite different from how most “pro-Europeans” continue to imagine the EU. Indeed, it is striking that, in discussions about debt relief for crisis countries, the European Commission has often been even more unyielding than the IMF. As Luigi Zingales put it in July 2015: “If Europe is nothing but a bad version of the IMF, what is left of the European integration project?” The transformation of the ESM into a European Monetary Fund may be the final, logical step in this process of remaking the EU in the image of the IMF. [...]

In particular, Merkel clearly believes that, in order to be “competitive”, Europe needs to cut back on the generous welfare state for which it is known. She likes to say that Europe has 7 percent of the world’s population, 25 percent of its GDP and 50 percent of its social spending in order to suggest that “it cannot continue to be so generous.” This logic is behind the imposition of austerity on “crisis countries”. For example, former Greek Finance Minister Yannis Varoufakis says that, in their first meeting, Schäuble told him that “the ‘overgenerous’ European social model was no longer sustainable and had to be ditched” in order to make Europe “competitive”. This “competitive” Europe bears little resemblance to the one of the “pro-European” imagination with its emphasis on the “social market economy”.

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Quartz: Religious Muslims in France submit twice as many job applications as Christians to get callbacks

According to a recent study (pdf), French Muslim jobseekers are less likely to get a callback for an interview than their Christian counterparts. French Muslims are even less likely to hear back from employers when they are religious. The opposite is true for Christians: being outwardly religious ended up boosting their callback rate. “Consequently, religious Muslims must submit twice as many applications as religious Christians before being called back by the recruiters,” economist Marie-Anne Valfort of Pantheon-Sorbonne University notes in the paper. [...]

To identify anti-Muslim discrimination, this study compared the callback rates of fake job applicants that were either identifiably Muslim or Christian but were identical in every other respect. To look at the impact of religion alone, Valfort made all the applicants emigrate from a country widely known for its religious pluralism: Lebanon. The Muslim and Christian applicants were put on a wide spectrum, with some very religious and others not religious at all. Valfort conveyed this information under the heading “outside interests” on their résumés. While religious applicants like Michel and Nathalie “train young people in the Catholic Scouting association Scouts and Guides of France,” Mohammed and Samira’s volunteer work involves “the Muslim Scouting association Muslim Scouts of France.”

Valfort sent out 3,331 applications for 3,331 job ads. She found that religious Muslim applicants faced a heavy economic penalty when applying for jobs when compared with their religious Christian peers and non-religious Muslim applicants. This penalty was particularly notable for men—”the callback rate of religious Muslim men is nearly four times lower than that of their Christian counterparts,” Valfort notes. She also found that recruiters were less likely to notify Muslim applicants that they weren’t selected for a job interview.

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