Category: The Dish

Stephen Walt thinks so:

First, he has put the idea of a further NATO expansion on the back burner for a long time, and maybe forever. Russia has opposed NATO’s march eastward ever since it began in the mid-1990s, but Russia was not in a position to do much about it. The brief 2008 war between Russia and Georgia was Putin’s first attempt to draw a red line, and that minor skirmish dampened enthusiasm for expansion considerably. This time around, Putin made it abundantly clear that any future attempt to bring Ukraine into NATO or even into EU membership will be met with firm Russian opposition and will probably lead to dismemberment of the country.

Second, Putin has restored Russian control over Crimea, an act that was popular with most Crimean residents and most Russians as well. The takeover entailed some short-term costs (including some rather mild economic sanctions), but it also solidified Russian control over its naval base in Sevastopol and will allow Russia to claim oil and gas reserves in the Black Sea that may be worth trillions of dollars. … Third, Putin has reminded Ukraine’s leaders that he has many ways to make their lives difficult. No matter what their own inclinations may be, it is therefore in their interest to maintain at least a cordial relationship with Moscow. And Ukraine’s new president, Petro Poroshenko, got the message.

Posner also disputes the theory, advanced by Tom Friedman, that Putin “blinked” after weighing the costs of the Ukrainian adventure against the benefits for his regime:

Russia’s economy was not weakened–the stock market was trading in the 1400s before the crisis and is trading in the 1400s today. The ruble is roughly unchanged, a hair lower. No one really knows whether China got a bargain or not; too much depends on unknown contingencies. But it is clear that Russia has benefited from closer relations with China. NATO hardly seems revived, the European countries are in turmoil and divided in their response to Russia, and as dependent on its gas as ever. Defense spending is not likely to increase, but even if it did, Russia would hardly care since it has no plans to invade Poland or Germany, and knows that they have no plans to liberate Crimea or provide military aid to Ukraine.

Against these trivial costs if that is what they are, consider Russia’s gains. … Saying that Putin “blinked” is like saying that the boy who stole a cookie from a cookie jar blinked because he took only one cookie rather than all of them.

Meanwhile, the conflict itself continues apace, and Russian involvement has by no means ended. Anna Nemtsova reports that the rebels in eastern Ukraine have taken over a border town, opening a supply corridor with Russia:

What this means is that even as Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with senior European leaders on Thursday and he and U.S. President Barack Obama circle each other warily during the D-Day commemoration in Normandy on Friday, the war in eastern Ukraine may be moving into high gear. Although Putin has withdrawn most of the Russian troops that had been poised on the frontier threatening a conventional invasion, the way is now open for volunteers and operatives of various stripes, along with supplies, to move freely into the country.

A couple of journalistic colleagues and I had been hearing about attempts to open this corridor for several days as we traveled in eastern Ukraine. The Russian ministry of foreign affairs, Russian parliament parliamentarians and the Russian volunteers in Ukraine we spoke to all talked about establishing what they called a “humanitarian corridor.” We had been looking for the hole in the border, and we discovered it Wednesday near a city called Sverdlovsk in the region of Luhansk.

(Photo: Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images)

Data discrepancies afflict around 2 million Obamacare enrollments:

The biggest concern is that some people may have received too high a subsidy, meaning they’d be asked to repay the excess or lose their coverage.

Obama administration officials said they believed most of the inconsistencies will be cleared up over the summer, but said they’d developed a system to “turn off” benefits for people who aren’t eligible. “The fact that a consumer has an inconsistency on their application does not mean there is a problem on their enrollment,” Julie Bataille, the Department of Health and Human Services’ spokeswoman said. “Most of the time what that means is that there is more up-to-date information that they need to provide to us.”

Philip Klein is alarmed:

2.1 million represents a lot of sign-ups. Even if a “vast majority” of instances are easily resolved, that could still leave hundreds of thousands of cases in which individuals received incorrect subsidy determinations. If individuals received extra subsidy money, it would mean that they would have to pay it back in the following tax year. A higher-than-expected tax liability could become a mess for lower-income Americans who budgeted for the year based on certain assumptions.

Cohn is less concerned:

The idea is to verify applicant information, in real-time. And mostly that’s what happened during open enrollment, at least once all of the consumer websites were working. But because the process is so complicated—and because people’s life circumstances sometimes change—the information that people supplied didn’t always match up with federal records. That was particularly true for income, since the data hub checked applications against (two-year-old) tax returns and (one-year-old) payroll stubs. Somebody who recently lost a job or got a new one, or went through a major life change like a divorce, or whose income simply varies a lot from year to year, could easily supply income information that was totally accurate but simultaneously at odds with the government’s latest data.

The Affordable Care Act anticipates situations like these and addresses them. Rather than hold up those applications, creating a huge backlog and potentially scaring away people seeking insurance, Section 1411 of the law allows applicants to complete the enrollment process even if the information they submit doesn’t match up properly. In such cases, people may “attest” to the accuracy of the information they provided. If the data mismatch is about citizenship or residency—or if it is about income and of greater value than 10 percent—these people receive official notices, requiring them to provide new information or show that the original, submitted information is correct.

In an interview on Tuesday, former Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford let loose with harsh criticism:

Ford, who served from 2010 to 2014, basically thinks that Obama was warned that Syria was going to hell, and did nothing to stop it.  “We have been unable to address either the root causes of the conflict in terms of the fighting on the ground and the balance on the ground, and we have a growing extremism threat,” the ambassador said. “We warned even as long as two years ago that terrorist groups” would take advantage of the chaos in Syria to build a base of operations — a warning that, of course, turned out to be correct.

He also doesn’t see the deal removing most of Syria’s chemical weapons as making up for…much of anything, really. “There really is nothing we can point to that’s been very successful in our policy except the removal of about ninety-three percent of some of Assad’s chemical materials. But now he’s using chlorine gas against his opponents.” According to Ford, the State Department believed “as much as two years ago” that the US needed to give much stronger support to friendly, non-extremist Syrian rebels. Support the right guys, the argument goes, and the terrorism problem doesn’t loom so large.

Greg Scoblete takes down Ford’s argument for arming the “right” Syrian rebels:

Ford blithely brushed off the question of how the U.S. would ensure custody of those weapons by assuring us that the U.S. government had “information on reliable groups” whose “agenda was compatible with our national security interests.” Of course, even if the U.S. did have a finely tuned understanding of various rebel groups and how they would act if they were to receive large shipments of U.S. weapons (a skill that Washington has curiously failed to manifest elsewhere) this is hardly the only argument against arming factions in Syria’s civil war.

A more serious objection is that backing one side to “victory” does nothing more than implicate the U.S. in the creation of yet-another failed state. Ford, and those cheering him on, have a [surprisingly] naive faith in the power of Syria’s rebel groups to not only depose Assad but to stand up a relatively cohesive and secure state in his wake. Where is this faith coming from? It couldn’t be from Iraq or Libya, where the U.S. directly and indirectly toppled regimes only to see chaos flower in the aftermath. The U.S. directly implanted a government in Afghanistan at the cost of billions of dollars and is now leaving the country at the mercy of a still-potent insurgency.

Larison piles on:

Ford unintentionally draws attention to some of the main reasons why it has never made sense to arm any part of the Syrian opposition. First, there is no such thing as a truly “reliable” group in these conflicts. No matter how agreeable a group’s stated agenda and ideology may appear, the U.S. gains no meaningful influence and control over the groups that it arms, and it cannot rely on these groups to do anything except pursue their own goals. In the short term, that may seem expedient because they claim to have similar goals, but that guarantees nothing later on. The main problem isn’t that the U.S. lacks information about the groups requesting weapons, though it might, but that it doesn’t know what will happen if it succeeds in promoting regime change by proxy.

But Walter Russell Mead agrees with Ford that Obama’s reluctance to intervene in Syria has created international security problems:

Twelve thousand foreign fighters, 3,000 of whom come from Western nations, have entered Syria as jihadists since the war began. The prospect of experienced terrorists with Western passports, native accents, and ties to local communities returning home to the United States and Europe presents a daunting security challenge. … The Soufan Group, an international intelligence and security firm, offered a stark warning this weekend that, as a result of the Syrian war, al-Qaeda “is probably in a better position now than at anytime since October 2001.” On Tuesday, Bashar al-Assad held sham elections that sent a clear signal to the world that he was bound and determined to remain in power. Ford is just the latest of many Washington figures, professional as well as political, Democrat as well as Republican, to decry the President’s weakness in response to the ever-worsening crisis. Will he now act? Can he?

Beinart weighs Ford’s views alongside the similar argument that Vali Nasr makes in his book, The Dispensable Nation:

The Ford-Nasr critique is hardly self-evident. Nasr assails the White House staff for putting domestic politics too much at the center of foreign policy. But Obama’s refusal to take bigger foreign-policy gambles may reflect an accurate assessment of the domestic mood. (It’s noteworthy that the one time Obama did take a big overseas risk—the raid on Osama bin Laden—it was in pursuit of a goal Americans truly cared about). …

Either way, the Ford-Nasr critique deserves more attention because it’s the one most likely to influence Hillary Clinton, who was more supportive of arming Syria’s rebels than Obama, more supportive of a larger Afghan surge and, according to Nasr, more supportive of talks with the Taliban earlier on in the conflict. Intellectually, Clinton has been more influenced by the Balkan Wars than Obama has, and less by the trauma in Iraq. And her self-declared doctrine—“smart power”—which envisages the coordinated use of different aspects of American might, is closer to what Ford and Nasr are proposing than to the Obama Doctrine: “Don’t do stupid shit.”

Keating observes that China’s tightly enforced collective amnesia about Tiananmen Square doesn’t extend to Hong Kong:

In contrast to the tense silence on the mainland, the commemoration of Tiananmen was very much in evidence in Hong Kong, where as many as 150,000 people attended a candlelight vigil [yesterday].  … Hong Kong is currently undergoing the dual and seemingly contradictory processes of becoming more closely integrated with mainland China while theoretically transitioning toward having a fully elected democratic government. But China and Hong Kong together aren’t just “one country, two systems”—another favorite slogan—they seem to be one country with two memories, and two very different understandings of recent history.

In addition to the regularly scheduled vigil, Rachel Lu reports on a smaller, more politically charged event that also took place in the city yesterday:

The organizers of the new gathering — two groups called Civic Passion and the Proletariat Political Institute — claim to espouse a complete rejection of the Chinese Communist Party and its rule, rather than holding out hope for reconciliation, reform, or redress of past wrongs. The large banner hoisted on the stage read in Chinese: “Don’t Need [Chinese Government] to Redress June 4” and “Want the Demise of the Communist Regime.” The new gathering only turned out a small fraction of the attendance at its storied counterpart in Victoria Park. The organizers claimed more than 7,000 were present, but police estimated approximately 3,060.

Simon Denyer visits Hong Kong’s new Tiananmen Square museum:

In a tiny fifth floor room in an office building in Kowloon, Hong Kong, a museum was set up in April to commemorate the events of June 4, 1989, better known by some as “Tiananmen Square.” It has already already attracted about 6,000 visitors since it opened. Only a few dozen people can fit into the 800-square-foot exhibition space at a time, but by the end of Wednesday, about 400 visitors had come. Johnny Li, a 26-year-old staff member, said about 40 to 50 percent of visitors come from mainland China. “Some are surprised because they didn’t know the history of June 4, but some already know, and share and discuss with other people in the museum,” he said.

Simon Denyer points out that the anniversary comes at a time when Hong Kong’s ties to the mainland are severely strained:

Under the terms of the territory’s handover from British rule in 1997, China promised significant autonomy under the “one country, two systems” model. At the time, many here were happy to see the British go, but that sentiment has since gradually eroded. China has promised the territory universal suffrage and genuine democracy in 2017, when the job of chief executive, the most powerful political role in Hong Kong, next comes up for grabs.

But many here fear that Beijing will fix the contest, to ensure one of its local allies wins. There are also growing concerns that China is gradually diluting Hong Kong’s cherished civil liberties and media freedom, while a massive influx of tourists and immigrants from mainland China has caused growing local resentment. The resentment undermines any hope Beijing might have of persuading the people of Taiwan to ever join mainland China under a similar “one country, two systems” model, and it is a constant reminder of a democratic spirit among Chinese people that refuses to go away.