Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Beer-Hall Mush: Merkel’s Statement Is about Germany, Not America



By Luke Thompson
Wednesday, May 31, 2017

President Trump’s first trip abroad has received mixed reviews. His turn through the Middle East went well, yet for all the success of the trip’s opening days, its back half disappointed. After a lackluster meeting with Pope Francis in Rome, the president buffaloed through a series of tense meetings under the aegis of NATO and later the G7. He blustered about everything from German automotive manufacturing to the Paris climate accords, and his European counterparts were happy enough to score cheap domestic political points by returning the favor. Newly elected French president Emmanuel Macron described photo-op handshakes like a veteran of gladiatorial combat. The parliamentary heads of the Nordic states took a photograph holding a soccer ball, a seeming send-up of the glowing orb featured at the launch of Saudi Arabia’s new Global Center for Combating Extremism.

Yet the big news came from German chancellor Angela Merkel. At a political event for her national party’s Bavarian counterpart, Merkel tossed back a liter of beer and suggested that “the times when we could completely rely on others are a bit over. I have experienced this in the last days. . . . That is why I can only say that Europeans must really take our fate into our own hands.”

This was an epochal declaration, according to the liberal corners of the American Internet, an end of the transatlantic alliance, an unprecedented break from the past! Never mind that Merkel’s musing pales in comparison with that of Western European rhetoric from 2004 through 2008. Lest we forget, Gerhard Schröder insinuated that President Bush’s proclivity to pray on weighty matters meant the leader of the free world was effectively a Manichean madman.

Indeed, far from speaking chiefly of America’s reliability, Merkel was speaking to a decidedly European, and specifically German, audience. That audience remains cognitively stunted by its persistent mythologizing of the European Union’s purpose, a delusion perpetuated by the unhealthy interpenetration of the continent’s governing elite by its intellectually desiccated academy.

From the founding of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1952 through New Year’s Day of 1995, the European project expanded slowly, deliberately, and pragmatically. The original six nations — the Benelux countries, West Germany, France, and Italy — were slow to add members. Denmark, Ireland, and the United Kingdom joined on New Year’s Day 1973. Greece came aboard eight years to the day thereafter. Portugal and Spain joined together, again on New Year’s Day, in 1986. Austria, Finland, and Sweden followed suit exactly nine years later.

From the vista of early 1995, the EU made a great deal of sense. The Soviet Union was dead. Germany was reunified and rapidly disarming. The project of decolonization was nearly complete. Spanish democracy, a close-run thing as recently as 1981, had finally taken hold. The EU’s member states had comparatively robust economies and reasonably effective institutions.

True, the Mediterranean countries faced structural challenges to their economies and Italy was (and is) Italy. But tourism promoted by the free movement of peoples, plus northern Italy’s robust manufacturing sector, suggested that these were fixable problems within the single currency. For those countries unwilling to join the euro, so be it: Accommodations could be made. Here was Western Europe post–Cold War, prosperous, shrouded in the American security guarantee, and arguably set on a common mission.

The invasion of Iraq ended these salad days. The European project went off the rails.

As the American occupation degenerated into a Mesopotamian mire, many in the European elite decided that by launching a preemptive war and snubbing the international order in the process, America had forfeited its claim to be the shepherd of liberal democracy. The European project, in the Eurocratic mind, could become the new vanguard of Western values. People wrote books with retrospectively risible titles like “The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy” and “Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century.” It was a heady time, and a foolish one.

Europe’s leaders forgot that the EU began, and in the hearts of its citizens remained, the most pragmatic of entities. It was the coal-and-steel trading bloc still. Francs and deutschmarks, lira and pesetas, could be traded in for euros — that was just money. But the sense of Europe as a single entity with a common mission had not penetrated beneath the ranks of the Brussels set. There was no memory, no community, no mission in the popular European imagination.

Yet to the Eurocracy, Iraq opened the door to an idea of Europe bigger than commerce and beyond postwar pragmatism. The EU, in their minds, could become something more than political. It could become something historical, even metaphysical. This led in short order to the hasty, foolhardy eastward expansion of the EU, into the post-Soviet landscape of backward economies and parchment-barrier institutions.

On May Day, 2004, the EU admitted Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Bulgaria and Croatia joined less than three years later.

Amid this institutional race east, a mass migration of labor headed west. The arrival of Eastern European workers en masse in Western European capitals gave conspicuous lie to the twin myths of economic interdependence and continental solidarity. At a structural level the wild lust for an eastward Manifest Destiny undermined the EU. It destabilized the single currency, rent social trust between and within the countries of Western Europe, and inspired Brussels to ignore referendum defeat after referendum defeat. Arguably, Brexit was born that day in 2004.

The belief that Europe could be a historical vessel of liberal democracy found special succor in the corridors of German academe, especially in Jürgen Habermas’s account of liberal democracy. Habermas, Germany’s most prominent intellectual, shrugged off his Marxist education and embraced liberal democracy. Yet unlike the American philosopher John Rawls, who tried (and failed) to craft a new theory of the social contract, Habermas’s account flattens into empty process. Lacking a coherent theory of human wants and needs, of passions and interests, Habermas reduced liberal democracy to “intersubjective rationality.” Instead of the rights of man, or even the prudent republican checking of faction with faction, liberal democracy became merely people reasoning together. As a result, liberalism ceased to be an ideology of the individualist and becomes an ideology of conversationalist.

Conversation is all good and well, make no mistake. We could use more of it in America these days. But conversation glosses over the institutions of the state, the hard facts of material interest, and the difficult but necessary work of counting noses and votes. Moreover, it presumes that politics can be separated from the animal spirits that move everyday citizens to expend their time and energy in the pursuit of political ends. It underrates the extent to which politics, like athletic fandom, is about enthusiastic, participatory tribalism. Intersubjective rationality cannot account for home-court advantage.

Habermas especially influenced the debate over Europe’s future thanks to the deep intertwining of Germany’s political class and its moribund academic elite. At a grubby level, this means many German politicians get outed as plagiarists when their hollow dissertations come under the microscope. At a more profound level, it means that many German politicos get indoctrinated into Habermasian liberalism. Combine a hunger for history with intersubjective rationality, and one can ignore popular rejection of a sweeping program. The conversation must go on.

The Merkel statement should be seen in this light. Many in the German political elite long for a world without American leadership, never mind that anything that splits the European bloc will allow Russia to pick the Western European countries apart through bilateral energy negotiations. Merkel was giving voice to those instincts — those animal spirits invisible to Habermas — but she was not fully embracing them. For all the ballyhooing around her statement, Merkel ultimately sounded a cautious note. She flattered the abiding desire among the German political class to be heroes of liberal democracy and charge headlong into the future as moral and historical agents. Yet compared with 2004, it could have been worse. After all, Merkel hedged her bets with a fist full of qualifiers.

America gains little from overreacting to Merkel’s statement, turning her words into a self-fulfilling prophecy. We would do well, however, to remember that the Europeans cannot always be trusted to act in their own best interests. That, if nothing else, justifies maintaining a transatlantic order that gives us the final say.

Donald Trump Puts Angela Merkel on Tilt



By Michael Brendan Dougherty
Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A German leader in a beer tent announces a new indifference to the United Kingdom and America and a new determination to lead Europe into a glorious future, possibly delighting the expansionist strongman leading Russia. The result, a little over seventy years ago, was a calamity for civilization, before Germany was brought to repent of its ambition. In 2017, the replay was far less threatening, and the German leader in question began issuing comedowns and take-backs in about 72 hours. The only casualties were the excited opinion columns about Europe stepping forward to lead the world Trump’s America had abandoned.

But it was a mysterious statement. “The times in which we can fully count on others are somewhat over, as I have experienced in the past few days,” Merkel lamented. “We Europeans must really take our destiny in our own hands. Of course we need to have friendly relations with the U.S. and with the U.K. and with other neighbors, including Russia. But we have to fight for our own future ourselves” Of course, she had electoral politics on mind. But something deeper is at work.

In poker, a player who has lost control of her emotions and the realistic assessment of the stakes at play is said to have gone on tilt. Donald Trump seems to put all of his opponents and some of his friends on tilt. The Democrats, the media, and foreign leaders often have good reasons to dislike Donald Trump’s leadership of the United States. Don’t we all? But what so often happens is that Trump’s opponents are goaded by the passions of their constituents, or their wounded sense of pride, or even deluded by their conviction that others must come to realize Trump’s presidency is some kind of cosmic mistake. And then they run out ahead of the evidence, or their own better judgment.

In global opinion-setting press clippings, German chancellor Angela Merkel and her new friend, French president Emmanuel Macron, outclass everyone on planet Earth. But in the real world, the thing that keeps cartographers sitting on their hands and reprinting the same European border maps year after year since the dissolution of the Soviet empire is the U.S. military, the one parked in Germany since 1945.

As one of her own party members said in an off-the-record comment to the Financial Times, “For Merkel, that was an unusually strong statement, Trump’s only been president for four months.” Perhaps a strategic partnership that has endured for the better part of a century isn’t so vulnerable to one tough speech by an American president, or so easy to change that the aspiration of a German chancellor remakes the world order.

But that didn’t stop the gusher of enthusiasm for Merkel’s comments. The Europhilic Irish Times purred that Merkel was stating the obvious: “Faced with an erratic and unpredictable White House, with its purely transactional view of global alliances, and a United Kingdom rapidly turning inward, the EU can only achieve its goals by pulling closer together.” American opinion writers were not much more sober, declaring it the practical end of Atlantic alliance.

How many aircraft carriers, nuclear subs, and fighter jets has Germany christened in these four months? How much closer has Germany come to military parity with Russia? What do you think Poland or Latvia thinks of trusting Germany for political and military protection, absent the United States? C’mon, everyone. Get a grip.

European leaders, contemplating the last 15 years of American leadership, are asking themselves if the problem is one with the American public, who keep electing unserious presidents who make foreign-policy mistakes. Are Europeans immune from bad foreign-policy leadership? Ask the French about Mali or Libya. Ask Germans on the street about Merkel’s open migration policy, or the deal with Turkey meant to stanch the flow. Does the American public sometimes question the utility of NATO? Of course. But European publics are less committed to NATO’s mutual-defense pact than Americans.

Germany is hardly more prepared to lead Europe away from the United States than Spain or Bulgaria would be. Germany’s overt leadership would divide Europe even more into competing Western and Eastern blocs. It was the non-idealistic leadership of European institutions heavily tilted toward German bondholders that led to further disaffection in the currency union. It was the idealistic leadership of Germany in the refugee crisis that led to Brexit. Questioning the Atlantic alliance in a fit of pique could look stupidly short-sighted. Donald Trump’s presidency could be over before Germany or any other European country could even rouse its public for the massive public spending that being a real-world power would require.

“Europe is a union of peace and freedom and it is worth fighting for,” Merkel said, to a great surge of applause. Who could argue otherwise? But the rejoinder suggests itself: Is it worth 2 percent of GDP? Someone, maybe even an oafish American president, might ask. And when he does, it’s best to try not to lose the run of yourself.

Government-Provided Health Care Doesn’t Ensure Better Health



By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, May 31, 2017

While Washington freaked out over the Congressional Budget Office’s verdict on the American Health Care Act (aka “Trumpcare”) and how cutting back health insurance would cost countless lives, the more interesting accounting came out of California. The dream of implementing single-payer health care across the Golden State came with a gobsmacking annual price tag: $400 billion, more than twice California’s annual budget.

So maybe this is a good opportunity to look for another homegrown solution to the problem of health care.

Loma Linda, Calif., has one of the highest life expectancies in the world. Residents there are ten times more likely to live to 100 than typical Americans. The average male in Loma Linda lives to 89, the average woman to 91 — both about ten years longer than the national average.

Before you make like Ponce de Leon and head there to find the Fountain of Youth, let me tell you there’s nothing in the water. Loma Linda is home to a thriving population of Seventh-day Adventists who place great stock in treating their bodies like temples. They don’t smoke, drink alcohol, or eat meat, and they get lots of exercise.

So maybe we should make former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg czar, proscribe meat, tobacco, and booze, and require North Korea–style calisthenics every morning before eating a mandatory breakfast of wholesome grains and raw vegetables.

No, we shouldn’t. But we can learn something from the Loma Linda residents.

Whenever the subject of health care comes up, advocates for more government involvement insist that America’s comparatively low life expectancy is a searing indictment of our dysfunctional insurance system. Senator Bernie Sanders recently seized on Donald Trump’s statement that the Australians have a better insurance system by noting that Australians live longer, which is true. They live, on average, about three years longer than Americans.

But the gold standard of social organization for Sanders isn’t Australia. It’s Denmark. He often waxes lyrical about how Denmark has a different — and better — definition of freedom that, naturally, involves a cradle-to-grave socialist welfare state. Obviously, there’s a lot to debate there, but how does Denmark’s supposedly more enlightened approach translate in terms of life expectancy? The Danes live about a year and a half longer, on average, than Americans — or not quite as long as Australians.

And that “on average” conceals more than it reveals. A recent study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation measured life expectancy by county across the United States. In 2014, a child born in Summit County, Colo., could be expected to live 86.83 years. The life expectancy of a child born in Ogala Lakota County in South Dakota, seat of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, is nearly 20 years shorter. Something tells me these discrepancies have much more to do with lifestyle than insurance.

Indeed, the chief reason American life expectancy lags — slightly — behind that of other developed countries has nothing to do with health care whatsoever. When the World Health Organization ranked America 19th out of 29 in life expectancy, Scott W. Atlas of the Hoover Institution pointed out that if you removed fatal car crashes and murders, the U.S. suddenly had the “world’s best life expectancy numbers.”

I can’t see how adopting Danish health care would affect driving habits or homicide rates. It’s also far from clear that government-provided health care does much to improve health generally. The Pine Ridge Lakota Indians already have it — in the form of the Indian Health Service. Of course, the IHS, like the Veterans Health Administration, has real problems. But a huge study of Medicaid expansion in Oregon found that, with the exception of depression diagnoses, increased health insurance yielded no significant improvement in health.

In 2016, when millions received coverage under Obamacare, American life expectancy went down for the first time in over 20 years. I’m not suggesting a causal relationship: Obamacare didn’t kill anyone. If it saved individuals’ lives here and there, that’s great. Still, those numbers vanish in the national data as anecdotes, not significant trends.

There are still good reasons to reform health care. But a little humility about what government can do, and the stakes involved, might be in order.