A Missed Opportunity to Embarrass Turkey’s Erdogan

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, November 14, 2019

Sen. Lindsey Graham explained on Wednesday that his decision to block the U.S. Senate’s consideration of a bill recognizing the expulsion and extermination of more than a million Armenians by Turkish forces in the early part of the 20th century was born out of a sense of decorum. “I objected to the Armenian resolution yesterday, not so much on substance, but I did not want to have that resolution passed while the Turkish president was in town,” Graham said, according to Fox News Channel reporter Chad Pergram.

By all accounts, Graham has no love for Turkey’s autocratic leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, or the modern sultanate over which he presides. As Axios reporter Jonathan Swan related, Graham was one of a handful of senators invited into the Oval Office with Erdogan. There, he admirably chided the Turkish leader over his invasion of Syria’s Kurdish-held territories and the atrocious behavior displayed by soldiers under Ankara’s command.  

Graham’s effort to preserve the high-flown choreography that typifies diplomatic relations between heads of state is noble but misplaced. Turkey’s increasingly dictatorial and anti-Western president does not deserve the honor.

Erdogan used the dubious 2016 coup attempt against him to imprison tens of thousands of dissidents and journalists, as well as to purge the military of elements still beholden to the institution’s secularist past. Amid Erdogan’s post-coup crackdown, the Turkish regime cut off power to and surround the American-manned airbase at Incirlik. The West protested but took no further action, and Erdogan consolidated his power. The full effect of his campaign against dissenters was on full, grotesque display in the White House on Wednesday, when so many of the Turkish press in attendance prefaced their questions for both presidents with obsequious praise.

The following year, Turkey—frustrated by the Trump administration’s refusal to extradite an exiled cleric living in Pennsylvania who Erdogan that blames for a laundry list of woes—began harassing and even arresting U.S. diplomatic personnel. After the United States protested, Turkey announced a halt to all non-immigrant visas from the United States and suspended future weapons purchases from Washington. In 2018, Erdogan was inexplicably rewarded for his behavior with a visit to the American capital, where his security detail was implicated in the brazen assault of otherwise peaceful demonstrators. Many of the charges against Erdogan’s bodyguards were dropped, but only because Ankara would not cooperate with American prosecutors.

Amid its incursion into Syria in October, Turkish forces launched a barrage of artillery rounds so near to known U.S. positions that U.S. officials did not believe it could be an accident. If the “bracketing” of U.S. positions with artillery was intentional, it would serve Turkey’s interests. The American president had signaled his intention to withdraw U.S. forces from the northeastern border with Turkey but dithered in the execution. Ankara was not taking any chances that the aggressive effort by Trump’s Republican allies to get the president to change his mind would be successful. The prospect of armed conflict with Turkish forces in those fraught hours was very real. “That’s an area weapon,” one U.S. soldier said of the 155-millimeter shells exploding around American positions. “That’s not something we ever would have done to a partner force.” But Turkey is not a “partner” in any conventional definition, even if it remains a nominal member of the NATO alliance. 

In Washington this week, alongside the president, Erdogan took the opportunity to castigate House Democrats and praise Trump for struggling on despite inheriting “the burden of Obama’s flawed foreign policy.” You don’t have to be particularly enamored with either the 44th President or his party’s House majority to look with contempt upon Erdogan’s manipulative effort to leverage America’s domestic political squabbles for his own cynical gain. Moreover, the productive outcomes that Graham’s defense of Turkish dignity was designed to preserve did not materialize. Turkey did not commit to abandoning the sophisticated anti-aircraft batteries it purchased from Russia in naked defiance of NATO’s demands, and Trump received no guarantees about the status of the safety of Kurdish forces with whom America continues to work.

There’s a lost virtue in practicing the art of diplomacy in public while reserving more contentious issues for behind closed doors. But Erdogan is due no deference from American lawmakers. He is due an embarrassment. It’s tragic that, when American lawmakers had the chance to hand him one, they passed.

A New Strategy on Campus: Blame the Jews

By Jonathan Marks

Friday, November 15, 2019

In a riveting and sad New York Times op-ed, Blake Flayton, a student at George Washington University and a “gay abortion rights advocate and environmentalist,” explained why his fellow progressives call him a “baby killer” and “apartheid enabler.” Like 95 percent of Jews, according to Gallup, the op-ed’s author has a “favorable” view of Israel.

George Washington University has been in the news lately for a blatant kind of anti-Semitism. A “pro-Palestinian” student was captured on video, saying, “We’re going to f**king bomb Israel, bro. F**k out of here, Jewish pieces of s**t.” The student, who says she was intoxicated, has apologized profusely and claimed she didn’t “even know why I said that.” I take her at her word. But the line between “Zionist” and “Jew” can be thin in anti-Israel discourse. In vino veritas.

Jewish students, who constitute about a quarter of GW’s student body, say that they experience anti-Semitism on campus. But crude anti-Semitism is not Flayton’s focus.

Instead, Flayton described a rally he attended in support of higher wages for custodial staff. In the course of that rally, representatives of the two leading campus anti-Israel groups, Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, spoke. They “railed against the oppression of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, which, according to them, had everything to do with G.W. janitors making less than their fair share.”

Flayton asks, “Reasonable people recognize that conflating the Jews with being money-hungry or cheap is anti-Semitic. How is tying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to janitors not getting paid enough at an American university any different?”

Good question.

It remains only to note that blaming the Jewish state for every species of injustice is a feature of the campus anti-Israel movement, not an anomaly. At the City University of New York in 2015, multiple Students for Justice in Palestine chapters signed a statement against CUNY’s “Zionist administration.” The topics? High tuition and low wages for campus workers. Jewish Voice for Peace has since 2017 been running a “Deadly Exchange” campaign, the core of which is that Israel is responsible for police violence against blacks in America. The strategy is clear enough: if you blame the Jews—sorry, “Zionism”—for everyone’s ills, you can draw more allies into your movement.

Anti-Semitism, you see, is a potent political strategy. It’s even more potent when student governments ignore Jewish students and condemn, as the student Senate at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign did recently, the “equation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.” Four hundred Jewish students, including the lone Jew in the Senate, walked out.

Once, certain student governments were satisfied to make pronouncements about the Middle East without educating themselves about it. Now they have graduated to lecturing and condemning Jews who complain about anti-Semitism without educating themselves about anti-Semitism.

Kudos to Mr. Flayton for stepping forward and to the New York Times for publishing him. No doubt, some adherents of the campus left are beyond shame. But in my experience, even professed anti-Zionists are more thoughtful and persuadable than their public pronouncements suggest. They genuinely believe, perhaps because they rub elbows mainly with the 5 percent of Jews who do not have a favorable view of Israel, that the people who charge them with anti-Semitism are disingenuous.

They haven’t thought it through, but they’re not beyond help.

What Sticks

By Noah Rothman

Friday, November 15, 2019

“Consequential, but dull.” That’s how Reuters reporters characterized the first day of public impeachment hearings, and they weren’t alone. “It was substantive,” NBC News observed, “but it wasn’t dramatic.” For partisan liberals, appraising the solemn rite of impeachment as though it was a very special episode of “Real Housewives” conveyed only the frivolity of the press. Clearly, though, House Democrats also want to see a little more “pizazz” in these proceedings, if only to hold the attention of the viewing audience. The substantive allegations against the president just aren’t doing the trick.

The Washington Post’s reporters recently observed a distinct shift in how Democrats have begun to talk about the claim that President Trump leveraged his power and contravened the will of Congress to compel Ukraine to announce the commencement of investigations into his domestic adversaries. No longer are House Democrats using the phrase “quid pro quo” as shorthand for the scandal. Instead, Democrats like Nancy Pelosi are describing what they’ve uncovered as “evidence of bribery.” Even if “bribery” does not accurately summarize the claims against Trump, Democrat Rep. Jim Himes said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” it is a more effective way to communicate the claims against Trump than using “Latin words.”

This subtle shift is not attributable to new revelations uncovered by House investigators but by Democrats’ discovery that voters are nonplused by the proceedings. As the Post revealed, this rhetorical transition followed message testing with focus groups in battleground districts, in which voters responded with more revulsion toward the word “bribery” than “quid pro quo” or even “extortion.” Moreover, “bribery” has the added benefit of reflecting the language in the Constitution pertaining to offenses that merit a remedy for presidential corruption as extraordinary as impeachment and removal from office.

There are two problems with this. First, “bribery” does not describe what is alleged to have occurred here—at least, not from the president’s perspective. The offenses at issue center around the claim—one now supported by the testimony of a half-dozen current and former administration officials—that the president misused his authority to achieve a domestic political objective, subordinating U.S. interests in the process. In that effort, Trump withheld the disbursement of congressionally authorized financial and military assistance, which may have violated appropriations law.

Some have argued that, even if Trump’s actions fall short of the criminal definition of what constitutes “bribery,” the Constitution does not explicitly define the term. After all, the Founders might have viewed that which the president sought to extract for himself from Ukraine as a material benefit. But the phrase “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” was appended onto “Treason and Bribery,” expanding the definition of what constitutes impeachable offenses to encompass a broader array of corrupt activities that stop short of simple “maladministration.” In other words, Congress would know an impeachable offense when it saw one, and it has the authority to define such offenses broadly. The Constitution is not the obstacle before Democrats; voters are.

And therein lies the second problem for Democrats. The president’s opponents have insisted that theirs is a somber duty, and they would go only where the facts led them. Thus far, the facts have led them in a direction that apparently does not sufficiently titillate voters in battleground House districts. That doesn’t speak to the gravity of the charges against Trump but the conscientiousness of voters. By message testing the themes surrounding impeachment and shaping their rhetorical strategy to most excite voters’ passions, Democrats have given their Republican critics ample ammunition to claim these proceedings are less about good governance than the pursuit of political advantage.

Impeachment is a political process. Like any such process, it will require broad public support if it is to be successful. To that end, Democrats are obliged to determine what course of action plays best with a critical mass of voters, but not at the expense of the facts of the case before House investigators. The language Democrats are now endorsing doesn’t clarify so much as confuse the allegations against the president. More damningly, it suggests to persuadable observers that the facts as we understand them are insufficient to produce the outcome Democrats would like to see from impeachment proceedings.

Marco Rubio’s Half-Baked Political Philosophy

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, November 17, 2019

I  am a great believer in Senator Marco Rubio, in his excellent intentions, and in the undoubtable ability of Senator Marco Rubio and his excellent intentions together to screw up anything they touch.

Senator Rubio, writing in National Review, joins the ranks of those who propose to reinvent capitalism — “common-good capitalism,” he calls it. Senator Elizabeth Warren also proposes to reinvent capitalism and calls her version “accountable capitalism.” Dear old Bernie Sanders still proposes to overthrow capitalism and be done with it, bless his heart.

Senator Rubio, working from remarks originally delivered in a speech at Catholic University, references a series of popes — Leo XIII, mostly, but also Benedict and Francis — to describe (whether the senator understands this or not) the familiar moral basis of fascist economic thinking, beginning from the premise that “workers and businesses are not competitors for their share of limited resources, but partners in an effort that strengthens the entire nation.” Under the careful tutelage of the state, of course. I write this as a fellow Catholic: God defend us from these backward, primitive-minded Catholic social reformers. Pope Francis would do mortal harm to the poor of this world if he had any real political power; blessedly, Providence has relieved him and us of that burden.

It is the case that resources are limited — scarcity is an inescapable fact — and that firms and workers compete with one another (as do consumers; politicians never talk about that, for some reason). What to make of that? Nothing. Senator Rubio simply proceeds with his shallow moralizing as though these facts were not facts. Some people like Chevy trucks, some like Fords, and some of us prefer Toyotas built in Texas. Does the marginal sale of one of these vs. one of the others “strengthen the entire nation”? Of course not. Apple, Disney, Amazon, and Netflix are fighting one another tooth and talon for market share in the entertainment industry, and “the nation” has no especial vested interest in any particular outcome. Nobody really even takes seriously the kind of rhetoric that Senator Rubio here is relying upon. These are just words that come out of the mouths of men who want power.

And power is what is at issue.

Men such as Senator Rubio desire for themselves the power to overrule markets — to limit trade and property rights, enterprise and exchange — in the service of what Senator Rubio describes as the “common good.” The problems with that are several. For one thing, Senator Rubio does not know what the common good is and has no way of knowing. For another thing, we know quite well, from long experience, how such vague and plastic notions of the “common good” interact with the discrete good.

Take, for example, Senator Rubio’s own servility on behalf of subsidies for the billionaire sugar barons of his home state, arguing that such handouts to business interests are a matter of “national security,” a position that the senator has defended by twisting himself into absurd positions that Bikram Choudhury himself would blanch to contemplate. I write this not because Senator Rubio represents the worst of what Washington has to offer but because he represents the best of what Washington has to offer. His heart is in the right place. His head is . . . elsewhere. Like most of the men and women who find success in politics, Senator Rubio has the wrong kind of intelligence for the task he imagines he is undertaking. He is clever, like most politicians, and like most politicians believes that a clever tweak here or there will make moot certain inconvenient realities such as economic scarcity. He is wrong about this.

He is wrong about a great deal. He worries about the “financialization” of the U.S. economy, which is largely a myth. (The share of assets controlled by financial firms has held steady around 2 percent for a long time.) He worries that the lack of satisfying employment in certain communities has led to substance abuse and a decline in marriage without considering the possibility that the unemployment is a symptom of the same noneconomic pathology as the addiction and family dysfunction. “Diagnosing the problem is something we should be able to achieve across the political spectrum, though even that seems challenging at times,” he writes. But Dr. Rubio has got it wrong. “Ultimately, deciding what the government should do about it must be the core question of our politics,” he continues. Misunderstanding the problem and then reorienting government toward the execution of a program of therapy dreamt up by quacks with no special expertise or genuine knowledge of the disease in question is exactly the catastrophe you get when you encounter the word “diagnosis” in a sentence written by a lawyer.

Capitalism is what happens when government respects property rights, which include the rights to trade and to work. What we need from men in government is not the quasi-metaphysical project of reinventing capitalism in the name of the “common good.” What we need from government is — government. The government in which Senator Rubio serves cannot manage to appropriate money through regular order, to cease its own ruinous accumulation of debt, or to secure a clear and lasting military victory over a rabble of half-organized fanatics festering in the wilderness of Afghanistan. So, no, I do not think they know how to run Apple or Facebook or Ford. If Senator Rubio cares about the common good, then he can butt right out while the people who produce the goods and innovations that bring with them such ancillary benefits as jobs and tax payments do what they do.

Which is not to say that there is no role for government in this. This is not a brief for anarchism. Government can — or could, or should — play an irreplaceable role in this by providing a predictable and stable policy environment (including in the matter of business taxes and regulation) that will allow firms to make long-term investments under reasonably stable conditions. Do you know what is not a synonym for “policy stability?” Reinventing capitalism. The federal government exists to provide public goods that are necessarily national in scope; in reality, most of the money it spends is simple redistribution of income, either directly through Social Security and other payments or indirectly through the provision and subsidy of medical benefits. And, if Senator Rubio would care to have a gander at the books over there at the Social Security Administration, it would be obvious that Washington cannot even do that right.

The nation does not need your philosophy, Senator Rubio. (Although, given how weakly articulated it is, may I recommend that you revise the part of your stump speech in which you make fun of philosophy majors?) We do not need your half-assed moralizing. We need stability and predictability from a government that secures our liberty and our property in the least obtrusive way that can be managed. And if you could manage that without bankrupting the nation, we would be grateful.

French President Emmanuel Macron Gets Trumpian On NATO

By Sumantra Maitra

Wednesday, November 13, 2019

Everyone in Berlin, London, and Washington’s policy circles know it to be true, but no one has said what French President Emmanual Macron has out loud, except for President Trump. Much as it pains me, sitting here in England, to say that a Frenchman is correct, he is.

It might be a subtle French bid for Euro leadership and hegemony, but Macron’s recent concern in an interview about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was as subtle as using a flamethrower to light a Jo Malone Pomegranate Noir candle.

Macron was positively Trumpian about a few things. When asked what is Europe’s endgame, Macron said Europe is not just a market, but a community: “Europe has lost track of its history. Europe has forgotten that it is a community, by increasingly thinking of itself as a market, with expansion as its end purpose…A market is not a community. A community is stronger: it has notions of solidarity, of convergence, which we’ve lost, and of political thought.”

He then pointed out that it is logical that America would refocus on China, an ever-growing revisionist hegemon in the Pacific and a threat far bigger than anything in the Western Hemisphere, and incomparably large compared to some tribals killing each other in the Middle East.

Macron also argued that the “End of History” is bunk. It’s over, much though some might try to return to the heady days of the early 1990s. “There was…the ‘end of history,’ of a limitless expansion of democracy, of the triumph of the West as a universal value system. That was the accepted truth at the time, until the 2000s, when a series of shocks demonstrated that it wasn’t actually so true.”

He is right about great power rivalry returning, and since great powers are the defining factors in world politics, he is correct about finding stability and equilibrium instead of evangelizing about rights and democracy, and he is correct about the Balkans being peripheral to the European Union’s interests. There’s nothing more foolish than an idealist who fails to see a changing world as it is, not as he thinks it ought to be.

Macron’s primary fire was not directed at the United States, much though Bloomberg would like to portray it that way, but it at Turkey: “You have an uncoordinated aggressive action by another NATO ally, Turkey, in an area where our interests are at stake. There has been no NATO planning, nor any coordination. There hasn’t even been any NATO deconfliction.”

While there might not be a problem between the militaries, the political alliance is under fire. There’s no denying that NATO expansion has made the alliance bloated. This is not the moat and drawbridge of freedom that saved Western Europe from communist tyranny. This is a new politically correct front for the liberal hegemony.

What benefit does North Macedonia bring to NATO, and if Montenegro can be a part of NATO, why not Mozambique, or Mongolia? Should NATO members spend money on learning Afghan Dari and Pushtu and building girl’s schools in Kurdistan? Is that what NATO was meant for? And why should anyone from Manchester, United Kingdom, or Massachusetts, United States die for Mariupol in Ukraine? Are LGBT policies in Chechnya the job of a defense alliance based on common shared interests?

The reality is this: After Brexit, 80 percent of NATO’s defense expenditure will come from non-EU allies. Only Germany leads a battlegroup in the East, a single one. The rest of the security burden is carried by two countries: the United States and the United Kingdom. That is unsustainable.

As Cato’s Ted Galen Carpenter wrote in his report, “A June 2015 Pew Research Center survey of public opinion in eight NATO countries showed that a median of 49 per cent of respondents thought their country should not defend an ally. France, Italy and Germany—three of the largest and most important European powers–all had majorities opposed to fulfilling their country’s obligation under Article 5.”

This reflects the growing concern of all international relations theorists that NATO in its current form is not a defense alliance at all, but a bureaucracy fighting to sustain and grow for survival. When push comes to shove, it would only be two Anglo-American great powers who spend their blood and treasure.

German defense spending is around 1.2 per cent of its gross domestic product. Their social spending is around 26 percent of GDP. Germany is also the strongest world critic of both the United Kingdom and the United States. Why on God’s green earth should anyone think of continuing this status quo?

This pattern to French assertiveness goes beyond just NATO posturing. Historic French foreign policy has been to ensure that France remains the dominant voice, compared to Mittel-Europa, or Germanic central Europe, in the European balance.

There’s an advantage in the French system that the Anglo-Americans do not possess. The French system of foreign policy is inherently hierarchical and top-down, regardless of the type of regime it has, a monarchy or a republic. The Anglo-American model instead relies heavily on public opinion. A diplomat from the United Kingdom or United States would be completely at ease to criticize his national leadership. Not a French diplomat, who’d support his country, regardless of who rules it.

There were no protests in Paris when Trump visited, as compared to London. The French understand national interest, a raison d’état, a lot more coherently than their counterparts do. Realism is in their blood. It was Cardinal Richelieu who supported the Protestant princes against the fellow Catholic superpower Habsburgs, simply due to its promotion of the balance of power.

Ever since, the French foreign policy has been to dominate central Europe, often at the cost of Germans, a position they lost permanently with the unification of Germany under Otto von Bismarck, and a position that they have tried to return to ever since. During the Cold War, as well, France was the only nuclear power, an on and off member of NATO, and never took part in joined decision-making. It pursued an independent nuclear deterrence as well as foreign policy, one that continued post-Cold War, as evident from repeated French unilateral military interventions in Africa.

France feared German re-unification post-Cold War, and the Franco-German division is nowhere more prominent than on the role of NATO. But interestingly, while Germany wants to leech on the United States and United Kingdom providing European security while sanctimoniously lecturing U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Trump about refugees and human rights, the French were always honest about their intentions. Macron’s attempt to take control of the EU is just another episode of the return of the historic French policy of “iron hand in a velvet glove.”

Regardless, he is right. NATO in its current form is obsolete and outdated. That doesn’t mean it cannot reform, but it is outdated, and that is a fact. An alliance in which member states do not share any common interest, common threat, equal contributions, or common values isn’t an alliance, but a bloated bureaucracy.

The paradox of NATO is that it institutionalizes Anglo-American hegemony, and ensures that no great power dominates the European continent, but at the cost of manpower and treasure which would be better spent somewhere else, where it is needed. The reason NATO muscle atrophied is because other member states know Uncle Sam will be there to break the glass in case of an emergency.

It is foolish to expect Western European powers to pay their fair share in defense when they know there are no threats of Russian tanks blitzing through Belgian meadows as long as British and American armor remains in the Baltics. These are facts, and for all his hidden intentions, Macron has been at least more honest about his assessment than most of the world’s leaders.

Trump Administration Vows To Fight EU Decision To Put Warning Labels On Jewish Products

By Erielle Davidson

Wednesday, November 14, 2019

As Israel faces repeated rocket fire from Islamic jihadists, the EU engages in its own battle to delegitimize the Jewish state in its latest ruling condoning discriminatory labeling practices for Jewish goods produced in contested areas of Israel.

Yesterday, the EU’s Court of Justice (ECJ), the highest court in the EU, ruled that Jewish products made in contested areas of Israel must bear consumer warning labels. Prior to the ruling, U.S. lawmakers in Congress fired warning shots, cautioning the EU that such a move would prompt the enforcement of American anti-boycott laws, thus endangering the EU’s trade with the United States.

Now, according to reporting by Adam Kredo of the Washington Free Beacon, the Trump administration is ready to go to battle over the ruling. Currently, the United States is the EU’s largest trading partner.

The origins of the legal dispute stretch back several years to when the EU issued a mandate in 2015 declaring that products produced in the West Bank and Golan Heights be labeled as coming from an Israeli settlement, facially for the purpose of promoting “consumer protection,” although it’s unclear if that is actually achieved here. In late 2016, France became the first EU member state to attempt to enforce the mandate, resulting in the Israeli winery Psagot filing a lawsuit claiming that such a mandate violated the EU’s anti-discrimination laws.

Under the new rule, goods produced by Jews will be labeled as having been produced in an Israeli settlement, while goods produced by Muslims may be labeled as made in “Palestine,” indicating blatant discriminatory treatment. Unsurprisingly, Israel’s presence in the West Bank and the Golan Heights are the only contested areas in the world to be the focus of the labeling ire of the EU.

“No other territory, occupied, disputed, or otherwise is subject to such requirements,” noted Eugene Kontorovich, director of the Center for International Law in the Middle East at George Mason University. Kontorovich emphasized the peculiarity of the ruling. “In no other case does any ‘origin labeling’ require any kind of statement about the political circumstances in the area. This is a special Yellow Star for Jewish products only.”

Indeed, there are a multitude of contested areas throughout the world that produce goods for which the EU has deemed politicized labeling requirements unnecessary. Despite Russia’s occupation of parts of Georgia or Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara, nothing in EU law or greater international law requires labeling goods produced by Russia in occupied parts of Georgia as “Made in Georgia” or goods produced by Morocco in Western Sahara as “Made in Western Sahara.”

As Kontorovich explained on Twitter, “Products around the world are made in many situations that raise ‘ethical’ and legal questions, from Chinese prison labor factories to Moroccan drilling Sahrawi oil. Only such concern that requires labeling in EU is Jews living in neighborhoods where they are not ‘supposed’ to be.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who has led the fight against antisemitism on a federal level, echoed those thoughts: “This labeling singles out Jews who live in communities where Europeans don’t think they should be allowed to live and identifies them for boycotts.” The senator elaborated on the somber gravity of the EU ruling, declaring the decision to be “reminiscent of the darkest moments in Europe’s history.”

Cruz alluded to the fact that he and Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) previously spearheaded a bipartisan resolution “condemning and committing to combat anti-Semitism in all its forms, including campaigns to boycott Jewish businesses.” As a sign of the dichotomy between the United States’s position and that of the EU, Cruz asserted, “The Europeans should note that [the resolution] passed the Senate unanimously.”

Yohan Benizri, the lawyer representing the winery, indicated the potential for such a ruling to foment a bureaucratic nightmare. “One doesn’t need legal training to recognize the unintended consequences of the EU adopting a policy of politicized labeling,” Benizri noted. “If the EU Court rules that geographic location is not enough, and that EU law mandates every product coming from either a ‘disputed territory’ or a country with ‘objectionable social policies’ be labeled as such, then EU markets will be thrown into chaos.”

Indeed, the EU’s treatment of Israeli goods violates the core norm of non-discrimination present in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and in its institutionalized successor, the World Trade Organization (WTO), of which the EU is a member. Eventually, the EU will likely be forced to justify its harsh measures against Israeli “settlement” products and detail why similar measures have not been imposed on goods produced by other WTO members from other supposedly occupied territories.

Before Wednesday’s ruling, U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NY) sent a letter to the EU Ambassador to the United States Stavros Lambrinidis, detailing his concerns over the anticipated ruling and its potential to cause “tensions” with the United States. “The regulation in question is problematic for a number of reasons, including because it targets specific businesses based on the ethnicity and national origin of their owners,” Menendez wrote.

Menendez also identified the slippery slope of engaging in ethnic favoritism via such labeling requirements, warning that such practices could “potentially lead to discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, religion and nationality, contrary to existing EU policies and laws against BDS campaigns, Israel boycotts and discrimination.”

As Menendez noted, many states (29, to be exact) have enacted robust anti-boycott laws that harshly penalize companies that engage in boycotts or economic pressure campaigns against Israel. Such EU maneuvers, Menendez warned, would likely jeopardize America’s trade relations with the EU, resulting in “serious and far-reaching implications and unintended consequences.”

Following the ruling, senior officials who briefed the Washington Free Beacon revealed that the Trump administration was ready to confront the EU over the decision, emphasizing that the ruling indicated EU support for the BDS movement and could thwart the administration’s ability to facilitate peace talks between the Palestinians and the Israelis.

“This is BDS, plain and simple,” the official stated on background to Adam Kredo of the Washington Free Beacon. “The administration strongly opposes the decision. It will not have the the intended effect. These efforts have never brought peace, only more divisions.”

The official continued on background by noting that the administration believes BDS (the political movement boycott, divestment, sanctions) to be antisemitic and finds the timing of the EU’s latest ruling particularly abhorrent: “The decision to announce this as Israel is defending a civilian population against hundreds of rockets is particularly tone deaf and demonstrates how poorly the E.U. understands the ramifications of these actions.”

Like Menendez, the official warned of the probable triggering of anti-boycott laws, a result that inevitably will heighten tension between the two otherwise relatively amicable trade partners. Given the Trump administration’s investment in crafting and forwarding a cohesive policy in the Middle East, it would make sense that such EU measures would come across as highly meddlesome at best and supportive of antisemitic economic warfare at worst.

As the administrative official asserted, “This administration has been perfectly clear, we think Israel is what’s right with the Middle East, not wrong with it. To do this kind of punitive action at this moment doesn’t recognize this reality.”

Indeed, given that contested areas in Israel are the only regions of the world subjected to these types of labeling requirements, it is hard to see how the EU’s decision isn’t simply evidence of more anti-Israel bias. As terrorists rain down hundreds of rockets on Israeli citizens in acts of jihadist warfare, the highest court of the European Union engages in its own economic warfare against the Jewish state.

The Blue State Model Is Failing

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, October 30, 2019

California—a state that by itself constitutes the world’s fifth-largest economy, is endowed with vast stores of human and natural resources, and has one of the planet’s most amenable climates for human habitation—is failing.

The Golden State is host to one of the country’s worst homelessness epidemics. It’s a state in which 19th century diseases such as typhus and tuberculosis are making a comeback. More people are moving out of the state than into it. Its rates of violent crime are on the rise. It has more failing schools than any other state in the Union. And now, true to basket-case form, California is home to massive, rolling power outages. But unlike in the developing world, these blackouts are not a result of resource deficiency but the voluntary imposition of darkness on the public.

Last year, California endured its deadliest and most destructive wildfire in the state’s history. That costly disaster has since been linked to a faulty transmission line operated by Pacific Gas & Electric. In the year that followed, PG&E has become the target of much of the public’s anger over the state’s increasingly destructive fires. That utility, which serves 16 million Californians, declared bankruptcy and lost control of the internal restructuring process. The electricity provider faces increasing pressure from the state’s progressive officeholders, who back a hostile process to transform the energy provider into a public utility. Perhaps most devastating, the state’s supreme court has ruled that utilities must eat the costs associated with electricity-caused wildfires regardless of whether they were accidental or the result of negligence. Amid this backdrop, PG&E has resolved to preventatively cut its services for Californians in the path of the hot and dry Santa Ana winds that fuel the state’s brushfires.

The impact on Golden State citizens who must now make do without this vital aspect of modern life has been dramatic. Perishable foods have been lost, costing individual households and restaurants tens of thousands of dollars. Hundreds of schools have been closed with little or no warning. The estimated 30,000 Californians who are sick or infirm and do not have access to gasoline-powered backup generators were left without functioning medical equipment. At least one death is attributable to what PG&E euphemistically deems Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS). 

It’s not entirely clear that this approach is accomplishing anything. PG&E and other power providers in the state lack the resources to build extensive networks of sensors and cameras that could pinpoint fire-prone areas or insulate all its transmission lines. Forecasting wind speed, direction, and duration is a complicated science, and some forecasts don’t materialize, causing consternation for PG&E’s cut off customers. And while a warming climate likely contributes to longer dry seasons and atmospheric volatility, which yields stronger winds, climate change is not the all-purpose excuse activists would like it to be. Even California Gov. Gavin Newsom—no shrinking violet when it comes to climate activism—has chided catastrophists on his side of the aisle for their myopia. “This is not, from my perspective, a climate-change story as much as a story about greed and mismanagement over the course of decades,” the governor said.

While utility providers make a convenient scapegoat, public policy is more to blame for California’s conundrum. Most wildfires are not caused by faulty electrical equipment but natural factors and human error. The state’s utilities are required by law to extend their networks to housing developed in high-risk areas, and, in a state with an acute housing shortage, more and more residences are built inside danger zones. What’s more, the patchwork of federal, state, local, tribal, and private interests that are responsible for forestry management have run up against the state’s onerous regulatory environment. A 2018 study conducted by the California Legislative Analyst’s Office found that “overcrowded forests” have contributed to the increased death of vegetation from stress and disease, resulting in a glut of combustible fuels on the forest floors. The report blames current forest management practices for imposing “limitations on timber harvesting” and “environmental permitting requirements” that “constrain the amount of trees and other growth removed from the forest.” 

The response to this complicated problem has been to impose “de-energization” on the state’s residents while making whatever power they can still access more expensive.

On the other side of the country, New Yorkers are also struggling to fulfill their power needs, but their deprivation has nothing to do with wildfires. New York’s National Grid has warned for months that new natural-gas customer applications for consumers in New York City and Long Island would be delayed if the state did not permit the construction of new pipelines from neighboring Pennsylvania. The Keystone State is rapidly harvesting gas locked inside the Marcellus Shale formation, much of which is located across the border in New York. But due to Albany’s fracking ban and its reluctance to finance new pipelines, New York cannot access the gas it’s providentially situated above, and it is increasingly unable to deliver that cleaner-burning fuel to its residents.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has demagogued the issue, blaming power companies for failing New York residents. “National Grid has a gun to the head of the people of the State of New York,” Cuomo said last week. He has responded to the crisis by compelling utility providers to restore service to the thousands of downstate customers who had been denied access to gas, but a gubernatorial mandate does not address the underlying need for a sustainable source of natural gas. Ironically, the state’s environmental regulations will have the effect of forcing New Yorkers to transition back to dirtier fossil fuels such as oil.

The story is much the same in Massachusetts, where Holyoke Gas & Electric announced early this year that it was suspending new natural-gas connections as a response to “insufficient pipeline capacity in our region to deliver additional load.” They were joined by Middleborough Gas and Electric Department, which also capped its delivery capacity due to “pipeline constraints.” In a country that will become a net energy exporter next year due to its newfound capacity to exploit new sources of natural gas, it’s unconscionable for the Northeast’s richest and most populous states to struggle with gas shortages.

In some of the nation’s most reliably Democratic states, basic modern necessities, such as access to power and heat, are becoming harder to come by. These are not the inevitable results of natural phenomena but failures of governance. For this, residents of these states have no one to blame but themselves. They voted themselves into this predicament. Fortunately, they can also vote themselves out of it.