Today we begin with former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul’s article in Foreign Affairs proposing that if Russian President Vladimir Putin agrees to negotiations with NATO powers about European security, that those talks be modeled after the Helsinki Accords.
If Putin does agree to negotiate, then Biden and his team should not just offer defensively minimal concessions to freeze the crisis. Instead, in concert with allies and partners, Biden should seize the diplomatic offensive and counter with a comprehensive, grand bargain for enhancing European security. Call it “Helsinki 2.0.” This agreement could refresh and modernize the Helsinki Accords signed during the Cold War, which stabilized the continent even as U.S.-Soviet competition grew in other parts of the world. It could resuscitate and amend defunct arms control agreements and provide a bigger framework for European security, and in the process help solve the issues surrounding Ukraine.[...]
After decades of division, it will be difficult—and maybe impossible—for Russia and the West to strike any security deals on Europe. They have little faith in each other and plenty of reasons for suspicion. But given the stakes, the world must try. If Putin signals a commitment to negotiate, Biden and his European partners should go big. After all, Europe’s security architecture needs genuine repair and creative renewal.
They should start with steps toward revamping transparency, which will allow each country to keep tabs on the other’s activities and better predict each other’s actions. Right now, Russia, the United States, and Europe have less information about the deployment of rival soldiers and weapons than at any time since the end of the Cold War. A new grand bargain on European security could commit all signatories to more frequent monitoring of troop deployments, weapons deployments, and military exercises. The United States and Russia have learned how to successfully implement an obtrusive inspections regime from the New START Treaty, which limits the number of nuclear warheads and delivery vehicles each country can deploy. New START is one of the few U.S.-Russian deals that still operates, and a broader agreement could share the treaty’s obligations to short-notice inspections and close probing of weapon systems. Helsinki 2.0 could allow Russian inspectors to visit the sites of U.S. missile defenses in Poland and Romania, and NATO monitors could have similar access to Russia’s Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad.
Fabrice Robinet, writing for The New Yorker, looks at the diplomatic efforts and goals of French President Emmauel Macron in negotiating with Moscow.
Beyond the palpable sense of urgency, what Macron is trying to achieve looks more like a balancing act. On the one hand, with the French Presidential elections just two months away, he seems intent on establishing himself as Europe’s leader—a role previously held by Angela Merkel, the former German Chancellor. On the other, he is following the hard line adopted by the United States and its nato partners, including the rejection of Russia’s demands that nato limit its military activity in Ukraine and that it bar the former Soviet territory from ever entering the alliance, while remaining more open than the Biden Administration and some other European nations to considering Putin’s security concerns. The situation seemed to escalate on Friday, with the Times reporting that Russia and its separatist allies in eastern Ukraine are, according to Kyiv and Washington, ramping up military preparations. Can Macron’s frenetic mediation help resolve the crisis, or will it simply be what the French call un coup d’épée dans l’eau, or a sword stroke in the water—an action that produces no effect?
The French President has a history of trying to cultivate personal ties with autocratic figures. He did it with Donald Trump—initially, at least—in a number of bonding events that included a “double date” at Mt. Vernon, with the First Lady, Melania, and the Première Dame, Brigitte. “It’s always important for Macron, the personal side of relationships,” Tara Varma, the head of the Paris office of the European Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “He wants to open a new chapter of French foreign policy,” she said, one that includes rekindling relations with Moscow.
A ten-reporter team for Der Spiegel examines the problematic nature of former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s dealings with Ukraine, Russia, and within the Social Democratic Party in Germany.
The history of the SPD is full of fractures and schisms. But the relationship between Gerhard Schröder, who was chancellor from 1998 to 2005, and his party is developing into a political drama of outsized dimensions. The manner in which the relationship has deteriorated over the years is unprecedented.
At one point, Schröder had almost achieved hero status within the party. He raked in election victories for the SPD, sent Helmut Kohl into retirement and clearly rejected German participation in the invasion of Iraq. But it has been all downhill ever since he was voted out of the Chancellery. First, his party began questioning the welfare reforms that Schröder had introduced while chancellor, and then Schröder began his love affair with Russia. Over the years, he has gone from being a source of irritation for the SPD to a downright curse. These days, 77-year-old Schröder is a danger to his party, to current Chancellor Olaf Scholz and, according to some, to the entire country.
At a time when the West is circling all the diplomatic wagons at its disposal in a combined effort to prevent Putin from marching into Ukraine, the former German chancellor is firing rhetorical barbs at Kyiv and seeking to deepen his business ties with Russia. Together with his friends on the Baltic Sea coast, Schröder is now trying to save the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, the suspension of which is widely seen as a key element in the package of sanctions aimed at curtailing Putin’s aggression.
Paul Krugman of The New York Times “wonks out” about what his colleague at The Times, Tressie McMillan Cottom, labeled as “folk economics.”
So, memories: When the 2008 financial crisis struck, economists, believe it or not, had an intellectual framework ready to go, pretty much custom-made for that situation — because it was devised in the 1930s during the Great Depression. The “IS-LM model” was introduced by the British economist John Hicks in 1937 as an attempt to encapsulate the insights of John Maynard Keynes, who had published “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” the previous year. There’s endless argument about whether Hicks was true to Keynes’s vision — which is irrelevant for my discussion now — because Hicks is what economists brought to the table in 2008.
According to IS-LM (which stands for investment-savings, liquidity-money), public policy normally has two tools it can use to fight an economic slump. Loosely speaking, the Fed can print more money to drive interest rates down, or the Treasury can engage in deficit spending to pump up demand. After a financial crisis, however, the economy gets so depressed that monetary policy hits a limit; interest rates can’t go below zero. So, large-scale deficit spending is the appropriate and necessary response.
But folk economics sees deficits as irresponsible and dangerous; if anything, many people have the instinctive feeling that governments should cut back in hard times, not spend more. And this instinct had a big, adverse effect on policy. True, the Obama administration did respond to the slump with fiscal stimulus, but it was underpowered in part because of unwarranted deficit fears. (This isn’t hindsight, and I was tearing my hair out at the time.) And by 2010, influential opinion — the opinion of what I used to call Very Serious People — had shifted around to the view that debt, not mass unemployment, was the most important problem facing the United States and other wealthy nations.
Abdul El-Sayed, now a commentator for CNN, writes about the absurdity of the Canadian trucker protest over vaccine mandates.
To appreciate just how strange this moment is, let's go way back to before Covid-19 was a word. Many of us would have expected that if a deadly virus began to spread among us, we, as a society, would look to doctors and scientists for answers. We'd demand public policy driven by their rational, evidence-based reasoning.
Sure, there'd be differences of opinion on a few key issues and the odd iconoclast or two who'd just never come along. But for the most part, we'd develop a collective approach to defeating the virus and do what needed to be done to get through the pandemic. And, let's be clear, that's exactly what a majority of people did.[...]
Here's what's so absurd about it: The protest over Covid restrictions is now disrupting peoples' everyday lives -- which is what the protest was supposedly aimed at stopping. They've lost the plot.
But perhaps it was the plot the whole time. It's impossible to divorce this moment from the sociopolitical trends that are also shrouded in absurdity -- the emergence of far-right movements around the world, the rash of proto-fascists and autocrats who've come to power, the salience of online conspiracy theories that spilled out of algorithms and into the real world in horrific ways.
In that context, perhaps the pandemic wasn't the substrate for the absurdity we're witnessing, but a catalyst that simply accelerated what had already been happening.
While looking for Canadian punditry about the trucker protest, I ran across this piece by E.M. Uzomaka for CBC News from earlier this month about a Toronto teacher that showed up to class in blackface.
This past October, my 14-year-old daughter’s teacher showed up to school in Blackface for Halloween.
This wasn’t the first time she had experienced an incident like this. Something like it happened at her previous school.
Her former vice-principal was sent a racist and threatening letter, which also named fellow Black teachers and parents. I ended up having to explain to my daughter why she was no longer seeing some of her teachers at school. She totally withdrew — eventually we sought out therapy to help her process everything.
At the time, she told me it made her realize that, as a Black person, her voice didn’t matter. [...]
As a Black parent, I have to protect myself and my children from an education system steeped in anti-Black racism.
Embedded within that system are what I call "white lies."
These are statements made to absolve people of any guilt. For example, pleading ignorance. Or passing Blackface off as a costume, not "intended to offend." These are both examples of "white lies" that many Black parents have experienced at school.
Be prepared if you decide to click on that first link within Ms. Uzomaka’s essay.
Robin Givhan of The Washington Post writes about the erosion of respect and observance for legal precedent in SCOTUS decisions.
The Supreme Court was once a place where history seemed to be venerated, where it was dealt with with some honesty and little emotion. The legal experts talk a lot about precedent and they quiz nominees to the high court to determine if they have respect for it. Stare decisis. One of the rare legal phrases that has seeped into the common vernacular and that’s uttered like a reassuring totem: Some things in this democracy are certain. History tells us so. Rest assured, fellow citizens, a few issues have been resolved and some arguments have been settled, perhaps not to everyone’s satisfaction, but they are no longer points of contention.
More than likely, the question of precedent will be posed in a multitude of ways to whomever President Biden ultimately selects to fill the seat that will be vacated by Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who recently announced his intention to retire. During previous hearings, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee were keen to know whether the nominee considered Roe v. Wade, which protected a person’s right to an abortion, to be settled law. They wanted to know about the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. The nominees were nothing if not enamored with precedent. They spoke of their respect for it, the importance of it and their intellectual understanding of it. But none of that meant that all of the prickly discomfort, resentment, anger or intolerance that spewed out in the past as these issues were wrestled into submission had been put to rest.
We have learned again and again that the emotions aren’t in the past. They are constant and exhausting. And overtime, they’ve muffled history’s voice.
Candice Norwood of The 19th News writes about the increasing number of Black women that now lead American law schools.
...Last year, the number of Black women leading American law schools reached a high of 28. Two are interim deans. Twenty-one of them were appointed dean for the first time within the last four years. A number of them are also the first Black woman to hold their position.
[...]
For Kimberly Mutcherson, holding a dean position is an opportunity to help instill ways of teaching the law that she did not see while studying at Columbia Law School in the 1990s. Law schools tend to teach the law uncritically, she said, which can seem removed from reality for students from communities that have been marginalized by it. It is also difficult to push back against an institution or professors who do not see themselves as part of the problem, she said.[...]
Mutcherson became the first woman, first LGBTQ+ and first Black law dean at Rutgers in 2019, when the number of other Black women deans noticeably began to grow. A database maintained by Mississippi College School of Law breaks down the race or ethnicity of 207 law school deans. Currently, 89 of those are White men, 54 of them are White women, 13 are Black men, 28 are Black women, seven are Hispanic or Latino men, five are Hispanic or Latina women, four are Asian or Pacific Islander men, and three are Asian or Pacific Islander women. Gender-diverse people are not listed in the database, and other groups make up less than 1 percent of law school deans.
Kiana Cox of the Pew Research Center reports that polling shows that half of Black Americans say that they are well informed about Black history and that they learned that information, in large part, from family and friends.
About half of Black Americans (51%) say they are very or extremely informed about the history of Black people in the U.S. Nearly four-in-ten (37%) say they are somewhat informed, while 11% say they are a little or not at all informed.
Among Black adults who identify as Black alone, 51% say they are very or extremely informed about U.S. Black history. An identical share of multiracial (51%) adults say the same. About half of U.S.-born Black adults (51%) and Black immigrants (50%) also say they are very or extremely informed about U.S. Black history.
There are notable differences among Black adults in how well informed they say they are when it comes to U.S. Black history. Black adults who say being Black is highly important to their identity are almost twice as likely as those who say being Black is less important (57% vs. 29%) to say they are very or extremely informed about the history of Black people in the U.S.
In addition, Black adults ages 30 and older are more likely than those under 30 to say that they are very or extremely informed.
Finally today, Moisés Naím writes for El País in English about various ways in which an awareness of mortality has become a response to the COVID-19 pandemic and what some people are doing about that newfound awareness.
Obviously, the “many” rich people who became aware of their mortality are not that many. The very lucrative year that Rolls-Royce had was on the back of just 5,586 vehicle sales worldwide. But while a few wealthy people now know that life is short, there are others who have decided to pour vast fortunes into finding treatments so we can all live healthier and longer lives. On January 23, the company Altos Labs opened for business. Like many biotech startups, their mission statement claims sweeping ambitions to transform the field of medicine. But unlike most other startups, they just might pull it off. [...]
The pandemic has brought us many surprises. One of these is a greater awareness of our own mortality and the reactions that this awareness provokes. For those who have the means, the response to the virus and its lethal threat is to enjoy what they have here and now. Obviously facing the pandemic by buying a Rolls-Royce is an option only for a privileged few, but you don’t have to be a millionaire to refuse to postpone gratification. Millions are doing so.
The pandemic has whetted an appetite in some people to help others. Some do it individually and modestly and others ambitiously and on a large scale. The scientists who launched Alton [sic] Labs are a good example of those who have captured the sense of urgency, discerned the new scientific opportunities and are acting upon them on a large scale.
Everyone have a great day!