Canadian Cincinnatus

The nature of Vladimir Putin’s economic ‘miracle’

Whenever I have to explain the secret of the success of Vladimir Putin’s success to people who do not understand the situation in Russia, I begin with a question: what was the world price of oil in 1999?

(In 1999, Putin became the Prime Minister of Russia. On Dec 31 of that year, he became President.)

Answer: the price of oil in February, 1999 was $9.30 a barrel.

There, in one number, is the secret of Vladimir Putin’s economic ‘miracle’. Given that the price of oil was $111 a barrel as recently as this June, and briefly over $140 in July, 2008, it is no wonder that Putin’s Russia is richer than Yeltsin’s. With that kind of surplus cash, you can have rampant corruption, a military buildup, and the trappings of prosperity all at the same time.

Unfortunately, there is a flip-side. When your economy is a one-note song, you are utterly dependent on the price of your critical commodity staying up in the stratosphere. Or as Matt O’Brien of the Washington Post put it:

“A funny thing happened on the way to Vladimir Putin running strategic laps around the West. Russia’s economy imploded.”

What Russia’s recent implosion exposes is how much of an economic incompetent Putin really is. In his 14-year ride as leader of Russia, he has had plenty of time to build up and diversify the Russian economy with sound free-market principles. Other eastern European economies like Poland, the Czech Republic, and my own homeland of Estonia were able to do it. They are now thoroughly Western - and didn’t need the constant inflow of petrodollars to make the transformation. In contrast, the end result of 14 years of Putinismo is endemic corruption, fading glitz and glamour, and a second-rate military. The contrast between Russia’s chest-thumping chauvinism and its underlying weakness is best exemplified by the Russian motorcycle gang, the Night Wolves, who display icons of the Virgin Mary and Stalin, while riding around in that most American of icons – the Harley Davidson.

As usual, Walter Russell Mead has a good take on Putin’s recent troubles. Read it here, but he makes a couple of points that I want to comment on.

“Putin, who embodies a mix of geopolitical recklessness and shrewd calculation …”

This is exactly right and something I have been saying for a while: Putin is clever tactically but a doofus strategically. While it is true that he has outwitted President Obama on Syria, and the West in general on the Ukraine, one must ask: to what end? How is Putin’s adventurism in Russia’s real long-term interest? As I have pointed out, Russia has three borders: in the east, against China; in the south, against various Muslim states; and in the West, against Eastern Europe. Along the eastern border, there is a demographic tidal-wave of illegal Chinese aliens flowing into Eastern Siberia that threatens – in the long-term - to undermine Russian authority there. So what does Putin do about this? He cuts a sweetheart oil deal with the ChiComs. As Mead puts it:

“If there were a way for China to make extremely advantageous energy and mineral deals while also propping up a power that, like China, wants to see a reduced U.S. role in the world, Beijing just might lend Putin a helping hand.

It won’t come cheap, though: Beijing can see what a weak hand Putin has, and it will expect to be compensated—at Russia’s expense—for any help it offers the struggling strong man.”

Along Russia’s southern border, the Muslims constitute a demographic and terror threat. So what does Putin do about it? He helps the most radical of those regimes (Iran) build an A-bomb.

In contrast, along the western border, all the new republics of Eastern Europe want is peaceful coexistence. As recently as a couple of years ago, NATO was actively exploring partnership with the Russian Federation. In reaction to this, Putin starts a war of annexation against one of them (the Ukraine), and practices tactical nuclear strikes against another (Poland).

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Russia also has one other border – in the north. For the moment it is peaceful. But with the creation of a northern command, bellicose promises of annexing the North Pole, and mock strategic bomber runs against Canada and the US, Putin is once again making enemies where there was once only friends.

But, as O’Brien points out:

“Putin might be playing chess while we play checkers, but only if we lend him money for the set.”

 

 

 

 

 

In praise of our commercial Christmas

Around this time of year, serious Christians all across the political spectrum to bemoan the increasing commercialization of Christmas, that the marketing of presents overrides and corrupts the true meaning of Christmas. Let me provide a counter-argument, what could even be called Christmas cheer, to those so concerned.

To see what I am getting at, look at Christmas commercialism from the opposite perspective, say from a devout Muslim living in North America. From his perspective, listening to his kids constantly mewling for Christmas presents, today’s commercialized Christmas looks more like an insidious plot concocted by devious Christians to spread Christianity to non-Christians through the backdoor of ‘secular’ commercialism.  And you know what? He is right, even if most Christians are oblivious to the proselytizing forces latent in the moneymaking zeal of our business world. In his own home, he is trying to hold the line, but he is being relentlessly worn down by his own kids, who want an X-Box or iPad for Christmas. If you want to attract converts, sometimes sugar works better than vinegar.

Now a Christian reading this might counter with the argument that long-term Christian success requires a return to fundamentals and an insistence on piety and reverence, particularly with regard to its faith and traditions. In other words, the constant ads for Christmas presents, complete with Christmas music, are a problem because they offend the true meaning of Christmas. Taking this line of reasoning further, one could also say that a religion that lacks at least some of the masculine militancy of, say, Oliver Cromwell or the Jesuits circa the counter-Reformation, will degenerate into either the corrupt Vatican of the Borgias or the effeminate weakness exhibited by many mainline Protestant denominations today, which are principally populated by little old ladies and led by pedophiles. Whatever else can be said about such an arrangement, it is not the way to future success. What is needed is less turn-the-other-cheek, multi-culti understanding and more Onward Christian Soldier.

If this is your argument, I hear you. In fact, I agree with you to a large degree. But tell me, how does what you say negate what I just said? It does not. Both can be true at the same time. The suspicions held by devout non-Christian believers that, behind the commercialization of Christmas, as well as secular Christmas songs like White Christmas and Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer (written mostly by patriotic American Jews), lurks the true meaning of Christmas, is well founded. From a Christian perspective, the glass is half-full, not half-empty.

So all you devout Christians out there, cheer up. All is not lost.

And Merry Christmas!

 

 

Justin Trudeau’s latest radio ad gives me hope

Have you heard the latest radio ad from the Liberal Party? It has been running on the main news station in Toronto and - I assume – the rest of the country. Its tone-deafness is something to behold and gives me real hope that the Conservatives will be able to overcome his ‘star power’.

The ad criticized the Harper Conservatives for their income-splitting scheme, calling it a giveaway to the rich that Justin Trudeau promises to claw back in order to help the ‘middle class.’ Er… Justin, most people who constitute the so-called middle class are married, and they would really appreciate a break on their tax bill. Then Justin goes on to say that because this money belongs to you (and not presumable the rich), Trudeau will keep all of it and spend it as he sees fit. No really… that’s what the ad says, in Justin’s own voice.

You don’t have to be a policy wonk to see the flaws in his argument. In fact, all you have to be is a married middle-class Canadian, who wants a few extra bucks to raise their kids, i.e. the future generation of Canadians. Is there nobody in the ad firm or the Liberal Party who proofread this ad? Aren’t there any adults in the room who can spot its glaring logical flaws or point to its breathtaking tone-deafness before it runs? I guess not.

Which means we can expect more self-inflicted gaffs like this from Trudeau before the next election is out. If the Harper team is smart, and it appears that they might be, they will bring more issues like this out to the fore and be ready to pounce on Trudeau’s miss-steps. With any luck, he will be killed by a thousand PR cuts before the next election day.

And I say this as somebody who doesn’t like the idea of income splitting. With the advent of gay marriage, the legal definition of marriage has become so amorphous as to become meaningless. Giving favours to married people made sense back when most marriages consisted of a father and a stay-at-home mother with dependent children. These days, society would get a lot more bang for its buck if it directed its favours exclusively towards couples with children. Bypass the DINKS (dual income no kids), both hetero- and homosexual. They have more disposable income than anybody else and aren’t going the extra mile for Canada like those raising the next generation. In some cases, marriage is just a scam, enabling one partner to get the benefits provided by the other partner’s job. But I also see what Harper is getting at, and I know that the best is the enemy of the good enough.

Policy quibbles aside, I think Harper needs to pour it on with policy issues. (As I have argued before, Senate reform – or abolition - would be a good next step. Trudeau is on the wrong side of that issue as well.) Justin Trudeau is just itchin’ to stick his foot in his mouth again.

Why Putin is less dangerous now that the Russia’s economy has collapsed

Many commentators have expressed the belief that Russia is more dangerous now that their economy has collapsed because Russian strongman Vladimir Putin is backed against the wall and may react unpredictably. Perhaps. But I have one question for these prognosticators: with what soldiers will he react?

I ask this question because one of the great sources of Russia’s recent military revival has been the comprehensive military reforms begun in 2008, transforming the Russian military from a large and ponderous conscript army to a modern professional army, like the US and UK militaries. Because of these reforms, the number of soldiers in the Russian army has dropped to 300,000. For the first time ever, the Russian Army is smaller than the US Army. It is smaller, but it is much more capable than before. A large conscript army may be good to repel a general invasion, but it a poor tool for fighting an expeditionary war like, say, Ukraine. This is because long-serving professionals are more competent at warcraft than 2-year conscripts, and also more motivated, as the US discovered in Vietnam. The proportion of conscripts in the Russian military is at an all-time low. In addition, the period of conscription has been reduced to 1 year from the traditional 2 years.

This was all made possible by high oil revenues that paid for, among other things, the vastly increased personnel budget. When the US Army went professional after the Vietnam War, the Pentagon’s personnel budget soared. A large portion of the Reagan era defence increases went to soldiers’ pay, to induce higher-quality recruits and to keep them in the service longer (something you rarely hear from critics of President Reagan). How will Vladimir Putin pay for all these professional troops now that oil price and the Rouble has tanked?

The only other option he has is more conscription, either by calling up more recruits every year, or by increasing their service period back up to two years. (A soldier only really becomes effective after the first year.) The problem here is that military conscription is enormously unpopular in Russia right across the social strata. This attitude is not a pro- or anti-Putin thing, or a pro-Russian or anti-Russian thing. It is a by-product of the incredibly bad conditions that Russian conscripts face, from both the actual physical conditions as well as the brutal hazing that goes on there. There is no analog in Western militaries so Westerners have a hard time comprehending this. I know a number of people who served in the Soviet military and their stories were hair-raising. As a result, privileged young men buy their way out of service. Others enter into phony masters programs designed to run out the clock making them too old to serve once they ‘graduate’. Young men without connections or money simply go into hiding. There is simply no other single action that Vladimir Putin could take to make himself more unpopular than to increase conscription. Widespread civil disobedience (i.e. even more than at present) will follow.

Even before its current difficulties, Russia did not have enough professional troops to go around, given all of Putin’s adventures. As a result, you kept seeing the same elite units (e.g. 76^th Airborne Division, 5^th Spetznaz Brigade) in every conflict: Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, and Eastern Ukraine.

With the collapse of the Russian economy, the Russian military will have no choice but to shrink. There is no way to pay the current numbers of professional soldiers, and that is a good thing. The alternative, calling in more conscripts, would be explosively unpopular.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer beady-eyed KGB goon.

Rare praise for Obama’s foreign policy: removing the Cuban blockade was a good strategic move

When President Barack Obama abruptly announced the end of the US embargo on Cuba, my first reaction was typical of an orthodox anti-communist cold warrior: I though it was terrible. I, of course, know all about Obama’s academic Marxist roots, so I automatically assumed that this was part of his long-term goal of ending American exceptionalism while helping his fellow travelers in the third world.

And in truth this may likely be part of his motive. But there is another part, one that is both clever and wise. To see what that is, one must look elsewhere in the world where dramatic events are currently unfolding.

As I write this, the Russian economy is coming apart at the seams. In response, Russian strongman Vladimir Putin made an angry stay-the-course speech on Thursday. He has also been gathering together allies. A mark of his desperation is that one of them is North Korea, whose leader, fellow communist Kim Jong Un, has been invited to Moscow in May. What’s next, Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko?

Something else that may have been next, until President Obama flat-footed him was Cuba. Not so much that Raul Castro would have been invited to Moscow. If he had, who cares? But that Putin could have threatened a Cuban Missile Crisis part deux: pull the economic sanctions (that you strengthened as recently last week) or I will place missiles into Cuba. He could have done that. And it wouldn’t have cost him anything. He is already a pariah, and he already has the missiles.

But now he can’t. Why would the Cubans now go along with him? Trade with America promises money and investment that Cuba desperately needs for survival. Especially as the Venezuelan aid that Cuba has come to be dependent on dries up, as that thuggish petrostate also crashes to the ground. What benefit will Putin’s missiles bring to the Cuban regime? They’re just cruise-missile magnets.

Osama bin Laden once said that the people instinctively want to back the strong horse. Vladimir Putin is no longer the strong horse. He is in the process of becoming one of history’s losers, one who only has a few cards left to play.

A few cards less, thanks to Obama’s timely move. Well-played Mr. President (words I never thought I would utter about the current inhabitant of the White House). 

Sea change in attitudes on gun control

As reported by Instapundit last week:

‘Gun-control advocates are seriously losing public opinion. Well, good. “What’s most striking in Pew’s new data is that views have shifted more in favor of gun rights since then among nearly every demographic group, including women, blacks, city-dwellers, parents, college graduates, millennials and independents. The two groups that haven’t budged? Hispanics and liberal Democrats. These numbers may capture the short memory of many Americans. But the long-term trend is undeniably grim for gun-control advocates, who seem to be losing ground even among their strongest traditional sympathizers.”'

In the US, the march of liberty was greatly aided by smart policy. In the 1990’s, gun rights activists focused on getting shall-issue concealed carry laws enacted at the state level. This has had the effect of turning people who are not intrinsically interested in firearms into gun-rights supporters. They started to see the practical benefits of gun ownership when it became possible to use guns for self-defence.

'The turnaround on this over the past 20 years has been astonishing, and should serve as a lesson to people who think we can’t see a sea-change on a civil rights issue, even when the media is overwhelmingly opposed.’

This statement applies to Canadian gun rights activists even more than their counterparts in the States. When the terrible wave of gun laws began in the late 1980’s, it was championed by the party gun owners were the most closely allied to ideologically – Canada’s Progressive Conservative Party. Unlike gun owners in the States, who could rely on the GOP, even in their darkest days, Canada’s gun owners first had to destroy the federal conservative party in order to save it. We had no media allies, we had no political allies, and – unlike the NRA - our political lobby groups were nearly broke.

And yet we persevered to the point where the long gun registry is a smoking ruin and the Canadian political landscape has been rewritten. As Instapundit Glenn Reynolds points out, it is amazing what ordinary people without resources can do when they stubbornly fight for civil rights, and keep it up without compromise over a long period of time.

There should be a lesson for all conservative activists in this story. Unfortunately, we have too many ‘conservative’ pundits, who are eager to obscure this message with empty slogans and false dilemmas, with stories like: “How to stay centrist and win Republican nomination.” As if the choice is between conservative purity (which ordinary people supposedly hate) and centrism (which ordinary people supposedly like). If this really were true, why are moderates presidential candidates like John McCain and Mitt Romney such losers?

In fact, the choice is between passion and commitment on one hand (which ordinary people actually love), and insider deal-making on the other (which they hate).

Jeb Bush vs. Hillary Clinton: Not

On Monday, Jeb Bush announced that he “had decided to actively explore the possibility of running for President of the United States.” The condemnation from conservative circles was immediate and negative. Here is a typical example.

While the antipathy of the conservative grass roots to Jeb Bush is well known - he has repeatedly dissed the conservative rank and file with his policy positions on amnesty and Common Core – what is less well known is the opposition from the left-wing rank-and-file to Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. Dick Morris, Bill Clinton’s former consigliere, discusses this here.

The political situation in the US today is similar to the political situation in Canada in the early 1990’s. In a democracy, there come times in its history when the governing elites become insular and divorced from the masses. Typically, this occurs when the public favours one policy proscription while the elites – regardless of party - favour another. In Canada 23 years ago, the principal issue separating the shepherds from the flock was the federal deficit. In present day America, the main issue is amnesty (though Obamacare and the deficit are a close second and third).

Such a divorce is a hazard of any government, but democracies are unique in that there is a solution baked into the cake – a purging of the elites. In Canada, this occurred in the 1993 Federal Election when the ruling Progressive Conservative government was wiped out, going from 156 seats to 2 (yes two). Because the outgoing Prime Minister, Kim Campbell, was only a one-term MP (former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and all his senior ministers saw the writing on the wall and bailed, leaving an inexperienced hack in charge), she was not even eligible for an MP pension and had to ignominiously drive her Honda Civic back to Vancouver.

In the US, anger at the elites has been building for quite a while, at least since 2006. This is the reason for the wild electoral swings from Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama back to huge Republican majorities in Congress. So far, the elites of both parties have managed to tamp down the discontent within their ranks but this situation cannot last forever. How it will resolve itself is impossible to predict. Such purges are necessarily unpredictable events (though necessary for the health of the republic), but a few things are for sure: Hillary Clinton won’t be the next President, and neither will Jeb Bush; and the current leaders of the Republican congress, the hapless duo of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, will be out as well.

Whether the Republican Party will survive this process – or disappear like Canada’s Progressive Conservative Party - is an open question, but the answer will depend on how fast the grass roots can wrest power from the oblivious elitist bozos (I’m thinking of you Mitch and John) who seem determined to wreck it with self-defeating measures like amnesty.

As a result, I think the possibility of the next presidential election being a contest between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush is greatly overestimated.

Rape hysteria, real rape, and the New Morality

What with Lena Dunham’s autobiography, Bill Cosby, the purported gang-rape at the UVA frat, and the Jian Ghomeshi scandal here in Canada, there sure are a lot of sex assault scandals in the air these days. Granted a few of them have turned out to be bogus, more due to the feverish imagination of an overeager MSM propagandist than to any actual evidence, but still where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

Whenever I think of the crime of rape, I remember what a late friend of mine told me. He was a retired Toronto police sergeant who worked mostly in the sixties, seventies and early eighties. He said that a significant percentage of sexual assault complaints were determined after closer examination to be bogus, and an overwhelming majority of these had a common theme.

What he had in mind was this: in a typical courtship, there is a push-pull dynamic going on. While both parties want to consummate the relationship, the woman has to push the man away at least a few times to make sure that he knows that she isn’t ‘easy’. The man must play hot and cold as well, lest his date think that he is a clingy beta-male weakling. While this is how most courtships progress, there are exceptions.

One exception can occur when the man is an alpha male with much greater sexual marketplace value than the woman. In cases like this, the woman is so smitten that she drops all her typical defense mechanisms. As a result, instead of the usual convoluted zigzag path between first glance and consummation, it is a straight line to the bedroom… or backseat… or dark alley… or… you get the idea. An excellent illustration of this from literature is the sex scene found in Tom Wolfe’s great novel, “I am Charlotte Simmons.”

Unfortunately, in these cases, the interests of the man and woman diverge after climax. The alpha male player thinks, how fast can I ditch this chick? While the woman thinks, oh, my God, I surrendered ‘my everything’ to him and he just tossed me aside like a used Kleenex: I feel used; I feel abused; I feel like I was raped; maybe I was raped; maybe I’ll charge him with rape. That will teach him. The brute! The Kobe Bryant incident is the classic example.

As my late friend pointed out, police skepticism is needed to sort these cases out from actual sex crimes. Usually, after questioning, female accusers tend to back off from their accusations. They weren’t really malicious. They just wanted to teach a cad a lesson. When feminists, who don’t want ‘the victim to be put on trial’, discourage detectives and defense attorneys from asking pointed questions, men can be sent to prison for engaging in consensual sex acts.

This also illustrates why feminists are so insistent that women be allowed to determine whether an act of intercourse was rape after the fact. While most men think that such a demand is an outrageous perversion of justice, here is the reason why it is made: a woman can determine whether she has been used by a man only after the sex act is over.

For a man to avoid this pitfall, I am reminded of a story told by a professor at Claremont McKenna College at the recent National Review Caribbean cruise. In a panel discussion on higher education, he told the audience of a male student who confided to him that he felt that, at with regard to the campus sexual assault policy, “the system was out to get him”. The professor gave his student this advice (I paraphrase), “Your instincts are correct. The deck is stacked against you, but there is an easy way you can avoid harm to yourself. Always act like a gentleman around women.”

I thought this was good advice, but also illuminated the larger problem: what is really happening here is a demonstration that the New Morality that the left has been pushing since the sixties isn’t working. Men and women are fundamentally different, with different interests and desires. Therefore, ‘free love’ can’t work. Sexual relations between men and women are best regulated by Traditional Morality, which has evolved by trial and error over countless millennia. It is an unwritten code of behavior that reached a state of near perfection in western societies in the early twentieth century.

If social conservatives were smart, they would seize on these rape panics as teachable moments. If they were smart. They are not. Rather, they try to refight the gay marriage debate, a battle long lost because the Left carefully chose the ground upon which that battle was fought. Thanks to the favourable terrain they chose, the proponents of gay marriage come across as heirs to the civil rights tradition of the sixties, and social conservatives, who champion religious freedom, come across as religious fanatics who assert their need to discriminate against their fellow man because of their barbaric beliefs.

On such battleground, you lose. It would be much better for social conservatives to explain to Low Information Voters what the Left’s real intentions really are, and attack the New Morality boosters for their obvious and epic screw-ups. Fighting battles like this is like picking low-hanging fruit. It’s easy. You just got to do it.

In Ferguson, Missouri, be careful what you wish for Rev. Al

A couple of weeks ago, I attended the National Review post-election cruise in the balmy Caribbean. In one of the lectures, black conservative Deroy Murdock discussed the history of racism in America. His point was that America’s healing process from Jim Crow is disrupted every time race-baiting demagogues like Al Sharpton and Eric Holder gin up a phony controversy, like Trayvon Martin (just before the 2012 presidential election) or Ferguson MO (just prior to the 2014 mid-terms). He described their irresponsible actions as akin to tearing the scab off a healing wound.

He is of course right, but I wonder if he is more right than he knows. What I mean is this: institutionalized anti-black racism by whites was a very real fact in parts of the United States not that long ago. While this situation has changed 180 degrees in the past generation, the memory of it is still alive. And while white Americans are genuinely trying hard to overcome this past, every prevarication by the black race-industry makes it just that much harder to do.

While there is no doubt that Al Sharpton, and, to a less extent, Eric Holder (who came from a mixed and privileged family) remembers real anti-black racism, I don’t think they really imagine that it can ever return. Why do I say that? Because their demagoguery is predicated on the continued existence of white guilt. As long as white guilt exists, Al Sharpton’s methodology works. In other words, he has power only to the extent that white people let him. But what were to happen if this were to change?

This possibility is not as far-fetched as it sounds. History teaches us that when the pendulum swings, it usually swings past the mark. This is what we are experiencing right now: the pendulum swinging from Jim Crow straight right past the colour-blind world that Martin Luther King so eloquently laid out in his Lincoln Memorial speech, to the world of affirmative action and racial hysteria and demagogues and witch-hunts that we have today. But who says that this pendulum is going to stay pinned to this extreme forever? It is possible, hell, it is practically a given, that it will start swinging the other way to compensate for today’s racial excesses. Right now, there are white university students who are so brainwashed in the white privilege malarkey that they actually feel that they deserve to be mugged after they have actually been mugged. This level of perverse ethnomasochism is unsustainable.

Unfortunately, when the pendulum does begin to swing back, it will – once again - swing past Martin Luther King’s ideal world back to a world where it will be once again OK for white Americans to feel racist towards blacks again. (We are seeing something similar happen right now in Western Europe, where a genuinely fascist right is metastasizing to counter the uber-PC sensibilities of the undemocratic and unaccountable EU.) Where the pendulum eventually stops won’t be anything like Jim Crow, as the pendulum will be moving more slowly this time, just like Jim Crow wasn’t anything like the slaveholding South, but it will be a world where the received white opinion will be actively hostile to the likes of Sharpton and Farrakhan and Holder. Unfortunately, it will also be a world where it will once again be OK to be unfair to blacks.

This is bad, but if this future comes to pass, it will not the fault of conservatives like me who oppose affirmative action and racial hysteria. We are doing our level best to dampen the pendulum’s motion so that it may drift back to its ideal resting position. It will be the fault of the racial demagogues, who are right now doing their best to push the pendulum in their favoured direction as far as possible, oblivious to the peril that they are creating for themselves – and for the people they are purporting to help - down the road.