Borderlands: The View from Azerbaijan

Guest post - By George Friedman

I arrive in Azerbaijan as the country celebrates Victory Day, the day successor states of the former Soviet Union celebrate the defeat of Germany in World War II. No one knows how many Soviet citizens died in that war -- perhaps 22 million. The number is staggering and represents both the incompetence and magnificence of Russia, which led the Soviets in war. Any understanding of Russia that speaks of one without the other is flawed.

As I write, fireworks are going off over the Caspian Sea. The pyrotechnics are long and elaborate, sounding like an artillery barrage. They are a reminder that Baku was perhaps the most important place in the Nazi-Soviet war. It produced almost all of the Soviet Union's petroleum. The Germans were desperate for it and wanted to deny it to Moscow. Germany's strategy after 1942, including the infamous battle of Stalingrad, turned on Baku's oil. In the end, the Germans threw an army against the high Caucasus guarding Baku. In response, an army raised in the Caucasus fought and defeated them. The Soviets won the war. They wouldn't have if the Germans had reached Baku. It is symbolic, at least to me, that these celebrations blend into the anniversary of the birth of Heydar Aliyev, the late president of Azerbaijan who endured the war and later forged the post-Soviet identity of his country. He would have been 91 on May 10.

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Baku is strategic again today, partly because of oil. I've started the journey here partly by convenience and partly because Azerbaijan is key to any counter-Russian strategy that might emerge. My purpose on this trip is to get a sense of the degree to which individual European states feel threatened by Russia, and if they do, the level of effort and risk they are prepared to endure. For Europe does not exist as anything more than a geographic expression; it is the fears and efforts of the individual nation-states constituting it that will determine the course of this affair. Each nation is different, and each makes its own calculus of interest. My interest is to understand their thinking, not only about Russia but also about the European Union, the United States and ultimately themselves. Each is unique; it isn't possible to make a general statement about them.

Some question whether the Caucasus region and neighboring Turkey are geographically part of Europe. There are many academic ways to approach this question. My approach, however, is less sophisticated. Modern European history cannot be understood without understanding the Ottoman Empire and the fact that it conquered much of the southeastern part of the European peninsula. Russia conquered the three Caucasian states -- Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan -- and many of their institutions are Russian, hence European. If an organic European expression does exist, it can be argued to be Eurovision, the pan-continental music competition. The Azerbaijanis won it in 2011, which should settle any debate on their "Europeanness."

But more important, a strategy to block Russia is hard to imagine without including its southern flank. There is much talk of sanctions on Russia. But sanctions can be countered and always ignore a key truth: Russia has always been economically dysfunctional. It has created great empires and defeated Napoleon and Hitler in spite of that. Undermining Russia's economy may be possible, but that does not always undermine Russia's military power. That Soviet military power outlived the economically driven collapse of the Soviet Union confirms this point. And the issue at the moment is military.

The solution found for dealing with the Soviet Union during the Cold War was containment. The architect of this strategy was diplomat George Kennan, whose realist approach to geopolitics may have lost some adherents but not its relevance. A cordon sanitaire was constructed around the Soviet Union through a system of alliances. In the end, the Soviets were unable to expand and choked on their own inefficiency. There is a strange view abroad that the 21st century is dramatically different from all prior centuries and such thinking is obsolete. I have no idea why this should be so. The 21st century is simply another century, and there has been no transcendence of history. Containment was a core strategy and it seems likely that it will be adopted again -- if countries like Azerbaijan are prepared to participate.

To understand Azerbaijan you must begin with two issues: oil and a unique approach to Islam. At the beginning of the 20th century, over half the world's oil production originated near Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. Hence Hitler's strategy after 1942. Today, Azerbaijani energy production is massive, but it cannot substitute for Russia's production. Russian energy production, meanwhile, defines part of the strategic equation. Many European countries depend substantially on Russian energy, particularly natural gas. They have few alternatives. There is talk of U.S. energy being shipped to Europe, but building the infrastructure for that (even if there are supplies) will take many years before it can reduce Europe's dependence on Russia.

Withholding energy would be part of any Russian counter to Western pressure, even if Russia were to suffer itself. Any strategy against Russia must address the energy issue, begin with Azerbaijan, and be about more than production. Azerbaijan is not a major producer of gas compared to oil. On the other side of the Caspian Sea, however, Turkmenistan is. Its resources, coupled with Azerbaijan's, would provide a significant alternative to Russian energy. Turkmenistan has an interest in not selling through Russia and would be interested in a Trans-Caspian pipeline. That pipeline would have to pass through Azerbaijan, connecting onward to infrastructure in Turkey. Assuming Moscow had no effective counters, this would begin to provide a serious alternative to Russian energy and decrease Moscow's leverage. But this would all depend on Baku's willingness and ability to resist pressure from every direction.

Azerbaijan lies between Russia and Iran. Russia is the traditional occupier of Azerbaijan and its return is what Baku fears the most. Iran is partly an Azeri country. Nearly a quarter of its citizens, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, are Azeri. But while both Azerbaijan and Iran are predominantly Shiite, Azerbaijan is a militantly secular state. Partly due to the Soviet experience and partly because of the unique evolution of Azeri identity since the 19th century, Azerbaijan separates the private practice of Islam from public life. I recall once attending a Jewish Passover feast in Baku that was presided over by an Orthodox rabbi, with security provided by the state. To be fair, Iran has a Jewish minority that has its own lawmaker in parliament. But any tolerance in Iran flows from theocratic dogma, whereas in Azerbaijan it is rooted in a constitution that is more explicitly secular than any in the European Union, save that of France.

This is just one obvious wedge between Azerbaijan and Iran, and Tehran has made efforts to influence the Azeri population. For the moment, relations are somewhat better but there is an insoluble tension that derives from geopolitical reality and the fact that any attack on Iran could come from Azerbaijan. Furthering this wedge are the close relations between Azerbaijan and Israel. The United States currently blocks most weapons sales to Azerbaijan. Israel -- with U.S. approval -- sells the needed weapons. This gives us a sense of the complexity of the relationship, recalling that complexity undermines alliances.

The complexity of alliances also defines Russia's reality. It occupies the high Caucasus overlooking the plains of Azerbaijan. Armenia is a Russian ally, bound by an agreement that permits Russian bases through 2044. Yerevan also plans to join the Moscow-led Customs Union, and Russian firms own a large swath of the Armenian economy. Armenia feels isolated. It remains hostile to Turkey for Ankara's unwillingness to acknowledge events of a century ago as genocide. Armenia also fought a war with Azerbaijan in the 1990s, shortly after independence, for a region called Nagorno-Karabakh that had been part of Azerbaijan -- a region that it lost in the war and wants back. Armenia, caught between Turkey and an increasingly powerful Azerbaijan, regards Russia as a guarantor of its national security.

For Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh remains a critical issue. Azerbaijan holds that U.N. resolutions have made it clear that Armenia's attack constituted a violation of international law, and a diplomatic process set up in Minsk to resolve the crisis has proven ineffective. Azerbaijan operates on two tracks on this issue. It pursues national development, as can be seen in Baku, a city that reflects the oil wealth of the country. It will not endanger that development, nor will it forget about Nagorno-Karabakh. At some point, any nation aligning itself with Azerbaijan will need to take a stand on this frozen conflict, and that is a high price for most.

Which leads me to an interesting symmetry of incomprehension between the United States and Azerbaijan. The United States does not want to sell weapons directly to Azerbaijan because of what it regards as violations of human rights by the Azerbaijani government. The Americans find it incomprehensible that Baku, facing Russia and Iran and needing the United States, cannot satisfy American sensibilities by avoiding repression -- a change that would not threaten the regime. Azerbaijan's answer is that it is precisely the threats it faces from Iran and Russia that require Baku to maintain a security state. Both countries send operatives into Azerbaijan to destabilize it. What the Americans consider dissidents, Azerbaijan sees as agents of foreign powers. Washington disputes this and continually offends Baku with its pronouncements. The Azerbaijanis, meanwhile, continually offend the Americans.

This is similar to the Nagorno-Karabakh issue. Most Americans have never heard of it and don't care who owns it. For the Azerbaijanis, this is an issue of fundamental historical importance. They cannot understand how, after assisting the United States in Afghanistan, risking close ties with Israel, maintaining a secular Islamic state and more, the United States not only cannot help Baku with Nagorno-Karabakh but also insists on criticizing Azerbaijan.

The question on human rights revolves around the interpretation of who is being arrested and for what reason. For a long time this was an issue that didn't need to be settled. But after the Ukrainian crisis, U.S.-Azerbaijani relations became critical. It is not just energy; rather, in the event of the creation of a containment alliance, Azerbaijan is the southeastern anchor of the line on the Caspian Sea. In addition, since Georgia is absolutely essential as a route for pipelines, given Armenia's alliance with Russia, Azerbaijan's support for Georgian independence is essential. Azerbaijan is the cornerstone for any U.S.-sponsored Caucasus strategy, should it develop.

I do not want to get into the question of either Nagorno-Karabakh or human rights in Azerbaijan. It is, for me, a fruitless issue arising from the deep historical and cultural imperatives of each. But I must take exception to one principle that the U.S. State Department has: an unwillingness to do comparative analysis. In other words, the State Department condemns all violations equally, whether by nations hostile to the United States or friendly to it, whether by countries with wholesale violations or those with more limited violations. When the State Department does pull punches, there is a whiff of bias, as with Georgia and Armenia, which -- while occasionally scolded -- absorb less criticism than Azerbaijan, despite each country's own imperfect record.

Even assuming the validity of State Department criticism, no one argues that Azerbaijani repression rises anywhere near the horrors of Joseph Stalin. I use Stalin as an example because Franklin Roosevelt allied the United States with Stalin to defeat Hitler and didn't find it necessary to regularly condemn Stalin while the Soviet Union was carrying the burden of fighting the war, thereby protecting American interests. That same geopolitical realism animated Kennan and ultimately created the alliance architecture that served the United States throughout the Cold War. Is it necessary to offend someone who will not change his behavior and whom you need for your strategy? The State Department of an earlier era would say no.

It was interesting to attend a celebration of U.S.-Azerbaijani relations in Washington the week before I came to Baku. In the past, these events were subdued. This one was different, because many members of Congress attended. Two guests were particularly significant. One was Charles Schumer of New York, who declared the United States and Azerbaijan to be great democracies. The second was Nancy Pelosi, long a loyalist to Armenian interests. She didn't say much but chose to show up. It is clear that the Ukrainian crisis triggered this turnout. It is clear that Azerbaijan's importance is actually obvious to some in Congress, and it is also clear that it signals tension over the policy of criticizing human rights records without comparing them to those of other countries and of ignoring the criticized country's importance to American strategy.

This is not just about Azerbaijan. The United States will need to work with Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary -- all of whom have been found wanting by the State Department in some ways. This criticism does not -- and will not -- produce change. Endless repetition of the same is the height of ineffectiveness. It will instead make any strategy the United States wants to construct in Europe ineffective. In the end, I would argue that a comparison between Russia and these other countries matters. Perfect friends are hard to find. Refusing to sell weapons to someone you need is not a good way to create an alliance.

In the past, it seemed that such an alliance was merely Cold War nostalgia by people who did not realize and appreciate that we had reached an age too wise to think of war and geopolitics. But the events in Ukraine raise the possibility that those unreconstructed in their cynicism toward the human condition may well have been right. Alliances may in fact be needed. In that case, Roosevelt's attitude toward Stalin is instructive.

Borderlands: The View from Azerbaijan is republished with permission of Stratfor.

The World's Resources Aren't Running Out

Ecologists worry that the world's resources come in fixed amounts that will run out, but we have broken through such limits again and again
By Matt Ridley, Wall Street Journal

How many times have you heard that we humans are "using up" the world's resources, "running out" of oil, "reaching the limits" of the atmosphere's capacity to cope with pollution or "approaching the carrying capacity" of the land's ability to support a greater population? The assumption behind all such statements is that there is a fixed amount of stuff—metals, oil, clean air, land—and that we risk exhausting it through our consumption.

"We are using 50% more resources than the Earth can sustainably produce, and unless we change course, that number will grow fast—by 2030, even two planets will not be enough," says Jim Leape, director general of the World Wide Fund for Nature International (formerly the World Wildlife Fund).

But here's a peculiar feature of human history: We burst through such limits again and again. After all, as a Saudi oil minister once said, the Stone Age didn't end for lack of stone. Ecologists call this "niche construction"—that people (and indeed some other animals) can create new opportunities for themselves by making their habitats more productive in some way. Agriculture is the classic example of niche construction: We stopped relying on nature's bounty and substituted an artificial and much larger bounty.

Economists call the same phenomenon innovation. What frustrates them about ecologists is the latter's tendency to think in terms of static limits. Ecologists can't seem to see that when whale oil starts to run out, petroleum is discovered, or that when farm yields flatten, fertilizer comes along, or that when glass fiber is invented, demand for copper falls.

That frustration is heartily reciprocated. Ecologists think that economists espouse a sort of superstitious magic called "markets" or "prices" to avoid confronting the reality of limits to growth. The easiest way to raise a cheer in a conference of ecologists is to make a rude joke about economists.

I have lived among both tribes. I studied various forms of ecology in an academic setting for seven years and then worked at the Economist magazine for eight years. When I was an ecologist (in the academic sense of the word, not the political one, though I also had antinuclear stickers on my car), I very much espoused the carrying-capacity viewpoint—that there were limits to growth. I nowadays lean to the view that there are no limits because we can invent new ways of doing more with less.

This disagreement goes to the heart of many current political issues and explains much about why people disagree about environmental policy. In the climate debate, for example, pessimists see a limit to the atmosphere's capacity to cope with extra carbon dioxide without rapid warming. So a continuing increase in emissions if economic growth continues will eventually accelerate warming to dangerous rates. But optimists see economic growth leading to technological change that would result in the use of lower-carbon energy. That would allow warming to level off long before it does much harm.

It is striking, for example, that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's recent forecast that temperatures would rise by 3.7 to 4.8 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial levels by 2100 was based on several assumptions: little technological change, an end to the 50-year fall in population growth rates, a tripling (only) of per capita income and not much improvement in the energy efficiency of the economy. Basically, that would mean a world much like today's but with lots more people burning lots more coal and oil, leading to an increase in emissions. Most economists expect a five- or tenfold increase in income, huge changes in technology and an end to population growth by 2100: not so many more people needing much less carbon.

In 1679, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the great Dutch microscopist, estimated that the planet could hold 13.4 billion people, a number that most demographers think we may never reach. Since then, estimates have bounced around between 1 billion and 100 billion, with no sign of converging on an agreed figure.

Economists point out that we keep improving the productivity of each acre of land by applying fertilizer, mechanization, pesticides and irrigation. Further innovation is bound to shift the ceiling upward. Jesse Ausubel at Rockefeller University calculates that the amount of land required to grow a given quantity of food has fallen by 65% over the past 50 years, world-wide.

Ecologists object that these innovations rely on nonrenewable resources, such as oil and gas, or renewable ones that are being used up faster than they are replenished, such as aquifers. So current yields cannot be maintained, let alone improved.

In his recent book "The View from Lazy Point," the ecologist Carl Safina estimates that if everybody had the living standards of Americans, we would need 2.5 Earths because the world's agricultural land just couldn't grow enough food for more than 2.5 billion people at that level of consumption. Harvard emeritus professor E.O. Wilson, one of ecology's patriarchs, reckoned that only if we all turned vegetarian could the world's farms grow enough food to support 10 billion people.

Economists respond by saying that since large parts of the world, especially in Africa, have yet to gain access to fertilizer and modern farming techniques, there is no reason to think that the global land requirements for a given amount of food will cease shrinking any time soon. Indeed, Mr. Ausubel, together with his colleagues Iddo Wernick and Paul Waggoner, came to the startling conclusion that, even with generous assumptions about population growth and growing affluence leading to greater demand for meat and other luxuries, and with ungenerous assumptions about future global yield improvements, we will need less farmland in 2050 than we needed in 2000. (So long, that is, as we don't grow more biofuels on land that could be growing food.)

But surely intensification of yields depends on inputs that may run out? Take water, a commodity that limits the production of food in many places. Estimates made in the 1960s and 1970s of water demand by the year 2000 proved grossly overestimated: The world used half as much water as experts had projected 30 years before.

The reason was greater economy in the use of water by new irrigation techniques. Some countries, such as Israel and Cyprus, have cut water use for irrigation through the use of drip irrigation. Combine these improvements with solar-driven desalination of seawater world-wide, and it is highly unlikely that fresh water will limit human population.

The best-selling book "Limits to Growth," published in 1972 by the Club of Rome (an influential global think tank), argued that we would have bumped our heads against all sorts of ceilings by now, running short of various metals, fuels, minerals and space. Why did it not happen? In a word, technology: better mining techniques, more frugal use of materials, and if scarcity causes price increases, substitution by cheaper material. We use 100 times thinner gold plating on computer connectors than we did 40 years ago. The steel content of cars and buildings keeps on falling.

Until about 10 years ago, it was reasonable to expect that natural gas might run out in a few short decades and oil soon thereafter. If that were to happen, agricultural yields would plummet, and the world would be faced with a stark dilemma: Plow up all the remaining rain forest to grow food, or starve.

But thanks to fracking and the shale revolution, peak oil and gas have been postponed. They will run out one day, but only in the sense that you will run out of Atlantic Ocean one day if you take a rowboat west out of a harbor in Ireland. Just as you are likely to stop rowing long before you bump into Newfoundland, so we may well find cheap substitutes for fossil fuels long before they run out.

The economist and metals dealer Tim Worstall gives the example of tellurium, a key ingredient of some kinds of solar panels. Tellurium is one of the rarest elements in the Earth's crust—one atom per billion. Will it soon run out? Mr. Worstall estimates that there are 120 million tons of it, or a million years' supply altogether. It is sufficiently concentrated in the residues from refining copper ores, called copper slimes, to be worth extracting for a very long time to come. One day, it will also be recycled as old solar panels get cannibalized to make new ones.

Or take phosphorus, an element vital to agricultural fertility. The richest phosphate mines, such as on the island of Nauru in the South Pacific, are all but exhausted. Does that mean the world is running out? No: There are extensive lower grade deposits, and if we get desperate, all the phosphorus atoms put into the ground over past centuries still exist, especially in the mud of estuaries. It's just a matter of concentrating them again.

In 1972, the ecologist Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University came up with a simple formula called IPAT, which stated that the impact of humankind was equal to population multiplied by affluence multiplied again by technology. In other words, the damage done to Earth increases the more people there are, the richer they get and the more technology they have.

Many ecologists still subscribe to this doctrine, which has attained the status of holy writ in ecology. But the past 40 years haven't been kind to it. In many respects, greater affluence and new technology have led to less human impact on the planet, not more. Richer people with new technologies tend not to collect firewood and bushmeat from natural forests; instead, they use electricity and farmed chicken—both of which need much less land. In 2006, Mr. Ausubel calculated that no country with a GDP per head greater than $4,600 has a falling stock of forest (in density as well as in acreage).

Haiti is 98% deforested and literally brown on satellite images, compared with its green, well-forested neighbor, the Dominican Republic. The difference stems from Haiti's poverty, which causes it to rely on charcoal for domestic and industrial energy, whereas the Dominican Republic is wealthy enough to use fossil fuels, subsidizing propane gas for cooking fuel specifically so that people won't cut down forests.

Part of the problem is that the word "consumption" means different things to the two tribes. Ecologists use it to mean "the act of using up a resource"; economists mean "the purchase of goods and services by the public" (both definitions taken from the Oxford dictionary).

But in what sense is water, tellurium or phosphorus "used up" when products made with them are bought by the public? They still exist in the objects themselves or in the environment. Water returns to the environment through sewage and can be reused. Phosphorus gets recycled through compost. Tellurium is in solar panels, which can be recycled. As the economist Thomas Sowell wrote in his 1980 book "Knowledge and Decisions," "Although we speak loosely of 'production,' man neither creates nor destroys matter, but only transforms it."

Given that innovation—or "niche construction"—causes ever more productivity, how do ecologists justify the claim that we are already overdrawn at the planetary bank and would need at least another planet to sustain the lifestyles of 10 billion people at U.S. standards of living?

Examine the calculations done by a group called the Global Footprint Network—a think tank founded by Mathis Wackernagel in Oakland, Calif., and supported by more than 70 international environmental organizations—and it becomes clear. The group assumes that the fossil fuels burned in the pursuit of higher yields must be offset in the future by tree planting on a scale that could soak up the emitted carbon dioxide. A widely used measure of "ecological footprint" simply assumes that 54% of the acreage we need should be devoted to "carbon uptake."

But what if tree planting wasn't the only way to soak up carbon dioxide? Or if trees grew faster when irrigated and fertilized so you needed fewer of them? Or if we cut emissions, as the U.S. has recently done by substituting gas for coal in electricity generation? Or if we tolerated some increase in emissions (which are measurably increasing crop yields, by the way)? Any of these factors could wipe out a huge chunk of the deemed ecological overdraft and put us back in planetary credit.

Helmut Haberl of Klagenfurt University in Austria is a rare example of an ecologist who takes economics seriously. He points out that his fellow ecologists have been using "human appropriation of net primary production"—that is, the percentage of the world's green vegetation eaten or prevented from growing by us and our domestic animals—as an indicator of ecological limits to growth. Some ecologists had begun to argue that we were using half or more of all the greenery on the planet.

This is wrong, says Dr. Haberl, for several reasons. First, the amount appropriated is still fairly low: About 14.2% is eaten by us and our animals, and an additional 9.6% is prevented from growing by goats and buildings, according to his estimates. Second, most economic growth happens without any greater use of biomass. Indeed, human appropriation usually declines as a country industrializes and the harvest grows—as a result of agricultural intensification rather than through plowing more land.

Finally, human activities actually increase the production of green vegetation in natural ecosystems. Fertilizer taken up by crops is carried into forests and rivers by wild birds and animals, where it boosts yields of wild vegetation too (sometimes too much, causing algal blooms in water). In places like the Nile delta, wild ecosystems are more productive than they would be without human intervention, despite the fact that much of the land is used for growing human food.

If I could have one wish for the Earth's environment, it would be to bring together the two tribes—to convene a grand powwow of ecologists and economists. I would pose them this simple question and not let them leave the room until they had answered it: How can innovation improve the environment?

Mr. Ridley is the author of "The Rational Optimist" and a member of the British House of Lords.
This article was first posted in The Wall Street Journal on April 25th. I post it here in its entirety because it might soon become unavailable on the WSJ website.

Canadian TV meteorologist on global warming

Canadian TV meteorologist on the need for some of that missing global warming.
Great video!

Putin Acted Because Obama is So Strong

Some things democrats say are pure parody, except that they mean them seriously. Democrat Chris Murphy, (D Ct.) of the senate Foreign Relations Committee said that. You have to see it to believe it.



Really now, does he think we are that stupid? Or is HE that stupid. Don't these people even try to learn about a subject before they pontificate on it? This is a man who is on an important committee that, among other things, takes a leading role in creating policy.

Question: Does Obama believe this? We already know that Vladimir Putin does not. http://www.caintv.com/dem.senator-says-putin-is-pani

Trey Gowdy Tells Congress

Trey Gowdy tells congress that they can either stand for something or they can stand for nothing. Watch:

More Sitcom than CENTCOM

Guest Post By Spengler (David P. Goldman)

American foreign policy is more sitcom than CENTCOM. That in a way is the good news. Our failures are comic while those of other nations are tragic. Americans do not understand the tragic impulses of other peoples because they are exceptional. The Europeans failed as nationalists, and are failing as post-nationalists.

Because Americans are not an ethnicity but a union of immigrants committed to a concept, our nationalism discloses a universal impulse. We blunder when we forget how exceptional we are, and ignore the tragic impulses that impinge on other peoples.

Only once in the past century have we read the world aright. We got it wrong when Woodrow Wilson proposed a utopian postwar vision in 1919, when the isolationists tried to stay out of the European conflict in the late 1930s, when Roosevelt and Truman let Stalin absorb Eastern Europe, when we overextended and then turned tail in Vietnam, and when we undertook to turn Iraq and Afghanistan into Western-style democracies. Ronald Reagan got it right when he decided that it was time to roll back communism - but he also understood that we would have to live with Russia as a nation.

We have stumbled into the world's troubles like incongruous clowns in a tragedy: we observe the anguished faces of the other characters and conclude that everyone else on stage is insane. That is how Americans view Russian President Vladimir Putin. As Time magazine reported last week:

An Obama administration official leaked to the New York Times on Sunday the fact that German Chancellor Angela Merkel told President Obama she wasn't sure if Putin was in touch with reality. "In another world," Merkel reportedly said, according to the leak. Then in a conference call with reporters later in the day, three administration officials took turns firing rhetorical shots: "[B]eing inside Putin's head is not someplace anyone wants to be."

I doubt that Merkel ever said it, but that's a different question. Russia, as Colonel Ralph Peters (retired) told Sean Hannity last week, "believes in Russia"; to the Obamoids, belief in one's country is prima facie evidence of mental defect. Hillary Clinton, Senator John McCain and Senator Marco Rubio meanwhile compare Putin to Hitler, an example of what the late Leo Strauss derided as "reduction ad Hitlerium".

Contrast that to President Obama's characterization of Iran in his interview with Bloomberg's Jeffrey Goldberg:

[If] you look at Iranian behavior, they are strategic, and they're not impulsive. They have a worldview, and they see their interests, and they respond to costs and benefits.

That's been the longstanding view of this administration.

Just how does one define rationality in global politics? Here is a question that helps: What is the rational self-interest of a nation that will cease to exist within the horizon of present-day expectations? We look uncomprehendingly on the petty wars of perished peoples and marvel at the sheer vanity of their forgotten battles. How do we know that someone in the future won't look back at us the same way? There have been Great Extinctions of the Peoples before in world history, but never with the breadth and speed of the demographic declines in our own era. That should give us something of an objective gauge with which to judge the rationality of actors.

Iran's unprecedented fertility decline has accelerated - from about 7 children per female in 1979 to only 1.6 last year, according to a UN estimate. Russia, meanwhile, is struggling to emerge from what seemed like a demographic death-sentence only a few years ago. Ukraine is Europe's poster-boy for demographic death.

Iran is dying a slow and dreadful death: by mid-century more than a third of its people will be over 60, and by the end of the century, half its people will be over 60, imposing an impossible burden on a poor country. Its rulers are taking urgent steps to reverse the fertility decline, opening clinics to treat infertility, which reportedly affects one-fifth of all Iranian couples, against a world average of around 8%. Why infertility is so widespread in Iran is unclear; it might be due to the fact that the reported incidence of chlamydia, a bacterial STD that causes infertility, is several times higher in Iran than in Western countries. Former president Mahmud Ahmadinejad began campaigning for earlier marriage and bigger families in 2009, but fertility has continued to fall.

I argued nearly a decade ago (see Demographics and Iran's imperial design, Asia Times Online, September 13, 2005) that Iran's decision to acquire nuclear weapons is an entirely rational response to its demographic decline: "Iran's motives for acquiring nuclear power are not only economic but strategic. Like Hitler and Stalin, Ahmadinejad looks to imperial expansion as a solution for economic crisis at home. ... This may appear to be a desperate gamble, but conditions call for desperate gambles. Ahmadinejad is not a throwback, as I wrote with a dismissiveness that seems painful in hindsight. He has taken the measure of his country's crisis, and determined to meet it head-on. Washington, from what I can tell, has no idea what sort of opponent it confronts."

Iran is rational, but not in the way Obama seems to believe. If you need $100,000 for an operation that will save your life and have only $10,000, it is rational to bet the whole stake at 10:1 odds. Iran must break out or break down. That is why it will gamble on nuclear weapons acquisition.

Total fertility rate for Russia, Ukraine, and Iran

Source: UN and CIA

Apart from some fine work by the demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, though, the glaring facts of Iran's demographic predicament have escaped notice by America's policymakers. Not so the demographics of Russia: the prevailing view among Western analysts (and especially hawkish ones) holds that Russia is a doomed nation. In December 2011, Professor Eberstadt published an essay entitled "The Dying Bear: Russia's Demographic Disaster" in Foreign Affairs. Last year I reviewed on this site Ilan Berman's book Implosion, which stated this widely held view as follows:

Russia is dying. Russia is undergoing a catastrophic post-Soviet societal decline due to abysmal health standards, runaway drug addiction, and an AIDS crisis that officials have termed an "epidemic." The population of the Russian Federation is declining by close to half a million souls every year due to death and emigration. At this rate, the once-mighty Russian state could lose a quarter of its population by the middle of this century. And according to some projections, if Russia's demographic trajectory does not change, its population could plummet to as little as fifty-two million people by 2080. It's a phenomenon demographers have described as "the emptying of Russia" - a wholesale implosion of Russia's human capital and a collapse of its prospects as a viable modern state. (See Reports of Russia's death are exaggerated, Asia Times Online, October 15, 2013).

A specter is haunting Russia: the specter of depopulation. The cohort of Russian women of child-bearing age is so depleted that even a recovery of Russia's birth rate will not forestall severe problems. Nonetheless I thought Berman's thesis one-sided and overstated. Russia's total fertility rate has recovered from around 1.2 a decade ago to 1.7 last year, and Russia's population increased slightly in 2013 for the first time in almost two decades.

We do not know quite why this has occurred, but it seems that Putin's aggressive efforts to promote fertility have had some effect - unlike in Iran. Like Jonah's prophecy to Nineveh, the threat of extinction may have motivated Russia to change course. And like Jonah, our modern prophets rankle at the prospect that the ban of doom may have been lifted.

I suspect that Russia's revived nationalism has a great deal to do with rising fertility. That includes the revival of the Orthodox Church, which is consubstantial with the Russian state. Countries that lose their faith and their identity also lose their motivation to bring new generations into the world; that is how civilizations die, the title of my 2011 book on demographics and geopolitics. Putin's nationalism is also a rational response to an existential threat. The Germans might go gentle into that good night, but Russia will fight for its identity and its future existence.

Russian nationalism - historically an imperial more than a national identity - always was a brutal business, and especially nasty towards national minorities, as my ancestors from the Pale of Jewish Settlement on the Western order of the Russian Empire knew all too well.

A core goal of Putin's national revivalism is the reintegration of Russians left stranded in the "near abroad" by the collapse of the Soviet Union: Russia's imperial policy of salting its border states with Russian settlers backfired when the evil Soviet empire collapsed. From the Russian vantage point this is not a matter of scoring points but an existential issue, a sine qua non of what it means to be Russian, and exemplary of the motivation for Russians to want their culture to continue.

Western pundits ridicule Putin's claim that Russia is a bulwark against Western decadence. From a Western standpoint, Putin's methods are repugnant. But they are the only methods Russia has ever known. The problem is that Western Europe is decadent. Most European countries are headed for demographic extinction. Russia, which seemed passed the point of no return, is struggling to retrace its steps.

Total Fertility Rate for Russia and Selected European Countries

Source: UN and CIA


That leaves the West with a conundrum concerning the Russian intervention in Crimea and possibly elsewhere in Russian-majority areas in Ukraine. Russia does not want to be like other European countries. Hungary, Poland, and the Baltic States have the lowest fertility rates of any nations in the West, ranging from just 0.82 children per female for ethnic Magyars in Hungary (excluding the Roma) to about 1.2 for Poland. That is where Russia was in 2000. Russia prefers the fecund past to the bleak future of the Europeans. That is why the nations of Europe fought the First World War 100 years ago: to avoid becoming what they are today. They fought to sustain belief in their destiny as nations. As Col. Peters said in the cited interview, "Putin believes in Russia's destiny."

The re-assertion of Russian identity, meanwhile, is as brutal a business as Russian self-assertion has been since the time of Peter the Great. Putin's patriotism is not my patriotism. I don't particularly like what Putin did in Crimea, but it was delusional to expect any other course of action. Russia is short of Russians, and it cannot ignore the 22 million Russians left stranded in newly independent republics of the former Soviet Union.

The Obama administration is staffed by the sort of utopian liberal internationalists who attended conflict-resolution seminars at Ivy League colleges. Putin seems a throwback, and that is just what he is: he is trying to revert to Russian identity prior to the 1917 October Revolution, not without some success. To compare him to Hitler is Billingsgate. The hawks seem upset that Russia has not chosen to accept its decline with Stoic resignation. It is easier to condemn Russian brutality than to suggest an alternative path by which Russia would remain viable a century from now.

It was inevitable that Russia would intervene if Ukraine became unstable. It is tragic in the full sense of the world, namely an outcome to which the participants are driven by circumstances they cannot control. Russia's interest in Ukraine, particularly in the Russian-speaking eastern half of the country, is existential not opportunistic.

As in Georgia, there was nothing the United States (let alone the Europeans) could have done to hinder it, and nothing they can do to reverse it. The tragedy will play itself out, and at the end of it - the very end - there will be no Ukraine, because there will be no Ukrainians.

Whether Russia survives into the next century is an open question upon which the crude conclusions of hawkish foreign policy analysts shed no light. I do not know the answer, but I am sure that America will have to deal with Russia as a strategic power for the indefinite future - a power of second rank, perhaps, but not one to be trifled with in its back yard.

I am an American and a hawk who wants America to be the world's dominant superpower. Whatever our errors, we are the only nation in the world capable of altruism. We hawks had a mandate after September 11, 2011, such as no-one had in America since Pearl Harbor, and we misplayed hand after hand until our chips are nearly gone. If we fail to understand the underlying trends that drive events and the motivations of the main actors, we will be out of the game entirely.

What should we have done in Ukraine? As I wrote on February 20, the West had the opportunity to promote a constitutional referendum including the option of partition. If Russian speakers in Crimea or the Donbas region preferred affiliation with Russia, so be it. Ukraine's constitution was in ruins before the Russians moved in. The odious Viktor Yanukovich beat the "Gas Princess" Yulia Timoshenko in a reasonably fair election in 2010, and proceeded to abuse his presidential powers. When the Maidan Square demonstrators chased him out, Ukraine's parliament voted unanimously to dismiss him. The absence of a single "nay" recalls Soviet-era majorities.

The West could have been midwife to a new national consensus - either a single Ukraine reaffirmed by popular mandate, or a decent divorce on the Czech-Slovak model, or perhaps a federal solution somewhere in between. Instead, we encouraged a constitutional crisis in Ukraine. Now we are stuck with the dubious Ms Timoshenko, one of the wealthiest oligarchs to emerge from Ukraine's post-independence theft of national assets, and an intransigent Russia in possession of Crimea.

Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman. He is Senior Fellow at the London Center for Policy Research and Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum, from which this post is reprinted. His book How Civilizations Die (and why Islam is Dying, Too) was published by Regnery Press in September 2011. A volume of his essays on culture, religion and economics, It's Not the End of the World - It's Just the End of You, also appeared that fall, from Van Praag Press.

Two Cows - by Matthias Varga

TWO COWS - by Matthias Varga

SOCIALISM
You have 2 cows.
You give one to your neighbour

COMMUNISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and gives you some milk

FASCISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and sells you some milk

NAZISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and shoots you

BUREAUCRATISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both, shoots one, milks the other, and then throws the milk away

TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows.
You sell them and retire on the income

ROYAL BANK OF SCOTLAND (VENTURE) CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by
your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows.
The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island Company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company. The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. You sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States , leaving you with nine cows. No balance sheet provided with the release.
The public then buys your bull.

SURREALISM
You have two giraffes.
The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.

AN AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows.
Later, you hire a consultant to analyze why the cow has dropped dead.

A GREEK CORPORATION
You have two cows. 
You borrow lots of euros to build barns, milking sheds, hay stores, feed sheds, dairies, cold stores, abattoir, cheese unit and packing sheds.
You still only have two cows.

A FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on strike, organise a riot, and block the roads, because you want three cows.

A JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce
twenty times the milk. You then create a clever cow cartoon image called a Cowkimona and market it worldwide.

AN ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows,
but you don't know where they are.
You decide to have lunch.

A SWISS CORPORATION
You have 5000 cows. 
None of them belong to you.
You charge the owners for storing them.

A CHINESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You have 300 people milking them.
You claim that you have full employment, and high bovine productivity.
You arrest the newsman who reported the real situation.

AN INDIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You worship them.

A BRITISH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Both are mad.

AN IRAQI CORPORATION
Everyone thinks you have lots of cows.
You tell them that you have none.
No-one believes you, so they bomb the ** out of you and invade your country.
You still have no cows, but at least you are now a Democracy.

AN AUSTRALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Business seems pretty good.
You close the office and go for a few beers to celebrate.

A NEW ZEALAND CORPORATION
You have two cows.
The one on the left looks very attractive...

Snowden Testimony to EU Parliament

Edward Snowden testified to the European Union Parliament testified today. At least this is the say that his testimony was published. His introductory remarks are included here in full. This was originally published on the EU Parliament web page, including quite a few questions. Link in .pdf.

Introductory Statement

1)
I would like to thank the European Parliament for the invitation to provide testimony for your inquiry into the Electronic Mass Surveillance of EU Citizens. The suspicionless surveillance programs of the NSA, GCHQ, and so many others that we learned about over the last year endanger a number of basic rights which, in aggregate, constitute the foundation of liberal societies.

The first principle any inquiry must take into account is that despite extraordinary political  pressure to do so, no western government has been able to present evidence showing that such  programs are necessary. In the United States, the heads of our spying services once claimed that 54 terrorist attacks had been stopped by mass surveillance, but two independent White House reviews with access to the classified evidence on which this claim was founded concluded it was untrue, as did a Federal Court.

Looking at the US government's reports here is valuable. The most recent of these investigations, performed by the White House's Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, determined that the mass surveillance program investigated was not only ineffective -- they found it had never stopped even a single imminent terrorist attack -- but that it had no basis in law. In less diplomatic language, they discovered the United States was operating an unlawful mass surveillance program, and the greatest success the program had ever produced was discovering a taxi driver in the United States transferring $8,500 dollars to Somalia in 2007.

After noting that even this unimpressive success -  uncovering evidence of a single unlawful  bank transfer -- would have been achieved without bulk collection, the Board recommended that the unlawful mass surveillance program be ended. Unfortunately, we know from press reports that this program is still operating today.

I believe that suspicionless surveillance not only fails to make us safe, but it actually makes us less safe. By squandering precious, limited resources on "collecting it all," we end up with more analysts trying to make sense of harmless political dissent and fewer investigators running down real leads. I believe investing in mass surveillance at the expense of traditional, proven methods can cost lives, and history has shown my concerns are justified.

Despite the extraordinary intrusions of the NSA and EU national governments into private communications world-wide, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the "Underwear Bomber," was allowed to board an airplane traveling from Europe to the United States in 2009. The 290  persons on board were not saved by mass surveillance, but by his own incompetence, when he failed to detonate the device. While even Mutallab's own father warned the US government he was dangerous in November 2009, our resources were tied up monitoring online games and tapping German ministers. That extraordinary tip-off didn't get Mutallab a dedicated US investigator. All we gave him was a US visa. 

Nor did the US government's comprehensive monitoring of Americans at home stop the Boston Bombers. Despite the Russians specifically warning us about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the FBI couldn't do more than a cursory investigation -- although they did plenty of worthless computer-based searching - and failed to discover the plot. 264 people were injured, and 3 died. The resources that could have paid for a real investigation had been spent on monitoring the call records of everyone in America.

This should not have happened. I worked for the United States' Central Intelligence Agency. The National Security Agency. The Defense Intelligence Agency. I love my country, and I believe that spying serves a vital purpose and must continue. And I have risked my life, my family, and my freedom to tell you the truth.

The NSA granted me the authority to monitor communications world-wide using its mass surveillance systems, including within the United States. I have personally targeted individuals using these systems under both the President of the United States' Executive Order 12333 and the US Congress' FAA 702. I know the good and the bad of these systems, and what they can and cannot do, and I am telling you that without getting out of my chair, I could have read the private communications of any member of this committee, as well as any ordinary citizen. I swear under  penalty of perjury that this is true.

These are not the capabilities in which free societies invest. Mass surveillance violates our rights, risks our safety, and threatens our way of life.

If even the US government, after determining mass surveillance is unlawful and unnecessary, continues to operate to engage in mass surveillance, we have a problem. I consider the United States Government to be generally responsible, and I hope you will agree with me. Accordingly, this begs the question many legislative bodies implicated in mass surveillance have sought to avoid: if even the US is willing to knowingly violate the rights of billions of innocents -- and I say billions without exaggeration -- for nothing more substantial than a "potential" intelligence advantage that has never materialized, what are other governments going to do?

Whether we like it or not, the international norms of tomorrow are being constructed today, right now, by the work of bodies like this committee. If liberal states decide that the convenience of spies is more valuable than the rights of their citizens, the inevitable result will  be states that are both less liberal and less safe.

Thank you.

Chess, Ghetto Style

D'Angelo Barksdale: Now look, check it, it's simple, it's simple. See this? This the kingpin, a'ight? And he the man. You get the other dude's king, you got the game. But he trying to get your king too, so you gotta protect it. Now, the king, he move one space any direction he damn choose, 'cause he's the king. Like this, this, this, a'ight? But he ain't got no hustle. But the rest of these motherfuckers on the team, they got his back. And they run so deep, he really ain't gotta do shit.

Preston 'Bodie' Broadus: Like your uncle.

D'Angelo Barksdale: Yeah, like my uncle. You see this? This the queen. She smart, she fast. She move any way she want, as far as she want. And she is the go-get-shit-done piece.

Wallace: Remind me of Stringer.
D'Angelo Barksdale: And this over here is the castle. Like the stash. It can move like this, and like this.

Wallace: Dog, stash don't move, man.

D'Angelo Barksdale: C'mon, yo, think. How many time we move the stash house this week? Right? And every time we move the stash, we gotta move a little muscle with it, right? To protect it.

Preston 'Bodie' Broadus: True, true, you right. All right, what about them little baldheaded bitches right there?

D'Angelo Barksdale: These right here, these are the pawns. They like the soldiers. They move like this, one space forward only. Except when they fight, then it's like this. And they like the front lines, they be out in the field.

Wallace: So how do you get to be the king?

D'Angelo Barksdale: It ain't like that. See, the king stay the king, a'ight? Everything stay who he is. Except for the pawns. Now, if the pawn make it all the way down to the other dude's side, he get to be queen. And like I said, the queen ain't no bitch. She got all the moves.

Preston 'Bodie' Broadus: A'ight, so if I make it to the other end, I win.

D'Angelo Barksdale: If you catch the other dude's king and trap it, then you win.

Preston 'Bodie' Broadus: A'ight, but if I make it to the end, I'm top dog.

D'Angelo Barksdale: Nah, yo, it ain't like that. Look, the pawns, man, in the game, they get capped quick. They be out the game early.

Preston 'Bodie' Broadus: Unless they some smart-ass pawns.

Offshore Wind Turbines for "Taming Hurricanes"

I thought this was a parody, until I realized that it wasn't. Funding sources include NSF and NASA. Is there nothing too outlandish for the Warmists in government and academia? Read the comments. This stuff isn't funny anymore. Desperate Warmists who are unable to feel shame cling to straws to keep the true believers on board.

The paper requires several trillion dollars of wind turbines to ameliorate a few mph of hurricane winds. I wonder what the unanticipated effects of that much wind disruption will be on weather and wildlife. Science reports both sides of the data. This is more of an advertisement for a product - sales puff is not science. From their website:

3:30 p.m., Feb. 25, 2014–The University of Delaware will steer the way toward making offshore wind turbines a reality in the United States through a new initiative announced today at a major industry conference. The Special Initiative on Offshore Wind, housed at the University’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment, will serve as an independent catalyst for offshore wind development and add momentum to a promising industry that is at a critical juncture.”

That is not science, it is advocacy.

Claim: Offshore Wind Turbines for ‘Taming Hurricanes’ | Watts Up With That?

Testimony of Greenpeace Founder to the U.S. Senate on Climate Change

Statement of Patrick Moore, Ph.D. Before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Subcommittee on Oversight

February 25, 2014

“Natural Resource Adaptation: Protecting ecosystems and economies”

Chairman Whitehouse, Ranking Member Inhofe, and members of the Committee. Thank you for the opportunity to testify at today’s hearing.

In 1971, as a PhD student in ecology I joined an activist group in a church basement in Vancouver Canada and sailed on a small boat across the Pacific to protest US Hydrogen bomb testing in Alaska. We became Greenpeace.

After 15 years in the top committee I had to leave as Greenpeace took a sharp turn to the political left, and began to adopt policies that I could not accept from my scientific perspective. Climate change was not an issue when I abandoned Greenpeace, but it certainly is now.

There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years. If there were such a proof it would be written down for all to see. No actual proof, as it is understood in science, exists.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states: “It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20 th century.” (My emphasis)

“Extremely likely” is not a scientific term but rather a judgment, as in a court of law. The IPCC defines “extremely likely” as a “95-100% probability”. But upon further examination it is clear that these numbers are not the result of any mathematical calculation or statistical analysis. They have been “invented” as a construct within the IPCC report to express “expert judgment”, as determined by the IPCC contributors.

These judgments are based, almost entirely, on the results of sophisticated computer models designed to predict the future of global climate. As noted by many observers, including Dr. Freeman Dyson of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, a computer model is not a crystal ball. We may think it sophisticated, but we cannot predict the future with a computer model any more than we can make predictions with crystal balls, throwing bones, or by appealing to the Gods.

Perhaps the simplest way to expose the fallacy of “extreme certainty” is to look at the historical record. With the historical record, we do have some degree of certainty compared to predictions of the future. When modern life evolved over 500 million years ago, CO2 was more than 10 times higher than today, yet life flourished at this time. Then an Ice Age occurred 450 million years ago when CO2 was 10 times higher than today. There is some correlation, but little evidence, to support a direct causal relationship between CO2 and global temperature through the millennia. The fact that we had both higher temperatures and an ice age at a time when CO2 emissions were 10 times higher than they are today fundamentally contradicts the certainty that human-caused CO2 emissions are the main cause of global warming.

Today we remain locked in what is essentially still the Pleistocene Ice Age, with an average global temperature of 14.5°C. This compares with a low of about 12°C during the periods of maximum glaciation in this Ice Age to an average of 22°C during the Greenhouse Ages, which occurred over longer time periods prior to the most recent Ice Age. During the Greenhouse Ages, there was no ice on either pole and all the land was tropical and sub-tropical, from pole to pole. As recently as 5 million years ago the Canadian Arctic islands were completely forested. Today, we live in an unusually cold period in the history of life on earth and there is no reason to believe that a warmer climate would be anything but beneficial for humans and the majority of other species. There is ample reason to believe that a sharp cooling of the climate would bring disastrous results for human civilization.

Moving closer to the present day, it is instructive to study the record of average global temperature during the past 130 years. The IPCC states that humans are the dominant cause of warming “since the mid-20th century”, which is 1950. From 1910 to 1940 there was an increase in global average temperature of 0.5°C over that 30-year period. Then there was a 30-year “pause” until 1970. This was followed by an increase of 0.57°C during the 30-year period from 1970 to 2000. Since then there has been no increase, perhaps a slight decrease, in average global temperature. This in itself tends to negate the validity of the computer models, as CO2 emissions have continued to accelerate during this time.

The increase in temperature between 1910-1940 was virtually identical to the increase between 1970-2000. Yet the IPCC does not attribute the increase from 1910- 1940 to “human influence.” They are clear in their belief that human emissions impact only the increase “since the mid-20th century”. Why does the IPCC believe that a virtually identical increase in temperature after 1950 is caused mainly by “human influence”, when it has no explanation for the nearly identical increase from 1910- 1940?

It is important to recognize, in the face of dire predictions about a 2°C rise in global average temperature, that humans are a tropical species. We evolved at the equator in a climate where freezing weather did not exist. The only reasons we can survive these cold climates are fire, clothing, and housing. It could be said that frost and ice are the enemies of life, except for those relatively few species that have evolved to adapt to freezing temperatures during this Pleistocene Ice Age. It is “extremely likely” that a warmer temperature than today’s would be far better than a cooler one.

I realize that my comments are contrary to much of the speculation about our climate that is bandied about today. However, I am confident that history will bear me out, both in terms of the futility of relying on computer models to predict the future, and the fact that warmer temperatures are better than colder temperatures for most species.

If we wish to preserve natural biodiversity, wildlife, and human well being, we should simultaneously plan for both warming and cooling, recognizing that cooling would be the most damaging of the two trends. We do not know whether the present pause in temperature will remain for some time, or whether it will go up or down at some time in the near future. What we do know with “extreme certainty” is that the climate is always changing, between pauses, and that we are not capable, with our limited knowledge, of predicting which way it will go next.

Thank you for the opportunity to present my views on this important subject.


Attached please find the chapter on climate change from my book,
“Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible
Environmentalist”. I would request it be made part of the record.



Testimony reposted from Watts Up With That?

Atmospheric Aerosol Eddies and Flows

This remarkable video from NASA GSFC Space Science shown aerosol flows in the troposphere. The animation shows the emission and transport of key tropospheric aerosols from August 17, 2006 to April 10, 2007. It shows the aerosol optical thickness of black and organic carbon (in green), dust (in red/orange), sulfates (in white), and sea salt (in blue) from a 10 km resolution GEOS-5 “nature run.”

What is most interesting to me is that huge continuous dust storm out of Africa. The Trade Winds pick up the dust. When the Trade Winds blow west this dust fertilizes the Atlantic equatorial ocean.

Also interesting is the sulfate flows from populated areas. Notice that the heaviest flows come from China and India, then Europe, then North America. Fascinating.

Where are the Global Warmists for Freedom?

Philosopher Daren Jonescu offers what is perhaps the best explanation of the global warming phenomenon ever. It is all about the politics, not the science. Human beings, not climate models. Moral authority, not science. Too much great stuff to excerpt, you are gonna have to read the whole thing. You won't be disappointed.

Writings From Climate Experts

Some on-the-record musings from climate experts, PHDs all

1. Dr Robert Balling: “The IPCC notes that “No significant acceleration in the rate of sea level rise during the 20th century has been detected.” This did not appear in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers.

2. Dr Lucka Bogataj: “Rising levels of airborne carbon dioxide don’t cause global temperatures to rise…. temperature changed first and some 700 years later a change in aerial content of carbon dioxide followed.”

3. Dr John Christy: “Little known to the public is the fact that most of the scientists involved with the IPCC do not agree that global warming is occurring. Its findings have been consistently misrepresented and/or politicized with each succeeding report.”

4. Dr Rosa Compagnucci: “Humans have only contributed a few tenths of a degree to warming on Earth. Solar activity is a key driver of climate.”

5. Dr Richard Courtney: “The empirical evidence strongly indicates that the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis is wrong.”

6. Dr Judith Curry: “I’m not going to just spout off and endorse the IPCC because I don’t have confidence in the process.”

7. Dr Robert Davis: “Global temperatures have not been changing as state of the art climate models predicted they would. Not a single mention of satellite temperature observations appears in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers.”

8. Dr Willem de Lange: “In 1996 the IPCC listed me as one of approximately 3000 “scientists” who agreed that there was a discernible human influence on climate. I didn’t. There is no evidence to support the hypothesis that runaway catastrophic climate change is due to human activities.”

9. Dr Chris de Freitas: “Government decision-makers should have heard by now that the basis for the long-standing claim that carbon dioxide is a major driver of global climate is being questioned; along with it the hitherto assumed need for costly measures to restrict carbon dioxide emissions. If they have not heard, it is because of the din of global warming hysteria that relies on the logical fallacy of ‘argument from ignorance’ and predictions of computer models.”

10. Dr Oliver Frauenfeld: “Much more progress is necessary regarding our current understanding of climate and our abilities to model it.”

11. Dr Peter Dietze: “Using a flawed eddy diffusion model, the IPCC has grossly underestimated the future oceanic carbon dioxide uptake.”

12. Dr John Everett: “It is time for a reality check. The oceans and coastal zones have been far warmer and colder than is projected in the present scenarios of climate change. I have reviewed the IPCC and more recent scientific literature and believe that there is not a problem with increased acidification, even up to the unlikely levels in the most-used IPCC scenarios.”

13. Dr Eigil Friis-Christensen: “The IPCC refused to consider the sun’s effect on the Earth’s climate as a topic worthy of investigation. The IPCC conceived its task only as investigating potential human causes of climate change.”

14. Dr Lee Gerhard: “I never fully accepted or denied the anthropogenic global warming concept until the furore started after NASA’s James Hansen’s wild claims in the late 1980s. I went to the [scientific] literature to study the basis of the claim, starting with first principles. My studies then led me to believe that the claims were false.”

15. Dr Indur Goklany: “Climate change is unlikely to be the world’s most important environmental problem of the 21st century. There is no signal in the mortality data to indicate increases in the overall frequencies or severities of extreme weather events, despite large increases in the population at risk.”

16. Dr Vincent Gray: “The [IPCC] climate change statement is an orchestrated litany of lies.”

17. Dr Mike Hulme: “Claims such as ’2500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous … The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was only a few dozen.”

18. Dr Kiminori Itoh: “There are many factors which cause climate change. Considering only greenhouse gases is nonsense and harmful.”

19. Dr Yuri Izrael: “There is no proven link between human activity and global warming. I think the panic over global warming is totally unjustified. There is no serious threat to the climate.”

20. Dr Steven Japar: “Temperature measurements show that the climate model-predicted mid-troposphere hot zone is non-existent. This is more than sufficient to invalidate global climate models and projections made with them.”

21. Dr Georg Kaser: “This number [of receding glaciers reported by the IPCC] is not just a little bit wrong, it is far out by any order of magnitude … It is so wrong that it is not even worth discussing.”

22. Dr Aynsley Kellow: “I’m not holding my breath for criticism to be taken on board, which underscores a fault in the whole peer review process for the IPCC: there is no chance of a chapter [of the IPCC report] ever being rejected for publication, no matter how flawed it might be.”

23. Dr Madhav Khandekar: “I have carefully analysed adverse impacts of climate change as projected by the IPCC and have discounted these claims as exaggerated and lacking any supporting evidence.”

24. Dr Hans Labohm: “The alarmist passages in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers have been skewed through an elaborate and sophisticated process of spin-doctoring.”

25. Dr Andrew Lacis: “There is no scientific merit to be found in the Executive Summary. The presentation sounds like something put together by Greenpeace activists and their legal department.”

26. Dr Chris Landsea: “I cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound.”

27. Dr Richard Lindzen: “The IPCC process is driven by politics rather than science. It uses summaries to misrepresent what scientists say and exploits public ignorance.”

28. Dr Harry Lins: “Surface temperature changes over the past century have been episodic and modest and there has been no net global warming for over a decade now. The case for alarm regarding climate change is grossly overstated.”

29. Dr Philip Lloyd: “I am doing a detailed assessment of the IPCC reports and the Summaries for Policy Makers, identifying the way in which the Summaries have distorted the science. I have found examples of a summary saying precisely the opposite of what the scientists said.”

30. Dr Martin Manning: “Some government delegates influencing the IPCC Summary for Policymakers misrepresent or contradict the lead authors.”

31. Dr Stephen McIntyre: “The many references in the popular media to a ‘consensus of thousands of scientists’ are both a great exaggeration and also misleading.”

32. Dr Patrick Michaels: “The rates of warming, on multiple time scales, have now invalidated the suite of IPCC climate models. No, the science is not settled.”

33. Dr Nils-Axel Morner: “If you go around the globe, you find no sea level rise anywhere.”

34. Dr Johannes Oerlemans: “The IPCC has become too political. Many scientists have not been able to resist the siren call of fame, research funding and meetings in exotic places that awaits them if they are willing to compromise scientific principles and integrity in support of the man-made global-warming doctrine.”

35. Dr Roger Pielke: “All of my comments were ignored without even a rebuttal. At that point, I concluded that the IPCC Reports were actually intended to be advocacy documents designed to produce particular policy actions, but not a true and honest assessment of the understanding of the climate system.”

36. Dr Paul Reiter: “As far as the science being ‘settled,’ I think that is an obscenity. The fact is the science is being distorted by people who are not scientists.”

37. Dr Murray Salby: “I have an involuntary gag reflex whenever someone says the science is settled. Anyone who thinks the science is settled on this topic is in fantasia.”

38. Dr Tom Segalstad: “The IPCC global warming model is not supported by the scientific data.”

.39. Dr Fred Singer: “Isn’t it remarkable that the Policymakers Summary of the IPCC report avoids mentioning the satellite data altogether, or even the existence of satellites — probably because the data show a slight cooling over the last 18 years, in direct contradiction of the calculations from climate models?”

40. Dr Hajo Smit: “There is clear cut solar-climate coupling and a very strong natural variability of climate on all historical time scales. Currently I hardly believe anymore that there is any relevant relationship between human CO2 emissions and climate change.”

41. Dr Richard Tol: “The IPCC attracted more people with political rather than academic motives. In AR4, green activists held key positions in the IPCC and they succeeded in excluding or neutralising opposite voices.”

42. Dr Tom Tripp: “There is so much of a natural variability in weather it makes it difficult to come to a scientifically valid conclusion that global warming is man made.”

.43. Dr Gerd-Rainer Weber: “Most of the extremist views about climate change have little or no scientific basis.”

44. Dr David Wojick: “The public is not well served by this constant drumbeat of alarms fed by computer models manipulated by advocates.”

45. Dr Miklos Zagoni: “I am positively convinced that the anthropogenic global warming theory is wrong.”

 46. Dr Eduardo Zorita: “Editors, reviewers and authors of alternative studies, analysis, interpretations, even based on the same data we have at our disposal, have been bullied and subtly blackmailed.”

Popular Technology.net: 1350+ Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skeptic Arguments Against ACC/AGW Alarm

1350+ Peer-Reviewed Papers Support Skeptic Arguments



As the Great Backdown continues, more and more scholarly papers support the skeptical view of the existence of catastrophic human caused global warming. Here Popular Technology finds over 1350 such papers. 

Reason and Accountability 

 

Or just the good part...

New Dimensions of U.S. Foreign Policy Toward Russia | Stratfor

By George Friedman

The struggle for some of the most strategic territory in the
world took an interesting twist this week. Last week we discussed what
appeared to be a significant shift in German national strategy in which
Berlin seemed to declare a new doctrine of increased assertiveness in
the world -- a shift that followed intense German interest in Ukraine.
This week, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, in a
now-famous cell phone conversation, declared her strong contempt for the
European Union and its weakness and counseled the U.S. ambassador to
Ukraine to proceed quickly and without the Europeans to piece together a
specific opposition coalition before the Russians saw what was
happening and took action.

This is a new twist not because it makes clear that the United States is not the only country intercepting phone calls, but because it puts U.S. policy in Ukraine in a new light and forces us to reconsider U.S. strategy toward Russia and Germany. Nuland's cell phone conversation is hardly definitive, but it is an additional indicator of American strategic thinking.

Recent U.S. Foreign Policy Shifts

U.S. foreign policy has evolved during the past few years.
Previously, the United States was focused heavily on the Islamic world
and, more important, tended to regard the use of force as an early
option in the execution of U.S. policy rather than as a last resort.
This was true not only in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also in Africa and
elsewhere. The strategy was successful when its goal was to destroy an
enemy military force. It proved far more difficult to use in occupying
countries and shaping their internal and foreign policies. Military
force has intrinsic limits.

The alternative has been a shift to a balance-of-power strategy in which the United States
relies on the natural schisms that exist in every region to block the
emergence of regional hegemons and contain unrest and groups that could
threaten U.S. interests. The best example of the old policy is Libya,
where the United States directly intervened with air power and special
operations forces on the ground to unseat Moammar Gadhafi. Western
efforts to replace him with a regime favorable to the United States and
its allies have not succeeded. The new strategy can be seen in Syria,
where rather than directly intervening the United States has stood back
and allowed the warring factions to expend their energy on each other,
preventing either side from diverting resources to activities that might
challenge U.S. interests.

Behind this is a schism in U.S. foreign policy that has more to do
with motivation than actual action. On one side, there are those who
consciously support the Syria model for the United States as not
necessarily the best moral option but the only practical option there
is. On the other, there are those who argue on behalf of moral
interventions, as we saw in Libya, and removing tyrants as an end in
itself. Given the outcome in Libya, this faction is on the defensive,
as it must explain how an intervention will actually improve the moral
situation. Given that this faction also tended to oppose Iraq, it must
show how an intervention will not degenerate into Iraqi-type warfare.
That is hard to do, so for all the rhetoric, the United States is by
default falling into a balance-of-power model.

The Geopolitical Battle in Ukraine

Russia
emerged as a problem for the United States after the Orange Revolution
in 2004, when the United States, supporting anti-Russian factions in Ukraine,
succeeded in crafting a relatively pro-Western, anti-Russian
government. The Russians read this as U.S. intelligence operations
designed to create an anti-Russian Ukraine that, as we have
written, would directly challenge Russian strategic and economic
interests. Moreover, Moscow saw the Orange Revolution (along with the
Rose Revolution) as a dress rehearsal for something that could occur in
Russia next. The Russian response
was to use its own covert capabilities, in conjunction with economic
pressure from natural gas cutoffs, to undermine Ukraine's government and
to use its war with Georgia as a striking reminder of the resurrection
of Russian military capabilities. These moves, plus disappointment with
Western aid, allowed a more pro-Russian government to emerge in Kiev,
reducing the Russians' fears and increasing their confidence. In time,
Moscow became more effective and assertive in playing its cards right in
the Middle East -- giving rise to the current situations in Syria and
Iran and elsewhere.

Washington had two options. One was to allow the balance of power to
assert itself, in this case relying on the Europeans to contain the
Russians. The other was to continue to follow the balance of power
model but at a notch higher than pure passivity. As Nuland's call shows,
U.S. confidence in Europe's will for and interest in blocking the
Russians was low; hence a purely passive model would not work. The next
step was the lowest possible level of involvement to contain the
Russians and counter their moves in the Middle East. This meant a very
limited and not too covert support for anti-Russian, pro-European
demonstrators -- the re-creation of a pro-Western, anti-Russian
government in Ukraine. To a considerable degree, the U.S. talks with
Iran also allow Washington to deny the Russians an Iranian
card, although the Syrian theater still allows the Kremlin some room to
maneuver.

The United States is not prepared to intervene in the former Soviet
Union. Russia is not a global power, and its military has many
weaknesses, but it is by far the strongest in the region and is able to
project power in the former Soviet periphery, as the war with Georgia
showed. At the moment, the U.S. military also has many weaknesses.
Having fought for more than a decade in the core of the Islamic world,
the U.S. military is highly focused on a way of war not relevant to the
former Soviet Union, its alliance structure around the former Soviet
Union is frayed and not supportive of war, and the inevitable post-war
cutbacks that traditionally follow any war the United States fights are
cutting into capabilities. A direct intervention, even were it
contemplated (which it is not), is not an option. The only correlation
of forces that matters is what exists at a given point in time in a
given place. In that sense, the closer U.S. forces get to the Russian
homeland, the greater the advantage the Russians have.

Instead, the United States did the same thing that it did prior to
the Orange Revolution: back the type of intervention that both the human
rights advocates and the balance-of-power advocates could
support. Giving financial and psychological support to the demonstrators
protesting Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich's decision to reject a
closer relationship with Europe, and later protesting the government's
attempt to suppress the demonstrations, preserved the possibility of
regime change in Ukraine, with minimal exposure and risk to the United
States.

Dissatisfaction with the German Approach

As we said last week, it appeared that it was the Germans
who were particularly pressing the issue, and that they were the ones
virtually controlling one of the leaders of the protests, Vitali
Klitschko. The United States appeared to be taking a back seat to
Germany. Indeed, Berlin's statements indicating that it is prepared to
take a more assertive role in the world appeared to be a historic shift
in German foreign policy.

The statements were even more notable since, over the years, Germany
appeared to have been moving closer to Russia on economic and strategic
issues. Neither country was comfortable with U.S. aggressiveness in the
Middle East and Southwest Asia. Both countries shared the need to create
new economic relationships in the face of the European economic
crisis and the need to contain the United States. Hence, the apparent
German shift was startling.

Although Germany's move should not be dismissed, its meaning was not
as clear as it seemed. In her cell phone call, Nuland is clearly
dismissing the Germans, Klitschko and all their efforts in Ukraine. This
could mean that the strategy was too feeble for American tastes (Berlin
cannot, after all, risk too big a confrontation with Moscow). Or it
could mean that when the Germans said they were planning to be more
assertive, their new boldness was meant to head off U.S.
efforts. Looking at this week's events, it is not clear what the Germans
meant.

What is clear is that the United States was not satisfied with
Germany and the European Union. Logically, this meant that the United
States intended to be more aggressive than the Germans in supporting
opponents of the regime. This is a touchy issue for human rights
advocates, or should be. Yanukovich is the elected president of
Ukraine, winner of an election that is generally agreed to have been
honest (even though his constitutional amendments and subsequent
parliamentary elections may not have been). He was acting within his
authority in rejecting the deal with the European Union. If
demonstrators can unseat an elected president because they disagree with
his actions, they have set a precedent that undermines
constitutionalism. Even if he was rough in suppressing the
demonstrators, it does not nullify his election.

From a balance of power strategy, however, it makes great sense. A
pro-Western, even ambiguous, Ukraine poses a profound strategic problem
for Russia. It would be as if Texas became pro-Russian, and the
Mississippi River system, oil production, the Midwest and the
Southwest became vulnerable. The Russian ability to engage in Iran or
Syria suddenly contracts. Moscow's focus must be on Ukraine.

Using the demonstrations to create a massive problem for Russia does
two things. It creates a real strategic challenge for the Russians and
forces them on the defensive. Second, it reminds Russia that Washington
has capabilities and options that make challenging the United States
difficult. And it can be framed in a way that human rights advocates
will applaud in spite of the constitutional issues, enemies of the
Iranian talks will appreciate and Central Europeans from Poland to
Romania will see as a sign of U.S. commitment to the region. The United
States will re-emerge as an alternative to Germany and Russia. It is a
brilliant stroke.

Its one weakness, if we can call it that, is that it is hard to see
how it can work. Russia has significant economic leverage in Ukraine, it
is not clear that pro-Western demonstrators are in the majority, and
Russian covert capabilities in Ukraine outstrip American capabilities.
The Federal Security Service and Foreign Intelligence Service have been
collecting files on Ukrainians for a long time. We would expect
that after the Olympics in Sochi, the Russians could play their trump
cards.

On the other hand, even if the play fails, the United States will
have demonstrated that it is back in the game and that the Russians
should look around their periphery and wonder where the United States
will act next. Putting someone in a defensive crouch does not require
that the first punch work. It is enough for the opponent to
understand that the next punch will come when he is least expecting it.
The mere willingness of the United States to engage will change the
expectations of Central Europe, cause tensions between the Central
Europeans and the Germans and create an opening for the United States.

The Pressure on Russia

Of course, the question is whether and where the Russians will answer
the Americans, or even if they will consider the U.S.
actions significant at all. In a sense, Syria was Moscow's move and this
is the countermove. The Russians can choose to call the game. They have
many reasons to. Their economy is under pressure. The Germans may not
rally to the United States, but they will not break from it. And if the
United States ups the ante in Central Europe, Russian inroads there will
dissolve.

If the Russians are now an American problem, which they are, and if
the United States is not going to revert to a direct intervention mode,
which it cannot, then this strategy makes sense. At the very least it
gives the Russians a problem and a sense of insecurity that can curb
their actions elsewhere. At best it could create a regime that might not
counterbalance Russia but could make pipelines and ports vulnerable --
especially with U.S. help.

The public interception of Nuland's phone call was not all that
embarrassing. It showed the world that the United States, not Germany,
is leading the way in Ukraine. And it showed the Russians that the
Americans care so little, they will express it on an open cell phone
line. Nuland's obscene dismissal of the European Union and treatment of
Russia as a problem to deal with confirms a U.S. policy: The United
States is not going to war, but passivity is over.

New Dimensions of U.S. Foreign Policy Toward Russia is republished with permission of Stratfor.

A More Assertive German Foreign Policy | Stratfor

By George Friedman and Marc Lanthemann

The Ukrainian crisis is important in itself, but the behavior it has elicited from Germany is perhaps more important. Berlin directly challenged Ukraine's elected president for refusing to tighten relations with the European Union and for mistreating Ukrainians who protested his decision. In challenging President Viktor Yanukovich, Berlin also challenged Russia, a reflection of Germany's recent brazen foreign policy.

Since the end of World War II, Germany has pursued a relatively tame
foreign policy. But over the past week, Berlin appeared to have
acknowledged the need for a fairly dramatic change. German leaders,
including the chancellor, the president, the foreign minister and the
defense minister, have called for a new framework that contravenes the
restraint Germany has practiced for so long. They want Germany to assume
a greater international role by becoming more involved outside its
borders politically and militarily.

For Berlin, the announcement of this high-level strategic shift comes
amid a maelstrom of geopolitical currents. As the de facto leader of
the European Union, Germany has to contend with and correct the slow failure of the European project. It has to adjust to the U.S. policy of global disengagement,
and it must manage a complex, necessary and dangerous relationship with
Russia. A meek foreign policy is not well suited to confront the
situation in which Germany now finds itself. If Germany doesn't act,
then who will? And if someone else does, will it be in Germany's
interest? The latter is perhaps the more intriguing question.

Setting Boundaries

Such a reconfiguration shows that Germany has its own national
interests that may differ from those of its alliance partners. For most
countries, this would seem self-evident. But for Germany, it is a
radical position, given its experience in World War II. It has refrained
from asserting a strong foreign policy and from promoting its national
interest lest it revive fears of German aggression and German
nationalism. The Germans may have decided that this position is no
longer tenable -- and that promoting their national interests does not
carry the risk it once did.

The timing of the announcement, as Ukraine's strategic position
between Russia and Europe continues to make headlines, was not
coincidental. While the timing benefited Germany, it would be a mistake
to ascribe too much importance to Ukraine itself, particularly from the
German perspective. That is not to say Ukraine should be discounted
entirely. As a borderland between the European Peninsula and Russia, its
future potentially matters to Germany -- if not now then perhaps in the
future, when unexpected regional realities might show themselves.

Ukraine is an indispensable borderland for Russia, but it has little
value for any modern power that has no designs against Russia. It is one
of the gateways into the heart of Russia. A hostile power occupying
Ukraine would threaten Russian national security. But the reverse is not
true: Ukraine is not a primary route from Russia into Europe (World War
II is a notable exception) because the Carpathian Mountains discourage
invasion. So unless the Germans are planning a new war with Russia --
and they aren't -- Ukraine matters little to Europe or the Germans.

The same is true in the economic realm. Ukraine is important to
Russia, particularly for transporting energy to Europe. But outside of
energy transport, Ukraine is not that important to Europe. Indeed, for
all that has been said about Ukraine's relationship to the European
Union, it has never been clear why the bloc has made it such a
contentious issue. The European Union is tottering under the weight of
Southern Europe's enormously high unemployment rate, Eastern Europe's
uncertainty about the value of being part of Europe's banking system and
currency union, and a growing policy rift between France and Germany.
The chances that the Europeans would add Ukraine to an organization that
already boasts Greece, Cyprus and other crippled economies are so slim
that considerations to the contrary would be irrational. The fact that
Ukraine is not getting into the bloc makes German policy even harder to
fathom.

Of course, some European countries have more of an interest in
Ukraine than others, particularly those formerly in the Soviet sphere of
influence. For Poland and the Baltic states, Russia remains the major
geopolitical foe in a way that Western Europe cannot fully comprehend.
These relatively small and new members cannot compel the EU heavyweights
to commit to a plan of action that would go too far in provoking
Russia, but they can still push their peers to take a more measured
action.

During the Orange Revolution, U.S.-led Western powers openly funded
opposition groups in the former Soviet states, threatening Russia's
strategic interests to the point that it had to eventually invade Georgia
to show the consequences of Western meddling. Over the past month,
Germany has been behaving similarly, albeit to a smaller degree: opening
partisan ties and giving relatively low-cost financial and rhetorical
support to opposition groups that can irritate Russia without actually
causing an immediate break with Moscow.

For the past decade, Germany could not afford to alienate Russia,
which Berlin thought could be the answers to some of Germany's problems.
It could reliably supply relatively cheap energy, it was a potential
source of low-cost labor, and it was a potential destination market for
German exporters looking for alternatives to stagnating EU markets.

Diplomatically, Moscow could have become a close ally and strategic
partner as erstwhile allies appeared to be growing increasingly hostile
to Germany. Relations with the United States were tense ever since
Berlin refused to participate in the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, and
Chancellor Angela Merkel's support for EU-wide austerity measures
strained Germany's ties with Southern Europe and France.

But the reality was otherwise. There is a fit between Germany and
Russia, but it is at best an imperfect one. Russia never industrialized
or modernized as Germany and many others had hoped as it reaped the
profits of high commodity prices. Under President Vladimir Putin, Moscow
became increasingly autocratic and went on the political and economic
offensive in Central and Eastern Europe.

This conflicts with Germany's strategic goals. Berlin's core
imperative is to preserve its economic power, which is highly dependent
on exports. The European economic crisis has caused consumption to
falter in the European Union, leading Berlin to search for export
markets further afield. While it has had some success in China and the
United States for certain industries, it has not been able to shed its
overwhelming dependence on European markets as a general destination for
its goods. Thus, Germany's only possible course of action is preserving
and eventually reinvigorating the free trade zone in Europe.

Russia's resurgence in Central Europe has concerned EU members in
that region. On the surface, the Germans were prepared to live with that
resurgence even though it appeared to threaten to unravel the bloc.
Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia are indispensable components of
the German industrial supply chain and a source of relatively cheap
skilled labor. That they should remain in the German sphere of influence
is a non-negotiable position for Berlin.

These issues are not new, but until now Germany had been constrained
in how it could establish firm boundaries with Moscow. Berlin believed
its dependence on Russian energy was a vulnerability that Russia could
exploit if it chose to. In addition, it was concerned about Russia's
ability to wrest Central Europe from EU control. In a worst-case
scenario, Germany would end up with a fragmented Europe, a distant
United States and a hostile Russia.

The fact that Germany actively supported opposition groups in
Ukraine, particularly in the absence of a pressing strategic imperative
to do so, is a sign that something has changed in Berlin's calculus
toward Russia. It seems as though the German government has determined
that Russia is facing major challenges at home; that its position in
Europe is weaker than it appears; that the risk of energy cutoffs are
minimal; and that there are no long-term economic benefits to an
economic relationship with Russia that goes beyond energy trade. That
last point cannot be overstated. Russia is poised to remain the most
important supplier of energy to Europe, and while the dependency runs
both ways -- Europe is Russia's largest customer -- Germany will make
sure the flow of energy continues unimpeded.

With the United States increasingly depending on a balance of power
approach to its foreign policy, relying more heavily on regional actors
to manage threats, the long-term U.S. security guarantees that had been
the hallmark of European defense since 1945 can no longer be counted on
in Berlin. As NATO continues to fray and the challenges posed by an
increasingly volatile Russia loom, Germany seems to be taking the first
step back into establishing a new national and regional security
framework.

A New Element

Germany's talk of a new, more assertive foreign policy that relies
more heavily on its military is, however, not solely linked to concerns
over Russia or the United States. Germany has accepted that its only
option is to rally Europe but as the past six years have shown, it has
had limited success on the economic front. The European Union is an
economic entity, but economics has turned from being the binding element
to being a centrifugal force. Either something new must be introduced
into the European experiment, or it might come undone.

Berlin believes that holding the European Union together requires
adding another dimension that it heretofore has withheld in its dealing
with the bloc: military-political relations. Standing up to a weakening
Russia will appeal to Central European nations, and taking a more active
role overseas would endear Berlin to Paris. Germany's allusions that it
would expand its international military operations, particularly in
Africa, is a clear nod to France, which has consistently expressed its
desire for a deeper military and political partnership with Germany.

Notably, the drive to bring Germany closer to France in the short
term could create tensions between them in the long term. Last week's
summit between British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President
Francois Hollande was a reminder that France and the United Kingdom may
have extremely different views regarding the European Union but still
see each other as a military partner and, more important, as a
counterweight to Germany.

Of course, Germany is in no position to take military action. It is
in a position to posit the possibility in some vague way, thereby
generating political forces that can temporarily hold things together.
Berlin needs to buy time, particularly in Central Europe, where Hungary
has embarked on an independent course and is being watched carefully by
others. With the United States unwilling to become involved, Germany
either becomes the counterweight or lives with the consequences.

At first, Germany's actions seemed confusing and uncharacteristic.
But they become more sensible when you consider that that Berlin is
looking for other tools to hold the European Union together as it
re-evaluates Russia. So far, Germany's announcement has been met
positively, mainly outside Germany, but the tension that a stronger and
more assertive Berlin exerts on the European continent and the global
stage are sure to come to the fore again. For now, however, Merkel has
no choice.

A More Assertive German Foreign Policy is republished with permission of Stratfor.