A growing number of American cities are banning new fast-food drive-thru windows, NPR reported last week.
While some activists tout the bans as a cure-all for much of what ails society, there’s a lack of evidence to support these bans. What’s more, research and anecdotal evidence suggest the bans are actually counterproductive.
Cities in at least four states have adopted drive-thru bans, Today reports. In Minneapolis, which banned new fast-food drive-thru windows in August, Today says proponents claim “curbing access to even faster fast food may help aid in reversing urban obesity rates, while also helping to improve road traffic accidents.” While I have exactly no idea what an “improve[d]” traffic accident looks like, the first clause in the previous sentence gets at the heart of the matter: fast-food critics are using fake nutritional and environmental arguments to make it more difficult for consumers to eat fast-food.
Supporters of drive-thru bans, though, point to a recent study by Canadian researchers. That study, which looked at fast-food drive-thru bans in Canada, concluded such “bans may play a role in promoting healthier food environments.“
But the devil is in the details. The most common purposes of the respective bans identified by the Canadian researchers were aesthetic in nature: improving walkability; reducing traffic; protecting community aesthetics; and “urban design.” These policy goals were followed closely by reducing air and noise pollution. Unlike the Minneapolis ban—and others here in the United States—none of the 27 Canadian bans included in the study was intended to combat obesity, improve nutrition, or decrease the density of fast-food restaurants.
Critics of these unpopular policies are quick to point out why they don’t work. Some argue the bans discriminate against people who are disabled, elderly, or traveling with children, for example. Others note that people will still drive to fast-food restaurants, then sit in their running cars while a family member or friend runs inside to pick up food. Or a driver might drop off a person to pick up a meal and circle the restaurant in their car while that person is in line. In either case, the result is likely more pollution than might have occurred had the driver simply joined the drive-thru queue.
Research has also poked giant holes in drive-thru bans. As I’ve noted previously—and The Atlantic, Governing, and others have, too—a 2008 Los Angeles ban that targeted fast-food restaurants in South Los Angeles, where roughly nine of every 10 residents is Latino or black—was a disaster. Obesity ramped up after the ban, which critics rightly dubbed condescending, racist, and counterproductive. Slate‘s Will Saletan called the South Los Angeles fast-food ban “food apartheid.”
Last week’s NPR report cites RAND’s Roland Sturm, whose research savaged the South Los Angeles ban. He calls drive-thru bans “ridiculous.”
“We need to be careful not to overstate what these bans can do,” Sturm told NPR. “If we want to lower obesity and want people to be healthier, [drive-through bans] are not going to achieve that.”
What’s more, research published in 2015 suggests people may consume more calories when they dine in restaurants than they do when they order takeout.
Several years ago, I opined that socially engineering food choices is a lousy policy that doesn’t work. That’s as true today as it was then—even if policymakers continue to ignore the facts. Fast-food drive-thru bans are really just another lame excuse to limit choice while claiming falsely to be combating obesity or protecting the environment.
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Renault, Volvo Slash Guidance, Unleashing Shockwaves Across Auto Industry
It has become a fool’s errand to deny that the global automobile industry is in recession (even if there is still some debate as to the causes). We have documented, at length, falling sales around the globe – led by the world’s largest market in China – over the last two years, and recessionary trends in places like North America and Europe show no signs of letting up.
And today, Renault and Volvo were the two most recent examples of just how dire the situation has become… and will be.
Renault shares plunged as much as 12% in Paris overnight after the company slashed its full year revenue and profit forecast, while pre-announcing Q3 revenue: “Due to an economic environment less favorable than expected and in a regulatory context requiring ever-increasing costs, Groupe Renault revises its guidance for FY2019,” the company’s release said.
The auto manufacturer guided for revenues to fall between -3% and -4%, versus previous guidance of near flat. It also guided for a contraction in its operating margin to about 5% from its previous guidance of 6%.
Automotive operating free cash flow “should be positive in H2 while not guaranteed for the full year”, the company said, rescinding its previous guidance of positive full year automotive operating free cash flow. The company plans on reporting full earnings on October 25.
Swiss truckmaker Volvo also reported a sharp decline in its Q3 orders and forecasted an upcoming slump in demand for next year, despite beating analyst estimates for the quarter, according to Reuters.
Volvo said that orders for its trucks, which include brands like Mack and Renault, fell 45% from last year. Analysts had forecast a drop of slightly more than 30%.
The company’s CEO, Martin Lundstedt, said that Volvo is well prepared for an “expected correction” in its main markets. Volvo had been reducing production volumes over the past quarter and said it’s going to continue making “further adjustments” in coming quarters in light of declining orders.
BI Intelligence analyst Johnson Imode stated:
“Volvo looks set for a sharp deterioration in 2020 profitability, in our view, following its weakest truck order intake since the 2009 recession in 3Q, predicting European and U.S. markets will fall by 15-30% next year. Production levels are being adjusted, but inherent operating leverage — with profit doubling in the 2016-19 cycle — demonstrates the challenge faced.”
Brokerage house Pareto piled on in a note out Friday: “Truck order intake was on the weak side, 17% below our estimate and 20% below consensus.”
Volvo’s outlook was anything but optimistic: it said it expects the market for heavy trucks to shrink by about 14% in Europe and 29% in North America next year due to “economic uncertainty”. Analysts had expected estimates of a decline of 11% for Europe and 25% for North America.
Heavy truck demand continues to falter as a result of the global economy weakening. As Bloomberg notes, last week, the IMF “made a fifth-straight reduction to its 2019 global economic forecast, citing trade tensions for its weakest growth projection since 2009.”
But other analysts aren’t as pessimistic. Danske Bank credit analysts including Natasja Cordes said: “Volvo has already begun to reduce production volumes and, in our view, is much better equipped heading into this downturn than it was in the past.”
“For 2020, we expect markets to come down to more normal replacement levels in both Europe and North America, which we have prepared ourselves for,” Volvo CEO Lundstedt said.
A growing number of American cities are banning new fast-food drive-thru windows, NPR reported last week.
While some activists tout the bans as a cure-all for much of what ails society, there’s a lack of evidence to support these bans. What’s more, research and anecdotal evidence suggest the bans are actually counterproductive.
Cities in at least four states have adopted drive-thru bans, Today reports. In Minneapolis, which banned new fast-food drive-thru windows in August, Today says proponents claim “curbing access to even faster fast food may help aid in reversing urban obesity rates, while also helping to improve road traffic accidents.” While I have exactly no idea what an “improve[d]” traffic accident looks like, the first clause in the previous sentence gets at the heart of the matter: fast-food critics are using fake nutritional and environmental arguments to make it more difficult for consumers to eat fast-food.
Supporters of drive-thru bans, though, point to a recent study by Canadian researchers. That study, which looked at fast-food drive-thru bans in Canada, concluded such “bans may play a role in promoting healthier food environments.“
But the devil is in the details. The most common purposes of the respective bans identified by the Canadian researchers were aesthetic in nature: improving walkability; reducing traffic; protecting community aesthetics; and “urban design.” These policy goals were followed closely by reducing air and noise pollution. Unlike the Minneapolis ban—and others here in the United States—none of the 27 Canadian bans included in the study was intended to combat obesity, improve nutrition, or decrease the density of fast-food restaurants.
Critics of these unpopular policies are quick to point out why they don’t work. Some argue the bans discriminate against people who are disabled, elderly, or traveling with children, for example. Others note that people will still drive to fast-food restaurants, then sit in their running cars while a family member or friend runs inside to pick up food. Or a driver might drop off a person to pick up a meal and circle the restaurant in their car while that person is in line. In either case, the result is likely more pollution than might have occurred had the driver simply joined the drive-thru queue.
Research has also poked giant holes in drive-thru bans. As I’ve noted previously—and The Atlantic, Governing, and others have, too—a 2008 Los Angeles ban that targeted fast-food restaurants in South Los Angeles, where roughly nine of every 10 residents is Latino or black—was a disaster. Obesity ramped up after the ban, which critics rightly dubbed condescending, racist, and counterproductive. Slate‘s Will Saletan called the South Los Angeles fast-food ban “food apartheid.”
Last week’s NPR report cites RAND’s Roland Sturm, whose research savaged the South Los Angeles ban. He calls drive-thru bans “ridiculous.”
“We need to be careful not to overstate what these bans can do,” Sturm told NPR. “If we want to lower obesity and want people to be healthier, [drive-through bans] are not going to achieve that.”
What’s more, research published in 2015 suggests people may consume more calories when they dine in restaurants than they do when they order takeout.
Several years ago, I opined that socially engineering food choices is a lousy policy that doesn’t work. That’s as true today as it was then—even if policymakers continue to ignore the facts. Fast-food drive-thru bans are really just another lame excuse to limit choice while claiming falsely to be combating obesity or protecting the environment.
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Beijing’s biggest support package ever for President Erdogan arrives at a critical time…
Despite the US threat to “obliterate and destroy” Turkey’s economy, the Turkish lira and Turkish interest rates barely have budged in the past week (Turkish stocks, especially banks, are down sharply, in part due to the US criminal charges against Halkbank for aiding Iran sanctions violations). That is remarkable given the fragility of Turkey’s currency earlier in 2019. Between February and May, the Turkish lira fell from 5.2 to the US dollar to 6.2 in response to US sanctions, before recovering to 5.88 to the dollar today. The Turkish central bank leaned on Turkish banks to refrain from offering liquidity to short-sellers, but Turkish money markets remained orderly.
What changed is China. Turkish President Erdogan’s insolence in the face of American threats brings to mind B’rer Rabbit’s imprecation to B’rer Fox: “Please don’t throw me in the briar patch.” The relevant foliage in this case is bamboo.
“Please don’t throw me in the briar patch.”
Bloomberg News reported Aug. 9, “China’s central bank transferred $1 billion worth of funds to Turkey in June, Beijing’s biggest support package ever for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan delivered at a critical time in an election month. The inflow marks the first time Turkey received such a substantial amount under the lira-yuan swap agreement with Beijing that dates back to 2012, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter who asked not to be named because the information isn’t public.”
China’s direct investment in Turkey also has surged this year, as Nikkei reported Aug. 22:
China is coming to Turkey’s aid during its economic crisis with $3.6 billion in funding for infrastructure projects, leveraging Ankara’s conflict with Washington to expand its Belt and Road Initiative in the key country that links Asia with Europe.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Aug. 11 that his country was preparing to trade through national currencies with partners like China, bypassing the US dollar. The US placed additional tariffs on Turkey the next day as a feud simmered over the imprisonment of a US pastor accused of being involved in the 2016 coup attempt against the Turkish leader.
The lira then hit about 7 per dollar, a drop of more than 40% since the beginning of the year. Spurned by one of the world’s economic giants, Erdogan naturally turned to another, China, for much-needed financial backup.
American policymakers should have their eyes checked for cataracts; they appear unable to keep the whole of the world map in view. This was eminently predictable. In August 2018 I warned in Asia Times that “China will buy Turkey on the cheap.”
China has had its issues with Turkey’s volatile and ambitious leader, to be sure. Turkey in the past styled itself the protector of China’s Uyghur minority, some 15 million Muslims who speak a dialect of Turkish and live mainly in China’s Xinjiang Province. China reportedly has incarcerated between 1 and 2 million Uyghurs in “re-education camps” where they are forced to learn Chinese culture to the detriment of their Islamic identity. Erdogan in the past had accused China of “genocide” against the Uyghurs. After the Chinese bailout, however, Erdogan declared that the Uyghurs are “living happily” in China.
Turkey has changed from Ataturk to Rent-A-Turk. China likes to keep its friends close and its enemies closer. China built the Great Wall to repel Turkic invasions, among others, and warred with nomadic peoples on its borders for centuries. Now Beijing believes that its $2 trillion Belt and Road Initiative will assimilate the Turkic peoples of Central Asia into its sphere of economic influence. The Turkic countries seem eager to sign up.
The Azerbaijan news site Trend reported Oct. 15:
The Cooperation Council of Turkic Speaking States (CCTS-Turkic Council) will strengthen in the coming period and will become an important center of power in the world, Professor Naciye Selin Senocak, the head of the cultural diplomacy department at the Institute for European Studies in Brussels and head of the center for Diplomatic and Strategic Studies (CEDS) in Paris, told Trend.
Senocak said that the 7th CCTS Summit in Baku is a significant event and undoubtedly will go down in history. The Turkish professor noted that the Turkic World covers a vast territory, from the Adriatic Sea to China, where about 300 million Turks live. Senocak said that the decision made by Uzbekistan to join the CCTS, as well as opening a representative office of the Council in the center of Europe-Hungary, indicate the importance and the growing role of this structure.
“In the new world order, where the control axis is shifting to Asia, CCTS will play an important role,” the Turkish professor noted. The representative of the Institute for European Studies added that CCTS will continue to develop and strengthen economically, politically and socially with the help of the One Belt One Road initiative, which will include other Eurasian countries.
Erdogan’s long-term problem is that there aren’t enough Turks in Turkey. Turkey’s Kurdish citizens continue to have three or four children while ethnic Turks have fewer than two. By the early 2040s, most of Turkey’s young people will come from Kurdish-speaking homes. The Kurdish-majority Southeast threatens to break away.
In 2016, I reviewed Turkey’s 2015 census data in Asia Times. It shows that the demographic scissors between Kurds and Turks continue to widen. Despite Erdogan’s exhortations on behalf of Turkish fertility, the baby bust in Turkish-majority provinces continues while Kurds sustain one of the world’s highest birth rates. Even worse, the marriage rate outside of the Kurdish Southeast of the country has collapsed, portending even lower fertility in the future.
According to Turkstat, the official statistics agencies, the Turkish provinces with the lowest fertility rates all cluster in the north and northwest of the country, where women on average have only 1.5 children. The southeastern provinces show fertility rates ranging between 3.2 and 4.2 children per female.
Even more alarming are Turkey’s marriage statistics as reported by Turkstat. Between 2001 and 2015, the number of marriages in Istanbul, the country’s largest city, fell by more than 30%, and by more than 40% in the capital Ankara. Most of the northern and northwestern provinces report a decline of more than half in the number of marriages. Not only are Turkish women refusing to have children; they are refusing to get married. The plunge in the marriage rate among ethnic Turks makes a further sharp decline in fertility inevitable.
Erdogan fears the Kurdish role in Turkey’s Northeast as a magnet for Turkey’s own restive Kurds, and wants to pre-empt the expansion of Turkish self-rule from its base in neighboring Iraq. That is the object of his ethnic cleansing campaign against Syria’s Kurds. In the long run, Erdogan hopes to lead a coalition of Turkic countries within the greater Chinese sphere of influence.
That doesn’t mean that Erdogan is a strong horse. He’s a draught horse, hitched to a Chinese wagon.
Last month, I asked why Jesus is common in some Spanish-speaking countries (as well as among Hispanics in the U.S.), but apparently very rare in other Christian countries, whether Catholic or otherwise.
Fortunately, Prof. Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde (Penn, Economics) offered an explanation:
“Jesús” became a relatively common name in Spain in the late [19th century], at the time when there was a strong revival of militant Catholicism as a reaction to secularization forces from the left-wing. It was linked with a steep increase in the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Christ and the Christ the King movement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_Heart
From Spain, as far as my understanding goes, the strong devotion to the Sacred Heart and Christ the King movement jumped to Mexico ….
The naming use never moved out of Spain (and to a small degree Portugal) to other Catholic European countries. My hypothesis (100% personal) is that in Spain and Mexico we usually say “Jesucristo” to refer to Christ, not “Jesús” (K12 + Catholic College gives me 20 years of education in Catholic institutions, and I would say 95% of times it was “Jesucristo”). Thus, “Jesús” sounds less odd as a first name.
Also, let me point out that a very common name for girls in Spain is “María Jesús” which is even odder for an English-speaker.
When I was a kid in Spain, in a class of 40 students or so, there would be 2 or 3 “Jesuses.” Today, I would say 1 at most, as the country has become more secular.
“Jesus” was not used in Spain during the Middle Ages at all for boys (thus, the argument that this has something to do with the Muslim presence in Spain and a reaction against the “Mohameds” is 100% false). [EV adds: This source supports the view that Jesus was not common in 16th-century Spain.]
To the best of my understanding, Jesuits started in the 16th century to promote adding “de Jesus” to names to make a point against Protestants in Northern Europe (i.e., you were “Luis de Jesus” or “Isabel de Jesus”) and to honor the Holy Family….
[The article at] https://ojsng.colmex.mx/index.php/nrfh/article/download/437/437 about first names in Mexico … states (page 22, footnote) that, in Mexico, the first documented use of “Jesus” as the main name is from 1852…. [I]n novels and other sources of literature in Spanish before around 1850, one never ever encounters a character named “Jesus.”
Armed with this, I searched through the Spanish baptismal records database on FamilySearch.org, and found Jesus as the first name appearing 5 times in 1800-1820 and 576 times in 1880-1900. Nor did it stem from an increase in database coverage over time; the database appears to 1.1 million total entries in 1800-1820 and 650,000 in 1880-1900. Searches through the Mexico records reveal the same pattern.
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Last month, I asked why Jesus is common in some Spanish-speaking countries (as well as among Hispanics in the U.S.), but apparently very rare in other Christian countries, whether Catholic or otherwise.
Fortunately, Prof. Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde (Penn, Economics) offered an explanation:
“Jesús” became a relatively common name in Spain in the late [19th century], at the time when there was a strong revival of militant Catholicism as a reaction to secularization forces from the left-wing. It was linked with a steep increase in the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Christ and the Christ the King movement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_Heart
From Spain, as far as my understanding goes, the strong devotion to the Sacred Heart and Christ the King movement jumped to Mexico ….
The naming use never moved out of Spain (and to a small degree Portugal) to other Catholic European countries. My hypothesis (100% personal) is that in Spain and Mexico we usually say “Jesucristo” to refer to Christ, not “Jesús” (K12 + Catholic College gives me 20 years of education in Catholic institutions, and I would say 95% of times it was “Jesucristo”). Thus, “Jesús” sounds less odd as a first name.
Also, let me point out that a very common name for girls in Spain is “María Jesús” which is even odder for an English-speaker.
When I was a kid in Spain, in a class of 40 students or so, there would be 2 or 3 “Jesuses.” Today, I would say 1 at most, as the country has become more secular.
“Jesus” was not used in Spain during the Middle Ages at all for boys (thus, the argument that this has something to do with the Muslim presence in Spain and a reaction against the “Mohameds” is 100% false). [EV adds: This source supports the view that Jesus was not common in 16th-century Spain.]
To the best of my understanding, Jesuits started in the 16th century to promote adding “de Jesus” to names to make a point against Protestants in Northern Europe (i.e., you were “Luis de Jesus” or “Isabel de Jesus”) and to honor the Holy Family….
[The article at] https://ojsng.colmex.mx/index.php/nrfh/article/download/437/437 about first names in Mexico … states (page 22, footnote) that, in Mexico, the first documented use of “Jesus” as the main name is from 1852…. [I]n novels and other sources of literature in Spanish before around 1850, one never ever encounters a character named “Jesus.”
Armed with this, I searched through the Spanish baptismal records database on FamilySearch.org, and found Jesus as the first name appearing 5 times in 1800-1820 and 576 times in 1880-1900. Nor did it stem from an increase in database coverage over time; the database appears to 1.1 million total entries in 1800-1820 and 650,000 in 1880-1900. Searches through the Mexico records reveal the same pattern.
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French intelligence have thwarted a terror attack directed at Paris that they said would have been similar in size and scope to the 9/11 terror attacks in the US that knocked down the North and South towers and crashed a plane into the Pentagon, the French newspaper Le Parisien reports.
A suspect is currently being held in France on preliminary terrorism charges after apparently planning a 9/11-style attack that would have involved several plane hijackings and dozens – if not hundreds – of deaths.
French intelligence must be particularly vigilant since their city encompasses many of Europe’s most recognizable monuments and statues, as well as other major tourist attractions and monuments. In recent years, terror attacks within the city have claimed more than 200 lives.
Just this month, an IT worker who worked with the Paris Intelligence Squad, a special unit within the Paris police, was shot and killed after he attacked several colleagues with a knife at work. The 45-year-old attacker was widely considered to be a responsible and dedicated employee and, thanks to his IT skills, was seen as a critical member of the team, with close access to the bosses.
The attacker managed to evade several mandatory background checks (all with the help of supervisors who promoted and protected him) after cracking jokes about anti-black and anti-muslim bias in a meeting with superiors, who waved checks that would have easily exposed the attacker’s checkered history with domestic violence and his many trips to hotbeds of Islamic fundamentalism.
In his role as an IT director for the Paris intelligence squad, he would have advanced knowledge of police operations against terror suspects, or of any investigations into his own activities.
Circling back to the most recent terror arrest, the suspect being held in France on preliminary terrorism charges apparently joined a 9/11-style hijacking ring. It doesn’t appear that their plot was very far along, since the would-be attacker was searching for a weapon when he was apprehended.
Many of the details were first revealed by French Interior Minister Christopher Castaner. He also revealed that this is the 60th time since 2013 that a terror plot has been foiled by French intelligence.
Un soixantième attentat a été déjoué en France depuis 2013, annonce @CCastaner en direct dans #VALP. Le ministre de l’Intérieur révèle que l’individu interpellé projetait une attaque inspirée du 11 septembre 2001 pic.twitter.com/8HDp4cMW4T
During this period, the most successful attack was the shooting at the Bataclan theater, which claimed the lives of more than 130 victims including (eventually) the lives of all three attackers.
Recently Ukraine has been thrown into the spotlight as Democrats gear up to impeach President Donald Trump. More important, though, is its role in damaging America’s relations with Russia, which has resulted in a mini-Cold War that the U.S. needs to end.
Ukraine is in a bad neighborhood.
During the 17th century, the country was divided between Poland and Russia, and eventually ended up as part of the Russian Empire.
Kiev then enjoyed only the briefest of liberations after the 1917 Russian Revolution, before being reabsorbed by the Soviet Union. It later suffered from a devastating famine as Moscow confiscated food and collectivized agriculture. Ukraine was ravaged during Germany’s World War II invasion, and guerrilla resistance to renewed Soviet control continued for years afterwards.
In 1991, the collapse of the U.S.S.R. gave Ukraine another, more enduring chance for independence. However, the new nation’s development was fraught: GDP dropped by 60 percent and corruption burgeoned. Ukraine suffered under a succession of corrupt, self-serving, and ineffective leaders, as the U.S., Europe, and Russia battled for influence.
In 2014, Washington and European governments backed a street putsch against the elected, though highly corrupt, pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych. The Putin government responded by annexing Crimea and backing separatist forces in Eastern Ukraine’s Donbass region. Washington and Brussels imposed economic sanctions on Russia and provided military aid to Kiev.
The West versus Russia quickly became a “frozen” conflict. Moscow reincorporated Crimea into Russia, from which it had been detached in 1954 as part of internal Soviet politics. In the Donbass, more than a score of ceasefires came and went. Both Ukraine and Russia failed to fulfill the 2016 Minsk agreements, which sought to end the conflict.
In excess of 13,000 people, mostly Ukrainians, are known to have died in this war, and some two million have been forced from their homes. The economy of eastern Ukraine has collapsed. Ukraine has suffered through painful economic dislocation and political division. Meanwhile, several hundred Russians are believed to have been killed fighting in the Donbass. Western sanctions have damaged Russia’s weak economy. And although the majority of Crimeans probably wanted to join Russia, opposition activists and journalists have been abducted, brutalized, and/or imprisoned. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church has been closed and Tartars have been persecuted.
The most important geopolitical impact has been to poison Russia’s relations with the West. Moscow’s aggressions against Ukraine cannot be justified, but the U.S. and Europe did much to create the underlying suspicion and hostility. Recently declassified documents reveal the degree to which Western officials misled Moscow about their intention to expand NATO. Allied support for adding Georgia and Ukraine, which would have greatly expanded Russian vulnerability, generated a particularly strong reaction in Moscow. The dismemberment of Serbia with no consideration of Russia’s interests was another irritant, along with Western support for “color revolutions” elsewhere, including in Tbilisi. The ouster of Yanukovych finally triggered Putin’s brutal response.
Washington and Brussels apparently did not view their policies as threatening to Russia. However, had Moscow ousted an elected Mexican president friendly to America, while inviting the new government to join the Warsaw Pact, and worked with a coalition of Central American states to divert Mexican trade from the U.S., officials in Washington would not have been pleased. They certainly wouldn’t have been overly concerned about juridical niceties in responding.
This explains (though does not justify) Russia’s hostile response. Subsequent allied policies then turned the breach in relations into a gulf. The U.S. and European Union imposed a series of economic sanctions. Moreover, Washington edged closer to military confrontation with its provision of security assistance to Kiev. Moscow responded by challenging America from Syria to Venezuela.
It also began moving towards China. The two nations’ differences are many and their relationship is unstable. However, as long as their antagonism towards Washington exceeds their discomfort with each other, they will cooperate to block what they see as America’s pursuit of global hegemony.
Why is the U.S. entangled in the Ukrainian imbroglio? During the Cold War, Ukraine was one of the fabled “captive nations,” backed by vigorous advocacy from Ukrainian Americans. After the Soviet Union collapsed, they joined other groups lobbying on behalf of ethnic brethren to speed NATO’s expansion eastward. Security policy turned into a matter of ethnic solidarity, to be pursued irrespective of cost and risk.
To more traditional hawks who are always seeking an enemy, the issue is less pro-Ukraine than anti-Russia. Mitt Romney, the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nominee, improbably attacked Russia as America’s most dangerous adversary. Hence the GOP’s counterproductive determination to bring Kiev into NATO. Originally Washington saw the transatlantic alliance as a means to confront the Soviet menace; now it views the pact as a form of charity.
After the Soviet collapse, the U.S. pushed NATO eastward into nations that neither mattered strategically nor could be easily protected, most notably in the Balkans and Baltics. Even worse were Georgia and Ukraine, security black holes that would bring with them ongoing conflicts with Russia, possibly triggering a larger war between NATO and Moscow.
Ukraine never had been a matter of U.S. security. For most of America’s history, the territory was controlled by either the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union. Washington’s Cold War sympathies represented fraternal concerns, not security essentials. Today, without Kiev’s aid, the U.S. and Europe would still have overwhelming conventional forces to be brought into any conflict with Moscow. However, adding Ukraine to NATO would increase the risk of a confrontation with a nuclear armed power. Russia’s limitations when it comes to its conventional military would make a resort to nuclear weapons more likely in any conflict.
Nevertheless, George W. Bush’s aggressively neoconservative administration won backing for Georgian and Ukrainian membership in NATO and considered intervening militarily in the Russo-Georgian war. However, European nations that feared conflict with Moscow blocked plans for NATO expansion, which went into cold storage. Although alliance officials still officially backed membership for Ukraine, it remains unattainable so long as conflict burns hot with Russia.
In the meantime, Washington has treated Ukraine as a de facto military ally, offering economic and security assistance. The U.S. has provided $1.5 billion for Ukrainian training and weapons, including anti-tank Javelin missiles. Explained Obama administration defense secretary Ashton Carter: “Ukraine would never be where it is without that support from the United States.”
Equally important, the perception of U.S. backing made the Kiev government, headed by President Petro Poroshenko, less willing to pursue a diplomatic settlement with Russia. Thus did Ukraine, no less than Russia, almost immediately violate the internationally backed Minsk accord.
Kiev’s role as a political football highlights the need for Washington to pursue an enduring political settlement with Russia. European governments are growing restless; France has taken the lead in seeking better relations with Moscow. Germany is unhappy with U.S. attempts to block the planned Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline. In Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky has campaigned to end the conflict.
Negotiators for Russia, Ukraine, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe recently met in Minsk to revive the agreement previously reached in the Belarus capital. They set an election schedule in the contested east, to be followed by passage of Ukrainian legislation to grant the region greater autonomy and separatists legal immunity. Despite strong opposition from nationalists, passage is likely since Zelensky’s party holds a solid legislative majority.
Many challenges remain, but the West could aid this process by respecting Russian security concerns. The U.S. and its allies should formally foreclose Ukraine’s membership in the transatlantic alliance and end lethal military aid. After receiving those assurances, Moscow would be expected to resolve the Donbass conflict, presumably along the lines of Minsk: Ukraine protects local autonomy while Russia exits the fight. Sanctions against Russia would be lifted. Ukrainians would be left to choose their economic orientation, since the country would likely be split between east and west for some time to come. The West would accept Russia’s control of Crimea while refusing to formally recognize the conquest—absent a genuinely independent referendum with independent monitors.
Such a compromise would be controversial. Washington’s permanent war lobby would object. Hyper-nationalistic Ukrainians would double down on calling Zelensky a traitor. Eastern Europeans would complain about appeasing Russia. However, such a compromise would certainly be better than endless conflict.