Link Banana

Joseph Corincione’s essay on nuclear proliferation gives a good introduction to the topic, and offers this upbeat note at the end.

For the first time since the initial efforts of the Truman administration in the 1940s, a movement to eliminate nuclear weapons has developed not from the political left but from the “realist” center of the security elite. This promises to give the cause of arms reduction a political plausibility and importance that previous efforts, including the broad-based Nuclear Freeze Movement of the 1980s, have lacked. Whether these efforts will succeed in their ultimate goal is far from clear; but if the movement can be sustained and gather wider support, this could dramatically reduce threats of nuclear war and nuclear terrorism—the greatest security threats now facing the United States.

This Europe.view column starts with an interesting premise:

IMAGINE Nazi rule in Germany surviving for decades, with Hitler undefeated in war and succeeded on his death in the early 1950s by a series of lacklustre party hacks who more or less disowned his “excesses”. Imagine then a “reform Nazi” (call him Michael Gorbach) coming to power in the 1980s and dismantling the National Socialist system, only to fall from power as the Third Reich collapsed in political and economic chaos.

Imagine a shrunken “German Federation” suffering ten years of upheaval, before an SS officer (call him Voldemar Puschnik) came to power, first as prime minister and then as president. Under eight years of rule by Herr Puschnik, Germany regains economic stability, largely thanks to a sky-high coal price.

It goes on to assert that current claims that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was legal and that the Katyn massacre was no perpetrated by the Russians are tantamount to Holocaust denial. Interesting stuff, whether or not you agree with it.

I have to admit that half of my affinity for this Europe.view column is that I just love that word. It’s like so many fights held in so many places all over the world. But the column’s also got a few very valuable points about relations between the Kremlin on the West that are worth hearing.

One solution is to use points made by Russian leaders themselves. Guess who said this: “Russia is a country of legal nihilism at the level…that no European country can boast of…Corruption in the official structures has a huge scale”. That sounds as though it came from some opposition politician such as Garry Kasparov—the sort of marginal (or marginalised) figure that Russians often say gains far too much western attention. But the speaker was Dmitri Medvedev, successor-designate to Vladimir Putin.

Another is for outsiders to show a bit more self-criticism. It is worth noting early on in the discussion some outrageous flaws in American (or British, or German, or French) foreign policy, as well as recent scandals involving corruption and abuse of power.

The most powerful western asset during the last cold war was not bigger nukes or higher living standards, but self-criticism. However bad western governments may be, they risk trouble eventually—from the media, the courts or the voters. That is not something that one can say with much confidence about Russia now.

Parag Khanna has an interesting piece in the forthcoming New York Times Magazine about America’s declining influence in the world. Though I think he does overreach — seeming to favor unrealistic certainty (which sometimes becomes outright alarmism) over necessary nuance — his broad narrative rings true.

At best, America’s unipolar moment lasted through the 1990s, but that was also a decade adrift. The post-cold-war “peace dividend” was never converted into a global liberal order under American leadership. So now, rather than bestriding the globe, we are competing — and losing — in a geopolitical marketplace alongside the world’s other superpowers: the European Union and China. This is geopolitics in the 21st century: the new Big Three. Not Russia, an increasingly depopulated expanse run by Gazprom.gov; not an incoherent Islam embroiled in internal wars; and not India, lagging decades behind China in both development and strategic appetite. The Big Three make the rules — their own rules — without any one of them dominating. And the others are left to choose their suitors in this post-American world.

If you lack the patience to read the whole thing, I’d recommend his policy priorities as the most interesting bit.

The Economist has an interesting story about the new dynamics within Germany’s rapidly-growing Jewish community.

By the time the Berlin Wall fell, Germany’s Jewish community had only 30,000 ageing members and was dwindling rapidly. Today it is the third-largest, and the fastest-growing, Jewish population in western Europe, after France and Britain. Between 1991, when the country was unified and immigration rules relaxed, and 2005, more than 200,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union emigrated to Germany. (At the same time, more than a million emigrated from the former Soviet Union to Israel and about 350,000 to America, leaving only about 800,000 behind.) In some parts of Germany, immigrants—usually referred to as “the Russians”—make up 90% of the local Jewish population.