Dear Friends,
I’m sharing ‘Commentator’ — a discussion of news. At
, discusses Life Itself.Best,
Sam
AT WHAT POINT DO NEGOTIATIONS BEGIN IN UKRAINE?
It’s really been a very slow couple of weeks for news.
The main reason for that is that the Ukrainian counter-offensive has stalled really before it started. American officials acknowledged that as much as 20% of the weaponry sent to the battlefield had been damaged or destroyed in the initial two weeks of the attack. Ukrainians find themselves facing multilayered defensive positions all across the front line. A Wall Street Journal profile of Ukraine’s sappers illustrates something of what the war looks like at the moment: the painstaking clearance of row after row of Russian mines.
The obvious stall means that the conversation turns inevitably to questions of a negotiated settlement. It seems to be sinking in for everybody that the front line may be difficult to move, and that the termination of the war will be determined through political will as opposed to decisive military action. And now does seem like a window where conversations start to become possible — the Ukrainians fully taking in the cost of an offensive; Putin finding through the Prigozhin episode that the war may undermine his security at home.
In Foreign Affairs, Samuel Charap, a RAND analyst, argues: “While Western governments should continue to do all they can to help Ukraine prepare for the counteroffensive, they also need to adopt a strategy for war termination—a vision for an endgame that is plausible under these far-from-ideal circumstances.”
Charap’s analysis is far from optimistic about the course of negotiations. He notes that the Korean armistice — the most obvious precedent for the current situation — was negotiated over two years, and involved 575 meetings, during which heavy fighting accounting for a substantial percentage of all battlefield casualties took place. Charab’s suggestion extends to the very modest effort to “stand up an effort in the U.S. government to develop a diplomatic track — likely with representatives from the U.S., Russian, and Ukrainian sides meeting continually as in the model of the Balkan wars contact groups.
It doesn’t sound like much, but it is a shift from the hard-line hawkish position that has been ascendant at times in the U.S. foreign policy establishment’s discourse. Foreign Affairs, which seems to be running Charap’s piece with trepidation and misgiving, gives ample space for howls of outrage from hawks arguing that “there can be no negotiations with Putin” and that “Ukraine should aim for victory not compromise.” But the debaters are all closer to each other than they may wish to acknowledge. As Charap points out, Biden has long made clear that “his administration sees this war as ending at the negotiating table” — even as pledges to “help Ukraine as long as it takes” garner more attention. The only real question is when negotiations begin in earnest, and now does feel like the time, with both sides having shown their hands and having faced the limits in what they can achieve.
In a granular piece, analyzing the state of the counter-offensive, the military historian Lawrence Freedman is a bit more sanguine about Ukraine’s battlefield changes but agrees fundamentally with Charap’s analysis. Part of what comes through in Freedman’s piece is that Ukrainian leadership is more amenable to a negotiated settlement than might be expected. Zelensky has been rigorously downbeat about the prospects for a counter-offensive, saying, “Some people believe this is a Hollywood movie and expect results now. It’s not,” while his military chief Valery Zaluzhny agreed that “Every day, every metre is given by blood.” What will likely start to emerge is a very difficult dance by which the Zelensky government engages in negotiations, accepting, to a large degree, Russian battlefield advances, while fending off hardliners within Ukraine who are insistent that war can only end with the restitution of all captured Ukrainian territory.
Russian intentions are harder to divine. Freedman notes that Russian actions haven’t been exactly sensical. “If the aim is to blunt the Ukrainian offensive until it runs out of steam, encouraging Kyiv’s Western supporters to look for a way out, then the Russian strategy is curious,” Freedman writes. “It is not fighting as if conserving its strength for the long haul. Instead, it is throwing as much as possible into current battles.” This seems to be a moment of real confusion for Putin. As Freedman writes, “The rationale for the war and the way that it has been fought was challenged by Prigozhin.” It’s very possible that, from Putin’s perspective, he may decide that he has achieved as much as he realistically can: still in power, with the bulk of Russian public opinion solidly behind him, and with gains deep in Ukrainian territory — and would welcome an overture along Charap’s lines to begin winding down the conflict.
Without that overture, the war, as Freedman notes, remains a zero-sum game — “all about territory,” with limited and often meaningless gains achieved at enormous sacrifices of life.
LAB-LEAK AGAIN
Given how little is going on in the news, it’s really startling how little the mainstream press is willing to cover congressional inquiries into Covid origins.
At this point, it’s getting funny. A trove of leaked messages from the team that put together the Nature Medicine article on “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” reveal the extent to which the scientists themselves didn’t buy their own conclusions and simply wrote what they felt was politically expedient to write.
Kristian Andersen, who went on to be the lead author of the highly-influential Proximal Origin paper, wrote in a Slack message on February 2, 2020, “The main issue is that accidental escape is in fact highly likely — it’s not some fringe theory.” But by the time the paper went to press, Andersen and his co-authors were apparently confident enough to argue the exact opposite: “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”
It becomes very clear also how “science” was conducted in the midst of the greatest public health-crisis of any of our lifetimes. The really critical “finding” of the paper — the dismissal of any accidental escape hypothesis as “improbable” and not merely as “unlikely” — came at the last minute and without any deliberation at all. “Anyway, it’s done. Sorry the last bit had to be done without you…pressure from on high,” wrote Eddie Holmes, one of the paper’s co-authors.
The “on high” line has been variously taken as a reference to Anthony Fauci or Jeremy Farrar or Frances Collins, but the issues with the paper go well beyond just undue influence from NIH. Nature had rejected an early version of the article out of concern that, as one reviewer put it, even leaving open the possibility of a lab escape would fuel conspiracy theorists. That prompted a fit of scientific scruples from Andersen, who wrote in an internal e-mail:
Unfortunately none of this helps refute a lab origin and the possibility must be considered as a serious scientific theory (which is what we do) and not dismissed out of hand as another ‘conspiracy’ theory. We all really, really wish that we could do that (that’s how this got started), but unfortunately it’s not possible given the data.
But those scruples didn’t last too long. And the paper, when it came out, presented a sense of unequivocal scientific unity, without a trace of the scientists’ own energetic debates.
It turns out — and the release of documents is helpful on this point — that the scientists were using one of the usual politician’s dodges, taking refuge behind the ambiguity of words. By writing that “SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the scientists appeared to rule out all laboratory-related theories but in fact they were just chipping away at the possibility of manipulation when in fact, as they themselves privately acknowledged, the far likeliest theory was that a naturally-occurring virus stored at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had inadvertently slipped out.
Unfortunately, even today, in a weirdly spin doctor-ish article, The Atlantic attempts to defend the scientists’ willful obfuscation. “The idea that Chinese scientists might have been collecting wild viruses, and doing research just to understand them, was not yet thinkable in that chaotic, early moment of pandemic spread,” writes The Atlantic’s Daniel Engber.
Well um. It was thinkable. People very much were considering that possibility. And the scientists working on the ‘Proximal Origin’ paper knew all about the practice of collecting wild viruses and their thinking about the origins of the pandemic was moving exactly along those lines. The premise — which The Atlantic is seriously espousing even now — is that the work of science is to shape public opinion or, more explicitly, to protect the public from the more unpalatable findings of science itself. Which, needless to say, undermines the whole basis of science’s authority — that science is (as Andersen wrote in his better moments) a neutral, objective seeker-after-truth; and oblivious to public, political pressure.
Speaking honestly, I’m a bit tired of thinking about lab-leaks, virology, vaccines, etc. At some deep level I don’t really care how the virus originated. What I do care about, very much though, is the near-shutdown of public discourse in Western countries in the midst of the single most dramatic, significant event of my lifetime; and the refusal to have any serious, open-ended public discussion about the origins of the pandemic is a potent metaphor of that. For years, really, anybody raising the lab-leak theory was dismissed — completely irrelevantly — as “racist.” People were booted off YouTube and mainstream social media platforms for discussing lab-leak. And the surprisingly trenchant Robert Kennedy campaign is best understood as a karmic payback for this completely patronizing approach by the scientific and media establishment. The belief was — as the conversations between Nature and the authors of the Proximal Origin paper demonstrate — that they could write whatever they wanted to write and have the public accept it as the ‘voice of science.’
Really, you can only get away doing that for so long, but, on the evidence of The Atlantic’s retort, these lessons are very far from seeking in even for the fearless truth-seekers who work in journalism. Curiously enough, Engber seems to be blaming the conversation on Covid lab-leak on….the conversation itself. “[The congressional investigation] sheds light on how discussions of the lab-leak theory went so very, very wrong, and turned into an endless, stultifying spectacle,” Engber writes and adds that “Barbed accusations [like that from the House] have only added headaches to the question of how the pandemic really started.”
That’s true in a sense. It was less of a headache in the long period where a blanket of silence prevailed over discussions of the pandemic’s origin — and where the really very-vigorous debates about the lab-leak theory occurred only behind the scenes, among scientists who then presented a false unanimity in their public-facing appearances. I can understand why politicians and even scientists think they benefit from this quelling of public conversation. I don’t like, though, to hear it from journalists.
AFTER AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
The theme that’s coming through here is the sense that the Democratic Party, and sort of right-thinking coastal people (my people, at the end of the day), have taken a wrong turn and aligned themselves with positions that do not reflect their deeper principles. For a long time, the Democratic Party was, fundamentally, the party of labor. Then it seemed to be the party of cool, young candidates who did well on late-night talk shows. Increasingly — and alarmingly — it’s become the party of the establishment, the nexus of tech, the scientific ‘consensus,’ and regulation that finds itself constantly in the position of putting down uprisings of populist fervor wherever they break out. I dislike this trend for many reasons, but one of the reasons I dislike it is that it’s politically shortsighted — it allows Republicans to develop a wide-ranging, entrenched ‘populist’ base that is sometimes nuts but sometimes engages in perfectly legitimate questions about the excess of power, which liberals are oddly unwilling to consider.
I’m a bit late to write about the Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action, but my sense is that it helps the Democrats reorient themselves and refind their core values.
Affirmative action has been considered such an unquestioned good on the left — as recently as 2021, a geophysicist was disinvited from a university talk on climate change merely for having criticized aspects of affirmative action policy — that, I have to admit, I hadn’t realized how precarious the underlying jurisprudence behind it really was. I hadn’t realized how divided the Supreme Court was in the initial decision greenlighting some limited forms of affirmative action, that that authorization was cut into by a pair of subsequent decisions, and that (somehow this was never mentioned when I was in school) affirmative action had, according to Grutter v. Bollinger, been deemed a temporary expedient and due to phase out within the 2020s.
The constitutionality of affirmative action was always deeply suspect, and Roberts’ ringing line in the majority ruling, “Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin,” is fundamentally hard to argue with.
The central issue in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard — and the litigants were artful in bringing the case on these terms — is that affirmative action, in practice, played out to be profoundly discriminatory against Asian-Americans. Students for Fair Admissions had been able to demonstrate that Harvard “consistently rated Asian-Americans lower than others on traits like ‘positive personality,’ likability, courage, kindness, and being ‘widely respected’….imposing in effect a soft quota of ‘racial balancing.’” The lame effort of Harvard to claim that — in compliance with previous Supreme Court rulings — “race was never a negative factor in admissions” is, as Roberts acidly wrote, “hard to take seriously,” given the intrinsically zero-sum nature of college admissions.
What affirmative action represented was a cheeky consensus that tried to do several different things at once — it would rectify historical injustice but through a doctrine of diversity while upholding an underlying principle of meritocracy under the theory that a scale for overcoming hardship could constitute proof of merit. But, as Peter Arcidiacono, a Duke professor who appeared as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in Fair Admissions, put it, “Part of me feels like with affirmative action, it was a Band-Aid. Because we're able to say, look, Harvard looks racially representative, everything's okay.”
As Arcidiacono noted, “Affirmative action disproportionately favors recent immigrants and those from wealthier families…and even the way the preferences operate, it favors advantaged African Americans much more than disadvantaged.” Meanwhile, implicit biases against Asian Americans made a mockery of the hardship criteria. (Arcidiacono cited the case of an Asian-American applicant who had been in foster care, had a father with severe mental illness, had been hit by a drunk-driver, and had impressed an interviewer enough for the interviewer to say, “This is one of the best interviews I’ve ever had,” and yet only merited a ‘standard-strong’ personal rating from Harvard.)
The Court’s ruling creates the opportunity to move beyond the compromise and to think through what we’re really trying to do with the education system. To me, there are three different directions — all perfectly valid, all with their own pluses and minuses. One is impose a strict meritocracy and, as much as possible, to run that through the entire national education system. In that system, test scores, grades, and writing ability would really be all that mattered — and, ideally, would be combined with an honest grading system within educational institutions themselves. That’s close to the system that the U.S. had at the point when its education system was a wonder of the world; and of what South Korea has now. Under that logic, if educational institutions come out as ethnically unrepresentative — majority Asian say — then so be it. Incidentally, when I was growing up, the famous New York City public schools were strictly meritocratic, overwhelmingly Asian, and they were widely considered to be some of the best schools in existence.
Another direction would be to deprioritize ‘meritocracy’ in favor of heterogeneity — to make top schools deeply representative of the country constituting it. Among other things, that would mean factoring in class far more than in the current race-driven affirmative action programs. I don’t think I’m in favor of this approach — it would be almost totally impossible to institute without quotas and would be subject to various manipulations in self-presentation — but I can understand the arguments for it: that ‘meritocracy’ often just means gaming the system and that it’s more important in students’ development to have exposure to a genuinely representative cross-section of the society.
The other direction would be to have the strict meritocracy but with a specific carve-out for African Americans under a logic of reparations. There are all sorts of issues there, the main one being that there isn’t a system of jurisprudence in place to support active reparations. But, really, that’s what affirmative action has been, although under the guise, as Justice Powell put it, of “obtaining the educational benefits the flow from a racially diverse student body.” The cracks in that system, though — the “disproportionate favoring of recent immigrants and students from wealthier families” — makes affirmative action as it stands all but useless as an instrument of reparations. There is a legal theory that, at the moment, seems mostly to be circulating in the dissents of cases like Fair Admission and Dobbs, that may pave the way for a more vigorous system of reparations. That theory holds that, essentially, the United States in its relations to African Americans was, prior to 1865, an illegitimate entity and in violation of its Constitution. Sotomayor hit on that in her dissent to Fair Admissions, arguing that “the Court cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter.” In other words — she is suggesting — a completely distinct body of jurisprudence needs to be drawn up, of which affirmative action was sort of a first draft but reparations are likely to come, which would deal exclusively with race relations and serve as atonement for “endemic segregation” under the theory that the United States was at one point, in one aspect of its existence, illegitimate.
Speaking personally, my vote is for strict meritocracy and letting the chips fall where they may be. But the post-Fair Admissions moment creates an opportunity to really think through — especially from the vantage-point of liberals — what we want our education system to be. What it can’t be — and the Supreme Court couldn’t have been clearer — is the sneaky compromise of affirmative action-as-we-know-it.
HAITI AND SUDAN
The slowness of the news week gives me a chance to think about a couple of countries that are constantly on the outside of news coverage — Haiti and Sudan.
On Sudan, a helpful Foreign Policy piece explains how the Sudan fighting is taking on wider geopolitical dimension — with “Gulf heavyweights Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates viewing the war as a chance to cement their hegemonic status in the Middle East.” Slightly arbitrarily, Saudi Arabia has chosen to back Burhan, the de facto ruler, while the UAE has sided with his rival Hemeti.
In Foreign Policy’s analysis, the most likely scenario is that “Burhan and Hemeti establish rival spheres of control in Sudan that mimic the situation in Libya, where an ongoing rivalry between various political and military factions has created a fragmented state with multiple centers of power.”
As The Washington Post reports, control of Western Sudan by Hemeti and his RSF is very bad news for Darfur. The RSF is understood as having its roots in the Janjaweed, and RSF presence in the deteriorating situation has led, according to the U.N., to executions and mass graves in Geneina in the Darfur region.
The next turn of the wheel may well be an active Egyptian intervention in Sudan. As Mahmoud Salem writes in Foreign Policy: “Egypt now finds itself in a bind: It does not have the resources or the desire to fight a war, yet it cannot afford to ignore the situation any longer.”
Meanwhile, a long, high-quality New Yorker piece on Haiti reflects on a beyond-impossible situation. Officials simply “throw up their hands when I mention Haiti,” writes Jon Lee Anderson in The New Yorker. An unnamed diplomat tells Anderson, “The basic truth is that there is no state” — an assertion amply supported by everything that Anderson comes across on his reporting trip, gang kidnappings, arsons, and murders; an utterly outmatched police force and army; and an emergent vigilante system featuring the summary executions of suspected gang members, often by burning them alive. As Dan Foote, the former U.S. Special Envoy to Haiti, sounding very un-envoy-like, puts it, “We just need to help the Haitian people unfuck themselves. All they need is a leader.”
What becomes very clear — and has been clear for a long time — is that there are no good options. U.N. peacekeepers, in their turn on the scene, managed to kill civilians, engage in sexual misconduct, and start a cholera epidemic. The current Prime Minister, Ariel Henry, confesses to Anderson that he “has no solution for the security problems in Port-au-Prince.” And police, outgunned, have had no better idea than to support the Bwa Kale vigilantes (the name means ’Shaft up the ass’).
That’s the cheery situation that, as Foote puts it, “makes people look wistfully back on the days of the Tonton Macoutes, when garbage was collected and their children played in the streets.”
As with Sudan, I don’t think there’s any viable solution that anybody could possibly offer. It’s just important to remember that there are parts of the world that have been completely abandoned by the ‘international community.’ When that happens — and security breaks down — the suffering is unimaginable.
Once more into the firey branch davidian compound. I mean we lost the third branch of Am'can dmcrcy when RBG died. Now the justices remind me of a highschool student tribunal trying the trends of the moment. Oliver Wendell Holmes guiding idea was experience is the prudent part of jurisprudence. Unlike Scalia deciding if your garage or your car is liable to search by police sans warrant. Common sense! He said, and it was his whole case decides your car is private but your garage isnot. Or vice versa, common sense! Sonya Sotomayor is just asbad . The healthcare mandate had her assent saying it was only helpful noblesse oblige that all should carry insurance. For a constttnl scholar, why do these assents and decents not refer to lived experience? Now it seems to me, and BTW of course i am fine with the court shutting the door against affrmtv action, i have no choice, the teeny tiny activist caste in the country is newly empowered to dramatize what compassion means. Too bad, they are powerless andnot up to the task. The meaning we should take from RBGs strange last 5 years on the court is that she knew she was the last real jurist on the gamefied partisan court. 9 months, 9 months the dems had, 9 months 9 months....