It was obvious to anyone who troubled to examine the data that Egypt could not maintain a bottomless pit in its balance of payments, created by a 50% dependency on imported food, not to mention an energy bill fed by subsidies that consumed a quarter of the national budget. It was obvious to Israeli analysts that the Syrian regime’s belated attempt to modernize its agricultural sector would create a crisis as hundreds of thousands of displaced farmers gathered in slums on the outskirts of its cities. These facts were in evidence early in 2011 when Hosni Mubarakfell and the Syrian rebellion broke out. Paul Rivlin of Israel’s Moshe Dayan Center published a devastating profile of Syria’s economic failure in April 2011. [1]

Sometimes countries dig themselves into a hole from which they cannot extricate themselves. Third World dictators typically keep their rural population poor, isolated and illiterate, the better to maintain control. That was the policy of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party from the 1930s, which warehoused the rural poor in Stalin-modeled collective farms called ejidos occupying most of the national territory. That was also the intent of the Arab nationalist dictatorships in Egypt and Syria. The policy worked until it didn’t. In Mexico, it stopped working during the debt crisis of the early 1980s, and Mexico’s poor became America’s problem. In Egypt and Syria, it stopped working in 2011. There is nowhere for Egyptians and Syrians to go.

It is cheap to assuage Western consciences by sending some surplus arms to the Syrian Sunnis. No-one has proposed a way to find the more than US$20 billion a year that Egypt requires to stay afloat. In June 2011, then French president Nicholas Sarkozy talked about a Group of Eight support program of that order of magnitude. No Western (or Gulf State) government, though, is willing to pour that sort of money down an Egyptian sinkhole.

Egypt remains a pre-modern society, with nearly 50% illiteracy, a 30% rate of consanguineal marriage, a 90% rate of female genital mutilation, and an un- or underemployment rate over 40%. Syria has neither enough oil nor water to maintain the bazaar economy dominated by the Assad family.

Both were disasters waiting to happen. Economics, to be sure, set the stage but did not give the cues: Syria’s radical Sunnis revolted in part out of enthusiasm for the ascendancy of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and partly in fear of Iran’s ambition to foster Shi’ite ascendancy in the region.

It took nearly two years for the chattering classes to take stock of Egypt’s economic disaster. The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, the benchmark for liberal opinion on foreign policy, gushed like an adolescent about the tech-savvy activists of Tahrir Square in early 2011. Last week he visited a Cairo bakery and watched the Egyptian poor jostling for subsidized bread. Some left hungry. [2] As malnutrition afflicts roughly a quarter of Egyptians in the World Health Organization’s estimate, and the Muslim Brotherhood government waits for a bumper wheat crop that never will come, Egypt is slowly dying. Emergency loans from Qatar and Libya slowed the national necrosis but did not stop it.

This background lends an air of absurdity to the present debate over whether the West should arm Syria’s Sunni rebels. American hawks like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, to be sure, argue for sending arms to the Sunnis because they think it politically unwise to propose an attack on the Assad regime’s master, namely Iran. The Obama administration has agreed to arm the Sunnis because it costs nothing to pre-empt Republican criticism. We have a repetition of the “dumb and dumber”consensus that prevailed during early 2011, when the Republican hawks called for intervention in Libya and the Obama administration obliged. Call it the foreign policy version of the sequel, “Dumb and Dumberer”.

Even if the Sunnis could eject the Assad family from Damascus and establish a new government – which I doubt – the best case scenario would be another Egypt: a Muslim Brotherhood government presiding over a collapsed economy and sliding inevitably towards state failure. It is too late even for this kind of arrangement. Equalizing the military position of the two sides will merely increase the body count. The only humane thing to do is to partition the country on the Yugoslav model, but that does not appear to be on the agenda of any government.

Notes:
1. See Israel the winner in the Arab revolts, Asia Times Online, April 12, 2011.
2. Egypt’s Perilous Drift, New York Times, June 15, 2013.

In short, a long intra-Islamic war left nobody safer, wealthier or wiser. Nor did it leave the West morally untainted. The U.S. embraced Saddam Hussein as a counterweight to Iran, and later tried to ply Iran with secret arms in exchange for the release of hostages. Patrolling the Strait of Hormuz, the USS Vincennes mistakenly shot down an Iranian jetliner over the Gulf, killing 290 civilians. Inaction only provides moral safe harbor when there’s no possibility of action.

Today, he adds, there comes “the whispered suggestion: If one branch of Islam wants to be at war with another branch for a few years — or decades — so much the better for the non-Islamic world. Mass civilian casualties in Aleppo or Homs is their tragedy, not ours. It does not implicate us morally. And it probably benefits us strategically, not least by redirecting jihadist energies away from the West.” This is not a good thing for the West, but a bad thing, he concludes. Pipes and Stephens are both friends of mine, and both have a point (although I come down on Pipes’ side of the argument). It might be helpful to expand the context of the discussion.

I agree with Stephens that it is a bad thing. It not only a bad thing: it is a horrifying thing. The moral impact on the West of unrestrained slaughter and numberless atrocities flooding YouTube for years to come is incalculable, as I wrote in a May 20 essay, “Syria’s Madness and Ours.” If Syria looks bad, wait until Pakistan breaks down. The relevant questions, though, are 1) why are Sunnis and Shi’ites slaughtering each other in Syria at this particular moment in history, and 2) what (if anything) can we do about it?

Part of the answer to the first question is that Syria (like Egypt) as presently constituted simply is not viable as a country. Iraq might be viable, because it has enough oil to subsidize a largely uneducated, pre-modern population. As an economist and risk analyst (I ran Credit Strategy for Credit Suisse and all fixed income research for Bank of America), I do not believe that there is any way to stabilize either country. In the medium term, Turkey will lose national viability as well. I outlined some of the reasons for this view in my 2011 book How Civilizations Die (and why Islam is Dying, Too).

Globalization ruins countries. It has done so for centuries. Tinpot dictatorships that keep their people in poverty the better to maintain political control will break down at some point. Mexico broke down during the 1970s and 1980s; the Mexican currency collapsed, the savings of the middle class were wiped out, and the economy shut down. In 1982 I wrote an evaluation of the Mexican economy for Norman Bailey, then director of plans at the National Security Council and special assistant to President Reagan. I saw a crash coming, and no way to to prevent it.

Three things prevented Mexico from dissolving into civil war (as it did during the teens of the past century at the cost of a million lives, or one out of seven Mexicans). One was the ability of Mexicans to migrate to the United States, which absorbed perhaps a fifth of the Mexican population. The second was the emergence of the drug cartels as an alternative source of employment for up to half a million people, and generating between $18 and $39 billion of annual profits. And the third is the fact that Mexico produces its own food most years. When the currencies of the Latin American banana republics collapsed, there was always enough food to maintain minimum caloric consumption. Not so in Egypt, which imports half its food and is flat broke. Egypt and Syria are banana republics but without the bananas (Daniel Pipes assures me that Egypt does grow bananas, and he personally has eaten them, but they are not grown in sufficient quantity to meet the country’s caloric deficit). Turkey was the supposed Muslim model for democracy and prosperity under moderate Islam. That idea, which I disputed for years, has gotten tarnished during the past week.

The economics of the ‘Turkish Spring’
By Spengler

Pitched battles between anti-government demonstrators and Turkish police over several days at Istanbul’s Taksim Square constitute a national uprising against Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s incipient Islamist dictatorship. As of this writing on June 2, tens of thousands of regime opponents are in control of the heart of Istanbul while police have withdrawn. The economic distress of Turkish households is an important factor in the country’s political upheaval.

News media have already dubbed the demonstrations a “Turkish Spring”. That is a turnabout, for the “Turkish model” was touted two years ago as the solution to the economic and social problems of the failing police states of Arab nationalism. Erdogan’s supposedly moderate Islamism and dynamic economic management supposedly offered a way out for Egypt and other failed economies of the Middle East.

Erdogan had declared himself a “servant of Sharia” during his 1994 mayoral campaign in Istanbul, but most Western observers chose to take the would-be Turkish dictator at his subsequent word that he would respect the secular character of the Turkish state.

In his 2011 presidential campaign, Erdogan emulated an earlier Anatolian, namely St Nicholas. As I wrote in a 2012 study for Middle East Quarterly,

Erdogan’s bubble recalls the experiences of Argentina in 2000 and Mexico in 1994 where surging external debt produced short-lived bubbles of prosperity, followed by currency devaluations and deep slumps. Both Latin American governments bought popularity by providing cheap consumer credit as did Erdogan in the months leading up to the June 2011 national election. [3]

Erdogan’s politically directed generosity has come back to bite Turkish consumers. Personal consumption is falling in real terms. GDP growth is close to zero, propped by a 20% rate of growth in government consumption. With government spending dominating economic activity at the margin, it is not surprising that Turkey’s inflation rate stands at 7%.

Exhibit 1: Turkish GDP, household consumption, and government consumption (year-on-year percent change)

Source: Central Bank of Turkey

The aggregate economic data disguise growing distress in the Turkish economy. Government data distinguish salaried employment in the formal sector from “unpaid family employment” and “self-employment”. During the past year, employment in the formal sector-has shrunk by 5%, while “unpaid family employment” has risen by 5%. That means simply that manufacturing and service workers with real jobs were laid off and took the bus back to hard-scrabble farms in central Anatolia or sponged on small family businesses. This is disguised unemployment. A 5% shrinkage in the formal economy workforce is a devastating result.

Exhibit 2: Formal employment, “unpaid family” and “self-employment,” (year-on-year change)

Source: Central Bank of Turkey

Turkey’s economy, oddly vaunted as the next China, relies on low- and medium-tech exports to Europe, the Arab world, and the former Soviet Union. It grew as a cheap-labor outlet for European and some Asian manufacturers and sank as the European economic crisis, Russian economic stagnation and disarray among Muslim trading partners shrank its markets. It has a lower rate of high-school graduation than Mexico and an enormous informal economy. A few Turkish universities teach to world standards, but Turkey has nothing to compare to the talent pool of China, Taiwan or Korea.

Exhibit 3: Turkish consumer credit outstanding

Source: Central Bank of Turkey.

To sustain the consumer bubble, Turkey ran a current account deficit that reached 10% in 2012, financed overwhelmingly with short-term debt-provided in large measure, according to anecdotal evidence, by the Sunni Gulf States who view Turkey as a bulwark against Iran.

Exhibit 4: Turkish short-term external debt

Source: Central Bank of Turkey.

Turkey’s short-term foreign debt is still growing at a 30% annual rate year on year (and at a 70% annual rate during the first three months of 2013). The economic slowdown was supposed to have reduced Turkey’s foreign borrowing; instead, it has accelerated. The patience of Turkey’s funders in the Persian Gulf is long but not unlimited.

Consumer debt outstanding has risen nearly 10-fold since 2006, and jumped by 40% during the past year. As I noted in my April 23 essay, it is hard to reconcile a 40% annual increase in consumer debt with a 5% annual increase in nominal consumer spending (inflation is running at 7%, so real spending is down by 2%). The data imply that Turkish consumers are borrowing enormous amounts to refinance the interest they owe on their existing debt.

Erdogan’s spending spree of 2011 has left Turks with a horrendous hangover. Banks cannot balloon their consumer loan book by 40% a year indefinitely; when the music stops, Turkish households will have to reduce their consumption sharply. Debt-burdened consumers know that this must happen sooner rather than later, and this presentiment probably helps sour the national mood.

“Turkey’s longer-term risks are even more daunting,” I wrote in the cited essay for Middle East Quarterly. “A developing country cannot sustain a fertility rate that leads to a rapid increase in elderly dependents, yet the fertility rate of Turks for whom Turkish is a first language has been in steady decline over the past fifteen years, falling to only 1.5-equal to that of Europe-while its population is aging almost as fast as Iran’s, leaving the country’s social security system with a deficit of close to 5 percent of GDP. “If we continue the existing [fertility] trend, 2038 will mark disaster for us,” Erdogan warned in a May 2010 speech.” Within a generation, half of Turkey’s military age men will come from Kurdish-speaking homes if the present trend continues.

In retrospect, analysts of Turkish politics may conclude, Erdogan’s Islamism was not a fresh start for Turkey but rather a belated attempt to pour Islamic glue into the cracks that threaten to fracture Turkish society. He may already have failed. A growing proportion of Turkish voters has concluded that they made a deal with the devil, and that the devil hasn’t kept his side of the bargain.

Notes:
1. US cables claim Turkish PM Erdogan has eight Swiss bank accounts, Hurriyet Daily News, November 29, 2010.
2. The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society, Pew Research Center on Religion and Public Life, April 30, 2013.
3. Ankara’s ‘Economic Miracle’ Collapses, The Middle East Quarterly, Volume XIX, Number 1, Winter, 2012.

Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman. 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. He is an Associate Fellow of the Middle East Forum.

Last week I took part in a Tablet magazine roundtable on the crack-up of Middle Eastern states and its strategic implications, along with Edward Luttwak, the New York Times‘ Robert Worth, Amos Harel of Ha’aretz, Lee Smith of the Weekly Standard, and Nathan Thrall of the International Crisis Group. Our group effort was one of several essays to appear in the past two weeks commenting on the disintegration of the system of states created after World War I by colonial cartographers. I argued:

 In their wisdom, the colonial powers characteristically created multiethnic and multisectarian entities based on the principle of minority rule. There is a reason that Syria has labored under brutal minority regimes for half a century, since the Ba’ath Party coup of 1963 led by the Christian Michel Aflaq, followed by the Alawite Assad dynasty’s assumption of power in 1971. If you create artificial states with substantial minorities, as British and French cartographers did after the First World War, the only possible stable government is a minority government. That is why the Alawites ran Syria and the minority Sunnis ran Iraq. The minority regime may be brutal, even horribly brutal, but this arrangement sets up a crude system of checks and balances. A government drawn from a minority of the population cannot attempt to exterminate the majority, so it must try to find a modus vivendi. The majority can in fact exterminate a minority. That is why a majority government represents an existential threat to the minority, and that is why minorities fight to the death. This meta-equilibrium is broken and cannot be restored.

Syria’s crack-up is at the top of the agenda, but the breakdown of putative nation-states extends across nearly all of the Muslim world. As Amos Harel reported in the Tablet symposium, the prime minister of Libya “has to cross checkpoints manned by five different militias, on his way home from office.”  In place of regular armies controlled by dictators, Libya is crisscrossed by ethnic and sectarian militias (including the one that murdered our ambassador last September). Egypt is on the brink of economic collapse and state failure; Iraq is in the midst of a low-intensity sectarian war; Syria’s civil war already is being fought out in Lebanon; and Turkey’s border has become unstable.

A vast number of young men have been drawn into irregular combat. Syria has become the cockpit of a Sunni-Shi’ite war, with Turkey and the Gulf states funneling money and jihadists into Syria while Iran sends Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah irregulars to the aid of the Assad regime. The young men of Libya already are mobilized into militias; Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood cells and Salafists and football mobs are not yet armed, but are organized. Iraq’s sectarians are armed to the teeth, in part thanks to American funding of the “Sunni Awakening” during the 2007-2008 surge. Very large numbers of young men are ready to fight to the death, while the breakup of the fragile civilian society of these countries draws more and more of them into the maelstrom. Terrorism has become a way of life in Syria, where both sides instigate atrocities, in part to intimidate their opponents and in part to bind their own fighters to the cause by making them complicit in such crimes.

How neocons and Obama liberals have created catastrophe by consensus in the Middle East

[Note: Tablet changed my proposed headline to "Dumb and Dumber," which carries a connotation I did not intend]

Egyptian protesters, seen through a flag, march toward Cairo’s landmark Tahrir square during a demonstration against President Mohammed Morsi on May 17, 2013. (Gianluigi Guercia/AFP/Getty Images)

I published this essay today at Tablet magazine:

Errors by the party in power can get America into trouble; real catastrophes require consensus.

Rarely have both parties been as unanimous about a development overseas as they have in their shared enthusiasm for the so-called Arab Spring during the first months of 2011. Republicans vied with the Obama Administration in their zeal for the ouster of Egypt’s dictator Hosni Mubarak and in championing the subsequent NATO intervention against Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. Both parties saw themselves as having been vindicated by events. The Obama Administration saw its actions as proof that soft power in pursuit of humanitarian goals offered a new paradigm for foreign-policy success. And the Republican establishment saw a vindication of the Bush freedom agenda.

“Revolutions are sweeping the Middle East and everyone is a convert to George W. Bush’s freedom agenda,” Charles Krauthammer observed in February 2011. “Now that revolution has spread from Tunisia to Oman,” Krauthammer added, “the [Obama] administration is rushing to keep up with the new dispensation, repeating the fundamental tenet of the Bush Doctrine that Arabs are no exception to the universal thirst for dignity and freedom.” And William Kristol exulted, “Helping the Arab Spring through to fruition might contribute to an American Spring, one of renewed pride in our country and confidence in the cause of liberty.”

They were all wrong. Just two years later, the foreign-policy establishment has fractured in the face of a Syrian civil war that threatens to metastasize into neighboring Iraq and Lebanon and an economic collapse in Egypt that has brought the largest Arab country to the brink of state failure. Some Republican leaders, including Sen. John McCain and Weekly Standard editor Kristol, demand American military intervention to support Syria’s Sunni rebels. But Daniel Pipes, the dean of conservative Middle East analysts, wrote on April 11 that “Western governments should support the malign dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad,” because “Western powers should guide enemies to stalemate by helping whichever side is losing, so as to prolong their conflict.” If Assad appears to be winning, he added later, we should support the rebels. The respected strategist Edward Luttwak contends that America should “leave bad enough alone” in Syria and turn its attention away from the Middle East—to Asia. The Obama Administration meanwhile is waffling about what might constitute a “red line” for intervention and what form such intervention might take.

The once-happy bipartisan consensus has now shrunk to the common observation that all the available choices are bad. It could get much worse. Western efforts have failed to foster a unified leadership among the Syrian rebels, and jihadi extremists appear to be in control of the Free Syrian Army inside Syria. Syria’s war is “creating the conditions for a renewed conflict, dangerous and complex, to explode in Iraq. If Iraq is not shielded rapidly and properly, it will definitely slip into the Syrian quagmire,” warns Arab League Ambassador Nassif Hitti. Iraq leaders are talking of civil war and eventual partition. Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, meanwhile, warned on May 1, “Syria has real friends in the region, and the world will not let Syria fall into the hands of America, Israel or takfiri [radical islamist] groups,” threatening in effect to turn the civil war into a regional conflict that has the potential to destabilize Turkey. And the gravest risk to the region remains the likelihood that “inherent weaknesses of state and society in Egypt reach a point where the country’s political, social and economic systems no longer function,” as Gamal Abuel Hassan wrote on May 28. Libya is fracturing, and the terrorists responsible for the September 2012 Benghazi attack are operating freely.

This is a tragic outcome, in the strict sense of the term, for it is hard to imagine how it could have turned out otherwise.

The whole essay is available here.

Dobbins is a prominent exponent of the idea that America can live with a nuclear Iran, as well as an opponent of the use of military force against Iran’s nuclear program under any conditions. Whatever the White House might be thinking, the appointment sent a signal to Iran that the military option is pure bluff.

“Obama’s AfPak envoy may embrace Iran” is the lead of today’s Asia Times Online under the byline of MK Bhadrakumar, a former Indian ambassador to Turkey. Writes Bhadrakumar:

The probability is that the United States President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry got around to reading the congressional testimony titled “Negotiating with Iran” given by Ambassador James Dobbins on the Hill on November 7, 2007, while deciding to name him as the new U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The appointment seems odd, the former Indian diplomat explains, because:

Dobbins has been an inveterate critic of Obama’s plan to reduce the US military footprint in Afghanistan. He voiced enthusiastic support for the counterinsurgency strategy [COIN] carried out by General David Petraeus and was sharply critical that the COIN was reduced to mere counterterrorist operation.

One wonders if the Republican establishment declined to object to Dobbins’ appointment because of his COIN credentials.

But there’s an explanation for Obama’s selection, Bhadrakumar adds:

Dobbins’ real credentials lie quite somewhere else than on the kinetic battlefield. Kerry made this clear while announcing the appointment. He said, “He [Dobbins] has deep and longstanding relationships in the region, … Jim will continue building on diplomatic efforts to bring the conflict to a peaceful conclusion, actively engaging with states in the region and the international community.”

Secretary Kerry was referring, evidently, to Dobbins’ “deep and longstanding relationship” with Iran.

Ethnocentrism is the snake in Christianity’s garden, and last week it slithered into the Church of Scotland. It took the form of a screed denying the special claim of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel.

By no coincidence, the most successful Christian communities embrace the State of Israel, while the least successful ones abhor it. Almost four-fifths of Americans identify themselves as Christians, for example and two out of five worship every week. Less than two-fifths of Britons say they believe in God, by contrast, and only one out of eight attends weekly services. More than half of Britons never go to church, against only 18% of Americans.
This division is mirrored in attitudes towards the State of Israel. By a margin of nearly five to one, Americans say their sympathies are more with Israel than with the Palestinians, and the proportion is at an all-time high. Britons view Israel negatively by a margin of 65 to 17, and the numbers are similar across the European continent, according to a BBC poll.

We observe eruptions of unabashed Jew-hatred in the European nations most likely to become extinct, notably in Hungary, where the ethnic Hungarian total fertility rate is just 0.83 per female, barely a third of the replacement rate. The third-largest party in the Hungarian parliament, Jobbik, wants to list all Jewish officials of Jewish origin as a national security risk and blames the country’s economic problems on a “Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy”. The party demonstrated on May 5 in Budapest to denounce the World Jewish Congress, which held its annual meeting in the Hungarian capital.

Hungary’s demographic disaster and Jobbik’s Jew-hatred are extreme cases, to be sure, but existentially challenged nationalities elsewhere in Europe evince a special animus against Jews and the Jewish State. Last week the Church of Scotland issued a report rejecting the notion that the Jewish people had any special claim on the Land of Israel, excoriating Zionism in general and the actions of past and present Israeli governments.

Both the Church of Scotland, the bearer of the Scots Calvinist tradition, and the country itself are a shadow of their former selves. The number of births per year has fallen by half since 1950 (and the number of births to married couples has fallen by four-fifths).

The Church of Scotland is shrinking; it had just 446,000 members in 2010, down from 1,319,000 in 1956. Its numbers shrunk by a quarter between 2001 and 2010, and are now shrinking even faster, by about 5% a year. At this rate its membership will fall by three-quarters in a generation.

Live Births Per Year in Scotland

UK Statistics Office

If we had some Scots, we would still have Scots Presbyterians, if we had some Presbyterians. That is a sad end to a great religious tradition that, among other things, fostered Christian Zionism. It may well have been a Kirk minister, notes the Church of Scotland report, who coined the phrase “a land without people, for a people without land”, referring to Jewish settlement of the then-sparsely populated Land of Israel at the end of the 19th century.

With the specter of disappearance visible at the horizon of a single generation, why is the Church of Scotland so concerned about the Jews’ claim on their historic homeland? One would think it had more urgent concerns. Its report, “The Inheritance of Abraham?,” is a junkyard dog’s assemblage of arguments against a special Jewish claim to the land.

The borders specified by the Bible are not the exact borders of the present state; even if they were, “The lack of detailed archaeological evidence supports the view that the range of scriptural material makes it inappropriate to try to use the Hebrew scriptures to determine an area of land meant exclusively for the Jewish people”; even if there were such evidence, the biblical grant of the land is conditional on a standard of behavior which the Church of Scotland doesn’t think Israel meets; even if the original Zionist concept was valid, it called for equal treatment of all of Israel’s citizens, and the Church of Scotland thinks Palestinian Arabs are badly treated, and so forth. It reads as if the presbyters had conducted a contest for the best excuse to turn the Jews out of Israel, and printed all the responses.

Christian friends from the Reformed tradition in America point to a specific bee in the Church of Scotland’s bonnet, namely the autumnal resurgence of Scots nationalism. The Scottish National Party, the region’s largest, launched a campaign for Scots independence from the United Kingdom in May 2012, with prominent support from Sean Connery and other celebrities. Patriotism might not be the last refuge of a scoundrel, as Dr Johnson said, but tribalism surely is the last refuge of an existentially challenged ethnicity.

As a regional entity clamoring for national status, Scotland imagines itself in a position similar to the Palestinian Arabs and identifies with them. The Irish tend to sympathize with the Palestinians out of the same misplaced nostalgia. Some Catholics conflate the problems of the poor with the misery of the Palestinians, for example Honduras’ Cardinal Andres Rodriguez Murcielago.

There is a great deal of wisdom in this observation: each nation views the other nations through the carnival-mirror of its own preoccupations. But there may be something deeper to the Church of Scotland’s newfound obsession with repudiating the Jews’ claim to the Land of Israel. It denounces Christian Zionism, which it defines (quoting an Arab Christian) as “a movement within Protestant fundamentalism that understands the modern state of Israel as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy and thus deserving of political, financial and religious support.”

That is a canard, for many Christians who could not possibly be characterized as fundamentalists understand Israel in biblical terms.

“Hardly anybody will dispute that the foundation of this state had something to do with the biblical prophecy,” the principal author of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Christoph Cardinal Schonborn said in 1996. No-one would characterize Cardinal Schonborn as a Protestant fundamentalist.

Like so many other European nations, the Scots are failing as Christians while they fail as a people. Failing Christians cling all the more passionately to their national identity. Writing at the end of World War I, the great German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig depicted this tragic frame of mind as follows:

Just as every individual must reckon with his eventual death, the peoples of the world foresee their eventual extinction, be it however distant in time. Indeed, the love of the peoples for their own peoplehood is sweet and pregnant with the presentiment of death. Love is only surpassing sweet when it is directed toward a mortal object, and the secret of this ultimate sweetness only is defined by the bitterness of death. Thus the peoples of the world foresee a time when their land with its rivers and mountains still lies under heaven as it does today, but other people dwell there; when their language is entombed in books, and their laws and customers have lost their living power.

Nationalism is the mortal enemy of Christian faith. Michael Wyschogrod, one of Orthodox Judaism’s great theologians, explained it as follows:

As understood by Christianity, a model of dual loyalty develops. The individual belongs both to a nation and to a religion. He is a Frenchman and a Christian or a German and a Christian. As Frenchman or German, he is a member of a national community with territorial and linguistic boundaries. But he is also a member of the supra-national church which has no national boundaries. … The church is a spiritual fellowship into which men bring their national identities because they possess these identities but not because such identities play a role in the church. The church thus understands itself as having universalized the national election of Israel by opening it to all men who, in entering the church, enter a spiritualized, universalized new Israel.

In one sense, Israel is beyond the “laws” of history. It is not subject to the rise and fall of all other peoples and empires, a fact which causes angry philosophers of history whose schemes Israel undermines to refer to it as a fossil not subject to historic destruction.

But at the same time, Israel does not abandon the domain of history. It refuses to exchange its historical and national messianism for a doctrine of individual salvation. Israel refuses to invent the idea of a church which forces men to live in two jurisdictions and to assume two identities: a member of a nation and a member of a church. When such a bifurcated existence is decreed for human life, European wars in which Christian fights Christian, not as Christian but as German, Frenchman or Pole, become possible. That such a church-sanctioned conflict was the rule rather than the exception in the history of Europe was not simply the result of a failure of Christianity. Once religion and nationality are separated, the historical order in which national destinies are realized is almost inevitably de-Christianized.

The nations of Europe stopped having children because they lost their Christian faith (as Mary Eberstadt argues in a brilliant new book, How the West Really Lost God, they also lost their faith because they stopped having children). As Christianity sloughs off the declining peoples of the West, some of them cling instead to ethnic identity. Rosenzweig wrote that once Christianity taught the Gentiles the Hebrew promise of eternal life, they abandoned their ancient fatalism about the inevitable extinction of their tribe.

“Salvation is of the Jews,” said St John: the God of Israel first offers eternal life to humankind. But the newly converted never abandoned their predilection for their own ethnicity. After Christianity taught them about the election of Israel, the Gentiles wanted the same kind election for themselves. In some cases that can lead to philo-Semitism – for example, among the Scots Calvinists of the past century. In other cases it leads to what one might call Election envy, Jew-hatred inspired by jealousy.

What makes America unique, an “almost-chosen people” in Abraham Lincoln’s quip, is the absence of ethnicity. As a nation founded on a covenant rather than an ethnicity it absorbs folk from every ethnicity, and despite the sin of slavery and ugly episodes of racism and xenophobia, America remains less polluted by the original sin of ethnic hatred than any land on earth. That helps explain why Americans instinctively sympathize with the State of Israel.

Asked why they support Israel, most devout American Christians will cite Genesis 12:3: “And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.” Many will add that the perseverance of the Jewish people despite persecution and hardship shows that the God of the Bible is a God of kept promises, and that God’s faithfulness to the Jews stands surety for His promises to the Christians as well.

As a Jew, I do not tell my Christian friends how to read the Bible (although it is always instructive to compare notes). But there is something else on which we can agree. Every Christian knows that each day, battle is joined afresh against an inner pagan. That is what Christians mean when they say that they must renew their conversion each day.

The inner pagan is not an abstract entity: it is the residual of the nation out of which the Christians believe they were called to theEkklesia/I>, what Eusebius (quoted by Henri de Lubac) called “the tribe of Christians.”

The national life of the Jewish people in its historic homeland stands guard as it were on the flanks of Christianity. The Election of Israel keeps the snake out of Christianity’s garden. Christians who tire of the demands of Christianity and prefer to worship their own ethnicity will rage against the Jewish people as an obstacle to idolatry, while the most devout and self-confident Christians view the continued presence of God’s people as a blessing.

There’s only one way to cut the Gordian Knot of regional conflict in the Middle East, and that is to de-fang Iran–destroy its capacity to make nuclear weapons and destroy the bases of the Revolutionary Guard.

Israel’s reported strike on a stockpile of Iranian missiles near Damascus overnight highlights the extent of Iran’s military presence in Syria. We do not (and will not) know the details, but the series of fireballs that “turned day into night” around the Syrian capital, as one observer told news media, make clear that an enormous amount of ordnance was in place. It was no secret that the Assad regime now depends on Iran and its cat’s paw Hezbollah. Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah declared April 30 that Syria’s civil war had become a regional conflict: “Syria has real friends in the region and the world that will not let Syria fall in the hands of America, Israel or Takfiri (extreme jihadi) groups,” Nasrallah said in a broadcast on Hezbollah’s al-Manar TV channel. “How will this happen? Details will come later. I say this based on information … rather than wishful thinking.”

Israel’s head of military intelligence, Gen. Aviv Kochavi, warned in March that Iran and Hezbollah already had built an army of 50,000 in Syria and planned to double its size. Syria had an estimated 220,000 regular soldiers in 2010, but probably can field less than half that number today; at a prospective strength of 100,000, the Iranian-Hezbollah force would become the dominant military power in Syria, in effect an army of occupation.

The events of the past eighteen hours make clear that Iran intends to use Syria as a base for missile attacks on Israel. The Iranian Fateh-110 missiles can deliver a 1,500 lb. warhead accurately at a distance of 300 km (Tel Aviv is 214 km from Damascus). Iranian Revolutionary Guards launching missiles at Israeli cities from Syria represents a much greater threat to Israel than Hezbollah in southern Lebanon does. Hezbollah is vulnerable to Israeli retaliation; the Iranians don’t care how much Israel might retaliate against their Syrian hosts. Israel had to degrade Iran’s missile capability in Syria. By the end of July 2006, about half of Lebanon’s 1.2 million Shia had fled their homes in the face of Israel’s incursion into the south of the country. Most went to Syria. Things are different now: Syrians are fleeing into Lebanon. A repeat of Israel’s 2006 attack would have catastrophic impact on Hezbollah’s Shia base, which has nowhere to run. And the Israelis, if they are forced back into Lebanon, will not deal with Hezbollah as gingerly as did the Olmert government in 2006.

Just after Obama’s re-election we heard Republican leaders explain that Obama had just gotten lucky — the economy was in the recovery phase of a normal business cycle, and Obama caught the right wave. As the stock market rallied through the first four months of 2013 and regained its old peak, the story seemed credible — until a couple of weeks ago, that is.

We’ve had one depressing economic report after another. Employment is barely growing, according to the ADP survey, which showed just 119,000 new jobs created in April and 118,000 in May. The April purchasing managers’ index for manufacturing fell sharply from 54.6 to 52.1 (50 is dead in the water).

The Shadow Government Statistics website calculates the true unemployment rate — the proportion of the working-age population that can work but doesn’t — at 23%. That includes so-called “long-term discouraged workers” not included in the labor force. Even the government’s own broad measure of unemployment still stands at almost 15%, twice the pre-crisis level.

On a GDP basis, the economy grew at an 0.8% rate in the fourth quarter of 2012 and at a 2.5% in the first quarter. That’s just 1.5% without counting inventories. Investment in industrial equipment actually fell during the quarter. It’s an economy that is flying barely above stall speed.

No, Obama didn’t win re-election because the vote happened to occur at the cusp of a normal business cycle recovery. The economy really is that bad. So is Obama. Sadly, so was the Republican ticket.

Why is the economy so bad? According to the usual chatter, it’s because payroll taxes went up and took $140 billion out of personal income during the first quarter. But another big category of personal income — receipts on assets — fell by $125 billion, a hit to personal income almost as big as payroll taxes. And almost all of that was due to lower dividends. It turns out that companies are paying a lot less cash out to stockholders. The S&P 500 dividend per share fell from about $9 to about $8 during the first quarter, and the GDP data indicate that drop occurred throughout the corporate world.

Another sign of economic weakness is that the sales of S&P 500 companies fell by 5% during the quarter. Profits per share, though, were higher. How is the stock market managing to levitate above a busted economy, where the sales growth of top companies can’t even keep up with nominal GDP? Part of the reason is leverage.

The intertwined histories of music and mathematics offer a clue. The same faculty of the mind we evoke playfully in music, we put to work analytically in higher mathematics. By higher mathematics, I mean calculus and beyond. Only a tenth of American high school students study calculus, and a considerably smaller fraction really learn the subject. There is quite a difference between learning the rules of Euclidean geometry or the solution of algebraic equations: the notion that the terms of a convergent infinite series sum up to a finite number requires a different kind of thinking than elementary mathematics. The same kind of thinking applies to playing classical music. Don’t look for a mathematical formula to make sense of music: what higher mathematics and classical music have in common is not an algorithm, but a similar demand on the mind. Don’t expect the brain scientists to show just how the neurons flicker any time soon. The best music evokes paradoxes still at the frontiers of mathematics.

In an essay for First Things entitled “The Divine Music of Mathematics,” just released from behind the pay wall, I show that the first intimation of higher-order numbers in mathematics in Western thought comes from St. Augustine’s 5th-century treatise on music. Our ability to perceive complex and altered rhythms in poetry and music, the Church father argued, requires “numbers of the intellect” which stand above the ordinary numbers of perception. A red thread connects Augustine’s concept with the discovery of irrational numbers in the 15th century and the invention of the calculus in the 17th century. The common thread is the mind’s engagement with the paradox of the infinite. The mathematical issues raised by Augustine and debated through the Renaissance and the 17th-century scientific revolution remain unsolved in some key respects.