The New York Times International - 01.08.2019

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION THURSDAY, AUGUST 1, 2019 | 11

of Defense proudly announced that the missile, once released by a rocket, glides at 27 times the speed of sound and is capable of horizontal and verti- cal evasive maneuvers. It flies “like a fireball,” said Mr. Putin. Well, of course Avangard has a really hot re-entry speed. But so does any other ballistic warhead. And yes, Avangard is capable of maneuvering, since it’s fitted with winglets. But that’s actually a very old idea — to fit a ballistic rocket with wings so it will be capable of atmospheric maneuvering. It was first tried in 1944 by Wernher von Braun with some of his Nazi V- rockets. It’s a dead end. At extreme speed, and with a warhead on a ballistic re-entry course, whatever you gain in maneuverability, you lose in preci- sion. It goes without saying that Avan- gard is capable of striking United States territory, and that it can’t be successfully intercepted. But so what? That’s true of any Russian I.C.B.M. Another of Mr. Putin’s wunderwaffes is the Zirkon missile, a hypersonic ship killer with a 250-mile range. It’s hard to say what it’s like: Every time Rus- sian officials boast about it, they post a photo of America’s hypersonic Boeing X52 Waverider. A hypersonic ship killer hurtling at eight times the speed of sound cer- tainly looks impressive in video games. But the harsh reality of a high-tech war is a tad different. Traditionally, there have been two different approaches to ship killers. The United States Navy opted for its slow, subsonic, sea-skimming but hard-to-detect Harpoon. The Soviet Union chose supersonic missiles. It was really good at pro- ducing scramjets and ramjets. In fact, that was one of the few fields where the Soviets were at the top of the game. The first-ever ramjet — a jet engine that doesn’t need a turbine and a com- pressor, relying on the sheer volume of air pushed through it by the speed it develops — was Nazi Germany’s V- “buzz bomb” that was employed to terrify the British in World War II, but only heightened their resolve. It was launched from a rail at a speed of about 370 miles per hour. After that war the Soviets acquired some of Hitler’s V-1s and V-2s and they were developed further by a bureau headed by Vladimir Chelomey. Mr. Chelomey wasn’t quite successful as a

designer until he employed an engineer, Sergei Khrushchev — a capable engineer, but what is more important, the son of the Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev. This gave Mr. Chelomey unlimited access to resources and resulted in the creation of some genuinely outstanding pieces of military technology. Soviet supersonic KUB surface-to-air missiles played an enormous part in the initial stages of the 1973 Israeli-Arab war, and the Onyx supersonic antiship missile was a genuine marvel. At the final stage of its flight it skimmed the water at 40 to 50 feet, far higher than its American counterpart but still enough to avoid detection. Despite all these successes, the Soviet Union never went for a hypersonic ship killer. The reason was sim- ple. Because of the extreme heat gen- erated by hypersonic flight, the missile wouldn’t be able to fly lower than 25 miles up, making it a sitting duck for interceptor missiles. It’s true that such a missile is fast, but remember that it’s a scramjet, with huge, big, nasty air intakes, on which it depends to keep aloft. Any deviation

from its course, especially at low alti- tudes, can wreak havoc with the air- flow. In other words, it’s not maneuver- able at any altitude, and is especially in danger of crashing if flying low. The Soviet Union chose not to manu- facture supersonic ship killers not because manufacturing them was impossible, but because they would be useless. They’re great stuff for a com- puter game. Not so great for real-world engineering. So this brings us back to our main topic. Almost all military hardware Mr. Putin is boasting about harks back to Soviet times. When the projects proved to be dead ends, the products were rejected even by the Soviet military — not because they were too advanced to create, but because they were not functional. The Soviet war chest was full of monstrous projects that were always top secret, whether they were feasible or not. That’s what Mr. Putin is capital- izing on — and what his generals are feeding him. Sometimes they just exaggerate, as with the S-400. But as often as not they take top secret Soviet failures and try to rehash them as public relations successes.

YULIA LATYNINAis a Russian journalist with Echo of Moscow, a commercial radio station, and Novaya Gazeta, an independent Russian newspaper.

Everything old is new again in Russia

Almost all military hardware Mr. Putin is boasting about harks back to Soviet times.

Russian S-400 Triumf anti-aircraft missile systems on combat duty in the Kaliningrad Region, in March. Russia deployed them back in 2007, but testing took 11 more years.

VITALY NEVAR\TASS, VIA GETTY IMAGES

LATYNINA,FROM PAGE

In recent years, the debate surround- ing the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel over its treat- ment of Palestinians has expanded from food co-ops and university de- partment meetings to the House of Representatives. Alas, it has not im- proved in clarity — if anything, this latest round shows that for both sides, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement today has very little to do with the movement’s original goals. Last week, the House voted 398 to 17 to support a bill denouncing B.D.S. for allegedly promoting “principles of collective guilt, mass punishment and group isolation” vis-à-vis Israel. It was strongly supported by most main- stream Jewish organizations. It was opposed, however, by many progressives, including a number of presidential candidates, perhaps because B.D.S. supporters are often liberal and left- wing activists — the kinds of people who volunteer for presidential cam- paigns and vote in their primaries and caucuses. This isn’t the first time anti-B. D. S. legislation has come up in Congress. Politicians looking to play both sides have often abstained from such bills, claiming that they violate protesters’ freedom of speech. This time was different: After the anti-B. D. S. bill was introduced, Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat from Minnesota, offered a bill affirming the “right to participate in boycotts in pursuit of civil and human rights at home and abroad.” Though the resolution never explicit- ly mentions B.D.S., it references boycotts against “Nazi Germany from March 1933 to October 1941 in response to the dehumanization of the Jewish people in the lead-up to the Holocaust” — setting off a storm of outrage from Ms. Omar’s critics. The bill has only six co-sponsors, but they include the leg- endary civil rights leader John Lewis, and it has earned the support of both the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” J Street and the A.C.L.U. All of this makes for dramatic news coverage. But with each iteration of the B.D.S. “debate,” the underlying issues seem to recede into obscurity. Consider the way Republicans took up the issue. Republican congressional leaders Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, for example, apparently saw the B.D.S. debate as yet another cudgel with which to beat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats over the head with the

trumped-up charge of disdain for America’s Jews. Writing together in The Washington Post, they lamented that she “has let the legislation languish on her desk,” frustrating the “bipartisan group of members of Congress committed to confronting anti-Semitism.” Senator Marco Rubio went even further, attack- ing Ms. Pelosi for allowing what he called “the radical, anti-Semitic minor- ity in the Democratic Party to dictate the House floor agenda.” One reason partisans feel comfort- able using B.D.S. as a political tool is that, as a political movement, B.D.S. is insignificant. Representative Brad Sherman, the Democrat, admits: “Am I worried about the overall B.D.S. movement worldwide as an economic matter? No. As an effort to delegitimize Israel, of course.” Mr. Sherman’s candor is welcome. Recent studies have demonstrated that the B.D.S. movement has had no dis- cernible impact on Israel’s economy. And while stories continue to pop up of troublesome student protests and faculty members who refuse to write recommen- dations for study in Israel, hardly any significant American institution — govern- ment, corporate or academic — has actually signed onto the boycott. Were I a bookie, I would offer better odds on the folks waging the War on Christmas. Supporters of B.D.S. are no less slippery. Representative Omar says, “We must support an end of the occupation and seek to achieve a two-state solution.” The movement she supports, however, does not. Nowhere in the movement’s official documents is there any recognition of Israel’s right to exist within in its pre-1967 borders. Mr. McConnell and Mr. McCarthy are not wrong to remind us that “Omar Bar- ghouti, one of the movement’s co- founders, proclaimed in 2013 that ‘no Palestinian — rational Palestinian, not a sell-out Palestinian — will ever ac- cept a Jewish state in Palestine.’” If you ask even the most prominent B.D.S. supporters and leaders about their strategic vision for victory, they inevitably start talking about South Africa and the need to be “on the right side of history.” What they cannot offer is a remotely practical theory of how their movement will somehow lead to a better life for Palestinians, much less their “free Palestine, from the River to the Sea” pipe dream. Instead, B.D.S. has become a purity

test of sorts for progressives in certain corners of American society — a defin- ing part of what it means to be woke. I see it every day, in my triple role as a college professor, columnist for a left- liberal magazine and father of a college-age daughter who gives me regular reports about her school’s “Israel Apartheid Day.” From all three, I get a regular earful about the importance of B.D.S. — but I’ve learned over time that actually boycotting, divesting from and sanc- tioning Israel could not be further from most anyone’s mind, either as a threat or a goal. Like vegetarian diets and carbon- neutral living, it has become some- thing that is vital to espouse, but much less important to explain, let alone carry out. So why are so many people worried about B.D.S.? Partly, concern over the movement is driven by parents — with whom I can relate — who fear that their children are being permanently turned against Israel by their profes- sors and fellow students. The rapid growth of anti-Zionist organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace, along with calls I get from my daughter, tells me that these fears are not entirely un- founded. In turn, “pro-Israel” groups and cynical politicians exploit these fears largely for fund-raising purposes by pretending that the threat of a genuine boycott of Israel is real. Some even engage in McCarthyistic attacks on pro-Palestinian faculty members. Even among the more hon- est opponents of the movement, there are so many Jewish groups tripping over one another to “help” students oppose B.D.S. on campus these days that I would not be surprised if they were driving up the price of kosher catering. The propensity of activists on either side to try to turn B.D.S. into a litmus test is misguided at best. Both sides make a huge deal about it because neither side any longer engages with its substance. As a liberal Jew who agonizes over what this endless occupation is doing — not only to the Palestinians but also the Jews, both here and in Israel — I wish I could find a movement that actually sought to help Israel realize the folly of the self-destructive path it is currently on and simultaneously advance the cause of a peaceful state for the Palestinians. Unfortunately, I can’t find one, on either side of the B.D.S. divide.

ERIC ALTERMANis the media columnist for The Nation and a professor of Eng- lish at Brooklyn College.

Eric Alterman

Pro-B.D.S. protestors outside New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s offices after he signed anti-B.D.S. legislation in 2016.

ERIK MCGREGOR/PACIFIC PRESS, VIA LIGHTROCKET, VIA GETTY IMAGES

Is B.D.S. taken seriously?

The effort to punish Israel has symbolic value for both sides — but its substance has lost all significance.

opinion

cities — like Baltimore — haven’t shared in the progress. But the social state of urban America is vastly better than it was. On the other hand, the social state of rural America — whiterural America — is deteriorating. To the extent that there really is such a thing as Ameri- can carnage — and we are in fact seeing rising age-adjusted mortality and declining life expectancy — it’s concentrated among less-educated whites, especially in rural areas, who are suffering from a surge in “deaths of despair” from opioids, suicide and alcohol that has pushed their mortality rates above those of African-Ameri- cans. And indicators of social collapse, like the percentage of prime-age men not working, have also surged in the small town and rural areas of the “eastern heartland,” with its mostly white popu- lation. What this says to me is that the racists, and even those who claimed that there was some peculiar problem with black culture, were wrong, and the sociologist William Julius Wilson was right.

When social collapse seemed to be basically a problem for inner-city blacks, it was possible to argue that its roots lay in some unique cultural dysfunction, and quite a few commenta- tors hinted — or in some cases de- clared openly — that there was some- thing about being nonwhite that pre- disposed people toward antisocial behavior. What Wilson argued, however, was that social dysfunction was an effect, not a cause. His work, culminating in the justly celebrated book “When Work Disappears,” made the case that declining job opportunities for urban workers, rather than some underlying cultural or racial disposition, explained the decline in prime-age employment, the decline of the traditional family, and more. How might one test Wilson’s hypoth- esis? Well, you could destroy job opportunities for a number of white people, and see if they experienced a decline in propensity to work, stopped forming stable families, and so on. And sure enough, that’s exactly what has happened to parts of nonmetropolitan America effectively stranded by a changing economy.

I’m not saying that there’s some- thing wrong or inferior about the in- habitants of, say, eastern Kentucky (and no American politician would dare suggest such a thing). On the contrary: What the changing face of American social problems shows is that people are pretty much the same, whatever the color of their skin. Give them reasonable opportunities for economic and personal advancement, and they will thrive; deprive them of those opportunities, and they won’t. Which brings us back to Trump and his attack on Representative Elijah Cummings, whom he accused of repre- senting a district that is a “mess” where “no human being would want to live.” Actually, part of the district is quite affluent and well educated, and in any case, Trump is debasing his office by, in effect, asserting that some Americans don’t deserve political representation. But the real irony is that if you ask which congressional districts really are “messes” in the sense of suffering from severe social problems, many — proba- bly most — strongly supported Trump in 2016. And Trump is, of course, doing nothing to help those districts. All he has to offer is hate.

A president who thinks it’s still 1989

KRUGMAN,FROM PAGE

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The New York Times International - 01.08.2019

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