THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Wednesday, March 11, 2020 |A
Requiem
ForaDream
Pravda Ha Ha
By Rory MacLean
(Bloomsbury, 343 pages, $27)BOOKSHELF| By Andrew Stuttaford
T
here are, remarkably, people who still believe that history
has a “right side”—and Britain-based travel writer Rory
MacLean, with his “firm and unwavering belief in the
promise of the future,” is one of them. Intriguing, informative
and infuriating, Mr. MacLean’s latest work, “Pravda Ha Ha: True
Travels to the End of Europe,” is something of a return, literally
and figuratively, to the ground covered in his beautifully written
first book, “Stalin’s Nose” (1992), an account of a trip around
Eastern Europe during that exhilarating interlude between the
fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Readable and often grimly entertaining, “Pravda Ha Ha”
demonstrates that Mr. MacLean has not lost his eye for absurdity
(a zoo in the yard of a prison ministry in Transnistria, a “republic”
that the world prefers to pretend does not exist), a good story
(wild times with a Russian chicken czar!) or a revealing detail
(in “Russia’s military Disneyland” there is a replica of the Reich-
stag, built so that Vladimir Putin’s cadets have a place to prac-
tice their assault techniques). Yet “Pravda Ha Ha” has less of the
subtlety that marked Mr. MacLean’s long-ago debut, a shortfall
that extends into occasionally
clumsy prose (“The Kremlin’s
teeth-like crenellations took a
bite out of the firmament”).
Perhaps the spirit in which the
book was written should bear
some blame. Beneath its sporad-
ically surreal veneer, “Stalin’s
Nose” was a profound meditation
on how the Soviet retreat had
opened up, if unevenly, not only
the futures of the nations of the old
bloc but also their long suppressed
pasts—pasts that, once unleashed,
would shape the years to come in
darker ways than Mr. MacLean had antici-
pated. But it’s difficult to blame him. “Stalin’s
Nose” was, fundamentally, an optimistic book. Given the change
from what had gone before, how could it not have been?
“Pravda Ha Ha,” by contrast, sets out to explain what is now
going wrong. The “end of Europe” in this book’s subtitle does
not refer only to the continent’s eastern periphery. After the
Berlin Wall fell, Mr. MacLean had “danced with so many others
on the grave of dictatorships,” but the recent turn of events
across Europe, from Russia to that Brexiting island just off the
mainland, has led him to dread what lies ahead. As Mr. MacLean
retraces his earlier journey (but backwards, from east to west,
from Moscow to London), he hears “the echo of marching
boots”—a symptom, mainly, of his bleak mood. Still, it’s
hard to miss that echo while reading the author’s tales of
Putin’s “troll state” or his report of a visit to Dnipro, Ukraine,
“a hundred miles from the Donbas battlefield.”
Disillusion is generally a better guide than hope, but when
disillusion is, if only partly, the product of a continuing
illusion—in this case, a vision of “Europe” to which Mr. Mac-
Lean is still in thrall—that is not necessarily so. Mr. MacLean
concludes “Pravda Ha Ha” with the claim that defining where
“Europe” ends is not a question of geography but “far more a
question of culture and morality, a matter of principles. It’s
the point where antique forms of identity clash with
modernity, where tolerance, decency and a certain way of
thinking end, where openness meets a wall.” But Mr. Mac-
Lean’s notion of “modernity” is no more than a declaration of
faith. He may have once “dared to imagine the end of the
nation state,” but many more wished to rebuild or preserve it.Regardless, the EU’s leaders—convinced, like Mr. MacLean,
that both righteousness and history are on their side—have
pushed “ever closer union” too far and too fast. In so doing,
they have helped provoke the reaction that is making a
mockery of Mr. MacLean’s European dream.
Failing to acknowledge how the EU has been its own worst
enemy leads Mr. MacLean astray as he searches for enemies
elsewhere. He exaggerates the effect of Russian efforts to
“undermine European unity” (though these are real enough).
At the same time, the author downplays the extent to which the
EU’s insistence on “unity”—on issues ranging from immigration
to the launch of the euro (the latter an initiative based on
politics rather than economics, with predictably catastrophic
consequences)—has become a force for destabilization within
its member states. The Kremlin has tried to exploit this
destabilization by lending a helping hand to European populists
of both left and right, although to what extent and with what
success remains as controversial as it is murky.
Mr. MacLean’s distaste for “antique forms of identity”
emerges as he chats to a lieutenant colonel from a nation—
Estonia—that has hung on to just such an identity against
overwhelming odds. Possibly relying on Estonians’ reputation
for calm, he asserts that the idea of “the individual identifying
with the nation [is]...adated,dreamyconcept.” To the
lieutenant colonel, “national identity is the myth that built
the modern world.” Mr. MacLean agrees, with the tactfully
qualified proviso that “in larger nations it’s mostly made up.”
Mr. MacLean does accept that “the myth of a nation” can
bond people together, but he contends that this myth deludes
as it does so, priming “for patriotism yet also for racism,
xenophobia and even genocide.” This is a distinctly partial view,
in both senses of that word, of nationhood—and what it can
achieve. After all, what preceded the nation-state was nasty,
brutish and prolonged. The most sustained attempt to replace it,
in the name of communism’s heaven on earth, led to the
destruction of tens of millions of lives, a horror Mr. MacLean
portrays powerfully, yet somehow without connecting the dots.
Despite such sins of omission, Mr. MacLean has an acute
grasp how a people’s history can be rewritten to reshape its
future—even if, interestingly, he has nothing to say about the
ways in which EU’s cheerleaders distort Europe’s past. His
examples range from a (brutally and brilliantly described)
Russia, an imperium of lies that sanitizes Stalin, to a Poland
where a battle is fought over a war museum deemed insuffi-
ciently patriotic by an incoming government of the nationalist-
populist right. That this government has got away with some
disconcertingly authoritarian moves surprises him. Then
again, he refers the Poles’ decision to vote PiS, “the so-called
Law and Justice Party,” into office as a choice for “the nation—
a more primitive form of collective identity.” When he con-
trasts this with what, swigging the Kool-Aid, he dubs “Europe’s
postmodern vision of community,” his choice of words suggests
we should be less surprised than Mr. MacLean appears to be.Mr. Stuttaford, who writes frequently for the Journal, has
worked for many years in the international financial markets.A travel writer’s encounters in the post-
Soviet sphere—and an elegy for a vision
of Europe that no longer seems realistic.My Daughter Is Driven to Learn Civics
I
t’s a half-hour drive to
Clara’s school. That’s 30
minutes trapped in the car
every morning with me, her
politically minded dad. I’ve
started to think of our daily
ride as the oldest established
permanent rolling civics lesson
in New York.
Clara’s about to turn 16.
She’s waking up to a world
saturated by politics. While
most of her day is still dedi-
cated to Latin homework and
javelina memes, she’s lately
taken an interest in the news-
papers splayed out on the
kitchen table. I see her scan-
ning election-year headlines as
she scarfs her cereal.
“Bloomberg dropped out?”
The news is right there on the
page, but she asks anyway. It’s
almost like it isn’t true until
dad confirms it. How much
longer will that last? I nod
sagely and sip my coffee.
“Wow,” she says. “He spent
all that and got nothing?”
“No, not nothing. He won
American Samoa.”
Clara rolls her eyes in the
16-year-old way.
“Hey, that’s something,” I
say.
“No it’s not,” she says, turn-
ing the page. She may be
young, but she gets it.In the car we turn on the
radio. The talk is of coronavi-
rus. Who botched the re-
sponse? Who deserves blame?
The announcer says that one
person got sick after driving a
neighbor to the hospital.
“I don’t see how you can
blame the president or the
governor or whatever,” Clara
says. “If your neighbor asks
you for a ride to the hospital,
are you going to say no?” Like
I said, she gets it.There are other topics, hot-
ter ones: war, guns, free
speech, abortion. If I hear my-
self starting to preach, I hit
the brakes (the figurative
ones). One day she’ll be grown
and I’ll be gone. The last thing
I want to be remembered for is
sermonizing about politics.
Still, some osmosis is hap-
pening. She’s started noticing
a teeny hint of bias in a certain
paper’s coverage of certain is-
sues. She points out skewed
headlines and photos meant to
embarrass or demean people
who hold outré views.
What do you expect? She’s
the daughter of a conservative
opinion editor. These are the
factory defaults.
My own parents set a good
example in this regard. They
had their politics, but they
raised me the way I want to
raise Clara. Nobody’s right all
the time, they told me. Try to
be fair to the other side by
looking at an argument from
that side’s point of view. Party
affiliation doesn’t tell you any-thing useful about a person’s
character.
“Say what you want about
this country,” my dad often re-
marked before doing just that.
“But it still beats the alterna-
tive.”
I’m trying to be fair-minded
in my morning chats with
Clara. I want her to under-
stand how the world works. I
want her to develop an under-
standing of the American po-
litical system’s strengths and
weaknesses. I want her to be
able to sniff out a lie. I try not
to put my finger too heavily on
the scale.
What I don’t want is her
walking around school pontifi-
cating: “My dad says free
trade is fair trade” or “My dad
says true capitalism has never
been tried.” The only thing
worse than a teenage eye roll
is a teenage parrot. And half a
billion down the drain.Mr. Hennessey is the Jour-
nal’s deputy editorial features
editor.By Matthew Hennessey
We talk politics in
thecar.Itrynotto
lay it on too thick.OPINION
Not for the
first time,
let’s wonder
how much
Vladimir Pu-
tin and
Crown Prince
Mohammed
bin Salman
really know
what they’re
doing.
Oil has crashed to $35 a bar-
rel thanks to a sudden feud be-
tween Russia and Saudi Arabia,
which comes amid the Covid-
shock to the global economy.
The upshot could bankrupt a
lot of U.S. shale companies, if
that’s either man’s thinking.
But their equipment would
survive, the drilling rights
would survive. Employees
would retain their skills. All
would end up in hands of lend-
ers who have every incentive
to preserve value and keep ap-
plying technology to lower the
price at which operations be-
come profitable again.
The U.S. has deep pools of
entrepreneurial capital. It has
highly sophisticated private
equity that can scoop up bar-
gains and bring assets back
into play in a way that, as has
been happening for a decade,
tends to cap any cyclical re-
bound in oil prices that the
Saudis and Russians may be
hoping for.
More important, the U.S.
may be the world’s biggest
producer but oil is a tiny
share of its economy. What
America loses in terms of oil-
industry wages and profits it
gains in lower gas prices for
Let Putin and MBS Both Lose
consumers and energy costs
for downstream industries.
Plus our political system at all
levels is geared to assuage un-
happiness from dislocated in-
dustries. We have a national
election coming up in which
bums can be thrown out and
new bums installed.
The strongmen’s despera-
tion is understandable but
nothing else about their feud
is: Saudi Arabia and Russia
have zilch to offer the world
except oil and gas. Their polit-
ical systems are poorly de-
signed to handle the shocks
coming their way. Russia
needs an estimated price of
$50 a barrel to keep its budget
afloat given limited borrowing
options under sanctions, and
that $50 price hardly sustains
the millions of Russians not
directly on the government’s
payroll.
Saudi Arabia is said to have
the world’s lowest production
costs—$3 a barrel—if costs are
construed narrowly. But throw
in the subsidies habitually re-
quired to keep restive princes
and social classes in line and
the Saudi government needs
$90 to sustain the political
model it has foisted on itself.
MBS’s role at least can be
explained: His legitimacy is
obviously in question judging
from this weekend’s arrests of
members of the royal family
amid accusations of a coup
plot. To be seen surrendering
the Saudis’ role as price leader
to the Kremlin right now
would hardly strengthen his
claim to the throne he wants
to inherit from his father.Mr. Putin rode an oil boom
to power 20 years ago but
the degree to which he has
mastered the energy politics
of even his own country is
debatable. He has often
seemed at a loss and fearful
of taking sides in oligarchic
disputes, even when they
threatened his carefully pre-
pared come-hither to West-
ern oil companies such as
Shell and BP. His crushing ofYukos and its impresario in
2003 took care of a personal
threat from a democracy pro-
moter but also began the
slow strangulation of ties
with the West, which has
been costly to him and his
cronies. It took only a flick of
Donald Trump’s finger re-
cently to scuttle Mr. Putin’s
precious Nord Stream 2 pipe-
line as it neared completion.
No part of Mr. Putin’s plan
was provoking an oil price
collapse on the eve of Tues-
day’s carefully scripted parlia-
mentary kabuki. Valentina Te-
reshkova, an 83-year-old
lawmaker and throwback to
the glory days of the Soviet
Union as the country’s first
female cosmonaut, proposed a
constitutional change to let
Mr. Putin serve in de facto
perpetuity.“The president is the guar-
antor of the constitution,” said
Mr. Putin in a speech accept-
ing the idea, his sentence
structure apparently confusing
subject and object.
These changes must pass a
Russian court in a system
where judges are beholden to
Mr. Putin, and a plebiscite that
may test even Mr. Putin’s
highly accomplished election
rigging. His popularity has
been eroding in polls of voters
who don’t kid themselves that
their phone calls aren’t moni-
tored. A heavy ding to oil reve-
nues that account for 30% of
gross domestic product will not
improve his standing. Remind
yourself what it was about the
2014 Ukrainian revolution that
so threatened Mr. Putin: a post-
Soviet public standing up
against a corrupt and impover-
ishing dictatorship.
Enthusiasts for free trade
and free flow of people, whom
Mr. Trump sometimes derides
as globalists, cherished the
idea of a planet growing richer
and freer together. Some of us
still do.
But, ironically, it’s the au-
thoritarian states that are
most hurt by the retreat.
China is dependent on the
world to absorb its superfluity
of manufactured goods. Russia
and Saudi Arabia are economic
pygmies that need a fast-
growing global economy to
buy their oil. A retrenching
world would be less prosper-
ous and harmonious but in
such a world you would also
rather be the United States
than anybody else.The American shale
industry will almost
certainly outlive
either man’s rule.BUSINESS
WORLD
By Holman W.
Jenkins, Jr.
Unexpected
crises should
forceusto
rethink our
premises. As I
was reflecting
on the eco-
nomic conse-
quences of
Covid-19, a
thought
struck me:
What if the relentless pursuit
of efficiency, which has domi-
nated American business
thinking for decades, has
made the global economic
system more vulnerable to
shocks?
As is almost always the
case, further research re-
vealed that my question is
anything but original. Envi-
ronmentalists, management
gurus and a few economists
all have explored the inevita-
ble trade-off between effi-
ciency and resilience.
Consider the example of-
fered by Roger L. Martin in
the Harvard Business Review.
Almonds once were grown in
many places. But because
some locations were better
than others, and economies
of scale were considerable,
consolidation occurred. As
the process continued, Cali-
fornia’s Central Valley won
out, and today more than 80%
of the world’s almonds are
produced there.
Although this is the most
efficient distribution of pro-
duction, Mr. Martin says, it
has a major drawback: “The
almond industry designed
away its redundancies, or
slack, and in the process it
lost the insurance that redun-
dancy provides. One extreme
Efficiency Isn’t the Only Economic Virtue
local weather event or one
pernicious virus could wipe
out most of the world’s pro-
duction.” As efficiency in-
creased, resilience declined.
This trade-off is unavoid-
able. Efficiency comes
through optimal adaptation
to an existing environment,
while resilience requires the
capacity to adapt to disrup-
tive changes in the environ-
ment. As Mr. Martin puts it,
“Resilient systems are typi-
cally characterized by the
very features—diversity and
redundancy, or slack—that ef-
ficiency seeks to destroy.”
Creating resilient systems
means thinking hard in ad-
vance about what could go
wrong and incorporating ef-
fective countermeasures into
designs. When you build an
airplane, you don’t assume
that pilots will get it right ev-
ery time. You do your best to
ensure that a pilot’s subopti-
mal choices under pressure
don’t result in catastrophic
failure.
It also involves creating
mechanisms to address threats
that even the best minds could
not envision in advance. This
is why it was a good idea for
the Obama administration to
set up “a permanent monitor-
ing and command group” at
the Department of Homeland
Security and another at the
National Security Council to
coordinate a whole-of-govern-
ment response to future pan-
demics—and why it was such
a bad idea for President
Trump to dissolve both units
in 2018. Inventing new com-
mand-and-control systems
amid a burgeoning crisis isn’t
easy.The tension between effi-
ciency and resilience is ubiq-
uitous. Much of modern
business depends on air
travel, which also speeds the
spread of infectious diseases.
Just-in-time production
techniques minimize inven-
tory inefficiencies. But they
render businesses more vul-
nerable to supply disrup-
tions. So do product designs
that depend on sourcing
parts across global supply
chains.These considerations have
broader implications for the
process of globalization that
has reshaped the world econ-
omy in recent decades. China
is now the world’s largest
manufacturer of the active
pharmaceutical ingredients
that give drugs their thera-
peutic effects. Food and Drug
Commissioner Stephen Hahn
said last month that the
coronavirus epidemic had in-
terrupted imports of an un-
named generic drug and that
China’s production problems
had heightened the risk of
shortages of “critical medical
products” in the U.S.
In a prescient statement
last July, a Pentagon official
deemed China’s dominance of
the drug-supply chain a na-
tional-security challenge.
Last October a Food and
Drug Administration officialtold Congress that because
of the opaque complexity of
the drug-supply chain, “we
cannot determine with any
precision the volume of [ac-
tive pharmaceutical ingredi-
ents] that China is actually
producing, or the volume...
entering the U.S. market.”
Resilience in the face of
unexpected shocks is a public
good, and experience is con-
firming what economic
theory predicts: In the relent-
less quest for increased effi-
ciency, which remains a key
source of competitive advan-
tage, the decisions made by
individual market actors will
produce, in the aggregate, a
less-than-optimal supply of
resiliency, a public good. To
solve this collective-action
problem, government must
act as a counterweight.
Government action entails
risks of its own, of course.
Government can go too far
and make poor choices. Not
long ago the Trump adminis-
tration unwisely declared
shrinking domestic steel pro-
duction to be a national
emergency. Today’s interrup-
tion of drug supplies from
China is a much greater secu-
rity threat.
An autarkic economy
makes no more sense than an
economy fully open to global
forces. The challenge is to
strike a sensible balance be-
tween efficiency and resil-
ience, which we won’t get un-
less the current crisis
triggers a long-overdue de-
bate on globalization and
national security. This time
we were taken by surprise.
Next time we’ll have no such
excuse.It often comes at the
expense of resilience,
as the new coronavirus
is making clear.POLITICS
& IDEAS
By William
A. Galston