My Amazon Review of Martin Indyk's "Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy"

Metternich in the Middle East

Martin Indyk, two-time ambassador to Israel under President Clinton and special envoy to the middle east under President Obama, has written an homage to Henry Kissinger’s middle eastern diplomacy before and after the October 1973 war. Indyk quotes extensively from Kissinger’s “A World Restored,” a book I read fifty years ago, on the role of Count Metternich at the 1815 Congress of Vienna that established order in Europe for the next 100 years. To Kissinger the role of diplomacy is not so much as to establish peace, but rather to establish a stable order based upon the balance of power and legitimacy.

 

On becoming President Nixon’s national security advisor in 1969 and later Secretary of State, Kissinger’s goal for American foreign policy in the middle east was to get the Russians out of the region and to avoid a return to Israel’s pre-1967 borders. He succeeded in both of those tasks, but it took the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the statesmanship of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to make those goals a reality. Along the way U.S. forces had to go on a worldwide nuclear alert (Defcon 3) fearing a direct Russian military intervention in the region.

 

Indyk gives us a daily play-by-play of Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy in the region. First, by disengaging Israeli and Egyptian forces in the Suez Canal area and later the much more difficult negotiation involving the critical passes in the central Sinai. Similarly, Kissinger shuttled back and forth between Israel and Syria dealing with Syrian President Hafez Assad in negotiating a partial disengagement in the Golan area. Further Kissinger was not above being duplicitous by suggesting his ideas as coming directly from the parties involved and vice versa in search of a deal. Further, because Kissinger believed in hierarchy of power both the Jordanians and the Palestinians were largely frozen out of the process.

 

Not only did Kissinger understand the players, but he also understood the geography and the topography of the region to better understand the military situation on the ground. As a result, he created a step-by-step process whose results hold to this day.

 

On the way we meet such key Israeli players as Prime Ministers Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin, defense minister Moshe Dayan and he brings out the much unheralded role of Israeli ambassador to the United States, Simcha Dinitz. Indyk relied on recently declassified sources in the United States and Israel and the held numerous interviews with Henry Kissinger.

 

While reading this book one marvels at Kissinger’s stamina shuttling back and forth between Israel, Egypt, and Syria. While all of this was going on Kissinger had to deal with the Russians on nuclear issues, the fall of the Nixon presidency under the strain of Watergate and the collapse of South Vietnam. His plate was more than full.

 

Indyk learned the hard way that potential big deals in the middle east have a way of blowing up. He was directly involved with President Clinton’s proposals with Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat in 2000 which blew up into the second intifada and further he was involved with President Obama’s efforts in 2013 which went nowhere. His lesson is that a peaceful order in the middle east will come gradually in small steps and the lure of the big deal is pure chimera.

For the full Amazon URL see: Metternich in the Middle East (amazon.com)

 

 

My Amazon Review of Scott Gottlieb's "Uncontrolled Spread"

 

Continuing Ineptitude

 

Former F.D.A. commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD was one of the few people who served in the Trump Administration and left with an enhanced reputation, no mean feat. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic Dr. Gottlieb was the go-to source for accurate information which he made available through op-eds and numerous television appearances. He helped us cut through the fog of misleading information that was coming, not only from the Trump Administration, but a host of other sources.

 

To Gottlieb the “villain” of the piece was the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) The CDC royally messed up in developing test kits and prevented the commercial laboratories and medical device manufacturers from developing their own testing protocols and testing kits. That allowed the pandemic to silently spread throughout the population. Further when the time came to scale up production, the CDC’s facilities were hopelessly inadequate and along the way the CDC gave conflicting advice about the use of masks.

 

Simply put the CDC is a slow-moving risk averse academic agency. In peacetime that is the way it should be, but in the wartime of a pandemic that culture can be devastating. As I learned along time ago it is better to be approximately right early than exactly right late. In contrast the private sector response to developing vaccine in record time was absolutely extraordinary and where Gottlieb’s old F.D.A. moved with unprecedented alacrity.

 

Of course, the stunning incompetence of the Trump Administration played a leading role. The administration went from denial to grudging acceptance and President Trump refused to wear a mask, setting a very poor example. The testing procedures in the White House were woefully inadequate and that led to a super-spreader event in the form of the Amy Comey Barrett Supreme Court announcement, where Trump himself came down with COVID.

 

Gottlieb discusses the perfidy of China in withholding information on the spread of disease there. To this day we do not really know how COVID originated there. Gottlieb believes it was an accident or a lab leak at their Wuhan Labs. The one person in the White House who was blowing the whistle on China was NSC staffer Matt Pottinger.

 

Gottlieb’s policy recommendations for the future include, enhanced surveillance systems, the paying of firms to carry excess capacity in protective equipment, testing equipment and chemical reagents. So instead of stockpiling these items which tend to go stale, excess capacity would be build into the system. He also recommends an international commission similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency to regulate advanced virology labs.

 

Dr. Gottlieb’s offers up an education on viruses, governmental processes, and the public health response to a crisis. At times he gets bogged down in too much detail, but his book is well worth the read.

 

Note: I received this book as a gift.

For the full Amazon URL see: Continuing Ineptitude (amazon.com)

Wake Up Call for the Fed

This morning the BLS reported the biggest increase in year-over-year consumer prices in 30 years. The overall index increased by  a stunning 6.2% and the core index(ex food and energy) increased by 4.6%. The increases were broad based yet the housing component remains substantially understated from what is occurring in the real world. Specifically owners equivalent rent was up 3.1% and tenant paid rent was up 2.7%. Knock, knock the real world increases for both of these housing measures are now running two to three times the official rate of increases. Thus as the official index catches up to the real world measured inflation will continue to run hot. Simply put, the term "transitory" is so last year.

The bond market responded by pushing up still low interest rates by about 10-15 basis points across the yield curve. What this means is that Fed will soon accelerate its tapering process and will start to pencil in rate increase as early as next June. As we noted recently the Fed is behind the curve and the markets will not find it a pleasant experience as the Fed starts to play cach up. (See Shulmaven: The Fed and the High-Pressure Economy  and  Shulmaven: Too Complacent about Inflation ) Further it is making less and less sense for the Biden Administration to push its already expansionist fiscal policy with its $1.75 Trillion Build Back Better social programs.

When Will the Democrats Ever Learn*

 

From Virginia to New Jersey to Long Island to Minneapolis to Seattle the Democrats got shellacked in Tuesday’s voting. They forgot that America is primarily a centrist country and that they only have bare majorities in the House and Senate. Simply put, even as I write this, they are over-reaching in their attempts to pass the Build Back Better reconciliation bill in the House. They do not understand that you cannot rewrite America’s social contract with bare majorities; they need the majorities that FDR and LBJ put together in 1933 and 1964, respectively. Further Biden was elected to stop the craziness of Trump, not to usher in an overarching expansion of the welfare state. (See my Open Letter to President Biden Shulmaven: An Open Letter to President Joe Biden)

 

On a more local level the Democrats have forgotten the role of engaged parents in the education of their children. Although technically Critical Race Theory was not taught in Virginia’s schools, many of the aspects of the theory are being taught. It is obvious if you accuse all white people of being inherently racist, perhaps more than a few would be turned away and that is precisely what happened in Virginia. And it is understood that “defund the police” is an absolute loser.

 

If the Democrats are going to have a chance to hold their slender majorities in Congress next year, they are going to have to abandon the crazy town ideas of the “woke” left. The Squad and their acolytes live in very insular worlds. If they ever ventured out into the real world, they would realize how off-putting their ideas are. As long as Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer cozy up to them, the Democrats will be in a world of hurt in 2022. Better they should heed the words of Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.

*With apologies to Pete Seeger

 

My Amazon Review of Gregory Zuckerman's "A Shot to Save the World"

 

From Cell Biology to Wall Street

 

Wall Street Journal reporter Greg Zuckerman has written a page turning thriller on the race to develop COVID-19 vaccines in record time. He brings to life the key developers of the COVID vaccines who were previously working on vaccines for cancer and AIDS. He further explains how a group of scientific outsiders who, with the aid of venture capital dollars, bet the ranch on mRNA (messenger RNA) as a method of delivering protection against the deadly COVID virus. The result came in the form of the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines.

 

Also in the race were the more traditional vaccines based on the adenovirus technology that were under development at Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) and the Oxford University/Astra Zeneca joint venture. The Oxford vaccine came out of the gate early, but it was plagued by testing issues and the JNJ vaccine had an issue with a rare side effect that slowed its adoption.

 

Zuckerman’s character sketches draw you into the major personalities. We have French immigrant Stephane Bancel, the highly promotional CEO of Moderna who on many occasions promised more than he could deliver. In fact, Moderna was the most shorted biotech stock as of the end of 2019. Nevertheless, Bancel had the foresight to buy an old Polaroid factory in Massachusetts that enabled Moderna to manufacture vaccines at scale and the shorts got their faces ripped off later. More interesting are the Turkish immigrant husband and wife team Uger Sahin and Ozlem Tureci who run BioNTech from their laboratory in Mainz, Germany. After scrimping for cash, the Swiss billionaire Thomas Strungmann funds them. And they struggled mightily to get off their initial public offering. The lesson here is that there is a symbiotic relationship between biological science and Wall Street, something that Congress should be very reluctant to tamper with.

 

Lacking production capabilities Sahin convinces pharmaceutical giant Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla to go all in on vaccine production. Bourla is so convinced that he turns down federal Warp Speed funding. He rightly believed that government could slow things down. Where Pfizer had nerve and strategic vision, Merck, the leading vaccine producer, chose not to enter the vaccine race. Years earlier Merck failed spectacularly with an experimental AIDS vaccine.

 

The most interesting character is the Hungarian immigrant Katalin Kariko. She is a true believer in mRNA and struggles for years as a postdoctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania. In fact, the authorities at Penn demote her. Nevertheless, she struggles on and develops a key process with Drew Weisman to modify natural mRNA to enable it to evade the body’s immune system. Her process is adopted by both Moderna and BioNTech. She ends up as senior executive at BioNTech and it is my uneducated guess that she and Weisman will soon win the Nobel Prize for Medicine. As an aside, her daughter won gold medals for rowing in the 2008 and 2012 Olympics.

 

Although there is quite a bit of molecular biology in the book, my high school advanced biology course from years ago seemed sufficient to get the gist of what was going on. Thus, the reader should not be deterred. Zuckerman has written a work of history that reads like a novel. My one quibble is that he should have pointed out that Bourla and Sahin are coincidentally grandsons of Salonika. (Now Thessaloniki) As a result of the Treaty of Sevres which called for the removal of Muslims from Greece and Greeks from western Turkey Sahin’s Muslim family was exiled to Turkey in 1920 and Bourla’s Jewish family remained, but just barely survived the Nazi holocaust in Greece. Who knows, perhaps both of their grandparents might have known each other in that very cosmopolitan city where most of the Turkish leadership of the 1920’s came from.

For the full Amazon URL see: From Cell Biology to Wall Street (amazon.com)