Judy Demsey writes:  Russia’s recently launched bombing of opposition targets in Syria is a brutal reminder of the decline of Western influence in the Middle East and North Africa.

In Afghanistan, the growing military might of Taliban fighters, who are now in open warfare with Afghan security forces, has exposed the weaknesses of the NATO-led mission in that country. Since the alliance’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in December 2014 after an eleven-year stint there, the country is lurching into another war.

Meanwhile, the United States’ decision to leave Iraq in December 2011, when the government in Baghdad was paralyzed by sectarian interests and the security forces were unprepared for later taking on the so-called Islamic State, has plunged the country into a new war.

And don’t forget Libya, where in March 2011 a NATO-led mission used its United Nations mandate, anchored in the responsibility to protect, to get rid of Libyan strongman leader Muammar Qaddafi. But NATO didn’t bother to consider the day after. The vacuum was filled by a plethora of competing tribes, Islamist forces, and a handful of genuine democrats. State building is not their priority, nor was it NATO’s.

The European Union’s 28 member states are now collectively faced with three unpalatable truths that expose Europe’s appalling lack of strategy, foresight, and understanding of crisis management.

The first is Europe’s – but also the United States’ – inability to do state building. The second is the questionable impact of hard power. The third is the fallout of wars: millions of refugees on the move, fleeing the areas of conflict.

The EU provided over €3 billion ($3.3 billion) in development aid and humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan between 2002 and 2013. In that time, the Afghans could boast how many girls were attending school for the first time and how many women were now able to work.

But neither the EU nor the United States was able to build strong state institutions that could preserve some of those gains. That would have required decades of commitment that the West was unwilling to invest.

Now, a mixture of deeply entrenched corruption, traditions, ethnic rivalries, and Taliban forces that never disappeared from the scene is coming back with a vengeance to undo the West’s intervention. Indeed, once it became clear that NATO’s military operation in Afghanistan was to be replaced by a small training mission, many competing groups quickly exploited the ensuing security vacuum.

The same could be said of Iraq. The 2003 U.S.-led military invasion, which actually destroyed the country’s preexisting state institutions, was not followed up by a sustained effort to build new ones. Libya is also another case in point.

The second issue is the efficacy of hard power. Military means can only be successful if they are followed up by a very long-term state-building strategy aimed at supporting and institutionalizing democracy.

This is what happened in Germany and Japan after 1945. That U.S. commitment was unqualified. Certainly, the Cold War played a crucial role in persuading the United States of the strategic need to bring stability to Western Europe and build democracy in Germany and Japan.

Had the United States neglected state building, America’s hard power would have been squandered. It would have done untold damage to postwar Europe’s stability, prosperity, and ability to defend itself against the Soviet Union. In short, without the duality of hard power and a long-term policy of soft power, countries have little or no chance of being stable.

In this context, Russia’s bombing of forces opposed to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime has little to do with the day after the conflict in terms of rebuilding state institutions. Indeed, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to intervene militarily in Syria could repeat the same mistakes of 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to protect Moscow’s ally in Kabul.

Finally, Europe (after Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey) is now picking up the pieces of these military ventures. Precisely because there are no stable, functioning state institutions – let alone the faintest hope of peace and freedom in several Middle Eastern countries – refugees are on the move.

And if any European government believes or hopes that Russia’s bombing campaign will end the flow of refugees, they are deceiving themselves. This is the new reality that European governments will have to accept.

It is questionable, however, whether Europe’s helplessness in the Middle East and its struggle to cope with refugees will make EU governments consider the miserable weaknesses of their foreign, security, and development aid policies.

On the rocky road to globalization

Twelve Pacific Rim nations, including the United States and Japan, have agreed to lower tariffs and take other steps to increase trade, an official told CNN.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership, long sought by President Barack Obama, will be announced at a news conference later this morning.

Andres Velasco writes:  Latin America has a new export: populist backlash. It first landed on the warm and receptive shores of the Mediterranean, nurturing support for Greece’s Syriza and Spain’s Podemos. Now it has reached the United Kingdom.

Corbynismo, the ideology of the long-marginalized British MP Jeremy Corbyn – who admired Venezuela’s late president, Hugo Chávez, thinks Vladimir Putin was justified in invading Ukraine, and now heads Britain’s venerable Labour Party – sounds familiar to anyone acquainted with Latin America.

Of course, this new populism (Hillary Clinton’s Democratic rival Bernie Sanders is also a card-carrying member) has much fodder. But being mad is not the same as being right. The new European populists are parlaying legitimate frustration into a misguided set of policies that can only produce more of the same. Latin Americans learned this the hard way in decades past. Europeans (and perhaps Americans) may be about to as well.

Three conceptual confusions cause Corbynismo to get crucial matters completely wrong.

The market for potatoes is not like the market for loans. Yes, bankers are greedy. And, yes, financial markets require close supervision and regulation. But what is true of financial markets need not be true of other markets.

Financial markets are not disciplined by the threat of bankruptcy. When banks get into trouble, governments always save them or wish they had (think Lehman Brothers). Regulation needs to provide the discipline that markets cannot.

But followers of Corbynismo are wrong to infer that the ills of financial markets infect all other markets, all the time. Countries, whether rich or poor, do not need a Potato Supervisory Board with new and enhanced regulatory powers.

It is great to be Keynesian – but during both halves of the cycle. Yes, orthodox economists of (mostly) Teutonic origin peddle a lethal fiscal-policy prescription. When the economy is booming, they claim, expenditure must be cut.. When the economy is tanking, expenditure also has to be cut in order to restore confidence and revive investment. For some European economies, this prescription has caused a needlessly long recession.

The way to render an aggressively counter-cyclical fiscal policy feasible is by relying on modern budget rules.

We did this in Chile during the copper price boom of 2006-2008, running budget surpluses of up to eight percentage points of GDP. When Wall Street melted down, we had the fiscal room to apply one of the most aggressive anti-crisis plans anywhere.

There is nothing inevitable or God-given about suffering, injustice, and inequality. That is why modern social democrats and progressive liberals are eager to right social wrongs. But effectiveness requires agnosticism about the policies required to achieve lofty ends.

Consider health care. Different things work differently in different places. Britain has a single payer and a single service provider: the National Health Service. Canada has a single public payer but mostly private providers. Obamacare establishes a public mandate to buy private insurance (with public subsidies for the poor) to finance services provided by (mostly) private hospitals and clinics.

Rarely is a US CEO held accountable for the activities of the company he leads. Donald Leon Blankenship, former CEO of the now defunct Massy Energy Company is on trial for the death of 29 miners in the explosion at the company’s Upper Big Branch deep mine in Montcoal, West Virginia on April 5, 2010. Three invstigators have concluded that his methods contributed to the  explosion . This is the first time in 150 years of Appalachian mining that a top boss of a coal firm has ever had to answer for how he ran his company.

Responding to the Syrian refugee crisis worldwide.  Abe of Japan writes a check.

Nancy Snow writes: Last year, 5,000 people applied for refugee status in Japan. 11 were accepted.

Japan is a strong target for refugee criticism because of its modest engagement in social media and global communications. Typically, it doesn’t proactively make its case to the world, largely allowing the international press and the Twitterverse to frame its issues for it.

The Washington Post article, comparing the refugee response of Europe with Japan’s closed doors, quotes heavily from Twitter messages that argue for opening the doors to refugees in Japan.

Accepting refugees to Japan is not unprecedented, just very limited. Between 1978 and 2005, Japan accepted over 11,000 Indo-Chinese refugees fleeing the Vietnam conflict. Japan was the first Asian country in 2010 to participate in the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ resettlement program, a pilot program to bring 90 Myanmar refugees from Thailand over the course of three years.

Where Japan shines is in providing assistance as a leading humanitarian nation. It is a top official development assistance (ODA) country, just below the United States, United Kingdom and Germany. International aid ostensibly greatly improves the lives of refugees. But because Japan is not a top host nation for refugees, it is vulnerable to critical global media stories singling it out as a rich country that takes in the least refugees. In contrast, Germany is celebrated for opening arms wide to take in up to half a million refugees. Germany may be facing incredible burdens from this population infusion, but its liberal refugee policy blowback may take years.

Germany was the Cinderella of the refugee crisis and Japan the Evil Stepmother before Abe’s address to the United Nations on Sept. 29. Abe announced a tripling of the budget from last year to $810 million in assistance to refugees and internally displaced people in Syria and Iraq.

The refugee criticism of Japan risked threatening an image that Japanese leaders have attempted to cultivate in developing nation brand Japan as a compassionate leader in the world. One of Japan’s most honored citizens, Madame Sadako Ogata, high commissioner of the U.N.’s refugee agency for a decade (1991-2000), remains one of the country’s most honored citizens. At age 88, she remains president of the Japan International Cooperation Agency, a Tokyo-based developmental organization that works to alleviate poverty, as one mission.

The focus on Syria may also carry with it a bitter memory for many Japanese. This past January, Abe announced a $100 million donation to help the countries of the Middle East fighting Islamic State inside their borders. Within a few days, Muslim militants with IS beheaded Kenji Goto, a journalist, and Haruna Yukawa, the Japanese hostage that Goto had gone to Syria to attempt to rescue.

Abe’s tripling of humanitarian assistance for refugees and internally displaced people in the Middle East is notable.

Gun deaths go down when gun control laws are stricter.