Things have been good the last couple of weeks. Over Fourth of Julyweekend I went to the Rothbury Music Festival, which was really great.For me, the highlight occurred when Dweezil played "Moving to Montana"as the second song of his set. Dancing to the guitar solo of this songwas great fun. 

Dweezil really rocked the house

Other acts at Rothbury included the (no longer grateful) Dead, Bob Dylan, Ani DiFranco (who was cheered by the women of the audience like she was Paul McCartney circa 1965), the Macpods, and King Sunny Ade. Unfortunately, I missed King Sunny's concert on Friday, as mine was a Saturday-Sunday ticket.

Good times at Rothbury

After Rothbury we headed to Silver Lake State Park on Lake Michigan, a really beautiful spot. West Michigan, which is the region my family is from, is a really gorgeous place. Most of the grad students and other academic types I know living in Ann Arbor have no idea how close they are to an amazing summer holiday.

Sand mountain at Silver Lake State Park in Michigan


Lighthouse and beach at another section of SIlver Lake State Park

This week I've been back in Ann Arbor, cruising around on my bike a lot. I spend my days doing three things—getting ready for my fall class, preparing for my physical move to Montana, and writing—but it's still great to get some exercise and enjoy my surroundings in Ann Arbor. Or not—this afternoon I spent about three hours on the couch reading "Reading Lolita in Tehran" and listening to the sound of the wind pass through the branches and leaves of the huge trees outside. So nice.

My recently souped-up bike

A few news items, however, have roused me from my splendid dislocation. The first of these is the Obama-Medvedev-Putin summit in Moscow.  

While it doesn't seem like the summitry threesome produced much with respect to concrete results, I don't think anyone was expecting much in that regard. Rather, I think the goal here was to establish a common vocabulary and build up some trust with one another. With that one very modest criterion in mind, it seems like the summit was probably a success.

Russia is one of those countries that both liberal and conservative Americans often love to bash—and the Russian government deserves much of the criticism that it gets. At the same time, however, I don't think there is any good reason why our relations with Russia have sunk so low.

There are a number of reasons behind Russian distrust for American policies in the territories of the former USSR and Eastern Europe. The Bush administration's decision to revive Reagan's "Star Wars" Strategic Defense Initiative struck the Russian government as an action that was hostile to Russia, while NATO's expansion into the territories of the former Soviet Union was seen as a betrayal of assurances the administration of G.H.W. Bush had made with Gorbachev while the Warsaw Pact was breaking up. The George W. Bush administration's recognition of Kosovo's independence last year marked only the final and perhaps most notorious of a series of steps taken by both Republican and Democratic administrations in Washington with respect to the former Yugoslavia which infuriated Vladimir Putin, as it did Boris Yeltsin (who also once intimated that NATO expansion into Eastern Europe could start a war) before him.

None of these issues were worth screwing up relations with Russia. With respect to missile defense, American claims that it was not directed against Russia but rather Iran were undermined when Vladimir Putin offered to transform the missile defense system into a joint US-Russia project that would be based in Azerbaijan, right over the border from Iran. The Americans refused, prefering to base it instead in the Czech Republic.

Meanwhile, American-sponsored overtures from NATO to Ukraine and Georgia have contributed to Georgia's loss, perhaps permanent, of two of its most precious territories, while a continuation of Bush-era policies towards Ukraine could help lead to a serious crisis over the Crimea (issues which I've talked about elsewhere).

Finally, I think that recognizing Kosovo as an independent country was also unnecessary, and served as one of the Russian pretexts for the Kremlin's partition of Georgia. While I supported the entry of Central European countries and the Baltic states into NATO, I really don't think this is the best way to go with either Ukraine or Georgia—it's just too intense an issue for the Russians. And if anyone thinks that Russia should not have veto power over the foreign policies of these two independent countries, contemplate for a second how Americans (and the US government) would react if the United States had collapsed twenty years ago and the Soviet Union, professing friendship with us, was proposing to enlist Canada and Mexico into the Warsaw Pact. Indeed, never mind Canada and Mexico, think more along the lines of Florida and Texas.

I don't like the idea of cynically dividing up the world into spheres of influence, but I do think it's important for the United States and Russia to communicate better with respect to where their "red lines" lie. What seems clear from last August and other events over the past eight years is that this communication during the Bush era was largely inoperative.

My hope is that the Moscow threesome will ultimately be seen as the first step towards restoring this communication. It seems like this is how government media in Russia are portraying the meeting, which I take as a good sign.

In Turkey, meanwhile, President Abdullah Gül has signed, "with reservations," a law allowing individuals in the military to be tried in civilian courts.

In many ways, this is a good law—I support it in principle. However, the context in which it was produced is troubling. Or maybe I should say the contexts, with the largest context being that of the Ergenekon investigation. A second context is that of the recent Çiçek document in Turkey (about which I've written here and here). A third important context is that of the source of the Çiçek document, the newspaper Taraf (about which I've written here). The final context is the timing of the passage of the legislation allowing the military to be tried in civilian courts, a law which soon met (unsurprisingly) with the public disapproval of military figures.

The AK Party, which has a majority in parliament, introduced and quickly passed the law late on a Friday night (two weeks after Taraf's story on Çiçek), prompting opposition figures to claim that the legislation was not given the attention and debate in parliament it deserved. As Nazlı Ilıcak points out, however, the Republican People Party's opposition to this law seems to come from a weak position, given the party's recent support for a trial of the leaders of the 1980 coup. In any case, the Republican People's Party has indicated that it will appeal to Turkey's Constitutional Court in their effort to overturn the legislation.

In light of the bizarre circumstances relating to the Çiçek document, and the very bizarre nature of the Ergenekon investigation more generally, the passage of this legislation should raise some flags. Perhaps the Çiçek document was part of an elaborate set-up designed to help pave the way for the passage of this legislation, which would then facilitate the detention and punishment of military figures caught up in the Ergenekon investigation, leading to the decapitation of the Army as a political force in Turkey. Or perhaps it was just a case of the government seizing the advantage in response to a story appearing in a newspaper. In any case, the AK Party has managed to seize the initiative from this latest twist in the relations between the military and the government, and has taken for itself a concrete legal advantage.

Which is of use to them for as long as the military is likewise willing to play by these rules.