Tag Archives: war

Africa in 2022

Leave a reply

Since I neglected Africa in one of my year in review posts due to my relative ignorance of this entire continent, here is a summary of a post about Africa in 2022. This person, Andrew Korybko, describes himself as “a Moscow-based American political analyst specializing in the global systemic transition to multipolarity”. His voice is definitely not impartial, and yet interesting. Some brief fact checking confirms that he is not making things up, although he puts his own (Russian intelligence?) spin on them. Here is his list of top 5 developments in Africa in 2022:

  1. Africa was affected by food and energy price spikes, but this did not trigger widespread civil unrest.
  2. African countries were generally neutral in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
  3. The government of Mali expelled French military forces and accepted Russian support (to glowing praise, in this author’s stated opinion, who believes there is a “Franco-Russo proxy war” going on. I take no position on this having next to no knowledge other than a vague sense that the current government of Mali came to power in a military coup and has been accused of atrocities.)
  4. A peace deal (according to this author; a “cessation of hostilities” according to Wikipedia) was reached in the Ethiopia/Tigray conflict.
  5. A new war is brewing in D.R. Congo and once again pulling in regional parties.

2022 in Review

Leave a reply

First, my heart goes out to anyone who suffered hardship or lost a loved one in 2022. People still died from Covid-19 of course, not to mention other diseases, violence, and accidents. People are living, dying, and suffering horribly in war zones from Ukraine to the Middle East to Myanmar. Having said all that, for those of us living relatively sheltered lives in relatively sheltered locations like the United States, 2022 does not seem like it will rank among the best or worst of years in history.

Highlights of the Year’s Posts

These are the posts I picked each month as most frightening and/or depressing, most hopeful, and most interesting.

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • JANUARY: A collapse of the Game of Thrones ice wall holding back the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica could raise average sea levels around the world by one foot, or maybe 10 feet “if it draws the surrounding glaciers with it”. The good news is that no army of zombies would pour out.
  • FEBRUARY: Philadelphia police are making an arrest in less than 40% of murders in our city, not to mention other violent crimes. Convictions of those arrested are also down. Some of this could be Covid-era dysfunction. But there is a word for this: lawlessness.
  • MARCH: What causes violence? It’s the (prohibition and war on) drugs, stupid. Or at least, partly/mostly, the drugs.
  • APRIL:  The use of small nuclear weapons is becoming more thinkable. Just a reminder that nuclear war is truly insane. Assuming we manage to avoid nuclear war, food insecurity might be our biggest near- to medium-term issue. One lesson of World War II is worries about food security played a role in the diseased minds of both Hitler and Stalin. And food prices right now are experiencing a “giant leap” unprecedented over the last couple decades. Food security, natural disasters, sea level rise, migration, and geopolitical stability all can form ugly feedback loops. And no, I couldn’t limit myself to just one depressing story this month!
  • MAY: The lab leak hypothesis is back, baby! Whether Covid-19 was or was not a lab accident, the technology for accidental or intentional release of engineered plagues has clearly arrived. And also, the world is waking up to a serious food crisis.
  • JUNE: Mass shootings are often motivated by suicidally depressed people who decide to take others with them to the grave.
  • JULY:  One way global warming is suppressing crop yields is by damaging pollen.
  • AUGUST: The fossil fuel industry intentionally used immoral, evil propaganda techniques for decades to cast doubt on climate science and make short-term profits, probably dooming us, our children, and our children’s children. Also, and because that is apparently not enough, nuclear proliferation.
  • SEPTEMBER: If humans are subject to the same natural laws as all other species on Earth, we are doomed to certain extinction by our limited genetic variety, declining fertility, and overexploitation of our habitat. So, how different are we? I can spin up a hopeful story where are evolving and overcoming our limitations through intelligence and technology, but time will tell if this is right or wrong.
  • OCTOBER: Hurricanes are hitting us (i.e., the United States: New Orleans and Puerto Rico being the examples) and we are not quite recovering back to the trend we were on before the hurricane. This seems to be happening elsewhere too, like the Philippines. This is how a system can decline and eventually collapse – it appears stable in the face of internal stressors until it is faced with an external shock, and then it doesn’t bounce back quite all the way, and each time this happens it bounces back a bit less.
  • NOVEMBER:  Asteroids could be used as a weapon.
  • DECEMBER: The U.S. legalized political corruption problem is getting worse, not better. This was one of Project Censored’s most censored stories of 2022.

Most hopeful stories:

  • JANUARY: LED lighting has gotten so efficient that it is a tossup on energy efficiency with daylight coming through a window, because no window is perfectly sealed. Windows still certainly have the psychological advantage.
  • FEBRUARY: “Green ammonia” offers some help on the energy and environmental front.
  • MARCH: There are meaningful things individuals can do to slow climate change, even as governments and industries do too little too late. For example, eat plants, limit driving and flying, and just replace consumer goods as they wear out. I’m mostly on board except that I think we need peace and stability for the long term survival of both our civilization and planetary ecosystem, and we are going to need to travel and get to know one another to give that a chance.
  • APRIL: While we are experiencing a disturbing homicide wave in U.S. cities, violent and overall crime are not necessarily at historical highs and are more or less flat. And yes, this was the most uplifting story I could come up with this month. Brave politicians could use the Ukraine emergency to talk about arms control, but if anybody is talking about that I am missing it.
  • MAY: I came up with (but I am sure I didn’t think of it first) the idea of a 21st century bill of rights. This seems to me like a political big idea somebody could run with. I’ll expand on it at some point, but quick ideas would be to clarify that the right to completely free political speech applies to human beings only and put some bounds on what it means for corporations and other legal entities, and update the 18th century idea of “unlawful search and seizure” to address the privacy/security tradeoffs of our modern world. And there’s that weird “right to bear arms” thing. Instead of arguing about what those words meant in the 18th century, we could figure out what we want them to mean now and then say it clearly. For example, we might decide that people have a right to be free of violence and protected from violence, in return for giving up any right to perpetrate violence. We could figure out if we think people have a right to a minimum standard of living, or housing, or health care, or education. And maybe clean up the voting mess?
  • JUNE: For us 80s children, Top Gun has not lost that loving feeling.
  • JULY: Kernza is a perennial grain with some promise, although yields would have to increase a lot for it to be a viable alternative to annual grains like wheat, corn and rice.
  • AUGUST: “Effective altruism” may give us some new metrics to benchmark the performance of non-profit organizations and give us some insights on dealing with existential risks (like the ones I mention above).
  • SEPTEMBER: Metformin, a diabetes drug, might be able to preemptively treat a variety of diseases colloquially referred to as “old age”.
  • OCTOBER: Gorbachev believed in the international order and in 1992 proposed a recipe for fixing it: elimination of nuclear and chemical weapons [we might want to add biological weapons today], elimination of the international arms trade, peaceful sharing and oversight of civilian nuclear technology, strong intervention in regional conflicts [he seemed to envision troops under Security Council control], promotion of food security, human rights, population control [seems a bit quaint, but maybe we would replace this with a broader concept of ecological footprint reduction today], economic assistance to poorer countries, and expansion of the Security Council to include at least India, Italy, Indonesia, Canada, Poland, Brazil, Mexico, and Egypt [maybe this list would be a bit different today but would almost certainly include Germany, Japan, Brazil, India, and Indonesia].
  • NOVEMBER: A review of Limits to Growth suggests our civilization may be on a path to stagnation rather than collapse. Or, we may be on the cusp of a fantastic science ficition future of abundance brought to us by solar energy, asteroid mining (there are those asteroids again!), and biotechnology.
  • DECEMBER: Space-based solar. This just might be the killer energy app, the last energy tech we need to come up with for awhile. Imagine what we could do with abundant, cheap, clean energy – reverse global warming, purify/desalinate as much water as we need, grow lots of food under lights in cities, power homes/businesses/factories with little or no pollution, get around in low-pollution cars/buses/trains, electrolyze as much hydrogen from water as we need for fuel cells to power aircraft and even spacecraft. Solve all these problems and we would eventually come up against other limits, of course, but this would be an enormous step forward. And space-based solar seems like much less of a fantasy than nuclear fusion or even widespread scaling up of new-generation fission designs.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

Brilliant Synthesis

Technology

The last couple years, I led off with other things and came around to a technology roundup towards the end. This year, I’ll just shake things up (yes, I’m wild and crazy like that) and lead off with technology developments during the year.

Solar energy has been a long time coming, but 2022 was a year when it really started to be at the forefront of the energy conversation and hard for the skeptics to ignore. We keep hearing that it is now the cheapest form of energy to build and put into operation. That means it is now limited by the materials needed to produce the panels, by the space needed to deploy the panels, and by the transmission and temporary storage infrastructure. Building rooftops take up a lot of space and are mostly not used for other things, so this seems like an obvious place to put the panels. The oceans of pavement we use to operate and park vehicles make up another somewhat obvious place – we can toughen the panels and drive on them, or we can put cheap roofs over the pavement and cover them with panels. Materials can be an issue because many of them are mined and sold by unsavory characters and governments, and there is clearly an environmental impact. But remember that we are trading this off against today’s coal, oil, and natural gas industry, not against some socially and ecologically blameless party. This industry intentionally lied to the public for decades and in the process did immeasurable damage to a planetary biophysical system.

Metals and minerals are also just limited. But even in hard-nosed economic terms, if solar panels are the lowest-cost option as we are hearing, they are holding their own with the costs of extracting, transporting, and burning fossil fuels. We could tax social and environmental impacts at international borders if we had the courage to do so, but even without that it is hard to imagine a system more damaging and irresponsible than the one we have been dealing with for the past century or so.

People will also say we haven’t kept the distribution infrastructure up to date, and this is true. In the United States at least, we don’t keep public infrastructure in a state of good repair. But we do create infrastructure when big business demands it, and they will demand an electric grid that can support their products when it comes to electric vehicles, devices and facilities. There may be a period of pain between when big business demands it and when the U.S. government provides it, and other countries will almost certainly outdistance us.

Longer term, as Fully Automated Luxury Communism tells it, space for solar panels will not be a problem because we will put them in, well, space. And this is not a far-future fantasy. The technology to gather the energy in space and beam it to the Earth pretty much exists now and governments and companies are seriously working on practical implementation. They swear it is safe, and even if it is not totally risk-free remember again all the death, pollution, and permanent planetary destruction the fossil fuel sociopaths have wrought.

Now, what about nuclear power? If we had really focused on it decades ago, we might not be in the climate change mess we find ourselves in now. It could still be a solution to the climate change mess in the future. But given how long it takes to bring new nuclear technology online at a large scale, and how fast solar energy appears to be scaling up and how reliable it appears to be, is it time to stop working on nuclear? I’m talking about known fission technology here. As for fusion, given that it is “always 20 years away” (no matter the year we are actually in), is it time to stop working on it and just throw all our research efforts at solar?

And materials will not be a problem either because we will produce them from asteroids and bring them to Earth, ending material shortages forever. I say, good but better to just use them to build things in space because we are running out of capacity to absorb the byproducts of the materials we already have down here. Just digging things up that were already in the ground and pumping them into the atmosphere and oceans has caused enough trouble.

By the way, once we are in space and messing around with asteroids, government and private actors will be able to divert their trajectories. It is easy to imagine scenarios where this is a great thing that actually saves all life on the planet. It is also easy to imagine scenarios where industrial accidents or intentional government actions threaten life on the planet. An international treaty and some oversight of this seems like a good idea as the messing-with-asteroids industry really starts to get going.

I don’t have my pet mini-mammoth yet, but biotechnology is continuing to gain steam. The idea of treating aging as a disease to be cured seems almost too obvious, but it seems to remove some bureaucratic obstacles that have been holding science and medicine back. Covid-19 was probably, maybe, perhaps not a lab leak. But it could have been, because the technology to make something like it, or much worse, exists in labs right now. It could be made if it has not already, and it could be leaked accidentally or intentionally, if it has not been already. And like nuclear technology, it will proliferate. Compared to nuclear technology, I think it will proliferate much faster and be much easier to hide. I have trouble envisioning any solution to this that does not involve heavy-handed surveillance.

On the positive side, biotechnology may be able to feed us when there are a lot more of us. With cellular agriculture, we can theoretically make meat or just about any kind of plant or animal tissue, and then we can eat it. We may finally be on the verge of modifying plants so they can make more efficient use of the sun’s energy, which is both exciting and scary. With a combination of abundant cheap electricity (from solar energy), abundant cheap materials, and highly efficient lighting though, we might be able to grow all the food we need in high rises without needing frankenplants.

And finally, the idea of controlling the weather with windmills is pretty fascinating. If we figure this one out, we might be able to end damage from floods, droughts, and hurricanes. But obvious Bond villain Elon Musk will also be able to use this to hold the world hostage for ONE HUNDRED TRILLION DOLLARS. That doesn’t really matter though because he is probably already planning to crash an asteroid into us anyway.

Propaganda, Social Media, and Truth

Social media is being blamed for a lot of our social ills at the moment. When we hear “social media” discussed, it seems to mean first and foremost interactive sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. where anyone can post a short snippet of any information they want and make it available to anybody else on the platform. Youtube also seems to fit this mold to some extent, although Youtube is a mix of personal and professionally-produced content. Then, underlying all this are Google search and other algorithms or “search” engines which are searching both for content to show individuals and individuals to show content. There are bloggers using WordPress and a million other tools and sites trying to get their content out, usually not all that widely if my personal experience is any indication (to the 5 or 6 people worldwide who read this blog regularly?) Then there is the huge ecosystem of Amazon and all the other sites trying to sell us stuff. Then there is professional journalistic media and traditional publishing companies trying to have their say (and sell us stuff), and finally there is some sense of the broader internet underlying all this.

Beyond trying to sell us stuff, corporations and non-profit entities are trying to manipulate all these communication channels to get their messages into our heads. This is propaganda, with the main goal being to sell us stuff and a secondary goal being to create awareness and positive images of their brands so they can keep selling us stuff. Also so people won’t complain to politicians about whatever the corporations are doing and risk those politicians meddling in the system in ways that are averse to corporate profits. At the same time, these companies and special interest groups are paying off the politicians to support their interests behind the scenes. This works out well for them (the corporations, special interests and politicians).

Finally we have the U.S. government and governments around the world trying to influence public opinion, occasionally by providing accurate information, sometimes outright lies, and often something in between.

All this is competing for our “attention”. Personally, I strongly prefer having more information to less, and I do not want to see regulation aimed at reducing the amount of information available to me. I believe, perhaps naively, that I have some ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, fact from opinion, and objective/honest communication from dishonest attempts to influence me. Regulation to protect children might be an exception to this – if social media sites are facilitating bullying and leading to mental health problems and even suicides, that is worth dealing with.

“Great Power Competition”, the “International Order”, and the United Nations

A major world leader of our time died in 2022. Okay, two world leaders if you really want to count Queen Victoria, but I am talking about Mikhail Gorbachev. To me, he represents a moment when optimism and visionary leadership had a chance to flower to the benefit of our civilization. He had a vision of long-term peace and stability, with powerful nation-states ceding some of their power to some form of world government. The basic vision was that no nation-state, no matter how powerful, would be able to succeed through violent means if it was opposed by all other nation-states acting together. With the threat of catastrophic war mostly behind us, humanity could have focused on solving all the other thorny problems, from food to energy to pollution to inequality. This was a beautiful vision, but unfortunately its moment passed us by, and we are back to the old cynical idea of coalitions of “great powers” arrayed against each other.

With the threat of catastrophic violence hanging over us, we are not focused on solving those other problems. The United Nations was supposed to at least be the seed of that new order that would usher in long-term peace and prosperity for our species. To be sure, the United Nations has accomplished a lot when it comes to human rights, science, agriculture, refugees, and other areas. It has also been a place where all the not-so-great powers of the world can band together and make their voices somewhat heard. But the Security Council was supposed to be the One Ring to Rule Them All and make “great power competition” obsolete. This has failed utterly, with the Security Council considered all but irrelevant at this point. Not only is “great power competition” ascendant, we seem to be proud of ourselves for bringing it back. If there is a devil, he must truly love “great power competition”.

With the threat of catastrophic violence hanging over us, we have failed utterly to solve other existential problems such as food security, global warming, sea level rise, ever-growing concentration of wealth, and the specter of a Captain Trips extinction plague whether of natural or manmade origin.

Resilience. Despite taking a gut punch, at the end of 2022 it feels as though our planetary civilization weathered the storm of Covid-19 and has more or less rebounded to something like the trend it would have been on. This is the textbook definition of resilience, and something to feel good about. If we get some time in between gut punches, we at least have an opportunity to work on our other problems while also preparing for the next gut punch. If we don’t make progress, maybe we can at least reach a state of stagnation rather than a self-actuated collapse. Can a civilization be resilient and stagnant at the same time? Maybe this is where we find ourselves, at least in the near term.

Happy 2023!

Trump withdrew U.S. troops from Somalia

Leave a reply

One thing I am willing to give Donald Trump some credit for is trying to end U.S. involvement in foreign wars. He tried unsuccessfully to withdraw from Syria, and he set the Afghanistan withdrawal in motion although it later became a debacle. Add to that an actual successful withdrawal from Somalia. This is from Middle East Eye, a publication I was previously unfamiliar with.

President Donald Trump’s administration moved to withdraw all 700 American troops from Somalia in 2020, after a three-decade presence in the country.

Middle East Eye

This does not mean drone strikes on targets in Somalia ended. They continued, and they are continuing now. And the Biden administration is sending a small number of troops back to Somalia. Apparently this is legal (ish?) – the U.S. is there at the invitation of the Somali government to please by all means attack its enemies. And the domestic justification supposedly goes all the way back to Congress’s approval of the global war on terror after 9/11.

November 2022 in Review

Leave a reply

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Asteroids could be used as a weapon.

Most hopeful story: A review of Limits to Growth suggests our civilization may be on a path to stagnation rather than collapse. Or, we may be on the cusp of a fantastic science ficition future of abundance brought to us by solar energy, asteroid mining (there are those asteroids again!), and biotechnology.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I tried to put myself in Russia’s shoes and explain the Ukraine conflict, mostly to myself.

what happened in Ukraine?

Leave a reply

I’ve been puzzled by the seeming irrationality of the Russian invasion ever since it happened. We are being buffeted by propaganda from both sides, so it is hard to tell what is true, but we can probably assume the truth lies somewhere in between the two extremes. I can’t independently verify the information in this Courthouse News Service (which I had never heard of before…) article, but it at least tells a story that passes the logic test for me. Here’s my attempt to summarize their story:

  • Ukraine had a really rough time in the 1990s and early 2000s following the end of the Soviet Union. It was ruled mostly by ex-Soviet cronies – the economy was in freefall, corruption and assassinations of politicians, journalists and activists were rampant, and they lost a big chunk of their population as many people who could move elsewhere in Europe or Russia chose to do so. Some people went so far as to call it a failed state.
  • There were major protests (the “Orange Revolution”) against corruption and political violence in 2004. Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian politician, was elected shortly afterward in an election widely believed by international observers to be rigged and interfered with by Russia. This is also when his opponent, pro-EU and anti-Russian Viktor Yushchenko, was poisoned, most likely by Russian or pro-Russian agents. Courts ordered a run-off election and Yushchenko was elected. [Part of the problem is these names sound very similar to western ears. Imagine a U.S. election where the candidates were named something like Thomas and Thompson.]
  • Russians and pro-Russian elements in Ukraine saw these events as U.S. interference in their political affairs, and feared that the same tactics could be tried in Russia itself. [I can’t argue pro or con, but the U.S. certainly doesn’t refrain from openly lobbying to try to influence other country’s elections, and we do know that the CIA has repeatedly tried to interfere in elections around the world in the past, typically in developing and middle income countries.]
  • Yushchenko turned out not to be all that anti-corruption or pro-western, at least not effectively so. In 2010, he ran against an even more anti-Russian and Ukrainian-nationalist politician, Yulia Tymoshenko. In this election, Yanukovych was re-elected in an election that international observers deemed fair.
  • The economy was extremely poor during this period, and Yanukovych accepted a bailout from Russia in exchange for abandoning plans to deepen trade and travel ties with the EU.
  • This caused public protests and street violence to break out again, with a neo-Nazi element in evidence. The presidential palace was stormed (this is sometimes called an “insurrection”), Yanukovych fled to Russia, and an anti-Russian, Ukrainian nationalist element took over.
  • The Russian government (“Putin”, “the Kremlin”) saw this as a coup orchestrated by the U.S. They believed this justified a military takeover of Crimea, which the largely pro-Russian population of Crimea seemed to support. This was an invasion and occupation in all but name – un-uniformed Russian soldiers basically fanned out from their bases already in Crimea and took over the government more or less opposed unopposed. A referendum was held in which the people voted to leave Ukraine and become part of Russia.
  • Pro-Russian elements then launched an armed rebellion in other eastern provinces of Ukraine.
  • Partly because Crimea and rebel-held areas of Ukraine did not participate in elections, an anti-Russian president (Poroshenko) was elected next. Russia believed U.S. interference was involved again. Ugly communist and fascist symbols and language was used by both sides, such as “decommunization” and “denazification”.
  • Ugly warfare between the Ukrainian army and the pro-Russian eastern rebels continued. Russia may have believed U.S. and “western” forces were involved in this warfare and that Ukraine was becoming increasingly likely to join NATO and/or the EU. [and who knows? some or all of this may be true.]
  • The current president, Zelenskyy, was elected in 2019 on a platform of negotiating a peaceful agreement to end the fighting. He used to play the president on TV. [This is exactly why the U.S. Democrats should have run either Harrison Ford or that guy who played the President in the first couple seasons of 24.]
  • The “Minsk Accords” were an attempt to end the warfare with a political solution, most likely some form of partial autonomy for the eastern provinces while remaining part of Ukraine. This was not successful. Zelenskyy became more hard-line anti-Russia and pro-resistance as the conflict dragged on.
  • Russia chose to invade in 2022. In my view, this was still a sovereign UN member state choosing to invade another sovereign member state’s recognized international borders, with the intention to occupy it indefinitely. I do not think there is any excuse for this. I do however think it is a useful exercise to try to put myself in the Russian shoes and try to understand what the thought process may have been. And when I do that, I can see a plausible case that they thought the U.S. and NATO were actively interfering in Ukrainian elections and supporting the Ukrainian military in suppression and atrocities against ethnic Russian civilians. They may have also thought the loss of Ukraine to NATO and the EU was only a matter of time until the U.S. was able to get a compliant regime in place that would allow it.

It seems like a move toward some form of autonomy for the eastern provinces and Crimea is the logical outcome here, under nominal Ukrainian rule within its original borders except that some big chunk of Crimea can just be considered a big Russian military base (like Guantanomo Bay). It could be demilitarized with a beefy UN peacekeeping force for an agreed period of time, and Ukraine could agree not to be eligible even for consideration to join the EU or NATO for some agreed period of time.

IMF World Economic Outlook

Leave a reply

The IMF predicts a worldwide slowdown over the next 2-3 years, although not an outright contraction. Of course, we know these things are not predictable.

Global growth is projected to slow from an estimated 6.1 percent in 2021 to 3.6 percent in 2022 and 2023. This is 0.8 and 0.2 percentage points lower for 2022 and 2023 than projected in January. 

Beyond 2023, global growth is forecast to decline to about 3.3 percent over the medium term. War-induced commodity price increases and broadening price pressures have led to 2022 inflation projections of 5.7 percent in advanced economies and 8.7 percent in emerging market and developing economies—1.8 and 2.8 percentage points higher than projected last January. Multilateral efforts to respond to the humanitarian crisis, prevent further economic fragmentation, maintain global liquidity, manage debt distress, tackle climate change, and end the pandemic are essential.

IMF

more on tactical nukes

Leave a reply

A New Yorker article lays out situations under which Russia might consider using tactical nuclear weapons.

Four scenarios may lead Russia to use a nuclear weapon, according to Kimball of the Arms Control Association. To coerce Kyiv or its nato allies to back down, Putin could carry out a “demonstration” bombing in the atmosphere above the Arctic Ocean or the Baltic Sea—not for killing, but “to remind everyone that Russia has nuclear weapons.” Russia could also use tactical weapons to change the military balance on the ground with Ukraine. If the war expands, and nato gets drawn into the fight, Russia could further escalate the conflict with the use of short-range nuclear weapons. “Both U.S. and Russian policy leave open the possibility of using nuclear weapons in response to an extreme non-nuclear threat,” Kimball said. Finally, if Putin believes that the Russian state (or leadership) is at risk, he might use a tactical nuclear weapon to “save Russia from a major military defeat.” Russia has lost some twenty-five per cent of its combat power in the last two months, a Pentagon official estimated this week. Moscow’s military doctrine reserves the right to use nuclear weapons “in response to the use of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction” against Russia or its allies, and also in response to aggression via conventional weapons “when the very existence of the state is threatened.” In military jargon, the country’s policy is “to escalate to de-escalate,” Richard Burt, the lead negotiator on the original start accord, which was signed by Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush in 1991, told me. “The idea is to so shock the adversary that a nuclear weapon has been used, to demonstrate your resolve that you’re willing to use a nuclear weapon, that you paralyze your adversary.”

New Yorker

Nuclear weapons are a cheap way to make a big bang, or at least threaten to do so. Cheap compared to maintaining a huge, capable conventional military force anyway. Russia seems particularly dangerous right now because it is a relatively poor, backwards country whose leadership has successfully used limited military aggression to appear strong and strategic to a domestic audience. The Ukraine war seems to have changed that, with Russia’s conventional military looking weak, ineffective, and the leadership lacking in strategery. Nuclear brinksmanship or even the recklessness of some kind of limited nuclear attack could be seen as a way to regain the upper hand. Let’s hope not.

Thinking a little about what might induce the Russian leadership to call off this attack, new nuclear agreements with the U.S., like reducing the arsenal overall, removing weapons from Europe, or a no-first-use pledge, seem like they should be on the table and would benefit everybody.

March 2022 in Review

Leave a reply

The Ukraine war grinds on as I write on April 7, with the Russian military seemingly pulling back from some areas while slaughtering civilians (hostages?) farther east and south. I proffered some limited views on the situation and media coverage of the war during the month, but I won’t go into it below.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: What causes violence? It’s the (prohibition and war on) drugs, stupid. Or at least, partly/mostly, the drugs.

Most hopeful story: There are meaningful things individuals can do to slow climate change, even as governments and industries do too little too late. For example, eat plants, limit driving and flying, and just replace consumer goods as they wear out. I’m mostly on board except that I think we need peace and stability for the long term survival of both our civilization and planetary ecosystem, and we are going to need to travel and get to know one another to give that a chance.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Ready.gov has posted helpful information on what to do in case of a nuclear explosion.

Bloodlands

Leave a reply

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder was on my list for awhile, and I suppose I finally decided to read it because of the war in Ukraine. This is a good book and a horrible book, in the sense that it is a well-researched, well-written account of probably the worst series of events in world history. It is first and foremost a book about the Holocaust. It is also a delightful romp through the famine Stalin intentionally imposed on Ukraine in the early 1930s, Stalin’s internal terror unleased on his own citizens in the late 1930s, Nazi mass murder of Soviet prisoners of war, the siege of Leningrad, and the forced relocation of people (including Germans remaining in newly Soviet-occupied areas) at the end of the war that resulted in additional deaths.

I certainly don’t have much to add to scholarly discourse on the Holocaust. I have read more than one account and feel that I have a grasp of the facts, which is a very different thing than wrapping my head around the events, which I am not sure anyone can do. I think everyone needs to have a grasp of the facts, grapple with them, and then not think about them all the time. One thing that surprised me is Snyder’s explanation of how the complete picture really became available only after the end of the Cold War. This is because many of the worst atrocities happened in areas that came under Soviet control at the end of the war, and western (i.e. outside the Communist countries) scholars after the war tended to focus on the evidence and accounts available to them of Jews and others in Western Europe. These people suffered horrible atrocities, but the atrocities further east were of another magnitude in terms of both body count and utter depravity. The Soviets did not exactly deny the Holocaust, but for propaganda reasons they tended to downplay the mass murder of Jews and portray events as atrocities committed by Germans against Soviet civilians, sometimes glossing over the fact that people in these areas came under Soviet control only late in the war, and in some cases were also subjected to Soviet atrocities.

Something I was not aware of was Stalin’s antisemitism in the early 1950s. This fit into his general pattern of paranoia that groups within the Soviet Union, whether Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Japanese, etc. might be under foreign influence and therefore be a threat to the Soviet state. In his paranoid mind, the ties between West Germany, the United States, and the newly formed Israel were a threat. There is some evidence he was planning a purge of Soviet Jews at this time. Luckily, he was not taken as seriously by underlings at this point as he had been in the 1930s, and he died before he could set any of these events in motion. Echoes of his paranoid rantings linking Nazis and Jews surfaced in Poland as late as the 1960s and 1970s, and I think we hear some echoes of this in the bizarre and seemingly illogical Russian rantings about “denazification” of Ukraine today.

Another theme that struck me was the underlying tension of food insecurity in Europe and the Soviet Union in the pre-war era. This was a motivating factor both in Hitler’s plan to colonize Eastern Europe and exterminate whoever was in the way, clearing the way for German farmers, and in Stalin’s depraved grain quotas imposed on Ukraine in the 1930s, in which peasant farmers were forced to grow grain for export but executed if they were found eating it themselves. Neither of these was a rational response to food insecurity, of course, but I think it holds lessons for us today. In the United States and much of the world, we have taken food security for granted for many decades now. As climate change takes hold, other environmental problems mount (soil erosion? ocean acidification? groundwater mining?), and population continues to grow (though slowly decelerating), the future of global food supply is not secure. On top of the technical and environmental challenges, food insecurity can trigger mass migration, civil unrest, geopolitical instability and even war, which in turn can exacerbate environmental and food supply problems in a vicious feedback loop. These are tough, tough problems, but one thing we can try to do is keep a focus on global peace and stability so we at least have a chance to focus our technological and economic prowess on solving the food security issue.