Coronavirus certainly continues to be the main thing going on in current events globally. I just don’t have a lot of new or insightful things to say about it. Here’s some other stuff I read and thought about in July.
WITH THE STUPID WORDPRESS BLOCK EDITOR, I CAN’T SEEM TO PUT A SPACE BETWEEN THESE PARAGRAPHS NO MATTER WHAT I DO.
Most frightening and/or depressing story:
Here’s the elevator pitch for why even the most hardened skeptic should care about climate change. We are on a path to (1) lose both polar ice caps, (2) lose the Amazon rain forest, (3) lose our productive farmland, and (4) lose our coastal population centers. If all this comes to pass it will lead to mass starvation, mass refugee flows, and possibly warfare. Unlike even major crises like wars and pandemics, by the time it is obvious to everyone that something needs to be done, there will be very little that can be done.
Most hopeful story:
In the U.S. every week since schools and businesses shut down in March, about 85 children lived who would otherwise have died. Most of these would have died in and around motor vehicles.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
The world seems to be experiencing a major drop in the fertility rate. This will lead to a decrease in the rate of population growth, changes to the size of the work force relative to the population, and eventually a decrease in the population itself.
Most of this article in National Interest (which I’m not too familar with) is an opinion piece about Iran sanctions, but a little more than half way it does a good job explaining the rationale behind the UN Security Council.
The UN Security Council is the most important multilateral institution engaged in global governance and cooperative rule-setting. Created in the aftermath of two successive and catastrophic world wars, the council’s legal structure of giving veto power to the major world powers has helped maintain peace between major powers for over seventy-five years. Its decisions mark the highest level of international law.
The raison d’être of the UNSC is to prevent the unilateral use of force by countries. The council relies on consensus decision-making among the five permanent members, ensuring the world’s most powerful countries are constantly in dialogue over pressing security matters. The council’s approval is required to launch wars and the resolutions it passes are binding on all UN members.
Crucially, the veto power the UNSC affords the United States, China, Russia, the UK, and France gives these leading powers a stake in the global order. This helps obstruct zero-sum competition from taking hold among them, which could easily spiral into the kind of worldwide conflicts that reaped immense suffering in the last century.
So, one way to state the purpose is to avoid cross-border aggression by major powers against other major powers, because such aggression by any one would automatically be opposed by the other four. No one country is so powerful that the balance of power would be in its favor.
To have a future, the Security Council clearly needs to be expanded to include today’s most powerful countries. It is unlikely it could kick off less powerful countries already there (looking at you, England and France). However, there is some limit to how many parties could be expected to reach consensus. How many? We need more than 5, and more than 10 seems like too many.
How do you define “powerful”? How about a formula? I pulled stats on GDP (at purchasing power parity) from the CIA World Factbook. GDP correlates to economic power, and potential though not necessarily military might. The top 10 look like this:
1
China
2
United States
3
India
4
Japan
5
Germany
6
Russia
7
Indonesia
8
Brazil
9
United Kingdom
10
France
That would include all the current members, plus add Japan, Germany (news flash: WWII is over!), India, Brazil, and Indonesia (hands down the world’s most populous and powerful nation that westerners never think about.)
Who barely misses the cut? #11-15 are Mexico, Italy, Turkey, South Korea, and Spain.
What if we decided actual military spending mattered. I pulled those numbers, gave 50% weight each to GDP and military spending, and it looks like this:
United States
China
India
Russia
Japan
Saudi Arabia
Germany
United Kingdom
Brazil
France
So this would trade Indonesia for Saudi Arabia, which seems odd. If you rate GDP 75% and 25%, you keep Saudi Arabia and Indonesia and leave out France. That seems like a non-starter.
Giving 10% weight to military spending doesn’t change the top 10 compared to straight-up GDP.
So I think my proposal is straight-up GDP. To summarize, it wouldn’t cut out any current member, and would add Germany and Japan, major developed countries and economic powers who lost a war 70 years ago, and major developing countries India, Brazil, and Indonesia. It would be harder to reach consensus with 10 than 5, but the effort of adding these important voices to the conversation would be worth it, and any hard-won consensus would have more legitimacy as representing the majority of the world’s power.
Soldiers from India and China literally fought with sticks and stones – in June 2020 – and reports are that at least 20 were killed. What appears to happen is that both sides undertake construction projects close to the disputed border. Troops occasionally encounter each other – or attack each other on purpose, who knows?
This just seems dangerous when it’s two large, powerful countries with powerful militaries, including nuclear weapons, and nationalist politics. Isn’t the UN Security Council supposed to help mediate in these cases? I haven’t heard a word about that – maybe one more sign the UN has weakened to the point of irrelevance.
I was reading an article recently (which I can’t find at the moment) arguing that the future of warfare is a large number of cheap missiles, drones and mines that make it almost impossible for an adversary to get close enough to attack you. This was put forth as a recommended strategy for the United States – we can give or sell these to our allies, flood the world with these things and make money in the process. It just seems cynical to me because today’s allies are not always tomorrow’s allies. Training Aghan freedom fighters in terrorist tactics seemed like a good idea at one time too.
Apparently, there is a fairly broad consensus that aircraft carriers are obsolete because they are too easy to attack with cheap missiles and eventually maybe space-based weapons. I know they are expensive, but I always thought the ability to get planes and soldiers anywhere in the world within a few days made sense as an alternative to maintaining large bases abroad. It’s always seemed to me that the navy is the most indispensible military service. After all, they have their own army (the Marines) and their own air force, and not only that but their army has its own air force. Plus, they have the submarines, which are the ultimate deterrent against nuclear attack, at least in theory.
Anyway, this article talks about getting rid of some carriers in favor of fleets of smaller, cheaper ships, possibly some crewed by robots. It also talks about a new class of carrier that is about one-third the size and one-third the cost, and meant to service helicopter and vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. Not sure whether you can “buzz the tower” in any of those.
The coronavirus thing just continued to grind on and on, and I say that with all due respect to anyone reading this who has suffered serious health or financial consequences, or even lost someone they care about. After saying I was done posting coronavirus tracking and simulation tools, I continued to post them throughout the month – for example here, here, here, here, and here. After reflecting on all this, what I find most frightening and depressing is that if the U.S. government wasn’t ready for this crisis, and isn’t able to competently manage this crisis, it is not ready for the next crisis or series of crises, which could be worse. It could be any number of things, including another plague, but what I find myself fixating on is a serious food crisis. I find myself thinking back to past crises – We got through two world wars, then managed to avoid getting into a nuclear war to end all wars, then worked hard to secure the loose nuclear weapons floating around. We got past acid rain and closed the ozone hole (at least for awhile). Then I find myself thinking back to Hurricane Katrina – a major regional crisis we knew was coming for decades, and it turned out no government at any level was prepared or able to competently manage the crisis. The unthinkable became thinkable. Then the titans of American finance broke the global financial system. Now we have a much bigger crisis in terms of geography and number of people affected all over the world. The crises may keep escalating, and our competence has clearly suffered a decline. Are we going to learn anything?
Most hopeful story:
Well, my posts were 100% doom and gloom this month, possibly for the first time ever! Just to find something positive to be thankful for, it’s been kind of nice being home and watching my garden grow this spring.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
There’s a comet that might be bright enough to see with the naked eye from North America this month.
With the coronavirus crisis raging, it is easy to forget that nuclear weapons are still out there. One thing coronavirus should be teaching us all is that the unthinkable can happen. Trump, aka the angel of death, has already made us all less safe by withdrawing from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty with Russia, the nuclear deal with Iran, ratcheting up tensions with China. Now the New Start treaty, through which the U.S. and Russia have achieved further arms reductions over the past decade, is set to expire on February 5, 2021. The current administration and/or the current Congress could do the right thing just this one time and extend the treaty. Then the next President and Congress could start working on extending the gains.
The Joint Task Force – National Capital Region is the unified military command responsible for Washington, D.C. and surrounding regions if they become a “battlefield”. In other words, if there is an armed attack, or if all hell breaks loose for whatever reason, and civilian government functions break down. According to Newsweek, it has been activated.
JTF-NCR is responsible for what the military calls “homeland defense”: what to do in the face of an armed attack on the United States, everything from guarding Washington’s skies to preparing for the civil unrest that could occur if a nuclear weapon were detonated in the capital. But most immediate, JTF-NCR is charged with facilitating continuity of government, particularly moving civil and military leaders to secret locations were the order given to evacuate the city.
You would assume that the commander in chief has command over the commander of this unit, which would be comforting in even remotely normal times. But the commander of this unit does have the authority to take whatever steps he or she (it’s a he) deems necessary if there is no civilian oversight available.
It seems unlikely there are any missiles inbound. It seems entirely likely that the Covid/election season could be the time a foreign enemy could try a cyberattack or attack critical infrastructure like the electric grid – kick your enemy while they are down. Hopefully we are ready for that.
Newsweek was the first “main stream media” source of news I paid attention to when I became aware of current events sometime in middle school. I don’t know if it is still the credible source of information I considered it back then (or if I was right back then.) One questionable claim did catch my eye – “Federal officials in the nation’s capital expect a New York-like epidemic in the District, Maryland and Virginia, one that could potentially cripple the government.” Taking a look at that claim on the University of Washington modeling site, it doesn’t hold up. The entire Boston-to-DC corridor is in fact hard hit, but the death rate and hospital utilization rates in DC are peaking right about now (I’m writing on Saturday April 18, the Newsweek article is from Thursday April 16) and both are projected to start falling. Hospitals in the DC, Maryland, and Virginia are busy but not expected to be overrun like they were in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. So it’s not clear what evidence the “federal officials” cited above would lead to a projected “New York-like epidemic…that could potentially cripple the government”. Perhaps some of these officials are used to working from home anyway, like in a white house for example.
George Soros summarized the disastrous state of the world in a speech to the World Economic Forum, then tried to end on a high note. The high note didn’t succeed, at least for me. He got me too depressed with his list of problems: climate change first and foremost; authoritarian trends in many countries including the United States, China, Russia, and India; Brexit; and specter of nuclear war rising. His solution to all this is better education focused on system thinking and critical thinking. I can certainly support that – if we start now, it is a long term investment that may pay off in 40 years as babies born today start to move into positions of power. We may always want to consider some shorter-term measures to deal with the risks of war and climate change if we would like those babies to have a civilization to grow up in for the next 40 years.