Tag Archives: geopolitics

September 2024 in Review

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I was sitting down to do my “October in Review” post and realized I never got around to September. So better late than never. I’m writing this on November 9, 2024 after the U.S. election but I’ll try to give U.S. politics a rest in this post (update: I almost succeeded although I couldn’t resist an interesting point about the U.S. Constitution).

Most frightening and/or depressing story: There is nothing on Earth more frightening than nuclear weapons. China has scrapped its “minimal deterrent” nuclear doctrine in favor of massively scaling up their arsenal to compete with the also ramping up U.S. and Russian arsenals. They do still have an official “no first strike” policy. The U.S. by contrast has an arrogant foreign policy.

Most hopeful story: AI should be able to improve traffic management in cities, although early ideas on this front are not very creative.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Countries around the world update their constitutions about every 20 years on average. They have organized, legal processes for doing this spelled out in the constitutions themselves. The U.S. constitution is considered the world’s most difficult constitution to update and modernize.

“arrogant” foreign policy

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I would tend to agree with Jeffrey Sachs’s description below of U.S. foreign policy as “arrogant”.

Here is not the place to revisit all of the foreign policy disasters that have resulted from US arrogance towards Russia, but it suffices here to mention a brief and partial chronology of key events.  In 1999, NATO bombed Belgrade for 78 days with the goal of breaking Serbia apart and giving rise to an independent Kosovo, now home to a major NATO base in the Balkans.  In 2002, the US unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty over Russia’s strenuous objections.  In 2003, the US and NATO allies repudiated the UN Security Council by going to war in Iraq on false pretenses.  In 2004, the US continued with NATO enlargement, this time to the Baltic States and countries in the Black Sea region (Bulgaria and Romania) and the Balkans.  In 2008, over Russia’s urgent and strenuous objections, the US pledged to expand NATO to Georgia and Ukraine.

In 2011, the US tasked the CIA to overthrow Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, an ally of Russia.  In 2011, NATO bombed Libya in order to overthrow Moammar Qaddafi.  In 2014, the US conspired with Ukrainian nationalist forces to overthrow Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych.  In 2015, the US began to place Aegis anti-ballistic missiles in Eastern Europe(Romania), a short distance from Russia. In 2016-2020, the US supported Ukraine in undermining the Minsk II agreement, despite its unanimous backing by the UN Security Council.  In 2021, the new Biden Administration refused to negotiate with Russia over the question of NATO enlargement to Ukraine.  In April 2022, the US called on Ukraine to withdraw from peace negotiations with Russia.  

Looking back on the events around 1991-93, and to the events that followed, it is clear that the US was determined to say no to Russia’s aspirations for peaceful and mutually respectful integration of Russia and the West.  The end of the Soviet period and the beginning of the Yeltsin Presidency occasioned the rise of the neoconservatives (neocons) to power in the United States. The neocons did not and do not want a mutually respectful relationship with Russia.  They sought and until today seek a unipolar world led by a hegemonic US, in which Russia and other nations will be subservient.  

U.S. foreign policy has been a playground bully. Nobody likes or trusts a bully, but they fear and respect the bully. This works okay for the bully as long as they are perceived as strong. But as soon as they are perceived as weak or at least weaker compared to competitors, they have a problem. They can’t keep others in line through fear or respect any more, and they don’t have friendship or trust to fall back on.

It’s hard to imagine repairing the relationship with Russia right now. Their action in invading a sovereign neighbor cannot be excused no matter what we have done. We can manage the relationship to try to make it less bad going forward, and we can try to learn from our mistakes and not repeat them with China and other (relatively, perceived to be) increasingly powerful countries. We can first put policies in place that can build trust over time. Nobody will trust as at first, but if our actions were to match our promises over a period of decades we could slowly rebuild our relationships. Here are a few ideas to bandy about: (1) a no-first-strike nuclear policy, (2) serious commitments to nuclear weapons reductions, and re-entering or re-establishing of treaties and agreements with other countries that have or potentially seek nuclear weapons, (3) nuclear power for countries that want it, in exchange for a commitment not to seek nuclear weapons and submission to a strict inspection regime, (4) a commitment not to invade sovereign UN member states ever again without a Security Council resolution, (5) a commitment not to interfere in other countries’ elections or seek “regime change” ever again through covert action, only through public diplomatic channels. There are plenty of things I leave off here (biological weapons and pandemic preparedness, food security, carbon emissions to rattle off just a few) but these are some basic war-and-peace ideas, and we need peace to have a shot at solving the other complex problems the world faces right now. Getting politicians to make these commitments or similar ones would be hard, and sticking with them for decades would be harder, but it needs to be done.

more on the deteriorating nuclear war risk situation

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This article is on a site called Declassified Australia.

The accelerating arms race in hypersonic missiles and anti-hypersonic defensive technology was unleashed upon the world following the US unilateral decision in 2002 under George W. Bush to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty between the Soviet Union and US. 

The ensuing weapons competition has pushed aside risk-mitigation measures, such as expanding the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty, negotiating new multilateral arms control agreements, undertaking transparency and confidence-building measures, and puts in jeopardy a cornerstone of world peace, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty…

Unlike the USA’s most recent Nuclear Posture Review which asserted its right to a ‘first nuclear strike’ in “extreme circumstances”, China has a ‘no first strike’ nuclear weapon policy.

An objective outside observer, let’s say an alien since how could any resident of Earth be objective on this, might conclude that China is the more rational, less paranoid, and less belligerent party here. Does the leadership of China actually think there is a case where the leadership of the U.S. would launch a first strike? Hopefully not, but a little strategic empathy would seem like a good idea for the U.S. here – other countries are legitimately afraid of the United States. We have invaded sovereign states, interfered with elections, and broken treaties repeatedly, so we should be able to step into someone else’s shoes for a moment and begin to understand why they might not trust us and might fear us. Reducing fear and building trust could be some pretty good concepts to build a risk-reducing foreign policy around.

the last days of World War II

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There is a new book about the U.S. fire bombing and nuclear attacks on Japan, leading to Japan’s ultimate surrender in 1945. I haven’t read the book, just listened to the FreshAir interviewed with the author linked to here. A book I have read, and which influenced me profoundly, was Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire. This new book (based on the interview confirms a few things I understood from that earlier book.

  1. In terms of suffering and loss of life in a short time, the U.S. fire bombings of Tokyo are one of history’s greatest war crimes. This new book says however that the U.S. was aiming for military targets and the bombing technology of the time was not that precise. On the other hand, the military apparently realized pretty quickly how awful it was and kept doing it anyway. For those who don’t know, a hundred thousand people or more were basically cooked.
  2. The Japanese military was just not going to surrender. Their plan was civilians to fight to the death to the last man, woman, and child, with sticks and stones if necessary.
  3. Japanese civilians were largely on board with this plan. The U.S. island hopping campaign and invasion of Okinawa were horrible, and any invasion of the Japanese mainland would have been another level of horror, human death and suffering beyond that. You could argue that the lives of U.S. soldiers, who had just been through hell in Europe (although U.S. casualties of course paled in comparison to British, European, and Russian casualties, and there were virtually no U.S. civilian casualties) were valued more than the lives of Japanese civilians.
  4. The emperor was in favor of surrender for months leading up to the bombing, but the military was largely in control of the emperor. Even after the atomic bombing, the military was still split and the emperor basically went against them to publicly surrender.
  5. Truman was kind of a bastard. I stand by this. Had FDR lived, I of course can’t say whether anything would have turned out differently, but I like to think it might have.
  6. One argument I hadn’t heard was that the Japanese occupation of China and Southeast Asia was killing as many as 250,000 civilians a month (!), and by cutting that short the American atomic bombing saved more civilians than it killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Maybe, but I still think there is a moral difference between deciding to kill directly and indecision which allows others to continue killing.

Are there lessons for today’s urban warfare and civilians who are willing to fight (real or perceived) enemies to the death. I won’t go there at the moment, but at least the number of zeros on today’s death and suffering is far fewer than the 1940s. Of course, one nuclear detonation could change that in mere moments.

Project 2025, Part 4

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Tackling the section called “The Economy”.

  • Self-labeled “Conservatives” are not sure if they like free trade or not. Economic and financial conservatives (confusingly known as “neoliberals” in every other country) do. But the xenophobic element does not, so the Republican party is conflicted about this one. This section is “on the one hand… on the other hand…” drivel with no clear policy position.
  • They want to get rid of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, because this agency knows the incontrovertible truth about climate change (which is always in quotes in this document) and this is against the fossil fuel industry agenda.
  • They want to gut the census bureau, because this agency knows the truth that the United States is under minority rule.
  • They want to gut the IRS.
  • They want to gut the Dodd-Frank rule and other regulations passed on the finance industry after they shamelessly almost destroyed the world’s economy in 2008. This is just shameless caving to a powerful industry lobby.
  • There is a faction that wants to eliminate central banking, or try other yahoo proposals like a return to the gold standard. All this was tried in the 19th century and ushered in a century of chaos, culminating in the GREAT DEPRESSION. This is EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. I am unclear, but I don’t think the executive branch can do this all on its own.

Project 2025

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We’re hearing, at least through media sources one might consider somewhat left-leaning, that “Project 2025” from the Heritage Foundation is an open plan for a fascist takeover of the United States following the example of Mussolini or even Hitler. Both those leaders mobilized street thugs, neutralized the legislative and judicial branches, and co-opted big business almost entirely. They also brought state/provincial and local police forces completely under their central control. Is Trump or any American leader even remotely capable of herding the cats that make up our decentralized, fragmented, and largely dysfunctional government? I’m a little skeptical, so let’s take a look at what’s actually in the document.

Keep in mind, the Republican Party did not even manage to pull together a written party platform in 2020. It was literally the party of no ideas. And that, in fact, does sound like Mussolini, who had no real concrete or coherent policy proposals, and ruled more on charisma, machismo and promises to Make the Roman Empire Great Again. And from what I understand, he was far better at campaigning than actually governing. Hitler, evil as he was, certainly put together a highly functional administrative state at least for a few years. And right off the bat, this document makes a “promise” right in the introduction (pp. 35-36) to decentralize power and dismantle the administrative state.

First of all, the actual document on the website is called “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” and then further down the page, “Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project”. Each chapter of this thing is written by a different “conservative scholar” covers a different part of the executive branch. So at this point, I have to say it seems totally normal for the leader of the executive branch to have a plan for who he (or she – I’ll just do the pronoun thing once) wants in each box of his org chart and to have some idea of what he would like each person to do once they are there. So I’ve skimmed through this 920 page document very quickly and tried to pull out a few highlights. It’s hard because although the document claims to make concrete policy recommendations, it doesn’t really. It mostly identifies key positions in the executive branch and recommends hiring people to fill them who agree with a very nebulous policy agenda of “protecting Christian families”.

  • It talks a lot about “families”. What it seems to mean by this is married heterosexual Christian couples with children.
  • It talks a lot about Christianity. It talks a lot about school choice. What it seems to mean by this is married heterosexual Christian couples teaching their own children to think like them. It actually states that “schools serve parents” and that parents are their children’s “primary educators”.
  • It talks about protecting Christian American families within our borders against foreigners. This seems to be the primary purpose of the military.
  • It talks about debt. What it seems to mean by this is eliminating most of the social safety net, possibly to lower taxes for Christian families. Of course, this does not apply to the cost of protecting Christian families from foreigners, which is worth any price.
  • But amid all this nebulous rhetoric, there are some concrete policy proposals that are just blatant giveaways to rich and powerful big business interests. A few are below (I can’t figure out how to make a simple indented list in this latest ridiculous version of WordPress.
  • “The President should eliminate the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC), which is cochaired by the OSTP, OMB, and CEA, and by executive order should end the use of SCC analysis.” [because why would our children need food, or coastal population centers? This is evil.]
  • Double down on the war on drugs. This does not mean helping addicts, which is a “leftist woke” idea. It means ramping up violence on our streets, at and near our borders. And this should not be managed by people with professional experience, it should be managed by politicians with political aims.
  • Lots of homophobic stuff. I won’t even go into it. When the “next conservative President” is looking for all these political appointees, a great place to start the search will be closets.
  • Merit hiring, merit pay based on performance appraisal results, and the ability to let underperformers go in the civil service bureaucracy. Okay, I could get behind this one in theory as should anyone who has ever been to a post office. But they also want to gut benefits for federal workers, which is not really the right idea. [A good idea would be more along the lines of extending similar benefits to private sector workers. And most of the private sector, save certain corners of the finance industry, would benefit greatly from this. But the finance industry gets what it wants, such as no functional health care system.]
  • They just generally want to gut the bureaucracy and starve the beast, of course. Same old ideas they have always had. They sell them on the idea that the money would be given back to average people, when in reality these ideas are always used to justify subsidies for the already wealthy and powerful at everyone else’s expense.
  • Prepare for “great power competition”, and specifically for a war with China over Taiwan. Then stick a fork in China’s eye. [great way to pare the national debt, right?]
  • Active support by active duty military for border control.
  • NUCLEAR MODERNIZATION AND EXPANSION [because why do our children need to survive to old age at all? This is evil.]
  • Just shovel money at defense contractors without limit, and make producing weapons the focus of the U.S. economy. Funding research and development is okay only when it is about weapons.
  • Double down on recruiting high schoolers into the military. pp. 134-135 – this section is particularly chilling.

I’ll go ahead and post this since I haven’t posted in awhile. Maybe I’ll continue looking at the document in another post.

a pacifist perspective on the Russia-Ukraine war

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Here is one perspective from “The North American Peace Movement” on the Ukraine war.

Initially, there was less clarity regarding the events in Ukraine of February 24, 2022. With research and reflection, most of the movement came to understand the conflict did not begin that day. The supposedly “unprovoked” Russian intervention in Ukraine was sparked by NATO moving closer and closer to the Russian border, the 2014 Maidan coup, the sabotage of the Minsk agreements, etc.

A consensus is maturing in the antiwar movement that Ukraine is a proxy war by the US and its NATO allies to weaken Russia. Even key corporate press and government officials now recognize the conflict as a “full proxy war” by the US designed to use the Ukrainian people to mortally disable Russia.

Dissident Voice

I can see a perspective that the Ukraine war really started with the Russian invasion of Crimea (aka Ukraine) in 2014 and the Russian-supported independence declarations of two other provinces in the east of the country. It was really a military conflict between sovereign countries at that point, and you can see the 2022 invasion as a new campaign within that war. The “Maidan coup” was the 2014 ouster of a pro-Russian government through a parliamentary process, and the election of an arguably anti-Russian government through an election with a lot of international observers that was generally deemed free and fair. I wouldn’t doubt for a second that the CIA interfered in that election at least through financial and propaganda support for its preferred side, and I wouldn’t doubt for a second that Russia and many other governments’ intelligence agencies did too. I can see the point of view that the Russian governing class has felt threatened by the U.S. and NATO going all the way back to the Balkan war in the 1990s and feels they are making a stand. And I don’t doubt that U.S. and NATO leaders encouraged Ukraine not to accept its initial loss of territory after 2014 (“the Minsk agreement”) in return for promises of military support.

Russia never respected Ukraine’s status as a sovereign nation state. This is the single greatest issue to me – Ukraine is a recognized sovereign nation with a seat at the UN, and all other UN nation states need to stand up for any nation state whose established territory is violated. This just has to be a bedrock principle that everyone (ESPECIALLY the U.S. following its adventure in Iraq) needs to recommit to.

more fun with the CIA World Fact Book: Israel and Iran

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All numbers here are as reported in the CIA World Factbook, except the last row which is me calculating GDP times % of GDP spent by the military.

IsraelIranJordanSaudi ArabiaEgypt
Population9 MIllion88 Million11 Million36 Million109 Million
GDP Per Capita (PPP)$44,400$15,500$9,500$50,200$12,800
Ginni Index38.640.933.745.931.9
Unemployment Rate3.7%8.8%19%5.6%6.4%
Average Life Expectancy82.275.476.376.974.7
Total GDP (PPP)$424 Billion$1.4 Trillion$107 Billion$1.8 Trillion$1.4 Trillion
% of GDP spent on military4.5%2.5%4.8%6.0%1.2%
Estimated Military Spending$19 Billion$35 Billion$5.1 Billion$100 Billion$17 Billion
CIA World Factbook

The sources of these numbers are not always crystal clear, so we can take them with a grain of salt, but still they yield some insights. Israel is just a small country. It’s about a tenth the size of Iran or Egypt in terms of population (I’m not sure how settlers and people in occupied territories are counted, but we are talking orders of magnitude here), and about a quarter to a third the size of Iran, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia in terms of GDP. An average person lives a rich country lifestyle and enjoys a long life in Israel, but in terms of sheer amount spent on the military you can see why they need foreign (i.e. U.S.) assistance and conscription to be on a similar level with these other countries in the region. I threw in Jordan, but it is a relatively small, not very wealthy country by these numbers. You can see why they would prefer not to get in fights with their neighbors or the world’s superpowers.

a strike on Iran, oil and commodity prices

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Please note: I wrote this before the fast-moving current events of Friday, April 19, 2024.

According to the (paywalled) Financial Times, an Israeli and/or US military strike on Iran could involve half a dozen important oil producing countries as well as snarling shipping traffic. This would seem like particularly bad news for Biden as Americans fuel up their planet-burning behemoths for the “summer driving season” followed by the fall voting season.

Netanyahu

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This is an article from 1996 in something called the Washington Report for Middle East Affairs. Here are some facts about Benjamin Netanyahu as reported by this article.

  1. He went to high school in suburban Philadelphia. (I looked up elsewhere, and it was Cheltenham high school. This is a public school district in a not particularly posh area.) Then MIT.
  2. He was a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen, at least at that point of graduating MIT.
  3. He has gone by at least four names. One of the three alternates is just a shortened version, but the other two are John Jay Sullivan and John Jay Sullivan Jr.
  4. His social security file is marked “classified”. According to this article, that suggests he may have been on the payroll of the CIA or FBI.
  5. To run for office, he had to give up his U.S. citizenship, which he did legally in Israel. But in the U.S., at least according to this article and in 1996, he was still legally considered a U.S. citizen. (This situation is not unusual though, as I know plenty of people in ambiguous dual citizen categories in their home countries for one reason of convenience or another. An innocent one is because someone lives in the U.S. but wants to visit family in their home country for an extended period without applying for a tourist visa.)

The article veers into some interesting territory from there, but I found these apparently fact-based nuggets interesting.