What is really happening?

If one thinks about it, it is pretty hard to tell what is really happening in the nation, or even in the world.

At the topmost level most of the news media that reports on what is happening in newspapers, on the TV, on talk radio, or in the social media is highly biased toward either the liberal or the conservative side. They are biased not only in how they report and how they “spin” the news, but even more so in what they choose to emphasize and what they choose to ignore.

Below that the political “newsmakers” who provide the media with their sources are of course equally biased toward one side or the other, depending on their party affiliation. And of course a good deal of underground maneuvering and plotting goes on private among these politicians and their staffs and advisors and publicists and major donors in the brutal game of political power. So that what gets fed (or leaked) to the media is itself already suspect.

Then there is the layer of academics, think tanks, and government agencies who provide ammunition to the politicians for their maneuvering. These also distort or “spin” the facts not only to satisfy their own political and/or ideological views, but even more to advance their own institutional powers and budgets. So that what gets fed (or leaked) to the political newmakers in the first place is also already suspect.

And below that is the shadowy world of intelligence agencies, insider trading, covert arms dealers, criminal enterprises, terrorist cells, and corporate maneuvering, which work hard to cover or distort or mask their real activities, often by disseminating disinformation which gets accepted readily by the credulous, including even sometimes the professional intelligence agencies.

All of which makes me think of what a good magician does when he or she distracts the audience with one hand while the real action is happening in the other hand.  I have the same sense about today’s news – how much is real and how much has been manufactured to support some shadowy purpose, or to distract us from what is really happening?  Certainly enough has been revealed over the past few decades to support this suspicion, from the torrent of partisan (and often incorrect) leaks during and since the last election to the supposedly-scientific studies the tobacco industry sponsored in the 1960s and 1970s to prove their product was safe.

We humans are gullible. It would be wise to remember that

America's enemies?

Amidst all the warlike talk from some US political figures and some media talking heads, who are the real enemies of America?

Russia certainly was an enemy during the Cold War years, because it wanted to export its communist system (which was really just another dictatorship) throughout the world. But today’s Russia is a shell of its former Soviet self, with a declining and aging population and an economy about the size of Italy, and no longer seeks to export its political system. Russia has brilliant designers of ships and aircraft and tanks, as good as anything the West has, but can’t afford to build or operate and maintain very many of them and doesn’t have the industrial base to sustain a major war with the West. They are certainly a regional power, and their understandable paranoia about the West (after Hitler’s and Napoleon’s invasions) means that they will continue to maneuver to gain influence around their borders. President Putin has been extraordinarily good at punching above his weight in international affairs and wrong-footing American policy. But Russia is no existential threat to America despite its nuclear arsenal, and although Russia and America have different agendas on many issues, there are many other issues on which we can work together productively.

China is a rising power, though still a regional one. China historically has been the dominant Asian power, and would like to regain that position. China doesn’t aspire to control the world, just to control Asia and be recognized as a major world power. Like Russia and many other countries, its birth rate is falling as its population becomes educated, and by about 2030 the population is expected to stabilize and then begin to slowly decline. In industrial and intellectual power China is approaching the US and may soon surpass it. There is no doubt that China is fast becoming America’s main commercial rival in world markets, but that doesn’t mean they are necessarily an enemy. If China threatens anyone it is Russia, with a thinly-populated Russian Siberia encompassing vast natural resources beckoning to China’s population.  And in fact China has a historical claim to Siberia, which was essentially taken from them by Russia in the 1860’s, not so long ago as national memories go. As is the case with Russia, although China and America have different agendas on many issues, there are many other issues on which we can work together productively.

Iran has a leadership that uses hatred of America as a means of maintaining political legitimacy within the country. But this leadership is aging, and the younger generation of Iranians actually admire America and things American. Moreover they are largely secular; despite the theocracy ruling Iran mosque attendance, especially among the young, is very low. And of course Iran doesn’t have an economy of a size to support a major war; it was strained to its limit just in the war with Iraq. So although Iran may continue to be a spoiler in the Middle East mess, it certainly isn’t an existential threat to America.  I suspect that if we just wait a while, the older generation of theocrats and revolutionaries will die off and Iran will revert to a Westernized Persian culture, though perhaps a fairly corrupt one, since the Revolutionary Guards have managed to gain control of most of the economy to enrich themselves.

North Korea of course has been blustering a great deal lately, as it has in the past. But realistically Kim Jong-il really just wants one thing – for his totalitarian regime to survive. He doesn’t aspire to take over the world, or even to take over South Korea. He doesn’t aspire to export his system to other places.  He doesn’t even aspire to be a serious commercial competitor to the US in world markets, or to oppose our policies in other parts of the world. He just wants to survive, and his nuclear program and posturing is aimed only at that – survival.  That is why sanctions and international pressure are unlikely to ever drive him to give up his nuclear program. In the long run containment until the system collapses of its own inconsistencies and inefficiency  is probably the best route, though given the effective brainwashing of the North Korean population that may take a long time – 50 years or more.  

The Islamic jihad currently roiling the Middle East will continue to produce terrorist attacks. But these, while painful and potentially expensive, are hardly an existential threat to America or any other nation. There is no mass army, no massive industrial base in this Islamic jihad to support a major confrontation with America.  Terrorists from this movement will continue to bedevil the world for decades to come, and stir up a lot of publicity (which we would be smarter not to give them), but realistically they are not an existential threat to the nation, even if they were to manage to pull off a major attack, like a dirty bomb in a major city.

And who else is there who might threaten America, whose national interests conflict so badly with ours that they might go to war with us, and who have an economy able to sustain such a war?   That’s not to say that there won’t be local clashes here and there from time to time, but I don’t really see any prospect of a major war in the next few decades unless politicians badly mishandle things (though they have done that before, as in World War I).

That’s not to say that we should just sit back. If we want to shape world events we need to keep our economy strong, our industrial base healthy, our population well educated and skilled, our military up to date and well trained, and our intelligence system functioning well (certainly better than it has been recently).. A nation in decline, whatever the reason for that decline, invites testing by others who aspire to replace it.  But it seems to me all this talk of America’s enemies is just political fearmongering. We have no serious enemies at the moment, unless it is ourselves.

Recommended: Engineers of Victory

Paul Kennedy's 2013 book Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War is a fascinating book to read for those interesting in the history of World War II. But in fact it is much more than that; it is an exploration of issues of military organization and strategic thinking that ought to concern us today as well. Kennedy has organized this book around five strategic problems to be solved, such as how to get convoys safely across the Atlantic, or how to defeat the "tyranny of distance". He certainly talks about the innovators who helped solve these problems, but he does so in the larger context of the entire chessboard of the war, and in doing so he educates us on basic principles of grand strategy that are as applicable today as they were in World War II. For example, both Germany and Japan overreached themselves, trying to do too much in too many places rather than focusing on the few key objectives that really mattered, a mistake America may well be repeating today.

Kennedy, a British historian, co-teaches a class in "grand strategy" at Yale, where he is Director of International Security Studies. His previous book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers is also worth reading.

More on the “De-population Bomb”

A friend, reading yesterday’s post, asked about fertility in India and China, the nations with the largest populations.

China currently has one of the lowest fertility rates of any nation at 1.57 births per couple. In addition the decades of a one-child rule which was introduced in 1979 and only rescinded in 2015, and the cultural preference for male children which led to the abortion of many female fetuses, has left the male-female ratio  among the younger generation at 120+ males for each 100 females. Clearly China has a severe future demographic problem. China’s population will remain stable until about 2030, after which it will begin to decline. And the urban young in China show the same trend toward fewer births and childless marriages as is seen elsewhere in the world.

India as, as of 2017, has a fertility rate of 2.43 children per couple, which is enough to keep the population more or less stable or even growing slowly. In fact within the next decade Indian’s population will exceed that of China, at about 1.44 billion people. However there is every reason to believe that India’s young will follow the same pattern as the rest of the world, and that fertility rates will continue to drop over the next decade or so until it is below the replacement level.

And as with other nations around the world, fertility rates in both nations are higher for those religiously inclined than for the secular population.

The “De-population Bomb”

In 1968 Professor Paul R. Ehrlich and his wife (typically, she wasn't credited) published “The Population Bomb”, which quickly became a best-seller among the green crowd. It predicted that population explosion would produce massive famine in places like India and China by the 1970s or 1980s. It wasn’t the only book making such predictions, but it became the central book for the green fad of those times. In fact of course the so-called “green revolution” of the 1970s massively increased the food supply in underdeveloped countries, and both India and China have better fed populations now than they did in the 1960s, even though they have much larger populations.

Far from facing an exploding population, the world today faces a “de-population bomb” in which many countries are depopulating themselves, producing too few children to maintain their population levels. It takes about 2.1 births per couple to hold population steady. It’s slightly more than 2 because a small proportion of babies grow up infertile, or die before reaching reproductive age, or for some other reason fail to produce progeny.  

But what is actually happening is that as nations educate their women, and as families become more secular, women start having less children. And this change is happening at an astounding rate in some countries. In Iran, for example, the fertility rate in 1960 was above 6 children per family. In 1990 it was still about 5 children per family. But today it is 1.68 births per couple.

This problem afflicts many major nations, like Russia (1.75  births per family as of 2016), Japan (1.46), Germany (1.50), France (1.96), the UK (1.80), and in fact the whole European Union (1.58 average across the EU). Within a generation these nations will be substantially smaller than they are now, and this has serious social implications. For example, at the present fertility rate Japan will have about half the population in 2100 it has now, and more than a third of those will be over 65 in age. The situation will be roughly similar in Russia and within the EU if fertility rates remain low.

Nations with low birth rates will grow increasingly aged populations, with more aged retirees and fewer young workers to support them and contribute taxes, which will eventually cause chaos with whatever public safety nets they have in place. Nations with low birth rates will reach the point where there are not enough young to defend the national borders.  And for cultures which have no social programs to supporting the aged, and depend on children to support their own aged parents, this will be disaster.

America thus far has maintained a stable fertility rate with more births than deaths, and so far does not face the same fate. Our fertility rate as of 2017 is slightly below replacement at 1.84, but immigration is keeping the total population relatively stable.  There is concern, though, that the Millennial generation may drive the rates lower. In America the younger age groups show the most precipitous decline in fertility rates. It costs on average about $250,000 to raise a child to age 17, not counting college, and many young couples today are choosing to put their money toward other things, like expensive homes or exotic vacations.

Secular liberals ought to note that cultures and groups that retain traditional religious beliefs (of any sort – Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, etc) as they modernize are not declining – they are still increasing. So demographics do not favor secular liberals in the long term; they will increasingly be outnumbered by religious believers. This is true throughout the world. The reason areas like the EU are in trouble and America is not (so far!) is that America has a much larger proportion of religiously-inclined than the EU.

I mentioned in a post a week or so ago that we faced a tsunami of major problems, even while the press keeps us distracted with relatively trivial near-term issues and trivia. This is one of the major problems that comprise that tsunami.