The Korean summit

It has been interesting watching the pre-summit maneuvering between North Korea’s Kim and President Trump. The Kim family has been very good at playing American and European leaders ever since the current Kim’s grandfather, Kim Il-sung. But perhaps they have finally met their match in Donald Trump. We will see.

What do both sides want, and can it be achieved?  Kim wants (1) to survive as leader, and (2) to get enough economic growth in his country to pacify the aristocracy around him, so that he isn’t overthrown (see point 1). He also needs enough political cover with his own populace to make an agreement. That is, whatever agreement emerges (if one does) has to look to his own people enough like a victory for him.

Trump (and the US generally) wants Kim to give up his nuclear program, including allowing enough intrusive inspections to assure he isn’t hiding stuff. We would also like to limit his ballistic missile program, though that may be harder because Korea may want to retain the ability to put its own satellites into orbit, which takes the same kind of rocket. And again, Trump needs something he can spin as a victory to the US voters.

Both Koreas talk about unification, but that really isn’t on the table anytime soon. China doesn’t want a unified (and American-oriented) Korea on its border. Japan doesn’t want a powerful, unified Korea as a neighbor. Kim certainly doesn’t want to “infect” his private country with unsettling liberal ideas from the West, and South Korea, if push comes to shove, probably doesn’t want to pick up the enormous expense of absorbing its medieval neighbor.

In the end, Trump has more leverage than Kim, and he knows it (that was the point of walking away from the talks last week).  Kim has his nuclear weapons, but really they don’t do him any good outside of domestic propaganda. If he ever used one of them, North Korea would be turned to radioactive glass by the US, or perhaps by China. On the other hand, the sanctions are biting Kim very hard, and they are discomforting the aristocracy around him. If things get bad enough, they might depose him, and I am sure he worries about that. So he badly needs relief from the sanctions.

A possible deal would see Kim give up his nuclear program, with intrusive inspections, in return for relief from the sanctions, a peace treaty with the US (we are still technically just in a truce from the Korean War) and perhaps some sort of international or UN guarantee of no invasion. Kim still needs to keep his military happy even without nuclear weapons, so perhaps he could follow the Iranian model and allow the military to get into the business of running all the new enterprises and skimming the profits.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Trump and Kim are both tough-minded negotiators, and this is a high-stakes game for both of them.

Recommended: The Revenge of Geography

Robert Kaplan's 2012 book The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and The Battle Against Fate is a wonderful summary of all areas of the world in geopolitical terms, as shaped by their geography. In large measure it is a useful companion to George Friedman's recent books (The Next 100 Years, and Flashpoints), but Kaplan goes into far more detail about the history, both ancient and recent, that has shaped the culture and geopolitical outlook of the peoples who inhabit these areas.

Of particular interest, I thought, was his concluding section on America, in which he argues that while the East Coast ruling elites have been focused on adventures and political maneuvering in Russia, China and the Middle East, they have been ignoring the single most important area to America's future, our neighbor to the South, Mexico. Were we to invest as much as we have invested in the Middle East wars in Mexico instead, we would have a stable, economically powerful and friendly partner which would make North America the powerhouse of the world.  If we continue to ignore Mexico we will end up sharing a 2000 mile long border with an immensely wealthy and violent narco-state that threatens the stability of our nation.  I find his argument persuasive.

Election interference

It takes some work, amidst all the Washington posturing and spin and claims and counter-claims, to work out what really happened in the last election. But by now a few things are pretty clear.

1.      The Russians, or at least some subgroup probably not officially part of the government but actually under government sponsorship, did try to stir things up via social media, and by hacking the poorly protected emails servers of several political groups. In general the effort seems to have been pretty ham-handed, especially the social media part. None of this is surprising – the US has a history of doing the same to other nations; indeed, the CIA has even actively promoted coups on more than one occasion, as we all now know. So the political outrage at the possibility of Russian interference is pretty hypocritical, but I guess it makes good copy for the more rabid liberal and conservative groups.

2.      It seems to me highly unlikely that whatever Russian interference there was had any appreciable effect on the election.  It seems to me the election was actually decided by the Democrat’s choice of an exceedingly poor and problematic candidate, by the resentment of the Sanders wing of the party and how they were treated at the convention, by the incompetence of the Clinton campaign strategists, and by then FBI director Comey’s off-again on-again handling of the email scandal. I don‘t think the Russians had much effect in the face of so much incompetence.  

3.      In fact, it appears that the major, and perhaps most worrying election interference came from within our own government’s judicial and intelligence communities. The public evidence available to date increasingly points to politically-motivated interference and spying directed by senior FBI and intelligence agency managers. The desperate attempts by the FBI and the intelligence community to avoid providing key documentation to the Senate and House oversight committees investigating suggest they are very worried about what will be revealed. And I note that although special prosecutor Muller has indicted several lesser people for lying to the FBI, no one has yet indicted ex-FBI director Comey, his top aid Andrew McCabe, ex-national intelligence director James Clapper, or CIA director John Brennan for lying to the FBI and/or Congress, although they have all subsequently publically admitted to doing so, or have been shown by public records to have done so.. Perhaps the upcoming Inspector General’s report, if it is truly impartial and hasn’t also been politically tainted, will deal with some of this.

In general, I think my prediction of some months ago that the Democrats may well come to regret opening the whole Russian can of worms  is coming true. The investigations haven’t yet much affected Trump, but they have certainly badly damaged the legacy of Obama and his administration, and worse may yet come.

Is America in decline?

Just as writers of potboilers repeat the same theme with variations from book to book, so Americans seem to have had a common doomsday theme for generations that America is in decline, and the next century (whatever that century is) will belong to someone else. It has been a reliable moneymaking theme for book after book and speaker after speaker for generations now. In my lifetime it was the Germans under Hitler who were going to surpass us, then it was the communist world, then it was Japan, then it was the EU, and now it is China who is supposedly poised to surpass us.

Balderdash! Like so much in the popular press and popular imagination these days, it is an idea completely unsupported by the evidence.

Consider:

The US, with 5% of the world’s population, accounts for about a quarter of the world’s total economic output.

The US, bounded by oceans it controls on two sides, and by friendly non-threatening neighbors on the other two sides, is one of the few nations in the world not much worried about land conquest.

The US navy, even in its current reduced state, completely dominates both the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, the major trade routes of the world. The nation that controls the seas controls the world’s economy.

The US is far and away the world’s leading innovator, which is why nations from France to Russia and China spend so much effort trying to steal our technology.

The US dominates space, which means we have superb coverage of what is happening anywhere in the world.. We currently have 568 US satellites in orbit, to China’s 177 and Russia’s 133.

Even with their problems, US universities are among the leading in the world.

The US dollar is the world’s reserve currency. Even the Russian mafia stores its ill-gotten gains in dollars rather than rubles – it is safer.

All the other major nations of the world are currently in crisis. China has moved to a dictator in order to prepare to deal with the growing internal tensions between the rich minority on the coast and the impoverished majority inland. Russia struggles with an export economy the size of Italy and in deep trouble. Europe is fragmenting as the EU comes apart. Latin America continues its centuries-long struggle to develop effective governments. And most of these nations are in the process of depopulating themselves over the next half century, which will bring enormous social and economic pressures and strife.

Americans (lead by the media, who need to make everything into a sensation) think they are in crisis, but in fact are not.

That’s not to say the US doesn’t have issues. It does. Our political system is highly dysfunctional. Our national debt is getting out of hand. We have developed a winner-take-all economy that is producing growing income inequality. These are real issues, but not nearly as serious as the current issues faced by the EU, Russia and China.

So next time you read some Cassandra predicting the decline of the US, take it with a grain of salt.

Recommended podcasts

I have mentioned several times in previous posts that I find the work of George Friedman’s Geopolitical Futures organization worth following. I recently listened to two podcasts from his group and a speech George Friedman gave, all of which I recommend.

The April 24^th podcast “Not Another Cold War” with Jacob Shapiro and Cole Alton, two senior staff members at Geopolitical Futures, after giving a few minutes analysis of what is happening in Armenia and Korea these days, devotes most of the podcast to giving an extraordinarily good assessment of the state of Russia today, the geopolitical issues it faces, and how that explains what Putin is trying to do at the moment. It can be found on YouTube at https://youtu.be/knHeNHn-dtA

The second podcast is an interview with George Friedman on the Olasky Interview, which can be found at https://soundcloud.com/world-news-group/the-olasky-interview-george-friedman-1. George is asked to estimate, for a number of major world leaders, whether their fortunes are going up or going down. I found this podcast fascinating.

Finally, George Friedman was the keynote speaker at the 2017 McCain Conference at the US Naval Academy, and his speech was an outstanding analysis of American foreign policy and strategy over the past 100 years. It can be seen at https://youtu.be/4i-RF6EhLZs

The consequences of impeaching Trump

Rabid liberals are still hoping to impeach President Trump. And for all I know he may actually be guilty of something impeachable. Most recent presidents, it turns out, were.

But I wonder if these people have really thought through the long term consequences of using impeachment as a political weapon? We already have a political system that barely functions. Almost half the voting public voted for Trump (about 30% voted for Trump, about 30% voted for Clinton, and 40% didn’t bother to vote at all.).  Are liberals actually so naïve as to think that the 30% who voted for Trump are going to meekly stand by while their vote is cancelled? I think it far more likely that a Trump impeachment, so clearly motivated simply by partisan politics, would so poison the political system in the future that any president the liberals manage to get elected would face the same sort of disabling political attacks and endless investigations that Trump is facing. Do we really want impeachment to become a political weapon, used any time the opposition wins the presidency? Do we really want to become a banana republic?

Do liberals really want that?  

The importance of nuclear energy

There is a widespread perception among those not conversant with the details of electric power systems that we could someday soon get all our electric energy from “green” sources like solar power, wind power and hydroelectric power. That is naïve. It’s one of those popular ideas that sound plausible to people who don’t really understand the technology.  Let me explain why.

Power engineers talk about “base load” and “peak load”. The base load is the steady amount of power required 24/7 on the grid to run factory motors, refrigerators in homes and in stores, electric trains and subways, furnaces and air conditioning systems, etc, etc. Peak load is the extra power required occasionally, such as in the evening when everyone turns on lights, or in very hot weather when everyone turns their air conditioning to high. Now the problem for wind and solar green power is that it is only available when the sun shines or the wind blows, so it is not very good for the base load, which needs to be generated reliably all the time. Hydroelectic power does better (so long as there is enough water in the reservoir or river), but we have already exploited just about all the hydroelectric sites in the country, so this isn’t going to grow much more.

There is a myth that we can just use batteries to store the extra wind or solar power until it is needed, just like our iPhones do. That sounds great to people who don’t really understand battery technology and battery economics. Yes, batteries are getting better and cheaper, but there are physics-based limits as well as economics limits to what can be achieved, and they fall far, far short of storing enough power to manage the base load. That’s why it’s hard to find an all-electric car that can go more than about a hundred miles between charges, even with a thousand pounds of batteries.

Good base load generating plants are coal fired, oil fired, gas fired and nuclear ones, and all except the nuclear plant produce greenhouse gases. So if we really want to go “full green” we are going to have to have nuclear power plants, lots of them.  That means we will have to get over our hysteria about nuclear power plants.  It’s true that there have been bad accidents with nuclear power plants – Chernobyl and Fukushima come to mind – but we have learned from those design flaws. And no doubt if we build lots more nuclear power plants there will still be an occasional accident – humans aren’t perfect. But it’s a matter of balancing risks. If we don’t build nuclear power plants we will continue to drive global warming, which in the end may produce a far more serious and widespread problem than an occasional nuclear power plant accident.

So by all means we ought to expand our solar and wind power farms as far as possible, but we will still need nuclear power to help sustain the base load if we really want to go full green. And that will require the public to get over its irrational fear of nuclear power. After all, even the Sierra Club has come to understand the necessity of nuclear power.