Recommended: The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy

Now that the Cold War is over (though a new one may be starting) and some of the secret files of both the USSR and the USA are available to scholars, we are learning a lot that we didn't know at the time, most of it a bit unsettling. David Hoffman's 2010 book The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy, working from newly declassified documents and interviews with some of the key players in both the US and the USSR, takes us into the thinking of Soviet and American leaders at the time.

This is interesting history, especially for those of us who lived through those times. But it is more than that; it is a template for how things, in both the US and Russia, are probably still evolving, especially with Russian resurgence under President Putin and the renewed US arms buildup in response to that resurgence (not to mention China's threat).  And it makes clear how easy it is for leaders to misjudge and misunderstand leaders in other cultures. This book is worth reading.

Saudi Arabia and the Jamal Khashoggi murder

President Trump is under a lot of pressure these days from politicians and activists to sanction Saudi Arabia over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. What this reveals, more than anything else, is how naïve most of the political class and most activists are.

First of all, oil prices depend heavily on how much oil Saudi Arabia chooses to pump. At the moment, at our request, they have increased production to help make up for declining Iranian production (on account of US sanctions), thereby keeping oil prices lower. If we sanction Saudi Arabia over this issue, they can simply pump less oil and let prices rise, which actually helps them while it hurts us. And Russia would love it, because it would help their financial situation.

Second, Arab regimes may fight among themselves, but they pull together in the face of external interference. If we try to force Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman out over this issue we will be seen as an external power meddling in Middle East affairs, and probably most of the Middle East regimes will turn hostile to us for a long time to come – hardly a smart move.  It would be nice if some of the other princes unseated him, but it will be terrible for us if we are seen to be the reason he loses his position.

Third, we need Saudi Arabia to help us contain Iran. Pissing them off at this point risks destroying the coalition we have been painfully and slowly assembling to meet the Iranian threat.

Fourth, Saudi Arabia is already playing Russia and the US off against each other. We are trying to limit Russian influence in the Middle East, and at the moment we have more influence than Russia. The last thing we need at the moment is an ill-considered move that drives Saudi Arabia into Russia’s arms.

So yes, let’s condemn the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. There has probably already been enough bad press for Saudi Arabia, especially from Turkey, on this issue that they have probably figured out that this ought not to be tried again. But there are a lot of complex and intertwined issues here, as is usually the case with Middle East politics. Let’s remember that at the moment we need Saudi Arabia more than they need us, and let’s not cut off our nose to spite our face.

Nuclear Weapons

I have just finished reading Richard Rhodes' three excellent books on the history of nuclear weapons, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1987), Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995), and Twilight of the Bombs:Recent Challenges, New Dangers and the Prospects for a World Without Nuclear Weapons. (2010). They detail the fascinating history of this effort, the personalities of the key players, and the inevitable political battles that were involved. One comes away amazed that so many exceedingly difficult problems were overcome in such a short time. The creators of America's nuclear weapons - both physicists and engineers - were truly brilliant.

I have also gone back and read John McFee's The Curve of Binding Energy (1994), which deals with the question of just how easy would it be for an individual, or a very few individuals, to build a home-made nuclear weapon. To cut to the chase, the answer is - very easy! All one has to know is freely available on Amazon for less than a couple of hundred dollars. All one needs in the way of equipment is freely available on e-bay, from chemical supply houses and from the local hardware store. And in fact we know this is possible because South Africa, Israel, Pakistan, India and North Korea have all managed to do it without help from us. It is easy to make a crude weapon, though much harder to make a weapon small enough and durable enough to fit a rocket.  The only difficult part - the only real barrier to a terrorist building a crude bomb - is obtaining enough enriched uranium, or (preferably) plutonium to make a bomb. A few kilograms of plutonium, an amount perhaps the size of a  grapefruit or less, would be enough.  And far more than that has already gone missing from nuclear inventories around the world, though how much of that is really missing and how much is sloppy record keeping is an interesting question.
                
This is an important question, because as I have argued elsewhere, if we really want to deal with the climate change issue we need to move much or most energy production to nuclear energy, which means there would be a lot of plutonium (an inevitable byproduct of running a nuclear reactor) around the nation in power plants, and it needs much better safeguards that we currently have, or that private power companies have the financial incentive to provide.                   

Recommended: 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Yuval Marari is a Israeli historian and a tenured professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and author of  Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2015) and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2017), both global best-sellers and both well worth reading. His newest book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018) is extraordinarily good, full of hard-headed reasoning and solid common sense (though that sense is not anywhere near as common worldwide as the name implies!).

The world faces a number of increasingly difficult problems. Harari takes on many of these and proposes fruitful ways of thinking about them and approaching them. I like especially his piece on "How do you live in an age of bewilderment, when the old stories (fascism, communism, liberalism) have collapsed, and no new story has yet emerged to replace them?"

Midterm election

Both sides will of course try to spin the results as a big win, but in fact the mid-term election results are just about what one would have expected. The Republicans seem to have picked up a couple of Senate seats, and the Democrats flipped about 30+ House seats to take narrow control of the House. As I mentioned yesterday, a 30 seat shift against the current president's party is right on the historical average for midterm elections. For a president with approval ratings below 50% (as Trump has) a 37 seat gain is the historical average. A "Blue Wave" would have been 40 or 50 or more seats, and that didn't happen. For comparison, the Republican "wave" of 2010 picked up 63 House seats, and the Republican "wave" of 1994 picked up 54 House seats.

The media will analyze the results endlessly and in minute detail, but my own reading of the situation is that Democrats once again shot themselves in the foot, an uncomfortably common occurrence these days. Midterm elections, with generally low turnouts, are often determined by who is energized to turn out to vote.  Until the Kavanaugh debacle, polls show that Republicans weren't very enthusiastic about the midterms while Democrats were. The Democrat's down-and-dirty street fight on the Supreme Court nomination energized Republicans, and probably stopped what might well have been a "Blue Wave" in the making.

With Congressional political control split between the two parties now, not too much will get done in Congress - and is that any different than the last two years?  The one major bipartisan issue that might possibly get through both the House and Senate is a infrastructure bill, if either party can get its act together. The question now is whether Democrats, with narrow control of the House, will focus on policy issues that might help them on the 2020 elections, or will waste the next two years in fruitless attacks and investigations of Trump.

By the way, Democratic pundits were so sure they would do better because of Trump's low approval ratings. But at the point of recent midterms the approval ratings of  recent presidents have all been below 50% (2018 Trump 41%, 2014 Obama 38.7%, 2010 Obama 45.7%, and 2006 Bush 30.3%). It seems to me Democrats have spent too much time making up fantasies about how they were going surely to beat Trump and believing their own propaganda, and not enough time in realistic hard-headed planning on regaining power.

What this election should have made clear to Democrats is that just being "against Trump" is not a winning strategy - it takes more; it takes some real policy proposals. Another thing that this election seems to me to have demonstrated is that far left candidates don't do well in America. Most of the ultra-liberal candidates that were the darlings of the party - Beto O’Rourke, Andrew Gillum, Stacey Abrams etc - lost despite the enormous amount of money spent on their campaigns.

Recommended: Democrats Are So, So Bad at This

Election day is tomorrow, and while this political season is largely in uncharted waters (there are lots of unknowns at the moment, like who will turn out to vote), my guess is that there will be no “blue wave”. Republicans will probably not only keep the Senate but even perhaps pick up a seat or two. Democrats will probably win the House by a thin margin, gaining just about what the opposition party usually gains in an off-year election (historically the president’s party usually loses about 30 seats in the next midterms) but not much more.

As I have said several times before, we badly need a viable liberal party to keep the nation’s politics in balance, and the current Democratic Party simply isn’t that party any more. In that regard, let me recommend the article today in Slate by Ben Mathis-Lilley entitled Democrats Are So, So Bad at This.

It is not of course just that Democrats haven’t learned how to get their message across; it’s also that in this election they don’t seem to have any message except outrage at Trump. If the sky had fallen and the economy plunged after Trump’s election, as liberal pundits assured us it would, outrage might have been enough. But in fact the economy surged, unemployment fell to a 50 year low, and working class wages began to rise, all a strong reversal of the anemic economy under the Obama administration. In the face of that, outrage alone simply isn’t a meaningful policy.