Meditations on American Foreign Policy – I

One of the staples of American popular culture is the prediction that America is in decline. Apparently this tradition dates all the way back to the founding of the nation, and has provided innumerable speakers and writers with a living ever since. And it still seems to be in vogue. Search Amazon for book titles with “American” and “decline” and the list runs to 20 pages.

Certainly the past couple of decades, when American foreign policy has been in the hands of the neocon interventionist internationalists, imbued with the naïve illusion that they could “spread American-style democracy” throughout the world at the point of a gun, has been grim. We have spent almost 18 years now in Middle East wars, killed, maimed and displaced tens of millions of people, thoroughly destroyed the infrastructure of a number of nations, spent enough (borrowed)  money to have permanently solved two or three major domestic problems, and accomplished absolutely nothing. In the face of that debacle, on can understand why the argument that we are in decline has some traction in the public mind. One of the few good things one can say about Trump is that he seems to be cleaning that clan out of the administration.

Part of this persistent fear of decline is the fear that some other power is rising to take our place as the global hegemon. In my youth it was the Soviet Union who was the threat. After that is was the Japanese, with their amazing economic growth, who were going to buy out America. Then some worried that the European Union would become powerful enough to challenge American dominance. Now we have China as the bogyman, and perhaps occasionally a resurgent Russia as well.

Of course lots of people have a vested interest in having a threatening external enemy. Service chiefs need to justify the budgets for their branches of the armed forces. Politicians find it useful to win votes, especially if their district houses major defense contractors. Corporations can use the fear in tactics to try to hobble foreign competitors. Authors and speakers find it a reliable topic to maintain their incomes. And demagogues find it useful to recruit and maintain followers and thereby increase their power.

But I will argue in this series that none of these – not China, not Russia, not Iran, not the EU - are the threat that popular writers and ambitious politicians make them out to be, and that the next century or two at least will be American centuries, not out of any brilliance from our political leadership or any special feature of the American culture - indeed despite the thoroughly predictable bumbling and incompetence of American politicians and the ignorance of most of the American voting public  - but due largely to the simple luck of American geography and demographics.  What will eventually end American dominance (and it will eventually end, as all empires end) will almost certainly not be any external threat, but rather the inevitable internal decay and corruption that seems to finally overcome all great empires.

Recommended: Media Botched Story

I recommend today's article in the Atlantic Monthly site: The Media Botched the Covington Catholic Story, and the Damage to their Credibility Will Be Lasting. The article describes how numerous other videos of this controversial event show that the media's original anti-Trump story was not only incorrect, it was in fact completely backward from the real events. It was the students who were being hassled by the American Indian (who is NOT a Vietnam vet, as he claimed), and before that by an African-American religious group, not the other way around.

Of course all kinds of media hogs and liberal politicians and clueless  Hollywood celebrities weighed in with their outrage - hoping, I suppose, to get a little more publicity for themselves.

A few media outlets actually apologized - quietly and half-heartedly - but to my amazement even today some media writers are still trying to push the same story, and attacking the students and their high school, even though the original story it is now thoroughly discredited. And of course now that we know the full story, none of the media have anything to say about the Native American or the African-American's bad behavior - that would be politically incorrect!  I find it sickening.

The 2020 election

They say a week in politics is a long time, so making any predictions now about the 2020 election is dangerous. Nevertheless, as democratic candidates like Kamala Harris announce their intentions to run for president I am tempted to predict that Trump is highly likely to be re-elected, and even that Republicans might possibly re-take the House in 2020.  Whether that is good news or bad news depends on your politics.

My prediction is based on the guess that the extremists in the current and likely crop of candidates are going to push all the Democratic candidates so far to the left in the primaries, each trying to outdo the others in virtue signaling, that the winner is unlikely to be electable.  What I don’t see is any movement emerging to try increase the Democrat’s appeal to the blue-collar working class in the middle of country that they used to represent and that Hillary blew off so disastrously in the last election.

To win again, Democrats need to retake those voters in Ohio and Michigan and Pennsylvania and other Midwest states that Hillary lost in 2016. They need to retake them in the face of a robust economy, record low unemployment, a resurgence in US manufacturing jobs, and rising working class wages – all things Trump promised in his 2016 campaign. And so they have to offer them something more appealing than just lectures about white privilege or cultural appropriation or toxic masculinity or socialist doctrines or other identity politics platitudes that play so well among the California liberal set. They need to offer them something concrete and positive in their day-to-day lives. And I don’t yet see them doing that.  

A poster child for what is wrong in America today

For those who haven’t been keeping up, a video went viral on Twitter the other day showing a smug teenager wearing a Trump “Make America Great Again” cap hassling a native America elder. It made great press and fed the unending outrage of the Trump haters. The video was viewed at least 2.5 million times, and re-Tweeted over 14,000 times.  And a number of mainstream media reporters and commentators picked it up and expressed the appropriate outrage. Only trouble was, it wasn’t true. Other videos show it was the teenagers, a Catholic school group on tour, who were being hassled by the America Indian elder, who pushed his way into the group calling them “beasts”, and the supposedly smug teenager was in fact trying to defuse the situation.  

Just to make it worse, it turns out the video was posted from a fake twitter account, supposedly owned by a California teacher but actually run by a blogger in Brazil who posts provocative stuff. (Twitter banned the account, but inevitably it will pop up again under a new name.)

This, it seems to me, is a poster child for all that is wrong with American politics and media today.  The mainstream media will push or spin or even fabricate any story, however poorly substantiated or vetted, that can tear down Trump, because it feeds their reader base. The gullible public will believe anything that shows up on Twitter so long as it feeds what they want to believe. And because of that, bad actors all around the world, not just in Russia, can mess with the American voting public’s mind at will.

Nor is this an isolated case. Another recent example is the recent widely-discussed claim that the Muller investigation had proof that Trump had ordered his lawyer to lie to Congress. The report was subsequently denied by the Muller investigation itself, but not before the networks had spent hours gleefully discussing the implications. And of course the story was headlined, but the subsequent denial was buried on page 30. As Mark Twain said " A lie can go around the world before the truth can get its boots on".

One wonders how the nation will survive with such a gullible and easily mislead voting public.  

Recommended: The Absent Superpower

Peter Zeihan's 2014 book The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder pretty accurately predicted the current global disorder. His new 2016 book The Absent Superpower: The Shale Revolution and a World Without America carries on the same theme, but updated to account for the unexpected success of fracking, and its profound effects on the world order.

The beginning of the book is a tutorial on fracking, and how it has become unexpectedly successful, making North America essentially hydrocarbon (oil and gas) independent of the rest of the world. The rest of the book explores the implication of that independence - the breakdown of the 1944 Bretten Woods agreements now that America doesn't have to bribe nations to ally with us against the Soviet Union (essentially the deal was open access to American markets and American-funded protection of maritime trade routes in return for alliance against the communists).  The short version is that North America and a few of our allies (Great Britain, Australia, etc) will do fine, but without the umbrella of American protection the rest of the world will be in a world of hurt.

Well worth reading and pondering.

The relevant and the trivial

I have likened the world to the ocean – on the top are waves and foam and much movement that catches our attention but is largely meaningless – just movement of water up and down. Deep underneath are great currents that actually move water and heat vast distances and make a huge difference to the planet’s climate. That seems to me an apt metaphor for American life these days. Most Americans are consumed with the daily political trench warfare in Washington, or the latest celebrity scandal, or the latest conspiracy theory circulating on social media, or the latest cultural, social or environmental fad issue – all driven by a hyperactive media but most largely meaningless in the long run. Meanwhile truly transformative things are happening largely under the media radar that will profoundly affect our lives, and the lives of our children and grandchildren.

There is no question that the world order that has prevailed since the end of World War II, and has kept the world largely at peace during that time despite the occasional proxy wars and the constant drumbeat of local insurrections and civil wars, is breaking down.  We may wish it would remain, but it won’t, and in fact it can’t. Conditions have changed and the world is, inevitably, responding to those changes.

Nor is Trump the cause of this disruption, much as his opponents would like to think so. He is, if anything, a symptom of the change, as is Brexit, the EU problems, the current Russian aggression, China’s expansionist moves, and the rise of nationalist parties throughout Europe.  If Hillary had won the election, things that matter would probably have been much the same, though of course her language and the media’s responses would have been more moderate.

The world system is immensely complex, with hundreds of thousands of interacting local agendas, trade flows, ideologies, cultural differences, etc, etc. But one can certainly sort out a few of the major factors that really matter.

The first one is changing demographics. I have written about this before. Lots of nations, in fact the majority of nations, are now depopulating themselves, some more rapidly than others. They are having less children than are needed to keep the population stable. And as a result they are becoming top-heavy with older people and short of the young workers who keep the whole economic system running with their labor and taxes and consumption. This will destroy the economies and social safety nets of many nations within a decade or two, with massive consequences for all of us.

The second one is changing technology. The world is now interconnected in ways never before experienced, or even anticipated. This has made possible instant communication across the globe and access for everyone to immense amounts of information. But it has also driven the rapid spread of propaganda and fake news, and the ability of authoritarian governments to track the location, the habits, and even the thoughts of its subjects in ways even George Orwell never imagined possible. (My new Subaru is talking to the internet all the time, Alexa is hearing everything said in our living room, Amazon knows what products I have looked at last night, local CCTV cameras watch me as I move around town, and my cell phone tracks exactly where I am at all times for anyone who is interested.).

Technology has also fostered automation and artificial intelligence, which are increasingly putting people out of work, and not just manual laborers or factory workers. (for example, AI is now better at reading an X-ray than highly trained and highly paid radiologists).  Capitalism requires workers who get paychecks so that they can buy products that keep other workers employed and produce profits that can be accumulated and reinvested to expand production., What happens when a lot of people get replaced by robots or AI and no longer get paychecks? That will certainly disrupt the system.

The third one is changing trade flows, especially of hydrocarbons (gas and oil) which provide the energy to run the world and the fertilizer to feed the world. This a is a complex issue which I won’t try to summarize here. I suggest reading Peter Zeihan’s 2016 book The Absent Superpower: The Shale Revolution and a World Without America. Or for an entertaining but good summary watch his one hour presentation on YouTube at https://youtu.be/feU7HT0x_qU.

The point I am making is this: the daily media outrage at whatever outrageous thing Trump has just said, or whatever infeasible populist proposal some politician has just floated to feed their base, or whatever sordid little Hollywood scandal has just surfaced, are just waves on the surface of the ocean – in the long run they simply don’t matter and consume our attention and energy to no purpose. We should put our attention to the deep currents in the world that really do matter, that really will disrupt our lives and the lives of our children.

YouTube Lectures added

In addition to the annotated book list available on the sidebar at the right, I have just added a list of interesting YouTube lectures on various topics - geopolitics, military strategy, physics, etc, etc. As with the book list, I will be adding to it from time to time.

US Strategic and Tactical problems II

As I said in the previous posting, it seems to me the US faces two major military issues, one strategic and one tactical. This note explores the tactical issue.

The tactical problem, it seems to me, is that technological advances have made much of our current military equipment and facilities either highly vulnerable, or obsolete, and we need to figure out how to respond to that change.

In World War II Germany began the war with two massive battleships, the Bismark and the Tirpitz. The Japanese invested in two state-of-the-art battleships, the Yamato and the Musashi. These were major investments in their fleets, and were considered at the time to be almost invulnerable because their massive guns could reach much further than other ships. Yet all were rendered ineffective, and eventually destroyed by air power, the new transformative technology.

We seem to be repeating that mistake. We are still investing in massive Ford class aircraft carriers, and large surface vessels like Ticonderoga class cruisers and Arleigh Burke class destroyers, which may prove to be just be large, juicy targets for swarms of anti-ship missiles. Similarly, our air force is stocking up on F35 fighters, which may be wonderful but are supported by slow, unarmed refueling tankers and slow, unarmed AWACs airborne radar systems, both of which make easy targets for advanced missiles.

The advent of precision munitions, some capable of traveling thousands of miles, with stealth configurations and advanced onboard AIs (and soon perhaps hypersonic speeds), holds not just our ships and aircraft at risk, but also the supporting infrastructure needed to keep those ships and aircraft in combat  – airfields, ports, fuel and ammunition dumps, etc. Parenthetically, that is why the new Chinese island bases built by reclaiming sand bars and rocks in the China Sea are not nearly the threat that the media assumes. They are fixed sites, and will be rendered inoperable by missile attacks in the first half hour of any conflict in the China Sea.

It seems to me we need to make two fundamental moves to counter these changes. First, we need to distribute our forces more – more smaller, less expensive, expendable, widely distributed  ships rather than fewer larger, massively expensive, indispensable ships. With current missile technology, even very small ships can pack a deadly punch, and with current computer and electronics technology even very small ships can participate in networked command and control and sensor sharing. The same with our aircraft – more smaller, less expensive, widely distributed, perhaps unmanned, aircraft rather than fewer wildly expensive aircraft.

The second move is to make our support facilities less vulnerable, and to have more of them for redundancy. We cannot have a navy dependent on just a few fixed location resupply ports – they are too easily put out of action, even on the US mainland. We can’t have an air force dependent on slow, unarmed refueling tankers and AWAC airborne radar systems – they are too vulnerable in today’s battlespace.

A few military officers have begun to raise this issue, but the military, like any bureaucracy, is very slow to change, and I fear will be unable to make the shift without the humiliation of a major debacle – like the elimination of an entire $40-50 billion carrier strike force by a single nuclear torpedo or missile.