Understanding the wider world

An acquaintance recently was complaining that they simply didn’t understand the world –Brexit, Trump, Russia, China, the Middle East mess, etc, etc.. Well of course none of us understand the world – it is far too complicated for any human to fully understand, but it is possible to understand at least the broad outlines of what is happening. Not that one could deduce it from the American press, so focused on shallow sensationalism and partisan ideology. But there is a core group of experts who, while they may debate details, do seem to agree on the broad outlines of what is happening. For those who are interested, let me suggest the following:

George Friedman seems to me to have an outstanding ability to condense the complexity of geopolitics into something intelligible to the ordinary reader. His 2010 book The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century is a wonderful primer on geopolitics and how geopolitical experts think about the world. His 2016 book Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe gives a good explanation as to why the European Union is in such trouble now. For those who are not especially prone to reading books like this, there are some good presentations by him on YouTube at https://youtu.be/zpAkT5YnpEA and https://youtu.be/scVSEAhvRD4. Also his 2018 talk at https://youtu.be/tJmrODCZmmw gives a nice succinct summary of American foreign policy. A couple of hours watching these presentations on YouTube would be a good beginning.

Peter Zeihan, who worked with George Friedman for a decade while Friedman was CEO of STRATFOR, has written two excellent, well researched books. His 2016 book The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder lays the groundwork for why the global world order that has prevailed since the end of World War II is now coming apart.. His more recent 2018 book The Absent Superpower: The Shale Revolution and a World without America carries forward from this and factors in the profound affects that American energy independence (from the fracking revolution) has produced. Again, if one is not especially interested in working through the substantial detail and research in these books, good short (appx 1 hour) summaries of his views are available in his excellent and quite entertaining presentations at https://youtu.be/feU7HT0x_qU and https://youtu.be/BclcpfVn2rg. The second presentation repeats some of the information in the first one, but has interesting additional information, especially since it came just after the midterm elections and he has interesting things to say about how American political parties are changing, so it is worth watching both presentations.

  

Finally, let me suggest Robert Kaplan’s excellent 2013 book The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate. Again, if you don’t want to read the book, you can get a good sense of his arguments from the extended (about 45 minutes plus an extended Q & A discussion) presentation of Grand Strategy of his on YouTube at https://youtu.be/JK7fhSn5AGo. By the way, none of these authors are especially happy with the way things are going; they are just reporting what they see and what they think will happen.

For someone who wants to get a relatively quick overview of the profound forces reshaping the world today, reading these books and/or watching the presentations would be a good start. There are of course lots of other viewpoints, especially from people who want to make the perennial argument that America is in decline (and we ought to follow their preferred ideology to avoid this fate). If nothing else, Friedman, Zeihan and Kaplan will provide a sound, fact-based basis from which to judge and evaluate these other viewpoints.

Recommended: The Second World Wars

Victor Davis Hanson is Professor of Greek and Director of the Classics Program at California State University, Fresno, and author of a number of very good books about wars, ancient and modern. His 2017 book The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won is not yet another history of the war.  It is instead a closely reasoned and well researched analysis of the strategy and tactics, industrial capacity, armaments, and personalities of the leaders that shaped the war. His views, informed as they are by his understanding of history (most mistakes have been made before in history, often many times) give  new insights into World War II, and offer some sobering thoughts about future conflicts. Well worth reading.

So is it a national emergency or not?

Trump has declared a national emergency to handle illegal immigration across the southern border. So is it really a national emergency or not?

In 2018 a total of 396,579 illegal immigrants were arrested trying to cross the border with Mexico.  That is the total that were caught. How many were not caught?

The ICE itself thinks it catches about 90% of those who try to cross, but independent experts doubt the figure is that high, and various estimates run between 55% and 85%.  Let’s assume perhaps 75% (3 in every 4) get caught.  That means the actual number of attempts – successful and unsuccessful – ought to be around 528,000, or say half a million per year as a rough estimate.

So do half a million people attempting to enter the country illegally across the southern border constitute a national emergency or not?  It’s not as many as in some past years (in 2000 more than 1.6 million were apprehended trying to cross the border), but a half million is still a lot of people.

Perhaps how one feels about this depends in part on whether one can lose one’s job to an illegal immigrant. The only contact wealthy liberals in gated communities have with such people is when they hire cheap gardeners or maids. On the other hand people with marginal jobs flipping hamburgers or picking vegetables in the Central Valley feel the threat directly.

There is of course the separate question of whether a physical barrier is the best way to handle this situation. The Obama administration apparently thought so, because it built about 700 miles of barrier before Trump became president, so current Democratic opposition to the barrier seems suspiciously political. Still, it is a valid question – would more high tech solutions (sensors, drones, helicopter patrols, etc) work better? Would they work as well? Would they cost less, or more?

Recommended: Heartland

Sarah Smarsh's 2018 book Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth is a book everyone ought to read. The author grew up poor on a wheat farm in Kansas, but managed to become a tenured professor. Her insights into the lives of the underclass in America, and how the system - created by people who have no concept of the needs  of the people they think they are helping, and who often, frankly, don't care about them - are searing.

Resurgent socialism

As the current crop of 2020 Democratic hopefuls is demonstrating, the younger generation is enamored (again) of socialism. Of course socialism has had a bad name in the US for the last century at least, being associated with Communism and the Soviet Union and China and Cuba and Venezuela…and…and…; none of which are systems I would like to live under.

Still, it is clear that we have some problems with the capitalism that Americans seem to love. For one thing, inequality in wealth and power has now grown to a pretty extreme level, approaching the level it was at just before the great depression. Currently the richest 1% of the population holds more wealth than the bottom 90%. And some CEOs are paid tens of millions ($103 million was the top CEO salary in 2017), while the average annual worker wage in the US in 2017 was $44,564. Clearly no one is worth $103 million a year – this is obscene! Or put another way, there is no way the CEO, however brilliant she or he is, is 2,430 times more valuable than the average worker.

Part of the problem is that, like the game of Monopoly, once a few people, by whatever means – luck or perseverance or skullduggery - get enough ahead of everyone else the capitalist system works to increase their wealth disproportionately. In Monopoly, once someone has the luck to get hotels on a few of the high priced squares everyone else in the game begins to lose ground. Similarly, once one has enough to invest, the investment returns tend to widen the gap from those who cannot afford investments.

And the same is true with power. The rich – billionaires like the Koch brothers or Tom Stayer or George Soros, and huge wealthy corporations, like ExxonMobile or Apple or General Motors – have undue influence over the political system, and (quite naturally), use their influence to shape it to preserve and increase their own wealth and influence.

Now every system has its inequalities; nature is unequal. Some people are born smarter, or work harder, or have better luck. No system can ever eradicate inequality completely, but there is a level of inequality at which societies become unstable, (not to mention, immoral) and I fear we are approaching that level, if not already there.

In this regard let me suggest the talks on YouTube by Professor Richard Wolff, here (Socialism in America) and here (The Game is Rigged). Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts and currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University in New York. Wolff is a Marxist economist, meaning he knows what Marx actually wrote vs what the public and media think he wrote, and there is stuff in Marx that applies to today’s situation. He certainly understands that the socialist experiments in Russia and China didn’t work out, and he has spent his career trying to figure out why.  It is well worth listening to his reasoning.

Considering that we may be heading back into a period of socialism with the younger generation, it seems worth educating ourselves on current socialist thought, and on what works and what doesn’t work. And by the way, though conservatives don’t like to admit it, we are already a socialist country in some respects – think of Social Security and Medicare and unemployment insurance – all socialist ideas that we wouldn’t want to give up

Recommended: Kleptocracy is on the rise in America

The oversized influence that American corporation have in government is already an issue, but The Atlantic has an article this month that expands beyond that to discuss the degree to which Russian kleptocracy is being  facilitated by American banks and law firms. The article Kleptocracy is on the rise in America will (or at least, should) alarm us.

As I argued in my just competed series on foreign policy, the American empire is far more likely to be destroyed by internal corruption than by the rise of any external competitor. And this is just the sort of creeping corruption that could do it!

Withdrawing from the INF treaty

The INF (Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missile) treaty, signed in 1987 by Reagan and Gorbachev, banned the design, production, testing and deployment of ground-based (but not ship-based or air-launched) cruise and ballistic missiles with ranges between 500 and 5000 km. We have adhered to that treaty up until now. The Russians, on the other hand, developed the 9M729 (SSC-8) cruise missile, with a range estimated up to 3400 miles, and have thus far deployed at least two battalions of this missile, with four launchers and an unknown number of missiles each.

We have complained to the Russians about this violation for several years now, but the Obama administration, typically, didn’t push the issue very hard and so Putin just ignored them. Trump gave the Russians 60 days to come into compliance, but they refused, claiming that the range was only 300 km, below the 500 km limit of the treaty, though they offered no proof of that claim, and only allowed external inspection for a few hours of a static mock-up of the missile by some journalists. We apparently know differently, probably because we have tracked test flights. But even without that, the missile appears to be an extended range variant of the 9M728 (SSC-7), which already has a range of 500 km.

It is not clear why the Russians have decided to abandon the treaty. There doesn’t appear to be any current tactical need for such a missile against the West, considering what they already have fielded. Perhaps its development was a result of internal politics – some group that pressed for it and that Putin needs as supporters. Perhaps it was just exuberance among some in the military. Perhaps the growing threat from China drove the perceived need for such a missile. Perhaps it was just Putin pushing to see how far he could go against Obama’s weak response. Perhaps Putin’s need to show the Russian public how strong Russia is was more important than adhering to the treaty. Who knows?

In any case, the treaty was for practical purposes already dead, since the Russians weren’t observing it. There is of course the predictable outcry in the US by those who think anything Trump does must be stupid (even if Obama tried the same thing). But in fact, withdrawing from the treaty is just an acknowledgement that it was no longer in force anyway. I am hard-pressed to see what benefit America would get from pretending otherwise and staying in the treaty when Russia is already violating it. Indeed, not reacting to Russian’s violation of the treaty might well encourage them to feel they could violate other treaties, like the START (Strategic Arms Reduction) treaty, with impunity.

In an amusing sidelight, China opposes the US withdrawal from the INF treaty. Of course, China itself never joined the INF treaty, and has developed and a deployed a number of missiles that would be in violation of the treaty, including the DF-26 “Guam Killer” ballistic missile they have been bragging about recently. Still, they oppose our leaving the treaty! Talk about chutzpah!

Meditations on American Foreign Policy – VII America Again

American politics tends to follow the trend of American popular opinion. Yuval Noah Harari, in his 2018 book 21 Lessons for the 21^st Century, talks about how people’s views are shaped by stories. We used to have three major stories in the world – Fascism, Communism, and Liberalism. World War II killed fascism as a viable story. The fall of the Soviet Union killed communism as a viable story. And now liberalism is falling apart. So we are left with no story, and as a result, political chaos until a new story emerges.

I think Harari’s argument is an interesting way to look at American foreign policy. Something significant is certainly happening in American culture. Note that in the last election, there was almost no talk about foreign policy. Note that the current crop of 2020 presidential hopefuls are all talking about domestic issues – free college, universal health care, social justice, immigration policy, etc, etc. There is almost no talk of foreign policy – of America’s place or responsibilities in the wider world. I think perhaps this reflects the inward – even selfish, even egotistical – focus of the younger generations, who are fascinated with “selfies”, who seem to share a sense of entitlement, some of whom need to document their every daily thought and action on twitter (as if anyone cares), and whose major political concerns tend to be centered around themselves or the group they identify with as victims of this or that oppression.

That self-centered approach to life will no doubt be reflected more and more in our foreign policy, in which we Americans may become even more clueless to the differences in other cultures, and may pull back even more from world affairs. Certainly America, like all nations, has at times been ignorant, heavy-handed and incompetent in its foreign policy, but despite that on the whole the American presence has been good for the world – it has largely kept the peace. Robert Kagen, in his 2012 book The World America Made, argues that without America the world today would be a much poorer, much grimmer world, and I find his arguments convincing. Peter Zeihan, in his 2016 book The Absent Superpower predicts just such a withdrawal of America from world affairs, since we are no longer dependent on Middle East oil (because of fracking), and therefore don’t care much what happens elsewhere.

If these predictions are accurate, the Washington foreign policy establishment that emerges as today’s neocons lose influence will be sharply different. But will they be better, or worse??

Meditations on American Foreign Policy – VI America

George Freidman has argued that America has had a consistent foreign policy wired into its DNA at least since the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, even if American politicians weren’t always aware of it. That policy is not unlike the policy Britain followed, successfully, for hundreds of years – keep a balance of power across the world so that no single power coalesces that can challenge American hegemony.  Around that central policy other subsidiary policies have appeared and disappeared; such as “Manifest Destiny” to justify expanding across the entire continent, “Wilsonian Democracy”, Woodrow Wilson’s rather naïve view that we could get everyone to live peacefully together, and more recently the naïve neocon belief in spreading American-style democracy across ancient tribal lands at the point of a gun. But underneath these ephemeral fads the core policy has remained unchanged. It seems to me history supports that analysis.

One of the advantages of being such a wealthy and powerful nation is that we can afford to make really dumb mistakes - mistakes which might destroy a smaller nation – and it doesn’t destroy us. The American debacles in Vietnam, and more recently our fruitless adventures in the Middle East, demonstrate this.

So what is there to say about American foreign policy? We have had periods when we seemed to do the right things. We managed the Cold War through a policy of alliances and containment, and it succeeded, in the sense that we did not have a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, nor did the Soviet Union invade and conquer Western Europe. And indeed we had about a 70 year period of unusual peace (for the most part) throughout the world. On the other hand, in more recent years the Washington foreign policy establishment has been in the grip of neocons who were eager to throw America’s weight around and interfere in the affairs of other nations, mostly with disastrous results.   Now the Trump administration, with its “America first” attitude, is in the process of cleaning that cabal out (to the vociferous dismay of many of its political and media supporters), but we don’t yet know what will replace it.

There are certainly worrisome signs. The appalling ignorance of history, civics, geography, science and basic economics of the American voters is only matched by the even more appalling ignorance in these same fields of our supposedly better-educated political class. There has clearly been a massive failure of the American educational system over the past few generations. For example, the current appeal of serious socialism to the Millennial set, despite the dismal history of socialist systems throughout the world, is an example of our national blindness to history or evidence. Are we perhaps going to have to live through George Santayana’s famous dictum: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.  

And there is the endemic problem of the ballooning national debt, and of both political parties addiction to deficit budgets to pay for popular vote-getting social programs. We have gotten away with this thus far because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, so we have a bit more leeway with debt than other nations. But there is a limit, and it is a lesson of history that great empires are as often as not brought down by over-extending themselves to the point of financial ruin.

And finally there is the creeping corruption of corporate power and wealth in American politics and government.  It is no secret that growing corporate power and corporate wealth has suborned many of the government agencies and political processes that are supposed to protect us and protect our rights.  When a company like Monsanto, using its leverage with government agencies, can force out of business almost all of its competitors in the soybean seed business, one ought to begin to worry. When pharmaceutical companies, using their campaign donations to pressure politicians, can prevent Medicare from negotiating competitive drug prices for Medicare patients, something is amiss.

One or more of these problems may eventually bring an end to American global hegemony, but the sheer dumb luck of being a large nation protected by oceans and weak neighbors, amply endowed with resources, with the most productive agricultural land in the world, will probably keep us on top for another century at least, despite our inevitable political and diplomatic blunders.

Meditations on American Foreign Policy – V Iran and Korea

Successive administrations in both parties have spent an inordinate amount of time focused on Iran and North Korea, largely because of the nuclear threat. I say “inordinate” because in reality neither of these nations poses an existential threat to America. Both are really just relatively weak authoritarian regimes that have learned how to pull America’s chain, and how to play the American media.

Let’s be clear. Nuclear weapons are worrisome, but in fact neither of these two nations is about to lob nuclear weapons into the USA or into any US allies unless we are invading them, and perhaps not even then, because they know perfectly well our nuclear retaliation would be devastating, and in both cases the primary focus of the ruling regime is on surviving.

There are currently eight declared nuclear nations (The US, Britain, China, Russia , France, India, Pakistan, and North Korea). Israel is an undeclared nuclear nation. And there are probably another dozen or so nations that could become nuclear nations over a long weekend if they needed to. The knowledge of how to build nuclear weapons is now widely available, so there is nothing special about either Iran or North Korea except that we don’t like them.  And by the way, it is doubtful that either of those two nations have missiles accurate enough to drop nuclear weapons  on specific US targets like cities or military bases. Missile range is one thing; missile accuracy is an entirely different, and much more difficult, proposition.

That is not to say that Iran and North Korea don’t present problems that the US needs to address. But they are hardly an existential threat to us, nor even close to ever becoming a peer competitor. And indeed neither are “in our neighborhood”, and so the main burden of dealing with them ought to fall on their own neighbors. In the Middle East there is already a coalition, including unlikely partners like Israel, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, forming to constrain Iran. In the case of North Korea, Japan and South Korea, and to some extent China itself, are serving as a counterweight. American involvement certainly helps, but is hardly essential. Their neighbors already have enough self-interest involved to motivate them adequately.

But one ought to notice how effective both North Korea and Iran are at playing to the American media, which is highly prone to hysterical responses, which in turn seem to force some politicians to feel the need to respond. I suppose nuclear scares make good news, but they hardly make good policy.

Meditations on American Foreign Policy – IV China

China is the current bogyman, the nation currently touted as being the long-term replacement for America as the global hegemon. And one can see why. It has a massive population of about 1.4 trillion, it has shown astonishing economic growth over the past 30 years, the Chinese as a culture are hard-working and entrepreneurial, the Chinese government has invested heavily in educating its best and brightest in the best universities around the world, and China has in recent years become increasingly assertive in world affairs, especially in its own region. There is no question but that China is a significant regional power in Asia.  

At the moment China is not yet a superpower. Despite having almost 5 times more people than the US, China’s GDP is still only about half that of the US ($12+ trillion vs $19+ trillion in 2018). Despite its bluster, its navy is currently no match for the US navy, or indeed even for the nearby Japanese navy. Its army is large (approximately 2 million, with another half million in reserves), but it lacks the transport or logistics system to reach much beyond the mainland, and indeed most of its land army is devoted to maintaining internal cohesion, at a substantial cost to its national budget.  Its industrial capacity could not sustain a major war. But if China were to continue to grow economically for another decade or two at the rate it has been growing over the past three decades, it might indeed become a superpower. That seems unlikely for several reasons.

First of all, China has a major geographic constraint. Its economy depends on maritime trade to bring oil and other resources into the country and to ship exports out. Bounded on its other sides by largely impassible mountains and deserts, it needs the sea routes. But its access to the China Sea is controlled by other nations like Japan and Taiwan and Vietnam and even the US (Okinawa). That is why it is so focused on controlling the first and second island chains. If these are in the hands of opponents its access to the sea can be cut off and its economy is vulnerable. As China rises, it is already prompting the formation of counterweight alliances with nations like Japan and Australia and even India, and of course the US.

China is trying to build up a significant “blue water” (ocean-going) navy, and has even taken to building aircraft carriers. But there is far more to having an effective navy than just building the ships. One needs to build the experience in handling naval strike groups, and that will take decades, even with intensive training and exercises. Its opponents, especially the US, Japan and Britain, already have centuries of experience as maritime powers.

And by the way, that is probably why China undertook the enormously expensive “Belt and Road” initiative, an attempt to build road and rail links to the Middle East and Europe along the old silk road routes. But even if successful, these cannot alone carry anywhere near the volume of trade China needs to maintain its economy. The sea routes are still critically important.

Second, its impressive GDP growth over the past 30 years isn’t quite what it seems. It has been driven by a government focus on providing jobs, largely funded by government loans, whether the jobs are needed or not. The result has been a massive overbuilding of infrastructure, especially in the wealthier coastal provinces, without regard to whether they provide returns or not. For example China now has an estimated 64 million empty apartments, many in brilliant new “ghost” cities with almost no inhabitants. As a consequence its banks also have an enormous portfolio of nonperforming (ie, bad) loans. So GDP growth is perhaps not a very good measure of what China has actually achieved, and of the true health of the Chinese economy.

Third, to continue to grow its GDP and competitive economic position much further, China will have to take steps to liberalize its system, steps which would loosen the power of the Communist Party. Steps like replacing the less efficient state-owned enterprises with more efficient privately-owned enterprises, and replacing central planning with market signals for resource allocation and pricing. But I doubt that the Party will loosen its grip, and in that they may be wise. China, so large and with so many disparate ethnic groups, always faces the threat of falling apart again, as it has done repeatedly through history, and only the tight grip of the Party can probably hold it together.

Finally, China faces a sharp demographic decline. It birth rate has fallen below 1.7 children per couple, well below the replacement rate of about 2.1 children per couple. Combined with the demographic problems that the 36 year “one-child” policy produced, China will, as some demographers have put it, “grow old before it grows wealthy”.  For those technically inclined, China is estimated to reach the “Lewis turning point”, the point where surplus labor decreases to zero and as a consequence labor costs start to rise sharply, around 2020-2030. Or put another way, while there are currently about 5 young workers per retiree in China, by 2050 there will be only about 2 workers per retiree. This will have severe social and political consequences.

So there is no question that China will be a major regional player in Asia, and that we need to deal diplomatically with it as such, but it seems a bit farfetched to see it as becoming a global superpower or replacing America as a global hegemon in the next century or two.

Meditations on American Foreign Policy – III European Union

I don’t think anyone ever thought that the European Union would become a military threat to the United States, but there were some who thought and argued that the EU might grow to become an economic threat and political counterweight.  After all, the European Union’s population is larger than ours (508 million vs 327 million in 2018) and its GDP almost the same as ours ($18.8 trillion vs $20.6 trillion in 2018), and it includes nations like Germany and Great Britain that are efficient producers and quite innovative cultures. Under the right circumstances a coalesced Europe might well have become a serious economic and even political competitor to US hegemony.

By now it is clear that the EU is no threat, and indeed may not even exist as a coherent force much longer. It simply can’t coalesce. Its various nationalities and subcultures are not only too dissimilar, but many actively despise one another for various historical reasons. And the founding premise of the EU, the construction of a one-size-fits-all universal bureaucracy and monetary union, is simply at odds with not only the differing cultural attitudes of its members, but with the practical realities of their differing economies.

But it is instructive that some in American saw the need to worry about the EU, even though the EU was actually formed, reluctantly, under American prodding, first as the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 which eventually morphed into the European Union in 1993. Its goals were certainly laudable. From the American point of view, it was an attempt to weld together a united Europe strong enough to contain the Soviet menace from the East, and NATO was the military expression of that goal. From the European point of view, it was an attempt to weld Germany in to such a strong cultural and economic bond with its neighbors that there could be no repeat of the horrors of World Wars I and II.

It is interesting that with the ongoing breakdown of the EU the German issue is rising once again. From a geopolitical point of view German is a recurrent problem. A strong, prosperous, capable nation, surrounded by major powers and with largely indefensible borders, Germany is always in an uneasy relationship with all its neighbors, and with France in particular. It had been France’s hope in the beginning that it would dominate the EU, but in fact as it turned out Germany dominates the EU, much to the distress of France.  But it may be that Germany can salvage at least a reduced European Union since it is an exporting nation and depends on having a sizeable export market to stay healthy. (47% of Germany’s GDP was exports in 2018).

But certainly at the moment there seems little prospect that Western Europe will raise up either an economic or a military threat to American hegemony anytime in the foreseeable future, nor for that matter (with the exception of Britain) even a very significant military ally.

Meditations on American Foreign Policy – IIa Russia Again

A friend, reading the last post, asked exactly how America had handled Russia badly. A very good question.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 we had a window of opportunity to reshape our relationship with Russia. And George H.W. Bush, then president, probably was a person who could have done that successfully, even though he came from the Cold War era. However, we dumped him in 1993 for Clinton and a succession of presidents since then, including Trump, who proved woefully inept at this effort.

Fundamentally what we did when the Soviet Union collapsed was to take a very loud victory lap, and then proceed to ignore Russia and its legitimate concerns, treating them like a third-rate banana republic.  We humiliated them, a proud people with a history far longer than our own. We showed what in sports would be considered poor sportsmanship. We made a very bad psychological mistake – we humiliated our opponent rather than welcoming them into the world order as a respected member. There is a saying: ”Choose your friends any way you like, but choose your enemies carefully”. Our humiliation of them has produced an enemy who will remember the slight for generations; indeed, it is a lever that Putin uses constantly with his people to keep power – very stupid of us!

Some think we should have mounted a Marshall Plan effort to help Russia in those critical days when it was imploding. I suspect that would not have worked well, because most of the money probably would have been stolen rather than used productively. Under the Soviet system a vast corrupt underground system grew to keep the system running, since the legal system was so inept. That corrupt underground system would probably have just sucked away any monetary aid from the West.

But we certainly could have done far more to help the Russian population, and to make them feel respected by the West, and we didn’t do that.  We could also have acknowledged their very real fears about Western invasions, and been more sensitive about pushing NATO right up to their doorstep. Indeed, George H.W. Bush promised the Russians that we wouldn’t do that, but subsequent presidents ignored that promise. It’s no wonder Russia doesn’t trust the West.

I doubt that anything the West might have done would have resulted in a stable, truly democratic government in Russia. But we certainly could have established better relations than we now have, and we might have coaxed Russia further into the Western world order. We failed thoroughly at that.

Meditations on American Foreign Policy – II Russia

The Soviet Union at its height was indeed an impressive threat, with an army numbering between 4 and 5 million throughout the Cold War and a vast nuclear arsenal that peaked at an estimated 45,000 warheads. Fortunately the leadership of the Soviet Union was risk averse, because had they elected to invade Western Europe it is not clear the West would have prevailed. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union though Russia has become little more than a declining regional power. The Russian military collapsed completely during the 1990s, but under President Putin the military has begun to modernizer and reconstitute itself. In the 2000-2010 period, when crude oil prices were in the $80-$120/barrel range, Russia was able to invest heavily in new weapons systems, but since then oil prices have dropped to the $40-60/barrel range (probably permanently because of the shale revolution) and the Russian economy, heavily dependent on oil and gas exports, can no longer support such heavy investment.

Russia is a vast land of immense natural resources, but hobbled by a thoroughly inefficient and antiquated industrial system inherited from the old Soviet Union. President Putin had a small window of opportunity, while oil prices were high, to invest heavily in modernization of his industrial base and begin to remedy that problem. But he didn’t, and in fact he probably couldn’t have, because he needed to divert so much of that money to the military and to the oligarchs who support him and keep him in power.

The Russian political system is a kleptocracy, and wildly corrupt. Putin is more a Mafia boss than a dictator, and depends on keeping his elite well off to stay in power. But he is a brilliant Mafia boss, and has consistently outmaneuvered American presidents and punched well above his weight in world affairs. But much of what he does and says, like his boasting about Russian’s new “superweapons”, is more for domestic political purposes, to keep public support, than for international consumption. Our issues with Russia aren’t the result of Putin. If Putin were to die tomorrow he would probably be replaced by someone very like him, It is not the leader that shapes Russia; it is its whole culture and system.

America handles Russia badly both because our ruling political elites don’t understand its culture or its paranoia and because they haven’t yet grown out of their Cold War mentality. We may not like the Russian system of government, but realistically that is what we have to deal with. There is no prospect that it can be converted to an America-style democracy, however much naïve neocons may wish that. Given Russia’s vast size and many ethnicities, it probably takes an authoritarian government to hold it together, and given the number of nuclear weapons it still has we should vastly prefer an authoritarian state to a failed state with poor or no control over those weapons.

In fact we do have some common interests with Russia, like restraining China and Iran and radical Islamists, and Trump’s instinct to try to find a working relationship with Russia, much as we may dislike their government, is correct. The current Democratic witch hunt to try to find “Russian collusion” with Trump is short-sighted hardball politics, not a rational response. And in fact when Obama was president the Democrats tried exactly the same thing (the so-called “Russian reset”), though it was an inept attempt and failed miserably

Russia of course is paranoid about invasion from the West, perfectly understandable considering its history, including most recently invasions by the French under Napoleon and by Germany under Hitler. Historically its defense has been to try to maintain a buffer of pro-Russian states on its largely indefensible western border. The expansion of NATO right up to its western border, into the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), and into Poland (and coordination and joint training with NATO by Finland, which is technically neutral) has produced predictable alarm, and explains why President Putin felt it necessary to retake the Crimea, the site of Russian’s only Black Sea naval port, and to try to destabilize a western-leaning Ukraine to render it at least neutral, if not actively pro-Russian.

There is no question but that the best of Russian weapons scientists and engineers are quite good, and in fact modern Russian ships, airplanes, missiles, and heavy weapons are about as good as those of the West, but the Russian economy and the Russian industrial system is simply incapable of building, supporting and maintaining very many of them. Nor is their economy, industrial capacity, transport systems and logistics systems capable of supporting a major war for any extended period.  And their current military doctrine accounts for that, being focused on preparations for very short military actions with limited objectives and small, highly trained special forces, preferably below the level that invites a military response from the West (as was the case, for example, with the “little green men” in the Crimea).

But at root Russia is faced with a severe demographic problem. Put simply, the Russian nation is dying out. Russian couples are currently producing 1.75 children per couple, well below the 2.1 replacement rate. Alcoholism is rampant (about 1/3 of Russian deaths these days are from alcoholism). Russia has the worst HIV epidemic in Europe or Asia, and Russian male life expectancy has declined to 58 years, the lowest of any developed country. Within a decade or two there won’t be enough youngsters in the 20-35 range to maintain the army and the factories, and non-Russian ethnics will begin outnumber Russians in many areas, producing predictable separatist movements probably leading to more breakups within current Russian territories.

So in the long run Russia is most likely going to continue to decline, and perhaps break apart further. And in fact recent polls in Russia show growing public discontent with empty store shelves and falling wages. That doesn’t mean that President Putin can’t continue to be a spoiler around the periphery of Russia (as his is currently being, for example, in Syria) for the next decade or so, but it does mean that Russia is highly unlikely to be an existential threat to America, or perhaps even to Western Europe, despite the pathetic weakness of NATO defenses absent the US.