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!