Peter Zeihan on Afghanistan

 Geopolitical analyst Peter Zeihan has an excellent piece today entitled The Return of American Narcissism.  The media is focused on the near-term day-to-day disaster in Afghanistan. Peter gives a much broader view of the whole affair.  I really like Peter's writing and analysis. He is non-partisan (as he says, no party represents him at the moment), he basis his analysis on facts and data, not ideology or wishful thinking (he admits he is not particularly happy with the future he predicts), and he is pretty blunt, which is refreshing in a world of focus-group tested talking points and political doublespeak.

The Afghanistan debacle 2

I suggested is a post back in June that the midterm election results would probably turn on a few key issues, of which the Afghanistan withdrawal was one. At the time I suggested that it depended on whether the medias found a “Saigon moment” (see photo below, the last people leaving on the helicopter on the roof of the American Embassy) or not to trumpet.

 A month ago US intelligence estimated that Kabul might fall to the Taliban in 6 to 12 months. Last week they revised this estimate to 90 days. Yesterday morning Taliban troops entered the outskirts of Kabul.

On Thursday, July 8, asked in a news conference if a Taliban takeover was inevitable, Biden said “No, it is not, because you have the Afghan troops, they're 300,000 well-equipped, as well equipped as any army in the world, and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable."

On Thursday, August 12, Biden said there would be "no circumstance in which you are going to see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan."  This morning helicopters are carrying staff from the American Embassy to the Kabul airport. Administration figures vigorously deny this is anything like Saigon, but in fact it is exactly like the Saigon debacle, and no amount of spin and denial is going to hide that.

All of these predictions were wildly wrong. The Taliban took over the country in about a week. Clearly it was long past time to get out of a 20-year unwinnable war, so in that respect Biden did the right thing to withdraw. Clearly there was thoroughly inadequate planning for this withdrawal, and in that respect Biden and his administration own the consequences. Oh, the military did a good, careful job of withdrawing their people and equipment, but the administration completely failed to account for the civilians, Afghans and foreigners, who also had to be withdrawn.

Trump, if he had been re-elected, might well have done as badly, But he wasn’t re-elected (whatever he says) so Biden and his administration own this debacle, and it will no doubt have consequences in the upcoming midterm elections.

 

The Afghanistan debacle

So we spent 20 years in Afghanistan training their troops and advising their politicians, we lost 2,312 soldiers killed and 20,066 wounded, killed somewhere between 35,000 and 40,000 Afghan civilians, and spent about $824 billion dollars. Now, within weeks of beginning the withdrawal of our troops, the Taliban, now increasingly equipped with captured US Humvees and M16 rifles abandoned by fleeing government troops, have retaken more than half the country, and the US is shipping in 3000 troops to hold the airport at Kabul while we evacuate most or all of the staff from the new $750+ million US embassy in Kabul.

Clearly the whole effort has been a disaster, and while Biden will probably get blamed, unfairly, for most of the inevitable fallout, in truth he finally did the right thing - what previous presidents in both parties couldn’t bring themselves to do – end an unwinnable war.

Like Vietnam, the American public were bombarded throughout most of these 20 years with optimistic press briefings about how we were just about to turn things around, about how the Taliban were almost defeated, about how soon Afghanistan would become a modernized democratic nation under American tutelage. Like Vietnam, we were assured several times that just one more “surge” of American troops would solve our problems. Like Vietnam, the civilian politicians refused to listen to their military advisors.  Like Vietnam, there was plenty of historical precedent (the French efforts in Vietnam, the Russian efforts in Afghanistan) to warn of the difficulties, which Washington experts and politicians ignored. Like Vietnam, Washington politicians had almost no understanding of the culture of their opponents, nor apparently any interest in learning.

There is plenty of blame to go around. This wasn’t a Democratic failure or a Republican failure – this was a profound failure of the American foreign policy establishment in Washington, all the worse because they apparently didn’t learn the lessons of Vietnam.  The press were outraged that Trump drove out so many of the experienced people in the State Department and in the foreign policy establishment. From my point of view it may have been one of the few things he did right.

Progress, they say, is making new mistakes, not repeating the old ones. We need a new generation in Washington, making new mistakes, not repeating the old ones.  

Will we get Trump again in 2024?

Let me say at the start that I didn’t want Trump in 2016 or in 2020, and I certainly don’t want him as president again. But looking at how things are going, I think if he chooses to run in 2024 he will quite likely win again.

Why? Well first of all, if he seeks the nomination I think hardly any Republican will run against him, and any who try will probably be dispatched as easily as he dispatched all his primary opponents last time. It is always a mistake to underestimate one’s opponents, as both Republicans and Democrats did in 2016. The man is an unprincipled sociopath, but he is absolutely brilliant at dominating the national media (who cooperate because his daily outrages make news and drive readership), and at persuading and reading the mood of his base – much, much better than any opponent he has faced thus far, as Scott Adams pointed out during the 2016 election.

If he runs, who will he likely run against? Biden was appealing in 2020 because he carried no major baggage. As vice president to Obama he was largely invisible, and his handlers kept him mostly under wraps during the 2020 campaign, a smart move since he has always been gaff-prone and clearly has lost a step or two as he has aged. Against Trump’s mishandling of the COVID pandemic, and the media’s obvious bias toward him (like suppressing Tara Reade’s sexual assault charge against him) Biden was in a good place. Yet even so Biden just barely won the election. Yes, he did well in the popular vote, but it is the electoral vote that counts, and he won that by the slimmest of margins in a few swing states. And if COVID hadn’t hit, Trump would most likely have won again on a growing economy and rising wages.

But Biden this time, 84 by the time 2024 arrives, will carry all the baggage that a sitting president always accumulates – blame for everything that goes wrong, whether it was his fault or not, and disillusionment among his base that he didn’t deliver everything he promised in his campaign.

If Biden, for whatever reason, doesn’t run for re-election in 2024, the obvious replacement will be his vice president, Kamala Harris. Given the current progressive movement in the Democratic party it would be hard to refuse a mixed-race woman vice president the nomination if she wanted it. But as she first showed in her painfully inept campaign in 2020, and subsequently in her performance thus far as vice-president in charge of the border crisis, she simply isn’t up to the job yet, and may never be. It’s not that she isn’t smart, it’s that she appears to have no political sense – she appears not to know how to play the media or work the political systems or appeal broadly to a base, or apparently (according to some insiders) even run a staff. Not surprising, since being a Stanford economics professor doesn’t really prepare one for this sort of thing. Trump would likely make a meal of her in a media-dominated election.

And the 2022 midterm election probably won’t help. Historically the president’s party almost always loses Congressional seats in the first midterm election, and the Democratic margin in both the House and the Senate is so thin that losing just a seat or two would be enough to tip the balance and completely stall the progressive legislative agenda. Just the redistricting exercise about to start will probably deliver an additional seat or two in the House to the Republicans.

So the Democratic candidate will probably have few recent legislative achievements to run on in 2024.

Now consider the issues that are likely to shape the 2024 election: rising inflation, rising crime rates along with the unpopular ‘defund the police” movement, increased illegal immigration across the Southern border, the fight over Critical Race Theory in schools, the fight over mask mandates, especially for school children, and the fallout from our Afghanistan withdrawal. These are all issues that animate the Republican base and mostly put Democratic policies on the defensive.

Of course, as I have said before, a week is eternity in politics, and all sorts of unexpected events before November 2024 could completely change the environment. But from where we are now, I would guess that if Trump runs in 2024 he is quite likely to win again. He is clearly maintaining his base and continuing to position himself for a run, if he is healthy enough when the time comes.

Not comforting, but a reality to deal with.

 

Is liberalism dead?

I am what only a decade or so used to be called a social liberal. I believe in free speech, the right of anyone to express any opinion – whether I agree with it or not. I believe in the fundamental principle of Anglo-Saxon law – people are presumed innocent until PROVEN guilty. I believe in tolerance – living in peace and harmony with people who hold different beliefs. I believe in teaching children critical thinking – not only the freedom but the obligation to question everything.  

These are apparently not things that are believed anymore by those who call themselves liberals, especially in the media or in politics. Nowadays among many so-called liberals it can be dangerous to express an opinion that disagrees with the current orthodoxy – it can get you fired from your job or lynched on social media, and it will certainly get you automatically condemned as racist, sexist and/or homophobic. Nowadays a college student can be “convicted” of rape without a trial or even the opportunity to offer a defense. Nowadays it can be career-limiting to dare to question the reigning orthodoxy.

When did liberals become so illiberal? Yes, the political right has gone crazy, but the political left has gone dangerously authoritarian. A North Korean defector, Yeonmi Park, took some college courses at Columbia University last year and reported, in print, that the crackdown on free speech at Columbia was more than she ever experienced in North Korea.

The columnist Andrew Sullivan, a staunch liberal and Obama supporter, who was forced to resign last year from the New York Magazine for daring to question some prevailing beliefs, wrote an article this week entitled What Happened to You: The Radicalization of the American elite against liberalism that seems to me to the point.

I am old, so I won’t have to live with this that much longer. But the younger folks, including my children and grandchildren, are heading into a repressive regime that may eventually resemble Stalinist Russia or present-day Iran or China, in which it is physically dangerous to dissent from or even question the party line and free speech is a principle long forgotten.

It really is pitiful ....

 It really is pitiful when the only sources I really trust for U.S. news these days are a British journal (The Economist) and a media group based in Qatar in the Middle East (Al Jazeera).  The old reliables - The Washington Post and the New York Times - have in recent years produced such partisan, sloppy, and biased news that I no longer can trust them. And of course the nightly TV news is almost as hopelessly biased to one side or the other these days as social media. No wonder there is so much misinformation going around.

Assessing Democrat’s mid-term election prospects

The mid-term congressional elections are still 17 months away (November 2022), and a week can be an eternity in politics.  Still, with Democratic control of congress balanced on a knife-edge, and Republicans almost unanimous in opposing most of president Biden’s initiatives, it would only take the switch of a single seat in the Senate, or 2 or 3 seats in the House, to completely stymie the progressive agenda.  And historically the party in power almost always loses seats in the first mid-term election after a new president takes office.

It used to be true that congressional races mostly turned on local issues, but that is less true these days when the national news and the internet have permeated everywhere, and local congressional candidates are boosted or damaged more by their parties’ national image than they used to be. So now days a congressional candidate’s chances can be significantly affected by what some other party member in some other state says or does.

There are always unexpected Black Swans in politics (wars, 9/11-type events, scandals, etc.), which can dramatically change the landscape even at the last minute. So any prediction this far in advance is pretty uncertain. Still, one can already begin to see the emerging issues that might shape the mid-terms.

The border issue

On the border crisis, which is a crisis, even though the mainstream press has been ignoring it as much as possible, May 2021 saw the largest number of apprehensions of illegal immigrants in 20 years, over 180,000. There is an informative graphic from the Washington Post here that shows the trends.

A new Harvard/Harris poll shows that 80% of Americans think the border is in crisis, 68% said that signals from Biden’s White House are encouraging illegal immigration, and 55% believe that former President Donald Trump’s border closing policies should have been left in place. The poll also found that 85 percent want stronger borders, compared to 15 percent who support weaker borders.

And vice-president Harris’s two-day tour of Mexico and Guatemala and her brief “photo op” visit to the border last week have been widely derided by liberals and conservatives alike as just ineffective political theater. Thus far nothing the administration has done, or not done, has seemed to stem the tide. This will clearly be a potent issue for Republicans in the upcoming mid-term elections, especially in the states on the Mexican border – Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.

The inflation issue

On the inflation issue, annualized inflation (that is, projecting the inflation for the first half of 2021 to the full year) stands at about 8% and climbing. The administration and the Fed keep assuring us this is temporary, a result of COVID supply chain disruptions. They certainly hope so, but Bank of America projects that it will remain high for at least 4 years.

One concern is that high inflation will push up the amount required to service the federal debt, which at today’s interest rate of about 2% stands at about $378 billion per year. The average maturity on the federal debt currently is about 65 months, so it will take a while before enough of that debt is rolled over at higher interest rates to begin to affect the federal budget, but at even 4% average interest rate servicing the federal debt would eat up practically all the discretionary federal budget (currently around $600 billion); at 8% or above it would be fiscal disaster.  So unless inflation drops dramatically in the next 17 months, this too will be a potent Republican issue in the mid-term elections. Economic issues tend to be the most important to the average voter, and voters are already noticing the higher prices in the store and at the pump.

On the other hand, if the economy is fully recovered and booming by the time of the mid-terms, wages are up, and unemployment is down, Democratic candidates will probably get a significant boost from that even with higher inflation.

The crime issue

Violent crime is up, although in fact it has been falling for decades now, so even with the recent increase it is still well below the rates of the 1990s.  In 2020 Chicago murders increased 50%, Los Angeles murders increased 30%, and New York murders increased 40%. Nationwide, 2020 murders were up 36.7% over the previous year. Most of the more dramatic violent crime increases are restricted to a few large cities, like New York and Portland and Minneapolis, but the 7/24 national news cycle headlines crime stories in these cities, so it has a much large effect nationwide than is probably warranted.

On its own the crime increase might not be much of an election issue except in a few big cities, but with the far left pushing the “defund the police” narrative it will likely be a more potent issue, especially if the Democrats can’t keep the more extreme progressives like AOC quiet on the issue. And of course “law and order” has always been a winning topic for Republicans.

The Afghanistan withdrawal issue

There was never going to be a good time to withdraw from Afghanistan. It was always going to be messy, but we probably should have done it long ago anyway. Whether it becomes a mid-term election issue depends on whether the media finds a “Saigon moment” (the photo of the long line of desperate people trying to get on the last helicopter on the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon) to trumpet or not. The Biden administration is trying to evacuate the thousands of interpreters, with their families, who helped American forces, and who would probably be executed by the Taliban if they stayed. If that comes off poorly, this could be a damaging issue for the mid-terms.

The critical race theory issue

Critical Race Theory is an outgrowth of an esoteric academic movement called postmodernism that developed in France in the 1940s in art, and then in the 1960s spread to the social sciences. It has a complex history, tracing back to Karl Marx’s work on class structure in the mid-1800s. In its present form as critical race theory it teaches that American society is inherently racist, which is certainly true (most societies are inherently racist against one ethnic group or another – it is part of the inherent xenophobia of the human species). Critical race theory is complex, even abstruse, and has many different flavors depending on who it teaching it. I seriously doubt that many parents, or many teachers either, really understand it. I have read a serious academic study of it, and I have trouble really grasping it.

But the movement to install teaching of critical race theory in schools, especially at the K-12 level, is producing serious backlash from parents, who think, whether correctly or not, that it is teaching children to hate America and white children to feel guilty because of their skin color. Whether parents have an accurate view of what is being taught or not, this issue is emotional and may well become a significant election issue.

The redistricting effect

Redistricting, based on the recent census, will occur for most states by the time of the mid-terms. I say “most states” because there are almost certain to be court challenges to some of the more extreme gerrymandering that will be attempted, and these issues may not be fully resolved by November of 2022.  Overall, Republicans will have a slight advantage here, because they control more statehouses (61 state chambers vs 37 chambers for Democrats) and more governors (27 Republican vs 23 Democrat).

The Trump wild card

Donald Trump is a wild card in this election. He may be indicted by the mid-terms. He may even be jailed by then. On the other hand, he still has a substantial following. But it is hard to predict whether he would use his influence with this following to defeat Democrats, or to defeat Republicans he doesn’t like. So far he seems to be aiming at Republicans he feels were disloyal to him.  Nor is it clear yet how much influence he retains now that he is out of office and off most social media.  So that is why he is a wild card.

The COVID non-issue

I would guess that COVID policy is not likely to be a significant issue. COVID will do what it will do. There may well still be local spikes among the 30% or so who for one reason or another refuse to get vaccinated, but I would judge that all the politically-significant effects have already happened. It is unlikely that Biden could get another massive COVID-relief bill through, or that he will feel the need to even try. And voter memories are notoriously short, so the effect of the relief checks he sent out will have mostly dissipated by the time the mid-term elections roll around.

17 months is a long time in politics, and no doubt other issues will arise that may significantly affect the mid-term elections, but these are the ones I am watching right now.