Understanding China

Tomas Pueyo has an fascinating and well done Twitter stream about China, and how geographic realities drive its history.  You can view it here. Quick to watch and highly recommended.

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.