International

Summarizing the Gaza War

/ ontheoutside / 4 Comments

After all the bloodshed and polemics it’s easy to forget what has actually happened with the Gaza war.

Prior to October 7 Israel was in a pretty good situation that seemed likely to get better.  They had relations with several Arab countries and the prize of a relationship with Saudi Arabia seemed to be in the offing. Palestinians weren’t the main topic, but they also had something to gain from leverage in the process.

Hamas was desperate to prevent all that.  Any moves toward peace were the enemy of a purified Islamic state in Palestine.  On October 7 they carried out the most horrifying and offensive attack possible, with killing of children in front of their parents (and then killing the parents) as well as rapes and anything else they could think of.  The objective was to provoke an Israeli reaction that would torpedo the looming progress.

The Israeli government was certainly capable of understanding what was going on.   However instead of the obvious reaction—whatever we do we do we’re not going to let Hamas dictate our future—they did exactly the opposite.  Why was that? (Contrary to the usual rhetoric this was not a fight for Israel’s existence.)

Simply put, Israel’s interest and Netanyahu’s interest were not the same.  Netanyahu’s long-standing support of Hamas (as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority) and his negligence of reported threats were directly responsible for the success of the Hamas attacks.  And despite his denials, all polls indicated that the Israeli population understood that.  So he had a problem. And the only way out was a great big war.

From that point on, the interests of Hamas and Netanyahu once again coincided.  The more civilians killed the better.  For Hamas it made them heroes defending the Arab world against the inhumanity of the Israelis.  For Netanyahu it proved that only he was tough enough to do what it takes.  (And what’s more, the longer the war the better the chance to bring back his buddy Trump who would support the dictatorial takeover of Israel.)

The interests of Israel however have been lost in the shuffle.  Anti-Semitism everywhere is on the rise, with not just relations with the Arab world but even the existence of Israel now active subjects of dispute.  Further the stated military objective—the elimination of Hamas—is nowhere near accomplished.  Despite the massive destruction and loss of life, it is estimated that Hamas has lost approximately 8,000 of its approximately 30,000-man army.  As the tunnels are mostly intact, there is no plan for how to change that.

But this war was never fought for Israel.  For Netanyahu it’s not clear how much he has burnished his reputation, but any challenge to his power has been pushed out to the indefinite future.  And Hamas is riding high.  So whatever horror the rest of the world may feel, we’ve got to call the war a smashing success for its perpetrators.  May they both rot in Hell.

Threats to Israel’s Existence

/ ontheoutside / 2 Comments

There is one aspect of the Gaza mess that hasn’t drawn enough attention:  that there was nothing inevitable about the success of the Hamas attack.  There was ample warning, but the defense was too complacent and the government was too preoccupied with its own priorities (the judicial takeover and the draconian measures on the West Bank) to pay attention to what mattered.

There’s nothing new about this statement, but the necssary conclusion doesn’t follow—that the Hamas attacks did NOT put Israel in a war for its existence.  The attack should have been a minor issue with far fewer consequences.  The reason it wasn’t was complacency and government corruption.  The attacks became the horrendous incident they were only because of the past and present failures of Netanyahu governments. The outcome of any subsequent such attack depends primarily on whether Israel addresses those failures—arguably more so than on Hamas. 

It was always strange that Israel would respond to the Hamas attack by doing exactly what Hamas clearly wanted them to do. I won’t say options were easy, but it didn’t have to be this. As we’ve noted before, the only way to understand it is to recognize that Netanyahu’s interests and Israel’s interests were not the same. As a distraction from his responsibility, Netanyahu had every incentive to turn the Hamas attacks into the biggest incident he could possibly create.

At this point it’s not even clear how much all the death and destruction has contributed to the “complete destruction” of Hamas. More generally it’s certainly hard to conclude Israel’s position has become more secure.

We all have to come to terms with that fact that the apparently self-evident statement that Israel was in a war for its existence was actually—primarily—Netanyahu’s self-serving lie. And what’s even worse is that for both Hamas and Netanyahu, the more people who die the better.

Hamas and Netanyahu are still playing each other’s game

/ ontheoutside / 3 Comments

One big revelation (at least to me) to come out of the Gaza war is that Netanyahu provided for major financial support to Hamas as a way of weakening the PLO.   The idea was that weakening the PLO would undermine any efforts for a two-state solution.    Netanyahu hates the two-state solution, because his stock-in-trade is as a strongman protecting Israelis from Palestinian evil.  Hamas hates the two-state solution, because (as they announced) they want all non-Muslims gone.

It’s worth emphasizing that these converging interests are still driving this war.  First of all, there is no question that Israel is playing Hamas’ game.  Hamas launched an infinitely repulsive attack in order to provoke a violent Israel response—one that would undermine efforts for peace between Israel and the Arab world.  That Hamas placed its tunnels and other military installations under civilian institutions (such as hospitals) was not just to provoke outrage in the world in general but most specifically to provoke outrage in the Arab world.  The inevitable horrors inflicted on the population would make any coexistence with Israel intolerable.

If anyone other than Netanyahu were running the Israel government, there would have been at least some consideration for the wisdom of giving Hamas exactly what they wanted.  However for Netanyahu there were no such qualms.  This was a marvelous opportunity for pumping up hatred of the Palestinians as well as an opportunity for redeeming himself politically. “Just imagine how much worse this all would have been if instead of from Gaza this was all coming from a Palestinian state right next door!”  What’s more he could put on a show of irreplaceable toughness.  Any issues with his criminal activities or his treasonous past relations with Hamas would be erased by crushing the Palestinians now.  (And think of the opportunities from a subsequent occupation of Gaza.)

Once Israel started with such a response, they were stuck in it–because they had to succeed no matter what.  And for now there is little incentive for either side to stop.  The well-being of the Palestinians, or even the Israelis for that matter, is simply not an issue.  Things are going just fine, and both sides are delivered from the one thing they hate most—which is a workable (two-state) peace.

Clarifying Some Issues for Climate Change

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It bothers me how much confusion there still is about what it takes to fight climate change.  A recent article in Bloomberg was a case in point.  They rank new EV’s by “greenness”.  I’m not going to talk about the details of what they call green, but the problem is that the whole idea is wrong.  All EV’s are green in the only way that matters, and a ranking by “greenness” just confuses the issue.

I’ll try to be organized about this.  First of all, the primary change that has to take place is the replacement of fossil fuels by sustainable sources of power.  In practice that comes down to moving everything to the electric grid, with a beefing up of that grid to handle the greatly increased demand and with sustainable sources.

The timescale for this transformation is dictated by a carbon budget—there is only so much more carbon dioxide we can put into the atmosphere before the consequences become catastrophic.  All that carbon dioxide just adds up, and the results continue to get (exponentially) worse. To succeed we have to stop burning fossil fuels before we hit the carbon budget limit.  That process has three parts:

  1. Make the electric grid what it has to be:  sustainably generated with much more capacity and much better connectivity.
  2. Move all applications to the electrical network. (Note that hydrogen apps fit here since most of the hydrogen will be electrically-generated.)
  3. Cut down on usage for all of the remaining fossil fuel applications.

The first thing to note is that most conservation efforts fit under item #3, so it’s worth stating unequivocally that conservation by itself is not the solution to climate change. It’s only a piece of what has to happen, and the rest is most of the problem.  And conservation for EV’s doesn’t fit here at all. Item #1 has to happen for all energy uses, so “greenness” of particular car models is an insignificant blip on a much bigger issue.  Finally, it should be obvious that despite what the oil companies tell you, climate change is not primarily a matter of everyone’s personal responsibility:  governments have to take large-scale action.

It’s worth saying a little more about items 1 and 2.  There is quite a lot of #1 that can start now:  improving and expanding the capabilities of the network as well as deployments of solar and wind power.  There are of course limitations to what we can currently get done.  The biggest current issue is in-network energy storage, to handle periods where there isn’t sun or wind.  However, this is an area of such active work that one can expect big improvements in the next few years.  For that reason it’s fair to regard item #1 as mostly a matter of money and commitment. (That’s not to say there can’t be big contributions from new technologies—such as fusion—as they become available.)

Item #2 is harder.  This involves not just familiar issues such as heat pumps but also industrial processes, such as for steel, cement, and plastics.  For these there is still research to be done before we can talk about worldwide deployments.  Overall this is an area with many different application-specific issues and deployment scenarios, so lots of work has to be organized and done in parallel.  Again this goes way beyond individual responsibilities. Note that EV’s fit under item #2—changing to an EV is a contribution regardless of whether your electric utility has done its work yet or not.

Finally there is the international aspect to the whole problem.  It’s amazing how much of the discussion of climate change is about us doing our part–as if our atmosphere were somehow detached from everyone else’s.  This really needs to sink in:  there is only one atmosphere, and we will only succeed if everyone else succeeds too.  Helping poorer countries to cope is not a matter of charity; it’s a matter of our own survival.  Obviously there are going to be negotiations over whose money gets spent on what, but rich countries are going to have to do what it takes for poor countries to redo their infrastructures.  Like it or not we are going to have to help with technology development and deployments worldwide.

Right-Wing Fantasyland meets Chinese EVs

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There was a good article in Bloomberg today describing the many aspects of Chinese dominance in EV’s.  It’s useful if discouraging reading.  How did this happen?  Why is the West so far behind?

Obviously there are multiple items and reasons behind them.  However all of them trace back to a single big one:  the endlessly propagandized right-wing fantasy of the miraculous, all-knowing, perfectly-adaptive private sector.

In this case there were two principal failings of the private sector:

  • Denying climate change, because it was inconvenient for current operations.
  • Discounting any role for government, because the private sector by definition knew better

With these two failings the private sector was blindsided by a market transition they had gleefully dismissed as nonsense—because it didn’t fit with current mindset and current operations of business.  The Chinese did strategic planning, and the private sector in this country congratulated itself on its ability to squelch it.  The oil companies are still at it.  Trump will do it again if he gets a chance. We lost four years of opportunities to position for change–an eternity for competition.

That is not a surprise.  There are things the private sector does well—principally optimizing current operations.  However the current economic powers-that-be are very poor at major transitions.   Instead they will act, as in this case, to hang on to the optimized past and to delay that future for as long as possible.   In other words to defend their their own immediate private interests against the interest of the country as a whole. 

Government of course has no perfect crystal ball, but it doesn’t have the same limitations and the same vested interests. It can act to support future businesses even before their time has come.  We have had some of that.  Both Tesla and SpaceX exist because of Obama-era seed money. (Some readers may remember Romney’s ridiculing Obama for such initiatives!) The mRNA vaccines that stopped Covid were only possible because of decades of government-funded research.  All of that in the face virulent right-wing opposition.  The Chinese government locked up resources and initiated new businesses.  We were too smart for that!

The bottom line here is explicit.   The private sector is not a miracle machine.  Its interests are not the same as our national interests, and it can’t even do a good job of providing for its own success.  We need government to care about the well-being of our people and even about the well-being of its businesses. 

As a final point here it’s worth noting that–contrary to the usual sloganeering–when Adam Smith talked about the “invisible hand” of the marketplace, he was not arguing for government to stay out of the miraculous private sector.  Instead he was making the case for a competitive “free” market, something only possible if government would stop the private sector from perverting the economy with monopolies and government influence.   That’s still a battle today!

Civics

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There was a perfectly reasonable article today in Foreign Affairs: “Afghanistan’s Corruption Was Made in America”.  Reasonable except for the surprise at what happened.  Afghanistan was a case of colonial corruption—whether we want to call it that or not—and the mechanisms of colonial corruption have been well-documented.  The classic work on the subject, which got just about everything right, was written in 1860.  The only problem is that for all the intervening years many societies, including ours, have tried hard to avoid learning.

That blind spot brings up the subject of Civics—what is it that we all ought to know? That’s despite the fact that it’s hard to say the word Civics without wincing. My high school Civics course was a giddy paen to American democracy and its perfections.  One sentence sticks in my mind:  “Propaganda is a neutral term despite its unfavorable connotation; what makes it good or bad is what is propagated.”  Take that for wisdom.

But it strikes me that we can point to a few things that belong in a real Civics course.  I’m going to give three titles.  I’ll start with Max Havelaar (the just-mentioned 1860 classic) for international relations, to disabuse people of the notion that we can be white knights to go fix the rest of the world.  This is not a plea for isolationism, but for recognition that our interests will dominate and corruption will likely follow.  At the very least we should be suspicious about our motives and about the reality of what we create.

A second title is Jane Mayer’s Dark Money.  This book has been around since 2016 and has had nowhere near the impact it should have.  It documents the very successful effort of the Koch organization to take over the political system in United States and reorient it to their objectives.  It explains most of what passes for incomprehensible in the press today—why the country has become ungovernable, why democracy is at risk, and how we got saddled with a mind-boggling Supreme Court. All of that was the plan from the beginning, and unless we’re clear on what happened, we’re not likely to be able to change it.

A third title is Heather McGhee’s book The Sum of Us. This book has some issues from trying to satisfy multiple constituencies, but its main message is clear: the different racial and other groups in this country have been turned against each other in a deliberate campaign of divide and conquer. And the only way to counter that is to recognize common interest and act for the common good. This was deliberate policy for Martin Luther King among others, but it’s not easy to do–group militancy will always fight it. However there is no alternative in taking on the powerful forces described in Dark Money.

Those books alone could give a big dose of reality to our political process. We can contrast that with what passes for Civics in public discourse today.

Most of what we hear about Civics today comes from the far right, where it’s back to the future–the contemporary version of what I had all those years ago with the John Birch Society. In the interim it hasn’t gotten better: this is still God’s country, above criticism and chosen to rule in His name. One particular feature worth noting is the weakness of the support for democracy. Democracy is defined as whatever it is that we’re doing, and it’s good because it’s ours.

On the left the world view is different, but fragmented. One person who does talk about Civics is the strange and (I find) worrisome figure of Danielle Allen.  Ms. Allen presents herself as standing above the messy political discussions of the day and as a pure advocate for civic virtue.  But her Civics lives in a world where there are no bad actors, and the primary issue is alienation of voters from the political system. In that world, the monumental importance of the 2024 election is hidden behind tales of civic involvement that ignore the real forces at work. In the end she’s cover for the people who have put us where we are.

For today, the kind of Civics outlined here doesn’t exist. But it’s worth recognizing that a real, substanitive Civics course is not so hard to describe. Maybe someday it could happen.

Democracy is Not Natural

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There is a fundamental misunderstanding of democracy that undermines much domestic and foreign policy.  One way to put it is that democracy is seen as a kind of natural way for societies to organize themselves.  What could be more normal than a bunch of people getting together for mutual benefit?  Just get rid of the autocrats, and the people will rule.

Unfortunately it’s the autocrats who are natural, and democratic societies are fragile, rare, and in dire need of careful cultivation.

For starters we can go back to the classical Greek models.   Democracy in Athens was both a sham and a disaster.  The Athenian democracy was created by Pericles as a way of wresting power from aristocrats.  Under its auspices he ruled with enormous personal power, and when he died things went to hell quickly.  The chaos led first to an authoritarian takeover (stopped only by the army) and then to the defeat of Athens by Sparta in the Peloponnesian wars.  Plato, writing later, dismissed democracy as nothing more than a prelude to dictatorship. 

As another example, a whole raft of new democracies were created in eastern Europe in the wake of World War I.  By the end of the 1920’s every single one of them was a dictatorship.  Once you’re in power there’s no reason to give it up.  And without a broad societal commitment to democracy, there’s nothing to prevent that.  Hitler of course was installed by a democratic election, and the conversion to dictatorship followed quickly and easily.

In the US today we’re so accustomed to this idea of democracy as normal, that we’re unprepared for today’s anti-democratic Republican party.  Since we don’t even ask why democracy is good, the question “why should we give up when we’re winning?” has no answer. Republicans today and their Supreme Court are unapologetically all about winning and maintaining power indefinitely. We’re surprised how easy it is to subvert our institutions, but that‘s what happens if society is not prepared to fight.

There are in fact a strong arguments for democracy.  We can look today at what goes on in China and Russian.  With authoritarian leadership you can never correct disastrous mistakes or deal effectively with corruption.  Further, autocrats once installed are beholden to no one. Rule of law goes out the window, so there is no protection from the rich and powerful. As we’ve pointed out here before, the enemies of democracy are no one’s friends. One problem is that people tend to think that the status quo is permanent, since they’ve always lived it.  So real consequences tend to come as a surprise.  Think of Brexit and the Supreme Court Dobbs decision.

Democracy is important, fragile, easily lost, and very hard to recover.  The powers that be (e.g the ever-present Koch organization) will always want to stand above rule of law.  They have enormous powers to sway the population, and once the population loses interest it’s hard to keep them out.  It is everyone’s responsibility to stand up for democracy.  There’s plenty of publicity these days about the threat to democracy in Israel, but the threat is just as real here and now.  It may take the same kind of mass movements to fight it.  As we all know the Supreme Court already has an end to democracy on its docket, and we can expect to hear about it in June.

Finally it’s worth recognizing that this same misunderstanding of democracy contributes to foreign policy goals that are to say the least delusional.  Most countries are corrupt dictatorships, and they’re going to stay that way.  Further our own attempts at state building (as in Iraq or Afghanistan) will continue to fail in chaos and corruption, because belief in self-evident democracy means there is no recognition of the magnitude of the job (or our own contributions to the problems). In one of Elena Ferrante’s novels she speaks of the power of expectations in controlling behavior—you cannot suddenly have democracy and the rule of law if that’s contrary to the everyone’s experience: 

“It was a world of favors, of services exchanged for other services, of debts contracted and debts called in, of concessions obtained and never returned, of pacts that could be broken and others that held until death. It was a world based on friendships and animosities, on associations and affiliations, on old enmities and new alliances. How could one change that world? By oneself, no one could. There was only one possibility: to become part of it, accept its conditions, go along with it to survive.”

Our biggest responsibility to the world is to build a working democratic society.  At the moment that’s a tall order, but that’s the job we’ve got.  In this juncture in history the US and EU are critical–the West is on the line to show it is a model that can be believed in. That’s not self-evident.

What To Do About TikTok

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It seems to me that the discussion of TikTok is distorted by the kind of xenophobic paranoia that frequently gets in the way. It’s not that there isn’t a problem, it’s that the real problem is not solved by a fixation on nasty foreigners.

There are two frequently discussed problems (that often get confused with each other):

  1. We’re giving a whole lot of information to TikTok that could be used by the Chinese government for nefarious purposes.
  2. The Chinese government could use their state-sanctioned control of TikTok to propagandize to TikTok’s base of customers.

The first point is pretty close to nonsense. Monumental amounts of information on the American population are already being collected, organized, and merchandized by companies who do this for a living. The last time I looked at this issue, more than ten years ago, you could already match what TikTok knows. Today it’s far worse. We need legal controls on information gathering. The fixation on TikTok for this issue is a distraction.

The second point is a more serious issue, as we’ve had more than enough experience with the coercive effects of social media. The problem, however, is that the dangers from TikTok are not an awful lot different than the dangers from good old American social media. There’s nothing that stops the Chinese government from putting propaganda on TikTok, but we’ve already had the Russians (and the Koch people) doing the same thing on Facebook. Unless we put up legal barriers to deliberate manipulation, social media are for sale to the highest bidder. Banning TikTok is just plain not the issue. (To my mind, any network operator that selects content for unsolicited distribution to users should be legally responsible for that content.)

You can even say flatly that the reason there is such bipartisan agreement on banning TikTok is that it is a handy way to make it seem that you’re doing something about a serious problem–without upsetting the real perpetrators much at all.