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.
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:
Make the electric grid what it has to be: sustainably generated with much more capacity and much better connectivity.
Move all applications to the electrical network. (Note that hydrogen apps fit here since most of the hydrogen will be electrically-generated.)
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.
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!
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.
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.
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):
We’re giving a whole lot of information to TikTok that could be used by the Chinese government for nefarious purposes.
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.
Monotheism amounts to an imperialistic assertion of primacy. That sounds like one of those wild-eyed slogans from the radical left or right. But in fact it is a simple statement of what drives quite a lot of policy, both domestic and international.
Let’s start close to home. In both Britain and the US there is a big problem with past imperial grandeur. The Brits just can’t get over their lost empire, and they keep doing completely illogical and crazy things (e.g. Brexit) in hopes of getting it back. The fact that the world has changed since then, with new powers and new bases for strength doesn’t register. Since the empire is taken to be an expression of British superiority (and of God’s grace raining down on Britain) there is no reason why it can’t just happen again. There is only one God and he’s ours.
The US has a similar problem, just a little later in time. We had the 1950’s and even 60’s when in the years following the destruction of the World War II the US was unquestionably the world’s only remaining superpower. If anything we were more dominant than the British as their peak. And we’re just as blind in looking back to it. Our dominance was a result of national superiority and God’s grace. We are the chosen rulers of the world and there’s nothing that ought to stop that.
The Chinese and the Russians have similar issues. Having lived in Italy at one point, there’s more than a bit of it (going back several centuries) there too.
The Old Testament (as I understand it) had a more limited notion of monotheism: each nation had it’s own god or gods and international struggles were also struggles of those gods. That sounds a little more accurate. Contemporary monotheism amounts to assertions of primacy. An astounding percentage of Americans are ready to talk about God’s protective shield over the US and our God-given role in running the rest of the world. That gets in the way of any notion international cooperation or any workable national objectives. With God on your side, reality just doesn’t matter.
The Brits have already driven themselves to at least a short-term future of poverty. It is relevant to notice—although seldom mentioned—that the pre-EO version of Britain was much slower than the continent in recovering from World War II and generally poorer per capita.
The US is on the brink of doing the same thing. We’ve got a dictatorial theocracy going, as well as a “we don’t need anyone” ethos on the right that denies any need to interact with the rest of the world except under terms of dominance. Furthermore the pervasive xenophobia denies the (currently enormous) contribution of foreigners to the economic strength of the US.
However the biggest problems are not even that. As climate change and also Covid and the Ukraine crisis show us, we have only one world. All the national gods are going to have to cooperate if we’re going to get out of this mess. Enough with national monotheism.
The dangers in Ukraine are enough to make one wonder about the current world order. We’d like to believe that it’s beyond the pale for one country to invade and take over another on the flimsiest of pretexts. Despite some current rhetoric, Crimea was not that: it had been an essential part of the Russian military infrastructure for centuries. Ukraine is different—what does it mean?
Regardless of how the Ukraine affair ends, the change it signifies is enormous. In the wake of the horrors of World War II, the US as remaining unscathed power helped put together a system of rules and organizations aimed at preventing another one. The idea was to prevent economic collapse and to resolve conflicts before they became wars. We got a UN, an IMF, and rules to govern international trade. The result was an extended period of world prosperity. The communist bloc stood outside all of that, but even in the days of the Cold War overt seizures of other countries were avoided.
Over the intervening years much of that liberal economic system remained, even as the world became much more complicated. Standards for permitted behavior lived on. In some sense, the Paris climate agreement was a kind of last hurrah. There was no enforcement mechanism, but the idea was that unanimity would shame the cheaters into compliance.
Trump broke that idea in a way that only an American President could. He asserted that there was no reason to obey any of those (US-initiated) international rules, and he got away with it. Until Trump people cared about WTO trade rules, climate progress, and democracy worldwide. Now essentially all of that is off the table. And the powerlessness behind many international institutions has been laid bare. If Putin decides to invade Ukraine, we’re in a world where the only consequences are the ones we manufacture for the event. The UN is manifestly irrelevant. Shaming has no force. There are no rules, and your friends can cover for you. It’s just the way things are. Military threats can be the first not the last of options.
This is a problem generally and for us in particular. Under Trump we developed adversarial relationships with just about everyone, with the view that they were all against us, and we had to show who’s boss. That limits our power. Most serious is what happened with China. Xi may be a megalomaniac and an autocrat, but we empowered Chinese hardliners and contributed to his nationalistic program by delivering threats echoing the imperialist past. When Trump said he would destroy the Chinese economy they took it seriously. The newly-revived alliance with Russia—a thorn in our side for Ukraine—was at least in part our own doing.
We have replaced our successful efforts for peace and stability with a new world view where we need no one, and any constraint on our ability to act is unacceptable. It’s easy to say (and many do say) so much the better. Every country needs to stand up for itself, and all of that international stuff just gets in the way. That’s an appealing slogan. It wasn’t just Trump’s line; it was behind Brexit and all the populist movements of the both the left and the right. However we’re not the only ones playing that game. That “freedom” is a freedom for any country to do anything, and the Ukraine affair is an early indicator of where that goes. We seem to have forgotten World War II and the Depression, and that’s just for starters.
Our own history gives an excellent example of what happens. That ocurred after the American Revolution, under the so-called Articles of Confederation. It took only a few years for the American states that had fought the British together to be at each other’s throats, torpedoing economic progress for everyone. Things got so bad that the states had no choice but to give up power to a new Constitution and a national government. In Europe there were centuries of wars that only ended when cooperation became manditory in the post World War II recovery.
It’s a fact that the liberal economic system has gotten a bad name in this country—”Bill Clinton let China in the WTO and there was nothing we could do about the Chinese assault on American jobs”—but that universally-repeated story is false. (It’s one example of what you might call bipartisan revisionist history—the left and right united against the center!) The main issue raised with China’s behavior has always been currency manipulation, which was in no way permitted under WTO rules. And as the following job loss chart makes clear, the loss of American jobs was 100% a phenomenon of the George W. Bush presidency:
That’s no accident. The radical neocons had us preoccupied with fighting a $3T war, and the same deregulation mania that produced the 2008 crash had us actually encouraging outsourcing abroad. For the business-friendly Bush people cheap off shore labor was good. All subsequent efforts to help the people hurt by that process were blocked by Congressional Republicans bent on sowing dissatisfaction ahead of the 2016 election. The liberal order conspiracy is a convenent fiction for both the right (to cover its tracks) and the left (to attack the center).
If we’re going to avoid economic and even potentially military disaster, we’ve got to get past the electoral propaganda and understand what we’ve done right and wrong. In particular we’ve got to wean ourselves from the siren-call of nationalism. We’re not going to “win” the future, but we can certainly all lose it. The real challenge is getting internationalism right, so that everyone has a stake in the action. We built unprecedented peace and prosperity after World War II. That job needs to be done again before we give it all up—in a way that has happened many times before. Both prosperity and peace are in question.
One important lesson of history is that economics precedes politics. The EU, for all its imperfections, is a vast improvement over centuries of status quo. What got that going was a step-by-step economic union, long before there was anything political on the table. In that sense, strangely enough, you can argue that the WTO is more important than the UN. Getting the WTO back on track is going to take considerable doing, but it has to happen. And perhaps climate change can yield an appropriate model.
Climate change is an unusual situation in that practically every country has veto power of the result. We all share the same atmosphere, and the CO2 concentration is only controlled when everyone cooperates. So the solution has to get a buy-in from everyone, rich countries and poor. In fact it can only work when rich countries recognize that—like it or not—they’re going to have to help the poor ones. Everyone will have to get used to the idea of an international project where the focus is less on who gets the best deal than on whether it delivers the necessary benefit for all.
A functioning WTO is a similar balancing act. As starting point there is one basic reality to be acknowledged: self-sufficiency is not a desirable or realizable goal even for large countries. Despite all the discussion of the evil Chinese, we would be vastly worse off if they just went away. Just in general, we are not always going to be the best at making everything, and our own industry will be crippled if we can’t build on what’s best.
Furthermore discussions of self-sufficiency tend to include a strong dose of the always-dangerous delusion “my people aren’t like that.” In fact domestic manufacture does not guarantee availability, quality, price, or appropriate technology. The single worst problem during the first stage of the Covid crisis was a lack of testing equipment—because the American manufacturer with a CDC contract to produce the tests had decided they could make more money doing something else. Similarly, self-sufficiency can do little to guarantee the well-being of the national workforce, as there is no substitute for government dealing with all relevant labor issues. Trade is more like climate change than it seems—it’s something we’ve got to make work.
The balancing act is in the many factors that have to be taken into account for fair trade: labor conditions, environmental rules, government involvement, and so forth. Those are both impediments and opportunities—they make the negotiations harder, but they are also leverage opportunities for a better world. Elizabeth Warren in her Presidential campaign made a long list of items she wanted to make as preconditions for trade with the US. Her standards were very high—it was pointed out at the time that no country met them—but her list was an indication of potential opportunities. Also, it is important that these rules should apply to everyone—including to us.
What this comes down to is that globalization, despite the rhetoric, is only anti-labor if we make it so—which is precisely what happened under George Bush. Instead of using it to establish worldwide labor standards, we used it deliberately to undermine workers everywhere. In other words thus far we’ve had globalization exclusively for the rich. If we don’t step in to control it, it will stay that way—populist movements or not. And if we don’t start learning how to create a world order for the benefit of humanity, no amount of national chest-beating will save us.
The Ukraine affair is dangerous in its own right, but even more dangerous as a symbol of a world out of control. What the world needs now is neither uncontrolled chaos nor world government, but a set of mutually-agreed rules to forestall a fight to the bottom. As with climate change, there is no way out other than to acknowledge we are now one interconnected world, and we will all either stand or fall together.
on the outside 