The Climate Argument Against Gas for Europe is Counterproductive Nonsense

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There have been many articles about how the plans to provide US natural gas to Europe will undermine progress on climate.  This is a false conflict between climate progress and support to Ukraine.

First of all there is a timeframe difference.  What matters for Ukraine is a show of Western resolve now.  Even a year from now the situation in Ukraine will hopefully be different.  It’s going to take at least that long for much to happen with natural gas terminals here or elsewhere.  There is no reason to undermine the support for Ukraine now.  

Second the argument that anything we build will be used for years afterwards—however frequently it is made—is wrong.  Terminals will be used as long as there is demand for their capacity.   If Europe, for whatever reason, weans itself off natural gas, then those terminals will not be used even if we want them to be.

Third the gas to be provided by the agreement is both insufficient and expensive.  We would only be providing one third of the current demand and the pricing is expected to be twice what is currently paid.  The agreement in fact provides a very strong incentive for the Europeans to get themselves off natural gas.

People who fight this agreement on climate grounds are doing no cause a favor.

A Serious Climate Scenario

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It seems to me more important than ever that we think about real scenarios for dealing with climate change.  There’s so much religion here that we can be missing the boat.  I’m going to take an extreme position in this piece, both because I think it should be on the table and because I think it’s more likely than a lot of what is taken for granted. 

I believe that fusion is going to work and be deployable in about the next ten years.  We’re going to know quite soon where that stands.  Both the Commonwealth Fusion people and Helion (among others) plan to generate net positive energy by 2025. There are also regularly new developments: more powerful magnets, longer plasma retension times, higher energies attained, even AI-based methods for controlling stability of reactor plasmas.  Higher temperature superconductors have been game-changers.  It is time to be serious about fusion.

The consequence is that we are entering (in the relatively near term) into an era not of energy scarcity but of energy abundance.  That’s not just a matter of fusion—solar, wind, and better in-network storage also contribute—but fusion represents real abundance. That’s a different mindset with different conclusions than most of what gets discussed.  I’ve argued earlier that it’s the proper mindset for the long-term, because it is the only serious way to address our worldwide problems.  The difference is that progress in fusion has been such that we can move that indefinite future to the nearer term.

With that point of view, we can view the response to climate change as two distinct issues:

– Keeping things from getting too bad in the interim while the new energy sources get up to speed.

– Deploying abundant energy to combat climate change.

It’s important to look at the second issue first, because the first (assuming we can solve it) is temporary.  The architecture for the second issue is relatively straightforward.   We’re going to have generation stations of significant size with high-capacity interconnection for distribution to users.   Electricity will be the basic form in which energy is delivered, but we’re going to have to deal with significant applications (industrial processes, air travel) where electricity itself is not the answer.  For such applications we’ll need ways to convert electricity to other forms of energy.  That may involve using electricity to make hydrogen or using electricity to achieve climate neutrality by pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere for synthetic fuels. (It’s interesting that carbon capture has value even without large-scale CO2 storage.)

The most important conclusion is straightforward:  we’re going to have to vastly increase and improve the facilities to generate and distribute electricity!  That is job number one and the most essential thing to be spending money on.  Existing technology will contribute to but not solve that problem.  We also need to figure out how to move everything that isn’t currently electric onto that network.  Note that ultimately it is much less important how efficiently we use electricity than that electricity is what’s used.  We’re not getting rid of air conditioners, and we’re not making sure that every electric hot water heater has a heat pump.

As to how we’re going to survive until then, the most important message is that survival means focusing on heavy hitters.  It is not the case that every little bit helps.  I’ve given this chart before for energy use in the US:

The key sectors are transportation, industrial, and electric power—not residential.  Electric cars are clearly an important contributing technology, but even they are only an infrastructure investment until the underlying power plants are converted.

For the rest of the world, the corresponding charts can be quite different, often tilted toward industrial uses. Focusing exclusively on the US distorts the issue.   We have to get world CO2 emissions down overall, regardless of where it comes from.  This is not a question of “every country needs to do its part”.  It’s a question of the most effective way to get the CO2 total down fast. 

We have to think about where all the sources are and how to get at them.  Carbon pricing schemes such as CCL are particularly helpful because of their wide impact. In this country a simple calculation tells you that the current annual subsidy to fossil fuel interests is about a trillion dollars, so we’re a long way from a rational economy. Putting solar panels on suburban roof tops—however useful—is not commensurate with the problem.  Furthermore, as the following chart indicates, we rich countries need to get used to the idea of helping the others in a big way or the job will never get done!

s11_2018_Projections

As the latest IPCC report (2/28/2022) put it: “Rich governments must quickly and dramatically scale up the level of adaptation finance for low-income countries.”

Or else—there’s no getting around it—we’ll end up stuck with geoengineering and hope for the best.  Simply stated (for those who haven’t heard) geoengineering delays global warming by filling the atmosphere with chemicals that put the whole world in shade. That can stop most (but not all) aspects of climate change, but with many known and unknown risks. 

It’s hard to come to a proper judgment of geoengineering. On one hand, it’s exceedingly scary to start messing with the whole world’s atmosphere, but on the other hand we don’t yet have all the technologies we need and we’ve been slow to deploy the ones we do have, so we may well need to be buying time. One can argue that geoengineering reduces the motivation for alternative energy progress, but that work today seems to have its own motivation. So in the end there is nothing immoral about geoengineering, and we may have to use it.  But given the risks and the fact that all that extra CO2 has to come out before we can quit, we had better do as little of it as possible. (These systems require regular replenishing, so turning them off isn’t a big issue; getting rid of the extra carbon dioxide is.)

You might wonder at this point why we brought up geoenginerring instead of the much-discussed topic of carbon capture? There’s a good reason. Despite all of the publicity around it, there’s no near-term silver bullet with carbon capture. For the yearly CO2 production in the US we would need huge infrastructure of processing plants full of giant fans—a multi-trillion dollar project using enormous amounts of energy to build and run it. And that’s before you even start to talk about where to put the output. The main reason carbon capture has such prominence is that it plays to the fossil fuel companies’ delaying tactics—if we can get rid of the carbon dioxide later, why worry about creating it now? Carbon capture is a project of energy abundance, AFTER we have somehow managed to survive. Going forward, unburning everything you burn is only sensible in particular application areas (e.g. air travel) where there is nothing else to be done.

Climate change unavoidably means a huge, expensive project—which is why it is important to be clear about what we’re doing.  As general principles, conservation for conservation’s sake is wrong, a focus on local issues is wrong, and an exclusive focus on current technology is wrong.  What’s right is to recognize that the future requires an electrical infrastructure capable of driving everything and that in the near-term we have to avoid distractions and focus on heavy hitters—worldwide—to keep from going over the edge.  Near-term and long-term projects are not necessarily the same. Finally we should realize that despite our current concerns, we are actually moving toward a period of abundant energy with enormous benefits for all—if we can stop fighting over the pieces of a pie that will become much bigger.

As an analogy I remember the early days of voice over IP networks, where the whole focus was how we would ever meet the realtime performance needs of speech.  It wasn’t so many years later that those same networks were handling realtime video to hundreds of millions of people worldwide—and voice was an almost invisible blip.   That’s the kind of transformation we’re talking about.  Limitless clean energy will change the world.

Ukraine in Our Future

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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.

Elon Musk as Time’s Person of the Year

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There is nothing wrong in celebrating Elon Musk, who has achieved much of real value.  There are even good messages to be drawn from those achievements.   However there are also plenty of wrong conclusions that can and are being drawn about Musk.  So it’s worth thinking about what’s wrong and what’s right.

Wrong message #1:  We don’t need government involvement in the economy; the private sector can be counted on to get the job done.

Fact:  Tesla was started with Obama-era seed money and Obama-era price subsidies for electric car sales.   SpaceX got going with NASA contracts.  Without government involvement we would have had neither. The major US automakers had to be dragged kicking and screaming to electric cars.   The private sector is not good at supporting novel projects without a near-term payoff.

Wrong message #2:  We can count on smart people like Musk to tell us what to do.

Fact:  High achievers have their limitations and blinders just like everyone else.  Musk’s statement that we don’t need “Build Back Better” because he himself never needed help from anyone is actually typical blindness of the class.  I worked for a successful startup where the four principals fell out with each other almost immediately after we went public—because each was sure he was the reason for success!

Wrong message #3:  In the end we can always count on American ingenuity.

Fact:  Musk is one more example of the importance of immigrants and children of immigrants to the American economy.   Same for Apple and Google.

Wrong message #4:  A few big heroes are what makes for national success.

Fact:  Musk was important as a technical visionary.  No one else recognized that the technological basis existed for an electric car company.  However he also fostered an environment where he could attract the best and brightest to his companies.   The achievements of Tesla and Space X have that broader basis.

What’s more, the Person of the Year could equally well have been given to the many scientists and technologists who gave us the Covid vaccines.  There are more than a few single heroes in our midst.  Big achievements reflect individual contributions of many able people.

I’ll limit the right messages to two:

Right message #1:  Technology matters, and things really can change

Both Tesla and SpaceX are fundamentally new businesses, rethought from the bottom up.  In a very few years they have changed the US economy.

As contrast, a recent book about the Boeing 737 MAX shows what happens a company loses track of the reality of its business in a blind race for profit.

Right message #2:  At all levels individuals can make a difference and should be rewarded accordingly

This is particularly important in technology-driven companies, but not only there.  As noted, that was important not just for Musk himself but also within Musk’s companies.   For contrast, my contacts at NASA and even JPL have described them as stiflingly bureaucratic.  The difference between the SpaceX and the SLS project is undeniable.

Both companies and countries have a tendency to ossify into hierarchical structures that declare themselves to be meritocracies.  Equality of opportunity—including opportunity for real success—is necessary both for individuals and for the success of the overall enterprise.   For society as a whole, we need both a safety net and true opportunities for individuals to succeed.

That, not the pronouncements of Elon Musk, is what makes for success as a nation.

The Hijacking of Race

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The Democratic Party owes black people a debt of gratitude for their organized commitment in the last election.   Even if that weren’t true, the United States owes black people what it has never delivered—real, functional equality of opportunity.  It’s worth restating what never made it into any textbook I ever had—slavery in this country didn’t end in 1863.  With Black Laws and then Jim Crow, the substance of slavery in this country persisted well into the twentieth century.  It’s no surprise that we live with a pervasive legacy of slavery.

What is owed here is progress—on everything that makes for personal and family prosperity and life satisfaction.  A recent NY Times piece does a good job of getting at what that means. However it’s worth recognizing that this objective gets hijacked every day in favor of other more exciting agendas, as examples:

– Anticapitalism.  This is a kind of knee-jerk on the left that gets applied to all issues (climate change is another one).  Get rid of capitalism, let me and my morally-certified friends run everything, and racism will vanish in an instant.  Otherwise there’s not a chance. Somehow the dictatorship of the proletariat (like trickle-down economics) survives in the face of all evidence.

– Violence.  It’s amazing how attractive violence is for people who spend their lives far from it.  That’s not just for the classic case of British Nazi intellectuals prior to World War II.  Two very good books The Good Lord Bird and The Underground Railway end with ringing endorsements of violence as a necessary way to get things done.  In context that’s not really a call to action, but it indicates a willingness to forgive violence as a tactic—a significant mistake supported only by rewriting history. 

There’s not going to be a revolution on the left in this country, so we’ve got to work with the flawed political process we’ve got.  Violence hardens opposition—end of story.  If you want to get things done, there’s no greater mistake than believing you have powers you don’t have.

– Cultural superiority.  This has many manifestations.  The good guys are immune from racism, create better artistic productions, are more moral and humane to each other, etc.

If you get past all of that, objectives here are not so different from what we owe to everyone else—a fair chance to succeed and a viable safety net.  What it takes to get there must be adapted to the history of anti-black racism, but adaptation is the rule for every other group also.  Our task as a society is to get the job done for everyone.

It is hijacking the race issue to

– Use it as a justification for anti-democratic behavior.

– Use it as a reason to justify any departure from the rule of law.  We are not doing anyone a favor by asking for an understanding of mob violence.

– Engage in ridiculous exercises of cultural superiority. That includes, in particular, anti-racism competitions.  I’d even say everybody is racist; the important question is who is doing damage and how to stop it. Anti-racism crusades may feel good, but they are not progress. And if they lose elections they are nothing more than destructive vanity.

Even if you think this is an oversimplification, you have to admit that the objectives here–a fair chance to succeed and a viable safety net–are worth pursuing.  You’d think they would be universally popular.  After all, as many have pointed out, essentially any social program has more white than black beneficiaries.  So why aren’t they universally popular?  The reason goes all the way back to What’s The Matter with Kansas.  Republicans have been convincing people for decades that all those measures are not for them.  It’s just giving the country away to the shiftless blacks.  People in Hillbilly Elegy and Strangers in their own Land are astonished that any of their own would waste time applying for such benefits.

Why are Republicans so successful?  BECAUSE WE KEEP HELPING THEM.  With all the discussion of white racists who just have to get used to giving up the advantages of white privilege (and deservedly take the hit), what else would you expect them to believe?  We’re not spending our time saying we’re committed to what it takes to achieve equality of opportunity for everyone—with all the benefits that entails.  Too often we’re playing the Republicans’ game.

You don’t have to agree with everything here, but one thing is indubitably true.  Fighting racism is about results, not morality contests.  It is about jobs, safety, and education for your kids.  It is a pragmatic issue.  Anything that doesn’t produce results is hijacking, regardless of how good it feels.

Stop Playing the Republicans’ Games

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As Democrats, our message has to be that we are in business to make life better for everyone—white, black, or anything else.  Life for most people in the US is poorer, more stressful, and more uncertain than in any other developed country.  That’s a fixable problem, and we’re trying to do it.  It’s not easy to fight the powers that be—so it’s not pretty as a process—but we’re up for the fight.  Climate fits in that picture as well.  Racism has its particular challenges. But we are moving everyone up.

That message is not compatible with the current chest-beating (mostly self-appointed) about how morally superior we are to the moronic white racists.   “Those people just have to get used to giving up the advantages they’ve enjoyed by being white, so they ought to suffer.”  Not a great way to get elected and not what we stand for.  It’s a false premise that we have to trade one group off against another.

That false premise is not just counterproductive as a message, it also leads to bad policy.  It is not okay to assume that it’s fine to make the other guy suffer.  In education, it is not okay to ignore kids who are successful, because they’re not the ones that count.  (I can tell you about mixed classes in middle school math.) With education, as in everything else, we are in it to make things better for everyone.  Fighting over insufficiently-provided resources—college slots or AP classes—is not the answer. Watering down education for the supposed benefit of the disadvantaged benefits no one.  And both are distractions from the many other items (e.g. family economic stability) that are needed if we really want equality of opportunity.  The objective is excellence for all.

We’re still living down “defund the police”—with columnists talking about how it is perfectly okay for mobs to trash the businesses of random people.  This education stuff is if anything worse, because it turns racial progress into a threat.  That may make some people happy, but it’s not productive, and it isn’t even to the advantage of the people it purports to serve.

As to what we ought to be talking about, it seems that vaccination is a marvelous metaphor for everything the Republican Party stands for.   Vaccinated people don’t get sick and die; unvaccinated people do.  The people cheering on the unvaccinated are largely vaccinated themselves (e.g. Murdoch and Fox people).  They’re sacrificing their supporters to the task of keeping themselves in power.  So they can continue to take their money–not just in taxes but in medical expenses, education expenses, and job insecurity.

There are lots of false bogeymen here.  “We can’t have those benefits without tanking the economy.”  “Just look at the inflation we’re already getting from the Democrats’ spending.”  Virtually all the benefits of Trump tax cuts went to the ultra-rich.  Virtually all of the corporate benefits went to stock buybacks instead of new investment.  Virtually all of the inflation is from shortages created by continuing Covid supply issues. Just as the Obama-era Republicans kept the country poor by blocking all stimulus, the current Republicans are deliberately keeping the country poor by blocking the national recovery from Covid.

One thing that is certainly true is that our strength as a nation, both economic and military, is built on people.  That means developing the capabilities of our population, spending on education and research, and getting the best and brightest from everywhere to come here.  Furthermore we need to develop the infrastructure (e.g. for climate change, 5G) that the economy will need for the future.  The Republican Party has proved it is ready to sacrifice all of that to profits returned to wealthy investors—and deliberately-incited divisiveness.

We need to be a nation united by policies that serve everyone.  Our history was written by contributions from all levels of society, including many categories people written off both here and abroad.  The divisions we have are more sown than real, so the most important message is that we are in this for all.  That’s the only way forward.

The Supreme Court has tipped the balance: the filibuster must end now

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Our starting point, however obvious, has to be stated unequivocally: the Constitution of the United States only exists insofar as it is supported by the Supreme Court. That’s just fact. Based on the form and content of the Supreme Court’s Texas decision, the Constitution no longer exists.

We’ve seen the Court stretching things before. The Citizens United decision had nothing to do with the intentions of the founding fathers. The pretext there was weak enough that you wondered if anyone really believed it. Some of Kavanaugh’s recent decisions were worse. However the Texas decision is a sea change. They no longer find it necessary even to come up with pretexts. There was no arguing of the case, and the statement of the majority said little more than that they had the power to do it so they did. Their preferred mode of operation now seems to be “shadow-docket” decisions, where nothing gets said at all.

Despite all that is written about checks and balances in government, sovereignty is indivisible. Someone always has the last word, and in the US system that someone is the Supreme Court. It is the least democratic of institutions and the only one with absolute power. There is no constraint on the scope of it’s decisions or on the rationale to be used in reaching them. And no mechanism to appeal the results.

This is not just about women’s health, serious as that may be. It’s easy to take over the country through the Court, and this Court has shown itself ready for the job. Voting restrictions of any sort will stand unless the Court strikes them down. Increases and decreases in government power are matters of what is or isn’t allowed. If the Court outlaws regulation of business (a current Republican project) then that’s that. Same for healthcare. The free press (already a problem) is what they choose to make of it.

Our current radically-unrepresentative Court (you can’t even call them conservatives) has now served notice that it is ready to act as it sees fit, without constraint of prior decisions or even the need to come up with arguments. That’s the tipping point. Just as with the last election, democracy itself is at stake. Because of the Court’s power, nothing short of reforming it will work.

So we have to enlarge the Court. To do that we need to end the filibuster. The Supreme Court has set down a challenge to democracy, so the time to act is now.

Lessons not Learned in Afghanistan

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Much of the blame-seeking around Afghanistan is not only off-base, but damaging to our national interest.  It’s incredible that even the comparisons with Vietnam talk about the final evacuations, not the failed enterprises.  By concentrating all attention on an asserted “manageable” withdrawal, we’ve given the real perpetrators a pass.

In the last couple of days the NY Times has finally published two good articles.  One by Ezra Klein has the apt title: “Let’s Not Pretend That the Way We Withdrew From Afghanistan Was the Problem”.  In it the author goes over the real options we faced and why.  It’s a good job. My only concern is that while he is exhaustive about the options, he stops short of all the conclusions I’d like to draw.

For that, the other article is essential.  That one was by Sami Sadat, commander of the Afghan Army.  His title is “I Commanded Afghan Troops This Year. We Were Betrayed”.  His point—that the loss was not just the Afghan army’s fault—is not the main point here.  What is important is that he gives a detailed description of the reality faced by the Afghan forces, and that says quite a lot about how much had gone wrong.  There are three points to make:

1.  The war was lost the moment Trump signed the Taliban agreement.

Here’s the quote from the general:

“The Trump-Taliban agreement shaped the circumstances for the current situation by essentially curtailing offensive combat operations for U.S. and allied troops. The U.S. air-support rules of engagement for Afghan security forces effectively changed overnight, and the Taliban were emboldened. They could sense victory and knew it was just a matter of waiting out the Americans. Before that deal, the Taliban had not won any significant battles against the Afghan Army. After the agreement? We were losing dozens of soldiers a day”.

The last bit is particularly important.  Defeat is an exponential process—the likelihood of attrition depends on how bad things look, i.e. on the losses of all kinds beforehand.  Once the process starts it accelerates.  It was an astonishing mistake of US intelligence to believe we had many months, a year and a half even, before a Taliban takeover.  There was no stability once defeat took root. Biden’s late withdrawal of 1200 US troops is not even mentioned by the general, as it was never the issue.

2. There was NO exit plan ever.

Again from the general:

“The Afghan forces were trained by the Americans using the U.S. military model based on highly technical special reconnaissance units, helicopters and airstrikes. We lost our superiority to the Taliban when our air support dried up and our ammunition ran out.

“Contractors maintained our bombers and our attack and transport aircraft throughout the war. By July, most of the 17,000 support contractors had left. A technical issue now meant that aircraft — a Black Hawk helicopter, a C-130 transport, a surveillance drone — would be grounded.

“The contractors also took proprietary software and weapons systems with them. They physically removed our helicopter missile-defense system. Access to the software that we relied on to track our vehicles, weapons and personnel also disappeared. Real-time intelligence on targets went out the window, too”.

The key point is that none of these functions are transferable in weeks or even months to the Afghan army.  This is a rebuke of the entire war effort. That this gap existed means that there was no serious attempt to make the Afghan army self-sufficient.   As for the contractors, the general’s language makes clear that they had no intention of making their valuable, proprietary expertise available to anyone.

3. The Afghan government had lost the support of the population

On this the general’s comment is specific to the military:

“… there was only so much the Americans could do when it came to the well-documented corruption that rotted our government and military. That really is our national tragedy. So many of our leaders — including in the military — were installed for their personal ties, not for their credentials. These appointments had a devastating impact on the national army because leaders lacked the military experience to be effective or inspire the confidence and trust of the men being asked to risk their lives. Disruptions to food rations and fuel supplies — a result of skimming and corrupt contract allocations — destroyed the morale of my troops.”

More generally, Fareed Zakaria cites a US government poll of Afghans in 2018 that “showed that Afghan support for U.S. troops was at 55%, down from 90% a decade earlier”. That’s saying almost half the population was ready to choose an unknown Taliban regime as better than what they had.  With the rampant corruption, participation in the last Afghan election dropped to less than 25%.  The Afghan President Ghani reportedly fled through Kabul to the United Arab Emirates with $169 million in cash.

So, with all of that why were we still in Afghanistan?  That answer is not complicated.

Getting out was always going to be some variant of the mess we’ve just seen.  And there was also a moral argument:  leaving was going to hurt a lot of people in Kabul (though fewer elsewhere).  So people in government wanted to believe a fantasy—that there was a solution.  That is, the Afghan military would defend the state against the Taliban, and everyone would live happily ever after.  That fantasy trumped reality all the way down to the end. 

What can you say about Biden? 

There’s no evidence he could have done much to delay the military defeat.  He has gotten more people out thus far than has happened in other comparable situations, but he should have started sooner and that would have reduced some of the chaos.  He has not given in to the many proposals for last-minute military actions that would have undoubtedly made things worse.  (To be clear, there was no Afghan army, the US couldn’t possibly take on that role itself, and any serious military action would have put all evacuees at risk. Talks of retaining a second military airport are particularly fanciful, as the evacuees weren’t there.) He might have gotten some of the military equipment out earlier, but doing so would have undercut the Afghan army even more.  (And the Afghan President Ghani pleaded with him not to do it.) 

So you can give him a B.  It was certainly embarrassing, but it could have been quite a lot worse.

Even more important, all Biden could do was manage the exit from a failed war. You’d never guess it from all the bluster, but there was no hiding the US defeat. For real responsibility it’s worth quoting a succinct recap of US policy failures from former anti-terrorism officer Ali Soufan:

“Every administration made a lot of mistakes in this. The Bush administration made a lot of mistakes in moving much-needed resources to focus on Iraq and then focusing on Iraq. The Obama administration even sent more troops in and, for eight years, was hoping that something miraculous would happen. The Trump administration is responsible for not understanding the situation at all and opening negotiations only with the Taliban and disregarding the Afghan government and releasing 5,000 Taliban fighters without asking the Taliban for anything in exchange. Unbelievable.”

Of that list it is important to recognize that primary responsibility rests with Bush and the Iraq war. In our eagerness for the neocon-inspired invasion of Iraq, we never even tried to take the opportunity to help create a viable state in Afghanistan. Our current media-fed collective amnesia about both Bush and the Iraq war shows how little we’ve learned from our own recent history.

Lessons

1. Don’t believe in “benevolent” colonialism. 

Neither Afghanistan nor Vietnam was a special American phenomenon.  Whatever our original motivations, these were ultimately colonial wars.  Once you take over a country, the motivation of the occupier is stability at all cost.  That leads to wholesale corruption at the expense of the population and even the war effort.  The Afghan general described that situation exactly. You can get a more detailed picture here. Vietnam was the same. The classic on this subject was written in 1860—we should have figured it out by now.

We got into Afghanistan as a follow-on to 9/11.   It was up to us to help rebuild the country, schedule elections, and get out.

2. Watch out for fantasies. 

Something has to be done about an intelligence establishment that was so eager to please, that it couldn’t recognize that the fantasy had no basis in reality.  Remember there was NO exit plan.

3. Watch out for complacency, the idea that the future will just be a continuation of the past.

There is no other obvious reason why Biden was being told that the Afghan army would hold off the Taliban for six months to a year and a half!

4. Finally, going back to Eisenhower, watch out for the military industrial complex. 

For that, it’s worth thinking about who won this twenty-year war.  Not us, just forced to leave.  Not the Afghans who had to live with the fighting and corruption, and now are stuck with the Taliban. The real winners were the contractors.

Over the last 20 years of war in Afghanistan, the U.S. spent $89 billion in taxpayer dollars to fund the building and training of the Afghan National Army with an estimated $2.26 trillion in total operating costs funded by U.S. taxpayers. Ever since the U.S. government began keeping track, contractors have made up more than half of the military personnel working for the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq.  This is all the more remarkable since—as we’ve seen—their objectives were not even aligned with our national goals!

The contractors are said not to be worried at all about the end of the Afghan war.  There’s a whole new round of military modernization coming.  And we’ve never been short of wars.