International

What We’ve Lost and Must Find

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We read regularly that many of our traditional strengths as a nation are being undermined in this administration.   But frequently such pieces end up tempering their concerns with a belief in America’s fundamental dynamism and vision, as contrasted with (say) the central control of the Chinese regime.  I’m all for believing in progress, but we’re not going to make any if we refuse to recognize how deep a pit we’ve fallen into.  Like it or not we are living with an administration that has deliberately attacked precisely those “American values” we want to believe in.

Here is a notion of what we’ve lost and need to find.

  1. Americans used to believe in the future.

 It was our future, and we did all we could to own it.  Our research institutions were the peak of the world, and people came from everywhere to participate. The list of Nobel Prizes records our success.  Part of that enterprise was to understand what was possible, and we built science into the functioning of government, so we knew where we were going.

All of that is now by the wayside, replaced by Trump’s “intuitions”.  He knows everything there is to know, and what he likes is by definition truth.  That holds for climate change, for research grants, and even (incredibly) for airplane launchers on aircraft carriers.  Even for NIH—a critical source of US competitiveness—grant money has been reduced and RFK’s decision logic hidden.   We’re not looking for truth, we’re looking for loyalty.

We still have the fruits of past successes in AI, SpaceX, and BioTech (all started with pre-Trump government money) and we even have a venture capital community to help fund it.  But all of that is today.  VC’s may sound future-looking, but they’re not going to fund anything that doesn’t pay back big and soon.  All of our present investments are at risk, because we’re too busy selling the present to think more than a step ahead.  The idea that we’re going to win with bigger and bigger investments in AI hardware sounds like the Maginot Line from pre-World War II France.  That was a huge defensive investment based on their experience with World War I, but the German Blitzkrieg just went around it.  In our case the Chinese, with a broader view of AI applications, may do the same.  In addition the obligatory government payoffs from big corporations mean that new entrants face vested interests with government-protected monopoly powers.  It’s like the old joke that someone in the nineteenth century patent office proposed to close it down because everything important had already been invented.  We just did that.

The Chinese have built up their universities and research institutions to be world class.   They figured out the coming importance of rare earths, solar cell and battery technologies, and medical research.  They may have government-defined five-year plans, but at least they have competent technical input and in many areas they have more internal competition than we do.  By contrast our focus now seems to be on the past—strong-arming our friends in hopes of delivering the jobs of the 1950’s.  What we call American dynamism comes not just from individuals, but also from the opportunities for such people to succeed.  For our current leadership that dynamism is unwelcome competition for its own all-embracing genius—something to be stamped out ASAP.

To succeed we must work to see the future and provide means to go there.

  1. Americans used to believe in our people

The American belief in its people goes all the way back.  The whole point of American democracy was to capture the strength of the population.  That’s why George Washington stepped down as President from the dictatorship that most of the world expected to see.  That’s why Lincoln talked about how “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” The democracy was far from perfect, but it was still a big step forward.

Coming out of that mindset was the revolutionary idea of education as essential to the role of the population in a democratic state.  This country pioneered the idea of educating the whole population, first at the high school level and then for colleges.  The power of the country expressed the capabilities of its people. Even the “robber barons” of the nineteenth century recognized the need to in some sense or other give back to the society to which they belonged. Immigration has always been a tricky issue, but we have learned that a multiplicity of people can participate in the democratic experiment and that diversity can be a source of strength.

Today we have replaced all of that with a dramatically different model.  We live in an age of self-declared superheroes.  We have a President who thinks he is infallible (and spends much of his time on monuments to himself), and business leaders who are convinced they belong to a different race.

Nothing in the Big Beautiful bill shows government has a role to play specifically for the population.  We’re running a huge deficit and cutting desperately-needed benefits to poor people so we can have big tax cuts for businesses and rich people.  There’s more detail on who gets benefits here.  When Trump talks about the golden future, there is no mechanism for it other than to make rich people richer.  When he attacks Social Security (e.g. with bogus claims of fraud) he’s attacking the whole idea of direct government support for the welfare of the population.  Crucially government has no role in protecting the population from the powers-that-be running everything for themselves.  Government of, by, and for the people should perish from the earth. 

People don’t necessarily see things that way, but one way or another they understand that there is no one protecting them from the abyss.  So the AI future looks pretty damn scary, and they’re not so enthusiastic about those datacenters either.  Owning the future sounds ridiculous.

To succeed we must support our people.

  1. Americans used to believe in our role in the world.

Coming out of the horrors of the Second World War, we and everyone else hoped for a better future, a new world where this horrible thing would never happen again.  America, as the major power of the age, took its responsibilities seriously.  A world at peace was a world where everyone could prosper.  That meant rules and responsibilities for everyone and institutions to support them.  It was easy for the US to want to be magnanimous; we were the richest, most powerful nation hands down.

We’re actually much richer now than we were then, but something else has also happened.  On an international front we are no longer so dominant, with China specifically challenging us in just about any dimension of wealth and power.  That’s our primary subject of discussion for international affairs these days, but in fact that’s only part of the picture.

The other part is about American society.  After World War II our nation was as equitable as it had ever been, with prosperity widely shared and new opportunities for personal success, particularly through the GI bill and expansion of education.  In the years since then that equality has been eroded until today, we have reached unheard-of levels of wealth and poverty, beyond even the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century.  The following charts show the magnitude of the changes to both wealth and income:

There is no question that the quality of life for many people has deteriorated.  And it is conventional to say that the international idealism of the post-war years has been replaced by a grubbier reality where we are no longer dominant and every country struggles to compete with all others.  And the quality of life issue reflects that grubby struggle, in particular with the Chinese.  So the post-war idealism makes no sense anymore—we just have to win.

It is no accident that this conventional picture elected Trump.   That’s what it was created to do.  There is no shortage of money in this country, but in the years since World War II the powers-that-be have learned to protect their wealth from the population at large.  And electing Trump has enabled a pillaging of the country without precedent.  You have to blame someone, and it’s always the foreigners and the immigrants.

We certainly do have competition with other countries.  But the idea that all our economic problems are because we are under assault from the rest of the world is patently false.  Trade deficit numbers simply don’t tell today’s true story.  An example is the Apple iPhone—a big winner for the USA but counted as a trade deficit loser.  Much of the economy works like that. And the quality of life issue is unquestionably something we have done to ourselves.  This is a prosperous country, but not everyone has felt that prosperity.

In other words we as a nation are in the curious position of carrying out a foreign policy designed to protect domestic inequality! Of course it’s all about those foreigners! In that we are doubly hurt.  We are unable to deal with the actually tractable problem of population insecurity.  And we have lost our essential (and historical) role of helping worldwide stability in the face of the huge problems of climate change, nuclear proliferation, and the unclear consequences of AI.

To succeed we must—especially now—be able to recognize our broad interest as a nation in the world, above and beyond any corruption or special interests.   

We (and everyone else) need a stable, prosperous, and peaceful world for our success.  That is a worthy and achievable goal.  We used to understand these three keys to doing that, and we can do it again.  Our challenge is to recapture them—for ourselves and for our children.

The European Heat Wave is Coming for Us

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The amazing thing about this title is that it has to be said at all.  There is only one world, and what happens to everyone else on this planet is going to happen to us too.  However the Trump-induced national insanity is such that the European heat wave has made zero impact on the national consciousness.   Those Europeans are just too stupid to understand air conditioning the way we do. We’re too good for climate change.

The Europeans have been hit by climate change that is beyond what their world is equipped to handle.  It  didn’t have to be very many more degrees to have a monumental impact.  This isn’t just a matter of personal discomfort.  Costs of crop failures are monumental, energy costs are way up, wild fires are burning in unheard-of places, and water levels in rivers are so low that they block commerce and cooling for nuclear power plants.  Once nature starts getting out of whack, it hurts everyone. However as the following chart shows, we’re not so far behind.

The results for us will be different, because our national infrastructure is different.  We do have more air conditioning, but we are not equipped for the electricity needs to double at precisely the same time that we need vast new power for data centers—which also need water supplies for cooling.  We have a large and vulnerable agricultural sector and our own potential for wildfires.  We have not been spared because we are smarter. We’ve been lucky enough to get a little more time to prepare, and all we do is pat ourselves on the back.

I have to end by repeating what always needs emphasizing—there is NO NEW NORMAL we can somehow prepare ourselves to handle.  If we don’t address climate change things will just continue getting worse—more and more rapidly.  There is no alternative to action.  By now we have a pretty good idea of what to do, both immediately and going forward.

We need to beat back the giddiness and do the work.

Hanging Over Our Heads

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Suppose the Iran war somehow reaches a conclusion, and we have a good, rational, democratically-elected regime in Tehran.  What would be a first act of such a regime?  In today’s world they’d need to start a nuclear weapons program as an absolute requirement to maintain sovereignty.

And what would happen after that?  The clear answer to that question shows what is really on the table.  Trump would decide. His Board of Peace is no sideshow–Trump wants to run the world. That may sound great to a US audience, but only until the story collapses. We can see what that means now.

Trump is not worried that the world he has called into being is really chaotic and dangerous.  Since he is THE universal genius, he’ll just take care of it. But in the Iran war we see how little grasp he has on reality. The two-day surgical intervention is out of control in all directions. We’re not always going to be in charge and not always even going to know where our actions will lead. Who knows where we’ll be after a Presidential version of Trump’s six bankruptcies.

The only way we know to control major wars is a system for international governance where war is to the greatest extent possible off the table.  Competing spheres of influence don’t work. International governance isn’t easy either, but we’re all lucky to have lived through such a period.  For all the flaws it mostly worked for peace.  We’re now in an era where many players now think they need nuclear weapons, and the restraints on acts of war are weakening.  Thus far no one has used those weapons, but it’s hard to avoid the feeling we’re getting closer to the brink.

There are other factors too. Computer-controlled drones have clearly changed the rules for warfare in ways we are only beginning to understand.  They have already overturned traditional measures of military strength in both Ukraine and Iran.  They’re cheap, readily available, and we can’t even protect our own radar systems from them. AI is another destabilizer at an even earlier stage of understanding.  Uncertainty and volitily in national assessments of strength or weakness risk wars of overconfidence or paranoia–with weapons of horrendous power.  More than ever we need to restore a framework for stability.

There are really only two ways to do that:  stability is either imposed by dictatorial fiat or assembled by common effort.  The first is Trmp’s vision, but it simply doesn’t match reality.  The second is something we have to make work.  For that everyone needs a stake in the game. There is a base of common interest from both climate change and the obvious risks for war, but the common effort takes more than that–a commitment to international well-being. Obama was able to do something of the sort with the unanimity he achieved around climate change, but it was unstable.  There was too much to be gained in the short term by cheating, and once cheating became respectable, it was hard to fight. Now we’ve got Trump’s sabotage instead.

That doesn’t say the effort was wrong or naive, just hard. Reality won’t wait, and the risks are only increasing. It’s worth noting that there are other success stories for cooperation among nations. The US itself is one–individual states had to decide (with some difficulty) to give up sovereignty for the union to succeed. The EU–despite its bad press–is another one, with prosperity after centuries of bitter wars. Shared prosperity can work, but it requires national governments to make sure benefits reach their populations. In addition here in the US people need to realize that an international order isn’t selling out our national self-interest—in fact we’re doing that today as an unreliable partner in any enterprise.

At some point climate change will become too serious to pretend away.  However, as has been noted many times, by then it may well be too late.  Similarly for war.  We don’t have a choice.  We have to recognize what is at stake now.  We can’t let Trump’s ego wreck the one marvelous world we’ve been granted.

An Example Says It All

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During the Covid crisis the Trump people carried on a campaign of blatant immorality that never got the attention it deserved. They got themselves vaccinated, but encouraged their supporters not to. Not getting vaccinated was an act of resistence to Biden, a gesture for freedom in the face of government overreach, and would be just fine. They killed supporters for their benefit.

That was handy for the campaign. It was a smokescreen for their botched handling of the early stages of the epidemic. So many people died from the anti-vax campaign that they could repeat their bottom line over and over again: “More people died from Covid under Biden than under Trump.”

Now cut to the present. As with Covid, it’s not an accident that Trump’s supporters are the ones hurt most by today’s Trump economy: the tariffs, the instability, the cuts to public services including medicare and social security. It’s certainly not the billionaires (or Trump himself) who are getting hurt. They’ve got their tax cuts, which is to say all those supposed savings from DOGE and other budget cuts went to them. The MAGA people–like the unvaccinated–are sacrificed to the program.

It’s the same internationally–who is getting hurt? Not Russia or China. He’s buddy-buddy with them. They’re all on board with the idea of spheres of influence, the idea that big powerful countries should be able to take what they can get. It’s US allies who trusted us. They’re easy targets, because they were on our side. They represented the first line of our defense against the USSR and now Russia. They didn’t have defenses against us (although they’re now learning).

It’s time to recognize that’s what Trump is. It’s easier to fleece people who considered themselves your friends than to fight enemies. He’s the ultimate confidence man. He’s enormously skilled in insinuating himself with people who are ambitious or have problems, and absolutely ruthless in taking advantage of those who have the misfortune to trust him. Whether he sees himself that way or not, that’s what he is.

There’s no arguing that the MAGA people, among others, have seen the prosperity of the country pass them by. There are real problems with the top-heavy distribution of wealth in this country. But Trump has sold them a story worthy of his talents: that poor immigrants and our foreign allies are the ones making them poor, while the billionaires who command real money and used their political power to create the wealth distribution are their friends! This amazing switch of responsibility is sold as free market economics, but it comes down to something as old as time–that the rich deserve all they can get and certainly should not be saddled with the needs of their inferiors. Unsurprisingly those billionaires are now cashing-in left and right while the others are standing hat-in-hand waiting for the ever-distant golden future.

The ultimate confidence man has delivered the ultimate win.

Urgent Messages

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1.  From the Olympics: 

In the opening and closing ceremonies at the Olympics many speakers, notably IOC President Thomas Bach, pointed out the importance of the Olympics as a symbol of what can be possible when all countries of the world to come together in peace.  That sounds nice, but it’s probably more apt to think about what happened with the original version of the Olympics, which persisted for quite some time. That message is not so rosy.

The original Olympics functioned even more as a symbol of peace, because there was an actual truce during the Olympic period.  But the overall lesson of the Olympic experience was that good feelings are not enough.  The Olympics did not prevent the horrendously bloody and unnecessary Peloponnesian War, fought between prime participants Athens and Sparta. 

Symbols aren’t enough.  If we don’t work at peace, it won’t happen.  There are more than enough parallels of that past with the current situation between the US and China.  If you want peace you need to remove reasons for war.

2.  From the fires and floods worldwide:

Messaging about effects of climate change has been more than a little confused.   We read about how front-line communities will bear the worst of climate issues (true enough but that makes it someone else’s problem).  We see maps of how different countries or regions will be better or worse off.  The NYTimes once had an article asking readers to plug in numbers to see if they were rich enough to escape the worst.  The most frequent objection to the Paris Accords is that we need to go back and renegotiate a better deal.

Nature is telling us something else.  We’re all in this together, and there is nowhere to hide.  Scientists have correctly indicated the directions of change.  But the world has never been here before, so it’s impossible to predict every bad thing that is going happen and where.

What’s more, carbon dioxide just accumulates in the atmosphere, so climate effects are going to continue getting worse until we can stop burning fossil fuels.  There will be more and more unexpected phenomena with more and more damaging results.   All the talk of taking CO2 out of the atmosphere is not going to produce results any time soon (and even if it works will itself take monumental amounts of energy).  So there’s only one answer—migrating the world’s energy requirements to sustainable sources.

This has to happen worldwide and we have to work together.  It may be contrary to all of our normal modes of behavior, but if we don’t all win we’re going to lose.

In the end the two messages are largely the same. We’ve fought two world wars, and now we’ve now got a third one against climate change. We have to learn how to behave when we’re all–unavoidably–on the same side.