Hubris, Terror, and Disaster in Afghanistan

Review of "The American War in Afghanistan", by Carter Malkasian.

This book is a nightmare to read. It records one bad decision after the next, through two decades of a slow-moving debacle. Should we have invaded at all? Should we have set up a puppet government? Should we have let the mission expand to incredible society-changing scope? Should we have built a sustainable Afghan military? Could any government have stood up to the Taliban? A million questions and pointed fingers follow such a comprehensive loss. Each of the four Presidents who presided over the war made grievous errors, and tried to muddle through the resulting quagmire, until Biden finally threw in the towel.

In the end, even Mullah Omar reportedly considered whether it had been wise to refuse the US demand to turn over or turn against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. It is a poignant coda to a national tragedy. But what could we have done differently? I will divide this question into several areas, including mission creep, Islam and the Taliban, the Afghan army, and the Afghan government. At the very outset there was sad narcissistic paradox, in the "war on terror". War is terrorism, pure and simple. The idea that others are terrorists, and that we are not when we drop bombs on them, is a curious, but typical bit of American exceptionalism. Our whole adventure in Afghanistan was colored by the vast gulf in how we saw ourselves (righteous, moral, good), and how Afghans saw us (depraved infidels who violated every norm of civilized behavior).

Mission Creep

It is startling to look back at the progression of our goals in Afghanistan. First, we asked them to give up Al Qaeda. Then we overthrew the Taliban government and installed a new one. Then we sought to establish a democracy. Then we sought to hunt down not just Al Qaeda, but also the Taliban- the former government and a significant cultural and Islamic movement. Then we sought to advance women's rights, fight corruption, and set up a competent government and army. All these things were desirable, but replicated what we could not accomplish in either Vietnam or in Iraq, working with similarly bad partners. Contrast this with our occupations of Germany and Japan, where we put a few of the former leaders on trial, policed with a pretty light touch, kept political development local at first, and concentrated on economic reconstruction. While the cultural alignments were obviously much closer, that should have moderated our ambitions in Afghanistan, not, as it happened, stimulated them progressively to "civilize" the Afghans. This is especially true when the national will and funding to deal with Afghanistan was so impaired by the Bush administration's adventure in Iraq, and later by the tortured path of Afghanistan itself. It is somewhat reminiscent of the defeat the Democrats experienced in the recent elections- a party that got a little overextended in its missions to affirm every virtue, identity and interest group, far beyond the core issues.

Islam

That Afghanistan is an Islamic country is and was no mystery, but that did not seem to get through to those setting up our progressively more invasive policies, or the new government. Poll after poll found that the Taliban had continuing support, and if not support, at least respect, because they were seen as truly Islamic, while the government we installed was not. Malkasian points out that as religious scholars, the Taliban tended to not be infected by the fissiparous tribal conflicts of Afghanistan, which Hamid Karzai, in contrast, tended to encourage. This also led the Taliban to nurture a very strong hierarchical structure, (patterned on madrassa practices), also unusual elsewhere in Afghan society. These three properties gave them incredible morale and sway with the population, even as they were terrorizing them with night letters, assassinations, suicide bombings, and other mayhem. As long as the government represented the infidel, and however well-intentioned that infidel was, the population, including the police and army, would be reluctant supporters.

The only way around all this would have been to allow one of the Northern Alliance leaders to take control of the country after they helped defeat the Taliban, and then get the hell out. But this would have invited another civil war, continuing the awful civil war Afghanistan suffered through before the Taliban rose to power. The deep conflict between the Pashtuns and the northern Tajiks, Uzbeks and other groups would never have allowed a stable government to be established under these fluid conditions, not under the Tajiks. So we came up with the magic solution, to appoint a Pashtun as president, over a nominally democratic system, but with US support that, instead of tapering off over time, rose and rose, until we got to the surge, a decade into our occupation, with over a 100,000 US soldiers.

That was never going to win any popularity contests, even if it did put the Taliban on the back foot militarily. Why was the government never seen as truly Islamic? Malkasian does not explain this in detail, but in Afghan eyes, more tuned to the US as foreign infidels than to the formal conditions of Islamic jurisprudence, the question answers itself. Democracy is not inherently un-Islamic. Consultative bodies that advise the leadership are explicitly provided. Whether they promote women's rights, or accept foreign soldiers, night raids, and legal immunity of foreigners is quite a different matter, however. Whatever the form of the government, its obvious dependence on the US, as painfully illustrated by Karzai's incessant and futile complaints about US military transgressions, was the only evidence needed that the Afghan government was, in popular terms, un-Islamic. It was the same conundrum we experienced in Vietnam- how to be a dominant military partner to a government that had at best a tenuous hold on the affections of the populace, which were in turn poisoned by that very dependence? It is an impossible dilemma, unless the occupying power is ruthless enough to terrorize everyone into submission- not our style, at least not after our dalliance in the Philippines.

The Armed Forces

Because the government never managed to get true popular support, its armed forces were hobbled by low morale and corruption. Armies and police forces are only expressions of the political landscape. Afghans are, as the Taliban shows, perfectly capable of fighting, of organizing themselves, and of knowing which way the wind blows. The army dissolved when faced with its true test. The most powerful solution would clearly have been to have a more effective and popular government that either included or sidelined the Taliban. But could there have technical solutions as well?

The air force was emblematic. The US experience in Afghanistan from start to finish showed the immense power of air attacks, when combined with ground forces. So we planned for an Afghan air force. But we seem to have planned for a force that could not maintain its own equipment, relying in perpetuity on Western contractors. Nor was the selection of assets well-organized. The Afghans mostly needed close air support craft, like attack helicopters and A10 gunships. They should have focused on a very few models that they could fully sustain, with financial and parts support from the US. But that assumes that the US, and the Afghan government, had more thoughtful long-range planning than actually existed.

Always a difficult relationship

The Government

Apart from being seen as a puppet and un-Islamic, the government was riven with tribal and regional conflicts. Karzai spent most of his time managing and trying to win tribal contests. Malkasian repeatedly shows how major decisions and mental energy went into these issues, to the exclusion of attention to the armed forces, or the resurgent Taliban, or resolving corruption, among much else. 

Overall, however, the main issue was that the US installed a top-down quasi-democracy without giving the people true power. Unlike the local political reconstruction in the post-WW2 occupations, let alone our own system, the new Afghan government was explicitly centralized, with provincial and district heads appointed by Karzai. Karzai was really the new king of Afghanistan, more or less foisted on the country, though he had a significant amount of national credibility. There was a great deal of effort to sell this to the people as democracy, and foster "communication" and collaboration, and buy-in, but the people were never allowed into a true federal system with full electoral control of their local districts. Perhaps this was done for good reason, both from the monarchical Afghan tradition, and in light of the strong tribal tensions frequently at work. But it sapped the mutual support / accountability between the people and their government.

Karzai himself broached the idea of bringing Taliban into the system early on, but was rebuffed by the US. We went on to lump the Taliban in with the other "terrorists", and they, like Ho Chi Minh, used their natural legitimacy (with enormous helpings of terror, suicide bombings, and other guerilla tactics .. yes, terrorism again!) to eventually get the upper hand. How much better it would have been to have drawn a relatively generous line against allowing the former Taliban top echelon into official capacities, suppress militias and all forms of political violence, and let the rest re-integrate and participate in a truly ground-up federal system? It was those excluded from the system who holed up in Pakistan, seethed with resentment, and organized the return to power that started in earnest in 2005/2006. The Taliban may have been a bad government and in bed with Al Qaeda and the rest of it. They were not particularly popular with people in many areas of the country. But they were also very nationalistic, highly Islamic, and made up a fair slice of Afghanistan's educated demographic. 

A common theme through all these issues is American hubris, and lack of listening / empathy / respect for / understanding of local conditions. We insisted on making the Taliban the enemy, then insisted on rooting them out through night raids, Guantanamo imprisonment, exile to Pakistan, and other degradations. And were frequently getting fraudulent intelligence to base it all on. We thought that more military power, and more money, would get what we wanted. But what we wanted was Afghans to want to work on behalf of their own country in a free, stable, and prosperous system. How could that system be built on our money and blood? It couldn't. I had to be built by the Afghans, in their own way.

• Global leadership is in play.
• Private jets are abominable. Gas taxes, anyone?
• The planet simply can not take it.
• Meritocracy... good or bad? I would offer that is a lot better than the alternative. But can it be improved?
• Drilling for the climate: geothermal power is coming along, at large scale.

The Politics of Martyrdom Invite the Politics of Extermination

Israel is following a kind of logic, but where does it lead?

We are all horrified by the war on Gaza. But there is some logic to it, despite the pervasive lack of reason. Hamas has set itself up as the never-say-die defenders of Palestinian ideals. Which appear to consist of the non-existence of Israel, and the resumption of Palestinian occupation of all its historical lands. (Though it has to be said that they had been ruled by a long succession of outside powers, from the Romans to the British.) Hamas cared little about the actual Palestinians, who have been pawns in its larger play for power and martyrdom. Like the PLO in earlier decades, Hamas has largely been carrying on an idealistic PR campaign of moral absolutism, resisting the occupier, to the last breath and drop of blood. So they posited that the survival of any member of Hamas was a victory for the "movement". This makes sense in a PR sense, as a moral position against oppression.

But all this also implies the nature of the Israeli response. Against an enemy that never negotiates, or concedes, or makes peace, the only solution (as the Romans found millennia ago) is extermination. Against an enemy that hides behind its own civilians and thinks nothing of operating out of hospitals and schools, in an attempt to play on the residual morality of its enemies, one can understand that compassion takes a back seat to effectiveness.

This is not to say that Israel is right either. They have compounded their original sin of terrorism and violent expropriation by more violence, more injustice, and the slow torturous drip of more expropriation. The West Bank continues to be eaten away by settlers and official Israeli state policy, and Gaza was under debilitating embargoes / sieges. Israel thought it was secure behind its border wall, but it turned out not to be so beautiful after all, for either side. But after the long historical process that has played out, Israel has all the power- the bombs, the planes, the organized political system and military. Hamas and the Palestinians generally have lost every war, and have little but their moral indignation and hatred to stand on. Turning that into extremist absolutism and martyrdom is a recipe for an even worse outcome. 

Their Muslim neighbors and allies took a couple of stabs at helping them, but lost each war to Israel, in comprehensive fashion. Their continuing assistance to the Palestinians is little more than cynical ploy to keep the Palestinians irritated and irritating, without risking their own necks. This was first the role of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, but that mantle has more recently been taken up by Iran. And now Israel is calling Iran's bluff, taking the fight to all its proxies and to Iran itself. They have not set themselves up for extermination, but rather for deterrence, whatever level of destruction that will take. The idea that Hezbollah could just pepper Israel with artillery at will without any reply was not realistic. 

So, can Israel carry out all these logical aims- to exterminate Hamas and degrade Hezbollah and Iran sufficiently to deter further guerilla warfare? That depends on its resolve and military capacity. But it also depends on its resolve to diffuse the overall Palestinian conundrum that, in the grand scheme of things sponsors all these antagonisms, by making a grand deal that finalizes a Palestinian state and territory. And that is where the current government of Israel is fatally uninterested and incapable. It looks like this government would rather be the new Rome, projecting power throughout the Middle East, collectively punishing Palestinians, and forcing Palestinians into a modern international diaspora, (and making itself into a semi-autocratic militarized state along the way), than it is in learning from its own history.

• Sanewashing?
• Negativity sells.
• The big lie. And lots of little lies. They all have a purpose.
• Covid plays keep-away with our antibodies, to come back for more.

Imperialism for Thee, but Not for Me

Realism, idealism, and false realism in the Ukraine war.

The Ukraine war has been a disaster. That much is certain. But who caused it, and could it have been averted with better policy from us? And what would the costs of such a policy have been? There is a large school of foreign policy "realists" (exemplified by John Mearsheimer) who think that Russia was driven to this war by the inexorable encroachment of NATO towards the Russian borders. Thus we are at fault, just as much as Russia, which is actually dropping bombs on Ukraine and cutting a blood-soaked swath through its eastern and southern regions. The imperialism of Russia over its neighbors is perfectly understandable, realistic, and OK. By this argument, Russia has been crystal clear that offering Ukraine the distant prospect of NATO membership, as we did in 2008, was a declaration of war (by us!). Russia has tried to negotiate in good faith all through this time, and kept working for peace, even as it could see its interests eroded, and the necessity of war increasing. Till at last, it was forced by our policy to take over Crimea, and ultimately, in the face of increasing infiltration by Western interests in Ukraine, launch the full scale war we see today.

While this is one perspective on the level of grand strategy and traditional balance of power views, it leaves out one of the actors in the drama, and is a curious way to apportion blame for manifest evil. The actor it leaves out is Ukraine, which might want to have some say in its own destiny. And the evil is the way in which this realist school casually consigns countries to "spheres of influence", fated to be sat upon by their neighboring bullies. Perhaps world history is one long story of bullies fighting it out over riches and territory. But does it have to be? It does not, and therein lies the difference between war and peace, blame and praise.

Realists point to America's own empire, perhaps most explicitly outlined in the Monroe Doctrine. This statement by John Quincy Adams claimed the entire Western Hemisphere to be a special zone where European meddling was unwelcome, and defended by the nascent power of the United States. This was largely aspirational at the time, and European imperialist powers continued meddling in the hemisphere nevertheless, even invading the US itself in the war of 1812. And of course, the Monroe doctrine was not intended to set up a US empire at all, but was rather an anti-imperialist document, promoting the self-determination of the countries of South and Central America. We have since certainly done our share of meddling, taking several large portions of Mexico for our own territory, corrupting various Central American countries in commercial and anti-communist quasi-empires. But on the other hand, for the most part we have had friendly and peaceful relations, even (the shambolic Bay of Pigs invasion aside) keeping our hands off of Soviet-allied Cuba.

Evolution of the Russian empire, over the centuries. Whether the areas under Russian occupation ever wanted to be there, or now wish to stay there, remains a live question.

It is clear that our view of empire is not, currently, a traditional one. We have lots of friends, lots of allies, and lots of power, of soft and hard kinds. But we have not set up a barrier of involuntary client states against regional threats. NATO is emblematic as a voluntary alliance. It was and remains a collective (if US-dominated) alliance of countries trying to deter a third world war. Such a war was first contemplated to arise from the European antagonists who had just fought the two preceding wars - Germany, France, and the UK. But as they rebuilt their societies on both an economic and moral basis, it quickly became clear that the real threat was going to come from the new Soviet Empire, which had quickly swallowed up all of Eastern Europe. 

Each of these Eastern European countries had their dreams of freedom crushed in the wake of Germany's defeat, and each was correspondingly eager to leave the Soviet Empire when the cold war, at long last, came to an end. Vladimir Putin blames Mikhail Gorbachev for loosening the reins and thoughtlessly letting the empire crumble. The current Russian state celebrates its greatest holidays around the high water mark of another leader, more the Putin's taste- Joseph Stalin, when Russian power was at its (relative) peak. Putin's idea of power is expressed in his relation with Belarus- a thoroughly cowed and pliant frontier, from which Russian conveniently launched a large portion of its invasion of Ukraine. It is typical of this curdled and "realist" perspective that the wishes of the people involved count for nothing. Their aspirations and well-being are irrelevant, the imperial state and its power are what matter. 

As an aside, Michael Kimmage has recently written a book-length analysis of Ukraine. It is a quite balanced history of the whole run-up to the war, laying out the moves, thoughtless or not, taken by both sides. Here, one gets a sense that Putin was sensing weakness in the West, in the wake of our Iraqi and Afghan debacles. But where this book really shines is in its epilogue, which is a pean to the power of history itself.

"Countries invariably conceive their foreign policies in reaction to earlier conflicts. They are led by their sense of who was wrong and who was right, of what the core problem was and what the solution to that problem was, fighting the last war until it is no longer the last war. The preoccupation with the past can be the path to wisdom, of learning from history, or it can leave countries trapped in their interpretations of the past. To investigate the origins of an ongoing war, then, is not just to chart the present moment. It is to peer, however uncertainly, into the future."

Kimmage recounts how Germany turned historical analysis on its head after World War 1 to claim that others had started it, and others were responsible for Germany's defeat, thus setting the table for a second round. Similarly, it is Putin's potted analysis of the cold war and its appalling aftermath for Russia that forms the motivation for his current war. Just like realism, this theory of the power of historical narrative serves to explain motivations and actions, and by understanding absolve the actors, to some degree, of culpabilty, making the current conflict seem inevitable. In this case, the West was doltishly uninformed and sleepwalked into an unnecessary war. 

But history is not a given. It is, in places like Russia, a product of the propaganda organs, not the science organs. It is narrated with a grievence and a point in mind, and can be, in the right hands, tailored to lead to practically anything the leader wishes to happen. The idea that we should be beholden to the historical analysis of another country or its leader, and thus be on the hook for appeasing their "legitimate" demands, feelings, etc. is absurd. However much such understanding helps us analyze what other actors have in mind, it should not bind our analysis of the same history, or of the broader functioning of the international system.

Returning to the realist perspective, it recognizes the lowest common denominator in an anarchic environment- raw power. It is the mafia approach to foreign relations. Well, we have an answer to that, which is a modern perspective, modeled in a modern state that has and uses overwhelming policing power against aggressors. It is enlightenment values that have suffused Europe, providing the peace seen on the continent among the members of NATO and the EU. We have gotten so used to living amidst civilized values that a Russian invasion of Ukraine seemed unthinkable, despite a long train of preliminary invasions, explicit policy statements from Russia, and propaganda preparation. Europe should have used its power to immediately push Russia back out of Ukraine. That would have been the ideal scenario to safeguard the values that Ukraine was aspiring to, and that the West embodies.

So, what about nuclear weapons and World War 3? Russia has been rattling its nuclear saber, resorting to any threat it can to keep Ukraine weak and friendless. Needless to say, it would not be wise of Russia to use nuclear bombs in Ukraine. Whatever grievances / justification Russia has for its invasion, even internally, would collapse immediately. I think everyone recognizes that nuclear weapons exist for mutual and existential deterrence, notionally protecting Russia (in this case) from invasion by other countries. Fine. Helping Ukraine rid itself of a cruel bully, restoring its independent and original borders, is, conversely, fully justified and is the kind of aim that lends itself to a limited war. At very least at this point, we should provide Ukraine with the wherewithal for air superiority over its own territory.

Russia exemplifies old thinking from the anarchic world order. It (and China as well) want to drag the world back into that world, recreating the glory days of Stalin's empire. Or even Catherine the Great's. It is in the power of the West, as a growing collective of democratic and prosperous countries, to deny these aims, rather than appeasing them. And the expeditious and effective use of police power in Ukraine would yield dividends into the future, strengthening the collective power of the West to foster the freedom and self-determination of other nations. Could this protective concept allow movement the other way? Sure- Hungary, for instance, might want to join the Russian orbit and leave the EU. And good riddence! They would be welcome to do so. These alignments should not be determined by war, (nor, hopefully propaganda and corruption), but by national sentiment and interest.

The primitive mafia mindset is also one that afflicts certain precincts of US politics, notably the Republican presidential candidate, who can't see beyond "strength" and machismo, and seems more likely to support Putin than NATO or Ukraine. It is another case of cavalier disregard not only of decades of collective work by the West to sustain a civilized international order, but of elementary concepts of justice and self-determination. Maintaining a just peace takes steadfastness, work and sacrifice. If we do nothing, then sure, the bullies will win and the world will go right back to one where bullies have only other bullies to be afraid of. If last week's Memorial day means anything, however, it is that collective sacrifice over the long arc of US history has always served, at least in principle, more freedom and less tyranny- for others, not just ourselves.

• Incredibly, Voyager 1 is back on track and transmitting. From 162 astronomical units (0.94 light day) from earth.
• The reason why our country is in this perilous position is ... lying liars.
• The state of corruption today.
• Alito throws wife under the bus.

The Shadow War

We are in a new world-wide cold war. And ironically, the many new technologies from the West have given autocratic states extraordinary new powers. 

Paul Theroux had a remarkable passage in one of his travel books, as he was passing through Myanmar, a military dictatorship then and now, that illuminated attitudes towards China and from China. 

"I heard lots of praise for the United States in distancing itself from the regime, and lots of blame for China and Russia and Singapore in supporting it- China especially. But China's prosperity, its need for oil and wood and food, had created a new dynamic. China had no interest in any country's developing democratic institutions; on the contrary, it was a natural ally of repressive regimes. When the World Bank withheld funds from an African country because it was corrupt and tyrranous, demanding that it hold an election before it could qualify for aid, China would appear with money- 'rogue aid,' with no strings attached, and got the teak, the food, and the drugs." - Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, 2008

The world seems headed into another cold war, definitely rhyming with the last cold war. It is highly unfortunate, and testament to some defects in US management of the post-cold war era, to the surprising durability, even attractiveness, of authoritarian systems, and to the many weaknesses of democratic systems. This new cold war, which I will call the shadow war, features Russia and China as the main poles of opposition to democratic and developed countries, mostly in the West, but including many others. This time around, China is the stronger power by far, and both Russia and especially China are quite advanced in their development, so that the West no longer has a monopoly in any particular technology or kind of organization. China has adopted all the magic of capitalist market mechanisms to grow its wealth, and stolen (or forced the transfer of) huge amounts technology and knowledge to make itself a leader in all sorts of industries.

The West has lately begun to wake up to the problem. Our hope that capitalism was somehow related to, or a leading wedge for, democracy has been dashed several times over. Instead of China turning into Hong Kong, it is Hong Kong that is turning into China. Not only is capitalism, as has been tirelessly pointed out from the left, amoral and indifferent to human rights, (as we already knew from slavery in the US), but democracy is also far more fragile than we had hoped, requiring a wide range of civic understandings, media practices, and forms of education that are far from universal, or natural. We had, in the windup to the cold war, seen many countries make slow and fraught transitions to democracy (Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea, and Eastern Europe), but have more recently seen countries backtrack into autocracy (Russia, Hungary).

Naturally, the war in Ukraine has put the most urgent point on this conflict, where Russia, which is to say its autocratic leader, felt that the existence of an independent and democratic Ukraine next door was too much to bear. Now, China also tells us that it loves its brothers in Taiwan so much that re-unification will come, no matter what the Taiwanese themselves might want. Love certainly takes some strange forms!

But it is a much broader issue, spanning the globe, and the depths of human psychology. On one list of countries ranked by democratic governance, the median country is Armenia, with a "hybrid regime" and scores of roughly five out of ten. This is not a great situation, where half the world, in rough terms, lives in various states of miserable, oppressive government. And as the quote above suggests, the authoritarians have in some ways the stronger hand. What happened?

We in the West had thought that democracy was the natural harbor of all peoples- the end of history, indeed. But in the first place, people power is a very limited power, if whoever has power is authoritarian enough to use tanks against it. And in the second place, democracy is not natural in many cultures. The Muslim culture, for instance, for all its virtues, has a fundamentally patriarchal and tribal governance model, with little room for democracy, though there are, traditionally, various forms of freedom, for men at least. So however attractive democracy is in theoretical terms, and as a model in the West that people from authoritarian countries like to vacation to... as a cultural pattern, it is not universal. And authoritarian patterns are hardly foreign to the West either. The Catholic church is an example of the preserved archetypes of patriarchy and authoritarian strong-man rule.

The Chinese dream is highly militaristic, and rather threatening.

But more deeply, the archetypes we have of leadership and politics are authoritarian.. the king, the hero. Jungian psychology, aside from its focus on archetypes, deals in the shadow, which is our real needs and instincts, insofar as they run counter to our surface goodness and conscious ego construction. A person like Donald Trump exemplifies all these trends. Why on earth are we still saddled with this sociopath after a decade of drama-queenity? He clearly touches a lot of people's archetypal conceptions of strength and heroism. His powers of psychological projection, reflectively rejecting his own shadow, are immense. He is rubber, others are glue. And his fundamental bond with the followers, by licensing their shadow sides of hate and violence, makes his every pronouncement right no matter what. We in the US are facing a cataclysmic political season, trying to repress the shadow of humanity, which is so amply expressed around the world in political / power systems that follow the logic of strength, ending up in states of terror.

Modern technology hasn't helped, either. After a brief flush of excitement about the ability of social media to amplify people power, especially across the Muslim world, it all went to pot as the shallow-ness and disorganization of such movements became apparent. The powers of databases, personal identification, surveillance, and media manipulation have been much more useful to authoritarian governments than to their antagonists, making state terror more effective than ever. Authoritarian countries now control their internet and media environments with great precision, increasingly project their twisted narratives abroad, and even hunt down dissidents outside their borders using the new information tools. So while information may want to be free, it doesn't really have a say in the matter- those with power do.

What to do about it? We in the West have lost control of our media environments. While we are waking up to some extent the the malevalent media from abroad, domestic media is controlled by money, which in the current environment of yawning wealth inequality, political fissiparation, and clickbait "business models" is just as crazy and corrupt. So there should be two approaches to this. One is to strengthen quality media, like PBS and its cohorts, with more offerings and deeper reporting. The other is to restrict how corporations can control media. The right to individual free speech can be preserved while making corporations more sensitive to social goods. The Dominion case against FOX was a small example of the powers available. Liability for lying should be a broader effort in the law, specifically against corporations, which are creatures of the state, not natural persons. We need to recognize the deep psychological powers we are up against in preserving enlightened, respectful civil government and discourse.

Obviously getting our own house in order, against the atavistic forces of political authoritarianism, is the first order of business. Abroad, paradoxically, we need to project strength as a democratic and developed community, holding the line in Ukraine and Taiwan, and against all sorts of authoritarian encroachments, until temperatures are lowered, and the current nationalist fevers abate. For what China has right now is an imperialist fever. It has been weak for so long and surrounded by so many unfriendly countries, that one can understand that it sees its recent economic prosperity as a special opportunity to recover a leading position in its neighborhood, militarily and politically as well as economically. That would be fine if it were not also trying to subvert free political systems and prop up tyrannical ones. There are good reasons why its neighbors are fearful of China.

Like in the last cold war, I think time plays a key role. We have to believe that democracies, for all their weaknesses, are better, and are seen as better, by people around the world. While today's authoritarian powers may have greater durability than those of the communist era due to their embrace of, rather than flouting of, market principles and modern technologies, they are ultimately fragile and subject to the opinions of their own people. Putin will not last forever. Xi will not last for ever. (The Kim regime of North Korea may, however, last forever!) Change is the achilles heal of authoritarian conservatism. So we are in for a very long haul, to keep spreading people power and peace internationally.

• Trade theft and IP warfare.
• Myanmar is a typical case of China's influence and values.
• Religion and war.
• Food oligopoly.
• Ghost roads and the end of nature.
• What, exactly, is the problem?

Damned if You do, Damned if You Don't

The Cherokee trail of tears, and the Palestinian conundrum.

History is a long and sad tale of conflict, interspersed with better times when people can put their animosities aside. Just as economics deals in scarcity and its various solutions, history likewise turns on our inevitable drive towards overpopulation, with resulting scarcity and conflict. Occasionally, special technological, spiritual, organizational achievements- or catastrophes- may allow periods of free population growth with its attendant bouyant mood of generosity. But more commonly, groups of people covet each other's resources and plot ways to get them. This was one of the lessons of Malthus and Darwin, who addressed the deeper causes of what we see as historical events.

The "New World" provided Europeans with an unprecedented release for their excess populations, especially the malcontented, the desperate, and the ambitious. They rhapsodized about the "virgin" lands that lay open, generally dismissing the numerous and well-organized natives present all over these lands, as "savages", occupying a lower technological and theological level of existence. There were plenty of rationalizations put forth, like Christianizing the natives, or "civilizing" them. But the hypocrisy of these formulations becomes clear when you consider the fate of the Cherokees, one of the "five civilized tribes". 

By the early 1800's, a couple of centuries of contact had already gone under the bridge, (as narrated by Pekka Hämäläinen in "Indigenous continent"), and native Americans were all integrated to various degrees in trading networks that brought them European goods like guns, pots, knives, and novel practices like horse riding. The Cherokees, occupying the lower Appalachians and piedmont between what is now Georgia and Alabama, were more integrated than most, adopting European farming, living, schooling, and governing practices. They even owned African American slaves, and wrote themselves a US-modeled constitution in 1827, in the script devised the scholar Sequoya.

Did this "progress" toward assimilation with the European culture help them? Far from! Their excellence in farming, literacy, and government raised fears of competition in the white colonists, and the Georgia state government lobbied relentlessly for their removal. Andrew Jackson finally obliged. He pressured the Cherokees to re-open their status as a settled nation, devised a removal treaty with a minority party, and then sent all the Cherokees in the region (about 16,000) off on the Trail of Tears, to the barren lands of Oklahoma. These Cherokees lost roughly a quarter of their population along the way, in a brutal winter. Compare this with the partition of India, where about twelve percent of the refugees are thought to have perished, out of roughly 16 million total.

A small part of the annals of ethnic cleansing, US edition. Needless to say, the "Indian territory" ended up a lot smaller than originally promised.

 

Georgia was thus ethnically cleansed, and does not seem to experience a great deal of regret about it. The logic of power is quite simple- the winner gets the land and spoils. The loser is lucky to not be killed. That the Europeans were significantly more powerful than their native antagonists doesn't change the logic, though it might appeal to our empathy and nostalgia in retrospect. The Cherokees and other Native Americans might have been accepted into US society. They might have been given one or two states for their sovereign governments, as the Mormons managed. There were a lot of possibilities that might have made us a more interesting and diverse nation. But at the same time, most Native Americans participated fully in the politics of power, terrorizing each other, making slaves of each other, and killing each other. They were not innocents. So the fact that they came up against a stronger power was hardly a novelty, though in this case that power was blundering and cruel, shared very few of their cultural coordinates, and was highly hypocritical about its own.

All this comes to mind when viewing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel won the major Middle East wars that so dramatically emasculated the Palestinians, first in the civil war that left Jordan and Egypt in charge of the Palestinian areas, then in the 1967 war that left all these areas in Israeli hands. But what to do with them? On founding, Israel was a liberal, New Testament kind of country, with humanist values and lefty kibbutzim. The then-recent Holocaust also caused a bit of hesitance when it came to either killing or exiling the losing Palestinians. Indeed, given that its neighbors Jordan and Egypt lost these wars, it would have made some sense at that time to deport all the Palestinians, of which there were about one to two million. But rather than do that, or make a firm border, Israel immediately started encroaching into Palestinian territory with security areas and "settlements", and has set up an ever more elaborate, though selectively porous and self-serving, security and boundary system.

Both sides have a schizophrenic reaction to the other. On the Palestinian side, the psychology of losing has meant quietism and acquiescence by some, but resentment and militantcy by others. Both lead to a spiral of worse treatment, the weakness of the former inviting abuse, and the desperate depredations of the latter inciting revenge, "security" measures, and tighter occupation. The provocations by each side are unendurable, and thus the situation deteriorates. Yet, in the end, Israel has all the power and the responsibility to come up with a long term solution. Over the decades, Israel has morphed from its founding ethos into something much more conservative and Old Testament, less beholden to the humanisitic ideals of the post-WW2 period. The wanton killing, starvation, and collective punishment of Gaza makes visible this moral breakdown.

The Palestinians can't win either way, either through Hamas's implacable hatred and impotent attacks, nor through the acquiescence of the Palestinian National Authority, which, in thanks for its good behavior, has received the creeping expansion of Israeli "settlements" on its land. These now take up, according to a detailed map, about 1/3 to 1/2 of the land of the West Bank. Overall, the options are: 1) to expel the Palestinians outright, which appears to be, for Gaza at least, where Israeli policy is heading, (made more ironic by the realization by historians that the Biblical Exodus never actually took place), or 2) to continue to muddle along in a torturous occupation with creeping dispossession, or 3) to grant Palestine some kind of autonomy and statehood. Assimilation, (4), long dreamt of by some, seems impossible for a state that is fundamentally an ethnic (or theological) state, and whose whole raison d'etre is ethnic separation, not to even mention the preferences of the Palestinians. Though perhaps assimiliation without voting rights, in sort of semi-slavery or apartheid, is something the Israelies would be attracted to? Perhaps insignia will need to be worn by all Palestinians, sewn to their clothing?

Map of the West Bank of the Jordan, color coded by Palestinian marginal control in brown, and settler/Israeli control in red.

What should happen? Indigenous Americans were infected, decimated, hunted down, translocated, re-educated, and confined to a small and very remote system of reservations. Hopefully we have have progressed a little since then, as a largely European civilization, which is putatively shared by Israel. Thus the only way forward, as is recognized by everyone outside Israel, is the two-state solution, including a re-organization of the Palestinian territories into a final, clearly demarked, and contiguous state. Israel's current political system will never get there. But we can help the process along in a few ways.

First, it is disappointing to see our current administration shipping arms to Israel at a furious pace, only to see them used to kill thousands of innocent, if highly resentful, civilians. Israel has plenty of its own money to buy whatever it needs elsewhere. We need to put some limitations on our military and other aid relationships, to motivate change. (Though that raises the question of Israel's increasingly cozy relationship with Russia). Second, we should recognize Palestine as a state, and bring forward its integration into the international system. This will not resolve its borders or myriad security and territory issues viz Israel, but it would helpfully motivate things in that direction. Israel has constantly cried wolf about the lack of a credible partner to negotiate with, but that is irrelevant. Israel is perfectly capable of building the walls it needs to keep Palestinians at bay. But then it wants pliant workers as well, and a peaceful neighbor, security viz Jordan and Egypt, territorial encroachments, and many other things that are either destructive, or need to be negotiated. 

By far the most constructive thing that could be done is to freeze and re-organize the Jewish settlements and other periphernalia that have metastasized all over the West Bank. There is no future without a decent and fair solution in territory, which is the third big thing we need to press- our own detailed territorial plan for Palestine. For one thing, Israel could easily vacate the whole corridor / valley facing Jordan. That would give a consolidated Palestine a working border with a country that is now peaceful, quite well run, and friendly to both sides. There are countless possible maps. We just need to decide on one that is reasonably fair and force it on both sides, which are each, still after all these years, apparently unwilling to imagine a true peace. This means principally forcing it on Israel, which has been the dominant and recalcitrant party the entire time.

The Cherokees are now one of the largest indigenous populations in the US, at roughly a quarter million, with their own territory of about seven thousand square miles in Oklahoma. They have internal and partial sovereignty, which means that they deal with their own affairs on a somewhat independent basis, but otherwise are largely subject to most laws of the enclosing governments. The Cherokees could easily have been assimilated into the US. Only racism stood in the way, in a mindset that had long descended into a blind and adversarial disregard of all native Americans as "others", (the irony!), competitive with and less than, the newly arrived immigrants. We could have done much better, and one would like to think that, a hundred or a hundred and fifty years on, we would have.

In the end, the West (read as European civilization, as developed out of the ashes of World War 2) is either for or against wars of aggression, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and human rights. Israel has won its wars, but never faced up to its responsibilities to the conquered Palestinians, and has tried to have it both ways, to be viewed by the world as a modern, enlightened state, even as it occupies and slowly strangles the people it defeated decades ago. 

• Slovenly strategic thinking. But really, visionless long-term politics.
• One Gazan speaks.
• Settler colonialism.
• Who's the victim?
• Shades of Scientology ... the murky networks of the deep evangelical state.
• In California, solar still makes sense.

America as Hegemon

The imperial track record is not good, but the hegemonic track record isn't all that bad.

I was recently visiting the USS Hornet, a WW2-era aircraft carrier now turned into a museum on San Francisco bay. Soon after, it was Fleet Week, when the US navy pays a visit to the Bay Area in force, capped by a Blue Angels air show. An appalling display of naked militarism, granted. But also an occasion to reflect on our world-wide empire, the nature of American power, the competence of our military, and the state of things internationally.

It was a little weird, seeing decades-old technology swooping up and down the bay, which has been, beneath this benevolent protection, so restlessly advancing the technological frontier in totally different directions- computers, phones, applications, streaming, social media. Which trends are more important for America's place in the world? Which technologies rule? What are we doing with all this military hardware? I tend to have pretty conservative views on all this, that the US is right to stick with the post-WW2 consensus that our military should be as strong as possible, and partner with like-minded countries around the world to advance the vision of that era, of human rights and democracy for all. 

When we have tried to do this task directly, in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, however, it has generally turned out very badly. The Iraq war was misconceived from the start, and went downhill from there. Despite the laudible aim of sparing the Iraqi people from the continued depredations of Saddam Hussein, the lying and the incompetence at all levels made the cure far worse than the disease, with anarchy and hundreds of thousands dead. But let's write that one off as a George Bush-as-decider blunder.

The Afghanistan debacle is more painful to contemplate, in some ways, in what it says about our fundamental incompetence as an imperial power. Its rationale was straightforward, international support wide-spread, and our power there absolute in the opening acts of the takeover. Yet with all those advantages, we ended up, twenty years later, turning tail and watching our hand-built Afghan military melt away even before we left the country. The Russians had, frankly, a better record in their Imperial Afghan turn. 

It is an appalling track record, really. We evidently and thankfully do not have the advantage of ruthlessness that ancient Rome enjoyed, or modern day spoilers like Russia and Iran. But nor, apparently, do we have the advantage of friendly relations, favorable hearts & minds, and good intelligence. We were constantly led astray by "friends" with all kinds of personal vendettas and agendas. We pride ourselves in our independence from the rest of the world, and thus know little about it, which means that we go into these settings woefully unprepared, besotted by whatever ideological issue du jure is fashionable in the US. Our priorities in Afghanistan seemed to be to hold elections and educate women. But were those the right aims? And even if so, were they carried out with any kind of wisdom and sense of priorities and proper preparation?

Most concretely, our military relationship was a disaster. The US military tried to make the new Afghan military into its own image and graft onto it its own systems and capablities, creating a dependence that caused immediate failure when Afghans caught wind that we were really, actually, going to leave. This was an incredible result, especially after the US military had been responsible for "training" countless militaries all over the world for decades. 

What on earth were we doing? Similarly to the intelligence failures, the military failures came from some fundamental inability to understand the problem at hand, and work with the society as it existed. Instead of creating a sustainable, right-sized, and politically viable force, we just assumed we were the good guys and anything we did was good. There was an intrinsic tension between leaving the society as it was, thereby just funding a reboot of a Taliban-like (or northern alliance-like) force to keep the country pacified, and forcing some change, on social, political, economic, and technological levels, by changing the form of government and associated institutions. The US clearly did not invade Afghanistan to keep everything the same. But by overreaching, we essentially achieved nothing, allowing precisely the group we dethroned to come back into power, and casting the country back into its pre-invasion economic and social abyss. At least, thanks to other technological bequests of the US and the West, the Afghans now have cell phones.

So our military and other institutions do not come off well in any of their recent engagements. It is a case of losing every battle, while winning the war. For we still enjoy a hegemonic position, not thanks to our incompetent and technology-bedazzled military, but thanks to our friends, with whom we still lead the world. The core groups of the anglophone countries, NATO, and the East Asian alliances with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan remain the core of the developed world, enjoying peaceful relations, democracy, and prosperous economies. China is advancing mightily to displace that grouping, but can not do so alone, and has little hope of doing so with streadfast friends like Russia and North Korea by its side.

Tiers of development. Blue is the developed world, yellow the middle-tier (developing), and red, the lower tiers of development (desperately developing, one might say).

The advantages of joining this developed core are so evident, that one wonders why it is under threat, both from the spoiler countries like Russia, and from endogenous authoritarians in the US, Poland, Hungary, India, and elsewhere. Two decades ago, we were looking at the end of history, when a futuristic society of peace and contentment would inherit the post-cold war earth, Russia would join NATO, and we would live happily ever after. But democracy is a cultural pattern that not everyone can easily understand, especially people who run (or want to run) undemocratic countries. As our framers understood so well, sovereign power is dangerous, and needs to be diluted among publicly competing branches, candidates, officers, and voters for it to be durably controlled, a bit like an atomic chain reaction. It takes wisdom and humility to figure that out and abide by such fundamental (constitutional) rules. 

It is tempting to take that power directly in hand, to satisfy a burning desire to "do something". In the US, a Republican minority has progressively lost its commitment to popular rule and the viability of contemporary governmental institutions. This is, incidentally, only possible because of their special relationship with sources of money and of media influence, without which they would have little popular purchase. In China, the communist party figured that, despite its own history of ravaging its country, it had developed a stable enough system of governance, and had obtained implicit popular support ... reflecting either brainwashing or acquiescence ... that it did not need actual elections or Western-style divided government. And in Russia, the bitterness of its descent into kleptocracy, under the poisoned banner of "capitalism", combined with various snubs from the West and general historical and cultural distance, rendered the idea of becoming a Western country too much to bear.

Each authoritarian system has, like an unhappy family, its own reasons, while the happy families of the West seem to, think along similar lines almost involuntarily, at least until some authoritarian mountebank comes along to solve all our problems by doing away with our safeguards. We are in a grand race to find out which systems are more stable. Those that rely on one person, such as the aging Vladimir Putin, for their decisions, or those that rely on popular will and a controlling set of institutions. The lessons of history could not be more stark, telling us that the former is the bigger crapshoot. Sometimes it turns out well, but more often not. That is why liberalism and deliberative democracy developed in the first place.

There remains a great deal of middle ground around the world. The muslim countries, for example, form a middle tier of populous and developing countries comprising, between Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Turkey, Iran, the Gulf states and others, well over a billion people. Our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan didn't help our relations there, but on the other hand, China is hardly making itself loved either, with its extermination campaign in Xinjiang. The cultural patterns of the Islamic world make it a particularly hard sell for Western democracy vs authoritariansim. Thus the brief Arab Spring came to a painful and inglorious end, mostly in whimpers, sometimes in horror. The liberatlization process took a long time in the West as well, measured perhaps from the French revolution, through the revolutions of 1848, culminating the aftermath of World War 2, with developmental delays in the Eastern European deep freeze. Ideas and new social patterns take a long time to take root, even when the templates (Switzerland, the US, ancient Greece) are at hand.

The American hegemony is little more than an agreement among like-minded and friendly nations to maintain their democratic systems, their prosperous (if environmentally rapacious and unsustainable) economies, and to largely offload their military responsibilities on the US. Whether those responsibilities have been well-stewarded is certainly doubtful. But up to this point, the agreement has been highly successful, mostly because the US has been a willing, stable, and vigorous anchor. Can the EU take our place? It is conceivable, but the EU is structurally less decisive. Bodies like the UN or the G20 are even less capable, in any executive sense. So, until we come up with something better, with a hot war against Russia and a cold one developing against China, and while other cultures are slowly chewing over their various problems with authoritarianism, it is critical that the US remain that anchor for the democratic developed world.

• What are the rules, anyhow?
• Bad intelligence.
• History is important to authoritarians, at least.
• Argentina is in the throes of inflation.
• The totalitarian speakership is bad for democracy, as well as being unworkable with thin majorities.

Profiles in Pusillanimity

China, its communist party, and our free speech. Review of America 2nd, by Isaac Stone Fish.

Why are there always spoilers on the international scene? Some country is always unhappy with the way things are, and does its best to shake up the system. That shaking can be as detrimental to itself as to any other nation, but greed and ambition are always with us. After the Cold War, Russia descended into criminal chaos, with little real help from the West, and, once it had finally pulled itself together, turned around with veangence on its mind to refashion its imperial / security sphere. Russia could have been a nice country, tied into the European cultural and defense system. But no, the nostalgia for satellites and empire were just too strong. Putin spent a decade and more pulling Ukraine into the Russian orbit, only to be finally rebuffed in a people-powered revolution. Now he is trying to do it the hard way, and will take and keep whatever he can grab, little though that may be.

All that is peanuts compared with the game brewing between us and China. While Russia is playing for its neighborhood, the stakes in this next game are the whole world. That is, who runs the "international system", such as it is, and who plays the dominant role over the next century. The US has spent the last couple of decades trying to pull China into the existing trade and security system, in hopes that it would change into a "nice" country, aligning with the US, Europe and our developed allies all over the world in a quest for peace and lawful security. That has not happened. Even less so than with Russia, which at least has a long strand of pro-European sentiment, China learned its lessons from the Russian debacle, and its own Tienanmen square brush with democracy, and resolutely stayed in the Leninist camp- of absolute and unapologetic party power. It was hardly even tempted by European values.

In his book "America 2nd", Isaac Fish is eloquent about how deep China's resentments vs the West go. China suffered a century or more of humiliating vassalage over the 19th century, mired in poverty, opium, and weakness vs colonial powers. Then it suffered again at the hands of imperial Japan, and then several decades on its own account under Mao enduring the Western ideology of Marxism-Leninism. Maybe the last part is projected on the West as well, I am not sure. But China has plenty of ground to make up, and the last few decades of managed capitalism have been, as all can see, completely transformative.

China has already attained number one status in pollution, in population, (though later overtaken by India), and will soon attain that status in GDP. China is busy projecting its power and values via foreign aid, "Wolf Warrior" diplomacy, their takeover of the South China sea, propaganda, intelligence, and hard-ball economic warfare. The question Fish asks is- why are we supporting this policy and the propaganda of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)?

Recall the quaint old days of "linkage", when the US considered using some points of leverage with Russia to influence Soviet policies we didn't like? China has no such qualms. Everything is linked, and particularly, China's great economic engine is linked with CCP propaganda. US companies that say anything the CCP does not like lose business and IP. The NBA went through a humiliating episode when Darryl Morey of the Houston Rockets criticized CCP repression in Hong Kong. The CCP promptly cancelled NBA air time and business in China, until the NBA comprehensively groveled back into its good graces, and has ever since kept its mouth shut. Black lives may matter, but Tibetan lives, Uyghur lives, Hong Kong lives... not so much, when a totalitarian power waves its big stick.

China can make its own jingoistic media as well. This is Wolf Warrior 2, whose tag line runs: "Anyone who offends China, no matter how remote, must be exterminated."

Far more damaging is the capitulation of Hollywood. After dabbling with tailoring films for the Chinese market, it turned out that it was easier, and not at all influenced by CCP pressure to project a positive world wide image, for Hollywood studios to get fully on board with CCP censorship for all releases, not portraying China or Chinese in a negative way. So, after a brief and now thoroughly repressed few years of agitation on behalf of Tibet a couple of decades ago, the film industry, one of the premiere arms of American soft power, has been turned and cowed, into a lapdog of the CCP. Not a peep about Tibet any more, indeed DreamWorks brought out a thoroughly whitewashed Tibet-adjacent feature in 2019 that suggests everything there is perfectly fine, thanks to Han characters who protect the region.

Capitulation has been the rule across the business world, as each business faces the brutal choice of playing with the CCP, or being barred from Chinese markets, and even hobbled in other ways as China gains power abroad. But this has not been enough. China has been busily corrupting the US government itself, masterfully using former officials to press its case for Western acquiescence. Henry Kissinger is the pioneer in this effort, but former presidents and many other officials have spared no effort in setting up post-career "consultancies" that assiduously advise any and all comers that resistance is futile- China will rule the world and we must accommodate ourselves to that fact. 

"There are plenty of antagonists in this story, some Chinese, some not. For those upset with Beijing's influence in America, understand this: by helping normalize corruption among our former diplomats and warping American perception of China over the last four decades, Henry Kissinger has done more harm to American interests than every ethnically Chinese businessman, hacker, spy, whether they hold American or Chinese citizenship."

It is ironic, with all the current complaints about cancel culture, free speech for fascists, woke restrictions, etc. that we are actually being policed in our speech by our geopolitical opponent, China, and do not seem to think anything amiss about that.

The ancient Art of War recommends winning by shaping the battlefield and the minds of the opponents- whereby not a shot needs to be fired. Fish emphasises the United Front operations of the CCP and its propaganda arms, which seek influence in many ways, not just media. The seduction of foreign officials and fixers comes under this area of government work, for instance, as does the pressuring of speech and behavior by foreign corporations. Everything is linked, as is proper under a totalitarian system, and every oar pulls in the same direction of keeping the CCP in power and gaining influence across the world.

The CCP has a great deal to answer for, both historically, and in its brutal approach to its current rule, even given its huge successes in economic growth and allowing the modernization of China. A democratic and free China would look very different, and could flourish just as well. We should not be taken in by the propaganda of identity between the CCP and China, or the permanence of CCP rule. We need to be able to think and speak freely, and facilitate the freedom of others. And this should start with Taiwan, whose freedom is in the crosshairs of the CCP. We should not acquiesce to the narrative that Taiwan must/will be assimilated into China, or that it is not, in fact, an independent nation with every right to self-determination. The CCP's track record of cultural genocide in Tibet, actual concentration camps and genocide in Xinjiang, and the decapitation of Hong Kong shows clearly enough what would be in store for Taiwan, and for the rest of us, were China to gain even more leverage.

• More of the same, and Maurice Greenberg is always at hand to support China.
• India is only marginally better.
• Should we end the drug war?
• Maybe we should just leave nature alone.
• Fascism is coming.
• But Scientology is ... aready here.

Haiti is Desperate

Let's help Haiti, and try to do nation building right this time.

We have a desperate situation on our doorstep, in Haiti. Governance has broken down, and anarchy is rampant, with the usual sad story of gangs, kidnapping, killing, looting, and mayhem. While the US has no formal obligation to help, and we have a long history of trying to help (as well as harm) Haiti, it is hard to stand idly by. The US has a frought history with "nation-building". We started in the nation-destroying business, laying waste to one Native American nation after another. Then we had a turn at destroying our own nation in the Civil War. After that came the quasi-imperial ambitions in the Philippines, the United Fruit Empire of Central America, including Panama and the Canal. The high point was our reconstruction of both German and Japanese societies after the second world war, though these societies were definitely not reduced to anarchy, only to temporary leaderless-ness and penury after the defeats of their somewhat abberrant fascist governments. Our more recent attempts to run countries like Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan have been thoroughgoing disasters, ending in various degrees of embarrassment. Why ask for more?

Notable US activities in Haiti:

• Sided with Whites in Haiti's war for independence (i.e. the slave revolt) ~ 1800
• Waited ~60 years to recognize the resulting Haitian government.
• Occupied Haiti 1915-34.
• Colonial-style trade with France and the US continued to immiserate Haiti, ongoing.
• Occupied Haiti 1994-97 to prop up elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. 
• Aristide was later ousted in a coup by the Haitian military, which had been extensively supported by the US.

One reason for all this failure is that our nation-building work has never been very conscious. We were faced with weak allies or vanquished enemies, and wanted little more than to have military access for our jihad du jur, and to get out as soon as possible. The social and the long-term was, perhaps with the exception of the post-WW2 reconstructions, always secondary to military objectives. But as we learn, the military is always ultimately political and social as well. As a super-power, we have a naturally narcissistic mind-set, caring little about the dynamics of other countries and having little patience with their deep histories and un-American ways. This has been particularly evident in our building of other nation's militaries, those in Vietnam and Afghanistan being made in our image and promptly failing in our absence.

But another thing that has been evident through all these adventures is that nation-building is very, very important. Our own revolutionary experiment fed us a civic myth of tremendous power and durability. Our many failures, bottoming out with Donald Rumsfeld's scorn of nation-building in Iraq as it melted down in flaming anarchy, should have taught us by now that attending to nation-building is a top priority in any military relationship, and in most international relationships generally. There is no military effectiveness without a national moral and civic ethos behind it. 

That leads to the question of whether any nation can "nation-build" for others. Like teenage development, nations develop typically in opposition to others, via revolutions, wars, conquest. "Help" is rarely relevant, and mostly harmful. But hope springs eternal, and sometimes desperate situations call out for a special effort.

What is the situation in Haiti? I am far from an expert, but it is mostly one of collapse of institutions (never competent to start with), amid repeated natural disasters, (indeed, eco-cide on a large scale), huge inequality and corruption, extreme poverty- even starvation, and a custom of right-wing military coups and meddling. We can not expect democracy to be the immediate solution, given the depth and long history of the dysfunction. Some kind of stabilization and gradual re-introduction of governance and civic society needs to be envisioned.

Gang-based governance is not working well in Haiti.

So, contrary to our last few nation-building projects, the one in Haiti needs to be a partnership between a minimal military or police presence and extensive social, civic, economic, and especially governmental / political support. The current administration has announced a very low-key plan of aid and consultation, but no prospect of fixing the underlying dysfunctions. Indeed, food aid and similar kinds of aid are notorious for degrading indigenous agriculture and other non-dependent economic activities. Current development aid is necessarily channeled through the existing structures of the target society, and this tends to increase the divisions and inequality of those societies, introduce corruption, and foist foreign ideas that are sometimes quite harmful. The US project in Afghanistan was certainly well-meaning in its focus on the rights and position of women in the society. But harping on this theme was immensely destructive with respect to any influence we were seeking in conservative areas. In the end, cosmopolitan Kabul collapsed pathetically in the face of traditional values. Engaging Haitians and people with knowledge of Haiti, and willingness to keep an open mind and an ear to the ground, would be essential as we navigate this process. 

I would envision a high level commission, of mixed composisiton, with people like Barack Obama, leading Haitians from various sectors, and knowledgeable Biden administration officials, dedicated to going to Haiti and spending a half year or year doing a bottom to top assessment of needs and prospects for reform, principally in government and the economy. It might be a bit reminiscent of the peace process in Northern Ireland that we participated in. The group would issue a recommendation / plan, covering constitutional changes, civic development, security, educational development, and economic development. They also might recommend some sort of conservatorship over higher levels of the government, run through the UN, or the US itself, including peace-keepers, hopefully not carrying cholera, or other temporary security help. At this point, some pressure might have to be brought to bear to force some of the changes and personnel into implementation. 

Democracy can't be the first order of business, as conditions and civic culture are so dire. So perhaps a program of progressive democratic development, from local institutions at the start, to progressively higher level elections and political development, could be envisioned, as security and civic conditions improve. A "foster" system might be a bit like the Chinese communist system, where democracy is not front and center(!), but competence is, and the higher levels spend a lot of time figuring out who is effective at lower levels of governance, including aspects such as managerial competence, lack of corruption, people skills, ability to work in an established legal system, economic vision, among much else. 

In Haiti, economic reconstruction would not be based on huge influxes of outside aid, but a be concerted effort, as part of the more general governance project, to determine and build the infrastructure for a sustainable indiginous economic basis, perhaps in light industry and agriculture- something like the relationship the US has with Mexico, minus the drugs and immigration. Subsistence agriculture is very popular in Haiti, and presents a fundamental choice for the nation. While the independence and simplicity it represents are understandably attractive, (indeed, consonant with a lot of red state rhetoric from the US), subsistence agriculture can not support an advanced economy. It can not support imports that are obviously desired, and may not even support Haiti's current population with the best security and governance. But whatever the economic choices Haiti makes, better governance would improve its people's conditions and happiness.

One long-term focus would be education. Education in Haiti is run almost entirely on a private basis, at best, via international NGOs. That would not change very soon, but clearly universal, compulsory, and free education is important for improving Haiti's future. General literacy is hardly above 50%. Education stands at the root of Haiti's problems- its lack of economic development as much as its tragic governance. There are many other issues, such as the proliferation of NGOs with private agendas and lack of cooperation with the government, and the way food aid from the US has destroyed native agriculture. Governance is not the only issue, in this extremely poor, ill-educated, and traumatized country, but it is a function that must be fixed if any other aspect of the society is to progress.

Lastly, there is the perennial problem of whom to trust. Foreigners coming into a country, however good-willed, do more harm than good if they do not have good information. Our occupation of Afghanistan was notorious for repeatedly killing the wrong people, because we got information from those who had private grudges or competing interests. Without adopting a state of surveillance and/or terror, how are we to sift wheat from chaff? This is where expertise comes into play, and why sending the military in to run things tends to go haywire, with illusions of power. So we need people who know the language, and something about Haiti. There are a lot of emigre Haitians in the US who could be helpful in that regard.

If we took such a project seriously as a long-term and cooperative venture, we could do a great deal of good in Haiti, which would be positive not only for Haiti, but for the US and our wider interests. Our relations throughout the hemisphere have been strained for decades, ridden with excessive militarism, condescention, colonialism, and the US-sponsored spread of drugs, gangs, and guns. We have a lot to answer for, and should make a greater effort to bring positive change to our friends in this hemisphere.

• Jamaica is another country with slow development.
• In the coming cold war, we need all the friends and skills we can get.
• Fake science is coming for the children.
• Santa does get some people worked up.
• Is big tech going to do us all in?

The Politics of Resentment

Ann Applebaum has seen where all this Trumpism is going ... in Eastern Europe.

Liberals in America are baffled. How could anyone vote for Republican candidates at this point? How could anyone, let alone half the electorate, vote for Trump? We are befuddled and anxious for the future of America, which, far from becoming great again, is turning into a banana republic before our eyes, if, hopefully, not worse. We in California are particularly dissociated, as Democrats run the whole state, and Republican voter registration continues to decline year after year and is now under one quarter of the electorate. What does the rest of the country see that we do not? Or vice versa?

Ann Applebaum has written a trenchant book on the matter, "Twilight of Democracy". She lives in Poland, so has had a front-row seat to the illiberalization of a political system, both in Poland and in nearby Hungary, which seems farther advanced. Eastern Europe has more reason than most, perhaps to be disillusioned with the capitalist orthodoxy, after their rather rough transition from Communism. But this is a world-wide phenomenon, sweeping fringe rightists into power from Brazil to Sweden. What is going on? Applebaum posits that the whole structure of meritocratic representative democracy, with its open competition for (good) public policy, and use of educated expertise over vast areas of state interests from foreign affairs to monetary regulation and education policy, have come under fundamental critique. And this critique comes partly from those who have been shut out of that system: the not-well-educated, not-bicoastal, not-rich, not-acronymed-minority, not-hopeful about the American future. It is, in short, a politics of resentment.

How have the elites done over the post-world war 2 period? They won the cold war, but lost virtually every battle in it, from Vietnam to Afghanistan. They let the lower classes of the US sink into relative poverty and powerlessness vs business and the well-educated classes, in a rather brutal system of collegiate competition, de-unionization, off-shoring and worker suppression. They have let the economy fester through several crushing recessions, particularly the malaise of the 70's and the real estate meltdown of 2008. While the US has done pretty well overall, the lower middle and poor classes have not done well, and live increasingly precarious lives that stare homelessness in the face daily. In the heartland, parents at best saw their children fly off to coastal schools and cultures, becoming different people who would not dream of coming home again to live.

America is heavily red, geographically.

And the elite-run state has become increasingly sclerotic, continually self-criticizing and regulating its way to inaction. A thousand well-meaning regulations have paved the way to a bloated government that can not build a high-speed rail line in California, or solve the homelessness crisis. Everyone is a critic, including yours truly- it is always easier to raise objections, cover one's ass, and not get anything done. So one can sympathize with evident, if inchoate, desires for strength- for someone to break the barriers, bring the system to heel, and build that wall. Or get Brexit done. Or whatever the baying right wing media want at the moment.

The elite party in this sense is the Democratic party - capturing the coastal and well-educated, plus public employee unions. The Republican party, the party of money and the rich, (not the elite at all!), has conversely become the party of the downtrodden, feeding them anti-immigrant, anti-elite, anti-state red meat. It was a remarkably easy transformation, that required only shamelessness and lying to make hay out of the vast reserves of resentment seething in middle America. 

But Applebaum's point is not that the elites have messed things up and it may be time to do things differently. No, she suggests that the new protofascists have reframed the situation fundamentally. The elites in power have, through the hard work of meritocratic institutions, set up pipelines and cultures that reproduce their position in power almost as hermetically as the ancien régime of France and its nobility. That anyone can (theoretically) enter this elite and that it is at least somewhat vetted for competence and rationality is disregarded, or actively spat upon as "old" thinking- definitely not team thinking. The path to power now is to stoke resentment, overturn the old patterns of respect for competence and empathy, discard this meritocratic system in favor of one based on loyalty and fealty, and so bring about a new authoritarianism that brooks no "softness", exercises no self-criticism, has no respect for the enemy or for compromise, and has no room for intellectuals. 

But Hungary is way ahead of us, in the one-party rule department.

A second angle on all this is that conservatives feel resentful for another good reason- that they have lost the culture war. Despite all their formal power, winning the presidency easily half the time, and regularly running legislative branches and judicial branches in the US, their larger cultural project to keep progress at bay, fight moral "decadence" and all the other hobby horses, have gone nowhere. The US is increasingly woke, diverse, and cosmopolitan, and the "blood and soil" types (including especially conservative Catholics and Evangelicals), are despondent about it. Or apoplectic, or rabid, etc., depending on temperament. Their triumph in overturning Roe may allow some backwater states to turn back the clock, but on the whole, it looks like a rearguard action.

This is what feeds disgust with the system, and with democracy itself. Republicans who used to sing the praises of the US government, the flag, and democracy now seem to feel the opposite, that the US is a degenerate wasteland, no better than other countries, not exceptional, not dedicated to serious ideals that others should also aspire to. Democracy has failed, for them. And Applebaum points out how this feeling licenses the loss of civility, the lying, the anything-goes demagoguery which characterizes our new right-wing politics. Naturally the internet and its extremism-feeding algorithms have a lot to do with it as well. Applebaum is conservative herself. She spent a career working in the Tory media in Britain, but is outraged at what Tory-ism, and conservatism internationally, has become. She sees a dramatic split in conservatism, between those that still buy into the democratic, liberal system, and those who have become its opponents, in their revolutionary, Trumpy fervor. In the US, the fever may possibly have broken, after a very close brush with losing our institutions during the last administration, as election after election has made losers of the far right.

Over the long haul, Applebaum sees this as a cyclical process, with ample precedent from ancient Egyptian times through today, with a particularly interesting stop in the viciously polarized Drefussard period in France. But I see one extra element, which is our planetary and population crisis. We had very good times over the last few centuries building the human population and its comforts on the back of colonization, fossil fuels, and new technologies. The US of the mid to late-20th century exemplified the good times of such growth. Now the ecological bells are ringing, and the party is coming to an end. Denial has obviously been the first resort of the change-averse, and conservatives have distinguished themselves in their capabilities in that department. But as reality gradually sets in, something more sinister and competitive may be in the offing, as exemplified by the slogan "America First". Not first as in a leader of international institutions, liberal democracies and enlightenment values, but first as in looking out for number one, and devil take the rest. 

Combined with a rejuvinated blood and soil nationalism, which we see flourishing in so many places, these attitudes threaten to send us back into a world resembling that before world war 1 or 2, (and, frankly, all the rest of history), when nationalism was the coin of international relations, and national competition knew no boundaries- mercantile or military. We are getting a small foretaste of this in Russia's war on Ukraine, which is a product of precisely this Russia-first, make Russia great again mind-set. Thankfully, it is accompanied by large helpings of stupidity and mismanagement, which may save us yet. 

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