Battle For the Truth

The battle of Midway- success comes from dedicated engagement with reality. Not from fantasy.

Memorial Day brings up the Greatest Generation and the battles it fought to keep the World Wars away from the US, and save other countries from tyranny along the way. One of the greatest of those battles was at Midway, about half a year after Pearl Habor. It carries some object lessons in why this generation was so successful, and what makes America great. I am watching Battlefield 360, a History Channel program that profiles the aircraft carrier Enterprise. The production is absurdly over-the-top and padded with cheap filler, yet also full of compelling history.

The story of this battle, as for all others, is a search for truth, which then leads to success. A mere 33 years after the Wright brother's first flight, the US christened aircraft carriers like the USS Enterprise, which carried 90 airplanes. Mastering flight was the first step to a new form of long-range mobile warfare. The US had broken the Japanese naval code, enabling us to know the truth of what Japan planned for its invasion of Midway. The US ran an experiment to nail down the meaning of one word in the code, which clearly denoted a place, but which place? The truth came out when the Japanese took the bait and relayed our (fake) news that Midway was short of water. The word was their code name for Midway.

The US had learned quite a bit about the dangers of fire aboard aircraft carriers, which are awash with fuel, bombs, and artillery rounds, which led to a variety of novel equipment and training, such as CO2 purging of fuel lines before facing attacks, fire-fighting foams, and dedicated, pre-positioned fire control crews. This led to the Enterprise being able to take three direct bomb hits and not sink, while in the battle of Midway, the US sank four enemy carriers with only a couple of bombs each. The Japanese had not learned the value and truth of protective design and effective fire suppression.

The US had radar, a new way to find out the truth of enemy positions, so critical to both defense and offense. As in the old board game of battleship, naval warfare is a game of cat and mouse. The more you know, and the more you can blind your opponent, the more successful you will be. The search for truth has been so integral as to be almost unconscious in our military (not to mention "intelligence") culture. And in the post-war era, it led to a broader cultural commitment to education and research which has formed US preeminence in physics, chemistry, and biology, among many other fields, including notably climate science.

Which all leads one to wonder why lying is now one of our leading national characteristics. Who does our president regard as the enemy, and who the friend? Why is, for him, truth in journalism so dangerous? What is the morality of a whole party lying habitually about fundamental economics, about public interest regulation, about democratic values, and about the future of the planet? What has happened to us?

• Damage control on Yorktown.
• Wall Street wants docile Democrats.
• Cancer cure ... the hardest part.
• Some thoughts about the crazy.
• It is not entirely clear why we side with Saudi Arabia over Iran.
• Meanwhile, it is worth sticking with Afghanistan.

Are We Too Powerful?

What is wrong with our foreign policy? Is it that our military is too big? Review of "The Power Problem", by Christopher Preble.

What is power? A simple and evocative word, but a complicated concept that we Americans seem naive about. We have the most nuclear bombs of anyone on the planet. But would we ever use them? Obviously not. So they do not really increase our power in many, most, and possibly any practical ways. The only setting where nuclear bombs are useful is the precise opposite of the one we occupy- a case like North Korea, which with only a handful deliverable bombs, and the madness to use one, can effectively deter us from ever attempting to overthrow their system. It represents power in only the most existential extremity, and none at all in the usual hurly burly of diplomacy, conflict, terrorism, and small wars.

Similar considerations apply to other levels of military power. We can precision-bomb anyone, anywhere, but does that make us powerful? Not if power really means getting other people to do what you want. Over the last couple of decades, terrorists have shown that they have the power to make us to what they want- start wars, drop bombs all over the place, aggravate a lot of friends, create ungoverned spaces, and make air travel miserable for millions. But have we had the power to make them do what we want? Precious little, other than the extremely blunt method of killing them piecemeal in a game of whackamole which is reaching a dispiriting state of functional surrender in Afghanistan, and stalemate elsewhere.

For people will do what they want, and military methods are never a good or efficient way to make them do otherwise. Rome ran a very militaristic and terroristic system, which is the way things have to be if others are going to bent to one's will by military means. This is the problem of international relations, and particularly our problem having taken on the role of the world's policeman, and gotten embroiled in numerous conflicts ranging from bitterly disappointing (Vietnam, Syria, Afghanistan) to catastrophic (Iraq).

Preble is writing out of the Cato Institute, (and in the realist tradition I have reviewed recently), and adopts a nuanced libertarian stance- that we should not do so much, should allow others to do more, that standing down a little bit would benefit everyone, especially ourselves. The record of the last few decades speaks for itself- that we have made several very bad blunders, mostly by rushing to the "military option" with too little thought. Preble puts a lot of focus on the military- how expensive it is, how intrusive into the rest of society, how wasteful, and how its very size and capability encourage policy makers to use it, like the proverbial hammer. He is an exponent of the Powell doctrine, which sought to hedge our enthusiasm by asking some critical questions, principally whether a particular military action really addresses a national security interest of the United States. Preble is of the opinion that our true interests are quite narrow- simply defense of the continental territory, and that everything else about our world-wide hegemony is not a core interest and could be de-emphasized, if not jettisoned.

Exhibit A is our Middle East policy. The word "inane" comes up in Preble's discussion, and it is hard to disagree. Despite our alarm over the Arab oil embargos of the 1970s, oil has generally found a way to market whatever we do. When we have tried to block exports from countries such as Iraq and Iran, their oil has found markets anyhow, if in reduced amounts, for the simple reason that they have little else to live from. Not even the richest petrostates can refrain from exports for very long. So our decades of support for some of the most retrograde governments imaginable, including garrisons in Saudi Arabia (now shuttered), Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and elsewhere in the Gulf, to "keep the shipping lanes open" and "maintain the flow of oil" have been mostly a waste of time and resources- a deep strategic error. Our only policy should be to deny broad control over the oil centers to strategic enemies such as Russia, or now China. But ISIS? How are they so different from the Saudis? Each sells oil as enthusiastically as it can.

This points to the real problem of US power, which is not so much the seductions of military Rambo activities, but the plain stupidity that they enable and amplify. We have a foreign policy run by amateurs, by definition. The president is rarely elected for foreign policy credentials, and then builds a team (see Hillary Clinton) hardly any more knowledgeable or judicious. Our ambassadorial ranks are filled with political donors and flaks. The congress has given up any hope of retrieving its war powers.  And our professionals, in the State Department and wider intelligence community, have numerous problems as well. How can we make this system work better?

I don't think that trimming our ambitions and letting the world go to the dogs, which is to say, to whichever other powers such as China and Russia have the ambition to take our place, is the only solution. We have good intentions (at least outside of the current administration) and have been generally justfied in our post-World War 2 Pax Americana, despite numerous costly blunders. We have also been served by those good intentions, which generate acquiescence, if not enthusiasm, on the part of our many allies and friends towards our dominant role, which in turn brings us benefits in economic and strategic terms. Not enough to offset the cost, perhaps, but having a stable world is difficult to value, really. Having and keeping many friends is the surest way to proceed to a peaceful world, which is our ultimate goal. In this sense, our competition with China should be on the basis of who can be friendlier and more supportive of an orderly state of affairs among the many other countries of the world.

The question is how to continue our relatively benevolent services without winding up in grievous error because we want to "fix" some problems a bit too enthusiastically. Preble raises the question of alliances, pointing out their inherent danger. If we promise mutual protection with a vast number of frontier countries, from South Korea to Ukraine, we should not be surprised to be drawn into conflicts not of our choosing, which may be unwise. Allied countries naturally feel a bit more free to provoke their neighbors given such protection, and we only need to think of World War 1 to understand the danger of such interlocking, tripwire alliances. So one approach is to make our relations with other countries more contingent, dependent on continuing good relations rather than legalistic (which is ultimately fictitious anyhow) in character. We should have friendship treaties with many, but alliances with few. But that is a minor point, since most of our rushes into action have been justified in other ways.

The deeper problem is not in having a military that is too strong, or alliances that are too promiscuous, but in having a policy-making apparatus that lacks intelligence. For all our NSA, CIA, and other capabilities, we blundered into Iraq for reasons that involved personal psychology (Bush, Cheney), intelligence failures (CIA), failures of integrity (Rumsfeld, the military, CIA), failures of institutional balance (State vs military and CIA), and further failures of intelligence- in lacking knowledge not only of the state of Saddam's power structure and capabilities, but of the culture we would be faced with were we to succeed in removing him. It was portrayed as the liberation of Paris all over again, plus lots of oil. The absurdity of this vision comes down to the insularity of everyone in power and the weakness of countervailing institutions (i.e. the State Department) that might have had a better grasp of the matter.

So while Preble is dubious about expanding the State Department, "its aim is to relate to foreign nations, not to run them", that is exactly where we need to go to gain a more intelligent foreign policy. But in a very specific way. We need more knowledge of local cultures that is useful to us. Right now, the customary tour is for a two or three years. This is enough time to get a feel for local conditions and make lots of high-level contacts. But it is no way to gather deep knowledge of the wellsprings of local sentiment, and the wheels that make everything work in that culture. It is that knowledge that we were missing in Iraq, and in Vietnam, and in the Balkans, and many of our other misadventures. We should keep the short tour officers- they are less likely to be captured by the local culture, and keep their service-to-America discipline. But we should add a cadre of officers that are a sort of cross between Peace Corps and Foreign Service, who specialize in learning about one other place for the long haul, and are not under threat or obligation to move elsewhere, unless they wish to do so. A sort of Lawrence of Arabia model, who might make themselves useful by writing books about the local culture, reports for the local embassy, etc. They would necessarily be more loosely tied to the US government bureaucracy, and their knowledge would come with some caveats. We probably cultivate a variety of locals currently who provide such key knowledge, but it seems that it does not always make a sufficient impression to affect our policy, due to failures in translation.

Knowledge is power. Some white privilege and great cinematography doesn't hurt either.

The next question is how to slow the rush to war, and weigh expertise more heavily in our foreign policy councils, such that all this deep knowledge and intelligence from the field gets used to actually make decisions, rather than brushed aside by an incurious or incautious executive. The current structures of departments and the interdepartmental process through the NSC, are effective in shaping rational policy. But again, there are a lot of amateurs at this table. Every one at the top level is a political appointee, other than the President herself. While the Secretary of State should be speaking for the arm of the government that is deeply knowledgeable in foreign affairs, and for its expert employees, that is hardly a given. The NSC needs at least one representative from the professional ranks of the State Department, and also needs at least one representative from Congress, to exercise its oversight and constitutionally balancing role. In compensation, the council could probably do without the drug policy advisor, Energy Secretary, and White House Chief of Staff. This would make our core foreign policy-making institution more professional, accountable, and responsive to knowledge from the field. It needs also to take its long-term policy role more seriously, and spend less energy on micromanagement.

Turning back to our over-militarized stance in the world, using force less requires not so much that our military be made smaller. We have prowling through all the oceans shockingly powerful submarines to which no one pays much attention or wishes to use. No, the problem is one of strategic conception- that we fail to realize how limited the effective role of military action is, compared with the vast scope for friendly and constructive engagement with other nations.

Military power is simply the power to kill people, not to make them do or think what you want. As we learn in the old Westerns, coercion is the least effective, least humane, and least durable way to run a society. The model of global policing (if that is what we are doing) needs to be one of community policing, not of SWAT teams dropped from Apache helicopters. In Afghanistan and Iraq, we routinely killed the wrong people because we did not know true local conditions and got our "intelligence" from bad sources. That is what you get with the SWAT team model. Our own civil war can serve as another touchstone here. What if some other country had barged in and told us what was right, and had started an occupation? That would not have gone over well. The opportunities for insurgency and simmering ongoing warfare would have been quite a bit higher, though there was plenty of that in the postwar South as it was. The point is that our blithe talk about "the military option" routinely fails the most elementary test of foresight- to put ourselves in the other party's shoes.

• Our total debacle in Syria. But warning.. propaganda is likely here.
• Smart is sexy.
• Factory farming- not a pretty sight. 
• Some charter schools are frauds.
• Who could be less qualified than Herman Cain to serve on the Fed?
• Yes, it looks very bad.
• Brain injury is common, and dangerous.
• In Australia, a war on cats.

Truth, Justice, and the American Way

Stephen Walt's critique of our overextended, idealist, militarized, and not very bright foreign policy: The Hell of Good Intentions.

Americans have gotten rather used to running the world. Whenever news arrives about some horror or injustice, action is expected. No matter how distant the crisis, we now have interests, and assets, close-by. It is a mindset we inherited from the Greatest Generation, who build a post-war order out of constant vigilence and activity- first to reform the perpetrators of the war, and then to forestall the spread of communism. After the Soviet Union imploded, we were left free, with a vast whirring mechanism of diplomatic and military machinery. For those raised on Lone Ranger episodes and Superman comics, which may describe a good portion of the foreign policy community over the last few decades, the answer was obvious- do good.

Stephen Walt takes direct aim at this mindset, which in his telling is borne as much from laziness and stupidity as from good intentions and US interests. We have committed terrible blunders in our rush to save people from predatory states- the prime examples being Vietnam and Iraq, which cost roughly 1.3 million and 0.5 million lives respectively, though the latter remains open-ended, due to our responsibility for creating ISIS. The people responsible for these comprehensive, mind-boggling disasters should have been tried as war criminals. But instead, our system barely batted an eye, and most of the architects of both horrors went on to continued participation in the US foreign policy commmunity, often at high levels.

This is because foreign policy is a strongly political field, at least as practiced in the US. Who would have hired Jared Kushner to run US Middle East policy? No one in their right minds, that's who. But the rot runs much deeper. Foreign policy is not science, and is difficult to evaluate, especially considering our problems with prophecy. So standards are virtually absent, replaced with a go-along-get-along ethic within a tight zone of conventional ideas. A big change since the Reagan era has been the intrusion of neoconservatives into this community, via right-wing administrations and their partisan think tanks like the Cato institute, American Enterprise Insitute, and Heritage Foundation. These were the minions who pushed the Iraq war, and they keep pushing the zone of mainstream thought rightward. Their current project is to demonize Iran. Which is odd, because Iran is a more functional democracy than Saudi Arabia, and intellectually far richer and more dynamic as well. The motivation for all this comes mostly from Israel, which has tacitly allied itself with Saudi Arabia and Egypt in a new cynical status quo ... just so long as no one says anything about the Palestinians.

The checkered career of Elliott Abrams is if anything more disturbing for those who believe that officials should be accountalbe and advancement should be based on merit. Abrams pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress in the 1980's, after giving flase testimony about the infamous Iran-Contra affair. He received a pardon from President George H. W. Bush in December 1992, and his earlier misconduct did not stop George W. Bush from appointing him to a senior position on the National Security Council, focusing on the Middle East. 

Then, after failing to anticipate Hamas's victory in the Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, Abrams helped foment an abortive armed coup in Gaza by Mohammed Dahlan, a member of the rival Palestinian faction Fatah. This harebrained ploy backfired completely: Hamas soon learned of the scheme and struck first, easily routing Dahlan's forces and expelling Fatah from Gaza. INsted of crippling Hamas, Abrams's machinations left it in full control of the area. 

Despite this dubious resume, Abrams subsequently landed a plum job as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, where his questional conduct continues. In 2013, he tried to derail the appointment of the decorated Vienam veteran and former senator Chuch Hagel as secretary of defense by declaring that Hagel had "some kind of problem with Jews". This baseless smear led the CFR president Richard Haass to distance the council from Abrams's action, but Haass took no other steps to reprimand him. Yet, apparently, the only thing that stopped the neophyter secretary of state Rex Tillerson from appointing Abrams as deputy secretary of state in 2017 was President Donald Trump's irritation at some critica comments Abrams had voiced during the 2016 campaign.

Naturally, Abrams has recently been appointed as the Trump Administration's envoy for the crisis in Venezuela, which should inspire confidence. The most that the mainstream press can manage as a description is that he is "controversial".

What is worse, not only are egregious blunderers and arguable criminals never held to account, (Bush, Cheney, Kissinger), but truth-tellers and whistle-blowers are routinely side-lined. Remember Eric Shinseki? He was quickly sidelined from the military in the Bush administration, after giving an accurate estimate of the number of troops needed to stabilize Iraq. He was later rescued from exile by Barack Obama, but did he re-enter the military? No, he was put in charge of the VA, safely out of the way, and in an impossible job to boot.

In September 2002, for example, thirty-three international security scholars paid for a quarter-page advertisement in the New York Times' op-ed page, declaring 'War with Iraq Is Not in the U.S. National Interest.' Published at a moment when most of the inside-the-Beltway establishment strongly favored warm the ad warned that invading Iraq would divert resources from defeating Al Qaeda and pointed out that the Unites States had no plausible exit strategy and might be stuck in Iraq for years. In the sixteen-pus years since the ad was printed, none of its signatories have been asked to serve in government or advise a presidential campaign. None are members of elite foreign policy groups such as the Aspen Strategy Group, and none have spoken at the annual meetings of the Council on Foreign Relations or the Aspen Security Forum. Many of these individuals hold prominent academic positions and continue to participate in public discourse on international affairs, but their prescience in 2002 went largely unnoticed.

One interesting point that Walt makes along the way is that one capability that has atrophed due to all this dysfunction is true diplomacy. The Iran nuclear deal was one of the few recent episodes where we actually sat down with friends and enemies and hammered out a peaceful deal, agreed to by all sides. It is far more frequent these days to make big pronoucements, whether bland or insulting, then threaten punitive action like sanctions or drone strikes. Granted, the Al Qaedas and ISISs of the world are not likely to come to any Geneva tea parties, but there is a lot of good we could be doing by diplomacy, such as in Latin America and Africa, which is being left on the table. Instead, we have very secretive military activities in about 20 African countries. Militarization has colored our foreign policy to an excessive degree. And how has our "Peace Process" been going in the Middle East? This one was not a casualty of militarization, but of Israelization. Because of our failure to bring sufficient pressure to get to a Palestinian state solution, Israel continues to be an Apartheid state, and our reputation in the region is a shambles, shown to be the lapdog of Israeli interests.

The Lone Ranger brings in the bad guy to close a successful episode.

Walt's solution to these dysfunctions is to reel back our ambitions, from what he describes currently as a policy of "liberal hegemony" to one of "off-shore balancing". Liberal hegemony is the idea, which is sort of a hat-tip to Karl Marx, really, that liberal prosperous democracy is the desirable endpoint for all peoples everywhere, so we should not mind giving history a shove every now and then to get everyone there faster. The benefit for the US is clear as well- the more democracies there are, especially as encouraged by us, the more friends we have and the more stable the world in general.

Off-shore balancing, in contrast, is more hands-off, and regards US interests involved only where some region of the world is being taken over by a large hegemon, (like China), which could create such a global imbalance that we in the Western Hemisphere may be threatened. The Middle East should be left to its devices, especially as long as the Iran and Saudi axes are reasonably closely matched. Likewise, Europe is not a problem, even with Russia glowering from the east, since power is heavily diffused, and Europe even without US help is well able to take care of itself. While seemingly cynical and isolationist, this is really a very traditional approach to foreign policy, steeped in centuries of experience with Metternich-ian balance-of-power practices in Europe.

While Walt offers some very accurate and telling critiques of the state of the US foreign policy establishment, I think the prescription does not quite fit the problem and he tends to soft-pedal its implications. While the Middle East would obviously be better off with a little less US meddling, would it be better off with more Russian meddling? I have previously advocated for prompt, decisive involvement in Syria, which might have led to a better outcome than what is happening now, for both the people of Syria, and our own strategic position. But it may have been just another costly fiasco- that is what makes this field so treacherous. (Incidentally, Walt mentions the US Holocaust Museum's extensive research on Syria, especially on the prospects of US involvement. It casts a rather dubious light overall, but does suggest that early intervention can be far more effective than late intervention.) Turning to China, Walt does not mention the fate of Taiwan, of the South China sea, of the Philippines, or Japan. Would keeping Australia out of Chinese domination be a vital interest of the US? How many interests would he be willing to give up before things get truly serious?

But the deeper issue is one of stupidity. Doing less will not make us smarter. Walt gives some very positive reviews to the various anti-establishment views of Donald Trump and the demographic that he connected with in winning the presidency. Trump was all about throwing the bums out, and retrenching US foreign policy with fewer entanglements and a more modest approach. How has that turned out? Walt decries what is quite evident- our policy, which seemingly couldn't get any worse, now has gotten much worse, with a dotard and his various short-lived protectors and yes-men running things. US interests and influence throughout the world are shriveling by the hour.

A second observation is that the Iraq was not brought to us by idealism. It originated in the psychology of unfinished business on the part of Bush, Cheney, and their extended right-wing establishment. Their idealism was, as anyone could see, paper-thin pablum, matched by their total disinterest in the actual country, its people, and what was to become of them in the aftermath. Stupidity reigned supreme, and hundreds of thousands were killed, and countless more lives destroyed and ravaged for that stupidity.

The case of Vietnam was different. We had recently half-won the Korean war, and saved its Southern half from bondage- a fate that becomes more shocking every year as we view what goes on in Chinese-backed North Korea. Due to our loss of the Vietnam war, all of Vietnam remains a totalitarian state- the South would have been much better off had we/they won the war. Our involvement there was heavily idealistic. But it was stupid. The smart people knew the lay of the land, knew the experience of the French, and knew that it was a civil war that the North had a huge head start on, in comparison with the corrupt, illigitimate Southern government. It was a triumph of hope over experience.

So what we need is more experience and smarts. The US needs a better foreign policy system, not different ideals. We need to rigorously insulate our intelligence and analysis system, of which the State Department is a prominent part, from politics. That means stopping the revolving doors of personnel coming from think tanks, lobbying organizations, corporations, and political appointments. Country and region experts need to have long-term relations with their areas, not short posts. Analyses need to be given something like five-year reviews, with promotion dependent on success. Those let go should never be let back in. Accountability needs to replace hackery, corruption, and amateurism. This community needs to be de-militarized as well, which has been a rising problem for decades. These analyses should have public and secret components, with as much as possible made public so that the country can see the work that is being done, and learn what the basis of our foreign policy is. Like militarization, excessive secrecy has also degraded discourse and accountability.

Lastly, we need a more mature media discourse about foreign policy, less reactive to the news of the day, (let lone the twitter-minute), and more analytic and historically aware. Off-shore balancing is a very credible view in this discussion, but so are more idealistic approaches. Helping abused populations in foreign lands is a good thing, if it succeeds. The point is to succeeed rather than fail in our foreign policy projects, which requires deep experience, accountability, good information, and mature discussion. Perhaps we will find out that we should be doing less, once we filter out the bad ideas. Or perhaps we will find out that to do the things we might want to do (think of the second Iraq war) would be, if done properly, unrealistically expensive and unfeasible for that reason.

• Faux-ocracies are a rising challenge.
• The Taliban is weary of gaining ground in Afghanistan.
• New Taliban, same as the old Taliban.
• Yes, we are dealing with a fascist.
• Medical insurance should be left to the private sector?
• We need a wealth tax.
• And a bigger inheritance tax.

World of Warlords

Why does the US keep funding warlords? And then wonder why "those people" are always fighing each other? Review of Ronan Farrow's "War on Peace".

What went wrong? We have asked ourselves that after countless foreign debacles, from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq. Why does every intervention turn to ashes, and every good intention end in embarrassment and hatred? Ronan Farrow, celebrity diplomat and journalist, has an answer. Though he has been through a rough family life, Farrow is a smart cookie, and after starting with an absurdly puffy profile of Richard Holbrook, the book eventually settles down into sharp vignettes of American policy and institutions gone awry, and a case for rebuilding our diplomatic capabilities. Part of the war of the title is being waged on the State Department, conducted by the military and successive presidents ending up with our absurdly anti-State current executive. But it is facile to call that a "War on Peace", as though State is our Department of Peace. It is, rather, our reserve of strategic, long-range thought and professional experience in international affairs, and arm of American power, whether advancing that power dictates peace, war, or cold war.

"There are two types of military dispute, the one settled by negotiation and the other by force. Since the first is characteristic of human beings and the second of beasts, we must have recourse to the second only if we cannot exploit the first." -  Cicero, as quoted in the book. Which is incidentally ironic, given the relentlessly bloodthirsty culture and methods of Rome.

The Pax Americana of the post-war era has served us very well, not to mention most other countries. It has been a time of dramatically improving living conditions, rising population, and governance. It has been built on overwhelming conventional power, combined with formal alliances with countless partners and soft leadership by a system both prosperous and just (more or less) which others can aspire to. The outstanding example of this is China, which in its emulation of our mode of production has lifted itself out of dire poverty over the last four decades, and done so very peacefully.

On the other hand, we have made countless blunders when trying to force conditions to our favor more actively. Iraq is a shining example. We destroyed a country only to belatedly realize we had no idea how to run it or whom to hire to do the job. Then we skidaddled prematurely, leaving behind chaos. We have stuck more persistently with Afghanistan, (up to the present moment, at least), but remain in a quagmire of epic proportions with a government that is hopelessly corrupt, filled with warlords. This is where Farrow's book starts to come into the picture. Why so many warlords? Why all the corruption, and why is the facade of democracy so thin?

Afghan president Ghani, trapped in a power structure full of warlords, armed militias, and corrupt elements.

Going back to the start of the war in 2001, we used existing forces that were already arrayed against the Taliban, namely the warlords of the Northern Alliance. Integrated with a US air campaign, they quickly swept the field. But then, in the absence of other alternatives, we kept turning to them to run things, and kept arming them and turning to them again. The CIA and the military led the way, partnering with whoever could supposedly provide the goods- that is men and power, to use our guns and intelligence. But it was always a rotten deal, buying long-term dysfunction for short-term convenience. After World War 2, would we have turned to extremist militias to run Germany and Japan, just because they were most enthusiastic to kill their enemies? Funding and arming the most extreme elements of a society is certainly the best way to get those arms used, but not always the best way to rebuild that society.

Indeed much of our foreign policy over the last few decades has consisted of arming our motley friends. Pakistan is exemplary in this regard. We have been shipping them billions of dollars of military aid since 1955. And what do we have to show for it? A country that is one of the leading state sponsors of terrorism, which is in perpetual cold war if not armed conflict with both of its neighbors India and Afghanistan, whose clear policy is to destabilize Afghanistan, and which lies to us and the world without compunction. And which has blithely acquired nuclear weapons along the way, subjecting the whole world to the spectre of extreme Islamist takeover of a cataclysmic arsenal.

It has not been a very successful policy, whatever benefits the CIA may think it has gleaned over the years. The worst part is that all this aid has strengthened the military as the leading institution of Pakistan, leading to innumerable coups, overwhelming political power even when a general is not serving as president, as well as economic and media power, to the atrophy of civic life and democracy. The best that we could do at this point is to issue a heartfelt apology to the Pakistani people that we have contributed to the militarization of their society, cut all military aid, and focus on continuing constructive dialog with everyone in the region, especially India.

Similarly, in Central and South America, we have spent far too much time and money chasing leftist mirages with right-wing funding, helping to cause the chaos that is now driving so many migrants to our borders from El Salvador, Guatamala, and Honduras. Instead of dramatic stunts of cruelty at the border, we would be much better served setting up a region-wide peace and governance process to help these countries regain stability and democratic institutions. Where is that effort? Nowhere to be seen in this administration. Farrow describes a long-term trend by which the military and the intelligence/security complex in Washington has gained power and money, versus our organs of diplomacy and long-term intelligence, which have atrophied. Nation-building became a dirty word. So now we are now dealing with a series of unbuilt nations, several of which we have unbuilt ourselves. Fear has gained over reason, much to the detriment of our domestic institutions, not to mention our approach to world affairs.

One might even say that the US has become one of the greatest terrorist regimes in the world, engaging proxy wars and armies across the globe often to rather dubious ends and resulting in vast "collateral" damage. It is our lack of expertise and inability to understand other cultures and conditions that leads to the horrors/blunders of Vietnam and Iraq. And that can not be fixed with more know-nothing "strength" from dotards, or with ever higher military budgets and military "aid" packages to anyone willing to throw their own people under the bus of American interests. We are the policeman of the world, at least for the moment. The question is whether the model we pursue is one of SWAT-style military policing, or one of community policing. The former breeds problems on both the short and long terms, while the latter solves them.

And one can note that these practices and attitudes do not stay safely abroad, far from our own culture. The militarization and warlordism of our foreign policy sees its reflection in the growing domestic mania for guns, security, walls, and the installation of a would-be warlord in the White House. While the most grievous harms of this administration may be the diminishment of our network of international relationships and influence, US society is being corroded internally as well by the pessimistic, fearful, and ignorant tenor of the security state.

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• How is that https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/conservative-economists-tax-cut-forecasts-by-j--bradford-delong-2018-12trickle-down coming along? And in France?
• Why not jail a US CEO?
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• Notes on deregulation.
• Remember how bearing false witness is a sin against god?

Iran and Saudi Arabia

Modern propaganda and ancient hate.

Frontline has an excellent three-hour series on the conflict between Iran and Saudi-Arabia. They come off like minuature versions of the US and the Soviet Union- superpowers of the Muslim world enmeshed in an ideological and tribal battle that is fought through proxy forces throughout the Middle East, making a hash of smaller countries and making strange bedfellows with the likes of Israel.

The Shia-Sunni split was always an undercurrent in the Islamic world, but was sharpened by the advent of modern fundamentalism. While the Saudis have always been fundamentalist in theory and corrupt in fact, Iran plunged into total fundamentalism with the revolution of 1979. The documentary discusses how sharply this changed the dynamics in the Muslim world, with Iran suddenly vaulted into the vanguard of the fundamentalist movement. This perennial "back-to-basics" feature of religion became a deeply ideological and psychological response to the muddled end of colonialism and the general failure of modernity in the Muslim world. We hear mostly of its Sunni / Salafist incarnation, as ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, etc. But for the Shia, it had an extra edge of tribal revolt against Sunni oppression.

Shia make up roughly 1/3 of Muslims in the Middle East, with populations in each country. They are a majority in Bahrain, though they have no role in the government. That was the situation in Iraq as well until recently. Iran's fundmentalism is sectarian, not pan-Muslim. Thus, despite ethnic divisions, it has been an instrument to unite Shia populations across the region, such as the Hezbolla party in Lebanon and the now-ruling parties in Iraq. Iran's reach is obviously limited by this sectarian character, but they have been willing to arm their friends to the hilt and send their minions into battle for the most dubious causes, especially the Assad government in Syria, which is composed of another Shia sect.

Saudi Arabia is petrified by all this, partly because they have their own Shia population, but more because their own power projection has been so bungled in comparison. They have assiduously funded fundamentalist madrassas and terrorists, and what do they have to show for it? Hatred from the West, yes, but also quite a lot of hatred from their own spawn, such as Osama Bin Laden, whose disgust with the top-heavy, spoiled, corrupt Saudi institutions was emblematic. Their best friend, the US, conquered Iraq and not only botched the whole project disastrously, but left the country in Shia hands. And in Pakistan, one of their most successful test beds of miseducation, does all the fundamentalism add up to a strong state or a good friend? No, it has led to chaos, double-dealing, and misery.

One of the themes going through this story is propaganda. No one in Iran gets Lebanese Hezbolla fighters to die in Syria for Assad without a very heavy dose of propaganda. A bunch of Saudis do not fly into the World Trade Center without lengthy indoctrination. Fundamentalism in general is the triumph of poorly thought-through ideals and archetypal images over reason and basic decency. The Palestinian cause, now in its twilight, was one long piece of performance art- of grievance and rage as policy and, occasionally, power. And the long Saudi / Wahhabi campaign of Jesuit-style fundamentalist eduction has only furthered the weakness and backwardness of the Muslim world in general, not to mention its violence, particularly against women. The record is appalling, but the mechanism teaches universal lessons- that people can be led in disastrous directions by well-crafted propaganda, based on supposedly profound fantasies.

It is something we are learning in the US as well, to our peril. Does free speech mean that private broadcast networks can spew the most pleasing, and scurrilous, falsehoods? Just how much bilge can the internet contain, and not blow up? Conflicts like the one above, between Iran and Saudi Arabia, are made possible by propaganda, which moves people to extraordinary emotion and effort. World War 2 remains a textbook example, with Germany and Italy transformed by deeply emotional, false, and effective, propaganda. We are in the US at a tipping point, with half the population feeling themselves part of the Republican team, whose life support comes from propaganda that seems, at least to this biassed observer, unworthy of any political discourse or intellectual respect, headed by a President who lies so casually and habitually that we now take it as absolutely normal. How can reason and empathy penetrate this jungle of mean self-righteousness?

Returning to the topic, the current administration's support for Saudi Arabia and hatred for Iran is not easy to understand, on the face of it. Saudi Arabia is at least as destabilizing a force in the world and in the Middle East. Both are explicitly fundamentalist, and both seek to export their ideologies abroad. Both are sources of oil, though the Saudis have far more and play the lead role in world oil prices. We do not care that much on our own behalf anymore, but have strong interests in keeping the oil infrastructure (political, military, and physical) of the Middle East intact on behalf of the developed world, for much of which (Europe, Japan) we have explicit defense responsibilities. So sure, we want to be friendly with Saudi Arabia and continue to have military bases in the area. But we have interest in friendship with Iran as well, which has far greater human and intellectual potential. Both countries have a fraught relationship with Israel, though Saudi Arabia has of late been much more accommodating, in its cynical and conservative/authoritarian way. But Iran's problems with Israel seem similarly superficial, just a way to gain credibility with the Palestinians and other disaffected Muslims. And our own difficult history with Iran, and their vitriolic propagada against us, is hardly reason to fall in line with Saudi Arabia's sectarian program. It would be better to turn the other cheek, as the Obama administration started to do.

If the struggle for supremacy in the Middle East were prompting a flowering of cultural, scholarly, and scientific advances, that would be one thing. But the reality is far more tawdry, where the Saudis just buy more arms from the US to dump on Yemen, and Iran coopts and arms Shia communities in the neighborhood, destroying Lebanon in the process, and bidding to do the same in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. The collision of irrational ideologies, served by up-to-the-minute propaganda methods, run by governing structures ranging from dysfunctional to medieval, is a toxic brew not likely to enhance the culture or living conditions of those in the region any time soon.

• The next level for propaganda.
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Hitler and Donald Trump

With apologies to "God and Donald Trump". An authoritarian comparison.

Hitler did not pounce on Germany suddenly and unannounced. His rise was a lengthy story of norms broken, lies told, prejudices nurtured, institutions destroyed, brilliant propaganda, judicious bullying, and the age-old scapegoating alchemy of victimization and hate. We are in the midst of a similar process, with the worser angels of our natures being seduced and exemplified by the current president. Trump loves authoritarian leaders, pines for authoritarian methods, (reads authoritarian speeches), and, overall, seems to use a playbook from one of the greatest authoritarians of all time. Maybe it is worth counting up the similarities. One of the best books on this remains William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

Propaganda
Trump had a few difficulties with FOX at first, as they had a few components still beholden to the old GOP, or with principles otherwise. But nothing succeeds like success, and FOX could not deny the beast they themselves had created through years of alternative reality and hate-filled programming. It is now a fully consumated marriage, with daily hate, direct policy integration, and personnel going back and forth. Joseph Goebbels would have been proud, though he would have criticized us for still allowing free media to exist. Trump has been doing his best to discredit all responsible media, and is getting a sympathetic hearing from those in his camp. Whether this infection of corrupt media values spreads into the rest of the culture is one of the biggest questions of our time.

Novel modes of communication
The Nazis used film, radio, graphics, and other media in very innovative ways, still admired today in some instances. Mass communication was still young, and they made great use of it for their propaganda. Now we have the first twitter president, marrying his lack of self-control and need to bully and  lash out at every source of anxiety with the new media of our time which narrow-casts and broadcasts simultaneously and instantly. These new media themselves are not the problem, rather it is the content, obviously. The issue is whether we neglect to take a longer view and are able to maintain our intellects and moral values while marinating involuntarily in this cesspool of Newspeak.

Scapegoats and concentration camps
Immigrants are the current administration's scapegoats and objects of hatred. No insult is too vile, no policy too harsh. Walls are to be built, detention centers filled, children ruined. Germany never had organized and nation-wide resistance to the antisemitism of the Nazis, so we are slightly ahead there. But in Germany too, the concentration camp system started slowly, first only holding communists and political opponents, and only gradually developing into the slaughterhouses found by the allies in the end. Immigrants are right now an easy target, not being citizens, with nebulous rights, if any.

Bullying
Trump's bullying is instinctive, relentless, and always personal. (Just ask Stormy Daniels!) If there is policy involved, it is decades out of date, and uninformed. The Nazis were obviously bullies as well, with far more lattitude, given their paramilitary organizations and eventual totalitarian control. Hitler's temper tantrums were evidently very Trumpian. But in foreign policy, they directed their bullying more sensibly- against their enemies rather than their friends. First Austria, then Czechoslovakia, were crushed by propaganda and threats. England was cowed from interfering, Russia was subborned and bribed, before being turned on later. There was method to the madness, where with Trump, we have daily lashing out without much sense let alone long term strategy. China is our friend, then our enemy. Russia is complemented on one hand, and sanctioned with the other. Canada is turned from our best friend to a bitter spouse. The authoritarian instinct is obviously the same, but with Trump, the point gets lost in personal narcissim, short attention span, and poor judgement.

Narcissism
Was Hitler a narcissist? Perhaps not as flagrantly as Trump, but anyone who starts a world war and ends up incinerating his own country in the pyre of his ambition probably gets the nod. There was also the personality cult, Führer, etc. So yes, he and Trump are cut from the same cloth there. Trump has tried mightily to identify himself with the nation and its wounds and salvation- just listen to his clunky inauguration speech. He is the only one who can fix what is wrong with the nation! The instincts are there, and the charismatic connection to at least some of his base. But he is far, far, from closing the deal with the country at large, and also has such appalling lack of judgement, intellect, and self-control that the whole project simply falls flat on purely operational grounds.

Economic policy
Here we get to a big constrast between the two. Trump has talked alot about infrastructure spending and beautiful airports and roads. But he has not lifted a finger to get there. His version of deficit spending is to give a lot more money to the rich- he's no national socialist! Hitler, on the other hand, really built the autobahn, the Beetle and other infrastructure. His Keynesian policies put everyone to work, as well as re-arming the nation. Of course all this led to tears, but it illustrates the difference between someone who really wants to rebuild the nation, and someone who only wants to get a feeling from a crowd of believers, while selling them down the river to his rich friends.

Crony capitalism
Yes, Hitler's economics put the big companies in control. But the program was obviously derigiste- under the state, and secondly, with the ultimate goals, successfully achieved, of rebuilding both the economy and the armed forces. Trump, in contrast, is spending all his efforts in strightforward Republican projects of favoring the corporate class generally over the wroking class. The tarriffs, the death of consumer protection, the death of the EPA, the corporate tax cuts- none of that is making America as a whole better let alone great. The nationalist rhetoric expresses Trump's authoritarian instincts, but his heart and whatever else passes for his head is with his corporate cronies, not with workers, or the nation at large.

Tastelessness
Here, Trump is almost in a class of his own. Hitler was a notoriously bad painter, but not entirely talent-less, and led a party that innovated in media, graphics, public displays, and architecture (if of an oppressively bombastic and brutalist style). Trump's style is more classic mobster and nouveau-riche. Both cases betray a lack of empathy and human feeling. As the Greeks and many after them maintained, aethetics are moral. We express ourselves and our vision of humanity through the art we make, support, and appreciate. It is a window into the soul or lack thereof of our leaders to see what they are capable of appreciating. Trump's case is one of edifice complex with a slather of gilt.

Fighting the last war
Hitler took a great deal of his ultimate program from America. We shamelessly swept Native Americans from our fertile prairies. We had slavery. We supported eugenics. He thought that the Ukrainian and Russian breadbasket could be the great fertile frontier for Germany. Too bad that the people already living there had airplanes and tanks! In this case, Hitler was several decades, if not centuries out of date, and paid grievously for it. For all his prowess in harnessing modern technology and economics to a program of national rebuilding and totalitarian control, Hitler was additionally obsessed with the the defeat by France in World War 1. It was all very backward-looking. Trump's errors of history are smaller-bore, but analogous, in that his conceptions, such as they are, are generally decades out of date. Is coal going to come back? That is absurd, not to mention environmentally suicidal. Is manufacturing coming back? Only with robots. He is harping on the nefarious trade policies of China (and Canada!). Well, that ship has mostly sailed. China has developed with our implicit help and support (not to mention funding our prodigious deficits). The remaking of a poverty-stricken communist basket case into a prosperous capitalist nation over the recent decades is the strongest possible compliment to our ideology and generous guidance of the international system. (Though further work remains to make our democracy functional and attractive as an alternative to China and Russia's new model of authoritarian capitalism). We should concentrate on fostering an increasingly rule-based and legitimate international system that keeps China on a responsible and lawful path, rather than introducing instability that only diminishes our current and future standing.

Love for fellow authoritarians
Whether there is a compromising Russian dossier on Trump or not, his love for Putin is unfeigned. G. W. Bush looking into Putin's eyes was bad enough, but this is revolting. Whether Duterte, Jinping, bin Salman, or Jong Un, Trump seems to love them all. Naked power is his elixir and dream. How sad that America's power has been built over the last century on more subtle foundations- the attractiveness of a properous, lawful, and respectful system that other peoples and nations can aspire to rather than cow before. Making America great used to involve opposing dictatorships rather then trying to emulate them.

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Feelings, Nothing More Than Feelings ...

Charles De Gaulle and the greatness of France. Review of his war memoirs.

Fin de siècle France was a mess. After a century of social and political enervation, France was not the powerful country she was over most of Western history. Proust is a fair barometer, obsessed by the distant glories of the noble houses, but met in the present with their dissipated exemplar, Baron de Charlus. World War 1 was billed by some as a romantic rite of purification by blood, but turned out to be throughly ruinous and horrible, leaving the France even more adrift and traumatized, despite having "won".

Naturally, France then failed to face up to the rapidly developing threat from the East, and crumpled igominiously once the Germans came, entering into the quasi-occupation / collaboration that was Vichy. Who was appalled by this? Everyone, even the Germans. And especially Charles de Gaulle, a government minister and military figure who had argued over the prior decade for military mechanization and mobilization, to supplement the static Maginot line. He was incensed that the government chose to surrender and enter into collaboration, instead of spiriting off what and who they could to France's extensive overseas possessions and continuing the war from there (while leaving the French continental population to whatever administration the Germans saw fit to impose).

Seeing no one else stepping up to that task, he took it on himself, powered by the radio broadcasting resources of the BBC. He stands as one of the great statesmen of the century, single-handedly organizing the Free French resistance against what turned out to be the millenarian and cataclysmic Hitlerian regime, leading the French state during the very delicate and difficult post-war period, and also re-organizing the French state (the Fifth Republic) along new lines, within which it still exists today.

At the liberation.

Vain? Yes. Monomanical? Absolutely. A selective memoirist? Yes. A born politician? Evidently. De Gaulle was obsessed with the greatness of France, a phrase that comes up time and again in his memoir. He most potent weapon was the word "No". When Britain wanted to get some payback for all its assiduous help, by, say, acquiring some of the French possessions in the Middle East like Lebanon and Syria, De Gaulle said no, and fought them off. De Gaulle faught tooth and nail for every colonial backwater, and later on for every inch of German territory he could wrest out of the Allies. This "No" rose out of the power De Gaulle developed as head of the French people, nurturing their feelings of pride, and victimization, and hope, through the long years of occupation, and the slow process of liberation.

The most interesting aspect of the book is the careful (if self-adulatory) accounting De Gaulle constantly keeps of how his listeners are feeling- how the spiritual bond between him and troops being reviewed, or crowds hearing his speaches, or the French community at large, is developing. It is feelings which are the object of propaganda, the sinews of civic community, and the foundation of national power. These feelings start off rather tenatively, but via the radio broadcasts, and through slow persistence on the ground, first setting up shop in England, then Brazzaville (then part of the French empire, wrested from Vichy), then Algiers, and finally Paris, De Gaulle gains the hearts of the French, and enters into uncontested administration of post-war France. De Gaulle also carefully took charge of the internal French resistance, by supplying arms, other logistics, and leadership.

A sample quote: De Gaulle, installed back in Paris, receives a communication from Marshal Pétain, earlier the titular head of the Vichy regime, now on his way to imprisonment in Germany, to the effect that Petain would like to negotiate with De Gaulle about the transfer of formal powers of administration in France, i.e. his own surrender, in order to prevent civil unrest.

"But what reply could I make to this communication? In such matters, sentiment could not stand in the face of the rights of the state. The Marshal referred to civil war. If by that he meant the violent confrontation of two factions of the French people, the hypothesis was quite out of the question. For among those who had been his partisans, no one, now, rose up against my power. There was not, on liberated soil, one department, one city, one commune, one official, one soldier, not even one individual who professed to oppose De Gaulle our of loyalty to Pétain. As for reprisals, if certain factions of the resistance might commit retaliatory actions against the people who had persecuted them in collaboration with the enemy,  it devolved upon the public authority to oppose itself to such actions, while insuring the action of justice. In this matter, no compromise was conceivable."

It is an object lesson for our time, in making a nation great again. Firstly, De Gaulle writes very well, in style that is admired in France, and also communicates his clarity of intellect, even in translation. Secondly, he generates increasingly representative advisory councils as he goes along, always taking the temperature of the major threads of French resistance (including the communists whom he loathes). Instead of tearing down state structures, he continually builds up new ones, in preparation for effective administration of ever larger populations and areas. Thirdly, he is never a poodle for foreign powers, standing up for French interests at every point, even when there is no France to stand up for. And fourth, his mind is always on the big picture. There are no scandals in this book, only high policy and monomaniacal focus on the objectives of a healthy France, Europe, and world.

He sees that in order to conduct the resistance from colonial territories, he will have to promise their independence, at least in principle. But getting from there presents enormous problems, especially when the British push Arab and Islamist agitation. De Gaulle ended up being the one to wind up the bitter Algerian war, (1962), selling out the various pied noir (settlers, in current parlance) to grant Algerian independence. When the US dreamt up the United Nations, De Gaulle viewed it with suspicion (and, in view of the ill-fated League of Nations, with some distain), even as he successfully got a seat on the security council. While this council may seem an absurd anachronism today, its original aim was rather evidently to serve as an anti-German league, consisting of all the Allied powers from WW2, particularly those surrounding Germany.

De Gaulle with Willy Brandt. De Gaulle was intent on building good relations with Germany, and integrating Germany into a new pan-European economic and security system.

In addition to his bitterness about Britain's greed, De Gaulle was bitter about the US as well. Roosevelt never took him seriously, and continually tried to circumvent De Gaulle in setting up occupation administrations and in conferring with the "big" allies. It is not entirely clear what the basis of this distaste was. It was putatively about De Gaulle's upstart status, as one who created his own state out of nothing, rather than sitting atop a pre-existing apparatus, not to mention a lack of democratic credentials. It was also about France's weakness- her ignominious military defeat left a sour taste, for sure. There was also France's unproductive treatment of Germany after WW1, first demanding huge reparations that prostrated and embittered Germany, then lacking the backbone to back them up or productively renegotiate them, rather allowing Hitler to thumb his nose at the Versailles regime and embark on his mad buildup to WW2. Or there may have been something else. But De Gaulle got his revenge later on, when he entangled the US in Vietnam, which was one jewel he was exceedingly reluctant to yield out of the colonial empire, especially to a bunch communists. All in all, our relations with France are a lesson on focusing on the current war and the friends you have, not the last one, or the ones you wish you had.

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Vietnam: the Good Fight

Maybe not wise or practical, but morally, Vietnam was justified, especially in hindsight.

It was culturally traumatic, and militarily disastrous. It was a collossal mistake and soure of bitterness for decades. The Vietnam war remains a touchstone of shame and division in the US; a toxic and momentous legacy in Vietnam itself. I saw the first several episodes of Ken Burns's treatment of how we got into that war, and found it very interesting, historically. The documentary's tone was drenched with sadness and tragedy. But it also let some significant facts leak in.

The problem was that the government of South Vietnam was a mess. It was essentially a successor state to the French colonial regime, while the government of the North was the successor of the successful independence fight, led by the communists / Viet Minh. The North capitalized on its credibility with effective PR, and before you know it, the South was overrun with Viet Cong and related insurgents, sympathisers, and agents, especially in the rural areas. And all seem to agree that Ho Chi Minh would have won the re-unification elections that were never held. But the North was not all it seemed. It was also a brutal communist state- a predator state. According to Wikipedia:

"The Socialist Republic of Vietnam, along with China, Cuba, and Laos, is one of the world's four remaining one-party socialist states officially espousing communism. Its current state constitution, 2013 Constitution, asserts the central role of the Communist Party of Vietnam in all organs of politics and society."

This, two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, and four and a half since the end of the American War (Vietnam War). This is a durable system! While Vietnam has lately followed China's lead in adopting limited capitalism, we should not imagine that it is a free or prosperous country. It remains very much in the totalitarian camp.

At the time, the US had just been through a similar war, in Korea, another tough slog defending the South from a blitzkrieg by the North. In that case, the US and the South were successful, and now South Korea has transformed into a happy, rich country, exporting K-Pop off an assembly line that seems to have no limit. Meanwhile, North Korea has remained stable in its way- stably dictatorial and desperately poor.

These are the conditions that the US was consciously defending South Vietnam from, and we were very right to do so. Unfortunately, the French had so thoroughly loused things up, between their import of Catholicism, their moral blindness in denying the Vietnamese what they had themselves had just fought World War 2 to regain, their futile war in Vietnam, and their organization of the South under Emperor Bao Dai and Prime minister Ngo Diem, that propping up the South proved impossible. The US did not want to replicate the colonialism of the French, just to keep the South out of the communist hands. But as it turned out, we would have had to do so and run the whole country, indeed on a rather brutal basis, if we really had wanted to save the situation. The problem was never military, but political- the people of the South were so mistreated by their government that their will to fight, in the myriad ways one has to fight in a civil and a guerrilla war, had dropped to zero.

So I think we should recognize that the US was doing a noble and proper thing in this war. Leaving the South defenseless, or cutting and running after we had gotten involved, would have been expedient, but not morally good. However, in hindsight, those would have been the wisest policies, saving everyone a great deal of death and waste. But that is a different point, both from the moral perspective, and given that hindsight comes too late. We can grant that many people, not least of whom were John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, recognized to some degree the bad, almost futile situation they were getting into. But while we can doubt their wisdom in not following their own analyses with greater discipline and political courage, their moral purposes were not bad ones.

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A Moronic Foreign Policy

Trump accomplishes the opposite of what he claims. But Putin would be so proud!

Is America great again? Apparently, we are getting there very fast, even faster than orginally envisioned, according to our President, who is also a very stable genius, with an extremely large button. But for some reason we are also a world-wide laughing stock, headed by a moron whose erratic spleen is vented daily on Twitter, who can't read more than a few sentences at a time, who lies compulsively, and whose wanna-be mobster management style is pathetically at odds with any trace of professionalism. His vision of greatness seems to be letting corporations and the rich (such as himself) run roughshod over everyone else. How long that will play with his base is anyone's guess. But the worst consequences of Presidential intelligence and temperament (or lack thereof) are, as usual, on foreign policy.

The US has been leader of the free world, and the industrialized world, since World War 2, and arguably since World War 1. We have been the indispensible nation, the leading economy, and the leading culture of the 20th century. We faught a drawn-out and bitter Cold War with the main ideological and geopolitical adversary, communism, which ended with the latter's complete implosion. Russia has reconstituted itself along Tzarist lines, while China has reconstituted itself along similar capitalist/authoritarian lines, but without the personality cult at the top, at least until the current president, Xi Jinping. These former communist countries have learned from each other, and from the West, to arrive at their current blend of corrupt, Orwellian one-party rule, combined with substantial personal and business freedoms. And China is growing at a clip that will make it the largest economy and leading world power in a matter of decades, if not years.

This is the current competition that we face as a governing model- one that is attractive to smaller countries like Pakistan, the Phillipines, Iran, and many others. It is a time of flux, and our leadership, while not as central as in the fight against communism, remains critical if real democracy is to supplant fake democracy. Yet our current administration is pedaling as fast as it can in the wrong direction. It is itself beholden to Russia for its existence, and the President conveys his admiration for Vladimir Putin as often as possible. It embodies precisely the same style of corrupt, authoritarian, nepotistic, and predatory tendencies as the countries we least want to emulate.

In foreign policy, this administration has been sending a lot of mixed signals. This on its face is bad foreign policy, and contributes directly to a decline in global leadership. But it is understandable, as a war plays out within the White House between the President's terrible instincts, and the obvious interests of the US as represented by his hand-picked military policy staff, by a withering State Department, and by whatever other sane people remain. So we have been making enemies on a daily basis. The President promised that he would solve the Middle East, and the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Who knew that meant giving Israel whatever it wants, and giving the finger to any notion of a peace process? The pissing match with North Korea has been both futile and contemptible. We have relinquished whatever slight claim we ever had to leadership on global warming. The sudden attack on Pakistan, while eminently understandable, was also unnecessarily bombastic. The attacks on NATO and Europe, though since reeled back by his handlers, have been very damaging to the notion that the US has anything futher to do with the future of Europe. Mexico? Don't even ask.

In sum, we are retreating from greatness on a daily basis, becoming a smaller, petulent actor on the world stage, at a time when our values are under the most subtle attack, and when competing models of governance have found new footing after the communist debacle. We seem to be rushing to join them, rather than standing for enlightened values of truth, decency, and equality.

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Profiles in Greed

Ulysses S Grant, Carl Icahn, and the character of capitalism.

Listening to a long podcast series about the Civil War, I was struck once again by the unusual character of our 18th president. Every one who knew him agreed that he had no sense for business. Yet he led the US army to a series of strategic victories, and wrote one of the great military autobiographies, and clearly did not lack intelligence. What makes the difference?

To contrast, a recent profile of Carl Icahn, paragon of US business and hero of Donald Trump, paints a character of quite a different color. Highly intelligent, yes, but with the added characteristics of intense greed and minimal scruples- apparently a modern-day Ebenezer Scrooge.

Grant was a forthright person, in love and war. Indeed, the archtypal story of his childhood was about a negotiation for a horse where he told the seller straight out what he was willing to offer, which thus became what he paid. Grant was very good with horses, possibly a mark of a character with less guile than normal. People, with their less scrupulous machinations, were more difficult, which clearly led to many of the disasters of his presidency. Does warfare require guile? On some, very strategic level, yes. But generally, clarity, consistency, attention to detail, and courage are more significant virtues. I don't think his Civil War campaigns were marked by strategic cleverness or deceit, but more by sound military reasoning, siezing strong points, deploying overwhelming numbers, fighting doggedly, and pursuing advantages opportunistically.

Ulysses Grant, colorized

Many of these virtues are relevant to business, but evidently one needs something more to succeed. The profile of Icahn describes in detail how he tried to use his influence with the president and his position as a semi-official economic adviser for personal gain- to rescind a rule requiring oil refiners, one of which Icahn owns, to blend ethanol or else buy offsets on a special market. His refiner could not blend ethanol, so was subject to a quite volatile market in RIN offsets. While unsuccessful, the effort was flagrantly unethical and illustrated Ichan's intense greed, his great skill in manipulating others, and his consistent practice of skirting the law whenever possible and advantageous. What a contrast to Grant! And something of a contrast to our current president as well, who isn't smart enough to be in the same league, and looks up to Icahn as a hero who sits on a far larger pile of money.

There was a brief period in the mid-20th century when business leaders were thought of as civic leaders as well. After the period of the robber barrons and Gilded Age, when the business community had been chastened by the great depression and the spectre of communism, (not to mention bitter union fights), and when the whole country had been brought together by the world wars. There was an ethic of fair dealing and paternalism towards workers, and of viewing the corporation as a public, civic entity, not just there to make money, but to play a supporting role in the American way of life. Perhaps I am looking back with rose colored glasses. At any rate, that period, however amicable, is long over. The captains of our current corporate landscape, especially those in finance, are poor models of any kind of ethics; scofflaws who are fined repeatedly, even in our attenuated enforcement landscape, providing models of greed, entitlement, and callousness.

How anyone could imagine that today's celebrity business leaders would make proper and positive civic leaders, particularly someone as twisted as our current president, is unimaginable (Michael Bloomberg excepted, perhaps). So now we are in an insult contest with North Korea, (among others), at an abysmal level of rhetoric which expresses perfectly the level of intellect and ethics our leader is bringing to the table, but which should surprise no one watching his business career or those of his colleages in the contemporary business world.

• I should be very unhappy right about now.
• Enemies bond groups.
• Francis Crick.
• State's rights, but only for crappy policy.
• Puerto Rico brings to mind.. guns and ammo, of course.

A Cosmos of Fear

Not Your Father's Star Trek Federation: Cixin Liu's dark vision in "The Dark Forest". (Warning: Spoiler alert)

After slacking off most of the book, Luo Ji gets down to the business of saving humanity in the last couple of chapters, even as he is spat upon by his beneficiaries as a false prophet. It has not been easy for the wallfacers project, which Earth developed after learning not only that there are extra-terrestrial aliens, but that they are intent on taking over Earth, and are also listening in to everything humans are doing. The idea was to nominate a few super-people to think and scheme in the privacy of their own minds, where the Trisolarians (aka Alpha Centurians), couldn't listen in. Sure, this involves a total lack of accountability. But on the other hand, it is humanity's only hope for secure strategic innovation. Sadly, Luo Ji's three colleagues have either committed suicide or disgraced themselves with schemes bordering on insanity.

Luo Ji's strategic insight is borne of a shockingly negative view of how intelligent civilizations would operate and relate in the greater cosmos. It incidentally offers a fascinating and neat hypothesis to the question of why we have never detected, let alone been visited by, aliens. The hypothesis is that natural selection operates in a particularly brutal way among rapidly developing, and far-distant civilizations. Communication is essentially impossible due to the distances involved. Yet the technological scope of civilizations that have a billion or two years on us is still remarkable, including missiles made of strong-force matter, vastly harder than regular matter, missiles capable of destroying whole stars, star-based amplification of messages that can easily be heard by the entire galaxy, and manipulation of sub-atomic / string theory dimensions to create protons with special computational and communication properties. The upshot is that a civilization can grow to highly threatening capability before others even know of its existence. All civilizations at some far level  of advancement are mortal threats, in principle, to others they know about, and given some with fewer scruples, some of them will simply extinguish any local threats they learn of, before asking too many questions.

Thus the cosmos becomes a very dark place, where announcing your existence is tantamount to a death sentence, there being far, far more advanced civilizations always listening and on the lookout for either room to grow, or just threats to their own comfort and security. Nothing could be farther from the positive vision of Gene Roddenberry, which, admittedly, was developed out of a social agenda rather than a study of galactic sociology and biological imperatives.

What is one to think of all this? Firstly, much of the science underpinning this vision is fictional, such as star-killing technologies, and matter manipulation at theoretical or inconceivable scales. Secondly, insofar as the model is biological evolution, it takes far too dim a view of the possibilities and benefits of cooperation. Evolution has shown countless times that there is room for cooperation even amidst the struggle to survive, and that cooperation is the only way to gain truly vast benefits, such as from multicellularity, eukaryotic organelle specialization, and human sociality. Thirdly, we also know from our strategic games with existentially destructive weapons, such as is presently playing out with North Korea, that deterrence rather than offense becomes the principal goal among those having achieved such powers. Would deterrence work in cosmic game theory? It is a problem, since, given a star-killing capability that takes many years to travel to its target and presumably could not be detected at launch or perhaps even at close proximity, offense might happen with impunity. (The Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across.)

But perhaps the most persuasive argument is simple morality- that despite the cold logic Cixin Liu develops, intelligent beings of such vast sophistication are probably more likely to wish to learn about other civilizations than to destroy them, whether out of boredom or out of a Prime-Directive kind of respect and interest. It is sort of unimaginable, to me at least, that the explicit goal of any advanced civilization would be to sterilize its environment so completely, even if unadvanced human history does offer that as a common, blood-drenched, theme.

• Toles on the maelstrom.
• Noonan, defending the indefensible.
• Do we want open borders? Not if we want a welfare state and other public goods.