The Dive - 11/1/21
Your monthly compilation of what's what on global politics, American society, and an assortment of odds and ends
Quote of the Month
“It’s one thing to say ‘Oh the sky and the thing, and it’s fragile.’ It’s all true. But what isn’t true, what is unknown, until you do [go to space] is this pillow, there’s this soft blue. Look at the beauty of that color. And it’s so thin and you’re through it in an instant… I hope I never recover from this. I don’t want to lose it.”
- William Shatner, describing his October 12 suborbital spaceflight aboard a Blue Origin New Shepard spacecraft
My recent scribblings:
1. Why the G20’s new corporate tax deal represents the “triumph of Detroit over Davos”
Why you should read it: In the Washington Post, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers explains why the G20’s new global minimum tax on corporations matters.
“For too long, governments have been complicit in the light tax burdens of their companies, competing in a race to the bottom that has steadily lowered corporate tax rates… This agreement ends that race to the bottom. Under the deal, countries representing nearly 95 percent of world GDP agree to tax their multinational companies’ foreign income at a rate of 15 percent. Fifteen percent is a floor, not a ceiling. Countries can of course go higher, but they can no longer lure mobile capital with rock-bottom tax rates.”
“This new global minimum tax is a triumph of Detroit over Davos. Countries have come together to make sure that the global economy can create widely shared prosperity, rather than lower tax burdens for those at the top. By providing a more durable and robust revenue base, the new minimum tax will help pay for the sorts of public investments that are fundamental to economic success in all countries… Workers around the world will also be better off because this historic achievement enables tax burdens to be placed on those most able to pay. For too long, mobile multinational corporations have used accounting gimmicks and clever legal arrangements to avoid taxes, benefiting their shareholders while shifting tax burdens to others.”
Why it matters: “A stronger tax base is central to American prosperity. What determines U.S. competitiveness is not whether we can lower our tax rates faster than other nations, but rather the strength of our fundamentals: the talents and skills of our workforce, the modernity and durability of our infrastructure, and the stability and trustworthiness of our institutions. We need to make important public investments in broadband Internet access, roads and bridges, basic research, climate change mitigation and education, from prekindergarten through the university level… In short, the agreement helps nations forge tax systems that are fit for purpose in the 21st century. It is also a template for much more that needs to be done to tackle the adverse side effects of our modern, global capitalism. Continued bold action will be needed to address other international challenges, including vexing problems of public health, as well as the existential threat of climate change. But Saturday’s agreement is a really good start.”
2. How Chinese censorship went global
Why you should read it: PEN International CEO Suzanne Nossel describes in Foreign Policy how China exports its censorship regime worldwide.
“As the United States and its allies confront the challenge of rising global authoritarianism, they must come to grips with one of its most insidious dimensions: the growing reach of the world’s most powerful autocracy deep inside Western societies. China’s global rise depends upon the world’s readiness to do business with it. That has put a premium on its international reputation. Increasingly, therefore, the CCP sees its continued reign as dependent not only on its long-standing practice of severely restricting speech inside China but also on dictating global narratives about China. Its rulers also fear that critiques that germinate abroad could seep through cracks in the Great Firewall and foster domestic instability.”
“Mounting a response to these incursions is not easy. Creeping Chinese censorship doesn’t fit neatly into a single policy box. It implicates human rights, trade, education, intelligence, media freedom, national security, and more. Many of the encroachments, moreover, implicate private institutions and corporations on sensitive questions of content, viewpoint, and ideology, areas where governments should—and legally must—hesitate to tread… These are reasons for prudence in addressing China’s creeping censorship. They must not be grounds to ignore the problem—or acquiesce to it. Recent incidents including LinkedIn’s pullback from China and the relocation of a Harvard University language program from Beijing to Taiwan may signal that the trade-offs for private institutions are becoming more difficult, making a reckoning over how to handle engagement with Chinese censors ripe.”
Why it matters: “A key step is to better understand Beijing’s aims and methods. Governments, universities, and private foundations should invest in research—both government-sponsored and independent—to unmask and publicize Beijing’s octopus-like reach into so many Western industries and institutions… Economic officials [in democratic nations] should analyze how trade rules and regimens can be invoked to challenge certain Chinese censorship practices as nontariff barriers to free trade. Standards and guidelines should be developed to spell out when the normal give-and-take among business partners, donors and grantees, vendors, and regulators crosses over into government coerciveness… Confronting mounting authoritarianism worldwide is a task that must begin at home.”
3. What Hong Kong, Lebanon, and Afghanistan have in common - and why the loss of basic freedoms in each place matters
Why you should read it: Journalist Kim Ghattas writes in The Atlantic about what the recent, sudden loss of basic liberal freedoms in Hong Kong, Lebanon, and Afghanistan portends for those freedoms worldwide.
“Lebanon and Hong Kong have everything and nothing in common. Both are energetic creative centers of design, film, and music; refuges for those seeking freedom of thought and expression; places situated between East and West, with a culture of emigration… Still, today they seem bound together by a similar feeling of loss—not as the result of a sudden war or a natural disaster, but because of the disintegration of something much more complex… Afghans, Hong Kongers, and Lebanese are all victims today of a form of authoritarian intolerance. The specifics are different for each, but the dislocation within them is perhaps the most visible expression of the disappearance of a world born out of the heady days of the 1990s. In these places, people feel betrayed by their leaders, the world, the West, by their own optimism even as they watch, stunned, the erasure of the life they thought possible after decades of progress—imperfect and uneven progress, but progress nonetheless. I have written about slow, surreptitious transformations, waves of change that wash over societies across decades until people wake up one day and think, What happened to us?”
"Pervasive in all the stories out of Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Hong Kong is a deep sense of loss—of hope and freedom, but also of space for liberal values and ideas, and, more literally, loss of home and of talent… The promised lands where so much was possible are now producing a stream of exiles, squeezing out artists and activists, writers and dissidents, but also nurses, bankers, teachers, and engineers. In a globalized world, the educated can seek a normal life outside their homeland. Exhilarating protests in both Hong Kong and Lebanon in 2019 failed to stop China’s systematic takeover of governance in Hong Kong or to reverse the growing stranglehold that the pro-Iran Shiite militant group and political party Hezbollah has on Lebanon’s politics… The population of Hong Kong has dropped 1.2 percent this year. The initial departures after the 2019 protests were of activists and prodemocracy lawmakers, but subsequent waves have involved middle-class professionals. Lebanon does not yet have official numbers on emigration, but as an indicator, the authorities have been renewing 32,000 Lebanese passports a month since January, up from 17,000 a month for the same period in 2020. By 8 a.m. on most days this summer, Beirut’s passport offices had already received the 400 requests they can process daily. (Regional offices elsewhere have been similarly overwhelmed.) An estimated 40 percent of Lebanon’s doctors and 30 percent of its nurses have left, while the American University of Beirut has lost 15 percent of its faculty. The airlift of more than 100,000 Afghans who did not dare stay to find out whether the Taliban had changed will deprive that country of many of its best and brightest. This exodus will change societies from within in all three places. (The key difference is that Hong Kong remains a wealthy place, while the economies of Afghanistan and Lebanon are crumbling.)"
Why it matters: “As it turns out, democracy is fragile and can come under attack—even in America. In the end, each in its own way, neither Lebanon nor Hong Kong was able to withstand being smothered by its authoritarian big brother. Afghanistan today, a result of invasion and nation building, is perhaps more a function of American delusion, but the chain of events that led to the Taliban’s August 15 takeover of Kabul also originates in the optimism of the 1990s, when the U.S. believed itself invincible. Few could conceive then that the mess of a faraway wreck of a country could impinge on the inexorable progress toward democracy… As American troops withdrew from Afghanistan, President Joe Biden said that the goal ‘was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralized democracy’ in the country. But democratic spaces, where pluralism, liberal values, and freedom of thought can flourish, are crucial. These spaces can exist and even expand in imperfect countries such as Afghanistan and Lebanon. Biden’s Summit for Democracy in December should not be limited to participants from democracies but should include people working to uphold governance and pluralism in countries where democracy is threatened and pushing to maintain freedom where it is disappearing—because if everyone leaves places that are in turmoil, who rebuilds them?
“On days when I despair at the state of Lebanon, or the future of Hong Kong, I think of the Berlin Wall. For 40 years, those living in its shadow, on either side, could not imagine a life beyond the division it enforced, even while many strove to bring it down. Until, one day, the wall fell. And there was an opportunity for a new world. Then, we were naive about the inevitability of the victory of liberal values. We must learn from those mistakes as we work to stop more walls from going up and the darkness from spreading.
4. Why “global governance” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be
Why you should read it: Francis Fukuyama pithily dismantles the notion that more global governance will solve the pressing worldwide problems like climate change for his site American Purpose.
“The failure of governments around the world to take the measures necessary to mitigate and adapt to climate change have led many people, especially younger ones, to assert that nation-states have become obsolete and must be replaced by a radically different approach… There are several reasons for thinking that nation-states will continue to be central. The first has to do with power. States are all about concentrating and making use of power. If they are liberal democracies, they not only deploy power but have institutions like the rule of law and democratic accountability to limit and control that power. As Max Weber argued, a state exercises a monopoly of legitimate force over a defined territory…. The problem with all existing supranational organizations, from the United Nations to the European Union, is that they are too weak to enforce rules on their members. This weakness is rooted in the unwillingness of the states that make them up to cede real power to the supranational body. For all of the EU’s acquis communautaires, when push comes to shove (as in the euro and migrant crises) it has no ability to compel its member states to obey its rules. It has no army or police force that can arrest recalcitrant officials or impose penalties when its rules are violated.”
“There are further reasons why such a supranational authority is unlikely to emerge. All political institutions have to be underpinned by a common set of agreed-on norms and a common identity. Planetary governance would require a ‘planetary consciousness’ that prioritizes global problems over other goods, like economic growth, job loss, or power relative to other nations. For better or worse, human beings tend to show the greatest loyalty to those closest to them like friends and family. As political systems have developed, the circle of trust has expanded and now encompasses the large units we call nation-states. But a sense of global citizenship remains limited to a very small circle of educated elites, mostly resident in rich Western countries, who have the luxury of tolerating the economic disruptions that would accompany strong climate action.”
Why it matters: “…dreaming about a future form of supranational governance to deal with climate change is a waste of time and a diversion from more realistic improvements to the way that we govern ourselves today at a national level… We need international cooperation on climate, but the actors will remain the world’s existing nation-states. And we need to think concretely about how to change national-level incentives they face, rather than imagining a future in which a new global consciousness suddenly takes hold.”
5. How anti-nuclear environmentalists hamstring the fight against climate change
Why you should read it: In Foreign Policy, Breakthrough Institute executive director Ted Nordhaus notes that the world’s current energy crunch results from unrealistic promises from many green activists about renewable energy sources like wind and solar combined with campaigns to shutter existing nuclear power plants and prevent the construction of new ones.
“For years, the proponents of wind and solar energy have promised us a green future with electricity too cheap to meter, new energy infrastructure with little environmental impact on the land, and deep cuts in carbon emissions. But despite the rapid growth of renewable energy, that future has yet to materialize. Instead, many of the places that are furthest along in transitioning to renewable energy are today facing a crisis of power shortages, sky-high electricity prices, and flat or rising carbon emissions… The proximate cause of all these crises has been surging natural gas prices as the world recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic. But the underlying problem is that despite huge bets on renewable energy over the last several decades, California, Britain, and Germany have chosen fossil fuels over carbon-free nuclear energy to backstop their electrical systems.”
To speak of these failures is often seen by green energy advocates as an attack on renewable energy. It is not. There is no reason wind, solar, and other sources of renewable energy can’t play a significant role in modern electrical grids and the fight against climate change. Far more dubious, though, is the notion that wind and solar energy might be the sole or even primary source of energy for modern economies. The problem, in other words, is not that the countries now experiencing energy crises have invested considerable effort in scaling renewable energy. It is that they have done so largely to the exclusion of all other low-carbon energy technologies—and exacerbated this problem by simultaneously shutting down nuclear power plants.”
Why it matters: “Ultimately, a future with a lot of nuclear energy—especially next-generation technology—is also one that can accommodate a lot of wind and solar. A future that forecloses the option of zero-carbon nuclear energy is one that, one way or another, is likely to require a lot of gas and even coal. In the face of its escalating energy crisis, Britain has just announced a crash program to build over dozen new nuclear reactors by 2035. Policymakers and green advocates across the West are facing, or soon will face, a similar choice: build more nuclear or accept a continuing and significant role for fossil fuels for many decades. The current wave of electricity crises worldwide is what happens when they pretend that choice need not be made.”
6. How climate change threatens to make the cradle of human civilization uninhabitable
Why you should read it: In a multimedia article, Washington Post reporters Louisa Loveluck and Mustafa Salim detail how climate change and dam projects have left uninhabitable the swathes of southern Iraq where human civilization first took root.
“No one lives here [in Haddam, Iraq] anymore. The mud-brick buildings are empty, just husks of the human life that became impossible on this land. Wind whips through bone-dry reeds. For miles, there’s no water to be seen… Dozens of farming villages are abandoned, but for an isolated family here and there. The intrusion of saltwater is poisoning lands that have been passed for generations from fathers to sons. The United Nations recently estimated that more than 100 square miles of farmland a year are being lost to desert… Years of below-average rainfall have left Iraqi farmers more dependent than ever on the dwindling waters of the Tigris and Euphrates. But upstream, Turkey and Iran have dammed their own waterways in the past two years, further weakening the southern flow, so a salty current from the Persian Gulf now pushes northward and into Iraq’s rivers. The salt has reached as far as the northern edge of Basra, some 85 miles inland… Temperatures in Iraq topped a record 125 degrees this summer with aid groups warning that drought was limiting access to food, water and electricity for 12 million people here and in neighboring Syria. With Iraq warming faster than much of the globe, this is a glimpse of the world’s future.”
"Across marshes often hailed as the original Garden of Eden and on the baking lands beyond, inhabitants now face a choice. ‘Do we stay or do we go?’ sighed Raad al-Ghali, a buffalo herder in the historic marshland of Chibayish while recently sheltering in the shadow beside his tent… Nearby fields have turned brown. Orchards and roses have disappeared, and the palm trees are dying slowly. In the border town of Siba, water for irrigation is so salty it is poisoning the harvest… Iraq’s climate woes have exacerbated shortages in everything from food to electricity generation. Fisheries have been depleted. In the country’s north, wheat production is expected to decline by 70 percent, aid groups say. In provinces without access to rivers, families are spending ever larger portions of their monthly income on drinking water.”
Why it matters: “Iraq’s average temperature has risen by 4.1 degrees Fahrenheit since the end of the 19th century, according to Berkeley Earth, double the speed of the Earth as a whole. Climate scientists warn that the extreme temperatures facing places like southern Iraq are a small taste of what will follow elsewhere.”
7. Why Russia’s hand in the Middle East is weak, actually
Why you should read it: Carnegie Endowment scholars Frederic Wehrey and Andrew Weiss argue in Foreign Affairs that Russia’s power and influence in the Middle East have been greatly exaggerated.
“By some metrics, the Russian role in the Middle East is formidable. Moscow deployed military forces and mercenaries to war-wracked Syria and Libya, confirming that it excels at filling power vacuums left by Washington. The Kremlin has also used a variety of other means to insert itself into the fabric of North Africa, the Levant, and the Gulf. It sells arms to Arab states such as Algeria, Egypt, and Iraq and works closely with the Saudis on managing global oil markets through the OPEC Plus arrangement. Russian and Israeli leaders tout their close people-to-people ties while working behind the scenes to avoid tripping over each other in Syria… Yet the strategic impact of Russian influence in the Middle East is more modest than many assume. If one looks a little closer at the Kremlin’s forays into the region, its disappointments and failures soon become apparent. This is due to the limitations of Moscow’s policy toolkit and, especially, the complexities of the Middle East’s political landscape. Despite being plied with Russian attention, regional actors hardly behave as Russia’s docile clients. Instead, they have shown an uncanny ability to frustrate its ambitions—a dynamic that is often overlooked by Western strategists.”
“This limited influence reflects the fact that Russia’s policy tools are ill suited to address the daunting problems facing the region. These include the COVID-19 pandemic’s fallout, as well as more deep-seated afflictions such as authoritarian rule, corruption, and the unmet demands of increasingly youthful populations for economic opportunity. And although the United States also lacks easy answers for these generational challenges, at least it has the virtue of approaching the region through a more holistic, rights-centered framework, especially under the administration of President Joe Biden. In Libya, for example, citizens still note with appreciation Washington’s postrevolutionary efforts to nurture civil society, education, a free media, and local governance, which stands in sharp contrast to Russia’s profit-centered focus on arms, infrastructure, and energy—to say nothing of credible UN allegations of war crimes committed by its Wagner Group mercenaries.”
Why it matters: “No one should harbor any illusions about the Kremlin’s capacity for malfeasance in this troubled region. But U.S. interests in the Middle East are best advanced by a sober, clear-eyed appraisal of the specific challenges posed by Russian activity—not breathless alarmism. In particular, Washington should recognize that in many instances, Moscow will fall short because of its limited capabilities and the ability of local actors to confound its plans… Ultimately, however, U.S. assets in the region are still unrivaled: the United States’ political and economic influence, hard power, soft power, embrace of multilateral diplomacy, and leadership of a rules-based global order continue to give it the upper hand over all its rivals. U.S. policymakers should focus on bolstering those advantages rather than inflating the threat posed by Moscow.”
8. “How corruption killed Lebanon"
Why you should read it: For The New York Times Magazine, reporter Rana Abouzeid lays out how Lebanon’s corrupt political system sowed the country’s demise.
"The Beirut explosion was one of the ugliest manifestations of everything that has gone wrong with Lebanon since the end of the 15-year civil war in 1990, an indictment of a postwar system that has enabled a handful of politicians to dominate and exploit every facet of the state. The country has collapsed under the burden of concurrent crises that were decades in the making: a financial and economic implosion, grinding political deadlock, the Aug. 4 blast… The Lebanese are now struggling to survive one of the world’s worst economic meltdowns of the past 150 years, a crisis the World Bank has called a ‘deliberate depression' perpetrated by a feckless ruling class. More than 70 percent of the population of a once-middle-income country now lives in poverty. The local currency has lost more than 90 percent of its value. In 2019, the Lebanese woke up one day to learn that the banks had locked them out of their accounts, leaving depositors unable to retrieve their rapidly depreciating funds. Triple-digit hyperinflation has taken hold. Food prices alone have increased 550 percent since 2019. Unemployment is soaring, businesses are closing and the country is hemorrhaging tens of thousands of people to emigration… The country has been driven to bankruptcy by a handful of politicians, most of whom began as sectarian warlords. The power-sharing agreement that ended Lebanon’s civil war produced a cross-sectarian political system — much like the one the United States imported into Iraq after the 2003 invasion — that has looted the state and weakened its institutions.”
“The power-sharing deal that ended the civil war is known as the Taif Agreement. Among other things, the Taif Agreement (named after the Saudi city where it was negotiated) divided Parliament, the cabinet and senior civil-service positions equally between Christians and Muslims (eliminating a prewar Christian advantage). This sectarianism was supposed to be temporary, but more than three decades after the agreement was signed, it is still deeply entrenched, and some of the Taif Agreement’s many other provisions, like decentralization and the creation of a Senate, have not been implemented…There’s Nabih Berri, the leader of the Shiite Amal Movement militia turned party, who has been parliamentary speaker since 1992. The Druse chieftain and former warlord Walid Jumblatt, head of the Progressive Socialist Party. The Maronite Christians’ Samir Geagea, the leader of the Lebanese Forces militia turned party. And Geagea’s wartime and peacetime rival, the current president, Michel Aoun, a general who commanded part of the Lebanese Army that split along sectarian lines during the war. And finally, the Sunni billionaire businessman and former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. ‘He was the godfather,’ [Hussein el-Husseini, former parliamentary speaker and architect of the Taif Agreeement] said. Hariri was assassinated in 2005 and succeeded by his son, Saad, the political heir of the Future Movement party. A company of five plus one — Hezbollah, which first entered government in 2005.”
Why it matters: “The next parliamentary elections are scheduled for spring 2022. Civil rights organizations and activists involved in the October [2019] Revolution are mobilizing to stand for seats, but first they must unite and agree to a common platform. They face a system that changes the electoral law ahead of every poll, by amending the size and boundaries of electorates, for instance, to suit the main political parties. We are champions in gerrymandering, really champions,” [Ziyad] Baroud, the former interior minister, told me. Still, the longtime electoral-reform campaigner believes that this time, ‘whatever the law, change is coming,’ and that the cry of the October Revolution, ‘All of them means all of them,’ should really be ‘All of us means all of us.’”
9. Why blue-collar workers gave up on social justice
Why you should read it: New York Times editorial board member Farah Stockman relates how and why blue-collar workers with union jobs slowly but surely gave up on social justice and progressive politics.
“I first met Shannon [Mulcahy] in 2017, shortly after her bosses announced that Rexnord, the bearing factory where she worked, was shutting down and moving to Mexico and Texas. I followed her for seven months as the plant closed down around her, watching her agonize about whether she should train her Mexican replacement or stand with her union and refuse… One of the biggest takeaways from the experience was that some of the most consequential battles in the fight for social justice took place on factory floors, not college campuses. For many Americans without college degrees, who make up two-thirds of adults in the country, the labor movement, the civil rights movement and the women’s liberation movement largely boiled down to one thing: access to well-paying factory jobs.”
“When you follow a dying factory up close, it’s easy to see how globalization left a growing group of people competing for a shrinking pool of good factory jobs. Affirmative action becomes more fraught as good jobs get scarce and disappear… John was a die-hard union man who came from a long line of union men. His grandfather and great-grandfather had been coal miners. His father-in-law had been an autoworker. To John, factories were places where the working class fought pitched battles with the company for higher pay and shorter working hours. He traced his identity to the miners and steelworkers who had been beaten, arrested and even killed for demanding an eight-hour workday and a day off every week. That’s why nothing stuck in John’s craw like the phrase ‘white privilege.’ The words implied that his people had been handed a middle-class life simply because they were white. In John’s mind, his people had not been given dignity, leisure time, safer working conditions or decent wages just because they were white; they had fought for those things — and some of them had died in the fight.”
Why it matters: “The fate of our democracy does not depend on them the way it hinges on voters like Shannon, Wally and John. The American experiment is unraveling. The only way to knit it back together is for decision makers in this country, nearly all of whom have college degrees, to reconnect with those of the working class, who make up a majority of voters.”
Odds and Ends
How scientists used lasers to remove the grey “biofilm” that disfigured the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC…
How researchers precisely dated the Viking occupation of Newfoundland to 1021 CE with the help of a rare cosmic-ray bombardment…
How veterinarians at Minnesota’s Como Zoo sedated a giraffe for surgery…
Two significant recent archaeological finds: a cache of Roman statues in southeast England and a mass grave of Crusaders in Sidon, Lebanon…
Obituary for the late, great Alan Kalter, voice of The Late Show with David Letterman…
Music of the Month
“Broomsticks,” a jaunty little witchcraft-themed number from the Pretty Reckless’ recent album Death by Rock and Roll.
A 2020 cover of Soundgarden’s “The Day I Tried to Live” from Sevendust.
“The Number of the Beast,” the title track from Iron Maiden’s 1982 album.
Image of the Month
