Quote of the Month
“Humans had perhaps a million years to get used to fires a thing and as an idea. Between the time a man got his fingers burned on a lightning-struck tree until another man carried some inside a cave and found it kept him warm, maybe a hundred thousand years, and from there to the blast furnaces of Detroit — how long?
“And now a force was in hand how much more strong, and we hadn’t had time to develop the means to think, for man has to have feelings and then words before he can come close to thought and, in the past at least, that has taken a long time.”
- John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America, p. 23
My Recent Writing:
What I’m Reading:
1. Why American power will endure
Why you should read it: International relations scholar G. John Ikenberry argues in Foreign Affairs that predictions of America’s relative decline discount the nation’s underlying strengths and therefore its ability to shape world politics.
"For over a century, people around the world have lived through an American era: a period dominated by U.S. power, wealth, institutions, ideas, alliances, and partnerships. But many now believe this long epoch is drawing to a close. The U.S.-led world, they insist, is giving way to something new—a post-American, post-Western, postliberal order marked by great-power competition and the economic and geopolitical ascendance of China… But in truth, the United States is not foundering. The stark narrative of decline ignores deeper world-historical influences and circumstances that will continue to make the United States the dominant presence and organizer of world politics in the twenty-first century. To be sure, no one knows the future, and no one owns it. The coming world order will be shaped by complex, shifting, and difficult-to-grasp political forces and by choices made by people living in all parts of the world. Nonetheless, the deep sources of American power and influence in the world persist. Indeed, with the rise of the brazen illiberalism of China and Russia, these distinctive traits and capacities have come more clearly into view… The struggle between the United States and its rivals China and Russia is a contest between two alternative logics of world order. The United States defends an international order it has led for three-quarters of a century—one that is open, multilateral, and anchored in security pacts and partnerships with other liberal democracies. China and Russia seek an international order that dethrones Western liberal values—one that is more hospitable to regional blocs, spheres of influence, and autocracy. The United States upholds an international order that protects and advances the interests of liberal democracy. China and Russia, each in its own way, hope to build an international order that protects authoritarian rule from the threatening forces of liberal modernity. The United States offers the world a vision of a postimperial global system. The current leaders of Russia and China increasingly craft foreign policies rooted in imperial nostalgia.”
“This struggle between liberal and illiberal world orders is an echo of the great contests of the twentieth century. In key earlier moments—after the conclusions of World War I, World War II, and the Cold War—the United States advanced a progressive agenda for world order. Its success rested somewhat on the blunt fact of American power, the country’s unrivaled economic, technological, and military capacities. The United States will remain at the center of the world system in part because of these material capabilities and its role as a pivot in the global balance of power. But the United States continues to matter for another reason: the appeal of its ideas, institutions, and capacities for building partnerships and alliances makes it an indispensable force in the years ahead. This has always been, and can remain, the secret of its power and influence… No other state has enjoyed such a comprehensive set of advantages in dealing with other countries. This is the reason that the United States has had such staying power for so long, despite periodic failures and disappointments. In today’s contest over world order, the United States should draw upon these advantages and its long history of building liberal order to again offer the world a global vision of an open and rules-based system in which people can work freely together to advance the human condition.”
Why it matters: “What will keep the United States at the center of world politics is its capacity to do better. The country has never fully lived up to its liberal ideals, and when it commends these ideals to others, it looks painfully hypocritical. But hypocrisy is a feature, not a bug, of liberal order, and need not be an impediment to making the liberal order better. The order over which the United States has presided since World War II has moved the world forward, and if people around the globe want a better world order that supports greater cooperation and social and economic advancement, they will want to improve on this U.S.-led system, not dispense with it.”
2. How Modi broke India
Why you should read it: In Foreign Policy, historian Ramachandra Guha describes how Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has dismantled his country’s democracy and constructed a cult of personality in its place.
“India claims to be the largest democracy in the world, and its ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), claims to be the largest political organization in the world (with a membership base even greater than that of the Chinese Communist Party). Since May 2014, both the BJP and the government have been in thrall to the wishes—and occasionally the whims—of a single individual, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. An extraordinary personality cult has been constructed around Modi, its manifestations visible in state as well as party propaganda, in eulogies in the press, in adulatory invocations of his apparently transformative leadership by India’s leading entrepreneurs, celebrities, and sports stars… Before Modi came to power in May 2014, India had in all respects a longer-lasting democracy than when Erdogan came to power in Turkey, Orban in Hungary, and Bolsonaro in Brazil. The 2014 general election was India’s 16th national vote, in a line extending almost unbroken from 1952. Regular, and likewise mostly free and fair, elections have also been held to form the legislatures of different Indian states.As the historian Sunil Khilnani has pointed out, many more people have voted in Indian elections than in older and professedly more advanced democracies such as the United Kingdom and the United States. India before 2014 also had an active culture of public debate, a moderately free press, and a reasonably independent judiciary. It was by no means a perfect democracy—but then no democracy is.”
“From July 2019 to January 2021, the world’s largest, oldest, and richest democracies were all led by charismatic populists with authoritarian tendencies. Boris Johnson and Trump are now both gone, yet Modi remains. Even while they were in office, it seemed to me that Modi was more dangerous to the interests of his country than Johnson and Trump were to theirs. The reasons for this are both structural as well as biographical. As the preceding discussion would have made clear, democratic institutions intended to act as a check on the abuse of power by politicians are far more compromised in India than in the United Kingdom or the United States. In the U.K., the press, Parliament, and the civil service all sought to thwart Johnson’s authoritarian tendencies. As for the United States, even if Trump sought to pack the Supreme Court, lower courts remained independent; so did the tax authorities and other regulatory institutions. Influential sections of the press did not capitulate to the cult of Trump; the universities remained crucibles of freedom and dissent. Even the person Trump chose as his vice president acted to endorse the results of the 2020 election, in consonance with the U.S. Constitution and in defiance of his boss… And as an individual, too, Modi represents a far greater threat to his country’s democratic future than Johnson or Trump ever could. For one, he has been a full-time politician for far longer than they have been, with much greater experience in how to manipulate public institutions to serve his own purposes. Second, he is far more committed to his political beliefs than Johnson and Trump are to theirs. While Johnson and Trump are consumed almost wholly by vanity and personal glory, Modi is part narcissist but also part ideologue. He lives and embodies Hindu majoritarianism in a much more thoroughgoing manner than Trump lives white supremacy or Johnson embodies xenophobic Little Englandism. Third, in the enactment and fulfillment of his ideological dream, Modi has as his instrument the RSS, whose organizational strength and capacity for resource mobilization far exceed any right-wing organization in the U.K. or the United States. Indeed, if it lasts much longer, the Modi regime may come to be remembered as much for its evisceration of Indian pluralism as for its dismantling of Indian democracy.”
Why it matters: “The cult of Modi the Superman, like the cult of Indira the Superwoman that preceded it, shows that [B.R.] Ambedkar was right to be worried about the dangers to Indian democracy of the religious practice of bhakti, or blind hero worship. The ruling party’s presentation of Modi as Hindu messiah-cum-avenging angel falls on fertile soil. One would not expect the population of a free country to be so cravenly worshipful of a living individual—but, tragically, they are… History offers us a few lessons. One is that—as the cases of Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Mussolini, Putin, and others all show—personality cults are always bad for the country that fosters and encourages them. Historians have passed their judgment on the damage that the cult of Indira Gandhi did to Indian democracy and nationhood. The day will come, though perhaps not in my lifetime, when historians will pass a similar judgment on the effects on India’s happiness and well-being of the cult of Modi.”
3. Why economic development represents the best strategy for climate resilience
Why you should read it: Also in Foreign Policy, Ted Nordhaus, Vijaya Ramachandran, and Patrick Brown make the case that only economic development can provide the necessary societal resilience in the face of a warming planet.
“Climate adaptation—the actions that societies take to protect their populations from extreme weather, such as storms, floods, droughts, heat waves, and cold snaps—works. It includes all the things people in rich countries take for granted: well-constructed buildings that withstand disasters, dikes and dams that protect from floods, air conditioning and cold storage for food and medicines, early warning systems, well-equipped first responders, and evacuation routes along well-paved roads… Even a cursory look at the data makes abundantly clear that development has saved millions of lives over the past century. The average resident of Earth today is more than 90 percent less likely to die from floods, droughts, storms, or other extreme climate events today than the 1920s—and that’s almost entirely the result of a phenomenal decline in the number of people living in poverty without access to such things as safe housing, functioning infrastructure, and good institutions.”
“Increased resilience to natural disasters of all sorts is strongly correlated with growing global wealth and improvements in infrastructure, technology, governance, and social services. As those stupendous death tolls from pre-development China and India make clear, the primary beneficiaries have been the globe’s poorest. That is especially true of recent decades, as falling poverty rates, rapid urbanization, and better communications technologies have radically improved the disaster resilience of most populations around the world… It is true that climate change can make some aspects of climate extremes worse. A flood, a heat wave, or a hurricane might be intensified by climate change. But in almost all cases, an extreme climate event would still be an extreme event without climate change—it just wouldn’t be quite as extreme. For instance, global warming likely made the high-profile heat wave that struck India in the spring of 2022 about 1 degree Celsius hotter than it would have been otherwise. Warming boosted rainfall from Hurricane Katrina by 4 to 9 percent and from Hurricane Ian by about 10 percent… In short, most of the costs associated with present-day climate disasters are due to natural climate variability, not climate change, and are determined by economic development and societal resilience, not the intensity of the climate hazard. For these reasons, the basic formula for adapting to climate change is the same as the formula that has allowed the world to radically reduce the human costs of climate-related disasters over the last century: more wealth, infrastructure, and technology.”
Why it matters: “There are many good reasons to attempt to limit global warming. But precisely how much the Earth warms will not be the main determinant of how climate change will impact human societies. Nor will focusing on wealth, development, infrastructure, and technology preclude a shift away from greenhouse emissions, as many activists would have us believe. To the contrary, there is very good reason to believe that economic growth and development over the rest of this century will be much less carbon-intensive than it was over the last century… Stopping global warming will require the world to cease burning fossil fuels entirely at some point. But a wealthier, more resilient, and more equitable world will have both more time and more resources to do so. The remarkable and largely untold story of adaptation to climate extremes by development shows how.”
4. Why Europe can’t separate trade and politics any more
Why you should read it: Financial Times columnist Martin Sandbu contends that the European Union can no longer afford to allow commercial considerations to solely determine its trade policy.
“For all the jibes about it being a protectionist bloc, the EU has long been an important force for deeper international trade. The cross-border integration of its own members’ economies is the deepest in history… It has achieved this by giving negotiating power to an executive — the European Commission — as unencumbered by national vested interests as one can realistically get, and by isolating trade policy from non-commercial considerations. But that very success means the EU is all the more challenged by a world where this isolation is no longer possible… The EU has recognised that a narrowly commercial trade agenda can undermine its priorities, and has also belatedly discovered the muscle that comes with a large and open market.”
“It’s against this backdrop that German chancellor Olaf Scholz went to China last week, business delegation in tow. The question the trip raises elsewhere in Europe is whether Germany has learnt to distinguish its own narrow commercial interests from Europe’s broader strategic ones… Scholz does not support “decoupling” from China. At the same time, he recognises strategic imperatives, promising to ‘dismantle one-sided dependencies.’ This is a step forward, and would help the German chancellor catch up with his voters, half of whom already think the country should reduce economic co-operation with China, while two-thirds reject economic interests taking precedence over human rights.
Why it matters: “The EU can no longer trade in isolation from strategic imperatives. Neither should the end of strategic naïveté be an excuse for withdrawal. Europe needs to transcend that old dichotomy and embrace the rather un-European approach of using trade policy to pursue political objectives.”
5. No reason to panic over a “desperate” Putin
Why you should read it: For Foreign Affairs, Emory University professor Dan Reiter maintains that even desperate leaders - as Russian President Vladimir Putin may well be in Ukraine - do not tend to risk catastrophe in gambles to resurrect their strategic positions.
“National leaders who are losing wars sometimes resort to desperate gambles. Defeat or even lack of victory might threaten their hold on power, and they are sometimes willing to take daring or outside-the-box moves to try to turn things around. This is the great fear about the war in Ukraine: if Russian President Vladimir Putin judges that his back is up against the wall, he may decide to take catastrophic action… The good news is that history suggests that Putin is unlikely to fulfill the West’s worst fears. Some leaders in losing wars have taken dramatic actions to stave off defeat. But often they have decided against the most drastic options, for either political or strategic reasons. Putin, like other leaders before him, will take into account whether his actions might actually help him win, and he may be reluctant to contemplate moves that could expose Russia to even greater losses or, worse, undermine his rule at home. Of course, there are still reasons to worry about a desperate Putin. But by examining how leaders tend to behave in these situations, the United States and its partners and allies can arrive at a more considered assessment of Putin’s threats and frame their own policies accordingly.”
“The situation that Putin now finds himself in is hardly new. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, many leaders fighting losing wars have attempted to somehow snatch victory from the jaws of defeat… Two things are clear about these military gambles. First, they are usually built on a theory of victory. States will engage in such a move only if there is a logic by which it might actually turn the war around. In ordering Germany’s last-gasp offensive in the Ardennes region of Belgium in December 1944, Adolf Hitler hoped to shatter the American line and force U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt to consider peace talks. Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s SCUD missile attacks on Israeli cities during the 1990–1991 Gulf War were intended to split off Arab states from the UN coalition… Second, just because a war is going badly does not mean that everything is on the table. Despite being backed into a corner, leaders may rule out some options. They may be wary of a move that might incur outsize strategic costs, even if it might turn the tide on the battlefield. In the Korean War, for example, China’s November 1950 intervention posed grave risks to the U.S. military position there. Yet the Truman administration ruled out direct attacks on Chinese territory because the risks of escalation with a nuclear-armed Soviet Union were too high."
Why it matters: “…the West can afford to turn down the panic meter a bit. Just as fears of Saddam’s possible desperate actions rightly did not dissuade us from liberating Kuwait in 1991, fears of Putin’s desperation should not stop us from supporting Ukraine. Western leaders should continue their current course of action, which is to provide a steady supply of military aid to Ukraine, seek ways to isolate Russian diplomatically and economically, and keep NATO troops out of combat, knowing that this course allows Ukraine to fight, survive, and make headway without creating significant risks that the West’s worst fears might come true. Just as the United States should be careful not to needlessly provoke or provide a pretext for Russian escalation, there is also no need to seek peace at any price… The United States should not let exaggerated fears of desperate action dissuade it from advancing national interests. The West’s enemies sometimes wish to feign desperation or madness to frighten it into inaction. Let us not accommodate them.”
6. How Masih Alinejad became the Iranian regime’s enemy number one
Why you should read it: The Atlantic writer Graeme Wood profiles Iranian-American activist Masih Alinejad and details her struggle against the religious regime in Tehran as well as the challenges she faces with the Iranian diaspora’s elites.
“The Iranian government wants to kill [Alinejad] because for the past eight years, she has been the most prominent champion of the right of Iranian women to forgo the hijab, or headscarf. She fled Iran in 2009, and since 2015, she has been a presenter for Voice of America, a U.S. government media service. (She makes about $80,000 a year, in a job without benefits or insurance.) But her main activity is on social media. Her accounts are the preeminent clearinghouse for videos of the countrywide protests that have erupted, and barely let up, since September, when the 22-year-old Iranian Mahsa Amini was arrested for violating rules on modest female dress. For this sin, Amini was beaten to death in police custody. Now videos surface daily of women strutting around with flowing hair—or beaten into crumpled, bloody messes by government thugs. Many of these videos emerge through Alinejad, who solicits and receives them, even though the government considers anyone who sends them enemies of the state.”
“She is caught between a regime that hates her and a diaspora whose elite isn’t eager to give her credit for anything. ‘When the protests started, Iranian-studies scholars were silent at first,” Kelly J. Shannon, a historian at Florida Atlantic University, told me. “Then when they spoke up, one of the first things they did was criticize Alinejad.’ As a feminist, Shannon said, she found it odd that a woman campaigning for women’s rights had risen so high on the list of priorities for critique. [University of Texas professor Nahid] Siamdoust called Alinejad a ‘pawn’ of ‘neo-imperialists’ like Mike Pompeo, with whom Alinejad once posed for a photograph. An open letter from hundreds of other Iranians, upset that The New Yorker called her the ‘leader”’of the protests, added another Trump senior official, John Bolton, to the list of unacceptable people Alinejad has allied herself with. (Bolton, the letter said, led the ‘charge to destroy women’s reproductive rights in the United States.’) [Columbia University professor Hamid] Dabashi allowed that Alinejad had once mattered, but ‘she lost that grace when she stood next to Mike Pompeo and sided with imposing crippling economic sanctions that have devastated an entire nation without any effect on the real criminals who run the country.’ For his part, Dabashi has a long and unblemished record of apologizing for these ‘real criminals’ and despising America and all its works, whether authored by Pompeo or not.”
Why it matters: “‘I think back to how lonely I was,’ she told me, her voice quavering slightly. ‘Eight years. Every single day. I was alone, uploading videos from inside Iran, rejecting forced hijab, and practicing civil disobedience.’ Where, she asked, were her critics? ‘I went by myself, on my own, to the Iranian embassies to practice civil disobedience.’ The critics went to the embassies too—not to protest, but to vote in sham elections, and cooperate in the fiction that an oppressive regime could be reformed. Demolishing that fiction, she said, is precisely the goal of the protests that her critics now so fervently support. ‘For these people, as soon as Michelle Obama and Ellen [DeGeneres] say something is bad, then it’s bad,’ Alinejad told me, bitterly. ‘But when I was saying that—when they put my brother in prison, when they tried to kill me—that was not so bad. Of course they hate me. I was right.’”
7. How nuclear power plant shutdowns pump up carbon emissions
Why you should read it: Breakthrough Institute experts Guido Nunez-Mujica and Seaver Wang crunch the numbers and find that the shutdown of nuclear power plants in wealthy countries releases carbon emissions equivalent to the combined annual emissions of 37 African nations with a total population of 455 million.
“As wealthy countries pressure developing nations to set stronger climate targets and avoid any new fossil fuel projects, they should consider their own impact on the global climate… Premature shutdowns of nuclear power plants in developed countries, for instance, have caused additional annual carbon emissions that now total 138.1 million metric tons (Mt) of CO2 equivalents a year. This yearly carbon footprint is nearly equal to the combined annual emissions from 37 African countries, with a total population of 455 million people.”
“In total, since 2012, the carbon costs of nuclear phaseout policies in developed countries add up to about 800 million tons of CO2. To place that number into context, that’s enough CO2 emissions to melt 2400 km2 of Arctic summer sea ice, plus or minus another 240 km2. It equates to a full two years of nationwide fossil CO2 emissions from a medium-sized country like Turkey, Australia, or the United Kingdom, or more than 0.1 parts per million of the 416 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the planet’s atmosphere… Why do shutdowns of nuclear power plants increase a country's fossil carbon emissions? This effect occurs because to date, low-carbon electricity formerly generated by decommissioned nuclear power plants in the wealthy world has largely been replaced by fossil fuels, causing added carbon emissions as a direct result of nuclear phaseout policies.”
Why it matters: “But even to the small degree that falling nuclear electricity generation has been replaced by renewable power, this represents ‘treadmill decarbonization’ where low-carbon energy is simply replacing other low-carbon energy sources instead of reducing overall fossil fuel consumption. At a time when governments should be seeking to maximize the pace of clean energy deployment and taking fossil fuel power off the grid, treadmill decarbonization counterproductively expends resources swapping out clean nuclear energy for renewables while letting fossil fuel plants continue to run… Rather than expecting Africans to develop by the rich world’s sustainability rules to offset the rich world’s emissions, wealthy countries should do far, far more to reduce dirty energy use at home while helping emerging economies grow and societies adapt to a warmer world. In the meantime, adopting a friendlier approach toward nuclear energy projects domestically and internationally would more than compensate for the increase in emissions that might occur as poor countries build a path out of poverty.”
8. Why the humanities suck right now
Why you should read it: Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh blasts the contemporary humanities, arguing they have allowed esoteric left-wing politics to erode their prestige.
“A liberal arts education was once the price of admission into polite society. Don’t assume that will hold true a generation from now. There is too much reputational wear and tear to contend with… Go to the Cézanne exhibition at Tate Modern and read the bumpf that accompanies it. You are asked to ‘wonder what this landscape would have looked like to us without colonisation?’ Much the same, mate. ‘Would we care about Cézanne or his work?’ Most likely. At one point, it is implied that he painted in fractured, proto-Cubist style because the ‘disintegration’ of life in French colonies was weighing on his subconscious. Were EY, who sponsor the show, too shy to press for an editor?”
“There are columns that would pause here to deplore the politicisation of art, literature and history. The point in this one is different: the problem is to a large extent self-solving. Surely, at some stage, the humanities become too silly to command public confidence? Employers start to view arts degrees with suspicion. Students read that price signal from the labour market and do other things. Taxpayers resent subsidising sententious museums and universities. The decline of English as an A-level subject, and the rise of Stem, seem like warnings.”
Why it matters: “It is tempting to blame the fallen status of the humanities to the fact that science ‘matters' more. Great events — the pandemic, climate change, energy prices — have involved the natural world of late. While there isn’t much more to say about the motives of Iago, the species has only begun to fathom what goes on at the atomic and subatomic level… But this isn’t the root of the problem facing the liberal arts. A 75-minute discussion has gone up on YouTube between [Cormac] McCarthy and the [Santa Fe] Institute’s president. What you see is the innate pleasure of thought, freed from political invigilation. The humanities have lost their knack for it. Society’s best will turn away accordingly. It isn’t the importance of scientific knowledge that gets a private genius to talk, but its incorruptibility.”
9. How social media broke Donald Trump’s (and Elon Musk’s and Kanye West’s) brain
Why you should read it: In the New York Times, computer scientist Jaron Lanier holds social media responsible for changing the personalities of powerful or influential individuals like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Kanye West.
“I have observed a change, or really a narrowing, in the public behavior of people who use Twitter or other social media a lot. (‘Other social media’ sometimes coming into play after ejection from Twitter.) When I compare Mr. Musk, Mr. Trump and Ye, I see a convergence of personalities that were once distinct. The garish celebrity playboy, the obsessive engineer and the young artist, as different from one another as they could be, have all veered not in the direction of becoming grumpy old men, but into being bratty little boys in a schoolyard. Maybe we should look at what social media has done to these men… The personalities of a great many famous and powerful people have changed in a similar way… I believe ‘Twitter poisoning’ is a real thing. It is a side effect that appears when people are acting under an algorithmic system that is designed to engage them to the max. It’s a symptom of being part of a behavior-modification scheme.”
“The same could be said about any number of other figures, including on the left. Examples are found in the excesses of cancel culture and joyless orthodoxies in fandom, in vain attention competitions and senseless online bullying… What do I think are the symptoms of Twitter poisoning? There is a childish insecurity, where before there was pride. Instead of being above it all, like traditional strongmen throughout history, the modern social media-poisoned alpha male whines and frets. This works because his followers are similarly poisoned and can relate so well… Twitter poisoning makes sufferers feel more oppressed than is reasonable in response to reasonable rules. The scope of fun is constricted to transgressions. Unfortunately, scale changes everything. Taunts become dangerous hate when amplified. A Twitter-poisoned soul will often complain of a loss of fun when someone succeeds at moderating the spew of hate.”
Why it matters: “These observations should inform our concerns about TikTok. The most devastating way China might use TikTok is not to misdirect our elections or to prefer pro-China posts, but to generally ramp up social media disease, so as to make Americans more divided, less able to talk to one another and less able to put up a coordinated, unified front.”
Odds and Ends
How a History Channel film crew stumbled on the underwater wreckage of the space shuttle Challenger, some thirty-six years after its tragic launch…
Why meetings suck so hard…
Consider the date…
How professional soccer players choose what nation to play for in the World Cup…
Twelve songs from the late Fleetwood Mac keyboardist, vocalist, and songwriter Christine McVie…
What I’m Listening To
“I Don’t Know What Christmas Is (But Christmastime Is Here),” a song written and performed by the Old 97’s for The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special.
“Tour de France (Etape 2)” by German electronica pioneers Kraftwerk, from their 2003 album Tour de France Soundtracks.
“Take Me Home, Country Roads,” a reggae cover of John Denver by Jamaican band Toots and the Maytals from their 1973 album In The Dark.
Image of the Month
