Quote of the Month
"Though all the brilliant minds that have shone over the ages agree on this one point, they could never adequately express their astonishment at this dark fog in the human mind. No one lets anyone seize his estates, and if a trivial dispute arises about boundary lines, there's a rush to stones and arms; but people let others trespass on their existence—or rather, they go so far as to invite in those who'll take possession of their lives. You'll find no one willing to distribute his money; but to how many people each of us shares out his life! Men are thrifty in guarding their private property, but as soon as it comes to wasting time, they are most extravagant with the one commodity for which it's respectable to be greedy." - Seneca, On the Shortness of Life, 3.1
What I’m Reading:
1. Will America abandon Ukraine?
Why you should read it: Wall Street Journal reporter Yaroslav Trofimov notes that while many of Vladimir Putin’s calculations about invading Ukraine proved wildly inaccurate, he has been able to count on a small faction of the Republican right in the United States to give aid and comfort to his brutal war of conquest.
“Support for Ukraine, widely deemed a self-evident American national interest two years ago, has become a divisive partisan issue in an election year. A notable part of the Republican right has begun expressing admiration for Putin and even for the beauty of Moscow subways and the quality of Russian supermarkets… For months the Republican leadership of the House of Representatives has been blocking legislation that would authorize fresh military assistance to Ukraine, including the latest bipartisan bill passed 70-29 by the Senate. The resulting cutoff has already caused an acute shortage of artillery shells in Ukrainian units. According to President Biden and Ukrainian commanders, it’s the main reason why Russia was able to seize the Ukrainian city of Avdiivka this month, Moscow’s first major battlefield advance since May.”
“Many Trump supporters who oppose further funding for Ukraine frame this approach as part of the need to focus on China, a much stronger rival than Russia. Despite warnings to the contrary from Asian allies, they downplay the effect that an American retreat in Europe could have on Asian security. American voters seem to care about Europe and Asia in equal measure, however. According to a recent Pew poll, some 74% of Americans believe that the war in Ukraine is important for U.S. national interests, just a notch below the 75% who say the same about the tensions between China and Taiwan.”
Why it matters: “The prospect of an outgunned Ukraine losing much more ground in coming months, coupled with fresh doubts about America’s commitment to defend its allies should Donald Trump return to the White House next year, is increasingly unnerving democracies in Europe and beyond… The sense of anxiety is particularly high in Taiwan, an island democracy that Beijing considers a ‘renegade province’ and has pledged to ‘reunify’ with the mainland. America’s walking away from Ukraine, if it happens, ‘is going to be a disaster and is going to encourage the dictators in Beijing, in North Korea and in other countries,’ warned Wang Ting-yu, who is slated to become chairman of the Taiwanese parliament’s defense and foreign affairs committee. ‘They will realize that the global leader doesn’t have the strength to keep its patience to support its allies. And if they think that way, they will make wrong decisions and misjudgments.’”
2. Why the fight to defend democracy requires moral compromises
Why you should read it: Writing in Foreign Affairs, American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Hal Brands argues that the emerging contest between democracies like the United States and its allies on the one hand and autocracies like China, Russia, and Iran on the other will require America to make the same sort of moral compromises it did to defeat fascism and communism in the twentieth century.
“American interests are inextricably tied to American values: the United States typically enters into great-power competition because it fears mighty autocracies will otherwise make the world unsafe for democracy. But an age of conflict invariably becomes, to some degree, an age of amorality because the only way to protect a world fit for freedom is to court impure partners and engage in impure acts… If the stakes of today’s rivalries are as high as Biden claims, Washington will engage in some breathtakingly cynical behavior to keep its foes contained. Yet an ethos of pure expediency is fraught with dangers, from domestic disillusion to the loss of the moral asymmetry that has long amplified U.S. influence in global affairs. Strategy, for a liberal superpower, is the art of balancing power without subverting democratic purpose. The United States is about to rediscover just how hard that can be.”
“In this sense, U.S. competition with China and Russia is the latest round in a long struggle over whether the world will be shaped by liberal democracies or their autocratic enemies. In World War I, World War II, and the Cold War, autocracies in Eurasia sought global primacy by achieving preeminence within that central landmass. Three times, the United States intervened, not just to ensure its security but also to preserve a balance of power that permitted the survival and expansion of liberalism—to ‘make the world safe for democracy,’ in U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s words. President Franklin Roosevelt made a similar point in 1939, saying, ‘There comes a time in the affairs of men when they must prepare to defend, not their homes alone, but the tenets of faith and humanity on which their churches, their governments, and their very civilization are founded.’ Yet as Roosevelt understood, balancing power is a dirty game… Desperate times also call for morally dexterous measures. When Washington faced no serious strategic challengers after the Cold War, it paid a smaller penalty for foregrounding its values. As the margin of safety shrinks, the tradeoffs between power and principle grow. Right now, war—or the threat of it—menaces East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Biden says the 2020s will be the ‘decisive decade’ for the world. As Winston Churchill quipped in 1941, ‘If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.’ When threats are dire, democracies will do what it takes to rally coalitions and keep the enemy from breaking through. Thus, a central irony of Washington’s approach to competition is that the same challenges that activate its ideological energy make it harder to keep U.S. diplomacy pure.”
Why it matters: “So far, the moral compromises of U.S. policy today are modest compared with those of World War II or the Cold War, in part because the constraints on unsavory methods are stronger than they were when Hitler and Stalin stalked the earth. But rules and norms can change as a country’s circumstances do. So Biden and his successors may soon face a daunting reality: high-stakes rivalries carry countries, and leaders, to places they never sought to go… The takeaway is that rough measures may be more tolerable if they are part of a larger package that emphasizes, in word and deed, the values that must anchor the United States’ approach to the world. Some will see this as heightening the hypocrisy. In reality, it is the best way to preserve the balance—political, moral, and strategic—that a democratic superpower requires.”
3. How interventionist trade policies can lead to freer trade
Why you should read it: In a lengthy report for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Peking University finance professor Michael Pettis observes that current international trade regime is broken and new, more interventionist policies will be required to return to a system of global trade that actually reflects principles of comparative advantage that underlay the doctrines of free trade.
“The global trading system has been broken for decades. A well-functioning trading regime would permit neither the large, persistent trade imbalances that characterize the current global trading system nor the perverse flow of capital from developing economies to advanced economies. The system needs new rules that encourage a return to the benefits of free trade and comparative advantage… This has important implications for U.S. manufacturing, unemployment, and debt. It means that the U.S. share of global manufacturing must decline while that of surplus countries must rise. Because surplus countries are those that subsidize their manufacturing at the expense of domestic consumption, American manufactures are forced indirectly to subsidize U.S. consumption. This is why, during the past five decades, manufacturing has consistently migrated from deficit countries (mainly the United States) to surplus countries (mainly China). Until global rebalances are resolved, this will continue.”
“In a well-functioning global trading regime, trade is broadly balanced and the purpose of exports is to maximize imports. What’s more, to the extent that trade imbalances exist, they do so mainly in the form of small, stable trade deficits in rapidly growing developing countries whose investment needs cannot be fully satisfied by domestic savings and so who must import savings from the capital-rich advanced economies… The current global trading regime is very different. Not only has it been characterized in the past several decades by huge, persistent trade imbalances that don’t seem to self-correct, but, even more perversely, excess savings are generated in both advanced and developing economies and are mostly directed to a handful of advanced, capital-rich economies—with the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia typically absorbing 60–80 percent of the total… The problem with trade isn’t trade itself—it is unbalanced trade, in which the supply created by a country’s exports isn’t matched by demand created by its imports. Unbalanced trade and competitive advantage don’t expand global production. It is balanced trade and comparative advantage that expand global production.”
Why it matters: “There is no meaningful difference between trade-oriented policies and most forms of industrial policy. Any economic, monetary, or fiscal policy that affects the balance between a country’s domestic savings and its domestic investment must necessarily affect that country’s trade balance, and through its trade balance, it must necessarily affect the balance between the domestic savings and domestic investment of its trade partners. In a closed global economy, where savings must equal investment, any policy that forces up the savings rate in one sector must be balanced by either higher investment or lower savings elsewhere.”
4. Why autocratic leaders confound American presidents
Why you should read it: In the New York Times, author and The Economist editor Steve Coll uses the example of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to explain why autocrats so frequently confuse the calculations of American presidents and foreign policy makers.
“At a time when the United States has identified managing dictatorships in China and Russia as the country’s most important national security challenge and when North Korea’s isolated and idiosyncratic leader holds nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles, Mr. Hussein’s case offers a rare, well-documented study of why authoritarians often confound American analysts and presidents… Why did Mr. Hussein sacrifice his long reign in power — and ultimately his life — by creating an impression that he held dangerous weapons when he did not?”
“The question is answerable. Mr. Hussein recorded his private leadership conversations as assiduously as Richard Nixon. He left behind about 2,000 hours of tape recordings as well as a vast archive of meeting minutes and presidential records… Shortly after the Gulf War, he secretly ordered the destruction of his chemical and biological arms, as Washington and the United Nations had demanded. He hoped this action would allow Iraq to pass disarmament inspections, but he covered up what he had done and lied repeatedly to inspectors. He did not tell the truth to his own generals, fearing that he might invite internal or external attacks. His decision to comply with international demands but to lie about it to U.N. inspectors defied Western logic. But Mr. Hussein would not submit to public humiliation, not least because he thought it wouldn’t work… Mr. Hussein [also] believed the C.I.A. was all but omniscient, and so, particularly after Sept. 11, when Mr. Bush accused him of hiding weapons of mass destruction, he assumed that the agency already knew that he had no dangerous weapons and that the accusations were just a pretense to invade.”
Why it matters: “In his many contradictions and inconsistencies, Mr. Hussein was not an unusual dictator. Important features of his reign are often found in autocracies — paranoia about threats to the leader’s power, unreliable information provided by unctuous and terrified aides and an inability to fully grasp adversaries’ intentions… Mr. Hussein’s case is a paradox. He was erratic enough that it would have been unwise to gamble with America’s security by guessing at his intentions. The better policy was to act on the basis of Iraq’s capabilities and to issue clear and convincing deterrence messages. Yet in the end, America made a profound misjudgment about his weapons of mass destruction capabilities because it failed to understand who he really was.”
5. The rise of the nihilist voter
Why you should read it: In his newsletter Work in Progress, The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson contends that a new strain of nihilism has emerged in American politics characterized by what political scientists call a general “need for chaos” rather than partisanship or ideology.
“Several years ago, the political scientist Michael Bang Petersen, who is based in Denmark, wanted to understand why people share conspiracy theories on the internet. He and other researchers designed a study that involved showing American participants blatantly false stories about Democratic and Republican politicians… The results seemed to defy the logic of modern politics or polarization. ‘There were many people who seemed willing to share any conspiracy theory, regardless of the party it hurt,’ Petersen told me. These participants didn’t seem like stable partisans of the left or right. They weren’t even negative partisans, who hated one side without feeling allegiance to the other. Above all, they seemed drawn to stories that undermined trust in every system of power.”
“The researchers came up with a term to describe the motivation behind these all-purpose conspiracy mongers. They called it the ‘need for chaos,’ which they defined as ‘a mindset to gain status’ by destroying the established order. In their study, nearly a third of respondents demonstrated a need for chaos, Petersen said. And for about 5 percent of voters, old-fashioned party allegiances to the Democratic Party or the Republican Party melted away and were replaced by a desire to see the entire political elite destroyed—even without a plan to build something better in the ashes.”
Why it matters: “Everywhere I look, I seem to find new evidence that American politics is being consumed by the flesh-eating bacteria of a new nihilism—a desire to see existing institutions destroyed, with no particular plan or interest to replace and improve them… The need for chaos is not a problem likely to be solved quickly. It might be more like a chronic condition in U.S. politics to be studied and understood. I ultimately see anti-elite sentiment as downstream of several very real elite failures, including the many public-health errors during the coronavirus pandemic. But although burn-it-down sentiment may come from reality, it also feeds off virtual reality, or the stories that people are told about the world. Consumers face a bonanza of news-mediated despondency about quality of life, in part because news outlets are responding to audience negativity bias by telling the worst, most dangerous, and most catastrophic stories about the world. If journalists want to understand the need for chaos, it might be useful for us to scrutinize the ways in which we are partly responsible for growing the public’s taste for narratives that catastrophize without promise of improvement.”
6. How America is missing an opportunity to advance its interests in Latin America
Why you should read it: Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Shannon K. O’Neil makes the case in Foreign Affairs that America’s global economic and industrial policies should focus far more on Latin America, where the critical minerals needed to make good on the Biden administration’s investments in semiconductor manufacturing and clean energy are abundant, than Europe or East Asia.
“Since U.S. President Joe Biden took office in early 2021, his administration has worked to try to diminish the threat China’s supply chain dominance poses to the United States. In his first 100 days, he ordered a sweeping analysis of the supply chains for four areas vital to U.S. security and economic stability: critical minerals, large-capacity batteries, semiconductors, and pharmaceuticals. The review found that the minerals that power Americans’ mobile phones and computers mostly come from China, as do a good portion of the active ingredients that go into 120 of the most basic medicines. The analysis showed how reliant the U.S. electric vehicle, solar panel, and wind turbine industries are on Chinese factories… These far-flung efforts, however, badly neglect solutions in the United States’ own backyard: the countries of Latin America. The region is rich in the critical minerals the United States needs. Many Latin American countries already boast sophisticated pharmaceutical industries. Others have technically sophisticated, economically competitive, and geographically proximate workforces that could assemble, test, and package microchips made in U.S.-based fabrication plants. American car makers already rely on Mexico, and incorporating Latin America more fully into electric vehicle manufacturing would make the industry more competitive by drawing on different labor markets and tapping into a fuller range of subsidies provided by the Inflation Reduction Act.”
“In terms of geographical proximity, Latin America, by contrast, is a Goldilocks option for U.S. manufacturers. It is not so close to the United States that moving production there would dangerously concentrate risk from natural or manmade disasters, but it is not so far that it creates complicated long-distance logistics problems. The United States has a great deal to gain broadly from helping Latin American countries strengthen their economies. Most of those countries are democracies, and economic growth and democratic consolidation in the region would create new investment opportunities and middle-class consumers for U.S. companies. And Latin America is the one region in the world with which the United States has an existing trade and market advantage, having already inked free trade agreements with 11 countries there… Latin America offers the best hope the United States has to diversify and relocate its vulnerable, highly consequential supply chains for critical minerals, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, and large-capacity batteries—all four of the supply chains that Biden’s administration identified as most crucial to U.S. security and prosperity. Latin America has ample reserves of half the over four dozen minerals Biden deemed critical. The region has a particular abundance of the minerals needed to make batteries: it is estimated to hold 60 percent of the world’s lithium reserves, 23 percent of the world’s graphite, and over 15 percent of its manganese and nickel. Latin America already mines a good amount of the world’s copper, which is crucial for the construction of electric vehicles, wind turbines, and other green technologies.”
Why it matters: “U.S. leaders must wake up to Latin America’s potential… The same commercial investments that could address U.S. national security weaknesses could also help stem the forces now pushing millions of migrants to leave their home countries and pulling young people into organized crime. If Latin American nations prosper, their citizens will have more reasons to plan for futures at home. Latin America’s combination of proximity, bounty, and democratic bona fides make its countries better suppliers, producers, customers, and partners for the United States than nations in any other place in the world. Latin America has so much of what the United States needs—and vice versa.”
7. Why the highly-educated so often fall for antisemitism
Why you should read it: Writer Dara Horn explains in The Atlantic that antisemitism remains widespread and entrenched among the highly-educated because this form of bigotry fits frictionlessly into a worldview that divides humanity into evil oppressors and the saintly oppressed—with Jews as the ultimate oppressor.
“The through line of anti-Semitism for thousands of years has been the denial of truth and the promotion of lies. These lies range in scope from conspiracy theories to Holocaust denial to the blood libel to the currently popular claims that Zionism is racism, that Jews are settler colonialists, and that Jewish civilization isn’t indigenous to the land of Israel. These lies are all part of the foundational big lie: that anti-Semitism itself is a righteous act of resistance against evil, because Jews are collectively evil and have no right to exist. Today, the big lie is winning… The many legitimate concerns about Israel’s policies toward Palestinians, and the many legitimate concerns about Israel’s current war in Gaza, cannot explain these eliminationist chants and slogans, the glee with which they are delivered, the lawlessness that has accompanied them, or the open assaults on Jews. The timing alone laid the game bare: This mass exhilaration first emerged not in response to Israel’s war to take down Hamas and rescue its kidnapped citizens, but exactly in response to, and explicitly in support of, the most lethal and sadistic barbarity against Jews since the Holocaust, complete with rape and decapitation and the abduction of infants, committed by a regime that aims to eviscerate not only Jews, but also all hopes of Palestinian flourishing, coexistence, or peace.”
“One confounding fact in this onslaught of the world’s oldest hatred is that American society should have been ready to handle it. Many public and private institutions have invested enormously in recent years in attempts to defang bigotry; ours is an era in which even sneaker companies feel obliged to publicly denounce hate. But diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives have proved to be no match for anti-Semitism, for a clear reason: the durable idea of anti-Semitism as justice… [DEI ideology claims] Some people in our society have too much power and too much privilege, and are overrepresented, so justice requires leveling the playing field. But anti-Semitism isn’t primarily a social prejudice. It is a conspiracy theory: the big lie that Jews are supervillains manipulating others. The righteous fight for justice therefore does not require protecting Jews as a vulnerable minority. Instead it requires taking Jews down… Again and again, the ostensible reasons for not addressing anti-Semitism in DEI initiatives quickly reveal themselves to be founded on ancient, rarely examined assumptions about Jews as invulnerable villains.”
Why it matters: “In Minneapolis, a woman who works in communications for a Jewish organization told me how ‘Free Palestine’ had, even before October 7, become a kind of verbal swastika—not because of its meaning, but because of how it is deployed. Apart from its use in political or protest contexts, it has also been used as an online-harassment technique: Trolls tag any post with Jewish content—including material unrelated to Israel—with #FreePalestine, summoning more freedom fighters to the noble cause of verbally abusing Jewish teenagers who dare to post pictures of challah… It is remarkable how little any of this has to do with anything going on in the Middle East. This harassment isn’t coming from an antiwar plea, or a consciousness-raising effort about Israeli policies, or a campaign for Palestinian independence, though those pretenses now serve as flimsy excuses. The only purpose of the chalking and swatting and taunting and assaulting and silencing is to dehumanize and demonize Jews. Every time Jews are forced to prove that they didn’t deserve this, or to hide who they are, it is already working.”
8. How anti-nuclear zealotry killed German industry and fueled the far right
Why you should read it: In Persuasion, Francisco Toro and Guido Núñez-Mujica posit that Germany’s anti-nuclear “Energiewende” has helped the far right by strangling the country’s energy grid and paring back its manufacturing industry—essentially an unintended form of “degrowth.”
“Last month, hundreds of thousands of Germans marched against the far right, as more and more polls show the extremist Alternative für Deutschland attracting almost a quarter of the electorate. The event received quite a lot of media attention. But not as much attention as another, intimately related story: As part of the ‘Energiewende’ policy ostensibly meant to clean up its energy grid, Germany announced, with great fanfare, that it had brought its carbon emissions from the electricity sector down by a record amount, 21%, and the figure now stands at the lowest level since the 1950s… net electricity generation for the public power supply in Germany fell in 2023 by 11.5%. Generation is now down 19% since its peak in 2017. Bragging about falling emissions when you’re in an electricity generation freefall is a little like bragging that you’ve lost weight after an amputation.”
“Why can’t Germany generate as much electricity as it could just six years ago? The war in Russia sure didn’t help, though counterintuitively oil and gas generation have held mostly steady over the past few years. The answer is that the speed of take-up of wind and solar just hasn’t been able to keep up with demand. Yes, high-carbon power generation continues to fall, but renewable generation stopped growing after the pandemic… So who absorbed the adjustment? Easy: industry, the old backbone of the German manufacturing state, which has been closing production facilities in significant numbers.”
Why it matters: “There are only three presently known energy sources that can be used at scale to balance a natural grid: hydroelectricity, nuclear and fossil fuels. Germany’s rivers are dammed, and its nuclear stations damned: decommissioned ahead of time. As a result, Germany was left with little choice but to double-down on fossil fuels… Going too far in this direction was politically hazardous, so they decided to simply make do with less power: economic degrowth in action. Of course, people depended on those power sources for jobs: good, well-paid, stable union jobs that guys without university degrees could get. The government closed down the factories—can they really be surprised some of these people now want to vote for the far right?”
9. Uncancel Woodrow Wilson!
Why you should read it: The Atlantic columnist David Frum defends President Woodrow Wilson against fashionable criticisms from his modern-day detractors, arguing that Wilson’s very real flaws must be set against his very real achievements and high aspirations.
“Wilson championed—and came to symbolize—progressive reform at home and liberal internationalism abroad. So long as those causes commanded wide support, Wilson’s name resonated with the greats of American history. In our time, however, the American left has subordinated the causes of reform and internationalism to the politics of identity, while the American right has rejected reform and internationalism altogether. Wilson’s standing has been crushed in between… My point is not to acquit Wilson of the charges against him, nor to minimize those charges by blaming the times, rather than him. Historical figures are responsible for their beliefs, words, and actions. But if one man is judged the preeminent villain of his era for bigotries that were common among people of his place, time, and rank, that singular fixation demands explanation. Why Wilson rather than Taft or Coolidge?”
“In the era of liberal academic hegemony, historians sought to weigh Wilson’s errors and misdeeds against his administration’s accomplishments, reaching a range of conclusions. But that era has closed. We live now in a more polarized time, one of ideological extremes on both left and right. Learned Hand, a celebrated federal judge of Wilson’s era, praised ‘the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.’ Our contemporaries have exorcised that spirit. We are very sure that we are right. We have little tolerance for anyone who seems in any degree wrong… In our zeal, we refuse to understand past generations as they understood themselves. We expect them to have organized their mental categories the way we organize ours—and we are greatly disappointed when we discover that they did not… In the time of Woodrow Wilson, issues and ideas were clustered very differently from today. Champions of Black political rights could display bitter animosity toward Catholic immigrants. Many exponents of women’s suffrage also held racist views. Some defenders of labor rights also supported bans on teaching evolution. Heroes of free academic inquiry were fascinated by the project of eugenics. Early advocates of sexual autonomy were attracted to fascism or communism or—as George Bernard Shaw was—both.”
Why it matters: “You do not need to withhold any single criticism of Woodrow Wilson, the man and the president, to regret the harm done by the unbalanced and totalizing censure that has been heaped upon him over the past decade. Wilson was a great domestic reformer. He was the first American president to perceive and explain how American power could anchor the peace of a future democratic world… Cancel Wilson, and you empower those who seek to discredit the high goals for which he worked. Those are goals still worth working toward. To realize them, supporters of American global leadership cannot dispense with the practical and moral legacy of Woodrow Wilson.”
Odds and Ends
Despite a hard landing that left Odysseus robotic lunar lander tilted to one side, NASA considers the IM-1 mission—the first American lunar landing since Apollo and the first in NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program—a success…
Richard Lewis, neurotic stand-up comedian and Larry David’s frequent sparring partner on Curb Your Enthusiasm, died at age 76…
Be sure to check your garage for any inert nuclear missiles—one Bellevue, Washington man bought one from his neighbor’s estate sale before donating it to the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio…
A deep sea robotic exploration mission operating off the coast of Chile has uncovered dozens of new species lurking 14,000 feet beneath the waves of Southeast Pacific…
How a recently discovered bog body in Northern Ireland echoed and paralleled the search for missing victims of the decades-long Troubles…
What I’m Listening To
A couple tracks from the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s film scores:
“Driving With the Top Down,” composed by Ramin Djawadi for Iron Man.
“I Got a Ride,” composed by Alan Silvestri for The Avengers.
“I Love You Guys,” composed by John Murphy for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.
Image of the Month
