The Dive - 9/1/21

Your monthly compilation of what's what on global politics, American society, and an assortment of odds and ends

Sep 01, 2021

Quote of the Month

“Continually remind yourself of all those highly dissatisfied men who pushed the boundaries of fortune in one way or another - in terms of fame, perhaps, or catastrophes met with, or enemies made. And then ask yourself: where is it all now? Smoke and ashes, the stuff of stories or not even that.”

- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 12.27

My recent scribblings:

1. Why the anti-liberal right gloats about America’s failure in Afghanistan

Why you should read it: ArcDigital columnist Cathy Young details the ways in which the anti-liberal right - think the likes of Tucker Carlson - have taken the Taliban victory in Afghanistan as a victory in the global war on liberalism.

“Our ‘nation-building’ in Afghanistan, while bumbling and misguided in many ways, certainly wasn’t intended to remake Afghanistan in our image. It was intended to help build the foundations of civil society and human rights, including some very basic rights for women and religious minorities, and to develop some pockets of liberal society. Not ‘liberal’ in the American sense of political liberalism, but in the classical sense of rule of law, respect for human dignity and individual freedom, and at least some sense of equality for all… But some people on the right are currently sneering at these efforts in ways that suggest outright gloating at the failure of liberalism.”

“No less troubling is the almost glowing tone in which anti-liberal conservatives often write about the Taliban…But let’s face it: authoritarian/totalitarian movements based on religious or ideological fanaticism are always going to have more ‘cohesion’ or ‘group solidarity’ than liberal democracies, if only because they have no compunction about terrorizing solidarity-deficient members of the group into submission or killing them if they still refuse to get back in line. When you start to sound like a fanboy about the Taliban’s ‘cohesion,’ perhaps it’s time to step back and reassess your position. (Here, the famous @dril tweet comes to mind about ‘issuing [a] correction’ on a post about ISIS: ‘you do not, under any circumstances, ‘gotta hand it to them.’”)”

Why it matters: “The conflict between secular individualist liberalism and patriarchal, tribal peasant culture steeped in authoritarian tradition and religion is hardly new, even within the West itself. Liberalization in countries where a large portion of the population belongs to such a culture is a difficult and delicate task, ideally accomplished via incremental and non-coercive change (e.g., policies that offer alternative ways of life and opportunities to people from villages who seek change, or schooling that opens up new possibilities for children). But the rhetoric of the anti-liberal right suggests that many conservatives in this camp don’t see liberalization as particularly desirable… It’s not that they prefer the Taliban or the Islamic Republic of Iran, obviously. It’s more that they don’t see the liberal society, based on individual rights, freedom of choice, and freedom of opinions, as a worthy goal to pursue… To ‘tradcons' like [Sohab] Ahmari and [Yoram] Hazony, liberalization is cultural imperialism—something these conservatives have in common with ‘woke’ leftists who think that negativity about the burka is ‘imperialist feminism’ or celebrate the defeat of ‘liberal-neocon imperialism’ in Afghanistan.”

2. Yes, Virginia, there are “military solutions”

Why you should read it: In The Atlantic, columnist Anne Applebaum writes that endless repetition of the slogan that here are “no military solutions” to conflicts blinds us to the reality that many groups do in fact pursue them - often to the detriment of liberalism and democracy.

“Of all the empty, pointless statements that are periodically repeated by Western politicians, none is more empty and pointless than this one: ‘There can be no military solution to this conflict…’ The phrase sounds nice, but it’s not true. In many conflicts, probably Syria and certainly Afghanistan, there is a military solution: The war ends because one side wins… Peace negotiators, experts in conflict prevention, UN officials, European Union officials, and myriad American and international diplomats don’t want to believe that this is true, because it doesn’t reflect the values of the world that they inhabit. They don’t know any Taliban fighters, Hezbollah militants, or Russian mercenaries and can’t imagine what the world looks like from their point of view. But violent extremists, contrary to the popular image, can be quite rational: They can calculate exactly what they need to do to win a battle, or a war, which is precisely what the Taliban has just done in Afghanistan. There was a military solution, and the group has been waiting for a long time to achieve it. Now it will convert the violent extremism of its movement into a violent, autocratic, tyrannical state.”

“The need to prevent this from happening in other places—to prevent violent extremists from invading places where people would prefer to live in peace and in accordance with the rule of law—is precisely why we have armies, weapons, intelligence agencies, and spies of various kinds, despite all of the mistakes they make and the ugly things they sometimes do. The need to prevent violent extremists from creating structures like al-Qaeda or rogue, nuclear-armed regimes is precisely why North Americans and Europeans get involved in distant and difficult conflicts. That’s why the U.S. has military bases in Germany, South Korea, and Kuwait, among other places. That’s why even the Dutch were persuaded to set up a base in Afghanistan… That’s also why the phenomenon of liberal internationalism—or ‘neocon internationalism’ if you don’t like it—exists: Because sometimes only guns can prevent violent extremists from taking power. Yet many people in the liberal democratic world, perhaps most people, don’t want to believe this. They have long found these tools either too distasteful or too expensive. Like [former UN Secretary-General] Ban Ki-moon and his many imitators, they sometimes even pretend that these tools are not necessary at all, because conflicts can be resolved by ‘talks’ and ‘dialogue’ and ‘cultural exchange.’ They pretend that there are always peaceful solutions that have somehow not been considered, that there is always a nonviolent answer that has somehow been ignored, and that ‘solidarity’ with the women of Afghanistan, without a physical presence to back it up, is a meaningful idea. ‘Hang in there sisters!’ wrote the Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis, in a tweet that celebrated the fall of ‘liberal neocon imperialism’ and unwittingly illustrated just how delusional the anti-war left has become. Hang in there, sisters? The fall of Kabul makes a mockery of that kind of language and shows up those who use it as fools.”

Why it matters: “The fall of Kabul should refocus Americans—in the administration, in Congress, in the leadership of both parties, but above all, ordinary Americans across the country—on the choices that are now coming thick and fast. Afghanistan provides a useful reminder that while we and our European allies might be tired of ‘forever wars,’ the Taliban are not tired of wars at all. The Pakistanis who helped them are not tired of wars, either. Nor are the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian regimes that hope to benefit from the change of power in Afghanistan; nor are al-Qaeda and the other groups who may make Afghanistan their home again in future. More to the point, even if we are not interested in any of these nations and their brutal politics, they are interested in us… We might not want any of this to be true. We might prefer a different world, one where we can stay out of their way and they will stay out of ours. But that’s not the world that we live in. In the real world, the battle to defend liberal democracy is sometimes a real battle, a military battle, not merely an ideological battle. It cannot always be fought with language, arguments, conferences, or diplomacy, or by deploying human-rights organizations, UN declarations, and fierce EU statements of concern. Or rather, you can try to fight it that way, but you will lose.”

3. How the United States left its Afghan allies to fend for themselves

Why you should read it: Veteran and author Eliot Ackerman takes issue in the Washington Post with claims that the Afghan military didn’t want to fight the Taliban, arguing that claims from President Biden and others to that effect were “at best, self-serving interpretations of events” if not outright falsehoods.

“…then the president said this: ‘American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.’ The Afghan military has consistently, in any one year, sustained more casualties in its fight against the Taliban than we have sustained in all 20 years of our war there. I fought alongside the Afghans. I watched them save American lives. In one instance, when a convoy I was in was ambushed, our Afghan partners were the first to drive back into the kill-zone to pick up wounded Americans. To say they are unwilling to fight because their forces collapsed after we turned our backs on them is a slap in the face not only to our Afghan allies but to Americans — such as me — who mixed our spilled blood with theirs.”

“Yes, we have faced challenges with the Afghan military. But it is a military we decided to build in our image as opposed to theirs. We made it a nationally recruited force as opposed to a regionally or tribally recruited force. The result was that Afghans typically didn’t fight in their native provinces. The backbone of accountability in Afghanistan — the disciplinary structures that have given them their reputation as fierce fighters — did not translate neatly into the structure we imposed on them. This was a strategic mistake made by us, one that has at times undermined our partnership with them in a counterinsurgency. Despite these challenges, they have fought for two decades beside us against a stubborn Taliban insurgency supported by nations such as Pakistan and Iran… If the Pakistanis had withdrawn their enduring support to the Taliban and denied them sanctuary within their borders at any point during this 20-year war, it would have been the Taliban, not our Afghan allies, who collapsed swiftly.But we decided it was time for our war in Afghanistan to end. Fair enough. But now, to accuse our Afghan allies of not fighting hard enough, then to use their alleged incompetence as a smokescreen for our own, is the height of arrogance, and dishonor. To abandon an ally is bad enough. To insult an ally from the East Room of the White House as Biden did in his speech creates a lasting moral injury.”

Why it matters: “Afghanistan is not my war. It’s our war. As much as we’ve heard about Afghans giving up the fight, we should not forget who was the first to leave the battlefield: It was us. Tell the Afghan soldiers who fought until they ran out of ammunition and were then slaughtered by the Taliban in Faryab province that they didn’t fight hard enough, or perhaps tell the same to the Afghan commandos who fought all summer in a desperate battles in Lashkar Gah. And we weren’t fighting only the Taliban in Afghanistan. We were also fighting their Pakistani and Iranian proxies who armed and trained them, as well as the interests of the Chinese and the Russians who in coming days will surely be among the first nations to recognize the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.”

4. How America’s addiction to sanctions hurts its foreign policy

Why you should read it: In Foreign Affairs, international relations professor Dan Drezner observes that policymakers have become more and more reliant on economic sanctions over the past two decades despite having little success to show for their efforts.

“Sanctions—measures taken by one country to disrupt economic exchange with another—have become the go-to solution for nearly every foreign policy problem. During President Barack Obama’s first term, the United States designated an average of 500 entities for sanctions per year for reasons ranging from human rights abuses to nuclear proliferation to violations of territorial sovereignty… The problem, however, is that sanctions are hardly cost free. They strain relations with allies, antagonize adversaries, and impose economic hardship on innocent civilians. Thus, sanctions not only reveal American decline but accelerate it, too. To make matters worse, the tool is growing duller by the year. Future sanctions are likely to be even less effective as China and Russia happily swoop in to rescue targeted actors and as U.S. allies and partners tire of the repeated application of economic pressure. Together, these developments will render the U.S. dollar less central to global finance, reducing the effect of sanctions that rely on that dominance.”

“The United States faces a conundrum. It confronts a growing number of foreign policy challenges and yet has a shrinking set of tools to fix them. Meanwhile, its favorite tool, sanctions, is wearing out through frequent use… Economic coercion works best when the state imposing the sanctions is unambiguous about the conditions under which they will be threatened, enacted, and lifted. To preserve its future ability to use economic statecraft, the United States must reassure other countries that it will apply sanctions smartly. It should, in word and deed, make it clear that it turns to sanctions under narrow and precisely defined circumstances. It should create standard operating procedures to secure multilateral support for sanctioning those well-defined categories of behavior. And it should swiftly lift sanctions and allow cross-border exchange to resume when actors comply with the stated demands.”

Why it matters: “Sanctions cannot and will not go away anytime soon… Even the countries now discovering sanctions still rely on them for only a fraction of their foreign policy goals; they also sign trade deals, engage in cultural diplomacy, and dole out foreign aid to win friends and influence countries. So did the United States once. Washington needs to exercise the policy muscles it has let atrophy, lest a statecraft gap emerge between it and other governments. U.S. policymakers have become so sanctions-happy that they have blinded themselves to the long-term costs of this tool. To compete with the other great powers, the United States needs to remind the world that it is more than a one-trick pony.”

5. Why veneration of “St. Jacinda” misses the real significance of New Zealand’s prime minister

Why you should read it: For The Critic, British journalist Nick Cohen argues that while progressives the world over have canonized New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern for threadbare reasons, her real significance lies in the fact that she serves as a harbinger for a new style of center-left politics in the developed world.

“At first glance, the adoration of Jacinda Ardern is preposterous. The prime minister of an isolated, rich and safe country is elevated by Meghan Markle, Stephen Colbert and every other chest-beater in the celebrity-liberal complex into a secular saint… I could talk about her success in protecting New Zealanders from Covid, but the veneration of her began before the pandemic, and comes from another source. She is adored to the point of excess by foreigners — and feared by the western right — because she represents a possible future. Not a certain future…Ardern’s career is a foretaste of a quieter and less frightening world in which workplace feminism has triumphed.”

“Modern liberalism is not merely about the protection of minorities, or in the case of women, the majority, but about awarding them dignity. It extends democracy’s original egalitarian promise that everyone’s vote will carry equal weight and says that everyone will be treated with equal respect… You must know the flaws in [Ardern’s] arguments. How do liberals respond to reactionary movements in Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism? Respect their right to be reactionary? If they do, how can they damn bigoted white voters? What do they say when trans rights conflict with women’s rights? And how do they respond to politicians such as Trump and Modi who turn their own ideas against them and assert that the identity and dignity of the majority demands the denigration of others?… Ardern has no answers to these questions. Indeed, she doesn’t even ask them. She was raised in the Mormon church, and there is a religious aspect to her politics and to much of global liberalism. One cannot imagine her or Stephen Colbert or millions like them expressing a heretical thought or acknowledging a contradiction.”

Why it matters: “A politics based on ‘diversity, kindness and compassion’ is often phoney and riven with double standards. Its self-regarding sanctimony can leave any intelligent woman or man wanting to throw up. But it is slowly winning across the West because it is better than the alternative vision of uniformity, cruelty and indifference Ardern’s opponents offer.”

6. How the “creative class” destroyed America

Why you should read it: For The Atlantic, David Brooks revisits his “bourgeois bohemians” thesis and holds this “creative class” - along with its dark mirror, the “boorish bourgeoisie” that constitutes the base for Trump-style right-wing politics - responsible for the current state of American politics and society.

“Over the past two decades, the rapidly growing economic, cultural, and social power of the bobos has generated a global backlash that is growing more and more vicious, deranged, and apocalyptic. And yet this backlash is not without basis. The bobos—or X people, or the creative class, or whatever you want to call them—have coalesced into an insular, intermarrying Brahmin elite that dominates culture, media, education, and tech. Worse, those of us in this class have had a hard time admitting our power, much less using it responsibly… The creative class has converted cultural attainment into economic privilege and vice versa. It controls what Jonathan Rauch describes in his new book, The Constitution of Knowledge, as the epistemic regime—the massive network of academics and analysts who determine what is true. Most of all, it possesses the power of consecration; it determines what gets recognized and esteemed, and what gets disdained and dismissed. The web, of course, has democratized tastemaking, giving more people access to megaphones. But the setters of elite taste still tend to be graduates of selective universities living in creative-class enclaves. If you feel seen in society, that’s because the creative class sees you; if you feel unseen, that’s because this class does not.”

“The modern meritocracy is a resentment-generating machine. But even leaving that aside, as a sorting device, it is batshit crazy. The ability to perform academic tasks during adolescence is nice to have, but organizing your society around it is absurd. That ability is not as important as the ability to work in teams; to sacrifice for the common good; to be honest, kind, and trustworthy; to be creative and self-motivated. A sensible society would reward such traits by conferring status on them. A sensible society would not celebrate the skills of a corporate consultant while slighting the skills of a home nurse.”

Why it matters: “The only way to remedy this system is through institutional reform that widens the criteria by which people get sorted. For instance, we need more pathways to success, so those who are not academically inclined have routes to social leadership; programs like national service, so that people with and without college degrees have more direct contact with one another; and an end to policies like residential zoning rules that keep the affluent segregated on top. More broadly, changing this sorting mechanism requires transforming our whole moral ecology, such that possession of a Stanford degree is no longer seen as signifying a higher level of being.”

7. How the Census bungled its race statistics

Why you should read it: Writer John Judis contends in the Wall Street Journal that subtle changes in the 2020 Census created the perception of a decline in white America’s population that progressives would be wise to ignore.

“The most common reaction to the release of the 2020 census was summed up in the headline ‘Census Data show the number of white people fell.’ The data show the number of whites declining by 8.6%. This observation was often coupled with a political projection: that while gerrymandering could benefit Republicans in 2022, the political future belongs to the Democratic Party… But these conclusions about race and politics rely on misleading census results. Contrary to Democratic hopes and right-wing anxieties, America’s white population didn’t shrink much between 2010 and 2020 and might actually have grown.”

“…many Hispanics who would have checked off white alone in 2010 may have checked ‘white’ and ‘some other race’ in 2020 [due to changes in Census forms]. The number of Hispanics checking two or more boxes increased by 567% from 2010 and make up about two-thirds of those who checked both boxes. Seventy-one percent of the population checked white in 2020, either alone or with one or more other boxes—an increase of 1.9% from 2010. It is very possible that if the census hadn’t changed the race question in 2020, the number of ‘whites’ might not have declined at all or declined only slightly. The number certainly wouldn’t have fallen 8.6%.”

Why it matters: “As for politics, Democrats may become the majority party, but not through demographics alone. Like earlier first- and second-generation Americans, many Hispanics and Asians initially found a home in the Democratic Party, but later (like the Irish or Poles) have begun making their political choices based on class, interest and values. If later-generation Hispanics and Asian-Americans still vote Democratic, it probably won’t be out of ethnic identification. There was some evidence of that in the 2016 and 2020 elections, in rising support among these groups for Donald Trump and other Republicans… That sorry fact is obscured by the census’s diversity indexes and by the use of terms like ‘people of color’ or ‘nonwhite,’ which suggest a commonality between African-Americans living in poverty in Chicago’s South Side and the Indian-American CEOs of Microsoft and Alphabet. The census may help with reapportionment and redistricting, but it doesn’t paint an accurate picture of America and its politics.”

8. Why now’s the time to wean kids off smartphones

Why you should read it: Psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Jean M. Twenge hold smartphones responsible for a rise in teenage mental health problems and argue in the New York Times that the post-COVID return to school offers an opportunity for parents to help their teenagers use smartphones in healthier ways.

“By 2012, as the world now knows, the major platforms had created an outrage machine that made life online far uglier, faster, more polarized and more likely to incite performative shaming. In addition, as Instagram grew in popularity over the next decade, it had particularly strong effects on girls and young women, inviting them to ‘compare and despair’ as they scrolled through posts from friends and strangers showing faces, bodies and lives that had been edited and re-edited until many were closer to perfection than to reality… [a] synchronized global increase in teenage loneliness suggests a global cause, and the timing is right for smartphones and social media to be major contributors. But couldn’t the timing just be coincidental? To test our hypothesis, we sought data on many global trends that might have an impact on teenage loneliness, including declines in family size, changes in G.D.P., rising income inequality and increases in unemployment, as well as more smartphone access and more hours of internet use. The results were clear: Only smartphone access and internet use increased in lock step with teenage loneliness. The other factors were unrelated or inversely correlated.”

“The smartphone brought about a planetary rewiring of human interaction. As smartphones became common, they transformed peer relationships, family relationships and the texture of daily life for everyone — even those who don’t own a phone or don’t have an Instagram account. It’s harder to strike up a casual conversation in the cafeteria or after class when everyone is staring down at a phone. It’s harder to have a deep conversation when each party is interrupted randomly by buzzing, vibrating ‘notifications…’ All young mammals play, especially those that live in groups like dogs, chimpanzees and humans. All such mammals need tens of thousands of social interactions to become socially competent adults. In 2012 it was possible to believe that teens would get those interactions via their smartphones — far more of them, perhaps. But as data accumulates that teenage mental health has changed for the worse since 2012, it now appears that electronically mediated social interactions are like empty calories. Just imagine what teenagers’ health would be like today if we had taken 50 percent of the most nutritious food out of their diets in 2012 and replaced those calories with sugar.”

Why it matters: “Even before Covid-19, teens were finding themselves increasingly lonely in school. The rapid transition to smartphone-mediated social lives around 2012 is, as we have shown, the prime suspect. Now, after nearly 18 months of social distancing, contagion fears, anxious parenting, remote schooling and increased reliance on devices, will students spontaneously put away their phones and switch back to old-fashioned in-person socializing, at least for the hours that they are together in school? We have a historic opportunity to help them do so.”

9. How an Iranian-backed assassination campaign targets young progressives in Iraq

Why you should read it: Daily Beast reporter Florian Neuhof details the toll of an assassination campaign by Iranian-supported militias on young Iraqi progressives.

“The prime minister had promised to investigate a wave of killings that has swept the country. The victims are often young, politically active Iraqis, and [Ehab al-]Wazni’s death is one of countless that have gone unpunished… The failure to rein in the killers is jarring to many citizens who believe the government knows who the culprits are. Powerful Iraqi militias, unshackled from state control, have been linked to the murder of hundreds during mass protests that engulfed Iraq in October 2019. Seeing their position under threat in upcoming elections, they are now suspected of picking off protest leaders, one by one.”

“When hundreds of thousands of young people took to the streets to protest rampant government corruption, high unemployment, and Tehran’s influence in Iraqi politics, 45-year-old Wazni quickly emerged as a leading figure. He pitched a tent in front of the governor’s building in Karbala, firing up the crowd with impassioned speeches. His acerbic social media posts ruffled the feathers of government officials and gave impetus to young Iraqis hooked on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter…Years of pent-up anger over government failure was unleashed in October when the protests reached Basra, Iraq’s second largest city and only major port. Surrounded by oil wells producing most of the country’s revenue, it should be a prosperous place. Instead, polluted drinking water is poisoning its population and round-the-clock blackouts make the sweltering summers unbearable. Its historic canals reek from sewage and are covered with waste. Iraq’s chronic corruption and mismanagement has not only rendered the city’s infrastructure useless; it’s also leaving thousands of young people without decent jobs. Leaving college with a degree in economics, [activist] Abbas [Subhi] had to scrape a living selling household items at the local bazaar.”

Why it matters: “Like many of the Tishreen protesters, Zahra [an alias for a 25-year-old hospital worker] grew up in post-invasion Iraq marred by the horrific sectarian conflict that pitted the countries Sunnis and Shias against each other. One of her early memories is of seeing the body of a man sprawled on the sidewalk, guts hanging from his torso, on her way to school. Her childhood trauma led her to denounce violence and sectarianism, and to keep up her social media activism even after the protests petered out last year… Real change will not come from guns nor the ballot box, Zahra believes. It will come from changing the mindset of Iraqis.”

Odds and Ends

“Why Mass Effect is some of the best sci-fi ever made…”

E Street Band drummer Max Weinberg and The Police drummer Stewart Copeland explain the greatness of late Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts…

“Thinking about how dogs think…”

Why barnstorming retains a timeless appeal…

How dogs - unlike wolves - are wired to communicate with humans…

Music of the Month - Charlie Watts Memorial Edition

“(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” the immortal Rolling Stones single from 1965.

“Gimme Shelter,” the ominous opening track from the Stones’ 1969 album Let It Bleed.

“Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)," from 1973’s Goats Head Soup.

“Get Off My Cloud,” another 1965 single from the Stones.

“Rocks Off,” the opener from 1972’s Exile on Main Street.

Image of the Month