Resource Curse, Useless Populations and Universal Basic Income

Podcast here: https://soundcloud.com/user-280580802/224-resource-curse-useless-populations-and-universal-basic-income

Alexander Etkind (2021) argued in his book “Nature’s Evil” that some countries’ reliance on fossil fuel export has made them very unequal, as the state leaders draw on the oil revenues to enrich themselves and their friends, and wage destructive wars against their neighboring countries. To keep legitimacy at home, they lavish a welfare state on their citizens, who become dependents on this largesse and do not form an independent middle class based on professions that would form a civil society that could challenge the power of the dictators. This is the classic resource curse (Ross 1999) or petro-aggression (Colgan 2013). Etkind is surely thinking of his home country, Russia. Russia’s petro-state aggression is now backfiring because the military conquest in Ukraine is not successful. But if they do succeed, they have the encouragement to push the envelope with more aggression in Europe.

Contrast that with labor-dependent countries: they export goods and services that require a large input of industrial or service/ professional labor. They have a substantial middle class who expect a high standard of living and democratic participatory political institutions, and could not support large-scale wars over long periods of time. The political leaders feel directly accountable to their citizens and direct most of the government spending toward building further economic capacity, e.g. public infrastructure, education, health care, and strengthening internal political legitimacy, e.g. social care, pensions. The Europeans and some East Asians (Japan, South Korea) are the major examples of labor-dependent countries. The US combines both features of being labor-dependent (top universities, top finance, top technology firms) and resource-dependent (shale gas, oil and minerals), and using that pre-eminent political and economic power to (1) maintain internal democracy and (2) fight/ fund foreign wars.

Etkind makes another interesting point in that the resource-dependent countries are as dependent on the goods and services provided by the labor-dependent countries, as the reverse. The elites of the resource-dependent countries need the rule of law, the private banks, the elite private schools, the elite medical care and cars of the labor-dependent countries, while the labor-dependent countries require the natural resources to produce their goods and maintain their high standard of living. Most of the benefits accrue to the labor-dependent, i.e. rich, countries, and the resource-dependent populations get very little save for their resource-controlling elites. This passage of the book is best quoted in full:

Let’s look at a trade between two states, one resource-dependent and the other labor-dependent. This is a typical situation in the field of international relations- a game for two players, one of whom sells a precious resource which the other buys, exchanging it for goods produced by the labor of its people. The labor-dependent state encourages internal competition, protects property rights, secures technical progress, and promotes public goods and services. None of this occurs in a resource-dependent state and its monopolies. In such a country, institutions don’t develop, nature is degraded, and the people fail to thrive. All this is a curse for the resource-dependent country but a blessing for its partner. Since the rulers of resource states do not guarantee property rights in their countries, they cannot rely on their own capital or hand it down to their children. Along with their subjects, the rulers also suffer from the absence of public goods such as fair justice or clean air. Their spouses need private goods which only labor-dependent states are capable of offering. Children need the high-quality education which is available only on the other side of the border. Parents need good doctors and hospitals. But while textiles or gadgets come from abroad, safe parks, clean beaches, or good schools and clinics are not available to import. So the next step ensues: the elite from a resource-dependent state keeps bank deposits in a labor-dependent state. This is where the elite settles its disputes, buys houses, establishes its families. Exported capital -a converted form of oil and gas- turns into a bank account in Switzerland, a chateau in France, a business in Germany, or shares in American corporations. This capital, significant by any standards, is profitable to the recipient. The Swiss bank gets a percentage, London property prices rocket, new businesses pay taxes in the host countries. This wealth trickles down, but those who benefit from it are very far away from the places where it was pumped or mined. Paradoxically, the resource-holding elite invests in the same institutions abroad that it ignores, or even destroys, at home: the judiciary, universities, parks. In a dual economy of the post-Soviet type, Rawl’s first principle is realized at one end of the earth, but his second at another. The wealth is created in one country and trickles down in a different country. The blessings for some do not balance the curses for many others: the sum of happiness declines and inequality grows. (Etkind 2021: 284-5)

The main sociological insight is that unearned wealth, i.e. natural resources that fund the wealth of the labor-dependent countries, creates a lot of inequality, low economic development and corrupt political institutions. It gives credence to Weber’s Protestant work ethic thesis, according to which it is necessary to work hard due to the belief that this would make one accepted by God, and, by the way, it gives you democratic political institutions, rule of law and a welfare state.

But work is generally considered to be odious and was only done if we had to. Aristotle and other Greek philosophers thought that women and slaves would do the essential work, while the aristois (landowners) would be politicians, generals and philosophers- all of them considered leisure (non-productive) activities. The Latin root word for “labor” is “laborare” which is toil or trouble. Recall the Adam and Eve story, when the two original humans were not required to do any work in the Garden of Eden until Eve tried the forbidden apple. The angry God came down and forced Adam to labor for his food and other economic needs, while Eve and all her daughters and granddaughters would suffer from the “labor” or pain of childbirth. Consider also that before the rise of modern medicine the maternal mortality rate was shockingly high. Only the unnatural and unliked things require motivation to do, such as work requiring the Protestant work ethic. There is no need for a sex ethic or food ethic, because lust and hunger are written in our DNA and we will pursue them even without elaborate motivational beliefs.

While capitalism starts with the necessity of the universal belief in hard work, it is not clear whether this hard work for the common social benefit, as in Etkind’s labor-dependent countries of the developed capitalist world, is a continuing necessity at all due to the rise of artificial intelligence. So far automation has not been net labor displacing because there are still niches where humans have a comparative advantage to machines, e.g. interpersonal, service oriented work. The continuing advances in AI imply that more and more tasks will be taken over by AI, thus increasing the labor-replacing and diminishing the labor-reinstating elements of technology.

With ever improving technologies, we can see the rise of bullshit jobs, i.e. those jobs where even the jobholders themselves do not believe that they are adding any value to the economy. Any quasi-monopolist organization operates according to soft budget constraint e.g. governments, higher education, hospitals, for-profit banks or tech companies. In a soft budget constraint, there is no threat by customers to withdraw their purchase, so output prices are far in excess of the cost price and profits are very high. High profits can fund extra administrative personnel, who are becoming paper-pushers for some arbitrary administrative goal. Are these goals worthwhile or are they reached? It doesn’t matter. If other organizations have them, you need them too, so the payroll will be inflated but the wealthier the country becomes (hence more automation), the more of these useless positions this economy will have.

There are different forms of resistance against pointless jobs. The greatest cultural response has been the narrative around the “Great Resignation”, i.e. people quitting their jobs during the pandemic, in part, because they wanted to reconsider their life options and accept a pay cut to start their own business or not work at all for a certain period of time. People wanted remote work options and a better work-life balance. Some cities had implemented temporary eviction bans, because the officials feared the economic hardship during the pandemic shutdowns. Surely, this was a temporary measure but never before or since have so many people had the taste of freedom from economic necessity. The irony is that a tighter labor market encourages automation, which will more permanently lower labor demand. The economic whiplash returned but we see more young people being open to work less and have a more modest lifestyle. Gen Z are less likely to have a driver’s license than the earlier generations at their age. Teenage employment has been on the decline since the early 2000s.

The classroom behavior of current students is a portending factor for society’s future. The introduction of ChatGPT in late-2022 has altered classroom expectations in that teachers must assume that students are using it to do many of their assignments. Students are also spending less and less time doing any schoolwork, and administrators are pushing the line that students are consumers who must be pleased at all means, i.e. everyone should have an A/ grade inflation (Yglesias 2024). Student loans are also through the roof, though at this point the federal government is the largest creditor (93%, see Hanson 2021). To the extent that the government imposes debt moratoriums (like during the pandemic) or cancels some of the debt outright, we are obtaining free college through stealth (but with plenty of private loan industry profits and economic anxiety among borrowers along the way). Student absenteeism is through the roof, and even as student activism is roiling campuses across the country due to Israel’s devastating war on Gaza, there is quite little concern about what learning students might be missing out on. If the AI job displacement hypothesis is true, then the students are absolutely doing the right thing in resisting hard work and becoming slackers. Even for researchers and teachers, there are elementary questions of our own obsolescence: why not have AI collect/ analyze the data and write up the findings? Why not shift instruction and learning to an AI chatbot that is programmed to serve the individual student, as opposed to the generic instruction that doesn’t serve the smartest or struggling students?

On a side note, I argue that liberal arts education is the most valuable major in an AI world, not the hard skill majors in STEM. That is not because humans will be better in novel writing, music composition or philosophizing than AI and not because we will earn more money in creative careers. It is because liberal arts is one of the few contemplative activities that we enjoy doing for its own sake, and we should have more time to enjoy contemplation in the age of AI. If machines can do all of our assignments, what is the point of being alive? I am not looking down on any mathematicians or physicists, who also enjoy their subjects for their own sake, though if they do so, I would put them in the same non-commodified camp as the liberal arts, who have been placed on the defensive in capitalist society that dislikes any activity that does not generate revenue. The core function of schooling and universities must be leisure coordinating services, not technical training institutes for jobs that will soon be replaced by AI. Universities claiming to perform the latter function struggle anyway with meeting it: at the end of the day, no university can guarantee employment. It can only offer a piece of paper that some employers will likely recognize. Universities are facing a crisis of legitimacy regarding the employability of their graduates that is much more serious than any of the current culture war issues. Within the logic of capitalism, there is no way to escape this logic.

Even China is turning away from hard work. It is the home of world industrial production and they have their own version of Protestantism which can be labeled the “Confucian work ethic”. Their traumatic pandemic experience coincided with an economic slowdown, the reduction of employment opportunities, growing US hostility and a weakening real estate sector. Lying flat (tangping) and letting it rot (bailan) have become common terms in the internet youth subculture. This is very different from the Boomer and Xer generation that have flooded into the factories in the large cities and founded companies to benefit from China’s integration into the global economy from the 1980s until the early-2010s. That generation was optimistic and shared in the CCP’s vision of an economically ascending China. In the absence of elections and a new economic boom, where will the CCP restore public legitimacy? Would they have to invade Taiwan?

Bullshit administrative workers are the more fortunate members of the human tribe. What about the workers who are displaced by technology and have no equivalent replacement work? We are in the world of the death of despair: the rise of suicide, alcohol and drug addiction. There is a growing concern about a “useless population”, i.e. those without jobs. In resource-dependent states, the large useless population is written into the social contract, but labor-dependent states have prided themselves in providing full employment to their populations. We are fortunately not in an extreme situation regarding technological unemployment yet, because unemployment is low, the labor markets are tight, the workforce is aging rapidly (although immigration is also high). But we also know that these deaths of despair have happened. The US is being flooded by marijuana, methamphetamine, cocaine, fentanyl (CBP 2024), and from the early-2000s until 2021, the number of drug overdose deaths have quintupled to over 100,000 (NIH 2023).

As AI is getting better, what do we do with the useless population? We evidently need a universal basic income to restore more economic security to the population. But is economic security and not starving to death enough to stave off political instability? Those who are dedicated to the Protestant work ethic and the favorable democratic political arrangement of labor-dependent states argue that becoming a charity welfare case creates authoritarian war. Why should the leaders in the formerly labor-dependent states treat their subjects with the same respect and reverence as when they used to be labor-dependent? UBI in combination with an anti-labor design would recreate the oppressive political economy that we currently know from resource-dependent states. Even worse, autonomous AI will decide that after we reached 100% unemployment that we are a superfluous species and, therefore, must be wiped out. The true social conservatives will adapt Etkind’s argument on the oppression of resource dependency to defend the Protestant work ethic and the capitalist economy. That itself sounds like a dystopian outcome.

We have to consider whether UBI is a ceiling or a floor. Is it a maximum regarding effort and income in a workless future, where we don’t starve but must twiddle our thumbs and hope that our benevolent overlords don’t decide to send us to the gulag or into self-destructive imperialist wars abroad? In that case, we must never have UBI and we should seek to extend the labor-dependent capitalist economy with a firm commitment to the Protestant work ethic. Or is UBI a minimum income that people can live on, so they can build businesses, leisure or communal activities, some remunerated and others not? In that case, we don’t have to worry too much about falling into the resource-dependent kleptocratic trap.

The positive vision for UBI is predicated on the floor metaphor, and we have to be clear in our minds that the objective must be to abolish jobs but to keep on working. Recall that jobs are a social and political formation where people sell their labor to an employer, so they pay these workers a wage. Work is any physical or mental exertion that creates a use-value for somebody. Do you decide to hire a chef to feed you, and that person is working a job, or do you cook your meals yourself, in which case you are self-providing work but are not working a job. We have to remove the job obligation while opening up the realm of personal freedom to pursue the work they desire to as many people as possible.

We must not fall into a trap of equating UBI with a resource curse, where the dictators who own the robots think that we subsist on their charity. Conservatives make a cogent case that we have never lived in a “brave new world” where most people are freed from the realm of toil and necessity. So we must not even try. My contention is that we must try it, and we must work hard to build a future that is ecologically sustainable, socially just, economically secure and politically democratic. Join me in trying to figure out how to get there.

Can Regional Wars Become Global Wars?

Podcast here: https://soundcloud.com/user-280580802/223-can-regional-wars-become-global-wars

Iran fired hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel, which Israel and the air forces of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, France, UK and US intercepted. The Iranian regime had clandestinely been attacking Israel through the support of its proxies of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine. Hamas controls the Gaza Strip since an election victory in 2006 after which the moderate Fatah was pushed out of Gaza. Hamas has carried out a major terrorist attack against Israel in the fall of last year. This culminated in a war between Israel and Hamas, where Hamas hides in the civilian buildings, so the Israelis wipe out the buildings killing also many of the civilians there. Iran had held back during the Israel-Hamas War, relying instead on Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen to fire the occasional rocket on Israel. But that posed no major threat to Israel.

Israel then stepped up its response by killing several high-level Iranian generals in Syria in December 2023 and January 2024. On the 1st of April, Israel assassinated more Iranian officers in the Iranian embassy in Damascus, including Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the leader of the Quds Force. The Iranian officers were aiding Hamas in military planning. Iran responded with these ballistic missile and drone attacks on Israel. Israel is now vowing revenge, but they are still held back by the US government that helped intercept the attacks on Israel but is unwilling to support Israel in fighting a full-blown regional war with Iran.

The Israel-Iran conflict has been a continuous proxy war that was initiated by the regime change in Iran in 1979. Before 1979, the Shah had ruled in Iran and was very friendly to Israel. But he was replaced by Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamist clerics, who were devoutly pro-Palestinian and wanted the elimination of Israel as a state. Ironically, in the early periods of mullah rule, Israel had supported the Iranian regime in fighting back against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, who had initiated the Iran-Iraq War that had no decisive outcome, though the Iranians were kept in the battle with Israeli weapons. Bilateral relations cooled significantly in the 1990s.

By the 2000s, Iran was working aggressively to enrich enough uranium to build their own nuclear weapons and become a counterweight to Israel, the only Middle East nuclear power. Israel has opposed Iran’s nuclear program and has brought the west on their side to get them to also oppose that program. Israel has been opposed to the JCPOA, the nuclear agreement in 2015, which was designed to limit the enrichment of uranium to levels below building a nuclear weapons program. The incoming Trump administration agreed with Israel and the other right-wing hawks and promptly resumed anti-Iran sanctions by quitting JCPOA. This gave Iran the policy freedom to continue secretly enriching more uranium. Israel reacted by frequently deploying the Mossad to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists and sending computer malware against Iranian computers. The Iranians, in turn, deploy Hezbollah and Hamas to attack Israel and they kill Israelis all over the world. It should be noted that Israel itself is supporting the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, who are working to overthrow the Iranian regime (clearly unsuccessfully).

The shifting nature of Iran-Israel relations from friendliness to hostility works in favor of improving Israel-Arab ties. Normally, Israel has had a hostile relationship with Arab countries, who are unhappy about the Israeli mistreatment of their fellow Arab Palestinians. But countries like Saudi, Jordan or UAE regard Iran as a geopolitical adversary as well. The Saudis see their influence threatened by Iran that has been supporting their Houthi proxies to topple the pro-Saudi regime of Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi. The Yemeni civil war has been going on since 2014. The Saudis are militarily incapable to remove the Houthis, and the US is not interested in fighting that war on Saudi behalf. The Arab Gulf states have a good reason to back Israel and oppose Iran. But what to make of their Palestinian brothers who are getting slaughtered in Gaza? Their plight is not of the highest priority to the Arab states, which suggests that pity (for Palestinians) is a less important motivator than fear and hate (toward Iran).

What are the prospects of a broader regional war? The Hamas terrorist attack in Israel and the destructive Israeli military response in Gaza have increased the possibility of such a conflict. The Israelis feel so besieged by Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran that they perceive American intervention to be a relief valve. If the US were to throw their weight behind Israel, they would have significantly more freedom to focus on eliminating Hamas by razing Gaza to the ground, while the Americans are engaging in a direct conflict with Iran. But that prospect would only be likely if a real neocon like John Bolton was in charge. Bolton has been in favor of all US-led regime change wars, including the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even while the US military and finances were stretched thin by both wars, he still wanted to topple the Iranian mullahs while serving in the Bush administration. In the Trump administration he was a lead advocate for dismantling JCPOA. The Biden administration is significantly more cautious in foreign interventions and has openly counseled Israel to consider not escalating further with Iran. Even as vice president Biden had opposed the Libya and the Syria regime change operation, though he failed to make the case on the former, because the French and the British were urging the Obama administration to topple Muammar Gaddafi.

The main fire test for the Biden administration has been the Ukraine War, where the self-imposed redline (no NATO troops fighting in Ukraine) has emboldened Putin in his own attempt at regime change in Kyiv. His rhetorical commitment to stand by Ukraine and support them financially and militarily rings hollow due to Congressional opposition to pass Ukraine aid. House speaker Mike Johnson serves at the mercy of the MAGA faction and the presidential poll leader Donald Trump, who opposes any more Ukraine aid. MAGA mixes political isolationism (“Ukraine is not an American problem”) with pro-Russian sentiments (“let Putin take Ukraine”).

Even the Biden administration’s attempt to hold back Ukraine in attacking the Russian oil facilities and refineries to protect American voters from higher gas prices is unrealistic to succeed given that Ukraine is no longer receiving any US aid. Israel is another US proxy that could provoke a broader regional war by fighting Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. US hegemonic power is inexorably weakening as their so-called allies do what they like. US impotence is revealed in their uncomfortable position of supplying Israel with military aid to raze Gaza to the ground and shooting down Iranian missiles against Israel, while at the same time tossing some humanitarian aid to desperate Palestinians who have not yet been killed by the Israeli bombs. That’s like paying for both shattering the window and repairing some of them. An incredibly wealthy country has the luxury to do so. The US had also supported both sides in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s.

The Ukrainians are looking at the western response to the Iranian rockets on Israel and wonder why NATO is not willing to provide the same missile defense to a non-NATO member like Ukraine as they do with Israel. The answer is evidently found in the nature of the adversary at hand. The British Foreign Secretary, David Cameron, used the excuse that the west was not interested in escalating the risk of a larger war in Europe, while that wider war is not a concern in the Middle East. The main difference between Russia and Iran is that Russia is a major nuclear power and Iran is not, though it is trying to acquire these capabilities. You can be aggressive against non-nuclear powers, but not against nuclear powers. Israel does have nuclear weapons, so the west does its best to shield Israel so they are not provoked to use it (Applebaum 2024). John Bolton now claims that western-induced Iranian regime change is more important than ever, because the window to do so closes once the mullahs control nukes. But that is precisely the reason that Iran cannot renounce the desire to acquire nukes.

China has indicated its support for the Iranian retaliation against the Israeli attacks on the Iranian embassy in Damascus (McCartney 2024). Russia is also repaying its receipt of Iranian Shaheed drones that are attacking Ukraine by promising to send Su-35 fighter jets to Iran that will be useful in an air force duel with Israeli fighter jets if a big war were to break out. Iran already received S-300 air defense systems to protect their nuclear plants from Israeli strikes (Warrick 2024). It is questionable how much aid the Russians can pump into Iran in a prolonged conflict, so only China would be capable of backstopping both Iran and Russia. China has been willing to do so with Russia, exporting critical technology components and dual-use goods to support the Russian war effort. Perhaps, if the war- and inflation-weary westerners have had enough of the conflicts on their periphery (Eastern Europe and Middle East), China could have a free run at taking over Taiwan.

The only relevant question for the global citizenry is whether any of the regional wars, either in Eastern Europe or in the Middle East, can escalate into an uncontrollable war culminating in a world war. Despite all this technology that is at our disposal, we are still monkey brains operating according to the tribal logic and the fight-or-flight logic. The stakes are now infinitely higher. When the two neighboring tribes were fighting each other with fists, sticks and stones, very few people could get hurt and even fewer died. But now hand these same tribes large nation states and nuclear weapons, and we could all be in big trouble. A peaceful sunny day could be interrupted all of a sudden by thundering missiles flying above our heads, and into the buildings and cities we took for granted. People could be called up to fight in a real major war. On the other hand, the nuclear deterrent is quite real, and as long as all the major powers (US, China, Russia) hold back, the regional wars can be contained.

Defense spending is rising everywhere in the world. According to David Graeber, the military meets the definition of a bullshit, useless job: if there was no nation or if everyone was peace-loving, there would be no need for a military, but once one country has it and is rapacious for resources of his neighbor, every nation now needs a military. As every country continues to spend more and more on the military, we are sacrificing other areas of spending like education, health or well-being. But we cannot counsel individual countries to cut their military budget as long as their neighbors spend more. The collective action problem could only be broken by a global Leviathan, a world government. Global institutions tend to be built after major wars, e.g. League of Nations and United Nations. Do we need another major war and the last human survivors making it out of the nuclear armageddon can form a peaceful world government that also happens to solve climate change, eliminate chronic disease and limit social/ economic inequality?

Further readings

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Israel_relations

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Iran%E2%80%93Israel_conflict

In the Longue Duree, Capitalism is a Death Cult

Podcast here: https://soundcloud.com/user-280580802/221-in-the-longue-duree-capitalism-is-a-death-cult

If you look at history over the short term (ca. 250 years), the capitalist system, which is centered on the private accumulation of capital driven by technological progress, has produced significant human advances. Life expectancy, literacy/ education, income/ standards of living have increased. This was the result of industrial comfort that comes from burning fossil fuel. Once we figured out how to increase productivity, we could move people from bare survival activities, i.e. growing food, to build cars, educate children and heal patients. Nowadays, there are even more services that could not have been imagined a few years ago like web designers that came with the introduction of the internet. Thus, social progress and human flourishing are not divorcible from the advances brought about by capitalist technological progress.

My argument is that capitalism is a death cult for humanity. How can human flourishing under capitalism be reconciled with something so destructive? It’s all about the temporal component. Over the long term (longue duree, to borrow from the French Annales school), capitalism is destroying human civilization. Declining ecological sustainability, fertility, jobs, health, social skills and geopolitical stability are all factors that undermine human civilization and they are the result of that same capitalist process and technological progress.

Declining ecological sustainability

As I stated earlier, the burning of fossil fuel made capitalist civilization possible, but the more fossil fuel we burn the stronger the greenhouse effect and the more rapid the warming of the atmosphere. It is difficult to maintain human civilization with rising temperature, as there is a physical limit to how much heat can be tolerated by the human body. Even AC won’t save us because of power outages at extreme temperatures that fry the electric infrastructure when that infrastructure is overwhelmed by high AC use during heatwaves. Food crops are also not sustainable, the more extreme the climate. Sensitive crops might no longer be grown. Warming is also depleting the nutritional value of foods resulting in nutritional deficiency. Without food, there is no civilization. Farmers from the Global South might be pushed to the brink and are forced to migrate north, which creates more anti-migrant discontent than what we already observe.

At this point, we are experiencing runaway warming, which is reinforced by El Nino, an atmospheric warming phase initiated in the Pacific. Climate scientists talk about the feedback loop, where warming results in climate processes that accelerate warming. Let’s take a few examples: permafrost melt, declining sea ice, shrinking forest cover/ burns. The permafrost is the layer of ice in the northern hemisphere (mainly Canada and Siberia) underneath which there are significant methane reserves that are the residue of dead plants and animals that have been trapped in the permafrost for many thousands of years. Methane is a 28-times more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, which has been the typical molecule that policymakers and scientists have been concerned about.

Warming contributes to melting sea ice, which reduces the albedo effect. Albedo is the sea ice reflection of the sun’s heat from the earth’s atmosphere. Without sea ice, the exposed water will absorb the sun’s heat instead. As the water warms up, it expands, and as more sea ice melts sea level rises that threatens coastal cities that continuously attract more people and real estate investments. That’s a serious threat to coastal civilizations. Shrinking forests come from planned burning (deforestation) to extract wood for housebuilding and convert land into cities and farmland. As the planet warms up and more moisture shifts into clouds that produce heavy rainfalls elsewhere, forests can dry up and become more susceptible to fires. These fires convert the forests from carbon sinks (which can limit warming) to carbon releasers, which contributes to more warming (Climate Reality Project 2020).

Policies can also contribute to the feedback loop, e.g. declining aerosol from climate protection laws. Because of the global concern about the warming effects of burning fossil fuel, governments are increasingly strict with shifting to alternative energy sources. The burning of fossil fuel does not only emit greenhouse gases but also aerosol. The decline in aerosol from burning less fossil fuel can have the short-term effect of raising warming. Governments have also regulated ship sulfur emissions, which has been prohibited since 2020. This reduced air pollution from the sulfur emissions, but it also reduced the aerosol cooling effect, thus contributing to additional warming, perhaps up to 0.05C (CarbonBrief 2023). On net, it still makes sense to eliminate burning fossil fuel, even if that also means a decline in aerosols that also contribute to warming. But the aerosol issue simply shows that every policy, even the climate-positive ones, contains a cost elsewhere.

Global warming has a disproportionate impact on Global South countries that have historically emitted much less carbon. Climate mitigation measures and investments in renewable energy are quite costly, and can easily be shouldered by the old rich industrial countries, while the poorer countries still invest in coal mining and hope that the technology will become so cheap that they can replace these coal mines. The inability to afford sea wall protection or invest in more efficient crops that require less water results in hunger crises which will drive both death and migration into the Global North. So even if we argue that capitalism is about spreading wealth to ever more people on the planet, the duration and extent that poor country citizens are experiencing it are shorter and less.

Consider this interesting exchange between a BBC journalist and the president of Guyana, Irfaan Ali (Twitter). Guyana had recently discovered offshore oil and has the highest economic growth rate in the world in the last few years. The journalist asked whether it was responsible for Guyana to cause 2 billion extra tons of carbon emissions by selling its offshore oil abroad. Ali cut off the journalist arguing firstly that Guyana invests in reforestation which is a net carbon sink and that it is hypocritical of the west to benefit from past development at the cost of the environment and then deny that same development to the Global South countries.

My take is that the BBC journalist is not wrong in his question, but that there is an indelible contradiction between social and environmental justice: social justice is about the poor countries deserving to climb up the development ladder, as the rich countries had, even if it involves carbon emissions. Environmental justice is about preserving ecological sustainability for everyone. Guyana is attempting to get rich from the oil sales and then re-invest a portion of those revenues into erecting sea walls against rising sea level and securing their infrastructure from climate change. It’s a fine approach for one small country, but what does that mean for world civilization?

To be clear, it’s not Guyana’s fault that more oil is pumped. It’s the oil companies that commission this oil, and the oil companies themselves are responding to the needs of millions of car commuters (myself included) who want to put gas in our tank and drive to work, so we can continue paying our bills in this capitalist economy. The green energy transition is promising, but what do we do with the retired wind turbines and solar panels? The many tradeoffs between economic growth and ecological sustainability make the continuous capitalist pursuit a self-destructive death cult.

Declining fertility

Capitalism is about continuously increasing the size of the workforce, and that means making women work. As more women work, they face an opportunity cost to having children, so over time, they are having fewer kids. Even as governments keep spending more money on children’s welfare, e.g. day care, pre-school, maternity and paternity leave, fertility rate is continuing to decline. Social conservatives are wrong to argue that feminism is the ultimate driver of lower fertility. Feminism with respect to higher female labor participation rate and demand for gender pay equality is itself a dependent variable, and I think that capitalist forces are the independent variable. Assuming very high husband incomes, many women would probably drop out of the labor force and focus on child-rearing, which is incredibly labor-intensive. But that option is not feasible as male wages in industrial countries have remained fairly stagnant, so women are increasingly joining the labor force. Once female labor participation reaches a certain level, there is a significant normative shift toward two-income households, and now there is a stark opportunity cost between a woman’s career and childrearing.

This cost continues to rise, as most countries in the world are shifting to a pattern of intensive parenting, i.e. increasing parental time investment in childrearing, e.g. driving the kids to after-school activities, playing and talking to them. Once a critical mass of middle and upper middle class parents pursue intensive parenting (“concerted cultivation” in Annette Lareau’s framework), the remaining parents, who have a more laissez-faire attitude (“natural growth”), are pressured to adopt that same parenting style or else fear ostracism from the other parents or their own kids being left behind. The idea that kids require more attention comes from the increasing competitiveness of middle class occupations. The rarity of those positions drives credential inflation, i.e. the devaluation of educational credentials, which is captured in the saying that a college degree is the new high school diploma (Collins 2019). How are credential inflation and scarce middle class occupations linked to capitalism? It’s ultimately about technological innovation that drives down the cost of production and reduces the need for human labor, first in the low education jobs (e.g. factories) and later in the credentialed service occupations that become replaced by AI.

The high cost of childrearing becomes even higher for people living in urban areas, where most of the job opportunities are. It is also in those locations that parents associate with other middle class people who do intensive parenting. Abigail Shrier (2024) is very skeptical of intensive parenting, which does not allow kids to mature mentally and causes them to remain perennially dependent on their parents. Poor mental health diagnostics become more common, thus pathologizing childhood. No wonder young adults are skeptical about becoming parents. Urban residents are very likely to have pets like dogs or cats. They are cheaper to maintain, provide companionship and do not have educational or career ambitions that need to be supported by parents.

We have to return to the issue of economic uncertainty to explain lower fertility: economic stability is lowered by labor market forces becoming the main supplier of people’s economic needs. Financial debt is significantly higher today than in the past, thus convincing many young adults to delay or forgo childbearing. When most people used to own land, they were not dependent on the market to make a living, and there are fewer disincentives to having children. Many children are necessary as laborers to grow more food and to replace the infants dying upon birth, which was very common. The Industrial Revolution decreased infant mortality and there have usually been one or two generations with huge families and most kids growing up with many siblings. But that is no longer a common experience with more urbanization, individualization (which is one branch of modern feminism) and economic uncertainty.

What is the link between individualization and feminism? It is about giving women the choice to pursue careers rather than focus on childrearing, and this individual choice happened through the introduction of the birth control pill in the 1960s. Other methods of contraception that have existed before that period, e.g. temperature/ calendar method, condom and pulling out before ejaculation, are not effective means of birth control. The social conservatives are furious about the individualization of women’s fertility choices and has been pushing back against abortion rights. Some US states have already banned abortion, but total abortions have increased nationally because the pro-abortion states have expanded capacity and oral abortion pills that can be shipped across the country have become the abortion method of choice. Thus, it is unlikely that current abortion restrictions have any meaningful impact on total fertility. The conservatives are already gearing up to fight against oral abortion pills and for a national abortion ban, but there is a significant female constituency that will fight back such restrictions.

There is an increasing concern about the rise in infertility coming from the exposure to chemicals, including plastic and phtalates. This results in a decrease in the sperm count, which increases the incidence of infertility. Further factors that lead to infertility are the warming planet (as discussed above) and poor diet, which I will discuss in the next section (Lathan 2023). In-vitro fertilization is becoming more common, but it is still quite costly and it is not a panacea. Successful women tend to delay childbearing well into their late 30s and early 40s at which point fertility is significantly reduced.

Whatever the cause of declining fertility, it is the result of decades of a capitalist and individualist society, and to the extent that there are ever fewer human beings born to this planet, the species has been self-destructing gradually. Elon Musk’s worry about a population collapse due to lack of fertility is not wrong. Fertility is a trend that plays out over several generations, but we now have sufficient data to show that since the 1960s, fertility is continuously falling and since the 1990s we have been observing fertility rates less than the replacement rate in most advanced industrial countries. Fertility is a longue-duree indicator that is negative for humanity.

Declining job security

In a capitalist economy, jobs are not made for eternity. The churning of the labor market comes from shifts in demand, e.g. there is no demand for VHS tapes anymore, or from technological innovation, e.g. robots and AI taking jobs. For capitalists, technological innovation is the main variable that generates new markets and revenue sources while also keeping the power of organized labor weak. If the Hollywood writers want to strike because they don’t want to be replaced by AI scriptwriters, they can buy themselves some time with a new contract, but the Hollywood bosses are already scheming for ways to circumvent the union and bring about full automation.

The ability to automate is not just a function of the tinkering engineer getting a eureka moment, but the social forces in capitalism. Do the workers have enough political power to lessen the extent of exploitation through strikes or influence in the political process? Are the labor costs in one production site in one country significantly higher than in another country, where production infrastructure keeps getting better and thereby making the latter country more competitive? Only as a final consideration would I put the technological ones, i.e. the long AI winter due to early limits in computing power that have been resolved by the continuous application of Moore’s Law, the doubling of computing capacity in transistors every two years.

The important question that arises is whether AI is a qualitatively different technology than previously. Past automation hits a hard barrier which is named Polanyi’s paradox, namely that workers know many subtle things about their labor tasks that they cannot put into words. Machines can be programmed to do predictable predefined tasks, but the programmers are not able to program machines if they cannot formulate the task in advance. Machine learning begins with predefined tasks and absorbing past data as “training” of the algorithm. In the later phase, AI is supposed to make autonomous decisions similar to a human child that spends the first few years learning language and ideas and then becomes an autonomous adult. The AI-human analogy is still somewhat weak, and existing AI models are still the most useful in assisting and augmenting humans rather than replacing them. So far replacement focused on jobs with predictable tasks like farming and manufacturing, hence the growing social inequality between the higher and less educated population, but service automation including the sinecure jobs of the highly educated is also advancing. How far is full automation away? Ray Kurzweil, the Google engineer, believes that “singularity” will be reached in 2045. Singularity is a point in the future where superintelligent computers control human society. Kurzweil goes even further by claiming that humans will merge with AI. Our biological bodies are increasingly integrating into machines already. Talk to anyone with a pacemaker or artificial hip.

Even in a scenario that averts the robot apocalypse, i.e. AI coming to wipe out humanity, the robots are going to send more people into early retirement maybe with universal basic income. Will most people know what to do with their free time to “live wisely and agreeably and well” as Lord Keynes (1930) once wrote? UBI supporters like myself hope this to be the case, but I don’t deny that a good human life is about working toward a goal, though it does not have to be wage work. Before the Industrial Revolution few people had jobs, i.e. a position of work with the payment of wages. A hunter or peasant is not working a job, but is definitely working physically! If no one has to hunt, farm or work a job for a living, will we have more artists or more drug addicts? If it’s the latter, it would still be the result of the capitalist innovation death cult, but if it was the former, then capitalism has, indeed, been a gift to humanity.

Recall from our earlier discussion of declining fertility that we anticipate rapid aging and a shrinkage of the labor force, so perhaps automation could still generate a full employment economy given the scarcity of human labor. As long as there are some tasks that need to be done by humans, the few humans could be doing these jobs. But it is also conceivable that the superfluous lumpenproletariat population is going to grow (along with some labor shortages in some industries) and bring about significant political instability at home, raising the specter of war and nationalism. There is a dream of the robot revolution bringing about luxury communism (Bastani 2019), but assuming the continuation of private property and the rationing of public goods to the masses (the main ingredients to capitalism), massive inequality and even underconsumption (after middle class jobs are wiped out by automation) are other possible outcomes. This would be another indicator for the death cult.

Declining health

If I argued earlier that longevity is a marker for improving life expectancy, then the recent decline or stagnation of life expectancy raises significant questions about what went wrong. In the short term, the dip in life expectancy can be explained by the Covid pandemic, but societies have been recovering from that period since early 2022. More important than the acute respiratory viruses are the chronic diseases that have been increasing quite rapidly in the US, but also in other industrialized countries. 60% of the US adult population struggles with cancer, heart disease, diabetes, asthma, COPD, kidney disease, fatty liver disease or high blood pressure, among other chronic diseases.

There are many potential culprits for the poor health of people in rich countries. One culprit could be a rise in the sedentary lifestyle that comes from highly car-dependent cultures. The more time we spend sitting down (including myself!), the less energy we burn and the less the stored fat gets burned. Obesity is a major factor behind the chronic diseases, but a sedentary lifestyle can’t be the full explanation. Cigarette/ tobacco addiction has been a major health problem, but we have seen a decline in smoking, and lung cancer incidence is decreasing. Many, but not all, chronic diseases are related to metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome includes high blood pressure, high blood sugar, too much body fat around the waist and irregular cholesterol levels. The ultimate culprit lies in the food supply.

Historically, many countries have struggled with feeding large populations. One bad harvest could result in declining grain stores and mass starvation could follow. The industrialization of agriculture solved this problem by injecting chemical fertilizers into the soil and thereby increases the grain stockpile. We were increasingly able to produce not only wheat and rice, but also corn, soy and sugar. The food companies also figured out how to convert seed oils that were used as engine lubricants into shelf-stable cooking oils that were renamed “vegetable oils”, even though these oils did not contain vegetables. The trouble now became how to sell this surplus food, so the food companies injected their grains, sugars and seed oils into all kinds of ultraprocessed foods that stimulate the dopamine receptors in our brains, so the food is becoming addictive and it becomes easy to overconsume. The body can reach satiety easily by focusing on fat and proteins that are contained abundantly in natural foods like meat, eggs or butter.

But now with the help of multibillion dollar advertising campaigns, people were fed ultraprocessed food full of processed carbohydrates that spike dopamine as well as insulin, a fat storage hormone. Insulin is needed to reduce the blood glucose spike that comes from the consumption of excessive amounts of carbohydrates, especially in the form of the ultraprocessed foods. The glucose is then stored as fat in the body and becomes potential energy, but given people’s stimulated food addiction they never get to use these fat stores and continuously ingest more processed carbohydrates. This process of fat storage results in glucose levels dipping very low, creating new carbohydrate cravings. Ultraprocessed food also lacks fiber or any texture that could give satiety signals to the body. Hence, people can down an entire can of soda, finish a bag of chips or cereals easily, while overeating on meat, eggs or whole fruits (not fruit juices!) is very difficult. A further problem is the declining nutrient value in food as modern crops with high yield have higher carbohydrate and lower mineral content (Pinho 2023).

Overconsumption of ultraprocessed food makes most of us fat. What is worse is that the food companies work together with the medical industry to keep the population fat and sick. The more metabolically sick patients, the more prescription drugs they need. These drugs oftentimes only work to suppress certain metabolic markers but without addressing the underlying issue. Take for instance insulin that is given to Type 2 diabetics. It is supposed to lower the blood glucose and thereby “control” diabetes. But it doesn’t do anything to reverse Type 2 diabetes, which medical researchers claim can only be controlled rather than cured. It doesn’t resolve the underlying problem of excessive carbohydrate intake that is pushing up blood glucose and requires more and more insulin, which is called insulin resistance. Feeding the body more insulin than what the overwhelmed pancreas produces merely pushes more glucose into the fat cells, thus, worsening excessive weight and other metabolic problems. But for the pharma companies it means more insulin sales, and for the hospitals and doctors it means more chronic disease patients that keep them in business.

Medical researchers that are supposed to conduct scientific studies about healthy and unhealthy nutrition receive funding directly from food companies, and the food companies only want to sponsor the studies that find what they want to find, e.g. blaming fat instead of sugar for cardiovascular diseases. The diet-heart hypothesis advanced by the physiologist Ancel Keys wrongly blamed heart disease on saturated fats that exist mostly in red meat and butter, the same foods that our species has been eating for hundreds of thousands of years and during periods where there was no widespread obesity! Even when there were studies disproving the diet-heart hypothesis, the medical research community fully embraced that hypothesis (Teicholz 2014).

The sugar and seed oil companies were quite happy about this medical consensus because cutting saturated fat usually meant increasing carbohydrate and seed oil intake, which are full of highly inflammatory linoleic acid and omega 6. The medical community converged on the so-called Mediterranean diet, which is similar to the DASH diet (dietary approach to stop hypertension), and the vegetarian diet. The former two diets contain lean meats like poultry and fish, while the latter cuts it out, but has allowance for cheese, milk and eggs. The vegan diet cuts out even these animal products. All the officially sanctioned diets are low in saturated fat (which has no known harmful effects on health!), but heavy on legumes, whole grains, fruits and vegetables. The rigorous pursuit of that diet makes metabolic markers worse because of the heavy dependence on carbohydrates from legumes and whole grains. The carbohydrates in fruit are less problematic because it is harder to overeat and vegetables contain very few carbohydrates. The flipside is that those foods are low in essential fats and proteins, so chronic desire to eat unhealthy snacks constantly looms over these sanctioned “healthy” diets.

Genuinely healthy diets are not very difficult to obtain: people have to go back to more ancient diets including carnivore and ketogenic, focusing on fats and proteins from animal products, but the medical community is extremely unlikely to embrace that diet because there are entire research programs surrounding the mainstream low-fat (high carbohydrate) dietary advice and improving the health of the population would cut demand for ultraprocessed food and pharmaceutical drugs that sponsor that very same nutrition research. How could the pharma companies sell their Ozempic weight loss drugs if people are healthy and no longer fat? Capitalist greed from food and medical industries makes people eat unhealthy food that then makes them unhealthy. Obesity and other chronic disease markers get worse, making the capitalist system a destructive death cult.

Declining social skills

The present trend toward declining fertility is also linked to declining social skills. If you can’t talk to others, you can’t hook up and get laid. The human ability to communicate with others is based on our experience as tribal members. Tribes were dense moral communities with no sense of individualism or privacy. Industrial societies are focused on individualization and private property, and this was the original alienation/ anomie. But industrialization by itself, while ripping apart the dense moral communities of the tribe, did not fundamentally undermine people’s sociability, as people still meet other people face-to-face in the workplace, in church or in school.

Smartphones are a major game changer. With text and video communication, the kids no longer have to communicate with people face-to-face. It changes the norms to such an extent that phone calls are uncomfortable. People are less likely to develop close friendships because personal liking requires face-to-face communication, a skill that does not exist for screen addicts that don’t know any other way to communicate. Even phone apps that re-insert sociability do not achieve that objective: dating apps created an unsatisfying hook-up culture, where people cannot enjoy the moment with their date knowing that they can keep swiping for a new date on their app. The availability of sexual choice comes at the cost of emotional commitment to a specific person, which reduces the likelihood of relationship formation. Marriage rates have declined by 20 percentage points from its peak in the 1960s reaching about half the adult population. The shares that have increased are the singles and the divorced (US Census 2023).

Individualization is the ultimate mark of a capitalist economy that measures “economic success” as individual financial accomplishments. As sociologists we know that there are no people that do well on purely capitalist objectives, so families and friends remain other important pillars. In those circumstances, we can “cope” with the demands of capitalism, but weakening social bonds put that into question. In Durkheim’s logic, individualization leads to anomie and that is socially destructive. Collins (2022) argues that with the Covid pandemic, more young people are pushed into the online worlds, increasing anxiety and depression and a drop in emotional energy, the feeling of emotional exuberance via heightened intersubjectivity and solidarity. Without social connections, we are in a death cult.

Declining geopolitical stability

War is as old as humanity. At least fighting for resources with neighboring tribes. Organized warfare is dependent on states. The first recorded war was in 2700 BC between Sumer and Elam in Mesopotamia. Thus, war precedes capitalism. Joseph Schumpeter (1919) thinks that capitalism can pacify the drive to war because businesspeople like the stability and predictability provided in a peace-time environment. War disrupts business in the civilian economy and is antithetical to capitalism. Capitalist democracies usually do not fight wars with each other (“Democratic Peace Theory”). War among big powers has become less likely with the introduction of nuclear weapons, and this relative peace during the “Cold War” also coincided with significant technological and economic development that lasted until the 1970s, at least in the advanced capitalist countries living under US leadership. Given that technical progress is a key ingredient to capitalism, nuclear weapons are themselves the product of capitalism, and an important contributor to geopolitical stability.

On the other hand, the socialist Jean Jaures said that capitalism carries war like the cloud carries storms. He is referring to the rapacious profit interests of the defense companies, who want to make money by encouraging more war. Perhaps, war overall is bad for most businesses, but capitalism is not perceived as a central structure among capitalists, but rather the capitalists pursue their own profit interest, so the defense companies want to fight more wars, especially in foreign countries which does not negatively impact the safety of the defense factories at home. What would stop governments to listen to the defense companies, especially if the war is happening in a faraway country not impacting the capitalists of other industries at home? Even during the Cold War, it wasn’t the Soviet and American populations that died in war, but the Mozambicans, Vietnamese and Afghans. The end of the Cold War gave us the impression that peace has been achieved, liberal democracy is spreading and the “end of history” has been reached (Fukuyama 1992). Francis Fukuyama no longer defends his original thesis today, and his more recent research is about uncovering the sources of nationalism and authoritarianism, which are forces that undermine liberal democracy (Fukuyama 2018).

Ukraine War, Gaza War, Taiwan conflict, and Houthi conflict are reflections of declining geopolitical stability. In the absence of a strong global hegemon, the secondary powers (Russia, China, Iran) that resent the existing but weakening hegemon (US) will push for wars and try their luck in expanding their sphere of influence. Given that their vision is not palatable to the neighbors in their region, they can only expand their sphere via war. I am sympathetic to the Schumpeterian thesis that most capitalists do prefer peace (also an argument made by Albert Hirschman), and it is quite noteworthy that the Russian push toward Ukraine coincided with continuing economic stagnation and western sanctions, i.e. the loss of the capitalist animal spirit.

Hypothetically, peace would have to be purchased by ongoing prosperity but that is difficult in the oligarchic patrimonial capitalism of Russia, where ownership over economic resources depends on the tsar. The tsar in the Kremlin had no moral qualms distributing most of the national resources to oligarchs, who in turn pay fealty to the tsar. The resources come from the hydrocarbon exports that the world is addicted to, and does not come from the human capital of the people, who then have no means to push for more democratization and a more peaceful foreign policy agenda that does not involve invading neighbors. But even the relatively more capitalistic China is not necessarily oriented toward peace. So far, there has been no war over Taiwan, the world’s production site for semiconductors, largely because the Chinese leadership is still risk averse. How would the US react? Would there be a major shooting war with the US Navy? The source of the Communist Party’s legitimacy lies somewhere between economic performance (high economic growth) and fulfilling nationalist objectives (reunification with Taiwan). The economy is weighed down by a rapidly aging population, US technology sanctions and a bursting real estate bubble, though manufacturing is quite robust, as China builds most of the electric vehicles and solar panels in the world. If economic performance is struggling, why would nationalism not become a desirable objective for the regime?

Capitalism supporters will now argue that if we want peace we would have to rev up the growth engine in these countries, but there are plenty of countries with poor economic growth and poor government legitimacy and no threat of war, e.g. Japan or western Europe. Also the failure of capitalism is built in, because the introduction of new technology consistently raises economic growth but what happens if your country is already on the technological frontier, e.g. US or Germany, or is rapidly aging, e.g. Japan and China? Also what if growth just exacerbates climate change? If we assume that the failure of economic development makes authoritarian states more belligerent, we cannot simply desire a higher growth state to magically reappear as not even the industrialized democratic states are growing rapidly anymore. Geopolitical instability may find its source in the political logic of nation states within the world system jockeying for political power amid economic stagnation at home and the opportunity to push the old hegemon from his throne. Capitalism does need political peace to thrive, but it’s failure to deliver the goods pushes us closer to a new catastrophic global war that could activate nuclear weapons and put an end to advanced civilization. No individual desires this outcome, but as a collective action problem we may stumble into it regardless. What can be more of a death cult than this dire outcome?

Conclusion

The narrative of capitalism is non-divorcible from technological, social and human progress. It is the new technologies in the innovation-driven social system (Schumpeter’s creative destruction) that ultimately make our lives better, which can be measured in our life expectancy, level of education and standard of living reflected in the purchasing power and the variety of consumer goods we enjoy. But I argue that this same system can generate such benefits only over the short term, while in the long term I see the negative externalities adding up significantly, resulting in ecological collapse, declining human populations, declining job security, declining human health, declining social skills and the threat of a global war. Perhaps, the twenty first century can make a turn for the better: maybe we can bring carbon emissions under control and figure out carbon capture/ geoengineering; encourage people to have more children; bring about fully automated luxury communism; feed people a wholesome proper human diet; reduce the role of smartphones in our daily lives; and avert global war. We are always allowed to have hope.

Why Reading is Superior to Talking For Acquiring Information

Podcast here: soundcloud.com/user-280580802/220-why-reading-is-superior-to-talking-for-acquiring-information

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.

Charles William Eliot

“People, who don’t read, remain dumb,” said the former chancellor of Germany Helmut Schmidt (2008). Even as a very busy finance minister and chancellor, he would take some time in the evening before bedtime to read a book. It should be obvious that the most knowledgeable people are the ones that read the most, and conversely, the least knowledgeable people are the ones that read the least.

Formal literacy and educational qualifications have increased everywhere in the world, but there is continuous concern about popular ignorance. Even the scholarly community by becoming increasingly specialized and producing ever more text, is become less well-read. It is not possible to read most literature even within a discipline, because too much text is produced. That overproduction of text is due to a substantial expansion in the number of PhDs minted and there are not enough academic positions to accommodate these graduates, so the only way to distinguish the graduate applicants for the scarce academic positions is to increase their publication requirement (Abbott 2016). Needless to say, this publish-or-perish race produces ever lower quality scholarship, as scholars game the lowest publishable unit and pivot to extensions of existing scholarship rather than the exploration of new paradigms.

Another concern is the creation of what the Germans call “Fachidioten” or one-track specialist/ expert idiots, i.e. people who are knowledgeable in their subfield but don’t comprehend other fields or take interest in them. Not everyone can be a renaissance man. It is much harder to attain today. Aristotle was knowledgeable in many subjects and could write about them, largely because much less was known in the ancient Greek world about science and philosophy. A comparable Aristotelian personality nowadays, who affiliated with an academic institution, would probably become a subject matter expert in one academic discipline and push his eccentric taste into private time, e.g. hanging out with bon vivant friends over a big dinner. A real unfettered academic would be a Charles Darwin character: he has unlimited resources through his wealthy family and pursues science as a full-time hobby. That is quite a romantic notion, and it is more common for wealthy family members to partake in the family business or become artists, which is a more individualistic rather than a collectivist lab-based pursuit.

Among the general public, there is a wide range in reading habit, as older, richer, urbanized and more educated people are more likely to read. Overall reading of books declined from 1978 to 2011. The share of people not having read at least one book in the prior 12 months increased from 12% to 22% (Gallup 2012). There are more ways of reading, including e-books and audio books. E-books have the advantage of saving space, as physical books take up a lot of space and are quite heavy. Notetaking on e-books has also become possible, although memory of information is better activated when scribbling with a pen on a page and flipping through the physical page. Audio books have the advantage that hearing voice is more intuitive and requires less effort than deciphering words on a page. The flipside is that audiobooks often come with multi-tasking, i.e. doing other chores on the side, which can diminish the concentration and the ability to receive information.

You might ask whether learning has to be from a book. What about long articles on Wikipedia or some periodical/ newspaper? If the comparison is between talking and reading an article, the latter is still a superior source of information, but nothing beats reading a book that takes much more effort to write than this blogpost.

In the age of the internet, we are also inundated with social media text, but the proliferation of short postings, i.e. snippets of text, is the bane of effective learning. The short social media posts only allow for soundbite statements, i.e. the advocacy of easy to grasp political viewpoints, and that creates the famous echo chamber, i.e. only liking the views close to one’s own viewpoint and foreclosing learning opportunities. Political progressives would learn from reading Edmund Burke or Friedrich Hayek, and conservatives benefit from reading Karl Marx or Rosa Luxembourg, so they can have the full expression of the idea rather than the soundbites that can be straw-manned, an intentionally misrepresented proposition that is set up because it is easier to defeat than an opponent’s real argument. Therefore, I would place social media text into the category of being worse than conversation for information transfer. It is harder to become polemical or combative, in a conversation than in a social media thread. Being polemical is the opposite of reasoned discourse essential for a true learning experience.

But social media has benefits too, e.g. the communication of new ideas or headlines among the more intelligent members using social media. I read the Economist for political news, but get a lot of the newest headlines from X. There are increasingly issues regarding the reliability of information and the rise of misinformation on that platform, as Elon Musk reduced speech policing, which is the opposite extreme of central authorities prohibiting unpopular viewpoints on social media. Musk has allowed community notes as a fact-checking tool but no longer does blanket takedown of individual posts. People should be aware of what social media can do for them: if you want entertainment, news or interesting ideas, check it out, but if you want in-depth information stick with long articles and books.

In this post, I make the case that reading is better than talking to acquire information. There are three crucial disadvantages to talking in the transfer of information: limits to expertise, focus and time.

Limits to expertise

You will have noticed that different people have different level of expertise in different topics. The least knowledgeable people are very hard to converse with if you are very knowledgeable yourself. In those instances, the pleasure of the conversation would come from focusing on topics that are very close to directly lived experience, e.g. troubles with one’s relationship with other people, the weather, sports, hobbies. All nice and fair for entertainment and developing relationships with others, but is that a good way to learn new concepts? It is rare to find people who are outright brutes. More commonly, most people know a lot about what they are passionate about, moderate amount about general knowledge areas and next to nothing about other specialized topics they are not interested in. Even if you converse with subject experts about their subject, they might not be excellent communicators, use too much jargon, so as to make their talk pointless (what is the point of communication other than to convey comprehensible information to the conversation partner?). Even if they expressed themselves clearly, there might be areas within the field where they have blindspots and they would have to go back to Wikipedia or a textbook to backfill critical context. I would not be able to list the three points I wanted to make in this post off the top of my head, but typing it out on the page and pondering during my forest hikes, I had plenty of time to reflect on them. There are limits to how much information we can hold in our brain and recall in a conversation.

In a book, the limits to expertise are less applicable. The book author is a subject expert and has convinced his editor and reviewers that his work contains enough information that is useful and thorough. An ignorant person who does not know much will not be able or inclined to write a book. There are still potential issues of the excessive use of jargon and confusing style of writing, which is a proclivity of postmodernist writing, but most book publishers have an incentive to print accessible works which boost sales (or at least do not cause declining sales). Blindspots in knowledge are non-issues given that the author will have thoroughly researched all the information he puts into his work.

Limits to focus

A conversation is very dynamic, flexible and spontaneous. Any word and sentence coming out of our mouths will trigger another thought by the conversation partner that can push the topic of conversation in a new direction. When we go to the listening position, the role is reversed. The words of our conversation partner trigger new thoughts on our end. The advantage of the spontaneous nature of conversation is that it works like a brainstorming session in that it triggers new ideas that we would not have discovered sitting alone at home. We learn new bits of facts in that conversation, which we can carry into future conversations with the same person (“regarding what you said last time, today I discovered that…”) or as a reference point for conversations with other people (“a friend of mine recently told me about…”). The brainstorming that naturally happens in a conversation has the disadvantage of not being able to go in-depth into a topic, so the broadness of topic coverage sacrifices on depth. Introverted characters generally only enjoy conversations if they go into depth rather than remain shallow (Cain 2012). But even introverts might get carried away by a new thought triggered by what the conversation partner has said. The limit to focus is about being unable to go in-depth into a topic we want to learn about during conversations.

TV interviews and podcasts are more focused conversations, where the interviewers do some preparation to fixate the topics of inquiry. Compared to podcasts, these standards are much stiffer for TV interviews where time is more limited and journalists have to undergo training for “rigorous” journalistic standards, usually by working in the same newsroom as more experienced journalists. Podcasts emerged from radio shows and the rise of the internet. People realize that they can record whole podcasts on Zoom with minimal audiovisual equipment, so podcast interviews can be more spontaneous like a normal conversation. But even the most rigidly planned out interviews and podcasts that hone in on the subject expertise of the interviewee have an element of spontaneity.

The book format does not have a limit to focus. The 200-300 pages in the book are completely focused on the topic that is suggested in the title. Fiction and novels can meander in the narrative and have many sub-narratives but there is still a grand narrative. Nonfiction books are even more restrictive in focus and the book editors work very hard with authors to choose revealing titles and subtitles. If you are really pressed for time and can’t read the book cover to cover, first glance at the table of content and read the chapter titles and subheadings slowly, then read the introduction, the conclusion and make use of the index table for keywords of interest. That’s often enough to get the gist of the argument. But you won’t have issues with a lack of focus if you have the 250 pages of one topic in front of you compared to the bits and pieces of information you get from conversations. Surely, conversations are more engaging and refreshing, and good writers have to work much harder to find good, enticing language for readers, but nothing can beat the level of detail and focus found in books.

Limits to time

Conversations can last many hours among good friends, but most conversations can be quite fleeting, e.g. work colleagues that walk by one’s office, wave at you and exchange a few pleasantries. As a college instructor, the conversations will often revolve around frustrating or mundane experiences with students or grading. What meaningful discussion can be had during short exchanges? Even in the long-form conversation, you can only raise issues at a high level of generality rather than the specificity that a book chapter or a whole book can deliver. Book writing can be constrained by the word and page limit set by the publisher, so complex topics have sequels or volumes. But even a short book takes longer to read than a long-form conversation. Book reading can be constrained by the speed at which readers can read and absorb the material and reading does require sustained effort, but it is there for you whenever you have the free time and bandwidth to focus on it, so these are not serious time limits at all.

Conclusion

If you want to learn and absorb a lot of information, reading is the superior form of receiving it rather than conversations, even if the latter format has other benefits: being more refreshing, spontaneous and stimulating. Even in the age of smart machines and AI, there is nothing like reading a good old book.

Is President Macron Pushing the Envelope in the War with Russia?

Podcast here: https://soundcloud.com/user-280580802/219-is-president-macron-pushing-the-envelope-in-the-war-with-russia

French president Emmanuel Macron stated earlier in the month that the west must not rule out sending troops into Ukraine to counter the Russian military aggression in the form of the full-scale invasion since February 2022. In an interview a week later, he reaffirmed the French strategic ambiguity, i.e. the non-commitment of future actions and assertion of full operational flexibility by NATO. In contrast, German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, is categorically ruling out any NATO intervention in Ukraine. Scholz is taking the more cautious position that US president Joe Biden has formulated at the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Macron’s statements are widely welcomed in Scandinavia, Baltics and Poland, who consistently rode a strident anti-Moscow foreign policy, as they each have historical experience with Russian imperialism.

As a western European power that has never been occupied by Russia, the French leader’s statement is, indeed, a historical volta-face, although the Germans and British have delivered a lot more weapons to support Ukraine than the French have. Therefore, France’s rhetorical commitment on behalf of Ukraine’s sovereignty is not matched by a firmer military commitment. Macron is pushing the envelope, but not as much as one might think.

Let us analyze some of the potential causes for Macron’s assertiveness in the conflict. The first reason is located in domestic policy. Macron’s centrists are facing two powerful opponents in the parliament: the leftists under Jean-Luc Melenchon, who are traditionally anti-US and pro-Russian, and the right nationalists under Marine Le Pen, who has received significant financial contributions from Putin’s oligarchs and is also closer to Russia than to Ukraine. Le Pen interestingly made a recent volta-face herself by backing Ukraine’s sovereignty, probably because the high cost of the war has eliminated Russia’s financial donations to her political party, the National Rally. Le Pen could potentially drive the same path as her right-wing colleague in Italy, the incumbent prime minister Giorgia Meloni, who is resolutely pro-Ukrainian and pro-American. Having more political unity on the Ukraine issue could strengthen Macron’s hand in the short term, but it could also backfire for him. More than half of the French voters are opposed to more aggressive rhetoric against Russia, but president Macron is termed out anyway, so perhaps he can allow himself such grand standing rhetoric.

There is also a significant foreign policy element in Macron’s assertiveness. During his rule, the French army has effectively been kicked out of West Africa. That means full withdrawal of French forces from Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali, and partial withdrawals from Gabon, Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire. The French maintain military bases to fight jihadists and terrorists, but these troops also limit the sovereignty of these relatively weak states in the region. The Sahel zone is marked by political instability and once the military juntas took over with the help of Russia’s Wagner Group, they no longer wanted the French forces in their territory. Macron is a wannabe French imperialist, as have been all prior French leaders, so he was certainly irked by Russia’s influence in the former French colonies. The French do not want to be beaten again, this time much closer to home by losing Ukraine to Russia.

Another foreign policy consideration is the historical French suspicion about the NATO alliance and the US in particular. Macron would like to position himself against the more cautious approach favored by Biden and Scholz.

The French and the Americans have worked together on many military missions, e.g. in Vietnam after World War II, where the French attempted to retain control over Indochina and the Americans inherited parts of the colony following the French defeat in Dien Bien Phu. It should be noted that the Americans denied air support to French forces which contributed to their defeat in Indochina. More recently, the French and Americans also run joint military bases in the Sahel zone carrying out anti-terror missions. But the Americans have never been shy to screw their junior partners across the Atlantic if it became opportune for them. Take for instance, the American opposing the British-French expedition in the Suez canal to retake it from Egyptian control. The expedition was aborted following US pressure. More recently, the Australians decided to snub their erstwhile French partners in the development of nuclear submarines and swapped them for American ones. That’s how the Americans “thank” their erstwhile French ally, who helped them gain independence from the British in the eighteenth century.

There have been other US-French disagreements over policy: within NATO, France is a full member of the alliance but has not been part of the military structure from 1966 until 2009. It also runs its autonomous nuclear weapons program, while those of the US and UK are integrated with each other. NATO had been headquartered in Paris until then and then moved to Brussels. During the Iraq War, the French and Germans both opposed sending troops to bolster the US-led invasion. Neither country was convinced that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, as alleged by the US. The US also wanted to reassert the dollar hegemony, as Saddam wanted to trade the oil in euros, the newly created currency supported by the French and Germans, who were, of course, snubbed by the Americans following the invasion. The French have also been resentful of the Americans for sanctioning French banks for undermining the US sanctions regime against Iran.

The Germans and French were the deciding votes in the 2008 NATO Bucharest summit that kept Georgia and Ukraine out of NATO. They acted under the pressure of the Russians, who were also selling more and more gas to the resource-dependent Europeans, especially Germany. The French were somewhat less dependent due to their nuclear power plants. The Americans were pushing for NATO expansion, and with the benefit of hindsight this would have been the right historical choice to avoid the bloodshed we are facing today.

With the rise of MAGA, the denial of US military funding for Ukraine and the high chances of Trump’s reelection, the US is no longer a reliable partner for Europe. It comes to the chagrin of the European countries that have been very close to the US like UK, Germany or the central eastern Europeans. But for the French, the US withdrawal from Europe could be welcomed, because they see themselves as a leading power for European integration, which originated with French foreign minister Robert Schumann’s advocacy for the steel union, the precursor to the European Community and European Union. The French believe that a stronger Europe implies a stronger France, and that would certainly be the case as long as the Germans like to sit back. This has not been the case in the eurozone crisis, where the powerful Germans blocked the introduction of eurobonds or Grexit, i.e. Greece exiting the eurozone. The French backed the eurobonds rhetorically but fell in line with the financial orthodoxy in Berlin and Frankfurt, the seat of the European Central Bank.

But in military affairs, the French position could matter more than the German one, because the German policy elites, certainly under Merkel and Scholz, are still frightened of a militarily powerful Germany. In the Weimar summit between France, Germany and Poland, the three leaders announced more joint European procurement of weapons, which sounds quite complex given that the military industries of the various European countries is not integrated. The EU essentially has a pool of funds that it doles out to nation states, who then spend it on cumbersome procurement in their respective military industries. In contrast, the ad hoc procurement of artillery ammunition organized by the Czechs with the financial backing of their allies has been quite efficient and prompt. The EU is also far away from setting up a unified military structure. The small Baltic states would be the most relieved if there was a unified EU army that would be a powerful deterrent against the Russian bear, but could the bigger states like France or Germany give up their armies? Recall that the French have been suspicious of the NATO military structure, so why would they surrender their army for the EU? But extreme situations require extreme interventions, and the French could take the intellectual and moral leadership on EU military integration if NATO falters under a Trump presidency.

The last point is historical: Napoleon Bonaparte became the European emperor in the early nineteenth century and similar to Putin today, he found his legitimacy from invading other European countries. He made it to Moscow, where he was defeated after finding an empty city and returning home. His troops were ambushed in the bitter cold winter. He had defied his general’s advice to retreat to Poland to wait out the winter. The Russians gave the French a thorough shellacking, and the current French leaders can’t be forgetting it. A century later, the French and Russians fought on the same allied side against an imperialistic Germany in both world wars, so that’s where the opposite impression of a French-Russian proximity is obtained. That was clearly a partnership of convenience, not out of conviction.

There are significant historical and cultural differences between these two European powers too: the French pioneered bourgeois freedoms and equality, while the Russians were the paragon for conservatism and czarist authoritarianism. The Ukrainians are clutching to their beliefs in freedom from czarist oppression and domination, and they are willing to fight to the last man for it. The French have a healthy respect for it, at least if that aspiration is not raised by their own historic colonies. Ask the Algerians.

The French rhetorical commitment might not mean too much in the absence of a European shift to a war economy to match Russian military production and make up for the US military abandonment of Ukraine. It might also not mean much so long as they keep their own powder dry and not send their forces into Ukraine. As long as NATO firmly stays out, Putin has no reason to back down from his imperialist ambitions regardless of what Macron says. No one knows how long the Ukrainians can withstand the Russian attacks, but all Europeans, including the French, know that they will be less secure if Ukraine is defeated.

Exponential Trends Can Be Scary But Are Often Manageable

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In a recent conversation with a demographer friend, he pointed out to me that many trends happen in an exponential rather than linear manner. It doesn’t mean that there is no maximum limit in values or that the rate of change cannot slow down again, but for a certain period of time, the trends are exponential and the social consequences are significant. Let’s go through several examples of this:

Covid-19

The coronavirus pandemic was formally recognized in March 2020. During that first wave, we saw an increase in hospitalization and death in the early stage of the pandemic. But the curve was quickly flattened as people were told to stay home. So after the first peak in the middle of April, the deaths and hospitalization declined again. But by the summer most states were relaxing their social distancing rules. Though in the early phase outside transmission was rarer. So the summer infections, where people spend more time outdoors, tend to be the lowest in the year. There was only a small summer wave. Then there was a major third wave in the winter of 2020 peaking in January 2021, the coldest month of the year. By that point, the vaccine was being introduced and there was the mistaken belief that vaccination would confer immunity from the disease. That is how the public health authorities were attempting to convince and then coerce (via employer and school vaccine mandates) the recalcitrant in taking up the vaccine.

Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/03/03/the-changing-political-geography-of-covid-19-over-the-last-two-years/

The later fourth omicron wave that commenced at the end of the summer of 2021 put these mistaken speculations to the test. It should be noted that the benefit of the vaccine was likely the decline in the incidence of death. The only way for the virus to survive once most people were vaccinated or already infected was to become less deadly. A dead patient cannot transmit the virus but a somewhat sick patient, who can still function in society, can. In that latest phase, social distancing and contact tracing becomes impracticable, hence the anti-Covid lockdown protests in China at the end of 2022. The infection and death rate was sensitive to human behavior, e.g. lockdown and social distancing, and the natural course of the virus, more deadly in the earlier phase, less so later but no less infectious, and less of an issue once herd immunity was achieved.

Population

World population took the shape of a linear increase for most of our history. There was a growth spurt in the transition from hunter/ gatherers to agriculture because the latter could support more people (even though it came with civilizational disease like poor teeth and more infectious diseases). But the real growth spurt occurred in the turn to the twentieth century until about the mid-1960s. In that period, societies had changed a lot: public health and sanitation became better, agricultural productivity was now skyrocketing with the introduction of chemical fertilizers and tractors and it takes time for people to adjust their fertility behavior to declining infant mortality (high fertility rate was necessitated by the high infant mortality).

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth

Some other things had shifted by the 1960s, which resulted in the decline of global fertility rates: urbanization had become more common and the high cost of living in cities along with the desire to provide good education for children to maximize their human capital discouraged a lot of childbearing. Hitherto children were considered a net asset because they would work the field. Scientists developed birth control for women, which separated sexual intercourse from childbearing. Many women used this new found freedom to delay marriage and childbirth by pursuing education and jobs first. Over time, women’s cultural values shifted and childbearing generally became less desirable. What happened once before with fertility is unlikely to be repeated again. Thus, demographers project peak population sometime in the second half of this century and a decline by the end of this century. We already observe it in some low fertility countries with low immigration, e.g. Japan. Their fate is coming for the rest of the world.

Artificial intelligence

Let’s turn to AI. Technology improves gradually and we do not perceive it initially. There were several AI winters from 1970s to about 2000, largely because the machine learning has not taken off in the way that the programmers had hoped for. Since 2005, we are in a so-called AI summer, where the pace of technical progress just accelerates. Very quickly, the machines outperform humans. AI programmer Geoffrey Hinton thinks that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a fully autonomous AI making its own decisions, is not far away and could threaten humanity. Yann LeCun from Facebook is much more skeptical and thinks that unnecessary fearmongering will result in government regulations that attempts to choke off useful innovation. Wherever AI is going, it is further ahead than what we could have imagined a few years ago. Every writer has to reconsider what his own value added is: why type books and articles if the machine will do it quicker and more efficiently? The underlying logic is Moore’s Law, where transistor capacity keeps doubling roughly every 1-2 years, thus allowing programmers to develop ever more complex algorithms using ever more training input data. AI is not capable of doing things on its own yet, but it expands its areas of operation, e.g. writing movie scripts, diagnosing patients, deciding on parole for prisoners, grading students.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

Dating Patterns

It used to be that families and friends were very influential in finding a romantic partner. For a while even finding a partner at work or in the bar were quite common. With the introduction of the internet in the 1990s, people are going increasingly for online dates using phone apps or websites. This way of partnership formation inevitably changes sexual norms, as the easy availability of potential partners creates fear of missing out, low commitment to a partner and reduces the likelihood of settling down. That could be another factor that structurally reduces the fertility rate. Of course, that exponential increase will eventually bottom out at a high equilibrium level, but up until now the graph has been pushing upward relentlessly.

Source; https://jabberwocking.com/how-great-is-online-dating/

Climate change and economic development

The most consequential application of the exponential trend is related to climate change, global warming and economic development, which must be analyzed together. February temperatures in the world have been relentlessly rising and we are facing the hottest year in recent history. We would have to go back several millions of years to experience this high of a temperature and back then there were no humans or even hominids around. The earth can easily handle higher temperature, but can we humans do it? Heatstrokes become more common and agricultural crops are threatened.

Source: https://twitter.com/vineet_tropmet/status/1766668838114881636

On the other hand, while the last 40 years of climate history are norm-shattering, economic development has been very positive. Economic stagnation was normal, as the most valuable things that humans produced was the food we fed ourselves: hunters and gatherers were looking for food, while farmers were growing it. In agricultural civilization, there were also government bureaucracies, armies/ warfare, priesthood and some other functions, but the organization of economy and society were simple. The Industrial Revolution changed this arrangement and created complex division of labor and a variety of goods and services. Industrial society is based on fossil fuel, whether it’s the car we put in the gas tank or everyday items we use like dishes, soap, plastics, roofing, housing insulation, furniture or appliances.

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-gdp-over-the-long-run

The more fossil fuel we burn, the higher the total CO2 emissions in the atmosphere. Similar to the GDP trend, we are observing an exponential increase in CO2. Given that a lot of the new industrialization is happening in Asia rather than the west, these are the regions where most of the growth in CO2 is coming from. The west can no longer fix carbon emission by itself without the cooperation of Asian countries, especially China. It is questionable whether the Global South countries can be convinced to renounce economic development to save the planet. They want the economic development but with less carbon-intensive energy sources that should be getting cheaper with economies of scale and sufficient public investment.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_annual_CO2_emissions_by_world_region_since_1750.svg

The encouraging news is that the growth in CO2 has slowed compared to previous years, while GDP continues to rise, which is called “decoupling”. Some of that decoupling can be explained by a shift in the industrial focus of the economy from manufacturing to services, where the latter is less energy-intensive. The second reason is that the rich countries have the resources to invest in renewable energy such as solar and wind. The third reason is more nefarious in that the rich countries import many of the industrial goods from the lower labor-cost countries.

Source: https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/absolute-decoupling-of-economic-growth-and-emissions-in-32-countries

Thus, the question arises whether we can address the climate issue effectively. We have been slowing the rate of increase in global CO2 and in the rich countries CO2 emissions are declining, but this is clearly not happening at a pace needed to halt further warming, and in democratic or even authoritarian societies we have a difficult time convincing the voters to accept impoverishment for the sake of climate change.

Conclusion

Exponential trends are the natural property of many human and natural systems. Thus, we may say that the pace of change in the world is often much faster than the human mind can grasp. Our minds work better on the linear scale. Mapping a logarithmic scale is often used to make the data easier to interpret visually, even though it distorts the pace of change which would more accurately be depicted on a linear scale.

We can adjust to even exponential trends eventually, even if it happens at some cost. For instance, any concerns about a population bomb depleting all the natural resources had not come to pass and the current concern is about population shrinkage. On the other hand, the climate change issue has not been resolved, and even as the pace of CO2 change is slowing somewhat, the most recent climate data is completely frightening. Are our social-economic arrangements changeable to accommodate our needs for a habitable planet? The solace on some exponential trends is that they have to stop at some point: online dating cannot be more than 100% of all partner selection methods. The Covid pandemic is not a perennial medical emergency after a critical threshold of herd immunity is reached and the tradeoffs for lockdowns and social distancing have become too costly relative to the disease incidence.

Statisticians and mathematicians will continue enjoying the property of exponential functions, while those studying the human and natural world will continue to look at their applications with concern, and many that don’t study it hope they can make it out well and alive.

Nepotism and Southeast Asian Politics

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In a recent op-ed Richburg (2024) noted that Southeast Asian politics is characterized by a significant amount of nepotism, i.e. the appointment of family members or close friends into high government positions. Nepotism is not easily reconcilable with rationalist modes of running a government. Max Weber had defined the six features that would make up a rational bureaucracy: specialization/ division of labor (rather than a powerful ruler trying to control most tasks), competence for job appointments, impersonality in bureaucracy, standard operating procedures and formal written records. Rational governments separate the officeholder from the ownership of the instruments of state power. Government leaders in rational bureaucratic systems are supposed to competently discharge their duties and not fill the bureaucratic ranks with incompetent family members.

The lack of rationality hinders predictable and stable institution-building which is a prerequisite to capitalist economic development. The nepotistic rulers counter that people that were born into power are the most knowledgeable in wielding it. Think of the Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko clutching the hand of his infant son Nikolai during state events. By now, Nikolai is turning 20 years old and is taller than his father. He is groomed to become the next Belarusian leader, assuming Lukashenko is not toppled. It is true that the descendants of the more powerful have more education than the common folk, but not all political acumen can be easily taught. The history of monarchies suggest many cases of failing dynasties due to later generations of leadership being self-centered and incapable of running the country’s affairs. Chinese dynasties lasted no more than 300 years.

In this post, I focus on the Southeast Asian case studies of nepotism.

Several Ruling Families

In the following case studies there are several ruling families in the political order. They are competing and jockeying for the high offices of the state.

Indonesia

In Indonesia, Prabowo Subianto, a former military general, vice presidential candidate in 2009 and presidential candidate in all the last three elections, was now elected president. He ran twice as the leading candidate against his predecessor Joko Widodo and lost each time. Prabowo is a leader for the Gerindra Party and is the son of Sumitro Djojohadikusumo, the former minister for research and technology in the Suharto adminsitration. Sumitro’s father was Margono Djojohadikusumo, founder of the country’s first state bank Bang Negara Indonesia and wrote the post-independence constitution. Coming from a high functionary family, Prabowo entered military service in 1970 and was promoted to general. From 1976 onward, Indonesia fought a war with East Timor following its declaration of independence from the Dutch. Indonesia itself obtained its independence from the Netherlands in 1945.

The East Timorese Fretilin Party was pro-communist and the fearful Suharto wanted to prevent communist rule by annexing East Timor into Indonesia. What followed was a decades long East Timorese independence struggle which the Indonesian Army brutally suppressed. General Prabowo had commanded the Special Forces that were responsible for various massacres in East Timor. East Timor ultimately obtained independence in 2002. When the Suharto regime was facing mass unrest, Prabowo’s task was to intimidate protesters and suppress the riots. When Suharto resigned in May 1998, Prabowo was also forced out from the military ranks. After his military retirement, he spent a few years in Jordanian exile, but he continued to invest in various family businesses, including stakes in paper pulp, oil, gas, coal, palm oil and fishery. The businessman in the family is Prabowo’s brother Hashim Djojohadikusumo. Prabowo became the wealthiest politician, when he entered politics in 2008. Hashim’s two kids, Aryo and Rahayu, have served as MPs from 2014 to 2019, but they decided not to run for reelection. Prabowo’s son, Didit Hediprasetyo, is a fashion designer and has no interest in politics.

After his second loss against Jokowi, Prabowo was appointed as the defense minister, where he focused on increasing defense procurement in naval vessels and the air force. There are increasing concerns about naval piracy and contestation with China for control over the South Chinese Sea along with Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and the Philippines. For the current presidential election, Prabowo ensured his victory by appointing the young Jokowi son, Gibran Rakabuming Raja, as his running mate. Gibran has been serving as mayor of Surakarta, a post held previously by his father Jokowi. Gibran is 36 years old and the Indonesian constitution stipulates the candidate to be at least 40 years old. The constitutional court permitted below 40 regional officials, including Gibran, to run as vice president, clearly implying that this was a loophole designed for the president’s son. It is not surprising that Jokowi subsequently endorsed his erstwhile political adversary and went against his party mate from PDI-P, Ganjar Pranowo. Jokowi is building up a political dynasty, which is ironic given that he himself comes from quite humble background unlike Prabowo. Jokowi was not shy with nepotism. He appointed Puan Megawati as culture affairs minister. She is the daughter of Megawati Sukarnoputri and PDI-P party leader.

PDI-P is a formally left-leaning progressive party founded by Megawati Sukarnoputri, the first female president of Indonesia from 2001 to 2004. Megawati is the daughter of former founding president Sukarno, who served from 1945 to 1967. Sukarno was overthrown by a pro-western military junta under Suharto due to his sympathies with the Soviet Union and the Non-Aligned Movement. Other prominent members of the Sukarno family were Sukarno’s other daughter Rachmawati Sukarnoputri, Member of the Presidential Advisory Council, and was in opposition to her older sister, Sukmawati Sukarnoputri, who founded an unsuccessful small party called Indonesian National Party (PNI), and son Guruh Sukarnoputra, an MP in Megawati’s PDI-P and musician.

Megawati had handpicked Jokowi as PDI-P presidential contestant in 2014, which made it easy for him to become the party nominee. Megawati was not a great public speaker, but she had significant political backing because of the political halo of her father, who was the founder of the nation. When Suharto’s dictatorship was toppled in 1997, she was the rising political star and became vice president in the 1999 elections. She ascended to the presidency following the impeachment of Abdurrahman Wahid, who had illegally dissolved the parliament and suspended Golkar Party, which was Suharto’s Party that held absolute political power until 1999 when the first democratic free and fair elections were held. Prabowo himself was a member of Golkar until 2008.

To round out the Indonesia discussion, President Suharto attempted to promote his own family members into politics as well. Suharto’s daughter Tutut was deputy chairperson of his Golkar Party, became first lady after the death of Suharto’s wife in 1996 and served for two months as social affairs minister before Suharto’s toppling. Suharto was building Tutut up as his successor, but his fall probably prevented that. When Tutut announced her run for the presidential elections in 2004, her party, the Concern for the Nation Functional Party (PKPB) only obtained 2.1% of the vote, so she was not eligible to stand. Her younger sister Titiek joined Gerindra, Prabowo’s political party. Previously she was an MP for Golkar. Titiek is the former wife of Prabowo. The most notorious Suharto offspring was the son Tommy, who is the leader of Berkarya a small party that failed to get any seats. He previously attempted to become the Golkar party leader. He was convicted for killing a judge who convicted him of corruption, serving 4 years in jail before being released in 2006. During Suharto’s rule, Tommy benefited from business concessions in cloves, a toll road, a car company, explosives producers, an airline and the state oil company, and he made sure to skim off the top. Corruption prosecutions did not happen until after the fall of Suharto. The Suharto family’s estimated net worth is north of $15 billion.

The membership of multiple family members in political offices indicates a significant degree of nepotism as part of the normal operation of politics, although the roots of Jokowi, Prabowo or Sukarnoputri’s political rule are still shallow unlike in the Philippines.

Philippines

Similar to Prabowo in Indonesia, Bongbong Marcos was elected president of the Philippines in 2022 appointing Sara Duterte as vice president. Sara served as mayor of Davao City. Sara is the daughter of Rodrigo Duterte, the former president from 2016 to 2022. Marcos secured the support of his predecessor in his electoral campaign, though in the Filipino election system presidential and vice presidential elections happen on separate ballots. It was the first election where the president and vice president from the same party ticket were elected. Marcos himself is the son of the former president and long-running dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who was the president from 1965 until 1986. Under Ferdinand Marcos thousands of dissidents were incarcerated, tortured and killed. The Marcos clan originated from Ilocos Norte in the northern island of Luzon, while Duterte’s power base is the southern island of Mindanao, where Duterte served as mayor of Davao City. In the 2022 presidential elections, Bongbong carried both population centers in Luzon and Mindanao, leaving only the smaller islands of Visayas to his adversary Leni Robredo.

Marcos first became politically active at the age of 22, when he was appointed vice governor of his father’s home province of Illocos Norte (1980-1983). The governor was his aunt, Ferdinand Marcos’ sister Elizabeth Marcos-Keon. Marcos received a promotion to the governorship in 1983 when his sick aunt retired. Marcos-Keon’s son Michael Marcos-Keon would serve as Illocos Norte governor in 2007 to 2010. Bongbong’s sister Imee Marcos served in that role from 2010 to 2019. Imee had attended Princeton University but never graduated from it. The incumbent governor is Matthew Manotoc, the son of Imee. Imee herself admitted, “It’s pretty feudal in the Philippines still, even though we like to fool ourselves.” (SMH 2012)

Bongbong Marcos had briefly attended the University of Oxford and University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School but couldn’t pass his exams and left without the respective degrees. Nepotism grazed in Ferdinand Marcos administration, as he appointed his son as chairman of the Philippine Communications Satellite Corporation in 1985. He was collecting a hefty salary without any formal responsibilities. The three Marcos children were assigned a mansion in Manila and Baguio. Bongbong’s mother, the First Lady Imelda, was infamous for her large shoe collection. The Marcos family has hidden an estimated $7 billion in foreign bank accounts, only a portion of which had been recovered by the Philippine government. By 1986, the Marcos party was over, because Ferdinand Marcos was toppled in a democratic uprising which brought the pro-democracy activist Corazon Aquino to power (more on them later).

Marcos and his family involving 80 individuals fled to Hawaii, where Ferdinand Marcos died in exile in 1989, but the rest of the Marcos family returned to the Philippines in 1991 to face various financial charges. But they were quickly integrated back into politics. Bongbong promptly ran for Congress in 1992, then served again as Ilocos Norte governor from 1998 until 2007. In 2016, Bongbong ran on the vice presidential ticket serving with Miriam Defensor Santiago, but the duo lost to Rodrigo Duterte and Leni Robredo. Bongbong was unhappy about the election result and demanded a recount. Duterte had threatened to resign if the vice presidency was handed to Bongbong. But the recount increased Robredo’s majority and the Presidential Election Tribunal dismissed Bongbong’s electoral recount. With Bongbong’s 2022 victory with the help of the Dutertes, the Marcos family returned to national power. All of the stolen money and human rights violations of the earlier Marcos regime no longer mattered to the electorate.

The other power faction were the Aquinos from Tarlac. Tarlac is in Luzon, but closer to the capital Manila than Iloco Norte. Corazon was the widow of the other pro-democracy activist Benigno Aquino Jr. or Ninoy, who was assassinated in 1983. Corazon was born to the Cojuangco family. Her father was Jose Cojuangco, a Tarlac businessman and Congressman. Ninoy was the son of Benigno Aquino Sr., Senate majority leader from Tarlac. Ninoy was the opposition leader attempting to challenge Ferdinand Marcos for which he was killed. The soldiers in charge of the assassination were later convicted during the Corazon Aquino presidency. Corazon entered politics following the killing of her husband and had the most legitimacy among the opposition groups. Corazon’s rule was somewhat controversial because her promise of land redistribution faced barriers, and the authorities had exempted her Cojuangco clan, major landowners, from redistribution. Instead, land shareholdings were handed to the local farmers. Ninoy and Corazon had four daughters and a son. The son, Benigno Aquino III or Noynoy, became Congressman for Tarlac (1998-2007), Senator (2007-2010) and president (2010-2016). Noynoy declared his run for the presidency only 40 days after the death of his mother, citing his desire to carry forward his family’s legacy. He won the election with that political energy. Noynoy retired in 2016 due to the term limit and passed away in 2021.

It is noteworthy that the term limit does not become an impediment to dynastic rule. In fact, the ambition of multiple family members can be better accommodated with term limits for the presidency, while there are enough House and Senate seats to accommodate the rest of the family.

Cambodia

In Cambodia, there is a monarchy under the House of Norodom. The dominant actor in the second half of the last century was King Norodom Sihanouk, who served as king from 1941 to 1955 and again from 1993-2004. In 1955, he abdicated and handed the title to his father, so he could become prime minister. Sihanouk’s father passed away in 1960 after which Sihanouk became Chief of State. He was toppled by the Khmer Rouge communists in 1970 after which he served as government-in-exile. He returned in 1975, but had poor relations with the Khmer. He was put under house arrest from 1976 to 1979. In 1979, the Vietnamese government invaded Cambodia and toppled the Khmer, putting a loyalist People’s Republic of Kampuchea in charge. Sihanouk opposed that government and instead formed a government-in-exile. The 1991 Paris Peace Accords finally organized a general election forming a coalition government between Sihanouk’s son Norodom Ranariddh and Hun Sen. Sihanouk was reinstalled as king in 1993 before his abdication in 2004. Sihanouk died in 2012.

Ranariddh and Hun Sen led different political factions with a power-sharing agreement. Hun Sen led the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP). By the late-1990s, the more power-hungry Hun Sen pushed Ranariddh to the political sideline. Ranariddh served as Prime Minister from 1993 to 1997. In 1997, Sen removed Ranariddh in a political coup. Ranariddh served as president of the National Assembly from 1998 to 2006. In 2006, Ranariddh was ousted by his own party, FUNCINPEC. He founded his own party but now Hun Sen used an embezzlement charge to drive Ranariddh into exile. In 2008, he returned to Cambodia and founded a new political party in 2014. In 2015, he returned to FUNCINPEC. By that point, he was completely marginalized politically. In 2018, he got into a car accident which killed his wife. He was on frequent medical treatment and died in a hospital in France in 2021.

Ranariddh’s younger brother Norodom Chakrapong served in both major political parties. He started in his brother’s FUNCINPEC, then joined Hun Sen’s CPP serving as deputy prime minister from 1992 to 1993. He then led a secession attempt for which he was forced into brief exile. In the mid-2000s, he returned to his brother’s camp. In 2007, he quit politics and was appointed to the Supreme Privy Council and in 2013 to the Constitutional Council by the King, his nephew Norodom Sihamoni. Sihamoni spent most of his childhood in Czechoslovakia, speaking fluent Czech, and reading about the Czech theater scene. He keeps a politically low profile, although he has advocated for “free and fair elections”, which is meant as an underhanded criticism of Hun Sen’s quasi-dictatorial rule as prime minister. Another daughter of Sihanouk is Norodom Arunrasmy, who served as president of FUNCINPEC (2013-2015) and Senator since 2018. Ranariddh’s son, Norodom Chakravuth, is the current FUNCINPEC leader and leader of the opposition. In his investiture speech Chakravuth said, “I am going to reunite the former royalists, Sihanoukists and Ranariddhists, so that the party can return to its former levels of success.”

The actual political power in Cambodia is vested in Hun Sen and his family. Sen came from a family of monks but joined the Khmer Rouge in 1970, then gradually climbing the political ranks within the military. He had the ability to align himself with any dominant power. When the Khmer Rouge regime expelled him in 1977, he fled to Vietnam. Vietnam toppled Khmer Rouge in 1979 and installed Sen as deputy prime minister. In 1985, he became prime minister. After the Paris Accord of 1991 he continued his rule with the power-sharing agreement with Ranariddh, which ended with Ranariddh’s removal from power. In every election, henceforth, Sen’s CPP received more and more votes. In 2013, CPP lost votes to the opposition party led by Sam Rainsy, who was forced into exile due to bogus charges of publishing a map giving up Cambodian territory to Vietnam. There were mass protests due to opposition perceptions of voter fraud, but Sen crushed the protests. In 2017, Sen barred the opposition from questioning government ministers and then dissolved the main opposition party. Opposition leader Kem Sokha was arrested for treason. The 2018 elections were rigged again by CPP and Sen appointed his son Hun Manet as military deputy commander-in-chief. Five years later, Sen resigned as prime minister and handed the title to his son Manet. Manet’s brother Hun Manith is lieutenant general and deputy commander-in-chief in the Army. Hun Many is the current deputy prime minister and minister of civil service. There is a non-monarchical dynasty in the making. Is it only a question of time until the Huns will remove the Norodoms?

Singular Ruling Families

There are further honorable mentions across the Asia-Pacific space, where there are ruling families, although these are more singular rather than multiple and competing.

Thailand

Thailand recently had a political shift. Thaksin Shinawatra, businessman and former prime minister (2001-2006) returned to Thailand to become the kingmaker of a coalition government with the conservative/ monarchist/ military parties that were previously led by Prayut Chan-o-cha. Prayut was a military general, who had seized the power in a military coup 2014 but due to significant popular pressure he relented to returning to democratic election. Prayut retired last summer but was appointed Privy Councillor, adviser to the king, in November 2023. The prime minister of the new government is Srettha Thavisin from Shinawatra’s Pheu Thai Party. Thaksin’s willingness to work with the military is all the more ironic given that he had lost power twice due to a military coup that was approved by King Bhumibol.

Thaksin came from a Hakka Chinese business family that immigrated to Thailand in the 1860s. Thaksin was elected as a popular billionaire in 2001, promising subsidized rice prices, universal health care and reduction of poverty for poor farmers in the northern and northeastern population centers, while angering the middle classes in Bangkok as well as the monarchy and the military, who felt that Thaksin was too challenging to the status quo. In the meantime, Thaksin was accused of corruption as he used government funds to benefit his companies that soared on the stock market. The military junta used the excuse of corruption and lese majeste, the defamation of the Thai monarchy, which is a criminal act, to oust Thaksin in 2006 while he was visiting the UN summit.

Thaksin remained in exile in Dubai and invested in various businesses like Manchester City Football Club. He purchased and received Montenegro’s citizenship in 2009. In late-2008, Somchai Wongsawat, who was married to Thaksin’s sister Yaowapha, became prime minister for three months. Somchai was removed for neglecting his duties as secretary in the Justice Department. Thaksin later promoted his younger sister Yingluck Shinawatra as his successor. She promptly won the first open election since his ouster in 2011. Yingluck entered the premiership and attempted to pardon her older brother but the junta blocked her request. In 2014, the military got sick of her and during anti-government protests it removed Yingluck from power for supposedly taking bribes for a rice-pledging scheme that was supposed to benefit poor farmers, who sold their rice at a guaranteed above-market price to the government. Yingluck was tried and convicted in absentia. In 2017, Yingluck had fled to Dubai to join her brother in exile. The Thai government cancelled her citizenship and she received UK and Serbian passport. In March 2024, Yingluck was acquitted by the Supreme Court of Thailand. In the meantime, Pheu Thai has been led by Thaksin’s daughter Paetongtarn Shinawatra.

Thaksin was biding his time in exile but returned in a deal with the military junta just in time for the 2023 parliamentary elections where Pheu Thai received the second-most votes, initially forming part of a pro-democracy, anti-military coalition with the Move Forward Party led by Pita Limjaroenrat. Move Forward received the most votes (38%), and Pheu Thai received the second most (29%). Prayut’s United Thai Nation only received 12% of the vote and landed in third place. Thaksin switched Pheu Thai’s support to the pro-military faction because the military had promised him a deal to commute his eight-year jail sentence. Upon his return to Thailand in August 2023, he served a half-year sentence in a hospital before he was released on parole in February 2024. While Srettha Thavisin is the prime minister, it appears to be the case that he owes his power to the Shinawatra family, including the patriarch Thaksin and his daughter and Pheu Thai leader Paetongtarn.

Pheu Thai’s decision to back the junta in their coalition is electorally costly and Move Forward is sure to capitalize from it. The new government is promoting higher minimum wage and a digital wallet redistribution scheme to generate popular support, but it’s too early to tell whether that will work. The military retains a lot of control over the political process because they appoint most of the 250 members of the Senate, which meant that the pro-democracy parties needed 375 of the 500 House seats to gain a majority. Move Forward’s Limjaroenrat only obtained 324 votes and could not become prime minister. In the latest December poll, Move Forward increased its majority from 38% to nearly 62%. The electorate is still sick and tired of junta rule and the Shinawatra’s arrangements can ultimately backfire. Move Forward is also significantly more progressive than Pheu Thai, demanding a higher minimum wage, a 40 hour workweek, more welfare services, public education funding, LGBT rights and even reforms to the lese majeste laws to lessen punishments for criticizing the monarchy.

Singapore

Singapore was founded by Lee Kuan Yew. He had taken over control over the People’s Action Party (PAP) and sidelined and purged the pro-communist party rivals. Once Singapore obtained independence from Malaysia in 1963 and PAP won most of the seats in the 1968 elections, PAP’s predominant position can no longer be challenged. Lee thought long and hard about succession. He believed in meritocracy, i.e. the smartest and most talented people should take the top jobs in politics and business. But he also believed that intelligence must be hereditary. Indeed, his elder son Hsien Loong was a Senior Wrangler in Cambridge University, i.e. he was the best mathematician at the college. He also earned a degree in computer science. The father pressured Hsien Loong to return to Singapore, where he joined the army and became a brigadier. In 1984, he joined politics in PAP, and was promptly appointed deputy prime minister in 1990, when Kuan Yew resigned in favor of Goh Chok Tong. Goh surrendered the premiership in 2004, opening the door for Lee Hsien Loong as third generation PAP leader. There were rumors about whether Hsien Loong’s older son Hongyi wanted to become a political leader. He became an army general and deputy director of the Government Technology Agency. Hongyi has denied these ambitions, although he is still a youthful 37 year old. For now, Hsien Loong anointed Lawrence Wong as his fourth generation successor. Wong is in his early 50s and so the fifth generation leadership issue has some time to be resolved. Will the PAP retain its legitimacy for this long?

There are already disputes within the Lee family. Lee Kuan Yews younger children are Lee Wei Ling and Lee Hsien Yang and they accuse their older brother and prime minister Hsien Loong of violating Kuan Yew’s will to destroy his Oxley Road residence. Kuan Yew, Wei Ling and Hsien Yang argued that the founding leader did not want to be worshipped by Singaporeans, but Hsien Loong is exactly attempting to do this by converting the Oxley Road house into a museum. It could build legitimacy for PAP. Because the younger siblings kept speaking up, Hsien Loong deployed the prosecutors to disbar Lim Suet Fern, Hsien Yang’s wife. She is a lawyer, who drew up the will for Lee Kuan Yew. Hsien Yang then decided to support the Progress Singapore Party (PSP) in the 2020 elections, which is a snub to his elder brother. PSP did not win any seats but the message was clear. Hsien Yang is not interested in running for political office, which potentially reduced PSP’s appeal. Hsien Yang briefly considered a 2023 presidential run but he was in exile in the UK and the Singaporean authorities are likely to block his access to the ballot given the government lawsuits around his neck. One of Hsien Yang’s sons, the Harvard economist Li Shengwu, was fined by Singaporean courts for private Facebook posts accusing the Singaporean court system for being pliant and litigious. All the more ironic that the very same court system was punishing him for “slander”, which western courts consider freedom of speech. Shengwu also accused his cousin Hongyi of harboring political ambitions and he has decided not to return to Singapore, arguing that political dynasties are bad for Singapore and fearing arrest upon return even though he had paid the fine.

North Korea

In North Korea, there is a communist regime that took over the northern portion of the Korean peninsula in 1945. Its first leader was Kim Il-Sung, who had received shelter in China in the early-1930s when the Japanese occupiers had banned the Korean communists. He also received military training and support from the Soviet communists in Khabarovsk. When the Soviets invaded Manchuria and northern half of Korea, they promoted Kim as the new communist leader in North Korea. The southern half of the peninsula was under American occupation and declared the Republic of Korea in 1948. Kim armed his defense forces and invaded the South. The Korean War ended in a stalemate near the 38th parallel, and for a while North Korea’s economy flourished with the help of the Soviet Union. Kim created a cult of personality and purged all internal party opponents, thus creating a full dictatorship. Land was controlled by the state and private landlords were expelled. Ordinary people dependent on state rations and daring to oppose the regime were collectively punished with their non-offending relatives. In the songbun caste system people were divided into “core”, “wavering” and “hostile” castes with harsh treatment given to the latter two.

Kim secured his power by appointing family members into the high offices of the state: His brother Kim Yong Ju was vice premier and vice president. His son Kim Pyong Il became ambassador in various countries. His daughter Kim Kyong-hui became Secretary for Organization in the Worker’s Party. But the most important family member was his son Kim Jong Il, the anointed successor as General Secretary. He was successor designate in 1974 and took over leadership in 1994 after Il Sung’s death. Kim Jong Il was a bon vivant and died age 70 in 2011. He anointed his even more morbidly obese son Kim Jong Un as successor. Kim Jong Un is trying to build up his daughter Kim Ju-ae as successor. He showed her in public during the missile launch in November 2022, although Korean society remains very patriarchal. Jong Un also trusts his younger sister Kim Yo-jong, who acts as a de facto foreign minister and right-hand person to her brother. Another Kim Jong Il daughter Kim Sol-song is a propaganda secretary and lieutenant colonel in the Army. Another son Kim Jong-chul is active in a rock band, has attended Eric Clapton concerts and has no interest in politics.

Not all Kim family members are doing well. Jang Song-thaek, husband of Kim Kyong-hui and uncle of Jong Un, was killed in the power struggle following Kim Jong Il’s death. Jong Un’s half brother Kim Jong-nam, who was seen as Jong Un’s competitor in power, was assassinated in the airport of Kuala Lumpur. At least the Singaporean authorities do not kill unruly family members.

India

While Kim is the currently ruling dynasty in North Korea, the same cannot be said about the Indian Nehru-Gandhi clan. The earliest documented Nehru was Raj Kaul, a Kashmiri Pandit. The patriarch of the family was Motilal Nehru, a prominent leader of India’s independence movement. He served as the president of Congress Party (Indian National Congress, INC), which was founded in 1885. Congress became the dominant political party in India being a catch-all secular party. The first major political leader was Motilal’s son Jawaharlal Nehru, who became the founding prime minister serving until his death in 1964. Jawaharlal Nehru succeeded his father as INC president in 1929. His sister Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit became a diplomat and president and UN General Assembly president. His wife Kamala Nehru was a social reformer and member of the All India Congress Committee. His cousin Brijlal Nehru was the finance minister of Jammu and Kashmir. Brijlal’s son Braj Kumar Nehru was ambassador to the US and commissioner to the UK. He was a governor of various Indian provinces.

Nehru was a proponent of socialist development and used Five-Year Plans to push the direction of the Indian economy. After Jawaharlal’s death, Indira Gandhi, his only daughter, became prime minister (1966-1977, 1980-1984). She married fellow politician Feroze Gandhi, who died of a heart attack in 1960. She became a dictator during the state of emergency from 1975 to 1977 which resulted in grave abuses of power. She was pushed into opposition in 1977 but won the following election in 1980. In 1984, she was assassinated by two Sikh bodyguards in retaliation for Operation Blue Star where the Indian army killed Sikh separatists. Indira was inherited by her son Rajiv Gandhi, who won the election that same year, but then lost power in 1989. Two years after that, he was assassinated too, this time by the Sri Lankan Tamil LTTE, which was resentful of Gandhi’s decision to deploy Indian soldiers to crush the Tamils. Rajiv’s wife Sonia Gandhi, a native Italian, took on INC chairwomanship, but never wanted to be prime minister herself. When INC won the majority in 2004, she drafted Manmohan Singh as prime minister, while she continued to decide on government policy via her party leadership.

Nehru-Gandhi was finally removed from most political offices of power when the rival BJP won the national election under Narendra Modi in 2014. He is poised to win a third term with Rajesh Gandhi (Sonia and Rajiv’s son) as INC lead candidate, not standing a chance. Priyanka, Rajesh’s sister, is the General Secretary of INC. Ironically, their cousin, Varun Gandhi, son of Sanjay Gandhi and grandson of Indira Gandhi, is a BJP politician.

Conclusion

In the Southeast Asian space nepotism, the appointment of family members into high political offices, is common practice. It is true that nepotism stands in opposition to meritocracy, i.e. the promotion of the most competent people to power, and meritocracy forms the basis for more rationalist political rule. On the other hand, nepotism is the natural human order, while rational/ meritocratic rule appears to develop in specific cultural contexts, e.g. in western Europe or China. Even in so-called rationalist governments, we can find some amount of nepotism and dynastic formation, e.g. the Kennedys, Bushs or Trumps in the US or Xi Jinping or Bo Xilai’s clans in China. It should be noted that more rationalist governments have a hard time institutionalizing such dynasties. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s political career abruptly ended with the end of the Trump presidency and Robert Kennedy does not benefit sufficiently from his father and uncle’s reputation in the 1960s for his current presidential run.

By natural human order, I refer to the sentiment of every individual to ensure that his offspring does well financially and politically. Nepotism is based on the biological instinct of procreation and the thriving of one’s descendants. The most extreme form of nepotism is the monarchy. Here, the successor is written into the state constitution, while uncertainty of succession results in palace intrigues, e.g. Ottomans and Chinese empires. With the exception of some Islamic countries (e.g. Saudi), absolute monarchies have been replaced by constitutional monarchies or republics. Even in these cases more surreptitious forms of political succession bring about family intrigues and the jockeying for power. The assumption in nepotistic political structures is that there is a weakly developed independent middle class who could form a broader layer of people from which a political leadership class could be drawn and who could form a strong educated opposition to excessively nepotistic anti-rationalist practices.

Controlling nepotism is not the only factor that forms the basis for democratic, pluralist and economic development. But it is an important factor. The fact that absolute monarchies are already quite rare suggests that human societies can change and nepotism can be curbed, but it can continue to flourish for a long time given that the powerful are merely applying their biological program of taking care of their own offspring. Rational bureaucratic rule is a cumbersome institutional framework that takes continuous cultivation to maintain like swimming against the river stream. If it gets reversed, we are back to traditionalist nepotistic rule that works as straightforwardly as being carried in the direction of the river stream.

Further readings:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prabowo_Subianto

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joko_Widodo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukarno

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megawati_Sukarnoputri

https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/suharto-clan-still-business-stumbling-politics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquino_family

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcos_family

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodrigo_Duterte

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Norodom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hun_Sen

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinawatra_family

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_family_(Singapore)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_family_(North_Korea)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nehru%E2%80%93Gandhi_family

Ukraine War and Domino Theory

Podcast here: https://soundcloud.com/user-280580802/215-ukraine-war-and-domino-theory

US presidential candidate Donald Trump said in a campaign speech that the US would not protect a NATO ally if it failed to spend at least 2% of its GDP on defense, claiming that this would make the NATO ally delinquent. In that case, he would let Russia do what it wished to do, including invading a European NATO ally (Gera 2024). Trump’s intention all along is not to convince NATO allies to increase defense spending but rather to have an excuse to pull the US out of NATO altogether. It is more than likely that many of Trump’s supporters are political isolationists, who do not mind if the US abandoned Europe and thereby raise the potential for a further Russian invasion in Europe if they succeed in taking all of Ukraine. Biden denounced Trump’s position and claimed that US support for NATO remains a “sacred obligation”.

It is all the more ironic that Vladimir Putin recently claimed to favor Biden over Trump as US president. Should he not be supportive of Trump given that he would pull the US out of NATO and thereby open the space for Russia to expand further west? It appears to be that Putin is more fearful of Trump than of Biden, which is why he chose to wait until the Biden presidency to launch the Ukraine invasion. Putin thinks that Biden is a more predictable leader. While Biden passed more military aid for Ukraine, making it difficult for the Russian army to break through, Putin believed Biden’s promise to not directly intervene to protect Ukraine from the Russian invasion. Biden stuck to that promise, and currently aid to Ukraine is held up anyway because the MAGA rebels in Congress control the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. Putin views a Trump presidency with higher risk, because in one moment he announced the US retreat from NATO and in the next moment he could invade Russia. Trump is an unpredictable madman, and Putin views that with higher risk and he is clearly not suicidal. On the other hand, the Trump supporters believing that geopolitical stability, i.e. the absence of major global wars, would be accomplished by having a madman in the White House by deterring overly cautious Russians are misguided. Global security is better served with cautious, calculating leaders given that impulsive leaders put us a heartbeat away from nuclear holocaust.

Trump is the leader in the national election polls, and, therefore we have to assess the geopolitical consequences of his victory in the November elections. The US exits NATO and cuts off all aid to Ukraine. The Europeans are furiously increasing defense spending and the Baltic states and Poland erect border fortifications fearing a further invasion by Russia. The European support for Ukraine is ultimately driven by the domino theory, the fear that the Russians will invade them next, especially the former Soviet territories like the Baltics. A few days after Trump’s anti-NATO speech, Putin announced that he would prosecute the Estonian prime minister, Kaja Kallas, one of the staunchest advocates for increasing military and economic aid to Ukraine. It should be noted that the Estonian government goes in full confrontation mode having outlawed Russian language instruction in Estonian school, a big sore point for Putin’s regime.

Europe will become more insecure. There are still two factors in operation that can deter further Russian aggression and put doubt into the domino theory. Firstly, even without the US, UK and France are two alliance members that have nuclear weapons. Crossing into NATO territory could allow even a diminished NATO counter-strike capabilities with their nuclear arsenal. Secondly, even without US support it is not evident if the Russians currently have the capability to seize all of Ukraine.

The battlefront in Ukraine is currently favoring Russia. After western equipment infusions in the winter of 2022/2023 and a failed Ukrainian summer counteroffensive last year, the west has effectively used up all the equipment they are willing to part with. Military production orders have certainly increased but it takes several years to fulfill these elevated production orders. The US military has an easier time scaling up production given that the army itself operates ammunition plants, while the Europeans rely on private companies like BAE Systems, Thales or Rheinmetall. Private companies only make significant investments if they have secure funding from governments given that these are the only major buyers of military goods. The shortage of military equipment means that the Ukrainians are presently outgunned by the Russians, who are steadily feeding more of their national resources into their own military-industrial complex.

Western sanctions on Russia are supposed to throttle Russia’s access to inputs that go into military production, but these sanctions are clearly undermined because the western companies simply re-route their trade to Central Asian countries that re-export the goods to Russia. Furthermore, China is selling any hardware or equipment components that Russia may want and bilateral trade among the two countries is still high. No wonder, the Russian arms industry is capable of churning out more military gear and send it to the frontline.

It should be noted that the Russians are not very effective in deploying their forces. There are no real adjustments to tactic. They send their vehicles in a straight line column forward, waiting to be picked apart by Ukrainian artillery and FPV drones. Social media is filled with the burning and destroyed Russian tanks. The Russian strategy is simply to overwhelm the Ukrainian defenses with sheer mass. When there is a local breakthrough, the Russians rush even more forces in that zone hoping to capture as much territory as possible. Since the failed counteroffensive and running low on munition, Ukrainians have been concentrating on defense. The Russians have been concentrating on capturing the town of Avdiivka, the last major Ukrainian outpost in the suburbs of Donetsk city. Putin has set out the goal to capture the town in time for the Russian presidential elections next month that is already rigged for Putin to win.

The Ukrainian leadership has the opposite logic of holding the town of Avdiivka by all means to deny the victory to Russia and not give the Ukrainian people the feeling that they keep losing, thus undermining national morale. Or at least that is President Volodymyr Zelensky’s logic. His commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhny had published op-eds claiming that Ukraine does not currently have the resources to win the war against Russia and that the Ukrainian resource inferiority can only be counteracted by the increased supply of superior western technologies. The Ukrainian Army is quite innovative and is now creating a formal drone army, which had hitherto been provided directly by grassroots Ukrainian citizens to the soldiers. Zaluzhny’s philosophy has also been to accept strategic withdrawals to more secure lines and fortifications and prevent the encirclement and loss of troops.

General Oleksandr Syrskyi, who led the Kharkiv counteroffensive in the fall of 2022 and organized the defense of Bakhmut in early 2023, holds a view closer to Zelensky: go on the offensive wherever possible and if you have to go on the defensive, then hold the towns by all means and withdraw only in the last minute. Syrskyi is much more open to Soviet-style military strategy than the younger Zaluzhny: be wasteful with losing your soldiers to reach your military objective. In the defense of Bakhmut, there were periods where Ukraine was losing as many soldiers as the Russians, which was an unsustainable strategy given the Russian manpower advantage. The Ukrainians lost Bakhmut after 9 months of grinding battles. It is not surprising that Zelensky recently decided to demote the very popular Zaluzhny and replace him with Syrsky as commander-in-chief.

It’s hard to say whether Zelensky is making a major strategic error in his decision to hold every inch of land. He knows that gaining back the land will be harder than holding it for as long as possible. Without additional military aid from the US, which continues to be held up by the US House of Representatives that is under the influence of Trump and his minions, the Ukrainians will have a hard time holding up against the continued Russian onslaught. Avdiivka is perhaps weeks away from falling, as the Russians are approaching the last major supply road. On the other hand, the only time the Russians advanced quickly was in the first two weeks of the war in 2022 when the Ukrainians were caught by surprise and didn’t have a general mobilization and solid defense fortifications outside the Donbas, where they held the front for eight years. The Russians have also burned up their most valuable and experienced tank and infantry units. Now they are feeding new inexperienced soldiers from the rural Russian provinces and even Nepalis, Cubans and Sierra Leonians into the frontline for costly frontal assaults. The Russian war economy is bringing significant assets into the war but these resources can be imperiled as the Ukrainians use cheap drones to destroy the Russian Black Sea fleet and the oil refineries and ports that generate most of the Russian foreign exchange.

Regardless of how many resources the Russians are pouring into Ukraine, only minor frontal advances are likely. Ukraine will continue resisting even without US support, but it will suffer more casualties. In the absence of decisive battle field success, Putin has the most incentives to seek a negotiated outcome to the war. Could MAGA in America continue to block Ukraine aid, thereby gradually pushing the Ukrainians back on the frontline and then force them to accede to negotiations and territorial concessions? These territorial concessions just buy both sides some time to rearm for the next iteration of the armed conflict. It would be destructive for Ukraine given that they have ever fewer resources to resist the Russians, so they have no incentives to negotiate.

Even with the US abandonment of Ukraine, the European allies have stepped up their military support and the EU recently passed a 50 billion euro financial aid package. Germany is the major European power that is shifting a portion of its industrial might to build more ammunition factories. The Nordic countries have added industrial weapons capacity as well.

But the unity of Europe is in question. The new pro-western Polish government supports Ukraine as before, but they have to back their domestic constituents, the Polish farmers, who block the Ukrainian trucks from bringing in Ukrainian grains that push down grain prices and drive the Polish farmers out of business. The former government under Mateusz Morawiecki explicitly supported the farmers, though it didn’t help them win the election, while the current government under Donald Tusk promised to resolve the farmer grievances but have not done much about it. Ukraine is already short of cash with a half-destroyed economy and the war is really expensive. By blocking the primary Ukrainian export commodity from entering foreign markets, the Poles are undermining their Ukrainian allies, even as the Poles continue to deliver military and financial aid.

Hungary is even worse for Ukraine. The Hungarian government under Viktor Orban wants to use its leverage in the EU council to extract concessions from the EU. The EU wants to punish Orban for rule of law violations and stealing EU funds for his cronies, while Orban wants to continue the status quo. He already delayed the Ukraine aid package by nearly two months with his veto, but in the beginning of February he finally caved because he was threatened with losing his veto right. But now Orban used his veto again over new Russia sanctions, presumably to protect Chinese companies that are selling to both the Europeans and the Russians.

Orban’s position favorable to Russia interestingly does not mean that he wants to return to the Russian empire. Orban’s political career in the 1980s began when he gave speeches against the Soviet army occupation of Hungary and for political freedom. By that point, Gorbachev already indicated no more harsh crackdown on independence movements in the Soviet satellite states, so Orban was clearly lucky to be born later than Imre Nagy, who led the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Orban likes EU membership for the subsidies it pays to his government. He also likes NATO membership, as he has no interest in a renewed Russian occupation. But he also thinks that he can accommodate Russia. He wants to purchase cheap Russian gas via the TurkStream pipeline and if Ukraine is taken over by Russia he is hoping to receive Transcarpathia (the Ukrainian province of Zakarpattia) with a large Hungarian minority as part of Hungary. Similarly, when the Hungarians allied with the Nazis in World War II, they received territory in Romania, Serbia and Ukraine, among others.

Thus, there are evident similarities between Orban, Trump and Putin: they are all authoritarian and corrupt in their political outlook and they think about national interest in a crude and narrow way, e.g. control over territory and resources. They detest the liberal international order, which is about the respect for national boundaries/ sovereignty, democratic governance and rule of law. Some countries of the Global South are backing Russia because they, in turn, detest the hypocrisy of the Global North, which historically imposed the worst kind of sovereign violation against the Global South via their colonial conquests, and now that white people close to home (there is a racial element to that resentment as well) in Ukraine have their sovereignty violated, the west now suddenly clamors for the respect of national sovereignty.

But I think this kind of resentment from the Global South is an expression of envy rather than opposition to liberal internationalist values. In other words, the people in the Global South if given the choice want to experience the positive effects of liberal internationalist values rather than renounce them altogether. Here, I am referring to the people of the Global South countries, not their leaders. The leaders may be corrupt authoritarians and it is in their interest to make a distracting case about the hypocrisy of the west or their supposed anti-family values surrounding a pro-abortion or pro-LGBT agenda. These liberal social values are, of course, influenced by the wealth that the rich countries have accumulated (by historically exploiting their colonies). The Global South leaders want their people to oppose the western imperialists and thereby support their own regimes, despite the low standard of living and lack of freedoms afforded to the population. For the people of the Global South, the desire to pursue liberal international values is exemplified by the tens of thousands of Venezuelans, Chinese, Indians and Russians streaming across the US-Mexican border into the US. Hence, the discourse on the US border crisis. The solution to reduce migration to the Global North would be about lessening the differences in wealth across nations. Then, it will also be feasible to spread more liberal political regimes in the way that Francis Fukuyama hoped for in the late-1980s. Whether that movement is feasible is very much in doubt at present.

Enacting liberal democracy in the west clearly has downside costs as well: the opposition of Viktor Orban and MAGA has been sufficient to throw off the level of support for Ukraine even if most countries and leaders are pro-Ukraine. Even the significant financial advantages of western economies against the much smaller Russians (including their North Korean, Iranian and Syrian allies) does not necessarily mean a Ukrainian military victory if it takes only a handful of political veto players to lower support for Ukraine. Putin’s only hope is that a long war is wearing out western support for Ukraine. That is very much a possibility.

Let me conclude with some further reflections on domino theory. The US has incorrectly applied the domino theory in Vietnam and Afghanistan, and failed to recognize it against Germany in both world wars. The fall of South Vietnam did not result in the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. Thailand remained a staunch US ally, and further south Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia also stayed in the US camp. The Vietcong were popular in Vietnam because they were the anti-imperialist forces that had thrown out the French colonizers. When the Vietnamese communists tried to expand their influence into neighboring Cambodia they experienced much more pushback. The US wasted huge amount of resources and manpower in this decade-long US occupation of South Vietnam.

The US considered the Afghanistan War to be a legitimate struggle against Islamic terrorism that should not spread further and threaten so many American lives again after 9/11. But there was no further 9/11 and the US was stuck in another quagmire without knowing how to do nationbuilding. The Taliban dug into the Hindukush mountains and retook the government after the US retreat. But there is no evidence that Taliban’s reach would go beyond Afghanistan.

In contrast, the US was not interested to interfere in the European wars in the first half of the twentieth century. The late US entry in the European war dragged out the conflict because the Allies (without the US) and Axis powers were about equally strong. In the case of World War II, the German-led Axis had a temporary advantage having knocked out France and putting the British and the Soviets in the defensive. In hindsight, we know that Hitler should have been stopped earlier, perhaps after the annexation of Austria in 1938.

To what extent does Russia fit the domino theory? My take is that the Russian case is somewhere in between these two extremes. I have no doubt that Putin will want to occupy as much territory as possible and there is no fixed territorial limit, so if he is not stopped in Ukraine, the other non-NATO post-Soviet countries, i.e. Moldova and Georgia are certainly threatened. But NATO land is very different. If Trump won the presidency and gave assurances to Putin to leave NATO, NATO would fall back into a purely European alliance but it would still be formidable. An attack on the Baltic states would bring the Germans, French and British into this war and even in the absence of nuclear weapons, the Russians do not have the resources to defeat a united Europe. On the other hand, if war of expansion is the only way for Putin to gain legitimacy at home, then why take the risk by letting him take Ukraine?

The concern about domino theory would have to be applied elsewhere. Could China invade Taiwan? If the US does not back its supposed allies, then there would be fewer obstacles for China to do so. Geopolitical stability in Europe is already a thing of the past, e.g. will Azerbaijan invade Armenia? We should prevent adding more fuel to the fire by stopping the Russian aggression in Ukraine. The isolationists are wrong to presume that giving Putin what he wants will stop the war. It will just buy some more time for future Russian aggression.

The Gaza Crisis, the Global North and Global South

Podcast here: https://soundcloud.com/user-280580802/214-the-gaza-crisis-the-global-north-and-global-south

On January 26, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), an organ of the United Nations, ruled that Israel must not commit genocide in its military campaign in Gaza, where they intend to wipe out Hamas as a political and military organization. In the process, they have destroyed 70% of all the buildings in Gaza, and killed nearly 30,000 people, while wounding more than 60,000. Israel responds to the October 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attack that resulted in 1,400 deaths and over 100 hostages from Israel. The Israelis claim that they have not committed and will not commit genocide, although leading Israeli officials have made salacious statements about cutting off food, fuel and medicine in Gaza, or realizing a new Nakba, the Arab word for “catastrophe”, i.e. the original expulsion of the Palestinians from their homeland with the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. The South Africans, who brought the case in front of the ICJ, promptly quoted these Israeli official statements in their lawsuit.

The positioning of the world’s countries in response to the ICJ ruling reveals the global political divide between the Global North and the Global South. The rich, powerful Northerners defend Israel and do not think that it can do anything wrong, while the poor Global South back Palestine in their quest for statehood and protecting their human rights.

Key: Blue countries oppose South Africa’s case, Green countries support South Africa’s case. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_v._Israel_(Genocide_Convention)

On the pro-South African side, Brazilian president Lula da Silva remarked that genocide must be stopped. Russia did not take a formal position on the case but was favorable to South Africa in its statements. The Ugandan judge Julia Sebutinde voted against the ICJ ruling, but the Ugandan government emphatically stated that Sebutinde’s views do not match the government’s.

On the pro-Israeli side, Austrian chancellor Karl Nehammer and Czech prime minister Petr Fiala claim that the ICJ is “politicized”, thereby delegitimating the ICJ. If the Arabs get killed, this should not be politicized, but Jews getting killed is an antisemitic tragedy. British Foreign Secretary David Cameron found the genocide case to be “nonsense”. He argued that Israel is “a democracy, a country with the rule of law, a country with armed forces that are committed to obeying the rule of law”. Therefore, a democracy can never violate the rule of law, similar to Britain and France toppling Libya’s leader Muammar Gaddafi during Cameron’s tenure as British prime minister. The Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said: “I would be a little bit uncomfortable about accusing Israel, a Jewish state, of genocide given the fact that six million Jews – over half the population of Jews in Europe – were killed.” In Varadkar’s logic, the past victim can never be a future perpetrator, even though this happens all the time: the most violent people tend to have a violent childhood with abusive parents. Hurt people hurt people.

The west is willfully turning a blind eye to Israel’s destructive and murderous ground offensive in Gaza in large parts because of the guilt they are carrying from centuries of European antisemitism. Pogroms, ghettoization and exiling of Jews throughout the centuries culminated in Arthur Balfour’s declaration handing Palestine to the Jews in 1920. It is noteworthy that this British politician who organized the British Mandate over Palestine was an antisemite, who wanted the British Jews to move to Palestine. The Nazi Holocaust was the straw that broke the camel’s back: the murder of 6 million Jews produced the impetus for the collective west, especially the United States, to support the creation of the State of Israel. As the Jews moved in especially from Europe, they were supplied by the American military and expelled the Arabs that have lived in Palestine for many years. The US has provided Israel with $260 billion in foreign and military aid from its founding until 2023. The US also blocked any sanctions for human rights violations by Israel. The Germans have financially underwritten Israel by paying 82 billion euros in reparations. Germany is extinguishing its guilt by financially compensating the Holocaust survivors. Guilt is a terrible principle of foreign policy: two wrongs do not make a right. Atoning for the Holocaust does not mean approving of Nakba.

Even as the Global North countries are unhappy about Israel’s heavy-handedness and appearing as hypocrites for being silent, they have another reason for backing Israel no matter what: the US believes that Israel is the major political ally in the region allowing the US to project its power in the Middle East region. The Americans have suspicions about Islamic groups in Middle East and North Africa, and they want to counterbalance the Iranians, who are supporting their proxies among the Hezbollah (in Lebanon and Iraq) and the Houthis (Yemen) among others. These militias are now attacking trading ships traversing the Red Sea, and the US retaliates with airstrikes against the militia bases. The outcome of these bombing raids is uncertain. Iran-backed militias, in turn, state that they will only stop these attacks if Israel stops its ground offensive in Gaza. The US is unwilling to do it even though it is the only power that could stop it, effectively by cutting off the military and financial aid to Israel.

In contrast, the Global South will back the Palestinians, especially the neighboring Arab and Muslim countries, although countries like UAE or Saudi Arabia would rather see the Palestinian issue go away, as they enjoy the intermediate position in the global economy, taking advantage of the western rule of law and trading system and keeping their business options open with China in the intensifying Cold War. For the Global South, the Palestinian plight, ranging from starvation, homelessness, death to statelessness, is reminiscent of the colonial oppression that many Global South countries have struggled to escape in the second half of the twentieth century. The Global North created the nation-state global order, and the Global South has to operate under the rules set by the Global North. South Africa might have the moral upper hand in the ICJ case but the Global North has the instruments to effect any changes on the ground.

The Global North promptly snubbed the ICJ ruling against Israel by eliminating UNRWA funding. UNRWA is the UN agency that was established in 1949 immediately after the Nakba with the task to provide education, medical care and shelter to Palestinian refugees in Gaza, West Bank and nearby countries with Palestinian refugee camps like Lebanon, Syria or Jordan. UNRWA has been funded by the Global North countries that have the most resources. It was a form of western atonement for supporting Israelis in expelling the Palestinians from their land. Over the years, Israel has accepted UNRWAs mission because it would provide the Palestinian people with welfare that the Israelis do not want to provide themselves.

But in recent years, Israel has voiced more and more suspicion against UNRWA for aiding Hamas, who carry out terrorist attacks and shoot missiles against Israel. In response to the ICJ lawsuit, Israel has countered that 12 UNRWA aid workers participated in the October 7 terrorist attack. UNRWA promptly fired these aid workers, but the US immediately agreed with Israel’s sentiment and suspended funding for the agency. The US is the largest contributor to UNRWA. The European allies (or vassals) immediately took the cue and cut UNRWA funding as well. UNRWA has already been hobbled in providing humanitarian relief in the midst of Israel’s Gaza campaign but now the humanitarian situation will be even worse with fewer resources to help the Palestinians. The Global North decided to snub the ICJ by condoning the Israeli perpetrators and defunding the Palestinian aid agency at a time of its greatest need!

Michael Fakhri, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, said on X that a day after the ICJ “concluded that Israel is plausibly committing genocide in Gaza, some states decided to defund UNRWA for the alleged actions of a small number of employees. This collectively punishes +2.2 million Palestinians.” Sadly, the ICJ is in no position to enforce its court order given that the UN is dominated by the five permanent members of the Security Council. Three permanent members (US, UK, France) are fully behind Israel.

While life for Palestinians is going to be catastrophic in the months and years ahead, Israel’s backing by the Global North and its impunity against the Palestinians does not mean that their path is sustainable. If full-scale genocide or expulsion are not feasible (the latter is blocked by neighboring Egypt and Jordan), the Israelis have no choice but to create a new governance model probably under the inclusion of the Palestinian Authority. The Israelis can attempt to rule over the Gazans directly, and they will surely control public security and the external borders as they are doing in the West Bank already. But how are the survivors of Israel’s genocidal campaign going to behave? Will they take it easy to be ruled over by Israeli authorities who brought them so much suffering?

In terms of domestic politics, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party support declined from 30% to less than 20%, which meant the decline of more than one third of his supporters. The poll leader is National Unity with more than 35% polling support. It is led by Benny Gantz, the former defense minister and currently a member of the war cabinet of Netanyahu. If an election were held today, it is hard to conceive of Netanyahu ever returning to the premiership.

He retained his popularity by promising a hardline approach of expanding Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and prior to the terrorist attack supporting Hamas as a political entity. The split between Hamas and Fatah would make it difficult to create a united front against Israel and thereby prevent a true two-state settlement. A genuine two-state settlement would abruptly end Netanyahu and other right-wingers vision for a unitary Israeli state covering the entire territory of historic Palestine. Netanyahu was also known as the law-and-order politician who would keep the Israelis safe from foreign harm, e.g. against Iran. But with the October 7 attack, that veneer of Israeli safety has been blown away, and the Israeli public make that clear by protesting against Netanyahu. The vision of a unitary Israeli state without regard for Palestinian interests has turned out to be an illusion. Israel retains control over the guns and the money, but all the resources in the world will not buy them peace but rather endless war and Palestinian hostility.

When it comes to upholding the international order, the west/ Global North is primarily interested in (1) one-sidedly atoning for its previous guilt (of antisemitism) at the expense of the Palestinians and (2) retaining US hegemonic dominance in the Middle East region by backing up its Israeli ally at all costs, even if it means the “sacrifice” of the Palestinian people, the loss of rule of law standards and the ill-will of the Global South that lacks the means to challenge the folly of the Global North.

Further readings:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNRWA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_v.Israel(Genocide_Convention)

The Threat to the German Economic Model

Podcast here: https://soundcloud.com/user-280580802/213-the-threat-to-the-german-economic-model

The German economy is struggling and this brings a lot of unrest and public criticism against the three-party coalition government consisting of the Social Democrats (SPD), Liberals (FDP) and Greens. In the latest sign of discontent, farmers have been protesting against the budget amendment that would scrap fuel subsidies for farmers, which would substantially harm the small farmers. Big farmers could benefit as small farmers struggle to keep their business going and have to sell their farms to the big farmers. The budget amendment came after the German constitutional court prohibited the government’s budget practice of using unused debt from pandemic-era measures to fund certain climate change policies. Germany’s economic problems are significantly bigger than the budget laws and farmer unrest.

German industrial production has been declining for the last two years. Clearly, the pandemic can no longer be blamed for the declining industrial activity because most industrial production (except transportation equipment) has recovered in the second half of 2020. Since the beginning of 2022, most industrial production declined, except for electronics.

Source: https://twitter.com/heimbergecon/status/1745327536488276234

An important factor behind the declining industrial production is the increase in natural gas prices, which has effectively tripled by the end of 2022, reaching 20 euros. As of December 2023, that figure dropped again to 12 euros, lower than during the peak, but still much higher than before.

Source: https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/publications/understanding-germanys-gas-price-brake-balancing-fast-relief-and-complex-politics/

The rise in the gas prices can be explained by the Ukraine War and Germany’s heavy reliance on Russian natural gas. Germany has been importing Soviet gas since the 1970s and further pipelines over the Baltic Sea were added in the early-2010s (Nord Stream 1) and again before the start of the Ukraine War in 2022 (Nord Stream 2). With the start of the war these pipelines were shut down, and Germany promptly signed new LNG deals with the US, Norway and Qatar. It also built LNG terminals in northern Germany bypassing all of the previous environmental objections that had previously hindered its adoption. But the shipped gas is much more expensive than the Russian pipeline gas, hence the higher gas prices. The Nordstream pipeline was blown and no one wants to admit that they were responsible for it. Was it the US or Ukraine? Or was it Russia itself? A Washington Post article points to a Ukrainian special operator as culprit (Harris and Khurshudyan 2023).

The Green Party had joined the coalition government in 2021 and has committed itself to a rapid green energy transition. The Green Party was merely accelerating an energy trend that has been happening over the last 15 years. German energy production has increased by 66% between 2010 and the end of 2023, but coal, lignite and oil consumption have been decreasing. Small increases come from biomass (essentially wood) and natural gas (hence the vulnerability to geopolitics). By far, the largest increases come from solar and wind. The renewable energy share has hit 50% with an 80% target by 2030.

Source: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts

The renewable energy transition is to be welcomed given the continuously escalating global atmospheric temperature following our fossil fuel-based lifestyle. But it is questionable whether this can be done so swiftly, especially as geopolitical conflict are causing a rise in energy prices that are followed by social unrest. Climate policies must be viewed as legitimate in order to work. Economy minister Robert Habeck’s decision to phase out nuclear energy despite the three nuclear plants still operating at the beginning of the Ukraine War shows the lack of prudence in the German government. Consider also that the Gerhard Schroder government had made the fateful decision to shut down the nuclear plants and rely on Russian gas while transitioning to renewable energy. Habeck still has to be commended for eating his environmental hat and agreeing to sign the LNG contracts with Qatar. He cared more about raison d’etat than green ideology.

Given the decline of industrial production and the heavy reliance on manufacturing as a share of the economy (about 18%), Germany cannot fully rely on renewable energy to operate manufacturing. Some renewable energy sources like hydrogen are still very experimental, and hence expensive to produce. 67% of German businesses have moved some of their operations overseas, resulting in deindustrialization (Caddle 2023). Popular locations are other EU countries or US and Canada that have their own (cheaper) gas supplies.

Energy prices are not the only challenge for German industry. Volkswagen has been the leading car producer in the world specializing in ever more fuel efficient combustion engine cars. Consider that Gottlieb Daimler, Karl Benz and Nicolaus Otto, all Germans, were the first people to have developed the commercial combustion engine vehicle in the 1880s. They have this age-old technology and believe that it will be in use for eternity. But as there are more and more electric vehicles from the US (Tesla) and China (BYD, NIO etc.) flooding the world market, the Germans are expected to lose car market share in the years ahead unless they aggressively join the EV movement. I am still somewhat skeptical of EVs because of short battery lives and the inconvenience of long charging times. However, EVs are less complex and have fewer parts than combustion engine cars. The business-friendly FDP has been bullish on e-fuels and is pushing the EU to add an exemption for e-fuels to the 2035 phase-out of combustion engine vehicle sales. It’s still very expensive to produce and cannot scale as of now (Posaner 2023).

Combustion engine (ICE) and Electric engines (BEV) market share, Source: https://earthbound.report/2023/01/12/tracking-the-decline-of-the-combustion-engine/

Germany’s export economy is threatened by the poor economy of its biggest trading partner China (McHugh 2023). China faces a rapidly shrinking fertility rate/ population. In China, the real estate sector is over-inflated, the corporate debt is very high, US sanctions are biting, capital is fleeing overseas. 10% of Germany’s GDP is exclusively the export of goods and services to China (The Economist 2023). On the other hand, the slightly negative trade deficit with China which was less than 20 billion euros spiked to over 80 billion euros in 2022 (Barber 2024). Exports to China peaked in early-2021 at around 12 billion USD a month and declined to less than 8 billion euros as of October 2023 (CEIC). Rising imports from China are focused on the electrical equipment sector where German companies are rapidly losing competitiveness (Colliac 2023). In the meantime, the German government and especially the Green Party foreign minister Annalena Baerbock is increasingly harping on a China-unfriendly position and falling in line with the hawkish US position. Baerbock took a course in international law and focused on human rights, which makes her naturally hostile to authoritarian regimes like the ones in Russia or China. It is questionable whether the biggest German trading partner can be snubbed so easily.

Source: https://www.ft.com/content/2e83bd08-90c4-467a-86a4-4db2e31d60de

Deindustrialization has been an ongoing phenomenon across many developed countries. In the German context, the city of Essen in Ruhr region of North Rhine Westphalia is a good case study for the impact of the loss of coal mining and steel-making that was essential for German industrialization from the late nineteenth century onward. Coal extraction in Essen had peaked in 1957 and has been declining ever since. German energy coal dependence decreased from 72% to 13% from 1950 to 2000. Many coal mines closed between 1960 and 1980 leaving many residents unemployed or displaced into less lucrative service industry jobs. The government has been trying to restore the economy over the years such as investing in the arts, the hydrogen industry (Chen 2023).

Deindustrialization has already negatively affected the overall economy. It is the worst performer among the large economies, having shrunk by 0.4%.

Source: https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/214905/economics/the-problems-facing-the-german-economy/

Deindustrialization also has negative consequences on real wages given that there are many workers in the manufacturing sector or are servicing that sector (think of car mechanics being laid off or have their pay cut shortly after car manufacturing workers following car sales declines). Real wages have peaked in 2019 and have declined by several thousand in inflation-adjusted terms. Labor strikes are happening in different industries, e.g. in the rail industry (Schuetze 2024). The rail industry is already quite unreliable given the lack of public investments resulting in frequent delays and long wait times for the trains. One third of all the trains arrived late in 2023, mainly due to construction work, labor strikes and poor weather (Berry 2024).

Source: https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/214905/economics/the-problems-facing-the-german-economy/

While wages have been lagging, unemployment is still quite low and there is a severe shortage of skilled labor due to the rapid aging of society, which also explains the government’s recent decision to allow foreign-descent persons to acquire dual citizenship and lower the length of residency to acquire citizenship from 8 to 5 years. Even with the slowing economy the unemployment rate remains below 6%. Sectors with a lot of job vacancies are transportation, logistics, social work, childcare, education, care for the elderly (Statista; Statista 2023).

Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/227005/unemployment-rate-in-germany/

Given this worsening economic state, it is not surprising that popular support for the governing parties is declining, although the Greens, who have been castigated for their fast energy transition program, have held the line the best losing only 1 or 2 points in support. The environmentalists, who insist on the urgency of climate change, have nowhere else to go, while the climate has become even crazier. In contrast, the SPD has lost about half their voters from the last election and so does the FDP. There is a chance that the FDP will not make it into the parliament in the next legislative elections. Chancellor Olaf Scholz is a very risk-averse and uncommunicative leader, which is a leadership style that he attempted to copy from his unpretentious predecessor Merkel, who stayed in the chancellory for 16 years. It is questionable whether Scholz can replicate this long tenure.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_German_federal_election

Scholz had the bad luck of facing the Ukraine invasion two months after starting on the job. He began his tenure with grand promises to alleviate the housing shortage and build more wind turbines, but instead had to manage a massive rearmament program for the Bundeswehr (German army) and financial support to Ukraine and Ukrainian refugees entering Germany. While Germany keeps upping the financial and military aid to Ukraine, becoming its second-biggest backer behind the US, Ukraine complains that the help is never enough. For instance, the French and British are delivering cruise missiles, which the Germans, and especially chancellor Scholz, refuse to do. With the US MAGA faction choking off Ukraine funding, Ukraine’s reliance on German support is only growing. Scholz is also overseeing high inflation and less industrial activity. Instead of driving social democratic policy, he is moderating the tension among his coalition partners, one of which wants to spend very little tax money on climate or social programs (led by finance minister Christian Lindner) and the other wants to do more on both (led by vice chancellor Robert Habeck) (Kinkartz 2023).

The two main beneficiaries of the government’s unpopularity are the conservative CDU/CSU (Union) and the right-wing nationalist AfD. It is noteworthy that while the three governing parties are running against the AfD rhetorically, rejecting their neo-Nazi messaging, the CDU is only against the AfD leadership but does not want to demonize its voters. Firstly, CDU leader Friedrich Merz is closer to the right-wing of the CDU than his predecessor Angela Merkel was. Secondly, CDU knows that the reason why their polling value is not even higher is because of the competition for votes with AfD. The right-wing conservatives that are interested in migration limits, the preservation of a German Christian culture and traditional family/ gender norms have usually voted for the Union parties, and that was still the case during the Merkel era, even though she was somewhat more liberal than many of her party members.

The AfD was founded in 2012 initially as a technocratic neoliberal party that wanted Germany to leave the eurozone and pursue more economic nationalism. But that technocratic message did not attract a significant amount of voter support and the party failed to enter parliament in 2013. In 2017, it entered the parliament, but this time new party leaders moved the party to the right on migration. 2015 was the year that many Syrian refugees fled to Germany, overwhelming the “Willkommenskultur” (welcoming culture) that the German political elites espoused during the early refugee wave, thus polarizing the migration topic and fanning the support for the AfD. With the Covid crisis, Ukraine war (including its many refugees), rising inflation and now deindustrialization, there are more and more areas where the political elites lack the tools to master these crises.

AfD support mixes anti-establishment sentiment due to incompetent political elites unable to solve their problems or making them worse with “volkisch”/ racist nationalism. The latter is about hurling the country back to a mythical past where everyone was white and the economy was booming. It is a non-working recipe. Consider, for instance, demography: Less than 80% of the German population is of native stock, and native German women’s fertility rate is about 1.4 compared to the 1.9 of the foreign-descent women. Where is the mythical past the AfD wants to go back to? The society can scarcely function without the many foreigners and Germans of foreign descent. Surely, there are more integration issues for war refugees from Africa and Middle East without German language background going to Germany compared to the high-skilled English-speaking migrants going to the US, UK or Canada. Can all of the refugees fill precisely the jobs where there are a lot of openings? It’s unlikely at least in the short term.

There is a lot of dissatisfaction with the AfD too as the many anti-AfD protests show. Even the Nazis never gained more than a third of the popular vote, while the ones that didn’t vote for them detested them. Drawing parallels with the 1930s is not so simple because German society is substantially more diverse today than it was back then. But one root cause of the rise of Nazism is the sharp decline of the middle class, which could very well be a structural trend given the lack of energy security, the high cost of the energy transition, the high cost of sustaining the war effort in Ukraine, the continuing deindustrialization, or the slow pace of innovation.

Despite these challenges, Germany also has a lot of advantages with its economic institutions, including the training institutes, apprenticeships and great universities, the large number of small and medium-sized businesses, the high level of human capital, and the liberal democratic culture. A thriving Germany is essential for a strong united Europe that is facing more geopolitical headwinds due to a potential Trump presidency abandoning the NATO alliance, the Russians threatening Europe’s eastern flank and the Global South countries (especially India and China) taking more market share from the old industrial powers. Let’s hope that the “sick man of Europe” (Germany’s designation in the late-1990s) becomes healthy again without doing it at the cost of other European countries, as was the case with its mercantilist policies among deficit-generating Eurozone countries in the early-2000s.

Why the American Heart Association Guidelines are Wrong

The American Heart Association has been issuing dietary advice to reduce the chances for cardiovascular disease, which also involves normal weight, bloody pressure, blood glucose levels, blood fats/ cholesterol levels (Lichtenstein et al. 2021).

I have been given the same advice by the doctor and nutritionist after a high blood pressure diagnosis but I am not convinced that the AHA guidelines are effective guidelines for heart/ metabolic health. I find that less carbs (not elimination)/ sugar and low stress are the most conducive to this outcome, while the AHA recommendations focus on low-fat, low-salt diets rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts, fish and poultry. 

My objection to the fat/ salt blood pressure hypothesis (DiNicolantanio and Lucan 2014; Unwin et al. 2019) is as follows: assuming a constant protein share, low fat diet automatically means high carb/ sugar diet (if you want to avoid starvation, which would be low fat, low carb). High sugar causes hyperinsulinaemia as the pancreas secretes more insulin and this insulin results in salt and fluid retention, which each raise blood pressure (it’s like adding water to a balloon, which stretches out and has more internal pressure). Thus, in a high carb diet even low consumption of sodium can elevate blood pressure because the insulin will make the kidney retain whatever salt you consume (including those in the natural, unsalted foods like meat). In the keto diet, there is the opposite problem of salt deficiency due to the kidneys excreting sodium and water from the body. I would say don’t overconsume salt, but don’t make this the main cause for high blood pressure.

In the meantime, I don’t agree that fat in the appropriate quantity is a problem: it does not cause a glucose spike, it gives consistent long-term energy, it reduces hunger cravings (Roekenes and Martins 2021) and therefore snacking that leads to weight gain. The problem is that the sugar companies are blaming fat for disease (Kearns et al. 2016) and, unfortunately, even AHA has adopted this nonsense advice that makes people overload on carbs. There is a reason that sugar companies are more profitable than fat companies (e.g. those selling oil or meat): sugar gives you a brief glucose spike, followed by a crash, which makes you hungry for more food, while fat gives you satiety so you stop eating too much. Yes, too much fat can be damaging but that’s not an issue because of satiety, while too much sugar means elevated triglycerides (blood fat), insulin production and blood pressure which can easily happen as you have sugar cravings and overeat on sugar (Parks 2001).

Here are my sources of agreement:

Sedentary lifestyle is bad/ exercise is important

Portion size control is important/ don’t eat too much

Eat a lot of vegetables

Eat whole fruits instead of juice

Don’t eat refined grains

Eat a lot of fish

Eat poultry

Don’t eat ultra-processed food/ eat minimally processed food [I think this is a big one and could reduce a lot of disease, obesity/ diabetes by itself!]

Don’t drink added sugar beverages like soda

Don’t drink alcohol

Don’t consume trans fat

We need precision nutrition because every individual has different metabolism/ food sensitivity

Here are my sources of disagreement:

Eat a lot of fruits

Depending on the fruit, they contain a lot of sugar, but the fiber and pectin in the whole fruit slows down the absorption of the sugar (Dreher 2018; Giuntini et al. 2022), so I think it’s ok to consume in moderation (not the fruit juices devoid of any fiber!) and I do eat fruit regularly but not in huge amounts. Berries are low-sugar fruits (Eenfeldt and Tamber).

Eat plenty of whole grains

Whole grains contain almost as much carbs/ sugar as the refined grain, so I consume those in small quantity. I spoke to another friend recently who said that Europeans and Asians can eat as much carb as they like and don’t get as fat, so maybe there is something going on in the US food system that is unfavorable to health. Sugar molecules are monosaccharides and disaccharides (single or two sugar molecules). Disaccharides are called lactose, sucrose and maltose. Starch found in whole and refined grains and also starchy vegetables like tubers are polysaccharides (multiple sugar molecules) (Panawala 2017). Starch gradually raises blood sugar level, and the impact of fiber reduces the pace of the spike compared to consuming pure sugar, but what matters for overall health is how much sugar enters your body not at what pace. Whole wheat consumption means more insulin production which can result in more visceral fat (fat around organs), hypertension, heart disease and Type 2 diabetes (Davis 2023). Type 2 diabetics suffer from carbohydrate poisoning, i.e. ingesting too much carbohydrate causing hyperinsulinaemia and insulin resistance, and should not be consuming any significant amount of carbohydrates, including whole grains (low carb diet effect on diabetes and obesity: Pavlidou 2023).

Dr. William Davis (2023) writes

Years ago, I used the ADA [American Diabetes Association] diet in diabetic patients. Following the carbohydrate intake advice of the ADA, I watched patients gain weight, experience deteriorating blood glucose control and increased need for medication, and develop diabetic complications such as kidney disease and neuropathy. Ignoring ADA diet advice and cutting carbohydrate intake leads to improved blood sugar control, reduced HbA1c, dramatic weight loss, and improvement in all the metabolic messiness of diabetes such as high blood pressure and triglycerides.

Get most proteins from legumes/ beans and nuts

AHA fails to point out that meat is more protein and nutrient-dense and is less likely to cause bloating (Dahl and Alvarez 2019). I consume some nuts that go down easily but most of my proteins come from meat which has a lot of bioavailable nutrients. My take is that many doctors who write these guidelines are vegans and vegetarians (Teicholz 2019), and that is often driven by animal welfare concerns and health is used as a justification to push plant-based preference. All of the anti-meat studies are observational/ correlational. Of course, average vegans/ vegetarians live healthier than average omnivores, because the former are more health conscious. Vegans make a conscious choice to avoid meat and they consciously choose the other foods they eat, while the omnivore might eat whatever feels good. As for meat being bad based on an omnivore diet, we don’t know that meat causes the disease. Why was it not the French fries/ cheesecake/ chips/ soda? Better comparison value would be to measure the health effect of carnivore diets, and that’s all good, except LDL cholesterol, although I am not sure whether cardiovascular issues arise if all the other blood vitals are fine (Bathum et al. 2013).

I quote the carnivore study finding: “Participants reported high levels of satisfaction and improvements in overall health (95%), well-being (66%–91%), various medical conditions (48%–98%), and median [IQR] BMI (in kg/m2) (from 27.2 [23.5–31.9] to 24.3 [22.1–27.0]). Among a subset reporting current lipids, LDL-cholesterol was markedly elevated (172 mg/dL), whereas HDL-cholesterol (68 mg/dL) and triglycerides (68 mg/dL) were optimal. Participants with diabetes reported benefits including reductions in median [IQR] BMI (4.3 [1.4–7.2]), glycated hemoglobin (0.4% [0%–1.7%]), and diabetes medication use (84%–100%).” (Lennerz et al. 2021)

Vegans who are not aware of micronutrients will suffer from anemia and nutritional deficiencies (O’Keefe et al. 2022; Mason 2023). It also increases the risk of hunger cravings (which is low in meat-inclusive diets), which could result in unhealthy snacking (cereals, sweets etc.)

Eat low-fat diary products/ low-fat diet

That’s clearly false. I think doctors are afraid that people overeat on high-fat diet because small amount of fat contains a lot of calories, but it’s exactly the opposite: it’s the high fat that increases satiety and reduces hunger cravings and excess caloric intake, while carbs increase your glucose level, then crash and make you hungry again, so you start snacking more leading to excess caloric intake. 

Don’t eat red meat

That’s definitely false, as the carnivore study above shows (which I do not recommend or follow). Many doctors dislike saturated fat causing high cholesterol apparently causing CVD, which is based on Ancel Keys’ and AHA’s mistaken hypothesis (Taubes 2001; Teicholz 2023). One red meat study notes that only triglyceride increases but not the other cholesterol markers (Sun et al. 2022). In the keto/ low carb diet that is meat-heavy triglyceride decreases along with other CVD factors, so that might not be an issue either (Dong et al. 2020). 

I largely agree with the keto premise, but for those who exercise a lot some carbs are ok. It’s also fine to eat more grains before a marathon.

Consume soybean, corn, safflower and sunflower oils, walnuts, and flax seeds

I consume walnuts and flaxseeds. I am skeptical about vegetable oils that need a lot of processing to make them into consumable oils. I stick to olive oil and butter. Coconut oil is fine too. There are studies that make opposite prediction/ finding about health impacts of vegetable oils (vegetable oil not inflammatory: Fritsche 2014; vegetable oil inflammatory: Shanahan 2017; DiNicolantanio and O’Keefe 2018), but the critics point to the higher linoleic acid content which is inflammatory. Interestingly, red meat is not linked to more inflammation assuming normal BMI (Wood et al. 2023).

Don’t eat coconut oil and animal fats (butter, lard)/ saturated fat

False. Butter looks fine to me (neutral on cardiovascular disease: Pimpin et al. 2016). Coconut oil is clearly opposed by AHA, but the studies do not show a clear health effect of coconut oil (Da Silva Lima and Block 2019). Lard is also fine and lowers blood fat (Koontanatechanon et al. 2022). Beef tallow is also fine, though not too many studies on it: a mouse study shows less fatty liver with tallow consumption (Tajima et al. 1995). Duck fat stimulates lipid metabolism (Shin et al. 2023). So, if the animal made the fat, it looks fine to me and helps with satiety.

Don’t add salt to the diet

As noted above, I think that salt is a minor factor to blood pressure and the major factor is hyperinsulinaemia, i.e. sugar and carbs. In a low carb diet, salt excretion increases, so salt intake should be increased in that case.

High LDL cholesterol is problematic

I am not sure whether that’s an issue, especially if the other markers (HgA1C, Triglyceride, HDL cholesterol, blood pressure, plaque in arteries) are good. For metabolically healthy individuals with high LDL, statins (LDL-lowering drug) should not be prescribed (Diamond et al. 2022). Furthermore, glycation of LDL (i.e. addition of carbs/sugar to LDL) is associated with atherogenesis (artery plaques), and that is the causal pathway for CVD (Younis et al. 2008). Oxidized LDL that is caused by smoking and high sugar intake is also linked to unhealthy high LDL cholesterol (Rhoads and Major 2018). High LDL cholesterol is less problematic if small LDL particles are reduced and most LDL particles are large or “fluffy” (Ivanova 2017).

The Food-Medical Industrial Complex and How Capitalism Kills

Podcast here: https://soundcloud.com/user-280580802/211-the-food-medical-industrial-complex-and-how-capitalism-kills

Back in 2015, I had argued that the food-medical industrial complex was enriching itself while making the population fatter and sicker (Liu 2015). The food industry developed high-sugar, high-fat, high-salt and ultra-processed food that are addictive and increase profits, making the population fatter and sicker, so the health care system benefits from it via higher demand for health care, including the use of major prescription drugs to lower blood pressure, control cholesterol and blood lipids, and more drugs to counteract the side effects of the first type of drugs. The profiting food and medical industries provide millions of jobs and billions in profits that increase the national GDP, but the increased incidence of metabolic syndrome ultimately lowers GDP and deteriorates national health and well-being. Metabolic syndrome includes high blood pressure, high blood sugar, excess body fat around the waist, and abnormal cholesterol levels. In short, capitalism kills.

The sugar industry has funded medical studies in the 1960s that blame obesity and metabolic syndrome on fat (Domonoske 2016). As a result, there was a discursive shift toward low-fat diets in the 1980s (La Berge 2008). The food companies produced ultra-processed food that are low in fat, but high in sugar in order to generate enough addicting flavor. Fat is more satiating than carbs/sugar but also less profitable because satiety reduces (junk) food consumption. La Berge (2008) explained one of the causes of rising obesity,

Some [people] were confused by the low-fat advice, thinking they could substitute refined carbohydrates for high-fat foods. Many saw large portions of pasta as an allowed indulgence. Always hungry? Eat to appetite. Just be sure it is low fat.

We turned away from the ancestral diet consisting of real food, i.e. meat (both lean and fatty), vegetables, fruits. In came the ultra-processed foods including fruit juices, soda, chips, breads, cookies, chocolate, cakes, candy, breakfast cereals, sweet yogurts. Foods became spiked with vegetable oils, corn, corn syrup and soy, all of which are heavily subsidized by the government. Low-fat proteins like chicken and imported fruits like limes, avocados, mangos became more popular, as fatty meats like beef, full-fat milk, lard or chicken eggs became less popular (Kurzleben 2015; DeSilver 2016). This coincided with ever rising obesity rates and poorer metabolic health. In the US obesity rate increased from 13% in 1960 to 42% in 2018.

A problematic cautionary tale comes from Nauru, a South Pacific island, that has an obesity rate above 60% and diabetes above 30%, the highest in the world. The islanders used to live a healthy life, catching their own seafood, growing their own tubers and fruits and drinking coconut milk. The European colonizers arrived in the early 19th century and discovered phosphorus, potassium and nitrogen fertilizers in the soil and exploited it. Nauru gained independence from Australia in 1968, taking control over the fertilizer fields and making handsome profits, although the resources depleted and with that the source of wealth. In the years that followed they increased the import of western industrial food especially canned spam and corned beef. They also consumed soda, rice and instant noodles. The imported food is certainly more convenient than the effort of growing it yourself, which also exercises the body. The soil was also depleted by decades of fertilizer farming. Nauruans did not only import foods but also industrial goods like cars and television that reduced walking and made life more sedentary. Being obese was a sign of wealth and, therefore, culturally valued (Aduriz 2023). The health authorities organize walking campaigns around the perimeter of the country’s airport but that’s merely a drop in the bucket without adjustments to the diet. Wealth literally purchased sickness.

The pursuit of a healthy diet is made complicated by the alienation that comes from following the Standard American diet (SAD) and a sedentary lifestyle. The ancestral diet to which the human body is well adjusted to involves animal proteins (meat), vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, roots, grasses, tubers. Animals were hunted, vegetables and fruits existed naturally and were gathered. Grains and high carbohydrate products were added later on during the agricultural revolution. Animals could be herded, while fruits and vegetables could be grown on the field. The heavy dependence on staple crops favored a higher population density (by having more food) but also transmissible diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, leprosy, influenza and smallpox. Furthermore, by relying on only one or two crops and neglecting animal proteins, the early farmers suffered from anemia, vitamin deficiencies, spinal deformations and dental pathologies. It is quite noteworthy that those on the ketogenic (low carbohydrate, low sugar) or carnivore (only meat-eating) diet suffer the least from these deficiencies and pathologies. Because grains were added in the past 10,000 years of human history it is not true that they form an essential part of the natural human diet.

Unfortunately, the US government made the fateful decision in the 1950s to publish a food pyramid that was heavy on grains (bread, cereal, rice, pasta), a little lighter on fruits and vegetables, very sparing on meat and dairy, and minimizing on fats, oils and sweets. The food pyramid is the officially sanctioned narrative of what constitutes a healthy diet, even though it is based on a lie to cover up agricultural commercial interests. The agricultural lobby wanted to push out their grains and carbohydrate-heavy products due to the production surplus, while vilifying saturated fats found in fatty red meat and high-fat diary like butter (Mason 2023). The modern iteration of the food pyramid was published by researchers from Harvard University, including Walter Willett, a convinced vegetarian: exercise and weight control is at the bottom, followed by an equal share of fruits, vegetables, healthy fats/ oils (including seed oils, olive oil and transfat free margarine) and whole grain (brown rice, whole wheat pasta, oats), relatively smaller portions of nuts, seeds, peanut butter, beans, tofu, fish, poultry and eggs. Then there is a smaller serving of dairy, and the smallest share goes to fatty meats/ red meat, butter, white bread, soda, sweets and salt (Harvard 2005).

The Harvard food pyramid certainly looks more rational than the 1950s one, and I agree that ultra-processed junk food must be cut out of any healthy diet. But they are certainly wrong on the promotion of grains and seed oils and the demonization of animal fats such as red meat or butter. Vegetable/ seed oils are high in linoleic acid and linked to heart disease (DiNicolantonio and O’Keefe 2018). If you cook your steak in vegetable oils you will likely get heart disease but it wouldn’t be the steak that caused it (use tallow, lard, butter, olive oil, coconut oil, ghee instead). Red meat contains a lot of saturated fat which supposedly clog arteries and increase the risk of heart attack but there is no evidence for that (Malhotra et al. 2016). The saturated fat causing heart disease thesis was advanced by Ancel Keys, a physiologist, and was disseminated via the American Heart Association, but saturated fat does not cause heart disease (Teicholz 2023).

A supposedly heart-healthy diet that also controls high blood pressure is the DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diet, which is focused on whole grains, vegetables, fruits, chicken and poultry, while limiting red, fatty meat. The guideline is to reduce salt and fat intake, and is endorsed by the American Heart Association. When I was diagnosed with high blood pressure, the doctor and nutritionist suggested to relieve stress (that does work!), cut out caffeine (I will never do that) and cut out salt. But how effective is DASH compared to other diets like keto? Keto diet has a larger impact on lowering blood pressure than DASH (Saslow 2023; Keto-only study shows the same result, Unwin et al. 2019; Barrea et al. 2023). I think the admirable thing about DASH is that ultraprocessed foods, sweetened beverages and sweets are cut out and that probably reduces the blood pressure, but it is high on carbs to compensate for cutting out fatty meats and full-fat diary. Assuming a constant protein share, a low-fat diet by definition means a high carb diet, and I think that actually causes a rise in blood pressure, diabetes, obesity and metabolic syndrome!

Carbs are converted into sugar and cause a glucose spike and more insulin production. If you add too many carbs, it causes hyperinsulinaemia, which results in fluid and salt retention and that raises the blood pressure. Less carb and sugar intake helps salt and fluid excretion, which lowers blood pressure. People, who are insulin resistant, ultimately develop Type 2 diabetes. Thus, cutting out salt does not necessarily reduce blood pressure but cutting sugar will (Dinicolantanio and Lucan 2014), because high carb consumption will simply induce the body to retain the limited salt that you intake from natural ingredients like meat. The kidney will filter out any excess salt, and only people with kidney disorder should be worried about excess salt intake (Boero et al. 2002). Unwin et al. (2019) note,

Sodium has been demonised as the cause of hypertension when perhaps insulin and insulin resistance may actually be the culprits.

Fat does not cause hyperinsulinaemia, because it does not spike blood glucose but provides satiety and reduces the risk of sugar cravings (keto diet suppresses ghrelin, a hunger hormone, Roekenes and Martins 2021). Fat also provides continuous energy levels and prevents mid-day tiredness. Why does the nutritionist not tell me to cut sugar/ carbs instead of salt? I hope it is “only” ignorance.

Willett published another study claiming that red meat intake is tied to diabetes (Gu et al. 2023). In the article, they speculate about reduced beta cell function and insulin sensitivity. They claim that heme iron contained in red meat increases oxidative stress and impairs beta cell function. They argue that processed red meats contain nitrate and promote insulin resistance, the precursor to diabetes. Furthermore, red meat consumers tend to have higher BMI and bodyweight, which is linked to diabetes. They advocate for substituting red meat with nuts and legumes. The study authors are evidently vegans and biased in their analysis!

The trouble with the research design is that it is based on observational surveys. Thus, it is impossible to control red meat consumption with other dietary intakes, e.g. ultraprocessed or sugary food. Fast food menus combine burger patties with bread buns, ketchup, french fries and soda, the latter being undoubtedly unhealthy. Furthermore, as noted earlier, red meat consumption has been decreasing over time, while diabetes has continuously increased. Thus, it is not the eating red meat that favors diabetes but rather its absence (Teicholz 2023). And even if red meat was not beneficial to health, it cannot be blamed for metabolic syndrome if it is consumed ever less. Teicholz (2019) also points out that medical authors who published the EAT-Lancet diet recommendation that labeled red meat (along with refined grains, though not whole grains, and sugar) unhealthy foods are predominantly vegetarians and vegans themselves, a clear conflict of interest. Disliking meat-eating does not mean that blaming meat for sickness is correct.

To test the effects of a red meat diet, it would be better to focus on carnivore eaters, who only or predominantly consume meat and water in their diet. Lennerz et al. (2021) find that people on a carnivore diet reported high health satisfaction along with optimal HDL cholesterol, HgA1C (blood glucose) and triglycerides (fat in the blood), while LDL cholesterol was also elevated. LDL is considered the “bad” cholesterol, but high LDL is not linked to more heart disease, and the prescription of statins produces too many side effects with minimal benefits (Ravnskov et al. 2018). Diabetes medication use is decreased significantly. Similarly, adherents to the ketogenic diet (fatty meat, vegetables and low-sugar fruits) saw a reduction in blood sugar, heart disease, obesity and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, cancer among other results (Masood et al. 2023). In the keto diet weight loss is sustained by decreasing hunger, as the lack of sugar implies fat burning (ketosis). While body fat is reduced (by ingesting a high-fat diet!), lean muscle mass is preserved. It certainly makes sense to claim that reducing carbohydrate/ sugar intake (but not meat that does not contain sugar!) would reduce hyperinsulinemia, the excessive production of insulin as a result of a high sugar intake, which is the prerequisite to insulin resistance and diabetes. It is not only the sugar industry that gives misguided advice on the proper diet but sometimes also scientists, dieticians and doctors.

But if most public health researchers agree that ultraprocessed and added-sugar foods are problematic there is a fair debate about plant-based vegan/ vegetarian pathways and carnivorous pathways. A more reasonable compromise is to be found in the ketogenic diet, which contains all the advantages of both pathways. The plant-based advocates have a much harder time meeting adequate micronutrient targets, e.g. vitamin B12, selenium, zinc, niacin, vitamin B2, vitamin B6, and calcium, compared to carnivores who get most of these micronutrients from animal protein (Clem 2021). Vegan protein intake is heavily reliant on rice, quinoa, beans and legumes that are not as easy to digest as meat. Furthermore, dependence on grains to meet nutritional needs raises the risk of insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome in the absence of sufficient exercise. Vegetarians, who consume butter, cheese and eggs have an easier time satisfying their micronutrient needs than vegans.

Carnivores claim that nutrients are the most bio-available (i.e. easy to take up by the human body) in meat, not in plants that contain compounds like phytates that decrease the absorption of iron or zinc (Foster 2021). I personally think that there are still nutrient benefits to plants. However, it is much more difficult to get all the nutrients from plants that are less dense than meat: you would have to consume a lot more calories of plants, e.g. beans, to get the same amount of nutrient benefits (e.g. protein) as red meat (SouperSage). Vegans have the advantage that they are generally more health-conscious and nutrition-conscious than the average American but a rigorous pursuit of that diet without high nutritional awareness either leads to anemia (salad or fruits don’t generate satiety) or unhealthy carb cravings that result in excess weight and metabolic syndrome.

Unfortunately, the food industry has joined the vegan bandwagon by selling their meat-like, plant-based products that are filled with vegetable oils, soy and wheat, not really health-conscious ingredients. The consumers don’t like it anyway, as Beyond Meat, one of these meat alternative producers, has cut 19% of their workforce, citing a drop in sales (Durbin 2023). It’s not only unhealthy junk but also has bad taste.

If we go to aesthetics and ignore the health component, carnivores have an advantage over the plant advocates. The plant-based advocates like Michael Greger, Walter Willett or Tim Spector have slender figures. They are very careful researchers and surely healthier than people eating a standard western diet, but they are not muscular and strong like the carnivore advocates such as Shawn Baker, Paul Mason, Anthony Chaffee or Ken Berry. Perhaps, vegans, carnivore, keto and omnivore careful about sugar intake can all live long healthy lives as they are more food conscious than the general population, but the meat-inclusive diet is certainly supportive of those with muscular stature. There are vegan bodybuilders who swear by a vegan diet, though how common is this pathway? Bill Pearl, an Olympian bodybuilder was a vegetarian, who consumed plenty of eggs and dairy, though he was a meat-eater early on in his career when he won most of the competitions. He became a vegetarian to lower his cholesterol (Physical Culture Study 2016). Vegan bodybuilders often use steroids to grow their big muscles, which is not surprising given the lower protein density in rice and legumes (Prasher 2018).

The strongest vegan arguments are not health-based (which is quite unconvincing) but connected to the environment. Red meat, especially beef, is more carbon-intensive than most fruits, root vegetables, rice and beans (Our World in Data 2023). The logic is that if we reduce beef consumption, methane emissions will decline as well. The problem with this logic is that only 3% of the US greenhouse emissions come from cows, although the land that is used to feed and graze the cows and is not used to store carbon makes that carbon impact potentially bigger (World Resources Institute 2022).

High beef demand might be one of the reasons that the Brazilian government under Jair Bolsonaro has promoted the deforestation of the Amazon to clear land for cattle and crops (Al Jazeera 2023). Other rich countries were accusing Bolsonaro of destroying the earth’s lung because the Amazon traditionally absorbs carbon, but it has now been emitting carbon on net due to smoke released from the deforestation. Bolsonaro countered that the west has to pay Brazil to stop deforestation (Jones 2021). Thus, his claim is that Brazil either increases revenues by selling more agricultural products via land clearing or gets welfare from the Global North. Given that the entire global economy is based on the payment of debts and needing to import goods and services from other countries, Bolsonaro’s argument could not be completely dismissed. On the other hand, his successor Lula has not used this reasoning and he argued that any form of economic development must be done sustainably.

Red meat consumption is expected to further rise with growing wealth in the Global South, but it is only a small subset of reasons for rising carbon emissions, and we have to take into account the totality of the wealthy lifestyle, such as taking airplanes or having regular electricity access, including air conditioning and heating. Given that I am not strongly convinced that red meat is negative to health, and are, in fact, essential to provide many bioavailable nutrients and satiety that curbs harmful sugar cravings, we have to find other means to minimize their carbon impact rather than promote veganism.

It appears to me that the vegan agenda is primarily driven by concerns about animal rights and the belief that humans should not cause the suffering of animals. Take, for instance, the Stanford nutrition scientist Christopher Gardner, who published many studies on the health benefits of vegetarianism and veganism, and is a vegan himself. He came around to a vegan diet believing in animal rights/ welfare, environmental sustainability and human health (perhaps in that order). He started with a meat-heavy diet and came around to vegetarianism after his vegetarian girlfriend dumped him. He wanted to get the girlfriend back by impressing her with his new diet but she was not interested. Now all of a sudden he discovered a diet that aligned with his “personal values”, i.e. animal rights with health as a possible benefit (Cardiology Associates 2023). Maybe the health benefits fall in line with his values as well. But sadly he can advocate the vegan agenda through his scientific studies.

Vegans usually use health or environmental reasons to advocate it as a diet that others should follow. Animal rights usually are not convincing to meat-eaters, and that is because meat-eaters discount those animal rights believing rightfully that just like there are carnivores in the broader animal kingdom (e.g. lions, tigers, wolves), we humans are also meat-eaters, though we’ll eat plants, fruits and legumes too. It is true, however, that humans have higher moral standards than other animals. We are also the only species obsessed about heaven and hell, injustice or inequality.

The food industry is intimately tied to the medical industry: as more people consuming the Standard American diet become obese and metabolically sick, the pharma companies came up with various weight-loss drugs, including Wegovy and Ozempic. These drugs promise to cut down appetite and thereby generate weight loss. The problems are their high cost ($12,000 per year), the loss of muscles along with fat (which suggests that it starves the body), and many side effects like turning the gut into stone, increased heart rate, blood pressure, insomnia, constipation and nervousness. Patients who get off the drug gain back the weight. Regarding cost, it would be significantly cheaper to remove added sugars from food products (Lustig 2023), but they affect business negatively: foods become less addictive, so food companies make less money and having fewer fat people lowers the demand for weight-loss drugs or the management of metabolic syndrome, e.g. blood pressure or cholesterol medications. Being healthy is anti-capitalist, so we need to manufacture sickness to create profits for food and pharma companies (and medical researchers receiving funding from them).

The nefarious dominance of the food-medical industrial complex on whose backs millions of jobs and billions in shareholder profits are generated shows the unacceptable nature of the modern capitalist economy. Capitalism kills. The current US GDP per capita exceeds $80,000, which puts the US near the top in terms of standard of living, but how does that measure actual quality of life? Driving a car surely increases GDP by generating profits and jobs in the automobile, oil, car repair, car insurance industries, but how happy are people to be stuck in rush-hour traffic to get to work or face higher risk of death via car accidents? Attending college can be an enlightening experience for those who enjoy studying but generates more debt and is a waste of time for those not enjoying it. Making lawsuits easy increases the redistribution of income between legal parties but does nothing to improve people’s lives. Eating unhealthy food and taking medical drugs to control symptoms generates jobs and profits for the medical and food industries, but are metabolically sick people happy and healthy?

Unfortunately, unhealth is promoted in some corners of the internet, where every form of ideology can find community support. The “body positivity” and “anti-fatphobia” movement advances the claim that obesity should be embraced, and that the metabolically unhealthy individuals are really healthy. The obese should have the right to demand airlines to build bigger seats or reserve two seats for the price of one to accommodate plus-size individuals (Lee 2022). They should find it easy to find plus-size clothing. They should go on the catwalk and become plus-size models and not be discriminated against by casting agencies. The movement is driven by young, obese women, who record videos that are uploaded on social media. The food industry is supporting and amplifying the body positivity movement by funding studies that claim that obesity is not a major problem (Belluz 2015). Not surprisingly, many of these obese social media influencers die at a young age, usually from a heart attack or some other organ failure.

The positive flipside to the internet society is that good nutrition advice is also proliferating, which is reflected in the vibrant vegan, carnivore and ketogenic diet communities. For the former diet, there are additional concerns about nutrient supplementation and adequate protein intake but vegans with high food knowledge could potentially do well. For the latter two diets, there are thousands of positive online comments about weight loss and physical improvements. People struggling with their weight stumble upon these online communities, try out new diets, find improvements in their own health and leave comments/ produce Youtube videos to convert more people to their healthy diet and lifestyle. I learned, for instance, about the benefits of looking at the sun in the morning after waking up, and the benefits of cold water showers (it’s about cold-shock proteins). Don’t forget intermittent fasting, exercise, good sleep, interesting activities and in-person friendships. If the human instinct for survival and thriving is working, the good news will hopefully continue to spread. We only have health to gain. What else do we have to lose?

Yemen and the Threat to International Shipping

Podcast here: https://soundcloud.com/user-280580802/210-yemen-and-the-threat-to-international-shipping

Ever since Israel’s ground operation in Gaza to remove Hamas resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of Gaza residents, the Houthis in Yemen have vowed to side with Hamas and has attacked ships that carry goods across the Red Sea. The Red Sea connects to the Indian Ocean via the Strait of Bab al-Mandeb. That strait handles about 12% of global trade. Global shipping companies have pulled their ships from the Red Sea following these attacks, forcing them to sail around the Horn of Africa, which adds up to two weeks to shipping times. This would be bad news for global economic recovery. Supply lines already had to adjust to the temporary disruption under Covid and the economic sanctions on Russia following the Ukraine War. Shipping prices have spiked over fourfold within a week, so there is a threat to inflationary pressure.

The US wants to safeguard global shipping and announced a naval coalition with nine other countries, including Bahrain, Canada, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, the Seychelles and the UK. Many of the European nations have been flaking off from the coalition, citing other important commitments (like in Ukraine), and Bahrain is the only Middle East country to join the coalition. The Saudis have been leading the proxy war against the Houthis with the military backing of the US and have been engaging in peace talks with the Houthis since March 2022. After being unable to dislodge the Houthis since they seized power in late-2014 via direct military intervention and suffering from Houthi strikes against Saudi oil facilities, the Saudis now want to to extricate themselves from this bloody war that has resulted in the famine death of hundreds of thousands of Yemenis that were harmed by the Saudi-led economic/ naval blockade. The Saudis do not want to join the US naval coalition and thereby threaten the peace process with the Houthis. The Houthis are backed by Iran, the traditional archenemy of Saudi, but the Saudis and Iranians have become more friendly with each other, following a brokered agreement with the help of China that trades heavily with both countries. Only UAE is interested in taking a more hardline approach on the Houthis but they have departed from the Houthi conflict in 2020 and do not want to return to it (Schaer 2023).

The Houthis are quite content with the Saudis staying out and they think that the attacks on shipping will increase western pressure on Israel to stop its brutal Gaza campaign. The Israeli port of Eilat has lost 85% traffic as a result of the Red Sea closure (Times of Israel 2023). The Houthis are unlikely to be able to destroy Israel or expel the Jews from the Middle East, as their main slogan demands. The much bigger issue is that they are a nuisance to international trade, and that the US is the only power that would keep the Red Sea open. China is the biggest beneficiary of international trade and has operated a military base in nearby Djibouti since 2017, but has not joined the US naval task force. China takes the resolute stance of not intervening militarily in other countries, accusing the US of meddling too much in other countries affairs (Kine 2023). It is quite noteworthy, however, that the Chinese are also not opposed to the US intervention against the Houthis, because they want their trade vessels to be safe from attack. China wants to be more influential in global politics but is not willing or ready to take on the hegemonic role. It is gradually expanding yuan currency swaps, e.g. with Russia or Saudi, to trade with other countries and bypass the US dollar, but does not fully subvert the US dollar. As of now, the international order is maintained by the US military which is funded by the vast domestic resources (third largest global population, abundant natural resources, advanced technologies, biggest military, growth-oriented rule of law) and the foreign purchase of US treasuries, especially by Japan, China and UK.

The Biden administration faces the difficult choice of how hard to hit the Houthis. Biden’s main foreign policy accomplishment was the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, so the signal was that the US is no longer interested in doing excessive policing work, especially not in an election year when Trump is driving home the US isolationist message. Even when the Iranian proxies in Iraq and Syria were attacking US bases, Biden did not promptly respond and only recently ordered airstrikes against the attackers (Waldenberg et al. 2023). If Biden goes hard against the Houthis, it could create a quagmire that is reminiscent of the Saudi-led coalition which failed miserably in its regime change attempt in Yemen, mainly because they so heavily relied on airstrikes rather than a full-on ground invasion in the mountainous home base of the Houthis. But doing only the minimum, i.e. vessel convoys, using air defense to shoot down Houthi missiles and drones, will be very expensive and can be a prolonged problem. The Middle East is a high tension region that can only be managed.

Let’s dig into Yemen’s history to detect the source of the Houthi’s rise. Large human settlements in Yemen go back to 5,000 BC. Being in the southern part of the Arabian peninsula it is on the border between western and eastern civilization. It was separated from Mesopotamia (Iraq and Syria) only by the Arabian desert. The Arabian desert and the lack of rivers made political consolidation difficult compared to places like Iraq or Egypt. Most of the water drawn for agriculture or pastoralism were drawn from groundwater or from the seasonal rainfalls (spring and summer). The most common crops are cereals (millet, corn, wheat, barley, sorghum), potatoes, chickpeas, and fruits like bananas, figs, apples, citrus. Since the 16th century, coffee trade has been an important source of revenue. Yemen also produces khat, a drug that grows on shrub. Oil and gas have been discovered in the 1980s and became the biggest foreign exchange.

The early empires were Minaean, Sabaean and Himyarite. The Romans under Constantin attempted to bring Christianity to Yemen. The Jewish warlord Dhu Nuwas (521-527) led a campaign of violence against the Christians in his domain. The Byzantines under Justin I led a coalition with the Aksumite and Arab Christians to defeat Dhu Nuwas. Another religious change occurred with the Prophet Muhammad, who spread Islam through Middle East and North Africa. Yemen being on the Arabian peninsula (Islam began in Saudi Mecca) was an early adopter of Islam. Prophet Muhammad sent his son-in-law as governor of Yemen. In the 9th century, the Zaydi sect from Iraq (Shia) settled in the mountainous highland of Yemen and became a significant Shia minority in Yemen. This factional division between Sunni and Shia became a source of conflict, as the Houthis mainly draw from Shia/Zaydis. Islam came to dominate Yemen, and the relatively smaller groups of Jews and Christians who stuck to their religion had to pay jizyah (tax on non-Muslims) to stay in Yemen. Islamic empires like the Rashidun, Umayyad or Abbasid Caliphate ruled over Yemen, but in practice it was ruled by local rulers like ibn Ziyad from 819 to 1018. Further dynasties were Sulayhid (1047-1138), Ayyubid (1171-1260), Rasulid (1229-1454), Tahiride (1454-1517) and the Ottomans (1538-1918).

The discovery of coffee and the growth in ship trade among the European and other Arabic powers made Yemen an important arena of conflict for domination beginning in the 15th century. The Portuguese, for instance, wanted to control trade via the Red Sea, Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean and, therefore settled all along Yemen as well. The Ottomans sent a large fleet from Egypt to conquer Yemen in 1538, storming the port city of Aden. Capturing Yemen was difficult resulting in high troop losses, and administering it was even harder in the highlands of the interior. It was Ozdemir Pasha, who finally conquered Sanaa, the major town in the interior, and ruled over Yemen from 1552 to 1560. The Yemeni Zaydis rebelled under Turkish rule and defeated several Pasha-led Ottoman armies until Sinan Pasha defeated the Zaydi army under al-Mutahhar, who died in 1572. The Zaydis had a strong sense of identity and were reviled by the Ottomans, who accused the Zaydis of being infidels. By 1627, Al-Mu’ayyad Muhammad organized a Zaydi army to remove the Ottomans from Yemen and five years later he sent an expeditionary force to seize Mecca but lost that battle to the Ottomans. Al-Mu’ayyad’s successor was his son al-Mansur al-Qasim, who founded the Qasimid state, which covered much of today’s Yemen and Asir and Najran in Saudi Arabia.

The Qasimid state itself was undermined by the Sultanate of Lahej which seized control over Aden and ran an independent kingdom. The Ottomans were also keen to push back the Qasimid and retook the coastline in 1833. In 1839, the British conquered Aden. They wanted to have a coal depot to refuel their ships that sailed between Suez, Egypt and India, their main colonial possession. When the Suez canal was built and completed in 1869, the Red Sea became an even more important sea route connecting the European Mediterranean with the Asian Indian Ocean. The British expanded their possession to the Aden hinterland covering much of what was known as South Yemen, while the Ottomans retained control over North Yemen, including the capital Sanaa. The Ottomans did not regard Yemen as high priority until the completion of the Suez canal at which point they re-captured the Arabian coast in the Red Sea. There were occasional Ottoman-British border clashes that were resolved in a 1904 agreement to demarcate South and North Yemen. The division of the country by external powers has relevance well into the twentieth century, when the country was briefly united from 1990 until the civil war in 1994 and from 2014 onward.

Under British rule, Aden became a global city attracting migrants from India, East Africa and Southeast Asia, the other British colonial possessions. Both the British and the Ottomans were ultimately harmed by World War I, but the Ottomans much more so. The Ottoman empire collapsed after World War I and by 1918 they ended the occupation of Yemen. Imam Yahya al-Mutawakkil had ruled the northern highland independently from 1911 onward. When the Ottomans retreated, he had the plan to capture the Greater Yemen similar to his Qasimid ancestors. The British put a check to Yahya’s ambitions. They had the superior airplanes to prevent Yahya’s forces from conquering Aden and pushing out the British. Ibn Saud became another power in Arabia and fought a war with Yemen. Ibn Saud was backed by the British, and in 1934 the Saudis and Yemenis agreed on a ceasefire. Yahya was forced to accept British sovereignty over the Aden protectorate, which lasted until 1963. Aden was the most industrialized part of Yemen. It had the second-busiest port after New York City. It had labor unions, and increasingly attracted Yemenis to work as port laborers.

1962 was an important year because Imam Ahmad bin Yahya, the ruler of North Yemen, died. His son Muhammad al-Badr became imam, but the military generals who hated imam rule overthrew the new ruler. Al-Badr rallied the North Yemen tribe unleashing the North Yemen civil war (1962-1970). The military junta led by Abdullah al-Sallal rallied for Egyptian support, which was run by the Arab socialist Gamal Abdel Nasser. More support came from the Soviet Union. With Nasser’s help the junta declared the Yemen Arab Republic (North Yemen) and chased out the imam al-Badr, who was backed by Saudi Arabia. The Saudis decided to backstab al-Badr in 1970 and recognized the Yemen Arab Republic. Al-Badr had no choice but go to exile in England, where he died in 1996. Here we observe an interesting pattern: the Saudis feel free to intervene in Yemen, but if the Saudis get tired, they give up and accept whichever political power rules in Sanaa. The Saudi decision to abandon al-Badr purchased them influence in Yemeni politics but generated Zaydi resentment which was the basis for the Houthi takeover many decades later.

South Yemen was also undergoing dramatic change in the 1960s. The National Liberation Front (NLF) agitated for independence from Britain which commenced in 1967, leading to the founding of the People’s Republic of South Yemen. Neither the Arab neighbors nor the west were interested in helping out this newly founded and impoverished country. It received backing from the Soviet Union and founded a Marxist state. There was a brief border war between North and South Yemen in 1972, but the country was ultimately unified in 1990. The decision to unify was based on the simultaneous discovery of oil revenues that both sides did not want to fight over, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union eliminated South Yemen’s external backer. Reunification with the North was perceived as the only way to survive. But unification was not a happy marriage.

The North was ruled by Ali Abdullah Saleh since 1978. He was a military general in his previous career. Saleh was a savvy politicians who could make the various tribes loyal to him, while he enriched himself massively from the increasing oil riches that were discovered in the 1980s. His greed, corruption and the monopolization of resources and positions for the military officers, tribal sheikhs and northern businessmen close to him alienated significant portions of society, such as the Houthis and the southerners, which undermined national unity and increased centrifugal tendencies.

Saleh became the president of the united Yemen, which is a tenure he held until he was toppled in 2012. The vice president was Ali Salem al-Beidh, the last leader of South Yemen. Even during Saleh’s rule, there was discontent in the south due to perceived marginalization of the southerners. In 1994, there was an attempt by the southerners to declare independence. al-Beidh quit the vice presidency, returned to Aden and declared the Democratic Republic of Yemen. Saleh mustered the forces to crush southern independence and stayed on as patrimonial ruler of Yemen. Al-Beidh fled to exile in Oman and supported the continued insurgency for an independent South Yemen. Following the civil war, the Yemeni Socialist Party, the stronghold in the south, no longer played a major political role in Yemeni politics.

Saleh had a hard time in holding the country together due to the quickly deteriorating economy. Much of the economy consisted of Saudi and Gulf state foreign aid and remittances from Yemeni workers in the Gulf states. Yemen decided to remain neutral following Saddam Hussein’s decision to annex neighboring Kuwait. Saudi promptly responded with severe economic sanctions by cutting all foreign aid to Yemen and deporting the Yemeni workers back home. The economy quickly declined and sectarian discontent resulted in the Yemeni civil war of 1994. Political ties to Saudi was restored in 2000, when both sides agreed to fixate the territorial boundaries and Saudi ended the economic sanctions by allowing Yemeni workers to work in Saudi.

A much more serious threat to Saleh’s rule was the Shia Zaydi insurgency that commenced with the arrest of Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, the Zaydi religious leader, in 1994 and intensified after his murder in 2004. The Houthis accused Saleh of corruption and being backed by Saudi Arabia and the US. The Saudis were promoting Wahhabism, which the Houthis opposed. The Houthis gained popularity by promoting Islamist welfare-oriented positions along with armed militancy to gain Yemeni independence from US and Saudi. Saleh’s regime, in turn, accused the Houthis of receiving financing from Shia-based Iran and wanting to replace the republic with an Islamic state. The Houthis had the longer breath. The 2011 Arab Spring built mounting pressure against Saleh to step down, an assassination attempt incapacitated him for several months, and he finally relented by handing the presidency to his vice president Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, a southerner. Hadi was backed by Saudi and US, but he was no more legitimate within his country than his predecessor.

Hadi’s government was weak and besieged by the Houthis, Al-Qaeda and the southern separatists. Hadi announced unpopular austerity measures including cuts in fuel subsidies to comply with IMF demands to balance the budget. The biggest threat were the Houthis who finally gathered enough forces in September 2014 in their northern stronghold in Sadah and swept toward the capital Sanaa, thereby dislodging Hadi’s central government. Hadi had to flee to Aden, where he was pushed out just a few months later. Hadi fled to Saudi Arabia. The Saudis, in turn, decided they had to intervene militarily to push out the Houthis and restore Hadi’s rule. We can see here that the weakness of the Yemeni central state allows for smaller, alternative powers to rise up and seize control over territory, and for the bigger Saudi neighbor to intervene whenever it felt opportune.

With Saudi help, Hadi returned to Aden but the Saudi coalition could not dislodge the Houthis in the western highlands that also harbor 75% of the Yemeni population. The Saudis were brutal in their methods, killing many civilians and imposing an embargo that resulted in mass starvation in the Houthi-controlled regions. In 2017, there were internal rifts between Hadi and the Aden governor Aidarus al-Zoubaidi. Hadi accused Zoubaidi of being too close to UAE and sacked him. Zoubaidi was a popular governor, so he declared the formation of a Southern Transitional Council (STC), which seized Hadi government buildings. Zoubaidi was backed by UAE, while Hadi was backed by Saudi, and both forces were fighting each other while both claim to continue fighting the Houthis. In 2020, STC declared self-governance, but the Saudis were finally able to convince UAE and STC to join a new governing body, the Presidential Leadership Council (PLC) putting STC and the Yemeni government together. To achieve that goal, Saudis pushed Hadi to resign. Rashid al-Alimi became the president and Zoubaidi became the vice-president of the newly formed PLC in 2022.

The only light point is that al-Qaeda remains a relatively small faction, but at one point al-Qaeda was contesting for space with STC, Government of Yemen (later PLC) and Houthis. Since the Houthi’s successful insurgency in 2014, the ex-president Saleh became a Houthi supporter, hoping to find a way to return to power. But by 2017, Saleh and the Houthis fell out with each other, and as Saleh was about to escape Sanaa to join forces with the Saudis, he was assassinated by the Houthis. The stand-off between Houthis and PLC (Yemeni government) remains unresolved, although if the Saudis reach an agreement with the Houthis the partition of Yemen could result in an end to the conflict. This would save many civilian lives as the Saudi embargo on food shipments to Houthi areas will also stop.

Let us recap the key ingredients for Yemen’s political troubles that led to the rise of the Houthis, who are, in turn, threatening the safety of international trade: (1) the natural geography involves a lack of rivers that disfavor political consolidation and favors fragmentation. (2) While Yemen is Islamic, the sectarian division between Shia Zaydis and Sunnis is relevant and is reflected in the current conflict between the Houthis and the Yemeni government. (3) Weak central governance made Yemen into a pawn of major foreign powers such as Ottoman Turks and British in the past and US, Saudi, Iran at present. (4) The economy is quite agrarian and poor, which lowers government stability during bad economic times and that favors civil wars. (5) Even the discovered oil riches do not automatically imply shared prosperity because Saleh’s regime was patrimonial and corrupt, benefiting a narrow economic and social elite close to himself, and leaving out other groups who can be mobilized to oppose the central government.

All that is to say, the chaos in that region will continue and internal and external powers will contribute their share to that chaos.

Further readings

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yemen

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yemeni_civil_war_(2014%E2%80%93present)

https://www.britannica.com/place/Yemen/Agriculture-forestry-and-fishing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Leadership_Council

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Transitional_Council

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda_in_the_Arabian_Peninsula

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houthi_movement

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Abdullah_Saleh

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Salem_al_Beidh

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdrabbuh_Mansur_Hadi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aidarus_al-Zoubaidi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hussein_al-Houthi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul-Malik_al-Houthi

A Chronology of the US Retreat in the Global Order

Podcast here; https://soundcloud.com/user-280580802/208-a-chronology-of-the-us-retreat-in-the-global-order

The US has been a hegemonic power to the present day, but it is weakening and this retreat results in a more chaotic global political order with a higher degree of political and military conflicts. US foreign policy can be divided in different time periods. The first two centuries from 1776 to 1945 may be characterized as building up US power. The thirteen colonies gradually expanded to cover much of North America. US discourse uses the label “isolationism”, which supposedly characterized parts of its history, but that term referred to non-intervention in European affairs, which was much more brazen in its colonial conquest, largely as a result of inter-state competition.

As for the US it was everything but isolationist. It has had an imperialist outlook from the beginning, because of the expansion from the original 13 colonies and later US states. To ensure this expansion, the US purchased land from Napoleonic France that was too busy fighting wars with Britain in other fronts. It further plundered Native American land, forcing them to migrate west and ultimately into US government-designated reservations. Finally, the US waged a war with Mexico from 1846 to 1848, which removed Mexico’s control north of the Rio Grande. Once conquest on the US mainland (Lower 48) was completed further territorial acquisitions came from purchasing Alaska from Russia (1867), the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom (1893), victory in the Spanish-American War resulting in control over Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guam (1898). In addition to territorial conquest, the US asserted its power early on via the Monroe Doctrine (1823), where the US declared Latin America to be part of its sphere of influence, opposing any European interference in that region, while the US retained its liberty to overthrow Latin American regimes it didn’t like. US-hostile regimes tend to be communist or nationalist, and want to restrain or remove the power of US corporations that dominate national industries. The US organized regime change coups in Guatemala in 1954, Brazil in 1964, Chile in 1973, El Salvador in 1979, Haiti in 1994. Not all coups worked, e.g. Cuban communists are still in power today. US influence extended beyond the American hemisphere, e.g. its setting up of trading ports in Japan (1854) resulting in the Meiji Restoration and the US participated in crushing the Chinese Boxer rebellion (1901).

The rise of the US as a world power was inevitable: its economic might was undergirded by capitalist norms and legal institutions inherited from the British, natural resource wealth unrivaled by Europeans, the adoption of industrial agriculture and manufacturing, the continuous immigration of the European and Asian “surplus” population. Its external security was guaranteed by two weak neighbors (Canada, Mexico) and two giant oceans (Pacific, Atlantic). The biggest military threat to the US was itself: the American civil war was about whether the future direction of the country involved slavery. But as long as the European powers held a stranglehold over their overseas possessions (especially the British, French and Germans), they would retain an advantage over the US. This changed with the two world wars, each of which caused by the geopolitical rivalry among the major European powers and in each case initiated by the late-colonizer Germany. Germany had long failed to participate in colonial conquest because they were divided in many states prior to the creation of the German Empire in 1871.

The conclusion of World War I opened an outsize influence to the US in shaping the affairs of the post-war order in Europe. President Woodrow Wilson formulated his Wilsonian principles involving national self-determination, the promotion of democracy and capitalism, collective security, and freedom of navigation/ seas. These were, indeed, quite radical proposals, because the Europeans would never have promoted these goals on their own account. The principle of national self-determination sounds good, but is not practicable as most people were either living in multiethnic European countries, the multiethnic colonies of European powers, or in tribal communities with an undeveloped sense of nationhood. Furthermore, drawing territorial boundaries divides multiethnic communities that have customarily lived side by side. This creates tensions where none existed before. Ethnic Hungarians find themselves in Romania, Ukraine or Slovakia. In order to live safely and speak their own language they either have to move to Hungary or they have to insist on minority rights in their newly formed nation-state and that becomes very contentious, as the majority population forms the government and does not want to recognize these minority rights. This creates later political conflicts if there is no generally recognized leadership, e.g. the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s after the death of Tito.

The first attempt by Wilson at creating US hegemony was blocked by a Republican opposition in Congress that wanted to return to isolationism. The Great Depression that started in the US further strengthened the calls for political isolationism and the erection of tariff barriers that reduced trade and made the economic downturn more severe. The Great Depression created political rifts in Japan and Germany that generated fascism and World War II. The Allied forces consisted of Britain, Soviet Union and Nationalist China. The US backed the Allied forces via the Lend-Lease Act, which also helped American industries revive from the Depression. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt had found his casus belli to enter the war, and Hitler’s Germany then declared war on the US. The Allies were in the defensive against the Axis powers, but when the US formally entered the war the industrial balance shifted strongly in favor of the Allies. Even Josef Stalin admitted after the end of the war that the Soviets could not have beaten Germany without Lend-Lease support. To be clear, the Soviets made the biggest sacrifice regarding human life and the devastation of the economy through the rampaging Wehrmacht in their own territory. In contrast, US industrial capacity and infrastructure was unharmed by the war, such that by 1945, half of the global economic activity was generated in the US. At the end of World War II, the US reached its hegemonic zenith.

As the Cold War ramped up, the US and the Soviets took the leading role in the bipolar geopolitical competition. The threat by the Soviet Union produced a permanent military-industrial complex, which demanded permanent funding regardless of the actual geopolitical need. At the same time, the proliferation of nuclear weapons made it impossible for the US to fight open wars with the Soviet Union and from the 1960s onward with China. It was in this context that both the Americans and the Soviets were supporting numerous proxy wars. The notable cases were Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan.

The US fought the Vietnam War, operating under the assumption of the domino theory. If one country became communist, all the other countries in the region would also join the Soviet sphere of influence and thereby would be lost to the US. The war lasted 10 years, and despite superior firepower, the Vietcong, fighting what they thought to be a righteous anti-imperialist war against American occupation and a highly corrupt South Vietnamese regime, prevailed. The Vietcong fought an asymmetric war, hiding whenever the Americans struck, and striking back when the American soldiers let their guard down in their search-and-destroy missions. The mounting human and economic cost of the war generated significant pushback at home, and it was the first time in US history that mass domestic opposition resulted in the US decision to depart from Vietnam. Without US firepower, the South Vietnamese regime fell in 1975. The images of desperate South Vietnamese collaborators hanging onto the departing US helicopters is seared into the memory of US foreign policymakers who were brought down from their imperial hubris.

The loss in the Vietnam War was the first sign that the US was not a universally loved foreign power that spreads democratic civilization to the world. Democracy promotion is to some extent a red herring. The US occupation “success” cases are old democracies that were resurrected after World War II, especially Japan and West Germany. South Korea and Taiwan are more significant success cases, but they developed indigenous democratic forces in the 1980s long after the start of the US occupation (in South Korea) and tutelage (in Taiwan). These were all countries that became highly developed, surely taking advantage of access to the big US consumer market. This generated a middle class that wanted democracy. But many other occupied countries in the Middle East had made no such democratic transition despite US occupation, e.g. Afghanistan and Iraq. Big US allies like Iran under the Shah or Egypt and Saudi Arabia were/ are full-on autocracies that happen to sell their oil to America cheaply.

But for America wars have “only” been costly economically and psychologically given the domestic opposition to these wars. For the Soviets, it became fatal. The biggest US strike against the Soviets occurred in the late-1970s, when the US funded the Taliban and the Islamists, who fought against the pro-communist regime that was propped up by the Soviets. The Soviets fell for the trap and sent their own military forces into Afghanistan which started a 10-year long costly military intervention that brought about the fall of the Soviet Union by the late-1980s. It is quite striking that the US would fall for the same Afghanistan trap only a decade later.

It was in the context of the communist collapse in Eastern Europe that Francis Fukuyama discovered the Hegelian dialectical moment in world history, where liberal democracy led by the United States would reshape the world and bring an end to alternative political ideologies. The 1990s were marked by the growth in the number of democracies, especially after integrating the former Warsaw Pact countries in central and eastern Europe into the EU and NATO. The EU itself became the successor organization to the European Community, vowing an ever closer political union. South Korea and Taiwan consolidated as political democracies as well. Free trade agreements were becoming more popular, as NAFTA was agreed on in 1992. During this period, only the US was able to fight wars without external constraints, which was a harsh lesson to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, who was immediately punished by the US-led coalition when he invaded Kuwait. The Clinton administration freely carried out military interventions in Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo. While the Rwandan and Bosnian genocide was occurring, American human rights scholars formulated the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, where the US should be able to stop human rights violations via military interventions. This doctrine was clearly selectively applied because when the Palestinians yearn for the recognition of their state or end Israeli collective punishment following Hamas terrorist attacks, the US would always side with the Israeli occupiers who block the path to statehood and any sanctions on Israel.

Liberal interventionism was merely another flavor of the aggressive US military doctrine that competes with neoconservatism. The neocons argued that US invasions were justified to advance democracy and punish regimes hostile to the US. These would include the Taliban in Afghanistan, who were accused of harboring Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, which orchestrated the 9/11 bombings, and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, who refused to hand the Iraqi oil rights to American oil companies and chose to trade his oil in euros. No wonder the French and Germans opposed the Iraq War. The neocons took a solid hold during the Bush jr. administration by hoodwinking the American public to invade Iraq and Afghanistan that was terrified and angered by the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York. Bush’s “axis of evil” also included Iran and North Korea. The only thing that deterred the Americans from further invasions was that Iraq and Afghanistan wars were extremely expensive, tied up significant military resources and nation-building was not working.

The honeymoon of US hegemony came to an end by the late-2000s. I argue that the last 15 years are about the unraveling of the US-led international order. The following chronology of events points to important episodes of this momentous global political realignment.

2008: Russia invades Georgia. The Bush administration indicated support for accepting Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, but this did not happen, mainly due to French and German opposition. These countries feared provoking Russian aggression. The US did not react to Russia’s invasion. Russia successfully reasserted its regional hegemonic status in the domain of the former Soviet Union that was and is controlled from the Kremlin.

2008-9: US financial crisis emanates from excessive mortgage lending and financial deregulation resulting in a global financial crisis. The US economy recovered fast after 2010, but unemployment remained elevated for a few years longer. The Obama administration disappointed the public with bank bailouts and no protection for homeowners who couldn’t pay their mortgages. Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party became political phenomena, each of them focused on grievances against the political order that are rigged for the well-off. Bernie Sanders, a left-wing populist, received the second largest vote share in the Democratic Party in 2016 and 2020 but is held down by conservative Democratic party insiders and donors. Donald Trump, a narcissist reality TV star and real estate tycoon, won the Republican primary and general election in 2016, vowing to shut down the border to new immigrants, cancel free trade agreements and put “America first”, thus chucking out the neoconservative (wars of foreign aggression) and neoliberal (pro-trade, internationalist) playbook of the Republican Party. Unresolved internal tensions (too much inequality, weak social safety net) make the public turn inward and less interested in running the hegemonic order.

2011: Obama administration announced the end of combat operations in Iraq. A smaller troop contingent of 2,500 US soldiers remain until today. Obama did not believe that Iraq was the right war to fight and opposed the neocon nation-building project. Democratic elections brought the pro-Iranian faction to power, which actively competed with the US for influence in Iraq. Obama thought that Afghanistan was the “just” war, because the Taliban backed Al-Qaeda. Obama’s proudest foreign policy accomplishment was the assassination of Osama bin Laden via a Navy SEAL raid in Pakistan, a US ally. Bin Laden had retreated from Afghanistan after the US invasion in 2001. Obama ordered a US troop increase in Afghanistan in 2009, but announced a steep drawdown of troops at the end of his first term. He, ultimately, wanted to end the Middle East wars and focus more on countering Chinese influence in the Far East. His two successors, Trump and Biden, were similarly skeptical about continuing the US occupation in Afghanistan. Obama’s foreign policy doctrine was to not fight “stupid” wars, and that meant not meddling too much in the Middle East. The flipside is that the disorder in the Middle East does not decline with the US retreat.

2013: Xi Jinping ascends to the presidency in China. Since the US financial crisis in 2008, China became the global growth engine, responding to the weaker US economy by launching a massive infrastructure package and launching the Belt-Road initiative that creates infrastructure in Global South countries. The US trade volume with Africa has been sinking, while the Chinese one increased after 2008. With the increasing wealth and US technology sanctions, China is increasingly investing in its own semiconductor industry and spends more on the military. It has set up a military base in Djibouti near the Red Sea and several bases in the South Chinese Sea. China has benefited from the US Navy securing the freedom of navigation (e.g. suppressing pirates) given China’s dependence on sea routes for international trade, but it wants to set up its own military regime given their suspicions about the US. Xi’s speeches emphasize that China is a “rejuvenating” global power that is overcoming the mistreatment suffered in the Qing and early Republican era when the western powers carved out Chinese ports and imposed a series of unequal treaties on China. In his retelling of history, the CCP’s historic mission is to restore China’s global power status which was last experienced during the Ming dynasty about 500 years ago. These political pronouncements contravene Deng Xiaoping’s political self-restraint. In the late-1970s, China was poor and suffered from decades of communist mismanagement under Mao. But this self-restraint is no longer needed. The US still has some leverage to restrain China, which was exemplified in the 2020 passage of the Phase One trade agreement and the 2023 agreement in APEC on restoring military communication. These were just small moves and future escalation in bilateral relations is still more than likely.

2013: Obama does not enforce the “red line” on chemical attacks against the Bashar Assad regime in Syria. The US had threatened to intervene militarily to interdict Assad’s use of chemical weapons against the opposition that was fighting Assad in the civil war. Assad had previously promised to destroy its chemical weapons. Assad used the chemical weapons anyway, killing 1,400 people. Obama waffled and asked Congress for permission to carry out air strikes, but Congress voted down the resolution. Assad remained in power. The US intervention in Syria would be limited to the northeast that was controlled by the Kurds. Obama would still order airstrikes in Syria but not for regime change. Two years after the chemical attacks, Russia decided to back Assad by deploying its air force. Iran is also supporting the Assad regime. For neocons like John Bolton or Hillary Clinton, Obama’s own secretary of state, this was a sign of US weakness. The neocons believe that America should have toppled Assad and thereby scare off the other powers like Iran, Turkey or Russia from intervening. But Obama did not believe that the US population had any more appetite for foreign wars, so Syria was ultimately cut up between various foreign powers jostling for regional influence. Its economy remains in shambles and the best talent has fled to the west.

2014: Following the Maidan coup in Ukraine, which toppled the pro-Russian regime, Russia invades Crimea and supports separatists in the Donbas to undermine Ukraine’s new pro-western regime. The Obama administration formally condemned the Russian invasion and along with the European allies imposed financial sanctions on Russia, but these were fairly mild and posed no deterrence to further Russian aggression. The Minsk accord in 2015 implemented a ceasefire, which was frequently broken by both sides. Ukraine needed to build up its corrupt and weak military and Russia wanted to arm further to effect regime change in Kyiv. To the chagrin of Vladimir Putin, Obama had called Russia a weak regional power, but he implicitly accepted Ukraine as part of the Russian sphere of influence by refusing to consider Ukraine’s NATO admission and to supply any arms to Ukraine. The no-arms policy was loosened under Trump. Obama also wanted to focus US resources on domestic problems and Asia-Pacific, e.g. the promotion of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. By refusing to stand up to Putin, further Russian aggression became possible in a later period.

2017: Donald Trump becomes US president questioning long-running US alliances, prompting German chancellor Angela Merkel to state that it is necessary to have a more independent European foreign policy. “America first” is about making the US a transactional player on the global stage making decisions in the narrow national interest rather than make decisions that would advance the broader interest within a liberal international order. Russia, China and Iran welcome the global anarchy, but the US allies are losing their confidence in the US continuing as the captain of their ship.

2017: Trump administration ended the US participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Obama had promoted US membership, allowing it to write the rules of the game, i.e. not leave the Pacific states up to the whims of China, which was not a member of TPP. Trump argued that trade agreements would sacrifice US jobs by shifting US corporate investments into other jurisdictions. TPP fell through without US support and was replaced by the smaller CPTPP (Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership), which has 12 signatories. CPTPP has expanded to include the UK. China, Taiwan, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Uruguay and Ukraine have submitted an application to join. Thus, China could potentially join the very organization that the US had hoped would exclude China. However, the US could force the CPTPP members Mexico and Canada to veto Chinese accession, and Japan raised objections regarding Chinese regulatory standards for e-commerce, intellectual property and state-owned enterprises. This would prevent China’s fast accession into the trade bloc. Trump only concluded the USMCA (US, Mexico, Canada) trade agreement to replace NAFTA. The key provision was to increase the North American and the high-wage ($16+) content requirement. This would presumably increase US jobs. The US is currently gaining manufacturing jobs, although it is hard to trace it to USMCA as the pandemic recovery implied a major labor shortage across many economic sectors. USMCA has improved the labor bargaining conditions for Mexican workers who can demand the higher wages to be eligible for tariff-free trade with North America (Wiseman et al. 2023).

2018: Trump administration quits the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) with Iran, stipulating an end to sanctions on Iran in exchange for ending their nuclear weapons program. The agreement was negotiated by the Obama administration, as he hoped to balance the region, which would presumably pacify the Middle East and free up US resources for the Asia-Pacific. The other signatories (EU, Russia, China) stick with the terms of JCPOA, though Iran cites the US departure from the agreement as excuse to continue to accumulate uranium. Biden announced his interest to return to the deal, but changed his mind as Iran supports Russia in the war in Ukraine and Hamas in Israel. The US released the $6 billion frozen assets that Iran had acquired in South Korea and are held in Qatar, but then re-froze those assets. Regarding the withdrawal from JCPOA, the US is the rogue state by renouncing a multilateral agreement and implicitly backing Saudi and Israeli hostility against Iran. Saudis and Iranians have announced normalizing their relations under Chinese auspices, which is another strike against US power.

2019: Trump administration withdrew US military units from Kurdish-controlled parts of Syria. The Syrian Kurds regarded the US withdrawal as a betrayal, and it opened the door for the neighboring Turks to smash the Syrian Kurds, whom they accuse of harboring Turkish Kurds who harbor separatist sentiments in Turkey. Trump sends another signal that allies cannot rely on the ironclad support of the US. They will have to diversify their external alliances to ensure their own security.

2020: Trump administration formally completes the withdrawal from the international Paris climate agreement. The Paris Accord contains non-binding agreements to phase out carbon emissions to stick with the goal to limit global warming to 1.5C rise from the preindustrial average. The Biden administration rejoined the Paris Accord a few months later, but the signal to the world was that there are no binding international agreements for America. It wants to claim moral authority on a rules-based international order while violating such rules with impunity.

2020: Trump administration signs the Doha agreement with the Taliban stipulating the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, precipitating the takeover of the Taliban a year later. The Biden administration stuck to the terms of the Doha agreement, although the US intelligence agencies falsely reported that the Taliban would take many more months to take Kabul, resulting in a hasty unorganized withdrawal of NATO troops and Afghan collaborators. While bringing to an end the shameful US foreign policy debacle similar to the Vietnam War, Russia took the cue that the US was weak enough and it could go on the offensive.

2022: Russia invades Ukraine. Biden administration reacts by passing economic sanctions and ramping up military aid to Ukraine, but provided no deterrence such as including Ukraine in the NATO alliance. Biden feared a nuclear escalation between US and Russia. It is not clear what the outcome of the war will be, although neither the Ukrainians nor the Russians are backing down, so the high-intensity conflict is going to continue for a while. Russia is backed by Iran, North Korea and, increasingly, China.

2023: Hamas commits a terrorist attack in Israel on October 7 killing 1,400 and taking several hundred hostages, resulting in Israeli retaliation in the Gaza Strip. Israel vows to eliminate Hamas, and has so far flattened northern Gaza forcing these internal refugees to flee to southern Gaza. Now Israel announced its plan to expand its bombing campaign in southern Gaza. Over 10,000 Gazans have already died. Iran and Hezbollah have threatened to intervene, while the US has deployed two aircraft carriers to back Israel. A broader regional Middle East war has been averted thus far, but the risk of one is still high if the Gaza conflict continues. There are no immediate prospects of resolution given that Hamas demands the destruction of Israel, while Israel continues settlement expansion in the West Bank and creates havoc in Gaza. The US unilaterally backs Israel and prevents any international condemnation of Israeli actions, thus ensuring an endless Palestinian struggle for survival and statehood and the future threat of terrorism. Furthermore, the US now is devoting more military resources to back Israel, while further military allocations to Ukraine are slowed down. Russia is the evident beneficiary of Hamas and their Iranian backers having opened up a new front for the US in the global power struggle.

2023: Venezuela announces a referendum to annex Essequibo in neighboring Guyana, as Guyana has substantial oil deposits that are controlled by the American oil company Exxon Mobile. Venezuela has its own substantial oil deposits but wants even more oil. It has faced American sanctions and mismanaged its oil resources by losing western engineers and handing over the oil company to incompetent managers. Recently, the Biden administration has become friendlier to the Maduro regime by releasing some sanctions in exchange for allowing democratic elections. It is questionable whether these elections will be held given that the main opposition candidate, Maria Machado, was not permitted by pro-Maduro courts to stand in the election. The US wanted Venezuelan oil to freely enter the oil market to make up for the rising prices from Russian energy sanctions. Now, the US would have to make an about-face if Venezuela does decide to invade Guyana by restoring the Venezuela sanctions, sending US troops and encouraging Brazil to carry out the fighting. Brazil has increased its military forces at the border to Guyana and Venezuela. The International Court of Justice is siding with Guyana and prohibits Venezuela to seize Essequibo but ICJ has no army and cannot enforce this order. If the US decided to fight an open war with Venezuela to protect its oil corporation, it would be the third major foreign war (next to Ukraine and Israel) it would be funding. The US military industrial complex is benefiting for sure, but where is the breaking point?

In the final analysis, the question is whether the US can restore its global hegemony and whether that is desirable. The answer is it probably can’t restore this power and it is problematic for global peace, even though it still has many advantages (magnet for global migrants, free market capitalism, global reserve currency, strong military) to remain a powerful country. A hegemonic power-led world is more stable and less violent, which does not mean that there is no violence or that the US would do good all the time. The US is a selfish power, as most others are, but it does have a universal political framework centered on the rules-based international order (while at times bending those rules to its liking) that works better than the anarchic alternative. As the hegemon is relinquishing power, the world is becoming more disorderly. Conflicts and wars and the threats thereof will increase, which increases global military expenditure and potentially reduces people’s standard of living and sense of safety.

US Cannot Fight a Three-Front War: Rapprochement between US and China

Podcast here: https://soundcloud.com/user-280580802/207-us-cannot-fight-a-three-front-war-rapprochement-between-us-and-china

The recent APEC summit involved an important bilateral meeting between the US and China in San Francisco. The US administration has worked toward facilitating such a meeting by dispatching several US officials like Secretary Antony Blinken and Janet Yellen to Beijing since summer. The bilateral relations were at a low-point after the US suspected China of having sent a surveillance balloon to the US in February of this year.

The US and China find themselves in a great power competition given that they are the world’s largest economies. The US seeks to preserve its world hegemonic status built on the universal use of the US dollar for trade transactions and reserve currency, a large economy and a powerful military with bases all over the world. China tries to catch up with the US economically, is building up a large military and tries to consolidate military control in the Asia-Pacific region. The US has been countering China’s rise with semiconductor sanctions to hobble the development potential of the Chinese economy and increasing tariffs on US imports of Chinese goods, which is a tax on US consumers. Based on these structural considerations, one should not have too much hope about the outcome of the current APEC meeting.

On the other hand, I argue that both sides need each other and would be wise to take steps to de-escalate bilateral political and economic tensions. One could argue that the summit outcome was quite modest, but the fact that high-level meetings are taking place is already setting a more positive tone in this vital bilateral relationship. As part of the meeting, both sides resolved to resume high-level military communication to prevent future accidents in the air and seaspace, which nearly happened in the Eastern Chinese sea earlier this year. They also agreed to increase the number of flights between the two countries, and streamline visa issuing, which would increase bilateral exchanges in education, business and culture. This is very much to be welcomed given that so many Chinese students prefer to stay in their own country than study in the US due to the China-hostile political climate (Ma 2023).

The US China summit also formulated cooperation on artificial intelligence to prevent military harm from autonomous robots. This is particularly important as both countries have the most advanced AI production sites. They also agreed on climate change cooperation, which involves meeting CO2 reduction targets by promoting renewable energy. This would presumably involve the easing of Chinese solar panel and windmills to access US markets. Climate change is the most important global problem that requires international cooperation, and the two largest emitters are the US and China.

There are other significant areas of mutual concern that are unlikely to be effectively addressed. The US wants China to stop Chinese companies that export the fentanyl raw material to Mexico, where drug cartels mix the ingredients, ship them across the border and sell it to American drug addicts, whose lives are destroyed by fentanyl. The number of fentanyl deaths in the US skyrocketed from 3,000 to 73,000 between 2013 and 2022 (USA Facts 2023). China has announced that they will work on restricting fentanyl exporters, though whether that will happen has to be observed. China wants the US businesspeople to return to China and deepen their partnership with Chinese firms. Xi Jinping paid a visit to Silicon Valley businesspeople to lure them back into China following the reopening from the pandemic, but many US capitalists are skeptical following the CCP’s business raids and the arbitrary detention of US businesspeople for “national security” reasons (Palmer and Zhang 2023).

But it’s not just the US that is making demands on China, but China also wants to convince the Americans to lower their tariff barriers to Chinese products. The trade war was initiated by the Trump administration in the belief that this would lower the US trade deficit and weaken China economically. China also wants to have access to the latest semiconductor technologies that are developed in the US, and hopes that the Biden administration will reverse the sanctions on Chinese semiconductor firms who can no longer access the latest US chips. US nationals have also been prevented to work with Chinese firms and share know-how with them. The US claims these semiconductor restrictions are about preserving national security and preventing the Chinese military from building equipment that could threaten the US (the same reason the Chinese are using to raid foreign businesses), but it’s primarily about hobbling China’s dominance in the technology and economic sector. It is not clear whether the US would back down on tariffs or semiconductor restrictions.

China’s economic vulnerabilities are presently larger than what the US is experiencing and would make them very interested in a detente with the US. GDP growth figures are below the levels experienced before the pandemic. China’s GDP has been stagnating for about three years at $17 trillion (2021-2023), while the US has been going from $23 to 27 trillion in that time span (China Power 2023). There is one positive news, which is that goods exports keep on rising. After staying stable at $2.5 trillion until 2020 it climbed to $3.5 trillion in 2022 (Statista 2023).

There are further issues: demographic aging due to lack of fertility and immigration is happening faster than anticipated; foreign direct investment has turned negative for the first time in decades; real estate investment is no longer a reliable driver of further economic growth, especially after the defaults of the two real estate giants Evergrande and Country Garden. 70% of people’s wealth is tied up in real estate and declining home prices have reduced the wealth and consuming behavior of homeowners (Glover 2023). The government itself had decided to tighten lending standards in real estate companies to prevent a further financial bubble, but at the cost of bankrupting these companies and sliding real estate prices and the economy (Dorn 2023). A quarter of the national economy is tied up in real estate (Raisinghani 2023). Youth unemployment affects about a fifth of the workforce in that age range in June 2023, when the authorities decided to stop tracking that figure (Steil and Harding 2023). The poor employment prospects have created many young Chinese, who have become receptive to rejecting hustle culture and “lie flat”. No more highly exploitative office jobs that require long hours, in part, because these jobs have become so scarce. The focus is now on minimizing work and doing gig economy jobs to make a living. This economic attitudinal change has a negative effect on mating and reproducing, which is reinforcing the demographic crisis.

China’s further economic rebound is limited by the lack of rule of law. In the early period of economic development, this was less important because China could attract foreign capital via its low labor prices. But this easy means of obtaining growth is no longer available as the labor force keeps shrinking and wages are rising, putting the country into the middle-income category. With a lack of rule of law, capitalists can easily be punished for violating the party line, which encourages them to minimize their investment and transfer as much capital as possible abroad. Capitalists fear arbitrary punishment and expropriation which makes it less likely for them to start businesses. Capitalists also lack reliable information to assess whether investments are going to pay off, as government statisticians publish data based on meeting administrative criteria as opposed to the actual figures. Researchers are also guarded in pursuing their research, fearing violation of government policies. Self-censorship results in distorted and less usable research, which limits R&D efforts.

In that case, economic development is still possible but becomes increasingly dependent on state-owned firms who operate according to administrative criteria rather than profitability and efficiency (Dembowski 2023). The CCP is clearly sacrificing further economic development in exchange for political stability that must be increasingly purchased by authoritarian control given that the economic goose stopped laying the golden eggs that kept the CCP popular. With all these economic headwinds, China has very good reasons to reengage more with the US.

In contrast, US economic recovery appears to be strong. Inflation has been elevated but is now decreasing, as supply chains adjust to the Ukraine war and the pandemic is pushed into the rearview mirror. The Inflation Reduction Act involves significant expansion in renewable energy sources, which lowers the long-term cost of energy bills. Tapping the strategic oil reserve has limited a rise in oil prices, which partly explains the lower energy inflation in US compared to Europe, which found it more difficult to wean itself from Russian energy (Khattar and Vela 2023).

Elevated Fed interest rates have made the cost of government borrowing significantly higher, but the Fed can always do deficit-financing, which it did not have to do as it’s domestic creditors, i.e. pension funds, wealthy investors, the Social Security Trust Fund, the Military Retirement Fund etc., that are holding more and more government debt (Figure 3 in Bertaut et al. 2023). The effect of the rising interest rate is more expensive mortgages that have reached levels last experienced in the end of the 1990s (nearly 7.5%, see FRED 2023), which could dampen consumer spending. Some positive news is coming forth with wages, which are now rising faster for high school graduates than for college graduates, which diminishes education-related earning inequality and broadens economic opportunities (Federal Reserve 2023).

The US dollar remains by far the primary currency of international trade especially outside the Euro-area. About 70% of all transactions in the world use the dollar, a stable share over the last few decades, while China’s has been modestly increasing since 2015, but is still less than 5% of the total (Figure 10 in Bertaut et al. 2023). As such, the Fed can issue billions of dollars in new currency without that by itself being a major driver of inflation. But with the increasing political hostility by the US and fear of US sanctions, Chinese banks doing international lending have increasingly shifted loan issuance toward their own currency. Now more than half the Chinese loans to low- and middle income countries are done via the yuan (Economist 2023). China reduced US treasury holdings by 40% from a decade ago reaching a little more than $800 billion (Nikkei 2023), although China is using some of these sales to prop up their weakening currency, and that figure does not account for US Treasury holdings outside the US, e.g. in Belgium and Luxembourg (Fox 2023). But the US reacts to the Treasury sales by simply increasing the internal financing of deficits, e.g. by tapping domestic investor funds and the Social Security Trust Fund, as noted above. Arguments about decoupling are somewhat premature as the monthly US goods imports from China still range $35 to $40 billion (Census 2023).

While China needs the US on trade and economics, the US needs cooperation with China because of the geopolitical conflicts it finds itself in. The US, through its proxies in Ukraine and Israel, is essentially fighting a two-front war already. Why should the US add to this headache by waging a full-on economic war against China and thereby destabilize global value chains, and raise the cost of living for western consumers, while encouraging the Chinese leadership to threaten Taiwan militarily? Ever since Biden took over in 2021, US geopolitical influence continues to be pushed back: in 2021, Biden completed the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, bringing the Taliban back to power. The US believed that this would free up national resources to strengthen its military capacity in Asia-Pacific, e.g. by building new bases in the Philippines or Australia, and this could be used to counter China’s influence in the region.

Vladimir Putin in Russia put a wrench in this calculation. The US and the Europeans decided to back Ukraine militarily, which helped the country survive the Russian onslaught but produced a very long war that remains without conclusion. The high cost of the war is continuing, although the Americans are pushing the Europeans to shoulder more of it.

The Middle East produced a new crisis with the Hamas terror attacks against Israel on October 7. Only a few weeks before that, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan had claimed that the Middle East had never been as peaceful as now. That statement clearly did not age well. In order to back Israel, the Americans have been diverting some military resources destined for Ukraine toward Israel. While most of the non-western countries look at the Ukraine conflict with largely neutral views that is not the case for Gaza, where Israeli bombing campaigns have resulted in over 10,000 Palestinian deaths, involving some Hamas fighters but mostly unarmed civilians. The US as the biggest financial and military backer of Israel could force the Israelis to call off the Gaza annihilation campaign, but is deciding to remain silent and bringing even the Arab US allies in the region (Egypt, Jordan, Saudi) against it. The Gulf countries led by Saudi Arabia are now hoping for China to become more assertive in the region and mediate in the conflict. Could the next step be to ask China to dispatch naval vessels? The US still dominates the Middle East via military bases and alliances, but this could change with the unresolved Gaza conflict.

The main beneficiary of the Gaza conflict is Iran, which supported the Hamas terrorist attacks to evoke the extreme Israeli reaction and thereby undermine the Abraham Accords that would have normalized Israel’s relations with Saudi Arabia, and thereby create a US-led Middle Eastern alliance. The normalization has been put on ice as long as Israel continues the bombing campaign in Gaza. Iran is supporting Hezbollah, the Syrian Assad regime, the Houthis in Yemen and Hamas in Gaza. It also supplies attack drones to Russia to fight in Ukraine. The US geopolitical retreat is, thus, resulting in costly wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, in which the preferred Asia-Pacific confrontation with China is taking the backseat.

Thus, the US wants to desperately avoid further tensions with China for now. The US is quite happy to stick to the one-China principle, and keep its Taiwan support low-key. The US is well-advised to pursue a “Nixon goes to China” strategy, where the US normalized relations with mainland China in the early-1970s to split the Moscow-Beijing-Hanoi axis while the US was desperately failing in its quest to prop up the corrupt South Vietnamese regime. The US ended up losing the Vietnam War anyway. Today, the US cannot afford a Beijing-Moscow-Tehran axis, even though its very own sanctions regime is bringing about this end state.

A Chinese analyst might now counter why China should make any deal with the US if the potential defeat of Iran and Russia would simply result in the next target being China. According to the US, China should supposedly undergo a democratic “color” revolution which would end the one-party rule of the CCP. China was very worried about the Arab Spring, which the west had goaded on, especially with the toppling of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. It is not surprising that China hedges its bets by continuing to back Iran and Russia by not participating in any western sanctions aimed at regime change in those countries. Chinese vehicles are now used by the Russian army to fight Ukraine.

But perhaps there is no other choice for now: the demographic and economic challenges in China are insurmountable, and the US remains an indispensable power to help relieve some economic tensions in China. The best deal that China can hope for is to re-adopt Deng Xiaoping’s great caution that previously served it well: hide your strength, bide your time. Do whatever is needed to get western capital flowing in again, develop the military gradually without threatening neighboring states, retain the status quo in Taiwan, build up more economic and military partnerships with the global South. Whether the US can be coaxed into such an accommodating arrangement given their hitherto hawkish position remains to be seen.

China needs the US economically, while the US needs China geopolitically. Chimerica was about the tight trade interdependence between US and China in the first decade of the twenty-first century (Ferguson and Schularick 2009). That was when China was economically smaller and not seen as a threat to the US. For the sake of global political stability there is no other option but to embrace a new albeit weaker and more fragile form of Chimerica.