The question "why is there a war in Ukraine at this moment?" can be answered simply, but the answer must be compound. "There is a war because Russia invaded Ukraine and much of the western world is assisting Ukraine in its resistance to that invasion." If the second half of that compound wasn't true the war triggered by the first half would likely have been a short one. There would be a larger country called 'Russia' by now, and perhaps that larger country's leaders would allow the captured province to call itself 'Ukraine.' Since both parts of the compound are true, we not only have a war we have a very particular war ... THIS war. So if you want to push the question further, you ought really to push both parts further: why did Russia invade? and why did the western world react the way it has, with rare near-unanimity? And those are both very good questions. To either of them a range of answers may be offered. I expect to come back...
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There are two (maybe three) great origin myths of the western world. We begin our stories either with the ancient Greeks or with the ancient Jews. Sometimes we get sophisticated and say that "we" as the west are the merger of the two -- a third story frame. At the heart of the troubled subject of Iranian/western relations is the simple fact that the Persians are the 'bad guys' in BOTH of the underlying two myths. The Greek narrowly escaped being swallowed by the Persian empire. The contemporaneous Jews did not escape that fate, although thanks to Esther they survived it. Yes, there are other more recent sources for the animosity, and there is the sociological fact that our elites will always want us to have foreign enemies. It is better we aim our bile at foreigners than at the domestic elites themselves! So, at any rate, the latter believe. Beyond all that: Iran is Persia and Persia have always been the enemy. Since long before there was Islam.
An AUMF is a Congressional "Authorization for the Use of Military Force." Our constitutional scheme contemplates a declaration of war as exactly that, the way in which a President as commander in chief receives authorization for the use of military force. But the U.S. hasn't declared war on anyone for 80 years. And we made peace with those foes 76 years ago. Since then, there has been a lot of use for military force. Our executives have not been shy about it. We have the fancy initials AUMF by way of a simulation of the original system. So it would be good to see an Aumf (try pronouncing it as a word, it's kind of fun) repealed. that would be a simulation of making peace. Putting AUMF Repeal Into Context (justsecurity.org)
I've probably said this before but ... I'll go over it again to justify this neat drawing of a medieval siege engine. it seems to me a key point in the political/military history of Europe in particular in the last several centuries that the whole issue of civilizing war by de-civilian-izing it. The whole issue of who are the permissible victims of combat has turned around. In medieval times, the idea that attacking civilians was a bad thing would have seemed very odd. Attacking civilians was pretty much the key tactic of every army. Surrounding cities and starving them out was standard practice. Indeed, in the high middle ages in Europe, attacking the other side’s army was something to be avoided if possible. You wanted to sneak around their army to get at their civilians. After all, their army was made up largely of noblemen, knights, who were worth a damned sight more than peasants and city rabble. Only very slowly has the philosophy of war moved in the direction ...
I've discussed both Taleb and Pinker in this blog at various times, but I've never brought the two of them together. Yet reality has brought them together for me. One of Pinker's books for a broad popular audience is called THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE (2011). It argues that the world is making progress toward peace. Violence still occurs, but it becomes less common century after century, peaceful methods of the resolution of differences advancing. An example: it is almost possible to imagine France and Germany on opposite sides of a war in the next fifty years or so. Yet not TOO long ago as meta-historians reckon time they were on opposite sides of three different wars within about 3/4s of a century. What has happened? See Pinker's title for his answer -- the better angels of our nature are slowly prevailing and giving us a better world. Taleb has been sharply critical of this book. With the help of statistican Pasquale Cirillo, Taleb wrote a couple of es...
Both George Soros and Charles Koch believe that the foreign policy of the United States has become unhinged from any defensible conception of national interest or human rights, and together they hope to use their vast fortunes to move the US toward diplomacy and peace, away from the endless war to which it now seems committed. Charles Koch is one of the “Koch Brothers,” renowned for having long offered financial assistance to Republican and conservative candidates for public office. Soros is the Hungary-born financier who notoriously said in 2003 that removing President George W. Bush from office would be the “central focus of my life” over the following year, as it was “a matter of life and death.” A headline in the Boston Globe has called it an “astonishing turn” that these two men have teamed up. Astonishing or not: Koch and Soros are combining to endow a new foreign-policy think tank, called the “Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.” The name is in homa...
There is no real reason for the policy makers of a nation to worry about bilateral trade deficits. After all, I have a gross trade deficit with my barber. I buy haircuts from him regularly and he never buys anything from me. I sell internet content. My barber has little reason to buy internet content. His website (if he even has one) would be a quite modest affair with no need for the product of my blood and sweat. Yet this deficit is sustainable -- there is no need for me to shed tears over it. What might be of concern is a global trade deficit. When what I sell to the world as a whole is of less value than what I buy from it, I am in an unsustainable position. The point, still, is that bilateral thinking doesn't help us address that situation. Just as some people make the mistake of worrying about bilateral trade deficits, others make the mistake that believing that such a deficit is a source of strength, of leverage. "I pay my barber a lot of money if we annual...
I've made no effort to edit or make sense of this. It's just what I jotted down at the time. He is in his reading-carefully-from-the-teleprompter mode. "Horrors on the scale of September 11, and we can never forget that, have not been repeated on our shores." "The American people are weary of war without victory." Criticized nation building, not interested in re-creating other countries so that they are "in our own image." His first instinct was "to pull out," but ... he has come to distrust his instincts. Three conclusions 1) our nation must seek an honorable and enduring outcome... 2) consequences of a rapid exit are predictable and unacceptable. [But isn't this what HRC was saying? She took flak on that both from Sanders and then from Trump himself.] 3) security threats we face in Afghanistan and the broader region are immense. With regard to the "broader region," he soon bring...
Insofar as any individual is THE public voice and face of anarcho-capitalism these days, it is not me (alas) but Stefan Molyneux. Be sure to spell his first name properly when looking for information about him. Though there is a well-known Stephen Molyneux, he's different person. At any rate, Stefan's rise to prominence has made me grateful that I am no longer editor of a publication on anarcho-cap and related subjects. Were I still at The Pragmatist, I would be expected to say something about him. And the sort of thing one can say must be either (a) ranks-closed against the mutual statist foe, or (b) shocking/edgy/pointed. My own reaction falls between the two stools. I have had no journalistic responsibilities within the world of libertarian and anarcho-capitalistic theorising since well before 2005, the year Molyneux founded what has been his punditry base ever since, FreeDomain Radio, out of Ontario. I fear that Molyneux, on balance, harmed rather than advanced...
The June cover story is a piece by David Bromwich entitled "What Went Wrong: Assessing Obama's Legacy." It is not quite as negative as the headline suggests. Bromwich, whose image you see here, considers Obama superior not only to his precursor, but almost certainly superior to whomever shall be his successor. There is a lot of quotable material here. I'll confine myself to just two quotes, though they will be substantial ones. That said, there is this: "In foreign policy, Afghanistan was the first order of business in Obama's presidency. His options must have appeared exceedingly narrow. During the campaign, he had followed a middle path on America's wars. He said that Iraq was the wrong war and that Afghanistan was the right one: Bush's error had been to take his eye off the deeper danger. By early spring of 2009, Obama knew that his judgment -- though it earned him praise from the media -- had simply been wrong. The U.S. effort in Afghanist...
A quote from the opening passage of her 1961 book, ON REVOLUTION. "Justifications of wars, even on a theoretical level, are quite old although, of course, not as old as organized warfare. Among their obvious prerequisites is the conviction that political relations in the normal course do not fall under the sway of violence, and this conviction we find for the first time in Greek antiquity, in so far as the Greek polis, the city-state, defined itself explicitly as a way of life that was based exclusively upon persuasion and not upon violence." Like many thinkers before and some since, Arendt tended to romanticize the Greek polis. I believe this passage exhibits that fact. Surely the slaves within the walls of Athens could have told stories about the use of violence against their persons to keep them in their status as beasts of burden. I doubt "persuasion" in a contrary sense had much to do with that. Still, I see her point. Before anybody would have thought ...
Just a quick book note today. The Simms book, EUROPE, is a very ambitious effort to put between two covers a discussion of the modern history (mostly the old-fashioned sort of history -- politics, war, and diplomacy) of the named continent. The book gives to this convoluted subject matter, ranging from the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to headlines in the early 21st century, fewer than 700 pages. Excluding the lengthy source notes gives you just 530 pages. Personally, I'm a sucker for Big Picture books like this. Anyway: one of the themes of Simms' book is contingency . There was nothing inevitable, Simms tells us, "about the defeats of Charles V, Louis XIV, Napoleon, and Hitler." Charles V was the King of Spain, and the Holy Roman Emperor, at the time when Spain was conquering much of the New World. Charles' big defeat was in his efforts in his Imperial capacity to suppress the Protestant Reformation. (He did keep it out of Spain, though!) Louis XIV...