Isegoria

People just want to feel good about war again, Freddie deBoer notes:

I want to suggest that you can think that Russia is clearly acting in an unjustifiably aggressive manner and that Ukraine has a right to defend itself, as I do; you can support sending further American arms and money to the Ukrainian government; you can think that NATO and EU behavior have nothing whatsoever to do with Russia’s actions; you can think that Russia’s motivations are pure mustache-twirling evil with no justifications in national security or realpolitik; you can pray for a swift and decisive Ukrainian victory; you can even argue that the United States should send troops and get into a hot war with Russia on Ukraine’s behalf — you can believe all of those things and still find the current state of the discourse to be disordered and unhealthy. You can believe all of that stuff and still argue that the intense social mandate against dissent and hard questions is ugly and unhelpful.

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So, to follow along, Americans focusing on America’s role in the world are guilty of insularity and self-obsession, but also only America stands in the way of victory for Putin. Does this make a lick of sense to you? You can’t simultaneously say that Americans are being self-obsessive when they discuss Ukraine while you demand that America do more and more for Ukraine. Calls for the United States to deepen its involvement in this conflict are definitionally the business of each and every American, including Chomsky, other left critics of prolonging the war, and me. It is nonsensical to claim that an American has no right to an opinion on conduct by America’s government.

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It’s also worth saying that it is of course not 100% Ukraine’s decision how much of their territory and their people to surrender to Russia because that’s not how the world works. Russia has had and will continue to have something to say about how much territory Ukraine keeps and how many people it loses. Is that fair? No. But that’s life. Russia possesses a large and advanced military, as well as the world’s largest nuclear armament. Those facts have consequences, no matter what American pundits think is fair. Sometimes the world is like that. I thought the fact that bad actors sometimes do bad things, and that our efforts to change this will often simply make things worse, was a shared lesson of recent history. I think that living as part of the hegemon has led many Americans to chafe at the idea that there are any obstacles to implementing their will at all, that the world is an entirely pliable entity that will bend to our preferences if we just want it enough. But there has never been a time in post-agrarian history when there was not some sort of conflict between peoples or powers, and the ongoing devastation in Yemen demonstrates that bad things are happening in the world all the time. Whether they’re seen as major challenges to international norms is a matter of publicity.

I suspect that Chomsky’s deeper sin, in that interview, was to make the sensible observation that you shouldn’t think of foreign policy in the exact same moral terms that you think of the behavior of individuals. Foreign policy and warmaking are not easily mappable onto the ordinary moral intuitions that we apply to day-to-day life and the people around us. Chomsky is asking us to think less about simplistic considerations of good and bad and to instead practice some hardheaded cost-benefit analysis. Specifically, he’s suggesting that perpetuating the conflict by enabling short-term Ukrainian victories will ultimately only increase the risk of a truly ruinous war between NATO and Russia and result in greater destruction to Ukraine, without much changing the eventual outcome. Could he be wrong? Absolutely. Is he so wrong that he deserves days of bipartisan rage? I don’t think so. And I also don’t think that rage can be explained in rational terms. I think it speaks to the emotional miasma that has developed regarding this issue.

I think supporting Ukraine in 2022 has become like supporting the troops in 2002 because people are desperate for a morally simplistic contest in which the Goodies will nobly defeat the dastardly Baddies. Americans grow up surrounded by World War II nostalgia and feel denied their birthright of ethically uncomplicated and heroic wars. There’s also a deeper desperation to be positively inspired. I think most people in 2022 are profoundly disillusioned, in politics yes but also in a broader overriding sense, and feel beset by convincing critiques of every idea, party, movement, and institution in American life. In recent decades it’s felt like everything has been undermined and nothing has been built. We churn out college graduates who can critique everything yet create nothing. Even the most dedicated partisans seem to have a jaundiced view of their own side, saving all of their passion and energy for excoriating the other. You look at the discursive inroads the socialist left has made in the last decade in this country, and it’s the perfect example: we’ve achieved no power and little representation, but the leftist critique of conventional liberalism has infected liberals, they’re stung by it, they preemptively work to address it, they feel exhausted by it. I find it very difficult to locate genuine, uncomplicated, positive feelings about the broad left-of-center project anywhere. The migration of political discussion to social media has helped extinguish optimism as a factor in political life. Briefly with Ukraine it seemed that there was finally consensus on a major political issue, and broad American ignorance about foreign policy facilitates superficial unanimity. But the cost of enforced consensus is too high; the stakes here are life and death, and in such a context the need for robust and unrestrained argument is greater than ever.

As J.R.R. Tolkien would put it, the superpowers are trying to build a secondary world that everyone else can inhabit:

Inside it, what the world contains is true: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The great game is indeed a game, but a game with a purpose of creating the rules of the game.

Think about it as a clash between two versions of the world. Or, more graphically, imagine a simulated landscape in which two or more computer programmers are fighting to redesign what appears on the monitor. The pixels keep changing from moment to moment. One second, the landscape looks like a mountain scene; then the mountains grow smaller and smaller until the landscape becomes a grassy plain. Some back and forth ensues until one of the programmers gives up and the other vision wins. Geopolitics is the struggle not to control territory but to create the territory.

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In his recent book, Jacob Helberg writes that the new wars are now less about who controls some piece of territory in Europe or East Asia than about who “controls the information networks and communications technologies that shape the distribution of world power by shaping the daily lives of billions of people.” He fails to draw an obvious but fascinating conclusion: what changed was that technology has rebuilt the world to such an extent that these networks are now the territory.

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Just as new technologies slowly raised the destructive potential of direct conflict, a new avenue was opened: states can now fight one another not by winning in a direct battle but by setting the rules under which other states must operate. Call it a form of indirect government: perhaps your opponent will even assume the rules are natural or given—but in reality, you have moved one level up in the great game. Your opponent is playing a video game. You are coding it. I would reserve the term superpower for those states engaged in a battle to shape the rules. Everyone else is competing under the rules.

Listen to Russian president Vladimir Putin or any of the thinkers orbiting the Kremlin and all you hear is the same geopolitical dread: will Russia be forced to play by Western rules, or can it rise to the role of world-builder? Putin seems to believe that an independent and Westernized Ukraine would reduce Russia to a subordinate status. His is the classical gamble of someone who attempts to change the rules of the game but risks achieving no more than being punished under the existing order. The danger for the Western order is that the tools used to punish and constrain Russian power will erode the legitimacy of that order.

The Ukraine war is a revealing moment in the history of world-building. The global system suddenly appeared as a tool of power rather than a neutral framework of rules. There is some danger in this moment of revelation because a number of state actors in the developing world may themselves stop playing by the existing rules or even start looking for alternative systems of play.

The Pentagon builds its budgets in five-year plans, Christian Brose notes (in The Kill Chain), much as the Soviet Union once did:

Once the Pentagon starts paying for people, places, and things, it has to keep paying for them. This means that the majority of the money that the Department of Defense plans to get in future years has already been obligated by past decisions. And once those programs get started, it is incredibly difficult to stop them, because of how many stakeholders in and out of our government benefit from continuing them at all costs.

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Of the limited future money that remains unspoken for, the process to plan how to spend it begins nearly two years before the Pentagon actually receives a dollar of that money from Congress.

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In that gap of time, entirely new technologies are developed. Brand new companies are founded. And the Pentagon cannot plan to take advantage of any of them, so it programs its future money toward capabilities and technologies that it knows about now, which makes it exceedingly difficult to be dynamic, adaptive, and responsive to unforeseen conditions.

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What’s more, if the Pentagon wants to shift, or “reprogram,” any of this funding for other purposes, it often requires permission from four different congressional committees, and the total amount of money that the Pentagon is allowed to reprogram in a given year is roughly .5 percent of its budget.

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As each layer of bureaucracy was added to govern the sprawling defense enterprise, some power shifted to the top. But much of this was power on paper. In reality, most power still remains at lower levels, concentrated ironically in what are known within the largest non-democratic institution in America as “communities of interest.”

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What this means, in practice, is that countless decisions affecting enormous amounts of defense spending are made by entrenched parochial interests spread around the Department of Defense that have neither the authority nor the incentive to make bold moves that change America’s defense program. This leads the Pentagon’s many communities of interest to view their senior leaders, who come and go every few years, as tantamount to part-time employees who are not around long enough to really matter—or, as a friend in one of those communities once put it to me, “the Christmas help.”

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Military servicemembers are only in a given job for a few years before they rotate to another one. In that short time, they are rarely rewarded for rocking the boat or raising problems up the chain, least of all when their complaints regard the failure of their own institutions to do new things or adopt new technologies for which few people as yet see a need. Such disruptions are more often viewed by the powers that be, who manage military careers, as a reason to doubt whether a person is a team player who deserves a top job in the next promotion cycle. Those who are rewarded are people who shepherd the existing programs of their respective communities of interest through the budget process with as little change as possible.

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The Navy fixates on “ship count.” The Air Force fixates on its number of squadrons. The Army fixates on its “end strength,” the number of soldiers in its ranks. And the Marine Corps has traditionally fixated on amphibious ships.

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For example, despite decades of progress in unmanned aviation, both the Navy and Air Force are planning to spend billions of dollars to develop new, manned fighter jets that they expect to deliver to the force many years from now.

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Both services are also developing autonomous aircraft, but they are limiting them to missions centered around traditional, manned fighter jets—refueling them, in the case of the Navy, and defending them, in the case of the Air Force.

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The truth is that Congress has considerable power to correct the failings and oversights of the Department of Defense and the defense industrial base, but Congress too often uses its awesome powers for things that just do not matter that much to the future effectiveness of our military. It is hard not to think that this is related, in some way, to the significant reduction in the number of members of Congress with military experience, which is roughly half of what it was thirty years ago, which contributes to a growing unfamiliarity with the US military among the very people charged with overseeing it.

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Discussing Elon Musk potentially buying Twitter, Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug) says, “I rarely think anything is meaningful. But I think this is.”

Action in a conflict is strategically positive if it makes further action easier. For example, in a shooting war, a battle is won if the result of the battle is to make the next battle easier. The same is true of a political confrontation.

The occupation of Ottawa was a defeat, not a victory (which should be easier to see now that it is not the Current Conservative Thing), because it left the powers that be stronger, and the powers that would be weaker. The regime fortified itself against any future clever democratic uses of eighteen-wheelers, and field-tested new tools of financial suppression. The participants and organizers were left with legal problems.

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Almost every conservative action is a defeat by this standard, which is why only losers are conservatives. For instance, traveling in Austin, I noticed that the streets had been largely cleared of homeless encampments (which have been pushed into the nearby forests). Most people take this as a conservative victory. It is actually a defeat.

It is a victory in the ordinary sense of the term — an action which gets what the actors want. It is a tactical victory — but a strategic defeat. At a party the other day, I spoke to one of the people who orchestrated this “victory,” and explained why I saw it this way.

In general, victory on an issue-based political rebellion is a strategic defeat, because it reduces the energy of support. Aristocratic support is crucial for any serious rebellion. Severe disorder in aristocratic cities produces rebellious thoughts among aristocrats, who start to question truths they had previously held sacred.

The first stage of these rebellious thoughts is the “unprincipled exception.” In the 1980s, it violated the principles of many aristocratic New Yorkers to vote for “tough on crime” Republicans. Seeing the results of their own principles in their own lives, they did not react by becoming Republicans — they reacted by voting for a Republican. They did not change their principles — they created an exception to those principles.

There are three fates for such an exception. It can stay what it is; it can go away; or it can expand to become a genuine change in principle. Because electing a Republican mayor created a tactical victory that gave the voters what they wanted, the exception went away — its troubling cognitive dissonance was no longer needed. Had the issue persisted, the exception would have stayed as it was or expanded.

Instead, thirty years, the progressive citizens of a mostly-safe, mostly-orderly New York looked at themselves and asked why they tolerated such unprincipled policing. Finding no answer, they rolled it back. Inertia no longer protected the consequences of the exception — and the conservative boomers in Queens and Staten Island who had allied with the exception were moving out and dying off. And the new consciousness was specifically programmed against “broken windows” and “stop-and-frisk.” In the end, the tactical victory was lost and became near-impossible to repeat. Finem respice.

The general lesson we learn from this is that, for a rebel, all true victories are total. He who makes half a revolution digs his own grave.

The only possible victory would be local but total:

These are the only kinds of incremental wins that rebels should shoot for — “niche coups” which completely and irreversibly capture a part of the whole.

Victory is only achieved if Musk completes his whole plan — buying Twitter and taking it private. This is because, as Musk fully recognizes, compliance with power is economically optimal. It is easy for power to control a public company — since a public company must be managed to maximize profit and serve the shareholders, just set up incentives which ensure that compliance is profitable. If there is only one shareholder and he has ulterior motives beyond profit, this control mechanism ceases to work. In any other situation, the management has a fiduciary responsibility to comply.

Would it be a strategic victory? Again, a strategic victory is a victory that makes other victories possible. It goes without saying that a monopoly social-media platform not beholden to the prestige media and its single synoptic perspective would be a source of enormous power that could create all kinds of tactical and strategic victories.

Christian Brose explains (in The Kill Chain) how our near-peers plan to win a future war:

Indeed, that is exactly how China plans to win a future war in Asia and how Russia plans to prevail in Europe: strike rapidly, consolidate their gains before US forces can respond effectively, harden their victory into a fait accompli, and force the United States to escalate the conflict to attack and dislodge their forces. This kind of rapid aggression will only become easier when future war is moving at the speed of hypersonic weapons and intelligent machines.

To deter this kind of conflict, the United States must have nearly all of the military forces required to defend against great-power aggression right where war might occur.

This necessitates positioning large numbers of new military forces, especially autonomous systems, advanced missiles, and electronic attack systems, in Europe and Asia.

It will also require the eventual forward deployment of advanced manufacturing and other means of production that could rapidly generate vast quantities of replacement forces in the event of conflict, where losses would be significant.

Strategy is perhaps the most abused word in Washington, Christian Brose notes (in The Kill Chain):

Government strategies are more often laundry lists of hopes and dreams that help leaders avoid making choices. They seek to be inclusive of everyone’s priorities and give every kid a trophy, rather than picking winners and losers among priorities that are all competing for finite resources. They say everything — and thus, nothing.

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Instead, we will need to relearn a lesson of history that we largely forgot during our three decades of uncontested dominance: that great powers are capable of limiting one another’s ambitions and rendering many of each other’s goals impractical or unachievable, regardless of how desirable those goals may be for one side or the other.

Great powers force each other to define their core interests, the things each is truly willing to fight over, and then make compromises and accommodations as necessary over the rest, lest competition descend into conflict.

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This is already the reality with China. It is unlikely, for example, that a US president would send an aircraft carrier through the Taiwan Strait in a significant crisis with China the way President Bill Clinton did in 1996. US carriers would probably not even operate within a thousand miles of the Chinese coast in the event of a conflict.

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China may be capable of denying dominance to America, but America can do the same to China. And that should be our goal: preventing China from achieving a position of military dominance in Asia, which might be accompanied by a growing global assertiveness that could lead to even more detrimental consequences for the United States and our closest allies.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought back the old question of how civil defense could help reduce the death toll from nuclear war:

But while a full-scale, US-Russia nuclear war would overwhelm target cities and devastate the global climate, up-to-date civil defense can make a difference in saving lives in what might be a more likely nuclear incident, like a terrorist bomb or a missile lobbed by a rogue state. “Yes, sadly, some people would die immediately and have no control,” says Kristyn Karl, a political scientist at the Stevens Institute of Technology. “But recent models show us there are many situations in which a lot of people would survive.”

The first step to making civil defense useful in the 21st century is to help people overcome what Karl calls the “fatalism and apathy” that nuclear weapons can engender, which is why she and her colleagues launched a program in 2017 called Reinventing Civil Defense. Using everything from graphic novels to posters to websites — Karl’s colleague at Stevens, Alex Wellerstein, is behind the Nukemap site that allows you to simulate a nuclear strike of any size on any location — the project aims to reawaken the public to the still-existing threat of nuclear war, and “the actionable steps,” as Karl puts it, that can be taken to potentially save their lives.

That advice can be broken down into three main points: get inside, stay inside, and stay tuned.

Should you receive warning of an incoming strike or detonation, get inside the nearest standing building — ideally one that is concrete — stay there for 12 to 24 hours, the amount of time when radiation levels from fallout will be at their worst, and wait for news about where to evacuate next.

More meaningful civil defense would require federal, state, and local governments to take the nuclear threat as seriously as they do others. When I spoke to Wellerstein in 2018 for my book End Times, he noted that while active shooter drills have become common in American schools, comparatively little is done on what actions can be taken after a nuclear strike. (Comparing the two threats is difficult, but one risk expert in 2018 put the chance of a student being killed by a gun while in a public school on any given day since 1999 at 1 in 614 million.)

“These sorts of activities can cause people not only to behave in their better interest during an emergency, but also to take it more seriously,” Wellerstein told me then. “You’re not going to save everybody, but there’s a difference between 500,000 dead and 800,000 dead.”