Are we born to succeed or are we made to succeed? Lizah van der Aart illustrates a recent Nature Human Behaviour article:
Are we born to succeed or are we made to succeed?
Friday, June 20th, 2025International trade simply wasn’t the zero-sum game that Napoleon assumed it to be
Thursday, June 19th, 2025On Friday, November 21, 1806, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon signed into law the Berlin Decrees:
These were designed to force Great Britain to the negotiating table, but instead were to lead — once he tried to impose them by force on Portugal, Spain and Russia — to his own downfall. The ‘Continental System’ created by the Berlin Decrees (and their successors the Milan and Fontainebleau Decrees of 1807 and 1810) was what Napoleon called ‘a retaliation’ against the British Order-in-Council of May 16, 1806, which had imposed a blockade of the European coast from Brest to the Elbe.
[…]
Since one-third of Britain’s direct exports and three-quarters of her re-exports went to continental Europe, Napoleon intended the decrees to put huge political pressure on the British government to restart the peace negotiations broken off in August.
[…]
International trade simply wasn’t the zero-sum game that, with his crude Colbertism, Napoleon assumed it to be
[…]
The Continental System damaged precisely those people who had done well from Napoleon’s regime and had hitherto been his strongest supporters: the middle classes, tradesmen, merchants and better-off peasantry, the acquirers of biens nationaux property he had always sought to help.
[…]
All American trade with France was therefore blocked unless the United States’ ships bought a licence in a British port for a substantial fee. Along with the British practice of ‘impressing’ (i.e. kidnapping) thousands of Americans for service in the Royal Navy, the November 1807 Orders-in-Council were the primary cause of the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States.
[…]
One major problem with the Continental System was that it could not be imposed universally. In 1807, for example, because Hamburg and the Hanseatic towns such as Lübeck, Lüneburg, Rostock, Stralsund and Bremen couldn’t manufacture the 200,000 pairs of shoes, 50,000 greatcoats, 37,000 vests and so on that the Grande Armée required, their governors were forced to buy them from British manufacturers under special licences allowing them through the blockade. Many of Napoleon’s soldiers in the coming battles of the Polish campaign wore uniforms made in Halifax and Leeds, and British ministers boasted in the House of Commons that Napoleon couldn’t even provide the insignia stitched onto his officers’ uniforms except by resort to British manufacturers.
[…]
By 1811 there were 840 vessels plying their often night-time trade between Malta and southern Mediterranean ports. Once landed, coffee and sugar were smuggled across borders despite the penalty of ten years’ penal servitude and branding, and after 1808 the death penalty on occasion for repeat offenders.
[…]
(Britain had imposed the death penalty for smuggling in 1736, which was regularly enforced.)
[…]
When French customs officials did capture contraband a proportion of it was often returnable for a bribe, and in due course it became possible to take out insurance against seizures at Lloyd’s of London.
[…]
Meanwhile, French imperial customs revenues collapsed from 51 million francs in 1806 to 11.5 million in 1809, when Napoleon allowed the export of grain to the British at high price when their harvest was weak – some 74 per cent of all British imported wheat came from France that year – in order to deplete British bullion reserves.
[…]
The Continental System failed to work because merchants continued to accept British bills-of-exchange, so London continued to see net capital inflows.
[…]
Much to Napoleon’s frustration, the British currency depreciated against European currencies by 15 per cent between 1808 and 1810, making British exports cheaper.
[…]
The Continental System also forced British merchants to become more flexible and to diversify, investing in Asia, Africa, the Near East and Latin America much more than before, so exports that had been running at an average of £25.4 million per annum between 1800 and 1809 rose to £35 million between 1810 and 1819.
When the Ottoman Empire began to collapse, the British and French had a different idea
Wednesday, June 18th, 2025 The Greater Middle East extends across one thousand miles, west to east, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), from the Mediterranean Sea to the mountains of Iran:
From north to south, if we start at the Black Sea and end on the shores of the Arabian Sea off Oman, it is two thousand miles long. The region includes vast deserts, oases, snow-covered mountains, long rivers, great cities, and coastal plains. And it has a great deal of natural wealth in the form that every industrialized and industrializing country around the world needs—oil and gas.
It also contains the fertile region known as Mesopotamia, the “land between the rivers” (Euphrates and Tigris). However, the most dominant feature is the vast Arabian Desert and scrubland in its center, which touches parts of Israel, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Yemen, and most of Saudi Arabia, including the Rub al Khali or “Empty Quarter.” This is the largest continuous sand desert in the world, incorporating an area the size of France. It is due to this feature that not only the majority of the inhabitants of the region live on its periphery, but also that, until European colonization, most of the people within it did not think in terms of nation states and legally fixed borders.
The notion that a man from a certain area could not travel across a region to see a relative from the same tribe unless he had a document, granted to him by a third man he didn’t know in a faraway town, made little sense. The idea that the document was issued because a foreigner had said the area was now two regions and had made up names for them made no sense at all and was contrary to the way in which life had been lived for centuries.
The Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) was ruled from Istanbul. At its height, it stretched from the gates of Vienna, across Anatolia, and down through Arabia to the Indian Ocean. From west to east it took in what are now Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Israel/ Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and parts of Iran. It had never bothered to make up names for most of these regions; in 1867 it simply divided them into administrative areas known as Vilayets, which were usually based on where certain tribes lived, be they the Kurds in present-day northern Iraq, or the tribal federations in what is now part of Syria and part of Iraq.
When the Ottoman Empire began to collapse, the British and French had a different idea. In 1916, the British diplomat Colonel Sir Mark Sykes took a grease pencil and drew a crude line across a map of the Middle East. It ran from Haifa on the Mediterranean in what is now Israel to Kirkuk (now in Iraq) in the northeast. It became the basis of his secret agreement with his French counterpart François Georges-Picot to divide the region into two spheres of influence should the Triple Entente defeat the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. North of the line was to be under French control, south of it under British hegemony.
The term Sykes-Picot has become shorthand for the various decisions made in the first third of the twentieth century, which betrayed promises given to tribal leaders and which partially explains the unrest and extremism of today. This explanation can be overstated, though: there was violence and extremism before the Europeans arrived.
[…]
The legacy of European colonialism left the Arabs grouped into nation states and ruled by leaders who tended to favor whichever branch of Islam (and tribe) from which they themselves came. These dictators then used the machinery of state to ensure their writ ruled over the entire area within the artificial lines drawn by the Europeans, regardless of whether this was historically appropriate and fair to the different tribes and religions that had been thrown together.
[…]
As rulers of the Ottoman Empire the Turks saw a rugged, mountainous area dominated by Kurds, then, as the mountains fell away into the flatlands leading toward Baghdad and west to what is now Syria, they saw a place where the majority of people were Sunni Arabs. Finally, after the two great rivers of the Tigris and the Euphrates merged and ran down to the Shatt al-Arab waterway, the marshlands, and the city of Basra, they saw more Arabs, most of whom were Shia. They ruled this space accordingly, dividing it into three administrative regions: Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra.
In antiquity, the regions very roughly corresponding to the above were known as Assyria, Babylonia, and Sumer. When the Persians controlled the space they divided it in a similar way, as did Alexander the Great, and later the Umayyad dynasty.
[…]
Iraqi Kurdistan has long been divided between two rival families. Syria’s Kurds are trying to create a statelet they call Rojava. They see it as part of a future, greater Kurdistan, but in the event of its creation, questions would arise as to who would have how much power, and where. If Kurdistan does become an internationally recognized state, then the shape of Iraq will change.
[…]
Various Arabian tribes had helped the British against the Ottomans during the First World War, but there were two in particular that London promised to reward at the war’s end. Unfortunately, both were promised the same thing—control of the Arabian Peninsula. Given that the Saudi and Hashemite tribes frequently fought each other, this was a little awkward. So London dusted off the maps, drew some lines, and said the head of the Saudi family could rule over one region and the head of the Hashemites could rule the other, although each would “need” a British diplomat to keep an eye on things. The Saudi leader eventually landed on a name for his territory, calling it after himself, hence we know the area as Saudi Arabia—the rough equivalent would be calling the UK “Windsorland.”
The British, sticklers for administration, named the other area Transjordan, which was shorthand for “the other side of the Jordan River.” A dusty little town called Amman became the capital of Transjordan, and when the British went home in 1948 the country’s name changed to Jordan. But the Hashemites were not from the Amman area: they were originally part of the powerful Qureshi tribe from the Mecca region, and the original inhabitants were mostly Bedouin. The majority of the population is now Palestinian: when the Israelis occupied the West Bank in 1967, many Palestinians fled to Jordan, which was the only Arab state to grant them citizenship. We now have a situation where the majority of Jordan’s 6.5 million citizens are Palestinian, many of whom do not regard themselves as loyal subjects of the current Hashemite ruler, King Abdullah. Added to this problem are the one million Iraqi and Syrian refugees the country has also taken in who are putting a huge strain on its extremely limited resources.
[…]
Until the twentieth century, the Arabs in the region saw the area between the Lebanese mountains and the sea as simply a province of the region of Syria. The French, into whose grasp it fell after the First World War, saw things differently.
The French had long allied themselves with the region’s Arab Christians and by way of thanks made up a country for them in a place in which they appeared in the 1920s to be the dominant population. As there was no other obvious name for this country the French named it after the nearby mountains, and thus Lebanon was born. This geographical fancy held until the late 1950s. By then the birthrate among Lebanon’s Shia and Sunni Muslims was growing faster than that of the Christians, while the Muslim population had been swollen by Palestinians fleeing the 1948 Arab–Israeli War in neighboring Israel/ Palestine. There has been only one official census in Lebanon (in 1932), because demographics is such a sensitive issue and the political system is partially based on population sizes.
[…]
Some parts of the capital, Beirut, are exclusively Shia Muslim, as is most of the south of the country. This is where the Shia Hezbollah group (backed by Shia-dominated Iran) is dominant. Another Shia stronghold is the Bekaa Valley, which Hezbollah has used as a staging post for its forages into Syria to support government forces there. Other towns are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim. For example, Tripoli, in the north, is thought to be 80 percent Sunni, but it also has a sizable Alawite minority, and given the Sunni-Alawite tensions next door in Syria, this has led to sporadic bouts of fighting.
Lebanon appears to be a unified state only from the perspective of seeing it on a map.
[…]
When the French ruled the region they followed the British example of divide and rule. At that time, the Alawites were known as Nusayris. Many Sunnis do not count them as Muslims, and such was the hostility toward them that they rebranded themselves as Alawites, as in “followers of Ali” to reinforce their Islamic credentials. They were a backward hill people, at the bottom of the social strata in Syrian society. The French took them and put them into the police force and military, from where, over the years, they established themselves as a major power in the land.
[…]
The Assad clan, from which President Bashar al-Assad comes, is Alawite, which comprises approximately 12 percent of the population. The family has ruled the country since Bashar’s father, Hafez, took power in a coup d’état in 1970. In 1982, Hafez crushed a Muslim Brotherhood Sunni uprising in Hama, killing perhaps thirty thousand people over several days. The Brotherhood never forgave or forgot, and when the nationwide uprising began in 2011 there were scores to be settled.
[…]
It is doubtful that whoever eventually “wins” would look kindly upon a Kurdish statelet within what are nominally the borders of Syria. Not only would the Syrian Sunni majority oppose losing territory, but the Turks would be horrified at having a Syrian Kurdish state on its borders. There would inevitably be moves to join it up to some of the Kurdish-dominated regions inside Turkey itself.
Even before his CIA connections came out, West’s experiments got him in plenty of trouble
Saturday, June 14th, 2025Despite the furtive nature of “Jolly” West’s research, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), he could be surprisingly garrulous
Among the press clippings in his file were two items from Portland, Oregon, newspapers, both dated October 1963—the murky period between his Oklahoma hypnosis studies and the Haight-Ashbury Project. West had given an address to the Mental Health Association of Oregon, letting it slip that he was inducing insanity in the lab. He framed these studies as positive developments: they might someday cure mental illness.
“We are at the dawning of a new era,” West told the crowd, “learning for the first time to produce temporary mental derangement in the laboratory.” The Oregon Journal noted that West “listed the new hallucination drug LSD, along with other drugs, hypnosis, and sleep deprivation as some of the things that [he was] using to produce temporary mental illness effects in normal people.” Reporting that West had done “extensive work” with LSD, the Journal continued: “The most important contribution of the drug so far is in producing model mental illnesses.”
Almost fifteen years later, besieged by reporters after the New York Times alleged that he’d taken part in MKULTRA’s secret LSD experimentation program, West insisted that all of his LSD work “had been confined to animals,” denying any CIA affiliation. When reporters pointed out that he’d received an awful lot of money from the agency, he retorted that he’d had no idea that the Geschickter Fund and other sources were CIA fronts. Legally, the CIA was obligated to tell the University of Oklahoma that one of its faculty had been on the agency payroll. Oklahoma revealed a heavily redacted memo saying that an unnamed professor—West, I confirmed through financial records—had been investigating “a number of dissociative phenomena” on humans “in the lab,” including an exceptionally rare clinical disorder known as “latah,” “a neurotic condition marked by automatic obedience.”
None of the allegations harmed West’s reputation. By then he’d left Oklahoma for UCLA, where he offered a steady stream of denials and continued to thrive through his retirement in 1988. Irascible and arrogant, he was quick to threaten lawsuits when anyone brought up the charges. Sometimes he threw in diversionary tactics: in a 1991 rebuttal, he claimed, “My secret connection to Washington, D.C. is not as a spook, but rather as a confidential advisor to Presidents… From Eisenhower to Bush, Democrat and Republican Presidents alike have freely sought and received my counsel.” In a 1993 letter to the editor of the UCLA Bruin, he had the temerity to compare his accusers to Nazi propagandists “in Goebbels’ tradition of the Big Lie.” West added, “I have never taken part in ‘mind-control’ experiments funded by the CIA or anybody else”: a statement belied by his own files.
Even before his CIA connections came out, West’s experiments got him in plenty of trouble. In 1972, he announced plans to build a lab in an abandoned Nike Missile base in the Santa Monica Mountains. He would call it “The Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence,” or the Violence Center, for short. There, in perfect isolation, he could study the origins and control of human violence by experimenting on prisoners. Governor Ronald Reagan gave the Violence Center a full-throated endorsement.
But West’s proposal for grant money landed him in hot water. He planned to test radical forms of behavior modification, implanting electrodes and “remote monitoring devices” in prisoners’ brains. A federal investigation concluded that the program involved “coercive methods” that threatened “privacy and self-determination.”
The committee’s disclosures stymied the Violence Center before it got past the planning stages. The California legislature vetoed the project; UCLA’s student body rose up in protest of West. And this, to reiterate, was before anyone had a clue about his CIA work.
Napoleon didn’t hold a single council of war throughout the entire campaign
Thursday, June 12th, 2025Napoleon was at Bamberg, waiting to see what the Prussians intended, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), when the Prussian declaration of war arrived:
‘He threw it away contemptuously,’ recalled Rapp, and said of Frederick William, ‘Does he think himself in Champagne?’ — a reference to the Prussian victories of 1792. ‘Really, I pity Prussia. I feel for William. He is not aware what rhapsodies he is made to write. This is too ridiculous.’
His reply:
Your Majesty will be defeated, you will compromise your repose and the existence of your subjects without the shadow of a pretext. Prussia is today intact, and can treat with me in a manner suitable to her dignity; in a month’s time she will be in a very different position. You are still in a position to save your subjects from the ravages and misfortunes of war. It has barely started, you could stop it, and Europe would be grateful to you.
He had his reasons for being confident:
Although Prussia had a potentially very large army of 225,000 troops, 90,000 of them were tied up garrisoning fortresses. No immediate help could be expected from Russia or Britain, and although some of her commanders had fought under Frederick the Great, none had seen a battlefield in a decade. Her commander-in-chief, the Duke of Brunswick, was a septuagenarian and her other senior commander, General Joachim von Möllendorf, an octogenarian. Moreover, Brunswick and the general in charge of the left wing of the Prussian army, Prince Friedrich von Hohenlohe, had rival strategies and hated each other, so councils of war could take up to three ill-tempered days to reach a conclusion. Napoleon didn’t hold a single council of war throughout the entire campaign.
The cape is still a commanding piece of real estate on the world map
Wednesday, June 11th, 2025South Africa’s economy is ranked second-largest on the continent, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), behind Nigeria:
It is certainly the powerhouse in the south in terms of its economy (three times the size of Angola’s), military, and population (53 million).
[…]
Because it is located so far south, and the coastal plain quickly rises into highland, South Africa is one of the very few African countries that do not suffer from the curse of malaria, as mosquitoes find it difficult to breed there. This allowed the European colonialists to push into its interior much farther and faster than in the malaria-riddled tropics, settle, and begin small-scale industrial activity that grew into what is now southern Africa’s biggest economy.
For most of southern Africa, doing business with the outside world means doing business with Pretoria, Bloemfontein, and Cape Town. South Africa has used its natural wealth and location to tie its neighbors into its transport system, meaning there is a two-way rail and road conveyor belt stretching from the ports in East London, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, and Durban; stretching north through Zimbabwe, Botswana, Zambia, Malawi, and Tanzania; reaching even into Katanga Province of the DRC and eastward into Mozambique. The new Chinese-built railway from Katanga to the Angolan coast has been laid to challenge this dominance and might take some traffic from the DRC, but South Africa looks destined to maintain its advantages.
[…]
In the days of the British Empire, controlling South Africa meant controlling the Cape of Good Hope and thus the sea-lanes between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Modern navies can venture much farther out from the southern African coastline if they wish to pass by, but the cape is still a commanding piece of real estate on the world map and South Africa is a commanding presence in the whole of the bottom third of the continent.
[…]
Nevertheless, every year more roads and railroads are being built connecting this incredibly diverse space. The vast distances of the oceans and deserts separating Africa from everywhere have been overcome by air travel, and industrial muscle has created harbors in places nature had not intended them to be.
In every decade since the 1960s, optimists have written about how Africa is on the brink of prevailing over the hand that history and nature have dealt it. Perhaps this time it is true. It needs to be. By some estimates, Sub-Saharan Africa currently holds 1.1 billion people—by 2050 that may just more than double, to 2.4 billion.
Pessimism, the sense that it is hopeless, is a self-fulfilling prophecy
Tuesday, June 10th, 2025Why do we suddenly get an explosion of creativity and progress in certain places and moments, Johan Norberg asks, and why do these golden ages end?
I have learned that ages become golden because they imitate and innovate. They first emerge because of cheating. They didn’t come up with all the innovations that made them prosper; instead they took them from others.
Athenian, Italian and Dutch merchants picked up new ideas on their business trips. Like the Borg of Star Trek, the Romans constantly absorbed peoples, ideas and methods by conquest, and Abbasid Baghdad actively sponsored a translation project to lay their hands on the world’s knowledge and science.
But there is a limit to how far imitation can get you. To make this progress self-propelling, these cultures had to combine these inputs with their own thoughts to create innovations, from higher agricultural yields to artistic rebellions. This takes inclusivity back home. People have to be allowed to try new things. Free speech, free markets and a rule of law that constrains the arbitrary actions of rulers leave room for this.
But get Giotto and the flying shuttle, it takes something more: a broader culture of optimism. Innovation is difficult and controversial, and the results are never guaranteed. Therefore, you need a sense that there is hope and possibility, and you need role models around you who have shown the way, to make it seem like it is worth trying. Others to be inspired by, learn from, and to compete with.
This progress sometimes became self-sustaining because, at a certain point, it started transforming the self-identity of these cultures. That is why we often see clusters of creativity, like philosophy in Athens, art during the Renaissance, classical music in Vienna and technology in Silicon Valley.
Pessimism, the sense that it is hopeless, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is a clue to the decline and fall of golden ages.
[…]
All these golden ages experienced a death-to-Socrates moment in times of crisis, when they soured on their previous commitment to open intellectual exchange. They started to support strongmen, control the economy and abandon international exchange. This made the fear of disaster self-fulfilling, since those barriers limited access to other possibilities and restricted the adaptation and innovation that could have helped them deal with the threat.
Yet he did not fail to listen to the remarks and objections addressed to him
Thursday, June 5th, 2025While Metternich would go on to be an implacable foe, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), his initial impression of Napoleon was largely positive:
What at first struck me most was the remarkable perspicuity and grand simplicity of his mind and its processes. Conversation with him always had a charm for me, difficult to define. Seizing the essential point of subjects, stripping them of useless accessories, developing his thought and never ceasing to elaborate it till he had made it perfectly clear and conclusive, always finding the fitting word for the thing, or inventing one where the image of language had not created it, his conversation was ever full of interest. Yet he did not fail to listen to the remarks and objections addressed to him. He accepted them, questioned or opposed them, without losing the tone or overstepping the bounds of a business conversation; and I have never felt the least difficulty in saying to him what I believed to be the truth, even when it was not likely to please him.
Beijing and the big Chinese companies don’t ask difficult questions about human rights, and they don’t demand economic reform
Wednesday, June 4th, 2025The Chinese are everywhere, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), and they mean business:
About a third of China’s oil imports come from Africa, which—along with the precious metals to be found in many African countries—means they have arrived, and will stay. European and American oil companies and big multinationals are still far more heavily involved in Africa, but China is quickly catching up. For example, in Liberia it is seeking iron ore, in the DRC and Zambia it’s mining copper and, also in the DRC, cobalt. It has already helped develop the Kenyan port of Mombasa and is now embarking on much larger projects just as Kenya’s oil assets are beginning to become commercially viable.
China’s state-owned China Road and Bridge Corporation is building a $ 14 billion railroad project to connect Mombasa to the capital city of Nairobi. Analysts say the time taken for goods to travel between the two cities will be reduced from thirty-six hours to eight hours, with a corresponding cut of 60 percent in transport costs. There are even plans to link Nairobi up to South Sudan, and across to Uganda and Rwanda. Kenya intends, with Chinese help, to be the economic powerhouse of the Eastern Seaboard.
Over the southern border, Tanzania is trying a rival bid to become East Africa’s leader and has concluded billions of dollars’ worth of deals with the Chinese on infrastructure projects.
[…]
China’s presence also stretches into Niger, with their National Petroleum Corporation investing in the small oil field in the Ténéré fields in the center of the country. And Chinese investment in Angola over the past decade exceeds $ 8 billion and is growing every year. The China Railway Engineering Corporation (CREC) has already spent almost $ 2 billion modernizing the Benguela railroad line, which links the DRC to the Angolan port of Lobito on the Atlantic coast eight hundred miles away. In this way travel the cobalt, copper, and manganese with which Katanga Province in the DRC is cursed and blessed.
In Luanda, the CREC is constructing a new international airport, and around the capital huge apartment buildings built to the Chinese model have sprung up to house some of the estimated 150,000 to 200,000 Chinese workers now in the country. Thousands of these workers are also trained in military skills and could provide a ready-made militia if China so required.
What Beijing wants in Angola is what it wants everywhere: the materials with which to make its products, and political stability to ensure the flow of those materials and products.
[…]
Beijing and the big Chinese companies don’t ask difficult questions about human rights, and they don’t demand economic reform or even suggest that certain African leaders stop stealing their countries’ wealth, as the IMF or World Bank might.
[…]
South Africa is China’s largest trading partner in Africa. The two countries have a long political and economic history and are well placed to work together. Hundreds of Chinese companies, both state-owned and private, now operate in Durban, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town, and Port Elizabeth.
The Confederation fostered a nascent sense of German nationalism
Thursday, May 29th, 2025The Holy Roman Empire had a logic to it in the Middle Ages, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), when it brought together hundreds of tiny German and central European states in a loose agglomeration for mutual trade and security, but it had grown less relevant:
On July 12, 1806 Napoleon made it yet more irrelevant when he proclaimed himself Protector of a new German entity, the Confederation of the Rhine (Rheinbund), comprising the sixteen client states allied to France, from which Austria and Prussia were notably excluded.
[…]
Under the terms of the founding of the Rhine Confederation, Napoleon now had an extra 63,000 German troops at his disposal, a number that was soon increased; indeed the term ‘French army’ becomes something of a misnomer from 1806 until the Confederation’s collapse in 1813.
[…]
Meanwhile, the Confederation fostered a nascent sense of German nationalism, and dreams that one day Germany could be an independent state ruled by Germans. There is no more powerful example of history’s law of unintended consequences than that Napoleon should have contributed to the creation of the country that was, half a century after his death, to destroy the French Empire of his own nephew, Napoleon III.
Angola is one of the African nation states with natural geographical borders
Wednesday, May 28th, 2025Sub-Saharan Africa’s second-largest oil producer, Angola, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), is one of the African nation states with natural geographical borders:
It is framed by the Atlantic Ocean to the west, by jungle to the north, and by desert to the south, while the eastern regions are sparsely populated, rugged land that acts as a buffer zone with the DRC and Zambia.
The majority of the 22 million–strong population live in the western half, which is well watered and can sustain agriculture; and off the coast in the west lie most of Angola’s oil fields. The rigs out in the Atlantic are owned mostly by American companies, but more than half of the output ends up in China. This makes Angola (dependent on the ebb and flow of sales) second only to Saudi Arabia as the biggest supplier of crude oil to the Middle Kingdom.
Angola is another country familiar with conflict. Its war for independence ended in 1975 when the Portuguese gave up, but it instantly morphed into a civil war between tribes disguised as a civil war over ideology. Russia and Cuba supported the “socialists,” the United States and apartheid South Africa backed the “rebels.” Most of the socialists of the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) were from the Mbundu tribe, while the opposition rebel fighters were mostly from two other main tribes, the Bakongo and the Ovimbundu. Their political disguise was as the FNLA (National Front for the Liberation of Angola) and UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola). Many of the civil wars of the 1960s and 1970s followed this template: if Russia backed a particular side, that side would suddenly remember that it had socialist principles, while its opponents would become anti-Communist.
The Mbundu had the geographical but not the numerical advantage. They held the capital, Luanda; had access to the oil fields and the main river, the Cuanza; and were backed by countries that could supply them with Russian arms and Cuban soldiers. They prevailed in 2002, and their top echelons immediately undermined their own somewhat questionable socialist credentials by joining the long list of colonial and African leaders who enriched themselves at the expense of the people.
The whole trick is to get the rest of the world to pay
Friday, May 23rd, 2025In theory, Juliet Samuel notes, the dollar ought to be a medium of exchange like any other, only useful to foreigners who want to trade with Americans, but in reality, dollars, in the form of US Treasury bonds, have become the backbone of the world’s piggy bank:
The dollar solves a dilemma. When a country accrues lots of savings, perhaps because it sells huge amounts of oil or has built a whole economy around battery or semiconductor exports, it needs to store the cash. Storing it in the country’s own currency presents two problems.
The first is that a lot of these supersaver countries have volatile exchange rates because they are ruled by capricious, thieving dictators, or because their financial markets are very small so it’s risky to have all the money in local lira or whatever. The second is that if they convert their savings into local cash, they’ll push their exchange rate up, and that will make their exports more expensive until they become uncompetitive, killing the golden goose. This, incidentally, is how a healthy trading system ought to rebalance itself.
So they don’t let that happen. Instead, what all these governments and sovereign wealth funds (and a few rich families or pensions) do is buy US Treasury bonds. Treasury markets are big and stable, open to anyone and underpinned by the rule of law.
When the US was by far the world’s biggest economy, this activity didn’t affect Americans much. In fact, letting the dollar become so important gave the US exceptional power to sanction foreigners and to borrow, seemingly without limit. But over decades, and especially since China became a full-fledged member of the trading system in 2001, the US economy has become smaller and smaller relative to the rest of the world, while the savers have become bigger and bigger. We are now at the point where there are an estimated $7 trillion worth of bonds squirrelled away as reserves by non-US savers: $3 trillion in China, the rest in Japan, Europe, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, Korea and Singapore. This has inflated the value of the dollar to the point where it is pricing American exporters out of the game. Products made using dollars and priced in dollars are just too expensive.
[…]
Back [during Trump’s trade war in 2018–19], the tariffs were not actually paid by consumers. As far as one can tell from the data, they were paid in two ways: first, US importers accepted lower margins on goods bought from abroad, and second, the dollar rose in value, boosting US spending power almost by exactly as much as Trump had put up tariffs.
Self-evidently, a rising dollar is not what a Trump White House would want if its aim is to revive American manufacturing. But this underscores a central trade-off not just with tariffs but with any solution to the problem of gargantuan trade and currency distortions: someone, somewhere has to pay. If Trump lets the dollar appreciate, then American consumers don’t have to bear the cost. But then American factories won’t recover either. So the whole trick, as far as US policy is concerned, is to get the rest of the world to pay.
If there is a grand strategy behind the trade war, which there certainly is in the mind of Trump appointees like the Treasury secretary Scott Bessent, it is an opening salvo in a struggle to fix the US trading position and to sort allies from enemies in doing so. Start with tariffs on everyone, let them feel the pain, then offer relief to those willing to help gradually deflate the dollar by slowly selling down Treasuries, opening up their own markets to US goods and agreeing to impose a tariff wall on China.
[…]
At the same time, domestically, the US could embark upon a massive deregulatory programme to cut production costs, pump more oil, clear away planning hurdles, cut payroll taxes and so on.
There were only about 170,000 Jews in Napoleon’s extended Empire, one-third within the old frontiers of France
Thursday, May 22nd, 2025Napoleon had an ambivalent relationship, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), with the Jewish population:
On May 30, 1806 Napoleon passed a ‘Decree on Jews and Usury’ that accused the Jews of ‘unjust greed’ and lacking ‘the sentiments of civic morality’, gave a year’s relief from debt repayment in Alsace and called a Grand Sanhedrin in order to reduce ‘the shameful expedient’ of lending money (something his own Bank of France did on a daily basis, of course).
[…]
This was the first sign of hostility towards a people to whom Napoleon had hitherto shown amity and respect; henceforth he seems to have been uncharacteristically unsure of himself when it came to policy towards the Jews. Although he didn’t meet many Jews during his childhood or at school, and none of his friends were Jewish, during the Italian campaign he had opened up the ghettos of Venice, Verona, Padua, Livorno, Ancona and Rome, and ended the practice of forcing Jews to wear the Star of David.
[…]
He had stopped Jews being sold as slaves in Malta and allowed them to build a synagogue there, as well as sanctioning their religious and social structures in his Holy Land campaign. He had even written a proclamation for a Jewish homeland in Palestine on April 20, 1799, which was rendered redundant after his defeat at Acre (but was nonetheless published in the Moniteur).
[…]
He extended civil equality for the Jews beyond the borders of France in all his campaigns.
[…]
Yet on his return to Paris after Austerlitz, Napoleon was petitioned by Salzburg businessmen and bankers to restrict Jewish lending to Alsatian farmers. Alsatian Jews made up nearly half of France’s Jewish population of 55,000, and they were blamed for ‘excessive’ usury in that curious inversion whereby people who borrow money under free contracts in an open market blame those who lend it to them.
[…]
The Jewish elders answered the questions he posed brilliantly, pointing out that exogamous marriage was as unpopular with Jews as it was with Christians, that interest rates reflected the risks of non-repayment, and that French Jews were patriotic supporters of his Empire.
[…]
Napoleon thereafter proclaimed Judaism one of France’s three official religions, saying ‘I want all people living in France to be equal citizens and benefit from our laws.’
[…]
‘I thought that this would bring to France many riches because the Jews are numerous and they could come in large numbers to our country where they would enjoy more privileges than any other nation.’
[…]
On March 17, 1808 he passed ‘The Infamous Decree’ which imposed further restrictions on the Jews, making debts harder to collect, conscription harder to avoid and the purchase of new trading licences compulsory.
[…]
In Germany Jews became full citizens under Napoleon’s edict forming Westphalia in 1807, with special taxes on them abolished. Similarly, in 1811 the five hundred Jewish families of the Frankfurt ghetto were made full citizens, as were all Jews except moneylenders in Baden. In Hamburg, Lübeck and Bremen the entry of Napoleon’s troops brought civil rights for the Jews, however much the local rulers and populace hated it.
[…]
There were only about 170,000 Jews in Napoleon’s extended Empire, one-third within the old frontiers of France,
Nigeria is West Africa’s most powerful country
Wednesday, May 21st, 2025By size, population, and natural resources, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), Nigeria is West Africa’s most powerful country:
It is the continent’s most populous nation, with 177 million people, which, with its size and natural resources, makes it the leading regional power. It is formed from the territories of several ancient kingdoms that the British brought together as an administrative area. In 1898, they drew up a “British Protectorate on the River Niger” that in turn became Nigeria.
[…]
In colonial times the British preferred to stay in the southwestern area along the coast. Their “civilizing” mission rarely extended to the highlands of the center, nor up to the Muslim populations in the north, and this half of the country remains less developed than the south. Much of the money made from oil is spent paying off the movers and shakers in Nigeria’s complex tribal system.
[…]
The kidnapping of foreign oil workers is making it a less and less attractive place to do business. The offshore oil fields are mostly free of this activity and that is where the investment is heading.
The Islamist group Boko Haram, which wants to establish a caliphate in the Muslim areas, has used the sense of injustice engendered by underdevelopment to gain ground in the north.
[…]
Most of the villages they have captured are on the Mandara mountain range, which backs onto Cameroon. This means the national army is operating a long way from its bases and cannot surround a Boko Haram force. Cameroon’s government does not welcome Boko Haram, but the countryside gives the fighters space to retreat to if required.
If war comes to Taiwan, the most critical and at-risk roles may not wear body armor or carry rifles
Tuesday, May 20th, 2025The Department of Defense is now squarely focused on China, Thomas Shugart explains, with deterring or defeating a potential invasion of Taiwan as its top operational priority:
The Pentagon’s strategy is likely grounded in denial—aiming to prevent the PLA from achieving its objectives in the first place, rather than simply responding after the fact. Reflecting this shift, the U.S. Army is undergoing a major transformation, moving away from some traditional maneuver formations and toward long-range fires, autonomous systems, and electronic warfare.
[…]
A war over Taiwan, if it comes, will not resemble the last one the United States fought. It will not be won by the kinds of small-unit, ground-centric operations that defined the Global War on Terror. It will be decided—perhaps before the first shot is fired—by which side can sense more, strike faster, and impose greater disruption. More specifically, it will be decided in the air, at sea, in space, and across the electromagnetic spectrum. “Trigger-pullers” of either side may ultimately finish the war on the ground, but its outcome will have been largely decided—and in some cases predetermined—by “button-pushers” who control information, aircraft, ships, submarines, drones, and precision fires.
[…]
Two decades of GWOT reinforced the picture of a soldier (or sailor) in camouflage with a rifle and night vision, operating in villages or mountains. In fact, for years now even U.S. Navy uniforms have come to reflect that idea. But in a Taiwan scenario, the key variables will be control of the air and sea by air and naval units, supported by long range strike, resilient ISR, reliable satellite access, and spectrum control. Ground troops will still fight with courage, skill—and if necessary, sacrifice. Yet if China achieves air and maritime dominance, its landing force will be able to reinforce at will from China’s near-inexhaustible number of ground troops—and Taiwan’s ground forces, no matter how motivated, will eventually be overrun. Conversely, if the PLA loses control of the air and sea, its invasion force will be stranded, exposed, and defeated. Likewise, no matter how well-trained, well-equipped, or numerous U.S. ground forces might be, if China secures air and naval superiority in the early phases of the conflict, those forces will never reach the battlefield: reinforcement and resupply at scale across the Pacific will be impossible in a contested or denied maritime environment. Strategic access hinges on winning the air and sea fight first. Again, the outcome will have been decided at sea and in the air.
We have seen this pattern before. In the early months of World War II, U.S. and Filipino forces in the Philippines fought with determination and courage. But despite their best efforts, they were ultimately forced to surrender—not for lack of grit or leadership, but because sea and air control around the Philippines had been lost to Japan. Cut off from reinforcement and resupply, these troops were eventually subjected to the Bataan Death March, one of the war’s most infamous atrocities. Their defeat was not the result of tactical failure at the unit level, but of larger operational conditions set by loss of control of the surrounding maritime and air domains. It would take the United States years of sustained naval and air campaigning to fight its way back across the Pacific and reverse the strategic tide.
Similarly, on Guadalcanal the fight on land was intense and costly, but it was control of the surrounding sea and air that determined the result. In fact, more American sailors died in the waters around Guadalcanal than Marines and soldiers died on the island. The same war offers a reminder that the most dangerous roles were often off the traditional battlefield. RAF Bomber Command suffered a 44% fatality rate. U.S. submariners lost 22% of their force—one of the highest fatality rates in the U.S. military during World War II and more than ten times the average for the rest of the Navy. If war comes to Taiwan, the most critical and at-risk roles may not wear body armor or carry rifles, but instead fly aircraft and crew ships, manage satellites, operate kill chains, or maintain resilient communications.
The PLA understands this dynamic. In 2024, it announced a sweeping reorganization that created three new co-equal forces: the Aerospace Force, the Cyberspace Force, and the Information Support Force.
[…]
The United States must demonstrate that even a well-planned first strike will not ensure Chinese success. This requires hardened, distributed networks, prepositioned capabilities, and personnel trained to operate through disruption.