After my last story was “back to Somalia”, this story the U.S. moving back into bases in the Philippines. If we want China to feel surrounded and threatened, this seems like a pretty good move.
back to the Philippines
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Tag Archives: war
Trump withdrew U.S. troops from Somalia
One thing I am willing to give Donald Trump some credit for is trying to end U.S. involvement in foreign wars. He tried unsuccessfully to withdraw from Syria, and he set the Afghanistan withdrawal in motion although it later became a debacle. Add to that an actual successful withdrawal from Somalia. This is from Middle East Eye, a publication I was previously unfamiliar with.
President Donald Trump’s administration moved to withdraw all 700 American troops from Somalia in 2020, after a three-decade presence in the country.
Middle East Eye
This does not mean drone strikes on targets in Somalia ended. They continued, and they are continuing now. And the Biden administration is sending a small number of troops back to Somalia. Apparently this is legal (ish?) – the U.S. is there at the invitation of the Somali government to please by all means attack its enemies. And the domestic justification supposedly goes all the way back to Congress’s approval of the global war on terror after 9/11.
November 2022 in Review
Most frightening and/or depressing story: Asteroids could be used as a weapon.
Most hopeful story: A review of Limits to Growth suggests our civilization may be on a path to stagnation rather than collapse. Or, we may be on the cusp of a fantastic science ficition future of abundance brought to us by solar energy, asteroid mining (there are those asteroids again!), and biotechnology.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I tried to put myself in Russia’s shoes and explain the Ukraine conflict, mostly to myself.
what happened in Ukraine?
I’ve been puzzled by the seeming irrationality of the Russian invasion ever since it happened. We are being buffeted by propaganda from both sides, so it is hard to tell what is true, but we can probably assume the truth lies somewhere in between the two extremes. I can’t independently verify the information in this Courthouse News Service (which I had never heard of before…) article, but it at least tells a story that passes the logic test for me. Here’s my attempt to summarize their story:
- Ukraine had a really rough time in the 1990s and early 2000s following the end of the Soviet Union. It was ruled mostly by ex-Soviet cronies – the economy was in freefall, corruption and assassinations of politicians, journalists and activists were rampant, and they lost a big chunk of their population as many people who could move elsewhere in Europe or Russia chose to do so. Some people went so far as to call it a failed state.
- There were major protests (the “Orange Revolution”) against corruption and political violence in 2004. Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian politician, was elected shortly afterward in an election widely believed by international observers to be rigged and interfered with by Russia. This is also when his opponent, pro-EU and anti-Russian Viktor Yushchenko, was poisoned, most likely by Russian or pro-Russian agents. Courts ordered a run-off election and Yushchenko was elected. [Part of the problem is these names sound very similar to western ears. Imagine a U.S. election where the candidates were named something like Thomas and Thompson.]
- Russians and pro-Russian elements in Ukraine saw these events as U.S. interference in their political affairs, and feared that the same tactics could be tried in Russia itself. [I can’t argue pro or con, but the U.S. certainly doesn’t refrain from openly lobbying to try to influence other country’s elections, and we do know that the CIA has repeatedly tried to interfere in elections around the world in the past, typically in developing and middle income countries.]
- Yushchenko turned out not to be all that anti-corruption or pro-western, at least not effectively so. In 2010, he ran against an even more anti-Russian and Ukrainian-nationalist politician, Yulia Tymoshenko. In this election, Yanukovych was re-elected in an election that international observers deemed fair.
- The economy was extremely poor during this period, and Yanukovych accepted a bailout from Russia in exchange for abandoning plans to deepen trade and travel ties with the EU.
- This caused public protests and street violence to break out again, with a neo-Nazi element in evidence. The presidential palace was stormed (this is sometimes called an “insurrection”), Yanukovych fled to Russia, and an anti-Russian, Ukrainian nationalist element took over.
- The Russian government (“Putin”, “the Kremlin”) saw this as a coup orchestrated by the U.S. They believed this justified a military takeover of Crimea, which the largely pro-Russian population of Crimea seemed to support. This was an invasion and occupation in all but name – un-uniformed Russian soldiers basically fanned out from their bases already in Crimea and took over the government more or less opposed unopposed. A referendum was held in which the people voted to leave Ukraine and become part of Russia.
- Pro-Russian elements then launched an armed rebellion in other eastern provinces of Ukraine.
- Partly because Crimea and rebel-held areas of Ukraine did not participate in elections, an anti-Russian president (Poroshenko) was elected next. Russia believed U.S. interference was involved again. Ugly communist and fascist symbols and language was used by both sides, such as “decommunization” and “denazification”.
- Ugly warfare between the Ukrainian army and the pro-Russian eastern rebels continued. Russia may have believed U.S. and “western” forces were involved in this warfare and that Ukraine was becoming increasingly likely to join NATO and/or the EU. [and who knows? some or all of this may be true.]
- The current president, Zelenskyy, was elected in 2019 on a platform of negotiating a peaceful agreement to end the fighting. He used to play the president on TV. [This is exactly why the U.S. Democrats should have run either Harrison Ford or that guy who played the President in the first couple seasons of 24.]
- The “Minsk Accords” were an attempt to end the warfare with a political solution, most likely some form of partial autonomy for the eastern provinces while remaining part of Ukraine. This was not successful. Zelenskyy became more hard-line anti-Russia and pro-resistance as the conflict dragged on.
- Russia chose to invade in 2022. In my view, this was still a sovereign UN member state choosing to invade another sovereign member state’s recognized international borders, with the intention to occupy it indefinitely. I do not think there is any excuse for this. I do however think it is a useful exercise to try to put myself in the Russian shoes and try to understand what the thought process may have been. And when I do that, I can see a plausible case that they thought the U.S. and NATO were actively interfering in Ukrainian elections and supporting the Ukrainian military in suppression and atrocities against ethnic Russian civilians. They may have also thought the loss of Ukraine to NATO and the EU was only a matter of time until the U.S. was able to get a compliant regime in place that would allow it.
It seems like a move toward some form of autonomy for the eastern provinces and Crimea is the logical outcome here, under nominal Ukrainian rule within its original borders except that some big chunk of Crimea can just be considered a big Russian military base (like Guantanomo Bay). It could be demilitarized with a beefy UN peacekeeping force for an agreed period of time, and Ukraine could agree not to be eligible even for consideration to join the EU or NATO for some agreed period of time.
IMF World Economic Outlook
The IMF predicts a worldwide slowdown over the next 2-3 years, although not an outright contraction. Of course, we know these things are not predictable.
Global growth is projected to slow from an estimated 6.1 percent in 2021 to 3.6 percent in 2022 and 2023. This is 0.8 and 0.2 percentage points lower for 2022 and 2023 than projected in January.
Beyond 2023, global growth is forecast to decline to about 3.3 percent over the medium term. War-induced commodity price increases and broadening price pressures have led to 2022 inflation projections of 5.7 percent in advanced economies and 8.7 percent in emerging market and developing economies—1.8 and 2.8 percentage points higher than projected last January. Multilateral efforts to respond to the humanitarian crisis, prevent further economic fragmentation, maintain global liquidity, manage debt distress, tackle climate change, and end the pandemic are essential.
IMF
more on tactical nukes
A New Yorker article lays out situations under which Russia might consider using tactical nuclear weapons.
Four scenarios may lead Russia to use a nuclear weapon, according to Kimball of the Arms Control Association. To coerce Kyiv or its nato allies to back down, Putin could carry out a “demonstration” bombing in the atmosphere above the Arctic Ocean or the Baltic Sea—not for killing, but “to remind everyone that Russia has nuclear weapons.” Russia could also use tactical weapons to change the military balance on the ground with Ukraine. If the war expands, and nato gets drawn into the fight, Russia could further escalate the conflict with the use of short-range nuclear weapons. “Both U.S. and Russian policy leave open the possibility of using nuclear weapons in response to an extreme non-nuclear threat,” Kimball said. Finally, if Putin believes that the Russian state (or leadership) is at risk, he might use a tactical nuclear weapon to “save Russia from a major military defeat.” Russia has lost some twenty-five per cent of its combat power in the last two months, a Pentagon official estimated this week. Moscow’s military doctrine reserves the right to use nuclear weapons “in response to the use of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction” against Russia or its allies, and also in response to aggression via conventional weapons “when the very existence of the state is threatened.” In military jargon, the country’s policy is “to escalate to de-escalate,” Richard Burt, the lead negotiator on the original start accord, which was signed by Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush in 1991, told me. “The idea is to so shock the adversary that a nuclear weapon has been used, to demonstrate your resolve that you’re willing to use a nuclear weapon, that you paralyze your adversary.”
New Yorker
Nuclear weapons are a cheap way to make a big bang, or at least threaten to do so. Cheap compared to maintaining a huge, capable conventional military force anyway. Russia seems particularly dangerous right now because it is a relatively poor, backwards country whose leadership has successfully used limited military aggression to appear strong and strategic to a domestic audience. The Ukraine war seems to have changed that, with Russia’s conventional military looking weak, ineffective, and the leadership lacking in strategery. Nuclear brinksmanship or even the recklessness of some kind of limited nuclear attack could be seen as a way to regain the upper hand. Let’s hope not.
Thinking a little about what might induce the Russian leadership to call off this attack, new nuclear agreements with the U.S., like reducing the arsenal overall, removing weapons from Europe, or a no-first-use pledge, seem like they should be on the table and would benefit everybody.
March 2022 in Review
The Ukraine war grinds on as I write on April 7, with the Russian military seemingly pulling back from some areas while slaughtering civilians (hostages?) farther east and south. I proffered some limited views on the situation and media coverage of the war during the month, but I won’t go into it below.
Most frightening and/or depressing story: What causes violence? It’s the (prohibition and war on) drugs, stupid. Or at least, partly/mostly, the drugs.
Most hopeful story: There are meaningful things individuals can do to slow climate change, even as governments and industries do too little too late. For example, eat plants, limit driving and flying, and just replace consumer goods as they wear out. I’m mostly on board except that I think we need peace and stability for the long term survival of both our civilization and planetary ecosystem, and we are going to need to travel and get to know one another to give that a chance.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Ready.gov has posted helpful information on what to do in case of a nuclear explosion.
Bloodlands
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder was on my list for awhile, and I suppose I finally decided to read it because of the war in Ukraine. This is a good book and a horrible book, in the sense that it is a well-researched, well-written account of probably the worst series of events in world history. It is first and foremost a book about the Holocaust. It is also a delightful romp through the famine Stalin intentionally imposed on Ukraine in the early 1930s, Stalin’s internal terror unleased on his own citizens in the late 1930s, Nazi mass murder of Soviet prisoners of war, the siege of Leningrad, and the forced relocation of people (including Germans remaining in newly Soviet-occupied areas) at the end of the war that resulted in additional deaths.
I certainly don’t have much to add to scholarly discourse on the Holocaust. I have read more than one account and feel that I have a grasp of the facts, which is a very different thing than wrapping my head around the events, which I am not sure anyone can do. I think everyone needs to have a grasp of the facts, grapple with them, and then not think about them all the time. One thing that surprised me is Snyder’s explanation of how the complete picture really became available only after the end of the Cold War. This is because many of the worst atrocities happened in areas that came under Soviet control at the end of the war, and western (i.e. outside the Communist countries) scholars after the war tended to focus on the evidence and accounts available to them of Jews and others in Western Europe. These people suffered horrible atrocities, but the atrocities further east were of another magnitude in terms of both body count and utter depravity. The Soviets did not exactly deny the Holocaust, but for propaganda reasons they tended to downplay the mass murder of Jews and portray events as atrocities committed by Germans against Soviet civilians, sometimes glossing over the fact that people in these areas came under Soviet control only late in the war, and in some cases were also subjected to Soviet atrocities.
Something I was not aware of was Stalin’s antisemitism in the early 1950s. This fit into his general pattern of paranoia that groups within the Soviet Union, whether Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Japanese, etc. might be under foreign influence and therefore be a threat to the Soviet state. In his paranoid mind, the ties between West Germany, the United States, and the newly formed Israel were a threat. There is some evidence he was planning a purge of Soviet Jews at this time. Luckily, he was not taken as seriously by underlings at this point as he had been in the 1930s, and he died before he could set any of these events in motion. Echoes of his paranoid rantings linking Nazis and Jews surfaced in Poland as late as the 1960s and 1970s, and I think we hear some echoes of this in the bizarre and seemingly illogical Russian rantings about “denazification” of Ukraine today.
Another theme that struck me was the underlying tension of food insecurity in Europe and the Soviet Union in the pre-war era. This was a motivating factor both in Hitler’s plan to colonize Eastern Europe and exterminate whoever was in the way, clearing the way for German farmers, and in Stalin’s depraved grain quotas imposed on Ukraine in the 1930s, in which peasant farmers were forced to grow grain for export but executed if they were found eating it themselves. Neither of these was a rational response to food insecurity, of course, but I think it holds lessons for us today. In the United States and much of the world, we have taken food security for granted for many decades now. As climate change takes hold, other environmental problems mount (soil erosion? ocean acidification? groundwater mining?), and population continues to grow (though slowly decelerating), the future of global food supply is not secure. On top of the technical and environmental challenges, food insecurity can trigger mass migration, civil unrest, geopolitical instability and even war, which in turn can exacerbate environmental and food supply problems in a vicious feedback loop. These are tough, tough problems, but one thing we can try to do is keep a focus on global peace and stability so we at least have a chance to focus our technological and economic prowess on solving the food security issue.
the 1962 Single Integrated Operational Plan
This is just chilling.
A full nuclear SIOP strike launched on a preemptive basis would have delivered over 3200 nuclear weapons to 1060 targets in the Soviet Union, China, and allied countries in Asia and Europe;
A full nuclear strike by SIOP forces on high alert, launched in retaliation to a Soviet strike, would have delivered 1706 nuclear weapons against a total of 725 targets in the Soviet Union, China, and allied states;
Targets would have included nuclear weapons, government and military control centers, and at least 130 cities in the Soviet Union, China, and allies;
The National Security Archive
That is clearly insane. What secret plans to destroy everything human civilization has achieved in the last 10,000 years are on the books today?
tactical nuclear weapons
Center for Public Integrity has an article explaining how a war involving tactical nuclear weapons could play out. The problem, beyond the obvious horrible human and environmental toll they would take, is that they would likely be the link in escalation from conventional war to civilization-annihilating total thermonuclear war. Please no.
Had such an invasion ever come, the commanders in the field, given authorization to use nuclear weapons to avert defeat, would retreat after deployment. (Soviet plans for war were to specifically attack tactical nuclear sites.) The war would then either end in hours with an exchange of ICBMs, or with a ceasefire negotiated to prevent armageddon.
Defense intellectuals describe the steps between peace and thermonuclear oblivion through an “escalation ladder,” with the leadership of both countries at war taking actions that invite the other country to either escalate, by increasing the stakes and tensions, or de-escalate, by backing away from further conflict. Tactical nuclear weapons are the rung separating conventional battle from a nuclear war.
Soviet leaders developed their nuclear weapons and doctrine as a response to U.S. nuclear war planning, and awareness of U.S. nuclear deployments to Europe. Both the U.S. and USSR assumed that once tactical nuclear weapons were used, it was more likely that thermonuclear exchange, not deescalation, would follow.
Center for Public Integrity
So the strategy was to out-crazy the other side. We rolled the dice on that risky strategy and won, but roll the dice enough times and everyone on both sides will lose.
The best thing that could possibly come out of this horrible Ukraine war, once the dust settles, would be renewed arms control negotiations. I am not too hopeful for that because the world seems to be in a very cynical place right now.