Tag Archives: geopolitics

German Rearmament

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We seem to live in a world where Germany and Japan are rearming, and most people are cheering. I generally would consider this okay myself – these are large, rich, powerful democratic countries that should be able to defend themselves and we would hope, support their democratic neighbors. This Foreign Affairs article paints a darker picture of a Germany that rearms in the face of a (perceived?) Russian threat, and then is taken over by a right-wing government.

A militarily dominant Germany could prove particularly dangerous if its centrist domestic leadership starts to lose power—as it just well might. The country is not due to hold national elections for three more years, but the extremist AfD now polls in first place at the national level. It subscribes to a far-right, illiberal, and Euroskeptic ideology. It is Russia-friendly, opposed to supporting Ukraine, and wants to reverse Germany’s post-1945 economic and military integration into the EU and NATO, at least in their current form. It sees military power as a tool of national aggrandizement that should be used exclusively to benefit Berlin. It hopes to develop a German defense industry that’s entirely autonomous from those of Berlin’s traditional allies. If it wins federal power, the AfD will use the German military exactly as Thatcher feared: to project power against Germany’s neighbors. In the same way that Washington has made once inconceivable claims on Canada and Greenland, an AfD-led Germany might eventually make claims on French or Polish territory.

It still seems far-fetched to me, but I could easily go back five years and name a bunch of things I thought were far-fetched, which have come to pass.

I have been thinking that terms like “right wing” and “fascist” are not very precise or helpful. What we see all over the world are political movements focused on ethnic nationalism. Ethnic nationalism pairs well with cultural conservatism and is more or less independent of economic ideology. Advancing the ethnic nationalist project is helped by being anti-democratic, anti-immigrant, and focused on external threats. This is the trend we are seeing in the U.S. and Europe, fueled by immigration pressure brought on by climate change, which is only going to intensify.

AI predictions for 2026

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It’s easy to find predictions for where AI technology, the “AI race”, and the knock-on effects for the US and world economies might go in 2026. I find myself slightly fatigued from hearing about it, but nonetheless it is important.

Here’s one knowledgeable sounding blogger’s predictions:

  • Artificial general intelligence will not be achieved in 2026.
  • Robots will not be able to clean my bathroom in 2026.
  • ‘No country will take a decisive lead in the GenAI “race”.’
  • “Work on new approaches such as world models and neurosymbolic will escalate.”
  • The AI-driven stock market bubble may pop, or it may not. The exact words here are “the beginning of the end”. Well, I can predict with 100% confidence that the stock market will either go up, down, or stay the same.
  • AI will be discussed in the US midterm elections.

Okay, nothing too earth shattering here. On the subject of “countries in the AI race”, one perspective is that the US is focusing nearly all its investment on private sector AI, while China is spreading its investments across a basket of technology and infrastructure investments including AI, “electric vehicles, batteries, robotics, solar panels, wind turbines and other forms of advanced manufacturing” (“the Antimonopolist” blog). The US was also at least trying to do this during and after the Covid-19 pandemic era, but that sensible long-term strategy has been monkey-wrenched by a certain fool in 2025.

Then again, we could ask whether the basic econ 101 lessons are completely disproven? Is it possible we should invest more in what we are good at and sell it to others, while buying things from them that they can make better, faster, or cheaper? There’s a tension of course between being highly efficient and focused on comparative advantage, and also being diversified so you are resilient if something happens to upset your trade flows. But we are certainly not seeing rational debate about all this in the US political context.

Chartbook makes an argument that if you compare the US and European economies, it is really just the performance (measured by profits and stock market values) of the “superstar” US tech firms that makes the US look better. And while life at the top of the heap may skew the US numbers, quality of life for the average working European aided by their bumbling, stumbling social welfare systems is actually not that bad.

my “top 10 U.S. political/geopolitical events of the 21st century”

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This Silver Bulletin post is called “The 51 biggest American political moments of the 21st century”. I liked it because it made me think. I found that the non-chronological nature of it threw me off a little bit. So I decided to come up with a “top 10 (U.S.) political/geopolitical moments of the 21st century” of my own. I picked some events off Nate Silver’s list, thought of a few extra of my own, and then put them in chronological order. Limiting it to 10 forced me to really think about what was most important, although like Nate I occasionally cheated by putting things together. I leaned towards events that were true “watershed moments” in the sense that they could have gone differently and the outcome for the U.S. and possibly the world might have been very different. I also leaned towards events where I remember where I was or what I was doing at the time, because I suspect those are important. I included 2000 as Nate did.

  • December 12, 2000: Bush v. Gore. I remember literally falling on my knees when CNN “called Florida for Gore” (the floor of my rental apartment in New Jersey was carpeted). Where would we be if this had gone differently? In general, you may see a theme below that I see Democrats as basically protectors of the pro-big-business, pro-low-profile-foreign-wars center-right consensus in the U.S. George W. Bush was on the right edge of this consensus, while Gore likely would have been on the left edge. I suspect 9/11 and the Afghanistan invasion would still have happened exactly as they did, but I don’t think the Iraq invasion would have happened. Who knows if other aspects of the 20-year “war on terror” would have unfolded as they did? We would have seen more action and progress on climate change and more standing up to fossil fuel industry propaganda for sure.
  • September 11, 2001. I was in my office building in Philadelphia. My mother called me on my desk phone (I didn’t yet have a cell phone) and told me what was happening. We turned on a small black and white TV with rabbit ears we had in our conference room at the time and watched the events unfold. The streets filled with panicky people and you couldn’t get on a train or highway for hours. There were rumors of additional planes in the air over Pennsylvania (which turned out to be true), but in the end nothing happened to us in Philadelphia directly. When I finally got back to my apartment in New Jersey, there were highway signs saying all roads to New York were closed.
  • March 20, 2003: Iraq invasion. A weird thing I remember is Dan Rather updates on the invasion during halftime of NCAA basketball tournament games. We aren’t used to mixing sports and serious news like that.
  • September 15, 2008: Lehman Brothers collapse. This is a stand-in for the larger financial crisis, surely one of the most important world events of my life time (I might pick the Berlin Wall as the single most important, but now we are going back to a previous century). The sub-prime mortgage derivative collapse might have been inevitable, but letting a major institution collapse was a key decision by the Bush administration that led to panic. It certainly played a large role in the Obama election. Obama understood that however distasteful, avoiding panic was the single most important thing he had to do, and he did it. I am an Obama fan, as I was a Bill Clinton fan and fan of the first 2-3 years of Joe Biden. He was just an effective keeper of the pro-big-business, pro-low-profile-foreign-wars center-right consensus. All these leaders pushed to accomplish the most incremental progress that was politically possible in their moments without blowing up the system.
  • January 21, 2010: Citizens United decision. No, I don’t remember where I was or what I was doing. I probably wasn’t even aware of this in real time. But this was crucial and the U.S. and maybe the world could be different without it. Maybe a marginally less corrupt election system would have delivered different results in 2016, and climate change and health care among other issues could be on a very different track.
  • October 28, 2016: the “Comey letter”. I picked this to represent the catastrophe of the 2016 election (which took place on November 8, 2016). The situation was on a knife edge, and without this “October surprise”, which turned out to be a complete hoax, maybe history would have unfolded differently.
  • November 4, 2016: Paris climate change accord takes effect. Obama really pushed and deserves a share of credit for getting this one done. It could still be in effect if Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders had won the 2016 election, OR if the U.S. Congress ever did its job of considering and ratifying treaties. Because none of these things happened, the U.S. never gained any momentum on climate action, and generations of our descendants are going to suffer as a result.
  • Friday, March 13, 2020: Covid shutdown. I picked this date because it is the date the Philadelphia public school system, where my son was in first grade at the time, insisted it would not shut down, and then announced late morning that it would shut down for two weeks, which turned into about a year. It was also the day my employer told me I wouldn’t be coming back to the office on Monday. I picked this date to represent the Covid-19 pandemic as a whole, but I could also have picked the date the first vaccinations were approved by the FDA, which was December 11, 2020.
  • November 30, 2022: Chat-GPT goes public. Not on Nate Silver’s list, but seems important no?
  • June 27, 2024: Biden-Trump debate. Of course, the real watershed moment was whenever Biden and his team decided he would run for re-election. Had he announced sometime in 2023 that he would be walking off gracefully into the sunset and allowing a real primary process to play out in 2024, maybe history and our present moment would be very different.

toilet rats, and a Singaporean perspective on Asia at the end of 2025

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The two things in my title are only loosely related, and here’s how. The Guardian has a gleeful article about toilet rats in the (US) state of Washington. Indeed, this does seem like a pretty good indicator of US decline. Nonetheless, I have one personal experience with a toilet rat, and it was in Singapore. Older-style public restrooms (confusingly for American tourists, called “toilets” as they are throughout most of the world) sometimes have squat toilets flush with the floor rather than western toilets that you sit on. This is a traditional Asian style of toilet, only the modern squat toilet is collected to a modern sewer system rather than just a hole in the ground. Anyway, I was in the restroom/bathroom/toilet when a rat came out of a little hole in the floor, either not noticing or not caring that I was there. I stamped my foot just to let the rat know that I was by far the larger and dominant mammal in the room, and the rat reacted by diving directly into the toilet and down the drain. And it was gone. So I assume it just swam for a bit until it got somewhere with air, and returned to whatever it was doing after I left. Anyway, the advice in Washington State is if you see a rat in your toilet you are supposed to flush the toilet or close the toilet lid. I would not do either of these things because rats are FAST, they are afraid of people, and they have sharp teeth. I think I would calmly close the bathroom door and just peak in after an hour or two to see if it chose to go back where it came from. And I might keep the toilet lid closed after that.

I have been in actual sewers in the United States, and I have seen rats. Sewer rats are plentiful. They don’t want anything to do with us humans, they just scurry away if they see us coming. I have never seen or heard of one coming into a person’s house through the plumbing. So the article seems a bit alarmist to me. Mice are another story. I just wiped some suspected mouse poop off my kitchen counter this morning, which is gross and a disease risk. Anyway…

The connection between Singapore and rats is that Singapore, which has a reputation as possibly the world’s most sparkling clean very dense city, is not perfect. There is trash and there are rats, like any other city. Singapore, and its experts, have a certain self-endowed swagger. Now Singapore really is pretty clean, and its experts really are pretty smart, which brings me to my point that Singapore is pretty good but not perfect. So anyway, here is what a Singaporean expert, George Yeo, with a lot of credentials says is going on in Asia at the end of 2025. It is one person’s opinion but also a uniquely Asian perspective and different from what we hear from the US government/media/nonprofit “blob”. The article is from Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post by way of Yahoo, so also keep in mind the possibility of censorship and/or self-censorship (as you also certainly should with the US blob).

  • If it ever becomes clear that the US will not continue to support Taiwan, China will take over Taiwan. Taiwan will not fight a war it will obviously lose leading to its own destruction and loss of a generation of its young people. Right now the US and China are sort of avoiding talking about this and trying to actively suppress others (like politicians in Taiwan and Japan) from talking about it, and this is essentially a continuation of the long-term status quo.
  • When we hear about large weapons sales from the US to Taiwan, there is an unspoken arrangement that these weapons are considered defensive and do not cross a certain line. The US is seen to be supporting Taiwan, China is seen to be outraged, and both sides get their propaganda win without serious escalation. Again, it’s the long-term status quo.
  • Another reason weapons will not cross a certain line is that the US will not provide weapons where it has a technological lead. “Knowing that many Taiwanese are blue, the US cannot be sure that advanced technology supplied to Taiwan will not quickly leak into China. The military technology supplied to Taiwan is technology the US can afford to lose to China.” [Wikipedia: “The Pan-Blue Coalition, Pan-Blue force, or Pan-Blue group is a political coalition in the Republic of China (Taiwan) consisting of the Kuomintang (KMT), the People First Party (PFP), the New Party (CNP), the Non-Partisan Solidarity Union (NPSU), and the Young China Party (YCP). The name comes from the party color of the Kuomintang. Regarding the political status of Taiwan, the coalition primarily maintains that the Republic of China instead of the People’s Republic of China is the legitimate government of China. It also favors a Chinese and Taiwanese dual identity over an exclusive Taiwanese identity and backs greater friendly exchange with mainland China, as opposed to the Pan-Green Coalition which opposes Chinese identity in Taiwan.” This also, if I am not mistaken, is the status quo position going back many decades.]
  • “There is growing realisation that the road to independence is a dead end…If the young people of Taiwan build their hopes on an illusion – as the young people in Hong Kong once did – it will only lead to tragedy…Taiwan can enjoy more autonomy by negotiating now rather than waiting another 10 years.”
  • Taiwan has economic and industrial strengths that China would like to maintain and benefit from after a hypothetical reunification [which to me, would seem to discourage any full-out military onslaught on a major urban and industrial city]. This is similar to the situation with Hong Kong, where there is some degree of autonomy and the situation is short of full integration [but in my words – obviously much more limited in terms of political freedom than it was in the past].
  • “How can they ever forget that it was Japan’s aggression which separated Taiwan from the mainland in the first place?” [Interestingly, Taiwanese I know tend to have relatively warm feelings towards Japan. I had to refresh on the history again thanks to Wikipedia – Taiwan was occupied/colonized/ruled by Japan from 1895 to 1945. So it was not invaded and dominated in the 1930s and 40s like much of the rest of China and Southeast Asia, and people there were not mistreated as badly.]
  • On “rare earths” we may hear about the US and its allies developing other sources of rare earths, but there are certain “heavy rare earths” which only China produces, and which are critical to industries around the world. Yeo says China could have played this card at any time in the past, and did so only reluctantly as a bargaining chip in response to the recent round of trade disruptions initiated by the Orange Baboon-Ass God [my words, although he does go into a tangent about the Monkey King which is a Chinese/Buddhist legendary epic. Maybe this is actually a very subtle swipe at his dipshit highness.] Yeo sees this situation as a form of mutually assured destruction where it would be irrational for either side to escalate further.
  • The reality of the US government debt is that if there is a severe contraction or reduction in the growth rate, it would at some point have to print money to service its debt. Central banks around the world are buying gold and diversifying away from the US dollar because of this risk.
  • “He [His Orange-Ass Highness] recognises that the US cannot dominate the world the way it used to in the past. The US hasn’t got the financial power or the manufacturing capability. So it has to retreat some and consolidate around its own core and concentrate on healing itself.” The US knows it is overextended globally, and this is what the bluster over exerting itself in the Western Hemisphere is about. It won’t be able to continue exerting itself globally by sheer power and force, so it is retreating particularly from Asia while still trying to look tough. [Maybe, but aren’t there still the 800+ military bases around the world? And why would we antagonize allies if we are in a position of weakness? I am just saying this is irrational, but I admit that ideology can Trump rationality.]
  • He doesn’t see disputes between China and Vietnam or China and the Philippines in the South China Sea “boiling over”.

Saudi Arabia and Pakistan

This new mutual defense pact between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan seems like a huge deal to me. My take is that after the Israeli attack on Qatar, Saudi Arabia has decided it can’t rely on the US nuclear umbrella to cover it. So they are formalizing a relationship whereby they bankroll Pakistan (and probably its shadowy security services with ties to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and other terrorist groups) in exchange for a nuclear arsenal with their names on it. It seems likely to me that other Gulf countries that often move in lockstep with Saudi Arabia (UAE, Bahrain, Oman) might join this alliance. I don’t know about Qatar itself, after Saudi Arabia was threatening them militarily just a couple years ago. And they have never ramped up military spending while welcoming in the US military. No matter how you look at it, it is a loss for control of nuclear proliferation and US influence in the region. It very well may have the deterrent effect on Israel that these countries are looking for, but it seems to drag a whole range of large countries into a mesh of confusing and entangled alliances, including the US, India, and China.

what countries U.S. combat troops are in at the end of 2024

Twice a year the President is required to inform Congress about where U.S. troops are engaged in combat. This seems to leave a lot out – most obviously, naval and air force operations around the world that are nominally based out of the U.S. and its territories. Massive U.S. bases in Japan, Korea, and elsewhere that are not obviously and directly engaged in combat. “Advisors”, special operations, covert actions, intelligence operations, and contractor operations of various kinds. Satellites, somewhat obviously. Nonetheless, the report says U.S. troops are engaged in combat in:

  • Iraq and Syria – lumped together, somewhat oddly. U.S. combat troops are on the ground inside Syria, a sovereign nation which has not invited us to be there. They are supposedly fighting Islam-inspired terrorists, but not the ones that just overthrew the country’s government. The U.S. is allied with Kurdish groups, which were fighting the Syrian government (but were not allied with the group that successfully overthrew the Syrian government), and are fighting Turkey, which is a U.S. ally and NATO member. The U.S. directly bombed “Iran-affiliated groups” in Syria twice in November. The short letter does not mention any U.S. support for Israeli operations inside Syria, but it is hard to imagine the U.S. being completely uninvolved. The U.S. still has troops in Iraq (Mission Accomplished) 21 years after invading that country. These troops are supposedly invited to be there by the Iraqi government, and are supporting “Kurdish Iraqi security forces” and providing “limited support to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization mission in Iraq”. I am kind of baffled by these last two statements, but I guess I am just ignorant.
  • “Arabian Peninsula Region”. This is an anti-terrorist mission supposedly at the invitation of the Yemeni government. At the same time, we are hearing about massive famine in Yemen caused by the Saudi attacks on the country, and it is not exactly clear what the U.S. role in that is.
  • Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. U.S. troops are involved in anti-terrorist actions in all these countries, supposedly at the invitation of the host countries.
  • Somalia – U.S. troops are involved in anti-terrorist combat operations at the invitation of the government. This one is pretty ugly, but many accounts.
  • Djibouti – Djibouti is basically a massive U.S. military base for many operations in Africa and the Middle East. Again, it’s a little odd that this gets mentioned when others don’t – what about Bahrain, UAE, Oman, Qatar?
  • Cuba – Guantanamo Bay is still open for business with 30 prisoners. Maybe Biden should just drop these people off in Florida or Texas on January 19.
  • Philippines – again, odd that this massive base gets mentioned when other massive ones do not, but it is because there are some in-country operations U.S. troops are involved in.
  • Israel – U.S. troops are defending Israel while it is attacking its occupied territories and sovereign neighbors.
  • The report mentions small numbers of U.S. troops in Egypt and Kosovo.
  • Afghanistan – “United States military personnel remain postured outside Afghanistan to address threats to the United States homeland and United States interests that may arise from inside Afghanistan.” Um, so this does not make it clear where they are, how many troops there are or what they are actually doing, if anything…
  • Niger – Well, here is a country that kicked us out following a military coup, and apparently we actually left when they asked us to.
  • There are 80,000 U.S. troops deployed to NATO countries in western Europe, according to the letter. Again, it’s a little unclear to me why these are listed while troops in Japan and Korea are not.

September 2024 in Review

I was sitting down to do my “October in Review” post and realized I never got around to September. So better late than never. I’m writing this on November 9, 2024 after the U.S. election but I’ll try to give U.S. politics a rest in this post (update: I almost succeeded although I couldn’t resist an interesting point about the U.S. Constitution).

Most frightening and/or depressing story: There is nothing on Earth more frightening than nuclear weapons. China has scrapped its “minimal deterrent” nuclear doctrine in favor of massively scaling up their arsenal to compete with the also ramping up U.S. and Russian arsenals. They do still have an official “no first strike” policy. The U.S. by contrast has an arrogant foreign policy.

Most hopeful story: AI should be able to improve traffic management in cities, although early ideas on this front are not very creative.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Countries around the world update their constitutions about every 20 years on average. They have organized, legal processes for doing this spelled out in the constitutions themselves. The U.S. constitution is considered the world’s most difficult constitution to update and modernize.

“arrogant” foreign policy

I would tend to agree with Jeffrey Sachs’s description below of U.S. foreign policy as “arrogant”.

Here is not the place to revisit all of the foreign policy disasters that have resulted from US arrogance towards Russia, but it suffices here to mention a brief and partial chronology of key events.  In 1999, NATO bombed Belgrade for 78 days with the goal of breaking Serbia apart and giving rise to an independent Kosovo, now home to a major NATO base in the Balkans.  In 2002, the US unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty over Russia’s strenuous objections.  In 2003, the US and NATO allies repudiated the UN Security Council by going to war in Iraq on false pretenses.  In 2004, the US continued with NATO enlargement, this time to the Baltic States and countries in the Black Sea region (Bulgaria and Romania) and the Balkans.  In 2008, over Russia’s urgent and strenuous objections, the US pledged to expand NATO to Georgia and Ukraine.

In 2011, the US tasked the CIA to overthrow Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, an ally of Russia.  In 2011, NATO bombed Libya in order to overthrow Moammar Qaddafi.  In 2014, the US conspired with Ukrainian nationalist forces to overthrow Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych.  In 2015, the US began to place Aegis anti-ballistic missiles in Eastern Europe(Romania), a short distance from Russia. In 2016-2020, the US supported Ukraine in undermining the Minsk II agreement, despite its unanimous backing by the UN Security Council.  In 2021, the new Biden Administration refused to negotiate with Russia over the question of NATO enlargement to Ukraine.  In April 2022, the US called on Ukraine to withdraw from peace negotiations with Russia.  

Looking back on the events around 1991-93, and to the events that followed, it is clear that the US was determined to say no to Russia’s aspirations for peaceful and mutually respectful integration of Russia and the West.  The end of the Soviet period and the beginning of the Yeltsin Presidency occasioned the rise of the neoconservatives (neocons) to power in the United States. The neocons did not and do not want a mutually respectful relationship with Russia.  They sought and until today seek a unipolar world led by a hegemonic US, in which Russia and other nations will be subservient.  

U.S. foreign policy has been a playground bully. Nobody likes or trusts a bully, but they fear and respect the bully. This works okay for the bully as long as they are perceived as strong. But as soon as they are perceived as weak or at least weaker compared to competitors, they have a problem. They can’t keep others in line through fear or respect any more, and they don’t have friendship or trust to fall back on.

It’s hard to imagine repairing the relationship with Russia right now. Their action in invading a sovereign neighbor cannot be excused no matter what we have done. We can manage the relationship to try to make it less bad going forward, and we can try to learn from our mistakes and not repeat them with China and other (relatively, perceived to be) increasingly powerful countries. We can first put policies in place that can build trust over time. Nobody will trust as at first, but if our actions were to match our promises over a period of decades we could slowly rebuild our relationships. Here are a few ideas to bandy about: (1) a no-first-strike nuclear policy, (2) serious commitments to nuclear weapons reductions, and re-entering or re-establishing of treaties and agreements with other countries that have or potentially seek nuclear weapons, (3) nuclear power for countries that want it, in exchange for a commitment not to seek nuclear weapons and submission to a strict inspection regime, (4) a commitment not to invade sovereign UN member states ever again without a Security Council resolution, (5) a commitment not to interfere in other countries’ elections or seek “regime change” ever again through covert action, only through public diplomatic channels. There are plenty of things I leave off here (biological weapons and pandemic preparedness, food security, carbon emissions to rattle off just a few) but these are some basic war-and-peace ideas, and we need peace to have a shot at solving the other complex problems the world faces right now. Getting politicians to make these commitments or similar ones would be hard, and sticking with them for decades would be harder, but it needs to be done.

more on the deteriorating nuclear war risk situation

This article is on a site called Declassified Australia.

The accelerating arms race in hypersonic missiles and anti-hypersonic defensive technology was unleashed upon the world following the US unilateral decision in 2002 under George W. Bush to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty between the Soviet Union and US. 

The ensuing weapons competition has pushed aside risk-mitigation measures, such as expanding the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty, negotiating new multilateral arms control agreements, undertaking transparency and confidence-building measures, and puts in jeopardy a cornerstone of world peace, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty…

Unlike the USA’s most recent Nuclear Posture Review which asserted its right to a ‘first nuclear strike’ in “extreme circumstances”, China has a ‘no first strike’ nuclear weapon policy.

An objective outside observer, let’s say an alien since how could any resident of Earth be objective on this, might conclude that China is the more rational, less paranoid, and less belligerent party here. Does the leadership of China actually think there is a case where the leadership of the U.S. would launch a first strike? Hopefully not, but a little strategic empathy would seem like a good idea for the U.S. here – other countries are legitimately afraid of the United States. We have invaded sovereign states, interfered with elections, and broken treaties repeatedly, so we should be able to step into someone else’s shoes for a moment and begin to understand why they might not trust us and might fear us. Reducing fear and building trust could be some pretty good concepts to build a risk-reducing foreign policy around.

the last days of World War II

There is a new book about the U.S. fire bombing and nuclear attacks on Japan, leading to Japan’s ultimate surrender in 1945. I haven’t read the book, just listened to the FreshAir interviewed with the author linked to here. A book I have read, and which influenced me profoundly, was Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire. This new book (based on the interview confirms a few things I understood from that earlier book.

  1. In terms of suffering and loss of life in a short time, the U.S. fire bombings of Tokyo are one of history’s greatest war crimes. This new book says however that the U.S. was aiming for military targets and the bombing technology of the time was not that precise. On the other hand, the military apparently realized pretty quickly how awful it was and kept doing it anyway. For those who don’t know, a hundred thousand people or more were basically cooked.
  2. The Japanese military was just not going to surrender. Their plan was civilians to fight to the death to the last man, woman, and child, with sticks and stones if necessary.
  3. Japanese civilians were largely on board with this plan. The U.S. island hopping campaign and invasion of Okinawa were horrible, and any invasion of the Japanese mainland would have been another level of horror, human death and suffering beyond that. You could argue that the lives of U.S. soldiers, who had just been through hell in Europe (although U.S. casualties of course paled in comparison to British, European, and Russian casualties, and there were virtually no U.S. civilian casualties) were valued more than the lives of Japanese civilians.
  4. The emperor was in favor of surrender for months leading up to the bombing, but the military was largely in control of the emperor. Even after the atomic bombing, the military was still split and the emperor basically went against them to publicly surrender.
  5. Truman was kind of a bastard. I stand by this. Had FDR lived, I of course can’t say whether anything would have turned out differently, but I like to think it might have.
  6. One argument I hadn’t heard was that the Japanese occupation of China and Southeast Asia was killing as many as 250,000 civilians a month (!), and by cutting that short the American atomic bombing saved more civilians than it killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Maybe, but I still think there is a moral difference between deciding to kill directly and indecision which allows others to continue killing.

Are there lessons for today’s urban warfare and civilians who are willing to fight (real or perceived) enemies to the death. I won’t go there at the moment, but at least the number of zeros on today’s death and suffering is far fewer than the 1940s. Of course, one nuclear detonation could change that in mere moments.