Tag Archives: geopolitics

Project 2025, Part 4

Tackling the section called “The Economy”.

  • Self-labeled “Conservatives” are not sure if they like free trade or not. Economic and financial conservatives (confusingly known as “neoliberals” in every other country) do. But the xenophobic element does not, so the Republican party is conflicted about this one. This section is “on the one hand… on the other hand…” drivel with no clear policy position.
  • They want to get rid of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, because this agency knows the incontrovertible truth about climate change (which is always in quotes in this document) and this is against the fossil fuel industry agenda.
  • They want to gut the census bureau, because this agency knows the truth that the United States is under minority rule.
  • They want to gut the IRS.
  • They want to gut the Dodd-Frank rule and other regulations passed on the finance industry after they shamelessly almost destroyed the world’s economy in 2008. This is just shameless caving to a powerful industry lobby.
  • There is a faction that wants to eliminate central banking, or try other yahoo proposals like a return to the gold standard. All this was tried in the 19th century and ushered in a century of chaos, culminating in the GREAT DEPRESSION. This is EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. I am unclear, but I don’t think the executive branch can do this all on its own.

Project 2025

We’re hearing, at least through media sources one might consider somewhat left-leaning, that “Project 2025” from the Heritage Foundation is an open plan for a fascist takeover of the United States following the example of Mussolini or even Hitler. Both those leaders mobilized street thugs, neutralized the legislative and judicial branches, and co-opted big business almost entirely. They also brought state/provincial and local police forces completely under their central control. Is Trump or any American leader even remotely capable of herding the cats that make up our decentralized, fragmented, and largely dysfunctional government? I’m a little skeptical, so let’s take a look at what’s actually in the document.

Keep in mind, the Republican Party did not even manage to pull together a written party platform in 2020. It was literally the party of no ideas. And that, in fact, does sound like Mussolini, who had no real concrete or coherent policy proposals, and ruled more on charisma, machismo and promises to Make the Roman Empire Great Again. And from what I understand, he was far better at campaigning than actually governing. Hitler, evil as he was, certainly put together a highly functional administrative state at least for a few years. And right off the bat, this document makes a “promise” right in the introduction (pp. 35-36) to decentralize power and dismantle the administrative state.

First of all, the actual document on the website is called “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” and then further down the page, “Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project”. Each chapter of this thing is written by a different “conservative scholar” covers a different part of the executive branch. So at this point, I have to say it seems totally normal for the leader of the executive branch to have a plan for who he (or she – I’ll just do the pronoun thing once) wants in each box of his org chart and to have some idea of what he would like each person to do once they are there. So I’ve skimmed through this 920 page document very quickly and tried to pull out a few highlights. It’s hard because although the document claims to make concrete policy recommendations, it doesn’t really. It mostly identifies key positions in the executive branch and recommends hiring people to fill them who agree with a very nebulous policy agenda of “protecting Christian families”.

  • It talks a lot about “families”. What it seems to mean by this is married heterosexual Christian couples with children.
  • It talks a lot about Christianity. It talks a lot about school choice. What it seems to mean by this is married heterosexual Christian couples teaching their own children to think like them. It actually states that “schools serve parents” and that parents are their children’s “primary educators”.
  • It talks about protecting Christian American families within our borders against foreigners. This seems to be the primary purpose of the military.
  • It talks about debt. What it seems to mean by this is eliminating most of the social safety net, possibly to lower taxes for Christian families. Of course, this does not apply to the cost of protecting Christian families from foreigners, which is worth any price.
  • But amid all this nebulous rhetoric, there are some concrete policy proposals that are just blatant giveaways to rich and powerful big business interests. A few are below (I can’t figure out how to make a simple indented list in this latest ridiculous version of WordPress.
  • “The President should eliminate the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC), which is cochaired by the OSTP, OMB, and CEA, and by executive order should end the use of SCC analysis.” [because why would our children need food, or coastal population centers? This is evil.]
  • Double down on the war on drugs. This does not mean helping addicts, which is a “leftist woke” idea. It means ramping up violence on our streets, at and near our borders. And this should not be managed by people with professional experience, it should be managed by politicians with political aims.
  • Lots of homophobic stuff. I won’t even go into it. When the “next conservative President” is looking for all these political appointees, a great place to start the search will be closets.
  • Merit hiring, merit pay based on performance appraisal results, and the ability to let underperformers go in the civil service bureaucracy. Okay, I could get behind this one in theory as should anyone who has ever been to a post office. But they also want to gut benefits for federal workers, which is not really the right idea. [A good idea would be more along the lines of extending similar benefits to private sector workers. And most of the private sector, save certain corners of the finance industry, would benefit greatly from this. But the finance industry gets what it wants, such as no functional health care system.]
  • They just generally want to gut the bureaucracy and starve the beast, of course. Same old ideas they have always had. They sell them on the idea that the money would be given back to average people, when in reality these ideas are always used to justify subsidies for the already wealthy and powerful at everyone else’s expense.
  • Prepare for “great power competition”, and specifically for a war with China over Taiwan. Then stick a fork in China’s eye. [great way to pare the national debt, right?]
  • Active support by active duty military for border control.
  • NUCLEAR MODERNIZATION AND EXPANSION [because why do our children need to survive to old age at all? This is evil.]
  • Just shovel money at defense contractors without limit, and make producing weapons the focus of the U.S. economy. Funding research and development is okay only when it is about weapons.
  • Double down on recruiting high schoolers into the military. pp. 134-135 – this section is particularly chilling.

I’ll go ahead and post this since I haven’t posted in awhile. Maybe I’ll continue looking at the document in another post.

a pacifist perspective on the Russia-Ukraine war

Here is one perspective from “The North American Peace Movement” on the Ukraine war.

Initially, there was less clarity regarding the events in Ukraine of February 24, 2022. With research and reflection, most of the movement came to understand the conflict did not begin that day. The supposedly “unprovoked” Russian intervention in Ukraine was sparked by NATO moving closer and closer to the Russian border, the 2014 Maidan coup, the sabotage of the Minsk agreements, etc.

A consensus is maturing in the antiwar movement that Ukraine is a proxy war by the US and its NATO allies to weaken Russia. Even key corporate press and government officials now recognize the conflict as a “full proxy war” by the US designed to use the Ukrainian people to mortally disable Russia.

Dissident Voice

I can see a perspective that the Ukraine war really started with the Russian invasion of Crimea (aka Ukraine) in 2014 and the Russian-supported independence declarations of two other provinces in the east of the country. It was really a military conflict between sovereign countries at that point, and you can see the 2022 invasion as a new campaign within that war. The “Maidan coup” was the 2014 ouster of a pro-Russian government through a parliamentary process, and the election of an arguably anti-Russian government through an election with a lot of international observers that was generally deemed free and fair. I wouldn’t doubt for a second that the CIA interfered in that election at least through financial and propaganda support for its preferred side, and I wouldn’t doubt for a second that Russia and many other governments’ intelligence agencies did too. I can see the point of view that the Russian governing class has felt threatened by the U.S. and NATO going all the way back to the Balkan war in the 1990s and feels they are making a stand. And I don’t doubt that U.S. and NATO leaders encouraged Ukraine not to accept its initial loss of territory after 2014 (“the Minsk agreement”) in return for promises of military support.

Russia never respected Ukraine’s status as a sovereign nation state. This is the single greatest issue to me – Ukraine is a recognized sovereign nation with a seat at the UN, and all other UN nation states need to stand up for any nation state whose established territory is violated. This just has to be a bedrock principle that everyone (ESPECIALLY the U.S. following its adventure in Iraq) needs to recommit to.

more fun with the CIA World Fact Book: Israel and Iran

All numbers here are as reported in the CIA World Factbook, except the last row which is me calculating GDP times % of GDP spent by the military.

IsraelIranJordanSaudi ArabiaEgypt
Population9 MIllion88 Million11 Million36 Million109 Million
GDP Per Capita (PPP)$44,400$15,500$9,500$50,200$12,800
Ginni Index38.640.933.745.931.9
Unemployment Rate3.7%8.8%19%5.6%6.4%
Average Life Expectancy82.275.476.376.974.7
Total GDP (PPP)$424 Billion$1.4 Trillion$107 Billion$1.8 Trillion$1.4 Trillion
% of GDP spent on military4.5%2.5%4.8%6.0%1.2%
Estimated Military Spending$19 Billion$35 Billion$5.1 Billion$100 Billion$17 Billion
CIA World Factbook

The sources of these numbers are not always crystal clear, so we can take them with a grain of salt, but still they yield some insights. Israel is just a small country. It’s about a tenth the size of Iran or Egypt in terms of population (I’m not sure how settlers and people in occupied territories are counted, but we are talking orders of magnitude here), and about a quarter to a third the size of Iran, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia in terms of GDP. An average person lives a rich country lifestyle and enjoys a long life in Israel, but in terms of sheer amount spent on the military you can see why they need foreign (i.e. U.S.) assistance and conscription to be on a similar level with these other countries in the region. I threw in Jordan, but it is a relatively small, not very wealthy country by these numbers. You can see why they would prefer not to get in fights with their neighbors or the world’s superpowers.

a strike on Iran, oil and commodity prices

Please note: I wrote this before the fast-moving current events of Friday, April 19, 2024.

According to the (paywalled) Financial Times, an Israeli and/or US military strike on Iran could involve half a dozen important oil producing countries as well as snarling shipping traffic. This would seem like particularly bad news for Biden as Americans fuel up their planet-burning behemoths for the “summer driving season” followed by the fall voting season.

Netanyahu

This is an article from 1996 in something called the Washington Report for Middle East Affairs. Here are some facts about Benjamin Netanyahu as reported by this article.

  1. He went to high school in suburban Philadelphia. (I looked up elsewhere, and it was Cheltenham high school. This is a public school district in a not particularly posh area.) Then MIT.
  2. He was a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen, at least at that point of graduating MIT.
  3. He has gone by at least four names. One of the three alternates is just a shortened version, but the other two are John Jay Sullivan and John Jay Sullivan Jr.
  4. His social security file is marked “classified”. According to this article, that suggests he may have been on the payroll of the CIA or FBI.
  5. To run for office, he had to give up his U.S. citizenship, which he did legally in Israel. But in the U.S., at least according to this article and in 1996, he was still legally considered a U.S. citizen. (This situation is not unusual though, as I know plenty of people in ambiguous dual citizen categories in their home countries for one reason of convenience or another. An innocent one is because someone lives in the U.S. but wants to visit family in their home country for an extended period without applying for a tourist visa.)

The article veers into some interesting territory from there, but I found these apparently fact-based nuggets interesting.

January 2024 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: 2023 was “a year of war“, and so far 2024 is not looking better. Those diplomatic grand bargains you always hear about seem to be getting less grand. And the drumbeat for a U.S. attack on Iran got louder.

Most hopeful story: According to Bill Gates, some bright spots in the world today include gains in administering vaccines to children around the world, a shift toward greater public acceptance of nuclear power, and maybe getting a bit closer to the dream of fusion power. He pontificates about AI, and my personal sense is it is still too soon, but AI does hold some promise for speeding up scientific progress.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: The return of super-sonic commercial flight is inching closer.

the drum beat for a U.S. attack on Iran continues

The media always refers to “Iran-backed” and “Iran proxy” groups responsible for various events in the Middle East, but we never really see proof that Iran is participating in specific attacks. We often hear that Iran is providing aid, arms, or has military advisers on the ground. I’m not saying any of this is outright lies, as I wouldn’t know, but it raises my propaganda hackles. Just substitute “US-backed” or “US advisors” and see how many situations around the world you could write and article about suggesting the US is a nefarious force behind all sorts of events. And of course, this is exactly what happened.

This is not hypothetical. The US has military advisers in Jordan, for example, who were just attacked by an “Iran-backed” group (why do we have troops in Jordan, or Syria for that matter, and is this article is suggesting we have troops in Iraq?). And here are some quotes from the warmongers, courtesy of Axios:

  • “Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), said in a statement the attacks the U.S. has carried out on Iranian proxies outside Iran “will not deter Iranian aggression,” calling to “strike targets of significance inside Iran.”
  • “The only answer to these attacks must be devastating military retaliation against Iran’s terrorist forces, both in Iran and across the Middle East,” said Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.). “Anything less will confirm Joe Biden as a coward unworthy of being commander-in-chief.”
  • Sen. John Cornyn, in a post on the social media site X, said: “Target Tehran[.]”
  • “The head of the snake is Iran,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee and former Air Force brigadier general, told Axios.”

The other talking point we are hearing from Republicans is that we are “acting like it is September 10”. This is a rhetorical attempt to link migration at the Mexico-Border to the Hamas attacks on Israel. The U.S. should of course be alert for an attack by radical Islamist groups who would see it as justified self-defense for America’s support for what they see as human rights abuses and war crimes committed by Israel. I am not taking a position here, just pointing out that it is a vicious cycle of escalating violence and all sides are stoking the flames rather than trying to interrupt the cycle. No evidence has been provided of any plot that would involve crossing the US-Mexico border.

a new “grand bargain” for the Middle East

When I first heard about a conceptual “grand bargain” under the Obama administration, the general idea was normalization of relations between the U.S., Iran, and Israel in exchange for Iran giving up its nuclear weapons program (maybe in exchange for a well monitored nuclear power program) and Israel allowing the creation of a Palestinian state. This obviously didn’t happen.

Before these ideas, there were smaller actual bargains including peace between Israel and most of its neighbors under Carter, and movement toward a Palestinian state under Clinton.

Before the October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, the latest idea was a formal normalization of (already de facto?) diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, possibly in exchange for nuclear power for Saudi Arabia. Iran was left out of this, and in fact it seemed to be the solidification of an anti-Iran block. The Palestinians were also left out of this, as far as I know. So now it seems to me that Biden is proposing a return to this deal that was already essentially made, and trying to add some progress toward a Palestinian state in the mix. It doesn’t seem that likely to me, at least until a new generation of leadership takes over in Israel, and unless/until Biden gets re-elected or a new generation of leadership takes over in the U.S.

It seems to me that the “grand” bargain is getting smaller and more cynical all the time. Still, one thing we can count on is the passage of time, and new leadership eventually taking over in all countries involved. One can hope for a brighter picture 5-10 years down the line. Hoping for a brighter picture by November 2024 seems a bit wishful to me.