Tag Archives: war

The Guns of August (2018)?

According to NBC:

U.S. intelligence agencies believe that North Korea has increased its production of fuel for nuclear weapons at multiple secret sites in recent months — and that Kim Jong Un may try to hide those facilities as he seeks more concessions in nuclear talks with the Trump administration, U.S. officials told NBC News…

Joel Wit, who negotiated a 1994 nuclear agreement with North Korea, said the U.S. always believed North Korea had two facilities to enrich nuclear material: Yongbyon and a second site the U.S. is aware of but whose name has not been disclosed…

The latest U.S. intelligence assessment concludes that there is more than one secret site, officials tell NBC News. The question is whether Kim will be willing to admit it.

This is the kind of deal that would work. We know North Korea would like to feel safe from U.S. attack. We can offer them that, along with eventual normal diplomatic and economic ties, in exchange for giving up their nuclear program. Giving up their nuclear program means first they have to declare everything they have, then let weapons inspectors in without restrictions to verify that what they said is true. Once they meet those commitments, the long process of dismantling and removing the materials and equipment can begin. Each time they fulfill a commitment, they can get something in return. This process was working pretty well in Iraq until George W. Bush messed it up. It was starting to work in Iran until Trump messed it up. Now Trump has been duped into a non-deal with North Korea when the Iran deal he was against is actually the kind of thing that could work with North Korea.

I don’t like the U.S. leadership looking stupid, ignorant and incompetent, but let’s face it, at this point that ship has sailed. The biggest risk here is actually that Trump will realize he was duped and overreact by doubling down on his earlier threats. North Korea would probably respond with threats of their own against the U.S. and its Asian allies. In the worst case it could escalate to one side or the other launching some kind of limited attack, followed by a larger retaliation, followed by regional alliances being triggered, and then the downward spiral to 2018 looking more like 1918. Let’s hope this is just my imagination getting away from me.

the numbers on Syria

Syria might not be grabbing the U.S. headlines right now, but the conflict is grinding on. The Week has some staggering numbers. Out of a population of about 20 million, 5.6 million are refugees inside the country and 6.2 million have left the country as refugees. That’s 60% of the population. Estimates of the death toll vary but the most widely accepted is around half a million. That’s 2-3% of the population.

how about a war tax?

Part of the reason the U.S. public accepts continuous war as normal is that we don’t realize how much we are paying for it. The idea of a war tax sounds politically crazy, but is is? It used to be pretty standard. Congress would declare war, ordinary people would be drafted and taxed, and people would generally be supportive but expect the war to end and things to go back to the way they were.

Until the Vietnam War, American presidents regularly introduced war taxes, seemingly less worried about offending the people than about financing the war. In some cases, the government had to work to elicit fiscal sacrifice, for example, with a pro-tax Disney cartoon in 1943 that touted “Taxes to Beat the Axis” during World War II. In most cases, the taxes did not actually offend the people…

In 2009, during debates about the Afghanistan surge, House Appropriations Committee Chair David Obey proposed a tax that would require homes with incomes between $30,000 and $150,000 to pay 1 percent on top of their existing taxes, and higher levels for the wealthier. Veterans of both Iraq and Afghanistan would be exempt: “We’re just trying to keep in the forefront what the financial costs are.”

Indeed, a study of the costs of these wars showed that the public is blissfully disconnected. In 2014, I surveyed 350 Americans and asked them to estimate the costs of the Afghanistan war to that point. Responses ranged from a million dollars to “probably $10 trillion. A lot more than we can afford.” The typical response was “I have no idea — $100 million?” The real answer at that point was $686 billion. Americans cannot make sense of such enormous figures. They can, however, make sense of their own budgets, which is why the connection with taxes is so much tighter, and why individuals become invested in the conduct of the war when war taxes are levied. As both Tilly and Smith observed, the visibility and intrusiveness of taxes are exactly what make individuals scrutinize the service for which the resources are being used. In the case of war, it means paying more scrupulous attention to its duration, goals, and cost.

running out of bombs?

The military-industrial complex needs to engage in continuous war so it can be ready in case a war starts. Or so I interpret the logic. Is this part of some vast, hidden conspiracy? Well, no, apparently they put a report out about it periodically.

The Pentagon plans to invest more than $20 billion in munitions in its next budget. But whether the industrial base will be there to support such massive buys in the future is up in the air — at a time when America is expending munitions at increasingly intense rates.

The annual Industrial Capabilities report, put out by the Pentagon’s Office of Manufacturing and Industrial Base Policy, has concluded that the industrial base of the munitions sector is particularly strained, something the report blames on the start-and-stop nature of munitions procurement over the last 20 years, as well as the lack of new designs being internally developed…

All this is happening as the U.S. is expending munitions at a rapid rate. For instance, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction concluded that 1,186 munitions were dropped in that country during the first quarter of 2018 ― the highest number recorded for the first three months of the year since tracking began in 2013; that number is also more than two and a half times the amount dropped in the first quarter of 2017.

Interesting, and I thought the Afghanistan war was more or less over. It seems like wars don’t really end any more, and the public now accepts ongoing regional wars as normal.

March 2018 in Review

Most frightening stories:

Most hopeful stories:

  • One large sprawling city could be roughly the economic equivalent of several small high-density cities. This could potentially be good news for the planet if you choose in favor of the latter, and preserve the spaces in between as some combination of natural land and farm land.
  • The problems with free parking, and solutions to the problems, are well known. This could potentially be good news if anything were to be actually done about it. Self-parking cars could be really fantastic for cities.
  • The coal industry continues to collapse, and even the other fossil fuels are saying they are a bunch of whining losers. And yes, I consider this positive. I hope there aren’t too many old ladies whose pensions depend on coal at this point.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

food crises

Food crises in the world got worse last year, according to a network of researchers (somehow, loosely?) affiliated with the UN. According to Bloomberg:

Food crises are increasingly determined by complex causes such as conflict, extreme climatic shocks and high prices of staple foods, often happening at the same time, the UN’s Food & Agriculture Organization, World Food Programme and EU said in a report Thursday.

Conflict will remain a major driver of food insecurity in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, while drought is likely to worsen crop and livestock output, increasing food insecurity in countries such as Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya, they said…

Extreme climate events –- mainly drought — were the main triggers of food crises in 23 countries, while conflict continued to be the main driver of acute food insecurity in 18 nations. The report defines acute food insecurity as hunger so severe that it poses an immediate threat to lives or livelihoods.

Dig a little deeper and it sounds like El Nino played a role in intense droughts in many parts of the world. I know El Nino happens with or without climate change, but climate change may arguably be making it worse. War may or may not be caused by climate change, but societies devastated by war are going to have a lot more trouble adapting to extreme weather and changes in water supplies than ones that are not. Food is the nexus of water, energy, and ecosystem services, so if we are exceeding the world’s carrying capacity this is where the signal is likely to show up, both in a long, steady climb in prices and in decreased capacity to recover from extreme events. The poor are always going to feel these effects first and most acutely.

beating the war drum

This article from The Intercept explains how the U.S. government and media often fail to examine the motives of foreign leaders, and this is one reason we keep making mistakes that lead to war.

That power is called cognitive empathy, and it’s not what you might think. It doesn’t involve feeling people’s pain or even caring about their welfare. Emotional empathy is the kind of empathy that accomplishes those things. Cognitive empathy — sometimes called perspective taking — is a matter of seeing someone’s point of view: understanding how they’re processing information, how the world looks to them. Sounds unexceptional, I know — like the kind of thing you do every day. But there are at least two reasons cognitive empathy deserves more attention than it gets.

First, because the failure to exercise it lies behind two of the most dangerous kinds of misperceptions in international affairs: misreading a nation’s military moves as offensive when the nation itself considers them defensive, and viewing some national leaders as crazy or fanatical when in fact they’ll respond predictably to incentives if you understand their goals.

The second reason cognitive empathy deserves more attention is that, however simple it sounds, it can be hard to exercise. Somewhat like emotional empathy, cognitive empathy can shut down or open up depending on your relationship to the person in question — friend, rival, enemy, kin — and how you’re feeling about them at the moment.

It is important to understand that the leaders of these countries are often terrified of the United States. Iran, North Korea, and to some extent China are almost certainly afraid of the United States. The Soviet leadership was terrified of the U.S. in the 1980s, a fact we didn’t appreciate fully until after the fact.

Understanding this doesn’t mean the United States can’t compete and defend itself against threats. It could help us finds ways to reduce tensions that ultimately lead to a safer world for everyone.

February 2018 in Review

Most frightening stories:

  • A general rule across many types of wildlife is that their range after urbanization decreases to between one-half and one-third of what it was before urbanization.
  • The Cuban sonic attacks are real. At least, the people who experienced them have real brain damage, even if we still don’t know what technology did the damage.
  • Cape Town will probably not be the last major city to run out of water.

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

January 2018 in Review

Most frightening stories:

  • Larry Summers says we have a better than even chance of recession in the next three years. Sounds bad, but I wonder what that stat would look like for any randomly chosen three year period in modern history.
  • The United States is involved in at least seven wars: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and Pakistan. Nuclear deterrence may not actually the work.
  • Cape Town, South Africa is in imminent danger of running out of water. Longer term, there are serious concerns about snowpack-dependent water supplies serving large urban populations in Asia and western North America.

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both: