Contra Hanson

Leave a reply

Victor Davis Hanson, the expert on war in ancient Greece, has an article over at National Review Online that needs attention. His argument is that we are entering a very dangerous situation in world affairs that could result in war without judicious diplomacy. The reasoning goes this way:

  • The United States altered its foreign policy towards retreat from command of the global commons (Posen 2003)
  • This provided space for revisionist states to challenge the established global order
  • Now that the United States is changing its foreign policy to a more aggressive assertion of hegemony, revisionist powers may miscalculate

His specific examples of revisionist states are:

  1. North Korea’s missile launches and threats of nuclear war against the United States and allies
  2. Russia’s violation of the INF Treaty and invasions of its near abroad
  3. Iran’s harassment of ships in the Persian Gulf
  4. China’s construction of artificial islands in the SCS
  5. The rise of Islamic State

He provides the following pieces of advice:

1. Avoid making verbal threats that are not serious and backed up by force. After eight years of pseudo-red lines, step-over lines, deadlines, and “game changers,” American ultimatums without consequences have no currency and will only invite further aggression.

This is not quite good enough. According to his strategic logic, the United States no longer has credibility as an enforcer, therefore any statement by this logic not only must be backed by force, but actually it should be signaled with force.  Taking this logic, it invites escalation.

 

2. The unlikely is not impossible. Weaker powers can and do start wars. Japan in December 1941 attacked the world’s two largest navies based on the false impression that great powers which sought to avoid war did so because they are weak. That current American military power is overwhelming does not mean delusional nations will always agree that it is so—or that it will be used.

The problem described is age-old. Weaker powers will initiate war, when the stakes are higher for the weaker power than they are for the stronger.

Now, his analysis of World War II is incorrect. Japan expected to wipe out the US Pacific fleet. It just so happened that the American carriers weren’t in Pearl Harbor at the time the attack occurred. They attacked the British in Malaya, because the British would be in the position of fighting a two-front war and Japan calculated that they would sacrifice colonial presence in the Pacific as homeland security was a higher priority. By ejecting the British from the Malay Peninsula, the loss of the Singapore coaling station would end the hegemony of the British Navy in the Eastern Pacific. The Japanese were not delusional.

 

3. Big wars can start from small beginnings. No one thought an obscure Austrian archduke’s assassination in 1914 would lead to some 18 million dead by 1918. Consider any possible military engagement a precursor to far more. Have a backup plan—and another backup plan for the backup plan.

Prudent advice, but from a realist perspective completely misunderstands World War I. It was not the assassination, but the structure of the international system in Europe at the time. World War I was bound to happen after German unification, it was just that nobody could say when. It upset the balance of power and drove a network of unconditional security pacts to help balance the system that had been in place since the Vienna Settlement. Beyond The Guns of August, Hanson should read Mearsheimers, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.

4. Do not confuse tactics with strategy. Successfully shooting down a rogue airplane, blowing up a speedboat, or taking an ISIS-held Syrian city is not the same as finding a way to win and end a war. Strategic victory is time-consuming and usually involves drawing on economic, political, and cultural superiority as well as military success to ensure that a defeated opponent stays defeated—and agrees that further aggression is counterproductive.

These conditions cannot be met in the post-World War II era. The presence of nuclear weapons means wars are necessarily limited when fought between great powers. The stakes are not high enough for a great power to wage a war of annihilation against a weak power. Wars since decolonization are principally wars of identity. They are ethnic conflicts which can only be terminated decisively with forced migration or genocide. Otherwise, they are merely frozen or managed, the more humane option.

The situation in the Middle East is a direct result of poor planning an poor execution of the campaign to change the regime in Bagdad in 2003. There was no real planning for the collapse of the regime and every decision by the provisional authority exacerbated the problems. The United States tried to do imperialism on the cheap and birthed a virulent insurgency. To attempt to turn Iraq quickly into a multi-ethnic/multi-confessional/multi-sectarian republic overnight was naive in the extreme. Humpty Dumpty was broken and nothing is going to put it back together again.

Were it not for the refugee flows destabilizing Europe, a better policy, but amoral and cruel, is a bloodletting. Let the parties grind each other up while balancing sides in turn to prolong the conflict and weaken all sides. The Obama administration except for the deployment to Iraq appeared to be attempting just that. At least that is the kind way of interpreting the half-measures taken, which Hanson rails against.

5. Human nature is unchanging—and not always admirable. like it or not, neutrals more often flock to crude strength than to elegant and humane weakness.

I am not sure what he is getting at here. Who’s flocking to whom? Is he channeling his inner Morgenthau? The fact of the matter is, in power politics, you can see either balancing or bandwagoning behavior. Furthermore, when you bring preferences into the mix, you get some very indeterminate behavior than would be expected by power politics alone. Christensen and Snyder (1990) for example, created a continuum index of power and risk aversion to explain various observed alliance behavior. At one end of the continuum are the lions, who are great powers with lots to lose and high risk aversion to upsetting the status quo. Next are the lambs, who are weaker powers with not much to lose but also risk averse. As you move up the scale, you come to jackals that are weaker states but willing to take some risk to upset the status quo. Finally you have the wolves that are states with power and willing to take great risks to increase it. Jackals bandwagon with wolves—think Italy with Germany in the Second World War. Russia these days behaves like a wolf. China and Iran behave like wolves in their respective neighborhoods.

North Korea is not a wolf. North Korea’s drive for nuclear weapons is fully explained by the lessons they have learned living in a unipolar world. Aggression by the United States to defend United States interests from the outside looks reckless—like a crusader state. North Korea is a case of authoritarian personal rule. Kim Jong-Un is the state. Having a nuclear weapon and a means to deliver it to the US mainland in his mind is the ultimate deterrent to a US engineered change of regime. No US President would risk a US city in exchange for removal of Kim’s regime. It is life insurance for Kim.

Kim inadequately appreciates how the drive toward this deterrent is in fact destabilizing and inviting attack. Nuclear weapons without a second strike capability is not much of a deterrent. It encourages a first strike to eliminate the arsenal. In the era of ballistic missile defense, the US just might risk regime change, before Kim has a chance to develop a second strike capability, such as mobile ICBMs that require little preparation to fire or nuclear armed submarines. Kim’s best strategy, and the one he is using, is the Soviet strategy from the end of World War II until 1964, when it was finally able to muster a viable second strike capability: threaten US allies with attack to dissuade US aggression.

6. Majestic pronouncements and utopian speechifying impress global elites and the international media, but they mean nothing to rogue nations. Such states instead count up fleets, divisions, and squadrons—and remember whether a power helps its friends and punishes its enemies. Standing by a flawed ally is always preferable to abandoning one because it can sometimes be bothersome.

No hegemon should be chainganged into war. (Libya is a case of this, and a major failing of the Obama administration.) If anything US allies often feel they are chainganged into war. As to the speechifying, US foreign policy has always been idealistic. Realpolitik is compatible with several strands of primordial foreign policy tradition. The policy prescriptions can be the same.

7. Public support for military action hinges mostly on perceived success. Tragically, people will support a dubious but successful intervention more than a noble but bogged-down one. The most fervent prewar supporters of war are often the most likely to bail during the first setback. Never calibrate the wisdom of retaliating or intervening based on initial loud public enthusiasm.

Liberal and some strains of classical realist theory assume that state preferences reflect popular, or at least elite popular desires, when the state has consensual legitimate government. Wars of choice, not defensive wars triggered by existential threat, necessarily will lack popular backing if they are not ended quickly on favorable terms. War is unpredictable. Don’t start one without an exit strategy short of victory.

8. War is a harsh distillery of talent. Good leaders and generals in peace are not necessarily skilled in conflict. They can perform as badly in war as good wartime generals do in peace. Assume that the commanders who start a war won’t be there to finish it.

Pure Clausewitz and sage advice to any President.

9. War is rarely started by accident and far more often by mistaken calibrations of relative power. Flawed prewar assessments of comparative weakness and strength are tragically corrected by war—the final ugly arbiter of who really was strong and who was weak. Visible expressions of military potential, serious steady leadership, national cohesion, and economic robustness remind rivals of the futility of war. Loud talk of disarmament and a preference for international policing can encourage foolish risk-takers to miscalculate that war is a good gamble.

While the advice on sources of power listed are important in the abstract, they don’t really figure into the calculus of the weak state fighting for higher stakes than the great power. What the weak state contemplating a change in the status quo wants to know is how much the status quo great power is willing to risk to maintain it. It is for that reason, loud talk of disarmament is important. It signals a change in preferences. Remote interests aren’t as important as they were.

Here is where the South China Sea situation got to where it is. In purely realist terms, geography in this case is destiny. China has approximately 9000 miles of coast line. It is dependent on international trade for energy, raw materials, and export markets for its manufactures, since it lacks a mass consumer society. Its access to the sea is constrained to narrow, easily blockaded straits formed by archipelagoes. Therefore, political and military control out to the first island chain is existential for China. Freedom of navigation and national self-determination of the archipelagic states in the region are not existential for the US. Taiwan is very serious but not existential because, just as MacArthur understood, Taiwan is an unsinkable aircraft carrier and submarine pen. China in possession of Taiwan gives it unfettered access to the Pacific for a submarine fleet that poses a threat to the US and radically alters the relative power of China and the United States. Japan is not at risk. Japan is a great power and a peer competitor of China.

The US is not going to risk war to prevent Chinese domination of the South China Sea and China knows it. China is not going to risk war either. It is why confrontations have always been with constabulary and naval militia forces.

10. Deterrence that prevents war is usually smeared as war-mongering. Appeasement, isolationism, and collaboration that avoid immediate crises but guarantee eventual conflict are usually praised as civilized outreach and humane engagement.

Welcome to the world of a consensual government. Kant’s republican peace theory predicts that states will be risk averse when they reflect popular will, since it is the demos that bears the cost of war.  It is ultimately a tragedy waiting to happen, since state preferences in the system vary and the only way to prevent war is to prepare for it–there are in fact wolves–and there is currently no such thing as a global security community.

Hanson needs to think more about the multipolar world prior to World War II. While “Munich” has passed into the lexicon as a synonym for pusillanimity, lest we forget, there are times when appeasement and collaboration are the wiser policy. It all depends on the preferences. Appeasement and collaboration were common tools of diplomacy between European status.

Revising US foreign policy towards Latin America

Leave a reply

Miguel Centeno and Andrés Lajous have an excellent article over at The American Interest. They perceptively diagnose the pathologies and promise of Latin America. They correctly address the diversity of Latin America.

Latin America has lagged global growth rates, even during supposed boom times early in the 21st century before the Great Recession.

Latin America has been too dependent on the export of raw materials. The dependence on China as a consumer of raw materials and, in the case of Venezuela, oil exports, means the region does not have an engine for growth if China slows and oil prices fall.

Latin America has made progress in democratizing. Coups d’état have become a rarity. Parties out of power have respected the outcome of elections and there have been peaceful transfers of power from one to another. Although there has been a trend towards Presidents for Life in Venezuela and El Salvador.

Latin America still suffers from tremendous inequality. The economies are still two-speed with urban, trade-related regions with high income and significant rural poverty. Lack of secure property rights contributes to the poverty. (Unmentioned by the authors are the cultural factors that contribute to this pattern.)

Mexico is no longer a source of illegal immigration to the United States (although they fail to note that remittances are still a large source of income for Mexico).

Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras are all struggling with lawlessness and violence driven by the illegal drug trade (also a source of violence in Mexico). This has led to a militarization of law enforcement by those states to reclaim territorial sovereignty (a monopoly on the legitimate use on violence). This drives migrant flows to the United States via Mexico.

Where the authors fail is to advocate the usual liberal internationalist/neoconservative nostrums:

  • Maintaining trade agreements with the region that result in both jobs in the U.S. and economic benefits throughout the region.
  • Recognizing that immigration is not necessarily a burden on the United States but is often a dynamic source of growth.
  • Realistically reappraising the “war on drugs” to take into account what prohibition has cost the region in human, political, and economic terms, and the alternative presented by the legalization of marijuana in several U.S. states.

An alternative that does not assume the United States would continue to be the safety value for people fleeing violence and acquiescence to unequal trade relationships is to:

  • Reform immigration policy like other “normal” countries. Mass unskilled immigration is not a net positive in the short run, contrary to the authors’ contention. Larger amounts of legal immigration for desired skills should be combined with aggressive enforcement of illegal immigration with provision for refugees from Latin America is the most sustainable.
  • Greater levels of the right kind of security assistance is needed in Latin America. That needs to be combined with judicial reform and development assistance to permit the state to exercise sovereignty.
  • The most difficult challenge that the US has little affect except through using trade agreements as the carrot is a transition to Anglo-American legal norms. As the authors correctly note, private property protections are weak. Furthermore, neopatrimonialism is still a prominent feature of the political economy of Latin America. Until government approaches a Weberian rational-legal source of authority, Latin America will continue to lag the world in economic development.

The US needs to avoid stoking anti-Americanism in Latin America. The US needs to avoid creating a continent worth of failed states Central and South America, so a radical restriction on trade would be disastrous, but the status quo is also not working, nor is decriminalization of drugs a solution to the problem of violence. George Washington made a policy prescription in his Farewell Address:

Observe good faith and justice [toward] all Nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all….In the execution of such a plan nothing is more essential than that permanent inveterate antipathies against particular Nations and passionate attachments for other should be excluded.

This may have been appropriate before the United States became a continental power, but the Monroe Doctrine applies now. The principal goal for US foreign policy regarding Latin America is to foster stability and prevent rival powers from using Latin American nations as a base to threaten the United States. In the modern context, this means constructive engagement, but not necessarily pursuing cosmopolitan policy prescriptions.

Tea for a Polymath

Leave a reply

Here at the Noble Polymath we drink tea.  We have a preference for the following varieties.

Lifeboat Tea

Lifeboat Tea Image

Lifeboat is produced by the Williamson Tea Company.  Williamson has their own tea growing plantations in East Africa.  The tea is a robust red liquor with a high caffeine content.  We prepare it by steeping 5 minutes rather than the recommended 3 minutes.  We serve it with raw sugar and homogenized milk.  Purchases of Lifeboat also help support the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, which is a volunteer organization with lifeboat stations around the UK that rescue mariners in distress.

Yorkshire Gold

Yorkshire Gold Tea Image

Yorkshire Gold is produced by Taylors of Harrogate from a blend of African and Indian teas. It is a strong tea, yet with delicate floral notes. It is high in caffeine. We brew it 3 minutes and serve with milk and sugar as well.

Royal Elixir

Royal Elixir is an Impra product.  It is Ceylon tea.  It is medium strength.  It is the tea that we have found that comes close to the tea served with breakfast at the old Yerevan Hotel in Armenia.  It goes great with an egg and crusty bread in the morning.

Our latest discovery is…

Make Mine A Builders

Builders Tea Image

It takes its name from the low quality tea that laborers in the UK drank.  It is a strong tea and definitely jumpstarts your heart in the morning.  Drink it in the afternoon, you may regret the insomnia.  Brewed 3 minutes with milk and raw sugar, it is a sturdy start to your day.  The flavor is close to a more robust Twinings English Breakfast.  It is not nearly as complex as the previous, but it is rejuvenating.  I love the tag line printed on the side of the box: “Britain wasn’t built on chamomile.”

Culture and Wealth

Leave a reply

I’ve received a promotion and been busy with the Coast Guard Auxiliary and graduate school in addition to work, so I apologize for my tardiness on getting a post up.  That said, I’d like to treat you to a quantitative analysis I recently conducted on the relationship between a country’s wealth and its culture.

The purpose of the analysis was to attempt a identify what characteristics of a culture contribute to a nation’s wealth.  I first looked at Hofstede’s dimensions and the data set on his website, however, I deemed it not usable since it lacked completeness.  Many countries did not have data across all five dimensions.  I then chose the GLOBE Project data set which is similar to Hofstede’s dimensions.  I downloaded the 2004 GLOBE Phase 2 data set for Society Cultural Scales.

I combined the GLOBE Project data (the Practice dimensions only, not the Values dimensions) with Polity IV Polity Index for the 57 countries in the data set.  I chose Polity because it was a good single value proxy for the variable I am really after, which whether the country has a government that functions on Weber’s rational-legal authority type.  A key control for whether the state is wealthy because it has good government, or whether the state is wealthy because it has a culture that makes it wealthy.  Thus I built my set of 10 independent variables (Polity plus nine dimensions from the GLOBE Project).

For the response variable I created a dichotomous variable from the World Bank’s estimates for states’ income.  The states classified as “high income” were coded 1 and the states with lower incomes were coded 0.

I then ran a logit regression in R.  results of which are below:


> summary(globe_glm_1)

Call:
glm(formula = Income ~ Polity + UASP + FOSP + PDSP + C1SPIC +
HOSP + POSP + C2SPIGC + GESP + ASP, family = binomial(),
data = dat)

Deviance Residuals:
Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
-2.47623 -0.40988 -0.03516 0.30218 1.83126

Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)
(Intercept) 32.5330 18.3861 1.769 0.0768 .
Polity 0.1036 0.1125 0.920 0.3574
UASP 1.1436 1.5992 0.715 0.4745
FOSP 0.2514 1.8538 0.136 0.8921
PDSP -0.4908 1.5613 -0.314 0.7532
C1SPIC 4.1808 2.2206 1.883 0.0597 .
HOSP -3.3569 1.4078 -2.385 0.0171 *
POSP -3.2482 2.7042 -1.201 0.2297
C2SPIGC -3.3308 1.3347 -2.496 0.0126 *
GESP -1.6019 1.5218 -1.053 0.2925
ASP -1.0237 1.7447 -0.587 0.5574
---
Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

(Dispersion parameter for binomial family taken to be 1)

Null deviance: 80.336 on 57 degrees of freedom
Residual deviance: 35.193 on 47 degrees of freedom
AIC: 57.193

Number of Fisher Scoring iterations: 7

>

The model reduces the deviance more than the NULL model. An analysis of variance of the model terms also shows the important coefficients.

> summary(globe_anova_1)
Df Deviance Resid. Df Resid. Dev
Min. :1 Min. : 0.1141 Min. :47.0 Min. :35.19
1st Qu.:1 1st Qu.: 0.5720 1st Qu.:49.5 1st Qu.:41.63
Median :1 Median : 2.7185 Median :52.0 Median :64.87
Mean :1 Mean : 4.5143 Mean :52.0 Mean :56.83
3rd Qu.:1 3rd Qu.: 7.5384 3rd Qu.:54.5 3rd Qu.:67.39
Max. :1 Max. :15.0461 Max. :57.0 Max. :80.34
NA's :1 NA's :1
Pr(>Chi)
Min. :0.0001049
1st Qu.:0.0122373
Median :0.1073930
Mean :0.2366209
3rd Qu.:0.4799755
Max. :0.7354827
NA's :1
>

The results indicate that the Humane Orientation Societal Practices and the Collectivism II Societal Practices (In-Group Collectivism) with both significant at the 0.05 level and negatively related to the odds of being wealthy society. What this indicates is that societies that are individualistic and competitive are more likely to be wealthy.

Furthermore, the Collectivism I Societal Practices (Institutional Collectivism) is significant at the 0.1 level and positively associated with the odds of being a wealthy society. What this means is that solidarity with employers is also associated with wealth–i.e., cultures like Germany, Japan and South Korea.

Interestingly, the Polity Index did not contribute more to the model. An investigation of outliers revealed that both Kuwait and Qatar, Gulf oil kingdoms, have negative polity scores–i.e., are authoritarian. All others are Polity 10’s, which is the highest score on the strength of democratic institutions and lack of authoritarian tendencies. Thus, there is an identity in this data set between wealth and liberal governance. Oil kingdoms appear to be a class all their own.

The True purpose of Decapitation

Leave a reply

One of the junior analysts over at the Foreign Policy Research Institute has a blog posting about the ineffectiveness of drone strikes on Al Qaeda leadership.  After discussing the killing of a senior Al Qaeda operative in Afghanistan, he goes  on to lament the failure of drone strikes to win the War on Terrorism:

Despite these pronouncements of impending victory, U.S. counterterrorism strategy is inherently flawed.  The U.S. relies on a tactic known as decapitation, which states that eliminating the leaders of an organization will lead to its destruction.

I would submit that the Pentagon or White House can claim victory in any winning engagement with the enemy, no matter how small.  Winning a battle and winning a war are two different things.  Furthermore, decapitation is not the strategy, it is a tactic, one of many being used in the Global War on Terror (GWT).  The U.S. has been in Afghanistan for 15 years to eliminate a hostile regime and build the successor state’s capabilities to the point that the state is able to exert sovereignty over its territory. (Sovereignty defined in the Weberian sense of a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.)

Decapitation is used to disrupt the opposing organization.  It will never lead to the destruction of a decentralized and franchised organization like Al Qaeda.  The temporary disruption caused by drone strikes should not be disparaged, because it fails to win a war singlehandedly.

The GWT is a civilizational conflict that will be generations long.  The defeat of violent salafi groups is not achievable with military methods alone.  Drone strikes are one of many ways to temporarily keep the wolves at bay.  Building the capabilities of states to police their own jihadis is an important tool in the longer term strategy.

 

Special Operators in Mosul

Leave a reply

There is a report that the U.S. has stepped up the use of special operators in Mosul.  This is pretty standard in advance of a push to take the city.  Throw a loose cordon around the city.  Use nighttime raids against high value targets to disrupt command and control and demoralize the insurgents by getting them thinking that there is no place to hide.  Then faint on one side of the city and advance in force elsewhere.  It is what we did to take Ramadi from Al Qaeda.  We sent Task Force 145, composed of Delta and SEALs to get the leaders before the Marines went in.

You know you are old when…

Leave a reply

There is a whole genre a jokes around the theme: you know you are old when…

One of my favorites has been:

You know you are old when the music you listened to is now called classic rock.

Or another of my favorites:

You know you are old when kids start calling you mister.

The other night, while watching TV, I came up with another:

You know you are old when Target stops marketing to your demographic.

Cheers!

Reflections on the Cubs

Leave a reply

The Chicago cubs, after 108 years of futility, won the World Series. As a San Francisco Giants fan since birth, I had no rooting interest in either team. I had considered backing the Cubs, since I consider the designated hitter in the American League an abomination. Every player should be required to play on both offense and defense as a matter of fairness. Plus, Madison Bumgarner, in the tradition of Giants starting pitchers who could hit, like Rick Reuschel and Don “Caveman” Robinson, put on a commercial this year for allowing pitchers to hit. (We’ll leave aside the other Giants tradition of pitchers hopeless at the plate—e.g., Atlee Hammaker.)

I also flirted with the idea that I should root for the Indians, since the great Giant second baseman and now broadcaster Duane Kuiper was an Indian. But it was National Review’s Jonah Goldberg who solidified my choice in rooting for the Indians.  He wrote:

I want the Cubs to lose… for the same reason I wanted the Red Sox to lose in 2004: I like curses. No I don’t mean in the sense of giving someone the evil eye so that they give birth to a duck or anything like that. I like curses because they are romantic, in the anti-Enlightenment sense. They defy the machine thinking of the Scientific Revolution.

…

[I]f the Curse of the Billy Goat is lifted, a game more attached to superstition than any other I can think of will be somewhat diminished.

Giants fans will recall Aubrey Huff’s “rally thong” as a prime example of baseball’s enduring and endearing superstitions. Therefore the “conservative” position is to root against the Cubs.

Jonah continues:

As a Chestertonian at heart, I like and respect old things. I like it when stuff beats the law of averages for reasons we cannot fathom. The Hayekian in me thinks old things that last often do so for good reasons we just don’t know—and sometimes can’t know.

Unfortunately, we live in an age where we take the razor of reason to every little thing and strain to know the whys of it, as if knowing the why will empower the how.

Jonah is on the right track but fails in the detail. The scientific method can answer the what and the how of a phenomenon, but not the why. I’ll paraphrase Leszek Kolakowski on the enduring nature of myth. Positivism, which is the philosophical ground of the scientific method, is incapable of addressing questions of teleology and providence, hence the necessity of myth to provide meaning to unconditioned experience.

The victory of the Cubs is unfortunately yet another very slight step in the demythologization of society’s institutions. Let us feel happy for the long-suffering Cubs fans, but also lament the diminishment of baseball.

 

Trump Presidency the end of the UN?

Leave a reply

It is hard to know if Richard Gowan’s column over at World Politics Review is clickbait  a la Vox or Gowan is serious about Trump being the end of the United Nations if he is elected president.

It is clear that under a President Trump, the U.S. would be changing its relationship with the U.N. and other multilateral institutions. President Trump has promised to deemphasize international engagement. His foreign policy positions are best described as conservative non-interventionism. Animating this non-interventionism are the beliefs that United States interests are not served by multilateral regimes and institutions, they are a threat to the republic, and sovereignty is an absolute good. In some ways Trump’s position is a return to Herbert Hoover’s criticism of the Roosevelt administration: the American republic is fragile and being undermined from within and without.

Gowan gets hysterical about the damage to international institutions Trumps promise of withdrawing from the Paris Agreement is:

This is in part because Trump has repeatedly signaled that he will give the institution short shrift if he takes office. He has already promised to “cancel” the Obama administration’s biggest multilateral achievement: The Paris climate change treaty.

While this might not be quite as simple as Trump claims, many countries could rethink their environmental commitments if they believe that the U.S. will renege on the deal. Unilaterally reversing years of negotiations would also inject a huge dose of distrust into U.N. diplomacy. If Washington trashes such a crucial treaty, it is hard to see why other governments should sign up to any major bargains in future.

First of all, the Paris Agreement does almost nothing over current law and treaties. If that is the Obama administration’s biggest multilateral achievement, the administration sure hasn’t achieved much in eight years when compared to the Clinton administration. The Paris Agreement merely reaffirmed existing articles of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). For this reason, it was deemed an executive agreement and not a treaty under constitutional law requiring ratification. The Paris Agreement is “Green Theater” nothing more. The “crucial treaty,” is the original Framework ratified in 1992. The UNFCCC does provide a mechanism for withdrawal in Article 25. Would U.S. withdrawal from the UNFCCC pose an existential threat to the U.N.? It is unlikely. Since the United States never acceded to the Kyoto Protocol with binding emissions limits, the UNFCCC poses little threat to the U.S. economy.

The only thing that could break the United Nations is a concerted effort to create a parallel IGO with greater legitimacy with respect to liberal democratic norms. One such proposal has circulated on the Right for years: a concert or league of liberal democracies, or possibly an even more narrow concert of the Anglosphere. However, given the non-interventionism of Trump, such an IGO would never be considered. No, the likely outcome of a Trump presidency is withholding U.N dues, as previous Republican administrations had due to U.N. support for contraception, as a sign of defiance. It would make good theater, but once a Democrat came into office, the arrears would be repaid. Trump does not pose an existential threat to the United Nations.

What will suffer is the already creaky liberal international order that had been constructed after the Second World War. The relative power the United States has declined, and the American public is weary of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These two things are contributing to a breakdown in the liberal international order. Dissatisfied revisionist powers—for example, North Korea, China, Iran, and Russia—are testing the limits of that order and even creating alternatives to that order. The United States appears poised to abandon maintenance of the liberal international order. In some ways, this is a return to type, where prior to WWII, the United States was content to enforce the Monroe Doctrine against European encroachment in the Western Hemisphere, but leave Europe to itself. Europe is no longer the bottle of scorpions it once was; the Middle East is that bottle of scorpions, but with the U.S. close to becoming energy independent thanks to technology and the post-industrial economy, the U.S. will likely pivot to its own period of “splendid isolation.”

Federalist 10 and the UBI

Leave a reply

Universal Basic Income (UBI) has gained traction as an idea among the reformicon/technocratic Right in the United States. For example, Charles Murray recently wrote a lengthy piece on the cover of the Review section of the Wall Street Journal on the subject. The concept of the UBI as a replacement for the welfare state on the Right has been mainly on the libertarian wing, where the UBI promotes poverty reduction without restricting liberty as much as the typical welfare state alternatives of conditional grants. The reason for the Right’s new found love of UBI is the risk that automation poses to the social fabric of society. When 47% of today’s jobs are subject to automation over the next 20 years, issues of morality and equity are presented front and center.

With half the nation not only unemployed, but unemployable, what does it do to an American polity that has the poster child for Weber’s Protestant Ethic? What Murray does no appreciate in his article is the risk to the constitutional order that a UBI poses. The dangers of faction, something Madison warned about and sold the Constitution as a solution for in Federalist 10, will be acute.

Madison described two dangers of faction: (1) tyranny of the minority (mainly a propertied ruling class) and (2) tyranny of a majority (mob rule). The new constitution was meant to tame faction through the mechanisms of divided and limited government, an independent judiciary, and representative and deliberative democracy.

Madison’s primary concern were with violent factions composed of land owners and the unpropertied, creditors and debtors, and geographic diversity (large versus small states and North vs. South). UBI carries tremendous risks for abuse through the democratic process. First, while the numbers proposed by Murray (an annual basic income of $30,000 with elimination of UBI at $40,000 of private income) will likely erode the likelihood of entering the workforce for those who could be employable, who is to say that the “dolists” who live off the UBI will not become the new unpropertied faction that will seek to exert their political influence to increase that dole to a more generous amount over time. Electoral politics is built around campaign promises and log rolling. It is unlikely the current institutions could restrain electoral majorities in the quest for “soaking the rich.”

Any UBI introduction will likely have to be via Constitutional amendment with anti-democratic protections installed to make it work. Otherwise, faction could tear the republic apart. It may also have to change the way the government funds itself. The repeal of an income tax and a substitution of a tax on capital may need to be implemented—i.e., tax the owners of the robots rather than the workers. The challenge there, is that it is essentially a tax on productivity gains, which will limit the increase in prosperity over time. Technology has not made republicanism obsolete, but it does pose challenges for the 21st century.