Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

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Someone on social media recently shared a video of two British talking heads discussing America, with one arguing that Americans are ‘conspiratorial by nature’.

I can’t agree with this assessment, as Americans tend to give others the benefit of the doubt more often than other people. But at the same time, there is a notable uptick in conspiratorial thinking in the USA, something that comes naturally when trust in ruling institutions rapidly erodes. The way that the government and the medical establishment fumbled COVID is testament to that, and nowhere is it more evident than in the hysteria around Jeffrey Epstein.

I’ve briefly commented on Epstein before, and my position has not changed since day one: this is not a sex scandal but a national security one. The “sex trafficking” charges (and convictions) were, in my opinion, nothing but a diversion, a smokescreen, from the real heart of the matter, one that enmeshed powerful people from all sides of the aisle. It’s a scandal that many wish would just go away, even if there are some partisans in Congress intent on using it for their own purposes.

Maybe ‘scandal’ is too strong a word? Maybe “affair” is the better latter half of the compound noun? I don’t know. What I DO know is that there is a lot more information that will come out in due time regarding Epstein and his “hobbies” that involved some of the most powerful people in the world. I am not making a moral judgment here, I’ll leave that to others. Mike Tracey has done a great job in digging in deep to reveal that pretty much the entire sex angle to the story is nonsense. The espionage side is bearing more fruit, however.

Recently, a hacker came into the possession of personal emails from former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, a close personal friend of Jeffrey Epstein. DropSiteNews received these emails and worked to verify the content. What they uncovered is very, very interesting, and is strong proof that Epstein was knee deep in the world of international backroom deals, especially involving the USA, Israel, and Russia:

Drop Site News

Jeffrey Epstein and the Mossad: How The Sex-Trafficker Helped Israel Build a Backchannel to Russia Amid Syrian Civil War

Jeffrey Epstein facilitated efforts to open a backchannel between Israel and the Kremlin during the Syrian civil war, according to leaked em…

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6 months ago · 653 likes · 7 comments · Murtaza Hussain and Ryan Grim

Jeffrey Epstein facilitated efforts to open a backchannel between Israel and the Kremlin during the Syrian civil war, according to leaked emails from former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

The trove of emails, exchanged at the height of the Syrian civil war between 2013 and 2016, reveal Epstein’s successful efforts to secure a private meeting between Barak and Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss a Russian-brokered end to the conflict, including winning Russian support for a negotiated removal of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Epstein was an invaluable resource for Israel’s former prime minister, who also served as head of intelligence and defense minister throughout his career, sharing whispers from within Russian elite circles and intel on Putin’s interlocutors in Europe and the U.S—and even advising him on how to engage with the Mossad. Barak, fresh out of his role as Israeli defense minister, built a deep portfolio of investments and business relationships around the world with Epstein’s help.

On February 21, 2014, Epstein wrote to Barak, “with civil unrest exploding in ukraine syria, somolia [sic], libya, and the desperation of those in power, isn’t this perfect for you.” Barak replied: “You’re right [in] a way. But not simple to transform it into a cash flow. A subject for Saturday.”

These efforts also provided cover for covert diplomacy on behalf of the Israeli government. Together, Barak and Epstein sought to pressure the Obama administration to either intervene directly in the Syrian war, or make concessions to the Kremlin in exchange for Assad’s graceful exit. In their exchanges, Epstein expressed his frustration at the Obama administration’s failures to contain Tehran, as the two men searched for opportunities to promote U.S. strikes on Iran.

Despite securing a sit-down with Putin in the summer of 2013, they did not succeed in convincing Russia to support Assad’s ouster, but their negotiations set the stage for U.S.-Russia cooperation on disarmament of Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal a few months later.

This is a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how back channels operate in times of conflict.

On the source of the emails:

The leaked emails come from the same archive previously reported by Drop Site—materials released by the hackers known as Handala and disseminated by Distributed Denial of Secrets. The emails include extensive, previously unpublished documents and photographs from Barak’s inner circle including non-public information verified as accurate by Drop Site. Many documents from the Handala hack were independently validated by records released by the U.S. House Oversight Committee this month.

Trying to get Russia to agree to Assad’s removal:

In the early hours of May 9, 2013, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak emailed his close friend Jeffrey Epstein with an urgent message. “R U awake? if yes, pl call,” Barak wrote Epstein, at 1 a.m. in New York. Shortly after they spoke, Barak emailed again to ask Epstein to keep their conversation private: “jeff pl don’t share the info with any of our friends.”

Epstein replied: “Of course not. I think you should let Putin know you will be in Moscow. See if he wants private time.”

Barak and Epstein built a backchannel to Putin in hopes of winning Russia’s support to remove Syrian president Bashar al-Assad from power, according to leaked emails from Barak’s inbox. Before approaching Putin, Barak and Epstein sought to use one of the major American newspapers to frame Israel’s narrative about the Syrian war, and telegraph a framework for peace talks led by the United States and Russia.

Private Citizen Ehud Barak:

Barak stepped down from his post in March 2013 after the failure of his new political party to contest Knesset elections. His retirement from formal office, he said, meant that he now would have time to “study, write, live and enjoy.” Instead, he immediately began working with Epstein to conduct covert diplomatic work in support of Israeli security interests abroad.

The key to Barak’s backchannel diplomacy with Russia was his relationship with Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian-Israeli oligarch and owner of the multinational conglomerate Renova Group. Barak offered his services as a strategic consultant to Renova, a position that would generate a lucrative salary for himself and further his ambitions in the global mining and energy sectors, while enhancing his access to powerful figures in the Russian elite.

Barak kept Epstein abreast of every update on his courtship with Vekselberg. As Barak progressed toward a formal agreement with Renova, Epstein counseled Barak on contract negotiations, writing on April 27, “I think you should propose all up front. no need for a written agreement. until later.”

Beneath the surface of mundane contract details, Epstein and Barak worked on a covert plan with the support of Israeli intelligence—regime change in Damascus.

The Israeli military strategist, often described as “emotionally handicapped,” relied on Epstein to help him craft his messaging when dealing with other political officials and business elites. Epstein, for instance, asked Barak to wait until they could speak privately before Barak notified intelligence leaders of a deal with Vekselberg: “do not go to number 1 too quickly, I understnad more now so we should speak.” The euphemism “number 1” is a moniker used to refer to the head of the Mossad, dating back to Barak’s days as director of Israeli military intelligence, when the Mossad director’s identity was kept secret.

As the Renova contract was being finalized—a $1 million advance and a $1 million quarterly retainer—Barak planned a trip to Moscow on May 12 to meet with Vekselberg.

Side note: Vekselberg is known for being in the possession of the world’s largest collection of Faberge Eggs.

A sample of the correspondence and mention of some US Intel heavy hitters:

A few hours after Barak informed Epstein of his Moscow plans, Epstein shared some intelligence about one of Putin’s interlocutors, the head of the Council of Europe: “on may 20 [thorbjorn] jagland is going to see putin in sochi, jagland asked that I make myself availble to meet with him sometine in june, to explain how russia can structure deals in order to encourage western investment, I never met him, wanted you to know.” Barak, who was working closely with Epstein to cut deals in the Eurasian energy sector, wrote back: “i know Jagland for long time. probably we have to talk about it.”

Epstein responded with a short list of past and present American national security leaders who, his response implied, could also be useful in Russia talks. He wrote, “Ok, panetta??, Alexander, Clarke?”—likely referring to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, NSA Director Keith Alexander, and Cybersecurity Czar Richard Clarke.

Upon his return from Moscow, Barak contacted George Tenet, former director of the CIA, to pitch a talk he (Barak) could give at Allen & Company’s Sun Valley event in July—a “summer camp” for billionaires and elite politicians to convene and negotiate deals. The topic? “Think of Syria, CW. (+background of Iran’s elections & nuke program, Global Terror, North Korea etc). Probably briefing for selected group.” Barak was not recorded on the guest list.

In the meantime, Epstein and Barak crafted an op-ed for Barak to publish that could shape the narrative for a Russian-led transition in Syria that secured Israel’s interests.

Iran:

Two months after the St. Petersburg conference, on August 21, 2013, opposition-controlled areas in Ghouta, Syria were struck by rockets containing sarin gas, killing and injuring thousands in the suburbs of Damascus. Ten days later, President Obama delivered a speech at the Rose Garden of the White House, announcing he’d seek congressional authorization for U.S. strikes on Syria, enforcing the “red line” he had drawn exactly one year prior.

Epstein emailed Barak as soon as news of Obama’s speech broke, on August 31, to propose publishing his shelved Syria narrative: “Time to write the wait ‘until too late’ op Ed ???” Barak responded, solemnly: “[U.S. strikes] might be launched before the op ed will be accepted by any major paper.” Epstein disagreed, suggesting any action would likely occur after the G20 summit on September 5, and Congress’s return the week after: “it will be at minmumm a week or two not before g20.” An hour later, Barak agreed: “After listening to POTUS speech, You’re probably right.”

In the same email thread, Epstein offered Barak guidance on how to ratchet the pressure on the U.S. to strike Iran: “I would use the opportunity to compare it with iran. The solutions become more compelx with time not less. i think many people would like your views on egypt. syria, etc. russias role.? i think you might point out the gassing of ‘women and children’ is an expressions from the 20th centry. women are no longer equiv to children,. civilians. vs combatants . only.”

Epstein was no bullshit artist:

Epstein was not merely a fixer for Barak, but also a friend and advisor, who collaborated with him at high-levels to promote Israeli security interests. The correspondence between Barak and Epstein, as well as publicly released information about Epstein’s travel and activities during this period, point to a significant degree of collaboration between the two men, involving numerous governments in negotiations intended to serve Israeli security interests. In a note sent by Barak to Epstein after the St. Petersburg forum in 2015, he rattled off a long list of heads of state, senior officials, and business magnates he had met, reporting “great meetings” with all.

Around the same time, Epstein was known to have conducted meetings with several Obama administration officials, including former U.S. ambassador to Russia, and later CIA chief William Burns, as well as Obama White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler. While shedding light on his efforts with Barak to secure Israeli interests in Syria, the emails leave open the question of other interactions that Epstein may have engaged in with U.S. and other government officials.

A fascinating peek behind the curtains, and only the tip of the iceberg…at least I think so.

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The horrible thing about liberal democracy is that you have to face the voters every few years or so. This mean that short-term results are rewarded, and long-term policy is punished if it doesn’t yield immediate positive results. I’ve defended the Trump admin’s quest to use tariffs to reorder and restructure the economy, even if it is being done in a clumsy and cumbersome manner. Economic globalism is no longer working for America and for Americans, and moving towards bilateral deals is the only avenue of approach permitted to the White House in the US system of governance. Lastly, one of the reasons he was voted into office was to detonate globalism in order to reshore jobs and re-industrialize the USA (very early days, admittedly).

It is also quite clear now that the tariff approach was meant to isolate China and cut it down to size. From what we know now, that has not happened. China is in a much stronger position globally than many thought, especially in light of its dominant position in rare earth minerals. This was the key leverage that Beijing held over the USA, and is what secured the agreement last week between Biden and Xi to work on an overall trade deal between these two giants. Think of it as an economic detente between two competing, yet very intertwined, superpowers.

Here’s a decent summary that focuses on the big picture of the tentative deal:

Both leaders will be happy at the outcomes from this meeting. Donald Trump is famously transactional in his approach to foreign policy, and he comes away from the meeting able to trumpet a “win” for the US.

China will be buying American soybeans, Xi has promised to help deal with the fentanyl issue and his threat to restrict China’s exports of the all-important rare earth minerals will not come into force for 12 months, at least.

However, it’s important to note that there was no agreement from China to relax restrictions it imposed in April on exports of some critical minerals. Xi will want to prevent the US from building stockpiles of some key rare earth elements.

As you might have read in the random commentary from this past Wednesday, rare earths are considered a major reason why Trump is not as publicly antagonistic towards Russia as he is towards others. They are a big deal.

Detente and a short term political win (maybe):

Restoring some trade between the two countries will also help ease the strain on US consumers. They are currently having to shoulder higher prices for everyday items, caused by the tariffs. Given that Trump pledged to bring down prices in his presidential campaign, he may be able to frame this as a political victory with American voters.

China will benefit from lower US tariffs on many of its exports and Trump will suspend plans to expand trade restrictions to companies on what is known as the “entity list.” This is something China has been pushing for as it affects many of its companies. But of course, as we know, all of this could easily change.

China has a longer-term vision, which its one-party system permits:

China’s analysis stressed that this was all at one with the country’s long-term strategy, developed “from generation to generation.” It spoke in terms of a broad sweep of development: “Our focus has always been on managing China’s own affairs well, improving ourselves and sharing development opportunities with all countries across the world.”

Tech is still a touchy area:

Tech issues will undoubtedly continue to cause tensions between Beijing and Washington. The US currently blocks Chinese access to much of the advanced tech that Beijing needs to fulfil its desire to become the world’s leader in AI.

And, despite Trump’s suggestion that he and Xi discussed China purchasing some chips from US firms, Chinese access to such advanced tech looks like it will remain heavily restricted.

Trump has said that any trade deal with China will not involve the export of Blackwell, the most advanced AI chip produced by US firm Nvidia. US lawmakers have previously raised concerns about allowing China to obtain the chip, suggesting it could bolster China’s AI industry and weaken the US’s tech edge.

Notable is what was absent from the meeting:

Taiwan doesn’t appear to have been on the agenda, from what both sides have said. Taiwan’s president, Lai Ching-te, took the opportunity of hosting delegates from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobby group this week.

He talked about nurturing “closer Taiwan-US-Israel cooperation on security, trade and beyond, promoting peace across the Taiwan Strait.” But it’s far from clear that this is at the front of Trump’s mind.

Before the trip, it was reported that Trump’s advisers had been concerned that the US president might come away from the meeting with Xi having in some way changed the language over China’s relationship with Taiwan.

There has also been talk in recent months that the US position might shift from “not supporting” Taiwanese independence to “opposing it”. However, when he was asked about this after his meeting with Xi, the US president said they hadn’t discussed it.

Human rights, on the agenda at just about every meeting between a US president and a Chinese leader for as long as anyone can remember, appears not to have featured in the two men’s discussion, either.

It wasn’t that long ago that the EU sent a trade mission to China with a strategy based around lecturing Beijing on human rights. Might this signal the end of western moralizing towards the Orient?

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One of the major themes of this Substack is that the term “liberal democracy” is never properly defined by its stewards. It is a constantly-shifting set of desired results that have long ago veered from the original intent. So far has it veered that even the concept of choice is often out-of-bounds. Almost everyone will run afoul of this very day’s definition, meaning that almost everyone is an authoritarian, fascist….or even a Nazi!

The West has for decades been governed by a liberal consensus; liberal politics and liberal (or as the kids call it, “neo-liberal”) economics. Every so often an opponent might pop up to question this consensus, but the full apparatus of the state will come down hard on them. No deviation is permitted. Sure, you have your social-democratic parties in Europe, your Republicans in the USA, etc. but they all are liberal parties in the end. The only notable differences are in the margins.

Sure, Trump may be an exception to this rule….after all, he did win in 2016 running on Pat Buchanan’s 1992 platform during the GOP nomination process. This only proves that even so-called conservatives (such as the GOP leadership mainstream) were long ago co-opted by the floating signifier known as “liberal democracy”.

It wasn’t always this way. In the olden days (30+ years ago), paleo-cons were an actual thing in the USA. They argued in favour of a nationally homogenous polity with limited government and minimal intervention in foreign conflicts. These paleo-cons were purged from the mainstream of the US right by neo-conservatives and their allies, first and foremost William F. Buckley. Trump 2016 was a long overdue rebellion to this purge.

Paul Gottfried has been writing on the subject of the transformation of American conservatism for decades now, and a collection of his essays was published recently by Passage Publishing. Here’s a very-well written review:

The central malady, the thread that runs through these four decades of essays, is the rise of what Gottfried calls, following James Burnham, the managerial state. The old bourgeois nation-state, with its defined borders, limited government, and specific cultural inheritance, has been supplanted. In its place stands a new leviathan, a regime of administrators, social scientists, media gatekeepers, and corporate partners who govern not by consent but by imagined expertise. This new type of regime is a postliberal creation, retaining the vocabulary of democracy but redefining it as a set of outcomes, including equality, diversity, health, and safety, to be engineered by a credentialed elite. Democracy is no longer self-government but indoctrination.

A regime of this nature requires a new language, or rather a corruption of the old one. Words must be unmoored from their historical meanings to serve the present. Gottfried’s most sustained analysis of this process centers on the word “fascism.” In the hands of the managerial class and its media adjuncts, “fascism” has been transformed from a specific, interwar European phenomenon of militant nationalism into a floating signifier of ultimate evil. The word has become code for the threat of genocide that forever emanates from unapproved attitudes.

This is very interesting:

The utility of such a maneuver is plain. The therapeutic state requires a perpetual patient, a society riddled with pathologies that only its expert class can cure. The ever-present, ever-expanding specter of “fascism” serves as the ultimate justification for endless intervention. Fascism has become 1984’s Goldstein for our time: an imaginary, shape-shifting threat whose supposed recurrence mobilizes the faithful and keeps whatever remains of an opposition fearful and subdued. Anyone who resists the progressive agenda, be it on immigration, gender ideology, or the centralization of power, can be branded with the scarlet F. The label’s historical incoherence is not a bug but a feature. It is a tool of power, not of analysis. That opponents of EU centralization are called Nazis, even though the actual Nazis were bent on continental conquest, is an irony lost on the accusers. The words are not meant to describe but to batter.

It’s not limited to the left, either:

This linguistic decay is not entirely a leftist phenomenon. A core contention of the paleoconservative critique, one that Gottfried makes with acid precision, is that the mainstream American right was a willing, if not always conscious, accomplice. He charts the rise of the neoconservatives in the 1970s and 1980s not as a revitalization of conservatism but as a hostile takeover. These figures, many of them ex-Trotskyists and disenchanted liberal Democrats, did not emerge from any recognizable American conservative tradition. They were merely less extreme liberals, comfortable with the New Deal welfare state and animated by a Wilsonian zeal for exporting democracy abroad.

What they created was not an opposition but a pseudo-opposition, a controlled sparring partner for the left that shared all of its foundational premises. The neoconservative-led right, Gottfried argues, became a movement of gatekeepers, policing its own ranks for any deviation from the new consensus, eagerly purging those who questioned their new orthodoxies on immigration, foreign policy, or the civil rights revolution. Neoconservatives offered a choice between a left that demanded radical change today and a conservative movement that promised to manage that same change more prudently tomorrow. They conserved almost nothing. Instead, they became a moderate wing of the managerial state that a genuine right would be expected to oppose. One begins to understand populist rage against a “uniparty” not as paranoia but as a raw, untutored recognition of the scene Gottfried has been describing for forty years.

Abdication of the old elites in a fit of self-flagellation:

Gottfried argues that the politics of guilt finds its most fertile soil in the post-Protestant mind, where the habit of intense, inward-looking moral inventory persists long after its theological framework has collapsed. The Protestant conscience, once tormented by the state of its soul before God, is now tormented by its standing before the commissars of sensitivity. It is a faith turned inward on itself, a culture of repentance without the possibility of grace.

…..

This sense is the engine that powers the therapeutic regime and explains the otherwise inexplicable spectacle of a civilization actively dismantling its own heritage. The historic WASP elite, in Gottfried’s telling, did not inadvertently lose power but rejected it in a fit of moral anxiety, becoming the loudest critic of its own ancestors. Gottfried recounts meeting Yale patricians in the 1960s engaged in “pompous self-debasement,” a ruling class that “destroyed itself.” This moral disarmament provides the justification for policies, from open borders to affirmative action, that are motivated not as prudential choices but as acts of penance.

Gottfried is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand recent US political history of the right wing.

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I am running short of time today (apologies), so I will just provide a link and one excerpt to this fascinating essay on why Pittsburgh has managed to escape post-industrial collapse, unlike nearby city of Cleveland:

In December 1979, a perfect storm of global competition, outmoded factories, and recession slammed into America’s industrial heartland. US Steel, for a century the jewel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s crown, shuttered 15 plants. Seemingly overnight, the 27,000 steel mill jobs across the city’s Monongahela Valley vanished with them. By 1980, one-in-five Pittsburghers was jobless, and they weren’t alone. In 1950, the industrial Midwest, a seven-state region stretching from Appalachia to Wisconsin, was home to 43% of all American jobs. Starting in the Seventies, steel shed 350,000 jobs, carmakers 500,000; 1.2 million blue-collar jobs disappeared, and Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, Pittsburgh lost nearly half of their populations.

The “Steel City” of the Thirties forged the Empire State Building and Golden Gate Bridge. But by the Eighties, Pittsburgh’s once-tidy working-class neighbourhoods were shooting-dens of bullets and heroin. Prostitutes walked the streets. Patrons queued outside bars at 10 in the morning. “I was watching my city die,” Peduto says again. “I mean, right before my eyes.” But family is family, and Peduto, a big man with a booming voice, saved his kin and kiln. The longtime councilman and city mayor from 2014 to 2022, he engineered America’s gold standard in urban revitalisation, with Pittsburgh now widely regarded as the country’s “most liveable city”.

Pittsburgh now teems with the creative types who drive startups and young firms. Nearly half of local Zoomers hold college degrees. Their ingenuity pushed city GDP from $79 billion in 2012 to $109 billion by 2021, a 37% jump. On a warm autumn evening, I walk the streets of downtown and can almost taste the wealth. Forty-somethings crowd the August Wilson theatre. Twenty-somethings sip cocktails in the dusk. The Steel City is now the Smart City, a centre of new tech boasting three billion-dollar AI firms. Pittsburgh’s legacy companies have come back too: the gleaming offices of Heinz, PPG and even US Steel dominate what locals call the “Golden Triangle” of the downtown, squeezed into the spit of land where the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio rivers all meet. The rivers mean bridges, 446 of them, many of which are painted black and gold: in Pittsburgh, even the infrastructure roots for hometown teams.

Through all this, Pittsburgh hasn’t become some bougie theme park. Instead, it is the most affordable city across the US, Australia, Canada, and the UK. That, of course, still leaves one more question: how did Peduto’s dead city come roaring back to life? For Ken Heineman, the answer starts with history. As far back as the 19th century, explains the author of a book on the city, Pittsburgh’s early industrialists lent a “special flavour” to the local elite. Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon, Scots-Irish Presbyterians both, practised a civic stewardship that defined the Pittsburgh’s establishment, a code that meshed with the social responsibility of the Catholic working class. Pursuit of the common good became the steel running down the city’s spine, creating social cohesion — and, if you like, a Pittsburgh family.

Click here to read the rest.

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We end this weekend’s SCR with a report on how DNA research discovered an ancient population located in Central Argentina that persisted for almost 10,000 years!

The researchers worked with archaeologists, bioanthropologists, and museum curators in Argentina to identify human remains in their collections that might yield analyzable DNA. After sequencing genetic material from 238 people who lived in the region over the past 10,000 years, researchers were surprised to find a previously unknown lineage. “This is a big part of the history of the continent that we didn’t know about,” says study co-author Javier Maravall-López, a Harvard University geneticist.

The ancient genomes, combined with archaeological evidence from the region, suggest that despite experiencing cultural upheaval, bouts of technological innovation, and severe environmental stress, the newly revealed lineage mixed with people from elsewhere in South America only at the region’s edges. It’s unclear why this group mostly kept to itself: There are no major natural features that would have prevented migrations into or out of the area from the Amazon to the north or Patagonia to the south. “It’s not like there are huge biogeographic barriers,” Barberena says. “The [area] is basically a huge plain.”

Despite its relative genetic isolation, the lineage was remarkably resilient. The geneticists found that many modern Argentinians share some ancestry with members of this population who died over the past 8500 years. A profoundly dry spell in the area between 6000 and 4000 years ago had no measurable impact on the population, either.

The pattern here differs from what researchers have found in Europe, Asia, and Africa, where shifts in lifestyle and language often happen alongside genetic change. In Europe, for example, ancient DNA studies have shown that farming arrived and spread across the continent together with an entirely new group of people.

The ancient Argentine population, however, didn’t intermingle much with other South American groups, even as archaeological evidence suggests its people started growing crops on a small scale about 1500 years ago. That continuity suggests people there stayed put while adopting new ways of life.

I love these stories. Click here to read the rest.

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Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

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Please hit the like and re-stack buttons at the top of the page as this helps my writing get more visibility. Thank you.

When I was a young boy, I used to really enjoy hearing things about “the old days” from older people that I knew. It allowed me to gain a better understanding of where we were (or where at least I was) at the point in time, and why certain older people were the way they were. Resistance to change is natural, but change is inevitable.

Big societal changes appear to come in subtly and gradually when you are younger, to the point of barely noticing them at all until they are hardcoded into your daily existence. When you reach a point in middle age, change appears more abruptly…if you’re paying attention. Our modern western cultures have for decades been centered around youth as the driver of changes in cultural trends. If you’re young, new things come naturally to you. When you’re in your 30s and early 40s, these same new things might appear a bit different, but not too foreign to get a quick grasp on. By the time you hit 50, you begin to look at the youth as somewhat alien…at least to you.

Online dating popped up on the scene when I was still a participant in that market, but I could never take part in it myself. It felt too cold, too commercial, too meat marketish. Where was the spark in e-dating? The subtly? The seduction? I couldn’t wrap my mind around it and never dipped a toe in that pool. I made a conscious decision to distance myself from “The New” because I was content with what was already available. Friends of mine used it regularly, but it was simply not for me. This was probably my first step into the world of being “old”. A fissure appeared where a gap is now present, one that will become a chasm as I get older.

I am Gen X, which means that a whole generation separates me from Gen Z, the youth generation of today. Gen Z grew up in a world that was networked to the hilt, where everything was already on the internet, and where the “meatspace” had already begun to lose its central role in human socialization. This is a generation that has grown up facing electronic screens, to the point where eye contact is in retreat when Gen Zers actually do encounter real humans in person. Their understanding of media, and more importantly, media consumption, is very different than mine. I like to make the joke (and it’s not really a joke as it has happened to me several times) that if you ask someone from Gen Z to explain something to you in a simple fashion, they won’t respond with a one or two line description, but will instead send you a link to a 4 hour podcast that kinda-sorta touches on the subject. Gen Z is the first truly online generation.

This also goes beyond the consumption of media, as it also floods into personal relationships. It is quite common for young people these days to have very few friends IRL (in real life), preferring those that they meet online in shared spaces. This goes wayyyy beyond e-dating. We are dealing with a generation of people for whom socialization has been almost entirely virtual, and whose friends circles are also quite often wholly online. The old rules of friendship and romance have changed, and they have changed significantly to the point where they appear very foreign to us “olds”.

One of the most dramatic changes has been young people’s relationship to sex. Sexual relations have not been a constant throughout history, as the Sexual Revolution upended much of what was in place for eons already, but unlike the newest changes, that revolution still involved actual people sharing a physical space. Now, being in the same room is no longer a prerequisite, as the massive world of online pornography has situated itself as a competitor to traditional (and newer) sexual relations. In many cases, the individual feels that he or she (and it’s almost always a “he”) no longer requires another actual human to satisfy their sexual needs. The individual consumerbot now reigns supreme.

The reason for all the nonsense that you just read is that Harper’s has published one of the best essays of the year to date: “The Goon Squad”. This is a new, online culture that is completely foreign to me, but one that makes perfect sense in light of the transformation of society thanks to rapid growth in electronic communication since the World Wide Web arrived on scene over 30 years ago. You’re going to learn a lot, and much of it is not pleasant….but this essay is very informative, making it worthy to share with you:

Gooning is a new kind of masturbation. More precisely, a new kind of masturbation at the heart of an internet-based, pornography-obsessed, Gen Z–dominated subculture every bit as defined and vibrant as the hippies or punks in their prime. The act itself resembles “edging”—repeatedly bringing oneself to the point of climax without actually climaxing. But gooning is more goal-oriented and more communal. The gooner goons to reach the “goonstate”: a supposed zone of total ego death or bliss that some liken to advanced meditation, the attainment of which compels them to masturbate for hours, or even days, at a time.

Gooners goon. I’m sorry that you had to learn this.

The gooners first came to limited public attention by way of their “gooncaves”: rooms remodeled in the service of porn consumption. You’d think a person, having just built a gooncave, would take every possible measure to conceal its existence, would bulk-purchase padlocks, price high-end CCTV systems, craft detailed alibis for every hour, every minute spent alone, and would still, after all that, bolt awake in the middle of the night, heart pounding at the fear of discovery. Instead, the gooners bragged about them. They posted photos of their gooncaves to Reddit. And these photos, which circulated through the young-to-youngish internet as early as 2021, were astonishing. One of course noticed the screens, sometimes three or four of them, sometimes upwards of a dozen, each lit up with porn, but one especially noticed the gooners’ own erect penises, foregrounded in the frame like waggish thumbs-ups. These were porn shrines. In hindsight, they were also leading indicators of some of the very serious psychological damage the lockdowns had wrought on the world. Those early-COVID images of depopulated city streets—these were their precise corollary. They showed you where the people went. Or where at least some of them did, likely the ones who were not exactly models of stability and robust mental health to begin with. Even so, it seemed beyond dispute that sixty years ago some of these gooners would have been fathers. Small-business owners. Dependable men in hats riding slow commuter trains, their mindscapes perfumed with thoughts of stocks, bonds, lawn care. Well, what could you do? Certain social systems had failed, certain historical trend lines had converged, and now we had these guys to deal with.

These are young men who have checked out of the dating pool, pairing nicely with the young men who have removed themselves permanently from employment.

Rapid technological change birthing a new culture:

But the gooners’ rise does, in retrospect, possess a certain inevitability. Anyone paying attention to online porn’s evolution over the preceding twenty years could sense, in its brain-melting variety and abundance, the blueprint for a new kind of person, a new relationship to human sexuality. In my own lifetime, I have seen incredible advances in the world of pornography. When I was a boy, there were still porn magazines; fathers hid them on high shelves. You stood on stools and gawked at them in a state of mortal terror. But by the time I started college, in the late Aughts, the foundations of our present porn environment were firmly established. Widespread broadband internet had enabled the rise of the so-called tube sites: platforms like Pornhub, which streamed untold numbers of clips free of charge. Then came the smartphones, transforming every toilet stall into a potential porn theater. The very air, suddenly, was misted with pornography.

In this earlier stage, if you wanted to watch porn, you still had to actively seek it out. That has since changed.

Vice has never been more available than it is today. Think about the rise of sports gambling, for example.

The author of this essay threw himself head first into the Goonverse:

So where were the gooners? A few seconds’ research revealed their home base: Discord, a social messaging platform not unlike Slack, offering a multiverse of chat-room servers accessible by invitation. If Instagram was where millennials went to post infographics about racial disparities in income and policing, Discord was where zoomers went to swap the screeds of lesser-known school shooters. Or to talk about gaming. Or whatever zoomers did. This was supposedly where the online youth were headed: away from their parents’ social platforms into private, self-policed spaces, little islands of affinity. I joined the first relevant server I could find: the GoonVerse, which had more than fifty thousand members. I examined the rules, which were at once surprisingly woke (no hate speech, no misgendering) and strict enough regarding the posting of child pornography as to suggest a serious and recurrent problem. Before entering, I was prompted to choose my “roles.” Age, region, and gender I could make sense of, but things grew confusing from there. Did I want to be “pinged for tournaments”? Was I a “hentai wankbattler,” or merely a “regular wankbattler”? These questions I answered at random, and then I entered the “stream room.”

Picture this: you work for a masturbation factory in hell. You log on to your scheduled workplace Zoom call. What do you see? You see what I saw in the GoonVerse. There was, inescapably, the porn itself, which occupied most of the screen, a hyperkinetic montage of tremendous penises barreling into and out of Japanese cartoon heroines, crudely rendered CGI horse-women, and actual female porn stars. Then, of course, there were the gooners, arrayed side by side in boxes at the bottom of the screen, their heads obscured—cut off by their cameras at the neck—and their hands in frantic motion. Primitive fears from childhood surfaced in an inchoate rush: a gigantic omnivorous worm I once saw in a movie on TV; the uncontrolled swarm of color that consumed the screen whenever my family’s PC crashed, suggesting something organic and harm-intending in what was supposed to be just a machine. One of the guys in the stream room was masturbating on the toilet. One of them looked like he was masturbating in jail.

He also created a questionnaire to learn about this culture:

For one thing, and crucially: most gooners do not regularly masturbate for eight to twelve hours at a stretch, as I’d initially been led to believe. They tend to do that only a few times a month, the rest of the time masturbating for—and I really did try to calculate this—an average of two or three hours a day. In other words, the goonstate, so central to the subculture’s branding and self-conception, is only rarely attained. (A sizable minority of respondents claimed never to have reached it, although none doubted its existence.) Like runner’s high, or epiphany in prayer, the goonstate is not the point of the practice, but rather its occasional and unbidden reward. You’ll never get there if you don’t put in the work. As for what “there” refers to—what the goonstate actually feels like—a sampling from the Questionnaire should get the point across:

It’s like being high while high

Intense bliss pure happiness and love

It’s so beautiful! It’s sublime. Like being washed away.

It’s like I’m in antigravity or covered in liquid. tingles all over me, brain fuzzy, skin tingling all over. No fears about cumming, because this was the real pleasure I was after, and I couldn’t cum at that point if I wanted to anyway.

What is immediately noticeable here is both the sheer amount of time spent “gooning”, and how alienated they are from real life.

What you hardly need an amateur goonthropologist to tell you—and what the Questionnaire amply bears out—is that this phenomenon in its full sweep can be traced at least partially to the fact that, in the span of about five years earlier this century, virtually every child in the developed world was granted instant, unrestricted access not merely to hardcore pornography but to some of the most extreme examples of it ever produced in human history. Many respondents have been regular porn viewers since the fourth grade; few were older than twelve when they picked up the habit. And they were watching some serious stuff. Stuff that, in earlier eras, you’d need to go out of your way to find—stuff that you could only get your hands on with the help of a middleman.

On a near-daily basis over the past decade, opinion columnists have fretted over this state of affairs, primarily over how all of this porn—a fair share of it violent and explicitly misogynist—was affecting the sexual behavior of young men in real life. What they apparently hadn’t considered was that the porn alone might be enough, that at sufficient speed and in sufficient quantity it could function as a workable substitute for life itself. This was certainly true for some before the pandemic, but the lockdowns appear to have disastrously accelerated this particular outcome in younger members of Gen Z. I’d been surprised at first to find that out of 107 respondents, 47 claimed to be sexually active in some capacity—roughly 47 more than I’d expected. But a quick crunch of the numbers set things straight. Median age of the sexually active gooner: twenty-seven. Median age of the non–sexually active gooner: twenty-three—i.e., someone in high school or college when the lockdowns began. It was this latter group that, in the Questionnaire, was likeliest to identify not merely as a gooner but also as a “pornosexual.”

This culture is even deeper than at first and second glance. Click here to read this great essay in its entirety.

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The safe assumption on February 24, 2022 was that the Russian Army would race against time to prevent an economic collapse brought on by western sanctions targeting its various industries and banking sector. Who could have predicted that the Russian economy would prove to be so resilient, and that the Russian Armed Forces would underperform?

Russia spent an entire decade building up a war chest and “sanctions-proofing” their own economy to the best of its ability in the run up to the war. Conducting very little direct trade with the USA certainly helped them in their efforts. Up to the time that this article was published (October 12th of this year), the Russian economy was slightly bruised by sanctions, but was still humming along relatively well, especially when compared to those in the neighbouring EU. Since then, a new round of sanctions have been unveiled, one that might have some actual teeth (to be determined).

Here’s a helpful analysis of the sanctions regime up until this latest round:

Since 2014, Western nations have hit Russia with a total of 26,655 sanctions (to mid-September 2025), with 23,960 coming after February 2022. The largest target group, with 13,611 sanctions, is state officials, business owners, and well-known public figures. The declared intention of sanctions was to force the Kremlin to alter its geopolitical course, i.e. to quickly withdraw from Ukraine, by causing a shock crisis in the economy and creating a backlash by prominent businesspersons and the public against the Kremlin.

The economy did suffer from disruption in 2022 (-1.2%), but growth returned in 2023 (+4.1%) and in 2024 (+4.3%). The economy also received a huge boost to income in 2022-23, as the EU was not ready for sanctions and was forced to stockpile Russian oil and other materials. The external trade and current accounts have remained comfortably in surplus since 2022.

The first miscalculation:

As mentioned, over 13,000 of the sanctions have been directed at individuals, especially Russian billionaires and business owners. The assumption being that these individuals would increase pressure on the Kremlin to withdraw from Ukraine to alleviate pressure on their businesses and to recover their wealth from sanctions orders. But here is where there is a lack of understanding about how Russia has changed since 2000. billionaires do not have political influence in Putin’s Russia and, as such, cannot be properly referred to as Oligarchs, i.e. as originally defined in ancient Greece. So, while these individuals were targeted by sanctions intended to pressure the government, they hold little to no political influence, and the measures have therefore failed to bring about any meaningful change in state policy - and nor will they.

Mikhail Fridman (one of the original 7 oligarchs and one of those who has retained his businesses and wealth) of Alfa Group had to explain the above fact to the British when prompted by the Financial Times.

Repatriated wealth of Russia’s billionaire class:

Moreover, while some assets – modest volume - belonging to the business elite have been frozen under Western sanctions, the bulk of their wealth remains in Russia or in so-called friendly jurisdictions. This is largely because, in the face of an increasingly unpredictable external environment – where sanctions were often imposed based solely on high net worth – many saw no viable option other than to redomicile their wealth and business interests to Russia or allied countries. And they had plenty of notice to do so since sanctions against Russia started quite meekly from spring 2014.

The 2025 Forbes billionaire Report showed that there are now 146 billionaires in Russia, up 21 from 2024 and with 15 new names appearing. The combined wealth of the billionaires is assessed at $625.6bn, a record high for Russia. Most of that wealth is now in Russia or in so-called friendly jurisdictions and has helped create a strong financial base in the country. This is one of the reasons why the government is now able to switch from financing the federal budget deficit from the National Welfare Fund, Russia’s Sovereign Wealth Fund, to tapping into the local debt market. With state debt at only 16% of GDP, the Finance Ministry has considerable scope to borrow and still keep Russia as a low indebted country.

Instead of staging a revolt, some of the sanctioned businesspersons have adapted to the new environment and have refocused their repatriated wealth on bolstering Russia’s domestic economy. Others have pursued investments or private activities outside the West, particularly in countries “friendly” to Russia. In essence, rather than weakening the Russian state, the sanctions inadvertently reinforced it by redirecting wealth and investment into the domestic market, while also simultaneously pushing away many of the pro-Western businesspeople who were essentially punished because of their nationality. Had policymakers heeded the advice of several prominent voices in the west to not sanction Russian billionaires but to make it easier for them to settle in the west and to bring the bulk of their wealth with them, it would probably be a different story in Russia today.

The sanctions regime alienated this class, resulting in massive injections of wealth at home.

Foreign companies (those that stayed) are still doing a brisk business in Russia:

Also, in terms of foreign businesses in Russia, while some left, many chose to stay, either directly or indirectly by selling their operations to local investors or changing their business models. Around 46% of the largest foreign companies operating in Russia in early 2022, sold their businesses to local investors, ensuring operations continued, providing goods and services, employment and taxes and bolstering overall GDP. Ironically, many foreign companies still operating in Russia are often finding themselves in a favorable position. With many Russian founded companies now sanctioned, foreign firms, or those which have evolved from a formerly foreign owned business, are emerging as key players in several sectors, often enjoying a competitive advantage. This has created another unintended consequence in that, according to a recent calculation published by the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) foreign companies are now contributing significantly to the Russian federal budget, paying taxes in excess of $20bn last year, but remain outside of Western sanctions lists.

Not bad!

What remains to be seen is if Russia’s economy can withstand this next wave of sanctions targeting its oil and gas sectors.

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The USA wants Europe to take the lead on countering Russia in Ukraine, via purchasing US weapons to send to Kiev. It also wants to dictate to Europe how to trade with the Chinese. What the USA is seeking from Europe is its total obedience to the point where the continent is reduced to little more than an American protectorate. The question becomes: what does Europe get out of it?

That is a question that has no good answer at the moment beyond 1. access to US consumer and capital markets and 2. the US defense umbrella. Is it worth sacrificing your own sovereignty for these two points? Pretty much no one is asking this question.

At the same time, the bills for this “alliance” continue to pile up, and the latest is the Chinese squeeze on rare earth minerals that Europe needs for its industry, defense, and green transition:

BRUSSELS — As Beijing further weaponizes its control over the flow of minerals that Western countries need for their green, defense and digital ambitions, Europe has to face an uncomfortable truth: It won’t escape China’s dominance anytime soon.

The Chinese government’s shock imposition earlier in October of sweeping export controls on rare-earth magnets and the raw materials needed to make them has escalated a running trade feud with the United States. The embargo threatens vast — and rapid — collateral damage on the European Union and has forced its way onto the agenda of a high-level summit on Thursday.

“A crisis in the supply of critical raw materials is no longer a distant risk. It is on our doorstep,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a pre-summit speech to European lawmakers.

Fully aware of how dependent European industry is on China, European leaders still chose to go head-first in and lecture Beijing on “human rights” and its relations with Russia. This is part of the price for that misstep.

Oops:

The EU, which imports nearly all of its rare earths and permanent magnets from the Middle Kingdom, is caught in the crossfire.

“We have no interest in escalation,” Maroš Šefčovič, the EU’s trade chief, told reporters Tuesday. “However, this situation casts a shadow over our relationship. Therefore, a prompt resolution is essential.”

China and the EU will “intensify contacts at all levels” on the issue, Šefčovič added. Wang Wentao, the Chinese trade minister, has accepted an invitation to come to Brussels in the coming days to discuss the restrictions, Šefčovič said after a two-hour call between the two.

Chinese sector dominance:

Yet, behind the talk of adequate diplomatic responses and potential retaliation there is no escaping the dominance in rare earths that China has built up over decades. For now at least.

“In the short term there’s nothing you can do, except try and negotiate with the Chinese,” said Philip Andrews-Speed, senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.

Hit where it hurts

Beijing dominates the entire supply chain of rare earths — a group of 17 minerals used in permanent magnets found in everything from electric vehicles and wind turbines, to F-35 fighter jets and naval vessels. Under its new export controls, importers will need a government license to access not only those permanent magnets, but also the refined metals and alloys that go into them.

China already weaponized its leading position in producing and refining critical raw materials — and specifically rare-earth elements like scandium, yttrium and dysprosium — in response to Trump’s first wave of punitive tariffs back in April. Eventually, the White House caved in.

Collateral damage of US-China trade relations:

This time, again, the Chinese export controls are “a tit-for-tat for U.S. policy,” said a person from the Chinese business sector, granted anonymity to speak candidly.

The EU is being hit, too: “The effects are direct and enormous, particularly for the defence sector,” Tobias Gehrke and Janka Oertel of the European Council on Foreign Relations wrote in a commentary. “The EU defence industry risks grinding to a halt as inventory shortfalls could leave it struggling to produce and deliver enough weapons for the war in Ukraine.”

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China accounts for 61 percent of rare earths extraction and 92 percent of refining, according to the International Energy Agency. It provides nearly 99 percent of the EU’s supply of the 17 rare earths, as well as about 98 percent of its rare earth permanent magnets.

Global rare earth production

Estimated mine production of rare earth elements in China and the rest of the world, in metric tons of rare-earth-oxide equivalent.

The EU is now scrambling to figure out how to fix a problem that should have never occurred in the first place.

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“Blood and Soil for me and not for thee” is the latest trend in Canada. A new movement called “indigeneous identitarianism” is all the rage, one which describes non-natives of Canada as “settlers”, and therefore below the natives on the totem pole:

Without Diminishment

Adam Zivo: Racial hierarchies are gaining traction in Canada

Adam Zivo is a Canadian journalist and columnist…

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6 months ago · 27 likes · Without Diminishment Editor and Adam Zivo

It is increasingly fashionable in some progressive circles to label non-indigenous North Americans as “settlers,” mere guests on indigenous land. Who would have thought that blood-and-soil nationalism—the odious ideology that claims that only certain races belong to certain territories—would return, wrapped in the mantle of social justice?

This movement—call it “indigenous identitarianism”— is gaining traction across North America but has been especially influential in Canada. There, it has already begun to erode democratic decision-making in favor of race-based hierarchies. The world would do well to look to the great white north to see how this path, if followed, could shape their own political and civic life.

Indigenous identitarianism generally posits that North America’s non-indigenous residents should be considered second-class citizens, either legally or symbolically. It suggests that they continually express gratitude for the “opportunity” to live on a continent “owned” by indigenous peoples.

To illustrate: Deanne LeBlanc, an award-winning academic at the University of British Columbia, wrote in a 2021 issue of the Canadian Journal of Political Science that non-indigenous Canadians should “consider themselves ‘foreigners’ in need of invitation onto Indigenous lands,” even if their families have lived on this continent for several generations. Similarly, Kaitie Jourdeuil, an academic at Queen’s University, published a 2022 article in The Conversation arguing that indigenous peoples should be given the right to make and enforce laws over 89 percent of Canadian land. That would mean some degree of disenfranchisement for millions of people.

Progressives often justify these beliefs on the basis of tradition: if indigenous peoples have lived here for millennia, then this land is always theirs. Indigenous communities also allegedly have a special “spiritual” connection to the land—their religion grants them a supernatural right.

This is Canada, so anything is possible.

Click here to read this piece in its entirety.

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We end this weekend’s SCR with a story about how Australia has gone to war against science in the name of political correctness:

In March 2025, the Australian government quietly buried its last collection of Pleistocene human fossils in an unmarked grave. These remains were of Homo sapiens who had shared the Earth with Neanderthals. But they went into the ground with little media coverage or protest from the global scientific community, who knew better than anyone that these delicate, carefully reconstructed fossils would not last long in hostile conditions.

The significance of this loss is hard to overstate. Australia is a unique piece in the puzzle of human origins. It was colonized by modern humans before Europe, but it remained almost entirely isolated, preserving many aspects of human culture and genetics that vanished elsewhere. As Charles Darwin observed, “the Australian aborigines rank amongst the most distinct of all the races of man.”

Following the British settlement of Australia, museums and universities accumulated collections of both historical and ancient remains. Most material came from southeast Australia and Tasmania, where the once-numerous tribes had suffered enormous losses and even extinction. Today, these thousands of bones, mummies, and fossils have almost all been buried or cremated; genetic “biographies” that were burned before they were ever read.

Click here to read the rest.

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Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

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The idea that a state involved in war where up to 1/4 of its land mass is under foreign occupation needs to be perfectly democratic is naive, at best. Wartime generally calls for emergency measures that include rapid and centralized decision-making capabilities, because such wars are existential threats, and democracy is time-consuming.

It’s with this in mind that I find myself defending Vladimir Zelensky, albeit with my defense of his centralization of power having certain qualifications. Ideally, one should have a “government of national unity” in place under conditions such as the ones that Ukraine is experiencing at the moment. This gives such governments wide mandates to skip over certain democratic processes that would hamper a successful war effort. The problem with Ukraine is that the country is more of a collection of regional clan-based oligarchies than a unified state (although this war is helping what remains of the country into the latter).

The notion that Ukraine should hold free and fair elections nationwide while Russia continues to chip away at its borders is absurd. Parliamentary parties should agree on a compromise candidate for a wartime presidency (who could be Zelensky himself), and parliamentary elections should be held in regions safe enough and far enough from Russian forces. Those regions closer to the front should have party distribution numbers frozen until either a ceasefire is in place or the Russians are pushed out (the former is much more realistic).

Democracy is a luxury in times of war, and I believe that the following report (written by a pro-Kiev and anto-Russian hawk) has certain hidden agendas that can be teased out with a proper reading:

At a closed-door parliamentary meeting last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy didn’t disguise his indignation with domestic critics.

According to a pair of attending lawmakers — who spoke with POLITICO on condition of anonymity for fear of inviting presidential wrath — the Ukrainian leader vented his frustrations to his own Servant of the People party, bemoaning members of parliament, civil society activists and journalists for failing to promote an unwaveringly flattering image of Ukraine to Western partners.

I find myself siding with Zelensky again here as image is everything in modern diplomacy, and Ukraine needs to display a united front to its sponsors and so-called Allies, lest the enthusiasm for their cause dissipate even further.

A revolt from inside the party ranks?

Truth is, there have been growing qualms and grumbles within party ranks about Zelenskyy’s highly personalized method of rule and his tendency to be dismissive of parliament — plus, the move against the anti-corruption agencies still rankles some of his own lawmakers.

The President’s Office had ordered party lawmakers, many of whom were reluctant, to back the legislation subordinating the agencies to the politically appointed prosecutor general. But within a day of signing the law, Zelenskyy was forced to back down in the face of protests and European warnings about democratic backsliding. His aides then sought to shift blame to them for the whole fiasco — not an uncommon tactic when policies pushed by the President’s Office prove unpopular, they complain.

The whole episode left many lawmakers questioning how Zelenskyy and his advisers failed to anticipate such a ferocious public reaction in the first place. Opinion polls have consistently shown that even in wartime, Ukrainians rank corruption as the country’s main domestic problem.

War profiteering in Ukraine is so brazen that it cannot be denied, and is taken as absolutely normal behaviour. After all, if the Americans won’t put a stop to it, how could ordinary Ukrainians even think of trying to do so all by themselves?

Defending Zelensky, and comparing Ukraine to WW2 UK:

His defenders, however, are dismissive of the complaints, saying war requires a firm, decisive hand. Or, as Zelenskyy’s powerful Chief of Staff Andriy Yermak told POLITICO earlier this year: “Especially during wartime, decisions must be made quickly and clearly.” Presidential aides also point out their boss enjoys high favorability in opinion polls.

They do have a point — and even many critics agree that the clamor and messiness of democracy shouldn’t be allowed to imperil the country as it fights an existential war. But they also stress that other wartime leaders took a markedly different approach — notably Britain’s Winston Churchill, who was keen to harness the country’s best, brightest and most capable from across the political spectrum to fill the ranks of wartime bureaucracy.

WW2 UK was a much more united polity than today’s Ukraine (or even today’s UK), and the Brits managed to fend off the Luftwaffe and not see an inch of their mainland occupied besides the Channel Islands (not sure how many of them). I do not think it fair to compare the two.

“Private concerns”:

While reticent to issue any public criticism for fear of handing Moscow a propaganda opening, according to three European envoys based in Kyiv who asked not to be identified for this article, Western allies have privately raised concerns. And some of the lawmakers in Zelenskyy’s party are also questioning recent developments— which have included firing elected mayors and exerting pressure on state agencies meant to be independent.

Even before the war, the government was impatient with parliamentary oversight. Now, having virtually abandoned the routine of ministers being questioned by parliament committees, it’s being shunned almost entirely. Noticeably, the presidential administration has also increasingly struggled to muster the votes it needs to approve favored legislation, partly because ruling lawmakers are growing frustrated with pressure to kowtow to the President’s Office and are worried they’ll be blamed by their constituents when things go wrong.

This unease predates the attempt to eviscerate the anti-corruption agencies. And a string of purges of more independent-minded ministers and government officials have prompted behind-the-scenes disquiet too. Recent government reshuffles have seen the forced departures of notable figures such as Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba, the head of Ukraine’s national power transmission network Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, and the highly popular armed forces commander General Valery Zaluzhny — now Ukraine’s ambassador to Britain — who clashed with Zelenskyy over war strategy.

I think that much of the western dissatisfaction can be chalked up to two things:

1. Zelensky’s unwillingness to budge on certain negotiating points

2. an unwillingness to sell off even more state jewels for pennies on the dollar

So much of Ukraine’s natural wealth has already been sold off that local oligarchs and their allies are now haggling with Kiev’s sponsors for what’s left to sell.

more:

Displaying unusually autonomous behavior, and in what many viewed as implied criticism of Zelenskyy, Servant of the People lawmaker and Chairman of Ukraine’s parliament Ruslan Stefanchuk subsequently issued a statement saying Ukraine needed to repair relations with Trump quickly — hence the expectation that the Ukrainian leader would seek to reassure and appease his party in last week’s meeting.

But the two lawmakers who spoke to POLITICO said that’s not how things turned out. Zelenskyy was unhappy with the poor level of attendance, as around a hundred of his party’s lawmakers failed to turn up. And the underlying tension only grew when one of them questioned the wisdom of gutting the anti-corruption agencies at a time when they were zeroing in on presidential administration insiders.

While Zelenskyy did say he’d consult with them more in the future, “that seems unlikely,” one of the lawmakers lamented. “The whole narrative points to a further tightening of the screws at home. As far as the President’s Office sees it, you’re either with Zelenskyy or you’re a Russian stooge.”

This last bit is interesting (and ominous), as it suggests that domestic political splits are much more serious than we have been told by our media thus far:

Indeed, the screws are being tightened. Just this month, for example, a group of around 20 former and retired Ukrainian diplomats and envoys were included in a regulation banning lawmakers and officials from traveling overseas without the express approval of authorities.

“It is difficult to understand why, in the fourth year of the war, it suddenly became so important to ban a group of no more than 20 people from traveling abroad — people who have the contacts and authority to promote Ukraine’s interests among foreign audiences,” Kuleba, who is among those impacted, told POLITICO.

“The only explanation can be political. And once such political logic takes hold, it becomes possible to arbitrarily decide which categories of people are allowed or forbidden to do certain things. Ambassadors are only an example, but one that reveals a much deeper problem.”

We’ve been through several cycles of Zelensky as hero/Zelensky might be doing a bad job already, and this won’t be the last one.

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Thinking about the conflict between Israel and Hamas yesterday, I engaged in some hypotheticals regarding how Israel could be beaten despite having the overwhelming (and overpowering) support of the USA. In the short-term, there is nothing possible as no one is coming to the aid of Hamas or the Palestinians in Gaza, as doing so would incur the wrath of the Americans.

This changes in the mid-term (and especially in the long term, which I will skip for now) though; if Israel becomes a much more unpleasant place for Israelis to live and if enough encouragement is offered to Israelis to relocate elsewhere due to this increasing unpleasantness, a recipe for the collapse of the Israeli state might (please not the qualifier here) come into view. If you can drain Israel of Israelis, then Hamas’ war is won.

There are problems with this scenario, of course. One is that Israelis are really, really devoted to the project known as the State of Israel. Another is that unlike much of the rest of the world, certain segments of their own population are making babies at an incredible rate, ensuring that Israelis will continue to show up in the future. Lastly, Hamas’ raid on October 7, 2023 certainly made Israel an unpleasant place to reside (for a few days, anyway), but neither they nor Hezbollah are in the same position that they were in pre-10/7 to be able to engage in even a limited war of attrition to force Israelis to reconsider whether remaining in Israel is worth the effort.

We GenXers (and those older than us) can remember a time when travel between countries wasn’t as open and free as it is these days. It was quite difficult even 100 years ago to rack up 12 foreign stamps on your passport unless you were a diplomat, entertainer, powerful businessman, or popular figure…assuming that you could afford to do so in the first place. Globalism and the dawn of mass global tourism changed all that, and with the opening of borders also came the ability to drain foreign countries of their talent…purposely.

I ran across this long, long essay on the subject of intentional brain drain and now I will punish all of you by excerpting from it:

Aporia

Brain Drain as Geopolitical Strategy

Written by Arctotherium…

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9 months ago · 108 likes · 31 comments · Aporia

“Immigration is America’s superpower” is a common thought-terminating cliché in US political discourse [1][2][3][4]. Proponents claim that the US can absorb the world’s human capital like a sponge and use it for geopolitical advantage, with many wanting more skilled immigration to “beat China” [1][2][3][4]. Brain drain is conceived as the keystone of a geopolitical strategy to preserve US hegemony and maintain America’s economic edge over other countries. The US can remain the world’s greatest power by opening the gates for as many people as possible, or at least as many above-average people.

Yet there’s an incredible hubris and bizarre lack of respect for immigrants’ agency implicit in this worldview.1 The hubris lies in the belief that the United States is so incredibly amazing that every capable person on Earth wants to be an American. The lack of respect lies in the belief that immigrants and their descendants don’t have their own views on how things should be run.

That hubris is somewhat justified because of the historical successes that come from brain drain immigrants. The Manhattan Project being a prime example, NASA putting men on the Moon being another.

“The Foreign Expert Model”:

It’s not impossible for states to deliberately use brain drain for geopolitical gain. This usually takes the form of what I call the “foreign experts model”. You identify specific areas in which national industry is inferior to foreign counterparts, and then invite small numbers of foreign experts in these areas (often many fewer than 10,000) to come and teach locals their skills, usually by paying them.3 The key components of the foreign expert model are:

1. It is demographically insignificant.

2. Foreign experts are expected to transfer their skills and knowledge to native students.

3. Foreign experts are recognized as foreign. There’s no expectation that they naturalize (though in some cases they do, and because of (1) this doesn’t matter much) and they’re usually excluded from political positions. They may have influence and authority in their domains of expertise, but not over the nation as a whole. This is crucial because giving up control of the state to gain geopolitical power is putting the cart before the horse.

4. Foreign experts are paid large sums of money or otherwise rewarded (usually above market value) for their expertise.

An illustrative example of the foreign experts model comes from the history of Saudi Aramco. Saudi Arabia has massive and easily-exploitable oil reserves, but did not have the local expertise to drill them after WWII. Relying on a wholly American-operated company would have left the country dependent on American goodwill and with little leverage. Iran and Venezuela chose to destructively nationalize their foreign-operated oil companies, while Equatorial Guinea and Nigeria allow foreign oil companies to operate autonomously in exchange for bribes and payouts. The Saudis took a wiser path:

At the very start of Aramco, the company was entirely owned and operated by Americans aside from menial labor. However, the Saudi government inserted a clause into their contract with the corporation requiring the American oil men to train Saudi citizens for management and engineering jobs. The Americans held up their end of the bargain, and over time, more and more Saudis took over management and technical positions. This steadily increased the bargaining power of the Saudi government, which periodically renegotiated its contract with the Americans over decades to get a greater share of the profits in exchange for more oil exploration or diplomatic concessions.

In 1973 and 1974, the Saudi government authorized two big final buy-outs of Aramco. The prices were not disclosed publicly, but the consensus is that the American oil companies were well-compensated, and that’s after they had made enormous profits for 30 years. This left the oil companies on good terms with the Saudis who were happy to employ them as consultants and specialists. Today, 80% of Aramco’s employees are Saudi, as well as all executives, though surprisingly not all board members.

Long term thinking (thumbsup.gif)

Two historical examples from earlier eras:

The Russian state under Peter the Great recruited 60 Dutch shipbuilders and around 750 Western European officers, technicians, and academics to found the Russian Navy. While we lack precise information on most of them, one English hydraulic engineer, John Perry, was offered 300 pounds (approximately 60 times the annual cash wages of an English laborer in 1700) plus expenses and bonuses for completed projects, for his service.

Meiji Japan used European and American military and industrial experts to build up their army and economy and colonize Hokkaido. The total number of “hired foreigners” (O-yatoi, a term coming from Yatoi, meaning “person hired temporarily”) was 2,000-3,000, and their combined salaries reached a third of the national budget in 1874. The Japanese government “did not consider it prudent to let them settle in Japan permanently,” and they were replaced by Japanese students once the latter finished training and learning.

Regarding the two earlier examples that I provided:

Far from immigration being America’s superpower, the exodus of European scientists shows how it is possible to gain the benefits of extraordinary talent with almost no immigration at all. Although they were not typically recruited by the US government, several private organizations funded their emigration, with the Rockefeller Foundation paying for 303 and the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars paying for 335. Instead of money, the huge incentive offered was safety from the Nazis and the looming war. These scientists helped make US science world-dominant. But US academia did not rely on the products of Germanophone higher education in perpetuity; the new arrivals taught American students their skills.7

Operation Paperclip is an even purer example of the foreign experts model, since it was wholly centralized around the US government. After WWII, around 1,600 German experts in key technologies such as rocketry, most notably Werner von Braun, were rounded up by the US Army and brought to the US. The huge incentive offered in this case was effectively kidnapping; German experts were not given a choice (though I suspect the vast majority preferred living in the US to ending up in a Soviet sharashka, a war crimes trial, or staying in an obliterated Germany). The numbers, again, were demographically insignificant. And instead of continuing to rely on German rocket expertise indefinitely, the new arrivals transferred their knowledge to locals.

Modern brain drain to the USA:

Rather than targeting small numbers of experts for their unique technical skills and presence in superior foreign industries, brain drain to the US today involves bringing in millions of marginally above-average people in the hope that a handful are loyal geniuses. The two major routes are student visas and skilled labor visas such as the H-1B. “America’s superpower” advocates typically want to massively expand both, with proposals such as ending country caps on employment-based green cards, and stapling a green card to every STEM diploma, being common. (Both of these proposals would primarily benefit Indian immigrants, who make up 62% of the green card backlog and 29% of foreign students—not counting secondary migration from Canada, Britain or the UAE).

Rather than being an expert in a novel industry or a world-class talent, the typical skilled worker visa recipient is a replacement-level IT worker.

Similarly, foreign-born students with US degrees are barely more literate or numerate than the US average, and they are below the (very low) US-born college-educated average.

When you bring in so many moderately bright people, some are inevitably very successful, like Elon Musk. But this is a nationally self-destructive way of finding them. The combination of ability and numbers guarantees elite replacement and consequent loss of national self-determination. The chief goal of US geostrategy should be allowing the American people to flourish; giving up American control of the US for the sake of geopolitical power defeats the entire purpose.8

Rather than recruiting talent in defiance of the market incentives, 21st century brain drain to the US is driven by said incentives. Skilled immigration to the US does not increase expertise in industries where the US is not already the leader. Instead it has the opposite effect: diffusing US expertise to the rest of the world. Worse, whereas the foreign experts model strengthens domestic sources of talent by providing extremely capable individuals with large spillover effects, modern brain drain to the US undermines the domestic talent pipeline by encouraging wasteful signalling and by forcing competition with the entire rest of the world.

This is a very interesting analysis that you should read in its entirety by clicking this link.

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Another French government has fallen, and barely anyone outside of France has noticed as the country stubbornly remains in a rut, one that began during the Sarkozy era and has not stopped ever since.

Class politics are never far away in protest-crazy France, but generational politics are coming to the fore now as well, adding an extra problem to the already sky-high pile for President Macron. One cannot understand modern-day France without understanding the 68ers. The “Me Generation” of the 1970s was not a strictly American phenomenon.

To no one’s surprise, François Bayrou and his government have been deposed by France’s National Assembly following a confidence vote that Bayrou triggered himself. Given the parliamentary arithmetic, Bayrou’s defenestration was far from remarkable. Equally, his replacement by the Macron loyalist Sebastien Lecornu surprised few politicos.

What was remarkable, however, was an unexpected cri de coeur from Bayrou in the days before the confidence vote that ousted him. The Prime Minister had tried, and failed, to balance the books. Even the threat of an IMF takeover hadn’t helped. With little left to lose, Bayrou declared that the winners in French society have been the baby boumeurs. On live TV, two weeks before the confidence vote, he called them out for their selfishness. The next morning he likened French workers to slaves, arguing that France will be “forcing them for decades to repay the loans lightly decided upon by previous generations”.

France is in fiscal trouble. Just typing that sentence feels weird to me, as if we’re in some new world:

Plus ça change, you might say. Fiscal profligacy and debt have long been a French forte. To find France’s last balanced budget, you would have to go back to 1975, 50 years ago. But with the deficit estimated at 5.4% of its GDP in 2024, its debt at 114% of GDP, and Greek bonds now outperforming French ones, France is living beyond its means. And this splurge of public money is not reflected on the ground. French growth, at 0.6%, is sluggish. Domestic consumption is flatlining and investments are being held back. There is no engine in the French economy.

The obvious question: where is all that money going?

The Left has blamed supposed handouts to heavily taxed French companies. Marine Le Pen sees immigration as the big fiscal drain of our time. But anyone who takes a cold look at the raw numbers can spot the issue: a quarter of all public spending in France goes towards pensions, well above the EU average. At roughly €420 billion per year, this is by far the French state’s largest category of spending. It is comfortably more than what France spends on its education, defence, security, transports, research, justice and infrastructure combined. To put this in context, France’s pension spending could fund 30 new Channel Tunnels per year, or all of China’s military spending for around 300 days. A single minute of France’s pensions spending could comfortably fund even the most lavish state summit at Versailles.

Worse still, pension spending keeps rising. In 2024, France increased pension spending by another €14 billion in 2024, just to keep payouts in line with inflation, despite the government scrambling to find billions in cuts elsewhere. And this was far from a one-off occurrence: of the €1 trillion of additional debt taken on during the Macron presidency, half can be traced back to pension spending.

“Get your filthy hands off of my gold-plated pension!”

Les Boumeurs as the generational winners:

None of this was the intention of the architects of France’s pension model, which was set up in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. The scheme relied on mandatory contributions that, in theory, constituted a “deferred salary” for when you retire. In practice, 28% of the total labour cost of a working-age French citizen goes towards pensioners. Taxpayers can only hope the next generation will be able to do the same.

Back then, when the scheme was founded, there were four to five working-age Frenchmen for every pensioner. Now, that ratio has fallen below 2:1, and will only get worse in the years to come. The boumeurs, in other words, paid into the system when there were plenty of workers per pensioner, and are now enjoying its benefits at the expense of a diminishing workforce. And their pensions are but one example of the boumeurs’ unparalleled run of generational luck. Having enjoyed cheap housing when house-building rates were high and net migration low, the boumeurs are much more likely to own property. They have also enjoyed targeted tax cuts and other benefits. As a result, their disposable income outperforms the national average, a first time in French history and an international oddity.

Read that again: Pensioned boomers are making more money on a yearly basis than the average working adult in their own country.

Macron is forced to rely on Les Boumeurs to keep him in power:

Emmanuel Macron, who will now have to form a new government, had tried to tackle pensions. When he was elected in 2017, he marginally increased taxes on pensioners. In 2019, he put together a plan to simplify the pensions system, eventually giving up during the Covid pandemic. In 2022, he increased the legal retirement age to 64, weathering massive protests. But he has never offered a true challenge to pensioners, not least because he owes his presidency to the grey vote. In 2022, 69% of 65+ year-old voters backed him over Marine Le Pen, while Le Pen edged him in the 18-34 category.

Boomers vote, unlike young people.

Pensions as the “sacred cow” of French politics:

Despite the divisions of French politics, then, there is one point of unity. Every single political party is terrified of touching the sacred cow of pensions. When Michel Barnier, the previous prime minister, pushed to have pensions only partially indexed on inflation — rather than bound to it — he was toppled by Le Pen. For now, her National Rally party is very happy to continue making inroads into Macron’s grey vote. With pensioners making up 35% of the electorate — as well as being the cohort most likely to vote — few politicians have a shot at ultimate power without them.

Time and again, voters have reminded politicians to keep the taps on. In 1981, they elected the socialist President François Mitterrand, who dropped the retirement age from 65 to 60. It’s taken 40 years and hundreds of protests later for France to increase it painstakingly to 64. In 1997, the French voted for the Left and the 35-hour legal work week.

Systemic absurdities:

The longer the system persists, the more absurdities emerge from it. In the public sector, where salaries have been largely frozen for more than a decade, you often hear of situations where senior retired bureaucrats earn more in inflation-adjusted pensions than their waged successors. In education, French teachers are very poorly paid by European standards. Where is the money going? Pensions again. The state artificially props up the total employment cost it pays for teachers only to send the difference to cover for pensions. Everywhere you dig into France’s public spending, you find more hidden pension spending. Thanks to these artificially pumped up social contributions — which go towards former soldiers’ pensions — France’s Ministry of Defence can claim it reaches Nato’s 2% of GDP target. France’s pensioners unintentionally saved their country from Donald Trump’s wrath.

Going into debt to pay pensions:

Less amusing for attentive French taxpayers is the reality that pensions spending has got so far out of control that public debt is now used not to pay for tomorrow’s investments but to subsidise the comfort of yesterday’s workers. And it is indeed comfort that is often being paid for, rather than actual need. In 2024, two-thirds of the increase in French savings were made by pensioners. Those aged 70 or over save, on average, 25% of their income, whereas 30 year olds only save 9%. These inequalities between generations pave the way for inequalities within generations, between those who will inherit and those who won’t. And the latter will see the rungs of the property ladder glide further out of reach.

Tragically, those inheriting property will do so, on average, in their 50s or 60s: too late to have a family, but only a few years before they, too, retire. Rinse, repeat. Many economists on the Left call for higher taxes on inheritance, but in the meantime the flow of transfers from the active population to the inactive continues. Inheritances and other financial transfers are expected to reach 20% of French GDP by the end of the next decade.

The “solution” for the problem of collapsing pension schemes has been to import more workers to increase the worker-to-pensioner ratio, but that isn’t working either, as France shows us.

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In the 20th century alone, the Vietnamese took on the Japanese, the French, the Americans, and the Chinese, and managed to expel all three from their land. The costs in human life were enormous, but the respect that they earned (and still maintain) is massive, particularly in anti-colonialist circles.

How did they accomplish these Herculean tasks? Kevin D. Pham argues that it was built on a “unique sense of national shame”:

Scroll through the comments section of any popular YouTube video about Vietnamese history, and you will see admiration and respect from around the world for Vietnam’s anticolonial prowess. ‘I’m Nicaraguan and we went up against US imperialism several times and won. Vietnam was a huge inspiration to the Sandinistas! Long live a free Palestine!’ ‘The Vietnamese struggle for independence is one of the greatest David vs Goliath stories in the history of the world.’ ‘How Vietnam managed to endure Chinese domination, French colonialism, and US imperialism is beyond me. What a country.’

These sentiments reflect a heroic narrative of resistance, one that is effectively propagated by the Vietnamese Communist Party as Vietnam’s ‘official history’ in state-sponsored publications, schools, museums and elsewhere. The narrative goes like this: for the past 2,000 years, the Vietnamese people, unified by national pride, time and again expelled more powerful foreign invaders from their land. This tradition of anti-imperial struggle culminated in the rule of the Vietnamese Communist Party whose official political ideology is ‘Hồ Chí Minh thought’, named after the narrative’s protagonist, the first president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

Inspired by a vision of communist revolution and drawing on a deep-seated tradition of Vietnamese resistance against Chinese domination, Hồ Chí Minh led the Vietnamese people to defeat Japanese occupation (1940-45) and French colonialism (1858-1954), as well as US imperialist invasion and their Vietnamese puppets (1955-75). The story evokes pride among Vietnamese people. As one Vietnamese translator put it: ‘Do you realise we are the only nation on Earth that’s defeated three out of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council?’

You cannot but be impressed. I’ve read many words from French and American military officials who fought the Vietnamese on their home soil, and the praise that they get is endless.

Romantic versions of the history are now being questioned:

But in the past decade, scholars of Vietnam have been showing that the history of Vietnamese anticolonialism is not so simple and romantic. Vietnamese anticolonialism includes an array of competing nationalisms. A handful of competing theorists and activists in the first half of the 20th century became influential ‘thought leaders’ amassing thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers. They offered diverse ways of making sense of and responding to foreign domination, and proposed a wide variety of counter-versions of a Vietnamese national identity, in which Hồ’s vision was one of several possibilities. What makes Vietnamese anticolonialism especially unique is its use of national shame for productive, anticolonial, nation-building purposes.

Some selected history:

And, contrary to the notion of a single, unified ‘Vietnamese people’, there has always been division. In the centuries after Chinese domination, civil wars persistently plagued the Vietnamese. Even after the emperor Gia Long unified Vietnam in 1802, civil strife continued up to the French invasion in 1858. As Phạm Quỳnh, a leading nationalist intellectual, put it in 1931, ‘since the end of the 18th century, internal dissension, including civil strife, has profoundly weakened us as the breaking up of our country combined with unrest have brought about such a state of affairs that could justify the French encroachment.’ And during French colonialism, Vietnamese figures influential in the public sphere had diverse, often conflicting ways of making sense of French colonialism, of how to respond to it and of the political ideology that should guide Vietnamese society after independence.

Those ideological differences devolved into violent civil wars among Vietnamese, beginning not during the ‘Second Indochina War’ (1955-75) but earlier. Conflicts between Stalinists and Trotskyists persisted from the 1930s until the Trotskyists’ elimination in 1945. The ‘First Indochina War’ began in 1946 as a conflict between two sides – Hồ Chí Minh’s ‘Viet Minh’, a communist-led coalition of all Vietnamese (communists and non-communists) who opposed the French, and French colonisers – and ended with French defeat at Điện Biên Phủ in 1954. However, by 1947 and onward, the war against France simultaneously became a civil war between Vietnamese in the south, with some groups defecting to the French given their differences with the communists. And after French defeat in the north in 1954, Vietnam was divided into two countries: the ‘communist’ north and the ‘anticommunist’ south. The Geneva Accords allowed for a period of 300 days for Vietnamese to choose a side. About 800,000 moved from north to south, and about a third of that number moved in the opposite direction. Thus began the ‘Second Indochina War’. In the north, the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), supported by the Soviet Union and China, called it the ‘The Resistance War Against America to Save the Country’. And those in the south, the anticommunist Republic of Vietnam (RVN) supported by the US, called it the ‘War Against Northern Communist Invasion’. Americans call it, simply, the ‘Vietnam War’. It took the lives of 58,000 Americans and, according to the Vietnamese government, more than 3 million Vietnamese. Although the RVN lost and no longer exists, it still exists nostalgically in the minds of Vietnamese in the diaspora, such as my parents. The winning DRV unified the country and renamed it the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

Being of Vietnamese heritage and being part of a family that was loyal to the South Vietnamese government, this essay is quite personal for the author. Read it in its entirety here.

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We end this weekend’s SCR with a look at “chatbots of the dead”:

‘Fredbot’ is one example of a technology known as chatbots of the dead, chatbots designed to speak in the voice of specific deceased people. Other examples are plentiful: in 2016, Eugenia Kuyda built a chatbot from the text messages of her friend Roman Mazurenko, who was killed in a traffic accident. The first Roman Bot, like Fredbot, was selective, but later versions were generative, meaning they generated novel responses that reflected Mazurenko’s voice. In 2020, the musician and artist Laurie Anderson used a corpus of writing and lyrics from her late husband, Velvet Underground’s co-founder Lou Reed, to create a generative program she interacted with as a creative collaborator. And in 2021, the journalist James Vlahos launched HereAfter AI, an app anyone can use to create interactive chatbots, called ‘life story avatars’, that are based on loved ones’ memories. Today, enterprises in the business of ‘reinventing remembrance’ abound: Life Story AI, Project Infinite Life, Project December – the list goes on.

These apps and algorithms are part of a growing class of technologies that marry artificial intelligence (AI) with the data that people leave behind. These technologies will become more sophisticated and accessible as the parameters and popularity of large language models increase and as personal data expands into the seeming permanence of the cloud. To some, chatbots of the dead are useful tools that can help us grieve, remember, and reflect on those we’ve lost. To others, they are dehumanising technologies that conjure a dystopian world. They raise ethical questions about consent, ownership, memory and historical accuracy: who should be allowed to create, control or profit from these representations? How do we understand chatbots that seem to misrepresent the past? But for us, the deepest concerns relate to how these bots might affect our relationship to the dead. Are they artificial replacements that merely paper over our grief? Or is there something distinctively valuable about chatting with a simulation of the dead?

Click here to read the rest.

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Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

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The long-held “nightmare scenario” of US foreign policy is a Russian-German (the latter meaning ‘Europe') alliance. The war in Ukraine has effectively put this nightmare to bed for the time being, but at the cost of pushing Russia into the embrace of China. This de facto alliance, one borne of necessity and reaction to US moves on the global chessboard, is now the main challenge for America for the short to medium term. It was manageable during the early phase of the Cold War, but the equation has changed quite a bit then, as Russia is much less powerful an opponent than the Soviet Union was, but China is a much stronger force due to the very rapid development of its economy and society. Where once Mao’s China was the junior partner to Stalin’s USSR, the roles have reversed as Beijing is now senior to Moscow.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. By this decade, China was already supposed to have opened up its political system via liberalization driven by the creation of a new class of Chinese millionaires and billionaires…a class created by trade with the USA. Americans worked under the assumption (or hope) that this new class would challenge the CCP’s grip on power in China, permitting the USA to play one side against the other for its own benefit. Instead, the Chinese saw what happened to the USSR when it permitted both political and economic liberalization at the same time, and took the lesson that Perestroika (economic liberalization) was necessary, but that Glasnost was a death sentence for the party and country.

In 2010, all the talk was about ‘Chimerica’:

Former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski sees a geopolitical shift from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He calls China and the US "the Group of Two that could change the world," while economic historian Niall Ferguson coined the term "Chimerica" to describe his view that the two countries are so closely joined, they have long since formed "one economy.”

Obama made a go of it:

Now Clinton's successor and fellow Democrat Barack Obama is looking for ways to work more closely with the giant nation, with its 1.3 billion people. Obama believes that cooperation with China is essential in the coming years. "The major challenges of the 21st century, from climate change to nuclear proliferation to economic recovery, are challenges that touch both our nations, and challenges that neither of our nations can solve by acting alone," the US president said during his recent visit to China.

One decade later and the dream of Chimerica was all but a distant memory:

By this point in time, the USA was already supposed to have closed up shop in the Middle East and moved many of its assets to the Far East in order to contain/strangle China. Events got in the way, whether they be Russia extending the life of the Ba’athist regime in Syria, or Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran’s conflict with Israel. Something always seems to get in the way of the infamous ‘Pivot to East Asia’.

At present, the Trump regime is working overtime to create an ad hoc anti-China trade alliance, using both carrot and stick with its allies and with neutrals. Simultaneously, the Chinese are prolonging Russia’s ability to sustain a notable amount of casualties in its war in Ukraine through various ways, one of which includes supplying it much-needed parts for its war machine.

Make no mistake about it: the de facto anti-American alliance between Russia and China (and North Korea as well) is one borne of necessity and existential interests, but it is not one without its own gaps and internal inconsistencies. It is within these gaps that the Americans hope to drive a Mack Truck through in order to strengthen its hegemonic ambition, as Patricia M. Kim advises:

No moment captured the shifting global balance of power more vividly than when Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un walked in lockstep on the red carpet at China’s military parade in early September. The three autocrats, despite a long history of mutual suspicion, projected a show of unity against Washington. The message behind the carefully managed scene was unmistakable: China is at the center of a rising anti-Western bloc, while the United States is adrift—divided at home, faltering abroad, and rebuffed by its rivals.

U.S. President Donald Trump has made no secret of what he wants from each of the three leaders: a peace deal with Putin to end the war in Ukraine, a trade pact with Xi to rebalance the U.S.-Chinese economic relationship, and a summit with Kim to revive stalled diplomacy on the Korean Peninsula. But all three have spurned his overtures. Instead of engaging on Washington’s terms, Kim, Putin, and Xi are now linking arms in Beijing, flaunting not only their growing willingness to challenge U.S. leadership but also their ability to do so in concert.

But beneath this show of solidarity, China, North Korea, and Russia remain uneasy partners. What the three countries have is a tactical alignment rooted not in trust or shared values but in overlapping grievances and necessity. History demonstrates that they are not natural allies. Each state remains wary of entrapment and is unwilling to subordinate its national interests to those of the others. And crucially, each still seeks something from the United States—leverage that Washington must wield wisely.

Imperial management. But can it be managed in light of this challenge?

Some history:

The last time China, North Korea, and Russia aligned this closely was during the Korean War, which ended badly for all. Kim Il Sung, the grandfather of the current North Korean leader, invaded South Korea with Soviet and Chinese support. The gamble failed. North Korea became the isolated, impoverished pariah state it is today, while its southern rival, backed by the United States, flourished. For China, the intervention was costly, in both blood and treasure. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers were killed or wounded, and scarce resources were drained from its economy, which was already battered by years of civil war and World War II. Worse, the war entrenched a permanent U.S. military presence on its doorstep and upended Beijing’s plans for Taiwan. Fearing a broader communist advance, the Truman administration reversed its hands-off approach and signed a mutual defense treaty with Taipei, indefinitely forestalling China’s goal of annexing the island, which remains unfinished business for China’s leaders to this day. For Beijing, the Korean War offered a sobering lesson: aligning with volatile partners, such as Pyongyang, out of ideological solidarity can incur enormous costs and generate long-term liabilities.

“Common cause masking old divisions and simmering mistrust”:

Today, more than 30 years after the end of the Cold War, the three countries have found common cause again in seeking to erode Washington’s power and influence. But the carefully choreographed display of unity masks old divisions and simmering distrust. Unlike Pyongyang and Moscow, Beijing seeks to reshape the global order without setting it ablaze. It aims to weaken U.S. influence without fully severing its profitable ties with the West. China has extended Moscow a critical economic lifeline and supplied dual-use goods that have helped sustain the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine. But it has done so because the costs have been manageable, limited to reputational damage among Western states. Crucially, the war between Russia and Ukraine has not yet posed a direct threat to China’s own security or economic stability. If that changed, Beijing’s calculus could shift quickly.

The cracks in the Chinese-Russian relationship are especially evident on the Korean Peninsula. China is deeply uneasy about Russia’s expanding ties with North Korea. Moscow has turned to Pyongyang for munitions and troops to sustain its war in Ukraine and the two countries have signed a mutual defense pact. Putin has now eclipsed Xi as Kim’s most important partner—frustrating Beijing’s effort to be the dominant player on the Korean Peninsula. Over the past two years, Russia has added to China’s concerns by transferring sensitive military technology, including air defense missile systems and drone capabilities, to North Korea. In private, Chinese analysts express concerns about the limited visibility over these transfers and their destabilizing potential.

China as most risk-adverse of the three:

What Beijing fears is a lack of control. In flash points such as the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea, China can calibrate the pace of escalation. But North Korean adventurism, backed by Russia, could create volatility on China’s doorstep that it cannot easily manage. As in the Korean War, China risks being dragged into a crisis by a reckless junior partner supported by Moscow. Russia, for its part, is less concerned about the consequences of instability in Asia. Putin’s focus is squarely on reasserting Russian influence in eastern Europe. Should tensions escalate on the Korean Peninsula or in the Taiwan Strait, it is far from certain that Moscow would be willing to shoulder serious costs to support either of its partners.

The cards in America’s hand:

The uneasy convergence of China, North Korea, and Russia may not give the United States a sweeping strategic opening, but it still leaves Washington room to maneuver if it engages each adversary with purpose and discipline. The United States still holds meaningful leverage with China because Beijing seeks economic stability. It wants to avoid any direct confrontation with the United States that would jeopardize its rise. Beijing also shares, at least in principle, several U.S. objectives: preserving regional stability, preventing a nuclear cascade in northeast Asia, and witnessing a peaceful resolution to the war in Ukraine. Chinese officials have repeatedly emphasized their support for cease-fire negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, portraying dialogue as the only way to resolve the conflict.

But overlapping interests alone are insufficient to spur cooperation. If Washington wants to translate these shared goals into tangible outcomes, it must proceed deliberately. The United States should make clear that progress on a trade deal and a possible Trump-Xi summit are contingent on China demonstrating its willingness to cooperate on areas of mutual concern—particularly curbing North Korea’s unchecked nuclear and missile expansion and ending the war in Ukraine.

A very notable concession from this Brookings fellow:

The United States does not need to engineer a split between China and Russia, nor could it anytime soon.

Kim argues that China is the best venue to disrupt this alliance:

Beijing will resist overt pressure to publicly break ranks with Moscow or Pyongyang. But private pressure might work to sway China, especially when its larger priorities are on the line. Despite its defiant tone, Beijing still seeks a trade deal with Washington that lowers tariffs and preserves a degree of stability in the U.S.-Chinese relationship. Failure to secure a deal may not be catastrophic for China’s economy. But it would add unwanted volatility, compounding existing economic strains and increasing discontent among the Chinese public. By raising the stakes and conditioning Chinese cooperation on Ukraine and North Korea as integral to a broader bilateral agreement, Washington could force Beijing to make modest but meaningful adjustments, such as slowing purchases of Russian oil, curbing dual-use exports to Moscow, and signaling to Pyongyang that denuclearization must remain a long-term goal.

A “diplomatic off-ramp” as the opening with Russia:

With Russia, Putin has shown little interest in peace talks that would require him to abandon his maximalist demands in Ukraine. He remains committed to outlasting U.S. and European support for Ukraine. But over time, Russia will need an off-ramp as troop losses mount, economic strains deepen, and public fatigue grows. Neither China nor North Korea can give Putin the diplomatic exit he needs. Only Ukraine and its partners can. Washington should not rush into negotiations; rather, it should use this leverage to carefully shape the conditions for a just and sustainable resolution to the war. The United States should coordinate with European allies to enhance Ukraine’s capacity for self-defense, provide credible security guarantees, and apply mounting economic pressure on Moscow. A key part of that strategy must involve pressuring China and India to scale back their support for Russia’s wartime economy—not through public ultimatums, which often provoke defiance, but through forceful backchannel diplomacy—allowing Beijing and New Delhi to change course without appearing to capitulate to U.S. pressure.

A concluding statement:

The red carpet moment in Beijing was meant to unsettle Washington—and it should. It underscored how far the United States’ rivals have come in teaming up, even if their interests do not completely align. Yet China, Russia, and North Korea each still have reasons to deal with the United States. If Washington can resist the urge for improvised, optics-driven diplomacy; recognize its sources of leverage; and lean into its comparative strengths—its alliances, military power, economic influence, and diplomatic reach—it can shape the strategic environment instead of just reacting to it.

To paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt: “Speak softly, and carry a lot of sticks and carrots.”

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This past 9/11 was the 24th anniversary of the terrorist attack that killed some 3,000 Americans, and was also the first to be commemorated after the USA handed over control of Syria to the Syrian branch of that very same terrorist organization.

You’d think that there would be some protest in the USA over this ugly fact, at least a minor revolt somewhere in the diplomatic ranks, but no…….memories are short and subjective, and Americans are fatigued from the constant onslaught of of news sensationalism that is a form of psychological terror in its own right. Al-Qaida has dropped down in the rankings of “things that I should worry about”, it seems.

At the very second that I am typing this, al-Qaida in Syria chief al-Jolani (now styling himself as Ahmed al-Sharaa, President of Syria), is meeting with his former boss, the former CIA Director David Petraeus at some event:

“The gang’s all here.”

al-Sharaa, the new darling of the wide-spanning US-Turkish-Israeli-Saudi-Qatari anti-Ba’athist alliance, recently met with CENTCOM head Admiral Charles Bradley Cooper in Damascus. They waited a whole day so that their appearance together would not fall on 9/11. This is a short report, so I’ll repost it in its entirety:

Self-appointed Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa met with the head of US Central Command (CENTCOM), Admiral Charles Bradley Cooper, on 12 September to discuss regional security and cooperation, the Syrian Presidency's office announced.

US Special Envoy to Syria, Tom Barrack, also attended the meeting with Sharaa in the People's Palace in Damascus.

"The meeting discussed prospects for cooperation in the political and military fields, in a way that serves common interests and consolidates the foundations of security and stability in Syria and the region," the Syrian presidency said in a statement.

The meeting between top US officials and Sharaa, a former Al-Qaeda and Islamic State in Iraq commander, occurred one day after the 24th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.

"The meeting reflected the positive atmosphere and shared commitment to strengthening the strategic partnership and expanding channels of communication between Damascus and Washington at various levels," the statement issued by Sharaa's office said.

US President Donald Trump met with the Syrian president on 13 May in the Saudi capital, Riyadh.

During the meeting, Trump announced the lifting of sanctions on Syria, praised Sharaa, and informed him of the need to take several measures, most notably normalizing relations with Israel.

On al-Jolani/al-Sharaa:

Formerly known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, Sharaa became known in Iraq for dispatching suicide bombers to kill US troops and Shia civilians after the 2003 US invasion.

After his detention at the US-run Bucca Prison in Basra, Sharaa was released by US officials and became the leader of the Islamic State in Mosul.

In 2011, he traveled to Syria under the direct orders of ISIS founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and established the Nusra Front, which became the official Al-Qaeda affiliate in the country.

US, Israeli, and UK intelligence supported Sharaa and the Nusra Front for over a decade as part of the operation to topple the government of former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, starting in 2011.

The CIA spent $1 billion per year on the operation to topple Assad, known as Timber Sycamore, which involved flooding Syria with weapons to arm the Nusra Front and other extremist Salafist armed groups.

Nusra, which later rebranded as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), took power in Damascus in December 2024.

Syrian forces loyal to Sharaa carried out the massacre of Alawite civilians in the coastal region of the country in March, followed by the massacre of Druze civilians in Suwayda governorate in July.

Al-Jolani knows that he is in power in Damascus thanks especially to the USA. He must also realize that he is disposable. Much of the Arab and Islamic world is up in arms because he is not confronting the Israelis, whose forces are creeping ever closer to the southern suburbs of Damascus. al-Jolani knows that in doing so he would quickly lose his head in a US-led decapitation strike. He has struck a deal with "the devil you know” in order to make a sizable tactical gain for extremist Sunni Islam in the Middle East.

From my perspective, I cannot but conclude that al-Qaida has been rewarded for 9/11. Sometimes terrorism does seem to pay off.

(Please note that the USA had a $10 million bounty on al-Jolani’s head up until December of last year when his forces took power in Damascus.)

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The assassination of Charlie Kirk opens up an opportunity for the Trump regime to finally deal with radical and violent left wing organizations in the USA. There has been some tough talk about doing this, particularly from Stephen Miller, but the jury is still out as to whether anything will actually be attempted to quash these groups.

Constitutionalists fear increased state power, particularly surveillance of US citizens, would be one result of such an effort. They raise a fair point. On the other hand, if this trend is not nipped in the bud, these groups will see it as a license to continue, and their influence will grow simultaneously. In my opinion, an all-out effort should be made to quash these groups, but that an overall plan must be put into place to assure civil libertarians that this would be intended to work as a reset of the system, to return to the status quo ante (tall order, I will concede).

Political violence is not limited to the left in the USA, but they are way more organized, and their networks run deep, especially their support networks, many of whom receive taxpayer money (think of the teams of lawyers always on hand to bail leftist demonstrators out of jail). Absent any effort to eliminate these violent groups, they will conclude that they continue to raise the temperature in the USA to a setting that best suits their goals.

Kyle Shideler has provided a “how to” w/r/t dismantling these networks. On legal obstacles:

The biggest initial problem the Trump Administration faces in confronting the radical Left is a refusal by the national security, federal law enforcement, and intelligence apparatuses to even recognize whom the president has identified as a threat.

Currently, the U.S. government refers to domestic terrorist threats in only the broadest possible categories, such as Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremist (REMVE), Anti-Government/Anti-Authority Violent Extremist (AGAAVE), Animal Rights/Environmentalist Violent Extremist (AREVE), and Abortion-Related Violent Extremist (ARVE). In every case, these categories are deliberately constructed to appear content-neutral, which allows the bureaucracy to appear even-handed while selectively emphasizing preferred political targets and ignoring others.

So, for example, while REMVE theoretically includes both white and black supremacist groups, in practice the USG spends its efforts targeting groups that are perceived as white supremacist and underemphasizes black supremacist groups. Similarly, while the bureaucracy might claim to target Antifa and similar radical Left actors under the AGAAVE category, in practice it has emphasized investigating parents at school board meetings, J6ers, Catholic church attendees, and the like.

The “need” to create a special “far left category” of domestic terrorist:

The president must direct the creation of the Far-Left Violent Extremist category and implement its immediate use across all departments and agencies. While the actual name is up for debate, it must explicitly include “anti-fascist” (Antifa), anarchist, autonomous Marxist, socialist, Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, and Communist extremists, and ensure that these distinctions are accurately and correctly defined.

Such an approach is not radical—in fact it is used by American allies abroad. The German Ministry of the Interior’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution defines Far-Left Extremism in precisely this way and meticulously categorizes each sub-category every year in reports that are openly available to the public.

A Far-Left Extremist category should also include individuals, groups, networks, and movements based on these ideologies that utilize single-issue activism on topics like animal/environmentalist extremism and abortion as cover for their efforts. Often these apparently single-issue organizations are used as a recruiting tool to activate individuals who may be interested in a specific political topic and bring them further into a movement whose true objective is revolution. This simple tactic alone shows the uselessness of the present set of federal categorizations.

Name-swapping and single-issue naming as a cloak for the network(s):

For too long the government, media, and academia have minimized the extensive threat posed by Far-Left Extremism, treating it as merely examples of single-issue activism. But cases like the BLM riots, Defend Atlanta Forest, Jane’s Revenge, and the Palestinian campus encampments have all demonstrated that for Far-Left Extremists, changing names and logos before taking action on behalf of a changing cause is standard operating procedure. By siloing these cases in different categories, federal law enforcement fails to document—and fails to understand—the danger posed by the far-left at the strategic level.

Two types of groupings:

Anarchist and Autonomist Marxists

Anarchist and autonomist Marxist networks dominate what are considered “anti-fascist” or Antifa activities. These include direct action and violent direct action such as sabotage, vandalism, doxxing, and preplanned violence, which encompasses both rioting and terrorism. They label all of American society, both mainstream conservatism and liberalism and all our public, constitutional institutions, as fascist.

Anarchist and autonomous Marxist groups are typically funded by direct crowdsourced funding, mutual aid, and local community-based fundraising. (This is taken from Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s theory of organizing, which is used by anarchist/socialist groups to describe how voluntary organizing provides unofficial quasi-governmental services.) In some cases, Antifa groups have fundraised by engaging in illegal activities, including the sale of drugs and prostitution. Senior members of the network may serve as protest training consultants or union organizers as part of their “day jobs.”

These groups are decentralized and non-hierarchical, but heavily networked through local “affinity groups,” collectives, or chapters, which are linked to similar groups primarily by ideological ties. They are not necessarily linked by financing. They also share ideological connections with similar groups and organizations that operate abroad, predominantly but not exclusively in Western Europe and Latin America.

and

Marxist, Marxist-Leninist, Maoist

Marxist, Marxist-Leninist, Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, and other Communist organizations typically create and proliferate structures as mass movement organizations. They think and act with greater strategic purpose than the anarchists and autonomous Marxists, and maintain systems of command and control. Their networks predominate in the indoctrination and organizational space, creating overlapping networks of community organizations, front groups, and other structures.

Additionally, they co-opt independent entities. Through their controlled organizations and those they infiltrate, they organize large-scale protests and disruptions under a variety of issues and labels. Whether controlled outright or dominated through disciplined infiltrators in key positions of authority, they can range from small, local, and niche to broad-based and national mass organizations. These groups are the most likely of all Far-Left Extremists to have access to fiscal sponsorship organizations through which they can access significant amounts of donor funds from progressive tax-free foundations.

These vertically integrated organizations and networks are also more likely to have operational ties to foreign governments and foreign Communist parties. Examples include the much-discussed Party for Socialism and Liberation’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party and groups like the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, which is extensively networked with other Communist parties such as those in China and Cuba. They may also have ties to Communist organizations designated as terrorist groups, including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Hamas, and the Communist Party of the Philippines/New People’s Army (CPP/NPA). Others may have ties to sanctioned governments, including Russia, Venezuela, Iran, and North Korea.

Like the anarchists and autonomous Marxists, these groups have ideological and doctrinal differences. They compete with each other for attention, funds, and recruits. Nonetheless, they effectively interact and coordinate through the use of the concepts of “diversity of tactics” and “popular fronts.” Like an orchestra, these groups play their own separate parts, but they have the effect of coming together as a functioning, cohesive whole. They generally accomplish this despite lacking a single entity that directs and coordinates the operation or campaign.

What is to be done:

Because these movements are made up of multiple entities that utilize different tactics and are organized in diverse ways, there is no silver bullet for defeating the Far-Left Extremist movement. Only a whole-of-government—and ultimately a whole-of-society—approach will be successful. Anyone who insists there is a single, easy method for stopping this threat is at best ill-informed.

Department of Justice

The DOJ would presumably serve as the lead agency in any effort. Federal counterterrorism authorities may be needed to address one element of the Far-Left Extremist network. Counterintelligence authorities, working through an entirely different set of statutes, may be necessary to pursue those individuals and groups linked to foreign entities that are facilitating subversion and those advocating, but not actually committing, violent crimes or terrorism. Legal authorities addressing racketeering, money laundering, charity fraud, and other white-collar crimes may be the best legal instruments in other cases. (Charity fraud investigations against Far-Left Extremist organizations have already played a key role in Georgia and Virginia.) Civil rights enforcement is likely necessary in different situations.

and

Office of the Director of National Intelligence

ODNI should produce classified and unclassified national intelligence products on Far-Left Extremism, at both the national and international levels, that highlight extensive evidence of transnational cooperation. Intelligence authorities need to coordinate to identify foreign ties to domestic Far-Left Extremist groups. ODNI should also investigate, and include in its reporting, the role played by foreign adversaries in supporting U.S.-based Far-Left Extremist groups. The Director of National Intelligence should authorize a “Team B” competitive analytical exercise composed of independent, outside experts on Far-Left Extremism to allow independent review of materials and methodology and provide alternative analysis. This approach would force competition within the Intelligence Community and assist it in reassessing and ameliorating its own shortcomings.

State Department/Treasury Department

The State Department should instruct consular officials to thoroughly investigate visa applicants and strictly enforce inadmissibility under Title 8, Chapter 12, §1182 (a)(3)(B) or (3)(D) of the U.S. Code (overthrow of the U.S. government, terrorist activities, or membership in totalitarian parties). Participation in any anarchist or Marxist party or organization should be considered de facto grounds for permanent inadmissibility. Current visa holders involved with any Far-Left Extremist group or who demonstrate support for such groups should have their visas revoked.

There are more suggestions for the DHS, IRS, and other gov’t agencies such as the Department of Labor. Click here to read the rest.

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We’re close to 5,000 words already, so I’ll keep this segment brief. The following is a wild report about Charlie Kirk’s recent visit to Bill Ackman’s home in the Hamptons, where supposedly he was read the Riot Act about not supporting Israel enough.

It’s from The Grayzone, so take it with a shovel of salt, as they are doing their very best to attack Israel from all angles and do not mind crossing the thin line between truth and propaganda in their activism:

The Grayzone

Billionaire Bill Ackman convened stormy Israel ‘intervention’ with Charlie Kirk, sources say

A month before Charlie Kirk’s killing, billionaire pro-Israel moneyman Bill Ackman arranged an intervention in the Hamptons during which sources say he and others “hammered” Kirk for the conservative leader’s growing criticism of Israeli influence in Washington. Kirk came away fretting about Israeli “blackmail,” sources say, as he contemplated a Catholi…

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7 months ago · 1206 likes · 20 comments · The Grayzone

An excerpt:

When his hosts presented him with a detailed list of every offense he supposedly committed against Israel, Kirk was “horrified,” said one person. At one point, according to another source, Ackman angrily chastised Kirk for his disobedience. The Zionist billionaire also allegedly demanded Kirk rescind his invitation for Tucker Carlson to speak at his upcoming America Fest 2025 in December.

The Grayzone reported on September 12, citing an associate of Kirk, that Netanyahu had offered to organize a massive infusion of pro-Israel money into TPUSA, and that Kirk refused. Another longtime friend of Kirk has told The Grayzone that the conservative activist also rejected an offer Netanyahu delivered two weeks before his death to meet with him in Jerusalem.

Kirk, according to one person with inside knowledge of the meeting with Ackman, said he left feeling as though he’d been subjected to “blackmail.”

In a series of text messages with The Grayzone, Ackman described these account of his meeting with Kirk as “totally false.” He pledged to release a public statement providing his own account of the event, but refused The Grayzone’s request for clarification or further details. He would not accept phone calls from this reporter.

“I think I can easily put this to bed,” Ackman promised, “I have receipts as they say.” He did not abide when asked to provide the so-called “receipts.”

In an apparent bid to reinforce the pro-Israel tone at the Hamptons meeting, Ackman hosted a coterie of pro-Israel operatives and conservative influencers at the off-the-record engagement. One was Instagram influencer Xaviaer DuRousseau of Prager U.

Reached by phone by The Grayzone, DuRousseau sounded flustered when asked about his presence at the meeting. He repeatedly demanded to know how this reporter obtained his number, and eventually hung up, refusing to answer questions about the event.

Click here to read it in its entirety.

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Is Autism really just vaccine-induced brain damage? argues that it could be the case:

While the extent classic “linguistic determination” like Orwell’s affects the population remains hotly debated, it is generally agreed to significantly influence certain key aspects of cognition. Likewise, I believe it has a significant impact, but it is much smaller in critically thinking individuals who also have significant creativity (as they are much more likely to move beyond the unsatisfactory frameworks in front of them).

However, what’s much less appreciated is that other (more effective) forms of linguistic determination are used to manipulate the public. One of the most common ones is to use an ambiguous term which is not clearly defined, so that depending on the needs of the situation, the audience can be steered towards the desired interpretation of it, even if those interpretations sometimes overtly contradict each other (effectively allowing the PR firm’s client to “have their cake and eat it).

Similarly, in a previous article, I highlighted how Fauci was a master of using slippery language to constantly get whatever he wanted with no accountability by implying but never explicitly stating his desired conclusion (which the media would then run with). One of the best examples of this tactic is having everyone in lockstep assert vaccines are “safe and effective” without ever defining what that actually means, thereby allowing the meaningless statement to be treated as “vaccines are 100% safe and effective,” yet simultaneously, having no accountability for lying as those who repeat it never actually said “100% safe and effective”. This was best demonstrated when Fauci (who continually told us the vaccine would prevent us from getting COVID) was grilled at a recent Congressional hearing, where in response to:

But we knew from the trials that people that got vaccinated still were subject to getting covid so was the covid vaccine 100% effective?

Fauci stated:

I don't believe any vaccine is 100% effective.

Note: in a recent article, I also highlighted how the ambiguous phrase “brain death” was created to make people believe unresponsive individuals were in fact dead, thereby both removing the societal cost of perpetually caring for them and securing a reliable supply of donor organs.

One of the most widely recognized side effects of vaccination is neurological damage (particularly to the cranial nerve and brain), and prior to the censorship which took over our medical journals, as I showed in this article, reports of vaccine brain and nerve injuries (e.g., encephalitis) were extensively reported throughout the medical literature—including many identical to what are seen in modern day autism.

Click here to read the whole thing.

Please note that we’ve already started a new entry in the FbF Book Club:

It’s a great read and the next entry will be up most likely this evening. Do me the honour and join us by subscribing to it and participating in the discussion.

Thank you once again for checking out my Substack. Hit the like button at the top or the bottom of this page to like this entry, and use the share and/or res-stack buttons to share this across social media. Leave a comment below if the mood strikes you to do so. And don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t done so already.

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Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

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Whenever someone brings up a philosophical question, I immediately ask them whether they believe humans were good or bad in the original state of nature. All else flows from the answer given to this question. Those who answer “good” will be more liberal in their political philosophy.

This is not only a question of humans in pre-society (assuming that humans ever existed in such a mode), but of human nature as well. Humans having an inherent nature has been taken as a given since we were able to communicate with one another. It is only in recent times where the very concept of human nature itself has been attacked as a social construct.

The Blank Slate Theory has a very long history, but it wasn’t until feminism gained its wings that it really took off, with many feminists arguing that gender differences are purely constructed and have nothing to do with actual sex. To them, socialization was the key differentiator. This is absurd, and more recent scientific study agrees that it is absurd. Genetics plays a significant role not just in how we look, but also in how we think and behave.

I could not find much of interest in the usual subjects that I focus on in my SCRs this weekend, so we’ll slightly veer off course and begin with this long essay by Francis Fukuyama about why human nature is not going away anytime soon:

Hobbes is rightly understood to be one of the founders of modern liberalism, even though his Leviathan was hardly what we would today describe as a liberal state. Most of the big political controversies of subsequent centuries revolved around alternative understandings of human nature, and therefore of the kinds of political systems that needed to be derived from them. For example, John Locke, who exercised enormous influence over the American Founding Fathers, had a softer view of human nature that encompassed a natural proclivity to acquire property, and to make it more productive. Private property emerged when human labor was combined with the “almost worthless things of nature,” and became the basis for market exchange and thus economic growth. Jean-Jacques Rousseau disagreed explicitly with Hobbes, arguing that “natural man” was not violent or greedy, but rather a timid, solitary creature who had within himself the capacity for happiness. The lust for resources and glory that Hobbes described came about only when early humans came together in societies and began to compare themselves to one another. Society rather than human nature was thus the source of competition, violence, and feelings of envy. Human happiness could be restored only by recovery of the authentic “natural man” that lay behind the customs and pressures created by an external “society.”

The differing assumptions about human nature represented by Hobbes and Rousseau have big implications for contemporary arguments over environmentalism and, indeed, the nature of human happiness. Hobbes presented a secular version of the Christian doctrine of original sin: human beings are by nature greedy, fearful, violent, and vain; it was only by coming together under a social contract that these natural passions could be kept under control. Rousseau, by contrast, reversed the valence of inside and outside: human beings are naturally good; it was only their entry into society that corrupted them and made them unhappy. The Rousseauian assumption is today shared by many anthropologists and environmentalists, who tend to believe that indigenous societies are more peaceful and environmentally protective than the modern industrial West.

For the last couple of centuries, many people in liberal Western societies have shared Rousseau’s assumption about the “natural goodness of man.” This is true insofar as they value inner authenticity, and believe that it is the pressures of “society” that suppress that authenticity and deny them the happiness they would naturally enjoy. In a Hobbesean world, growing up entails acceptance of the fact that one cannot do whatever one wants, and that a successful life requires conformity with social rules. In a Rousseauian world, by contrast, the inner self is constantly seeking liberation from stifling social constraints, whether the latter are enforced by a state, or simply by social custom.

(I can’t blame you if you feel like you are back in Poli Sci 101)

“…seeking liberation from stifling social constraints” may be the trend now, but the trend towards seeking liberation from biological constraints is also on full display via transgenderism. Transhumanism is the next step.

Enter DNA:

The discovery of DNA and the genetic code in the 1960s provided a heretofore missing biological account of inherited physical and behavioral traits. Given this, and the ubiquity of belief in human nature, it may seem surprising that there has been a huge amount of pushback against the very concept, and outright denials on the part of serious thinkers that human nature exists.

There were a number of reasons for this skepticism. In the first place, as knowledge of genetics increased, it became clear that our genetic inheritance interacts with our social and physical environment in very complex ways. Human beings are not robotically programmed to behave in determinate ways like certain animal species. Faculties may be rooted in the human genome, but their development could be extended, enhanced, or conversely constrained by how an individual is brought up and interacts with society. Geneticists discovered that certain genes are expressed only in response to specific environmental signals. It was therefore sometimes hard to say what core human capacities were “by nature.”

We know a lot more today about human nature than we did in the 18^th or 19^th centuries, not just as a result of advances in biology, but also because of research coming from archaeology, comparative anthropology, and indeed primatology. From the vantage point of the present, it is safe to say that the early modern liberal narrative about the state of nature was wrong in several respects. I presented evidence for this in the first volume of my Political Order series. Human beings are social by nature, but their sociability takes certain characteristic forms. The biologist William Hamilton’s theory of inclusive fitness posits that human beings—indeed, not just human beings but most sexually reproducing species—are altruistic in proportion to the number of genes they share with relatives. They are also strongly inclined towards reciprocal altruism, that is, the exchange of favors or benefits with close colleagues. This means that the most prevalent form of social life lies in community with a small circle of friends and family. This means that patrimonialism—that is, rule by friends and family—is deeply natural. By contrast, the kind of impersonal authority required by a modern state where officials are chosen on the basis of merit does not come naturally to political actors. For this reason, “re-patrimonialization” is a constant threat in modern political systems. We see this today as Donald Trump seeks to undermine the merit-based bureaucracy, relying instead on a close circle of trusted friends and family.

Fukuyama on-brand with the jab at Trump.

We all knew the following to be true, intuitively:

More recent data also suggests that Hobbes may have been closer to the truth than Rousseau with regard to propensities of early peoples towards violence. The latter’s assumption about the “natural goodness of man” is unfortunately contradicted by a fair amount of empirical evidence: many hunter-gatherer societies have higher murder rates than contemporary American or Mexican cities, and evidence of bloody warfare extends backwards in the archaeological record as far as we can see. Humans are social creatures by nature, but their sociability is often driven by the need to organize violence. Stewardship of the environment appears to be due more to a lack of technological capacity rather than intention. The world’s megafauna were largely wiped out following the entry of modern humans into those regions where they existed.

The “noble savage” is a myth.

Feminists muddying the waters:

Controversies over the role of biology re-emerged big time with the rise of feminism in the 1960s. Many feminists were strongly on the social construction side, arguing that apparent male-female differences in either behavior or social outcomes were due exclusively to the way that girls were brought up in contrast to boys. Women had to be liberated from the social conventions that made it hard, for example, for them to enter a variety of professions from driving trucks and piloting airplanes to serving in the police and military.

But while biological arguments about what girls and women could or could not do were steadily debunked, there remained a core set of male-female differences that could not be overcome. Men and women obviously differ with regard to physical characteristics, which go beyond the fact that they have different reproductive organs. Height, upper body strength, longevity, and other features may be normally distributed for both sexes, and there will be individuals in the tails of the distributions that will outperform the vast majority of members of the other sex. But the medians of those distributions differ. So while any individual woman may be stronger or taller than any individual man, the characteristics of the sexes will not be the same in the aggregate. This is why male and female sports remain segregated to this day.

These differences very likely extend to psychological characteristics as well. In the 1980s evolutionary psychologists began to argue that male and female reproductive strategies differed, not just among human beings, but among very many sexually-reproducing species. Men tended to be more promiscuous than women because that was their optimal strategy for getting their genes into the next generation; women by contrast needed stable homes in which to raise their children to adulthood. Adolescent women are also less inclined to risk-taking, which is why the vast majority of crimes are committed by young men in cultures all over the world.

It took a lot of scientific study for many people to undo social engineering and relearn old truths.

Here is the crux of Fukuyama’s essay:

There is another, even more fundamental reason why progressive liberals resist granting significance to human biology: it represents a potentially insuperable limitation of human autonomy.

At the core of modern liberalism is an assertion of the equality of human dignity, based on a posited universal human capacity for choice. Human beings may differ in terms of intelligence, strength, skin color, and gender, but all are deemed moral agents who have the ability and the right to make choices about their own lives—rights to speech, belief, association, and the like. Protecting that autonomy has been regarded as the moral core of a liberal society. In early modern Europe, autonomy was understood as the right to make choices within pre-existing moral frameworks, frameworks established by various religious traditions. Freedom of religious belief was therefore one of the key values protected by rights like the U.S. First Amendment.

Over time, however, the sphere of autonomy expanded relentlessly to include not just the ability to make choices within a moral law defined by an existing religious tradition, but also to choose one’s framework and even make up moral rules for oneself.

This is nowhere more evident than in the sphere of sexuality, gender, and family life. Many countries have legalized abortion, which is typically framed as a way of protecting the autonomy of women to control their own bodies. But the final frontier in the denial of the significance of biology is the contemporary transgender movement. Many transgender activists, supported by a good part of the medical establishment, assert that gender is wholly unrelated to biological sex, that is, to one’s XY chromosomes. Rather, it is a matter of individual choice, much as one might choose a new name or a place to live. They don’t want to be told that their genetic endowment will have powerful effects on their gender identity.

This is where liberalism has taken us. Much like the useless William F. Buckley yelled “HALT!” in the faces of his contemporary liberals, so too does Fukuyama insist that the tide of progress stop due to going “too far”. Yet progress insists that we overcome all duties, all bonds of familiarity, and and limitations of humanity itself.

Fukuyama’s fear:

Finally, while technology promises to take away the limitations of human nature, this is a false promise. I believe that we are moving into dangerous territory here. Human beings are not disembodied wills floating in space that can choose to land in any shape or form they choose. Our human experience, and therefore the ends and goods that we seek, have been deeply shaped by our physical bodies and the strengths and limitations that they entail. This is why I wrote my 2004 book Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. Human beings have been using technology to enhance their physical and mental faculties continuously throughout history. We are faster, stronger, see better, travel further, and live longer through technologies from eyeglasses to automobiles to vaccines. Biomedical technology can already shape behavior and outcomes through surgery, drugs, and other interventions. But the emergence of genetic engineering made possible by technologies like CRISPR-Cas9 promises much more fundamental changes to those underlying faculties that may one day alter our understanding of political rights.

Do we really want to be able to freely change our underlying natures, to make human beings more or less aggressive, more or less compassionate, more intelligent or more servile? We may not like the proclivity for risk-taking and violence, but what unanticipated consequences may flow from an effort to breed it out of the human race? And who is it that will be exercising the power to decide these issues, decisions that will affect not just subjects in the present generation, but all of their descendants? Will these powers be exercised by wealthy elites, who can then give their descendants a leg up in social competition in centuries to come?

Liberals need to recognize that while autonomy is a human good, it is not the sole human good that trumps all other ends that people choose. Part of the human experience lies in coming to terms with limitations, both those that apply to us as individuals, and those that are true of human beings as a species. Indeed, those limitations are what link us in communities. Many people deliberately want to live within a religious or cultural tradition that binds them in communities, even as it restricts their freedom of individual choice.

As the Latin poet Horace said, “You can throw nature out with a pitchfork, but it will always come running back.” We will never become gods, and may learn that lesson only as we approach our 200^th birthdays with the diminished faculties of five year olds.

Has the genie already been let out of the bottle?

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I’ve come to conclude that social media has displaced movies, television, and popular music as the most powerful form of US soft power at present. Think about it: outside of Russia and China, apps like Facebook, Instagram, and X are wildly popular, and being tilted towards US culture, they set the tone for much of what is produced content-wise. This is absorbed by users of these apps.

This is not to say that the Americans have a monopoly on social media soft power, they don’t. Russia and China are walled off, and the Chinese owned Tik Tok platform is massive. This means that there is some healthy competition for US social media giants, and this also means that due to their inherent soft power capabilities, the USA will promote them and defend their presence overseas as much as possible. They’d be stupid not to.

For example, the EU has made threats against apps such as X, and none other than US VPOTUS JD Vance has threatened Europe over its increasingly-restrictive laws on speech. These two bits are not alien to one another, as Vance is working to ensure the freedom of operation for American-based social media giants on the European continent as a way to maintain and expand US influence there.

Even though these apps are not “real life”, they do have influence….at least with certain segments of the population. Elon Musk, no dummy, didn’t shell out $45 Billion USD on Twitter to turn it into X as a lark. In fact, that platform did help Trump win last year’s Presidential Election.

Elon’s purchase also caused an exodus of very vocal left wing Twitter users to a new app called Bluesky. This app (modeled on Twitter/X) was created to cater to those reacting to Elon’s purchase of the once liberal-dominated platform. Hopes were high that it would replace Twitter/X, but those hopes have largely been dashed, as Nate Silver explains:

Silver Bulletin

What is Blueskyism?

Bluesky, the Twitter spinoff that was once billed as a kinder, gentler alternative to what is now known as X, probably isn't …

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7 months ago · 534 likes · 97 comments · Nate Silver

Bluesky, the Twitter spinoff that was once billed as a kinder, gentler alternative to what is now known as X, probably isn't on death's door. But after a burst of growth around the election, it's shrinking and steadily declining in influence, even as other corners of the left thrive during Trump's second term.

The life and death of social media platforms are dictated by network effects. Although there can sometimes be inflection points, for the most part, their trajectory is predictable. You join them because other people are joining them, and that in turn makes them progressively more useful. And you remain on them out of habit until and unless a critical mass decamps for somewhere else.

Twitter/X has slowly declined in influence, according to external evidence — Elon Musk’s occasional claims to the contrary notwithstanding.1 And yet, despite some extremely problematic characteristics that we’ve documented at Silver Bulletin, X remains relatively sticky, partially because it’s been a slow glide down from a high peak following earlier years of exponential growth.

Alternatives like Meta’s Threads, Trump’s Truth Social and the independent Mastodon have failed to gain traction. And we’re at a point where it’s probably safe to assume that Bluesky won’t displace Twitter either.

The first mistake was to bill Bluesky as a Twitter replacement. Doing that means that you are defining your own product against that of another, meaning that it is little more than a copy. People generally prefer to the real thing to a copy, especially when it’s free of charge.

Some numbers (something that Nate is know for):

Let’s take a look at Google searches related to each platform.2 By this measure, Bluesky peaked in November, 2024 following Trump’s reelection — although even then, despite largely glowing media coverage, it topped out at about 1/20th the worldwide search volume for X.

Even on a logarithmic scale — on a linear scale, the graph is boring, because everything but Twitter would pretty much just be a flat line — the gulf between X and the other platforms is clear. And since the election, Bluesky has lost ground. More precise data based on the number of unique “likers”, “posters” and “followers” at Bluesky tracks a similar curve, with an initial peak around the election and a secondary peak after Trump’s inauguration but persistent erosion since then. The number of unique posters at Bluesky peaked at just under 1.5 million on Nov. 18, 2024 but has since fallen to an average of about 660,000 on weekdays and 600,000 on weekends: in other words, a drop of more than half.

The decline in Bluesky’s number of unique daily followers is even more substantial. They topped out at 3.1 million on Nov. 18 last year, but are now just under 400,000 per day: almost a tenfold decline. So while a dedicated troupe of Bluesky regulars are still skeeting up a storm, they’re gaining less and less traction, preaching only to the converted.

Why this failure to achieve escape velocity? Well, as I’ve written about before, it might be Twitter itself was the outlier, created by tech nerds and for tech nerds at a time when the Internet was less tribal. Not only is anything else unlikely to supplant Twitter, but Twitter itself would probably fail to realize the same prominence if it were launched today, even if there were no dominant Twitter-like platform competing with it.

Silver is a regular target of the posters over at Bluesky, so he is enjoying its failure to replace X as the news app to be on. For him, it’s personal. He has also summarized what “Blueskyism” is in three concise points:

The first essential characteristic: Smalltentism

Aggressive policing of dissent, particularly of people “just outside the circle” who might have broader credibility on the center-left. Censoriousness, often taking the form of moral micropanics that designate a rotating cast of opponents as the main characters of the day. Self-reinforcing belief in the righteousness of the clique, and conflation of its values with broader public sentiment among “the base”.

……..

But now that Blueskyism is losing the battle of ideas, it just draws the tent narrower and ensures that it will remain obscure.

The second essential characteristic: Credentialism

Appeals to authority, particularly academic authority. Centering of the suitability of the speaker based on his or her credentials and/or identity characteristics (standpoint epistemology) as opposed to the strength of his or her arguments, accompanied by the implicit presumption to claim to be speaking on behalf of the entire identity group.

Although Blueskyism is small, its practitioners mostly consist of people within the professional-managerial class: (over)educated blue-state liberals, perhaps people who have drawn the short straw of elite overproduction. You can see that in the demographic data, or in the attitude site management takes: the platform literally just banned people from Mississippi because of a dispute over age verification.

The third essential characteristic: Catastrophism

Humorless, scoldy neuroticism, often rationalized by the view that one must be on “war footing” because the world is self-evidently in crisis. Sublimation of personal anxiety as a substitute for political activism or material solutions to the crisis, with expressions of weariness and pessimism signaling virtue and/or savviness.

Although the first two characteristics already limit the appeal of Blueskyism, this makes it worse. Even people who might otherwise be sympathetic to Bluesky have noticed how impossible it is to get away with a joke on the platform, one of the things that X sometimes13 still has going for it. The Bernie-era, Chapo Trap House strain of left-wing discourse also at least had a caustic if sometimes juvenile humor streak. Blueskyism does not.

Instead, the prevailing Blueskyist attitude is often something like this — that we’re in the midst of a “late stage capitalist hellscape” and that you have to be “delusional” to have any amount of hope or optimism”:14

Purity-spirals and humourlessness drive people away from your cause(s).

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I guess the theme of this weekend’s SCR is liberalism and the challenges it faces. In this segment, let’s see what the so-called Blueskyists (outside of the app itself) have to say for the state of global liberalism as it stands today:

The friends of liberal democracy have awakened to the external threat posed by autocratic states, of which Russia, China, and Iran are the most dangerous, and to the internal threat from leaders who practice what Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has misleadingly described as illiberal democracy—a facially majoritarian electoral system without safeguards for the civil rights of individuals and minorities or the civic rights of the press and political opposition. But liberal democracy’s supporters have not tried hard enough to understand why they have been blindsided once again by an upsurge in hostile sentiments.

The mobilization of anti-liberal passion is to some extent inevitable. After all, the defenders of liberal democracy are the true conservatives of our time, seeking to preserve what is good about the present as the best basis for future improvements.

I love this last line, as what constitutes “liberal democracy” changes on a whim, making it a moving target. Them being the “true conservatives” is like being conservative about the shape of jelly.

Inner vulnerabilities of liberal democracy:

First: Because liberal democracy restrains majorities and gives even small minorities a say, it slows the achievement of goals that majorities support. This generates public frustration with institutional restraints, and an unacknowledged envy of authoritarian systems that can act quickly and decisively. China can build huge cities in the time that it takes the United States to review the environmental impact of minor highway projects. Liberal democracy requires more patience than many possess.

While this problem can be mitigated (for example, by removing excessive obstacles to building things), it cannot be eliminated. Liberal democratic institutions are constructed with two purposes in view—to help achieve collective goals and to protect against tyranny. But efficacy and security pull in opposite directions. While checks and balances can protect us against dangerous concentrations of power, they can also hamper government’s ability to carry out the will of the people. When core problems remain unsolved for years or even decades, public frustration grows. So does support for leaders who are willing to break the rules to get things done.

Okay, this is fair.

Next:

Second, liberal democracy requires tolerance for minority views and ways of life to which many citizens are deeply opposed. It is natural to feel that if we consider certain views or ways of life to be odious, we should use public power to suppress them. In many such cases, liberal democracy requires us to restrain this impulse, a psychological burden that some will find unbearable.

I take issue with the claim that these specific liberals tolerate minority views. After all, they have become very censorious as of late.

This leads directly to the third inherent problem of liberal democracy: the distinction it requires between civic identity and personal or group identity. Although liberals may believe that certain religious views are false and even dangerous, they must accept those who hold these views as their equals for civic purposes. Advocates may freely express these views; they may organize to promote them; they may vote, and their votes are given equal weight. The same goes for race, ethnicity, gender, and all other particularities that distinguish us from one another.

This is indeed an internal paradox of liberalism. We are supposed to be judged and treated as individuals, yet people choose to cling to group identities.

And the last one:

The fourth inherent difficulty of liberal democracy—the necessity of compromise—is no easier for many to accept. If what I want is good and true, why should I agree to incorporate competing views into public decisions? James Madison gives us the answer: In circumstances of liberty, diversity of views is inevitable, and unless those who agree with us form a majority so large as to be irresistible, the alternatives to compromise are either inaction, which is often more damaging, or oppression, which always is.

Again, I must take issue with this due to how much de-platforming and de-banking took place not too long ago.

There is a lot more to this essay from this former Clinton official, so read it here in its entirety.

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Now it’s time for some comment fodder via an interview with Holocaust Studies Professor Norman J. W. Goda who insists that Israel is not conducting a genocide in Gaza:

Earlier this year, Goda wrote a long essay titled “The Genocide Libel,” in which he argues that the accusation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza “is political, designed not so much to describe a crime, but to place Israel, its military, its citizens, and its supporters as outside the realm of decency and human values.” Recently, he wrote another piece, with the historian Jeffrey Herf, about “why it’s wrong to call Israel’s war in Gaza a ‘genocide.’ ”

Genocide is defined by the Genocide Convention of 1948 as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Some scholars of the Holocaust, most notably Omer Bartov, have argued that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, where more than sixty thousand Palestinians have been killed, and that it is the duty of Holocaust historians to speak out against the war. But Bartov has also argued that “the majority of academics engaged with the history of the Nazi genocide of the Jews have stayed remarkably silent, while some have openly denied Israel’s crimes in Gaza, or accused their more critical colleagues of incendiary speech, wild exaggeration, well-poisoning and antisemitism.” He specifically pointed to Goda as an example.

Excerpts from the interview (I won’t do any bolding here so as not to confuse. All bolded parts are questions from the interviewer):

Antisemitism was obviously inextricable from the Holocaust, and the Holocaust was the single most infamous or one of the most infamous large-scale human-rights violations. It seems that Holocaust historians often feel it is important to address contemporary antisemitism and human-rights violations.

Yes, very much. The generation of Holocaust historians before mine took up the subject owing in part to their objections to the Vietnam War. There was a school of thought at the time that viewed Vietnam itself as a genocide, and believed that the United States, which was instrumental in the defeat of Nazi Germany and all that it stood for, was now fighting what was, in essence, a colonial war with mass civilian casualties.

The longer answer to this is that the Holocaust was seen at the time as a civilizational rupture. It was the premeditated murder of one European group by other European groups, and it took place in Europe. Faith in the Enlightenment and European progress was destroyed. The Holocaust became, as a result, the prototypical way that we think of genocide. In recent decades, scholars of European colonialism have pointed out that scenes of extreme mass violence, and even genocide, also took place in the colonial world. And that has raised questions that we are all trying to figure out. One is, has the Holocaust become a hegemonic narrative that crowds out our consciousness of race-based mass atrocity? Can we understand the Holocaust and colonial violence better by finding common elements? What is the relationship between antisemitism and racism?

And the thing that complicates all of those discussions is how one feels about Israel. The way one feels about Israel really lights a fire under all of these debates—about where the Holocaust fits into contemporary Israeli politics and the war in Gaza.

…….

You wrote something about the war in Gaza with the title “The Genocide Libel.” What historical resonance was that title supposed to have?

In the world of antisemitism, “libel” refers to all of those antisemitic tropes by which Jews were charged with horrible things, whether it was the deliberate and gleeful ritual killing of non-Jewish children, or the accusation that Jews manipulated foreign governments, controlled the press_, and ultimately strove to control the world.

……

In your paper you write, “Genocide accusations against Israel are different” from other such charges. Do you think charging Israel with genocide is antisemitic?

The accusation that Israel is committing genocide is the peak of a pretty broad mountain. We’ve had arguments over Israel for decades. Again, some questions: Was the return of Jews necessary, proper, and overdue after the Holocaust, or is Israel just another European racist colonial state, or even settler-colonial state? Did Israel’s existence as a settler-colonial state necessitate erasure of the Arabs who were in Palestine? Or were the Arabs in Palestine done in again and again by inflexible, wrongheaded, venal, and corrupt leadership?

I’m sensing what you believe given those adjectives.

Well, look, Palestinians have not had the best leaders, and one can make the argument that those leaders led the Palestinians down a very tragic and very dark alley.

………

Things get somewhat heated:

Just to go back to my question, though: Considering that you talked about a “genocide libel,” is lobbing that accusation against Israel today antisemitic?

I do think that we need to look at it broadly. Is the accusation of genocide in keeping with the one legal definition of genocide that we have? Have these accusations been made before, and is there something peculiar about them in Israel’s case? Namely, do they weave in antisemitic tropes? Israel is fighting a war that in some ways is unprecedented. It’s a war against a dug-in enemy who has created fortifications underground, but also under civilian structures.

Israel is not denying aid to Gaza because Hamas is under buildings, correct?

The blockade is kind of a different issue.

It’s part of the case when people make these genocide charges against Israel.

Well, they focus on a lot of things, but I think it’s worth making the point that genocide accusations against Israel really go back to the nineteen-sixties.

And even more heated:

There’ve been people in government in Israel and close to the government using phrases like “ethnic cleansing” to refer to what the country is doing. There are widespread reports of war crimes committed by Israeli forces, and of intentional attacks on innocent civilians, and of starvation. Does the argument about genocide feel different now than when people were accusing Israel of it in the past?

Well, there’s no doubt that there are war crimes that the Israeli government or the Israeli military will have to investigate. “Genocide” is a very different term. Normal countries commit war crimes. Genocidal countries are something else. They are rendered illegitimate, and they are rendered illegitimate permanently.

Not permanently, right? Germany’s a beloved member of the family of nations now, or whatever clichéd phrase you want to use.

But the Nazis hopefully are never coming back to power, and the Hutus are never coming back to power in Rwanda.

So the people who committed it are permanently delegitimatized? Is that what you mean?

When you say Israel is a genocidal state, and Zionism is a genocidal doctrine, you’re saying that Israel as a Jewish state is not only committing genocide but is genocidal as such.

Let’s say hypothetically that Israel was committing genocide. How would you talk about it? Or are you saying it could not be discussed?

I’m not the one who’s obsessing over the term “genocide.” There have been numerous people who have said that “genocide” is the only term to use here, and that was said very shortly after October 7th. You’re talking about the recent problems with food distribution and that sort of thing. It’s worth remembering that within days of October 7th, there were articles being published calling the war, which had barely got under way, a textbook case of genocide.

Click here to read the rest.

The only comment that I will make is that Israel is lucky to have the USA as its shield from the ICC at The Hague because they’d be sanctioned and bombed by now for doing things that Serbs and Croatians were hit for during the 1990s. War is the most difficult time to pin down facts pertaining to actual events, and politicized courts have their own agendas.

P.S.

Be respectful in the comment, please and thank you!

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We end this weekend’s SCR with a look at Christopher Marlowe, the man who walked so that Shakespeare could run his mouth off to our collective delight:

By the time Marlowe died in 1593, at just 29 years old, England was in the midst of a cultural and intellectual flourishing. Greenblatt credits Marlowe with sparking this transformation. In a new book, Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Christopher Marlowe, Greenblatt—one of the world’s foremost Shakespeare scholars—argues that Marlowe didn’t merely precede Shakespeare, he made Shakespeare’s career possible.

“It was Marlowe who cracked something open,” Greenblatt says, “and enabled Shakespeare to walk through—how should we say?—over his dead body.”

Marlowe’s story, Greenblatt adds, is also relevant to many of academia’s current preoccupations. He was a “first-gen” student who glimpsed radical possibilities in the supposedly conservative texts of “great books courses.” He faced a “vocational crisis” familiar to many humanities students today—and pursued his passion despite the risk.

Click here to read the rest.

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Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

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I have been very, very frustrated for some time now as I desperately want to write full-length essays on the war in Ukraine but am not able to do so because the situation on the ground and in the world of diplomacy has barely changed since the failed Ukrainian summer offensive of two years ago. The fight continues to grind on, with the Russians chipping away at Ukrainian defenses in the southeast of the country, and with no breakthrough in sight (assuming that the Russian military seeks to do that in the first place). I know that many of you who are subscribed to this Substack share that same frustration, but I cannot write the same essay over and over again. Doing that would be a disservice to readers.

The two sides (Russia vs. USA/EU/NATO/Ukraine) continue to talk past one another, with the main actor on the side, the USA, hilariously positioning itself as a mediator. The fact of the matter is that there are two wars being fought simultaneously, and the USA is the main actor in the more important one (USA vs. Russia). A belligerent USA managed to position itself as a mediator in the conflict between Israel and Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran, but trying to pull the same trick with Russia is too tall an order to fulfill.

At the same time, Russia has to humour to the USA as a recognition of its unrivaled power. This was the reason for the recent summit in Alaska, one which ended quickly and served only to remind Trump and his team that the Russian position has not fundamentally changed. Russia came away from this summit with a small victory in which US demands for an immediate ceasefire were dropped.

Fast forward to this past Monday where Ukrainian President Zelensky arrived in Washington with the cream of the crop of the European National Branch Managers of USA Inc. (including EU VP of USA Inc. Ursula von der Leyen) to reiterate Ukraine’s position, one that is effectively unchanged from the time of Boris Johnson parachuting into Kiev in 2022 to urge Ukraine to keep fighting. The only thing of note to occur during that meeting was that Trump informed the world that the EU would buy weapons from the USA to continue to arm Ukraine so that it can defend itself against Russia.

Trump says a lot of things, and on this issue he has done a lot of flip-flopping. Maybe it’s his negotiating style? I don’t know. What we DO KNOW is that he claimed to be in favour of an American role in providing security guarantees to Ukraine, so long as there were no US boots on the ground there. He added that this could come in the manner of air support, with European forces providing boots on the ground. The second that Trump suggested that this could be in play was the very moment that the past week saw zero positive movement towards a resolution of this conflict.

This war is about setting the new border between Russia and the US Empire. The USA rejects Russia’s desire to re-establish spheres of influence in its ‘near-abroad’, because it feels that it can continue to turn its neighbours against Moscow and integrate them into Atlanticist structures. Russia views Ukraine as an existential matter, and insists on having a veto over its security future. This was the case in February of 2022, and this is still the case in August of 2025. Who in the right mind actually took seriously the idea that European soldiers would be stationed on the ground in Ukraine while the USA patrolled the skies? This would be an INTERVENTION on the side of Ukraine, and would be the EXACT kind of thing that Russia wanted to prevent in the first place by invading its neighbour.

The Russians aren’t dumb. They went to Alaska to humour Trump, but Russian FM Lavrov wearing a CCCP sweatshirt was the best indicator as to how low their expectations of the summit would be. They were proven right by Monday’s media show.

Of particular note is the cynicism on display from the UK and France. Both countries know that Russia will not permit the stationing of forces from NATO countries on Ukrainian soil, yet they tried to insert themselves anyway through the most thinly-hidden layer of “peacekeeping forces” or as part of a “security guarantee” for Kiev. Who are they trying to kid? Key EU states such as France and Finland, in tandem with the UK, have joined Kiev in pretending that they hold the cards in this conflict and can dictate the terms of peace to Moscow. The Americans are of two minds: on the one hand they are playing good cop to the EU/NATO/UK/Ukrainian bad cop, but they also want to end, or at least freeze, this conflict and park it on Europe’s plate so that they can finally turn their focus to countering China.

Almost nothing has changed in this conflict, which is frustrating for a writer like myself. I don’t even have a good article or essay to share with you on this topic, because so little is new. For the sake of format and consistency, I am resigned to sharing this piece from the Guardian UK which looks at potential security arrangements for Ukraine if peace should ever break out there:

Zelenskyy has said that the details will be worked out and “formalised on paper” within a week to 10 days. As many as 30 countries – called the “coalition of the willing” – are likely to be involved, with some help from the US, although what that might mean is unclear. Speaking after his meeting on Monday with Donald Trump and European leaders in the White House, Zelenskyy said their support could take many forms.

Okay.

One of those could be prysutnist (the Ukrainian word for presence), meaning they would provide troops. And it might include intelligence, as well as providing security in the air and on the Black Sea, or simply funds, he said.

A total non-starter, as it would violate the main reason for Russia’s decision to invade. Furthermore, Lavrov has stated that any conference on security guarantees to Ukraine must include Russia, meaning that it would have a veto on said guarantees. Rejecting this would mean agreeing to more war with Russia.

The key question is, which European governments are willing to take part in a peacekeeping mission inside Ukraine? The UK and France have indicated they are ready to send soldiers as part of a “reassurance force”. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, confirmed: “We have to help Ukraine on the ground.” Germany is more sceptical. Many details have yet to be worked out. Would western troops be stationed along a ceasefire line or provide a more limited training role in big cities such as Kyiv and Lviv? And what rules of engagement would they have if they came under Russian fire?

This would be NATO-by-stealth.

Trump has promised to coordinate a Europe-led peacekeeping operation in Ukraine. “When it comes to security, there’s going to be a lot of help,” he said on Monday, sitting next to Zelenskyy in the Oval Office. The US president made clear European countries would be expected to carry most of the burden. “They are a first line of defence because they’re there. But we’ll help them out,” he said.

Ukraine wants to buy $90bn worth of US weapons and says they could form part of the security guarantee. Overall, however, Trump has been vague about how much the US would contribute. He has ruled out Ukraine’s membership of Nato, which Kyiv believes would be the best deterrent against a future Russian onslaught. There seems no prospect the US would send its own troops to take part in a peace-keeping mission. One more realistic option would be for the Pentagon to provide logistical support to a proposed “sky shield”. The plan envisages an air protection zone in the west and the centre of Ukraine, including over the capital Kyiv, enforced by European fighter jets.

Once again, NATO-by-stealth.

According to Trump, Vladimir Putin agreed during their summit in Alaska that Ukraine required security guarantees. Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff has said that these would be outside the auspices of Nato, but would be the equivalent of article 5, Nato’s self-defence pact in which an attack on one is considered an attack on all. Russia’s interpretation of guarantees, however, seems different from Witkoff’s version. The Kremlin says it is categorically opposed to western troops in Ukraine. It is unlikely to accept a peacekeeping force as part of any deal.

This is just NATO. These people are shameless.

Left outside of my commentary is what has been agreed to in back channels between the relevant parties. There is a growing sense that Kiev is willing to accept territorial losses in return for strong security guarantees, but Russia will not accept security guarantees such as those that have been floated.

This war is far from over.

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As the USA continues to swallow up Europe, there is one notable area of increasing divergence: how each treat speech. Attacks on free speech are common no matter which party is in power in the USA, but the First Amendment remains a remarkable bulwark in the protection of speech for American citizens.

Europe, on the other hand, is a different story. The trend on the continent (and in the UK) has been growing restrictions on speech in order to “defend democracy and democratic values” i.e. illiberalism to protect liberalism. Rather than following the American lead that bans speech only in the most severe cases, Europe has chosen instead to be legally intolerant towards those that they deem “intolerant” for expressing views that are considered to have committed that very same secular sin.

It was only sixty years ago when Mario Savio led the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley out in California. Back then, he and other campus leftists were considered the vanguard of free speech activism in the USA. Protests were held, papers and articles were written, and many court battles were won over time to ensure that all kinds of speech were deemed acceptable and to be protected by law. By the time Savio’s colleagues wormed their way into power, it was time for them to begin to attack speech that they didn’t approve it, coining the term “hate speech” and insisting that “hate speech isn’t speech but is violence”.

This long campaign bore fruit in the very recent past where “de-platforming” became de rigeur. If you couldn’t ban speech that you didn’t approve of, you could pressure private businesses to ban it on your behalf. Social media worked hand-in-glove with the Obama and Biden regimes to do just this very thing, as all of you are already aware of. Despite these efforts to restrict speech, the culture of the USA has not permitted these restrictions to take hold (as of the present). The love of liberty that is encoded in the DNA of the USA will not permit restrictions on free speech. For the median American it simply does not compute.

There will be future efforts to restrict speech in the USA (and the Trump admin is guilty of doing this too), but America is a far cry from what is happening in Europe at present:

American officials are waging a multifront attack on Europe’s approach to free speech. This month, a congressional delegation traveled to Dublin, Brussels, and London to probe and decry European regulations on digital speech. A State Department human-rights assessment issued last week pointed to objectionable “restrictions on freedom of expression” in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. All of this follows Vice President J. D. Vance’s speech in February at the Munich Security Conference, where he accused European leaders of retreating from the continent’s “most fundamental values,” including free expression.

These assessments might seem untrustworthy, given the flagrant transgressions against free-speech principles from the Trump administration and its allies. But the fact is that European leaders are corroding the right to free expression, and show every sign of sliding further down a slippery slope into illiberalism.

I applaud Vance’s criticism directed at Europe that he delivered during his speech in Munich earlier this year, and I do that for entirely self-serving reasons. I do not believe that US criticism of Europe’s drive to restrict speech is altruistic, because such restrictions hamper the ability of social media giants to conduct their businesses, and negatively impact US soft power on the continent. It’s in the USA’s strategic benefit to have a regulatory environment in Europe that is very liberal because their social media giants are the biggest, and US influence and soft power emanate through them.

Europe and the U.S. have always had different free-speech cultures. In the postwar era, both confronted the question of how tolerant societies should treat intolerant factions. Much of Europe concluded that, although free speech is important, views that threaten democracy itself are different and can be criminalized; see laws in various European states against Nazi propaganda. In contrast, the American system protected expression as vile as neo-Nazis marching through a town of Holocaust survivors because, by First Amendment logic, fascist speech poses less of a danger than enabling the state itself to engage in viewpoint discrimination. Despite these differences, both Europe and America mostly expanded speech protections in the 20th century and pulled back from censorship, seeming to converge on liberal values by the time the Iron Curtain fell and the internet spread.

The shift:

The shift has been gradual, emerging in landmark cases at the European Court of Human Rights, as well as in legislation at the national level. But the new reality is stark. Last year, Amnesty International (hardly a Trump-administration ally) published a report about what the organization’s secretary-general, Agnès Callamard, called a “Europe-wide onslaught against the right to protest”; the report documented examples of restrictive laws, use of excessive police force, and arbitrary arrest. It’s not just protests. European judges have signed off on the criminalization of the kinds of hate speech that, while easy to revile, pose nothing like Hitlerite peril. When a middle-aged mother lashes out at asylum seekers in a social-media post (later deleted), or a pro-Palestinian marcher chants a slogan that some but not all see as genocidal, or a flyer calls gays “deviants,” a tolerant society can exercise forbearance and respond with counterspeech. European states are often deploying handcuffs instead. And European leaders are pushing to expand the speech that can get a person thrown in prison.

Think about how many resources are tasked with monitoring speech and arresting those who violate these ridiculous laws.

Europe’s slide towards illiberal speech laws:

Since shortly after its inception in 1959, the European Court of Human Rights, also known as the Strasbourg Court, has heard cases of alleged violations of the 1953 convention. The court’s strongest precedent affirming liberal free-speech values was articulated in a 1976 case called Handyside v. United Kingdom. In it, the court actually ruled in favor of the British government’s censorship of a book, for schoolchildren, whose content was deemed obscene. Yet its judgment stated that, in general, freedom of expression is “applicable not only to ‘information’ or ‘ideas’ that are favourably” or indifferently received, “but also to those that offend, shock or disturb the State or any sector of the population.” That ethos would be a powerful bulwark for expressive rights, if enforced. Yet in a series of rulings that began in the aughts, the court betrayed that ethos until it was all but abandoned.

One influential case, in 2009, concerned Daniel Féret, a Belgian politician who founded a far-right political party. He published campaign leaflets that included statements such as “stop the Islamization of Belgium” and “save our people from the risk posed by Islam, the conqueror.” A Belgian court convicted Féret of inciting discrimination, hatred, or violence, and punished him with a suspended prison sentence, 250 hours of community service, and 10 years of ineligibility for office. His punishment “had the legitimate aims of preventing disorder,” the court ruled, stating that “incitation to hatred” need not involve calls “for specific acts of violence.” Rather, “insults, ridicule or defamation aimed at specific population groups or incitation to discrimination, as in this case, sufficed.” Punishing insults that could lead to discrimination is a much lower standard than punishing calls for imminent violence that are also likely to lead to it.

In a 2012 case, Vejdeland and Others v. Sweden, four Swedes challenged their conviction for distributing to high schoolers leaflets that called homosexuality a “deviant sexual proclivity” and argued that promiscuous gays were responsible for spreading HIV. The court ruled that discrimination based on sexual orientation is as serious as racial discrimination, and that although the four Swedes might have been trying to initiate debate on “a question of public interest,” they had a duty to avoid “as far as possible” statements that are “unwarrantably offensive,” such as disparaging homosexuals as a group. How far such a duty to avoid offense might extend was unclear. In 2015, the court concluded that European states could be justified in punishing speech that is contrary to the “underlying values” or “spirit” of the European Convention on Human Rights, “namely justice and peace,” but didn’t clearly define those values or set forth a test for what violates them.

In short, what constitutes “hate speech” is a moving target.

This is very applicable to yours truly as I moderate comments on here:

With online speech offering national authorities more occasions to launch prosecutions, the court set another speech-chilling precedent in 2015: An online news portal in Estonia could be punished for failing to remove hateful comments posted beneath a news article that itself was unobjectionable, the court found. In a similar case, in 2023, the court ruled against a far-right politician from France, Julien Sanchez, who had been punished for failing to delete hateful comments left beneath a Facebook post he wrote, even though he apparently hadn’t seen the comments. That ruling included the sweeping statement that because “tolerance and respect for the equal dignity of all” are foundational in a pluralistic democracy, “it may be considered necessary in certain democratic societies to penalise or even prevent all forms of expression that propagate, encourage, promote or justify hatred based on intolerance.” Not only must wrongthink be banned, the court suggested; justifying the wrongthink of others, or failing to adequately monitor and censor it, can be penalized, too.

(So please understand why I will sometimes delete comments in the replies).

Europe seeks to get even more restrictive:

European leaders are pushing for even more sweeping restrictions. In part, they seek to expand the categories of persons that, according to the Council of Europe, are protected from incitement to hatred or discrimination to include gender, disability, sexual orientation, language, and age, in addition to already protected categories (race, color, religion, and descent or national or ethnic origin). Many are pushing to expand what counts as hate speech, too. In a 2022 strategy paper on how to better combat hate speech, the Council of Europe defined it as “all types of expression that incite, promote, spread or justify violence, hatred or discrimination against a person or group of persons”––note that justifying hatred is a lower standard than advocating it. The European Commission has been pushing a proposal to require that all European Union states make hate speech a crime. And in 2024, the European Parliament urged the European Commission to adopt an open-ended approach to the sorts of discrimination that are banned, rather than a closed list, so that authorities “can adapt to changing social dynamics.”

Like I said, a moving target. Lots of people will get ensnared for the simple reason that the definitions keep changing. “But they can defend themselves in court”, some might argue. The problem is that the process is very often the punishment itself.

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My writing is ridden with references to powerful NGOs that are funded by billionaires, huge corporations, etc. in order to sway public policy. I like to say that NGOs are an end-run around democracy. You know it, and I know it.

The gutting of USAID shed light on just how enmeshed USGov is with these NGOs, and how entangled it is with these huge corporations and the super rich that fund them. A significant number of educated people in western countries are employed by them, and they all have a tendency to lean in one political direction: that of western liberal democracy (whatever that means on this exact day). They all have a tendency to converge on the same side of any issue, which makes a lot of sense as all the major NGOs tend to be funded by the same entities time and time again.

Right wingers have long lamented that such infrastructure is largely unavailable to them due to lack of funding, and especially due to lack of interest from wealthy individuals who share their beliefs, but won’t fork out the cash to found the necessary institutions/media outlets/etc. needed to actively push their views. I remember Mike Cernovich once describing how he would be called to meet with some of these types, and when he would pitch an idea to them, they would all inevitably ask: “Okay, so when can I expect a return on investment?”

There is no financial return on investment in this realm, unless you’re an arms dealer funding The Atlantic Council to agitate for Ukraine to keep fighting its war against Russia. George Soros doesn’t make profits on his philanthropy, because he is more interested in wielding power through his strategic investments in NGOs. He does it to win, not to add more zeroes to his bank account.

aka “Big Curt” tackles this dilemma in his own idiosyncratic way:

Gray Mirror

The riddle of the niggardly billionaires

Unfortunately, I recently had to delete a million-view tweet because of a grammatical error. In this unfortunate tweet—this fatal banger!—I described the behavior of our beloved tech billionaires as “negrous.” My enemies pounced…

Read more

8 months ago · 94 likes · Curtis Yarvin

Philanthropy is not lobbying. Lobbying exercises power directly. Philanthropy creates structural power. The dividends of lobbying are direct, and generally aimed at some financial return. Lobbying converts money to power back to money.

Philanthropy generates power by generating prestige. “Soft power” is the attribution of prestige to a perspective. However many tanks the Red Army still had, the USSR was doomed once Western New Left ideas had established themselves among its young elites. Fashion flows downward. The ideas of the elites quickly become the ideas of the masses. All regimes rest on public consent.

Always and everywhere, prestige is generated by “elite human capital.” The power strategy of philanthropy is to capture, maintain and improve this human capital, which has or will obtain high status, causing its ideas to flow naturally down the stream of fashion, thus acquiring structural consent and becoming governing ideas. New, radical ideas first become socially acceptable, then socially required. This process is not fast. At least, it is not naturally fast. But its result is very stable.

Fundamentally, there are two ways to pursue prestige: inside prestige and outside prestige. Inside prestige is prestige within existing prestige-creating institutions. Sometimes, inside prestige is formal (ranks, credentials, offices, etc), sometimes it is reputational, and sometimes, lo, it even correlates with actual merit.

Outside prestige is prestige outside of existing institutions, unconnected to power. There is little outside prestige in the present world, but there is some. It can only correspond to two things: merit, and money.

Outside prestige may even include credentialed insiders—but rank them on a divergent reputation schedule. Their outside identities may even be opaque pseudonyms, to which this prestige becomes attached. Insiders are not bad. We love our insiders. Their inside rank, however, is not our outside rank.

Orban and Fidesz get this, which is why they have generously funded the creation of think tanks and other institutions in Hungary: to prepare the country for a post-Fidesz regime, and to give conservatives there a strong power base while out of power so that they are not lost in the wilderness.

The only meaningful mission of right-wing philanthropy (not lobbying) in the 21st-century is to use patronage to develop informal networks of outside prestige. These networks must blossom into institutions, which will develop soft power.

If these institutions are designed to be self-funding, they will turn into slop factories, or fail. Or both. But success has to be tested. Money is easy to test. How can we test prestige? There are actually two questions here: whether we can define it, and whether we can measure it. Immeasurable success is still success, if it can be defined.

Big Curt gets it.

The power of prestige:

Consider the New Yorker. While the New Yorker is not my favorite publication, it is prestigious. Why? Because not only does everyone who subscribes to the New Yorker wish they could write for the New Yorker, everyone who doesn’t subscribe to the New Yorker wants to be someone who subscribes to the New Yorker—even if they hate it. Draw that as a social graph. It is not a symmetric graph. Fashion flows downward.

And always, money complicates the picture. New Yorker writers are not well-paid. They are, in fact, terribly paid. Yet it is not hard to recruit for the position. Whether or not the magazine as a whole turns a profit is unclear—it might—but if it does, its market cap might not buy Jeff Bezos’s shoes. It would certainly not buy his yacht.

Generally speaking, although some media companies are profitable, they are the exception that proves the rule. Unless they are slop populist media, they exist in order to matter, not in order to profit—regardless of the details of their corporate structure.

While it is difficult to recognize the very lucrative New York Times as a patronage organization, it is absolutely that—with an absolute hereditary monarch, no less. The NYT could not go out of business. Before it would go out of business, it would turn into ProPublica. It can be a business—it does not need to be a business.

But the NYT unites existing prestige and existing power. It is specialized in sitting on the throne, not in getting the throne. If we want the left to give us lessons in getting the throne—we have to look to the past.

Big Curt provides us 5 filters for why Big Tech punches below its weight philanthropically:

Let’s look at the filters that make the “tech right” punch far below its weight in the philanthropic department.

The first filter is that most people who matter or want to matter are liberals, because liberalism is the ideology of mattering.

Every element of liberal ideology makes sense only when you realize that the ideology always has to match what makes liberals matter more. Normal rich people want to matter and so are infected by the normal ideology.

The second filter is that the people who are left may be weirdos, but they aren’t idiots. Very few billionaires are idiots. It happens, but…

Because they are not idiots, they realize that any public action against the regime will, at least in the short term, have negative personal expected value. While sponsoring outside prestige is one of the least confrontational possible actions, it still marks you as an enemy. Who needs that? Whose life is too easy? Certainly not a billionaire. It’s not like he’s retired. These people don’t retire.

Scientists estimate that just these two filters remove 98% of the financial potential for (genuine) philanthropic action. Worst, these are the most sensible people. The remaining 2%, though priceless and essential, are all unstable or irrational in some way. They are not responding in a normal way to normal human drives and incentives.

Lots of food for thought thanks to Big Curt. Click here to read the rest.

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We’re almost 5,000 words in already, so I’ll keep this brief; here’s a look at the rise of America’s intangible economy:

Fifty years ago, the assets held by S&P 500 companies were predominantly physical — factories, equipment, inventory et cetera. But today, it is estimated that around 90 per cent of their assets are intangible, ranging from intellectual property, brand value and networks, to code, content, talent and knowledge.

This week I argue that this transformation helps to explain four prevailing themes in the US stock market: high concentration, exceptionalism, volatility and bubble-like valuations.

90%!!!!!!!!!

America is also, by far, the largest source of measured intangible investment in the WIPO’s sample. Last year, investment reached $4.7tn in current prices, nearly twice the combined total of France, Germany, the UK and Japan.

For all intents and purposes, the US is an intangibles-driven economy.

Crucially, disembodied assets have very different economic properties to physical ones.

“Intangibles are much more scalable: they have high upfront fixed costs and zero marginal costs. Once code is written, producing additional units of software costs nothing,” says Kai Wu, founder of Sparkline Capital, who has developed a methodology to measure firm-level intangible value.

More numbers:

These traits explain US business dynamics today. First movers have grown large, exponentially so, with their size acting like a competitive moat. A narrow set of superstar firms drives the country’s growth.

Using a sample of around 900 US companies between 2011 and 2019, the McKinsey Global Institute found that just 5 per cent — accounting for 23 per cent of employment share — generated 78 per cent of positive productivity growth.

For measure, the WIPO finds that intangible assets make up 90 per cent of the total enterprise value of the 15 largest American companies, considerably higher than that of the broader US corporate sector.

Relevance to today’s stock market:

Today, the top 10 stocks account for 40 per cent of the S&P 500’s market capitalisation and 33 per cent of its profits, according to Andrew Lapthorne, global head of quantitative research at Société Générale.

Market concentration has risen to these historical highs following steep growth since the mid-2010s, driven by the Magnificent 7 tech stocks.

This group includes Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft, whose intangibles-heavy asset base of software, algorithms and digital platforms benefits from scalability and synergies. Today, these assets — alongside the data and talent the firms have amassed — are being used to power their shift into artificial intelligence.

One risk emanating from this is market volatility:

The rise of intangible assets within the S&P 500 could be adding to market volatility, too.

First, with a narrow group of companies driving the index, idiosyncratic risk causes it to be more volatile than a broader, more diversified portfolio, says David Kostin, chief US equity strategist at Goldman Sachs, in a November 2024 research note.

Second, intangible investments tend to be financed using internal funds or equity, as they are harder to pledge as collateral for loans. Still, their valuations can become particularly sensitive to both actual and expected changes in the interest rate path.

Intangibles often derive most of their current value from potential future cash flows. For example, a large language model monetised via subscriptions may produce steady earnings over many years. As rate forecasts shift — as they do frequently in response to data releases — the discount rate applied to future earnings changes too.

Third, non-physical assets are hard to value. For instance, a patent could be worthless or worth billions, with its value dependent on factors including regulation, competition and market adoption. Again, these idiosyncrasies can drive rapid fluctuations in value.

I found this to be mildly interesting due to its framing.

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We end this weekend’s SCR with a question: will future civilizations bother to excavate our remains?

While archaeology is now practiced around the world, we shouldn’t overstate our society’s dedication to it. Serious archaeological work occurs only where it is politically and ideologically convenient. When the government approves of the work, such as the British Museum’s excavations buttressing the prestige of the empire, or recent Turkish backing for the Göbekli Tepe excavations to boost tourism revenue, a great deal is possible. But without the active support or at least the tacit permission of the state, archaeology remains small-scale and marginal, if not suppressed. This is most obvious under governments which actively destroy past artifacts for ideological reasons, such as the Taliban, the Islamic State, or Australia.

In Italy, stifling “legal mechanisms are straightforwardly to blame for throttling archeological discovery”, to the extent that “Many artifacts end up on the black market … or are even simply destroyed or hidden away.” Less dramatically, when a friend of mine led an expedition to find ancient sites in the Amazon, his partner at a Brazilian university advised him not to get the government involved, because they don’t like finds which could interfere with resource extraction. In the United States, the ​​Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act gives federally recognized Native American tribes substantial power to veto or censor archaeological investigations, which is often used to block research that holds the possibility of contradicting a tribe’s mythology or complicating their claim to land.

Further east, excavations of Mississippi Mound Builder sites are only occasionally suppressed by the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, who have been granted de facto jurisdiction as one of the few surviving tribes from the region; nevertheless these excavations remain small-scale and niche, in large part because the possibility of finding more evidence that there were once sophisticated native civilizations in North America would be very inconvenient for the civic mythology of both European-descended and Native-descended Americans. The largest investigations of these enormous and poorly-understood mounds were conducted during the Great Depression, when the Works Progress Administration was looking for any excuse to mobilize workers and would gladly hire two hundred men to excavate and catalogue a single site, whereas an excavation today will consist of maybe half a dozen graduate students.

Click here to read the rest.

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Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

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Remember Europe’s drive for strategic autonomy?

It’s history now…little more than an interesting footnote from the first quarter of this new century. It’s a concept that never managed to gain traction as most of the countries that make up the European Union rejected this French-led proposal. Future academics will make reference of it, while future historians will ask “what could have been?”

The war in Ukraine dealt strategic autonomy a mortal blow, and the new trade deal between the USA and the EU has buried its corpse deep in the ground, so deep that it is now mixed in with dinosaur fossils. What took place in Scotland over a week ago was not a deal, but was instead a capitulation.

Quite a lot of what I laid out in my original Turbo America essay has come to pass, but one prediction that I had made in that piece is only coming into view now: that the USA has entered its extractive phase of empire. Gone are the multilateral trade deals that ushered in US-erected globalist structures that did benefit it in the original phases of that era. Instead, they are being replaced with bilateral deals that can be described as extortion.

The fact of the matter is that the USA has three things that everyone wants access to:

1. the US dollar

2. the US domestic consumer market

3. US capital markets

Thanks to decades of globalist-driven economic integration and inter-dependencies, it is incredibly, incredibly difficult to untangle economic relations with the USA (even if actually desired). This has left the Americans with an insane amount of leverage over most of the world’s economies. “Want access to our consumer markets? Want to find money for investment? Now you have to pay the piper. If you don’t, you will destroy your own economy.” It’s as simple as that.

Europe, led by national branch managers of USA Inc. instead of actual statesmen, walked right into this trap by first signing onto the US-led war against Russia. It was this initial capitulation to US hegemony that laid the ground for this later economic capitulation. Europe was doing relatively fine economically while buying natural resources from Russia, and with Russia serving as a large consumer market for European exports. By permitting the USA to tear the EU away from Russia economically, it was forced to rely on imports from the USA, giving Washington more leverage over their economies. This trade “deal” means that Europe is now a de facto protectorate of the USA.

The most epic reverse colonization in history happened with a handshake. At the Scotland Summit (July 27), European leaders queued up to sign away their continent’s economic sovereignty while cameras flashed and everybody smiled.

The irony would be breathtaking if it weren’t so tragic: the heirs of empires that once carved up Asia and Africa with fountain pens have themselves been carved up by an American president with a Truth Social account.

Donald Trump’s genuine achievement is that the law of the jungle has been consecrated as legitimate in international relations. What makes this transformation particularly grotesque is how willingly Europe has contributed to its own subjugation.

Scotland marked the precise moment when the EU ceased pretending to be a global power and embraced its true calling: America’s preferred payment app.

Considering that Europe will now be footing the bill for the Ukrainian side in the war in that country, it’s worse than just being a preferred payment app. (BTW, this Trump-Putin summit will go nowhere).

While Brussels officials celebrated their compromise with Washington—accepting 15% tariffs on European exports while exempting American goods entirely—they missed the essential truth of their capitulation.

European citizens, do not believe your leaders: Europe had not negotiated. It had been robbed at gunpoint while applauding the thief’s negotiation skills.

Instead, once the dust has settled from Trump’s second inaugural, a new world order has crystallized with brutal clarity. In this new arithmetic of power, America coerces, China contains, Europe complies.

The tripolar world that European elites spent years theorizing through “strategic autonomy” has collapsed into an unambiguous bipolar certainty, with Brussels relegated to the role of sponsor to a competition it cannot influence.

Europe agreed to the demand that their exports will cost more (and therefore be less competitive in the US market), while getting nothing in return from the USA.

The butcher’s bill:

The “Liberation Day” tariffs announced in April—10% baseline with “reciprocal” rates reaching 50%—were never about freeing America from unfair trade practices or correcting imbalances but blackmail elevated to statecraft. Finally, they tested which powers would resist and which would capitulate.

The message was simple: pay up or face economic devastation. While China refused the costs, Europe volunteered to satisfy them, following an arc of self-deception: first, came the ritual announcements of counter-tariffs, theatrical gestures well applauded by the sycophants, meant to preserve dignity rather than impose costs.

Then came the inevitable retreat, justified through euphemisms about “maintaining dialogue” and “preserving the relationship.” Finally, the political cowardice of European leaders was exposed and came total surrender, dressed up as “the best possible deal we can get.”

The Scotland arrangement represents the apotheosis of Ursula von der Leyen’s incapacity to govern, negotiate and lead: US$750 billion in American energy purchases, $600 billion in additional investments and acceptance of punitive tariff rates in exchange for absolutely nothing—terms that would have triggered wars in previous centuries.

I like this line:

However, European negotiators emerged from a golf course claiming victory, justifying it because Trump had apparently threatened even worse terms. In sum, the logic of the beaten spouse—gratitude for lighter beatings.

The Chinese did something else entirely:

Beijing watched Europe’s humiliation with the amusement of a casino owner seeing gamblers double down on losing hands. Because China’s response to American pressure reveals a sophistication that European leaders cannot fathom: the power of saying no.

When Trump escalated tariff threats, China responded with drastic precision. Export restrictions on rare earth elements created immediate supply chain crises across Western manufacturing while avoiding the escalation that might force Washington into total confrontation.

The message was calibrated perfectly: we can hurt you, but we aim not to. The choice remains yours, for now.

The June rare earths framework that followed demonstrated China’s mastery of tactical minimalism. Beijing agreed to resume limited shipments under strict licensing arrangements—creating enough supply stability to prevent Western economic collapse while maintaining enough uncertainty to preserve leverage. Beijing gave Washington face-saving concessions while conceding nothing of substance.

and

Compare this to Europe’s approach during the same period. While Chinese factories hummed with restricted but continuing production, European manufacturers faced supply shortages. VDL cried: “We all witnessed the cost and consequences of China’s coercion through export restrictions! This pattern of dominance, dependency and blackmail continues today.”

Later, Brussels scolded Beijing about its relationship with Russia while simultaneously begging for rare earth provisions. European officials seem incapable of grasping the contradiction; you cannot lecture your supplier while depending on their mercy.

The irony is exquisite: European leaders acted as if Russia were a Chinese satellite just as the EU itself became a US military and economic satellite, complete with matching uniforms.

Europe’s pathological weakness:

Europe’s collapse stems from confusion about the nature of power. European leaders believe that moral posturing can substitute for material leverage and legal frameworks can constrain actors who recognize no law but strength.

The EU’s response to the Russia-Ukraine war exemplifies this delusion. Brussels imposed sanctions on Russian energy while simultaneously financing Moscow’s war efforts through continued purchases. In 2024, EU energy payments to Vladimir Putin totalled €23 billion ($26.3 billion).

Since the invasion began, the bloc has transferred to the Kremlin the equivalent cost of over 2,400 fighter jets. European officials banned technology exports to Russia while maintaining dependence on Chinese supply chains that, according to the EU leaders, ultimately serve Russian interests.

This schizophrenic approach to security extends to European defense spending, which provides another illustration of confusion masquerading as resolve. EU leaders agreed to increase military expenditures to 5% of GDP—a figure that would bankrupt most member states—without any coherent rationale beyond American demands.

The Treaty of Versailles imposed lighter burdens and triggered a world war: this is not burden sharing but tribute payment dressed up as NATO solidarity.

It’s rather funny that the EU is still gung ho about criticizing China regarding human rights and demanding changes on that front while being very reliant on Chinese supply chains. Moralism is just empty posturing, but in this case, it might lead to devastating economic consequences for the continent.

Surrender:

The Scottish-Golf-Course Summit crystallized Europe’s strategic bankruptcy. European negotiators arrived believing that compliance with American demands would elevate their status from junior partner to indispensable ally. Instead, the leaders’ submission confirmed their role as a source of funds to be extracted rather than a partner to be consulted.

European officials (Von der Leyen, Kallas, Sefcovic) first denied the reality of what they signed, then seemed surprised by this outcome, as if their years contributing to institutional weakness might suddenly transform into strength through bureaucratic alchemy.

When your victories align perfectly with your opponent’s interests, you are not negotiating, but surrendering. They should finally go—preferably before they auction off the remaining pieces of European sovereignty.

Note this bit:

The emerging global architecture has three distinct layers.

America has perfected coercive extraction. Washington discovered that threatening allies produces better results than persuading them, that ultimatum yields more than negotiations.

It secured concrete gains—military contracts, energy purchases, duty-free market access—without resistance. This confirms America’s transformation from alliance leader to alliance predator.

The golf course arrangement proves that European compliance can be purchased through blatant intimidation. Why build partnerships when you can operate protection rackets with diplomatic immunity?

Just like I said in Turbo America:

From the piece:

Turbo-America means that the USA openly engages in coercion of both opponents and allies to get its way. There is little to stop them, so why not do it? Hiding behind the mask of “democracy” and “global norms”, the USA introduces new concepts of rule globally to further cement its rule and gain advantage for its corporations.

Back to the analysis:

European leaders have discovered that capitulation pays better than resistance: playing the client to Washington and the scold to Beijing is more comfortable than actual competition. But the tragedy of European passivity extends beyond economics to existential questions about the nature of sovereignty itself.

Can political entities that refuse to defend their interests claim to represent anything more than geographical expressions? Does the European Union exist as anything beyond a mechanism for collecting and transferring resources to more assertive powers?

European officials console themselves with fantasies about eventual American gratitude, imagining that sufficient compliance might restore their voice in global affairs. This is the thinking of the colonized, the belief that servitude might eventually earn respect. History suggests otherwise.

Ouch.

There is one potential silver lining in all of this if you are European: this trade deal benefits the Brexit argument:

As world leaders and economists across Europe digest the news of the EU-U.S. trade agreement, some experts told CNBC that while it may be bad news for the bloc, the deal could serve as an unexpected boost to the U.K.

The European Union is facing a higher 15% tariff rate on its goods imported to the U.S. compared to the 10% levy the U.K. has agreed to.

“In theory, the UK benefits,” Philip Shaw, chief economist at Investec, told CNBC.

“The new EU tariff of 15% means that UK exports to the US have become relatively cheaper, which could boost British trade with the US as American firms buy goods from Britain rather than the EU,” he explained.

U.K. goods would also be cheaper for U.S. consumers due to the lower tariff rate, meaning they may favor British products over those manufactured in the EU, Alex Altmann, partner and head of Lubbock Fine LLP’s German desk, suggested in a note published shortly after the EU-U.S. deal was announced.

Why rejoin the EU if they have a better deal with the USA already in place?

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The amount of information that we are bombarded with daily via media would terrify the average late 19th century European urban dweller. A medieval peasant in 14th century France would most likely lost his or her mind if they had to experience the blast of infoterror that we moderns are quickly evolving to absorb and digest. “Quantity has a quality all its own”, someone once said, but our brains have become more scrambled as a result.

The most negative impact of these permanent tsumanis of information is the collapse in epistemic truth. We are having more and more difficulty in being able to ascertain what is objectively true and what is objectively not true. Not only that, the institutions that we have traditionally relied on to tell us the truth (and form wide-ranging social consensus) have lost our trust, the result of which is almost entirely the fault of these same institutions.

For societies to function, certain truths that work as wide-ranging consensus must exist as they form the basis of how to process news, developments, events, and so on. Without social consensus and without trusted institutions upon whom we can rely to tell us the truth, we are rendered afloat in a sea of information, divided from each other, as we seek to somehow stay afloat while experiencing these continuous and permanent deluges of information.

Am I sounding too much like a ‘pseud’? I think I am. Thankfully, is here to do a better job at explaining what I am trying to say than I ever could:

Roots & Wings with Frank Furedi

Epistemic crisis – a bad case of truth decay

I am sure that you all have heard of one of the many recently invented Orwellian words that raise questions about the status of truth. Terms like post-truth, fake news, misinformation, alternative fact, truthiness, truth-decay or post-fact draw attention to the unprecedented epistemic crisis that afflicts the contemporary world…

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9 months ago · 62 likes · 3 comments · Frank Furedi

The term epistemic crisis refers to a world where trusted sources of knowledge are conspicuous by their absence. Norms and values that assisted society to determine what counts as knowledge and truth have lost much of their force. People no longer automatically believe what they see or hear on the media. Society no longer possesses a social consensus on some of the most fundamental issues that touch on everyday life.

Some refer to the disintegration of trust in previously recognised sources of knowledge – the media, expertise, the courts – as a form of ‘truth decay’. According to the think-tank Rand, truth-decay is defined in part by ‘increasing disagreement about objective facts—a trend that exists on a scale not observed in previous eras of American history’[i]. Other manifestations of truth decay are the blurring of the line between opinion and fact, and a decline in trust in established sources of information.

One of the most dramatic symptoms of truth decay is the public’s loss of trust in institutions that have served to sustain society’s fundamental standard of truth such as ‘science, universities, professional journalism, and public health agencies’[ii].

What underpins the absence of a consensus about the meaning of truth is the absence of a recognized form of epistemic authority. Epistemic authority is the authority ascribed to institutions and individuals who serve as the source of trusted forms of knowledge and of the truth. Those who possess epistemic authority can be trusted to provide truthful information on matters that pertain to different dimensions of our lives.

One of the reasons why you are here is that you are savvy enough to know that mainstream media cannot be relied on to tell you the whole truth, or quite often, even a solitary morsel of truth. Most of you reading this appreciate my attempts to separate fact from fiction, something that is becoming increasingly more difficult as we enter the Age of AI.

Today there are no institutions that can claim to possess unquestioned epistemic authority. Our political establishment suffers from a credibility gap. Instead of openly justifying its actions and policies it relies on subterfuge and outright lies. Just this week we have discovered that the British Government’s ‘spy unit’ has asked tech companies to monitor their social media platform for content about two tier policing and illegal migrants’ hotels.[iii] The aim of the Government information strategy is to both monitor and censor opinions that call into question its policies on sensitive issues such its policies towards illegal migrants.

We know our governments lie to us on a daily basis and we are left with the task of trying to figure out what is true, what is false, what is somewhat true, what is misleading, what is being buried, what is being minimized, and so on. Gone are the days when you could turn on the TV and listen to Walter Cronkite and go to bed assured that you are well-informed (we were naive back then, but that is a story for another day).

Frank rejects the elite consensus notion that social media is responsible for this decay:

The most common explanation for the cause of truth decay focuses on the social media. It is also an argument that possesses the least merit. Factually speaking the loss of epistemic authority preceded the emergence of the social media[vi]. As far back as the early 19^th century there the status of epistemic authority was put to question. This problem was the central theme of Sir George Cornewall Lewis’s book, On the Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion, published in 1849. G. C. Lewis was a well-known Liberal politician, who was at times the Secretary of State for War, Home Secretary, and Chancellor of the Exchequer. His inquiry was directed at the ‘influence of authority in matters of opinion’, by which he meant the capacity to resolve disputed issues by an individual, group, or institution that is recognised as the authority on that subject. Lewis himself noted that ‘there is no one body of persons who are competent to judge on all subjects, and who are qualified to guide all sorts of opinions; that there is no one intellectual aristocracy, separated from the rest of the community, and predominating over them indiscriminately’

The mid-20th century hegemony of the technocratic managerial elite:

The issues raised by Lewis were never resolved in modern society. However, despite the controversy that surrounded the authority of truth it was possible to develop a working consensus around the question of which institutions were reliable sources of knowledge and information. During the 20^th century, particularly during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s such a consensus emerged under the hegemony of a liberal technocratic managerial class. This consensus was institutionalised throughout the dominant political and cultural institutions of society.

So long as the hegemony of the technocratic managerial elites remained stable a degree of consensus on its version of the truth prevailed. Those who questioned the epistemic authority of the ruling elites were consigned to the margins of intellectual and cultural life. As Jeffrey Friedman explained;

‘with most of the media, the universities, and all other cultural institutions in the hands of consensus liberals, there was nothing the conservatives could do but complain about the uniformity of opinion in these institutions; and criticize the claims to objectivity of the liberals (liberal ideologues, in the conservatives’ opinion) who staffed these institutions, and who more often than not viewed themselves as disinterested, scientifically neutral experts’.

This consensus has suffered a significant collapse over the past two decades:

The polarisation thesis provides important insights into working of the contemporary epistemic crisis. But the context for understanding the emergence of this crisis is the unfolding of the loss of elite authority. Indeed, the precondition for the intensity of political polarisation is the decline of the hegemonic influence of the political and cultural establishment.

In the current debate on polarisation and post-truth culture the finger of blame is frequently pointed at the political right. Conservative and populist influencers are blamed for an epidemic of scepticism towards the status of truth. Trump and other right-wing politicians are held responsible for the normalisation of lies and for the scandalous attacks on the integrity of science and expertise. A typical example of this approach is Michiko Kakutani’s book, The Death of Truth which blames Donald Trump and a host of anti-liberal on-line trolls for the demise of truth and wilful promotion of ignorance.

Libera-lish critics like Kakutani appear to overlook the dishonesty and deception that is widely practised within the cultural institution of society. Institutions of higher education -where scholarship is often trumped by academic activism – are not any longer friends of truth. The influence that they exert on generations of young people ensures that their version of post-truth is complicit in creating the phenomenon of credentialised ignorance. Once scepticism toward the truth has become institutionalised in the Academy is it any surprise that this attitude gains currency in other parts of society?

The reality is far more complicated than the simplistic scapegoating of a malevolent right. The concerns of the liberal left regarding the pernicious influence of dishonest influencers on the social media is no more legitimate than the concern of conservatives regarding the constant output of anti-right propaganda on the mainstream media. Even today the power of the social media is no match for the influence of Hollywood, the mainstream media and the dominant cultural institutions -including schools and institutions – of society.

“Credentialized ignorance”. I like this.

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I find the Yazidi fascinating; an ethnoreligious group whose faith pre-dates both Christianity and Islam, and who have somehow managed to stay alive in the Middle East through to the present.

Most westerners are ignorant of their existence, with the Yazidi only really landing on our radars during ISIS’ drive through Western Iraq, when young Yazidi females were taken as sex slaves by these Sunni radicals.

Living in a rough neighbourhood like the Middle East is tough enough for the established, larger players. Being a permanent minority like the Yazidi increases the difficulty level significantly. It is a miracle that they still exist.

The wannabe commies over at Jacobin have published a very, very long piece on the Yazidis and their current plight, and it is well-worth reading in its entirety if you have the time to do so:

Mount Sinjar rises from the arid plains of northwestern Iraq like a grassy sentinel — ancient, scarred, and unyielding.

Today marks eleven years since the Islamic State launched its genocidal assault on the Yazidis in Sinjar.

To the Yazidis, the mountain is sacred; they believe Noah’s ark rested here after the biblical flood. Its slopes are dotted with shrines, sacred places where fires are lit and prayers spoken. Under starlit skies, Yazidi oral histories of creation, exile, and survival are passed down from generation to generation.

Mount Sinjar has also served as a shield for the Yazidis through generations of persecution. The historically marginalized ethnoreligious community, with roots in pre-Zoroastrian belief systems, blended with Sufi influences, has long relied on the mountain for protection.

Escape:

So when the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), or Daesh — a Salafi-Jihadist group that branded the Yazidis as infidels — stormed the Yazidi heartland of the Sinjar region on August 3, 2014, hundreds of thousands instinctively fled toward the mountain.

While many escaped to Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, an estimated fifty thousand Yazidis took refuge on Mount Sinjar’s upper plateaus.

ISIS horror:

For those unable to reach higher ground, unimaginable horrors ensued. Within days, ISIS had killed thousands. Nearly seven thousand Yazidis were kidnapped — women and girls sold into sexual slavery, boys indoctrinated as child soldiers. Over a thousand Yazidis, mostly children and the elderly, died from starvation, dehydration, or injuries during ISIS’s siege of Mount Sinjar, which cut off tens of thousands from food, water, and medical care.

The entire Yazidi community of around four hundred thousand was displaced, captured, or killed.

The present state of affairs:

Over a decade after ISIS’s genocidal assault, a fragile calm has returned to Mount Sinjar, interrupted occasionally by Turkish drone strikes targeting Yazidi militias aligned with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a Kurdish militant group that has waged a decades-long insurgency against Turkey. However, following PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan’s recent call for disarmament, such strikes have grown less frequent.

Threaded between military posts, checkpoints, and tunnel entrances etched into the mountainside, rows of makeshift tents stretch along Mount Sinjar’s northern edge. Hundreds of Yazidi families remain here, unwilling to return to villages below where the past feels perilously close.

Most have stayed on the mountain since ISIS’s initial onslaught; others returned after years in internally displaced persons (IDP) camps in the Kurdistan region, where over two hundred thousand Yazidis still live. All are drawn to the mountain as their last true protector against a genocide they fear may yet return.

ISIS no longer holds Sinjar, but the district is now split between armed groups backed by outside powers. Caught between rival militias — and sometimes compelled to join them — Yazidis remain in limbo. Their future in Sinjar is uncertain and shaped by forces beyond their control.

This is a very good long read for your weekend. Click here to read it in its entirety.

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It would be remiss of me to not note the passing of Ozzy Osbourne, a legend of modern music.

I was never a ‘Metalhead’, but I do have a great respect for Black Sabbath (the band for which he is best known), and whose first few albums I consider to be excellent. To me, Ozzy and Black Sabbath represented that Midlands cohort of Englishmen for whom the foppishness of the upper middle class was completely alien. These were working class lads from the lower classes, and they did not put on any airs.

For your average North American, it’s difficult to comprehend just how ingrained the British class system remains in the UK to this day, and just how different these classes are from one another. In the extreme, they are practically different peoples altogether. Understanding this class system is the foundation for understanding the British people of today, their culture, their society, and their politics. One really needs to experience up close to gain an understanding of it.

Anyway, back to Ozzy, and back to Metal, which was originally a product of England’s urban working class:

At least in its early years, heavy metal was a genre of urban Britain. Black Sabbath’s most high-profile contemporaries, Deep Purple (London), Judas Priest (Birmingham), and Led Zeppelin (London), all formed in English cities under Harold Wilson’s Labour government at the height of the post-war welfare state. This was at its most stark in Black Sabbath: Iommi’s distinctive style came from losing two fingertips in a sheet metal accident. Iommi has also stated that original drummer Bill Ward — who played with the band for the first time since 2005 for their final show — would ‘pick up rhythms from the factory press’. Speaking in 2017, bassist Geezer Butler described wanting to put ‘that industrial feel’ into their music.

The working-class life of 1960s Britain was imprinted in metal’s DNA. No matter what direction Osbourne’s life may have taken him in as the decades passed — becoming, by the 2010s, a multimillionaire media figure who publicly supported Israeli apartheid, not to mention credible allegations of domestic violence — centring the innovation of metal in post-war Britain’s social democratic state should not be forgotten.

Here comes the ideological bit:

One explanation for this is what the late cultural critic Mark Fisher called ‘indirect funding’, meaning Britain’s post-war welfare state. Left-wing governments may not have typically funded these cultural products directly, but unemployment benefits and house prices kept low by the abundance of council housing gave individuals the space and free time in which to be creative.

By the end of the 1960s, you could reasonably expect the working-class jobs that Ozzy and his band took before their big break to pay a decent, livable wage. Sure, they would not have had much money, but it would have been more than the innings provided by a contemporary world of zero-hours contracts, gig economy labour, with unpredictable shift patterns and constant surveillance enacting a psychological as well as financial toll on employees.

In short: they were poor, but they were taken care of while “on the dole” (British term for welfare).

This world no longer exists:

But what now of the city that birthed Sabbath, and metal itself? After four decades of ‘unleashing the free market’, the world that Black Sabbath was born in no longer exists. The Crown, the Birmingham pub that Black Sabbath played their first ever show in, has been closed for over a decade. More than just part of the city’s music history, it is part of a wider trend — over 2,000 pubs have closed across the UK in the last five years, a rate of one a day. Music Venue Trust’s 2024 Annual Report shows similarly grim news for grassroots music venues; 40 percent of all venues operating at a loss in the last year and an average of two are closing for good every month.

There is no one reason for this. Some pubs never recovered after covid, a decade and a half without real terms wage growth for their customers as the average price of a pint of beer increases from £2.89 in 2010 to £4.83 in 2025 (significantly higher in cities) has hurt demand. Pub landlords and music venue owners have to subsidise the profits of private electricity companies just like the rest of us, paying more than double what they did a few years ago.

I’d go even further and suggest that the alienation borne of extreme screen attachment prevents even friend groups from being formed.

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We end this weekend’s SCR with a report on how human footprints have been found from an era (and in a place) where they should “not” have ever been found:

A uniquely preserved prehistoric mudhole could hold the oldest-ever human footprints on the Arabian Peninsula, scientists say. The seven footprints, found amidst a clutter of hundreds of prehistoric animal prints, are estimated to be 115,000 years old.

Many fossil and artifact windfalls have come from situations like this special lakebed in northern Saudi Arabia. Archaeologists uncovered the site, deep in the Nefud Desert at a location nicknamed “the trace” in Arabic, in 2017, after time and weather wiped the overlying sediment away. It’s easy to imagine that a muddy lakebed was a high-traffic area in the Arabian Peninsula over 100,000 years ago.

Click here to read the rest.

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Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

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It’s an article of faith for today’s Marxists that capitalism (or “Neo-Liberalism”) is about to collapse due to its “internal contradictions”, and that it will take down the USA with it. I don’t need to repeat my stance on this matter, but they are a vocal lot and are very confident in the the correctness of their catechism.

Marxists have had a bad run these past few decades beginning with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc through to capitalism’s continued refusal to fall apart. “It’s coming, it’s coming…believe me!”, they insist. After all, it’s a matter of science, and to them, the science was settled a long, long time ago.

You have to feel for them in a way. It’s got to be painful to try and win new converts based on the performance of countries such as Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and such (almost no western Marxists will defend North Korea, it seems). Neither Venezuela nor Bolivia are communist regimes, but they will take what they can get it, and the gettings have been meagre since 1989. Doctrinaire Marxism seems to be out, with a pragmatic and increasingly fashionable hammer and sickle funnily enough making inroads with youth in places like the USA these days.

University to me was a culture shock: I arrived from a self-contained suburb into a new world where half of the undergrads that I would soon meet would describe themselves as Marxists, and with faculty staff easily surpassing that number. “Have any of you ever lived in a communist country? Do any of you have family from communist countries?”, I would think to myself.

That was the 1990s, and the 90s are now a different world. Back then, China was just the place that made cheap junk…even if they were beginning to develop a bit of a military bite. “How will China react?” was a question that was not frequently asked with respect to international issues outside of East Asia, but you were beginning to hear it.

Today’s western Marxists have firmly ensconced themselves in the so-called “Anti-Imperialist movement”, one in which the Global South is the victim of the predatory Global North and its rapacious Neo-Liberal economics. Even though Marxists are very prone to a religious fanaticism when it comes to their faith, pragmatism is not alien to them. One need only look at the Popular Front strategy of the second half of the 1930s as a best example. This pragmatism manifests itself today in strategic support for Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Russia, etc……any country or grouping that is a target of US foreign policy.

The best example of this pragmatic approach within a larger Marxist framework is western support for China against the USA. The recent defeats of Hezbollah and Iran and the inability (or studious avoidance) of Russia to deliver a knock-out punch in Ukraine leaves China as the Marxists’ only hope in their holy war against capitalism and its American mother ship. Sure, China is a one-party state led by a communist party, but it is communist-in-name-only and is one of the two main pillars holding up global capitalism today. I guess it’s true that you’ve gotta work with what you’ve got.

It’s becoming more and more clear that the rest of this century (or at least the next two decades) will be dominated by the rivalry between the USA and China. But where Marxists insist on seeing (or hoping for) an ideological clash between the two, my view is that the fight will strictly be a battle for turf, wholly non-ideological beyond the realm of propaganda. Marxists tell us that there is no God. I tell them that their faith in Marx is misplaced.

I’m sharing this essay with you that comes courtesy of an American Marxist who resides in Shanghai. It has a “stream of consciousness” quality to it as it has the tendency to wander and meander, but there are some interesting bits to make you think:

Back in the 2000s, when it seemed that China’s leadership had embraced the neoliberal “Washington Consensus,” dissent against that consensus naturally seemed leftist, if only because China was moving away from the state and toward the market. To the extent that, within modern Chinese history, “Right” means to be aligned with the interests of capital (and the Kuomintang), and “Left” means to be aligned with the interests of labor (and the CCP), Hu Jintao–era critics of the direction China was going were considered voices from the Left.

Such figures ranged from Cui Zhiyuan, the Chicago PhD and one-time MIT professor who worked on land reforms in Bo Xilai’s Chongqing; to Gan Yang, whose essay on “three traditions” sought to integrate socialism, Confucianism, and Dengist reforms into a holistic blend; to Wen Tiejun, whose fiery advocacy of rural Chinese made him persona non grata in some Beijing circles. For these thinkers, it felt like the interests of rich, out-of-touch Westernized types from coastal cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou were drowning out everybody else.

This last line represents the majority or dominant impression regarding today’s China among westerners these days.

More on Wang:

Wang critiqued liberalism as a tool of global capitalism, arguing that China’s post-1978 reforms had led to inequality, depoliticization, and elite dominance. He advocated for a return to socialist ideals, with greater political participation, state intervention, and resistance to Western ideological hegemony. In his 2008 tract, “Depoliticized Poli­tics” (去政治化的政治), he argued that liberal intellectuals had aligned with market elites, promoting a vision of democracy that ultimately served capital rather than the people. In 2009’s “The End of the Revolution,” Wang argued that China’s problem wasn’t an oppressive government, but its integration into globalist capitalism. In those years, he jousted with the liberals, like Xu Jilin, and those advocating social democracy and an accountable state, like Qin Hui; his leftism was partly borne of an emotional allegiance to the journey China had been on and to the collective experiences of Chinese people, and partly a localized version of the same backlash to globalization that we’ve experienced in the United States, Russia, western Europe, and, indeed, everywhere else. Wang just got there first.

Purists vs. Pragmatists. A story as old as time itself.

Wang curates a tradition of Chinese indigenous theorists of modernity, essentially an alternate narrative to that of a modern West colliding with a primitive China: in developing this historical understanding, he has given valuable intellectual ammunition to Chinese leaders in search of a positive story to tell about China’s rise. He has helped to rehabilitate Maoist thought, in parallel with Xi’s government, while his emphasis on finding a Chinese genealogy of thought has dovetailed with a rejection of American political structures and economic frameworks; without ever joining the government, many of his arguments have been adopted by a Chinese regime that needs to explain itself.

The Xi era has posed a question to would-be leftists, those who sought to rehabilitate Mao’s era: what would you do if China really did become communist? Wang is cautiously supportive of the moves China has made in the past decade. His work bridges the gap between Chinese nationalism, the idea of communism (and its Chinese form), and Western philosophy and discourse. You could say that he is a friendly, or palatable, face for these ideas, capable of articulating China’s historical—and perhaps future—trajectory. In other words, he’s still in the game.

If you read the above two paragraphs carefully, you can tease out how this Marxist hopes that the increasing rivalry between the USA and China will lead the latter to re-think at least some elements of its economic modernization, turning back to at least some forms of Marxist organization.

The crux of the matter:

What had really begun was the history of modern China, which was a figment of some intellectuals’ imaginations until it became flesh. It was as if a frozen world had melted, and statues came to life. The dithering of the ancien régime, the bribes and treachery and pardoning of one’s children—that was all over. It was time to get moving. Those persons you saw in the street had become comrades; this street you’ve always walked down had become the homeland. That solidarity allowed China to start the process of capital formation, building human capital—the only capital that it had—in places like Daqing and Dazhao, slowly seeing life expectancy, literacy rates, and internal organization go up during the Maoist years, even as the country remained desperately poor. When the time was right, and Mao’s death gave way to a new era, every element was in place for an economic takeoff.

In the China of today, however, the memories of shared struggle are almost lost; propaganda billboards and kitschy TV shows say “don’t forget the struggle.” Red Tourism is the CCP’s stations of the cross: historic sites like Zunyi in Guizhou, Shaoshan in Hunan, and, of course, Yan’an in Shaanxi, attract tour groups. Wang remembers, and cherishes, this struggle, along with the CCP, the vehicle of the radical change: from the total fragmentation and failure of the late Qing dynasty, to the search for a way out, to the creation of a new collective consciousness, to the creation of a new physical structure—the oil company, the train station, the factory, the research lab—that became what the CCP calls “New China.” In the process of change, how did China stay true to itself? What even is China as a historical constant? What’s the thing that keeps repeating?

The author is asking whether today’s China is really China at all, equating “real China” to that of the revolutionary era under Mao. Are the people China? If so, then China is shifting like sand due to modernization, and massive internal migration.

For Wang, Chinese Communism manages to stay Chinese, even though communist theory is universal, similar to how America proclaims universal human rights but is still a specific set of places, experiences, universities, types of food. In Wang’s discourse, China is sort of the axle of contemporary history, where the tide finally turned: the largest population group declared fealty to the state, not the market, as an organizational system. Shortly afterwards, at the Bandung Conference of 1955, they signaled that they were on the side of the downtrodden “Third World.” But the Chinese nation, as we understand it now, is still an artificial creation, contingent upon historical coincidences.

Is China being “on the side of the Third World” nothing more than a result of how the world lines up today? You have to find allies where you can.

Now that the revolution has succeeded, and become entrenched—even as one angry young Chinese leftist told me, become a ruling party rather than a revolutionary party—preserving the fighting spirit is tough. Wang’s adversary Qin Hui’s 2015 book 走出帝制》(Breaking Away from Imperial Rule) argued that China had reverted to a nouveau feudalism, which in today’s China might be a more powerful critique than the liberal one. If China’s government system is a powerful tool, it is one that can undo inequality or cement it, root out corrupt elites or entrench them.

If global capitalism is the predator, then China needs a strong state to protect it, but if the state and associated elites are the predator, then maybe capitalism can save them. In this narrative, it can be difficult to disentangle America and its government, liberal world order, and the like from capitalism itself. If China’s comparative advantage is labor and manufacturing, America’s comparative advantage is capital. And yet, some Chinese new leftists, who follow Trump and Vance closely, see the Americans as the biggest victims of the process. How can you say “Yankee, go home” in Boston? Multinational capitalism has no home­land; Manhattan is the mountain; the capitalists are the vultures who have made their nests there. Maybe someday, they will fly somewhere else.

I do not share the author’s belief that there is a possibility that China pivots back to some form of socialism in reaction to increasing American attention being given to it.

For me, it’s the Siamese Death Embrace locking China and the USA together that is most fascinating, making any attempt to unwind the relationship incredibly complex.

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I was doing quite a bit of business in London up until two years ago, and I spent a good deal of time in different hotels across the city, particularly in South Kensington.

During one trip I had to find a new hotel to extend a stay, and I managed to land in a Scandinavian-type one. This hotel prided itself on being very ecologically conscious, meaning that much of the interior was made from re-used material, especially wood. The rooms were very, very small, but I did not mind the size as I would only be there to sleep. What bothered me most was the shower because the water pressure was very low….low like a dribbling baby.

My thoughts immediately turned to the concept of economic de-growth; the idea that economic growth should be jettisoned for the sake of planet’s health. It’s an idea that has gained currency in some quarters (mainly elite academic circles), but remains an incredibly tough sell. Who wants to purposely lower their own living standards?

We humans are the custodians of the flora and fauna of Earth and we have a duty to be environmentally conscious and protect our planet. It’s the only home that we have. Duty can be abused for selfish or for political reasons, which is why so many people are wary of climate alarmism, seeing sinister agendas lying behind it. I think that this hesitancy to radically re-orientate our lives to protect the planet is valid in the light of the history of elite-driven campaigns.

This reluctance to jump aboard the de-growth train is made all the more easier when it is championed by open communists such as Japan’s Kohei Saito and his philosophy of “de-growth communism”:

The economist and statistician E.F. Schumacher did not know what, exactly, would cause “society’s collapse”. But, he said, “I do know that a society which seeks fulfillment only in mindless material expansion does not fit into this world for long. There simply is no place for infinite growth on a finite planet.” He delivered that grim assertion in 1974, as the postwar economic boom was giving way to stagnation. A generation of heterodox economic thinkers—including Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Dennis Meadows, and others in the informal circle known as the Club of Rome—were coming to believe that economies could not grow forever and that the goal, perhaps, should be “degrowth.”

Fast Forward:

Fifty years and around $130 trillion in global GDP growth later, intellectuals in Europe, North America, and Japan are again proposing that societies abandon economic growth as their primary aim. The crisis this time is climate change. In a March 2023 report the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that, within several decades, human-caused planetary heating is likely to overshoot the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold, beyond which lies deadlier heat waves, droughts, floods, and hurricanes, plummeting crop and fishery yields, and cascading ecosystem collapses that will turn forests into deserts. Avoiding that fate, according to the IPCC, “would require unprecedented transitions in all aspects of society.”

How far would these transitions take us? Back to a pre-industrial agrarian society? That would effectively kill off billions of people.

Among the most prominent of those thinkers is the Japanese philosopher Kohei Saito. In 2020 Saito published Capital in the Anthropocene, a shinsho, or small paperback, often designed to introduce readers to a subject. Today’s ecological crises are driven by economic growth, he wrote, and growth is driven by the compulsion to profit, capitalism’s motivating force: “It’s capitalism—nothing more, nothing less—that lies at the root of climate change and the other global environmental crises that come with it.” Saito considers several proposals to rein in capitalism—taxing wealth, tightening environmental rules, nationalizing certain industries—but ultimately finds them wanting. He instead proposes “degrowth communism,” a system of common ownership—to be managed by local assemblies and worker cooperatives—in which every person has a responsibility to care for the Earth and a right to enjoy its productive capacity. For Saito, treating the Earth as a “commons” means using its resources more prudently and distributing them more equally.

The book—translated into English last year as Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto—was a breakout success in Japan, selling around 400,000 copies in 2020. Academic celebrity followed. For months the face of Saito, a thirty-seven-year-old professor at the University of Tokyo, peered at Tokyo straphangers from advertisements promoting his televised lecture series on Capital.

“It’s capitalism”. It’s always capitalism for the Marxist. This monomania is what makes many people suspicious of such types as Saito, seeing a sinister political agenda lying underneath an altruistic blanket.

The capitalist counter:

For decades debates over the social and ecological merits of capitalism have therefore turned in part on the costs and benefits of growth. In his classic 1974 study In Defence of Economic Growth—written as a response to critics like Schumacher—Wilfred Beckerman portrayed rising GDP as a thin black line between freedom and “soul-destroying toil.” Growth, he argued, creates wealth and forestalls class conflict; as long as the pie keeps growing, no one is likely to complain about their slice. More recently, the Oxford economist Max Roser, founder of the open-source “Our World in Data” project, has correlated growth—defined as “an increase in the production of goods and services”—with declining poverty rates in industrialized countries over the last two hundred years. But even if existing wealth were distributed more equally, Roser argues, substantially reducing the penury that still plagues much of the world would require the global economy to grow at least five times over.

Decoupling economic growth from environmental impact:

So while Roser does not doubt growth’s social virtues, the real question, he thinks, is about the relationship between growth and the health of the planet. If “we want to achieve a future in which global poverty is substantially lower than today and in which humanity has a smaller negative impact on the environment,” he writes, we would need “to decouple economic growth from environmental impacts.” Is that possible?

Some economists believe it is. Researchers such as the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Robert Pollin and the World Bank’s Stéphane Hallegatte have argued that as economies gain access to renewable fuels and more efficient production techniques, they can grow while still reducing carbon output. This “green growth” thesis hinges on the idea that states can achieve an “absolute decoupling” of growth and CO2 emissions by improving efficiency and substituting renewables for fossil fuels in sectors like transportation, manufacturing, and electricity generation.

There is some evidence for this view: data from eighteen OECD countries suggest that, after an initial period of industrialization, CO2 emissions do not rise with GDP. Even if you count certain externalized emissions toward a nation’s total—for instance, emissions associated with their imported goods—some developed nations, such as Denmark and the UK, seem to have managed to decouple GDP and CO2 (although per capita emissions in these countries remain high). Prominent defenders of the green growth thesis—some of them associated with the Breakthrough Institute, an “ecomodernist” research center in Berkeley—argue that there is no reason every nation should not be able to achieve similar results.

Would be nice.

Saito ain’t buying it:

But Saito believes it is a perilous delusion to imagine that capitalist growth can be decoupled from environmental degradation in general and CO2 emissions in particular. One reason is that the overall scale of production grows even as particular processes become more efficient. “Companies will always find a way to reinvest any surplus capital they produce,” he writes, “and there’s no guarantee this investment will be green.” Here he echoes an observation Marx made at the height of the Industrial Revolution: the laws of competition require firms to reinvest productivity gains back into the process of production itself. If a company churning out one hundred smartphones an hour buys a machine that allows it to make one hundred phones in half an hour, it will attempt to double production. These phones must find buyers, but demand can usually be manufactured, and when it cannot be, investors move on to more profitable ventures. In the aggregate, capitalist production requires more resources the more efficient it becomes.

Not all Marxists are aligned on this matter, with many proving to be Saito’s most fiercest critics:

Saito’s synthesis of Marxism and degrowth might seem intuitive, since they both critique capitalism. But the two theories have historically clashed; as Saito puts it, there has been “a long-standing antagonism between the Red and the Green.” Some proponents of degrowth take the Soviet Union’s environmental record as proof that Marxism abets ecocide. For others the orthodox Marxist theory of history—which sees capitalism as a necessary step on the path to communism—affirms ecological destruction in the present as a condition of collective abundance in the future. Readers of The Communist Manifesto will find Marx marveling at “the Subjection of Nature’s forces to man” achieved by British industry; elsewhere he describes British colonialism as “the unconscious tool of history,” “regenerating” stagnant Asian societies. For critics, such views commit Marxism to an ecologically ruinous “Prometheanism” that aspires to dominate the nonhuman world, as well as a Eurocentric “productivism” that equates human progress with industrial development.

Plenty of Marxists are no less suspicious of degrowth theories, which the geographer Matthew T. Huber has panned as “mish-mash ecologism.” Critics like Huber see degrowth as a Luddite fantasy, motivated by middle-class consumer guilt, that rejects modern technology without thinking seriously about how to feed the four billion people who lack independent means of subsistence, much less guarantee them sufficient resources to live well. Degrowth for these thinkers is at worst a recipe for painful contraction and at best what one of its founders, the French economist Serge Latouche, reportedly called a “slogan in search of a program.”

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Let’s move away from the Marxism ;)

The politics of group identity to me are ceaselessly entertaining. Whether it be the genesis of an identity, its trajectory over time, or even cases where an identity fails to take hold despite efforts to construct it and firm its foundation. Yes, identity can be fluid, but in my opinion not all identities are valid (we’ll leave this for another time).

One of my favourite debates to watch (and to dip my toe into from time to time) revolves around the question of “Who is an American?” I have no skin in the game, but the temptation to take part in these debates is more often than not too strong to reject. It’s a great subject after all: do certain Americans have more claim to American identity than others? Birthright citizenship vs. Jus Soli, new vs. old, colonial descendants vs. Ellis Islanders….Natives, American Descendants of Slaves…..this topic has it all.

takes the liberal view that today’s immigrants in the USA are just as American as those of colonial stock:

Social Studies

America Isn't a Heritage

I wrote this for UnHerd, where it was published yesterday…

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9 months ago · 37 likes · 4 comments · Leighton Woodhouse

What’s being said is this: some Americans are more American than others. Specifically, those who can trace their lineage in the United States back many generations are more American than naturalised US citizens, or even the native-born American children of immigrants.

The word “heritage” is the giveaway. Among nativist-leaning American nationalists, the term “Heritage Americans” refers to those who can trace their lineage in the US back to the genetic stock of colonial America. To its proponents, Heritage Americans constitute an “American ethnicity” — basically WASP, with a smattering of German, and a sliver of Scandinavian. Some would also count black descendants of slaves as Heritage Americans, though others would not. Those who cannot claim this lineage are presumed to be somehow less American than those who can.

What about hyphenated-Americans? To me, it appears to be a case of having your feet in two different ponds simultaneously. If I were an American, I’d definitely describe myself in hyphenated terms, but when I look at it objectively, I see hyphenization as an error as it creates more categories of identity, and therefore more division. I like to joke around and tell Americans that the entire Ellis Island Cohort should have been assigned names from a Nathaniel Hawthorne novel upon arrival in their new land. Instead of Gino Esposito, it should be Young Goodman Brown….all the while still looking and sounding like Gino Esposito from Queens, NY.

While DHS can’t say this outright, MAGA influencers such as Jack Posobiec can. A few days ago, at a Turning Point USA conference, Posobiec, aping Trump, claimed that New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, a naturalised US citizen, is not, in fact, an American. “This idea that if you just hand someone a piece of paper that makes them American,” he said, referring to US citizenship, “guess what, it’s failed. It’s wrong. It’s not true.” “You are fake Americans,” Posobiec growled, “and we are going to smoke you out, every single one of you.”

There is the matter of citizenship, and there is also the matter of belonging to a nation (very extended tribe). The two often get confused, but they shouldn’t, as they are separate categories of identity. One is legal, the other is not. Many people will resent arrivistes telling them how to live their lives or how their city/country/etc. should be run. This is a normal reaction.

A couple of days later, Posobiec’s “fake Americans” net grew even wider. Referring to Minneapolis mayoral candidate Omar Fateh, he tweeted: “This is clearly not an American.” Fateh was born in Washington, D.C., to immigrant parents from Somalia. There is no question of his citizenship status, though Trump’s executive order purporting to repeal birthright citizenship could conceivably change that. (When I asked Posobiec to explain exactly what separates a real from a “fake” American, he replied: “Everyone knows what an American is.”)

The jist of Leighton’s argument:

What Mamdani and Fateh have in common is that neither of them are “Heritage Americans” — a term that isn’t just legally meaningless, but also historically delusional. The conceit behind it is that the early Americans shared a common culture and set of values. This is because they were mostly English and universally Christian. Therefore, the narrative goes, they were united in their belief in such core Anglo-American virtues as democracy, rule of law, and limited government. Later waves of migrants, like those who went through Ellis Island, were further removed from these shared Anglo-American folkways, but not entirely so, as they were almost entirely from Europe. Since Americans opened their country to the rest of the world in the later 20th century, however, the nation has been inundated with people who are completely alien to American political and moral culture. From that began the dissolution of American society. This is roughly JD Vance’s point of view.

This is all ahistorical mythmaking. There was little that was culturally unifying across Colonial America. Just because the colonists were English and Christian didn’t mean they all got on — in fact, it meant the opposite. In the Old World, Christianity had been the source of endless fragmentation and war for 100 years, while England had been torn apart by those divisions more than perhaps any other country in Europe. These hatreds found their apotheosis in the bloodbath of the English Civil War, whose ripples spread across the Atlantic Ocean to the American eastern seaboard. There, the colonists of Virginia and the greater Tidewater region were faithful servants of the deposed King — many of them had fought for him as Cavaliers. Meanwhile, the colonists of Massachusetts Bay shared the Puritan faith of those who had chopped off the King’s head. What the two colonies had in common wasn’t “shared values”, but deep mutual contempt.

and

In the Old World, the various regional populations of England despised one another. In the American colonies, they could live apart in mutual disdain. With their newfound isolation and political autonomy, the differences between them became even more pronounced. In New England, the Puritans established a flat, communitarian social order topped by a strong and sometimes authoritarian government. Meanwhile, the Tidewater gentry reproduced the fixed hierarchical order of the English aristocracy as best they could. They in turn were loathed by the anti-statist Ulster Scots of the Appalachian backcountry, who for centuries in Britain had fought for what they regarded as their natural, God-given liberties against the constant oppression and predations of the English and Scottish crowns. The Deep South idealised a Roman-style slaveocracy ruled by oligarchs, while the Quakers of Pennsylvania established a pacifist society based on tolerance and Christian love.

These disparate cultures could not have been more hostile to each other. The unification they achieved under the drafting of the Constitution and Bill of Rights was the result of painstaking horse trading and compromise in the face of a common enemy. Even that wasn’t enough to prevent secession and an American civil war a century later. What finally cohered American civilisation, if anything, was the dilution of regional and sectarian identities in the bloody mess of westward expansion — a historical process that involved not just Americans of European ancestry but people from all over the world, from Sweden to Peru to China.

plus

This may sound like postmodern revisionism to the Right, but the fact is that the United States has always been a multicultural society. It’s only through the distortion of our modern eyes that we fail to perceive the cultural and political diversity out of which we forged a nation.

“Heritage” is a relic of feudal Europe, in which social status was a function of one’s bloodline. America was founded specifically to leave all that behind. What united us was not a common history or language or tradition, but a shared drive to seek prosperity for our families through hard work, rather than resign ourselves to our stations of birth. In this commitment, the immigrants who seek opportunity in the US today are as American as those who landed on the Mayflower. It’s those who would replace this American self-conception with an anachronistic caste system based on ancestry who betray the founding ideals of the country.

Do you agree with ?

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I haven’t shared much of anything from Aris Roussinos on here in some time, so here’s an essay from him on how sectarian politics is on the rise in England, something that was considered to be relegated to the economic basket case known as Northern Ireland up until recently:

In his 1977 book The Break-Up of Britain, the socialist and Scottish nationalist writer Tom Nairn titled his chapter on the United Kingdom’s then-most restive province “Northern Ireland: Relic or Portent?” On this, as with so much else, Nairn may have been prescient. A year ago, it was natural to speculate on whether anti-migrant disturbances would become a feature of the English summer, as those deriving from the province’s traditional, and now largely ceremonial, ethnic conflict are in Northern Ireland. Today, it appears that “rioting season” has become England’s new routine. Rather than a freak occurrence, to be dealt with by harsh sentencing, the mixed protests and clashes in Epping, like the demonstrations in Diss and now Canary Wharf, still seem like only tremors before a greater earthquake. When Nigel Farage warned this week that “nobody in London understands how close we are to civil disobedience”, the response from Left-liberals, confused and frightened by a predictable course of events nevertheless incomprehensible to their worldview, was to cast him as a sort of English Ian Paisley, threatening violence at a safe remove for political gain.

This isn’t the England of 1994, that’s for sure.

Is it going too far to declare a creeping Ulsterisation of English politics? In a response to their demographic decline, currently mostly focusing on the British state’s loss of control of the nation’s borders, one would have expected the English to adopt a similar siege mentality to that of Ulster’s Protestants, whose “conditional loyalty” to the British state has always been dependent on the sense that it was safeguarding their ethnic interests. It now appears that they have. Like the PSNI, the English police is being criticised for its handling of disorder by a mobilising ethnic community, with the latter enjoying the tentative support of two political parties. One of those, Reform, increasingly appears to be poised to swap roles with what was famously dubbed, until Cameron, “Britain’s natural party of government”. As with the SDLP and UUP in Northern Ireland, respectively replaced by the more radical Sinn Fein and the DUP through a process of what analysts of such conflicts call “ethnic outbidding”, the dynamics in mainland Britain are adopting uncanny echoes of Ulster’s once-unique dysfunction. The DUP is now being threatened from its Right by an even more explicitly ethnic party, Traditional Unionist Voice, though this has not happened in Britain or England. The dynamics of the next decade — what remains of Labour’s capacity to govern the country, and the unknowable, but not immediately reassuring possibilities, of a Farage-led Britain — will surely determine this question.

This unforced error of mass immigration that began under Tony Blair is colouring and will continue to colour English (and UK) politics for the next decade or two, or even longer.

An Irish element to the story:

In the summer of 1914, mainland Britain was only spared a civil war spreading from Ulster by the outbreak of the First World War, just as 1640s Protestant settler refugees from Ulster fleeing to London helped spark the conditions for England’s only civil war the state chooses to refer to as such. The Glorious Revolution, still referred to as such for its foundational role in the wavering modern liberal-democratic order, is still celebrated for its climactic Boyne victory every summer by Ulster Loyalists, albeit for their own Irish reasons. Unlike a growing number on the Right, or even in ordinary life, I believe the modern British state is very far from outright conflict. Yet disturbances of a lesser kind, for being less grave in their consequences, are surely more likely to spread, and to become our new, so easily avoidable, normal.

Many of last year’s English rioters, given the epicentre of the disturbances in northwest England, were of Irish descent and may, like that other child of the Irish diaspora, Tommy Robinson, have kept up with events across the water. Even the English movement’s two political martyrs, Lucy Connolly and Peter Lynch, bear good Gaelic surnames, just like Reform’s Epping candidate and female organiser, as well as many of the Homeland Party’s public faces. Whether this signifies successful Irish diaspora assimilation into Britishness is perhaps a deeper question than you might initially think. Similarly, the “No Surrender” slogan on the English flag borne by masked Canary Wharf protestors nods to the interest in Ulster Loyalism apparent in some London football firms, something also true of the British radical Right in the Seventies and Eighties.

This SCR is already very, very long, so read the rest here.

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We end this weekend’s SCR with an entry that showcases postcards from 1920’s Palermo, Sicily:

The Erich Sonntag Postcard Collection

Francesco Verderosa's Palermo, c. 1920

And we’re so baaaaack at doing “postcarding from the past”, and today I’d like to take you to one of my favourite places I’ve ever visited: welcome to Palermo, Italy, the capital of the autonomous province of Sicily. Locally also known as Paliemmu or Palèimmu, here’s some basic information …

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a year ago · 8 likes · 2 comments · Stephan Sander-Faes

As it happens, and while I have a wealth of colourful picture postcards from the Cold War, too (which I’ll show you in a second posting), today we’ll be talking about one Francesco Verderosa, a native of Palermo. and photographer-publisher extraordinary.

Who was Mr. Verderosa? Well, according to this dedicated website, he

published local topographicals into the divided-back era, many of them produced by Purger of Munich. In 1920 he was at 364 Corso [now via ?] Vittorio Emanuele. Palermo is the capital of the Italian island of Sicily.

Hence, Mr. Verderosa’s activities—much like the postcards of Mexico by Hugo Brehme—cover the final years of what academics have dubbed the “Golden Age” of the picture postcard (c. 1880-c. 1920). According to this dedicated postcard auction site, his postcards sell for some 3.90 to 7 Euros apiece.

Click here to check out the rest of the collection.

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Edit: Back to work……..Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

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Completely independent of detaching my left shoulder from its socket, I have done a rather good job of detaching myself from the drudgery of tracking day-to-day US politics. To be honest, it feels quite liberating, and I am happy with the decision that I made.

The fact of the matter is that the political situation in the USA is BORING at present, and when politics are boring, the only conclusion that can come from it is that things are “stable”. The eight years of media-driven infoterror that coloured the first Trump administration and the Biden gerontocracy that succeeded it simply ran out of energy. It is very difficult to get passionate about budget cuts or trade talks….unless you are some sort of nerd/wonk. The USA is a very stable polity at present, and this fact should upset those who supported Trump in 2016, 2020, and yes, 2024 as well. Trump was elected to usher in a revolution (even if smarter types knew that this is an impossible ask), not govern in accordance with the menu on display.

It is this present incongruous situation that makes Trump v2.0 rather dull to observe. #MAGA by and large wants a revolution, but The Donald is a 1990s Clinton liberal. Compounding this matter is the fact that the US system is built around compromise and Trump is working wholly within the system (and much more effectively than his disastrous first attempt). You cannot compromise your way to a revolution, nor can you usher in a revolution by rigidly adhering to the system already in place (anti-Trump lawfare types will quibble with this bit). I pointed out this fact way, way back in the black and white era of 2016 when I told #MAGA that Trump is THE VEHICLE and not THE DESTINATION. But then a cult of personality arose, completely shouting down my message. “So it goes”, Vonnegut would say.

When I reflect on the past nine years of US politics, I am left scratching my head, wondering what all the fuss about Trump really was. Was it all a negative reaction to his brash personality and style? The cacophony of the reaction of his first time in office did not match his actual policy. We know that “Trump-Russia” is bullshit, we also know that Russian meddling in the 2016 US Presidential Election was also nonsense. I still can’t figure out what was really behind the psychological breakdown of US elites in 2016 through to the Biden era (and some still haven’t recovered to this day). Democracy can be distilled down to the simple notion that those in power can be removed by way of elections, and this has been the hard-encoded norm in US politics throughout its history. Why would the election of a 90s Clinton liberal be met with an existential crisis among its elites? Why couldn’t some of them sit out for four years like they had done in the past? It doesn’t make sense.

On the other side of the ledger, the cult of personality built around Donald Trump has blinded his base with respect to what can be done. Instead of explaining this at length, allow me to be curt: what the base wants (revolution) cannot be done without torching the Constitution. Trump v2.0 can start deportations on a massive scale, but all it takes is a single future Democrat in office to undo the entire effort. #MAGA has to win EVERY election for at least a generation so that the bureaucracy can be replaced wholesale, and so that the present culture can be entirely swapped out with a new one….and even then it’s not a sure bet.

The bigger problem with #MAGA wanting a revolution is that it would mean turning away from conservatism, as they would need to toss the current system into the dustbin of history. Not only is this a tall order, it is also seditious. Americans on the American right revere the Constitution with a religious fervour, but it is precisely that document that prevents them from opening the path towards getting what they actually desire. To become revolutionaries, they must reject conservatism…..and if you know Americans you know that this is simply not going to happen (e.g. Step 1: Install a revolutionary leadership). The best that #MAGA can hope for are some policy changes that they hope will stick through a future Democrat-led administration.

Curtis Yarvin and I are on the same page regarding this gap between goals and reality:

Gray Mirror

Reconciling the right

After an energetic start, the Trump administration has started to slow down. The most worrisome trend is its increasing tendency to focus its efforts away from public drama and toward “good government…

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9 months ago · 181 likes · Curtis Yarvin

Beyond this oligarchy, there is nothing. The hotbed of democracy, the Congress, has a 98% incumbency rate and a seniority. The monarchical aspect of the old Constitution—the President—is largely symbolic. We saw this vividly when we spent four years with a senile President, without the public noticing or even being told.

I repeat: the USA is very, very stable.

A good test for the reality of political change is whether a man on the street would notice the change, if he didn’t read the newspaper. Using this test, few Americans could tell the difference between a Democratic President and a quarter. Alas, the Presidency is going the way of the old European monarchies, which in many countries have stuck around in symbolic form. There will always be ceremonies, banquets and photo-ops.

In the contest between this oligarchy and democracy, democracy always loses. Not only does public opinion not control the regime—the regime controls public opinion. In most cases, the mind of the ruled class can be counted on to follow the mind of the ruling class, if sometimes with a lag of decades. Fashion flows downward.

Big Curt is making the point that much of what gets reported by media on a daily basis is largely irrelevant. He is right.

Note the following:

Even in cases where the people are stubborn—there is no country where mass immigration has ever been popular—regime ideology prevails at a policy level. And mass immigration is the final solution to the democracy problem. As Bertolt Brecht said: would not it be easier for the government to elect a new people?

I am glad that Curtis made a point of highlighting this simple fact because it is a view that I share with him. And not only do I share it with it, I consider it the most important issue in western liberal democracy today; if you can simply dilute the popular will by importing new people at a large scale, can you honestly call your system “democratic”? (Furthermore, the rise of the NGO industrial complex as an effective end run around democracy makes the answer to this question even simpler).

Today’s Republican Party is the voice of democracy, or as some call it “populism.” It exists to oppose the oligarchy. Or perhaps, to appear to oppose the oligarchy.

The spectrum between controlled opposition, ineffective opposition, and weak opposition is hard to measure. But ever since FDR chose Wendell Willkie, a Democrat until six months before the election, as his opponent in 1940, Republicans have been on this spectrum.

While Nixon and Reagan were certainly sincere in their populism, their administrations had no lasting positive effect on the regime—indeed, Nixon is responsible for affirmative action and Reagan for immigration amnesty. Could Democrats have sold these policies?

Liberalism is baked into the pie of US politics, which makes notions such as “conservative revolution” simply ridiculous.

Here comes the important part:

Trump is different. He started his first administration with enormous roars about crossing the Rubicon. Then he marched up to the Rubicon, sat down and fished.

It is not a healthy place to fish. Clouds of infected mosquitoes rise from this river. Trump spent the whole administration on the defensive. And when he finally fled, the bugs pursued him. The lawfare did not stop until he was elected again.

While the second Trump administration has not crossed the Rubicon or come remotely close, it is not sitting around and fishing. It charged in ankle-deep, momentarily terrifying the mosquitoes—who are at least on the defensive.

Moreover, the new administration even passes the man-on-the-street test—at least if we can believe the reports that deportation has decreased congestion on Los Angeles freeways. Migrants are no longer flooding across the southern border, and the administration may even complete a coast-to-coast fence (albeit cuttable in 90 seconds with an angle grinder).

But except in foreign policy, with the miraculous and almost accidental closure of USAID, no significant damage has been done to the regime. To the contrary: the opportunity to oppose Trump has rejuvenated it.

Curtis is appealing to Trump to cross the Rubicon, but he knows full well that Trump is not the man to do it (the vehicle, not the destination, as I stated above).

Right now, the opposition forces are in chaos—divided by personal and cultural rifts. Jeffrey Epstein emerges to challenge Adolf Hitler as the world’s most important dead person. Or is he dead? Many Americans are starting to suspect that they will never even know.

When the regime is united and its enemies are divided, it always wins. The regime is always united. The Democrats have perfect discipline. The Republicans have—no idea what they want. Some want this. Some want that. The Democrats all want the same thing—power.

More on Epstein in the next segment. See below.

Not that the hobbits are innocent in this schism! They are anything but innocent. Fundamentally, the hobbit is living in a dream—a kind of virtual Shire, superimposed on his senses by augmented reality, over the grim rotting Yookay that is everywhere around him. America has its own Yookay, with a helot class that speaks Spanish and not Urdu. Does he want the truth? He can’t handle the truth!

Even when the hobbit sees that he is not living in Norman Rockwell America, he is never far from the idea that “acting as if” will get it back. Hobbit politics is fundamentally a form of “manifesting.” Because this cargo-cult creed is incoherent and fake, any situation in which hobbit politicians are making actual decisions will be mercurial and unpredictable. In fact, as happened in February 2020, the high elves may have to turn their platform on a dime (“we have always been at war with Eastasia”) to navigate the hobbits’ mercurial turn.

How can these groups knit themselves into a single effective political force? I despair. Everyone despairs. And—

Curtis is lamenting the poor state of #MAGA, one filled with very dumb people and very opportunistic ones as well.

The staffers in the Trump administration have not quite absorbed the full reality of their predicament. Like Duke Leto in Arrakis, everyone in the administration—from Trump himself on down—is in a trap.

They have one and only one way to stay out of the jaws of this trap: *never lose another election*.

What most Trump staffers don’t realize is that, in the next Democratic administration, lawfare will be *industrialized*. Everyone who worked for the administration, everyone who took money from the administration, will be targeted. Think there aren’t enough prosecutors? There will be enough prosecutors. Thousands of trespassers were targeted after January 6. Trump appointees are not technically trespassing, but the principle is the same. When swine enter the temple, a great purification is necessary. This purification calls for blood—your blood.

The executive branch? No such thing. Everyone in every job in every agency has a mission which is defined by law. Didn’t follow the letter and/or spirit (either will do) of the law? You broke the law. And was there a budget involved? Uh huh. Thought so. You’re an embezzler. You’re a thief. To protect the public—you need to be in jail. You broke the law. This is America. Break the law—go to jail. Criminal! Thief!

The problem with the second Trump administration is that they’ve actually gotten their feet wet in the Rubicon. Like the crowds on January 6—this may not be effective opposition, but it is certainly not controlled opposition. Or at least, the control could be improved.

Trump will not cross the Rubicon. You can bet on it.

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I’m going to open myself up to criticism by stating the following:

I do not for one second believe that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself. I also believe that he was in the employ of at least one national intelligence agency. At the same time, I also believe that this entire affair is nowhere near as important as it has been made out to be.

In fact, I slot the “Epstein Scandal” in the same column with other campaigns such as “Lock Her Up!”, “Comet Pizza”, the Durham Report, and so on: they are all wild goose chases that divert focus from what is most important (obtaining, securing, and retaining power to change the system) to place them on that which is at best second in rank.

Epstein sells, no doubt about it. And the Epstein Affair is a very American one in that its twists and turns have led it to land square on the bingo card of the very Christian (in the American sense) #MAGA base. Think about it….Epstein has it all: child sex rings, powerful liberal figures, blackmail, conspiracy, enormous money types…all in a very appealing Caribbean location. All that’s missing is the rule-breaking maverick investigator to take it all down and we have all the ingredients for a summer blockbuster.

The rule-breaking maverick is supposed to be Donald Trump, at least according to his base. His administration is supposed to not only shed light on this conspiracy, but is also supposed to put the “evil-doers” behind bars, thus draining the swamp and returning the USA to some previous Golden Age. One problem: real life isn’t a movie and power and corruption have a tendency to enmesh whole swathes of people.

I do believe that Epstein was part of an intelligence project, and I can see the argument that it involved blackmail. I do not believe that there was an active child-sex ring of the sort told to us by Con Inc. media. I also believe that these kinds of intelligence ops are the “cost of doing business”. Cynical? Sure. I’ll concede the point.

Sometimes you need autists to do the work for you, and on this issue I will defer to the turbo-charged autism of :

Michael Tracey

The Epstein humiliation

In the past few days I’ve been somewhat unexpectedly deluged with requests to discuss the “Epstein Files” debacle. Here’s a podcast I did with Unherd. Here’s an appearance today on the 2WAY platform. And here’s a…

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9 months ago · 172 likes · 81 comments · Michael Tracey

While I don’t claim to possess encyclopedic knowledge of every last aspect of the sprawling saga, I’ve consumed enough court transcripts and related material over the years to become increasingly wary of how this topic now functions in the popular imagination. And in particular, how it has been used by political scammers to manipulate, inflame, and entice a certain segment of the public, such that large quantities of people apparently believed there was something called the “Epstein Files” sitting somewhere in a cavernous government vault, just waiting to be triumphantly unveiled — and then at last would emerge this long-awaited Rosetta Stone of hidden elite depravity, exposing once and for all how power in society is really distributed.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Epstein mythology has also thoroughly humiliated the Trump Administration. Figures like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino auditioned for their current top roles at the FBI by spending the prior several years on the GOP podcast circuit, and if anything plays to the id of right wing social media, it’s peddling speculation about the supposed concealment of child-sex trafficking rings. Once the righteous are restored to power, so the story goes, the perpetrators will finally get what’s coming to them.

When people wonder why Pam Bondi, as attorney general, teased imminent scandalous revelations from the “Epstein Files,” only to then disclaim the very existence of those files, they overlook the obvious answer: She and other administration officials have long sought to rouse their followers on social media by indicating keen interest in Epstein mythology. Simply name-dropping Epstein was a surefire winner in the less-than-scrupulous podcast environments where JD Vance was shrewdly electioneering last year. This made it possible for “anti-establishment” media consumers to believe that by voting Republican in 2024, they were voting to defeat the Deep State—and so to release the “Epstein Files.” Such logic may have been shallow and deluded, but its political employment has proved to be highly clever and effective.

Still, the dam was bound to break eventually. Epstein mythologists now denounce Trump & co. for concealing evidence of a far-reaching child-sex-trafficking ring and blackmail network that they are certain exists. But if anything needs to be denounced, it is the charlatanism of those who exploited the credulous and trafficked in nonsense to attain high office. Now that would be a “trafficking” conspiracy worth exploring in greater depth.

“It plays well to the base.”

There are many things that I’ve long found maddening about the prevailing conception of the Epstein issue, especially on social media. It’s considered vicious and offensive to simply observe that the original and most high-profile accuser, Virginia Guiffre, was an admitted serial fabricator. As though this should have no bearing at all on how we perceive the veracity of the wider mania she unleashed — and even though it was always Guiffre’s wild, sensational claims that formed the evidentiary basis for what people now profess to believe with such strident conviction: that Epstein orchestrated a massive child sex-trafficking and blackmail operation, implicating untold scores of powerful individuals in illicit sexual encounters, and now the horrifying truth continues to be covered up by the Trump Administration.

Giuffre, as the highest-profile Epstein accuser, was absolutely integral to the creation of the mythology. It was she who made the most sensational claims of being sex-trafficked to prominent third-party individuals—including Alan Dershowitz, Prince Andrew, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, and former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson. For nearly a decade, Giuffre accused Dershowitz of committing depraved sex crimes, but by 2022, she was forced to admit in a civil settlement that her claims had been false. Strangely, this development failed to penetrate the mythology—perhaps because it demonstrated the serial fabulism of the accuser on whose claims the mythology was built.

Despite her decade’s worth of sensational charges, Giuffre was not called as a witness by prosecutors in the 2021 trial of Ghislaine Maxwell. Not one of the four alleged victims to testify in that trial claimed they had ever been trafficked to any third-party individuals; indeed, the sex trafficking conspiracy for which Maxwell was ultimately convicted consisted of two persons: herself and Epstein.

Thus, the only time that the heightened evidentiary standards and adversarial scrutiny of a criminal trial were brought to bear, no claims were even tested that could have substantiated the central premise of the popular mythology—namely, that Epstein ran an elaborate sex-trafficking operation to supply prominent men with minors, and then capture their illicit exploits on tape for the purposes of blackmail. (Blackmail to what end, exactly? Never clear.)

Click here to read the rest.

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I’m old enough to remember when anti-Globalism sentiment was almost entirely found on the left side of the political divide. Seattle, Genoa, anti-G7 protests, Occupy Wall Street……they all seem so quaint, and distant. Yet they were real, and they were gaining strength. Then all of the sudden the movement dissipated as western leftists shifted focus towards what is now know as “identity politics”. Personal matters of identity and choice shoved class to the side.

At the same time, left-liberals and leftists critical of globalization were harmed by the compromises that they had to make while in power. It was (and largely still is) impossible to actively pursue and implement anti-globalist policies in western liberal states. Identity politics came to be seen by leftists and left-liberals as a godsend, because it allowed them to pursue social policies that they could successfully implement.

The downside with this shift is that anti-Globalist sentiment has largely passed from the left to the right, as the negative aspects of economic globalism began to be felt by the broad public in western liberal democracies, with offshoring, de-industrialization, mass migration, and dropping standards of living becoming all too visible to even the most apathetic voter. It is these issues that stem from globalism that have powered the rise of the right in many countries. Leftists have realized this, and are frantically debating among themselves as to how to return anti-Globalist sentiment to the left.

Here is one view (a rather convoluted one, IMO):

Under the neoliberal hyper-globalization wave, the Global North took advantage of the weakness of the Global South by trapping millions of its workers in a relentless cycle of exploitation while offshoring had dramatic impacts on the standard of living of average citizens back in the Global North as well-paid industrial jobs became few and far in between, wages stagnated, and the social safety net was torn apart, partly because of less government revenues due to neoliberal tax cuts for corporations and the rich and partly on account of simple ideological reasoning. Austerity for the masses but subsidies, tax breaks, and bailouts for industry and the financial sector is a central aspect of the ideological agenda of neoliberalism. And while some developing nations did benefit from the great connectivity in the global economy that has been unleashed since the early 1980s, it is primarily the elites in the Global South, as much as it is in the Global North, that gained the most from the neoliberal hyper-globalization wave.

A standard-fare critique.

Right wing anti-Globalism as “fake:”

However, the backlash against globalism by hard-right and far-right parties was not based on a scathing critique of neoliberal capitalism but was seen instead as a political project advanced by Marxism and the radical left with the double aim of destroying national culture and replacing the nation-state with institutions of global governance. This is of course an evasion of what capitalist globalization is all about, but it would be naïve to think that the backlash against globalism by the far-right does not have socioeconomic roots. The anti-globalist sentiment that brought President Donald Trump to power in the United States and scores of other authoritarian political figures across the world is driven by both cultural and socioeconomic factors and is nurtured by the “us versus them” mentality. The far-right of course is not anti-systemic and in fact enjoys the support of digital moguls like Elon Musk. As such, it is fooling voters on the economy with promises of a new order. The far-right’s anti-globalism stance begins and ends with the imposition of draconian measures against immigration and the creation of a culture of cruelty.

A critique of the left:

The anti-globalism of the far-right is perverse and irrational, and thus it may speak volumes of the need of a widely and publicly educated citizenry to sustain democracy, but it also calls attention to the gross political failures of the reformist left parties that came to power during the height of the anti-globalization period. Indeed, while the contradictions of neoliberal globalization led to electoral victories of left parties in scores of countries across the world during the last couple of decades, the shift to global neoliberalism was not countered by the parties of the reformist left that came to power. They may have criticized neoliberal hyper-globalization while they were in opposition, but they did very little once they came to power to combat its destructive effects. At the very best, they increased spending on social programs but did not try to diminish the spread of globalization on their economies and societies. Subsequently, by failing to tame, let alone shrink, capitalist globalization, they quickly saw their political fortunes decline and found citizens changing sides. This is the principal factor that has activated a turn to the far-right across the globe, including the United States, although Trumpism also needs to be considered in light of the peculiar social, cultural, and ideological features of the country.

One cannot help but notice the emphasis placed on economic factors, even if the author tips his hat towards social and cultural ones in places like the USA.

His solution:

We also know that pressure “from below” to tame or even reverse neoliberal globalization, a view that was held by the main body of the anti-globalization movement of the 1990s and 2000s, is a flawed strategy. The way out of neoliberal globalization is by developing a new globalization that is free from the destructive tendencies of capitalist accumulation and operates through political processes in which democracy and globalization are in a symbiotic relationship and thus support and reinforce each other.

The left is historically obligated to advance an alternative vision of a world order beyond capitalism. A world order where the rights of labor are at the pinnacle of human society and thus the means of production are collectively owned by workers while the exploitation of nature is seen as injustice.

In short: communism with a green touch :)

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This edition of the SCR is already quite long, so I’ll cut to the chase as I will be talking Turkey in the Syria essay coming out this week.

Conor Gallagher of Naked Capitalism is shedding light on how Armenia’s turn away from Russia and towards the USA is working to effectively box Russia out of the Caucasus, while permitting Turkey to pursue its grand “Turanian Corridor” ambitions:

The US with heavy French involvement, has successfully turned to Armenia into a tool of the West in recent years. The US has one of its largest embassies in the world in Armenia and even a representative of the US armed forces embedded in the Armenian Defense Ministry. The biggest problem for the West was that the plan to get a stooge government in Georgia failed — an effort that isn’t completely dead, but it’s on life support, and with it the logistics to Armenia.

Nonetheless, the Armenian government, by most objective accounts acting against the interests of its people, has successfully eroded ties with Russia over the past few years,[1] despite Moscow being the historic counterweight to the designs of Türkiye and Azerbaijan. Why did the Armenian government of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan do this? Hard to say for certain. The charitable view is that was a clumsy rebalancing act. Either way, Armenia is now in an untenable position, and it looks like the final sell-out has begun.

There is now talk that the US, having abandoned the plan to weasel itself more comfortably militarily into Armenia, is instead content to turn the job over to Türkiye and Azerbaijan. It’s also possible this was the plan all along and that resistance from the Armenian government and tensions between Azerbaijan and the West were just a feint that are so in vogue in the West nowadays. It would make sense that the plan to open the Turan Corridor not get the green light until Armenia had successfully pushed Russia out of any involvement. That now appears to be the case unless Armenia does an about face and pleads for Moscow’s help, and/or Russia were to forcefully intervene.

As of now, the government in Yerevan is doubling down on its anti-Russia stance as it arrests clergymen and businesspeople who were allegedly plotting a coup. Armenia is speeding towards nationalizing a power grid owned by jailed Russian businessman as Pashinyan stated there is a “high probability that certain circles in Russia are behind these hybrid operations and this hybrid war.”

I think that this is a very fair assessment of the situation.

Of course, Brussels and the US are very interested in a direct route to get their hands on all that Caspian and Central Asian fossil fuels and strategic minerals. They had hoped to do so through Georgia, but a Turkic corridor that simultaneously hurts Iran makes for a fine Plan B—even if it means turning to old friend/foe Erdogan.

As the Atlantic Council so-eloquently put it a few years back: “Türkiye can become an energy hub—but not by going all-in on Russian gas.” Washington wants that gas to come from Azerbaijan and elsewhere in Central Asia.

Everyone wants to get their hands on Caspian and Central Asian natural resources. It’s largely what led to US efforts re: Georgia’s Rose Revolution.

Grand Turkish ambitions:

It could also be a cooperation with the US plan to further weasel its way into the Caucasus. While Türkiye’s moves eastwards via a link up with Azerbaijan through Armenia are part of its own grand visions for a Turkic corridor stretching into China and it has long insisted Armenia will cooperate one way or another, it likely took some deals to get Ankara to agree to the potential Washington role in that plan. This US policy is not a product of the Trump administration, but it certainly has its own motivations:

The U.S. model envisions American business interests as a stabilizing force, similar to a recent deal involving rare earth minerals in Ukraine. One U.S. official reportedly told [Olesya Vardanyan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace] that the plan could even lead to a Nobel Peace Prize for former President Donald Trump, suggesting that the initiative may become part of his broader foreign policy platform.

Meanwhile, Türkiye’s eastwards march will ratchet up the pressure on Iran and Russia. Tehran is worried that Ankara’s visions of Pan-Turkism will incite ethnic unrest and divisions in the Azeri and Kurdish areas in the northwest of Iran. As Ali Nassar writes at The Cradle:

It reveals a layered geopolitical project anchored in Pan-Turanist nationalism, Muslim Brotherhood-aligned political Islam, and strategic deployment of military and development tools – crafted to serve Ankara’s national interests while converging with NATO’s broader regional goals.

…Pan-Turanism, an early 20th-century ideology premised on the unification of Turkic-speaking peoples from Anatolia to western China, has been resurrected in Ankara as a vehicle for geopolitical consolidation. Today, Turkiye deploys this vision to deepen its grip on Central Asia – particularly in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Azerbaijan.

This ideological push is operationalized through the Organization of Turkic states, which functions as a joint political, economic, and security bloc linking Ankara with these post-Soviet republics.

Türkiye and the West also have visions of using the Zangezur as an energy corridor to send fossil fuels and other resources from Central Asia and the Caspian westwards while cutting out Russia and Iran, all the while increasing their footprint in these countries, effectively carving out a chunk of the Eurasian “heartland.”

As mentioned, I will turn to Turkey this week.

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We end this Monday edition of the SCR with a look at the “banker who caused the 1929 stock crash”:

In late March 1929, interest rates on margin loans soared after attempts by the Federal Reserve to rein in margin investing. Amid the panic, Mitchell announced City would provide $25m to shore up the borrowing market. Investors started buying on margin again.

The move helped avert a potential crash. But his actions also helped scuttle growing demands that the country rethink margin investing and allowed speculation to continue into the fall, when Mitchell remained optimistic in spite of teetering stocks.

“There is nothing to worry about in the financial situation in the United States,” he told the New York Times on Oct. 1, preparing to set sail for a four-week European vacation.

Mitchell’s buying patterns suggest he likely wasn’t trying to deceive. The problem was he happened to be wrong: There was too much speculation, too much borrowing, and when stocks slipped it led to a cascade of margin calls and sell-offs. Some $14B was lost on Black Tuesday alone.

Click here to read the rest.

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Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

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As I write this, skirmishing continues between Indian and Pakistani armed forces despite both sides agreeing to a ceasefire only a few hours ago.

This is not the first time that India and Pakistan have come to blows over the contested northern provinces of Jammu and Kashmir. Nor is this anywhere near the most violent episode in this long-running conflict between these two rival states. Since the Partition of India by the departing United Kingdom in 1947, four wars have been fought between the two, with millions of people being permanently displaced, and quite a lot of civilians losing their lives in the process. The size of these two countries makes any outbreak in fighting an important global matter, but what makes it critical is that both possess their own nuclear arsenals.

At the same time, the fact that both are nuclear-armed has worked to de-escalate flare-ups between the two. Brinkmanship is always a threat, but a nuclear exchange is desired by neither side, despite both claiming ownership to the entirety of Jammu and Kashmir. This nuclear parity permits Pakistan to offset the conventional superiority (at least in numbers) held by its much larger neighbour, India. In parallel to this, certain elements of Pakistan’s deep state also sponsor (with plausible deniability) militant Islamist groups on the Pakistani-side of the Line of Control separating the two country’s armed forces in Jammu and Kashmir. It is these militant groups that destabilize the region, and that routinely draw the ire of the Indian government.

It was also a militant Islamist group that conducted a terrorist attack last month in Indian-controlled Kashmir that claimed the lives of 26 Indian tourists. India felt no option but to react, squarely pointing the finger of blame at Pakistan for harbouring terrorist groups. Pakistan naturally rejected these charges, but its government has never dropped its claim to control over the whole of these two majority-Muslim regions. Destabilization is the only card that it can play, despite it risking a more serious confrontation, one which world leaders hope to de-fuse.

In my opinion, Kashmir is the world’s most significant flashpoint due to both belligerents possessing nuclear arms, their rival claims on the region, the size of their conventional forces, the powerful symbolism attached to ownership of Jammu and Kashmir, and its proximity to China. Despite laying dormant at times, the US Pivot to East Asia will result in more attention being given to this flashpoint because of the jockeying in position between China and the USA, and the diplomatic overtures that will be presented to both Pakistan and India in order to get them on one side or the other. It this specifically this type of environment that invites more foreign intel meddling, and more proxy conflicts. It accentuates the danger of a nuclear exchange between these two neighbouring states.

Opinions are divided as to whether this latest outbreak of fighting will be a routine tit-for-tat, short-lasting confrontation, or something more dangerous. Ian Hall makes the case for the latter:

We’ve seen these kinds of crises before. India and Pakistan have fought full-scale wars many times over the years, in 1947, 1965, 1971 and 1999. There were also cross-border strikes between the two sides in 2016 and 2019 that did not lead to a larger war.

These conflicts were limited because there was an understanding, given both sides possess nuclear weapons, that escalating to a full-scale war would be very dangerous. That imposed some control on both sides, or at least some caution.

There was also external pressure from the United States and others on both occasions not to allow those conflicts to spiral out of control. While it’s possible both sides will exercise similar restraint now, there may be less pressure from other countries to compel them to do so.

In this context, tensions can escalate quickly. And when they do, it’s difficult to get both sides to back down and return to where they were before.

As recently as yesterday, US VP JD Vance said that this conflict was “none of our (the USA’s) business”. Many are concerned by such a statement because, if taken at face value, it removes the powerful influence of the USA from the equation, one that has traditionally worked to de-escalate tensions between the two. In my opinion, Vance’s statement was for domestic political consumption. I am certain that Rubio and his diplomats have been keeping the phone lines busy in the meantime. It is in the interest of the USA to keep peace between the two in order that both can be wooed to the American side in its rising conflict with China (tall order!)

Why did India strike this time?

There was a claim of responsibility after the attack from a group called the Resistance Front, but it was subsequently withdrawn, so there’s some uncertainty about that. Indian sources suggest this group, which is relatively new, is an extension of a pre-existing militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, which has been based in Pakistan for many years.

Pakistan has denied any involvement in the tourist attack. However, there has been good evidence in the past suggesting that even if the Pakistani government hasn’t officially sanctioned these groups operating on its territory, there are parts of the Pakistani establishment or military that do support them. This could be ideologically, financially, or through other types of assistance.

In previous terror attacks in India, weapons and other equipment have been sourced from Pakistan. In the Mumbai terror attack in 2008, for instance, the Indian government produced evidence it claimed showed the gunmen were being directed by handlers in Pakistan by phone.

But as yet, we have no such evidence demonstrating Pakistan is connected to the tourist attack in Kashmir.

This creates the conditions for speculating that other intel groups might be involved.

Hall suggests that the political cost for doing nothing will outweigh continued military escalation by both sides:

It remains to be seen what cost either side is willing to pay to escalate tensions further.

From an economic standpoint, there’s very little cost to either side if a larger conflict breaks out. There’s practically no trade between India and Pakistan.

New Delhi has likely calculated that its fast-growing economy will not be harmed by its strikes and others will continue to trade and invest in India. The conclusion of a trade deal with the United Kingdom, after three years of negotiations, will reinforce that impression. The deal was signed on May 6, just before the Pakistan strikes.

And from the standpoint of international reputation, neither side has much to lose.

In past crises, Western countries were quick to condemn and criticize military actions committed by either side. But these days, most take the view that the long-simmering conflict is a bilateral issue, which India and Pakistan need to settle themselves.

The main concern for both sides, then, is the political cost they would suffer from not taking military action.

External mediation (and the perceived lack of it):

So, how does this play out? The hope would be there’s limited military action, lasting a few days, and then things calm down rapidly, as they have in the past. But there are no guarantees.

And there are a few others willing to step in and help de-escalate the dispute. US President Donald Trump is mired in other conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza and with the Houthi rebels in Yemen, and his administration’s diplomacy has so far been inept and ineffective.

When asked about the Indian strike today, Trump replied it was a “shame” and he “hopes” it ends quickly. That’s very different from the strong rhetoric we’ve seen from US presidents in the past when India and Pakistan have come to blows.

New Delhi and Islamabad will likely have to settle this round themselves. And for whoever decides to blink or back down first, there may be a substantial political cost to pay.

Although tensions between India and Pakistan have been a permanent feature of their relationship since the Partition of India, flare-ups between the two have been effectively managed and de-escalated on a routine basis. The nightmare scenario of a nuclear exchange between India an Pakistan has largely subsided from its peak in the 1990s.

On the other hand, the volatility of the Kashmir issue becomes more pronounced as East Asia becomes the world’s most important theatre of conflict. China controls a portion of the contested region, meaning that the mix of forces makes Jammu and Kashmir even more incendiary. Get ready to learn more about this highland region, and get ready to learn more about Myanmar/Burma, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and so on.

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The two most important elements that global US power rests on are:

1. its ability to project military power anywhere in the world

2. the Dollar

There are many other factors that explain why the USA is as powerful as it is, but these two are by far the most important. This is why certain states that have run afoul of the USA have tried (successfully, in the case of North Korea) to develop their own nuclear arms programs. This is also why there have been efforts to move away from the US Dollar in arena of international trade.

The Greenback is king, and it will remain that way for some time to come. Its only challenge in recent times has been from BRICS, and that has been at best a tepid one. The integration of the global economy since the end of the Cold War have made it incredibly difficult to set up a rival system of trade, as the infrastructure that was built since the end of World War Two has proven to be both very sturdy, and practically impossible to untangle one’s self from without causing immense self-harm.

Every so often, we are treated to “the sky is falling” opinion pieces about the US Dollar losing its status as the global reserve currency, and they generally draw little attention…except from the fringes. The sheer size of the US economy, the depth of its capital markets, and the amount of US dollars held by foreign countries in their reserves makes such declarations either very premature, or outright absurd.

The enduring strength of the greenback is taken as a given by the powers-that-be, but it is also jealously guarded and monitored very, very closely for any potential threats to it. Long-time readers of this Substack know that I don’t take the threat from BRICS very seriously, and I think that my position is wholly justified. Trump has made a couple of negative comments about the organization, but it is largely off of the radar of most people in the USA and Europe. Funnily enough, it is Trump that is seen as a possible threat to the US Dollar’s global standing, one that has been argued during the media meltdown six weeks ago regarding his introduction of tariffs on foreign countries.

Are there grounds for this fear? Or is it just more media sensationalism? I’ll let you decide after you read this piece about the US Dollar, the Federal Reserve, the Bretton Woods System, and the threat of Trump to demolish the entire structure:

When economists seek to account for the dollar’s outsize role as the only true global currency, they point to structural factors such as the US share of world GDP, or the depth and liquidity of US financial markets. This approach underlies the sanguine view of many financial market participants that, come what may, so long as the US remains the world’s leading economy, the dollar will remain its safe haven.

The second Trump administration is a reminder that raw numbers can only take us so far. For as historians will tell you, it is the actions of people, not economies or markets in the abstract, that explain how international currencies rise and fall. It was people who took the crucial steps to build the institutions that made the international dollar. And it is people who will ultimately determine whether these same institutions survive or fail.

‘The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”

Now for some history:

The individual with the strongest claim to patrimony of the global dollar is probably Paul Warburg, German-American scion of the Hamburg-based Warburg banking family. The young Warburg worked in international finance in Hamburg, Paris and London before marrying into the Kuhn, Loeb banking dynasty in 1895 and emigrating to the US in 1902. Extensive international experience impressed upon Warburg the advantages accruing to Britain from London’s position as the leading source of trade credit and investment finance for merchants and bankers in diverse parts of the world. Those diverse parts included the US, which was almost entirely dependent on London and sterling for international credit.

Like many a naturalised citizen, Warburg was deeply loyal to his new country. He worried that the American economy’s dependence on London and sterling exposed it to foreign shocks over which it had no control. He appreciated also that London’s appeal as an international financial centre rested on the backstopping efforts of the Bank of England, which stood ready to act as lender of last resort, guaranteeing the market’s liquidity and stability. It followed that any aspirations the US might have had to promote international use of the dollar were hamstrung by the absence of a central bank.

When I first got onto the internet in the mid-90s and was introduced to non-mainstream US politics, I was inundated with calls to “End the Fed”, and kept coming across long screeds about the Federal Reserve is “evil”. You couldn’t avoid it, as these types of articles, essays, posts, etc. were everywhere. Sure, a lot of these people were cranks, but so what?

Anyway:

Starting in 1906, Warburg became a tireless promoter of the creation of this institution. One of the prospective central bank’s key functions, he argued, would be to develop a market in dollar-denominated credit instruments for use in financing international trade. Adopting European parlance, he referred to these bank drafts or bills of exchange as trade acceptances, anticipating that the central bank would “accept” or buy them as a way of lubricating the new market in trade credit.

Warburg wrote newspaper columns. He spoke at public forums, overcoming shyness born of heavily accented English. In 1910 he was part of the small group of experts who met on Jekyll Island, off the Georgia coast, to thrash out the provisions of what became the Federal Reserve Act. In 1914 he became a founding member of the Federal Reserve Board. The regulations he drafted allowed the Fed to purchase dollar trade acceptances as a way of fostering the market. By the 1920s, that market had grown to the point where the value of dollar trade acceptances matched, and in some years exceeded, the value of trade credits originated in London and denominated in sterling.

The dollar’s status as a rival to sterling suffered a setback in the 1930s, when the Fed withdrew from the acceptance market and the US suffered a series of debilitating banking and financial crises. America emerged from the second world war as the western world’s only superpower, creating an opening for the dollar. But it took the intervention of another singular individual, Harry Dexter White, to cement the greenback’s international role.

Alright, then what happened?

A prickly personality, White pursued an unrewarding academic career before joining Henry Morgenthau’s Treasury Department in 1934 and rising to assistant to the secretary with full responsibility for Treasury’s participation in all international economic and financial matters related to the second world war. During the war, White drafted the plan that became, with modifications, the US blueprint for the IMF, the World Bank and the Bretton Woods System, the institutions that provided the basis for the postwar international monetary order and the dominance of the dollar.

To be sure, the US had to negotiate with other countries present at the international monetary conference convened at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944. White had to parry with his British interlocutor, John Maynard Keynes. But key elements of the White Plan went straight into the Bretton Woods agreement.

Specifically, White sought to distinguish the dollar as the only fully convertible international currency of the newly minted Bretton Woods System. An early draft of the agreement read that exchange rates should be pegged to gold or “gold-convertible currencies”. When one of Keynes’s colleagues, Dennis Robertson, innocently observed that only the dollar was apt to be freely convertible into gold following the war, White saw an opportunity to cement the dollar’s role. He and his team stayed up all night, redrafting the agreement to replace “gold-convertible currencies” with “gold . . . or the United States dollar of the weight and fineness in effect on July 1, 1944”. The Bretton Woods agreement thus singled out the dollar as the sun around which the other elements of the postwar international monetary system revolved.

The subsequent period of dollar dominance was not attributable solely to White and the institutions created at Bretton Woods. It took the Marshall Plan to provide Europe with the dollars needed to resume international payments and reintegrate its economies into the global order. US leaders had to bypass Congress’s reluctance to join the International Trade Organization by agreeing to establish the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

“….the dollar as the sun around which the other elements of the postwar international monetary system revolved.”

Excellent description.

Despite the setback of 1971, the dominance of the greenback persists to this very day:

Thus, even when the Bretton Woods System of exchange rates pegged to the dollar broke down in 1971, the greenback’s global centrality lived on, supported by the institutions built by Warburg, White and their compatriots: an independent Federal Reserve, an open world trading system to which the US and its partners were committed, and a rock-solid geopolitical alliance. The dollar’s continued dominance derived from sheer numbers — from the US’s large share of global GDP and financial transactions — but equally from relationships and reciprocity.

If this essay sounds like a hagiography of the banking establishment, don’t worry, it is. This is the Financial Times, after all.

Trump as a threat (as usual):

It has taken Donald Trump only a few months to weaken if not destroy those relationships and that reciprocity. Trump and his appointees question the very values and arrangements on which nearly a century of dollar dominance is based. For the first time in living memory, the survival of the institutions on which that dominance rests has been cast into doubt.

To start, America’s economic exceptionalism is in doubt. The US economy has outperformed those of other advanced countries in recent years. It is home to the world’s leading tech companies. It is at the forefront of research in artificial intelligence. It has a start-up-friendly culture where serial entrepreneurs are forgiven their failures, and a well-developed venture capital industry to seed new enterprises. It is a magnet for foreign talent.

But there is no guarantee that what was true in the past will be true in the future. The research capacity of the public sector and US universities is being gutted. Whether skilled migrants will still see America’s pearly gates as welcoming is an open question. Policy uncertainty and doubts about rule of law threaten to make America a less attractive place to invest.

The author also states that the overuse of sanctions on the part of the USA is also a threat, once with which I agree. Then there is also the USA’s actual fiscal outlook:

Then there is America’s troubled fiscal and financial outlook. The dollar has been attractive to central banks as a form of foreign reserves, and to corporate treasurers, sovereign wealth fund managers and international investors generally, because it is available in ample amounts while still holding its value. The US has provided a steady supply of dollars to meet the liquidity needs of an expanding world economy without supplying so many as to erode confidence in their value.

But if this has been true until now, US fiscal and financial woes could, in the not-too-distant future, push the dollar over the edge. The Congressional Budget Office’s long-term budget outlook shows debt in the hands of the public rising from 99 per cent of GDP in 2024 to 116 per cent in 2034, 139 per cent in 2044 and 166 per cent in 2054. Impending legislation, including measures that extend Trump’s expiring 2017 tax cuts, could push debt up even faster. There is no magic debt-to-GDP threshold where confidence is automatically lost. But endless tax cuts, mythical expenditure reductions and high levels of political polarisation will at some point cause foreign investors to doubt the dollar’s prospects.

Not being nice to allies also poses a threat:

Finally, the dollar’s global role will suffer if the US is perceived as turning its back on its allies. Countries hold as reserves and use in international payments the currencies of their alliance partners. Not only are those partners seen as reliable stewards of their foreign balances, but holding the currency of one’s ally is taken by the partner as a sign of good faith. Before the first world war, members of the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy) and the Triple Entente (France, Britain and Russia) held as foreign reserves the currencies of their alliance partners. Still other countries held as reserves the currencies of countries with which they had security understandings.

In the 1930s, not only the Commonwealth and Empire but also a fair number of Britain’s other allies held their reserves in London and pegged their exchange rates to the pound in the arrangement known as the Sterling Area. In the 1960s, the German and Japanese governments supported the dollar, helping to preserve its international currency status, because of the value they attached to their defence alliance with the United States, and specifically to US military forces stationed on their shores. Today, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan hold a disproportionate share of their foreign reserves in dollars because they depend on the US security umbrella. In the wake of Trump’s Oval Office blow-up with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and appeasement of Russia, this notion that alliance politics are important for international currency status is about to receive a real-time test.

Trump is trying to do things, one of which is his attempt to structurally reform both the US and global economies. Judging by this essay, any attempt to try anything risks bringing down the entire structure first put into place at Bretton Woods in 1944. That does not inspire confidence.

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Zee Germans are conducting a very interesting experiment: how to separate the popular will from democracy in a system that claims to be a democracy and that is based on giving every adult the right to vote in elections?

We are nearing the end of this years’ long experiment as Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has classified AfD, now the country’s most popular political party, a “right-wing extremist organization”. This designation means that the entire party apparatus is now under surveillance by domestic intel, right down to all communications made between party members. In short: the security organs of state are spying on AfD across the country, including its members.

Two state-level AfD parties have already received this designation, but this is the first time that a party at the national level has been designated “a threat to the constitutional order”. This “threat” has 152 seats in the German Bundestag, btw.

Even the Americans are taken aback by this ruling:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemned a decision Friday by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency to classify the political party Alternative for Germany (AfD) as a right-wing extremist organization, calling the move “tyranny in disguise.”

“What is truly extremist is not the popular AfD—which took second in the recent election—but rather the establishment’s deadly open border immigration policies that the AfD opposes,” Rubio wrote in a post on X in the hours following the decision.

“Germany just gave its spy agency new powers to surveil the opposition,” he wrote. “That’s not democracy—it’s tyranny in disguise.”

Rubio is correct, but there are two important things to remember:

1. this is a result of the de-Nazification policy that West Germany went through shortly after WW2

2. Rubio’s criticism is clearly directed towards anti-Trump elements in the US Deep State, particularly those ones who wanted to ban him from office

Germany is incredibly sensitive about its WW2 legacy, meaning that it is constantly on the look out for anything even remotely right wing in order to quash it and show the world that it has “learned its lesson”. Western liberal consensus is that anti-migration politics is right wing or even far right, despite it representing the majority of public opinion in practically every western country today. Because of this elite consensus and when combined with (somewhat) recent history, Germany’s ruling elites effectively equate AfD to the NSDAP.

After conducting a three-year-long investigation into the party, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution released a 1,000 page report, citing violations of core constitutional principles including human dignity and the rule of law.

“This is democracy. This decision is the result of a thorough & independent investigation to protect our Constitution & the rule of law,” the official X account for the German Foreign Office wrote in a reply to Rubio’s post. “It is independent courts that will have the final say. We have learnt from our history that rightwing extremism needs to be stopped.”

And there you have it. Germany’s 12 years of Nazi rule means that the country cannot be permitted to oppose mass migration even if the democratic majority shares this view. This ruling now permits the German constitutional court to decide whether to ban the party or not. This would be the nuclear option. If that button is pressed, western liberal democracy seals its doom as its overarching internal paradox (think: Popper) comes to the fore.

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I really, really like the British term “chancer”. A chancer is defined as “a person who exploits any opportunity to further their own ends.”

Chancers provide us entertainment through their scheming, manipulating, and ambition. I love reading stories about chancers, and I’ll share this current one with you which details how a Hindu guru on the run from authorities in India has been trying to set up an autonomous state in South America via indigenous rights:

Followers of a fugitive Indian Hindu guru on a mission to establish his own state are popping up across Latin America, offering hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy land in Ecuador, Paraguay and now Bolivia.

At the end of last year, a representative of the Baure Indigenous people in the Bolivian Amazon signed a “perpetual” contract leasing 60,000 hectares (148,260 acres) of their vast rainforest for $108,000 (£81,910) a year.

A representative of the Cayubaba Indigenous people signed a similar contract, leasing 31,000 hectares for $55,800 annually.

On the other end of the contracts, the profiteer was the United States of Kailasa, which, despite presenting itself to the Indigenous peoples as a nation, is not recognised by any country or the UN.

The fictional nation was created by Nithyananda – a self-anointed “godman” and the “supreme pontiff of Hinduism” – in 2019, after he fled India while facing charges of abducting children for his ashram and one of raping a follower.

After failed attempts to buy land in Ecuador and Paraguay – and even signing an agreement with the US city of Newark, which was later scrapped when officials realised Kailasa did not exist – the fake country turned to Bolivia.

Gotta keep trying:

Between September and November 2024, its representatives signed contracts with at least four Indigenous groups for the 1,000-year lease “with automatic and perpetual renewal” of their lands.

Everything seemed to go according to plan until the Bolivian newspaper El Deber exposed it last month.

“When I first read the contracts, I thought, ‘I must be imagining this’. They were so irrational that it felt like magical realism,” said Silvana Vicenti, the journalist who broke the story.

According to the contracts, seen by the Guardian, Kailasa would control vast swathes of land, “with full sovereignty and autonomy” within each Indigenous territory including rights over the airspace and all natural resources above or below the ground.

The Indigenous groups would be obliged to “defend Kailasa in any legal proceedings” and support its recognition “as a sovereign and independent state, protect it against aggression, and back its admission to international organisations such as the UN”.

For Vicenti, it seemed like “a monarchy with Indigenous subjects”.

Bolivia is not having it:

“The contracts are a total scam,” said Morales. “But the strangest part is that, to this day, no one knows exactly what happened. First, how did they get in? … How did they reach these places and start directly approaching sectors of Indigenous Amazonian territory?”

The Bolivian government has yet to provide all the answers.

After the case broke, it issued a statement denying diplomatic ties with the fictitious country.

lol

On 24 March, Calderón announced that Bolivia had expelled 20 foreigners “linked” to Kailasa – of different nationalities, including Indian, British, American and Chinese – who had entered the country as tourists but were seeking to “obtain land” in Indigenous territories.

and

Nithyananda, whose whereabouts remains unknown, gave a “live presidential address” on social media last Wednesday to dispel “malicious rumours” allegedly spread by “anti-Hindu media outlets” claiming he was dead.

He did not mention Bolivia directly, but his YouTube channel has published videos where his followers admit to signing the lease agreements and claim they sought to “support environmental protection … and [provide] humanitarian aid” to the Indigenous communities.

The Guardian sent a list of questions to the Bolivian government and Kailasa’s “office of international relations” but has not received a response.

The Multi-ethnic Indigenous Territory II organisation, which includes the Ese Ejja people who signed the contract, issued a statement that said Kailasa had “manipulated” some of its representatives and taken “advantage of their vulnerability to extract a signature with the promise of easy money”.

The group added: “Our territory is not for sale, it is not for rent, and it is not subject to any kind of negotiation. Our land is the legacy of generations who have cared for and defended it with blood and resistance.”

Pretenders used to be very common in older days when monarchies were the norm. It’s good to see that these types have not been completely relegated to history.

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We end this weekend’s SCR with the tale of the rise and fall of the Hanseatic League:

In the first four years of the Great Interregnum Period (1250–73​​), when the Empire had no emperor, the number of toll stations on the Rhine doubled to 20. This is the origin of the term robber baron: local barons, operating out of riverside castles, would set up illicit toll stations and demand significant shares of merchant cargo in order to pass.

The journey on land wasn’t much easier. Toll booths were similarly common. Nominally, these were to pay the landowner for the maintenance of the roads and bridges but in reality they were usually left dilapidated. Merchants voyaging on land had to load their wares on the backs of mules and horses (which were about a third the speed of ships). The narrow widths of medieval roads meant these caravans stretched out in long lines, leaving animals and cargo physically exposed. These vulnerable, slow moving, value-dense caravans attracted bandits who roamed the isolated roads between towns. It was nearly guaranteed a caravan would face an attempted robbery – either illegally by bandits or (somewhat) legally in the form of a toll shakedown – over the course of a sufficiently long trip.

As a matter of safety, Northern European merchants learned to move together in armed groups. These traveling merchant bands were called hansas, a Lower German word meaning ‘company’ or ‘troop’. When a hansa formed for a trip, they elected an alderman (literally ‘elder man’) who would speak on behalf of the group to the various authorities – lords, princes, bishops, and other rulers – they might encounter along the way.

Once they completed the arduous journey, the merchants had to deal with the local governments of their destination cities, each of which had different and constantly changing laws. To protect the local merchants and craftsmen within their city walls from competition, princes might demand exorbitant taxes from foreign merchants or deny them access to the city altogether. Merchant bands had to negotiate collectively to secure the right to trade within each city in which they wished to conduct business. And if they made it into the city walls, they might not make it out: capricious lords might suddenly imprison foreign merchants (as happened to German merchants in England in 1468 and Novgorod in 1494), raid their offices, or seize their merchandise.

Local laws threatened foreign merchants more than they protected them. Most town courts, themselves newly formed, had minimal experience adjudicating long distance commercial disputes. When such disputes did arise, courts could take weeks or months to arbitrate them, and were heavily biased towards locals over foreign traders. Without sovereign states, merchants were left dealing with a fractured landscape of town courts, where each market had its own idiosyncratic laws. And because foreign traders could evade punishment by fleeing overseas, courts in England, France, Italy, and the Holy Roman Empire often collectively punished foreign merchant communities for the unpaid debts of their countrymen.

The lack of early medieval records makes it difficult to quantify just how much Northern European commerce grew as a result of continuous long distance trade. Before the late medieval period, Northern Europe’s archaeological record of trade shows just several dozen sites known as emporiums: small, temporary settlements outside of towns where foreign merchants traded with locals. But starting in the late medieval period (1300 to 1500), Lower German merchants began to change this.

Click here to read the rest.

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Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

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Liberation Day.

On April 2nd, the USA rolled out a new tariff scheme that was applied to friend and foe alike. The reception of these tariffs was met with almost-universal disbelief due to how extreme they were. The usual gang of anti-Trump politicians, thinkers, and scribblers were quick out of the gate to condemn this latest policy rollout. Others (such as myself) decided to take a wait-and-see approach just in case there were some hidden elements that would only come to light later on, certain facts that would make this big move make more sense.

It now looks like there was much less to this rollout than I thought, with the suspension/postponement of tariffs and mixed up/often contradictory public statement from the administration making this clear. The administration came very close to blowing up its own economy and just as close to seizing up a good deal of the world’s trade at the same time. I believe that this is a very obvious conclusion now, with the only possible counter being that this was tactical in pursuit of a longer-term strategy, something that I cannot at present accept as real.

Shock and awe. Shock and awe certainly worked during the First Gulf War, but shock and awe in economic terms can backfire when your domestic economy is exposed to fallout from it. This is precisely what happened, and it is the cleanup from this fallout that will buys this administration for the next few months as it engages in trade negotiations with foreign governments. The British use the term “own goal” for when a soccer player accidentally scores against his own team. This now has all the appearances of a Trump-led own goal.

At the same time, Trump is still to be commended for addressing and trying to act on the fact globalism is no longer working for America and Americans. The bet that the USA placed on China opening up its political system through integration into the global trade regime lost, and instead it was the Chinese who have benefited the most from the architecture erected by America. The USA is now in pursuit of cobbling together a new system of trade, one which can only be a retreat from globalism, as it seeks to use any new arrangement to tame the Chinese by restoring America’s manufacturing base. The vision is sound, but the execution seems to be sorely lacking.

Julius Krein has analyzed the past three weeks of tariff-mania, and in the opinion of this layman his conclusions are sound:

To be sure, the tariffs proceeded from sound motivations. The hollowing out of the U.S. industrial base over the last fifty years is now widely recognized as a major national security and macroeconomic problem, especially after the Covid pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine War exposed glaring vulnerabilities in America’s defense industrial base. There is—or at least there was—a broad, bipartisan coalition to address this crisis. Unfortunately, the policies the Trump administration decided to pursue seem confused, and the process by which these measures were determined and implemented has been confusing, to say the least.

I feel that the above excerpt reflects a shared consensus view and won’t find much opposition.

A radical approach:

On April 2, the Trump administration essentially embarked on a crash “decoupling” with multiple trading partners, particularly China, on which tariffs of up to 145 percent have been levied. Under any circumstances, this would be an extremely painful course of action. The costs of tariffs are felt immediately, while any benefits can take years to materialize—the time it takes to construct new production facilities and reconfigure supply chains. In the absence of alternative sources of supply, such massive tariffs will either raise the cost of goods considerably or, in some cases, make their provision entirely uneconomical, leading to shortages and disruptions.

Such economic pain itself makes this approach unlikely to succeed, as many businesses will conclude—correctly, in this case—that aggressive tariffs cannot be sustained politically. Companies will choose to wait out a temporary tariff storm rather than make investments in new supply chains that could take a decade to pay off.

The Trump administration nonetheless voluntarily chose this radical approach, and seems to have done so without any meaningful consultation with industry—including U.S. manufacturers that the measures were supposed to benefit—or political outreach. Minor changes to transportation safety regulations undergo more thorough preparation, vetting, and coalition building than did the largest tariff increase in a century.

Even the most hawkish tariff advocates outside the administration did not propose levying tariffs of this magnitude immediately, and to the extent that industry input was received, it was ignored. Notably absent from the liberation day press conference were any major business leaders as well as prominent Democratic or even Republican endorsements, signaling the policy’s fragility from the start. Indeed, the advice of Elon Musk was reportedly rebuffed, even though Musk, whatever his recent political and personal controversies, is the most successful American manufacturing entrepreneur in living memory.

Like I said above, “shock and awe”. Was this because the President doesn’t have much room elsewhere to try and reorient the economy?

Immediate fallout and walk-back:

Predictably, the reaction of the markets, as well as the general business community, was furious. Stock indices fell more than 10 percent in two days, and companies began scrapping forward earnings guidance and capital spending plans. Notably, Treasuries and the dollar also declined, signaling some level of foreign capital flight. As the turmoil deepened, administration officials waffled between insisting that the tariffs were permanent or merely bargaining chips in a new round of trade “deals.”

One week later, on April 9, the president “postponed” reciprocal tariffs for ninety days on most countries, though raising China tariffs further, admitting that increasing market volatility motivated the decision. On April 12, the administration waived tariffs for all countries on cell phones and various electronic products, promising to announce new sectoral tariffs later. The net result has been to place many U.S. manufacturers, facing higher component costs and working capital issues, at a distinct disadvantage, while the uncertainty generated by so many abrupt policy changes has had a chilling effect on new investment.

Next to profit, business craves nothing more than stability. The initial shock combined with revisions, walk-backs, exemptions, and so on is akin to an earthquake measuring 8.5 on the Richter Scale. How do companies plan for the future if they have no idea what costs will be like from one week to the next?

Building an anti-China coalition:

As of this writing, the administration has pivoted firmly to negotiating new trade deals, and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent has stated that his plan is to negotiate with allies first and then approach China “as a group.” This is a sensible strategy, but the last few weeks have severely damaged American credibility and raise doubts about the durability of any deal struck with the Trump administration. Moreover, the administration took a highly combative tone with allies in its first two months over issues ranging from the annexation of Greenland to mocking Canada as the 51st state to publicly inveighing against European speech and election laws.

This is true. Trump’s over-the-top baiting of Canada and Europe hasn’t done him or the USA any favours.

What have we learned?

At this point, it should be clear that a tariff-first strategy for reindustrialization is not going to succeed. Purely “protectionist” measures like tariffs work best when there is a domestic industry to protect. But many critical manufacturing sectors—such as cell phones, ships, consumer drones, processed critical minerals, various electronics components, and many others—are essentially nonexistent in the United States. In addition, certain critical manufacturing machinery and equipment are no longer produced here, so a reindustrializing America would, initially, have to increase imports of such equipment. Even when the domestic industry has not been entirely lost, trade protection without investment support has an uninspiring track record. American political discourse has been uniquely obsessed with tariffs as the first or only tool of industrial development, a fixation that is frequently counterproductive.

White House officials’ more recent statements suggest that they have finally internalized what their actions previously revealed: the liberation day tariffs were a costly mistake. The administration will now have to pull off a series of frantic negotiations just to extricate itself from an economic calamity, despite having already exposed points of weakness that forced a retreat from liberation day.

I am forced to agree with Julius that this entire episode has been “a costly mistake”.

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If you’re 45 and above, you will remember how much fear Japan stoked in the hearts of Wall Street in the 1980s when their economy was booming and their exports sector exploding. There were major concerns that the Japanese economy would leap ahead of the USA’s, and that it would result in Japan discarding its constitutional pacifism in order to spread its wings once more throughout the Pacific.

These concerns were no limited to the fringes, they were real. So real were they that respected geopolitical analysts like George Friedman (later of Stratfor) wrote books like these:

The argument was that an upstart like Japan would crash head first into US economic and security interests, sparking another war between the two. This conflict was inevitable because challengers will always seek the crown, and the king will always fight to maintain possession of it.

Suffice it to say that this war did not come to pass. The Japanese threat was vastly overstated, and its economy has been in stagnation-mode for decades now (even though living standards remain very high in relative terms). What may seem inevitable need not be.

The next several years will see marked increase in tension between the USA and China, as the former completes its long awaited “Pivot to East Asia”. So anxious are the Americans to pivot that they have been threatening to “walk away” from Ukraine if they cannot hammer down a peace deal in the very near future. This indicates just how serious a threat they view China’s ascent to be to its economic and security interests. If they are willing to sacrifice more in Ukraine than originally intended, the implication is that China’s rise is a grave concern, and that a clash between the two looks very likely….some would argue that it is inevitable, appealing to a relatively new IR concept called the “Thucydides Trap”.

Andrew Latham explains the concept to us, arguing that Thucydides is misunderstood, making conflict between rising powers and hegemons not necessarily inevitable:

The so-called Thucydides Trap has become a staple of foreign policy commentary over the past decade or so, regularly invoked to frame the escalating rivalry between the United States and China.

Coined by political scientist Graham Allison — first in a 2012 Financial Times article and later developed in his 2017 book “Destined for War” — the phrase refers to a line from the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, who wrote in his “History of the Peloponnesian War,” “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.”

Distortion:

At first glance, this provides a compelling and conveniently packaged analogy: Rising powers provoke anxiety in established ones, leading to conflict. In today’s context, the implication seems clear – China’s rise is bound to provoke a collision with the United States, just as Athens once did with Sparta.

But this framing risks flattening the complexity of Thucydides’ work and distorting its deeper philosophical message. Thucydides wasn’t articulating a deterministic law of geopolitics. He was writing a tragedy.

This essay might be an exercise in historical sperging, but I think it has value:

Thucydides fought in the Peloponnesian War on the Athenian side. His world was steeped in the sensibilities of Greek tragedy, and his historical narrative carries that imprint throughout. His work is not a treatise on structural inevitability but an exploration of how human frailty, political misjudgment and moral decay can combine to unleash catastrophe.

That tragic sensibility matters. Where modern analysts often search for predictive patterns and system-level explanations, Thucydides drew attention to the role of choice, perception and emotion.

His history is filled with the corrosive effects of fear, the seductions of ambition, the failures of leadership and the tragic unraveling of judgment. This is a study in hubris and nemesis, not structural determinism.

Much of this is lost when the phrase “Thucydides Trap” is elevated into a kind of quasi-law of international politics. It becomes shorthand for inevitability: power rises, fear responds, war follows.

Therefore, more of a psychological study of characters rather than structural determinism.

Giving credit to Allison:

Even Allison, to his credit, never claimed the “trap” was inescapable. His core argument was that war is likely but not inevitable when a rising power challenges a dominant one. In fact, much of Allison’s writing serves as a warning to break from the pattern, not to resign oneself to it.

Misuse:

In that sense, the “Thucydides Trap” has been misused by commentators and policymakers alike. Some treat it as confirmation that war is baked into the structure of power transitions — an excuse to raise defense budgets or to talk tough with Beijing — when in fact, it ought to provoke reflection and restraint.

To read Thucydides carefully is to see that the Peloponnesian War was not solely about a shifting balance of power. It was also about pride, misjudgment and the failure to lead wisely.

Consider his famous observation, “Ignorance is bold and knowledge reserved.” This isn’t a structural insight — it’s a human one. It’s aimed squarely at those who mistake impulse for strategy and swagger for strength.

Or take his chilling formulation, “The strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.” That’s not an endorsement of realpolitik. It’s a tragic lament on what happens when power becomes unaccountable and justice is cast aside.

and

In today’s context, invoking the Thucydides Trap as a justification for confrontation with China may do more harm than good. It reinforces the notion that conflict is already on the rails and cannot be stopped.

But if there is a lesson in “The History of the Peloponnesian War,” it is not that war is inevitable but that it becomes likely when the space for prudence and reflection collapses under the weight of fear and pride.

Thucydides offers not a theory of international politics but a warning — an admonition to leaders who, gripped by their own narratives, drive their nations over a cliff.

Latham does have a point, but events have a momentum all their own, and they are often hard to stop. Inevitabilities do exist, such as Israel and Hezbollah entering into conflict with one another in 2022 after their 2006 war saw the latter come out with a tactical victory. Barring a black swan event, the USA and China are headed for a collision. The question is: in what form?

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One hugely important story that I have not covered enough on this Substack is the collapse of French influence in West and Northwest Africa. The story of Algeria is well-known, but that took place more than half a century ago. In the past decade, French military forces have been evicted from several countries, creating a vacuum that is being filled by other powers. Russia has been very active in the region, as has Turkey, the UAE, and China (albeit only economically).

During the Great War on Terror (GWOT), this region saw more coverage due to the presence of al-Qaida franchises in places like Mali, Niger, and Mauritania. As that conflict tapered off, so too did interest in this part of Africa. This hiatus in western media interest lasted until the French found themselves becoming persona non grata in several countries that were once its colonies. France is on the retreat in West and Northwest Africa. It does have a backup plan though; working with Morocco to become its successor by way of establishing it as the regional hegemon. Such an outcome would permit the French to retain some presence in its former colonial holdings, and not be completely shut out, a condition that cannot be discounted at present.

I came across this long entry on Morocco’s push for power in Northwestern Africa, and I learned quite a bit from it. I cannot judge how accurate the portrayal is, but it definitely is worth a read for those of you interested as to what is going on in that part of Africa.

Vizier

Morocco Builds an Empire in West Africa

Paving The Road to Africa…

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a year ago · 34 likes · 1 comment · Vizier

Until recently, Morocco was geographically isolated in northwest Africa, sharing land borders only with Algeria to the east and the vast, mostly ungoverned Sahara to the south. Persistent tensions with Algeria have led to repeated border closures, leaving Morocco with just one overland connection to the rest of Africa: south through the disputed Western Sahara region via Mauritania. Morocco considers Western Sahara an integral part of its territory and has administered most of the region since Spain’s withdrawal from its former colony in 1975.

The Polisario Front, an insurgent group claiming to represent the Sahrawi people native to Western Sahara, have long sought independence, and since 1975, Polisario has waged an intermittent war against Morocco, allegedly with varying degrees of military, financial, and diplomatic support from Algeria, Libya, Cuba, and Iran. International monitors estimate that this multi-decade war has resulted in 10,000-to-20,000 casualties among combatants and civilians.

As part of its counterinsurgency efforts, Morocco has constructed the Berm, a 2,700-kilometre-long "sand wall" manned by 100,000 soldiers stationed in a series of military outposts. This defensive line stretches from the Algerian border to the Atlantic, effectively serving as Morocco’s de facto southern boundary. The Berm creates a slight separation between Mauritania and Western Sahara (and thus Morocco), leaving a stretch of largely uninhabited territory known as No Man’s Land. Due to extensive minefields and the absence of permanent settlements, this area has historically prevented direct border access between Morocco and Mauritania.

That’s a very long wall!

Change:

This is changing. The Guerguerat border post, once a remote checkpoint between Mauritania and Morocco separated by No Man’s Land, is now being transformed into a fully operational international crossing with the necessary infrastructure. It has become a crucial node in Morocco’s trade network with sub-Saharan Africa, facilitating over $1 billion in annual exports, roughly 2% of Morocco’s total exports, primarily agricultural and industrial goods.

The Guerguerat and Smara-Bir Moghrein crossings represent more than logistical improvements. By establishing direct corridors with Mauritania and its resource-rich interior, abundant in iron, copper, and oil, to Moroccan Atlantic ports like Laayoune, this infrastructure will further integrate Mauritania into Morocco’s export-driven economy and enable access to the rest of Africa to participate in this expanding economic zone. Given Morocco’s industrial ambitions, which demand substantial natural resources, this development marks a new phase in Rabat’s long-term geopolitical strategy to position itself as Africa’s primary economic gateway to the Atlantic, Europe, and beyond.

In doing so, Morocco hopes to establish itself as a regional hegemon that can outmanoeuvre its historical rival, Algeria, and replace waning French influence in West Africa. But Morocco faces stiff competition. As France’s influence wanes amid diplomatic setbacks, and Russia’s engagements in Mali and elsewhere face growing scrutiny over war crimes and other abuses, a power vacuum has emerged across West Africa.

New actors, including Turkiye, Iran, China, and the Gulf Arab States, are vying to fill the void. Even so, Morocco stands out as the most geographically proximate, politically stable, and economically coherent contender, with a thousand-year history of cultural and imperial dominance covering much of the region. Unlike external powers, Morocco is playing a long game, one it has been preparing for over two decades under King Mohammed VI (MVI), who ascended the Moroccan throne in 1999.

Morocco sees Algeria as its main challenger, but not its only one.

France outsourcing its role to Morocco:

Morocco’s economic and diplomatic expansion into West Africa is not rivalrous towards France, but instead part of a process of France “outsourcing” the management of its Françafrique sphere of influence to Morocco. France’s attempt to maintain the post-colonial status quo in the region has resulted in diminishing returns over time, and Morocco has positioned itself to take advantage of the moment when France could no longer maintain that status quo and sought new partners to take over this process.

Since ascending to the throne in 1999, MVI has systematically cultivated Morocco’s ties with West African nations through a combination of high-level diplomacy and strategic economic investments that would eventually position Morocco to replace French influence in West Africa. His frequent visits to Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Côte d’Ivoire have yielded numerous cooperation agreements spanning trade, security, and infrastructure development. These partnerships form the backbone of Morocco’s ambitious vision to position itself as the primary economic and logistical conduit between Africa and Europe.

At the heart of this strategy lies the Al Mada investment fund, the royal family’s financial arm that functions as Morocco’s de facto sovereign wealth fund. Through Al Mada, Moroccan businesses have aggressively expanded into West African markets, particularly in banking, insurance, telecommunications, and construction, seeking to replace French influence across the region.

Competition (long excerpt, apologies):

France’s historical influence in West Africa dramatically declined, with a broad military retreat occurring across the region as military juntas take over Sahel nations one by one. This has opened up opportunities for Morocco, once colonised by France along with the rest of Africa, to fill the void. However, Morocco is not the sole actor vying for influence in West Africa. Regional neighbours such as Algeria and international powers, including Russia, Turkiye, China, and the UAE, have similarly intensified their presence, each advancing distinct strategic agendas.

Guided by a decades-old Soviet-era ‘Africa policy’ and President Vladimir Putin’s ambition, Russia has capitalised on rising anti-Western (particularly anti-French) sentiment in West Africa to become the foremost military power in the region. Through support for military juntas, including those of Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Chad (as well as seeking to expand their footprint in eastern Libya and Sudan), and fourth-generation warfare tactics such as disinformation campaigns and propaganda, Russia has significantly eroded French influence. However, Russia too has seen its soft power in the region take significant blows, not least because of the actions of paramilitary organisations like the Wagner Group, which has operated in Mali as an extension of the Kremlin. Under the pretext of security contracts, the group has also engaged in the illegal extraction of gold reserves and stands accused of numerous human rights violations and massacres against civilians.

Algeria, historically aligned with Russia and something of an archnemesis to Morocco, has conducted joint military exercises with the Russians near Morocco’s border. However, since the Ukraine conflict began, Algeria has cautiously distanced itself from Moscow, citing Russia’s diminished arms export capacity and its reluctance to commit to overt military alliances. Nonetheless, both nations continued to support Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria until its collapse in December 2024. Algeria also defied the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) by acquiring Russian-made Su-57 fighter jets, prompting US Senator Marco Rubio to propose sanctions in 2022.

Algeria, for its part, has long relied on proxy warfare to extend its influence, backing separatist movements such as the Polisario Front in Morocco and the Azawad Front in Mali. Leaked diplomatic cables suggest that after the 2012 Tamanrasset terrorist attack, Algerian authorities struck tacit agreements with AQIM, redirecting threats towards Moroccan and French interests in exchange for sparing Algerian assets. This alleged cooperation has reportedly led to the deaths of at least three Moroccan nationals in Mali over the past decade.

Iran’s role in West Africa, though understated, is multifaceted and expanding. Since the 1990s, Tehran has promoted Shia proselytisation in a region historically dominated by Sufi Islam. Nigeria now hosts a larger Shia population than Lebanon, with groups like the Islamic Movement, modelled on Iran’s revolutionary system, advocating for a Shia Islamic republic. Iran and Hezbollah have also allegedly supported the Polisario Front since 2018, supplying training and short-range missiles to fighters in Tindouf. Reports even suggest Polisario troops participated in Syria’s civil war alongside Iranian-backed militias.

China’s involvement, by contrast, is primarily economic. Through its Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing focuses on securing raw materials and funding infrastructure, such as Mauritania’s Nouakchott deep-water port and Guinea’s Djibloho Dam, while establishing logistics networks for mineral extraction.

Turkiye has also grown assertive, selling drones to Mali, including the model downed by Algeria, and backing Libya’s Tripoli-based government. Ankara’s plans to open military bases in southern Libya, near Algeria’s border, signal a deepening engagement across Africa.

The UAE has likewise emerged as a pivotal player, cultivating ties with the Sahel military juntas, facilitating Mali’s gold exports, and processing Guinea’s bauxite into aluminium in Emirati facilities. It maintains naval access agreements with Mauritania and robust investment links with Morocco, though relations with Algeria remain strained due to competing regional ambitions.

A scramble for Northwestern Africa?

More challenges:

However, Morocco faces numerous challenges in doing so. Terrorism is on the rise across the Sahel as the French military retreat, Russian paramilitary war crimes, and weak state capacity have allowed groups like Al-Qaeda to occupy territory. Powers further afield like Russia, China, Turkiye, the UAE, and Iran are also seeking to take advantage of the state of chaos across Africa.

Perhaps most importantly, ordinary citizens in Morocco are not reaping the rewards as the country suffers from high and persistent unemployment and low wages. The Makzhen, Morocco’s political and economic elite, and particularly the royal family through the Al Mada fund, reap the lion’s share of rewards through the acquisition of French assets and new business links across Africa. As King MVI looks across West Africa and sees an opportunity to restore Morocco’s historical position of primacy in the region, he may yet be forced to contend with issues closer to home, like fixing Morocco’s political economy.

It’s interesting to note that despite the French retreat from the region and the increasing Russian and Chinese presence there, the USA has not made too much noise in response.

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El Salvador is in the news these days, and it’s all thanks to that incredible one-man news generator, Donald Trump. We’ll discuss the issue of deporting people to El Salvador in the future, but for now I want to share this travelogue from an actual Salvadoran who was born and resides in Southern California. She has spent quite a bit of time there in the past and recent past, and finds that there is a bit of a disconnect between what foreigners imagine the place to be since Bukele arrived on the scene and what it is actually like.

This is written in a loose style, adding a very personal touch:

Undocumented Sentiments

El Salvador

The flight arrived fifteen minutes early. This is something I’m normally happy about, but not when check-in is at 3 pm. I had messaged the host to ask if I could come in earlier, but unfortunately, there was a guest the night before, and the room wouldn’t be ready until 3 pm. I’m the kind of tired where my stomach hurts and I feel nauseous. The sun peer…

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a year ago · 15 likes · Martina Martinez

We had an Uber driver who was from Austin, TX. I couldn’t remember if he was Salvadoran-born or not. I didn’t want to press but tried to decipher from his story-telling if he had been deported, or just wanted to live in El Salvador. “Self-deported,” something I joke about on X but at the same time I am somewhat serious about it, especially more so as we drove along the breathtaking coastline of La Libertad.

I told him that I had some family in Soyapango and his eyes widened. “There used to be tons of gang members there,” he said.

He mentioned that a few years back, the police used to harass him about his tattoos. Now, not anymore.

We made it to El Zonte, which was now rebranded as Bitcoin Beach. We were told to meet the rest of the group at the Bitcoin Farmer’s Market. It looked like it was ending, but I guess I thought that because there weren’t too many people around. The farmer’s market had the strangest version of hippies that I’d never seen before. They reminded me of the type of hippie that’s like an aspiring Buddhist yogi who ventures off to Thailand to find themselves. But this kind of hippie is weirder. The God is Bitcoin. Manifesting Bitcoin. The Vibes of Bitcoin. At the farmer’s market, you only pay in Bitcoin. There was a coffee bar. A couple of Salvadoran ladies selling honey. An Eritrean/Ethiopian food stand. Baked goods with no seed oils. Crystals and jewelry. It was very hot and I was very thirsty, but no one seemed to be selling water, and that was all I wanted. Behind me, I noticed a small creature in a box. It was a sweet little tuxedo kitten.

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Leave it to the Japanese to be charmingly weird.

We end this Easter Monday’s SCR with a story about how one Japanese town is experiencing a craze in ‘Middle-Aged Man Trading Cards’:

In the small town of Kawara in Fukuoka Prefecture, something unexpected is happening at the Saidosho Community Center. While kids in most parts of Japan are obsessed with Pokémon cards — or perhaps the franchise’s latest smartphone game, Pokémon TCG Pocket — the children of Kawara are clutching to something a little closer to home.

They are playing a trading card game (TCG) where the stars aren’t fantasy creatures, anime heroes or even famous baseball players, but ojisan (middle-aged or older men) from the local community of Saidosho.

Click here to read the rest.

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Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

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It’s quite funny that the biggest topic of discussion right now is the tariff system that the USA introduced earlier this week. Tariffs. That is about as boring a subject as it gets. This is a far cry from war, or phony “Russia controls Trump” conspiracies theories. I think it makes a strong case that US politics has “re-normalized” after several years of media-driven hysteria. Tariffs, trade imbalances, deficits….this is incredibly vanilla stuff that would lead most people to turn off the TV news.

I can speak to the politics of trade, but I must confess that I am pretty much useless when it comes to the technical aspects of it, especially the fine details. It’s all very dry stuff, and I was never going to be an accountant or economist. This is why I am agnostic on these tariffs, and am just kicking back and enjoying the show. I don’t have any real insight to offer on the specifics.

What I can say is this: these tariffs are an official recognition that economic globalism no longer works for the USA. The Americans introduced this system in the 1990s, and at first it worked for them (but not for large swathes of Americans, of course). They bet that free trade would open up China and permit them an entry point in which to topple the CCP. That did not happen, and the Americans had to re-calibrate, something that should make perfect sense to everyone. This re-calibration has led to the introduction of these tariffs, heralding a possible new era in US imperial history, one in which they are now more extractive, no matter if a country is an ally, an enemy, or a neutral party. I am not the only one to have reached this conclusion:

America will do what it thinks is best for itself, and that is perfectly fine and reasonable. But because this is Trump doing this, everyone is losing their minds. “Tariffs are a tax” is one of the most common refrains in response to the jettisoning of decades of economic and political orthodoxy. Free Trade is supposed to be a permanent feature of the USA, or at least the conservative/right wing of US politics, many argue.

“Only Nixon could go to China”, so I guess only Trump could end the Neo-Liberal consensus on trade. brought up an excellent point when he wondered out loud how the anti-globalism protesters in Seattle in the late 1990s would react to learning that it would be a sitting GOP President who would end it. Times change, and times are weird.

Will this tariff scheme result in a re-industrialization of the USA? I have no idea. Will it lead to more balanced trade? Beats me. I am going to rely on what others have to say, and we’ll start with this essay from Oren Cass that was published in February of this year:

Understanding America

The One Word that Explains Globalization's Failure, and Trump's Response

Donald Trump is at his best when he seizes on a common-sense position that happens also to be correct, confounding elite technocrats attempting to impose on the nation a view that both seems absurd and is in fact wrong. His insistence on framing his administration’s forthcoming actions on trade in terms of “reciprocity” is a perfect example. The United …

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a year ago · 81 likes · 35 comments · Oren Cass

Oren Cass is a proponent of tariffs and of America’s re-industrialization, so let’s see what he has to say:

“Isn’t that how it already works?” No, no it is not. Reciprocity is supposed to form the basis of the international trading system, but other countries have flouted that expectation and the U.S. has repeatedly turned a blind eye. To keep the party going, economists constructed a narrative in which reciprocity was unnecessary. Let other countries behave however they want, the story went, the U.S. would benefit from opening its market to all comers.

Okay, this makes sense.

The premise underlying this confidence was that manufacturing does not matter and indeed a nation benefits most from producing as little as possible domestically and importing as much as possible from abroad. As Milton Friedman had put it back in the 1970s, “The gain from foreign trade is what we import. What we export is the cost of getting those imports. The proper objective for a nation, as Adam Smith put it, is to arrange things so we get as large a volume of imports as possible for as small a volume of exports as possible.”

By this logic, anything that slows the flow of imports, or raises their cost, would indeed be a self-inflicted wound. If the Chinese Communist Party wants to block the sale of U.S. electric vehicles in China, let it. We should still want as many cheap Chinese EVs as possible flooding into our market. In a Wall Street Journal column denouncing Trump’s strategy two weeks ago, economic historian Douglas Irwin deployed the metaphor of blocking up a harbor. “The British economist Joan Robinson once said that a country shouldn’t throw rocks into its own harbors just because other countries have rocky coasts,” he wrote. “The same principle applies here: The U.S. shouldn’t have stupid tariff policies just because other countries have stupid tariff policies.”

But the American experience of recent years has proved this mindset to be extraordinarily naïve. That’s not my word, it’s Krugman’s, from our conversation last week on the “On with Kara Swisher” podcast:

OC: The initial argument was that trade deficits are self-correcting.

PK: I don't think I ever said that. I think I said the trade deficits are not a problem.

OC: No. You wrote a piece for the American Economic Review in 1993, in fact titled, “What Do Undergrads Need to Know About Trade?” in which you said we need to teach them “that trade deficits are self-correcting.”

PK: Okay, if I did say that, that was naïve…

“Gotcha!”

A collapsing orthodoxy:

What’s remarkable about the collapsing orthodoxy is that we are not learning something new so much as rediscovering what wiser economists knew all along. Even Friedman’s claim that “the proper objective for a nation, as Adam Smith put it, is to arrange things so we get as large a volume of imports as possible for as small a volume of exports as possible,” runs directly counter to what Smith actually wrote, which was: “If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of them with some part of the produce of our own industry.”

With some part of the produce of our own country. A vital assumption of the classical model was that trade would be balanced—something made here for something made there. David Ricardo, explaining the principle of comparative advantage with the example of Portuguese wine and British cloth, described what England was doing as “purchase[ing wine] by the exportation of cloth.” John Stuart Mill stated especially bluntly that “since all trade is in reality barter, money being a mere instrument for exchanging things against one another, we will, for simplicity, begin by supposing the international trade to be in form, what it always is in reality, an actual trucking of one commodity against another.” The purpose of trade was not to decimate your own industrial base (obviously), it was to trade.

The last line should be self-evident, but it is obvious that it has been ignored for some time now.

Which brings us back to the present debate. Trump has repeatedly made clear that his frustration is with the imbalance in trade—the U.S. has an annual $1 trillion trade deficit, reflecting $1 trillion worth of goods made abroad for our consumption, which we acquire not with “some part of the produce of our own industry” but rather by sending back assets—ownership of our real estate and corporations, treasury debt that represents simply an I.O.U. to pay some day, and so on. Thus we simultaneously erode our domestic industrial capacity in the near-term and send abroad the claims on our long-term prosperity. As Warren Buffett observed, “Our country has been behaving like an extraordinarily rich family that possesses an immense farm…We have, day by day, been both selling pieces of the farm and increasing the mortgage on what we still own.”

The very first paragraph of Trump’s memorandum for an “America First Trade Policy,” issued on Inauguration Day, emphasized “a path toward eliminating destructive trade deficits.” The first directive to his administration was titled “Addressing Unfair and Unbalanced Trade” and instructed it to “investigate the causes of our country’s large and persistent annual trade deficits in goods.” The White House fact sheet announcing the “Fair and Reciprocal Plan” on trade emphasized twice that “lack of reciprocity is unfair and contributes to our large and persistent annual trade deficit.”

Cass proposed a global tariff model, one that is macro and not tailored to a country-by-country basis:

The reciprocal model has real benefits of its own. In the global-tariff model, no individual country has much incentive to change its own policies toward the U.S. because no reduction in a particular bilateral deficit would significantly alter the overall trade balance. The global tariff operates only at the macro level, attempting to reshape the relative attractiveness of domestic versus foreign production and acquiring U.S. goods versus assets. Reciprocal tariffs would have the macro effect, but they would also pit countries against each other in attracting U.S. business. For instance, let’s say the U.S. continues to push supply chains out of China, where will they go? Most likely to countries facing lower reciprocal tariffs. How does a country get a lower reciprocal tariff? By reducing its trade deficit with the U.S., which will require opening access to U.S. producers and encouraging the purchase of U.S. products. That would be nice.

The following excerpt is the most interesting one to me, and I assume it will be to you too:

Finally, while both global and reciprocal tariffs could help to move toward a trading-bloc system in which the U.S. and its allies maintain high levels of free and balanced trade while collectively excluding non-market and heavily distorted economies, reciprocal tariffs might get there more smoothly. Countries that do adopt fair policies and achieve balanced trade with the U.S. would naturally transition into such a bloc as tariffs among them drop toward zero, while those that do not would find themselves outside it. Ambassador Robert Lighthizer outlined this scenario in a recent New York Times essay. The final step would be for the U.S. to insist that its partners likewise impose high tariffs outside the bloc. And lo and behold, over the weekend, “Trump Team Pushes Mexico Toward Tariffs on Chinese Imports.” (On a podcast last week, C.J. Mahoney, Deputy U.S. Trade Representative in the first Trump administration, described how an updated USMCA could provide for “common external tariffs that are consistent across North America.”)

“The final step would be for the U.S. to insist that its partners likewise impose high tariffs outside the bloc.”

China is the target and this is about the Pivot to East Asia.

Will it work? Mainstream economics are adamant that this is a horrible idea, but I turn to Bismarck who said of Americans:

“There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children, and the United States of America.”

The usual laws don’t apply to America, so they just might pull this off. It could happen. It might not.

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In 1992, Democrat Party strategist James Carville told election campaign workers working on behalf of Bill Clinton’s bid to become President of the United States to focus on the message “It’s the economy, stupid”. This one line has resonated ever since, illustrating the importance of simple messaging when on the campaign trail. It’s instructive in that it forced campaign workers to not get lost in the weeds i.e. arcane policy debates, and instead zone in on bread and butter issues (recall that a recession had hit the USA at the time).

Elitism will often generate an effect akin to having one’s head in the sand, and this can fairly describe much of Europe’s and North America’s politics of the past two decades or so (or even longer). Nowhere else is this more obvious than when it comes to immigration, the issue that most drives the populist backlash that has coloured our political world for over a decade and a half. Populism on both sides of the ocean has many fathers, but none are as fecund as the immigration issue. Yet many mainstream parties insist on not addressing valid concerns regarding it, choosing instead to wave them away as “racist” or “xenophobic”, or patronizingly moralize in its favour….and then they wonder why populism continues to gain support.

US Democrats are still in post-loss autopsy mode, and some are now beginning to bring up the issue of immigration and its harmful effects on their future electoral prospects. To them, immigration restriction has been verboten, the realm of racist rednecks. After all, only racists would oppose mass migration, right?

Wrong. Liberal Denmark proves a counter to this assumption, which is why the New York Times flew a trial balloon a few weeks ago in the form of a long story on how Danish liberals restricted migration and have managed to retain political power:

Generous support for Ukraine is only one way in which Denmark has become an outlier. Since President Trump won re-election in November, Frederiksen has become a global symbol of opposition to him, thanks to her rebuffing his call for Denmark to turn over control of Greenland. But the main significance of Frederiksen and her party, the Social Democrats, has little to do with aid to Ukraine or a territorial argument in the North Atlantic. Over the past six years, they have been winning elections and notching policy victories that would be the envy of liberals worldwide, and doing so at a moment when the rest of the West is lurching to the right.

The framing up above is as follows: “She is a good person. After all, she opposes Trump. This means that good people can be immigration restrictionists too.”

Over the past several years, there is arguably not a single high-income country where a center-left party has managed to enact progressive policies and win re-election — with the exception of Denmark.

Since the Social Democrats took power in 2019, they have compiled a record that resembles the wish list of a liberal American think tank. They changed pension rules to enable blue-collar workers to retire earlier than professionals. On housing, the party fought speculation by the private-equity industry by enacting the so-called Blackstone law, a reference to the giant New York-based firm that had bought beloved Copenhagen apartment buildings; the law restricts landlords from raising rents for five years after buying a property. To fight climate change, Frederiksen’s government created the world’s first carbon tax on livestock and passed a law that requires 15 percent of farmland to become natural habitat. On reproductive rights, Denmark last year expanded access to abortion through the first 18 weeks of pregnancy, up from 12 weeks, and allowed girls starting at age 15 to get an abortion without parental consent.

All the while, the country continues to provide its famous welfare state, which includes free education through college (including a monthly stipend of about $900 for living expenses), free medical care and substantial unemployment insurance, while nonetheless being home to globally competitive companies like Novo Nordisk, the maker of the anti-obesity drug Ozempic. In 2022, Frederiksen won a second term, defying the anti-incumbent mood that has ousted incumbent parties elsewhere since the Covid pandemic. As part of her success, she has marginalized the far right in her country.

Here’s a tip: if you want to marginalize the far right in your country, co-opt their immigration platform. It’s just that easy.

Denmark as progressive maverick:

But there is one issue on which Frederiksen and her party take a very different approach from most of the global left: immigration. Nearly a decade ago, after a surge in migration caused by wars in Libya and Syria, she and her allies changed the Social Democrats’ position to be much more restrictive. They called for lower levels of immigration, more aggressive efforts to integrate immigrants and the rapid deportation of people who enter illegally. While in power, the party has enacted these policies. Denmark continues to admit immigrants, and its population grows more diverse every year. But the changes are happening more slowly than elsewhere. Today 12.6 percent of the population is foreign-born, up from 10.5 percent when Frederiksen took office. In Germany, just to Denmark’s south, the share is almost 20 percent. In Sweden, it is even higher.

These policies made Denmark an object of scorn among many progressives elsewhere. Critics described the Social Democrats as monstrous, racist and reactionary, arguing that they had effectively become a right-wing party on this issue. To Frederiksen and her aides, however, a tough immigration policy is not a violation of progressivism; to the contrary, they see the two as intertwined. As I sat in her bright, modern office, which looks out on centuries-old Copenhagen buildings, she described the issue as the main reason that her party returned to power and has remained in office even as the left has flailed elsewhere.

The Danish progressive argument for immigration restriction:

Leftist politics depend on collective solutions in which voters feel part of a shared community or nation, she explained. Otherwise, they will not accept the high taxes that pay for a strong welfare state. “Being a traditional Social Democratic thinker means you cannot allow everyone who wants to join your society to come,” Frederiksen says. Otherwise, “it’s impossible to have a sustainable society, especially if you are a welfare society, as we are.” High levels of immigration can undermine this cohesion, she says, while imposing burdens on the working class that more affluent voters largely escape, such as strained benefit programs, crowded schools and increased competition for housing and blue-collar jobs. Working-class families know this from experience. Affluent leftists pretend otherwise and then lecture less privileged voters about their supposed intolerance.

“There is a price to pay when too many people enter your society,” Frederiksen told me. “Those who pay the highest price of this, it’s the working class or lower class in the society. It is not — let me be totally direct — it’s not the rich people. It is not those of us with good salaries, good jobs.” She kept coming back to the idea that the Social Democrats did not change their position for tactical reasons; they did so on principle. They believe that high immigration helps cause economic inequality and that progressives should care above all about improving life for the most vulnerable members of their own society. The party’s position on migration “is not an outlier,” she told me. “It is something we do because we actually believe in it.”

Can this be applied elsewhere? Not every country is Denmark, of course,

The Brahmin Left:

In earlier eras, some of the biggest concerns about high levels of immigration came from the political left. Progressives worried that it would hurt the most vulnerable members of the society where they were arriving. As A. Philip Randolph, the American labor and civil rights leader, argued a century ago, “The excessive immigration is against the interests of the masses of all races and nationalities in the country.” By the late 1960s, however, the political left was starting to change. Students and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic were becoming more influential, energized by the movements against nuclear arms, pollution and racial and gender discrimination.

The French economist Thomas Piketty has coined the term “Brahmin left” to describe this new version of progressivism. (Brahmins are the highest caste in India, and Protestant elites in Boston came to be known as Brahmins.) In Piketty’s telling, the term captures the shift of the political left away from its working-class roots toward a more affluent, academic version of progressivism that focuses on social issues and cultural identity rather than economic class. This shift helps explain why the Democratic Party and center-left parties in Europe once won voters without college degrees by wide margins and now lose this same group.

Immigration is a natural issue for the Brahmin left. The old left worried that a labor pool swollen by immigration would undermine unions and lower wages. The new progressives focused instead on the large benefits for the new arrivals. Immigration was a way to help the world’s poor, many of whom were not white. The advocates for the 1965 law in the United States considered it an extension of the civil rights movement. In Europe, the issue was a way to make amends for colonialism. In both places, it was also a response to the failure to protect Jews during the Holocaust.

The Brahmin left paired its arguments for racial justice with economic and cultural arguments. Immigrants start new businesses and provide labor that makes other businesses possible. In doing so, they expand a country’s gross domestic product. They invigorate the countries where they arrive, diversifying food, music, sports, art and other forms of culture.

What happens when the bill finally arrives?

By the 1990s and early 2000s, rising immigration became a signature feature of post-Cold War globalization, celebrated by nearly every politician and intellectual who seemed to matter, including Tony Blair, George W. Bush, Bill Gates, Milton Friedman and liberal academics who agreed with Friedman on little else. In 2015, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany famously exhorted her country’s citizens to welcome waves of refugees from the Middle East. “Wir schaffen das,” Merkel said: “We can do this.” Think tanks and journalists trumpeted the advantages of immigration. Academic economists shed their usual skepticism about free-lunch arguments and claimed that immigration benefited everyone.

But most voters in the receiving countries were never as enthusiastic. As liberals recognize in other circumstances, a policy that lifts G.D.P. doesn’t necessarily benefit everyone. Rapid immigration can strain schools, social services, welfare programs and the housing market, especially in the working-class communities where immigrants usually settle (as happened in Chicago, Denver, El Paso, New York and elsewhere over the past four years). Many studies find a modestly negative effect on wages for people who already live in a country, falling mostly on low-income workers. A 2017 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, intended as a comprehensive analysis of the economic effects of immigration, contains a table listing rigorous academic studies that estimate immigration’s effects on native wages; 18 of the 22 results are negative. The Brahmin left sometimes waves away these effects as too small to matter. The workers who experience them feel differently. Corporate executives feel differently, too, which explains why they often push for higher immigration to restrain wage growth.

This is a very, very informative read and I encourage you to read it in its entirety.

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We’ve covered South Africa in previous SCRs, so I apologize to those of you who are a bit done with the subject. To me, it’s a fascinating drama; a highly-developed country slowly de-developing by design due to its political system and to human greed.

When the distant-from-Africa Normie thinks of South Africa, he/she will automatically think of Nelson Mandela and the campaign to free him from prison. A story with a happy ending for all except maybe the supporters of Apartheid. The truth is very different, of course, and Lawrence Thomas has chosen to explain to us why that is:

South Africa is what happens when a country becomes ungovernable. From endemic sexual crime to farm murders, rolling blackouts, and expropriation, the rest is just the details. What has come to be termed “South Africanization” is not the failed development of a Third-World nation such as Afghanistan or Somalia, but the structural de-development of a once fully modern state that had its own nuclear weapons program. President Trump’s support of Afrikaner farmers has brought global attention to the decaying state of the country and is perhaps the most high-level recognition yet that the 1990s “Rainbow Nation” dream is dead. What’s strange about it all is how much of it happened on purpose.

What may be worse is that the very system of law and government itself has become an instrument to be captured and used to further the mass looting of the country. South Africans of all races inherit a Western political culture and economy. The average South African experiences a strong civic identity, highly active political parties, popular national media networks, a market economy, and a parliamentary constitutional order. The last thirty years saw a coalition of political actors, patronage networks, and organized criminal gangs seize control of and use all the infrastructure of modern government for their own ends.

State-driven radicalization:

The combination of social progressivism with an economic model of managed decline has become orthodoxy in many establishment parties across the developed world. South Africa is a study of the political phenomenon in its advanced stage and a demonstration of what is at stake in defeating it in the rest of the Western world. Flip Buys, leader of the Afrikaner trade union Solidariteit, was likely prophetic when he foresaw that South Africa would become home to the “first large grouping of Westerners living in a post-Western country.”dens a widespread movement that sees land redistribution as the sole resolution to the country’s racial conflict and views the presence of any white population as fundamentally illegitimate. The radicalization of race politics is the means through which political fights are won, since it plays on the country’s major divides and wins over those who feel left out of the spoils.

On the ground, reports tell of ANC officials tacitly allowing invasions of private and public land by squatters. Occupations of this sort have sometimes preceded the farm murders which have gained media attention internationally, and squatters have now begun to invoke the Expropriation Act. Such groups become the shock troops of political pressure: they can harass and pressure the occupants of the lands they occupy, or worse, while becoming a media story about the “landless oppressed” used to justify broader government action. The broad facilitation of ground-level conflict and crime by those with political power is the defining feature of South Africanization.

Persistent decay:

In other words, decay is a burden without benefit. There is no “rock bottom.” Business, political organization, social fabric, and all other forms of Western cultural life just face increasing costs. Some are direct, while others are opportunity costs: how much doesn’t happen because almost no one can guarantee electricity? In a relatively developed country, there’s still much more to break down and expropriate.

The combination of social progressivism with an economic model of managed decline has become orthodoxy in many establishment parties across the developed world. South Africa is a study of the political phenomenon in its advanced stage and a demonstration of what is at stake in defeating it in the rest of the Western world. Flip Buys, leader of the Afrikaner trade union Solidariteit, was likely prophetic when he foresaw that South Africa would become home to the “first large grouping of Westerners living in a post-Western country.”

Click here to read the rest.

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It’s all very, very long selections this weekend, friends. Sorry about that!

Up in the Great White North, the Trudeau-led Liberals were headed towards an electoral wipe out of historical proportions, until President Trump decided to publicly bait Canadians via what-must-be-jokingly threats to turn their country into the 51st state. Since then, the post-Trudeau Liberals have seen their prospects ascend like a phoenix risen from the ashes solely due to a backlash against Trump.

The history of Canadian-American relations is more complex than one might think, and my friend has published a killer deep-dive into its history:

Nemets

On the Historical Unity of Americans and Canadians

“Canadians have relatively few binding national myths, but one of the most pervasive and enduring is the conviction that the country is doomed” – Andrew Potter…

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a year ago · 105 likes · 41 comments · Peter Nimitz

Here’s an excerpt:

The divide between Patriot and Loyalist causes in North America was primarily ideological and sectarian rather than national or sectional. Those sympathetic to republicanism rallied to the Patriots regardless of their region or background, while those who felt affinity to imperial institutions or whom believed in the “mixed constitution” rallied to the Loyalists. Two Patriot generals, Moses Hazen and James Livingston, came from Quebec’s English-speaking population, as did perhaps half of the four hundred and fifty men in their two units – the First and Second Canadian Regiments. The remainder, heavily drawn from French veterans who had settled in Quebec following the French and Indian War, were described as a dissolute lot, unattached to their native Catholic Church. American republicanism didn’t just appeal to those whom were parts of democratic assemblies, but also those unattached to any institution but whom still aspired to play an active role in shaping the fates of their at best partially-formed communities. At the end of the war, the survivors settled in New York’s Hudson Valley. Had the invasions succeeded, they would have likely been the rulers of the American state of Quebec.

The failed invasions of Quebec were followed in 1776 by a Patriot invasion of Nova Scotia. Local Patriot sympathizers invited a Massachusetts militia force to conquer the colony. It was defeated. Nova Scotia’s Patriot sympathizers fled to Maine and established a settlement there.

The settlement of the Patriot volunteers from Quebec and Nova Scotia in the United States during and following the American Revolution was only part of a larger population exchange – an exchange which added a sectional and eventually national angle into the existing ideological and sectarian divides. About fifty thousand Americans and ten thousand Europeans who fought for or sympathized with the Loyalist cause settled in Quebec and Nova Scotia following the conclusion of the war, septupling the English-speaking population of Canada. Previously only divided by loyalty, the English-speakers of North America were now divided by an international border.

Like I said, it’s a deep dive. If you’re interested in reading this history, click here.

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I don’t buy the argument that humans in pre-history were less violent than more recent ones. Some may disagree with me, but your opinion on this fundamental question will colour almost all of your politics and philosophy.

We end this weekend’s SCR with an essay that argues that violence in pre-history wasn’t as common as people like myself think, and that it was restricted to psychopaths whose effects were magnified by their psychological condition:

We are naturally a highly violent species with a thin veneer of civilization that masks a brutal proclivity for violence – or so many people think. In the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes said that human life without government is ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’. William Golding’s novel, The Lord of the Flies, which won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1983 and many of us read in school, suggests that boys will rapidly descend into mob violence and brutal cruelty without oversight from authority. To know whether this is true, we need to understand the rates of violence among our ancestors.

There is longstanding disagreement on this issue among scholars: many hold the cultural assumption that humans are by nature bellicose, but there is also a ‘noble savage’ camp that believe the opposite. Stephen Pinker’s influential 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature tipped the scales by using a data-oriented approach to demonstrate that prehistoric people tended towards extremely high violent death rates, with average rates of violence higher than during the peak years of World War Two.

However, Pinker’s data also showed that prehistoric hunter gatherers seem to have been less violent than prehistoric agriculturalists. This is of critical importance in understanding human history because for 96 percent of our evolutionary history, we were hunter gatherers.

Comprehensive new research has emerged with much more archaeological data on violence in prehistory. Analysis indicates that prehistoric hunter gatherers were considerably less violent than the orthodoxy previously held. This finding also seems to be borne out by ethnographic data on modern hunter gatherers with lifestyles relatively similar to their prehistoric ancestors.

Click here to read the rest.

Thank you once again for checking out my Substack. Hit the like button at the top or the bottom of this page to like this entry, and use the share and/or res-stack buttons to share this across social media. Leave a comment below if the mood strikes you to do so. And don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t done so already.

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Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

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COVID-19 opened the eyes of a tremendous amount of so-called “normies” in that they realized that their own governments would actually act maliciously towards them, where before they would generally chalk up negative effects to incompetence, gridlock, or other less malignant factors.

One issue with this is that once a person is shown who or what is working behind the curtain, they will often assume that this is a ‘one size fits all’ method for understanding what else is happening in their world. The best example of this is the over-exaggerated importance assigned to the World Economic Forum (WEF), a yearly gathering of global leaders to discuss pressing global issues. WEF is nothing but an excuse to visit Switzerland and hob-nob with like-minded people, and its chief organizer, Klaus Schwab, is little more than a glorified event planner and coordinator. I am sorry to disappoint, but WEF is not the Legion of Doom.

To see an actual yearly event that regularly produces important global outcomes, one need to travel not too far from Davos. The annual Munich Security Conference is a genuinely important event. It is here where global security is not just discussed, but where policy, outlook, and strategy are often revealed. It was in 2007 in Munich that Vladimir Putin informed the world that Russia would no longer be passive and would take a more active role in defending its own security interests, highlighting the encroachment of NATO on its borders as a “serious threat”. Putin told the audience that things were going to change, and we saw how they did change less than a year later when Russia reacted to a Georgian provocation in its breakaway South Ossetia region by defeating the Georgian army in a very short war.

Much has happened at the MSC in the years since then, but this year’s event produced an incredible shock when US Vice President J.D. Vance delivered a speech to attendees in which he read the Riot Act to Europe’s leaders. Unfortunately, I do not have a working link to the text of his speech, so here is a video instead:

For the sake of brevity, I will highlight the key points of his speech before we dig in a bit deeper:

1. Europe’s main enemy isn’t Russia or China, it’s internal

2. Europe has turned its back on “core western values” like free speech, preferring to implement speech laws that restrict the speech of its citizens

3. Europe’s biggest issue is mass migration, which Vance stated is a self-inflicted one

4. Europe has lost respect for democracy by refusing to implement of the will of its voting public, and by purposely blocking non-mainstream parties and politicians from power through legal trickery

5. Europe needs to step up and take care of its own security, as the USA is moving its focus to East Asia in order to contain China

Let’s grab some text from his speech:

But while the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine – and we also believe that it’s important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defence – the threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values: values shared with the United States of America.

I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election. He warned that if things don’t go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany too.

Vance is telling Europe that democracy cannot be restricted to whatever the mainstream parties say it is, and that popular will must be respected. He highlights the outrageous example of Romania, where a maverick politician upset the apple cart, causing the government to annul an election for fear that he would win it. It was excused as being necessary due to “Russian election interference” even though the actual stated cause (election ad purchases/social media campaign) turned out to be the work of one of the mainstream parties!

Vance added:

But when we see European courts cancelling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard. And I say ourselves, because I fundamentally believe that we are on the same team.

We must do more than talk about democratic values. We must live them. Now, within living memory of many of you in this room, the cold war positioned defenders of democracy against much more tyrannical forces on this continent. And consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, that closed churches, that cancelled elections. Were they the good guys? Certainly not.

One should note that Vance places emphasis on the USA and Europe having shared values and being on the same team.

I look to Brussels, where EU Commission commissars warned citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest: the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be ‘hateful content’. Or to this very country where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of ‘combating misogyny’ on the internet.

I look to Sweden, where two weeks ago, the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Quran burnings that resulted in his friend’s murder. And as the judge in his case chillingly noted, Sweden’s laws to supposedly protect free expression do not, in fact, grant – and I’m quoting – a ‘free pass’ to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief.

And perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons in particular in the crosshairs. A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith Conner, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and an Army veteran, with the heinous crime of standing 50 metres from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes, not obstructing anyone, not interacting with anyone, just silently praying on his own. After British law enforcement spotted him and demanded to know what he was praying for, Adam replied simply, it was on behalf of his unborn son.

Vance is defending free speech, one in which “hate speech” does not exist. Since this speech was delivered, many European politicians have engaged in the cognitive dissonance of arguing that Europe has free speech, but that hate speech is not permitted.

There is another aspect to Vance’s words on speech, though. Vance is not just defending free speech, he is also defending the USA’s social media giants and their operations on European soil. Twitter/X in particular has been in the crosshairs of Brussels and certain European governments, and the US Government is going to bat for them not just to protect business interests, but because US-based social media is now the USA’s most potent form of soft power, made all the more important with the recent cuts to USAID, NED, and the wider NGO Industrial Complex. Vance’s speech was not altruistic, but rather self-interested.

In Washington, there is a new sheriff in town. And under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer them in the public square. Now, we’re at the point, of course, that the situation has gotten so bad that this December, Romania straight up cancelled the results of a presidential election based on the flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency and enormous pressure from its continental neighbours. Now, as I understand it, the argument was that Russian disinformation had infected the Romanian elections. But I’d ask my European friends to have some perspective. You can believe it’s wrong for Russia to buy social media advertisements to influence your elections. We certainly do. You can condemn it on the world stage, even. But if your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.

The Biden regime pressured Europe to go along with its censorship policy, plans that could not be implemented in the USA due to the First Amendment, but that could be put into place in Europe. Vance announcing the arrival of a new sheriff put the Europeans into a notable state of discomfort because not only does it seem like the Americans are wildly schizophrenic, but that they personally spent a lot of political capital doing the bidding of the ancien regime. “You Americans demand that we do one thing, now you’re telling us to do the opposite”, is how they translated this portion of Vance’s speech.

Now, this is a security conference, and I’m sure you all came here prepared to talk about how exactly you intend to increase defence spending over the next few years in line with some new target. And that’s great, because as President Trump has made abundantly clear, he believes that our European friends must play a bigger role in the future of this continent. We don’t think you hear this term ‘burden sharing’, but we think it’s an important part of being in a shared alliance together that the Europeans step up while America focuses on areas of the world that are in great danger.

But let me also ask you, how will you even begin to think through the kinds of budgeting questions if we don’t know what it is that we are defending in the first place? I’ve heard a lot already in my conversations, and I’ve had many, many great conversations with many people gathered here in this room. I’ve heard a lot about what you need to defend yourselves from, and of course that’s important. But what has seemed a little bit less clear to me, and certainly I think to many of the citizens of Europe, is what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for. What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important?

I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people. Europe faces many challenges. But the crisis this continent faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together, is one of our own making. If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you. Nor for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump. You need democratic mandates to accomplish anything of value in the coming years.

This is music to my ears, but to your average Eurocrat, this is more American schizophrenia.

And of all the pressing challenges that the nations represented here face, I believe there is nothing more urgent than mass migration. Today, almost one in five people living in this country moved here from abroad. That is, of course, an all time high. It’s a similar number, by the way, in the United States, also an all time high. The number of immigrants who entered the EU from non-EU countries doubled between 2021 and 2022 alone. And of course, it’s gotten much higher since.

And we know the situation. It didn’t materialise in a vacuum. It’s the result of a series of conscious decisions made by politicians all over the continent, and others across the world, over the span of a decade. We saw the horrors wrought by these decisions yesterday in this very city. And of course, I can’t bring it up again without thinking about the terrible victims who had a beautiful winter day in Munich ruined. Our thoughts and prayers are with them and will remain with them. But why did this happen in the first place?

Vance is tying migration to security, and is telling the Europeans that this elite-driven policy does not reflect the will of the people. He states it bluntly:

No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants. But you know what they did vote for? In England, they voted for Brexit. And agree or disagree, they voted for it. And more and more all over Europe, they are voting for political leaders who promise to put an end to out-of-control migration. Now, I happen to agree with a lot of these concerns, but you don’t have to agree with me.

To the average European soc-dem or green, this is racism and fascism. The problem is that these are the words of the Vice-President of the most powerful country in the world. Vance is legitimizing anti-migration politics and political parties, to the horror of the EU elites.

But what no democracy, American, German or European will survive, is telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns, their aspirations, their pleas for relief, are invalid or unworthy of even being considered.

Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There is no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don’t. Europeans, the people have a voice. European leaders have a choice. And my strong belief is that we do not need to be afraid of the future.

Vance legitimizes Germany’s AfD by telling the Germans that the traditional ‘firewall’ that was erected to keep out non-mainstream parties of the right has no place in a democracy.

This speech has sent an earthquake across Europe, resulting in an “emergency meeting” to be held this week in which European leaders will try to adjust to this new reality.

And this is a new reality.

My instincts tell me that most European leaders will double-down on the so-called ‘values’ that they have been championing for some time now, until this new reality finally sets in. This is not 2017, and their friends in the Democrats in the USA are not telling them how to react, because they are in disarray as well.

One last thing: Vance’s speech did not even mention Ukraine despite it taking place at a security conference. I believe that this was intentional, as Vance is telling Europe that it is not the USA’s equal, and that if it wants to be treated with that level of respect it needs to begin to take care of its own security and rely less on the USA.

This leads into the upcoming peace talks regarding the war in Ukraine for which a have a very long essay coming out this week, one that I have been working on for several days now.

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It’s been a little over two months since the Assad regime collapsed in Syria, and I am still digesting the events. In fact, I am planning a write-up of what has happened since then, because the wiping off of the board of a key Russian client state and ally is very, very important in that it has significantly changed the composition of the region.

40 years of Iranian foreign policy were blown up in the course of two weeks. The land and air bridge that was Ba’athist Syria and that connected Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon has been eviscerated. Iran’s ability to project power (and to threaten Israel) has been significantly reduced, while its Lebanese ally, Hezbollah, is now isolated.

Hezbollah is isolated and militarily weakened, but to completely write it off would be a mistake. For decades now, it has served as a ‘state within a state’, serving its Shi’ite constituency in the south of the country, in Baalbek, and in and around the southern suburbs of Beirut. Its key strength has been its social welfare program, something made all the more important by the fact that Lebanon has for some time now been a failed state. Hezbollah has worked to deliver social services where the state has been unable to do so.

On the other hand, the decapitation of Hezbollah’s leadership and its perceived poor performance in its recent war with Israel have harmed its reputation among its core constituency. This makes their social services all the more important as they rebuild their military capacity. FT published a revealing story on this recently:

After her son, a Hizbollah military officer, was killed in an Israeli air strike in southern Lebanon last year, Umm Hassan made lapel pins of his image to commemorate him. When the pain was at its worst, she told herself he had chosen this path.

Umm Hassan, 56, was also consoled by the expensive private school her grandchildren would attend thanks to Hizbollah’s Martyr Foundation. Though she was not a party member, she said the group “had not left anyone behind”.

But her faith was mixed with contempt for Hizbollah’s bloated ranks, with middling leaders who stayed away from the front lines and, she said, included Israeli collaborators: “It would not have gotten this bad if there had not been traitors.”

That part of the world has a strong conspiratorial mindset, but to deny Israeli infiltration of Hezbollah structures would be wrong, with the best evidence being how their security apparatus was used against them by Israel to decapitate their leadership.

With the group now under pressure, keeping the faith of constituents such as Umm Hassan is vital to its future. Central to this effort is Hizbollah’s sprawling network of social welfare organisations including schools, hospitals, and its construction arm Jihad al-Bina, which has deployed hundreds of engineers to survey damaged homes and start repairing its heartland.

“Hizbollah is asking itself questions . . . about its organisational structure, because their role has changed, and the task has changed from the regional to the domestic,” said Nassib Huteit, an academic close to the party.

“…from the regional to the domestic” concedes that Hezbollah needs to pick up the pieces and rebuild once more.

After its last war with Israel in 2006, Hizbollah deepened support by making good on the vow of its longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah to rebuild “better than before”. With funds from Iran, its own commercial enterprises and state compensation payments, party-linked institutions took a prominent role in reconstruction.

But today the organisation faces far greater destruction and is without Nasrallah, who was killed by Israel last year. Israel’s offensive, which began after Hizbollah started firing rockets across the border following Hamas’s October 7 2023 attack, culminated with an invasion in October 2024. More than 4,000 people in Lebanon and at least 140 from Israel were killed.

One big question is how Iran will adjust to the new reality on the ground, and if it will continue to fund Hezbollah at the same level that it has for decades now.

In full swing:

Still, its postwar repair system is in full swing. In the battered south, every four or five villages is assigned a committee of about a dozen engineers, a local official said. These committees had inspected more than 270,000 homes as of late January, according to Jihad al-Bina.

Once the appraisals are reviewed by Jihad al-Bina’s Beirut headquarters, residents are told to pick up their compensation cheques and cash them at their local branch of Hizbollah’s microfinance lender al-Qard al-Hassan, more than 30 branches of which were hit by Israeli strikes.

In the central market of Baalbek, a paper sign fluttered from the rubble of what was once one of its offices: “We’re glad to welcome you at our branch down the road!”

I find this impressive…but there are issues:

But the official’s defensiveness came as some in Lebanon were aggrieved by the process. In the Hizbollah heartlands of the Bekaa Valley, southern Lebanon and Beirut’s southern suburbs, both supporters and non-supporters described what they saw as stingy or slow practices in appraising damage and compensating them.

Ahmed’s apartment in Baalbek, for example, was wrecked when an Israeli missile targeted the flats below, which he said the landlord had rented out to members of Hizbollah’s military wing.

He was sure the damage was worth at least $10,000, but the cheque that arrived was for $2,500. Ahmed was incensed. “We’re living in the house, trying to fix what we can ourselves, but it’s hard — we don’t even have running water,” he said. “We don’t have any trust in the state, and we hate the parties, but the parties made us hate the state.”

Read that last line again: Lebanon’s state failure is what has permitted Hezbollah to fill in the vacuum.

Many say, however, that Hizbollah and its patron Iran lack the means to lead reconstruction this time, given the scale of the task. The war caused at least $3.4bn in physical damage, according to the World Bank. Even Hizbollah’s leader Naim Qassem stressed the state’s responsibility, saying in December: “Fundamentally, restoration and reconstruction will be the government’s to follow-up on and we will be by its side.”

Hizbollah was also dealt a political blow last month with the selection of a president and prime minister seen as committed to reducing its influence in Lebanon. Their candidacies, which were championed by the west and the Gulf Arab nations, could help facilitate international funding for reconstruction which analysts expect to be diverted away from Hizbollah.

But Hizbollah may not be sidelined so easily. Hussein Kamaleddine, a local official in the southern village of Srifa, said the group’s local networks were nimble. The party had been careful to placate its beneficiaries and smooth over disagreements because it knew the stakes, he said.

“Militarily, they’ve been depleted,” he said. “They need time. But they have institutions.”

Hezbollah is resilient, something that will help them survive as the western and Arab patrons of the new government in Beirut pressure it to de-militarize this organization.

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If you listened to BigTech closely in the run up to last November’s US Presidential Elections, you learned that a big part of their defection from the Democrats to Donald Trump was due to their opposition to the Biden regime’s plans to steer the development of the US AI industry, and to insert its own politics in it in during the process.

Friend of this Substack Marc Andreessen expressed “shock” when he attended a meeting with top officials who revealed what their intentions would be for AI as a whole. This, for him, was the turning point and what led him to change horses. I have no doubt that this was the straw that broke the camel’s back for others in his circles.

I missed this explainer piece when it was published last month, but I think it adds value to our understanding of this story, and of the wider AI “issue” (for lack of a better word). Outgoing National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan issued a “catastrophic warning” about AI just three days before leaving his role:

• The next few years will determine whether artificial intelligence leads to catastrophe — and whether China or America prevails in the AI arms race.

Why it matters: Sullivan said in our phone interview that unlike previous dramatic technology advancements (atomic weapons, space, the internet), AI development sits outside of government and security clearances, and in the hands of private companies with the power of nation-states.

This is the crux of the issue for both Sullivan and people like Andreessen. AI is seen as such an important development that Sullivan and those around him sought a monopoly on it in terms of direct government control over it. BigTech balked.

Somehow, government will have to join forces with these companies to nurture and protect America's early AI edge, and shape the global rules for using potentially God-like powers, he says.

• U.S. failure to get this right, Sullivan warns, could be "dramatic, and dramatically negative — to include the democratization of extremely powerful and lethal weapons; massive disruption and dislocation of jobs; an avalanche of misinformation."

The fear expressed by Sullivan is that the largest players in AI could effectively act as their own polities, independent of the USA.

Staying ahead in the AI arms race makes the Manhattan Project during World War II seem tiny, and conventional national security debates small. It's potentially existential with implications for every nation and company.

• To distill Sullivan: America must quickly perfect a technology that many believe will be smarter and more capable than humans. We need to do this without decimating U.S. jobs, and inadvertently unleashing something with capabilities we didn't anticipate or prepare for. We need to both beat China on the technology and in shaping and setting global usage and monitoring of it, so bad actors don't use it catastrophically. Oh, and it can only be done with unprecedented government-private sector collaboration — and probably difficult, but vital, cooperation with China.

Note the political aspects above.

Between the lines: Sullivan leaves government believing this can be done well — and wants to work on this very problem in the private sector.

• "I personally am not an AI doomer," he says. "I am a person who believes that we can seize the opportunities of AI. But to do so, we've got to manage the downside risks, and we have to be clear-eyed and real about those risks."

The big picture: There's no person we know in a position of power in AI or governance who doesn't share Sullivan's broad belief in the stakes ahead.

• Regardless of what was said in public, every background conversation we had with President Biden's high command came back to China. Yes, they had concerns about the ethics, misinformation and job loss of AI. They talked about that. But they were unusually blunt in private: Every move, every risk was calculated to keep China from beating us to the AI punch. Nothing else matters, they basically said.

• That's why they applied export controls on the top-of-the-line semiconductors needed to power AI development — including in Biden's final days in office — and cut off supply of the hyper-sophisticated tools Chinese firms need to make such chips themselves.

A big reason for the USA’s sudden urge to pivot to East Asia is to hamper China’s ability to compete with them with respect to AI.

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I’ve said much about the 1990s on this Substack over the years, and I would rather not repeat myself again so as to not irritate the audience ;)

Understanding that decade is the key to understanding much of what is happening around us now, and I will leave it to the great Christopher Caldwell to explain to us why this is, courtesy of a very long essay on the subject that was first published a year and a half ago:

Something in the nineties had gone calamitously, tragically, but invisibly wrong. The United States had endured setbacks: the Los Angeles riots of 1992; various mid-decade standoffs, shoot-outs, and bombings, from Waco to Ruby Ridge to Oklahoma City; and the dot-com equities crash at century’s end. Yet there was scarcely an instant in the whole decade when the country’s strength, stability, and moral pre-eminence were questioned, at least in mainstream media outlets.

It was not as if nothing changed in the nineties—but almost all the changes seemed to make the position of the United States more secure. The country underwent the largest peacetime economic expansion in its history. The stock market boomed. Home ownership rose. The government showed more fiscal responsibility than it had in a generation, finishing the decade with annual budget surpluses. Government spending as a percentage of GDP fell to levels last seen in the 1960s. So did crime of all kinds.

Using computer networking technology devised by its military and refined by its scientists, bureaucrats, and hackers, the United States was managing the global transition to an information economy. The United States got to write the rules under which this transformation took place. That should have been a source of safety—but it turned out to be a source of peril. The Cold War victory, combined with a chance to redefine the economic relations that obtain among every human being on earth, was a temptation to Promethean excess. An exceptionally legalistic, hedonistic, and anti-traditional nation, the United States was poorly equipped to resist such a temptation. It misunderstood the victory it had won and the global reconstruction it was carrying out.

Click here to read this fantastic essay in its entirety.

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We end this week’s late SCR (sorry!) with an essay that asks if we should give birth control to wild animals:

In her opening remarks, Giovanna Massei, Botstiber’s European director, painted a picture of a world where humanity and nature were increasingly in conflict. “People and wildlife are sharing more and more space,” she said. Pigeons and rats bothering New Yorkers, feral horses troubling ranchers in the American West, elephants breaking free from game reserves across Africa, capybaras running riot in South America’s gated communities. In places, agricultural losses and property damage are escalating into the billions and countless diseases — Covid and avian flu among them — originate in animals and spread to people when the two populations come into contact.

“We are running out of options,” Massei said. “We don’t believe for a second that fertility control is the only way, but certainly, we want people to consider it.”

Massei spoke as a prominent representative for a growing field that purports to offer conservationists a straightforward solution to one of the thorniest questions in their discipline: What do you do when the wilderness is too wild? Refuges untrammeled by humankind are shrinking, and so too the number of animals they can support. The boundaries between humans and wild creatures, ever porous, are becoming even thinner. Hunting or culling wild animals is one option — just kill any problematic species. Or continue destroying their habitat and let them go extinct on their own.

Click here to read the rest.

Thank you once again for checking out my Substack. Hit the like button at the top or the bottom of this page to like this entry, and use the share and/or res-stack buttons to share this across social media. Leave a comment below if the mood strikes you to do so. And don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t done so already.

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Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

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One subject that I have not covered over the years on this Substack has been demography and the crisis of collapsing birth rates across Europe and elsewhere. It’s not that I think that shrinking numbers are a good thing, it’s just that I, like pretty much everyone else, don’t have a feasible plan to reverse the trend. “History belongs to those who show up”, is my statement on the issue.

It was only a few decades ago that alarmist books about the world’s population explosion were detailing how there soon wouldn’t be enough resources to maintain such numbers, and that conflict would break out to ensure access to them, paired with mass famine and pandemic diseases. These days, positive birth rates are almost entirely confined to the African continent, meaning that the alarmism of the 1970s can be quietly shelved for now.

There are some people who have defended the notion that the world already has too many people, and that shrinking populations at home is a “good thing” anyway. They usually point to things such as environmental considerations, the “quality of most people today”, or the soaring costs of urban living when making these arguments. Every single one of these people who have tried to make this argument to me come from countries with very large populations at present. I am certain that this permits them to make such arguments, as they lack the psychological conditions present in those whose existence is more precarious.

“I think Ukraine wishes it had more bodies to send to the front against Russia”, is one of my immediate go-to retorts to those who claim that population decline is a good thing. To trot out a very old cliche, there is safety in numbers. During the Interwar era, the subject of France’s decline in births was never too far away from being front and centre in political debate. France was Europe’s first country to suffer from a drop in birth rates, leading it to fall behind Germany. The horrid losses of the First World War meant that France viewed itself as under the threat of national extinction if it couldn’t match their neighbours to the east. Birth rates are not just a matter of culture and society, or even economics. They are just as important for self-preservation, something that Ukraine is learning the hard way:

Even before the Russian invasion, Ukraine was facing a demographic crisis. The population began aging way back in the 1960s. Then, in the 1990s, the disintegration of the Soviet Union led to economic collapse, leaving millions of men and women without a future. They had fewer children, or they left the country.

The Russian invasion has now turned the demographic crisis into a catastrophe. Almost 7 million people, mostly women and children, have fled abroad since February 24, 2022, the day of the invasion. At least 5 million Ukrainians are now living under Russian occupation, cut off from the rest of the country by trenches and minefields. On top of that are the tens of thousands of civilians who have been killed and the up to 100,000 fallen soldiers.

In the early 1990s, early in the country’s independence, Ukraine had a population of 51.5 million. Today, only an estimated 29 million people live in Ukrainian areas under Kyiv’s control. The populations of industrialized countries begin shrinking when the birthrate falls below 2.1 children per woman, and in the EU, the rate is 1.5. In Ukraine, though, the birthrate has fallen below one, according to estimates by leading demographer Ella Libanova, head of the Institute for Demography and Social Studies in Kyiv.

Ukraine’s population has almost halved itself in less than two generations. Nor has this halving been uniform, as Ukrainians, like almost everyone else these days, are much older on average than they were back in 1991. This can be argued as an auto-genocide. It’s also the main reason why Ukraine has stubbornly refused to lower its conscription age to 18, keeping it at 25 after lowering it from 27.

Here is a very typical story:

Andriy Bohdan is in good spirits despite it all, gushing about the region he calls home. The 57-year-old has been mayor of Horodnya for the last 22 years and is also head of the "hromada” of the same name, a kind of federation of municipalities that includes the town and all of the surrounding villages, right up to the borders with Russia and Belarus. Bohdan receives his visitors in a sparsely furnished building that serves as his office, his mobile phone ringing without pause. Files are piled up on the tables and assistants are rushing back and forth through the offices. The 2025 budget is currently being compiled.

A man with sharp eyes and a broad smile, Bohdan says that much has changed for the better since Ukraine gained its independence in 1991, particularly in people’s minds. "The work ethic is better than it used to be, as is the way we treat nature and the environment,” he says.

Horodnya is a town with clean, broad streets flanked by well-tended gardens in front of small wooden houses and tidy playgrounds. Empty houses and even completely abandoned hamlets can be found in the forests surrounding the town. The countryside is deserted but not neglected.

"The natural scenery is beautiful,” Bohdan says, and the people are tough and hard-working. "There is a lot of potential here, for tourism, for example,” he says. "But the demographic situation is a big problem.”

And then:

Bohdan has been around for every step of the downfall. In the 1980s, as the Soviet Union was nearing its end, 16,000 people still lived in town, a third more than today. An engineer by training, Bohdan’s first job was with Rubin, a Moscow-based television manufacturer that had a subsidiary in town. "In the Soviet Union, our city was the only district capital where color televisions were produced,” he says proudly.

But then, the Soviet Union collapsed. The factory went broke in 1997, the mayor says, costing 2,400 people their jobs. One year later, the military air base also closed down, the second largest employer in the region at the time. "Seven-hundred people were without work and all the soldiers were gone,” Bohdan says. Suddenly, Horodnya had one of the highest unemployment rates in all of Ukraine.

"The market economy was only slowly gaining a foothold here,” says Bohdan. Many have left, he says, finding jobs in places like Poland, Italy or elsewhere in Europe, the men as seasonal laborers, the women in nursing.

This accurately captures the situation all across post-communist Europe. When state industries collapsed, unemployment soared. Those that were able to leave did so. For those countries “lucky” enough to have joined the EU, they experienced a continuous wave of people (especially the young) moving west to countries like Germany and the UK to find work, leaving behind a lot of empty villages and shrinking towns.

In the villages surrounding Horodnya, the elderly are frequently the only ones left. When she got started here in the late 1990s, says village head Lyudmila Kutsa, there was more of everything: more people, more houses, more life.

……..

Since 1998, she has been responsible for nine tiny hamlets in the forest. There used to be 10, but one of them was abandoned completely. Another is home to just a single person, with others having populations of three or five. Some 800 people used to live in the area, but now the total is below 300 and only two of nine village shops remain open. "People used to come to me,” she says, "but now I have to visit them.”

My village had around 300 residents in the late 1960s. Today it has maybe 40. My mother’s village counted 600 heads back then. Today it has at most 60. There are many reasons to account for this, but it is the norm in post-communist Europe.

This is where Der Spiegel goes off of the rails:

In the mid-term, she hopes that Ukraine becomes a member of the European Union. "It would be best for our family if we could easily travel home without all the paperwork – even if only for a visit.”

Ukraine’s demographic fate does, in large measure, depend on its partners in the West. A certain degree of depopulation is unavoidable, demographer Libanova believes. The population is simply too old. This trend is far from unique to Ukraine. Russia is also facing similar problems, though the country’s population is four times larger.

There are, however, tools available to Ukraine to fight against extreme depopulation, Libanova believes. "Not only must Ukrainians be encouraged to return, but people from other countries must be attracted as well,” the expert says. An improvement in life quality could also contribute to a rising birthrate.

Before that happens, however, the war must come to an end. The security guarantees that Ukraine receives will then be decisive. People would hardly return to a country facing an indefinite threat from Russia. Indeed, more would likely leave. EU membership would be crucial for the country’s economic future, says Libanova. "It would stimulate growth and modernize the economy.”

EU membership for Ukraine would see another catastrophic outflow of its people, as the continent’s larger economies act as magnets. Industries in Germany, Holland, Belgium, Spain, etc. would love to have access to Ukrainian labour.

The only thing that this last segment of the report gets right is that Ukraine needs peace in order to try and halt its population collapse.

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Despite my friend Scott Locklin’s protests, I think that we have reached a point where LLMs can no longer be ignored if we want to maintain a good understanding of where the action is today. So much money is being poured into AI that downplaying it seems like a bad bet. Maybe Scott is right and maybe I am wrong? He knows his shit, and I admit that I certainly don’t.

There are many of you that know your shit too when it comes to matters AI. I have read the comments when this subject has been brought up in the past. I think that we can agree that AI is now an industry that is seen as critical to the economic and security futures of countries. Why else would so much money be poured into it? The new Trump regime recently announced that it was setting up a $500 billion(!) AI program to be led by Sam Altman and OpenAI.

Three years ago, LLMs were dismissed as “glorified chatbots”, but I am beginning to see some naysayers change their minds. At the same time, I am forced to ask: what are the real-world applications that are facilitated by LLMs today that matter? Once again, I ask that those of you in the know address this question in the comments section below.

One of the main themes of AI in media today is that of an “AI arms race”, with the USA pitted against China (and with the rest far, far behind these two leaders). As I’m sure that all of you are already aware, Trump’s AI announcement was quickly followed by an earthquake out of China: the proclamation that DeepSeek, a Chinese AI system was able to better its American competition in performance, and at a much, much lower cost. Friend to this Substack Marc Andreessen described the announcement as the “Sputnik moment for AI”, meaning that it has produced such a shock for the US AI industry that it now has to scramble to adjust, recognizing that there is a new reality in their world.

I don’t know how factual the DeepSeek announcement really is, and I am already seeing people argue that the ridiculously low cost of the product is due to certain other costs being excluded. Time will tell. In the meantime, here’s an article on DeepSeek and Chinese economic dynamism from a source who is very bullish on China:

It has become fashionable among Western commentators to predict the decline of China’s economic “miracle.”

Slowing growth, a troubled real estate sector and demographic shifts are regularly cited as evidence of the malaise. Tensions with the United States – especially under the past two administrations – have further fueled this narrative.

Yet the picture is far more nuanced. Under President Donald Trump, Washington has so far avoided the most sweeping tariffs and measures that his campaign rhetoric suggested were a done deal.

However, three days before his inauguration, Trump remarked: “I anticipate that we will address numerous issues together, starting right away. We talked about trade balance, Fentanyl, TikTok, and various other topics. President Xi and I will do everything we can to make the world more peaceful and secure.”

These comments suggest an implicit recognition that China’s economy is evolving, not collapsing – and that the United States, despite its rhetoric, understands Beijing’s structural shifts.

Let’s jump ahead to the DeepSeek stuff:

An exemplar of this private-sector dynamism is DeepSeek, founded by hedge fund manager Liang Wenfeng. The company recently unveiled its R1 large language model (LLM), a groundbreaking AI system developed on a relatively modest budget.

DeepSeek’s trajectory challenges the notion that Chinese firms rely solely on state-driven innovation. Its story instead highlights the private sector’s capacity to overcome domestic hurdles and external restrictions alike.

Lessons from early US-led AI breakthroughs steered DeepSeek toward an innovative path that diverges sharply from Western norms: the company developed novel training methods and “pure reasoning capabilities” without any supervised data, all while rejecting the typical model of massive resource investment seen in America.

Some specifics:

Operating under hardware constraints imposed by sanctions, DeepSeek created unique optimization techniques to fully utilize less powerful GPUs, a feat that has surprised US researchers.

Using just 2,048 Nvidia H800 GPUs and US$5.6 million, it trained a model with 671 billion parameters – comparable to efforts by American giants such as OpenAI and Google, which often spend multiples of that amount.

Again, I don’t know how true the attached cost really is….but what is more interesting to me is that they were able to do this under the sanctions regime that restricts Beijing’s access to certain chips.

China’s tech successes:

The country continues to leverage its vast manufacturing prowess, built over decades, to dominate high-tech industries such as renewable energy, electric vehicles and AI. DeepSeek’s rise mirrors the broader trajectory of firms like Huawei and ByteDance, which have transformed from imitators into global innovators.

At the same time, China leads the world in AI-related patents and boasts one of the largest pools of graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Its digital economy accounts for over 40% of GDP, driven by e-commerce giants Alibaba and JD.com.

Newcomers like DeepSeek are pushing boundaries further by demonstrating that even global-scale AI can emerge from smaller budgets if paired with the right mix of technical expertise and business acumen.

The author credits China’s massive industrial base for its growing success in the tech sector, breaking it down as follows:

It is a vast, integrated network of suppliers, logistics hubs, specialized clusters and infrastructure that supports a range of high-value industries.

1. Scale and Integration
   China’s manufacturing network is unmatched in its breadth and depth. From basic components to sophisticated semiconductor machinery, the country’s supply chain spans virtually every sector. Clusters of specialized suppliers allow companies to iterate quickly, reduce costs, and rapidly scale up production. This structural advantage has proven invaluable in high-growth areas like electric vehicles, batteries, and consumer electronics.

2. Robust Infrastructure
   Massive public investments in roads, rails, and ports have created a highly efficient transportation network that streamlines the flow of goods. The ability to move large volumes of materials across vast distances at competitive costs is a key reason China has managed to maintain its status as the “world’s factory.” In turn, this infrastructure underpins the development of cutting-edge sectors—from biotech to AI hardware.

3. Economies of Scale and Rapid Prototyping
   Nowhere else can companies scale from concept to mass production as swiftly or cost-effectively as in China. Thanks to a dense network of component suppliers, R&D centers, and testing facilities, Chinese firms can compress development cycles, a vital advantage in fast-moving fields such as renewables and advanced electronics. This synergy fuels innovation by allowing ideas to be tested, refined, and brought to market quickly.

4. Policy Support for Upgrading
   Beijing actively promotes the modernization of traditional manufacturing. Initiatives like “Made in China 2025” channel resources into high-tech industries, including robotics, aerospace, and new energy vehicles. These policies also encourage collaboration between SOEs and private firms, catalyzing innovation while safeguarding strategic sectors. The result is a manufacturing ecosystem that is continually moving up the value chain – evident in the success of companies like DeepSeek, which benefit from local suppliers of AI hardware and services.

A final word from the author:

DeepSeek’s achievements exemplify a broader narrative of resilience, where challenges – though significant – are neither insurmountable nor indicative of inevitable decline.

A more nuanced perspective reveals China’s transition from an export-driven, investment-heavy model to one centered on domestic consumption and technological innovation. Far from being abandoned, its vast manufacturing infrastructure is being upgraded and redeployed to support a high-tech future.

This evolution is a testament to China’s resilience, ingenuity and capacity for reinvention – qualities that continue to reshape the possibilities for others in the global economy.

Please share your thoughts to help us better understand just what is really going on here.

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It’s been a heady first two weeks on the Trump47 regime, as the President and his administration have purposely released a continuous stream of executive orders to roll back existing policies and undo much of the perceived harm introduced by previous governments. The sheer number of releases is intended to overwhelm opposition to these changes, with theory being that there are simply too many to fight all at once as resources are finite and attention is divided.

Legal challenges to these orders are inevitable, with some already having been filed. I do not know how many will survive, if any at all….but I must admit that it is very fun to watch. And it’s only getting more fun, as the knife is now being applied to the NGO Industrial Complex. Longtime readers of this Substack have learned just how important the NGO sector is in US foreign policy in that it works as a trojan horse inside of countries targeted for regime change. I have often described them as “end runs around democracy”. For those of you interested in learning about this, I suggest that you read this entry in my series on colour revolutions and regime change:

Today I learned that all NGOs working in foreign countries that are funded by the USGov are having their funding suspended for 90 days. This is already sending shock waves around the world, as not only are State Department officials losing their shit, but local NGO employees are wondering how they can continue operating in the meantime:

People are quickly learning just how much of a footprint the USA has in their countries and how significant an influence they have on politics in their homelands. All of their Trojan horses are being exposed at the same time, meaning that it will take some time for most people to digest the sheer scale and size of US meddling abroad.

Mainstream media is already beginning to push back against this funding suspension, using their typical tricks to try and paint this order as potentially “risking the safety of millions”:

Marocco strode into the offices of USAid this week flanked by members of Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency”, a special group Trump created, with clipboards in hand. Several hours later, almost 60 senior officials from the office had been put on paid leave. Veteran aid officials with decades of experience at the agency were escorted from the building by security, according to current and former USAid officials, and their email accounts were frozen.

“They wanted to decapitate the organisation,” said a current USAid employee. “And they did it by pushing aside the leadership and decades of experience.”

The purge followed confusion within USAid over the stop-work orders drafted by Marocco and signed by Marco Rubio, the new secretary of state, leading some to believe that limited actions could continue if funds had already been committed.

The Guardian UK has decided to focus its attacks on Mr. Marocco.

“We have identified several actions within USAid that appear to be designed to circumvent the president’s executive orders and the mandate from the American people,” wrote Jason Gray, USAid’s acting administrator, saying the relevant staff would be put on administrative leave.

Some employees have openly rebelled. In an email to all staff seen by the Guardian, Nicholas Gottlieb, USAid’s director of employee and labor relations, said that appointees at USAid and “Doge” had “instructed me to violate the due process of our employees by issuing immediate termination notices”.

Calling the requests “illegal”, Gottlieb said he “will not be a party to a violation of [due process]”. Hours later, he was put on administrative leave.

In a separate email to the sidelined USAid senior staff, Gottlieb wrote that the “materials show no evidence that you engaged in misconduct”.

Fight! Fight! Fight!

The chaotic rollout of the ban has led to whiplash for critical programs around the world, from emergency Aids relief (which has been granted a waiver), to clean-water and sanitation programs, to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, which the Washington Post reported on Friday had gone offline.

Yet there are few details of a vast review program, which is supposed to evaluate thousands of foreign aid grants as well as an expected torrent of waiver requests. And a number of the senior USAid staff put on administrative leave were lawyers who had helped prepare requests for exemptions from the foreign aid freeze, sources said.

Demoralization:

Previous cables indicated that the people involved would include Marocco or the new director of policy planning, Michael Anton, another political appointee. The state department declined to answer questions from the Guardian about who is evaluating the reviews and how many staff had been detailed to the process.

“We’re all trying to figure out, is there a review process? Who’s part of that review?” said the former senior USAid official. “Is it Pete Marocco and his two best friends?”

At USAid, other directives have been enacted that have both defunded and demoralised staff. Photographs of aid programs around the world have been literally stripped off the walls after a “directive has been issued to remove all artwork and photographs from the offices and common spaces across all buildings”.

Musk’s “efficiency department” has crowed about slashing $45m in scholarships for students from authoritarian Burma.

The $40bn a year that the US spends on foreign aid is less than 1% of its budget. But the US spends $4 out of every $10 spent globally on humanitarian aid, according to the state department, and the sudden cutoff has led to thousands of layoffs among US contractors and local partners around the world.

And of course:

A former USAid official said the decisions could put millions of people around the world at risk.

“If there’s a tropical cyclone that hits Cox’s Bazar tomorrow, then how are you going to save all those people, and then how are you going to rebuild if there’s a stop-work order?” said a former senior USAid official, referring to the city in Bangladesh where more than 1 million Rohingya refugees are living. “You could have people sitting there for 90 days and sitting and waiting for what? That’s what worries more.”

Critics who say that this order effectively reduces US influence abroad are absolutely correct….but what if this is part of a widely-assumed fundamental change in how the USA conducts its foreign policy?

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To me, the big difference between 2017 and 2025 in the USA is that Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans seem to have all the energy sapped out of them this time around. Demoralization and recriminations have set in, with a recognition that they indeed did lose the election and that Americans have rejected their vision for governance. The kids are calling this a “vibe shift”. What I see is that the initiative has passed from one group (the activist wing of the Democrats) to another (#MAGA).

It is no longer “uncool” to be #MAGA, judging from what I see on social media. The cultural vanguard of this movement is young, and they have grown in both size and confidence. Naturally, they are a varied bunch, but what is important to recognize is that they have infused the political right with a sense of optimism, and of purpose as well. The excesses of the activist’s social experimentation led many people to defect to Trump this time around, with BigTech being the best example. People naturally follow their elites, and elites are informed by what they learn from people who they respect (whether that’s a good thing or not depends on your perspective).

This shift reminds me of the move away from hippiedom to yuppiedom made by the Boomers by the 1980s. Was that necessarily a good thing? I’ll leave that up to you to decide, but I think that this shift is real. It seems to be that scolding is experiencing returns that are diminishing at an increasingly rapidly rate, and that publicly supporting Trump is no longer confined to people in flyover country, young men at campus fraternities, etc. It is now normalized in the culture, something that it had not achieved during Trump45.

This normalization does not mean the end of opposition, nor even of media attacks. Case in point: this report in New York Magazine that is making the rounds:

It’s Monday, January 20, the first night of Donald Trump’s second presidency, and just a couple blocks from the Capitol Building that his now-pardoned MAGA army swarmed four years and 14 days ago, there is, as there has been for the past several nights in restaurants, hotel ballrooms, and lobbying offices, a party for people who have never been happier about the direction in which this country is heading. They are drinking, smoking, flirting, networking, but mostly congratulating one another on their big win.

This party is at Butterworth’s, a new dimly lit bistro that has become a hot spot for the right in part because one of its investors is Raheem Kassam, once the editor-in-chief of the U.K. edition of Breitbart. On the menu are themed cocktails with names like American Carnage and the Second Term. In the middle of the room, in a hip-hugging emerald ball gown and a hefty string of pearls, is Tanya Posobiec, the wife of Jack Posobiec, a far-right activist and onetime Pizzagate pusher. She has just arrived from one of the president’s three official inaugural balls and is telling me about how splendid her night has been. She even met Mike Tyson and Conor McGregor. She’s surprised, she admits, that despite the horrible traffic, the below-freezing weather, and the general pandemonium, it’s been a no-drama weekend. “I haven’t heard anyone complain,” she says, almost shrieking with glee. “It’s such a positive vibe.”

“No resistance in sight”:

For the first time in several administrations — the last inauguration, of course, was marred by the pandemic and an insurrection, though nobody here would call it that, and the one before that was surrounded by unfriendly protests — this long weekend has been an unfettered celebration. No resistance in sight. Everywhere, across the capital, people are comparing invitations and wondering, How did that person get into that party? and, as usually follows that question, Why wasn’t I invited? As one 28-year-old conservative influencer, Xaviaer DuRousseau, tells me, “It’s Republican Coachella, and Donald Trump is our Beyoncé.” (He kept his weekend organized on a color-coded spreadsheet in intervals of 30 minutes.)

“Obnoxious”:

It’s easy to see the festivities as an obnoxious victory lap of the MAGA coalition, and of course they are. Conservatism — as a cultural force, not just a political condition — is back in a real way for the first time since the 1980s. But here in D.C., among the tourists from Tampa, the donors, and the last politicians Trump whipped into submission, one can also witness the emerging influence of a newer type of conservative. They are not disenfranchised or working class or anti-elite or many of the other adjectives used to describe Trump supporters since 2016. Rather, they are young, imposingly well connected, urban, and very online. They are rebels once again storming Capitol Hill, though without the pathetic scariness of the January 6 rioters.

They are crypto nerds and influencer girlies and recent MAHA converts and gays of all stripes, plus your standard-fare Rogan-listening bros. Few of them would call themselves Republican, lest they be tarred RINO. They refer to their political affiliation, almost always, as the “movement.” Some are the black sheep at their own family Thanksgivings, yet they project confidence that they’re the relevant ones now. Many are hot enough to be extras in the upcoming American Psycho remake.

“A massive cultural realignment”:

Even up until the election, many liberals who still thought of themselves as the owners of mainstream culture dismissed this scene as fringe. And it is unclear who is seriously serious about their beliefs and who is a grifter doing it for the bit. But a massive cultural realignment is taking place, and now this set of shitposters is in the same league as an entirely new Establishment, which includes not only the tech overlords (Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos) but also a growing number of celebrities (Carrie Underwood, the VillagePeople, Snoop Dogg, and Jewel). Kim Kardashian is posting photos of the First Lady. Even Spotify hosted an inauguration brunch. (Meanwhile, all the progressive institutions — Hollywood, college campuses, the mainstream media — feel like they’re collapsing simultaneously.) “We were the underdogs for so long. Now every last foe is a friend,” Wexler tells me. “Trump winning is the first step of the real work we have to do. It’ll culturally trickle down.”

Click here to read this long-winded collection of resentments in full.

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We end this weekend’s SCR with a book review that laments the death of bohemian culture in NYC’s Greenwich Village:

Reading David Browne’s Talkin’ Greenwich Village helped me make sense of my own experience as a romantic young artist in New York who was driven not only by nostalgia, but by a deep need for artistic community. The book, essentially a constellation of biographies of key Village musicians (Dave Van Ronk, Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, Peter, Paul and Mary, Eric Andersen, Phil Ochs, Joni Mitchell, Suze Rotolo, The Roches, National Lampoon, and Suzanne Vega) that also touches on the history of spaces (Kettle of Fish, Café Wha?, The Gaslight, Café Au Go Go, the Blues Project, Blue Note, The Bitter End, and the Village Vanguard), demonstrates that bohemians and bohemia are symbiotic: The place and the people co-create each other when the underlying conditions are right.

The Village had all the ingredients of a perfect urban ecosystem: charming old-world architecture, deep history, and a multiethnic character; affordable rent, a working-class Italian community that resisted rapid gentrification; ample public space (Washington Square Park), and a robust network of platforms for artistic expression. It resisted exploitation, mass demolition, and unchecked gentrification for much of the twentieth century. It had just enough charm and architectural dignity to be appealing, situated in Lower Manhattan, yet it remained a little too violent and working-class to draw the wealthiest mid-century elite.

The Village was rough and beautiful. It was jazz and folk, black and white, gay and straight. A pedestrian walking down MacDougal Street in the early 1960s would hear a cacophony of “strumming, coffee machines, and smatterings of applause” from coffeehouses and clubs. It was a place where a young Ornette Coleman could “dyna[mite] known boundaries,” and young folkies from out of town could enter a “more liberating world” just by knocking on the right door (often that of Village fixture, guitar teacher, and blues singer Dave Van Ronk).

Click here to read this review in its entirety.

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Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

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This past November, I had the pleasure of speaking at another MCC conference in Brussels. The subject of this meet was “the culture war and Europe’s geopolitical future”. I had a good time, and I am certain that I entertained the audience as well.

While there, I had the pleasure of meeting , author of the excellent Substack The Upheaval. I’ve shared some of this writing with you here in the past, and take great pleasure in doing so again today. Lyons has a laser-like focus on China, but what makes him valuable in comparison to most is that he comes from a position that has, until now, not really been part of the DC establishment. He can be best described as a realist from the populist camp of US politics, one who understands power and who also gets how truly delicate it can be.

Since Barack Obama moved into the White House in 2009, everyone has been waiting for the US to “pivot” to East Asia i.e. making containing China its primary security interest by relocating its attention there and away from the Middle East. Reality got in the way, either by accident or surprise, allowing the Chinese more time to prepare for this inevitable shift in focus. During the second half of Trump’s first term in office, we saw the Americans begin to pressure China on a few fronts: targeted economic sanctions, CIA-backed failed revolution in Hong Kong, attempts to destabilize Xinjiang/East Turkestan by media campaign accusing Beijing of “genocide”, etc. Notably, the media and establishment were on Trump’s side with respect to China, accentuating the bipartisan support for China policy conducted by his administration. However, COVID-19 arrived and gave Beijing a much-needed respite.

Interestingly enough, the defeat of Iran’s 40-year long foreign policy in the Levant in the span of two weeks means that not only has Hezbollah been defeated and Iran and Russia evicted from Syria, it also means that the USA can put more resources in its long-awaited pivot to East Asia (Iran has not yet been tamed even if significantly humbled). Furthermore, the timing coincides with Trump47, a regime with a different attitude towards power and the US role on the global stage. Lastly, the assumption is that a peace deal between Russia and US-sponsored Ukraine is now visible in the horizon. A freer hand to deal with Beijing?

The most important flashpoint between the USA and China is Taiwan, an island that Beijing sees as an integral part of the People’s Republic of China, and a state that the USA does not want Chinese forces to capture. N.S. Lyons lays out what’s at stake over Taiwan:

Xi Jinping has declared in no uncertain terms that the reunification of Taiwan with mainland China is not only essential but the very “essence” of the leader’s epochal vision for the “great rejuvenation” — making China great again by reestablishing it as the world’s number one superpower. For Xi and the Chinese Communist Party, the island democracy of 24 million people is already their territory, separated from them only by Western imperial meddling. Its return to their control is non-negotiable. As Xi thundered in a major speech in 2022, “The wheels of history are rolling on toward China’s reunification and the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. Complete reunification of our country must be realised, and it can, without doubt, be realised.”

Xi has assigned specific dates to this goal. He has declared that reunification must be achieved no later than 2049, the centenary of the People’s Republic of China, but has also named 2035 as the date when China’s rejuvenation should be “basically realised”. Given that in 2035 Xi will likely still be in power, albeit aged 82, and that retaking Taiwan would be the nationalistic triumph to cement his political legacy in China, this appears to be his real deadline. That makes him a man in a hurry, and so he has ordered China’s military to complete its modernisation programme and be ready to “fight and win” a major war over Taiwan with a peer competitor (like the United States) by 2027.

This goes a long way in explaining China’s massive military buildup.

The risk:

Still, Xi would clearly much prefer to take Taiwan without fighting, if at all possible. China faces numerous internal challenges — including a slowing economy, a demographic crisis, widespread corruption, and social instability. And Xi seems to have prioritised these issues over external threats (to limited success). More important, though, is the fact that war is always an inherently unpredictable and risky business, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrated for analysts in Beijing. An invasion of Taiwan would be a risk of far greater magnitude, with the penalty for failure likely to be, at a minimum, the economic devastation of China, the political delegitimisation of the CCP regime, and the end of Xi Jinping.

By making reunification with Taiwan central to his and his party’s stated purpose, Xi Jinping is willing to risk it all.

Trump The Spoiler:

There is another reason for Beijing’s hesitation. It has long believed that the United States and the broader West is in terminal decline, that time is thus on China’s side, and that it can simply wait until American power collapses of its own accord. As a recent Heritage Foundation report details, “observation and assessment of Western civilisational strength or decline helps to shape almost every aspect of China’s policies, both foreign and domestic”. And it has paid close attention to the West’s “culture war” in particular. Viewing progressive “Left-liberal ideas as profoundly corrosive and destabilising”, the CCP has concluded that “the West’s will and ability to put up a fight are degrading over time”, and that “if it remains on its present course, the West could even withdraw from the world stage, collapse, or split apart”. As long as China believes this, it has no logical reason to ever bother fighting the United States over Taiwan at all.

TURBO!

As Turbo America is now the foreign policy prime directive, and as necessary reforms (e.g. dismantling the DEI Industrial Complex at home) are being pushed through to support this directive, Lyons argues that we are entering a truly dangerous period:

Yet this conclusion is precisely why we may now be entering a period of particular danger. Should Beijing assess that, under the Trump administration, America is successfully reversing its decline and entering an era of cultural, economic, technological, and military revitalisation, then its strategic calculus is liable to flip. Like Imperial Japan, which before Pearl Harbor became obsessed by the motto “if the sun is not rising, it is setting”, China might conclude that its window of opportunity could be lost. In that case, China’s incentives would suddenly invert: it would seem advantageous to attack sooner rather than later, before its relative strength vis-à-vis the United States declined.

Chinese industrial superiority, especially in the military realm:

This danger is accentuated by the fact that China currently has a number of significant advantages in a war over Taiwan. In fact, the United States has “had its ass handed to it for years” in most wargames, as David Ochmanek, a senior RAND Corporation analyst and former deputy assistant secretary of defence, memorably put it. In particular, China possesses huge material advantages, including massive stockpiles of anti-ship missiles that can strike US surface ships from long range. Meanwhile America would run out of critical munitions within an estimated three to seven days and be unable to replace them, given that it currently takes its manufacturers nearly two years to produce a single cruise missile.

In general, a lack of domestic manufacturing capacity is the West’s most damning weakness when it comes to modern warfare. Even after three years of war in Ukraine, the United States and Europe combined still cannot match the capacity of Russia to manufacture basic munitions like artillery shells. Russia currently produces some three million shells per year, compared with 1.2 million by the US and EU together.

Unlike during the Second World War, today the United States is no arsenal of democracy. As it stands, were it to find itself in an extended war of attrition with China, an industrial titan which manufacturers a full 29% of the world’s goods, the US appears likely to find itself at a shocking disadvantage. For one thing, China maintains an astonishing 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the US, as a leaked slide from an Office of Naval Intelligence briefing starkly exposed in 2023. China already possesses the world’s largest navy, with more than 370 vessels, compared with the US Navy’s 296.

Note: I have several ex-US Navy readers who have gone at length in emails to me where they highlight the current naval imbalance between the USA and China.

What “should” be done?

The situation is not hopeless, however. The United States and Taiwan don’t need to be able to dominate China militarily to prevent a war; they merely need to make an attack on the island appear so exceptionally costly to China that it never dares pull the trigger. This is what Elbridge Colby, Trump’s nominee for Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, calls a “strategy of denial”, and it can be accomplished by focusing squarely on mass-producing and deploying asymmetric weapons such as drones, missiles, and sea mines to turn Taiwan into a veritable porcupine.

This plan is sensibly straightforward, yet still somehow manages to rankle much of Washington, including people within the conservative coalition. On the one hand, it offends the hawkish neoconservative remnant of the Republican Party, because, as Colby has explained, taking Taiwan’s defence seriously — along with the reality of China’s strength and America’s limits — will necessarily mean prioritising Asia, requiring allies in Europe and the Middle East to provide more for their own defence instead of attempting to police the entire world ourselves.

And now for the million dollar question: Why should the USA make it impossible for China to take control over Taiwan?

On the other hand, the idea of defending Taiwan also causes a portion of the more non-interventionist MAGA base to bristle. Why, they ask, should America ever waste its blood and treasure to fight for an island on the other side of the world? This is a good question, but it has a good answer.

The stakes of a conflict over Taiwan are of an entirely different category than any of the wars of choice the United States has involved itself in this century. Although little Taiwan is a democracy facing down an authoritarian great power, defending an abstract ideal like democracy is not the real reason for the United States to intervene over Taiwan. Rather, the blunt truth is that if the United States fails to protect Taiwan (as it has done since 1949), this would, more than any other geopolitical catastrophe, demolish our credibility as a security provider, conclusively mark the decisive moment China achieved hegemony as the world’s new dominant superpower, and lead to the rapid collapse of the web of alliances and institutions charitably known as the “liberal international order” and less charitably as the American Empire.

It would deal a huge blow to US credibility, but I am not so certain that it would be the death knell of US Empire.

More:

And while many on the populist Right, myself included, are deeply sceptical of America’s sprawling empire and the vast costs of maintaining it, its sudden collapse would have swift and devastating consequences for the American nation at home. For one thing, our economy today is utterly dependent on running both a massive trade deficit of imports and gargantuan federal debts. The former depends on the latter, and both are completely dependent on the US Dollar maintaining its “exorbitant privilege” as the world’s reserve currency — a status it retains essentially only because the United States is the world’s top dog. A clear victory by China over Taiwan would end that privilege, with the world quickly reordering itself for a Chinese century. In the defeated United States, the result would be a simultaneous debt, financial, and economic crisis of a magnitude that would make the Great Depression seem mild. Americans’ standard of living might never recover.

The case for defending Taiwan is, therefore, firmly a matter of America’s national interest, not idealism. And to do so would be to maintain peace through strength — to avoid war through deterrence — not to seek forever wars abroad. The Trump administration should be prepared to make that case. Moreover, in so doing it can point out that all the steps necessary (bringing industry home, disciplining defence procurement, restoring military competence, and pushing allies to do more for their own defence) are fully in line with a broader America First agenda. This rearmament would be a campaign of nation-building at home, not abroad.

You may agree or disagree, you may even hope that China succeeds in its quest to bring Taiwan back into the fold (this is an international Substack, after all). But I will argue that this is THE best argument that I have come across with respect to US denial of Chinese designs on Taiwan.

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Greenland is where Donald Trump best exemplifies the proverbial “bull in a china shop”. To borrow from Shakespeare, there is a method to his madness.

COVID-19 taught us that many countries are too reliant on critical supply chains that are not fully (or mostly) under their own control, with China having an outsized presence in them. Manufacturing capacity is the most obvious example, but another one that is just as important is control over rare earth minerals. Greenland has these in abundance, and that explains have of the reason why Trump has set his sights on buying the island. Even though Greenland is a Danish possession (and therefore part of the US-led NATO alliance), and even if the USA already has a military presence on it, its full integration would allow for the complete denial of any Chinese investment on it.

Just as important from a strategic point of view, Greenland acts as an Arctic buffer from Russia, a country that has expanded its military presence in the freezing waters surrounding the island. The working assumption is that the Arctic will be transformed over time due to “Climate Change”, opening it up for settlement and exploitation of its natural resources.

A large segment of #MAGA has long been decried as “isolationists”, which is an unfair characterization, at least in my opinion. This cohort can be described as “Buchananite” (in honour of Patrick J. Buchanan) in that it wanted to focus on problems at home, and not act as the world’s policeman. They are not interested in empire, as empires bring home a lot of problems from abroad. Interestingly enough, Buchanan wrote about this very subject in 2019, describing Trump’s desire to purchase Greenland as fitting “into a venerable tradition of American expansionism”. Many of them will ask: “How is this America First?”

Most others are pulling out the smelling salts and doing their best Margaret Dumont imitations in protest of Trump’s Greenland Gambit. Here’s a recent example:

Trump is not the first US politician to try to buy Greenland. The earliest documented attempt to acquire the island goes back to 1868.

The last serious pre-Trump effort is that by President Harry S. Truman’s government in 1946. Trump’s renewed interest in Greenland thus stands in a long tradition of American efforts of territorial expansion.

Even without this historical background, Trump’s latest bid is less irrational today than it may have seemed back in 2019. On the one hand, Greenland is exceptionally rich in so-called “critical minerals”. According to a 2024 report in the Economist, the island has known deposits of 43 of 50 of these minerals. According to the US Department of Energy, these minerals are essential for “technologies that produce, transmit, store, and conserve energy” and have “a high risk of supply chain disruption”.

The latter certainly is a valid concern given that China – a key supplier of several critical minerals to global markets – has been increasing restrictions on its exports as part of an ongoing trade war with the US. Access to Greenland’s resources would give Washington more supply chain security and limit any leverage that China could to bring to bear.

Denying your opponent access to important resources explains a large chunk of the reasoning behind the continued US presence in the Middle East.

Greenland’s strategic location also makes it valuable to the US. An existing US base, Pituffik Space Base, is key to US missile early warning and defence and plays a critical role in space surveillance. Future expansion of the base could also enhance US capabilities to monitor Russian naval movements in the Arctic Ocean and the north Atlantic.

US sovereignty over Greenland, if Trump’s deal comes to pass, would also effectively forestall any moves by rivals, especially China, to get a foothold on the island. This may be less of a concern if Greenland remains part of Nato member Denmark which has kept the island economically afloat with an annual grant of around US$500 million (£407 million).

The author explains how Trump’s aims do have credibility:

Greenland’s independence – support for which has been steadily growing – could open the door to more, and less regulated, foreign investment. In this case, China is seen as particularly keen to step in should the opportunity arise.

Add to that growing security cooperation between Russia and China and the fact that Russia has generally become more militarily aggressive, and Trump’s case looks yet more credible. Nor is he the only one to have raised the alarm bells: Canada, Denmark and Norway have all recently pushed back against an increasing Russian and Chinese footprint in the Arctic.

So, the problem with Trump’s proposal is not that it is based on a flawed diagnosis of the underlying issue it tries to address. Growing Russian and Chinese influence in the Arctic region in general is a security problem at a time of rising geopolitical rivalry. In this context, Greenland undeniably poses a particular and significant security vulnerability for the United States.

Where the author thinks that Trump is wrong in his overbearing approach:

Rather than strengthening US security, Trump is arguably effectively weakening it by, yet again, undermining the western alliance. Not only does the irony of doing so in the north Atlantic appear to be lost on Trump. But it also seems that there is an even more fundamental problem at work here in that this kind of 19th century-style territorial expansionism reflects Trump’s isolationist impulses.

“Incorporating” Greenland into the US would likely insulate Washington from the disruption of critical mineral supply chains and keep Russia and China at bay. And signalling that he will do it whatever the cost is an indication that, beyond the kind of bluster and bombast that is normally associated with Trump, his approach to foreign policy will quickly do away with any gloves.

Rather than investing in strengthening security cooperation with Denmark and the rest of its Nato and European allies to face down Russia and China in the Arctic and beyond, Trump and his team may well think that the US can get away with this. Given that what is at stake here are relations with the US’s hitherto closest allies, this is an enormous, and unwarranted, gamble.

No great power in history has been able to go it alone forever – and even taking possession of Greenland, by hook or by crook, is unlikely to change this.

Personally, I believe that this has much to do with Trump putting US allies on notice, demanding that they ramp up military spending as the Americans seek to shift their attention to the Far East in order to contain China.

How much of it is bluster? How much of Trump’s push to purchase Greenland is real?

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One of the many themes of this Substack is how NGOs are end-runs around democracy, in that big money (often from the government!) will fund small group to have outsized influence on the political process at home and especially abroad. Think tanks fall within this realm. How many times have you come across names like The German Marshall Fund, The Atlantic Council, RAND, American Enterprise Institute, etc.? Too many times to count. The question that most springs to mind when it comes to think tanks is: “Who funds them?”

The Quincy Institute has done us all a huge favour by publishing a report on leading US think tanks and their funding. They have even created a tracker for researchers such as myself to track who is funding which think tank. What this report tells us is that think tank funding is relatively cheap as it produces a lot of bang for the buck when it comes to influence on US foreign policy. It also tells us that foreign governments are key funders, and that funding is often opaque.

Executive Summary:

This brief provides a detailed analysis of a first-of-its-kind, publicly available repository of U.S. think tank funding — www.thinktankfundingtracker.org. The repository tracks funding from foreign governments, the U.S. government, and Pentagon contractors to the top 50 think tanks in the United States over the past five years. It serves as a vital research guide for anyone wishing to learn more about the funding sources of prominent U.S. think tanks.

The repository gives a five-point transparency score to each of the top 50 think tanks in the U.S., a scale created by the authors based on five binary questions. Based on this criteria, nine of the top 50 think tanks (18 percent) are fully transparent, while 23 think tanks (46 percent) are partially transparent. Most concerning, the remaining 18 think tanks (36 percent) are “dark money” think tanks, entirely opaque in their funding without revealing donors.

In the past five years, foreign governments and foreign government-owned entities donated more than $110 million to the top 50 think tanks in the United States. The most generous donor countries were the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and Qatar, which contributed $16.7 million, $15.5 million, and $9.1 million to U.S. think tanks, respectively. The Atlantic Council, Brookings Institution, and German Marshall Fund received the most money from foreign governments since 2019: $20.8 million, $17.1 million, and $16.1 million, respectively.

In that same period, the top 100 defense companies have contributed more than $34.7 million to the top 50 think tanks. The top donors include Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Mitsubishi, which provided $5.6 million, $2.6 million, and $2.1 million, respectively, to the tracked think tanks between 2019 and 2023. The Atlantic Council, Center for a New American Security, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies were the top recipients of Pentagon contractor money: $10.2 million, $6.6 million, and $4.1 million, respectively.

The U.S. government has directly given at least $1.49 billion to American think tanks since 2019. However, the vast majority of this funding — $1.4 billion — goes to the Rand Corporation, which works directly for the U.S. government.

While think tanks exist to produce independent analysis, the prevalence of special interest funding raises questions of intellectual freedom, self-censorship, and perspective filtering. This is compounded by instances in which individual researchers simultaneously hold positions at a think tank and a given foreign government or corporation, a clear potential conflict of interest.

Independent analysis? Or influence buying?

Some graphics from the report:

The Atlantic Council is the big one:

Foreign Government Donors (from what is publicly available):

I’ll share one more:

Actually, one very last one:

“Why think tank funding matters”:

Think tanks have played, and continue to play, an important role in the creation of U.S. foreign policy. Originally formed in response to a need to overhaul machine politics, think tanks offered analysis and expertise to policymakers. Robert Brookings, the businessman who founded the Brookings Institution, claimed his new policy institute was “the first private organization devoted to the fact-based study of national public policy.”²⁶Others, including the Hoover Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations, followed suit. As historian Stephen Wertheim documents in his book, Tomorrow the World, the Council on Foreign Relations played a crucial role in planning for the United States to lead a new international order after World War II.²⁷Brookings, meanwhile, helped design the Marshall Plan.²⁸Later, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara relied heavily on the RAND Corporation and their “whiz kids” to inform the statistics-based logic and strategy of the Vietnam War. There have always been prevailing incentive structures, but think tank research was more academic and reliant on longer-term funding, often from the U.S. government itself. For many decades, this was the model for how most think tanks operated in the United States.

Today, the landscape is quite different. Starting in the 1970s and 1980s, the number of think tanks ballooned as they became more politically active and their funding models shifted toward short-term sources.²⁹Special interests dominate think tank donor rolls today, and many think tanks even openly advertise the influence that foreign governments and private corporations can gain through sponsorship programs. Kjølv Egeland and Benoît Pelopidas, the authors of a study of think tanks, wrote that “the most generous funders exercise significant influence on the evolution of the foreign policy marketplace of ideas by affecting which questions are asked and which expert milieus are enabled to thrive.”³⁰If think tanks are reliant on Pentagon contractors and there is no counterbalancing voice, it can lead to an entire sector singing in chorus for things that will benefit Pentagon contractors — most notably, ever-increasing defense budgets and foreign conflicts.

As two researchers, Campbell Craig and Jan Ruzicka, put it in a 2022 study on the institutions that support nuclear weapons, those that “support the extant nuclear order enjoy funding, political support, and policy relevance; those who deviate from it do not,” which suppresses the rise of alternative ideas to the status quo.³¹In Egeland and Pelopidas’ follow-up study, all 45 think tanks in their sample acknowledged funding from either nuclear defense contractors or governments with an interest in the continued deployment of nuclear weapons and found that “such stakeholder funding has real effects on intellectual freedom.” Though impossible to quantify exactly, understanding these relationships between think tanks and their donors matters.³²

Egeland and Pelopidas, through interviews with dozens of current and former think tank staff, as well as grant managers, found compelling evidence that funding can lead to self-censorship and donor-directed censorship in some cases.³³“Self-censorship is the greatest threat to our democracies in the West. A lot of think tank experts posture as experts with complete academic freedom — this is absolutely not the case,” one think tank scholar explained to the authors of the study. A grant manager who provides funding to think tanks explained how the process works: “The recipient knows they might not be funded next time around if they’re very disloyal.” A former think tank analyst went even further, telling Egeland and Pelopidas: “what we were producing was not research, it was a kind of propaganda.” Given the scathing commentary from interviewees, the conclusion of this analysis is quite blunt: “Scholars, media organizations, and members of the public should be sensitized to the conflicts of interest shaping foreign policy analysis generally and nuclear policy analysis specifically.”³⁴

If think tanks were doing what they were intended to do in the first place, there would be no issue. The conflicts of interest that have arisen in recent decades make it a very, very important matter today.

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I was halfway through an essay on the LA wildfires before closing the window and discarding the content. I felt that I couldn’t do justice to the subject and that many others would be better suited to expound on the disaster. I personally know three people from Altadena who lost their homes to the inferno. How could I write about it in an effective manner? I decided that I couldn’t.

Instead, I’m sharing this short essay from Irish writer (and LA resident) Colm Tóibín:

On Tuesday evening, houses in Altadena, a more varied community than Pacific Palisades, a place where many artists and writers live, began to burn, including the house of a close friend. For the fire to come down to Highland Park from Altadena, it would have to cross the 134, which leads to the 210. There was no sign on Tuesday night that it was doing so, but the area where the fire was raging was not that far from here. I would think nothing of going to Altadena in the normal course of events. Why should it not come here? The wind was strong enough to take embers a few miles. We went for a walk and saw fires burning in the distance.

What was strange as I was going to bed was that the water in the narrow swimming pool in the backyard was churning, as though the wind had somehow got underneath it. By Wednesday morning, the surface water was fully coated with grit and soot and ashes.

At seven in the morning on Wednesday my phone made an alarming sound. A message came that we were to evacuate now. I had been fast asleep just a second before. Now it was all go. I ran around the house. If only I had pumped up the wheels of the bicycles – if only – we could go zooming down the hill like heroes! The problem was that my boyfriend’s phone was silent on the question of evacuation. Now he checked all the news outlets and saw that the evacuation zone was still about two miles away.

By this time, I was already making plans. One of them included a scenario of me in the middle of the swimming pool, not drowning or waving, just screaming as I fended off the fire and smoke around me. I have no idea why this image involved adding a decade and a half to my age and switching gender, but I was a very old lady in the pool, much like the brave and relentless Barbara Frietchie.

and

As the day went on, we could smell the fire. And the light seemed brighter, as though it was lit for a film. Later, a dense greyness appeared to the north. No further order came to evacuate. We went to the supermarket, where things were normal. The mail came, a little bit late, but it came. A great number of houses lost electricity, but we still had power.

A new fire started in Hollywood. It might have looked as though we were now surrounded on three sides by fires, but it didn’t feel like that. Pacific Palisades and Santa Monica were far away. The worry, however, was that the Altadena fire would spread further or that a little autonomous fire would start around here in some hilly scrubland and, with the help of a new wind, make its way down the dry hill towards us, wooden-framed house by wooden-framed house, shrubs and garden trees, and then everything we own.

Click here to read it in its entirety.

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We end this weekend’s SCR with an attack on H.G. Wells, by the great Scott Locklin:

HG Wells is one of those figures who loomed large over my childhood. His stuff was popular with previous generations: he was given the title of prophetic by my grandparents, a fair achievement in early marketing and public relations. This is intensely silly as most of his science fiction was ridiculous fairy story tier stuff, and his near future “prophetic” stuff was along the lines of “there will be a war with Hitler in Europe and airplanes will be important.” Something blindingly obvious to anybody in 1933. A lot of his work was made into movies in the 1950s, some of which are quite charming; Time Machine, Earth to the Moon and War of the Worlds. These films from that era are better than the books. The reason they’re so much better: they are only very loose adaptations. Most of the reason they succeed as science fiction films is due to the work of the screenwriters; men like Nigel Kneale (unsung genius; everything he did was good), David Duncan and Barre Lyndon. Also producer-director George Pal. If Wells had written them, nobody would have seen them.

I recently rewatched “Shape of things to come” 1936 edition. It’s a reasonably close adaptation of his book of the same name: he wrote the screenplay. It is touted by various kinds of art-poufs as being important as a film somehow. It is insanely bad. This was supposed to be muh hard science, yet people are running around with ridiculous capes and useless giant helmets. The movie is a series of speeches given by the same couple of actors, portraying different characters and their descendants through history. The connecting material is 1935 era special effects set pieces. There’s no dramatic arc. The smarty pants guy makes smug remarks about war, the dorky guy makes dumb remarks about war, then the same actors do it again in a post apocalyptic future, then again in their totalitarian “utopia.” Some “bad” man who hates progress (played by post apocalyptic warlord actor) gives a speech about how we should stop all this progress nonsense, foments a riot, then they shoot a couple of kids into space in a big gun, wiping out the evil rioters. Then the father of one of the kids (a totalitarian Klaus Schwab dictator who probably wants you to eat the bugs) gives a rousing speech about how progress is good, actually. I wanted to kill all the characters in this movie. I watched it as a kid, figuring it would be like all the cool 50s HG Wells movies, but it wasn’t: those took enough liberties with Wells stories to make them halfway decent. This was the pure, unadulterated Wells, and it sucked.

Click here to read the rest.

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Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

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When Vladimir Putin first walked through those golden doors in an act that signaled the beginning of his presidency, my attitudes towards Russia were very, very different from what they are today. Not only did I inherit a suspicion of all things Russian thanks to my ethnicity, I also was instantly dismissive of Putin because he was a product of the KGB. I had applauded the dissolution of the Soviet Union when it took place, and even supported the Chechens in their first war against Moscow (this was before their fight had become Islamicized). I. like many others, felt that Russia was a dangerous threat to Europe because it had become so weak and desperate, fully expecting that it would lash out in response.

My priors were instantly tested when his leadership won the Second Chechen War by the end of April 2000, four months after he had entered office. This was not the embarrassing, sclerotic, Russian Army of the First Chechen War. “Not bad”, I thought to myself. Putin had defeated an Islamist insurgency, and quite thoroughly too.

Around the same time, Putin publicly met with the seven most powerful oligarchs of Russia at the time, and offered them the famous deal whereby the state would permit them to retain their ill-gotten wealth if they kept out of politics. Of those seven, one immediately fled to Spain, four took the deal, and two decided to challenge Putin, one of them being his former sponsor, Boris Berezovsky. Putin followed through on his threats, forcing Boris to flee into exile in the UK, and arresting Mikhail Khodorkovsky. I was very impressed.

What led me to finally change my mind was Russia’s refusal to join the US-led alliance that invaded Iraq in 2003. Instead, Putin teamed up with Germany’s Gerhard Schroeder and France’s Jacques Chirac to reject participation in a war without justification, one that would only serve to be a disaster for Iraq and the wider region, and that would benefit many dangerous forces, Islamic extremists being one of the main ones. The short period between 9/11 and the US invasion of Iraq was a critical one for my political development, as I immediately saw just how cynically the USA would use 9/11 for its own purposes. Putin’s Russia was fighting Islamic extremism, while the USA was aiding and abetting it. This refusal to go along with Washington plus the examples above are what led me to begin to admire Vladimir Putin.

I am not Russian, I do not want to be Russian, I don’t even want Russia in the EU (it’s far too big and too foreign). However, I cannot but admire the man and his efforts to resurrect Russia from the disastrous Yeltsin era. Any objective analysis of his time in office has to conclude that he has done a very good job with respect to politics, society, economy, and even defense (especially when you factor into it how the USA has been chipping away at Russia the entire time).

Ben Aris reflects on 25 years of Volodya, and he too can’t help but possess a grudging admiration from the man, in his own way:

I went to his very first state of the nation speech where he put demographics at the top of the policy priority list and set the goal of “catching up with Portugal as the top economic priority. Today Russia is the fourth largest economy in the world in adjusted terms, ahead of Germany and recently overhauled Japan as well. Out of the top five biggest economies in the world three are BRICS nations (China, US, India, Russia, Japan).

And he put his money where his mouth is by hiring German Gref, now the head of Sberbank, as an economic guru who launched the “Gref Plan” to implement a radical economic reform plan. It was a heady time. Gref was a total outsider and had no power of his own, yet thanks to Putin’s personal backing he pushed through radical change after radical change that has evolved into today’s National Projects 2.1 that is still a top domestic policy initiative.

The heavy irony is that Putin’s ambition is not to recreate the Soviet Union, but, as he recently laid out in great detail in his Valdai speech, to Make Russia Great Again.

His quote about “the greatest tragedy of the 20^th century was the fall of the Soviet Union” is widely abused as the rest of that quote, never mentioned, is “… for Russians who found themselves trapped in “foreign” countries…” ie living in the newly independent 15 republics created in December 1991.

Putin is probably second only to whichever Pope is currently enthroned in St. Peter’s and to Donald Trump in terms of purposeful media misuse of his words.

Early European dreams:

And Europe was up for a partnership with Russia in general and Putin in particular – until Russia started booming in the second decade of this century.

Putin has always seen the best way to make Russia great is through partnership with Europe. Former First Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich told me this personally: “China is too far away, and they are too different from us. Russia is a European country. Our future is with Europe.”

It is also widely forgotten that Putin’s first foreign trip as president was to the UK, where he stood on the floor of the House of Commons and announced a 50:50 joint venture with BP and the privately owned Russian oil company TNK. This was not a 51:49 joint venture, but an unheard of even split 50:50 joint venture – in other words, a true partnership. Tony Blair jumped at the deal and BP made an absolute mint over the next two decades.

Putin then went on to Brussels where he met with Mario Draghi, then head of the EU, and asked to join the EU. He was told “no.” Russia is simply too big and would have swamped the EU institutions. Putin accepted that, so he went on to do the next best thing: he started to build the Eurasian Economic Union (EUU).

I interviewed the architect of the EEU several years later, who told me it was specifically designed to mirror the EU (unlike its precursor, the Customs Union), using exactly the same rule book, so that it could easily integrate with the EU and create a single market “from Lisbon to Vladivostok” - a phrase much loved by Putin for many years.

He even asked to join Nato, which was met with a half measure: the Russia-Nato council.

Much of this is either forgotten, ignored, and hand-waved away, as these overtures to the West complicate the narrative in which Putin is an imperialist bent on domination.

Here’s something new even for me: I was unaware of this failed Opel deal:

But of course, it went wrong most obviously from the 2014 annexation of the Crimea. In the run up to the annexation, the EU blocked many of Russia’s attempts to create other partnerships like BP-TNK that Putin pursued, like buying shares in EADS (Airbus) in an attempt to get a seat on board to rescue Aeroflot and Russia’s aviation industry, or its attempt to buy the bankrupt Opel carmaker to rescue AvtoVaz. That deal was blocked by the US to prevent the technology transfer to Russia that would have created a European automotive powerhouse. Putin, who had personally brokered the Opel deal with former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, was visibly furious when Washington put the kybosh on it. And that is not to mention Russia’s 18-year-long WTO accession saga that finally ended in 2012 – probably the high water mark in East-West relations, when the long-sought “partnership” looked like it might work. Russia made a lot of significant concessions to get into the WTO, like basically sacrificing its entire pork production business to European imports.

Disillusionment:

Putin became disillusioned as it became clearer and clearer that the EU would never accept Russia as a partner. The Maidan revolution in Ukraine in 2014 crystalised these fears. Putin came to the conclusion that the West was actively afraid of Russia’s competition in things like aviation and automotive and actively trying to hobble Russia’s development, but at the same time the EU was happily helping itself to Russia’s cornucopia of raw materials and giant consumer market, the largest in Europe.

These tensions came to a head when EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell came to Moscow in 2021 to broker a deal and repair relations with an increasingly brittle Kremlin. He suggested trade should be separated from politics – a compromise. But it was too late. Borrell was met by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov who humiliated the EU diplomat by having three EU diplomats expelled while the two men were sitting across the table from each other and then followed up with the “new rules of the game” speech delivered in February 2021 at a joint press conference. Lavrov’s main point was: Russia would no longer tolerate the West doing business with one hand and applying sanctions and interfering with Russian domestic policy with the other. With this speech, Putin’s patience with the West had run out and the speech was the first shot fired in what would become the Ukraine war a year later.

Putin’s dream of a single market from Lisbon to Vladivostok was dead. Putin never wanted to partner with China – Russians remain as afraid of China as the West is – but given the failure of building a European partnership, the Chinese option is the obvious alternative. By rejecting Putin’s overtures to build real working relations and engaging with Russia, albeit a difficult and daunting prospect, the upshot has been to drive Moscow into Beijing’s arms, which I suspect will prove to be a major geopolitical blunder in the long-term.

Economic revival:

The Western-advocated “shock theory” introduced by Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar inflicted almost a decade of misery and an early grave for tens of millions of men. I arrived in Russia in 1993 just after the price liberations were put in place and inflation was running at 1,400% a year – 4% a day. The economic crash was an order of magnitude worse than anywhere else in the former Warsaw Bloc, as detailed by bne IntelliNews’ despair index, and the payment system collapsed so completely that Russia became a barter economy as its money became meaningless – the so-called virtual economy, made famous by academics Barry Ickes and Clifford Gaddy – again something that is rarely mentioned these days.

Putin quickly fixed all these problems, starting with a complete overhaul of the labour code that slashed Soviet bureaucracy and the introduction of a flat tax regime that unfettered business. The tax rates – the lowest in Europe – have remained untouched for almost all of Putin’s tenure. It has only just been amended in the last few months to finally introduce the beginnings of progressive taxes 25 years later.

The effects of these reforms were stunning. Russia was still reeling from the default and devaluation on August 13, 1998 when Putin took over at the start of 2000. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) was predicting that Russia’s economy would spend years in recession at the time; GDP expanded by 10% that year in a record that has never been matched. That marked the start of a totally unexpected decade-long boom that transformed everyone’s lives.

“At the time the average per capita income in the US was $30,000. If you took that as the baseline for the equivalent incomes in Russia in 2000, then by 2008 the equivalent per capita incomes in Russia were $600,000 a year,” a Russian friend explained to me to describe what the change felt like.

Western critics of Putin fail to judge him by Russian standards, instead insisting on measuring him by their own standards, ones that are completely foreign to Russia and Russians. This goes a long way in explaining why so many of them fail to grasp his popularity, and the refusal on the part of Russians to risk liberalization, as they fear it could lead to a return to the disastrous 90s.

Aris argues that the economic transformation is the basis of Putin’s popularity, and I can’t help but agree. Here are some numbers:

Restoring sovereignty and national pride:

Moreover, Putin's job of making sure there is no alternative has been made easier by the fact that the opposition has remained fissiparous and ineffective. The two opposition politicians that might have replaced Putin – Boris Nemtsov and Alexey Navalny – were both murdered. But even if they had been allowed to run for office, most Russians see both as untested and unqualified to run the country. The irony of Russian elections is Putin would probably still win even if they were free and fair. When criticised by a reporter as Putin took office for the fourth time, he shot back: “And how many terms has Merkel served? Four, isn’t it?” She had just been re-elected for a fourth time two months earlier.

As for the Ukrainian war, Russian surveys conducted in 2022 universally found that Russians thought that going to war with their “brothers” in Ukraine was a stupid idea and were very uncomfortable with the idea of Russian troops invading Ukraine. However, since then similar surveys have found that once the war started, and as it is universally seen as a war with Nato, which is supplying most of Ukraine’s weapons and half its money, Russia needs to win.

That is another thing that Putin gifted Russia with: the restoration of the famous Russian national pride after the humiliation of losing its superpower status following Yeltsin’s dissolution of the Soviet Union – another reason why Yeltsin is so hated in modern Russia. Today patriotism is at an all-time high.

It obviously hasn’t been all wins for Russia over the course of the past quarter-century, but by an objective analysis one must conclude that Vladimir Putin has done one hell of a job turning his country around.

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We’re only days away from the Inauguration and everybody is waiting to see if Trump has learned anything from his first go at being President of the United States of America.

Despite having his first termed sabotaged by all the forces arrayed against him, optimism remains high that he indeed did learn something last time, and that he will be able to implement at least some of the agenda items that propelled him into office. Curiously, the opposition this time around appears to be rather muted, especially when compared to 2017. Did they exhaust themselves? Or have they entered acceptance mode? Time will tell.

The expectations for Trump47 are plenty, and here are a few of the key ones:

1. immigration reform/mass deportation of illegals

2. de-regulation to permit certain business sectors to “let rip”

3. a peace deal to end the fighting in Ukraine

4. a more transactional approach to foreign policy

These are just four examples, but there is another one that I wish to highlight: the desire for a certain amount of revenge against the previous regime and the establishment overall. Some Trump supporters want vengeance, and expect it as well. Whether it be for lawfare, for discrimination due to “Wokeness”, etc., the desire for settling scores among #MAGA supporters is not be underestimated.

More sober minds would be content with just the truth of what has gone on all these years, one of these minds being Peter Thiel:

In 2016, President Barack Obama told his staff that Donald Trump’s election victory was “not the apocalypse”. By any definition, he was correct. But understood in the original sense of the Greek word apokálypsis, meaning “unveiling”, Obama could not give the same reassurance in 2025. Trump’s return to the White House augurs the apokálypsis of the ancien regime’s secrets. The new administration’s revelations need not justify vengeance — reconstruction can go hand in hand with reconciliation. But for reconciliation to take place, there must first be truth.

The apokálypsis is the most peaceful means of resolving the old guard’s war on the internet, a war the internet won. My friend and colleague Eric Weinstein calls the pre-internet custodians of secrets the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC) — the media organisations, bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs that traditionally delimited public conversation. In hindsight, the internet had already begun our liberation from the DISC prison upon the prison death of financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2019. Almost half of Americans polled that year mistrusted the official story that he died by suicide, suggesting that DISC had lost total control of the narrative.

The Ancien Regime vs. The Internet is an interesting framing. It reminds me of a Mexican-American guy from California who I knew years ago and who summed up Trump’s 2016 shock victory as “the revolt of the newspaper comments section”.

We cannot wait six decades, however, to end the lockdown on a free discussion about Covid-19. In subpoenaed emails from Anthony Fauci’s senior adviser David Morens, we learnt that National Institutes of Health apparatchiks hid their correspondence from Freedom of Information Act scrutiny. “Nothing,” wrote Boccaccio in his medieval plague epic The Decameron, “is so indecent that it cannot be said to another person if the proper words are used to convey it.”

In that spirit, Morens and former chief US medical adviser Fauci will have the chance to share some indecent facts about our own recent plague. Did they suspect that Covid spawned from US taxpayer-funded research, or an adjacent Chinese military programme? Why did we fund the work of EcoHealth Alliance, which sent researchers into remote Chinese caves to extract novel coronaviruses? Is “gain of function” research a byword for a bioweapons programme? And how did our government stop the spread of such questions on social media?

Now that the dust has settled, I think that it is safe to conclude that nothing in recent memory has radicalized so many “normies” as what western governments put their own citizens through during the COVID era. I can’t recall anything that has made so many non-political or politically apathetic people turn very political.

Personally, I will never, ever forget this:

This next excerpt is very interesting because I am certain that many of you share the same suspicions that I share with Peter Thiel:

Our First Amendment frames the rules of engagement for domestic fights over free speech, but the global reach of the internet tempts its adversaries into a global war. Can we believe that a Brazilian judge banned X without American backing, in a tragicomic perversion of the Monroe Doctrine? Were we complicit in Australia’s recent legislation requiring age verification for social media users, the beginning of the end of internet anonymity? Did we muster up even two minutes’ criticism of the UK, which has arrested hundreds of people a year for online speech triggering, among other things, “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”? We may expect no better from Orwellian dictatorships in East Asia and Eurasia, but we must support a free internet in Oceania.

In light of the Twitter Files, I certainly cannot exclude the possibility that US diplomacy played a hand in the Brazilian affair. After all, the Americans do have a long history of laundering foreign policy via willing partners (rendition, the Steele Dossier, torture in Syria, etc.).

More:

Darker questions still emerge in these dusky final weeks of our interregnum. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently suggested on Joe Rogan’s podcast that the Biden administration debanked crypto entrepreneurs. How closely does our financial system resemble a social credit system? Were an IRS contractor’s illegal leaks of Trump’s tax records anomalous, or should Americans assume their right to financial privacy hinges on their politics? And can one speak of a right to privacy at all when Congress conserves Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, under which the FBI conducts tens of thousands of warrantless searches of Americans’ communications?

What Thiel is proposing is for the ancien regime to come clean in order to clean the slate and begin anew:

South Africa confronted its apartheid history with a formal commission, but answering the questions above with piecemeal declassifications would befit both Trump’s chaotic style and our internet world, which processes and propagates short packets of information. The first Trump administration shied away from declassifications because it still believed in the rightwing deep state of an Oliver Stone movie. This belief has faded.

Our ancien regime, like the aristocracy of pre-revolutionary France, thought the party would never end. 2016 shook their historicist faith in the arc of the moral universe but by 2020 they hoped to write Trump off as an aberration. In retrospect, 2020 was the aberration, the rearguard action of a struggling regime and its struldbrugg ruler. There will be no reactionary restoration of the pre-internet past.

The future demands fresh and strange ideas. New ideas might have saved the old regime, which barely acknowledged, let alone answered, our deepest questions — the causes of the 50-year slowdown in scientific and technological progress in the US, the racket of crescendoing real estate prices, and the explosion of public debt.

Perhaps an exceptional country could have continued to ignore such questions, but as Trump understood in 2016, America is not an exceptional country. It is no longer even a great one.

Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and many others have followed Thiel’s lead in rejecting the Democrats and their vision for America. During the first Trump term, Big Tech was bullied by establishment and media into doing quite a lot of the dirty work for them, with social media censorship being the most obvious example. This time around, Big Tech is firmly in Trump’s corner. These are all self-interested parties, so proceed in caution and don’t give them the benefit of the doubt. Make them earn your trust.

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It is my contention that all of us who live in the West are “default liberals”, with certain differences between groupings that fall within the larger liberal framework. This is the result of having our post-war order built upon the defeat of Nazi Germany+the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the USA as the leading power.

It is very difficult to imagine any of our countries turning against liberalism in real terms towards actual authoritarianism, even if the USA would permit such an experiment to take place. Elections, political parties, open debate (for the most part), etc., all seem so natural to us. We would be like fish out of water if any of these necessary elements of liberalism were denied to us. The emphasis on individual human rights in our constitutions and laws only cements its assumed permanence in our minds. On the other hand, never say “never”.

Personally, I think that the reports of the death of liberalism are greatly exaggerated, to paraphrase Twain’s famous line. All parties in the West with any popularity or representation in their respective legislative assemblies fall within the liberal democratic framework, despite what loud voices in media, politics, and culture will have you believe. Trump is a 90s Clinton Democrat, and his cabinet is shaping up to be a coalition between conservatives (liberals) and disaffected liberals (also liberals). Germany’s AfD is not the NSDAP, nor is it even “far right”. These populists are all liberals to one degree or another, and they are all seeking to trim back some of the recent excesses of a more exuberant liberalism that veered off course into semi-authoritarianism aka “illiberalism”.

Aris Roussinos is of a different opinion than mine (which is why I will yell at him on the phone later this evening):

This year’s surrender of the crown has proved smoother than the contested handovers of 2016 and 2020: this time, neither side has summoned up their mobs. Broken, dejected, for the first time self-doubting, America’s liberal establishment has come to accept the extinction of its political order. Had they taken their project — or their right to eternal rule — as seriously as they claimed to, no doubt they would have chosen stronger candidates than Joe Biden and Kamala Harris: that they could not do so itself speaks of a certain exhaustion. Beyond the rhetoric, at least as messianic and civilisational in scope as anything the further reaches of the Right could dream up, Left-liberalism — the last of the great 20th-century ideologies — possessed very little of substance to fight for. Bereft of ideas and confidence, American liberalism died from the head down: all that is left of it is an entrenched caste of bureaucrats to be weeded out and replaced. The old order is dead: but what is struggling to be born?

Aris is correct in describing the outgoing regime as having exhausted itself, no longer able to muster up the energy to do in 2025 what it did from 2017 to 2021. Yet I think that his definition (in this case) of liberalism is far too narrow. The incoming regime largely wants a return to the liberalism of the pre-Obama era. This is not a revolution.

For a time, in the 2010s, confused and frightened liberals cycled through a series of personality cults, latching onto populist avatars of its own — Trudeau, Merkel, Ardern, Macron – who promised, like King Arthur against the invading Saxons, to hold back the waves of history for a time at least. Yet all of these are now politically dead, having achieved little but accelerating the incoming power of the waves that would wash them away: in Macron’s case, characteristically the most interesting, seemingly by design. No doubt, this cult of personality took root due to the absence of serious policy: it is an obvious fact of our present political moment that anyone concerned with shaping the world they actually live in can only now engage with “the Right,” simply because “the Left” is both intellectually and politically defunct. We see this in the intellectual Left’s new engagement, part fearful but increasingly curious in its own right, with the ferment of ideas on the Right. What is the Left’s project, what are its big ideas now it has broken its political and intellectual power through its catastrophic self-derailment into identity politics? It is a difficult question to answer, but also a pointless one: it simply doesn’t matter, and is unlikely to for the next few decades at least. One might as well ask what is next for Baathism.

My view is different than Aris’ here: this liberal faction overplayed its hand, and now has to retrench for a bit….but its gains are undeniable, with most almost certainly impossible to rollback (think “gay marriage”). These victories are being consolidated despite their electoral loss.

Yet even still, “the Right” is, conceptually, an absolute mess. Much of what is novel in it is genuinely harmful, and presents huge risks of even worse political futures than those given to us by millenarian Liberalism. As Yeats saw it at a similar time of political flux, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” If it possesses any coherent, unifying purpose, the new Right consists merely of rolling back the liberal innovations of the Sixties onwards: and perhaps that is progress enough. Much of Trump’s initial appeal was that of the boy in the Emperor’s New Clothes, mockingly pointing out the nakedness of the West’s rulers. Had they taken the critique seriously — of their radical identity politics of race and gender, of their programme of economic self-destruction through a unilateral energy transition, of their commitment to an imaginary borderless Utopia in which the rest of the world dreams only of achieving its historic destiny as Western liberals — perhaps the destruction of their order would not be so total. The dying liberal order chose suicide through want not just of self-reflection but of pragmatism. And indeed, perhaps if the incoming order has a single defining characteristic, it is pragmatism rather than any coherent replacement ideology. Perhaps it is not just the great 20th century ideologies — fascism, communism, postwar liberalism — that are dead, but any all-consuming ideology at all.

Aris correctly points out that much of what has led to the rejection of the Democrats (and to left-liberals elsewhere) lacks real coherency and vision, which bodes ill for the future of these new rejectionist regimes. Owning the libs is not policy, nor is it even remotely close to good governance.

The 20th century liberal democratic model is going the same way as the great 20th century totalitarianisms it defined itself against. Yet — as reflected in liberal discourse where the assumption made is that politics is a binary choice between liberalism and fascism — liberals are still trapped in the 20th century, fighting ghosts, even as the world has already moved on. Applied to the international order, then, the conclusion — we must hope — of the war in Syria is a perfect example of this conceptual shift. Just a few years ago, the operating assumption that a stable conclusion to the Syrian war was really something within the West’s (which means America’s) power to bring. Instead, we have witnessed the opposite: rebel victory was brought by a group the West shuns, under US terror sanctions for perfectly valid reasons. The West’s purported end state in Syria, a rebel victory, was brought about by the West walking away from the problem, and conceding strategic defeat. Yet the relatively bloodless form of political transition witnessed in the past few weeks was also brought by the seeming strategic victors — the supposed resistance axis of Iran, Russia and Hezbollah — making the pragmatic decision to withdraw support from Assad, confident that they could maintain their interests in the new order.

I reject this assessment as I cannot countenance the notion that the Americans had nothing to do with the recent HTS victory in Syria. Turkey did much of the heavy lifting, but it was the sanctions regime alongside the distraction of Iran and Hezbollah that permitted the very weak Ba’athist government to collapse in on itself so rapidly. This, to me at least, signals a big victory for the Americans, and for their system. It’s clearly an embarrassment to the Russians, and a significant loss for Iran, both of whom are revisionist powers.

Aris has much more to say about his contention that liberalism is on the ropes than I have shared with you here, so click this link to read it in its entirety.

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British comic Stewart Lee is by far my favourite standup comedian these days. He has a flair for the absurd and a style that I really, really enjoy. His politics are 180 degrees from mine, a fact that doesn’t bother me when I watch one of his performances.

“Stu” is a very, very politically correct person, and proud as hell to be one. He calls it “being empathetic”, as many of them tend to do. And he is correct when he points out just how idiotic, boorish, and predictable many “anti-woke” types tend to be. Despite this, there is room for criticism of Stu, something that is more than willing to deliver:

It would be convenient for me, as the author of a critical piece about the comedian Stewart Lee, to say that he isn’t funny. It would be convenient for Stewart Lee, as the subject of a piece in The Critic, to be described as being unfunny. Unfortunately for both of us, Stewart Lee is very funny — one of the few great stand-up comedians of our time.

One of his funnier qualities has been his disdain for many of his peers. His unfavourable comparison of Ben Elton to Osama bin Laden, a man who “has at least lived his life according to a consistent set of ethical principles”, is a classic. His contempt for the work of Russell Howard — “observational comedy from a Victorian mental hospital” — is glorious.

On “Anti-Woke” comedians:

Another of Lee’s targets is “anti-woke” comedy. Frankly, he makes some good points. A lot of “anti-woke” comedy, as I’ve written before, is absolute trash — revelling in its supposed provocative status without being funny. Jerry Seinfeld complained about “P.C. crap” in comedy this year while writing and starring in Unfrosted — a film that was about as funny as footage from 9/11.

But Lee goes too far. He’s right that some comedians who complain about political correctness “are filling stadiums, winning Grammys, and getting $60m off Netflix”. But that wouldn’t be the case if people on his side of the political aisle had succeeded in having them censored. Dave Chappelle might not have been “cancelled” for his jokes about transgenderism but Netflix employees certainly tried. If I’m convicted of attempted murder, I can’t say, “But he’s alive, isn’t he?” (Other cancellations have been more effective, such as the long exile of Graham Linehan.)

“If [Jerry Seinfeld]’s not able to think a little bit around whatever he imagines are these current restrictions are[sic],” Lee tells Prospect, “then he’s not a very good comedian. It’s pathetic and ungrateful and unimaginative.” Some might recall the time when Lee faced protests against Jerry Springer: The Opera, a musical he co-wrote that some Christians considered blasphemous. I remember Mr Lee complaining, and rightly so, about these protests, and I doubt that he looks back and thinks he was being “pathetic and ungrateful and unimaginative” and should have thought a little bit around the protestors’ “restrictions”. If the difference is that he agrees with “these current restrictions”, he should say so.

He won’t, though.

But Lee has had a long record of being unsympathetic to satirists who have faced censoriousness if they happen to disagree with him politically. When he was facing protests against Jerry Springer: The Opera, he rankled at comparisons between himself and the cartoonists who were facing death threats for drawing Muhammad. The comparisons were flawed, yes, but Lee was not objecting for the obvious reason that he, unlike Lars Vilks and Kurt Westergaard, was not facing serious threats against his life. He wrote:

In my new capacity as sin-eater for the religious guilt of the entire world, I fulfil a lifetime’s ambition by appearing on the Today programme, with a member of the Muslim Council to discuss the Danish Mohammed cartoon controversy. Everyone’s anxious to draw parallels with the opera’s persecution by the Christian right, but the Danish cartoonists wandered into a world of protected religious symbols they didn’t understand. We have used a set of icons whose implications we appreciate, within a tradition of Christian imagery.

This read an awful lot like Lee was saying that because Muslims have more of a theological basis for being sensitive about their religious iconography, if some of them respond with violent censoriousness to offence, it’s the fault of the people who have caused offence. They should have known that people would try to murder them.

More generously, Lee might have been trying to rationalise his sense that Muslims have been excluded enough without comedians making fun of them and their religion. That’s debatable — but what’s not debatable is that people who have made fun of Islam are a more excluded group, because they have a lot of people trying to exclude them from the realms of the living. I’m sure it was annoying for Lee to have his shows cancelled but it wasn’t as dramatic as Kurt Westergaard hiding with his granddaughter in a panic room while an axe-wielding maniac tried to kill them, still less the staff of Charlie Hebdo being shot to death.

If you DO want some laughs this weekend, check out one of Stu’s many standup performances that can be found online. He is both hilariously funny and an ass.

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We end this weekend’s SCR with a look at how living alongside penguins in the Antarctic is really like:

I was working at an ecosystem monitoring camp called Cape Shirreff, in Antarctica, where we collected data on the seals and penguins that breed on the island and hunt krill in the waters nearby. The long-term monitoring program was initiated to measure the impact of the krill fishery, but climate change has become a key focus of the research.

The five months I spent at Cape Shirreff dovetailed with the summer breeding season of our target species: chinstrap penguins, gentoo penguins, and Antarctic fur seals. Most of the methods we used were standard ecosystem-monitoring protocols developed by a committee under the Antarctic Treaty that focuses on the Southern Ocean. To monitor the penguins, we’d be documenting nest counts, adult survival, adult weight, egg weight, egg lay dates, chick hatch dates, chick growth rates, chick survival, and the composition of penguin diets. We’d attach data loggers to penguins to measure the duration of their foraging trips, how deep they had to dive to find food, and where they found it.

In the early season we waited for the nests to take shape and eggs to be laid. Once a nest was confirmed active, when eggs appeared, I banded one bird at each of the 75 plot nests I was tracking so I could discern between individuals. It was easiest to do this when the penguins were incubating because they didn’t run away. At the beginning of the banding period, Matt took me out to his colonies so he could teach me how to handle and band the birds. As gentoos had started laying first, we started with them.

Click here to read the rest.

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Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

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This is the last SCR of 2024, and we’re going to make it a much shorter one than usual for two reasons: 1) the content isn’t new to the readership here and 2) there is always a drop off in media production around this time of year. Looking towards 2025, I am going to have to cast an even wider net to find good essays/articles/reviews/etc., as it is getting more and more difficult to do so thanks to the shutting down of online outlets combined with de-boosting of foreign links at places like Twitter/X, once the greatest of all news and articles aggregators around. The great Helen Andrews has also lamented this development. I will make it work, though. There is also a third reason as to why this one will be shorter than usual: most everyone is enjoying the Holiday Season (as they should!).

We’ll start off this last 2024 SCR with some cheer and merriment; Europe had a terrible year, and it’s probably going to get worse:

Europe’s growing far right, meanwhile, has only entrenched its position. This summer’s European elections were marked by breakout performances for the hard right across the union, and there were major advances on the national level, too. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom forged a government coalition; Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s post-fascist prime minister, saw her popularity deepen; and the far-right Alternative for Germany surged to become the country’s second-most-popular party.

Europe’s extreme right has moved past the point of normalization — now a regular force of government, it is becoming almost banal. For Europe, its consolidation caps a year of tumult. Judging from the continent’s parlous economic situation and general social disarray, matters are only going to get worse.

This is from the New York Times, and one of the authors, Anton Jaeger, is a left-wing academic (and mutual of mine on Twitter/X), so keep this in mind as you read it.

A decade ago, Europe presented a very different face to the world. In Greece, the radical left party Syriza was about to rise to power on the back of resistance to austerity imposed by the so-called Troika of the European Commission, European Central Bank and the Eurogroup. In France, a center-left president, François Hollande, was being hounded by rebels on the left of his party. And in Britain, a socialist backbencher named Jeremy Corbyn was soon to claim the leadership of the Labour Party.

All of this reads like ancient history today. Syriza, which ultimately carried out the austerity it had campaigned against, lost power in 2019 and splintered after a former Goldman Sachs trader was elected as its leader. Mr. Corbyn has been kicked out of the party he once led, and the French left has been sidelined by Mr. Macron’s penchant for cutting deals with the right. Die Linke, once a credible challenger to the Greens and Social Democrats for leadership on the German left, risks disappearing from parliament altogether in the country’s upcoming elections.

The Euroleft has a habit of blaming austerity for the decline in the fortunes of the continent’s left wing parties. They feel that they were guilty of compromising too much, or straight up collaborating with what they refer to as “neo-liberal” forces:

This decline is not the result of a political law of nature. Instead, Europe’s current political constellation owes much to a cohort of politicians and officials who held sway in the 2010s across the continent. Following Angela Merkel’s lead during her 16-year stint as Germany’s chancellor, it was they who set the terms of European politics that have now come back to haunt policymakers. Their response, for instance, to the “euro crisis” — the seemingly never-ending financial troubles that followed the crash of 2008 — was to offer a damaging blend of moralism and technocracy.

Doubling down on punitive austerity measures, Jeroen Dijsselbloem — Ms. Merkel’s lieutenant as head of an informal grouping of Eurozone finance ministers — claimed that the debt-ridden governments of Southern Europe had wasted their money on “schnapps and women.” For his part, Jean-Claude Juncker, then chief of the European Commission, admonished Greeks that there was “no need to commit suicide because you are afraid of dying.” Led by Ms. Merkel, Europe’s politicians insisted on obeisance to financial markets and European etiquette, no matter the consequences.

A collapsing economic model and a stagnant Europe:

Today, the costs of this aggressive aversion to change have become starkly apparent. In the past decade and a half, continental growth indicators have gone from stagnant to concerning. In a recent X-ray of the European economy, Mario Draghi, a former head of the European Central Bank and former prime minister of Italy, sounded a belated alarm as to the grim extent of the decline: lack of innovation, lagging productivity and general economic underperformance. The continent’s economic future looks impossibly bleak.

The wallop has been a long time coming. Occupied with disciplining Europe’s periphery, policymakers in Berlin missed a reckoning with Germany’s economic model. A book published this year by the German commentator Wolfgang Münchau required no more than two syllables to sum up the results of this procrastination: “Kaput.” Mr. Münchau’s list of causes for the downturn are familiar: the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which together spurred a global price fever and cut off the usual source of energy on which German factories ran — an inflationary spiral compounded by America’s trade wars. For an economy coasting by, these shocks proved worse than destabilizing.

Germany’s prized export sector especially suffered from such complacency. For years, reports of an impending green revolution in electric vehicle production were dismissed. Now an industrial doomsday is dawning: Germany’s car producers have seen themselves priced out of their trusty Chinese markets, steadily served by Chinese producers. As catastrophic growth forecasts told a story of their own in October, Volkswagen announced it was closing factories in Germany for the first time in its 87-year history, with severe knock-on effects for neighboring economies in Belgium, Poland and the Netherlands.

Those who find themselves on the political right will have many problems with characterizations of the following excerpt:

Economically, the Merkel consensus sowed the seeds of stagnation. Politically, it wound up destroying dissidence to its left while allowing discontent on the right to thrive. As inflation pushes the cost of living skyward and real wages stagnate, European electorates have been left with the sense that the levers of policy are slipping from their grasp. Railing against immigration — long a source of ire for many across the Western world — and engaging in Americanized culture wars at least allow a cathartic release and the illusion of control.

In this environment, far-right forces have predictably prospered, alternately tolerated and co-opted by the political center. In seven out of 27 countries in the European Union, from Finland to Italy, the far right now directly participates in government. In the newly assembled European Commission led by Ursula von der Leyen, a key ally of Ms. Meloni holds an important vice-presidential position. Rather than the bloc fending off the far right, the prospect seems to be a far-right European Union, in which the mainstream chases the extremes.

Two issues will dominate the European continent in 2025:

1. how to achieve a peace deal in Ukraine and re-start much-needed trade with Russia (US-permitting)

2. how European leaders at the EU and national levels approach the return of Donald Trump to the White House

Europe is in danger of playing second fiddle on the first point and fumbling the second one. I wouldn’t expect much different from this uninspiring lot.

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Turbo America had a very, very good 2024, as the Americans continued to poke The Bear in Ukraine, deftly manage Israel’s tactical victories over Hezbollah and Iran (while keeping a tighter lid on Hamas), and monitoring the removal of the Syrian rook from the geopolitical chess board. It’s only China and East Asia where the USA have not continued to rack up the Ws.

Biden’s National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, is chuffed. He insists that his team’s work means that Trump is inhering a very strong global position to begin his new administration:

“I think what we’re handing off is a very strong hand from the United States in terms of our national power, in terms of the strength of our alliances, and in terms of a key point that you made in your opening statement, which is that America’s competitors and adversaries are weaker and under greater pressure than they have been.”

He added: “I’m proud of what we’re handing off.”

One important idea where the American position has improved during the last four years is in military preparedness, Sullivan said.

“America’s defense industrial base was in an incredibly weakened state,” he said, saying it was a decline “40 years in the making.”

Iran certainly is in a much weaker position than 4 years ago, with 40 years of its foreign policy going up in smoke in a matter of two weeks.

Russia is a mixed-bag as it has been cut off from Europe economically, culturally, and politically (in terms of influence), but it is now a much more disciplined state thanks to the backfiring sanctions regime leveled against it.

China? Remains to be seen.

In discussing specific international situations, Sullivan told Zakaria that the most concerning aspect of the fall of Syrian strongman Bashar Assad is the potential for a resurgence of ISIS there. He also said that while Iran has seemingly been weakened in recent months due to defeats suffered by its allies in Syria and Lebanon, Iran might lash out in response.

When good things happen, Sullivan cautioned, “there are frequently bad things lurking around the corner.”

The Russia-Ukraine war is ongoing. Sullivan, who is to be replaced in his position by Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), urged Trump to maintain the pressure on Russia that President Joe Biden has applied to President Vladimir Putin’s regime since the start of the Ukraine war.

“We need leverage,” Sullivan said to get an equitable deal between Russia and Ukraine. “And that leverage is continued military support for Ukraine.”

Taking Syria off of the board is a blow for Russia (especially if they lose their naval re-fitting station), but at the same time the collapse of the Assad regime actually gives the USA less leverage with Russia regarding Ukraine now that Syria is done.

For 2025, eyes should be focused on:

1. what kind of regime/situation will take hold in post-Assad Syria?

2. is peace possible in Ukraine?

3. will this finally be the year that the USA pivots to East Asia?

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Protests are still ongoing in Georgia, but it seems like the new government is not going to fall, as they have sworn in a new President, and the previous one is willing to leave the building (but will continue to insist that she is the only real “legitimate” President of Georgia).

I wrote about the anti-government demonstrations in Georgia a few weeks ago, wondering why they have been more subdued than the ones that resulted in the Rose Revolution in 2003:

Outgoing President Salome Zourabichvili has thrown in the towel, telling supporters that she will be leaving the Presidential Palace:

Georgia’s pro-western president, Salome Zourabichvili, has said she will leave the palace but remain the country’s legitimate officeholder, after refusing to hand over the keys to her successor in the wake of a controversial general election.

Zourabichvili spoke as thousands of protesters gathered in the capital, Tblisi, to demonstrate against the inauguration of Mikheil Kavelashvili, a former football player turned far-right politician backed by the ruling pro-Moscow and increasingly authoritarian Georgian Dream (GD) party, who was sworn in as president at a parliamentary ceremony.

The inauguration of Kavelashvili – which for the first time in Georgia’s history was held behind closed doors in the plenary chamber inside parliament – is likely to further escalate a months-long political crisis during which there have been large pro-European Union demonstrations.

At least 2,000 pro-EU protesters had gathered outside parliament before the disputed presidential inauguration.

Addressing the protesters moments before the inauguration, Zourabichvili, who has become a rallying figure for those opposed to GD, declared: “I remain the only legitimate president. I will leave the presidential palace and stand with you, carrying with me the legitimacy, the flag and your trust.”

Venezuela had Guadio, Belarus has that Svetlana woman, and now Georgia has Salome.

After taking the presidential oath in parliament, Kavelashvili said: “Our history clearly shows that, after countless struggles to defend our homeland and traditions, peace has always been one of the main goals and values for the Georgian people.”

The GD party has presented itself as the sole guarantor of stability in the country, accusing the west of trying to drag Tbilisi into the Ukraine conflict.

Kavelashvili, known for his far-right views and derogatory comments against LGBTQ+ people, went on to praise “our traditions, values, national identity, the sanctity of the family, and faith”.

The standoff between Zourabichvili and GD had plunged the country into a political crisis following the contested election in October that GD had won but many Georgians believe was rigged with Russia’s help.

Zourabichvili and protesters have declared Kavelashvili “illegitimate”, demanding a rerun of the October general elections.

What Georgian Dream (GD) do not want is to turn their country into another Ukraine, something that the USA and some in the EU are all too happy to do to “stick it” to the Russians. Russophilia in Georgia is nowhere near a majority position for various historical reasons, but Georgians are a conservative people who do not want to take another risk like former leader Saakashvili did in 2008 when he tried to liberate North Ossetia using force against Russian peacekeepers. GD are being both prudent and pragmatic, with the opposition idealistic to the point to recklessness.

Naturally:

Weighing in on the crisis, US Republican congressman Joe Wilson has said that Zourabichvili is invited to attend Donald Trump’s inauguration next month “as the only legitimate leader in Georgia”.

He announced a bill “which will prohibit US recognition of the illegal dictatorial regime in Georgia and recognise Zourabichvili as the only legitimate leader in Georgia”.

But the prime minister, Irakli Kobakhidze, of the GD party, has ruled out calling fresh elections. He had had said that Zourabichvili would face legal consequences if she chose to stay in office.

The USA is already sanctioning key Georgian government officials.

Will the incoming Trump administration clean out the US State Department of the Nuland-regime changers?

I’ll give Ben Aris the last word:

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“You want Foucault? I’ll give you some Foucault.” (The following shared essay doesn’t have much Foucault in it, to be honest).

I won’t say much now as I have a longer-term plan to do a series on the infamous French philosopher….but I will share this essay that argues that he is not to blame for the rise of “Identity Politics”, and says that “ontological absolutism” is where you really should direct your anger:

Sadly, the vision of academic pursuit in the social sciences and humanities being guided by disinterested inquiry is obsolete. Job descriptions, not just in the humanities but also in the empirical sciences, increasingly demand explicit ideological and activist orientations (e.g., decolonialism, environmental justice, anti-racism). Analytic distance and critical detachment are denounced as outmoded colonial vestiges of cisgendered white male supremacy. Meanwhile, a scholar’s identity and therefore their experience is privileged, especially if they are from underrepresented groups where a tacit and often condescending expectation often exists that their topics of research overlap with their identity. Academic pursuit guided by nondogmatic, open-ended inquiry hears its death knell.

A popular explanation for this larger shift blames the abandonment of the pursuit of truth as root cause and points the finger at social constructivists like my doctoral adviser. This argument is epitomized by public intellectual Yascha Mounk’s recent book The Identity Trap which names the usual suspects—the French philosopher Michel Foucault, critical theory, and the bogeyman known as “postmodernism”—as key culprits of the new dogmatism. With truth dead, everything is permitted.

Yet as someone who grew up intellectually in this milieu, I believe that today’s stridency and moral absolutism is less explained by social constructivism but by its rejection. While social constructivists emphasized doubt, ambivalence, and uncertainty, academics now speak with absolutist, if imaginary, moral clarity on a host of issues ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

I can see his point…….

Ontologists not only make broad and foundational claims about the world but also normative claims about how it should be. If knowledge-oriented social constructivists were focused on how our ways of seeing the world were filtered through our own cultural and historical lenses, ontologists attempt to break through the filters to get to absolutes. In other words, while epistemology was narrow and limited in its focus on human understanding, the new ontologists aimed to move “beyond the human,” forming part of a wave of “animal studies” that spread throughout the humanities. A key text of the “ontological turn” in anthropology argues “how forests think” (the short but confounding answer: in 19th-century American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic theory).

While tendencies toward these kinds of abstract mystifications would lead more politically radical academics to accuse the new ontologists of—what else?—not being politically radical enough, ontologists themselves made a key contribution to the new polarization, especially in how their work translated to wider popular readings, by embracing binary logics—most notably, between so-called Western and non-Western (usually indigenous) ontological realities. Invariably, these dichotomies take on a moralistic dynamic: Western ontologies are bad because they are colonialist, ableist, capitalist, racist, misogynist, and so on and so on, invariably leading to planetary destruction. Non-Western ontologies are not only good but necessary for our salvation, often from, in increasingly apocalyptical tones, the perils of climate change. It goes unmentioned that the archaeological record is dotted by the collapses of non-Western societies that somehow managed to destroy their own environments.

The author gives us lots to think about, but I will skip ahead to the concluding paragraph:

In 1994, Michael Ignatieff asked Eric Hobsbawm if he would have rejected communism if he had known of Stalin’s atrocities during the 1930s. Hobsbawm infamously answered, “probably not” because such “sacrifices” could be justified and “the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing.” Our new academic radicals appear willing to embrace Hamas’ atrocities to create a new world in the service of a speculative fantasy that imagines that the region might erupt in peace and harmony if Israel magically or not-so-magically ceases to exist. If the world is the horror they consider it to be, one readily understands what horrors they will countenance in order to transform it. And while it is tempting to dismiss the thinkers of these obscure theories as deeply unserious and not worth taking seriously, it is a mistake to underestimate their influence throughout academe.

And before someone says it: yes, this essay is self-serving from an ethnic standpoint. That should make it an even MORE interesting read.

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We end this year’s last SCR with a review of a new biography of Stanley Kubrick. I guess I am not too creative and far too conservative, as I cannot decide between Kubrick and Fellini as to who is the greatest film director of all-time:

Kubrick’s photographs for Look are hard-edged and commanding; they fix an image once and for all. Far from being illustrations, they have a quality – a little like Weegee’s – at once random and composed. In one, the circus director John Ringling North dominates the right half of the frame, shouting instructions to an unseen person, while above and to the left a high-wire act has two showgirls suspended from the wheels of a bicycle: the picture frame is divided by a balancing bar carried by the cyclist. In another, a scientist works with a slab of white-hot metal, shielded from the dazzling light by opaque goggles. Kubrick also photographed celebrities like Montgomery Clift and Rocky Graziano. His aesthetic was realist, no gimmicks allowed, but he never stinted on drama: a news vendor, looking contemplative beside a headline that reads ‘FDR Dead’, was told to look sadder. The vendor complied, and the result was a picture ready to receive the caption ‘A Nation in Mourning’. Kubrick told Jack Nicholson many years later that a photograph is a copy of life, but ‘in movies you don’t try and photograph the reality, you try to photograph the photograph.’ Did this mean that the film is the more real of the two copies by virtue of its conscious abstraction? Reality, he seems to have felt, is an unlisted bottom floor – hard to get to and, once you have got there, hard to the touch.

There was a movie theatre on almost every block in his part of the Bronx, and, as he told Jeremy Bernstein in a 1966 interview, ‘I used to go to see films ... practically every film.’ Art-house theatres scarcely existed yet, but you could buy a ticket to the Museum of Modern Art, where they showed Chaplin, Griffith, Von Stroheim, Eisenstein, Murnau, Pabst, Lang. For the greats of the silent era, Kubrick seems to have felt a veneration free of envy. The typical American product of the 1940s drew a different response: he was sure he could make something better. For Kubrick (according to Michael Herr, his friend and collaborator on the screenplay of Full Metal Jacket), ‘there was definitely such a thing as a bad movie, but there was no movie not worth seeing.’ He told Herr in an exuberant moment that The Godfather must be the greatest movie ever made. When challenged he backed off a little: it was the movie with the greatest cast. This points to a curious fact about Kubrick’s own work with actors. There are magnificent performances in his movies – by George C. Scott, James Mason, Peter Sellers, George Macready, Kirk Douglas, Nicole Kidman, Sterling Hayden; and in smaller roles, Slim Pickens, Peter Ustinov, Sue Lyon, Leonard Rossiter, Shelley Winters, Sydney Pollack – but there is never a trace of ensemble feeling. The actors, and for that matter the characters, are monads, each in a separate cell.

Click here to read the review in its entirety.

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Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

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The last time that we spent some time together here Bashar Assad was still in power in Damascus. “Stunning” has to be the best word in the English language to describe the chain of events that began with HTS making a run for the suburbs to the immediate west of Aleppo and that ended with al-Jolani entering the Syrian capital as a liberator (of sorts).

All of us should have seen this coming and many of us did expect the US-led anti-Syrian coalition to use Russia’s diverted attention, Hezbollah’s tactical defeat, and Iran’s embarrassing loss to Israel as an opportunity to settle some scores. What is by far the most shocking is the speed with which the regime fell. I am reminded of how Adolf Hitler argued that “with one swift kick” the USSR would collapse. The Soviets didn’t, but the Syrian Ba’athists most certainly did.

I have been following the events very, very closely, but I have also been keeping my powder dry because it is a monumental event that is reverberating around the world, with its significant impact still not fully understood as of yet. That powder will be used tomorrow when I publish a long essay covering the events of the past month in Syria, and within a larger historical and geo-political context. It should be a good one.

It would be remiss of me not to permit a bit of discussion about the collapse of the Syrian government in this weekend’s SCR though, which is why I am using this report about the threat posed to China emanating from Turkestani jihadis who took part in the offensive that ended Bashar Assad’s rule:

China’s concern stems from credible reports of the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP) fighting alongside HTS. The TIP, also known as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), is a Uyghur separatist group with origins in China’s restive western province of Xinjiang and deep ties to al-Qaeda and its affiliated groups.

It is seeking an independent Islamic state in Xinjiang called East Turkestan. TIP was designated a terrorist organization by China and the UN, and up until 2020, also by the US. The militant group was founded in Pakistan but has since established a foothold in neighboring Afghanistan. In recent years, the group’s influence in Afghanistan and Pakistan waned under Chinese pressure.

In a surprising turn of events, many of the militants and their families took refuge in the Syrian rebel stronghold of Idlib. By 2017, then-Syrian ambassador to China Imad Moustapha claimed that there were as many as 5,000 Uyghur militants in Syria.

Turkey backed the TIP’s relocation to Syria, a gambit that effectively killed two birds with one stone. Turkey is sympathetic to the plight of its oppressed Turkic brethren and it was able to take the Uyghurs under its wing in areas under its influence in northern Syria.

“….and up until 2020, also by the US.”

TIP is a jihadi group that is a potential destabilizer in China’s Xijiang Province (also known as East Turkestan). It would play a role similar to that of the Mujahideen in Chechnya after the First Chechen War, whereby it would work to spark unrest in a minority Muslim region, invite harsh retribution to radicalize the local population, and result in condemnation of China, and potentially spark a rebellion. This group is closely managed and supplied by NATO ally Turkey.

Chinese Major General Jin Yinan has claimed that the TIP is fighting in Syria to draw attention to the Uyghur cause and to gain combat experience so that they can one day use those fighting skills against Beijing.

The claim was confirmed when the Emir of the TIP, Abdul Haq al-Turkistani, called on Uyghurs from around the world to join the fight against the Assad regime – and China. “Today, we are helping our brothers wage jihad in Greater Syria. Tomorrow, the soldiers of Islam must be ready to return to China to liberate Xinjiang from the communist occupiers.”

Beijing claims that the TIP carried out terrorist attacks in China in 2008, 2011, 2013, 2014 and 2015. Attacks included ramming vehicles into pedestrians, stabbings with knives in public areas, car bombs, and suicide bombings.

It is difficult to verify if the group was behind all of the claimed attacks. Some were probably carried out by lone wolves disgruntled with the social-economic inequality in Xinjiang.

Nonetheless, Beijing blames the group for all of the attacks and has implemented restrictive measures, epitomized by huge detention facilities, in the Uyghur’s home province in response. These strict measures will not likely keep a lid on the unrest forever, with clear signs it continues to bubble just beneath the surface.

As the USA lumbers toward its “Pivot to East Asia”, the temptation to use such a militant group will be too tempting to overcome. Recall that just prior to the breakout of COVID-19 there was a concerted propaganda campaign about “genocide in Xinjiang” from your usual US State Department-backed outlets. If these accusations begin to flow once more, then TIP surely can’t be too far behind either?

Naturally, China is worried:

Indeed, in 2022, China’s Permanent Representative to the UN claimed that TIP-related violence was resurgent in recent years, saying, “the TIP is not only launching attacks in Syria, but is also using Syria as base to recruit and train militants to launch attacks on China and Central Asia.”

To tackle the reemergent threat, Beijing vowed to “coordinate with Syria and other relevant parties to combat TIP terrorism.” The statement was made amid reports that TIP participated in an attack that killed 112 people at a military academy in Homs last year. What the statement meant in actual practice, however, remains unclear.

…but still has not directly intervened on the ground in Syria:

Despite TIP’s supposed rising threat to China’s national security, Beijing has remained steadfast to its decade-long modus operandi of non-intervention. It has been content so far to freeride on other countries with boots on the ground in Syria.

The only meaningful action Beijing took was to hold high-level talks with Damascus to share intelligence on the TIP’s movements on a monthly basis beginning in 2016. This intelligence stream will discontinue with Assad’s fall from power.

China’s apparent inaction sends a message that while Beijing is concerned by the fact that if battle-hardened TIP militants – known for fighting like “lions” in Syria – make their way back to China in sufficient numbers, it will face an insurgency many times stronger than the previous one it does not believe this will happen as it is unclear the TIP can and will return to China.

Central Asia as a springboard into Xinjiang?

Beijing is worried that while China itself remains out of reach, TIP militants will once again settle in neighboring Afghanistan and Pakistan. That’s a high risk as the two countries have become safe havens in recent years for various terrorist organizations, including ISIS-K, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA).

Indeed, there has been an uptick in attacks on Chinese citizens and assets abroad in recent years, especially in Pakistan. Despite the lack of available evidence, Beijing believes these attacks stem from the TIP’s collusion with ISIS, al-Qaeda and the BLA to undermine China’s overseas interests and investments.

Therefore, should battle-hardened TIP militants return to Pakistan and join forces with the TTP, BLA and others, as Beijing claims is already happening, it would pose a serious threat to China’s strategic interests as its flagship project – the Belt and Road Initiative – runs through the country.

My contention has for a long time been that one of the main reasons that the USA stayed so long in Afghanistan was to facilitate and support raids into Xinjiang through Afghanistan and possibly Kygyrzstan as well. Also note how Chinese infrastructure projects have been taking hits in places like Pakistan. The Americans have repeatedly stated that they won’t let such a project be completed without a few difficulties popping up during the course of construction.

There are a ton of spin-off effects resulting from the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, and this is one of the more significant ones. We’ll tackle these in tomorrow’s essay.

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Public-private partnerships sound neutral to most ears, as the assumption is that the two come together for the benefit of the common good in that one can help fill in a need for the other when necessary to do so. There are certainly quite a lot of examples of such partnerships being beneficial as intended.

Ideally, such partnerships are limited in that the domain of one does not cross over into the other. To paraphrase Christ: Render unto the state the things that are the state’s, and unto the private sphere that which is private. Unfortunately, this neat division has long ago been abrogated…..something that all of you are already aware of and something that has best been exemplified via how Big Tech colluded with the government to censor people’s opinions on social media not too long ago.

In the old days, liberalism not only meant a tolerance for differences (including that of opinion), but also that personal liberty should be maximized so long as society at large was not negatively impacted by said liberties. The fly in the ointment was “society at large”, an exception that has in recent decades experienced a significant expansion in and transformation of its meaning. In western societies, intolerance was for a long time considered to be the preserve of the conservative and those further to the political right, but nowadays it is the mainstream political liberal who is much more visibly intolerant of different opinions in particular (even though they perceive themselves as the more tolerant ones, and as being its standard-bearers).

The “illiberal liberal” has managed to weaponize the entirety of society (or “whole of society”, as per the Obama era) to more easily shape their own country to best resemble the ideal form that it should take. This has permitted them to do “end runs” around procedure and bypass national constitutions. It has a bipartisan history, especially in countries like the USA, but its roots are entirely liberal, or better yet, post-liberal, as Nathan Pinkoski argues in this brilliant essay:

The state-society distinction reached its apogee in the mid-twentieth century, when the triumph and challenges of the postwar moment clarified the importance of defending social freedom from state power, while ensuring that the public realm was not taken over by private interests. Over the last few decades, this distinction has been eroded and finally abandoned altogether. Like it or not, the West is now postliberal.

What does Nathan mean?

This is not the same “postliberalism” that we are accustomed to hearing about. Postliberal thinkers from Patrick Deneen to Adrian Pabst have exposed the conceptual problems inherent in liberal theory. Liberals justify the separation of the public realm from the private sphere by appealing to value neutrality. This notion of separation involves a certain moral and metaphysical thinness. The commitment to neutrality is thought to prevent states’ coercing belief through law and force. It protects the private sphere, so that individuals and associations can live out their creeds. Yet by promoting civic neutrality, liberalism socializes us to moderate our ambitions for public life. Against this view, postliberal thinkers argue that the liberal state’s rejection of a substantive vision of the good hollows out politics and civil society. Liberalism produces a state bent on driving tradition and religion out of public life, an atomistic society in which money is the only universally acknowledged good. Postliberal intellectuals contend that if our ruling classes relinquished their liberal commitment to neutral institutions in favor of a substantive vision of the good, we could renew our civilization.

In short, Postliberals (Nathan’s spelling) are pragmatists, or even utilitarians, in that they happy to use to the newly-crafted weapons at hand to create their perceived better society even if it upends old, core liberal traditions like neutral institutions. This is very interesting!

Some history:

Leftist intellectuals were among the first to recognize the collapse of the old liberal separation between state and society. In their view, neoliberalism was to blame. Under Reagan and Thatcher, the private sector began to take over the public one; corporate power took control of the state, and economics captured politics. But this analysis gets ­reality backwards. The state has not been suborned by economic interests. Rather, political interests have come wholly to dominate economic and financial interests, fusing state and society together.

The triumph of the political is most evident in the way today’s debates about liberalism proceed. They are invariably concerned about connecting liberalism to international politics, the postwar liberal international order. To save liberalism, centrist stalwarts call for America to defend the “rules-based” order set up after World War II. It’s a familiar story: In the aftermath of the war, international institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were commissioned to establish the bases for an impartial system of economic competition. But because of communism, postwar liberalism had a limited reach. The fall of the Eastern bloc changed that. The end of the Soviet empire vindicated liberalism, and after 1989, liberal institutions could truly become international. Neutral, procedural mechanisms would coordinate divergent interests on a global scale. Now, however, Russia’s military aggression and China’s ascendancy are straining this globalized system. Populists undermine it at home. So laments the narrative.

and

The international situation tells the tale of postwar liberalism’s breakdown most clearly. Neutral institutions, particularly financial ones, have been weaponized to serve political ends. In this realm, the erosion of the distinction between state and society has been quiet and subtle, yet startlingly effective. The political transformation of world finance has driven domestic upheavals and reordered the way we are governed. It is the engine of the West’s great transformation from liberal modernity to something new—to actually existing postliberalism.

The American Greenback freed from being tied to the gold standard actually made the USA increase its global power:

The first sign that we don’t live in the old postwar liberal international order is that the economic system underwriting it has long ceased to exist. In August 1971, Richard ­Nixon decided to suspend the convertibility of the dollar to gold. The change shattered the economic system established at Bretton Woods during the final stages of World War II. Nixon’s decision initially shocked the global financial system, but it laid the foundation for American financial ascendancy. The dollar replaced gold as the backstop of global finance. Thus, as the United States entered the first stages of de-industrialization in the 1980s, American economic and political power did not decline, as experts anticipated. Nor did anyone really comprehend the tremendous political advantages implicit in the transition from a gold standard to a global economy based on America’s fiat currency. The American political classes were, at least at that time, only dimly aware of their own capabilities. They were focused on other objectives.

Economic liberalism was paired with social liberalism to spread the Gospel of Liberalism worldwide in the wake of the collapse of the Berlin Wall:

On July 3, 1989, months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Wall Street Journal affirmed its commitment to the following constitutional amendment: “there shall be open borders.” The surprise events of the following November provided the opportunity to implement this vision of a truly global economy committed to the free movement of goods, capital, and labor. But just as the Wall Street Journal editorial had opined that more minorities were needed to help Americans “acquire a renewed view of our own difficult past,” so openness meant advancing the spirit of anti-discrimination further than ever before. This imperative set the transatlantic tone for the next few years. In 1990, Congress raised immigration to unprecedented levels to boost economic growth. It also abolished much of the English-language testing for naturalization and made it easier for homosexuals to immigrate to the United States. That same year, the Schengen Convention proposed the abolition of all border controls within Europe. In 1991, Congress passed new civil rights legislation that cemented in place the doctrine of disparate impact. To abolish discrimination on the basis of sex, the European Court of Justice overturned national laws that prohibited businesses from assigning women nighttime shift work. Open borders, free trade, and the open society: It seemed that neoliberalism’s triumph was complete.

From the vantage point of the 1990s, it looked like the Americans and Europeans were using the opportunity presented by the collapse of the Soviet Empire to construct a genuinely liberal global system. Economic affairs would be liberated from statist, political competition, the crude power contests of the past.

Utopian!

Note:

Utopianism of that sort may have animated commentators such as Thomas Friedman, and it’s still the way the stalwarts of the center recall the moment’s aspirations. But this account downplays the political and economic anxieties of the period. 1989 had set off a discreet but decisive geopolitical contest within the West. The Europeans were using the opportunity of 1989 to take continental integration to unprecedented levels, laying the groundwork for the Euro. Led by the French, they dreamed of building a new continental powerhouse that could challenge the United States. German unification was set to be the cornerstone of a single sovereign Europe. Yet George H. W. Bush made American support for German unification conditional on the French and West Germans’ preserving NATO and expanding it into East Germany. It was a cunning move. By keeping NATO alive, Bush forestalled European geopolitical independence. As the Cold War ended, the rationale for military and economic dependence on the United States receded. Yet the first Bush administration engineered events so that American political and economic power over the rest of the West became greater than ever before.

Let’s skip ahead a bit to get to the meat of his argument:

When Bill Clinton took office, he continued the pursuit of openness. In 1993, he ratified NAFTA and relaxed the ban on homosexuals in the military. However, he made it clear that the old liberalism was not enough. Eager to extend the reach of democracy and confront foreign enemies who stood in its way, his administration developed new tools to advance America’s global power. In September, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake outlined a new paradigm. His speech, “From Containment to Enlargement,” bespeaks a political revolution. It provided the blueprint not only for the foreign policy agenda of nearly every U.S. president since then, but for the convictions of every right-thinking person. Lake’s speechwriter was Anthony Blinken.

Lake began by denouncing neo-isolationism on the left and right. Its source, he asserted, lies in misguided economic anxiety. The speech contained the usual promises that global free trade would bring prosperity for all. But the economic benefit to American citizens was an afterthought. The speech focused on America’s new global political program. With the elimination of the “big, red blob” of communism, the United States would focus on expanding the world’s “blue areas” of market democracies—on regime change.

Yet the policy of enlargement was not just about using American military might to expand liberal democracy. Enlargement, Lake argued, had a second meaning. It was about developing and enhancing state-society partnerships. The Clintonians were learning from domestic politics. In that sphere, they were launching a revolution from “government” to “governance,” what Christopher Caldwell describes as the “great innovation of the Clinton administration.”

Borrowing from management theory, the Clintonians wanted government to expand to involve social actors. These actors were not held to the same rules of conduct as state actors were, and therefore could act much more effectively. By leaning on social actors, leaders could bypass state actors responsible to the electorate and could get good results. Domestic lessons set the precedent; after all, the civil rights revolution was conducted as a state-­society project. Court decisions had established the significant liabilities facing private organizations should they fail to be vigilant agents of anti-­discrimination. And private organizations learned to become very effective agents of this new political project. They had their vision of justice and wanted to achieve it. It was too important to leave that task to slow-moving governments. By the early nineties, there were now legions of NGOs, corporations, philanthropic associations, academics, entrepreneurs, journalists, and bureaucrats who expected to have a say in politics. They did not see themselves as bound by national loyalties, restricted by certain borders, or subject to rigid accountability structures. In the new era of “governance,” this dispersion of control was something to celebrate. It’s no surprise that Lake’s speech targeted “centralized power” as the enemy hindering the spread of the “blue” hue. Globalization’s interpreters, wedded to narratives about the obsolescence or privatization of the state, passed over the true significance of these changes. What was really happening was the deformation of the state.

The Clinton administration saw that achieving their foreign policy revolution would require looking beyond the state, just as the civil rights revolution had done at home. “We should pursue our goals through an enlarged circle not only of government officials but also of private and non-­governmental groups,” Lake argued, naming a range of social actors, from “private firms” to “­human rights groups.”

The Clintonians were offering the first theory of global management directed to geopolitical and moral objectives: a substantive vision of the good. State and social actors would be coordinated to fight the “intolerant energies of racism” abroad. They would confront what Lake called “backlash states,” isolating them “diplomatically, militarily, economically, and technologically.” Although he didn’t go into detail, Lake also portrayed America’s “financial” resources as “national security resources.”

Things should now be clicking in your mind: suspended bank accounts a la the Canadian Truckers, the hyperinflation of sanctions regimes that have been implemented worldwide, the complete weaponization of finance, and especially how business and government have worked hand-in-hand to help the USA pursue its foreign policy objectives.

This is one of the best essays that I have read in 2024, so do yourself a favour and read it in its entirety.

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I have grown increasingly bullish on US prospects these past two and a half years, with the rapid collapse of the Syrian government only reinforcing my position. Turbo America continues to (slowly) gain popularity among the chaterrati, even if many refuse to even consider it as today’s reality.

Much of what I write about it entails understanding reality, leading to many unfortunately confusing the descriptive for prescriptive. I try to do my best to constantly re-assess my priors in order to grasp reality as firmly as possible, whether it leads to optimism or pessimism.

French sociologist Emmanuel Todd has a new book out entitled “The Defeat of the West” (not yet available in English) in which he grapples with reality through his own lens and arrives at Point Pessimism. A noted contrarian, he has in the past gone from “America is enemy #1” to “only America can save France and Trump just might do it”, to only return to the beginning, as he became disillusioned by Trump’s failed first term in its inability to escape “Neoliberalism” and boost both manufacturing and the working class at home.

The following review of “The Defeat of the West” that was recently published in American Affairs has lots of fun stuff in it:

Emmanuel Todd’s latest book, La Défaite de l’Occident (The Defeat of the West), begins by listing the many surprises of the war in Ukraine. First, the war erupted in Europe, the paradise where history was supposed to have ended for good. The second surprise is that the war in Ukraine has relatively little to do with Europe; the decisive actors are Russia and the United States. Another is the resistance of Ukraine itself, which was perceived by many in both the West and the East as a failed state. The Russians did not expect that defeating Ukraine would be so difficult. Western societies, for their part, were astonished to see a nation find its raison d’être in the struggle for its own survival.

Russia’s economic resilience has also been met with disbelief. Mos­cow has developed an immunity to sanctions, while Western industrial weakness is increasingly on display. According to Todd, Europe’s geo­political and economic passivity has also been starkly evident. Moreover, he argues, the war exposed the ideological isolation of the West. The illusion of an integrated world under American hegemony has burst, revealing the final truth that the French thinker wants to impart to us—the defeat of the West.

No need to mention my view that the ‘defeat of the West’ is not happening anytime soon.

Whether we believe that Europe imprudently disregarded the possibility of war in Ukraine for ideological reasons, or simply lost the industrial capacity to prepare for it, Europe’s passivity stems, according to Todd, from the Maastricht Treaty. Maastricht, he argues, marked the ascendance of several related trends: the moment when elites enclosed them­selves within an intellectual bubble, the beginning of deindustrialization, and the loss of economic sovereignty for European nations, which has instilled a sense of permanent pessimism on the continent.

According to Todd, the triumph of the euro was not only the rise of a transnational currency but ultimately the victory of a surrogate reli­gion. Maastricht messianism appeared in the specific context of the dis­integration of collective beliefs; the grand narratives that allowed indi­viduals to form a community had vanished. Todd points out that history provides many instances in which a crisis in religious beliefs trig­gered people’s desire to find security in the worship of money.

Yet faith in the euro does not necessarily translate into hope for the future. In his 2020 book Luttes des classes en France au XXIe siècle, Todd argues that the single currency, embodying the ideology of the oligarchy, led to a loss of faith in the future among the French people. In addition to continually declining living standards in France, Maastricht messianism has led to depressive resignation among much of society. After 1992, it is not narcissism, as described by Christopher Lasch, that has prevailed, but “passivism,” as analyzed by Alain Ehrenberg in The Weariness of the Self. People have stopped rebelling because they don’t believe that tomorrow can be any different from today. Apathetic indi­viduals create an apathetic society incapable of real political conflict.

I think that Todd is spot on in his analysis here in that Europe is now a largely passive actor with events passing it by. I will also agree that “passivism” is a fair characterization of much of Europe these days, albeit with a continually growing anger from certain segments. This passivism is not yet in danger of turning into fatalism, something that is deadly to any organism, thanks to the angry cohort that is making itself heard through the vehicle of populism.

This is also an excellent indictment of Europe today:

Meanwhile, European elites have yielded to what Todd calls the anti-ideology of “Europeanism.” It is an anti-ideology insofar as it does not allow for any active political community to emerge: the upper classes have been captivated by the belief that nations should not exist. In this respect, Europeanism is very similar to Anglo-Saxon ultraliberalism, which also dismisses the nation as a pernicious fiction. According to Todd, this belief manifests in various ways, primarily through efforts to abolish nations via European integration or to fragment them by geo­graphically separating minorities, ultimately increasing atomization in the name of multiculturalism.² Without a shared moral compass, society disintegrates “into isolated bubbles, confined to their own problems, pleasures and pains.” In this condition, the governing establishment constitutes nothing more than another “autistic group,” says Todd, with the only difference being its greater visibility.³

At a more practical level, the abandonment of the national framework in economic thinking has led to many policy mistakes that have weakened European states. Alternatives to liberalism have been stamped out, reducing economic policy exclusively to making the labor market more flexible or to cutting public spending. Another consequence of rejecting the concept of the nation is the neglect of demographic issues.

To Todd, France no longer matters as it gave up a large chunk of its national and economic sovereignty to the EU, meaning Germany. He considers France to be a satellite of Berlin and Washington. What we do not learn from this review is what Todd thinks of Germany’s rapidly sinking economy.

An interesting side note:

The U.S. nullification of Switzerland’s historic banking secrecy became a watershed moment, according to Todd, after which Euro­pean elites would have to park their money in tax havens subject to U.S. control.¹¹ According to researchers, “the US law enforcement authorities managed to coerce the transformation of Swiss banking secrecy regula­tions against the preferences of Switzerland’s government and financial sector.”¹² Swiss secrecy, which benefited the continent’s richest people, was unilaterally pierced by Washington. From the beginning, Americans framed the issue as a legal matter, thus avoiding politicization. The atmosphere after the financial crisis was conducive to such arbitrary actions. Washington hollowed out Swiss secrecy using the principle of extraterritoriality, and Switzerland alone could not stand up to a country with the world’s deepest financial markets.

On American Declinism, a school that Todd has reluctantly returned to:

Todd’s pro-Trump optimism has since given way to a belief in the almost certain decline of America. Todd writes that the United States has transitioned from being the world’s factory to its largest consumer, and despite Trump’s nationalist rhetoric, seems unable to reverse course.

With the outbreak of war in Ukraine, the West is sinking into a “false consciousness.” Having destroyed its own industry and working class, it is trying to prevail in a war that requires industrial might. Viewed through List’s prism, the United States is vulnerable, having lost its industrial base and instead placing its faith in the illusion of “infor­mation highways,” through which flows, in the parlance of Xi Jinping, spiritual opium.¹⁹

Within the United States itself, life expectancy for the poorer popula­tion is plummeting, and the hypertrophy of finance has turned politics into a pastime for the rich. The rest of the globe, Todd asserts, views the West not as a bearer of democratic uplift but rather as a constellation of liberal oligarchies holding the poor in contempt.²⁰ The “Global South” prefers Moscow and Beijing to Washington. Future historians, he says, will be astonished by the West’s narcissistic blindness to this fact.

Even in the realm of technology, the U.S. advantage no longer seems as formidable as Todd previously argued. While China may not yet be at the cutting edge in semiconductors or aviation, it has made remarkable progress in other areas. Chinese EVs pose a serious threat to European legacy firms, and their dominance in this sector has enabled them to overtake both Germany and Japan in car exports. In clean tech, China’s grip on the solar supply chain makes it hard for any observer to envision the “greening of the European economy” without Chinese involvement. As Dan Wang notes, China has a technological momentum of its own and retains considerable strengths, largely independent of its slowing economic growth or demographic challenges.²¹ Its strength lies in its workforce, which continues to advance in manufacturing complexity.

When it comes to another technology likely to mold the future econ­omy and warfare—AI—the U.S. lead may be temporary, if not already lost.²² Moreover, American STEM education is in deep crisis.²³ China produces more than twice as many PhDs in STEM fields annually as the United States. Washington’s technological hegemony is no longer unas­sailable, especially as China has become the greatest manufacturing power in the world.

Perhaps the last redoubt of American strength is its control of the global financial system. In La Défaite de l’Occident, however, Todd suggests that the dollar is America’s own resource curse. The United States has fallen into the habit of creating currency, which is easier than producing, say, machine tools. One can argue that this continuous injection of money into the global economy is precisely the reason why America will not be isolated anytime soon. Nevertheless, efforts to undermine the dollar’s dominance are gaining strength.

I strongly disagree with the argument that the Global South prefers BRICS to the USA…..they might prefer it in some ways (like the reluctance of the latter to lecture them on domestic issues), but they overwhelmingly prefer access to the US consumer market and the US Dollar.

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We’re already at 5,500 words after only three segments of this weekend’s SCR, so I’ll cut this one short. The Frankfurt School has left a notorious legacy not only in political philosophy, but also history and politics in general. In this slice of history, we visit them visiting Napoli in 1925, and how that sojourn made them “rethink modernity”.

Martin Mittelmeier’s “Naples 1925: Adorno, Benjamin, and the Summer That Made Critical Theory” (Yale), translated by Shelley Frisch, is a kind of intellectual history by way of Vitamin D synthesis. He examines how this group of thinkers was changed by the Italian environment. Although they had projects planned (Mittelmeier gives a rundown of the vast personal libraries they lugged along), they could not anticipate how Italy would operate on them. Coming from Germany, one of the most advanced industrial countries in the world at the time, Adorno, Benjamin, and the others witnessed a society that stubbornly resisted modernization as they knew it—or, as they came to feel, that found its own way through. “The experience of the city of Naples became an essential checkpoint for the analysis of modernity,” Mittelmeier writes. His book claims that the landscapes and the peoples of Naples and Capri are the forgotten “source code” for some of the most influential diagnoses of modern life.

Southern Italy was indeed a “foreign place”:

The “Naples” essay set off a lively competition among Benjamin and Lācis’s circle for who could write the best essay about southern Italy. Bloch, one of the more mystical members of the group, produced an account of his time in Naples and its environs in which there are stirrings of his later concept of “simultaneous non-simultaneity,” the idea that people—including Neapolitans—could live in different temporalities in the same place, at the same time: seventeenth-century social life but with telephones. He, too, was impressed by the porousness of life in the south. Watching a group of Neapolitans arrive at a restaurant and effortlessly enter the conversations already under way, he said, was “a true lesson in porosity; there is nothing aggressive about it, rather all is friendly and open, a diffuse, collective, gliding.” (One cannot help thinking that the observation reveals more about Germany than about Italy.) Adorno, in his own writing about his time in Italy, was more sensitive to the kind of willful projections his countrymen were making onto the place, which was already overrun by tourism. There was a Capriote fisherman named Spadaro, who had been photographed so many times for postcards that, Adorno wrote, “he himself has been symbolically lit up . . . [and] made the sea and stars unnecessary.”

Click here to read this in its entirety.

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We end this weekend’s SCR with a look at French enfant terrible Claude Bessy aka “Kickboy Face” and his partner of many years, Philomena. Here is the only introduction to Kickboy Face that you will ever need:

Claude, whose poison pen reviews in Slash were signed with the unassailable pseudonym, “Kickboy Face,” is a profane French chain-smoker who is utterly contemptuous of any kind of hipster canonization of punk or any other music form. When “Decline” director Penelope Spheeris asks, “Does Kickboy have a lot of enemies?,” he practically spits out his reply: “I should hope so, otherwise I am wasting my fucking time.”

As a co-founder of Slash, Claude’s partner Philomena “Philly” Winstanley does not often get her due. Alice Bag wrote of Philomena, “Even though she is reticent and extremely modest about her involvement, her importance to the L.A. punk scene should not go unrecognized.”

Close to the beach, the couple’s Santa Monica house became THE party spot and home-away-from-home for visiting musicians, from the Screamers to Nick Cave and Madness.

Gradually, the line between work and life began to blur. Exhausted, Philomena decided to leave L.A. and return home to London. Claude followed, eventually finding work at venerable label Rough Trade, and then at the legendary Manchester club The Haçienda as a video DJ. Through it all, his take-no-prisoners attitude about music remained intact and as refreshingly acidic as ever.

Eventually, they grew tired of their peripatetic lifestyle, and decided to settle in Barcelona. That’s where they stayed until Claude succumbed to lung cancer in 1999.

Click here to read the rest.

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Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

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When my very poorly-educated uncles washed ashore in North America in the 1950s, they managed to find steady blue collar employment that was secure and that paid well. They worked at the same company until they retired, safe in the knowledge that their pensions would deliver them a continued good standard of living. Their wives (even less educated than they were, if at all) never had to work. They stayed home to raise their children, all of whom went on to complete post-secondary education and join the middle class.

When my Aunts and Uncles landed in Canada in the 1960s, jobs were still plenty for the poorly-educated. They too managed to secure an excellent standard of living for themselves and their children, especially when compared to the land that they emigrated from. For those of us who arrived in the 1970s, the only real change was that women too had to work. My mother, aunts, etc. all ended up working on factory floors, secure in the knowledge that if they worked hard, they too could live well and catapult their kids into a higher standard of living.

Something broke later on; it didn’t happen all at once, but these kinds of jobs began to depart for places like Mexico and China. These earlier generations were already moving into retirement (if not already retired), with Boomers still at work. It was fine, because their children were educated and didn’t need to work blue collar jobs. Those still at work on the factory floor saw how their kind of work was no longer secure, with offshoring, temporary employment, benefit-stripping, etc. starting to take hold, all in the name of “being competitive in a global business environment”. If you were a white collar worker, you were still doing pretty well.

This is no longer a certainty in the West, though. Much of the white collar middle class is now part of the “precariat”; a cohort that lacks job security, suffers from the price inflation of everything, and is always in danger of downward economic (and therefore social) mobility. The middle class today is highly educated, much more educated than their parents were, but struggle to maintain the same living standards that their less educated and less qualified blue collar parents provided to them.

Central to the social contract of liberal democracy is the promise that our lives would continue to get better, so long as we kept faith in the system. This contract has broken down, with the 2008 economic crisis and especially the COVID-19 lockdown era being the two most illustrative examples. Younger generations are largely locked out of the real estate market, entry to which was taken for granted even by Generation X. This overall decline has negatively impacted the perceived legitimacy of the state, and has greatly reduced the faith that people have in their respective national elites. The betrayal felt by the middle class in particular has arisen for too many reasons to list here. Suffice it to say that it has been the main reason as to why populism has taken off all across the West. Populism is the democratic reaction to the failure of the ruling elites.

This populist backlash has largely been located on the political right in the West, despite it sharing common ground with the old left when it comes to issues such as economics. Strangely, the left-of-centre has all but rejected this current wave of populism, tying its mast to globalism, elite managerialism (and reliance on “experts”), eschewing traditional labour-focused politics in favour of trendy social mores. This has not gone unnoticed, with old left types such as German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck continuing to hammer home how social democrats have abandoned and betrayed the working class that they once centered their politics around. Streeck is no stranger to the readers of this Substack, and I am very happy not just because he has been profiled in the New York Times, but because this profile has been written by another favourite of this site, Christopher Caldwell:

In recent decades, Mr. Streeck has described the complaints of populist movements with unequaled power. That is because he has a convincing theory of what has gone wrong in the complex gearworks of American-driven globalization, and he has been able to lay it out with clarity. Mr. Streeck may be best known for his essays in The New Left Review, including a dazzling series on the cascade of financial crises that followed the crash of 2008. He resembles Karl Marx in his conviction that capitalism has certain internal contradictions that make it unsustainable — the more so in its present “neoliberal” form. His latest book, “Taking Back Control? States and State Systems After Globalism,” published this month, asks whether the global economy as it is now set up is compatible with democracy. He has his doubts.

Understand Mr. Streeck and you will understand a lot about the left-wing movements that share his worldview — Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain and the new Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance in Germany. But you will also understand Viktor Orban, Brexit and Mr. Trump.

Mr. Streeck (whose name rhymes with “cake”) argues that today’s contradictions of capitalism have been building for half a century. Between the end of World War II and the 1970s, he reminds us, working classes in Western countries won robust incomes and extensive protections. Profit margins suffered, of course, but that was in the nature of what Mr. Streeck calls the “postwar settlement.” What economies lost in dynamism, they gained in social stability.

What has changed since that golden era?

But starting in the 1970s, things began to change. Sometime after the Arab oil embargo of 1973, investors got nervous. The economy began to stall. This placed politicians in a bind. Workers had the votes to demand more services. But that required making demands on business, and business was having none of it. States finessed the matter by permitting the money supply to expand. For a brief while, this maneuver allowed them to offer more to workers without demanding more of bosses. Essentially, governments had begun borrowing from the next generation.

That was the Rubicon, Mr. Streeck believes: “the first time after the postwar growth period that states took to introducing not-yet-existing future resources into the conflict between labor and capital.” They never broke the habit.

Very quickly their policies sparked inflation. Investors balked again. It took a painful tightening of money to stabilize prices. Ronald Reagan’s supply-side regime eased the pain a bit, but only by running record government deficits. Bill Clinton was able to eliminate these, but only by deregulating private banking and borrowing, Mr. Streeck shows. In other words, the dangerous debt exposure was shifted out of the Treasury and into the bank accounts of middle-class and working-class households. This led, eventually, to the financial crisis of 2008.

As Mr. Streeck sees it, a series of (mostly American) attempts to calm the economy after the ’70s produced the system we now call neoliberalism. “Neoliberalism,” he argues, “was, above all, a political-economic project to end the inflation state and free capital from its imprisonment in the postwar settlement.” This project has never really been reconsidered, even as one administration’s fix turns into the next generation’s crisis.

To Streeck, democracy and globalism cannot co-exist as the latter demands uniformity, while the former insists on localized nuances to permit sovereignty.

Managerialism and the over-reliance on the expert class:

At each stage of neoliberalism’s evolution, Mr. Streeck stresses, key decisions have been made by technocrats, experts and other actors relatively insulated from democratic accountability. When the crash came in 2008, central bankers stepped in to take over the economy, devising quantitative easing and other novel methods of generating liquidity. During the Covid emergency of 2020 and 2021, Western countries turned into full-blown expertocracies, bypassing democracy outright. A minuscule class of administrators issued mandates on every aspect of national life — masks, vaccinations, travel, education, church openings — and incurred debt at levels that even the most profligate Reaganite would have considered surreal.

The internal paradox:

Mr. Streeck has a clear vision of something paradoxical about the neoliberal project: For the global economy to be “free,” it must be constrained. What the proponents of neoliberalism mean by a free market is a deregulated market. But getting to deregulation is trickier than it looks because in free societies, regulations are the result of people’s sovereign right to make their own rules. The more democratic the world’s societies are, the more idiosyncratic they will be, and the more their economic rules will diverge. But that is exactly what businesses cannot tolerate — at least not under globalization. Money and goods must be able to move frictionlessly and efficiently across borders. This requires a uniform set of laws. Somehow, democracy is going to have to give way.

A uniform set of laws also requires a single international norm. Which norm? That’s another problem, as Mr. Streeck sees it: The global regime we have is a reliable copy of the American one. This brings order and efficiency but also tilts the playing field in favor of American corporations, banks and investors.

Populism as a “tendency towards deglobalization”:

As we no longer have an economic policy that is managed democratically, it should not be surprising that it produces unfair outcomes. Nor should it be surprising that in the wake of the mortgage crisis, Covid, the war in Ukraine and so-called Bidenflation, this unfairness would give rise to what Mr. Streeck calls “tendencies toward deglobalization” — such as those that emerged with a vengeance on Nov. 5.

The “global economy” is a place where common people have no leverage. Parties of the left lost sight of such problems after the 1970s, Mr. Streeck notes. They allowed their old structure, oriented around industrial workers and primarily concerned with workers’ rights and living standards, to be infiltrated and overthrown by intellectuals, who were primarily concerned with promoting systems of values, such as human rights and lately the set of principles known as wokeism.

….and a reaction to the abandonment of the working classes.

The “weaponization” of everything to stem the rising populist tide:

This new, topsy-turvy idea of democracy comes with a new political strategy. The interests and agendas of standard-issue parties are increasingly reinforced by the media and other grandees of globalization. These actors have “fought against the new wave of politicization,” Mr. Streeck writes, “with the full arsenal of instruments at their disposal — propagandistic, cultural, legal, institutional.”

Mr. Streeck is probably referring here to the obstacles put in the way of so-called left-wing movements in Europe — Syriza, Podemos, La France Insoumise in France. But his observation applies just as well to so-called right-wing parties. At present, Marine Le Pen, whose party won the most votes in France’s national elections last summer, is standing trial for embezzlement before a court that may ban her from politics for five years. In Germany this month, more than a hundred members of the Bundestag requested a constitutional ban on the country’s fast-growing right-wing party the Alternative for Germany, ahead of national elections scheduled for February.

There are dangers, too, in the way partisan prosecutors, in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election, convicted Mr. Trump of 34 felonies involving bookkeeping, on a legal theory so novel that not one American in a thousand could explain what he had been convicted of. A majority of Americans effectively voided the conviction at the ballot box.

Streeck remains a creature of the soc-dem left, but his critiques are finding much more support on the right these days. The best example of this is how Americans chose to reject newer forms of identity politics, opting instead for a positive vision that they hope will provide relief for the precarious nature of their lives at present.

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As I type this out on my laptop, the Syrian branch of al-Qaida is overrunning the city of Aleppo and moving south towards Homs and Hama. They are in the fourth day of their lightning offensive in which they have struck out from Idlib Province, taking the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and Russian forces by surprise. This is a tragedy in the making, with massacres of innocent civilians very likely to result from it. I hope that this offensive can be stopped, and these jihadis forced back into the pocket that they escaped from.

A big reason why this offensive is succeeding is that the Syrian Government has been stripped of one of its most important allies: Hezbollah. This Shi’ite force from Lebanon played a critical role in defending Syria from al-Qaida, ISIS, and other jihadi outfits during the country’s recent civil war. Hezbollah’s decision to enter the Israeli-Hamas conflict on the side of the latter meant that they had to redeploy their forces to face the IDF.

In 2006, Hezbollah scored an important victory against the Israelis in Southern Lebanon. The IDF was taken by surprise by the Hezbollah defense, rendering it unable to gain even a tiny foothold on Lebanese soil. The Israelis were embarrassed, and Hezbollah was widely feted, its reputation burnished. The successes that it counted in Syria a decade later only elevated the respect already accorded to it.

Everyone knew that 2006 was no the last time that Hezbollah and the IDF would fight, as another war between the two was inevitable. The current conflict that was sparked by Hamas’ audacious raid on Israel saw a low-level tit-for-tat fight between Hezbollah and Israel. Israelis living in the north of the country were forced to move out due to Hezbollah shelling, a retaliation conducted against Israel for its actions against Hamas in Gaza. For an entire year, no one seemed to want to escalate the conflict….until the Israelis finally decided to take the fight to Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon. Its leader, Nasrallah, was killed in a targeted strike. Its entire senior leadership was also eliminated, as was its communications network. Many of its arms depots have been blasted to smithereens. The IDF crossed over into Southern Lebanon, attempting to reach the Litani River, and thus ensure the safety of the north of Israel, a condition required for its citizens to return.

The Israelis have met with fierce resistance on the ground and have only achieved limited tactical successes…but when combined with the elimination of its senior leadership, the destruction of much of its weaponry, the decimation of many towns and villages in the Shi’ite heartland, Hezbollah chose to sue for peace….a peace that does not involve Hamas and Gaza. It is a separate peace, something that Hezbollah stated that it would not even consider until recently.

Will this ceasefire hold? I have no idea. What I do know is that Hezbollah has been severely mauled by the IDF, but not entirely defeated. It needs to lick its wounds, regroup, re-arm, and most of all, repair its reputation with its base and with the wider Arab world. Hezbollah talked a big game during this conflict, with some of their more excitable supporters bragging about “500,000 missiles attacking Israel” or “Hezbollah units crossing the border into Galilee”. Hezbollah did not fare well, but it will be back, and it will live to fight the IDF for another day.

Some Hezbollah supporters and apologists are daring to declare victory, making a fool out of themselves. This is no victory:

When Palestinian forces left Beirut in 1982, forced out by the Israelis, they flashed victory signs on the trucks carrying them to the city’s port. This later led the Palestine Liberation Organization official Issam Sartawi to remark that, with more victories like the one in Lebanon, the PLO would soon find itself in the Fiji islands.

That memory came to mind while I examined the front page of the pro-Hezbollah daily Al-Akhbar on the day the ceasefire in Lebanon took hold. The paper’s headline read, “Steadfast, Victorious.” Even assuming that one is unthinkingly devoted to a Hezbollah view of the world, to believe that the party’s thirteen-month war with Israel constitutes in any way a victory is so delusional that it must actually be reassuring to Hezbollah’s foes. Only a party deeply anxious about the potential domestic backlash against the senseless conflict it provoked would be capable of passing off a historical cataclysm as a success.

The author of this analysis is clearly biased, so proceed with caution.

“Close to a surrender”:

The conditions of the ceasefire agreement effectively laid out what was not far from a surrender for Hezbollah, but the party and Iran accepted it, more or less showing that they were willing to live with its implications. This tells us something.

The major issue of contention was Israel’s demand that it be allowed to intervene militarily inside Lebanon if Hezbollah violated the ceasefire agreement. The Lebanese were blindsided by a U.S.-Israeli side letter that granted Israel the freedom to engage in such military action, regardless of what Lebanon, Hezbollah, or Iran preferred.

The crux of the issue and saving face:

The person who understood what was going down was Lebanon’s parliament speaker Nabih Berri. One can say many things about Berri, but not that he’s a fool. The speaker must have quickly grasped that the systematic destruction of the Shia community was a threat to his own political survival. That’s why he went out on a limb in early October, along with caretaker prime minister Najib Mikati and the Druze leader Walid Joumblatt, to support a ceasefire agreement and commit to “implementing Security Council Resolution 1701 and to deploying the army south of the Litani River.” This decision earned Berri a disapproving visit from Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araqji, who reportedly was unhappy with Berri’s acceptance of Resolution 1701. This prompted a sour Joumblatt to state a few days later, “A certain visitor to Lebanon wants to give us lessons in resistance. We are the ones who can give him those lessons, not the other way around. We have a rich history in this field.”

What this points to is that, from the start, Berri sought an accord with the U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein, whatever the price. When he saw that the Americans and Israelis had concluded their side agreement, he added a formulation to the ceasefire deal that essentially accepted what this side agreement sought to impose. Berri suggested that the ceasefire plan grant both sides a right to self-defense, which is how the Israelis view their freedom of action in Lebanon. What did the Lebanese gain from this? First, they saved face, allowing Berri to relativize accusations that the ceasefire proposal infringed Lebanese sovereignty. Second, he bought Hezbollah a potential right of response to Israeli actions, also under the rubric of self-defense.

Why did Hezbollah agree to this deal?

Up to the eve of the ceasefire, Hezbollah was facing an increasingly difficult situation, which the party’s launching of over 200 rockets against Israel on November 24 sought to conceal. The party was about to lose Khiyam in the eastern sector of border area, where Israeli forces were said to have reached the Litani River, and it was facing an Israeli push in Bayada in the western sector, which potentially could have opened up the road to Tyre. While Hezbollah was resisting, there seemed to be no coordinated opposition on its part, so it was only a matter of time before the Israelis would envelop its combatants south of the Litani. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the country, Shiite society had been thoroughly dislocated as the Israelis expanded their bombings of major towns and population centers.

The author lays out the tasks at hand for Hezbollah:

Its priority will be to revive its community, rebuild decimated Shiite areas, and find an acceptable relationship with the Lebanese state and the other religious communities, while preserving as much of its power as possible.

More importantly, Hezbollah is now facing a Lebanese society far less willing to accept its hegemony than ever before. Relations between the country’s sects and the party have deteriorated in the past five years, consequently this internal struggle could lead to further stalemate and tensions, or it may lead to some sort of dialogue with the party on everything from surrendering it weapons to doing so in exchange for obtaining a greater share of political power in the state. But we seem to have reached the limits of the formulation Hezbollah imposed on successive governments, namely the triptych of the Army, the People, and the Resistance. Henceforth, many non-Shiite political representatives will refuse to include the resistance in that equation.

I am not so certain of this analysis, as Hezbollah requires both “the Armalite and the ballot box” to secure the existence of its community. Voluntary disarmament would leave its Southern Lebanese heartland prone to attack from Israel, and possibly others.

Hezbollah’s efforts to spin its latest communal calamity as a victory are a sign of things to come. The party will not give anything up if it can help it, but that means ignoring the context in which it finds itself. The Lebanese army can be expected to implement its mandate in an expansive way, now that it enjoys both popular and political cover. For Hezbollah to try to return to what it had prior to October 2023 would require it to enter into a confrontation with the Lebanese state, army, and most political parties in the country, isolating it further. With Israel just over the horizon waiting to intercede militarily against any effort by Hezbollah to return its heavy weapons to the south, Hezbollah could well find itself caught up again in a new war in which it stands alone against all. This may be the stuff of heroic narratives, but it is also a path toward communal debilitation.

I think that this overestimates how much power the Lebanese Army can project. Lebanon after all is a failed state.

Lastly:

So, the claims of victory we are hearing from some Lebanese are, ultimately, pitiful. In the end, Lebanon is and will alas remain a nation of pawns, of gambling chips, in a wider regional and international power game. Today, many in the country’s south, the Beqaa, and Beirut’s southern suburbs have lost everything, but for what purpose? To be Iranian sandbags against Israel so that Iran itself can be protected? To see the Americans and Israelis make backchannel arrangements at their expense? Where can one see any victory here?

This is an appeal to isolate Hezbollah, and to thereby effectively evict Iranian influence from the Levant. A bruised Hezbollah is, in my opinion, still a potent force that will be tough to politically neutralize, and physically dislodge.

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In 2014, Sweden announced that it would pursue “the world’s first feminist foreign policy”. This experiment came crashing down a few months later when the Swedish government relented on its stated policy and permitted the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia due to pressure from Swedish and EU business interests. Swedish feminism crashed into the brick wall of reality.

Swedish politics have changed quite a lot since then, veering back to the centre (and somewhat to the centre-right), with the country no longer being the flag-bearer of contemporary elitist liberalism. The failure of its feminist foreign policy might have served as a lesson to some, but it also became an inspiration to others despite it being a debacle. Naturally, the worst political party in Europe, the German Greens, took one look at the Swedish example and decided that they too would pursue a similar policy even though it had no history of success. Not to worry, as they would succeed where the Swedes failed!

At present, the German coalition government (of which the Greens are a part) is being savaged by liberals and the left for its public support of Israel, making a mockery of its feminist pretensions:

Last year, Germany’s Foreign Office spelled out guidelines for a “feminist” foreign policy, focused on defending marginalized women. Today in Gaza, this same ministry is arming the deadliest war on women and girls this century.

Keep in mind that this is from Jacobin, a Marxist publication.

On October 21, the international research organization responsible for the development of the concept, the Center for Feminist Foreign Policy (CFFP), along with the human rights NGO HÁWAR.help, hosted a press conference on the topic “preventing femicides, legalizing abortions.” German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, of the Green Party, took center stage at the conference, along with other high-profile women from the worlds of politics and culture.

These sorts of demands are the lowest common denominator of all feminist movements — and yet hostility was stirring both inside and outside the event, mainly due to Baerbock’s presence. Someone in the audience stood up in protest and shouted, “Stop the genocide of Palestinian women!” and was eventually removed by security. Outside the conference, women protested with signs reading, for example, “Women’s rights shouldn’t mean white privilege.”
The images and videos from the conference and the associated protests have trigged strong responses on social media: the founders of the CFFP were accused of “white feminism,” and prominent international feminists have since resigned from the organization’s advisory board.

This event being a circular firing squad should surprise no one, as “purity spirals” are par for the course with that crowd.

The accusation:

This debate has brought to the surface an issue that has been simmering for some time: even though the German Foreign Office claims in its guidelines for a feminist foreign policy to “focus on the rights, representation and resources of women and marginalized groups,” in practice it undermines exactly those rights. In practice, feminist foreign policy is simply meant to give the German government a progressive veneer. The fact that ultimately there is nothing feminist about Baerbock’s policy is made perfectly clear by her policy toward Gaza.

The details:

It is true that Baerbock has a clear profile and legitimate claim to feminist credentials on this [abortion -ed.] issue. But she can only be considered a feminist in general if you choose to completely ignore her actions in her own ministry.

After the United States, Germany is Israel’s most important arms supplier. Between August and October 2024, Germany approved more than €94 million worth of arms deliveries to Israel. The foreign minister’s near unconditional support for Israel, even when its army attacks schools and other civilian infrastructure, was made clear when she falsely claimed last month that “civilian sites could lose their protected status [under international law] if terrorists abuse this status.”

Baerbock’s words are completely at odds with the reality on the ground in Gaza and Lebanon. A UN report released just a few weeks ago has stated that it could now take 350 years to rebuild Gaza if the coastal strip remains under blockade. In Gaza, more than half a million women are affected by food insecurity, and 175,000 are exposed to life-threatening health risks. In no other conflict in the last two decades have as many women and girls been killed in just one year as in Gaza. If these facts aren’t clear enough, even the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) has recently begun taking legal action against German’s arms deliveries to Israel.

In 2023, Germany’s “center-left” governing coalition set a record for arms exports, and this year it could be exceeded again. Besides Israel, these weapons are being sent to countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, showing that rhetoric about “the fight against Islamism” in the name of protecting women’s rights doesn’t have to be taken too seriously if and when it upsets Germany’s geopolitical and financial interests. The weapons sent to Turkey are also being used, among other things, to crush the Kurdish liberation movement and thus the women’s revolution in northeast Syria. Ironically, German foreign policy has probably never been as un-feminist as it is now, even if it has written out its feminist guidelines.

Ouch!

The Marxist critique of Baerbock’s self-declared feminist foreign policy:

Left-wing feminists have been formulating criticism of the government’s feminist foreign policy ever since the concept entered German political discourse. Political sociologist Rosa Burç has explained that feminist foreign policy runs the risk of “creating a new space for legitimizing interventionist foreign policy.” The feminist writer Hêlîn Dirik wrote that “a capitalist and imperialist state will not challenge the conditions that drive women and queer people worldwide into poverty, exploit them, subject them to violence and marginalize them.” It follows that it doesn’t matter whether German foreign policy calls itself feminist. Ultimately, Germany’s foreign policy interests are capitalist interests, which are based on the exploitation of the oppressed, who are often women and girls.

This self-image makes it impossible to be receptive to criticisms that point out the colonial dimensions of feminist foreign policy. It would mean taking into account the economic and social changes necessary to achieve women’s liberation. To do so would mean, in principle, dissolving or at least restructuring the purpose of the CFFP so drastically that it would no longer be seen as suitable for a seat at the table of power. The seat of power would be rightfully seen as the political opponents of a genuinely universally feminist vision for the world.

There are some valid points in the above critique, but the remedy leaves a lot to be desired!

To Jacobin, Baerbock’s feminism is little more than window-dressing:

Yet attempts to brush aside the political character of the criticism is part of the classic liberal-feminist bulwark against critiques from the Left. In the name of peace and keeping up appearances, feminists are called on to hold back on criticizing “each other.” At the end of October, it seemed that the CFFP might really be open to some criticism, declaring that it intended to address the legitimate criticism “amidst the hatred and lies,” but the post was deleted shortly thereafter, and the CFFP website has since been taken down for “maintenance.” It is unlikely that we will see an honest political debate that goes beyond addressing personal and identity-based grievances. Perhaps the best we might expect is that next time we speak about “feminist foreign policy,” a Palestinian woman will be allowed to share the stage with Baerbock.

I think that Baerbock will rue the day that she agreed to pursue this policy for the foreign office. Foreign policy is a lot harder than it seems because reality keeps getting in the way, and they also involve participants over whom you sometimes do not have any direct power.

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Canada continues to be unintentionally hilarious, all thanks to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his government.

The Great White North was forever a boring place politically, but the arrival of Trudeau Jr. on the scene shook things up. One of the first things that he and his government committed themselves to was to work to improve the country’s relations with its Native tribes, both politically and especially economically. The Trudeau government invented a genocide narrative based around residential schools.1 Canada too wanted a dark aspect to its own history, so that it could share in the self-flaggellation that has coloured the recent history of its neighbour to its immediate south.

Maybe the intention here was to show these Native communities that Canada really, really did care and that by doing this, everything bad that had happened would be forgiven and forgotten? I dunno…..what I do know is that Native bands are now seeking to directly do business with China, whereby they would sell natural resources under their control to Beijing:

Canada’s indigenous communities are seeking deals with China that could give Beijing access to the country’s natural resources, despite warnings from Canadian security services over doing business with Xi Jinping’s government.

This week the Canada China Business Council indigenous trade mission is in Beijing to discuss potential energy and other business deals in a trip that could put Canada’s national “reconciliation” with its First Nation communities at odds with its national security priorities.

Karen Ogen, the trade mission’s co-chair and chief executive of the First Nations Liquefied Natural Gas Alliance, said her goal on the trip, which starts on Wednesday, was to sell LNG for the benefit of the Wet’suwet’en communities in Canada’s western province of British Columbia.

“We’ve been oppressed and repressed by our own government,” she said. “I know the history with China is not good but we have an understanding of what we need and what they need.”

Canada purposely degraded its own national sovereignty in parts of its own country in the name of “reconciliation”. Granting more sovereign rights to others surprisingly means that these groups will pursue their own interests. Who could have seen this coming?

Clever Chinese:

China has spotted an opportunity in the sometimes fraught relations between Canada’s national and provincial governments and indigenous groups.

In 2021, shortly after Canada imposed sanctions on Beijing over the treatment of its Uyghur population, Chinese officials began to object to the “systemic violations of Indigenous people’s rights by the US, Canada and Australia” at the UN’s Human Rights Council.

“The PRC tries to undermine trust between Indigenous communities and Canada’s government by advancing a narrative that the PRC understands and empathises with the struggles of Indigenous communities stemming from colonialism and racism,” said a spokesperson for Canada’s security intelligence service.

A 2023 CSIS report accused China’s government of employing “grey zone, deceptive and clandestine means” to influence Canadian policymaking, including Indigenous communities.

“China knows how sensitive Indigenous reconciliation is to the Trudeau government,” said Phil Gurski, a former CSIS intelligence analyst.

A lot of these First Nations (Native bands) reside in the west of the country. Coincidentally, Canada’s third-largest city, Vancouver (located in Canada’s west), is roughly one-third Chinese in composition.

First Nations will continue to pursue these deals with the Chinese:

But CSIS remains concerned over Beijing’s possible access to resource-rich areas or geopolitically important waterways and regions such as the Arctic through First Nations groups.

“It not only undermines the government but is a way to potentially embarrass them on Canada’s past,” said Gurski.

But Matt Vickers, from Sechelt Nations land in Canada’s western province of British Columbia, who first visited China in the 1990s and is part of the CCBC delegation heading to Beijing this week, rejected the concerns of the security services.

“China now understands that for any major project to receive approval in Canada, you need First Nation consent, and not only consent but the First Nations require a majority equity play in those projects,” he said.

The CCBC is a bipartisan organisation consisting of Canada’s biggest companies, including Power Corp, which is the main sponsor of the Indigenous event.

This week’s trip marks the third time a group of Indigenous officials has travelled with the council to China in an effort to identify export markets, sources of capital and potential tourism projects.

“These missions have been developed in the spirit of reconciliation and collaboration, to help delegates better understand how China’s economy and economic development influences its desire for imports and investment opportunities,” said Sarah Kutulakos, executive director of the CCBC.

It gets even funnier:

Deteriorating relations between Ottawa and Beijing meant this year’s CCBC meeting would likely be “sombre”, said former Canadian ambassador to China Guy Saint-Jacques.

First Nations leaders should have “very limited expectations” from the trip. “I don’t expect big business coming out of it,” he said.

But Ogen, of the First Nations LNG Alliance, said she would put the controversy surrounding the trip to Beijing aside. “I . . . look at the global energy sector, China’s need for our gas, and how I can make the best deal for my people,” she said.

Trudeau scored an own-goal.

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We end this weekend’s SCR with a long read on “gonzo journalist” Hunter S. Thompson, and his brilliant work Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72:

In some respects, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trial ’72 is a savage one-man counterinsurgency. Thompson’s bimonthly Rolling Stone dispatches—later collected in book form—offered space to not only flay his favorite villain Richard Nixon, but also the double-speaking Democratic Party hacks hatching their own cynical propaganda and calculations. Over 50 years later, it’s still one of the most prophetic warnings ever written about American politics. A death letter directed at the schizophrenic duality of the national character, the slimy stock poltergeists who chronically haunt us, and our credulous need for both authenticity and artifice. It’s also a hysterical slapstick about meeting a deranged ex-Dead roadie turned acid casualty in a hotel bar, offering him your press credential, and letting the “Boohoo” run amok on Muskie’s Sunshine Special train across Florida.

At its most straightforward On the Campaign Trail remains an essential history for its shrewd political insight, guillotine prose, and immersive reporting. McGovern’s campaign director, Frank Mankiewicz, called it the “least accurate and most truthful” book about the election. But it’s best understood as a road map of spiritual tragedy and cultural decline. A bildungsroman about human limitation, our allergy to the truth, and the importance of trusting your instincts.

Things started with cautious optimism. In letters, Thompson told his Rolling Stone editor Jan Wenner that they needed to create an underground movement to unseat Nixon. In 1971, the United States passed a constitutional amendment allowing 18-year-olds the right to vote, and Thompson imagined a generational awakening that embraced both the “latent & massive Kesey-style voter with the 18-21 types.”

From the first missives, Thompson mocked the folly of pure objectivity (“the phrase itself is a pompous contradiction.”) His guiding principle was H.L. Mencken’s adage that “the only way a reporter should look at a politician is down.” But over the months shadowing the candidates, Thompson practically became a McGovern surrogate. Without compromising his honesty, the writer quixotically tried to tip the election toward the son of a Wesleyan Methodist preacher, described by Bobby Kennedy as “the most decent man in the Senate.”

Click here to read it in its entirety.

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Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

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I am thankful that the readers of this Substack are not unanimous in their opinions when it comes to the most lively topics that are discussed here, as there are few things that I find more boring than an echo chamber. This is not an endorsement of a free-for-all mudslinging match, but is a thank you to those that do challenge myself and others here with thoughtful comments. If you can’t test your priors, you will eventually get lazy, and even worse, grow out of touch.

Donald Trump’s victory one week ago today is still being digested by both Americans and non-Americans. Expectations are high in both the negative and the positive sense as to what will result from his second term in office. He is no longer an unknown quantity, and he has experience under his belt, unlike 2017. As of this moment, he quickly discarded both Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley from the pool of potential high-level appointments to his team. This is a great sign. However, there are reports that he has settled on Marco Rubio as his desired Secretary of State. This is a bad sign (and is something that we will discuss later).

Trump has already outlined much of what he intends to do while in office, with migration being the hottest and most popular issue. He has also indicated a desire to engage in a root-and-branch reform of the federal bureaucracy, which is a very, very tall order to say the least. The agenda is very ambitious, but expectations must be tempered because:

1. the US system is based on compromise

2. you need full party support in Congress to get things done, and as of present, the GOP does not equate to #MAGA

3. the clock is already ticking

4. he has a history of making bad choices

The above is not an endorsement of his entire agenda, but I will admit to liking quite a lot of it. I will continue to do my best and hold as closely to objectivity over the course of this next administration while discussing it here. Suffice it to say that I believe that foreign policy will be by far the most difficult area to sort out, as it was precisely the fear around what he would do in 2017 that led to the years-long public meltdown in media that helped derail his first term.

Many of you reading this do not support him, which is fine. Many of you who do support him are not expecting much to come from his second go at it, which is also fine. He is returning to the most important job in the world, and so, so much will be resting on his shoulders.

I waited to put out this SCR because I wanted to find an article or essay to best riff off of last week’s results, one that would conform to at least one of the themes of this Substack. The best option was published over the weekend, one in which Francis Fukuyama argues that Biden, not Trump, is the anomaly here, because Americans overwhelmingly voted for The Donald, and their votes could see an end to both America’s liberalism, and to the liberal international order:

But the significance of the election extends way beyond these specific issues, and represents a decisive rejection by American voters of liberalism and the particular way that the understanding of a “free society” has evolved since the 1980s.

When Trump was first elected in 2016, it was easy to believe that this event was an aberration. He was running against a weak opponent who didn’t take him seriously, and in any case Trump didn’t win the popular vote. When Biden won the White House four years later, it seemed as if things had snapped back to normal after a disastrous one-term presidency.

Following Tuesday’s vote, it now seems that it was the Biden presidency that was the anomaly, and that Trump is inaugurating a new era in US politics and perhaps for the world as a whole. Americans were voting with full knowledge of who Trump was and what he represented.

I take issue with Fukuyama’s contention that American voters rejected liberalism. Donald Trump is nothing if not a 1990s Clinton liberal. Elon Musk, a man who played an outsized role in Trump’s victory, is also your standard-fare liberal who was, until recently, himself a Democrat. Two key players on Trump’s transition team, RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, are also both ex-Democrats and both are political liberals.

One of the bigger themes of this Substack is how the term “liberal democracy” is used and abused, and constantly changed and updated. This constant morphing leaves those who fall outside of its present and temporary definition relegated to the status of “illberals”, if not fascists. I think Fukuyama himself understands this, and you will see why here:

Classical liberalism is a doctrine built around respect for the equal dignity of individuals through a rule of law that protects their rights, and through constitutional checks on the state’s ability to interfere with those rights. But over the past half century that basic impulse underwent two great distortions. The first was the rise of “neoliberalism”, an economic doctrine that sanctified markets and reduced the ability of governments to protect those hurt by economic change. The world got a lot richer in the aggregate, while the working class lost jobs and opportunity. Power shifted away from the places that hosted the original industrial revolution to Asia and other parts of the developing world.

The second distortion was the rise of identity politics or what one might call “woke liberalism”, in which progressive concern for the working class was replaced by targeted protections for a narrower set of marginalised groups: racial minorities, immigrants, sexual minorities and the like. State power was increasingly used not in the service of impartial justice, but rather to promote specific social outcomes for these groups.

Both “neoliberalism” and “woke liberalism” are core to today’s understanding of what is meant by “liberal democracy”. It is these two elements that have perverted what liberalism is, not those alienated by it and who have rallied around Donald Trump. This is not the first time that Fukuyama has railed against “wokeness”, so he understands this. It is Trump, and not Kamala or Biden, who is closer to classic liberalism.