"Whole of Society" As a Totalizing Force, Russia "Incapable" of Further War Gains, Saudi "Threat" re: Russian Asset Seizure, Next Washington Consensus, How War on Drunk Driving Was Won
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De-dollarization is underway but will proceed slowly. The key players (Japan, the Gulf rulers, China above all) are exposed to phenomenal losses if they miscalculate.
The issue is not simply using dollars for trade. The great strength of the US dollar is that banks that use SWIFT need to keep a proportion of their deposits in reserve in order to maintain sufficient liquidity for routine interbank settlement. These reserves are held as cash, bullion, specie (precious metals in the form of formal currency) or government bonds. The arrangements for this are set out in the various iterations of the Basel Accords. US dollars have long been the preferred form of reserve because they are the most easily traded and hence most highly liquid. US treasury bills are also much easier to manage than bullion, which requires either heavy investment jn safe storage facilities or reliance upon a third party (typically the US or UK).
Because of the Basel Accords every economically active person on earth outside of Iran or North Korea is exposed to the US dollar via their bank account deposits.
Unscrambling this will require a vast amount of patient work in systems of settlement and exchange. The Russians and Chinese are working on the full spectrum of issues...as are a few other parties.
Biden incentivised progress with this through the sanctions. Long term the size of the US debt, trends in productivity and anxiety about the breakdown of the rule of law also make it inevitable that people will seek relief from the dollar.
This is an amazing comment. I was going to comment on the great yet lengthy article on the Washington Consensus, but I would have no words wiser than these. Certainly our global adversaries will be prepared for a moment in which the dollar becomes materially Pareto sub-optimal. But they won’t press for the triggering event; they are too smart to do that and will just be ready for it.
Thank you. I was trying to explain things as directly and as faithfully as possible. These matters need to be demystified.
As for global adversaries, I am not sure that these distinctions are meaningful. America's rivals work with it and will continue to do so. They do not necessarily want to deal with a superpower in disarray. In any case, in a monetary crisis even American allies will prioritise their self-interest as will multinational firms that hold cash reserves of their own. Crises involving currency are more intense than any other kind. Since reserve currency status is involved the stakes are unimaginable. So all the key overseas players will be cautious.
Very fair point. The degree by a foreign adversary would react more than would any other self-interested foreign actor, allies includes, makes sense. Although I do recall a meeting w reps from the CSRC when I was government, during which they were very proud to showcase their “new” derivatives exchanges on which one could hedge WTI, other dollar assets in yuan denominated contracts. (That these exchanges / contracts exist are public facts, as is the fact of those meetings.) I took note.
Thanks for that. Very interesting. The US dollar is doing well relative to the Euro. No surprise there. This trend will go on as long as Europe is deindustrialising.
But the long term global trend is something very different.
It is getting late in my time zone but I will make sone further comments tomorrow.
Further to my earlier comments, the rising demand for dollars right now probably indicates that the many crises around the world (above all Ukraine and the deindustrialisation of Europe) are generating capital flight. In addition reserves held overseas by multinationals may be involved as forms move money to America to position themselves for reshoring.
However this trend only mitigates but does not resolve the underlying issues. The dollar's future relies on expectations of US reliability in key areas: the rule of law, military prowess and industry. The cost of tge world subsidising US spending is rising and the risk of default (via hyperinflation or repudiation) is growing.
Provided Trump is elected and he manages to reign jn spending pressure on the dollar will ease. We could well see a boom in some areas.
Russian sanctions were designed to be leaky- because Europe (including Ukraine) continues to import large amounts of Russian sourced energy while both the US and EU rely on some key Russian commodities. The bank accounts of these Russian industries were not sanctioned or frozen. And the EU has no legal right to seize the frozen Russian assets. The interest earned on the assets is a murkier question. Ukraine could sue for damages and try to attach assets held in the EU or US. Surprised they haven’t tried that yet in London or NY courts (afraid of losing?)
And bonus points for quoting both Ciaramella and Sullivan in the same piece - comic relief!
Interesting piece - too bad that your sarcasm over Navalny’s death costed you a subscription…
On the issue of confiscation of the Russian central banks’ foreign reserves assets - which happen to be mainly located in one place: Euroclear, Brussels - I can confirm that the EU Deep State, with which I happen to have a certain familiarity, is nearly unanimously against it. Irrespective of Saudi veiled threats, the move is regarded as too blatant a violation of one of the most established principles of international law - sovereign immunity - and potentially destabilising for the international financial system, and the euro in particular. The American advocates of the moves are routinely labelled as ‘crazies’ at least behind their backs.
This is a total tangent, but something I think about every once in a while
> Of course, many things have happened in the last 40 years that contributed to this reduction. Vehicles are better designed to prioritize life preservation in the event of a collision. Emergency hospital care has improved so that people are more likely to survive serious injuries from car accidents. But, above all, driving while drunk has become stigmatized.
When cars were invented, they had an abstract level of risk (which you could measure in eg 'car deaths per year', but I'm saying something more abstract), and they had a level of benefit (which you could measure in eg "how fast it goes"). Society at some level decided on what the acceptable level of risk was, and let cars be that dangerous. Again, I'm talking very abstractly and this is just an example, but, in eg the 1930s, we had X vehicle deaths, and cars went Y speed. If we wanted fewer vehicle deaths, we could have made the speed limits lower than Y. But we didn't, because at some level we were willing to accept that risk.
Cars have become massively better over time. They are faster, safer, more fuel efficient, etc. But, at the same time, the laws, the regulations, etc., governing how much vehicle risk we're allowed to have, have gotten _tighter_. That is to say, again this is just one example of a more abstract idea: in 1950, cars could go 50mph with an adequate level of safety. Now they can go 90mph with the same level of safety. And yet, speed limits in general are coming _down_ instead of rising to accommodate the technological progress of safety.
This is backwards from how it should happen. As cars get better and safer, we should be able to drive faster! But instead, what actually happens, is that as cars get better and safer, the expectations we put on them grow even faster than their capabilities, and we get stuck in this pattern where everything gets less and less fun, as we're allowed less and less risk.
To summarize with a hyperbolic note: if self-driving car technology ever achieves wide scale adoption, a sensible policy reaction would be to _increase_ the legal BAC limit. Since, y'know, you can't drunk drive because drinking makes you bad at driving, but if you're not the one driving, why does it matter? But I promise you, if self-driving car technology ever gets to that point (I don't think it will, but _if_), the BAC laws will be _more_ restrictive, not less. Does that seem right to you?
My car has an emergency brake that it will automatically invoke if it thinks I'm goin to crash into something.
It _constantly_ false-alarms when, eg, the car in front of me is turning and I don't slow down enough.
It did not slam on my brakes the ONE time I needed it, when my garage door broke and only opened halfway, and somehow I didn't notice in the backup camera, and ended up backing through my garage door.
> It feels like only a matter of time until a car won't let you exceed the speed limit for any reason, for instance, even though there are obviously situations where to be able to do so is vitally important.
Source: I heard it on a podcast, so take that with the grains of salt it deserves, but, apparently California is in the process of passing a law forcing your car to fire an alarm (similar to when you drive without a seatbelt on) when you go >10mph over the speed limit
Ralph Nader's "Unsafe at Aby Speed" has this cool couple pages about people falling several stories onto cars and living. Nader attributes much of the deaths by vehicle to projecting parts (fins, etc).
By that logic anyone who just hits someone or something is guilty of intentional criminality. You could back into someone in a parking lot and be accused of premeditation.
Operating a motor vehicle when intoxicated is a crime. The only question is the punishment. In that regard, someone doesn't have to be accused of premeditation to end up with a sentence equivalent to 1st degree murder.
I looked it up. It's called vehicular homicide, but applies to other reckless driving as well.
"In many jurisdictions, a driver who causes the death of another person while driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs commits vehicular homicide. In addition to the driver's intoxication, some states require proof of negligent driving. In other states, establishing that the driver was intoxicated and caused a fatality is sufficient."
Nothing like 1st degree. Depends on the jurisdiction but the sentences are surprisingly light.
Yes, the sentences are light. There are criminals in Canada who serve less than 10 years in jail for 1st degree murder. They obtain early release for "good behavior". This needs to stop. As for drunk drivers, they do not deserve leniency.
Most drunk drivers are harmless but we lack the ability to target the small fraction of people who drive while insanely and obviously drunk. If you look at actual drunk driving deaths of innocents (not just the drunk hitting a tree) it’s amazing how high their blood alcohol is. People getting arrested for a 0.09% (or whatever barely over the limit number in your area) blood alcohol are collateral damage. I am not saying it’s good to drive drunk but this is one more area of modern life that lazy broad brush laws make worse.
Pompeo and some guy named Urban wrote a WSJ opinion article (https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-trump-peace-plan-for-ukraine-russia-foreign-policy-926348cf) that when it comes to Ukraine Trump might turn out to be more radical than Biden. I share these feelings. It was Trump in his previous term who started the massive arms shipments to Ukraine. It is also my impression that Trump takes Putin's demands too easily. Most likely Trump thinks that he can bully both sides to consent to some Korea style armistice on the front lines at that moment. However, it is unlikely that Putin will consent to that. It is the big question how Trump will react.
Even if Trump gets elected and wanted to end the war in Ukraine, anything less than total Russian capitulation and the howls of "Putin Puppet!" will be deafening.
Trump twice cucked out of leaving Syria, to give but one example. Trump is weak, stupid and easily manipulated.
Well that Siegel piece was perfectly disturbing. Not because it was at all surprising -- internet surveillance expanded, of course, in perfect conjunction with the so-called Great Awokening, which also kicked off during Obama's second term. Rooting out wrongthink against a totalizing state ideology is no easy feat.
No, what's disturbing is how it came about. Siegel's account dovetails perfectly with both Mike Benz's and Matt Taibbi's expositions on the Twitter files. In Benz's telling, the security state viewed the internet as a convenient disruptor of disfavored regimes abroad, and was perfectly willing to throw gas on the digital fires that stoked outbursts like the Arab Spring. But as the internet gradually facilitated domestic opposition, they became more circumspect. And Taibbi provides examples, such as organizations like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which pivoted from profiling jihadis to any and all "extremists" online, interfacing with Twitter and any social media they could sink their hooks into.
If this sounds crazy, good. It is. But it's also not. It occurred via sheer bureaucratic inertia. Washington is at bottom a jobs program for party members. Would CISA and the like, after defeating Al-Queda and ISIS, declare "mission accomplished" and close up shop? Of course not. People have mortgages to pay, after all. The show always goes on.
To tie this into the subsequent essays: Washington has sunken unfathomable energies into Ukraine for the past decade. Why? For its natural resources, naturally. But its gambit is failing. And God knows how many Western firms were leveraged upon the expectation of its success. So once the Russkies finish grinding the AFU into dust and force NATO's capitulation in the conflict, what will 'Ukrainists' find for new employ? A question worth considering, because empires don't wither away; they implode.
With regard to this: "Russia is unlikely to make significant territorial gains in Ukraine in the coming months as its poorly trained forces struggle to break through Ukrainian defenses that are now reinforced with Western munitions, U.S. officials say.", and like comments from U.S. officials who have been wrong about everything related to the U.S. military since the 1950s:
Do not believe them. Russia's military progress has been accelerating, while Ukraine without electricity half the time is not a viable country or military combatant. Of course NATO will say things like this. What else are they going to say?
I was a bit puzzled by this New Washington Consensus. My impression of the difference between Biden and Trump's China policies is that the Democrats are stressing the military component and the Trump Republicans are stressing the trade component. It was Obama who started the conflict with his (military) pivot to Asia. Biden's main contribution was Pelosi's visit to Taiwan and the conclusion of military treaties with China's neighbors.
The Biden administration inherited Trump tariffs and doubled them. It also introduced investment bills like CHIPS and IRA. That may be what Sullivan is talking about. But it is not convincing me. It sounds like Biden is copying Trump without understanding him. CHIPS and IRA look like the kind of 1970s industrial policy that doesn't work because it doesn't see industry in its context. You can build factories but when the workers (education!) and suppliers are not there they will find it hard to survive.
It will be interesting to see what Trump's next steps will be if he becomes president.
Thanks for an interesting selection this week. In 2016 I was telling Aussie “security/strategy”types that the CCP was using 1984 as a guide for their control of society. That was a time when China was still being viewed favourably in Australia. Alas my clarity on China was balanced by my daft naivete regarding the US and Western ‘liberal democracies”, which Seigel’s fine article confirms for me. The authoritarian and the liberal regimes were both adopting totalitarian measures in tandem.
It's also bracing to see what Seigel describes in the US is happening in Australia, UK and EU. Mike Benz has good stuff on this, as another reader notes. We are now paying attention to the crew behind the curtain. They may be a mediocre bunch but they excel in malicious rat cunning and are organised and funded.
The pieces on whole of society, sanctions and asset theft, Washington consensus and Ukraine complement each other nicely. I wonder if a venn diagram was made, if Shamala Cipher will be in the overlap.
Putin is just treading water pending the result of the U.S. election (and perhaps Orban’s ongoing peace initiative). He remains keen to show himself as a man of principle and doesn’t want to be seen to take more land beyond that necessary to achieve his stated objectives. I have no doubt that, should it be necessary, the Russians can push forward quickly.
Hit the like button at the top or bottom of this page to like this entry. Use the share and/or re-stack buttons to share this across social media. Leave a comment if the mood strikes you to do so.
And please don't forget to subscribe if you haven't done so already!
De-dollarization is underway but will proceed slowly. The key players (Japan, the Gulf rulers, China above all) are exposed to phenomenal losses if they miscalculate.
The issue is not simply using dollars for trade. The great strength of the US dollar is that banks that use SWIFT need to keep a proportion of their deposits in reserve in order to maintain sufficient liquidity for routine interbank settlement. These reserves are held as cash, bullion, specie (precious metals in the form of formal currency) or government bonds. The arrangements for this are set out in the various iterations of the Basel Accords. US dollars have long been the preferred form of reserve because they are the most easily traded and hence most highly liquid. US treasury bills are also much easier to manage than bullion, which requires either heavy investment jn safe storage facilities or reliance upon a third party (typically the US or UK).
Because of the Basel Accords every economically active person on earth outside of Iran or North Korea is exposed to the US dollar via their bank account deposits.
Unscrambling this will require a vast amount of patient work in systems of settlement and exchange. The Russians and Chinese are working on the full spectrum of issues...as are a few other parties.
Biden incentivised progress with this through the sanctions. Long term the size of the US debt, trends in productivity and anxiety about the breakdown of the rule of law also make it inevitable that people will seek relief from the dollar.
In the meantime we have to endure TurboAmerica.
The only way to 'de-dollarize' is for the rest of the world to run trade deficits with the US. Until then, enjoy your USD holdings.
This is an amazing comment. I was going to comment on the great yet lengthy article on the Washington Consensus, but I would have no words wiser than these. Certainly our global adversaries will be prepared for a moment in which the dollar becomes materially Pareto sub-optimal. But they won’t press for the triggering event; they are too smart to do that and will just be ready for it.
Thank you. I was trying to explain things as directly and as faithfully as possible. These matters need to be demystified.
As for global adversaries, I am not sure that these distinctions are meaningful. America's rivals work with it and will continue to do so. They do not necessarily want to deal with a superpower in disarray. In any case, in a monetary crisis even American allies will prioritise their self-interest as will multinational firms that hold cash reserves of their own. Crises involving currency are more intense than any other kind. Since reserve currency status is involved the stakes are unimaginable. So all the key overseas players will be cautious.
Very fair point. The degree by a foreign adversary would react more than would any other self-interested foreign actor, allies includes, makes sense. Although I do recall a meeting w reps from the CSRC when I was government, during which they were very proud to showcase their “new” derivatives exchanges on which one could hedge WTI, other dollar assets in yuan denominated contracts. (That these exchanges / contracts exist are public facts, as is the fact of those meetings.) I took note.
"De-dollarization is underway but will proceed slowly."
US % is actually increasing...
https://www.macrobond.com/insights/charts-of-the-week/german-trade-inflation-measures-swift-and-the-yuan#chart-8
Thanks for that. Very interesting. The US dollar is doing well relative to the Euro. No surprise there. This trend will go on as long as Europe is deindustrialising.
But the long term global trend is something very different.
It is getting late in my time zone but I will make sone further comments tomorrow.
Further to my earlier comments, the rising demand for dollars right now probably indicates that the many crises around the world (above all Ukraine and the deindustrialisation of Europe) are generating capital flight. In addition reserves held overseas by multinationals may be involved as forms move money to America to position themselves for reshoring.
However this trend only mitigates but does not resolve the underlying issues. The dollar's future relies on expectations of US reliability in key areas: the rule of law, military prowess and industry. The cost of tge world subsidising US spending is rising and the risk of default (via hyperinflation or repudiation) is growing.
Provided Trump is elected and he manages to reign jn spending pressure on the dollar will ease. We could well see a boom in some areas.
Great roundup, thanks! Loved the Tablet piece.
Russian sanctions were designed to be leaky- because Europe (including Ukraine) continues to import large amounts of Russian sourced energy while both the US and EU rely on some key Russian commodities. The bank accounts of these Russian industries were not sanctioned or frozen. And the EU has no legal right to seize the frozen Russian assets. The interest earned on the assets is a murkier question. Ukraine could sue for damages and try to attach assets held in the EU or US. Surprised they haven’t tried that yet in London or NY courts (afraid of losing?)
And bonus points for quoting both Ciaramella and Sullivan in the same piece - comic relief!
Interesting piece - too bad that your sarcasm over Navalny’s death costed you a subscription…
On the issue of confiscation of the Russian central banks’ foreign reserves assets - which happen to be mainly located in one place: Euroclear, Brussels - I can confirm that the EU Deep State, with which I happen to have a certain familiarity, is nearly unanimously against it. Irrespective of Saudi veiled threats, the move is regarded as too blatant a violation of one of the most established principles of international law - sovereign immunity - and potentially destabilising for the international financial system, and the euro in particular. The American advocates of the moves are routinely labelled as ‘crazies’ at least behind their backs.
This is a total tangent, but something I think about every once in a while
> Of course, many things have happened in the last 40 years that contributed to this reduction. Vehicles are better designed to prioritize life preservation in the event of a collision. Emergency hospital care has improved so that people are more likely to survive serious injuries from car accidents. But, above all, driving while drunk has become stigmatized.
When cars were invented, they had an abstract level of risk (which you could measure in eg 'car deaths per year', but I'm saying something more abstract), and they had a level of benefit (which you could measure in eg "how fast it goes"). Society at some level decided on what the acceptable level of risk was, and let cars be that dangerous. Again, I'm talking very abstractly and this is just an example, but, in eg the 1930s, we had X vehicle deaths, and cars went Y speed. If we wanted fewer vehicle deaths, we could have made the speed limits lower than Y. But we didn't, because at some level we were willing to accept that risk.
Cars have become massively better over time. They are faster, safer, more fuel efficient, etc. But, at the same time, the laws, the regulations, etc., governing how much vehicle risk we're allowed to have, have gotten _tighter_. That is to say, again this is just one example of a more abstract idea: in 1950, cars could go 50mph with an adequate level of safety. Now they can go 90mph with the same level of safety. And yet, speed limits in general are coming _down_ instead of rising to accommodate the technological progress of safety.
This is backwards from how it should happen. As cars get better and safer, we should be able to drive faster! But instead, what actually happens, is that as cars get better and safer, the expectations we put on them grow even faster than their capabilities, and we get stuck in this pattern where everything gets less and less fun, as we're allowed less and less risk.
To summarize with a hyperbolic note: if self-driving car technology ever achieves wide scale adoption, a sensible policy reaction would be to _increase_ the legal BAC limit. Since, y'know, you can't drunk drive because drinking makes you bad at driving, but if you're not the one driving, why does it matter? But I promise you, if self-driving car technology ever gets to that point (I don't think it will, but _if_), the BAC laws will be _more_ restrictive, not less. Does that seem right to you?
My car has an emergency brake that it will automatically invoke if it thinks I'm goin to crash into something.
It _constantly_ false-alarms when, eg, the car in front of me is turning and I don't slow down enough.
It did not slam on my brakes the ONE time I needed it, when my garage door broke and only opened halfway, and somehow I didn't notice in the backup camera, and ended up backing through my garage door.
> It feels like only a matter of time until a car won't let you exceed the speed limit for any reason, for instance, even though there are obviously situations where to be able to do so is vitally important.
Source: I heard it on a podcast, so take that with the grains of salt it deserves, but, apparently California is in the process of passing a law forcing your car to fire an alarm (similar to when you drive without a seatbelt on) when you go >10mph over the speed limit
Ralph Nader's "Unsafe at Aby Speed" has this cool couple pages about people falling several stories onto cars and living. Nader attributes much of the deaths by vehicle to projecting parts (fins, etc).
The Tesla Cybertruck has sharp angles and edges. I suppose trucks are exempt from safety features required for cars?
Troll harder
Drunk driving fatalities should carry the same penalty as 1st degree murder. Stigmatization doesn't work with people who have no conscience.
By that logic anyone who just hits someone or something is guilty of intentional criminality. You could back into someone in a parking lot and be accused of premeditation.
Operating a motor vehicle when intoxicated is a crime. The only question is the punishment. In that regard, someone doesn't have to be accused of premeditation to end up with a sentence equivalent to 1st degree murder.
I looked it up. It's called vehicular homicide, but applies to other reckless driving as well.
"In many jurisdictions, a driver who causes the death of another person while driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs commits vehicular homicide. In addition to the driver's intoxication, some states require proof of negligent driving. In other states, establishing that the driver was intoxicated and caused a fatality is sufficient."
Nothing like 1st degree. Depends on the jurisdiction but the sentences are surprisingly light.
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/vehicular-manslaughter-driving-related-homicides.html
Yes, the sentences are light. There are criminals in Canada who serve less than 10 years in jail for 1st degree murder. They obtain early release for "good behavior". This needs to stop. As for drunk drivers, they do not deserve leniency.
Thanks. What about this one? Seven years:
https://time.com/4092254/heather-cook-maryland-dui/
"...Palermo’s family had hoped for a ten-year sentence with no probation..."
I would have hoped for life in prison, to serve as an example.
But victims are merely spectators in the so-called justice system.
"Whole of society" is the latest iteration of "for your safety" which is the standard rationale for censorship and mass surveillance.
"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." - Alphonse Karr
Freedom will become a reward for compliance. I am sure someone else said that first but forget who.
Freedom is said to be a reward for responsibility. Nowadays, compliance is the new responsibility.
Most drunk drivers are harmless but we lack the ability to target the small fraction of people who drive while insanely and obviously drunk. If you look at actual drunk driving deaths of innocents (not just the drunk hitting a tree) it’s amazing how high their blood alcohol is. People getting arrested for a 0.09% (or whatever barely over the limit number in your area) blood alcohol are collateral damage. I am not saying it’s good to drive drunk but this is one more area of modern life that lazy broad brush laws make worse.
America cannot granularly govern and really never could, probably never can. Certainly not from any central point.
Pompeo and some guy named Urban wrote a WSJ opinion article (https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-trump-peace-plan-for-ukraine-russia-foreign-policy-926348cf) that when it comes to Ukraine Trump might turn out to be more radical than Biden. I share these feelings. It was Trump in his previous term who started the massive arms shipments to Ukraine. It is also my impression that Trump takes Putin's demands too easily. Most likely Trump thinks that he can bully both sides to consent to some Korea style armistice on the front lines at that moment. However, it is unlikely that Putin will consent to that. It is the big question how Trump will react.
Even if Trump gets elected and wanted to end the war in Ukraine, anything less than total Russian capitulation and the howls of "Putin Puppet!" will be deafening.
Trump twice cucked out of leaving Syria, to give but one example. Trump is weak, stupid and easily manipulated.
thanks Niccolo.
Well that Siegel piece was perfectly disturbing. Not because it was at all surprising -- internet surveillance expanded, of course, in perfect conjunction with the so-called Great Awokening, which also kicked off during Obama's second term. Rooting out wrongthink against a totalizing state ideology is no easy feat.
No, what's disturbing is how it came about. Siegel's account dovetails perfectly with both Mike Benz's and Matt Taibbi's expositions on the Twitter files. In Benz's telling, the security state viewed the internet as a convenient disruptor of disfavored regimes abroad, and was perfectly willing to throw gas on the digital fires that stoked outbursts like the Arab Spring. But as the internet gradually facilitated domestic opposition, they became more circumspect. And Taibbi provides examples, such as organizations like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which pivoted from profiling jihadis to any and all "extremists" online, interfacing with Twitter and any social media they could sink their hooks into.
If this sounds crazy, good. It is. But it's also not. It occurred via sheer bureaucratic inertia. Washington is at bottom a jobs program for party members. Would CISA and the like, after defeating Al-Queda and ISIS, declare "mission accomplished" and close up shop? Of course not. People have mortgages to pay, after all. The show always goes on.
To tie this into the subsequent essays: Washington has sunken unfathomable energies into Ukraine for the past decade. Why? For its natural resources, naturally. But its gambit is failing. And God knows how many Western firms were leveraged upon the expectation of its success. So once the Russkies finish grinding the AFU into dust and force NATO's capitulation in the conflict, what will 'Ukrainists' find for new employ? A question worth considering, because empires don't wither away; they implode.
Well said, Luke.
With regard to this: "Russia is unlikely to make significant territorial gains in Ukraine in the coming months as its poorly trained forces struggle to break through Ukrainian defenses that are now reinforced with Western munitions, U.S. officials say.", and like comments from U.S. officials who have been wrong about everything related to the U.S. military since the 1950s:
Do not believe them. Russia's military progress has been accelerating, while Ukraine without electricity half the time is not a viable country or military combatant. Of course NATO will say things like this. What else are they going to say?
To be fair, we've been hearing this for over two years now.
The problem is that Russia does not want and does not have the appetite for conflict. The West is itching for a fight.
Well Russian soldiers are in fact fighting and dying for a cause they believe in. The West not so much.
We've been hearing that one for a while as well. The West continues to escalate.
Mike Benz's stuff is eye-opening. He is very good linking the big picture with what is going on at the grassroots level.
Generally correct. but Ukraine is of no value to the West, except as a threat to Russia.
I was a bit puzzled by this New Washington Consensus. My impression of the difference between Biden and Trump's China policies is that the Democrats are stressing the military component and the Trump Republicans are stressing the trade component. It was Obama who started the conflict with his (military) pivot to Asia. Biden's main contribution was Pelosi's visit to Taiwan and the conclusion of military treaties with China's neighbors.
The Biden administration inherited Trump tariffs and doubled them. It also introduced investment bills like CHIPS and IRA. That may be what Sullivan is talking about. But it is not convincing me. It sounds like Biden is copying Trump without understanding him. CHIPS and IRA look like the kind of 1970s industrial policy that doesn't work because it doesn't see industry in its context. You can build factories but when the workers (education!) and suppliers are not there they will find it hard to survive.
It will be interesting to see what Trump's next steps will be if he becomes president.
Thanks for an interesting selection this week. In 2016 I was telling Aussie “security/strategy”types that the CCP was using 1984 as a guide for their control of society. That was a time when China was still being viewed favourably in Australia. Alas my clarity on China was balanced by my daft naivete regarding the US and Western ‘liberal democracies”, which Seigel’s fine article confirms for me. The authoritarian and the liberal regimes were both adopting totalitarian measures in tandem.
It's also bracing to see what Seigel describes in the US is happening in Australia, UK and EU. Mike Benz has good stuff on this, as another reader notes. We are now paying attention to the crew behind the curtain. They may be a mediocre bunch but they excel in malicious rat cunning and are organised and funded.
The pieces on whole of society, sanctions and asset theft, Washington consensus and Ukraine complement each other nicely. I wonder if a venn diagram was made, if Shamala Cipher will be in the overlap.
The link to Jacob Siegel's 'investigative essay' in Tablet mag (13 ways of looking) opens to an 'oops' page. Here is the pdf of that article:
A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century
Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation
BY JACOB SIEGEL MARCH 28, 2023
https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/Testimony-Siegel-2023-05-16-2.pdf
Weren't traffic fatalities in 2020 classified as COVID deaths? Maybe that reduced the drunk driving total.
Putin is just treading water pending the result of the U.S. election (and perhaps Orban’s ongoing peace initiative). He remains keen to show himself as a man of principle and doesn’t want to be seen to take more land beyond that necessary to achieve his stated objectives. I have no doubt that, should it be necessary, the Russians can push forward quickly.
Nothing strange about the cultural police being ubiquitous, it’s academia and law eating the rest of what’s left.
Academia and law resemble Komodo dragons: they scratch prey, infection sets in, victim eaten alive or dead.