Saturday Commentary and Review #186

J.D. Vance Reads Europe The Riot Act, Hezbollah Begins to Rebuild, Jake Sullivan's "Catastrophic" AI Warning, The Fateful Nineties, Is the Wilderness Too Wild?

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.

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.

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