Trump hastens imperial decline

We're having gale force winds and intermittent outages this morning, so I am not going to try to write anything that requires coherent attention. Here I share a piece to ponder for the new year.

Author Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who specializes in Southeast Asia. Juan Cole passed this along by way of TomDispatch.

The End of the American Century

... let’s face it, Donald Trump’s second term is likely to mark the end of America’s near-century as the world’s preeminent superpower. After 80 years of near-global hegemony, there are arguably five crucial elements necessary for the preservation of U.S. world leadership: robust military alliances in Asia and Europe, healthy capital markets, the dollar’s role as the globe’s reserve currency, a competitive energy infrastructure, and an agile national security apparatus.

 However, surrounded by sycophants and suffering the cognitive decline that accompanies aging, Trump seems determined to exercise his untrammeled will above all else. That, in turn, essentially guarantees the infliction of damage in each of those areas, even if in different ways and to varying degrees.

America’s unipolar power at the end of the Cold War era has, of course, already given way to a multipolar world. Previous administrations carefully tended the NATO alliance in Europe, as well as six overlapping bilateral and multilateral defense pacts in the sprawling Indo-Pacific region. With his vocal hostility toward NATO, particularly its crucial mutual-defense clause, Trump is likely to leave that alliance significantly damaged, if not eviscerated.

In Asia, he prefers to cozy up to autocrats like China’s Xi or North Korea’s Kim Jong-un instead of cultivating democratic allies like Australia or South Korea. Add to that his conviction that such allies are freeloaders who need to pay up and America’s crucial Indo-Pacific alliances are unlikely to prosper, possibly prompting South Korea and Japan to leave the U.S. nuclear umbrella and become thoroughly independent powers.

Convinced above all else of his own “genius,” Trump seems destined to damage the key economic components of U.S. global power. With his inclination to play favorites with tariff exemptions and corporate regulation, his second term could give the term “crony capitalism” new meaning, while degrading capital markets. His planned tax cuts will add significantly to the federal deficit and national debt, while degrading the dollar’s global clout, which has already dropped significantly in the past four years.

In defiance of reality, he remains wedded to those legacy energy sources, coal, oil, and natural gas. In recent years, however, the cost of electricity from solar and wind power has dropped to half that of fossil fuels and is still falling. For the past 500 years, global power has been synonymous with energy efficiency. As Trump tries to stall America’s transition to green energy, he’ll cripple the country’s competitiveness in countless ways, while doing ever more damage to the planet.

Nor do his choices for key national security posts bode well for U.S. global power. If confirmed as defense secretary, Peter Hegseth, a Fox News commentator with a track record of maladministration, lacks the experience to begin to manage the massive Pentagon budget. Similarly, Trump’s choice for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has no experience in that highly technical field and seems prone to the sort of conspiracy theories that will cloud her judgment when it comes to accurate intelligence assessments.

Finally, the nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, is already promising to punish the president’s domestic critics rather than pursue foreign agents through counterintelligence, the bureau’s critical responsibility.

By the time Trump retires (undoubtedly to accolades from his devoted followers), he will have compressed two decades of slow imperial decline into a single presidential term, effectively ending Washington’s world leadership significantly before its time.

If US imperial decline would be good for most Americans or most other peoples, one could applaud. But that's hard for me to believe, even though I've spent a life fighting American imperial impositions on the rest of the world. The imperial ambitions of the Russia, China, North Korea and Iran axis don't look benign. Hard times ahead and Mr. Trump is a fire accelerator.

Christian nationalism in churches

I don't usually write here about books which I found grossly unsatisfying. Books with which I disagree? Often. Problematical? Sure. But badly constructed, argued without historical context, and poorly thought out? Very seldom.

These last thoughts were my reactions to Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism by Brian Kaylor, a Baptist minister, and Beau Underwood, a Disciples of Christ pastor, who run something called Words and Way.  

As anyone who reads here knows, the history and practices through which we express our encounters with whatever we take as God or Ultimate Concern is one of my themes there. Because we are human, these are all within, and manifestations of, our cultures and societies. Therefore, our religious practices and institutions reflect our cultures; it would never occur to me to assume that they sprung full-formed like the goddess Athena from the head of a Zeus nor from the tablets of the law brought from the mountain by Moses. We make what we can with what we've received and do our best to treat it as sacred.

Kaylor and Underwood write with good intent. They seem to believe they are exposing novelties. But so many others, only glancingly acknowledged here, have mined this territory, often more deeply: scanning my own wanderings in this literature on this blog, I found such names of Robert P. Jones, Katherine Stewart, Randall Balmer, Diana Butler Bass, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Sarah Posner, Daniel Schultz, David A. Hollinger, Jemar Tisby, Esau McCaulley, Eddie Glaude, Kevin M. Kruse ...

Okay, this book wasn't written for me. I simply had read too many of its sources. Here's some of the blurb for Baptizing America:

How can Mainline Protestants spot [Christian nationalist] practices in their own activities? ... Christian Nationalism ... exists in sanctuaries where an American flag has been displayed for decades, when we pledge allegiance to one nation “Under God,” or when the U.S. is called a Christian nation. Baptizing America critiques the concept of civil religion, arguing that such expressions are far more dangerous than we realize. Mainline Protestant congregations will likely recognize themselves in the overlooked expressions of Christian Nationalism that pop up in the activities of both church and state.

And little as I like this book, the reaction of my church book reflection group to it taught me a lesson. Everyone doesn't notice that the words "under God" in the national pledge of allegiance, flags in the sanctuary, and patriotic hymns are not intrinsically Christian. Some were taken aback to see the secular nationalism of church customs called out. This book helped them to see habitual practices a little differently. That helps all of us focus more on whatever the message of Jesus' life and death might mean. 

To me the Christian nationalist trappings of American Protestantism are simply the cultural detritus of the middle of the last century within mainline churches, a relic of when American empire was riding high. That time is long gone.

• • •

Donald Trump's first presidential inauguration in 2017 evoked a solid protest against Christian nationalism from the Rev. Gary Hall, the retired dean of what Episcopalians deem "the National Cathedral" which as been accustomed to figure in the festivities.

For more than a century, the cathedral has tried to stand in two worlds at once, attempting to be both a practicing Christian church and a gathering place for American civic expression. As the cathedral’s former dean, I believe that fidelity to the former role now requires rejecting the latter.

For much of its life, the cathedral experienced the tension inherent in playing two roles as creative but not potentially destructive.

But much has changed in American religious life over the past 110 years, and the cathedral has found it increasingly difficult to have it both ways.

After World War II, Christians began seriously to reflect on their relations with the prevailing culture. How could our religion square its validation of oppressive regimes (Protestants and Catholics in Nazi Germany, mainline Christians supporting segregation in the American South) with the principles of love and justice exemplified and articulated by Jesus.

Over the course of the past 75 years, it became impossible to see the church’s mission as compatible with its traditional role of endorsing the status quo. We began to see ourselves less as “Christendom” and more like the early church that stood up to Rome.

... I believe Trump’s election has proved that the cathedral’s attempt to continue this religious/civic balancing act is no longer tenable.

In his words and actions, Trump has shown himself to be outside the bounds of all mainstream norms of Christian faith and practice. His often-expressed xenophobia and misogyny, not to mention his mocking of the disabled and admission of abusive behavior, place him well outside the values of compassion and respect for human dignity that mark historic Christianity at its best. It is simply inappropriate to use a precious institution such as Washington National Cathedral to suggest that the church bestows its blessing on a leader so obviously beyond the pale of Christian thought.

The cathedral’s dilemma exemplifies this watershed moment in the Christian church’s role in American public life. The community that claims to follow Jesus must choose between its role as what our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry calls “the Jesus Movement” and its long-standing practice as the validator of the status quo. With Trump’s election we cannot, with any integrity, be both.

If the church is going to be faithful to Jesus, we must (as he did) stand as a force of resistance to unjust and oppressive civil authority. We cannot use the words, symbols and images of our faith to provide a religious gloss to an autocrat. ... I simply do not believe that the most visible symbol of compassionate faith in America should lend itself to endorsing or espousing their shrunken, fearful vision of our national life.

That was then. How much more so now. I doubt Trump will want to take his circus to that historic church this time, but who knows? A cursory search does not reveal plans.

Empire over

 Once upon a time, before we reverted to lusting after monarchism, we were part of this. No kings!

Q. What's the most common holiday in the world? A. Independence from the British Empire day. There is one somewhere in the world on average every 6 days.

[image or embed]

— Bothy Cat (@bothycat53.bsky.social) November 23, 2024 at 5:30 AM

No offense to the Brits. Today they struggle with their own travails. Imperial decline is the pits, but the destiny of empires.

After empire

Conservative Party British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has set a general election for July 4. (We'll be in that country floating the inland canal system on a narrowboat, so I may or may not see something of this.) 

I had been holding Alex Massie's commentary on the contemporary United Kingdom for our visit, but Sunak's surprise move makes it worth publishing now. 

There is much truth in the post-imperial line, “We are here because you were there” but even this undersells the real transformation of the British population.

To observe this is simply to note reality. There is nothing wrong or deplorable about any of this and I see no reason to regret it.

And, overall and with obvious counter-examples to complicate the picture, this transformation has been achieved with comparatively little trouble or fuss. That is not to downplay the experiences of black and asian Britons but, rather, to try and see the larger picture.

High-profile leadership positions are not everything but nor are they nothing. The prime minister is a Hindu whose parents hail from India, the mayor of London is the son of a Pakistani bus driver, the first minster of Scotland is Scots-Pakistani (and so is the leader of the Scottish Labour party), Kemi Badenoch, who may yet be the next leader of the Conservative party, was born in Nigeria, the next foreign secretary, David Lammy, is the son of Guyanese immigrants, and Vaughan Gething, the new first minister of Wales, is a black man born in Zambia.

It is exaggeration to say that among western nations only the United States has political leadership of such diversity (and even then, some of that American diversity is a matter of political appointment rather than electoral success).

Ten million people living in Britain today were born overseas. The paradox of immigration politics in Britain is that politicians talk tough on immigration while presiding over a system of unprecedented liberalism. The rhetoric may sometimes be ugly; the reality is rather different.

Britain is no longer the quaint antiquarian museum of castles, cathedrals, and the slightly absurd monarchy of American imagination. Nor is it the land of a wondrous, universal national health system won by unionized labor. I am looking forward to a glimpse (only) of a more complex reality.

Christmas in Ukraine

 

At the moment caught here, Russian missiles are not incoming. But they might be at any time; the war against the empire grinds on.

 

Myroslava Tanska-Vikulova writes from Ukraine:  

Strange as it may sound, the aroma of gluhwein [Ukrainian mulled wine] on Independence Square or hot tea that warms Ukrainian defenders at the front – these are our simple pleasures, the ones that help us understand what we’re living for.

In recent years, every Ukrainian has become dependent on one another. The front cannot exist without the rear, but without the front Ukraine’s distinct culture and society would be eliminated.

Since the invasion began, the holidays have taken on a whole new meaning for us. Now it's not just about drinking champagne while the bells ring, or opening presents.

For Ukrainians, Christmas and New Year is a time to thank every defender, a time to remember that it is only because of them that we sleep under warm blankets, to pay tribute to those who have died and those who are still in captivity, to think about those who are currently under occupation and cannot feel free on their native Ukrainian land.

St. Nick via Razom, people-to-people aid to Ukraine

• • •

The Ukraine war puts me in mind of another anti-colonial war, an analogy that I see raised very seldom in this country, yet which seems highly apt to me: the United States War of colonial Independence, 1775-1783.

A rag-tag band of colonials with sophisticated political ideas and mixed motives decided they were ready to throw off a constraining imperial power. The old power despised them as rude farmers and shop keepers. It took their revolt lightly, expecting a quick suppression. Ingenuity and determination among the colonials kept them in the fight and stretched the old empire's military resources. Other world empires propped up the revolt in order to weaken their competitor. There was nothing easy about the U.S. independence struggle, but the insurgent colonists prevailed and the rest is history.

When I think of Ukraine this year, I think of General Washington crossing the Delaware River on Christmas night in 1776 leading his ill-trained, under-equipped Continental Army to challenge the era's most imposing military. 

Few observers would have expected that these improbable amateur troops could endure and win, but they did. Ukraine surviving Russian invasion makes no sense. But Ukraine still lives and carries hope of something better for its people and for all of Europe. I am grateful for the example, however tenuous and imperfect.

It's not a pretty picture

 

I guess you'd have to predict this guy couldn't just fade away. More than half a century of imperial promotion, torture, and war-making doesn't lead to a graceful exit.

In her latest article for Tom Dispatch, Erudite Partner reminds us of centenarian Henry Kissinger's many contributions to the last eight decades of U.S. efforts to seize and hold onto global hegemony. 

It’s hard for powerful political actors to give up the stage once their performances are over. Many crave an encore even as their audience begins to gaze at newer stars. Sometimes regaining relevance and influence is only possible after a political memory wipe, in which echoes of their terrible actions and even crimes, domestic or international, fade into silence.

... Unlike the president he served as national security adviser and secretary of state, and some of those for whom he acted as an informal counselor (Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush), Kissinger’s reputation as a brilliant statesman never required rehabilitation. Having provided advice — formal or otherwise — to every president from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Donald Trump (though not, apparently, Joe Biden), he put his imprint on the foreign policies of both major parties. And in all those years, no “serious” American news outfit ever saw fit to remind the world of his long history of bloody crimes. Indeed, as his hundredth birthday approached, he was greeted with fawning interviews by, for example, PBS NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff.

... If nothing else, Kissinger’s approach to international politics has been consistent for more than half a century. Only actions advancing the military and imperial might of the United States were to be pursued. To be avoided were those actions that might diminish its power in any way or — in the Cold War era — enhance the power of its great adversary, the Soviet Union. Under such a rubric, any indigenous current favoring independence — whether political or economic — or seeking more democratic governance elsewhere on Earth came to represent a threat to this country. Such movements and their adherents were to be eradicated — covertly, if possible; overtly, if necessary.  ...

Read it all.

Colonial wars past

In Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam Harvard historian Fredrik Logevall aims to provide

a full-fledged international account of how the whole saga began, a book that takes us from the end of World War I, when the future of European colonial empires still seemed secure, through World War II and then the Franco-Viet Minh War and its dramatic climax, to the fateful American decision to build up and defend South Vietnam.

This Pulitzer Prize winning history is sweeping, thorough, fascinating -- and, perhaps most surprisingly, gentle. This is a sad narrative, but not, as it might have been, a catalogue of villains.

Logevall writes with empathy for most all the men (there were hardly any women who figure as actors) engulfed in the long running tragedy. He's particularly aware of slaughtered Vietnamese and French colonial draftees, but also of successive French and American officers and officials tasked by their countries with holding back the tide of history.

The American war in Vietnam was my backdrop growing up and coming into young adulthood. I sought then to understand the American war, tuning in to contemporary US journalism, which did convey very early on that this was a futile and probably immoral misadventure. I also dipped into alternative sources, mostly from the left, including the international relations Howard University scholar Bernard Fall and the anti-imperialist Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett who reported from Hanoi. But like most engaged young anti-warriors, my real interest at the time was what this atrocious war was doing to my own country. Vietnam was a symptom of racism, and inequality, and hubris that had to be contested at home. So a very superficial narrative of what was going on in Indochina would suffice for many of us.

This book fills in background that was neither accessible nor seemed important to people like me at the time. Some random highlights, most all of which touch on points when the tragedy could have been, if not averted, played out to a different finish:

• Logevall suggests that if FDR had lived, the sort of instinctive anti-colonialism that was still part of the pre-WWII American mental furniture might have led him to try to keep the French from returning to make war on Indochinese nationalists. We didn't much hold with colonies in those days (while not admitting we'd seized a few from Spain at the beginning of the century.)

But Roosevelt died, and soon thereafter patterns of thought were laid down that would drive U.S. policy for the next twenty years.

• Ho Chi Minh, who had been jousting with French colonialism since the Versailles Conference in 1921 that concluded WWI in western Europe, saw the 1939 European war (WWII) and the German defeat of France as Vietnam's chance for independence. First the Vietnamese had to take on the Japanese; then expel the Europeans. The resurgent French wanted their colony back in 1945 and soon were fighting Ho's Viet Minh. Yet according to Logevell's account, Ho didn't give upon the hope that the Americans would let the French fail and not take up the war as late of 1949.

• John F. Kennedy toured French Indochina in 1951, seeking to burnish his foreign policy credentials. Even then, with French defeat and expulsion by Vietnamese nationalists still three years ahead, he saw where this was going in notes he wrote about the trip:

"We are more and more becoming colonialists in the minds of the people ... we will be damned if we don't do what they [the emerging nations] want."

• Yet by the time the Kennedy administration succeeded Eisenhower in 1961, the young president and his country had succumbed to the inertia of continuity that pervades our political system.

A White House aide of the time, when asked years later how the U.S. interest in Vietnam was defined in 1961, answered "it was simply a given, assumed and unquestioned." The given was that Ho Chi Minh could not be allowed to prevail in Vietnam, that the Saigon government must survive, that failure to thwart the Communists here would only make the task harder next time.

And so the Americans replicated the terrible trajectory of the France's failing empire and tried to impose our own post-WWII imperium. It's a bit of an investment of time to read Logevall's whole story, much of it intricately descriptive of military folly in terrible jungles amid both bravery and stupidity on all sides. Mostly there was death -- but eventually (in 1954) there was pride in the new Vietnam in the north and determination to finish the job by winning national freedom in the south. And eventually the intruding Americans too were swept away, though it cost of at least a million Vietnamese deaths and 20 more years of suffering.

• • •

The Vietnamese siege of the French outpost at Dien Bien Phu was the first world event which stuck in my consciousness as a child. I had no idea what it was about, but I have vague memories of the 15 minute nightly TV newscast repeating day after day that the battle for this obscure jungle redoubt raged on -- and then it was over and the oh-so-foreign Vietnamese had prevailed. Reading Logevall's detailed account, I realized that I was being drawn back into my mother's feelings during that event. 

She had been devastated in 1940 by what was called "the fall of France," the overrunning of that country by Nazi Germany -- she was among the relatively small contingent of Americans who had urged preparedness to fight on an isolationist United States. During WWII, listening to the war on the radio, she developed great affection for the Free French and its leader Charles DeGaulle. Some of that carried over into her reaction to France's colonial war in Vietnam. She worried about the French and was oblivious to the dignity of Asian colonial subjects. She conveyed that to me as we listened to "the fall" of Dien Bien Phu. Reading about Dien Bien Phu, I felt again her emotions, an odd sensation.

• • •

The title of Logevall's book derives from a remark by the journalist David Halberstam that the American war in Vietnam occurred "in the embers of another colonial war." Halberstam wrote his own account of America's Vietnam quagmire, appearing in 1972 when the war had not yet ended, The Best and the Brightest. Yes, I'm rereading that one ...

Shards from the wide world, mostly about power and who has it

When I share domestic tidbits, I usually know where I think they lead. When it comes to the emerging 21st century global power configurations, I'm a bemused and helpless spectator. Here are some links, some with my commentary in italics.

Atrios: Biden's foreign policy leans towards do the right thing more than any president in my lifetime, as far as I can tell.
I agree, feeling concern and consternation amid inevitable reservations.

John Ganz: I am overly given to viewing things in terms of grand clashes of ideologies and social forces to the point that I can sometimes lose sight of the two dominating spirits of world-affairs: stupidity and vanity.
A useful caution ...

Nathaniel Rachman - marking Mikhail Gorbachev' passing
How politicians deal with opposition, humiliation and defeat is one of the great tests of office. Now more than ever, those in charge of the world’s leading powers struggle to face it. In China, the leadership of the Communist Party has blundered into a disastrous Covid policy, unable to change course for fear of tarnishing its own image. In the United States, a former president has rejected his own electoral defeat, imperiling American democracy. And in Russia, Putin’s vicious resentment of Ukraine’s independence led to this year’s brutal invasion.
Unlike Putin, Xi and Trump, Gorbachev’s was a model of leadership defined not by achieving one’s goals, but by accepting their rejection. He is a reminder that even those who fail spectacularly can redeem themselves by knowing how and when to lose. It is a shame so few leaders today seem ready to do the same.

Brad DeLong - the mysteries of British decline
My view—which may be wrong—has been that Britain’s long relative economic decline since the heights of 1870 has been due to its persistent refusal to invest in its people and in its technology-driving industries. You can say that the first of these has cultural-ideological-political roots—Tories fearing that if people get over-educated they will not respect their betters, and Labour fearing that if people get over-educated they will not respect their parents—and you could be right. You can blame the second on the British Empire making it just too easy to to invest abroad and count on the power of the gunboats to make foreign investments safe. You can then say that those institutional habits persist to this day, and you could be right as well. Perhaps. ...

John Cassidy: In the past six years, the Conservative Party has jettisoned economic skepticism, and embraced wishful thinking and self-sabotage.
Yes, the Tories suck. Or perhaps we see across the pond the natural trajectory of imperial decline?

Meanwhile the far-flung US imperial project grinds along:

Sarah Lazare: In September, the U.S. created a foundation that was supposed to unfreeze Afghanistan’s foreign assets. Yet, interviews with trustees reveal that, in three months, no funds have been disbursed—or concrete plans made—to help the Afghan people.

Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute: While MBS Undermines America, Joe Biden Has His Back on Yemen -- Few people noticed, but the United States Senate came very close to ending America’s complicity in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen earlier this week. But the very same person who had vowed to end that war intervened and stopped the Senate from taking action — President Joe Biden. The White House feared that the Senate resolution would have emboldened the Yemeni Houthi movement. But Biden may have instead signaled the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) that, even as he continues to undermine the United States, America still has his back.  
We're addicted to both fossil fuels and treating the people of the greater Middle East as pawns in American strategic games. You too Joe Biden.

And so to Russia's imperial dreams:

Someone using the handle Daragh at Crooked Timber:
... in many ways the Russian populace is much like the poor-white farmers of the antebellum south – hugely disadvantaged by the system themselves, but willing to support it because it puts them one or two steps up the ladder of oppression. Changing this mentality will be difficult work – potentially the work of generations. But it's work that needs doing if there is going to be a Russia that isn’t inclined to aggressive predation on its neighbours.

Greg Afinogenov: Unlike the American Baby Boomers, who have retained a vision of themselves as the protagonists of history since their teenage years, the utopians among the Soviet shestidesiatniki (“‘60s-ers”) became the occupants, if not of the dustbin of history, at least of its recycling bin. Too old when the USSR collapsed to forge new lives in its wreckage, they were also too young to have benefited much in its prime.

Ghia Nodia: An Imperial Mindset -- What the outcome of World War One was for Hitlerism, the outcome of the Cold War was for Putinism. ...A bigger problem is that, unlike Germany after World War Two, it will be very difficult for Russia to find a place in the world that would be acceptable for its national self-esteem. Before the war, Russia’s economy and institutions did not allow it to become either a true member of the global elite or an alternative center of power like China. It could only desperately punch above its weight—by invading Ukraine—without a chance of ever being truly satisfied. These underlying conditions will not disappear: in fact, they have been made worse as a result of the invasion. Russia will not become a true member of the international elite any time soon, though it may face a choice between being a poor relation of the West or becoming a junior partner of China. In either case, ressentiment will remain.

So to the Ukrainian people whose admirable, involuntary resistance to tyranny, we use to inspire ourselves:

Tom Nichols: This holiday season, many of us will seek peace and a reset heading into the new year by drawing closer to family, taking a break from work, and observing the rituals of our faith. We tend, during this time, to clear our mind of unpleasant things. But as Americans, citizens of the greatest democratic power on Earth, we must not forget that the largest European conflict since World War II is continuing to burn away in Ukraine. A democratic nation is refusing to be conquered by a vengeful imperial power, and it is paying for it with the lives of innocent men, women, and children. As we celebrate the season, let us remember that the Russians have shown no intention of taking a holiday from murder.

I agree with Nichols here -- but seeking to use our wealth and privilege for peace is always a higher calling than victory, even when the struggle is just. I believe Ukraine's cause is necessary and just. And I don't want to forget that justice is not everything. 

Happy New Year!

A fan's guide to what is shaping college football bowl games

When I need to restore my soul, I've long watched massive numbers of these made-for-TV college athletic spectacles. There are something like 41 of them this year beginning December 16. Most are pedestrian, but a few are delights. All offer their moments and their quirks. 

But the structures that set the terms for them have changed pretty radically since I last indulged one of these seasonal bowl binges. I thought I'd share some observations and definitions of terms.

Of course, Division 1 NCAA football has long been a business, a Darwinian contest among sports administrators to showcase teams that will excite alumni donors. For decades, that meant attracting promising high school athletes with "scholarships" which rendered them something like indentured peons under all-powerful coaches, subsisting on the favor of their masters (almost all men) -- and perhaps their talent. This might lead to a continued athletic career at the professional level for a very few. And college degrees for about 73 percent of high level players -- slightly higher than their non-athlete peers. These graduation rates are something like 15 percent higher for white players than for black ones.

Legal challenges during last decade have reduced the power of college athletic administrators to keep players in penurious servitude and allowed some direct compensation to athletes from the schools, but even more from booster collectives. But it's the conferences that control the TV money and rake in big bucks.

And it's the NCAA and the conferences that shape post season (bowl) play. Over the next few years, all the accreted anarchic bowls will be sucked into the College Football Playoff National Championship. Forget iconic bowls like the Rose Bowl serving as contests between regions of the country. Which schools play where will be determined by "national standings," not accidents of history. This may make economic sense and even for some less-mismatched, but more exciting, contests, but something is lost.

Something else that has gone bye-the-bye is the expectation that college football players will give their all for their schools in post-season play. Players with strong NFL prospects routinely choose not to risk injury (or have their weaknesses highlighted) by "opting out" of bowl play. Just about every bowl game I have watched this year has begun with a recitation of a list of absentees "preparing for the NFL draft." This is understandable; football is these guys' ticket, not that degree in sports management.

And besides, coaches are doing the same -- jumping to the next job before the post season finishes. This might be one of the most surreal outcomes I've run across:

Wasabi Fenway Bowl - Cincinnati vs. Louisville, December 16
Cincinnati: Head coach Luke Fickell left for Wisconsin and won't coach in the bowl. Kerry Coombs will remain on staff under new coach Scott Satterfield and is the interim head coach for this game. ...  
Louisville: The Cardinals lost coach Scott Satterfield and a couple of assistants to Cincinnati. Deion Branch will work as the team's interim coach for this game. ...

College football players, their peon status newly loosened, play their own game of musical chairs. In theory, the NCAA has long defined eligibility for its athletes as four seasons in their sport, plus a "red shirt" year when they play little or not at all. Teams red-shirt (hold out) players for development or major injuries and sometimes can squeeze an additional year out through administrative legerdemain; this is why I keep hearing of "six year players." Also why one hears that some athletes are in graduate school for academics while still playing undergrad college sports.

And currently the newly implemented "transfer portal" allows college football players to jump from one academic institution to another, perhaps for a better deal, or better TV exposure, or to follow a preferred coach who made a move. The portal is a database of athletes hoping to make a jump. Until this was put in place, transferring students had to sit out a year at their new digs. No longer. The transfer portal rules are somewhat intricate and evolving. Players who have entered the portal can play in bowl games with their old college, but mostly don't. That's another list of opt-outs announced at the beginning of this year's games.

There's a heck of a lot of money in college football and its post-season. And so long as we don't, as a society, conclude that American football is too lethal to continue to attract masses of customers, there'll be young athletes who want in. I will miss the less blatantly commercial version of the college football post-seasion. But the new one will undoubtedly put on a grand show. Guess I'll have to learn all the new rules. It's more fun when I understand them, at least superficially.

A city of lights

Before Russia invaded Ukraine, like probably most people reading here, I had never heard of the city of Mariupol. 

Only a year ago, someone made what I assume is a tourism-promotion video, celebrating a municipality that turned itself into a light show for Christmas. What is shown here is gone, blasted to bits, the survivors scattered, a city of about 400,000 people wiped away by conquest.

I am taking time to try to know more about this so-foreign part of Europe. Historian Timothy Snyder's fall lectures at Yale on The Making of Modern Ukraine are available in full and for free. In addition to being a language polymath, he's a charming lecturer. I highly recommend this series.

Shards from bleeding Ukraine

Putin's imperial war to conquer Ukraine could be the end of us all, so I can hardly ignore it. 

George Packer, usually a pretty hard-boiled journalist, felt he had to see for himself. He questions his own objectivity. His story is worth reading in full.

Journalism that waves the banner of moral clarity makes me uneasy. Moral clarity can be blinding, and most subjects worth writing about are complicated. But a few things are morally clear: slavery, and genocide, and Russia’s attempt to destroy Ukraine. ...

It’s absurd to approach this war from a position of neutrality. As a journalistic stance, neutrality is worthless, and usually spurious, because everyone is a partisan of some kind. Objectivity is different: the necessary effort, always doomed to fall short, of rendering reality exactly, like a carpenter striving for plumb, level, and square. What’s most crucial is independence: refusing to surrender your judgment of the truth for the sake of a political cause. 

Journalism doesn’t require an anesthetized moral faculty. It ought to be possible to want Ukraine to win this war and still tell what you see and hear there honestly. 

... Here was another motive [to go to Ukraine]—the strongest and most dubious of all. I wanted a gulp of Ukrainian air. I wanted to breathe its hope. What a thing to ask of people fighting for their lives. 

...I don’t know if Ukraine can win this war, but I know it must. Putin’s Russia is committing crimes that have not been seen in Europe since Hitler and Stalin—leveling cities, terror-bombing civilian populations, creating millions of refugees, using rape and torture to break the will of those under occupation, separating families, detaining and interrogating at least 1 million Ukrainians and sending many to far-off internment camps, preparing to annex entire regions, erasing their language and culture, burning crops, using vital food and energy supplies to blackmail the world. If Western leaders are too afraid of Putin and their own voters to stop him and punish him for these crimes, he’ll know that the West is as weak and pleasure-seeking as he’s always believed. ...

Packer's full-throated endorsement of Ukrainians' struggle to preserve their country and future is wonderfully attractive. I share his moral enthusiasm; I think he's right. But I don't know how many of us that conclusion will leave unscathed.

• • •

Pundits struggle to discern whether Putin is wily and/or evil and/or simply has drunk a disorienting Koolaid. In this tidbit, Susan Glasser wonders ...

... There is also the matter of Putin getting the West wrong. We in Washington hardly have a monopoly on misguided assumptions being a driving factor in international affairs. Many indicators suggest, in fact, that they were a major reason why this war happened. Putin not only failed to understand that Ukrainians would stand and fight against his aggression; he also failed to foresee the U.S. and its NATO allies remaining united and funding the Ukrainian resistance. Moscow’s bogus annexations of more Ukrainian territory seems likely to produce only more Western sanctions—and the possible extension of the war that Putin looks increasingly like he is losing. “The problem is, of course, us misreading him, but also him misreading us,” [security analyst Fiona] Hill observed. 

• • •

Click to enlarge. This is hard to look at.

Retired U.S. General Mark Hertling argues plausibly that the poor condition of the Russian military means "Putin’s recruits are heading for slaughter."

• • •

Kateryna Kibarova explains why she came Home to Bucha.

I'm Ukrainian. I have no children. I am not putting anyone in any danger. I can be useful to my country. I have a very close friend who lives in Great Britain. I had options to go to Poland. But if we all leave, who will defend the country? Who will support the economy? Who will sustain the belief that we will win? And who will make sense of the fact that we have had to endure it all? This is my home. I'm staying here.

• • •

This is still the disunited United States and there are millions of us who are suspicious of our country's repeated martial adventures. We've lived through decades of misbegotten imperial wars. Some caution about enthusiasm for our righteous endorsement of Ukrainian is certainly advised. Author Robert Wright brings a warning.  

Yet many American elites—politicians, journalists, even “think” tankers—have been reacting to this war as if it were a football game or some other purely zero-sum contest. They’ve celebrated Ukrainian gains on the battlefield with no ambivalence, blissfully unaware that dramatic Ukrainian military success was always bound to encourage Kremlin risk taking, raising the chances of regional or even nuclear war. 

Now, with Ukraine’s big battlefield success having been followed by Russian mobilization and Putin’s declared annexation, bliss will be harder to come by even if awareness fails to grow.

Wright published before Putin's current round of nuclear threats. I just know I don't know what to think, but I choose not to entirely look away.

When you are in a hole, stop digging

The inept cruelty which has characterized U.S. involvement with Afghanistan doesn't end.

A group of victims of the 9/11 attacks have written to President Biden: Afghan Central Bank Funds Belong to Afghans

President Biden: We all lost loved ones on September 11th and call upon you to return the Afghan Central Bank funds to the Afghan people. This is their money, not ours.

Their argument may not seem obvious, but certainly deserves consideration.  Robert Wright and Andrew Day explain.

In February, Biden signed an executive order freezing $7 billion in assets owned by Afghanistan’s central bank. The order reserved half that amount for 9/11 victims’ relatives who had successfully sued the Taliban for damages years ago. But this week 80 other relatives of 9/11 victims urged reconsideration of the policy. In a letter to Biden they wrote, “Ninety-five percent of Afghans are impoverished, and nearly nine million are at risk of starvation…this money is theirs, not ours.”

These families argue the impounded assets never belonged to the Taliban.

This money does not belong to the Taliban. This money comes from Afghanistan’s central bank, and as such, it belongs to the Afghan people. Victims of terrorism, including 9/11 victims, are entitled to their day in court. But they are not entitled to money that lawfully belongs to the Afghan people.

Our government has never been much concerned with the rightful claims of ordinary Afghans, but Biden should not be compounding the evils left by this misbegotten imperial adventure.

More on "the economic weapon"

Preparing to write my previous post about sanctions in international affairs, I came across two contemporary commentaries that seem worth amplifying.

That always interesting commentator Jane Coaston wants nothing to do with feel-good ejections of individual Russians as protest of the Ukraine invasion. 

Banning Russian Tennis Players Won’t Stop the War. ... the All England Lawn Tennis Club (better known as the venue for The Championships at Wimbledon) joined with the British Lawn Tennis Association in banning all Russian and Belarusian players from competing at its event ...

Sports writer including Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post argue the ban is a right move. But not Coaston.

... limiting Russian influence by banning Russian and Belarusian tennis players from Wimbledon is unlikely to bring about a swifter end to the war in Ukraine or concretely damage Putin’s regime. ... feeling strong isn’t the same thing as doing the right thing, or even doing something that makes sense. Russian tennis players didn’t invade Ukraine. And punishing Russian tennis players won’t stop the war in Ukraine. But apparently the ban makes the governing bodies running Wimbledon and the L.T.A. feel as if they have done something. And seemingly, that’s good enough for them.

I'm with Coaston. The horrible reality of the invasion is too awful to be appropriated for a podium by performing sports administrators, in my view especially snotty English ones.

• • •

I almost never read editorial board opinions. I don't get the genre -- how can a publication have an opinion? But "the New York Times editorial board" actually added something essential to discussion of the current economic punishment being visited on Russia. 

... although Russia’s invasion proves that economic integration is no cure for war, economic isolation is also not a recipe for peace. Sanctions are often sold as an alternative to war. But they can also be a precursor to war, as seen with the institution of the American oil embargo against Japan and the freezing of Japanese assets about five months before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

So, while sanctions can hobble economies, they rarely compel the kinds of wholesale political changes that American officials would like to see. ... Change is unlikely to occur when sanctions are imposed without communicating the steps that must be taken for them to be rolled back.

All the more reason that the United States should have a clear plan for how and under what circumstances it would be appropriate to roll back these latest sanctions. Right now, this has been left deliberately vague to allow the Ukrainians to directly negotiate with Russia. It is laudable to give deference to Ukrainians whose lives are on the line in this terrible war. But creating clear goals and communicating benchmarks for sanctions relief are important factors in successful sanctions. Too often, sanctions are left in place for decades, without evaluation of whether or not they are achieving what they were put in place to do.

Exactly. My emphasis. The Ukrainians will determine how this horrible war ends and at what cost to themselves. But Russia has to know what, if anything, would allow economic reintegration with the parts of the world economy which have cut that country off. Otherwise you get ineffectual stupidity -- like U.S. sanctions on Cuba and Iran.

Residents of Puerto Rico not eligible for SSI says the Supreme Court

Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens -- except when Congress decides to discriminate against residents of the island territory. That's the effective content of a ruling last week that Puerto Ricans living in Puerto Rico cannot participate in the federal program called Supplemental Security Income, which provides benefits to older, disabled and blind Americans. The program is available in all 50 states and the District of Columbia to all citizens.

It's no wonder that Puerto Ricans have been and remain conflicted about whether to seek to have their island become a U.S. state. When U.S. expansion across the continent meant mostly white settlers dispossessing the native inhabitants, it was taken for granted that the new lands would eventually become states. But a land seized from Spain's collapsing empire in 1898 presented a new situation. Would the U.S. be willing to absorb a Spanish-speaking colony as an equal part of the whole?

At best, only half-heartedly. Though Puerto Ricans have been U.S. citizens since 1917, what democracy the island enjoys has come in fits and starts. Like our other quasi-colony, the District of Colombia, Congress can and does meddle quite directly in local affairs. 

Puerto Ricans' exclusion from SSI seems a gratuitous insult. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, whose family moved to the mainland from Puerto Rico, was the only dissenter:

“In my view, there is no rational basis for Congress to treat needy citizens living anywhere in the United States so differently from others. To hold otherwise, as the Court does, is irrational and antithetical to the very nature of the SSI program and the equal protection of citizens guaranteed by the Constitution. I respectfully dissent.”

The Biden administration did include extending SSI to U.S. territories in its omnibus "Build Back Better" bill -- now apparently hopelessly stuck in the Senate.

A very contemporary dialogue with a blast from the past

At the end of February, finding myself in the unaccustomed position of watching my government increasingly implicated in what seemed a necessary and just war for the self-determination of the Ukrainian people, I went searching for a little book I hadn't thought about in decades.

My introduction to cultural critic Dwight Macdonald's 1958 paperback volume of essays, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, might give ammunition to our contemporary rightwing nut job book banners. In high school I had a student job delivering the daily New York Times to the 15 or so brainy, or perhaps pretentious, students and teachers who subscribed. Next to the office where I picked up the papers, there was a book rack containing an odd assortment of random paperbacks for sale, mostly for under $2. When I was handed my monthly $10, I would splurge on something from the rack. (Yes, I was a socially inept nerd.) And that's where, in my conservative high school, I ran across Macdonald's essays, probably in 1963.

I didn't understand a great deal of what Macdonald was writing about. I knew absolutely nothing of the 1930s intellectual leftist circles from which he had emerged and with whom he was still arguing. But one aspect of the book was revelatory: Macdonald included piece after piece demanding that those of us privileged to live in the United States recognize the conduct of the Allies fighting Nazis in Europe had not been blameless. Long before Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five (1969) brought home the terror of the firebombing of German cities, Macdonald wanted us to know what "we" had done. He didn't diminish the Holocaust or the crimes of Hitler's aggressive war -- in fact he was way ahead of many "responsible" authorities in foreseeing the murder of European Jews -- but he wasn't going to let anyone bask in victorious innocence about the war.  

We lived in fear of the Bomb in those days. The Cuban missile crisis had been the previous fall. The U.S. war in Vietnam was just coming on the radar of ordinary citizens. In Macdonald, here was someone trying to bring a moral lens to it all.

Much of the book is cultural criticism and I really didn't have the background to understand that. But this ferocious interrogator of his own country's war crimes concluded the political section with an essay from 1952, which I was drawn to when Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February pitched me into an unexpected political place. Macdonald explains his early 1950s choices in the snippets quoted here; material in italics is my dialogue with his essay.

"I debated Norman Mailer at Mt. Holyoke College; my position was summed up: 'I Choose the West.'"

I choose a West that supports a Ukrainian state and people which those Ukrainian people choose.

"I choose the West— the U.S. and its allies— and reject the East — the Soviet Union and its ally, China, and its colonial pro­vinces, the nations of Eastern Europe. By 'choosing' I mean that I support the political, economic, and military struggle of the West against the East. I support it critically... but in general I do choose, I do support Western policies."

All war is evil. Human freedom is good, although routinely abused. I choose freedom wherever people strive toward it.

"During the last war, I did not choose, at first because I was a revolutionary socialist of Trotskyist coloration, later because I was becoming, especially after the atom bomb, a pacifist. ..."

If curious about the Trotskyism, I recommend the original book. This aspect of Macdonald is a piercing vignette from a long-gone intellectual era. Atomic bomb pacifism of a secular character was quite common after the horrors of  WWII.

"I choose the West because I see the present conflict not as another struggle between basically similar imperialisms as was World War I but as a fight to the death between radically different cultures. ..."

Our terrified, imperial War on Terror -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Abu Ghraib and our complicity in Yemen and so many other places -- calls the moral value of our culture into question. This country was born in and thrives on racial and sexual domination. Still ...

"In choosing the West, I must admit that already the effects on our own society of the anti-Communist struggle are bad: Senator McCarthy and his imitators are using lies to create hysteria and moral confusion in the best Nazi-Communist pattern... In short, we are becoming to some extent like the totalitarian enemy we are fighting."

Still, more profits for the tech-military-industrial barons. Today's United States exiles its losers to tents on our sidewalks while anesthetizing its winners with mindless consumption of our irreplaceable planet. And a large minority of us were persuaded that it meant "freedom" to put a criminally unserious person in a position to use the Bomb.

"But (1) being on the road is not the same thing as being there already (though one might think it was from certain Marxist and pacifist statements), and (2) this malign trend can be to some extent resisted."

After the fact, we sometimes apologize and even aspire to make amends. We have sometimes put some of our mass murderers on trial. Citizens of Minnesota did convict Derek Chauvin. Not a high bar, but there it is ...

"... Ours is still a living, developing society, open to change and growth, at least compared to its opposite number ..."

Well, I hope so. And we do produce the likes of the Rev. William Barber, Stacey Abrams, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, climate activist Bill McKibben, Congresscritters Pramila Jayapal and Ro Khanna -- leaders who are neither entirely inside' nor entirely outside, the realm of power and who challenge us to find ways to make this colossus better. Is it enough? No. But the horrors of the invasion of Ukraine remind me, I choose the permanent struggle which is life and hope. 

To my surprise and delight, I found the entire text of Macdonald's little book of essays available for free download under the title Responsibility of the Peoples [pdf]. There's much more there, including my first introduction to the work of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement. I'll be coming back Macdonald on the blog from time to time.

A sometimes wise, often strange, book

The book excerpts that follow, written in 2020 as far as I can tell, seem perhaps even more on point about what we are trying to comprehend today than when they were written:

Whereas Hungary represents how capitalism without meaning or restraint open the door for a return to an older nationalism, Russia represents the disruptive force that nationalism can be in the world when hitched to a belligerent approach to national security, the worldview that domestic and international laws are always to be subjugated to the raw will to power. The corruption that seeped into Hungarian political life is but a drop in the ocean of graft upon which Russia runs. ... The nostalgia for the past and ceaseless Us versus Them politics was ... a reflection of Putin's political project, one in which greatness is defined by what you can destroy, not what you can build. And what Putin set out to destroy, above all, was the idea that was so prevalent when the Berlin Wall came down: that a new world order of democratic values and agreed-upon rules and norms was here to stay. 

For much of the twentieth-first century, Russia has led the counter-revolution to American domination -- not by seeking to upend the local order that America constructed, but rather by disrupting it from within, turning it (and ultimately America itself) into the ugliest version of itself. I think of how Russians must have seen us Americans as I was growing up: capitalist stooges, driven entirely by a lust for profit; a militarized empire, unconcerned with the lives of distant people harmed by our foreign policies; racist hypocrites, preaching human rights abroad and practicing systematic oppression at home. That's the America Putin wants all the world to see, and that's the America that Putin wants us to be. 

Think about it. Isn't that what you would want for someone who humiliated you? For them to be revealed, before the world, as the worst version of themselves? By doing so, Putin leveled the playing field -- the world is what it is, a hard place in which might makes right, capitalism is as fungible as Communism, and a ruthless Russia will always have to be treated with the respect it was denied after the wall came down.

• • •

Ben Rhodes, from whose After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made these thoughts derive, was a national security aide and speech writer to President Barack Obama. He's all of 44  now and served 8 years back then on the White House staff. The more senior figures in the U.S. foreign policy establishment, then and now, seem to regard him as an irritating twerp.

Nonetheless, it has leaked out that Obama used Rhodes extensively when he wanted to open up to normalizing relations with Cuba -- perhaps some youthful thinking helped break that fossilized morass open. Today Rhodes can be found as cohost of Pod Save the World.

In response to the shock of the United States electing an authoritarian moron to succeed Obama, Rhodes wandered the world, trying to understand illiberalism on the ascendant. This book is the story of the places (Hungary, Russia, Hong Kong) and people (mostly members of a young, modern, educated class like his own) who he met and commiserated with.

It's not a bad book -- as the excerpts above indicate, it is often insightful.

But to this reader, it's also just plain weird. 

Rhodes seems genuinely to know a lot about the places he describes. (With his background, one would hope so.) But he shows not the least brush with any leftish narrative of "western" history. I'm not talking hard core Marxism or Lenin on imperialism. He uses all the conventional critical words -- corruption, capitalism, nationalism, American exceptionalism. He understands that women matter, but perhaps has never had to understand how we're different. He describes being in his own country during the "racial reckoning" of 2020 and he is sharp about how white supremacy constrained Obama. But above all, his mindframe is "rules-based-order," "international law," "human rights." He doesn't seem to have a frame for society-wide, systemic oppression and subjugation.

Don't get me wrong: I love that some of the horrors and heartbreaks in our past have taught the U.S. and Europe to care about liberal values. But I can't understand the implications of what we affirm on our better days without also considering fascism, communism, imperialism, colonialism. And patriarchy. And somehow Rhodes seems untouched by these concepts; they are not his frame.

Rhodes is aware of US hypocrisy. He knows unequivocally that the "War on Terror" was both a practical and ethical disaster for the country. He knows U.S. global hegemony is over. He's perhaps like his old boss without the cosmopolitan sophistication, preferring to point his readers to visions of better possibilities rather than chew over the breakage of the past. He's likable. But this is an odd book, just a notch off-center for this reader.

Nuclear perils

Today's news that war damage to electric lines has interrupted monitoring of the radioactive Chernobyl site in Ukraine makes the thoughts of Mohamed ElBaradei even more to the point.

Chernobyl

In 2002, Mohamed ElBaradei was Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency. He called bullshit on the Bush administration's 2002 claim that Saddam Hussein's Iraq possessed nuclear weapons. He was correct. The U.S. (make that John Bolton) worked to get him canned from the agency. International opposition defeated that move and in 2005 ElBaradei was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

So ElBaradei's observations on the nuclear implications of the Russian invasion of Ukraine seem well grounded.

Zaporizhzhia, Europe’s largest nuclear facility, is home to six nuclear reactors, any one of which could have been jeopardized by the fires that were started during the Russian shelling of the facility and fighting at the plant. That the flames were extinguished quickly is a testament to the professionalism and bravery of the plant’s workers. But with Russian officers now interfering in the running of the plant, the Zaporizhzhia reactors remain at risk. 

The world got lucky, as it did with Russian troops’ equally dangerous incursion into the shuttered Chernobyl plant during the first days of the invasion. Yet there are still another half-dozen nuclear reactors scattered across Ukraine, which means that the worst-case scenario remains a live possibility. The release of radioactive material could render entire population centers uninhabitable, threatening hundreds of thousands of people – and not just in the immediate vicinity. ...

The point he's making here is something we need to listen to. In recent years, climate hawks have insisted that nuclear-generated electric power has to be part of overcoming dependency on coal and oil if we hope to mitigate carbon pollution. Nuke plants make clean energy, as least with regard to carbon emissions.

Certainly nuclear power is attractive on its face -- and most likely engineers have figured out how to make nuke plants safer than Chernobyl or Three Mile Island. Designs do get better with experience.

Every once in a while, I try to inject a question like "have they figured out what to do with the waste?" into online discussions. Either there is no answer or people who've been beat up for even thinking about nuclear get hostile.

My question is not hostile. I'm just trying to inject the human dimension into the discussion of nuclear power. Our species is not capable of behaving carefully or sensibly for the thousands of years it takes for high end nuclear waste to decay. We're bright and creative hominids, but we fight wars. The horror of  Ukraine is a reminder that in a crisis, the soldiers can take over from the engineers with dire consequences.

* * *

ElBaradei goes on to summarize where the global nuclear weapons danger is today:

As we have seen in the Ukraine war, nuclear weapons have once again become instruments of security strategy. All nine [Nuclear Weapons States] NWSs – China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the UK, and the US – are, indeed, now in a frantic race to modernize their arsenals. 

Even more ominously, the NWSs are availing themselves of new cyber and artificial-intelligence technologies, as well as advanced sci-fi-like hypersonic missiles that are designed to evade existing defense systems. And many – including Britain and France – now keep their nuclear weapons on heightened alert, a status that raises the probability of a nuclear-weapon launch (be it intentional, accidental, or as a result of cyber manipulation). 

Despite all our past legal commitments, we are still living in a world where security strategy ultimately depends on nuclear weapons. ...

He goes on to call for the sort of patient, tiresome negotiation and confidence building which created the nuclear treaty firewalls which successive Republican administrations in the U.S. and the aggressive autocracy in Russia have torn down over the last 20 years.

His prescription includes a mobilized global public opinion which makes "the hoarding of [nuclear] arsenals ... a taboo akin to genocide." Such a force existed for awhile in the 1980s -- the Ukraine war reminds us we still need it.

Ukraine: let's not do this again ...

Finally somebody has said something I find sensible about the multi-faceted crisis that goes by label "Ukraine." I could have said "Russian imperialism," or "post-Soviet nationalism," or "European Union growing pains," or "Autocracy v. Liberal Democracy," or "U.S. imperial decline," but for now I'll stick with simply with one word: Ukraine. There's a lot to understand and unpack there, and it's far beyond my knowledge.

But I resonate with much of what Michael Tomasky offered in in The New Republic [my emphasis]:

... while there’s a lot we don’t yet know, a clear bottom line for the Biden administration has been etched: Don’t go to war. Period. 

If today’s news turns out to be a temporary respite—or a trick—and Russia does invade, cable news will be a nonstop source of images of the invasion for a few days at least. Russian atrocities and deaths of Ukrainian civilians will be emphasized. American neocons and certain Senate front men thereof, notably Democrat Robert Menendez and Republican Marco Rubio—who’s pushing aggression when he’s not apologizing for Donald Trump’s crimes—will get a lot of air time. This last point, incidentally, is one of the key ways in which the mainstream media are failing democracy: If a person can give good blather on foreign policy, TV will anoint that person as an expert, even if he’s gotten everything wrong for a decade or two. ... 

... history records no [U.S. military interventions that were] smashing successes that I can remember. There were, instead, the disastrous quagmires in Vietnam and Iraq. And even most of the interventions that were “successes” from a military or intelligence point of view turned out to be disastrous in a broader sense. We engineered a quick coup in Iran in 1954; what happened next? We installed a ruthless pro-American regime that the people finally expelled in 1979, which was replaced in turn with a ruthless anti-American regime that neocon belligerence has helped to transform into a regional, if not global, power—perhaps soon with nuclear weapons capability. ... 

... Getting militarily involved in Ukraine means getting into a war with Russia, crossing the uncrossable Cold War lines that threatened nuclear annihilation. Maybe Putin will back down. But even if he doesn’t, the fight here is solely economic. If Biden once aspired to bring Ukraine into NATO, he gets the situation now. If Putin does go in, and the war caucus starts trying to whip the country into a frenzy, [Biden] had better stick to his nonguns.

Biden has been around enough ugly blocks to know that he can't expect any lasting popular support at home for getting into a direct military confrontation in Eastern Europe. 

It's not hard to be sympathetic toward those Ukrainians who urgently want to become more European. And the U.S. probably owes them at least some reparations for afflicting them with that sleazy, used political consultant, Paul Manafort, whose wiles helped to impose a Russian puppet back in 2010. And there was much to admire (and some things to fear) in the Maidan uprising that tossed that strongman back to Moscow in 2014, leading to the current government structure. But hey, Ukrainians and Europeans are going to have to untangle this as best they can. 

It's unlikely that deep U.S. involvement here can do good. Our track record stinks.

An anachronistic empire of slave labor

My apprehension of World War II is colored by ancestry, though I was not born until shortly after. That is, I grew up knowing that "The War," meaning the war in Europe to defeat fascism and Nazism, was the central and defining experience of my mother's life. Perhaps the 9/11 attacks played a similar role in some current generations' lives -- an historical experience which colors deeply all that comes after.

My mother experienced The War as an extended crisis. Unusually for her class and location -- I think because she encountered emigre Germans, refugees from the Nazis -- she viewed Hitler as a threat not only to her Jewish and German friends, but also to her own way of life. When I read Erik Larson's In the Garden of the Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin, I realized that she was almost certainly in the audience for the diplomat William E. Dodd's anti-Nazi speaking tour after he returned from Germany.

What made The War such a long, draining crisis for people like my mother was that her fellow citizens didn't see the threat coming or didn't want to look. Mother was a moderate Republican; she was out of phase with her peers, agitating against German expansionism throughout the 1930's, watching in horror as Hitler absorbed Austria and Czechoslovakia, listening on the radio to the fall of France to Hitler's armies, and to the bombing of London. "America First" politicians were slow to take up what she feared was a uncertain fight to preserve human decency. It was an agonizing time to be her kind of engaged citizen. Was Nazi barbarism about to overrun everything?

The central insight of economic historian Adam Tooze's The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy was that this terror was somewhat misplaced. Hitler's terrible Aryan empire never had a chance against the productive capacity of American arms, shipped first to Britain and later to the Soviet Union. In fact, even a Russia degraded by vicious Stalinist purges and erratic central planning, had the economic capacity to resist and defeat the Germans. The German state was a second rate economic power that Nazis tried to organize to overshoot its actual strength -- and its eventual collapse was all but inevitable.

For all the misery and murder, barbarity and brutality, Nazism was not going to win The War or the future. I found Tooze's book fascinating, but this may be an acquired taste. He proves his case in vast detail and summarizes in broad strokes.

Once Germany had engaged both Britain and the Soviet Union and once the United States threw its weight fully into the scales, the odds against the Third Reich were bound to be overwhelming. In 1941, before the German invasion of the Soviet Union but also before the American economy hit full stride, the combined GDP of Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States exceeded that of Germany by a factor of 4.36 to 1. Similarly, in the 1930s the combined steel output of Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States had been almost exactly four times greater than that of Germany and that at a time when American industry was well short of its productive peak. By 1944 the ratio of steel output, even if we add the output of Belgium, France and Poland to the German side, was 4.5 to 1 against Germany. What Germany faced by 1944 was simply the crushing material superiority that German strategists had always feared.

Tooze demands recognition that, in addition to Nazism's ideological and all-too-successful attempt to exterminate Europe's Jews, German economic planning was also based on starving or murdering the continent's Slavic people's to make room for German imperial expansion. The Nazis were envious of French and British colonial empires and looked for potential slave labor of their own.

The point is not that Germany’s imperialism in Eastern Europe represented a regression into atavistic barbarism. The Nazi programme of genocide was certainly barbaric. But, as we have seen, it was tied to an ambitious project of colonial settlement and violent modernization. The point is not that Nazi racism was atavistic. The point is that it was anachronistic. ... 

[Germany's invasion of Russia] was a belated and perverse outgrowth of a European tradition of colonial conquest and settlement, a tradition that was not yet fully aware of its own obsolescence. ... 

... By the 1940s, the nineteenth-century map of economic and military power, centred on the established states of Western Europe, no longer existed. This was the most basic fallacy underpinning the effort by the Third Reich to create an empire in the East. America’s emergence as an economic superpower on the one hand and the explosive development of the Soviet Union on the other had fundamentally altered the balance of global power. ... 

... Whereas the incarceration of more and more potential workers in murderous concentration camps was clearly irrational from the point of view of the overall war effort, from the point of view of the individual employer the concentration camps were often a godsend. Even in 1944, Himmler was still able to provide new workers. Though these people were quickly worn out, the advantage of the SS was precisely that they were able to offer their industrial clients an apparently limitless flow of new inmates.

Tooze concludes that it is inadequate to concentrate entirely on the Nazi's ideological intent; the economic order they aspired to impose was almost equally murderous.

Obviously, ideology was decisive in the last instance, especially in relation to the Judaeocide. There could be no other reason for killing one group with such awful thoroughness. The assumption of a racial struggle was an unalterable given in the Nazi worldview. On the other hand, it is also clear that, as the war ground on, sustaining the war effort increasingly came to override every other preoccupation of Hitler’s regime.

I found this book broadening. As far as I can tell, Tooze's estimation of the Nazism's essential economic weakness is now generally accepted by historians, a change in emphasis from previous accounts. We see differently as we move farther away in time. My mother wouldn't have accepted Tooze's thesis for a minute -- the danger seemed too immediate.