Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Age of War and Revolution Page 12 of 22

Reasons For Hope (1): The Solutions Are Known

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On February 8, 2023

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Ok, this place has mostly been about how fucked we are, and how we’ve fucked up. Blame is more on our leaders than us, but as a species we’re on the hook.

But there is cause of hope because mostly we know what we have to do.

We know we have to reduce CO2 and Methane emissions. We even know mostly how. We pretend we don’t, because the how will involve changing the economic basis of our societies. Something between forty to fifty percent of our jobs aren’t needed or are actively harmful. People should mostly work from home if they can. We need to outlaw planned obsolesence and get rid of suburbs and exurbs as they currently exist. Everyone and everything needs to prove that it increases biodiversity and communities need to show a CO2/Methane deficit, without cheating and bullshit offsets.

We need to prepare for what’s coming. Solutions include but are not limited to

  • building seawalls
  • moving to renewable resources,
  • rewilding,
  • creating wetlands around vulnerable areas and replanting and rebuilding ecospheres
  • change agriculture to huge hothouses and vertical farming and so on
  • reduce our reliance on meat though not remove it entirely since there are regions that make sense as pasture land
  • Move to regional manufacture of specific items
  • Reduce reliance on large power grids
  • fix our infrastructure
  • replace a lot of our infrastructure with styles that last longer and/or are easier to repair (asphalt and steel-reinforced concrete have to go, fortunately we now know how the Romans created concrete that lasted thousands of years)
  • Fix our air infrastructure to check for CO2 , oxygen and to clean the air
  • Set up systems to allow individual buildings and neighbourhoods to be power and water self-sufficient where possible
  • stop poisoning or overusing our aquifers
  • stop growing water intensive crops we don’t really need in areas that don’t have water (almonds in California)

All of this is fairly basic. The details can be complicated, but we know what must be done and we either have the technology or can develop it.

The hard problem is not the technical stuff, complicated as it may be, the hard problem is the political question. The hard thing is that we have to change how we live and how we organize our societies in fundamental ways.

But we know, generally speaking, what has to be done. And that is cause for reasonable hope, because it means that if we do solve the political problem, we’ll be able to get moving very quickly.

We just, like any addict, have to be willing to actually change, and that means giving up our current way of living.

That’s hard. But it is going to happen. We can do it before we hit bottom, or we can do it the hard way. But we will do it.

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The Red Queen’s Race, Neoliberalism & Why Healthcare Is Being Privatized

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On January 23, 2023

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Back in the early 2000s I remember reading an interview with Ted Turner, who founded CNN and later sold it. He wasn’t happy with how it was being run so the reporter asked him why he didn’t buy it back.

He explained that he had only a few billion dollars, which meant he wasn’t “in the game” anymore. People mocked him for it, since to a normal person that’s more money than they could ever use, but he was right. He had sold, and now he couldn’t re-buy; prices for key assets like CNN had gone up.

This the basic issue the real players, the mega-rich and the CEOs who run the big companies face. The amount of money that was enough last year isn’t enough this year, let alone in five years. Fall behind and soon you’re out of the game. This doesn’t have to be personal money, just money you control, so if you have effective management control of a company you don’t have ownership control of, you’re in the game, though such people generally reward themselves massively, so they at least aren’t embarassed in front of their peers.

Different oligarchs are competing against each other and so are different groups: tech, finance, manufacturing, military-industrial, etc…  If one gets enough of an advantage, then they buy out the others, and even if you’re still filthy rich, you’re out of the game and nowhere near as powerful as those still in the game.

As everyone knows now, the rich have been taking more and more of pie. The most famous chart is the labor productivity vs. wages one:

Furthermore, the real players have been narrowing: there are fewer and fewer people who are really in the game. Vast waves of consolidation in almost every industry have created oligopolies and monopolies, because those sorts of businesses can squeeze customers. Some games are easier to squeeze than others: healthcare is a famous example as people will pay almost anything to live. There’s a reason Bill Gates is buying up all the farmland he can get, too, with environmental disaster onrushing, he knows that those who control food will (with enough political cover) also clean up.

But at the end of the day, everyone is taking from the same pool: any increase in wealth that doesn’t come from productivity increases has to come from someone else. The rich do take from each other, though they play by the rule that unless you’ve betrayed other elites  you get to stay wealthy, but most of what they take still has to come from the masses.

Unfortunately they’ve been squeezing the masses for 40 to 50 years, maybe a little more. So they have to keep finding new places to squeeze. This is why power has been privatized and de-regulated; why water and sewage is privatized in the UK (and sewage is in the rivers again), and so on.

But in those countries with public health systems (aka. not the US) like Canada and the UK, well, that’s a place where the full squeeze hasn’t been put on. Prices can easily be raised, by moving to the profit maximizing price (insulin at $800, like in the US, and so on), though it means a lot of people will suffer and die.

There’s one last big public heifer to be taken down and consumed, in other words. And if you don’t get in on it, well, your rivals will and they’ll be richer than you, and you stand a good chance of being forced out of the game.

So, with a few exceptions (manufacturing used to be one of them), the elite consensus is to privatize health care. It’s a big cow, sitting there waiting to be chopped up, and if you get a big enough chunk you may be able to buy out some rivals or at least stay in the game.

And in some cases it’s pretty much the last one. In the UK, it’s the only thing of worth the government owns which it hasn’t privatized. So, as everyone understands by now, you deliberately underfund and sabotage it, then call in the private sector because it isn’t working well. The same thing is happening in multiple Canadian provinces, including where I live in Ontario.

And the real players will become fewer and fewer, and if it means that you die or suffer, well, that’s a price the players are willing to pay so they can stay in the game.

As the game narrows, the players will also turn even more on each other. This has already happened with the TransAtlantic elite, who used to more or less cooperate: the US is now feasting on Europe. But then the Germans had been feeding on much of the rest of Europe already. And it’s obvious that Chinese and US elites are moving to a confrontation, and this is driven in great part by the refusal of the CCP to allow anything important in their economy to be controlled by foreigners.

Sadly, there is a real economy, and it is being fantastically mismanaged, not least by allowing the real carrying capacity of the world to collapse. Elites had such a huge pie (to change metaphors) that it usually made more sense to fight over it than to cooperate to grow it more. So we’re at the beginning stages of collapse. There will come a time when the pie starts to shrink in ways no one can deny.

The silver lining, such as it is, is that so much will have been privatized and screwed up that when we finally do get serious about change, assuming we avoid a Dark Age (not a sure thing) we will be able to do things differently, since there will be so little legacy left.

It’s not much of a silver lining, but destruction does make change possible.

 

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The Death Throes Of The World Europe Made

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On January 18, 2023

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Most people don’t really get just how extensive European conquest of the world was.

The map’s a bit inaccurate over in Russia: most of Russia is “not Europe” and was conquered — most of it should be green, like North America. Likewise, Japan was conquered by the US, which is a European colony. Leaving aside their brutal war crimes, they were stupid to pick a fight with an industrialized continental power: there was never any chance of winning against the US, as Admiral Yamamoto told them.

But the point is fairly simple: Europeans made the modern world. Wiped out almost all the natives in North America; conqured all of Africa and South America, and almost all of Asia. We went around and imposed our form of capitalism. We destroyed local industry, as in India (which was at least as industrialized as England before the conquests) and forced the natives to trade with us on negative terms, the most famous example being the two Opium wars to make China allow the Opium trade, since England had almost nothing else the Chinese wanted to buy.

World War I and II were a competition between the European powers (which include the US, who had by then essentially completely wiped out the natives) and the US and USSR, the peripheral continental powers won the war, divided Europe between them, “de-colonized” and then ruled the world between them till the USSR collapsed, at which point the US got to tell almost everyone what to do and how to do it for a good twenty-plus years.

A few nations managed to sort of resist: Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and North Korea, but they were made to suffer vastly for their defiance.

The era ended, I would argue, when Russia sent troops to Syria. They defied the US directly, and fought, and the US backed down. One could argue for Georgia, but it was on Russia’s border. Syria was an assertion that the US could not overthrow any government it wanted and that it didn’t control the Middle East minus Iran.

But Russia, important as it is, is now a junior ally to China. They have the nukes, but they don’t have the economy to stand up to the West and NATO without China’s support, and they know it. The competition is not really between Russia and NATO or Russia and the Ukraine, but China and the US, even though neither side has anything more than observers on the ground.

The Russians have chosen their side: chosen not to be Europeans but to be Asians. They say this frequently, it’s a deliberate choice. If this century is to be the Asian one, Russia will be Asian. This change from looking to Europe and being essentially European is massive, and it’s what makes it possible for China to win. Losing Russia, with its vast resources and land ties to China makes it nearly impossible to use American sea-power to “choke out” China thru trade interdiction.

The coming cold war, and possible hot war (or a series of proxy wars) with China is about whether a non-European power will be allowed to remake the world Europe made. Everyone recognized that the US was Britain’s heir, ruling indirectly, but ruling nonetheless. It is about a different, non-EuroAmerican elite being powerful: people who don’t believe in exactly the same things as the trans-Atlantic rulers.

It is an existential threat to European rule, and it is being treated as such. The “yellow peril” has arrived.

In 30 years, will Mandarin be the the new English? The new lingua-Franca? The language everyone has to know and that you can, if clumsily, get by on almost everywhere?

Absent a major war, likely nuclear, or civilization collapse, I find it hard to see a scenario where China doesn’t become the most important global power. Oh, they have problems–but so does everyone.  Cries of how they can’t do it because of culture seem weak to me: China was the civilization leader for most of the last 2,000 years, the idea that Chinese culture can’t produce science, music, arts and all the other flowers of civilization is absurd and they’ve certainly been able to adopt our innovations, just as we previously adopted gunpowder and the printing press from them.

Everything ends. We Europeans had our day in the sun (though my Irish ancestors missed most of it) and now the sun sets, as it always does.

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China’s Trade Surplus Grows, Including With the US

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On January 17, 2023

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There’s a lot of talk about friend-shoring and bringing industry back to the US and its allies, but the reality is quite different.

The bottom line, right now, is that if the US went to war with China, the American (and Western) economies would virtually collapse.

The US is making serious preparations for war: they are fortifying allied countries in Asia in a similar fashion to how they did Ukraine after 2014, although obviously with less of an eye to ground invasion. Japan has doubled its military budget and stated that it will no longer obey the “peace” constitution but will participate in offensive operations with America.  US bases are popping up around China wherever they are allowed.

But to fight a non-nuclear war with China, the West has to genuinely re-shore its critical industries, and it isn’t doing that beyond a few steps with regards to semiconductors. A vast swathe of basic industrial goods are made by China, and not by the West, or not in sufficient quantities.

However, to seriously repatriate industry requires reducing the cost-structure: and that means reducing housing costs, and in the US, health-care and tuition costs, so that Western industry is cost-competitive. Right now the US is grabbing a swathe of energy price sensitive industry from Europe, and especially Germany, but that doesn’t help much in an general war: they’re taking from their allies, not their enemies.

Genuine oligarchic plutocracies, which is what most of the West is, including the US, are generally very bad at industry and war, though there are exceptions (Venice, at various points. But being merchants concentrated their minds on naval power.)

The steps required for America and the West to rise to the challenge of China require Western elites to make painful choices they so far are avoiding: they simply have to give a better deal to their populations, and not concentrate on keeping wage increases under inflation increases (which is what has happened in the US.)

America’s elites can be absurdly filthy rich or they can just filthy rich and have a chance of retaining their global pre-eminence. It’s unlikely they can do both, though I suppose they could bet on ruling a post-nuclear wasteland, if they’ve gone fully insane.

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A Map Showing The Two Main Geopolitical Blocs

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On December 28, 2022

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Yeah, it is mostly this simple:

This is pretty much the map for UN resolutions aimed at Russia, too.

As I’ve noted before the bottom line is that if you are a developing country, China offers cheaper loans and cheaper and faster development work like ports, airports, hospitals, roads, railways, schools and even cities. If you aren’t close to them, they don’t care about your internal politics, either.

I remember reading an interview with a minister of an African state who said approximately, “every time a western minister visits us we get a lecture, every time a Chinese official visits we get a new hospital.”

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As for sanctions, well, everyone’s scared of them, and everyone in that green zone knows that they could be sanctioned at the drop of the hat and that the sanctions never go away. Even if they don’t approve of some things Russia or China does, they don’t want the precedent of more and more sanctions and they want to belong to a monetary system which won’t lock them out.

Afghanistan is a particularly “amusing” case: when the US pulled out it then sanctioned Afghanistan and froze its foreign reserves. There was an immediate famine effecting millions. Biden is a perverse evil genius: by ending a war he was able to kill FAR more people than if he’d left troops in country.

Then there is Iran, where a treaty was signed under Obama which would remove sanctions. Iran kept its side, but the US pulled out anyway under Trump, and lo! Biden did not reverse him. Even the Europeans disagreed with that one.

China simply offers a better deal now than the West, and there’s a couple centuries or more of resentment towards Europe and America and Japan. Most countries would rather be allied with China.

And that’s why this map is fairly close to what the cold war map will look like. A few “green” countries will cut deals with the West, but most will go with China and Russia. And why wouldn’t they?

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A New Age Of Vertical Integration

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On December 27, 2022

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There was a time when companies preferred vertical integration: they wanted to own their supply chain. Then, for a long time, the mantra was to concentrate on one’s core business and let other specialists take care of all the non-core parts of your business.

Well…

This is no longer viable business practice. In a period of civilization collapse supply chains become unreliable: you may not be able to get what you want or you may not be able to get it at a price you can afford.

Supply chains will become more unreliable as time goes on. Leaving aside the fact that logistics companies make out like bandits during periods of supply constraints and thus have little incentive to fix the problem, climate change, environmental collapse and the new era of cold and hot war will make supplies more and more unreliable and scarce.

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The more something matters, the more this will be true: many countries couldn’t get vaccines, no matter what, and countries which created them gave them to themselves and their allies first. When water, food, minerals and energy becomes scarce, countries and companies will prioritize themselves first, their allies second and everyone else not at all. Strong countries, faced with famine, will not export food they need, and weak countries will be forced to export resources they need even if it means death and deprivation for their people.

If you need something, you better make it yourself, or be in lockstep with a company or country who needs you as much as you need them.

The smaller you are, the worse this will get. Amid the shortages of the pandemic small and medium enterprises, including stores were largely cut off: the biggest customers got served first and everyone else got the scraps.

A reliable supply chain and predictable politics are necessary for ages where companies and countries specialize. Eras of war and decline and collapse are eres of vertical integration and keeping ones suppliers close. The extreme version of this was feudalism: make or grow everything you have locally, because you can’t count on anything more than a day’s travel.

Most areas of the developed world won’t wind up that bad for some time yet, but that’s the extreme end of the road we’re on. Hopefully we’ll never get there, but wise countries and companies will no longer rely on widespread supply chains they have no control over.

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The Rules Based International Order is the Minority

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On October 31, 2022

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I’ve said this for a while, but now we have empirical proof that most of the world likes Russia and China more than the US (h/t Johnstone):

“Among the 1.2bn people who inhabit the world’s liberal democracies, three-quarters (75%) now hold a negative view of China, and 87% a negative view of Russia,” the report reads. “However, for the 6.3bn people who live in the rest of the world, the picture is reversed. In these societies, 70% feel positively towards China, and 66% positively towards Russia.”

However, across a vast span of countries stretching from continental Eurasia to the north and west of Africa, we find the opposite – societies that have moved closer to China and Russia over the course of the last decade. As a result, China and Russia are now narrowly ahead of the United States in their popularity among developing countries.

While the war in Ukraine has accentuated this divide, it has been a decade in the making. As a result, the world is torn between two opposing clusters: a maritime alliance of democracies, led by the United States; and a Eurasian bloc of illiberal or autocratic states, centred upon Russia and China.

Now, what they’re saying without quite saying it is that the Ukraine war correlated with even better public opinion towards Russia and China.

I find the next chunk predictable:

However, what matters may not be so much the presence of democratic institutions, but
rather, whether they are valued and appreciated by citizens. If so, attitudes towardscountries such as Russia or the United States might take into account their potential to assist – or damage – the health of their democracy. For a closer look at Figure 20 reveals anumber of electoral democracies, such as Indonesia, India or Nigeria, in which the public remains sympathetic to Russian or Chinese influence, in spite of a difference in political regime. Thus it is not simply whether democratic institutions exist that countsbut rather, the degree to which they are seen as functional and legitimate.

This seems reasonable, at first glance. Here’s the chart:

Eyeball those nations above and below the 50% mark.

What does the grouping below 50% all have in common? What does the grouping above 50% have in common?

Whether or not they could be considered part of the Westerns sphere. Those above the line are generally not those who have done well under US hegemony and who are not Western allies.

So, yeah, this looks to me to be a case of “correlation is not causation”. I would gently suggest that what creates the legitimacy of “democratic institutions” is whether they have delivered for people and that those countries under 50% tend to be those who have been inside the Western (US/EU/close allies bubble.)

So, yes, it is actually about the new cold war.

Now remember, China now does most of the world’s development. It isn’t even close. They build the new ports, airports, hospitals, roads, bridges and even cities. Further, they do it cheaper than the West does it.

So, if you’re a developing nation who isn’t inside the “blessed bubble”, even as bad as that bubble has become under neoliberalism, China looks good and America looks… well, not so good, especially since the US has been the primary driver of trade and finance rules which have been very bad for the third world.

This has been going on for a long time, but since the collapse the USSR there hasn’t been another option. China offers one, and Russia is thumbing its nose at a global order that has gone out of its way to screw over the countries which are above that 50% line.

So, I wouldn’t say it’s exactly about “democratic legitimacy” — that legitimacy is a dependent variable and it is associated with America, NATO and to a lesser extent the EU. When a global regime doesn’t deliver it is discredited, and in fact even in countries under the 50% mark, most have been losing trust in “democratic legitimacy” as well. Americans and British will know well of what I speak.

The end result is that most of the world now slightly favors China and Russia and the important part is that trend is likely to continue. There will be a cold war, and most of the world wants to remain neutral or slightly favors China/Russia. On election Lula in Brazil said they would keep trading with both sides and not be drawn into the cold war, but Brazil is one of the founding members of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) the most important economic bloc that doesn’t include the US. Brazil will remain “neutral” but 31% of Brazil’s exports now go to China and 11% to the US. If the US is stupid enough to push, and military might isn’t determinative, Brazil would be foolish not to go with China.

Power follows industrial capacity and popularity follows treatment. With a few notable exceptions, if you’re a third world country, China treats you better than the US has in ages. As for Russia, well, they may screw with nearby countries, but otherwise they don’t get involved much (remember Syria invited them in, and is a long time ally.) Indians, in particular, remember that Russia was a friend for generations when the US and Europe were not. As for Africa, China has been developing good relations thru trade and development for decades now.

In this cold war, the West is going to be the one isolated, as the above (older) map from the Economist suggests. Yes, they are “neutral” for now, but if forced to choose, don’t assume they’ll choose the current order.

The “rules based international order” is rather small and how it has been run has damaged democratic legitimacy far more than “China” or “Russia”.

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Ukraine Is The First Major War Of The “Age of War and Revolution”

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On October 10, 2022

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There are periods that tend relatively peaceful, and there are eras of war and revolution.

Back in 2016 I added a new category, “The Age of War and Revolution”. It’s now 10 pages long. I added it because it was clear we were transitioning, and we’ve now hit a marker point: the first major war in the Age.

It’s the first, but it won’t be the last.

Sri Lanka was the first collapse of the Age (related “The Twilight of Neoliberalism“, a sub-category).

There will be more of those. My money is currently on England (good chance it won’t be the UK by then) being the first formerly 1st world nation to collapse.

I was talking to a friend about the “get out of the US” advice I’ve been giving for years. People have (rightly) often asked, “but where?” The obvious answer used to be somewhere in Europe, but Europe has chosen decline, and if they don’t manage it well, collapse. Many European countries are going to wind up in 2nd and 3rd world status (many are already 2nd world, and the UK, if you aren’t in the top 10% or so, is already a 3rd world nation, as is America, outside of Europe.)

I’m seeing two interesting trends:

  1. The US is losing its allure to the best and brightest technocrats;
  2. Though anecdotal, for the first time in my life, I know multiple people who want to, are, or have moved to China.

A lot of what made America “special” and led to it being a tech, science and engineering leader for so long is just that so many of the smartest people would emigrate there.

For a long time now I’ve told Americans that Canada is heading in the same direction as the US, we just started in a better place.

But that still matters. If I had gotten cancer in the US, I’d be planning my funeral and considering suicide to avoid the last months of hell. I’d be dead, even if still walking. In 10 years, I’m not sure that wouldn’t be true in Canada, in 20 years, I figure it’s likely.

Some countries will pull together and take care of their populations. Some won’t. Many won’t be able to, no matter how much they want to.

Wars will rage: there will be less resources; food and water will be scarce and per-capita food consumption is going to drop for at least 70 or so years, maybe longer. If you’re young, you’ll see the end of 1st world obesity, though that will be partially driven, at first by countries needing their citizens to be in fighting shape. (Most Americans are too wide to fit thru the hole into an Abrams tank, for example.)

Revolution will be common and so will civil unrest. The idea that non-violence is superior will fade. It will be used some places and times, but the hard ideological commitment to it among the left will die.

I’m unsure how technology will play into it. The obvious play for the rich was always autonomous robots, to overcome the “Who will watch the watchers” problem of police, military and paramilitary forces. But most countries probably won’t have the resources to create and maintain large numbers of armed robots and even the rich ones may find it’s beyond reach outside of certain protected zones.

But for now, just understand, the world has changed. This is a new historical era, we’re now solidly at its start, and Ukraine is only the first of the major wars, not the last.

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