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 18 of 32

Macron & Many European Leaders Call For WWIII?

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On February 27, 2024

19 Comments

So, French leader Macron thinks Europe should send troops to Ukraine to fight Russia. (This is colloquially known as “declaring war on Russia.”)

rench President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday that sending Western troops to Ukraine should not be ruled out, as European leaders concluded a summit on supporting Kyiv.

“There is no consensus today to send ground troops officially but … nothing is ruled out,” Macron said at a press conference in Paris, where the meeting had just wrapped up. “We will do whatever it takes to ensure that Russia cannot win this war.”

“The defeat of Russia is indispensable to the security and stability of Europe,” the French president added.

…

The subject was first raised publicly by Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, who said a “restricted document” ahead of the summit had implied “that a number of NATO and EU member states were considering sending troops to Ukraine on a bilateral basis.”

…

Macron also announced that leaders agreed to set up a ninth capability coalition on deep strikes that will focus on medium- and long-range missiles. Other coalitions include artillery, air defense and de-mining.

This is, in effect, an acknowledgment that Europe knows Ukraine is losing.

So, there are two main possibilities here. First, it’s a negotiating ploy, to get a better deal for Ukraine. Second, they’re serious.

Let’s point out a couple things: Russia is outproducing the entire West in artillery shells and ammunition and Western armories are bare: they’ll run out in two weeks to a month of real war, at most. Second, China is not going to let Russia really lose a war, because they know who’s next and Europe has mostly been very willing to follow the US in anti-Chinese actions.

Iran, obviously, will support Russia as well. They know they’re on the list.

It’s actually not clear that the West would win this war: Russia is out-producing the West in terms of war materials, China is the undisputed largest industrial power in the world and it’s not clear that if other powers step in, China and maybe Iran won’t step in on Russia’s side. They really, really don’t want to: but the defeat of Russia, as already noted, is an existential threat to them.

Next, if either side starts losing, there will be a strong temptation to reach for the nukes.

On a smaller note, if Europe supplies long range missiles and those missiles hit something that matters (say the Kremlin, or the Bolshoi) things could get ugly fast. Seeking to expand the war further into Russia is certainly “legal” but it’s not wise. It won’t change the outcome of the war, it will merely make the war more likely to expand, which is why the German Scholz is correct to oppose it.

All my life, the charge against people outside elite circles has been that we are “un-serious”.

This is extremely un-serious behaviour.

I will note, further, that the reason Europe and the US can’t compete with China and Russia is that they simply refuse to reduce economic rents, lower living costs and make their rich less rich in order to reduce operating costs and oligopolies and monopolies sufficiently to ramp up production, both of war materials and, well, everything else.

They want to live like Kings, our elites, having the South send them materials and the Chinese and other nations send them manufactured goods, while using their populations for rent extraction so they can become richer and richer.

They have confused money with power. Money is only power when it can buy power. And increasingly, in the West, it can only buy power domestically, not internationally.

This is a grave mistake, and the graveyard of Empires.

Fools. And worse than fools.

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The Level Of American Foreign Policy Incompetence

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On February 23, 2024

21 Comments

Is breathtaking. Brzezinski was Carter’s National Security Adviser. In 1997 he wrote, not long after the fall of USSR, that:

Potentially the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia and perhaps Iran, an ‘anti-hegemonic’ coalition, united not by ideology but by complementary grievances. . . . Averting this contingency . . . will require a display of US geostrategic skill on the western, eastern and southern perimeters of Eurasia simultaneously.” — Zbigniew Brzezinski

It’s sort of hard to do commentary on this, because of the jaw dropping, head-banging stupidity of it all.

I don’t like US foreign policy after WWII thru the late 60s, but it wasn’t brain-dead. Evil, often, but not stunningly stupid. Nixon was a terrible person, but his “opening of China” was smart and policy after him thru to Bush the Elder was, while not good, or smart, was at least not always stupid.

But since then American policy has been brain-dead. Making Russia into an enemy. Making Iran into an enemy. Shipping America’s industry to China so that a few oligarchs could get richer for maybe two generations. None of this was necessary, for decades polls in Iran showed that Iranians had positive views of America. Russia was so enamored of the West that Putin, in his early years, begged to be let in.

But the US had greed and grudges. The Russkies were always bad and the Iranians had humiliated America, so there could never truly be cooperation and peace and trade which was designed to benefit both side.

And so America lost its global hegemony, precisely by doing what it was repeatedly warned not to do: unite the greatest Asian powers against it.

American and Western elites in general aren’t suited to run lemonade stand, let alone countries or an Empire.

Imbeciles, specialized only in self-promotion and accumulated money which will be worth one-tenth what it used to be when the Empire collapses.

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The Truth About Joe Biden, America, And Europe’s Future

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On February 15, 2024

14 Comments

Joe Biden is responsible for a genocide in Israel, because Israel couldn’t do it without American support. (And this isn’t his only mass murder. He engineered a famine in Afghanistan.)

Obama said that he and Joe were responsible for making the US the biggest oil and gas producer in the world. Biden has, in office as President, made that brag too, meaning he owns it.

He is also responsible for all the deaths in Ukraine since March of last year, when the US, thru the UK PM Boris Johnson, scuttled a peace deal. As a result, Ukraine will almost certainly wind up losing much more land and hundreds of thousands more dead. Most likely it will wind up a landlocked nation. The IMF and the EU will then loot it to the ground with neoliberal policies.

Never let the US use you as their proxy in a war. They always fuck you over.

Biden also has overseen the institutionalization of a permanent pandemic without instituting proper mitigations. The official numbers are a vast under-count, since they only count reported deaths and most jurisdictions no longer report Covid deaths. This before we get to Long Covid. Joe now owns that, and that will be tens of millions disabled Americans and early deaths and hundreds of millions. I’ll do a post on some numbers on how many children are getting it soon. It always amuses me how Americans and Europeans go on and on about how much they love their children, when every piece of evidence indicates the exact opposite. (Regular readers will recall how I wrote, again and again, not to send children back to school till proper ventilation and filtering was put in place. Billions for weapons, none for protecting your kids.)

As for the US economic numbers, they are fake, because inflation is vastly understated and anyone who pretends otherwise is an economist, an idiot, or on the payroll—and often all three, since being an economist or believing in economic models is the equivalent of being hit repeatedly in the head by Muhammad Ali in his prime.

Joe accelerated the trade war with China started by Trump. As a result, China will become the world leader in microchips, which they were not pursuing before the sanctions. Within 2 to 3 years they will cause a microchip glut on everything the but high end chips They will, within 10 years, be the world leaders in auto production and within 15 years, the world leaders in civic aviation.

Sanctions against Russia have failed and Russia’s economy is growing fast. It is now larger than Germany’s and far healthier in the ways that will matter as things get worse.

Joe’s policies in Ukraine and Europe are leading to German de-industrializing. Europe is doomed, in so many ways. When AMOC goes, and models are showing that could happen as soon as next year (though I don’t expect it quite that soon), well, European agriculture will collapse, and there will be famine and a huge wave of refugees out of Europe. The irony will be deep. I wonder if Russia and Africa will accept many European refugees.

(The industrial movement makes no real difference to climate change, it’s just moving production from place to place but it is going to hurt almost every country which is an ally of America.)

And humans wonder why they live in Hell.

It’s because we deserve it, at least as a species.

Many readers and hundreds of millions to billions of people are going to lose everything due to the effects of climate change and ecological collapse. When that happens remember that many voted for it again and again and made excuse after excuse for the people accelerating it, the worst of whom definitely includes Democrats as well as Republicans

As for the US, the sooner it collapses, the better it will be for humanity as a whole. The empire was the global hegemon during the time when everyone knew about climate change, and it not only didn’t stop it, it put the pedal to the metal.

 

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Clear Talk About History’s Sweep

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On January 31, 2024

20 Comments

I’m fifty-six. I’ll be fifty-seven in less than a month. My hair is white, and my body’s not what it used to be, though in some ways it never was.

My parents were conservatives but I remember back in 1979, they thought Reagan was a bad idea. They were right, but he won, and I was 12 years old, just finished elementary school and about to go to boarding school, as my father had a job in Bangladesh, then the poorest country in the world.

Seventy-nine/eighty is when the world changed. It had been changing before: working class male wages in the US peaked in 68: there was the OPEC crisis, going off gold, stagflation, etc… But it was Thatcher and Reagan who locked in neo-liberalism, which was essentially a looting operation. Sell everything off, burn it all down, turn it into cash and damn the consequences.

And here I am fifty-six watching the end of their crass, stupid and selfish movement. They created the world’s richest rich; transfered the world’s manufacturing base from American allies to China, completely gutted the environment such that we’re now past important tipping points, and they did it with the support of a lot of ordinary folks who wanted to be wealthy without having to work for it thru housing price gains and a stock market that never went down.

Those people: the Reagan Democrats, well, a lot of them won in that they died before the bill came due but the bill is being paid and will be paid by their children, grand-children and great-grand-children.

It was all unnecessary, there were better ways to fix our problems. I’ve written a ton of those articles, so have others, I won’t go into it.

We humans, in the hegemonic power and its satrapies, chose to burn it all down and throw it all away rather than make the necessary changes to create an economy which wouldn’t destroy the planet and which would be good for everyone.

Because of this we’re in classic population over-shoot. Look it up if you don’t know what it is, but basically, animals that overshoot, and we’ve proved ourselves dumb animals, have violent population crashes, and that’s what’s coming.

I write about some topics again and again. I apologize to those who are tired of it. I do so for a couple reasons, the first is that as a mentor once told me “about the time you’re sick of writing it, people are just beginning to get it.”

the second is that I really want you to know. I care about my readers and I want you to get how bad things are going to be: that we’ve passed the peaks and are on the downslide, so that, perhaps, you can do something about it: not to stop it, it isn’t going to be stopped and anyone telling you it will is lying to you, but to prepare and perhaps suffer less.

The sweep of history is fast and slow. It’s slow when you look at a single human life: I’m not going to see the next upswing, I’m too old and not very healthy. It was my curse to be born at the time when an empire decided to destroy itself and the largest environmental disaster in human history was about to happen. I’m lucky, I supposed, compared to those younger than me, most of whom will not see the next upswing either, but won’t have seen some of the good times, even if I didn’t participate in them much.

But the sweep of history is also fast. From Thatcher in 79 to now is forty-five years. That’s not very long. When I read my first economic textbook back in the early 80s, it noted that the US had a trade deficit, but it didn’t matter because American still produced almost everything it needed.

In less than fifty years the greatest industrial power the world had ever seen pissed it away, deliberately. It’s probably not a bad thing, the US was a bad hegemon, though much worse after Reagan than before. The Chinese will start out better and their run will be interrupted by environmental and civilization collapse. The end of American empire is probably bad for me personally, as a Canadian, but I figure it’s a net benefit to the world.

Humanity’s probably going to survive, but the next hundred and fifty years or so are going to be UGLY. Still, if we make it, and I’m betting we will, there will be another side.

I’m not going to stop writing about our problems, but I do want to write my little bit about what a better civilization, during the long emergency and after, might look like, so I’ll try to write more about that.

Thanks to all my readers who have hung on for the ride. I know it hasn’t been the most pleasant: there just hasn’t been much good news to share and that’s not going to change. But that doesn’t mean it’s all gloom, there are some silver linings (like the US going under), and there is some reason to hope for the future and believe that what we do now may influence that future for the better.

Let’s see if we can do that.

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And This God Has Granted To Me, That

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On January 30, 2024

31 Comments

I shall live to see the destruction of my enemies.

The great joy of watching the American government be humiliated, over and over again, as their empire collapses.

To watch as those they oppressed cease to fear them, as their enemies circle the old brute, nipping at their heels, tearing at them, as they dies innumerable wounds.

This, God has granted to me.

And so too has God granted to me to watch the end of Neoliberalism. “Greed is good” they screamed, as they strip mined the economy, becoming the richest rich in the world’s history, even as they destroyed the basis of their power.

Soon they will be the rich of undeveloping countries; the rich of India in 1950. Scream at China as they will, nothing will change that they sold the golden geese to china for cash on the barrelhead and two generations of epehemeral wealth.

The Europeans, so smug and so sure of themselves after centuries at the top, as they fall back to being the meaningless backwater of Eurasia that is Europe’s normal state. “But we live in a Garden!” they will wail, as the garden fills with wheels and wrecked cars.

Satraps of their own colony, slaves to America, colonialists who killed hundreds of millions then screamed that their enemies were evil, not them, no, they were the good people, the civilized people.

This, God has granted me to see.

And then, all the capitalists, in all the countries, China, America, Japan, Russia, Europe, India: everywhere. “We can grow infinitely! We’ll always substitute! Technology will save us! We should engineer products to for planned obsolesence! Wealth! Power! Infinity! We are geniuses! This is the best time every and we are the smartest smart people to ever smart!”

And it’s all coming down. Seems that infinite growth on a planet which isn’t infinite doesn’t work out. Seems that places to safely store pollution like CO2 and plastics aren’t infinite on a little green and blue planet. Seems like humans aren’t independent of insects and plants and other animals and plankton: that we’re just one life form and if we kill too many of the others that may not work out for us.

God did not grant to me the power or the voice or the gifts necessary to prevent any of this evil.

But God has granted to me to see the end days of my enemies, and if they are my end days as well, still will I enjoy them.

May Bush, and Bill Clinton and Blair and Pelosi and Obama and Biden all live very long lives, with clear minds, that they might see all they created destroyed.

This God has granted to me, to see the destruction of my enemies and the fall of all they built.

I worked to prevent this, with all my might, and failed, as did all of us who fought against these evils. May what is born after be born of good, and learn from the fall of evil.

But still, I will enjoy what God has granted me.

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The Terminator Future (The End of Meat)

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On January 16, 2024

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This is my third piece this week on how the world is changing and why. The first handled the geopolitical, the second the military tech at this moment and how that is making empire difficult.

This one is about the future.

There’s going to be a period of war which is all about autonomous robots. Drones, missiles, robodogs with guns, tiny swarms, etc…

Humans are a stupid and inefficient way to apply force: most of the human body is not designed for combat: we are slow, clumsy and easily damaged and destroyed compared to what we can build.

As the cost of autonomous robots (and they will be autonomous because remote control is a weakness) continues to plummet and as the knowledge of how to build them spreads, they will replace humans on the front lines. Humans will be victims, but not primary combatants.

At the state level this means that states which can produce the most robots will win: the robots will be expendable and used in vast numbers. The chain of resources to manufacturing and the ability protect that chain will be what matters.

For smaller groups, robots will offer cheap violence against soft targets (and sometimes hard targets.) A militia can be people who build drones then use them to attack a governor or an activist they hate.

Let’s give one concrete example. Say it’s twenty years from now, you’re China and some piss–ant country like Yemen is causing problems hitting your ships with drones and missiles. You warn them and they don’t stop.

Fine. Release a few million autonomous hunter-killer drones. They will crawl over every single inch of land, not even in the mountains will it be possible to hide. No matter how  many robots Yemen has,  you’re China, you have magnitudes more. You can’t lose.

In time there will be, as the gamers say, a “meta”–we’ll figure out how autonomous robots work, and how to fight with them and defeat them and so on. But during the adoption period (and remember, that period is usually 30-40 years and sometimes longer) those who figure out how to use robots best will punch far higher than their apparent weight, and if anyone can obtain a monopoly on some for of advanced weaponized robot which is effective (like European ironclads when no one else had any), well, they will do very well and may be able to parlay that into a long period of dominance.

Don’t be sure you know exactly how this will play out. For example, a decentralized model where every citizen builds and contributes drones may turn out to be very strong versus a centralized model. Or it may not. We don’t know yet.

But the time of meat as the right way to fight is coming to an end.

(Or has it? We’ll come to that in the next article in this series.)

Our fundraiser ends Friday. We’re about $400 from the final goal, which is an article on the Medieval credentials crisis.

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The Sun Sets Slowly—Then Quickly

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On January 14, 2024

15 Comments

And there are moments when you realize it is setting:

The people of the mountain have checkmated the people of the sea. As commenter VietnamVet wrote:

The Five-eyes Oceanic Empire is dying before our eyes. UK, Canada, Australia, and the USA (let alone New Zealand) simply do not have armament or manpower to occupy Yemen to push the Houthi back far enough from the Gate of Grief at the mouth of the Red Sea to reopen the Suez Canal to western shipping. A global logistic choke point has closed. The second, the Panama Canal, is limiting ships due to the drought.

The American and UK navies both have manpower shortages. When the aircraft Carrier Gerald Ford left the region, it was already vastly undermanned:

In the face of a massive shortage of Navy sailors, America’s newest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78), has downsized, cutting the crew aboard by hundreds of sailors.

The cuts appear to be deep and dramatic. Over the past six months to a year, some 500 to 600 sailors have left the USS Ford and not been replaced. In fact, the USS Ford has shed so many crew members that the ship’s company (core crew members that operate the vessel) is now below the Ford-class Carrier Program’s original Acquisition Program Baseline objective of 2,391 billets—a goal set back in 2004 that many observers considered unrealistic.

On top of this, ships can only store so many missiles. Every missile salvo reduces the amount of time before they have to return to base. America and Britain have been sending vast numbers of missiles to Israel and Ukraine and western manufacturing capacity is vastly below what is needed to refill stocks.

Meanwhile the Yemenis live in a mountainous country and their missiles are all mobile. It is impossible to take them out just with naval power: boots on the ground are necessary: a full invasion and occupation, in fact and that just isn’t happening: the US might be able to do it by going all out, but it would have nothing left for anywhere else.

So fundamentally, the US can’t invade and it can’t stop the Yemenis from shooting missiles. It might be able to bomb a lot, but that won’t stop the Yemenis: the endured one of the longest and most brutal bombing campaigns of the last hundred years just recently.

The US — the West, doesn’t have deterrence. We can’t do anything to the Ansar Allah which will make them back down and we don’t have the ability stop them by main force.

Trying to stop them by main force has made the situation worse: now even more vessels can’t enter the Red Sea—commercial cargo lines are not going to chance being shot up.

America is a naval empire. It, like the old British empire, rests on being able to keep the shipping lines open and on using naval power (and air power) to hurt nations while those nations can’t fight back. In the 19th century the Brits would park ironclads off the coast and just pound cities, and there was nothing those cities could do in return.

This is, then, one of the key moments in the end of Western hegemony. The point at which we no longer have deterrence; at which we can no longer “big foot” other nations.

The end of Western dominance is close, very close. I can taste it, like a hint of salt on a sea breeze. The Chinese are only behind in a few technological areas. Once other nations can get everything they need from China/Russia and other lesser nations they will be free to throw off the Western order, because the new and improved missiles make “stand off and bomb” far less effective than it used to be.

They don’t have to be scared of us, and soon they won’t need us.

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The Anti-China Chip Jeremiad Is The Stupidest Policy Imaginable

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On January 4, 2024

14 Comments

So, if at first, or second, or third, or tenth you don’t succeed, try try again. The Netherlands, under heavy pressure, has canceled already approved sales of ASML lithography machines to China.

The leadership of ASML had resisted these sanctions because they said it wouldn’t work: what would happen is that China would learn how to make the machines themselves.

What he didn’t say, but it is true, is that ASML would not just lose the Chinese market, they would eventually lose the world market anywhere that didn’t put high tariffs on China or ban Chinese ASML machines, because when China learns how to make their own they will inevitably be cheaper, and the quality will catch up at some point.

Sanctions work on weak nations. They do not work on strong nations, or on nations which have strong friends. Russia sanctions might have worked if China and India and most of the South had gone along, but since China was never going to let Russia be destroyed, and since Russia produces all the fuel and food and most of the minerals it needs, plus still has a fair bit of advanced and heavy industry, especially arms manufacturing, it was never going to happen.

Sanctions against China are insanity. All they do is accelerate local production.

The thing is that before the sanctions most Chinese majors preferred US or South Korean designed chips. They were considered better and more reliable. Executives would not buy Chinese chips, even when they were available.

But when the US first launched its chip sanctions they were clearly trying to take out Huawei, one of China’s largest companies.

Being reliant on western chips went from the safe choice to the insanely risky choice and China, both private and public, spent vast sums and made huge efforts to build their own chip industry (including lithography machines are alternatives.)

There was a small window to turn this around when Biden was elected, but he doubled down on sanctions.

This needs, I think, some unpacking.

I don’t like to reach for arguments are about racism, but there’s a weird assumption in the Western ruling class that the West is just superior to everyone else: that our technological lead was somehow innate and inevitable and eternal.

Given that China had the tech lead over the entire world for a couple thousand years (or may 1,500 before which it was India or Ancient Greece and before that it was always Mesopotamia or Egypt) this seems strange. Europe took the tech lead for complicated reasons, both China screwing up and European events which were historically contingent and mostly not planned.

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A full discussion is beyond the scope of this article (and fills many many books) but “Why Europe and not China” is its own genre.

But nobody with any sense thought it was because Europeans or those of European descent are innately superior to Chinese.

I’m a broken record on this, but where the industrial base goes, the tech lead goes, at least in the industrial era. Pre-industrial it’s a bit more complicated, but it’s not an awful guideline, the exceptions tend to be transient, but they do exist (the ancient Greeks were insanely advanced) and they tend to occur where there are is a group of constantly competing small nations, which is the over-simplified explanation for European pre-industrial revolution technological advancement and also explains the massive leaps China took during warring states periods.

But if you don’t have a forced competition between near equals who know they can’t sit still or a genuine breakthrough (the industrial revolution) or both, then the more normal processes mean that where the industrial base is, so goes the tech.

Now, sanctions against China would make sense IF and only IF, you were going to take advantage of them immediately. In other words, go to war or make really radical changes to try and re-industrialized.

How radical? Well, my estimate is that if the US wants to re-industrialize it needs to drop housing and rental prices by about two-thirds, and forbid all excess profits on any product which isn’t new, say less than ten years old (and a new model is not new. Smarthone producers should have been allowed to gouge on smartphone prices for ten years after the first iPhone, for example.) No food gouging, no pharma-price gouging on medicines decades old, and so on.

The US (and Europe) need a crash, not in living standards, but in price structures. That means the people at the top need to become a lot less rich, very very fast. Social welfare isn’t a problem, actually, letting ordinary people have a backup so they can take risks and start new companies is a good thing, and so is forcing companies to really compete for employees. Tech advancement and economic growth was far better in periods with when the US had more generous welfare systems.

Obviously these policies are extremely radical, and equally obviously, America isn’t going to pursue them, so anti-China sanctions are basically pointless and actually accelerate their tech progress.

China now has the lead in more techs than not. That’s not going to change: it’s going to get worse. When the US sent its industrial base to China that became inevitable because all “end of history” bullshit was, in fact, bullshit. Capitalism doesn’t require representative democracy and neither does fast technological progress. (It doesn’t need capitalism, per se, either, but that’s the only solution we know and it was necessary for China to do capitalism to get the industrial base transfer. Also, again, another book sized topic.)

Anyway, again, anti-China or Russia sanctions increase the speed with which they catch up in tech, not decrease it. The Russia sanctions could have been justified if they let Ukraine win, but obviously they didn’t, and it should have been obvious at the time they wouldn’t because of China’s very good reason for not allowing them to work.

Our leaders, still only good at making themselves richer, worthless for all other purposes. And, in the end, the policies they pursued to make themselves rich will just turn them into the people running shithole countries which don’t much matter.

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