Trump Is Definitely Considering Nuking Iran

Source: Hotpot.ai

Trump is in a tight spot with the Iran war and needs to find a way out before the midterms. A tactical nuclear strike on Iran's nuclear enrichment and storage installations seems to offer what he needs to end the war on his terms and in MAGA style.

The Post-Westphalian World: Reflections on Trump 2.0's Military Adventurism

The weak are meat, and the strong do eat

(Cloud Atlas)

The international rules based order sets normative expectations, deters transgressions, and manages conflicts. It does so via a host of treaties and institutions mostly introduced soon after WWII, from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the UN and its many affiliated organisations and treaties (WTO, UNLCOS, ICJ, World Bank, NPT, etc) to private members' clubs like the G7, EU, OECD, and NATO. 

Like all institutional orders, it is maintained by and for the powerful actors in whose interests it was designed, especially the USA, the most powerful of all. This obvious fact is often willfully misinterpreted. 

First, an order instituted by the powerful to protect and advance their own interests need not come at the expense of the less powerful, when compared to a situation without any such order. To the contrary, by constraining all it is often of even more value to the weak - who have no other source of protection - than it is to the strong. Merely because an international order can be judged as lacking compared to some hypothetical ideal ('fairness') does not mean that any rational state would prefer a world without it. 

Incentivising War Crimes: The High Cost of International Humanitarianism

Wars have never been the concern only of their combatants. Other states pay close attention to the geo-political implications and opportunities created by armed conflict, and interfere directly or indirectly when their cynical calculations suggest that would advance their interests.  For example, various countries - the UAE, Iran, Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Qatar - have been involving themselves in Sudan's ghastly civil war, apparently looking to pick up geopolitical advantages - especially access to Red Sea ports that would allow them to threaten international shipping via the Suez Canal, or to prevent other states from doing so. When extended to material support to favoured factions this increases the resources of the combatants, increasing the ambition of their respective war goals and so extending the war by reducing the scope for a mutually acceptable peace deal.

Such amoral realpolitik in international relations is as old as war itself, together with its unfortunate consequences for human lives. What is somewhat more recent is the rise of international moral concern for the lives of civilians threatened by war, expressed through the increased influence of civil society. At least since the Greeks' 1820's war of independence, states have also been interfering in other people's wars out of humanitarian concerns to reduce civilian suffering.

The problem is that although each individual humanitarian intervention may be sincerely morally motivated - and even sometimes succeed in its goal of reducing suffering - the practise of morally motivated interference would seem actually to increase the amount of civilian suffering due to war. It makes civil wars more likely to start and harder to end, while incentivising crimes against civilians.

Tiny Countries Should Not Exist

There is no good reason for tiny countries to exist, and we should stop making more of them.

The World Bank classifies 40 countries as 'small states' on the basis of having a population smaller than 1.5 million (though, oddly, this list excludes some rich tiny countries like Luxembourg and Estonia). Some are as small as 11,000 (Tuvalu), and the total population of all of them put together is only 20 million. Nevertheless, each of these countries has full 'sovereignty' - meaning that the organisations recognised as ruling over the populations within these territories have special and equal rights under international law: to exploit the resources that fall within their exclusive economic zone, for example, or to vote on matters of global importance at the United Nations, or to make up their own regulations about corporate taxation and secrecy.

This is absurd, but also far from harmless.

Unconventional Ways To Contribute To Climate Care: World Peace, Ozempic, Economic Growth

Update: Now also on substack

It is widely recognised that climate change is so hard to deal with because it is a super wicked problem. Every part of it is connected to everything else and is continuously changing; billions of actors with different opinions and interests disagree about what to do; there is no right solution; every (expert's) way of understanding the problem is a misleading simplification; and so on (previously). 

It is less widely recognised that some of the very features that make climate care so hard also present opportunities for making it easier. In particular, the feature that everything is connected to everything else means that climate change is exacerbated by many other challenges at the same time that our efforts to manage it must compete with those other challenges for our limited resources - political, organsiational, and economic. For example, the New Cold War is geopoliticising international relations and diverting massive resources towards rearmament (in attempts to deter hot war). The New Cold War makes climate care harder. Conversely, however, we may see that any progress we might make in returning the world to more peaceful relations would be enormously helpful for the climate care project. 

Various other challenges - from the demographic transition to public health - may have the same feature. They appear to compete with climate care for our attention, but should actually be understood as complementary to the climate care project because wicked problems get easier to manage when the world gets easier.

The Climate Change Policy Problem: Why Can’t The World Do The Right And Obvious Thing?

Source

Many of those who care deeply about the environment find the climate change policy problem baffling. This includes the climate scientists who contribute to the increasingly pessimistic scientific consensus, as well the environmentalist activists who see that consensus as a call to action, and the many hundreds of millions of ordinary people (and my academic colleagues) who understand climate change as an existential danger to humanity.

Why can’t the world do the right and obvious thing about this huge and urgent problem?

Israel Should Have Fought This War Very Differently, But Thousands Of Innocent Palestinian Civilians Were Always Going To Die

Source: Hotpot.ai 

Human psychology seems to drive us to pick a side in conflicts and then go all in. Hence a disappointing number of those observing the Israel-Hamas war even from a safe and comfortable distance argue not only that one side is in the right, but that it can do no wrong and that the other side is entirely evil. This tribalism also encourages the reduction of sides to 'us' and 'them', despite the fact that wars are always between political organisations, not peoples. 

Objectivity is the attempt to apply the same moral standards in the same way to all sides. In my view the recent ICC indictments of leaders of Hamas and the Israeli government reflect an attempt to do just this. It is obviously true that Hamas started this war, and that it deliberately committed many atrocities against civilians, but that fact doesn't make any and all actions by the Israeli military justified. 

Here I want to focus on a point that many passionate critics of the war seem to be missing. This is the mistaken belief that there was some way for this war not to result in the deaths of thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians. Once Hamas launched its initial attack, it was inevitable that Israel's government would use military means to try to prevent it from doing such things again. Since Hamas is deeply embedded in a heavily populated urban environment, mass civilian casualties were inevitable (and probably expected and intended by Hamas). 

Could The Threat of Information War Deter China From Attacking Taiwan?

Source

Taiwan is an independent prosperous liberal democracy of 24 million free people that the Chinese Communist Party solemnly promises to annex to its empire by whatever means are necessary. Although Taiwan's flourishing capitalist economy once allowed it to outgun and hence straightforwardly deter China from a military invasion, this military advantage has switched to China over the last 20 years. If Taiwan is to be kept free it must find another means to deter the CCP.

Israel's Crimes Do Not Deserve This Much Attention

This post has been significantly updated and republished here

Taking Decolonization Seriously Means Recognising the Moral Agency of Non-Western Political Actors

In the context of the current decolonisation movement it is rather strange that whenever bad things happen in a non-Western country they are still routinely analysed as the moral responsibility of actors in the West - (former) governments, companies, ideologues, consumers, etc.  For example,

1. War: If a Western country is involved in a war (or an ally - as in the case of Saudi Arabia in Yemen) then they are routinely assigned the entire responsibility for that war, including for all the terrible things done by those they are fighting.
2. Illiberalism: Government oppression of religious and sexual minorities, political opposition, free press, and so on is routinely attributed to 'colonial era laws' or continuing Western ideological influence. 
3. Misgovernance: Government dysfunction and corruption are routinely blamed on Western consumers/companies' demand for natural resources; terrible environmental and labour regulations (or enforcement) are likewise blamed on Western demand for cheaper products 

This way of looking at the world is unfounded, patronising and unhelpful. It betrays a pernicious asymmetry in the recognition of moral agency between Western and non-Western actors. Western actors are assumed to have the power to make decisions that matter and to bear moral responsibility for their choices. Non-western actors are not. Although many of those who are so ready to blame Western actors may think they are opposing 'colonisation', this asymmetry actually continues rather than repudiates the patronising moral hierarchy that characterised the West's unfortunate colonial history.

In reality non-Western political actors make important decisions all the time that affect many people's lives, and these are not merely overdetermined reactions to external forces but actions initiated by them for their own reasons. There is no good reason why they should not be held as morally accountable for their choices as they would be if they were making such decisions in a Western country. 

Why Governments Failed the Challenge of Covid and Capitalism Succeeded

Capitalism has had a good Covid. While governments of every political hue seem to stumble from one crisis to the next, for profit corporations stepped up to deliver our food and consumer goods to our doors, reroute disrupted supply chains, manufacture huge amounts of PPE, and develop multiple safe and effective vaccines in record time. I put this triumph of capitalism over statecraft down to two factors in particular. 

1. Corporations are better at globalisation than national governments 
2. Political incentives are less well aligned with the public interest than those for corporations

There Is No Such Thing As Countries

As any map will show you, the world is divided by political borders into spaces called countries. People and things can live in, come from, or go to these places.

But countries are not any more than that.

Firstly and most obviously, countries are merely a social construction. They are collectively produced fictions (like money, or religions) rather than mind-independent objects (like stones). Being fictional does not mean that countries do not matter, but it does mean that they only exist so long as enough people agree to act as if they do.

Secondly and more significantly, countries are places not agents. Places on a map cannot have interests or goals or take actions to achieve them. To think otherwise is to confuse the properties of one kind of thing with another. This category error infects not only general talk, but also much otherwise careful journalism and even academic analysis. For example, the influential Realist school of international relations is founded on the axiom that countries do (or ought to) act only in their national interest. This trades on two category errors: that countries (rather than governments) can act and that they have interests. The result is confusing and unfalsifiable nonsense about buffer zones, access to resources and so forth that is about as helpful for understanding, predicting, and managing conflicts as an astrological map.

Invading Ukraine Can Only Be Bad For Russia

If Russia invades Ukraine this will be very bad for Ukraine. This has led many commentators to assume that invading Ukraine would be a great victory for Russia and a great defeat for the US and its allies. Actually the opposite is true. Ukraine doesn't matter geopolitically, and therefore the suffering of Ukraine also doesn't matter. What Ukraine does represent is a huge military distraction for Russia (as Iraq and Afghanistan were for the US) and a huge advertisement for NATO membership.

If our governments won’t help refugees, they should let us sponsor them ourselves

Guest post by Brecht Weerheijm

As of 2020, over 80 million people are on the run from war and persecution. Of this group, over 26 million are refugees looking for a safe haven outside of their home country. Most of these are from countries torn by civil war or governed by authoritarians, to whom human lives seem not to matter. The burden of caring for these million falls squarely upon the shoulders of developing nations; 86% of all refugees are hosted by developing countries, with the UN’s 46 least-developed countries taking in more than a quarter of all refugees. Millions are living in inhumane conditions in refugee camps across the globe, in nations that lack resources to take proper care of these refugees. Even if there are means to stay alive in these camps, there is often no access to public services or a path to citizenship. Refugees are neither politically represented nor provided with education, and this status is often inherited by their children and grandchildren.

The Moral Case for Guest Worker Programmes

The United Arab Emirates is a small but rich rich country with a million or so citizens and nearly 9 times as many foreign migrants, mostly from poor Asian and Arab countries. In 2019 remittances home from these guest workers amounted to $45 billion (12% of GDP). In comparison, total overseas aid from rich countries in 2019 was $145 billion (an average of 0.3% of donors' national income). 

Another way of putting this is that one small country's entirely self-interested transactional relationship with the poor world is responsible for transferring 30% as much wealth as all the high minded moral principles of the whole world turn out to be worth. The lesson I draw from this astonishing statistic is that anyone who really cares about reducing global poverty should be looking at how to make more countries like the UAE, not vice versa.

What Good are Nuclear Weapons to North Korea? Analysing Kim Jong-un

North Korea's development of fission bombs and ICBMs is very worrying. Unfortunately the analysis of it in the news media is woeful. Some commentators assume that North Korea works like a normal country (like their country); some clearly don't understand how war works; some believe the regime's propaganda; some seem unable to think in a straight line at all. Some manage to make all those mistakes at the same time and more. One can only hope that the US, South Korean, and Japanese war ministries have better experts. In the meantime, at least we can throw out the worst nonsense.

Tyrants Aren’t Smarter Than Democrats. Just More Evil

Tyrants like Vladamir Putin and Kim Jong Un seem to win a lot of their geopolitical contests against democratic governments. How do they do it?

A common explanation is that these tyrants are better at playing the game. They are strategic geniuses leading governments with decades of experience in foreign affairs and characterised by single-mindedness and a long-term horizon. Of course they are going to make better geopolitical moves than democratic governments riven by political factionalism and only able to think as far ahead as the next election.

This explanation is wrong. Tyrants don’t succeed because they are especially skilled at the game of geopolitics, but because they are baddies. Tyrants make bold moves because they are willing to subject their country (and the whole world) to more risk. They can do that because they care less than democrats, and hence worry less, about bringing harms to their people. Like a hedge fund manager, they can afford to take big risks because they are not playing with their own money. When tyrants win it is because of luck, not brilliance. This is easier to see when tyrants lose – as they nearly all do in the end, when their luck runs out.

A Team Approach to Intergenerational Justice

We have difficulty living up to our obligations to future generations. To be precise, our problem is not not that we don’t care about what happens to the world after we're gone. It is that we can’t explain why we should care, and therefore cannot systematically think through and institutionalise the responsibilities implied. That might not matter so much - it hasn't mattered too much before in human history - except that we face at least one big intergenerational problem that just can't be muddled through: Climate Change.

What Terrorists Want - and How to Stop Them Getting It

After every new atrocity or catchy ISIS video the armchair psychologists and amateur Islamic theologians take to the air. Their low grade psychobabble turns tragic events into compelling TV narrative and brings mainstream attention to political opportunists. But even if it made better sense it would still be irrelevant. All these pundits are focused on the wrong thing: how particular individuals are recruited to terrorist groups and causes.

Source

Terrorism is not a personality type, a psychological illness, a theology, or a goal in itself. Terrorism is a technique, a particular form of warfare that the weak wage against the strong.

If we want to stop terrorism we have to first understand it. That means acknowledging its rationality as a means to an end. The question we should be asking is, what are terrorist acts supposed to achieve and how?

The Brain Gain: Why Smart People Should be Encouraged to Leave Developing Countries

Guest post by Denise Coenegracht

Skilled workers emigrating from developing countries are good for us, but bad for the developing countries At least, according to the received wisdom. When considering the facts, a different picture emerges. One with many economic upsides for the migrant's home country. Meet the brain gain.