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The Liberal Internationalist Delusion.

Now that the football World Cup is over and I have sated my thirst for the beautiful game for the time being, albeit with a very bitter taste at the end of the tournament given my background and team loyalties, I figure it is time to return to the real world. So let’s begin that effort by dispelling some misconceptions about what is and is not the global geopolitical and strategic situation at the moment.

As I have consistently written and said for some years now, liberal internationalism, the foundation of the Western-centric global order created during the Cold War and continued into the first decades of the post-Cold War era, is dead. Part of this is due to the shifts in the last four decades from a bipolar to a unipolar to a multipolar and now polycentric international system where emerging and declining great powers compete for influence and control. This long transitional moment (again, one that I have written and spoken about extensively on this blog and elsewhere), has been characterised by two major features: 1) rules and norms violations by an increasing number of actors; and 2) as a result, the resort to conflict as the systems regulator. The combination leads to uncertainty and a corresponding turn to self-interested national geopolitical strategies as a hedge against it. This has been likened to a return to the “state of nature” or international anarchy as Thomas Hobbes and many of his successors have referred to the core nature of the international system.

The combination of these two features has fundamentally undermined the liberal international order because its very premise was to use international and multinational organisations as the basis for conflict resolution and adjudication of cross-border disputes as well as arbiters and mediators of international negotiations and agreements. An entire institutional edifice was constructed to this end, spanning agencies as diverse as the UN, WHO, ILO, International Whaling Commission (IWC), IAEA, ICC, and many more. This edifice was constructed on a latticework of laws, rules, regulations, treaties, agreements, compacts, and other instruments that are designed to regulate the interactions of actors in the fields in which they are applied. This includes defining what is acceptable and proper and unacceptable and improper behaviour in the subject areas where international and multinational institutional jurisdiction was applied (via conventions, treaties and ratifications).

What is notable about the liberal international order was that it operated on the basic premise that nation-States and other global actors would enter into collective agreements that in essence were self-binding in nature. As Jan Elster so eloquently pointed out in his book “Ulysses and the Sirens,” (which has nothing to do with current adaptations of the Homeric Epic) democracies and their rules, and by extension international organisations founded on a system of rules and norms that are designed to mediate conflict and lend predictability and regularity to international interactions, were akin to a nation-States strapping themselves to masts so as to avoid the temptation of pursuing immediate self-interests that could result in deleterious longer-term results, especially when other actors do the same. The wreckage of the League of Nations and other failed international experiments in collective governance prior to WW2 served as vivid reminder to the architects of the Cold War and post-Cold War orders that unfettered pursuit of national self-interest in a world without rules was a recipe for disaster.

However, as enlightened as the liberal international perspective was (“liberal” in the sense of being based on a belief in the perfectibility of human kind and the “civilising”” effects of rules and norms on individual and collective behaviour rather than as a political ideology), it suffered from an innate flaw. The entire institutional edifice that supported it was, beyond various fines and sanctions imposed on violators in specific areas, dependent on voluntary national enforcement of universal rules. This not only was an infringement on national sovereignty (but presumably accepted by those involved) , but also meant that in practice many international institutions lack the enforcement capability that otherwise would compel non-compliant actors to adhere to established rules and norms governing their behaviour. It is therefore left to individual nation-States, occasionally in concert with one another, to punish transgressors. But if doing so runs contrary to perceived national interests or diplomatic and military ties that otherwise bind compliant and non-compliant actors together, then the rules become unenforceable because no state will be capable or wiling to do so.

Consider the case the International Criminal Court (ICC). It has issued warrants for several senior Israeli officials, Russian president Vladimir Putin, and assorted human rights violators from various parts of the world. Yet the US, Israel, China, India and Russia, among others, are not party to the Rome Statute that created the ICC. They offer various justifications for this stance, most often boiling down to their fear that their citizens could be targeted for malicious prosecutions for activities that otherwise should consider to be reasons of State (raison d’état). The US is very explicit in rejecting ICC jurisdiction (and in fact is working to have it disbanded) because it fears that US military personnel will be arrested and tried for war crimes committed while in the service of US interests. It argues that if criminal investigations and prosecutions are to happen, they should happen in US courts, including military courts if necessary (although Trump’s pardon of convicted war criminal Eddie Gallagher and many others puts paid to the notion of impartial justice for military and certain civilian defendants).

Whatever the merits of such arguments, in practice it means that the entire enforcement power of the ICC depends on individual nation-States willing to enforce its warrants and extradition requests. Besides various African countries that have surrendered former officials for assorted crimes against humanity, the Philippines recently agree to extradite former president Rodrigo Dutarte to The Hague for human rights violations when he was in office. He is now awaiting trial on those charges.

Conversely, although warrants are outstanding on them, Putin, Netanyahu and other Russian and Israeli officials remain at large because, well, who is going to arrest them? While it is true that they risk arrest if they travel outside their home States and allied countries (such as what happened to former Chilean dictator Agusto Pinochet when he traveled to the UK in the late 1990s), the truth is that they basically have impunity from prosecution. Putin has travelled to China and India and other states, including the US, and received red carpet welcomes. Netanyahu regularly visits the US. In fact, when New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani suggested that Netanyahu be arrested the next time he travels to the US, a chorus of indignation rose from across the political spectrum and civil society. Friends do not let friends get hunted by the ICC.

On another front, it is now clear that the notion freedom of navigation is under serious threat. A cornerstone of the liberal international order institutionalised during the Cold War, it is apparent that countries can and will interfere with commodity supply routes if and when they can. It is not just Iran that is flexing its muscle in the Strait of Hormuz, or the US replying with its counter-blockade, or the Houthis moving to close the Bab El Mandeb strait leading to and from the Red Sea. Chinese interference with shipping in the South China Sea and Taiwan Straits are a regular occurrence, especially involving vessels from regional neighbours, and government officials in Indonesia have expressed interest in imposing trilateral “maintenance fees” (i.e. Iranian-style tolls) along with Malaysia and Singapore in the Moluccan Straits. Others could well follow, including in the Bosphorus Strait and the Northern Passage across the Arctic. So far, although there is more talk than action, the era of unrestricted freedom of navigation appears to be ending because there is neither the will or capability to bring littoral or even remotely-based transgressors to heel.

The point of these digressions is to illustrate how weak the enforcement mechanisms are in the liberal international. order. While voluntary self-restraint and adherence to norms may be possible during times of relative peace and stability, those conditions disappear in moments of international systemic transition marked by conflict. In other words and to bring things back into contemporary focus: what was possible then is no longer possible now.

There is another factor that must be considered as well. The liberal international order was crated by and for Global North white men. It is a product of imperialism and colonialism by the North in the Global South. Although it never lacked for lackey’s and proxies in the South (say, people like Kofi Annan), the institutional edifice that I mentioned above was created to serve the interests of a Northern and Western-centric status quo. The rules and norms were Western ones. The major beneficiaries of the outcomes these institutions produced were Northern ones. Think of the activities of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other international “aid” and development agencies. They may have done some good but ultimately whose interests did they serve first and foremost? At best, their record is mixed.

That is where the rise of the Global South, encapsulated in the creation of the so-called (and now expanded) BRICs bloc of countries, basically heralded the death knell of that North and Western-centric institutional bias. If the international institutional order is to preserve itself it will have to accommodate, genuinely this time, the interests of the Global South. That means more fairness, transparency and regional, national, ethnic and religious diversity in their decision-making structures. The Global South is here to stay given the revolution in telecommunications and capital flows in an increasingly technopolar systemic constellation that no longer finds exclusive root in the North. It will take time for these trends to crystallise, but the era of Western dominance of the international order, at least as we have known it since the end of WW2, is coming to an end.

Regrettably, in my opinion, the New Zealand foreign policy establishment (including academics, government officials, civil society organisations and interest groups) overwhelming adhere to the belief in liberal internationalism. It makes sense at one level because small countries need protection from the “might makes right” logics of Great Powers. Self-binding international institutions, rules and laws offer that to them but constrain the prerogatives of the strongest actors when measured by hard power variables. That poses a problem in times of flux.

At another level there is a delusional aspect to this. Along with the fiction of NZ’s foreign policy independence (Malaysia says the same thing about its international position), NZ elites involved in foreign-policy making continue to speak of the liberal international order as if it was a universal good (when it was demonstrably not regardless of its many positive features) and is still viable in spite of the obvious challenges and changes that are undermining it. Some speak of “reform” of international institutions, while others nod towards Canadian Prime Minster Mark Carney’s call for a compact of Middle Powers to balance Great Power competition and its trickle down, ripple or spillover effects (the US has outright rejected the proposal and instead asserted its unilateral America First “Donroe” Doctrine as the basis for its engagement with the world. Similarly giants like China and India prefer to exercise their power in a traditional self-interested way, so their support for a Middle Power alliance network is lukewarm at best).

I assume that the support base for liberal internationalism in the 21st century is comprised of constructivists (those who believe that institutions shape behavior and when reproduced via norms, rules, laws and procedures create a form of bureaucratic inertia that make some behavioral outcomes unthinkable, much less acceptable–say, like genocide) and idealists who believe that appeals to the better angels of human nature can be encouraged via institutional means. There is also a more darker interpretation of intellectual motivation behind the liberal internationalist worldview, which is to cloak Western post-colonial dominance in a web of “liberal” organizational networks self-ratified as legitimate at the global level.

The majority consensus in support of liberal internationalism in NZ is led by Professor Robert Patman of Otago University, many of his students in government and academia, and people like former PM (and Patman collaborator) Helen Clark. Professor Patman is erudite and knowledgeable, and is conscious about where his strengths lie. To his credit, he knows his stuff and also knows what he does not know (which is a sign of intellectual maturity, in my opinion). But he seems to be loathe to see, or at least admit, what sits before him: when it comes to liberal internationalism, the thrill is gone. Recently he has shown signs that he recognises that there is a problem with the “rules based system” and has added that angle to his analytic repertorie, suggesting that institutional reform (rebirth?) is not only possible but necessary. A gaggle of other pundits echo and megaphone his thoughts without the analytic depth or breadth that he displays, but the effect is magnified. Most of those who talk and do foreign policy New Zealand remain in the liberal internationalist camp.

There are two exceptions to this rule when it comes to local foreign policy expertise (as I see it). Dr. Rueben Staff (a Patman student) is a realist who decamped to Europe when opportunities for academic advancement in NZ got limited. He accepts Great Power competition as given and has a pro-Western “bias” that dovetails at times with the local liberal internationalists. But he is more focused on hard power rather than soft power and the need for small countries to make hard choices rather than straddle the fence between opposing Great Power orientations. Although he and I differ on several things, he is very worth reading and listening to when he does feature in the NZ media.

The other “contrarian” is Van Jackson at Victoria University of Wellington. I do not know him personally but I understand that he held a position similar to mine in the Pentagon during the Obama years (my tenure happened under Clinton), and he has been quite prolific turning out academic publications, opinion pieces, policy reports, videos and sub stack essays since he entered academia. He also has a progressive activist orientation, something that is rare in any foreign policy circles, much less those in NZ. If I had to pigeonhole him I would call him a neo-Marxist globalist. It is a clumsy term and he may not approve of it, but to me it captures his working class orientation and big picture comprehension. As with Steff and Patman, his is a voice worth listening to.

Beyond them the bench gets thin when it comes to in-depth foreign policy analysis. Although the corporate media has a habit of featuring these lesser lights, it does not matter because all in one way or another appear to embrace the liberal internationalist mantras and parrot the rationales offered by more notable defenders of the liberal international status quo. The trouble, again, is that with the exception of the likes of Steff and Jackson (coming from different perspectives), they live in a world that is more magical realism than realistic. I have not asked Patman and other liberal internationalists this question directly since I no longer travel in their professional or social circles, but I wonder if their ongoing faith in and and support for liberal internationalism is more an aspirational expression of hope rather than a recognition of fact.

In any event, the international system does need re-ordering. But like alcoholism, there has to be a recognition of the problem of liberal internationalism before a solution can be soberly offered. For the moment we are stalled at denial, and when not that, at the stage where cosmetic changes are thought to suffice if just people would coalesce round the wish that it be so.

Alas, that is not to be. To quote Poe in his 1845 poem “The Raven,“

“Nevermore.“

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Media Link: “A View from Afar” on Systemic Change.

Selwyn Manning and I discussed some of the things that I have been thinking about recently in today’s podcast. I have written about these themes on these pages but this video format allows Selwyn to get his two cents in and expand the discussion. I hope that you find it of interest.

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Systemic Change, Institutional Lag and Societal Resilience.

The following is a draft of a talk that I am giving to a professional group. I thought that it would be good to trial it here. It is not quite stream-of-consciousness in nature but is fairly loose in terms of argument tightness and structure. My usual approach is to write a long form essay on the theme of the talk, then condense and memorize it for an off-the-cuff presentation. I do not use slides or power point presentations for the talks. 25 years of university lecturing and a lot of public speaking allows me the luxury of distilling fairly complex thoughts into shorter talking points. I have incorporated some references brought up by reader Barbara Matthews because they add depth to the discussion.

Introduction.

As Dickens wrote, “we live in the best of times and we live in the worst of times.” That is because we are experiencing  a moment of systemic transition in world affairs. This transition is political, economic, cultural and technological, something that in aggregate affects the entire global network of human institutions. It also involves changes in nature, which cause and compound the human changes that we are now observing. As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus observed, we never step in the same river twice. The moment is fluid and uncertain, the possibilities both open and endless yet potentially dark and forbidding.

In order to make sense of this we might break down the broader picture into component parts. These are 1) the structure of the international system; 2) the rules governing the global order; and 3) the geopolitical repercussions of the changes currently underway.

First, the world is moving from a multipolar to a poly-centric system. In the past 50 years we have seen the long transition from the bipolar world of the Cold War, to the unipolar world of the first post-Cold War decade, then the emergence of a multipolar world where rising great powers like China and India compete for global primacy with declining powers like the US and Russia, and where new and old middle powers are finding necessity in forging alliances amongst themselves and smaller States rather than seek the security provided by larger Powers. That includes the rise of the Global South, exemplified by the emergence of a bloc of so-called BRIC countries, which represent a challenge to traditional “northern” dominance of the international arena (“South” here referring not to a geographic location but an ideological orientation that has roots in anti-colonial struggles).

“Polarity” traditionally has only involved nation-States. Large Powers exercise gravitational “pull” on smaller powers that seek their physical protection and provision of material security. It now includes non-State actors like technology conglomerates and their supply chain adjacents. The “poles” themselves can be divided into techno hubs, entities that use knowledge economies to generate wealth and power, and resource hubs, those that provide energy and material inputs to the global knowledge economy.  Both need each other and in fact hybridisation of these productive models is now the norm in many places such as the Arab Gulf States. When the independent power of non-State actors and cross-border impacts of technology are factored in, we see that rather than multipolarity what is emerging is a polycentric constellation of global-reach actors that cluster around mutual interests or, often enough, conflict nodes based on their rival pursuit of competitive advantages in specific material or ideological realms.

Secondly, this has led to the demise of the post-WW2 “liberal” status quo, which was designed to bring stability and predictability to the exchanges between State and non-State actors in the international field. The disruption of this “liberal” international order (liberal defined not on ideological terms but as a voluntary system of mutual checks and balances governing International relations and foreign affairs), has led us to what is now a “post-liberal” (and often illiberal) world order, one where  liberal rules, norms and conventions are violated and its institutions increasingly  ignored. This is a return to what Hobbes called a “state of nature” in international affairs, often interpreted as a return to “might makes right” doctrines associated with the golden era of late 19th century imperialism. Those who can, do. Those who cannot suffer at the hands of those that can.

The institutional edifice created after WW2, what came to be known as the Liberal International Order, is breaking down. The norms, rules and institutions that made up that order have been rendered ineffective by the rapid changes in human societies, and liberal rules, norms and institutional processes are being increasingly ignored in favour of more self-interested actor-centric approaches to global affairs. An area where this has been seen quite starkly is in the field of international affairs, where the liberal international order attempted to stabilise and regulate away from actor-centric foreign policies and towards mutually cooperative inter- or transnational institutional arrangements that mitigated power disparities between nation-States and among private market agents based on their geographic and political position in the global system. One such regulatory mechanism was the concept of freedom of navigation, which guaranteed safe passage to civilian shipping on the open seas and in smaller maritime spaces (e.g. chokepoints such as straits and small seas) otherwise subject to the interference of adjacent littoral states or non-state actors (like pirates).

Third, that returns us to a core notion now commonly used in non-specialist circles: geopolitics. Put simply, geopolitics  is the relationship between geography and politics. It traditionally used to be seen as a matter of how human politics and military strategy conformed to or utilised immutable geographic characteristics in pursuit of (national) State interests, recognising that geopolitics also encompasses economic, diplomatic and sociological factors as they are influenced by geography and geographic trends. Mass migrations are an example of such activity because they have cultural, economic and security implications, but things like hydro dam construction on rivers that traverse national borders have the potential to become serious diplomatic, economic and military problems as well. The disputes about Mekong River damming, dredging and usage, and the consequent end of traditional riverine lifestyles and population exodus from riverine communities, are an example of this.

Now, although the need for geopolitical adaptation remains a constant of international relations, the relationship between geography and politics has shifted. On the one hand, technologies have made human adaptation or utilisation of geographic features far more extensive than in previous eras. Humans dominate nature in a measure that they did not before, which in turn allows them to exploit terrain and earthcapes in previously unknown ways. Think of undersea and space travel, geospatial mapping, deep sea mining—and warring. Once unimaginable, all are either now currently in existence or on the threshold of becoming reality. Automation, robotics and nano-technologies, to say nothing of AI applications in those fields, allow for the exploitation of geography (and nature in general) in ways unheard of during the golden era of geopolitical thought in the early 20th century.

On the other hand, climate change and other natural shifts have altered the physical world in fundamental ways: consider the melting of the Arctic Ocean icepack opening up the Northern Passage and the retreating ice cover in Antartica opening up accessibility to mineral exploration in ways never seen before. The same is true with the impact of warmer temperatures of drought/deluge cycles on fishery stocks and freshwater supplies. At the intersection of climate change and technological advancement, solar, wind and hydro energy production have significant geopolitical implications that go beyond traditional comparative advantages in one or the other under previous technological regimes.

In summation: geopolitics is at once more fluid and yet remains constant as a guiding principle of international relations. The more things change, the more that they stay the same. In moment of global systemic transition, geopolitics becomes a core feature of the process. That is where human agency becomes a decisive variable for better or worse. What follows is two issues where human agency is at play.

Institutional lag.

“Institutional lag”  refers to the time gap between an event or appearance of a phenomena and the response to them from complex organisations. Derived from management theory, the concept posits that institutions will be slow to respond and adapt to changes in their environment, which in turn will lead to unnecessary costs, superfluous behaviours, design obsolescence, duplication of functions, misplaced objectives and ill-suited planning. 

This syndrome is often more than just a failure to react in a timely or responsive manner. Complex organisations develop a type of bureaucratic inertia where established systems and procedures are resistant to change unless some externality forces them to. Even then, they way the respond is not agile and may often not be what is needed for the adaptive task at hand. The adage about generals always preparing for the last war is an illustration of the concept but the notion extends further. Until a technological or other form of social breakthrough occurs, the organisation is perpetually bound by “tradition” (procedure and usage) and therefore always behind the times. Innovative breakthroughs are more often forced by externalities, not pushed by proactive internal reform within the organisation.

Societal Resilience.

Refers to the ability of human societies, including businesses and economic sectors but extending beyond that, to be adaptable and flexible when it comes to unforeseen, unexpected or sudden events that disrupt their business models and the production chains in which they are located. These can be caused by sudden technological advances, black swan events, political crisis and wars, epidemics and pandemics, natural disasters and other unanticipated phenomena. The term is derived from “Industrial resilience,” which is basically management-speak for changes in processes, procedures and networks caused by external events that require rapid responses via technological advancement and/or diversification of input and output links as well as market substitution, among other things.

In a way, societal resilience, and especially business or industrial resilience, is inversely related to institutional lag. The more resilient a society, industry or social group is, the more bureaucratic inertias can be overcome and institutional lags minimised. Therein lies the problem. Societies and the organisations and demographics that comprise them seek stability, and stability depends on commonly accepted status quos. When something happens that disrupts the whole or part of an institutionalised status quo, the response is often increased resistance to change “in the way things are” rather than flexible adaptability. It is embedded in the human condition so the issue is not trivial in times of systemic change.

It was thought that the Covid pandemic would force industrial resilience upon the global trading community, and indeed, concepts such as “near-shoring,” “friendshoring,” and regional hubs all gained traction in the international system of production, consumption, telecommunications, transportation and commodity and service exchange. The reality was that genuine resilience strategies was adopted by a minority of businesses, with the majority opting, after a period of disruption, to assume a “business as usual” approach and resume their old ways of doing things. This included “just in time” production schemes that worsened the impact of the pandemic in terms of post-recovery demand increases. With little inventory stockpiled while demand was low, business found themselves unable to fill orders quickly, leading to inflationary pressures resultant from demand on limited stock, compounded by the US imposition of tariffs on a wide range of goods from dozens of countries and regional trading blocs. None of this was anticipated by corporate elites once the Covid wave had crested.

Likewise, once the pandemic peaked in terms of deaths, illness and infection rates, many social actors, including political parties, interest groups, community organisations and an assortment of individuals grouped into a variety of grassroots agencies, engaged in revisionist historical interpretations of the pandemic and its underlying causes. Besides theories about Covid’s origins (in a Chinese lab or wet market, among others), there was questioning of whether the disease existed at all and whether vaccines were needed, necessary, useful in fighting the its spread or were part of some Deep State mind control plot. The use of surgical masks as simple front-line defense against airborne infections was even questioned. People were murdered in disputes over mask usage, and an assortment of quacks sprang forth to offer a range of pseudo- or non-scientific solutions such as injecting bleach into the body (advocated by president Trump), horse vaccines and perineum tanning (advocated by assorted alternative medicine adherents and wellness “influencers”).

This reaffirms the axiom that transitional moments such as that involving global systemic change are marked by conflict, not just in the form of rules and norms violations between competing actors such as nation-States and global non-State powers, including the resort to violence in order to settle disputes, but in the human propensity to resist change per se. That is what resilience must focus on: overcoming the innate human tendency to resist change even when it is forced upon us.

One measure that is both a sign of societal resilience and a stop-gap during periods of institutional lag is hedging. Hedging can be both strategic or practical and can be deployed at both levels simultaneously. Diversifying trade partners, seeking alternative sources of information or material inputs, widening exposure to previously unknown contacts, languages, cultures and experiences, experimenting with new ways of doing things are in one way or the other examples of resisting complacency and stagnation by not putting one’s eggs in one basket. Strategic hedging focuses on planning for (and against) long-term events. Tactical hedging focuses on immediate problems.

For example, if the PRC decides to restrict NZ dairy or meat imports because of displeasure with a NZ foreign policy stance, what does NZ do as a contingency plan? Rescind the foreign policy measure that caused Chinese displeasure? Find alternative foreign markets? Open at a lower price scale or subsidise the domestic market for the excess inventory caused by the Chinese bans? Reduce production and ask producers for patience (and reduced profits)? One decision (what to do with the foreign policy stance) is a strategic matter, the answer to which will determine subsequent tactical choices if necessary.

While that is happening industrial resilience will be tested in the export sector, determining whether it is flexible and adaptable enough to weather the dispute and emerge with better plans that cope with future exigencies.

The point of this illustration is to highlight the utility of hedging as a resilience response to crisis, uncertainty and change. That may or may not lead to more durable patterns of behaviour, and that depends on how the inevitable conflicts that arise are resolved and mitigated. Much money and effort has been spent developing sophisticated risk analyses that offer predictive models for myriad of systemic events. That is helpful in framing and avoiding identified problems but it is in the solutions that stem from them where true resilience is found. Given what has been mentioned above, that may be the most daunting project before us.

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Playing with numbers.

Reaction to US Secretary of Defense (he prefers to call it “of War”) Pete “Kegseth” Hegseth’s comments that NZ was “freeloading” on the US because it does not spend 3.5% of GDP on defense was predictable if shallow for the most part. Most reasonable commentators, including–surprisingly–Don Brash, found the figure to be ludicrous on the face of it, and as someone said, perhaps intended to be aspirational rather than realistic. That is a very polite way of phrasing things. Predictably, the government responded by pointing to its pledge to spend 2%GDP on defense in the next decade, although it was vague on the how and why’s of the increase other than repeating the recent mantra that NZ is located in an increased threat environment.

The impolite way of phrasing things is that the call for NZ to spend 3.5% of GDP on defense is a mastubatory pipe dream by a sweaty-palmed war fetishist white nationalist alcoholic “Alpha male” wanna-be by the name of Pete Hegseth. It has no basis in any discernible fact and it bears no relationship to any known strategic reality. Like most of what he says, Hegseth’s demand is a blustery babble of bullying rhetorical incontinence, much like his purported US war plan for its attack on Iran.

So let’s consider the facts.

The only countries that spend 3.5% of GDP on “defense” are authoritarian, war-mongering and/or garrison states (a garrison state is one that is besieged by hostile adversaries, like Ukraine, Iran and Taiwan). Most liberal democracies come nowhere close to that benchmark, and in fact until MAGA madness overtook US defense policy, the so-called “2 percent standard” where NATO members contributed that amount of their GDP to their collective defense was considered to be on the high end of the scale, especially for smaller states and particularly for those that did not have frontline borders with hostile actors like Russia. Two percent is already a stretch for most countries. 3.5% is untethered to the realities of most national security calculations.

A brief look at global GDP expenditures on defense tells the story: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS

Anyone with a modicum of understanding of democratic politics knows that (unlike the US) most democracies prioritize domestic policy areas that immediately affect voting constituencies. These include health, welfare, housing, education, retirement benefits and other public goods that maintain the material bases of public support for a given government, and more generally for democracy as a form of governance (as opposed to, say, various types of authoritarianism). Expenditures on defense and security (including on intelligence services) tend to be of lower priority and directly related to exposure to threats to national interests, including but not limited to the physical integrity and sovereignty of a given democratic state. Since threats can be indirect, distant or too large to be handled alone, many democracies forge security alliances and pacts with larger like-minded or strategically-aligned partners. NATO is an example of that, as is the Australian-New Zealand bilateral defense pact and various regional security agreements.

One of the advantages of such collective security agreements is that it reduces the need for individual countries to increase their defense spending to levels that draw resources away from non-security domestic spending. In military terms, collective security agreements are supposed to be a form of force multiplier in which smaller partners exchange the mantle of protection from larger partners by assuming roles in support of common objectives and interests that the larger partners cannot or prefer not to do by themselves (say humanitarian assistance or peacekeeping missions).

What the US is demanding, therefore, is contrary to the spirit as well as intent of democratic collective security. It threatens to withdraw its security “cover” from countries unless they spend more on defense than the US does itself (the US is at 3.4% of GDP spent on defense while actively involved in several conflicts of its choosing). Moreover, this one-size-fits-all spending baseline not only ignores the reality of domestic politics in most liberal democracies other than the US. It also ignores the geopolitical realities of different states. The US is a continental country surrounded by blue water and non-threatening land neighbours that has a neo-imperialist foreign policy and war-mongering constituencies that drive it to pursue continuous wars that it does not necessarily fight to win: instead, it must find foreign enemies to fight in order to justify its international behaviour and provide sustenance to its military-industrial complex (which is a motor force of the US economy). It fights not to win but because it can, and because it has domestic actors that materially benefit from perpetuating the suffering of others.

Liberal democracies like NZ are cut from a different cloth. Their threat environments are often different to that of the US and, for that matter, from each other in most instances. So the cookie-cutter approach to security and defense spending demanded by Kegseth and his minions, as well as parallel demands that defense policy of US partners dovetail and overlap in the interest of “interoperability” and strategic integration, falls short of recognizing the specific threat environments that other States may have to cope with, and therefore the strategic perspectives that they need to adopt in response. The international community, both in peace and in conflict, is not as US-centric as some might think. Force integration and joint operations is not a “ready to wear” clothes rack, either in terms of objectives as well as capabilities. This reality is lost on the MAGA administration.

Beyond the issue of a blunderbuss approach to defense spending in the aggregate, something that perhaps is because of the US’s own history of weapons development and procurement, it is not the total amount of GDP spent on defense that matters but what that money is spent on. Spending money on soon-to-be obsolescence platforms like the recently announced “Trump class” battleships (actually, non-battleship surface warships), is utter folly and often driven by non-military or non-strategic considerations like providing jobs to local constituencies (as is the case with the AUKUS nuclear submarine project in Australia). In an age of AI, minituarization and automated weapons technologies like drones, satellites and submersibles, military procurement and replenishment policies must be driven not by some arbitrary financial baseline but by literally getting more efficient bang for the buck. Threat environments and internal resource constraints should determine what weapons systems and support infrastructure are needed and what strategic policies should be used to deploy them. After that, the guiding principle should be to maximize value per dollar, not reach some arbitrary spending threshold.

All of this presumably happens against the background of a well thought-out geopolitical and geostrategic perspective. “Strategic culture” refers to a State’s historical approach to its external environment, one that weaves political, diplomatic, economic and military theory and capabilities into concrete practice. In this light NZ represents a somewhat odd case, as it has a Army-centric military despite being a maritime state (with a very weak Navy and virtually no Air Force), responds more to allied threat assessments than its own, adopts contradictory if not juxtaposed trade and security policies (trading preferentially with an emerging Great Power while aligning itself with a declining Great Power that is an avowed adversary of the former), professes to be idealist and pacifist in orientation (self-styling as a “champion” of the international rules based order and having an “independent” foreign policy) when in fact it behaves in an internal interest group-driven and externally clientalistic, ethically-agnostic fashion governed by short-term objectives. Some might say that this is a pragmatic approach; others might call it amoral, unprincipled and opportunistic.

Although many Defense White Papers and other policy papers have been produced outlining NZ’s purported vision of its place in the world, the threats it believes it must confront and the means by which it proposes to do so, what emerges from reading them is something more akin to strategic incoherence. We get much description of events and conditions that are influenced by the perceptions of larger partners, but we are not told precisely why we configure that NZDF and intelligence services in the way that we do. For example, the PRC is clearly considered by NZ and its security partners to be the major extra-regional threat to the South Pacific, but we are never told exactly why (Influence operations? “Dollar diplomacy?” Security pacts with Pacific Island nations? Other covert activities? Different value systems?). Much is alluded to but little is presented in the way of concrete evidence.

The same was true for the nearly two decades of NZ intelligence community intelligence assessments that jihadists, both foreign and domestic, were the greatest terrorist threat to NZ and its interests. This responded more to the expectations of NZ’s intelligence patrons in the 5 Eyes network and beyond rather than the probability of a jihadist attack in NZ. In fact, not a single such thing occurred in spite of many media-driven scares and episodic arrests, during a period in which rightwing neo-Nazi extremism, including a well documented presence in NZ that remains to this day, were virtually ignored in annual intelligence threat assessments. Until March 15, 2019, that is.

Recent NZ threat assessments like those mentioned are presented as fact at a time when the US has gone rogue under Trump, killing hundreds of civilians on the open seas without warrant or evidence, kidnaping the leader of a sovereign state, threatened to annex NATO allies, launched an opportunistic war of aggression under false pretences against Iran at the behest and in conjunction with another, in fact genocidal rogue state, kowtows to an authoritarian neo-imperialist aggressor in Europe, threatens the overthrow of the Cuban regime while subjecting that country to a total fuel blockade, slaps punitive tariffs for political reasons on governments that do not come to the US heel and spends US taxpayer money on openly influencing foreign elections in favour of its preferred candidates–who exactly is the clear and imminent threat here? And yet the US is not mentioned in NZ threat assessments once–not once–other than in oblique mentions of “Great Power Competition” affecting our part of the world. Yeah right. Meanwhile our military brass and civilian defense establishment court favour with US weapons manufacturers and government security officials without a shred of light cast on their activities and the reasons for them. So US good, PRC bad–but we trade more with the bad guys than the supposed good ones.

There are no parliamentary debates about these issues, much less public discussion of things like why the 2%GDP spend on defense criteria must be followed by NZ in the first place. Is it because NZ is a NATO partner? Is it because Trump threatens us with sanctions or tariffs if we do not obey? Or is it because in order to provide for some measure of self-defence we need to increase budgetary allotments for specific weapons systems and their logistical infrastructure? What, in fact, is the purpose of our defense forces? Territorial resistance against foreign invasion and occupation? Expeditionary service to our security masters? Global good citizen participation in multinational operations? What should be the emphasis of our forces? Peacekeeping and/or humanitarian operations (using military engineers and medics)? Special forces? Infantry without armor or air support? Coastal defense? Regional policing? Force support to Australian or other partner militaries? Civil defense?

In sum, there is much more to drawing up a defense budget than using some drunk US official’s number blocks as a guideline. But because the toddler’s math logic is strong with that one, and because he sits atop a very powerful death machine to which NZ is connected in multiple ways, NZ must be very calibrated in its response. For that it needs to truthfully know exactly what it needs to defend against, for how long given current and near future government resources and threat scenarios, and what tools are best suited to the task once national security priorities are honestly defined and operationalised given the fluid context of the times.

Having done that, and only then, can NZ tell Hegseth to shove his 3.5%GDP demand where the sun don’t shine.

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Men coming late to the party.

I was recently hospitalised and spent some time in the wards of a local hospital. For most of the stay I was in a room with 3 other men with similar ailments. We all were subject to a routine where we were prodded, pricked, measured, weighed and subject to various other indignities and small degradations on a regularly scheduled basis, including late night wake ups and trips to the loo for urine samples wearing those bare-arsed hospital gowns. We were constantly asked our names and date of birth by rotating crews of nurses, technicians and orderlies and when given medications. Doctors came around episodically, sometimes trailing junior colleagues who asked us to explain why were there as if we were children. In return we barraged them with questions about when we would be released, questions that they could not answer until all protocols had cleared and been signed off on.

On seperate occasions two of my roommates, older Maori men, objected to the constant repetition of the procedures and processes. One appeared to be a senior member of his whanau (given his visitors) and the other claimed to have been abused while in State care. Both clearly believed in defending their mana. Neither liked being ordered around by the all female, all foreign nursing and technician staff. Although there was some language hurdles, I thought that the women were actually quite polite and patient in their interactions with us. But they were firm and insistent in any event.

The men most vigorously objected to the repeated checking of basic facts (name/DOB, with the man who spoke of his time in State care mentioning that his Maori name was changed against his will into a Pakeha name while he was in State custody and the other fellow mentioning that the staff should figure out who he was by then), having given the same answers each time. As the days passed they objected to the constant taking of blood samples, temperatures, blood oxygen levels and other body status indicators, as well as being moved around for scans in other parts of the hospital. So did I, but silently. At times they refused to comply with instructions, eventually requiring the doctors to intervene in order to chart their progress.

I was completely sympathetic to their complaints because quite frankly, the routine was a pain in the rear. Plus, we all detested the food (prepared by David Seymor’s cronies at Compass, the same outfit awarded the Ministry of Health school lunch contract) and the intrusions on our sleep given how little of it we could get. For those of us in that wardroom, the thrill (such as it was) was gone.

As I listened to their complaints I realized that these men were coming late to a women’s “party.” Underneath the specifics that bothered them lie a broader phenomenon that extended beyond their individual circumstances. In the end what they were complaining about, and which they were attempting to defend against, was their bodily autonomy and the intrusions upon it. This was not just a defense of mana although it deeply involves it. As women everywhere know all too well, this is a condition where one’s body is not one’s own, but instead is subject to the manipulations and demands of others. I wondered if these men made that connection–that their plight was akin to that of women everywhere at some point in their lives–and concluded that they probably did not because their concerns were immediate and unreflective about the broader syndrome. They were living their unhappy moment, not dwelling on the deeper context in which their human agency was being infringed.

My approach to hospitalisations, much like my approach to air travel, is to not rock the boat, try to get along, suffer indignities in quiet and avoid trouble with petty tyrants in the medical hierarchy and passenger control and security infrastructure. But I have an advantage in that I am a mediocre older white guy who does not have to defend my bodily autonomy or my mana on a regular basis. For those who do, the issue could well be existential rather than a mere inconvenience, and given that perspective born of life experience, a reason to protest against otherwise seemingly small slights.

Beyond that realisation about bodily autonomy, I used the involuntary holiday in the wards as a time for reflection on my own life and what is in store for my loved ones down the road. More immediately, I witnessed a hallway fight and a death in the first ward I was assigned to (which served as a type of triage unit). My care was actually quite good but it was clear that the staff were undermanned and overworked. Most of all, although being able to leave the hospital in a somewhat vertical position was a plus, I also realized yet again that it takes extraordinary people to handle with grace and aplomb the everyday grind of dealing with very unhappy and sometimes uncooperative patients in very unfortunate circumstances not always of their own making. In other words, it seems that when it comes to intrusions on one’s personal autonomy, hospital staff also have reasons to complain. Because foreign or not, they have mana, too.

To them, I tip my hat.

And to those old guys in our wardroom defending their mana, I say good on you because what are we if we do not have our dignity to defend? To them and decent old guys everywhere I say: Kia kaha.

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Will Israel nuke Iran? Some background.

Regular reader Barbara Matthews asked me in a comment on a previous post about Israeli nukes. I replied on the comment thread on that post but have decided to flesh out the answer and post it here by way of a primer on Israel’s nuclear weapons since many people do not know much about it. Here goes:

Israel is estimated to have around 100-400 nuclear warheads (more likely closer to the lower figure). The throw weights (explosive power) of these warheads is classified but estimated to be variable but relatively low yield (20-300 kiloton (kt), with 1 kiloton=1000 tons of high explosives), along the lines of US and Russian Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile (IRBM) throw weights but far smaller than the megaton (one million tons of high explosive) + throw weights of US and Russian “heavy” strategic warheads. It is believed that most Israeli nukes are of the “tactical” IRBM type rather than strategic in nature.

Israel is not a signatory to the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and is believed to have some of its nuclear weapons technology passed on to it by an Israeli spy in the US government (later imprisoned and deported to Israel) who was part of the Lakam nuclear spy ring that operated from the 1950s that helped apartheid South Africa develop a bomb and test it in 1979 over the South Indian Ocean and which supplied nuclear technology to the Argentine military dictatorship in the 1970s, plus a lot of other covert shenanigans. After years of silence and ambiguity and nebulous statements by previous government officials, Netanyahu has implied in public comments that Israel will use nukes on Iran in specific circumstances because it sees Iran as an existential threat. If so it would be the first “first strike” since Hiroshima and Nagasaki and violate the second strike retaliatory premise of modern nuclear deterrence theory.

Israel has a standard delivery system triad of air, sea and land-launched nuclear weapons. The land leg has the “heaviest” warheads that are mounted on Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) known as Jericho-1 and Jericho-2s that potentially can reach distant adversaries such as North Korea. I do not know but assume that Israel has MIRV (Multiple Re-Entry Vehicle) technologies in its nuclear fleet, presumably for the heavier warhead-bearing platforms like the Jerichos.

Its main nuclear research and development facilities are at Dimona in the Negev desert, which also serves as a civilian power generating facility that, besides the power generation aspect, produces around 20 kg of Plutonium each year as waste that is directed to the weapons program. 5-6kg of Plutonium is needed for a 20 kiloton warhead, so there are constraints in the Israeli weapons production process, especially for larger-yield warheads. By wy of comparison, the Hiroshima bomb had 15 kilotons of throw weight while the Nagasaki bomb had 20-22 kt of explosive power.

The use of Plutonium is interesting for several reasons. First, its is by-product of nuclear energy production so is not enriched uranium such as those used in both civilian energy (<20–usually 3-5 precent– enriched) production and most advanced nuclear weapons programs (90 percent enriched U235). It is also very unstable and dirty when compared to enriched uranium, which means that besides the risk of accidental chain reactions, the radioactive cloud and plume from a detonation will be far more lethal than those produced by more refined nuclear weapon detonations. That means that detonations in the air at any altitude and on the surface will generate plumes that will then drift hundreds of miles traveling on the prevailing winds, contaminating everything. along the way.

In the case of Iran, Israel would presumably use “bunker-busting” deep penetration missiles to destroy Iran’s nuclear stockpiles and delivery platforms widen deep underground. That might minimise or partially contain the fallout contamination that follows such strikes. But Israel has shown little regard for civilian casualties when levelling Gaza, Lebanese neighbourhoods and parts of the West Bank as well as Iran itself, so we cannot discount the possibility that it might use air- or surface-burst weapons, including against civilian targets (these are known as counter-value strikes) as well as “hardened” military targets (known as counter-force strikes).

In my opinion, there is at least a 50-50 chance that Israel will use nukes against Iran if this conflict does not go the way that Netanyahu’s regime wants it to go, especially of the US–yet again– loses interest and withdraws from the conflict as midterm elections approach and GOP political fortunes turn South as commodity prices continue to rise, etc.

If I were to be charitable I would say that unlike the US, which sees Iran as hostile but containable, sort of like North Korea, Israel views Iran as a threat to its very existence. Why? Not because of nukes but because hardliners in Iran have repeatedly uttered serious anti-semitic as well as anti-Zionist rhetoric towards the Jewish state. The former include grotesque stereotypes and caricatures, betraying a profound and twisted hatred of Jews as a people rather than Israel as a nation-State. In light of that Israel wants to eliminate Iran as a functioning State and partition it into various ethnic nationalities in which Persians are just one of many, albeit a dominant group in whatever demographic mosaic is constructed out of the ashes of the Revolutionary Republic. That removes Iran as a threat to Jewish, not just Israel’s existence.

If I were to not be charitable I would say that Bibi and co. just want to degrade but not destroy Iran so as to keep it as a convenient scapegoat and enduring threat that helps them justify their rogue actions and avoid having to account for their own crimes and atrocities. In that perspective, it is the tail that wags the imbecile dog that is the MAGA administration, but that dog is about to turn tail for domestic political reasons in the US and at that point the spectre of Israeli nukes against Iran becomes real.

One other factor must be considered in Israel’s strategic equation to launch such strikes: who will retaliate against Israel in the event that it does engage in the first use of nuclear weapons against Iran, much less retaliate in kind with a nuclear counter-strike? Quite frankly, I do not see anyone being capable or willing to do so.

The “Doomsday Clock” run by the Association of Atomic Scientists already sits at 85 seconds before midnight, the closest it has ever been to nuclear armageddon day, and that was set before the US and Israel launched their war against Iran.

The moment of deadly truth may be fast approaching.

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No Bread, all Circus on the Potomac.

A well-worn truth about regimes in crisis is that as their failures mount, internal fractures emerge and external opposition grows, they resort to diversions and distractions in order to maintain their grip on power. The more that they are in trouble, the more outlandish become the “lookee here” and arm-waving at shiny objects and glittery glitz. The Romans had a phrase to describe this phenomenon, which is often the terminal phase of a regime in crisis: “bread and circus” (which referred to the mass spectacles performed in Colosseums and the distribution of bread to citizens as things otherwise got worse for them). In Argentina during my youth, the Peronists turned this tactic on its head and offered demi-johns of red wine along with large loafs of French bread to people assembled at their rallies and demonstrations when they were in office as well as when in opposition (when able to do so). In both instances, the popular feel-good moment often presaged darker times for those in power–and their countries as well.

It appears that the MAGA administration has reached that phase. But there is a twist to this tale. There is no bread in the MAGA distraction. Instead there are higher domestic commodity prices thanks to Trump’s tariff regime; higher fuel and fuel derivative prices thanks to the US/Israeli war of aggression against Iran and the consequent closing of the Straits of Hormuz; a bloated federal deficit due to tax breaks for rich individuals and corporations even with reductions in the federal budget for non-defence expenditures; stagnated incomes and employment levels for most wage earners; culture war weirdness seeping into the education system, arts institutions and research centres; the proliferation of sports and ” predictive” betting and dodgy get-rich-quick schemes that encourage insider trading by elites and masses alike; all wrapped up in increased domestic repression in the form of ICE and its adjacent “law enforcement” agencies.

Rather than bread, the US is offered crumbs.

Then what about the circus? Unlike the absence of bread, the MAGA movement is full of circus. On top of all the other outrages, graft, corruption, excess, incompetence and crass coarseness of the Trump administration, two recent events exemplify this in bold relief.

The first is the passing of an Immigration Bill by the GOP -controlled Congress that includes US$ 1 billion earmarked for the new White House ballroom that Trump has fixated on and for which he promised only private funds would be used (after razing the historical landmark that was the East Wing of the White House without congressional consultation or approval, as per law). Trump and the GOP argue that the recent purported attempt on Trump’s life at the White House Correspondents dinner (the assailant did not make into the ballroom where Trump was located) justifies the expense in the name of security even though the White House already has multiple security layers that start outside the perimeter fences enclosing the complex’s grounds and continue into the buildings themselves. Plus, US$1 billion is a bit much even for a three story structure that will dwarf the White House itself (recognising that the White House is a 18th century-sized neo-classical-style mansion that is small and quaint by modern standards). This is pork barrel politics at its finest.

In sane societies with rational democratic elected leaders, the appropriation of US $1 billion in taxpayer money to fund what was supposed to be a privately-financed ballroom for a vainglorious president in an election year (midterms are in November, with all of the House of Representatives and one third of the Senate having seats contested, as well numerous governorships and other political offices throughout the country) would appear to be an act. of political suicide. But the US is no longer a sane society run by rational people. Instead, it has become a divided amalgam of decent people having to coexist with a hard core voting third of racists, xenophobes, hypocrites, opportunists, charlatans and grifters using the foundational narrative of “greatness” and “freedom” to cloak their selfish ambitions and (not so) private prejudices. Conservative support for the ballroom and its political underpinnings are a shining illustration of that.

The circus does not stop with a garish ballroom. In a few days the White House will host a cage fighting card on the White House South Lawn. Not a cricket match, not a tennis match, not a chess match, not polo, not basketball, not gymnastic, not fencing or ice skating, not any sort of game or sport that conveys dignity and sophistication in competitive endeavour.

No. Instead, we will be treated to the spectacle of steroid-laden brutes bashing each other into bloody submission inside an actual chainlink cage as if they were modern-era gladiators entertaining the Roman hordes (4000 spectators will be ringside on the South Lawn and millions of others are anticipated by the White House to be watching on the Washington Monument grounds across from the South Lawn and on global media outlets). Trump will be ringside but could also be the MC, depending on his mood. The prime seats will be reserved for his acolytes and associates in the political, business and religious worlds. Despite their expensive finery, they and the rest of the MAGA mob will revel in their bloodlust, shouting, cheering, booing and baying like hounds at the stylised but real violence. Given their limited historical knowledge, someone in the Trump administration–perhaps Pete “Keg”seth given that he has recent form in this regard–will make grandiose comparisons to Gladiators by referencing the movie of that name, not the actual historical era in which they were part of the Roman circus..

To finish with this Roman motif, think of contemporary Washington DC as Rome before the Fall. The MAGA movement is Rome, Trump is its Caesar, the GOP are its praetorian guard, the Potomac is its Tiber River, and its downfall is inevitable not because it will be overrun by a modern-day equivalent of the Huns, but because it is collapsing from within as I write. It may take some time, but the rot has well and truly set in and there will be a day coming in the not-to-distant future when we look at whatever emerges from the rubble of the White House East Wing (and perhaps that Arc de Trump, aka the “United States Triumphal Arch,” that he is proposing for a site looking across from the Eastern banks of the Potomac River towards Arlington National Cemetery) as something akin to the Colosseum itself–a relic of a time when excess overcame taste, and where vacuous venality lorded over ethics and civility.

It would be fitting if the Trump/MAGA legacy turned out to be a case of figuratively fiddling while the country burned. Let’s hope so because at least out of ashes can come regeneration. The US sorely needs that.

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Causality in context.

Media and MAGA spin aside and assuming that this was not (another) staged assassination attempt, besides all other contributing factors, the intense levels of frustration felt by many who see that Trump continues to get away with the most egregious (and criminal) behavior in the face of institutional impotence has clearly raised stress and anger levels in US society. Add in Trump’s normalising of violent political rhetoric against scapegoats and demonising those who oppose him (say, by condoning ICE tactics, including the murders of US citizens protesting against them) then the stage is set for events like this.

The sad truth is that Trump reaps what he sows. This does not imply condoning real attacks on him no matter how loathsome he is, but it does offer more by way of contextual backdrop than the immediate and fetishistic coverage being regurgitated and manipulated by corporate media and partisan political agents. What is needed is more context to the causality.

The “good”news is that the suspect–a mild mannered computer geek, part-time tutor and teacher with hard science degrees who lived with his parents at age 31–is alive (or at least not “Epsteined” yet) may yet give us some idea of his motivations, much like in the case of the Charlie Kirk killer. Assuming of course that he will explain what drove him to engage in what should have been a suicidal act. For the moment we have as a clue to his motivation an email left for his family that complains about being tainted by a corrupt pedophile war-mongerer. We can figure out who that is.

If I were more cynical than I already am, I would say that this event is another diversion away from a previous diversion (the war with Iran) that itself was a diversion from major problems for Trump (the Epstein files and failure of his domestic agenda in a midterm year).

It will take a while but eventually the truth about the “attempts” on Trump’s life will come out. For the moment we have to resist those who make the “but both sides do it” arguments. There is only one side inciting violence and sadly there are some on the fairer side of history who respond by seeking retribution (as seemingly is the case with this suspect). By doing so they do not help the cause of fairness and instead play into the hands of the fear-mongerers, MAGA mouthpieces and corporate media ghouls. Let us not lose sight of that fact because the spin machine is already hard at work framing the narrative surrounding the event as an affront to God and country.

It would be otherwise laughable but my political math calculator says that the increase in “attempts” on Trump’s life will be proportional to Trump policy defeats suffered in the run-up to the November midterms. The more his policy agenda suffers setbacks, the more assassins will come out of the woodwork in order to do him in at surprisingly unguarded places such as the Washington Hilton where the latest shooting occurred (and where Reagan was shot as well). If the current negative trend continues (Iran standoff persists, gas and commodity prices spike, more ICE violence and popular backlash endure through the Summer and Fall, etc.), by October there will be a frenzy of shoot ’em ups at Trump events that will make the shootouts at the OK Corral in Tombstone look tame. And Trump ain’t no Wyatt Earp or Doc Holliday. More immediately, it is time to keep an eye on what that Goebbels-inspired Stephen Miller has to say because he is the propaganda puppet master.

As for the attack itself. Set up, much?

In light of all of this, what I am trying to establish a chain of causality assuming that it was not staged. In terms of percipient, immediate and background causes is it the fault of US gun culture? No, because the guns were legal and the suspect has no police record (in fact he had a clean sheet after background checks to be a teacher). How about untreated mental health issues? Maybe, but if so even his family and acquaintances were unaware. Socioeconomic status causing class resentment? No, as he came from an affluent family. Radicalization in an ANTIFA sort of way, on-line and via association with like-minded others? Perhaps but also not probative. Was living in his parent’s basement and trying to be a video game developer contributory to his state of mind? Likely, but in a twisted way. He was a loner and a gamer but being a so-called incel (involuntary celibate) and gaming nerd are more of a rightwing thing seldom associated with progressive values.

So I am left with the uncontrollable frustration thesis mentioned at the top of this post. No one is doing anything to effectively stop the criminality, corruption and opportunistic incompetence of the violence-dog whistling MAGA administration and in fact many actors continue to support and enable it as it drags the country down. In the words of Howard Beale (Peter Finch): ” I am mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore!”

The twist is that the frustrated loner theory sounds like a plausible contributing factor if we loosen the predominant ideological feature of US “incels.” Back in the Pentagon an old CIA hand told me, with reference to young men joining guerrilla and narco groups, about the “blueballs theory” of recruitment. Guys who cannot get laid and do not have strong affective relations with their female family members are approached with an explanation for their personal failures and social alienation being XYZ, these being whatever sounds likely as a justification given the religious, ethnic, political and economic context of the times. The idea is to pin their woes on “da Man,” whoever “da Man” might be at the time, and get them to join the effort to fight him at all costs. This is as true for ISIS and al-Qaeda as it is for the Proud Boys or Colombian FARC back in the day. The key to recruitment into practicing violence is not so much the cause itself as is its explanatory power when it comes to an individual’s frustrated situation and the remedies for it.

Well, the orange weasel and his MAGA governing cohort are the epitome of ‘da Man” in the current US context, and it is not hard to be hating on them for a variety of reasons. Heck, if Stephen Miller can get a wife and reproduce and “nice,” even “Alpha” guys cannot, then something is seriously messed up when it comes to certain male demographic in the US. Their rage is real. And while it is mostly vented on women, gay and trans people, Muslims, ethnic minority groups,”wokesters” and “libtards,” sometimes it spills over into attacks on public figures by people outside of the usual suspects.

SAD!

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Regime transition sequencing.

I was reading a recent article in which the author wrote that the US has actually made the transition to democracy in Venezuela more difficult than it could have been by removing Nicolas Maduro and his wife from the country but leaving the rest of his regime intact. In the author’s words, “they took the dictator but left the dictatorship.” He went on to write that the usual order of things is to embark on a political regime transition (presumably to democracy if the starting point is authoritarian) followed by an economic regime transition (say, in simplistic terms, from communism to capitalism) or at least significant economic reform. In Venezuela’s case, the US has pushed for US-investor friendly economic reforms in the extractive industrial sector but left the Bolivarian regime otherwise intact and has not bothered with broader economic reforms that promote market diversification, income redistribution, decreased dependence on primary good exports (including but moving beyond petroleum), and more value-added domestic commodity and service production.

That got me to thinking about one major theme of the first generation regime transition literature of the (late) 1970s-1980s, which focused on the transition from democracy to authoritarianism in Europe, East Asia and Latin America in the 1960s and early 1970s and then the transitions form authoritarianism to democracy in the rest of the 1970s and 1980s. One theme that emerged was the sequence by which regime transitions occurred. We might call it a type of “chicken or egg” question.

Some argued that what was needed first for democracy to obtain was an economic transition from state-centric (e.g., Keynesian welfare or socialist) to free market models, which was believed would promote the civic freedoms needed for democracy to emerge as the corresponding political form (this was grounded in what was known as “modernisation theory,” which was a 1950s-era prescription for overcoming underdevelopment in the “Third World”). That was the “egg” answer, which was used as one justification for the US support for China’s admission into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. As with original modernization theory, the underpinning syllogism proved incorrect.

Instead, both in the PRC and in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) as of the 1990s, communist party leaders engineered the move from a state-controlled command economy marshalled along what might be described as Stalinist or Maoist lines to a state capitalist economy in which investment and production was incrementally opened to private (including foreign) investment while the State controlled overall economic management decision-making and kept a stake in specific productive assets (e.g., telecommunications in both instances).

In effect, capitalism came but democracy did not. In both the PRC and SRV change occurred within the political regime, not of it, regardless of economic change. Communist Parties still control both countries and staff the leadership of the State. Their respective leadership architectures and other partial regimes within the larger whole have been subjected to reforms of various magnitudes, including those deemed required to accommodate the economic changes undertaken by the national political leaderships in question. The same is true, in another variation on the theme, in Singapore under the PAP regime: the overall regime remains and reforms (in Singapore’s case by “liberalising” when it comes to political and civil rights without giving up ultimate authority) while the economy changes (from post-colonial trading to techno-finance capitalism). In other words, rather than a transitional sequence, in some instances economic change can occur under the aegis of a stable political regime (at least if it is authoritarian).

Others have disagreed with the economic–>political change thesis, noting that political regime change was required before economic regime change could happen because economic policy is ultimately a political choice made by regime leaders. This is the “chicken” answer. The 1948 Chinese, 1959 Cuban and 1979 Nicaraguan revolutions are considered emblematic in this regard.

In both types of sequence, the key issue is one of parametric change: the boundaries of political and economic life are fundamentally altered as a result of the major institutional changes that define regime transition as a social phenomenon no matter which way the chain of causality proceeds.

Among other subtopics, one part of the debate about regime transitions in the 1980s centred on the preferred “regime change sequence” leading to democratisation. It was a simple, perhaps crude measure, but it had the virtue of forcing scholars and policy practitioners to address the linkage between political change and economic development and reform rather than just one or the other. It also broadened the “chicken or egg” question with regard to the linkage between economic development and political regimes, Was there a correlation or causal relationship between specific regime types and certain levels of development? If so, in which direction and of what specific type in both categories? Capitalist to socialist, socialist to capitalist or somewhere in between? Authoritarian to democratic or democratic to authoritarian and if the latter, what type of authoritarian? The possibilities of political-economic regime change are not as straight forward as might seem at first glance.

There is a third type of regime change that is also theoretically possible> It is simultaneous rather than sequential in nature. This is a situation where economic and political regime change occurred simultaneously, as part and parcel of the same transitional dynamic. This alternative was particularly of interest to students of the fall of the USSR and Eastern bloc regimes grouped in the Warsaw Pact as well as of the revolutionary transitions such as that of Nicaragua and Iran in 1979. In the former the hope was they would transition to both democracy and capitalism in short periods of time. In the latter the expectation was that with revolutionary overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship, socialism as an economic model could be rapidly imposed. The 1979 Iranian revolution represented a variant on that model, with many hoping that the post-Reza Pahlavi regime would be a theocratic democracy wedded to an Islamic market economy rooted in traditional Bazaari social relations of production.

Sadly, in both instances the 1979 revolutions eventually brought economic changes, but under a different type of authoritarianism than what existed before rather than the democracy that was promised. This may have been partially a product of the hostile reaction and pressure placed on the revolutionary regimes by the US and other Western states, but the fact is that be they simultaneous or sequential, the 1979 revolutionary regimes delivered something different than what was hoped (and fought) for.

The simultaneous transition possibility was also considered in the rise of Hugo Chavez and Bolivarianism in Venezuela in 1979 via electoral means, which presumably would have paved the way for a peaceful revolutionary change towards popular democracy and socialism, much in the way hope was previously raised along the same lines by the 1970 election of Salvador Allende in Chile. Alas, neither expectation was met: Allende was overthrown and killed in 1973 by a US-backed military coup d’état supported by rightwing forces while Chavez and his successor Maduro descended into authoritarian-kleptocratic rule culminating in the US military kidnapping of the Venezuelan leader in January of this year. As the author mentioned at the beginning of this post noted, the Venezuelan political leader has been forcibly removed but the regime has not.

As for former Soviet states, the record is very mixed. Russia has reverted to authoritarianism with a state capitalist/oligarchical hybrid economic model grounded in fossil fuel extraction and modernised Soviet-era industrial production.. Some former Warsaw Pact states have gone both democratic and (mostly) market capitalist. Others have gone autocratic and state capitalist/kleptocratic. Some have gravitated towards the European Union and even NATO. Others have remained within the Russian orbit on both political and economic grounds. This is especially true for Central Asian former Soviet republics (the so-called “Stans”), which have not undergone appreciable political regime change except to use elections as legitimation devices while economic control of extraction-based primary good production remains in the hands of nepotistic political elites and politically-connected interests.

It can be argued that simultaneous regime transitions cannot happen simply because of the turmoil and complexities involved in attempting to manage profound political and economic changes all at once. The cases cited above support that view regardless of what eventuated after the old political regime was displaced or the economic model substantially altered. But the issue of transitional sequencing remains an important one, not just conceptually but also as a matter of policy practice, especially if the goal is to restore or revive democratic governance.

As an example, my stay in the Pentagon in the early 1990s was based on a successful fellowship application that was centred on a proposal on how to democratise civil-military relations in post-authoritarian Latin America. I had noticed the difficulty with which new civilian elected governments were coping with entrenched authoritarian traditions in the (sometimes Prussian) military cultures of several Latin American nations, and so outlined in the fellowship proposal ways in which US non-lethal military aid, weapons sales and peer-to-peer training programs, coupled with legal and normative changes to the institutional relationships between the armed forces and civilian government, might help “democratise” the relations between political leaders and the military hierarchies of the time.

This was just one part of the political regime transition from dictatorship to democracy in that region–what was called “partial regime change,” where the sum of a number of reforms in the constituent parts of an electoral democracy (civil rights, election procedures, interest group intermediation systems, inter-agency accountability, policing authority, budget-setting agendas, federal-state relations, and even the relationship between civilian and military authorities)–were reformed, reconstituted or revitalised with the purpose being to provide institutional underpinnings that would support, then sustain and eventually reproduce democratic governance structures.

Again, the results were mixed but for the most part I am pleased to see that in places like Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay, the changes that my colleagues and I proposed seem to have stuck.

Getting back to the subject of Venezuela and now the attempt at forced regime change by the US in Iran, the folly of the move becomes clearer (as if it was not already). Not only were the “decapitation” strikes simply instances of state-sanctioned murder (by proxy, since the Israelis did the actual bombing of targeted leaders like the Ayatollah Khamenei), the Islamic regime and its constituent partial regimes remain intact, albeit with a stronger military influence replacing a weakened clerical caste headed by Khamenei’s badly injured son Mojtaba (something that is more the result of Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) dissatisfaction with the cleric’s enforcement of theocratic social policy prior to the US/Israeli attacks rather than the US/Israeli strikes themselves). If anything, what political regime change might be underway is, by several accounts, one from a theocratic to a military-dominated regime, conveniently reinforced by the foreign aggression waged upon Iranian society.

Lines of succession, promotion, policy and operational authority remain in place. So do the underlying civic structures, including the Bazaari social networks that even if now in opposition to most of the hard-line elements in the regime, remain fiercely anti-Western and Persian nationalist in orientation. In other words, the partial regime mosaic that when taken together constitutes the institutional edifice of the Islamic regime continues in place and functioning. Like in Venezuela, some former leaders are gone (dead) but the regime remains even as it evolves from within. Nor has the economy changed–although porous sanctions and the Revolutionary Guard toll booth blockade of the Hormuz Straits has strengthened the Islamic Republic regime’s control over it.

In effect, we have seen leadership change without regime change, little significant economic change other than a shift in beneficiaries in the Venezuelan case, and no real transitional sequence at all. This demonstrates the shallowness of what passes in the US for strategic thinking, comparative political analysis and foreign country expertise, to say nothing of the ahistorical ignorance of the MAGA elites in and outside of government who enable and support US foreign adventurism under Trump.

In fact, it might do well for scholars, politicians and economic interests alike to return to that literature on authoritarian regime demise to develop a US-focused idiosyncratic conceptual and practical framework for studying the late stage dynamics of the second MAGA administration. Because it is quite feasible that its demise will more resemble that of dictatorial collapse rather than that of democratic decline even if certain electoral trappings and procedural niceties cloak the entire process. The question for the US then is: if the transitional sequence begins with political change away from MAGA, will it a) result in its elimination from political society? and b) what if any economic and other partial regime reforms will come from the anti-MAGA political change if it occurs?

Without both, regime (or at least government) change in the US away from what exists today will not happen. Depending on one’s perspective, that may or may not be a good thing.