Carlo Graziani

The War of the Trains, Part 1

by WaterGirl| October 4, 20228:30 pm| 144 Comments

This post is in: Carlo Graziani, Guest Posts, Open Threads, War in Ukraine

The War of the Trains

by Carlo Graziani

As war in Ukraine approaches the 7-month mark, those of us who have been watching it through the lens of Adam Silverman’s nightly Ukraine War Updates on Balloon Juice, and discussing each night’s take, have seen the conflict gradually transform itself. The initial clash seemed nearly unintelligible, built as it was from contradictory media and Twitter narratives. But time and better information—together with the opportunity for real-time Jackal education in modern warfare derived from what rapidly became our nightly discussion seminar—wrought a more stable overall picture of the conflict, with definite themes that we can now see to have been threaded through the narrative since the beginning, even though these themes were not perceptible at the outset.

What I propose to do here is describe my own synthesis of this picture. I am indebted to Adam for his tireless work as convener and material seeder of the seminar, and to many Jackals, whose ideas I ruthlessly farmed for this piece¹. This synthesis is almost certainly not the same overall scheme that Adam, or any particular Jackal, might choose for the task, and many details are probably still arguable. Nonetheless, I believe that now is a good time to sum up where we’ve been by distilling what we’ve learned from those nightly reports-cum-seminars, because we can see clearly much that was originally obscure, and because a few possible futures are more clearly discernible now as a consequence.

One feature that I find very striking is the importance that logistical considerations have played in the war since its earliest days, and the slight appreciation that these considerations receive compared to the flashier “kaboom-war” stories of drones, tanks, artillery, fighter aircraft, and so on. I think these considerations have shaped the campaign to a very great extent for both combatants, and I’ve therefore chosen them as organizing themes of the narrative. If you were wondering why “trains”, that’s why, although as we’ll see, there’s quite a bit more to the train part of the story. Railways have played an outsized role in this conflict, to an extent that seems almost anachronistic: one must look to WWI, or the European continental wars of the late 19th Century, or the US Civil War, to find comparable examples. And yet, while one occasionally catches a dutiful reference to a “key railway junction” as a battle site in the Ukraine war, this aspect of the conflict has passed largely under silence. I hope to illustrate here what’s been missing from narratives that don’t emphasize rail supply as a key factor in the war.

Prologue: Misleading First Impressions

It’s useful to set things up by looking back at a few things that many people were very sure about that we know now were actually quite wrong. This in not an exercise in “neener-neener”—I was wrong about a few important things myself—but rather is helpful in that it reminds us not only of how much has happened since February, but also of how much our understanding of the war has changed since then.

An Unfair Fight: The original Russian attack on Ukraine on 24 February was a four-theatre assault—Kyiv, Kharkiv, the Donbas, and the Azov/Black Sea coasts—whose scope and ambition must certainly have reminded many in the West of their nightmares about the Cold War Soviet Army when it stood for decades, poised in apparent readiness to sweep down and envelop Western Europe. In those first few weeks, despite the early signs of Russian reverses, it appeared to many that a straightforward accounting of the balance of forces condemned Ukraine to being crushed by sheer mass.

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There was much that was wrong about this judgment, some that was obvious at the time, some that would only become clear later. Immediately obvious was the inaptness of the comparison between the modern Russian ground forces and the Cold War Soviet ground forces: the former is tiny compared to the latter (less than one-sixth the size, without even counting the rest of the Warsaw Pact), and organized completely differently. The Russian ground forces started out with about 400,000 of their active personnel signed up as “contract servicemen”, with the remaining 200,000 or so being draftees. The force was designed so that the former were intended as the fighting edge, the latter as service personnel. The intention behind the overall design of the force is that this army was to be used for short high-intensity wars against massively overmatched adversaries along the Russian borders, and certainly not for extended conflicts against NATO member states (such as Turkey) who would certainly invoke Treaty collective defense provisions. The assumption was always that victory would be assured within weeks, a few months at most. A prolonged conflict would expose the expiration date of this army. Clearly, the Russians believed that Ukraine was the type of state that their army could easily victimize in short order.

Somewhat less obvious—although I can claim that I did see this at the time²—is that the Russian army had never trained for an operation of the scope and complexity of the assault on Ukraine, and while they would certainly find 40-year old experience on the conduct of such operations in old documents, field manuals, and in memories of doddering officers, lack of maneuver and logistics practice at scale would certainly be a problem for them.

The subtle error that even experts on force design appear to have made at the time is that almost nobody took the trouble to examine the force structure of the Ukrainian army. This sounds almost too bizarre to write down now, but it’s true. There were fantastic amounts of analysis by world experts on Russia’s military, which gave accounts and estimates of manpower, weapons, tactics, doctrine, strategy, logistical practice, history, politics, and so on, including lively debate, uncertainty bands on quantitative estimates, really an intellectual cornucopia. But on Ukraine, other than some sparse commentary by a few NATO officers who had actually been working to train up Ukrainian Army officers since the Russian 2014 invasion of Crimea, it was extremely difficult to find anything beyond what Wikipedia had to offer. Still, Wikipedia’s entry on the Armed Forces of the Ukraine is instructive: one can find there the interesting fact that Ukraine has had Universal Military Training (UMT), lasting 18 months for each conscript (as opposed to Russia’s 12-month training), and has had UMT continuously since independence, with only a brief interruption. This is significant, because Ukraine also has an inactive reserve, which all draftees enter after completing their 18-month training, and remain in until age 55.

What this means is that throughout the war, Ukraine has had potentially vastly more manpower at its disposal than Russia. Getting that manpower back into uniform, trained back to spec, and deployed usefully as part of an orderly pipeline was always going to be a complex problem. But it was never going to be the kind of issue that Russia is confronting now as it attempts to refill its depleted army ranks by means of manic improvisations intended to take the place of a force design process that would ordinarily require a decade of time and billions of dollars in government budgeting.

An Inadequate Supply Line: There was a great deal of anxiety—“hand-wringing” is too harsh a term for worries expressed by people whose heart is in the right place, but certainly high emotion—over the apparently slow response by the West, and especially by the Biden administration, in supplying needed weapons to the Ukrainian army in those first, desperate weeks. Especially when the Ukrainians themselves, from Zelenskyy (“I need ammunition!”) on down, were asking for everything, and “all” that was showing up seemed to be NATO hand-held infantry anti-tank and anti-air weapons, as well as the entire junkyard of Warsaw Pact hardware still in the armories of Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, the Baltic Republics, etc., there was a lot of public recrimination against a U.S. policy attitude holding that not blowing up the world in a thermonuclear war remained a priority. Critics argued heatedly that this was merely an excuse to slow-walk supplies urgently needed to save Ukraine from the assault.

What we know now is that there was no slow-walk. Instead, there was was a long game, with an orderly logistical plan to transition the Ukrainian armed forces from their Warsaw Pact-era weapons inventory to one composed of NATO-standard weapons, in the middle of a shooting war, without actually disrupting the war effort. If you think about it, this is an incredibly difficult feat to pull off, but if you look at the successive Pentagon drawdown lists of hardware that have been supplied to Ukraine since June, you can see the steadily accelerating progress of that effort, as NATO-standard artillery, aircraft munitions, electronic warfare gear, and other high-end weaponry have gradually pushed the boundary out. Most of these elements come with long logistical tails that include eye-watering spare parts lists, maintenance schedules, tech mechanics training, operator training, tactical training, integration with other systems, and probably more that I don’t even know about. Without some of these items, these weapons systems aren’t that useful. Without others, they stop working in a few days to a week, which is a bad investment of a multi-million dollar weapons system. Operating a HIMARS unit is not too dissimilar from operating a high-performance aircraft—you don’t just drive it around like a pickup truck, occasionally picking up some missile six-packs or gas. It needs all that infrastructure, or you might as well not bother.

That’s what was happening in April and May, while the Warsaw Pact junkyards were getting emptied out: a lot of logistics was getting set up to turn Ukraine into a NATO client state. It wasn’t showy, and the payoff was not going to be apparent for several months. But the Biden administration did not use fear of thermonuclear war as an excuse to do nothing: it used risk of thermonuclear war as a boundary to delineate a space within which it could operate. Inside that space, largely in secret, it began to move in a way to help the Ukrainians create the basis for their eventual victory in the war.

The Rear Areas: The Western attention to Ukrainian supply is only part of the logistical story of the war. From the very beginning of the conflict, in a way that was not evident in the nightly footage of detonations, desperate actions, and depressing outrages, limitations of logistical practice of the Russian armed forces impeded the invasion effort, and became the immediate focus of attention of the Ukrainian Army (abbreviated UA here) general staff. The UA knew the outlines of Russian logistical thinking well from Soviet days, having only really turned to the very different Western logistical practices under NATO tutelage since 2014.

The radical difference between the logistics and supply practice Russia and that of the West is described in this excellent and readable recent academic paper published by the Scandinavian Journal of Military Studies, which is updated with lessons from the war in Ukraine. Another great resource is this well-timed post on the War on the Rocks blog from November 2021. The crucial aspect of Russian practice, and the Achilles heel that the Ukrainian quickly identified, is the reliance on the rail network for all long-haul transportation of military supplies—“long-haul” being distances above about 140 km/90 miles. Russian logisticians therefore establish logistical distribution hubs at railhead served by high-capacity track, then use trains on lower-capacity track (often single or double track) to convey those supplies, which are crated but unpalleted, to trucking hubs within 140 km of the front, where they are unloaded and dispatched by truck to their final addresses.

Composite railway map of Eastern Ukraine and some adjoining portions of Russia. Original maps from: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~yopopov/rrt/railroadmaps/. I’ve shown where lines from the different map plates connect by the maroon arrows, and annotated in Latin script the names of key cities shown in Cyrillic on the Russian maps.

The map that I’ve assembled above from the excellent personal railroad site of Yuri Popov, a physics instructor at the University of Michigan, shows the rail connections from Russia to Eastern and North-Eastern Ukraine. I’ll be referring to it as we go along. Note one conspicuous feature, however: there actually aren’t that many available connections between Russia and Ukraine.

Necessity driven by political geography and rail connectivity forced the Russians to supply the entire war from two distribution hubs: Belgorod in the north, and Rostov-on-Don in the south. If you look at the map again and focus on the Belgorod lines you can see why the Russians are so pissed off about their failure to take Kharkiv. Had they succeeded there, they might actually have won the war by now, because Kharkiv would have given them easy interior access to the Ukrainian rail network, which the Ukrainians themselves have been using to great effect to exploit their interior lines of communication. The UA would have been forced to tear up those lines to stop the Russians, greatly degrading their own war effort, and they probably would have lost the entire Donbas by May anyway. By holding Kharkiv, the UA kept the Russians moving around the periphery of the rail network, and held the interior for themselves. It was a crucial move in the war, that we can only really see the significance of now.

A feature that resulted from this outcome is the fact that for most of the war, the Russian army eastern forces have been supplied from Belgorod through a rail line terminating at a trucking hub at Kupyansk³. This corresponds on the map above to the line annotated by the middle arrow. The Southern theatre has been largely supplied from the Rostov-on-Don hub, by means of rail lines through Crimea passing over the Kerch Straits bridge, through the rail junction at Dzankhoi (where the UA Special Operations Forces (SOF) arranged for an ammunition warehouse to explode last August. Hmm..)

Intelligence, Deception: One factor that could be suspected, but of course never overtly stated or reported, was that one of the most important forms of Western—principally US—assistance to Ukraine came in the form of growing intelligence cooperation. According to reporting by the Washington Post in August, this cooperation was cautious and circumspect at first, as the Ukrainian government was known to have been penetrated by Russian operatives. Over time, as confidence in Ukrainian security measures grew so did the cooperation, to the point that it seems quite likely that currently, near-real-time US remote sensing data from space and airborne platforms is probably making it to customers in the UA.

Part of the evidence that is on public display of the Ukrainian capability for highly secure operation is, as we will see, the extent to which they have been able to conceal from the Russians and from the public both capabilities and intentions that in retrospect were practically in plain view. The UA and the Ukrainian government have, by necessity, employed a weapon that weaker parties traditionally turn to in wartime: deception. As we will see, they implemented a program of deception that paid dividends to a degree at least matching the spectacular successes that the British, and, later, the Western Allies, achieved in WWII. That is the story to which we turn next, as we take up a chronology of the war.

Tomorrow: The essay’s conclusion, A War In Four Acts.

I seriously considered compiling a list of nyms of Jackals who helped shape the views that I express here, but I became anxious that this would become an invidious exercise, as I was sure to leave out important contributors. In all good faith, I am grateful to all of you. This nightly discussion is, in a way, an intellectual home for me.
However, this insight also tripped me up, and led me to get the biggest thing of all wrong: I was so sure that the Russians knew that they were unprepared for an operation of this scope and ambition that they would never actually invade at all. I was, as a consequence, extremely skeptical of the Biden administration’s warnings that the invasion was imminent. That’s how analysis goes sometimes—being right on some things can make you wrong on other, more important things. I try to keep an “OK, I was wrong about that” within easy reach, without my ego getting in the way, because of experiences like that one.
One frequently reads references to Lyman (south of Kupyansk) as the terminus of that line, by war analysts who like to refer to Lyman using terms such as “important rail junction.” There is in fact little evidence that Lyman has been used by the Russians in a significant logistical role at least since early July, and possibly since May. A June 1 Operational Update by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense notes Russian efforts to repair “…the railway bridge crossing in the area of the settlement of Kupyansk to restore the logistics supply of the railway branch Kupyansk – Lyman.” Presumably UA SOF damaged the bridge, cutting the rail line south of Kupyansk as early as May. In any event, by early July the UA had begun its campaign of HIMARS strikes against logistical and command, control, and communications (C3) targets, and Lyman has always been so close to the front line that putting a trucking hub there would have been suicidally stupid, even for the Russians. Finally just look at Lyman and at Kupyansk on Google Maps: Kupyansk is a bona fide road hub, and a natural site for a trucking logistic hub; Lyman is not. I have no idea how the notion of Lyman as a crucial logistical link in the Russian supply network gained such currency, but it may have been one of those “truths” that asserted more than once provided its own confirmation, then began gaining adherents like a snowball rolling downhill until it became a consensus view, irrespective of what maps and logic say.

The War of the Trains, Part 1Post + Comments (144)

Russia: The Big Squeeze

by WaterGirl| May 5, 20228:30 pm| 160 Comments

This post is in: Carlo Graziani, Guest Posts, Open Threads, War in Ukraine

Russia: The Big Squeeze
by Carlo Graziani

Preview
When the war in Ukraine began, quite a few critics of the Biden administration were quick to claim that sanctions on Russia would have no positive effect. It was ridiculous to claim to know in early March how effective sanctions might be, given the timescales of months on which one would expect to see their effects. But it is just possible now, in the tenth week of the war, to start seeing the real effects that have already taken hold, using actual economic data.

That’s what I’ve been trying to do for the past week, and the results have been sobering. The bottom line is this: I see evidence that an economic cataclysm is about to enfold Russia, crippling its central nervous system much sooner than is generally appreciated. So much so that I would not be surprised if by late June, the actual battles in Ukraine are pushed below the fold of the front pages of major newspapers by a bigger story, featuring the words “collapse” and “Russia”.

That should give us pause, and perhaps even scare us a little, because of the unpredictability associated with that scenario. I want to lay out the evidence I see. The usual caveats apply: I am not an economist, a political scientist, etcetera. I just think there’s an important story that needs attention right now.

The war is still only ten weeks old as of this writing, so that it’s not easy to give definite judgments about how the economic story is going to end in Russia at this stage. A few things are clear, however, and we can expect them to be a lot clearer by June or July.

The Russian economy is like a car speeding down a mountainside over broken ground, and the very first set of sanctions—the Russian Central Bank foreign currency reserves freeze—sabotaged the car’s brakes. All the other sanctions (including an oil embargo, export controls, navigation, aviation and financial restrictions) gave the car various random accelerating shoves, so that it is now careening dangerously among trees and boulders.

From the perspective of someone wanting to see the car crash, the best thing in the analogy is that the guy at the steering wheel, who has the last chance to save the car, is Putin, and while he thinks he knows how to drive, actually he has no idea. He’s too busy shrieking incoherent threats into his cell phone and firing a weapon out of the window, while Nabiullina, his Central Banker, looks on aghast from the passenger seat.

(Below is the TL;DR version, breaking here so we can put the full post under the fold)

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The Full Post

The Big Squeeze

by Carlo Graziani

When the war in Ukraine began, quite a few critics of the Biden administration were quick to claim that sanctions on Russia would have no positive effect. It was ridiculous to claim to know in early March how effective sanctions might be, given the timescales of months on which one would expect to see their effects. But it is just possible now, in the tenth week of the war, to start seeing the real effects that have already taken hold, using actual economic data.

That’s what I’ve been trying to do for the past week, and the results are sobering. The bottom line is this: I see evidence that an economic cataclysm is about to enfold Russia, crippling its central nervous system much sooner than is generally appreciated. So much so that I would not be surprised if by late June, the actual battles in Ukraine are pushed below the fold of the front pages of major newspapers by a bigger story, featuring the words “collapse” and “Russia”.

That should give us pause, and perhaps even scare us a little, because of the unpredictability associated with that scenario. I want to lay out the evidence I see. The usual caveats apply: I am not an economist, a political scientist, etcetera. I just think there’s an important story that needs attention right now.

The Freezing of the Russian Central Bank’s Foreign Currency Reserves

The significance of first sanctions against Russia’s Central Bank are widely misunderstood as mere asset freezes. But they were much more than that. They constituted acts of fundamental economic sabotage, analogous to surreptitiously cutting the brake fluid lines in a car. It is essential to understand this aspect of what the Biden administration accomplished in the first three days of the war, in order to understand what is about to happen to Russia.

This New Yorker article by Ben Wallace-Wells, is well-worth a thorough read. But the TL;DR is as follows:

Under its respected Central Bank governor, Elvira Nabiullina, Russia had stockpiled $630 billion in foreign currency reserves since 2014 in order to protect itself from future Western sanctions, having been somewhat stung by sanctions in 2014. Such reserves would give the bank the ability to carry out stabilizing financial maneuvers in the event of a crisis, analogously to what the US Federal Reserve did in response to the 2009 financial crisis. Try to envision what would have happened in the US in 2009, if the US Federal Reserve had not had the legal authority to supply arbitrary amounts of liquidity to US financial institutions: banks, quasi-banks (such as Goldman Sachs), and nonbanks (such as AIG). The US, and the world, would likely have been plunged into a repeat of the 1929 Great Depression. That’s what the Russian Central Bank planned to use that stockpile for: economic stabilization.

By 27 February, under sanctions agreements between Western and Japanese governments, approximately half of those reserves—almost $300 billion, in currencies such as US dollars, pounds, euros, and yen, in ledgers held by banks under the legal authority of Western and Japanese Central Banks, were cut off from Nabiullina’s control. Of the remaining stockpile of Russian Central Bank assets, 13% are in renmimbi, 22% are in gold, and the remainder is in “International Institutions” (I believe that this means IMF, World Bank etc.). The renmimbi are useful for trade with China, but not so much for market stabilization maneuvers. The assets in International Institutions might as well be marooned, since it might take years to figure out a way to get them under Russian control again with all those hostile Western financial systems in the way. And if Russia starts dumping gold it has to do so at a discretely, at a discount, because gold transactions with Russia are also sanctioned, and at any rate dumping that much gold would reduce its value considerably.

The Russians never saw it coming. They are basically screwed. That stockpile was their big plan to sanction-proof their economy. They no longer have any tools at their disposal to protect themselves from whatever economic crisis that should arrive. Western politicians have sabotaged their car brakes.

The fact that that wealth cannot be used for industrial investment is also significant, of course, as is the international hunt for oligarch wealth (about $240 billion as of 14 April according to Forbes) which might otherwise similarly be pressed into Russian national service for industrial investment or financial stabilization. Some of that oligarch wealth is supposedly held on behalf of Putin himself, which is another reason freeze it. But believe it or not those are second-order effects. The paralysis of the Russian Central Bank is a crippling blow that was struck on the third day of the war. Whatever economic crisis the Russians experience now, they have no safety margins.

Export Controls

Western economies (and China) tend to have a lot of vertical integration, which means that there are value-adding supply chains that go from raw materials through various stages of manufacture and servicing to final high-end, often high-tech products, often within national boundaries, or at least within trading blocs such as the EU.

Russia is not like that. It is often referred to as a “petrostate”, which assimilates it to Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia, or to Venezuela. This is not totally accurate, but pretty close. The basis for Russian wealth is mineral wealth, plus agriculture. Russia has no vertical integration. They do not produce much of the industrial infrastructure that they require to mine or pump their mineral wealth (which is a very high-tech business nowadays, if it is to be done with any economic feasibility). Instead, they buy or contract that stuff, mostly from the West. They also import key inputs to all their finishing industries, including microchips, machine tools, specialty chemicals and many others. It’s pretty incompetent economic management, but hey! If you’re busy reviving an imperial nationalist program, you can’t sweat details like that…

The US, Canada, the EU, the UK, and Japan have targeted Russian military, aviation, and oil industries with export control sanctions (a summary is here). The point to understand is that “targeting” in this context is a bit of dark economist humor. Those industrial inputs are also inputs to other industrial manufacturing processes—they are what is called “dual-use”. So the lack of Russian investment in their industrial base means that the West can basically switch that industry off, as if by remote control.

Remember how in April 2020 we couldn’t get enough toilet paper (among other things) in the West as a consequence of the pandemic, and we learned to shrug and say “because supply chain”? Well, in Russia, factories that manufacture sunglasses, dishwashers, automobiles and so on are going to shut down soon, if they haven’t already, for lack of inputs showing up at their loading docks, basically “because supply chain”.

That’s a lot of laid-off workers.

Unemployment and Inflation

Here is a Reuters article containing a forecast that there may be 2 million more unemployed people in Russia by the end of the year than there were before the war began. I would emphasize that all such forecasts are wild-ass guesses—nobody has any idea what is really going to happen. Moscow’s Mayor recently asserted that his city is looking at 200,000 newly unemployed people just from foreign companies shutting down their operations and leaving the country.

Russia does pay unemployment benefits. Which is interesting, because the only way it can fund those exponentially-growing benefits despite its vanishing tax base is using its oil and gas revenues—which are themselves dropping due to increasingly effective embargoes. So while it is certainly not very nice to deliberately put millions of people on the dole (although a “compared to what” question is certainly appropriate here) there is a valid war strategy reason for doing so: Putin is thereby forced to choose between beggaring an enraged, impoverished and disillusioned populace to fund his military or appeasing the masses while starving his army. I like that choice.

Oh, and a lot of scarred combat veterans are about to come back to a nonexistent labor market. That always works out well.

Speaking of day-to-day life in Russia: the principal use of a healthy, un-crippled Central Bank’s authority is to curb inflation. So, how is that going in Russia?

Inflation is hard to measure, and even harder to forecast. I’ve seen numbers that are all over the place. The Russian economics ministry reported annual inflation rates of 17.49% as of April 8, up from 16.70% a week earlier (I love that second significant figure after the decimal point—how precise!) The World Bank apparently forecast an inflation rate of 22% for 2022.

These claims strike me as innumerate. A senior Russian minister apparently told the upper house of the Duma on 13 April that a composite index of average food items consumed by Russians (potatoes, onions, carrots, beets, etc.) increased in price by “50%-60%” since the beginning of the war. That is to say, in 6 weeks of war. If you annualize a 50%-per-6-weeks rate of inflation—compound it to 52 weeks—what you get is a 3,260% annual rate of inflation. You did not read that wrong. It means that food prices paid by average Russians should be expected to increase by a little over 33 times in a year. I assume that members of the upper house of the Duma either don’t own calculators or don’t understand exponential progressions.

If the Russian government can’t figure out how to stop this, then there is a shitstorm on the way. People are spending 40% of their vanishing incomes now on food. It will be 100% in a month or less. The government had better hose them down with more of that oil revenue, and besides feeding the problem by feeding inflation, that’s once again less for the military. Or, the Central Bank can use its one remaining tool, and raise interest rates sky-high, and crater the economy.

A Provisional Summary

The war is still only ten weeks old as of this writing, so that it’s not easy to give definite judgments about how the economic story is going to end in Russia at this stage. A few things are clear, however, and we can expect them to be a lot clearer by June or July.

The Russian economy is like a car speeding down a mountainside over broken ground, and the very first set of sanctions—the Russian Central Bank foreign currency reserves freeze—sabotaged the car’s brakes. All the other sanctions (including an oil embargo, export controls, navigation, aviation and financial restrictions) gave the car various random accelerating shoves, so that it is now careening dangerously among trees and boulders. From the perspective of someone wanting to see the car crash, the best thing in the analogy is that the guy at the steering wheel, who has the last chance to get the car under control, is Putin, and while he thinks he knows how to drive, actually he has no idea. He’s too busy shrieking incoherent threats into his cell phone and firing a weapon out of the window, while Nabiullina, his Central Banker, looks on aghast from the passenger seat.

I believe that there may be an economic crisis that is about to hit Russia that has no parallels in great power economic misery since Weimar Germany, or possibly since 1945 Germany. If that’s correct, then sometime this summer the war in Ukraine could move below the fold of major newspaper front pages, displaced by an even bigger story, believe it or not. We need to get ready.

I don’t know what the political effects of such a crisis might be. I have some hopes for regime change, founded on the notion that dictators need to show success. I do think it is possible that a lot of people’s loyalty to Putin could sour as their lives sour. A lot of those people are in the military, and in the security forces.

But that may be wrong. It doesn’t matter, really. We have to do this anyway, to contain Russia. The rules are different now. We are not going to allow Russia to do the world what Serbia tried to do to the Balkans in the late 1990s using the same type of grievance-driven irredentist pseudo-historical self-affirming bullshit narrative to justify any aggression as self-defense. We need a new containment, until Russia can move past this political psychosis. Economic isolation through sanctions will be one of the tools we use to manage that containment, and calibration of sanctions will be part of the incentives that we must learn to use manage eventual Russian emergence from that isolation.

This makes sense to me. What do you all think? ~WG

Russia: The Big SqueezePost + Comments (160)

The Resumption of History: Part 5

by WaterGirl| April 22, 20228:30 pm| 93 Comments

This post is in: Carlo Graziani, Guest Posts, The Resumption of History

Before we get started on the final chapter of this series, I want to take a minute to thank Carlo for sharing his thinking – and writing – about The Resumption of History with us. These posts have led to some great and interesting conversations in the comments. So, Carlo, thank you again!

If another post appears shortly after this one goes up, don’t be alarmed if this post disappears for awhile; it will be back up later.

The Resumption of History: Part 5 — Awakenings

by Carlo Graziani

Part 4, The Sources of American Soft Power ended like this:

I’ve had some conversations with twenty-somethings lately that have left me very concerned, because of the latent bothsidist/whataboutist attitudes underlying such phrases as “to my generation” that precede some observations of near-complete detachment and cynicism. Well, honestly. Who can blame them? We transmitted to them an image of our values based on the neo-liberalism that we learned from Reagan and Thatcher. I’d be cynical too.

On the other hand, perhaps we may now live in a time when it is possible to refocus on what matters.

Channelling Churchill

Such a man, if he existed, would be England’s last chance.

In London, there was such a man.

William Manchester, from the Preamble of The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill. Visions of Glory 1874–1932

That was a very long digression from the narrative, I’m afraid, but I really feel that we need clarity of purpose now, of all times. Because events have called us to that purpose.

When Putin launched his war on Ukraine on 24 February, I was surprised, but I knew other people who were not. There was a wide spectrum of expectations with respect to the outcomes of the war. Some people expected a rapid Russian victory, others did not. There were expectations of disarray in NATO, of a massive humanitarian catastrophe, of rapid Ukrainian territorial concessions. Above all, the most logical, depressing expectation was that of another tawdry, made-for-the-24-hour-news-cycle war, narrated as blood sport in an arena the size of Texas, that would eventually move another post-Soviet border, by a bit.

I don’t know anyone whose expectation was an electrifying moment such as “I need ammunition, not a ride!”

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the ex-comic ascended to the Presidency of Ukraine, not particularly popular in his country on the eve of the invasion, would not have been anyone’s favorite choice for “war leader”. He certainly stepped into the role with aplomb, though. It would have been a perfectly easy, even rationally justifiable choice—although probably fatal to the Ukrainian cause—to move his government to the relative safety of Lviv, or even accept a bugout. Instead he chose defiance, and Ukrainians, irrespective of their pre-war views about him, instantly rallied to him with a unanimity that gave the nation hope, resilience—and the strength to counter-punch far, far above its weight class. By this simple act of moral courage, Zelenskyy reminded the West, in one terrible clarifying moment, what freedom really means, what it’s worth, and what it costs.

In that cathartic moment, it was as if the scales fell from the eyes of people all over the world. As if we all woke up simultaneously from the same narcotized dream. Suddenly, NATO is a military alliance with a purpose again. Germany will actually make real, painful economic sacrifices to wean itself from Russian energy sources, and actually rebuild its military, both political impossibilities before Zelenskyy’s Teachable Moment. Finland and Sweden are done with neutrality. So are Swiss bankers. In the US, suddenly, everybody remembers that Ukraine is in fact fighting the same Russia that attempted to subvert our own democracy, and Russia’s agents of influence in the media are finally losing their outsized traction. Even right-wing radio callers want to know how to send money to help Ukraine.

The What, And The Why

We aren’t out of the woods, and we can’t be sure we will catch all the breaks—for example one can still be justifiably worried about the final outcome of the French Presidential election this Sunday, and the possibility of a rump Le Pen-Orban axis inside Europe—but I believe that the clarity of this moment is an irreversible achievement. In this moment, it is finally possible to speak sensibly about who we are, and about why it is necessary that the Putins, the Orbans, the Modis, and so on should be pushed back: We want to live securely in a democratic world of laws.

This is a Power issue, not a Justice issue. “Free enterprise” is nice to have, but is a secondary, negotiable Justice issue, subject to endless modification, as the many nations that govern themselves by means of various perfectly viable forms of social democracy demonstrate. That’s not what we’re talking about. This issue has nothing whatever to do with capitalism. The primary—Power—issue here is that our democratic institutions are to be protected from threats of corruption. Some of those threats are clearly external. Russia is a serial bad actor that has demonstrated time and again its willingness to undermine democratic institutions, in many countries, including our own, because it views them as exploitable weaknesses, and because it frames its own interests in zero-summation with those of the West. Here is the general rule that I believe we should use to think of Ukraine: when a nation chooses to organize itself democratically, another nation acting to subvert that democracy makes war on all of us. How we respond must vary from case to case, but we can never fail to respond. This we cannot compromise on, ever again. That is who we are.

And now, with that recovered memory of our real identity, we can finally understand what happened to us. During the Cold War, the ideological contest between the West and the Soviet Union was also, in a sense, a war for the priority between Power and Justice, between Madison, Jay, and Hamilton on the one hand, and Karl Marx on the other. And despite the fact that the West “won” the Cold War, Marx cleaned those guys’ clocks—no contest, a straight-up ass-kicking. We agreed with the Soviets that the contest was about the superiority or inferiority of capitalism over communism—rather than about the superiority of constitutionalist-style law-limited Power and transparent democratic institutions over the alternatives. We rejoiced when we thought that we had beat them because of our “free” enterprise, and then we set about getting rich.

Think of the irony: Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher allowed Marx to set the terms of the debate when they forged the neo-liberal consensus—what mattered was Justice, rather than Power. Which was the wrong result: remember, the problems of Power are prior to those of Justice, and must be addressed first if Justice is to be addressed durably at all. But by picking the grounds on which the war of ideas was to be fought, Marx could just walk away and win anyway. Wherever he is, he must have gotten a chuckle out of that one. With that one slick move, he faked us out of our own most valuable political inheritance.

Well, no more. It’s past time that we focused on living up to the core ideals that make us the West. And on teaching those ideals to our kids. And on transmitting them to the rest of the world, free of the commercial hypocrisy of neo-liberalism. The world needs those ideals, a lot more than it ever needed capitalism.

So, anyway, Volodymyr? Thanks.

All 5 parts, once published, can be found here: The Resumption of History

The Resumption of History: Part 5Post + Comments (93)

The Resumption of History: Part 4

by WaterGirl| April 21, 20228:24 pm| 52 Comments

This post is in: Carlo Graziani, Guest Posts, The Resumption of History

The Resumption of History: Part 4 – The Sources of American Soft Power

by Carlo Graziani

Part 3, Of Justice and Power, ended like this:

So we cannot look to Marx for usable thinking about Power. For that, we must turn instead to the “bourgeois” political philosophers of the American Revolution.

Justice and Power in America

The philosophers of governance who did think hard about the Problem of Power were living a century or more before Marx, in England and in the American colonies. The English Enlightenment furnished the raw material for the deeply skeptical view of human nature that informs the US Constitution. The very notion of “checks and balances” that Americans absorb in their civics classes reflects the nearly paranoid level of suspicion held by the writers of that document, that the Federal Government, or a State, or even a mob of people, might take it into their heads to do something corrupt. Each of the amendments comprising the Bill of Rights asserts a proscription on what the Federal Government may do with admirable directness and clarity (except for the Second Amendment, which begins with an apology, but that’s another story), showcasing the concern for limiting power. There was one thing that Madison, Jay, Hamilton, et al. were absolutely determined about, above everything else: Americans would never have another Sovereign. Nobody, but nobody would ever be above the law.

That’s a really tall order, though. A piece of paper cannot really do all that work by itself, no matter how impressive the calligraphy and the signatures. All it takes is for high officials with enough power to conspire not to be bound by its terms, and the constitution is moot. This is a dispiriting story that has recurred many times in many places all over the world.

It almost appeared to happen in the United States in January 2021, but then it did not. Which if you think about it is odd. In most countries in the world, an incumbent leader in control of military and security forces, with a reasonably large political base, plenty of time to make preparations, and a determination to wreck democratic norms to remain in power, would not have that much difficulty in doing so. But Trump couldn’t pull it off. So, that’s interesting. Why not?

The answer, I think, is that the real constitutional checks are not in that piece of paper but in our minds and in our culture. That is where the “Ideology of the Enlightenment” that I’ve been working around to talking about is doing its work. In the United States, today, there are still enough people who were socialized to the idea that, for example, the President cannot just change an election outcome that doesn’t suit him. Think about that. There are a lot of places in the world where people are too cynical about elections, and Power, to believe that.

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Mike Pence—Mike Pence!—the utter mediocrity plucked from a dead-end political career in Indiana who probably couldn’t name three signers of the Constitution if there were a free corn dog in it for him; whose loyalty to Trump led him to dutifully allow his boss humiliate him in new ways each week of his term as Vice President; that Mike Pence could not bring himself to sign off on the farcical plot abstain from his constitutional duty to certify the election results. This notorious moral coward was more scared of being busted for violating the Constitution than he was of Donald Trump and his mob of latter-day brownshirts!.

I don’t think that this was a near miss. I think it was, rather, the tip of an iceberg. If this idiotic coup had gone further, then in order for Trump to remain in power many of the 2.1 million civilian federal workers and 1.2 million military personnel employed by the US government would have had to take actions in support of the coup that would have made those individuals feel physically nauseated. I believe that Trump would likely have been rejected by the government in a manner analogous to an organism’s immune response rejecting a foreign organ transplant. I feel sure that the sheer outrageous Soviet-style obscenity of self-appointed “alternate” elector slates arriving to nullify the votes of millions of citizens according to John Eastman’s demented plan would have triggered an insurrection inside the Federal Government, with officials at Justice, Defense, Treasury, Homeland Security etc. actively rebelling, to the point that in the end the whatever nominal power Trump retained, the joystick would have gone slack in his hands. I’m deep in counterfactual territory here, but I don’t think it is too far-fetched to imagine that the Secret Service might actually have taken him into custody, if only to escort him to Mar-a-Lago.

That is our secret sauce. This country indoctrinated itself into the values of rule of law, writ large, for over two centuries, to the point that those values became a cultural norm. We are still, demonstrably, as of January 2021, a people that will brook no compromise concerning the ultimate rules that our rulers must submit to. Would you like something to be proud of, as an American? Forget about our economic leadership, or our technological primacy. Be proud of that.

Let me finally spell out the point of this extended rumination. When I allude to “The Ideology of the Enlightenment” in this essay, what I mean is not only the notion that it is useless to design a system of governance to deliver Justice unless the exercise of Power by that system has been carefully and mindfully circumscribed. I also mean that it is absolutely essential to have clear messaging about the importance of the problems of Power; that one must propagandize the aspect of Power limitation in governance—such as freedom of political speech, or of the circumscribing of official, judicial, police, and prosecutorial authority—and the crucial role that it plays in a strong, successful democracy; that one must socialize one’s citizens into the values of Power limitation as a critical means of inoculating one’s democracy against tyrants. It is dangerous for us to ever forget this.

Note that this is also, and not inconsequentially, a discussion of freedom. But not “freedom” in the sense of the word as it is shouted by the kind of entitled idiot “patriots” who like to wave “We’re Number 1” Foam Fingers while presumptuously helping themselves to an individual’s license to do anything they like at anybody else’s expense. This is “freedom” in the sense of preserving our liberties as citizens to choose our government, and limiting the corruption that could destroy those liberties. This is a discussion about the freedom that’s worth having, worth protecting, and worth talking about without shame. The freedom that makes the country worth defending in the first place.

It is also a discussion about corruption. There is an unusual feature of Western, and particularly US institutions compared to those characteristic of the rest of the world. The level of corruption of all kinds in those institutions—in Central Banks, in Courts, in Government Departments, as well as in private institutions—while not zero, is so much lower than in the rest of the world that the fact is frequently remarked upon by visitors from developing nations—I have met a few who never even found the routine corrupt practices in their home countries noteworthy in the slightest until they came to the US and suddenly didn’t have to bribe anyone. This relative lack of institutional corruption is a phenomenon that is clearly related to the same set Enlightenment values: corruption doesn’t check itself, it is checked when institutions designed to limit it are set up in a culture that expects it to be limited. This feature of our society is, I believe, one of our most important sources of soft power. Most of the world dwells in such extensive and endemic corruption that the idea of living without it can seem more utopic than the idea of “freedom”, believe it or not.

At the moment we, in the US, still appear to have some immunity to tyranny, some attachment to our lawful institutions of government, and some allergy to corruption. We do not do these things perfectly. For example, our attachment to a “Unitary Executive” as a legal concept is an abomination that needs to be sent to some kind of graveyard as quickly as can be arranged, before executive power becomes unbounded. Also, we allow our police and prosecutors far too much power. I still believe that we grant the FBI and the FISA court too much deference, in the name of fighting Terrorism. Nonetheless, the needle does seem to be moving on even these issues lately. There are some grounds for optimism.

We could lose those things, though. We have become confused about what we’re about in recent decades, and it shows in what our youth thinks of us. I’ve had some conversations with twenty-somethings lately that have left me very concerned, because of the latent bothsidist/whataboutist attitudes underlying such phrases as “to my generation” that precede some observations of near-complete detachment and cynicism. Well, honestly. Who can blame them? We transmitted to them an idea of our values based on the neo-liberalism that we learned from Reagan and Thatcher. I’d be cynical too.

On the other hand, perhaps we may now live in a time when it is possible to refocus on what matters.

Tomorrow: Awakenings

All 5 parts, once published, can be found here: The Resumption of History

The Resumption of History: Part 4Post + Comments (52)

The Resumption of History: Part 3

by WaterGirl| April 20, 20228:25 pm| 56 Comments

This post is in: Carlo Graziani, Guest Posts, The Resumption of History

The Resumption of History: Part 3 — Of Justice and Power

by Carlo Graziani

Part 2, The Age of Anxiety, ended like this:

And how do you even retrieve a political discussion that’s so hopelessly confused? How did we allow it to get so muddled? Why did we allow ourselves to be intellectually cornered into defending capitalism, as if that was the point, as if free enterprise were the aspect of our societies that, if someone were to place limits on it, we would say “no, sorry, now our societies are not worth defending after all”? What the hell happened to our actual political values?

The Problems of Governance

Which is to say, it’s past time that I made good on my promise to actually say what I mean when I write about “Enlightenment” ideology, because we need to unpick this mess. To do that, though, I need to ask your indulgence while I review some foundations of governance. I apologize for the parts that will seem obvious, although I hope that at least the framework will look somewhat unfamiliar to at least some readers.

From the earliest gatherings of people into large organized societies, certain types of problems had to be addressed by rulers and bureaucrats on a recurring basis across geography and time. Taking an anachronistic view of these problems, we can fit them in two broad categories, which, for want of better terms can be called The Problem of Justice and The Problem of Power. These terms need some explanation, because while they are evocative, they are not exactly self-explanatory. They are also not standard terms of art: rather, they are shorthands that I need for the discussion that follows. If they seem terminologically quirky, please indulge these quirks for the space of this essay.

The Problem of Justice

The Problem of Justice stems from the commonplace observation that when individuals agree to live in society, that agreement creates benefits: intangible benefits, such as collective security; but also tangible benefits—exponential growth of wealth, consequent on the ability of a few individuals to grow food for many; and on the specialization of skills that the labor thus freed from subsistence can thereupon engage in.

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The intangible benefits raise problems of mutual obligation within society that I will not address here, not because they are uninteresting, but because for reasons that will become clear below, the tangible benefits are the ones that concern us here. Those benefits raise the following problem: society created the wealth, but society is a construct. How are individuals to benefit? Who, exactly are the stakeholders of society, who are entitled to a payout, and in what measure? The natural process of wealth creation will not land the wealth in the laps of the designated stakeholders, whoever they may be, nor in the designated amounts. How is that wealth to be collected and redistributed? What part is to be used for the common good, and in what way?

These questions have been answered in many ways over time and geography. Stakeholders have been those who held monopolies over edged weapons, or white men, or bourgeoisies, or proletariats, or mandarins, or members of ethnic groups, or everyone born on a territory over some age, and so on. Fiscal systems have included contract tax-farming, various aristocratic hierarchies, clerical tithing networks, the IRS. And so on. Much of this was not really well-thought out, or thought out at all, really. Until Marx.

Karl Marx furnished the first modern, systematic theory of Justice, in the sense above. Which makes sense, because as I’ve set it out, “Justice”—at least the part of Justice having to to with the tangible benefits of living in society—is really a materialist resource allocation problem. And Marx was, before everything else, a materialist philosopher. He wove together economic theory and historical narrative in such a powerful combination that nowadays even scholars who violently dissent from Marxist views would never dare sever the link that he forged. He hammered home the fertile cross-pollination of economic and historical thinking, and singled out the importance of the social class as a key tool of socio-historical analysis, one of his many durable contributions. Marx is one of those rare writers, like Aristotle or Freud, whose work is so powerful that they can be wrong on many, even most details, while the systems of thought that they create condition the work of scholars, and even change the habits of mind of entire societies, for centuries after their deaths.

If you happen to think as I do, Marx is still conditioning your thoughts today on the proper stakeholders in society—to the extent that we feel that capital and income is not the same as human worth—and on how wealth should be collected and redistributed—by taxation rates that do not respect self-important and self-serving assertions of the societal good inherent in conspicuous consumption and accumulation. Thinking that way does not make one a Marxist: it merely acknowledges the important and positive ways in which the world that we live in is still shaped by Marx’s thought.

The Problem of Power

The trouble with Marx is that he was utterly uninterested in the other key problem of governance, the Problem of Power. Which is this: Suppose that you have created institutions of government designed to carry out your design of Justice. You must now animate those institutions by installing officials, whom you must invest with functions and mandates. And you must entrust them with the power of government to carry out those mandates. At which point you will immediately run into the most immutable, best-known, iron law of politics: power corrupts. It doesn’t matter how you choose or train your officials, they will be tempted to abuse their power every day, and, inevitably, some of them will.

“Corruption” here does not mean merely or only pecuniary corruption. A government official may refuse to take even a penny in wrongful compensation, but if that official should improperly shield a family member from a judicial process (say), that is corruption, and it is the type of institutional rot which, if unchecked, can spread and destroy any scheme of Justice ever devised. In order to ensure that this does not happen, the institutions of government need to be somehow designed to prevent this kind of corruption from occurring by limiting the authority of officials, even if doing so means that the ability to provide Justice is impaired.

That is the paradox and tragedy of governance: the problems of Justice and Power are in tension with each other. Without limitations of authority designed to prevent corruption, institutions of Justice soon rot. But if those limitations are too effective, Justice will be hamstrung.

People who care deeply about Justice frequently chafe at those restrictions, often (in my view) without acknowledging the importance of their function. For example, the right to “Freedom of Speech”, which enables so much enraging speech that many would prefer to see suppressed, is a restriction on Power: it prevents government from deciding what political statements people may or may not make. Weakening that restriction could have dreadful consequences for all speech, irrespective of what awful political speech it permits now.

Another example of a problem of Power has to do with the “Rule of Law”. That phrase is vague, and covers a lot of ground, but in my opinion the most important claim under its aegis is the total and uncompromising requirement that our rulers be themselves bound by laws that they cannot change or evade as it suits them. Obviously this is a problem of Power—in fact, it is the principal Problem of Power.

The framework of Justice and Power allows us to make a key observation: the Problems of Power are prior to the Problems of Justice, in the sense that it is a higher priority to resolve Power-related issues than Justice-related issues. This is an assertion that is likely to raise immediate objections in some quarters, but it is easy to defend. If institutional corruption is limited—if solutions to Problems of Power are addressed at the institutional level—then the possibility exists to provide a durable design of Justice. If institutional corruption is not limited, no such possibility exists.

Note also how this framework allows us to analyze that slippery phrase, the “Free Market”, that I alluded to in Part I: used in its non-technical, ideological sense, the phrase is a compound of terms pertaining to Power (“Free” as in free of overbearing goverment regulation) and Justice (“Market”, a choice of resource allocation algorithm), which uses rhetorical legerdemain to press into service the priority of the former in order to justify a particular family of distributional schemes belonging to the latter. Neat trick, eh?

As I said, Marx had no interest whatever in problems of Power. As near as I can tell there was still widespread belief in an idea of human perfectibility associated with faith in the possibilities of science when Das Kapital was written that may have made it easy to ignore the problem of human corruption. The intellectual toxins of Romanticism had not quite set in by that point. And, of course, if the State withers away, I suppose there is less of a concern about corruptibility of leaders. Consequently, Marxism is, taken as a theory of governance, at best half a theory.

None of the intellectual ankle-biters who followed Marx appeared to even notice that there was a gap to be filled here, least of all the opportunistic pseudo-philosopher polemicists who led the Russian Revolution. Their Theory of Power was Vanguardism: an elite, educated in “Revolutionary Consciousness” would furnish a “Vanguard of the Revolution” that would safeguard the interests of Marxist(-Leninist) Justice. To even call this scheme a “theory” is to endow it with too much dignity. It was word salad covering preparations for a politics of violent coercion.

I believe that this disinterest in the Problem of Power—the wilful inability to even understand that a problem exists—is the feature to which we can trace the depressingly unfailing habit of purely Marxist governance projects to collapse, over and over again, in savage orgies of violence directed against the proletariat (or agrarian class) that they nominally exist to defend, while officials enthusiastically knife each other in the back, before eventually settling into an equilibrium state of self-dealing, corrupt bureaucracy at the expense of the nations that they govern. I cannot think of a single exception to this rule. And it’s been 105 years since the Russian Revolution.

So we cannot look to Marx for usable thinking about Power. For that, we must turn instead to the “bourgeois” political philosophers of the American Revolution.

Tomorrow: The Sources of American Soft Power

All 5 parts, once published, can be found here: The Resumption of History

The Resumption of History: Part 3Post + Comments (56)

The Resumption of History: Part 2

by WaterGirl| April 19, 20228:35 pm| 115 Comments

This post is in: Carlo Graziani, Guest Posts, The Resumption of History

The Resumption of History: Part 2 — The Age of Anxiety

by Carlo Graziani

Part 1, The Davos Consensus, and its Discontents ended like this:

How did we get from the “triumph” of 1991 to this? How do we explain the cancerous metastasis represented by this challenge to the neo-liberal order?

I have a candidate explanation: anxiety.

Beneath The Dormant Volcano

The thing is, below the notice of the Davos elites, all over the world, there were a lot of people for whom getting smart was not a ticket to getting rich. In the developing world there continued to be plenty of conflicts both above and below the threshold of Western media notice, affecting the hardscrabble lives of billions. And even beyond that old news, the shiny new world order brought strange, disturbing, destabilizing novelties.

Sudden market crashes due to instabilities caused by the replacement of human traders by computers wiped out many small nest eggs; global currency crashes plunged entire tiers of nations encompassing hundreds of millions of people into crisis for no reason intelligible to the immediate victims (including citizens of Russia in 1998, a particularly delicate time in post-Soviet politics).

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An imbecilic war of choice by the US destabilized the Middle East by wiping out a Westernizing Arab Nationalist movement over 40 years in the making. In this context, “The West” has a longer-term historical sense than its 20th Century meaning: it is the cultural ecumene that succeeded “Christendom”, and is viewed by Islamists as such. In this sense Saddam Hussein was our (i.e. Westernizing) dickhead, as was Qaddafi, as were Assad pere, Sadat, Nasser, Arafat, et alia. They may have been Marxists, but Marx was, after all, a Western philosopher in the same sense. All of them looked back for inspiration to Kemal Ataturk, the pioneering Westernizing nationalist Turkish reformer (the destruction of whose modernizing works is the life project of Recep Erdogan, who has more than one iron in the fire in this narrative).

This is not hindsight: any half-lettered day laborer in the Sudan could have told you in 2002 that Sadam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden loathed each other far more viscerally than either despised George Bush, but apparently this fact passed beneath the notice of the US National Security Council. When the George W. Bush declared war on “evil” characters such as Hussein using language straight out of a Justice League comic-book morality tale, the effect was merely to discredit and destroy Arab nationalism, leaving the field open to medieval-minded Islamist dead-enders, the only remaining viable region-wide political alternative in the Middle East. This effectively turned the region into an roiling, uncontrollable, political seismic zone. It was the ultimate geopolitical own-goal.

A financial crisis straight out of 1929 wiped tens of trillions of dollars of small-investor wealth off the books all over the world, although oddly the people intermediating those transactions did OK. Weird new global pandemics, spread by frenetic new global travel patterns before COVID-19 (Avian flu, Ebola, Swine Flu, SARS-CoV-1) suddenly stalked the world. New, really new, weird, really weird weather, made large parts of the densely-inhabited world much harder to live in. And drove more desperate people to emigration, to competition, and to more conflict. Southern hemisphere nations that could not act as magnets for global outflows of jobs acted instead as sources for global inflows of migrants heading for the Northern hemishpere, where they were distinctly unwelcome.

Western Europe, long accustomed to scolding the US for its history of racial prejudice when such reproofs merely took the form of celebrating African-American cultural and political icons, suddenly discovered an ethnic and racial mean streak of its own, as it found itself struggling to assimilate hundreds of thousands, then millions of North African and Middle Eastern migrants fleeing war zones, famines, or simply poverty too abject to credit. The “choice” between being forced to see those people sleeping on streets and in train stations or sinking their teeming cockleshell boats at sea produced some of the ugliest political discourse I ever hope to hear in my lifetime.

All of this by way of saying, for many, many people, life was not only not getting more comfortable, it was getting weirder, more alarming, more anxious.

And that, I think, is the common thread. Anxiety. People, all over the world, saw a lot of change that they didn’t have any control over, that they didn’t like, that in many cases ran right over them, and that they wanted stopped and reversed, somehow. And their leaders, in most cases, were feeding them bullshit happy-talk about about how everything was getting better.

Well, this is the kind of political tinder that evokes demagogues. It’s not possible to even be a normal politician when people get this angry and scared. And if you are the kind of politician who knows how to surf this kind of sentiment, it is child’s play to turn fear into anger, anger into hate, and hate into power. Like flies drawn to excrement, those demagogues showed up for work and promptly ate the lunches of the politicians who should have been carrying the neo-liberal gospel to further triumphs.

In the US, the dynamic began manifesting itself with the accelerating growth of wealth and income inequality, documented brilliantly by Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, further spurred by the inevitable, but utterly mismanaged economic dislocations driven by globalizing outflows of jobs—not discussed in polite company at Davos—compounded by the happy-talk of the elite celebrating trade deals such as NAFTA that were obviously—obviously—immediately immiserating to millions who saw middle-class status slipping away. And, of course, the inflow of migrants from the South, always a constant flow in the US, was growing, circumventing legal immigration limits, often enough facilitated by traffickers in ways that allowed it to be coupled in the public mind with crime, in addition to (less logically, but understandably) those disappearing jobs.

Following which, we have a couple of market panics driven by inscrutable forces, the 9/11 clusterfuck, and the 2009 financial crisis.

In parallel, populist spoilers on the right (Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot) and on the left (Ralph Nader) played as a chorus to Newt Gingrich’s nihilistic “bomb-throwing” republicanism, displacing Jack Kemp/Bob Dole “Intellectual” (really!) Republicanism as the template for the Republican demagoguery to follow: The Karl Rovian Imagineering, the Fox Empire enablers, and the PAC-men billionaires. All acting in cynical, demagogic, anxiety-manipulating maneuvering schemes to gain and maintain power.

It would actually be funny, if it weren’t so deeply tragic: Imagine the silly looks on the faces of all those entitled rich guys who thought they were in control of the GOP, and running it as a finely-tuned engine for stoking rube-rage and converting it into power and wealth, when it suddenly dawned on them that Trump and his army of trailer-park yahoos had them all naked, spread-eagled, and tied to a barrel, as he took control of the party that they had primed for him by whipping up all that hate, simply because he realized before anyone else that you don’t need a dog whistle if you’re prepared to bellow all the ugly parts at the top of your lungs. Kind of like those German oligarchs in the 1932 election, who thought those ridiculous idiotic Nazi street brawlers were useful, but not serious, and anyway they were under control.

I realize how schematic the above account is. I know that it leaves out the America’s shabby treatment of Blacks and the concomitant manipulation of racism, and also gives no account of the Religious Right, the culture wars, the Paranoid Style in American Politics, and other factors that are dispiritingly constant factors in US social history going back to the age of Andrew Jackson, if not earlier.

My point is that in prosperous times the toxic effects of those pathologies of American politics are containable. In anxious times they are decidedly not.

So that’s where we stood, in the United States. By 2016, it had come to Trump. To the extent that the US had ever upheld ideals that the rest of the world aspired to emulate, it was beginning to appear that those ideals, whatever they were, were destined for a trip through the shredder. The US had just elected President a figure that the rest of the world would have no trouble recognizing as an oligarch.

And then, to add insult to injury, our own kids (who, just as we did as adolescents, thought that history began on the day they started paying attention to news) blamed us for screwing up the world because we were “capitalists”, and because “free enterprise is stupid” (or “racist”, or “transphobic”, or whatever) and because “capitalism is destroying the environment”.

And how do you even retrieve a political discussion that’s so hopelessly confused? How did we allow it to get so muddled? Why did we allow ourselves to be intellectually cornered into defending capitalism, as if that was the point, as if free enterprise were the aspect of our societies that, if someone were to place limits on it, we would say “no, sorry, now our societies are not worth defending after all”? What the hell happened to our actual political values?

Tomorrow: Of Justice and Power

All 5 parts, once published, can be found here: The Resumption of History

The Resumption of History: Part 2Post + Comments (115)

The Resumption of History: Part 1 (by Carlo Graziani)

by WaterGirl| April 18, 20228:30 pm| 63 Comments

This post is in: Carlo Graziani, Guest Posts, The Resumption of History

The Resumption of History: Part 1 — The Davos Consensus, And Its Discontents

by Carlo Graziani

A Turning Point

I’ve been trying to capture what it is about this moment that feels different from the usual tawdry occasions of televised war served up in our media-hypnotized age. It’s not easy. Sometimes a simile is useful. The most helpful simile that I’ve been able to come up with is this: history is like a mile-wide printed paper scroll that emerges from a slot, usually at a glacial pace that allows its contents to be read at leisure, although coherent interpretation of the contents generally must wait until much later. In the past two months, however, the extrusion rate of the scroll has suddenly speeded up to a fantastic rate, so that no reader can keep up with all the new history that has just been written. It seems very clear that a lot of things just changed in the world all of a sudden. But it’s impossible to take a census of everything that just changed, or of exactly what the implications are for the world that we expect to live in when the scroll eventually slows down again.

We seem to be at some kind of turning point in history, a time that we will come to recognize as having brought to a head conflicts long a-brewing, and, I believe and will argue, bookending a period that began at the end of the Cold War, when the long struggle between the West and the Soviet Union ended with the latter’s collapse in 1991. I do think that period has some lessons for this one.

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At the time—actually, a couple of years earlier—a young scholar named Francis Fukuyama published an essay, later expanded into a book, called The End of History, which argued that the impending global triumph of liberalism would remove the drivers of historical development (this summary does not do justice to Fukuyama’s argument), leading to a new era in human development. The argument was greeted with a mixture of celebration for its foresight in predicting the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, and mockery for its oversimplifications. And of course, today it is apparent that its predictions were simply wrong. But all of this is quite unfair to Fukuyama, who was one of the very few people who not only noticed at the time that big changes were in the wind, but was also actually trying to make a structural effort to peer into the future. Getting it right in 1989 would have required superhuman clairvoyance. Perhaps the lesson to learn from The End of History is that at such moments, merely identifying the correct intellectual tools to use, and the right trends to watch, might be more modest and achievable goals than actually attempting to scry the future.

That’s what I’d like to attempt here, at any rate. I’ve been spending a lot of time over the last few years mulling over various versions of the “how the hell did we get here” question. The last two months have been very clarifying of a number of issues for me, and helped me unify a number of rather scattered threads. I’d like to try to tell a coherent story of our relatively recent past as a means of sorting out some issues of political philosophy that in my opinion we, in the West, have allowed to become entangled, confused, and corrupted, to the point that we nearly forgot how to believe in the ideals that make us “The West” as something other than a geographical descriptor.

With that accomplished, I’d like to do some accounting of the elements at our disposal for understanding the world described by the scroll still shooting out of that slot.

The result will be a work of synthesis, bringing together a bit of history with some political philosophy in a very informal way, in an attempt to form a basic coherent picture. Such pictures are always wrong, in some sense, because they oversimplify. But they can be useful nonetheless as crude guidance. I doubt that we could expect much better tools for understanding the present, much less the future, from a much more refined treatment.

Even so, I’m not entirely sure I can pull this off. Someone ought to try, though.

Why Did The West ‘Win’ The Cold War?

I want to establish a premise: when asking a question like “Why did the West win the Cold War”, I am not inviting a full-up academic debate on this vast, nuanced, textured, difficult, potentially-hard-to-even-articulate-properly question; nor am I extending an invitation to the run-of-the-mill morality-play types of explanations that frequently devolve into NFL-style sack-dances. I don’t have the space in this type of essay for the former, or the patience for the latter. So I will simply state a view that I believe ought not be controversial. The West prevailed over the Soviet Union in the Cold War in virtue of two logically distinct advantages:

The tangible economic advantage: Western capitalism was organised in a manner that was unarguably more efficient than the Soviet command economy. Even though the latter was, in fact, a war-mobilization economy for almost its entire 74-year history, and hence capable of generating terrifying combat power, its actual economic power was disproportionately small and immiserating to the people imprisoned in its system. In the end, the competition did not turn out to be primarily military. To the extent that the competition showcased economic success, the Soviet bloc started behind, and only fell farther back as technological progress accelerated.
The intangible ideological advantages: There were aspects of the respective politics of the two blocs that held different attractions to different people. I am going to return to these in some detail later, because I feel that it is important to disentangle some of the confused political discussion that later issued from that era. For now I just want to state that by the late ’80s, it was clear that the justice politics of Marxism-Leninism were quite discredited, whereas there was still credibility to the Enlightenment ideology animating the Western politics of liberty. Basically, “Freedom”. Really, I know how oversimplified this reads. I promise, we’ll get back to this, because it’s important.

I’m sorry if this seem kind of obvious, but my point is that these two apparently innocent, distinct philosophical threads became entangled in damaging, even toxic ways. Have you ever noticed the sleight of hand that occurs in phrases such as “The Free Market”? The word “Free” does two distinct jobs in that phrase: in the technical sense of the phrase (as a neutral, resource allocation algorithm) the word “free” describes the agility of agents in a market to meet each other collectively so as to establish efficient market equilibria; but in the ideological sense it means something very different: it acts as ideological evidence for the validity of what ought to be a value-neutral technical argument. In one implicit portmanteau phrase, we have a conflation of the tangible and intangible “weapons” that “won” the Cold War. Likewise for “Free Trade”, “Free Enterprise”, and so on. Conservative ideologues routinely use that bit of wordplay to cordon off commerce from taxation and government regulation. What sort of pervert would want to tax or regulate freedom, after all?

Of course, by the 1980’s with the advent of Ronald Reagan in the US, and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, it was perfectly clear that the erosion of the philosophical distinction between liberty and capitalism was the way of the future, and that the two were destined for fusion into a “neo-liberalism” whose character principally emphasized inviolable international trade relations and national fiscal and budget policies favoring business development, rather than national democratic arrangements.

Well, as the saying goes, you can’t argue with success. In 1991 the Soviet Union, against almost everyone’s expectations, fell down without triggering nuclear armageddon. The new neo-liberal order had won.

The Davos Consensus

Another reason one could argue the West “won” is that at the beginning of the Cold War the challenge presented to the West by the Soviet Union was met by US policymakers through the creation of an international architecture designed to manage the conflict that eventually became known as the Cold War. The purpose of this architecture was to contain the Soviet challenge while limiting the risk of all-out war, and the nuclear global annihilation that was the almost certain outcome of such a war. That architecture, the product of cold, realist, amoral, but mindful calculation, succeeded beyond the hopes of its architects in 1991. In doing so, it rendered itself obsolete.

In a perfect world, a careful reconceptualization of that architecture in light of issues likely to arise in the decades to come would have been thought timely at that point. In the absence of a new existential challenge to replace the Soviet Union, this was too much to hope for. What we had instead was a smug triumphalistic victory celebration. Communism had been defeated by—wait for it—“Free Enterprise”. Forget about liberty—the tangible benefits of Western democracy had won the day. Coca-cola and Benetton and Gucci; Intel, and IBM and Microsoft; Boeing and Airbus, CNN and Disney and Mercedes: these were the manifestations of the West’s obvious superiority over the Soviet system.

This narrative was too dazzling and overpowering to be gainsaid. The Western economies were generating wealth, and wealthy people, at such incredible rates, that it didn’t seem utterly stupid at the time to believe the implication: this is it—economic utopia. Get as smart as we are, and we can all be rich.

This, for want of a better term, is the Davos Consensus. The elite government, business, and media figures who meet and issue positions papers at the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual Davos meetings can stand in quite well for the smug, detached, entitled stakeholders who subscribed to this “get smart/get rich” outlook on modernity.

Something went wrong with Utopia, though. There were discontents.

The Rise Of The Demagogues

Signs of trouble began to appear almost immediately. You would think that if the neo-liberal social order was so wildly successful at producing prosperity as its elite so clearly believed it to be, then voters would systematically reward the order by electing rulers who subscribed to that order. But increasingly, there were flies in the ointment. Rulers were appearing who didn’t fit the neo-liberal mold.

Alexander Stille once wrote that “Italy has had a rather remarkable record in the twentieth century as a laboratory of bad ideas that have then spread to other parts of the world. Fascism was invented in Italy, as was the Mafia, and left-wing terrorism went further in Italy than in any European country”. This quote is from the introduction to “The Sack of Rome”, his 2006 book on Silvio Berlusconi. This observation seems very prescient to me now, because I believe that Italy did indeed do the honors on a very bad idea due to infect the world (as an Italian-American, I’m not particularly proud of this). Berlusconi, contemptuous of democratic norms, fawningly admiring of power, proudly uncultured, intuitively populist, militantly ignorant, corrupt to the core, and utterly determined to evade all limitations on his own power by any means at his disposal, was indeed a warning and a portent of things to come.

He was just the first. Within a few years there came Zhirinovsky, Putin, and Orban. Yanukovic, Erdogan, and Modi. Farage, Duterte, and Salvini. Bolsonaro, Le Pen, and Trump. All in the Berlusconi mode: an eager appetite for power married to an utter lack of interest in democratic norms.

At first all these leaders and wannabes seemed sui generis. They germinated in wildly dissimilar terroirs, so that it seemed absurd to assimilate them. But they certainly seemed to have no difficulty in finding affinities among each other. For example, there is now ample documentation—in the Mueller report—that Russian military intelligence, undoubtedly at Putin’s direction, explicitly set out to aid the Trump election campaign at a critical phase in 2016, by hacking the Clinton campaign and releasing damaging documents at times calculated to do maximum political damage, and later cultivated and groomed Trump and his acolytes using classic spycraft techiques of agent recruitment and maintenance. Muller also documented the unselfconsciously corrupt enthusiasm with which Trump confidantes such as Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Roger Stone and many others embraced their seduction by the GRU.

Trump and Bolsonaro’s bromance needs no re-hashing here. Marine Le Pen felt her connection to Putin worth playing up until recently. Narendra Modi’s circumspection on condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine decidedly contradicts his country’s lopsided trading preference for the US over Russia.

Recep Erdogan—who, note, is the leader of a NATO country, with a recent history of military tension with Russia, and a clear zero-sum competition with Russia over Black Sea primacy, is playing both sides in the Ukraine conflict, furnishing weapons to Ukraine, but refusing to take a political stand against the Russian invasion. And, why should he? Where are his political affinities, really? Ideologically, he has more in common with Putin than with Biden.

And all of this without even going into the frenzy of democratic norm-breaking practiced by Donald Trump during the squalid midden that was the Trump Administration itself, and the consequent stomach-turning spectacle of Putin’s effective commandeering of US policy towards Ukraine. How did we get from the “triumph” of 1991 to this? How do we explain the cancerous metastasis represented by this challenge to the neo-liberal order?

I have a candidate explanation: anxiety.

Tomorrow: The Age of Anxiety

All 5 parts, once published, can be found here: The Resumption of History

The Resumption of History: Part 1 (by Carlo Graziani)Post + Comments (63)