Category: Daniel Serwer
Stevenson’s army, December 9
Charlie, preoccupied with orals the last few days, sent this “catchup” last night:
I’ve been busy with orals the past 3 days. Here’s what I think is happening.
– The armed services committee leaders agreed on a compromise NDAA without ever giving the Senate a chance to vote on amendments or the bill. The House substittuted the NDAA package on a bill originally intended to approve a memorial for a Florida terrorist attack. The important statement of managers is here. A summary here. BTW, included in the NDAA package is the first State Dept authorization bill in 20 years. Fred Kaplan wonders if members even looked at the bill.
This morning he added:
– US will send small arms and ammo to Ukraine.
– WSJ says US will tighten sanctions on Iran.
– Harvard report says China will soon lead US in tech.
– NYT reports problems boosting US R&D.
– Big national and defense strategy documents coming early next year.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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Identity politics have come to America, with a vengeance
Three big social issues plague America today: vaccination, guns, and abortion. On all three, Republicans are preferring harm to their constituency over commonsense public health measures, while Americans on the whole support them.
This is most obvious in Republican opposition to vaccination against COVID. As a result, the corona virus is killing far more Republican voters, mainly in rural areas and the suburbs, than Democrats. Hundreds of thousands of Republican voters have died, and likely hundreds of thousands more will die before the epidemic ebbs definitively. An epidemic of the unvaccinated means an epidemic of mostly Republicans.
Guns are a more complicated story. They kill more Americans by suicide than by interpersonal violence. Suicide is far more common in Republican-dominated rural areas than Democratic-dominated cities, where interpersonal violence is more common. The deaths from guns are an order of magnitude lower than the deaths from COVID, so tens of thousands of Republican voters are dying due to their party’s opposition to gun safety measures that Americans overwhelmingly support.
Abortion is more complicated still. But ending abortion in red states, which is what will happen if Roe v Wade is overturned in the Supreme Court, will saddle those states with the added welfare costs associated with unwanted children and poor mothers, while depriving those states of the economic flows attributable to abortion clinics and associated medical care. Abolishing abortion will also increase law enforcement burdens, as illegal procedures are likely to substitute for some legal ones. Americans on the whole favor the availability of legal abortion in many instances.
Why would a political party choose to harm its own constituency in these ways?
The justifications for the Republican position on vaccination and guns are similar: the issue, they say, is freedom. People should be free to get vaccinated or not and free to own and carry guns or not. This position entirely disregards the impact not only on the people opting for freedom but also on the rest of the population. The obvious analogy is seat belts: they are required to protect the people driving from physical harm as well as the broader population from the economic damage due to injuries in car accidents.
The justification for the Republican position on abortion is the inverse: the issue, they say, is not the freedom of a pregnant woman to choose but rather the right of a fetus, even a non-viable one, to live. Where that right is spelled out in the Constitution I don’t know. Certainly fetuses in the 18th century had no such right. I suspect that if men got pregnant the position would be reversed: freedom to choose would prevail, as it does for vaccines and guns.
Along with denying the validity of the 2020 election results and objecting to teaching about slavery in American schools, these three issues have come to define what it means to be a stalwart Republican today. Identity is not subject to logic or persuasion. Attempts to convince are treated instead as attacks on identity. Once people are convinced their identity is being attacked, they will regard almost any response as justified. Party becomes self. Self-defense is justified.
Thus the growing effort to bias elections irretrievably in the Republican direction, through gerrymandering, restrictions on voting, empowering of state legislatures to interfere in elections and even overturn election results. Texas has no problem with using the added members of the House of Representatives it is entitled to because of increased numbers of LatinX and other minorities to increase white Republican representation in Congress. Other Republican-controlled states will follow suit.
So the Republican positions on these three social issues, by establishing a clear identity, help to justify anti-democratic measures intended to keep Republicans in power no matter what. The consequent deaths are ignored. Those of you who follow the Balkans and the Middle East, about which I more commonly write, will understand what this is all about. Identity politics has come to America, with a vengeance.
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Notes of good news from Syria
I had the honor Sunday to meet and hear Kinan Azmeh, a Syrian clarinetist. His music and spirit were the best news I’ve heard from Syria in a long time, so here he is:
PS December 9. Here is some more from Kinan:
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Stevenson’s army, December 7
– Putin & Modi made nice in advance of Biden call.
– NYT reports WH signals on Putin call.
– FP says Ukraine desperate for arms.
– WaPo notes discrepancies if not hypocrisy in summit of democracies.
– Politico sees irony in Biden foreign policy appointments.
– British parliament “rife” with drugs.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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Getting back to the nuclear deal is the best option, the sooner the better
Iran is arguably already a threshold nuclear state. American withdrawal from the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, aka Iran nuclear deal) in 2018 has allowed Tehran to enrich uranium to 20%, develop more advanced centrifuges, and likely make other technological process. It is now well within one year of being able to fabricate a nuclear weapon. What difference does that make?
Not much, yet. Possession of nuclear weapons is not a major factor in today’s geopolitics, because they are unusable. As Richard Burt put it a decade ago:
The currency of power has changed from [nuclear] military power to economic, technological competitiveness.
http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1230/the-new-geopolitics-why-nuclear-weapons-no-longer-serve-us-interests
Israel’s growing power in the Middle East is not due to its nuclear weapons, which represent a guarantee of its existence rather than a means of projecting power. Arab states are now cozying up to Israel because of its economic and technological prowess, built on top of its military strength. Nuclear weapons have given Pakistan a means of deterring a conventional Indian invasion but have not made Pakistan India’s equal even within South Asia. India is by far the greater economic and technological power. Russia’s resurgence as a great power is not based on its nuclear weapons, which Moscow possessed in the 1990s when it was an economic basket case, but rather on its economic recovery and willingness to project conventional military force into Georgia, Ukraine, and Syria as well as hybrid warfare in the Balkans, Belarus, and elsewhere.
Nuclear weapons are still important for deterrence, but they do little more than guarantee mutual destruction.
So what’s wrong with Iran getting nuclear weapons, or the technology to make and deliver them within a few months time? The answer lies in Turkey and Saudi Arabia, not in Israel. Iran becoming a threshold nuclear state will inspire, if it has not already, its regional rivals to do likewise. Both President Erdogan and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman have both said as much. I’d guess Turkey is technologically capable on its own. Saudi Arabia may need to buy experts and technology abroad, but it is capable of doing so. Once four countries in the Middle East go nuclear, the risks of intentional or accidental nuclear warfare rise exponentially.
Bilateral deterrence works reasonably well, judging by experience not only with the Soviet Union/Russia and the United States but also with India and Pakistan, India and China, as well as China and the US. Multilateral deterrence poses much more complex issues, especially with countries that lack second strike capabilities and are geographically proximate. Preparation for launch of Iranian missiles that might (or might not) carry nuclear weapons could trigger responses not only from Israel, which in its submarines has second strike capability, but also from Turkey or Saudi Arabia, depending on the crisis du jour. Miscalculation is a key factor in war. The odds of a mistake are much higher the more countries are involved.
The question remains: can the world manage with Iran as a nuclear-threshold or even a nuclear country? The answer is yes, at least for a while, but that circumstance will not be in Iran’s favor. If it fails to negotiate a return to the JCPOA, the US will tighten its economic sanctions and apply them with more vigor. Israel will continue its “dirty war” of cyber attacks and assassinations of Iranian scientists. Europe and the UK will go along with the Americans, as their financial institutions and companies have too much to lose by displeasing Washington. Moscow won’t want Iran to go nuclear, but its companies may well be prepared to surreptiously help Tehran evade sanctions. Beijing may do likewise, as it has much to gain from acquiring Iranian oil at sanctions-induced relatively cheap prices.
The negotiations on return to the JCPOA adjourned Friday without progress and bitter words from both Washington and Tehran. Failure of the negotiations, whose aim is to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear threshold state, will thus aggravate East/West tensions and vastly complicate US relations with both Russia and China, which won’t take kindly to the tightening of sanctions. Iran’s economy, already well on the way to ruin, will deteriorate further. Israel will find its dirty war progressively more difficult and less effective as the Iranians learn how to counter it. Washington will want try to restrain Ankara and Riyadh from acquiring all the technology needed for nuclear weapons but will find it increasingly difficult to do so.
Getting back to the nuclear deal is the best option. The sooner the better.
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– Former Senator Bob Dole has died at 98. He was a masterful legislator and a witty partisan. NYT has some of his quips.
– WSJ says US is trying to block Chinese efforts to build an Atlantic base in Equitorial Guinea.
– NYT says Syria is a narcostate with illicit amphetamines its biggest export.
– FT says US has been sharing intelligence on Russian threat to Ukraine, convincing allies.
– Dan Drezner parses the stories on Ukraine.
– Jim Fallows analyzes the threats to US democracy, sees protection of minority rights morphing into minority rule.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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