“What is happening with the vandals in the White House is similar to what happened to Austral[as]ia in 1942 with the fall of Singapore.

“What is happening with the vandals in the White House is similar to what happened to Australia in 1942 with the fall of Singapore. I don’t consider America to be a reliable ally, as I used to.
    “Frankly, I think it is time we reconsidered our priorities and think carefully about our defence needs, now that we are having a more independent posture... Our future is now in a much more precarious state than it was on 19 January.
    “Trump 1.0 was bad enough. But Trump 2.0 is irrecoverable.”

~ former chief of the Australian Defence Force Admiral Chris Barrie, from the artic le '‘Vandals in the White House’ no longer reliable allies of Australia, former defence force chief says'

“'The US is utterly not a reliable ally. No one could see it in those terms ... [President] Trump is wilful and cavalier and so is his heir-apparent, JD Vance: they are laughing at alliance partners, whom they’ve almost studiously disowned.'
    "America had been fundamentally altered by Trump’s second administration and that American leadership of a rules-based international order was 'not returning'.
    "“'The speed of America disowning allies to embrace a new world order where it cuts deals with Russia and China has been so astonishing that people are struggling to grasp it, especially in this country, where people just cannot contemplate a world where America treats so lightly its alliance with Australia'.”

~ former Australian foreign affairs minister Bob Carr, from the article 'Bob Carr says Aukus a ‘colossal surrender of sovereignty’ if submarines do not arrive under Australian control'

'A Day of American Infamy' [update 2]

"In August 1941, about four months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt met with Winston Churchill aboard warships in Newfoundland’s Placentia Bay and agreed to the Atlantic Charter, a joint declaration by the world’s leading democratic powers on 'common principles' for a postwar world. ...
    "The Charter, and the alliance that came of it [including the supply of military equipment to Britain by Lend-Lease] is a high point of American statesmanship. On Friday in the Oval Office, the world witnessed the opposite. Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s embattled democratic leader, came to Washington prepared to sign away anything he could offer President Trump except his nation’s freedom, security and common sense. For that, he was rewarded with a lecture on manners from the most mendacious vulgarian and ungracious host ever to inhabit the White House.
    "If Roosevelt had told Churchill to sue for peace on any terms with Adolf Hitler and to fork over Britain’s coal reserves to the United States in exchange for no American security guarantees, it might have approximated what Trump did to Zelensky. Whatever one might say about how Zelensky played his cards poorly — either by failing to behave with the degree of all-fours sycophancy that Trump demands or to maintain his composure in the face of JD Vance’s disingenuous provocations — this was a day of American infamy.
    "Where do we go from here?"

~ Bret Stephens from his editorial 'A Day of American Infamy 

PICS: Bottom, war leader Winston Churchill at the White House 3 January 1942, wearing his air-raid suit (Imperial War Museum); top, a war leader at the White House with two thugs (Getty Images) 

UPDATE 1: 

"What does seem clear is that Trump is putting an end to the foreign policy the United States has pursued since the end of World War II. Indeed, his worldview seems to rest on two assumptions that run directly counter to the way in which, for all the serious differences between them, every president since 1945 has thought about America’s role in the world.
    
"The first is that Trump has a fundamentally zero-sum view of the world. America’s relationship with allies like Japan or the United Kingdom has been based on the assumption that both sides would benefit from the partnership. In particular, America would provide its allies with a security guarantee; in return, it would enjoy international stability, reap the benefits of free trade, and have huge sway over the rules governing the world order. Even if the United States might be a net contributor in the short run, expending more for its military budget than its partners, these alliances would over the long run serve the country’s 'enlightened self-interest.'

"Trump, by contrast, seems to believe that every deal has a winner and a loser; since American allies in Europe or East Asia are not unhappy about the current arrangements, this must mean that it is his nation that’s the sucker. ...

"The second assumption shaping Trump’s foreign policy is his belief that spheres of influence are the natural, and perhaps even the morally appropriate, way to organise international relations. ... [and] that maintaining an alliance structure that ignores spheres of influence is naive, needlessly costly, and fundamentally sentimental. ...

"Panama and Greenland are in America’s sphere of influence, and so Trump believes that he is entitled to make outrageous demands on them. Conversely, he seems to regard Ukraine as falling into Russia’s natural sphere of influence ...

"If Trump gets his way, the world will become much more transactional. America’s erstwhile allies in the western hemisphere will either need to learn to stand on their own feet or to pay financial tribute to their protector. Those which happen to be located in the vicinity of the world’s most powerful authoritarian countries will need to accommodate themselves to the diktat of Beijing or Moscow ..."

~ Yascha Mounk from his post 'Help Me Understand... The New World Order'

UPDATE 2:

"In light of the events of the past week [which includes the US siding with Russia and North Korea on a UN resolution condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and a three-ship Chinese naval circumnavigation of Australia], the Washington faction of NZ's Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Trade faces a new and major problem. ...

    "President Donald Trump’s affection for dictatorial regimes; the brutality of his transactional approach to international affairs; and his apparent repudiation of the 'rules-based international order' in favour of cold-eyed realpolitik; makes it difficult for America (and its increasingly apprehensive allies) to retain their footing on the moral high-ground.
    "It is difficult [therefore] to criticise the transactional elements of the relationships forged between China and the micro-states of the Pacific – the Cook Islands being only the latest in a succession of Chinese-initiated bilateral agreements negotiated in New Zealand’s 'back yard' – when the United States is demanding half of Ukraine’s rare earths in part-payment for the American munitions supplied to counter Russian aggression.
    "What those three Chinese warships have produced, however, is a much more compelling argument for aligning New Zealand’s defensive posture in general and its military procurement in particular with Australia’s. In the much colder and more brutal world that is fast emerging from the collapse of the 80-year-old Pax Americana, only the Australians can be relied upon to protect us – and only then if they are satisfied that the Kiwis are pulling their weight."

 ~Chris Trotter from his post 'What Are We Defending?'

"The capitalist achievement"

"It would be cold comfort if the gains since 1800, or 1960, had gone to the rich, as you hear claimed every day. But the poor have been the big winners. The great economist Joseph Schumpeter described “the capitalist achievement” in his 1942 book, 'Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy':

"'The capitalist process, not by coincidence, but by virtue of its mechanism, progressively raises the standards of life of the masses. Queen Elizabeth I owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.'

"Marie Antoinette is supposed to have said, when told that the peasants had no bread, 'Let them eat cake' (well, 'brioche,' but same difference.) In rich countries now, people worry about different problems. All of us, even the poor, have too much bread. We eat too much cake. We are on our way to a world in which everyone has 'first‐​world' problems such as bulging waistlines, cluttered closets, and nothing good to watch on Netflix."

~ Deirdre McCloskey and Art Carden from their 2020 book Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich [excerpted here]

 

 

But Hipkins never noticed

Accidental Prime Minister Chris Hipkins apparently never read history.

"There have been times when China has been more active in its history," said the child leader at the Labour rump's party conference. "But bear in mind," said the historically-challenged infant, "that China has never invaded any other country."

At this point I hand you over to Bob Edlin, who has a little list ...

Tibet attests to that being bollocks, although maybe it did not come into the curriculum at Waterloo Primary School, Hutt Intermediate and Hutt Valley Memorial College (later known as Petone College), where Hipkins was educated before he completed a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Politics and Criminology at Victoria University,
    In 1950, the newly established Chinese Communist Party launched an invasion of Tibet to incorporate it into the People’s Republic of China. ... 'By seizing Tibet, China gained access to a multitude of rich natural resources and easier access to the strategically significant Indian border.' ....
    'In February 1979, Chinese forces launched a surprise invasion of northern Vietnam ...' '... Diplomatic relations between the two countries were not fully restored until 1991.
    Then there’s tiny Bhutan .... [where] China Is Quietly Expanding Its Land Grabs in the Himalayas.... just its latest move to ... challenge its regional rival India in the Himalayas. ... Constant skirmishing on the border dates back to the Sino-Indian Border War in 1962.
    Then there’s Taiwan, [never ever a part of historical China and] the subject of constant threats from Beijing that it will one day take control of the country ... by force if necessary. ... China’s refusal to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has only added to those fears.

One could also mention Korea, in modern times (1950), which China invaded to maintain the hermit kingdom in its tyrannical solitude.  And in olden times (1636), when it invaded to maintain a vassal state.

And Mongolia, invaded in 1919 to crush dissent.

At this point we can see that China has torched, turned over and touched up nearly every single nation on its border. Yet according to Hipkins Junior, "China has never invaded any other country."

Waterloo Primary School, Hutt Intermediate and Hutt Valley Memorial College would all like a refund on their history teachers.

To AUKUS, or not to AUKUS?

"Economists think that the more interconnected countries are by trade and investment, the less likely warfare will occur between them. [See for instance the NOT PC posts 'Free Trade Is the Path to Peace & Prosperity' and 'The Horsemen of non-apocalypse']
    "On many occasions countries have consciously intensified those interconnections as an alternative to war.
    "Examples include the federation of the American states into the USA following a confederation after customs conflict between Maryland and Virginia; the European Coal and Steel Community (which evolved into the EU) tying up the French and Germany industries after three painful wars; ASEAN which was started after the Indonesian confrontation of Malaya ended; recently India has improved its physical and trade links with its neighbouring China and Pakistan.
    "Alas, economic relations between China and the US have deteriorated. That this occurred under both President Trump and President Biden suggests a structural tension arising from jostling over their places in the world. ...
     "One can explain the First World War and the follow-up Second World War as a consequence of Germany catching up in economic size to Britain and trying to find a comparable place in the world. (Neither noticed that the US was already bigger.) We may be grateful that moving from one global hegemon, Britain, to a second, the US, did not involve conflict between the two (although the two world wars accelerated the transfer from a weakened Britain). 
    "It is unlikely that China is going to be the next global hegemon. Rather, we are moving to a multipolar world where there is none. There is a plausible economic model which predicts that world economic output, and hence power, is moving to where the populations are – the situation before British industrialisation. It occurs because of the ease with which technology and capital can transfer between countries.
    "That does not mean that Chinese productivity will catch up to the American level – not in this century anyway. Factors like the resource base and social organisation mute the economics. ...
    "So behind today’s incipient economic warfare and military machinations we face a multipolar world whose shape is uncertain. ... The challenge for the world, then, is how to get from the current world order, in which the US acts the hegemon, to a multipolar world in which the US is but one of four or so big economies. Full multipolarity may be less than a quarter of a century away.
    "The US does not seem to see the issue this way. It is largely preoccupied with the short-term task of trying to maintain its current hegemony in a world whose order it sees as not too different from the immediate post-war one. ....
    "New Zealand may have little influence over the evolving world order. In so far as we have, we should be putting our effort in assisting it to move towards the reality of multipolarity. Ultimately New Zealand is having to balance its short-term interests against its long-term ones. I am not sure our friends always understand this."

~ Brian Easton from hist post 'Trading Towards A Multipolar World'

"...capitalism would destroy itself by breeding a 'new class...' "

"Joseph Epstein’s [article] 'Socialists Don’t Know History' ... on the abysmal historical knowledge of young people brings to mind the prophesy of the keenest of economists, Joseph Schumpeter, in 1942 when he said that capitalism would destroy itself by breeding a 'new class: bureaucrats, intellectuals, professors, lawyers, journalists, all of them beneficiaries and, in fact, parasitical on them and yet, all of them opposed to the ethos of wealth production, of saving and of allocating resources to economic productivity.' The 77 years since then has proven Schumpeter a major prophet."

~ Larry W. White, from his 2019 letter to the Wall Street Journal. Hat tip The Dangerous Economist, who reposts a more similar yet more detailed 1992 article by Robert Samuelson 'Schumpeter: The Prophet'

"Free markets are the only — the *only* — cure for poverty."

 

Transcript here, from the Yaron Brook Show.

More news from the War on Drugs™

"When President Nixon declared drug addiction Public Enemy Number One in 1971, it was with his 1969 declaration to Congress that the full forces of government must be marshalled “to cope with this growing menace to the general welfare of the United States.” Again, the nation was told, we would reduce crime and poverty, lower the scope and costs of incarceration, and stamp out a danger to the American family.
    "It is a vast understatement to say that these assurances were wrong ...
    "As of 2015, the rate of prisoners as a function of the population has grown from 100 per 100,000 in the period before Nixonian drug policy to over 500 per 100,000. As a result, the United States has become the world’s largest jailer, both in absolute terms and in rate. ...
    "Between 1973 and 2013, over $1 trillion was spent on drug enforcement in the U.S. alone. Yet, in 2016, Americans spent $150 billion on heroin, methamphetamines, cocaine, and marijuana, which doesn’t even factor in other classes of illicit drugs. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of these sunk opportunity costs is that despite a regime of increasing funding for supply-side enforcement, drug prices have continued to decline over the last four decades. This isn’t to say that they exist in cost parity with legal substances; their prices are still higher. What it does say is that current policy does little to abate demand.
    "Moreover, instead of reducing crime, prohibition simply creates more criminals. Everyone involved in the drug market, from supplier to distributor to consumer, is automatically a criminal. Absent the property rights protections and dispute resolution apparatus available via normal legal channels, interested parties must resolve their own conflicts, often leading to violent means. ...
    "Just as it was with alcohol during Prohibition, quality control is an issue with illegal drugs. As we discussed earlier, prohibitory laws create incentives to minimise the costs of production and transport while maximising profit, which in turn trends towards potency as the major concern. Because the product is manufactured by local entrepreneurs, however organised, there are no industry-wide safety standards. Hence, the current issue of heroin laced with fentanyl, for example. This leads to an increase in drug-related overdoses, and other related problems.
    "These are just a few of the more obvious social costs related to the War on Drugs™."

~ Tarnell Brown from his post 'Nothing New Thing Under the Sun: Prohibition, Drugs and the Iron Law'

"Tribalism Divides Us — Only Individualism Can Unite Us"

 

"There is no surer way to infect mankind with hatred — brute, blind, virulent hatred—than by splitting it into ethnic groups or tribes. If a man believes that his own character is determined at birth in some unknown, ineffable way, and that the characters of all strangers are determined in the same way — then no communication, no understanding, no persuasion is possible among them, only mutual fear, suspicion, and hatred. Tribal or ethnic rule has existed, at some time, in every part of the world, and, in some country, in every period of mankind’s history. The record of hatred [and its result] is always the same."

~ Ayn Rand, from her 1977 lecture 'Global Balkanisation,' examining the meaning of “ethnicity” and the consequences of “modern tribalism” in politics -- quoted in Tom Bowden's post 'Tribalism Divides Us — Only Individualism Can Unite Us'

 

"Far from being a project of US imperialism, NATO expansion has been a process driven by the small and vulnerable countries, which are also the most fundamentally anti-imperialist ones"

"In order to accept the premise that Russia could have vetoed former Soviet or Eastern bloc states from ever choosing to enter into certain international alliances, it is first necessary to deny those states full sovereignty.... It is not often acknowledged that entertaining this Russian talking point capitulates to the sphere-of-influence politics of the Cold War...
    "The expansion of NATO since the end of the Cold War is often discussed solely as a US policy decision. But this ignores the goals and interests of the small countries, whose politicians made the case for NATO membership much more forcefully than anyone in Washington, and often in the teeth of American doubts and objections....
    "It had often been the fate of the small nations of Europe to be dominated by the larger ones.... An important lesson of the 20th century was that, while appeasement encouraged aggressors, strength deterred them. And it had been the strength of the United States which had changed the course of European history.... Still, Europeans have often struggled to convince Americans that it is in their interests to support freedom on the European continent. ...
    "Far from being a project of US imperialism, NATO expansion has been a process driven by the small and vulnerable countries, which are also the most fundamentally anti-imperialist ones, since their continued existence is predicated upon their ability to deter imperialist neighbours. While many of the threatening imperialisms of the European past have happily vanished, the Russian one maintains its claims.... It is for this reason that a Ukrainian victory—in teaching the Russians where their borders lie—could end the Russian imperial story for good, and hasten the day when a civilisation at ease with itself can live in harmony beside Europe."

~ Oscar Clarke, from his post 'When Havel Met Biden'

Productivity? Or the opposite... ?

"Anyway, here is how the chart of labour productivity levels looks [now] across countries....

"[I]f there is something to that point [that measurements may differ across countries] ... [we might make] comparisons of how New Zealand has or has not dropped down the OECD league tables ... over the last 10 years ... a period half governed by Labour and half by National.
    "Here I’ve shown (ranked top to bottom) the levels of real GDP for 2012 and 2022, and in the final column I’ve identified where a country has changed by more than two rankings over that decade:

"Most of the material movements are in the bottom half of the table. There are some stellar performers, most notably Turkey and Poland. And there are some really really mediocre ones: Portugal and our own New Zealand. We’ve dropped six ranking places in a club of only 37 members in just a decade....
    "But there is no sign that either of our major parties (well, or the minor parties) care, or have any ideas, any credible narrative, to reverse our economic decline."

~ Michael Reddell, from his post 'Does any political party care?'

UPDATE: To make the comparisons even clearer ... or more stark:

This is not normal

Source: Liabilities data for 1916–2023 from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, statistical release H.4.1, Factors Affecting Reserve Balances of Depository Institutions and Condition Statement of Federal Reserve Banks, via FRED; and M2 money supply data for 1959–2023 from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, statistical release H.6, Money Stock Measures, via FRED. Note: The solid trend line (1) is a curve fit to the data between 1965 and 2003. The solid trend line (2) is a double exponential curve fit to the data after 2003. The two world wars are indicated by arrows pointing to the pink regions. Recessions are indicated by sepia-colored strips.

"The world since 1900 has experienced two major world-encompassing wars. Wars cost a lot of money, and countries—even if they were once on a gold standard—usually start printing massive amounts of money to finance their wars....
    "[Yet i]f we take the real value of the expansion of U.S. Federal Reserve liabilities between 1934 and 1963 due to World War II, and compare this to the total liabilities from 2008 to 2023, we find [this most recent period] to be 2.3 times larger at its peak than it was in World War II!"

~ John Hartnett. from his post 'Has World War II Already Begun?' [emphasis mine]

"NZ has put off change for 50 years. The bill will arrive."

"We should hold a national golden jubilee for the half century that has passed since the last time we received more from overseas than we spent: 1973. Same year the Watergate hearings began in the US, Norm Kirk was prime minister and colour TV arrived in New Zealand.
    "We’ve been losing ground for a long time....
    "We have put off change for 50 years. The bill will arrive."

~Josie Pagani, from her op-ed 'The economy is on a precipice and every choice available to us is hard '

"While unemployment fluctuates, the underlying core of a quarter-of-a-million sick people or sole parents is entrenched"

From the Welfare Working Group's 2010 report: Long-Term Welfare Dependency: The Issues

 

"Most working-age welfare benefits were introduced in the late 1930s, and for the next thirty years recipients comprised just 2 percent of the population and were overwhelmingly widows and invalids. The explosion in welfare began from the mid-seventies.
    "Getting to my point, while unemployment fluctuates the underlying core of [a quarter-of-a-million] sick people or sole parents is entrenched. The economy has to carry this population whether times are good or bad, whether there are jobs or not.
    "WHY this situation has developed - or been allowed to develop - could fill a thesis. But many of you will have lived through the entire period and can probably share some valuable observations. Feel free."

~ Lindsay Mitchell, from her post 'The disconnection between unemployment and welfare dependency'

Scientists deliver final ‘final warning’ on 'climate crisis'

"UN climate warnings are like the village communist predicting the imminent demise of capitalism every week – and about as likely to happen.... 

    "In 2021 it was a 'Code Red for Humanity'...
    "2020 it was Yale’s turn to issue the ... ‘final warning’ on climate: ‘It’s all on us, here, now,’ says reviewer....
    "You can find final warnings and last chances stretching all the way back to 1989 if you can find them using one of our woke search engines:

U.N. Predicts Disaster if Global Warming Not Checked
PETER JAMES SPIELMANN June 30, 1989
UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000....

"Before anyone tries to claim the 1989 claim was not a real UN warning, even Snopes's fact checkers admit this was a real UN warning;...
    "My only concern in this ridiculous charade, is for the naive younger people who take these warnings seriously, and feel distressed that older people are not acting, are not showing any sense of urgency about preventing the imminent end of the world.
    "But for some people at least, that distress doesn’t last forever. As you get older, you get wiser, at least in terms of learning how to judge the credibility of others. How many times can a rational person watch the UN and other alleged authority figures get it dead wrong, and still give unquestioning acceptance to their latest wild predictions of imminent disaster."

~ Eric Worrall, from his post 'IPCC Issues their Annual Final Climate Warning'

20 Years On: "The case for removing the worst of the Arab prison states looks more justifiable than ever, even as the blunders involved in its execution look even more unpardonable...."

"The case for removing the worst of the Arab prison states looks more justifiable than ever, even as the blunders involved in its execution look even more unpardonable....
    "[The] account [must begin] with the singular figure of Saddam Hussein. The decision to employ force cannot be understood without taking stock of the dictator’s perverse 'role and agency,' and no amount of revisionism can efface his incessant malice, aggression, and volatility.
    "The regime of absolute control and capricious terror in Baghdad established what the Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya called a 'republic of fear, or what the country’s first post-war president, Jalal Talabani, once described as 'a concentration camp above ground and a mass grave beneath it.' 

    "Before the arrival of coalition forces, Iraq was an abattoir of repression at home, and a font of menace and violence abroad. Although the rule of the Ba’ath Party has seldom been omitted from retrospective evaluations of the causes of the war, it has generally been given short shrift. It’s therefore not especially surprising that Saddam Hussein is now widely regarded as a phantom threat, and that the war has come to be perceived as the outcome of a conspiracy.
    "[We should not overlook] the moral and strategic challenges posed to American power by Iraq’s ancien régime. Perhaps one anecdote will illuminate the character of the modern totalitarian state the Ba’athists modeled on those of Hitler and Stalin. On July 22nd, 1979, just days after he assumed the presidency of Iraq, Saddam Hussein convened an urgent assembly of the Ba’ath Party leadership. One of his lieutenants opened the meeting by announcing a treasonous plot in which the conspirators were said to be present, and an old party rival bearing the signs of torture was produced to identify the 68 supposed collaborators. As the names were haltingly recited and the accused were detained, panic swept the room. Desperate to assure the new leader of their loyalty, some of the remaining delegates broke into hysterical chants of 'Long live Saddam!' 

 

    "A few days later, 22 of the 68 accused were brought to the courtyard of the same building for execution. The penalty would be meted out by the delegates themselves, to whom Hussein personally handed pistols, thereby ensuring their complicity with the new order.
    "The bloody origins of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship were indicative of the means of his rule. For decades, he would pursue forcible domination of the Middle East, and vast quantities of Iraq’s petroleum revenue were devoted to purchasing the instruments of war and genocide. The ambition to lay his hands on weapons of mass destruction persisted even in the face of daunting obstacles. In 1975, four years before he became president, the Iraqi Ba’athists inked a deal with French prime minister Jacques Chirac to acquire a nuclear reactor. The facility was later destroyed by an Israeli airstrike, but not even this brush with foreign power on Iraqi soil caused a rethink of the country’s nuclear aspirations. As Saddam later confessed to his American interrogators, these aspirations never ceased and were judged a necessary insurance policy for a regime dedicated to expansionism. As Saddam himself later put it, 'the boundaries of our aims and ambitions … extend through the whole Arab homeland.'...
    "The unintended consequence [however] of destroying Iraq’s Ba’athist tyranny without securing the institutions of free government was to release forces of barbarism straight out of [Conrad's] Heart of Darkness. But whatever may be said of this Rousseauian failure of imagination on the part of the American government, it scarcely undermined the casus belli. In fact, the vicious forces empowered by Saddam Hussein that swarmed into the power vacuum after his fall were part of the case for war to begin with. The evisceration of Iraqi civil society and the increasingly Islamist character of Ba’athist rule prefigured the descent into mayhem after he was swept from power. Had his reign been permitted to continue, the most plausible scenario would have been the eventual implosion of the regime under its own weight, turning a rogue state into a failed state.
    ... Advocates of a more humble foreign policy are always ready to explain the risks of using power, and seldom address the risks of not doing so. In the case of Saddam Hussein, this is a colossal mistake. It is perfectly possible to argue that the manifold blunders involved in the policy of ushering Iraq into a new era pale in comparison to the failure of refusing to confront its insane regime for so long.
    "To put the matter another way: Whatever the costs of the US military engagement in Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s nightmarish tyranny was never going to be anything approaching a compliant partner in the international order. In all likelihood, it was going to enlarge its own power at the expense of every decent movement and state in its orbit until it was removed by force or collapsed into mayhem. By 2003, invading forces encountered a country already in an advanced state of disarray. Even more than other autocracies that abound in the Arab world, Ba’athist Iraq had kept society under a lid of oppression, stultifying the social, political, and economic development of the country. In due course, its implosion—whether by internal revolt or fratricide between the despot’s sons—would have unleashed a hideous orgy of violence. Absent the helping hand of international security forces, post-Saddam Iraq would have made the bloodletting of the Lebanese civil war look tame by comparison.
    "The experiment in participatory politics in postwar Iraq has been a messy and sometimes nasty arena of sectarian rivalry and confessional jostling.... The Ba’athist-Bin Ladenist forces arrayed against the new Iraq were eventually routed, but not before inflicting grievous wounds, both in Iraq and on the American psyche. The costs and failures of the war stimulated a remarkable coincidence of view between cynical conservatives and soft-headed progressives across the West that remains largely intact to this day. The public lost faith in the traditional mission of US foreign policy to shore up the international system. Despite America’s robust material support for Ukraine, it’s clear that the cause of American activism has not quite recovered from the war in Iraq.
    "Some two decades after the Iraq War was launched, its hold on America’s imagination has not slipped. But if it’s to be a determining influence over Americans’ view of the world and their role in it, a more sober consideration of its lessons is needed. Greater accuracy in our hindsight will sharpen our foresight. It therefore remains a relevant question whether the world would be better off were Saddam Hussein and his psychopathic sons still in power in Baghdad. Years after the demise of the Arab awakening, the case for removing the worst of the Arab prison states looks more justifiable than ever, even as the blunders involved in its execution look even more unpardonable."

~ Brian Stewart, from his post 'Chronicle of a WAR, 20 Years On'

* * * *

"... most worryingly of all, the West has forgotten how to set up a successful civil government in an occupied area. In the long run this last concern is the most serious, and it might mean that the brutality becomes more visible, and [the conquered country] more bloodstained.
    "And it is serious for another reason. What about the other terrorist-supporting governments that should be in George W. Bush's sights? If terrorism is to be toppled then the governments of Libya, Sudan, Jordan, Syria, Iran and Iraq must be toppled and replaced - and NOT with the fascist-leaning puppets that the US has supported in the past...
    "If Bush can't set up successful civil governments in these countries, then he may have to call off the War Against Terrorism early, just as his father called off the Gulf War early for the self-same reason.
    "As you may recall, the Gulf War ended in 1991 with the US reluctant to finish the war as they should have - with the toppling of Saddam Hussein. When Bush senior stopped the turkey shoot on the road to Baghdad, it wasn't just a loss of courage - it was also the realisation that they had no end-game, that they wouldn't know what to do when they got there."

~ me, from my 2001 post 'The Roots of Peace'

* * * * 

"[T]he notion that the Bush administration deceived the American people has become the accepted narrative of how we went to war.
    "Yet in spite of all the accusations of White House 'manipulation' -- that it pressured intelligence analysts into connecting Hussein and Al Qaeda and concocted evidence about weapons of mass destruction -- administration critics continually demonstrate an inability to distinguish making claims based on flawed intelligence from knowingly propagating falsehoods.
    "In 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously approved a report acknowledging that it “did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments.” The following year, the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report similarly found 'no indication that the intelligence community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction'....
    "Iraq-Al Qaeda links were 'substantiated by intelligence information.' The same goes for claims about Hussein’s possession of biological and chemical weapons, as well as his alleged operation of a nuclear weapons programme.
    "Four years on from the first Senate Intelligence Committee report, war critics, old and newfangled, still don’t get that a lie is an act of deliberate, not unwitting, deception. If Democrats [and others who] wish to contend they were 'misled' into war, they should vent their spleen at the CIA....
    "This may sound like ancient history, but it matters. After Sept. 11, President Bush did not want to risk allowing Hussein, who had twice invaded neighbouring nations, murdered more than 1 million Iraqis and stood in violation of 16 U.N. Security Council resolutions, to remain in possession of what he believed were stocks of chemical and biological warheads and a nuclear weapons program. By glossing over this history, the ... lies-led-to-war narrative provides false comfort in a world of significant dangers."

~ Los Angeles Times, from their 2008 op-ed 'The White House Didn't Lie About Iraq'

* * * * 

"While mistakes were made by both the Bush administration and the Obama administration, those mistakes were of different kinds and of different magnitudes in their consequences, though both sets of mistakes are worth thinking about, so that so much tragic waste of blood and treasure does not happen again.

    "Whether it was a mistake to invade Iraq in the first place is something that will no doubt be debated by historians and others for years to come. But, despite things that could have been done differently in Iraq during the Bush administration, in the end President Bush listened to his generals and launched the military 'surge' that crushed the terrorist insurgents and made Iraq a viable country.
    "The most solid confirmations of the military success in Iraq were the intercepted messages from Al Qaeda operatives in Iraq to their leaders in Pakistan that there was no point sending more insurgents, because they now had no chance of prevailing against American forces. This was the situation that Barack Obama inherited — and lost.
    "Going back to square one, what lessons might we learn from the whole experience of the Iraq war? If nothing else, we should never again imagine that we can engage in 'nation-building' in the sweeping sense that term acquired in Iraq — least of all building a democratic Arab nation in a region of the world that has never had such a thing in a history that goes back thousands of years.
    "Human beings are not inert building blocks, and democracy has prerequisites that Western nations took centuries to develop. Perhaps the reshaping of German society and Japanese society under American occupation after World War II made such a project seem doable in Iraq.
    "Had the Bush administration pulled it off, such an achievement in the Middle East could have been a magnificent gift to the entire world, bringing peace to a region that has been the spearhead of war and international terrorism....
    "Despite the mistakes that were made in Iraq, it was still a viable country until Barack Obama made the headstrong decision to pull out all the troops, ignoring his own military advisers, just so he could claim to have restored 'peace,' when in fact he invited chaos and defeat.."

~ Thomas Sowell, from his 2015 post 'Who Lost Iraq?'

"As always there are lessons both to avoid and to emulate from history, and a lesson too from this capitulation: 

• Subduing and modifying Japan and putting it on a path to peace and prosperity after WWII: Six years and the destruction of Shintoism as an ethical code.
• Reconstructing Germany and setting it on a path to peace and prosperity after WWII: Seven years, and the destruction of Nazism as an ideology.
• Reconstructing Iraq (including hunting down and killing the killers and those who supply them) and setting Iraq on a path to peace and prosperity: Too difficult. 

"Setting both Germany and Japan on the path to peace and prosperity -- making havens of peace and prosperity at the heart of Europe and at the door to Asia, and putting down the twin bacilli of Shinto nationalism and German national socialism -- this was selfishly important to anyone who valued a peaceful world ravaged by decades of strife and war, and was done by people who knew what they were doing. Just as selfishly important now would [have been] a haven of secular peace in the ravaged Middle East.
    "Now I grant you that the knowledge of how to set up a country from the rubble has clearly been lost (just another symptom of the modern-day philosophical collapse), and German and Japanese reconstruction did not have sworn enemies in the country next door supplying arms, money and training to brainwashed killers (that this continues so brazenly is another symptom of the timidity brought to the war against Islamic totalitarianism), but surely there should be recognition that setting up a post-war country ravaged by tribal and religious conflict takes years, not months, and that making a haven in the Middle East for peace and prosperity is of selfish importance to everyone in the west."

~ me, from my 2007 post 'Democrats Vote for Cut and Run'

"In 1945, the knowledge existed to successfully rebuild countries after they'd been liberated from savagery. But by 1991's Gulf War, even the victors had realised that knowledge had gone. Disappeared. Gone with the wind. So they didn't drive to Baghdad, because they knew enough to know they wouldn't know what to do when they got there.

    "They still don't."

~ me from my 2021 post, 'Kabul'

Treatyism and re-tribalism

"The 1840 Treaty of Waitangi was, like all human products, of its time and place. One aim – shared by British and Maori signatories alike – was to establish the rule of law by imposing British sovereignty through British governance. Sovereignty and governance go together as two sides of the same coin – with intertwined meaning. In the decades which followed, the treaty lost relevance in the new colonial society. This is the case with all historical treaties.
    "Revived in the 1970s as the symbol of a cultural renaissance, the treaty was captured by retribalists in the 1980s to serve as the ideological manifesto for the envisaged order – a reconstituted New Zealand. It was given a ‘spirit’ to take it above and beyond its historical location so that it could mean whatever retribalists say it means.
    "This treatyist ideology successfully promotes the false claim of partnership between the government and the tribes. However there is a deeper more insidious strategy propelling us to tribal ethno-nationalism. It is the collapse of the separation between the economic and political spheres....
    "The corporate tribes have already acquired considerable governance entitlements – the next and final step is tribal sovereignty. It’s a coup d’etat in all but name, accomplished not by force but by ideology – enabled by a compliant media.
    "Given the enormous success of retribalism is it too late to reclaim New Zealand from the relentless march to blood and soil ethno-nationalism? ...  

    "Retribalism has attacked ... democracy through the covert use of ideology. I want to talk specifically about how this is occurring ...

    "[First] the treaty is transformed from an historical document to a sacred text.... [and then] the second tactic comes into play. It is the diversion tactic. This ‘how many angels on a pinhead’ tactic operates by diverting us into echo-chamber squabbles – about the 1840 meaning of this word, that word, this intention, that intention. This is all interesting and important material for historians but our concern should be, not what the treaty said in 1840 – those days are gone – it served the purpose of the time – but what it is being used to say today – and for what purpose....

    "[Second], our education system is indoctrinating children into retribalism. The so-called ‘decolonisation’ and ‘indigenisation’ of the curriculum is the method. This is a disaster. Decolonisation will destroy the very means by which each generation acquires reasoned knowledge, and in so doing, the ability to reason....

    "[Finally], an ideology becomes omnipotent when it is not challenged. In a democracy the media should inform us of all competing interests and in all their complexity. We, the people, need to know everything, because it is us who will decide what should happen. Mainstream media has failed to do this – indeed is culpable in embedding treatyism."

~ Elizabeth Rata, from her 2022 speech 'In Defence of Democracy'

Why is life 255 times better now than in 1800?

"Why life is 255 times better now than in 1800: [because] people have 8.5 times more stuff[1]; they have 5 times as much time to enjoy it[2]; and there are 6 times as many people.[3]"

~ philosopher Stephen Hicks doing philosophy-maths in his post 'Why life is 255 times better now than in 1800'

NOTES (page references are to Deirdre McCloskey's 2006 book The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce):

1. Wealth: “The amount of goods and services produced and consumed by the average person on the planet has risen since 1800 by a factor of about eight and a half” (p. 16). The items consumed include more and better food, cleaner water, education, health care, safer technologies, and so on. Consequently:

2. Life expectancy: Increased wealth “raised the expectation of life at birth in the world from roughly 26 years in 1820 to 66 years in 2000” (p. 18). So if one is an adult by, say, age 16, the average amount of adult life rose from 10 years in 1820 to 50 years in 2000 — a factor of 5.

3. Population: “The world’s population increased from 1800 to 2000 by a factor of about six” (p. 15).

 

"Tribalism Divides Us — Only Individualism Can Unite Us"

"There is no surer way to infect mankind with hatred — brute, blind, virulent hatred—than by splitting it into ethnic groups or tribes. If a man believes that his own character is determined at birth in some unknown, ineffable way, and that the characters of all strangers are determined in the same way — then no communication, no understanding, no persuasion is possible among them, only mutual fear, suspicion, and hatred. Tribal or ethnic rule has existed, at some time, in every part of the world, and, in some country, in every period of mankind’s history. The record of hatred [and its result] is always the same."

~ Ayn Rand, from her 1977 lecture 'Global Balkanisation,' examining the meaning of “ethnicity” and the consequences of “modern tribalism” in politics -- quoted in Tom Bowden's post 'Tribalism Divides Us — Only Individualism Can Unite Us'

Is there a difference between a "market society" and a capitalist one? What exactly makes the difference that makes that difference, and on which side of that divide does, and will, China sit? Author of the book 'Is Capitalism Sustainable' Michael Munger answers in this guest post ...

China: A House Divided

BY MICHAEL MUNGER

THERE HAVE BEEN CLAIMS that China’s enormous economic growth and widely shared prosperity are the result of turning to capitalism. I think this is not true; China is not capitalist.

Of course, that depends on having a definition of capitalism that is clear, and that does not simply apply to all nations. It also requires a definition that is not so naively aspirational that no nation could satisfy the conditions to qualify as truly capitalist, because of the tendency toward cronyism in democracies.

I have come to think of it in terms of concentric circles, each smaller than, and fully contained in, the larger category. For me, the categories are exchange relations, market societies, and capitalism. All capitalist countries are market societies, and use exchange relations. But many market societies are not capitalist.

Exchange relations

EXCHANGE IS A MEANS of improving the welfare of both (all) parties to an exchange, if the exchange is voluntary. I have written a number of papers (this, and this) on the nature of “truly voluntary,” or euvoluntary, exchanges. Exchange that is not voluntary, but coerced by human agency, is theft. Such exchanges can look voluntary, if routinized over time, as in the case of Mancur Olson’s “stationary bandit.”

Voluntary exchange must leave the exchangers better off, because they are not obliged to exchange and yet choose to do so. The bases of voluntary exchange are three:

1. Different preferences, same endowments
2. Different endowments, same preferences
3. Division of labour, with specialisation that creates what looks like different endowments, on steroids

More simply, if I like bananas and you like oranges, and we both have bananas and oranges, then I’ll give up some of my oranges in exchange for your bananas, and we are both better off, even with the same total amount of stuff. If I have many bananas, and you have many oranges, and we both like fruit salad, again we exchange and we are both better off.

The really interesting example is the one that Adam Smith and David Ricardo described, resulting from division of labour and comparative advantage. If we were all clones, but specialised, we would soon have more stuff than if each of us supplied all of our own individual needs. And if that specialisation were further guided by differences in endowments, climate, natural resources, and local skills, the increase in the total amount of products available is redoubled and redoubled again.

Exchange is likely to have been common in the earliest days of human clans and tribes of hunter-gatherers. Groups of 150 roaming the terrain could likely find most of what they needed. But some people learned how to make clothing, and others learned how to make spear points and attach those sharpened stones to sticks to make spears. Division of labour, even at this level, rewarded tribes that fostered internal specialisation, so that the group could increase its total output.

But, as Adam Smith noted, division of labour is limited by the extent of the market. So the pressure to extend exchange beyond internal specialisation in a tribe created rewards to figuring out how to multiply transactions over greater distances and larger numbers of people who can specialise.

Market relations

EXCHANGE, IN THE SENSE of barter, is cumbersome, and transaction costs can hinder all but the simplest exchanges. Barter requires a “double coincidence of wants,” where I want what you have but we can only exchange if I happen to have something that you want in exchange, and we can find each other.

Markets are a subset of exchange relations where institutions have emerged, or perhaps been created, to reduce the transaction costs of impersonal and geographically extensive exchange. Some widely accepted currency, an accounting system, a shared system of weights and measures, and a system for adjudicating disputes over contract breaches using rules that are consistent and predictable, all transform simple exchange into something else entirely. Markets enable the degree of division of labour to reach much greater elaboration, and create much faster growth in the wealth of market participants. Adam Smith’s observation that division of labour is limited by the extent of the market is a recognition that increasing returns are not only the source of wealth, but a requirement that commercial society evolves institutions to handle the increased volume of trade, and the commodification of many aspects of human activity.

Capitalism

THE CONSTRAINT ON THE expansion of markets is partly the difficulty of extending shared commercial norms over physical and cultural distances. But markets and their consequent division of labour can also be held back by a lack of liquid capital. Physical capital is the buildings, machines, tools, and technology that increase the productivity of labor and foster the creation of products and services. Liquid capital is the product of saving, or foregone consumption, that allows entrepreneurs to use abstract value in the form of money to give physical form to their conceptions of production. The genius of capitalism in the US can be seen in Silicon Valley or Wall Street, where “venture capitalists” accept shares of ownership in a potential venture after they provide the liquidity that the entrepreneurial founders need to give their ideas physical shape and structure. This conversion of the capital structure from liquid form, which could be invested anywhere, into physical form, which is now at risk because it cannot be easily turned back into cash, is both the source of profit and the source of risk in a capitalist system.

Capitalism, however, also creates concentrations of economic power because of the ability of successful investors and entrepreneurs to gather large amounts of wealth. Ownership in a capitalist system is both the mechanism for raising liquid capital—by selling shares that are claims against the value of future profits—and a means of controlling substantial resources independent from state direction and control. The private ownership of tools and materials that characterise a market system are on a much smaller scale than the ownership of land and a controlling interest in the shares of joint stock corporations. Nations that do not have the corporate form of private ownership are likely to run up against capital constraints, as it is difficult to generate liquidity on a scale, and in a time frame, that allows the successful exploitation of profit opportunities.

So, is China Capitalist?

WHICH BRINGS ME BACK to the question posed at the outset: Is China capitalist? The answer is NO; China is a commercial market system, [what Ludwig Von Mises called a "hampered market"] but it is not capitalist. China’s great increase in total wealth, and the widely distributed nature of that increase in prosperity resulting in an unprecedented decline in poverty, were the product of the adoption of market reforms starting in 1978. There were some early hopes that China might continue to evolve in the direction of capitalism, but the government has (correctly) seen that actual capitalism would create what are, in effect, countervailing centers of power in great concentrations of wealth in the hands of owners of corporations.

Markets are systems that produce wealth and sharply reduce poverty. Capitalism is a system for raising liquid capital and creating countervailing power centers that constrain totalitarian aspirations of government. As long as the Chinese state is primarily centralized and authoritarian, capitalism will be blocked. But that means that Chinese economic growth will be strangled, as capital becomes more and more constrained.

To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, the Chinese commercial state cannot stand divided against itself. China will not cease to exist, but it will cease to be divided. It will become all authoritarian, or it will become capitalist.

MICHAEL MUNGER is a Professor of Political Science, Economics, and Public Policy at Duke University and Senior Fellow of the American Institute for Economic Research.
His degrees are from Davidson College, Washingon University in St. Louis, and Washington University, and his books include the best-selling Is Capitalism Sustainable?.
Munger’s research interests include regulation, political institutions, and political economy.

This post first appeared at the AIER blog.