Sunday Cutdown XVII
Clearing my inbox of stories I want to document
1) The war with China will be completely droned
VOX: Why the Pentagon wants to build thousands of easily replaceable, AI-enabled drones
THE TELEGRAPH: As Chinese invasion looms, only a mighty drone strike armada can save Taiwan
From the VOX story:
It’s hard to overstate the level of hype currently surrounding military drones. Just in the past week, former senior US military commanders have penned commentaries comparing drones, in terms of their revolutionary potential, to the development of the phalanx formation that helped make Alexander the Great’s conquest possible, and suggesting they may make the US Air Force obsolete.
It’s not hard to understand why. The ongoing war in Ukraine has seen drones transform from a bespoke counterterrorism tool — one largely controlled by the US and its allies — into a ubiquitous feature of the modern battlefield.
The Military Singularity is coming for the entire Air Force, it now seems.
It’s also coming for the entire “pacing threat” that is China, meaning a lot of US military plans for how we’d prevent China’s successful invasion are being recast into the sort of network/swarm warfare that we dreamt about in the Office of Force Transformation in the Pentagon in the years after 9/11.
This is presented as something threatening to the US military’s technological superiority AND as an answer to the threat of massed forced represented by the PLA, but the logic is ancient. From the VOX piece:
With drones, the military with the advantage isn’t necessarily the one with the most advanced or most powerful weapons, but the one that has these new weapons en masse and can quickly build and replace them.
Casting this as somehow new to the American Way of War is a bit ahistoric: We have always won with more stuff delivered faster to the battlefield.
I mean, reread your WWII history.
Thus, the only threat the US faces here is bureaucratic — as in, to its Cold War system of weapons, systems, and platform development, which the Pentagon is radically updating with the whole Replicator initiative designed to crank cheap and disposable drones by the gajillions (eventually).
The Military Singularity approaches with ever faster speed, with the Ukraine war transforming our preparations for the Taiwan conflict. I can’t see anything stopping it now.
2) America’s top-down defense vs China’s bottom-up security
FOREIGN AFFAIRS: Playing Both Sides of the U.S.-Chinese Rivalry
Good article that makes the same basic argument I make in America’s New Map: America leads with defense, China leads with security. The former approach captures the local military, but the latter captures the local government and society.
As I say in the book:
As this era’s globalization is vertically consolidated along South-North lines, security increasingly displaces defense. Security leverages surveillance, and effective surveillance depends on access and sensors, the most important of which is a smartphone—the modern data chokepoint blending consumer activity with personal security. Those who own the sensors determine the access. That is the nature of the security competition now underway among our five superpowers, where Apple versus Huawei is a more compelling throughline than US Navy carriers versus China’s carrier-killer missiles.
In other words, we waging a 20th century, pre-globalization struggle in a 21st century, post-globalization landscape. Again from the book:
Today, America insists on bringing a knife to the gunfight that is the superpower brand war—a game China is winning stone by stone. Oblivious to Beijing’s strategy, Washington frames the contest along familiar lines—namely, the poker-like military showdown over Taiwan. While Washington dutifully marshals its defense budget to prepare for the next generation of high-tech warfare (knife), Beijing calmly executes its Belt and Road Initiative to lock in its stealthy access to local police and security systems worldwide (gunfight). Both imagine a path to supremacy playing different games: America hunkers down while sharpening the pointy end of its military spear, while Beijing methodically maximizes its worldwide political, economic, and security presence, seeding work-arounds for feared disruptions to come.
With globalization becoming increasingly digitalized, ask yourself which strategy seems more appropriate.
The future is security — not defense. As the Military Singularity ruins classic warfare, making it too dangerous even for soldiers, the real struggle with China becomes who supplies, shapes, defines, and rules domestic security systems around the world.
That is where China’s true ambitions lie.
3) The progressive correction to come
GUARDIAN: The big idea: should we worry about trillionaires?
DECCAN HERALD: India now more unequal than in Raj era
Signs of the great economic regrading to come: when too few control far too much.
We are heading into some true Marxian territory here.
Remember: populism is just opening course of this meal, which doesn’t really start until the progressive reaction kicks in. So don’t get too fixated on today’s conservative backlash. That friction simply heralds the looming arrival of far larger political and social forces.
Our goal throughout is the same it’s always been: hold off severe answers from Left (communism) and Right (fascism) by threading that needle with middle-class progressivism. This is just as true at home as abroad.
That is what America is all about: maintaining the middle and, by doing so, showing the way forward.
The world needs us now more than ever in this regard.
4) Al Gore spots the practical political threat of climate change
POLITICO: ‘We can reclaim control of our destiny,’ Al Gore says of climate change
NEWSWEEK: Texas National Guard Faces Calls to Shoot Migrants After Being Overpowered
The quote:
“If we don’t take action, there could be as many as one billion climate refugees crossing international borders in the next several decades,” he said. “Well, a few million has contributed to this wave of populist authoritarianism and dictatorships and so forth. What would one billion do? We can’t do this. We could lose our capacity for self-governance. “
Or we go full-fascist and start killing them all at the border …
Don’t say you haven’t been warned.
5) The Kushner one-state solution: gentrify Gaza. It’s no joke.
DAILY BEAST: Kushner Pitches Moving Palestinians Out of Gaza’s ‘Valuable’ Waterfront
We are getting all the signs of Gaza’s impending erasure — or its full-up diminishment as a threat vector by Israel.
The going-all-the-way variant is to drive most Palestinians out of Gaza and have hardcore Israeli settlers step in. That quiet part is now being spoken of — out loud — across the far right of Israel’s political landscape. Gaza as “the next Riviera.”
Maps are already being passed out as to where to move in. Hundreds of Israeli families have already signed up to settle Gaza.
Kushne is just selling that vision in the corridors of business power: another way to package the whole thing as a real-estate grab — or a welcomed gentrification of Gaza.
This is happening.
Gaza is going away. There is no turning Netanyahu off this path.
The decision has been made, and it will eventually kill the US-Israeli strategic partnership.
Israel’s call, I get it. But this will cross the Rubicon for those Americans who do not welcome a future of ethno-religious nationalism — at home or abroad in our key relationships, and, demographically speaking, they represent the majority American viewpoint going forward.
So this divorce is only a matter of time.
Strategically speaking, it won’t be the end of the world as many experts will cast it, but it will be painful and full of emotion — and part of generational conflict in the US in the years and decades ahead.
6) The state of GOP congressional leadership
DAILY BEAST: Johnson Brags Secretive Spending Deal Includes Embassy Pride Flag Ban
Too stupid for words:
The final package of spending legislation that needs to pass before Friday to keep the federal government from shutting down includes a provision banning LGBTQ+ flags from being flown at U.S. embassies, according to Bloomberg News. Citing a person familiar with the matter, the outlet reported Wednesday that House Speaker Mike Johnson had boasted of the provision in recent days as he’s tried to sell the $1 trillion deal to some of his skeptical colleagues. But a Democrat familiar with the text of the package said the ban actually prohibits the flying of any flag other than the U.S. flag. They added that there was no moratorium on embassy officials’ “personal” use of Pride flags.
Such is the visionary leadership of the GOP today.
7) Another signpost of the Great Northward Migration
ALJAZEERA: How migration transformed an Indigenous town in Panama’s Darien Gap
A remote indigenous community in Panama sees its population explode as it becomes this crucial way station for South Americans headed north to America.
Hundreds of thousands of people now cross from Colombia into Panama each year, using a narrow land bridge called the Darién Gap. Bajo Chiquito sits at the northern edge of its most popular trail: The Colombian border lies a mere 24km (15 miles) away.
“When I was a boy, it used to be silent here,” said Saray Alvarado, a 27-year-old local who works in a shop that recharges migrants’ phones for a fee.
The street behind him bustled with large crowds more befitting of a city. “A lot has changed,” he told Al Jazeera.
The unintentionally hilarious part of this reporting: local officials worrying about what happens to the community once this economic boon created by migrants goes away.
It ain’t going away. This is just getting started.
8) Military service without the vote
PILOTONLINE.COM: Puerto Rican military veterans deserve equal rights
About 12%, or 1-in-8 US military personnel hail from US territories.
A sort of letter to the editor by a retired US military officer:
Having served in the U.S. Army for 30 years, I have had the privilege to serve our country alongside the bravest individuals I know including some of my fellow Americans from the commonwealth of Puerto Rico. After their service, some decide to go back home to their families and communities on the island, where our veterans are denied the right to vote for president, denied voting representation in Congress, and are subjected to unequal treatment under federal laws and programs; all because Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, and not a state.
Unfortunately, this has been going on for more than 125 years. While hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans have proudly served, including in all U.S. wars from World War I to the present day, never once has the U.S. Congress passed legislation to grant our fellow U.S. citizens a choice to determine their status.
Many of our fellow U.S. citizens from Puerto Rico have paid the ultimate sacrifice to defend our freedoms and the U.S. Constitution. Let us repay their honorable service to the nation with full federal voting rights and the benefits of every other American citizen.
It is nuts, isn’t it?
9) When climate mitigation impacts global trade
DW: EU palm oil ban: Malaysia, Indonesia seek trade justice
The EU bans palm oil imports because it considers the crop too damaging to the environment. But that pushes Malaysia and Indonesia to turn to the WTO for relief.
WTO says no, in effect recognizing the right of importing nations to eschew products they consider not worth the “externality” cost.
I have to believe we’re going to see more and more of this in the food and cleaning industries (where palm oil is used for all sorts of products), just like we’ve long seen in the energy industry.
10) Not an unreasonable list from Mexico
WAPO: Will Mexico’s president change the course of U.S. elections?
The gist:
In December, the Mexican migration authority said it had run out of money and stopped deporting migrants moving through the country. It also stopped flying them from Mexico’s northern border to the interior of the country. Coincidentally, perhaps, migrant encounters with U.S. agents at the border with Mexico surged over 300,000, the highest monthly tally on record.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Secretary of State Antony Blinken had barely returned from Christmas break when they were dispatched to plead with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador on Dec. 27. And on the 30th, the Mexican government found the cash to start moving migrants away from the U.S. border again.
AMLO, as the Mexican president is known, took the opportunity to lay down some demands: an end to the Cuba embargo, removal of all U.S. sanctions against Venezuela, the legalization of some 10 million unauthorized immigrants living in the United States, and $20 billion for countries in the region. He forgot to ask for a unicorn.
Amazing bit of snark (unicorn) from this Latino WAPO editorial board member.
Personally, I don’t find the wish list to be anything close to bizarre.
End to the Cuba embargo? I’ve wanted that for decades.
Remove all sanctions against Venezuela? Please tell me what they’ve accomplished except to open the door for China, Iran, and Russia.
Legalize the undocumented in US? We regularly do such amnesties.
Some aid for countries across LATAM? Does anybody think we send too much now?
If that’s considered a unicorn list, then there you have it: America’s way or the highway.
No wonder we’re so beloved across LATAM.
11) Climate change will never set on the British islands
GUARDIAN: 46C summer days and ‘supercell’ storms are Britain’s future – and now is our last chance to prepare
Lede presents a scary but realistic scenario:
It’s the August bank holiday in 2050 and the UK is sweltering under the worst heatwave on record. Temperatures across much of England have topped 40C for eight days running: they peaked at 46C, and remain above 30C in cities and large towns at night. The country’s poorly insulated homes feel like furnaces, and thousands of people have resorted to camping out at night in the streets and local parks in a desperate attempt to find sleep. Hospital A&Es are overwhelmed and wards are flooded with patients, mostly old and vulnerable people who have succumbed to dehydration and heatstroke. Already, the death toll is estimated at more than 80,000.
“Weather porn” to Bjorn Lomborg but his gripe is mostly about uncertain and wasteful mitigation efforts, when the focus needs to be on enabling “prosperity, adaptation and resilience.”
Fine, but when that trio of goals requires serious political activism, some “weather porn” is justified. The urgency quotient on adaptation is rising.
12) Why the Antarctic may be worse off than the Arctic on great-power tensions
FOREIGN AFFAIRS: Great-Power Competition Comes to Antarctica
From this Foreign Affairs article, an interesting if disjointed argument:
Observers have often drawn parallels between Antarctica and the Arctic. The two regions are similar on the surface—extreme ends of the earth, frigid polar climates. They are the subject of interest from the same countries—namely, China, Russia, and the United States. But crucially, the regions are administered differently: the Arctic does not have a treaty system, while the Antarctic does. Geographically, the Arctic is a maritime domain, whereas Antarctica is a continental landmass.
The Arctic is not part of the global commons; it is a region encircled by undisputed land territories of eight states. During both world wars and the Cold War, the Arctic was a key theater. Since 1996, Arctic governance has been facilitated by the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum that promotes communication and environmental partnerships. In the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Arctic Council members decided to pause their work with the council while Russia served as its chair. The result was the effective disengagement of Russia from Arctic affairs. With the chair rotating to Norway in 2023, activities restarted but without Russia’s participation. In February, it was announced that there would be a gradual resumption of virtual working-group meetings, after some researchers raised alarm over the global implications of the continued absence of Russian Arctic climate data.
Antarctica has not had to weather the same setbacks, thanks to the Antarctic Treaty.
What I find odd about this argument: the article is all about how the whole Antarctica situation is devolving into nasty and dangerous competition while, quite frankly, the Arctic suffers no such issues (lot of hype, some military build-up, but that adds up to a big nothing burger to-date). And yet, the Arctic is cited for “setbacks” ((I’m not seeing any) while Antartica …
The rules of the road are well established in the Antarctic, and for the most part, they have succeeded in keeping the continent insulated from geopolitical tensions.
So, all the history and background say, in effect, don’t worry. But the article is very much in worry mode, the big problem being that, per the treaty, nobody owns the Antarctic, which means, everyone can trash it in one way or another and there’s no great force stopping that.
The article then gets lots in a lot of detail.
I am not sold on the title or the argument. Pretty weak piece, in my opinion. Just a vague variant of “be afraid, be very afraid.”