Monday, April 29, 2024
Saturday, April 27, 2024
Sunday, April 21, 2024
China-Russia-Iran Axis Is Bad News for Trump and GOP Isolationists - Bloomberg
China-Russia-Iran Axis Is Bad News for Trump and GOP Isolationists - Bloomberg
The Second Cold War Is Escalating Faster
Than the First
To understand
what is at stake in the fight against the axis of China, Russia and Iran, just
read “The Lord of the Rings.”
April 21, 2024 at
5:00 AM GMT+1
Niall Ferguson is
a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the
Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author, most recently, of
“Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.”
In J.R.R. Tolkien’s great epic, The Lord of the Rings,
it becomes apparent only gradually that the forces of darkness have united.
Sauron, with his baleful all-seeing eye, emerges as the leader of a vast axis
of evil: the Black Riders, the corrupted wizard Saruman, the subhuman orcs, the
malignant courtier Wormtongue, the giant venomous spider Shelob — they are all
in it together, and Mordor is their headquarters.
Tolkien knew whereof he wrote. A veteran of World War I, he
watched with dismay the approach of a second great conflagration. Sipping pints
of bitter and puffing his pipe in “The Shire” — his idealized Middle England —
he could only shudder as Nazi Germany, fascist Italy
and imperialist Japan came together to form their Axis in 1936-37, and mutter, “I told you so,” when Hitler and Stalin joined
forces in 1939.
We, too, are witnessing the formation and consolidation of an
Axis. I was vividly reminded of Tolkien by a tweet published by the
conservative broadcaster Mark R. Levin on Tuesday. It is worth quoting:
“Appeasement is escalation. Our enemies are on the move. Our allies are being
encircled and attacked or soon attacked. … Conservatism and MAGA are not about
isolationism or pacifism. They’re not about appeasement or national suicide. …
It is up to us, patriotic Americans, to step into the breach and get this done
now.”
The significance of Levin’s intervention — penned from Israel, which
he has been visiting — is that it so clearly puts him on a collision course
with the isolationist elements within the Republican Party, such as
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who last week threatened to oust House
Speaker Mike Johnson if he pressed ahead with a bill that would restore US aid
to Ukraine. “We are going to stand for freedom and make sure that Vladimir
Putin doesn’t march through Europe,” Johnson declared. “We have to
project to Putin, Xi, and Iran, and North Korea, and anybody else that we will
defend freedom.”
To the likes of Greene and Levin’s former Fox News colleague
Tucker Carlson, the war in Ukraine is just “a quarrel in a far-away country
between people of whom we know nothing,” as British Prime Minister Neville
Chamberlain infamously said of Czechoslovakia
in September 1938. They appear quite unembarrassed to serve as Russian
President Vladimir Putin’s “useful
idiots,” in direct lineal succession to Hitler’s and Stalin’s apologists in
the 1930s.
And not only Putin’s. for, as State Department spokesman Matthew
Miller pointed out last week, behind the Russian war effort stands the vast
economic resources of the People’s Republic of China. “What we have seen over the past months is that there have
been materials moving from China to Russia that Russia has used to rebuild
[its] industrial base and produce arms that are showing up on the
battlefield in Ukraine,” Miller told reporters on
Tuesday. “And we are incredibly concerned about that.” In Beijing earlier this
month, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned her Chinese counterpart that
there would be “significant consequences” if
China continued to support the Russian war effort in Ukraine.
Despite their protestations that they wish to act as peacemakers,
China’s leaders gave the invasion of Ukraine their blessing on its eve — what
else did the mutual pledge of a
“no-limits” partnership mean? — and President Xi Jinping’s support has been
crucial to Putin’s survival ever since his invasion force was repelled from the
outskirts of Kyiv
The emergence of this new Axis was foreseen by Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national
security advisor years ago.
By the same token, one cannot treat Iran’s war against Israel in
isolation. Tehran supports Russia’s war against Ukraine, supplying thousands of
drones and missiles similar to the ones unleashed against Israel last weekend.
Russia, in turn, is likely helping to strengthen Iran’s air defenses. China
is not only one of the main buyers of Iran’s oil; Chinese Foreign
Minister Wang Yi called Tehran immediately
after the attack on Israel to praise
rather than condemn his Iranian counterparts. Chinese propaganda has been
consistently anti-Israel since Hamas’s murderous attacks of Oct. 7 last year.
er, as long ago as 1997. In his book The Grand Chessboard,
Brzezinski wrote:
Potentially, the most dangerous scenario would be a grand
coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an “antihegemonic” coalition
united not by ideology but by complementary grievances. It would be reminiscent
in scale and scope of the challenge once posed by the Sino-Soviet bloc, though
this time China would likely be the leader and Russia the follower.
Brzezinski was prophetic. Looking back over the past three years,
however, it is hard not to conclude that his successors in the Biden
administration have done a great deal unwittingly as well as wittingly to make
this coalition a reality, beginning by
abandoning the Afghans to the tender mercies of the Taliban in 2021, then
failing to deter Russia from invading Ukraine in 2022, and finally failing to
deter Iran from unleashing its proxies against Israel in 2023. Yes, Biden stepped
up to aid Ukraine and Israel when they came under attack, but an earlier show
of strength might have avoided both emergencies.
Levin and Johnson have realized, as former Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo has long argued, that some quarrels in far-away countries must
ultimately concern us. They are parts of
a single war being waged by a new Axis against the fundamental values we hold
dear: democracy, the rule of law, individual freedom. I predict that the
isolationists’ counterarguments will not age well.
For now, fortunately, we are in Cold War II, not World War III.
However, Cold War II is proceeding rather faster than Cold War I. If the
Russian invasion of Ukraine was our equivalent of the Korean War of 1950-53, we
have (thus far) skated past a second Cuban Missile Crisis — over Taiwan — and
have already entered a period of détente, a sequence that took two decades last
time around. Since last November’s presidential summit in Woodside, California,
the Chinese have seemed genuinely keen to avoid a showdown and want to engage
in serious, if frosty, dialogue with their American counterparts, reminiscent
of 1969-72.
But the surprise attack on Israel by Hamas last October propelled
us all the way to 1973. And it is worth recalling that détente did not long
survive Henry Kissinger’s successful assertion of US primacy in
the Middle East in the wake of that year’s Yom Kippur War. In short, in Cold
War II we seem to be getting the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s compressed together in
a somewhat bewildering mash-up.
Then, as now, cold war has
an ideological dimension: at least some Republicans are back to talking
about defending freedom. To Putin and Xi, that is just code for CIA-backed
“color revolutions.” Then, as now, cold war is a technological race,
though today the frontiers of innovation are artificial intelligence and
quantum computing as well as nuclear weapons and “star wars” (missile
defense).
Then, as now, cold war is inflationary
and domestically divisive. Then, as now, it matters a lot if China and
Russia are united, as opposed to at each other’s throats. Their current unity
is a real headache for the US and its allies, who find themselves in the
situation — envisioned more than a century ago — of Nicholas Spykman’s “Rimland,” trying to
contain Halford Mackinder’s vast Eurasian “Heartland.” Then as
now, there are not just two groupings, but three, because a significant number
of countries would prefer to be nonaligned rather than have to choose a side.
So what are the biggest differences between Cold War
I and Cold War II?
First, China is a much
bigger economic contender than the Soviet Union ever was. Second, the West is economically entangled with China, through a vast web of supply
chains, in a way we never were with the USSR. Third, we are much weaker in terms of
manufacturing capacity. With China flooding the world with cheap “green” stuff, the West has no option but to revive
protectionism and industrial policy, turning the economic strategy clock
back to the 1970s, too. Climate adviser John Podesta made that
clear last week at Bloomberg’s BNEF Summit. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen complained
last month that Chinese “excess capacity … in ‘new’ industries like solar, EVs,
and lithium-ion batteries” was “hurt[ing] American firms and workers, as well
as firms and workers around the world.”
Fourth, US fiscal
policy is on a completely unsustainable path. To run a 7% deficit at a time of full employment is,
to put it mildly, not what the macroeconomics textbooks recommend. More
importantly, as the Congressional Budget Office has just pointed out, the
relentless growth of the federal debt in public hands relative to gross
domestic product — from 99% this year to a projected 166% by 2054 — will
inevitably constrain future administrations, for the simple reason that an
inexorably rising share of revenues will have to go on servicing the debt.
My sole contribution to the statute book of historiography — what
I call Ferguson’s Law — states that any great power that spends more
on debt service (interest payments on the national debt) than on defense will
not stay great for very long. True of Hapsburg Spain,
true of ancien régime France,
true of the Ottoman Empire, true of the British Empire, this law is about to be
put to the test by the US beginning this very year, when (according to the CBO) net interest outlays will
be 3.1% of GDP, defense spending 3.0%. Extrapolating defense spending on
the assumption that it remains consistently 48% of total discretionary spending
(the average of 2014-23), the gap between debt service and defense is going to
widen rapidly in the coming years. By 2041, the CBO projections suggest,
interest payments (4.6% of GDP) will be double the defense budget (2.3%). Between
1962 and 1989, by way of comparison, interest payments averaged 1.8% of GDP;
defense 6.4%.
As Michael Boskin and Kiran Sridhar recently
argued, the Biden administration’s proposed defense budget for 2025 is already
“vastly inadequate.” The Department of Defense needs to be spending more if our
adversaries are to be deterred. On current trends, it seems certain to be
spending less.
Fifth, our alliances
may prove to be weaker than they were in Cold War I. In Europe, Germany is even more
ambivalent about US leadership of the Atlantic alliance than it was in the days
of Ostpolitik. In Asia,
the US may think the “Quad” has turned India into an Asian ally, but I very
much doubt India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, would pick up the phone if
Washington called for assistance in a Taiwan crisis.
For all these reasons, we should not be overconfident about the
outcome of Cold War II. In particular, as Elbridge Colby has consistently warned, a
Taiwan crisis — were China to blockade or invade this year — would find the US
ill-prepared. And Beijing may not conform to US intelligence assessments that
it will wait until 2027 to make its move.
Yet there is one final similarity with Cold War I that I omitted
above. Now, as then, there is a
bipartisan consensus in Washington that the communist superpower poses a
serious threat. The political question that remains to be answered this
year is who is best able to counter that threat.
In a way, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris personify the post-Vietnam
Democratic Party’s approach, which ran from Jimmy Carter through Bill Clinton
to Barack Obama. This approach nearly always prioritizes
“de-escalation” over deterrence (even in Ukraine that has been true), and tends to cut the
defense budget. By contrast, Donald Trump has veered between belligerence and
isolationism, clearly preferring trade wars to the “fire and fury” of
real wars. But he is temperamentally good at deterrence — if only because our
adversaries find him so unpredictable. Under Trump
defense spending went up.
By launching their drone and missile swarm at Israel, the Iranians
have unwittingly given many Republicans permission to follow Pompeo down a path
of hawkishness that is anything but isolationist. Read the new Foreign Affairs essay by
outgoing Wisconsin Representative Mike Gallagher and former Trump adviser Matt
Pottinger to get a flavor. “China,” they argue, “is underwriting expansionist
dictatorships in Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela.” Stopping it will
require “will require greater friction in US-Chinese relations” and “rapidly
increasing US defense capabilities.” They accept my longstanding argument that
we are in Cold War II, but dismiss détente as likely only to “fortify [the Chinese] conviction that they can destabilize the world
with impunity.” In short, Pottinger and Gallagher want to fast-forward this new
cold war to the 1980s.
Will Trump himself heed the hawks’ advice? If he chooses to stick
with isolationism, I suspect it may hurt his chances of reelection. But if he
discards that delusion, there could suddenly be a 1980 vibe to his year — and
not only because Trump has rediscovered Ronald Reagan’s lethal question: “Are
you better off than you were four years ago?” Despite having pursued a policy
of technological containment of China that has been in many ways tougher and
more effective than Trump’s, Biden looks weak right now. Not only has he been
lousy at deterring America’s foes. He can’t even get a close US ally — Israel —
to do as he asks.
It may therefore be that the ultimate historical significance of
the Iranian attack on Israel will be its effect not on the Middle East but on Republican
sentiment in the US.
Tolkien’s hobbits are also isolationists, in their way. However,
despite their strong preference for the quiet life, Frodo and Sam come to
realize that they must fight their way to Mordor and risk their necks to
destroy Sauron’s Ring of Power. When they return to the Shire, they find that
it, too, has been overrun by the Enemy. But it is not too late to salvage the
situation. Symbolically, the wicked wizard Saruman perishes on the very
threshold of Frodo’s beloved home:
“And that’s the end of that,” said Sam. “A nasty end, and I wish I
needn’t have seen it; but it’s a good riddance.”
“And the very last end of the War, I hope,” said Merry.
“I hope so,” said Frodo and sighed. “The very last stroke. But to
think that it should fall here, at the very door of Bag End! Among all my hopes
and fears at least I never expected that.”
“I shan’t call it the end, till we’ve cleared up the mess,” said
Sam gloomily. “And that’ll take a lot of time and work.”
Words for isolationists to ponder in 2024.
Ferguson is also the founder of Greenmantle, an advisory firm;
FourWinds Research; Hunting Tower, a venture capital partnership; and the
filmmaker Chimerica Media.
More From Niall Ferguson at Bloomberg Opinion:
·
From Deepfakes to Arms Races, AI Politics Is Here
·
Resistance Is Futile, But Maybe Not
With AI
·
If You Think World War III Is Unimaginable, Read This
Niall Ferguson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is the Milbank Family
Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author,
most recently, of “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.”Su
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Friday, April 19, 2024
What black mold and climate change have in common - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail
What black mold and climate change have in common - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail
...Consider allergy season. When the temperatures rise, plants produce more pollen. Not only do seasons now start 20 days earlier than they did in 1990, there’s about 20% more pollen filling the air, largely thanks to climate change. “If you’ve sensed that your allergies are getting worse each year, it’s not your imagination,” Lisa Jarvis writes. In the US, a quarter of adults and nearly 20% of children are impacted by allergies, a figure that’s set to grow as the world gets hotter.
When the lungs are aggravated by pollen, Lisa says, “it’s downright dangerous for people with asthma: An analysis of asthma patients Maryland found that very early-onset spring led to a 17% increase in hospitalizations.” And you know what worsens people’s asthma? Climate change, doh!
Mark Gongloff says the wildfire season in Canada is set to “start sooner and end later and potentially be more explosive” than last year. “Children, senior citizens and people with asthma and other underlying health issues can be harmed by relatively low concentrations of wildfire smoke,” he writes, but the “toxic stew of chemicals, delivered in particles small enough to enter the bloodstream” is dangerous for us all.
The costs associated with climate-caused health complications are not insignificant. Sweden, for instance, found that allergies cost the country of 9.5 million people upwards of 1.3 billion euros per year, thanks to treatments, doctors’ visits and hospitalizations. And in the US, wildfire fumes could cause as many as 27,800 US deaths per year by 2050 — an annual economic cost of $244 billion.
Tuesday, April 16, 2024
The Breakthrough Prize is becoming a bigger deal - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail
Kim Kardashian and the scientists - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail
Science and stardust |
Actress Glenn Close thinks scientists should be more famous. “Oh please,” she said on the red carpet of the Breakthrough Prize gala last weekend. Their status “should be way above celebrity.”
For more than 10 years, making science glamorous has been the goal of Breakthrough Prize, which doles out $3 million awards in fields like mathematics and fundamental physics in the style of a classic Hollywood awards ceremony.
While Close is still more famous than, say, CRISPR scientist Jennifer Doudna, the events have handed out significant cash, raised the profile of some researchers and have lately gained cachet in Hollywood. News outlets noted attendees’ outfits Saturday, and posts from celebrities at the gala made the rounds on social media this week. An Instagram post by Close, for example, showed her seated between Doudna and the artist Jeff Koons, garnering 3,000 likes. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s tuxedo was dissected in detail on his social network X.
Held at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, the event is a rare coming together of tech nerds and the Hollywood elite. Bemused honorees left their labs to mingle with the likes of Lizzo, Venus Williams and Vin Diesel. Fredrick van Goor, who shared a prize for life sciences for work on cystic fibrosis, said the notion of a red carpet “never entered our minds,” but if it helps inspire others to take on what he said was “a cool job,” he’s all for it.
The prizes were founded by investor Yuri Milner, his wife Julia, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and 23andMe boss Anne Wojcicki, along with Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg. In the beginning, hardly anyone paid attention. Now, the event’s profile has been elevated by escalating production values and — crucially — a move to Los Angeles.
Wojiciki believes the prize’s science-boosting effort is working. “Over time with repetition, it sinks in,” she said. Attendee Vlad Tenev, the chief executive officer of Robinhood Markets Inc., noted that viewership for the Oscars has declined over the years, but viewership for the Breakthrough Prize has risen. “I look forward to when that crossover happens,” he said.
The driving force behind the awards is Milner, a physicist by training, who runs the investment group DST Global. Milner said that while the impact is hard to measure, there are invisible effects that are “profound and precious.” For example, he said Huda Zoghbi, a geneticist who won a Breakthrough Prize in 2017, got a letter from a Lebanese woman who said she had watched the ceremony online that year with her young daughter. The woman’s daughter decided to become a scientist.
About one-third of guests were neither celebrity nor scientist, adding to the unusual milieu. Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb Inc., said he was impressed the previous year when he was seated at a table with the family of late physicist Stephen Hawking, plus Eddie Redmayne, who played Hawking in The Theory of Everything. Financier Michael Milken said he found the other guests interesting, but it was hard to feel starstruck. “I financed most of these companies,” he said about the studios the actors worked for.
On stage, Margot Robbie and Bradley Cooper handed the prize in fundamental physics to quantum clockmakers Hidetoshi Katori and Jun Ye. Patients whose lives had been saved by medical progress spoke about their treatment. And Alicia Keys and Kim Kardashian hugged each other for warmth in the unusually chilly Los Angeles night, before presenting another prize in life sciences to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for their work in artificial intelligence and protein folding at Alphabet Inc.’s DeepMind.
Elon Musk sat at a table next to Dame Emma Walmsley, CEO of GSK Plc, along with Brie Larson, Kardashian, Kris Jenner and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Also at the table was James Corden of Carpool Karaoke fame, who was the night’s emcee. Before the event, Musk joked with reporters about who should play him in an upcoming biopic — Bradley Cooper or Benedict Cumberbatch — and dodged questions about his business endeavors. He also took a serious turn.
“I’m glad Yuri Milner is doing the Breakthrough Prize, because technology is what moves civilization forward, and saves lives, and makes life interesting,” Musk said. “Hopefully it doesn’t kill us all.” —Sarah McBride
Monday, April 15, 2024
The grid needs a 21st-century upgrade - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail
The grid needs a 21st-century upgrade - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail
Long-distance transmission lines have barely changed in a century, says Jason Huang, chief executive officer of TS Conductor Corp. The Huntington Beach, California-based company has been recognized as a BloombergNEF Pioneer for developing a new kind of wire that weighs less, carries more power and can be cheaper to install. That’s a big deal, because efforts to add carbon-free renewables to the power grid have been hindered by a lack of transmission lines to deliver the energy.
Photographer: Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg
Conventional conductor — that’s the technical name for this kind of wiring — has a steel core surrounded by strands of aluminum. TS Conductor uses a carbon-fiber core instead that’s stronger, thinner and about 80% lighter. That lets the company pack more aluminum in the same size wire so it can carry as much as three times more power.
Huang sees his innovation as an under-appreciated, but much-needed, component of the green energy transition. Installing miles and miles of transmission lines across public and private land can be a paperwork nightmare, and some projects can take up to a decade to line up all the approvals. It’s a lot easier, he says, to replace the wires on existing transmission lines with his new-and-improved version. It’s also a lot faster, and that’s critical.
Saturday, April 13, 2024
The alienating rise of Trump’s unholy alliance - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail
The alienating rise of Trump’s unholy alliance - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail
Trumpism Is Emptying Churches — Francis Wilkinson |
Donald Trump, a 77-year-old Bible salesman from Palm Beach, Florida, has emerged as the nation’s most prominent Christian leader. Trump is running for president as a divinely chosen champion of White Christians, promising to sanctify their grievances, destroy their perceived enemies, bolster their social status, and grant them the power to impose an anti-feminist, anti-LGBTQ, White-centric Christian nationalism from coast to coast. That Trump doesn’t attend church and has obviously never read the book that he hawks for $59.99 seems of interest exclusively to his political opponents.
McBride says, “99% of crypto is absolute garbage.”
https://www.mauldineconomics.com/download/global-macro-update-transcript-stephen-mcbride-4-12-24
Reasons the US Outshines Europe - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail
Dividends on Offense - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail
"Here's a name you likely do not know. Britt Harris just retired at the CEO of the University of Texas/Texas A&M University Investment Management Company’s $60+ billion endowment fund. He was also CEO of Bridgewater, then ran the $140 billion Teacher Retirement System of Texas. "
These just touch on the vast pools of privately managed US institutional investment funds available to support equity investing in the US.
Friday, April 12, 2024
Drone-delivered chili isn't the future - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail
Drone-delivered chili isn't the future - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail
One of his big bets in 2024 is “Prime Air,” Amazon’s new-wave drone delivery service that he says will eventually allow the e-commerce company to deliver packages to customers in less than an hour. While there’s certainly a need to fulfill here — human laziness has no bounds! — Leticia Miranda says there are a few problems with the methodology:
Amazon’s drones can only carry orders that weigh up to five pounds, and items can’t be too fragile because they need to survive a 12-foot drop … A 2023 McKinsey study estimates that a single-package drone delivery costs a company about $13.50, which is more expensive than delivery via an electric or gas vehicle making just one delivery. For drones to make a company money, a single operator will have to manage as many as 20 drones at one time.
Twenty drones!!! Consider, for a moment, what that might mean for your town. Wendy’s and DoorDash are currently testing a drone program in Christiansburg, Virginia, that can deliver Baconators, Frosty, french fries and even chili in “30 minutes or less.” But do we really want 20 drones whizzing around at 60 mph carrying CHILI of all things? I can hear the EMS radio dispatcher now: “Unit 5, Unit 5, we have a report of a vehicle with obstructed vision due to an aerial spillage of Wendy’s chili on the windshield. Respond to the intersection of Main and Elm.”
Not to mention, drones are loud! This 2021 study described them as being “substantially more annoying” than your average airplane or traffic jam. In the future, we’ll still need lots and lots of humans to deliver stuff. But if this chart from Justin Fox is any measure, it’s *not* looking like the US working-age population is up to the task:
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