Category Archives: International issues

Random North Korea thoughts

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The missile launch makes the WaPo think of President Trump. It makes me think of Bob Gallucci.

1. I had a course from him at Swarthmore College.

2. He negotiated the deal in 1994 that was hailed as stopping North Korea’s nuclear program. North Korea got some badly-needed oil shipments, and we got their promise to stop enriching uranium.

3. About a week ago, he co-authored a bipartisan letter to President Trump urging negotiations with North Korea.

A cynical view is that the chances of a U.S. attack are inversely proportional to President Trump’s perception of his popularity. In that case, if you want to minimize the chances of war, you should be telling President Trump that he is very secure in his position and the American people are very happy with him.

Ten years ago, the Capitol Steps came up with How do you solve a problem like Korea? I haven’t watched it. But I knew that if I Googled that title I would find something.

Economic Indicators to Follow in the Trump Era?

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Tyler Cowen gives three.

if the worst predictions about Trump turn out to be true, the negative consequences ought to show up in some of the world’s most fragile spots.

He suggests following an index of Baltic stocks, an index of Taiwan stocks, and the exchange value of the dollar. On the later, he writes,

Many emerging-economy companies are running up alarmingly high dollar-denominated debts, and a strong dollar increases that debt burden in real terms. More generally, the dollar remains the primary source of liquidity in the global economy, especially if the eurozone sees continuing troubles. A more expensive dollar implies a greater scarcity of liquidity, and there is increasing evidence this may herald or cause global financial and economic volatility.

What about domestic policy? I would suggest looking at an indicator of where the highest-income counties are located. For now, Terrence P. Jeffrey writes,

The four richest counties in the United States, when measured by median household income, are all suburbs of Washington, D.C., according to newly released data from the Census Bureau.

It would be nice to have incomes go up more in the rest of the country than in the DC area.

The State of Arab Youth

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From a UN development report press release.

Today, youth in the region are more educated, more connected and more mobile than ever before.

Pointer from Timothy Taylor.

We know from Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public that this is a mixed blessing. Indeed, also from the press release:

increasing levels of armed conflict are destroying the social fabric of the Arab region, causing massive loss of life not only among combatants, but also among civilians. Conflicts also are also reversing hard-won economic development gains by destroying productive resources, capital and labour, within a larger territory neighbouring countries where they are fought. Between 2000–2003 and 2010–2015, the number of armed conflicts and violent crises in the region have risen from 4 to 11, and many of them are becoming protracted in nature.

Trump Explanation to Flatter the Right

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William Voegeli writes,

When Trump says political correctness cripples our ability to think, talk, and act against terrorism, he’s signaling that our response to terrorism is severely compromised by Islamophobia-phobia—the closed-minded, contrived, overwrought, unwarranted, misdirected, counterproductive fear that accurate threat assessments and adequate self-defense might hurt a Muslim’s feelings. “Public sentiment is everything,” said Lincoln of a republic’s political life, which means that those who mold public sentiment are more powerful than legislators and judges, because they make “statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.” Our molders of public sentiment have made citizens more worried about accusations of bigotry than they are determined to report possible terrorism. A man working near the San Bernardino shooter’s home, according to one news account, “said he noticed a half-dozen Middle Eastern men in the area” before the attack, “but decided not to report anything since he did not wish to racially profile those people.”

The essay is long, but I recommend all of it. Along the way, Voegeli quotes Megan McArdle approvingly and refers to Bryan Caplan disparagingly.

Voegeli links Trump’s surge in popularity to the high-profile attacks by Islamic terrorists. While I believe that those helped him, and that another one could hand him the election, I am inclined to believe that he would have obtained the nomination even if those attacks had not taken place. If my guess is correct, then by seeing Trump support primarily as a reaction against political correctness, Voegeli is overly uncharitable to the left and he is overly flattering to the right.

Voegeli sees Trump as comparable to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Voegeli sees each as a champion of a good cause, which they ultimately discredit with their idiosyncratic and erratic behavior. My thoughts:

1. McCarthy’s cause was anti-Communism. His enemies complained of anti-Communist hysteria. I am so steeped in David Halberstam that I am not ready to concede that McCarthy discredited anti-Communism or to concede that the anti-Communists had it right. What discredited anti-Communism was the Vietnam War, which the anti-Communists got wrong.

2. I think that Voegeli somewhat mis-characterizes Trump’s cause. Trump does not want to slay the dragon of Islamic radicalism. In my reading, Trump’s cause is anti-cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitans see the world through the eyes of an affluent tourist. Foreign countries are places that take Visa, with interesting foods and friendly people speaking accented English. Anti-cosmopolitans might see the world through the eyes of an American soldier sent to Iraq or Afghanistan. Foreign countries are places where barbarians lurk. Even when we succeed for a while at protecting ordinary people from these barbarians, the people are neither grateful to us nor inspired by us to keep the barbarians from returning.

The anti-cosmopolitan motto might be “Keep the U.S. out of the Middle East, and keep the Middle East out of the U.S.” The conservative establishment is heavily invested in keeping us in the Middle East. The liberal establishment is heavily invested in allowing Middle Easterners to come here. Perhaps it was inevitable that the champion of anti-cosmopolitanism was an outsider with many off-putting personality traits. But it could be that a loss by Trump will only discredit Trump, and anti-cosmopolitanism will, for better or worse, remain a force that affects American policy going forward.

Tyler Cowen on Brexit, Steven Pinker, and Joseph McCarthy

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And also other topics. The link goes to a Twitter post with a video.

Judge for yourself, but to me it sounds like he is telling a PSST story. He says that, for better or worse, the UK spent the last twenty years working with a set of rules on trade in services with other European countries, and now that those rules have been cast into doubt by the Brexit vote, the British economy is in trouble. It is a very different take from that of those who think in GDP-factory terms.

Also, in my other post today, I mention an event on plutocracy co-sponsored by the Hudson Institute and The American Interest. Tyler Cowen makes remarks that have little or nothing to do with the article that he wrote for the event. Two of his more provocative opinions:

1. Steven Pinker may be wrong. Rather than mass violence following a benign trend, it could be cyclical. When there is a long peace, people become complacent, they allow bad leaders to take power and to run amok, and you get mass violence again. (Cowen argues that there are more countries now run by bad people than was the case a couple of decades ago)

2. Joseph McCarthy was not wrong. There were Soviet agents in influential positions. Regardless of what you think of that, the relevant point is that today Chinese and Russian plutocrats may have their tentacles in the U.S. and may be subtly causing the U.S. to be less of a liberal capitalist nation and more of a cronyist plutocracy.

What I’ve Been Reading

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Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and its Allies, by Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn. About a week ago, he was mentioned as a potential Trump running mate. His book became available on Tuesday, and I finished it on Thursday, just before the attack in Nice. My thoughts:

1. The ratio of rhetoric to substance is too high for my taste.

2. The endorsement from Michael Ledeen is fitting. Like Ledeen, Flynn views the regime in Iran as the root of much evil.

3. Flynn frequently says that “we are losing” the war against radical Islam, without spelling out his basis for that assessment. At one point, he cites a figure of 30,000 deaths from terror attacks in 2014, compared to fewer than 8,000 in 2011. He also cites figures indicating that there are now 35,000 ISIS fighters in Syria, compared to 20,000 in 2015. Otherwise, I did not find any data, anecdotes, or analysis that justifies the claim that we are losing.

4. He asserts that

contrary to conventional wisdom, Radical Islam played a major role in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq long before our arrival in 2003

He provides support for that contention. Nonetheless, he says that

It was a huge strategic mistake to invade Iraq militarily. . .our primary target should have been Tehran, not Baghdad, and the method should have been political–support of the internal Iranian opposition.

5. He argues that we should use social media against radical Islam.

6. He says that we should call for a reformation of Islam.

7. He argues that we need to gain support of local populations, and what they most value is security. They will join whatever side they believe is winning.

Relative to the goal of gaining the confidence of the local population, I would imagine that the effect of drone strikes is small, and not necessarily positive. I do not believe that Flynn offers an opinion on that issue.

For me, (7) raises the question of whether we should send troops to the Middle East to try to defend local populations against Islamic radicals.

Suppose that we were to follow the libertarian policy of avoiding all foreign intervention. One scenario could be that as a result local populations in the Middle East decide that they have to accommodate the Islamic radicals. Then the radicals become strong enough to destabilize Europe and perhaps even take over some countries there. By the time they get around to attacking the U.S., they could be much closer to parity with us militarily than they are now.

On the other hand, I could argue against intervention by saying that the local populations appear to have too little capability and motivation to defend themselves against Islamic radicals for us to try to do the job for them. I would like to have seen this issue addressed in Flynn’s book.

Here is an op-ed by Flynn.

How Should Europe be Organized?

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In the wake of the Brexit vote, here are my thoughts. I view the issue primarily from a libertarian perspective, which means a bias in favor of free trade and free movement and a bias against centralized bureaucracy.

1. The actual Brexit vote, as I interpret it (and I make no claim to expertise at reading voters’ minds) seemed to rest mostly on hostility to free trade and free movement, with some hostility toward centralized bureaucracy. And if you have not already followed my recommendation and read Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public, the Brexit vote is another reason you should.

2. I think that a common currency is a good thing. As readers of my new book will realize, I don’t subscribe to the sort of monetarist macroeconomics that would lead one to say otherwise.

3. I think that freedom of movement is a good thing. Border checkpoints are a bad thing.

4. However, you have to think about how to reconcile freedom of movement with welfare-state benefits. The libertarian approach is to get rid of the welfare-state benefits. A less radical approach is to clarify which benefits are limited to citizens and specify the qualifications for becoming a citizen.

5. As for terrorism coming from immigrants, it seems that we can choose two of the following three: privacy, open borders, and security. I am willing to toss out privacy, as long as the government actors providing security are not themselves able to hide what they are doing. Few card-carrying libertarians would agree with this view. Before you blast away at it, read or re-read David Brin’s Transparent Society Revisited. In any case, I interpret the voters as saying that we should toss out open borders.

6. Some people equate a strong EU with technocrats being able to solve/avert the sovereign debt crisis that threatens several countries. I do not.

7. Some people see the EU as a force for free trade. I see it as a force for trade that is managed, regulated, and harmonized. Is this more or less free than what we would see if trade policies were left up to individual governments? I would guess it is somewhat less free, particularly as we move through time, and the bureaucratic tentacles of the EU tend to spread.

8. Of all the reasons for selling stocks, I think this was the least compelling. I wonder if the stock market was simply poised for a decline, anyway, but it needed some sort of focal point to get the selling going.

On net, I would have voted “Leave.” But I don’t like the anti-immigrant, anti-trade rationale.

Venezuela

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I can imagine that this might be a front-page story every day if it were happening in a different country, say, Egypt or Poland.

I find it easy to come up with explanations that are not chartitable toward the news media. Let us stay away from those. Think of charitable interpretations, such as American readers feel little or no connection to Venezuela. Or that this is one of many important stories that Donald Trump has driven off the front page.

What is the best, most charitable reason for the news media not to give more coverage to Venezuela? Serious, nonsarcastic answers only, please.

Honor, Face, Dignity, and Victimhood

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Jorg Friedrichs writes [UPDATE: link fixed],

In short, status is more salient for honor and face than for dignity cultures. In honor cultures, hierarchy is like a “pecking order” with “cockfights” rife among status-anxious rivals because the honor code requires defending honor against real or perceived challenges from peers. In face cultures, hierarchy is engrained in the collective consciousness of the group and status anxiety cannot burst into conflict because people must know their place. In dignity cultures, self-worth is a birthright so status and, by implication, status anxiety should matter less.

There is a lot of interesting, speculative discussion along these lines.

On a related note, in a recent Cowen-Haidt discussion, Jonathan Haidt brought up one of his old posts.

I just read the most extraordinary paper by two sociologists — Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning — explaining why concerns about microaggressions have erupted on many American college campuses in just the past few years. In brief: We’re beginning a second transition of moral cultures. The first major transition happened in the 18th and 19th centuries when most Western societies moved away from cultures of honor (where people must earn honor and must therefore avenge insults on their own) to cultures of dignity in which people are assumed to have dignity and don’t need to earn it. They foreswear violence, turn to courts or administrative bodies to respond to major transgressions, and for minor transgressions they either ignore them or attempt to resolve them by social means. There’s no more dueling.

Campbell and Manning describe how this culture of dignity is now giving way to a new culture of victimhood in which people are encouraged to respond to even the slightest unintentional offense, as in an honor culture. But they must not obtain redress on their own; they must appeal for help to powerful others or administrative bodies, to whom they must make the case that they have been victimized.

Impressions from Israel

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I am back now.

1. There is a construction boom underway. My best guess is that until recently household formation grew faster than supply, but now the opposite is going to happen. I believe that there are long lags between intent to build and completion. Perhaps projects that complete after the middle of next year will face some downward price pressure, although that seems inconceivable to Israelis.

2. The Israeli center-left seems bereft at the moment. They perceive themselves as lacking leaders. Netanyahu faces stronger threats from the right than from the left. No politician can get away with advocating a policy based on trust and confidence in Palestinian leaders.

3. My center-left friends, who were enthusiastic about Obama in 2008, feel very differently now. I think that on a scale of 1 to 10, where I might rate his foreign policy as about 4, they seem to rate it lower than 2. They believe that Europeans are similarly disillusioned with Obama. I have no first-hand evidence for or against that.

4. They don’t know what to make of U.S. politics. Israelis whose sympathies lie with Democrats have trouble grasping Hillary Clinton’s struggles. Those who align with Republicans cannot grasp what has happened to establishment candidates there. I cited Martin Gurri frequently.

5. On security, I never felt danger, nor did I sense an increased presence of guards.

6. What will Israeli Arabs do? There is a case for saying that rationally they are fortunate to be living in Israel, and polls show that close to half feel that way. In the Haifa area, there are middle-class Arab families moving into Jewish neighborhoods. But I would guess that ethnic identity and resentment are potentially strong.