The difference between Afghanistan and Ukraine I see is the following. The most potent ideology is nationalism. In Afghanistan nationalism worked in favour of the Taliban, in Ukraine nationalism works against Russia.
“The Putin has to be deposed idea” has been replaced by the “we can win this without escalating into a broader conflict” idea. It’s more plausible.
Glad Matt admitted that 150k troops wasn’t enough to even try to take the whole country. It would have been enough to maybe take half if they both fought with Soviet tech, but ukr had us/turkey tech.
Russia supply lines won’t be as exposed now. But we are giving ukr the good stuff. It will be an interesting test. Let’s say we win, do we go for Crimea. You have to take the base. They will bring out the tactical nukes, but they may not limit to novorussiya. On the contrary, they’d make sure it wasn’t just novorussiya.
The Georgia scenario was a better outcome for the average Ukrainian, unless you wanted to go to Poland. Best thing is to support Biden and hope he is right in the end.
Beating Putin and the other kleptocrats who run countries like Nigeria, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Iran requires that we dramatically reduce fossil fuels. A proven way to escalate that reduction is a carbon tax, specifically HR2307, Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act. Matt has outlined several good incentives, which include a carbon tax. Rather than reducing payroll taxes the carbon tax should be redistributed to households as monthly "dividends." Households that see money every month (or quarter) are more enthusiastic about the carbon tax than tiny reductions in their payroll taxes.
We can see this war as a wake up call in multiple ways, on multiple fronts, and take action to lead the rest of the world in energy innovation and defiance of autocratic corruption.
One remaining typo ("... and to permitting new utility-scale wind and solar warms.") that I love because it could either be mechanical {[w] and [f] aren't that far apart on the keyboard} or psychological {solar = warming}.
I bought into Mancur OIson when I was a libertarian but, over time, I've come to see him as... premature? I'm not really sure what the word should be.
I think Olson, et al underestimate the wisdom of a small-c conservative approach and see an inability to chase every new policy fad as evidence of sclerosis. Decision-making is often seen as purely crisis-driven, at best, and "unresponsive". But what I've concluded over time is that:
1. The marginal value of any of these changes is often much smaller than their proponents (and opponents) claim. For example, the US is largely incapable of getting its transit house in order. While true, doing so is almost meaningless: our house is sprawling Victorian manor where every function is carefully separated from every other, so the transit impact you see in places with dense clusters of people and services just doesn't exist here.
2. A lot of proposals are actually just chasing transient features of the economy or society. During the 1990s and again in the 2000s there were a number of proposals to chase innovative ideas like government-backed investment accounts. Each of these proposals was undone by the bursting of a bubble.
3. Most proposals go nowhere because people aren't even known, not because a quagmire of veto points and interest lobbying has arisen. Nearly all the policy discussion is within elite circles and never really leaves it. At best, it will penetrate down to blog-reading sub-elites like me. (And I, at least, am not a political actor but some jackass trying to look smart at parties.) Maybe 1% of the population is aware enough of the discussion to recall it without prompting.
4. Even when known, no one is being persuaded. Very little work ever goes into persuasion at all and my only real theory about this is that the persuasion happened among the original discussants, who now assume it's as well-known outside as within their subculture of political junkies.
So nothing gets done because there's no real reason for it to rather than because a dense web of decision-making procedures impedes progress. Either the policy is not important enough for anyone to push, it really shouldn't be in the first place, or it simply lacks the kinds of penetration into the public that set politics into action long term.
I'm not sure I agree there's much of a comparison between Afghanistan and Ukraine. The big difference is less the country "got its shit together" and more: Ukraine has an actual national identity forged over centuries and more recently after eight grueling years of war against Russia. Then a dictator decided to invade and slaughter the people who opposed his insane nationalist project.
Afghanistan, on the other hand, has been a failed state for decades and in a state of civil war since at least the Soviets invaded in the 1980s. It's probably more accurate to say the country has been in a constant state of civil war since 1973 when the King was deposed. Overall Afghans didn't fight because their sense of national identity is poor and didn't want to fight a losing battle for a corrupt and pitiful regime propped up by the Americans. If the Taliban was a foreign power (say: Russia for instance) I wouldn't doubt the Taliban and the Afghan National Army would join forces and fight like hell to kick the Russians out. Then go back to killing each other.
Matt compares Ukraine to Afghanistan, but I think a better comparison would be with Croatia in the early 90s. As far as I understand, Croatia began its war in 1991 against a well-equipped state army (JNA) and associated militias. Croatia's own military did not really exist at the time--they resorted to making armored vehicles out of metal pipes and dropping bombs out the doors of old biplanes. Nevertheless, the JNA (which I think was having its own problems by then) was unwilling or unable to completely destroy the Croatian force. The war settled into a trench phase by late 1991, and a ceasefire began in early 1992 which lasted for several years. During this time the Croatian military reformed itself with help from an American firm. In 1995 the Croats launched a massive attack against Serbian militias in the Krajina, which was so successful that some people think that NATO planned it for them.
The Croatian case seems to be quite similar to the Ukrainian one. The two countries both had an established (if slightly corrupt) state administration and a homogeneous population with a common enemy. They therefore didn't have to worry about organizing tax collection, conscription or police at the same time as fighting a war, and didn't have to worry about defections from the military. It was probably also helpful that the two countries each had a low-intensity trench war occupying a small, defined part of their respective territories. They could rotate units through that area to give them combat experience, without worrying about the war spilling out and disrupting government or economic activity in other regions.
So I don't think it's the case that the defeat of the Afghan government was due entirely to poor decisions by it and by its allies, or to the lack of foreign assistance. I imagine that "former communist government suffers near-death experience, fights trench war for a few years and develops surprisingly effective military" may actually be a pretty common outcome.
Regarding the footnote on oil, obviously oil tankers can sail wherever they want, but it costs significantly more money to sail further, and requires many more tankers because each round-trip takes longer. A lot of it currently comes through Russia’s Baltic ports and those are not convenient for Asian buyers. China and India have also been able to negotiate significant discounts on Russian oil and will be in an even stronger position to do so if nobody else will buy it. Russia can try to ship more through the Black Sea ports, but there are physical limitations there too.
Point is that although oil is famously (mostly) fungible for the buyer, meaning there is something like a single world market, the amount that sellers earn varies quite a bit depending on the point of delivery. Shipping to China to sell at a 20% discount is a big hit compared to shipping to Germany at Brent prices.
Would it be fair to say that the latest iteration of Olson's "distributional coalitions" dynamic is the prevalence of the "equity lens" in all public policy discussions? Not that equity doesn't deserve attention, but... I spent decades is the union movement, so I know how righteous one can feel in fighting for "shares." But I also know the limitations of that quest, when one's single lens diverts attention to the need for greater purpose, more "moon shot" projects, more scientific discoveries and innovation, more growth --- and, to Matt's harping on this theme, more immigration, more workers, more jobs.
My hot take is that the US, EU, Britain, Australia, Japan and possibly others should take small steps moving towards a global governmental super-structure. Current global bodies include the UN (which has a seat for every country, which numerically means lots of dictatorships), or pan-continental bodies which sort of make sense and sort of don't (the EU, South America a little bit moving towards their version of the EU called Mercosur, the same thing with Africa and the African Union).
It would make a lot more sense to put what everyone vaguely handwaves as 'the West' into a formal body- picking and choosing your friends based on actual values, and not just who's geographically closeby. You at least see a step towards this with the CANZUK concept (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANZUK). The new 'Western Nations' alliance could form a free trade pact for starters, then over the decades inch towards other stuff, sort of like what the EU's done. As a reminder, the US + the EU + Britain alone is about 3 times the size of China's economy. Maybe eventually a mutual defense pact over time.
Is this super-unrealistic right now, in this new age of nationalism? Sure- but as the EU proves, these things can work out over a multi-decade time span. We should counter the power of China and Russia with a new global body that's authoritarian-free and proudly elitist, the opposite of the UN- poor countries need not apply
There is a strong moral case to be made for the West (i.e., western Europe) to immediately cut off fossil fuel imports from Russia. Whether that would have a material effect on the war and would be worth the potentially huge economic pain in Germany and others are not so clear to me.
The war up to this point has been a disaster for Putin. He clearly believes he can still pull off some sort of victory, even if it is only conquering the Donbas. Would an immediate and total cessation of fossil fuel imports change his mind and cause him to admit defeat? Highly unlikely. If anything, it would give him more cause to paint the war as one of Russia versus the West, and call for the Russian people to tighten their belts and sacrifice, just as their courageous forefathers did so many times. And I suspect that that would work with the populace. And can Russia actually execute military operations without oil/gas money coming from the West? I don't see why not, and not only because it can pick up sales from other countries. The war is expensive, but not *that* expensive. Conscripts are cheap, and the weapon systems you're using have already been built.
A *long-term* (and permanent!) cessation of western imports would obviously be catastrophic for Russia, but in the long-term yadda yadda yadda. That's a problem to be dealt with after pulling out a "victory" and waiting for the West to accommodate itself to whatever shape that victory has.
That said, my main hope is that the West does see this as an inflection point and uses it to make long-term defense changes and as a spur to divorce itself more quickly from fossil fuels, beginning in a planned and controlled way (i.e., no severe recession in Germany) with those imports from Russia.
I'm sorry to say that your thesis is almost entirely wrong:
"The economic war on Russia is half-assed not because each national leader has independently decided to half-ass it, but because all of our societies are experiencing demosclerosis and simply can’t choose to act decisively on the Russia issue. We lack the capacity."
It has nothing to do with demosclerosis. The problem is that Ukraine is not important enough for most people to be willing to accept sacrifices and the tradeoffs that come with policy that isn't half-assed. Like with many other things, the virtue signaling on Ukraine far outstrips what people are actually willing to accept.
The problem is actually a lack of popularism. Helping Ukraine as long as the domestic cost isn't high is very popular. Potentially sacrificing 3 percent of GDP to help Ukraine is not popular and the reason it is not popular has nothing to do with demosclerosis.
If there's a nugget here it's that political leaders have insufficiently made the case to the public that some sacrifice is worth helping Ukraine. In fact, they are avoiding that argument completely for the most part.
Disagree that "political leaders have insufficiently made the case to the public". We've had a full court press from the media/millitary industrial complex.
Can they really win without trying though? If Russia focuses all their efforts on conquering Eastern Ukraine, which seems to be what they're doing now, that's probably entirely feasible. The Ukrainian army has certainly performed better than expected, but the triumphalism around the discourse is dangerous and could be preparing people for a rude awakening.
Just a little deeper dive into the natural gas graph. The "industry feedstock" part (about 1/3) is essentially fertilizers. That's where the cheapest ones come from. Nuclear, solar and wind won't replace that. Right now farmers are scrambling to find other sources, like natural manures, but that will take time. Unlike driving your car fewer miles or turning down the thermostat a notch to stretch other energy sources to go farther, such actions won't help 8 billion people who need to eat today. So, while farmers are already seeing increased fertilizer costs over last year in the 200-300% range, and while we in the US and Europe won't see retail food prices go up that much (because the farm price is a small portion of our value-added retail price), folks in developing countries who rely on basics (as well as Ukrainian wheat to help keep all wheat prices lower) will face real costs. This is a bigger deal than many realize and not easily solvable without immediate replacements for natural gas. So, just a little aside to point out it isn't just about finding other energy substitutes for heating German homes.
The difference between Afghanistan and Ukraine I see is the following. The most potent ideology is nationalism. In Afghanistan nationalism worked in favour of the Taliban, in Ukraine nationalism works against Russia.
We need maintain Ukraine as a major grain supplier and exporter, e.g. holding Odessa is a priority.
We need to commit to allowing the investments necessary for US producers to supply LNG to Europe
“The Putin has to be deposed idea” has been replaced by the “we can win this without escalating into a broader conflict” idea. It’s more plausible.
Glad Matt admitted that 150k troops wasn’t enough to even try to take the whole country. It would have been enough to maybe take half if they both fought with Soviet tech, but ukr had us/turkey tech.
Russia supply lines won’t be as exposed now. But we are giving ukr the good stuff. It will be an interesting test. Let’s say we win, do we go for Crimea. You have to take the base. They will bring out the tactical nukes, but they may not limit to novorussiya. On the contrary, they’d make sure it wasn’t just novorussiya.
The Georgia scenario was a better outcome for the average Ukrainian, unless you wanted to go to Poland. Best thing is to support Biden and hope he is right in the end.
Beating Putin and the other kleptocrats who run countries like Nigeria, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Iran requires that we dramatically reduce fossil fuels. A proven way to escalate that reduction is a carbon tax, specifically HR2307, Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act. Matt has outlined several good incentives, which include a carbon tax. Rather than reducing payroll taxes the carbon tax should be redistributed to households as monthly "dividends." Households that see money every month (or quarter) are more enthusiastic about the carbon tax than tiny reductions in their payroll taxes.
We can see this war as a wake up call in multiple ways, on multiple fronts, and take action to lead the rest of the world in energy innovation and defiance of autocratic corruption.
One remaining typo ("... and to permitting new utility-scale wind and solar warms.") that I love because it could either be mechanical {[w] and [f] aren't that far apart on the keyboard} or psychological {solar = warming}.
I bought into Mancur OIson when I was a libertarian but, over time, I've come to see him as... premature? I'm not really sure what the word should be.
I think Olson, et al underestimate the wisdom of a small-c conservative approach and see an inability to chase every new policy fad as evidence of sclerosis. Decision-making is often seen as purely crisis-driven, at best, and "unresponsive". But what I've concluded over time is that:
1. The marginal value of any of these changes is often much smaller than their proponents (and opponents) claim. For example, the US is largely incapable of getting its transit house in order. While true, doing so is almost meaningless: our house is sprawling Victorian manor where every function is carefully separated from every other, so the transit impact you see in places with dense clusters of people and services just doesn't exist here.
2. A lot of proposals are actually just chasing transient features of the economy or society. During the 1990s and again in the 2000s there were a number of proposals to chase innovative ideas like government-backed investment accounts. Each of these proposals was undone by the bursting of a bubble.
3. Most proposals go nowhere because people aren't even known, not because a quagmire of veto points and interest lobbying has arisen. Nearly all the policy discussion is within elite circles and never really leaves it. At best, it will penetrate down to blog-reading sub-elites like me. (And I, at least, am not a political actor but some jackass trying to look smart at parties.) Maybe 1% of the population is aware enough of the discussion to recall it without prompting.
4. Even when known, no one is being persuaded. Very little work ever goes into persuasion at all and my only real theory about this is that the persuasion happened among the original discussants, who now assume it's as well-known outside as within their subculture of political junkies.
So nothing gets done because there's no real reason for it to rather than because a dense web of decision-making procedures impedes progress. Either the policy is not important enough for anyone to push, it really shouldn't be in the first place, or it simply lacks the kinds of penetration into the public that set politics into action long term.
I'm not sure I agree there's much of a comparison between Afghanistan and Ukraine. The big difference is less the country "got its shit together" and more: Ukraine has an actual national identity forged over centuries and more recently after eight grueling years of war against Russia. Then a dictator decided to invade and slaughter the people who opposed his insane nationalist project.
Afghanistan, on the other hand, has been a failed state for decades and in a state of civil war since at least the Soviets invaded in the 1980s. It's probably more accurate to say the country has been in a constant state of civil war since 1973 when the King was deposed. Overall Afghans didn't fight because their sense of national identity is poor and didn't want to fight a losing battle for a corrupt and pitiful regime propped up by the Americans. If the Taliban was a foreign power (say: Russia for instance) I wouldn't doubt the Taliban and the Afghan National Army would join forces and fight like hell to kick the Russians out. Then go back to killing each other.
Matt compares Ukraine to Afghanistan, but I think a better comparison would be with Croatia in the early 90s. As far as I understand, Croatia began its war in 1991 against a well-equipped state army (JNA) and associated militias. Croatia's own military did not really exist at the time--they resorted to making armored vehicles out of metal pipes and dropping bombs out the doors of old biplanes. Nevertheless, the JNA (which I think was having its own problems by then) was unwilling or unable to completely destroy the Croatian force. The war settled into a trench phase by late 1991, and a ceasefire began in early 1992 which lasted for several years. During this time the Croatian military reformed itself with help from an American firm. In 1995 the Croats launched a massive attack against Serbian militias in the Krajina, which was so successful that some people think that NATO planned it for them.
The Croatian case seems to be quite similar to the Ukrainian one. The two countries both had an established (if slightly corrupt) state administration and a homogeneous population with a common enemy. They therefore didn't have to worry about organizing tax collection, conscription or police at the same time as fighting a war, and didn't have to worry about defections from the military. It was probably also helpful that the two countries each had a low-intensity trench war occupying a small, defined part of their respective territories. They could rotate units through that area to give them combat experience, without worrying about the war spilling out and disrupting government or economic activity in other regions.
So I don't think it's the case that the defeat of the Afghan government was due entirely to poor decisions by it and by its allies, or to the lack of foreign assistance. I imagine that "former communist government suffers near-death experience, fights trench war for a few years and develops surprisingly effective military" may actually be a pretty common outcome.
Regarding the footnote on oil, obviously oil tankers can sail wherever they want, but it costs significantly more money to sail further, and requires many more tankers because each round-trip takes longer. A lot of it currently comes through Russia’s Baltic ports and those are not convenient for Asian buyers. China and India have also been able to negotiate significant discounts on Russian oil and will be in an even stronger position to do so if nobody else will buy it. Russia can try to ship more through the Black Sea ports, but there are physical limitations there too.
Point is that although oil is famously (mostly) fungible for the buyer, meaning there is something like a single world market, the amount that sellers earn varies quite a bit depending on the point of delivery. Shipping to China to sell at a 20% discount is a big hit compared to shipping to Germany at Brent prices.
Would it be fair to say that the latest iteration of Olson's "distributional coalitions" dynamic is the prevalence of the "equity lens" in all public policy discussions? Not that equity doesn't deserve attention, but... I spent decades is the union movement, so I know how righteous one can feel in fighting for "shares." But I also know the limitations of that quest, when one's single lens diverts attention to the need for greater purpose, more "moon shot" projects, more scientific discoveries and innovation, more growth --- and, to Matt's harping on this theme, more immigration, more workers, more jobs.
My hot take is that the US, EU, Britain, Australia, Japan and possibly others should take small steps moving towards a global governmental super-structure. Current global bodies include the UN (which has a seat for every country, which numerically means lots of dictatorships), or pan-continental bodies which sort of make sense and sort of don't (the EU, South America a little bit moving towards their version of the EU called Mercosur, the same thing with Africa and the African Union).
It would make a lot more sense to put what everyone vaguely handwaves as 'the West' into a formal body- picking and choosing your friends based on actual values, and not just who's geographically closeby. You at least see a step towards this with the CANZUK concept (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANZUK). The new 'Western Nations' alliance could form a free trade pact for starters, then over the decades inch towards other stuff, sort of like what the EU's done. As a reminder, the US + the EU + Britain alone is about 3 times the size of China's economy. Maybe eventually a mutual defense pact over time.
Is this super-unrealistic right now, in this new age of nationalism? Sure- but as the EU proves, these things can work out over a multi-decade time span. We should counter the power of China and Russia with a new global body that's authoritarian-free and proudly elitist, the opposite of the UN- poor countries need not apply
The many caveats offered here remind me of why I don’t like globespinning clubmen who offer analyses like “The Rise & Decline of Nations.”
There is a strong moral case to be made for the West (i.e., western Europe) to immediately cut off fossil fuel imports from Russia. Whether that would have a material effect on the war and would be worth the potentially huge economic pain in Germany and others are not so clear to me.
The war up to this point has been a disaster for Putin. He clearly believes he can still pull off some sort of victory, even if it is only conquering the Donbas. Would an immediate and total cessation of fossil fuel imports change his mind and cause him to admit defeat? Highly unlikely. If anything, it would give him more cause to paint the war as one of Russia versus the West, and call for the Russian people to tighten their belts and sacrifice, just as their courageous forefathers did so many times. And I suspect that that would work with the populace. And can Russia actually execute military operations without oil/gas money coming from the West? I don't see why not, and not only because it can pick up sales from other countries. The war is expensive, but not *that* expensive. Conscripts are cheap, and the weapon systems you're using have already been built.
A *long-term* (and permanent!) cessation of western imports would obviously be catastrophic for Russia, but in the long-term yadda yadda yadda. That's a problem to be dealt with after pulling out a "victory" and waiting for the West to accommodate itself to whatever shape that victory has.
That said, my main hope is that the West does see this as an inflection point and uses it to make long-term defense changes and as a spur to divorce itself more quickly from fossil fuels, beginning in a planned and controlled way (i.e., no severe recession in Germany) with those imports from Russia.
I'm sorry to say that your thesis is almost entirely wrong:
"The economic war on Russia is half-assed not because each national leader has independently decided to half-ass it, but because all of our societies are experiencing demosclerosis and simply can’t choose to act decisively on the Russia issue. We lack the capacity."
It has nothing to do with demosclerosis. The problem is that Ukraine is not important enough for most people to be willing to accept sacrifices and the tradeoffs that come with policy that isn't half-assed. Like with many other things, the virtue signaling on Ukraine far outstrips what people are actually willing to accept.
The problem is actually a lack of popularism. Helping Ukraine as long as the domestic cost isn't high is very popular. Potentially sacrificing 3 percent of GDP to help Ukraine is not popular and the reason it is not popular has nothing to do with demosclerosis.
If there's a nugget here it's that political leaders have insufficiently made the case to the public that some sacrifice is worth helping Ukraine. In fact, they are avoiding that argument completely for the most part.
Disagree that "political leaders have insufficiently made the case to the public". We've had a full court press from the media/millitary industrial complex.
Can they really win without trying though? If Russia focuses all their efforts on conquering Eastern Ukraine, which seems to be what they're doing now, that's probably entirely feasible. The Ukrainian army has certainly performed better than expected, but the triumphalism around the discourse is dangerous and could be preparing people for a rude awakening.
Just a little deeper dive into the natural gas graph. The "industry feedstock" part (about 1/3) is essentially fertilizers. That's where the cheapest ones come from. Nuclear, solar and wind won't replace that. Right now farmers are scrambling to find other sources, like natural manures, but that will take time. Unlike driving your car fewer miles or turning down the thermostat a notch to stretch other energy sources to go farther, such actions won't help 8 billion people who need to eat today. So, while farmers are already seeing increased fertilizer costs over last year in the 200-300% range, and while we in the US and Europe won't see retail food prices go up that much (because the farm price is a small portion of our value-added retail price), folks in developing countries who rely on basics (as well as Ukrainian wheat to help keep all wheat prices lower) will face real costs. This is a bigger deal than many realize and not easily solvable without immediate replacements for natural gas. So, just a little aside to point out it isn't just about finding other energy substitutes for heating German homes.