“There is something odd about the conventions governing this war where NATO giving Ukraine weapons to fire at Russia is considered fair game but NATO forces actually firing the weapons ourselves would be a potential trigger for nuclear war.”
What’s odd? This is literally how proxy wars have worked since the days of the Roman Republic, if not before.
Yeah, the calculus here is pretty simple. Ukraine, even with massive support from Europe and the US, does not pose an existential threat to Russia. We, being NATO broadly but the US specifically, do. If we cross the line into a shooting war, Russia cannot safely assume we will stop short of a complete regime change. So rationally, the Russian regime has to leave room to escalate, to deter us from entering the conflict as an active participant.
Granted, that's generally not considered "fair game" in a proxy war, but again, it's not that uncommon. Sending in "advisors" to set up advanced weapon systems and have some local press the "launch" button is arguably fair game. I think that MY is commenting that the line between "fair game" and "not fair game" is kind of arbitrary.
The preceding paragraph is exactly what I was talking about!
MY's comment is that "NATO giving Ukraine weapons to fire at Russia is considered fair game but NATO forces actually firing the weapons ourselves would be a potential trigger for nuclear war."
To quote myself: "Sending in "advisors" to set up advanced weapon systems and have some local press the "launch" button is arguably fair game. I think that MY is commenting that the line between "fair game" and "not fair game" is kind of arbitrary."
(EDIT: For reference, the Harpoon missiles that Ukraine got from Denmark are land-based. Setting them up is probably somewhat complicated. Hence, "advisors" would be helpful to set them up.)
The previous paragraph to which we're referring specifically states the (correct) understanding that Harpoon and other land-based systems will not break the Russian blockade. They lack the range, Ukraine lacks the targeting data, and the geography of the Black Sea is such that Russia can use SSNs to their full potential as commerce hunters in the southern two-thirds if they so desire.
Breaking this blockade would require an organized naval intervention by naval powers larger than Ukraine, not "advisors" or "volunteers".
And? You quoted MY writing about who gets to press the launch button for an advanced weapon. That's what I responded to. Everything you've written since then seems to be an attempt to change the subject.
"You quoted MY writing about who gets to press the launch button for an advanced weapon."
In context, no, that's not what Matt wrote. I mean, this is clear enough that 20-odd other people understood it the way I did.
If Matt meant we should be loaning "advisors" and "technical consultants" and even "volunteers" to Ukraine, fine, he can come clarify that.
But in context it seems very, very clear that that's *not* what was meant by that sentence, as the preceding sentence notes that the blockade needs to be broken and that weapons sales won't do the trick.
Given the fuzzy boundaries between war and peace in the pre-modern era, I'm not sure there's a perfect example of a purely proxy war, but the American experience in Afghanistan 1979-2020 would likely look familiar to Romans fighting in the Second Latin War in the 4th century. Former "allies" that they frequently armed to fight off foreign threats, but eventually came back and tried to bite them hard.
Likewise, the First Macedonian War evolved into mainly a proxy conflict as the Romans sought to use Greek allies to hold Macedon at bay while it focused on Carthage.
Rome's historical "barbarian management" in the north also mirrored China's for most of its existence, in that it armed and bribed one group of barbs to fight another rather than doing so itself, whenever possible.
Certainly, Roman avoidance of direct combat in these instances was because it wanted to husband resources, not fear of retaliation, but the practice of handing the guy between you and the person you dislike a spear and hoping they end up dead before you need to get involved is pretty damned old.
I think all he's saying is that it's weird that very overt arming of a belligerent over another (upon their request), just to have that belligerent fire your weapons at their enemy, isn't considered an act of war while firing the weapons yourself would be.
- I stab you with a knife --> I committed an act of war
- I give my knife to the guy standing next to me, *at his request*, and know he's definitely going to stab you with it --> I did not commit an act of war
Not sure this makes sense from a logical perspective. The two sides are *pretending* it makes sense just to avoid direct war but, functionally, there is no difference.
Arguing that the entire concept of proxy war makes no sense is something that one might do... but the historical record would seem to have the last word.
We've been having proxy wars for a good, long while now.
I think the odd part is that these “rules we’re living with” are still being honored to any extent. The only pretense Russia needs to “justify” nuclear escalation is the pretense that Russia manufactures for the purpose. After all, Putin’s regime has always demonstrated great faculty for fabricating pretense.
That’s why it’s so scary that Russia has claimed supply shipments are legitimate targets, implying that the distinction between proxy wars and direct conflict has blurred in their view. I expect the rules we’re living with to be rewritten in short order and not for the last time. Scary times.
Russians shot at us in Vietnam, they did not provide anti air defense and training but keep themselves at a clear remove from actually pulling triggers. Proxy war in Korea was also not this clear cut. We had a big shootout with Wagner group in Syria. It’s not so cut and dry.
In neither of the situations you mentioned did the USSR deploy an organized, nationally-flagged and recognized military force.
There were plausibly deniable volunteers and “volunteers”, advisors/observers who could be hung out to dry or simply lie and say they never fired a shot, etc.
But that’s a very different story from deploying an organized NATO naval force to break a blockade.
This is true but I wonder if I could dig up some organized blockade run examples. In any case, I took Matt to be describing things like providing the advanced air defense systems UKR has asked for since day one. They seem to have been asking for just such a ‘plausibly deniable’ force to operate patriot batteries etc for / with them. Bc these would be on Russia’s doorstep is a potential confounder but it seems we are about to station them all over Russia’s doorstep elsewhere so I’m not sure about the validity of that.
The US provided navy escorts for oil tankers running the Iranian blockade during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Will). Much safer than breaking the Russian Black Sea blockade, however.
I assume that Putin is hoping to rerun his play with Syria:
commit atrocities and cause famine in third world;
create waves of desperate refugees flooding western democracies;
fund white supremacist/nativist candidates in the democracies;
see his puppets propelled to electoral victory by resentment of refugees and white supremacist hysteria;
watch his puppets relax sanctions and grant him territorial gains.
It's not crazy, it's just immoral. And with Murdoch, Le Pen, Farage, AfD, Trump, and lots of others working in concert, it has a good shot at succeeding.
This vastly overstate the amount of puppet-mastering Putin can do or even thinks he can do? There are much simpler reasons for why Russia became involved in Syria, and refugees were fleeing that country before Russia began directly supporting Syria, indeed they were leaving when the civil war first started and outside intervention was mostly Western arms aiding certain of the rebel groups. The top 3 refugee-sending nations at that time were Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, along with a smattering from North and sub-Saharan Africa.
And there are nativist, popularist, right-wing leaders in office right now like Erdogan, Orban, Duda. None of them are dancing to Putin's tune.
In other words, the simpler explanations are going to be much more correct here. Not everything is about influencing US politics.
Talking about Turkey - individual NATO members have sent varying degrees of lethal military aid to the Ukraine. I'm not informed enough to rank their contributions, but I know that Turkey is no exception in sending lethal aid.
Maybe there's a good argument for them to leave NATO, I don't know enough about it other than to add they are in a truly key geopolitical condition, they have a fairly unique strategic position and they have historically viewed Russia as their chief foreign military threat.
But to DTs original point - this has little to do with "Putin's Playbook" of triggering refugee crisis through higher food prices which will then lead to Putin friendly right-wing Populists being elected. Higher food prices could lead to the collapse of Erdogan's government for all he or I know about it.
This seems... overblown. As it was when we last discussed the issue in the lead-up to the French presidential election.
No one is defeating the Tories in Britain, certainly not whatever party Farage has created this week to serve as a vehicle for his personal grandstanding.
Le Pen got squished *badly* in the second round and came damned near to being edged out by the French left in the first round.
The GOP has already made very clear that it isn't going to become pro-Russian anytime soon, Trump's occasional bouts of Putin Fever notwithstanding.
AfD is so far from power that it makes Le Pen look close.
The most this is likely to achieve is to make conventional centre-left or centre-right politicians become more hostile to immigration (like the Danish Social Democrats, or Macron in France) to hold off vote surges for the far right. That achieves nothing in terms of helping Putin achieve his goals.
Orban and Erdogan (and only those two, Duda is definitely not in agreement, for instance) have been less pro-Ukraine than other European countries, but they're still more hostile to Putin than, say, most of the Arab world. Without control of national media to set a less anti-Putin line, the out of government right-populists are having to either take a Dudaesque strongly anti-Putin line to protect their own political rear, or are in the Zemmour position of their vote collapsing because of a perceived association to Putin.
Whatever you think of Russia's actions in Syria, they almost certainly resulted in a net decrease in the number of people who would have fled Syria by now. Putin clearly intervened to save Assad in order to preserve Russia's only Mediterranean naval base and to gain influence in the Middle East. He recently cashed in some of that influence to get Israel to not send drones to Ukraine and the Gulf States to not increase oil production and keep oil prices high, so it isn't hard to see why he sought out that influence.
While I wouldn't dismiss this outright, I'd characterize this more as speculative upside than as Putin's direct objective. The direct objective is simply to take hostages. That is, you hurt Indonesia et al. to (a) get those countries to pressure the rich countries to change course, (b) affect public opinion within the rich countries, e.g. peeling off some more left-wing support for continuing to help Ukraine, (c) make a few billion people more upset with the world order in general which in the long run indirectly hurts the countries most identified with that order.
Wouldn't the direct objective be to hurt Ukraine, by eliminating their exports? Blockading an enemy country is pretty standard stuff in war. It doesn't need to be much more complicated than that.
An additional thought that occurs just now is that global food price increases are just as likely to increase immigration pressures to Russia from the Central Asian states of Uzbekistand, Tajikistan, Kazakhstant, etc. There are already something like 7 or 8 million Central Asian immigrants residing in Russia right now and although they are largely welcome by the government they aren't always welcome by all Russians.
I could be wrong but what little I’ve read (and Occam’s Razor) suggests that the one thing that really scares Chinese people (and, consequently, their leaders) is food shortages.
There are plenty of Chinese people alive today who remember starving (and their contemporaries starving to death) during the Great Leap Forward.
China has hovered at the outer limits of Malthusian catastrophe for basically all its post-Tang existence. It had as many people as the US in 1920 in 1120, and as many people as the US today in 1800, despite having in every way worse agricultural resources, especially after 15-20 *centuries* of intensive agriculture in the Yellow and Yangtze River Valleys.
Achieving and maintaining food security is probably the single most ingrained habit of any Chinese government at this point.
The amount of pushback against the Shanghai lockdowns that was framed in terms of "we're starving" was incredible.
Also wasn't a big driver of the Arab spring high bread prices? That definetly would motivate Xi Jing Ping to create a huge stockpile that they will be hesistate to give away.
Yeah and even prior to that the Chinese government for centuries would have massive reserves that they would release in case of bad harvests. It was considered the key to the legitimancy of the government.
That sounds right, but those days are getting further and further in the rear view. Maybe the CCP originally made those stockpiles to assuage those fears, but their calculus could change.
My hope from all this is that the world does its level best to improve agricultural productivity and put aside silly ideas about organic farming, as Sri Lanka has learnt the hard way. Just as Believing The Science was wise with Covid vaccines, it is wise with GMO crops. Or perhaps Monsanto actually puts microchips in them?
Oh yeah, this bit:
"High wheat prices push up the value of the dollar, improve our terms of trade, and have some offsetting disinflationary benefits in terms of making exports cheaper."
A strong US dollar makes US imports cheaper and exports more expensive.
As detailed in The Overshoot article linked in this Slow Boring piece, [1] the US could fully replace the lost Russian and Ukrainian wheat imports with current agriculture productivity. The issue is that US farming has pivoted away from wheat and to corn and soybeans. The shift to corn is particularly concerning as the increased crop is primarily used for dubious ethanol production to use in fuel. And the growth in soybean planting is all about exporting animal feed for Chinese pig farmers.
> Longer-term, the U.S. is the natural candidate to fill in for Russia’s missing wheat surplus. American farmers spent the past several decades replacing wheat fields with corn and soybeans. The area harvested for wheat in the U.S. has shrunk by more than 40% since 1997 (from 25.4 million hectares to 15 million hectares), while land harvested for corn is up by 17.5% (from 29.4 million hectares to 34.6 million hectares) and land harvested for soybeans is up by 25% (from 28 million hectares to 35 million hectares).
> If U.S. wheat acreage had remained constant and productivity had followed the same upward path, U.S. farmers would be harvesting about 32 additional megatons of wheat each year right now. That would be roughly enough to offset the loss of Russian exports. The transition might take a few years, but it should be achievable using the full array of tools present in the typical U.S. farm bill.
One thing I'm not sure about that's pretty relevant to any quick shift from one type of crop to another is the seed supply, since producing seeds is a biological process that can't be sped up. Seed suppliers have to forecast demand at least one growing season ahead, especially for hybrid seeds. I don't believe most wheat grown in the US is hybridized which probably helps, and seed companies sometimes do take advantage of the reversed growing seasons between North and South America to shorten the seed production cycle, but it's still a biological process that takes time.
I'm not sure anything beyond higher wheat prices, humanitarian aid to the poorest victim countries, and elimination of the ethanol subsidy/mandate needs to be done.
I just wrote it in the comment but Sri Lanka's issues with fertilizer wasn't driven by a great belief in organic farming but because the Sri Lanka government used to subsidize fertilizer for free for farmers. The Sri Lanka decided to forgo the program for a year to save dollars and simply spun it about organic farming as a cover.
Last year fertlizers prices increased by 80% and Sri Lanka was already having the beginning of a foreign exchange crisis. Sri Lanka is a chronic net importer and the pandemic decreased remittnances and tourism which was their main source of dollars that they used to pay for their imports. The Sri Lanka government has recieved 16 different IMF loans in the past and the Sri Lankan governement at the time was a popularist one that wanted to avoid getting IMF help as it would have required increasing taxes and cutting spending. So they instead they cut fertilizer imports and tried to get Chinese loans instead which has left them in signifcantly worse straits. The negoitations with the IMF will likely take months since the IMF doesn't want to keep continuing bailing out Sri Lanka. So they will try to get Sri Lanka to implement some reforms to prevent it but time will see if the pattern will continue to repeat itself.
I accept there is a wider context to the Sri Lankan government deciding to stop importing fertiliser, but any conversation with somebody of sense would have told them that the value of the finished goods the fertiliser would help create would be many times the cost of the fertiliser. But the Sri Lankan government appears to listen to cranks in all matters, according to this Bloomberg article:
Basically, I want to the convey the main crank behavior was trying desparetly to avoid going to the IMF or signficantly raising interest rates doing a foreign exchange crisis! It's weird to see a country fail basic international macroeconomics so badly. Everything else that came after were symptoms of that.
I think Matt means that a strong dollar makes the US price of exported goods from the US cheaper.
As usual I push back against the idea that supply shocks -- like higher prices of wheat -- cause inflation. At most they push the Fed to inflate, but inflation is the Fed's business. Period.
No, it makes them more expensive. A strong dollar makes it more worthwhile for other nations to export >to< the US, and more expensive to import >from< the US. The two effects increase the supply of goods available in the US and therefore reduces inflation within the US.
It is the same mechanism that goes from fiscal deficits to capital inflows to "stronger" [what a stupid adjective :)] dollar that has undermined US manufacturing capacity in recent decades.
Russia is able to replenish the Black Sea fleet to an extent. They have internal littoral routes to transfer some ships to Black Sea ports without turkeys blessing.
Breaking the blockade will also require more than sinking surface ships. The blockade is enforced through mines, and subs. All that they must do is restrict merchant shipping by making it uninsurable. As a result breaking the blockade will require some kind of fleet of allied ships even if they are not allied warships. Someone will need to make a government level decision to buy or collateralize some ships and send their crews into danger.
Finally, folks in the west should pause from time to time and look inward. Many of us are desperately trying to get back to a status quo ex ante that no longer exists and in fact has not existed for some time. Matt keeps jokingly saying putin should have read his post about not invading. In fact Russia seems to have been better prepared for the invasion to go very poorly than I thought. They may be in this for the long haul and it’s worth looking at things like the grain shortage and chinas huge stockpile as long run gambits and not a strange attempt to force the US to end sanctions. As Matt writes it doesn’t make much sense from that respective so why do we keep framing it that way? Bc mentally we are grasping for return to status quo so we project that mirror image onto our adversary.
"Russia is able to replenish the Black Sea fleet to an extent. They have internal littoral routes to transfer some ships to Black Sea ports without turkeys blessing."
It's true that "some" ships can use their inland waterways, but it's useful to clarify what "some" means: I believe that the limiting factor is that Volga-Don canal, which only allows for a maximum draft of 3.6 m (12'). There are modern warships of that size (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steregushchiy-class_corvette would just fit), but that 3.6 m restriction is still pretty limiting. There's a reason Russia wants to use the Bosphorus.
For sure. But replacing small craft is all they really should need to do wrt these shore based anti ship missiles / drone attacks. Of course the Moskva sinking indicates otherwise but I really don’t know what happened there.
“ All that they must do is restrict merchant shipping by making it uninsurable. ”
NATO countries could act as an insurer of last resort for a trifling amount of money. The Russian government has already stepped in to provide that service domestically.
I agree, but ‘trifling’ and the number of merchants willing to do this relies on how many ships attempting this get sunk. Russia is quite a few subs in the Black Sea right now. Russia is insuring merchant ships but also no one is shooting at those ships it’s collateral risk they are insuring.
Matt mentioned it briefly but pay attention to fertilizer. Last year fertilizer prices rose by 80% and this year 40%. Russia is the main exporter of fertilizer and without fertilizer, farming yields are significantly lower. If developing countries are struggling to afford fertilizer, that can have devasting consquences in the coming years as farming yields decrease, forcing them to import more food, hurting the value of the currency, making it hardier to afford fertilizer.
One of the reason why Sri Lanka is in such desperate straits was because last year the government could afford to the import price for fertilizer and so stopped providing it to Sri Lankan farmers. As a result, their rice production cratered, leading to worse foreign exchange crisis.
So- Milan indicated that unfortunately an official poll of SB readers is not coming any time soon, but gave his unofficially blessing for an unofficial one made by readers (of readers and for readers!). The idea is to create an anonymous poll to get a sense of where subscribers are from (US state or country abroad) , party alignment (American) and political ideology (say political compass quadrant), 2020 vote and 2022 vote plans and also poll on a few key issues. So -any suggestions for a handful of interesting and illuminating issue questions for the poll (and how to phrase them)?
EDIT: Looking for issues that could be polled in multiple choice format (as done by Pew etc.) to maximize response rate.
This would absolutely be better information, but it doesn’t lend itself as easily to a drop down menu or list of checkboxes. (Do you include 20 or 50 or 100? Is there just one box for “rural” or is there one for each state or region?)
It can just be an input box, right? There would need to be a little bit of data integrity cleanup to account for spelling/punctuation, but that shouldn't be too difficult. And for people in non-metros, a county should suffice.
Airport code seems like it would be easiest. Unique, short, no versioning problems, and I'm sure it would be easy to convert to human-readable with some light scripting.
for policy issues, say we do it by asking people to check three out of a selection, what would be that total selection pool of policy issues you would suggest (we need to avoid open-ended question to maximize response and also so we get aggregate data automatically)?
Might be interesting to get political views on specific subjects. E.g. more vs less gun control, more vs less deficit spending in the next fiscal year, more vs less anti-monopoly regulation.
I thought demographics go without saying? My question is rather if I need to pick no more than 3-5 issue questions, which would they be? Or in other words, which pew polling questions would you suggest to pick ?
It doesn’t seem like a huge mystery why a country with a billion people that is the world’s largest cereal importer and suffered both the first- and second-deadliest famines in human history, the most recent being in living memory, would stockpile huge amounts of grain. I suspect a food shortage is on the short list of things most likely to kill millions of people and topple the government, it’s quite logical for them to take significant steps to avoid it.
One easy one would be to end the ethanol mandate and, if there are any I suspect there are, subsidies to "biodiesel." Neither of these would pass an NPV test using a reasonable price of net carbon emissions anyway. [I welcome correction on this point if anyone knows I am wrong about biodiesel.]
The investments in infrastructure integrating Ukraine with the West will be needed anyway, so get started with the "reconstruction" now.
I would think with where fuel prices are that it would be difficult to end the ethanol mandate, politically at least. I honestly don't know how much ethanol subsidies/mandates actually affect the prices at the pump, but I'd think the political ads would be easy to write just before the midterms about "the Biden administration is cutting aid to farmers and raising gas prices all while yada yada yada."
Shout out to Matt Klein’s The Overshoot, which provides the Oil and Wheat stats in this article, https://theovershoot.co/
It’s one of the more expensive substack subscriptions at $18/month, but it is absolutely worth it. I’ve seen it recommended by numerous people I respect including Jason Furman, Adam Tooze, Joe Weisenthal, and Paul Krugman. Those endorsements convinced me to subscribe and the Overshoot has provided me with a lot of detailed and novel data analysis of economic issues facing our world.
I’d particularly recommend the recent article on the abnormalities in US economic data that suggests our recent GDP decline is likely a data collection or analysis issue due to the abnormality of our current situation. https://theovershoot.co/p/us-economic-data-arent-adding-up
And one of the core theses of Klein’s work is that the US economy had been understimulated since at least the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. I.e., we had an undershoot. The Overshoot name is a call for us to make up for those mistakes as explained in several public (i.e., free) articles, including:
I don’t think western powers could convince Chinese leadership to sell down any significant amount of its wheat reserves as they see it as a critical strategic asset. As shown in this article, China is a major wheat importer. Hence their massive reserves serve as a buffer against global crises and trade wars.
It’s possible some African and Middle Eastern nations might be able to make major geopolitical concessions to China in return for desperately needed food. E.g., granting China the right to military bases and ports within their countries. That’s understandable in the short-term, but presents more problems for global security and peace in the long term.
Good point. I don’t think it’s a total conspiracy theory to think that one of the reasons for China’s grain stockpile is to have a supply if they try to invade Taiwan and the US enforces a blockade in retaliation.
The US has a little grain, too, and would counter China's offers. Empirical questiin: are China's reserves enough to let them outbid the US in enough strategic places to make the whole gambit worthwhile?
That is a really good point, and really obvious in retrospect. Thanks! Along with other comments about how China really values food security, I'm now pretty confident that China won't try to use food reserves to buy significant geopolitical victories.
Turkey is working with Russia in an attempt to reopen Ukrainian grain shipments, although its questionable whether Russia is operating in good faith. From a Bloomberg article published today, “Ukraine Cautious as Turkey, Russia Push Black Sea Grain Deal”. [1]
> Turkey and Russia have reached a tentative deal to restart shipments of Ukraine’s agricultural products from a key Black Sea port, but Kyiv remains skeptical of the proposed pact, according to people familiar with the discussions.
> Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government has offered military help to clear mines off the coast of Odesa and escort grain ships but Ukraine has yet to endorse the plan, worried that removing defenses could leave the vital port open to Russian attack, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss matters that aren’t yet public. Turkey hopes that a United Nations endorsement of the proposal could allay security concerns, the people said.
> The Russo-Turkish plan would allow for removal of mines near Odesa and guarantee safe passage for ships out of the Black Sea, under the auspices of the UN, the people said. Turkey, which has sought for months to mediate in the conflict, aims to set up a center in Istanbul to monitor and coordinate the shipments. Ukraine hasn’t participated directly in the talks, according to an official there.
Basic food supplies is one of the areas where reliance on international free trade has some really major pitfalls.
In this case, it has led to a lot of the overpopulated and poorer third world countries being screwed, and given our geopolitical rival a weapon to use against the west.
The US is a major agricultural exporter, so it would suck for us, but we should really try to push other countries to be self-sufficient instead of getting them addicted to our cheap corn/soybeans/etc
Then they are eventually, inevitably going to have an even more massive humanitarian disaster when the food supplies are disrupted for an extended period of time.
It’s even worse IIRC Ireland had enough food it was just exported to the UK in the form of grain, butter, meat, etc. The peasant farmers had existed on potatoes. When that crop failed they couldn’t afford to buy what was being exported.
Also do you think Putin is trying to cause another European refugee crisis by creating an international food crisis? That last did help pro Russian right wing parties so it wouldn't be the craziest idea.
Food would be plentiful and inexpensive if we grew crops for humans instead of for animals. Animal agriculture is food production in reverse: 50% to 90% of the food value/calories is lost by feeding it to animals. Animal agriculture may be the most wasteful thing in the world.
I was with you right up until this:
“There is something odd about the conventions governing this war where NATO giving Ukraine weapons to fire at Russia is considered fair game but NATO forces actually firing the weapons ourselves would be a potential trigger for nuclear war.”
What’s odd? This is literally how proxy wars have worked since the days of the Roman Republic, if not before.
Yeah, the calculus here is pretty simple. Ukraine, even with massive support from Europe and the US, does not pose an existential threat to Russia. We, being NATO broadly but the US specifically, do. If we cross the line into a shooting war, Russia cannot safely assume we will stop short of a complete regime change. So rationally, the Russian regime has to leave room to escalate, to deter us from entering the conflict as an active participant.
"This is literally how proxy wars have worked since the days of the Roman Republic, if not before."
Kind of? That said, it's not that weird to secretly send your troops (sorry, "volunteers") to fight in the proxy war in small numbers. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union_in_the_Korean_War#Soviet_Pilots
Granted, that's generally not considered "fair game" in a proxy war, but again, it's not that uncommon. Sending in "advisors" to set up advanced weapon systems and have some local press the "launch" button is arguably fair game. I think that MY is commenting that the line between "fair game" and "not fair game" is kind of arbitrary.
Copy-pasted from a few minutes ago:
"The preceding paragraph specifically mentions defeating the Russian Black Sea Fleet, for context.
That's not happening short of an organized naval deployment."
The preceding paragraph is exactly what I was talking about!
MY's comment is that "NATO giving Ukraine weapons to fire at Russia is considered fair game but NATO forces actually firing the weapons ourselves would be a potential trigger for nuclear war."
To quote myself: "Sending in "advisors" to set up advanced weapon systems and have some local press the "launch" button is arguably fair game. I think that MY is commenting that the line between "fair game" and "not fair game" is kind of arbitrary."
(EDIT: For reference, the Harpoon missiles that Ukraine got from Denmark are land-based. Setting them up is probably somewhat complicated. Hence, "advisors" would be helpful to set them up.)
The previous paragraph to which we're referring specifically states the (correct) understanding that Harpoon and other land-based systems will not break the Russian blockade. They lack the range, Ukraine lacks the targeting data, and the geography of the Black Sea is such that Russia can use SSNs to their full potential as commerce hunters in the southern two-thirds if they so desire.
Breaking this blockade would require an organized naval intervention by naval powers larger than Ukraine, not "advisors" or "volunteers".
And? You quoted MY writing about who gets to press the launch button for an advanced weapon. That's what I responded to. Everything you've written since then seems to be an attempt to change the subject.
"You quoted MY writing about who gets to press the launch button for an advanced weapon."
In context, no, that's not what Matt wrote. I mean, this is clear enough that 20-odd other people understood it the way I did.
If Matt meant we should be loaning "advisors" and "technical consultants" and even "volunteers" to Ukraine, fine, he can come clarify that.
But in context it seems very, very clear that that's *not* what was meant by that sentence, as the preceding sentence notes that the blockade needs to be broken and that weapons sales won't do the trick.
Wait, what war did the Roman Republic fight by proxy where they sent advanced weaponry to a proxy but didn’t dare send any of their own troops?
Given the fuzzy boundaries between war and peace in the pre-modern era, I'm not sure there's a perfect example of a purely proxy war, but the American experience in Afghanistan 1979-2020 would likely look familiar to Romans fighting in the Second Latin War in the 4th century. Former "allies" that they frequently armed to fight off foreign threats, but eventually came back and tried to bite them hard.
Likewise, the First Macedonian War evolved into mainly a proxy conflict as the Romans sought to use Greek allies to hold Macedon at bay while it focused on Carthage.
Rome's historical "barbarian management" in the north also mirrored China's for most of its existence, in that it armed and bribed one group of barbs to fight another rather than doing so itself, whenever possible.
Certainly, Roman avoidance of direct combat in these instances was because it wanted to husband resources, not fear of retaliation, but the practice of handing the guy between you and the person you dislike a spear and hoping they end up dead before you need to get involved is pretty damned old.
The Antigonids sent a corp of phalangites fight with Cathage and Hannibal at Zama.
I can't recall if they were volunteers or some ancient equivalent, or official troops though.
Dang. I should have read David's post first.
I think all he's saying is that it's weird that very overt arming of a belligerent over another (upon their request), just to have that belligerent fire your weapons at their enemy, isn't considered an act of war while firing the weapons yourself would be.
- I stab you with a knife --> I committed an act of war
- I give my knife to the guy standing next to me, *at his request*, and know he's definitely going to stab you with it --> I did not commit an act of war
Not sure this makes sense from a logical perspective. The two sides are *pretending* it makes sense just to avoid direct war but, functionally, there is no difference.
I... guess?
Arguing that the entire concept of proxy war makes no sense is something that one might do... but the historical record would seem to have the last word.
We've been having proxy wars for a good, long while now.
I think the odd part is that these “rules we’re living with” are still being honored to any extent. The only pretense Russia needs to “justify” nuclear escalation is the pretense that Russia manufactures for the purpose. After all, Putin’s regime has always demonstrated great faculty for fabricating pretense.
That’s why it’s so scary that Russia has claimed supply shipments are legitimate targets, implying that the distinction between proxy wars and direct conflict has blurred in their view. I expect the rules we’re living with to be rewritten in short order and not for the last time. Scary times.
I don't see any contradiction there. Just because it has worked that way for a long time does not mean it isn't exceedingly odd.
Russians shot at us in Vietnam, they did not provide anti air defense and training but keep themselves at a clear remove from actually pulling triggers. Proxy war in Korea was also not this clear cut. We had a big shootout with Wagner group in Syria. It’s not so cut and dry.
It’s pretty cut and dried.
In neither of the situations you mentioned did the USSR deploy an organized, nationally-flagged and recognized military force.
There were plausibly deniable volunteers and “volunteers”, advisors/observers who could be hung out to dry or simply lie and say they never fired a shot, etc.
But that’s a very different story from deploying an organized NATO naval force to break a blockade.
This is true but I wonder if I could dig up some organized blockade run examples. In any case, I took Matt to be describing things like providing the advanced air defense systems UKR has asked for since day one. They seem to have been asking for just such a ‘plausibly deniable’ force to operate patriot batteries etc for / with them. Bc these would be on Russia’s doorstep is a potential confounder but it seems we are about to station them all over Russia’s doorstep elsewhere so I’m not sure about the validity of that.
The US provided navy escorts for oil tankers running the Iranian blockade during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Will). Much safer than breaking the Russian Black Sea blockade, however.
The preceding paragraph specifically mentions defeating the Russian Black Sea Fleet, for context.
That's not happening short of an organized naval deployment.
I assume that Putin is hoping to rerun his play with Syria:
commit atrocities and cause famine in third world;
create waves of desperate refugees flooding western democracies;
fund white supremacist/nativist candidates in the democracies;
see his puppets propelled to electoral victory by resentment of refugees and white supremacist hysteria;
watch his puppets relax sanctions and grant him territorial gains.
It's not crazy, it's just immoral. And with Murdoch, Le Pen, Farage, AfD, Trump, and lots of others working in concert, it has a good shot at succeeding.
This vastly overstate the amount of puppet-mastering Putin can do or even thinks he can do? There are much simpler reasons for why Russia became involved in Syria, and refugees were fleeing that country before Russia began directly supporting Syria, indeed they were leaving when the civil war first started and outside intervention was mostly Western arms aiding certain of the rebel groups. The top 3 refugee-sending nations at that time were Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, along with a smattering from North and sub-Saharan Africa.
And there are nativist, popularist, right-wing leaders in office right now like Erdogan, Orban, Duda. None of them are dancing to Putin's tune.
In other words, the simpler explanations are going to be much more correct here. Not everything is about influencing US politics.
They sure seem to be dancing to Putin’s tune to me.
Poland, Hungary and Turkey have all sent military aid to Ukraine. Turkey has sealed off the Bosphorus to Russian ships.
And everybody else’s ships. And refuses to join in sanctions on Russia. And is buying defense material from Russia. Time for them to leave NATO.
Talking about Turkey - individual NATO members have sent varying degrees of lethal military aid to the Ukraine. I'm not informed enough to rank their contributions, but I know that Turkey is no exception in sending lethal aid.
Maybe there's a good argument for them to leave NATO, I don't know enough about it other than to add they are in a truly key geopolitical condition, they have a fairly unique strategic position and they have historically viewed Russia as their chief foreign military threat.
But to DTs original point - this has little to do with "Putin's Playbook" of triggering refugee crisis through higher food prices which will then lead to Putin friendly right-wing Populists being elected. Higher food prices could lead to the collapse of Erdogan's government for all he or I know about it.
This seems... overblown. As it was when we last discussed the issue in the lead-up to the French presidential election.
No one is defeating the Tories in Britain, certainly not whatever party Farage has created this week to serve as a vehicle for his personal grandstanding.
Le Pen got squished *badly* in the second round and came damned near to being edged out by the French left in the first round.
The GOP has already made very clear that it isn't going to become pro-Russian anytime soon, Trump's occasional bouts of Putin Fever notwithstanding.
AfD is so far from power that it makes Le Pen look close.
The most this is likely to achieve is to make conventional centre-left or centre-right politicians become more hostile to immigration (like the Danish Social Democrats, or Macron in France) to hold off vote surges for the far right. That achieves nothing in terms of helping Putin achieve his goals.
Orban and Erdogan (and only those two, Duda is definitely not in agreement, for instance) have been less pro-Ukraine than other European countries, but they're still more hostile to Putin than, say, most of the Arab world. Without control of national media to set a less anti-Putin line, the out of government right-populists are having to either take a Dudaesque strongly anti-Putin line to protect their own political rear, or are in the Zemmour position of their vote collapsing because of a perceived association to Putin.
The thought of a Polish right-wing government cozying up to Russia is entertaining, but... implausible, shall we say?
Whatever you think of Russia's actions in Syria, they almost certainly resulted in a net decrease in the number of people who would have fled Syria by now. Putin clearly intervened to save Assad in order to preserve Russia's only Mediterranean naval base and to gain influence in the Middle East. He recently cashed in some of that influence to get Israel to not send drones to Ukraine and the Gulf States to not increase oil production and keep oil prices high, so it isn't hard to see why he sought out that influence.
While I wouldn't dismiss this outright, I'd characterize this more as speculative upside than as Putin's direct objective. The direct objective is simply to take hostages. That is, you hurt Indonesia et al. to (a) get those countries to pressure the rich countries to change course, (b) affect public opinion within the rich countries, e.g. peeling off some more left-wing support for continuing to help Ukraine, (c) make a few billion people more upset with the world order in general which in the long run indirectly hurts the countries most identified with that order.
Wouldn't the direct objective be to hurt Ukraine, by eliminating their exports? Blockading an enemy country is pretty standard stuff in war. It doesn't need to be much more complicated than that.
Well that too, but as Matt notes it doesn't seem like Ukraine is the main country getting hurt, which I assume Russia has noticed by now.
An additional thought that occurs just now is that global food price increases are just as likely to increase immigration pressures to Russia from the Central Asian states of Uzbekistand, Tajikistan, Kazakhstant, etc. There are already something like 7 or 8 million Central Asian immigrants residing in Russia right now and although they are largely welcome by the government they aren't always welcome by all Russians.
Thanks for proving the American Right doesn't have a monopoly on conspiracy theories.
I could be wrong but what little I’ve read (and Occam’s Razor) suggests that the one thing that really scares Chinese people (and, consequently, their leaders) is food shortages.
There are plenty of Chinese people alive today who remember starving (and their contemporaries starving to death) during the Great Leap Forward.
China has hovered at the outer limits of Malthusian catastrophe for basically all its post-Tang existence. It had as many people as the US in 1920 in 1120, and as many people as the US today in 1800, despite having in every way worse agricultural resources, especially after 15-20 *centuries* of intensive agriculture in the Yellow and Yangtze River Valleys.
Achieving and maintaining food security is probably the single most ingrained habit of any Chinese government at this point.
The amount of pushback against the Shanghai lockdowns that was framed in terms of "we're starving" was incredible.
Also wasn't a big driver of the Arab spring high bread prices? That definetly would motivate Xi Jing Ping to create a huge stockpile that they will be hesistate to give away.
Yeah and even prior to that the Chinese government for centuries would have massive reserves that they would release in case of bad harvests. It was considered the key to the legitimancy of the government.
That sounds right, but those days are getting further and further in the rear view. Maybe the CCP originally made those stockpiles to assuage those fears, but their calculus could change.
My hope from all this is that the world does its level best to improve agricultural productivity and put aside silly ideas about organic farming, as Sri Lanka has learnt the hard way. Just as Believing The Science was wise with Covid vaccines, it is wise with GMO crops. Or perhaps Monsanto actually puts microchips in them?
Oh yeah, this bit:
"High wheat prices push up the value of the dollar, improve our terms of trade, and have some offsetting disinflationary benefits in terms of making exports cheaper."
A strong US dollar makes US imports cheaper and exports more expensive.
As detailed in The Overshoot article linked in this Slow Boring piece, [1] the US could fully replace the lost Russian and Ukrainian wheat imports with current agriculture productivity. The issue is that US farming has pivoted away from wheat and to corn and soybeans. The shift to corn is particularly concerning as the increased crop is primarily used for dubious ethanol production to use in fuel. And the growth in soybean planting is all about exporting animal feed for Chinese pig farmers.
> Longer-term, the U.S. is the natural candidate to fill in for Russia’s missing wheat surplus. American farmers spent the past several decades replacing wheat fields with corn and soybeans. The area harvested for wheat in the U.S. has shrunk by more than 40% since 1997 (from 25.4 million hectares to 15 million hectares), while land harvested for corn is up by 17.5% (from 29.4 million hectares to 34.6 million hectares) and land harvested for soybeans is up by 25% (from 28 million hectares to 35 million hectares).
> If U.S. wheat acreage had remained constant and productivity had followed the same upward path, U.S. farmers would be harvesting about 32 additional megatons of wheat each year right now. That would be roughly enough to offset the loss of Russian exports. The transition might take a few years, but it should be achievable using the full array of tools present in the typical U.S. farm bill.
[1] https://theovershoot.co/p/russias-attack-on-the-worlds-food
One thing I'm not sure about that's pretty relevant to any quick shift from one type of crop to another is the seed supply, since producing seeds is a biological process that can't be sped up. Seed suppliers have to forecast demand at least one growing season ahead, especially for hybrid seeds. I don't believe most wheat grown in the US is hybridized which probably helps, and seed companies sometimes do take advantage of the reversed growing seasons between North and South America to shorten the seed production cycle, but it's still a biological process that takes time.
I'm not sure anything beyond higher wheat prices, humanitarian aid to the poorest victim countries, and elimination of the ethanol subsidy/mandate needs to be done.
I just wrote it in the comment but Sri Lanka's issues with fertilizer wasn't driven by a great belief in organic farming but because the Sri Lanka government used to subsidize fertilizer for free for farmers. The Sri Lanka decided to forgo the program for a year to save dollars and simply spun it about organic farming as a cover.
Last year fertlizers prices increased by 80% and Sri Lanka was already having the beginning of a foreign exchange crisis. Sri Lanka is a chronic net importer and the pandemic decreased remittnances and tourism which was their main source of dollars that they used to pay for their imports. The Sri Lanka government has recieved 16 different IMF loans in the past and the Sri Lankan governement at the time was a popularist one that wanted to avoid getting IMF help as it would have required increasing taxes and cutting spending. So they instead they cut fertilizer imports and tried to get Chinese loans instead which has left them in signifcantly worse straits. The negoitations with the IMF will likely take months since the IMF doesn't want to keep continuing bailing out Sri Lanka. So they will try to get Sri Lanka to implement some reforms to prevent it but time will see if the pattern will continue to repeat itself.
I accept there is a wider context to the Sri Lankan government deciding to stop importing fertiliser, but any conversation with somebody of sense would have told them that the value of the finished goods the fertiliser would help create would be many times the cost of the fertiliser. But the Sri Lankan government appears to listen to cranks in all matters, according to this Bloomberg article:
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-04-17/sri-lanka-debt-crisis-is-the-result-of-fringe-policies
Basically, I want to the convey the main crank behavior was trying desparetly to avoid going to the IMF or signficantly raising interest rates doing a foreign exchange crisis! It's weird to see a country fail basic international macroeconomics so badly. Everything else that came after were symptoms of that.
I think Matt means that a strong dollar makes the US price of exported goods from the US cheaper.
As usual I push back against the idea that supply shocks -- like higher prices of wheat -- cause inflation. At most they push the Fed to inflate, but inflation is the Fed's business. Period.
No, it makes them more expensive. A strong dollar makes it more worthwhile for other nations to export >to< the US, and more expensive to import >from< the US. The two effects increase the supply of goods available in the US and therefore reduces inflation within the US.
Yes. I think that is what Matt meant.
It is the same mechanism that goes from fiscal deficits to capital inflows to "stronger" [what a stupid adjective :)] dollar that has undermined US manufacturing capacity in recent decades.
Russia is able to replenish the Black Sea fleet to an extent. They have internal littoral routes to transfer some ships to Black Sea ports without turkeys blessing.
Breaking the blockade will also require more than sinking surface ships. The blockade is enforced through mines, and subs. All that they must do is restrict merchant shipping by making it uninsurable. As a result breaking the blockade will require some kind of fleet of allied ships even if they are not allied warships. Someone will need to make a government level decision to buy or collateralize some ships and send their crews into danger.
Finally, folks in the west should pause from time to time and look inward. Many of us are desperately trying to get back to a status quo ex ante that no longer exists and in fact has not existed for some time. Matt keeps jokingly saying putin should have read his post about not invading. In fact Russia seems to have been better prepared for the invasion to go very poorly than I thought. They may be in this for the long haul and it’s worth looking at things like the grain shortage and chinas huge stockpile as long run gambits and not a strange attempt to force the US to end sanctions. As Matt writes it doesn’t make much sense from that respective so why do we keep framing it that way? Bc mentally we are grasping for return to status quo so we project that mirror image onto our adversary.
"Russia is able to replenish the Black Sea fleet to an extent. They have internal littoral routes to transfer some ships to Black Sea ports without turkeys blessing."
It's true that "some" ships can use their inland waterways, but it's useful to clarify what "some" means: I believe that the limiting factor is that Volga-Don canal, which only allows for a maximum draft of 3.6 m (12'). There are modern warships of that size (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steregushchiy-class_corvette would just fit), but that 3.6 m restriction is still pretty limiting. There's a reason Russia wants to use the Bosphorus.
For sure. But replacing small craft is all they really should need to do wrt these shore based anti ship missiles / drone attacks. Of course the Moskva sinking indicates otherwise but I really don’t know what happened there.
“ All that they must do is restrict merchant shipping by making it uninsurable. ”
NATO countries could act as an insurer of last resort for a trifling amount of money. The Russian government has already stepped in to provide that service domestically.
I agree, but ‘trifling’ and the number of merchants willing to do this relies on how many ships attempting this get sunk. Russia is quite a few subs in the Black Sea right now. Russia is insuring merchant ships but also no one is shooting at those ships it’s collateral risk they are insuring.
Matt mentioned it briefly but pay attention to fertilizer. Last year fertilizer prices rose by 80% and this year 40%. Russia is the main exporter of fertilizer and without fertilizer, farming yields are significantly lower. If developing countries are struggling to afford fertilizer, that can have devasting consquences in the coming years as farming yields decrease, forcing them to import more food, hurting the value of the currency, making it hardier to afford fertilizer.
One of the reason why Sri Lanka is in such desperate straits was because last year the government could afford to the import price for fertilizer and so stopped providing it to Sri Lankan farmers. As a result, their rice production cratered, leading to worse foreign exchange crisis.
So- Milan indicated that unfortunately an official poll of SB readers is not coming any time soon, but gave his unofficially blessing for an unofficial one made by readers (of readers and for readers!). The idea is to create an anonymous poll to get a sense of where subscribers are from (US state or country abroad) , party alignment (American) and political ideology (say political compass quadrant), 2020 vote and 2022 vote plans and also poll on a few key issues. So -any suggestions for a handful of interesting and illuminating issue questions for the poll (and how to phrase them)?
EDIT: Looking for issues that could be polled in multiple choice format (as done by Pew etc.) to maximize response rate.
Mother's maiden name, city you met your partner, best friend from childhood, pets name?
Hahahaha!!!
Religious affiliation and practice.
Social media use, how much of which
Region of residence before 18 or 21 years vis a vis now
Socioeconomic status of parents vis a vis now.
I said this earlier, but although I would be fine with both, I would greatly prefer metro area over state for US geographic subdivision.
This would absolutely be better information, but it doesn’t lend itself as easily to a drop down menu or list of checkboxes. (Do you include 20 or 50 or 100? Is there just one box for “rural” or is there one for each state or region?)
172 Combined Statistical Areas (CSA) plus 50 states for areas outside CSAs = 222 total. 226 if you want to include Puerto Rico.
It can just be an input box, right? There would need to be a little bit of data integrity cleanup to account for spelling/punctuation, but that shouldn't be too difficult. And for people in non-metros, a county should suffice.
Airport code seems like it would be easiest. Unique, short, no versioning problems, and I'm sure it would be easy to convert to human-readable with some light scripting.
Everybody should append their airport code to their names.
Works for smaller cities. But what do you do about the people that put BUR or SJC or ONT or EWR, or especially BWI?
I think I'd just accept the loss of granularity and dump them into "NYC area", "DC area", "Bay area", etc.
What else do people read regularly? Top 3 salient policy issues? Where-ish do you live? Any interest in in-person meetups in your region?
for policy issues, say we do it by asking people to check three out of a selection, what would be that total selection pool of policy issues you would suggest (we need to avoid open-ended question to maximize response and also so we get aggregate data automatically)?
How many are single children, or first-born children (if siblings), etc.
Might be interesting to get political views on specific subjects. E.g. more vs less gun control, more vs less deficit spending in the next fiscal year, more vs less anti-monopoly regulation.
Don’t know why anyone hasn’t said age, gender, race, college attainment, etc.
Maybe we could literally pick out some Pew polling questions including the response options so it would be easy to compare SB to the US as a whole.
I thought demographics go without saying? My question is rather if I need to pick no more than 3-5 issue questions, which would they be? Or in other words, which pew polling questions would you suggest to pick ?
It doesn’t seem like a huge mystery why a country with a billion people that is the world’s largest cereal importer and suffered both the first- and second-deadliest famines in human history, the most recent being in living memory, would stockpile huge amounts of grain. I suspect a food shortage is on the short list of things most likely to kill millions of people and topple the government, it’s quite logical for them to take significant steps to avoid it.
One easy one would be to end the ethanol mandate and, if there are any I suspect there are, subsidies to "biodiesel." Neither of these would pass an NPV test using a reasonable price of net carbon emissions anyway. [I welcome correction on this point if anyone knows I am wrong about biodiesel.]
The investments in infrastructure integrating Ukraine with the West will be needed anyway, so get started with the "reconstruction" now.
I would think with where fuel prices are that it would be difficult to end the ethanol mandate, politically at least. I honestly don't know how much ethanol subsidies/mandates actually affect the prices at the pump, but I'd think the political ads would be easy to write just before the midterms about "the Biden administration is cutting aid to farmers and raising gas prices all while yada yada yada."
If ethanol lowers the price of gas, then wouldn't the market keep it in force without the government mandating it?
I thought the ethanol mandate made gas *more* expensive.
It depends on the price of non-ethanol gas. It was more expense for quite a while, but not now: https://neo.ne.gov/programs/stats/inf/66.html
Its not quite as simple though. Ethanol contains less energy, so you get worse gas mileage for the same volume of fuel.
Fair point. That has to be calculated as part of the comparison. https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/ethanol.shtml
Shout out to Matt Klein’s The Overshoot, which provides the Oil and Wheat stats in this article, https://theovershoot.co/
It’s one of the more expensive substack subscriptions at $18/month, but it is absolutely worth it. I’ve seen it recommended by numerous people I respect including Jason Furman, Adam Tooze, Joe Weisenthal, and Paul Krugman. Those endorsements convinced me to subscribe and the Overshoot has provided me with a lot of detailed and novel data analysis of economic issues facing our world.
I’d particularly recommend the recent article on the abnormalities in US economic data that suggests our recent GDP decline is likely a data collection or analysis issue due to the abnormality of our current situation. https://theovershoot.co/p/us-economic-data-arent-adding-up
And one of the core theses of Klein’s work is that the US economy had been understimulated since at least the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. I.e., we had an undershoot. The Overshoot name is a call for us to make up for those mistakes as explained in several public (i.e., free) articles, including:
* Let's Overshoot, https://theovershoot.co/p/lets-overshoot
* Inequality, Interest Rates, Aging, and the Role of Central Banks, https://theovershoot.co/p/inequality-interest-rates-aging-and
Thanks for this detailed recommendation!
This sucks, man.
I don’t think western powers could convince Chinese leadership to sell down any significant amount of its wheat reserves as they see it as a critical strategic asset. As shown in this article, China is a major wheat importer. Hence their massive reserves serve as a buffer against global crises and trade wars.
It’s possible some African and Middle Eastern nations might be able to make major geopolitical concessions to China in return for desperately needed food. E.g., granting China the right to military bases and ports within their countries. That’s understandable in the short-term, but presents more problems for global security and peace in the long term.
“ China is a major wheat importer.”
And the US Navy would enforce a blockade of Chinese ports if they tried to invade Taiwan. That makes sense.
Good point. I don’t think it’s a total conspiracy theory to think that one of the reasons for China’s grain stockpile is to have a supply if they try to invade Taiwan and the US enforces a blockade in retaliation.
The US has a little grain, too, and would counter China's offers. Empirical questiin: are China's reserves enough to let them outbid the US in enough strategic places to make the whole gambit worthwhile?
ETA: looks like the US has less than half of China's reserves. It would be risky but if China really wants something, there's a decent chance they could buy it with grain. https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/grain-world-markets-and-trade
That is a really good point, and really obvious in retrospect. Thanks! Along with other comments about how China really values food security, I'm now pretty confident that China won't try to use food reserves to buy significant geopolitical victories.
Turkey is working with Russia in an attempt to reopen Ukrainian grain shipments, although its questionable whether Russia is operating in good faith. From a Bloomberg article published today, “Ukraine Cautious as Turkey, Russia Push Black Sea Grain Deal”. [1]
> Turkey and Russia have reached a tentative deal to restart shipments of Ukraine’s agricultural products from a key Black Sea port, but Kyiv remains skeptical of the proposed pact, according to people familiar with the discussions.
> Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government has offered military help to clear mines off the coast of Odesa and escort grain ships but Ukraine has yet to endorse the plan, worried that removing defenses could leave the vital port open to Russian attack, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss matters that aren’t yet public. Turkey hopes that a United Nations endorsement of the proposal could allay security concerns, the people said.
> The Russo-Turkish plan would allow for removal of mines near Odesa and guarantee safe passage for ships out of the Black Sea, under the auspices of the UN, the people said. Turkey, which has sought for months to mediate in the conflict, aims to set up a center in Istanbul to monitor and coordinate the shipments. Ukraine hasn’t participated directly in the talks, according to an official there.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-06/ukraine-cautious-as-turkey-russia-push-black-sea-grain-deal
Basic food supplies is one of the areas where reliance on international free trade has some really major pitfalls.
In this case, it has led to a lot of the overpopulated and poorer third world countries being screwed, and given our geopolitical rival a weapon to use against the west.
The US is a major agricultural exporter, so it would suck for us, but we should really try to push other countries to be self-sufficient instead of getting them addicted to our cheap corn/soybeans/etc
To clarify: self-sufficient with respect to basic 'staple' foods.
Then they are eventually, inevitably going to have an even more massive humanitarian disaster when the food supplies are disrupted for an extended period of time.
It’s even worse IIRC Ireland had enough food it was just exported to the UK in the form of grain, butter, meat, etc. The peasant farmers had existed on potatoes. When that crop failed they couldn’t afford to buy what was being exported.
Also do you think Putin is trying to cause another European refugee crisis by creating an international food crisis? That last did help pro Russian right wing parties so it wouldn't be the craziest idea.
That's an interesting idea (can't speak for Matt but I'm not sure, though it seems possible)
Food would be plentiful and inexpensive if we grew crops for humans instead of for animals. Animal agriculture is food production in reverse: 50% to 90% of the food value/calories is lost by feeding it to animals. Animal agriculture may be the most wasteful thing in the world.