2010 offers some interesting potential. I’m wary of the notion that 2009 was so bad that the world can only go up in 2010. That being said, I am hopeful.

In 2010 there will be a Review Conference for the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). I expect this one will be a little less divisive than the last. Having said that, I don’t expect any significant advances to be made. The non-nuclear weapons states may appreciate the change in tone among nuclear weapon states with respect to their pledge to move toward disarmament, but, until it comes with real movement, one shouldn’t expect they will budge on nonproliferation requests involving them. I don’t suspect an agreement on verifiable reduction in warhead numbers by the US and Russia would be seen as a sign of real movement toward disarmament, and I don’t suspect anything beyond that will be agreed to. This being said, any year in which NPT members don’t drop out is a good year on that front.

There will be mid-term elections in the US. I would not be surprised if there is significant losses by Democrats in Congress. It is, perhaps, a sign of the wisdom of crowds that the American citizenry intuitively realizes that any party holding both the executive  and legislative branches will spend like a sorority girl with her daddy’s platinum card. I don’t know if it will go as far as a complete turn-over of the reigns of power as seen in Clinton’s first mid-term or Bush’s second, but I wouldn’t be surprised. That would be alright with me. A President that does’t think it would be a great idea to attack say Iran and North Korea simultaneously, and a legislative branch that can pretend to be fiscally conservative when they are battling an opposition party (though the way they spent during the Bush presidency would make Lenin say “damn, you guys need to reign in government spending!”)

There will be another climate change summit, this one in Mexico. I don’t expect more than in Copenhagen.

There will be the 21st Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, Canada. I predict that Kenya and Ecuador will not be big winners.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/18/north-south-korea-hackers

It has been reported that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) obtained a copy of the strategy for defense of South Korea allegedly by way of an insecure thumb drive used by a South Korean officer to download the plan.

I once found an apparently new SD card in a parking lot that appeared to have dropped through a slit shopping sac or out of a pocket. It was still in its packaging. While it was probably perfectly fine, I was, of course, not about to put it into any device of mine. Even though everybody presumably knows about the dangers of putting such memory in their computers, this probably remains an effective ploy because of its twin-pronged appeal. It appeals to those with larceny in their hearts, and to the prurient interests of those who are just hoping that they found the memory stick that just happened to have fallen out of Anna Kournikova’s handy-cam after she made a private sex tape.

However, it does make one think about how ubiquitous portable memory is and to wonder how one can trust any of it. The danger is even greater if the objective is not a targeted attack such as espionage, but rather creating random viral chaos. Obviously, there is probably little danger that terrorists or enemy states would get any benefit from sling-shotting thumb drives into the parking lot at Langley or Fort Meade. Those people are all aware of the risks, and have safeguards in place (e.g. computers with no ports for portable memory). However, what about the increasingly common give-away memory. Thumb-drives have become one of the more popular promotional items these days. I, myself, use a couple such drives. Even if you buy a thumb-drive off the shelf, how can you be certain it wasn’t tampered 1982 Tylenol style?

The Gap Again Widens

 The September trade numbers are out and America’s Trade deficit increased significantly since August. Not only did it increase, but it made the largest percentage increase since February of 1999. Of course, part of that dramatic note is due to the contraction that resulted as part of the economic down-turn.

An AP article (see: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gNiyJ905Ho0Ur96V2TQhsBX19lGwD9BUNGF80) sites authorities who suggest that the increase in energy prices is outstripping the benefit gained in the export sector by a falling dollar.

As President Obama travels through Asia this will no doubt be a subject of discussion. A Chinese Yuan that is kept artificially low is credited with a not insignificant portion of the problem. The Chinese have indicated a willingness to let the Yuan adjust a little, but are, not unexpectedly, quite concerned about the state of the dollar (being holders of vast quantities of dollar assets.)

Source: www.kremlin.ru

The venerated first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) will expire on December 5, 2009. The importance of this treaty lies not merely in the fact that it reduced the numbers of nuclear warheads and the platforms on which they reside in both the Soviet and US arsenals (later the five weapon holding successor states of the Soviet Union and the US.) Perhaps more important were the unprecedented levels of verification and information exchange incorporated into the Treaty- a codification of President Reagan’s often quoted “trust, but verify” line.

Currently, negotiations are underway to replace the expiring START. Reports indicate that there are two major outstanding bones of contention. The first involves the issue of ground-based mobile launchers, which the Russians have but the US does not. The US would apparently like to see more control over them, but the Russians object to what they see as a unilateral concession. This may be a gambit in search of a concession on the US side. The second issue deals with the details of the allowable numbers of various weapon platforms.

There has been talk in the US Senate of extending START I six months because, even if a new treaty is concluded in the next three weeks, it won’t be ratified and enter into force until much later.

I attended the Honeywell-Nobel Laureate Lecture at Georgia Tech a week ago on November 4th 2009. The speaker was Sir Harry Kroto, and he gave a rapidly paced and entertaining talk entitled Science, Society, and Sustainability. The middle portion of this talk, the part dealing with society, dealt to a large degree with the tension between science and religion, and, in particular, his views about intolerance and dogmatism among many religious people.  

During this section, he raised an interesting question. To paraphrase [hopefully largely in accordance with his intended meaning], the question was: ‘How many people think that parents should be able to raise their children to believe whatever they choose?’  To which I was one of several who feebly raised hands. There was then a follow-up about whether the view was maintained in the face of the fact that people were teaching their children that those who believe in evolution [he might have put it in terms of being atheist and /or agnostics] would end up in hell. While I’m not certain of his exact phrasing, the jist was that “non-believers” [however people who deem themselves qualified to make such determinations define it] would end up being punished in some form of eternal afterlife.

Now, if the question is whether it is an unconscionable thing to teach a child, I would have to say yes. Furthermore, if the question is whether people should decry such lessons in intolerance, I would agree with this as well. I would even go as far as to say that one should use any influence one has as respectable forthright citizen to set a good example about how one should properly address differences in worldview. However, the “should be allowed to” indicated the potential for a more ominous meaning in the form of the state using its monopoly on legitimate force to somehow try to regulate and /or over-ride parents. I don’t mean to imply that is what Professor Kroto meant, as he did not get into any detail and I had to leave during the Q&A. However, if the question is should people be allowed to teach there children bad ideas, I would have to answer yes – because there is no alternative that doesn’t result in a greater bad.

However, given that children learn lessons from parents not only from explicit teaching statements but through observation of all manner of daily conduct, to try to control these lessons would be akin to trying to control thought-which is a slippery and treacherous course. If the question is whether the state should use its monopoly on legitimate force to try to control what moral, ethical, and normative lessons parents teach their children, then I think that would be a sad idea. I, of course, am not just speaking  of the state using force directly, but through those mechanisms that are enforceable by force such as regulations or dictated curriculums for private and home-schooled children. 

Should one try to undermine a parent? First, I would suggest one consider whether undermining a parent’s legitimacy in some areas is not undermining their legitimacy in all areas? If so, what is the result of society in which children are put in the middle of a tug of war between what parents say and the state’s suggestion that a parent cannot be trusted to be correct. In some sense, we should all try to undercut bad thinking, but the idea that there would be a formal mechanism of the state to try to undermine what parents teach is a little disturbing to me.  First, it is not likely to be effective because parents have the benefit of primacy in a children’s learning experience. Mao tried to override parental education during his Cultural Revolution, and it failed. Second, and more importantly, regulating thought is not a route to a more peaceful society, but to perennial war.  

While we should strive to be as virtuous as possible in thought as well as deed and to set good examples, it does not follow that one can control the thought of others. If a person cannot be free in their own mind, in what manner can he or she be said to be free? Where people act and move about, they have the potential to hinder the free action of others, but, in their minds, they may think as they please, and through thought alone, cannot adversely impact  the lives of others. This is the crux of the issue. While there is an important role for the government in negating the use of force or fraud between citizens, there is greater damage to be done in trying to regulate and control thought than there is in the many sad and despicable ideas that exist in the world.

If one wants a peaceful world, regulating thought is the kind of activity that one should like to avoid. The path to peace is, first and foremost, followed by setting laudable examples. This means that we all have to avoid the tyranny of certainty – that is, thinking and acting on certainty in one’s own life with regards to those things about which one cannot possibly be certain. This certainly applies to homo religiosis (religious man) who preaches that those who don’t believe as he does will be damned for an eternal afterlife, but it also applies to scientists who call people with religious beliefs deluded. The former thinks he or she knows the mind of his god – typically in contravention of his or her own belief structure that indicates god is more vast than man can understand, and the latter has achieved certainty based on his or her interpretation of an inductive process in contravention of the logic of science.

Why do I think that “soft power” is the only way to challenge bad ideas? By this I mean to say that the state (or others using force illegitimately) cannot force anyone to believe anything, but, at best, individuals can spread good ideas through exemplary thought and deed and at the expense of bad ideas. I think of the root of conflict in terms of an intangible construct that I’ll call “societal burden”. This burden exists wherever control is exerted over the autonomous thought, movement, and action of individuals. Where such burden exists and there is no other means to relieve it, people will engage in conflict. This burden is the root of conflict, and, as such, the object should be to minimize this burden. I am not advocating anarchy, of course. Optimization by way of minimization of societal burden is not achieved by a lack of government. With no government, the strong and amoral may exercise control over the weak,and this may lead to a proliferation of societal burden. Government, while it takes the role of exerting some control, also, by maintaining a monopoly on legitimate force, is able to keep the strong and immoral from preying on all others. Over the centuries an important feedback mechanism has developed by way of democratic and republican systems that allows the governed to exert force back over the government- and this feedback keeps government from going hog-wild in exercising force  over the citizenry as is seen in dictatorships and authoritarian systems. A second key tool is a blind rule of law that applies universally, but is not subject to arbitrary modification except with the consent of the governed.

It seems we have evolved a pretty good system for minimizing societal burden as well as for gradually pushing bad ideas out of the marketplace of ideas through soft power, and, hopefully, our systems will continue to move in the right direction. However, there are no short-cuts and one cannot speed up the pace.

RoK Navy Ships Like Those Involved in Skirmish

The navies of North and South Korea engaged in a brief, 2-3 minute, skirmish that resulted in the North Korean ship returning to port for repair. The engagement occurred after a North Korean ship apparently ventured across a limit line off the west coast of the peninsula and then failed to heed an extended volley of warning shots. There were no South Korean casualties.

There seems to be a widespread belief that the North Koreans engaged in the provocation to send a signal in advance of President Obama’s impending  trip to Asia. Incidentally, the US recently announced that it would send a special envoy, Stephen Bosworth, to North Korea to engage in talks on North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.  Of course, this rationale may or may not be accurate. For all we know, the North Korean captain and crew were attempting to carry out a “Hunt-for-Red-October-esque” defection plot. However, the hypothesis about sending a message does seem consistent with North Korean behavior historically, which tends toward the provocative and crisis bargaining.

Assuming that the North Korean action is an attempt to either send a message or influence behavior, what is the goal and how does Kim Jong Il imagine this behavior will translate into his objective? From this side of the street one might assume that the provocative action is designed to push the Obama Administration away from the negotiating table. One does not have to have a great understanding of American politics to understand that the more North Korea engages in provocation, the more it makes it impossible for President Obama to extend an olive branch. While the President may enjoy creating a more peaceful tone for global diplomacy and a large swath of the American citizenry may support him in this, he is also well aware that politically he cannot afford to respond to aggression with conversation or concession. More broadly than just the President, the Democratic Party realizes that one of its greatest Achilles’ Heels is an appearance of weakness that the American public finds unappealing in times of crisis. Of course, this assumes that Kim Jong Il has internalized the old lesson from Sun Tzu, and that he knows his enemy as well as himself. The evidence doesn’t seem to support this in that what Kim Jong Il says he wants often seems to be paired with actions that are designed to do anything but achieve his stated goals.

A second possibility is that Kim wants to negotiate but wants to avoid starting from a position in which his country is seen as the weak party in the negotiation. I suspect this is what most people refer to when they say that Kim Jong Il ordered his Navy to be provocative because of Obama’s visit. This raises the question of how provoking a naval force whose capabilities seem to be several generations ahead of yours achieves this goal. The somewhat predictable outcome of the North Korean ship returning to port in flames while the South Korean ships remain untouched does not seem to bode well for an expression of strength. However, there is an alternative to showing strength by might, and that is showing strength by way of the will to be kooky. That is, Kim Jong Il may be saying: “Look I know my country is poor and seems too weak to have leverage, but I am willing to press things to the limit so don’t discount me.”

There is another possibility, and that derives from the inability to segregate domestic from foreign messages. That is, Kim Jong Il may be trying to convince his people that the dynasty is still alive and well without having any intended message for actors abroad. I have not heard much about Kim Jong Il’s successor in all this, but internally there may be an attempt to build some gravitas for him.

I don’t know what resides in the mind of Kim Jong Il or Kim Jong Un, but it seems clear they need better advice on strategy.

What explains the diametrically opposed positions on nuclear power witnessed between France and Germany? France is arguably the most pro-nuclear energy country in the world, and Germany, while it may be having second thoughts, has been retiring its aging nuclear plants so as to gradually phase out of the nuclear energy business.

These two countries have quite a bit in common in addition to being neighbors. They have similar sized populations and economies. While Germany is a little bigger in terms of both population and Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the two countries’ per capita GDP figures are quite close. On a broad continuum of political governance, they are quite close together as republics with parliaments and constitutions. There is a paper that suggests that Frances nuclear power optimism is a product of a system of governance that makes it hard for dissenting interest groups to make headway into impacting policy. (Delmas & Heiman, J of Policy Analysis and Management, 20 (3), pp. 433 – 456) They both built considerable nuclear capacity initially.

First, it may be interesting to consider those commonly hypothesized explanations that don’t do so well at clarifying this divide. One might find it reasonable to expect that public opinion about nuclear energy in the two countries would be radically different, and that this is the root of the divide. However, there is a survey conducted by GlobeScan on behalf of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that shows that, while Germans do have a slightly higher proportion of their population with negative opinions on nuclear, the differences were not, in fact, massive.

 

In France there is not a majority of the population clamoring for more plants, and, on the other hand, the percentage of Germans that want to see more nuclear power is only a couple percentage points below what is seen in France. These results could be deceptive. “Use existing facilities, do not build more”, which is the largest response category for both countries, could mean different things to citizens of the two countries. France might be considered to be at its saturation point with respect to nuclear power. Even though it is a major electricity exporter (including to Germany), France has so much nuclear capacity that it uses it not just for base-load production but also in a load-following role that is less optimal for nuclear plants. This is reflected in the lower capacity factors seen in France than most other advanced nuclear countries. (A capacity factor is a proportion representing what a plant actually produces over what it could theoretically deliver if it operated at its rated capacity constantly over a time period.) At any rate, when a Frenchman says don’t build more, he or she may just be saying that there is enough to meet the need and it would not be cost-effective to build more, whereas a German, not being near that saturation point, may be more likely to be expressing a negative view toward nuclear energy. However, if one examines the polling data for whether nuclear energy should be expanded to mitigate climate change, French and Germans are quite similar in the proportions that want expansion (about 40% each), but Germans have a somewhat higher proportion that are opposed to building more nuclear plants for this purpose (56% to France’s 43%).

Germany has been advancing renewable energy plants. However, as I have mentioned in past posts, these sources are not yet up to replacing coal and nuclear. While it has been posited that Germans are more environmentally conscientious, as observed in their build up of renewables, it should be noted that German emissions of greenhouse gases from energy production is significantly higher than France’s, even when one normalizes per capita or per GDP dollar (i.e. carbon intensity) the French come out ahead. It is also worth noting that it has only been quite recently that Germany has outdone France with respect to either the proportion of electricity coming from renewables or the absolute value of renewable electricity generated.

 

Besides differing policies toward nuclear energy, what else separates France and Germany? One prominent difference is that France is a nuclear weapons state, but Germany is not. This is not to imply that there is a connection between the difference on nuclear weapons and on nuclear energy – particularly given the fact that these two countries were building nuclear energy capacity side-by-side  in earlier times. However, it does act as a reminder that this policy gulf may, in fact, be idiosyncratic to the two countries in question. It may be tied to the history of each going back to the early days of the Cold War.

There are some differences that may have some generalizability. One factor is that French nuclear infrastructure is owned by firms that are super-majority owned by the French government, while German nuclear infrastructures are primarily owned by private sector firms. This may make a difference in that governments presumably have different attitudes towards risk and uncertainty than private-sector firms. Governments are used to being able to redistribute risk across the entire population, and, being expected to assume certain high consequence operations, are more used to such activities. Firms have to think about risk and uncertainty differently because they can only distribute their risk through costly insurance programs. If one considers the 53 nuclear power plants currently under construction, only two are being built in a country, Japan, where the private-sector dominates power plant ownership. Even the one plant currently under construction in the US is being built by the Tennessee Valley Authority, which is one of the few Federally owned corporations in the United States. It is very common to have mixed public-private ownership of nuclear power plants, but strictly privately owned plants are a rarity, even with the many policies put in place to facilitate them.

Another notable difference is that Germany has massive stocks of coal.While Germany’s reliance on coal has been dropping, it is still true that both its production and consumption of coal are several times that of France.  Coal, like nuclear, is ideal for base-load power production, and, for that reason, coal may be considered the primary competitor of nuclear power in its domain. It is true that natural gas, which is ideal for peak-load production, is also used widely for base-load capacity – particularly when natural gas prices are low.

The case of France and Germany is an interesting one for considering why one state might be bullish on nuclear power while another, facing many similar circumstances, is bearish. Of course, as mentioned it may or may not be possible to generalize from this case to others. It is certainly possible that there are idiosyncratic explanations for this difference in policy. Even some of the more generalizable explanations just beg further questions. For example, if the public-sector versus private-sector ownership is an important factor, this raises the question of why the two countries took different approaches to plant ownership. Applying the hypothesis that having an abundance of fossil fuel deposits reduces the incentive to build nuclear plants to a broader set of countries can yield ambiguous results.

When I started studying the question of how nuclear power’s expansion was likely to transpire, I, like many, took it as  a given that there would be a substantial global expansion of nuclear power plant construction. I expected the “renaissance” would include both growth in countries that have long had a near de facto moratorium on plant construction (e.g. the United States) as well as some of the more promising aspirant countries that have not previously had commercial nuclear power such as Indonesia and Turkey. While I never believed that most of the states clamoring for nuclear energy would achieve it in my lifetime, I did expect a significant swing. After all, with a price on carbon and renewables not ready to take a chunk out of king coal at an affordable cost, nuclear power seemed to stand to be a big winner from climate change.

Today I am far less sanguine about an expansion that could be reasonably be termed a “global renaissance of nuclear power”. Perhaps it can be said that Asia is experiencing a nuclear boom. 57%  of the plants currently under construction are being built in just five Asian countries (China [over 25% of the total alone], India, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan), and if you add Russia you have accounted for almost 3/4ths of the current construction. However, beyond rhetoric and political attempts to signal support for nuclear energy, there is little evidence of a full-fledged renaissance yet. The graph below shows the number of power plants being brought on-line each year, and the number of countries in which plants were brought on-line.

Just recently, the US government has signalled support for nuclear. The EPA predicted 180 new plants constructed by 2050 as a result of climate change legislation in its recent analysis (see: http://www.examiner.com/x-19285-Chicago-Economic-Policy-Examiner~y2009m10d26-EPA-sees-180-new-nuclear-power-plants-over-the-horizon ). Furthermore, there is evidence that the Obama Administration is backing nuclear expansion as part of a bid to get the required legislative support for passing carbon-constraining legislation. (see: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/27/AR2009102704081.html )

Should we expand nuclear power? I believe that, if we want to slow the pace of and eventually reduce carbon output, nuclear will have to be part of the solution. When you consider the scale on which we use electricity, wind, solar,  geothermal, and conservation in their current state of development don’t do the job . Hopefully, one day we will be able to cost-effectively tap the power of the sun for most of our electricity needs and will be vastly more efficient in our use of power, but that day isn’t today and by the time it arrives we may have suffered a dire price. 

It is essential to  understand the differences between nuclear power and renewables in terms of scale. Nuclear plants are typically both rated higher in terms of the amount of electricity they generate, and have much higher capacity factors than renewable plants. The capacity factor is a percentage of the rated power that a unit actually produces over the course of a year. For nuclear, capacity factors tend to be above 90% on average, and can be 100% in years in which fuel is not changed out and there are no other disruptions. For wind, a reasonable capacity factor is about 33%. This means that a typically sized nuclear plant (1000 MW(e)) produces more than 4000  wind turbines of 600 KW (e) or almost the same as 500 massive 5 MW(e) wind turbines. (These are at conservative capacity factors of 85% for nuclear and 35% for wind.)

So what is the tough nut to crack if the legislative environment is suitable for nuclear power’s growth? If one asks what policies need to be put into effect to spur US nuclear renaissance, one might quickly note that said policies are largely already in place, and still the evidence of a resurgence is primarily on paper.

First, you would need to provide loan guarantees. Why? Because private utilities don’t typically have enough assets to get people to loan them billions of dollars over a relatively short timeframe. It is not that these firms are small or not profitable, but rather that the magnitude of costs and risks for nuclear is so high. This is exacerbated by the many examples of planned plants that have not panned out. Famously, the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant in Long Island, New York was completed but never made a return on investment. The operator eventually went out of business / was subsumed by a government entity. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 provides for a program that would reimburse lenders up to a cap in case of default. Current discussions are considering increasing the $18.5 billion pot for this program as that, sadly, is a scant amount on the scale of spurring a massive increase in nuclear power.

Second, while the nuclear power industry has had a quite respectable safety record, the scale of possible consequences and liabilities makes it impossible for utilities to afford the kind of insurance they would need to ensure they could stay in business in the aftermath of an accident. The government has the utilities covered on that front as well with the Price-Anderson Act that caps the liability of private firms so that they only have to insure up to a certain level.

Third, a major problem in nuclear power plant construction, much as in Defense Department acquisitions, is a proclivity towards cost-overruns and delays. One can imagine that stretching out the interest payments on an $8 billion dollar loan could be quite costly proposition.

It is useful to understand that nuclear plants are cost-intensive in front-loaded construction costs, but are relatively cheap in terms of fuel and operations and maintainance. This means that, once plants are built, they are relatively profitable when the utilities no longer have to funnel a big chunk of the money back into paying off the capital costs. I’ve heard an employee from Georgia Power say that nuclear was by far their least expensive power source, but this was, of course, based on the fact that the plant costs had depreciated off their books. The Federal government has provided delay insurance to cover delays that are due to the regulatory requirements (i.e. if the NRC puts a hold on you, the government picks up the tab) for a limited number of early plants. Furthermore, some jurisdictions (i.e. Georgia and Florida) have approved the extremely controversial practice of allowing their utilities to charge customers for plants before they are even running (for that matter, before construction has even begun.)

Despite all these policies, I remain skeptical that we will see a major nuclear power plant construction boom given the magnitude of costs and risks involved. This puts me at a loss. While I believe in the benefits of nuclear power, I am also quite concerned about our massive deficit, so I’m not too sure about the one policy prescription that remains available to jump start a renaissance. That is, if the government buys or substantially increases subsidization of nuclear power that may make a difference. Any such policy would have to ensure that taxpayers got their investment back in terms of a cut of the earlier mentioned profitability.

In the Fall of 2002  I drafted an essay that became a Cato Institute Policy Analysis paper on why invading Iraq was a bad idea. In essence, the paper used rational actor theory to propose that there were better ways to address the threat to US security interests posed by Iraq, to the extent such threats existed, than by going to war. Now, seven years later, it is interesting to revisit the subject.

What made me think about this the recent discussion about a surge for Afghanistan. General McChrystal’s suggestion that 40,000 additional troops need to be introduced into the theatre raised quite a stir in the news. However, there seems to be a widespread opinion among military leaders that the 40,000 could not begin to be introduced until the new year, and could not fully be in place until late next year (presuming that they would all come from the US.) Perhaps President Obama’s delayed response is due to an attempt to figure out where they could get these troops in a reasonable timeframe. It is telling that despite a budget of over half a trillion dollars (not counting supplementals) and a military of over three million people when all branches and reserves are included, we cannot come up with 40,000 troops. Of course, few of the three million are relevant to the task at hand (i.e. sending F-16 mechanics or submariner firemen to Afghanistan is not that useful), but this raises a question for another day about why our military seems to be so ill-tailored to the wars it fights. However, the point to note here is that we can’t come up with 40,000 troops because many of the relevant troops are either in Iraq, already in Afghanistan, or are momentarily  rotated out of one of our two war zones long enough to keep their private lives in order and their sanity intact.

Let me acknowledge first that I, at least, was as fooled as anyone about the likelihood that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and /or programs for WMD. Readers of past posts will note that I place little stock in the ability to know or predict behavior absent first-hand knowledge. Despite the sound advice of Sun Tzu that we cannot know an enemy’s capabilities (much less their intentions) without first-hand information (e.g. through spies) and that such knowledge cannot be derived from oracles, humanity still thinks it can – except our oracles are probabilistic risk models. That said, in the absence of certain knowledge one is forced to make a best guess based on a reasonable reading of past actions and the available  indicators. I maintain that, given the uncertainty, it was not unreasonable to think that Iraq had WMD, and, at any rate, the advice given was optimal whether Iraq had WMD or not. The fact that Hussein did not have WMD by no means invalidates but rather bolsters the core message of the paper that (even believing that there were chemical weapons or worse) the threat to US security interests was overblown, and, to the extent these threats existed, they could be handled more effectively without force.

The question at hand here is whether we are better off having attacked Iraq, and I would maintain that we are certainly not at the moment. If, unlikely as it may be, we are threatened tomorrow by an actual threat to our existence or fundamental strategic interests we would be slow and hard-pressed to respond because we are stretched thin by the war in Iraq. True, there is one less dictator in the world. Nice as that may sound, as long as that dictator is not ruling the US, it is not a good measure of whether US interests are improved.

One issue to consider is the threat posed by the perception of the US as a “high capability – low will” state. I don’t suspect we have any enemies that think the capability of the US military is anything but extremely high. Our military is technologically without peer, and is, at best, matched by few in terms of the level of training and morale of forces (I would contend that an all-voluntary military is a force-multiplier unto itself, particularly after spending so much time studying the Russian system and its influence on combat-effectiveness when I was a graduate student .) However, there is also a perception that the US has a limited stomach for warfare, and will not see its engagements through to the end. This problem is created when a country is a little too fast-and-loose in going to war. Its danger is that it decreases the perception of other states of the cost of conflict with America and makes them more likely to engage in activities that may be viewed as threatening.

Frankly, I am astounded at the relatively slow erosion of support for conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan that is, I presume, a mix of the influence of the 9-11 events on the national psyche and a detachment of the average American to these distant wars. The erosion is present none-the-less. It is not unreasonable that American support for the war in Iraq has diminished. The outcome of the conflict fundamentally affects the way people in Iraq live but not substantially how Americans live, and so it is a given that people over there will be willing to fight long after our will wanes. You may remember hearing a line during the political debates to the effect that ”Timelines to withdraw would be a boon to insurgents and radical elements”. I hate to break it to those critics, but whether we leave now, next year, or in 20 years, some radical element will be around to claim victory. 

The US needs to look at war more like it looks at nuclear war. In other words, it is an extreme action against dire attacks against the national existence or critical national interests and should not be engaged in lightly, and that, having made the decision, we will fully accept the consequences of war and see the conflict through to a definitive end. War as a means to reach limited objectives such as tweaking the world into a more palatable form – as I would suggest was the case in Iraq – is a dangerous game. 

Unfortunately, we are really only mid-course in the conflict in Iraq, so knowing the degree to which we will be better or worse off after than before the war remains unclear. If our government (both the Bush and Obama administrations) is correct in its prevailing presumption that we can leave an Iraq that is democratic, stable, and friendly to the US we may end up better off. However, we live in a world where uncertainty is inexorable, and there are other scenarios, that we cannot accurately judge the likelihood of, that may make us worse off. The most prominent of these alternative scenarios is that the Shia majority takes control and reciprocates against a minority that oppressed them for decades. Under this scenario, we will have essentially built an Iraq – Iran alliance that will make any involvement we have in the Persian Gulf region more challenging and may shake up regional stability.

I was disappointed to see that the Obama administration rejected a meeting with the Dalai Lama on his upcoming visit to Washington DC. This symbolic act of deference to the Chinese seems like an interesting follow up to slapping a massive 35 percent tariff on tires imported from China.

This shows just how politics results in bass-ackwards policy. While comparing the Chinese Tire Tariff to the Hawley Smoot Tariff Act may be hyperbole, it cannot be said to be sound economic policy by any stretch of the imagination. (Proponents of tariffs often forget that the US exports things as well, and life gets a lot harder for those US companies that export goods and services when tariffs are imposed. [Why shouldn't other countries return the favor.] So, in essence, you are hamstringing the companies that do things well relative to the rest of the world in support of those companies that are not competitive of their own faculties.) Of course, the tariff is not an economic policy in that it is not a plan of action designed to achieve an optimal effect on US national income. Instead, it is a political policy designed to increase / maintain support for a political party, and no doubt there was some sort of tit-for-tat agreement (presumably related to support for healthcare and / or carbon constraints) that played into the agreement.

On the other hand, because there are relatively few voters of Tibetan origin in the US, it is quite easy to use turning down a meeting with a the Tibetan religious leader as a means to buy good will with the Chinese. Of course, the Chinese may gladly accept the actual injury imposed by the tariff in exchange for the imagined victory of being able to point out that the US doesn’t recognize the Dalai Lama’s status. The Chinese often seem more concerned about what appears trivial and symbolic than real offenses. However, from the Communist Party of China’s perspective, the economic cost of a tire tariff may be inconsequential compared to the boon of realizing that they can do as they please domestically and regionally without suffering the slightest loss of legitimacy on the international stage.

Of course, as we in the United States have gleefully accepted a situation in which we gluttonously overspend while the Chinese willingly buy up our debt, we are not in a great position to say anything if the Chinese say… abscond with a little boy in order to usurp a religious lineage (particularly one which has relatively few adherents / voters in the US.) [This referring to the Panchen Lama, who disappeared and was replaced with a Party-sanctioned puppet. I, of course, don't know that he was killed, just that he has been kept out of the public eye and incommunicado.]   

 Needless to say, I think, in this particular case, the Obama Administration got it entirely wrong. The Administration should foster free trade, and not encourage China to believe that they can set the White House’s meeting agenda and /or replace religious leaders without loss of legitimacy. It was big news that Italy dropped in the most recent Freedom House rankings from “Free” to “Partially Free”, but no one would imagine that Italy could get away with saying: “Sorry Cardinals, we know you picked this ‘Benedict’ guy, but we’ve got this other guy- ‘Antonio’, and he’s now the real Pope. By the way, before you complain, Vatican City is no longer a sovereign country - we took it over as it was never really its own country anyway.”  There would be outrage, and people would stop treating Italy like a first world power.