In one of his more interesting recent analyses George Friedman declaims that the world is still unipolar and the United States remains the sole global superpower:

It’s no surprise, then, that Putin sees the U.S. as a force trying to create a unipolar world, because in some notable ways, it is a unipolar world. The U.S. is the largest economy in the world, its current problems notwithstanding. It also has a sophisticated military, able to bring overwhelming force to bear, train an army at war in new weapons, and use subtle force to shape the world. American power isn’t absolute, and it can be outstripped. But it is sufficiently mobile to act sequentially when simultaneous action is impossible. Put simply, the United States is the most powerful economic and military force in the world – when it chooses to act. Inaction can be confused by men like Putin as weakness. The U.S. has learned that with its inherent power it has time to react.

The American public often sees the United States as weak and mismanaged. There’s a tendency to label Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush as criminals or morons or both. The same charges were levied against Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Contempt for the commanders-in-chief is a prerequisite, to prevent tyranny, even if it has its drawbacks. The America First movement opposing U.S. participation in World War II interfered with Roosevelt’s ability to make decisions. It had a direct impact on Pearl Harbor and caused a painful initiation for the U.S. into war by the Japanese, which of course ended in catastrophe for them.

The perception of American weakness is a global one, shared even among Americans. Being underestimated has its uses, as does sporting a public that doesn’t trust its president. But only enormously powerful nations can afford the contempt. The past few months haven’t taught us that the United States is finagling a new world order. It’s taught us that Russia is weakening, that China is managing its relationship with the U.S. carefully, and that the international architecture created after World War II, though more complex, essentially remains in place. It is a unipolar world.

We’re not the only power capable of deploying force far from our shores. Countries capable of doing that include Russia, China, and France. Britain? Used to be but I’m not so sure at this point. I don’t think any other country is capable of deploying force from its shores at scale. Other than using intercontinental ballistic missiles that is. If you add that the club includes (at least) Russia, China, Britain, France, and, forsooth, North Korea.

Read the whole thing. His analysis of the differences between the Russian and Chinese postures is interesting (TL;DR is that Russia has flubbed but China hasn’t).

I’m seeing lots of breathless predictions about the outcome of the midterm elections. It’s far too early to tell. So far about 2 million ballots have been cast nationwide that we know of. See also here. In general it is illegal to count votes until election day.

That’s about 1% of registered voters and a greater percentage of likely voters.

If I had to guess I’d say that the Republicans will capture the House but the Senate is too close to call. It could go either way.

There’s no formal definition of a “wave election”. My definition would be an election in one party or the other captures all of its leans, likely, or safe districts plus all of the “too close to tell” districts and some of the other party’s leans, likely, or safe districts. That’s not how the media tend to define it. Roughly, their definition is a “big seat change”. By their definition it is likely to be a wave election but I’ll be surprised if it turns into a wave election by my standards. I’ve been surprised a lot lately.

In theory it’s not too late for a change in, say, the inflation or unemployment rates to cause a change in the trajectory election but in practice I suspect it is.

Fifty years ago there were several major grocery chains here in Chicago. Jewel-Oslo. Dominicks. Aldi. And there were dozens of small, independent stores and small chains.

Now Walmart and Target have gotten into the grocery biz. And there’s also Whole Foods. But most of the small independents have vanished.

Back in 1999 Albertson’s acquired Jewel-Osco. A dozen or so years ago Bob Mariano left Fazio Foods (Dominicks) and started Mariano’s. Then Fazio Foods shut down the Dominicks chain. It wasn’t acquired. They just shut it down. A couple of years ago the Mariano’s stores were acquired by Kroger.

The big news here is that Kroger is acquiring Albertson’s. Unless they close some stores (I assume they will) that means that they’ll have several hundred stores in the Chicago area, dwarfing everybody else. Indeed, probably more than all of the others combined.

So instead of having two mediocre major chains (Albertsons’s and Kroger), we’ll have one superchain which I assume will be worse than mediocre. I honestly don’t see how that would pass antitrust muster.

Update

Consumer Reports’s reviews of supermarket chains and, sure enough, they echoed my views of both Kroger’s and Alberton’s—they’re both mediocre. Trader Joe’s is one of their top-rated picks. Sadly, none are convenient to me but I shop at Trader Joe’s occasionally. They also seem to like Aldi’s which is convenient to me. I guess I’ll need to give Aldi’s another chance. I was unimpressed the only time I shopped in one. Besides I’m wary of multi-national chains (Aldi’s is actually ALDI’s and it’s a German chain).

I won’t bother commenting on the WSJ’s editorial on President Biden’s claims that 1) the COVID-19 pandemic is over and 2) there is a COVID-19 emergency. Alternatively, I’ll just point out that maintaining emergencies as long as possible has become a very bad habit of the federal government.

It reminds me of the late Mayor Daley’s angry response to the charge that the Chicago Police had created the disorder that made the 1968 Democratic convention one for the record books: “The Chicago Police were not there to create disorder; they were there to preserve disorder”.

The editors of Bloomberg second the observations I made in my post of a week or so ago. Here’s it’s opening:

Florida’s home-insurance business was in trouble even before Hurricane Ian tore across the state last month. Big insurers were taking their business elsewhere, smaller ones were going broke, costs due to litigation and fraud had soared, and so had premiums. The private market was pulling back as the risk of weather-related damage mounted, leaving homeowners to buy protection from the state-backed Citizens Property Insurance Corp. and the federal National Flood Insurance Program — or else to go uninsured.

This creaking system could be flattened altogether by Ian. Expect an epidemic of new litigation as insurers and policy holders fight over what destroyed their homes. (Standard policies cover damage from wind but not from flooding.) Costs to private insurers alone could reach $63 billion. This worsening mess proves, for the umpteenth time, that rebuilding homes and other structures isn’t good enough: The public and private treatment of weather-related risks needs to go back to the drawing board.

and here are a few more nice snippets:

Insurance is a crucial part of the problem. Correctly priced protection for buildings in high-risk areas would be unaffordable for many low-income households. This squeezes the private market and leads the federal government to cover flood-related risks, often charging premiums lower than they should be. Put that another way: The federal government helps families live in places that jeopardize their own (and everybody’s else’s) wealth.

There are some places in the continental United States that are more costly and risky to live in than others. Traditionally, those areas have had lower populations. For the last fifty years the populations of those areas have been rising sharply and I would claim that the subsidies being provided to live there are among the reasons why.

Here’s their conclusion:

Layer upon layer of hidden subsidy pushes the same way, separating choices and their consequences. Mortgage securitization, for instance, obscures differences in location-based risks attached to particular loans, meaning that borrowers in low-risk places end up supporting those inclined to gamble. (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, taxpayer-supported quasi-government entities, helped develop this model.) Another example: When infrastructure is rebuilt after a hurricane, the cost isn’t confined to those who like the odds of living in a high-risk area. The list is endless. Despite its narrow focus, one recent study counted numerous actual or proposed federal policies on weather-related disasters that invite added risk.

No doubt, the political obstacles to better aligning risks and incentives are daunting. A pattern invariably repeats itself: Disasters strike, public funds (understandably) flow to help the victims, and the underlying problems only get worse. Still, policy makers owe it to voters to look beyond relieving the immediate hardships and attend to fundamentals. An approach that prioritizes rebuilding and carrying on as before, rather than reducing risk and improving resilience, is a formula for continually escalating harms.

Nearly a third of the U. S. population lives in just three states. That was true 200 years ago, too, but the states with the largest populations back then had large populations before Columbus and as long as anyone can determine. The three states with the largest populations now had small populations 200 years ago. Only modern society and technology have made them livable.

The famine in opinion pieces worth commenting on continues. What struck me about David Brooks’s New York Times column reacting to the brouhaha in the Los Angeles City Council (obvious racism being expressed), is how many falsehoods underpin the situation. Here’s Mr. Brooks’s description:

Council President Nury Martinez — who has since resigned from the Council — along with two colleagues and a labor ally talked about a range of subjects, including redistricting, but two assumptions undergirded much of what they said. Their first assumption was that America is divided into monolithic racial blocs. The world they take for granted is not a world of persons; it’s a world of rigid racial categories.

At one point Martinez vulgarly derided someone because “he’s with the Blacks.” You’re either with one racial army or you’re with another.

The second assumption was that these monolithic racial blocs are locked in a never-ending ethnic war for power. The core topic of their conversation was to redraw Council districts to benefit Latino leaders.

Let’s start enumerating them. The first, never mentioned by Mr. Brooks, is that there is a static amount of wealth so the only option or become wealthier is to take from somebody else. If that were true we would still be living on the amount of wealth we were 200 years ago. We aren’t. We’re much wealthier. That “exploitation model” is Marxist and wrong but it also the prevailing view among those who produce nothing themselves other than, possibly, discord. It is a view commonly encountered among politicians.

But that’s not the only misconception involved. All but one of the members of the Los Angeles City Council are Democrats (there is also a lone independent). Anyone who believed that all that is needed to achieve comity is single party hegemony was sadly mistaken. Republicans may be reveling in the Los Angeles City Council’s conflicts but they didn’t cause it and they aren’t responsible for any impasses that arise. Squabbling for primacy among Democrats is.

And look how well that comports with what I’ve been predicting for the last 20 years (since Judis and Texeira’s Towards a Permanent Democratic Majority). The increasing percentage of Hispanics would result in a racial spoils system which blacks would inevitably lose. We’ll see if the other part of my prediction holds true—the beneficiaries of conflicts between blacks and Hispanics will be white.

I want to call attention to a final misconception: the notion that only Anglos can be racist. How anyone could believe that eludes me but people clearly do. My Irish and Swiss ancestors would recoil at being referred to as “Anglos” but that’s the racial divide that has emerged—blacks, Hispanics, and Anglos. There aren’t enough “Asians” yet to add to the cacophony.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Kevin Rudd engages in a little public prognostication about the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party:

The big news from this National Congress won’t be senior personnel appointments. It will be the ideological content of Mr. Xi’s formal work report. In his regime, communist ideology is no longer a cosmetic formality draped over a de-facto system of unrestrained state capitalism. Mr. Xi is an ideological fundamentalist who has moved the Communist Party to the Leninist left, the economy to the Marxist left, and China’s foreign and security policy to the nationalist right. Throughout this process, shifts in ideological formulations by Mr. Xi have also been the best predictors of later changes in policy. Ideology, as under Mao, has become the embedded code language by which real policy change is signaled to China’s 96 million Communist Party members.

On the economy, Mr. Xi recognizes that China’s growth is faltering. Demographic pressures are a major headwind; China’s population is aging and its workforce shrinking. Mr. Xi’s decision to rebalance the relationship between the private sector and the state has been a drag on growth. His zero-Covid policy continues to shut down major cities. And an unsettled geopolitical environment is disrupting global supply chains and broader trade.

Mr. Xi needs to decide which of these four factors to target to restore growth. He can do little about demography, but he can do a lot about Covid restrictions. He might declare a “people’s victory” over the pandemic before rolling out a more limited form of medical surveillance.

Ideology is the main problem. Mr. Xi believes the private sector is a long-term challenge to the Communist Party’s power. He has deep reservations about private control of the tech sector and what he calls the “fictitious economy” of property and finance. Don’t expect any dramatic ideological recommitment to the market from his work report. Mr. Xi could well decide to move further to the ideological left, despite the predictable effect it would have on growth.

On foreign policy, party congresses have declared since 2002 that China enjoys “a period of strategic opportunity.” This was ideological code. It meant that no major wars were on the horizon so China could maintain rapid economic development as its core strategic priority. Starting in 2019, such language began to change in official documents. The Communist Party has concluded that there has been a long-term bipartisan hardening in U.S. strategy, including deep changes on Taiwan and the “one-China policy.” In China’s view, Japan, Australia, India and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have also grown more adversarial, looking to balance Chinese power through institutional arrangements. Beijing’s “wolf warrior” approach to diplomacy has had real-world consequences.

Mr. Xi is likely to use his report to define China’s new strategic environment in a manner that gives national security priority over the economy. This may signal that China is gradually moving toward a long-term war footing. In the short term, however, Mr. Xi may still seek to stabilize (although not to normalize) U.S.-China relations. He doesn’t want an accidental conflict with the Americans in the 2020s. Under present conditions, the risk that China might lose is still too great. He hopes to change that by the 2030s.

I try to avoid offering advice to people in countries other than my own. I don’t believe I understand the context well enough to do so.

I’m more interested in the United States than I am in China. I think that, if the United States is to remain the country it is has been for the last century, we need to be considerably less dependent on China than we are at present. That’s not for China; it’s for us. It’s also not to aggravate or alienate China but to preserve the United States.

The editors of the Washington Post wonder what a post-Putin Russia would look like. They offer multiple, contrasting views. For example, this dystopian view is probably the closest to what will actually happen:

One dark scenario is that Mr. Putin’s anti-Western, authoritarian kleptocracy, mixing crony capitalism and despotism, will endure with or without him. A significant part of Russia’s population remains enamored with him, angry and inchoate, making it a ready constituency for a demagogue. As analyst Nikolai Petrov noted before the invasion, Mr. Putin’s anti-Western rhetoric “has taken a firm hold in the hearts and minds of many Russian citizens,” who are in a “state of deep resentment towards the West” and believe that it has prevented Russia from regaining great-power status.

Also reinforcing continuity are the powerful security and military structures that Mr. Putin has exploited and expanded for more than two decades. But key questions, impossible to answer now, surround the fallout a defeat in Ukraine would have: Would the military, humiliated and resentful, turn against the Kremlin power structure? Would the population at large?

There is something they rather clearly do not understand. The United States does not have a foreign policy worthy of the name and never has had one. Due to the nature of our society and our government we have an emergent foreign policy which is not really a policy as such.

But that’s not true in Russia. Russia has a foreign policy and it has been largely unchanged over the last 200 years. Just to take one aspect of that foreign policy, preserving access to a warm water port is considered a vital Russian national interest. That’s the problem with the Ukrainians’ pledge to recapture Crimea. The Russians invaded in 2014 and annexed it to preserve their access to the port at Sevastopol. The impetus was the putsch that replaced the legitimately-elected pro-Russian government with, roughly the present anti-Russian government. The Russians understood that meant that their access to Sevastopol was threatened and, predictably, they acted to preserve it.

As usual keep in mind that I’m not justifying the Russian view. I’m just explaining it.

More surprises from the New York Times. The title of Tom Friedman’s latest NYT column is “We Are Suddenly Taking On China and Russia at the Same Time”. Here’s its opening paragraph:

In case you haven’t noticed, let me alert you to a bracing turn of events: The U.S. is now in conflict with Russia and China at the same time. Grandma always said, “Never fight Russia and China at the same time.” So did Henry Kissinger. Alas, there is a strong case in the national interest for confronting both today. But have no doubt: We are in uncharted waters. I just hope that these are not our new “forever wars.”

I strongly suspect that if you took an opinion poll of the American people they wouldn’t favor “taking on” either China or Russia let alone both at the same time if by “taking on” you mean military conflict.

Although his choice of words is making matters worse, I doubt that President Biden actually wants to go to war with them, either, let alone go to war with both of them at the same time.

But our chickens have come home to roost. Decades of bad policy are all coming to a head at the same time. Remember that in war the enemy gets a vote.