In his latest Washington Post column Fareed Zakaria has problems both with his diagnosis of the problem and in his prescription. To his credit he discerns the problem impelling right-wing parties into power in Europe correctly:

The appeal of the far-right Sweden Democrats also centers on immigration. The party talks a great deal about the rise of crime, gang violence and abuse of the country’s generous welfare state.

but his concerns are misplaced:

But its main campaign proposal was a 30-point plan designed to turn Sweden, which has arguably one of the most generous immigration systems in Europe, into the most restrictive. It is “time to put Sweden first,” says Jimmie Akesson, the dynamic 43-year-old leader of Sweden Democrats.

Immigration is also the issue that has propelled Giorgia Meloni into power in Italy.

He does begin to hedge:

Sweden’s population is now about 20 percent foreign-born, which is much higher than in the United States, where that number is about 14 percent.

It’s at least 15% in the U. S. at this point and that’s only counting the above-ground economy in the U. S. How many people are in the shadows? We don’t really know. I have struggled to find sources measuring the U. S. population using indirect measures, e.g. sewage, water, highway use, etc. The subject is rather clearly taboo.

While I agree with him that the U. S. has a greater tolerance for immigrants than the ethnic states of Europe, Gallup’s polling results on American attitudes towards immigration tell a clear story. Only about 27% of Americans think the number of immigrants should be increased. That has plummeted since, surprise, 2019.

Pay close attention to this paragraph in which he’s right on the mark:

About 5 percent of the U.S. population was foreign-born in the 1970s. Since then, that percentage has almost tripled. Even so, people can be convinced that large numbers of outsiders can be assimilated and absorbed. What enrages them is the sense that people no longer become immigrants through a process that the host country controls but rather by crossing the border illegally, claiming asylum status, gaining entry and then simply sticking around. And that fear is justified.

Then he veers into a lengthy discussion of the U. S. asylum system. The United States does not have a problem with asylum-seekers. It has a problem with job-seekers petitioning for legal entry as asylum-seekers. How do we know they’re job-seekers? Just ask them. Practically every interview with the “asylum-seekers” has them explaining that they’re looking for jobs. As I have been saying for decades, we need a guest worker program.

BTW, that’s dramatically different from the mass immigration in Europe. The immigrants there are venue shopping for generous welfare packages. That’s what’s got the Swedes (and Germans) frustrated. Immigrants didn’t go there to work; they went there to go on the dole. Italy is just a target of opportunity, a way station on their way to Sweden or Germany. Brussels is what’s preventing the Italians from expediting their passage.

I won’t venture a guess at what might solve Europe’s immigration problems. Let’s focus on ours. We only have two choices. We can decide that we want to be a stratified society with a large underclass, a struggling middle class, and a prosperous overclass primarily of European descent like, again surprise, Mexico. In that case we should cut the various forms of welfare presently extended including educating the children of immigrants. What good is an education to people who will spend their lives picking strawberries, washing dishes, or changing beds?

Alternatively, we can, like Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, restrict employment-related immigration to individuals with the skills needed to find good jobs in the 21st century. Those include the ability to read and write English and a high school equivalent education or better.

I actually think we should be accepting more genuine asylum-seekers. The problem with our asylum process isn’t the flood of people who qualify. It’s the enormous number of people who apply but aren’t actually seeking asylum from anything except poverty.

There has been an enormous amount of “passionate intensity” in the attributions of guilt in the attacks on the NS1 and NS2 pipelines. Some are absolutely convinced that Russia was responsible; others are equally convinced it was the United States. The case of those defending the U. S. isn’t helped by President Biden’s imprudent assertion earlier this year that he would take steps to prevent NS2 from going into production. I think it’s too early to tell. Indeed, we may never know.

One interesting thing I read was that there have been multiple attempts in the past to mine the pipelines using underwater drones. If they discovered who was behind those attempts, their findings have not been made public. All sorts of countries and individuals have underwater drones capable of the job.

As reported by the Paul Kirby at the BBC, here are the priorities of the incoming Italian prime minister:

Earlier this year she outlined her priorities in a raucous speech to Spain’s far-right Vox party: “Yes to the natural family, no to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology… no to Islamist violence, yes to secure borders, no to mass migration… no to big international finance… no to the bureaucrats of Brussels!”

That sounds like her election is a shot across the bow of the European Union. Italy’s GDP is about $1.9 trillion. Less than France’s to be sure but enormously more than Greece’s or Hungary’s. The Italians have leverage that the other “PIGS” (Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain), the major debtor nations in the EU, do not.

Brussels, i.e. the EU, is the main force that has created the flood of immigrants that brought Ms. Meloni to power. I don’t see any way that the new Italian government can push back on mass immigration without pushing back on the EU. BTW the “big international finance” referred to are mostly French, German, Luxembourgish, and Spanish investors. The election was a warning shot to them as well.

You have undoubtedly heard of the “mystery leaks” of the Nordstream 1 and Nordstream 2 pipelines that carry gas from Russia to Germany. Multiple sources are stopping just short of declaring that the pipelines have been sabotaged. Let’s assume that’s the case.

Whodunnit? I think there are several candidates:

the United States
Russia
Poland
Ukraine
Germany

just to name a few. Multiple sources have claimed that the United States sabotaged the pipeline with various motives being presented to explain it. The Ukrainians among other sources believe that the Russians sabotaged the pipelines. Again various motives. I’ve seen some claims that Poland was responsible. It’s not clear to me what Poland’s motive might have been other than to give Germany no choice other than to stop Germany from buying Russian gas.

Ukraine might have been responsible for similar reasons to those suggested for Poland.

And there’s an outside possibility that Germans might have sabotaged the pipelines.

It also might be the case that the culprit is deferred maintenance. That sounds pretty likely to me. Although it might be possible I think it’s unlikely that any actor other than a government engaged in deliberate sabotage. The pipelines are too deep for scuba divers.

I genuinely wish that the United States including our government and media would maintain a low profile with respect to the demonstrations presently going on in Iran. The last thing we want to do is convince the mullahs that the demonstrations are foreign-sponsored.

At 1945 James Holmes argues that, from a Clausewitzian standpoint, right now may be the perfect time for China to attack the United States:

Brands and Beckley are professors at Johns Hopkins and Tufts, respectively. Though they don’t mention the sage of nineteenth-century Prussia in their lucidly written new book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, they apply Clausewitzian logic to Communist China, arguing that the world is witnessing “peak China.” If China stands at the zenith of its power, and if Chinese Communist Party magnates know it, then they might reason that now is their best opportunity to use military might to settle longstanding grudges.

My own view is that practically all of that is premature but a lot including the survival of the United States, the survival of China, and, possibly, the survival of the human species depends on China’s objectives and how the Chinese authorities evaluate the relative strengths of the U. S. and China.

There’s another possible scenario: China and the U. S. may be co-dependent with both recognizing that. In that event regardless of their relative strengths, it would be highly unlikely for China to engage the United States.

I would also point out that China’s military doctrine is completely untested while ours is proven. We continue to be strong militarily and weak politically as Soviet, Chinese, and Russian leaders have all recognized. I suspect that China’s way of war more closely resembles Russia’s than it does ours.

Would a second Pearl Harbor have a different outcome than the first?

What struck me about Sebastian Mallaby’s latest Washington Post column was the gap between its caption, “These signs show that China is starting to crack”, and the actual material of the column. That suggests to me that the editors have an axe to grind which the column doesn’t actually grind enough for them.

Here’s the meat of the column:

In the first decade of this century, China manipulated its exchange rate. This boosted exports, but it also led to an unsustainable trade surplus, the recycling of the receipts into vast piles of U.S. financial instruments and, ultimately, to a queasy feeling of dependence when Wall Street blew up in 2008.

The Communist Party’s next trick was to order banks and local governments to fuel a construction boom. Again, this boosted growth, but it replaced unsustainable foreign-bond buying with unsustainable domestic debt. Sure enough, the country’s largest property developer has defaulted. Buyers of unbuilt apartments are furious. A mortgage boycott has spread to more than 100 cities. Home prices have fallen for 12 straight months. Since real estate drives more than a quarter of the economy, the collapse of the sector threatens a wider slump.

The third snag casts a cloud over China’s strength in tech. For political reasons, again, China cannot tolerate tech titans who aspire to become Elon Musk-style influencers, who list their companies on foreign stock exchanges, or who found companies that help Chinese students apply for colleges abroad. So it has cracked down on the lot of them. This won’t encourage the next generation of technologists to start companies in China.

And then there is demography. In 1979, in yet another fit of statist hubris, China’s leaders imposed a harsh one-child policy, resulting in sex-selective abortions, a gender imbalance, and a fertility rate that cratered even faster than it would have if China had followed the standard pattern of a developing country. Far too late, the government recognized the fuse it had lit, eventually moving to a two-child policy in 2016. Last year, in a panic, the government announced a three-child policy along with programs to encourage childbearing. Fertility shows no sign of picking up.

I would say that China started manipulating its current in the last decade of the last century but that doesn’t affect his point.

There’s very little with which to disagree in those points. You might object to his diction (his choice of words), e.g. “manipulate”, “trick”, “cloud”, “hubris”, but the list are simply facts. Their significance remains to be seen. I think the problems to which he’s calling attention are all failings of the Chinese Communist Party.

I have a somewhat unorthodox view of the CCP. I don’t think that they have masterfully navigated China’s path to prosperity, an overly simplistic statement of what I think is the prevailing orthodoxy. I think they’ve impeded China’s rise in the interest of their retaining the reins of power. Whether China can overcome the roadblocks Mr. Mallaby calls out while the CCP retains power remains to be seen. I don’t think it can for reasons I’d like to explain.

You might find the title of this post mystifying. Do you know who killed more people than anyone else in the 20th century? You might say Hitler, Stalin, or Mao but at best Stalin and Mao only tell half the story.

Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was a Russian agronomist whose divergent theory of genetics and inheritance led directly to the deaths of tens of millions of Russians, Ukrainians, and Chinese by famine. His theory was called “Lysenkoism”. The danger of Lysenkoism was not merely that it was wrong but that, since it was politically attractive to Stalin, it became the established orthodoxy first in the Soviet Union and then in China. The episode is a cautionary tale of the dangers of politicized science.

That’s what I think the risk in China is. It is quite true that China is devoting an enormous amount of time, money, and energy into research and scientific education. That time, money, and energy is bearing some fruit, e.g. hypersonic weaponry, 5G.

The risk is that the investments that China is making are only means to an end and the end is not prosperity, economic growth, technological development, or the furthering of science. It is the continuance in power of the Chinese Communist Party. Only science and technology that further that goal will be acceptable. Anything else will be stamped out. That’s the lesson of politicized science, supported by the treatment of China’s tech entrepreneurs.

The case in point from China’s recent history is its infrastructure development. The reason that China builds buildings, bridges, and railways that collapse just a few years after construction is that they were politicized infrastructure investments. They were supposed to look good rather than be good.

There was an additional matter I wanted to point out. The supply chain bottleneck seems to have changed. At the beginning of the year the bottleneck was largely in the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Hundreds of ships were backed up in harbor or out at sea, waiting to be unloaded, their contents shipped by truck and train all over the United States.

Now there are only a handful of ships waiting in port in those ports. It’s not entirely clear to me what the nature of the bottleneck is today but, judging by the hundreds of ships waiting in China’s harbors or out at sea, waiting to enter China’s harbors, today’s bottleneck is China. I don’t know what the underlying problem is. It could be China’s recurring COVID-19 lockdowns. It could be a deliberate slowdown. I doubt that the Chinese harbors don’t have the ability to load and unload ships fast enough.

I have long believed that we were too dependent on China for strategic goods. An example of that emerged recently in which key components for a U. S. military jet were delayed because the metal used in manufacturing them was obtained from China. I don’t know about you but I find that confidence-shaking.

Now it appears that excessive dependence is not limited to strategic goods.

Occasionally, I refer to the “ethnic states of Europe”. Which countries do I mean by that? Very nearly all but the very smallest European countries define themselves in ethnic terms. The Baltic countries, Sweden, Denmark, Hungary, Romania, Greece, etc. Modern France has organized itself around the notion of “Frenchness” but it remains a country overwhelmingly populated by the “ethnic French”. You need to strain the notion of ethnicity a bit to understand “ethnic French” but if you squint you can still see that France remains an ethnic state. So is Germany although similarly you must engage in a willing suspension of disbelief to recognize German ethnicity (Bavarians, Swabians, and Westphalians make more convincing ethnicities than German).

Let’s consider the example of Hungary. Hungary is a country of roughly 10 million people. Its official language is Hungarian which bears only the most distant relationship to any other language and, with the exception of a few provinces of other countries, is spoken only in Hungary. Very few people born in other countries who visit or even emigrate to Hungary speak Hungarian—it’s of little use to them other than in Hungary.

The present prime minister, the head of government in Hungary, is Viktor Orbán. Mr.Orbán has gained the ire of progressive media in the United States, castigated as “far-right”, “right-wing”, “right-wing nationalist”, “far-right nationalist”, authoritarian, etc. largely for the crime of nationalism. Espousing ethnic nationalism and opposing LGBT rights and abortion are heresy if not apostasy among those who believe that every country should ethnically, racially, and culturally diverse not to mention very open sexually with few if any limitations on abortion.

Nationalism and, possibly, the other “far-right” views espoused by Mr. Orbán are gaining strength in the ethnic states of Europe, not just in Hungary but in practically all of them. Sweden has its farthest right government in decades. AfD in Germany and FN in France are actually gaining in power.

I’m in no position to say whether the political parties and positions gaining strength in the ethnic states of Europe are good, bad, or indifferent. I don’t know enough about the political history or context in those countries to make such a judgment. I wish other Americans wouldn’t leap to the (to me) weird conclusion that because a foreign political party is called “right-wing” in the press and they consider themselves “right-wing” that they should support that foreign political party. Or, as should be obvious, “left-wing”, mutatis mutandis.

Right now the America progressive media are running around with their hair on fire because Italy is poised to have its farthest right-wing government in power since Mussolini. It’s not hard to explain why: immigration, largely from the Middle East and Africa, are putting substantial strains on the social and now political fabrics of these ethnic states. How many immigrants are producing this strain? In most countries they constitute 5% or less of the population. In France it’s around 15% but they’re not deemed immigrants—they come from France’s African former possessions. 85% of the French are français de souche, the rest are mostly ethnic Arabs or sub-Saharan Africans.

What about Ukraine (I hear someone ask)? The same thing is true there. The present Ukrainian government is a Ukrainian nationalist government. That’s one of the reasons the Russians invaded. Once again I’m not justifying it but explaining it. In Ukraine as in other countries that were parts of the former Soviet Union, ethnic Russians tend to see themselves as minorities experiencing discrimination. Don’t confuse that with their wanting to return to Russia or be part of Russia. They aren’t the same thing—mostly I think they just don’t want to be discriminated against in the countries in which they were born and which they think of as their homes. Their view of “not being discriminated against” may conflict with the goals of ethnic nationalists in those countries.

I’ve posted my views on how our immigration system should be changed several times but what may not be recognized is its subtext: I don’t want to abolish immigration to the U. S. but to preserve it. The last time our percentage of immigrants in the country was as high as it is now we effectively prohibited immigration for 40 years. I think the strains of the loss of control over our southern border are starting to show. Said another way Trump was a symptom not the disease.

Update

It isn’t just in the EU that nationalism is on the rise. It’s on the rise in Russia—Russian nationalism, too, is one of the factors behind Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And it’s not just in Europe. President Xi’s policies are broadly nationalist ones. And in India the rise of Hindu nationalism is the most important development there in decades.