In ancient Greek myth, Scylla and Charybdis were two sea monsters that inhabited the Straits of Messina between Sicily and the Italian mainland. The phrase “between Scylla and Charybdis” means being caught between two unpleasant alternatives. Defense policy expert Benjamin Friedman’s advice in his piece at UnHerd presents two alternatives, each of which is undoubtedly unacceptable to Western countries:

U.S. and European leaders repeat the talking point that the terms and timing of peace should be up to Ukraine. Western support should be automatic and unquestioning, they imply. But there are both strategic and humanitarian reasons why this is the wrong approach.

First, trying to weaken Russia is probably counterproductive, past a point, to NATO countries’ security. Russia has dashed itself on the rocks in Ukraine, losing a chunk of its fighting force, degrading its military morale, and demonstrating shocking military deficiencies. This weakness makes it quite unlikely to invade another country soon. Maybe some further humbling could help, but Russia is not going to disappear as an energy exporter that can fund a substantial military force and large nuclear arsenal. Endless sanctions and continual proxy wars will create a resentful garrison state, with more revanchist nationalism and desire for payback.

Second, encouraging Ukraine to hold out for a full victory may be bad for the country itself. Of course, Ukraine should be best positioned to judge what’s best for it. But, on the other hand, Ukraine’s political situation may make it impossible for any Ukrainian leader to accept the limits of what war can achieve. And what Ukrainians want depends in some sense on what their sponsors will bankroll.

Pre-invasion Ukraine is instructive. Since 2014, when Russia seized Crimea and stoked insurgency in Donbas, Ukraine’s perilous circumstances suggested a compromise with Russia, by accepting neutrality, giving up on Crimea, and implementing Minsk II, which effectively meant allowing rebel areas autonomy. This was never a great deal for Ukraine, except compared to the alternatives: being endlessly menaced or invaded.

After this deal, the U.S. went on about “ironclad support” and held out the prospect of NATO membership. This was gross negligence, not just because Ukraine’s prospective NATO membership was at once a chimera and provocative to Russia, but because it tempted Kyiv’s belief that western support would prevent the need for painful compromise.

I presume that the Western preference would be for Putin just to go away. Or for Russia just to go away. I doubt that either of those are realistic prospects.

The larger question is whether ceding Western foreign and defense policy to Ukraine is prudent either for the countries of the West or for Ukraine?

In an op-ed in the Washington Post criminologists James Densley and Jillian Peterson throw some shade on the hate hypothesis for identifying the motives of mass killers:

Our research shows that mass shooters walk a common route to violence through early childhood trauma. If they fail to achieve what they’ve been socialized to believe is their destiny — material wealth, success, power, happiness — as they age, they reach an existential crisis point.

When they no longer feel connected to the people and places around them, this becomes a suicidal crisis — except the thought of merely taking their own lives leaves them unfulfilled. As the sister of one perpetrator told us, her brother went from asking, “What’s wrong with me?” to asking, “What’s wrong with them?”

Hate comes late along this pathway. Searching for answers, angry men comb through the words and deeds of other angry men who came before, including past mass shooters. In the darkest corners of the Internet, they eventually find someone or something else to blame for their despair.

Unlike many of those who identify problems they have some prescriptions:

There are many strategies to preempt mass shootings, none perfect on their own. These include improving access to mental health care and crisis support at schools and workplaces, expanding suicide prevention programs, holding media and social media companies accountable for hateful rhetoric on their platforms, and limiting access to firearms for high-risk individuals.

which are okay as far as they go I suppose but I think that we would find that all of those are much more difficult and of more limited effect than they may suppose.

Their diagnosis rings pretty true to me and I think it should be noted that the sense of entitlement to which they point is not limited to white supremacists but is common to white supremacists, black nationalists, and Muslim fundamentalist extremists, albeit for somewhat different reasons. Perhaps we should think a bit more critically about the factors. Has a generation of the cult of unearned self-esteem supported a fertile environment for developing such monsters? What role does isolation play? How much do social media cultivate that isolation? How about family structure and dynamics? Too much/too little/the wrong sort of parental attention?

I mentioned that I received some treasures of family history from my father’s cousin a week or so ago. One of the most valued was the picture above.

That’s a picture of my grandmother, Esther Wagner, and her younger brother Louis, which, judging by their ages, was taken about 1899. I had never seen that picture before, it’s the picture of her at the youngest age I have ever seen, and I am glad to have it.

My grandmother Esther Wagner Schuler was the only one of my grandparents who was alive when I was born and she died when I was very young. I believe I only met her two or three times and my recollections of her are few and fuzzy.

Although my parents, siblings, and I were very close and I continue to be close to my siblings and their families, we were not close to our extended families. As I noted above, I had no relationships with grandparents. My parents were both only children so I have no aunts, uncles, or cousins and, in fact, I never met any of paternal grandmother’s siblings or families and only one of my maternal grandmother’s siblings and their families. I wasn’t even aware of the existence of this cousin of my dad’s until very recently.

A few notes about Louis Wagner. Louis had a college education and was a lawyer which undoubtedly inspired my dad to become a lawyer. I don’t believe he practiced. Louis was married but to the best of my knowledge he and his wife had no children.

Update

Since you may recall that my family is from St. Louis, you may wonder why there should be a picture shot in Chicago of my grandmother and her brother. When he was in his late 20s or early 30s my great-grandfather Wagner, Esther’s father, was blinded (or partially blinded) by a botched eye operation. My great-grandfather made the courageous (or reckless depending on how you look at it) decision to uproot his family, moved to Chicago, studied, and became a chiropractor. He and his family returned to St. Louis and he practiced that for the next half century until his death. I think I’ve got his diploma around here somewhere.

I assume that photograph was taken while the Wagners were here in Chicago.

While I’m reacting to news items of the day, I think the murders of 10 people that took place in a Buffalo, New York supermarket are terrible and heinous. That said I genuinely wish that President Biden had not commented on it. If he is genuinely interested in violence perpetrated against black people, he should comment about Chicago. It is not atypical for a similar number of black people to be killed here over any given weekend.

I do not see any good purpose in stoking racial animosities. What do people think would happen? I thought that some idiot would go to a black neighborhood and shoot up a supermarket. The problem isn’t guns or at least it isn’t just guns. It’s hate. Hate produces more hate. Raising the temperature will not help black people. It will hurt them.

In the wake of India’s ban on wheat exports, I thought a few statistics about global wheat production would be timely. Here are the world’s largest producers of wheat:

• China (137 million metric tons)
• India (110)
• Russia (75)
• U. S. (45)
• Australia (36)
• Ukraine (33)

while the biggest exporters of wheat are:

• Russia ($8 billion)
• U. S. ($6 billion)
• Canada ($6 billion)
• France ($5 billion)
• Ukraine ($4 billion)

Neither China nor India are major exporters of wheat—nearly all of their wheat is grown for domestic consumption.

Over the last 25 years U. S. wheat production has declined almost 30%. I don’t object to countries specializing in the economic activities they do best and can earn the most from doing. That just makes sense.
I do object to paving over or otherwise developing prime farmland. It is an exhaustible resource and they aren’t making more of it. If taken out of production, it should be required to just lie fallow.

At The Duck of Minerva Dan Nexon points out the irony of his teaching a college course on American Grand Strategy while being skeptical that the United States has a grand strategy:

I wrapped the 2022 edition of my undergraduate “Grand Strategy” seminar this past Tuesday.

This must have the eight or ninth iteration of the class. I like teaching it. I really do.

But I have significant reservations about “grand strategy” as a classroom subject.

I’m not at all convinced that grand strategy is a thing. Yes, plenty of people advocate for a preferred “grand strategies.” Not a few of them would love to become the ‘next George F. Kennan,’ which leads to some truly eyeroll-worthy titles.

It’s one thing to point to a proposal, such as containment or offshore balancing, and say “this is a grand strategy.” The problem comes when we try to develop consistent standards – ones that allow us to agree that “yep, that’s a grand strategy” or reply “no, that’s merely big tactics.”

Read the whole thing.

It remains me a great deal of a college course I took as an undergraduate on the history of U. S. foreign policy. The very distinguished professor’s thesis was that the U. S. had no foreign policy. It was an argument that he and I had for the entire duration of the course.

I think that the U. S. has a foreign policy and, indeed, a grand strategy but it’s nothing like the foreign policy or grand strategy of, say, China in that it’s not an organized plan but an emergent phenomenon, formed of the individual decisions of hundreds of thousands or even millions of American diplomats, government officials at all levels, businessmen, consumers, and travelers, all much to the chagrin of the U. S. State Department I’m sure since they dream of running the show.

That’s the reason for the seeming conflict between the frequently encountered opinion encountered abroad that the people like Americans but don’t like the U. S. government. The federal government doesn’t actually reflect the American grand strategy.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal do their own analysis of the reasons for the shortage of baby formula:

One reason the market is so concentrated is tariffs up to 17.5% on imports, which protect domestic producers from foreign competition. Non-trade barriers such as FDA labeling and ingredient requirements also limit imports even during shortages.

Canada’s strong dairy industry has attracted investment in formula production. But the Trump Administration sought to protect domestic producers by imposing quotas and tariffs on Canadian imports in the USMCA trade deal. The FDA can inspect foreign plants so the U.S. import restrictions aren’t essential for product safety. They merely raise prices for consumers and limit choice.

Further limiting competition is the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) for low-income mothers. By the Department of Agriculture’s estimate, WIC accounted for between 57% and 68% of all infant formula sold in the U.S. Under the welfare program, each state awards an exclusive formula contract to a manufacturer.

Companies compete for the contracts by offering states huge rebates on the formula women can buy. The rebates equal about 85% of the wholesale cost, according to a 2011 USDA study. Women can only use WIC vouchers to purchase formula from the winning manufacturer. These rebates reduce state spending, but there’s no such thing as free baby formula.

Why would manufacturers give states an enormous discount? Because the contracts effectively give them a state monopoly. Stores give WIC brands more shelf space. Physicians may also be more likely to recommend WIC brands. After 30 states switched their WIC contracts between 2005 and 2008, the new provider’s market share increased on average by 84 percentage points.

America’s baby-formula shortage illustrates how bigger government can make big business bigger, thereby limiting competition and choice.

I’m in favor of producing more in the United States but I also support free trade but my support for free trade has limits. For example, I think that tariffs are a completely reasonable way of reducing our dependency for strategic goods and materials on geopolitical competitors.

But barring imports of Canadian baby formula doesn’t fall under that rubric. A short term emergency removing of the tariffs on imported baby formula is completely within the president’s power and President Biden should act immediately. As I have also said, it’s critically important for him and if not him some other government official to instill confidence in American parents that their babies won’t starve. In the longer term there are farther reaching policies and social issues that should be addressed. Maybe eliminating WIC’s reliance on exclusive formula contracts is one of them.

One of the dirty secrets behind monopolies is that while natural monopolies are rare government-created monopolies are embarrassingly common.

The news media are full of reports of a baby formula shortage. Political leaders are beginning to take action on it, blaming the usual suspects. Under the circumstances I thought it might be interesting to dig into the baby formula shortage ab it. Here’s CNN’s report:

A nationwide shortage of baby formula has spurred a response from several House committees in an effort to figure out what’s caused the issue and how the government can ease the problems causing the shortages.

Two House committees announced this week they are looking into the issue, with a spokesperson telling CNN that the House Committee on Oversight and Reform on Friday morning sent letters to four separate companies that produce baby formula requesting information about the supply chain issues.

Additionally, a House Energy and Commerce Committee spokesperson announced a hearing on baby formula for May 25 and told CNN they plan to call representatives from the Food and Drug Administration and Abbott, a major baby formula producer, to testify.

American stores have had a hard time keeping baby formula in stock for months due to a recall, inflation and supply chain problems. Manufacturers have said they are producing at full capacity, but it’s not enough to keep up with demand. While this has become a bipartisan issue on Capitol Hill, lawmakers are pointing fingers at different parties for the issue, with Democrats blaming the companies and Republicans blaming the Biden administration and FDA.

I remain skeptical there’s an actual shortage. I would say there were an actual shortage if consumers, retailers, and wholesalers had no inventories, manufacturers were at full production, and consumers, retailers, and wholesalers were just buying for near-term consumption. I do think that inventories are presently lower than is expected which is causing people to panic. That’s leading to panic-buying, hoarding, speculative buying, and price increases (“price gouging”). It has been suggested by some that a previous round of panic-buying, hoarding, speculative buying, and price increases, followed by a slow using of the hoards have left producers largely in the dark about the actual size of the present U. S. baby formula market. That could be true and I have no idea of the degree to which that affects the present situation.

Let’s assume there’s an actual shortage. What’s behind it? Like everything else it’s undoubtedly multi-factorial. Many are pointing to a bacterial outbreak in a single production plant in Michigan. Some point to COVID-19. More should be wondering how taking a single plant offline could cause a national shortage?

The answer is imprudent regulation over a period of years. 98% of all of the baby formula sold in the U. S. is made in the U. S. and nearly all of it is produced by just three companies (Abbott, Mead Johnson, and Nestle). Get that? We don’t import baby formula. Canadian, Irish, Dutch, French, and German baby formula is just as wholesome as American-made if not more so. Indeed, I trust their products more because EU requirements tend to be more stringent than ours. The pretext for the protectionism is helping family farmers but, again, I’m skeptical. It’s hard to ferret out but I believe that most of the benefit accrues to those mega-producers and family dairy farmers are actually hurt by our import regulations, mostly by the reciprocal limits imposed by our trading partners.

Why are there so few U. S. producers? Again I would say consolidation and regulation. Defenders of industry consolidation generally point to economies of scale but I’m a skeptic about those. I think that most economies of scale have been fully realized much earlier than people think and may even reverse at some point. That’s something that was suggested to me when I accidentally received an invoice that should have been sent to one of the largest companies in the world from one of my suppliers. I learned that I was paying the same price as they were despite being 1% of their size.

There are two areas in which I definitely believe there are economies of scale: finance and government regulation. It’s a lot easier for a $50 billion company to borrow or do financial planning than it is for a $50 million company. It’s also a lot easier for a big company to conform to government regulations than it is a small one. That is not accidental. As I’ve said before big government prefers doing business with big companies. There are many reasons for that but among the most important is that it’s easier. The total volume of the U. S. baby formula market is about $4 billion annually. It’s easier for a FDA bureaucrat to deal with three companies doing $1.3 billion each than it would be to deal with 100 companies doing $40 million each. Over time regulations tend to get tailored to suit the big guys. That’s part of what’s called “regulatory capture”.

It’s not that we should have no regulations. It’s that regulations should be appropriate to the actual requirements and not in a perpetual state of flux. Most developed countries require much more cost-benefit analysis for new regulations than we do.

I wanted to make one last point before I left this subject. Since there are racial/ethnic differences in patterns of breastfeeding. There are economic, practical, and social reasons for it. As a general rule babies should be breastfed for their first six months but most black babies have been completely weaned by six months. That means that any shortage of infant formula has a disparate impact on black mothers and babies.

What do I think should be done about all of this? In the near term we should drop all barriers to importing baby formula from Canada and stop complaining about “price gouging” or “greedy corporations” but start complaining about hoarding or speculation. In the longer term we should figure out why there are only three baby formula producers in the U. S. and reverse it, examine dropping import restrictions on baby formula from EU countries, start using cost-benefit analysis to evaluate new regulations, encourage employers to provide private areas for pumping or actual breastfeeding if appropriate, and encourage black mothers to breastfeed their babies. Beyoncé has done some good work in that area.

In the even longer term we need to abandon the ideas that more regulations are always good or that regulatory agencies can be left on their own recognizance to come up with regulations.

I thought you might find this excerpt from Colm Quinn of Foreign Policy’s newsletter interesting:

On Wednesday, the International Energy Agency announced that renewable capacity is on track for record growth in 2022, with 320 gigawatts of clean energy expected to come online this year—an amount roughly equivalent to Germany’s annual energy usage.

That such growth is happening amid supply chain snags and increasing raw material prices adds only more cause for optimism.

The sunny forecast is largely driven by increases in solar capacity in China, the European Union, and Latin America. It’s a different story in the United States, where a succession of hurdles is preventing the U.S. solar energy industry from catching up with the rest of the world.

The most prominent obstacle involves a Commerce Department investigation opened after a U.S. company alleged that Chinese firms were dumping cheap panels into the U.S. market via companies in Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam.

That single probe is expected to delay imports from those key suppliers, which accounted for 99 percent of all solar panel capacity imported into the United States in 2021, as U.S. buyers stay away for fears of having to pay still unknown amounts in retroactive tariffs.

A solar industry trade group has cut its forecast for new installations by 46 percent this year as a result.

U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told a Senate committee last week she was “deeply concerned about being able to get to the goal of 100 percent clean electricity by 2035” if the issue was not resolved quickly.

But the U.S. solar industry’s outlook wasn’t too bright even before that roadblock, with rising commodity prices, particularly in silicon, adding to the cost of components that have recently been on a downward trend.

The failure of U.S. President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better bill has also added to doubt over the future of the industry, with solar tax credits—due to be extended in the bill—now facing an uncertain future.

Geopolitics also play a role, with U.S. solar companies blocked from importing parts from some Chinese firms after those based in Xinjiang were hit with U.S. sanctions over concerns that their products were made using forced labor—a topic FP columnist Elisabeth Braw has covered in the past.

But sourcing parts domestically has its own problems. “For many years, the U.S. has applied a stick approach towards solar manufacturing,” Marcelo Ortega, a solar analyst at energy research firm Rystad, told Foreign Policy.

“I don’t think there’s been the incentivization of domestic manufacturing. It’s just been penalizing those relying on overseas supplies.”

I see several takeaways from those observations. First, it is all but certain that Chinese manufacturers are “dumping” solar panels and components on the United States. Dumping is defined as selling below the price in the producing country sometimes even below the cost of production. It would be completely unsurprising. China has been doing that for product after product for decades but China is sufficiently large and opaque that it’s hard to prove.

Second, the degree to which we actually have domestic solar panel production is questionable. At best we have a solar panel assembly sector that is partly or completely dependent on Chinese components and/or materials. I have no opposition to subsidizing domestic production of solar panels but grave reservations about our subsidizing Chinese production of solar panels.

Third, relying solely or primarily on the “stick approach” is foolhardy. Why are we so committed to it? IMO it’s bipartisan. Conservatives don’t like government interference in the market and progressives don’t like subsidizing big corporations.

Finally, we aren’t looking at solar power in a systematic fashion but in a piecemeal fashion. How we’re going to power all the electric vehicles that proponents want built without more power from all available sources isn’t clear to me. How we’re going to move all that power from where it’s being generated to where it’s needed is even less clear.