I present this post at Foreign Policy by Hal Brands and Michael Beckley not because I believe it is true but because it presents a point-of-view that was, at least to me, quite counter-intuitive:

The idea of a Thucydides Trap, popularized by Harvard political scientist Graham Allison, holds that the danger of war will skyrocket as a surging China overtakes a sagging America. Even Chinese President Xi Jinping has endorsed the concept arguing Washington must make room for Beijing. As tensions between the United States and China escalate, the belief that the fundamental cause of friction is a looming “power transition”—the replacement of one hegemon by another—has become canonical.

The only problem with this familiar formula is that it’s wrong.

The Thucydides Trap doesn’t really explain what caused the Peloponnesian War. It doesn’t capture the dynamics that have often driven revisionist powers—whether that is Germany in 1914 or Japan in 1941—to start some of history’s most devastating conflicts. And it doesn’t explain why war is a very real possibility in U.S.-China relations today because it fundamentally misdiagnoses where China now finds itself on its arc of development—the point at which its relative power is peaking and will soon start to fade.

There’s indeed a deadly trap that could ensnare the United States and China. But it’s not the product of a power transition the Thucydidean cliché says it is. It’s best thought of instead as a “peaking power trap.” And if history is any guide, it’s China’s—not the United States’—impending decline that could cause it to snap shut.

and

A dissatisfied state has been building its power and expanding its geopolitical horizons. But then the country peaks, perhaps because its economy slows, perhaps because its own assertiveness provokes a coalition of determined rivals, or perhaps because both of these things happen at once. The future starts to look quite forbidding; a sense of imminent danger starts to replace a feeling of limitless possibility. In these circumstances, a revisionist power may act boldly, even aggressively, to grab what it can before it is too late. The most dangerous trajectory in world politics is a long rise followed by the prospect of a sharp decline.

and

Over the past 150 years, peaking powers—great powers that had been growing dramatically faster than the world average and then suffered a severe, prolonged slowdown—usually don’t fade away quietly. Rather, they become brash and aggressive. They suppress dissent at home and try to regain economic momentum by creating exclusive spheres of influence abroad. They pour money into their militaries and use force to expand their influence. This behavior commonly provokes great-power tensions. In some cases, it touches disastrous wars.

They go on to present both Imperial Germany and Imperial Japan as examples of just that dynamics.

They conclude:

To be clear, China probably won’t undertake an all-out military rampage across Asia, as Japan did in the 1930s and early 1940s. But it will run greater risks and accept greater tensions as it tries to lock in key gains. Welcome to geopolitics in the age of a peaking China: a country that already has the ability to violently challenge the existing order and one that will probably run faster and push harder as it loses confidence that time is on its side.

The United States, then, will face not one but two tasks in dealing with China in the 2020s. It will have to continue mobilizing for long-term competition while also moving quickly to deter aggression and blunt some of the more aggressive, near-term moves Beijing may make. In other words, buckle up. The United States has been rousing itself to deal with a rising China. It’s about to discover that a declining China may be even more dangerous.

I will only make one observation. In the entire history of the world there has never been a country that has been rising in power while declining in population and China’s population is already declining. Perhaps China is the exception that proves the rule.

If you listened to the talking heads programs this morning you may have been a bit confused by what you heard. I know I was. In the interest of clarity I wanted to make a few points:

1. Neither poverty, chaos, nor crime in your country of origin constitute legitimate cases for asylum under U. S. law. Legitimate cases require persecution or fear of persecution in their countries of origin due to race, religion, being a member of a particular social group, nationality, or political opinion.
2. Similarly, a refugee under U. S. law is an individual who is unwilling or unable to return to his or her home country due to a well-founded fear of persecution due to race, membership in a particular social group, political opinion, religion, or national origin.

It should be manifestly clear that very few if any of the Haitians who somehow made their way to our southern border were either legitimately seeking asylum or refugees. Taking the most charitable possible view they were economic migrants. Less charitably, they were venue shopping for the best deal.

They went from Haiti to Chile, Venezuela, Colombia, or elsewhere because those countries had very lax immigration laws.

90% of Haitians speak only Creole. Creole is not French. Of the adults among those, again charitably, at most 62% are literate in Creole. Relatively few Americans speak Creole. The demand for workers who speak a language intelligible to very few in the U. S. and who are illiterate in that language is quite low in the 21st century. Like the Somalis before them the only thing they are really prepared for is to be clients of the state for life.

I believe that the United States should be giving more aid to Haiti and should be providing it in a more prudent manner so that it actually reaches those for whom it is intended. I do not believe that the proper way to to ameliorate the living conditions of the people of Haiti is to bring them here.

Something else you may not have noticed. Last week the House passed a $768 billion defense appropriations bill. Connor O’Brien reports at Politico:

The House on Thursday easily passed a $768 billion defense policy bill that endorses a major budget boost, dealing the biggest blow yet to President Joe Biden’s Pentagon spending plans.

Lawmakers approved the National Defense Authorization Act in a 316-113 vote with broad support from Democrats and Republicans as momentum builds on Capitol Hill to add upwards of $25 billion to Biden’s defense proposal.

What did it include?

In all, the legislation would authorize $768 billion for national defense programs, including $740 billion for the Pentagon base budget — an increase of $25 billion from what Biden requested — and $28 billion for nuclear weapons programs under the Energy Department.

On the House floor this week, Armed Services leaders touted the legislation as a key step in shedding aging weapons and helping the Pentagon pivot toward emerging technologies that help match threats posed by China and Russia.

“Everybody here will find something that they do not like,” House Armed Services Chair Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said on the House floor. “But it is also the nature of the legislative process, in this case, that we have produced a product that everybody in this House can be proud of.”

The top Armed Services Republican, Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama, added that the bill is “laser-focused on preparing our military to prevail in a conflict with China.”

and

The bill also would:

— Authorize $28.4 billion for 13 new Navy ships, including three Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and two Virginia-class attack submarines.

— Authorize the purchase of 85 Lockheed Martin F-35 fighters, matching the Pentagon’s budget request.

— Procure 24 Boeing F-15EX jets for the Air Force, double the number requested by the Pentagon.

— Prohibit private funding for cross-state National Guard deployment except for emergency or disaster relief efforts.

— Require generals and admirals to be out of the military for 10 years before they can serve as defense secretary, up from the current seven-year cooling off period.

— Provide a 2.7 percent troop pay raise.

$768 billion sounds like a lot of money and it is. It’s about 3.5% of GDP which is a lot less than it has been in the past but not nearly as much as some hawks in the U. S. think we should be spending. My priorities would be, well, different than those reflected in the article. I think we should be downsizing the Air Force, and the Army, sharply cutting the size of the general staff, and focused more on readiness, which has suffered somewhat during 20 years of continuous deployment and warfare, than on big ticket item spending.

You might not have been aware of it with all of the partisan bickering going on in the U. S. but today the Germans went to the polls to elect a new chancellor. For the first time in sixteen years Angela Merkel is not on the ballot. NPR reports:

Early exit polls from Germany show an extremely close race between the center-left Social Democratic Party and the center-right Christian Democratic Union, in an election that will decide the next chancellor of the country after 16 years of Angela Merkel in office.

Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and its partner, the Christian Social Union, have 25% of the vote, placing them in a tie with the Social Democratic Party. Following behind is the Greens with 15%.

Additional context if provided by Reuters:

BERLIN, Sept 26 (Reuters) – Leaders of Alternative for Germany (AfD) put on a brave face after projected election results showed support for the far-right party dropping and said they rejoiced in seeing Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives slump to their worst-ever result.

The mood was subdued at a restaurant in Berlin where party leaders and a few dozen members had gathered after the party failed to improve on the 12.6% it secured four years ago, settling instead on 10-11%.

“Should this result stand this would mean that Merkel has ruined my former party,” said AfD honorary leader Alexander Gauland, who was a member of the outgoing chancellor’s Christian Democrats (CDU) before joining the far-right party.

“Despite our relatively weaker result we have accomplished our mission: Merkel is out,” added Gauland, drawing applause.

Although only the election for chancellor is on the ballot there are actually two questions: who will be elected chancellor and will Germany move farther to the right or to the left? Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is generally described as “far-right”. A better description would be nationalist, Eurosceptic, and anti-immigration. I will be interested in seeing the election returns in Bavaria and Saxony, where AfD is particularly strong.

I do wish that Americans would stop trying to understand foreign political parties through the prism of our own politics. None of the parties above is much like either of our major political parties. In particular both the SDP and CDU are farther to the left than our Democratic Party while AfD is in some ways farther to the right than our Republican Party and in some ways farther to the left. There’s just no comparison.

It’s pretty much the same with all political parties in other countries. Britain’s Tories are more like our Democrats and more like our Republicans than than Labour is like either.

A German chancellor who is not Angela Merkel will unquestionably provide important challenges for Europe, the United States, and the world. We’ll need to see how it all turns out before making any predictions.

I thought you might find some of the observations in Costas Paris and Jennifer Smith’s Wall Street Journal article on the ongoing issues in our supply chains interesting:

Participants in each link in the U.S. chain—shipping lines, port workers, truckers, warehouse operators, railways and retailers—blame others for the imbalances and disagree on whether 24/7 operations will help them catch up. All of them are struggling with a shortage of workers.

The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are managed separately and operate 13 private container terminals. Long Beach officials said last week they would try operating 24 hours a day from Monday to Thursday. Gene Seroka, executive director of the larger Port of Los Angeles, said his port will step more cautiously, keeping existing hours while waiting for truckers and warehouse operators to extend their hours.

with this particularly telling:

Union Pacific Corp. , one of two main railroads moving freight from the West Coast into the country, is primarily seeing delays, or dwell, when it picks up cargo from ports and hands it off to trucks at destinations, Chief Executive Lance Fritz said in a recent interview. “Where we see dwell is on either end,” he said.

Nike executives said Thursday that the amount of time it takes to move a cargo container from Asian factories to North America is now about 80 days, or twice as long as it was before the pandemic. Moving items such as paper towels or furniture within the U.S. is also a challenge, with Costco executives saying it can be difficult to find trucks or drivers on short notice.

The “dwell time” refers to how long a container sits waiting to be unloaded from transport or loaded into transport for the next stage in its journey. A doubling of dwell time is a lot.

Interpretations of all of this may vary but mine is that “just-in-time” inventory (JIT) has come back to bite us in the butt. JIT requires predictable and, indeed, short dwell times. A doubling of dwell time means that factories are idled or store shelves empty.

JIT enables both manufacturing and retail to operate smoothly with a lot less warehousing and, consequently, significantly lower capital investment. If JIT no longer works or can’t be made to function acceptably it will have grave repercussions that echo through the economy. This is just about the worst time to be increasing corporate income taxes or increasing the cost and risk of capital investment.

Is it just me or have the opinion pieces (editorials, op-eds, blog postsl, etc.) of today become incredibly boring and repetitive? As I’ve pointed out before a lot of blogging is reaction and it’s hard to post when there’s so little to which to react. If it were August, I could understand it.

In a lengthy jeremiad in the Washington Post Robert Kagan identifies an incipient constitutional crisis, as grave in his view as the one that Lincoln faced or that was faced in the nullification crisis:

The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves. The warning signs may be obscured by the distractions of politics, the pandemic, the economy and global crises, and by wishful thinking and denial. But about these things there should be no doubt:

First, Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate for president in 2024. The hope and expectation that he would fade in visibility and influence have been delusional. He enjoys mammoth leads in the polls; he is building a massive campaign war chest; and at this moment the Democratic ticket looks vulnerable. Barring health problems, he is running.

Second, Trump and his Republican allies are actively preparing to ensure his victory by whatever means necessary. Trump’s charges of fraud in the 2020 election are now primarily aimed at establishing the predicate to challenge future election results that do not go his way. Some Republican candidates have already begun preparing to declare fraud in 2022, just as Larry Elder tried meekly to do in the California recall contest.

How grave is the danger?

The stage is thus being set for chaos. Imagine weeks of competing mass protests across multiple states as lawmakers from both parties claim victory and charge the other with unconstitutional efforts to take power. Partisans on both sides are likely to be better armed and more willing to inflict harm than they were in 2020. Would governors call out the National Guard? Would President Biden nationalize the Guard and place it under his control, invoke the Insurrection Act, and send troops into Pennsylvania or Texas or Wisconsin to quell violent protests? Deploying federal power in the states would be decried as tyranny. Biden would find himself where other presidents have been — where Andrew Jackson was during the nullification crisis, or where Abraham Lincoln was after the South seceded — navigating without rules or precedents, making his own judgments about what constitutional powers he does and doesn’t have.

Today’s arguments over the filibuster will seem quaint in three years if the American political system enters a crisis for which the Constitution offers no remedy.

I don’t disagree with him about the gravity of the situation but I don’t believe he truly understands the sources of the problem and I would set the clock all the way back to 2016. Trump was elected to the presidency legitimately. After his election the Clinton campaign, the Congress, the media, the political appointees in the executive branch, and the permanent civil service employees, particularly those in State, Justice, and Defense, did not precisely cover themselves in glory. For four years there was an if not concerted at least unison effort to frustrate President Trump and his supporters which went well beyond ordinary politics. I think that the nomenklatura‘s rejection of a duly-elected president is a crisis as dire as the one to which Mr. Kagan calls attention.

To clarify:

1. I did not vote for Donald Trump either in 2016 or 2020.
2. I think he was elected legitimately in 2016.
3. I don’t think he was a good president.
4. He pursued some of the correct policies. I don’t much care why.
5. I think that Joe Biden was elected legitimately in 2020.
6. I condemned the events of January 6 of this year unconditionally.
7. I think it was better described as disorderly conduct, a demonstration that had gotten completely out of hand, rather than as an insurrection.
8. All of the actual homicides of the day appear to have perpetrated by the Capitol Police.
9. The deaths of several Capitol Police officers, as far as I can tell sick old men, are as much the fault of the Congress which is directly responsible for the governance of the Capitol Police as it is of those who breached the Capitol
10. I have no reservations in declaring that the actions of President Trump on that day were reprehensible.

I agree with Mr. Kagan that we are already in the midst of a constitutional crisis but I think its scope is significantly broader than he appears to.

In his regular Washington Post column Josh Rogin laments that President Biden’s initiative to stabilize U. S.-China relations is failing:

The problem is that China’s actions do not match Xi’s words. The Chinese government has responded to the Biden foreign policy team’s repeated outreach attempts with antagonism, while doubling down on its military expansion, economic aggression, domestic atrocities and wholesale disregard for the international community’s legitimate concerns about all of this behavior.

When Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Chinese leaders in Anchorage, they lectured him publicly. When Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman visited China to establish working-level ties, Chinese authorities criticized the United States in a news release before the meeting even ended. Beijing used former secretary of state John F. Kerry’s repeated trips to China to send a clear signal China won’t cooperate on climate change unless the Biden administration reverses every single Trump administration policy it finds objectionable.

I think that the administration’s essay to stabilize our relationship with China has been doomed from the start and Trump’s activities are only a minor component of that. To want to stabilize things both parties must like where matters stand as they are and I don’t honestly believe that either party likes the present state of affairs. Quite to the contrary of what Mr. Rogin suggests I don’t think the Chinese see the United States as a reliable negotiating partner. Why should they? For our part I don’t think we should like any order that the Chinese found worth stabilizing. There’s just no meeting of minds here.

I would add that under a Westphalian order how China handles its strictly internal affairs is completely up to China. Appeals to human rights or international norms are completely irrelevant. And we don’t even honor the Westphalian order but matters today are very different than they were 70 years ago when we set the present international order up to suit ourselves. And we don’t even honor that.

So, which is it to be? A Westphalian order or the post-war international order? Take your pick and be prepared to live with your choice. Or just do as we like and be prepared when the Chinese do the same.

I found this post at The Conversation by Rayna M Letourneau on the problems facing the nursing profession interesting and informative.

I don’t really have anything additional to say about it. I think Ms. Letourneau calls out some interesting issues. I don’t have any solutions. IMO COVID-19 has aggravated problems that have been brewing for a long time.