I agree with the point that Antony Blinken and Lloyd Austin make in their Washington Post op-ed. In theory anyway. In theory our alliances are force multipliers:

Our alliances are what our military calls “force multipliers.” We’re able to achieve far more with them than we could without them. No country on Earth has a network of alliances and partnerships like ours. It would be a huge strategic error to neglect these relationships. And it’s a wise use of our time and resources to adapt and renew them, to ensure they’re as strong and effective as they can be.

but I’m not entirely convinced that’s how it has been working out in practice. The entire discussion evokes for me Yogi Berra’s observation about theory and practice. In theory there’s no difference between theory and practice but in practice there is.

Let’s consider some concrete examples. Let’s consider the U. S., U. K., and French bombing of Libya in 2011 which largely brought down the Qaddafi regime. U. S. participation allowed France and England to do something they couldn’t accomplish on their own. At the end of a week of intervention the French and British had materially exhausted their own ability to prosecute the campaign. Was the converse true? No.

Let’s consider our alliance with Germany. Over the last 20 years what have we accomplished with that alliance we would not have been able to accomplish without it? I genuinely can’t think of anything.

In fact I don’t think I can come up with any examples from the last 20 years in which our alliances have been force multipliers.

Okay, let’s consider a hypothetical non-military alliance and objective: the Paris Accords. If we had joined the Paris Accords and actually made substantial cuts in our greenhouse gas emissions, would it have changed the course of human-induced climate change? Even if you make the dozens of assumptions you would need to make, I don’t think it would because China would have done exactly what they have done and as long as China maintains that course the objective cannot be reached. That seems to be a case in which one of the member’s participation in the alliance is actually a figleaf covering their own lack of compliance rather than a force multiplier.

My tentative conclusion is that our alliances to be force multipliers the relationship must be more one of equals than that of client and patron and all of the participants must live up to their obligations. That would require efforts and expenses on the part of our allies they have neither been willing to exert nor bear. For the last 75 years the objective of our foreign policy has been to turn all of our notional allies in clients. Can we change that? Is it too late to change that?

In an op-ed in the Washington Post Australian journalist Richard Glover presents ten reasons why Australia’s campaign against COVID-19 has fared reasonably well. Here they are:

1. The bush fire experience
2. First Nations people must be given power to run their own response
3. States matter
4. It helps if people follow the rules
5. It’s important to reach across the aisle
6. You don’t have to choose between “saving lives” and “saving the economy”
7. People trust the health system
8. Make use of the police and military
9. Mobilize communities
10. Be an island

He touches on critical differences between Australia and the United States but refrains from pointing them out explicitly. I don’t know whether that’s from discretion, ignorance, or he simply takes Australia’s circumstances for granted. I’ll point some of them out much more explicitly:

1. Don’t have a long land border.
2. Be small. Australia’s population is more than an order of magnitude smaller than ours. That doesn’t just mean that the problem facing them is one-tenth as complex as the problem that faces the U. S. It means that the problem they face is 1/1000^th as complicated as the problem we face.
3. Have higher social cohesion. Australia is much more linguistically, culturally, religiously, ethnically, racially, and economically more homogeneous than the U. S. These things matter.
4. Have a government that’s worthy of trust.
5. Give partisan and political advantage a lower priority. When those are the highest priorities everything else takes a backseat.

All things considered when you take into account the enormous handicaps under which we’ve labored, we’re not doing too bad.

As much as we may need to rebuild our material infrastructure, there is an astronomically greater need to rebuild our societal infrastructure which we’ve been tearing down faster than it can be rebuilt over the period of the last 50 years.

Just when we thought we’d escaped him, Jared Kushner has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal advising the Biden Administration to capitalize on the strong hand they were dealt in the Middle East:

The geopolitical earthquake that began with the Abraham Accords hasn’t ended. More than 130,000 Israelis have visited Dubai since President Trump hosted the peace deal’s signing this past September, and air travel opened up for the first time in August. New, friendly relations are flowering—wait until direct flights get going between Israel and Morocco. We are witnessing the last vestiges of what has been known as the Arab-Israeli conflict.

[…]

The Biden administration is making China a priority in its foreign policy, and rightly so—one of Mr. Trump’s greatest legacies will be changing the world’s view of China’s behavior. But it would be a mistake not to build on the progress in the Middle East. Eliminating the ISIS caliphate and bringing about six peace agreements—between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, Morocco and Kosovo, plus uniting the Gulf Cooperation Council—has changed the paradigm.

During his 2017 visit to Saudi Arabia, Mr. Trump called on Muslim-majority countries to root out extremist ideology. As the custodian of the two holiest sites in Islam, Saudi Arabia has made significant progress in combating extremism, which has greatly reduced America’s risk of attack and created the environment for today’s new partnerships. In Mr. Trump’s final deal before leaving office, he brokered the end of the diplomatic conflict between Qatar and Saudi Arabia, restoring an important alliance to counter Iran.

concluding:

The table is set. If it is smart, the Biden administration will seize this historic opportunity to unleash the Middle East’s potential, keep America safe, and help the region turn the page on a generation of conflict and instability. It is time to begin a new chapter of partnership, prosperity and peace.

Credit where credit is due. The Trump Administration made more progress in the Middle East than the previous ten administrations combined and I suspect a lot of that was due to Jared Kushner. Nonetheless I’m skeptical that the Biden Administration was actually left with a strong hand. I think it was left with a set of contradictions, a “wicked problem”. There is no actual solution to a wicked problem—the only hope is to set up a process that might ultimately lead to a solution.

IMO that’s the challenge that faces the Biden Administration: advocating a process in the Middle East that could ultimately improve the situation there. I don’t believe they’ll arrive at that through bilateral negotiations with Iran or by punishing MBS. I also don’t believe they can accomplish that and make the administration’s own caucus happy at the same time and they’re more likely to choose pacifying their caucus over pacifying the Middle East.

One more observation. I don’t think that the Abraham Accords revealed what Mr. Kushner says they did:

The Abraham Accords exposed the conflict as nothing more than a real-estate dispute between Israelis and Palestinians that need not hold up Israel’s relations with the broader Arab world.

I think it revealed that the Palestinians just aren’t that important to the rest of the Arab world in the total scheme of things. That was just a ploy. Unfortunately, just as we have an internal constituency promoting Israel’s interests even when they conflict with our own or with an improved situation in the Middle East, we have an internal constituency promoting the Palestinians’ interests with similar short-sightedness. Those are among the reasons it’s a wicked problem.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal, no foes of expanding immigration, are dismayed at the situation the Biden Administration has fomented at our southern border:

The White House on Saturday dispatched the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the southern border, tacitly acknowledging the growing humanitarian crisis as migrants surge to enter the U.S. Stephen Miller, the restrictionist adviser to Donald Trump, could not have devised a better way to undermine the prospects for immigration reform.

FEMA typically addresses unpredictable calamities like hurricanes, but this border mess is man-made. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported nearly 397,000 encounters with migrants on the southwestern border in the first five months of fiscal 2021, which began in October. That’s about 25% more than in the same period in 2019.

In 2019 the surge of migrants led to “dangerous overcrowding” at border control stations and detention facilities, in the words of the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general. Covid and social-distancing requirements have further reduced capacity at government facilities and nonprofit shelters.

Unaccompanied children are arriving in droves, with CBP reporting nearly 9,500 encounters in February, a 61% increase over January. The Washington Post reports that more than 8,500 migrant children are at facilities run by the Department of Health and Human Services, while another 3,500—“the highest figure ever”—are stuck at CBP stations waiting for a spot to open at the shelters.

The wait times for children stuck at CBP facilities now often exceed the 72-hour legal limit, and the Post says unaccompanied children are “waiting in cramped and austere holding cells with concrete floors and benches” where the “lights remain on 24 hours a day.” Remember in 2019 when the media and Democrats called similar conditions a moral catastrophe?

They conclude:

President Biden has backed himself into this box canyon by failing to heed political and economic reality. Americans want to be generous to immigrants, but they also reject the view that the U.S. can finance the healthcare and education of anyone who breaks U.S. law to get here. That should be clear enough from the immigration reform failures going back to George W. Bush in 2007.

I think they misread the election returns. There was no full-throated rejection of the net effect of Trump’s immigration policies although there was rejection of some of the strategies he used to get there and of the man himself. I think the editors’ characterization is about right: Americans want to be generous as long as it doesn’t inconvenience themselves too much. The Biden Administration’s policies is inconveniencing Americans too much, particularly Americans who live adjacent to our southern border.

At Quillette Michael Totten profiles Portland, the city in which he’s lived for all of his adult life. Here’s the kernel of the piece:

In the early days, thousands of people took to the streets and demanded police accountability and reform. Most of the protesters were my middle class neighbors, and the vast majority of them were peaceful. A minuscule percentage broke windows, looted stores, and set fires. But as time went on, the mainstream protesters were more or less satisfied that their point had been made, and they had excellent reasons to believe this: the Oregon legislature enacted a comprehensive reform package with blazing speed, and Portland police drove around saying “Portland, we hear you” through loudspeakers. So nonviolent reform-minded protesters returned to their lives and to their jobs (if they still had jobs).

The black-clad criminal contingent didn’t stay home. They returned to the streets, night after night, throughout the entire summer and into the fall and even the winter, not to protest but to carry out what they call “direct action”—violent assaults against local businesses, police stations, the police union headquarters, the federal courthouse, and the private homes of local officials. They wore body armor. They threw bricks, frozen water bottles, and even Molotov cocktails at the cops. They returned night after night without letup as if brawling in the streets were their job. The recently passed police reforms were not even acknowledged. Most combatants were military-age white men.

Portland suddenly felt less like Amsterdam and more like perennially riot-stricken Paris during one of its bad months, as if Portland were experiencing something akin to an autoimmune disorder, where the body’s immune system attacks healthy tissue. Protests are not riots, and riots are not protests. Protests are constitutionally protected activities vital to any functioning liberal democracy. Riots are violent crimes punishable by imprisonment. Activists, journalists, and politicians alike have a terrible habit of using the terms interchangeably. They might as well use fire and ice as synonyms if they can’t keep these opposites straight.

Although he’s writing about Portland I suspect that many of the U. S.’s major cities are now too expensive, too violent, and, at least in Chicago’s case, too corrupt to hold onto their populations so they’re voting with their feet. Who leaves and who stays will be the next big questions.

Impelled by James Joyner’s post at Outside the Beltway, “Why Moral Persuasion Is So Hard”, I took the same test he did at YourMorals.org. Here are my results on the “Moral Foundations” test:

As you can see in some areas I’m more aligned with liberals, in others more aligned with conservatives, in others somewhere between the two, and in yet others aligned with neither.

I took quite a number of the tests and that was more the rule for me than the exception. I didn’t align extremely closely with anybody. I’m eccentric; I’m used to it.

I want to make three points a bit more pointedly than James did. First, in my opinion most people are extremely immature in their moral judgments and there’s a good reason for it. They have the moral judgments of 7 year olds because most have received no systematic formal moral education other than whatever they received at their mothers’ knees. They’re more concerned about “niceness” or doing what’s expected of them than about whether things are right or wrong.

Second, I believe we are making a transition from a society motivated by internalized guilt (conscience) to one motivated by externalized shame (the opinions of others). I do not believe that development is compatible with liberal democracy, the sort of citizen-based society we’ve had for most of our history. It requires a lot more policing at all levels and a much more intrusive state. I don’t like it but I see nothing that can be done about it.

Finally, the variety and degree of moral disagreements are increasing in this country. What else would you expect? There is no global code of morality. To assume one is a fundamental error. With 15% of the country immigrants and a substantial percentage reared by immigrants who in some cases have wildly different moral views than the old WASP code fundamental moral disagreement is baked in. I don’t see much we can do about that, either.

I’m not even going to bother to link to an article I read claiming that the U. S. is “a very wealthy country” because I think it’s grossly misleading and undoubtedly a pitch for the ill-conceived tax on wealth.

Instead I will just point out that there is a higher percentage of poor people in the United States by the most common international definitions (incomes < $1.90/day, incomes > $3.20/day, incomes < $5.50/day) than in any Western European country, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand and a higher percentage by the first two of those definitions than in any European country including Moldova, by most reckonings the poorest country in Europe. Whether we were ever the richest country in the world is open to debate but I think a better characterization now would be that we are a middle income country with some extremely wealthy people in it. I don’t believe that the effect of a wealth tax would be to alleviate poverty in the U. S. but to change the U. S. to a middle income country in which fewer extremely wealthy people lived.

As I’ve been maintaining for decades I think it’s even better to think of the U. S. as three countries sharing the same borders: the richest country in the world, a middle income country, and a poor country. Contrary to most Democrats I think our attentions should be focused on the rural poor and people living on Indian reservations. That’s where the genuine, grinding poverty in the U. S. is. But it’s the urban “poor” who are only relatively poor and don’t meet the definitions above who get the most attention because that’s where the votes are.

And just for the record I think that rather than monkeying with deductions or increasing the marginal rates or imposing a tax on wealth we should abolish the personal and corporate income taxes, replacing them with a VAT, prebated based on income. Unlike our present system that would be an efficient tax and would not be regressive.

You might want to read Ed Yardeni’s post on increasing rents as a possible driver of inflation. The TL;DR version is that people are moving but restrictions being placed on builders especially those related to COVID-19 has cut the inventory of homes on the market which predisposes people to rent which in turn pushes up rents. Or, said another way, it’s our old friends supply and demand.

Meanwhile in their normal counter-productive way politicians are calling for rent and mortgage jubilees while state and local governments are raising property taxes. Here in Illinois a lot of that is to pay the pensions of retired public workers and keep paying present public workers not work. It’s a short life but a merry one.

At The Hill Nick Sargen reminds us of what happened the last time the federal government began implementing plans as ambitious as those of the Biden Administration:

For some observers, this predicament is similar to what occurred in the mid-late 1960s when President Lyndon B. Johnson proclaimed the “Great Society” while the Vietnam War was being ramped up. The initiatives included a “War on Poverty,” creation of Medicare and Medicaid, the launch of the Head Start program, urban renewal and passage of the Motor Vehicle Air and Pollution Control Act.

When these programs were unveiled in the mid-1960s, the federal budget was close to balance and interest rates and inflation were low. Thereafter, federal spending rose by 50 percent in the second half of the decade owing to the expansion in social programs and costs incurred in fighting the Vietnam War. Because tax rates then were substantially higher than today (with the top marginal tax rate for households at 70 percent) the increase in the federal budget deficit did not rise above 3 percent of GDP.

Nonetheless, consumer price inflation, which was only 1 percent at the beginning of the 1960s, rose steadily in the second half and approached 6 percent in 1970. The principal reason was the Fed was slow to raise interest rates and inflation expectations increased. The situation culminated with the first U.S. dollar devaluation in December 1971 that was the precursor of the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates.

and

The main cost incurred by the “Great Society”— added healthcare expenses associated with Medicare and Medicaid — did not show up immediately but grew exponentially over time. For example, U.S. spending on healthcare was only 5 percent of GDP when these programs were launched as compared with 18 percent today and federal programs now account for nearly one third of the total.

I share Mr. Sargen’s confidence in the ability of the Fed to manage that. There are some major differences between now and 50 years ago among them that in 1970 imports were only 5% of GDP and now they’re three times that. If Americans do, indeed, spend more as a consequence of the ARPA of 2021, we’ll be subsidizing the recovery of the rest of the world while, if bond rates rise as predicted, income inequality will be exacerbated.

As I’ve said previously I’m less concerned about consumer inflation than I am about stunting our economy’s ability to grow in the future or of catastrophic loss of confidence in U. S. credit.