Many (many) years ago when I was an undergraduate I took a year-long course in American diplomatic history. I spent the entire year arguing with the professor about his primary thesis which was that the United States does not have a foreign policy and never has had. My objection, to use the terminology I would use now rather than that I used then, was that the United States has an emergent foreign policy, formed from the various sometimes conflicting objectives of different individuals and organization in the country. The White House. The State Department. The Department of Defense. Individual diplomats in the State Department and officers in the Department of Defense. Companies with foreign trade. Individual Americans.

In a jeremiad in Foreign Affairs Hal Brands paints a very bleak picture of what an “America first” foreign policy would look like and do:

What would become of the world if the United States became a normal great power? This isn’t to ask what would happen if the United States retreated into outright isolationism. It’s simply to ask what would happen if the country behaved in the same narrowly self-interested, frequently exploitive way as many great powers throughout history—if it rejected the idea that it has a special responsibility to shape a liberal order that benefits the wider world. That would be an epic departure from 80 years of American strategy. But it’s not an outlandish prospect anymore.

Siding with my teacher of those many years ago I do not believe that the United States has ever had the policy that it had “a special responsibility to shape a liberal order that benefits the wider world” and I honestly have no idea of where he would get such an idea. I would challenge Dr. Brands to explain how any of the following (starting after the conclusion of World War II) achieved that effect:

• The Korean War
• The Vietnam War
• The Gulf War
• Our intervention in the Yugoslavian civil war
• The invasion and 20 year occupation of Afghanistan
• The invasion and occupation of Iraq
• Our intervention in the Libyan civil war

and those are just to name a few. I can name a dozen other things that we did not do which might have had that effect but precious few that did.

I believe there are people in the State Department and Department of Defense who have a policy of primacy—not merely primacy from a global standpoint but primacy in every theater of operations. Europe, the Middle East, the Far East, etc. I think an argument can be made that each of the conflicts above was an assertion or attempt at assertion of primacy only tangentially related to “a liberal order”.

Take the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, for example. I don’t see how it had anything to do with a liberal order. I think that one could make a reasonable argument that the Taliban-led government of Afghanistan posed a mortal threat to the United States due to its support and hosting of terrorism. I did not make that argument but I think it was reasonable. I do not see how continuing to make that argument while allowing the Taliban to reassert control over Afghanistan is equally reasonable. That’s not to say that leaving was not the right choice. It was a terrible mistake from the outset.

We certainly didn’t further our interests. We spent a lot of money and lost a lot of lives, ultimately demonstrating that our efforts were futile against a determined native resistance, the opposite of primacy if anything.

Of all of the conflicts listed above only two, the Korean War and the Gulf War, had Security Council authorization, once again the opposite of a liberal order. In the case of Libya we had Security Council authorization to protect civilians but not to prevent the Libyan government from protecting itself.

Note, too, that all other major economies, e.g. UK, France, Germany, Russia, China, have been merrily pursuing their own national interests during the entire period. That raises a question I wish that Dr. Brands would answer. What does he expect to happen if the U. S. pursues a liberal international order as the basis of its foreign policy while every other country on the globe pursues their own parochial national interests? I would expect, well, pretty much what has happened. U. S. diplomatic and military primacy would fade as U. S. economic primacy at least from a relative standpoint declined.

None of the above should be construed as my voting for an “America first” foreign policy. More a renunciation of primacy and a few steps in the direction of non-interventionism with “America sometimes”.

Today is Jack’s second birthday. Take a bow, Jack!

With Kara gone Jack has become my daily walking buddy. We walk at least five miles a day together, more on weekends.

Jack combines considerable charm with willfulness. If he doesn’t want to do something, he won’t do it, darn you. The bowing behavior comes naturally. I believe it might be innate—his grandfather and, I believe, his father both do it, too.

I’m hoping this will be a big year for Jack. For one thing I’m hoping to take some pack hikes with him to get him started on his Working Samoyed title.

If you want to read a very good illustration of why I don’t think the Israelis are our friends, read this article by David Brinn in the Jerusalem Post. Of the two positions taken by Israelis in the article this is the more temperate:

The declaration by Norway, Ireland, and Spain calls for a Palestinian state on 1967 borders with Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital and all the West Bank won by Israel in the Six-Day-War handed over to the Palestinians.

As Salman Rushdie so astutely stated in an interview this week, any Palestinian state coming into being in the foreseeable future would turn into a terrorist state, run and manipulated by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and their like-minded goons – for whom a state is just a means in which to continue their holy war to eradicate Israel.

But if the geopolitical trend continues, that is exactly the situation we’re headed toward. Israel will soon be totally isolated, and even the goodwill of the United States will be helpless against an onslaught of a combined European/Russian/Chinese front that stands in silence in memory of Raisi and justifies Hamas barbarism with rewards of statehood.

When the world no longer cares about differentiating between the victims and the aggressors, it’s clear that a new normal has arrived and that Israel – not Iran or Syria – is a rogue state.

The slippery slope is speeding up, and it’s unclear whether there’s any way to put the brakes on to stop it.

For the first time in some 30 years since moving to Ma’aleh Adumim, built on land won by Israel in 1967, I’m worried that I’ll be forced to leave and move to Israel ‘proper.’

Of course, that will be an Israel with the North and South already unlivable, which will be impossible to defend. With a hostile Hamas-run country on the border, it’s only a matter of a short time before October 7 takes place again and again.

The other position is, basically, the Likud position.

I will repeat what I’ve said before. Israel is not our friend but Hamas is our enemy. The choice isn’t between good guys and bad guys but between bad guys and worse guys. Given a choice between an Israeli victory in Gaza and a Hamas victory in Gaza we should choose an Israeli victory. But our support for Israel should be something less than full-throated.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Mike Waltz and Mark Kelly write about the urgent necessity of rebuilding the U. S. maritime sector:

China uses the world’s oceans to pursue global supremacy, employing coercion and economic intimidation against weaker nations. In the South China Sea it has seized more than a dozen islands in waters claimed by its neighbors. China is using the islands as military outposts, which serve to choke off the region’s economic and natural-resources lifelines. Beijing’s games of chicken with foreign ships contravene international law, risk dangerous escalation, and deny freedom of navigation to American allies and partners.

Yet the Communist Party’s reach and intentions extend beyond regional waters. China has become the world’s top shipbuilder. It controls one of the world’s largest shipping companies and boasts the largest navy. It has built these capabilities with the help of massive state subsidies.

By flouting international standards of fair market behavior, China has secured nearly half the world’s shipbuilding market as well as control over port and shipyard infrastructure around the world.

In shipbuilding, according to a conservative analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Security, China offered $132 billion in subsidies to the shipbuilding and shipping industries between 2010 and 2018. These industries are buttressed by policies like debt forgiveness, low-interest bond issuance, equity infusions and barriers to foreign competition.

Let’s consider just one tiny aspect of China’s domination of U. S. shipping: ship-to-shore (STS) cranes. All U. S. ports taken together have a total of 250 STS cranes used to more containers from ships to the docks and vice versa. Of the 250 200 are from China, 80%. They’re all made by a single company, Zhenhua Port Machinery (ZPMC). Back at the beginning of the year there was a kerfuffle about the Chinese-made cranes being equipped with the ability to make or receive calls without the calls being made or detected by the users of these cranes. Security concerns were raised. The Biden Administration announced a number of security measures including a 25% tariff on Chinese cranes and the intention to replace all 200 of the Chinese-made cranes presently installed with U. S.-made cranes.

These cranes are expensive—around $10 million each. The amounts being discussed to replace them ($20 billion) are about right but that’s not all. We import food (15%), oil (43%), building materials (40%), and many, many other consumables, much of them from or through Canada and Mexico. Canada has a dozen ports with these STS cranes and Mexico at least a half dozen. To secure shipping we’ll need to subsidize Canada’s and Mexico’s replacement of cranes, too—they’re unlikely to do so otherwise.

And there’s a sort of ripple effect in the supply chain for these cranes—steel, electronics, copper, etc. My back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that we’d need to increase our steel production by about 2% (it’s been declining for decades). Then there’s iron, coal, etc. to make the steel. And that’s just for cranes. Not ships which the main subject of the linked article.

So simply building more STS cranes is not enough. It will take a major effort.

And that brings me to my real point. We only have a handful of alternatives. We can do what we have been doing for forty years which is wish for the best. We could make China into a vassal of the United States. That’s what you’re seeking when you demand that China abandon its own interests in favor of yours. I don’t believe we’re prepared for what that would require.

The United States could become a vassal of China. That would be hard on the U. S. but even harder on the countries of the Western Pacific. Or we could re-industrialize, regardless of cost or run-on effects.

You pays your money and you makes your choice.

A question I frequently ask, only rarely receiving an answer is what kind of a country do we want to be? The graphic at the top of this page from an article by Juliana Kaplan and Madison Hoff at Business Insider on the American middle class illustrates why.

A good place to start the discussion is with the definition used by Pew Research for “middle income”:

Broadly, Pew Research Center defines middle-class households as making two-thirds to double America’s median income. That adds up to an income range of about $30,000 to $90,000 for single Americans in 2020 dollars. But there are other ways out there that the middle class could be defined, as seen in a Brookings analysis of 12 definitions — including Pew’s.

Here’s how the middle class has been faring in America.

A single American making $30,000 to roughly $90,000 every year is middle-income, according to Pew. A household of two would have to earn around $42,000 to $127,000 to qualify.

Now let’s return to the graphic at the top of the page. Here’s the story it tells as I see it. 50 years ago the United States was mostly middle income with a relatively small percentage upper income and a quarter of the people lower income. Over that fifty years the number of those in the upper income tier has grown substantially as has the number of people in the lower income tier while the middle income tier has shrunk considerably.

The way I sometimes describe it is that we’re becoming more like Mexico.

What kind of a country would I like it to be? I would like for the lower income tier to have shrunk, the middle income tier to have grown, and the upper income tier to have grown a little or even stayed the same. I’ve also expressed my belief on how to get there: reindustrialization and less immigration by individuals with few skills and little or no English.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Steven E. Rhoads returns to an argument that I do not think will ever be over. He argues in favor of what is called “trickle-down economics”:

President Biden in his State of the Union address encouraged Americans to imagine a future in which “the days of trickle-down economics are over” and the economy is built “from the middle out and the bottom up.” That expression, “middle-out” economics, has bounced around Democratic politics for at least a decade. But how would it work? No one says.

Politicians may scorn the trickle-down effect, but it is responsible for Americans’ economic well-being. Even some prominent 20th-century liberal economists, including Paul Samuelson and Alfred Kahn, agreed that the innovation and investment that lead to capital formation are crucial to economic growth. Kahn once wrote: “The most powerful engine of productivity advance is technological progress, generated in large measure by expenditures on research and development and embodied in improved capital goods and managerial techniques.” That process confers benefits on everyone, he added, “precisely by trickling down.”

When employees use better equipment and have better managers, they become more productive. This makes them more valuable to their companies and stirs competition in the labor market, causing their real incomes to rise.

I dearly want investment in facilities, better equipment, and better managers but it will take some convincing, which Mr. Rhoads does not even attempt to do, to persuade me that increased investment in facilities, equipment, or personnel is what has actually gone on during the past 40 years. As evidence I will submit the DJIA and GDP. In 1980 the DJIA closed just under 1,000. A few days ago it closed over 40,000 for the first time. That’s a 40 fold increase. In 1980 U. S. GDP was just under $3 trillion. Now it’s just over $25 trillion. That’s a slightly more than 8 fold increase. Over that same period CEO pay has increased 10 fold (relative to rank and file workers). Nominal private fixed investment has gone up about 10 fold as well:

Why the discrepancy? I would submit that it can all be explained by considering that the meaning of “investment” has changed over the years. It used to mean building new facilities, buying equipment, and hiring more and better employees. Now it means “speculating on financial instruments”.

Any “trickle-down” from that is limited to the relatively small amount that dribbles into the real economy.

Update

In the original post I included a graph of residential fixed private investment rather than non-residential fixed private investment. It was an error which I have corrected.

At Foreign Affairs Andriy Zagorodnyuk and Eliot A. Cohen outline a theory of victory for Ukraine in its war against Russia:

Moscow is no invincible juggernaut. Russia’s small gains were made possible only by its overwhelming advantage in firepower—which occurred only as a result of the disruption of Western aid. The country’s artillery systems are based on old models and lack precision and long-range capabilities, and its multiple-launch rocket systems, tanks, and aviation equipment are no match for Western models. If Ukraine can increase precision strikes by long-range artillery, it can turn the war’s arithmetic against Russia and impose an unacceptable rate of attrition on Moscow. Eventually, Russia will be unable to replace its manpower and materiel fast enough. The country’s economy simply will not be able to sustain this war in the face of constant losses.

If Ukraine has enough supplies, it will be able to keep Russian artillery at bay. Enhanced air defenses, including F-16 fighter jets equipped with long-range air-to-air missiles, would reduce Russian attacks on critical infrastructure inside Ukraine as well as on units stationed near the front. With Russia’s forces increasingly paralyzed, Ukraine would soon be able to use its Western long-range systems—such as its Army Tactical Missile Systems (better known as ATACMS)—to take down Russian command-and-control centers and air-defense assets.

Kyiv must also use drones in much larger numbers to fulfill all these tasks. Ukraine has already demonstrated that it can wield unmanned vehicles with devastating effects; it is thanks to drone attacks, for instance, that Russia’s Black Sea Fleet has been disabled. Drones have also helped prevent large-scale Russian maneuvers on the ground. And they are making it possible for Ukraine to strike deep into Russia, hitting Russian oil facilities, military bases, and weapons factories. To counter that threat, Moscow may need to station most of its air defense systems at home. Russia is simply too large for its defenses to simultaneously shield the homeland and the battlefront. It will become even more vulnerable if the United States allows Ukraine to strike legitimate targets within Russia using U.S.-donated weapons.

The process of softening Russian positions and weakening Russian resolve will likely take about a year, after which Ukraine should reclaim the initiative. Kyiv should again launch limited counteroffensives, which will allow it to retake key terrain. If this assault is successful, Putin’s regime could face a crisis bred of heavy losses and battlefield failures. The Russian political system, after all, is already showing cracks. The mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed 2023 mutiny, the demotion or arrest of senior military officials including General Sergei Surovikin, and the shocking success of Islamic State (ISIS) terrorists at striking inside Moscow in March all reflect the regime’s mounting vulnerability. If Ukraine advances to a point where Russia can no longer hold on to gains, Putin will find himself in deep trouble. His 2014 seizure of Crimea is critical to his domestic popularity; to see Russia’s control of the peninsula threatened would be a major symbolic defeat.

How realistic is this plan? It seems to me that Ukraine has problems in addition to late deliveries of munitions that the United States and its NATO allies are hard pressed to deliver at the pace they are being used by the Ukrainians. Ukraine just lowered its draft age from 27 to 25. And Al Jazeera is reporting that Ukrainian President Zelensky is calling for NATO members to take action against incoming Russian missiles directly:

Zelenskyy proposed that the armed forces of neighbouring NATO countries could intercept incoming Russian missiles over Ukrainian territory to help Ukraine protect itself.

Russia has fired thousands of missiles and drones at Ukraine since the start of its invasion in 2022 and launched an assault in the northeastern border region of Kharkiv on May 10 that resulted in their biggest territorial gains in a year and a half.

Meanwhile, Russia is conducting tactical nuclear weapons drills on the Ukrainian border.

Inspired somewhat by Josh Barro’s recent observation at The Hill that the present state of the U. S. economy is likely to persist through November, I thought I’d list some events that might have a considerable effect on the presidential election other than the economy.

Ukraine, facing defeat, sues for peace

This is actually not unlikely. Disheartening as it would be for the Ukrainians I suspect this scenario would actually improve President Biden’s political prospects. Democrats would certainly blame Republicans and Donald Trump in particular for the loss.

Russia sues for peace

Let’s consider the flip side of that coin. IMO this, too, would improve President Biden’s political prospects. He should be able to claim that his strategy in supporting Ukraine had been successful.

Israel defeats Hamas

Would this have any effect on our election one way or the other? I don’t think I see it. Since I also believe that the surviving members of Hamas (and there will be surviving members of Hamas if only in other countries) will claim victory regardless of the outcome, I don’t this affecting the outcome of our election one way or the other.

In honesty I don’t think that any of the events above would be likely to have a material effect on the presidential election. Although there are a few who would say otherwise I don’t believe that most Americans care that much about what happens in other countries.

President Biden withdraws from the campaign

Perversely, I think this eventuality is the most likely to deliver a victory to the Democrats in the fall whoever would become their presidential standard-bearer. Frankly, I doubt that this would happen. See the alternative events below.

President Trump withdraws from the campaign

I doubt this will happen, either. Indeed, I think that even if President Trump is convicted of everything he’s been indicted for in all jurisdictions, he’ll be running for president from his prison cell.

President Biden dies or is incapacitated

I think that what happens in the event of President Biden’s death or disability prior to the election depends on timing. If he’s already been named the party’s candidate, his running mate, who will inevitably be Kamala Harris, does not automatically become the nominee or even the frontrunner. The party leadership would decide who would become the candidate.

President Trump dies or is incapacitated

I would be remiss in not considering the possibility of an elderly, overweight, out-of-shape man experiencing some sort of debilitating health issue, even death, over the next several months. I honestly have no idea who the Republican nominee would be if Donald Trump were unable to run.

Major terrorist attack on the U. S.

IMO a terrorist attack would be politically disastrous for President Biden unless it were perceived that President Trump had encouraged the attack in which case it would be disastrous for him.

I would be interested in hearing the views of other on the eventualities above or anything else you think might swing the election one way or the other.

NBC 5 Chicago reports that Chicago lost population last year:

New data released by the U.S. Census Bureau this week showed Chicago losing approximately 8,200 residents in the span of a calendar year, which could not only drop the Windy City behind Houston in terms of America’s largest cities, but could also have big consequences in a variety of other ways.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Chicago lost approximately 0.3% of its population between July 1, 2022 and July 1, 2023. The city’s population is still the third-highest in the U.S., but Houston is rapidly gaining, growing by 0.5% to 2,314,157.

According to an analysis by the Illinois Policy Institute, Chicago could be overtaken by Houston by the year 2035 as America’s third-largest city.

A shrinking population (and fewer kids in school) will not persuade the CTU to reduce its demands. That’s one of Chicago’s biggest problems today. A population of 2.75 million is struggling to honor the commitments made by a population of 3.5 million.