Russian Roulette

Tick-tick-tick--click! Tick-tick-tick--click! Tick-tick-tick--click!

Imagine you're living in a major European city in the summer of 1914.  Paris, Vienna, Belgrade, Sofia - it doesn't really matter which one.  How would you react to news about the Archduke's assassination? Would you immediately start preparing for the coming war, or would you keep going about your daily life as usual? It seems counter-intuitive now, based on how inevitable World War I looks in hindsight, but at the time, a lot of people weren't concerned about the assassination setting in motion the events it did - partially because there had already been a handful of crises already, and they ultimately ended civilly, without a larger war breaking out.

* In 1908, Austria-Hungary annexed part of Bosnia, Russia then menaced Austria-Hungary, and Germany menaced Russia in response.

Tick-tick-tick--click!

* In 1912, Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, and Serbia teamed up to acquire territory from the Ottoman Empire.


Tick-tick-tick--click!

* In 1913, Serbia and Greece turned on their former ally Bulgaria, in a dispute over the spoils of their victory from the previous year.


Tick-tick-tick--click!

* Then, in 1914. . .tick-tick-tick--BANG!

Treating the Archduke's assassination as an unimportant event seems more understandable now, doesn't it? That's the tricky thing about historically significant events: you usually don't know which ones will end up being minor tremors and which ones will blow up into unmanageable crises until later.  Maybe much later.  And even when times are uneventful and dull, there are always multiple parts of the system at risk of careening out of control.  Think of it like driving an old, high-mileage car. It's been through a lot of wear-and-tear, so because of its advanced age, there are multiple potential points of failure.  A belt at risk of snapping, a frayed wire, a leaky gasket.  Every time you drive it somewhere, you're adding stress to an already strained system.

Nations are like that.  There are countless moving pieces, and at any given time, one of them could break down with catastrophic consequences.  A crop failure.  A terrorist attack.  A natural disaster.  A financial collapse.  There's a constant undercurrent of chaos flowing through a seemingly calm and orderly facade.  So it's natural for people to ignore or downplay the potential for chaos constantly unfolding around them.  The people who can't or won't exhaust themselves, mentally and emotionally.  (They also irritate everyone around them with their constant "The end is nigh" pronouncements - or so I'm told.)  There's a danger in that complacency, though.  It leads people to assume that because they survived a past crisis, they will also survive the current one.




We're living in one of those uncertain moments right now.  Right-wing authoritarianism is on the rise multiple areas throughout the world.  Brazil just elected a far-right politician as president.  In Germany, a far-right movement is gaining popularity, and Angela Merkel's retirement signals an uncertain future.  There's also a far-right resurgence in other parts of Europe.  And America, which has long held the title of "Leader of the Free World," is seeing its democratic institutions being eroded from within.  Will this be a temporary uptick, or will it lead to a long-term erosion of democracy? Will the international order that has been responsible for over seventy years of relative peace endure, or will we call these "the inter-war years" someday? We can't know for sure, because we're in the middle of these events. But there's no doubt that the storm clouds are gathering.

Tick-tick-tick. . .

. . . And the Zen Master Says, "We'll See."

Gust: There's a little boy and on his 14th birthday he gets a horse... and everybody in the village says, "how wonderful. The boy got a horse" And the Zen master says, "we'll see." Two years later, the boy falls off the horse, breaks his leg, and everyone in the village says, "How terrible." And the Zen master says, "We'll see." Then, a war breaks out and all the young men have to go off and fight..Except the boy can't cause his leg's all messed up. and everybody in the village says, "How wonderful."

Charlie: And the Zen master says, "We'll see."

Gust: So you get it.

Charlie: No.  No, 'cuz I'm stupid.

Gust: You're not stupid, you're just in Congress.

Charlie: Send 'em money. . . 

Gust: Gonna start with the roads, move on to the schools, factories -

Charlie: Gust, now, it's a party.

Gust: - restock the sheep herds.  Give them jobs, give them hope.

Charlie: I'm trying. I'm trying.

Gust: Yeah, well, try harder.

Charlie: I'm fighting for every dollar.

Gust: Yeah.  Yeah.
Charlie: I took you from five million to a billion.  I broke the ice on the Stinger and the Milan.  I got a Democratic congress in lockstep behind a Republican president.

Gust: Well, that's not good enough.  Because I'm gonna hand you a code-word classified NIE right now, and it's gonna tell you that the crazies have started rolling into Kandahar like it's a fucking bathtub drain.    -- Charlie Wilson's War

You can't solve complex problems with simple fixes.

I don't like Donald Trump. Anyone who reads my blog, who follows me on social media, or who knows me in real life knows this. I haven't been shy about expressing my dislike.  And it's not hard to understand why - he's given people countless reasons to despise him.  The problem is that it's easy for that dislike to become an instinctive response - to reflexively say "Trump's screwing up again" when events call for a more nuanced analysis. When that happens, your criticisms become contradictory yourself ("Trump did A Thing which is wrong and stupid", and a few days later, "Trump did the opposite of A Thing, which is also wrong and stupid.") At that point, you've basically become a robot that squawks "Trump sucks" whenever he does anything.  You begin to overlook nuance and exercise critical thinking, and you're completely blind to the possibility of anything good coming out of his decisions.

For example, Trump and the recent NATO summit.  Since becoming president, Trump has repeatedly accused other NATO members of not paying their fair share.  That's a flagrant distortion of the facts, but it's not what I want to write about.  

It's not much of a secret that Trump isn't a big fan of international alliances - trade, military, or otherwise.  He's slammed NATO several times, among other international partnerships.  Here's the plot twist, though: I've never been a big fan of international military alliances and America's global military presence, so you'd think I'd be celebrating someone's efforts to disentangle the US from these commitments.  That's what Trump seems to be doing, little by little, so you'd think I'd be celebrating what he's doing.  Yet, I'm not.

So, why is that?

Is it because I despise Trump so much that I automatically oppose his position, no matter whatever it is? My opinions on a handful of issues have changed so significantly since Trump took office, that some people probably think so.  I've asked myself that more than once, and it's possible.

But it's much more likely that it was obvious from the start of his presidential campaign that Trump wasn't up to the task.  Even overlooking his history of corruption (much of which only came out after the 2016 election), Trump never exhibited the ability or the desire to understand the complexities of any of the issues he would grapple with as president.  

Being president is, obviously, hard.  Every decision the president makes is restricted by a number of factors: economic consequences, domestic and international political considerations, precedent, long-term policy goals, and on and on and on. Seriously, go read any book about a president finding a solution to any given issue, let alone a serious crisis, to see just how many variables they have to consider when tackling the problem. You begin to see just how little room a president has to maneuver.

So back to NATO. For the sake of argument, let's treat it as a given that it's one of those entangling alliances the Founders warned us about. (Whether it really is is a discussion for another time.) How does the United States extract itself from the organization? That's the big question.  NATO has been around since not long after World War II ended, even though the Soviet Union - the adversary it was created to counter - dissolved in the early 1990s. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, there have been four US presidents besides Trump: Bush Sr, Clinton, Bush Jr, and Obama.  Why didn't any of them address the question of NATO, and lay the groundwork for scaling back America's involvement? All of them seem to be fairly capable and competent, at least enough to get the ball rolling on this.

There are a couple different explanations for why they didn't.  Maybe it turned out that NATO was in America's interest - that the benefits outweighed the drawbacks. That's the simplest explanation, right? Or maybe it was impossible to examine the partnership with NATO independent of a multitude of other factors, such as international economics, to name just one. Maybe those four presidents looked at the intricate web of connections between America and the other members of NATO, realized that cutting one thread would affect countless other threads, and concluded the sheer complexity made doing so difficult, if not impossible.

Does that mean some sort of "cutting the Gordian knot" solution is the only way out of an otherwise unsolvable problem? I guess in this situation would mean just up and leaving NATO.  How would that play out? Well, here are a few questions that it would raise: 

• What happens to all the US troops stationed in NATO countries? Do they get redeployed to the United States, or stay on US bases in Europe? 
• What happens if they're redeployed - where do we station them, and what do we have them do? Can we muster them out of the military, and can the economy handle the sudden influx of separated troops? 
• What about the bases themselves - do we turn them over to their host nations? Do we need to negotiate new SOFAs with each NATO nation?
• How will this affect current military operations? How will the US get troops from CONUS to the Afghanistan or Iraq theaters? What about supplies? 
• Will this affect trade relationships with the other NATO nations, and if so, how? 
• How will NATO fill the vacuum left by America's withdrawal or downsizing? That is not an insignificant question, and answering it could require enough research to complete a book.

My point here is that, even if you're not a fan of foreign entanglements (which I'm still not), getting out of them is not an impulsive decision.  It will have to be done some day, and it will be painful - and like ripping off a Band-Aid, waiting only makes it hurt worse.

However, it's a decision that should absolutely not be entrusted to someone like Donald Trump - a person who isn't smart or interested enough to understand the scope or consequences of his decisions, who doesn't have any concern for the people who get hurt by his decisions, and whose loyalty to the United States is under heavy suspicion.

So, to recap: making complicated decisions, including ones about America's involvement in NATO, are not off-the-cuff decisions.

Also, Donald Trump is an idiot.

All About Game of Thrones

This post will be slightly different than previous ones, because I'm going to connect pop culture to real-world events, not just political theories and concepts.  The post's title gives away that it'll be focusing on Game of Thrones, because season 7 of GoT wrapped up recently and I need a "fix".  So let's dive in. 

I'll start by making the case that Game of Thrones is, in one major way, an allegory for World War I, because I'm a huge WWI buff.  Let's start with how the series begins.  At the start of the show, Westeros has been at peace for several years, but there are tensions simmering beneath the surface.  The Starks and the Lannisters don't get along, House Martell is nursing a grudge against Tywin Lannister, the exiled Targaryan children want to reclaim their throne, and the Night King is raising an undead army in the north.  The glue holding that peace together has started to dissolve.  This state of affairs is somewhat analogous to Europe in 1913; although it's not a perfect match, there are a few parallels.  Despite regional conflicts like the back-to-back Balkan Wars and minor crises like the Fashoda Incident, Europe was enjoying a few decades of relative peace.  However, just like in Westeros, tensions were brewing beneath the surface.  Britain and Russia worried about an up-and-coming Germany, France smarted over its loss in the Franco-Prussian War, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was clumsily mismanaging the Balkans, and so on. And both the European great powers and major houses of Westeros were ensnared in a web of entangling alliances that increased the likelihood of a continent-wide conflict.  I suppose that makes either Ned Stark or Robert Baratheon the Archduke's fictional counterpart.

The next couple of parallels are just coincidental similarities I noticed between the show and mostly 20th century events:

• The loot train battle from S7E4 is kind of like the early battles of World War I (the first few months, before the front lines stabilized and trench warfare began.) Dany's dragon is like the machine gun, a new and effective weapon that creates massive carnage, and the Lannister soldiers are the unlucky troops on the receiving end.  
• The Night King's army vs, well, pretty much everyone else is maybe symbolic of the Cold War.  I'll admit, I'm probably stretching this connection to the absolute limit, but consider this: the dragons represent nuclear weapons and everybody on the side of the living represents NATO.  Also, the White Walkers and especially the wights somewhat resemble a communist society, or at least how other works of fiction have portrayed one; I might be reaching here, but think about the "bugs" in Starship Troopers, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or Animal Farm.  

Finally, Game of Thrones can probably be used to explain the concept of realism (which I briefly discussed in my Prisoner's Dilemma post).  Realism proposes that nation-states are the primary actors, exist in an anarchic system, have interests but not allies, and constantly struggle for power.  Sounds a lot like the interactions between the various houses of Westeros, doesn't it? Those same interactions also illustrate two international relations explanations for how alliances develop, known as "bandwagoning" and "balancing." The two terms are pretty easy to figure out, so I won't insult your intelligence by explaining them; but to understand their relevance to Game of Thrones, recall how one of the lesser houses positions itself in relation to a more powerful house, like the Starks or the Lannisters.

That's all for now.  I may revisit and expand on Game of Thrones as an example of realism in the future, because I barely scratched the surface and I also stumbled across some excellent reference material. And if you want to learn a little about how GoT references pre-20th century events, here is a fun article.