Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

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The Fall Of Europe

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On December 27, 2024

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Even before election, Trump is roaring. Screams of taking over the Panama Canal, Canada and Greenland. Promises of tariffs on, essentially, everyone. Lots of domestic threats about immigrants and going after Democratic politicians. At the same time his proxies, like Musk, muse on slashing Social Security and Medicare.

Europe’s in particularly tentative position: threats of tariffs and forcing Europe to spend more of its money on defense, by which Trump means “buying more US weapons.”

Western Europe has been an American satrapy since WWII. The Americans invaded and never left, and have had the Euros under the economic thumb the entire time. When necessary they have overthrown governments and they have every politician of note under surveillance.

Eastern Europe fell under the thumb after the collapse of the USSR and were, mostly, happy to do so.

For a long time this was a pretty good deal. Europe was a “garden”. GDP per capita might have officially been lower, but life was better than in the US. Europeans lived longer, were healthier and had all the social welfare that Americans didn’t have.

In most cases they had better food, too.

As for Eastern Europe, the EU massively subsidized it post Warsaw Pact and countries like Poland, often aggressively in disagreement with Brussels, couldn’t survive without the EU’s subsidies.

The EU wasn’t some lovely place devoid of conflict, however. In particular Germany used the Euro to de-industrialize most of the other European nations. The Euro was cheaper than the German mark would have been and almost everyone else’s currencies were more expensive that their pre-Euro currencies. Italy, in particular, which had been an industrial powerhouse, took it on the chin.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, China rose. America sent China its industry and a lot of its tech. This is an old tale, so let’s just say it was a combination American elite greed and Chinese ability to plan long term and take advantage of that greed. At the same time, Europe was falling behind technologically: the fast movers in science and tech were the Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese, Americans and, later, the Chinese, who now lead in about 80% of fields.

Europe wasn’t even in the technological game: they had legacy tech, mostly, with a few exceptions. This was especially true of Germany, with big advantages in steel, automobiles and industrial chemicals.

German industry was, as a rule, pretty heavy and it used a lot of energy. It got that energy, increasingly, from Russia. Cheap.

Then came twin blows: the Russian energy was no longer available cheap (though the Euros still buy plenty thru cut-outs like India) and China caught up and even surpassed Germany, especially in automobiles.

And so, as just on example (auto jobs are also being slashed):

As European industry (German industry) collapses, it either goes away entirely, or in many cases moves to America, where energy costs are lower.

America is cannibalizing Europe and Trump seeks to cannibalize the rest of America’s allies. The tariffs and threats are an attempt to move as much industry and as many jobs back to America as possible.

Meanwhile Europe has serious internal divisions. The right is rising, fast, in multiple nations. Though not as dramatic, so is the left. (The real left.) The center-right and center-left parties are in disarray. Eastern Europe with exceptions like Hungary, is rabidly anti-Russia, but Western Europe, and especially Germany, objectively needs Russia if it wants to retain its industry.

Poland now has a significantly larger army than Germany and better equipped. Poles… Poles do not like Germans or Germany. Hate is not too small a word. They take German and French money, but they hate Germany. Russia isn’t a threat to Germany. But if I were a German politicians or general I’d been looking at Poland with fear and wanting to re-arm.

My best guess is that the European, EU project is not long for the world. Multiple rising parties are anti-EU. The Euro has been bad for most European countries, and has been run to benefit Germany. Freedom of movement has led to intakes of immigrants which have lead to massive anti-immigrant backlashes. These backlashes are often cloaked in racism, but the bottom line is that Europe is in decline and people already there don’t want to share if it looks like sharing is bad for them.

Now Trump is pushing policies which are clearly anti-European and unlike Biden who was mostly sub-voce about it (except when opposing Nord Stream) Trump is in the Euros face.

If the EU wants to survive, it’s going to have to change into a real, non-vassal government. More like, the project will shatter. Next week we’ll talk more about this, in particular what they can and should do.

The great European garden is full of weeds and looks likely near its end. Can it be saved, or can any individual countries save their bit of the garden?

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Merry Christmas

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On December 25, 2024

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Hope you’re having a good one. If not, hope it isn’t too awful.

Use as an open thread for nice things if you wish.

The Game Theory of Giving Up Private Justice or Ending The State Monopoly On Violence

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On December 24, 2024

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In the state of nature, if someone does you wrong, it’s up to you and your mates to deal with it. This often means violence.

For most of English history there was no police force. Republican Rome had no police. There was law, but it was often privately enforced and often families and friends would take vengeance for wrongs. This led to rather a lot of violence and death, as well as feuds, where violence would continue long beyond the original offense.

Private justice; private vengeance thus comes with huge downsides, so in many societies we give up our right to use violence to right wrongs. We give that right to government in some form, and we reap the benefits of safety and that, in principle, stronger groups can’t bully those who are too weak to obtain their own justice.

The benefits are huge and everyone with sense recognizes that going back to private justice, to saying “they did me or mine wrong, I should beat or kill them” will mean a huge loss of public safety.

But whenever there’s a situation where changing from the status quo entails a huge cost there will be those who say “in that margin, I can benefit. All I have to do is take just a little less than the cost of change.”

How many people does private insurance and denials of care kill? It’s certainly, at least, in the tens of thousands.

What happens is simple enough. Some people, rich and powerful, get the right to harm others for money: the government doesn’t go after them for killing or hurting people. This is true of private equity buying companies, larding them up with debt then running them into bankruptcy so that many of their employees wind up impoverishing and homeless, for example. It was true of bankers causing a financial crisis. It is true of pharma jacking up prices or bosses stealing employees wages and water companies in the UK dumping sewage into the river and giving the money intended to clean sewage to their executives and investors.

None of this is punished by the law, yet people suffer.

But the cost of going back to private justice is HIGH and the transition cost, where the police and courts will charge those who enforce private justice with crimes, while not charging those who kill thousands with crimes, is awful.

So the bet by those who commit what has come to be called “social murder” is that they can get away with it: the cost of private justice is too high.

Still, there’s always the temptation to take a little more, then a little more and then a little more. To think, “well, I’m so rich I can have bodyguards and travel by helicopter and private jet and armored limo. The peons can’t get to me.”

But slowly (then all at once) ordinary people realize it’s not a good deal for them. Americans come to realize that Putin and Xi aren’t their real enemies, because their real enemies are those who are actually going to kill them or make them homeless, and those people are the rich and powerful in their own country.

Elon Musk, right now, is trying to cut Social Security and Medicare. If he succeeds a lot of people will wind up in pain, homeless or dead who wouldn’t have otherwise. He’s a direct threat to many, many people.

Putin isn’t going to make you homeless or kill you or deny you health care.

And when this switch flips, well, perhaps people decide that the high cost of going back to private justice is worth it and that when they gave up their right to private justice, they gave up their power. It was a good deal, as long as they could keep control of government and use government to control the wealthy and powerful, but once government control was lost, well, the power they gave up was used against them.

And this is, maybe, where we are. If more and more executives, CEOs and politicians wind up targets of extra-judicial justice, we’ll know it’s happened.

This isn’t, of course, an endorsement. It’s analysis. It’s in no one’s interest for the situation to become so awful that ending the state monopoly on violent justice makes cold hard rational sense for millions of people.

But that appears to be where we’re heading, if we aren’t there already.

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Some Countries Need Less Population

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On December 23, 2024

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There is a genre of population decline doomerism. An example:

Here’s the thing, Japan imports about sixty percent of its food. Japan is, by any reasonable measure, over-populated.

If you can’t feed your population and if there is no reasonable prospect that you could feed your population, perhaps you have too many people?

Another country for which this is true is Britain, which imports about 80% of its food. Yet the British have also been importing over a million people a year.

One might suggest, as well, that any country which has a large number of homeless people is also overpopulated: clearly it has more people than it is capable of taking care of. (Though we all know that’s usually a choice, not a constraint.)

The world is overpopulated by humans and our domesticated animals. We are in classic population overshoot.

When climate change and ecological collapse and resource depletion hit, there isn’t going to be enough food to go around. When that becomes the case, countries are going to prioritize themselves first and their close allies second. Entire countries which are now breadbaskets will either produce less, or will no longer produce enough for themselves. When the Gulf Stream turns off, which is expected any time in the next 50 years, for example, Europe as a whole will face a huge food deficit.

Better to start shedding population now, gradually, than to do it thru famine, food riots, revolution and war.

If you can’t feed your population, you have too much population. (Partial exception for city states and small states. Partial.) If you can’t house your population, you have too much population.

There are very few countries in the world which genuinely need more people. Russia, perhaps. Japan doesn’t. China doesn’t. India doesn’t. Most European countries don’t. Most African countries don’t. Etc…

Population doomers never ask the simple question: Under what circumstances is population growth good and under what circumstances is population decline good?

And for whom?

There was no better time to live in Medieval Europe than after the Black Death.

Decline now, while it’s gentle. If you insist on not doing so, you will do it the hard way.

(Much of this is driven by prioritization of GDP, a desire for low wages, and a deep misunderstanding of what makes an economy strong. More on that in the future.)

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Open Thread

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On December 21, 2024

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Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Elon Musk Threatens Congress Successfully

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On December 20, 2024

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This is some amazing shit:

Congress was about to vote on a bill called a “Continuing Resolution”, which would fund the operations of the federal government. But yesterday, Musk started tweeting around the clock about how he hated the bill and that he would fund the campaigns of politicians who ran against Congress members who supported it.

….Shortly after Musk decided he was against the Continuing Resolution, Trump and JD Vance issued a statement saying they were against it, too. The politicians in Congress fell in line, and now it looks like the government funding plan is dead.

Here’s the thing. Being rich only means you’re good at making money in a specific way. It doesn’t mean anything else. Gates, for example, pushed the “Common Core” education changes, and there’s no evidence they did any good and some reason to think they were harmful.

We have a rich man (maybe a billionaire) as President. We have Musk, the world’s richest man, who spent a lot money helping Trump win as one of the most important people in the new administration, who has said he wants to cut Social Security and Medicare.

Money is the ability to tell people what do. It let’s you control their actions, either directly or indirectly.

FDR defined fascism as:

Ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power

The US has been trending towards oligarchy for ages. The final victory for oligarchy was probably “Citizen’s United”, which made money the same as speech and thus protected under the first amendment.

The famous Princeton oligarchy study, which used data from 1981-2002, which is to say from back when the rich weren’t nearly as powerful as they are now, found that:

…when one holds constant net interest-group alignments and the preferences of affluent Americans, it makes very little difference what the general public thinks. The probability of policy change is nearly the same (around 0.3) whether a tiny minority or a large majority of average citizens favor a proposed policy change (refer to the top panel of figure 1).

By contrast—again with other actors held constant—a proposed policy change with low support among economically-elite Americans (one out of five in favor) is adopted only about 18 percent of the time, while a proposed change with high support (four out of five in favor) is adopted about 45 percent of the time. Similarly, when support for policy change is low among interest groups (with five groups strongly opposed and none in favor) the probability of that policy change occurring is only .16, but the probability rises to .47 when interest groups are strongly favorable (refer to the bottom two panels of figure 1). Footnote 41

Musk is the world’s richest man. He threatened members of Congress using his money, and they caved.

It’s always amusing when Americans call Russia an oligarchy. It isn’t. Russia’s oligarchs have very little power compared to Putin. If they cross him, he destroys them. They do what he wants, when he wants or they go to jail or have to flee the country, giving up any wealth in Russia.

America, on the other hand, is sickeningly an oligarchy and it’s going from indirect to direct oligarchical control.

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Batshit Delusional Canadian Conservatives

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On December 19, 2024

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I want to highlight some tweets, because they’re representational of a lot of what modern Canadian conservatives think:

Trump’s 51st state rhetoric regards Canada is serving a number of different functions, but beneath it all Trump understands the threat posed to the United States by the Laurentian Elite who run Canada, and their disgraced and soon to be replaced poster boy, Justin Trudeau.

Trump and his people are well aware of a number of growing threats to US interests happening with the neighbors. His talk of tariffs is merely a negotiating tool to force the Canadian government to start governing like adults.

An incredible amount of illegal migrants, terrorists, and highly dangerous drugs like Fentanyl are flowing into the US from the northern border, and Trudeau has done squat fuck all to stop it, and in many ways has encouraged it through his globalist immigration policies.

Canada is also moving into the Chinese sphere of influence and control. Let us not forget that CSIS confirmed ChiCom interference in Canadian politics back to Mulroney, and direct interference in the last two elections. Nothing has been done about that.

China is also buying land and resource access in Canada, which Trump, and every administration previous to his, rightly viewed as theirs, insofar as the historical precedent has been set by Canada and the US having an incredible trade relationship. Trump wants them out.

The discussion around tariffs was a component of the disagreements between Trudeau + Freeland last week which lead to her resignation as Deputy PM + Finance Minister. Trump is already orchestrating major Ws for Canada, and signaling to the government he means business…

…TL;dr – what Trump is doing is good for The United States and will ultimately be good for Canada. We will not become an official 51st state, but Canada will definitely improve if it heeds to Trump’s demands. The status quo is leading us to hell.

This is so insane it’s hard to even respond to, but let’s give it a shot.

Canada’s policy has been massively anti-Chinese all thru Trudeau’s reign. We have sanctions on China. We arrested a Huawei VP for the US, which previous government officials felt was insane. We are not friendly to China, and their influence ops are not particularly effective. Our intelligence services are working against Chinese influence but do nothing to stop American or Israeli influence.

America has 100X the influence that China has over Canada. Israel has a 100X the influence that China has over Canada. China is not even in the running.

Canada’s land and resources do not (or should not) belong to America. As Russia proved recently, if the resource is in your country, you can take it away any time you really want to. BA Canadian is saying that the US rightly owns our resources is beyond offensive.

There are only two countries in the world which are a threat to Canada: the US and Russia. Russia is a minor threat to some our northern island possessions, the US is an existential threat. There is only one country in the world which could invade and conquer Canada. We have one-tenth the population and an army which is a joke. We are no threat to the US at all, and if we moved to let Chinese military forces in (which we won’t) America would bomb or invade the hell out of us.

America, on the other hand, has a proven record of being run by deranged warmongers who will invade or otherwise destroy foreign countries. We are zero threat to the US, the US is a huge threat to us. It is a maxim of strategy that you plan based on other countries capabilities, not their intentions, because intentions can change.

No one who doesn’t want a nuclear deterrent is a Canadian patriot. It is the only way we can be safe from the implicit (or under Trump, nearly explicit) threat of American force.

It is true that the neoliberals who have run the country from Mulrooney on have been terrible for Canada. But they have been terrible exactly because they over-integrated us with America from the Free Trade and NAFTA deals on. The old Canadian economy, from about 1880 to 1990 or so was based on having a real manufacturing sector to balance the resource sector. When resource prices were high, we subsidized industry. When resource prices were low (and thus the dollar was low) our manufacturing became more competitive and we subsidized the resource industry and paid welfare to laid off resource workers. That mixed economy produced one of the best economies in the world for over a century.

But American style conservates in Canada seem to want to deepen our vassalage to America. Our interests are not the same as America’s in all cases and acting as if they are is delusional.

The last real Prime Minister of Canada was Justin Trudeau’s father Pierre. He was willing to tell the US to go to hell when necessary. During one trade dispute he actually closed the border to trade flow to the US.

No PM since then has been willing to give the middle finger to the US and they have made us weaker and more dependent on America. We used to not ship raw seafood or logs, for example—all primary processing was done in Canada.

Now, ever since the fall of Britain in WWII (they won the war and lost the peace) there’s no question we’ve been a vassal state, but there’s abject vassalge and there is dignified vassalage where you’re able to stand up for your own interests.

Too many American influenced Canadian conservatives have bought into ridiculous ideas. To think that Trump cares about the welfare of Canadians is so out to lunch that I can’t find words to describe it. It’s questionable if Trump cares about anything but Trump. He cares about America as an extension of himself. He sure as hell doesn’t care about any other country except perhaps Israel.

Trump wants things from Canada which he thinks will make America better off. That’s all. This isn’t a “tough love” situation where he’s trying to make us do the right thing because it’s good for us. It might work out that way in some parts, but it’s not his intention, it’s a result of him destroying the post-cold war international order which was terrible for Canada and Canadians and putting the boot to neoliberalism.

But Trump’s policies are intended to take industry away from America’s allies and bring them to the US, just as were Biden’s. He’s more brutal and honest about it, but Canada can’t afford to lose even more industry.

Get nukes, and run Canada for Canadians. Only a Canada with nukes can be a sovereign country, free from the implicit threat of invasion. Force the Americans to downsize their embassy and move it far from Parliament, and watch Americans like hawks so they don’t run a color revolution.

Both the neoliberals who run Canada now and the American-style conservatives who want to replace them are bad for Canada and any Candian who wants Trump to push Canada around is a traitor. Someone who wants to pucker up and kiss the boot that’s kicking him.

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Canadian Finance Minister Freeland Resigns

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On December 18, 2024

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This isn’t about all the high minding crap she said (lost the confidence of the PM, etc…) it’s an attempt to pressure Trudeau to resign, so the Liberals don’t have him as an albatross hung around their neck during the next election. The Liberals will still lose, I’d think, but they won’t get slaughtered, or that’s their hope.

Freeland has terrible politics. She’s the worst sort of neoliberal. She’s been Trudeau’s strong right hand, and done most of his dirty work. Given this is the case, I don’t think she’ll make a good candidate if she’s the new Liberal leader.

Trudeau may want to hang on, knowing he’ll lose the next election, with an eye to running again after four years of Conservative rule. It’s what his father did, and he may wish to emulate Pierre.

Pollievre, the Conservative leader, will probably be the next Prime Minister. He’s right wing of the modern American variety. Nativist, nasty, and stupid. About the only good thing I can say about him is that he’ll fight if Trump goes ahead with tariffs.

Trump’s threatening everyone with tariffs. The Euros, Chinese, Mexico, Canada and so on. The smart response would be for all of these nations to coordinate their response, rather than each midget fighting on their own. More on that in a later post.

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