Life after Trump, Part II: Searching for Truth in a Flood of Freedom

Read the other installments in this series:
 
Life after Trump, Part I: Living in the Lightning
Life after Trump, Part II: Searching for Truth in a Flood of Freedom
Life After Trump, Part III: The End of the Republican Alliance
Life After Trump, Part IV: Building a Better Democrat…Maybe
Life After Trump, Part V: The Opening Roster
Life After Trump, Part VI: The Crisis List—Russia
Life After Trump, Part VII: The Crisis List—The Middle East
Life After Trump, Part VIII: The Crisis List—China

Starting within minutes of the January 6 riots, a variety of tech platforms began blocking posts by President Donald Trump. Within three days nearly all platforms – a list which includes Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Twitch, Shopify, Spotify, Google, YouTube, Instagram, SnapChat, TikTok, Discord, even Pinterest – had enacted restrictions, in many cases, lifetime bans, on multiple members of Trump’s inner circle’s communication capabilities and/or product sales. The one exception – Parler – was instead blocked from being offered on the Apple store and purged from Amazon Web Service’s server systems, functionally killing Parler as a company. Parler’s site went down January 11. Perhaps for good.
 
Techworld’s stated logic for the bans is pretty straightforward. All publicly declared they had monitored planning for the violence January 6 on their platforms, and so had cooperated with federal law enforcement to counter it. When the violence happened anyway, techworld took another look and saw follow-on plans to deepen and broaden the violence and in many cases, use said platforms to organize and communicate about said violence. In techworld’s mind, the bans were the only logical action they could take.
 
Outrage from those of the hard Right was expectedly fierce, with charges of censorship echoing throughout the media, both traditional and new. It is difficult for me to sympathize, and not simply because of what happened January 6: Within minutes of AWS’ announcement, folks on Parler were using the platform to plot attacks on AWS server farms. I’d have shut it down too.
 
Free speech in the United States is not absolute. There are many carve-outs, but three are relevant when evaluating the aftereffects of the events of January 6.
 
First, and perhaps least importantly, while you have the right to speak your mind, you do not have the right to be listened to or respected, nor the right to speak on someone else’s place or time. The first enables me to utterly ignore most of what Bernie Sanders says (except for its entertainment value), and the second enables techworld to block Trump and folks like him from their platforms. Neither Sanders nor Trump have legal recourse here as neither immunity from my laughter nor platform access are Constitutional rights.
 
Second, and far more importantly, you do not have the right to incite violence. Way back when in 1919 the Supreme Court ruled that speech either designed to cause violence or speech that could be reasonably expected to lead to violence is flat-out illegal and punishable with jail time. It’s called the Clear and Present Danger principle.
 
Rudy Giuliani’s “trial by combat”, Donald Trump Jr’s “we’re coming for you”, and Trump’s weeks-long encouragement of his supporters to show up in DC January 6 to disrupt the election certification are all very nearly textbook examples of non-protected – in fact, criminal – speech. So much so that all will likely be included into future law-courses as actual textbook examples. (Fun fact: The Clear and Present Danger principle was first manifested by the Supreme Court to codify the punishment of a socialist. Trump is in some weird historical company.)
 
Third, you do not have the right to publish falsehoods that you know are falsehoods, especially should such falsehoods cause reputational or economic harm. Such actions come under a mix of libel, slander, and defamation laws. Trump is very familiar with slander laws as in his pre-presidential days he sued pretty much everyone he did business with under their umbrella.
 
It appears to me that Sidney Powell, part of TeamTrump’s efforts to overturn the election, is less familiar. She has done a bang-up job of crafting assertions about what happened in the elections. Her (catastrophic) mistake was to segue from general delusions about the election being ruined by foreign Communists and rogue Republicans and a Venezuelan ghost and lizardmen and aliens from Tau Ceti e to specifically asserting Dominion Voting Systems has knowingly tampered with voting. (Fun fact: only one of the above is hyperbole.) She did so without producing a single shred of proof. That obviously is slander and obviously causes reputational and economic harm. So, Dominion sued her on January 8 for $1.3 billion in damages. I expect Dominion to (very easily) win the case, most likely resulting in Powell’s permanent disbarring and most likely reducing her to permanent penury. (Unless of course the Tau Cetians pick her up and take her home.)
 
What Trump and Powell and others in Trump’s inner circle have done are not political views. These are political lies specifically intended to warp the American system and inflict personal harm upon others. Having things like this melon-scooped out of public life doesn’t bother me one iota. Countering such statements isn’t censorship because what’s being countered isn’t protected speech.
 
So why has it gotten so bad?
 
Two reasons. The first has to do with technology.
 
Back in the 1970s we all watched the same news programs. We obviously interpreted the information provided through different personal, geographic, and ideological lenses and came to different conclusions, but with everyone working from the same information, the splits in American society weren’t very…splitty.
 
Fast forward to today. The evening news is over half prescription drug commercials. People source their news from Twitter and Facebook. Twitter only gives you what you ask for. Facebook aggressively funnels you to ever more esoteric and focused feeds. Gone is broadcasting. All that’s left is narrowcasting. We are no longer beginning from the same trough of information. Of course, we are disagreeing more. Add in the omnipresence of social media, and of course extremist speech is more common.
 
The second issue is one of law.
 
Our pre-existing communication laws as regards things like falsehood and libel were designed for the world of newspaper and television. The singular meaningful update for the Digital Age occurred with the 1996 Telecommunications Decency Act. Of key relevance is something known as Section 230, a clause which indemnifies any provider of digital services from any slander or incitation to violence which occurs on their platforms. Section 230 rules that digital platforms are not publishers like Nightline or the Wall Street Journal, but instead simply platform providers, and so are not legally liable for what their users do.
 
Put simply, you can lie and scream and plot on Facebook or Twitter and no matter what you say or do, Facebook and Twitter face zero criminal repercussion.
 
Section 230 was designed for email and discussion blogs. It was written a decade before Facebook and Twitter. Social media of the type that dominates current information exchange wasn’t even a glimmer in Steve Jobs’ eye. Mark Zuckerberg was only 22. Things like libel laws have not caught up. Congress has neglected to even pick up the issue. And since Section 230 is fundamentally about First Amendment rights and legal responsibilities, only Congress has the Constitutional power to decide what is and what is not protected speech, as well as what the platforms should and can and should not and cannot ban.
 
This puts contemporary society in an uncomfortable place. The shift from broadcasting to narrowcasting has prioritized speed and pizzazz. Broad legal indemnity means no one has a financial or legal interest in context or accuracy. This shift has weakened our critical thinking capacity at the same time making us utterly reliant upon our own internal hooey detectors to determine what is true and what is false, all the while under constant assault from libtards, neckbeards and conspiracy theorists of all flavors.
 
It’s infuriating. It’s exhausting.

For those of you on the Right, do you believe the election was fraudulent? Because not a single – not one – piece of evidence has been presented in court or the public sphere that has withstood the scrutiny of a third grader. For those of you on the Left, did you think that the 2020 Black Lives Matters protests were huge? Because they weren’t. If you exclude the first week of the protests (and Portland which perpetually exists in a state of societal breakdown) there wasn’t a single day where the total number of people protesting nationwide exceeded 100,000. Rallies in DC regularly top several times that figure.
 
The shift from broadcasting to narrowcasting has weakened our ability to see the truth of things even when the real facts are right in front of us. And that takes some people down some seriously odd rabbit holes.
 
Let me give you an example of just how wackadoo things have gotten:
 
For those of you who don’t follow the more eclectic side of American conspiracy wackiness, the QAnon conspiracy world claims there is a global Satanic cabal of child slavers and molesters that counts Democratic lawmakers as among their chief architects and that only the moral purity of Donald Trump can save us. Some versions claim the leaders of said cabal are in reality lizardmen, while others assert said cabal has engineered coronavirus so that they can use the pretext of vaccination to inject everyone with microchips to better select their child targets. Like I said: wackadoo. QAnon, at the moment, is protected speech. Considering the implications for politics and health and public safety and the reputations of the real lizardmen, it should not be.
 
Until Congress establishes new guidelines, everything that is said on social media exists in a legal grey area. With the exception of sex trafficking and child pornography, nothing is expressly banned. For the platforms, the result has been to take a very light hand to monitoring. Facebook has been slow at even taking down ISIS beheading videos. And since the standards are legally nonexistent, elected officials have been granted the benefit of the doubt.
 
Trump and those around him have taken advantage of the leeway, repeatedly ignoring pre-existing norms and laws. Twitter in particular has noted that Trump has violated their Terms of Service many, many times and that the only reason they had not suspended his account before January 6 was that Trump was the sitting president and so his tweets enjoy a different evaluation standard. Twitter further made it clear that should the tone and content of Trump tweets persist after January 20 that they wouldn’t hesitate to ban him. From a certain point of view “all” the events of January 6 did as regards Trump-related bans was to speed up the process and use a slightly larger dragnet than what was already going to kick in the week after Biden’s inauguration. But let’s make this abundantly clear: Twitter is under no legal obligation to do so.
 
Regardless of what happens to Trump, the people who rioted thinking Trump had their back were not elected to high office and so are far less shielded. The FBI is treating the death of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick at the hands of the rioters as a murder of one of their own. Yes, murder. His skull was bashed in with a fire extinguisher, and then he was dragged from the Capitol and beaten to death by the crowd in a full-on Fallujah-style horror. One rioter even struck him repeatedly with a pole…that had the American flag on the other end. This. Is. Not. Free. Speech. The bureau has pulled out the stops in hunting them down.
 
It hasn’t been much of a hunt. The mob’s belief in their immunity led them to film and selfie almost every aspect of their crimes and then post it all on Twitter, Facebook and Parler. Such actions not only pushed Twitter and Facebook over the line into enacting their bans (and prompted Apple and AWS to ban Parler from their systems), but also made it soooooooo eeeeeeasy for the FBI to identify the perpetrators. Or, as the FBI has classified them, terrorists. But, again, let’s make this absolutely clear: the mob’s discussion and posting of assault plans on social media platforms and their subsequent posting of Sicknick’s murder do not themselves constitute illegal acts. The FBI is simply viewing the posts as both announcements of crimes.
 
I have no problem drawing a line between what is permissible in public discourse and what is not. My problem is not the drawing of the line. What I have a problem with is who draws the line.
 
So long as Section 230 is in place, it is up to the new media platforms and only the new media platforms to decide when and where and how and if to block any specific post or user. They have become both the providers and the regulators of the public domain. They chose to communicate with federal law enforcement about the rioters descending upon DC. They chose to deplatform those who were inciting general acts of and planning specific acts of violence. They were not legally required to do so, nor would they have been criminally liable had they chosen not to act.
 
And yet social media is absolutely part of – perhaps even the root of – the problem. Facebook’s own internal research indicates that 64% of the time a user joins an extremist Facebook group, it is because Facebook recommended the group to the user. This is the same Facebook that scrapes every bit of personal data it can get from your computer and phone and then sells that data to scammers, complete with a data analysis of what sorts of scams Facebook thinks you are most likely to fall for. An eager purchaser of said data and analytics is the Russian bot farm. I trust the implications of that are fairly obvious.
 
Do I think that techworld did the right thing in the aftermath of the January 6 riots? Most definitely. Political violence should have no role whatsoever in American society and I applaud anyone who takes such a stance.
 
Do I think techworld is getting better? A bit. At the same time Twitter et al was banning Trump, it has also started (timidly) blocking more traditional peddlers of lies. Tweets from Chinese government accounts at how much better China’s genocidal policies have made life for Uighurs have been deleted, as have tweets out of Tehran that US and UK coronavirus vaccines are designed to hurt Iranians. In this Wild West of information, someone needs to be the sheriff, and Twitter seems to be cautiously, reluctantly, baby-stepping forward.
 
But do I trust techworld to be the guardians of our means of communication, especially when it comes to things like accuracy? Most definitely not. The “truth” is often not a clear line. I recognize we need a line, but drawing that line is neither techworld’s responsibility nor their strength. That responsibility is ours, and that of our elected representatives in Congress. Until Congress acts, this is the reality we are trapped within.
 
I don’t mean to suggest for one second that a solution is easy. Because no matter what Congress aims for – amending Section 230, breaking up the tech firms, turning their platforms into public utilities, etc. – the core question of who has the power to regulate content remains. Resolving this is the tech issue for the United States for the next few years.
 
Now normally I’d not bother with this sort of piece. The intersection of media and new media and the First Amendment and regulation are clearly a pot of domestic issues heavy on the hornets. I normally steer well clear of precisely this sort of passion-laden topics. Not this time, and not simply because of what happened January 6.
 
My concern is that we have been here before.
 
The last time we were introduced to a new technology that changed our relationship with information, it was the telegraph. In less than two decades, we went from it taking six months to Oregon Trail information across the country to instantaneous tapping via wire. Reporters just started making stuff up to sell papers. Some of it was pretty funny. Until it wasn’t. A particularly ethically unfettered journalist by the name of Joseph Pulitzer decided Spain was a good target. His “reporting” agitated for war, and in April 1898, war he got.
 
Today, the United States has largely withdrawn its forces from the world. In the aftermath of Iraq and Afghanistan, America has had years to rest, recover, recruit, and rearm. I’ve recently found myself saying that anyone stupid enough to pick a fight with the United States deserves what they get. I always thought that Americans were smart enough to tell fact from fiction. To know when they are being manipulated. The past few years have proven me wrong again and again and again. I really don’t want the United States to launch a conflict because of social media bullshit. The damage we could do to ourselves and others would be incalculable. Social media isn’t (just) about cat videos and your grandchildren’s pictures. It has become geopolitical.
 
One final point. There is an assertion among rightest Republicans that techworld is liberal and that the Trump purge from the platforms is a coordinated effort to shape the national conversation. I agree with the first half of the assertion. Most of techworld is based in Silicon Valley. I do not agree with the second. The effort to reshape the conversation is far more diffuse, but also far broader than merely techworld. The entire business community is in play.
 
Before the day was out January 6 a veritable avalanche of business associations ranging from the National Association of Manufacturers to the American Bankers Association to the American Petroleum Institute to the Business Roundtable had publicly called upon Vice President Mike Pence to use the Constitution’s Article 25 to force Trump from office. And that on top of a raging waterfall of direct condemnations from individual firms and CEOs. All in all, we are talking about tens of thousands of firms representing the majority of the American business community.
 
American politics have changed. And now America’s political parties are changing with them.
 
Coming soon:
Life After Trump, Part III: The End of the Republican Alliance

If you enjoy our free newsletters, the team at Zeihan on Geopolitics asks you to consider donating to Feeding America.

The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.

Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.

Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.

The team at Zeihan on Geopolitics thanks you and hopes you continue to enjoy our work.

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Life after Trump, Part I: Living in the Lightning

Read the other installments in this series:
 
Life after Trump, Part I: Living in the Lightning
Life after Trump, Part II: Searching for Truth in a Flood of Freedom
Life After Trump, Part III: The End of the Republican Alliance
Life After Trump, Part IV: Building a Better Democrat…Maybe
Life After Trump, Part V: The Opening Roster
Life After Trump, Part VI: The Crisis List—Russia
Life After Trump, Part VII: The Crisis List—The Middle East
Life After Trump, Part VIII: The Crisis List—China

Let me start off by saying that in an advanced democracy like the United States, political violence must never be tolerated. We have institutions and courts and elections expressly to manage our differences and debates. That isn’t simply how things are, that is how things should be. The ban on political violence is entrenched in both our norms and our laws and is the foundation of not simply our Constitution or our civilization, but of civilization itself. Anyone who encourages otherwise should rot.
 
Many have compared the events of the January 6 Capitol riots with the violence which occurred concurrently with the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020. The idea cannot simply be dismissed out of hand. But not being correct isn’t the same as being right. During the 2020 protests, some figures in national leadership encouraged people to do more than simply march, and cheerfully paid their bail after their arrests. AOC comes to mind. That is indeed crassly irresponsible. Damaging. Stupid.
 
But we expect different things from different people. We hold four-year-olds to different standards than college students, much less parents of four. That’s life.
 
So, while I am the polar opposite of impressed when folks like AOC engage in dubious political acts and grandstanding, I can’t say that I’m shocked or offended or mourning for the future of my country. I expect that sort of crap from young, first term Congresspeople and I weigh it against some of the less-than-wise things I did in my 20s. Yes, from time to time they besmirch their office and their place in history, but they are rabble-rousers. It’s their schtick. It isn’t like they are leaders.
 
In contrast, Trump is the president. He is the leader of the free world. The presidential standard is higher than the standard for a 31-year-old-until-recently-bartender-now-first-term-Congresswomen.
 
Even if the standard were the same, Trump has surrounded himself with people seeped in law & order conservatism and respect for American institutions like Reince Priebus, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Rex Tillerson, James Mattis, John Kelly, Nikki Haley, and HR McMaster. Even folks on TeamTrump that I might personally disagree with more often – such as John Bolton, Jeff Sessions and Gary Cohn – are hardly what I would call fascists or anarchists. Even if you hate any or all these men and women on ideological grounds, you must admit that they are adults and that they realize spending a month of your time encouraging the most violent portions of American society to descend on the capital to lay siege to the Capital complex isn’t a good call. I have zero doubt that all of them warned Trump against similar actions on multiple occasions.
 
I have zero doubt such warnings were the proximate reasons all no longer serve in the White House.
 
Trump knew exactly what he was doing. He was deliberately assembling a mob over the course of weeks. He deliberately encouraged them to march on the Capitol. He wasn’t shocked when they stormed the People’s House, but instead the opposite; leaks from the White House are rife with details about how he was overjoyed. Trump’s problem is he just couldn’t fathom that what he did was…wrong. Ethically, morally, institutionally, civilizationally, democratically, legally, criminally wrong.

Geopolitics has two speeds.

The first is glacial. The immutable features of land and ocean, mountain and plain, jungle and river, shape who we are, what we dream, what we can attain, what we must try, how we succeed and how we fail. But not necessarily today. The forces of geography and demography rarely play out in years. It is more often decades. We always live in the shadow of geopolitics, but we can and do and always will mold the short-term to our will.

The second speed is lightning. We can live. We can build. We can fly. We can fight. We can rage against the dying of the light. But no matter who we are or what we believe, the forces of geography and demography will always win out in the end. Germany was destined by geopolitics to soar in a century-long rise, and then history sped up and Germany crashed in a six-year cataclysmic war. The Soviet Union was similarly destined to dominate, just as history was destined to speed up with the Soviet collapse. I’d argue we are approaching the end of China’s time in the sun, and very soon history will speed up and plunge the Chinese into a long, horrible dark.

The world is a messy, often violent place. Wars over this or that patch of land, or this or that resource, have dominated all of recorded history…until recently. After World War II the Americans crafted the world’s first true global Order, wielding their unparalleled military in a manner that enabled all countries to participate in global trade without needing to protect their production, their citizens, or the ebb and flow of materials and goods shipments. We did it to purchase the loyalty of the allies to fight the Cold War, but the American rationale hardly prevented the strategy from transforming our world.

This Order is all most of us know. It is responsible for everything from peace in Europe to mass immunizations to the device you are reading this series on. But make no mistake. Our world is new. Our world is fragile. But above all our world is artificial and it bears absolutely no resemblance to the rest of the six-thousand-year saga of human history. We are able to live in our world because the Americans have been holding back the glacier, preventing the world from reverting to its long norm. But for the Americans, the globalized world is little more than a side effect of a war that ended thirty years ago. And holding back the glacier is hard.

Geopolitics always wins in the end. The glacier always lurches forward into lightning. The longer we hold back the glacier, the more furious the lightning – and the Americans have been holding back the glacier for seventy-five years.

I…I’m not sure precisely what I’m expecting to achieve with this series. An end? A beginning? A mourning for what once was? Hope for what might still be? A bit of schadenfreude? Maybe. Certainly, a double fistful of commiseration. I freely admit I’m horrified at what has transpired in DC. I’m still in a bit of shock.

What I know for certain is that globalization is over. Politically, each president who took office after the Berlin Wall fell has demonstrated ever-less interest in holding it together. In that, Trump was no outlier, but simply the next step down the road. There is no globalization without the United States providing global safety, and the globalized world has grown to the point that the United States lacks the economic and military capacity to sustain the system. Certainly, in the aftermath of January 6, the Americans no longer have the cultural capacity to even try to hold the center.

What I know for certain is that there was a coup on January 6, but it didn’t happen when the guy in paramilitary dress with a fistful of zip ties managed to break into the Gallery, or when the guy wearing the swastika shirt emblazoned with SMNE (six million is not enough) walked into the Speaker’s office, or when the guy in the Chewbacca bikini trapsed through the Capitol Rotunda where just two years ago the last president with global ambitions and a global conscience – George HW Bush – lay in state. It occurred when the acting Secretary of Defense and the Vice President called in the National Guard to eject the rioters from the Capitol complex over Trump’s express refusals. It happened January 7 when the office of the Attorney General began a criminal investigation of the President of the United States. At the time of this writing, on January 10, the United States does not have a leader.

What I know for certain is that Trump’s fall from grace has changed us a nation. If there is one thing that both diehard Trumpists and Trump’s staunchest opponents agree on, it is that the United States needs to change. The year 2021 will be the year we debate what must change, and maybe even how. This year will be about groping our way forward. About deciding what we want our political parties to be. About the role of technology in society. About law enforcement. About disease. About (in)equality. This is the year we debate both what America is and what it should be. That’s a big plate of stuff to chew through. I have little confidence we’ll finish it this year. Which means the United States is utterly incapable of dealing with the world in any meaningful way.

What I know for certain is that I’m going to try to keep my personal politics out of this series. I’m going to attempt to avoid dancing on graves or crying in corners. I’m going to attempt to avoid falling down rabbit holes on topics ranging from violence in society to the First Amendment to Congress to the American political system. I’ll try to point out when analysis veers into opinion. I’m pretty sure I’m going to fail here and there. I will try to act like I’m not on Twitter. I’m pretty sure I won’t bat a thousand on that either.

And that’s because I know one more thing for certain:

We are not simply in a time of transition. From globalization to something newer (or older). From Trump to Biden. From calm to chaos. The glacier of history has broken free. We are living in the lightning.

Coming soon: 
Life After Trump Part II: Searching for Truth in a Flood of Freedom

If you enjoy our free newsletters, the team at Zeihan on Geopolitics asks you to consider donating to Feeding America.

The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.

Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.

Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.

The team at Zeihan on Geopolitics thanks you and hopes you continue to enjoy our work.

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Video Dispatch: Of Vaccines and the New Year

COVID-19’s Thanksgiving surge is upon us. We’re now facing record cases, hospitalizations and deaths and will continue at least through the end of January 2021.
 
But there is some very good news out there as regards vaccines. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. It is not a train. Let us break down what’s happening and what’s about to happen so you can make sense of and plans the New Year.

If you enjoy our free newsletters, the team at Zeihan on Geopolitics asks you to consider donating to Feeding America.

The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.

Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.

Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.

The team at Zeihan on Geopolitics thanks you and hopes you continue to enjoy our work.

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Video Dispatch: Good News on the Vaccine Front

It is a rare bit of good news we have to share in general, and especially in 2020, so we’re taking it! Less than a year after the broader world found out about an emerging new coronavirus epidemic in Wuhan we now have two very promising vaccine options applying for emergency use authorization in the United States with more around the corner. There are some potential hiccups looming, mostly around manufacturing and distribution and state-level decisions around prioritizing who gets first and second round access to the vaccine. But, the hardest parts of the process are done and it’s getting easier to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

If you enjoy our free newsletters, the team at Zeihan on Geopolitics asks you to consider donating to Feeding America.

The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.

Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.

Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.

The team at Zeihan on Geopolitics thanks you and hopes you continue to enjoy our work.

DONATE TO FEEDING AMERICA

Beyond the Election: Part II

Part I of this newsletter published a week ago, before we had enough U.S. states reporting election results to call the race. Now, barring something truly odd, Joe Biden has won a more than sufficient number of states to be considered President-elect.
 
For those who follow my work, it should come as no surprise that I’m not a big fan of either sitting president Donald Trump or the new President-elect. I’m a foreign policy guy and neither man has shown the interest in or competence to build something that will outlast him.
 
This isn’t entirely their fault. The United States is the least involved economy in the global system as measured as a percent of GDP, with the single biggest chunk of that involvement wrapped up with America’s neighboring NAFTA partners. My preferences aside, there is no burning need in the United States for global engagement. No wonder that aside from issues relating to the September 11, 2001 attacks and the Iraq War, Americans haven’t considered foreign policy an above-the-fold issue for the bulk of the post-Cold War era.
 
But this new norm will not last forever. Americans will care about the world again someday. The question is what does the road from here to there look like?
 
There are two ways the Americans might reengage in the future.
 
The first is the internal route. The (always fractious) American political system is, at present, in a state of breakdown. American first-past-the post electoral laws – the winner for each seat need only gain one more vote than whoever comes in second place – forces a two-party system. That induces the parties to behave certain ways. If they focus too much on explicit policies, they tend to alienate large swathes of the electorate. Instead they throw wide nets to include as many different factions as possible: evangelicals, business owners, pro-lifers, national security enthusiasts and fiscal obsessives for the Republicans; pro-choicers, environmentalists, socialists, organized labor, the youth and a rainbow of minorities for the Democrats.
 
But there is nothing hard-and-fast or permanent about these coalitions. As culture and technology and the economy and the world evolve, so too do the factions. Today the factions are shifting furiously. Union voters have all but become Trumpist Republicans (the AFL-CIO chief was in the Oval Office endorsing Trump’s NAFTA renegotiation while the rest of the Democratic coalition was hanging with Nancy Pelosi putting the finishing touches on Trump’s impeachment). National security voters are sniffing about the Democrats (every politically active living former intelligence chief and Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense endorsed Biden rather than Trump). Businesspeople – equally appalled by Trump’s erraticism and Biden’s tax plans – are in the wind.
 
Such reshuffling is normal. Healthy even. Political coalitions reflect strategic, cultural and economic realities, and over time those realities evolve. No political coalition is forever. No party is forever. The War of 1812 did in the Federalists. Westward expansion birthed the Democrats. The Whigs withered away as America geared up for its Civil War. The trauma of the Great Depression saw Black Americans abandon the Republicans for the Democrats while business leaders went the opposite direction. Today’s reshuffling – a reaction to the Cold War’s end and the Digital Revolution – is America’s seventh.
 
The Americans cannot even begin a conversation with one another about what they want out of the world until they’ve sorted out their internal political evolution. Only then can they begin to craft a grand strategy, and only then can they begin to assemble and implement a meaningful foreign policy. But the reordering takes time. The last party restructuring in the 1930s and 1940s took twelve years. This time around the Americans are only in year five. That means the global superpower is out to lunch until a point far closer to 2030 than 2020. What engagement occurs has been reduced to little more than presidential whim.

The second route is externally driven, and far, far more dangerous: Something pops up that scares the Americans, forcing them back into the world.
 
This was the strategy of Osama Bin Laden: attack the Americans in a way they could not ignore to induce them to slam sideways into the Middle East. OBL’s thinking was the Americans would partner with the region’s secular leaders to hunt down al Qaeda, and that partnership would so enrage the ummah that the Islamic masses would rise up and overthrow their rulers, ushering in a new Muslim Empire.
 
It obviously didn’t work out the way he had hoped. Yes, the Americans became embroiled in a pair of decades-long wars, and yes, those wars contributed to the Arab Spring and Arab Winter which in turn shattered the regional order, and yes, those wars and that shattering pushed a half dozen countries – so far – into de facto collapse.
 
But a pan-Islamist empire? The region is further from that now than ever. Of more lasting significance, by 2020 the Americans have largely abandoned the region to its own devices. America now boasts a military that is not only rested, recuperated and rearmed, but battle-hardened.
 
Any new American lash-out would undoubtedly be more violent and holistic than their recently ended Middle Eastern adventures. In part it is the inexorable march of military technology: America’s stealth bombers can now strike any position on Earth from their home bases in Missouri, while American drones can dominate a battlefield without need of a single solider in theater. Americans may be gun-shy about invading and occupying other countries at present, but such weapons systems make them eminently willing and able to devastate anything, anywhere, at any time. After declaring victory, the Americans don’t even need to go home because they will have never left in the first place.
 
But the bigger piece of the picture is economic. In the two decades since the September 11, 2001 attacks, the United States has become economically divorced from the wider world. The shale revolution has severed the thickest, most strategically significant link between the American economy and global norms. Integration with Mexico has reduced American dependence upon global manufactures. The entire American political spectrum now firmly anti-China, Americans are ready and willing – even eager – to cut the remainder of the ties that bind.
 
In the 2000s the Americans were always cautious about where and how they acted in an economic sense. For example, they knew Saudi elements played leading roles in the 9/11 attacks, yet the Americans largely spared Saudi interests for fear of repercussions in the oil market. If provoked today, the Americans truly would not care about what the world would look like the morning after any retaliatory actions, because they are now largely immune to any collateral damage.
 
Consider America’s post-Cold War conflicts: Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq. Sure, none of the places turned out to quite be Wisconsin, but imagine for the moment if the Americans had treated them all like Yemen: liberally applying ammunition to strategic bombing and assassination efforts and never sparing a thought to occupation or reconstruction. Simply wreck all economic and political infrastructure and then … leave.
 
This is the new normal for American policy. Any country stupid enough to provoke the Americans now will get something far harsher than the fate which ultimately befell OBL.
 
Massive capacity. No concern for credibility. No hint of a goal. No care for the aftermath. It’s a volatile, dangerous mix. And until the Americans can find a new internal balance, it’s the world we all live in.

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Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.

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Beyond the Election: Part I

So…we had an election. It has gone down to the wire. At the time of this writing mid-day November 4 the votes are still being counted. America’s politics have significantly de-matured since the contested election in 2000 between W Bush and Al Gore, so even once a winner is declared I expect significant court challenges by both sides.
 
We’ll get to some of the implications of this election’s outcomes for the United States in Part II, but first I want to close the book on the globalist era. Doing that first requires a look back to the heyday of American globalism.
 
Way back when in a 1994 debate on Iraq at the United Nations Security Council America’s then-Secretary of State Madeline Albright famously noted that Americans “will behave, with others, multilaterally when we can and unilaterally when we must.” At the time pundits, rivals and allies alike took the statement as a one-off from a politician serving an administration famous for its lack of interest in foreign affairs of any type, who simply wished to avoid a debate over what many thought was a questionable security policy. With the benefit of hindsight we recognize Albright’s statement for what it truly is.
 
A tell.
 
The early 1990s were a heady time in America. The Soviet Union had just collapsed. Americans were basking in the glow of a world in which they not only knew no equal, but no challengers. Democracy was on the march. Globalization was an unalloyed positive. History was over. America was forever triumphant. All things were possible. The free family of nations would rule a world safe eternal.
 
Albright was among the most globally-minded personalities within the Bill Clinton administration, an administration that was already by far the most multilateralist in American history. Yet even in 1994, near the height of America’s post-Cold War exceptionalism fever dream, the most globalist of globalists let slip that the Americans really have no problem going it alone.
 
For the half century before Albright’s tenure, the globalized world was an American construct. The United States found itself facing down Joe Stalin’s Red Army and quickly realized it needed allies. Not to back America up or stand shoulder-to-shoulder with it, but to willingly place themselves between the Americans and Soviet forces. Needless to say, that was a big ask. And so the Americans bribed everyone. The American Navy patrolled the oceans for all. The American financial system and consumer market were opened to all. The American nuclear umbrella was extended to all. In exchange, the Americans obtained the right to command a global alliance to confront, contain and beat back the Soviets.
 
What most in today’s ecosystem of political, economic or global affairs forget – whether they predict the rise of China or the centrality of the Middle East or the eternity of Europe – is that the Americans view these Cold War structures as a trade. Guns for butter if you will. And since the Americans no longer see a need for help with the guns, they feel the world can make its own butter. Ever since the time of Albright, American interest in the world has declined steadily, and American voters and have consistently selected presidents who care less and less about the wider world.
 
Until now, when the Americans are at best actively dismissive – and at worst actively hostile – to nearly all things international.
 
The question is not will Americans return to the world in the aftermath of the 2020 general elections. They won’t.
 
In fact, from my point of view, we really aren’t looking at any meaningful changes in America’s global position one way or another.
 
Donald Trump is the known quantity; No one – Trump included – expects constructive international engagement in a second term. But Joe Biden was hardly a better choice if one’s desire is an engaged America. What foreign policy he has discussed focused on a degree of economic nationalism that is positively French. Biden’s anti-Chinese plans are far more adversarial than the Trump administration’s. The region which would have suffered the most under President Biden would have undoubtedly be Europe. The Europeans were largely dismissive of Barack Obama’s call for economic stimulus and military assistance in Afghanistan, leaving a sour taste in the mouth of the entire Obama administration, then-Vice President Joe Biden included. And should Biden be the next president there was never even a hint of a possibility of him reversing what had become a decades-long American withdrawal of military forces from…everywhere. Biden’s talk was one of closing off trade and borders and military commitments but somehow translating that into more American involvement and leadership. Um…no. That’s not how that works.

The question isn’t even will American credibility return in a post-Trump world. Americans do not care about their credibility. If they did they would not have abused their allies (W Bush), ignored their allies (Obama), or insulted their allies (Trump). Instead, what passes for American foreign ambition has declined with each of the past four administrations. Clinton sought gravitas without action. W Bush sought loyalty without reward. Obama sought isolation in all things. Trump simply seeks disengagement. And a President Biden has made it pretty clear he plans to sacrifice foreign connections to deal with domestic issues.

No, Americans care not about their credibility. It is capacity they crave.

Even the least charitable reading of the American system credits it with a massive – and massively insulated – economy. Only about one-ninth of the U.S. economy is dependent upon trade, and nearly half of that is trade within NAFTA, America’s local trade alliance. The shale revolution has not only made the United States net oil independent, it has reduced the costs of oil production in America to levels below that of the Persian Gulf. America’s university systems remain without peer. Add in COVID-related disruptions to global supply chains, and the United States is going through the greatest re-industrialization process in its history.

The United States also has the slowest aging population of the entire developed world save New Zealand, with even “young” countries like Indonesia, Brazil and India aging at least three times as quickly. The Chinese on average became older than the Americans back in 2018. Alone of the significant states, the Americans only need engage with others economically should they choose to.

Militarily, the United States is the only country in the world that maintains a long-reach deployment-capable military force. Each of its ten (soon to be eleven) supercarrier battle groups can outsail and outshoot the rest of the world’s combined navies. Only the United States can maintain open seas access out of reach of their own coastlines. As to boots, only the United States can deploy at a moment’s notice a quarter-million troops anywhere in the world. Any other country would struggle mightily to shift one-tenth as many.

America oozes capacity. That’s not the problem. The problem is America’s goal.

The country doesn’t have one.

I could talk about shoulds. The United States should reforge its alliances to seek new, higher-minded aspirations. It should leverage what’s left of global institutions to promote cooperation among like-minded nations. It should trade access to its consumer and financial markets to promote free enterprise and human rights and democracy in order to expand the roster of those nations. It should use its global reach, economic heft and technical prowess to lead efforts to rein in greenhouse gas emissions, expand education and health, and box in countries who would use access to global markets for ill gains.

But these are shoulds, not wills. People who believe as I do – that the United States ought to play a positive role in making the world a better place – have seen their preferred candidate lose in each of the seven presidential elections leading up to 2020. In the election just concluded, we didn’t even have a horse in the race.

A different sort of thinking now dominates American thought on all things international. The “America First” of the Right is reflexively hostile to the world. The “America First” of the Left is reflexively hostile to American involvement in the world. The “America First” of the middle just finds the world exhausting. Americans have chosen – repeatedly – that they are simply done.

Or at least they are done for now.

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The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.

Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.

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Video Dispatch: Coronavirus – Looking Ahead

In my latest dispatch, I discuss the resources I look at when analyzing the current snapshots of where we are in the corona pandemic, as well as where I think we’re headed this Fall and beyond.

The current wave has key differences from previous spikes in American outbreaks; infected populations are younger overall (owing largely to failures in American universities in educating students and isolating infections) and death rates have thankfully fallen as healthcare workers and hospitals have adapted treatment protocols since the initial wave swept through New York and the northeast. But we’re not out of the woods yet… 

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The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.

Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.

Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.

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Video Dispatch: Coronavirus – The Bigger Picture

The previous two dispatches touched on the best-case scenario and the “not good” scenario, and why both indicate the public health response and the economic recovery can’t even begin before there’s a vaccine. Now, let’s pull back a bit and look at the bigger picture.

I’ve spent the last decade of my career telling you that the demographic time bomb was ticking for much of the world. In a scenario in which everything continued along as it was, many countries still had a bit of time to just barely eke out major structural changes. But that isn’t the world we’re in. In this dispatch, I talk about what happens when coronavirus and the coronavirus recession hit demographics. 

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The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.

Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.

Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.

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Video Dispatch: Coronavirus – The “Not Good” Case Scenario

There are many reasons why we should not assume a vaccine will return life to normal. I discussed some of these in the first part of this dispatch on the best-case scenario. But it is more complicated than that. For part two in this video dispatch, I was overlooking King’s Lake after a change in the wind blew the smoke from the West coast’s wildfires my way and ended my hike early. It was a fitting time to talk about just a few of the major issues that could push recovery even farther out. 

If you enjoy our free newsletters, the team at Zeihan on Geopolitics asks you to consider donating to Feeding America.

The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.

Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.

Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.

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Video Dispatch: Coronavirus – The Best Case Scenario

Even in the best case scenario, a coronavirus vaccine can’t be rolled out fully to the general American population until the second quarter of 2021. But that only marks the beginning of the end.

If you enjoy our free newsletters, the team at Zeihan on Geopolitics asks you to consider donating to Feeding America.

The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.

Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.

Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.

The team at Zeihan on Geopolitics thanks you and hopes you continue to enjoy our work.

DONATE TO FEEDING AMERICA