The climate crisis demands new ways of thinking scientists should be first to admit failure and move on.

A universal policy failure

Inarguably, one of the most significant and long-lasting legacies of the 50-year old Apollo programme was the life-changing experience its astronauts had upon viewing the earth from the vantage point of another celestial body. The vision they described of its fragile and delicate beauty is all the more striking and poignant at this moment in climate emergency.

We, that is to say, humanity has this beautiful planet, home now to 7 billion people with nowhere else to go, and are running a reckless experiment, that has taken the Earth system right out of the mode of operation it has been running in for millions of years. Climate and earth scientists should be and should have been the first to see the utter insanity of this hellishly dangerous undertaking.

But in some strange way, and despite the warnings over the past decades of many individuals such as Roger Revelle, Jim Hansen, Kevin Anderson, to name but a few, it appears the latest generation of protesters, from Fridays for Future to Extinction Rebellion have done far more to hammer home the real message that climate crisis cannot be taken lightly, and is urgently and ultimately a most horrifying question of life and death. We do not know when it will happen and who will be hit first, but one thing is certain: if we do not change course quickly, things can get very nasty indeed.

I am not advocating sending climate researchers to space, or holding the next climate summit on the surface of the moon not least for the tremendous CO2emissions that would entail. But after 27 years as a climate and Earth scientist, I believe that it is my own profession that most urgently needs to take a huge step back and view the whole planetary picture from a new perspective. After decades of climate system research much of it coordinated with a political process to mitigate climate change, global CO2emissions keep rising in a quasi-exponential fashion (see Figure).1As far as the atmosphere is concerned, there has been no action on climate change whatsoever. If we were some kind of super bug that has found a way of rapidly decomposing deep carbon reserves, the picture would not alter in the slightest. Any extra-planetary observer of the current crisis with advanced remote sensing capabilities would be compelled to conclude there is no intelligent life on Earth.

Climate science responsibilities

How and in what way have we as scientists contributed to this disastrous failure of climate policy? The first point indicates scientific conservatism and has been noted before by many.2It is our job as scientists to question new theories to make sure they hold up. So, we demand to know how certain we are this is true. But what we do not ask is if we can be sure this effect will never happen. This latter is how anyone is trained to think in an emergency situation.3The best-known example is probably the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Changes (IPCC) decision to explicitly exclude ice sheet melt from its Fifth Assessment Reports estimate of future sea-level rise. It is now widely believed that there is a substantial risk of much more rapid change, mainly due to the possible collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.4

The second has to do with our holding on to illusions, for fear of inciting panic. The IPCCs Special Report on 1.5 degrees warming gives a remaining emissions budget as of 1 January 2018 of 320 billion tonnes (Gt) of CO2, when accounting for some Earth system feedbacks.5Using the latest estimate for 2018,1and a continuing exponential rise in emissions in accordance with the last 170 years,6I conclude that the budget given by the IPCC will be exhausted at the beginning of 2025. Past investment in fossil-fuel and energy infrastructure alone has been estimated to commit the world to emitting 658 Gt CO2, as of 2018.7Given that the approach of climate policy has been to address fossil-fuel emissions at the demand and not the supply end,8and that the negative emissions technologies that dominate the IPCCs below 1.5 degree warming scenarios are unproven,9it is extremely unlikely the Paris Agreements goal will be met.10But even the publications outlining the most dramatic scenarios scientific or popular never seem to say it is too late.

Another way we, as scientists, have contributed to the crisis concerns the excessive rationalisation of a threat. In other words we switch off common sense and produce scientific results borne of idealized models be they mathematical or intellectual. All of us are probably well apprised of the knowledge that there is no decisive and radical action on climate change no car free Sundays as enforced during the 1980s oil crisis (Im old enough to remember!), no massive push towards public transport, no willingness to stop the continuing rise in air travel, or awareness of the enormous energy consumption of the internet.11The Climate Action Tracker initiative estimates that given existing pledges, the world is heading towards 3 degrees of warming.12As citizens we all know the difference between a politicians words and deeds and we are all painfully aware of recent changes in the geopolitical landscape, implying a very real risk of a 4 or higher degree of warming.13And yet, the IPCCs various assessment reports have repeatedly relied on highly idealized so-called integrated models that know and admit nothing of these things, and therefore be easily bent to produce results that fly in the face of common logic.14In our official model, this purportedly objective approach is the very one implemented to inform policy makers.

Finally, Paul Watzlawicks famous dictum that we cannot not communicate is also true for us climate scientists, even if we do not want to hear it. By going on with our daily routines and not rebelling filling in another grant application for looking at yet another tiny detail of the complex web of cause and effect that is the planetary climate system, following the demands of a funding system that might serve the interests of politicians as much as those of humanity we send out a powerful message that everything is under control. The way the IPCCs assessments are structured makes it very clear that regarding climate change, we are dealing first of all with a physical problem (Working Group 1) that has impacts on the natural world and societies (Working Group 2), that have to be dealt with by technical solutions (Working Group 3)15. An alternative point of view may be simply expressed by saying we are dealing with the mundane problem of good housekeeping the original meaning of the Greek word economy. Climate change, biodiversity loss, overfishing and air pollution could also just be symptoms of a more fundamental problem: that the word economy has assumed a different meaning from its origin, and that we cannot imagine a functioning economy without never ending growth supported by unlimited resources.16

A way out

The fact that we have been so stunningly unable to react to climate change may have to do with a failure to see precisely where the problem really resides and that the community of climate scientists have falsely assumed the position of superior expertise, where in fact it should have belonged to social anthropologists, historians, psychologists, and political and social activists. If this is so, it would explain the remarkable success of the latest protest movement, and the failure of the science and policy establishment.

If we take this point of view on board for a moment, it becomes clear where the way out of the crisis can be found at least in principle: acceptance of our collective failure, humility on the part of the experts, and immediate action from the human side of the problem. Most of the funding so far plunged into expert meetings, science conferences, computer resources, expeditions and lab work should now go towards building social capital and political trust, the facilitation of pertinent, open debate, and the establishment of global democratic institutions with capacity to deal with a global problem that so far has been impossible to tackle.

To read an interview of Dr Knorr by the founder of IFLAS, Professor Jem Bendell, see here.

References

1See figure. Emissions from Global Carbon Project until 2017 for energy and cement production plus land use change, 2018 using preliminary estimate by LeQur et al.,Earth System Science Data, 10, 1-54, 2018, DOI: 10.5194/essd-10-2141-2018. 2018 land use emissions assumed unchanged against previous year.

2For example Brysse, K. et al.Climate change prediction: Erring on the side of least drama? Global Environmental Change 23 (2013) 327337, or Discerning Experts, Oppenheimer et al. 2019,https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo33765378.html

3Peacock K. A.A Different Kind of Rigor: What Climate Scientists Can Learn from Emergency Room Doctors. Ethics, Policy & Environment 21, 194-214, 2018.

4Bamber J. L. et al.Ice sheet contributions to future sea-level rise from structured expert judgment, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 116,11,195-11,200, 2019.https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1817205116

5CO2released through permafrost melt and methane released by wetlands.

6The rise of 1.65% per year is the one that corresponds to the long-term trend as shown in the figure. However, since 1945 emissions from fossil-fuel burning have been rising much faster for most of the time, see Hansen J. et al.Assessing Dangerous Climate Change: Required Reduction of Carbon Emissions to Protect Young People, Future Generations and Nature, PLoS ONE 8, e81648, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0081648, 2013.

7Tong, D. et al., Committed emissions from existing energy infrastructure jeopardize 1.5 C climate target, Nature 572, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1364-3, 2019.

8Denniss, R. and Green, R. Cutting with both arms of the scissors: the economic and political case for restrictive supply-side climate policies, Climatic Change 150:7387 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-018-2162-x, 2018.

9Fuss S. et al., Betting on negative emissions, Nat. Clim. Change 4, 850-853, 2014. Anderson, K., Duality in climate science, Nat. Geosci. 8, 898-900, 2015.

10The IPCCs estimate notably excludes a range of positive Earth system feedbacks that could lead to more warming. For a more complete list of Earth system feedbacks see e.g. Steffen W. et al., Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci, 115, 8,252-8,259, http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1810141115, 2018.

11Heinberg, R. and Fridley, D. Our Renewable Future. Island Press, 2016.

12https://climateactiontracker.org/global/cat-thermometer/S

13Special issue of Phil. Trans. Royal Soc. A, Four degrees and beyond: the potential for a global temperature increase of four degrees and its implications Vol. 269, 2011.

14This refers in particular to Chapter 2 of the IPCC 1.5-degree Special Report. Figure 2.4 shows a range of socio-economic scenarios, of which most seem to comply with the constraint that climate change is limited to less than 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Figure 2.5 then shows that a large number of them imply massive negative carbon emissions during the period, to the amount of a quarter of half the current positive emissions. I assert here that to think our willingness to engage in altruistic behaviour on such an absolutely massive scale,one that would reach levels of carbon flux comparable to the much easier activity of burning fossil fuels driven by selfish desire for convenience is truly and utterly in defiance of common sense.

15For a wider discussion of the implications of the General Circulation Model view of the climate problem see Demeritt, D., The construction of global warming and the politics of science,Ann. Assoc. American Geographers, 91, 307337, 2001.

16Meadows, D., Randers, D., and Meadows, D., The limits to growth the 30-year update. Earthscan, London, New York, 2012.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks James Rumball ([emailprotected]) for suggestions and copy editing.

Teaser image credit: By NASA/Apollo 17 crew; taken by either Harrison Schmitt or Ron Evans https://web.archive.org/web/20160112123725/http://grin.hq.nasa.gov/ABSTRACTS/GPN-2000-001138.html (image link); see also https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_329.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43894484

Excerpt from:

The Climate Crisis Demands New Ways of Thinking from Climate Scientists - Resilience

In June 2020, Lebanons inflation rate was 20 per cent, month-on-month. In other words, prices in the country were, on average, 20 per cent more than they were a month before. Compared to a year earlier, in June 2019, they had nearly doubled.

Lebanon is well on its way to hyperinflation when prices of goods and services change daily, and rise by more than 50 per cent in a month.

Hyperinflation is most commonly associated with countries like Venezuela and Zimbabwe, which this year have seen annual inflation rates of 15,000 per cent and 319 per cent, respectively. Lebanon is set to join their league; food inflation surged by 108.9 per cent during the first half of 2020.

When hyperinflation takes hold, consumers start to behave in very unusual ways. Goods are stockpiled, leading to increased shortages. As the money in someones pocket loses its worth, people start to barter for goods.

What characterises countries with high inflation and hyperinflation? They have a sharp acceleration in growth of the money supply in order to finance unsustainable overspending; high levels of government debt; political instability; restrictions on payments and other transactions and a rapid breakdown in socio-economic conditions and the rule of law. Usually, these traits are associated with endemic corruption.

Lebanon fulfils all of the conditions. Absent immediate economic and financial reforms, the country is heading to hyperinflation and a further collapse of its currency.

How and why did this happen?

Lebanon is in the throes of an accelerating meltdown. Unsustainable economic policies and an overvalued exchange rate pegged to the US dollar have led to persistent deficits. Consequently, public debt in 2020 is more than 184 per cent of GDP the third highest ratio in the world.

The trigger to the banking and financial crisis was a series of policy errors starting with an unwarranted closure of banks in October 2019, supposedly in connection with political protests against government ineffectiveness and corruption. Never before whether in the darkest hours of Lebanons civil war (1975-1990), during Israeli invasions or other political turmoil have banks been closed or payments suspended.

More than a third of Lebanese are unemployed and poverty rates exceed 50 per cent

The bank closures led to an immediate loss of trust in the entire banking system. They were accompanied by informal controls on foreign currency transactions, foreign exchange licensing, the freezing of deposits and other payment restrictions to protect the dwindling reserves of Lebanons central bank. All of this generated a sharp liquidity and credit squeeze and the emergence of a system of multiple exchange rates, resulting in a further loss of confidence in the monetary system and the Lebanese pound.

Multiple exchange rates are particularly nefarious. They create distortions in markets, encourage rent seeking (when someone gains wealth without producing real value) and create new opportunities for cronyism and corruption. Compounded by the Covid-19 lockdown, the result has been a sharp 20 per cent contraction in economic activity, consumption and investment and surging bankruptcies. Lebanon is experiencing rapidly rising unemployment (over 35 per cent) and poverty rates exceeding 50 per cent of the population.

With government revenues declining, growing budget deficits are increasingly financed by the Lebanese central bank (BDL), leading to the accelerating inflation. The next phase will be a cost-of-living adjustment for the public sector, more monetary financing and inflation: an impoverishing vicious circle!

We are witnessing the bursting of a Ponzi scheme engineered by the BDL, starting in 2016 with a massive bailout of the banks, equivalent to about 12.6 per cent of GDP. To protect an overvalued pound and finance the government, the BDL started borrowing at ever-higher interest rates, through so-called financial engineering schemes. These evolved into a cycle of additional borrowing to pay maturing debt and debt service, until confidence evaporated and reserves were exhausted.

By 2020, the BDL was unable to honour its foreign currency obligations and Lebanon defaulted on its March 2020 Eurobond, seeking to restructure its domestic and foreign debt. The resulting losses of the BDL exceeded $50 billion, equivalent to the entire countrys GDP that year. It was a historically unprecedented loss by any central bank in the world.

With the core of the banking system, the BDL, unable to repay banks deposits, the banks froze payments to depositors. The banking and financial system imploded.

As part of Lebanons negotiations with the IMF to resolve the situation, the government of Prime Minister Hassan Diab prepared a financial recovery plan that comprises fiscal, banking and structural reforms. However, despite the deep and multiple crises, there has been no attempt at fiscal or monetary reform.

In effect, Mr Diabs government and Riad Salameh, the head of the central bank, are deliberately implementing a policy of imposing an inflation tax and an illegal Lirafication: a forced conversion of foreign currency deposits into Lebanese pounds in order to achieve internal real deflation.

The objective is to impose a domestic solution and preclude an IMF programme and associated reforms. The inflation tax and Lirafication reduce real incomes and financial wealth. The sharp reduction in real income and the sharp depreciation of the pound are leading to a massive contraction of imports, reducing the current account deficit to protect the remaining international reserves. Lebanon is being sacrificed to a failed exchange rate and incompetent monetary and government policies.

What policy measures can be implemented to rescue Lebanon? Taming inflation and exchange rate collapse requires a credible, sustainable macroeconomic policy anchor to reduce the prevailing extreme policy uncertainty.

Here are four measures that would help:

First, a Capital Control Act should be passed immediately, replacing the informal controls in place since October 2019 with more transparent and effective controls to stem the continuing outflow of capital and help stabilise the exchange rate. This would restore a modicum of confidence in the monetary systems and the rule of law, as well as the flow of capital and remittances.

Second is fiscal reform. It is time to bite the bullet and eliminate wasteful public spending. Start by reform of the power sector and raising the prices of subsidised commodities and services, like fuel and electricity. This would also stop smuggling of fuel and other goods into sanctions-laden Syria, which is draining Lebanons reserves. Subsidies should be cut in conjunction with the establishment of a social safety net and targeted aid.

These immediate reforms should be followed by broader measures including improving revenue collection, reforming public procurement (a major source of corruption), creating a National Wealth Fund to incorporate and reform state commercial assets, reducing the bloated size of the public sector, reforming public pension schemes and introducing a credible fiscal rule.

Third, unify exchange rates and move a to flexible exchange rate regime. The failed exchange rate regime has contributed to large current account deficits, hurt export-oriented sectors, and forced the central bank to maintain high interest rates leading to a crowding-out of the private sector. Monetary policy stability also requires that the BDL should be restructured and stop financing government deficits and wasteful and expensive quasi-fiscal operations, such as subsidising real estate investment.

Fourth, accelerate negotiations with the IMF and agree to a programme that sets wide-ranging conditions on policy reform. Absent an IMF programme, the international community, the GCC, EU and other countries that have assisted Lebanon previously will not come to its rescue.

Lebanon is at the edge of the abyss. Absent deep and immediate policy reforms, it is heading for a lost decade, with mass migration, social and political unrest and violence. If nothing is done, it will become "Libazuela".

Nasser Saidi is a former Lebanese economy minister and first vice-governor of the Central Bank of Lebanon

Updated: August 3, 2020 11:16 AM

Excerpt from:

How to save Lebanon from looming hyperinflation - The National

Editors Note: This article is the introductory essay for Vol. 3, Iss. 3 of theTexas National Security Review. Please check it out the volumehere.

As the world sunk deeper into a deadly global conflagration in 1941, Princeton University professor Edward Meade Earle gathered a group of eminent scholars to discuss the history and practice of military strategy. The seminar eventually produced a landmark collection of essays, Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler. The book, which was updated in 1986 by Peter Paret, quickly became a classic.

Three things in particular are notable about the 1943 volume, which included some of the best military and political historians working in the middle part of the 20th century. First is the focus on individuals: leaders such as Frederick the Great and thinkers like naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan. The second is an understanding that conflict had become all-encompassing, dominating every aspect of society. Given the total mobilization of the World War II, when every element of the economy, political system, and even information was tightly controlled and exploited by the state, this frightening perspective was understandable: When war comes it dominates our lives. Third, the essays focus on the physical elements of war: the movement, clash, and material and human destruction between massed groups of men and machines fighting to destroy each other. Certain themes appear over and over again, across centuries, national, and ideological lines:

Among these are the concept of lightning war and the battle of annihilation; the war of maneuver vs. the war of position; the relationship between war and social institutions and between economic strength and military power; psychology and morale as weapons of war; the role of discipline in the army; the question of the professional army vs. the militia.

The outstanding articles in this issue have caused me to reflect upon what such a volume might look like today (an important task my esteemed Kissinger Center colleague Hal Brands is actually pursuing). Would these three themes the role of individuals and leaders, the complete socio-economic mobilization by the nation-state to prosecute war, and the place of kinetic, physical conflict serve as the organizing principles for a third edition of Makers of Modern Strategy? Or do we need to focus on different factors and forces that better reflect the nature of contemporary and future conflict?

In some ways, the issues today are quite similar as a commentator on the original volume pointed out, the goal of the book was to reflect upon the art of controlling and utilizing the resources of a nation or a coalition of nations, to promote and secure their interests against enemies, actual, potential, or presumed. This is as good a definition of grand strategy as any, and is as applicable today as it was in 1943. The interests of key states, however, and the means of securing those interests, appear quite different in 2020 than in 1943. Instead of reflections on the best ways to deploy battleships or tanks, the latest analyses of grand strategy focus on new tools which are often non-kinetic, such as cyber-weapons and economic warfare.

The first big shift in the realities of war occurred only a few years after Makers of Modern Strategy appeared, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The ability to deliver unimaginable destruction in such a short period and from long distances transformed the use of force. As Bernard Brodie pointed out, Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. For the next eight decades, the strategy of deterrence using weapons to prevent events like invasion, conquest, or coercion became the key focus. While counter-intuitive and often terrifying, a renaissance in strategy emerged, centered upon sophisticated analyses of what kinds of weapons, arrayed in what strategies and deployments, would best ensure they were never used. This strategic revolution also generated the intellectual architecture and policy elements for another novel form of strategy: negotiated bilateral and multilateral arms control. Such agreements sought to decrease the chance for the kind of miscalculation and misperception that some believed could lead to an unwanted war. These strategies appeared to play a key role in the peaceful end of the Cold War and the absence of great power war ever since.

There are reasons to wonder whether our period of new technological transformation and great power rivalry is challenging the underpinnings of the decades-long legacy of deterrence and arms control. Luis Simon and Alexander Lanozka, for example, highlight the consequences that new precision-guided missiles have had on the strategic environment, particularly in northeastern Europe. These precision strike weapons, deployed as part of an anti-access/area denial strategy, often blur the line between conventional and nuclear environments. The collapse of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty revealed how our legacy arms control concepts and institutions are poorly adapted to this new world. Given how exposed Baltic members in NATO are to Russian power, this confused environment could be dangerous.

It is important to recall that much of the post-1945 revolution in military strategy was based upon the clear distinction between nuclear and non-nuclear forces. A considerable amount of intellectual energy was expended trying to figure out whether and in what ways conflict could still take place under the nuclear shadow, and under what circumstances either planned or inadvertent a conventional war might escalate into a nuclear conflict. Rebecca Hersman convincingly demonstrates that the linear model of escalation that shaped strategy throughout most of the nuclear age no longer captures the complex and non-linear dynamics of an international system marked by profound technological change, increased security competition, and a fraying global order. Hersman creatively deploys a metaphor from physics to highlight what she labels wormhole escalation. Her analysis captures a terrifying and underappreciated irony that the ability of states (and non-state actors) to use novel, non-kinetic, and sub-strategic tools such as information warfare, cyber attacks, and economic coercion to target an adversarys strategic interests actually increases the dangers of a nuclear crisis through strange, uncharted paths. Asymmetric capabilities may encourage higher risk, or simply blur risk and increase the fog of war, potentially producing disastrous outcomes. Hersmans truly original analysis is precisely the kind of chapter one that would hope to find in a new Makers of Modern Strategy.

Similar challenges for strategists exist in the world of cyber conflict. Michael N. Schmitt argues that the portrayal of cyberspace as the new Wild West, a completely unregulated, anything-goes domain, is untrue. The reality is more mixed, though promising. Cyberspace presents a dilemma: States and societies are relying on it more for critical economic, political, and security functions, yet cyber attacks and malfeasance are on the rise. International law, according to Schmitt, increasingly provides an important if imperfect tool to help states establish and solidify norms, express their interests and preferences, and regulate the most harmful activities.

In the past, economics was largely seen as a means to support a successful military strategy. The state with the largest industrial economy, that could produce the most steel, coal, and electricity, and that could convert those assets into weapons that supported military forces, was the one that could best prevail in war. For David H. McCormick,Charles E. Luftig, andJames M. Cunningham, economics is no longer simply about the means to support war. Economic dominance is the goal of great-power competition, and economic tools the best means to achieve that end. In other words, future great-power competition is as likely to occur over the development of new technologies, the crafting of international economic institutions and norms, and reserve currency status. This is different from the recent past, when global economic exchange was seen purely through the lens of the laws of comparative advantage and mutual gain. The idea that when China sold cheap goods to the United States, citizens in both countries benefitted, is seen as increasingly suspect. McCormick et al believe that at least some portions of economic activity need to be understood through the zero-sum approach of traditional security and geopolitical competition. In their view, China and Russia, with their strategic investments in key technologies and industries, are well ahead of the United States in the field of state-driven economic strategy. The article lays out a series of concrete measures the United States could take, ones that fall short of the kind of national economic planning that America eschews but do coordinate and encourage targeted private sector activity in strategic industries.

Needless to say, we need rigorous scholarly and analytical tools to identify, measure, and evaluate these changes. Jessica D. Blankshain and Andrew L. Stigler provide a very useful primer on the tools available to social scientists, from game theory to statistical analysis to historical case studies. We will need these and other tools to make sense of the complex, ever changing world of national and international security.

Has war changed since Earle, Gordon Craig, Hajo Halborn, Robert Roswell Palmer, and others offered their reflections on the nature of military strategy, and if so, in what ways? The first question would involve who or what constitutes the makers of modern strategy. While there are certainly great strategic thinkers and leaders ranging from several American presidents to Chinas President Xi Jinping have mattered enormously one is struck by the importance of other variables shaping the security environment. Technology, the role of ideology, demographics, the move to a post-industrial, globalized economy: The tectonic, intensifying structural forces shaping world order in recent decades seem to have outpaced both our ability to conceptualize international security and to translate these ideas into policies.

This leads to the second theme of the 1943 volume the total mobilization by the nation-state of society for war. As dangerous as the world has been since 1945, the place that war plays in most modern countries has decreased substantially. In 1960, 6 percent of global GDP was spent on military spending. By 2017, it was down to 2 percent. Beyond the economic side, the number of people involved in state-driven military enterprises has fallen as armies and navies have shrunk. Even in the United States, which possesses far and away the worlds most powerful military, in 2019 only spent 3.4 percent of its GDP. Only 0.4 percent of the total population is active duty military. The historians Paul Kennedy and William McNeill both argued that the so-called rise of the modern West was driven by fierce security competition and the constant prevalence of war in Europe. War and geopolitical competition drove any number of other profound changes, from the rise of the modern bureaucratic state, mass education, literacy, public health, international finance, and technology. The connection between war and new technological developments, or war and socio-economic change, seems far more tenuous today than in the past. In 2020, Charles Tillys observation that war made the state and the state made war tells us less than it once did.

Does this mean the kind of great power wars that plagued the world in earlier centuries has abated for good? Scholars such as Bear F. Braumoeller have cautioned against believing that either human nature or fierce international competition have fundamentally changed. As the growing rivalry between the United States and China reveals, great-power competition has not disappeared. Will these rivalries, however, take different forms? Will the age of kinetic, force-on-force, army-on-army battles, highlighted by battleships and tanks, be replaced by economic statecraft, battles in space and in the cyber world, autonomous weapons, and robots? The digital revolution, combined with the decreasing value of land, shifting demographics, and changing socio-economics, all under the nuclear shadow, does make the idea of great power war somewhat unthinkable. And yet.

Scanning the globe, one sees any number of places where traditional, physical military force retains its threat, as the recent deadly clash between China and India over the line of control reveals. Can we really rule out a Russian invasion of Estonia, or a move by China to take Taiwan by force? And could we rule out a fierce military response by the United States and others? Such a scenario might make the three themes leaders, total mobilization, and physical, material force dangerously relevant again. Obviously, these are scenarios we should work hard to prevent from occurring, and their dire potential consequences highlight the continuing importance that deterrence and statecraft play in the world. To that end, let us hope the third edition of Makers of Modern Strategy is written in conditions similar to what we find today, and not the terrifying world faced by Earle and his colleagues in 1943.

Francis J. Gavinis the chair of the editorial board of theTexas National Security Review. He is the Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and the inaugural director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at SAIS-Johns Hopkins University.His writings includeGold, Dollars, and Power: The Politics of International Monetary Relations, 19581971(University of North Carolina Press, 2004) andNuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in Americas Atomic Age(Cornell University Press, 2012). His latest book isNuclear Weapons and American Grand Strategy(Brookings Institution Press, 2020).

Image: U.S. Air Force (Photo by Tech. Sgt. Gregory Brook)

Excerpt from:

What's Modern About Modern Strategy? - War on the Rocks

A specter is haunting Italys highways: the specter of Chavismo. Highways: the Venezuelan model has won, claimed journalist Nicola Porro in a video addressed to his 700,000 Facebook and 400,000 Twitter followers. Porro is a famous face on Silvio Berlusconis Mediaset TV stations and deputy editor of the tycoons newspaper Il Giornale; and within just hours, his talk of Venezuela had been adopted by dozens of right-wing commentators, but also a large part of the liberal establishment.

Such fury was not exactly well-grounded. Earlier in July, Giuseppe Contes government decided to take back a 33 percent public share in the company that manages Italys highways, twenty years after it was privatized. This was perhaps a rather tepid move, given the appalling in recent years, deadly neglect of the highways under private management. Yet comparisons with Hugo Chvez and Nicols Maduro abounded in national media, presenting Contes move as extreme and illegitimate.

His attackers drew on tropes already well-established in European and US public discourse, resorting to Cold War anti-communism even three decades since the fall of the Eastern Bloc. Faced with the slightest deviation from neoliberal orthodoxy, defenders of the status quo wheel out the classic rhetoric of economic failure, foreign ideology, and associations with uncivilized non-European countries deploying anti-communism against even forces that stand far from any kind of Marxist politics.

The Italian governments decision has its origins back in 2018, when the Ponte Morandi a cement road bridge in the outskirts of Genoa collapsed, killing forty-three people. This tragedy sparked sharp debates on the apparent lack of maintenance of this bridge and of Italys road infrastructure in general. Especially targeted was the Benetton family, owners of the clothes firm and over the last two decades the majority stake in highway-management firm Autostrade per lItalia (ASPI).

Back then, Conte led a coalition uniting the populist Five Star Movement with the hard-right Lega, and the call to revoke the Benetton familys concession began to make headway. This was a major about-turn in a public debate dominated for over a quarter-century by talk of how the efficient private sector should replace all direct state management, driving a wave of privatizations unrivaled outside the old Eastern Bloc.

ASPI was created in 1950 as part of the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI, the then-vast public industrial holding company) and was a key force in the economic boom of the 1960s. Its building of one of the worlds densest highway networks fully suited a development model based on steel (public, at the time), oil (also in public hands) and cars (then, like now, under FIATs private quasi-monopoly).

The privatization of ASPI, along with IRI and many other public firms, came in the 1990s: the now-triumphant neoliberal ideology demanded this, but so, too, the binds established by the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, the founding act of the European Union, which among other things compelled Italy to slash its public debt through sell-offs of public assets. ASPI was privatized in 1999, and by 2002 the Benetton family had majority control. Since then, shareholders have drawn enormous profits, as road tolls have continually risen while investment in maintenance has been close to zero.

The highways themselves remained public property: what was privatized was their management, and the Ponte Morandi tragedy raised the possibility that the concession would be withdrawn. Yet it was unclear whether it would be entrusted to some other private owner, or if the state would directly take back control.

As this was still being debated, there came an unusual change of government. In summer 2019, Matteo Salvinis hard-right Lega split from its alliance with the Five Star Movement, which in turn formed a new coalition together with the center-left Democrats; despite this upheaval, the independent lawyer Giuseppe Conte remainedprime minister.

The Democrats had particular problems in countenancing nationalization. This party is, in fact, the heir to the political forces that led the privatizations of the 1990s, fully embodying the paradigm of progressive neoliberalism; it also has very close links with financial groups like the Benettons, considered leading lights of the enlightened, progressive-minded bourgeoisie notwithstanding their environmental and social violations in Latin America.

But the Democrats new leader Nicola Zingaretti was elected in 2019 on a platform, if not of Corbyn-style rupture, at least of partly walking back the Blairite infatuation of previous years. It would, indeed, have been odd for the theoretically most social-democratic of Italys main parties to be the only one opposed to revoking the concession.

Faced with a popular demand to do something to punish the Benettons considered indirectly responsible for the forty-three deaths if not nationalize the highways outright, the government was also trapped by its need not to appear overly anti-business, in an international context where it could imagine no economic strategy other than attracting private investment. Added complication came from the jungle of norms governing these outsourcing agreements.

Whatever the myth of the state-as-regulator of private business, these rules consistently favor the concession-owner stipulating billions of euros in fines for the state itself should it take the highways back from the privateer management.

The story came to a head on July 15 when the government and ASPI announced an agreement. State-owned financial holding company Cassa Depositi e Prestiti is to buy up 33 percent of the shares in ASPI (at a cost lower than any possible penalties) while another 22 percent will be ceded to institutional investors enjoying government confidence.

Then, the firm will be floated on the stock exchange and the Benettonss share will fall under 10 percent. This is far from a forced nationalization something the Italian constitution does, in fact, allow for but a market operation, contracted with the current owners, which will see the state intervene as a simple shareholder (if a major one) in a private firm.

But there is a clear shift: the state is to return as an economic actor, taking back part of what was privatized twenty years ago. If in 2018 the economist Mariana Mazzucato, theorist of a new state interventionism, wrote an article for leading daily La Repubblica (together with our comrade Simone Gasperin) entitled Highways: Nationalization Is No Taboo, today she is herself economic advisor to Prime Minister Conte.

The operation also bears the typical traits of this government and Contes own leadership, a balancing act between the progressive neoliberalism of the Italian center-left of the last twenty-five years and the need to give a different kind of response to a socio-economic situation in which such recipes have become unsustainable.

Contes government is not socialist and does not have any program of nationalizations. The agreement over the highways is fully internal to the mechanisms of a market economy. But the fact that, for the first time in decades, the Italian states role in a sector of the economy is growing rather than falling, certainly does point to a window of opportunity. This is a crack in the monolithic neoliberal consensus and the Left would do well to try and widen this crack further.

The day after the agreement, the specter of Bolivarianism made its terrifying appearance on the frontpages. Autostrade per lItalia a statization reminiscent of Venezuela claimed Lucio Malan of Berlusconis Forza Italia party in the Senate. Center-right MP Maurizio Lupi agreed, The expropriation of the Benettons is shocking, we arent Venezuela. The popular ultra-free-marketeer YouTuber Rick DuFer complained that Venezuela is near.

Such rhetoric also spread to the liberal press. If Italy becomes Venezuela, who will invest? asked former economy minister Giovanni Tria on Huffington Post Italia. Its editor Mattia Feltri added, this isnt the way a government resolves matters with private business except in Venezuela. One La Repubblica columnist found the comparison with Venezuela a little over-the-top but agreed with stigmatizing a certain drift toward neo-statism allitaliana. On July 20, Economy Minister Roberto Gualtieri was asked by a Corriere della Sera journalist, The government is displaying a dirigiste face, a little Venezuelan. Why would a foreign investor risk their capital in Italy?

There is another immediate reason for this sudden interest in Venezuela. In June, a few weeks before the ASPI agreement, the conservative Spanish daily newspaper ABC reported on alleged Venezuelan financing of the Five Star Movement (M5S), which backs Contes government.

The accusation was groundless but gained traction in the right-wing opposition, which habitually (and falsely) presents M5S as a radical-left force in a bid to erode its support among conservative parts of the electorate. Lega leader Salvini, himself in coalition with M5S just twelve months ago, claimed in June that the government now is a mix of the CGIL [trade union federation] and Venezuela.

Lets repeat: this was a part-nationalization, on market terms, carried out by a very moderate center-left government with both liberal and populist traits. The rhetorical move to associate this kind of policy with Venezuela is new to Italy, given how little there is in its politics of even vaguely socialist coloration.

Elsewhere this comparison is well-established, not least in the United States, where for years Venezuela has been presented as the archetype of the authoritarianism and economic collapse supposedly bound to result from socialist policies.

Even more so in Spain, whose media are much more assiduous in following Venezuelan events, and where Chavismo has often been at the center of public debate. Indeed, right-winger Jos Mara Aznars government was accused of supporting the 2002 coup attempt in Caracas by both the subsequent Socialist prime minister Jos Luis Rodrguez Zapatero and by Chvez himself.

Still legendary in Spanish politics is a 2007 incident where, faced with Chvezs continual interruptions of a speech by Zapatero at a summit in Chile (aiming precisely to launch attacks on Aznar), the then king of Spain Juan Carlos yelled at the Venezuelan president: Why dont you shut up?

The rise of Podemos in the 2010s then fueled the Spanish rights obsession with Venezuela, not least as party founders Pablo Iglesias and igo Errejn had experience as political consultants working for Latin American left-populist governments. For years, the Right has accused Podemos of being funded by Venezuelan petrodollars, albeit without finding any evidence.

But why Venezuela? If a good part of the radical left internationally condemned Juan Guaids coup attempt and imperialist interference in that country, Bolivarianism hardly enjoys the appeal it did fifteen years ago, when Chvez could boast of opening the way to the pink tide across Latin America. The impression is that this comparison with Venezuela is so successful because it responds to a well-established canon: Cold War anti-communism.

We speak of anti-communism all too little in the West, despite the formidable role of anti-Red propaganda across much of the world in the second half of the twentieth century. It was one of the weapons that devastated the US left, from McCarthyism onward: it has decided elections and deeply molded public debate in multiple countries. The presence, in Italy, of the Wests biggest Communist Party from 1943 to 1991 made it a rather different context compared with countries like Britain and (West) Germany, where anti-communism has devastated anything to the left of social democracy. But it made its mark in Italy, too.

Beyond the folklore of Don Camillo and Peppone (the village priest and the local communist, at the heart of a famous set of conservative films and books after 1945) Christian Democracys anti-communist rhetoric across its forty-year postwar hegemony has left deep traces. It is no accident that even after the Italian Communist Party dissolved in 1991 soon rallying behind moderate Catholic center-left leaders like Romano Prodi in the 1990s and 2000s, Berlusconi continually labeled all his adversaries communists, including the likes of Prodi.

This was a theme right from the moment the billionaire tycoon spectacularly announced that he was entering politics in 1994: the second line of his televised address declared that he had decided to enter the field and concern myself with public affairs, because I do not want to live in an illiberal country governed by immature forces and men double-bound to a politically and economically failed past.

In the attempt to delegitimize any vaguely progressive proposal any deviation from free-market orthodoxy the invocation of communist economic failure is a powerful weapon. So, not by accident, Venezuela comes into play. The point is not that Maduro really does represent a beacon for socialists internationally, but rather that the economic crisis that has struck that country will remind many Westerners of the stereotypes about scarcity in former Eastern Bloc countries. State intervention means communism, communism means poverty.

But the rhetoric about Venezuela doesnt only draw on the economic element of Cold War anti-communism. Also fundamental is the idea of foreign ties and even funding. The Moscow rubles that funded the Italian Communist Party and other Western parties are omnipresent in anti-communist stereotypes, and, behind this, the deeper idea of the communist as a traitor.

This draws on many antisemitic tropes, with which it is, indeed, often associated: communists, like Jews, are held to be more loyal to their international ties than their own country, to be at odds with the fatherland and thus a potential traitor. This guy isnt really one of us: hes paid from abroad, and the point of his radical ideas is to damage us.

In its Venezuelan versions, this rhetoric also draws on the anti-communist idea that communism is something unEuropean and essentially foreign often meaning, typical of non-white, uncivilized, colonized peoples, from the Chinese to the Vietnamese and Cubans, all so many Cossack barbarians readying to invade our civilized Europe. And its easy to identify the deep link between the pink tide in Latin America and the continents indigenous movements, even just looking at the personal biographies of many leading figures on the Left.

Not by chance, on February 28 at the peak of his primary run Bernie Sanders was himself attacked on similar grounds, as a violent column in the New York Times accused him of having been on the wrong side in the Cold War. This article had many disturbing traits, not least where it attacked Sanders on the grounds that The guy who was angry about the downfall of Salvador Allendes Marxist regime in Chile in 1973 is still angry about it today. The writer forgot to mention that this Marxist regime was a democratically elected government; its downfall, a fascist military coup.

In the Italian case, the sudden interest in Venezuelan matters thus seems to have very little to do with Maduros policies which, indeed, no one is indicating as a model to follow or as the leadership of an international socialist movement. Rather, it seems connected to deeper traits of the dominant culture in the liberal West. An established repertoire of anti-communist attacks can be called on to smear anyone who tries to question free-market orthodoxy, even as in the case of the Italian highways in the most ambiguous and timid forms.

The Cold War ended in 1989, but its cultural legacy is much more overbearing than we often imagine. And its clear that no one on the Left can hope to win broad support, without being prepared to confront this kind of rhetoric.

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How Partially Nationalizing the Highways Turned Italy Into Another Venezuela - Jacobin magazine

COVID-19 can be defeated, if we adhere to SOPs

As the situation worsens and deaths become overwhelming, family members may only be informed and attendance of burial is by one or two members of the family. I believe that is not what we want.

OPINIONHEALTH COVID-19

The coronavirus, first identified in China in December last year, has ravaged all countries of the world, causing socio-economic devastation in many countries. Within seven months, the death toll is close to 660,000 people and over 17,000,000 infections.

In March, President Yoweri Museveni instituted the first lockdown in Uganda after the first case was confirmed. The idea, at the time, was to assess where the cases are, trace contacts and identify possible alert cases.

Fortunately, there were no alerts, truck drivers from neighbouring countries were the main source, who initially were allowed to continue with their journey after extracting samples, only leaving behind their telephone contacts, to be contacted if their results turned out positive. They would then get admitted to the nearest designated hospital for treatment. President Museveni's position of ensuring that trucks continue despite the lockdown was a perfect position as Uganda had to continue to avoid economic collapse.

With truck drivers identified as the main source of the coronavirus, new measures allowed them to proceed after testing negative for COVID-19, a decision that has saved Uganda from a catastrophe.

The President has re-opened the economy except schools, gyms, borders, places of worship and large gatherings. Political activities are also up with national elections for February 2021. The reopening is a "new normal" that we should comprehend.

To avoid the coronavirus and avert the pandemic, the health ministry has issued standard operating procedures (SOPs) that include frequent washing of hands, social-distancing up to two metres and wearing of masks, if we are in public.

However, a good number of people are obstinate and ignore these guidelines. Some wear the mask like necklaces or simply cover the mouth. This is unfortunate. With 1,154 cases as of July 31, 123 active cases and two fatal alert cases, Ugandan health workers are doing extremely well, but the situation can get out of hand. If, out of nonadherence that happens, we must know the implications of the disease to the health infrastructure and to ourselves.

By not adhering to the SOPs, we endanger our health workers who are not replaceable on short notice. Training of doctors and nurses take years. Let us not endanger them through our reckless behaviour. The worst situation is community transmissions which gain momentum through a multiplier function where one positive person infects 10, each of the 10 also infect 10 and within one month, 10,000 cases can be registered, making contact tracing impossible.

This can overstretch hospitals and doctors earmarked for COVID-19 treatment. In Greater Kampala, (Kampala, Wakiso and Mukono districts), the treatment centres are Mulago and Nagulu hospitals, whereas Namboole stadium was mentioned as a possible treatment centre in case the situation gets worse.

If a person tests positive after being attended to at another hospital or clinic outside the designated ones, all health workers that interacted with that patient are taken into institutional quarantine to avoid transmitting it to patients and their families.

This can drastically reduce the number of health workers and may overwork those who remain. Remember that no foreign country offers help with doctors because they are also handling the situation in their own countries.

The existence of COVID-19 does not take away other diseases that have to continue to be treated. In such a situation, patients with sickness such as malaria or bacterial-induced sore throat infections may be chased away at other clinics to avoid contracting the virus.

With a huge increase in the virus infections and designated COVID-19 hospital beds get full, in-patient admissions start to replace those who have died, as intensive care beds or ventilators are not easily installed. Ventilators are operated 24 hours by trained medical personnel who also need years of training. Intensive care patients that survive take between five and 21 days before transfer to the general ward. Even if the Government was to put up another field hospital, there might be no health workers to deploy there.

The result, like in other countries, becomes home treatment where you keep health workers informed of your condition on phone and your own people start to distance themselves from you. Unavoidable delayed treatment may be dangerous because by the time the overstretched health workers reach you, the situation may not be reversible.

Out of obstinate, negligent or unfortunate behaviour, one may take COVID-19 home, infect their family or neighbours who are vulnerable like the diabetic, hypertensive, asthmatic, cancer and HIV patients. We must know that all ages are equally vulnerable. You cannot know who will survive or die. It could be you or your loved one, parents or the entire family.

Upon positive confirmation, one is taken to a designated health facility alone and your loved ones wait for updates from health workers. Do we ever imagine if the person taken to quarantine is your five-year-old child whom you cannot take care of as a parent?

As the situation worsens and deaths become overwhelming, family members may only be informed and attendance of burial is by one or two members of the family. I believe that is not what we want.

As President Museveni said right at the beginning, COVID-19 can be defeated, if we adhere to SOPs. We know how the disease is spread. The choice to avoid it. Take personal responsibility, wear the mask, stay safe.

The writer is the director of Confucius Institute and the head of Department of African Languages at Makerere University.

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Unmasking The Realities Of Covid 19 - New Vision