Category: Economics

Alas, Tulsi Gabbard left the Democratic Party after some years of abuse typified by Hilary Clinton branding her a Russian agent.  I can’t say I blame her. She went from the Democratic Congressional Caucus to the arms of the Fox News punditry, a go-to for Tucker Carlson and the “populist” Right.  There’s wisdom in crowds – the idea that crowds are wiser than “experts”, thus “populism” – and also mass mania, unfortunately another facet of “populism”.  Right now, the foreign policy fad of the moment on the “populist” Right is a retreat to fortress America.  It’s incoherent, but there it is.  Bubble #1.

That’s not all.  Bubble #2 is the grip of climate-change ideology among our so-called elites.  The simple fact that climate changes is exploited for a wholesale revamping of our way of life.  This won’t end well since we are starting to see the first signs of its horrendous fallout as Putin utilizes his oil/gas/coal weapon.

Commissar Putin’s invasion of Ukraine carries the pin to pop both bubbles.  In the first fantasy, the limits of collective security, collective solidarity, collectively imposed anything are borne out.  One overriding behemoth must be available to thump the world’s worst malefactors.  In the 19th century the role was filled by Britain and her navy; the baton passed to the U.S. in the 20th and 21st centuries, like it or not.  Sorry Tulsi and Tucker.  One nation must fill the role of the one power who scoundrels must watch over their shoulders.  Is this carte blanche for intervention?  No, but we must be in a position to act when necessary, Tulsi and Tucker be damned.  When a vacuum exists, we get the barbarian 5th-century sacking of Rome and the descent into Hobbesian chaos, Europe as a Napoleonic grand duchy, the slaughter pens of the WWI trenches, blitzkrieg and the Holocaust, and communist expansion at the barrel of a gun (or tank, or ICBM) and more mass slaughter in the late 20th.  Weakness invites horrors.

Collective solidarity gambits like the UN or EU are no substitute for the behemoth.  A majority of the UN could probably fit into the international malefactors’ caucus, which makes the occupants of the building on Turtle Bay a dubious enforcer of goodness and light.  As for the EU, it is proof that once an ideological frenzy like climate-change ideology grips continental elites all the nations in the club will step back a century in prosperity.  The result is a decline in energy freedom and a fall into a dependence on the whims of Putin and his Kremlin kleptocrats, and a choice between wintertime of mass hypothermia or quietude on the rape of Ukraine.

Make no mistake about it, today’s thugs-with-nuclear-weapons act like Jack the Ripper, always looking to see if the night watchman is distracted or asleep.  For 10 years, in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union, the world chose to be spectators as Russia suppressed Chenya.  The appetite wasn’t whetted with a few Chechens so Putin turned his gaze to the bigger prize of the Ukraine in his campaign to reconstitute the USSR.  Interestingly, the role of night watchman at the time was filled by Obama, but Obama was busy with the eight-year run of his apology tour.  Obama was caught promising Putin a dismantlement of missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic if Putin would play nice for his reelection campaign.  Done deal.  Obama gets reelected and afterwards Putin invaded and annexed Crimea and used proxies to lop off two eastern districts of the Ukrainian Donbass.  After the Trump interregnum, Putin pounced with Obama II, Joe Biden, at the helm fumbling Afghanistan, dispiriting the American military with an inquisition to ferret out the nefarious kulaks of “white supremacy” in the ranks, and wrecking the US economy in wild spending and a full-frontal assault on our bountiful energy resources – a textbook example of how to voluntarily dismantle a nation.

In the meantime, Tucker and Tulsi are aghast that the semi-senescent Biden would dare empty US weapons inventories in support of a Ukrainian fighting force of high esprit de corps.  And the Ukrainians are giving a good accounting of themselves.  But Tucker, Tulsi, and the “populist” Right in the podcastry are in the grip of fear of Russia’s nuclear arsenal.  What do they propose to do as Putin brazenly invades?  I don’t know, they won’t say, but they heap scorn on Zelensky and his country.  Odd.  It’s perplexing.  Is it due to an unstated love affair with nationalism, even if it is of the Russian variety?

Anyway, no better inducement for nuclear proliferation cannot be imagined.  Go nuclear, and you too can establish the caliphate, starve your people and unite the Korean peninsula under a monomaniacal family junta, or fulfill your wish to reimpose the iron fist of the USSR.  Just get the bomb and watch the “populist” Right media sweat bullets if our government should dare arm the victims.

No nation should put itself at the mercy of nuclear blackmail.  The possession of nuclear weapons should not mean that a nation’s rulers have the winning lottery ticket to the mega-prize as the rest of the world cowers in acceptance.  Cowering is no answer; deterrence is, as it always has. Sī vīs pācem, parā bellum: “If you want peace, prepare for war.”  Not even diplomacy works without it.  That is, make the cost of using these WMD’s far greater than any benefit.  The cost can come in the form of nuclear retaliation and/or Russia’s status as a pariah in the full sense of the word and/or threats to Putin’s personal safety.  Being Interpol’s no. 1 fugitive will not contribute to an autocrat’s peace of mind.  State the costs up front and be prepared to carry it out.  Sweating bullets is for Putin, not the pundits in the Fox News studios.

The formula applies to us as well.  To stand by, appease, or sanction aggression will only green-light more of it.  The costs of the populist Right’s dithering and fear are far greater than any benefits.  Why shouldn’t Red China initiate a “special military operation” on Taiwan since the politburo in Beijing has nuclear weapons too?  Say goodbye to Taiwan.  Speaking of a Hobbesian world beset by anyone with the “bomb” license.  No matter what the Right’s appeasement caucus has to say, you can’t replace a calculation that is as old as humankind with dithering and fear.

Ukraine is forcing another cost/benefit dose of reality and the bursting of Bubble #2.  Putin’s ambitions are smashing any illusions of a costless “transition” to a carbon-free ecotopia.  Indeed, the wakeup call of the cure being worse than the disease may be the one Putin gift to the world from the Ukraine imbroglio.  The so-called cure of greenie energy promises a devolution to a 19th century GDP, with very little likelihood of any impact on global temperatures.  The world watching a voluntary descent into economic struggles isn’t likely to inspire much of a following.  Self-immolation isn’t a successful recruitment tool.

Germany called it Energiewende (energy transition), their effort in reality to transition from industrial powerhouse to Putin concubine.  Under the EU’s own Green Deal, the continent is to be carbon free by 2050, and all the while cementing an addiction for Putin energy as their backbone, and particularly for Germany: 55 percent of Germany’s natural gas, a third of its oil, and half its coal.  Try running the factories of Mercedes-Benz Group AG on the kind of electricity that makes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez smile.

Unsaid about the “transition” is the absolute need for a fossil fuel backbone to buck-up those ugly and vast arrays of Bunyanesque windmills and solar panels.  But the electricity production is unavoidably spasmodic. The hours of full sunlight in Germany, for instance, translate into the annual daylength equivalent of 158 days, or conversely 207 days of cloud cover.  And sometimes, inexplicably, the North Sea wind fails to blow, which happened in September 2021 and lasted weeks.  When nature didn’t cooperate with the dream of Berlin’s central planners, Germany double downed on stupid by closing the three remaining nuclear power plants (now delayed).  Germany learned that zero-carbon/zero-nuclear means blackouts, rationing, skyrocketing rates, job losses, and the prospect of widespread hypothermia deaths in this and future winters if they refused to pay the Khan’s ransom.

In the upside-down logic of the greenie crowd, not paying the ransom means an even greater attachment for Alices’ Wonderland.  For these dreamers, Putin’s cutoff is more of an excuse to transition to . . . blackouts, rationing, skyrocketing rates, job losses, and the prospect of widespread hypothermia deaths in this and future winters.  Alice’s logic is evident on the “populist” Right.  Their substitute for “peace through strength” is . . . dithering and fear.  Diplomacy driven by dithering and fear leads to a dark place.  At this juncture, the loons of the Left, enveloped in eco-madness, and the loons of the “populist” Right, in the grip of Russian nuke-fear paralysis, have nothing to offer but wreckage.

RogerG