It’s China, not Russia (or Afghanistan)!

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Among many things that right-wing propagandists like Tucker Carlson are good at is distraction. Remember Benghazi, Libya? Remember how much time and money the bloviators spent on inflating the significance of a terror attack on our diplomatic station there that killed Ambassador Stevens and three other people? The years-long, ultimately unproductive congressional investigations cost nearly $7 million.

Based on the amount of time and money allotted, you would have thought that poor, broken Libya was the key to world history. Yet it’s a primitive, tribal backwater of no strategic importance to the US. Even its oil and gas are—to the extent of any interest in the West—Italian and French interests, not our own.

Today you can see another GOP feint coming a mile away. The right-wing pols and talking heads are going to bang the drum on our awkward exit from Afghanistan and on Russia’s effective annexation of Crimea, which is now a fait accompli. They are going to try to keep the focus on our inability to “contain” Russia, its butchery to keep Assad in power in Syria, its support for the crude dictator Lukashenko in Belarus, and its attempt to destabilize Ukraine if Russia can’t have it for itself.

All these things are true and real. But none of them is a serious strategic threat to the US’ future, let alone our entire species’. China presents both.

Today’s China is the only nation that seriously challenges us for global leadership. China has less than 18% of the world’s population but accounts for 28.7 % of global manufacturing. It is seeking or nearing global supremacy in such vital fields as quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology. China alone has placed a lander on the Moon’s Dark Side. Meanwhile, Russia has an economy the size of Italy’s.

China’s claim of hegemony in the South China Sea threatens global commerce and the security and prosperity of Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and South Korea—all our allies or neutral countries. Russia threatens global shipping, if at all, only in the Black Sea.

As for Afghanistan and its threat of Islamist terrorism, they are mostly Russia’s and China’s problems now. Russia has been fighting its Islamic neighbors to the South for at least two centuries. China keeps over a million Islamic Uighurs in concentration camps and persecutes many who are not incarcerated. Meanwhile the US observes freedom of religion, has mosques in every major city, and has female Muslims in Congress who wear hijabs. Guess which major powers are most likely to be the next focus of Islamist terrorism.

Yes, Joe Biden and his crew botched our exit from Afghanistan a bit. But getting out was not just the right thing to do: it was essential. China, the Number One greenhouse gas polluter (despite a late start), is the greatest current threat to our species’ comfort and survival.

With Xi Jinping having declared himself China’s latest emperor, with surveillance cameras on every street corner in China’s major cities, and with so many Uighurs in detention or forced labor, China is also the world’s greatest threat to human rights and Enlightenment values. Russia’s gulags, while still in operation, are now limited mostly to Putin’s domestic political rivals, such as Aleksei Navalny.

Right now, China is making clever and attractive commercial overtures toward Europe, Africa and the rest of Asia, seeking to split the “West” apart. As the successor to over five thousand years of clever and competent diplomacy, China is a master of this trade. (Even our own Henry Kissinger, on his first trip to “open” China for Nixon, reportedly advised his crew never to lie to the Chinese. His reason: they were—and are—supremely well-informed and competent in diplomacy and able to recognize a lie instantly.)

As for Russia itself, I have some relevant experience. I have spent over fifty years, on and off, studying the Russian language, literature and culture. In 1993, at the height of Russia’s openness to the West, I took a Fulbright Fellowship teaching intellectual property and antitrust law at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (“MGIMO” in the Russian acronym). That’s the same school that educated Vladimir Putin, albeit long before my time there.

Five and a half years ago, I wrote an essay about Russia’s national character and place in the world, entitled “Five Essential Truths about Russia.” Nothing decisive has changed since then. Russia is still an historically battered and consequently paranoid nation, stuck in a tsarist model of government (with Putin the latest tsar in a Potemkin “democracy”), slowly and painfully making its way toward modernity and nationally shared prosperity. Its leadership (including Putin), arose out of the ashes of World War II and the closet of Russian Communism; it has eyes ever fixed on Russia’s much-invaded borders and its “near-abroad.”

As Russia’s own clone of Tucker Carlson said on air, Russia has the power to reduce the US to radioactive ash. But the power to destroy is not what our species needs most now. If we do nothing at all, global warming will warp or destroy much of our global civilization all by itself. It will also produce a global flood of climate refugees that will make the current flow here from Africa, Central America and Haiti seem like a mere dribble.

China has the power both to create and to destroy. For several centuries in the early Middle Ages, it was undisputedly (at least in retrospect) the globe’s most advanced civilization. China is now teetering on a precipice dividing modern, technocratic state capitalism from a return to China’s imperial past, with advanced technology now capable of making China the most totalitarian dictatorship in human history. China, not Britain, could well be the realization of George Orwell’s darkest fantasies. And as the world’s largest polluter, China also holds the key to decelerating global warming.

Yet China’s future hangs in the balance. According to the New York Times, it may be turning inward again and withdrawing from the West, as it de-emphasizes instruction in English and training in foreign universities. Yet at the same time, China seeks to dominate global commerce, trade, science and technology, all of which are quintessentially cooperative.

Much of our species’ future will depend on how China’s current cultural schizophrenia resolves itself. And because the US is the only nation on Earth remotely comparable with China in size, wealth, power, and scope of influence, our policy toward China will be crucial. In comparison, what happens in and to Russia will be an afterthought, a footnote in history—unless, of course, some misguided Russian or American pushes The Button, in which case our species’ future will simply cease. And as for Afghanistan, it’s Russia’s and China’s problem now.

So as you watch President Biden’s leadership of American foreign policy, keep your eyes on China. It’s not everything that matters now, but in foreign affairs it’s pretty close.

Biden’s recent whiplashing pivot, along with Britain, to supply Australia with nuclear-powered submarines was diplomatically awkward. Yet it was a good first step toward containing China’s inappropriate nationalistic designs on the open seas, in bald contradiction to treaties that China itself has signed.

But containing China’s rare expansionism is only an important first step. We must learn to work with China to contain our entire species’ pollution and growing self-immolation. And we must learn to cooperate commercially, for the good of our entire species, without compromising or jeopardizing the world’s erratic progress toward human rights.

These are complex, delicate and difficult tasks. They will be by far the most important foreign-policy tests of the US for the next several decades. They alone should be how Biden’s foreign policy rightly should be judged. And we progressives should begin practicing, right now, how to keep voters’ eyes on the ball and off of distractions.

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Corporate Covid Cowardice

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The first Emergency Use Authorization for a vaccine against Covid-19 came last December 11. That was nine months ago—long enough to make a baby!

Yet only yesterday did we have the first full-court press by anyone with real national power to get everybody vaccinated. President Biden reportedly pulled out all the stops of presidential power, including the rulemaking power of OSHA over the safety and health of private workplaces, to mandate vaccinations. Unless they have valid medical or religious reasons for refusing to be vaccinated, workers in the military, federally-supported jobs and even private businesses of more than 100 employees soon will have to take the shots or find other work. It’s about time!

Coincidentally, the contagious delta variant was also first identified last December, in India. Of course it took a few months to recognize how quickly it would spread around the world and how contagious it was. But it seems clear, in retrospect, that the best approach to saving people and (because people are customers) the economy was getting all hands on deck to be vaccinated. That strategy might have avoided most, if not all, of this summer’s and fall’s big Covid hit to the economy, not to mention tens of thousands of unnecessary infections, hospitalizations and deaths.

What was by far the primary reason for this deadly and economy-killing delay? It was politics. It was not just the sensible politics of reasonable political differences. It was the politics of science denial, heads in the sand, and jinned-up artificial rage. It was getting millions of ordinary people to refuse a vaccine that could save their lives and avoid the suffering and death of their loved ones and co-workers, in the name of the “freedom” to do whatever the hell they please. It was a Republican Party that put brand differentiation—by whatever means and for whatever absurd purpose—above the people’s health and welfare. It was a movement that made the Luddites and the Know Nothings of old look like paragons of Reason.

One of the most disappointing things about this malevolently manufactured delay in mass vaccination was the role that business played in it. I’ll bet that, in the corporate suites and the boards of directors of the Fortune 500 companies, over 90% of those medically eligible got vaccinated within 90 days of that December 11 start date. (Some enterprising reporter or researcher should gather these statistics ASAP.)

How can I be confident? Because all the professors, scientists, technologists, lawyers and others in my own personal milieu got vaccinated as soon as they could. The retired among us spent hours or days on the phone tracking down the quickest way to get vaccinated. Some got in our cars and drove for hours to get the shots as quickly as we could. My wife and I drove over forty miles to a town we’d never visited to get our first Moderna shot, then found a much closer place to get the second shot four weeks later.

The high executives of big corporations are no less intelligent and informed than we and probably more self-protective; and they have/had much greater resources to locate and command their shots. But what did all these captains of industry do publicly, while undoubtedly scarfing up vaccines for themselves and their families?

They pandered to the mob. Fearing being called out and maybe losing customers, they kept silent. Many, if not most, refused to mandate vaccination among their employees, for God’s sake, let alone their customers. The “leaders” of corporate America ducked their public-health and common-sense responsibilities and refused to lead.

As a result, I have avoided (among many other things) traveling by air since my last pre-pandemic plane flight on February 26, 2020. I’m not getting on a plane again until all crew and passengers must show evidence of full vaccination, must wear masks (preferably N-95s handed out at the door) during the entire flight, and will even be nagged to wear them properly, not dropped below their noses.

I’m still waiting for a single airline to break ranks and do the right thing, while at least seven cruise lines have mandated vaccinations for all passengers and crew. And therein lies the riddle. Why did so many corporate leaders (outside the cruise industry) fail to do the right thing for their employees, their customers, and ultimately their own businesses?

Let’s suppose, for a moment, that my reasonable conjecture is true—that 90% or more of execs and directors in America’s corporate suites got themselves and their families vaccinated within 90 days of vaccine availability. Why not urge or require something similar for their customers?

The answer is unlikely to be business savvy. I doubt any airline, for example, did a marketing survey or even had the time to do so. If one had, it might have found that people like me, who grabbed the chance to be vaccinated, travel by plane (or did before the pandemic) at least a half-dozen round trips per year, while the sort of people claiming “rights” to be infected and infectious maybe traveled once, for example, to trash the Capitol on January 6.

There is, of course, a bit of speculation in this point. But nowhere have I read of any careful marketing studies, or any data gathering, to justify the near-universal cowardice of corporate leaders in the face of blindly irrational resistance to common-sense public-health measures. Corporate leaders’ AWOL status in the biggest public-health crisis in a century deserves, at a minimum, massive socio-economic and political research.

Can we expect better now? I hope so. President Biden’s all-fronts push on vaccination and masking may be much like the naïve child pointing out the last Emperor’s absence of clothing. At very least, it will give timid corporate leaders “cover” for doing the right thing for their employees, their customers, and their businesses. The big question that needs answering is why and how these far-sighted men and women, who together built the strongest economy in human history, lacked the courage to do anything similar each on his or her own. The question is why, at this critical time, our corporate leaders acted like deer caught in the headlights of obviously irrational demagoguery.

CODA: I am no left-wing basher of corporations. I have written several essays on this blog (including this one on the often-unacknowledged upside of corporate “rule” and this one on the downside) about the increasing entrenchment of large corporations on the traditional domains of government. As our society, science and technology grow increasingly more complex and specialized, increasing corporate domination of the details of daily life is only natural. But with that domination comes increasing corporate responsibility, including responsibility for the public welfare.

In its initial response to Covid and its later response to vaccination, corporate America dismally failed both the test of responsibility and the test of common sense. It behooves us all to find out why, in detail, and consider how that failure can be corrected. As the very corporate development of the “miracle” mRA vaccines (Moderna’s and Pfizer’s) shows, a modern society cannot always count on government alone to do all that its people need for survival.

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The Great Experiment: A Marshall Plan for Afghanistan

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

America’s fighting force has now left Afghanistan, except for the continuing threat of the odd drone strike or bombing run to keep terrorists in check. So a great experiment is now beginning. The question it poses is simple but profound. Do you have to have won in order to execute a Marshall Plan? Or can such a Plan turn defeat on the battlefield into something resembling a moral, human and practical victory?

As I’ve outlined elsewhere, our Marshall Plan was unique in human history. World War II had killed an estimated 50 million people before their times, over ten times as many as Covid has to date. Yet at its end we were the luckiest victor, with our homeland largely intact. (Soviet Russia, in contrast, had been devastated.) So we did something unprecedented. We invented the Marshall Plan and loved our former enemies, much as Jesus had advised.

After our constructive occupation of Japan and our Marshall Plan in Europe, our two former enemies have become the world’s third and fourth largest economies. Both are thriving and hugely productive democracies. The energy and efficiency that had made them such terrible foes have now made them global sources of innovation and great places to live and work. The first hybrid cars came from Japan, and the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccine came from Germany. These two nations are now our strongest allies, independent sources of power and backbone.

We didn’t set out to do good. Our motives were entirely practical and selfish, albeit enlightened. We wanted to avoid another war, perhaps an even more terrible one. We knew that poverty, misery and resentment are the sources of war, and we wanted to reduce them in war-devastated lands. We also wanted to limit the breeding grounds for Communism in postwar Europe and Asia.

George C. Marshall was hardly an idealist or a dreamer. He had been a Five-Star General and Army Chief of Staff. He had organized the United States’ military victories in Europe and Asia. You can’t get much more practical than that.

It was only later, in the postwar period and as Secretary of State, that Marshall conceived and implemented the Plan that bears his name. A practical man, he loved our former enemies because that was what worked to build a better world. In fact it worked spectacularly. The peace and prosperity that have prevailed in most of Europe and East Asia for 75 years are largely Marshall’s legacy.

Of course it’s easier to remake societies when you have total control. Wartime Japan and Germany had both surrendered unconditionally, giving the US’ occupying forces plenary power to remake them. No similar situation pertains in Afghanistan. But oddly enough, our earlier ignominious defeat—in Vietnam—may provide a model.

Today, 46 years after our defeat in Vietnam, we have friendly relations with Hanoi. Vietnam now makes our underwear and docks our cruise ships. Our industries are increasingly transferring production from China to Vietnam, which doesn’t steal our technology, hack our computers, plan global commercial domination, or threaten international shipping and maritime peace. Like China’s, Vietnam’s “Communism” has morphed from classical Marxist central control to a form of regulated state capitalism, but without China’s aggressive, expansionist globalism.

Our current good relations with Vietnam grew out of a sense of moral obligation, albeit a somewhat selfish one. Our military had left a lot of their own behind in Vietnam—the so-called “missing in action” or MIAs. Those among us who had fought the war felt a strong moral obligation to leave none of their own behind, living or dead. So “return the MIAs” became a national movement, with strong political support in the Republican Party and at the highest levels of our government.

Our late Senator John McCain had languished for half a decade as a prisoner of war in a North Vietnamese prison camp. Motivated to get our war dead out, he helped lead our “return the MIAs” effort. But he was only one of many.

In the course of innumerable visits to Vietnam and negotiations with Vietnamese leaders, McCain and others learned just how terrible the war had been for the other side. The defoliant Agent Orange had disfigured and maimed Vietnamese children. Myriad landmines and unexploded bombs, decades later, still killed and maimed rural people in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

So our MIA negotiators gained respect for the Vietnamese, seeing just how costly the war itself had been for them and their neighbors. (The war had killed an estimated 3.3 million soldiers and civilians in the three Southeast Asian nations.) That sense of moral obligation and respect became the basis for our current friendly relations with Vietnam, despite our humiliating loss in the war.

Could our relationship with Afghanistan follow a similar trajectory? MIAs are not an issue there: the peculiar nature of the Afghan terrain and battles there let us extract nearly all of our war dead and wounded in real time. But an even stronger moral obligation has arisen in Afghanistan: an obligation to the living.

Today the bond we Americans feel with Afghans has nothing to do with MIAs. Instead, it involves the Afghans who helped us in our battles and in our diplomatic and civilian efforts to improve Afghans’ lives. Our moral obligation to them sparked much of our extraordinary last-minute evacuation effort, which has just ended. Thousands of our military survivors, as well as interested civilians, helped and are still helping evacuate Afghan friends, working virtually, online and even in person. They and we all have a moral stake in the fate of the Afghan diaspora and in the Afghans who, willingly or not, remain under Taliban rule.

Our moral obligation doesn’t stop there. Until the recent collapse, grants from the US and international institutions like the World Bank reportedly provided three-quarters of the Afghan nation’s public spending. The real prospect and fear of that money-flow stopping was one of the strongest factors in the collapse of the Afghan Army and government.

So now, it seems to me, we have a far stronger moral obligation in Afghanistan than we did in Vietnam. We have an obligation to thousands—maybe millions—of Afghans who looked to us for protection, sustenance and the prospect of a brighter future. We have a moral obligation to prevent the collapse of the Afghan economy and the humanitarian catastrophe that would follow. And yes, we have a moral obligation, within limits, to work with the Taliban to persuade and help them to govern their country well.

As for means, we have them, too. The prospect of American warriors coming home in body bags is ended. The fighting, wounding and dying are ended. We and our wartime allies have enormous leverage in money, on-ground experience, and knowledge of the place, the time, and the people. We have enduring personal bonds of American warriors, civilians and emissaries with Afghan soldiers and civilians.

So what we should do now is organize a new Marshall Plan for Afghanistan. As the richest country on Earth, we must try to show the world that “soft” power can still help improve a society after military power has failed.

Of course much depends on the Taliban seizing the opportunity that we proffer. But they would be crazy to miss chance to build a better, happier and more prosperous nation on the foundations of a kinder, gentler Islam and cooperation with their erstwhile enemies. And who knows? If we succeed, we will have taken a giant step along the hard trail blazed by George Marshall toward making war itself obsolete.

Afghanistan is still there. Millions whom we have educated, trained, enriched and given the vision of a brighter future are still there. Many of those who have left will return when and if conditions improve. Our military equipment may be gone, but the hotels, theaters, businesses, roads, schools and hospitals that we financed or built are still there. The Taliban, let alone under its currently restored leadership, will not want to destroy them. If we are humble enough to let Afghans accept new leadership and a different God, we can see to it that all our sacrifice (and theirs!) will not have been in vain. Let the diplomats take over after the warriors have departed.

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