Of Warming Planets and Cooling Economies

Did you notice when the Obama Administration paused in its ballyhooing about global warming?  President Obama and his officials had been busily hustling the warming of the planet and its attendant disasters—which they insist can only be fixed by increasing government control of our lives, from birthing to breathing.  The President was in Florida, blaming the future hurricane season—which has not yet happened—on global warming.  “The best climate scientists in the world are telling us that extreme weather events like hurricanes are likely to become more powerful.”  What President Obama did not mention—anywhere in his speech at the National Hurricane Center in Miami—was that the scientists predicted a “below-normal” hurricane season for 2015.  Was that mercy because of or in spite of global warming? 

Perhaps we should not blame the President for leaving that little item of information out, since for each of the last several years the cited “best climate scientists” (whoever they are) had predicted extraordinarily active and destructive hurricane seasons.  Since each season turned out to be unusually mild, the official forecasters have now changed their tune, putting themselves solidly in-sync with recent trends.  Do not put yourself at risk with a long investment on it either way. 

As for global warming, however, the President and those who say they agree with him insist that the debate is over (in either science or a free nation can the debate ever really be over?), meaning that it is unacceptable to disagree with them.  If you can’t say something calamitous, then don’t say anything at all.

Then, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, the global warming talk stopped.  There was a mercifully, if brief, moratorium on warming warnings.  Instead of predicted calamity, a real calamity was at hand that required some ‘splaining.  The most recent report on the nation’s economic growth was announced.  Not only had growth slowed, as measured by government number crunchers, the economy had actually declined in the first 3 months of 2015.  That seemed to come as a surprise to no one who is either without a job or working in a job that is something less than the job held before 2009.  But it was unwelcome news to the Administration that has been working on economic revival for going on seven years.

Instead of global warming, the Administration needed cold weather to blame for the decline in economic activity during January, February, and March.  The lead official White House explanative was, “harsh winter weather”.  I did not make this up, and you are not supposed to notice how convenient White House excuses are.  It was better that global warming talk was cooled for a moment lest people recognize the contradictions in the official propaganda and begin to wonder whether White House policies were working.

Winter weather is not a novel excuse for failed government programs.  The old Soviet Union blamed repeated crop failures on harsh winters (in Russia?  Who knew?).  The similarity in excuses used by the Obama White House and the Soviet Politburo is not accidental.  Central planners can survive only if they have at the ready a list of excuses of things beyond their control.  The list could be a long one, since in the end there is not very much about the economy that central planners can control, if control means making things go the way intended.  To quote the character Jayne Cobb, in Serenity, “what you plan and what takes place ain’t ever been exactly similar.”

Of Lessons of History and Preventing Wars

History does not repeat itself, not precisely.  Humans, though, have been doing similar things for thousands of years.  History offers patterns from which we can learn.  That is to say, that there is nothing new that is wholly new. 

There is too much for comfort in the current international situation—and the U.S. response to it—that feels like the 1930s.  The republics of the West, focused inward, struggle with economic traumas and work hard to make them worse in the name of making things better.  National leaders even when aware of storm clouds on the global horizons ignore them if they can, and minimize the dangers if they cannot, applying symbolic but ineffective remedies where action is unavoidable.  Aggressive second rate powers strive for recognition as though first rate powers, conspiring to disrupt the international equilibrium and the peace that rests on it to get what they want.  While potential enemies rapidly rearm, the West disarms in the name of peace, heedless of the wars and conflicts that fill the vacuums of their military retreats.  Again, I am talking about today, not the 1930s, but the parallels are disquieting.

The United States has gotten into unwanted conflicts, especially in the 20^th Century, when adversaries miscalculated our nation’s willingness to sacrifice to defend crucial interests.  Weak-kneed, pusillanimous, or just unwise national executives invited war by giving enemies many reasons to doubt our will and resolve:  unprepared armed forces, verbal warnings enforced with bluster, shirked fulfillment of pledges to help endangered friends.  The Japanese thought that isolationist and poorly armed America would seek a negotiated settlement after Pearl Harbor, the North Koreans were confident that we were too war-weary to defend the South, Saddam Hussein—twice—believed that we would not want to fight a war in the sands of Iraq.  Our responses to frequent goading did little to dissuade them.  Logically following our miscues they each went too far at last.  They all could have been stopped by a determined show of strength early while war remained avoidable, when we could have corrected their calculations at lesser cost to us and to them.

The communist leaders of China are by nature cautious.  You survive the palace intrigues of the Forbidden City by avoiding mistakes, not by making them.  But the Chinese leaders also have big plans, increasingly marked on a global map.  The leaders of the regime in power are the heirs of their founder, Mao, who liked to refer to the United States as a paper tiger.  For a time Nixon and Reagan disabused them of that notion, but they seem to be reconvincing themselves of Mao’s insights.  Where is the recent evidence to the contrary?

At first, Chinese forays were camouflaged by equipping and supporting the adventures of the proxy North Koreans.  Lately, the Chinese military itself has repeatedly hacked into U.S. civilian and military computer systems, with efforts ranging from nuisances to theft of military and technology secrets. The rapidly expanding Chinese navy is now building aircraft carriers, though it has no overseas enemies.  In a related effort, the Chinese are dredging up artificial islands in the South China Sea, a thousand miles from their shores, closer to the Philippines, Malaysia, and Vietnam than to the southern coast of China.  With naval stations and air strips on the islands, the Chinese are asserting a dramatic expansion of territorial waters measured from these militarized sandbars.  Connecting the dots from new island to new island (there are some half dozen or more of these land-creation projects underway), the Chinese navy alleges control of sea lanes and airspace, demanding that planes or ships not pass their theoretical net without Beijing’s permission.  The U.S. has made protests, recently backed up by a reconnaissance plane flying across what has been international waters and free airspace since before and after World War II.  At least for the moment the Chinese only fired words, eight times (according to a CNN story) warning the U.S. plane to stay away.  “This is the Chinese navy.  You go.”

This is a minor disturbance in a major geopolitical struggle.  Busy trade lanes cross the South China Sea.  In the context of Beijing’s acquisition of an offensive, MIRVed nuclear missile arsenal now approaching the size of Russian and U.S. nuclear forces (the U.S. being the only one developing plans to reduce its stockpile), the risks are becoming very high.

China has big domestic problems.  The economy is slowing, if not already in recession.  That will make it even harder for Beijing to keep quiescent a population only half of which has experienced extraction from grinding communist poverty.  An aging population will be difficult for the declining workforce to support in coming years.  And then there is the legacy of China’s one-child policy, more than 100 million males with no possibility of marriage and family.  What to do with those restless men?

Throughout history, China’s biggest dangers have usually been from Chinese, vulnerabilities from the outside attracted only when there was weakness caused by internal struggles.  Might the heirs of Mao seek to distract internal discontent with international adventurism?  A lesson from history is that the more autocratic the regime, the more likely it is to resort to this gambit.

We need a foreign policy that convinces the Chinese leaders how dangerous and unrewarding such moves would be.  That becomes harder to do the more we allow the Chinese to fool themselves that it might be otherwise.   That was a pattern of disaster for Tojo, Hitler, and others—and for us.