Digest 26: More deaths than Vietnam; negotiating momentum; pragmatic Germany?
Digest #26 – I guess this means I’ve been doing this Substack for a year now. Over the year I feel like I’ve come to better define what it is I’m aggregating notes on. Inspired by this passage from Dominic Cummings – here writing on WWI:
‘Westminster handled deterrence over Belgium catastrophically and could not integrate thinking between economic, political, military and intelligence considerations. We did the worst of all worlds, fighting over Belgium after confusing our message so much Berlin thought we would not fight.’
And this from Graham Allison:
‘My conviction that we owe those who’ve made the ultimate sacrifice our best efforts to apply lessons of wars past to avoid unnecessary wars sending future generations to premature graves. The long peace the world has enjoyed since World War II is history’s exception – not the rule.’
Such thinking feels desperately lacking right now. I consider that I am making a humble attempt to integrate economic/political/military/intelligence thinking, and illustrate how needless war could be averted. That’s what this Substack is about.
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A few people noted not getting an email notification on my last digest. If you missed it, the last one is here. The Victoria Nuland clip at the top is well worth a listen!
Onto this digest – most interesting highlights from the past two weeks…
More deaths than Vietnam
From the New York Times:
‘In just a year and a half, Ukraine’s military deaths have already surpassed the number of American troops who died during the nearly two decades U.S. units were in Vietnam.’
Please let that sink in.
And Vietnam was awful.
The West encouraged Ukraine’s counteroffensive, which (without air support) was surely doomed to fail – and which from leaked intelligence reported by even the very gung-ho Washington Post, we know we knew ahead of April.
Negotiating momentum
I’d like to re-highlight two passages from Daniel Kurtz-Phelan’s book on George Marshall’s attempts to broker peace at the outbreak of the Chinese Civil War, that feels very analogous to Ukraine today.
‘Marshall grasped the dynamic at work. Each side overplayed its hand when momentum seemed to be in its favor and then came back to negotiate when the momentum had shifted, at which point the other side was no longer interested.’
‘As far as Marshall was concerned, there was already plenty of blame to go around. Each side had pressed its advantage in moments of apparent success, then come back newly obliging when momentum started to reverse.’
The idea that you can negotiate at the height of a pendulum swing your way is fallacy. The likes of Richard Haass who advocated for this in April of this year, after a lifetime in and around diplomacy, should have known better.
Pragmatic Germany?
This from Freddie Sayers and Wolfgang Munchau at UnHerd (for 3 mins) is really good:
If you can entertain the more conspiratorial, from Seymour Hersh:
‘Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who has kept his silence about when and what he knew about President Biden’s decision to mangle Germany’s economy by destroying the Nord Stream pipelines last September… Scholz’s continued silence about an act of violence against his state can only be described as mystifying, especially as the energy crisis intensified in recent months to the point where the German people were suffering.’
Ray Dalio on U.S. civil war
‘What is now happening hasn’t happened before in our lifetimes but has happened many times throughout history—typically, just before civil wars. In my opinion, this is a VERY big, bad deal yet most people are quietly going along with it.’
Does the expansion of BRICS matter?
The existing five BRICS countries are, measured by PPP, already larger than the G7, and they’ve six more countries imminently joining.
If you care about this, I highly recommend this week’s All-In Podcast from the below timestamp, all the way through. Excellent back and forth debate.
Rather than try to start a rival reserve currency, it appears clear the first objective of the group is to reduce their vulnerability to the U.S. dollar – using their own currencies in trade amongst themselves.
My having been hyper-sensitive to this, and evidently wrong in timing, earlier in the year, it was also notable to see that one of these new member countries, Argentina, looks like it might choose to dollarize:
‘Following his surprise win in Argentina’s Aug. 13 presidential primary, Javier Milei was in the international spotlight discussing an unusual topic for a rock-star politician: monetary policy.
Mr. Milei has promised to close the central bank and dollarize the economy—a process that would essentially outsource the country’s monetary policy to the Federal Reserve.’
Bad as things seem in the West, we should be grateful we’re not experiencing hyperinflation.
Lastly on this, looking back at some notes from Lee Kuan Yew (this said pre-2013):
‘To hold ground in the Pacific, the U.S. must not let its fiscal deficits come to grief. If they come to grief and there is a run on the dollar for whatever reason… and the bankers and all the hedge funds and everybody come to a conclusion that the U.S. is not going to tackle these deficits, and they begin to move their assets out, that would spell real trouble… America’s debt is what worries me most, because it will absolutely strike at the heart of America’s global leadership.’
Too many generals
This clip contrasting the number of U.S. four-star generals in WWII versus today is fascinating:
My Lai Tapes
I listened to a BBC audio documentary about the My Lai massacre.
On 16 March 1968, U.S. soldiers killed 504 innocent Vietnamese villagers in My Lai, Vietnam.
The last few seconds of the documentary stood out:
‘Most Americans, if they know anything about My Lai, know that some soldiers killed some civilians. But they have little grasp of the scale of the massacre… A simpler, sanitised My Lai massacre has become the accepted version of events. The lessons that were learned have been largely forgotten. It’s almost as if it never happened. But the problem with cover-ups is they set the stage for further abuses. Today the public has difficulty believing its troops are capable of atrocities because they just don’t understand that they’ve happened before.’
The audio is from 2008. Part one of the documentary here. Part two here.
On Prigozhin’s death
Dominic Cummings put it better than anyone back in early March of last year:
‘It’s reasonable to believe all of:
a. Putin is mafia, Russia is a mafia government… AND
b. Nato expansion was a historic mistake, we should have aimed for a Ukraine that’s neutral and prosperous, with Nato completely off the table. AND
c. Putin bears most responsibility for the deaths in Ukraine. AND
…People in Ukraine have the right to vote for who they want but it’s sensible to consider carefully what Russia wants given it’s nuclear-armed and Putin does not care about civilian casualties and elements in D.C are happy to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian.’
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Thanks for reading. I’m going to be away in the U.S. almost all of September. I will resume back here on Substack in October.