On wheat: Maybe it takes a long time for world wheat production to adjust, but what about world wheat consumption? Price of wheat goes up slightly, people reduce their wheat consumption by one percent, it doesn't seem like a big deal.
On the complexity and installation difficulty of heat pumps: what's wrong with ordinary electric heaters? They're less efficient than heat pumps, but that's partially offset by the fact you only have to heat the room you're in instead of your whole house. Plus you can buy one for, like, twenty bucks, and plug it into your wall. (Not sure how well it works in genuinely cold places, though.)
Re: the Sarah Taber thread, I'm bearish. It's been a hot minute (>200 years, probably) since there was a famine because calories required exceeded calories produced. The trouble since the second agricultural revolution has been getting food in mouths. Most Eastern European wheat goes to feeding the Middle East. *If* Iran and/or Saudi Arabia play nice, then India can make up the shortfall. But if both of them decide to play hardball and get aboard the "burn down the 20th c. global order" train, they could plausibly close off trade (Iran closing land routes, Saudi Arabia closing sea routes). I'm not sure if/why they might do so, but I also lost money on Putin's invasion happening, so I'm trying to keep options open re: corrupt autocratic regimes doing daft shit. Since there's certainly no regime corrupter or autocraticer than the House of Saud and Iran is already mostly not a part of the global order, I'd say the prospects of Indian wheat actually making it to the consumers of Eastern European wheat is >50% but bad enough to be alarming. I'd consider any prediction of major Middle Eastern famine below 20% to be a good arbitrage opportunity.
What makes you think Saudi Arabia would be able to close sea trade routes through the Red Sea? They don't control the entire Red Sea from an international law perspective, and if they tried to control it with force they'd immediately get slapped down by a coalition of every major trading nation that uses that route, which happens to include all of Europe and Asia.
Granted, a lot would need to go wrong for that to happen, but there's currently a shooting war in Europe, so clearly we're living in a universe which allows a lot of things to go wrong. But if you want a plausible story, here's one: Iran shuts down overland trade because it's Iran. Saudi Arabia tells the Asian powers (already dependent on Saudi oil) and the European powers (probably soon-to-be dependent on Saudi oil now that Russia's trying its hardest to get them to give up Russian oil) that they're going to extort the wheat shipments through the Red Sea and Europe and Asia are going to allow it to happen (and keep America from stepping in) on pain of no longer getting Saudi oil. I think the conjunction probability "Saudi Arabia tries this" and "conditional on them trying it, it works" is less than 50%, but I can't honestly say it or something basically similar to it in outcome is much less than 20%. As I said in my original post "less likely than not, but still likely enough to be alarming".
No I'm sorry but what you're saying just sounds ridiculous to me. If you're allotting anything over .01% of Saudi Arabia being able to limit sea trade through the Red Sea your model of the world is just fundamentally so far gone from mine I'm not sure where to start. And to do it just so they can stop some wheat shipments that would ease famine in neighboring countries? I can't even understand how you'd think they'd want something like that. You seem to think they have some major grudge with the current world order that they'd be willing to watch the world burn in order to score some points or something? You've bought in way too hard to the whole democracy vs. autocracy meme that's going around. Countries, whether democratic or autocratic, care mostly about themselves and will continue to act in that manner moving forward.
And the idea that a shooting war in Ukraine is so fundamentally surprising to you is also strange. Has there not been multiple wars in former Soviet territory since the 90s? Yugoslavia, Georgia, Chechnya, and even Ukraine since 2014? I might not have been expecting Putin to attempt a full-on invasion like this, but it hasn't completely rearranged my worldview the way it has for you. Seems like you're over-updating way too hard on this one. And honestly your ideas on foreign policy seem so fundamentally distorted I just don't even know where you're getting this stuff from.
Saudi Arabia has a very good, homegrown, well-equipped air force which is entirely up to the task of shutting down Red Sea shipping if no first-rate powers wanted to stop them. So the argument that they lack the capability is incorrect.
The argument that they wouldn't want to is giving Mohammed bin Salman entirely too much credit. The Jamal Khashoggi assassination implies a pretty much infinite willingness to do destructive, violent, internationally unpopular things for petty reasons. And that's assuming that it's not in Saudi Arabia's interest to burn down the rest of the Middle East, which is demonstrable nonsense. They're surrounded by people who hate their guts and they have enough oil wealth that they don't need to look beyond their peninsula to keep themselves fat and happy as long as no one traipses across the desert and punches them in the mouth. Hence why they've funded, trained, and equipped approximately 100% of the most violent, deranged, destabilizing terrorist groups in the Middle East and North Africa since the House of Saud came to power.
The only check on their not setting the entire region on fire is the fear of losing the support of first-rate powers who depend on them for energy and on whom they depend for security. If the Middle Eastern powers who could plausibly threaten them were too busy starving to do so and the first-rate powers were even more dependent on Middle Eastern oil than they already were, MbS could easily say "I'm altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further" where one of the alterations is they get to do what they want in the Red Sea. And if you think the family which funded and supported literal Osama bin Laden wouldn't happily cause chaos and misery to increase their security and relative standing in their region, then you're the one who needs to rethink their world-model.
"You seem to think they have some major grudge with the current world order that they'd be willing to watch the world burn in order to score some points or something?" Yes. Literally yes. This is their revealed preference. If you're paying attention then you'd know that the world burning is strongly positive in the Saudi utility function. Again, and I can not emphasize this enough, the House of Saud and their Wahabi allies provide roughly 100% of the material and philosophical support for approximately all of the world's Islamic terrorists. Speculate to your heart's content about what they rightly or wrongly expect to get out of burning the world but you're arguing that the person actually currently splashing gasoline around the building and tossing lit matches into the wastepaper baskets wouldn't burn the building down if given the chance.
>The Jamal Khashoggi assassination implies a pretty much infinite willingness to do destructive, violent, internationally unpopular things for petty reasons.
No it doesn't. It shows that a young autocrat pushed his hand too far thinking he could get away with it and got burned. It's more likely that he'll be a lot more cautious moving forward.
>And that's assuming that it's not in Saudi Arabia's interest to burn down the rest of the Middle East, which is demonstrable nonsense.
How do you square that with MBSs pet project Neom? Or is attempting to build a regional megacity within an economic free trade zone something someone would want to do when they plan on burning down their entire region?
>If the Middle Eastern powers who could plausibly threaten them were too busy starving to do so and the first-rate powers were even more dependent on Middle Eastern oil than they already were, MbS could easily say "I'm altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further" where one of the alterations is they get to do what they want in the Red Sea
So if Saudi Arabia was threatening to stop wheat shipments from relieving starvation in Middle Eastern powers you think they'd just sit back and be like, oh well guess you got us? And you don't think the US would intervene because... Europe/Asia would lean on us because they depend on Saudi oil? You clearly have an axe to grind against the House of Saud and Wahabism, but it just seems like foreign policy naivety to think the world would allow Saudi Arabia to hold them hostage over their oil exports. We could probably just relax sanctions on Venezuela/Iran to replace their oil output if it came to it. Russia has Europe over a barrel because of natural gas more than oil. You can't easily reroute natural gas transportation, LNG is expensive to produce/store/transport compared to using gas pipelines.
Anyways I don't think we're convincing each other of anything here so I'll leave off responding further. But if Saudi Arabia does anything remotely close to messing with sea trades through the Red Sea in the next fifty years I'll consider you the victor of the informal bet in my mind.
Edited to remove some snark. I shouldn't be so combative just because our worldviews are so wildly disparate.
I think the focus people have on wheat is a bit myopic. Sure, Ukraine grows a lot of wheat, but it exports more corn than it does wheat (and these tend to be somewhat supplementary goods.) According to this (https://www.fb.org/market-intel/ukraine-russia-volatile-ag-markets), Ukraine has 6 agricultural exports that typically exceed $1 bil/yr:
* Corn ($5.8b)
* Sunflower Seed ($5.7b)
* Wheat ($5.1b)
* Rapeseed (Canola) ($1.7b)
* Barley ($1.3b)
* Sunflower meal ($1.2b)
Of these, the shortage I'm least concerned about is wheat, because wheat has multiple crops per year. I'm not familiar with Ukrainian climate/practices specifically, but in rural Michigan where I live farmers usually get two crops of wheat per year. Farther south with a longer growing season, you can get three crops per year. A spring invasion may only knock out half of Ukraine's annual wheat production, even in the areas that are completely shut down.
On the other hand, corn produces one crop per year. Sunflowers produce one crop per year. So does rapeseed. I'm not familiar with barley, but a quick google suggests it's probably a typical one crop per year plant as well. These grains seem likely to be more affected by any shorter invasion scenario than wheat.
>An alternative interpretation is that authoritarian armies that have not been tested in a long time and then are asked to invade have a tendency to dramatically underperform
I mean we can't have it both ways with the authoritarianism and effectiveness observation. On COVID and fiscal policy, authoritarianism is considered a feature. But now for military operations it's a bug? I could be convinced otherwise but I don't think authoritarian governments have much of a correlation with military might.
FWIW, I think a better military parallel for the current invasion might be Russia's own winter war(s) with Finland or the Second Chechen war. In both cases, Russia chose to "learn the hard way" before ultimately changing tactics to brutally suppress the populace.
The difference is that policymakers and public health authorities don't shoot people for a living. With COVID and fiscal policy you can just do the Lee Kwan Yew thing where you find the smart people and put them in charge. With military operations, finding the smart people and putting them in charge results in smart people being in charge of the people with guns, and smart people are usually smart enough to wonder, if they're in charge of the people with the guns, why they shouldn't be in charge of everything else as well. Expecting different strategies to work in an arena where the people with guns are versus the arenas where there aren't people with guns isn't "trying to have it both ways", it's just not falling prey to the halo effect.
There’s some other nice stories about the military forces of Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, Prussia, Mao’s PLA, and Soviet Russia.
Maybe those stories could be instructive as to how strong authoritarian regimes can be. Maybe being smart isn’t the end all be all the rationalist community fantasizes it should be.
-Imperial Japan: fought liberal powers, lost so badly they became a de facto satellite state of the liberal powers for at least a decade
-Nazi Germany: fought liberal powers, lost so badly that ~100% of their high command killed themselves or were tried and executed
-Prussia: fought liberal powers, lost so hard their country suffered a critical existence failure, near-total discontinuity of political institutions
-Mao's PLA: fought liberal powers by proxy in Korea, took a draw after heavy losses due to liberal powers not caring enough to commit to total war
-Soviet Russia: never fought direct action against near-peer liberal powers, still somehow lost hard enough that they stopped existing
Can you spell out the thought process behind using a list of illiberal regimes which lost to liberal regimes as evidence for how strong illiberal regimes can be? You seem to think this is a much stronger argument than it is, and it would be fascinating to find out why.
If I were to list militarily powerful liberal regimes - for starters Revolutionary America, the Union in the American Civil War, the Allies in WWII - the list would be as impressive as yours but with the added benefit that the powers on my list... actually... you know... won.
If you actually want to give evidence I'd give credence to, try finding a 1.) industrial-era war, 2.) fought between near-peers, 3.) where both sides were seriously committed to the fight, 4.) where there was a clearly-more-liberal side, and 5.) the more liberal side clearly lost. I'm not enough of a military history nerd to confidently state that there aren't any, but none of the major wars I can think of since the American Revolution fit the bill. Either the liberals won (or at least forced draws) or they weren't playing to win (Vietnam, GWOT, etc.).
And that's playing the low-tier game of cherrypicking examples (which I'm happy to do since even the cherrypicked examples of the creme de la creme of non-liberal militaries still got their asses handed to them whenever they went against liberal militaries), if you actually look at the broader data, even if I'm wrong and non-liberals have occasionally pulled off a W, that's still a notable outlier compared to the obvious trend of liberals winning when they fight non-liberals.
>Can you spell out the thought process behind using a list of illiberal regimes which lost to liberal regimes as evidence for how strong illiberal regimes can be?
Because militarily they were the stronger players in the same way the US is stronger than the Taliban or Viet Cong despite taking big L's to both. And even if you want to point to the scoreboard, the Nazi's/Japanese were still very strong and extremely capable war fighters. Most of our maneuver warfare doctrine today comes from the Nazi's, and before that the Prussians. The Japanese literally invented the naval warfare paradigm the US/world uses today. They were simply more advanced and capable. Also, their military competence had little to nothing to do with how liberal or illiberal their governments were.
My assertion is that "liberalness" is a noisy factor in evaluating military might. In the case of WWII, which do you think had more of an effect: the liberalness of the players, or the industrial isolation/might of the US or the Slavic tolerance of taking huge causalities? (As an aside, I would argue that if it wasn't for the illiberal Soviet's commitment to losing untold numbers of young men, WWII goes another way in the European theater.)
I'll make another assertion: the liberalness of a regime more predictably informs their political aims (what kinda of goals they have) much more than their military capabilities (how they use violence to achieve those goals). And I think this is what's getting conflated. Illiberal regimes more often undertake uniquely dumb strategies like, say, invading Russia in the winter instead of sticking to the European continent or bombing Pearl Harbor instead of sticking to China and European colonies or invading Kuwait or anything Indonesia has ever done or invading Vietnam (China) or invading Cambodia (Vietnam) or anything in the Congo or pretty much Africa. There are notable exceptions where liberal governments do really dumb things too but that's mostly just America.
Bottom line: Liberalness informs the "what" and a bunch of other stuff informs the "how".
> Because militarily they were the stronger players in the same way the US is stronger than the Taliban or Viet Cong despite taking big L's to both
These are clearly different, tho. The US lost to the VC because they didn't care about winning the war, they just wanted to spend the minimal amount of blood and treasure as they could get away with to prove to NATO and the Soviets that they'd stick by their security guarantees. The geopolitical aim in Afghanistan wasn't as clear cut, but, again, we easily could have won militarily if we cared to. Hitler cared so little about his war that he... *checks notes*... killed himself when his defeat became clear. You can bet your ass that if Dick Nixon or Biden had felt personally threatened by the VC or Taliban to the point that they'd commit suicide if they entered DC and that was a likely thing to happen, then we would have flattened Vietnam/Afghanistan instead of withdrawing.
> And even if you want to point to the scoreboard, the Nazi's/Japanese were still very strong and extremely capable war fighters.
Sure, they were good. But not as good as the Allies.
> Most of our maneuver warfare doctrine today comes from the Nazi's, and before that the Prussians.
The difference is that the Allies had the tactical flexibility and delegated command doctrine to adopt the best tactics of their opponents, achieve strategic aims due to individual initiative, etc. while the Nazi tactics were kept from reaching their full potential due to inflexibility at every level of the chain of command which was deliberately fostered by Hitler as a defense against palace coups. Just like I said originally.
> They were simply more advanced and capable.
And yet, despite fighting a war to the knife, they lost. Non-liberal regimes can support flashy tactics and fancy gadgets, but children study tactics, professionals study logistics and when it comes down to the boring, gears-level operations which actually result in winning wars, non-liberal regimes just can't compete for much the same reason command economies are worse than free market ones, even if we ignore the coup risk, which we can't because it's an omnipresent consideration for autocrats.
> In the case of WWII, which do you think had more of an effect: the liberalness of the players, or the industrial isolation/might of the US
You say this like the industrial might of the US is totally exogenous to their liberalness. Treating these as separate is inherently missing the point, the US only had its industrial might because it was more liberal.
> the Slavic tolerance of taking huge causalities
If I imagine a hypothetical alternate history where Russia is ruled by a liberal regime (perhaps descended from the traders of Novgorod instead of the raiders of Muscovy) which had approximately Western levels of political liberalization and therefore had to foster economic growth by developing and deploying top-line technology instead of the Tzars then Lenin and Stalin deliberately stalling development so they could more easily maintain personal political power, the hypothetical Liberal Russia would almost certainly have had as much or more success as the actual Soviet Russia with considerably smaller human costs. I admit this is speculation though. That said, none of the resources tied up in the East would have helped Germany take Britain (that would be an inherently naval op and there weren't any naval actions of note in the Eastern Front, plus Operation: Sea Lion was cancelled before Operation: Barbarossa, while the Nazis and Soviets were still allied), and as long as the Allies had Britain as a staging ground, the Axis loses in the long-run.
> Bottom line: Liberalness informs the "what" and a bunch of other stuff informs the "how".
I think your mistake is that you see liberal regimes laying out war aims as a direct result of liberalism and think that's the only way liberalism acts. "A bunch of other stuff: logistical superiority, industrial capacity, strategic competence (again, the boring sort of strategic competence which made Bobby Lee the one who handed over his sword at Appomattox despite having more technical victories than Ulysses Grant), determines actual outcomes, but that has nothing to do with political liberalism, right?" Except it does, it's just downstream of them. Liberal countries are free to use efficient, effective, push-pull logistics since a broadly cooperative mindset between different levels of the chain of command mitigates fears of graft or political empire-building. Liberal countries are okay with the political heads not actually being the most powerful people in the country, so they industrialize aggressively. Liberal countries have a unifying ideal so they can promote the most skillful generals without needing them to satisfice personal loyalty to the Supreme Leader or keep an eye out for their political officer drawing his sidearm whenever he makes a decision. And then when liberal countries consistently have better logistics, stronger industry, and generals better at the boring drudge work which actually turns defeats into draws and draws into victories, well that's just coincidence! But when the coincidences stack up to an approximately 100% win rate in serious wars, well, there's only so many times you can play the "coincidence" or "bad luck" card before you have to wither reevaluate the source of your losses or go bust.
Bottom line: sometimes non-liberal governments can produce good tacticians but children study tactics, professionals study logistics. On the things which actually win wars, the things which professionals study, liberal regimes consistently outperform illiberal ones. The "bunch of other stuff" to which you attribute liberal success is a predictable consequence of liberalism and hard-to-impossible to get any other way.
> The US lost to the VC because they didn't care about winning the war
I think we have irreconcilably different ideas of what war is and how it's fought. It's not a game played at recess or a Boy Scout trip. I can assure you the best the US had to offer wanted to win that war. And in Iraq. And in Afghanistan.
The VC and Taliban had far better strategy with far worse operational and tactical capability. Their big tactical innovation was the IED. Their illiberal ideals were totally orthogonal to their ability to win a mandate from the populace, something one would think liberal countries would be better at. AQI/ISIL/ISIS/whatever performed poorly in Iraq because they couldn't govern effectively. They had already ousted the Americans but couldn't get the populace onboard with their vision. The VC and Taliban were able to govern sanely and thus ousted a liberal opponent. I'm having a hard time seeing where liberalism plays into any of these three wars.
We also fundamentally disagree on the pound for pound military strength of the Axis. I've never understood this narrative of poor German logistics. I think it's ideologically motivated. They were very competent in comparison to their peers who mostly quickly rolled over. Their log train was better than the Allied powers until the Americans got involved. Some of that was obviously because they had interior lines. They literally invented combined arms warfare which relies heavily on logistical coordination. Their problem was there just wasn't any oil and their aggressive operational movements outpaced the log train. They clearly didn't have a coordination problem. They disappeared millions of Jews as a sidequest. They quelled literally every insurgency within every country they occupied. Their invasion of Russia probably ends up working if not for scorched earth and lack of oil (like literally not having enough, not just not getting it to the right place). The length of that log train combined with having to fight a war on multiple fronts is truly astonishing even by today's standards. They were so far ahead of their time it's uncanny.
Log trains can't deliver resources that don't exist. Their mistake was biting off more than they could chew - a strategic error, not an operational or tactical one. If they stayed on the continent, their log train was probably fine. I see the outcome of WWII as the result of extremely lucky errors by the Axis, mainly picking more fights than they could finish. Again, liberalism is just totally orthogonal to idiosyncratic decisions made my Hitler.
The real cost to putting so much weight on this liberalism narrative is this kind of hubris it generates amongst civic leaders, military leaders, and the populace writ large. We feel we're entitled to win because we're the good guys with good liberal ideals. "We are here to help the Vietnamese because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out." And there's a version of that bullshit for every bad strategic engagement the US has ever gotten into. This thread of hubris underlies most of your points. You don't think illiberal cultures can be innovative or flexible or decentralized. You don't think illiberal societies can be economic powerhouses or produce capable leaders. I can tell you from personal experience - those backwards jerks are capable of standing toe to toe with Americans and winning.
>With so many tech experts leaving, Russia is hoping it can help convince them to stay by
> exempting them from the draft. It is an interesting dilemma. If you admit you’re an expert, you
> can’t be drafted, but also you can’t leave. I wonder if they have linked up the two lists
> successfully.
They absolutely have not, last I checked you could just lie to passport control and they had no way of catching you (except the normal ways of "you look like you're lying, if you really do marketing, tell us about what you've done at work recently"). IIRC the standard advice for those leaving was to prepare a detailed story of why you're going, where you're going, how you're super definitely coming back, and what you do for a living that definitely isn't tech.
On wheat: Maybe it takes a long time for world wheat production to adjust, but what about world wheat consumption? Price of wheat goes up slightly, people reduce their wheat consumption by one percent, it doesn't seem like a big deal.
On the complexity and installation difficulty of heat pumps: what's wrong with ordinary electric heaters? They're less efficient than heat pumps, but that's partially offset by the fact you only have to heat the room you're in instead of your whole house. Plus you can buy one for, like, twenty bucks, and plug it into your wall. (Not sure how well it works in genuinely cold places, though.)
Re: the Sarah Taber thread, I'm bearish. It's been a hot minute (>200 years, probably) since there was a famine because calories required exceeded calories produced. The trouble since the second agricultural revolution has been getting food in mouths. Most Eastern European wheat goes to feeding the Middle East. *If* Iran and/or Saudi Arabia play nice, then India can make up the shortfall. But if both of them decide to play hardball and get aboard the "burn down the 20th c. global order" train, they could plausibly close off trade (Iran closing land routes, Saudi Arabia closing sea routes). I'm not sure if/why they might do so, but I also lost money on Putin's invasion happening, so I'm trying to keep options open re: corrupt autocratic regimes doing daft shit. Since there's certainly no regime corrupter or autocraticer than the House of Saud and Iran is already mostly not a part of the global order, I'd say the prospects of Indian wheat actually making it to the consumers of Eastern European wheat is >50% but bad enough to be alarming. I'd consider any prediction of major Middle Eastern famine below 20% to be a good arbitrage opportunity.
>Saudi Arabia closing sea routes
What makes you think Saudi Arabia would be able to close sea trade routes through the Red Sea? They don't control the entire Red Sea from an international law perspective, and if they tried to control it with force they'd immediately get slapped down by a coalition of every major trading nation that uses that route, which happens to include all of Europe and Asia.
Granted, a lot would need to go wrong for that to happen, but there's currently a shooting war in Europe, so clearly we're living in a universe which allows a lot of things to go wrong. But if you want a plausible story, here's one: Iran shuts down overland trade because it's Iran. Saudi Arabia tells the Asian powers (already dependent on Saudi oil) and the European powers (probably soon-to-be dependent on Saudi oil now that Russia's trying its hardest to get them to give up Russian oil) that they're going to extort the wheat shipments through the Red Sea and Europe and Asia are going to allow it to happen (and keep America from stepping in) on pain of no longer getting Saudi oil. I think the conjunction probability "Saudi Arabia tries this" and "conditional on them trying it, it works" is less than 50%, but I can't honestly say it or something basically similar to it in outcome is much less than 20%. As I said in my original post "less likely than not, but still likely enough to be alarming".
No I'm sorry but what you're saying just sounds ridiculous to me. If you're allotting anything over .01% of Saudi Arabia being able to limit sea trade through the Red Sea your model of the world is just fundamentally so far gone from mine I'm not sure where to start. And to do it just so they can stop some wheat shipments that would ease famine in neighboring countries? I can't even understand how you'd think they'd want something like that. You seem to think they have some major grudge with the current world order that they'd be willing to watch the world burn in order to score some points or something? You've bought in way too hard to the whole democracy vs. autocracy meme that's going around. Countries, whether democratic or autocratic, care mostly about themselves and will continue to act in that manner moving forward.
And the idea that a shooting war in Ukraine is so fundamentally surprising to you is also strange. Has there not been multiple wars in former Soviet territory since the 90s? Yugoslavia, Georgia, Chechnya, and even Ukraine since 2014? I might not have been expecting Putin to attempt a full-on invasion like this, but it hasn't completely rearranged my worldview the way it has for you. Seems like you're over-updating way too hard on this one. And honestly your ideas on foreign policy seem so fundamentally distorted I just don't even know where you're getting this stuff from.
Saudi Arabia has a very good, homegrown, well-equipped air force which is entirely up to the task of shutting down Red Sea shipping if no first-rate powers wanted to stop them. So the argument that they lack the capability is incorrect.
The argument that they wouldn't want to is giving Mohammed bin Salman entirely too much credit. The Jamal Khashoggi assassination implies a pretty much infinite willingness to do destructive, violent, internationally unpopular things for petty reasons. And that's assuming that it's not in Saudi Arabia's interest to burn down the rest of the Middle East, which is demonstrable nonsense. They're surrounded by people who hate their guts and they have enough oil wealth that they don't need to look beyond their peninsula to keep themselves fat and happy as long as no one traipses across the desert and punches them in the mouth. Hence why they've funded, trained, and equipped approximately 100% of the most violent, deranged, destabilizing terrorist groups in the Middle East and North Africa since the House of Saud came to power.
The only check on their not setting the entire region on fire is the fear of losing the support of first-rate powers who depend on them for energy and on whom they depend for security. If the Middle Eastern powers who could plausibly threaten them were too busy starving to do so and the first-rate powers were even more dependent on Middle Eastern oil than they already were, MbS could easily say "I'm altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further" where one of the alterations is they get to do what they want in the Red Sea. And if you think the family which funded and supported literal Osama bin Laden wouldn't happily cause chaos and misery to increase their security and relative standing in their region, then you're the one who needs to rethink their world-model.
"You seem to think they have some major grudge with the current world order that they'd be willing to watch the world burn in order to score some points or something?" Yes. Literally yes. This is their revealed preference. If you're paying attention then you'd know that the world burning is strongly positive in the Saudi utility function. Again, and I can not emphasize this enough, the House of Saud and their Wahabi allies provide roughly 100% of the material and philosophical support for approximately all of the world's Islamic terrorists. Speculate to your heart's content about what they rightly or wrongly expect to get out of burning the world but you're arguing that the person actually currently splashing gasoline around the building and tossing lit matches into the wastepaper baskets wouldn't burn the building down if given the chance.
>The Jamal Khashoggi assassination implies a pretty much infinite willingness to do destructive, violent, internationally unpopular things for petty reasons.
No it doesn't. It shows that a young autocrat pushed his hand too far thinking he could get away with it and got burned. It's more likely that he'll be a lot more cautious moving forward.
>And that's assuming that it's not in Saudi Arabia's interest to burn down the rest of the Middle East, which is demonstrable nonsense.
How do you square that with MBSs pet project Neom? Or is attempting to build a regional megacity within an economic free trade zone something someone would want to do when they plan on burning down their entire region?
>If the Middle Eastern powers who could plausibly threaten them were too busy starving to do so and the first-rate powers were even more dependent on Middle Eastern oil than they already were, MbS could easily say "I'm altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further" where one of the alterations is they get to do what they want in the Red Sea
So if Saudi Arabia was threatening to stop wheat shipments from relieving starvation in Middle Eastern powers you think they'd just sit back and be like, oh well guess you got us? And you don't think the US would intervene because... Europe/Asia would lean on us because they depend on Saudi oil? You clearly have an axe to grind against the House of Saud and Wahabism, but it just seems like foreign policy naivety to think the world would allow Saudi Arabia to hold them hostage over their oil exports. We could probably just relax sanctions on Venezuela/Iran to replace their oil output if it came to it. Russia has Europe over a barrel because of natural gas more than oil. You can't easily reroute natural gas transportation, LNG is expensive to produce/store/transport compared to using gas pipelines.
Anyways I don't think we're convincing each other of anything here so I'll leave off responding further. But if Saudi Arabia does anything remotely close to messing with sea trades through the Red Sea in the next fifty years I'll consider you the victor of the informal bet in my mind.
Edited to remove some snark. I shouldn't be so combative just because our worldviews are so wildly disparate.
I think the focus people have on wheat is a bit myopic. Sure, Ukraine grows a lot of wheat, but it exports more corn than it does wheat (and these tend to be somewhat supplementary goods.) According to this (https://www.fb.org/market-intel/ukraine-russia-volatile-ag-markets), Ukraine has 6 agricultural exports that typically exceed $1 bil/yr:
* Corn ($5.8b)
* Sunflower Seed ($5.7b)
* Wheat ($5.1b)
* Rapeseed (Canola) ($1.7b)
* Barley ($1.3b)
* Sunflower meal ($1.2b)
Of these, the shortage I'm least concerned about is wheat, because wheat has multiple crops per year. I'm not familiar with Ukrainian climate/practices specifically, but in rural Michigan where I live farmers usually get two crops of wheat per year. Farther south with a longer growing season, you can get three crops per year. A spring invasion may only knock out half of Ukraine's annual wheat production, even in the areas that are completely shut down.
On the other hand, corn produces one crop per year. Sunflowers produce one crop per year. So does rapeseed. I'm not familiar with barley, but a quick google suggests it's probably a typical one crop per year plant as well. These grains seem likely to be more affected by any shorter invasion scenario than wheat.
>An alternative interpretation is that authoritarian armies that have not been tested in a long time and then are asked to invade have a tendency to dramatically underperform
I mean we can't have it both ways with the authoritarianism and effectiveness observation. On COVID and fiscal policy, authoritarianism is considered a feature. But now for military operations it's a bug? I could be convinced otherwise but I don't think authoritarian governments have much of a correlation with military might.
FWIW, I think a better military parallel for the current invasion might be Russia's own winter war(s) with Finland or the Second Chechen war. In both cases, Russia chose to "learn the hard way" before ultimately changing tactics to brutally suppress the populace.
The difference is that policymakers and public health authorities don't shoot people for a living. With COVID and fiscal policy you can just do the Lee Kwan Yew thing where you find the smart people and put them in charge. With military operations, finding the smart people and putting them in charge results in smart people being in charge of the people with guns, and smart people are usually smart enough to wonder, if they're in charge of the people with the guns, why they shouldn't be in charge of everything else as well. Expecting different strategies to work in an arena where the people with guns are versus the arenas where there aren't people with guns isn't "trying to have it both ways", it's just not falling prey to the halo effect.
That’s a nice story about the halo effect.
There’s some other nice stories about the military forces of Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, Prussia, Mao’s PLA, and Soviet Russia.
Maybe those stories could be instructive as to how strong authoritarian regimes can be. Maybe being smart isn’t the end all be all the rationalist community fantasizes it should be.
Lets review that list:
-Imperial Japan: fought liberal powers, lost so badly they became a de facto satellite state of the liberal powers for at least a decade
-Nazi Germany: fought liberal powers, lost so badly that ~100% of their high command killed themselves or were tried and executed
-Prussia: fought liberal powers, lost so hard their country suffered a critical existence failure, near-total discontinuity of political institutions
-Mao's PLA: fought liberal powers by proxy in Korea, took a draw after heavy losses due to liberal powers not caring enough to commit to total war
-Soviet Russia: never fought direct action against near-peer liberal powers, still somehow lost hard enough that they stopped existing
Can you spell out the thought process behind using a list of illiberal regimes which lost to liberal regimes as evidence for how strong illiberal regimes can be? You seem to think this is a much stronger argument than it is, and it would be fascinating to find out why.
If I were to list militarily powerful liberal regimes - for starters Revolutionary America, the Union in the American Civil War, the Allies in WWII - the list would be as impressive as yours but with the added benefit that the powers on my list... actually... you know... won.
If you actually want to give evidence I'd give credence to, try finding a 1.) industrial-era war, 2.) fought between near-peers, 3.) where both sides were seriously committed to the fight, 4.) where there was a clearly-more-liberal side, and 5.) the more liberal side clearly lost. I'm not enough of a military history nerd to confidently state that there aren't any, but none of the major wars I can think of since the American Revolution fit the bill. Either the liberals won (or at least forced draws) or they weren't playing to win (Vietnam, GWOT, etc.).
And that's playing the low-tier game of cherrypicking examples (which I'm happy to do since even the cherrypicked examples of the creme de la creme of non-liberal militaries still got their asses handed to them whenever they went against liberal militaries), if you actually look at the broader data, even if I'm wrong and non-liberals have occasionally pulled off a W, that's still a notable outlier compared to the obvious trend of liberals winning when they fight non-liberals.
>Can you spell out the thought process behind using a list of illiberal regimes which lost to liberal regimes as evidence for how strong illiberal regimes can be?
Because militarily they were the stronger players in the same way the US is stronger than the Taliban or Viet Cong despite taking big L's to both. And even if you want to point to the scoreboard, the Nazi's/Japanese were still very strong and extremely capable war fighters. Most of our maneuver warfare doctrine today comes from the Nazi's, and before that the Prussians. The Japanese literally invented the naval warfare paradigm the US/world uses today. They were simply more advanced and capable. Also, their military competence had little to nothing to do with how liberal or illiberal their governments were.
My assertion is that "liberalness" is a noisy factor in evaluating military might. In the case of WWII, which do you think had more of an effect: the liberalness of the players, or the industrial isolation/might of the US or the Slavic tolerance of taking huge causalities? (As an aside, I would argue that if it wasn't for the illiberal Soviet's commitment to losing untold numbers of young men, WWII goes another way in the European theater.)
I'll make another assertion: the liberalness of a regime more predictably informs their political aims (what kinda of goals they have) much more than their military capabilities (how they use violence to achieve those goals). And I think this is what's getting conflated. Illiberal regimes more often undertake uniquely dumb strategies like, say, invading Russia in the winter instead of sticking to the European continent or bombing Pearl Harbor instead of sticking to China and European colonies or invading Kuwait or anything Indonesia has ever done or invading Vietnam (China) or invading Cambodia (Vietnam) or anything in the Congo or pretty much Africa. There are notable exceptions where liberal governments do really dumb things too but that's mostly just America.
Bottom line: Liberalness informs the "what" and a bunch of other stuff informs the "how".
> Because militarily they were the stronger players in the same way the US is stronger than the Taliban or Viet Cong despite taking big L's to both
These are clearly different, tho. The US lost to the VC because they didn't care about winning the war, they just wanted to spend the minimal amount of blood and treasure as they could get away with to prove to NATO and the Soviets that they'd stick by their security guarantees. The geopolitical aim in Afghanistan wasn't as clear cut, but, again, we easily could have won militarily if we cared to. Hitler cared so little about his war that he... *checks notes*... killed himself when his defeat became clear. You can bet your ass that if Dick Nixon or Biden had felt personally threatened by the VC or Taliban to the point that they'd commit suicide if they entered DC and that was a likely thing to happen, then we would have flattened Vietnam/Afghanistan instead of withdrawing.
> And even if you want to point to the scoreboard, the Nazi's/Japanese were still very strong and extremely capable war fighters.
Sure, they were good. But not as good as the Allies.
> Most of our maneuver warfare doctrine today comes from the Nazi's, and before that the Prussians.
The difference is that the Allies had the tactical flexibility and delegated command doctrine to adopt the best tactics of their opponents, achieve strategic aims due to individual initiative, etc. while the Nazi tactics were kept from reaching their full potential due to inflexibility at every level of the chain of command which was deliberately fostered by Hitler as a defense against palace coups. Just like I said originally.
> They were simply more advanced and capable.
And yet, despite fighting a war to the knife, they lost. Non-liberal regimes can support flashy tactics and fancy gadgets, but children study tactics, professionals study logistics and when it comes down to the boring, gears-level operations which actually result in winning wars, non-liberal regimes just can't compete for much the same reason command economies are worse than free market ones, even if we ignore the coup risk, which we can't because it's an omnipresent consideration for autocrats.
> In the case of WWII, which do you think had more of an effect: the liberalness of the players, or the industrial isolation/might of the US
You say this like the industrial might of the US is totally exogenous to their liberalness. Treating these as separate is inherently missing the point, the US only had its industrial might because it was more liberal.
> the Slavic tolerance of taking huge causalities
If I imagine a hypothetical alternate history where Russia is ruled by a liberal regime (perhaps descended from the traders of Novgorod instead of the raiders of Muscovy) which had approximately Western levels of political liberalization and therefore had to foster economic growth by developing and deploying top-line technology instead of the Tzars then Lenin and Stalin deliberately stalling development so they could more easily maintain personal political power, the hypothetical Liberal Russia would almost certainly have had as much or more success as the actual Soviet Russia with considerably smaller human costs. I admit this is speculation though. That said, none of the resources tied up in the East would have helped Germany take Britain (that would be an inherently naval op and there weren't any naval actions of note in the Eastern Front, plus Operation: Sea Lion was cancelled before Operation: Barbarossa, while the Nazis and Soviets were still allied), and as long as the Allies had Britain as a staging ground, the Axis loses in the long-run.
> Bottom line: Liberalness informs the "what" and a bunch of other stuff informs the "how".
I think your mistake is that you see liberal regimes laying out war aims as a direct result of liberalism and think that's the only way liberalism acts. "A bunch of other stuff: logistical superiority, industrial capacity, strategic competence (again, the boring sort of strategic competence which made Bobby Lee the one who handed over his sword at Appomattox despite having more technical victories than Ulysses Grant), determines actual outcomes, but that has nothing to do with political liberalism, right?" Except it does, it's just downstream of them. Liberal countries are free to use efficient, effective, push-pull logistics since a broadly cooperative mindset between different levels of the chain of command mitigates fears of graft or political empire-building. Liberal countries are okay with the political heads not actually being the most powerful people in the country, so they industrialize aggressively. Liberal countries have a unifying ideal so they can promote the most skillful generals without needing them to satisfice personal loyalty to the Supreme Leader or keep an eye out for their political officer drawing his sidearm whenever he makes a decision. And then when liberal countries consistently have better logistics, stronger industry, and generals better at the boring drudge work which actually turns defeats into draws and draws into victories, well that's just coincidence! But when the coincidences stack up to an approximately 100% win rate in serious wars, well, there's only so many times you can play the "coincidence" or "bad luck" card before you have to wither reevaluate the source of your losses or go bust.
Bottom line: sometimes non-liberal governments can produce good tacticians but children study tactics, professionals study logistics. On the things which actually win wars, the things which professionals study, liberal regimes consistently outperform illiberal ones. The "bunch of other stuff" to which you attribute liberal success is a predictable consequence of liberalism and hard-to-impossible to get any other way.
> The US lost to the VC because they didn't care about winning the war
I think we have irreconcilably different ideas of what war is and how it's fought. It's not a game played at recess or a Boy Scout trip. I can assure you the best the US had to offer wanted to win that war. And in Iraq. And in Afghanistan.
The VC and Taliban had far better strategy with far worse operational and tactical capability. Their big tactical innovation was the IED. Their illiberal ideals were totally orthogonal to their ability to win a mandate from the populace, something one would think liberal countries would be better at. AQI/ISIL/ISIS/whatever performed poorly in Iraq because they couldn't govern effectively. They had already ousted the Americans but couldn't get the populace onboard with their vision. The VC and Taliban were able to govern sanely and thus ousted a liberal opponent. I'm having a hard time seeing where liberalism plays into any of these three wars.
We also fundamentally disagree on the pound for pound military strength of the Axis. I've never understood this narrative of poor German logistics. I think it's ideologically motivated. They were very competent in comparison to their peers who mostly quickly rolled over. Their log train was better than the Allied powers until the Americans got involved. Some of that was obviously because they had interior lines. They literally invented combined arms warfare which relies heavily on logistical coordination. Their problem was there just wasn't any oil and their aggressive operational movements outpaced the log train. They clearly didn't have a coordination problem. They disappeared millions of Jews as a sidequest. They quelled literally every insurgency within every country they occupied. Their invasion of Russia probably ends up working if not for scorched earth and lack of oil (like literally not having enough, not just not getting it to the right place). The length of that log train combined with having to fight a war on multiple fronts is truly astonishing even by today's standards. They were so far ahead of their time it's uncanny.
Log trains can't deliver resources that don't exist. Their mistake was biting off more than they could chew - a strategic error, not an operational or tactical one. If they stayed on the continent, their log train was probably fine. I see the outcome of WWII as the result of extremely lucky errors by the Axis, mainly picking more fights than they could finish. Again, liberalism is just totally orthogonal to idiosyncratic decisions made my Hitler.
The real cost to putting so much weight on this liberalism narrative is this kind of hubris it generates amongst civic leaders, military leaders, and the populace writ large. We feel we're entitled to win because we're the good guys with good liberal ideals. "We are here to help the Vietnamese because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out." And there's a version of that bullshit for every bad strategic engagement the US has ever gotten into. This thread of hubris underlies most of your points. You don't think illiberal cultures can be innovative or flexible or decentralized. You don't think illiberal societies can be economic powerhouses or produce capable leaders. I can tell you from personal experience - those backwards jerks are capable of standing toe to toe with Americans and winning.
>With so many tech experts leaving, Russia is hoping it can help convince them to stay by
> exempting them from the draft. It is an interesting dilemma. If you admit you’re an expert, you
> can’t be drafted, but also you can’t leave. I wonder if they have linked up the two lists
> successfully.
They absolutely have not, last I checked you could just lie to passport control and they had no way of catching you (except the normal ways of "you look like you're lying, if you really do marketing, tell us about what you've done at work recently"). IIRC the standard advice for those leaving was to prepare a detailed story of why you're going, where you're going, how you're super definitely coming back, and what you do for a living that definitely isn't tech.