What Just Happened 32
Mostly a one story week
Welcome. Here’s some of what’s happening in the world this week. Today is Saturday, October 21, 2023.
Today we’ll take stock of the situation around Gaza and consider the bigger picture in international relations. We also have items from Scotland, the South Caucasus, we’ll take a victory lap in Poland, share a novel ‘post-Westphalian’ idea, talk a little domestic politics and as always, we have suggestions for further weekend reading.
CS&W will not publish our regular Saturday edition next weekend as I’ll be traveling, but I’ll probably post individual shorter items these next two weeks as news happens.
Common Sense and Whiskey does two things: travel and politics. On Tuesdays there’s a travel article and on Saturdays a political week in review. Common Sense and Whiskey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support what we’re doing here, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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THE BIGGER PICTURE: The Hamas atrocities in southern Israel, the ongoing retaliation and resulting death and violence in Gaza, Russia’s slow and deadly grind against Ukraine and President Biden’s stated commitment to defend Taiwan with force if necessary can all be wrapped into one great big ball of seething foreign policy angst.
Let Graeme Wood start us off with this, which he wrote last Saturday in The Atlantic:
“If war breaks out generally around Israel, and questions arise about Israel’s very survival, the United States will have to start counting its ammunition. How much is left for Israel, after Ukraine has taken its share? And what about Taiwan, now third in line? These are hard questions, and Iran, Russia, and China would be thrilled, collectively and separately, to force them on the United States.”
In words George H. W. Bush used in a different context, this will not stand.
Even before the Hamas attack on Israel, NATO’s most senior military officer, Military Committee head Admiral Rob Bauer (Royal Netherlands Navy) told the Warsaw Security Conference on October 3rd that NATO arms industries must “ramp up weapons and ammunition production as ‘the bottom of the barrel is now visible’ due to the war in Ukraine.”
"We started to give away from half-full or lower warehouses in Europe and therefore the bottom of the barrel is now visible. And we need the industry to ramp up production in a much higher tempo and we need large volumes.”
Meanwhile, that same day in the United States, a group of eight MAGA Republicans brought down the Republican speaker of the house. As of today, eighteen days have gone by and the House of Representatives remains an inert body, as it has been for the entirety of this Hamas/Israel conflict, limiting American effectiveness.
But let’s save the MAGA hostage taking for a separate column. Even if the House were in working order, the United States, as an FPRI analysis puts it, “does not have the resources to pursue global primacy and contain China and Russia alone, simultaneously.”
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Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, President Biden has made a strenuous effort to avoid a face to face confrontation with Russia that could escalate to the use of nuclear weapons. In the process he has doled out weaponry to Ukraine in a deliberate and measured way. Some say he has been too deliberate.
Word came early in the week of the first known Ukrainian use of American ATACMs, ballistic missiles that can be fired from either tracked or wheeled launchers, have a somewhat longer range than UK provided Storm Shadow and French SCALP missiles, and that the Biden administration had held back from providing to Kyiv, apparently afraid of the escalatory possibilities.
In that first use Kyiv claimed to have destroyed Russian helicopters, an anti-aircraft missile system, and an ammunition warehouse in Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts this week. Speaking from China, Vladimir Putin called the US supplying the missiles to Ukraine “a mistake.”
This is not a critique of the way the administration has waged its support for Ukraine. Rather, it’s a look at where we are now. American weapons have helped Ukraine fight Russia to a standoff, so that as winter approaches, the fighting has begun to settle into static trench warfare.
Ten years ago this autumn publishers lined American bookshelves with new titles anticipating the hundredth anniversary of the Great War. Those books examined WWI from every angle, and just about all of them agreed on one thing: by the end of the war, the consensus of decision makers was that that if they had it to do over, they’d have avoided the war’s disastrous, debilitating and inconclusive … yep, trench warfare.
The question whether we have learned anything from history is academic; a potentially more kinetic dilemma is that, as long as the devolution into the trenches in the Donbas drags out, there is the opportunity for other, maybe only vaguely related events to infect and complicate this volatile moment.
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The US did a remarkable job of rallying its allies in the Ukraine fight and a less effective job in convincing the wider world. Now, with the sides having fought to a standoff, the Biden administration suddenly confronts the eruption of open ended war in the Middle East.
In the good old days of a year and a half ago, it was easy to say the US was with Ukraine “for as long as it takes,” and a search of the WhiteHouse.gov website turns up dozens of uses of the phrase “for as long as it takes” with “Ukraine.” That’s in part because a year and a half ago, it didn’t look like it would take this long.
In Washington this week they must be thinking, use those ATACMs well, Volodymyr, and yes, we’re with you for as long as it takes, but can you just hold on for now, because here’s Hamas and Israel, and this week we are at pains to demonstrate that we are Israel’s staunchest ally in the world.
(Don’t even think about Taiwan right now. The idea that the US could hold off Russia, be Israel’s BFF and contain China too, in a military campaign in Taiwan? That is crazy. And yet since Russia invaded Ukraine President Biden has explicitly stated the US would support Taiwan with force if necessary four times. For now and possibly for all time, this is a graveyard to whistle madly past.)
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You’ve probably seen statistics like these:
”During the height of the Cold War, the United States held a substantial economic advantage on the world stage by contributing 27 percent to the global gross domestic product (GDP), surpassing the combined share of the Soviet Union and China at 14 percent.... However, the global landscape has since experienced a transformative hefty transformation. By 2020, the United States witnessed a relative decline, accounting for 16 percent of global GDP, while the combined economic clout of China and Russia surged to 22 percent.”
Washington’s unipolar military moment was fleeting and has fled. The US is stressed at home and abroad. Its system of governance is under attack on fronts both foreign and domestic.
It has been unthinkable for 75 years to consider even a crack in the plaster of the preeminent position of the United States. Today the Hemingway line about bankruptcy, how it happens slowly at first and then all at once, comes to mind. It is only prudent to acknowledge and discuss the possibility of American decline now.
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Israel has been talking this week about “eradicating” or “eliminating” Hamas. With the help of the United States, Israel is a fearsome military machine in a nasty neighborhood, one that on paper should be able to do extensive enough damage to its regional foes (individually, at least) to severely damage their military capabilities.
Yet we all know that in the long run, Israel’s Hamas and Hizbollah problems, and those it has with other anti-semitic groups, will ultimately have to be solved politically. But there are problems: for one, Hamas’s founding document, the 1988 Covenant of the Hamas, explicitly calls for the killing of Jews.
For another, a political solution is a notion Israel’s politicians have demonstrated precious little inclination even to entertain in the fourteen years of President Netanyahu’s rule. With the Hamas atrocity of October 7th, any potential political project has now been packaged and sent away for resolution by the next generation.
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All week Israeli spokespeople equated Hamas with ISIS each time they uttered the word Hamas. Shrill appeals to US opinion show how worried Israel is about weathering the withering public opprobrium that is sure to come.
But as much as Israel’s messaging machine has worked to attach itself to the US hip this week, it’s too facile to call October 7th Israel’s 9/11, for this is no 9/11-like wake up call. Unlike al-Qaeda was to Americans, to Israelis Hamas is not an unknown, amorphous terror group 7,500 miles and two continents away.
Israel has been living side by side with Hamas for the entire time Hamas has terrorized Gaza. And during this entire time Israel has been Hamas’s utility company, regulating its electricity, it’s water, supplying and monitoring its internet. Netanyahu has tolerated Hamas and now he cannot.
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We relearned old lessons this week. We were reminded that there will not be peace in the Middle East on the cheap, fashioned around and without the Palestinians, as wealthy regional players like Bahrain and the UAE had hoped. Sustainable peace will have to be built constituency by constituency, and not among financiers and over the heads of the people.
The United States has been trying to sneak out of the Middle East for at least the last two presidencies. The Abraham Accords, for example, were the Trump administrations’ shot at making peace over the heads of the Palestinians. This week showed conclusively that that strategy will not work.
Solving the Middle East politically is beyond Israel’s imagination. As for the United States, the last thing it will want to add to its to-do list just now is solving the Middle East. Ergo, the Middle East will not be solved.
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Most importantly for the United States, an open-ended engagement in Gaza has the potential to distract and derail Washington from its two most important foreign policy priorities – support for Ukraine and managing its relationship with an assertive China. And yet, in a New Yorker article filed yesterday, Susan Glasser reported that “Some senior Israeli officials told the Americans to expect a war that could last as long as ten years.”
The United States must not allow itself to be swept up in Israeli emotion, no matter how just. At times this week the administration looked at peril of allowing just that to happen. Neither can it allow itself to be bogged down in bloody, months or years long conflict in the Levant.
To believe that the goal of Hamas’s attacks was to distract the US from its foreign policy priorities may be to endow the nihilists with too much strategic foresight. In any case, Washington must keep its eyes fixed on the larger prize.
The US cannot possibly succeed in doing all it has promised, all at once. It’s not beyond imagining that under enough stress, the US and the worldwide system it supports could begin to buckle under enough pressure at once from enough different directions. And unfortunately, I’m not the only one who thinks so: Behind the Curtain: Rattled U.S. government fears wars could spread.
Soberingly, former State Department official and former president of the Council on Foreign Relations Richard Haass told the BBC World News America program on Wednesday, “It’s hard to be confident right now that this situation can be managed.”
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RELATED, FROM SCOTLAND: As of yesterday the parents of Nadia El-Nakla, who is married to Scotland’s first minister Humza Yousaf, were trapped in Gaza. “Elizabeth and Maged El-Nakla, who live in Dundee, travelled to Gaza last week to visit their son and four grandchildren, as well as Maged’s 92-year-old mother, who is unwell,” the Guardian reported.
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MICE WILL PLAY: Michael Rubin reminds us that, with just over a month to go in the 2020 Trump/Biden presidential race, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev attacked Nagorno-Karabakh, choosing to act under cover of the distraction of the tail end of President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign against President Joe Biden. Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed chose election day itself, Nov. 3, 2020, to attack his own country’s Tigray minority in the north.
And Aliyev chose last month “to complete Azerbaijan’s occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh and ethnically cleanse the indigenous Armenian community,” as Rubin has it, knowing that the United States is preoccupied with the dismal state of its domestic politics and a growing congressional rift between lawmakers over support for Ukraine.
Türkiye is currently active across Syrian Kurdistan, targeting civilian infrastructure in a possible precursor to a further incursion against what it calls Kurdish rebels. And just now, watch for possible further moves by Azerbaijan to link its territory Türkiye via Armenia. We talked about Nachchivan two weeks ago; here’s that map one more time:
Politico reported on October 13th that:
“Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned a small group of lawmakers last week that his department is tracking the possibility that Azerbaijan could soon invade Armenia, according to two people familiar with the conversation. …
Azerbaijiani President Ilham Aliyev has previously called on Armenia to open a “corridor” along its southern border, linking mainland Azerbaijan to an exclave that borders Turkey and Iran.”
That is Nakhchivan.
Having now pocketed Nagorno-Karabakh, if Aliev decides to invade — and Gaza, which is commanding the overwhelming majority of international attention, would offer a perfect cover to do so — Aliyev would at a minimum be seeking to create the corridor he’s long desired between Azerbaijan proper and Nakhchivan, through southern Armenia.
The Azeri army will hold an on-premises practice run next week (Oct 23 - 25). On Tuesday Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry announced the “Mustafa Kemal Atatürk 2023” military exercise, to be carried out with its main benefactor, Türkiye, in Baku, Nakhichevan and the “liberated territories,” namely Nagorno-Karabakh.]
This exercise could be to get a feel for an upcoming operation to establish that corridor through Armenia to connect with Türkiye proper. Azerbaijan’s preferred route would be the so-called Zangezur Corridor, which would carve out a space along Armenia’s border with Iran.
[Note though that Iran opposes this maneuver for several reasons. It would erase the Iran/Armenia border. It could ignite new pan-Turkic irredentism. And it could kindle further Azeri nationalism in Tabriz, an Azeri majority city of a million and a half people and the capital of Iran’s East Azerbaijan province, about 150 miles south of Armenia.
On my one trip near the Iran/Armenia border area seventeen years ago, nothing moved except the birds in what were utterly bucolic wheat (or maybe they were barley) fields.]
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NEW ARGUMENT OF THE MONTH: Ian Bremmer called the emergence of autonomous tech companies ‘post Westphalian’ on a podcast with Foreign Affairs, and suggested corporations must be brought in as stakeholders in running the world by using treaty-like agreements with governments, which really would be post-Westphalian.
Tech companies are in fact acting (mostly) with impunity as powerful entities with interests outside of and separate from governments in the countries where they operate. Last month, for example, Elon Musk’s acknowledged on social media that he has a hand in the outcome of the war in Ukraine. As the New York Times has it:
“Later on Thursday [September 7th], Mr. Musk responded on his social media platform to say that he hadn’t disabled the (Starling internet) service but had rather refused to comply with an emergency request from Ukrainian officials to enable Starlink connections to Sevastopol on the occupied Crimean peninsula. That was in effect an acknowledgment that he had made the decision to prevent a Ukrainian attack.
“The obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation."
Negotiating with corporations as stakeholders in the governance of the world is a new idea that brings forth any number of questions. One obvious question would be, with whom would governments negotiate, and how would they be selected? It’s a serious idea that requires much debate. For now maybe let’s sleep on it before we invite the MyPillow guy to join Bibi, Abu Mazen and Biden at Camp David?
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GEORGE SANTOS: Speaking of hard to imagine, George Santos is still a member of the House of Representatives despite his indictment on federal fraud charges. Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy needed Santos to hold onto his slim majority. It’s hard to tell who needs him now, or for what.
It doesn’t look like Santos will be an early order of business for whichever new leader the House manages to throw up. File that under “the more things change” in the majority Republican House. However, former US Attorney Joyce Vance reminds us that, apart from the House’s disfunction, Santos may not be around forever:
“A scheduled pre-trial conference in the case set for last week has been rescheduled for late October. The government wrote in a letter to the court that ‘the parties…continue discussing paths forward in this matter. The parties wish to have additional time to continue those discussions.’ That’s prosecutor speak that means, we’re talking about a guilty plea with the defendant.”
We saw elsewhere in the past week how the approach of a trial can sometimes bring the merits of a guilty plea into sharper focus.
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POLAND: “Evil has prevailed in Poland, temporarily,” Marek Suski, a senior PiS official, told the public broadcaster TVP. This is his party’s version of a gracious admission of electoral defeat, offered in the same spirit in which its campaign was waged.
Assuming no last gasp chicanery to come from the PiS, this week brought the best news for Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine and the rest of Europe in all of 2023.
Could the defeat of a judiciary-fouling, media-manipulating xenophobic party of Polish political darkness lead to a consolidation all that is righteous and just and a hastening of the shift of political power to the east in Europe? Probably not all that, no.
But that’s fodder for columns to come. This week, let us just celebrate the repudiation of Jarosław Kaczyński and his Law and Justice party whose ideas of conspiracy around every corner and foreigner behind every bush was roundly defeated last weekend in Poland.
But not right away, probably. Polskie radio explains:
“Under the Polish constitution, the new parliament will convene for the first time within 30 days after the elections, by November 14, as the outgoing government will officially tender its resignation.
The head of state will then appoint a new prime minister, usually a politician designated by the party that won the parliamentary elections, the PAP news agency reported.
The president has 14 days to name and swear in the new Cabinet, which then has to secure the support of the absolute majority of MPs.
Otherwise the new Cabinet also tenders its resignation and the responsibility to name the new prime minister is taken up by lawmakers.
A new prime ministerial candidate can be put forward by a group of at least 46 MPs, and has to be approved by an absolute majority of the lower house within 14 days.
If this deadline is not met, the initiative returns to the president, who has 14 days to appoint a new prime minister and his Cabinet. The lower house then has 14 days to back the new government, a step that requires only a simple majority, the PAP news agency reported.
If this third option also fails, the president has to call an early election, to be held within 45 days, according to officials.”
In other words, President Andrzej Duda, a PiS member, can gum up the works, if he is so inclined, at least until January.
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IMPROBABLE HEADLINE:
AND FINALLY: Our life and times.
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WEEKEND READING
Every weekend I suggest worthwhile reading that’s guaranteed to improve your posture, your online dating prospects, and make you an all around better person. Read ten articles, lose five pounds. Here they are:
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How far south can you drive? A road trip to the edge of the Earth
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I like this article’s premise. “Anyone who doesn’t regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains,” as Vladimir Putin put it. Can it be true that China’s leadership falls into the second category? China’s Soviet Shadow
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The increasingly symbiotic relationship between humans and technology signals a new era in the evolution of life on Earth. After The Human
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Book excerpt. At the height of China’s Great Famine in 1960, a group of students exiled to the countryside launched a magazine that dared to tell the truth. Their convictions, and the love they bore for one another, were put to the test. A Spark Extinguished
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For decades, spending on the future put the United States ahead of all others. What would it take to revive that spirit? Longer Commutes, Shorter Lives: The Costs of Not Investing in America
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The four-times-indicted, twice-impeached, two-time Primetime Emmy-nominated former President of the United States of America and current World Wrestling Federation Hall of Famer has chosen the riverside Rust Belt enclave of Dubuque, Iowa for one of his increasingly rare public rallies. Donald Trump is coming to Dubuque, Iowa
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A history of the internet browser. Your Internet Browser Does Not Belong to You
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Book excerpt: Rupert Murdoch didn’t want to dump his ratings leader and favorite Fox host. But was Tucker Carlson giving him a choice? Breaking Up Is Hard to Do
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Introducing stagiaire, nurdle, smishing, jorts and more. Merriam Webster: “We Added 690 New Words to the Dictionary for September 2023.”
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Capital largely rules the world and capital has helped shape a fiscal system that strongly favors its activities. Where to draw the line
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Thank you for reading this week’s newsletter. Common Sense and Whiskey does two things: travel and politics. On Tuesdays there’s a travel article and on Saturdays, the political week in review. To receive new posts and support what we’re doing here, sign up for a subscription here.
There are something like 20,000 of my travel photos, currently from 113 countries and territories on EarthPhotos.com. And join 2,100 people who follow my constantly updated Twitter/X list of 200 experts whose job it is to follow Russia’s War on Ukraine.
On Tuesday we’ll have a diary of the six weeks preceding Russia’s war on Ukraine, culminating on 24 February, 2022 with: “Reported missile attack on Ukraine’s Borispil airport, the main international airport in Kyiv.”
Good weekend. See you then.
Thanks Bill! I look forward every week to your take on these world events. It’s nutz out there!