Welcome. Here’s just a little bit of what’s happening in the world this week, and a discussion of what happens next here at CS&W. Today is Saturday, November 11, 2023.
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.
Welcome back. I’ve been away in what used to be the British West Indies for a week or so at the beach. Anguilla is a sedate, secret little island that hides behind the busy and slightly garish cruise ship magnet of Sint Maarten.
Anguilla is pretty much a glorified sandbar, a low-key collection of calm, sandy beaches, a few hotels and resorts, with finer cuisine than you might expect. It’s just a short ferry ride from Sint Maarten’s Princess Juliana International Airport. Please don’t mention it to the cruisers who hit the strip in Sint Maarten’s Philipsburg in search of “Steak Madness” night or “Lobster Tuesday.” Better to keep it between us.
(I wrote about Anguilla’s unlikely Revolution on a Sandbar after my first visit there. You can read that here.)
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Before we get to today’s main topic, two items in the news. First, a note on how today’s events frame the future – specifically, the week’s developments in the war between Israel and Hamas. Antony Blinken was in the region early in the week, and made the administration’s argument that the United States opposes a ceasefire while supporting a humanitarian pause in the fighting.
“It’s our view that a ceasefire now would leave Hamas in place to regroup and repeat attacks,” Al-Jazeera reported Blinken said on Monday. Those words, said in one context, will soon enough be read back to him in another.
No less an authority than Valerii Zaluzhni, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, says Blinken’s concerns are spot on, and that they are already happening in Russia’s war on Ukraine:
“… the prolongation of a war, as a rule, in most cases, is beneficial to one of the parties to the conflict. In our particular case, it is the russian federation (sic), as it gives it the opportunity to reconstitute and build up its military power,” Zaluzhni wrote in a paper for the British edition of The Economist.
Several outlets have reported that, as NBC News has it, “U.S. and European officials have begun quietly talking to the Ukrainian government about what possible peace negotiations with Russia might entail.” Meanwhile voices on the non-institutional Republican right are already putting pressure on the Biden administration for a ceasefire while threatening to defund the war.
Even as Biden, Blinken and company quietly explore the notion of peace negotiations with Russia, the president maintains that the United States will stand with Ukraine for “as long as it takes.” Events in the Middle East, and the administration’s well-meant but contradictory efforts to grapple with Ukraine, are maneuvering the United States into a corner.
Blinken will soon enough be shown his own words about how a Middle East “ceasefire now would leave Hamas in place to regroup and repeat attacks” as evidence of U.S. inconsistency in opposing a ceasefire in Gaza while brokering one in Ukraine.
Meanwhile the administration, if the war’s American Republican opponents prevail with their defunding threats, will have increasingly less leverage to continue to fund Ukraine’s war effort. Watch this space.
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One other note, this one on domestic politics, specifically the general perception that the Democrats have a mighty challenge ahead in reelecting Joe Biden. In his New York Times column yesterday Paul Krugman begins his defense of Biden administration policies by writing, “First, Biden is not, in fact, presiding over a bad economy.” This is a version of ‘who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?’ Careful about telling voters that they’re wrong about what they see in their daily lives.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics says US monthly inflation rates were above 6 percent for nine months in 2022 (inflation is at 3.7% right now). Before last year, rates hadn’t been that high that long since 1979.
Although inflation has fallen, no one feels good about the economy. We all realize that that $15 dollar burger isn’t going back to $10, and everybody’s standard of living has thereby been lowered. No matter how much inflation has fallen, no matter how low unemployment gets, this is what people mean when they say the economy is terrible. Besides the age issue, this is the administration’s core reelection problem.
Later in that NYT column, Paul Krugman explains that “this isn’t the first time we’ve seen a temporary surge in prices that leveled off but never went back down. The same thing happened after World War II and again during the Korean War, the latter surge being roughly the same size as what we’ve seen since 2020.” This is a turned around way of pointing out that we haven’t seen such a loss of purchasing power since the 1950s.
People who first voted the last time inflation hit 6%, in the early 1980s, are closing in on retirement. No one who has come of voting age since, comprising essentially the entire working — and voting — age population, has ever seen the abrupt devaluation of their purchasing power that happened last year.
It may be ironic to remember fondly in comparison the Great Recession of 2007 - 2009, when inflation briefly topped 5%, but that is where we are. And this is the Democrats’ 2024 problem.
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Now, the main subject I want to discuss today: when I started this newsletter in the early part of the year I described it as an experiment. We’d see how it went, run it for about a year and go from there. It’s been an interesting and mostly fulfilling experiment.
We’ve covered a lot of ground with the Tuesday travel columns, featuring stories from off-the-beaten-track places, the places I think are most interesting — places as disparate as Tibet, Svalbard, Burma and Zambia.
And for the Saturday Week in Review column, boy oh boy has there been a wealth of news to dissect. We’ve spent a ton of time on Ukraine, the Sahel, the DRC and other parts of Africa, on NATO as it has expanded and is trying to expand further. We’ve discussed the extensive jockeying for geopolitical position in the Pacific. Important elections have brought the coronation of Sultan for Life Erdogan on the one hand, and on the other a surprise or two, including a victory for the good guys in Poland.
Over the course of the year I’ve learned a few things about the newsletter business. The Substack format is my first experience with more or less regularly scheduled writing, other than my monthly column at 3 Quarks Daily. Prior to this Substack iteration of Common Sense and Whiskey, since the early 2000s I maintained a CS&W blog at Wordpress and before that at Typepad and at both places I posted a sort of random mix of travel and current events posts on no fixed schedule.
The main thing I’ve learned is that I’m not smart enough to write a consistently intellectually satisfying, comprehensive, general, weekly current events column. So many people are so vastly more well-versed than I in their areas of expertise that for a reader to be properly well informed means not reading a generalist weekly compilation like I’ve been writing, but instead to read experts in their own individual fields.
So we’ll be making some changes.
What Happens Next?
The short answer is, I’m not sure. There are two parts here:
As to the Tuesday travel stories, I’ve been sharing articles at a pace faster than I can gather new material. In short, sometime next year I’ll run out of past adventures to write about. Here, serialization of some of my longer-form work, a little bit in each newsletter, might work.
As for the Saturday week in review columns, my inclination right now is to produce columns focusing on just one or a few items at a time, which would probably shorten column lengths but also allow me time for a little more research on each subject.
The world is in a period of extraordinarily fast transition. I think broadly, three epochal geopolitical events shaped the last hundred years: the Second World War, the collapse of the Soviet Union (and with it, the end of the Cold War), and China’s rise from poverty. Yet virtually all the international rules under which we function were written for the world as it was around 1950, in the wake of WWII. Western-imposed institutions have calcified; the world is shedding them, and fast. There’s a whole lot to be written about this changing world.
Besides that, I have two broad areas of particular abiding interest: The first is fallout from the collapse of Communism as defined by the Soviet political system, and what has since emerged and is still emerging in the former Soviet space. The other is the cultural and political richness of the African continent, which is surely the most fertile ground for twentieth century China-like poverty eradication in this century. These seem to be natural topics to expand on as we go on.
I find I’m insufficiently qualified to offer opinions as nuanced as I’d set out to on so much of the minutiae of daily events across Africa, developments in troubled places like Congo’s east, the Kivus and Ituri provinces, for example, Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region or Sudan’s Darfur. I’m even less confident describing inside politics in lesser known African governments (Benin? Who knows internal politics in Benin?), some of which seem to be perpetually just hunkering down to survive a coup-free week. But maybe we can discuss larger African trends.
A remarkable quarter of the 21st century has come and gone and institutions and rules from the 1940s and 1950s no longer fit. Challenges in this world come fast and furious and top to bottom. In the far north, for example, Russia’s war on Ukraine has set off radical scramble and realignment across the Arctic. In the south, the West Antarctic ice shelf, which contains enough water to raise global sea levels by about 10 feet, is melting precipitously.
How does the world cope? Are humans up to the challenges? I’m not entirely convinced, but these are the type of broader stroke questions I think we can continue to talk about here.
The famous Antonio Gramsci quote that “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born” is true enough today, even though it’s more than 90 years old; whether that means, as the quote continues, “now is the time of monsters,”* is yet to be seen.
The William Butler Yeats quote about how “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” is happening week after week in domestic politics across the world and right before our eyes. Whether, as Yeats continues, “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity” appears broadly true. Whether that is a long term condition also remains to be seen.
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I’ll pause CS&W for a couple more weeks now to work on fine tuning for year two. I’ve also paused billing for paid subscribers. I’m grateful to you who have subscribed; please tell me what you like here and what you don’t; post your comments and suggestions, or if you prefer, email me more quietly at billmurraywriter (at) gmail.com.
My aim here, as I’ve written since CS&W started way back in the early 2000s on Typepad, is to take a good clear look at the world out there. That won’t change.
Back soon.
* The “time of monsters” quote is Gramsci writing from prison in 1929, as translated by Slavoj Žižek in 2010.
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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.
Good weekend. See you soon.