Getting Serious
Decadence is great fun, but sooner or later childish things have to be put aside—or they'll be taken away.
Apr. 2 - This is a not very almanacky almanac. I make no apologies (he said apologetically).
The five-day Danish Easter vacation (Easter being the holiday now celebrated as the “Day of Trans Visibility” in the United States) has come and gone. Eldest was off in Tenerife getting sun eczema and having her phone stolen and Youngest was either off with her friends or hosting them at our house or hunkering down alone in her room to recover from all the time with her friends. Herself and I alternated between trying to accomplish things we’d been putting off for a long time, and coming up with reasons to put them off a little longer..
It’s a delicate balance.
On the one hand, the effort involved in maintaining a household with two working parents and two teenage girls is strenuous enough that anything requiring more than ten or twenty minutes of focused attention is almost always postponed to weekends or vacations.
On the other hand, that effort is also strenuous enough that by the time those weekends and vacations roll around, who the hell wants to spend them catching up on to-do lists?
So we got some stuff done, but not as much as we’d told ourselves we would. We also relaxed a lot, but not as much as we’d have liked to. We finished off whatever series we’d been watching together and watched the first season of the new series that Netflix assured us everyone else in Denmark was watching. We put a significant dent in our Johnnie Walker reserves. And we got a lot of sleep. I mean a lot.
At some point over the break I came across news that the American defense establishment was planning for war in 2027. I don’t remember where I first saw it: it seemed to be one of those things that everyone was just suddenly talking about, like 16:8 fasting or the Kardashians.
I usually ignore stories like that because they’re not stories so much as gossip, but apparently Glenn Reynolds saw the same news and decided to treat it more seriously: he dedicated an entire Substack essay to the subject (“That 1938 Feeling”).
Reynolds’s own source for the war-in-2027 scenario seems to be pegged to a tweet from a guy who says he met with someone in the military who told him that the Department of Defense expects to be at war in 2027. (“Not in the sense that they mean to,” the tweeter adds, “but that the likelihood is high enough that we need to be ready.”)
Tweets from people who claim to have met someone who said something aren’t high on my list of credible sources, but Glenn Reynolds is. In more than two decades of daily blogging, he’s rarely gotten anything wrong—and when he has, he’s acknowledged it. I’m therefore willing to assume there’s more to this than meets my eyes. Maybe the tweeter, Aaron Slodov, is himself a highly credible source who’s known to have access to high-ranking defense officials. I don’t know. But since everyone apparently knows that China’s military has been ordered to be ready to take Taiwain in 2027, it would hardly be surprising.
There was also news over the winter that Germany would deploy a brigade to Lithuania that would be “combat ready” in 2027. That will be their largest out-of-country deployment since 1939—when they got a little carried away.
I’ve been writing all winter about the way Denmark’s neighbors have been preparing for war. (See, for example, here.)
So the idea of global war within a few years seems to have become part of the zeitgeist.
Reynolds uses his Substack piece to explore what we should be doing to prepare ourselves for a massive war in 2027.
He makes some good points, most of which boil down to this:
But if you wanted to distill what the U.S. could do into one brief phrase it would be this: “get serious.”
That’s exactly right.
That means, among other things, a defense secretary who’s up to the job (we don’t have one of those) and a commander in chief who takes things seriously, and isn’t on the Chinese payroll. (Oops.) Well, that’s what I would do, and what the U.S. should do, not what the Biden Administration will do. We will pay a price for that, if things come to a head.
That’s also correct as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go anywhere near far enough, as a lot of the points he makes earlier in his essay make clear.
There are estimates that the catastrophic collapse of the Key Bridge in Baltimore will keep that city’s port closed for up to a year, and that repairing the bridge could cost up to $400 million and take up to a decade.
That’s one bridge in one city—but we’re supposed to turn our decadent civilization around in just 36 months?
If the western world genuinely believes that massive global conflict is likely just three years from now, it needs to talk much more seriously about what “getting serious” actually means.
We’re constantly being told that the climate is the most serious civilizational threat we face. Trillions of dollars and god knows how many millions or billions of man hours have been invested in tilting at that particular windmill, despite the fact that the threat is chronologically remote and the consequences will be gradual and adaptable.
If we believe that a third world war is not only possible but likely in just three years—if all this war talk isn’t just the military-industrial complex trying to claw back some of the treasure being gobbled up by the climate-industrial complex—then we had better drop everything and get our minds right.
And fast.
We’re going to need vast amounts of energy to power an exponential increase in manufacturing. Windmills and solar panels ain’t gonna cut it—not in three years, not in ten.
That manufacturing is also going to require more raw materials, so we not only need to drill, baby, drill but mine, baby, mine:
In 1993, 38 percent of world production of REEs (rare earth elements) was in China, 33 percent was in the United States, 12 percent was in Australia, and five percent each was in Malaysia and India. Several other countries, including Brazil, Canada, South Africa, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, made up the remainder. However, in 2008, China accounted for more than 90 percent of world production of REEs, and by 2011, China accounted for 97 percent of world production. Beginning in 1990 and beyond, supplies of REEs became an issue as the Government of China began to change the amount of the REEs that it allows to be produced and exported. The Chinese Government also began to limit the number of Chinese and Sino-foreign joint-venture companies that could export REEs from China.
Question: if putting ourselves on the war footing necessary to defend ourselves in the event of a global war—or, preferably, to make ourselves strong enough to prevent such a war—will require vast amounts of rare earth elements, would it not behoove our decadent asses not to rely on our enemy for the raw materials necessary to do so?
America has a habit of getting into global fights late and playing catch-up—astonishing the world with the magnitude of its belated aptitude. What if America had geared up as the arsenal democracy in 1935 instead of 1940? How many millions of lives might have been spared? How many cities preserved? How many nuclear weapons not detonated?
Anyone in any position of leadership who says global war by 2017 is likely, or even just probable, and then immediately pirhouettes to talking about the importance of carbon footprints, pronouns, climate justice, trans visibility, equity, or any other such baroque nonsense ought to be immediately relieved of all responsibility: either they’re engaged in the worst sort of scare-mongering or they’re derelict in duty. In either case we need to get them out of the way.
I’m cynical enough to believe that a lot of what we’re hearing right now is in fact just scare-mongering, motivated by many different impulses—not least of them the ability to say “I told you so” if war breaks out.
I’m also cynical enough to believe that the likelihood of there being a catastophic global war would be significantly lower if we prepared ourselves for one—not just to survive it, but to win it.
Reynolds concludes as optimistically as possible:
So we may luck out and avoid a war. Heck, we might have done so last time around. But we didn’t, and we may not avoid another one now. And even if we do, it’s likely to be a bumpy ride.
He’s obviously right: on our current trajectory, avoiding war would be lucky indeed.
Should we count on that? On luck?
Or should we get serious about preserving the peace by preparing for war, thereby minimizing the role of luck?
I know what the Gods of the Copybook Headings would say.
It’s the birthday of Otto von Bismarck (1815) and William Harvey (1578).
Happy Tuesday!
© 2024, The Moron’s Almanac
Nail hit on head.
Alas, there are no real signs of anything remotely looking like seriousness being even on the far horizon. I hear a lot of huffing and puffing, but action - as opposed to cheap words - is not happening. It is not happening with rearmament, ammunition production ramp-ups with respect to Ukraine/Russia.
It is not happening with new nuclear reactors being greenlit, restarting of fossil production lines or new mining for rare earth minerals (if you want to look at the number of new nuclear reactors being built, as well as those planned, you can go here: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/plans-for-new-reactors-worldwide.aspx - I will leave the conclusion as to the seriousness of the West in this area as an exercise for the reader).
Because, before our politicians actually do get serious about any of this, they will need to explain to their voters why the last three decades of increasingly shrill climate doom-mongering coming very soon around the year 2100, may kinda sorta have been a bit too hysterical and that the problem to solve isn't all that urgent or imperative, when you have actual near-term concerns you need to address; and how the promises of pie-in-the-sky magical green revolutions are not actually achievable when you really get down to it.