typical us-living russia-lover/us-hater. expect him to be hired by russia today tv channel.
thing is – i can understand if people hold these views in russia – they are brainwashed. but someone living in the west espousing them makes me think he’s a scumbag or has brain issues. People who I personally know who held similar views had problems adjusting to life in the US, so associated Russia to be great by comparison.

This is hardly the first time I’ve had the anti-America rug thrown at me, so hey, let’s do this democracy thing to settle this.

My opinion? From my perspective, the main things that some could qualify as being “anti-American” on this blog is a certain pessimism on its future economic, and by extension geopolitical, prospects (not helped by 10%-of-GDP deficits), and pointing out that things such as that the State Department’s simultaneous crusade against Wikileaks and propagandization of Internet freedom abroad is rather schizophreniac (to put it mildly). On the other hand, it’s frequently and freely acknowledged that the US is still the world’s predominant superpower, and probably the best place on Earth for the upper-middle and higher classes.

I’m also skeptical that I’d qualify as a “Russia-lover” (in the propagandist sense of the term our anti-S/O commentator means). I’ve posted plenty of links to corruption scandals and injustices and the like on the Twitter and Facebook extensions of this blog; the blog itself has had an entire post specifically dedicated to criticizing some of Putin’s policies. I suspect that his real issue with this blog is that it doesn’t follow the Western media’s ”Have you stopped beating your wife?” approach to reporting on Russia – or the propaganda model by which it operates in general - that he himself has been seemingly brainwashed with.

Incidentally, I too can apply pop psychoanalysis to that commentator – psychological insecurity leading to projection; the yearning to justify his own emigration by casting Russia and its defenders as demonic Others; perhaps even a Ukrainian inferiority complex – and for pages on pages if needed, but I really can’t be bothered.

You say "fascist", as if it's a bad thing. But dude, people love fascists!

Depressingly fatalist, morbidly truthful, irresistibly Nietzschean. That’s Howard Bloom’s “The Lucifer Principle” in a nutshell: a meandering trawl through disciplines such as genetics, psychology and culture that culminates in a theory of evil, purporting to explain its historical necessity, its creative potential and the possibility of it ever being vanquished. The odds do not appear to be good. For in the world painted by Bloom, peace is submission, social hierarchies are natural, ideas are polarizing, and liberal individualism is invidious to the collective “superorganism” that both oppresses, nourishes and saves us. Fascism really is the “natural state” in every sense of the term.

Bloom, Howard – The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History (1995)
Category: human society, psychology, history; Rating: 5/5
Summary: Amazon reviews, James Schultz

More S/O material on related topics:

• Violence is Reality – the grisly reality of prehistoric war.
• If Malthus and Ibn Khaldun were to meet for coffee… – the overwhelming importance of social cohesion, or Asabiyah, to national success.
• The Belief Matrix – my own ideas on the role of sobornost’.

Superorganism, or: The Whole is Greater than its Parts

Bloom starts off by providing reams of evidence on why it is completely logical for nature to be “red in tooth and claw”. Selfish genes need to replicate and it is no great loss if they doom billions of individuals to untimely deaths in the struggle for evolutionary survival. Hence, creatures battle for the “privilege of procreation”. High-ranking gorilla females kill their harem rivals’ offspring. Existence in primitive societies is so brutish and short that it is as if they were fighting World War Two every year and life eternal (the myth of the “noble savage” really is just that). The wellspring of Western civilization, the Romans, have the rape of the Sabines as one of their proudest foundational myths. In short, violence is reality.

[The Rape of the Sabine Women, Pietro da Cortona.]

One interesting theory he mentions is that of the triune brain, according to which the human mind is actually composed of three brains – the reptilian (stimuli, mating, territoriality), mammalian (loyalty to family and clan) and primate (reasoning faculty). The reptilian component makes creatures nasty and violent, while the mammalian reinforces the power of social groups. It is only the latter that allows man to dream about peace, even as they hack each other to pieces in the waking world.

In the next section, Blooms asks why people commit suicide. He cites a lot of research showing that isolation is the ultimate poison – without social approval, people not only tend to become depressed, but their physiology goes on self-destruct mode, encouraging illnesses, insanity and suicidal tendencies. This is a negative feedback loop because once you are depressed, other people no longer want to be around you or make friends with it (but that, too, works in the interests of the group). He ties this in to the larger idea that just as cells, sponges and ants can only survive as constituent particularly of a greater whole or not at all, so humans are part of a greater “superorganism” that is society.

Paradoxically, the logic of “group selection” encourages loyalty to the superorganism that cares little if at all for the individuals that owe it their fealty. For instance, upon seeing a pride of lions beginning to stalk a herd of gazelles on the African savanna, the beasts that notice the predators begin prancing about in warning. This actually diminishes their individual chances of survival, since lions are likeliest to go for animals that are acting unlike the rest of the herd. The best outcome for the individual gazelle upon noticing the lions would be simply to retreat slowly to the safe center of the herd. However, over the evolutionary eons, groups with many individuals exhibiting these self-preserving tendencies presumably got weeded out, for self-interest is the bane of group interests. Hence in real life we do get a lot of genuinely altruistic loyalty to the group – amongst ants, gazelles, humans.

Humans who are no longer needed by the group really are no longer needed and might as well wane and die (“the Moor has done his duty, he can now go home”). Durkheim suggested suicide was essentially individuals altruistically relieving society of their own burden to it, and I would suggest that this is especially evident in societies like Japan without the traditional Western Christian guilt. I would also suggest that this is the reason why ostracism and exile were so much more fearful punishments in the pre-industrial world than they would seem in today’s global rootless cosmopolitanism. In an age when bonds were strong and essential, but geographically tied to small regions, being shorn of human contact would have been psychologically crippling.

All this of course has a more than passing resemblance to Turchin’s and Ibn Khaldun’s work on social cohesion and Asabiyah. There’s a reason why through the ages soldiers have willingly charged cold steel pikes and machine gun fire for the glory of their nation. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and far more important too – and the superorganism knows this.

[The Battle of Gettysburg. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori!]

Though shalt not kill… but only as long as they’re members of your tribe. Otherwise it’s cool. Note that primitive societies believe “humans” to be only their own tribe or clan (in fact if you look at the etymology, many ethnicities call themselves “the people” in their own tongues). Civilization has expanded the definition of those considered to be human to their own nations: in the case of the Jews, to the Israelites; in the case of later “universal” religions, potentially to all humanity (except inveterate heathen, of course). Even many modern liberals are intolerant of those who don’t share their liberal ideals. Why these divisions? Having enemies is really good for social consolidation (see “castle identity”, “residential fortress”, “siege mentality”); human societies are defined not by what they are, but by what they oppose and hate. Or as Orwell would say, war is peace.

There is always a deep wellspring of frustration in any society. Bloom quotes interesting research showing that fro cells to ants to humans, each unit performs a preordained role. In any ant colony, there are industrious workers and lazy workers, soldiers and queens. Separate the industrious and lazy workers into separate group and new social roles are created as some former busybodies become idlers and former idlers become industrious. In observations of summer campers, it was noted that after a few hours, bunk-mates assumed four specific social roles: dominant “alpha male”, unpopular “bully”, “joker” sidekick and the over-eager “nerd” who is kicked around by everyone.

All human minds possess thousands of unrealized personalities which could have been but aren’t. This results in an undercurrent of frustration, which can be channeled into the hatred of the interloper that binds it together. Early cellular lifeforms discovered that they could dispose of calcium, poisonous in high quantities, by using it to build shells. In similar fashion, common hatreds glue societies together, such “that every tribe regards outsiders as fair game; that every society gives permission to hate; that each culture addresses the demon of its hatred in the garb of righteousness; and that the man who channels this hatred can rouse the superorganism and lead it around by the nose”.

From Genes to Memes, Yet Us vs. Them Always

In another chapter full of worthy insights, Bloom notes that the main vector of evolution shifted from genes swimming through “the protoplasmic soup of the early earth” to memes floating through a “sea of human brains”. Both genes and memes mercilessly exploit their hosts in their struggle for survival and bid to overspread the earth. Though rat broods are normally loving to each other, insert a rodent from a different clan that smells different, and they tear the unfortunate apart – even if he carries their genetic stock (rats tell who is who by smell). Humans are more advanced: they have language, culture and religions that bind closer than any uniform. The Hebrew genocide of the Canaanites was just and splendid, for their ethno-genetic stock was chosen by the LORD God.

Over the millennia of ancient history, memes gradually divorced themselves from the genetic level altogether, appearing in “universal” religions like Zoroastrianism and Christianity after St. Paul. Competing universal religions and ideologies now encompass nearly the whole world. The confer several advantages. First, the effective illusion of control, which is good guarantor of health and mental agility (note that most medical procedures even today are based on getting the patient to believe she will recover and hence doing so). Second, memes help consolidate huge communities, and hence ensure their own long-term survival.

A society is, in effect, a vast, problem-solving neural net – humans are to it like brain cells are to a mind. As a swarm of individuals interact in limited and simply ways (bees, humans), an extraordinarily complex structure emerges (a beehive, the modern economy). One feature of human society is male expendability – from cradle to old age, men have weaker immune systems, are more accident-prone and die quicker. This is especially marked in primitive societies where warfare is brutal and incessant.

The reasons are biologically obvious: whereas one man can inseminate dozens of women, one woman can only reproduce about once a year at most. So Mother Nature can afford to play with men as dice, ensuring that only the fittest survive. Interestingly, life is most brutal and profligate in the south, where resources are plentiful. In the tropics, male birds tend to have bright plumes to attract female attention (which also makes them highly visible to predators); but in the north, birds have grayer colors designed to blend into the surroundings, and their sex tends to be indistinguishable to the human eye. That is because the female needs male help to rear her chicks through the hard winter months of dearth. Likewise with humans, polygamy has been most prevalent in southern cultures – even if many guys die in battles for prestige, territory and slaves, the women can continue the race without most of them.

Most men failed, and died early or had little reproductive success (in primitive societies only 50% of men end up having offspring, compared to 80% of women). But those who made it, like Chinggis Khan, became the biological fathers of millions (King Saud was probably the last such very influential warlord). But as history progressed, memes steadily took center place. The generators of successful memes, like St. Paul, Marx or Sayyid Qutb, took the center place in the lives of millions and billions!

The Pecking Order: Hierarchy is Good

Stalin was right: the weak get beaten. That’s what happens to those at the bottom of the pecking order, the phenomenon observed in the 1920′s where chickens formed a fixed hierarchy that determined priority access to food and shelter. While the top hen was well fed, warm and respected, the one at the bottom was ostracized and pecked by everyone else. Likewise, those at the top are most sexually successful in primitive societies. In a series of experiments in which three male rats and three female rats were brought together in a cage, some 92% of offspring accrued to the dominant male!

Success breeds success, failure breeds failure. Low ranking baboons suffer increased levels of glucocorticoids, a stress hormone that acts as a slow poison, and walk around slouched and defeated. The same thing operates in human societies – being at the bottom of the pecking order is bad for you, as you suffer from increased rates of depression, blood pressure, heart attacks, etc – obviously this also makes you unattractive and entrenches your gutter status. In contrast, higher ranking monkeys people walk upright and their testicles hang down further. (So consequently no wonder that that is the reason why men are recommended Alexander posture and walking with one’s legs wide apart… it is to project the image of the physical aspects of the alpha male; on third thought that would explain society’s dislike for the “pick-up artist”, since their craft essentially cheats the naturally emergent hierarchy by getting men to mimic alpha traits instead of actually being one).

There’s a very good reason for the existence of these feedback loops that reinforce social hierarchy – the alternative to hierarchy, with its inherent, diffuse coercion, is anarchy. This entails a state of constant expenditure of previous, limited energy on banditry and defense. In this situation, the weak and friendless get trampled down even more quickly and ruthlessly than if they were (merely) oppressed within a hierarchic system. So it is actually in the interests of everyone, including even its lowliest members. (The exceptions are, of course, those who believe that their position in the hierarchy is unjustified on the basis of their abilities or beliefs, e.g. the Bolshevik insurrectionist, the Islamist cell member, etc, who would like to level the current hierarchic system in a cleansing purge before rebuilding it in their own image). Bloom notes that “superior chickens make friends”, not only within societies, but within the community of tribes and nations. Just as powerful Yanamamo tribes attracted allies and clobbered the weak and friendless tribes, and Rome maintained coalitions awed by its political and military prowess, so the modern US draws on the loyalty of many of its allies in the West and elsewhere through the visibility of its hegemonic power. (It even gets financial credit at low prices due to an effect called American alpha!)

In the last few chapters, Bloom ingeniously – or in an act of unintentional hypocrisy, but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt – shows “us vs them”, memes and hierarchy at work in his own book! He states America’s refusal to support France and Britain in their neo-colonial 1956 endevour to seize back the Suez Canal was morally wrong, proclaims the superiority of the West over the cultures of the Third World and labels Islam a “killer culture” harboring the next barbarians. (Of course, the Islamist crazies promptly did their best to prove him right). No, you don’t need to be a PC-head to realize that in the last hundred pages Bloom strays from his fascinating insights into a morass of opinion(ated) projections of his social theories onto modern geopolitics and the “clash of civilizations”. They can be skipped. The only more or less useful additional point he makes is that giving gifts is insulting, like the World Bank does with Africa, because it created humiliating cultural dependency relationships (e.g. demands to Africans to do things the way armchair economists with no practical experience there want them to). China’s straightforward infrastructure or cash for resources approach is better for Africans, both spiritually and probably even economically.

The Lucifer Principle: Superorganism, Memes & Hierarchy

These elements combined form the Lucifer Principle. The superorganism – be it body, village, nation (“imagined community”) or civilization – curtails your individuality, and has no qualms about throwing your life and health away if doing so would serve the greater good. It can throw you against another superorganism so as to weed out the weak, identify the strong, and consolidate itself internally and ideologically (war is peace). It can – and does – trample your mental and physical health under the social stratification it requires to maintain its own complexity (peace is submission). But it also nurtures and protects you with a love harsh but true… for while you can surmount the burdens and realize yourself (slavery is freedom), without society, that would be impossible… survival itself is impossible (freedom is death). I would say that the essence of the Lucifer Principle is that fascism is the natural state.

[The essence of the book in one comic. Translation: "What's the matter, you fat monkey?" "Fuck off, fucking fascist!" "You say 'fascist', as if it's a bad thing. But dude, people love fascists. Have you ever met a woman who fantasizes about being tied up and raped by a *liberal*?"]

Though Rome “had been an oppressor, it was also “the source of nourishment and peace”. It’s end brought not freedom, but death, says Bloom, as roving bandits moved in to pick its carcass. (Though I would make the caveat that by its end the Western Empire armies were themselves no better than bandits). In conclusions: “Superorganism, ideas, and the pecking order – these are the primary forces behind much of human creativity and earthly good. They are the holy trinity of the Lucifer Principle”.

There were several problems with the book. It was tied in loosely with the book and while chock full of fascinating details, many of them did little or nothing to advance or support the argument. The poor organization made writing this review rather tedious. The two chapters at the end, in which Bloom tried to apply disjointed elements of the Lucifer Principle onto modern politics and geopolitics, were largely irrelevant and should have been split off into a separate volume.

2. When I meet people, I sometimes mention the S/O blog as one of the things I do if I think they might be interested in its material. My problem – somewhat paradoxically, as its author – is that I also have difficulties in summarizing what it is about. Erm… Russia. Peak oil. EROEI. What’s that? Futurism. So what do you think will happen? I look at trends, and possible discontinuities, for example… Anyhow, I don’t feel like I’m doing it right. I’d appreciate it if you could help me out, e.g. by writing down three or four sentences that distill the essence of S/O.

3. A lot of Not So Good news on the climate change front. The subsea permafrost of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is destabilizing, possibly threatening to uncork massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere over just a few decades (i.e. instantaneous on the geological timescale). This is bad because methane is much more potent than CO2 over timescales of decades. There is a danger that the process will pass a threshold beyond which it acquires runaway characteristics, raising global temperatures by as much as 8-10C. Needless to say, such an extreme hothouse state would spell the end of industrial civilization, maybe even homo sapiens. Therefore, should global warming runaway, geoengineering will almost certainly be attempted as a “last gamble”.

Methane release from the not-so-perma-frost is the most dangerous amplifying feedback in the entire carbon cycle.  Research published in Friday’s journal Science finds a key “lid” on “the large sub-sea permafrost carbon reservoir” near Eastern Siberia “is clearly perforated, and sedimentary CH₄ [methane] is escaping to the atmosphere.”

Scientists learned last year that the permafrost permamelt contains a staggering “1.5 trillion tons of frozen carbon, about twice as much carbon as contained in the atmosphere,” much of which would be released as methane.  Methane is  is 25 times as potent a heat-trapping gas as CO2 over a 100 year time horizon, but 72 times as potent over 20 years!

The carbon is locked in a freezer in the part of the planet warming up the fastest (see “Tundra 4: Permafrost loss linked to Arctic sea ice loss“).  Half the land-based permafrost would vanish by mid-century on our current emissions path (see “Tundra, Part 2: The point of no return” and below).  No climate model currently incorporates the amplifying feedback from methane released by a defrosting tundra. [AK: See MIT study using upgraded model that takes this into account].

The new Science study, led by University of Alaska’s International Arctic Research Centre and the Russian Academy of Sciences, is “Extensive Methane Venting to the Atmosphere from Sediments of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf” (subs. req’d).  The must-read National Science Foundation press release (click here), warns “Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.”  The NSF is normally a very staid organization.  If they are worried, everybody should be.

It is increasingly clear that if the world strays significantly above 450 ppm atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide for any length of time, we will find it unimaginably difficult to stop short of 800 to 1000 ppm.

There are so many positive feedbacks to global warming in the Arctic – it is both the canary and the gas in the coal mine. Do yourself a favor and read the whole article.

James Cascio (one of the leading thinkers about geoengineering) writes about using methanotrophic bacteria, genetically-engineered to survive the cold Arctic seas, to oxidize the excess methane in that region. He also stresses that if the methane gun goes off, we may have no choice to attempting large-scale geoengineering.

If the frozen methane in the Siberian ocean is melting faster, our options are extremely limited. We’d no longer be in a position to stop the melting, even by ceasing all greenhouse gas production today; the temperature increases we’re seeing now are the results of greenhouse gases put into the atmosphere decades ago. And when methane melts, it appears to do so quickly — there are signs that past methane clathrate events took less than a human lifetime. This is why I think that methane melt would inevitably mean geoengineering.

Probably a more realistic, and certainly cheaper, proposal than a 100,000 square mile sun shade.

4. A good, albeit depressing, article by George Monbiot on the intellectuals’ fallacy that reason persuades. Unfortunately for the world, it’s the opposite.

5. Iraq Opens Up to Foreign Oil Majors – Mission Accomplished!

The contracts awarded in two auctions, which pay a per-barrel fee for development work rather than granting a share in the production itself, will cost the companies a total of about $100 billion to develop deposits, Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani said in December. Iraq, with the world’s third-largest oil reserves, will earn about $200 billion a year. …

A group led by BP, which vies with Shell as Europe’s largest oil company, will receive $2 billion per year in fees to develop the Rumaila field. A Shell-led group will get $913 million and a group led by Exxon, the largest U.S. oil company, will receive $1.6 billion per year. Each calculation is based on the agreed-to per-barrel fee times the maximum production level.

“We see this as the beginning of a long-term relationship with Iraq and will continue to look for further opportunities,” Andy Inglis, BP’s chief executive for exploration and production, said on a conference call March 2.

This is not looting, as hardcore critics of US foreign policy / imperialism assert. The contracts were signed on favorable terms to Iraq (i.e. not the production-sharing agreements, or PSA’s, typically arranged with corrupt Third World states). The main hope is that under the current plans, a rapid surge in Iraqi production will postpone global peak oil (World Oil Capacity to Peak in 2010 Says Petrobras CEO) by up to a decade. This is important because cheap oil flows are one of the key foundations of Pax Americana and of the global (neo)liberal internationalist order.

[History of Iraqi oil production].

Will this actually work? I am skeptical. The optimistic scenario assumes the confluence of all the best outcomes in the following:

1. Iraq’s reserves are not massively overstated for political reasons like in the rest of OPEC.
2. The security situation in Iraq remains stable, unlikely given the fragility of the post-2008 agreements between ethnic / religious clans, and the influence Iran weilds over key political factions.
3. No geopolitical disruptions, such as Iran blocking the Strait of Hormuz or raiding Iraqi oil installations, e.g. in response to a US-Israeli strike on its nuclear facilities.
4. Iraq manages to attract the technical talent to make this work. Developing oil fields is a highly complex organizational endevour, and most of its managerial talent emigrated in 2003-2008.

Finally, history itself suggests that the odds are against the Al-Shahristani plan / optimistic scenario from being realized. Note that at three distinct prior points in the last three decades, it appeared that Iraq might become a dominant oil exporter. The buildup in the 1970′s was interrupted by the Iran-Iraq War. The late 1980′s recovery was utterly reversed by the Gulf War. The 1990′s recovery was stunted by UN sanctions, and output again dipped during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and remained depressed throughout the anarchic 2003-2008 period.

The common pattern? All Iraq’s historic rises in oil production, or recoveries, were interrupted by geopolitical flux in decadal cycles. Considering the current, irreconcilable tensions between Iran, Israel and the US, is it really outlandish to suggest that some renewed geopolitical shock in the early to mid-2010′s once again disillusions the Iraq oil bulls?

6. Collapse of Pax Americana watch. Complexity and Collapse: Empires on the Edge of Chaos by Niall Ferguson, court historian of the American empire. I highly recommend registering with FP and reading the article free.

What matters most is that in such systems a relatively minor shock can cause a disproportionate — and sometimes fatal — disruption. As Taleb has argued, by 2007, the global economy had grown to resemble an over-optimized electrical grid. Defaults on subprime mortgages produced a relatively small surge in the United States that tipped the entire world economy into a financial blackout, which, for a moment, threatened to bring about a complete collapse of international trade.

Though the more fundamental source of system strain was the first peak oil shock, this analysis is still valid and correct.

Regardless of whether it is a dictatorship or a democracy, any large-scale political unit is a complex system. Most great empires have a nominal central authority — either a hereditary emperor or an elected president — but in practice the power of any individual ruler is a function of the network of economic, social, and political relations over which he or she presides. As such, empires exhibit many of the characteristics of other complex adaptive systems — including the tendency to move from stability to instability quite suddenly. But this fact is rarely recognized because of the collective addiction to cyclical theories of history. …

But what if fourth-century Rome was simply functioning normally as a complex adaptive system, with political strife, barbarian migration, and imperial rivalry all just integral features of late antiquity? Through this lens, Rome’s fall was sudden and dramatic — just as one would expect when such a system goes critical. … the final breakdown in the Western Roman Empire began in 406, when Germanic invaders poured across the Rhine into Gaul and then Italy. Rome itself was sacked by the Goths in 410. … Byzantium lived on, but the Western Roman Empire was dead. By 476, Rome was the fiefdom of Odoacer, king of the Goths.

What is most striking about this history is the speed of the Roman Empire’s collapse. In just five decades, the population of Rome itself fell by three-quarters. Archaeological evidence from the late fifth century — inferior housing, more primitive pottery, fewer coins, smaller cattle — shows that the benign influence of Rome diminished rapidly in the rest of western Europe. What Ward-Perkins calls “the end of civilization” came within the span of a single generation.

I am an adherent of the fast collapse school. Most historical examples conformed to this pattern.

The most recent and familiar example of precipitous decline is, of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union. With the benefit of hindsight, historians have traced all kinds of rot within the Soviet system back to the Brezhnev era and beyond. Perhaps, as the historian and political scientist Stephen Kotkin has argued, it was only the high oil prices of the 1970s that “averted Armageddon.” But this did not seem to be the case at the time. In March 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, the CIA estimated the Soviet economy to be approximately 60 percent the size of the U.S. economy. This estimate is now known to have been wrong, but the Soviet nuclear arsenal was genuinely larger than the U.S. stockpile. And governments in what was then called the Third World, from Vietnam to Nicaragua, had been tilting in the Soviets’ favor for most of the previous 20 years. Yet less than five years after Gorbachev took power, the Soviet imperium in central and Eastern Europe had fallen apart, followed by the Soviet Union itself in 1991. If ever an empire fell off a cliff — rather than gently declining — it was the one founded by Lenin.

True that it collapsed suddenly, but as I wrote previously, this was because the dictator (Gorbachev) lost the will to enforce coercion – i.e. the thing that made central planning work. Otherwise, the Soviet system was entirely sustainable (which is not to say that it was “optimal”, “good”, “dynamic”, etc). See Harrison 2001.

If empires are complex systems that sooner or later succumb to sudden and catastrophic malfunctions, rather than cycling sedately from Arcadia to Apogee to Armageddon, what are the implications for the United States today? First, debating the stages of decline may be a waste of time — it is a precipitous and unexpected fall that should most concern policymakers and citizens. Second, most imperial falls are associated with fiscal crises. All the above cases were marked by sharp imbalances between revenues and expenditures, as well as difficulties with financing public debt. Alarm bells should therefore be ringing very loudly, indeed, as the United States contemplates a deficit for 2009 of more than $1.4 trillion — about 11.2 percent of GDP, the biggest deficit in 60 years — and another for 2010 that will not be much smaller. Public debt, meanwhile, is set to more than double in the coming decade, from $5.8 trillion in 2008 to $14.3 trillion in 2019. Within the same timeframe, interest payments on that debt are forecast to leap from eight percent of federal revenues to 17 percent.

These numbers are bad, but in the realm of political entities, the role of perception is just as crucial, if not more so. In imperial crises, it is not the material underpinnings of power that really matter but expectations about future power. The fiscal numbers cited above cannot erode U.S. strength on their own, but they can work to weaken a long-assumed faith in the United States’ ability to weather any crisis. For now, the world still expects the United States to muddle through, eventually confronting its problems when, as Churchill famously said, all the alternatives have been exhausted. Through this lens, past alarms about the deficit seem overblown, and 2080 — when the U.S. debt may reach staggering proportions — seems a long way off, leaving plenty of time to plug the fiscal hole. But one day, a seemingly random piece of bad news — perhaps a negative report by a rating agency — will make the headlines during an otherwise quiet news cycle. Suddenly, it will be not just a few policy wonks who worry about the sustainability of U.S. fiscal policy but also the public at large, not to mention investors abroad. It is this shift that is crucial: a complex adaptive system is in big trouble when its component parts lose faith in its viability.

… The next phase of the current crisis may begin when the public begins to reassess the credibility of the monetary and fiscal measures that the Obama administration has taken in response [AK: this has been a constant S/O theme for a year now]. Neither interest rates at zero nor fiscal stimulus can achieve a sustainable recovery if people in the United States and abroad collectively decide, overnight, that such measures will lead to much higher inflation rates or outright default. As Thomas Sargent, an economist who pioneered the idea of rational expectations, demonstrated more than 20 years ago, such decisions are self-fulfilling: it is not the base supply of money that determines inflation but the velocity of its circulation, which in turn is a function of expectations. In the same way, it is not the debt-to-GDP ratio that determines government solvency but the interest rate that investors demand. Bond yields can shoot up if expectations change about future government solvency, intensifying an already bad fiscal crisis by driving up the cost of interest payments on new debt [another major S/O theme - compound debt trap or inflation]. Just ask Greece — it happened there at the end of last year, plunging the country into fiscal and political crisis.

Finally, a shift in expectations about monetary and fiscal policy could force a reassessment of future U.S. foreign policy. There is a zero-sum game at the heart of the budgetary process: if interest payments consume a rising proportion of tax revenue, military expenditure is the item most likely to be cut because, unlike mandatory entitlements, it is discretionary. [AK: see my argument that the US military-industrial complex will be hit particularly hard by the coming debt & fiscal crises] … And what about the United States’ other strategic challenges? For the United States’ enemies in Iran and Iraq, it must be consoling to know that U.S. fiscal policy today is preprogrammed to reduce the resources available for all overseas military operations in the years ahead. [AK: This is the geopolitical component of collapse]

Defeat in the mountains of the Hindu Kush or on the plains of Mesopotamia has long been a harbinger of imperial fall. It is no coincidence that the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in the annus mirabilis of 1989. What happened 20 years ago, like the events of the distant fifth century, is a reminder that empires do not in fact appear, rise, reign, decline, and fall according to some recurrent and predictable life cycle. It is historians who retrospectively portray the process of imperial dissolution as slow-acting, with multiple overdetermining causes. Rather, empires behave like all complex adaptive systems. They function in apparent equilibrium for some unknowable period. And then, quite abruptly, they collapse. To return to the terminology of Thomas Cole, the painter of The Course of Empire, the shift from consummation to destruction and then to desolation is not cyclical. It is sudden.

That said, the suddenness shouldn’t be overstated. In reality, when a complex system collapses, its constituent parts tend to reassemble into a simpler structure after some period of flux; but since this simpler structure requires fewer investments to maintain itself, the resulting entity can, in principle, be even more vigorous and expansionist than the hypertrophied empire that preceded it. For instance, the late USSR was decrepit, at home and abroad; today’s Russia is brashly expansionist, for its radical post-Soviet “simplification” has freed up resources away from the maintenance of complexity. Likewise, following the collapse of Pax Americana, the American Republic will remain; it will be like a crustacean that has shed its shell, and it will, if anything, be enthusiastic about reclaiming its old spheres of influence in a far blunter, more aggresive manner than it maintains Pax Americana today.

[Desolation by Thomas Cole (last stage of empire)].

(Overall I like Ferguson’s work, especially the earlier ones before he became famous and adopted an air of aloof arrogance - The Pity of War is a masterpiece of historical revisionism. BTW. I met him once when he was giving a talk about his new book The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (certainly not his best book, IMO). He made the surprising claim that Iran today is as big a threat to US hegemony as Imperial Germany was to the UK in 1914. I took issue with this, citing Iran’s vastly weaker economy, military, etc relative to Germany a century ago, which by 1914 had twice the UK’s steel production, Europe’s most powerful armed forces, and leadership in the new chemical and electrical engineering industries. His answer to my criticism was unsubstantive and unimpressive. Nowadays, I realize that in a way he was correct, however. Though Iran cannot stand head-to-head against the US, 1) today’s US Empire is a much more fragile system than the British Empire and 2) in particular, Iran can hit it the US at a criticial position – its reliance on cheap oil. British power in 1914 relied on its financial strength, Royal Navy, and coal. Germany was powerless to do anything about the latter two, though over four years of total war it did indirectly undermine the former, since Britain’s military expenditures shifted the balance of financial power to the US. In contrast, Iran can hit directly at the heart of US power – the global oil system.)

7. Who owns US debt? One interesting thing I observe in those figures is that in the last half-year, America’s strategic competitors (China, Russia) have slightly reduced US Treasury holdings, whereas its allies (Britain, Canada, Japan, France, Australia, Poland) tended to increase them. Plus, there are suspicions / conspiracy theories? that the US, it’s own best ally, is buying its own debt.

8. Economic apocalypse watch. Europe’s banks brace for UK debt crisis - UniCredit has alerted investors in a client note that Britain is at serious risk of a bond market and sterling debacle and faces even more intractable budget woes than Greece.

Fitch warns Britain and questions Greek rescue as sovereign risks grow:

A string of European states are stepping up the pace of retrenchment, aiming to cut deficits to 3pc of GDP within three years. The risk is that Britain will soon stick out like a sore thumb, left behind with a shockingly large deficit long after such loose fiscal policy can be justified as a crisis measure. The UK deficit this year is 12.6pc of GDP, the highest among G10 states.

The Government is clearly counting on a “Korean” recovery, modelled on Korea’s fast return to trend growth following the Asian crisis in 1998. It relies on rising output and tax revenues to plug much of the deficit. “This is an optimistic assumption,” said Fitch.

The Coming Greek Debt Bubble by Peter Boone and Simon Johnson.

By the end of 2011 Greece’s debt will around 150% of GDP (the numbers here are based on the 2009 IMF Article IV assessment; we make some adjustments for the worsening economy and the restating of numbers since that time – for example, the fiscal deficit in 2009 will likely turn out to be about 8 percent, which is double what the IMF expected until recently).  About 80 percent of this debt is foreign owned, and a large part of this is thought held by residents of France and Germany.  Every 1 percentage point rise in interest rates means Greece needs to send an additional 1.2 percent of GDP abroad to those bondholders.

What if Greek interest rates rise to, say, 10% – a modest premium for a country which has the highest external public debt/GDP ratio in the world, which continues (under the so-called “austerity” program) to refinance even the interest on that debt without actually paying a centime out of its own pocket, and which is struggling to establish any sustained backing from the rest of Europe?  Greece would need to send at total of 12% of GDP abroad per year, once they rollover the existing stock of debt to these new rates (nearly half of Greek debt will roll over within 3 years).

This is simply impossible and unheard of for any long period of history.  German reparation payments were 2.4 percent of GNP during 1925-32, and in the years immediately after 1982, the net transfer of resources from Latin America was 3.5 percent of GDP (a fifth of its export earnings).  Neither of these were good experiences. …

The French and Germans are apparently actually encouraging banks, pension funds, and individuals to buy these bonds – despite the fact senior politicians must surely know this is a Ponzi scheme, i.e., people can get out of Greek bonds only to the extent that new investors come in.  At best, this does nothing more than postpone the crisis – in the business, it is known as “kicking the can down the road.”  At worst, it encourages less informed people (including perhaps pension funds) to buy bonds as smarter people (and big banks, surely) take the opportunity to exit.

While the French and German leadership makes a great spectacle of wanting to end speculation, in fact they are instead encouraging it.  The hypocrisy is horrifying – Mr. Sarkozy and Ms. Merkel are helping realistic speculators make money on the backs of those who take seriously misleading statements by European politicians.  This is irresponsible.

Eurozone could risk ‘sovereign debt explosion’ - Europe’s governments are at increasing risk of an interest rate shock this year as the lingering effects of the Great Recession drive debt issuance to record levels and saturate bond markets, according to Standard & Poor’s.

9. John Michael Greer makes a post excellent even by his high standards, Barbarism and Good Brandy. Emergy, energy concentrations, and economic triage for dummies.

10. A stunning 80% of Internet users around the world see Internet access as a fundamental human right. (This is an illustration of the amazing centrality the Internet has assumed in our lives over the past decade. The son of ARPANET is easily the most significant invention of late industrialism – so significant, that as far as I know uniquely, it created an entirely new social, economic, and military environment – that of cyberspace).

The BBC has a map of the spread of Internet penetration around the world from 1998-2008. Just ten years ago, the only “wired societies” were those of the advanced world. Today, even nations like Brazil, Iran, and Belarus have widespread Internet penetration. With 29% penetration as of end-2009, China has decisively overtaken the US as the nation with the most netizens.

Within the next 2-3 years, the Internet is projected to 1) become much, much faster, by orders of magnitude, and 2) penetration will become near-universal in all but the poorest nations.

11. One example of how the Internet is changing the world – people put their shit up and it is coming back to bite them in the ass. Back from 2005 - Bloggers Need Not Apply.

That’s when the committee took a look at their online activity. In some cases, a Google search of the candidate’s name turned up his or her blog. Other candidates told us about their Web site, even making sure we had the URL so we wouldn’t fail to find it. In one case, a candidate had mentioned it in the cover letter. We felt compelled to follow up in each of those instances, and it turned out to be every bit as eye-opening as a train wreck. [AK: I don't mention my blog on these occasions unless what I've written there is directly relevant to it. That said, I make absolutely no effort to hide my online work - nor would I ever consider doing it]

We’ve all done it — expressed that way-out-there opinion in a lecture we’re giving, in cocktail party conversation, or in an e-mail message to a friend. There is a slight risk that the opinion might find its way to the wrong person’s attention and embarrass us. Words said and e-mail messages sent cannot be retracted, but usually have a limited range. When placed on prominent display in a blog, however, all bets are off. …

It would never occur to the committee to ask what a candidate thinks about certain people’s choice of fashion or body adornment, which countries we should invade, what should be done to drivers who refuse to get out of the passing lane, what constitutes a real man, or how the recovery process from one’s childhood traumas is going. But since the applicant elaborated on many topics like those, we were all ears. And we were a little concerned. It’s not our place to make the recommendation, but we agreed a little therapy (of the offline variety) might be in order. …

You may think your blog is a harmless outlet. You may use the faulty logic of the blogger, “Oh, no one will see it anyway.” Don’t count on it. Even if you take your blog offline while job applications are active, Google and other search engines store cached data of their prior contents. So that cranky rant might still turn up. [AK: This is really stating the obvious]

The content of the blog may be less worrisome than the fact of the blog itself. Several committee members expressed concern that a blogger who joined our staff might air departmental dirty laundry (real or imagined) on the cyber clothesline for the world to see. Past good behavior is no guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum. … [AK: I would suggest Tribble's department go the whole nine yards and ban the Internet in their workplace. I mean past good behavior is no guarantee that someone wouldn't go over to blogger.com and start up a blog within 5 minutes. Even better, we wouldn't have to read his parochial diatribes]

We’ve seen the hapless job seekers who destroy the good thing they’ve got going on paper by being so irritating in person that we can’t wait to put them back on a plane. Our blogger applicants came off reasonably well at the initial interview, but once we hung up the phone and called up their blogs, we got to know “the real them” — better than we wanted, enough to conclude we didn’t want to know more. [AK: Likewise, this is enough for me to conclude that I don't want to work with or study under Tribble and his ilk either. So we do each other a favor ]

Ivan Tribble is the pseudonym of a humanities professor at a small liberal-arts college in the Midwest.

The anonymous beigeocrat who wrote this article is both 100% correct and an excellent reason to blog under one’s own name.

It’s true that associating your real-life “True Name” with the writings, rantings, and ravings of an online avatar may potentially result in real-life consequences. Unsuccessful job applications, denunciations, and other Kafkaesque nightmares are distinct possibilities. (We live in a society that likes to pretend it’s free, even makes a religion of it, whereas in reality it is just a multitude of centrally planned corporate dictatorships and professional guilds). Surely it’s best to conform, get yourself a nice cushioned job, and pursue the American Dream of ever bigger living boxes and higher-horsepower wheeled boxes with Stakhanovite fervor?

That is what most people do – the premeds with no life except studying, the grad students desperately seeking tenure, the office robots who don’t make it to the top of the corporate pecking order, all in thrall to the Tribbles of the world. But is this really a free, or even satisfying, existence?

I too was under the System’s spell until about a year and a half ago (I assume the timeline based on when I dropped my anonymity). I now realize – true, still more in theory than in practice – that expending great efforts on spinning the careerist hamster wheel is pointless, even idiotic (far better to own the wheels and hamsters yourself). I also realize that the world now has so many hamsters and so many wheels that sustaining them far into the future is probably unrealistic. I am also thankful that I’ve come to these conclusions in my early 20′s, rather than in my 40′s, a time when the same realizations tend to cause midlife crises… Real freedom only begins with freedom from fear.

Incidentally, that is why I respect people who are unafraid to tell it like it is under their true names (e.g. Leos Tomicek), even when I don’t agree them on most things (e.g. Craig Pirrong).

[Zaporozh'e Cossacks writing a letter to the Sultan by Ilya Repin].

I guess I’m rambling now, displaying a lack of focus to the search committee picking over this entry. Back on topic. Leaving aside questions of principle, I don’t even think that Tribble is correct in his practical conclusions that blogging is almost always bad for job applications, etc. If you annoy someone with your Russophile or doomer views*, big deal – you don’t get the position (one out of at least hundreds of others), and you are the better off for it – i.e. you won’t have to deal with a judgmental, opinionated boss. However, every so often your views will find a surprisingly warm reception, allowing you to establish a strong, friendly rapport based on common values with your prospective employers and colleagues.

Finally, the source of Tribble’s critique of public blogging comes from his infatuation with the traditional academic establishment, which is very conservative and mafia-like in its cliquishness. The democratic Internet, which eliminates the need for the current, broken system of peer review, and gives voice to organic intellectuals as never before, is viewed with deep suspicion. No wonder. I’ve blogged for two years as a hobby, and I already managed to get cited on Google Scholar with absolutely zero effort on my part. Such possibilities must be immensely frustrating to the old school who have to jump through the traditional hoops. But they are losing the war. As the Internet becomes ever more ubiquitous in our lives, and as limits to growth constrain the traditional, bureaucratized academic system, it will be bloggers and amateur enthusiasts, eccentrics and organic intellectuals, who will take over as the driving force behind social and cultural progress (though probably not technical R&D).

* That said, I probably wouldn’t recommend going public with extreme and unpopular views, such as neo-Nazism, “race realism”, or political Islamism (fundamentalist Christianity is totally cool though). Perhaps I’ll yet regret writing about Green Communism and ecotechnic dictatorship. Then again, one can always take up sustenance permaculture or sail off in a boat.

12. Turkey watch. Zavtra.com.ua: Turkey might activate its relations with Russia in retaliation to US (recognition of Armenian genocide). Turkey’s interests are diverging from those of the US on a range of issues, causing it to edge a bit closer to Russia.

That said, there’s absolutely no point in speaking about a solid alliance. This Eurasianist fantasy is just that, a fantasy. Russia and Turkey simply have too many potential clashes of interests (the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Black Sea, and Central Asia), which will eventually emerge into prominence because they are both rising Powers.

What is more likely are temporary marriages of interest, such as what we have now. Turkey might be interested in this to free up resources for increasing its influence over Iraq, Syria, the Balkans, and former-Soviet Central Asia; Russia will be interested in freeing up resources for its own geopolitical projects, i.e. reasserting hegemony over the Caucasus. Once the new Russian and neo-Ottoman Empires are both consolidated, their relations will deteriorate.

13. China watch. Beijing seeks a shift in geopolitics

More importantly, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership is gunning for a paradigm shift in geopolitics, namely, new rules of the game whereby the fast-rising quasi-superpower will be playing a more forceful role. In particular, Beijing has served notice that it won’t be shy about playing hardball to safeguard what it claims to be “core national interests”. …

Likewise, Central Party School strategist Gong Li said Beijing should “not yield a single inch” as far as matters such as Taiwan and Tibet are concerned. Professor Gong said while China is not yet a superpower that can throw its weight around on a global scale, Beijing should “brandish the sword” in areas affecting the country’s “core values and major interests”.

According to Yang Yi, a well-known scholar at the Beijing-based National Defense University, China has been thrust to the forefront of the global stage by force of circumstances. “Under such circumstances, it’s better that we take the initiative and be proactive and creative,” said General Yang. When faced with challenges and provocations, China should “show the flag and hit hard [at opponents]“, he added. “While we may suffer temporary damage, it is imperative that our opponent be dealt a blow that it cannot sustain.”

14. Robert Amsterdam writes about The Rise of the Franco-Russo Axis. I don’t agree with this characterization – as with Turkey and even Germany, it is more a temporary marriage of interests. France gets snubbed by the US, e.g. the most recent - France vows retaliation against US in air tanker dispute. Though volatile Sarkozy shows his displeasure by acquiescing to major commercial and military deals with Russia, the longer-term analysis suggests that France and Russia will be natural strategic competitors.

This comment by georgesdelatour (arguing that Britain and Russia are natural partners) got me thinking of European geopolitics in the 18th century. A rising Russia, surrounded by non-friendly Poland, Sweden, and Turkey. Friends with Habsburg Austria, and sometimes Prussia and England. Almost always aligned against France, which in turn allies with nations like Turkey and Poland to check Habsburg designs. Italy is disunited and Spain is weak. In essence, Russia’s relations tended to follow a chequerboard pattern – enemies with its neighbors (Turkey, Sweden, Poland), friends with its neighbors’ neighbors (the German states, Austria), enemies with its neighbors to the 3rd degree (France), and friends with its neighbors to the 4th degree (Britain).

As I noted in Europe, The Black Continent, a broadly similar geopolitical structure may appear within the next two decades, albeit with some differences – e.g. modern day Germany is more powerful than Prussia, whereas Habsburg Austria has no modern equivalent; Italy is an independent player; Turkey’s power is rising, rather than declining as with the Ottomans; and the US, though its global empire will probably collapse, will nonetheless remain a very powerful and significant player.

Based on the 18th century precedent, there is ground to believe that Russia and Britain will pursue good relations – especially since Britain will want for gas supplies since it will be suffering an energy crunch by the mid-2010’s. On the other hand, Britain is closely aligned with the US, whose primary goal is to preempt the emergence of a Eurasian hegemon. Since the Russian Empire is reconsolidating itself, this might limit the scope of any Anglo-Russian friendship.

15. Rise of Russian Empire watch. Azarov, close Yanukovych supporter/ POR member, becomes Ukraine’s PM. The new cabinet is dominated by the pro-Russian Party of Regions, with a few independents and smaller party members in the less important posts. The BYT bloc is in the opposition and seems to have reverted to its strident anti-Russian stance; the pro-Russian coalition now in power (POR / Litvin bloc / Communists / some defectors) is currently strong, though potentially unstable.

PS. The new cabinet is also all-male, which is surprising even by the generally low levels of political participation of women in E. European politics. Did Yanukovych get an allergy to all female politicians after his struggle with Yulia?

16. Even more on new Eurasian Empire. Stratfor has a series summarizing Russia’s designs on and activities towards reconsolidating its Eurasian Empire. The analysis is steretypically Stratforish, logical and hard-knuckled realist (perhaps to a fault?). But I essentially agree with it.

• Russia’s Expanding Influence, Introduction: The Targets
• Russia’s Expanding Influence, Part 1: The Necessities – Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Georgia are considered vital. The first three are already back within Russia’s sphere of influence.
• Russia’s Expanding Influence, Part 2: The Desirables – the Baltics, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
• Russia’s Expanding Influence, Part 3: The Extras – Moldova, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan.
• Russia’s Expanding Influence, Part 4: The Major Players – maintain good relations with Turkey, France, Germany, and Poland so as to prevent them from interfering too much in imperial reassertion.

See also Vladimir Putin forging ahead with vision of Eurasian empire.

17. Commentator Randy McDonald sent me this link which argues that nothing substantial may come out of the recent Eurasian-integration trends, just as nothing substantial came out of the Union state of Russia and Belarus after 1997. I could potentially sympathize with this view.

However, one major difference between today and the past two decades is that now 1) the West is in rapid decline, whereas 2) Russia’s relative rise is accelerating. Indeed, as suggested by Ferguson above (and numerous times on S/O), the entire global system may now be approaching a discontinuity that kills off today’s (neo)liberal cosmopolitan internationalism and massively reduces American influence. The old rules of the game will be thrown overboard.

Just like in human societies aspiring people flock around the alpha male of the tribe, so all nations like to bandwagon with what they believe is the stronger – or will soon become the stronger – nation. Or as Osama bin Laden put it, “when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse”. From the perspective of nations bordering a resurging Russia in the 2010′s, the new Eurasian Empire will appear to be the strongest horse in their vicinity.

18. Anti-neoliberal rant about Latvia’s economic collapse. You think Greece has problems? Try Latvia.

19. War watch. Indian Su-30 Fleet Expands Still More. A Russian Tragedy – conscript hazing (dedovschina) still influential. China roundup. North Korea Builds An Operating System (cyberwar). A Different World – interesting article about China’s encouragement of out-of-the-box military thinking. The South African Scam – it’s Navy is regionally dominant (no surprise there), but ill-trained. Picture Perfect – India’s military-industrial complex is inefficient.

20. Limits to Growth watch – water shortages. One of the less discussed issues, but one that is easily as significant as peak oil.

• Cyprus conflict closes leaders’ eyes to water shortage
• Tajik harvests left high and dry

PS. I hope to write a review of Pearce’s book When the Rivers Run Dry within the next few weeks.

21. America’s watch / Rise of the Rest / Waning of Pax Americana. Nikolas Gvosdev, a realist, on the BRIC Wall about the waning of Washington’s influence amongst the BRIC democracies.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton returned empty-handed from Brazil. Neither Foreign Minister Celso Amorim or President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva were responsive to her arguments for supporting stronger sanctions against Iran.

This shouldn’t have been a surprise. Brazil has long made clear its stance on the Iranian question: it wants proof that Iran is working not on mastering nuclear technologies, but on actually constructing a weapon. … Brasilia is not eager to condemn what it sees as activities that any rising power should have the right to engage in.

But the ramifications go far beyond getting Brazil’s support in the Security Council. Efforts to get a new stronger sanctions resolution are running against not only the expected resistance from China, but reluctance on the part of Turkey to endorse this approach. Meanwhile, India’s private sector shows no real enthusiasm for cutting off commercial relations with Tehran. Instead of showcasing the determination of the “international community,” the Obama administration is facing the reality of a divided world. Even if successful French diplomacy with Russia ameliorates Moscow’s opposition, the current drive for sanctions looks largely like a “Euro-Atlantic” initiative—and if so, it loses a good deal of its punch if half the world chooses to ignore them.

Two years ago, Washington was abuzz once again with the prospects for a “League of Democracies” that would support U.S. global leadership. But in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis, which devastated Burma/Myanmar, a very clear rift opened up between the democracies of the advanced north and west, which advocated an intervention on humanitarian grounds, and the democracies of the south and east, which proved to be far more receptive to China’s call for defending state sovereignty. In the Doha round of trade talks and in the ongoing climate change negotiations, the leading democracies of the south and east—Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, India and Indonesia among them—have tended to line up with Beijing instead of joining Washington’s banner. …

The rebuff of Clinton in Brasilia this past week did not have to be a foregone conclusion. But it is a dramatic reminder that even the inspirational presidency of Barack Obama is not sufficient to pull the “southern democracies” into a closer partnership with the United States.

See also As NAFTA Growth Slows, Mexico Should Look South.

22. International Women’s Day.

• Some Thoughts on Russia and Feminism… (poemless)
• Domesticating March 8th; Consuming Russian Feminism (Sean)
• What I Believe: Feminism (my dialectical interpretation)

24. Other stuff.

• Could the Taliban be genetically linked to the Jews?
• Navy Recruitment Commercials: USA vs Japan (video humor)
• French bread spiked with LSD in CIA experiment (I wonder if the CIA still makes them and if so how I could get a sample… strictly for research purposes of course)

24. Liberasm watch. Valeria Novodvorskaya: Normal Collaborationist. (Leos)