Obviously the president is not the nation, but I think the regard with which other world leaders hold the POTUS reflects the regard they hold America (and specifically, America's likelihood to take action in its best interests).
I dispute that the regard other world leaders hold the POTUS reflects American standing, and think you are falling victim to the classic conflation of being popular with being influential while tethering yourself to a stunted view of who the audience that matters is.
In diplomatic contexts, a classic basis of leveraging/manipulating people is to go after those whose self-image is centered on being perceived well. If specific person(s) can convince you that your reputation depends on their approval, you will not only prioritize their interests over your own (because you will rationalize that their good opinion is your interest), but also their views over the views of other observers. Because 'they' are/should be the more important partner, 'their' opinion matters more, and 'they' can speak for the rest of the partner-population because they are more important.
Which is how you get the Europeans/Americans conflating 'Europe/America' and 'the west' and 'the world' depending on whose gravitas they want to speak with.
The issue being, of course, that the interlocuter whose good opinion you want does not represent more than themselves, and their interests are not your own, and when you start changing yourself for their regard you are giving them power over you to the detriment of not only yourself, but your own power base.
In the domestic American political context, this dynamic is analogous to the (now former) Republican elites who were more interested in Democratic-aligned media respectability than in the issues Republican voters cared about. Republican party elites who were concerned about respectability politics routinely made observable concessions on party base priorities while seeking accolades from respectable media. They did so despite even though increasing majorities of those interlocuters sympathized with, were members of, or actively cooperated with the Democratic party against the Republican party positions.
This parallel's implications should not be subtle, because they are not unique.
I'm not sure what your grievance here is; you share the silly belief that I'm concerned whether State Department officials will be welcomed at European wine and cheese parties, or you think I dramatically underestimate how well Trump can play other world leaders and not be played by them? (I have already said I think Harris will absolutely be played by them.)
My 'grievance' is that you are raising a concern of a situation you were already happy with. You've already had a president who was played and flattered to- that was Barrack Obama.
In a geopolitical sense, Obama was an exceptionally vain president whose primary theme was wanting to be seen as historic and symbolic and appreciated for his ideas, and Obama's focus-zones-of-choice were those that played to glowing coverage. As Obama was more or less a Eurocentric Atlanticist by instinct, and the Europeans were very happy to flatter that, that's where he spent most of his time (and where he spent a good part of his initial retirement). In areas far more removed from American political sensibilities and where the coverage was less consistently glowing- such as Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and most of Asia- Obama was far more distant after the initial honey moon and usual requirements.
This might be fine if Obama's popularity in Europe actually translated into major policy wins in Europe, in using increased popularity to shift the Europeans in more advantageous ways, but not only did this not happen, but Obama was instead lobbied into European-favored paths to American and even his own detriment.
Not only were longstanding American grievances not resolved by the EUropeans (NATO underinvestment, growing Russian gas-dependency, increasing Chinese network/infrastructure access, asymmetric protectionism by the Europeans), but the Europeans alternatively were able to lobby the Obama administration into, among other things,
-The Russian Reset (part of the German-preference for prioritizing Russian economic engagements over more pro-US eastern european partner security concerns; the aftermath of this helped lead to the Democratic over-compensation and russia-gate scandals)
-Brexit campaign lobbying (which was not only likely detrimental to the intended effect, but cultivated a higher level of partisan-driven political influence efforts)
-The Libya intervention (which was European grudge match against a former cold war foe who actually acceded to major US demands in the previous decade)
-The Syria Red Line debacle (a product, and then consequence, of Franco-British intervention partnership)
-The Iran Deal (a Congressionally-unpassable arrangement which offered major economic opportunities for the Europeans)
-The Paris Climate Accords (another Congressionally-unpassable arrangement which furthered anticipated EU-protection policies but which contributed to American political polarization due to its adoption into EPA regulation and following court cases)
These are not things that are in and of themselves 'bad' or indefensible in why they were approached, but rather indicative of high-profile ways in which the Europeans were able to assert more influence on how the US approached certain issues than vice versa, in ways more clearly beneficial to European than American-consensus interests (not least because many were beyond any American consensus but hoping to create new fait accompli).
Sometimes this is fine, quid-pro-quos are often one-sided in isolation, but the failure-state of pursuing regard (which Obama got quite a bit of for agreeing with what the Europeans wanted) and falling to flattery (clearly the Europeans were quite convinced by Obama's high-intelligence rationales).
To return to the grievance- your complaint, even when shadowed in both-sidisms, has already come to pass. The most recent well-regarded president is a president who was so routinely flattered for his wit and charisma that it generally isn't even recognized as flattery. This has already happened. It was not an objection at the time. It is not a credible objection now.
I think very few people here have opinions worth valuing. I didn't ask you to value mine.
I did not claim you did. I will now ask why you made an argument based off of your opinion, if you don't think it's well informed enough to be worth valuing.
It's the same sort of self-negation that accompanies several of your criticisms and predictions. 'Everything Trump does will be terrible and fail, unless it succeeds in which case it was/will be worthless.' 'My opinion is strong and argued at length, but I won't claim it has worth worth defending.'
Well, which is it- is your opinion strong, worthless, or both?
I am poking you in the eye on this because part of the derangement in TDS comes from the totalizing mix of simultaneously asserting 'worst thing ever' and accompanying 'can't possibly be good' when worst thing ever doesn't occur. Not only is this contradictory in its own right, but it's a form of patronizing dismissal of the opinions of others by dismissing the relevance of the not-failures others may value as successes... which goes to part of why Trump is simultaneously successful and so triggering to PMC types with TDS, because Trump champions issues that are/were dismissed as unimportant, and disregards things claimed to be important.
Hence the blunt challenge on if you think your opinion on Trump foreign affairs is worth valuing. If you do, it's fine to say so and we can go into challenging that basis- but if you don't, but you are making strong claims anyway, that is itself unsound / not logical / the D in TDS.
I confess I am not sure what exactly you think I am wrong about, other than apparently not having a high enough opinion of Trump, and overestimating Europe's importance? I am willing to be persuaded on the latter point (and maybe on the former, but you haven't really tried).
And I shall probably not, since I just lost a bloody lot of effort trying to put together an effort response, including a post on issues with your previous post. That was lost for good, but here is try two for your question on overestimating Europe's importance.
/// Trump's Effectiveness Abroad ///
On Trump's effectiveness abroad, the short version is that unless you have a second language skill I'm not aware of, your impression of how effective Trump was and how he was perceived is shaped by the Atlanticist-dominated media coverage of international relations, i.e. Western European and State Department liberal types (many of whom are reading western european media company coverage) who are the prime targets of TDS. This is not an unbiased or objective audience. Outside of Europe, Trump's reception was 'normal.' Lower general opinion than Obama, who was and cultivated a rockstar popularity, but Obama was also rarely willing to press issues at the cost of his popularity.
Trump acceptance in turn followed from that he was generally willing to let partners focus on what they wanted without 'usual' levels of US interference (read: Trump was willing to buck the local ambassador and not make issues of things the local embassy might ask for government pressure on), as long as he got some signature concession. Mexico got substantial lack of pushback on its internal reform priorities (including rolling back the Mexican oil industry liberalization) after it supported NAFTA renegotiation and did Remain in Mexico, Japan got to play a leading role in the Quad and facilitation in Philippine influence and access after its own trade agreement, Korea got to pursue sunshine policy 2.0 with American facilitation (including the Trump-KJU summit, which was a South Korean success that tends to get ignored), and the Israeli-Arab normalization had a bunch of different angles of who got what for what.
When you (sarcastically) claim you are accused of not having a high enough opinion of Trump, this is true, but not because you should have a high opinion of him. Trump's effectiveness abroad was quote / unquote 'normal.' It was not terrible, it was within historical norms. Trump was a transactional president who did far less to meddle in some places than other presidents have in the past, and while that may seem a low bar to clear that is a still a bar many American presidents failed at.
/// The Europe Exception ///
The only place Trump was particularly 'bad' at was Europe, which is also by design the part of the world with the most reverse media influence back to the US (because when your national security for 50 years depends on American opinion, you invest in shaping American opinion).
There's plenty to be said about the extension of US politics into European political thought (such as how BLM protests of the Obama administration were echoed in European countries without the issues), and how the Obama administration tried to subvert Trump (at the same time the Obama administration was locking in the Russia-gate narrative domestically, Obama in his farewells to Merkel more or less encouraged her to consider herself the leader of the free world- imagine what your perspective is if the American president says 'don't trust my successor' even as American intelligence leaks are insinuating a Russian stooge), but the crux of the policy differences between Trump and Europe was the already emerging breakdown of the strategic logic of the cold war-originated alliance.
During the Cold War, the US granted European countries systemic economic advantages vis-a-vis US industry in exchange for strategic deference. Sometimes this was for things like the Marshal Plan, but it was also done to help other parts of the US alliance, such as trading concessions to American markets for letting Korea get access to European markets. The EU, when it was forming in its current form in the late 1990s/early 200s, inherited many of these concessions, even as EU collective bargaining had an often explicit purpose of improving European negotiating positions against the US.
This was because European and American competition is an explicit policy consideration of the relationship. Again, the stated purpose of the EU common market is to get better deals (for Europe) at the expense of others (the US). A united European polity was considered a way for the Europeans to compete with the US in the post-cold war, and there's no shortage of international relations scholarship about how European rule-making would restrain and shape others (including the US) to European benefit. European centralization and unification has been a common idea and explicit goal of many relevant European elites involved in EU politics. However, during the post-9-11 Iraq War, the Bush Administration broke the back on European solidarity when the Franco-German attempt at a pan-European objection to the Iraq War (in part because of their particular bilateral interests in Iraq) was undercut by the UK and coalition of the willing who supported the US invasion of Iraq. While this broke the attempt at a European common position, you will also note that this effort was breaking the core logic of the alliance- an inherited economic incentive for Europe, but not a deferential strategic asset for the Americans.
This was the start of the 'modern' call for European strategic autonomy from the US- the notion that an autonomous Europe is needed to not get into American wars 'it' didn't want to get involved with. Given that the coalition of the willing and American coalitions in general are voluntary, the primary way to advance European strategic autonomy and not get involved in an American conflict was to... not spend more on NATO, which would bring into conflict with Russia, at a time that the Franco-German consensus was that Russia was a critical economic partner and also a counter-balance to American influence in Europe (and also extending that peace dividend could help prop up the post-financial crisis challenges to the governments).
The Trump-Europe issue, for all its messiness and propaganda, basically revolves around the context that a critical mass of the European elites wanted the benefits of an inherited economic-concessions-for-military-deference bargain, except to cut out the military or deference requirement and disagreement of who the threat actually was.
If this doesn't seem unreasonable, consider why typically states pay mercenaries, and not the other way around.
Put another way- in so much that trade concessions are a form of payment for future services, the Americans are not the mercenary in the US-Euro security relationship: the Europeans are.
/// How Much Would You Pay For European Allies? ///
The strategic value issue, in turn- the 'why is Europe important to the US'- is that Europe simply can't offer much value as a military asset, even if it wanted to.
Europe is a critical enabler for the US to fight against Russia, but the primary reason (besides morality) to fight Russia is if you are allied with the Europeans who Russia's revanchism threatens. There are separate issues of what Russia would do to prolong conflict with the US for ideological/revanchist/other mockable reasons if the US did pull out of Europe, but fundamentally there is no need to fight the Russians over Europe if you don't consider Europe worth fighting for. Europe helping the US ability to fight Russia is an advantage for the Europeans, not the Americans, and in so much that there is a cost saving here, it is enjoyed by the Europeans, not the US, who would be avoiding far greater costs by simply not being obliged to fight.
The challenger the Americans care about, on the other hand, is China. This is one of the few bipartisan consensus points for the US over the last 25 years. Russia can break itself and half of Europe apart, and the US would be fine. China is the only power with the mass and industrial capacity and- critically- naval potential to threaten not only the American ability to go where it chooses, but to reach back to the US.
The things is, all the reasons that applied to the Europeans not wanting to align with Trump against Russia apply even more so to China. China is not a military threat to Europe per see. Unlike Russia, there are not territorial conflicts or near-term revanchism. China is a major potential market (that Germany is hooked on), China is a major potential investor (that post-financial crisis Europe is struggling to find sources of). China is a very clear advocate for a multipolar world order, and while China would prefer to be the biggest pole it's also not exactly going to be competing for Europe, so a Chinese multipolar order has overlap with a European multipolar order.
When the Europeans say they don't want to get roped into an American conflict, the American conflict they're thinking of is typically going to be the US-China conflict.
And here the value of the Europeans as military allies is dismal. Not only has NATO underinvestment crippled European military in general, but the Europeans haven't had the right kind of capabilities. A US-China war is functionally a naval war, and the European armies undercut by decades of underinvestment are far easier to fix than navies with the same restraints. There's a reason when there's talk of European Indo-Pacific power, they are talking about small islands on the wrong sides of the Pacific.
Now, this doesn't mean that the Europeans can't contribute anything to the US in a china conflict. However, the most valuable things the Europeans bring to the table is not their military support, but other things. Like... money and trade flows.
Which is the conflict that the US and Europeans have over NATO costs. And trade relations. And which the Europeans with significant China exposure threaten to lose quite a bit of if they side with the US over China in a US-China conflict. And which competes with the strategic logic of who is paying who for their geopolitical support.
Ya know, people like to mock "fashionable Euros" like our relationship with NATO and European trading partners is a fake Gay EuroVision contest, but Europe (and the Commonwealth) is actually still pretty damned important - more important (at least to us) than the rest of the world, I would argue.
But you didn't argue that. You didn't even claim that. Your argument was scoped to 'the world,' not 'the pretty damned important (at least to us) Europeans.'
That is a common eurocentric tendency, and eurocentricism is as defensible a geopolitical bias as any other, but while Europe may be a peninsula was an ego problem, it is certainly not the world. It's not even the most important part of the world to the US- and that's a point of US bipartisan consensus for nearly the last 25 years.
This is without touching on whether the Europeans should be 'more important' is a prescriptive argument, not a descriptive argument, and one where a lot of lobbying occurs precisely to shape your perception in that direction. You later arguments in this very post reflect the narrative priorities of non-American states whose objections are grounded in zero-sum interest differences (such as how the relative tariff advantages should be between the European Union negotiating block and the US economy, and whether European non-investment in defense spending should shape American security commitments to the Europeans).
I do not think Putin actually respects Trump and I think Trump is too susceptible to flattery. Do we think China, and our Japanese and Korean allies, respect Trump more?
Sure. Why not- it's not like they have any particular respect for Harris (whose start as a girlfriend of a connected politician is not exactly secret), or Biden (probably the most credible madman-theory nuclear leader in a generation), or even Obama (whose own susceptibility to flattery was well known and for whom the derogatory comics abroad would generally not be printed in any reputable American media).
But it's also irrelevant on two fronts.
First, as a matter of argument, because you've shifted your goal posts to 'respect Trump' from 'America's standing.' This is a fine motte to retreat to, but it's still an abandonment of the bailey.
Second, America's standing on the global stage doesn't derive from personal respect for the President of the United States as a person. It derives from the fact that the Americans have a lot of money, a lot of military logistical power, and a government able (and willing) to use them. The opposition to Trump in many cases does more to harm American standing than Trump himself, because it gets in the way of what the US government could do for them in any quid-pro-quo.
Africa and MENA might or might not like Trump more (Harris they will probably see, correctly, as an easy mark for more American largesse). I guess you could say that Iran and the Arabs and North Korea are more afraid of just how crazy Trump might be. It's somewhat of a toss-up but on the international front I think Harris is very marginally better for us. I think world leaders will mostly roll their eyes behind her back but carry on business. Trump throwing a monkey wrench into everything may be a feature and not a bug to his supporters, but I don't think that actually helps us. All his promises about tariffs evening the playing field and "making NATO pay its fair share" are going to be either empty, or disastrous, and "make them believe you are crazy enough to start a war" is not, IMO, actually a good strategy for preventing wars.
Is your opinion on global politics or good strategy well informed enough to be worth valuing?
You've given a lot of tropes here, but please believe me when I say that not going through them line by line is a courtesy to forum standards. Suffice to say, it's a classic ethnocentric American perspective with many of the classic American tells (poor latin america, unworthy of American attention as ever), and lacking any significant demonstration of awareness of how American presidents actually impact other country's politics. In so much that it reflects a foreign perspective, it's an obviously European-based foreign perspective... which is to say, one of the most compromised by American political feedback loops in the world, which frequently blends American and European ethnocentric narratives, and a dynamic completely non-generalizable to the world as a whole.
While European-American political overlap (and contamnination, if one prefers) is certainly a valid topic of discussion, it's not a particularly relevant one to the world that doesn't share major American-centric media constellations or have as active an effort of purposely shaping and influencing American political-elite opinions through major media organization relationships.
Dean
27d ago
Probably for the best, give how likely you would be to lose that bet. It's not like Trump has to do 'great' to not 'epically fuck up,' which was the bar you set.
From your post, you'd be wrong if Trump just did as well as last time. Heck, you'd still be wrong if he did worse than he did last time.
Actually you lead me to something I've thought for quite a while in the 2020 aftermath -- the way that courts require proof of fraud that turned the election directly led to the low quality of some of the Trump campaign's lawsuits. If you are expected to prove not only that there was fraud against you, but also that the fraud amounted to at least some specific number of votes, unless you have significant cooperation from the folks counting the ballots (hint: Trump did not) your only play is to throw everything you have at the wall and hope that enough votes are found to stick.
It is a bit a structural trap, yes. By requiring the standard of impact to raise to 'outcome determinative', it prohibits the sort of indicators that would normally be pursued to identify/recognize outcome-determinative fraud, while at the same time systemically encouraging weaker, and thus easier to dismiss, expansive-but-weaker claims whose dismissal can be used to justify claims of no fraud. Defenders can point to the dismissal of unfounded accusations as proof that there is no basis of accusation to warrant further examination, while ignoring that the scoping of acceptable arguments gerrymandered what would be investigated from the start.
In metaphorical terms, this is the equivalent of demanding proof that most of an iceberg is below the waterline, and then only reviewing reports from the people who then claim to have seen underneath the water from an impossible distance.
Yes, it was impossible for them to have seen the things they claimed. No, disproving their claim of having seen underneath the water does not actually disprove whether there was an iceberg. You've already filtered out the people who would only claim to have seen the tip of the iceberg. This procedural hurdle works because the requirements smuggled in a change of argument centered around the already-filtered observers, and from a position that starts from a presumption of negation (there is no reason to believe the existence of something not already observed), rather than precaution driven by the nature of the observed (the nature of floating ice is that the majority will be beneath the surface, regardless of whether the underwater mass is observed or not).
From a legal system built on a presumption of innocence, that approach may make sense. But the threat of an iceberg comes from the nature of the thing, not the characterization of the observer of the hard to observe bits. If you steer a ship on the principles of 'harmless until proven sufficiently harmful,' you are going to sink a lot of ships, and certainly more than if you didn't have such a high bar on sufficient proof of sufficient harm.
This is far from the only context where this sort of standard would be detrimental. There are plenty of contexts where the signature of something is far more detectable and demonstratable than the following force that effects. Dismissing the signatures because the signatures themselves are not sufficient force is just ignoring the signals.
Dean
1mo ago
Trump has always had a bit of a plebian sense of wealth. The expression a decade ago was that Trump lived like how poor people thought the rich lived, as opposed to how the rich actually lived. In that sense, he's the 'what the Everyman would see himself doing if he had Trump's wealth.'
Dean
1mo ago
He wouldn't be gunning for a Trump victory, he'd be absolving himself of the blame for a Democratic defeat.
Regardless of what Obama may or may not have intended a convention to go, two of the facts that were critical to Kamala's consolidation of being nominee was (1) her head start on all other candidates with her campaign media (some starting the Sunday after the Saturday-ish media covering Biden's step down, meaning all the other main political rivals and their support staff were home for the weekend), and (2) her legal inheritance of the Biden campaign war chest. The later of these was already known and being speculated about even before Biden's resignation, and the former was clearly pre-planned at the time given the dynamics of the surge flooding the media space. Again, no matter what Obama or others might have wanted, these dynamics were already in play and smothered potential for a viable convention.
What a Biden endorsement of Kamala does is flip the script of the pre-stepdown narrative of Biden as the responsible actor with agency (if Biden loses this, he put himself before the Party) to Biden as the non-primary agent (Biden ultimately put the Party before himself). This puts the agency in the actors/leaders of the Party who led the confrontation- namely, Obama and Pelosi among others. Except Pelosi has already largely retired from active politics (and is very old), whereas Obama specifically lives in the DC area to remain engaged in party politics.
Whereas a contested political convention might have produced an absolving 'well, no one's at fault especially not me' dynamic (or, more plausibly, everyone blaming eachother, but not one specific person in general), and Kamala coronation puts the agency/responsibility for the results of that one the part of those who arranged it- which goes back to the Obama wing of the party. Note further that Obama never actually publicly opposed Kamala, so any post-defeat gripings would be significantly undercut by his agency in putting her in the position in the first place.
Bringing this back to Biden, there's basically a political binary after supporting Harris. Either Kamala wins- in which he has backed the winning horse / has a higher relative influence than he would have had he held out / Kamala's favors to him likely include the protection of his political dynastic interests- or Kamala loses. If Kamala loses, however, the fault is not his- it's either whoever failed to support her (if a key wing of the party rebels), or it's the fault of whoever put her in the first place (the Party leaders who ejected him). The Obama wing of the party suffers whatever intangible consequences there are of having backed three losing candidates (Hillary, Harris, and Biden who they themselves ousted) and bringing Trump into office twice.
It might be to the Party and/or Obama's interest that Biden have not supported Harris in a purely 'Trump minimization' perspective... but this route is also a route in which Biden could also be blamed for a failed convention (which itself could be a defeat condition), which would serve Obama's political interests but hardly Biden's. And also if the party actually wanted a Trump-minimization strategy in the first place, there were many other things they could have done over the last few years other than pave the road for MAGA's return.
Dean
1mo ago
It also has substantial value in crisis contexts, in the 'natural disaster just cracked the ground-based infrastructure, can anyone tell me what's going on' sort of system.
Dean
1mo ago
Sure. No disagreement, even. Consider this an assent.
...I'm not sure how else to add 'that is a sound and valid addition' without coming off as sillier than I mean to.
Thank you for demonstrating your continued retreat from your opening positions. I look forward to seeing how much of a motte you retreat to over time.
And no, for others, 17 year olds is not the limits of what one can find regarding Hamas child soldier reports.
This is barely intelligible. If you make a surprising and significant claim, you should provide a source.
And if you wish to claim that Israelis shoot children, and then launch screeds on the jews being uniquely evil, you should provide a source that accuses the Israelis of shooting children, instead of claims that children were shot without an attribution as to by whom.
Which serves as another basis of the non-linking, since the lack of relevant sourcing to support a surprising and significant claim (like 'the Jews are deliberately one-shotting children') has been a reoccuring theme of this thread.
And yes, that was left for you specifically to walk into.
Because the argument wouldn't be as effective if I were the one to provide a link.
If someone is actually interested in whether Hamas uses child soldiers, they can very trivially google "Hamas Child Soldiers" and find multiple reports on the history by organizations including Amnesty International, Child Soldiers International, and the United Nations, among others. This doesn't even include self-publicized material such as from the Hamas Youth Wing. These aren't even 'new' reporting- there are easily observable reports from the early 2000s during the tail end of the Intifada years to late last decade, well before the current conflict. Any observer of the conflict with any significant experience has read any one of these over the last few decades- they are old news, not particularly controversial, and numerous.
The reminder of the existence of such reporting isn't just the function any link would provide- it is remind the reader of past reports they've heard of and can easily find again (thus appealing to their own understanding of the conflict), and thus the contrast to the OP's dogmatic dismissal of contrary evidence published over the last decades. Their own trust in their own memories and experience is the legitimizer of the position.
While nominally the target doesn't work as well on people not as experienced in the topic, the prompt that they could easily search for it serves a second level of argument, in which if they do look they will find, and their ability to find evidence of child soldiers if they choose to look for it will be contrasted with the OP's dismissal. This, too, utilizes their agency in the search to bolster the argument.
People who refused to do the search, as a third category, in turn expose themselves to audiences one and two, and thus discredit the OP's objection even fuller when people who are aware recognize they are denying international records that aren't obscure.
None of these three layers of effect would be as effective if a link is simply provided, which can be dismissed on the basis of coming from a partisan regardless of what reference was linked to. The searcher's own agency is what legitimizes the discovery.
Additionally, there is a fourth level, which is a rhetorical trap for the less aware if someone tries to do a surface-level search. One of the easy top-searches is a past UN report that also criticizes Israel for 'child soldier' use (primarily in the context of proximity when searching tunnels / etc.). If this were to be raised in a way to try and establish moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel, not only would a choice to focus on that report validate the relevance of child soldiers as a mitigating circumstance (by acknowledging that the children are not necessarily automatically moral innocents in a combatant sense), but it would also be a demonstratation of a motive for why someone besides Israel might have shot the children (as in, rather than be shot by the Israelis, they are shot because they are associated with the Israelis).
This snare was non-central to the point on the ease of finding evidence that the OP looked to, but was on hand to use if pulled, which again would not work as well if proactively linked to and explained by myself.
Did you predict the 2022 special military exercise?
I assume you mean the Russian one? Sure. I was noting they still weren't committed until they were, but I was one of the realtively people on the forums arguing that the invasion threat was credible and shouldn't be dismissed because of visible factors. It was a relatively minority position back then due to European inclinations to reference the Iraq War intelligence failures / this was American fearmongering / a very memorable denunciation that I knew nothing of slavic brotherhood.
I wasn't sure if the intervention would be tailored to the Donbass and if the other forces were diversionary (they did appear to be too small for a full invasion, but enough for a significant impact), and I believed (and still do) that Putin might have pulled back at the time if he got some of the geopolitical concessions he was angling for at the time (like the Nord Stream pipeline completion). I even thought Ukraine would crumple.
But I was very much against 'this is just another drill.'
What were the visible actions that were not part of the historical pattern of exercises-that-were-not-starts-of-war?
Among other things fact that the Russians had left equipment near Ukraine in 2021, and then not taken it back home with them, allowing it to be proximal and staged so that when they did the 2021 exercise it was building up new force capabilities that were far beyond normal levels. This was significant because when Russia or equivalent countries do a military exercise, they generally don't actually bring enough to do a full invasion and it's visible from orbit. The fact that Russia didn't take it's equipment back home, but then brought in another small army's worth of stuff, and then kept bring more stuff in, was the visibly apparent 'they have an invasion-scale force assembled' which they didn't need if they were 'just' doing exercises.
Additionally, 2021 had multiple developments that correlated with pre-conflict shaping, including a massive pre-invasion propaganda campaigns both against Ukraine (fake nation, nazi narratives) and international legitimization by framing it against NATO (the NATO infrigement/withdrawal demands), the European energy non-refil in which they didn't go through their normal practice of filling European gas stocks during the summer per normal practices, and there was the Russian dynamic behind the Belarusian migrant crisis which was a challenge / shaping perceptions of the new German government.
There wasn't some big propaganda push afaik,
You misremember. The propaganda campaigns were in 2021 mostly, but they were very consistent with pre-war justificaiton narratives, on three grounds- trying to prep the target population (we are you liberators / brothers freeing you from despotic rule), the home population (Russia is standing up for itself for historical Russian brotherhood and territory), and internationally (are war is historically justified and also it's NATO's fault).
and neither was there a withdrawal of the hundreds of billions in economic funds that subsequently got trapped in western banks.
The Russian funds were frozen, but the anamolous economic behavior pre-invasion was the effort to increase European dependence on Russian imports through supply chain artificial shortages of gas.
Notably, in turn, the Russian funds not being immediately moved was a reflection of how the Russians thought the conflict would go (a quick fait accompli the Europeans would ascede to), which has generally been understood to be a mistake for a long-war (which a Taiwan blockade would likely be).
Dean
1mo ago
While I fully agree with your general point and thrust of argument, particularly in overall polling differences compared to previous elections, the current leads in key states are still well within normal margins of error. We are in various cases talking about leads of 0.X% when a margin of error can be wide.
While I fully agree that based on historical patterns this would be a shoe in, there is a point that this assumes no changes in how polls were conducted between election cycles to try and improve their accuracy. There are many interests- commercial, strategic, and political-competitor- that have incentives to try and improve polling accuracy, and so it's not good to assume the same errors will continue to be repeated in the same way.
New equivalent errors may be introduced, and there are even conspiratorial takes on why polls may be wrong (such as presenting polls claiming a much closer race to support the effectiveness of future cheating by reducing the amount of cheating needed to plausibly 'narrowly' win), but these would have to be made and I don't think you or most other people are making them.
Dean
1mo ago
Here are the problems with that: I don’t see evidence of that happening in the past;
Then you ignored past evidence. As such, no reason to link it again when you can easily see for yourself if you search.
Hamas would like to maintain access to top medical care, which would be jeopardized if they began to threaten medical providers;
Hamas is not prioritizing civilian access to top medical care over things that jeopardize access to top medical care.
This is demonstrated when it regularly does things such as turn medical centers into military bases and steals aid from the public and co-opts local palestinian medical organizations into logistics and propaganda associates, all of which decreases the quality and availability of medical care. Hamas does them anyway.
Hence, there is no reason to believe maintaining access to top medical care prioritizes goals (such as control of the Gazan territory) that could be advanced by threatening medical providers (who could complicate narratives if allowed to be outspoken, but whose shortage serves as a useful propaganda tool for soliciting international sympathy).
Note that this is paralleled with Hamas's use of interior ministry regulations and enforcement of journalism coverage from within the strip, which itself has had observable not-back effects as while these rules nominally don't apply to organizations like the Assoicated Press, the reliance of these organizations on people within the strip, and thus subject to Hamas retaliation, shapes which relationships with the outside world can form in the first place.
Most of the volunteer doctors are not making a career in the Gaza Strip, so there is no reason for them to cowtow to the ideology of Hamas;
Sure there is- access to Gaza in the first place.
In order for external actors to operate within Gaza, they must be permitted by whichever authority controls access to the ground the organization wishes to work on and from. Organizations which do not cowtow, do not gain or retain access. This is basic access-control policy.
the very same survey we are talking about has 20% of the doctors say they didn’t see shot children — so why did this 20% say that? Where’s the evidence that 20% were harassed or asked to leave?
You are reversing the cause and effect of a filtering process, and in turn running into the issue of the nature of small-scale surveys which you are conflating with the filtering effect.
The filtering effect is a pre-survey effect. The effect of filtering is not claiming that 20% of the survey respondents would be asked to leave after saying 20% say that they didn't see shot children. The filtering effect can be something like that 80% of doctors surveyed are willing to say they saw shot children because they are recruited from the sort of (permitted) organizations that include a higher number of doctors who would be willing to say they saw shot children on a survey if it benefited the palestinian cause, but also would not opine on who shot the victims, especially if doing so might work against the cause.
Which goes into the data on who was doing the shooting, rather than who was shot, which not even the NYT respondents cited claim were Israeli shooters.
Except even in this case there is a far more mundane explanation for radical scores, which is survey structure of small samples.
The author is writing on the basis of surveys that includes themselves and people/organizations they know. Groups of people who know eachother are also groups of people who have a stronger tendency to have heard about the same things, often from eachother. This is how you get cultural / information silos where people can get influenced by group thought dynamics that do not have to reflect reality, and why establishing the representativeness of a sample population is critical.
What you presented is a story but the story has nothing evidencing it. The rest of your comment is just trying to obfuscate the fact that innocent Palestinian children ought to obtain medical care.
Medical care for being victimized by whom?
Again, I return to the data points that not only do the shooting-cases not claim that the shooters were Israelis, but that the majority of the article is focused on medical consequences of things like malnutrition and psychological damage that are the responsibility of Hamas, who have been stealing aid, compromising medical organizations, and perpetrating the conflict.
Which, while you certainly had a... take on the evilness of da joos, seemed rather light on equivalent religious analysis on the rulers of gaza.
That Hamas is utilizing 8 year old child soldiers to lob grenades is a level of propaganda that the IDF hasn’t even reached yet.
You seem to have misunderstood the point of the opening, which was to contest your characterization of the limit of child soldiers, which itself wasn't limited to Hamas. A child soldier is not a 16 year old. A child soldier is a child who is used in the function of war, regardless of their age, and as such age alone does not disprove someone from being a combatant unless the age is so low that they physically cannot.
There has been no information coming out of Israel that Hamas is using preteen child soldiers in their operations, neither is there drone or other footage which would immediately shift public opinion in favor of Israel. This isn’t happening.
Sure it is. It's denied and disparaged as Israeli propaganda or otherwise that it shouldn't matter because children, but it is in no way hard to find information of Hamas using pre-teen children as human shields to military operations, of using preteens as messengers or conveyers of military goods, of Hamas opening fire into crowds of civilians which would involve pre-teens, of stealing and depriving the Gazan population of resources which lead to murder over or due to a lack of resources, of Hamas deliberately murdering families of dissidents for the purpose of intimidating the populace, and otherwise setting conditions in a warzone in which people are regularly shot for less-than-maximally-nefarious-reasons by maximally-nefarious jews.
This is not true. Emergency nurses will deal with children shot in all places.
There are two problems with this contestation, both demonstrating separate logical errors leading to data issues.
First is a dynamic which can be summarized as 'tell me you didn't think about triage without telling me you didn't think about triage.' Triage itself is screening function when medical issues over overwhelming and resources- included the doctors themselves- are limited. Not all injuries are emergencies to a triage, and in turn not all injuries will go to emergency treatment in the first place. If you then cite numbers of medical emergency cases, you are starting to count after triage has already filtered relevant contextual numbers.
Second, the NYT isn't citing a representative sample of emergency nurses- or even exclusively emergency nurses- in the first place. It was specifically citing people who were willing to claim observation of children being shot, which is itself a selection bias. '100% of the people I cited claimed cases of X' means nothing on a statistical when you are not citing people who do not support X, and that's if you had a representative survey basis in the first place, which the NYT opinion presenter does not.
As would surgeons, parademics, and critical care doctors. Any child shot is going to see these professionals. There’s not some “child shot in the head super-specialist” at these clinics. I mean, maybe neurosurgeon, but that’s not even a listed specialty in the article.
Thank you for admitting another issue in the article's data base, I was hoping to lead you to that point.
Yes, the lack of professional characterization is a separate issue for the brilliance of the research, as it conflates the medical supporters who might have a more representative understanding of general child injuries as part of the triage process (who, in the article, aren't even claiming Israeli snipers or the such in the first place) from more specialized medical experts whose expertise in specific things- like, say, chest surgeries- who would only be under a significant selective survivorship bias of what they are exposed to (both the nature of the injury, but also operating on people who survive long enough to get to them).
This conflation of category of medical experts, in turn, can be and is used to conflate the different viewpoints to distorting effect. As the viewpoints of people with wider-but-less-serious issues are presented in equal ground with more narrow perspective that are narrower-but-more-severe (because the person in question is primarily dealing with the most severe cases). This is a technique to shape audience perception by insinuating that the equivalence of the reports suggests that the conflated categories are a single category that is both more common and more severe on average than the spread actually is.
But since relevant medical and surgical specialties do exist, and the volunteers of any previous or accumulated experience will be allocated those cases as a matter of course, we can infer from organizational practicalities (and some parts of the article itself) that there is a relevant degree of case selection filtering going on.
Who do you believe is the lower specialty on whom they drop off the children only merely shot in the abdomen or thigh?
Or the hand or the foot or the arm?
The person with clearly vestigial wounds is clearly the lower priority and will receive more limited care by less trained or specialized people. A surgeon who specializes in opening up chest cavities to remove things that can kill people is not going to spend their time resetting dislocated joints or applying splints, when that level of care can be provided by a more-numerous non-surgeon whose use in that role can free up the surgeon to do surgeries.
Now, if you wish to make the argument that the Gazan medical situation is not so dire such that there is no need to triage and thus more specialized medical professionals see a representative selection of wounded children...
Dean
1mo ago
Sure it is, if you define value innocence. If you value innocence, then coercing non-innocent actions devalues it by decreasing the degree of innocence.
This includes, for example, compromising information integrity as a condition for access. If you want to assist people in gaza under the administrative control of Hamas, your access to Gaza depends on your public statements aligning with their interests. If they do not like your position, then depending on who you are you may lose access, or people may lose their lives. Therefore, there is a systemic bias at play, and all participants who play to it (speaking only within the bounds Hamas presents) are complicit, and thus less innocent, and thus less valued.
This is why arguments to the value of humanity rarely want to focus on innocence per see. Innocence is too easily compromised.
Dean
1mo ago
That was a Palestinian doctor, not a foreign volunteer doctor like most interviewed here.
I think this is a brilliant bit of journalism. First, they specify preteen children who are killed, a hugely important qualifier for a conflict which may see 16-year-old boys plant IEDS.
...because the spiritual purity of 15-and-younger boys disarms explosives?
You may feel this is brilliant journalism, but nothing in it really addresses child soldiers, which have a sordid history in islamic extremism even without touching on Hamas' deathcult tendencies. Child soldiers aren't merely 'are they big enough to carry a gun', which can be well below 10, but 'are they old enough to throw stone-heavy grenades,' which is even less. A preteen can easily be a child soldier, and even a cutoff of 6 is being arbitrary in terms of 'can they provide militarily-useful tasks.'
Nor does anything in the article address the nature of Hamas's influence in the information space, which is not only in the form of influence on intermediaries (by controlling access to Gaza) but also on the locals reporting to those intermediaries (by threats of retaliation).
Nor does the article- or you- make any effort to clear for selection bias on head/body shot children. For the article, there's only 8 cited speakers and the doctors who have the internal medicine specialty to be spending time on children shot in the head are, by the nature of their specialty, not going to be the medical experts handling walking-wounded children who got shot in the arm or non-critical parts of the leg but who don't rise to their need.
You say this...
Third, the data uniquely sheds light on possible Israeli misconduct.
...but the data doesn't uniquely shed light on possible Israeli misconduct. The data doesn't uniquely shed light on any misconduct. The data doesn't even demonstrate a pattern, because the data is depicted without time, context, or even attribution.
Heck, the data doesn't even provide an actual number of children shot.
Most of the article- the vast majority of the article- isn't even about gunshots. It's about malnutrition, psychological harm, baby mortality, and other things.
There are only 8 speakers cited with stories of children being shot. Given the relative range differentials between the Israeli small arms users and Palestinians, it would seem reasonable that a 'the Israelis are deliberately targeting children' to rely on snipers (shooting individual targets from range with precision), rather than closer-range options (pistol-executions) or mid-range-but-less-accurate fires.
On a very basic breakdown of -Attribution of who done it -Attribution of child-soldier era child -Characterized as single shot -Characterized as a sniper (single shot, single targets)
We have
Claim 1: 6 children, ages 6-12, single shots to skull
Attribution: None Child-soldier age: Yes Characterized as single shot: Yes Sniper characterized: No (no claim of a sniper context, or how a sniper would be responsible for a singular group)
Claim 2: Pediatric gunshot-wound patients
Attribution: None Child-solder Age: Unclear Characterized as single shot: No (gunshot-wound patients is plural patients, not claiming all patients had a single gunshot wound) Sniper characterized: No
Claim 3: Several children with high-velocity bullet wounds in head and chest
Attribution: None Child-soldier age: Unclear Characterized as single shot: No Sniper characterized: No ('high-velocity bullet' does not imply sniper, and no basis of what this means is provided)
Claim 4: 4-5 year old children, all shot in head with single shot, all delivered at once
Attribution: None Child-soldier age: No Characterized as single shot: Yes Sniper characterized: No (Additionally, group delivery implies no risk in taking the time to load all individuals, supporting a close-killing, not snipers)
Claim 5: Child shot in the jaw
Attribution: None Child-solder age: Unclear Characterized as single shot: Yes Sniper characterized: No (Not in nature of delivery or precision)
Claim 6 Father + Brother claiming children (3 and 5) were shot by snipers in house after rumored Israeli pullout
Attribution: None (Israeli attribution is of the rumor of an Israeli pullout from a neighborhood; the sniper is not attributed) Child-soldier Age: No Characterized as single shot: Yes Sniper characterized: Yes
Claim 7 18-month little girl with gunshot wound to the head
Attribution: none Child-soldier age: No Characterized as single shot: Yes Sniper characterized: No
Claim 8 (Dr. 'Many' children, on almost daily occurrence, with nonfatal gunshot wounds to head
Attribution: none Child-solder age: Unclear Characterization as single-shot: No Snipe characterized: No (Not in nature of delivery or precision)
So of our 8 claims- claims that are clearly selected for shock impact to print and thus are probably at the bounds of what even the NYT would consider worth reporting- we have...
8 Claims
Attributions to Israeli Shooters: 0
Characterization of Non-Child Soldier Age Victims: 3
Characterization of single shots: 5
Sniper characterized: 1
So when you say this...
So, why are Israeli soldiers one-shotting children in Gaza?
This is assuming a conclusion not supported by the data.
No evidence, or even claim, is made that it was Israelis in particular shooting the children. That may be the insinuation, but nothing in the article elevates the Israelis over other factors or actors, including...
-Revenge killings / crimes of passion targeting a family
-Armed criminals attempting to silence witnesses of a crime
-Suicide by traumatized children (see lower article on psychological trauma)
-Resource-shortage/'mercy' murders by caretakers unable to afford the children (see lower article on inability to care for children)
-Cross fire from other combatants
-Deliberate fire by other combatants*
*This is the due reminder that Hamas deliberately works to get Palestinians killed, uses human shields for military positions, and done the shooting themselves on occasion... and that the current conflict wouldn't be occuring if they weren't willingness to plan and execute theatrical murder of children for propaganda effects
And this is if the claims made are to be taken at face value, and not reflective of other data compromise issues such as selection bias (if Dr. Farah is the sort of doctor who can help children shot in the head, he's not going to be given the children who were shot less severely who other, less specialized, people can care for) or other issues of unintentional or intentional bias, or examples of outright deception.
(This is the due reminder that any Gazan medical center data that relies on the Gazan ministries is using Hamas-approved and provided data. This includes conflating gazan civilian and gazan combatant casualties, and exagerating claimed losses.)
And this doesn't even approach whether incidents which would be Israel were results of laws-of-war-acceptable action, which the article doesn't even try to address from any perspective. Naturally the Hamas-institutional data would not exactly be publicizing how many children who have been shot were shot in the context of being belligerents in the current conflict.
And this doesn't go into data collection issues, such as how the relevant medical authorities were picked, the lack of cross-reference to any sort of objective data sets (or even unobjective data sets), and the rather blunt use of emotive language and framings for what ends with a rather direct policy advocacy stance which itself would imply the selection of data was driven to justify the policy rather than the other way around.
So, as far as brilliant research goes, nah. Not really.
Sure. Let's start with 'pattern recognition.'
This is not the first time China has conducted a military exercise simulating a blockade of Taiwan. In all exercises simulating a blockade to date, Taiwan has not, in fact, been blockaded. Therefore, there is no causal relationship justifying a claim that a Chinese military exercise simulating a blockade of Taiwan is evidence of imminent blockade of Taiwan, as there must be other distinguishing features for the former to lead to the later. This takes even more meaning when there is a separate pattern of China conducting threatening exercises, but no attack or blockade, in protest to some Taiwan official statement or another. Again, distinguishing factors needs to be observed to justify claims of deviating from historical patterns of behavior.
We could go further with the advanced concept of backwards reasoning. If China were making a deliberate decision to initiated a military blockade of Taiwan, then what would we expect to see China do in the context of a deliberate leadup to war that would not be seen in the historical pattern of exercises-that-were-not-starts-of-war. This might include, for example, a pre-event propaganda campaign providing initial narrative buildup or international legitimization for the immeninent actions, particularly propaganda emphasizing the historical nature of rectifying the century of humiliation. It might include the mobilization of the Chinese navy, which is to say the social media reflections of the recall of shore leaves, the noticeable trends of all the Chinese naval groups readjusting their movements to start adopting both reinforcement of a blockade and preparing to intercept any efforts by regional naval actors to block it. It might include things like minimizing sanction exposure risk by a sharp withdrawal of PRC state-controlled economic funds from western financial institutions, demands made of the Taiwanese, and threats against external intrusion.
We would expect, in other words, to see actual effort correspond to the sort of actions that would be taken to launch a blockade, and not just the adjacent fleet sailing around for a day not actually stopping anyone going to Taiwan.
We can go further if you'd like, but it'd be punching more than a little down. As an alternative, I propose we let you memory hole this oops of a catastrophizing and then slightly more embarrassing attempt to reserve the right that you told me so.
Dean
1mo ago
Musk claims he wants to just set a booster back on the launch mount after a catch (as they just practiced late yesterday) and stack the next ship on to launch again an hour later (as they probably won't practice for years). Sounds crazy to me, but I though catching the giant rocket in more-giant robot arms was crazier, so what the hell do I know?
I suspect that's one fight he'll lose on regulatory grounds. Space travel isn't quite regulated like the FAA, but aircraft maintenance requirements are no joke and no small part of why airline scandals become such a big thing, even as those same maintenance standards are why airline safety is so exception. The federal government is willing to accept some form of risk by SpaceX in the name of R&D, but if/when flights fail because of the complications of one flight compromise the next, maintenance delays can be enforced.
This is especially true if the inevitable accidents knock out a tower. One of the logistical issues of the catch-strategy is that it makes the towers a far more 'brittle' chokepoint. Previously, towers needed to just be able to set up the rocket in the first place, but the rocket could land more or less wherever that was a suitable pad. Now the rockets can only land in one place, and if a tower is damaged then no flights what-so-ever can land or launch from there until it is re-established. Which is to say, a single landing accident could take out a launch site for days / weeks / even months.
What that means for Musk is that the boosters will likely need to be re-inspected / re-certified. That would likely entail lowering them to the ground, driving them over to a maintenance facility, and otherwise doing more than an hour of work. The exception would be if a government was willing to provide a waiver for this requirement, say in time of conflict... but in such a conflict, an adversary who could justify a need to launch more payloads into orbit would also have the capacity to target the towers by various means, meaning, again, safety and reliability issues. And this, in turn, would bring the comparison of how governments regulate military aviation, which in some respects is more intense than civil regulations (because the government actually owns the expensive thing).
Now, don't get me wrong- it's all still very impressive- but this is one of those areas where the salesmanship and technical capacity starts to run against other actor interests.
Dean
1mo ago
And yet, Taiwan remains unblockaded, the nukes are not flying, and the satellites are not falling. Instead, in the last 48 hours, the Chinese ships returned, nuclear sabers were not rattled, and one of the most impressive technical feats of a decade has foreshadowed an even greater resilience of the space economy.
Yesterday was not the start of a war. There was no particular reason to believe that yesterday was the start of a war. That the many various reasons why not were beyond to are what demonstrated a lack of basis for your judgement and justification for fears, much as your lack of perception in 2017 led you to be 'nervous' and believe yourself 'at risk' during a propaganda cycle. The world does not function as you think it does, and the way you think it does is a result of fear mongering you decided to try and spread to others.
You are not charged with insanity. You are charged with a lack of sound judgement.
Dean
1mo ago
Looks like you still haven't found a declassification process the President needs to go through that Trump failed to go through. Feel free to come back when you do.
Dean
1mo ago
Looks like you still haven't found a declassification process the President needs to go through that Trump failed to go through. Feel free to come back when you do.
Dean
1mo ago
What's your take on the likelihood of a "soft blockade"/quarantine/enhanced customs inspections?
In the current week / imminent days, as the OP fantasized? Below negligible, particularly without a corresponding buildup of forces or chinese domestic narrative campaign.
If the OP wanted to say this was a drill normalizing conditions for an attempt to establish a blockade, sure. And whatever- that's not actually a blockade. But that wasn't the position.
How would Taiwan and allies respond?
In current week / month / year, October 2024?
The Biden Administration publicly identifies the effort, denounces, and announces an intent to break the blockade while moving multiple carrier groups towards the region. Harris issues as-fiery-as-she-can speaches on the need for American strength and unity against the Chinese threat, while being conspicuously present in official photos of Biden and the National Security aparratus taking response, even as a new rush of adds characterize the Democrats as the party of defense and appeal to the neocons once more while social media sites like Reddit begin to mock Trump for bonespurs and Vietnam avoidance. The Republicans, in turn, offer full throttled support (for the Troops, not Biden), seek to out-hawk Biden even as Republican propaganda elevates Biden's China-corruption links and attacks Waltz on his links and otherwise claims this as the vindication of every objection to Ukrainian aid (regardless of how little of it would be relevant or useful in the current week/month/year).
Taiwan and allies quietly watch in horror and try to silently wave down the Americans for overreacting to yet another Chinese drill where the US overreaction might increase Chinese counter-reaction in ways that the Chinese will continue doing even after American attention drifts away a few news cycles later.
In many ways I am more pessimistic about the international environment than most people, and while I am optimistic in some respects (particularly on Western versus PRC/RUS/IRN axis competition) my position could boil down to 'I don't think anyone can be expected to do 'good' on foreign policy over the next years/decades,' because drones.
What many posters in this forum think AI may imply in the medium to long term in terms of major upheaval and disruption, I view drones implying in the short and medium term. I believe that drone warfare has hit a tipping point where we are already seeing a transition in the balance of power between offensive and defense in favor of the strategic defense, and that this has major implications for all forms of expeditionary and aggressive warfare, i.e. what the US is already built to do, and what revaunchist powers like Russia and China have aspired to be able to do. Drone technology is emerging in a way that is providing a historically unparalleled ability to debilitate state resources, and that is going to fundamentally change how nations approach military defense (and offense) in the next 30 years compared to the last 300.
This is a bit conceptual, so I am going to try and break it down a bit.
In the field of military history, there's two related and distinct concepts you may or may not have heard of: a military revolution, and a revolution of military affairs.
Military revolutions are major changes in tactics and strategies that are driven by emerging technologies. This is things like how guns changed reliance on bows and arrows and melee, how rapid reload / sustained fire weapons changed Napoleonic armies to trench warfare, how tanks and motorized vehicles changed trench warfare to maneuver warfare, and so on.
Military revolutions are, by their nature, often very bloody because they represent periods where new optimizations can have disproportionate effect, and rebalance the balance of offense vs defense in ways that make previous strategies or paradigms unworkable. For example- the AK-47 represented a modest military revolution because the ability to mass produce cheap, reliable, and effective light infantry weapons that could be distributed to guerilla groups made colonial empires fundamentally unviable. Empires could not justify the cost-benefit of maintaining colonial holding by force, and so the strategy of the post-WW2 era gradually became to disengage from colonial empires.
A Revolution in Military Affairs is worse / bloodier / more significant.
A Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) is not just a change in tactics, but when technological or organizational changes irrevocably change how warfare itself is pursued- particularly by changing the relationship between the populace and how war is conducted. These can be technological changes, but they can also be organizational or social changes.
The exact criteria and lists may differ, but five examples include rise of the seventeenth-century state system (where permanent standing armies were maintained by the state rather than reliance on ad-hoc raisings of mass armies or fuedal forces), the French revolution (where nationalism changed the relationship that the populace had with the state and the execution of warfare), the industrial revolution (where military-industrial capacity not only became critical for arming mass armies with advanced capabilities but could be used to bolster other forces by sparing surplus capacity at a scale never previously done), World War I (where machine guns, trench warfare, and special weapons like gas led to historically unprecedented killing potential with demographic-levels of impact), and superpower nuclear competition (where the conduct and selection of wars to fight over sharply veered away from ever-larger conflicts to avoiding total wars of annihalation between not only nuclear states, but other states in general).
RMAs are rarer but more significant than MRs because of the social change dynamic at play. Going beyond changes in tactics, the changes in how organizations or polities pursue these new paradigms often lead to disproportionate, and thus self-feeding, effects where actors pursue not just the technology to use in the old way, but pursue the new social and institutional evolutions that further propel the technology. For example, the rise of precision bombing from the US gulf war has changed how countriess across the globe approach airpower- no one builds for carpet bombing fleets anymore, and instead precision fires or precision-missiles in lieu of precision-bombers dominate.
My view is that weaponized drones represent both a military revolution (they are effective weapons changing tactics and strategies, as seen with how the Russia-Ukraine War has adopted to both sides using them and trying to counter their use), and a revolution in military affairs.
The Ukraine War in particular, but also the Iranian use of drones in their proxy conflicts, have demonstrated how societies themselves can basically grass-roots up militarily significant contributions from common commercial product. Weaponing small commercial-off-the-shelf drones with what amounts to hobby-shop equipment is what allows a 1,000 dollar drone project to destroy a 100,000,000 dollar piece of military equipment at a 100,000-to-1 cost ratio.
Which is another way of saying, for the cost of one modern fighter jet, you could conceivably invest in more drones-that-can-kill-parked-fighter jets than there are fighter jets in the world. That is something that no state in the modern world can afford to brute-force through, and in the current era counter-UAS is hard but drone warfare is easy. Typically far less cost-effective than the drone-to-aircraft example, but still easy and still cost effective.
What makes it a RMA and not just a MR, however, is the accessibility to non-advanced economies and non-state actors.
The Ukraine War has demonstrated how you can have a distributed practically grass-roots drone warfare program put together in a matter of months across a coherent society even when being directly attacked by an existential invasion threat. The Iranians and IRGC have demonstrated how proxy drone warfare can be deliberately proliferated across sectarian group alliances to have impacts across entire geopolitical regions, to a point where quasi-stat / substate actors like the Houthis can produce their own drones despite being under regional blockades and air power. Terrorist groups like ISIS and criminal groups around the world have demonstrated how even non-state actors can access and utilize customized drones for operations.
What this means is that drones represent one of the biggest challenges to state military capacity in history. What the AK-47 did to the viability of colonial empires, drones may do to the entire concept of expeditionary organized armies, where any state that tries to organize a military to take unwilling territory by force will face cost-disproportionate losses that wreck the cost-benefit justifications for going to war in the first place.
This also means that states will have exceptional incentives to develop security states able to detect, trace, and go after drone use. Partly for normal law enforcement, but partly to mitigate the risks of asymetric wariors / insurgents moving in to start attacking high-cost targets in core regions. This will likely lead to vastly expanded / normalized security state technologies to track people and computers and drones, far beyond the sort of counter-terrorism authorities introduced in 9-11. These means to mitigate UAS threats can, in turn, counter the ability of other states to penetrate protected population centers that would normally be done for prepatory operations.
This, in turn, means that various forms of military conquest / forced entry into unwelcome areas is going to be less possible than ever. No one looks at the Russian experience in Ukraine and thinks 'I want to win like that,' and drone proxy warfare will likely make that increasingly a norm rather than exception. Any state that tries to force itself into another state is risking itself to proxy support for the invaded by any number of states with their own attack UAS capability, quite possibly AI-trained to recognize the military equipment being used to invade. There are some contexts where proxy resupply may be impossible- I think Taiwan is credibly screwed due to blockade vulnerabilities- but in general I am not concerned about China invading or establishing puppet states from asia to africa.
The flip side, though, is that I am concerned on the ability of the US to maintain air bases or war stocks in foreign countries where the local government/people don't want it to be there. I don't think the US could have maintained the Iraq or Afghan occupations for as long as it did if the US had invaded in 2023 rather than 2003. Not unless it was willing to make some significantly different decisions regarding partition or siding with ethnic majorities. This will credibly not only apply to the specific territories where a small state might welcome a US presence, but also to the neighbors who might host / turn a blind eye to anti-US militant activity crossing borders. (An example here would be how the Houthis in western Yemen were able to use UAVs against the UAE all the way across eastern Yemen.)
In other words, the drone revolution- both as a military revolution and revolution in military affairs- cuts both ways. It will drastically increase the cost of American adversaries trying to pursue revanchist invasions. It will also drastically increase the cost of American expeditionary adventures abroad, or even to US opponents in any given conflict who can send asymmetric forces to attack distant airbases elsewhere. It is going to lead to a lot of blood in parts of the world where things aren't so clear cut, whether it's already ongoing conflicts, sectarian divisions where both sides can credibly reach drone capabilities, and/or efforts by geopolitical actors to create drone-empowered insurgencies where they don't already exist. Costs and casualties will climb.
If you noticed that there was no reference to political candidates in this, that was the point- this is a foreign policy problem driven by dynamics beyond any candidate's ability to prevent. No matter what a candidate does, great harm and damages will occur around the world regardless- and thus everyone will 'fail.' Anyone with an interest in saying 'they didn't succeed' will have more than enough to fill the confirmation bias regardless of how well they do relatively, and there is unlikely to be any credible or plausible metric of what 'success' looks like going forward.
Unironically, if he does 'nothing'- does not start a conflict, does not join a conflict, does not participate in a conflict- that could be a better action (or inaction) than doing anything 'about' them.
Americans often have a bias for action- 'don't just stand there, do something'- that would typically be associated with being proactive and more impactful policies, but in the context of the drone RMA represents a major risk. If you forward deploy extremely expensive forces, you are putting them in range of drone users, and if you actually commit those forces to a conflict then you are giving those opponents the reason / basis to actually act against them. This would be the case if, say, the US joined Israeli airstrikes on Iran- Iran would seek to retaliate with its drones, and there are American logistic bases in Kuwait right across the water.
In this sort of context, the better posture / strategy is to not be participating, but being ready to, to establish a deterrence factor that allows you more limited but below-threshold actions. Those American bases in Kuwait may not be able to support attacks against Iran, but maybe they can shoot down Iranian drones sent against Israel, which is a desirable effect in and of itself. In the meantime Iran knows that if they tried to attack those Kuwaiti bases, then while they might do damage they would receive far more damage than they currently are as the US would enter its own 'use it or lose it' dynamic and would utililze what it could as much as it could before drones rendered it unable to. In this way, the US preserves its ability to maintain a beneficial effect (mitigating Iranian attacks on Israel) for a longer period, and at a lower cost (which is what allows it to persist for longer).
This is where a non-interventionist instinct is a directionally correct strategic bias vis-a-vis a more interventionist impulse. Instinct alone is not sufficient- there are going to be costs and risk taking regardless, there is more to a neutral jing strategy than doing literally nothing, and there are contexts where the general trends would not apply. I am not making a general claim that any war the US enters in will lead to it being dogpiled across the world and all bases destroyed by drone swarms. But erring on the side of caution by expecting clear interests and clear partner buy-in is going to be an increasing positive as potential costs raise.
/
To return to your question, you ask 'what would trump do about -topics-', but my response is that it's more important what he is NOT likely to do- try to get directly involved.
Unlike the foreign policy establishment opponents broadly aligned against him, Trump is not likely to embrace an R2P intervention (which would expose a US presence to proxy militants supported by hostile competitors), or maintain an indefinite exposure to asymmetric drone attacks (the Iraq/Syria presence, which he was thwarted in his withdrawal from in his first term), or stay to assume the costs of fighting for a country that doesn't want to fight for itself (the Afghanistan context). He is unlikely to prioritize the harmony and good regard of host partners over systemic cost trends and risks. He is unlikely to expand US commitments or exposures to new areas or partners without clear interests and gains for doing so. He is likely to engage in limited tit-for-tat strikes or counterstrikes that will lead people to accuse him of failing or falling into that escalation spiral, but tit for tat is probably the best response possible and a more stable strategic equilibrium than outright ignorring proxy attacks.
This will almost certainly come at the opportunity cost of things he could do more of but isn't inclined towards. People who think the US should intervene for the right thing are probably going to be disappointed by a lack of interventions in general. Anyone whose self-image of what it means to be an American on the world stage may cringe at the missed opportunities, the tolerance for the intolerable foreign leaders, and so on.
But- per my thoughts on drones- this is a feature, not a bug. The expectations Americans have of relatively low-cost/low-casualty wars are not keeping up with technological reality. The Gulf War standard of conflict success is gone and is not coming back any time soon. The best bet the US has for maximizing effects and minimizing costs is to help those who are willing to fight (and pay) for themselves, rather than assuming the burdens of fighting (and paying the costs) for them.
This, however, is not going to come easy, and it's certainly not going to be held in high regard by partners who prefer the US operate under a different paradigm (and assume the costs of doing so).
More options
Context Copy link