Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Notes -
Anyone here familiar with the situation in Bangladesh? Most of the news reports I’ve seen seem pretty trash, and I don’t trust them anyway. I’ve seen some videos of Muslims trashing Hindu temples, but lack context.
Multiple bad incentives aligning is what's happening.
India was critical to the independence of Bangladesh, and both countries have generally had an amiable relationship. India has been a big proponent of turning Bangladesh into a somewhat secular nation. It is still 92% Muslim, with 8% Hindus.
Bad incentives:
This is coupled with some really odd global incentives which empowers the anti-hindu lynch mob:
Truth is, Hindus are 2nd only to Jews in being lynched & exiled from every historic homeland. From Malaysia (whose Hindus ended up forming Singapore) to Afghanistan (which may be my family's ancestral home....20% chance), majority Islam has shown itself to be incompatible with Hinduism. There might be a bunch of incentives this time around, but this is a movie we Hindus have seen before.
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Bangladesh was originally a part of Pakistan but had a sizeable Hindu population. Even in the infamous Bengali genocide which was committed by Pakistani Army, the Bengali Hindus were dis-proportionally targeted. So there is a large history of communal tensions in Bangladesh. Infact, when in India, the controversial Babri Masjid was demolished by a crowd of mobs, there was a backlash in Bangladesh where Hindu minority was targetted.
As many would know recently there was an uprising in Bangladesh which overthrew the reigning PM Sheikh Hasina, daughter of the Founding Father of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Sheikh Hasina in power had made changes to election process which gave the reigning PM power to overlook the election rather than an interim government which was traditionally done. The sham elections that followed gave her quite a bit of power. The student protests which were originally about Freedom Fighter reservation quotas in government jobs, spilled over into a popular uprising resulting in her ouster.
She occupied a more secular space in the Bengali polity and was pro-India, and kept extreme Islamists in check. So after her ouster, the Hindu community without state protection and being seen as a Hasina supporters were especially vulnerable. Though in Urban areas protesting students took upon themselves to protect vulnerable communities from Islamist backlash, this is much less the case in non-Urban areas.
The situation is still developing and we cannot say if the interim government will able to reign in the chaos, but probably hope so.
Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus chosen as the interim leader is a well respected figure in Bangladesh, but his political ability is unknown. On the other hand Bangladesh Nationalist Party and Jamaat-e-Islami are fuming over the lack of control over interim government.
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A little maneuver warfare, as a treat.
~72 hours ago Ukraine launched an incursion into Kursk oblast, and have made it to the town of Sudzha, 10 km from the border. At least two brigades have been committed. Some air defence has also been active in the region, making it challenging for the VKS to operate. It's too early judge what the goal is, and officials have yet to comment. The response from Russian officials won't shock anyone.
Some notable features:
Surprise! In the last year plus of fighting both Ukraine and Russia have opted for more dispersed formations, as large masses of men and metal tend to get spotted and shelled pretty quickly. The ubiquity of drone+satellite intel meant that either side getting caught flat footed on the frontline was not on many bingo cards.
Despite the manpower disadvantage and shortages Ukraine is still willing to commit men to riskier operations like this.
The tempo of Russian assaults in Donbas remains unchanged, for now.
Some thoughts:
With the middle east stealing all the oxygen in the international news room Ukraine has been out of the new cycle for awhile. It's been even longer since it's had a high profile win. So a strong motivator for Ukrainian strategists is likely to be to get some positive press and a morale boost.
Life or
deathpromotion for Gerasimov? Russia probably shouldn't haven't been caught off guard. I find it increasingly likely that like Shoigu before him, Gerasimov will be promoted into a position where he remains close to Putin, but his incompetency can do the least harm. And someone less-loyal-but-more-competent will be found to fill his shoes.I like a good blitzkreig as much as the next guy, but is this, like... actually a defensible salient? It doesn't really look like it, and throwing a bunch of guys into a new meatgrinder to attract some media attention seems not only morally reprehensible, but also (since I'm sure we're long past the point where that matters) pretty bad strategy for a country currently engaged in a war of attrition against an opponent with many more resources to attrit?
Kinda / sorta / it doesn't need to be to serve the purpose of overall defense. The issue isn't the specific-holdability of this specific terrain, but rather what the Russians would need to re-secure it, particularly since while they have 'more resources', they don't necessarily have more of the right kind of resources to counter a mobile defense without compromising the offense in other sectors.
In military doctrines, there are generally two main types of defense: positional defense, and mobile defense.
A positional defense is what you generally think of in the Ukraine War over the last 2.5 years- trench lines, artillery duels, relatively static air defense needs and placements. This has its advantages for the defender in increasing cost-ratio, but disadvantages in that the opponent gets to choose when and where exactly to the attack. Similarly, it has its disadvantages for the attacker, but it also has it's advantages in some respects. Because it's mutual trenchworks, counter-attacks face the same general disadvantage, even as the general attack can establish overlapping mitigation measures for things like counter-drone / anti-air / artillery / etc, which can let the participant move forces in 'relatively' safe conditions. Positional defenses are costly, but generally more one way in favor of the larger party.
This is what Russia has reorganized its military to fight over the last two years. Tanks are used to support attacks on specific positions, mass concentrations of artillery forces and depots to support suppressive fires on static positions, etc.
A mobile defense, on the other hand, is a far more aggressive form of counter-force defense which terrain is given up for time / opportunities to maneuver and strike where most advantageous, with the goal of targetting enemy forces so that they are unable to advance / must retreat and reconsolidate, preserving the defender's control of key territory further behind and having out-sized effects on forces. It is harder to pull off in both terms of contexts and skill level, but it also has the potential to be even more efficient in terms of cost-to-the-defender, as the defender can be fighting over ground that the other side doesn't already have prepared with the sort of over-lapping systems of artillery / AA / counter-drone EW that could mitigate the force effectiveness, as only the stuff that you can carry with you can move with you. The defender can thus be more proactive in choosing when and where to counter-attack, avoid fights over specific terrain that is unfavorable, and because the attacker has to press the advance- and thus leave the advantages of positional defenses- to pursue.
The issue with mobile defenses is that you need to give up terrain for time and space for when to counter-attack the enemy force. This could lead to retreating until the war is lost, or you have to go into positional defenses you can't abandon. It also requires the political capital for a leader to be willing to tell his nation 'no, we're not going to fight over all the terrain.'
But if- hypothetically- you could get a lot of the enemy's terrain to maneuver through, which you wouldn't pay a significant political cost to give up...
This is where we start hitting the defensive context of this offensive. It's not that the surprisingly rapid advance of Ukrainian forces means a new static front line to be defended in Russia. It's that the fact that Ukrainian forces were able to maneuver so quickly forward, also means they will be able to maneuver backwards, and laterally, and thus have the capacity for a mobile defense. And because this is so far from the Russian-Ukrainian front lines, the Russians have to leave their static position setups and try to maneuver- and in doing so, open themselves up for attacks that wouldn't be possible against forces under the defensive-position envelopes.
We've already seen some of this happen. There was reportedly a HIMARs attack in Kursk that destroyed a column of Russian forces in transit. This would simply not have been possible in a normal static defense, because (a) the units wouldn't have been consolidated, (b) would have likely been in defensive positions, and (c) the area would have been under various AA/missile-defense envelopes. Similarly, there were reports of Russian platoons surrendering after being flanked and enveloped. The point isn't that the Russians are in a catastrophic defeat- the point is that the same sort of expenditure of Ukrainian resources wouldn't have achieved these sort of results if just pushed into the positional defenses.
What this means for the Russians is that they need to bring in maneuver forces of sufficient capacity / protective capabilities to push back the Ukrainians, and that this requirement increases with time. The more the Ukrainians are able to advance, the more terrain they have with which to maneuver and trade away- and the more they have, the more Russian resources are required to contain the pocket.
The issue for the Russians is that they don't have the extra army to spare. If it did, we wouldn't be discussing the Ukrainians advancing over a relatively under-defended Russian border, but the Russians advancing the other way across the relatively under-defended Ukrainian border. Unlike the Ukrainians, who built up the resources for this offensive rather than put it into the front lines, the Russians have been prioritizing beefing up the front lines over additional fronts- as seen with the recent Kharkiv offensive, which could be the analog here, but which was apparently under-resourced as a light-infantry push without significant technical/mechanized support.
Which will likely mean that Russia will need to take forces from the front lines. This likely means the reserves, not literal front line troops, but front line offensives won't be conducted with the same level if there's no reserve force to sustain the losses / exploit a success.
And in the process, those reserves are being exposed to much greater risk. This is why that HIMARs-convoy destruction is notable- the Russian maneuver warfare capability has sharply degraded over the last few years as the Russians have reverted from a post-Soviet era to a Soviet-era army, and maneuver warfare is one of the contexts where technological differentials matters more and more. The Russians are able to mitigate some of the risks of modern western capabilities when they have nested EW/AA capabilities, but when you take Russian forces out of it, you're getting back to the technology differentials of the Desert Shield era.
Which is how this serves as a strategic-level defense even if no territory or town is fought over street-by-street. Even if this offensive 'only' takes a month for the Russians to roll back to the border, that's a month of disruption to the Russian offensives elsewhere, at higher system vulnerability than in the positional defense paradigm. The Ukrainians could blunder this, of course... but even if the Russians tried to follow them right across the border, that would be a relative Ukrainian win, as there was a reason that the Russians weren't attacking that border anyway, and forces the Russians commit there aren't fueling the advances elsewhere.
And this is without the other anciliary costs and benefits. Aside from the propaganda value, including the value of Ukraine having a high-profile success near the end of the American election cycle (good news encourages continued support, when the Russian strategy has been hoping for a negative narrative to encourage American withdrawal of support), there's also the matter of western aid policy. The Ukrainians have been faced with real significant limitations on how some weapons can be used from Ukraine into Russia, such as what would allow them to go after Russian airfields. (Or- more recently- how the Kharkiv offensive was allowed to build up strength because the Ukrainians weren't allowed to fire into the clearly massing forces.) The Ukrainian offensive- in which various systems are now being used from within Russia in Russia- has had such a muted response, that this will very likely lead to relaxed restrictions in the future. If it does so, then Ukrainian gains in better utilizing western aid will further increase their overall defensive effectiveness against the Russians, and mitigate some of Russia's main enduring advantages (such as military airfields for the glide bomb campaign.)
Put all together, and I think your question of 'is this a defensible salient' is a qualified yes on an operational level (maneuver defense is a form of defense), but a much stronger yes on a campaign level (undercutting offenses in other regions by requiring commitment of Russian reserves), and especially at a strategic level (shaping western weapons restriction policy, information/vibes impact of the US election season).
But it's not necessarily the right question. It's not whether any square kilometer of the salient will be held- it's that by putting the Russians in the position of having to take it back in the first place, multiple defensive interests have likely been advanced.
Hope that helps.
Great answer, thanks!
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Don't you mean kharkiv rather than kherson?
Indeed I did. Thank you, and corrected.
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It sort of maybe does to me? There is some sort of a river going through Sudzha, which sounds by default nicer to defend than the original state border. I was pessimistic at the start, thinking there was no way UA wouldn’t stall out before reaching the river bank, and now optimistic again since they did. (Well, in Google street view the river looks very puny so this might be wishful thinking)
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Reminder that Kursk Nuclear Plant still has 2 (or 3) RBMK-1000 units, same type as in Chernobyl
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Implicit in all the supportive arguments about the incursion is the assumption that the Ukrainian forces cannot break through the enemy defenses anywhere inside official Ukrainian territory, or that they shouldn't try it because it'd be wasteful or something. After all the Atlanticist propaganda I've read about the orc hordes in the last two years, this just strikes me as 100% pathetic.
If the Ukrainians believe there's currently more tactical/strategic value in making this incursion than using the same resources elsewhere, as there very well may be, then there's nothing odd about them making this incursion.
eh, objective / subjctive, if you believe that aliens are going to ascend you to the next plane of existence it's not odd to eat the phenobarbital laced apple sauce as their comet reaches it's closest approach to Earth. Still odd af to everyone else.
From what we've seen of the war lately the Donetsk situation is a huge mess, they've been begging for reinforcements for months. Russia is entering Toretsk, captured most of Niu York, and has pushed through all but one defensive line between them and pokrovsk. Which is the main logistical hub for the entire region. Not even western analysts have been able to make sense of this border raid. Russia can just use conscripts to defend their own soil so it's unlikely to pull troops out of Donetsk. To use it as a bargaining chip they have to actually hold it, which considering they can't hold fortifications that have been built up over years seems unlikely given they will have to defend villages without those fortifications and with less established supply lanes, air defense issues etc. Capturing and sabotaging a Russian nuclear plant to create an environmental disaster just makes them look insane to the rest of the world.
Only explanation that makes some sense to me is that this is a Bibi situation, they are getting pressure to tie things up or at least begin winding down before the November elections and are spending 5k+ lives to escalate things and keep the war hot.
we will see whether this will work out
so far it featured one of deadliest strikes in this war, with one of columns massacred
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What's pathetic? Not attacking where the enemy is strong, and instead attacking where he is weak?
What is pathetic is that the same people are praising this incursion as a good idea who have been trying to convince everyone for many months that the war will definitely be won in a short time by the Ukrainians liberating all their territories by force, without negotiating anything with the orc vermin, advancing to their post-1954 borders.
this sets are not the same
and in category "who can find more egregious bad takes" side that can use Russian MoD official statements is likely to win
and if anyone claims that this "war will definitely be won in a short time" then they should be ignored as stupid and/or propagandist
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I'm not following. Should they not support the incursion? Would that be less pathetic? If not, it sounds like you just don't like the rah-rah propaganda, which is understandable, but I don't see how it's relevant to the current developments.
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The raid is humiliating, but probably not game-changing. Ukraine is able to penetrate deeply, because it's driving along undefended highways through poorly defended landscape, but they will have to commit many more additional resources lest they overextend themselves like Napoleon or, well, Gerasimov in 2022.
There are multiple possible explanations for that:
There are more:
Might this backfire on Ukraine by allowing Putin to cast it as a defensive war, giving him a freer hand to employ conscripts?
Not particularly. From a Russian legal perspective, the freer hand has already been secured via the annexation of the un-held territory. Putin doesn't need more political capital to change a law or anything, that's already been done. From a domestic politics perspective, the defensive casting probably doesn't sell, at least not in a way that doesn't invite semantic quibbling about how much Russians believe the propaganda versus parrot it.
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Use of conscripts would technically mean a greater manpower replacement sustainability but at a cost of popularity.
As such, that is an explicit goal of Ukraine's. They want a greater use of conscripts by Russia. Would it be good or bad for the outcome of the war, who knows?
I don't know what is the mood like in Russia right now, but a defensive use of conscripts while volunteers focus on the offensive might be something you could sell to people.
Russia isn't manpower constrained given current recruitment methods (at the moment anyway), they materiel constrianed, which is why I said it would mean greater manpower replacement sustainability.
They can't outfit, mechanize and give air support to another army in addition to what they already have. If they could, they would have already.
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And if one assumes an ugly grind, then it is better for it to take place in Russia. If fighting will involve artillery, glide bombs and drones turning towns and villages into ruins - then doing it on the other side of border seems preferable.
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Thinking about working hours vs. GDP/cap, for example in this graph. It seems that poor countries aren't poor because of any lack of work. If anything, people in poor countries work much more. However, their productivity is low in comparison to richer countries. How can poor countries improve their productivity? Is it as simple as introducing technology and organizational systems from the West, or is there more to it?
Fixed that for you. Deirdre McCloskey has a trilogy on why the industrial revolution happened in the West rather than elsewhere.
I've only read the reviews but have got that impression that in her telling it is all about subtle stuff, like Bourgeois Dignity. There are lots of other theories, but it seems very common to admit that things came together in a way we don't understand and which only transfer to other countries, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, now China, for other reasons that we don't understand, and with their own distinctive twists, which also will not transfer.
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Since you're largely stuck with the human capital and natural resources you have the only thing you have control over is improving your institutions and create enough stability that people dare to invest.
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Are you new to this forum? DNA IQ.
I am.
Assuming that this is the dominant variable (I'm unsure of that), how would interventions look like? AFAIK eugenics interventions did more harm than good in the past. What would you have, tax breaks for high-IQ couples to have more kids?
Like, the countries than had these interventions are now suffering from inbreeding, deficit of creativity and economic stagnation?
Yes, and that too.
But foremost is having wish to do that.
Stop subsidizing loss of high IQ people to emigration. Put them in contracts to stay. Stop subsidizing useless degrees, especially female ones. Subsidize sperm freezing (probably highest ROI thing ever) and EVF.
There's many successful men who became fathers at >50 yrs. But their old sperm accumulates mutations. If they used frozen when it was new...
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Even if partially true it would not be entire answer. And would be among harder to change so is not a good answer to this question anyway.
Because the question is not factual. It's a "does this dress make me look fat" type of question. The good answer is what they want to hear.
It not like increasing IQ by a mere 15-20 points (not 100) is a difficult problem like terraforming Mars. Just the wish is not here.
nope
discussing how to tackle say corruption and overregulation can be interesting and fruitful discussion
rather than racist uninformed dismissal
Even if you tweak hard race definition to match current wealth of various areas it would completely fail how and why some areas got much richer within last decades (for example no matter how much you try you will NOT explain East Europe purely by "DNA IQ")
Let's not make strawmen and r-word accusations. Nobody claimed IQ is single causal variable, just the most significant one. East Europe poverty relative to West Europe is mainly due to having planned economy and communists in past. Having communism (IQ denying ideology) lowers your country prosperity for future decades.
Are you sure? Seems to me that https://www.themotte.org/post/1116/transnational-thursday-for-august-8-2024/239006?context=8#context did this
"IQ denying ideology" not sure has this problem existed there at all, and it was not actual source of problems
"Are you new to this forum? DNA IQ." seems quite clear "racism is right", at least I see no real difference
Well unlike you, u dominicq was able to understand that correctly: https://www.themotte.org/post/1116/transnational-thursday-for-august-8-2024/239108?context=8#context
if you come here to sneer rather than to learn...
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That sounds like a pretty difficult problem, at least practically speaking.
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While it's a popular view here, it's hardly a consensus. Particularly on a country-scale.
IQ-income is more relevant between countries than between individuals in a country (assuming monoracial). Because luck evens out and zero-sum games even out. A high IQ person in average IQ country might have low income because he's low on social ladder relative to his countrymen. This doesn't work between countries. A whole country cannot be low on social ladder, it's a zero-sum game.
A whole country, however, might have bad government/have bad relations/bad resources etc. (btw, high corruption in a country also decreases IQ-income correlation for individuals in that country)
My understanding of the whole genetics vs. IQ thing is that there is indeed a strong correlation, but not that it's the only factor. You seem to be saying this yourself in another comment.
There's been just a few too many countries that went from top dog to basketcase, and vice-versa, for me to go full IQ-gene-reductionist.
like... which examples? You not being clear of differentiaing two associations, genetic IQ vs phenotypic IQ and phenotypic IQ vs GDP per capita, doesn't help.
If there's a high IQ population under different policies (e.g. China) then it might get richer or poorer, this doesn't not simply low IQ population might do something to outcompete high IQ pop under normal government.
Argentina went from nearly US tier rich to. It's still very rich to median person.
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One important element to consider are large corporations that already occupy a market. If your Amazon or similar have a monopoly on a developing country's industry, that country can't really build its own industry in the same niche. At least not without very savvy government influence, as can be seen in Norway's hydroelectric power production. If you want to learn more about this fascinating topic, here's a pretty good summary.
TL;DR: Foreign corporations could build and operate dams on Norwegian territory but they had to use a significant percentage of Norwegian workers as part of their workforce and they would only own those dams for 60-80 years. Thus Norway got both the eventual ownership of the dams and a skilled workforce who knew how to operate them.
These are the kinds of clever tactics it would take to truly catch up to western GDP per capita. So you'd need competent leaders, a loyal population with homogeneous culture and belief in its leadership and even then, it'd still take many decades for any kind of noticeable progress to be made.
Natural resources are another obvious advantage but they can either be a boon or a curse. You have countries like Oman where a brilliant dictator guided his nation into modern times but you also have countless examples of oil wealth leading to corruption and a slow descent into poverty and misery for the citizens.
If a low IQ country tried to copy this policy, most likely it'd have been unsuccessful and people said '$countryname$ tried too hard with its protectionism, protectionism bad
Resources are never a curse. These examples almost certainly would have been even worse without oil, just not as notable ones.
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Saudi Arabia apparently did something similar with their foreign-investment oil company, although they bought it out rather than force a contractual handover.
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