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C ontinuing the contest to develop superiority in strategic nuclear weapons is bound to lead to increasing vulnerability for the American people. The argument
rests on IQ data. See my book: Nuclear Weapons and the Blue-eyed People.
Richard R. Peppe |
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Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan are right. Georgia is precisely the kind of fault line that divides American conservatives and will divide American conservatives for the foreseeable future. Russia will not turn into a big Switzerland because it would be congenial to neocons.
Anyone who thinks what I think; that nuclear weapons reflect human intelligence, and that international IQ data promises that no one country can win the nuclear terror game; has to accept that there will be serious, even violent clashes between America and Russia, but negotiations about controlling nuclear weapons must continue. From the beginning of the 21st century to as far as anyone sees into the future, nuclear weapons will dominate any other issue in international politics. All facts must accommodate the nuclear weapons fact.
According to a page 1 Wall Street Journal piece on August 29, 2008 the Bush administration is considering changes in American Russian agreements concerning nuclear arms control, in response to events in Georgia. A key phrase in the piece is the assertion by Secretary of State Rice that "it is not business as usual."
One of the potential actions designed to punish Russia is ending cooperation on proliferation issues. Another issue concerns agreements on reducing nuclear weapon stockpiles, and verification protocols.
In a September 3, 2008 Wall Street Journal editorial
'Stop! Or We'll Say Stop Again,' the writer criticizes the European Union for a tepid response to Russia's action in Georgia. The one substantive threat the EU did take, to halt negotiations with Russia over new economic arrangements is criticized as basically worthless. The Russians had not been particularly exercised over the proposed new arrangements before their aggression.
In an August 29, 2008 WSJ Op-Ed piece, Arthur Herman identifies Russia, Iran and Venezuela as a new "axis" of evil. A curious fit, one might think, but Mr. Herman identifies the elements that shape the fit: Authoritarian political structures, a preference for "crony" corrupt structures rather than free marker solutions, anti-free market preferences, corrupt business arrangements, and perhaps most important, wealth from oil. He believes that Russia's intervention in Georgia is the type of provocation that requires a response.
But he also tells us not to become overly exercised about the facts: "Despite Russia's nuclear arsenal, none of these states poses a military threat comparable to the Cold War Soviet Union, or even the Axis powers in the 1930s. For all their bluff and bluster, Russia, Iran and Venezuela have a relatively tenuous position in the world; for all their oil wealth their economies remain weak and unstable."
Another WSJ reviewer, Judy Shelton, argues in a September 3, 2008 piece, "The Market Will Punish Putinism" that Russia is bound to lose foreign investment capital as a result of its actions. The U.S. should take heart, she tells us, because Russia stock prices have to reflect their unease at Putin's assertions of traditional Russian despotic claims.The value of the ruble has also fallen as investors have retrieved their investments. In response the Russian central bank has raised interest rate which has inevitably tightened credit, causing problems for the entire Russian population.
My view on the point is that Russia's vulnerability to the price level of a single commodity, oil, cannot be dismissed out of hand. It is one thing for a small isolated Saudi Arabia to function with this vulnerability; it is a very different thing for a large population that wishes in some important respects to challenge the United States, Western Europe and NATO to live with the same vulnerability. So Ms. Shelton is right on one central point; when oil prices sink Russia may need American and European cooperation.
But I think that the suggestion that the U.S. respond by support a fast tick European Community membership for Ukraine, and, if necessary to ignore European doves, and offering Ukraine the opportunity to adopt the dollar. It guarantees that Russians who are marginally pro-West, and even pro-American, will see this as a long term threat at home.
How seriously the Russians, or even the ordinary American, might take the proffered menu of American threats is anyone's guess but if an American administration follows through with them, the net result has to be a less secure world for everyone. Given that nuclear weapons are engineering talent, what is being promised is simply: Continue the same arms race that was in effect for the past half century.
The problem is that today, roughly at the end of the first half century of nuclear competition, America is orders of magnitude more vulnerable than it was 50 years ago. The key question that America has to ask itself is whether America can be infinitely safe while making Russia infinitely vulnerable.
Mr. Herman and Ms. Shelton, following the American Establishment line of the last 50 years believes that the ultimate reality in the nuclear force progression will be found in economic data. I believe the ultimate reality in the nuclear story will be engineering talent, and that international IQ data establishes that Russia and China will be able to do what they have done for the past 50 years: match the American nuclear terror march, step by step.
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John Bolton, in a July 15, 2008 piece in the Wall Street Journal, argues that if Israel attacks Iran's nuclear facilities, the US should "make it as successful as possible." The U.S will be "blamed" for the strike, whether it succeeds or fails, so there is no gain for the U.S., should the attack fail.
One wonders whether Bolton is advocating direct American involvement, including boots on the ground, should the attack prove to be less than a knockout punch? It is not clear.
I do not know how many articles by John Bolton I have read; there have been a few. Most have addressed North Korea. This, I think, is the first that I have come across that deals with Iran. But one sees in the piece about Iran the same advice one sees in the articles about North Korea: More force, please.
First, the really major difference in America's options against a nuclear ambitious North Korea and its options against a nuclear ambitious Iran: There is no player in the Mideast that looks remotely like China.
A generation from now, maybe two, how good the Chinese algebra student is will be too visible to everyone to imagine that the U.S. would invade North Korea, to destroy North Korea's nuclear program, should China seriously object. In the mid 20th century whether a war on the Korean peninsular would go nuclear was strictly an American decision. That will not be the case by the mid twenty-first century.
So whether America's leaders think that Iran and North Korea occupy roughly equivalent positions on the political moral yardstick is irrelevant. There is a long term tether on America's behavior on the Korean peninsular in a way that there isn't in the Mideast.
"Eventually" force may be the only alternative that the U.S. has available. Bolton addresses the meaning of the term correctly. It is not that instant before Iran has the ability to fire a nuclear weapon at another state. "Eventually" is that instant before Iran's toddle down the path toward the nuclear wading pool becomes unstoppable. That is, when Iran has the ability to prevent an invasion against its nuclear program. What is required for Iran to reach that instant of time? Consider Iraq.
If Iraq had a nuclear weapon that would have destroyed 100,000 American invaders, albeit at the cost of a couple of million Iraqi lives, would America have invaded? Sobering, but one begins to appreciate the attractiveness of nuclear weapons from the perspective of the Third World.
America is now an hour from nuclear annihilation from both Russia and China, because, between 1940 and 2000 it did not want to choose between the only two alternatives that could have kept Russia and China away from the nuclear cupboard. In the first instance, it could have joined with Germany to force Russia off the nuclear path. Failing that it could have subordinated every international goal to the goal of a nuclear free China, and, alone, or with Russia it could have terrorized China away from its nuclear goals with the threat of a nuclear attack. Today, those possibilities have been left abandoned in the dust of history.
I doubt that a much more pacific policy, more and bigger carrots, would have been successful. But, in retrospect, if America were afraid to force the issue through war, it would have been preferable to the policies that America followed. The worst alternative was the alternative The Greatest Generation took: Talk so tough that Russian and Chinese bureaucrats were afraid of the American nuclear fist; but not so afraid that they were forced to abandon their determination to obtain the terror themselves.
The second major problem with Mr. Bolton's column is that it puts American prestige and lives at risk, and then allows for failure. This is why America has to make it clear to everyone, precisely what its position is should Israel start a war with Iran.
The really dangerous idea in the piece is almost a throwaway line: "John McCain responded to Iran's missile salvo by stressing again the need for a workable missile defense system to defend the U.S. against attacks by rogue states like Iran and North Korea. He is undoubtedly correct..."
I do not believe that it is possible to develop a missile defense system that will not be interpreted by the Russians and the Chinese, and probably large portions of the American electorate, as systems that will offer protection against Russian and Chinese missiles. The Russian and Chinese response to that may be to develop their own defense system. But I suspect the more likely response will be to develop offensive systems that will "crowd" the American system.
The failure to look honestly at the capabilities of Chinese and Russian nuclear engineers, could result in better missiles aimed at America, closer to America. It would be ironic if a disagreement with a state that could not really threaten America developed into the staging ground for an engineering contest that made America more vulnerable to very serious threats.
r peppe |
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Mark Helprin concludes his May 13, 2008 Wall Street Journal warning about China with an elegy to America: "That beneath a roiled surface is a power limitless yet fair, supple yet restrained." Well, let's begin with the word "Limitless." The last 50 years have demonstrated something about America on the nuclear weapons issue: The reality isn't Limitless anymore. Not for America. Not for any country. America sacrificed thousands of men and billions of dollars in Vietnam and went home rather than actually start a thermonuclear war. On that issue, America did the right thing: Quit.
It isn't 1945 anymore, and it isn't 1945 anymore for a reason: Chinese and Russian nuclear weapon engineers are too good at what they do. No one will ever see China as a reprise of Japan circa 1945; Hiroshima never happens in Peking. Moscow never becomes a replay of Berlin. We know that precisely because we know about nuclear weapons.
So the end of Mr. Helprin's article is just wrong. America's strength is not limitless; China and Russia both have nuclear weapons aimed at America's children just as America has nuclear weapons aimed at their children. America will not invade Russia and China even though at some future date America may look up and see the moral equivalents of Saddam Hussein running Russia and China. Iraq could be invaded; Russia and China will not be invaded. There is a limit to what America will do to China and Russia. There is a reason Russia and China will never surrender The Bomb.
The end of Mr. Helprin's article is wrong. What about the beginning and the middle? The are interesting, but they are dangerous. The beginning presents a fact that will grow to be as important as any fact in the human universe. China grows richer, China grows stronger.
I have read that Napoleon observed, "See China, she sleeps. Let her sleep. When she wakes she will shake the world." Well, here we are.
Mr. Helprin urges America to use its economic muscle. America today has an advantage but its "sharp nuclear reductions and China's acquisitions of ballistic-missile submarines and multiple-warhead mobile missiles will eventually come level." The change in the relationship between The US and China is treated as if it were inevitable, but, Mr. Helprin believes it is not inevitable.
The key for him is economic: China's advantage in its torrid advance is cheap labor, America should respond with its advantage, technology labeled "automation." His ambition: Compete economically, deter China from taking certain military options, protect America's allies and maintain a favorable balance of power. His version of The Problem: America does not recognize the immediacy of the threat. Far from being an imperialistic aggressor America has been too restrained.
He puts it in historical context: If America were to allocate the average of GNP that America devoted to the military between 1940 and 2000 America would have $800 billion a year to build and maintain a navy and land forces.
"And there we will be, if we are wise, not with 280 ships but a thousand. . . As opposed either to ignominious defeat without war, or war with a rising power emboldened by our weakness and retirement, this would be infinitely cheaper."
In a non-nuclear world America's $800 billion trumps everything. America is the successor to the British Empire that the Greatest Generation wanted it to be: The World Policeman.
In a nuclear world the $800 billion does not trump everything. China has not and does not need the $800 billion to force America into a condition the Greatest Generation never could have anticipated: Mutual Assured Destruction. The Chinese potential to destroy America now rests on a handful of land missiles 45 minutes away. Suppose that China responds to America's 1000 ships with the comparative handful of ships that China can afford, but it makes those handful capable of carrying and delivering nuclear weapons.
What Mr. Helprin, and the American Establishment does not note is that we have been here before. Mr. Helprin's focus on the economics of The Challenge is the same as the focus for 50 years of intelligent, white, patriotic, democratic intellectuals. The assumption is that Russia then, and both Russia and China now can be safely "controlled", "steered", "led", "threatened" by America because America has a much bigger economy than Russia and China. But 50 years ago the U.S. could have destroyed both Russia and China without being destroyed itself. America no longer has that security.
The key is that nuclear weapons have not been, and will not be, so expensive that a much smaller economy can not produce enough of the things to threaten America. There is a reason Mutual Assured Destruction has become part of the common vocabulary.
Assume that China sees America's insistence on a thousand ships as a threat against it. And assume further that while there may be a certain amount of dissonance around the issue, the Chinese recollection of Anglo-American racism in Asia guarantees a united Chinese determination to match the blond threat with their own threat.
There is a bottom line truth to nuclear weapons. America can not have a world in which the American three year old is infinitely safe and the Chinese and Russian three year olds are infinitely vulnerable.
r peppe
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One reads Joseph Cirincione's The Greatest Threat to Us All which appeared in The New York Review and there is no reference to I.Q., no reference to certain ethnic realities that were largely introduced into the world by democratic blonds, and no reference to the spectacular engineering achievements that were accomplished in just two generations by populations that a few decades ago were widely regarded by the American Establishment as inferior. These are long term dangerous omissions.
Mr. Cirincione begins the piece with a nod to this election year obsession with terrorism, and its ultimate expression, nuclear terrorism. He recounts the geographic specifics: Iraq, Iran, other contenders in the Middle East, North Korea, several specific locales in the rest of the world where peaceful nuclear power could morph into some version of nuclear terror. He puts some numbers into the problem: In the 1980's 65,000 nuclear weapons were held by the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The total in 2007 was down to 26,000 with Russia and America accounting for the vast majority, and about one thousand divided among seven other countries.
How did the world get to this place, where a weapon system has become THE PROBLEM; the problem that has overtaken the strategic issues that, presumably, created the felt need for the weapon system in the first place? Mr. Cirincione draws on Richard Rhodes Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race to suggest a major influence was the actions of a handful of Cold War Warriors in critical government positions. The focus consistently remains on the president and a handful of political advisers, acting from appointed positions within the government, with assistance from connected outside intellectuals. Truman, of course, is the first important figure: He quadrupled the defense budget and assumed that an emphasis on more nuclear weapons would enhance the security of the U.S.
The first President Bush and "Team B"; Carter and Committee on the Present Danger, the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States and President George W. Bush continue the central theme through decades. Sometimes the outside forces reinforce the then administration's nuclear positions, sometimes they seek to present the American people with the dish of fear in order to harden and expand the nuclear effort. But the emphasis in the review of Mr. Rhodes work is on people, the "People in Charge", and their willingness to practice "threat inflation," America's vulnerability to unfriendly foreign states.
After presenting History as Rhodes sees it, Cirincione addresses a fundamental question: What are nuclear weapons for? He appears to think that they are completely irrational. The work that he reviews, The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger, by Jonathan Schell, gives the review an opportunity to criticize the present day Men in Charge. He quotes Schell's book, "The mission of nuclear weapons is no longer to produce stalemate with a peer." Their purpose under Bush is to win wars against non-nuclear powers. The policy operates in favor of the status quo; neither the U.S. its allies or its foes question, deep down, the reality of a continuing and expanding nuclear universe.
Proliferation, in this view, is built into what the People in Charge in America believe. Pakistan, which is the focus of two of the books included in the review; America and the Islamic Bomb: The Deadly Compromise by David Armstrong and Joseph Trento, and Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons by Adrien Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark. Again, the focus is American Men in Charge and, again, the blame spreads through the decades because "successive US administrations looked the other way," as their Pakistan ally developed and sold the material and information that encapsulate proliferation.
The operational assumptions that grip Cirincione are revealed in his assertion that the "greatest" threat to American national security is the possibility that al-Qaeda might acquire a nuclear weapon, or the material to make one. The focus is on "material;" equipment and technology, loose on the planet. Pakistan is by no means the sole nuclear threat; with fifty countries holding stockpiles of material that could be used for nuclear weapons, the terror going forward, seems limitless.
At the end however, we know what to expect of the review, we expect hope: and for over a half century the intellectuals performing the review have not disappointed. Cirincione is no exception. He quotes, approvingly, a Harvard based authority who tells us that nuclear terrorism is the "preventable catastrophe." All that is required is the proper focus by The Men in Charge, and, of course, more money.
Now, it is a curious matter to me that there have been so many similar, intelligent and literate commentaries on the nuclear conundrum for a half century, and the at end of a half century of optimistic endings, and assurances that this is really a simple matter, there is no doubt of the central conclusion of the half century nuclear dance: the United States is orders of magnitude more vulnerable to nuclear annihilation than it was in the middle of the 20th century.
Liberals share, with right wing conservatives, certain specific dangerous fantasies about the new trinity, the blast, the delivery, the instrumentation. The threat, they think, is about material and technique
But there is one hopeful sign. The thread is not followed, but the first wisp, hanging off the spool, is there. The review contains one precise, economic, insightful gem: "The system itself was, Rhodes says, 'a dream, a fantasy, an uninformed winner-take-all bet that American technology could make miracles happen." Perfect. Miracles did not happen between 1950 and 2000. Instead, a poor, backward, ignorant, illiterate, dirty peasant society, China, can now blow the United States to Kingdom Come.
Now, of course, of course; this destruction would come at the expense of a China turned into a Hiroshima inferno. But if one sees the world when President Truman was in power; China could not have destroyed the U.S.; but the U.S., with its bomber fleet and handful of nuclear weapons, could have destroyed China.
The change relative to Russia is not as dramatic, but remember these numbers: During the Truman Administration the USSR had about two hundred nuclear weapons when the United States had 1,400. Truman greatly increased the defense budget and the U.S. had 20,000 nuclear bombs by 1960, and 32,000 by 1966. (It is worth noting that when Kennedy and Khrushchev stared at each other over Cuba, estimates were made that the Soviet Union only had 4 to 6 missiles capable of hitting the American land mass with a nuclear weapon. Had the United States been willing to run the risk, it is all but certain that the U.S.retaliation, could, in fact, have bombed Russia into oblivion.) The American loss of security facing Russia may not have been as perfect as the loss facing China, because even in the 1950's a lucky Russian bomber might have found its way to the North American continent. But it is incontestable that America was orders of magnitude more vulnerable in 2006 than in 1956.
Now Mr. Cirincione, and the authors he reviews seem not to be aware of this expanding balloon of vulnerability that has become not a problem, but a condition for the population on the North American continent. The bitter reality that is being forced upon the American population is this: America cannot have a world where the American three year old is infinitely safe, and the Russian and the Chinese three year old is infinitely vulnerable.
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"When TR Claimed The Seas" is the title of a nostalgic piece in the December 18, 2007 WSJ. Bret Stephens, the author, celebrates the Great White Fleet. On December 16, 1907 the U.S. sent 16 battleships around the world. Teddy Roosevelt's purpose for the trip: To announce to the world, that may otherwise have not been paying attention, that the U.S. was a military superpower. President Roosevelt stated that he had become aware of a "veiled truculence" from the Japanese. Mr. Stephens concludes, it was time for a showdown.
Mr. Stephens suggests that there was a benefit from the demonstration of force. The Japanese became democratic four years later, for a time. Mr. Stephens concludes that it was unfortunate that the U.S. did not maintain the fleet and a more aggressive posture. He tells us that America's position as a maritime power cannot be wished away.
" 'We should annex Hawaii immediately. . . It was a crime against the United States, it was a crime against white civilization, not to annex it two years and a half ago. The delay did damage that is perhaps irreparable; for it meant that at the critical period of the island's growth the influx of population consisted, not of white Americans, but of low caste laborers from the yellow races.' " (Walter A. McDougall, Let the Sea Make a Noise, p. 391.) One imagines that President Roosevelt, a very popular man, thought what other influential Americans thought.
Now, of course, everyone learned a lesson from the Great White Fleet, but no reasonable person would complain if the yellow people learned a somewhat different lesson than white people. Hawaii after all is in Asia, and Asians might be excused if they thought that they had the same right to keep Hawaii Asian as the whites had to keep Northern Europe and America Northern European.
Mr. Stephens tells us that China's rise is not something that anyone can stop. For reasons that I outline in my book centering on scores on quantitative IQ tests, I am sure that he is correct. However, Mr. Stephens tells us that China's rise "can be steered." If we would but fit our vision to Teddy Roosevelt's vision, he tells us, we can be assured that the Chinese will not steer toward America.
Mr. Stephen ignores the single most important element of the Chinese fleet that will accompany China's progress. The fleet will carry nuclear weapons. It is true that Teddy Roosevelt's progeny will have nuclear weapons aimed at the progeny of the low caste laborers in China. What is most different from Teddy Roosevelt's time is that, curiously, the progeny of the low caste laborers in China will have nuclear death aimed at Teddy Roosevelt's progeny.
From the perspective of the low caste yellow laborers: Progress.
rpeppe
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In the November 26, 2007 Wall Street Journal Shelby Steele offers a distinction in categories to account for wars America wins-Big Time- and wars America where "America does not do so well." The distinction pivots around whether the war is a war of survival or a war of "discipline." World War II, is, of course the archetype of a war of survival.
Steele's distinction slides away from the harder test; the test that the future may very well force America to take. The real issue is that in the face of a real life nuclear threat, what would America do if an enemy had nuclear weapons, and announced not that he wanted to occupy or change the borders of the United States, but that he wanted to occupy or change the borders of another country?
In a sense, this potential threat has been the defensive rationale for the nuclear weapons game. The offensive rationale had a very American idealistic optimism and has focused on encouraging or forcing democracy on reluctant participants in the larger Cold War Game.
Now that Communism as an ideology has disappeared the rational for more investments in nuclear weaponry has tended to follow the outlines of the defensive play book. America is not in an ideological struggle with Islam in the way it was engaged in an ideological struggle with Communism. It sees itself under attack by a violent and virulent corruption of Islam.
Now, Steele's perspective on Iraq is interesting: Iraq is a war of discipline, of choice, and America could leave without any real fear fro its survival. However, he posits a larger war encompassing Iraq: The war against terror which is, he says, a war of survival.
Well, terror could come in different shapes, sizes and ideologies. Radical Islam may be one serious variant of the species. However, no terror is as potentially as terrifying as the terror that could ride in on a nuclear armed ballistic missile. In fact unless radical Islam obtains nuclear armed ballistic missiles, the fact is Islam cannot literally threaten America's survival.
To handle this aspect of the terror game, America will need help. There are two powers now that have the capability to threaten America's survival. It is not likely that either China or Russia will lay down their nuclear capability.
United, the United States, Russia and China probably could stop any other power from obtaining the ultimate terror capability; the terror that could destroy America.
Is America doing anything to bring some unity among the three real nuclear powers?
rrp
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"Instituting sweeping missile defense" is a phrase that appears in the November 30,2007 Wall Street Journal in an editorial page piece about Fred Thompson by Kimberly A. Strassel. He would like to do it.
Where to begin? Simple. The role of engineering talent.
In 1950 America did not need a missile defense, no one had intercontinental missiles. The U.S. was the first country to fasten them into a military reality. She used that to make Russia and China vulnerable. But after some period of time, Russia and then China developed a real world capability to strike the U.S. with missiles. Clearly, something did not work out to give America more security in the real world. The U.S. became vulnerable after she had made Russia and China vulnerable.
Engineering talent made Russia and China vulnerable. Later, engineering talent made the U.S. vulnerable.
The candidates that are pushing missile defense should be asked one question: What if your ambition to create a dense system for the U.S., while maintaining an offensive system that makes Russia and China vulnerable, results in Russia and China creating offensive systems in space that will "crowd" America's defensive system? What if that means that the time to correct a mistake moves from an hour to ten minutes?
r peppe |
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In a November 12, 20007 piece in the Wall Street Journal, Mark Helprin gives some gentle advice to Germany and to Europe generally. Germany is a major country with no independent nuclear threat. Therefore will be vulnerable to threats from a nuclear capable Iran. Even without a missile system, Iran could truck the thing over the border from the east. What should be done? Mr. Helprin offers two pieces of advice: Russia, the sheriff to the east, must understand that NATO will build up its forces to demonstrate that Russia will not become a viable threat. Second, Germany should more closely identify its policies with that of the US and integrate its own forces with the nuclear capabilities of the US, Britain and France.
What is wrong with this advice? Germany and the German people specifically have a very very special place in the Russian soul. When asked if the fall of the Berlin Wall and the integration of East and West Germany would mean a "normal" state, a state that might have nuclear weapons, the response was direct and unequivocal, "We will not permit it."
Identifying the German more closely with American nuclear capabilities will certainly be seen as provocative to the Russians. Dampening Iran's capabilities will require some cooperation from the Russians. Mr. Helprin's advice is at cross-purposes with itself.
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The next U.S. president will not be able to avoid North Korea's nuclear competence. To say this is not to say that the United States is going to go to war with North Korea. However within four years the weight of informed technological opinion will be that North Korea has nuclear weapons, but not the ability to deliver them long distance with any degree of confidence. The issue presented to the President and his/her ad visors will be whether that is acceptable.
The Wall Street Journal, in its October 5,2007 editorial, states that a nuclear North Korea is a bad result, but a worse precedent. The writer's gaze sees North Korea but the focus is Iran.
The editorial ticks off complaints against the Bush Administration: It is promising aid to North Korea in advance of Kim Jong Il's meeting his responsibility to disclose the status of its nuclear program; it looks like the Korean stockpile of plutonium and the uranium program may not be examined or may even be tacitly accepted by the U.S.; Korea's activities promoting proliferation have not been pursued with the vigor that they deserve; and, astonishingly, the U.S. is taking steps to aid the regime. The one fact that partially redeems the situation in North Korea, and would not apply to Iran according to the editorial, is that North Korea has a very large neighbor that can keep a lid on the dictator. This redeeming grace is not operative in the Middle East.
Now, the Journal, like most American commentary has a bias toward optimism. One might see China as a leash on North Korea, but, more depressing, and more realistic, one might see it as a leash on the United States. The U.S. has a big big reason not to invade North Korea.
r peppe |
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Another, quite long, advantaged (page A 15) piece on China in the WSJ that forces a class analysis on a behavioral change, and, thereby, misses what is likely to happen.
Mr. Guy Sorman tells us what he sees, having spent all of 2005 and part of 2006, traveling throughout China. The generally favorable Western press misses: Overwhelming corruption, poverty, isolation, and disaffection of the 1 billion strong peasantry. Villages where at least 80% of the families are affected by AIDS, and are without proper medical care. Teachers who can read and write, but not much more. Two hundred million peasants from the villages looking for work in the growing urban slums. A one child policy that has enraged the peasant. Unemployment closer to 20% than the official 3.5%. A class of "parvenus," newly established workers for enterprises owned and directed by the Communist Party. He tells us that there is no guarantee that the 1 billion he finds will ever integrate with the parvenus in a modern China. It is just as likely that the peasant will remain forever out of modernity. Lacking political rights the peasantry cannot force the ruling bureaucracy to an accounting.
He introduces us to an official who criticizes Mr. Sorman for a lack of confidence in the Party's ability to solve problems. Mr. German agrees; he has no such confidence.
Now, a behavioral analysis must begin with the billion peasants, not on the consumption side as Mr. Sorman teats the issue, but the production side. Obviously a population that large cannot rely on a few hundred thousand bureaucrats to give them an adequate standard of living, adequate medical care, or a productive educational system. The peasantry has to do it itself. There is only one starting point to begin the transformation: a school system. The "West" has been reading for 500 years, the Chinese peasantry has been in a school system for less than 70 years. Whether the annual growth rate is 8% or 10%, in truth except for Japan and Korea, no one has seen such a rapid change for such an enormous population. This change is a tribute to the intelligence of the Chinese once they are in a school system, no matter how impoverished. A behavioral analysis would predict the amazing growth rate given just two data points: information that a school system has been instituted, and Chinese IQ scores.
The difference between Mr. Sorman's skepticism, and my position about the trajectory of the Chinese economy, and the Chinese nuclear weapons program, revolve around Chinese IQ scores.
Nuclear weapons are, fundamentally, talent, IQ scores made visible. Mr. Sorman's division of the Chinese population into two categories: the parvenus and the peasantry, invites an analysis that would place the toiling villagers into the categories "Invisible" and "Impotent." But the teacher in that poverty stricken isolated village knows when An Wang shows up. They have tests, and the boy that can help the Chinese keep pace with the blonds in the death business begins to become visible, like his Slavic 15 year old counterpart, two generations ago. The blond problem is not the best algebra student selected out two hundred million, but the best algebra students out of over a thousand million people, one-fifth of the human race. The blonds cannot force the Chinese to be infinitely vulnerable, while the blonds remain infinitely safe.
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