One way the US attempted to keep the Iranian regime in a box during the 1980s was by tacitly supporting Saddam Hussein in the extremely brutal Iran-Iraq war. Another was by stationing Marines in Lebanon..Both of those worked out very badly.
The point is, US reluctance to do anti-Iranian policing in the ME is grounded in real historical failures, not just e.g. fear of escalation. Maybe in retrospect some alternative policing methods could have worked much better, but one should not be too confident about such things.
I think this point is well taken, but the policy of the last 3.5 years, in which Iran has literally been given billions of dollars in aid and reduced sanctions while it brazenly escalated its violent attacks is also pretty insane.
There's a broad spectrum of approaches we could take between the extremes of "wage war on the bad guys" to "give the bad guys money even as they wage war on us".
You forgot the case "Iran isn't a bad guy, maybe stay out of their yard just because we are still upset they disposed their corrupt playboy hereditary dictator we put in place."
C'mon man. You gonna tell me about those heroic Hamas freedom fighters on October 7 too and how the die was cast that they "had to" rape a bunch of girls and kill children because of some crap that happened 50 or 80 years ago?
Not everything needs to be intellectualized.
Our history with them is neither here nor there. It's fine that they don't like us and they have some justifiable reasons not to. Just like with have justifiable reasons to not like the Iranian government. Some reasons more justifiable than others.
What's not justifiable by any legal (or I guess sensible moral) standard is Iran waging war by attacking civilian shipping.
It's the difference between thinking you're a jerk and, because I think you're a jerk, sneaking up behind you and pushing your mom out into the street. It's fine to not like someone. It's not fine to physically attack someone. If you saw my in the act of doing this, you'd be completely justified in using force to stop me. In the absence of established means of resolving an ongoing dispute, you'd also be within your rights to take take action to prevent me from doing it again.
That is the level that states operate at. All the same incentives exist. Who we like and dislike matters very little compared to what behavior we tolerate.
“For example, using our navy to protect freedom of navigation and commerce seems good to me.” What might be a better alternative to using the US government Navy for this? What about oil and shipping companies protecting their own interests? Certainly they would need to develop this capability. Are US Navy ships and personnel best trained for Arnold’s vision of protecting “freedom of navigation and commerce?” Can we hear from US Navy personnel about this? Does this activity distract from their primary role of protecting the our territory?
Arnold, can you elaborate on this topic? What qualifications and special knowledge do you have on this topic? Knowing what to believe means knowing who to believe. I don’t trust you in this issue yet, but I’m open to the idea that you might be right.
Jefferson fought pirates. Many think that the peace and prosperity of the world since WWII is owed to America's command of the seas. I base that on reading Peter Zeihan, among others.
I'm not an expert on this, but I did a tiny bit of research and this is what I found.
"according to Reuters, insurance premiums for ships navigating the Red Sea have surged from 0.7% to as much as 2% of the vessel’s value"
That's...not the end of the world. Either assuming the extra risk or going around the Cape aren't astronomical cost barriers. They aren't even meaningful cost barriers.
Now, I'm with you. I think there is "a principle to the thing." As a proud racist eugenicist, I think we should genocide the Houthis.
But if I were to put on my Defense Attorney hat, they aren't doing anything because it really doesn't matter all that much.
I saw a cost comparison of the Barbary pirates, and I'm not even going to try to remember the actual costs. But it would have been cheaper for the merchants to pay the bribes every other nation was paying than to build and man and operate the warships the US did build and use to fight the pirates. US consumers would have had cheaper goods.
Sure bribes suck. So does wasting taxes to puff up egos.
"I hope that people read and come away with a better appreciation of what makes our modern world possible." Seems like this book would lead to a lively Socratic discussion in a basic econ class. It would seem to contains many examples of human connectedness, but also plenty of pessimism and things to disagree with. I'm going to read Albion's Seed instead though. :) Thanks Arnold.
This is simultaneously correct but misguided. As someone with some special knowledge about naval matters, yes, the US navy is pretty much the only game in town when it comes to this mission.
We literally have the only meaningful navy in the world capable of maintaining naval ships in the area that can effectively defend the merchant ships being attacked. This really doesn't require "qualifications and special knowledge", just an ability to google and read. It's always a red flag when I see someone making this kind of ask, because while there are some naval issues that are technically important, it doesn't take any real expertise to look at and get a basic understanding of the capabilities of modern warships, their numbers, and the kinds and numbers of weapons we're talking about.
It's a disingenuous appeal to authority.
However, it's almost completely aside from the point. These aren't random attacks by pirates. they're acts of war with specific goals. Russian and Chinese ships quite clearly are not attacked.
The US is losing this battle because we are shooting down very cheap missiles with very expensive missiles. We choose not to confront the Iranian ships that supply the Houthis with missiles and drones or the Iranian ships that provide targeting and guidance data to the Houthis.
That is, the use of force is a political consideration. The US Navy can shield merchant ships (at great cost and not infinitely).
The US Navy has NOT been used to compel Iran to stop its attacks. This would be cheaper and more effective than defending the ships, because Iran has a limited number of surveillance and supply ships. If we sank them, or used the US Navy to attack other weak points in punitive strikes against Iran, this may be quite effective (as it was in the 80s), but it remains to be untried.
Oil and shipping companies protecting their ships from ballistic missile attacks again, is a fanciful thing to say that doesn't require any expertise to demonstrate why it's fanciful. Google it. Ships have the choice of going through the Red Sea or taking a much longer trip around Africa. Which many of have done rather than take the risk. But it's a huge ongoing expense.
I might be over complicating things, but clearly the Navy’s most advanced weapons are highly classified. Arguably some of the most important known weapons the Navy fields are the Trident D5 SLBM and the Ohio Class submarines. Similarly space based reconnaissance assets that track the location of every ship in the world, especially those coming from North Korea or Iran potentially carrying a dirty bomb into the SF Bay Area. Coordinating the classified DOE sensors that can sniff out and see nuclear materials. Consider that the Navy uses stealth drones that are still classified and completely unknown to the public.
Sure you can read about ships on Wikipedia but the classified stuff isn’t there. The fusion of information from drones, satellites with both electronic sig int and optical sig int, along with military comms are not going to be easily read about on some white website. This stuff is SCIF only.
Even the top brass in the Navy has difficulty grasping all the physics and engineering behind the tools they are procuring from the MIC.
We’re way past Jefferson fighting pirates. The best ideas are tucked away in the minds of anonymous men and women that can never speak about their work.
The capabilities that we have to defend ourselves and what we know about our enemies are not available to you.
I don't really want to respond to this because it's cringingly misinformed, but I also think it's important to respond to this because it's so misinformed. Why?
I've come around to the understanding that most people have very little idea about how things work. But from the perspective of a democratic society, there's something to the idea that an educated, self-governing populace should have a basic grasp of how something their military operates.
Yes, we have ICBMs and recon satellites and drones. That's great. But these are not weapons for fighting pirates. And we're not beyond fighting pirates because... obviously these "pirates" still exist. Unless, I guess, your proposal is to nuke Tehran.
Further, we absolutely do know a lot about our capabilities. In many ways, the military is just like every other type of government operation. You may think they're a bunch of secretive geniuses who have a bunch of magic bullets saved up, but I assure you they're not. They may slightly mis-state some things, and certainly they cover up some strategic capabilities, but many things are available and verifiable.
In this case, none of the stuff you are talking bout has any relevance to the Red Sea.
We need appropriate weapons to deal with lots of situations. If a very real sense, the problem that the US Navy currently faces is that it's very over-engineered to defend against these low tech attacks.
We know that we are expending missiles at a far greater rate than we're building them. Literally, we've likely launched more in the last few weeks than we will build in the entire year. Look it up.
Fundamentally, the anti-air missiles we're burning up are super expensive. They were designed for fighting wars against the Soviet Union and China and defending very specific, high value targets.
Using them against $20k drones is, in many ways, a travesty. And for that the US Navy government does deserve criticism, but that's an entirely separate issue from what you are talking about.
What you need to understand is that the existence of expensive, fancy things doesn't negate the need for boring, run of the mill things.
True, but a government that tries to do everything well does nothing well. I say limit the scope as much as possible. Specialize in defending against the most important threats. Leave shipping security to the corporate world. Let profit and loss signals guide entrepreneurs. Simple. Are you even open to experimenting or does it have to be your way?
"a government that tries to do everything well does nothing well."
That's a slogan, but the specifics matter.
I think the kinds of "experiments" you're talking about just kind of unravel in the real world. Generally, the extreme anarcho-libertarian concept that if we just stop having government then private actors will evolve solutions overlooks the fact that governments are, themselves, a product of that process. Private actors formed governments to solve these collective action problems and that's still a core function of government to be a kind of residual problem solver.
In this case, a key point is that these pirates aren't really pirates. They're waging war on us for clearly stated political reasons. Setting aside everything else. It'd be kind of ridiculous for the US government to disclaim it has a responsibility to protect its own citizens and their interests, but suppose it did. We say "hey, the US military is only for protecting the US territory, and if you want to be an entrepreneur and engage in free trade in this big, dangerous world, you're on your own."
So what do these guys do? They don't sail the Red Sea and prices go up. Global trade decreases. Because this policy pressures us and people respond to incentives, other countries that oppose us politically can be expected to do the same as Iran and start attacking US interests with no end in sight.
This is a good example of how to draw some conclusions from basic numbers. The British navy has a grand total of 6 ships that can shoot down ballistic missiles (Type 45 destroyers). A general rule of thumb that still applies is you can count on a 3rd of any class of ship being non-operational and being refitted if not in all-out war. In fact, for this class of ship, apparently only about 3 of the 6 are currently available.
So, you've got 3 ships. Each has a 48 round magazine for carrying missiles. The primary type than can shoot down a ballistic missile are going to be a subset of this. The most expensive subset in fact. Let's be generous and call it 50%, or 24 missiles per ship. A couple articles I read suggested they only carry 8 of these.
Next, understand that the total number of these missiles produced is not all that big, and these missiles can't be reloaded at sea. In the case of the UK this means that to re-arm itself, the ship has to leave the Red Sea and sail 3,000 miles to Gibraltar.
Maybe one might quibble with the numbers around the edges, but the basic math is inescapable. The Royal Navy just doesn't have the staying power to keep ships on station in the Red Sea. They might theoretically be capable of keeping a ship on station, but their limited stockpile of missiles and their inability to reload them means they don't have much staying power.
The US Navy has larger numbers and can reload at Souda Bay (closer) but faces the same basic problems. They do have the option of employing aircraft which can shoot down a lot of the cheaper drones with cannons. But it's the same basic calculus, writ large.
I'm all in favor of merchant ships not just protecting themselves, but making that decision on their own. Do they want to hire crew who are willing to shoot back? Can they transfer security teams for travel through the most infested areas? Is the extra cost and risk worthwhile compared to the cost of bypassing infested areas? Do merchants ships want to take the shortcut between Taiwan and China?
All too often, government creates the problems it uses to justify further "fixes". It's not legal for merchant ships to carry even rifles to protect themselves, let alone larger mounted weapons, therefore we must send billion dollar warships firing million dollar missiles with no regard for the cost. One workaround is for civilian security teams to come aboard as soon as in international waters, to transfer from ship to ship. But where do these teams get their weapons? Oh, that's illegal too. Better to send in those billion dollar warships and their million dollar missiles ... but they don't do much useful except scare pirates, which a few armed merchant ships could do just as well.
US has a fleet which patrols the world's oceans in the ready for conflicts of various sorts. I have a hard time seeing any reason that protecting shipping would conflict with other objectives. Suggestions?
While not a perfect monopoly, the advantages of one shipping protector are large, not just to the shippers and their customers but to the world economy more generally. It is possible to coordinate this protection among other navies and at least some of that happens. Maybe the UN would be a more appropriate leader of this effort but I doubt that would work as well.
I would argue most US trade deals favor other countries more than US. We tolerate that for many reasons but mainly that we see the benefits as still larger than the costs. Maybe that isn't always true but I'd argue it mostly is. Likewise, I'd say the same for what we do to protect global shipping. In both cases it is important not to let perfect get in the way of good.
“US has a fleet which patrols the world's oceans in the ready for conflicts of various sorts. I have a hard time seeing any reason that protecting shipping would conflict with other objectives. Suggestions?“ If it’s just a side gig, maybe it doesn’t hurt. In general limiting the US government’s role to defense of our territory seems like a good idea. To what extent was 9/11 motivated by US government presence in the Middle East?
Other questions to consider. Does the price of gasoline reflect the cost to transport it from the Middle East if the U.S. Navy is providing the bulk of the security? Would we have more bicycles and cleaner vehicles if the price of gasoline reflected all the costs to protect oil tankers?
Are we sure that US Navy is the best way to protect shipping? For example, can it be done at lower overall cost by private companies?
Does the U.S. Navy crowd out superior private alternatives that would make the oceans even safer for travel and commerce?
"In general limiting the US government’s role to defense of our territory seems like a good idea."
Probably a better idea to include NATO allies. Probably other innocent parties too.
911 was entirely due to our presence in the middle east.
"Does the price of gasoline reflect the cost to transport it from the Middle East if the U.S.,..."
No. And whether the added cost is small or large is mostly dependent on how much of the fleet's cost you attribute to shipping lanes protection vs other objectives.
Do you really want private companies fighting with state actors and with terrorists on foreign soil?
“Do you really want private companies fighting with state actors..” What would Merle Kling say? Sometimes it’s this way and sometimes it’s that way.
Do you really want the POTUS to be judge, jury and executioner, calling drone strikes on American and foreign citizens? Do you want POTUS cabinet members to create secret courts, CIA black sites, Bluffdale data centers and XKeyscore programs? How much do you want to rely on heroics like Snowden, Assange, and others that blew the whistle through official channels that we never hear about? Do you really want to read another report about anal feeding and sleep deprivation torture?
The Bush and Obama years were a disgrace to our country. The last thing I want in my life is to become an US-government-hating libertarian anarchist. I would much rather be a patriot.
In order to do that we should limit the power of government to the essentials. We don’t need them to do things that the private sector can do better.
Those all seem like valid concerns even if I see some of them differently. That said, I'd still rather have the President making those decisions than much less accountable CEOs.
One of the greatest strategic blunders in U.S. history, if not world history, was the younger President Bush's decision to overthrow the Sadam Hussein regime in Iraq. We might never know but can speculate about Bush the Younger's motivations. The blunder was twofold. First, we already had significant control over Hussein's freedom of action given the American and British imposition of a very effective "no-fly zone" on large swaths of Iraq. Overthrowing Hussein to prevent him from invading other countries was superfluous. Second, the Hussein's Iraq was a bitter enemy of Iran; the two countries had already fought a years-long and mutually damaging war. Iraq was an important counterweight to the theocratic regime in Iran. Once we overthrew Hussein, the Iranian mullahs had much more freedom of action. And now we are paying the cost of Bush's blunder.
Define US interests. If the US aims to secure the petrodollar or control Europe's or China's access to cheap energy it remains in the Middle East. If the US aims to run perpetual trade or capital deficits or regulate global markets for its own benefit then it must police the world. The excuses for doing so are of secondary importance, if that.
Furthermore, policing the world offers extraordinary benefits to the US political class. Kickbacks, doceurs, gifts, job opportunities for the kids. Ukraine is not an isolated example. Neither was Saudi Arabia before King Salman and MBS cleaned it up. Foreign policy is too lucrative a racket for the political classes to even think of ever giving up.
The US government has never tried to perfect anyone or anything. Nor could it ever, not being perfect itself. It merely tries to protect and promote what it thinks is its own interest ((often being badly wrong about this). As for policing, they’d have a lot better results if they themselves were always law abiding.
Thanks for teeing up the topic of the US approach to foreign policy. Yergin (1992) and Bobbitt (2002) shaped my thinking here. Our strategic interests are secure borders, non-proliferation of nukes, access to oil, and maybe open shipping lanes and markets. More deeply, total war entails a technology race and the ability to manipulate the population to fight, hence the welfare-warfare state. I disagree with Bobbitt's "responsibility-to-protect" as it is mission impossible. Unfortunately, the existence of a world-war-machine leads to the temptation to use it. And that's before invoking the neo-con's arrogance...
Lee Fang's claim that "We [the United States] force our belief systems on others at the barrel of the gun" is representative of the muddled thinking typical on this subject. U.S. interventions have usually been to support regimes that have been (or at least that the U.S. government thought were) less coercive than the alternative. During the Cold War, the U.S. government supported democracies and certain dictatorships where communism seemed to be a big threat. (And it was right to do so; communism has always been catastrophic.) Since the Cold War, the U.S. government has mainly supported attempts to promote democratic governance. It is reasonable to argue that some countries aren't ready for democracy because their people are too little educated, too tribally divided, or too unsuited by their culture. But countries where most people are happy with their dictators are few, otherwise those places wouldn't need to be dictatorships. The dictators are truly the ones who are "forcing [their] belief systems at the barrel of a gun."
Having a hard time seeing how our international horseplay, enlightened or not, doesn’t simply just have to end like right now. We simply can’t afford it anymore even if it wasn’t a complete failure.
The deficit for fiscal year 2024 ended September 30 was up 8%, or $138 billion, from $1.695 trillion for FY 2023. Contributing to this growth was a 29% increase in interest payments which rose to $1.133 trillion for the year. The deficit amounted to 6.4% of GDP, up from 6.2% for FY23. This despite revenues climbing to $4.919 trillion, up 11%, or $479 billion, from the prior year, FY24 outlays rose 10%, or $617 billion, to $6.752 trillion. Interest costs as a share of GDP reached 3.93%, less than the 1991 record of 4.69% but the highest since 4.01% in December 1998.
The weighted average interest rate on federal debt was 3.32% in September, up 35 basis points from a year earlier.
National defense outlays are estimated to be about 3.5% of GDP and to have amounted to $907,728 million in FY24, up from $820,263 million for FY23. And for this we have nothing to show. Our civil liberties are crushed beneath the weight of public-private total surveillance system in which all of our online speech is recorded and filed away and if the powers that be feel like it we are debanked and placed on watch lists. International trade is obstructed by pirates and terrorists around the globe. We live in terror of WWIII breaking out at any moment. Foreign invaders occupy our cities and towns with impunity and China operates its own police force on our soil.
Because many states already operate volunteer defense forces of their own that provide sufficient military capacity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_defense_force ) all of this central government national defense spending is redundant and could be eliminated entirely with little marginal consequence to our current national defense posture.
Disbanding the standing military as President John Adams once did would actually enhance security for individual citizens. As the Father of the Constitution, President James Madison once wrote in a passage that could not be more relevant today:
“The means of defence against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.”
And indeed here we are, enslaved to a national debt of $35.7 trillion, $271,577 per taxpayer, and that will only get worse absent radical action.
In the conventional America, Imperial World Police model, the US uses treaty and private investment to change the meaning of the target country's sovereign powers that "guarantees the controlling power's economic [interests]" in Carl Schmitt's terms. Whatever arrangement maintains that set of interests is copacetic.
In the neo-Athenian Model of perfecting the world (also reflected by a developed and globalized understanding of the Monroe doctrine), the US will identify the target countries as tyrannical or improperly oligarchic, and then target them for regime change either through direct or indirect means. Where this model differs from Thucydides' model of Athenian imperialism is that the Athenians extracted gold and silver from Delian league members. It had a material component. The world perfecting model of the contemporary US actually has an anti-materialistic bent in that it extracts money from the first model to fund its mission of change.
When Athens was in trouble, it went from extracting tribute to charging transaction fees. It immediately stopped offending its Delian League members (with offensive tribute) and collected more money overall.
I tend to think that Arnold’s view on this topic is possibly too heavily colored by his kinship to Israel, even if just culturally. Arnold - in a post not long after Oct 7 you talked about strategy for dealing with Israel’s neighbors. Can you talk about the best longterm strategy for Israel? What should they do that they may not already be doing? Do they really not have anywhere else to go? Should they try to buy land and build a country in a safer part of the world? Can Israelis easily immigrate to the U.S. and if so what might we expect of the demand to do so?
It would be good to hear more concrete suggestions about what could have been done better vis a vis Iran, rather than these generalities about being tougher.
For all the talk about the nuclear deal being a giveaway to Iran, their revealed preference once Biden took office was to decline resuming it. Perhaps it was not such a sweetheart deal for them after all.
Or perhaps they'd already gotten all the good they could from the deal, e.g, billions of dollars of Iranian funds were now unfrozen and they had developed alternative financial arrangements.
Arnold, you advice sounds a lot like what people on the left accused foreign policy of being in much of the pre-Reagan era. Supporting Somoza because, in the words of FDR, "he's a son-of-a-bitch, but he's our son-of-a-bitch." Supporting stability and not trying to make things better.
It was the Reagan administration that made a public disavowal of that in the case of Ferdinand Marcos.
1. 'mere' policing more-or-less requires the consent and cooperation of the foreign nation being policed, which we almost never get...
and
2. If we invade a country without their consent and cooperation, we then have to decide what sort of instructions to give the soldiers and state department officials who are now in-country.. And it's basically politically impossible for us to ever tell our own soldiers or officials that "as long as you're basically in charge of the country anyway, you are absolutely forbidden to do anything remotely resembling, say, improving woman's rights in that location, or other plausible tangential acts of 'perfecting' the country by, basically, just being nice people while you're there.
I don't disagree but I'd say there's a more basic difficulty. It is far easier in hindsight to see the mistakes.
Of course we don't even know which of those "mistakes" were destined to be so. Maybe a small difference could have reversed the result. And maybe some successes that seem they were obvious good choices actually had very low probabilities of success.
While I agree with AK's concerns, turning hindsight into foresight mostly isn't easy.
"And it's basically politically impossible for us to ever tell our own soldiers or officials that "as long as you're basically in charge of the country anyway, you are absolutely forbidden to do anything remotely resembling, say, improving woman's rights in that location ..."
It's not impossible at all. In Afghanistan there is the colorful local tradition of Bacha Bazi which I'll spare you a description of here since you can look it up if you like. Suffice is to say that "our own soldiers and officials" usually begged to intervene when observing such cases and were ordered not to and, reluctantly but obediently, followed such orders.
yes, and that was pretty much the limit.... telling soldiers that it was illegal under afghan laws already, and it was the afghan responsibility to conduct arrests for, and that it didn't involve the soldiers any way.
And the law as written only barely supported that position.
In pretty much any situation where american law was clear, and staying out of it wasn't an option, things got interesting. The asylum claims alone from people like fighter pilots sent to the USA for training, and who didn't want to leave, were a nightmare...
One way the US attempted to keep the Iranian regime in a box during the 1980s was by tacitly supporting Saddam Hussein in the extremely brutal Iran-Iraq war. Another was by stationing Marines in Lebanon..Both of those worked out very badly.
The point is, US reluctance to do anti-Iranian policing in the ME is grounded in real historical failures, not just e.g. fear of escalation. Maybe in retrospect some alternative policing methods could have worked much better, but one should not be too confident about such things.
I think this point is well taken, but the policy of the last 3.5 years, in which Iran has literally been given billions of dollars in aid and reduced sanctions while it brazenly escalated its violent attacks is also pretty insane.
There's a broad spectrum of approaches we could take between the extremes of "wage war on the bad guys" to "give the bad guys money even as they wage war on us".
You forgot the case "Iran isn't a bad guy, maybe stay out of their yard just because we are still upset they disposed their corrupt playboy hereditary dictator we put in place."
C'mon man. You gonna tell me about those heroic Hamas freedom fighters on October 7 too and how the die was cast that they "had to" rape a bunch of girls and kill children because of some crap that happened 50 or 80 years ago?
Not everything needs to be intellectualized.
Our history with them is neither here nor there. It's fine that they don't like us and they have some justifiable reasons not to. Just like with have justifiable reasons to not like the Iranian government. Some reasons more justifiable than others.
What's not justifiable by any legal (or I guess sensible moral) standard is Iran waging war by attacking civilian shipping.
It's the difference between thinking you're a jerk and, because I think you're a jerk, sneaking up behind you and pushing your mom out into the street. It's fine to not like someone. It's not fine to physically attack someone. If you saw my in the act of doing this, you'd be completely justified in using force to stop me. In the absence of established means of resolving an ongoing dispute, you'd also be within your rights to take take action to prevent me from doing it again.
That is the level that states operate at. All the same incentives exist. Who we like and dislike matters very little compared to what behavior we tolerate.
“For example, using our navy to protect freedom of navigation and commerce seems good to me.” What might be a better alternative to using the US government Navy for this? What about oil and shipping companies protecting their own interests? Certainly they would need to develop this capability. Are US Navy ships and personnel best trained for Arnold’s vision of protecting “freedom of navigation and commerce?” Can we hear from US Navy personnel about this? Does this activity distract from their primary role of protecting the our territory?
Arnold, can you elaborate on this topic? What qualifications and special knowledge do you have on this topic? Knowing what to believe means knowing who to believe. I don’t trust you in this issue yet, but I’m open to the idea that you might be right.
Jefferson fought pirates. Many think that the peace and prosperity of the world since WWII is owed to America's command of the seas. I base that on reading Peter Zeihan, among others.
Jefferson's situation was a bit different. Barbary pirates were selectively extorting US ships.
I'm not an expert on this, but I did a tiny bit of research and this is what I found.
"according to Reuters, insurance premiums for ships navigating the Red Sea have surged from 0.7% to as much as 2% of the vessel’s value"
That's...not the end of the world. Either assuming the extra risk or going around the Cape aren't astronomical cost barriers. They aren't even meaningful cost barriers.
Now, I'm with you. I think there is "a principle to the thing." As a proud racist eugenicist, I think we should genocide the Houthis.
But if I were to put on my Defense Attorney hat, they aren't doing anything because it really doesn't matter all that much.
I saw a cost comparison of the Barbary pirates, and I'm not even going to try to remember the actual costs. But it would have been cheaper for the merchants to pay the bribes every other nation was paying than to build and man and operate the warships the US did build and use to fight the pirates. US consumers would have had cheaper goods.
Sure bribes suck. So does wasting taxes to puff up egos.
I’ll check him out. Thanks.
“He is the author of The Absent Superpower, Disunited Nations, and The End of the World Is Just the Beginning.”
https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B00MPX86VK
see my review here: https://www.econlib.org/library/columns/y2022/klingthoughtexperiments.html
"I hope that people read and come away with a better appreciation of what makes our modern world possible." Seems like this book would lead to a lively Socratic discussion in a basic econ class. It would seem to contains many examples of human connectedness, but also plenty of pessimism and things to disagree with. I'm going to read Albion's Seed instead though. :) Thanks Arnold.
Albion's Seed is verrrry long. Scott Alexander has a good (and also fairly long) summary:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/
Thank you. I’ll check it out.
This is simultaneously correct but misguided. As someone with some special knowledge about naval matters, yes, the US navy is pretty much the only game in town when it comes to this mission.
We literally have the only meaningful navy in the world capable of maintaining naval ships in the area that can effectively defend the merchant ships being attacked. This really doesn't require "qualifications and special knowledge", just an ability to google and read. It's always a red flag when I see someone making this kind of ask, because while there are some naval issues that are technically important, it doesn't take any real expertise to look at and get a basic understanding of the capabilities of modern warships, their numbers, and the kinds and numbers of weapons we're talking about.
It's a disingenuous appeal to authority.
However, it's almost completely aside from the point. These aren't random attacks by pirates. they're acts of war with specific goals. Russian and Chinese ships quite clearly are not attacked.
https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/the-houthis-issue-isnt-really-with
The US is losing this battle because we are shooting down very cheap missiles with very expensive missiles. We choose not to confront the Iranian ships that supply the Houthis with missiles and drones or the Iranian ships that provide targeting and guidance data to the Houthis.
That is, the use of force is a political consideration. The US Navy can shield merchant ships (at great cost and not infinitely).
The US Navy has NOT been used to compel Iran to stop its attacks. This would be cheaper and more effective than defending the ships, because Iran has a limited number of surveillance and supply ships. If we sank them, or used the US Navy to attack other weak points in punitive strikes against Iran, this may be quite effective (as it was in the 80s), but it remains to be untried.
Oil and shipping companies protecting their ships from ballistic missile attacks again, is a fanciful thing to say that doesn't require any expertise to demonstrate why it's fanciful. Google it. Ships have the choice of going through the Red Sea or taking a much longer trip around Africa. Which many of have done rather than take the risk. But it's a huge ongoing expense.
I might be over complicating things, but clearly the Navy’s most advanced weapons are highly classified. Arguably some of the most important known weapons the Navy fields are the Trident D5 SLBM and the Ohio Class submarines. Similarly space based reconnaissance assets that track the location of every ship in the world, especially those coming from North Korea or Iran potentially carrying a dirty bomb into the SF Bay Area. Coordinating the classified DOE sensors that can sniff out and see nuclear materials. Consider that the Navy uses stealth drones that are still classified and completely unknown to the public.
Sure you can read about ships on Wikipedia but the classified stuff isn’t there. The fusion of information from drones, satellites with both electronic sig int and optical sig int, along with military comms are not going to be easily read about on some white website. This stuff is SCIF only.
Even the top brass in the Navy has difficulty grasping all the physics and engineering behind the tools they are procuring from the MIC.
We’re way past Jefferson fighting pirates. The best ideas are tucked away in the minds of anonymous men and women that can never speak about their work.
The capabilities that we have to defend ourselves and what we know about our enemies are not available to you.
I don't really want to respond to this because it's cringingly misinformed, but I also think it's important to respond to this because it's so misinformed. Why?
I've come around to the understanding that most people have very little idea about how things work. But from the perspective of a democratic society, there's something to the idea that an educated, self-governing populace should have a basic grasp of how something their military operates.
Yes, we have ICBMs and recon satellites and drones. That's great. But these are not weapons for fighting pirates. And we're not beyond fighting pirates because... obviously these "pirates" still exist. Unless, I guess, your proposal is to nuke Tehran.
Further, we absolutely do know a lot about our capabilities. In many ways, the military is just like every other type of government operation. You may think they're a bunch of secretive geniuses who have a bunch of magic bullets saved up, but I assure you they're not. They may slightly mis-state some things, and certainly they cover up some strategic capabilities, but many things are available and verifiable.
In this case, none of the stuff you are talking bout has any relevance to the Red Sea.
We need appropriate weapons to deal with lots of situations. If a very real sense, the problem that the US Navy currently faces is that it's very over-engineered to defend against these low tech attacks.
We know that we are expending missiles at a far greater rate than we're building them. Literally, we've likely launched more in the last few weeks than we will build in the entire year. Look it up.
Fundamentally, the anti-air missiles we're burning up are super expensive. They were designed for fighting wars against the Soviet Union and China and defending very specific, high value targets.
Using them against $20k drones is, in many ways, a travesty. And for that the US Navy government does deserve criticism, but that's an entirely separate issue from what you are talking about.
What you need to understand is that the existence of expensive, fancy things doesn't negate the need for boring, run of the mill things.
True, but a government that tries to do everything well does nothing well. I say limit the scope as much as possible. Specialize in defending against the most important threats. Leave shipping security to the corporate world. Let profit and loss signals guide entrepreneurs. Simple. Are you even open to experimenting or does it have to be your way?
"a government that tries to do everything well does nothing well."
That's a slogan, but the specifics matter.
I think the kinds of "experiments" you're talking about just kind of unravel in the real world. Generally, the extreme anarcho-libertarian concept that if we just stop having government then private actors will evolve solutions overlooks the fact that governments are, themselves, a product of that process. Private actors formed governments to solve these collective action problems and that's still a core function of government to be a kind of residual problem solver.
In this case, a key point is that these pirates aren't really pirates. They're waging war on us for clearly stated political reasons. Setting aside everything else. It'd be kind of ridiculous for the US government to disclaim it has a responsibility to protect its own citizens and their interests, but suppose it did. We say "hey, the US military is only for protecting the US territory, and if you want to be an entrepreneur and engage in free trade in this big, dangerous world, you're on your own."
So what do these guys do? They don't sail the Red Sea and prices go up. Global trade decreases. Because this policy pressures us and people respond to incentives, other countries that oppose us politically can be expected to do the same as Iran and start attacking US interests with no end in sight.
Do you have any positive suggestions for improvement?
You read my comment in the least generous way possible. Thanks.
I'd bet Great Britain has adequate ships for hot spots. China does too but as you say, they aren't getting hit.
This is a good example of how to draw some conclusions from basic numbers. The British navy has a grand total of 6 ships that can shoot down ballistic missiles (Type 45 destroyers). A general rule of thumb that still applies is you can count on a 3rd of any class of ship being non-operational and being refitted if not in all-out war. In fact, for this class of ship, apparently only about 3 of the 6 are currently available.
So, you've got 3 ships. Each has a 48 round magazine for carrying missiles. The primary type than can shoot down a ballistic missile are going to be a subset of this. The most expensive subset in fact. Let's be generous and call it 50%, or 24 missiles per ship. A couple articles I read suggested they only carry 8 of these.
Next, understand that the total number of these missiles produced is not all that big, and these missiles can't be reloaded at sea. In the case of the UK this means that to re-arm itself, the ship has to leave the Red Sea and sail 3,000 miles to Gibraltar.
Maybe one might quibble with the numbers around the edges, but the basic math is inescapable. The Royal Navy just doesn't have the staying power to keep ships on station in the Red Sea. They might theoretically be capable of keeping a ship on station, but their limited stockpile of missiles and their inability to reload them means they don't have much staying power.
The US Navy has larger numbers and can reload at Souda Bay (closer) but faces the same basic problems. They do have the option of employing aircraft which can shoot down a lot of the cheaper drones with cannons. But it's the same basic calculus, writ large.
I'm all in favor of merchant ships not just protecting themselves, but making that decision on their own. Do they want to hire crew who are willing to shoot back? Can they transfer security teams for travel through the most infested areas? Is the extra cost and risk worthwhile compared to the cost of bypassing infested areas? Do merchants ships want to take the shortcut between Taiwan and China?
All too often, government creates the problems it uses to justify further "fixes". It's not legal for merchant ships to carry even rifles to protect themselves, let alone larger mounted weapons, therefore we must send billion dollar warships firing million dollar missiles with no regard for the cost. One workaround is for civilian security teams to come aboard as soon as in international waters, to transfer from ship to ship. But where do these teams get their weapons? Oh, that's illegal too. Better to send in those billion dollar warships and their million dollar missiles ... but they don't do much useful except scare pirates, which a few armed merchant ships could do just as well.
US has a fleet which patrols the world's oceans in the ready for conflicts of various sorts. I have a hard time seeing any reason that protecting shipping would conflict with other objectives. Suggestions?
While not a perfect monopoly, the advantages of one shipping protector are large, not just to the shippers and their customers but to the world economy more generally. It is possible to coordinate this protection among other navies and at least some of that happens. Maybe the UN would be a more appropriate leader of this effort but I doubt that would work as well.
I would argue most US trade deals favor other countries more than US. We tolerate that for many reasons but mainly that we see the benefits as still larger than the costs. Maybe that isn't always true but I'd argue it mostly is. Likewise, I'd say the same for what we do to protect global shipping. In both cases it is important not to let perfect get in the way of good.
“US has a fleet which patrols the world's oceans in the ready for conflicts of various sorts. I have a hard time seeing any reason that protecting shipping would conflict with other objectives. Suggestions?“ If it’s just a side gig, maybe it doesn’t hurt. In general limiting the US government’s role to defense of our territory seems like a good idea. To what extent was 9/11 motivated by US government presence in the Middle East?
Other questions to consider. Does the price of gasoline reflect the cost to transport it from the Middle East if the U.S. Navy is providing the bulk of the security? Would we have more bicycles and cleaner vehicles if the price of gasoline reflected all the costs to protect oil tankers?
Are we sure that US Navy is the best way to protect shipping? For example, can it be done at lower overall cost by private companies?
Does the U.S. Navy crowd out superior private alternatives that would make the oceans even safer for travel and commerce?
"In general limiting the US government’s role to defense of our territory seems like a good idea."
Probably a better idea to include NATO allies. Probably other innocent parties too.
911 was entirely due to our presence in the middle east.
"Does the price of gasoline reflect the cost to transport it from the Middle East if the U.S.,..."
No. And whether the added cost is small or large is mostly dependent on how much of the fleet's cost you attribute to shipping lanes protection vs other objectives.
Do you really want private companies fighting with state actors and with terrorists on foreign soil?
“Do you really want private companies fighting with state actors..” What would Merle Kling say? Sometimes it’s this way and sometimes it’s that way.
Do you really want the POTUS to be judge, jury and executioner, calling drone strikes on American and foreign citizens? Do you want POTUS cabinet members to create secret courts, CIA black sites, Bluffdale data centers and XKeyscore programs? How much do you want to rely on heroics like Snowden, Assange, and others that blew the whistle through official channels that we never hear about? Do you really want to read another report about anal feeding and sleep deprivation torture?
The Bush and Obama years were a disgrace to our country. The last thing I want in my life is to become an US-government-hating libertarian anarchist. I would much rather be a patriot.
In order to do that we should limit the power of government to the essentials. We don’t need them to do things that the private sector can do better.
Those all seem like valid concerns even if I see some of them differently. That said, I'd still rather have the President making those decisions than much less accountable CEOs.
I say those CEOs are much more accountable than politicians. They have competitors and shareholders.
“If you think that it is a job for the UN, I’ve got a school in Gaza with a Hamas tunnel underneath to sell you.”
Great piece, great line.
Apologies once again for my terrible rants yesterday, especially with AndyG. Maybe I’ll go back and trim away some of my comments.
Please. they're vomitous. And wrong.
I respectfully disagree.
If you cared about respect, you wouldn't have dumped all those absurd comments on a thread. And yes, you're wrong.
Absurd comments? In what way were any absurd?
One of the greatest strategic blunders in U.S. history, if not world history, was the younger President Bush's decision to overthrow the Sadam Hussein regime in Iraq. We might never know but can speculate about Bush the Younger's motivations. The blunder was twofold. First, we already had significant control over Hussein's freedom of action given the American and British imposition of a very effective "no-fly zone" on large swaths of Iraq. Overthrowing Hussein to prevent him from invading other countries was superfluous. Second, the Hussein's Iraq was a bitter enemy of Iran; the two countries had already fought a years-long and mutually damaging war. Iraq was an important counterweight to the theocratic regime in Iran. Once we overthrew Hussein, the Iranian mullahs had much more freedom of action. And now we are paying the cost of Bush's blunder.
Define US interests. If the US aims to secure the petrodollar or control Europe's or China's access to cheap energy it remains in the Middle East. If the US aims to run perpetual trade or capital deficits or regulate global markets for its own benefit then it must police the world. The excuses for doing so are of secondary importance, if that.
Furthermore, policing the world offers extraordinary benefits to the US political class. Kickbacks, doceurs, gifts, job opportunities for the kids. Ukraine is not an isolated example. Neither was Saudi Arabia before King Salman and MBS cleaned it up. Foreign policy is too lucrative a racket for the political classes to even think of ever giving up.
The US government has never tried to perfect anyone or anything. Nor could it ever, not being perfect itself. It merely tries to protect and promote what it thinks is its own interest ((often being badly wrong about this). As for policing, they’d have a lot better results if they themselves were always law abiding.
Thanks for teeing up the topic of the US approach to foreign policy. Yergin (1992) and Bobbitt (2002) shaped my thinking here. Our strategic interests are secure borders, non-proliferation of nukes, access to oil, and maybe open shipping lanes and markets. More deeply, total war entails a technology race and the ability to manipulate the population to fight, hence the welfare-warfare state. I disagree with Bobbitt's "responsibility-to-protect" as it is mission impossible. Unfortunately, the existence of a world-war-machine leads to the temptation to use it. And that's before invoking the neo-con's arrogance...
Was American in action in Iran in 1953 *police* action or *perfect* action?
Embrace the power of "and"?
Lee Fang's claim that "We [the United States] force our belief systems on others at the barrel of the gun" is representative of the muddled thinking typical on this subject. U.S. interventions have usually been to support regimes that have been (or at least that the U.S. government thought were) less coercive than the alternative. During the Cold War, the U.S. government supported democracies and certain dictatorships where communism seemed to be a big threat. (And it was right to do so; communism has always been catastrophic.) Since the Cold War, the U.S. government has mainly supported attempts to promote democratic governance. It is reasonable to argue that some countries aren't ready for democracy because their people are too little educated, too tribally divided, or too unsuited by their culture. But countries where most people are happy with their dictators are few, otherwise those places wouldn't need to be dictatorships. The dictators are truly the ones who are "forcing [their] belief systems at the barrel of a gun."
Having a hard time seeing how our international horseplay, enlightened or not, doesn’t simply just have to end like right now. We simply can’t afford it anymore even if it wasn’t a complete failure.
The deficit for fiscal year 2024 ended September 30 was up 8%, or $138 billion, from $1.695 trillion for FY 2023. Contributing to this growth was a 29% increase in interest payments which rose to $1.133 trillion for the year. The deficit amounted to 6.4% of GDP, up from 6.2% for FY23. This despite revenues climbing to $4.919 trillion, up 11%, or $479 billion, from the prior year, FY24 outlays rose 10%, or $617 billion, to $6.752 trillion. Interest costs as a share of GDP reached 3.93%, less than the 1991 record of 4.69% but the highest since 4.01% in December 1998.
The weighted average interest rate on federal debt was 3.32% in September, up 35 basis points from a year earlier.
National defense outlays are estimated to be about 3.5% of GDP and to have amounted to $907,728 million in FY24, up from $820,263 million for FY23. And for this we have nothing to show. Our civil liberties are crushed beneath the weight of public-private total surveillance system in which all of our online speech is recorded and filed away and if the powers that be feel like it we are debanked and placed on watch lists. International trade is obstructed by pirates and terrorists around the globe. We live in terror of WWIII breaking out at any moment. Foreign invaders occupy our cities and towns with impunity and China operates its own police force on our soil.
Because many states already operate volunteer defense forces of their own that provide sufficient military capacity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_defense_force ) all of this central government national defense spending is redundant and could be eliminated entirely with little marginal consequence to our current national defense posture.
Disbanding the standing military as President John Adams once did would actually enhance security for individual citizens. As the Father of the Constitution, President James Madison once wrote in a passage that could not be more relevant today:
“The means of defence against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.”
And indeed here we are, enslaved to a national debt of $35.7 trillion, $271,577 per taxpayer, and that will only get worse absent radical action.
In the conventional America, Imperial World Police model, the US uses treaty and private investment to change the meaning of the target country's sovereign powers that "guarantees the controlling power's economic [interests]" in Carl Schmitt's terms. Whatever arrangement maintains that set of interests is copacetic.
In the neo-Athenian Model of perfecting the world (also reflected by a developed and globalized understanding of the Monroe doctrine), the US will identify the target countries as tyrannical or improperly oligarchic, and then target them for regime change either through direct or indirect means. Where this model differs from Thucydides' model of Athenian imperialism is that the Athenians extracted gold and silver from Delian league members. It had a material component. The world perfecting model of the contemporary US actually has an anti-materialistic bent in that it extracts money from the first model to fund its mission of change.
When Athens was in trouble, it went from extracting tribute to charging transaction fees. It immediately stopped offending its Delian League members (with offensive tribute) and collected more money overall.
I tend to think that Arnold’s view on this topic is possibly too heavily colored by his kinship to Israel, even if just culturally. Arnold - in a post not long after Oct 7 you talked about strategy for dealing with Israel’s neighbors. Can you talk about the best longterm strategy for Israel? What should they do that they may not already be doing? Do they really not have anywhere else to go? Should they try to buy land and build a country in a safer part of the world? Can Israelis easily immigrate to the U.S. and if so what might we expect of the demand to do so?
It would be good to hear more concrete suggestions about what could have been done better vis a vis Iran, rather than these generalities about being tougher.
For all the talk about the nuclear deal being a giveaway to Iran, their revealed preference once Biden took office was to decline resuming it. Perhaps it was not such a sweetheart deal for them after all.
Or perhaps they'd already gotten all the good they could from the deal, e.g, billions of dollars of Iranian funds were now unfrozen and they had developed alternative financial arrangements.
Arnold, you advice sounds a lot like what people on the left accused foreign policy of being in much of the pre-Reagan era. Supporting Somoza because, in the words of FDR, "he's a son-of-a-bitch, but he's our son-of-a-bitch." Supporting stability and not trying to make things better.
It was the Reagan administration that made a public disavowal of that in the case of Ferdinand Marcos.
the two key problems there are that
1. 'mere' policing more-or-less requires the consent and cooperation of the foreign nation being policed, which we almost never get...
and
2. If we invade a country without their consent and cooperation, we then have to decide what sort of instructions to give the soldiers and state department officials who are now in-country.. And it's basically politically impossible for us to ever tell our own soldiers or officials that "as long as you're basically in charge of the country anyway, you are absolutely forbidden to do anything remotely resembling, say, improving woman's rights in that location, or other plausible tangential acts of 'perfecting' the country by, basically, just being nice people while you're there.
I don't disagree but I'd say there's a more basic difficulty. It is far easier in hindsight to see the mistakes.
Of course we don't even know which of those "mistakes" were destined to be so. Maybe a small difference could have reversed the result. And maybe some successes that seem they were obvious good choices actually had very low probabilities of success.
While I agree with AK's concerns, turning hindsight into foresight mostly isn't easy.
"And it's basically politically impossible for us to ever tell our own soldiers or officials that "as long as you're basically in charge of the country anyway, you are absolutely forbidden to do anything remotely resembling, say, improving woman's rights in that location ..."
It's not impossible at all. In Afghanistan there is the colorful local tradition of Bacha Bazi which I'll spare you a description of here since you can look it up if you like. Suffice is to say that "our own soldiers and officials" usually begged to intervene when observing such cases and were ordered not to and, reluctantly but obediently, followed such orders.
yes, and that was pretty much the limit.... telling soldiers that it was illegal under afghan laws already, and it was the afghan responsibility to conduct arrests for, and that it didn't involve the soldiers any way.
And the law as written only barely supported that position.
In pretty much any situation where american law was clear, and staying out of it wasn't an option, things got interesting. The asylum claims alone from people like fighter pilots sent to the USA for training, and who didn't want to leave, were a nightmare...