Category: Strategy

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Post-election score sheet.

Since pundits are pontificating, experts are expert-ting and blowhards are bloviating, I figured I would add my 2 cents worth of commentary into the mix. I certainly do not profess to by any sort of expert on NZ politics, so what follows is more an impression rather than an informed opinion. Yet the goddess knows that this cannot be worse than what was displayed in the media on election night and generally since then. Here I will just tabulate a scorecard of winners and losers and leave it for others to pick through the detritus.

BIG WINNERS:

Big money. Billionaires and well-funded rightwing astroturf organisations. They worked hard to game the system and the succeeded spectacularly. Not only did they convince National to push out the voter registration deadline by two weeks, which effectively disenfranchised voters who for a number of circumstances usually waited until Election Day to register and vote (a new deadline that favoured the more well-heeled who live under less precarious/more stable circumstances and can plan ahead). They also found loopholes in Election advertising laws that, as Andrew Geddis and others pointed out, may have adhered to the letter but not the spirit of the law, and both the Electoral Commission and the Left opposition were slow to react when the advertising campaign in favour of giving party votes to minor rightwing parties was sprung on the public. National reacted negatively but half heartedly because although it did not want a stronger tail wagging its dog, the accompanying voter suppression tactics favored it and the overall effect would be to keep the dog as the Alpha in the government yard.

The Opportunities Party won big by getting into parliament. A Trojan horse party with a chameleon facade, it siphoned votes mostly from Labour while introducing tech-bro capitalism into the political equation. Behind its wonky appeal and PR curated look, OP represents a different capitalist fraction than farmers and traditional Northern and Rotary Club businesses, have a more environmentally sensitive and younger orientation, but are no friends of the working classes (blue and white collar salarymen and women). They are the Internet Party without the Kim Dotcom weirdness and a more technocratic orientation as they pursue profit “with a conscience” rather than via rapacious, visibly exploitative means. While an improvement over the Mowbrays and export protein-based and other primary good economic interests, they are not necessarily advocates for the general wellbeing of everyday people. Theirs is the individual agency of the well-to-do, not the collective solidarity of common people facing difficult circumstances.

LESSER WINNERS:

The minor puppet parties of the billionaire and astroturf-backed Right have in fact become stronger tails on the National dog. Given the incompetence of the current National leadership and its soon to happen post-election leadership changes, the minor party tail wagging will be more like a rudder for the National-led ship of state in its second term as majority government coalition partner. No wonder the ACT First leaders had drunken grins at Election Night parties.

National won by not losing but, for reasons that may have to do with the MAGA-ification of the party under a slow-moving Christian fundamentalist take-over or perhaps as a way of lancing the boil of incompetence infecting its senior cadres, saw the purge of key secularist members of its ranks in what was basically a “getting rolled by voters” scheme. Why these senior figures allowed themselves to be cornered in electorates where they were exposed, and who advised them to stay there, is unknown to me (and I welcome edification on the matter). But if there is a move rightward within National towards more fundamentalist-influenced “values” and policy, then this election served its purpose (the matter of incompetence remains an open question and will not necessarily be solved by burning in the likes of Simeon Brown to “big boss” positions).

The Greens solidified their claim to being the voice of NZ progressive forces and expanded their base. Te Pati Maori gamed the system the other way from the right-wingers, going for the electorate vote in Maori-heavy electorates where they won 5 out of 7 contested. This consolidates the current leadership and orientation even as it reaffirms their primary status as a separatist party.

LOSERS: The NZ voting public, which in a low turnout contest gave similar numbers of popular votes to the major coalitions (between Left 43> and Right <50 percent of the total of votes cast), but who were outmaneuvered by the clever strategic voting campaign waged by the Rightwing party sponsors. Money and voter ignorance speak loudly, and lack of public awareness about strategic voting schemes and the amount of big money poured into promoting them left the voters in a position of being less agents of their own collective destiny and more pawns in an elite contest to ensure that power was ultimately made to be seen as contestable but in fact was non-transferable.

BIGGEST LOSER: The Labour Party. Although it won more of the popular vote than did National, the MMP framework is not a head-to-head race between major parties and unlike the rightwing strategic gaming, Labour did nothing to counter-balance what was happening out on that side with the party vote (say, by pushing for Green or Opportunity votes at the party level while focusing on electorate seats). In fact it failed to see what the rightwing strategic voting campaign was set up to do until it was too late. Worse yet, the combination of ideological stagnation (clinging to discredited and outmoded Blairite and 3rd Way tropes and shying away from re-affirming a class line of any sort), institutional timidity within the Party apparatus (no one apparently pushed for a a breakthrough policy platform that took advantage of the discontent with National’s arrogant incompetence and ACT and NZ First’s divisive and corrosive brand of MAGA-influenced politics), and individual cowardice (not just by mini-meek Chris Hipkins but his retinue of senior enablers and bootlickers as well), combined to doom its chances. Once again it snatched defeat from the jaws of victory–a victory that was all but handed to them as the default option before voting began –and frittered away its opportunity to close the door on the Ardern era of Labour politics and begin a new chapter out of the ashes of the obviously failed “neoliberal” (the term itself is a leftover relic from three decades ago) and market-driven precepts that have given us the current era of cowboy capitalism, one percenters, income stratification, wealth concentration, reduced tax revenues and public spending and the consequent declines in social services. Like elsewhere in the democratic world, the politics of greed and privilege were ripe for repudiation. Instead, Labour offered to stitch up a velvet glove for that iron fist.

To continue the analogies, Labour argued about the taste of the toppings on the socio-economic pie (maybe try a capital gains tax, but no wealth tax or significant changes to the tax codes) rather than on the distribution and core ingredients of its slices or the reduction in its overall size under the market-driven precepts. It refuses to address root causes but instead fiddled with cosmetic fixes to a model crafted by and for the benefit of capitalists (the propertied classes), not workers (the non-propertied classes). That is the sad fact of the matter. Labour is not a working class party and has ceded its vanguard role to the Greens, who after years of Morris dancing and participating in healing circles have begun to address the bread-and-butter concerns of non-propertied people (i.e., most of us).

That is my short-term impressionist synopsis. Perhaps things will change once special votes are counted at a pace more befitting Niger than New Zealand. But the failure of the election to result in a change of government given the context was ultimately caused by the combination of confusion, complacency and conformity among some voters and political leaders in the face of a well-planned manipulation of the rules as given by monied interests.

PS: Using my own version of the “Michael Moore Method” of polling (using billboards in front yards and shop windows as sample indicators), it appears that many recent migrants from South and East Asia in West Auckland voted for ACT and National. They live in middle class neighbourhoods undergoing demographic change and higher density re-development, so to my mind they are the new “battler” class: small property owners or salaried people with aspirations of property ownership. I know that, admitting that generalisations are not conclusive, Indian Kiwis tended to vote for Labour and Chinese Kiwis tended to vote for National in the past, but from my surveys, in West Auckland they have coalesced as a voting bloc around the “low taxes, low crime, low public spending” mantra. Along with outward migration by Kiwis to foreign countries, especially Australia, whose votes are yet to be tabulated, that could be a partial explanation for the initial results.

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Reframing the narrative.

It is said that those who frame the questions win the debate. Those who set the terms win the negotiation. If true, then the resolution to any matter of dispute starts with how the subject is approached, or put differently, how the narrative about the substance of the dispute is framed. That extends to negotiating approaches. Traditional diplomacy starts with areas of contention or disagreement and works towards resolutions via agreement, often of the “second-best” kind where no party get its preferred option but all parties get some of what they want without prohibitively costing the other (in game theory parlance, the strategy pursues even-sum outcomes). In contrast, the so-called Pacifika negotiating method championed by the Ardern government’s foreign policy team is to start with areas of commonality and consensus and then work back towards areas of contention and disagreement. Here the logic is that positive-sum openings can generate higher return even-sum outcomes. The traditional approach seeks to address contentious matters directly with the aim of finding a core of agreement that can serve as the basis for a mutually acceptable resolution even if just over the short-term. The second seeks to establish a basis of trust from which durable agreements on specific subjects can be reached.

This extends to political and electoral framing. US political analysts have noted that although the MAGA administration is grossly incompetent in pretty much every substantive way other than using public office to engage in graft and corruption, it is very proficient at PR and propaganda spinning. This often reaches Orwellian heights, such as when the White House announced that it is winning the war with Iran, that ICE is protecting US citizens from criminal “aliens,” that the US is using lethal force on the open seas to stop drug smuggling, that medicaid and voter fraud is rife, that social security is discretionary income, or that tariffs will be paid by the foreign exporters, not US consumers. A major aspect of this full spectrum disinformation campaign, one that takes its origins from Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with s**t” principle, is to gaslight the public into second guessing the reality that they are living. For example, gas and other commodity prices, including groceries, are not going up and if they are it is president autopen Biden’s fault because he left everything in a shambles.

In spinning this alternate reality the MAGA administration has willing accomplices in the corporate media, including Fox News, OAN and Newsmax. Thanks to billionaire take-overs of once honourable institutions like CBS, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, the editorial direction of US “mainstream’ news has taken a distinctly rightwing tilt that, not surprisingly, reinforces MAGA framing of the national narrative. In fact, narrative framing has become more about spinning disinformation that reporting facts, and in this regard the rise of social media as competitors under market conditions only aggravates the situation and perpetuates the syndrome by reinforcing the move to an attention gig economy where all opinions are equally valid, “free” speech is devoid of social responsibility, expertise is disdained and algorithms push individual and collective preferences around lowest common denominators. Book reading gives way to doom-scrolling and learned debate is pushed aside by TikTok memes and podcasting, even when done by ignorant and often illiterate fools.

Although the US can be considered an exemplar in this regard, and has strong competition from State-organised disinformation campaigns in places like the PRC, Iran, Israel and Argentina, NZ has its own version of framing the narrative in the lead up to General Elections. In that regard the Right are, here too, winning.

The strategy is simple and can be summarised in two words: costs and taxes. For whatever reason (and there are several) Kiwis are a notoriously stingy lot. The very mention of taxes evokes images of grim reaper scythe-weilding IRD agents coming to take hard-earned incomes from average Kiwis. It does not matter if taxes are used to assist the neediest, to build and maintain infrastructure, to provide policing, education, housing, welfare and medical care to and for all, and to provide for a minimal level of national defense and security. In other words, even in these days of privatisation and public sector budget cutbacks, taxes fund core functions of the State. That frees the private sector, which is very unregulated compared to many other liberal capitalist democracies,, to pursue material interests without jeopardising basic social needs via public good provision.

In NZ, however, the Right has successfully captured and framed electoral narratives around the subjects of public sector costs and taxation, specifically the need for less of both in the face of the desire of Labour and other Left parties to increase public sector spending derived from taxation (and hence the costs to the average battler) for any number of frivolous “woke” and otherwise unnecessary reasons that ultimately benefit the undeserving, lazy and irresponsibly indolent. For the Right taxes are also just a rent-seeking instrument to justify civil service existence in make-work sinecures and shoulder-tapped public sector positions. They fuel a form of bureaucratic parasitism and as such must be resisted, curtailed and when possible, eliminated because the costs of doing so are economically unsustainable.

Rather than confront this false framing head on, Labour has succumbed to it. Its acquiescence stems from the Blairite “Third Way” legacies of 30 years ago that, much like the discredited neoliberal precepts that fuel the NZ Right’s sclerotic vision of market-led economics, is grounded in contexts that no longer apply to contemporary society. But dogma reigns supreme in NZ and both major parties buy into the narrative about keeping taxes low at all costs, quite literally so.

That is unfortunate because, given the incompetence and mean-spirited elite-serving nature of the NACTFirst coalition, there is a window of opportunity for Labour and its junior partners to emphasise that things do not have to be like this. NZ is capable, through the use of taxation and other policy instruments, to re-order itself as a fairer and more just society, one in which avarice and self-centredness take a back seat to inter-class and ethno-racial solidarity, something that is now very much under siege. This government-led institutional divisiveness and exclusion is often pushed by foreign interests that use NZ fronts as facades for their divisive appeals. The infamous Taxpayers Union and its sister astroturf agencies are cases in point, as Nicky Hager has recently reminded us in his book Dirty Work.

The Right also has been able to reframe narratives on any number of policy specifics by simply repeating the mantras “but what about the cost?” “where is the money coming from?” and/or “who is gong to pay for it?” Labour and its junior partners (save te Pati Maori, which does challenge colonialist narratives) too often fall into the trap by trying to explicate, often using policy wonk and technocratic terminology, how and from where policy funding will come from and how costings will be calculated and funded. This inevitably leads them to into the “no new taxation” and public spending arguments that they cannot win. The circle of despair is never-ending: Even things like a capital gains tax, which is a common public revenue instrument in OECD countries, become the targets of “taxation is theft” claims that leave the Left speechless in response.

All of this reductio ad absurdem Rightwing argument permeates its very effective election campaign strategies. Rather than reply from the back foot while riding the market-fetish policy narrative, Labour and its allies should be doing some narrative reframing of their own, focusing not on immediate costs but on who benefits and gains over the long term from their policy initiatives. Although the NACTFirst coalition has worked hard to dismantle Labour’s social engineering polices (such as with regard to traffic safety, tobacco use, electric car rebates and petrol levies) and replaced them with more deregulation and weakening of social safety nets of various stripes, the NZ Left have an opportunity to restore the commonweal orientation to public policy after three years of what can best be described as malevolently-intended criminal incompetence on the part of the government.

Readers may recall my referencing Gramsci’s notion of good sense versus common sense, the latter being the narrative framed by elite discourse on how the “proper” society should look like, and the former being the reality we see with our eyes and feel in our hearts. Rather than address what passes for market-driven common sense, as has been the case in NZ for three decades, the NZ Left should be countering it with a good sense reinterpretation of social reality as we experience it. From there the solutions to injustice, inequality and deprivation can more properly be addressed.

This includes human rights and civil liberties. The Right frames the extension of rights to previously excluded and marginalised people, including Maori, as an infringement on the rights of the majority and in fact a selective awarding of rights to some but not all. Freedom of speech for the Right means the freedom to engage in bigoted dog-whistling and hate-mongering. Rather than argue the matter as an issue of group entitlement and the limits of opinion, the Left needs to reframe the narrative as a matter of universal rights and human dignity, including respect for difference. The same goes for confronting Rightwing fear-mongering, which plays on ignorance, scapegoating (trans! immigrants!), division and acrimony as the fodder for electoral support. The Left should just call out those types of appeal for what they are and not get mired in arguments about who deserves what in NZ society. For the Left the issue is not one of entitlements but of endowment: humans are endowed with inalienable rights regardless of who they are and nobody is entitled to anything more or less than that. That includes matters of historical redress for past injustices–if a wrong was done it must be rectified.

The bottom line is that the Left cannot win if it simply responds to a policy narrative set by the Right (including on policy specifics), and even if it wins an election (a tactical victory) it cannot pursue a progressive policy agenda that will make a tangible difference to the majority’s lives if it continues to do so. Given that NZ is a capitalist society inserted in a capitalist world economy in which post-colonial, pro-market rules apply throughout the social hierarchy even if Maori are awarded “their” space in the socio-economic and cultural order, the best way for the NZ Left to advance is to reframe elections specifically, and politics in general, as a contest about how a new social contract should be defined in this technogarchical world.

Think of it as a foundational reset. The issue is more about an ideological shift, in fact an ideational shift, rather than about technocratic solutions under market-oriented conditions. Put another way, if it is true that politics is the art of the possible (as in what is possible to achieve under the circumstances given the socio-economic, cultural, political and get strategic context), then the basic issue is about framing what is defined as “possible.” For the Right, no matter how much it may use the language of agency, freedom and choice, what is possible is limited to those with a particular set of material endowments, social backgrounds and connections, and value orientations (lets say for the sake of argument White Anglo Saxon Protestant in nature). For the Left, what is possible is what we collectively aspire to be when unconstrained by material or sociodemographic difference. In that regard, Left politics as the art of the possible is about pursuing (and redressing where violated) universal ideals rather than catering to particularistic, elite-dominated interests, however incremental and reformist that pursuit may have to be given the dominant narrative confronting it..

Because for the Left, even as milquetoast as it is in NZ, arguing about policy specifics in a debate framed by the Right is always going to be a losing proposition.

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Fear-mongering the “Other.”

One of the signs of desperation of a political campaign, movement or ideology is the resort to fear mongering. Rather than offer a a bias for hope in the form of positive policy initiatives, fear mongerers use stereotypes, scapegoats and distorted narratives to stir anxiety and dread of the “others” in amongst the body politic. The “others” are the usual suspects–immigrants and foreigners, sexual, ethnic, religious and racial communities, social classes, intellectuals (remember Pol Pot?) ideological non-conformists and contrarians, witches and witch doctors, heavy metal Satanists, even tax-and-spend liberals–the list is as long as human history itself. New ones are invented every generation. They often are held to be carriers of disease and other pestilence or are pet eaters, children snatchers, rapists and murderers. They could well be shape-shifters or aliens, so the best precaution against their insidious designs is to beware and vote/follow those who saw the danger first and call it out. Oftentimes fear mongers will try a rock by rock approach, throwing out accusations against one entity to see if they can gain political traction with it, and if not, then move on to another scapegoat. Again, the targets are endless.

In recent times the US Right has focused on Islamicists and communist/socialists. The election of Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of New Youk and Abdul El-Sayed as Democratic candidate for the US Senate from Michigan has galvanised US conservatives into a frenzy of xenophobic bigotry over what they see as the imminent takeover of the self-proclaimed land of the free by Islamocommies. These forces of doom used to be called Islamofacists but once they introduced social democratic views into their political discourse, then they conveniently morphed into “commies” because as we all know, for the Right, socialists and communists are two sides of the same Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Trotsyite-Castroite coin, with a little Ho Chi Minh, Guevara, Bukharin, Luxemburg and Angela Davis thrown in.

I will leave aside the differences between communism, socialism, social democracy and democratic socialism because my point (beyond the fact that most of the Right would not know the difference between them) is that for the fear mongers the objective is to tar them all with the same “othering” brush, to conflate them as one evil hydra and inflate them as an existential threat to the Republic and the Nation on which it purportedly stands.

NZ has its mini-me variant of that with the peripheral Right parties scapegoating various immigrant communities, most lately Indians (NZ First), and the ACT Party seeing Reds under beds anytime regulations are proposed or rights extended rather than curtailed. They both see Te Pati Maori as Maori-communists and the Green Party as wokester-communists seeking to infringe on the traditional rights of patriarchical white cis male capitalists (or, as they would say, “natural leaders”). The key point is that, because they have nothing positive to offer anyone other than their corporate patrons and pocket-liners and the mouth-breathing troglodytes who find reassurance in their hatreds, the NZ Right, just like the US Right, resorts to fear mongering as its weapon of choice.

Moving past the cut and thrust of the daily political news cycle, this is the lesson of the moment. The Right, both here and elsewhere (there are parallels to be drawn in places like Argentina and Brazil as well), have crested their wave of electoral popularity and run out of ideas for governing besides scripted corporate-speak mantras about financial discipline, governmental efficiency, law and order and traditional values. In fact, it is the lack of new policy ideas and initiatives that have made them electorally vulnerable, which is why they are now resorting to their weapon of choice.

I can only hope that the opposition in the US, NZ and other places like Argentina can focus on this syndrome as a campaign issue while offering a more positive vision for the future based on concrete proposals to improve commonweal conditions in the countries in which they are located. This means rejecting timidity, incrementalism and purely centrist-focused prescriptions in favour of bolder initiatives that move beyond cautious and defensive postures that serve to reaffirm the status quo by tinkering around the margins and onto more progressive actions that seek to accomplish more than just undo the bad Right policies of the recent past. That involves taxation, social policies, macro-economic re-orientation, foreign relations and a re-framing of what government exists to do and what the role of the State is in doing it–both a narrative and a substantive change, in other words–so that the tired recourse to fear-mongering can finally be put to rest based on a new, more inclusive social contract in which the license of consent is granted by the masses, not just by the entrenched elites of the current moment.

All of this must be done as a “sincere” campaign strategy rather than by hiding behind a curtain of centrism while the governing Right defends its position via fear mongering about “extremism” and assorted “other” assaults on the social fabric. Because in doing so, the Right inadvertently demonstrates that the time is ripe for more radical and progressive change. If being radical is to be progressive, then to be status quo is to be regressive. And regression is the breeding ground for fear-mongering “others.”

In this context bold change is not being ideologically extremist. It is being realistic and practical given the circumstances and alternatives. So Carpe diem!

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The Liberal Internationalist Delusion.

Now that the football World Cup is over and I have sated my thirst for the beautiful game for the time being, albeit with a very bitter taste at the end of the tournament given my background and team loyalties, I figure it is time to return to the real world. So let’s begin that effort by dispelling some misconceptions about what is and is not the global geopolitical and strategic situation at the moment.

As I have consistently written and said for some years now, liberal internationalism, the foundation of the Western-centric global order created during the Cold War and continued into the first decades of the post-Cold War era, is dead. Part of this is due to the shifts in the last four decades from a bipolar to a unipolar to a multipolar and now polycentric international system where emerging and declining great powers compete for influence and control. This long transitional moment (again, one that I have written and spoken about extensively on this blog and elsewhere), has been characterised by two major features: 1) rules and norms violations by an increasing number of actors; and 2) as a result, the resort to conflict as the systems regulator. The combination leads to uncertainty and a corresponding turn to self-interested national geopolitical strategies as a hedge against it. This has been likened to a return to the “state of nature” or international anarchy as Thomas Hobbes and many of his successors have referred to the core aspect of the international system.

The combination of these two features has fundamentally undermined the liberal international order because its very premise was to use international and multinational organisations as the basis for conflict resolution and adjudication of cross-border disputes as well as arbiters and mediators of international negotiations and agreements. An entire institutional edifice was constructed to this end, spanning agencies as diverse as the UN, WHO, ILO, International Whaling Commission (IWC), IAEA, ICC, and many more. This edifice was constructed on a latticework of laws, rules, regulations, treaties, agreements, compacts, and other instruments that are designed to regulate the interactions of actors in the fields in which they are situated. This includes defining what is acceptable and proper and unacceptable and improper behaviour in the subject areas where international and multinational institutional jurisdiction was applied (via conventions, treaties and ratifications).

What is notable about the liberal international order was that it operated on the basic premise that nation-States and other global actors would enter into collective agreements that in essence were self-binding in nature. As Jan Elster so eloquently pointed out in his book “Ulysses and the Sirens,” (which has nothing to do with current adaptations of the Homeric Epic) democracies and their rules, and by extension international organisations founded on a system of rules and norms that are designed to mediate conflict and lend predictability and regularity to international interactions amongst equals, were akin to nation-States strapping themselves to masts so as to avoid the temptation of pursuing immediate self-interests that could result in deleterious longer-term results, especially when other actors do the same. The wreckage of the League of Nations and other failed international experiments in collective governance prior to WW2 served as vivid reminder to the architects of the Cold War and post-Cold War orders that unfettered pursuit of national self-interest in a world without rules was a recipe for disaster. But adherence was always voluntary and sanctions were limited, porous and few.

However, as enlightened as the liberal international perspective was (“liberal” in the sense of being based on a belief in the perfectibility of human kind and the “civilising”” effects of rules and norms on individual and collective behaviour rather than as a political ideology), it suffered from an innate flaw. The entire institutional edifice that supported it was, beyond various fines and sanctions imposed on violators in specific areas, dependent on voluntary national enforcement of universal rules. This not only is an infringement on national sovereignty (presumably accepted by those involved), but also meant that in practice many international institutions lack the enforcement capability that otherwise would compel non-compliant actors to adhere to established rules and norms governing their behaviour. It is therefore left to individual nation-States and non-State actors, occasionally acting in concert with one another, to punish transgressors. But when doing so runs contrary to perceived national interests or diplomatic and military ties that otherwise bind compliant and non-compliant actors together, then the rules become unenforceable because no state will be capable or wiling to do so.

Consider the case the International Criminal Court (ICC). It has issued warrants for several senior Israeli officials, Russian president Vladimir Putin, and assorted human rights violators from various parts of the world. Yet the US, Israel, China, India and Russia, among others, are not party to the Rome Statute that created the ICC. They offer various justifications for this stance, most often boiling down to their fear that their citizens could be targeted for malicious prosecutions for activities that otherwise should consider to be reasons of State (raison d’état). The US is very explicit in rejecting ICC jurisdiction (and in fact is working to have it disbanded) because it fears that US military personnel will be arrested and tried for war crimes committed while in the service of US interests. It argues that if criminal investigations and prosecutions are to happen, they should happen in US courts, including military courts if necessary because justice in the US is universal, neutral and blind. (although Trump’s pardon of convicted war criminal Eddie Gallagher and many others puts paid to the notion of impartial justice for military and certain civilian defendants).

Whatever the merits of such arguments, in practice it means that the entire enforcement power of the ICC depends on individual nation-States and other actors willing to enforce its warrants and extradition requests. Besides various African countries that have surrendered former officials for assorted crimes against humanity, the Philippines recently agree to extradite former president Rodrigo Dutarte to The Hague for human rights violations when he was in office. He is now awaiting trial on those charges. In all of these cases, the political leaders that followed the accused in power made the decisions to permit their arrests and extraditions did so for what can charitably described as murky reasons rather than out of strong commitment to universal justice.

Conversely, although warrants are outstanding on them, Putin, Netanyahu and other Russian and Israeli officials remain at large because, well, who is going to arrest them? While it is true that they risk arrest if they travel outside their home States and allied countries (such as what happened to former Chilean dictator Agusto Pinochet when he traveled to the UK in the late 1990s), the truth is that they basically have impunity from prosecution. Putin has travelled to China and India and other states, including the US, and received red carpet welcomes. Netanyahu regularly visits the US. In fact, when New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani suggested that Netanyahu be arrested the next time he travels to the US, a chorus of indignation rose from across the political spectrum and civil society. To put it in personal terms: Friends do not let friends get hunted by the ICC.

On another front, it is now clear that the notion freedom of navigation is under serious threat. A cornerstone of the liberal international order institutionalised during the Cold War by the 1958 Convention on the High Seas and its sequels, it is now apparent that countries can and will interfere with commodity supply routes if and when they can. It is not just Iran that is flexing its muscle in the Strait of Hormuz, or the US replying with its counter-blockade, or the Houthis moving to close the Bab El Mandeb strait leading to and from the Red Sea. Chinese interference with shipping in the South China Sea and Taiwan Straits are a regular occurrence, especially involving vessels from regional neighbours, and government officials in Indonesia have expressed interest in imposing trilateral “maintenance fees” (i.e. Iranian-style tolls) along with Malaysia and Singapore in the Moluccan Straits. Others could well follow, including in the Bosphorus Strait and the Northern Passage across the Arctic. So far, although there is more talk than action, the era of unrestricted freedom of navigation appears to be ending because there is neither the will or capability to bring littoral or even remotely-based transgressors to heel.

The point of these digressions is to illustrate how weak the enforcement mechanisms are in the liberal international. order. While voluntary self-restraint and adherence to norms may be possible during times of relative peace and stability, those conditions disappear in moments of international systemic transition marked by conflict. In other words and to bring things back into contemporary focus: what was possible then is no longer possible now.

There is another factor that must be considered. The liberal international order was created by and for Global North white men. It is a product of imperialism and colonialism by the North in the Global South that was a means to keep order in the post-colonial moment during a time of Great Power competition. Although it never lacked for lackey’s and proxies in the South (say, people like Kofi Annan), the institutional edifice that I mentioned above was created to serve the interests of a Northern and Western-centric status quo. The rules and norms were Western ones. The major beneficiaries of the outcomes these institutions produced were Northern ones. The entire combine was posed in contraposition to Soviet alliance networks. Think of the activities of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other international “aid” and development agencies. They may have done some good but ultimately whose interests did they serve first and foremost? At best, their record is mixed.

That is where the rise of the Global South, encapsulated in the creation of the so-called (and now expanded) BRICs bloc of countries, basically heralded the death knell of that North and Western-centric institutional bias. If the international institutional order is to preserve itself it will have to accommodate, genuinely this time, the interests of the Global South. That means more fairness, transparency and regional, national, ethnic and religious diversity in their decision-making structures. The Global South is here to stay as an international “player” given that the revolution in telecommunications and capital flows in an increasingly technopolar systemic constellation no longer finds exclusive root in the North. It will take time for these trends to crystallise, but the era of Western dominance of the international order, at least as we have known it since the end of WW2, is coming to an end.

Regrettably, in my opinion, the New Zealand foreign policy establishment (including academics, government officials, civil society organisations and interest groups) overwhelming adhere to the belief in liberal internationalism. It makes sense at one level because small countries need protection from the “might makes right” logics of Great Powers. Self-binding international institutions, rules and laws offer that to them but constrain the prerogatives of the strongest actors when measured by hard power variables. Large states are prevented from applying their full weight against smaller or weaker states because of the buffering effect of international institutions that cannot be easily manipulated (although they have been and are in practice). That imposed collective restraint poses a problem for Great Powers in times of flux.

At another level there is a delusional aspect to this. Along with the fiction of NZ’s foreign policy independence (Malaysia says the same thing about its international position), NZ elites involved in foreign-policy making continue to speak of the liberal international order as if it was a universal good (when it was demonstrably not regardless of its many positive features) and is still viable in spite of the obvious challenges and changes that are undermining it. Some speak of “reform” of international institutions, while others nod towards Canadian Prime Minster Mark Carney’s call for a compact of Middle Powers to balance Great Power competition and its trickle down, ripple or spillover effects (the US has outright rejected the proposal and instead asserted its unilateral America First “Donroe” Doctrine as the basis for its engagement with the world. Similarly giants like China and India prefer to exercise their power in a traditional self-interested way with or without international institutions, so their support for a Middle Power alliance network is lukewarm at best).

I assume that the support base for liberal internationalism in the 21st century is comprised of constructivists (those who believe that institutions shape behavior and when reproduced via norms, rules, laws and procedures create a form of bureaucratic inertia that make some behavioral outcomes unthinkable, much less acceptable–say, like genocide), and idealists who believe that appeals to the better angels of human nature can be encouraged via institutional means. There is also a more darker interpretation of intellectual motivation behind the liberal internationalist worldview, which is to cloak Western post-colonial dominance in a web of “enlightened” organizational networks self-ratified as legitimate at the global level.

The majority consensus in support of liberal internationalism in NZ is led by Professor Robert Patman of Otago University, many of his students in government and academia, and people like former PM (and Patman associate) Helen Clark. Professor Patman is erudite and knowledgeable, and is conscious about where his strengths lie. To his credit, he knows his stuff and also knows what he does not know (which is a sign of intellectual maturity, in my opinion). But he seems to be loathe to see, or at least admit, what sits before him: when it comes to liberal internationalism, the thrill is gone. Recently he has shown signs that he recognises that there is a problem with the “rules based system” and has added that angle to his analytic repertorie, suggesting that institutional reform (rebirth?) is not only possible but necessary. A gaggle of other pundits echo and megaphone his thoughts without the analytic depth or breadth that he displays, but the effect is magnified. Most of those who talk and do foreign policy New Zealand remain in the liberal internationalist camp.

There are two exceptions to this rule when it comes to local foreign policy expertise (as I see it). Dr. Rueben Staff (a Patman student) is a realist who decamped to Europe when opportunities for academic advancement in NZ got limited. He accepts Great Power competition as given and has a pro-Western “bias” that dovetails at times with the local liberal internationalists. But he is more focused on hard power rather than soft power and the need for small countries to make hard choices rather than straddle the fence between opposing Great Power orientations. He is not naive about what happened when voluntary consensus and mutual self-restraint break down. Although he and I differ on various things, he is very worth reading and listening to when he does feature in the NZ media (Patman is ubiquitous on that score).

The other “contrarian” or “non-conformist” (my labels) is Van Jackson at Victoria University of Wellington. I do not know him personally but I understand that he held a position similar to mine (different regional focus) in the Pentagon during the Obama years (my tenure happened under Clinton), and he has been quite prolific turning out academic publications, opinion pieces, policy reports, videos and sub stack essays since he entered academia. He also has a progressive activist orientation, something that is rare in any foreign policy circles, much less those in NZ. If I had to pigeonhole him I would call him a neo-Marxist globalist. It is a clumsy term and he may not approve of it, but to me it captures his working class orientation and big picture comprehension. As with Steff and Patman, his is a voice worth listening to.

Beyond them and not including defense specialists, regional and area studies or intelligence/security analysts who do not focus on the theoretical and conceptual bases of approaches to foreign policy and international relations, the bench gets thin when it comes to comparative foreign policy and international relations analysis. Although the corporate media has a habit of featuring lesser lights, it does not matter because all in one way or another embrace liberal internationalist mantras and parrot the rationales offered by more notable defenders of the liberal international status quo. The trouble, again, is that with the exception of the likes of Steff and Jackson (coming from different perspectives), they live in a world that is more magical realism than realistic and where things are assumed rather than critically evaluated. I have not asked Patman and his liberal international colleagues this question directly since I no longer travel in their professional or social circles, but I wonder if their ongoing faith in and and support for liberal internationalism is more an aspirational expression of hope rather than a recognition of real time fact.

In any event, the international system does need re-ordering. But like alcoholism, there has to be a recognition of the problem of before a solution can be soberly offered. For the moment we are stalled at denial, and when not that, at the stage where cosmetic changes are thought to suffice if people would just coalesce round the wish that it be so.

Alas, that is not to be. As The Raven quoth in E.A. Poe’s 1845 poem,

“Nevermore.“

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Media Link: “A View from Afar” on Systemic Change.

Selwyn Manning and I discussed some of the things that I have been thinking about recently in today’s podcast. I have written about these themes on these pages but this video format allows Selwyn to get his two cents in and expand the discussion. I hope that you find it of interest.

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Systemic Change, Institutional Lag and Societal Resilience.

The following is a draft of a talk that I am giving to a professional group. I thought that it would be good to trial it here. It is not quite stream-of-consciousness in nature but is fairly loose in terms of argument tightness and structure. My usual approach is to write a long form essay on the theme of the talk, then condense and memorize it for an off-the-cuff presentation. I do not use slides or power point presentations for the talks. 25 years of university lecturing and a lot of public speaking allows me the luxury of distilling fairly complex thoughts into shorter talking points. I have incorporated some references brought up by reader Barbara Matthews because they add depth to the discussion.

Introduction.

As Dickens wrote, “we live in the best of times and we live in the worst of times.” That is because we are experiencing  a moment of systemic transition in world affairs. This transition is political, economic, cultural and technological, something that in aggregate affects the entire global network of human institutions. It also involves changes in nature, which cause and compound the human changes that we are now observing. As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus observed, we never step in the same river twice. The moment is fluid and uncertain, the possibilities both open and endless yet potentially dark and forbidding.

In order to make sense of this we might break down the broader picture into component parts. These are 1) the structure of the international system; 2) the rules governing the global order; and 3) the geopolitical repercussions of the changes currently underway.

First, the world is moving from a multipolar to a poly-centric system. In the past 50 years we have seen the long transition from the bipolar world of the Cold War, to the unipolar world of the first post-Cold War decade, then the emergence of a multipolar world where rising great powers like China and India compete for global primacy with declining powers like the US and Russia, and where new and old middle powers are finding necessity in forging alliances amongst themselves and smaller States rather than seek the security provided by larger Powers. That includes the rise of the Global South, exemplified by the emergence of a bloc of so-called BRIC countries, which represent a challenge to traditional “northern” dominance of the international arena (“South” here referring not to a geographic location but an ideological orientation that has roots in anti-colonial struggles).

“Polarity” traditionally has only involved nation-States. Large Powers exercise gravitational “pull” on smaller powers that seek their physical protection and provision of material security. It now includes non-State actors like technology conglomerates and their supply chain adjacents. The “poles” themselves can be divided into techno hubs, entities that use knowledge economies to generate wealth and power, and resource hubs, those that provide energy and material inputs to the global knowledge economy.  Both need each other and in fact hybridisation of these productive models is now the norm in many places such as the Arab Gulf States. When the independent power of non-State actors and cross-border impacts of technology are factored in, we see that rather than multipolarity what is emerging is a polycentric constellation of global-reach actors that cluster around mutual interests or, often enough, conflict nodes based on their rival pursuit of competitive advantages in specific material or ideological realms.

Secondly, this has led to the demise of the post-WW2 “liberal” status quo, which was designed to bring stability and predictability to the exchanges between State and non-State actors in the international field. The disruption of this “liberal” international order (liberal defined not on ideological terms but as a voluntary system of mutual checks and balances governing International relations and foreign affairs), has led us to what is now a “post-liberal” (and often illiberal) world order, one where  liberal rules, norms and conventions are violated and its institutions increasingly  ignored. This is a return to what Hobbes called a “state of nature” in international affairs, often interpreted as a return to “might makes right” doctrines associated with the golden era of late 19th century imperialism. Those who can, do. Those who cannot suffer at the hands of those that can.

The institutional edifice created after WW2, what came to be known as the Liberal International Order, is breaking down. The norms, rules and institutions that made up that order have been rendered ineffective by the rapid changes in human societies, and liberal rules, norms and institutional processes are being increasingly ignored in favour of more self-interested actor-centric approaches to global affairs. An area where this has been seen quite starkly is in the field of international affairs, where the liberal international order attempted to stabilise and regulate away from actor-centric foreign policies and towards mutually cooperative inter- or transnational institutional arrangements that mitigated power disparities between nation-States and among private market agents based on their geographic and political position in the global system. One such regulatory mechanism was the concept of freedom of navigation, which guaranteed safe passage to civilian shipping on the open seas and in smaller maritime spaces (e.g. chokepoints such as straits and small seas) otherwise subject to the interference of adjacent littoral states or non-state actors (like pirates).

Third, that returns us to a core notion now commonly used in non-specialist circles: geopolitics. Put simply, geopolitics  is the relationship between geography and politics. It traditionally used to be seen as a matter of how human politics and military strategy conformed to or utilised immutable geographic characteristics in pursuit of (national) State interests, recognising that geopolitics also encompasses economic, diplomatic and sociological factors as they are influenced by geography and geographic trends. Mass migrations are an example of such activity because they have cultural, economic and security implications, but things like hydro dam construction on rivers that traverse national borders have the potential to become serious diplomatic, economic and military problems as well. The disputes about Mekong River damming, dredging and usage, and the consequent end of traditional riverine lifestyles and population exodus from riverine communities, are an example of this.

Now, although the need for geopolitical adaptation remains a constant of international relations, the relationship between geography and politics has shifted. On the one hand, technologies have made human adaptation or utilisation of geographic features far more extensive than in previous eras. Humans dominate nature in a measure that they did not before, which in turn allows them to exploit terrain and earthcapes in previously unknown ways. Think of undersea and space travel, geospatial mapping, deep sea mining—and warring. Once unimaginable, all are either now currently in existence or on the threshold of becoming reality. Automation, robotics and nano-technologies, to say nothing of AI applications in those fields, allow for the exploitation of geography (and nature in general) in ways unheard of during the golden era of geopolitical thought in the early 20th century.

On the other hand, climate change and other natural shifts have altered the physical world in fundamental ways: consider the melting of the Arctic Ocean icepack opening up the Northern Passage and the retreating ice cover in Antartica opening up accessibility to mineral exploration in ways never seen before. The same is true with the impact of warmer temperatures of drought/deluge cycles on fishery stocks and freshwater supplies. At the intersection of climate change and technological advancement, solar, wind and hydro energy production have significant geopolitical implications that go beyond traditional comparative advantages in one or the other under previous technological regimes.

In summation: geopolitics is at once more fluid and yet remains constant as a guiding principle of international relations. The more things change, the more that they stay the same. In moment of global systemic transition, geopolitics becomes a core feature of the process. That is where human agency becomes a decisive variable for better or worse. What follows is two issues where human agency is at play.

Institutional lag.

“Institutional lag”  refers to the time gap between an event or appearance of a phenomena and the response to them from complex organisations. Derived from management theory, the concept posits that institutions will be slow to respond and adapt to changes in their environment, which in turn will lead to unnecessary costs, superfluous behaviours, design obsolescence, duplication of functions, misplaced objectives and ill-suited planning. 

This syndrome is often more than just a failure to react in a timely or responsive manner. Complex organisations develop a type of bureaucratic inertia where established systems and procedures are resistant to change unless some externality forces them to. Even then, they way the respond is not agile and may often not be what is needed for the adaptive task at hand. The adage about generals always preparing for the last war is an illustration of the concept but the notion extends further. Until a technological or other form of social breakthrough occurs, the organisation is perpetually bound by “tradition” (procedure and usage) and therefore always behind the times. Innovative breakthroughs are more often forced by externalities, not pushed by proactive internal reform within the organisation.

Societal Resilience.

Refers to the ability of human societies, including businesses and economic sectors but extending beyond that, to be adaptable and flexible when it comes to unforeseen, unexpected or sudden events that disrupt their business models and the production chains in which they are located. These can be caused by sudden technological advances, black swan events, political crisis and wars, epidemics and pandemics, natural disasters and other unanticipated phenomena. The term is derived from “Industrial resilience,” which is basically management-speak for changes in processes, procedures and networks caused by external events that require rapid responses via technological advancement and/or diversification of input and output links as well as market substitution, among other things.

In a way, societal resilience, and especially business or industrial resilience, is inversely related to institutional lag. The more resilient a society, industry or social group is, the more bureaucratic inertias can be overcome and institutional lags minimised. Therein lies the problem. Societies and the organisations and demographics that comprise them seek stability, and stability depends on commonly accepted status quos. When something happens that disrupts the whole or part of an institutionalised status quo, the response is often increased resistance to change “in the way things are” rather than flexible adaptability. It is embedded in the human condition so the issue is not trivial in times of systemic change.

It was thought that the Covid pandemic would force industrial resilience upon the global trading community, and indeed, concepts such as “near-shoring,” “friendshoring,” and regional hubs all gained traction in the international system of production, consumption, telecommunications, transportation and commodity and service exchange. The reality was that genuine resilience strategies was adopted by a minority of businesses, with the majority opting, after a period of disruption, to assume a “business as usual” approach and resume their old ways of doing things. This included “just in time” production schemes that worsened the impact of the pandemic in terms of post-recovery demand increases. With little inventory stockpiled while demand was low, business found themselves unable to fill orders quickly, leading to inflationary pressures resultant from demand on limited stock, compounded by the US imposition of tariffs on a wide range of goods from dozens of countries and regional trading blocs. None of this was anticipated by corporate elites once the Covid wave had crested.

Likewise, once the pandemic peaked in terms of deaths, illness and infection rates, many social actors, including political parties, interest groups, community organisations and an assortment of individuals grouped into a variety of grassroots agencies, engaged in revisionist historical interpretations of the pandemic and its underlying causes. Besides theories about Covid’s origins (in a Chinese lab or wet market, among others), there was questioning of whether the disease existed at all and whether vaccines were needed, necessary, useful in fighting the its spread or were part of some Deep State mind control plot. The use of surgical masks as simple front-line defense against airborne infections was even questioned. People were murdered in disputes over mask usage, and an assortment of quacks sprang forth to offer a range of pseudo- or non-scientific solutions such as injecting bleach into the body (advocated by president Trump), horse vaccines and perineum tanning (advocated by assorted alternative medicine adherents and wellness “influencers”).

This reaffirms the axiom that transitional moments such as that involving global systemic change are marked by conflict, not just in the form of rules and norms violations between competing actors such as nation-States and global non-State powers, including the resort to violence in order to settle disputes, but in the human propensity to resist change per se. That is what resilience must focus on: overcoming the innate human tendency to resist change even when it is forced upon us.

One measure that is both a sign of societal resilience and a stop-gap during periods of institutional lag is hedging. Hedging can be both strategic or practical and can be deployed at both levels simultaneously. Diversifying trade partners, seeking alternative sources of information or material inputs, widening exposure to previously unknown contacts, languages, cultures and experiences, experimenting with new ways of doing things are in one way or the other examples of resisting complacency and stagnation by not putting one’s eggs in one basket. Strategic hedging focuses on planning for (and against) long-term events. Tactical hedging focuses on immediate problems.

For example, if the PRC decides to restrict NZ dairy or meat imports because of displeasure with a NZ foreign policy stance, what does NZ do as a contingency plan? Rescind the foreign policy measure that caused Chinese displeasure? Find alternative foreign markets? Open at a lower price scale or subsidise the domestic market for the excess inventory caused by the Chinese bans? Reduce production and ask producers for patience (and reduced profits)? One decision (what to do with the foreign policy stance) is a strategic matter, the answer to which will determine subsequent tactical choices if necessary.

While that is happening industrial resilience will be tested in the export sector, determining whether it is flexible and adaptable enough to weather the dispute and emerge with better plans that cope with future exigencies.

The point of this illustration is to highlight the utility of hedging as a resilience response to crisis, uncertainty and change. That may or may not lead to more durable patterns of behaviour, and that depends on how the inevitable conflicts that arise are resolved and mitigated. Much money and effort has been spent developing sophisticated risk analyses that offer predictive models for myriad of systemic events. That is helpful in framing and avoiding identified problems but it is in the solutions that stem from them where true resilience is found. Given what has been mentioned above, that may be the most daunting project before us.

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Will Israel nuke Iran? Some background.

Regular reader Barbara Matthews asked me in a comment on a previous post about Israeli nukes. I replied on the comment thread on that post but have decided to flesh out the answer and post it here by way of a primer on Israel’s nuclear weapons since many people do not know much about it. Here goes:

Israel is estimated to have around 100-400 nuclear warheads (more likely closer to the lower figure). The throw weights (explosive power) of these warheads is classified but estimated to be variable but relatively low yield (20-300 kiloton (kt), with 1 kiloton=1000 tons of high explosives), along the lines of US and Russian Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile (IRBM) throw weights but far smaller than the megaton (one million tons of high explosive) + throw weights of US and Russian “heavy” strategic warheads. It is believed that most Israeli nukes are of the “tactical” IRBM type rather than strategic in nature.

Israel is not a signatory to the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and is believed to have some of its nuclear weapons technology passed on to it by an Israeli spy in the US government (later imprisoned and deported to Israel) who was part of the Lakam nuclear spy ring that operated from the 1950s that helped apartheid South Africa develop a bomb and test it in 1979 over the South Indian Ocean and which supplied nuclear technology to the Argentine military dictatorship in the 1970s, plus a lot of other covert shenanigans. After years of silence and ambiguity and nebulous statements by previous government officials, Netanyahu has implied in public comments that Israel will use nukes on Iran in specific circumstances because it sees Iran as an existential threat. If so it would be the first “first strike” since Hiroshima and Nagasaki and violate the second strike retaliatory premise of modern nuclear deterrence theory.

Israel has a standard delivery system triad of air, sea and land-launched nuclear weapons. The land leg has the “heaviest” warheads that are mounted on Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) known as Jericho-1 and Jericho-2s that potentially can reach distant adversaries such as North Korea. I do not know but assume that Israel has MIRV (Multiple Re-Entry Vehicle) technologies in its nuclear fleet, presumably for the heavier warhead-bearing platforms like the Jerichos.

Its main nuclear research and development facilities are at Dimona in the Negev desert, which also serves as a civilian power generating facility that, besides the power generation aspect, produces around 20 kg of Plutonium each year as waste that is directed to the weapons program. 5-6kg of Plutonium is needed for a 20 kiloton warhead, so there are constraints in the Israeli weapons production process, especially for larger-yield warheads. By wy of comparison, the Hiroshima bomb had 15 kilotons of throw weight while the Nagasaki bomb had 20-22 kt of explosive power.

The use of Plutonium is interesting for several reasons. First, its is by-product of nuclear energy production so is not enriched uranium such as those used in both civilian energy (<20–usually 3-5 precent– enriched) production and most advanced nuclear weapons programs (90 percent enriched U235). It is also very unstable and dirty when compared to enriched uranium, which means that besides the risk of accidental chain reactions, the radioactive cloud and plume from a detonation will be far more lethal than those produced by more refined nuclear weapon detonations. That means that detonations in the air at any altitude and on the surface will generate plumes that will then drift hundreds of miles traveling on the prevailing winds, contaminating everything. along the way.

In the case of Iran, Israel would presumably use “bunker-busting” deep penetration missiles to destroy Iran’s nuclear stockpiles and delivery platforms widen deep underground. That might minimise or partially contain the fallout contamination that follows such strikes. But Israel has shown little regard for civilian casualties when levelling Gaza, Lebanese neighbourhoods and parts of the West Bank as well as Iran itself, so we cannot discount the possibility that it might use air- or surface-burst weapons, including against civilian targets (these are known as counter-value strikes) as well as “hardened” military targets (known as counter-force strikes).

In my opinion, there is at least a 50-50 chance that Israel will use nukes against Iran if this conflict does not go the way that Netanyahu’s regime wants it to go, especially of the US–yet again– loses interest and withdraws from the conflict as midterm elections approach and GOP political fortunes turn South as commodity prices continue to rise, etc.

If I were to be charitable I would say that unlike the US, which sees Iran as hostile but containable, sort of like North Korea, Israel views Iran as a threat to its very existence. Why? Not because of nukes but because hardliners in Iran have repeatedly uttered serious anti-semitic as well as anti-Zionist rhetoric towards the Jewish state. The former include grotesque stereotypes and caricatures, betraying a profound and twisted hatred of Jews as a people rather than Israel as a nation-State. In light of that Israel wants to eliminate Iran as a functioning State and partition it into various ethnic nationalities in which Persians are just one of many, albeit a dominant group in whatever demographic mosaic is constructed out of the ashes of the Revolutionary Republic. That removes Iran as a threat to Jewish, not just Israel’s existence.

If I were to not be charitable I would say that Bibi and co. just want to degrade but not destroy Iran so as to keep it as a convenient scapegoat and enduring threat that helps them justify their rogue actions and avoid having to account for their own crimes and atrocities. In that perspective, it is the tail that wags the imbecile dog that is the MAGA administration, but that dog is about to turn tail for domestic political reasons in the US and at that point the spectre of Israeli nukes against Iran becomes real.

One other factor must be considered in Israel’s strategic equation to launch such strikes: who will retaliate against Israel in the event that it does engage in the first use of nuclear weapons against Iran, much less retaliate in kind with a nuclear counter-strike? Quite frankly, I do not see anyone being capable or willing to do so.

The “Doomsday Clock” run by the Association of Atomic Scientists already sits at 85 seconds before midnight, the closest it has ever been to nuclear armageddon day, and that was set before the US and Israel launched their war against Iran.

The moment of deadly truth may be fast approaching.

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Regime transition sequencing.

I was reading a recent article in which the author wrote that the US has actually made the transition to democracy in Venezuela more difficult than it could have been by removing Nicolas Maduro and his wife from the country but leaving the rest of his regime intact. In the author’s words, “they took the dictator but left the dictatorship.” He went on to write that the usual order of things is to embark on a political regime transition (presumably to democracy if the starting point is authoritarian) followed by an economic regime transition (say, in simplistic terms, from communism to capitalism) or at least significant economic reform. In Venezuela’s case, the US has pushed for US-investor friendly economic reforms in the extractive industrial sector but left the Bolivarian regime otherwise intact and has not bothered with broader economic reforms that promote market diversification, income redistribution, decreased dependence on primary good exports (including but moving beyond petroleum), and more value-added domestic commodity and service production.

That got me to thinking about one major theme of the first generation regime transition literature of the (late) 1970s-1980s, which focused on the transition from democracy to authoritarianism in Europe, East Asia and Latin America in the 1960s and early 1970s and then the transitions form authoritarianism to democracy in the rest of the 1970s and 1980s. One theme that emerged was the sequence by which regime transitions occurred. We might call it a type of “chicken or egg” question.

Some argued that what was needed first for democracy to obtain was an economic transition from state-centric (e.g., Keynesian welfare or socialist) to free market models, which was believed would promote the civic freedoms needed for democracy to emerge as the corresponding political form (this was grounded in what was known as “modernisation theory,” which was a 1950s-era prescription for overcoming underdevelopment in the “Third World”). That was the “egg” answer, which was used as one justification for the US support for China’s admission into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. As with original modernization theory, the underpinning syllogism proved incorrect.

Instead, both in the PRC and in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) as of the 1990s, communist party leaders engineered the move from a state-controlled command economy marshalled along what might be described as Stalinist or Maoist lines to a state capitalist economy in which investment and production was incrementally opened to private (including foreign) investment while the State controlled overall economic management decision-making and kept a stake in specific productive assets (e.g., telecommunications in both instances).

In effect, capitalism came but democracy did not. In both the PRC and SRV change occurred within the political regime, not of it, regardless of economic change. Communist Parties still control both countries and staff the leadership of the State. Their respective leadership architectures and other partial regimes within the larger whole have been subjected to reforms of various magnitudes, including those deemed required to accommodate the economic changes undertaken by the national political leaderships in question. The same is true, in another variation on the theme, in Singapore under the PAP regime: the overall regime remains and reforms (in Singapore’s case by “liberalising” when it comes to political and civil rights without giving up ultimate authority) while the economy changes (from post-colonial trading to techno-finance capitalism). In other words, rather than a transitional sequence, in some instances economic change can occur under the aegis of a stable political regime (at least if it is authoritarian).

Others have disagreed with the economic–>political change thesis, noting that political regime change was required before economic regime change could happen because economic policy is ultimately a political choice made by regime leaders. This is the “chicken” answer. The 1948 Chinese, 1959 Cuban and 1979 Nicaraguan revolutions are considered emblematic in this regard.

In both types of sequence, the key issue is one of parametric change: the boundaries of political and economic life are fundamentally altered as a result of the major institutional changes that define regime transition as a social phenomenon no matter which way the chain of causality proceeds.

Among other subtopics, one part of the debate about regime transitions in the 1980s centred on the preferred “regime change sequence” leading to democratisation. It was a simple, perhaps crude measure, but it had the virtue of forcing scholars and policy practitioners to address the linkage between political change and economic development and reform rather than just one or the other. It also broadened the “chicken or egg” question with regard to the linkage between economic development and political regimes, Was there a correlation or causal relationship between specific regime types and certain levels of development? If so, in which direction and of what specific type in both categories? Capitalist to socialist, socialist to capitalist or somewhere in between? Authoritarian to democratic or democratic to authoritarian and if the latter, what type of authoritarian? The possibilities of political-economic regime change are not as straight forward as might seem at first glance.

There is a third type of regime change that is also theoretically possible> It is simultaneous rather than sequential in nature. This is a situation where economic and political regime change occurred simultaneously, as part and parcel of the same transitional dynamic. This alternative was particularly of interest to students of the fall of the USSR and Eastern bloc regimes grouped in the Warsaw Pact as well as of the revolutionary transitions such as that of Nicaragua and Iran in 1979. In the former the hope was they would transition to both democracy and capitalism in short periods of time. In the latter the expectation was that with revolutionary overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship, socialism as an economic model could be rapidly imposed. The 1979 Iranian revolution represented a variant on that model, with many hoping that the post-Reza Pahlavi regime would be a theocratic democracy wedded to an Islamic market economy rooted in traditional Bazaari social relations of production.

Sadly, in both instances the 1979 revolutions eventually brought economic changes, but under a different type of authoritarianism than what existed before rather than the democracy that was promised. This may have been partially a product of the hostile reaction and pressure placed on the revolutionary regimes by the US and other Western states, but the fact is that be they simultaneous or sequential, the 1979 revolutionary regimes delivered something different than what was hoped (and fought) for.

The simultaneous transition possibility was also considered in the rise of Hugo Chavez and Bolivarianism in Venezuela in 1979 via electoral means, which presumably would have paved the way for a peaceful revolutionary change towards popular democracy and socialism, much in the way hope was previously raised along the same lines by the 1970 election of Salvador Allende in Chile. Alas, neither expectation was met: Allende was overthrown and killed in 1973 by a US-backed military coup d’état supported by rightwing forces while Chavez and his successor Maduro descended into authoritarian-kleptocratic rule culminating in the US military kidnapping of the Venezuelan leader in January of this year. As the author mentioned at the beginning of this post noted, the Venezuelan political leader has been forcibly removed but the regime has not.

As for former Soviet states, the record is very mixed. Russia has reverted to authoritarianism with a state capitalist/oligarchical hybrid economic model grounded in fossil fuel extraction and modernised Soviet-era industrial production.. Some former Warsaw Pact states have gone both democratic and (mostly) market capitalist. Others have gone autocratic and state capitalist/kleptocratic. Some have gravitated towards the European Union and even NATO. Others have remained within the Russian orbit on both political and economic grounds. This is especially true for Central Asian former Soviet republics (the so-called “Stans”), which have not undergone appreciable political regime change except to use elections as legitimation devices while economic control of extraction-based primary good production remains in the hands of nepotistic political elites and politically-connected interests.

It can be argued that simultaneous regime transitions cannot happen simply because of the turmoil and complexities involved in attempting to manage profound political and economic changes all at once. The cases cited above support that view regardless of what eventuated after the old political regime was displaced or the economic model substantially altered. But the issue of transitional sequencing remains an important one, not just conceptually but also as a matter of policy practice, especially if the goal is to restore or revive democratic governance.

As an example, my stay in the Pentagon in the early 1990s was based on a successful fellowship application that was centred on a proposal on how to democratise civil-military relations in post-authoritarian Latin America. I had noticed the difficulty with which new civilian elected governments were coping with entrenched authoritarian traditions in the (sometimes Prussian) military cultures of several Latin American nations, and so outlined in the fellowship proposal ways in which US non-lethal military aid, weapons sales and peer-to-peer training programs, coupled with legal and normative changes to the institutional relationships between the armed forces and civilian government, might help “democratise” the relations between political leaders and the military hierarchies of the time.

This was just one part of the political regime transition from dictatorship to democracy in that region–what was called “partial regime change,” where the sum of a number of reforms in the constituent parts of an electoral democracy (civil rights, election procedures, interest group intermediation systems, inter-agency accountability, policing authority, budget-setting agendas, federal-state relations, and even the relationship between civilian and military authorities)–were reformed, reconstituted or revitalised with the purpose being to provide institutional underpinnings that would support, then sustain and eventually reproduce democratic governance structures.

Again, the results were mixed but for the most part I am pleased to see that in places like Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay, the changes that my colleagues and I proposed seem to have stuck.

Getting back to the subject of Venezuela and now the attempt at forced regime change by the US in Iran, the folly of the move becomes clearer (as if it was not already). Not only were the “decapitation” strikes simply instances of state-sanctioned murder (by proxy, since the Israelis did the actual bombing of targeted leaders like the Ayatollah Khamenei), the Islamic regime and its constituent partial regimes remain intact, albeit with a stronger military influence replacing a weakened clerical caste headed by Khamenei’s badly injured son Mojtaba (something that is more the result of Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) dissatisfaction with the cleric’s enforcement of theocratic social policy prior to the US/Israeli attacks rather than the US/Israeli strikes themselves). If anything, what political regime change might be underway is, by several accounts, one from a theocratic to a military-dominated regime, conveniently reinforced by the foreign aggression waged upon Iranian society.

Lines of succession, promotion, policy and operational authority remain in place. So do the underlying civic structures, including the Bazaari social networks that even if now in opposition to most of the hard-line elements in the regime, remain fiercely anti-Western and Persian nationalist in orientation. In other words, the partial regime mosaic that when taken together constitutes the institutional edifice of the Islamic regime continues in place and functioning. Like in Venezuela, some former leaders are gone (dead) but the regime remains even as it evolves from within. Nor has the economy changed–although porous sanctions and the Revolutionary Guard toll booth blockade of the Hormuz Straits has strengthened the Islamic Republic regime’s control over it.

In effect, we have seen leadership change without regime change, little significant economic change other than a shift in beneficiaries in the Venezuelan case, and no real transitional sequence at all. This demonstrates the shallowness of what passes in the US for strategic thinking, comparative political analysis and foreign country expertise, to say nothing of the ahistorical ignorance of the MAGA elites in and outside of government who enable and support US foreign adventurism under Trump.

In fact, it might do well for scholars, politicians and economic interests alike to return to that literature on authoritarian regime demise to develop a US-focused idiosyncratic conceptual and practical framework for studying the late stage dynamics of the second MAGA administration. Because it is quite feasible that its demise will more resemble that of dictatorial collapse rather than that of democratic decline even if certain electoral trappings and procedural niceties cloak the entire process. The question for the US then is: if the transitional sequence begins with political change away from MAGA, will it a) result in its elimination from political society? and b) what if any economic and other partial regime reforms will come from the anti-MAGA political change if it occurs?

Without both, regime (or at least government) change in the US away from what exists today will not happen. Depending on one’s perspective, that may or may not be a good thing.

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Rumble in a strategic jumble.

In boxing terms, Iran is doing an Ali rope-a-dope defense against the US. Strategically, the US, like Foreman, sought the fight in order to burnish its fearsome (some might say brutish or thuggish) reputation. In return, Iran had to take the fight because it came to it as a matter of reputation, honor and physical defense. For one. the fight was an (ill-advised and ill-conceived) opportunity; for the other, it is existential.

Theoretically a mismatch between a much more powerful state and a far weaker adversary, at a tactical level the conflict has turned into an asymmetrical war of attrition. Asymmetrical because it is not just about weapons capabilities but also about political and social will and comparative timetables. The US has midterm elections, domestic economic factors and the global system of trade to consider and operates on chronological calendar-defined notions of political, military and economic time. The Iranians have their existence to consider and operate on cloud time, not because they are dreamy but because like the movement of clouds, they operate with a different, far slower and longer conceptions of temporal movement. The US initially said that it would win in 6 or so weeks, and because that time frame has now been reached without a win, it has rushed to seek a means of saving face and going home–or even to the status quo ante. It will not achieve the latter but will have to do the former sooner or later. This is an own-goal that makes W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq look like strategic genius.

Saving face will be hard to do, so the MAGA administration may decide to double down and as Trump suggested a few days ago, turn the conflict into a religious civilisational war of annihilation with apocalyptic objectives. That may be delusional, but given what else has happened with the Trump 2.0 administration it is no longer in the realm of the impossible save for the intervention of the global community. Meanwhile, the Iranians have expected and prepared for as much.

For the moment the Iranians are doing the rope-a-dope, Middle Eastern style. Absorbing blows, shifting its centre of gravity, counter-punching just enough to stay in the fight–nimble, agile and patient. Under Trump and Hegseth the US is a lumbering Foreman looking for a knockout but, because it has no strategic rationale, instead is exhausting itself politically/diplomatically while doing so. Meanwhile, after the initial US/Israeli onslaught, Iran is recovering, conserving its resources, digging (further) in and keeping its powder dry for the next rounds.

The difference with the original Ali-Foreman bout is that Iran will not eventually counter-punch a knockout blow, but will force the US to retreat, reduce its barrages, stumble about seeking a different type of military opening, hope for a draw and/or quit. The apocalypse scenario will only delay and raise the costs of the eventual stalemate, even if Israel or the US decide to abandon all rationality and exercise their nuclear options against what still remains a non-nuclear weapons state. Then yes, armageddon may come.

Short of that, the post-fight scenarios will be negative for both aggressors as well. Neither the US or Israel will have the eyes and ears inside of Iran that they once had, Iran will still have its maritime toll system in the straits of Hormuz (basically a pay to play scheme in order to guarantee safe passage), will still have weapons and U235 stockpiles hidden away, and former US and Israeli allies and clients will re-calibrate their relationships with both while the world trade systems adjusts away from Western-centric financing, insuring and perhaps fossil fuel dependency itself (to include derivatives such as plastics and fertiliser as well as non-renewable energy supplies). As others have written, the ultimate irony is that Iran may well come out of this strengthened and the global of system of trade less US-dependent than they were before the preventative US/Israel wars of preventative aggression were launched against the Persian nation-State.

Think of it this way: the Arab oligarchies that thought that they sat safely under the US security umbrella now are being bombed by Iran because they allow the US to attack Iran from bases on their soil. Yet they are too afraid to counter-attack Iran because they fear the implications of a wider regional war on their material fortunes. NATO has now seen what the US security guarantee looks like in practice, and with Trump ranting about quitting the alliance and taking Greenland (while appeasing Putin with regard to Ukraine), they see what the future holds if they persist in trying to accomodate the bully. As for Taiwan and its US security guarantee–may the goddess protect them. Meanwhile, other Great Powers or Great Power wanna-be’s bide their time…

Getting back to the original boxing analogy, this juror’s score is TKO or win by points for the Iranians. Someone needs to tell the self-proclaimed champ that it is time to retire.

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An analogy and an axiom.

Some words to the wise.

Analogy: Trump’s war against Iran might be the geopolitical equivalent of Custer’s last stand at Little Big Horn. Built on arrogance born of easy bullying in lesser conflicts, he has overestimated his capabilities and grossly underestimated his opponent. Iran may be Trump’s Sitting Bull, but the analogy holds only if Custer had a malevolent manipulator like Netanyahu leading him to his ignominious comeuppance.

Axiom: History shows that the side that prevails in war is not always the one that can deliver greater punishment to the adversary but the one that can absorb the most punishment and keep on fighting. Superior weapons do not always overcome determination and will.

Remember that “asymmetrical warfare” does not only refer to differences in weapons capabilities, kinetic mass and quality of forces brought into battle. It also refers to the motives and commitment that adversaries bring to the fight.

The US is an instant gratification, short attention span culture with a low social pain threshold and technology fetish, especially when it comes to gadgets, weapons and war-fighting (which feeds into the other cultural traits). Iran is the birthplace and seat of a 6000 year old Persian culture that invented chess and carpet weaving. Both of these endeavors require consummate patience, perseverance, imagination, complex multidimensional thought and extended foresight that sees the “play” several moves ahead of the current moment. At the behest of an international pariah client-state partner unable to “go it alone,” the US has launched an opportunistic expeditionary war of aggression against Iran during a midterm election year. Iran is fighting an existential defensive war of attrition in and from its ancestral homeland against the US and its regional (including Arab) allies, including the pariah state.

Given these differences, the axiom could well explain the analogy.