The 30% solution — when war without end ends: Spengler

[unhappycamper]

http://atimes.com/2016/03/the-30-solution-when-war-without-end-ends-spengler/

The 30% solution — when war without end ends: Spengler
By David P. Goldman on March 13, 2016

During the Cold War, the assumption that nations are rational actors dominated foreign policy research, and with good reason: the United States and the Soviet Union pursued their rivalry by rational means. Mathematical simulation provided baseline scenarios for conflict management. Today, the emergence of militant Islam as a major (and perhaps the most important) strategic threat to the United States challenges the old assumption of rationality. Where this assumption prevails, as in the effort to bring Iran into the strategic architecture of Western Asia, it is deeply controversial.



Cold War planners had the benefit of an extensive body of academic work and a consensus that embraced the majority of practitioners. Today, academic research into the prospective behavior of actors with limited rationality is rare. Policymakers are forced back to guesswork about practical issues, for example, the prospect of supporting “moderate” Islamists against less-moderate Islamists. Public debate over pressing issues is highly colored by ideological rhetoric.

Analyzing irrational impulses in the context of real-world events is an inherently contradictory exercise. Paranoid schizophrenics may act with great rationality in the service of an irrational delusion. Distinguishing an irrational impulse from the rational means placed at its service requires highly subjective judgments. When an irrational impulse is combined with irrational leadership (for example, Adolf Hitler’s personal conduct of the war in the Eastern Front), we encounter yet another order of complexity. I have argued that Franz Rosenzweig’s Existentialist sociology of religion provides indispensable insights into this phenomena.[ii]

Nonetheless, the foreign policy failures of the United States and its coalition partners in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and elsewhere during the past fifteen years have taught us that rationality is overrated. We observe behavior on the part of combatants that appears suicidal. Here some historical examples provide a helpful starting point. We encounter in many of the great conflicts of the past elements of irrationality, including overtly suicidal actions, which provide insights into the kind of conflicts that have emerged during the past two decades and are likely to continue through the rest of the present century. A fresh look at great conflicts of the past should provide a corrective to our past preoccupation with rationality.

[bemildred]

1. One of Spengler's better efforts.

People pay far too little attention to the effects of demographics. There is an assumption that great leaders shape history. The problem is very few are great leaders, and the rest get shaped, rather than do the shaping. Or you get people like the Clinton's or Bush the Lesser or Erdogan who have great effect, but not the effect they set out to do. They prance around for a while and make a lot of people miserable and then they and their works get swept away. Dipshits like Sykes-Picot are the norm, not the exception.

[malthaussen]

2. Funnily enough, the ones most likely to promote the "great leaders" shtick...

... are the ones who aspire to be leaders. Unfortunately, since the media are most attracted to the simplicity of personality politics, they reinforce this approach, which has led us, willy-nilly, to Mr Donald Trump. Not that Trump is the first demagogue to run for President of the United States (nor the first narcissist).

The problem with "rationality" is that it presupposes we are acting rationally, whereas in some instances one might reasonably wonder if we are not, rather, the selfsame paranoid schizophrenics referenced in the article. It can lead to complications: for example, in the run-up to the first Iraqi war, I was constantly struck by how our foreign policy continued to focus on warnings and admonishments to the Iraqis that "they didn't understand" how devastating a war would be for their country -- a demonstration that we thought they were acting "irrationally." Of course, their reaction was "do you feel lucky?" which gave us the required excuse to annihilate their army (although the first time, we didn't execute their leader and occupy their country). The problem with this kind of "irrationality" is that it doesn't leave a lot of room for difference of opinion: it is as though supporters of Mrs Clinton were to accuse supporters of Mr Sanders of irrationality, because he "clearly" had no chance to win the nomination. (And of course, they do; and of course, he may not)

Which is why I ultimately define war as killing people until they do what we want them to do. We might claim it is killing them (or otherwise leaning on them) until they act "rationally," but it appears that they do not always have the same tidy little definition of what constitutes rationality as we do. Gee, one might even go so far as to say that it is strikingly irrational to expect others to define rationality as we do.

-- Mal

[bemildred]

3. I think the notion that people are rational is unsupported by the evidence.

Most of the time when somebody calls somebody else nuts, what they mean is they don't understand them, and since they are correct, the other guy must be wrong. And usually that means they disagree about the premises they claim to reason from.

But let's face it, we are big apes, ape-like creatures if you prefer, with all the mammalian baggage and simian social impulses that go with it. Rational my ass.

[malthaussen]

4. I've always thought MAD was only a valid doctrine...

... so long as everybody subscribed to it. A form of agreed rules within which unfriendly governments could manoeuver with reasonable expectation of being understood. Unfortunately, that only works when operating within the same rhetorical tradition. When not, it is easy for signals to be misinterpreted. And then we have the media, who are sure to scream blue murder whenever a move is made in the dance of saber-rattling and posturing that constitutes foreign affairs. And a few inside practitioners who will exploit this to further their own agendas, or just as a way of saying "look at me!"

-- Mal

[bemildred]

5. Any reason not to blow up the planet is good, in my opinion.

Talk about irrational. I remember when I first realized that our leaders were seriously pursuiing first strike capability. That's when I knew they were all nuts.

[malthaussen]

6. As good old General Buck Turgidson said...

"...no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops."

-- Mal

[Baobab]

8. he was really wrong, billions would be killed because of the rise in food prices alone, mostly child

ren.

People do horrible things when there is no food. unspeakably horrible. Hunger drives people crazy.

[bemildred]

9. If we are lucky, a few thousand might continue the species in miserable conditions.

That based on the assumption that there would remains places on the planet that would remain inhabitable and provide enough food.

Oxygen will be a problem in the short run because of methane, hard to say how that will go, because we don't really know how much methane will come out when it heats up. It oxydizes pretty quickly. So you can't just go up, you have to stay low to breathe. So high latitude and low altitude is the idea, but with rising seas what high altitude is is uncertain too. Hill country should be good.

[Baobab]

18. Atmosphere might get blasted out into space and if it exceeds escape velocity

if it exceeds escape velocity

it wont be coming back.

That could pose problems.

That would be with big bombs, not small ones. Small bombs are much better in that respect.

They just turn people into vapor.

[Baobab]

7. At some point during the 1980s they discovered all their estimates of fire storms in cities were all

WAY TOO LOW.

in other words, cities would become one huge toxic fire storm a lot like 9-11 but much much bigger.. making any hope of survival in them zero and covering the entire country and possibly the world with toxic dust (discovered in 2010- such dust contains carbon nanotubes (CNTs) which are more toxic to breathe than asbestos..they transmigrate through the body causing massive systemic inflammation and clog up the lymphatic system causing a condition called mesothelioma..

Also, both the US and Russia had their own wake up calls when each, through making a small math error had a bomb go off that was much more powerful than they expected. Such explosions run the risk of being so strong that they would propel a significantly large amount of our atmosphere up and out into space exceeding earth's escape velocity, and rendering the planet unlivable (for us at least) due to lack of remaining air.

[bemildred]

10. And that's the other option, global winter, tectonic destabilization, tsunamis, etc.

And right now we are pretty far from stable to begin with, climate-wise, perhaps it would be the last straw. That's the thing about chaotic systems, you just don't know.

[Baobab]

11. Google Carrington loss of the ultimate heat sink

for a terrifying scenario that could happen at any time

[bemildred]

12. That appears to be a publicity article for a computer software model for nuclear cooling? nt

[bemildred]

13. Ah, I see what you are talking about. Core meltdown.

They don't even know where the core is, do they? It went "down"?

[Baobab]

14. Well, do you mean in Fukushima? That is kind of what they do

Because of gravity and intense heat and those elements being heavy.

But Carrington refers to the 1859 solar storm coronal mass ejection event so I was trying to say that if we should have another solar storm like the one that narrowly missed us in 2012, we would have a bunch of nuclear melt down s at the same time all around the planet.

A sort of melt down-in.

[bemildred]

15. Ah yes, all the electronic shit we put in everything.

Yes, that could be upsetting. I had read of that 1859 event recently, but had not looked into it yet. An asteroid seems more direct, but I suppose the sun is a much bigger threat.

The PDFs I found were about that computer model and Fukushima.

[Baobab]

16. Resilientsocieties.org

or resilientsociety.org

Petition for rulemaking is/are the one(s)

One in eight chance in any decade.

If it happens, governments will go south.

Literally.

[bemildred]

17. Ah, these guys:

http://www.resilientsocieties.org/

Good idea. Next time just post the link.