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Thanks for the advice! I’ve purchased one of these books and will start giving it a go (again).
I remember doing this in college – specifically I remember how tedious it got after a while. Hopefully this time will be better.
As both an example you did not cite, and a possible explanation, I offer up the University of Michigan.
It deeply pains me to say this, as a graduate of *the* Ohio State University, but whether in academics, networks, or the success of its graduates, in short, in every relevant aspect save college sports, *the* Ohio State University cannot possibly hold a candle to the University of Michigan. In my past career as a computer scientist, I always noticed without fail that an overwhelming number of capable engineers and scientists came from one of the following schools: elite private schools such as CalTech, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and MIT, the University of California system, The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which may be rightly called the cradle of the computing revolution…and for some reason, the University of Michigan.
I have no direct experience with the computer science, electrical engineering, and physics programs at the University of Michigan that produced so many of my colleagues. I do not know why a girl I was once quite fond of ascended the brightest heaven of medicine from the port of Michigan Medicine. I am not familiar with how the University of Michigan’s law school became one of American law’s “T14”. But I *do* know that among Midwestern state flagship universities – actually among all state flagships outside of the West Coast and the Northeast, the University of Michigan, and only a tiny number of other schools stand in the first rank. I am sure that the exceptionality of Michigan must stem at least in part from this.
@Ethan
Absolutely, I would actually agree with all the counterpoints you raise to the specific arguments I relayed, but I also wanted to clarify that in the spirit of the OP, that my anecdote isn’t meant as an explication per se of “why might China not use nuclear weapons” but “why would a very senior USG official with deep knowledge of China consider the idea so viscerally unspeakable.” While I may not have been totally clear in conveying this, my main point was that for senior USG officials, the idea that China could escalate to nuclear weapons is viscerally horrifying, so much so that it might motivate them to reach for any plausible reason at hand (US soldiers in Mongolia is a bit out there, to say the least) to persuade themselves that *they could never*. And it’s the framing for “why could they never consider this” which leapt out to me. Among normies, the answer typically is some variant of “because then we would escalate to 5000 nukes fired and all of humanity would perish” – also silly, but for more basic reasons.
For a senior career USG official, the reason is the terrifying possibility that all their works would turn to ashes; the destruction of the conviction that anyone could be so desperate as to flip the table on the world order in such a way. It comes from a very different place than a normie’s understanding of nuclear use calculation, such as it is, or for that matter, an outside of the establishment but well informed individual’s understanding of nuclear use calculation.
On first reading this post back in June, my initial reaction was that I thought your sociology of technology was almost entirely right, particularly the multi-generational evolution of technology. But as someone who formerly was a federal government tech worker in natsec, what struck me was how at least within the US federal government, every generation is represented, and not stratified by generation either; that is to say, among new hires in their 20s and 30s, you actually will encounter representatives of all four generations in substantial numbers (nor do I think it is much different in private sector tech). In fact, I would actually argue that while new generations of tech have come, no generation of tech has really passed away, and individual worlds of tech remain the same.
Generation 1 is easy – mathematicians and military researchers’ natural habitat very much is the ecosystem of defense contractors and research labs which constitutes the modern military industrial complex. In 1958, this was “the only game in town” so to speak, especially for some narrow specialties such as computers and aerospace – if you knew engineers or scientists in those fields, I’d say there was a better than 50% chance that they held a security clearance or at the very least, worked on behalf of the Department of Defense in some capacity. Yet if you were to browse StackExchange or tech Twitter or /r/aerospace, you would find almost no regular tweeters (ie not Lockheed Martin’s official twitter) who own up to this background. There are two reasons: firstly, people from these backgrounds are outright forbidden from talking about large parts of their work (proprietary or classified parts), and strongly discouraged from chatting even about the unclassified or non-proprietary parts. One would very reasonably conclude that they formed a small part of the engineering sector. This conclusion would be wrong – large defense contractors and research laboratories were and remain massive employers of engineers – Raytheon employs somewhere on the order of 60% more more people than Google (post-recent tech layoffs it may be as much as twice as many). NSA for the vast majority of its history was far and away the largest employer of mathematicians, until it lost this title to Google – but unlike Google mathematicians, NSA mathematicians notably are employed doing actual math. Within the world of Raytheon, one would correctly assume that the tech industry of the 50s never really departed.
One might think that Generation 2, the counter-cultural hippies, would be less represented within natsec tech relative to outside tech (where they are many), and you would be right. Overall, I would say that the second generation is the branch which has very much withered the most relative to their peak era – a casualty of the centralizing powers of the Internet and Big Tech I suppose. Yet even then, you will still find many counter-cultural anti-establishment activists within all layers of tech, the rise of the cryptocurrency community is very much a resurgence of the anti-establishmentarians. Analogously to the original hippies, they “saw their dreams of network technology utopia die hard, and sought to use network technology (again) to resurrect them.” But while counter-cultural hippies are not widely represented in natsec tech, they are not *nonexistent*; I have met both left and right anarchists employed in the civil service, and it is somewhat strange how the federal government seems to attract its share of libertarian ideologues seeking to burn it all down (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/13/the-surreal-case-of-a-cia-hackers-revenge, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden).
Though I think it is correct to say that an interest in robotics or tinkering with computers no longer is cause for social alienation in high school and university, you still very much can distinguish the true neurodivergent tinkerers who defined Generation 3 from the careerists who dominate Generation 4. It will perhaps come as a surprise to no one that many tech workers in the government share Generation 4’s preoccupation with tech employment as a source of social status and a comfortable upper middle class life, but the percentage of tinkerers employed in tech, either within or outside government, does not strike me as much changed from the apparent percentage of the 80s/90s (of course I was not alive to witness the tech industry of the 80s and too young in the 90s). I have long thought that propensity for tinkering probably reflects a kind of autism which is prevalent among tech workers and which attracts one to mechanical problems.
Overall, the main point I have been driving towards is that the existence of a hegemonic tech culture is somewhat overstated, relative to the many subcultures that inhabit tech. Within General Dynamics, the first generation never passed away; the white collared careerists of IBM actually service a market for mainframes larger than it ever has been. The relative strength of these subcultures in the wider overculture waxes and wanes; I do not think 2023 would be kind to the Edward Tellers of the world, but there remain many Edward Tellers, who continue to inhabit the same tech subculture prior generations inhabited.
As someone who currently is a US federal government employee; I would like to offer the viewpoint of someone speaking from “within the deep state” so to speak on the reticence of natsec hands to ponder the possibility of a Taiwan contingency going nuclear.
Firstly, some background: when I started my career in government, my job was unambiguously that of an easily substitutable tech worker bee, which is to say, I was far from any kind of policy or decision-making. However, by happenstance and opportunity, in late 2021 I changed to a job which was quite different in character. While I’m still overall fairly junior, my current job gives me significantly greater visibility into the decisionmaking process of the NSC – quite a lot of my day to day work now involves drafting analysis and talking points for discussions which occur at the sub-IPC and IPC (interagency policy committee – essentially the foundational discussion forum for NSC) level. It was in this context that I happened to have a very revealing conversation with someone who works at the same level.
A bit more background: all NSC directors, by the nature of their position, are effectively political appointees and policymakers. So for directors and senior directors at the sub-IPC or IPC level, their job is essentially to vacuum up information delivered through briefings and responses to questions they might have, and then propose topics for discussion by representatives of departments and agencies during sub-IPCs and IPCs, which they chair, set the agenda for, and steer discussion during, which in turn direct the government to do things. To make this job easier, they often are essentially “paired” to a representative from one of ODNI’s national intelligence managers (NIM) who usually have a portfolio for some function or region (eg NIM-Aviation manages intelligence on aviation topics, NIM-East Asia on East Asian topics, etc. and individual mission managers at a NIM usually have their own sub-specialties, eg the China lead for NIM-Aviation, the military lead for NIM-East Asia, etc.). You can think of the relationship as similar to that of Sir Humphrey Appleby to Jim Hacker – the permanent civil servant whose job is to shape the worldview of the political appointee by informing him about what is happening, suggesting good ideas to him, and discouraging bad ideas – Sir Humphrey in turn has considerably less important flunkies and analysts (such as myself) to tell him what is happening in the world, because he is too busy managing Minister Hacker. Someone in this job specifically will invariably be fairly senior, be considered a subject matter expert in his field and region, and have comparable influence in directing policy as an actual NSC director (which is actually not all that much, probably in the top 1000 but not the top 100, but still quite a lot more than the rest of USG). The visibility into affairs of state is somewhat greater: as a mission manager, you can reasonably expect to delivered agendas and readouts for all Deputies Committee meetings relevant to your portfolio (which is to say, the point where one starts to accumulate significant actual power to bind and loose USG), and the sub-IPC/IPC forums do tend to fulfill a substantial role as ideas shops for the Deputies.
So anyhow, the point I’m making is that it was in this context that I happened to have an informal (unclassified) conversation about Taiwan nuclear risk (not long after one of the monthly zoom calls where nukes came up actually) with the NIM mission manager I work with, someone who has spent his entire career since the early 90s working on China topics, someone who very much is plugged into the interagency on China topics. He is not, I want to emphasize, ignorant, or an obstructive bureaucrat. He is fluent in Mandarin. He has spent a significant part of his life in Taiwan, and a large percentage of his extended family lives in and is from Taiwan. He fully understands the stakes at play here. There are a couple of moderately significant US-China diplomatic events from the past 15 years for which he was the primary actor on the USG side. I do not count him as one who takes either the risk of a Taiwan contingency or its escalation into nuclear warfare lightly, but I think his (paraphrased, since I write from memory) response, and more critically, the way in which he related it, usefully illustrates how the decisionmaking level of USG thinks about Taiwan nuclear risk.
[tone here generally authoritative, speaking with straightforward confidence]
W______, this is something which I do not think China would ever dare do. Do you remember the Lin Biao incident, how for the first twenty years of the PRC, Lin Biao was Mao’s right-hand man, his name was printed next to Mao’s in every Little Red Book, everyone in China had to praise him almost as much as Mao? But then he had to flee to Russia, because he lost the political battle, and the Party had to explain why someone who Mao had put so much trust in had betrayed China, and attempted to defect? There was a *massive* crisis of confidence, it discredited the Party. There was a direct line from the loss of faith from the Lin Biao incident to the Party’s crisis in 76 and 89.If China were to nuke Taiwan to accomplish their reunification, it would have the same result. The Party has spent decades telling their people that they will reunify their motherland, that accomplishing reunification will validate every tenet of Chinese nationalism, that in doing so they are making themselves and their Taiwanese comrades whole again. How can they destroy all that by touching off a nuke? If China had to touch off a nuke to reunify Taiwan, then we would have no reason to hold back anymore. We would use every instrument of national power available to us to communicate to the Chinese government “your government did this, it killed millions of your fellow Chinese to try to undo its total failure, everything they told you about how unification would go was a lie.” It would be impossible to hide from the Chinese people. For the Chinese people to confront this would create a crisis of Chinese governance similar to that of 76 and 89. And we would communicate that if they do this, we are going to give them that.
[tone here became significantly more emotive, had the sense of deep unsettledness]
The Chinese government also has to know that if they need to use a nuclear weapon to win in Taiwan that they would lose the post-war settlement. Every country in Asia would be totally horrified by it, from our close allies in Korea and Japan to the fencesitters in Vietnam and Indonesia. Do they want to see an Asian NATO come into being? We’ll bring everyone into it – Japan, Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Mongolia – do they want to see US soldiers in Mongolia, that can happen! Everyone will know that by doing this they would have made themselves the enemies of the rest of humanity, that no reunification could possibly be worth this price.As much as possible, I’ve tried to reflect this response verbatim, while avoiding any stylistic flourish or assumption on my part. The Lin Biao comparison, the assertion that USG would consider all restraints lifted after nuclear use, and statements like Mongolia joining Asian NATO are essentially taken verbatim – those parts in particular stood out to me.
Should this be taken as a direct statement of policy? No, definitely, absolutely not. This was a literal hallway conversation, a visceral reaction from someone who has spent a lifetime in government marinating in China topics with deep personal connections to Taiwan. But the major conclusions I think are those that senior USG China hands would probably directly reach for in response to this topic.
– China would never dare use a nuclear weapon to reverse failure in Taiwan
– Because they have to know that even if it lets them gain Taiwan, our direct response and the international reaction we would marshal would be totally destructive to their international standing
– so much so that it would put the safety of the Party’s rule over China in question, both due to organic domestic factors and the strength of our direct response
– and knowing this, and knowing that we would *communicate* this to them, they could never even think of doing this.Unpacking this a bit further, it is not hard to see the central thread which unifies this conviction – China *would never dare*. They can’t use this absolute weapon, because even if there is no global thermonuclear war, they would be the real losers, no other country can ever forgive someone who uses this absolute weapon, the consolation prize of Taiwan could never be worth what comes after, and we would make sure of it, because the US can never recover from letting someone use this absolute weapon and get away with it.
As the suggester, I think the issue of issue knowledge is a fair point. While I’m by no means deeply attached to this topic, I was curious if you would be more comfortable with setting a Japan-centric topic if I could invite a guest (not a Patreon subscriber) who I would feel confident in asserting has fairly good knowledge of Japanese domestic politics who would be able to frame any discussions surrounding Japan’s role in a wider East Asia geopolitics sense (where for whatever it’s worth, I think your level of issue knowledge is extremely high). The person I would like to invite is a coworker of mine (who also works in national security) who lived in Japan for a significant period of time, still has significant personal connections and is consequently fairly plugged into domestic Japanese politics, and I understand to be fluent in Japanese. Plus I think by dint of her job and interests, she would greatly benefit from joining the Scholars Stage community.
Naturally, I think ultimately choice of topic is your prerogative but this particular topic is one in which I would be greatly interested in hearing more of your analysis, views, and insight.
A bit of an anecdotal response:
For background, I currently work in a DC-area office within what’s sometimes termed the national security complex. This office is split about 50-50 between government employees/active duty members of the military and government contractors. Most (though not all) of the government employees graduated from a four-year university, either directly after graduating from high school, or via the GI bill after discharging from the military; the exception is a veteran who joined the military out of high school, became a government employee, and did not attend a four year college. The active duty members of the military are all commissioned officers, mostly at the O-3/O-4 level. Nearly all of the government contractors served in the military at some point, and a large majority of them enlisted directly out of high school (some on the other hand were formerly commissioned officers and presumably attended a four-year institution of some kind). A large majority of the contractor enlisted veterans did not attend a four year university and do not have a four year college degree (though several do), while all of the non-veteran contractors have a four year degree. All told, the office is split about 50-50 by gender, but the civilian/active duty military side of the house’s breakdown has a relatively large percentage of women, while a large majority of the contractor side is men. As a general rule of thumb, it is safe to assume that the contractors tend to earn more money than the government employees/contractors, but are much less likely to advance into positions of influence (the one exception is the project manager for the contracting company).
I use the people in my office as a small pool that yields up useful illustrative examples, but as near as I an tell most of the points I’m making below generalize to my broader professional and social circle (the two overlap a remarkable amount). They may not generalize to the wider population of gamers or people.
So with all that having been said:
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The women in my office, by and large, don’t play video games at all. This is true agnostic to all the other backgrounds I mentioned, including job category (active duty military, government employee, or contractor), educational background, veteran status, race, age, and income. Nearly all of the men in my office play video games at least casually, a few (myself included) are very active gamers. I do know a fair number of women outside this office who game, including some I would class as “very active gamers” but the gender lopside persists and my read is that gaming as a whole is not too different. In discussing the class and other demographic divides in gaming, this trend is probably more prominent than any other divide*.
Nevertheless, I think it is significant. Once, my supervisor, who is a middle aged woman who does not game at all, asked me how it was I came to acquire a near-encyclopedic knowledge of world geography. I had amazed her, and actually nearly all of my other coworkers, by off-handedly and without consulting references identifying the capital of Carinthia as being Klagenfurt. I simply explained it as “I play map games.” The men in the office mostly understood that immediately as meaning “I play those boring strategy games where you stare at a map and manage a country or whatever.” She (a senior civil servant with over twenty years of experience in national security, fluent in multiple languages, and with a near-instinctive understanding of the national security bureaucracy) understood this to mean “I play those browser/pub games where you look at a map and try to guess where a city name is based on how it sounds.”
*during the GamerGate era, this divide was a topic of great significance in popular culture. One of the central claims of anti-Gamergaters was that this divide is mostly driven by an unwelcoming culture in the gaming community of of male chauvinism that sometimes verges into outright misogyny. While I was not a GamerGater then and do not align myself ideologically with them now, in broad strokes, I do not think that this is the primary cause of the gender divide; my own read is that it is primarily driven by different natural levels of interest, though in some cases, the anti-GamerGaters had a (often extremely exaggerated) point about there being an undercurrent of anti-feminist and sometimes overt misogyny in some parts of gaming.
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– Among the gamers I know, there absolutely is a significant and notable class divide between the types of games that gamers are inclined to play. In water cooler conversations that turn to gaming and hobbies with other members of my office, I’ve found that the enlisted contractor veterans overwhelmingly have a preference for first-person shooter and console games. Usually, the conversation would go something like this:
Contractor and Enlisted Veteran: “So, what do you do for fun, V?”
Me: “Oh you know, cycling, hiking, reading, board games, anime, I’m in some tabletop groups, I also play video games a lot.”
Contractor and Enlisted Veteran: “Oh gaming? Nice I also game a lot. What games do you play?” (perhaps worth noting that all the other ones typically don’t elicit any sort of connection – though tabletop and anime are a bit more likely to get bites from people from an enlisted military background)*Can we think of any other institutions, or forums of interaction that draw a larger group from different races, classes, and backgrounds together in common cause?
Me: “I play a lot of Paradox Interactive games, grand strategy games where you manage a country or a society or a dynasty or something like that. I like strategy games in general like Total War and Civilization. I also play some classical real time strategy games like Age of Empires and Heroes of Might and Magic.”
Contractor and Enlisted Veteran: “Oh uh…cool. Never heard of any of those. I mostly play first person shooters like Call of Duty. I also played Skyrim once. I used to play League.”This exaggerates the point a bit; I used to be a very avid fantasy RPG gamer, and had I said “I like playing games like Dark Souls, The Witcher, Dragon Age, Elder Scrolls, Final Fantasy, and Elden Ring” there would have been a much better chance I would have gotten a moment of inter-class relatability. Similarly, had I said I was into competitive fighting or battle royale games: Super Smash Bros, League of Legends, or Overwatch, it’s also fairly likely I would have gotten such a moment. Most of the gamers I have encountered professionally and socially as adults, regardless of background, primarily preferred those two kinds of games; in fact, I currently am part of a social group (Super Smash Bros tournament club which later became a generic nerd culture club) which is extremely ethnically, educationally, veteran status, and family and current income diverse. Actually, now that I think about it, it is the only non-work social group I have ever been part of which drew a sizable cadre from all ethnicities (yes even Pacific Islander), had substantial numbers of both college grads and non-college grads, substantial numbers of both veterans and non-veterans, and had people who came from both poor and wealthy backgrounds. I would count many people from that group as among my closest friends currently**.
And yeah, when the people in this club are not playing Super Smash Bros, they are typically either into battle royale games like League of Legends or Overwatch, or fantasy RPG games like The Witcher or Elder Scrolls. Watching anime is also a fairly popular hobby here (not about gaming specifically, but it overlaps enough with gamer culture to be worth noting).
**I met most of these people in person, often through professional relationships, not online. I do not think any group I joined online would have matched that level of diversity, even if it was also a Super Smash Bros tournament group; certainly, no online group I joined and met with later in person has resulted in the same level of personal closeness. My point in sharing that example is mainly to illustrate that while the general pool of players for certain kinds of games, such as competitive Super Smash Bros, *does* cut across different races, social classes, and family backgrounds, but for that to happen when a group of such enthusiasts forms and for there to simultaneously still be closeness between the members probably requires special circumstances (such as existing deep bonds) when the group forms.
Anyhow – as I mentioned above, my own personal interest in games very much tends towards the grand strategy, turn-based strategy, and real-time strategy genres. My primary observation of this particular sub-genre of games is that the vast majority of people who I encounter in real life have a similar reaction to Contractor and Enlisted Veteran in the above conversation, regardless of class background – bemused surprise that anyone would find these kinds of games “fun.” The Super Smash Bros group I describe above has 40 members, but from the time I turned 18, I have met fewer than 10 people in real life who reciprocated my interest in strategy gaming. Of *those* people, all but one came from a college educated, coastal culture background (the exception was an enlisted veteran government employee who admitted that his interest in those kinds of games was far less than his interest in Call of Duty). The vast majority of people I know who reciprocated my interest in strategy gaming, I met online. I met the vast majority of *those* people through a discussion forum for counterfactual history with extensive sidelines in writing historical fiction, tabletop gaming, and discussion of current events. My read on what this indicates, if anything, is that while strategy gaming is not a particularly popular sub-genre of gaming in general, its fans tend to have a particular lean towards the college educated, relatively middle to upper class family background and income.
I suppose the reverse would be true of Call of Duty fans. I think nearly every Call of Duty fan I have encountered came from an enlisted military (and typically not college educated) background; the two exceptions came respectively from extremely rural Kentucky and exurban Rust Belt Ohio. I don’t really know very many Call of Duty fans though.
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So wrapping up all of the above:
-How superficial are most gaming interactions/relationships?
Honestly, I would say “usually very” especially if they are online-only (but gamers with substantial online relationships have a strong tendency to exaggerate the closeness of their online relationships). This is especially noticeable (and cringe) when used to describe parasocial relationships between gamers and streamers/vtubers. *Some* relationships/interactions characterized by gaming can become very close indeed, but the only example I have experienced (which I described above) is more accurately described as a closely-knit moderate-sized social group with gaming as a kind of “glue” experience to knit all the members together. Gaming was not, and currently definitely is not the only basis of connection between the members, even though it forms a majority of how the members all relate to each other. I will admit that until joining the Super Smash Bros tournament group, I had had a very high opinion of the closeness of the online community that formed from the history discussion forum, it was only after joining that group that I realized just how superficial my connections to most members of that community, including the gaming sub-group, was in reality, even the ones I was comparatively very close to.-How class divided is the video game market between genres?
Some very significant sub-genres of gaming, such as fantasy RPG (Dark Souls, The Witcher, Dragon Age, Elder Scrolls, Final Fantasy, and Elden Ring) and competitive (League of Legends, Overwatch, fighting games) have very significant cross-class appeal. Others, such as any kind of strategy gaming (Total War, Paradox Interactive, Civilization), tend to be relatively narrowly targeted at people with a middle or upper class background, while others, such as most first person shooters (Call of Duty), tend to target working class or blue collar class backgrounds. Some of these genres are more niche than others; first person shooters are often AAA games, while strategy gaming, particularly certain niches such as grand strategy (Paradox Interactive) or classical strategy (Age of Empires, Heroes of Might and Magic***) do not have very***Among strategy games, this truly ranks as among the most obscure. I have *never* met another non-online person who even recognizes this game, and I am not close to most of the online people in that community. I would dearly love to meet at least one other person who has played that series as much as I am.
-Can we think of any other institutions, or forums of interaction that draw a larger group from different races, classes, and backgrounds together in common cause?
I can think of one, the same one that supplied so large a percentage of the Super Smash Bros club I describe above. It is the American military.With regards to abridging Three Kingdoms, many adaptations (not quite the same as abridgments I suppose) benefit from adapting only a subset, Peach Tree Oath to Red Cliff being a very common one (and frankly the section which is probably most familiar to general audiences anyhow). A reasonable abridgment of Three Kingdoms might follow a similar approach.
With regards to the question of munitions, I’ve been reliably informed by some of my colleagues with prior military experience that in fact no military, not even the US military, actually stockpiles or stages more munitions than are required for more than a few weeks of high intensity combat operations prior to beginning any operation – the cost would be astronomical and the assumption is that you refill any stocks you use up with delivery of other stocks from elsewhere or new production.
I agree with Konstantin that it is very likely that Russian maintenance of munitions stocks quite possibly also leans towards the “shambolic” side, and with the onset of sanctions, replacement of certain classes of munition, for example, any kind of precision weaponry, is likely to be very difficult or even impossible. At a guess, I would say the apparent transition of the Russian military to siege mode, increasing usage of vintage or “simple” munitions (eg unguided bombs), and the reported reaching out to China for backfill on military supplies may indicate that Russia is in fact starting to feel the pinch as expected (in fact, as of today it has been almost exactly 3 weeks since Russia commenced operations in Ukraine).
I do not really have the expertise to place a good timeline on when Kyiv or Kharkiv may fall, though my baseline is also that Russia will probably eventually conquer both cities eventually, and with them, probably most of the Left Bank. An (effective) retreat of the Ukrainian forces currently facing Donetsk-Luhansk strikes me as unlikely however – the time to do that was before the war actually began, now, with Russian forces surrounding Kharkiv and Mariupol, and pushing into Zaporozhia, there quite literally does not seem to be any place left for those forces to retreat to, I suspect that they are lost (but just don’t know it yet).
In terms of what war termination negotiations might look at, and assuming both that Russia manages to consolidate substantial gains, mostly in the East, while Zelenskyy’s government survives in the West, my personal guess would be no negotiated settlement, but a standoff akin to that with Donetsk-Luhansk, but on a much larger scale.
*If* Zelenskyy’s government survives, but is constrained to Western Ukraine, then I would rate the chances of no negotiated settlement but permanent armed standoff highly, perhaps 65%. My primary reason for thinking this is that once the period of active military operations end and lines fix, domestic forces will all be very strongly against Zelenskyy concluding any kind of negotiated settlement; the rump of Ukraine he will have left to him is the most nationalistic and anti-Russian part, and thus the least amenable to any kind of negotiated settlement. Russia for its part would have to abandon much of its gains in such a scenario in order to accommodate such a settlement, something I do not believe that Russia could tolerate either: to have reached such a point, they would necessarily have had to pay a catastrophic amount of blood and treasure for that land; to give up all that for guarantees of neutrality and secession of Donetsk-Luhansk and recognition of Crimea as part of Russia strikes me as inconceivable.
As I write this, we have extensive reporting in media of Russian landing craft approaching Odesa. If they succeed in taking the city, and assuming all other events happen as described above (Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mariupol, rest of Left Bank are conquered successfully), then I consider it likely that Russia will have a substantial right bank presence, and the incentive to negotiate on Russia’s part falls considerably, and I would up my probability of the “permanent standoff” scenario to 80%. The rump centered on Lviv that would be left to Ukraine would be considerably smaller and correspondingly much more negatively disposed to negotiation. Russia’s gains, including a land bridge to Transnistria are greater, and accordingly, harder to give up.
If the Odesa landing fails, then the additional reverses to Russian arms may finally prove a blow similar in magnitude to a total failure by Russia to take Kyiv, with unpredictable consequences. Putin I think will probably still hold substantial territory, enough to negotiate with, and I rate this scenario the most likely to result in some kind of negotiated peace that is sufficiently face-saving for both sides. In this scenario, I would reduce my probability of a “permanent standoff” to perhaps 30%.
For the purposes of evaluating the above prediction, I would consider any negotiated settlement before 12/31 of this year as falsifying the prediction of “permanent standoff”. I would actually say a negotiated settlement in 2023 or 2024 would falsify it too but I’m sure no one wants to actually wait that long to score internet points off me (or actual money, really, if anyone wants to put money on it).
A Russian invasion, in my opinion, seems all but certain at this point. I have a number of reasons to believe this, but I think the easiest summation is given by this article by Putin: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181. There has been a lot of ink spilled by both proponents and opponents of US intervention as to whether Putin is “justified” in not wanting NATO to be on Russia’s border, or whether it is “justified” for the US to commit to guaranteeing the independence of former Soviet republics like Ukraine from Russian interventions. These considerations do matter in a tactical sense but the overarching driving reason for the current buildup is a desire on the part of Putin to undo at least in part “the greatest tragedy of the 20th century.” I think, sometimes, it is actually quite easy to forget that while it’s nice to imagine the construction of a foreign policy as being driven by careful consideration of numerous competing interests: security, economic, cultural, etc., sometimes it really is something as base as supreme indignation at the map being painted the wrong way.
This does not mean that I think the particular demands that Russia is making are wholly in bad faith, offered with the intent of being rejected; as I mentioned earlier, they have real tactical value and I think if Russia achieved their maximal demands or the critical parts thereof they would probably back off for the moment. But I think this context makes it very unlikely that the US or Ukraine will concede them.
I do not think that a successful Russian invasion of Ukraine, whether to forcibly separate Donbas, topple the government of Zelensky, annex the whole country, what have you, in itself would fracture NATO, because Ukraine is not a member of NATO, and thus no obligation to defend Ukraine has been breached by any putative failure to defend Ukraine. Recriminations may fly, but the alliance itself, I do not imagine, will be threatened.
But I do think that something that has not been widely discussed as much as it should have is the likely aftershocks of an invasion, if it absolutely is in the offing, are the enormous humanitarian consequences of what would be the largest military operation carried out in Europe since the Second World War – the largest military operation in fact, carried out globally since the invasion of Iraq (a slightly smaller but similarly populous country) in 2003. Whatever result may come, there is no dodging the fact that we will observe death and destruction that at least will mirror that of the 2003 invasion, which is to say, in the tens of thousands at least in military deaths, and God only knows in civilian casualties. A refugee crisis of concomitant proportions is sure to follow.
It is perhaps useful now to recall how a refugee/migrant crisis of just over a million people turned Europe upside down in 2015, entrenching social and political dislocations that empowered extremists, discredited establishment parties, and generally changed the very shape of European politics and society. Does anyone care to guess what would be the result of a second refugee crisis in 7 years where the putative refugees do not face the barrier of a very large sea?
I agree with your assessment that privately, including among many (even most?) leftists/liberals that woke politics has become something of a joke. This is somewhat anecdotal, but within my various social circles (all of which are overall left/liberal-leaning), I would struggle to name a single person who affirmatively likes or actively participates in woke moralist crusading (starting cancel mobs, going to protests, conducting fundraisers for various good woke causes, participating in diversity training seminars, conducting diversity training seminars, posting paragraphs to social media about alleged white supremacy or whatnot, actually reading (or even purchasing) How to be an Antiracist or White Fragility, or even performing basic signaling functions such as introducing yourself with pronouns). Actually, I would say that most regard the moralist crusade with indifference at best but more commonly as a source of amusement or a target for disdain (even if many nevertheless accept some or many of the underlying factual and moral claims of woke ideology). I would caveat the above however by noting that with the exception of my university social circle, that my social circles are mostly 1 or more degrees removed from the beating hearts of woke ideology – media, academia, non-profit world, activism, publishing. It may be that if I was heavily immersed in one of those fields, that I would know many more true believers who practice daily and sincerely believe in woke crusading, without any sense of detectable irony.
I don’t however, think that this necessarily implies that politics itself will become more stable – either electoral national politics or in the internal politics of organizations (companies, government agencies, universities, etc.). Rather, I would say that it’s far more likely that we would see a mass-checking out of nearly everyone who bends towards the cynical from active participation in politics, leaving woke ideologues and their enemies to fight it out ever more viciously. In other words, politics, will increasingly become a niche practice dominated by small cliques, and most people will do their best to pretend it is not a thing which happens or has any relevance to their daily life.
I have a couple reasons for thinking this: one of which is observational, and the other more sociological.
Firstly, despite my belief that the general population of America regards woke ideology with a mixture of amusement, disdain, and contempt (naturally the more conservative one is, the more the latter prevails), I can see no sign that woke politics is declining as a tool used for acquiring and wielding power and influence to the end of reshaping American society. For example, just today, the University of North Carolina’s Board of Trustees reversed their previous denial of tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones of 1619 project fame, after the apparent success of a major pressure campaign from sources both internal and external to UNC, a campaign one imagines was probably primarily ideologically driven by wokeism [1]. Following similar trends are the abolition of separate honors courses in public schools [2] [3], abolition of mandatory SAT testing [4] in university admissions, woke modifications to educational curricula [5], and expansion of diversity and inclusion initiatives in hiring practices [6]. Frankly, it seems premature to declare woke politics “dead” when it is plainly still being actively exercised and implemented and if anything, accelerated.
That the above persists, notwithstanding the fact that the popularity of nearly any of the above proposals, to say nothing of woke ideology in general, is pretty godawful, reflects the reality that politics in America, whether electoral or organizational, can be quite easily practiced with only token consultation from the people who will be most affected by it. In the electoral sense, this means that small cliques, whether of staff or donors, are far more likely to be the arbiters of ideological accountability than some ill-defined massive block of voters [7], reflected in the willingness of campaigns to adopt extreme positions that most voters notionally oppose [8]. In the organizational sense, this means that successful organizational internal politics are and will continue to be driven primarily by small cliques with direct continuing access to organizational leaders [9]. In both cases, the culprit is scale – elected officials with very large constituencies or executives of very large bureaucratic organizations will naturally default to interpretations of reality or plans of action drafted by those only a few degrees removed from them [10] [11] [12], which can then be freely implemented on the masses at large. Woke politics, in other words, will persist because most citizens of the empire have no interest in attending the emperor’s parade, even if they understand, on some level, that the emperor’s parade will have some direct significant effect on their life (perhaps because if the parade goes off without a hitch, they too will be commanded to disrobe), and everyone who cares enough to watch is deeply committed to accepting the idea that the emperor is in fact clothed.
Pundits of an anti-trust or anti-censorship bent are often wont to bemoan the fact that when an industry or network is dominated by only a few large institutions, cancellation is easier because being kicked from the monopolist is equivalent to being kicked from the industry/network – I surmise it is also the case that when an institution is very large, it becomes much easier to manipulate the principals and decision-makers in that organization (say, in a woke direction) because it becomes so much more necessary the larger an organization scales to rely on trusted agents to digest and report compiled information and also to disseminate orders throughout the organization. One area where I would depart from the claims of decentralizers – this phenomenon is inherent to the total “market” or “playing field” being large scale, not just due to the existence of concentrated organizations per se. “Information digest services” for targeting and “action dissemination services” for direction are also an emergent phenomenon of communities not organized under an explicit hierarchy. Intra-Twitter sh*tflings are a good example of this.
On a final note, I spoke not too long ago with a friend of mine who I would describe as generally belonging to “Chapo Trap House leftism” [13] – which is to say, he accepts virtually all of the factual and ethical claims of woke ideology, but is deeply contemptuous of nearly all of the practice of woke politics and what broadly is termed “identity politics”. While I do not share all aspects of his narrative of the causes of the growth of woke politics [14], I agree with his assessment that woke politics, cancel culture, and the like are being promoted at least in part for the purpose of making the practice of politics so miserable that anyone who does not have a compelling direct interest in participating in politics (in his view, the very rich, and actual politicians) will mentally check out, reducing the effective size of the constituency (and number of competing interests too). Unfortunately, if this is the case, it suggests that woke “politics by cancellation” will continue unabated at elite levels of society, even as the rest of America mentally checks out.
I am not really sure how I would go about measuring whether this prediction would hold in an objective way that lends itself to a bet. Maybe compiling a list of ten “cancel-vulnerable” (whether by dint of being aggressively un-woke in a woke or woke-vulnerable institution) individuals (e.g. Ross Douthat, Adrian Vermeule, etc.) and determining what percentage have not been unceremoniously given the boot in a year’s time?[4] https://www.fairtest.org/university/optional
[7] https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1255125470263283713
[8] https://news.gallup.com/poll/315962/americans-say-policing-needs-major-changes.aspx
[9] A personal anecdote of mine which illustrates this phenomenon rather neatly: about one and a half years ago, I and several of my coworkers received the opportunity to brief a fairly senior executive at our employer on recommendations for improving the hiring and retention of personnel, for which purpose we were allocated 30 minutes. So we collected a deal of employee survey data, which we analyzed, and then turned into a number of recommendations and actions on the said topic. Approximately 10 minutes into our brief, the official remarked on how he actually had a meeting on the very same topic tomorrow with his strategic communications team – for which purpose they were allocated 1 hour, which I gather also reflected the relative weight of influence.
[10] Another anecdote –in the immediate aftermath of the George Floyd killing in mid-2020, nearly all the senior executives at my employer, in perfect unison, dispatched messages to their respective divisions unequivocally condemning the killing, and instituting a series of “race and reckoning” discussions (or something similar to that) wherein they would, on a monthly basis, chair virtual meetings where the leadership team would host a video call, and employees would dial in, and I don’t know, share stories about everything they thought was wrong about race in America. What struck me about these events was the speed and uniformity with which they were enacted, despite a notable lack of any grassroots demand for a series of meetings to discuss their feelings on race (to be clear, I think if you polled my coworkers then and now, most would agree with the specific statement “George Floyd was unjustly murdered” but for multiple senior leadership teams to implement the same random response to the George Floyd killing reeked strongly of a canned process being disseminated from a single influential source (probably the diversity office) rather than any actual responsiveness to workforce demand).
[11] Truthfully, the above is really more of a trivial description of how large bureaucratic organizations work in general; executives of large bureaucratic organizations in general don’t normally get situational reporting or decide on what actions to take by canvassing the workforce, but by having one of their immediate minions provide their take or draft a plan, and then passing that down to the workforce to be implemented. Basically, this means that the individuals who have the most actual power within a large bureaucratic organization are those one reporting level removed from the principal decision maker, because they are the ones who directly craft the reality the decision maker operates in and draft what action the organization should take in response to that reality.
[12] While I cannot claim any direct experience in electoral campaigns, a friend of mine who was a staffer in a Seattle City Council electoral campaign a few years ago once described to me in detail an incident which occurred during the campaign:
Seattle is notoriously one of the “wokest” metro areas within the United States. As such, the norm is that accusations, often frivolous, of various woke sins, such as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, what have you, are leveled with wild abandon, with little or no regard for anything resembling reality. In this case, the opponent of my friend’s candidate, who is black, had it put about that my friend’s candidate, who is white (and also staunchly progressive), of being a closet white supremacist, because, as near as I can tell, he had some policy positions that could be cast as NIMBY, which has historical ties with redlining, which is based in racism, and therefore, holding those positions made him a white supremacist (if it wasn’t obvious, the accusation was complete nonsense).
However, the reason I share this story is because my friend and his coworkers on the campaign, upon hearing of this, put their heads together and concluded that knowing the candidate, he would not take this accusation very well, and so contrived to keep him in the dark about the social media blackening of his reputation, both to avoid unsettling him while he kissed babies and ate ice cream and speeched up crowds, and also because they judged that they could manage the online flame war better anyhow. Remarkably, they actually almost succeeded, only failing because one was careless enough to refer to the accusation while the candidate was in hearing range, who was as upset as they had predicted he would be.
Most people seem to understand on a basic level that most campaign decisions are crafted by “interns”, not the actual candidate, but I suspect that this level of information/action management of candidates (and other organizational principals) by second-order personnel is far more normal, deep, and pervasive than most people intuitively realize.
[13] It may interest you to know that this friend is the same friend in [12]
[14] “Woke politics is a plot by the ruling class to make politics so absurd and mentally painful to take part in that nearly everyone becomes depoliticized, indirectly eliminating popular political participation. Corporate wokeness as chronicled by /r/ABoringDystopia and /r/latestagecapitalism is deliberately soul-crushing, bizarre, and detached from reality, to deliver the message that corporations are all-powerful, you are not, and really, it’s best if you just stopped caring so much. Also, this is the natural end state of neoliberalism.”
I understand that he still thought that this would be a temporary state of affairs, because he believed “the contradiction would increase so much that eventually there would be a massive proletarian uprising that would seize the means and fight a massive people’s war against the US ruling class.” I’m personally a little skeptical.
Hi all, my name is Winston, and I’m a software developer for the Department of Defense specializing in a mixture of data science and cybersecurity. I read some of the Scholar’s Stage pieces regularly since about 5-6 years ago, but started reading it much more regularly as his work became increasingly topical to my current work in the past 2 years (I also have especially appreciated many of Tanner’s writings on topics such as contemporary American society and culture).
Nice to meet you all!
