2025-02-27 17:41:59
For years, people have been asking me to give them a list of good popular economics books to read — as in, things a layperson can understand, rather than textbooks with equations and such. It’s a reasonable request, but for years, I procrastinated. But I’m doing it now, for two reasons.
First, I have a book coming out in Japanese in a few weeks, about the Japanese economy (there will eventually be an English version). After that, I’m going to start on my first English-language book, which will be about macroeconomics. So I figured I had better take stock of what people have already written, to think about how I can add value.
The second reason is that I saw this intriguing idea from Sam Enright:
I think I would find more value in an “anti-reading” list – a list of bad books and articles that are commonly recommended by smart people, but which are detested by people with deep expertise in the subject. What are the most harmful ideas in a field I am at risk of being taken in by?
I realized that this is a valuable exercise — most people are too polite to warn the public away from bad ideas. And in fact, I think that sweeping, questionable theories can be even more dangerous than outright bad ones. People are easily seduced by a theory that purports to explain vast complex phenomena in simple terms, and if the theory gets a few things right, it can seem to a layperson like the whole thing has been validated.1 Even though it’s often very useful and interesting to read these theories and think about them, the public deserves to be warned to exercise caution when deciding how much faith to put in them.
So anyway, here’s a list of good, bad, and questionable popular economics books. I’ve cited only recent books — things written since 1990. So no Wealth of Nations or Das Kapital or The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.
Also, as always, if your favorite book (or your most hated book) doesn’t make it onto the list, it’s probably because I haven’t read it.2
There are a few popular books out there that will actually teach you economics — including economic concepts, theories, and research methods. Of books I’ve read, five really stand out. If you want to learn what modern economics is all about, but you don’t want to pick up a textbook, read these five books.
This is basically an Econ 101 course disguised as a popular book. It goes through the basic concepts of microeconomics — supply and demand, game theory, etc. — and illustrates each one with simple examples from real life. Harford’s style is incredibly readable; The Undercover Economist is always light and entertaining, keeping you engaged without sacrificing nuance or accuracy. Of all the pop econ books I’ve read, this one is the closest model for what I’d like to write.
In the past three decades, economics has changed from a largely theoretical enterprise to a mostly empirical discipline. Central to this shift has been the so-called “Credibility Revolution” in empirical economics — the development of a set of techniques that are much better (though hardly perfect) at isolating cause and effect. These tools are the bread and butter of what economists do nowadays, so if you want to understand how modern econ gets its results, you need to understand something about these methods. Mastering Metrics is a readable, entertaining introduction to the tools of the Credibility Revolution, by two of that revolution’s leading proponents. There’s a tiny bit of math, but don’t be scared — the authors are so good at explaining how empirical economics works that you’ll never get lost in the weeds.
If you want a summary about how economists have recently been thinking about big problems — things like trade, immigration, climate change, inequality, etc. — this is the book for you. If you still think of econ as a basically libertarian field, defined by folks like Milton Friedman, Good Economics for Hard Times is an important update. The discipline has shifted in the direction of endorsing government intervention, but in a pragmatic rather than an ideological way. Banerjee and Duflo sketch out a cautious middle path on most of the big issues of the day, endorsing eclectic, often incremental policy approaches, careful evidence-based analysis, and nuanced thinking about costs and benefits. It’s humble, practical, deeply empathetic book — a great antidote to the big sweeping claims of theorists who claim they have everything figured out.
The only book in this section that wasn’t written by an economist, The Myth of the Rational Market is nevertheless one of my very favorites. It’s the story of finance theory, and how early ideas about efficient, rational markets eventually had to make room for behavioral finance. Along the way, you’ll learn not just about the key figures involved — people like John von Neumann, Eugene Fama, Richard Thaler, and so on — but also about the theories themselves. You’ll learn a little bit about portfolio selection, factor models, and many other things that make finance academia tick. And you’ll understand more about what convinces the field of economics to change its mind on the big questions.
There aren’t many books that do a good job of explaining macroeconomics to a lay audience,3 but this one stands out from the rest. Krugman is probably the best economics explainer of our time. In The Return of Depression Economics, he tries to explain three interrelated phenomena — financial crises, aggregate demand shocks, and liquidity traps. These three things often go together, and 2008 is a great example — a financial crisis led to a shortage of demand, and the government had trouble reviving demand thanks to the fact that interest rates were at 0. Not every economic crash follows this pattern, but it’s a pretty common one, and Krugman does a great job of explaining some of the theories that economists use to think about those episodes.
Economic history isn’t a substitute for economic theory — it’s a complement. Past events provide nuance that theory omits.
I actually did a full review of this book here:
This is an economic history book, describing how amazing the “long 20th century” — which DeLong defines as 1870 to 2010 — actually was. This was the time when the world became truly modern, when much of humanity went from rural poverty to urban comfort, when starvation was mostly conquered and industrial modernity was invented. DeLong’s purpose is twofold — first, to get the reader to appreciate how awesome and unique those 140 years of growth really were, and second, to understand that some of the fundamental social and political questions raised by that period have yet to be answered. In particular, DeLong argues that inequality, economic risk, and lack of community are three issues that the market hasn’t managed to deal with, even as humans have gotten fabulously wealthy overall. A very good read.
This excellently written book is about the economic instability that led up to the Great Depression. It covers things like World War 1 reparation debt, hyperinflation, the gold standard, the 1920s stock market bubble, and the banking crisis that tipped the world into the disastrous 1930s. Ahmed tells this story through the eyes of central bankers in the U.S. and Europe, largely blaming them for failing to head off the catastrophe. I personally think he’s a little too hard on them — no one knew what they were dealing with at the time, and hindsight is always 20/20. But the lessons learned from the Depression are important nonetheless.
This book famously argues that humanity has picked the low-hanging fruit of science and technology, and that this caused rapid economic growth that won’t be repeated in the future. Things like electricity, the internal combustion engine, and indoor plumbing can only be invented once, after all. Gordon’s book came out at the height of the post-2005 productivity slowdown, and seemed to offer a compelling (if pessimistic) explanation. (Tyler Cowen’s short book The Great Stagnation is another good book in this genre.) Now, with AI promising — or threatening — to upend and transform the entire global economy, Gordon’s thesis is receiving a lot less attention. But it’s still very much worth reading, and will teach you a lot of interesting history. And if AI ends up not delivering the promised productivity boom, there will certainly be a resurgence of interest in Gordon’s ideas.
This book is about the Nazi economy. It describes how Germany was basically an export-oriented economy before the Depression, and how it essentially switched from exports to rearmament as a source of demand for its factories (something I worry about China doing very soon). It argues that Hitler’s wild aggression was partly motivated by fear that the Nazi war economy would eventually be eclipsed by those of his rivals (which in fact it was). And it describes how the Nazis struggled to deal with their limited supply of basic commodities during the war — something that will inevitably be very important if we have another major war. All in all, a very timely and relevant book.
This is the best history of the eurozone crisis that I know of. If you think the U.S. responded badly to the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession that followed it, you should see Europe for comparison. Tooze discusses why the U.S. bounced back from the crisis more quickly than Europe — basically, a more vigorous stimulus response, better policy coordination, and more effective taxation. This book should make you a little more pessimistic about the EU as an economic institution going forward, unless big changes are made.
This book is about a spectacular failure of applied economics. In the late 1990s, there was a huge hedge fund called Long Term Capital Management that promised to make untold amounts of money by using economic models to identify small temporary mispricings in the bond market, and then borrowing vast amounts of money to trade against those mispricings. LTCM had not one but two Nobel-winning economists. Of course the whole thing blew up, because there was stuff out there that the theories hadn’t taken into account — a scary foreshadowing of the much bigger blowup in 2008. Anyway, Lowenstein’s book is an incredibly fun, readable account of this little disaster.
Here are a few other books that I couldn’t fit into either of the sections above, but which are worth a read.
This book is about the economics of immigration. It tries to answer the question of whether immigrants to the U.S. in the modern day end up doing better or worse than the European immigrants of a hundred years ago, in terms of things like income and cultural assimilation. The answer is “the same or better”. The book also reviews evidence that immigration has economic benefits for native-born Americans. I interviewed Leah Boustan here.
This is another book about immigration, but it focuses entirely on the high-skilled variety. It shows how much skilled immigrants contribute to the U.S. economy, explains the evidence that native-born Americans actually benefit from having more skilled immigrants working alongside them, and (mostly) debunks the idea of “brain drain”.
I did a full review of this book for my old blog back in 2016. It’s Dani Rodrik — a highly respected but heterodox and somewhat iconoclastic economist — meditating on what his discipline gets right and what it gets wrong. He explains why most of the standard leftist criticisms of econ that you read in places like the Guardian are wrong. But he also notes that economists do themselves no favors by promoting simplistic ideas like “free trade is good” to the public, and saving all their nuance and disagreement for when they’re behind closed doors. I don’t agree with everything in this book, but it’s definitely worth a read if you care about the economics discipline.
This is a history of behavioral economics, from one of the people who invented it. It vividly shows how economists argue with each other, what kinds of evidence they accept and what they reject, and how consensus in the field changes.
Now we start getting to the dangerous stuff. The world is a complex place, and phenomena like the rise and fall of nations, or century-long patterns of inequality, are too big for any scientist to study in a lab. Still, humans crave understanding (or at least, the feeling of understanding), and so they’ll inevitably spin grand theories that are difficult to evaluate one way or another. These theories are often valuable and worth reading, but inevitably have flaws. I recommend reading everything on this list, but always with caution and skepticism.
Believe it or not, this is actually my favorite pop economics book of all time. And that’s in spite of the fact that it makes some major mistakes:
(See also here.)
How Asia Works is a theory of how countries can industrialize and go from poverty to wealth. It advocates a three-pronged strategy: 1) agricultural land reform, 2) export promotion, and 3) control of the financial system to support export industries. Studwell recounts the post-WW2 history of successful industrializers like Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China, and contrasts them with less successful ones in Southeast Asia. He determines that the three strategies listed above are the things that all the winners did. It’s an unproven theory, but a breathtakingly powerful and tantalizing one, and economists are starting to take it more seriously these days. A couple of years ago, I actually wrote a whole series of posts analyzing a bunch of developing countries through the lens of Studwell’s theory. Anyway, I heavily recommend this book.
I really like the big idea in this book, but I don’t trust my instincts. The big idea is that nations that build inclusive institutions — property rights, democracy, rule of law, and all the other stuff I tend to like — prosper over time, while nations that focus more on extracting value from their citizens tend to fail. I really like this idea, since it says that, in effect, the good guys win. But there are actually lots of problems with the empirical research that underlies the book (and which recently received a Nobel Prize). I summarized a few of those issues in a post last October:
Really, the question of why nations fail, and of the development of deep-rooted sociopolitical institutions over centuries, is too big to answer definitively at this point — and may never be answerable. But I still recommend reading Why Nations Fail, because the theory is at least interesting and compelling.
This book — like most of Ha-Joon Chang’s books — espouses a theory of development very similar to Joe Studwell’s in How Asia Works. Chang is worth reading because he takes a very broad and historical view of economic development and industrial policy — you will always learn a lot from his books. I thought the most interesting tidbit in Bad Samaritans was how early British industrialists thought that German and Japanese factory workers were incorrigibly lazy — not exactly the stereotype we have today! The implication being that if you think a country can’t develop because its people lack the proper culture, you may simply be repeating old mistakes.
Like most people who either recommend or condemn this book, I haven’t actually read it. What I have read are several of Piketty’s papers on the topic of inequality, which is probably good enough to get the core ideas. In any case, I recommend reading Capital in the Twenty-First Century, even though I haven’t yet done so. The big theory — that inequality naturally rises over time unless war or revolution or disaster acts to bring people back down to a similar level again — is compelling and important. The data backing it up is somewhat spotty, as is typical for these big historical theories, but Piketty’s idea hasn’t yet been disproven.
In economics, the theory of “skill-biased technological change” is the idea that as technologies get harder and harder to use, society gets more unequal. Computers are the classic example here — smarter people can learn how to code really well, while less smart people can’t. Economists argue back and forth about how big of a deal this is. In Average is Over, Tyler argues that the coming age of AI will supercharge skill-biased technological change, causing extreme inequality between those who are able to make use of the new technology and those who aren’t. Color me skeptical. The existing research on AI consistently shows that on specific tasks, AI helps boost low performers much more than high performers. And that makes sense — AI is inherently a substitute for intelligence, and Econ 101 says that when substitutes become cheaper, price goes down. But anyway, Tyler’s theory is worth reading, and he has many other interesting predictions and policy recommendations that don’t necessarily depend on that central thesis.
I wrote a review of this book back in 2023:
Basically, this book predicts that a combination of A) rapid population aging, and B) the U.S.’ withdrawal from its role as guarantor of global security will cause much of the global economy will collapse. Billions will die, economies will be fragmented and limited to local regions, and people who live in places without enough critical minerals, waterways, and other natural resources will be impoverished. I don’t think that’s going to happen — humans are much too good at finding substitutes for resources and working out new collective security arrangements. But I do think the challenges Zeihan identifies are real ones, and that he’s generally reasonable about the direction of the effects they’ll have, if not the magnitude. So the book is still a fun and interesting read.
And here we come to my “anti-reading” list.4 I’ll try to keep it short, but there are some pop econ books whose ideas and argumentation are so poor that the average person will not benefit from reading them.
I wrote a really long and mostly negative review of this book a year ago:
In a nutshell, this book says that the Luddites were right, and that automation is bad for average people. The history and evidence to support this argument are both highly questionable, and sometimes just plain sloppy. Meanwhile, the authors’ policy recommendation is that tech businesses should be incentivized or compelled to invent technologies that complement human labor, instead of ones that automate it away — as if any entrepreneur or engineer knows that in advance. The whole book isn’t very credible, and feels more than anything like a jeremiad against the tech-bro class.
I can hardly believe it was 11 years ago, but in my early days as a fiery and irritable blogger I once wrote a scathing review of David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years. Just for fun, let me quote from that review:
[T]he main problem with Debt: The First 5000 Years is that after slogging through all 560 pages, I can't for the life of me tell what point it's trying to make about the phenomenon of debt…Debt is a sprawling, rambling, confused book…Graeber continually talks around the idea of debt…Perhaps capitalism is a rotten, inhumane system that kills relationships, rewards violence and trickery, and enslaves us all to the brutal logic of the market before inevitably destroying the planet. Or perhaps not. But either way, there's little insight to be gained by reframing the issue in terms of debt.
I don’t think I can do better than that summary here.
No, I haven’t read this book! I have a limited time to exist and be awake in this universe, and I am not going to spend it reading a 336-page book about MMT. For those who don’t know, MMT is a pseudo-theory5 that pushes infinite government deficits without concretely specifying why deficits are safe or how they think the economy actually works. I haven’t read The Deficit Myth, but I have read a couple of MMT papers, and that was quite enough to get the gist:
When economists do read Kelton’s book, they come away with the same conclusion: there’s just no actual theory there. Here’s what a pair of economists from the Banque de France had to say:
Overall, it appears that MMT…is a more that of a political manifesto than of a genuine economic theory…As Hartley (2020) notes, MMT “is not a falsifiable scientific theory: it is rather a political and moral statement by those who believe in the righteousness – and affordability – of unlimited government spending to achieve progressive ends”.
And here’s Giacomo Rondina of the University of California San Diego:
[M]y reading of the MMT academic literature suggests that MMT has not yet provided a fully coherent theory of the macroeconomics of government intervention…As a consequence, many macroeconomic practitioners “peeking under the hood” (cit.) of MMT cannot help but feel a sense of frustration in understanding how exactly the engine is supposed to work.
I salute these brave souls for being able to endure more MMT nonsense than I was. In any case, my friendly advice is to do what I did instead, and avoid spending mental effort on this stuff.
The years have not been kind to poor old Freakonomics. The blockbuster result that made the book famous — that abortion caused the big crime drop in America, by reducing the number of unwanted children who grow up to commit lots of crimes — turned out to probably be false. Some other economists found a coding error in the famous abortion-crime study that totally invalidated the result. The authors tried to argue that it still held, using some more complicated methods, but these methods weren’t very credible or convincing. Meanwhile, the other chapters in the book are often more about sociology and anthropology than economics, and the chapters that are about economics tend to be about results that are cute but ultimately not that important. Freakonomics is a fun read, but at this point it’s more of a historical artifact than a guide to good economics.
And not even a layperson. The other day I had a political scientist tell me that political science is a more predictive field than economics. As evidence he cited a case of several political scientists who predicted in 2016 that Donald Trump would be a bad President.
Or perhaps because I’m trying to suppress all knowledge of its existence, because your favorite author’s theory represents a mortal threat to the corrupt and shadowy oligarchs whom I secretly serve. Or perhaps I found your favorite book just too unremarkable to mention. Whichever of these it is, I apologize.
As I said, I am planning to write one soon.
Interestingly, most of the bad books tend to be leftist in their ideological orientation. There are also a bunch of bad economic ideas out there that are more rightist — goldbug-ism, some of the economic theorizing around Bitcoin, and MAGA-style protectionism. But these tend not to have popular books associated with them — or at least none that I’ve heard of.
MMT is a movement rather than a theory — a cabal consisting of Warren Mosler, Stephanie Kelton, and a handful of others, whose pronouncements are taken as received truth by the movement’s followers. Inevitably, it’s the pronouncements of these gurus that are treated as the only authentic guide to what MMT really says about the economy; any outsider is not permitted to interpret or apply the “theory” on their own.
2025-02-26 17:06:51
Back at the beginning of his first term in 2017, Trump briefly tried to cut federal science spending. I wrote a pair of posts for Bloomberg saying that this was a bad idea. Here are some excerpts from the first of those:
Support for science and technology is one of the key functions of a modern, rich-country government. Developed nations like the U.S. are at the technological frontier. It’s hard for them to grow by imitating or catching up to other countries, so in order to advance, they have to improve productivity. But productivity growth has been slowing noticeably…Research shows that most scientific and technological fields require more money and manpower to maintain the same rate of progress as time goes on…Unfortunately, federal research spending in the U.S. has leveled off…
Even most free-marketers recognize that the government has a key role in basic research and technology. The private sector won’t pick up the slack -- private companies are great at turning research into commercial products, but bad at doing pioneering scientific work. This is because it’s hard for companies to capture the fruits of research spending -- science is a public good. The U.S. high-tech economy works well because it has a pipeline -- government and universities do the basic research, while companies commercialize the science that emerges. Cutting off the first part of the pipeline will strangle American industry, leaving rivals in Asia and Europe to dominate the industries of the future.
And in the second post I waxed lyrical about how abandoning science can lead to civilizational decline:
To understand why science is so important, it’s essential to take a broad view of history…Science was…the secret sauce of Western civilization…
During the Middle Ages, the Islamic empire under the Abbasids of Baghdad boasted many of the world’s leading thinkers, some of whom were experimenting with ideas eerily similar to those eventually embraced by European scientists. But for some reason, the Caliphate turned away from these ideas. No one knows exactly why, but many blame the rise of anti-scientific and anti-rationalist schools of thought…
Another frustrating historical example is China’s Ming Dynasty. China…in the 15th and 16th centuries it was the world’s most technologically advanced civilization. Proto-science was common in early modern China, but the country cut itself off from foreign influences and de-emphasized science in the civil-service examinations. Eventually, China ended up importing Jesuit astronomers from Europe…
If there’s something that makes the U.S. and other modern developed nations more successful than those old empires, it’s not the strength of their armies or the superiority of their religious beliefs -- it’s a healthy respect for the march of systematically acquired knowledge of the natural world.
But as with so many of Trump’s threatened disruptions to the American system in his first term, this one never actually materialized. Nondefense R&D spending actually rose, while research spending stayed constant as a fraction of GDP. Defense R&D spending — mostly “development” rather than basic research — took a cut as the military allocated money toward other priorities, but recovered over the rest of Trump’s term:
In fact, the big cuts to federal defense-related development spending came under Obama, Clinton, and George H.W. Bush.
Things may not go the same way this time around, though. In his second term, Trump is issuing deeper and more far-reaching executive orders than in his first. And he now has Elon Musk on his team — a man whose ability to get things done is unparalleled. As a result of Trump’s executive orders and Musk’s layoffs, federal science funding in the United States has been abruptly thrown into chaos.
First, Trump issued an executive order suspending almost all grants from the National Institutes of Health — the U.S.’ biggest government research funding agency other than the DoD. When a court ordered the funding to resume, the Trump administration found other ways to hold up funding. This is from Nature:
About a month after Donald Trump took office…almost all grant-review meetings remain suspended at the…NIH…preventing the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research from spending much of its US$47-billion annual budget…These review panels are suspended because the Trump administration has barred the agency from taking a key procedural step necessary to schedule them. This has caused an indefinite lapse in funding…The Trump administration issued an order on 27 January freezing payment on all federal grants and loans, but lawsuits challenging its legality were filed soon afterwards, putting the order on hold. However, payments are still not going out, because Trump’s team has halted grant-review meetings, exploiting a “loophole” in the process[.]
Trump also issued an order that would severely limit the NIH’s ability to pay “indirect costs” — i.e., payments to support infrastructure and personnel at the labs that actually do the government-funded research. A judge has also blocked that order, but Trump may find another creative way around the courts. As a result of these orders, NIH funding has been mostly halted, or at least severely delayed.
Meanwhile, Musk’s DOGE has been firing a bunch of “probationary” workers at the science agencies:
As the administration seeks radical changes to research funding, it has also sought to cut employees at federal scientific agencies…Wide-ranging cuts of probationary workers — who are typically in their first year of employment at federal agencies and not yet subject to the same job protections as more tenured staff members — have hit almost every corner of the government…Hundreds of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were let go…Similar shake-ups are anticipated at other science agencies, including NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which manages the National Weather Service…Employees at the National Science Foundation (NSF) have been told that up to half of the agency’s staff could be laid off soon…Matt Brown, the recording secretary for NIH Fellows United, a union that represents about 5,000 fellows, said NIH staffers were let go on Friday.
On top of all these executive orders and firings, Trump is reportedly planning to ask Congress to cut science funding by a substantial amount:
[T]he White Houses’ first budget request of Donald Trump’s second term could be a fiscal reckoning for America’s government scientific enterprise. The National Science Foundation, a cornerstone of the country’s research infrastructure with its annual $9 billion purse, might face particularly savage cuts…intelligence from within the administration suggested the agency’s budget could be slashed by up to two-thirds, potentially shrinking to a mere $3 billion.
In other words, the attack on science funding that was successfully deterred back in Trump’s first term may become a reality in his second.
Why is this happening? Why are our leaders suddenly and willfully smashing one of the core institutions that made America the world’s leading nation over the past century?
The most likely answer is a very simple one: Like many of the Trump administration’s early actions, it’s an ideological purge. Trump and Musk have decided that America’s scientific establishment is a hotbed of woke ideology that needs to be torn out root and branch, regardless of the damage to the country’s strength in science and technology. This is from an article in Physics World:
In response to [Trump’s executive] orders, government departments and external organizations have axed diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes, scrubbed mentions of climate change from websites, and paused research grants pending tests for compliance with the new administration’s goals…
Even before they had learnt of plans to cut its staff and budget, officials at the NSF were starting to examine details of thousands of grants it had awarded for references to DEI, climate change and other topics that Trump does not like…
Trump’s anti-DEI orders have caused shockwaves throughout US science…NASA staff were told on 22 January to “drop everything” to remove mentions of DEI, Indigenous people, environmental justice and women in leadership, from public websites. Another victim has been NASA’s Here to Observe programme, which links undergraduates from under-represented groups with scientists who oversee NASA’s missions…
Anti-DEI initiatives have hit individual research labs too…Fermilab – the US’s premier particle-physics lab – suspended its DEI office and its women in engineering group in January. Meanwhile, the Fermilab LBGTQ+ group, called Spectrum, was ordered to cease all activities and its mailing list deleted. Even the rainbow “Pride” flag was removed from the lab’s iconic Wilson Hall.
This isn’t surprising. Republicans already had significantly lower trust in science before 2020, probably because scientists tend to be progressives. But that trust took a big hit after the Floyd protests and the subsequent proliferation of “woke” culture across America’s elite institutions:
Now, it’s not like the Republicans are wrong about much of America’s scientific establishment being “woke”. Remember that the fundamental fact of American politics is education polarization — the higher a degree someone in the U.S. has, the more likely they are to be a Democrat and a progressive. Before 2020, you could be a progressive in good standing while still opposing systematic racial discrimination against white people in hiring, promotion, funding, and so on; after 2020, it became much harder.
Conservative journalists like Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon and John Sailer of the Manhattan Institute have been relentlessly chronicling examples of this over the past few years, and there really are a lot of them. Lots of science departments at universities made prospective hires sign DEI statements. This is from a 2024 study of academic job postings by Nate Tenhundfeld:
Racially discriminatory hiring practices are hard to measure, but they appear to have become fairly commonplace in the sciences. Some of these examples are blatant and explicit. Others quietly rely on DEI statements, punishing applicants who refuse to discriminate on the basis of race. Here’s John Sailer in the WSJ:
Through public-records requests, I acquired the rubrics for evaluating diversity statements used by two NIH-funded programs. The University of South Carolina’s program currently seeks faculty in public health and nursing. The University of New Mexico’s program seeks faculty studying neuroscience and data science. Both programs use virtually identical rubrics for assessing candidates’ contributions to diversity, equity and inclusion…The South Carolina and New Mexico rubrics call for punishing candidates who espouse race neutrality, dictating a low score for anyone who states an “intention to ignore the varying backgrounds of their students and ‘treat everyone the same.’ ”
The federal granting agencies have been fairly heavily involved in this. In another article, Sailer notes that the NIH actually requires DEI statements as a condition of some of its science funding programs. He also discovered emails at the NIH espousing explicit racial discrimination:
Honestly, this stuff is just egregious. I’m no lawyer, but it seems like if racially discriminatory admissions at government-funded universities are illegal under the Fourteenth Amendment, then racially discriminatory granting practices and racial discrimination in hiring at government-funded science departments are probably not going to pass constitutional muster either.
More importantly, turning science into an explicit racial spoils system is not going to be good for either science or race relations in America. In a multiracial democracy like ours, it’s important that every racial group believe that they’re being treated fairly and equally by the system. If one group is clearly being discriminated against by the country’s institutions, it not only causes resentment among that group, but also engenders worry among other groups that they might be next.
Even beyond the narrow issue of racial discrimination, political activism by members of the scientific establishment are decreasing Americans’ trust in science. This is from Alabrese et al. (2024):
The study measures scientists’ polarization on social media and its impact on public perceptions of their credibility…An experiment assesses the impact of online political expression on a representative sample of 1,700 U.S. respondents, who rated vignettes with synthetic academic profiles varying scientists’ political affiliations based on real tweets. Politically neutral scientists are viewed as the most credible. Strikingly, on both the ’left’ and ’right’ sides of politically neutral, there is a monotonic penalty for scientists displaying political affiliations: the stronger their posts, the less credible their profile and research are perceived, and the lower the public’s willingness to read their content.
Seen in the light of research like this, the merging of science and political activism over the last decade has been a disaster for one of America’s most important institutions. In 2015, most Americans of both parties believed that scientists are politically neutral. Now that hard-won reputation for objectivity has been damaged.
Now that doesn’t mean it’s worth gutting one of America’s most important and effective institutions, just to get rid of wokeness. In fact, I think it’s very much not worth it; the culture of science is less important than the productivity benefits it creates for our nation. On top of that, DEI stuff was already on the wane, and more scientists were already speaking up about the importance of objectivity well before Trump was elected. I really dislike politicized science, but I don’t think the Trump administration’s slash-and-burn approach is the right response.
But I think what we’re learning is that the American right has decided to start defecting in the repeated prisoner’s dilemma that defines our social relations. Conservatives have decided that the benefits science brings to America are not worth it if the culture of science makes America less of the kind of nation they want to live in.
For this reason, I hope Trump’s purge fails, but I also hope that the scientific establishment responds to the purge by simply ditching the politicized crap of 2020-2024 and returning to a stance of political neutrality.
It’s important to recognize that talk of a science apocalypse in the U.S. may be premature. It’s likely that once this purge is complete and wokeness has been culled to his satisfaction, Trump will un-pause federal grants. He may even hire more employees at the granting agencies to replace the ones who were fired. And the proposed NSF budget cuts may not end up making it through Congress, just as happened in Trump’s first term. There’s still a slim chance that this will end up being a false alarm.
But if it’s not, what happens to our economy? Most economists are in agreement that the economic benefit of research spending is well worth the cost. A 2009 literature review by Hall et al. found that “in general, the private returns to R&D are strongly positive and somewhat higher than those for ordinary capital, while the social returns are even higher, although variable and imprecisely measured in many cases.” More recent research agrees. Jones and Summers (2020) show that if you assume R&D spending is solely responsible for new technologies (rather than, say, unfunded tinkerers inventing stuff in their garages), then society benefits enormously from every dollar spent.
But that glosses over a crucial question: How important is federal government research spending, specifically? Conservatives might question whether private companies will pick up the slack if the federal government steps back. In fact, this has been happening for decades — as federal R&D spending has fallen as a share of GDP since the 1960s, private R&D spending has stepped in to fill the gap:
The list of federally funded scientific breakthroughs and groundbreaking inventions is certainly long — everything from AI and the internet and smartphones to Crispr and mRNA vaccines to GPS satellites and the microprocessor. But that doesn’t tell us the counterfactual. It’s theoretically possible that without federal funding, corporate labs would have come up with these inventions — or better ones — even earlier.
Some economists actually do think that. For example, Arora et al. (2023) find that an increase in federal R&D funding in a field tends to reduce corporate R&D spending in that field — a case of “crowding out”. They also argue that federal spending is less efficient in purely economic terms, because some basic science represents abstract knowledge that never makes it into any practical invention. The authors then speculate that some of the productivity slowdown of recent decades might be happening because research has shifted from private to public:
The sluggish growth in productivity over the last three decades or more in the face of sustained growth in scientific output has puzzled observers. Our findings point to a possible reason…The limit on growth is not the creation of useful ideas but rather the rate at which those ideas can be embodied in human capital and inventions, and then allocated to firms to convert them into innovations. In other words, productivity growth may have slowed down because the potential users — private corporations—lack the absorptive capacity to understand and use those ideas. The loss of absorptive capacity is partly related to the growing specialization and division of innovative labor in the U.S. economy. Not only do universities and public research institutes produce the bulk of scientific knowledge, but over the past three decades, publicly funded inventions and startups have grown in importance as sources of innovation. Concomitantly, many incumbent firms have substantially withdrawn from performing upstream scientific research. The withdrawal of many companies from upstream scientific research may have reduced their absorptive capacity—their ability to understand and use scientific advances produced by public science.
But I think you should be very suspicious of these conclusions. Notice that Arora et al. claim that “publicly funded inventions and startups have grown in importance as sources of innovation.” But now look at the chart I posted above, and remember that private sector R&D has actually increased massively as a share of GDP, even as federal funding has withered and shrunk. So either Arora et al. are just plain wrong, and are trying to explain facts that don’t exist, or the “and startups” part of their sentence is doing all of the work there.1
In fact, federally funded R&D often benefits the economy by creating startups. Babina et al. (2020) find that federal R&D generates a lot of startups, which spin out of university research projects, or make heavy use of academic discoveries:
We find that federal and private funding are not substitutes. A higher share of federal funding causes fewer but more general patents, more high-tech entrepreneurship, a higher likelihood of remaining employed in academia, and a lower likelihood of joining an incumbent firm… Together with evidence from industry contracts, the effects support the hypothesis that private funding leads to greater appropriation of intellectual property by incumbent firms. Privately funded research outputs are more often patented, while federally funded research outputs are more likely to end up in high-tech startups founded by graduate students.
And Tartari and Stern (2021) find that federal government research is unique in serving this function:
Our key finding is that changes in Federal research commitments to universities are uniquely linked to positively correlated changes in the quality-adjusted quantity of entrepreneurship…Research funding to universities seems to play a unique role in promoting the acceleration of local entrepreneurial ecosystems.
In other words, these papers find that the more that research spending in America is dominated by big companies, the more the resulting innovations will get patented and locked away inside the bowels of a Google or a Pfizer or a General Motors, where the rest of the economy can’t use them as much. But the more that the federal government funds university research, the more that new inventions enter the economy via dynamic new fast-growing companies that compete against the aging behemoths.
In other words, the U.S. economy’s increasing reliance on private R&D spending — most of which is done by big companies — could be making it harder for scrappy startups to disrupt the incumbents. This could be taking the U.S. in the direction of countries like Japan, Korea, and Germany, where big old corporations dominate the landscape. Trump’s cuts to federal science will probably end up hurting the “little tech” that Marc Andreessen likes to talk about.
As for the effect of federal funding on productivity — i.e., what we ultimately care about — most papers find that it’s big and positive. For example, Fieldhouse and Mertens (2023) find really huge effects:
We estimate the causal impact of government-funded R&D on business-sector productivity growth…Using long-horizon local projections and the narrative measures, we find that an increase in appropriations for nondefense R&D leads to increases in various measures of innovative activity, and higher productivity in the long run. We structurally estimate the production function elasticity of nondefense government R&D capital…and obtain implied returns of 150 to 300 percent over the postwar period. The estimates indicate that government-funded R&D accounts for about one quarter of business-sector TFP growth since WWII, and generally point to substantial underfunding of nondefense R&D. [emphasis mine]
Their methods are a bit unorthodox, but Dyevre (2024) uses more standard methods and obtains broadly similar results:
Using a novel firm-level dataset…covering 70 years (1950-2020), I estimate the impact of the decline in public R&D in the US on long-run productivity growth. I use two instrumental variable strategies…to estimate the impact of the decline in public R&D on the productivity of firms through technology spillovers. I find that a 1% decline in public R&D spillovers causes a 0.03 to 0.08% decline in firm TFP growth. Public R&D spillovers appear to be two to three times as impactful as private R&D spillovers for firm productivity. Moreover, smaller firms experience larger productivity gains from public R&D spillovers. [emphasis mine]
In other words, although there’s not an absolute consensus in the economics field, most researchers find that federally funded R&D is incredibly important for U.S. productivity growth. The decline in federal spending has made it harder for the U.S. economy to sustain the kind of productivity gains it saw in earlier decades.
Even the seemingly silly government-funded research projects that conservatives love to make fun of — shrimp running on treadmills! — often result in very practical discoveries. Jim Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute lists a few:
[R]esearch into frog skin secretions unlocked the mysteries of fluid absorption, paving the way for oral rehydration therapy. The payoff has been nothing short of remarkable: over 70m lives saved, most of them children in developing nations…Scrutinizing fly reproduction yielded an elegant solution to America’s livestock pest problem: the sterile screwworm fly. This peculiar triumph of entomology now saves ranchers $200m annually…When scientists first examined Gila monster venom, they were hardly dreaming of treating diabetes and obesity. Yet this toxic cocktail held the key to developing GLP-1 agonists like Ozempic. Maybe you’ve heard of this drug?
On top of the productivity benefits, federally funded scientific research has major national security implications. Not only does some DoD spending go directly to creating militarily useful technologies that help preserve America’s technological edge over China, but more research funding in general will be needed to compete with China’s massive push to become the world’s leading scientific power. Right now, on some popular measures of scientific research output, America is being left in the dust by our main rival:
Seen in this context, Trump and Musk’s assault on research spending looks to be part of the unilateral disarmament and deindustrialization that is rapidly becoming this administration’s hallmark.
So if Trump and Musk care at all about the wealth and security of the nation, they need to turn the science funding taps back on as quickly as possible. I understand that they feel the need to purge woke culture from the system, but that purge needs to finish before it becomes too late to save American scientific prowess. The clock is ticking.
In fact, it’s probably both of these things.
2025-02-25 16:32:30
Today let’s talk about partisan politics. Not the most fun topic, but an important one.
This is not a nonpartisan blog. I focus mostly on analyzing the world to figure out what’s going on, because that’s what I enjoy the most, and that’s where I think I add the most value. But I don’t hesitate to share opinions or take political sides. And I don’t make any secret of the fact that I want the Democrats to win.
This is not because I view the Democrats as “my team” — I view America, the country, as my team. Nor do I want the Republican party to die; I want it to be a sane and reasonable conservative party that does sane and reasonable things when it wins elections. The problem is that right now, the Republicans are neither sane nor reasonable, because they’ve been hijacked by ideologues and isolationists with autocratic impulses. That’s bad for the country. So I want Democrats to mount a credible, effective opposition to Musk and Trump.
The problem with that is that over the past 12 years or so, the Democrats have also become less sane and reasonable than they were before. They’ve become obsessed with divisive identitarianism, unpopular culture wars, and paralyzing proceduralism. They’ve let an out-of-touch extremely-online educated class dictate their attitudes and language, and they’ve let some of the big cities they run fall into disorder and decay. Their drubbing at the hands of Trump in 2024 was no accident.
This doesn’t mean I view the two parties are equivalent; even if the Dems didn’t change an iota from 2024, I would still want them to defeat Musk and Trump. But the harsh reality is that if they don’t change, they probably won’t defeat Musk and Trump. Dems are rapidly losing ground with Hispanic voters, Asian voters, and even some Black voters, while failing to win back a matching number of White voters. For decades, more Americans called themselves Democrats than Republicans; that has now reversed.
Democrats are even starting to lose ground with the younger generation, with both young men and young women calling themselves more socially conservative.
Democrats are simply no longer America’s majority party. That’s particularly shameful and galling, given all the bad things Trump has done.
Right now, a few Democrats are allowing themselves to indulge in the complacent fantasy that Trump and Musk will be so horrible that their movement will collapse on its own and drive everyone back to the Dems. Yes, Trump and Musk will make mistakes — indeed, they are already making mistakes — and yes, this will give their opponents crucial openings to seize upon. But it won’t happen automatically, and if Dems don’t make some big changes, it’ll be difficult to capitalize on those errors.
So anyway, here’s a sketch of what I think the Dems will need to do. My three basic ideas are:
Present a sane alternative to Trump’s inflationary policies
Defend democracy and freedom of speech against Trump/Musk overreach
Ditch the progressive baggage of the 2010s, and focus on the common good
Most of these approaches have been used successfully by Democratic politicians in the recent past — most notably by Bill Clinton in 1992. In fact, recapturing the spirit of 1992 is a good general summary of how Dems ought to think about how to recover from the disaster of 2024.
As I like to say, macroeconomics is the natural predator of foolish regimes. Trump beat Harris in part because Americans were mad about inflation, but he came into office without a credible plan to actually end inflation. And already, inflation is creeping back up:
There may be some natural forces pushing inflation up here — decoupling from China and the reorganization of supply chains. But one culprit is probably inflation expectations, which are now rising. Remember that when people expect more inflation, it often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Americans are expecting more inflation because Trump is doing stuff — or promising to do stuff — that causes inflation. Trump constantly calls on the Fed to cut interest rates. Lower interest rates raise inflation. Trump has either implemented tariffs or threatened tariffs. Tariffs raise inflation. Trump has promised huge tax cuts, which will inevitably lead to huge government deficits. And so on. Trump is just a very inflationary kind of leader.
In 2021-22 we discovered — or rediscovered — that inflation is really bad for regular Americans. It lowers real wages and raises the cost of living.1 It erodes the value of bonds, which represents a lot of old people’s savings. It creates uncertainty and makes people feel angry about the economy.
And Americans are already getting angry. Trump’s approval rating on the economy is rapidly beginning to sour, and is now more negative than for any recent President at the start of their term in office:
2025-02-23 16:57:12
I’m writing a longer post, but it’s taking two days, so in the meantime, here is one of the more absurd statements I’ve seen recently:
This statement is wrong, of course. According to biographer Walter Isaacson, Elon got a 1400 on the SAT in the late 1980s, on his second try. SAT scores and IQ are highly correlated, and according to all the sources I can find, an SAT of 1400 at that time would have roughly corresponded to an IQ of in the mid-130s. Elon also has a bachelor’s degree in physics and was accepted to a materials science PhD program in the 90s. He is a man of well above average intellect.
But that’s not why Abramson’s statement is so absurd. The reason it’s absurd is not its content but its purpose — it represents an attempt to diminish the country’s fear of Elon Musk and his role in American politics by calling him stupid. This is a very foolish thing to try to do.
First of all, IQ is not a great measure of competence at the kind of things Elon is best at — building and improving organizations, identifying talent, managing large numbers of people, fundraising, creating and communicating a vision for the future, and so on. Keuschnigg et al. (2023) find that IQ tends to plateau at high levels of wealth:
We draw on Swedish register data containing measures of cognitive ability and labour-market success for 59,000 men who took a compulsory military conscription test. Strikingly, we find that the relationship between ability and wage is strong overall, yet above €60,000 per year ability plateaus at a modest level of +1 standard deviation. The top 1 per cent even score slightly worse on cognitive ability than those in the income strata right below them.
In the past, Americans recognized the importance of abilities that can’t be measured on a test — real-world business acumen was generally revered over book learning. But as knowledge industries grew in importance and the highly educated professional class rose in power and prominence, the country began to worship at the altar of raw intellect. Even many Americans who, if you put them on the spot, would swear up and down that IQ is a racist and meaningless concept will resort almost instantly to calling people “idiots” or talking about their low IQ in a social media fight.
And yet whatever his IQ is, Elon has unquestionably accomplished incredible feats of organization-building in his career. This is from a post I wrote about Musk back in October, in which I described entrepreneurialism as a kind of superpower:
Even as American manufacturing (and German manufacturing, and Japanese manufacturing, etc.) has been hollowed out by Chinese competition and our great old companies have stumbled and declined, one single entrepreneur has been able to build and scale gigantic new cutting-edge high-tech world-beating manufacturing companies in the United States of America. That one man is Elon Musk.
Consider SpaceX. Without this one Musk company, America would be lagging far behind China in the space race. But with SpaceX included, the U.S. is far ahead of China…And SpaceX is a manufacturing powerhouse. Despite doing almost all of its manufacturing in the United States, the company has been able to outmanufacture all of China in its field…SpaceX has already launched so many Starlink communication satellites into low Earth orbit that Musk’s constellation [of satellites] now outnumbers all other active satellites and spacecraft combined…
It’s not as if other businesspeople haven’t tried their hands at space. Jeff Bezos, creator of the world’s premier e-commerce site and the world’s top cloud computing network, founded Blue Origin, a SpaceX competitor, but it lags far behind…
But SpaceX is neither a fluke nor a special case. Despite a recent modest increase in competition, Tesla still utterly dominates the market for electric vehicles in the U.S…And when Elon recently set up a cluster of GPUs to train his new AI model, it was done far faster than Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang believed possible[.]
As an industrialist, Elon is unmatched by any American in the country’s entire history — Henry Ford, his closest competitor for the title, failed in the aerospace industry.
Seth Abramson could not build SpaceX, or Tesla, or any of the things Musk has built, no matter how much money someone handed him. Neither could I, dear reader, and neither could you. Neither, I think, could Terence Tao, or any of the other highest-IQ supergenius mathematicians on the planet.1 Any of us could spend a lifetime and burn a trillion dollars and probably not end up with anything remotely resembling Musk’s high-tech industrial behemoths.
Why would we fail? Even with zero institutional constraints in our way, we would fail to identify the best managers and the best engineers. Even when we did find them, we’d often fail to convince them to come work for us — and even if they did, we might not be able to inspire them to work incredibly hard, week in and week out. We’d also often fail to elevate and promote the best workers and give them more authority and responsibilities, or ruthlessly fire the low performers. We’d fail to raise tens of billions of dollars at favorable rates to fund our companies. We’d fail to negotiate government contracts and create buzz for consumer products. And so on.
And there are probably lots of other, less obvious things that Musk does that we would fail to do:
A key driver of [Musk’s] success is a relentless focus on solving problems fast, often by working directly with the engineers or coders who've gotten stuck, Marc Andreessen says…The legendary venture capitalist shared his insights from working closely with Musk on X, xAI, and SpaceX…Unlike many CEOs, Musk is devoted to understanding every aspect of his businesses, the Andreessen Horowitz cofounder and general partner said. He's "in the trenches and talking directly to the people who do the work," and acting as the "lead problem solver in the organization."
I’ve been watching Elon succeed at building seemingly impossible companies and driving them to new heights of success for over a decade. And at every turn, there were hecklers on social media calling him an idiot, a fraud, and a huckster, and claiming that his companies were about to collapse and die. Although Elon didn’t deliver on every promise he ever made, again and again he has made his hecklers eat their words.
And Elon did this in spite of the entire apparatus of American proceduralism and anti-development policy being against what he was trying to do. It’s famously difficult to build factories in America, thanks to land acquisition costs, procedural barriers like NEPA, regulation, high labor costs, and so on. And yet as of 2023, Tesla produced more cars in America than it did in China:
California is famously one of the hardest states to build in, and yet SpaceX makes most of its rockets — so much better than anything the Chinese can build — in California, almost singlehandedly reviving the Los Angeles region’s aerospace industry. And when Elon wanted to set up a data center for his new AI company xAI — a process that usually takes several years — he reportedly did it in 19 days.2
Contra Nate Silver, none of this really has much to do with Elon’s IQ.
Part of the reason some progressives still insist on sneering at Elon’s intellect is the traditional class resentment of the shabby educated elite for the wealthy titans of industry. But I think a lot more of it is simply what the kids call “cope”. Right now, Elon is applying all of the same talents he used to build his companies — motivating employees, circumventing red tape, identifying and overwhelming every bottleneck at breakneck speed — to his effort to remake the U.S. civil service with DOGE. Telling themselves that Elon doesn’t really have any talent, or that he just gets lucky, or that he’s just a huckster, or that he only succeeds because of government help, are ways that progressives comfort themselves with the belief that Elon’s efforts will inevitably fail.
Another way that some people have coped with Elon’s blitz is to stubbornly insist that history is moved not by “great men”, but by slow and inexorable forces:
Of course, history is extremely complex, and only happens once, and so historians can’t really know how much of history is driven by “great men” vs. slow, inexorable forces.3 When pressed, they will admit this:
Note the key example of Genghis (Chinggis) Khan. It wasn’t just his decisions that influenced the course of history, of course; lots of other steppe warlords tried to conquer the world and simply failed. Genghis might have benefited from being in just the right place at just the right time, but he probably had organizational and motivational talents that made him uniquely capable of conquering more territory than any other person in history.4
The comparison, of course, is not lost on Elon himself:
Before you’re tempted to sneer at Elon for misspelling “Khan”, remember that Genghis Khan himself was unable to spell his own name, having never learned to read or write — another vivid reminder that book learning and organizational talent are two very different things. Progressives who comfort themselves that Elon could never conquer their country because he doesn’t have the world’s highest IQ are just as foolish as a scholar of the 13th century telling himself that his country could never be conquered by an illiterate man on a pony.
But beyond all the coping and classism, I think there’s one more reason some progressives try to call Elon a dummy. Over the past 15 years, mass social media has replaced outside reality in many people’s lives, so that things that happen on Twitter/X feel more substantial than things that happen in the streets. In this virtual world of constant denunciations and insults, the only way you can attack and defeat someone is to call them “dumb” a lot, and get a lot of other people to call them “dumb” at the same time. The idea is that if enough of you call someone “dumb” at the same time, then he’s defeated, and you win. This is why everyone on Twitter/X is always calling someone an idiot, a dunce, or some other similar word.
Except that in the real world beyond the little X app on your phone, simply calling someone “dumb” does not actually defeat them, any more than Rachel Maddow actually “destroys Trump” when she says mean things about him on MSNBC. Maybe saying that Elon has a 110 IQ makes you feel like you beat him in your little online fantasy world, but out there in the actual world, he is still ripping up your national institutions at breakneck speed.
People who think that denigrating Elon’s capabilities will somehow defeat him or make him go away are simply fools — not low IQ, but simply unwise people reacting suboptimally to an external challenge. Elon Musk is, in many important ways, the single most capable man in America, and we deny that fact at our peril.
The one possible exception being the late Jim Simons. But probably not even him.
We should also ask ourselves why, as a country, we built a system where only one guy is able to do all this stuff, instead of lots of slightly less capable entrepreneurs also being able to do similar things. But that’s a topic for another post.
As with many humanities disciplines, historians tend to mistake the current consensus within their field for objective truth.
I recommend Frank McLynn’s book Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy as a good introduction to this history, along with Dan Carlin’s podcast series on the Mongols. A lot of people enjoy Jack Weatherford’s Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, but while it’s definitely the most fun of the bunch, I think it’s a bit too hagiographic of the Mongols.
2025-02-21 10:32:10
Imagine, for a moment, that the U.S. lost a major war against a coalition of China and Russia. What would the victorious coalition force our country to do, as the terms of our surrender? I’m not sure, but based on the settlement of World War 1, America’s list of concessions might look something like this:
Withdrawal: The U.S. would unilaterally withdraw support for countries trying to resist Chinese/Russian hegemony. Furthermore, the U.S. would stop trying to wield influence in Eurasia, instead limiting its sphere of influence to the Western Hemisphere (or simply to North America).
Disarmament: The U.S. would reduce the size and capability of its military by a significant amount.
Deindustrialization: The U.S. would cancel industrial policies designed to compete with Chinese manufacturing, and instead economically focus on delivering raw materials and agricultural goods to China.
This list is roughly similar to the settlement that Germany was forced to accept at the Treaty of Versailles after losing World War 1 — it’s only missing the large reparations payments that Germany was forced to make to the victorious powers.
Anyway, now realize that under its new President Donald Trump, America is very rapidly making moves in all three of the directions listed above.
First, withdrawal. Trump is holding “peace” negotiations with Russia over Ukraine, to which Ukraine and its European supporters weren’t even invited. At those talks, he has unilaterally and preemptively conceded to a long list of Russian war demands, with Russia as yet offering nothing in return. And meanwhile, he has publicly blamed Ukraine for starting the war — something that even many of his supporters in the U.S. can see is an obvious lie. Here was Trump’s public statement about the war from his social media account:
Trump has also proposed that Chinese troops should police a ceasefire deal in Ukraine.
On top of that, some European officials believe that the U.S. is preparing to withdraw its troops from the Baltic countries — small nations that used to be part of the USSR, and which Russia will probably go after once it’s finished with Ukraine. There are even rumors that the U.S. might withdraw from Europe entirely, although so far the Trump administration has assured Poland that it won’t do this.
Next, disarmament. Publicly, the Trump administration has endorsed a House budget that includes a substantial increase in defense spending, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has called for a bigger defense budget. But privately, Hegseth has been telling the Pentagon to prepare for drastic cuts:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered senior leaders at the Pentagon and throughout the U.S. military to develop plans for cutting 8 percent from the defense budget in each of the next five years, according to a memo obtained by The Washington Post and officials familiar with the matter…Hegseth ordered the proposed cuts to be drawn up by Monday, according to the memo, which is dated Tuesday and includes a list of 17 categories that the Trump administration wants exempted…
The Pentagon budget for 2025 is about $850 billion, with broad consensus on Capitol Hill that extensive spending is necessary to deter threats posed by China and Russia, in particular. If adopted in full, the cuts would include tens of billions of dollars in each of the next five years…The budget directive follows a separate order from the Trump administration seeking lists of thousands of probationary Defense Department employees expected to be fired this week. That effort is being overseen by billionaire Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service as part of his broader dismantling of the federal bureaucracy.
And a week earlier, Trump called for a “deal” with China where each country would cut its military spending in half. (This would actually be unilateral U.S. disarmament, since most of China’s military spending is off-budget.)
The market thinks this is a big deal. Hegseth’s memo caused a big drop in the value of U.S. defense stocks — not just traditional “prime” contractors, but also Palantir, commonly thought to be allied with the administration:
As some folks on X put it, if Trump & co. aren’t trying to forfeit the world to China here, they chose an odd way of showing it.
(Update: There are now some claims emerging that the cuts in defense spending aren’t actually cuts from the overall defense budget, but reallocation from existing programs to new Trump priorities. We’ll see in the coming months if that’s accurate, or if there are actually going to be cuts. In any case, Trump definitely floated the idea of a 50% cut in defense spending, and DOGE is definitely conducting mass firings at the Pentagon.)
Finally, deindustrialization. Trump is rapidly moving to cancel the industrial policy push initiated under the Biden administration. He has frozen Congressionally approved funding for EV subsidies, and issued orders to end policies favoring battery-powered vehicles. Now he’s firing large numbers of workers tasked with administering the CHIPS Act. This is a huge blow to semiconductor industrial policy:
Meanwhile, Trump’s threats of tariffs against China are rapidly evaporating. During his campaign, he promised 60% tariffs on China. After he was elected, that suddenly fell to 10%. Now Trump is talking about making a “deal” in which he repeals even the original tariffs he put on China in his first term (and which Biden kept in place), in exchange for Chinese promises to buy U.S. goods.
This would essentially amount to unilateral cancellation of U.S. tariffs, since a similar “deal” in Trump’s first term led to China breaking its promise to buy American agricultural products. But even if it succeeded, such a “deal” would push the U.S. in the direction of deindustrialization, ceding manufacturing to the Chinese, as a number of people who study U.S.-China relations and trading patterns have noticed:
What is going on here? Why is the President of the United States acting like his country just lost a major war to its chief rivals? How can we explain this flurry of moves, seemingly all designed to weaken the U.S.’ position?
Conspiracy theorists will suggest that the U.S. did in fact just lose a major war. They will tell you that Trump, and Vance have been directly contacted and suborned by China — or possibly by Russia — and have either been threatened or bribed into selling out their country. An alternative theory is that Elon Musk has been turned, and is using his influence to bully the administration into making these moves. A number of people have advanced these theories on social media, and I occasionally hear them come up in casual conversation.
While I don’t think these conspiracies are entirely impossible, I think they’re extremely unlikely. The threats and bribes required to get America’s leaders to become actual foreign assets would be enormous. Trump is already America’s most powerful man, and Musk the world’s richest, and they have the entire apparatus of the U.S. government to protect them from foreign threats. And the risk of getting caught — which would likely entail prison or execution for the conspirators — is too high, especially given the complexity and sheer audacity of what such a conspiracy would require in order to pull off. So “the most stupendous and audacious conspiracy in the history of humankind” is not the first, or even the second, explanation that I’d turn to here.
Instead, I think there are two plausible theories of what’s going on. The first is that Trump, Musk, and Vance have decided to reorient America’s role in the world, to match their own ideological goals and their assessments of U.S. capabilities. I call this the “Metternich-Lindbergh Theory” because it combines Klemens von Metternich’s dream of a concert of conservative powers dedicated to cracking down on internal dissent with Charles Lindbergh’s vision of an America focused exclusively on the Western Hemisphere.
First, let’s talk about Klemens von Metternich, and the history of the early 19th century. Metternich was an Austrian diplomat, and later chancellor of the Austrian empire. In the early 1800s, Europe was still reeling from the French revolution and the massive wars it had given rise to. European regimes were terrified that French-style revolutionism would erupt again, overthrowing their royal families and reordering society.
Metternich was among Europe’s most conservative leaders. He had the idea that instead of constantly fighting each other as they had in the 18th century, European countries should be at peace and cooperate to suppress internal revolutionist dissent. Thus was the “Concert of Europe” born. For half a century after Napoleon’s defeat, a system of overlapping diplomatic institutions — many of them facilitated by Metternich — successfully prevented wars in Europe, while Metternich and the conservative Tsar Alexander I of Russia worked hard to suppress revolutionary and liberal sentiment throughout Europe. Metternich’s system had its ups and downs, but it was successful at preventing a wave of attempted revolutions in 1848 from causing major regime change in Europe.
Now consider the events of the late 2010s and 2020. Every American knows about the Black Lives Matter protests that started in 2014 and reached a crescendo in the Floyd protests in the summer of 2020 — the biggest American protest movement in at least a century, if not ever. But what many Americans forget is that the late 2010s, especially 2019, were a time of extreme popular unrest all over the world. Here’s how The New Yorker reported it at the time:
When historians look back at 2019, the story of the year will not be the turmoil surrounding Donald Trump. It will instead be the tsunami of protests that swept across six continents and engulfed both liberal democracies and ruthless autocracies. Throughout the year, movements have emerged overnight, out of nowhere, unleashing public fury on a global scale—from Paris and La Paz to Prague and Port-au-Prince, Beirut to Bogota and Berlin, Catalonia to Cairo, and in Hong Kong, Harare, Santiago, Sydney, Seoul, Quito, Jakarta, Tehran, Algiers, Baghdad, Budapest, London, New Delhi, Manila, and even Moscow. Taken together, the protests reflect unprecedented political mobilization.
Take special note of the words “Moscow” and “Hong Kong” in that list. 2019 saw Russians pouring into the streets of Moscow to protest Putin’s rule, after years of slow growth and sanctions. It also saw China’s biggest protests since Tiananmen Square, when Hong Kong erupted for months on end. Every power in the world, democratic or authoritarian, was shaken by 2019 and 2020.
These protests were, technically speaking, more similar to 1848 than to the French Revolution — almost no regime changes actually occurred, but everyone in power was spooked, many governments made major concessions, and the protests seemed to herald an era of roiling social change. No one knows exactly why the world erupted in unrest in 2019, but the leading theory is technological. The advent of social media and smartphones simply gave people the ability to organize street actions — and to exchange radical ideas and inflammatory images — more easily. This theory is laid out at length in the books The Revolt of the Public, by Martin Gurri, and Twitter and Tear Gas, by Zeynep Tufekci (both of which came out before 2019).
In the U.S., these social changes manifested as what we now call “wokeness”. Wokeness, in the form of DEI and trans culture, was institutionalized under Biden, not just in government but in many corporations, universities, and other American institutions. This was basically seen as a concession to popular unrest. The Trump resurgence — and especially Elon Musk’s DOGE — can be seen as a reaction to those concessions and to that unrest. American conservatives saw a mortal threat from the institutionalization of anti-white discrimination, and have bent all of their energies toward crushing anything that smacks of the sentiment of 2020.
Russia and China, meanwhile, each responded to the unrest in their own way. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while certainly a bid for glory and imperial restoration, can also be seen as a reaction to 2019 — a redirection of the country’s energies and violent young men toward an external enemy. And China’s zero-Covid policy can be seen partly as a reestablishment of the draconian, pervasive social control of the Mao era — notably, Hong Kong was finally crushed using anti-Covid controls as an excuse.1
America’s new rulers may therefore see their interests as more aligned with Russia and China than did the Biden regime they replaced. Biden-era Democrats were inclined to make maximum concessions to the movements of 2014-2020, while Trump-era Republicans are inclined to make none at all. They likely see wokeness as a bigger threat than Chinese and Russian power — in the words of Chiang Kai-Shek, “a disease of the heart” vs. “a disease of the skin”. Remember JD Vance’s words from the recent Munich Security Conference:
[T]he threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor…[W]hat I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.
And Darren Beattie, currently serving as interim undersecretary of state for public diplomacy under Trump, tends to tweet things like this:
And here’s Tristan Tate, a rightist influencer, calling for America to ally with Russia and China instead of with democratic nations:
This is more extreme than most MAGA types would put it in public, but it’s probably indicative of deeper strains of thought within the movement.
What’s more, Trump, Musk, and Vance understand that foreign conflicts can sometimes force a country to make concessions to popular reform movements at home, because it’s difficult to battle a foreign enemy while suppressing internal dissent. They won’t have forgotten that America’s movement toward civil rights and desegregation was heavily influenced by World War 2. They may worry that the necessity of resisting Chinese and Russian power could force the U.S. to make concessions to progressivism.
So ideologically, the MAGA movement is inclined to seek something like the Concert of Europe — a triple alliance with Russia and China to tamp down on dissent, reverse immigration flows, and so on. Of course this wouldn’t look like the formal institutions Metternich devised, but an informal partnership. The key would be to avoid any great-power conflicts and to focus on internal ideological battles.
Just for fun, here’s a pic I had Grok draw of the new Metternich system for a post a couple of months ago:
Elon is obviously in the position of Metternich here, with Trump as the aging Austrian emperor somewhere out of the frame.2
Geopolitically, this wouldn’t actually look like 19th-century Europe — it would look more like the world envisioned by Charles Lindbergh in the 1930s. Lindbergh argued that the U.S. should completely avoid involvement in Eurasia, and focus entirely on the Western Hemisphere:
Let us give no promises we cannot keep make no meaningless assurances to an Ethiopia, a Czechoslovakia, or a Poland. The policy we decide upon should be as clear cut as our shorelines, and as easily defended as our continent…This western hemisphere is our domain. It is our right to trade freely within it. From Alaska to Labrador, from the Hawaiian Islands to Bermuda, from Canada to South America, we must allow no invading army to set foot. These are the outposts of the United States. They form the essential outline of our geographical defense…Around these places should lie our line between neutrality and war. Let there be no compromise about our right to defend or trade within this area…Let us not dissipate our strength, or help Europe to dissipate hers, in these wars of politics and possession.
His movement was called the “America First” movement, which is a name that many Trump supporters use nowadays as well.
At the time, America rejected Lindbergh-ism. But there’s a big difference between then and now: the global balance of power. In the 1930s, the U.S. was the world’s manufacturing colossus, giving it the power to determine the fate of Eurasia. Today, that role is occupied by China, whose manufacturing capabilities now dwarf America’s.
Trump, Musk, & co. may have looked at that lopsided manufacturing equation and decided that there’s just no way that America, even in concert with its allies and potential partners like India, can match Chinese power over the next few decades. The daunting prospect of retooling American society to keep up with the Chinese may have caused the MAGA people to balk, and to start looking around for ways to come to an accommodation with the new reality of overwhelming Chinese power.
Lindbergh-ism — a voluntary retreat to the Western hemisphere — might seem like a way of appeasing the Chinese, at the same time that it allows America’s new rightist leaders to focus all of their energies on Metternichian internal struggles. Part of that idea is to divide the world into three spheres of influence, controlled by three authoritarian conservative powers — China as the ruler of Asia, Russia as the ruler of Europe, and America as the ruler of the Western Hemisphere.3 That certainly fits with Trump’s suddenly bellicose statements toward Canada and other nearby countries.
That’s what I call the Metternich-Lindbergh theory of Trump’s sudden rush to accommodate America’s foreign rivals. It’s basically an early surrender in Cold War 2, but Trump, Musk, & co. may see it as their only option for preserving their vision of Western civilization.
That’s one theory, but it’s not the only one. Another theory — which is probably still the one most people believe — is that Trump’s actions represent a sincere effort at a geopolitical realignment. This is sometimes called the “Reverse Kissinger” theory. Kissinger exploited the Sino-Soviet Split to make a de facto alliance with China against the USSR in the second half of the Cold War; the idea here is that Trump wants to peel off Russia from China in order to refocus all of America’s efforts on its more powerful rival in the Pacific.
It’s not actually a terrible idea, if you don’t care about ideology or the rules-based international order, and you only care about the pure balance of power. Of course Russia isn’t going to be America’s ally anytime soon, and will continue to depend on China economically. But Russia is weak enough that they might relish the chance to stay neutral in a U.S.-China conflict, and rebuild their depleted strength. And China’s hesitancy to support Russia in the Ukraine war shows that their partnership is more of a loose axis than a true, solid alliance. Meanwhile, becoming neutral with respect to Russia would make it easier for the U.S. to cement its alliance with India, which has good relations with Russia and which will be absolutely crucial in any long-term balancing coalition against China in Asia.4
Of course this also requires that the U.S. sacrifice Europe as an ally, but Trump may have calculated that Europe wasn’t going to be much help against China after all. Perhaps better to let Europe and Russia simply keep each other occupied while America pivots to Asia.
There is some evidence that the Trump administration does actually care about deterring China in the Pacific, instead of simply retreating from the world stage entirely. The U.S. State Department has removed language about not supporting Taiwanese independence, angering China. The Trump administration has also stepped up diplomatic support for Taiwan, in cooperation with Japan and South Korea. The administration has appointed a bunch of China hawks.
But if this is true, how can we explain all the things Trump has done that seem likely to strengthen China’s advantages over America? How can we explain the defense spending cuts, the cancellation of industrial policy, the blocking of the TikTok divestment bill, the cancellation of USAID programs designed to counter Chinese influence around the world, the withdrawal from international bodies that China will dominate in our absence, etc.?
To make the “Reverse Kissinger” theory work here, we have to add in some other assumptions. Specifically, we have to assume one of two things:
The Trump administration is stupid, and doesn’t realize how many of the things it’s breaking will diminish its power vis-a-vis China.
The people claiming that all of the above moves will weaken give China the advantage are wrong, and Trump’s moves are actually fine in terms of maintaining U.S. power.
Since defense spending increases and semiconductor policy have such strong bipartisan support in Congress, I think it’s probably unlikely that #2 is true here, at least for a lot of the things Trump is doing.
So the most plausible alternative to the Metternich-Lindbergh theory of Trump’s behavior is that he’s trying to pull a Reverse Kissinger, but is doing lots of dumb stuff that hampers his own effort. I wouldn’t discount this theory, but at this point I think the Metternich-Lindbergh idea has to be considered the leading hypothesis.5
Over the next few months, we’ll get a clearer picture of which theory is right. If the Metternich-Lindbergh theory holds true, then the next people to get rug-pulled by Trump and Musk will be figures in the defense-contracting world and the defense establishment who want to stand up to China. This includes folks like Palmer Luckey and the folks at Palantir, who clearly see the imperialist threat posed by China. It also includes much of the defense and foreign policy establishment, including many of Trump’s own appointees. If the defense cuts actually go through, it will be a big tell.
Watch for cancellation of export controls on China, removal of troops from U.S. bases in the Pacific, claims that Japan and South Korea are sponging off the U.S. and failing to pay for their own defense, administration reversals on language about Taiwan, and so on. If you see this stuff happening, that should strengthen your belief that Trump and Musk want America to withdraw from Asia and focus entirely on internal conflicts and regional influence.
I think this is the likeliest way that things will shake out, though still far from certain. But if I’m right, and Trump and Musk think they’ll be able to realize the geopolitical visions of Lindbergh and Metternich, I think they’re in for some rude surprises.
First of all, I suspect that although they’re certainly exhausted from the 2010s, Americans are neither as apathetic nor as tuned-out as the Trump administration seems to assume. Trump’s actions on Ukraine have roused a number of normally compliant conservatives to public expressions of confusion, anger, and dissent — these include the likes of Nikki Haley, Patrick Ruffini, Mark Levin, Niall Ferguson, the Wall Street Journal, and various GOP legislators, and probably some others that I haven’t come across.
Eventually those Republicans can be cowed by rightist rage or whipped into line with the threat of Musk-funded primary challenges or whatever. But they’re proxies for a deeper well of broad public sentiment that’s a lot harder to corral. Trump’s Ukraine comments were followed by another downward tick in his poll numbers:
Trump is still on his “honeymoon”, and people probably haven’t been following the DOGE stuff or the executive orders very closely. But eventually enough praising of dictators and denouncing of democracies will make the American people notice. America has changed since I was young, but it hasn’t changed that much — right-wing X-and-TikTok junkies still represent only a small slice of the population.
Most Americans don’t like it when their leaders sell them out to their enemies.
If Trump starts cozying up to China as well as to Russia, as I predict he’ll do fairly soon, the American people will get even more negative about his regime — especially because economic factors are likely to become headwinds at the same time. Eventually, if disapproval gets very high, the Democrats will be able to rally the American public around something other than bland messaging about health care or the identity politics that failed them in previous years.
There’s another big problem with the Metternich-Lindbergh idea, which is that China also gets a vote. Russia is probably happy to take a breather and get the U.S. off its back, but China might not be satisfied with dominion over a third of the world. It’s unlikely to see an introverted, inscrutable, autocratic U.S. as a true ally. And China’s leaders will worry that another change of U.S. leadership could bring American power back to challenge it in Asia.
For this reason, if the U.S. appeases China, they’ll keep trying to weaken American power, even in the Western Hemisphere. They’ll step in as Canada’s patron and protector, as well as the countries of Latin America; the U.S. won’t be able to dominate South America as it did in Lindbergh’s time, and South America has plenty of resources that China would like to monopolize for itself. Shorn of the assistance of Japan, South Korea, and India, the U.S. would not be very capable of resisting Chinese encroachment in its own back yard.
Nor would China stop its efforts to destabilize U.S. society. If MAGA becomes the dominant ideology in America, China and its influence operations will try to support leftism, wokeness, and anything else they think will keep the U.S. divided and off-balance. (Russia might even help China out in this regard, because hey, why not?) Thus, the Metternich strategy could backfire on Trump and Elon’s goal of purging wokeness from the West.
I think it’s worth remembering why the original Metternich system eventually failed. It failed because some powers — mostly Germany, but also Russia and France — weren’t satisfied with their static spheres of influence in the region as of 1815. National conflicts returned, and countries like Metternich’s Austria that had turned inward found themselves outmatched by countries that had built up manufacturing, science, technology, and their militaries. This time, due to where China currently is in its power cycle, I expect the half-life of any international conservative pact to be significantly shorter than in the 1800s.
History doesn’t stop for conservatives, any more than it stopped for liberals.
Of course, it’s a little more complicated. Zero Covid caused its own small eruption of protests in mainland China, forcing Xi to end the policy as a concession.
In the 1930s analogy, Trump is Lindbergh and Musk is Henry Ford.
You’ll also recognize this as the geopolitical arrangement in Orwell’s 1984.
I suspect this is why Tulsi Gabbard was conformed for Director of National Intelligence. She’s pro-Russia, but also strongly pro-Modi, and could help cement that alliance.
There’s also a “mixed” theory where Trump, Hegseth, and others want to stand up to China, but Elon and Vance won’t let them.
2025-02-19 16:00:59
In 1994, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons, in exchange for security guarantees from the United States and Russia to respect Ukraine’s borders and sovereignty.
In 2022, Russia violated that agreement, launching an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine’s borders, claiming pieces of its territory. In 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump held talks with Russian leaders, falsely blamed Ukraine for starting the war, and reportedly offered a “peace deal” that would endorse Russian conquests of Ukrainian territory.
Contrast this with the experience of North Korea. In 2006, the country tested its first nuclear weapon, and is now reckoned to have about 50. Despite being impoverished and surrounded by hostile powers and questionable allies, North Korea has never been seriously threatened with war in the years since it went nuclear. Indeed, during his first term, Trump went out of his way to accommodate and befriend North Korea’s leader.
The moral of these stories and others1 is painfully, uncomfortably clear. The modern world is a place where nuclear-armed great powers, led by authoritarian leaders, often feel the impulse to bully smaller nations. If those smaller nations lack nuclear weapons, they lie prostrate and vulnerable at the feet of the bullies. But if they have nukes, they are much harder to push around. This doesn’t mean they’re impervious to attack — Israel has been struck by Iran and its proxies — but having nukes dramatically improves a small country’s security.
There are at least three smallish nations for whom this lesson is especially urgent right now. In Europe, Poland is menaced by Russia, which seeks to dominate Poland as it did under the Tsarist empire and again under the USSR. Trump is frantically appeasing and trying to befriend Russia, and the West European nations are not yet willing to fill the gap. If Ukraine falls, Poland will be next on Russia’s menu — and Russia will have plenty of newly conscripted Ukrainian troops to throw as cannon fodder against Poland.
In Asia, meanwhile, Japan and South Korea confront a bully far more powerful than Russia. China is the world’s manufacturing superpower, with industrial capacity far exceeding the U.S. and all its Asian allies combined; even if Trump’s America decideds wants to defend Asia against a Chinese takeover, it’s not clear it has the ability to do so. And as Palmer Luckey eloquently pointed out in a recent interview, there’s every indication that China wouldn’t be satisfied with the conquest of Taiwan — it’s building a case to claim Japan’s island of Okinawa, and might support a North Korean takeover of South Korea in order to turn the whole peninsula into a Chinese satellite state.
Poland, Japan, and South Korea need something to replace the failing deterrence of their alliances with the U.S. Almost exactly one year ago, I made the case that that “something” is nuclear weapons of their own. I usually wait at least two years to “rerun” a post of mine, but in this case the situation seems rather urgent and the message is painfully timely. I don’t like nuclear proliferation any more than you do, but in the new terrifying world of authoritarianism and great power conquests, it’s probably inevitable; best to do it in a way that preserves as much as possible of the stability and freedom that Europe and Asia have rightfully come to treasure.
Anyway, here’s my post from last year:
I am, to put it mildly, very unhappy about the need to write this post. I’ve been putting it off for a long time. And yet I’m going to write it, because it’s true, and someone needs to say it, and warning people about unpleasant geopolitical realities has kind of become one of my roles as a blogger over the past year. I wrote about how the U.S. isn’t psychologically or economically prepared for war with China, about the U.S.’ withered defense-industrial base, and about the vulnerability of world commerce to area-denial strategies. But today it’s time for me to write about the scariest of these topics — the need for controlled nuclear proliferation. Japan and South Korea, and possibly also Poland, need to create their own nuclear deterrents.
For my entire life, it’s been an article of faith among most of the people I know that nuclear proliferation is a bad thing. And that makes sense, because nuclear weapons are truly terrifying weapons. The U.S. and USSR had many close calls during the first Cold War; if even one of those had resulted in a nuclear exchange, much of human civilization would have been laid waste. The more pairs of countries are staring each other down with nukes, the greater the chance that one of those pairs will have a false alarm or accidental launch. That simple math should make us terrified of nuclear proliferation.
Furthermore, from 1990 through 2010, nuclear disarmament made the world a lot safer. U.S. and Soviet/Russian nuclear stockpiles dwindled from over 60,000 between them to fewer than 10,000:
And fewer than 4,000 of those are actually deployed; most are kept in reserves or have already been retired.
So why on Earth would we turn our back on a successful strategy of disarmament and actually recommend that more countries build their own nukes? Isn’t that pure stark raving world-destroying insanity?
Well, no, for several reasons. First, I’m not recommending that countries go back to keeping tens of thousands of nukes on hair-trigger alert like the U.S. and USSR did; instead I’m recommending that a couple of countries develop modest nuclear deterrents along the lines of France’s, the UK’s, or India’s. Second, countries outside of the U.S. alliance system have been engaging in nuclear proliferation for half a century now, so to simply do nothing in the face of that strategy will not stop nuclear proliferation from occurring; it will simply make it one-sided.
Third, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s threat to invade Taiwan signals a new expansionism on the part of the totalitarian great powers, which will be difficult to deter conventionally. Fourth, internal political divisions mean that Japan, South Korea, and Poland can’t rely on the U.S. nuclear umbrella like they used to. Fifth, evidence from South Asia suggests that modest nuclear deterrents can act as a stabilizing force at the regional as well as the global level. And finally, breaking the one-sided taboo on nuclear proliferation will probably make it easier to set up an effective new global nonproliferation regime.
In other words, Japan and South Korea getting nukes is not a good thing, but it’s probably the least bad option available at this unhappy juncture.
The original five nuclear powers, as defined in the nonproliferation regime set up in the 1960s, were the U.S., the USSR, China, the UK, and France. These were also the countries with permanent seats on the UN Security Council, and they were the victors of World War 2. So the original list of approved nuclear powers made sense as an extension of the postwar global order.
Those states generally tried to keep nuclear weapons to themselves, but not always. It’s an open secret that China helped Pakistan build nuclear weapons:
In 1982, a Pakistani military C-130 left the western Chinese city of Urumqi with a highly unusual cargo: enough weapons-grade uranium for two atomic bombs, according to accounts written by the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, and provided to The Washington Post.
The uranium transfer in five stainless-steel boxes was part of a broad-ranging, secret nuclear deal approved years earlier by Mao Zedong and Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto that culminated in an exceptional, deliberate act of proliferation by a nuclear power, according to the accounts by Khan…
According to Khan, the uranium cargo came with a blueprint for a simple weapon that China had already tested, supplying a virtual do-it-yourself kit that significantly speeded Pakistan's bomb effort. The transfer also started a chain of proliferation: U.S. officials worry that Khan later shared related Chinese design information with Iran; in 2003, Libya confirmed obtaining it from Khan's clandestine network.
France, meanwhile, helped Israel build a nuclear reactor to produce material for nuclear bombs.
Pakistan, once it had nukes, had few reservations about proliferating them. It helped Iran, which doesn’t quite have nukes yet, but is close. And it did succeed in helping North Korea to go nuclear.
Meanwhile, although China isn’t exactly happy that North Korea has nukes, it has steadfastly refused American entreaties to take strong action to force North Korea to denuclearize. Chinese aid kept the North Korean economy and military afloat in the face of U.S. sanctions, allowing it to build up its nuclear arsenal and its missile capabilities. And China has never showed much interest in helping to curb Iran’s nuclear program, buying a large amount of Iranian oil and enabling the Iranian economy to stay afloat in the face of U.S. sanctions.
So nuclear proliferation is happening, and it’s mostly being done by China and its allies. Increasingly, this means that U.S. allies are facing nuclear-capable enemies without nukes of their own. India has nukes to balance Pakistan’s, and Israel has nukes to balance any future Iranian arsenal. But three key U.S. allies are in a very perilous situation right now: Japan, South Korea, and Poland.
Japan, South Korea, and Poland have been staring down the teeth of nuclear-armed China, North Korea, and Russia for decades now. But in the past, they could always rely on the U.S. nuclear umbrella to protect them from those enemies. The U.S. nuclear umbrella is an explicit or tacit agreement with an ally. The U.S. promises that if someone nukes that ally, the U.S. will use its own nuclear weapons in retaliation. In exchange, the ally agrees not to develop nuclear weapons of its own.
In the 1990s or the 2000s, the U.S. side of that bargain was a credible promise. But under Donald Trump, the solidity of the nuclear umbrella was called into question. During his presidency, Trump demanded that South Korea and Japan pay the U.S. to provide them with nuclear protection, implying that the nuclear umbrella was conditional. Trump has consistently shown hostility toward NATO, threatening to withdraw from the alliance, and recently declaring that if he won the presidency again, he would encourage Russia to conquer any U.S. allies that didn’t spend enough on their militaries.
Meanwhile, U.S. politics has now developed a “MAGA” faction — loyal to Trump, but not dependent on Trump — that is openly friendly to Russia and hostile to NATO. House Speaker Mike Johnson has blocked aid to Ukraine, resulting in the momentum of the war shifting to Russia. A pro-Russia online media ecosystem, including Tucker Carlson and others, has gained influence on the Right.
In this situation, allies should not be confident that America would come to their defense with nuclear weapons if they were attacked. If a Democrat is President, the nuclear umbrella is probably still in place (barring Congressional stonewalling), but a Democrat will not always be President. If Trump is rejected in 2024, a Republican will still probably win in 2028 or 2032, and that Republican will have to at least placate the “MAGA” wing that wants to support Russia and withdraw from NATO.
In other words, the U.S.’ domestic political divisions mean that it’s no longer a reliable nuclear protector. It might still come to the aid of Japan or South Korea or Poland with nukes, but betting the continued existence of your country on what America might do is an incredibly risky strategy.
America’s descent into unreliability comes at the most perilous possible time for Japan, South Korea, and Poland. China and Russia are on the march, led by personalistic totalitarian dictators and emboldened by both U.S. weakness and by China’s manufacturing dominance.
Russia has, of course, invaded Ukraine. But there’s no indication that swallowing it would satisfy Putin’s appetite. Estonia and Moldova are probably next on the menu, since the former has a large population and the latter has a Russian-controlled enclave. (Estonia is in NATO, but if Trump refuses to come to its aid when it’s attacked, NATO is a defunct alliance.) But Russia’s real prize is Poland, which Russia views as its ancient and most dangerous rival for influence in the Slavic world. Russian government mouthpieces regularly issue threats against Poland:
In general, it’s clear that Putin wants to restore some sort of Russian control over all of the lands that were part of the old Russian Empire. Whether he has the capability to do that is another question. Technology has shifted toward the defense, and drones, mines, and portable missiles are now fairly easily able to stop fleets armored vehicles in their tracks. Putin’s initial attempt to take Ukraine by blitzkrieg failed for this reason, and an attack on Poland wouldn’t go any better.
But Putin may not need a lightning victory in order to keep on rolling. He’s reoriented Russia’s entire economy around the Ukraine War, and mobilized all of its manpower. With robust oil revenues, Chinese manufacturing support, and a demographic advantage over the other East European states, there’s no reason Putin can’t just keep on attacking and attacking for decades.
Renard Foucart believes that Russia is so committed to the Ukraine war that its economy basically now depends on continuing that war:
Russia’s economy has not collapsed. But it does look very different, and is now entirely focused on a long war in Ukraine – which is actually driving economic growth…Put simply, the war against Ukraine is now the main driver of Russia’s economic growth…A protracted stalemate might be the only solution for Russia to avoid total economic collapse. Having transformed the little industry it had to focus on the war effort, and with a labour shortage problem worsened by hundreds of thousands of war casualties and a massive brain drain, the country would struggle to find a new direction…The Russian regime has no incentive to end the war and deal with that kind of economic reality.
Russia thus seems to be trying to invent a new kind of empire — a “slow empire”, for which perpetual war is a way of life instead of a means to an end. It may never execute the kind of rapid, lightning conquests that empires of the past hoped to achieve, but it will relentlessly grind forward for decades on end.
China hasn’t launched any major attacks yet, but it does seem to be moving in a bit of a Russia-like direction. In addition to its threat to conquer — excuse me, “reunify with” — Taiwan, China has been trying to slowly slice off bits of territory from India, the Philippines, and Bhutan. And it’s also now pushing a claim to the Japanese island of Okinawa — not some small outlying island, but an important Japanese province.
Thus, while Xi Jinping might not be quite as reckless or aggressive as Putin, he clearly seems to want to carry out a similar policy of continuous slow expansion. And China’s economic and population advantages over its neighbors are far larger than Russia’s; China can continue a “slow empire” strategy for many decades.
If you’re in the path of a “slow empire”, how do you defend against it? You can’t out-manufacture China or a China-supplied Russia. You can’t throw more bodies into the fray than China and Russia can. What do you do? Other than surrender, you basically have two choices:
Get the U.S., West Europe, or other external powers to protect you, or
Develop nuclear weapons.
For Japan and South Korea, the choice here is very clear. The U.S. is their only external protector against China, and the rise of MAGA politics (and the shriveling of the U.S. defense-industrial base) means that the U.S. is no longer reliable. Nuclear weapons are the only real possibility of an enduring security guarantee for Japan and South Korea. And that’s not even taking into account the need to deter the loose cannon of North Korea, whose nuclear-capable missile arsenal is growing more deadly by the day.
For Poland, the case is less clear. It has another potential protector besides the U.S.: the European powers of Germany, France, and the UK. Those countries can theoretically outmatch Russia in terms of both population and manufacturing, even if Russia gets Chinese help. And the UK and France have nukes of their own. And there’s no loose cannon like North Korea in the neighborhood.
The main danger for Poland is that Germany, France, and the UK, like America, will remain mired in political paralysis, and that their defense-industrial bases will remain moribund, and that they will fail to come to Poland’s aid against Putin. Even if its manufacturing base allowed Poland to hold out against Russia by itself, a non-nuclear Poland might be cowed into submission by Russian nuclear threats. If West Europe allows Ukraine to fall, Poland will almost certainly strongly consider scrambling for nukes.
So for Japan, South Korea, and possibly Poland, getting nukes is the obvious strategy for dealing with the expansionist empires next door. If these countries went nuclear, it would draw “hard boundaries” past which Xi and Putin could not pass, even if they succeeded in gobbling up Ukraine, Taiwan, and other small nations in the area. Japanese, South Korean, and Polish nukes would freeze the battle lines of Cold War 2, potentially stopping it from turning into World War 3.
Of course, as I mentioned, Japanese, South Korea, and Polish nukes could also start World War 3, in case of an accidental launch. And some people might worry that if they possessed nukes, these three countries would themselves become more aggressive.
In the case of Japan and South Korea, I’m not so worried. These are peace-loving, non-expansionist countries with zero interest in starting wars with their neighbors. Furthermore, they would not be able to win a nuclear confrontation with China, only to make China pay a very high price for any victory. So even if they wanted to be aggressive, they couldn’t.
And both Japan and South Korea are known for highly competent civil servants and well-functioning national institutions; the danger of accidental launch isn’t zero, but it’s probably less than for the U.S., China, Russia, or other existing nuclear powers. I can’t think of any countries on the planet more capable of maintaining a nuclear deterrent safely and using it wisely. I have a bit less confidence in Poland, since it escaped communism and endemic corruption only recently, and its technocratic elite has been in power for a far shorter time.
But there’s another reason I’m not so worried about Japanese or South Korean nukes, which is that nuclear deterrence seems to have had a salutary effect on war in South Asia. India and Pakistan have fought each other four times (with India winning all four contests). Their fourth war, the Kargil War of 1999, came right after both had developed nuclear weapons. But although there were some nuclear threats, the nuclear factor is part of what made Pakistan eventually back down. Ultimately, casualties in that war were very low — probably less than 2000 deaths all told.
An India-Pakistan standoff in 2019, meanwhile, fizzled in part because of worries over nuclear weapons. Pakistan’s President Imran Khan famously declared: “With the weapons you have and the weapons we have, can we afford miscalculation? Shouldn’t we think that if this escalates, what will it lead to?” Ultimately, both countries backed off of hostilities.
This is a very encouraging outcome. India and Pakistan are much poorer countries than Japan or South Korea, and have a recent history of warfare. And yet nuclear weapons very clearly acted as a restraint on war between the two bitter enemies. Obviously the possibility of a nuclear war between the two remains, and people are right to be scared of it. But South Asia offers a glimmer of hope that nuclear deterrence can stop or prevent conventional war between major powers, just as it stopped the superpowers from going to war with each other during the first Cold War.
So while I think Japan and South Korea getting nukes would reduce the risk of major conflict, there’s one more issue to consider: Where does it end? Every instance of nuclear proliferation prompts other countries to think “Why not us, too?”. If Japan and South Korea get nukes, why not Indonesia, Vietnam, and Malaysia? If Poland gets nukes, why not Hungary, Armenia, or Azerbaijan? A world where every country has nuclear weapons will almost certainly see them used at some point, after which their use could become normalized.
What we need in order to prevent this is a strict internationally enforced nuclear nonproliferation regime. Right now, we don’t have that; China and Russia are happy to help Iran and North Korea thrive under U.S. sanctions, allowing their nuclear programs to continue. What we have right now is a unilateral nonproliferation regime, where Chinese and Russian allies get nukes, and U.S. allies don’t. This is kind of like trying to implement gun control by giving up your guns and expecting your enemies to follow suit.
The only global nuclear nonproliferation regime that will work is one that China and Russia both buy into wholeheartedly and work to enforce. And they will only do that if they see a threat of proliferation on the opposite side of the global divide. Right now, China and Russia have no incentive to enforce nonproliferation, because they know U.S. allies will refrain from getting nukes unilaterally and voluntarily.
If Japan and South Korea go nuclear, this immediately changes. At that point, China and Russia know that democratic countries are going to play by the same rules they are, instead of a different, more restrictive set of rules. Which means China and Russia become just as worried about nuclear proliferation as the U.S. and West Europe are.
Right now, Japan and South Korea’s lack of nukes represents a glaring hole in the global balance of power, and an invitation to China and Russia to expand. It may seem paradoxical to think that new countries getting nukes would lead to a fundamentally more secure world, but in this case I think the alternative is clearly worse.
The non-nuclear Iran, unlike North Korea, has suffered regular Israeli and U.S. attacks. Nuclear Pakistan’s sovereignty is regarded as inviolable. And despite the popularity of “Death to Israel” chants, other Middle Eastern countries don’t seriously think about launching a major war with it, because Israel has nukes.
