Nader Elhefnawy

2011 Round-Up, Part II: The Year's Biggest Security Stories

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 13:53:00 +0000

With the end of 2011, many news outlets have proffered their lists of the year's biggest stories.

The list from the Wired Danger Room includes the killing of Osama bin Laden and other setbacks to al-Qaida; the "Arab Spring" in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya (and the international intervention there); the "end" of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, and the withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Iraq - while a substantial force of private contractors remains behind and the covert, "shadow" side of the War on Terror intensifies; and the revelation of startling anti-Muslim ignorance and bigotry in FBI training materials.

As these stories demonstrate, the list is rather focused on the War on Terror and the Middle East, but it also includes problems with high-tech aircraft programs (the grounding of the F-22 fleet, the beleaguered F-35 program), the revelations of previously secret programs (like the stealth helicopter used in the operation against bin Laden, and Pentagon research into crowdsourcing), the activities of Mexican drug cartels, and the U.S. armed forces' reaction to the massive budget cuts facing them in the coming years.

Still, there is much that the quick recaps of those items misses. The discussion of the Arab Spring is far from complete without mention of events in states besides the three North African nations that got so much press – like Bahrain (which responded with a brutal crackdown, in which it was backed by Saudi and UAE forces, events which were underreported, and which Western governments generally shied away from criticizing) and Yemen (where events have also turned bloody), which are not even mentioned in the Danger Room round-up. Additionally, the U.S. is not the only country recently forced to make sharp cuts in defense spending by its economic difficulties. (In relative terms, Britain's cuts seem far more dramatic, and are not irrelevant to the U.S. given the import of British participation in American-led interventions in the past two decades.)

One might add that during 2011 China reached two milestones in the modernization (repeat, modernization, not build-up) of its forces – its testing of a fifth-generation fighter, the J-20, and the maiden voyage of its first aircraft carrier. (The significance of these events – which represent only an early stage in the development of both those capabilities - has been grossly exaggerated by scare-mongers, but I can't help feeling that an overview of the year would not be complete without mention of them.)

Offering a more global view (in contrast with the strongly American outlook of the Danger Room), as well as greater attention to less "traditional" (but arguably more important) issues is the list of The New Security Beat's most-viewed posts. Six of the top ten explicitly discuss demographics in some way (among other things, the role it played in the revolution in Tunisia, the implications for food security, and the revelation of a new, higher UN estimate about where population growth will go in the 21st century), two deal with water security issues, and one with the interaction between the two ("Peter Gleick: Population Dynamics Key to Sustainable Water Solutions"). There is also an attempt at developing a big picture ("In Search of A New Security Narrative").

However, the items presented by The New Security Beat is less news-y and more analytical than the Danger Room, so that while the pieces discussed above certainly demand attention, they do not quite function as a comprehensive round-up of the year's events. Indeed, two of the biggest stories in energy and environmental security during 2011 are not mentioned in it – the Fukushima nuclear disaster (the most dramatic nuclear energy incident in a generation, which will profoundly affect our handling of this energy source) and the 2011 United Nations Climate Change Conference (the agreement produced by which represents a step further than we have gone before, but even on paper is short on both the commitment and ambition needed to tackle the problem, while in real life carbon emissions continue to shoot up).

At the same time, there is the matter of the world's financial system, which remains deeply troubled as one G-7 member after another sees its credit rating suffer (the U.S. got downgraded in August), and the Eurozone crisis tediously drags on and on and on – simply some of the more conspicuous signs of the continuation of the 2008 economic crisis. It would be simplistic to set this problem above the others – economic security is hardly extricable from the kinds described above – but it seems to me the area of greatest short-term vulnerability. Unfortunately, as recent events show, nothing significant has been done about any aspect of this (not trade imbalances, or income inequality, or stagnant consumption, or the destabilizing overfinancialization of the world economy). Indeed, the problem hardly seems to have been acknowledged – precisely because such acknowledgment flies in the face of the neoliberalism that remains the orthodoxy, even as it has been shown to be bankrupt again and again, and the fact seems unlikely to change anytime soon.

2011 Round-Up, Part I: The Best of this Blog
1/4/12
Reliving British Decline?
11/8/11
Niall Ferguson on Decline
11/8/11
An "East of Suez" Moment?
10/27/11
Keeping the Hype in Check IV: China's Sub Fleet
10/24/11
"Twenty Years After the Cold War: A Strategic Survey": A Short Version
10/23/11
Twenty Years After the Fall
10/2/11
Keeping the Hype in Check III: China as Global Military Power
2/10/11
Keeping the Hype in Check II: The ASBM
2/5/11
Revolution and Rebellion in the Postmodern World
2/3/11
Keeping the Hype in Check I: The Chengdu J-20
2/1/11

On the Eureka Paradigm

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 18:48:00 +0000

I recently wrote at my other blog Raritania about "folk" perceptions of science, with a focus on what I call the "Eureka paradigm" of technological research and development. You can check out my post here.

SOPA Blackout Protest

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:30:00 +0000

I found out about the protest against SOPA (H.R. Bill 3261, innocuously named the "Stop Online Piracy Act") too late to participate properly. So I'm posting this message to indicate my solidarity with the protestors - and offering this link to blackout participant Wikipedia's FAQ on the subject.

Until tomorrow, please regard this site as also blacked out.

This blog will resume its normal operations then.

2011 Round-Up, Part I: The Best of this Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 19:42:00 +0000

Below is a listing of my more substantive pieces from the past year, organized by category.

Articles
"Space War and Futurehype Revisited." Space Review (November 14, 2011).

"Twenty Years After the Cold War: A Strategic Survey." Parameters 41.1 (Spring 2011), pp. 6-17. (I also posted a summary version of this article here.)

Book Reviews
"After the Empire, by Emmanuel Todd." Nader Elhefnawy (October 2, 2011).

"The Final Fall, by Emmanuel Todd." Nader Elhefnawy (October 2, 2011).

"The Power Elite, by C. Wright Mills." Nader Elhefnawy (August 13, 2011).

"Do Good Fences Make Good Neighbors? by Brent L. Sterling." Joint Forces Quarterly 62 (July 2011), p. 131.

"The Next Decade: Where We've Been . . . And Where We're Going, by George Friedman." Nader Elhefnawy (June 1, 2011).

"The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order, by Parag Khanna." Nader Elhefnawy (April 19, 2011).

"In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, is the Key to Future Prosperity, by Eamonn Fingleton." Nader Elhefnawy (March 5, 2011).

Other Blog Posts
By category:
This Year's Most Popular Post:
A Primer on the Technological Singularity
11/1/11

Two more posts, on the question of the projected sixth-generation fighter:
A Sixth Generation Fighter: Artificial Intelligence?
11/20/11
A Sixth Generation Fighter: Flight Control Systems?
11/5/11

Retrospectives of the Cold War's End:
"Twenty Years After the Cold War: A Strategic Survey": A Short Version
10/23/11
Twenty Years After the Fall
10/2/11

A series on China's military power, "Keeping the Hype in Check":
Keeping the Hype in Check IV: China's Sub Fleet
10/24/11
Keeping the Hype in Check III: China as Global Military Power
2/10/11
Keeping the Hype in Check II: The ASBM
2/5/11
Keeping the Hype in Check I: The Chengdu J-20
2/1/11

A few posts on the question of national decline (recently popular again):
Reliving British Decline?
11/8/11
Niall Ferguson on Decline
11/8/11
An "East of Suez" Moment?
10/27/11

And finally:
On 2012
12/21/11
Revolution and Rebellion in the Postmodern World
2/3/11
Piracy in 2010
1/19/11

Happy New Year

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 21:48:00 +0000

Happy 2012 everybody. May this year be your best yet – and all of us, still here in 2013 to laugh at the adherents of "apocalypse 2012" theories who have made such a pain of themselves.

January 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 15:33:00 +0000

2011 Round-Up, Part II: The Year's Biggest Security Stories
1/27/12
On the Eureka Paradigm
1/26/12
SOPA Blackout Protest
1/18/12
2011 Round-Up, Part I: The Best of this Blog
1/4/12
Happy New Year
1/3/12

2012

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 15:33:00 +0000

January 2012

Holiday Hiatus

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 15:08:00 +0000

The last months of 2011 have been good for this blog, with traffic hitting a new record level.

Thank you for reading.

As for the rest of the year: I'm taking Christmas and New Year's off, but I will be back the first week of January. I look forward to seeing you here then – and in the meantime, wish you the best this holiday season.

On 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 15:38:00 +0000

For decades, Nostradamus-obsessed doomsayers insisted on the apocalyptic significance of the month of July (or August) 1999.

Of course, that month came and went without such an incident – or much remark about the absence of such an incident, frankly.

All too predictably, the Mystic Apocalypse Industry shifted its attention to other predictions of doom. Nostradamus never went out of style, exactly, but he has since run second place to the new favorite, a bizarre reading of the Mayan long count calendar which holds that the end of the world will come on December 21, 2012 – next year's winter solstice, exactly one year from today.

So for over a decade, we have had to listen to a massive torrent of this nonsense.

One way or another, we'll find out the truth in a year. My prediction: I will be here, alive and well and on this blog, on an Internet as functional as ever, to remind everyone of what didn't happen.

But I doubt anyone will pay much attention. That "prediction" will be quietly forgotten, because that's what always happens, and the Industry will seize on something else and find plenty of takers, because that's what always happens.

Meanwhile, rational study of the real threats to our existence (ecological problems like resource depletion and climate change, for instance) gets ignored, or dismissed. It's far from fair, or for that matter conducive to our well-being, but all too predictable.

Until this time, next year, though, those who don't want to feel totally alone during the hysteria can check out 2012hoax, a wiki devoted to debunking the myth. They might also do well to check out NASA's Q & A on the subject.

Most Popular Posts?

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 14:47:00 +0000

To go by the number of page-views, it seems that the most read original posts on this blog are (in descending order):

"A Sixth-Generation Fighter?" (January 23, 2010).

"The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century by George Friedman" (July 19, 2009). (Book review.)

"A Primer on the Technological Singularity" (November 1, 2011).

The other pieces were, as you might guess, peer-reviewed articles published in other forums, namely my articles on energy - "Toward a Long-Range Energy Policy" (Parameters, Spring 2006) and "The Impending Oil Shock" (Survival, Summer 2008), and my piece on space warfare, "Four Myths About Space Power" (Parameters, Spring 2003).

December 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 14:45:00 +0000

Holiday Hiatus
12/22/11
On 2012
12/21/11
Most Popular Posts
12/4/11

A Sixth-Generation Fighter: Artificial Intelligence?

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 15:03:00 +0000

One possibility that has appeared in discussions of the sixth-generation fighter is that it might be unmanned. The advantages of such an approach are obvious. Eliminating the pilot means being able to do away with the space and weight needed for human accommodation, while the aircraft's performance would no longer be constrained by human endurance. Additionally, this eliminates the risk of human losses in aerial operations. That at least some of the next generation of fighters might be remotely piloted seems plausible enough, given the increased use of such aircraft in reconnaissance and strike missions.

More radical, however, is the question of aircraft which are fully autonomous. Doing away with remote control would reduce the reliance on a vulnerable communications link, on the inevitable time-delay and disruptions to the data transfer between the aircraft and a distant operator, and human reflexes. Additionally, a fully autonomous aircraft would greatly simplify the trouble and expense of training operators.

However, this mode of operation is far less common at this point, requiring as it does more advanced artificial intelligence than anything available. Yet, those who are bullish on this issue speculate that human-grade artificial intelligence might be available by the 2020s, just in time to be an option for the designers of the first crop of sixth-generation fighters. And of course, assuming continued progress on AI past that point, better-than-human artificial intelligence would set the standard, pushing human beings out of the cockpit once and for all.

Still, even if the optimists are right about this trajectory, it is unlikely to come about all at once. We might see intermediate steps, such as smarter aircraft systems, like the "intelligent flight control system" currently under study in some research programs, and sufficient automation to enable designers of strike aircraft like the F-15E Strike Eagle and F-18F Super Hornet to dispense with Weapons Systems Officers. This is not the limit of present ambition, however; Russian publicists for the PAK-FA promise the aircraft will have an expert system with near-human capability. And capability which is merely "near-human" might still be seen as adequate for an autonomous aircraft because of the other advantages it offers.

For the moment, though, a very large question mark hangs over this issue.

A Sixth Generation Fighter: Flight Control Systems?
11/5/11
A Primer on the Technological Singularity
11/1/11
A Sixth-Generation Fighter?
1/23/10

My New Goodreads Page

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 15:28:00 +0000

I'm now on Goodreads. (If you're not familiar with it, think of it as Facebook for readers.) The page is very much a work in progress, but you can check it out here.

New Article: "Space War and Futurehype Revisited"

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 18:28:00 +0000

This week's edition of The Space Review is up, with Jeff Foust writing on the state of solar system exploration and reviewing the second edition of Kevin W. Plaxco and Michael Gross's Astrobiology: A Brief Introduction, Dwayne Day on Chinese space reconaissance plans, and Michael Listner on the legal implications of Russia's Phobos-Grunt Mission.

Also appearing there is my first contribution to the publication since early 2009, "Space War and Futurehype Revisited," which takes another look at visions of space warfare from a not-so-distant yesteryear, specifically the visions of U.S. space dominance widely seen in the late 1990s and early 2000s, which increasingly seem passe - even if they have not totally ceased to be factors in international politics. (As Dwayne's article on China's military space program demonstrates, an exaggerated view of American capabilities certainly affects what other countries are doing.)

Reliving British Decline?

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 13:18:00 +0000

History may repeat itself, but it never does so exactly, one reason why historical analogies often mislead. (Consider, for instance, what scholar Jeffrey Record has to say about the "Munich" analogy in American policymaking.) Yet, the same can be said of just about any intellectual tool used improperly – or disingenuously.

The analogy so often drawn between today's United States and the British Empire is no exception to the pattern. Certainly the analogy has often been misused – in recent years, by the neoconservatives in particular. Yet, the parallels between their trajectories are well worth considering nonetheless, and one way of making such a comparison more useful might be (as I suggested in a previous posting) to not simply ask whether the U.S. is comparable to Imperial Britain, but, remembering how both have evolved, to ask which point in British history parallels the present moment.

Given the renewed prominence of declinism in current debates, it makes sense to start with the moment in which the United States was most prominent internationally. This is generally recognized as having been about 1945. At that time, like Britain after the Napoleonic Wars, it was the victor in a conflict that established it as the global hegemon, putting it in a position to shape the international order (politically through the United Nations, North Atlantic Treaty Organization and other American-led institutions, economically through the Bretton Woods system). In part because its economy had boomed while Europe and East Asia were savaged by the conflict (another parallel with Britain circa 1815), its economy is widely reckoned to have accounted for a third of world output. Additionally, its armed forces enjoyed (until 1949) a monopoly on nuclear weaponry, as well as a preponderance of air and sea power, and unmatched power projection capabilities (much as the Royal Navy ruled the waves through the nineteenth century).

Just as Britain continued to prosper in subsequent decades, enabling it to recover from the staggering debt it had accumulated (268 percent of GDP by 1822, according to Niall Ferguson's The Cash Nexus), the United States enjoyed a generation of rapid growth after World War II (an amazing 4 percent a year from 1950 to 1973), sharply reducing the burden of the debt it had amassed winning its war (which shrank from 121 to 32 percent of U.S. GDP between the end of World War II and 1980).

Nonetheless, the Cold War, which is so often thought of as an unalloyed triumph for the American system, started to take its toll from right after World War II. Massive U.S. expenditures on the conflict accelerated the running down of the Bretton Woods economic system (inevitable given the rebuilding of Europe and Asia, and the spread of development beyond these regions). This led to the suspension of the gold standard in 1971 (ending the convertibility of the dollar to gold, just as Britain did with the pound in 1914). The U.S. entry into the Vietnam conflict with large forces (1964-1973) resulted in a protracted, costly, confidence-shaking trauma (arguably paralleling the Boer War in many respects). The U.S. defense build-up of the 1980s contributed powerfully to the quadrupling of the U.S. national debt in twelve years, and the U.S.'s prioritization of its defense sector came at the expense of its broader economy, not so well-served by military Keynesianism as had once been the case. And in the course of it all, the U.S. lost its industrial edge, all but ceding critical sectors to foreign competitors (like machine tools), while shortsightedly concentrating on finance, just one way in which it reflected vested interests rather than the interests of the nation as a whole (a tendency common to great economic powers in decline, Britain included). Unsurprisingly, the U.S. from the 1970s on began its pattern of running trade deficits year in and year out, and the American dollar weakened substantially against the yen and the mark, leading to the currency devaluation of the 1985 Plaza Accord (a parallel to the devaluations that have marked British decline as a hegemon), and made the U.S. the world's largest international debtor (such as Britain became as a result of World War I).

It might be suggested, then, that by the end of the Cold War the position of the U.S. was not unlike that of Britain in 1918, when it had defeated its principal rival, Germany (and even extended its empire, mainly through the acquisition of former Ottoman territories), but at great cost to itself. After World War I, it seemed that Britain was due to pass the position of international leadership to another power, the U.S. (which declined to assume such a role), while in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it seemed that the U.S. was likely to cede world economic leadership to Japan or a German-led Europe (though neither actor proved able to take on that role).

Just like the 1920s were for Britain, the experience of the 1990s and early 2000s was an ambiguous one for the United States where its direction was concerned, ambiguous enough that the idea of American decline (and indeed, substantive debate about the U.S.'s direction) was marginalized after 1995, not least because of the economic boom the U.S. enjoyed in the latter part of that decade. Additionally, the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, made talk of global American empire newly popular (with the recent boom making such a course seem economically bearable to those optimistic about such a path).

Still, as the memory of the boom of the '90s receded and the economy returned to its earlier, mediocre performance, and the costs of the War on Terror (particularly the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan) mounted, and the old problems (deindustrialization, debt, etc.); as the distribution of international economic power continued to change, shifting away from the U.S. to China, and in less dramatic ways, to the European Union and to oil exporting countries like Russia, change reflected in the continued weakening of the dollar; such a stance increasingly seemed unrealistic, opening the door to new questions. Is the 2008 financial crisis analogous to the Wall Street crash, the global economic crisis that followed an analog to the Great Depression, many wondered? Is the War on Terror, so often compared to World War II by pundits, taking a toll on the U.S. comparable to that which the Second World War took on Britain? For the time being, this is rather less clear, but perhaps we are in some ways reliving Britain's experience in the 1930s, or the 1940s – or even, as Dan Goure of the Lexington Institute suggests, the 1960s.

Of course, even assuming that this is the case, there is plenty of room for disagreement about the implications. Those anticipating a repeat of the 1930s might wonder about the prospect of a new round of great power warfare with fascist revanchists or others of their ilk. This seems to me rather unlikely now, and I find myself instead thinking about the disparity between British resources and foreign policy ambitions in those times, the preoccupation of much of its elite with unrealistic fantasies of the empire's continuation - and the country's need to get its house in order. Simply put, the most pressing security threats at the moment, and through the foreseeable future, are not the traditional ones, making the latter the really relevant lessons for our time.

An "East of Suez" Moment?
10/27/11

Niall Ferguson on Decline

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 13:15:00 +0000

Last month Niall Ferguson published an article in Newsweek Magazine approaching the issue of American decline.

While Ferguson has done some interesting work as an academic in the past (his book The Cash Nexus has been useful to me in the past, and I've appreciated his interest in counterfactuals), given how he has settled into his cozy position as "court historian" of American neoconservatives (how many college professors get to pitch their next book in this forum?), I didn't expect much, and got even less.

Discussing the U.S.'s difficulties in recent years, Ferguson could have pointed to any of the manifold errors of policy: the favoritism shown to services over production, and especially financial speculation over manufacturing; the basing of consumer demand on increased borrowing, instead of rising wages; the treatment of every conceivable service as a profit-making opportunity for a vested business interest, instead of the demonstration of a healthy respect for public goods, and the public good; a disdain for the views that natural resources cannot be squandered and debt accumulated indefinitely without consequences, that imports must actually be paid for by exports, that a functional country cannot be that for long unless it funds a functional infrastructure, and that a vision longer than the past and next quarters is essential to the sustenance of national prosperity.

Predictably, he does not mention any of these things as such, touching on only a few of them indirectly. He notes that consumer debt is a problem, but gives no thought to how it mounted so high. He acknowledges the financially ruinous nature of the health care system, but is evasive on the issue of why the return on the money is so poor. While he mentions some surprising statistics reflecting the worsening reputation of the U.S. for corruption (bribery, poor auditing and accounting standards, and the like), and this is indeed worrisome, he does not dare consider how this came to be, never approaching the sordid story related by authors like Jonathan Chait in The Big Con (2007), Thomas Frank in The Wrecking Crew (2008), and Matt Taibbi in Griftopia (2010).

Indeed, Ferguson is more plain-spoken when giving the "safe" answers one would expect given his well-known positions, answers that essentially translate to the charge that Americans are not pushing hard enough to win globalization's race-to-the-bottom: that American workers put in less hours than, for instance, South Koreans (never mind that the American work year has long been increasing, so that Americans now put in more hours than anyone else in the Western world, running harder just to avoid falling behind too much); that American students aren't studying enough math and science (never mind the true complexity of this particular story).

The result is a reminder that, even amid this protracted economic crisis, the orthodoxies that have been so ruinous remain unchallenged, the real issues are still ignored, and the same facile answers pass for serious thought – "the truism still made to seem like the deeply pondered notion," to paraphrase C. Wright Mills. But alas, we hardly needed reminding.

A Sixth Generation Fighter: Flight Control Systems?

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 15:18:00 +0000

The first sixth generation fighter remains a long way off, and at this point, much of the talk about them remains pure guesswork, far too much of it wish lists of improvement in familiar areas of performance (like greater stealth or connectivity) unconnected with a technical basis for such improvements, or the realization of science fiction-al concepts (like hypersonic, laser cannon-firing invisible jets). Still, it is worth noting that virtually all of the features regarded as standard on the fifth-generation fighter, after all, actually appeared in earlier aircraft, if in a less sophisticated form: stealth (in the F-117 and B-2); super-cruising capability (seen in the British Lightning interceptor); thrust-vectoring engines (seen in the Harrier and Yak-38 Forger); phased array radar (seen in the MiG-31); infra-red search and track systems (seen in the MiG-29, MiG-31 and SU-27 fighters); and helmet-mounted sights (as in the MiG-29 and SU-27).

It therefore stands to reason that many of the features that will be standard on sixth-generation will appear in other aircraft long before the first generation six jet goes on its first test flight, and this seems especially likely to be the case with the flight control systems for this next generation of aircraft. The fly-by-wire controls all but standard on today's fighters may be replaced by other systems, such as fly-by-optics, which substitutes optical fibers for wires, permitting faster data transmission and greater security against electromagnetic interference, such as will be seen on the Mitsubishi ATD-X fighter, Japan's fifth-generation fighter; or fly-by-wireless, dispensing with wiring of all kinds to relay information to the actuators controlling the flight surfaces, an approach seen in the experimental Portuguese UAV known as AIVA. The hydraulic actuators which actually control the flight surfaces might also be replaced by electric circuits, an approach the designers of the F-35 are using in that aircraft. (Both fly-by-wireless, and power-by-wire, are expected to reduce aircraft weight and reduce the maintenance burden.)

Even more exotic are approaches which integrate flight control systems into an aircraft's wings to reduce mass and cost, as well as improve performance, and at least two are objects of interest at the moment, namely flexible wings, with which NASA has experimented using a modified F-18 (dubbed the X-53); and fluidics, which British researchers are experimenting with in the Demon drone that first flew last year.

We might also see the advent of intelligent flight control systems, which would enable onboard computers to automatically compensate for the failure of particular aircraft systems, or for damage incurred in flight. (This too is reportedly planned for the ATD-X.)

For the time being, though, it remains to be seen which, if any, of these approaches will set the next generation's standard.

A Sixth-Generation Fighter?
1/23/10

A Primer on the Technological Singularity

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 17:53:00 +0000

In March 1993 mathematician Vernor Vinge famously presented a conference paper, "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era," in which he wrote dramatically of a "change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth," caused by "the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence," whether through the expansion of human intelligence via biotechnology or mind-machine interfaces, or the emergence of "strong" artificial intelligence.

This greater-than-human intelligence would not only exceed the human capacity for mental activity, but, particularly to the extent that it is an AI, be capable of designing still-smarter AI, which in its turn can create AI smarter than that, and so on, in a chain of events far outstripping the original, human creators of the technology - while in the process exploding the quantity of intelligence on the planet.

This "intelligence explosion," theoreticians of the Singularity predict, will result in the acceleration of technological change past a point of singularity, analogous to the term's mathematical meaning - a point beyond which the curve of our accelerating technological progress explodes - resulting in

a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control. Developments that before were thought might only happen in "a million years" (if ever) will likely happen in the next century.

The idea of an intelligence explosion was not new at 1993, having quite old roots in science fiction before then, as Vinge, a science fiction writer himself, acknowledged. (To give but one example, something of the kind happens in the course of the stories collected together in Isaac Asimov's I, Robot, with "The Evitable Conflict" describing such a sequence of events quite presciently.) Additionally (as Vinge also acknowledged) Vinge was preceded by Bletchley Park veteran Irving John Good who is often credited with first giving the a rigorous nonfictional treatment in his 1965 paper, "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine."

However, Vinge's particular presentation has been highly influential, in part, perhaps, because of its timing, converging as it did with similarly spectacular predictions regarding progress in computing, robotics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology (Eric Drexler's Engines of Creation came out in 1986, Hans Moravec's Mind Children in 1988, Ray Kurzweil's Age of Intelligent Machines in 1990) in what some term the "molecular" or GNR (Genetics, Nanotechnology and Robotics) revolution (which many now take to be synonymous with the Singularity concept). That intellectual ferment would shortly be turbo-charged by the expectations the "tech boom" of the late '90s aroused, and perhaps also the pre-millennial buzz in evidence during the approach to the year 2000 as well.

In the years since then, the idea has not only become the predominant theme in "hard" (technologically and futuristically-oriented) science fiction, but made increasing inroads into mainstream discussion of a wide range of topics - for instance, by way of Peter Singer's highly publicized book on robotics and warfare, 2009's Wired for War (reviewed here).

There is, of course, a range of outlooks regarding the implications of a Singularity. Some are negative, like Bill Joy's well-known essay "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us"), or for that matter, the darker possibilities Vinge has touched on, like technological accidents or a turn to hostility toward human beings on the part of those intelligences. However, there are also "Singularitarians" who believe not only that the Singularity is possible, but that they ought to act to bring about a benign intelligence explosion, which they expect (especially in combination with advances in biotechnology, nanotechnology and robotics) to bestow on humanity a whole array of epoch-changing, species-redefining goods, including unprecedented prosperity as vast artificial brainpower explodes our economic productivity while vaulting over the inevitable resources scarcities and cleaning up our ecological messes, and even a transition to the posthuman, complete with the conquest of death (a theme which also occupies much of Kurzweil's writing).

The Case For The Singularity
As stated before, the argument for the possibility or likelihood of the Singularity is largely founded on expectations of an exponential growth in computing power. Singularitarians like Kurzweil commonly extrapolate from the well-known "Moore's Law" that the circuitry and speed of chips doubles every two years (or less). At the same time, they reject a mystical (and certainly a dualistic, body-mind) view of cognition, viewing the basic stuff of the brain as "hardware," the performance of which computers could plausibly overtake.

This raises the question of what the hardware can do. Kurzweil estimates the human brain's performance as equivalent to 10 petaflops (10 quadrillion calculations) a second. As it happens, the IBM Blue Gene supercomputer passed the 1 petaflop milestone back in 2008, while the fastest computer in the world today, the Fujitsu-built "K" computer is capable of 8.2 petaflops a second at present, and expected to attain the 10 petaflop mark when it becomes fully operational in November 2012. Nor does this mark the outer limit of present plans, an exaflop-capable supercomputer (a hundred times as fast) popularly projected to appear by 2019.

Of course, it can be argued that merely increasing the capacity of computers will not necessarily deliver the strong AI on which the Singularity is premised. As Dr. Todd Hylton, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's SYNAPSE (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics" program puts it,

Today's programmable machines are limited not only by their computational capacity, but also by an architecture requiring human-derived algorithms to both describe and process information from their environment.

Accordingly, some propose the "reverse-engineering" of the human brain, the object of several high-profile research programs around the world, of which SYNAPSE is only one, some of which are expected to achieve results in the fairly near term by their proponents. Henry Markham, director of the IBM-funded "Blue Brain" project, claims that an artificial brain may be a mere ten years away.

Those arguing for the possibility of human-level or greater artificial intelligence can also point to the improving performance of computers and robots at everything from chess-playing to maneuvering cars along obstacle courses, as in the Defense Advanced Research Agency's 2007 Grand Challenge, as well as the proliferation of technologies like the irritating and clunky voice-recognition software that customer service lines now routinely inflict on the purchasers of their company's products.

The Case Against The Singularity
Writers like Kurzweil and Moravec can make the argument in favor of the Singularity's likelihood in the early half of the twenty-first century seem overwhelming, but that claim has plenty of knowledgeable critics, including Gordon Moore or Moore's Law himself - ironic given how often his prediction with regard to the density of components on semiconductor chips is cited on the idea's behalf.

Some might respond by citing Arthur Clarke's "First Law of Prediction," which holds that "When a distinguished elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right," whereas "When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." Moore's objection appears more intuitive than anything else, but, besides the obvious philosophical and epistemological problems involved in defining consciousness and verifying its existence (such as those raised by John Searle's "Chinese Room" argument), skeptics have offered several cogent criticisms of Singularitarian assumptions, which generally fall into one of two categories.

The first category of argument posits that it may simply be impossible to develop really human-like artificial intelligence. Physicist Roger Penrose's 1989 The Emperor's New Mind, in which he argues the inadequacy of physical laws to account for human consciousness – and therefore, the prospects for human-equivalent machine-based intelligence – is perhaps the best-known argument of this kind.

The second is the position that, while artificial intelligence of this kind may be theoretically feasible, we are unlikely to realize the possibility in the foreseeable future. This could be due to either the growth in computing power slowing down sharply before the point of the Singularity (given our likely reliance on undeveloped new computer architectures to continue Moore's Law past - or even through - this decade), or the elusiveness of the "software" of intelligence, which seems a more subtle thing than building a faster computer. (Certainly those whose expertise is in biological systems rather than computer hardware and software tend to be more skeptical about the possibility, pointing to the complexity of human neurology, as well as how little we actually understand the brain.)

Less directly relevant, but telling nonetheless, is the fact that, far from accelerating, our technological development may actually have slowed as the twentieth century progressed, as Theodore Modis and Jonathan Huebner have each argued on theoretical and empirical grounds.

It is also telling that there has been a tendency on the part of "Singularitarian" prognosticators to push the dates of theirs predictions farther and farther into the future as the years go by without the Big Moment happening. I.J. Good himself declared it "more probable than not that, within the twentieth century, an ultraintelligent machine will be built" (a guess which influenced Stanley Kubrick's 2001). Of course, the century ended and the titular date came and went without anything like the expected result. Later expectations reflect this, Vinge guessing in the early 1990s that the Singularity would occur in the generation-length period between 2005 and 2030, while Kurzweil suggested 2045 as the big date in The Singularity is Near.

Notably, Kurzweil made more modest but also more specific predictions about what would happen prior to the event, including a list of developments he offered in his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines, for 2009. A good many observers revisited his claims when the time came (myself included). Kurzweil himself discussed the results in a 2008 interview with the newspaper Ha'aretz, and while sanguine about his results, others disagreed, and the same newspaper mentioned him in its New Year's Eve list of recent prediction bloopers. (Indeed, since that time Kurzweil has conceded on some points, bumping what he predicted for 2009 regarding virtual reality and automobiles over to 2020 if not later in an article he published in the New York Daily News in December of that year.)

It may be noteworthy, too, that the production of original ideas about the Singularity seems to have fallen off. Surveys of the field, like the aforementioned book by Peter Singer, increasingly seem to go over and over the same list of authors and works (Vinge, Moravec, Kurzweil, Joy, et. al.), most of which are a decade old at this point, rather than some rush of new ideas as one might expect from our racing toward the transition to a post-Singularity reality. (Indeed, I have found the vigor of the critics more striking as of late.) Even science fiction has taken less interest, the genre actually seeing something of a backlash against the concept.

In short, there is abundant reason to think that the Singularity is not just open to question, but coming along rather more slowly than many of its advocates argue, and perhaps even implausible for the foreseeable future. Yet, even if the last decade has tended to validate the skeptics, that is a far different thing from saying it has discredited the idea – especially given how much can still change in the time frame Kurzweil has suggested for the Big Event (to which he has stuck, even after his moderation of his smaller predictions). Moreover, we can at the very least continue to expect to see faster computers, more sophisticated software and more versatile robotics, and that, for as long as human beings continue to dream of some transcendence, some will continue to envision technology as the means by which we attain it.

November 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 17:51:00 +0000

A Sixth Generation Fighter: Artificial Intelligence?
11/20/11
My New Goodreads Page
11/19/11
New Article: "Space War and Futurehype Revisited"
11/14/11
Reliving British Decline?
11/8/11
Niall Ferguson on Decline
11/8/11
A Sixth Generation Fighter: Flight Control Systems?
11/5/11
A Primer on the Technological Singularity
11/1/11

An "East of Suez" Moment?

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 11:42:00 +0000

Comparisons between the U.S. and the British Empire have long been routine in discussions of America's position, especially during this last decade when overt advocacy of American empire became a commonplace in some quarters. However, the analogy has rarely been a close one, with rather fewer pundits wondering aloud whether the appropriate comparison between the U.S.'s present position is with the Britain of 1815, or 1851, or 1870, or 1890, or 1914, or 1918, or 1945, or 1971 – quite different points along its trajectory as a global hegemon.

With declinism made fashionable again by military quagmire and financial crisis, by economic "recession" and exploding debt (and perhaps, by the election of a Democrat to the White House making attentiveness to American problems more palatable to the political right), it is perhaps inevitable that the parallel implicit in so much of the writing on this theme has shifted from the first of these dates, to the last, Lexington Institute Vice-President Daniel Goure flatly asking "Is Afghanistan Withdrawl America's 'East of Suez' Moment?" - in the sense of Britain's formal conclusion of its earlier, independent role as a military actor in Asia between 1968 and 1971.

Dr. Gore may or may not be right in making the comparison between the position of the Wilson government, and Obama's, but I suspect that the quarter of a century of British history after World War II – its successes and failures, its illusions and delusions – is deserving of rather more attention than Americans have generally devoted to it, and likely to get it in the coming years.

Two New Reviews: Emmanuel Todd's The Final Fall and After the Empire
10/2/11

Keeping the Hype in Check IV: China's Sub Fleet

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 11:22:00 +0000

Five years ago, one forecast had China amassing a submarine force of as many as 180 boats by the mid-2020s – enabling it to outnumber the U.S. Pacific Fleet's submarine force by five to one according to a widely cited estimate published by John Tkacik. Developing such a force in this time frame required China to add six subs a year to their fleet, above replacement level – and virtually the whole current fleet would have to be replaced, given that the bulk of it is comprised by obsolete, aged Romeo, Ming and Han-class boats sure to be past their useful life by then.

In short, China would have had to launch eight boats every year for almost two decades to reach a force size of 180 subs. Such a rate of peacetime production seemed very unlikely to me. On the contrary, China's modernization of its modern forces has tended to produce smaller (though more up-to-date) forces.

A new analysis by David Axe in The Diplomat indicates that this is exactly what has happened. In the 2007-2010 period, China added a mere six subs to its fleet, a small fraction of the frantic rate of production needed to realize the higher estimates. As a result, China has some sixty submarines in 2011, its size remaining well below the aggressive estimates offered by analysts hyping the "China" threat (though modern Song and Kilo-class boats have replaced many of the older vessels in that time). It also seems likely that this force will shrink in the coming years, with Russia less willing to sell additional submarines (projections based on the Chinese Kilo purchase, in fact, seems to have contributed significantly to the overestimates of China's sub force increases).

Moreover, it is worth noting that boat-counting has its limits. There are significant differences between the relative handful of nuclear boats China seems likely to possess, and the diesel boats that seem likely to continue to comprise much of the country's fleet. The most important are submerged range and speed. The Kilo-class sub can sail six thousand miles while snorkeling at a speed of seven knots, while fully submerged, it can only do four hundred miles while crawling along at three knots (in comparison with a nuclear-powered Los Angeles-class submarine, which can sustain twenty knots while submerged, over a range limited only by the endurance of the crew).The upshot is that in today's threat environment, conventional submarines can be very effective in a coastal defense role, but are rather less suited to the kind of long-range operations undertaken by "blue-water" naval powers than the nuclear-powered vessels that make up the whole of the U.S. Navy's force. Additionally, as Axe notes, a straight comparison between the U.S. and China is simplistic given – as so many continually forget – China is itself surrounded by other countries with considerable naval establishments, and submarine forces, of their own, including Russia, Japan, India and South Korea.

The result, as Axe notes, is that "China isn’t building a world-class, globally-deploying submarine force. It’s building a mostly defensive, regional undersea force – and a smaller one than once predicted."

Keeping the Hype in Check III: China as Global Military Power
2/10/11
Keeping the Hype in Check II: The ASBM
2/5/11
Keeping the Hype in Check I: The Chengdu J-20
2/1/11

"Twenty Years After the Cold War: A Strategic Survey": A Short Version

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 14:28:00 +0000

My article "Twenty Years After the Cold War: A Strategic Survey" appears in the current issue of the U.S. Army War College Quarterly Parameters. Below is a short version.

In looking at the development of the international system during the last two decades, six trends appear paramount:

1. Great power conflict, as it has manifested in arms races, proxy conflicts and armed confrontations, has receded, not only from Europe after the end of the Cold War division, but Asia as well, with improved relations among Russia, China, India and Japan. Indeed, the number of objects which might plausibly produce such situations has tended to shrink, with disputes over the remaining issues growing less intense (as has been the case with the issue of Taiwan since the mid-1990s, let alone the 1950s).

2. The shift from interstate warfare to intrastate warfare as the dominant form of political violence has continued. Even as the outbreak of war has become more frequent, interstate warfare has grown less frequent, increasingly confined to the margins of the international system, and more limited in length, scale and intensity.

3. Neoliberal globalization has only deepened, but has proven problematic, contributing to the stagnation of global economic growth (which may have worsened every decade from the 1970s on), as well as increased financial instability; sharper inequality; and the social and political stresses feeding ethnic and sectarian conflict.

4. Global output, world manufacturing and the balance of trade have shifted toward East Asia, and especially China (more than offsetting the impact of Japan's relative decline on the region's overall position), while the consolidation and extension of the European Union have conduced to the preservation of Europe's economic weight (despite Germany's relative decline). Meanwhile, the U.S.'s changed – likely, weakened – position is understated even by its smaller share of Gross World Product, given its more rapidly shrinking share of world industrial production (perhaps already eclipsed by China), and its trade imbalances.

5. Resource politics have only grown more pressing, rather than being diminished, a problem highlighted by the politics of energy, which have seen energy exporters (like Russia and Venezuela) enhance their wealth and status, while energy importers (like the United States) have seen their trade balances and their economic growth suffer.

6. International cooperation on global issues has proven consistently disappointing, compared with the high hopes seen in the early 1990s regarding a more powerful United Nations, and action on alleviating global poverty and environmental problems (symbolized by the Rio Summit, the Kyoto Protocol and the Millennium Declaration), and nuclear nonproliferation.

The result has been a more complex, diffuse international distribution of economic and political power (even as the U.S. remains in a class of its own militarily), while the international community as a whole faces a host of problems (like climate change) requiring unprecedented levels of cooperation – with the results of the efforts made to date underwhelming. The 2008 financial crisis has exposed key vulnerabilities of every actor - China's unsustainable export-oriented path, and Europe's troubled finances and lack of political cohesion for instance – while offering a reminder that the "declinists" of the '80s and '90s were essentially correct in their reading of the U.S.'s situation. Not only has the country seen the mediocre growth observed since the 1970s continue, but its deindustrialization, balance of payments problems and mounting debt have only got worse, inside a context of greater economic integration and ecological strain, and it all poses bigger problems for the U.S. than "traditional" security considerations. The article goes on to advocate a focus on addressing these problems (the rebuilding of the country's infrastructure and manufacturing and energy bases in recognition of the new realities), while cooperating with other nations in a "broader, sustained effort to redress the imbalances and vulnerabilities of the international economic system."

My New Facebook Page

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 14:27:00 +0000

I'm now on Facebook. While my page is very much a work in progress, you can see it here.

Twenty Years After the Fall

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 17:25:00 +0000

In 1991 Robin Blackburn published the anthology After the Fall: The Failure of Communism and the Future of Socialism (London: Verso, 1991), offering a round-up of responses to the demise of the Soviet/Communist camp and the end of the Cold War from a wide array of prominent leftist thinkers, touching on everything from the role of the peace movement in bringing the Cold War to an end, to the condition of women in the Soviet Union.

Nonetheless, it might fairly be said that the question dominating the book is the one implicit in the subtitle--"the Failure of Communism, and the Future of Socialism." In acknowledging the failings of twentieth century Communist parties in and out of power the authors are unanimous in recognizing the Soviet-style combination of a one-party state with a command economy as a deeply flawed approach, time and again resulting in repressive, stagnant, bureaucratic regimes that never approached Western levels of development--with the gap widening after the onset of the "information age." Many of them also agree with the conventional wisdom that the Soviet Union not just failed to cope with computerization and the newer communications technology, but that this was a challenge it was intrinsically incapable of meeting or even surviving, and that the impetus for the overthrow of the system came principally from below.1 However, this should not be confused with a simplistic vindication of the pieties of orthodox economics, let alone of conservative triumphalism more generally. The authors gathered here are a reminder of the great extent to which Western leftists were critical of the Soviet Union and its imitators (genuine Stalinists few and far between in the West long before 1989).

They also provide a reminder of the oversimplification entailed in equating the Cold War with a meaningful test of "capitalism against socialism," or taking the failings of Soviet-style socialism as some proof of the intrinsic irrelevance, futility or evil of the socialist project, or the Marxist critique of capitalism; or slighting the role of Communism in such progress as the twentieth century saw. In "Reflections on the Crisis of Communist Regimes," Ralph Miliband discusses the unpromising circumstances of the establishment of Communist governments, normally taking place in underdeveloped countries without a substantial history of democracy or even independence, often at a point in which they were badly traumatized by civil and foreign war, and forced to contend with the hostility of the non-Communist world from this position of weakness through their history (Russia, China, Vietnam). Fred Halliday observes in "The Ends of Cold War" that, despite those problems, many Communist states still made significant advances over their earlier material condition, industrializing and modernizing their countries, and elevating the living standards of their populations. In "Goodbye to All That," Eric Hobsbawm points out the fact that the capitalist states incorporated a great deal of socialism into their systems in the form of Keynesian planning, welfare states and often national ownership of the "commanding heights" of the global economy (especially in their period of greatest success, from the 1940s to the early 1970s), without which they would be far less successful, and far less attractive places to live--while the handful of developing nations which succeeded in catching up to the industrialized world also followed strongly statist courses in doing so (contrary to the mythology propounded by neoliberal "Bad Samaritans," and of course, neoliberal disasters the world over, from Pinochet's Chile to contemporary Iraq). And in "Radical as Reality," Alexander Cockburn celebrates the role of Communism in such progress as has been made in the West in the areas of civil rights and social justice, the fights against colonialism and apartheid, while the Soviet Union, through its role as competitor and counterweight, made possible for the newly independent nations of the Third World a measure of autonomy they would not otherwise have enjoyed.

Moreover, the authors argue for the continued relevance of socialism given its capacity to address problems with which capitalism is ill-equipped to cope, like ecology, inequality and the human values for which the market cares nothing, as Eric Hobsbawm sums up in the volume's closing essay, "Up From the Ashes." Robin Blackburn's excellent long essay "Fin de Seicle: Socialism After the Crash" offers a reminder that the command economy's weaknesses were recognized by prominent Marxists all along, from Karl Kautsky to Leon Trotsky to Che Geuvara, and that many of them wrestled with the problem of developing a "socialized market" combining market mechanisms with economic democratization and social imperatives--an idea Diane Elson and Andre Gorz explore in "The Economics of a Socialized Market," and "The New Agenda," respectively. Giovanni Arrighi's "Marxist Century, American Century" even offers an argument for why the twentieth century did not bear out Marx's predictions--and why the twenty-first century might prove closer to it.2 In short, the Soviet Union was finished, and with it the one party state-command economy approach to socialism, but in the view of nearly all of the authors, socialism as such did not die in 1991.

Still, the neoliberal wave continues two decades later. Certainly no advanced industrial country has accepted programs quite as radical as those routinely imposed on developing states, but even there privatization and deregulation (often of reckless kinds) have been the order of the day, organized labor has been weakened (in cases, virtually crippled), wages have been held down (or worse), and welfare states and public services have offered less (albeit, due to a chipping away by conservative reformers rather than shock therapy) and tax systems become more regressive. If anything, the economic crisis that began (or perhaps, simply deepened) in 2008 seems to have perversely accelerated the trend, the political right making most of the gains in its aftermath, despite its role in precipitating the crisis in the first place. And of course, what goes for the world's economic challenges goes, too, for the ecological ones, as the astonishingly tepid response to the energy-climate crisis makes all too clear.

That the left would suffer in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse hardly seems surprising. However, the end of the Cold War brought opportunities as well as obstacles. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw a questioning of the Anglo-American version of capitalism that was not be seen again until the 2008 crisis. The end of the confrontation between the superpowers also raised a genuine prospect of a peace dividend (a rather larger one than has been realized), and alleviated one of the weapons the right used against liberals and leftists: the claim that they were the agents or dupes of a hostile foreign power intent on world domination. And it may not have been inevitable that radical neoliberal programs would so fully dominate the reform processes in Eastern Europe, Edward Thompson's rejoinder to Fred Halliday's "The Ends of Cold War" perhaps overoptimistic but not wholly wrong in his discussion of the prospect of a "third way" for the region. That the left would so thoroughly fail to capitalize on these opportunities, so completely fail to prevent a triumphalist right from defining the popular understanding of the event and the politics of the next twenty years, can only be regarded as a profound disappointment.

NOTES
1. For an alternative view of the role of the IT revolution in the Soviet collapse, see my blog post, "Reconsidering the IT Revolution's Place in History." For an alternative view of the dismantling of the Soviet system more broadly, see David Kotz and Fred Weir, Revolution From Above: The Demise of the Soviet System (New York: Routledge, 1997).
2. Arrighi's key contention is that Marxism envisioned a proletariat which simultaneously grew more immiserated and more powerful. The twentieth century, however, saw a divergence between the most immiserated proletarians (in the peripheral areas of the global economy, where Communist movements did succeed in establishing themselves) and the most powerful (in the industrial core countries), which saw their lot improve and their goals moderate. In particular, following the collapse of world capitalism in the Depression and World War II, American capitalism was capable of expanding and accommodating working class aspirations through the development of the multinational corporation as a new operating model. When Europe and Japan recovered to the point that they were able to follow suit, they quickly crowded the market, resulting in a preoccupation with cost-cutting and speculation rather than dynamic expansion (as low post-1973 growth rates show), while the gains of the working class in the advanced industrial countries began to erode (implying an eventual reconvergence in the proletariat)--trends more in line with Marxist analysis.

Two New Reviews: Emmanuel Todd's The Final Fall and After the Empire
10/2/11

Two New Reviews: Emmanuel Todd's The Final Fall and After the Empire

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 13:19:00 +0000

I have recently posted a pair of reviews of books by Emmanuel Todd, 1976's The Final Fall, and 2003's After the Empire. The first book was a prediction about the demise of the Soviet Union and its East European empire; the second, a prediction about the end of American hegemony.

The two analyses are nearly three decades apart in time, but contain a number of interesting parallels, not least economic dysfunction concealed behind brighter-looking statistics, declining tolerance and universalism (and with it, external appeal), increasing militarism, and the breakdown of their influence over their European partners – the bottoming out of which marks the end of each empire.

History proved Todd at least half-right about the Soviet Union. Where the U.S. is now, let alone where it will be in the coming years, remains open to question, but his argument is at the very least food for thought.