Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Hilzoy: Obsidian Wings: Liberating Iraq: "Peter Beinart has a piece in TNR about why he supported the war: 'For myself, perhaps the most honest reply is this: because Kanan Makiya did. When I first saw Makiya--the Iraqi exile who has devoted his life to chronicling Saddam Hussein's crimes--I recognized the type: gentle, disheveled, distracted, obsessed. He reminded me of the South African exiles who occasionally wandered through my house as a kid. Once, many years ago, I asked one of them how the United States could aid the anti-apartheid struggle. Congress could impose sanctions, he responded. Sure, sure, I said impatiently. But what else? Well, he replied with a chuckle, if the United States were a different country, it would help the African National Congress liberate South Africa by force.' He also writes about why he got it wrong...

Hoisted From the Archives from 2003: The Grand Strategy of the United States of America: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal: "The economic policy of the Bush administration has been frightening: The deliberate unbalancing of the long-term finances of the U.S. government in the hope of sharpening the funding crisis of the social-insurance state—with the effect of slowing capital formation and economic growth, and increasing the interest of economic crisis. The backing-away from the Republican Party's historic commitment to free trade. The reversal of Newt Gingrich's proudest achievement: the partial reform of the farm subsidy program.

The security policy of the Bush administration has been more than frightening; it has been terrifying...

... At the moment administration insiders are trying to convince elite reporters that the Bush administration did not deceive outsiders about Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program as much as deceive itself—that the highest levels of the Bush administration proved grossly incompetent at the basics. They did not know how to assess intelligence. Nobody had heard of Machiavelli's 500-year-old warning not to trust exiles: "Such is their extreme desire to return to their homes that they naturally believe many things that are not true, and add many others on purpose; so that, with what they really believe and what they say they believe they fill you with hopes..." Note that this declaration of incompetence is the Bush administration's spin on what happened.

But the most awful and dreadfully terrifying aspect of all has been whenever Bush administration intellectual allies talk about what they see as the motivating theory of the world underlying Bush administration security policy. They call the Clinton Administration naive for believing that international relations is a positive-sum game in which all sides can win. They speak of explicit concern on the part of the United States not just for its absolute but its relative economic power. As the University of Chicago's Dan Drezner puts it, the logic of Bush's National Security Strategy is to "prevent other great powers from rising, in order to ensure the long-term growth of freedom, democracy and prosperity."

But what does "prevent other great powers from rising" mean? What could it possibly mean other than "try to keep China and India desperately poor for as long as possible"—for when China and India close even half the gap in prosperity separating them from the industrial core, their populations alone guarantee that they will be very great powers indeed.

It is certainly not in the interest of world prosperity, or in the interest of China or India, to try to keep them poor. It is not in the national interest of the United States either. The history of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries teaches us that there may well be something uniquely dangerous to world peace and political sanity during the two generations in which a culture is passing from a poor rural agricultural to a rich urban industrial (or post-industrial) economy. Whether the aggressive foreign policy pursued by Wilhelmine Germany, the Leninist and Stalinist agony of Russia, the terrors of Mao, the dictatorships of Mussolini and Franco, or the most monstrous Nazi regime—the twentieth-century transition to industrial society appears to be a very dangerous time both for the citizens of the country in transition and for neighbors and passers-by.

Is it really in the interest of the United States to try to "prevent other great powers from rising" at the cost of lengthening the period of time during which other societies are vulnerable to the devils that afflicted most notably Germany in the twentieth century? Wouldn't the rest of us rather minimize than maximize the time we might be faced with the problem of containing a National Hinduist India, a Wilhelmine China, or a Weimar Russia?

And do the rest of us want the children of China and India to be taught in fifty years that the rich countries at the turn of the twentieth century did all they could to accelerate the growth and increase the prosperity of China and India, or that the rich countries strove to "prevent other great powers from rising"?

It is long past time for a complete change of personnel at all levels of the Bush administration. The world cannot afford to have neoconservatives at high levels of the U.S. government who do not work for global prosperity and peace, but instead for maximum U.S. relative power. Now we do know that there are grownups in the Republican Party—statesmen who work for more rapid economic development, for multilateral cooperation, and for a world in which the United States leads because of its fortunate position rather than dominates because of its military power. They staffed the first Bush administration. Where are they?

#shouldread #security #hoistedfromthearchives

It is not going to happen. The throne is not going to be kept warm. The American century-and-a-half of potential and century of actual global diplomatic preeminence is over. The question is whether there will be no hegemony, a Chinese hegemony, or an inner alliance of western Europe plus Canada, Japan, and Australia that set the pace: Dan Froomkin: Daalder and Lindsay Say: U.S. Allies Should Keep The Global Leadership 'Throne' Warm For Trump's Successor: "Ivo H. Daalder, who served as Barack Obama’s ambassador to NATO, and James M. Lindsay, a senior vice president of the Council on Foreign Relations, are out with a new book: The Empty Throne: America’s Abdication of Global Leadership. They outline their plan for an interregnum in a companion piece entitled The Committee to Save the World Order published by Foreign Affairs...

Wikipedia: Aztec Myth: "Ometeotl gave birth to four children, the four Tezcatlipocas, who each preside over one of the four cardinal directions.[citation needed] Over the West presides the White Tezcatlipoca, Quetzalcoatl, the god of light, mercy and wind. Over the South presides the Blue Tezcatlipoca, Huitzilopochtli, the god of war. Over the East presides the Red Tezcatlipoca, Xipe Totec, the god of gold, farming and Spring time. And over the North presides the Black Tezcatlipoca, also called simply Tezcatlipoca, the god of judgment, night, deceit, sorcery and the Earth...

Dan Drezner: Assessing Nikki Haley: "Haley... had two traits that made her unusual within the Trump foreign policy team. The first is that she was a professional politician... able to send messages to key constituencies, pleasing the Trump White House at times and other groups at other junctures...

Lawrence Wilkerson: Cheney wanted new cold war with China: "Cheney used various bureaucratic techniques to deal with each of these national security issues. He lost on China. He won on Iraq. He won on Afghanistan. He won on Iran, but he didn’t win on Iran by getting a presidential decision; he won on Iran by exploiting the dysfunctionality of Condi Rice, the national security adviser...

Not what I said at the Blum Center Development Lunch today: more what I wish I had said—albeit it is still incoherent and disorganized:

Let me begin with three direct responses to points Michael Nacht made. Let me then try to—briefly—propose a framework, perhaps a framework for analysis, perhaps merely a framework for convincing people in the national security community that they should take issues of economic development seriously, and so give large grants so that the Berkeley development community can do more things—things closely related to what we would be doing anyway.

John R. Boyd (1995): The Essence of Winning and Losing:

Stephen Fritz (2008): On Citino, 'Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942': "Continuing his examination of the German way of war, Robert Citino has produced a cogently argued, clearly written book in which he asserts that the German defeat in World War II was as much conceptual as it was material...

Reading Adam Tooze's powerpoints for his _War in Germany, 1618-1648 course, and thinking about the Vexed Question of Prussia in World History...

For a bit over the first half of the Long 20th Century global history was profoundly shaped by the peculiarity of Prussia. The standard account of this peculiarity—this sonderweg, sundered way, separate Prussian path—has traditionally seen it has having four aspects. Prussia—and the "small German" national state of which it was the nucleus—managed to simultaneously, over 1865-1945:

Nikita Sergeyevitch Khrushchev to John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1963): "We and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly of what terrible forces our countries dispose..."

• Secretary Rice, in her opening statement, focused on historical roots of our current mishegas...: Why we decided to launch such a war of choice in 2003 has always been opaque to me. Can you make your thinking less opaque to me, as to why this was thought to be a good idea?...
• Reactions to the Four Ex-National Security Advisors Panel: Joe Nye—and the others—should not have pretended that that the Trump Administration has a strategy, and is some sort of unitary actor. It doesn't. It isn't...

Aspen: Security: Nine Reactions to the Four Ex-National Security Advisors Panel: Most important:

• Joe Nye—and the others—should not have pretended that that the Trump Administration has a strategy, and is some sort of unitary actor. It doesn't. It isn't. For the right analogies, we need to reach back to the Tudor or Stuart dynasties—a King Charles II Stuart without the work ethic, mostly concerned with his mistresses, his parties, and deference to himself; easily bribed by the King of France, &c.; plutocrats maneuvering and using access to advance their interests; other kleptocrats manuevering and using access to advance their interests; and a few technocrats—a Pepys, a Godolphin—trying to hold things together. Graham Allison's three analytical perspectives—rational actor-organizational process-bureaucratic politics—are not sufficient to understand this thing. We need a fourth perspective: weak chaos monkey king, perhaps?...

And here are eight more:

Aspen: Security: A Question I Did Not Ask Condoleeza Rice: Secretary Rice, in her opening statement, focused on historical roots of our current mishegas, and how the foreign view of the U.S. as a country that is not well-governed, that cannot handle its trade and immigration issues, has been long building.

That reminded me of something that has long puzzled me: Dual containment of Iran and Iraq—that always seemed to me like a very good idea, a very good policy, a profoundly imperfect policy, yes, but the best we could do given that we live, as Cicero said, not in the Republic of Plato but in the Sewer of Romulus.

Back in 2002 we already had a serious global terrorism network problem. "One enemy at a time" is elementary strategy. Yet in 2003 we broke dual containment by invading Iraq. We broke dual containment:

• without a plan for getting the 300K Arabic-speaking military police optimal for stabilization,
• without a plan for a post-invasion Iraq not theologically and ideologically in sync with Iran, and
• without a spur to action in the form of an advanced Iraqi nuclear weapons program.

Why we decided to launch such a war of choice in 2003 has always been opaque to me. Can you make your thinking less opaque to me, as to why this was thought to be a good idea? And what does this say about how good an idea disruption for disruption’s sake is in general?

Aspen: Development Finance Introducing considerations of strategy into development is a very sharp two-edged sword. On the one hand, the Cold War focused the attention of the entire American government on making the redevelopment of northwest and the development of southwestern Europe and of East Asia—Korea and Taiwan and Japan—a success. That was of enormous value in making the US development efforts the greatest successes we have ever had.

In addition, as Barney Frank once said when my colleague Barry Eichengreen was testifying in front of him, the Cold War was worth 60 votes in the House of Representatives. Now we have a much harder row to hoe.

On the other hand, there have been many times over the past 70 years in which strategic logic has overcome development logic. And there are dangers in poisoning the entire effort to the extent that strategic logic takes on too large a place. Walt Whitman Rostow had John F Kennedy primed up talk to Sukarno about all the wonderful things the US was going to do for Indonesian development. But Suharto—sorry, Sukarno, Sukarno, Sukarno—was interested in two and only two things: Irian Jaya, and free cash flow that he could use to reward elements of his political coalition...

Aspen: Approaches to Fragility: This started as a joke-of-the-moment, in response to talking about "fragile states" in which farmers fight with herders. But it is more. This is Colorado. However, this is the American West. And of the American West we remember that, at least in Broadway's version of Oklahoma, the farmer and the cowman can be friends. But the farmer and the cowman can be friends only when there is a matriarch with a shotgun in the picture.

One reading of world history is that a huge amount of the civilizing process is accomplished when people's mothers and aunts gain social power. The academe that we have has not thought very hard about how it is mothers and aunts gaining social power, or about what we can do to assist this process in the states me regard as fragile...

I was reading Herbert Hoover (1964): Freedom Betrayed on the plane, and it is really clear to me why nobody wanted Hoover to publish it during his lifetime and why his heirs buried it for half a century:

I will tell you what I think. I think Hoover does not quite dare say:

When Hitler attacked Stalin in June 1941, the U.S. should have told Britain to cool it—embargoed Britain until and offered it security guarantees when it made peace with Germany—and then the U.S. should have supported Hitler in his war on Communism, by far the worst of the three totalitarianism of Communism, Naziism, and New Dealism. Afterwards, Hitler and his successors would have had their hands full ruling their Eurasian empire, and Naziism would have normalized itself, and Communism would be gone. Too bad about Nazi rule over the French, Belgians, Dutch, Danes, and Norwegians, but that would have been a price well worth paying.

He does not quite dare say it, but he is thinking it, and almost gets there...

Herbert Hoover:

Dedicated to celebrating the memory of two field commanders who may well have been the worst in history:

Drink a toast to John Bell Hood on the 7/28 anniversary of his defeat at Ezra Church1

Hood... moved his troops out to oppose the Union army... planned to intercept them and catch them completely by surprise.... Unfortunately for Hood... Howard had predicted such a maneuver based on his knowledge of Hood from their time together.... His troops were already waiting in their trenches when Hood reached them. The Confederate army also had not done enough reconnaisance... and made an uncoordinated attack.... In all, about 3,642 men were casualties; 3,000 on the Confederate side and 642 on the Union side

And drink a toast to Max von Gallwitz—perhaps the only Imperial German commander who could have turned the Somme into a draw!

No, the Trump administration is not very competent at achieving its stated goals. But that does not mean that the Trump administration is not doing enormous harm under the radar by simply being its chaos-monkey essence. The smart David Leonhart tries to advise people how to deal with this: David Leonhardt: Trump Tries to Destroy the West: "[Trump's] behavior requires a response that’s as serious as the threat...

Steven L. Hall: "From a counterintelligence perspective, something is going on behind the scenes. Before Helsinki I was less sure; post Helsinki, I feel sick..."

Yes. It is long past time for 25th Amendment remedies. Why do you ask?: David Frum: What Hold Does Putin Have on Trump?: "We still do not know what hold Vladimir Putin has on Donald Trump, but the whole world has now witnessed the power of its grip...

Hoisted/Smackdown: On the NATO Bombing of Yugoslavia...: May 31, 2006: Having made the mistake of having joked about Noam Chomsky and so provoked a Chomskyite troll eruption that was painful to clean out, I believe that I have to make my position clear:

Noam Chomsky is a liar.

For example, Noam Chomsky says:

On the NATO Bombing of Yugoslavia, Noam Chomsky interviewed by Danilo Mandic: Director of Communications [for Clinton Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott], John Norris.... [T]ake a look on John Norris's book and what he says is that the real purpose of the war had nothing to do with concern for Kosovar Albanians. It was because Serbia was not carrying out the required social and economic reforms, meaning it was the last corner of Europe which had not subordinated itself to the US-run neoliberal programs, so therefore it had to be eliminated. That's from the highest level...

John Norris simply does not say what Chomsky says Norris says. "Reform[ing] their economies, mitigat[ing] ethnic tensions, and broaden[ing] civil society" is simply not the same thing as "subordinat[ing] itself to the US-run neoliberal programs". NATO moved against Milosevic because he had proceeded "from mass murder to mass murder", not because Serbia was evidence that economic prosperity was attainable by doing the opposite of what the U.S. recommended

Here's the passage from John Norris (2005), Collision Course: NATO, Russia, and Kosovo (New York: Praeger), that Chomsky is misciting, p. xxii ff.:

Project Syndicate: America the Loser: The American century ended on November 8, 2016. On that day, the United States ceased to be the world’s leading superpower–the flawed but ultimately well-meaning guarantor of peace, prosperity, and human rights around the world. America’s days of Kindlebergian hegemony are now behind it. The credibility that has been lost to the Trumpists–abetted by Russia and the US Electoral College–can never be regained... Read MOAR

Note to Self: John Gaddis's Strategy is a weird book. I do not recommend it. But there are some gems. This is one of them—British late nineteenth-century Prime Minister the Earl of Salisbury's attitude towards America:

Salisbury as explicated by Andrew Roberts, transmitted via Gaddis:

Jennifer Pitts: A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France: "A dramatic shift in British and French ideas about empire unfolded in the sixty years straddling the turn of the nineteenth century...

Hoisted from the Archives: Rather more urgent than I thought it would be 27 months ago: After the Next Nuclear Fire...: In the early 1980s the U.S. NSA—or perhaps it was the Defense Department—loved to play games with Russian air defense. They would send probe planes in from the Pacific to fly over Siberia. And they would watch and listen: Where were the gaps in Russian sensor coverage? How far could U.S. planes penetrate before being spotted? What were Russian command-and-control procedures to intercept intruders? And so on, and so forth.

Tactics and operations, yes. But also logistics and strategy. Bobby Lee lost in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. Erwin Rommel lost in North Africa and Normany: Adam Tooze (2016): Blitzkrieg manqué or a new kind of war? Interpreting the Allied Victory in the Normandy campaign1 Adam Tooze: "Given the scale of the violence that they were dealing out in the final stages of the war, it is not surprising that at least some people spoke out in protest...

20th century British Tory prime minister Harold Macmillan is most known not for anything he did but for a witty letter that he wrote to Dick Cressman, Director of Psychological Warfare at Allied Forces Headquarters in the Mediterranean…

"Greeks to Their Romans"-The Twentieth Century Superpower Succession

Thx to Wavelength and the very interesting micro.blog http://delong.micro.blog/2018/04/21/greeks-to-their.html

Text: http://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/03/harold-macmillan-greeks-to-their-romans-document-on-the-twentieth-century-imperial-succession.html

RSS: http://delong.micro.blog/podcast.xml.

Republicans purge every thinker who was correct. Republican economists who were right about 2007-2012 are now, as best as I can see, all ex-Republican economists. And the same dynamic has long been working in the national security space: Gene Healy (2015): Think Tanks and the Iraq War: "It would be even better if the GOP’s 2016 contenders weren’t still, 12 years later, so eager to seek foreign policy advice from people who got the Iraq War Question spectacularly wrong...

Should-Read: National Security Council (1950): NSC-68, U.S. Objectives and Programs for National Security: "Within the past thirty-five years the world has experienced two global wars of tremendous violence...

Should-Read: Nathan Jensen: Exit options in firm-government negotiations: An evaluation of the Texas chapter 313 program: "A unique economic development incentive program in the state of Texas that holds almost all elements of bargaining constant...

Should-Read: Our political democracy has not been obviously covering itself in glory since... I would argue 1981, when the Republican Party made what then-senator Howard Baker called the "riverboat gamble" on big deficits and tax cuts, on which it has then doubled down and subsequently reinforced with foreign wars to busy giddy minds and what can now only be called authoritarian white supremacy. But others can blame the downward political spiral on other, later events: the rise of Newt Gingrich in 1993, the coalescence behind the unqualified George W. Bush in 2000, the embrace of Mitch McConnell's destructive opposition strategy in 2009, or the embrace of Donald Trump in 2016. Why should any in China's leadership class today believe that it should be moving toward our kind of political democracy? That authoritarians have a much worse lower tail is true. But the Chinese government can argue that its controls on that bad lower tail are now at least as good as ours. And what do we see back? I believe that our system is better, but what arguments convincing to them can I make? Anybody? Anybody? Bueller?

The very sharp Karl Smith:

Karl Smith: Pax Sinica: What Is To Be done?: "Tyler Cowen reminds me of an issue I used to think a lot about...

Twitter: @antonhowes, @pseudoerasmus, @Econ_Marshall, and me: Malthus and Sparta:

@antonhowes: Preparing my lecture on the Malthusian Trap. A topic with so many grim and unusual examples it feels like I'm writing Horrible Histories...

Live from the "Palace of Nestor" in Mykenaian Pylos: Coast Guard Tablet: "This is how the guards defend the coastal areas:...

Hoisted from Ten Years Ago: After World War I: Weber: Marxism, liberalism, and what we will here call "nationalism"—just to be polite... http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/09/lecture-notes-f.html

• We've talked about Marxism...
• We've talked about classical liberalism...
• We haven't talked about "nationalism"...

We read Norman Angell: We did not read Max Weber: nationalism as social-darwinist doctrine:

The Onion: Hijackers Surprised To Find Selves In Hell: "JAHANNEM, OUTER DARKNESS—The hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon expressed confusion and surprise... http://www.theonion.com/article/hijackers-surprised-to-find-selves-in-hell-1445

...Monday to find themselves in the lowest plane of Na'ar, Islam's Hell.

"I was promised I would spend eternity in Paradise, being fed honeyed cakes by 67 virgins in a tree-lined garden, if only I would fly the airplane into one of the Twin Towers," said Mohammed Atta, one of the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 11, between attempts to vomit up the wasps, hornets, and live coals infesting his stomach. "But instead, I am fed the boiling feces of traitors by malicious, laughing Ifrit. Is this to be my reward for destroying the enemies of my faith?"

The rest of Atta's words turned to raw-throated shrieks, as a tusked, asp-tongued demon burst his eyeballs and drank the fluid that ran down his face.

According to Hell sources, the 19 eternally damned terrorists have struggled to understand why they have been subjected to soul-withering, infernal torture ever since their Sept. 11 arrival.

Winston S. Churchill: Their Finest Hour http://amzn.to/2eUQZd3: "AFTER THE COLLAPSE of France the question which arose in the minds of all our friends and foes was, 'Would Britain surrender too?'...

...So far as public statements count in the teeth of events, I had in the name of His Majesty’s Government repeatedly declared our resolve to fight on alone. After Dunkirk on June 4 I had used the expression, “if necessary for years, if necessary alone.” This was not inserted without design, and the French Ambassador in London had been instructed the next day to inquire what I actually meant. He was told “exactly what was said.”

T on Niall Ferguson's WWI Book:

His WWI book was awful. It's entire premise is anachronistic, and it shows the same predilection for snide ad hominem attacks as the rest of his writing.

I beg to differ. I thought that Ferguson"s World War One book was pretty good. It suffered to a small degree from AJP Taylor disease, but a very mild case only--you learn a lot from TPoW http://amzn.to/2gnp2em, while you learn nothing—in fact, your Δ(knowledge) < 0—from Tayllor's Origins of WWII http://amzn.to/2gnp2em.

Also apropos of the three neoliberalisms: (1) Mont Pelerin; (2) Charlie Peters; and (3) anti-Black, anti-woman, anti-Arab, anti-union—and anti-French:

With the opening of "Dunkirk", time to hoist and highlight this:

2006: Nick Gillespie Has Had It with Marty Peretz ("Lafayette! Nous Sommes Ici!" Department) http://www.bradford-delong.com/2006/09/nick_gillespie_.html: He writes, accurately and correctly:

Hit and Run: They're starting to shit themselves in public... TNR owner and "Spine" blogger Marty Peretz is enacting the cyberspatial equivalent... with posts such as this one on French jokes:

I was never able to get anybody interested in publishing this when I wrote it and shopped it around ten years ago. I do wonder why: it is, I think, rather important...

After the Next Nuclear Fire... http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/07/after-the-next-.html: In the early 1980s the U.S. NSA--or perhaps it was the Defense Department--loved to play games with Russian air defense. They would send probe planes in from the Pacific to fly over Siberia. And they would watch and listen: Where were the gaps in Russian sensor coverage? How far could U.S. planes penetrate before being spotted? What were Russian command-and-control procedures to intercept intruders?

Will the "Dunkirk" movie be any good? I cannot say that I am optimistic. But if you want to understand the bigger picture, here is my take on it:

From: My Very Short Take on World War II... http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/01/my-very-short-take-on-world-war-ii-hoisted-from-the-archives.html: How are we to understand World War II? One way is to take a look at the first three major campaigns—the Polish campaign of September 1939, the French campaign of May-June 1940, and the first six months of the Russian campaign from June 22 to the end of 1941.

In the 1939 Polish campaign, the Nazis lost 40,000 soldiers killed and wounded. The Poles lost 200,000 killed and wounded. The Poles also lost about 1,000,000 taken prisoner.

In the 1940 French campaign, the Nazis lost 160,000 soldiers killed and wounded. The allies lost 360,000 soldiers killed and wounded. And the allies also lost 2,000,000 soldiers taken prisoner.

Joshua Micah Marshall (2002): "I really, really, really want to recommend a book to you. It's called Strange Victory: Hitler's Conquest of France and it's by Ernest R. May, a highly respected diplomatic historian... https://web.archive.org/web/20040209000732/http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2002_05_12.html

...There are two reasons why this book is so good. The first is that it is just a marvelously engrossing narrative of one of the most pivotal moments of the 20th Century: the lead-up to the Second World War and particularly Hitler's lightning victory over France in May and June of 1940. It's just a very polished, compelling World War Two book and a very good read.

Hoisted from 2007: My Little Golden Book of Neoconservatism http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/07/my-little-golde.html: Jeff Weintraub worries that people don't know what neoconservatives are... http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/07/my-little-golde.html

...Jeff Weintraub: "Neocons," "very liberal Communists," and other scare-words: As Patrick Porter correctly points out, "neocon" (or "neoconservative") is expanding into an all-purpose term of abuse without much concrete content, historical specificity, or political substance.... This increasingly promiscuous use of the increasingly elastic scare-word "neocon" reminds one of the equally promiscuous way many right-wingers used to call anyone they didn't like a "communist."... [T]he word "liberal" often serves a similar function in some right-wing circles ...... though that's not entirely new, either. Back in 1973 Martha Mitchell, the wife of Nixon's Attorney-General John Mitchell, said that her husband often warned against the threat posed by the "very liberal Communists"...

I think I have the answers. Here are what I think are good takes on the neoconservative ideas and their vicissitudes, and on the neoconservatives--my takes and others':

China and Economic Growth: Hoisted from the Archives (What I Am Thinking About Right Now Department) http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/07/china-and-econo.html: Hoisted from the archives: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/01/china_and_econo.html: A somewhat different take on Ben Friedman's Moral Consequences of Economic Growth than the review I wrote for Harvard Magazine. Written for Caijing:

Time to hoist this again, and think about it some more, for the very sharp Neville Morley reports from 1600 Pylos & Sphacteria Avenue:

Neville Morley: 1600 Pylos & Sphacteria Avenue: "Here we are again, with a new article on ‘Why everyone in the White House is reading Thucydides’... https://thesphinxblog.com/2017/06/22/1600-pylos-sphacteria-avenue/

Should-Read: Not just in hindsight! The point of my citing to George Kennan’s 1946 “Long Telegram”—published in 1947 in Foreign Affairs as “The Sources of Soviet Conduct”—was to stress that what you, Pseudoerasmus, whoever you are, call the retrospective assessment was Kennan’s prospective hope as well.

Kennan wanted containment, not rollback. Kennan wanted to move the conflict to the political economic-ideological level: which system better delivered on Enlightenment values of prosperity, security, freedom? He was confident that, if moving the conflict to that level could be accomplished, the U.S., the western alliance, liberal democratic capitalism would win if it deserved to win. And he was confident it deserved to win.

Curiously, N.S. Khrushchev—at least in his saner moments—wanted the same thing: he, too, sought to move the conflict to the political economic-ideological level: which system better delivered on Enlightenment values of prosperity, security, freedom? He was confident that, if moving the conflict to that level could be accomplished, Soviet communism would win if it deserved to win. And he was confident it deserved to win. “We will have to be the ones making your funeral arrangements…”

Khrushchev was wrong. But he was a believer…

Pseudoerasmus: The Cold War Triumph of Liberal Capitalism—in Hindsight https://medium.com/@pseudoerasmus/if-we-ask-the-retrospective-question-why-did-western-liberal-capitalism-actually-triumph-then-e025706801e0: "The tête-à-tête Soviet-American global struggle over the Third World...

Sam Bowman: "Was finding @nfergus's piece today quite interesting, until he cited this figure (which is based on a falsehood): https://t.co/wdAjuaP8BS...

It's disturbing. As we face the probable abrogation of NAFTA, possible trade wars with China, Germany, and others, and the total cluster** that is the Trump administration's policies (if any) toward NATO and Russia, a number of really smart and really well-intentioned people are, I think, making rhetorical--and in some cases substantive--errors that are degrading the quality of the debate and increasing the chances of bad outcomes. And they are doing it while trying to be forces for good, light, human betterment, truth, justice, and the American way...

So let me do some boundary policing here...

It's disturbing. As we face the probable abrogation of NAFTA, possible trade wars with China, Germany, and others, and the total cluster** that is the Trump administration's policies (if any) toward NATO and Russia, a number of really smart and really well-intentioned people are, I think, making rhetorical--and in some cases substantive--errors that are degrading the quality of the debate and increasing the chances of bad outcomes. And they are doing it while trying to be forces for good, light, human betterment, truth, justice, and the American way...

So let me do some boundary policing here.

Outsourced to: Robert Waldmann: Podhoretz: "John Podhoretz who wrote...

What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn't kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything? Wasn't the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now? [John Podhoretz (July 25, 2006). "Too Nice to Win? Israel's Dilemma". New York Post. Retrieved April 7, 2007 <http://nypost.com/2006/07/25/too-nice-to-win-israels-dilemma/>]