You make a series of careful, judicious statements and then say there is no evidence for lab leak theory. There's plenty of evidence. Not conclusive but there is evidence.
I've spent way too much time on the issue, and I can assure you that there is no evidence for the lab leak hypothesis. Yes, the media is full of so-called "evidence", all of it false.
I think it was probably zoonotic, but I'm sorry the idea that there is no evidence of the lab leak hypothesis is just totally nuts. First of all, just the presence of the Wuhan Institute of Virology near the origin is extremely strong evidence of lab leak. The DEFUSE grant proposal to study sarbecoviruses and the emergence of the Furin Cleavage Site as a clean 12 nucleotide insertion are both extremely strong evidence. This is all false?
The DEFUSE grant was not even funded, and experts now say that claims that the virus looked "engineered" are inaccurate. The outbreak did not begin anywhere near the lab, it began near a wild animal market. The exact same sort of animal market that was the source of the first SARS epidemic. I do not regard "there's a virus lab in Wuhan, a city of 10 million" as evidence.
As happy_grey_panda said, we have very different definitions of evidence. Obviously “there’s a virus lab in Wuhan, a city of 10 million” should hugely raise your credence in lab leak.
The problem is that most people making these comments don't have much understanding of China. I've been to Wuhan and understand the size of the metro area.
Virologists say there is a reason why these SARS epidemics start in animal markets in southern China mega cities like Wuhan and Guangzhou. It's not some sort of weird coincidence. I understand that many Americans have never heard of Wuhan, which is one of China's largest cities. If so, they might want to refrain from making sweeping claims.
In 2014, one well known virologist was actually in that same Wuhan animal market, and took a photo of a raccoon dog cage. He commented on risk posed by these facilities.
No one is saying that lab leak is impossible, just that the evidence overwhelming points to the animal market. There is no evidence for lab leak, unless you consider "same city" to be evidence (I don't.)
So Biden’s own FBI has moderate confidence in the lab leak theory.
Biden’s Department of Energy thinks the lab leak most likely, albeit with low confidence.
You surely do not have to agree with that theory, but claiming there is no evidence is claiming that Biden’s FBI is what? Incompetent? Simply virulently politically anti-China? Despite the fact that other parts of Biden’s administration don’t think the lab leak is likely?
I feel like I'm playing whack a mole on this issue. Consider this:
"The FBI based its “moderate confidence” assessment on the lack of any proof of a virus transfer from an animal to a human in Wuhan, the Chinese city where Covid first emerged, and the long distance — over a thousand miles — from Wuhan to the caves where bats carrying coronaviruses live, said Jason Bannan, who retired from the FBI two years ago."
This is an absurd argument. No one disputes that SARS1 began in a suburb of Guangzhou, which is about 800 miles from the "bat caves". There's nothing at all odd about SARS2 beginning in Wuhan. And unlike with SARS1, all the animals were destroyed at the beginning of the pandemic.
These FBI guys are good at catching bank robbers, not investigating a complex medical mystery on the other side of the world. They are in way over their heads. BTW, most of the US intelligence agencies say it was from the animal market.
I’m not trying in any way to get you believe that the lab leak is more likely.
Just that the “zero evidence” claim is flat wrong.
You sorta did that when you said you were closer to 90/10 than 100/0. But only sorta.
I don’t know what the answer is, but for me the fact that Fauci wanted to hide that he’d funded the Wuhan lab, and paid off the experts who emailed him that it was likely a lab leak to quickly write a paper saying it couldn’t have come from a lab leak is pretty compelling evidence that it might be a lab leak.
I feel like there's some semantic thing going on in this thread and other conversations Scott has had on this topic. Scott may be saying something like there's no "evidence" in the sense of like something that offers proof beyond a doubt in a hypothetical court case adjudicating this question. And commenters are saying there /is/ evidence in the bayesian sense of like a fact that once learned ought to shift your prior to some different posterior distribution, relative to before you knew about the fact.
I do think the second definition is better, and Scott often thinks in a more bayesian way, but not always (he is a human afterall, not a perfectly updating robot).
To be clear, I've always been closer to 90/10, not 100%. There are other more knowledgeable experts who say it's a million to one against lab leak, I don't make that claim.
In any case, this is all off topic. The US government has being lying about the issue to smear China.
Experts are experts because they are purveyors of consensus opinions or at least a narrow range of officially sanctioned opinion - the spouting of which is intrinsically tied to their status and employment, which makes them less likely to break from said consensuses.
Say what you believe because it may very well need saying.
Strongly disagree. People that do something for a living generally know better then the rest of us about thing they do for a living. We can fancy ourselves that they luck common sense or biased by paychecks. And it certainly true in some cases. But when we need medical attention or car fixed or fly aircraft we always go to experts. And, generally speaking, there is nothing wrong with commonly accepted consensus. We all live 99% of our lives by following commonly accepted consensuses. And it works out 99% of the time.
Sure, I mostly agree - but I don't think this is a rule you can unilaterally apply to all fields of expertise.
Nobody is seriously questioning the expertise of pilots, mechanics, engineers etc because their respective consenses have not broken the public trust. The 99% success rate you refer to are the things we don't need to have a public discussion about.
However when talking on more murky fields like say macroeconomics, misinformation / disinformation, the corporate press, climate science, the social sciences, even things like diet - consensuses on these topics are in no way as grounded in reality and facts as the task of patching a hole in a radiator. And so called experts in these fields have been shown over and over again to be vulnerable to ideology and even dishonest in service of ideology.
Yes. Fields you're referring to are more complicated (impossible or very difficult to conduct controlled experiment) and generally young and still developing. Also, observers (us) are more gullible and susceptible to propaganda. C19 pandemic response is good example. Like anti-vaxers. Most observers are not capable to reason through or understand the complexities.
I am a South Korean macroeconomist who has serious problems with the works of people like Nathan Lane (amusing last name for this specific situation) whom Noah Smith considers as someone "being in his lane" for studying South Korea's "successful" industrial policy. The research clearly lacks external validity.
You are such a gentleman. If I faced such a smug comment, I would've asked "how about you? who gives you the authority to call people expert and non-expert?". Anyway, don't stay in your lane!
The entire storytelling schtick about South Korea's case is that the country turned out to be rather successful in the end. That creates room for all kinds of non-sensical narratives about what made it successful, including all these hazily defined "industrial policies" that are probably just the surface level developments masking deeper free market forces that helped the country get richer in spite of IP. Also important: basically 50% of South Korea's current success comes from post-democratization liberalization and reform. Chaebols were actively resisted by political powers, especially when liberal administrations were in power. None of this is properly reflected in these studies that are in vogue. Nathan Lane was in fact going around extolling the genius of Park CH for a while...
Yes, I completely agree with you on industrial policy. The supporters tend to assume anything good comes from IP, and anything bad they blame on some other factor. Cross sectional data suggests that free market economies strongly outperform interventionist policies.
I don't know what happened to Noah. I used to read him enthusiastically, going back to blogspot days and recently on both Substack and Twitter. He started fighting with lefties online and encouraging patriotism within the Democratic Party, which was fine, but it got out of hand. His pro-US rhetoric slowly turned anti-China, and then in the aftermath of Oct 7 he seemed to get seriously radicalized, in response to online statements that I often found fully abhorrent, but the response was sometimes no better!
I can't comment, because I don't follow his twitter. But I will say that twitter in general tends to be a race to the bottom. I think he's a talented blogger, I just happen to disagree on this issue.
Keep writing on China, Scott. I’m worried about what Noah seems obsessed with these days: America’s relative inability to build big things, such as warships, and the danger of an invasion of Taiwan. But I’m also worried about what you write about here. We are acting like characters in a Greek tragedy and bringing on the very thing we most want to avoid: a war with China. And thanks for the tip on Yasheng Huang. I’ve started following him now.
Trouble is that Trump and his new right broligarch supporters have the same world view as Putin and Xi. They aren't bothered by Putin taking Ukraine or the Bamtics, or Xi taking Taiwan. Or whatever Israel is doing. That is because they just want to do the same thing and get Greenland and Canada. Back to 19th Century colonial sphere of I fluence thinking. It's moot to criticise these people through the lens of the old system of rules based orders. They do not subscribe to this logic. They subscribe to the logic of power and might is right alone.
Specifically, the new establishment believes that the US has nothing to gain from promoting international rules and order. They believe the US has most to gain from bullying other countries and taking things by force, because the US is often strong enough to do this. And they find it acceptable that other powers will bully their own neighborhood. The logic of street gangs carving up a city.
Plus, stating the obvious, the incoming regime in the US prepares for a world without NATO, hence the insistence on buffer states. Canada and Greenland are meant to become to the US what Russia wants Ukraine to be to Russia: a buffer zone. Panama canal helps with the ultimate goal, a US that can exist without any allies.
I fully agree with the China take. The level of China fear and demonizing is harmful and dangerous to us. This is not to praise the regime or allow ourselves to be doormats but to recognize that we have much more to gain working with China than working against China. The pre-WWII example of Japan is a sobering reminder of what can go wrong if we do otherwise.
As for "Chamberlain was right to appease Hitler in 1938", yes this was the right thing. That Hitler betrayed his own solemn promises within months established unambiguously that Hitler was evil, bent on conquest, could not be trusted and probably actually meant what he wrote in Mein Kampf. Because of that, the vast majority of those opposed to war with Hitler changed their minds, Chamberlain included, and were ready to act the next time Hitler tried something (Poland). Strong, unified public opinion was key to winning the necessarily long and difficult war which followed. Even then, how close did Britain come to negotiating a peace in 1940? Had public opinion been more ambivalent about the war, that could have come about quite differently. Chamberlain was the necessary sacrifice for ultimate victory. The world would potentially be a much worse place now had he not set himself up to take the fall.
Two related historical parallels:
1. The French military decision to withdraw all forces 10km from the frontier during the tensions of August 1914 is one of the key facts that make it clear that France was invaded, unprovoked. Whatever the blame that can be allocated for the catastrophe that was WWI, the worst one could say about France is being insufficiently proactive in trying to talk Germany, Russia and Austria down from their highly irresponsible behaviour. But hey, more than a century later in France summer holidays are still sacred.
2. That Putin invaded Ukraine two years into a pandemic that saw essentially no senior leader face to face dialogue for two years is telling. The inadvertent shunning allowed Putin to be further isolated in his reality distortion field and actually think his invasion was a good idea. Anybody in Putin's circle was obviously telling him what he wanted to hear while the people outside his circle who could speak truth to him and penetrate his reality distortion bubble were too busy isolating themselves to talk.
I am not of the opinion you should „stay in your lane“ and by and large yours is a well differentiated view, with which I agree in large parts.
Interestingly, nuance and understanding of the others viewpoint ends with Russia where you take the quote everyone takes (is there no other?) out of context and interpret it in maximalist fashion („he wants to conquer europe“) when it is well known the he was lamenting the economic catastrophe that followed the break up, as well as the uncertain fate of 25 million Russians suddenly living abroad-ther is 4 hours of Oliver Stone interviews from 2016 on this.
Probably because you have never been to Russia, whereas you recently visited China?
Ps.
which Mearsheimer quote are you referring to? I am only familiar with his 2015 University of Chicago lecture (30 million views) where he predicts that the US‘s actions will lead to the destruction of Ukraine.
I was exaggerating for effect. It does not change my point if you replace „Europe“ with just the Baltics and Georgia, does it?
If Putin was intent on reoccupying land, he would not have ordered the separatists to withdraw from Mariupol in 2015 (when Ukraine did not have a giant army) as a precursor to the Minsk agreement…(something which Russian nationalists have faulted him with ever since)
I was not referring to the your opposition to the invasion- fully understandable, if you are a principled pacifist. rather your percieved lack of understanding Russia’s viewpoint (you beautifully laid out imperial Japan’s anxieties, as a response to western actions without justifying the occupation of Manchuria).
I believe you would be positively surprised of how different modern Russia is relative to your expectations - just as you were on your recent China visit.
I have visited Russia often and done business there. my experiences do not correspond at all to what I read in western media (I also was not surprised, when it did not collapse under sanctions).
looks like I have to rewatch the Mearsheimer lecture, maybe I remember wrongly..
Just give it up. My views on Russia's foreign policy will not change if I visit and discover they have modern shopping centers and skyscrapers (something I'm already quite aware of.)
As far as China, I already knew what it was like, so my recent visit did not change my previous perception.
And one doesn't have to be a pacifist to oppose Russia's invasion, one merely must be a non-fascist.
"President Trump supported the single worst human rights abuse in China, their decision to put 1 million Uyghurs into concentration camps? Can you blame the Chinese public for being cynical about the US?"
Doesn't this assume that the Han Chinese public, specifically the anti-Americans, are sympathetic to Uyghurs? Is that a reasonable assumption?
No, I meant something different. You are right that they are not particularly sympathetic. My point was that the Chinese don't take our human rights complaints seriously--they think we actually don't care about the Uyghurs (which in Trump's case is true) and that we are using human rights as a cudgel to attack China.
saying you care without actually caring makes one a hypocrite. Even worse, if ulterior motives can be constructed/suspected. Coindencially thats exactly what the Chinese (and Russians) believe.
Not a good basis for fruitful international cooperation.
Japan was waging what was essentially a genocidal war in China and Southeast Asian (in which Japan committed atrocities similar in scale and brutality to nazi Germany) that the US sought to hinder via embargo. Classifying that as a mistake that likely helped caused (the pacific theater of) WW2 is an ambitious claim, to say the least. I guess one could also say really Britain and France caused WW2 by declaring war on Germany instead of just letting it have western Poland then hoping for the best.
"To be clear, there is a reasonable argument for the US putting those sanctions on Japan, as it had invaded China and was expanding elsewhere. Nonetheless, it does seem to have been at least one factor that led to the attack on Pearl Harbor."
Yes, I do think it contributed to Pearl Harbor, and that was my point. But I agree that the China invasion created a case for sanctions. Today, China is not engaged in the sort of war that Japan was engaged in in the 1930s, and hence the fact that it contributed to Pearl Harbor seems very relevant.
You’re analogizing US policy toward Japan to present day US policy toward China as - supposedly - similarly increasing the likelihood of an avoidable war.
I am saying the US war with Japan might have been avoidable. I am not saying it should have been avoided. Those are two different issues. Perhaps it's good that we were drawn into the war, just as it was arguably good that we were drawn into the war with Germany, which might also have been avoidable. Both countries were engaged in mass murder. Today, it would not be good to be drawn into a war with China, as the situation is completely different. The cost of such a war would exceed the benefit.
I strongly agree with your claims about industrial policy and about the failings/limitations of foreign policy experts. All your points at the beginning of the piece are excellent, while Noah’s vary between weak and idiotic.
I’m almost surprised no one has said anything like my comment above.
But I suppose it’s because the rest of the piece sucked all the air out of the room.
IMO you mar what would have been an excellent piece about the industrial policy and “expertise” stuff with the stuff on China. Some of it I’d agree with, some I wouldn’t, but then there is the drift into TDS-land, where you shift to various potshots at Trump and those on the right who don’t hate him.
In particular the worst part to me was your move to leftist logic about government legitimacy and the fact that we had elections where we elected someone you don’t like becoming the rationale to people in a country where there are no elections that the U.S. government is illegitimate…
You should change lanes. Once you understand the new field's vocabulary and culture, your pre-existing skill set give you access to lots of low hanging fruit. Once back in your original field, you bring with you subject matter knowledge that your colleagues lack.
You are a monetary /macro economist. Macro is really hard in history and politics because the commentary is about very short term views and stochastic events. Seeing the forest for the trees and looking at who is trying to swim upstream is very important. And many world leaders do not do that. They swim in short term power politics and self-enrichment (cultural status or monetary).
Predicting something like Putin’s rise to power with the KGB as his constituency would probably be impossible. But the Chinese Communist Party is more than one person. It is the world’s largest institution! There is a lot more predictability there.
China is macro macro macro. There are millions of political decisions every day. The day’s asset prices tell you nothing, since you have no idea who was buying and selling and for what purpose.
But there are big historical currents. What policies and trends under Deng are the same under Xi? What are the interactions like over time between Beijing and the mayor/provinces? What constraints does centralized planning put on economic growth and monetary stability? How does family as a unit of political/economic/cultural decision making impact their big picture? When will Americans understand hybrid warfare and the “Three Warfares”?
I think much more cultural/educational/intellectual interaction with China is very important. And it doesn’t just have to be with the mainland. The Chinese diaspora is huge. Some of their best and brightest are right here.
I’m much more suspect about trade and investment. We still do a ton of trade, but that volume is ignored in our own domestic battle of words. And investment without political understanding and backstopping is not credit-worthy investment.
Jump into the next lane!!!!!!
=> Noah Smith chided me for offering opinions on foreign policy risks, suggesting I was not qualified to opine on that subject
=>….suspect that it’s almost impossible to forecast in this area, just as it’s not possible to reliably forecast movements in asset prices. The world is too complex. But being unable to forecast is not an argument for an activist industrial policy. You cannot justify any sort of government policy without some sort of model, some sort of assumptions about how the world works. I cannot analyze industrial policy without some sort of foreign policy assumptions. So I do my best.
=>We should be trying to improve relations with China, not trying to launch a new cold war. Freer trade and investment is a good place to start.
You make a series of careful, judicious statements and then say there is no evidence for lab leak theory. There's plenty of evidence. Not conclusive but there is evidence.
I've spent way too much time on the issue, and I can assure you that there is no evidence for the lab leak hypothesis. Yes, the media is full of so-called "evidence", all of it false.
I think it was probably zoonotic, but I'm sorry the idea that there is no evidence of the lab leak hypothesis is just totally nuts. First of all, just the presence of the Wuhan Institute of Virology near the origin is extremely strong evidence of lab leak. The DEFUSE grant proposal to study sarbecoviruses and the emergence of the Furin Cleavage Site as a clean 12 nucleotide insertion are both extremely strong evidence. This is all false?
The DEFUSE grant was not even funded, and experts now say that claims that the virus looked "engineered" are inaccurate. The outbreak did not begin anywhere near the lab, it began near a wild animal market. The exact same sort of animal market that was the source of the first SARS epidemic. I do not regard "there's a virus lab in Wuhan, a city of 10 million" as evidence.
As happy_grey_panda said, we have very different definitions of evidence. Obviously “there’s a virus lab in Wuhan, a city of 10 million” should hugely raise your credence in lab leak.
The problem is that most people making these comments don't have much understanding of China. I've been to Wuhan and understand the size of the metro area.
Virologists say there is a reason why these SARS epidemics start in animal markets in southern China mega cities like Wuhan and Guangzhou. It's not some sort of weird coincidence. I understand that many Americans have never heard of Wuhan, which is one of China's largest cities. If so, they might want to refrain from making sweeping claims.
In 2014, one well known virologist was actually in that same Wuhan animal market, and took a photo of a raccoon dog cage. He commented on risk posed by these facilities.
No one is saying that lab leak is impossible, just that the evidence overwhelming points to the animal market. There is no evidence for lab leak, unless you consider "same city" to be evidence (I don't.)
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/future-pulse/2024/05/16/a-lab-leak-theorist-explains-00158283
So Biden’s own FBI has moderate confidence in the lab leak theory.
Biden’s Department of Energy thinks the lab leak most likely, albeit with low confidence.
You surely do not have to agree with that theory, but claiming there is no evidence is claiming that Biden’s FBI is what? Incompetent? Simply virulently politically anti-China? Despite the fact that other parts of Biden’s administration don’t think the lab leak is likely?
I feel like I'm playing whack a mole on this issue. Consider this:
"The FBI based its “moderate confidence” assessment on the lack of any proof of a virus transfer from an animal to a human in Wuhan, the Chinese city where Covid first emerged, and the long distance — over a thousand miles — from Wuhan to the caves where bats carrying coronaviruses live, said Jason Bannan, who retired from the FBI two years ago."
This is an absurd argument. No one disputes that SARS1 began in a suburb of Guangzhou, which is about 800 miles from the "bat caves". There's nothing at all odd about SARS2 beginning in Wuhan. And unlike with SARS1, all the animals were destroyed at the beginning of the pandemic.
These FBI guys are good at catching bank robbers, not investigating a complex medical mystery on the other side of the world. They are in way over their heads. BTW, most of the US intelligence agencies say it was from the animal market.
I’m not trying in any way to get you believe that the lab leak is more likely.
Just that the “zero evidence” claim is flat wrong.
You sorta did that when you said you were closer to 90/10 than 100/0. But only sorta.
I don’t know what the answer is, but for me the fact that Fauci wanted to hide that he’d funded the Wuhan lab, and paid off the experts who emailed him that it was likely a lab leak to quickly write a paper saying it couldn’t have come from a lab leak is pretty compelling evidence that it might be a lab leak.
I feel like there's some semantic thing going on in this thread and other conversations Scott has had on this topic. Scott may be saying something like there's no "evidence" in the sense of like something that offers proof beyond a doubt in a hypothetical court case adjudicating this question. And commenters are saying there /is/ evidence in the bayesian sense of like a fact that once learned ought to shift your prior to some different posterior distribution, relative to before you knew about the fact.
I do think the second definition is better, and Scott often thinks in a more bayesian way, but not always (he is a human afterall, not a perfectly updating robot).
It's just one of those issues that attracts a lot of 100% yes/ 100% no estimates and not many people in the middle.
To be clear, I've always been closer to 90/10, not 100%. There are other more knowledgeable experts who say it's a million to one against lab leak, I don't make that claim.
In any case, this is all off topic. The US government has being lying about the issue to smear China.
Even more than "not conclusive", it seems to me that the balance of evidence is against the lab leak hypothesis. But I agree it's not *zero* evidence.
Experts are experts because they are purveyors of consensus opinions or at least a narrow range of officially sanctioned opinion - the spouting of which is intrinsically tied to their status and employment, which makes them less likely to break from said consensuses.
Say what you believe because it may very well need saying.
Strongly disagree. People that do something for a living generally know better then the rest of us about thing they do for a living. We can fancy ourselves that they luck common sense or biased by paychecks. And it certainly true in some cases. But when we need medical attention or car fixed or fly aircraft we always go to experts. And, generally speaking, there is nothing wrong with commonly accepted consensus. We all live 99% of our lives by following commonly accepted consensuses. And it works out 99% of the time.
Sure, I mostly agree - but I don't think this is a rule you can unilaterally apply to all fields of expertise.
Nobody is seriously questioning the expertise of pilots, mechanics, engineers etc because their respective consenses have not broken the public trust. The 99% success rate you refer to are the things we don't need to have a public discussion about.
However when talking on more murky fields like say macroeconomics, misinformation / disinformation, the corporate press, climate science, the social sciences, even things like diet - consensuses on these topics are in no way as grounded in reality and facts as the task of patching a hole in a radiator. And so called experts in these fields have been shown over and over again to be vulnerable to ideology and even dishonest in service of ideology.
Yes. Fields you're referring to are more complicated (impossible or very difficult to conduct controlled experiment) and generally young and still developing. Also, observers (us) are more gullible and susceptible to propaganda. C19 pandemic response is good example. Like anti-vaxers. Most observers are not capable to reason through or understand the complexities.
I am a South Korean macroeconomist who has serious problems with the works of people like Nathan Lane (amusing last name for this specific situation) whom Noah Smith considers as someone "being in his lane" for studying South Korea's "successful" industrial policy. The research clearly lacks external validity.
You are such a gentleman. If I faced such a smug comment, I would've asked "how about you? who gives you the authority to call people expert and non-expert?". Anyway, don't stay in your lane!
The entire storytelling schtick about South Korea's case is that the country turned out to be rather successful in the end. That creates room for all kinds of non-sensical narratives about what made it successful, including all these hazily defined "industrial policies" that are probably just the surface level developments masking deeper free market forces that helped the country get richer in spite of IP. Also important: basically 50% of South Korea's current success comes from post-democratization liberalization and reform. Chaebols were actively resisted by political powers, especially when liberal administrations were in power. None of this is properly reflected in these studies that are in vogue. Nathan Lane was in fact going around extolling the genius of Park CH for a while...
Yes, I completely agree with you on industrial policy. The supporters tend to assume anything good comes from IP, and anything bad they blame on some other factor. Cross sectional data suggests that free market economies strongly outperform interventionist policies.
I would recommend starting by not taking Noah this seriously.
Hmmm . . .
https://x.com/Noahpinion/status/1880114135830262006
I don't know what happened to Noah. I used to read him enthusiastically, going back to blogspot days and recently on both Substack and Twitter. He started fighting with lefties online and encouraging patriotism within the Democratic Party, which was fine, but it got out of hand. His pro-US rhetoric slowly turned anti-China, and then in the aftermath of Oct 7 he seemed to get seriously radicalized, in response to online statements that I often found fully abhorrent, but the response was sometimes no better!
I can't comment, because I don't follow his twitter. But I will say that twitter in general tends to be a race to the bottom. I think he's a talented blogger, I just happen to disagree on this issue.
Keep writing on China, Scott. I’m worried about what Noah seems obsessed with these days: America’s relative inability to build big things, such as warships, and the danger of an invasion of Taiwan. But I’m also worried about what you write about here. We are acting like characters in a Greek tragedy and bringing on the very thing we most want to avoid: a war with China. And thanks for the tip on Yasheng Huang. I’ve started following him now.
Trouble is that Trump and his new right broligarch supporters have the same world view as Putin and Xi. They aren't bothered by Putin taking Ukraine or the Bamtics, or Xi taking Taiwan. Or whatever Israel is doing. That is because they just want to do the same thing and get Greenland and Canada. Back to 19th Century colonial sphere of I fluence thinking. It's moot to criticise these people through the lens of the old system of rules based orders. They do not subscribe to this logic. They subscribe to the logic of power and might is right alone.
Specifically, the new establishment believes that the US has nothing to gain from promoting international rules and order. They believe the US has most to gain from bullying other countries and taking things by force, because the US is often strong enough to do this. And they find it acceptable that other powers will bully their own neighborhood. The logic of street gangs carving up a city.
"The logic of street gangs carving up a city."
Well put.
Plus, stating the obvious, the incoming regime in the US prepares for a world without NATO, hence the insistence on buffer states. Canada and Greenland are meant to become to the US what Russia wants Ukraine to be to Russia: a buffer zone. Panama canal helps with the ultimate goal, a US that can exist without any allies.
*Baltics
I fully agree with the China take. The level of China fear and demonizing is harmful and dangerous to us. This is not to praise the regime or allow ourselves to be doormats but to recognize that we have much more to gain working with China than working against China. The pre-WWII example of Japan is a sobering reminder of what can go wrong if we do otherwise.
As for "Chamberlain was right to appease Hitler in 1938", yes this was the right thing. That Hitler betrayed his own solemn promises within months established unambiguously that Hitler was evil, bent on conquest, could not be trusted and probably actually meant what he wrote in Mein Kampf. Because of that, the vast majority of those opposed to war with Hitler changed their minds, Chamberlain included, and were ready to act the next time Hitler tried something (Poland). Strong, unified public opinion was key to winning the necessarily long and difficult war which followed. Even then, how close did Britain come to negotiating a peace in 1940? Had public opinion been more ambivalent about the war, that could have come about quite differently. Chamberlain was the necessary sacrifice for ultimate victory. The world would potentially be a much worse place now had he not set himself up to take the fall.
Two related historical parallels:
1. The French military decision to withdraw all forces 10km from the frontier during the tensions of August 1914 is one of the key facts that make it clear that France was invaded, unprovoked. Whatever the blame that can be allocated for the catastrophe that was WWI, the worst one could say about France is being insufficiently proactive in trying to talk Germany, Russia and Austria down from their highly irresponsible behaviour. But hey, more than a century later in France summer holidays are still sacred.
2. That Putin invaded Ukraine two years into a pandemic that saw essentially no senior leader face to face dialogue for two years is telling. The inadvertent shunning allowed Putin to be further isolated in his reality distortion field and actually think his invasion was a good idea. Anybody in Putin's circle was obviously telling him what he wanted to hear while the people outside his circle who could speak truth to him and penetrate his reality distortion bubble were too busy isolating themselves to talk.
Excellent comment! (Even where you disagree with me.)
Scott,
I am not of the opinion you should „stay in your lane“ and by and large yours is a well differentiated view, with which I agree in large parts.
Interestingly, nuance and understanding of the others viewpoint ends with Russia where you take the quote everyone takes (is there no other?) out of context and interpret it in maximalist fashion („he wants to conquer europe“) when it is well known the he was lamenting the economic catastrophe that followed the break up, as well as the uncertain fate of 25 million Russians suddenly living abroad-ther is 4 hours of Oliver Stone interviews from 2016 on this.
Probably because you have never been to Russia, whereas you recently visited China?
Ps.
which Mearsheimer quote are you referring to? I am only familiar with his 2015 University of Chicago lecture (30 million views) where he predicts that the US‘s actions will lead to the destruction of Ukraine.
You comment is both dishonest and insulting. I never said Putin wanted to conquer all of Europe, I said he wanted to recreate the Soviet Union.
You say you are familiar with his 2015 lecture? Obviously not:
https://www.themoneyillusion.com/beware-of-foreign-policy-experts/
Do you really believe that my opposition to Russia's invasion of Ukraine is motivated by the fact that I've never visited Russia?
I was exaggerating for effect. It does not change my point if you replace „Europe“ with just the Baltics and Georgia, does it?
If Putin was intent on reoccupying land, he would not have ordered the separatists to withdraw from Mariupol in 2015 (when Ukraine did not have a giant army) as a precursor to the Minsk agreement…(something which Russian nationalists have faulted him with ever since)
I was not referring to the your opposition to the invasion- fully understandable, if you are a principled pacifist. rather your percieved lack of understanding Russia’s viewpoint (you beautifully laid out imperial Japan’s anxieties, as a response to western actions without justifying the occupation of Manchuria).
I believe you would be positively surprised of how different modern Russia is relative to your expectations - just as you were on your recent China visit.
I have visited Russia often and done business there. my experiences do not correspond at all to what I read in western media (I also was not surprised, when it did not collapse under sanctions).
looks like I have to rewatch the Mearsheimer lecture, maybe I remember wrongly..
Just give it up. My views on Russia's foreign policy will not change if I visit and discover they have modern shopping centers and skyscrapers (something I'm already quite aware of.)
As far as China, I already knew what it was like, so my recent visit did not change my previous perception.
And one doesn't have to be a pacifist to oppose Russia's invasion, one merely must be a non-fascist.
"President Trump supported the single worst human rights abuse in China, their decision to put 1 million Uyghurs into concentration camps? Can you blame the Chinese public for being cynical about the US?"
Doesn't this assume that the Han Chinese public, specifically the anti-Americans, are sympathetic to Uyghurs? Is that a reasonable assumption?
No, I meant something different. You are right that they are not particularly sympathetic. My point was that the Chinese don't take our human rights complaints seriously--they think we actually don't care about the Uyghurs (which in Trump's case is true) and that we are using human rights as a cudgel to attack China.
which politician who has any say on the matter in Washington cares about the Uyghurs?
Cares? Or says they care? Trump doesn't even pretend to care.
saying you care without actually caring makes one a hypocrite. Even worse, if ulterior motives can be constructed/suspected. Coindencially thats exactly what the Chinese (and Russians) believe.
Not a good basis for fruitful international cooperation.
Natural gas cost has more to do with loss of coal mining jobs lately.
That's true, but even so the total output level is about the same as 100 years ago, even as employment has fallen from about 800,000 to about 40,000.
I really enjoyed your talk with Noah and Tyler Cowen. I think you’re way too hard on your performances
Japan was waging what was essentially a genocidal war in China and Southeast Asian (in which Japan committed atrocities similar in scale and brutality to nazi Germany) that the US sought to hinder via embargo. Classifying that as a mistake that likely helped caused (the pacific theater of) WW2 is an ambitious claim, to say the least. I guess one could also say really Britain and France caused WW2 by declaring war on Germany instead of just letting it have western Poland then hoping for the best.
Sorry, where did I say it was a mistake? I said:
"To be clear, there is a reasonable argument for the US putting those sanctions on Japan, as it had invaded China and was expanding elsewhere. Nonetheless, it does seem to have been at least one factor that led to the attack on Pearl Harbor."
Yes, I do think it contributed to Pearl Harbor, and that was my point. But I agree that the China invasion created a case for sanctions. Today, China is not engaged in the sort of war that Japan was engaged in in the 1930s, and hence the fact that it contributed to Pearl Harbor seems very relevant.
You’re analogizing US policy toward Japan to present day US policy toward China as - supposedly - similarly increasing the likelihood of an avoidable war.
I am saying the US war with Japan might have been avoidable. I am not saying it should have been avoided. Those are two different issues. Perhaps it's good that we were drawn into the war, just as it was arguably good that we were drawn into the war with Germany, which might also have been avoidable. Both countries were engaged in mass murder. Today, it would not be good to be drawn into a war with China, as the situation is completely different. The cost of such a war would exceed the benefit.
I strongly agree with your claims about industrial policy and about the failings/limitations of foreign policy experts. All your points at the beginning of the piece are excellent, while Noah’s vary between weak and idiotic.
I’m almost surprised no one has said anything like my comment above.
But I suppose it’s because the rest of the piece sucked all the air out of the room.
IMO you mar what would have been an excellent piece about the industrial policy and “expertise” stuff with the stuff on China. Some of it I’d agree with, some I wouldn’t, but then there is the drift into TDS-land, where you shift to various potshots at Trump and those on the right who don’t hate him.
In particular the worst part to me was your move to leftist logic about government legitimacy and the fact that we had elections where we elected someone you don’t like becoming the rationale to people in a country where there are no elections that the U.S. government is illegitimate…
You should change lanes. Once you understand the new field's vocabulary and culture, your pre-existing skill set give you access to lots of low hanging fruit. Once back in your original field, you bring with you subject matter knowledge that your colleagues lack.
You are a monetary /macro economist. Macro is really hard in history and politics because the commentary is about very short term views and stochastic events. Seeing the forest for the trees and looking at who is trying to swim upstream is very important. And many world leaders do not do that. They swim in short term power politics and self-enrichment (cultural status or monetary).
Predicting something like Putin’s rise to power with the KGB as his constituency would probably be impossible. But the Chinese Communist Party is more than one person. It is the world’s largest institution! There is a lot more predictability there.
China is macro macro macro. There are millions of political decisions every day. The day’s asset prices tell you nothing, since you have no idea who was buying and selling and for what purpose.
But there are big historical currents. What policies and trends under Deng are the same under Xi? What are the interactions like over time between Beijing and the mayor/provinces? What constraints does centralized planning put on economic growth and monetary stability? How does family as a unit of political/economic/cultural decision making impact their big picture? When will Americans understand hybrid warfare and the “Three Warfares”?
I think much more cultural/educational/intellectual interaction with China is very important. And it doesn’t just have to be with the mainland. The Chinese diaspora is huge. Some of their best and brightest are right here.
I’m much more suspect about trade and investment. We still do a ton of trade, but that volume is ignored in our own domestic battle of words. And investment without political understanding and backstopping is not credit-worthy investment.
Jump into the next lane!!!!!!
=> Noah Smith chided me for offering opinions on foreign policy risks, suggesting I was not qualified to opine on that subject
=>….suspect that it’s almost impossible to forecast in this area, just as it’s not possible to reliably forecast movements in asset prices. The world is too complex. But being unable to forecast is not an argument for an activist industrial policy. You cannot justify any sort of government policy without some sort of model, some sort of assumptions about how the world works. I cannot analyze industrial policy without some sort of foreign policy assumptions. So I do my best.
=>We should be trying to improve relations with China, not trying to launch a new cold war. Freer trade and investment is a good place to start.
No, don’t stay in your lane; the whole world is your highway!
One false note: “Because we were racist.”
Because *they* were racist. You and I did not exist in 1919.
Good point.