All posts by robbo28

Thoughts on Turning 40 (…and turning 74)

It’s weird for a channel that covers so much death and destruction, but I don’t actually think about my own mortality much. That’s not to say I don’t think about age. In fact I’ve always been obsessed with age, and the passage of time. “Can you believe that we’re 20!, 30?, 35!” etc. etc. But I’ve never really thought about the end much, just sort of assuming there would always be more time to do everything. Turning 40 certainly puts this sort of thing in perspective. Reading the obituaries of people with very full lives, just a decade or two older helps with that too.

So I’ve been a bit maudlin lately. But, as I point out in this video, turning 40 is also very helpful. It’s given me a bigger sense of my own frailty, but also a sense of my own power. I could certainly get hit by a bus tomorrow ( especially with the amount of bicycling I do in New York City), but how much life I have left is largely in my control. That’s a powerful thing. It’s also left me a little less obsessed with age as well. All the milestones have passed. What I do with the time left, and how much time I have left is largely up to me…

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Is the War in Yemen Over? | UAE Withdrawal | Yemen 17

This video has turned out to be quite prescient. Closing in on two months ago, when it became clear that the UAE was withdrawing some troops from Yemen, I proposed three possible scenarios for what it would mean. All three are still worth considering, but it’s looking like the one I flagged as most likely is the one that’s happening. It’s a sort of Vietnam 1973 scenario. The Saudis have lost, but they won’t acknowledge it yet, and there is plenty of murder and destruction to come before it becomes obvious to everyone with a 1975 style “helicopters on rooftops” moment.

I didn’t anticipate how quickly things would fall apart, however, with Saudi and UAE proxies engaging in open warfare in the only major Yemeni city that their “coalition” has managed to take. I think the Vietnam parallel stands though. Since World War II we have been lucky enough to see very little inter-state war. Much of the suffering in the world has come in the context of civil wars. This Saudi invasion of its neighbor is only one of a handful of such examples since the 1940s. Vietnam is one of those examples, and the parallels will just get more and more obvious. As sad as this is, it is a bit heartening to see that the US failure in Vietnam wasn’t some unique failure of will, it’s just really fricking hard to invade a country in the modern context. The Saudis are doing even worse than we did, much more quickly.

The US invasion of Iraq also fits into the Vietnam structure pretty well, as I documented five years ago

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The Terrible Threat From Chinese Grad Students

When should we panic? Donald Trump has obviously given freer reign to the nativist and racist instincts of my country, but how out of the ordinary is it really? There was a large industry and policy community based around fear of the other long before Donald Trump. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that his cartoonish attempt to put into practice all the ideas that Republicans used to only pay lip service to at election time has INCREASED support for immigration and multi-culturalism in the United States. It’s an interesting question. People are undeniably being hurt, but it’s often just because already existing policies are being carried out in a more haphazard fashion.

This video plays with the question. It focuses on a panic the Trump administration is creating around Chinese students and workers in the US, and places it in the context of decades of hate towards other groups that our country has been swimming in. It points out that the new China-panic might actually be a result of the diminishing panic about other groups. I don’t have any firm answers here, but it’s very worth thinking about.

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How US War With Iran Will End Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia is in a terrible trap. Even the things that it thinks will help threaten its demise. As I pointed out in this video’s companion video, they want a US war with Iran because it would lead to a spike in oil prices, and more damage to competitors in Kuwait and Iraq than to themselves. But even this strategy comes with risks, whether they are caught up in the war or not.

I don’t have a ton of sympathy for the Saudi royal family, obviously, but it’s a situation worth appreciating. It’s Kafkaesque. They’ve constructed a paradise that no longer works. Every ploy they employ gets them closer to the edge. This video lays out the problem of the war with Iran, and this series lays out the broader problem.

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Why Saudi Arabia Wants War With Iran | Markets Are Dumb 9

This video connects a few concepts to the possibility of US war with Iran that should be getting more attention. It’s quite well known that Saudi Arabia dislikes Iran, and wants the US to confront that country. But we rarely dive into why that may be. A lot of time and effort is put in to the Sunni vs. Shia myth, something I’ve dismantled elsewhere. When we want to blame religion, it’s almost always politics that’s really to blame.

And when politics are screwing something up, it’s very often economics at the bottom of it as well. That’s certainly the case for the Saudis enthusiasm for US war with Iran. This video lays out how directly this is linked to the price of oil. Simply put, war with Iran could be an economic bonanza for Saudi Arabia…

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The New Cold War Could Be Fun! | China, The US and Everyone Else | MIC 19

Multi-polarity doesn’t have to be a disaster. It certainly could be. As competition between the US and China has ramped up over the past year or so, the focus has been on violent possibilities, and the US defense department has led the charge. That’s certainly the point of the exercise. China is being turned into an enemy so we can sell weapons. The competition now looks to me to be inevitable. But, as this video entreats, we can change the tone of that competition.

We can change the frame from war to friendly competition. The last cold war had horrific consequences, but it had positive ramifications as well. If we act proactively we can optimize the mix of the next competition for positivity rather than horror. This may sound ridiculous, but it’s not. The tone of the New Cold War will determine whether or not it kills us.

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Is the United States Islam’s Best Friend?

The question asked by this video may seem ridiculous, or even horrifying. The United States has waged a relentless war on Muslim countries for two, based on the terrorist activities of a few individuals and ideologies that were just as much inspired by the US intelligence community as they were by any religion. From Iraq, to Yemen to Somalia and Libya it’s a pretty horrifying legacy.

But it could be so much worse. In this video I argue that the Devil world-wide Islam knows is vastly preferable to the devil it does not know. Both China and India have demonstrated in recent years that their approach to their own Muslim minorities is awful. As their power grows this treatment will extend to Muslims worldwide. In the months since I made this video, this has only gotten more apparent, with India’s new repression of the Muslims of Kashmir, to Modi’s (very related to Kashmir) growing closeness with the most repressive elements of the Israeli government.

Mexico is About To Have A Very Good Decade | NFTGA 19

I should really cover Mexico more, as I finally do with today’s video. This channel is very much based on US policy. Sure, I go in depth on the history and politics of a range of other countries, but it’s almost always in the framework of their significance for US foreign policy. Mexico is probably more important for the long term success or failure of the United States than any other country, except maybe China. Mexico is vastly more important for the US than any of the Middle Eastern wars or conflicts I have described.

Mexico is a trillion dollar economy. There are not many of those. It also shares one of the world’s longest borders with the United States. As I talk about today, there’s a good chance that the US and Mexico are going to converge further over the next couple decades, creating a block, with just three countries, that could remain vastly richer than China throughout the century. Or it could go in the other direction. Drug Wars, border nastiness, and outright US racism could derail this happy future. This is a topic I should cover more.

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John Bolton’s Quest For A New Pearl Harbor | Iran Sanctions 4

One of the many irritating things about US foreign policy is its complete lack of imagination. We just keep running the same old scripts over and over. World War II, probably the US’s best war, and really the only one that can be called “good” in the 20th century, still provides the mental models for most foreign policy practitioners. This comes about in very conscious ways, such as the closing in on a century long insistence that everybody the US doesn’t like is Hitler, but I think it comes about in unconscious ways too.

In today’s video, I talk about the way that US National Security Adviser John Bolton’s foreign policy directly echoes FDR’s. They both wanted war, though for very different reasons. John Bolton is using similar tools, and as the past week illustrates he’s getting perilously close to bringing about the same results. But unlike FDR, he has no noble purpose. This is some scary stuff. But it’s also pitiful. We’ve advanced so much as a world over the past 70 years. It’s profoundly disappointing that the most powerful people in it are playing out scripts from another era.

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North Africa Is More Important Than You Think | Everybody’s Lying About Islam 39

With today’s video I tie together the past month or so of production, and explain why it is that I’m so interested in North Africa. Arab democracy, human rights, human progress, all of that is lovely. But today I focus on a much more simple, dollars and cents issue: Every month the Atlantic economy is mired in war and destruction in North Africa, is a month where the Pacific Economy surpasses it. The disaster in Libya is contributing to economic stagnation in Europe and the Eastern United States. There are very self interested reasons to promote peace.

I really enjoy the way that this one connects the North Africa region together, and then connects it to the implications for the world as a whole. I don’t think enough media does that. Let me know what you think!

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