What is particularly interesting about President Xi’s speech is that he locates the foundations of the post-WWII order not in Bretton Woods (the U.S.-dominated monetary arrangement) but in the establishment of the United Nations in San Francisco. China was the first signatory of the UN Charter.
The US’s veto power on the UN Security Council has in effect made the UN a toothless institution; it cannot fulfill its mandate if one country has full control over its functioning. Interestingly, a more powerful China may create the conditions for a system of international law that has greater legitimacy and adherence around the world because it’s not seen as the instrument of only one global power. This is some kind of “decentralization”—but is it enough to ensure world peace?
In other words, it is not the virtue of any particular country in the UN that lends it legitimacy (the perceived “goodness” of the U.S., China, or any other country), but the balance of power *between* countries that does so.
But major outstanding questions remain:
What is the actual *mandate* of the UN?
How is its scope defined so that it can actually execute effectively against that mandate?
How is membership in the UN reconcilable with the sovereignty of member nations?
Is it possible to have international institutions that aren’t captured by the interests of one or more super powers?
These questions all demand new thinking in political theory and the foundations of relationships between human collectives.
“(America) goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benign' sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of envy, and amibition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit."
- President and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams
“It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.”
- A. N. Whitehead, “Symbolism” (1927)
The traditional political labels of “right” and “left” are becoming increasingly meaningless. This gives us the opportunity to genuinely engage with people and think together. But it upsets partisans who want to determine in advance who the “good guys” and “bad guys” are.
Be skeptical of anyone who talks about what “leftists” or “right-wingers” believe. They rarely, if ever, define their terms and often use these words to make arguments from fear or hate. Anyone trying to scare or trigger you into agreeing with them is manipulating.
Nation-states are historically a new phenomenon. As people began rising up against the oppression of monarchies and aristocracies in the 18th and 19th centuries, they looked around for a new basis for political community. Many European thinkers found it in something called “the nation.” A legitimate government should embody the will of the people, they argued, and the people are the “nation.”
But who is the nation? Answering that question ended up being both liberating and extremely bloody. Revolutionaries and political theorists across Europe defined the nation as based on shared language, religion, customs, or race—or some combination of these. The trouble with all of these definitions was that within virtually any geographic territory, there were many people who did not “fit the description” of the nation. What should be done with them?
Some nationalist movements adopted a pluralist notion of “nation,” conceiving of the nation as a set of ideals and principles that anyone from any background could subscribe to. But other nationalist movements doubled down on race, religion, language, and narrow definitions of culture to demarcate who was “in” and who was “out.” (In the United States, for example, there has been an ongoing civil war—sometimes military and sometimes cultural—between pluralist and essentialist notions of nation that still continues today.)
As a result, nationalism became an ideology that, even as it helped people overthrow their kings and build democracies, also led them to murder and expel their countrymen at extraordinary scale. With the advent of industrialized warfare and the bureaucratic state, nationalism propelled the worst genocides and ethnic cleansings the world had ever seen. The seemingly “natural” borders of many countries around the world today are the result of this massive violence and displacement.
The lesson from the “era of nationalism” is not, as some would argue, that such violence is a regrettable but necessary step on the path to “self-determination” for various “nations.” Rather, we are now challenged to find a better basis for political community—one that does not require the extermination of inconvenient “others.” Why? Simply because the murder of human beings and the theft of their property are immoral. We cannot continue to organize our political lives based on founding acts of violation and dispossession.
We can, of course, choose to adopt a pluralist notion of nation. But perhaps we need to begin thinking beyond the nation as the sole repository of political community. Perhaps that paradigm has run its course. Perhaps, in a world of instant, global information technology, there are more humane and just ways to organize politically. What could these be?
So often, the solution to seemingly unsolvable problems begins with believing better things.
To believe better things, we must first think.
To begin thinking, we must suspend our current beliefs and stop assuming that all the options are already on the table.
What else is possible? Of what is possible, what is desirable? Of what is desirable, what is best? And why?
Soon enough we will move from an account-based finance model where the account holder is the authorized user to one in which the custodian (acting on behalf of the state) is the authorized user and you have to extensively justify in advance every transaction you want to make.
We just can’t let go of export controls on software, can we?
“To prevent powerful AI models from falling into the hands of foreign adversaries, the order would require companies developing powerful AI models to provide regular reports to the Commerce Department outlining how they plan to protect their technology from espionage or digital subversion and mandate that large cloud services providers like Amazon and Microsoft notify the government each time foreigners rent server space to train large AI models.”
Also, this notion that the government can “police competition” (their words!) based on the “risk” that anticompetitive things “might” happen is fantasy. It’s seeking out precrime. Have consumers actually been hurt? Ok, that is a crime—prosecute it as such. Deploying the full power of the administrative state to harass the companies developing this technology is what is anticompetitive—for America.
The Admin’s use of the word “monopoly” in this context also misunderstands the very nature of AI, which is only effective in proportion to the compute power it draws on. Of *course* the big guys will have an advantage in developing the models. There is literally no other way. The state is applying 19th-century definitions of monopoly to a technology that that era could not even imagine.
“The draft order instructs every agency under its umbrella to police AI business competition, looking out for “risks arising from concentrated control” and preventing the dominant multi-billion dollar firms from further consolidating power. There is growing concern that only the largest companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft will be able to compete.”
One of the reason we’re mired in forever wars is, of course, our ability to print money seemingly ad infinitum. This is an illusion, of course, but it serves as an excuse.
Another, perhaps more important, reason is that we seem to have lost any objective standard for what constitutes “victory” in a military conflict. Did the “War on Terror” eliminate terrorism? No. Did it at least eliminate the terror groups it targeted (al-Qaeda, the Taliban)? Also no. The former morphed into an even worse terror organization (ISIS), while the latter just took over the country we occupied for 20 years to … prevent its takeover of that country.
If war is politics by other means, its objective is to impose political solutions by force that are not diplomatically acceptable to one or more parties. But a peace based on force is fragile and generally ends the moment the superior force is no longer there to impose it.
This is why a rules-based international order matters. The only way to prevent both terrorism and constant war is for participants in the order to feel like generally everyone is more or less playing by the same rules. Whenever certain players feel like their interests are structurally disregarded, that they cannot achieve meaningful improvements to their status by playing the game of diplomacy, they will resort to violence—either the large-scale, centralized violence of war, or the small-scale, decentralized violence of terrorism.
"What Is a Nation?" by French ethnologist Ernest Renan, 1882.
This should be required reading in classrooms across the world even today. While it is certainly a text of its time, it has significant resonances with political questions regarding the nature of political community and of the nation-state.
"A nation is therefore a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future. It presupposes a past; it is summarized, however, in the present by a tangible fact, namely, consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life. A nation's existence is, if you will pardon the metaphor, a daily plebiscite, just as an individual's existence is a perpetual affirmation of life. That, I know full well, is less metaphysical than divine right and less brutal than so-called historical right. According to the ideas that I am outlining to you, a nation has no more right than a king does to say to a province: 'You belong to me, I am seizing you.' A province, as far as I am concerned, is its inhabitants; if anyone has the right to be consulted in such an affair, it is the inhabitant. A nation never has any real interest in annexing or holding on to a country against its will. The wish of nations is, in all, the sole legitimate criterion, the one to which one must always return."
There are some battles that, even if you win, you lose.
There are many ways to define “reason”—it’s an ongoing philosophical debate. By reason I mean a capacity for autonomous, informed, and compassionate judgment, not a denial of all feeling.
We hold the principles we hold in part because we emotionally resonate with the world they bring about when practiced. The emotions that inform our principles can be at odds with other, sometimes very strong emotions we have that are rooted in fear, greed, disgust, hate, or other more short-term, immediate survival-oriented emotions.
The practice of morality is to a large extent a discipline of privileging long-term ends over short-term impulses and satisfactions. This has to do with how we allow our emotional lives to influence our judgment and behavior.
All that to say—reason is not denying emotions and feelings. It’s about getting better at navigating them.
We are seeing in real time who functions from tribalism and feelings and who functions from principle.
What if it’s not our feelings that make us moral people, but our capacity for reason?
What if the goal of a moral life is not to eliminate all of our prejudices—a worthy though very difficult, almost saintly task—but to use principles to cross-cut our prejudices?
(If we hold a principle—for example, “I believe all people are equally worthy of dignity and rights”—yet find ourselves emotionally resisting that when certain people or “kinds” of people come to mind, we can recognize that we have a prejudice and choose to act on our principle rather than our prejudice.)
The sovereign does not obey the law.
The sovereign uses the law as cover for what it does anyway.
Symptoms are scary. Symptoms are sexy. Symptoms are exciting. Symptoms are terrible. Symptoms are profitable. Symptoms are convenient.
We will never solve the problems we claim to want to solve by focusing on symptoms. This benefits those who benefit from dysfunction.
Problems are solved and illnesses cured at the root. That is what “radical” means—one who goes to the root of things.
The Crypto Wars continue.
According to mathematician Daniel Bernstein at U Illinois Chicago, the NSA appears to be deliberately weakening NIST standards for post-quantum cryptography (PQC).
Specifically, NIST’s calculations for Kyber512 are “glaringly wrong,” making it seem more secure than it really is. Bernstein has submitted FOIA requests and taken NIST to court to discover the NSA’s level of involvement in formulating PQC standards. Unsurprisingly, the NIST “PQC Team” includes many NSA members.
The NSA, like other standards bodies (for example, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute) has a long history of deliberately weakening encryption standards. A 2013 New York Times report documented that the Agency had a budget of $250M to do so. There is no reason to believe that next-generation encryption standards will be immune to tampering by states eager to break encryption.
Looks like we might need that enemy money. #Bitcoin
Political conflicts require political solutions.
Simply pouring more resources into a conflict—financial or military—only serves to fan the flames of whatever structural political issues underlie it.
It is this political test that leaders have been failing and continue to fail.
(Every war ends in a political solution. Wars are precluded by political solutions. In some cases, perhaps a bloodbath is the only path to an eventual political solution, but in the majority of cases, this is just an excuse for failures of imagination and character. War is a way that people try to turn an unsatisfactory political situation into a satisfactory one. Diplomacy serves the same purpose, at vastly lower cost. The point of diplomacy is to create a satisfactory political situation without war.)
One way to secure power is to progressively narrow the field of possibility to 2 or 3 terrible outcomes and then demand that people choose between them.
Whenever someone pulls any version of the "trolley problem" on you, they're demonstrating that they can't be trusted.
Pay close attention to what kind of consent is being manufactured right now.
Recognizing what we don’t know and refusing to fill information gaps with stories is how we avoid doing things we later deeply regret.
Generating false urgency is a sales tactic. Don’t be sold.