Perhaps it is the jittery state of the US Treasury market, but people have been asking. Can America afford two wars at once? The two wars being in Ukraine and Israel/Palestine. In the last 48 hours both President Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen have been at pains to emphasize, that, of course, America can.
Very clean analysis. It fights against panic. It might have delved a bit into the question of whether the US is doing itself any good by funding the guards on the wall of a prison holding the original inhabitants of the land, but I know that is outside the purview of your article. Good work.
I'd stay away from the idea of 'original inhabitants' of the land. Just how far back is your timetable? Fighting wars over history seems foolish, better to leave the history behind maybe.
Some people use events that happened millenia ago as an excuse. But only when it suits their argument.
I don't see many people using the Bible to argue that the lands of Israel and Palestine should belong to the descendants of the Philistines or the Amalekites or whatever and that the True Ancestral Homeland of the Jews is in Iraq near Ugarit.
This is a nice lesson on Keynesian economics and why “deficits don’t matter.” Unfortunately it seems the majority of the US public thinks it does, hence the power behind the stalemate on Capitol Hill. If we can get beyond this part of government economics, it would go a long way towards engaging exactly what and where the economic limitations are. It would go a long way towards explaining where we are today.
The deficit is definitely not why we have a stalemate. We have a stalemate because the GOP is the party of nihilism. GOPpers didn't care about the deficit with Trump's tax cuts.
I have no doubt that life-long politicians, democrats and republicans alike, understand the structure of government economics. The problem is over the voting base, who believe government economics is structured like household economics. Essentially the voters are beholden to and manipulated by a fallacy. I lay this at the failure of public education and the talking heads who refuse to clarify this on mainstream news. Hence the dangers of public debt and deficit remain hidden and unexplored.
You make a good point, and I should have been specific. I was taking my time-line from the start of the Jewish Diaspora, generally considered to be 597 BC under Nebuchadnezzar, with a break-up of the Jewish population into three groups, located in Egypt, Babylon and parts of Judea. There is a great account of how the story of the Arc came about through the group in Babylon, but I digress. There was further split-up under the Romans. So the Jews have not been in charge of "Israel" for 2700 years. Enough time to say: It belongs to those who have lived there since you left.
In America, there are always real resources for wars, even if they are far away and meaningless to the vast majority of US citizens. But there are never real resources for the health and well-being of the citizenry, especially those unhoused in urban blight or in fly-over country. Feh.
Notwithstanding the fact that the neocons probably have at least one more war in mind, I think that the question of whether the US can afford two wars will ultimately depend on one factor you've not considered here - that's the quality of the systems available. Sure the US may be able to hose more cash at Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics or whoever , but if what they're being provided with is really not very good then it's going to make little difference if the adversary is anything like 'near peer' or if the conflict extends beyond a few months.
Here's just a few issues: The current 'full mission availability' rate of the US fleet of F-35s is, even in peace time, just 25% (see Pentagon figures from pogo.org) - they break down easily and take ages to fix. Likewise their Javelins have turned out to be rather fiddly and prone to break down in actual combat - certainly compared to Russian RPGs. The vaunted 'Trophy' armour on US & Israel tanks has already shown itself to be vulnerable in Gaza. The special sauce of the NATO training they gave the AFU hasn't been converted into gains in the Ukrainian's summer offensive & in Ukraine the RF have now had lots of experience of the various flight & other profiles of plenty of Western munitions - some of which they may have passed to the Iranians.
So yes the US can afford two or three or four wars as long as those wars can be won by lots of 'Fourth Generation' fighters & A10s bombing places without much in the way of an integrated air defence network - beyond that things may start to get more prohibitively expensive. .
Talking about eliding... perhaps you might revisit your efforts to differentiate the conflicts/wars in Ukraine and Israel.
Both countries face an enemy whose stated goal is the eradication of the state and the culture. In Israel's case, the additional stated goal of the eradication of the Jewish religion.
With the exception of Russia, Ukraine is surrounded by friendly countries...Israel is surrounded by countries with historically antagonistic views of the Jewish state.
And who is actually buying Treasuries at the moment? Households (which includes hedge funds for some weird reason), foreign investors and some institutional investors. Strangely, they're also probably the same people that own most of the shares in the defence companies. So long as the money supply doesn't become too detached from real resources this is just a system to flush unlimited money around the investment accounts of the wealthy. (btw the ones telling you we can't redirect that money to the poor and needy instead are the wealthy ones).
What's interesting to me though is that many people and institutions buy US debt because it's the only game in town but most empires fall when they overstretch themselves in war. Then it'll be the old bankruptcy cliché - gradually then very quickly.
The US will always find money for wars to support its hegemony because the hegemony depends on its very ability to do so! My history teacher decades ago told me that the Roman army basically existed to capture new places to support the needs for food, metal and gold of the Roman army, then a finance professor a decade ago told me that the end of dollar dominance is the end of modern capitalism. The moment that America stops being able to invent unlimited cash to preserve its position is the moment America collapses.
One thing we need to temper this alarmism with, though, is the understanding of what *kinds* of munitions we can produce, not just the top-line numbers.
Some of our munitions and the weapons systems that fire them are basically 10-100x more accurate than they were a generation ago when we were making 10-100x more of them. To be clear, that "some" is doing a LOT of work here, and therein lies the true cause for concern. We still need to be able to produce a significant multiple of what we're producing right now in order to wage a realistic modern conflict.
But we shouldn't let pure stockpile numbers fool us into thinking there's a greater emergency than exists. It's extremely unfortunate that we've slipped into a worse "sleeping giant" position than even where we were on the eve of Pearl Harbor, but it's also extremely true that we've had a whole bunch of Discourse over the last few years about low labor force participation among young men AND their alarming affinity for violent and aggressive political rhetoric.
So, the first year or two of a "real war" wouldn't exactly be a cakewalk, but there are millions of young American men whom such a war would entice out of their parents' basements to make all of the shells and missiles and ships and microchips we'd desperately need. They'd feel a "call of duty" away from Call Of Duty.
The proposal is a funding package for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan assuming that the massively dysfunctional GOP can abandon culture wars to actually govern for even 1 day.
> Israel is conducting a counterinsurgency operation
Conducting it since 1948, eh?
Very clean analysis. It fights against panic. It might have delved a bit into the question of whether the US is doing itself any good by funding the guards on the wall of a prison holding the original inhabitants of the land, but I know that is outside the purview of your article. Good work.
I'd stay away from the idea of 'original inhabitants' of the land. Just how far back is your timetable? Fighting wars over history seems foolish, better to leave the history behind maybe.
Original in the sense that they were there, in what became Mandatory Palestine, at the time when the British military occupation began.
Some people use events that happened millenia ago as an excuse. But only when it suits their argument.
I don't see many people using the Bible to argue that the lands of Israel and Palestine should belong to the descendants of the Philistines or the Amalekites or whatever and that the True Ancestral Homeland of the Jews is in Iraq near Ugarit.
I think it’s fair when some of the folks in prison were alive and living outside of Gaza in the rest of Palestine before being put there
This is a nice lesson on Keynesian economics and why “deficits don’t matter.” Unfortunately it seems the majority of the US public thinks it does, hence the power behind the stalemate on Capitol Hill. If we can get beyond this part of government economics, it would go a long way towards engaging exactly what and where the economic limitations are. It would go a long way towards explaining where we are today.
The deficit is definitely not why we have a stalemate. We have a stalemate because the GOP is the party of nihilism. GOPpers didn't care about the deficit with Trump's tax cuts.
I have no doubt that life-long politicians, democrats and republicans alike, understand the structure of government economics. The problem is over the voting base, who believe government economics is structured like household economics. Essentially the voters are beholden to and manipulated by a fallacy. I lay this at the failure of public education and the talking heads who refuse to clarify this on mainstream news. Hence the dangers of public debt and deficit remain hidden and unexplored.
You make a good point, and I should have been specific. I was taking my time-line from the start of the Jewish Diaspora, generally considered to be 597 BC under Nebuchadnezzar, with a break-up of the Jewish population into three groups, located in Egypt, Babylon and parts of Judea. There is a great account of how the story of the Arc came about through the group in Babylon, but I digress. There was further split-up under the Romans. So the Jews have not been in charge of "Israel" for 2700 years. Enough time to say: It belongs to those who have lived there since you left.
In America, there are always real resources for wars, even if they are far away and meaningless to the vast majority of US citizens. But there are never real resources for the health and well-being of the citizenry, especially those unhoused in urban blight or in fly-over country. Feh.
it’s going to be a no vote november next year
That's what Putin's holding on for.
What about three wars?
The First Battle of the Next War: Wargaming a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan
https://www.csis.org/analysis/first-battle-next-war-wargaming-chinese-invasion-taiwan
Notwithstanding the fact that the neocons probably have at least one more war in mind, I think that the question of whether the US can afford two wars will ultimately depend on one factor you've not considered here - that's the quality of the systems available. Sure the US may be able to hose more cash at Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics or whoever , but if what they're being provided with is really not very good then it's going to make little difference if the adversary is anything like 'near peer' or if the conflict extends beyond a few months.
Here's just a few issues: The current 'full mission availability' rate of the US fleet of F-35s is, even in peace time, just 25% (see Pentagon figures from pogo.org) - they break down easily and take ages to fix. Likewise their Javelins have turned out to be rather fiddly and prone to break down in actual combat - certainly compared to Russian RPGs. The vaunted 'Trophy' armour on US & Israel tanks has already shown itself to be vulnerable in Gaza. The special sauce of the NATO training they gave the AFU hasn't been converted into gains in the Ukrainian's summer offensive & in Ukraine the RF have now had lots of experience of the various flight & other profiles of plenty of Western munitions - some of which they may have passed to the Iranians.
So yes the US can afford two or three or four wars as long as those wars can be won by lots of 'Fourth Generation' fighters & A10s bombing places without much in the way of an integrated air defence network - beyond that things may start to get more prohibitively expensive. .
Talking about eliding... perhaps you might revisit your efforts to differentiate the conflicts/wars in Ukraine and Israel.
Both countries face an enemy whose stated goal is the eradication of the state and the culture. In Israel's case, the additional stated goal of the eradication of the Jewish religion.
With the exception of Russia, Ukraine is surrounded by friendly countries...Israel is surrounded by countries with historically antagonistic views of the Jewish state.
Pity no politician of any persuasion in the UK seems to understand this.
The UK military is a shadow of its former self and public services are dying on their feet.
And who is actually buying Treasuries at the moment? Households (which includes hedge funds for some weird reason), foreign investors and some institutional investors. Strangely, they're also probably the same people that own most of the shares in the defence companies. So long as the money supply doesn't become too detached from real resources this is just a system to flush unlimited money around the investment accounts of the wealthy. (btw the ones telling you we can't redirect that money to the poor and needy instead are the wealthy ones).
What's interesting to me though is that many people and institutions buy US debt because it's the only game in town but most empires fall when they overstretch themselves in war. Then it'll be the old bankruptcy cliché - gradually then very quickly.
The US will always find money for wars to support its hegemony because the hegemony depends on its very ability to do so! My history teacher decades ago told me that the Roman army basically existed to capture new places to support the needs for food, metal and gold of the Roman army, then a finance professor a decade ago told me that the end of dollar dominance is the end of modern capitalism. The moment that America stops being able to invent unlimited cash to preserve its position is the moment America collapses.
The commissar has spoken and educated us. Thanks 🙏
One thing we need to temper this alarmism with, though, is the understanding of what *kinds* of munitions we can produce, not just the top-line numbers.
Some of our munitions and the weapons systems that fire them are basically 10-100x more accurate than they were a generation ago when we were making 10-100x more of them. To be clear, that "some" is doing a LOT of work here, and therein lies the true cause for concern. We still need to be able to produce a significant multiple of what we're producing right now in order to wage a realistic modern conflict.
But we shouldn't let pure stockpile numbers fool us into thinking there's a greater emergency than exists. It's extremely unfortunate that we've slipped into a worse "sleeping giant" position than even where we were on the eve of Pearl Harbor, but it's also extremely true that we've had a whole bunch of Discourse over the last few years about low labor force participation among young men AND their alarming affinity for violent and aggressive political rhetoric.
So, the first year or two of a "real war" wouldn't exactly be a cakewalk, but there are millions of young American men whom such a war would entice out of their parents' basements to make all of the shells and missiles and ships and microchips we'd desperately need. They'd feel a "call of duty" away from Call Of Duty.
Maybe another point to make is what happens if China attacks Taiwan while the US is distracted in Ukraine and the Middle East?
The proposal is a funding package for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan assuming that the massively dysfunctional GOP can abandon culture wars to actually govern for even 1 day.