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This newsletter is an exploration of how big things end, and just four days ago something very big came to an end. Depending on who you listen to, it was the end of “peace on the European continent for a long time to come”, or the end of the post cold-war era, and the reintroduction of force into foreign affairs, or the end of all hope that humans are capable of change. And it’s possible that the invasion of Ukraine may be the end of all three of those things. Only time will tell what this event ended, and what it began, but in my opinion people’s chief reaction has been an overreaction, and these quotes are great examples of that.
This is one of the reasons why I spent the last few newsletters talking about randomness, black swans, fragility and its opposite: antifragility. If you put it all together it’s a toolkit for knowing when things might break and then dealing with that breakage. This is not to say that it enabled me to know that Russia was going to invade Ukraine in February of 2022, but it does put one on the lookout for things that are fragile. And it’s been apparent for a while that the “Long Peace” was very fragile. I wish it wasn’t, but that and a dollar will get you a taco.
Certainly, now that it’s broken, it’s easy to say that peace was fragile, that it would inevitably break and we shouldn’t lose our heads about it. But how do we identify fragile things before they break? And in particular how do we make them less fragile, even antifragile? In simple terms things that are fragile get weaker when subjected to shocks, with antifragility it’s the opposite, they get stronger, up to a point. A teacup is fragile: the more you jostle it, the more use it gets, the more likely it is to end up in pieces on the floor. The immune system is antifragile: when you expose it to a pathogen (or a vaccine) it gets stronger.
So how does all of this help us deal with the invasion of Ukraine? That’s an excellent question. Unfortunately I don’t think the answer is either simple or straightforward. But, as evidenced by the initial quotes, I think that we’ve had peace between the great powers for so long that we become unhinged at the idea of war. We’ll do anything to prevent it. Unfortunately prevention can turn out to be just postponement.
I’ve written a couple of essays where I used the analogy of fighting forest fires. The forest needs periodic fires to clean out the deadwood, but when you fight every fire the deadwood accumulates and eventually you end up with a fire that has so much fuel that it ends up wiping out the entire forest. You take an antifragile system and turn it into a fragile one.
Obviously coming up with a clever metaphor for the situation doesn’t get us very far. But it does illustrate what I’m most worried about, that we’ve become so unused to fires (which used to happen all the time) that when the first one comes around we’re going to mishandle it and turn it into an inferno.
I see lots of people saying that Putin won’t stop at Ukraine, that this is the beginning of WW III. First off, it’s only been four days. Acting too hastily almost certainly has far more downside than upside, because if we’re not careful then, yes, this could be the beginning of WW III. Immediately losing our heads and declaring it to be so on day one could turn it into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This is because of another topic I talk about a lot, and part of why it’s difficult to draw on what happened in the past: the modern world has changed all the rules. War is now very different. Hanging over any decision to intervene, in the background of every war room, haunting every discussion of force, is a fear of nuclear war. And Putin has already upped the ante, by putting his nuclear forces on high alert.
I hope the Ukrainians humiliate the Russians, and it’s nice to see that the war is already not going as smoothly as they expected. But in the end if this escalates into a full on nuclear war, it’s not going to matter who started it, or whose cause was just, because the inferno doesn’t care.
If peace is fragile, is war antifragile? That’s a scary assertion, though one I have toyed with in the past. Perhaps historically it was, but we’re at the end of history, and no one knows how it’s going to turn out. If that scares you as much as it scares me consider donating.
The analogy of the immune system as anti-fragile should include the fact that for it to work, you get sick. While getting sick in the short term can buy you the long run gain of immunity, it causes you to incur multiple short-term risks. The first is obviously you might die; in which case the long run anti-fragility becomes moot. Less obvious is that some pathogens exhaust or learn to evade the immune system (HIV, Hepatitis C, in some cases B and so on. Sharing a needle with an HIV patient won’t make you anti-fragile, just incur you a lifetime of some serious medication). Another is that going thru sickness today weakens the body which may not be noticeable now but later on will. (This is one idea I think Bret Weinstein might be onto something. A bad cold today means your cells die and get replaced, your telomeres get shorter. Decades later your body either can’t respond as well to another cold or longer telomeres increase the risk of rogue cells reproducing into cancer). The gist is while the immune system is anti-fragile, you should still try to avoid getting infections because it is only a toss of the dice if infection will make you stronger or simply shorten your game in the immediate or long term.*
Yet we will all get sick now and then despite our efforts. So, while the Russian-Ukraine War may seem like the breaking of the peace, the increase of fragility, I would actually say the opposite. Since the implosion of Bush’s War on Terror, the right has tried to cultivate a theory of fragmentation. Break down and undermine international organizations, turn not just a blind eye to authoritarians but actually cultivate them as some sort of ‘friends’. See examples like Brexit, de-legitimizing NATO, flirting with Hungary’s leader, Brazil’s, even Putin himself (shall we remind ourselves what Trump’s 1st impeachment was for? It wasn’t the Steele Dossier). Perhaps, ironically, this embrace of the fringe actually caused these targets to get a bit stronger while antics like Steve Bannon saying we should side with Russia because they are ‘anti-woke’ caused them to get weaker.
The response seems to be very clearly a rejection of fragmentation. Russia has seen its currency collapse, its stock market collapse, in the metro people can’t board the trains because when Apple cut off their app store, down went the transit app. Russia looks like a country stuck firmly in the past causing a lot of chaos with what as an endgame? Getting control of a country that will be as friendly as Ireland was to the UK for generations? Things going badly for Russia here have improved long run peace esp. in terms of Taiwan, S. Korea and probably a bunch of other places. It also means the argument between whether this area is European or Russia’s mix of itself and Europe will be settled now. Every country not currently invaded by Russia will position itself towards Europe.
This gain, though, isn’t for free. The short-term risk is we go from stupid to really stupid. I don’t think the US would do something as foolish as send its military to directly engage Russian forces, which would open the risk of a limited or larger nuclear war. However, Putin may double down on bombing civilian areas. Likewise, the odds here are in the long run more countries will get nukes. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” consisted of 3 countries, one with no nukes, one with and one either with or very close. Only one got invaded. I’m sure if the Ukraine could do it again, they would have said “we’ll keep some of those USSR nukes thank you very much”. But if we get thru the short-term sickness, we do see indications that in the long term ‘sending in the tanks’ is more costly than it seems, even for a superpower. The world seems to share a consensus against this and now a precedent that doing so will cause a lot of nations to inflict pain on you, even ones you think you have ‘locked up’ in dependence (see Germany). This does provide some hope that we can continue to build a custom against invasion, and if it does that will be anti-fragile.
* I do recall a Bible Story where the devil asks Jesus to jump off a cliff because Scripture says angels would save the Messiah. Jesus responds with basically “sure they would, but Scripture also says don’t test God”.
Antifragility is never unlimited it only works up to a point. Also I would think my post on the inverted pyramid of individual risk vs. societal risk would be important here:
https://wearenotsaved.com/2021/10/15/a-deeper-understanding-of-how-bad-things-happen/
Yes any given individual doesn’t want to get infected, but trying to create a whole society that never gets sicked has created all sorts of auto-immune problems.
Also I don’t think it’s at all clear that China will be less likely to invade Taiwan after this. In fact I think what’s more likely is that this will act like the fall of the Soviet Union. Everyone expected particularly after Tiananmen Square that China would shortly follow the SU, but instead they studied what happened to Russia and learned from it, and here they are still going strong 30+ years later. I think when the invasion of Taiwan eventually arrives it will turn out that China learned a lot from Russia’s mistakes in Ukraine.
True, infection will happen but I think the model is take prudent steps to avoid infection, if it happens, try to avoid spreading it, and then at least you’ll get the antifragility over the longer run. As an analogy this is slightly different from exercise which most will say you should do at least a bit.
I think from China’s POV:
1. Invading a neighbor is clearly not seen as simply “people who are almost the same just figuring out their business”. Previously we had Hong Kong which I think many will say has ‘fallen’ on some level (but people I talked too still say it is more free than mainland China, unless you want to be political).
2. It may be better to be seen as having an intimidating military than actually use your military and discover all the things that were neglected and don’t quite work as well as you want. For example, I read a thread about tires and how the armoured trucks need to be moved a few times a month. Otherwise dry rot develops quickly in the sidewalls and the first time you use them on mud or snow they blow out.
There are differences. China won’t find itself shutdown because Apple yanks their appstore payments. Taiwan may or maynot fight as much. I do think, though, that this does move the needle against invasion. Consider what would happen if Russia had as easy a time with it as they did with Crimea? Wouldn’t that have increased the odds of China saying “why not us too?”
You are presenting another analogy here, the forest fire one. The forest keeps growing, if a small fire doesn’t happen the fuel keeps building up (I think they call that a ‘fire debt’). Eventually you’ll have so much fuel that it is pretty much guaranteed a spark from somewhere will set it off in a huge fire.
This implies that unusual long periods without war are building up some type of debt that would culiminate in a war more massive than would have otherwise happened. The fact that the Cold War went on so long without a massive confrontation besides some proxy wars does seem unusual but I’m not sure it follows the same pattern.
For example, suppose in a counter history there was a modest war between NATO and the Soviet bloc around the time of the Berlin airlift. Say one or two nukes were used, there were clashes of tanks and maybe 200K died before an armistace was agreed and a full scale world war was avoided yet it was still quite serious.
In the forest model, war today would be less likely on the idea that the ‘fuel’ was depleted in the previous hot war. But forest fire fuel is basically inert. It collects on the ground and while I suppose after a long enough period of time fungus breaks it down so it doesn’t burn anymore, you do have a dynamic where no fire this year means there’s two years worth of fuel waiting for drama to happen next year.
But then the two World Wars so close to each other do seem to counter the forest model. Humans are not as inert as fuel. All the men who airlifted to Berlin who might have said “we should have just kicked their asses” are now old or dead. The ‘fuel’ may not collect the way it does in a forest.
A different model could be a ‘habit model’. You didn’t get drunk last week, you didn’t get drunk this week, odds are next week you won’t get drunk either while someone else does the exact opposite because doing something over and over builds up a habit. Not invading or going to war over Taiwan, S. Korea, Cuba, Berlin, etc. may build a habit up that one just ‘doesn’t do that’ in the modern age. Habits can be broken but when they are there’s always the risk that it won’t be a one off event but the start of a new pattern. The fact that we didn’t leap into WWIII when we were so used to having a WW every generation might be seen then as a start of a new and better habit….the one day a drunk decides he will try sobriety and then does it again the next day.