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… read about a call to legislate emissions accountability for the US military.

While the United States never ratified the Kyoto Protocol, a landmark climate change treaty that entered into force in 2005, US negotiations around it ensured that military emissions would be largely exempt from other efforts to curtail greenhouse gasses. The 2015 Paris Accords, which the United States left in 2020 but rejoined in 2021 [[link removed]], call for voluntary reporting of military emissions. It is an important yet insufficient step, given the scale of the climate crisis and the finite time in which major action can be taken. Win Without War, together with 26 other groups, released a statement this week demanding that the new National Defense Authorization Act be free of provisions that would sabotage any effort to apply climate accountability to the military or its contracts. Win Without War Policy Director (and former Critical State writer) Sam Ratner writes [[link removed]], “Congress is dithering on a basic form of climate accountability: undercutting a needed federal rule to have defense contractors disclose greenhouse gas emissions, and preventing the Defense Department from fulfilling a series of executive orders to address climate change.” Mandating emissions reporting from defense contractors is a vital step to ensuring accountability and action on emissions. Any claim that national security is better served by a perpetually warming planet is ludicrous.

Parallel Invasions

Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine was matched with an attack on individual freedom and expression at home. Journalist Vasilia Kirilochkina was working in media at the time and noticed the shift when a story about a happily married gay couple had to be amended to exclude both “happily” and “married.”

“They strongly advised me to lose the word ‘happily,’ since this could be regarded as creating an attractive image of same-sex relationships, a.k.a. ‘propaganda.’ They also recommended not mentioning that the couple was married, writing instead that the two men were ‘involved.’ According to the new legislation, they explained, homosexual relationships could not be equated with ‘traditional’ ones, including marriage; the same went for raising children,” writes [[link removed]] Kirilochkina at Popula.

Kirilochkina left Russia in 2022 following another invasion of Ukraine and many further legal and political assaults on LGBTQ+ people. Looks like President Vladimir Putin’s revanchist war against Ukraine and his reactionary war against queer people operate in parallel.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Desert Glower

The American southwest is known for its deserts, where cacti have long since adapted to the infrequent rains and general dryness. Yet, these deserts sit on top of aquifers, ancient seas whose water can be pumped to the surface and consumed. In Arizona, groundwater is being pumped to grow hay for shipment abroad, depleting an ancient reserve to subsidize the lifestyles of Gulf monarchs. Hay and alfalfa grown in the United States are fed to dairy cattle [[link removed]] in places like Saudi Arabia, while laws in the country prohibit the same production of alfalfa locally.

“In La Paz County, a rural community about 100 miles west of Phoenix, Al Dahra Farms USA has been running a 3,000-acre farming operation in the Sonoran desert, draining down the same groundwater that the county’s residents rely on to fill their wells. The Emirati-owned farming company tapped into a former public water supply in 2013 to grow hay that gets shipped to countries in Asia and the Middle East,” reports [[link removed]] Nathan Halverson at Reveal.

What’s more, according to records obtained by Reveal, that same deal was funded by the state of Arizona’s retirement system, directly depleting the future to enrich the past.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Drilling Down: Part I

Military history is at once social, cultural, and technological, all bound in the ways and means and facts of death. Military history also risks being used to tell “just-so” stories: explanations of the present as the inevitable result of the past. The rise of Europe [[link removed]] from the 15th through the 19th century, and all its assorted distributions of wealth and violence, requires historical explanation. Yet, the most commonly offered one is that of military history that focuses on European warfighting. The interior armies of Europe, the narrative goes, were insulated from steppe nomads and thus developed infantry-intensive pike-and-firearms armies, which required tremendous organization and capital. This, in turn, made the modern state.

But what if the central premise is wrong? In “ Chinese Volley Fire and Metanarratives of World History [[link removed]],” Barend Noordam offers a history of the independent and repeated development of volley fire by China, focusing especially on the Ming Dynasty. “Volley Fire” is the practice of simultaneously firing projectile weapons, like guns, to create a “volley” of bullets. (The technique can also be used with arrows and, especially, crossbow bolts.) Part of the development of modern European gunpowder armies involved drilling the army, so a rank of soldiers would fire their guns, then fall back to reload as the rank behind them fired with loaded weapons, repeating until the first rank had reloaded and was ready to restart the process.

Modern day China grew from empires, similar to how Russia came from the Soviet Union and Turkey came from the Ottoman Empire, and as a result, is one of the large states beset by fast-moving nomads and their cavalry armies. If Tsars and Sultans developed volley fire, it is understood as a response to infantry warfare against states on their European frontiers. China lacked the same condition to develop the tactic on its own.

“First of all, volley fire with firearms arose during the Ming primarily as a response to the challenge nomadic cavalry posed, and not as a result of infantry warfare,” writes Noordam. “There are also signs that this causation not only held true for Ming China, but other Eurasian empires bordering the steppe as well,” he explained.

Steppe nomads, most famously the Mongols but others throughout history, present a unique challenge to sedentary states, both on political and military grounds. On horseback, nomads can simply evade taxation and incorporation into state systems the way farmers cannot. But nomads are also fast enough to threaten raids on stored food and goods, necessitating some form of military response.

Volley fire also strengthens militaries against everything from pirate raiders to other pike-and-cannon armies. To achieve volley fire takes military drill; among other evidence for Ming volley fire, Noordam points to a reloading song recorded by a military officer commanding soldiers in southern China against Wokou pirates.

“I would like to make a plea for redirecting our gaze to the steppe-frontiers of unified Eurasian land empires as sites of important innovations,” concludes Noordam. “For a long time, first the idea of oriental despotism, and then its partial and implicit survival in the competitive European states paradigm, has conditioned many modern scholars towards disregarding the innovative potential of these frontier zones and the larger polities they partially delimited. Yet, Wokou originating from the dynamic maritime world were blasted away with volley fire tactics perfected on the northern frontier of the Ming Empire.”

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Alan Ruiz Terol retraced [[link removed]] the path of European migration to Argentina and back again. With the backdrop of turmoil and hardship in Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Argentina made a concerted push to attract migrants from European countries. Now, those migrants' descendants are seeking to immigrate to the countries their ancestors fled by tracing documented lineage back. Just like Argentina once privileged European immigrants over its own Indigenous population, European nations “prefer to welcome Argentines, whites and Catholics, who in theory will fit in culturally, over, say, Muslim Africans,” said Marcelo Huernos, a researcher at Argentina’s National Museum of Immigration.

John R. Emery and Anna Pluff dispel [[link removed]] the notion that President Harry S. Truman chose to use an atomic bomb against Japan in order to prevent 500,000 American casualties. “After the successful test at Trinity, the military estimates of an invasion presented to Truman were less than 31,000 killed, wounded, or missing,” the authors write, noting that planning at the time counted on atom bombs as well as invasion as complimentary, not competing, strategies. “Claiming to have saved millions of American lives is a linguistic trick to put those both at the time and today arguing against the necessity of the atomic bombings to end the war at an instantaneous disadvantage,” they conclude.

Carolyn Beeler interviewed [[link removed]] Linda Thomas-Greenfield, US ambassador to the UN, about the difficulty of reestablishing a deal to get grain safely shipped through the Black Sea to the world. “The secretary-general, the government of Turkey, are continuing their efforts to bring Russia back into the grain deal. Their attacks on Ukraine, however, show the lack of concern that they have for people around the world,” said Thomas-Greenfield. While Russia is isolated on the UN Security Council, it is a permanent member with veto power, so it has been able to block agreements. Getting grain out is beneficial for the world and Russia’s economy but tensions over Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine make it difficult.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Xed Out

A quick programming note on the well-played section. X, the site owned by Elon Musk and formerly known as Twitter, is increasingly managed in a way that is unsafe for users. Most recently, this came to light when Musk personally intervened [[link removed]] to restore an account that had posted upsetting and illegal imagery. Safeguards against the upload of such imagery [[link removed]] appear to be missing from the site. This is normally the part of the newsletter where I tell jokes, riffing on the news of the week as seen on Twitter, which is one of the joys of producing and sharing Critical State. However, given the refusal of the company to maintain basic and vital safeguards, I feel uncomfortable directing anyone to the site once and probably still known as Twitter.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] WELL-PLAYED

New Alaskan hegemony just mooooved in [[link removed]].

Yellen, tripping [[link removed]].

Pressed for time? Try these fun algorithmic recipes, they’re a real gas [[link removed]].

Facing harsh questions from Australia’s parliament over the site’s obvious policy failures, Twitter executive Nick Pickles found himself in a real, well, you know [[link removed]].

The Persian Gulf bore [[link removed]].

This Is Sparta* *( A barely more proficient regional military built on one of the most extraordinarily oppressive labor systems ever devised [[link removed]]).

Is it not simply enough to see a simulacra of an explosion [[link removed]] on screen, large [[link removed]]?

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Critical State is written by Kelsey D. Atherton with Inkstick Media.

The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX and GBH.

With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”

Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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