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We live in a world inexorably but not inevitably warming. Much of the raw materials of climate change, like greenhouse gasses emitted and captured in the atmosphere, have already been built up. There’s a narrow window to keep the present level of buildup below that which will increase average global temperatures by 1.5 degrees Celsius. It is, if I am being honest, the kind of looming, imminent peril that I worry about most, especially whenever I set my infant child down to sleep at night. In a world where foreign policy was responsive to the nightmares haunting the future, massive and coordinated international action to halt, mitigate, and reverse climate change would be overarching policy. Instead, as the US presidential election cycle gears up for another campaign, voters can expect debates on the contours of Great Power Competition, overlooking the urgent necessity of climate action. “All that’s necessary for a future uninhabitable for much of humanity is for things to continue as they are,” writes Spencer Ackerman for The Nation [[link removed]]. “We do not have to ignore the atrocities of the great powers in the interest of climate cooperation. We just have to jettison strategies like great-power competition that make present and future atrocities more intractable.”

Private Military Equity

Yevgeny Prigozhin, failed coup plotter and one-time chef to perpetual Russian President Vladimir Putin, is a curious kind of entrepreneur. Before his half-attempted coup, followed by his reported death while flying to Moscow with other leaders of the Wagner Group mercenary company, Prigozhin occupied a unique function in the Russian state: a way for money to be poured into a company to purchase everything from human wave attacks to Russian claims on goldmines abroad. Wagner, and the broader Concord Group Prigozhin operated, offers insight into state function when understood as an adaptation of Private Equity (PE).

“Why I find this thought about the Concord group and violent PE so intriguing is that it offers us a way to look at the Russian state through the lens of political economy: that is to ask how it has adapted very liberal institutions like a private equity firm to very illiberal means,” writes Yakov Feygin at Building a Ruin [[link removed]].

How does a chef end up in charge of a mercenary company powerful enough to threaten a coup? Following the “Concord as Private Equity” reasoning, what Prigozhin could deliver was a viable infrastructure to turn state money to state ends, even if the goods were subpar. It’s a fascinating angle on an otherwise perplexing career and one that offers insight into how authoritarians work around their own sclerotic bureaucracies.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Alpha Bet Ambiguity

The alphabet is a profoundly useful tool, one whose functional use predates its understanding as we know it today. Writing at The Ancient Near East Today [[link removed]], Seth Sanders looks at how the earliest evidence of the modern alphabet suggests a less literate origin than one might imagine.

“It is clear that rather than picking one sign to consistently stand for one sound, the alphabet’s inventors grabbed anything from the Egyptian inscriptions they saw that looked to them like a house, without regard for its actual reading in Egyptian. So for the B sound they used the ‘house’ sign (O1/O1B in Gardiner’s hieroglyphic sign list [[link removed]'s%20Sign%20List%20is%20a,study%20of%20ancient%20Egyptian%20hieroglyphs.]) but also a totally linguistically unrelated sign, ‘reed shelter’ (O4/O4B) since they look more or less the same if 1) you can’t read Egyptian or 2) you just don’t care,” writes Sanders.

This means that, rather than the work of scribes or the product of a specific education system, what we received as the alphabet may have its most immediate origin in the functional language of the less-than-literate classes. Sanders suggests that in order to understand this path of creation, scholars should look beyond learned structures of knowledge reproduction and into how people will play with the tools and symbols they encounter in regular life.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Beneath The State: Part II

A young United States conquered Florida piece by piece. From the presidency of Thomas Jefferson on, the early American republic had eyes on securing the Gulf Coast, designs greatly aided by the Louisiana Purchase. However, the process of converting land from European claims to new states was rarely done all at once at the negotiating table. First, there were actions taken below the level of overt war, which changed political reality enough to set up a negotiated handover.

In “ Salami Tactics: Faits Accomplis and International Expansion in the Shadow of Major War [[link removed]],” Richard W. Maass uses the example of Florida to set up a parallel to modern expansions below the level of war.

Maass regularly invokes the People’s Republic of China’s construction of military bases in the largely uninhabitable Spratly Islands as an example of such action, shifting the terrain of a future conflict while requiring a more aggressive reaction from another state to reverse. But the true heart of his paper is US and Spanish policy over Florida from 1809 to 1819, and of Russian action against Georgia in 2008 and against Ukraine in 2014. Maass’ paper was published in the winter 2021-2022 issue of the Texas National Security Review, setting it just before Russia’s much larger invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Nevertheless, it’s an illustrative show of why thinly sliced conquests can be more enduring than big bloody stabs.

“The term ‘salami tactics’ describes the repeated use of limited faits accomplis to gain influence within some competitive arena at an adversary’s expense without provoking major retaliation. Instead of pursuing a single decisive victory, the object is to advance slice by slice, securing cumulative gains at minimal cost,” writes Maass.

In Florida, the faits accomplis came when US agents encouraged the populations of Baton Rouge and Mobile (then of Western Florida) to revolt in favor of ascension to the United States. Spain, facing the ongoing revolt of its South American empire and beset by a war of royal succession at home, was little capable of averting this. It’s a direct parallel to how, in 2008, Russian forces in a five-day war moved into Georgia and guaranteed the separation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two provinces occupied and now paid by Russia.

“A state is most likely to pursue salami tactics when: (1) the cost of retaliation is high; (2) the likelihood of the rival reversing its fait accompli is low; (3) the cost of the fait accompli is low; (4) the rival’s fear of future predation is low; and (5) the state’s own expectation of further gains is high,” writes Maass.

For 19th-century Spain, retaliating against the United States over Florida meant inviting a direct war at a time when resources were already strained. For the United States in 2008 and 2014, intervening directly against Russia meant moving too late to stop the acquisition of Georgian provinces or Crimea, respectively, and carried with it the risk of nuclear escalation should the US itself attempt a war to restore territory.

Salami slicing, as a tactic, works best when the slices can be thinly separated. There are hard limits. The continuous provision of US arms and aid to Ukraine following the 2022 invasion shows that, when it comes to fait accompli, it’s best to not bite off more than even a great power can chew.

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Tibisay Zea was puzzled [[link removed]] over the decision by Haitian Marcorel Zidor, also known as Pastor Marco, to march his followers into a confrontation with a well-armed gang, leading to many of their deaths. Marco’s congregants were armed with clubs and machetes, but against the semi-automatic rifles of the gang they confronted, they were outgunned. “The pastor publicly announced that he was going to take the members of his church to Canaan to fight the gangs. This is actually incitement to violence, and the police should have prevented the victims from going to Canaan,” Rosy Ducenat, program manager of the National Human Rights Defense Network in Haiti, told Zea.

Mie Hoejris Dahl observed [[link removed]] the dangers of failing to follow through on peace work in Colombia. In 2016, the country signed a historic agreement disarming the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the largest and longest-running armed faction in Colombia. Thousands of fighters turned in their weapons in exchange for the promise of training and skills that would acquaint them with civilian life. Now, those rehabilitation camps have fallen under attack by other armed groups, making participation unsafe for former FARC members. As Colombia enters negotiations with other armed groups, an inability to fulfill the terms of 2016 looms large as a threat over the whole process.

Leila Goldstein explored [[link removed]] the ways in which rural and poor Cambodians are affording college. A lack of student housing compounds this. “It would be another burden for my family because they would have to pay for my school tuition, my place to live and also for other financial support that I would need to ask for coming to Phnom Penh,” Srey Touch Kroch, a second-year student at the Royal University of Phnom Penh, told Goldstein. Kroch lives in a dorm for female students supported by the nonprofit Harpswell. For male students, attending as a monk and living in a monastery is an option, with the freedom to leave their orders afterward.

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

This kind of dense, walkable urbanism is difficult to unearth [[link removed]].

Mongolia’s military has a perfect opportunity to do the funniest thing in history [[link removed]].

Behold a fully operational canon [[link removed]].

My vaporwave nightmare t-shirt that includes a recipe for trenchfoot [[link removed]] is raising a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.

AI is already taking jobs from the hard-working henchmen and goons who would otherwise make fake audio recordings [[link removed]] for presidential campaign purposes.

Golda’s hour [[link removed]], a missed opportunity.

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud [[link removed]:(Operation_Cue)_-_A_few_minutes_after_detonation_the_atomic_blast_in_Operation_Cue_looked_like_this_-_NARA_-_541787.tif], before examining the ruins of the atomic test dummies [[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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