Read about the climate carveout for militarism. Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing…

… read about the resource curse that wasn’t.

An M-1 Abrams tank gets about six tenths of a mile per gallon of fuel, yet you don’t hear much about a coming “electric tank revolution.” That’s because back in the 1990s, when the world’s governments were coming together to create some of the first global climate change agreements, representatives from the Pentagon tagged along to make sure that they wouldn’t be subject to emissions standards. Newly released documents [[link removed]] from negotiations of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 show how committed the Defense Department was to ensuring that the US military — which routinely emits more carbon in a year than most entire countries — avoid being inconvenienced in any way by the global need to prevent climate apocalypse. The documents are striking, perhaps most because they so clearly show how divorced Pentagon planners were from any holistic sense of “national security.” Climate change threatens everyone, but the Defense Department was interested only in the effect of efforts to preserve the climate on “military readiness.” It wasn’t until 2021 that the Pentagon declared climate change a “national security priority,” but even today, its 52 million metric tons of annual carbon emissions are exempted from current emissions restrictions.

Entangling alliances

Military alliances are a two-way street – allies provide each other with assistance that benefits both partners, aiming to create synergies between their forces. In practice, though, outgoing traffic on that street is often heavier than in the inbound lane. As a new article [[link removed]] in the journal Security Studies shows, when the US enters new alliances, whatever added capabilities its new allies are providing do not lead to any cost savings for the US military. Indeed, quite the opposite.

According to the statistical analysis in the article, each new alliance commitment the US took on between 1947 and 2019 added an average of somewhere between $11 billion and $21 billion to the US defense budget.

The result is somewhat surprising, given that past studies have found that alliances between democracies generally result in reduced defense spending, at least in the short run. Yet the way the US structures its alliances, along with its commitment to a global force structure, appears to drive a significant percentage of US defense spending.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Apartheid origins of the League of Nations

When we learn about it in history classes in the US, we tend to identify the League of Nations with one famous racist in particular – Woodrow Wilson, the US president and Ku Klux Klan enthusiast who tried to persuade Congress to join the League. But there is another famous historical racist who was arguably more important to the founding of international government as we now know it. South African leader Jan Smuts, one of the architects of apartheid in his country, was a major theorist behind both the League and, later, the United Nations.

A recent article [[link removed]] by political scientist Jacob Kripp in the American Political Science Review tracks Smuts’ role in the creation of the League and its principles as part of his project of promoting worldwide white supremacy.

The League’s embrace of a “mandate” system, Kripp argues, institutionalized colonial forms of indirect rule and segregation into an international order that was notionally grounded in self-determination. Smuts presented the mandate system as a path to preventing race war and preserving a racial hierarchy with whites at the top.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE What does ‘legitimacy’ mean: Part I

One of the most difficult parts of a statebuilding enterprise to conceptualize is the idea of legitimacy. Actually becoming a state is pretty straightforward. Do other states recognize you as a state? Congratulations, you’re in the club of states, available to receive hugs [[link removed]] (that is, offers of international trade). Whether your state institutions are legitimate in the eyes of your putative citizens, however, is more difficult to track. If people pay taxes, are they doing it because they are invested in the project of the state, or just because they fear the coercive consequences if they do not? If people seek alternative dispute resolution systems rather than using government courts, is that due to lack of confidence in the court system or simply the presence of a strong alternative for certain types of cases? These kinds of questions are crucial both for rulers trying to gauge the strength of their governments and for citizens trying to make decisions about which forms of governance they will utilize in their lives. To that end, this week and next on Deep Dive we’ll look at new research on measures of government legitimacy and what it means to gain and lose legitimacy.

Most legitimacy discourse is, directly or indirectly, about civil war. Rulers fear a loss of legitimacy primarily because such losses can lead to rebellions. Conversely, rebels seek legitimacy as a source of both martial support and acceptance of their capacity to govern. The assumption backing that discourse is often that questions of legitimacy grow in salience up until the height of a civil war, and then fade as the war is resolved. A new article [[link removed]] in the journal Comparative Political Studies by political scientists Philip Martin, Giulia Piccolino, and Jeremy Speight upends that sequencing by investigating what happens to government legitimacy after the civil war ends.

Martin et al. focus on Côte d'Ivoire, which fought two civil wars between 2002 and 2011. During the war, large swaths of the country were governed by rebel forces known as the Forces Nouvelles (FN). There were a number of political shifts over the course of the years of conflict, but in the end, leaders associated with the FN won the second war and took over the national government. On paper, it seems like people who embraced FN governance during the conflict would be enthusiastic about this outcome – state institutions transitioning into the control of the people they built relationships with during the war. Yet when Martin et al. conducted a survey in Côte d'Ivoire in 2018, they found that people who had lived in rebel-held areas had significantly more negative views of state institutions and civic obligations – and more positive views of extra-legal anti-state action – than those who had lived in government-held areas during the wars.

One way to explain this counterintuitive finding would be to say that ethnic politics, rather than geographic politics, best explains the Ivorian system and that surely co-ethnics of the pro-FN government in formerly FN-held areas support the government. It turns out, though, that when you disaggregate the data by ethnicity, results are fairly similar across ethnic groups. Indeed, the most significant point of ethnic difference is that Mande respondents – an ethnic group largely supportive of the FN – are actually substantially more supportive of extra-legal anti-state action than members of other ethnic groups. That is, disaggregating the data by ethnicity only makes the original finding more compelling. Similarly, variations in poverty levels, religion and gender do not account for the differences found in views of state legitimacy.

Instead, Martin et al. suggest alternative theories for why respect for government fell in FN-controlled areas. One in particular will be familiar to students of civil wars: unmet expectations. People interviewed by the researchers expressed disappointment about the gap between what they expected the government to be able to deliver to them after an FN victory and what has actually been accomplished. Postwar reconstruction in FN-held areas has been limited, especially compared to the soaring fortunes of FN-associated leaders who have taken over the national government. Only 31% 0f respondents from FN-held areas said that they felt their local economy had improved since 2011.

Such disappointment is certainly enough to reduce belief in state institutions, but it does less to explain support for extra-legal anti-state actions. That, Martin et al. argue, is the result of the ways communities under rebel control during the war expanded their definitions of legitimacy and governance. Once you live under rebel governance, it becomes difficult to return to the idea that the state is the only – or even necessarily the primary – source of governance. Instead, extra-legal systems of dispute resolution and mutual aid become available to fill in governance gaps, whether those gaps come from rebels or the state itself. In their survey, Martin et al. found that people who engaged in collective action – say, joined a local council or volunteered on a community project – while their community was occupied by the FN were both more likely to have continued involvement in collective action after the war and less likely to approve of the government. Even with the war over, wartime experiments in self-governance continue to provide a competitor to state power in northern Côte d'Ivoire.

LEARN MORE [[link removed]]

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS

Daniel Ackerman followed [[link removed]] the journey of an Afghan family that has recently resettled in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Farkhanda Ehssan worked for USAID in Kabul, training women as journalists. When the Taliban returned to power, Farkhanda, her husband, and their three children were able to escape on a US military flight. From there, they bounced between military bases, first in Qatar and then in Germany, before being sent to a camp in El Paso, Texas, to await resettlement. Last month, they were placed in New Bedford, where the family has found housing and Farkhanda’s husband has found work. Farkhanda hopes to establish a mutual aid program for Afghan refugees, but first the US must accept and place enough of them to have a community capable of sustainable support.

Hanna Homestead highlighted [[link removed]] the introduction of a new House resolution last week that articulates a new path forward for US foreign policy. The Foreign Policy for the 21st Century Resolution, introduced by Democrats Pramila Jayapal and Barbara Lee, urges that US foreign policy be rooted in diplomacy rather than militarism, and for foreign policy spending to reflect those priorities. A policy built around the resolution would be a radical change from the status quo – as it stands, the US gave more money to Lockheed Martin last year than it spent on the State Department and USAID combined. Yet the resolution reflects beliefs about foreign policy widely held in the US public. A recent poll found that twice as many people in the US want to reduce the defense budget as want to expand it.

Elana Gordon gathered [[link removed]] expert views on what we’ve learned about the omicron variant of the COVID-19 virus. The spike in infections caused by omicron appears to be receding in parts of the world where the variant first emerged, leading experts to suggest that transmission may be fairly low worldwide by the beginning of March. However, they warn, transmission levels will only remain low if new variants do not emerge. With the US and Europe blocking the worldwide distribution of mRNA vaccines needed to combat variants, the likelihood is that new variants will continue to emerge.

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

A specialized competitor [[link removed]] to the universal model, the F-35Ex.

El Salvador [[link removed]] and Chile [[link removed]] are currently being led by two very different archetypes of millennial man.

“We see you’ve chosen to distribute your information in a way that doesn’t make us money. Would you like to delete [[link removed]] it instead?

A dispatch [[link removed]] from down at the men in military industrial complex.

Feral hog discourse is back [[link removed]].

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Follow The World: DONATE TO THE WORLD [[link removed]] Follow Inkstick: DONATE TO INKSTICK [[link removed]]

Critical State is written by Sam Ratner 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.

Preferences [link removed] | Web Version [link removed] Unsubscribe [link removed]