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… read about economists using war to unmake the state in Ukraine.

To wage and sustain wars, rulers have developed better and more powerful institutions for tax collection, conscription, and materiel requisition, in many ways developing the state in the process. As a result, Ukraine has consistently demonstrated its ability to fight and win against a larger and more established military power. But the war has come with drastic costs to the country’s economy, from occupied land to millions of displaced people to loss of trade. Those realities constrain Ukraine’s ability to pay for its war through taxation and trade. Into this comes a report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, offering a ready-made solution for Ukraine to square the circle. Except, as Adam Tooze writes [[link removed]], “the CEPR authors propose to sever any association between war-making and the state as anything more than a residual safety net. The 21st century has thus given birth to a new strange new vision of warfare without the state.” Instead of building state capacity, the way Ukraine has proven it can build military capacity, the CEPR aligns with the President Volodymyr Zelenskyy-authorized labor deregulation and suggests minimizing other government functions. It is also anti-democratic, writes Tooze, and “risks driving wedges into the national solidarity that is, if history is any guide, necessary to sustain the war.”

shorting longtermism

How much should the weight of potential future generations weigh on our heads? “Longtermism,” a popular ideology that’s growing among Silicon Valley types, emphasizes the importance of imagined distant future multiples of the population over the needs of people presently living and seeks to guide actions accordingly.

“Like other strains of doomism, longtermism obsesses about the possibility of human extinction rather than admit that climate change is happening right now and the most privileged among us have yet to suffer its impacts,” writes Megan Ruttan for Currently [[link removed]].

Longtermers treat the present as a lost cause and the threat of human extinction as the only one worth responding to, argues Ruttan, which allows them to privilege the hoarding of wealth and the survival of the Global North against the needs of people without means experiencing climate change now.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] power flows

Europe is bracing for a cold winter, thanks largely to heating infrastructure built around an assumed availability of cheap natural gas shipped from Russia, sometimes through Ukraine. When Russia invaded in February 2022, it shifted supply, and in many countries, people endured scarcity or more expensive heat until the warmer months. Infrastructure takes time to build, and switching heat and electricity supply over to new sources is work. But markets can adapt, and in both the near- and medium-term, it looks like that’s the case.

“Some of my initial despair at Europe’s prospects earlier in the year centered around the lack of demand response which in turn appeared to be as much consumer and policy inertia as chip shortages for heat pumps and solar inverters, which have only recently eased,” writes Alex Turnbull at Syncretica [[link removed]]. “No more — we are seeing vertical adoption of consumer technology to structurally reduce gas use and, combined with very strong messaging and incentives from governments, it is now showing up in the data.”

Turnbull extends this optimism not just to the immediate gas crisis in Europe but sees market forces in the renewable energy and battery sectors following science and the availability of cheap and abundant materials to lower future costs.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE When Putsch Comes To Shove: Part I

The period from February 2021 to February 2022 saw six successful coups in Chad, Mali, Guinea, Sudan, Burkina Faso, Myanmar, and three failed attempts in Niger, Sudan, and Guinea-Bissau. If militaries, especially in neighboring countries in Africa, are experiencing similar instability, is there a greater risk to worry about?

No, argues Naunihal Singh in “ The Myth of the Coup Contagion [[link removed]].” Instead, he writes, “Three key structural factors made these countries particularly vulnerable to coup attempts: a recent history of successful coups, low economic development, and regimes that are neither highly democratic nor highly authoritarian.”

Before diagnosing the problem, Singh walks through several possible other explanations. The first is the risk of contagion of coups, where a military seizing power in one country inspires a nearby military to take the same chance. Instead of looking for a connection in geography, Singh points to the lineage of coups in the countries in question. If the strategy has served the political needs of officers in the past, then officers can refer to that domestic precedent instead for inspiration and justification.

The second claim Singh examines is that of coups as a response to insurgent violence, especially across the Sahel. In Burkina Faso, the coup plotters specifically point to a lack of resources to fight the war as they’d like as a cause, but that dynamic is lacking elsewhere. Further limiting the role of insurgency in driving coups is that insurgent violence in the region had higher peaks in 2015 yet saw no coups related to that threat.

There is also the question of training by Western militaries, especially done by the United States. The US military is actively involved in training forces it chooses to partner with across the world, and many US training efforts with countries in the Sahel have come as part of the United States’ broader effort to fight insurgencies in the region. Some of these soldiers, trained by the US military, have participated in coups, one even dramatically leaving a months-long training by Green Berets to stage one. Singh notes, “US Africa Command does not track how often officers whom it has trained try to overthrow their governments,” but also points to the fact [[link removed]] that between 1999 and 2016, the United States trained 2.4 million soldiers abroad, a pool large enough to include some coup plotters.

Instead, coups can largely be traced to a successful history of coups in the country, low economic development, and weak institutionalization in either democratic or authoritarian directions. Consolidated regimes are harder to overthrow.

The security concerns that have eroded once-strong anti-coup norms are looming over all of this. “Penalties against coup making are also weak and inconsistently applied. When Western countries fail to act against coups out of fears of disrupting security relationships, they appear hypocritical, preaching the virtues of democracy but placing a low value on democracy-promoting actions in practice,” concludes Singh. “In the end, there is no substitute for clear and consistent implementation of pro-democratic and anti-coup norms, without loophole or exception.”

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Levi Bridges reported [[link removed]] on the walnut harvest of Kyrgyzstan, which contains the largest natural walnut forest in the world. The government owns the forest, with harvesters renting land from which they can shake and sell the nuts at harvest time. But the forest has been threatened by overgrazing and climate change. Grazing, in particular, is a risk as cattle eat saplings and horses take bark from old trees, eroding the forest at both ends. “The idea is that selling animals for meat is a better investment than the meager interest earned in a savings account,” reports Bridges.

Kate Kizer called [[link removed]] for real accountability to follow the Biden administration’s frustration with the government of Saudi Arabia, following OPEC’s recent decision to cut oil production coincidentally ahead of US midterms. “Instead of misconstruing the stability of the region to the stability of its authoritarian regimes like Saudi Arabia, US policymakers would be better off tying the future of its relationship to changemakers [[link removed]] in Saudi Arabia (and the region) who have the most vested interest in creating a more just and prosperous future for all,” writes Kizer. The United States could use the leverage it does have, like Saudi’s dependence on US-made weapons, to get concessions of power from the royal house to Saudi civil society.

Tibisay Zea visited [[link removed]] Chile’s Atacama desert in bloom. The region, almost perpetually dry, is home to plant species that have adapted to the rare deluge, which turns the desert into a carpet of flowers. This wonder is an attraction, one that carries with it ecological risk, as tourists come to the area, and some leave with plucked flowers or stolen plants. “During his first visit to the Atacama region earlier this month, Chile’s President Gabriel Boric announced the creation of the Desierto Florido National Park for the first quarter of 2023 in an attempt to preserve the area,” reported Zea.

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

Ring ring ring, banana pwn [[link removed]].

I would have gone with a Cornwall Pineapple Parliament, but “ Lettuce Monarchy [[link removed]]” is good too.

At this rate [[link removed]], England will recreate the Heptarchy by accident in mid-December.

Historical memory, spooky scary, boys becoming men, men becoming corpses [[link removed]].

“Starship Troopers” was a documentary [[link removed]].

The 44 days [[link removed]] of Louis Napoleon.

Overrule Brittania [[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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