Charles W. King

Marvel Studios’ recent blockbuster film Avengers: Infinity War features an apparently unstoppable villain with a monsterous goal; to kill half of the living beings in existence, at random. He purports to believe in the dire necessity of this task because there are not enough resources in the universe to sustain its current or future population, and that continued population growth will only result in an increase in poverty, desperation, and conflict. The heroes of Infinity War have an understandable problem with this but their instincts for self-preservation & protection are not nearly as interesting as Thanos’.

Thanos’ belief that the galactic population will increase past the galaxy’s ability to sustain them and lead to widespread suffering and strife is right out of An Essay on the Principle of Population by 18th century British political economist and cleric, Thomas Robert Malthus. In 1798 Malthus had watched over the preceding decades as the British population had soared and enclosure reduced the land held in common in the United Kingdom. There had been food protests across the nation as the British moved away for the ‘moral economy’ of feudal landholding to early modern market economics. Malthus was not the only English thinker concerned with the plight of the British poor, both John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government and Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations were written in part to speak to the same concerns. Unlike Locke and Smith, whose works both have long tangents opposing the British Corn Laws, Malthus supported the Corn Laws. He did so for reasons that Thanos would sympathize with, that the only way to address suffering was a sustainable food supply.

Thanos would also likely sympathize with the solution to the crisis in food availability in Ireland that predates Malthus, Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick. Swift satricially proposed that the Irish poor sell their children to the rich as food, thereby alleviating their own poverty, increasing the food supply, and preventing population growth. Thanos and Swift’s solutions demonstrate how the most direct solution to a crisis may in a utilitarian sense provide for the greatest good and least suffering, but for other reasons are rightly considered truly horrific.

Another problem with Malthusian doomsaying, in addition to some of the horrific remedies it has led states to enact like the People’s Republic of China’s one child policy, is that in the more than two hundred years since Malthus’ essay it has little evidence in support of it. In 1798 Great Britain was in the midst of the British Agricultural Revolution that would see crop yields continue to grow and productivity to increase for decades to come. This trend would continue into the twentieth century with industrialized agriculture, chemical fertilizer, and new breeds of crops. The best evidence in support of Malthus is that real wages for European peasants were static for thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution, except for a temporary spike in real wages in the decades after the Black Death killed approximately one quarter of the European population. This supports the idea that food availability affects poverty, but not Malthus’ other main contention: that population growth would always outpace productivity growth.

Thanos clearly believes this to be the case as well. However history does not bear Malthus and Thanos’ convictions out. Policies like the British Corn Laws and the P.R.C.’s one child policy have proven to have disastrous collateral effects. They show that galactic conquerors and policy-makers should not attempt to stop short of the kind of cliffs that Malthus described, but to foster and create the bridges over these chasms.

Charles W. King

The recent outbreak of Ebola in a remote part of Congo prompted a rapid and comprehensive response from the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) including the first time in its seventy year history that its Director has traveled into the midst of an active hotzone. The response from the United States has been decidedly muted, unlike the previous outbreak in West Africa that began in 2013 where thousands of U.S. Army troops were deployed to construct field hospitals and support aid efforts. In the years since the West African outbreak the Trump Administration has requested Congress roll back funding that had been allocated for addressing Ebola and other virulent outbreaks. While costly, the expenditures by the United States between 2014 and 2016 to combat Ebola in West Africa, primarily through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (C.D.C.) and U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S.A.I.D.), represent an important strategic deployment of American resources to address a national interest.

Like food aid, medical aid to foreign countries, especially to address potential epidemics, is not solely altruistic. Infectious diseases like Ebola and Marburg are easiest to contain when populations of infected are localized. The the outbreaks of SARS and Avian Flu, which are much less lethal to humans than Ebola or Marburg, demonstrate how difficult fighting a disease that has penetrated the international travel network. If the United States was attempting to prevent Ebola or a similar disease from making it through American border posts, seaports, and airports it would be significantly more costly and dangerous than the billions spent in the West African campaign. American support for the fight against Ebola in West Africa between 2014 and 2016 was ultimately a single-digit billions line item in a trillions of dollar budget. A medical quarantine of the United States would not only be a major federal expense, but would have a significant effect on gross domestic product and economic growth.

The relatively contained outbreaks close to their origin are also important for the development of medical remedies and vaccines. The WHO is now deploying a vaccine for Ebola that was first tested in the last months of the West African outbreak in the thousands of doses in Congo. Without international funds for fighting in West Africa or Congo Merck, the pharmaceutical giant who developed the vaccine, would not have been able to incentivized to do so, which would hamstring future responses whether the outbreak was in the developed world or the undeveloped world.

It is also in the long term interest of the United States that the developing be stable and prosperous world. Stable developing states are markets for American goods and services. Unstable ones are sources of not only misery and death, but dangerous pressures on the United States and its allies, the Syrian Refugee crisis being only the largest and most recent example. Civil strife has been simmering in Congo and among its neighbors for decades, the return of major conflict at the same time as an outbreak could be orders of magnitude deadlier than the 2013-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa which killed approximately eleven thousand people. Epidemics cause their own refugee crises, but combined with flight from conflict such an outbreak could be un-containable by current measures. Policy-makers in the United States and Europe have a good case for supporting medical aid to the rest of the world, both in crises and in times of relative calm. They simply need to make it.

Charles W. King

Today the depiction of Germany as a country and a people is inherently conservative. German restraint in foreign policy and the insistence on austerity in the wake of sovereign debt crises in Ireland, Spain, Italy, and Greece have bolstered this reputation, but it goes back much further, before Germany was a unified state. The revolutions of 1848 reached Germany last, the counter-revolutionary push back began in Germany first, and in between the character of the revolutions of 1848 in Germany were never as radical as those in Hungary, Italy, or France. Germany, the United States, and United Kingdom are the three poster children for Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. How does this square with Germany as one of the standard bearers for the modern welfare state?

While not providing as extensive safety net as the Scandinavian countries, the welfare state in Germany is extensive. While many would be inclined to chalk this up to the prevalence of post-World War Two Social Democratic parties, similar to Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland, this is incorrect. While the revolutions of 1848 may not have been as radical in pre-unification Germany, they did leave their mark. By the time of unification in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 industrial capitalism had spread throughout Germany, and support for socialism and anarchism had increased, as had anti-clericalism among the Protestant majority. Similar to the food protests in England in the 1700s described by E. P. Thompson in The Moral Economy of the English Crowd, social unrest increased in Germany as urbanization and industrialization increased, egged on by socialists and anarchists.

Otto von Bismarck was the architect of German unification, an arch-conservative he was concerned with the increasing support for the left and the level of social upheaval in Germany in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War. He correctly discerned that the majority of the popular support for the German left was not because the general population supported or even understood the political objectives of the Communists, Socialists, or Anarchists, but these groups advocated programs like state provided medical care that directly addressed the needs of working and middle class Germans whose economic situations were precarious in the new industrial capitalist economy. Bismarck concluded that if economic precariousness was a source of political instability it was in the interest of the state to provide an economic safety net. This is why the arch-conservative German Empire was the first state to implement what we would recognize as a modern welfare state.

Part of the reason for the political instability that Bismarck and other political leaders across Europe and the United States needed to address during this period is a result of what is known as the “Paradox of Rising Expectations”. As people’s economic situations got better over the course of the 1800s they expected them to continue increasing, as wealth concentrated at the end of the century and growth slowed the increase over time in the standard of living began to slow political unrest increased. However, as Imperial Germany and other European nations demonstrate this does not always lead to revolution or democratization. Policy-makers expecting to see increasing democratization in the People’s Republic of China have recently been surprised by a reassertion of control by Xi Jingping. They would to well to remember that the paradox of rising expectations can be weathered not only with economic growth, but also with the pragmatic implementation of government programs.

Charles W. King

At the recent National Defense Industry Association Armament Systems Forum in Indianapolis Retired Major General Bob Scales criticized the American defense industry for not producing a new service weapon to replace the M-16, which Scales has been critical of for decades. The Department of Defense has repeatedly looked into replacing the M-16 and its derivatives, as early as the 1990s, but has never done so. The development history of another iconic American service rifle demonstrates why.

When the U.S. entered World War Two in 1941 it did so with arguably the most advanced service rifle in the world, the semi-automatic M1 Garand. Germany and the Soviet Union would both adopt semi-automatic service rifles over the course of the war, the Gewer 43 and SVT-40, but neither saw more than limited issue to their respective services. In addition the Gewer 43 was resource intensive and a significant drain on Germany’s damage industrial capacity late in the war. The Garand on the other hand was ubiquitous, being issued to the majority of American troops and also provided in large numbers to other Allied forces. Today the decision to adopt a semi-automatic rifle in the 1930s is widely seen as progressive and forward thinking on the part of the Army, but the adoption of the M1 was not as radical as it might have been.

Garand designed two versions of his rifle. One in .30-06 and the other in a promising new round; .276 Pedersen. The modern terminology for calibers smaller than “full size” rifle cartridges like the .30-06 and 7.62 NATO is “intermediate” and 5.56 NATO is such a round. Had the .276 Pedersen been adopted it would have been the first adoption of an intermediate caliber round for military use, but that would have to wait until the German army put the StG 44 into limited use late in World War Two. The United States Army has always been good at math, and its analysis of after action reports dating back to the Spanish American War in 1898 told them that high volumes of accurate fire was more important than individual round lethality. Intermediate cartridges provide this. As the 1930s began the clear leader in the joint Army, Navy, and Marine trials was the Garand in .276 for these reasons, but they were not enough.

In 1931 Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur intervened and ordered a halt to all development of service rifles not in .30-06 caliber. This was for a number of reasons, almost exclusively logistical. The .276 Pedersen cartridge had to be lubricated, which the Army had never liked but was willing to deal with. The greater problem was that all of the Army’s light machine guns were in .30-06. One of the fundamental features that makes a light machine gun light is that it fires the same ammunition as the service rifle. Accepting a new rifle caliber in the 1930s would have precipitated a replacement of not only the Army’s rifles but also all of its light machine guns, which it did not have the funds or wherewithal to do.

This is also why the Army’s current Next Generation Weapons program begins with the development of a new cartridge followed by a new light machine gun before either a new rifle or carbine. Rifles and light machine guns are not the only American weapons systems chambered for 5.56 NATO, let alone what is fielded by the U.S.’s NATO allies. It also prompts the question of what the performance gains of phasing the M-16 and its derivatives would be. For some the M-16 should have been ditched years ago, but from a broader policy perspective the question must be asked; what are the larger logistical and even diplomatic costs of that switching to a new weapon system would impose?

Charles W. King

Assessment by American and Israeli intelligence agencies of the April 13th strikes against the chemical weapons facilities of Bashar Al Assad have revealed that the stikes did little to impede the regime's ability to use chemical weapons against its people. This prompts the question of what was the point of these strikes, and why has the United States, France, and United Kingdom not continued attacking Syrian facilities. The cessation of strikes suggests that their objective was not to render the Assad regime incapable of using chemical weapons, but a number of possible objectives remain. One is that the strike made the regime unwilling rather than unable to use chemical weapons in the future. Time will tell if the strikes did deter the future use of chemical weapons, but current indications are not encouraging. Even if Assad does not use chemical weapons again, that does not mean that deterrence was the intent, in total or in part, of strikes.

Being seen to done something, and something violent, in response the use of chemical weapons is important for the Trump Administration both at home and abroad. Abroad the United States needs to demonstrate that it’s longstanding threats of harsh treatment for any government that uses chemical weapons are credible. With little ability to implement harsher sanctions or further isolate the Syrian government, military strikes were the logical choice to demonstrate American resolve and ensure credibility. However, the relative ineffectiveness of the strikes dents this credibility somewhat.

The Trump Administration also has obvious domestic political motivations for using military force against Syria, it puts the Administration in direct contrast to their bête-noire, the administration of Barack Obama. Assad’s forces also used chemical weapons during the Obama Administration, crossing what that administration described at a “Red Line”. The Obama Administration was roundly criticized for its response to this line being crossed, which was to implement, through the United Nations, a disarmament program we now know to be ineffective.

Making foreign policy based on domestic political considerations is dangerous. Neither Woodrow Wilson nor Franklin Delano Roosevelt would have come to the aid of France and the U.K. if they had relied on the opinion of the American people. William McKinley was unable to resist the overwhelming push for war with Spain in 1898.

While the resulting victory in the Spanish-American War proved beneficial for the United States as it expanded its reach in the Caribbean and Western Pacific public opinion rarely coincides with good strategy. The First and Second World Wars are prime examples of when the United States had clear strategic interests but was prevented from acting on them by domestic politics.

At the end of World War Two Harry Truman ordered the use of atomic bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which remain controversial to this day. Having advocated for its development and worked on producing atomic weapons, dozens of scientists signed a petition against the use of atomic bombs against people. Despite this, and the fervent belief of Generals like Curtis LeMay that the Japanese would surrender due to conventional bombing before an invasion was necessary, Truman chose to use the atomic bombs against Japanese cities.

Especially in democratic systems doing nothing can be extremely difficult, despite it often being the best way to secure long term strategic objectives. Frequently the premise that advisors are presented with is to recommend a course of action, which excludes the possibility of restraint. Policy-makers should not conflate restraint with inaction or indecision. Choosing not to act is a valid and important strategic choice that must be part of the full range of options for foreign policy.