Mueller cites one estimate that if the cash the United States spent deterring the Soviets during the Cold War had been invested in the domestic economy instead, it “would have generated an additional 20 or 25 percent of production each year in perpetuity.”

(When you’ve got a billion-dollar, precision-guided stealth hammer, as the saying goes, everything looks like a jihadi nail.)

Mueller sometimes swings so hard for the fences that he whiffs completely. So, for example, while minimizing the threat Iran poses to the United States, he compares the 1979-81 hostage crisis to a mere case of “house arrest,” as though the imprisoned U.S. diplomats were allowed to sleep comfortably in their own beds during the harrowing 444-day episode. (They weren’t.) Even more problematic, while downplaying the threat from China, Mueller blithely dismisses Beijing’s handling of its Uighur minority as merely “graceless.” His intention here may be to come across as plucky or ironic, but the result is ugly and morally obtuse.

the core points made by the book are so important. War, after all, is stupid—a truth all leaders should work even harder to keep front-of-mind. Yet The Stupidity of War has an even bigger flaw. Like the work of so many restrainers today, Mueller’s argument is almost entirely negative; he does a great job of killing some sacred cows, but he never really delivers on his book’s subtitle by sketching out an alternative U.S. foreign policy. Although he writes favorably about the virtues of both “appeasement” (which he thinks got an undeservedly bad name at Munich) and “complacency,” he doesn’t provide much sense of what these principles would look like in action. And that’s a pity. The lacuna leaves readers to wonder what form U.S. policy toward China, Iran, and Russia would take in Mueller’s ideal world.

If, for example, the United States withdrew its armed forces from around the globe, it would have to rely more on proxies to serve its ends (or simply allow them to serve their own). But recent years have shown what giving the Saudis and Israelis free rein in the Middle East looks like, and it isn’t pretty

Perhaps the biggest unanswered question involves one of Mueller’s strongest arguments in favor of dismantling the United States’ military machine: that its existence keeps tempting the country’s leaders to use it. If this prospect worries Mueller so much, why doesn’t China’s rapid military buildup seem to concern him? After all, his overall case for complacency rests on his argument that China is a status quo player with little appetite for military adventure. But if building huge arsenals inevitably tempts their owners to use them, won’t Beijing also soon find military adventures impossible to resist?

Both Russia and, increasingly China, have been viewed as the main revisionist challengers to the liberal international order. The main vehicle for these counter-ordering efforts have been new economic and security regional organizations established by Moscow and Beijing to project their agendas and check the influence of Western counterparts. For Russia, this has included founding the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) as a regional security alternative to NATO, while in the economic sphere Russia has pushed for ever-increasing regional integration through the Eurasian Economic Union. For China, the most important of these new organizations is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) founded in 2001. And in 2016 China also founded the Quadrilateral Cooperation and Coordination Mechanism (QCCM), established to promote regional anti-terrorist coordination and security cooperation between Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Around the same time investigative reports revealed that Beijing concluded an agreement to establish a military base in Tajikistan, with Chinese troops given the authority to patrol large swathes of the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border.

the Central Asians states attend more summits, working groups and interagency groups convened by Russia and China than they do for the liberal ordering organizations

In the 2000s the West’s patronage monopoly was dramatically broken by the rise of both Russia and China as goods providers

Not only did transnational actors promoting liberal ordering lose their influence, but the region has witnessed the rise of actors now promoting illiberal norms in a variety of settings. The SCO and the CIS began openly criticizing the inappropriateness of political liberalism, while also creating new formal and informal legal frameworks that allowed, in the extraterritorial actions against political exiles in name of counterterrorism,  including rapid extradition requests, investigations and even renditions.

we argue that Central Asian provides compelling evidence as to why this time transformations in the liberal international order are likely to prove far more significant and enduring. During the 1990s, the norms, institutions and actors associated with liberal ordering were pretty much the only source for integrating the new Central Asian states into global governance. However now, Central Asia is a far more dense and contested region, where different sources of order and norms openly co-exist, compete and interact with one another.

About nine million people a year die from pollution

About one million of Earth’s eight million species of plants and animals are threatened with extinction

More than three billion people are affected by land degradation, and only 15 percent of Earth’s wetlands remain intact

In South Africa, one of the hardest-hit countries on the continent by the pandemic, a mutated and more transmissible variant of the virus emerged less than two months ago, leading to a massive spike in both the number of cases and deaths.

Experts and humanitarian workers fear that even as high-income countries in the developed world get a handle on cases and begin distributing vaccines, poorer and developing countries in Africa will be left behind.

Data from the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention released on Tuesday shows that the African continent has tracked more than 3.6 million COVID-19 cases and some 91,500 deaths. That number is expected to increase further in the coming weeks.

Last month, then-U.S. Ambassador to South Africa Lana Marks announced that she had spent 10 days in an intensive care unit after developing COVID-19 in late December. Marks, a luxury handbag designer and Trump political appointee, drew fire from embassy staff last March when she returned to the country and did not self-isolate after attending an event at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago resort despite some attendees later testing positive for COVID-19. 

South Africa has a highly developed health care system, but in poorer countries in the region embassies are relying on medical evacuation to deal with severe cases. One official in the region said medical evacuations have been taking 48 to 72 hours, adding, “In terms of COVID, that could be a death sentence.”

According to an internal USAID memo, patients in Eswatini, which borders South Africa, were dying due to a lack of oxygen supplies

In a review of Covid-19 social response programmes, cash transfer programmes were found to be: Short-term in their duration – lasting just over three months on average Small in value – an average of $6 (£4.30) per capita in low-income countries Limited in scope – with many in need remaining uncovered

The world’s food systems endured numerous shocks in 2020, from economic impacts on producers and consumers to desert locust swarms and erratic weather. All indicators suggest that this may be the new normal. The ecosystems we rely on for water, air and food supply are under threat. Zoonotic diseases are on the rise owing to growing demographic and economic pressures on land, animals and wildlife.

A warming planet is contributing to costlier and more frequent extreme weather events. And as people pack into low-quality housing in urban slums or vulnerable coastal areas, more are living in the path of disease and climate disaster.

We need sustained financing for approaches that prioritise human, animal and planetary health; restore landscapes and diversify crops to improve nutrition; reduce food loss and waste; strengthen agricultural value chains to create jobs and recover lost incomes; and deploy effective climate-smart agriculture techniques on a much greater scale.

Focusing on food security would address a basic injustice: almost one in 10 people live in chronic hunger in an age of food waste and plenty. This focus would also strengthen our collective ability to weather the next storm, flood, drought, or pandemic – with safe and nutritious food for all.

People across the national security spectrum said: You don’t have to like, respect, or agree with Cohen and Patel, but you underestimate their drive and Machiavellian prowess at your own peril.

“Kash had a meteoric rise,” a senior administration official explained. “He gets hired for the Russia collusion [investigation], and that put him at the president’s doorstep. For the past year Kash has swung the biggest dick in D.C. because he could just say, ‘Oh, I’m going to go to the president.’ And we were on emails with him where he’s telling four-star generals, ‘Hey, this is a White House priority. Don’t make me go talk to the president, because I will.’ And the generals always rolled over.”

the Joint Chiefs were creating their own “security compartments” containing operational planning details “for the express purpose of hiding key information from career civilian and political leaders in the Pentagon”—up to and including the secretary of Defense. Talk about a deep state. “That means that policymakers were basing their decisions on partial information. It’s very dangerous and irresponsible, and that’s something I’ve actually highlighted in my conversations with [Biden’s] transition team.” I’ll admit it sounded loopy. To me it had all the elements of a Trump fever dream: The military and intelligence establishment was somehow scheming against the renegades. That is, until two other senior national security officials—with Miller and company—confirmed Cohen’s assertion.

On the leg back to D.C., Miller invited me up to his cabin. I asked him about the $1.5 trillion F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (a deeply flawed system I had covered at length for Vanity Fair)—a purportedly off-the-record conversation that someone in the Pentagon decided to simply post on the Defense Department’s website. What did this costly, badly flawed aircraft—27 years in the making—say about the Pentagon’s spending priorities? Miller started laughing before letting loose: “I cannot wait to leave this job, believe me. Talk about a wicked problem! I wanted to take that one on. F-35 is the case study…. [T]hat investment, for that capability that we’re never supposed to use…I’m like, ‘We have created a monster.’”

Sitting on his couch at the end of a surreal week, he finally took off the gloves. His target? The Defense Department itself, the largest organization in the world—and one he has served in various ways since he was 18. “This fucking place is rotten. It’s rotten.” Miller’s gravest concern, he said, involved a bedrock principle of American democracy: civilian control of the military. “When the system is weighted towards the Joint Staff and the geographic combatant commanders against civilian control, you know, we’ve got to rethink this.” He expressed a belief that by “idolizing and fetishizing” the top brass, members of Congress had ignored an erosion over time in the chain of command.

The CIA gambit took place last year. In fact, when I had spoken with Cohen about the matter, he had told me, “The idea was to put Kash in as the deputy, which doesn’t require Senate approval, and then to fire Gina the next day, leaving Kash in charge…. Robert O’Brien, [Trump’s national security adviser], is the one who deep-sixed it.” When I pressed Patel further about these machinations, which had occurred in December, I saw him turn lawyerly: “That stuff is between me and the boss. That’s the only thing I don’t comment on. Ever. It’s executive privilege.”

‘Well, who are these people that have the complete picture?’ I felt like I finally did as acting SECDEF—to a point. I’m sure there’s still some stuff that was being compartmented. But I don’t know that for a fact.”

The United States Political Violence (USPV) database records numerous riots around elections during the mid-19th century. In April 1855, for example, hundreds of nativists “invaded” a German area of Cincinnati, Ohio, and destroyed more than a thousand ballots. Subsequent fighting led to two deaths. In August of that year, nativist Protestants attacked German and Irish neighborhoods in Louisville, Kentucky, killing at least 20. In Baltimore, election violence became routine in the 1850s, with 30 dead and 350 wounded in the 1856 election alone

The bloodiest efforts came in the repression of Black people. The USPV lists nearly 70 incidents of political riots and assassinations in the decade after the formal cessation of hostilities, mostly in the South but including riots in Philadelphia and Indianapolis

Widespread political violence around elections only really ended when the federal government conceded that the South would be run by whites. Even then, anti-government violence took place.

Flattering coding rules used to produce datasets make it too easy to dismiss any aberration when a look at the historical record keeps turning up aberration after injustice after atrocity. Historians, scholars of Black history, and political scientists specializing in race and ethnic politics have long been sharply critical of the idea that that concepts like democracy, sovereignty, or the rule of law can be as bluntly coded as standard datasets long did.

American democracy did not penetrate to state level until the 1960s. Nearly a quarter of the states denied voting rights to Blacks—who made up a majority in some of those states before the Great Migration—from the late 19th until the mid-20th century

A federal union with authoritarian states cannot but be at least partly authoritarian itself

Despite the abolition of slavery, the imposition of Jim Crow meant that neither Congress nor the presidency were elected by fully democratic, or even representative, means

Consider Max Weber’s workhorse definition of the state: the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. By that definition, large swathes of the United States approached failed-state status for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries

just as today, there were voices even at elite institutions counseling patience and unity. An 1898 Yale Law Journal article defended lynching as a natural outcome of Reconstruction having given the ballot to former slaves too early, and urged “education,” not federal intervention, as the cure. Woodrow Wilson, a leading historian and political scientist long before he became president of the United States, defended the Ku Klux Klan and white terrorism as “aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation.” Such efforts eventually paid off in helping to efface such atrocities from textbooks even as monuments—and popular culture—embraced Lost Cause nostalgia for the Confederacy.

Revisiting the United States as a partial or flawed democracy means confronting much of the history that celebrants of the liberal world order claim as a series of triumphs for democracy

social scientists have lately become more skeptical of the conventional verities of progress. The V-Dem Institute in Sweden has compiled indices of democracy that are more sensitive to conditions like racial segregation. They show the United States as substantially less democratic than other countries, like the United Kingdom or Sweden, for most of the 20th century. Political scientists investigate topics that once attracted little attention, like the relationship between American political violence and social transformation, how national economic integration led to the decline of lynching, or how the “carceral state” (more than 2 million people are held in U.S. prisons or jails) degrades U.S. democracy today.

In the immediate aftermath of the storming of the Capitol, reporters and others turned to the British seizure of the Capitol building in 1814 as the closest analogue. Turning to foreign invasion rather than domestic precedents, however, says a lot. It suggests that people do not know the domestic precedents even exist, and it reinforces the notion that American political violence is “unthinkable.” (Even describing the 1814 incident as “foreign” is complex. The burning of Washington in 1814 was carried out by a British force that included marines previously enslaved by Americans—and motivated by hatred of the slavery system.)

it’s time to think more openly—and less defensively—about the totality of U.S. political history and behavior at home and abroad