Earthling: Is the US already at war with Russia?
Plus: Doomsday cult at Google; Musk's starship troopers; US-China soft power war; etc.
I recently taped a conversation with journalist and Substack juggernaut Matt Yglesias in which we (among other things) reminisced about the early days of Bloggingheads.tv—which (drum roll) will next week be rechristened on YouTube as the Nonzero channel. Paid newsletter subscribers can get the audio or video version of the conversation here (and can get the audio version in podcast apps via the newsletter’s feed). The conversation will be publicly available late Tuesday on YouTube and via the Wright Show podcast feed (oops, I mean “Robert Wright’s Nonzero podcast feed”—the podcast is also being rebranded).
–Bob
Some critics of America’s response to the Russia-Ukraine crisis have argued that Washington is risking a direct war with Moscow. In the New York Times, Bonnie Kristian of Defense Priorities asks whether we can be sure we’re not already in one. In recent decades, she writes, “The line between what is war and what is not war has perilously blurred, and determining the moment we move from one to the other has become a more difficult task.”
Kristian cites several causes: the endless and far-flung post-9/11 war on terror, with its various gradations of US military involvement in faraway conflicts; the leeway Congress now grants presidents to use force in various ways; and technology that makes it easy for the US to kill adversaries without deploying troops.
Kristian notes parallels between the Ukraine war and the war in Yemen, where the US supports a Saudi-led military coalition. Both involve not only American-made weapons but American guidance in choosing targets—reportedly including, in the case of Ukraine, a Russian ship and high-ranking Russian officers.
If that doesn’t sound like direct involvement in a war, suggests Kristian, maybe you should try a little cognitive empathy: “If we swapped places—if Russian apparatchiks admitted helping to kill American generals or sink a US Navy vessel—I doubt we’d find much ambiguity there. At the very least, what the United States is doing in Ukraine is not not war.”
If you’re worried that Elon Musk’s plan to ship vast numbers of humans to Mars will distract him from solving problems on Planet Earth, we have good news. Sam Biddle of The Intercept says the Pentagon is studying the possibility of “using SpaceX rockets to stop the next Benghazi via starship troopers.”
In 2020 the Pentagon announced that it was working with SpaceX to study the feasibility of a system that could blast rockets filled with military supplies into space and guide them to any location on Earth in under 60 minutes. Biddle has now unearthed documents showing that the envisioned purpose of the system goes beyond logistics, to include what the documents call a “quick reaction force” that could deal with crises comparable to the 2012 attack on the US diplomatic compound in Benghazi.
The mere demonstration of this capability, the documents say, “could deter non-state actors from aggressive acts toward the United States.”
What could go wrong, you ask? Apparently the law is unclear on when such high-altitude vehicles would be violating a country’s airspace—leaving aside the question of whether a rocket passing over a country might be construed as a weapon and dealt with accordingly.
William Hartung of the Quincy Institute said SpaceX could be contributing to “the global militarization of space” and asked how America would feel if it were a mere flyover country. “Going anywhere without having to get any approval from anybody has appeal from a military point of view, but would the US want other countries to have that same capability? Probably not.”
Israel is expanding covert operations against Iran’s nuclear and military assets, report Dion Nissenbaum and Dov Lieber in the Wall Street Journal. As Iran edges closer to producing weapons-grade uranium, Israel aims to stop it from developing a nuclear warhead and a missile that could deliver one.
In the past year, Israeli drones have struck nuclear facilities and a drone base in Iran, and Iranians working on nuclear and military programs have died in mysterious circumstances that suggest poisoning. In 2020, President Trump gave Israel the green light to assassinate Iran’s top nuclear scientist using an AI-assisted, remote-controlled machine gun. “Israel’s expanded campaign has fueled the long-running shadow war with Iran, which has responded to the stepped-up attacks inside its country with a new push to target Israelis around the world,” the authors say, citing Israeli leaders.
The Senate Armed Services Committee voted to add another $45 billion to Biden’s proposed military budget for 2023. That means the Pentagon could get $858 billion next year. National security analyst Stephen Semler writes in his newsletter that such profligate military spending lacks public support—but he offers a graph that may explain the disconnect between members of the committee and their constituents:
