Earthling: US think tank advocates murder
Plus: Population bomb fizzles, anti-TikTok tyranny, mind-controlled army robot dogs, Israel’s far right gets a militia, and more!
A 2020 study found that the Center for a New American Security had gotten more money from defense contractors in the previous five years than any other think tank in America. So it wasn’t shocking when CNAS published a report this week concluding that the US, in order to counter Iran, should “establish greater defensive military capability and interoperability among its partners” in the Middle East.
But the CNAS report did feature one recommendation that, even by the standards of military-industrial-complex discourse, actually was shocking.
The recommendation begins like this: “US leaders should consider sending private messages to Iran’s political and military leaders indicating its resolve to see them removed from power should they not abandon the nuclear program.”
At first glance, this might seem to be saying that America should threaten Iranian officials with regime change. Which would be bad enough, given that America’s Middle Eastern regime change efforts—by ground invasion in Iraq, by aerial bombardment in Libya, by arming proxies in Syria—have produced mainly dead people, refugees, and instability. But it gets worse—or, at least, creepier.
The recommendation continues: “As recently as early 2020, the United States demonstrated the military capacity to target individual Iranian leaders, such that direct messaging to individuals with the power to determine the future of Iran’s nuclear program could have a very persuasive and coercive effect.”
That is a reference to the assassination, at Donald Trump’s behest, of Qassem Suleimani, Iran’s most important military commander and one of its highest ranking officials. The CNAS report continues: “Having demonstrated that the capability exists to target Iran’s military leaders, augmenting that demonstrated capability with a shift in public messaging, the United States could convince Iran’s leaders that Iran’s nuclear program is a millstone around their necks, rather than an insurance policy that ensures their survival.”
So the Center for a New American Security is recommending that the US government convey to various Iranian officials—through “private messages” that are somehow reinforced by “public messaging”— that if they don’t comply with its wishes they will be murdered.
Where to begin?
With the sheer irony of using Donald Trump as your role model when it comes to Iran policy? His decision to abandon the Iran nuclear deal is the reason CNAS is worried about the possibility of Iran developing a nuclear weapon to begin with.
And by the way: If Iran, in response to America’s reneging on the deal and re-imposing brutal sanctions, chooses to leave the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (which the treaty allows, given three months notice), and then build a nuclear weapon, it will have the same status in international law as Israel, India, and Pakistan—nuclear powers that aren’t in violation of the treaty because they aren’t part of it.
In contrast, murdering Iranian officials would violate international law. For that matter, it would by mainstream reckoning violate the 1976 US ban on foreign assassinations (though you might get disagreement on that from the various government lawyers who have since been told to issue secret opinions that supposedly locate loopholes in the ban).
And, legalisms aside, there’s the fact that, as veteran foreign policy observer Jim Lobe noted this week, the CNAS plan might well not work—at least, to judge by the failure of Israel’s various assassinations of Iranian scientists to derail Iran’s nuclear energy program.
Though this question of efficacy could stir some discussion in Washington circles, all the pesky legal questions are unlikely to draw any attention—especially the ones about international law. After all, the US foreign policy establishment’s dirty little secret is that the “rules based order” is something US adversaries are expected to comply with scrupulously while the US and its allies (like Israel, in this case) defy it at will. Hence the Iraq invasion two decades ago and the presence of US troops in Syria today. Avoiding honest discussion of international law helps keep this secret safe.
Maybe there’s a kind of value in CNAS carrying this contradiction to such vivid extremes that it’s harder to ignore: Yes, we’re the world’s self-appointed police, but we’re also the gangsters, and we’ll kill anybody we want to kill. You got a problem with that?
This week Elon Musk and other notables called for a six-month “pause” on developing the most powerful AI systems. Their open letter said AI labs are “locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one—not even their creators—can understand, predict, or reliably control.” Better safety protocols and stricter government oversight are in order, they said.
Notably missing from the signatories was one famous AI Cassandra, Eliezer Yudkowsky. Apparently that’s because he doesn’t think Elon and company are freaked out enough. He wrote in Time: “Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die.” He says a moratorium on all training of advanced AI “needs to be indefinite and worldwide… Shut it all down.”
Of course, as the Earthling noted last week, attempts to slow AI research in the US will run into warnings from tech execs and politicians that we can’t afford to sleep while the Chinese are busy building world-dominating bots. Still, on Twitter, Russian crypto-enthusiast and tech visionary Anatoly Karlin deemed a meaningful moratorium not quite impossible: “It requires the US and China (world's only relevant countries) agreeing and credibly committing to hardware caps complete with inspection regimes and cryptocurrency ban, and extending it to their allies and vassals. Far fetched, but not implausible.”
Meanwhile, ChatGPT4 is showing a remarkable ability to make inferences about what’s going on in people’s minds (aka cognitive empathy)–according to NZN, at least. And this week the precocious bot put in an impressive performance as a guest on the Nonzero podcast.
Supporters of two TikTok-banning bills under consideration in Congress say the legislation would protect US citizens from the intrusions of China’s authoritarian government. But, writes Marcus Stanley of the Quincy Institute, these bills, if passed, would expose US citizens to intrusions by their own government and give it powers that would invite authoritarian use.
The House’s DATA Act “is almost surreal in its implications,” Stanley writes. For example: If it passes, Americans who give personal data to any company “subject to the influence of” China could have their financial assets frozen—meaning they couldn’t even withdraw cash from an ATM.
Happily, Stanley judges the bill unlikely to pass. But the Senate’s RESTRICT Act could well become law. It would empower the executive branch to ban or censor smartphone apps and other information conduits owned by companies controlled by “foreign adversaries.” That would initially mean China, Russia, Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea, but the president could expand the list at will except when both houses of Congress nixed an addition.
The bill would authorize not just harsh sanctions against foreign companies but punishment of Americans who evade or help others evade the restrictions. It’s unclear what exactly this would mean, but Stanley says it could “lead to American citizens being prosecuted for accessing information on foreign-owned technology platforms such as WeChat.”
Which countries lost the most people during World War II? And which lost the biggest percentage of their population? NZN’s graph of the week shows that those two questions have very different answers: