The real problem with the Trump-Biden choice
Plus: Secret US-Israel arms transfers, AI oracles, NATO in Ukraine, busting an AI safety delusion, Google’s Gemini versus India’s Modi, and more!
Super Tuesday has now come and gone, leaving in its wake the harsh reality of this year’s presidential election: In eight months, America will have to choose between an 81-year-old who sometimes seems older than his age and a 78-year-old who sometimes seems younger than his age—like, 12, maybe 13 years old.
Not surprisingly, polls show that there is less enthusiasm within each party for its candidate than there was during the last Biden-Trump matchup. But that doesn’t mean voters aren’t revved up about the election. True, an NBC poll found that 62 percent of Biden voters say they’re more anti-Trump than pro-Biden—but it’s possible to be really, really anti-Trump, and a lot of Biden voters are. In a polarized country awash in “negative partisanship,” you don’t have to love your party’s candidate in order to be gripped by a paralyzing fear that your party’s candidate will lose.
If you suffer from this syndrome, I have some free therapeutic advice: Consider the possibility that whether your candidate wins doesn’t matter as much as you think. And I mean that in the most momentous sense possible: Maybe when it comes to keeping the world from spiraling toward catastrophe (and, lest you doubt my bona fides here, averting the apocalypse is literally part of NZN’s mission statement), neither Trump nor Biden is up to the job.
There—feel better? Not yet? Well, give me a few more paragraphs.
The source text for this sermon is a piece in Tuesday’s Financial Times written by historian Adam Tooze. It begins:
Looking to the future much of the world is frozen in horror at the prospect that American democracy will, by this time next year, deliver a second Donald Trump administration, hell-bent on tearing up the international order. But what about Joe Biden’s record on that score? Clearly, the manners of the Biden administration are less disruptive. It does not indulge in climate denial. It plays nicely with Europe. But…
After the “But,” Tooze notes, among other things, that under Biden “the US has poured resources into Ukraine and the Middle East, but is unable and unwilling to broker a satisfactory peace.” And “in relation to China the Biden team has, if anything, escalated the tension” even beyond the level that Trump carried it to.
In critiquing Biden’s prolific and often unilateral use of sanctions and other economic weapons against China (and against other adversaries), Tooze notes an irony that is typically noted in the context of American military interventions: “Washington is seeking to defend what it likes to call the rules-based international order with a series of unruly self-interested interventions.”
And Tooze has an interesting explanation for this economic variant of America’s rules-based hypocrisy: It grows out of a dawning pessimism—the waning of the post-Cold-War belief that an economically interconnected world is a fundamentally good thing. National security adviser Jake Sullivan and other policymakers of his generation “pay lip service to global prosperity, but see globalization as undermining America’s middle class, opening the door to Trump and propelling the rise of China.”
The problem with this Gen X critique of globalization (and this is me talking, not Tooze) isn’t that it’s wrong on the specifics. Free trade has indeed hurt some American workers—by sending American jobs to China and other low-wage countries—and therefore has helped Trump; and certainly it has helped China. The problem, rather, lies in America’s atavistic reaction to the resulting challenge—a reaction that was less surprising in the case of the avowedly nationalist and proudly primitive Trump than in the case of Biden.
The reaction involves:
(1) concluding that the “rise of China” is inherently bad (a judgment that, when formed in an economic context, finds unfortunate synergy with comparable views in the national security realm, exacerbating the Blob’s already robust penchant for threat inflation); and
(2) relying heavily on unilateral economic weapons as a way to address globalization’s bad side effects—and matching that with economic warfare in the national security realm, not to mention gratuitous military muscle flexing in China’s neighborhood. (Did you know the US has now sent troops to the Kinmen islands, which are Taiwanese territory but more than 100 miles from Taiwan and only a few miles from mainland China?)
Meanwhile, the thought of actually sitting down and having sustained discussions with China about working out our differences seems like a quaint idea from a simpler time. More alien still is the idea of building international institutions to systematize such rationality. Indeed, the US has abetted the decay of multilateral fora—like the adjudicatory tribunals of the World Trade Organization—that for one bright shining post-Cold-War moment were actually resolving international disputes.
Even if the confrontational approach to China practiced by both Trump and Biden doesn’t lead to war, the next worst thing—a prolonged Cold War—is something we can’t afford, given the number of non-zero-sum problems the world’s nations need to collectively address: climate change, pandemics, the proliferation of nuclear and biological weapons, the militarization of outer space, threats posed by AI, and so on. These dangers, if unaddressed, could in various combinations prove truly catastrophic.
“Non-zero-sum” (the root of this newsletter’s name) is a concept that never deeply penetrated the character of either the Trump or Biden White Houses. Sure, the basic idea—that the world is full of non-zero-sum games, and you should seek win-win outcomes and avoid lose-lose outcomes—is one that Sullivan and others in Biden’s administration can recite. But the actual harnessing of international non-zero-sum dynamics is, for them, typically in the service of some zero-sum confrontation; cooperation is something you do with some countries to thwart other countries. Biden adviser Daleep Singh writes that the US should “attract non-aligned countries into its orbit with positive inducements, and in doing so… gradually isolate China before any conflict unfolds.” (Memo to Singh: Isolation has been known to cause conflict.)
I suspect that if you confronted Sullivan and other Biden officials with Tooze’s diagnosis—that they’re undermining the rules-based order because they “no longer believe in the optimistic historical vision that once framed those rules”—they’d insist that there’s a kind of optimism they retain: faith in the power of America to spread democracy—a distinctively neoconservative version of American exceptionalism, most recently trumpeted by Biden in his State of the Union address. But this claim rings hollow when, with American democracy in disarray, we can’t promulgate our model by example and instead resort to various forms of coercion, none of which seem to work.
There is another kind of optimism, rooted in what I guess you could call a kind American exceptionalism. Here the idea is that America is uniquely positioned, by virtue of power and geographic location and other assets, including ethnic diversity, to draw the world’s nations into a true global community, which then addresses the many challenges nations collectively face.
But this will involve reviving a virtue that has more or less vanished from American foreign policy: humility. We’ll have to give up on reshaping other countries in our political and cultural image (which often backfires anyway), and concentrate instead on pursuing interests we share with them. If we accurately perceive those interests and truly grasp their importance, there will then be enough impetus to achieve the elusive pre-requisite for pursuing them effectively: putting war—both hot wars and cold wars—aside.
Doing this will take a kind of revolution—an uprooting of paradigms that dominate the US foreign policy establishment, a transformation of political discourse. And that won’t be accomplished before November or for that matter during the subsequent four years. It’s a bigger project than that—and, besides, it won’t find sympathy in the next occupant of the White House. Neither Trump nor Biden could abide the required national humility. And neither man has a serious interest in international governance (even though, in a deeply non-zero-sum world, it is the only way to fully serve the American interests that Trump claims unswerving devotion to).
This doesn’t mean one candidate isn’t better than the other, or that one candidate couldn’t be much, much worse for the country than the other. I have my views on that, and I’ll vote accordingly. But it does mean there are better ways to spend the next eight months than obsessively following the polls or soaking up the self-righteousness in your particular election-year echo chamber. Namely: Spend the time thinking about, and talking about, what has to happen if we’re to have a better choice the next time around. —RW
NZN’s graph of the week shows that America isn’t the only country afflicted by a crisis of trust in public institutions.
Two AI updates:
Inflection AI released a new version of its Pi chatbot—which, according to prominent AI watcher Ethan Mollick, is now “near GPT-4 class” and, unlike ChatGPT, “aims to be your friend, not your assistant.” Actually, Inflection positions Pi more as a combination of friend and assistant, a chatbot that weds emotional intelligence with regular intelligence. But Pi definitely has a different vibe from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude. And who knows—maybe Pi could indeed be, as Mollick suggests, “the road to HER.” Reid Hoffman, co-founder of Inflection, was on the Nonzero podcast in January, talking about Pi and, more broadly, AI’s upsides and downsides. Inflection’s other co-founder, Mustafa Suleyman, is the author of The Coming Wave, a book NZN has touted as doing an unusually good job of sizing up the downsides.
Get ready for oracular AIs—and maybe hordes of them. It’s long been known that aggregating the predictions of human experts—harnessing “the wisdom of the crowd”—yields better results than relying on individual experts. A new study finds that a crowd of 12 large language models is about as accurate as a crowd comprising hundreds of human forecasters. The LLMs were asked questions that had been posed to humans at a forecasting tournament, including: “Will Bitcoin reach $40,000 before January 1, 2024?” and “Will Hamas lose control of Gaza before 2024?” Since generating and aggregating LLM predictions is fairly cheap, the researchers expect wide application of the technique “to predict future events in politics, economics, technology, and other real-world subjects.” No word yet from the LLMs on whether that prediction is accurate.
For two more AI updates, see below.
The Biden administration has apparently been using a loophole in government regulations to keep arms transfers to Israel out of public view.
John Hudson of the Washington Post reports that more than 100 arms sales to Israel have been made since the Gaza war began. But, he says, only two of the sales had previously been made public, one worth $106 million and the other worth $147.5 million. Each of the other sales fell short of the monetary threshold that requires the White House to notify Congress. As a result, Hudson writes, “the weapons transfers were processed without any public debate.”
The secrecy is particularly questionable in light of the fact that these “sales” were probably paid for by American taxpayers. Each year the US sends $3.3 billion to Israel for defense expenditures with the stipulation that the money be used on American weapons.
Meanwhile, in the West Bank, Israeli settlers continue to build “outposts”—settlements that are illegal not just under international law but under Israeli law—and accompanying roads, and continue to put pressure on Palestinians to vacate their villages. This is all documented in a new Wall Street Journal video titled “Visual Evidence Shows Illegal Settler Construction in West Bank Surging.”
There have long been reports that Ukraine and Russia nearly reached a peace deal only weeks after Putin’s invasion, and this week those reports got their most precise corroboration yet. The Wall Street Journal has obtained a copy of a treaty, drafted by Russian and Ukrainian negotiators in mid-April of 2022, under which Russian troops would have withdrawn from territory taken during the invasion.