|
AR
My end-of-year hike culminated in a pause to review Morden Bog
|
|
|
|
2025 December 30
Munich Security Conference 2026: AfD Invited
Deborah Cole
The Munich Security Conference (MSC) has invited lawmakers from Alternative für Deutschland to join its annual gathering of top international defense officials in February.
At MSC 2005, US VP JD Vance lambasted exclusion of the AfD in a speech accusing Germany of stifling free speech. Days before the German general election in February, he also met with AfD co-leader Alice Weidel just but not with then-chancellor Olaf Scholz.
The MSC brings together heads of state, government ministers, and military leaders from around the world for a weekend of public addresses and private consultations. Its current leader is former German ambassador to the US and UK Wolfgang Ischinger.
MSC spokesperson: "The MSC decides independently on invitations to its events."
AR The AfD is pro-MAGA and pro-Putin, so it should not be indulged in polite civil society. Ischinger and the MSC have a duty to maintain solidarity with the global community of democracies and to show due respect for the international rules-based order.
Promoting the AfD would risk spoiling all we've achieved over decades in Europe and handing the initiative to barbaric authoritarians. That said, Europe's incarnation as the EU is in dire need of reform to keep up with the emerging global Zeitgeist.
|
|
The White House / US Navy
Trump class battleship USS Defiant
|
|
|
|
2025 December 23
Battleships Are Back
The War Zone
President Donald Trump has rolled out plans for new Trump class large surface combatants for the US Navy. These are to be armed with a wide array of missiles as well as electromagnetic railguns, laser directed energy weapons, and more. Trump says the goal is to build at least two of these battleships as the centerpiece of a new Golden Fleet.
US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth: "American strength is back on the world stage, and the announcement of the Golden Fleet, anchored by new battleships, the biggest and most lethal ever, .. marks a generational commitment to American sea power across the entire department."
Specification:
★ 30,000−40,000 ton displacement
★ Intermediate-Range Conventional Prompt Strike (IRCPS) hypersonic missiles
★ Laser directed-energy weapons
★ Nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missiles (SLCM-N)
★ Three Vertical Launch System (VLS) arrays
★ Multiple turreted electromagnetic railguns
★ Command and control with unspecified AI-driven capabilities
US Navy Secretary John Phelan: "Our adversaries will know, when the Trump-class USS Defiant appears on the horizon, American victory at sea is inevitable."
AR What an amazing Christmas present for war nuts everywhere!
|
|
NATO
German tanks stand guard on the Eastern Front: NATO Multinational Battle Group Lithuania
|
|
|
|
2025 Winter Solstice
Religion
Kwame Anthony Appiah
For the Romans, religion was about doing the right thing in the right way. What they encountered abroad were, in their eyes, more or less eccentric versions of cultic life.
After the empire became Christian, the Romans claimed to possess the truth. When European Christendom began confronting unfamiliar worlds through exploration and conquest, the traffic with ancient cultures forced reflection on what counted as true religion.
European scholars did their best to treat disparate systems of practice and thought as members of a class. The meaning attached to practices was vague. A sharp division between sacred and profane was undermined by countless ethnographies.
Traditional religions aim at explanation, prediction, and control. Where science posited impersonal forces, traditional thought posited personal ones. What Europeans wanted to call religion was a pragmatic explanatory framework.
Think about how referring expressions work. Causal theories of reference explain why our words can target the same class of object even when our conception of it shifts. A word continues to refer so long as it stands in the right causal relation to the entity that gives rise to its use.
In the historical and social realm, the things we name are doubly human products, being products first of our collective activity, then of our collective description. Many philosophers of language call such entities social kinds.
Religion belongs to that subcategory of social kinds that living people apply to themselves. Classifications and people classified reshape one another. Categories create kinds.
The larger truth is that we navigate the world with models that merely approximate it. The map may not be the territory, but the sciences advance through such tolerable falsehoods. Their worth lies in the utility of their results.
Religion still orders law and policy, directs research, and shapes the inner lives of those who use it. For the religionist, it continues to name a space of meaning.
AR Good point − the word "religion" denotes a modern and rather artificial category or kind.
Today, religion may be something with primitive roots and partisan (even eccentric or extremist) modern expressions, but in previous centuries it denoted a coloring or tendency of life and thought so pervasive and intangible as to seem natural and given.
The contrast with science and secular life is modern.
2025 December 18
Putin's Next Target
Paul Mason
Donald Trump told Europeans they are on their own in the deterrence of Russian aggression.
NATO secretary general Mark Rutte: "We must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured."
Militarily, Europe is strong enough to deter Putin. But our fragmenting social cohesion, mistrust in the institutions of democracy, and complacent political class worry me. Defeating an enemy is about removing their will to fight as well as their means to fight.
Faced with Putin's aggression, European NATO is all we have.
AR The UK is vulnerable to hybrid warfare until the threat is more widely understood among voters. Europe is vulnerable until its national leaders do more to demonstrate that our unity is implacable. To strengthen NATO, we need more economic integration.
2025 December 17
Western Democracy
Rafael Behr
Vladimir Putin restored order and national self-esteem to Russia, but not political freedom.
Putin sees liberal democracy as stupid and weak. It submits its rulers to the contradictory caprices of dumb voters. The way to accelerate its failure is to amplify those contradictions, nurture division, and accelerate polarization.
All divergence of opinion is ripe for radicalization via the algorithms of social media. Anything that inflames the social tissue that holds multicultural societies together can be used to attack the democratic immune system.
Putin's export of chaos can involve incursions over NATO borders with drones, ships, and submarines. It features cyber-attacks on infrastructure, arson, and sabotage. The more insidious threat is pollution of democratic discourse.
Ideology is not the prime vector for sabotage. Political commitment and activism can be less useful than apathy and disengagement. The most toxic substance is cynicism. Democracy itself starts to be dismissed as a sham.
Putin sees that democracy is easily manipulated by elites to legitimize plunder. Post-Soviet Russians were tricked by the great lie of political freedom. That lie was a rhetorical patina on the western conspiracy to diminish Russia.
This is the resentment that fuels Putin's hostility. Instead of authoritarian regimes crumbling because their captive subjects craved freedom, it will be demoralized citizens of failing liberal societies turning to strong leaders for order.
Dictators underestimate the resilience of societies governed by law and institutions.
AR This seems a sound analysis. Putin may win a few tactical victories − such as Brexit and Trump − but he can't win the long game. We just need to stay strong and hold out.
|
|
|
|
|
|
2025 December 16
The Truth Physics Can No Longer Ignore
Adam Frank
Physicists aim to understand living things as machines. But a mystery is unfolding in every living being that challenges basic assumptions.
Reductionism is not the only way to think about things. In complex systems, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Once particles come together in organisms, particle physics is not enough.
A living body is a dynamic pattern playing out over time. The patterns that make up life are self-organized. Living systems both create and maintain themselves in a strange loop.
Life is the only system in the universe that uses information for its own purposes. A robot follows a program, but life is both agentic and autonomous. Analyzing life as a complex system may help.
Large language models may or may not achieve general intelligence or even become conscious. The best way to assess such claims is to study life.
The study of life opens a path for the future of physics on a level playing field with life science.
AR I read this piece as a pendant to my book Psy‑Phy.
European Decline
Anton Jäger
Europe has been provincialized. The region has been decaying and may be at risk of civilizational erasure.
A reckoning with European decline can give rise to a healthier approach to the present. After a century of Europe in charge, it can free Europeans of a heavy burden.
Brussels no longer suffers from denial. Yet many of the remedies in circulation today are likely to aggravate the disease. We need a new politics of decline.
Europe needs a break with the austerity fetish. EU technocrats are the Taliban of neoliberalism in an age that has declared it obsolete.
Europe needs conscious centralization and pooling of sovereignty. Fragmentation held sway for too long as it slid into ever deeper dependence on the United States.
Europe should heed Britain. In the postwar world, as its empire was crumbling, Britain opted to become butler to the United States, forgoing independence for a special relationship.
Europe need not become a supersized Britain. It can shed its delusions of grandeur. It can play the game even if it no longer gets to be the star player.
Europe can become a pleasant public allotment in the suburbs of the new global order.
AR As a European senior citizen, I can befriend this prospect.
|
|
|
|
2025 December 15
A Viable America
The New York Times
The United States won the Cold War with a broad continuity of policy between Republican and Democratic administrations. We could not hope to win an ideological struggle against Communist adversaries if we were faithless to our own ideals. Shared prosperity was vital.
This is not the approach of the Trump administration. President Trump believes in cutting deals, not sharing values; in making money, not winning friends; in hard power, not soft power. He is indifferent to the distinction between despotism and democracy.
Russia seeks to annex a neighbor. China is eyeing regional hegemony and expanding its arsenals. A Chinese attack on Taiwan would push the world into an economic crisis. A Russian attack on a NATO member state would put Europe and America on a global war footing.
Arsenals alone did not win the Cold War. Just as important were the tools of soft power. Respectful consultation among allies. Mutually beneficial trading ties. Fidelity to democratic ideals. Strategic firmness matched with diplomatic flexibility. Patience.
If the United States is on the cusp of a new Cold War, these will be the tools we will require. We cannot afford the consequences of a world in which dictators can aggress at will. Preventing that requires leaders with wisdom and vision.
AR America without allies becomes a rogue nation. Europe without the EU becomes a crazy quilt of unviable states. Russia without Putin becomes a potentially civilized state. China without socialism becomes less viable. Americans must choose allies wisely.
2025 December 14
America Needs Allies
The New York Times
The Tomahawk cruise missile can travel over 1,600 km to deliver 450 kg of explosives onto a target. In June, the military fired 30 of them to destroy nuclear facilities in Iran. With threats growing worldwide, the United States and its allies are short of Tomahawks.
Last year, the United States was close to a deal to co-produce Tomahawks at a factory in Japan, potentially doubling production of the missiles. US officials said expanding production abroad would damage the US economy and risk the US technological edge. The deal has now gone cold.
The United States has a 17% share of global manufacturing. China has close to 28%. It is acquiring advanced weapons systems and equipment many times faster than America is. One Chinese shipyard can build more than all American builders combined.
The United States risks being overtaken militarily by a rising industrial powerhouse. History shows such competitions between rising powers and established ones often end in catastrophic wars. The United States needs to rethink its approach to alliances.
For too long, many allies have outsourced their own protection to the United States, but an alliance of the United States with Japan, South Korea, Canada, Australia, the European Union, and others can match China. Democracies need to collaborate far more fully.
In a world where America is no longer the dominant superpower, the United States needs to reassure those with shared values. President Trump is undermining the foundations of US alliances when the United States needs all the friends it can get.
AR Let's not let a drama become a tragedy. The archvillain Putin has already saddled us with Brexit and Trump, but we needn't compound those plot twists by persisting in error.
|
|
NATO
NATO secretary general Mark Rutte: "NATO is a defensive alliance. We will remain a defensive alliance, but make no mistake,
we are ready and willing to do what it takes to protect our 1 billion people and secure our territory."
|
|
2026-01-01
