Can We Stop A More Brutal World?
Humanity Needs to Say No!
A reminder for new readers. That Was The Week collects the best writing on critical issues in tech, startups, and venture capital. I selected the articles because they are of interest. The selections often include things I entirely disagree with. But they express common opinions, or they provoke me to think. The articles are only snippets. Click on the headline to go to the original. I express my point of view in the editorial and the weekly video below.
This Week’s Video and Podcast:
Content this week from @kteare, @ajkeen, @noahpinion, @broderick, @kantrowitz, @aagave, @blaiseaguera, @NorvigPeter, @amir, @mikeloukides, @fchollet, @jasonlk, @mslopatto, @mvpeers, @jeffjohnroberts, @ron_miller, @frederici, @DavidSacks, @RayDalioEditorial
Editorial
This was a week when it was almost impossible to escape politics, particularly world politics. The barbaric, medieval images coming out of Israel on Shabbat Saturday morning, at the start of the Jewish New Year, were both sickening and, at the same time, sadly, not surprising.
This was in a week where my media consumption included the interview Graham Alison did at the All In Summit and a similar couple with Ray Dalio and Larry Summers. All three focus on the current and future world order. The interview with Alison is this week’s Video of the Week.
So, it is time for me to stand back and ask some big questions. It is also time to begin to try and answer them. It all starts with Graham Alison’s book “Destined For War” and Ray Dalio’s essay this week - “Another Step Toward International War.” These are two super-intelligent big thinkers focusing on the coming end of US global supremacy, leading to a possible or even likely global conflict. Then there is Noah Smith’s “You're not going to like what comes after Pax Americana,” one of this week’s Essay of the Week.
Alison refers to Thucydide’s Trap. That describes an apparent tendency towards war when an emerging power threatens to displace an existing great power as a regional or international hegemon.
Weakening great powers allows opponents to take advantage of the new situation. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union are historical examples. But broader global conflict becomes possible when the one great power declines. The decline of Great Britain from the late 19th century, alongside the rise of Germany and the USA, is an example. It led to the removal of the pound as the world’s reserve currency, two world wars, and the bankruptcy of Great Britain. Much of the period since 1945 was about the US replacing Britain worldwide.
Dalio sees these trends as inevitable repeating cycles.
“Based on the perspective I have gained from studying history and from my over 50 years of experiences betting on what’s likely to happen, it seems to me that the Israel-Hamas war is another classic, unfortunate step toward a more violent and encompassing international war. In other words, it’s part of a larger war dynamic. Anyone who has studied history and is watching what is going on should be concerned about 1) these conflicts moving from being contained to being all-out brutal wars that continue until the other side is clearly defeated, and 2) these conflicts spreading to involve more countries. In order to gain perspective on how these pre-war stages in the Big Cycle unfold, I suggest that you study other pre-war periods, such as those in the two years prior to World War I and II in both Europe and Asia. What is happening now sure looks a lot like that.”
“…these two hot wars (the Israel-Hamas war and the Russia-Ukraine war) are not just between the parties directly involved in them—these wars are part of the bigger great power conflicts to shape the new world order—and they will have big effects on the countries who are allies and enemies of the four sides in these two seemingly irreconcilable wars.”
In his interview, Alison also paints the world as a USA-China-driven set of conflicts (listen to it, it’s short and powerful).
He and Dalio both believe that a global war is not inevitable:
”To push the point home, I want to make clear that I believe that we are in that brief part of the Big Cycle when the conflicts are heating up and the leading powers still have the ability to choose between crossing that line into brutal war or pulling back from the brink.”
After documenting the wars between stats that are beginning to break out, Noah Smith weighs in with this:
”These are just a few signs of an unraveling global order. Pax Americana is in an advanced state of decay, if not already fully dead. A fully multipolar world has emerged, and people are belatedly realizing that multipolarity involves quite a bit of chaos.”
Smith states that the relative peace of the post-war years was due to US supremacy:
”But the simplest and most parsimonious explanation for the Long Peace is that American power kept the peace. If countries sent their armies into other countries, there was always the looming possibility that America and its allies could intervene to stop them — as they did in the Korean War in 1950, the Gulf War of 1991, Bosnia in 1992 in Bosnia, Kosovo in 1999, and so on. Soviet power occasionally helped as well, as when the USSR helped India intervene to end the Bangladeshi genocide in 1971. But overall the Soviet Union was a revisionist power that was more likely to start wars than end them, while the U.S. and its allies, being the most powerful bloc, preferred to keep the status quo.”
The decline of the policeman is enabling the rise of mischief makers.
”Like tigers eyeing their prey. The world is starting to revert into a jungle, where the strong prey upon the weak, and where there is a concomitant requirement that every country build up its own strength; if your neighbor is a tiger, you should probably grow some claws of your own. Old scores that had to wait can now be settled. Disputed bits of territory can now be retaken. Natural resources can now be seized. There are many reasons for countries to fight each other, and now one of the biggest reasons not to fight has been removed.”
These three writers all make compelling reading, if also depressing.
My point of view starts with human agency. History is not already written and is being played out like a script. The key factor today is the US. The global power with the most compelling reason for peace. Leadership includes managing decline. And US leadership for the next decades will be about managing the transition to a new world order. That can be done in many ways. One of those ways is to resist change. All of the others involve embracing change and managing it. The relationship with China, India, and the rising world manifest in the BRICS will be central to that.
I do not want a world war. I certainly do not want to fight China. I believe national self-interest and global peace are aligned. I also think, along with Alison, that China’s economy is unstoppable.
But if the rhetoric of today, positing the rest of the world as either enemies or weak allies survives, then we are talking ourselves into mass slaughter based on inhuman values.
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When Hamas slaughtered innocents on the last Shabbat, it was an act of extreme barbarism. If Alsion Dalio and Noah Smith are to be believed, this behavior is simply the opening scenes of the same thing on a mass scale.
In 2023 we can say no, as most of us have this week. And we can say it to our governments when they scapegoat “others” (immigrants, China) to explain their failings. Pointing the finger at others and wanting to fight them is, at the root, a barbaric thought leading to barbaric actions.
Wanting to police content is part of the same set of thoughts. In a piece announcing the failure of content moderation - This is what an unmoderated internet looks like - Ryan Broderick writes:
“And so I think I’m ready to finally face the facts: Community moderation, in almost every form, should be considered a failed project. Our public digital spaces, as they currently exist, cannot be fixed and the companies that control them cannot, or, more likely, will not ensure their safety or quality at a scale that matters anymore. And the main tactic for putting pressure on these companies — reporters and researchers highlighting bad moderation and trust and safety failures and the occasional worthless congressional hearing playing whack-a-mole with offensive content — has amounted to little more than public policy LARPing. We are right back where we started in 2012, but in much more online world. And the companies that built that world have abandoned us to go play with AI.”
This was triggered by X’s “failure” to moderate some of the more horrific content and opinions following last Saturday’s events. I do think Ryan is right about the inevitable failure of content moderation. But he regrets it. I see it differently. I want to know even the most disgusting views so that I can know them and rebut them. There really is no such thing as content moderation. That is when one side wants to erase the other.
Twitter has, for me, justified its existence this week. The wonderful writing of Isaac Saul would not have been made available to the 16 million people who read it. Seeing other views, many horrific, is a price worth paying for the good stuff. I do not want content moderation. I want open conversation. He ended with this human reaction to events. And, in the face of some inhuman acts, a human reaction is what we all need this week:
“Am I pro-Israel or pro-Palestine? I have no idea.
I'm pro-not-killing-civilians.
I'm pro-not-trapping-millions-of-people-in-open-air-prisons.
I'm pro-not-shooting-grandmas-in-the-back-of-the-head.
I'm pro-not-flattening-apartment-complexes.
I'm pro-not-raping-women-and-taking-hostages.
I'm pro-not-unjustly-imprisoning-people-without-due-process.
I'm pro-freedom and pro-peace
and pro-all the things we never see in this conflict anymore.
Whatever this is, I want none of it.”
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