My first heretical disagreement with Peter Zeihan
And there will be one more to follow
Peter Zeihan is smart and well-informed. I learn a lot from his videos. But he promotes two ideas I disagree with. He thinks…
- Military power is important
- Global demographic aging will cause a productivity, trade, and standard-of-living apocalypse
His views seem to be the orthodox position. Most people seem to agree with him. But I don’t. I’m a heretic about both contentions.
This is the first of a two-part series where I provide my heretical counter-arguments against Zeihan’s concerns.
In this article, I will counter the idea that military power is important.
In my second article, I will debunk Zeihan’s concern about a productivity collapse due to aging populations. I will show how and why productivity will continue to rise.
As a bonus heresy, I will also debunk a non-Zeihan claim, that a Universal Basic Income (UBI) will be needed to compensate for job losses caused by increased automation.
I think the future will be vastly better than Zeihan assumes, but without the need for UBI.
I will also argue that a widespread acceptance that centralized military forces are impotent — as in mostly useless — could make things improve even faster.
Read, set, go…
Is military power a key factor in world affairs?
I ask a crucial question. When was the last time any country made a clear profit from using military power? There are two points to consider…
- True conquest has become nearly impossible.
- Retaliation against attacks has become cheap and easy (what you can do to others, they can do to you)
The truth of assertion number one began to be known as long ago as 1775 when British regulars were savaged by hit-and-run American colonials hiding behind rocks and trees during the battle of Lexington/Concord.
Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox, continued the demonstration of how powerful irregular guerilla tactics could be during his operations in the Southern theater of the American Revolution. Whereas General Washington constantly risked losing the entire Continental Army during set-piece battles, it was decentralized resistance that ensured Britain would never subdue America. The final conventional victory at Yorktown only served to obscure this underlying reality. However…
The fundamental superiority of decentralized resistance would soon be clarified in 1808, when Napolean gagged trying to counter guerilla tactics in Spain. Indeed, this was when the term guerilla was born.
The difficulty of lasting conquest has only become more obvious as technology has further shifted the advantage in favor of asymmetric defense. Even Hitler, who was supposedly trying to conquer the world, didn’t try to hold all of France. It wasn’t worth the cost. He also knew that the only way he could hold the Soviet Union was to exterminate most of the populace and enslave the rest. Otherwise, asymmetric guerilla warfare would have bled the Reich for decades.
Things have only gotten worse for centralized military power since then.
- Decentralized resistance stymied the United States in Vietnam
- Primitive tribesmen in Afghanistan defeated the Soviet Union by using cheap missiles to destroy expensive tanks and aircraft
- Insurgents in Iraq thwarted the United States by using cheap remote-controlled roadside explosive devices. In the end, peace was achieved via bribery rather than military power.
Even the current war between Russia and Ukraine fits my narrative. It should have been easy for huge Russia to conquer small Ukraine. Instead, it’s been a war of grinding attrition.
The influx of expensive Western aid has obscured the fact that most of the attrition has been caused by cheaper missiles and drones destroying more expensive Russian equipment.
Of course, some might point to Crimea as a recent example of successful conquest, but Crimea had been part of Russia for a long time previously. Did it make that much difference to the Crimeans whether they were part of Russia or Ukraine? If it had mattered, do you doubt that the Crimeans could have expelled the Russians using the same remote-controlled technology the Iraqi insurgents deployed against the U.S.?
It might also be said that NATO successfully used centralized military power to prevent genocide in Kosovo. That’s a good counterargument, but I ask myself two questions about it…
- Does that one positive result justify decades of extravagant military spending by the U.S. and Europe? And/or…
- Might an equally good result have been achieved by arming the Kosovo populace with defensive weapons, including the same kind of remote-controlled explosive devices used in Iraq?
Indeed, the same question could be asked about Ukraine. What if all the aid had been in the form of those cheap, remote-controlled explosive devices? Might the defensive result have been better achieved through those cheaper means, and with more of Ukraine’s cities and homes left standing?
I stand by my claim. I don’t think military power achieves very much anymore, and it certainly isn’t worth what we spend on it. Instead…
It’s economic and cultural power that matters.
For example, the government of Iran hates the U.S. government, but the people of Iran seem to love Americans. Why? Because…
The Iranian people watch our movies and TV shows via satellite, and aspire to the life they see in our art.
If the Iranian theocracy ever falls it won’t be because of the U.S. Military Industrial Intelligence Complex (MIIC). It will be because of the American-loving Iranian people. Millions of Iranians have taken to the streets six different times to protest their government. It’s a simple fact…
We’re never going to invade Iran and overthrow the theocracy, and if we did we would lose the support of the Iranian people that our culture won for us.
In addition, simply attacking Iran to punish them for transgressions real or imagined won’t cause the slightest change in how the Iranian government behaves. It may even make it worse, or provoke terrorist reprisals.
I think Peter Zeihan badly over-estimates the importance of military power. Sadly, he’s not alone. I think nearly everyone gets this wrong. The result is bad policies and wasted resources. The system that claims to protect us makes us less safe by generating unneeded enemies. We are also less wealthy than we would otherwise be if we stopped wasting money on a useless military establishment.
My next article will give my heretical refutation to Peter Zeihan’s claim that we face a productivity, trade, and quality-of-life apocalypse due to an aging world population. I will also take a swing at Universal Basic Income, and then tie those two issues together with the military question to prophecy a world that will be vastly better than today.
Thank you to John McAlister for making my work possible. None of my heretical opinions should be confused with his more sober and wise positions.
Copyright © Perry Willis 2024
Perry Willis is the co-founder of Downsize DC and the Zero Aggression Project. He co-created, with Jim Babka, the Read the Bills Act, the One Subject at a Time Act, and the Write the Laws Act, all of which have been introduced in Congress. He is a past Executive Director of the National Libertarian Party and was the campaign manager for Harry Browne for President in 2000.
