This post assumes that leaders can tell the difference between “loyalists” and “war hawks.” Many are loyalists because they think that you are a war hawk, and this just assumes that they wouldn’t just turn on you and join the war hawks. Such a strategy is risky if you don’t want to be couped and killed.
Edit: it also assumes that there are any pure “loyalists” and not solely just war hawks. How do we know that?
The post also assumes that the "hawks" are always bad. A Hawk might be like a pitbull dog. He is scary, requires lot of food and care, neighbours don't like you because of him, but when someone breaks into your house he will be the first to lunge at the intruder.
Who from your side is working countless hours figuring our your plan in case there will be a ground invasion of your country ? Who from your side worked on creating deep bunkers and factories that manufacture million drones ? It is all those Hawks.
Assumes taking away Hawks will lead to peace is a bit like believing taking away guns will lower crime !
My impression is that severe fanaticism was genuinely common in WW2 Japan. There was a low rate of captures relative to kills because they would fight to the death, and when defeat was certain engage in a "banzai charge" or, for officers, commit seppuku. Germany was a very different story, although Hitler wanted those at Stalingrad to fight to the death.
Bingo, Dan Carlin often talks about that in his Hardcore History shows though points out it was common throughout throughout all of history. All Western soldiers vastly preferred fighting in Western Europe because it was "civilized" warfare. The Soviet and Japanese fronts though, to your average Western soldier, were just insane though in different ways. Japanese from the level of fantacism, Eastern front from the level of outright vindictiveness and cruelty of both sides.
There seems to be an internal conflict here. Your position is that most people pretend to go along with the regime out of fear. At the same time your step 2 requires the leader to know how to distinguish the true hardliners from the pretend hardliners. Does the leader have that knowledge? If the leader built the regime and elevated the hardliners himself, maybe he could know most of them. But it the leader simply saw the hardliners grow in power around him, I find it unlikely that he would.
Even if the Iranian leadership gave the US and Israel everything they want, I doubt that the US and Israel would cease being hostile to them. Their choice is probably between: 1) be seen as a traitor and be killed or 2) be seen as a glorious martyr and be killed.
Bingo, that was what Putin rightly learned after the West continued to rebuff and grind Russia down in the 90s when they(Russia ) was genuinely in good faith trying to reconcile and join "Europe". The Iranian leadership isn't stupid, regime change still ends with them hung from the gallows hence you ride the horse you got.
"Why on Earth would you refuse to save your own skin by simply giving the U.S. and Israel what they want?"
What does the US and Israel want? The other day I heard it was unconditional surrender.
Like genuine question here. I have no clue what my sides war aims are.
Maybe I would just conclude that the USA intends to do regime change and whatever danger I face from them I might as well take my chances on surviving.
In both Night of the Long Knives and Romania's crackdown on the Iron Legion, the regime was intent on going to war, so it wasn't a matter of "doves" vs "hawks". It was a faction that came to be regarded as dangerous to the regime. The Soviet Union also did plenty of purging, but few in the west applaud them for doing so.
And in the current situation Iranian leaders disagree on strategy, but most don't want unconditional surrender. Unlike 1945 we aren't going to split the atom on their heads.
What you are missing is why expressions of belief in crazy ideologies become dominant in the first place -- because they are a very good signal of loyalty.
The problem a leader who wants to push back against a theocracy has is that it's damn hard to get henchmen who are personally loyal to you and freethinking enough to be ok with questioning the faith.
---
This is very much speculation but I suspect
that's why you instead see the pattern of leaders first spending decades slowly centralizing power. No doubt at the outset they say this is necessary to let me effectuate change. And they have a point.
The danger is that they need to purge the government of any potential rivals so they also end up purging it of most people who aren't yes men. By the time they are in a position to finally act on their centralized power they have become the problem because they lack the advice and pushback needed.
My problem with this is its assumption that real life can be so neatly described and manipulated.
* All doves and hawks can be easily distinguished
* There will be no false positives and negatives
* Doves will remain loyal and be ruthless
* Hawks won't smell a rat and will cooperate
* Murphy doesn't intervene
The odds that everything will go to plan are slim. Every failure spreads awareness, much as turning on Qaddafi after he gave up his nukes made all other dictators supremely aware of the importance of having nukes. North Korea and Iran certainly learned the lesson.
In effect, it could only work the first or second time it's tried. Every failure decreases the odds of a subsequent success by an order of magnitude. And that increases the odds that the successful dove takeover will be followed by hawks taking over even more ruthlessly.
The flaw in this argument is that the relevant internal enemy isn't simply the ideologically-driven pro-war elements of your own regime. If the price of peace over the past century has always been to surrender oil concessions to the West, to take the West's side in its geopolitical conflicts with Russia, and to go along with the West's support for the aggressive territorial ambitions of the Zionists, then making peace with the West ultimately means having to deal with massive popular opposition to your rule.
One could extend the brutality to oppressing the Iranian people themselves, which is essentially what the Shah did when he instituted the SAVAK secret police with the CIA's help. However, SAVAK was only able to keep a lid on massive popular discontent, not exterminate it. Ultimately, the Shah and the special interests (both domestic and American) that profited from his systematic plundering of Iran couldn't hold onto power as more and more victims of the plundering joined various groups of anti-Western radicals in opposing the Shah's regime in spite of the SAVAK's severe repression of them.
In other words, anti-Western radicalization is not simply a function of a regime's hostile ideology and the influence of those loyal to it; it is a process that is often driven by the West's own imperialistic misbehavior winning new recruits to the anti-Western cause.
This kind of makes me wonder if there’s not a similar approach to be taken with regime change.
The common response to campaigns like Trump’s right now are that it’s impractical to bomb an entire country’s leadership until you’re left with nothing but hawks.
But this belies other instances when we have accomplished similar things with similar types of actors/insurgencies! Most famously, the relentless campaign against Al Qaeda was basically successful! It became a running joke that we were always killing “Al Qaeda’s #2”, but the quiet story there is that we killed off so much of the organization that it largely fell apart and is now a shell of itself.
(Notably, we also seem to have managed to keep the collateral casualties just low enough to avoid creating new recruits for them)
Similarly, in a much less violent example, the 70’s-90’s RICO campaign stamped out most of the American Mob/LCN without spawning a new generation of ever-more vicious Italian-American gangsters, by imposing such a high prosecution rate that joining up was a maximally unattractive job prospect.
To be clear, I absolutely despise our current fascist regime. I want them to stop doing evil things like indiscriminately killing innocent children.
But I do feel like we should be more willing to entertain making the world less safe for evil people. Even if we decide against it, it’s a discussion worth having because of the sheer numbers of lives at stake.
This is Caplan at his most dangerous and most entertaining — taking a morally radioactive scenario, analyzing it with Econ 101 clarity, and explaining it with the calm of someone assembling IKEA furniture. Unsettling and brilliant.
If you succeed, you get peace and infamy, a la Augusto Pinochet, and probably deep, abiding self doubt and guilt. The rest of your life second guessing your decision.
This post assumes that leaders can tell the difference between “loyalists” and “war hawks.” Many are loyalists because they think that you are a war hawk, and this just assumes that they wouldn’t just turn on you and join the war hawks. Such a strategy is risky if you don’t want to be couped and killed.
Edit: it also assumes that there are any pure “loyalists” and not solely just war hawks. How do we know that?
Pretty much this. It's pretty difficult to obtain accurate information about attitudes that people hold in dictatorships.
The post also assumes that the "hawks" are always bad. A Hawk might be like a pitbull dog. He is scary, requires lot of food and care, neighbours don't like you because of him, but when someone breaks into your house he will be the first to lunge at the intruder.
Who from your side is working countless hours figuring our your plan in case there will be a ground invasion of your country ? Who from your side worked on creating deep bunkers and factories that manufacture million drones ? It is all those Hawks.
Assumes taking away Hawks will lead to peace is a bit like believing taking away guns will lower crime !
My impression is that severe fanaticism was genuinely common in WW2 Japan. There was a low rate of captures relative to kills because they would fight to the death, and when defeat was certain engage in a "banzai charge" or, for officers, commit seppuku. Germany was a very different story, although Hitler wanted those at Stalingrad to fight to the death.
Bingo, Dan Carlin often talks about that in his Hardcore History shows though points out it was common throughout throughout all of history. All Western soldiers vastly preferred fighting in Western Europe because it was "civilized" warfare. The Soviet and Japanese fronts though, to your average Western soldier, were just insane though in different ways. Japanese from the level of fantacism, Eastern front from the level of outright vindictiveness and cruelty of both sides.
There seems to be an internal conflict here. Your position is that most people pretend to go along with the regime out of fear. At the same time your step 2 requires the leader to know how to distinguish the true hardliners from the pretend hardliners. Does the leader have that knowledge? If the leader built the regime and elevated the hardliners himself, maybe he could know most of them. But it the leader simply saw the hardliners grow in power around him, I find it unlikely that he would.
This solution wouldn't only apply to the Iranian regime. I can think of at least two others directly involved in the war.
Even if the Iranian leadership gave the US and Israel everything they want, I doubt that the US and Israel would cease being hostile to them. Their choice is probably between: 1) be seen as a traitor and be killed or 2) be seen as a glorious martyr and be killed.
Bingo, that was what Putin rightly learned after the West continued to rebuff and grind Russia down in the 90s when they(Russia ) was genuinely in good faith trying to reconcile and join "Europe". The Iranian leadership isn't stupid, regime change still ends with them hung from the gallows hence you ride the horse you got.
Gaddafi gave up his WMDs and Nato got him killed 8 years later. Other 3rd world regimes surely took notice of that.
The Night of the Long Knives worked wonders.
"Why on Earth would you refuse to save your own skin by simply giving the U.S. and Israel what they want?"
What does the US and Israel want? The other day I heard it was unconditional surrender.
Like genuine question here. I have no clue what my sides war aims are.
Maybe I would just conclude that the USA intends to do regime change and whatever danger I face from them I might as well take my chances on surviving.
In both Night of the Long Knives and Romania's crackdown on the Iron Legion, the regime was intent on going to war, so it wasn't a matter of "doves" vs "hawks". It was a faction that came to be regarded as dangerous to the regime. The Soviet Union also did plenty of purging, but few in the west applaud them for doing so.
And in the current situation Iranian leaders disagree on strategy, but most don't want unconditional surrender. Unlike 1945 we aren't going to split the atom on their heads.
Which war you see connected with the Night of Long Knives?
The one written about in Mein Kampf.
What you are missing is why expressions of belief in crazy ideologies become dominant in the first place -- because they are a very good signal of loyalty.
The problem a leader who wants to push back against a theocracy has is that it's damn hard to get henchmen who are personally loyal to you and freethinking enough to be ok with questioning the faith.
---
This is very much speculation but I suspect
that's why you instead see the pattern of leaders first spending decades slowly centralizing power. No doubt at the outset they say this is necessary to let me effectuate change. And they have a point.
The danger is that they need to purge the government of any potential rivals so they also end up purging it of most people who aren't yes men. By the time they are in a position to finally act on their centralized power they have become the problem because they lack the advice and pushback needed.
My problem with this is its assumption that real life can be so neatly described and manipulated.
* All doves and hawks can be easily distinguished
* There will be no false positives and negatives
* Doves will remain loyal and be ruthless
* Hawks won't smell a rat and will cooperate
* Murphy doesn't intervene
The odds that everything will go to plan are slim. Every failure spreads awareness, much as turning on Qaddafi after he gave up his nukes made all other dictators supremely aware of the importance of having nukes. North Korea and Iran certainly learned the lesson.
In effect, it could only work the first or second time it's tried. Every failure decreases the odds of a subsequent success by an order of magnitude. And that increases the odds that the successful dove takeover will be followed by hawks taking over even more ruthlessly.
This is Caplans worst take since selling tech stocks during the pandemic.
The flaw in this argument is that the relevant internal enemy isn't simply the ideologically-driven pro-war elements of your own regime. If the price of peace over the past century has always been to surrender oil concessions to the West, to take the West's side in its geopolitical conflicts with Russia, and to go along with the West's support for the aggressive territorial ambitions of the Zionists, then making peace with the West ultimately means having to deal with massive popular opposition to your rule.
One could extend the brutality to oppressing the Iranian people themselves, which is essentially what the Shah did when he instituted the SAVAK secret police with the CIA's help. However, SAVAK was only able to keep a lid on massive popular discontent, not exterminate it. Ultimately, the Shah and the special interests (both domestic and American) that profited from his systematic plundering of Iran couldn't hold onto power as more and more victims of the plundering joined various groups of anti-Western radicals in opposing the Shah's regime in spite of the SAVAK's severe repression of them.
In other words, anti-Western radicalization is not simply a function of a regime's hostile ideology and the influence of those loyal to it; it is a process that is often driven by the West's own imperialistic misbehavior winning new recruits to the anti-Western cause.
This kind of makes me wonder if there’s not a similar approach to be taken with regime change.
The common response to campaigns like Trump’s right now are that it’s impractical to bomb an entire country’s leadership until you’re left with nothing but hawks.
But this belies other instances when we have accomplished similar things with similar types of actors/insurgencies! Most famously, the relentless campaign against Al Qaeda was basically successful! It became a running joke that we were always killing “Al Qaeda’s #2”, but the quiet story there is that we killed off so much of the organization that it largely fell apart and is now a shell of itself.
(Notably, we also seem to have managed to keep the collateral casualties just low enough to avoid creating new recruits for them)
Similarly, in a much less violent example, the 70’s-90’s RICO campaign stamped out most of the American Mob/LCN without spawning a new generation of ever-more vicious Italian-American gangsters, by imposing such a high prosecution rate that joining up was a maximally unattractive job prospect.
To be clear, I absolutely despise our current fascist regime. I want them to stop doing evil things like indiscriminately killing innocent children.
But I do feel like we should be more willing to entertain making the world less safe for evil people. Even if we decide against it, it’s a discussion worth having because of the sheer numbers of lives at stake.
This is Caplan at his most dangerous and most entertaining — taking a morally radioactive scenario, analyzing it with Econ 101 clarity, and explaining it with the calm of someone assembling IKEA furniture. Unsettling and brilliant.
Eventually all liberals and libertarians have their come to Jesus moment when they meet the Tamerlane principle. Awesome Bryan, good to see you here
Well said, sir. Bryan Caplan - author of the latest edition of "The Prince."
Isn’t this basically what Stalin did? Of course, he was naive for believingHitler, but it kept him in power until a natural death.
If you succeed, you get peace and infamy, a la Augusto Pinochet, and probably deep, abiding self doubt and guilt. The rest of your life second guessing your decision.
Hard choices.