NZNet Digest: How Trump's war is backfiring
It's fueling antisemitism and hardening the regime. Plus: Is China AGI-pilled? Are books dead? America's holy warriors. And more!
This is the second issue of NZNet Digest, a collection of highlights from NonZero Network member newsletters and other worthwhile media outlets. Paid subscribers to the NonZero Newsletter can get a 50 percent discount on an annual subscription to any NZNet member newsletter.
Which leads to some local news: NZNet will expand next week when The Beinart Notebook, Peter Beinart’s excellent Substack, officially joins the network. So let’s start there:
Last week, a Marine Corps veteran named Brian McGinnis made headlines by shouting “America does not want to send its sons and daughters to war for Israel” during a US Senate hearing. In a video op-ed, Peter Beinart offers some thoughts on why this should worry American Jews:
What this Marine Corps veteran was saying has actually become the mainstream public understanding of why the US did go to war, that it was pushed into it by Israel. And there’s a significant kernel of truth to that. And this is happening in a moment in which real antisemitism is already rising…
It’s rising partly just because all forms of bigotry are now rising as American liberal democracy fails, and this kind of authoritarian ethno-nationalism rises. But it’s also rising because of this specific claim that America has been pushed into wars by Israel with the support of large Jewish donors like Miriam Adelson and Jewish organizations like AIPAC. And if you wanted to supercharge that antisemitism, nothing–nothing–could have supercharged it more than what we have seen right now.
Peter expanded on this subject in a conversation with Bob on the NonZero Podcast this week. (On Thursday of this week we’ll post a conversation with Iranian-born commentator and author Hooman Majd about ways the Iran war could conclude—or fail to conclude.)
A number of observers have suggested that Trump thought “decapitating” the Iranian regime--killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other top officials—would empower an “Iranian Delcy Rodriguez,” a new leader who, like Venezuela’s new leader, would prove pliable. In an interview with Novara Media, Iran expert Vali Nasr drove home how far Trump was from being right. The segment begins with a question about Ali Khamenei’s refusal to authorize the development of long-range ballistic missiles.
Interviewer: Many of our viewers and listeners are familiar with the fact that Iran didn’t develop nuclear weapons because Khamenei was a handbrake on the development of an explicitly weapons-based nuclear program. But… you’re saying that Khamenei [also] stopped a missile program that would have potentially been able to go beyond the Eastern Mediterranean, maybe even to Western Europe?
Vali Nasr: Yes. I mean, in a way, he was a hardliner—he was anti-American, he was not a friend of the West. But he also was far less a risk taker and far less confrontational than what’s coming after him. I mean, we’ll see how his son will be, but it’s very clear that… the IRGC [Revolutionary Guard] leaders that Israel eliminated were more—and this is a comparative term of course—more moderate than the ones that replaced them. The new commander of the IRGC is far more risk-taking and dangerous than the one that Israel killed in the supreme leader’s house…
So what Israel has achieved essentially is a generational change in the IRGC. And now at the top of the Iranian system—and contrary to what Trump thinks, that decapitation brings sort of an Iranian version of Ahmed al-Sharaa, the Syrian leader, somebody who’s willing to put a tie on and come and shake hands—the opposite is happening. You’re getting military commanders that are much more willing to take the fight to the United States….
Decapitation always makes military organizations more dangerous because the new generation that comes up actually escalates to prove itself… And ultimately wars shape regimes. And this war, the way the Iranians see it, this is the last war they want to fight with the US.
And now this is turning into a war of survival of Iran—it’s not about the regime any more. So when the United States and Israel bombard Iran’s historical heritage in Isfahan, in Tehran, when President Trump says that the borders of Iran are in question and they may change at the end of this war and ‘I’m going to arm separatists to break away from Iran,’ this becomes an existential moment for the country. And that’s not the point at which you’re going to get more moderate forces coming to the front or pragmatic forces coming to the front. It is the ones that are willing to fight and die and wage a battle to save the country that are going to become the more prominent voices. So for now this war has hardened Iran, which is exactly the opposite of what President Trump imagined—that somehow the war would soften Iran.
Now that she has been fired as Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem is bringing her know-how to a new role as special envoy to Trump’s “Shield of the Americas.” But what is the Shield of the Americas? Derek Davison explains:
Essentially it’s supposed to be a hemispheric coalition against drug trafficking, but in Trumpian fashion it’s neutered right out of the gate by the fact that he’s petulantly refusing to involve any countries that are run by left of center governments. That excludes Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico—three of the four largest economies in Latin America and all seemingly critical would-be participants in any meaningful counternarcotics project.
One thing we know for sure about the long-term consequences of the war with Iran: We don’t know what they’ll be. That point was driven home this week by Mark Leon Goldberg, who observed that “perhaps the most enduring pathology of war is the law of unintended consequences.” Consider, says Goldberg, a connection between a war launched 23 years ago and an attempted act of terrorism this week in New York City, “where two men tried to set off an improvised explosive device outside the Mayor’s residence.”
The 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq may have displaced Saddam Hussein, but it also gave birth to the Islamic State, which at one point controlled a large swath of Iraq and Syria and committed genocide against the Yazidis. Though [ISIS was] defeated on the Iraqi and Syrian battlefields, we are still living with the aftermath of the Islamic State’s rise to power 15 years ago. On Monday, two teenagers who allegedly pledged allegiance to ISIS were arrested for trying to detonate a bomb outside Gracie Mansion. Such are the unpredictable chain reactions that war inevitably sets into motion.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, among others in Silicon Valley, sees the US as engaged in an existential race with China to “artificial general intelligence” or AGI, with the outcome determining whether the world is run by a benign alliance of democracies or an axis of authoritarian autocrats. But is it possible that China hasn’t gotten that memo? On Sinica’s Trivium China Podcast, Kendra Schaefer, a consultant who has been following developments in Chinese technology for two decades, notes that China’s latest Five-Year Plan calls for exploring “development paths for general artificial intelligence” but stops short of suggesting a major government initiative:
Rather than urging tech firms to pursue AGI or indicating that the state will support basic research in AGI and funnel a bunch of state resources into that particular technology or that development direction, it [the Five-Year Plan] uses very cautious language, only calling to explore pathways towards this amorphous thing. And the hedging is really telling, because it suggests Beijing is not really fully convinced that current scaling approaches represent the only or even most viable route to AGI capabilities. And it could also just reflect genuine ambiguity within Chinese policy circles about what AGI actually means…. So, the state acknowledged that the term exists, but I wouldn’t say that they’ve named it as an explicit pursuit.
It’s not your fault if you can’t finish most of the non-fiction books you pick up these days. Instead, argues Paul Bloom in a post from the Small Potatoes archive, the fault lies with “the system”:
Authors are expected to write non-fiction books that are about 70,000 to 100,000 words long. Maybe this was a reasonable length in the past, but now there are too many other distractions in the world, and few of us have the Sitzfleisch anymore for that kind of long book.
You might think the market would correct this. Suppose Omakase dinners were 61 courses. Suppose most movies were over five hours long. People would lose interest, and in response, restaurants and movie studios would ratchet things down, working to give people what they want.
It’s a mystery to me why this sort of correction hasn’t happened with books.
Yes, it’s puzzling. And it may bode ill for some worthwhile forthcoming books.
But, on the brighter side: Every month lots of future readers are born, and this month one of them was named Zoe Elaine Starmans Bloom. Paul sometimes refers to her as his small potato. Congrats to all concerned!
American Prestige podcast co-host Danny Bessner joined a livestream of The Glenn Show last week (as did NonZero alumnus and American Conservative senior editor Andrew Day) to discuss the war on Iran. Bessner told host Glenn Loury that the war is helping to sustain what had already been a sharp drop in support for Israel among Democrats:
Bessner: [Israeli Prime Minister] Netanyahu, I think, overplayed his hand. One of the rules of Israeli politics, until basically the second Obama administration, is that you don’t really piss off an American president, and you don’t really align with one particular political party. I think Netanyahu made the gamble—and I think he turned out to be right—that this was the opportunity to basically take over Gaza and the West Bank… I see that happening. But it came at the expense of bipartisan support for Israel.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio says that Iran is “led by radical clerics” who “make decisions on the basis of theology—their view of theology, which is an apocalyptic one that has to be taken very seriously.” But you could say something similar about American military policy, argues independent journalist Ken Klippenstein: