NZNet Digest: New Dimensions of Dumbness in Trump's War
Plus: China's Plato ploy; How to lose sleep the fun way; New paths to Armageddon; Passover reflections; and more...
Welcome to another 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.
Note: Owing to my Easter travels, there won’t be an issue of the Earthling this week. Another Note: I’ll be hosting a Zoom call with paid NZN subscribers Saturday April 25 at noon US Eastern Time. I plan to mainly discuss AI, though, depending on the preceding week’s events, some discussion of war (or peace) may be hard to avoid. Save the date!
—Bob
SINICA
After two weeks on the ground in China, investment strategist Andy Rothman reports that Beijing sees the Iran War’s energy shock as validation of Beijing’s green-tech bet. The expectation is that higher oil prices will boost foreign demand for Chinese batteries, EVs, and such renewables as solar panels, somewhat as the 1970s energy crises boosted the demand for fuel-efficient Japanese cars. But, now that the US has performed this service for China by attacking Iran, it’s not clear to Beijing that President Trump has much more to offer. Rothman frames Trump’s scheduled visit to China in mid-May this way:
Beijing will give Trump the pomp and circumstance he craves but does not trust him enough to engage in serious negotiations, I was told. The Chinese will be happy to agree to do things that are in their interest, such as buying more soybeans and signing non-binding MOUs [memorandums of understanding] to purchase Boeing aircraft, but they won’t make any real concessions to a leader they don’t trust. Note that the two sides still haven’t published a written statement of what Trump and Xi agreed to when they met last fall in Korea, and Beijing hasn’t even verbally acknowledged its side of that deal. China’s objective is simply to maintain stability in the bilateral relationship…
Operation Epic Fury (aka Attacking Iran) is “already among the most consequential unauthorized presidential uses of force in all of American history—probably the second most consequential, after the Korean War.” That’s the assessment of Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith, legal scholars who served in the Obama and George W. Bush administrations, respectively. In their newsletter Executive Functions, they argue that the administration’s failure to get Congressional approval for the Iran war isn’t just a constitutional problem—it’s a strategic one. The chaos of the last month, they suggest, is partly a product of the president not having to explain himself:
There is a direct connection, we think, between the absence of real consultation with Congress, before or since the conflict began, and the volatility with which the administration has conducted the war. This is not necessarily because congressional leaders have great military insight (though some may). It is because the need to justify and explain to government leaders outside the presidential bubble might have surfaced the many problems that have become apparent over the last month and counseled a steadier course. … But, and it is a meaningful “but,” Trump will soon have to ask Congress for appropriations to support this very expensive war. This is the one constitutional check that he must face. Soldiers, defense contractors, and others must be paid. Appropriations are the point at which Congress can and must hold the administration to account for its unilateral decision to go to war.
The risk of nuclear war is growing, according to international security expert Wilfred Wan—not just because such treaties as New START have lapsed, or because of heightened tensions among nuclear-armed states, but because of technological advance: The growing military importance of such domains as AI, outer space, and cybertech is creating new and poorly understood pathways to nuclear escalation. Wan, speaking to Mark Leon Goldberg on the Global Dispatches podcast, noted that various new technologies, including remotely steered or autonomous drones, can render nuclear-armed militaries more vulnerable and hence raise the chances of nuclear counter-attack.
Last June, we saw a number of Ukrainian drones target and damage Russian strategic bombers because these bombers were being used to launch conventional cruise missiles into Ukraine. But by doing this, [Ukraine] also attacked Russian nuclear forces, which were undermined as a result of the attacks. And in fact, some Russian experts called for a nuclear response to those attacks because of the strategic impact that they had… A lot of these capabilities in space and cyber, they can serve conventional and nuclear missions, they can serve civilian and military missions in a manner that can contribute to confusion or unintended consequences. … Multi-domain operations contribute to greater destabilization and more frequent crises because there’s a lack of agreements on thresholds, on red lines, on what would be a proportionate response … and all of that, in turn, impacts on escalation pathways.
In recent weeks the Israeli military has displaced more than a million Lebanese and seized lots of Lebanese territory, but the operation is encountering much more resistance than expected, according to Rami Khouri of the American University of Beirut. He tells Peter Beinart that, after Israeli strikes destroyed much of Hezbollah’s infrastructure and leadership in 2024 and 2025, the organization reconstituted itself to an extent that now impedes Israeli and American goals.
If you go back now, document all of the mainstream media and US political and Israeli political statements about Hezbollah [having] been “dealt a death blow, they can’t do anything anymore,” and then look at what Hezbollah is doing today, most of what the US mainstream media and political class and the Israeli media and military class [have] said about Hezbollah is not true….
Khouri says Israel’s goal is regional hegemony—to turn nearby nations into “unofficial vassal states” and to accomplish that with no constraints from international law:
Before the Israelis did the genocide against Gaza, they and the Americans conducted a political genocide against the international rule of law… The ICC [International Criminal Court], the ICJ [International Court of Justice], the UN resolutions, the Human Rights Council [have] been neutered if not wiped out. The law is what Trump and Netanyahu say it is. But what’s going on on the ground, in Iran and Lebanon, suggests that Trump and Netanyahu may not achieve what they want because the pushback has been so severe and so significant.
When the Pentagon asked for $200 billion to fund war with Iran, some Democrats pointed to such alternative uses for that money as medical care for Americans. But will that kind of messaging really resonate with voters? Glenn Show regular John McWhorter is skeptical. It’s “a little too abstract to move people into the voting booth,” he said to host Glenn Loury, who promptly disagreed:
Here’s $200 billion. Let’s see. What can we do with it? We can indemnify our citizens against the possibility that they’ll be driven into bankruptcy by health care costs, or we could drop some more bombs on Tehran. Let’s see—which one is making America great again? I mean, I don’t think that’s one that you need a degree in rocket science to be able to figure out. … Everything depends on how long this thing goes on. And oil, too. What’s going to happen with oil? … I’ve been reading stories about urea, the substance that goes into the manufacture of fertilizers, that is derived from processing natural gas, and that is in short supply, and that will affect agricultural planting cycles. … The consequence of agricultural yields going down means starvation in some places in the world. All this is very serious stuff.
This just in from the frontiers of psychological research: Losing sleep to a newborn feels different from losing sleep to insomnia. Paul Bloom, a month into the life of baby Zoe, reports that he’s tired and stupid—but weirdly cheerful. The veteran insomniac hypothesizes that the misery of sleeplessness has less to do with the sleep you lose than with the story you tell yourself about why you lost it:
I’ve long been an insomniac, and a bad night often leaves me angry and bitter the next day. So I expected newborn sleep deprivation to make me miserable. But it hasn’t. I’m tired—and, yes, stupid—but still pretty cheerful. I think the difference is that my usual insomnia feels like failure: I’ve ruined the next day, and it’s my own fault. But being awake because you have to keep your tiny baby alive feels purposeful, even virtuous—like your legs burning after a long run.
Why did China fly classicists business class to a 400-person conference in Beijing in late 2024? Some Western observers have answered defensively: China is trying to mine the West’s source code—this is nothing less than civilizational appropriation! But writer Chang Che—author of a recent New Yorker piece on the boom in interest in the classics in Chinese universities—tells Sinical Podcast host Kaiser Kuo that the reality is more complicated:
There was an interpretation that China was trying to use classics like offense. I don’t think that was the case. … If you are a Chinese scholar studying at, let’s say, Yale and you go into a cocktail party and you say, “Who is Shakespeare?” or “Who is Plato?”—you’d be laughed out of the room. That’s just unacceptable. But if you’re an American scholar at [Beijing University] and you ask who Du Fu is, that’s completely fine. That’s not a thing that you will be socially ostracized for. So there’s a cultural asymmetry in the global expectations about how we understand Chinese civilization versus Western civilization. And in this current era, China is like— ‘Why? Why should that be the case?’ … The goal is for people in the Chinese classics departments to be well-read in both Eastern and Western traditions. It’s going to be a home for Plato as much as Confucius.
With Passover arriving amid multiple Israeli military campaigns—including ongoing assaults in Gaza and the West Bank—Peter Beinart spoke with Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, chancellor emeritus of the Jewish Theological Seminary, about whether Judaism can be disentangled from the policies of the Israeli state. Schorsch says tension between religious identity and government action is ancient, stretching back to the biblical prophets’ critiques of Israelite kings, and reads the Passover narrative itself as implying moral constraints on national power:
So, the first stricture that Israel faces is to remember its slavery, remember the cruelty and the political oppression which you suffered, for that is the polar opposite of the kingdom that I want you to create. And the second stricture on this political entity coming out of Egypt is Mount Sinai. Mount Sinai follows the Exodus. The Exodus is not an end in itself… Mount Sinai is the giving of the Torah. It is the giving of commandments. It is the imposition of principles and values that are to guide this political entity. The political entity created after the Exodus is not to be driven by greed; it is to be driven by constraints, morality, and fundamental principles. So, the nation to come out of Egypt had quite severe constraints placed upon itself in order to help it become the model political entity that might inspire the ancient world. I believe thinking of Passover in that context gives us values and inspirations that can help us celebrate Passover in the contemporary era.
AI policy: Some of the summaries (the short introductions that precede the italicized blocks of text) in this issue of NZNet Digest are based on AI-generated drafts. In all cases the summaries were edited, and substantially altered, by a human (me), and in all cases the summary was checked for accuracy by a human who read the text that the summary characterizes.
—Bob
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