A Security Policy Scenario
Political and economic outcomes of the potential Russian attack on Ukraine make the attack significantly more likely
After sending my upcoming book to the publisher, I’ve been using my evenings to program a sort of a collaborative prediction market prototype. While playing with it, I’ve used recent international security policy articles as prototype data.
After looking at maybe ten or twenty hours of this constantly updating feed of information about, mostly, Russian aggression, a grim synthesis has started to take shape in my head.
This text presents this synthesis.
The TL;DR is that political and economic outcomes of the potential Russian attack on Ukraine make the attack significantly more likely. Anti-inflation, isolationist candidates will prevail in US elections, making US participation in a long war in Europe unlikely.
Economic outcomes of the potential conflict
Joe Biden has an inflation problem.
As William Galston and Elaine Kamarch wrote a couple of days ago in the Brookings Fixgov blog, “inflation politics is clearer than inflation economics”. They argue that even if inflation will decline this year, the effect on working-class voters may be disastrous for Democrats.
The people who feel the impact of inflation most are also those who cast critical swing votes in the last two presidential elections, where a wide education gap has opened up between the two parties. Among voters with a B.A. or more, Biden got 61% of the vote, up from Hillary Clinton’s 57% in 2016. This total included 57% of white voters with a college degree or more, 69% of Latinos, and 92% of African Americans. The gap in support for Biden among whites with and without college degrees was 24 points; among Hispanics with and without college degrees, 14 points. By contrast, there was no education gap whatever among Black voters. Voters with incomes under $50,000 are a large group. They made up 38% of the vote in the 2018 midterms and 35% of the vote in 2020.
Traditionally, inflation helps conservatives in elections. The core argument of ending the lavish spending and taking the economy in control brought in power Nixon, Reagan and Thatcher, according to former US treasury secretary Larry Summers in an Economist podcast published yesterday.
The conservative argument to contain inflation is tempting, because while high unemployment is a problem for some small part of the population, high inflation is a problem for most people. Inflation feels like someone is taking a share from all of your paychecks.
For this reason, Galston and Kamarch in the Brookings blog post are rightly concerned about how well the democrats will do in the midterms. But there is another, arguably more important election looming in 2024: the US presidential election. Galston and Kamarch point out that Democrats have a significant opportunity in 2024 elections if they manage to bring down inflation.
My take on the same topic is more pessimistic. Because do you know what really gets inflation going? A proper war.
War is heroin for inflation
According to Henry Oliver in Economic consequences of war since 1790 in England, France, Germany and the United States (1941), with few minor exceptions the English, French, and German wholesale price rises of during the first World War were greater than all previous wholesale price increases in the 150-year period. Between 1914 and 1920 English, American, French, and German prices advanced by 223, 145, 500, and 1600 percent respectively. Then, French prices rose another 250 percent, and German prices reached astronomical heights.
Then, a populist right wing party in Germany seized the opportunity.
However, importantly concerning the argument of this text, the inflation didn’t spike during the war but after it. The British and American peaks came in 1920, the German in 1923, and the French in 1926.
According to another old article about war, inflation and Kondratieff waves (a foresight concept I have criticized elsewhere), Thompson and Zuk (1982) wrote that global wars, as opposed to interstate wars, are found to have an abrupt and temporary impact on prices. The impact, they claim, persists for a number of years beyond the actual duration of warfare.
Thus it seems that the economic outcomes of the potential war increase the odds of a right wing candidate winning the US presidential elections. Donald Trump is that candidate, because as he can only serve one term, many hungry republicans will sit back and wait instead of making the political suicide of trying to dethrown him.
But of course, Donald Trump is not a typical right wing candidate. On top of being the supreme “control” candidate for antiprogressive economic Thatcherism, he has another rare but coherent policy position that will increase his odds even further in the event of a major war in Europe. He is an isolationist.
And that brings us to the political outcomes of the potential conflict.
Political outcomes of the potential conflict
Anyone who has played any computer strategy game with “war weariness” knows that anti-war sentiment has high public support in democratic nations that are in war, especially if the war is costly.
For a long time, however, the USA has had presidents that sometimes were “antiwar” when they ran for the job but became pragmatists or even hawks when in office. Fighting for American interests was considered a good policy that guaranteed public support. Antiwar politicians from Vietnam to Iraq were, mostly, suspicious fringe leftist (until they weren’t).
According to Robert Kaplan in another recent Economist podcast, historically, the centrist politics in the US has pushed the antiwar and isolationist ideas out of the core of the politics. In other words, domestic context where moderates win elections was needed to sustain coherent US foreign policy. But as the center has disappeared in American politics, there is now more room for isolationist candidates even in the mainstream parties.
And especially for that particular “America first” candidate.
For the USA, foreign policy is an extension of the domestic situation, Robert Kaplan explains. If the domestic situation is fraught, that is going to impact on the foreign policy. And, I might add, if the domestic situation is clear but opposite to the previous situation, foreign policy might change. In his previous run, Trump did try to get the US out of NATO even without the popular mandate to do so.
Russian roulette
Both economic and political outcomes of the potential war support the isolationist US president from 2024 onwards. Thus, I consider it very likely (85%) that an anti-inflation, isolationist candidate will win the 2024 US presidential election. If this happens, I would suggest that the future of the USA as a NATO member is a coin-flip (50%).
I also think Russia needs to attack this year for these effects to really take place. They would benefit from creating a permanently unpleasant situation for US troops. An attack that happens later, during the US presidential election campaigning period, might swing the vote to a completely different direction.
So this is how this scenario could roll out:
Russia blatantly attacks. Everyone protests. Nato increases its presence in the Baltics, Poland and Romania and indirectly helps Ukraine in any way it can. This costs a lot of money and manpower, maybe even some lives are lost.
While the economic situation is quickly becoming more uncertain, a candidate promising a withdrawal from the messy Europe and out of NATO while simultaneously promising to “take the economy back in control” has a strong case.
Trump wins the 2024 election, and during the first 100 days in power, pulls the American troops back home from Europe with a popular mandate.
Where do the Russian ambitions end then?
Security policy outcomes of this scenario:
- The US needs to win a war they cannot start themselves fast. This is probably impossible as quick escalation with another nuclear power is out of question.
- Europe needs to start finding ways to survive alone, fast.
- Finland’s “NATO option” might not be a cure all medicine, after all.
Additional ideas:
This NY mag Intelligencer post had a very interesting insights on how Richard Nixon benefitted from and controlled inflation, how it made advocating progressive policies very difficult, and how Trump could do the same in a potential future term.
Even if I claimed that right wing populists and conservatives benefit from inflation in elections, they might be harmed by it if they are in power: NY Times
