interviews
The Uniqueness of Electrification in The United States
by Gretchen Bakke
September 10, 2021
This interview with Gretchen Bakke, author of The Grid, and visiting professor of anthropology at the Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems at Humboldt University in Berlin. , Humboldt University, Berlin Germany, was conducted and condensed by franknews. This interview was originally published in February 2019.
frank: I have your book here, it's such a great framing piece that simplifies something so complicated.
GB: Incredibly complicated.
I would love to talk about energy democracy. How people want to move forward, and what sort of policy needs to be in place.
I think when you talk about energy democracy, it's not quite the same thing as equity.
I've spoken to some people who incorporate equity into their definition of energy democracy. They say, in trying to fix certain systems, we need to also engage people who have been marginalized from energy systems in the past. But it is also definitely its own issue.
One thing that's remarkable about systems everywhere, is that there's some sort of universal electrification. Just the idea. That idea seems to be an early 20th-century idea. Places that didn't get a grid in the early 20th century have a very partial and elite system. If you look for example, at Lagos in Nigeria, what you have is rich people on the grid, and poor people on a generator system. Even poor people means middle-class people, right? There's still a grid there, but it's like two or three generators, a bunch of cables, and it runs for one building or maybe two buildings. It uses heavy fuel oil, usually diesel, so it's a much more polluting thing.
The fact that there already is universal electrification, even though it's not profitable for companies is something that in my experience, everybody wants to preserve.
I never talked to anybody, the entire time I was doing research, that thought some people should have electricity and other people shouldn't.
I did talk to people who thought it might be wise, as the system is redeveloped, overhauled, or given a new shape at the lowest levels, to think more about the quality of electricity as being matched more closely to the needs of the user. This is maybe true, but it's also a sneaky way of saying Facebook should have more reliable, more stable voltage, with no interruption whatsoever, and the home user should not.
The question is, once you open that door, how far can you go with it before you start to actually develop two parallel systems? It might be true – it might be that I personally don't need to have the same quality of electricity as the US military. But give an inch and they take a mile. You don't want that to happen. I think that's one question. I think the other thing, and this is what I would guess you're interested in talking about democracy, is thinking about the way in which the electricity systems are becoming more individualized, especially with rooftop solar, and how that sense of ownership, or control, over the electrons that you make can be produced, while maintaining this universal system.
Absolutely.
The dream version of it is that everybody has solar, everybody has some kind of small wind, everybody is connected to a big grid, and everybody has some kind of storage, and thus has the capacity to run off their own electricity when they want, when it's cheaper, or when the big system is down. But also has the capacity to feed into a public electricity system. This is perfect. It's hard to manage, and it's hard to figure out how to pay for the grid if you do that, because you still have exactly the same giant infrastructure, but the way you make money off of it is removed.
In this ideal, is it a combination of public and private sectors maintaining the larger infrastructure, and the individual running their personal solar on the home?
If it was really ideal, the individual could choose to run it or not. The only way that that kind of system can actually work is with some pretty serious AI. When I was finishing the book, people were always talking about an orchestrator. What we need is an orchestrator to make all of this complexity work together. It was still this idea that it would be a person. What I’ve found in the three years since, is now there’s an assumption that computers can do this. Computers can make it so that whatever is happening on the level of the individual, the small scale producer doesn't actually take down the larger grid. You could just have a button that said, “I'm available to go off the grid if needed”, on your phone, I guess. I always imagine a real button on the wall, but this will be on your phone.
Then if there is too much demand, the orchestrator can just flip you off, and you can run on your own system, because it's two o'clock in the afternoon and you live in Phoenix, you need air conditioning. You have your air conditioning, but you also have your solar. Solar and air conditioning are so nicely married to each other. That's the ideal, but then the question is, where are all the ways that it can go wrong? Where we lose democracy, actually, and we lose equity. Even though there's some sort of dead reckoning sense of where we want to get to.
We tend to think of renewable energy as good, but eventually those companies will accumulate the same amount of wealth and power as coal or oil. The question becomes, like you said, what are the challenges and how do you move forward?
And how does democracy need to be reformed? Because if you think of it as kind of old school democratic, then a house can be an entity that can vote somehow forward into a management structure, which then represents it up. Along the way, you can do that with little company forms. Like I have my own little electricity company, and this is how much I make. My block is represented by this other kind of electricity company, and that goes up. It's not rocket science, we know how to do democracy in that way.
The question is, does democracy in that way work? Does it only produce a trickle up of funds and a trickle down of responsibility and risk?
As we move forward do you think we continue to use the grid as our primary infrastructure? Or do we move away from it?
The premise is, and the fact of the matter is, it's not replaceable at this point. It's simply not. We are replacing little tiny bits of it all the time, but the bigger system, you can't just build a parallel system next to it. It's too expensive to do that.
The thing that I really understood about the grid when I was writing the book is that nobody understands it.
There isn't any one person who understands how it all fits together. People understand their tiny little piece of it, and they understand the thing on either side of that tiny piece, and that's it. The expertise and the technology has the same structure. If we have 80% solar feeding into this grid, here's what happens when a cloud goes over at the level of five seconds. Now, this is a giant problem, and there's electrical engineers working on figuring out how to make the grid function in this case. There's a push behind the expert. At the expertise level, people are interested actually, in the larger infrastructure. And nobody else knows enough to get around it. It might just be like inertia when you sit there. One thing that I really have seen is that the way in which reforms are happening in the western part of the US, and the way that they're happening in the northeast are quite different. There are different logics at work that might actually, in 100 years, if we're still here, and not completely roasted to death, produce two systems with fairly different underlying structures.
What is the difference?
The west is inter-regional cooperation. The west is really like, how do you deal with the fact that you have hydro in the Pacific Northwest, and you have wind in the Dakotas, and you have all this solar on the south. It turns into this regional balancing of renewables that then depends a lot on people being able to take themselves off the grid in order to manage that in a reasonable way, but it's huge. That's why you have all these fights in California saying, we don't want to import any coal power from Idaho, and Idaho is saying, "We don't want to be part of this thing. You're going to force all of your renewables on us." The reason those fights are happening is because what's developing is, in fact, a very large regional balanced, renewable system.
What's happening in the northeast, because it's so much denser is, micro grids that can island themselves, but for the most part are interoperable. It's a very different shape. It's like a foam in the northeast, all these little bubbles that are stuck together. If this will happen, we'll see, but that seems to be the direction it's going. Whereas there's very few little bubbles developing in the west. What happens in the south is up for grabs.
Is one better than the other?
The grid is always about geography. It's always a local system. What you have available to you geographically determines what you're capable of doing. You can have pumped air storage in Alabama or Mississippi. The way in which the weather affects the grid is interesting. During Hurricane Harvey, one of the things they learned was that the solar panels stay on the house if the roof stays on the house. Really the weaker link is not how a solar panel connects, it's how the roof is connected to the building. These are things that in the West Coast, with the possible exception of the Pacific Northwest, are just not problems. The storms aren't that ferocious, but on the East Coast they are. There needs to be a reaction to that, that provides the resilience they all like to talk about. What they also found after Sandy, is that communities that had one house on a block that had electricity came back much more quickly. They had a sense of cohesion, of social cohesion, of neighborliness, and there was less sense of trauma, things will rebuild quickly, and everything worked better. In that in that case, you want to be able to have a micro-grid even if it's at the level of the home.
The idea of being islandable seems like a very good thing. People like to point to Wall Street during Sandy, which seemed islanded off.
They actually had generators in the basement, so everything was out except this one building, and people were really mad because they saw the lights on, and they're like, "Why do those guys have it?", assuming that they were prioritized to get electricity, but they actually had a generator system in their skyscraper, and on the ground floor in that skyscraper were all kinds of shops and restaurants that then served everybody. Everybody talks about this like, "We could go there, we could have kebabs."
At least we have kebabs!
They weren't islanded properly speaking, it's just that they had giant diesel generators in their basement.
They weren’t on their own grid.
Problem with that is, of course, you run out of gas.
Now, there's a race in the technology sector to figure out how to store renewable energy. I mean, we have batteries –
People love batteries. There's a lot of ways to store electricity that are less detrimental to the environment, but people do love batteries.
What was your initial motivation in writing The Grid?
The original motivation is kind of twofold, but they go together. One is that I felt like I saw a lot of people trying to intervene in the system who didn't understand what that meant, didn't understand what it was as a system. Those interventions were people putting solar on the roof, and then they're super mad that when their house blacked out. I know a lot of people who have bought diesel generators instead because during a blackout you get to have power.
It was also just this idea that you could make electricity into a commodity and make money off of it like anything else that has been so damaging to the system. There were a lot of interventions happening in the grid, and I just thought well, we need a primer. That's a super practical side of it.
The other side was this desire to try to tell the history of America in a different way. I was surprised how much the book ended up being a business history. I did not intend it to be that way, I was really like, "I'll have a technology history chapter, a business history chapter, legislative history chapter, and then we'll just sort of go forward.”
But the uniqueness of electrification in the US is that it's always been for profit.
There are pockets that are not that way for historical reasons, and ideological reasons. The fact that the business community has been so interested in the book, I think it's been really good, I hope. I hope it's really good. Those were the two pieces. It really is this American story of a battle between freedom, independence, self-reliance, big money, and big government.
How do we determine what energy is worth? As you wrote, it's not tangible. It's not a banana.
One of the problems I have with the way these arguments are happening in the US is that what is it worth always, somehow only has one metric, and that metric is money.
But what is it worth to you that you have energy security? If there's a way you can have solar and not lose your power, which is not that complicated, what is that worth to you? A lot. What is it worth to stop carbon emissions? If you just get a lot of solar up, all you've got are the emissions that go into making those panels, and getting them on your roof, from China or wherever they come from. The singular metric is a part of capitalism – that we're not allowed to measure anything any other way. That's not true everywhere.
Not to glorify China because it does not need to be glorified at this moment, but I did see one talk by a Chinese electrical engineer, whose job was to make a new green city from scratch. Everything he presented had two metrics, how much it costs, and what the carbon emissions were. I was just like, "Okay, great, I don't care what the metrics are, but I'm so happy you have two of them so that then there's this possibility of saying, "Okay, how do I, in fact measure worth?"
Right. It's actually a much deeper conversation than just what technology is available, how much does it cost, and how much money can you make?
I think you really see that with the fires in California. How can you maintain a system that doesn't spark? What is the cost of that? It's not about just money.
I was thinking about how relevant The Grid is in relation to these California fires.
I think the thing to look at is the difference between the way in which Southern California Edison has been upgrading their system, and the way in which PG&E was not upgrading their system. At this very basic level of how a wire connects to a pole, how a wire connects to a transformer, if you're in a situation where any spark creates a fire, what's the necessary technology to not have any sparks at all, ever?
PG&E was just neglecting that sort of upgrade?
I don't know if they were neglecting it, but they weren't prioritizing it to the same degree that Southern California Edison has, and I would say at this point, it might be interesting to talk to Southern California Edison. Because there should be fires in Southern California too. It's not just bad luck that they're all happening in PG&E territory. There are sometimes fires in Southern California, but it's not the same. With the same frequency.
This is where energy democracy becomes a question. This is a public thing, this grid. I embrace this, the infrastructure, but also what it gives us, what it affords us, and if I'm the master of my house and I have my solar panels, and I live in Southern California or Northern California, I do not want to be the one responsible for hooking that system up, because I'm going to burn down everybody.
It's not like this Occupy Wall Street movement of electricity independence, we'll just destroy the entire country. One spark at a time. Even the companies do it wrong, and they're well trained people. I think there's a place for expertise in the future. If you want universal electrification, there's a place for expertise in there.
In terms of policy in the U.S., what do you think we need in order to move towards a more ideal scenario?
We need to stop using fossil fuels. I think what Governor Brown did wasn't little. It will be interesting to see if it sticks, but it was an interesting first trial, which is just, here's the date we'll be done. We're not going to put it in our cars, we're not going to put it in our electricity system, we're not going to extract it, we're not going to burn it, we won't import it. The fossil fuel businesses will be gone.
I recognize the current government does not want to do this, but the reason I say it has to happen at the level of policy, is that as soon as that kind of thing gets said seriously, there's a lot of innovation that starts to be funded. Things begin to change. I don't know if you've seen this yet, but you should, you will – you stop seeing a house with like two solar panels on the roof. Every single rooftop should have solar. Where you're moving away from private decisions about household electricity use being mimicked in the infrastructure into a larger, statewide decision. For example, if the car becomes electric, how do you deal with that? You need some people who conceptualize it, but you also need a lot of tiny little machines that are going to make these things interoperable with each other. This is a wonderful thing, you have the car, it can store electricity, and then it can charge at work, and then you drive it home, blah, blah. But it turns out that the cars are using their own electricity at precisely the same moment the sun goes down. Actually they are not a storage resource to a solar power grid, not at dusk at least. These little things, where you're like, "Oh, weird, that's not going to work." It was a great idea, it won't work. But those kinds of studies, and the kind of investment, if we're keeping capitalism for right now, that's necessary to make major change happen, will only happen when there's laws in place.
Right. And laws that say no fossil fuels?
I think law saying no to fossil fuels. That's what I think. The issue is, does it need to be across the board, like what California did? I find that interesting, in a good way. Does it need to be sector by sector? If there was no global warming, I think by 2100, we'd have renewable electricity anyway because once you build it, it's free. This is something that has been a shock to everybody that I've talked to. That the price per kilowatt hour is coming down to about zero. You still have to build the thing and there is some maintenance, but essentially, what you're paying for is the labor power to make it, and continue to make it work. I think that transition would happen, we'd figure out how to do it, we'd be at 100% renewables, people would start having electric cars because it's cheaper to use free electricity than it is to pay for gas. The shift would happen slowly.
Without global warming, we will be doing this anyway. The question is if we need legislation to make it happen, because we need it to happen faster.
That's a really interesting way of framing it because that doesn't seem to be the debate. The debate seems to be why should we do these things? Is global warming real? Who cares? This is how things function, any alternative seems impossible, new policy that’s ambitious is wild idealism, etc. etc. But framing this as what is already happening, climate change or not, is really interesting.
I guess the problem is just like when we lose coal – we should all be super attached to coal. But industries change.
Everything is an issue of perception. I like your idea of working backwards.
I think we'll move that way with capitalism completely intact. There's a lot of reasons to challenge the current world order, but we don't even have to challenge it.
It's like getting ready to go to the airport. Your flight is at 10, you need to be there at 8, so you leave your house at 7. If we're going to move to renewables by 2050, what are the steps that need to take place right now?
Exactly. But something needs to happen, and that's the thing, any kind of law is going to make a giant difference, but it seems to be very difficult to make a law.
Do you find one argument most compelling after all this research?
Of why we should have a law?
Of why laws should change? Of why our energy systems are important to focus on period.
No. I feel like I don't talk about things in terms of climate very much. Sometimes because I've been explicitly told not to, but sometimes because everybody gets really anxious. When you're talking about transforming the electricity system, people are like, "That's a funny problem". Engineers are all super excited, because they have a good job again, and they used to have a boring job, and the utility people are kind of scared, but they're also excited, because maybe they can change the way the company works.
The transformation of the electricity system is producing all of these very exciting problems for people who are in the industry. I think it's producing a lot of exciting opportunities for people outside the industry. There's a kind of hopefulness.
It hits the desire to tinker, that a lot of people have. There's not an ideological argument in it.
Part of that is, we need to retire all of our coal fired power plants for 2050 anyway. They've been retiring for a while, we've been replacing them with natural gas for a while, natural gas works differently than coal fire plants. We've already had to adapt the system to that, now we're not building as many, and we're building more renewables. But it's all outside of a conversation about good and bad people.
I feel like 2018 has made climate change a much more mainstream conversation than it was before. The weird weather piece of it, like, "Okay, we don't know about climate, but weather", we can tell you that it's weird. That might be just the beginning of a way in, where it stops being about having this abstract conversation about what lefty people believe rigthy people should do.
I feel like there is a holier than thou attitude that gets rolled in. People have a lot of other problems and desires, so for now, how can an energy transition not be about climate change? That's the slow path. But if we want to speed it up, then it has to be about climate change, and after that, it just turns to politics, and that's hard. I don't have a solution for that one.
We'll talk in five years.
Who knows what anything will look like in five years! The slow way is avoiding climate change in conversation, and the fast way is folding it into the conversation, and risking politicizing everything.
Really. I think what you said about the airport is really nice because there is the sense that the airplane will leave if you're not on it. That's essentially what the IPCC's latest report was – we have 12 years to do this. What do we do?
Do you feel optimistic?
I have decided that being optimistic is a more interesting story. I think it's really easy to talk about how you would fold up your life and future generations of your family and call it the death of humanity and all that. That may be where it all ends up, but at least for now it's not the more interesting story to tell or to investigate. Until it's hopeless, I would say I'm kind of in the, what are we doing? What is working? What is stopping us? How can we get around that? I feel like there are people who have believed that climate change is happening for a while, and now what they really want is action, and that group is growing every single day. People are just like, "Could somebody do something, please? Someone."
Anything.
Anything. Anything will be fine. I believe that each of those anythings, if they can be done, then opens up a whole new world of possibility. I can say, "Yes, we just need to get rid of fossil fuels, no extraction, no sale, no trade, no use." You can say that. I would be fine with just, we're going to stop having cars with engines in them.
Yeah.
I mean France said that. France is all nuclear, so they can. I guess it's still kind of how do we knock down a giant fireball, and while, by the way, we're doing that, try to make the world a little more equitable. The number one thing I would say needs to happen at the small level is that people with rooftop solar or small wind, need to be able to keep their lights on. That just has to happen.
How does that happen?
Essentially the problem is that if there's any electricity feeding into the system, when the men working on the system try to bring it back up, they get electrocuted. There just needs to be a switch, essentially, that automatically takes anything generating electricity off the system. There are places where this is being discussed more seriously, but if you have a diesel generator that already happens. You can do it with solar.
You can do it...
Yeah. To run a microgrid with solar power is more complicated technologically than with a diesel generator. With diesel, you actually have to go turn it on, and in that act of turning it on, you make a signal that says this house is an island. But with solar, it just stays on, there isn't any break. There would have to be some sort of artificial break put in, like maybe your power goes out for 45 seconds and then comes back on again. I don't know how it would work, but I could tell you that it's not so complicated.
It's a legislative problem, and it's a systems engineering problem, but it's not a technological problem.
I think the argument that everybody starts with is the good one, which is that electricity is everything – it's money, it's information, it's family, and some ways it's communication. It's the sense of how you're connected to the world. Just the idea of a blackout is a ridiculous misnomer, because the lights are not what matters anymore. If the electricity goes out you don't have running water anymore in your house. It's become this completely essential substructure of everything that we are and do.
Of course we should be interested in it.
We can't remove it anymore.
interviews
The Partisan Politics of National Security
by Chris Capozzola
March 23, 2020
This interview with Chris Capozzola, MIT professor and author of Bound by War: How the United States and the Philippines Built America’s First Pacific Century, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Could you start by introducing yourself?
Chris Capozzola | My name is Chris Capozzola. I'm a professor of history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I teach 20th-century US political and military history.
I want to talk about the politicization of the military. More specifically in this time period between World War II and Korea – when we see a real shift in Democrats' and Republicans' stance on the military.
I’m glad to have a chance to share this history, because I think most Americans in the 21st century take for granted that Republicans are the party of national defense, national security, and a big military, and that Democrats are the party against that. This was not always the case.
In the 1930s, we saw the reverse. The Depression was underway and war looming in Europe after the rise of Hitler. As president, Franklin Roosevelt was committed to creating an active place for the United States in the world, and understood the military as crucial to his goal.
Roosevelt faces opponents. Some within the Democratic party think of entering World War I as a mistake, and don't want to repeat it. The Republican party is concerned that expanding the US military would commit the US to being more active in geopolitical conflict , which might strengthen the Presidency at the expense of Congress, or the states, or the people.
Roosevelt has to navigate that tension as the war's really looming.
Once we enter World War II what happens?
In some ways, the debate about a military build up and aid for allies is intense and ongoing until December 7th, 1941. Pearl Harbor brings that debate to an end. During the war, there was bipartisan support for the war effort and for most efforts to expand federal power over the military.
It helps FDR with the effort that he had been making in domestic politics to expand federal power. I always like to say that the Democrats won World War II. They convinced the American public that a strong federal government that provides for its citizens and is deeply engaged in the world is the solution to their problems.
What is the context behind this Democratic position?
I think for many Democrats were from two directions in this time period.
On the domestic side, they are supporting Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. They really believed that an active federal government, at the national level, will do more for ordinary people to get them out of the Depression. They also remember Woodrow Wilson and his legacy at the end of World War I. Wilson was a Democrat. He wanted to bring the US into the League of Nations, but he was defeated, mostly by Republicans, but also by some Democrats. With Roosevelt, Democrats are pushing for the US to join the United Nations, and for the United States to establish NATO. They do not want to retreat from international affairs after World War II in ways that they had after World War I.
And after the war is over?
No one quite knows what the military should look like after World War II is over.
The military had expanded dramatically. 24 million men and women served during World War II. Everyone knew that it was not going to stay that big, but there were also new technologies – the atomic bomb, and the makings of what would eventually become the Air Force in 1947. No one really knew what kind of Army was needed. No one really knew if we should still have a draft. The draft was brought to an end after World War II. There were new policies for veterans, like the GI Bill, which was adopted in 1944. It was an effort both to reward veterans, and also to get them to show up at the polls and support politicians who supported veteran initiatives.
Everything was up in the air in 1945, importantly including, America's relationship with its wartime ally, the Soviet Union. The Second World War has created a very cautious alliance between the US and the Soviets against Germany, and that alliance just falls apart as the Cold War replaces the Second World War. As the Cold War emerges, you see a shift in terms of the parties and politics of national defense and national security.
What’s the shift?
Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans support Communism. Neither party wants to see the Soviet Union succeed. Both parties agree that Communism is a threat to the American way of life. However, they don't necessarily agree on how to approach the issues, and between 1948 and 1950 the Democrats are taking the heat for any setback in the war against Communists. Harry Truman, a democrat, is the president. As the Chinese Communist party under Mao's control is consolidating its power, Truman is charged with losing China. Republicans use Communism to critique the Democrats, and that becomes a central way that Republicans have challenged Democrats on national security.
Ever since then, Republicans have generally been pushing for stronger anti-Communist measures, and larger military forces, and the Democrats have been put on defense.
The next war the US enters is Korea. What’s the partisan response then?
That's why this period from 1949 to 1950 is so intense, because you have the Chinese Civil War and the Chinese Revolution that leads to a Communist victory. You also have news that the Soviets have the atomic bomb.
Once again, Truman, a Democratic president, gets the blame for Korea. The US experiences some military victories, but a lot of defeat. Very quickly, the war in Korea becomes a stalemate between the Communist and non-Communist forces. This makes it harder and harder for Truman to say that the Democrats have the right answer on defense.
What's the public Republican stance on Korea?
It’s two-fold. There's certainly bipartisan support for stopping Communism and for supporting American troops and allied troops in Korea. But there are also plenty of Republicans who want to take the war efforts a step further.
Truman doesn't want the war to get big because he knows it would start to affect the economy. It might require drafting large numbers of American soldiers, and he knows that the war is not that popular. Also, Americans don't quite understand the stakes of this war - its complicated and far away. It's not clear to Americans why this is part of American interest.
There are plenty of Republicans who are angered by Truman's limited war strategy. Including General Douglas MacArthur, who starts publicly advocating a much more aggressive war, even while he's serving in uniform under Truman.
Certainly through Iraq and Afghanistan. How does the electorate respond to the transition?
I think the transition happens during the Korean War, but I think we can see it playing out for the average American voter over the course of the Vietnam War in the 1960s.
Kennedy made moves to bring us into Vietnam, and Johnson, of course, expanded the war. He does this, in part, because he felt that, as a Democrat, if he did't send American troops to Vietnam, he would be seen as weak on defense. He feared that he would look as bad as Truman did for having lost China and Korea. Over the course of the Vietnam War era, you start to see the emergence of an anti-war position within the Democratic party. Senator Eugene McCarthy, a critic of the Vietnam War, challenges Johnson during reelection. .
This is where the Vietnam War is different from the Korean War. With the Korean War, there is a bipartisan consensus that the war needs to happen, that the Communists need to be stopped, and that Americans need to beat them -there was just division about who had the better plan. By the end of the Vietnam War, there is an anti-war wave in the Democratic Party, and that will remain an important force. It was critical of Reagan's Cold War policies. It was critical of the War in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, and continues to be a voice today.
Do you think there’s a clear Democratic line on military engagement or intervention post-Vietnam?
I don't think so. In fact, you see deep divisions within the Democratic party today and in the last 10 or 15 years about when to use military force. Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright felt military intervention was necessary in the late-90s in Kosovo. Some of President Obama's advisors advocated a greater involvement in the war in Syria. But Obama's hesitation to committing US troops to Syria, reflected the ongoing reluctance within the Democratic party to engage in large-scale military commitments abroad.
It seems that there are similarities in this in terms of the Republican narrative. Since Korea, the GOP has been strong on defense, big on military. President Trump and a rising white nationalist sentiment seeks a return to isolationist conservatism. On the left, Senator Sanders moves towards pacifism. Actionably, how different are those stances?
I would make a distinction there. One wing of the Democratic Party has a clear spokesman in Senator Sanders – an anti-interventionist who would actually seek to reduce American troop strength, reduce the number of US missiles. President Trump, for all his talk has made few moves. And in the moves he has taken are anti-interventionist nor do they reduce the size of the military. Instead, he is simply shifting from multilateralism towards unilateralism.
Unilateralism is about going it alone. This is what President Trump calls "America First." There was, in fact, an organization in the 1930s called "American First," which sought to oppose international treaty commitments, the League of Nations, and multilateral forces. In that sense, Trump is not inventing something new. He's tapping into a very old strand in the Republican Party, the kind of thing that was right there in the 1930s, and that Franklin Roosevelt had been fighting against when he was trying to get us ready to fight Germany and Japan.
There is a hyper-clear difference in motive and context. But what’s the difference in terms of orders?
The difference would be very visible in military size and its power. President Trump has made no moves to reduce troop strength, to reduce troop presence at overseas bases.I think that an anti-interventionist president from the Democratic Party would make those moves. That's the difference between a reductionist approach, or even a disarmament approach, and a shift towards unilateralism.
Does this say anything about party ideas around hegemony or global order?
The years of the Cold War, when the US was a clear power on one side and the Soviets on the other, are maybe more of the exception than the rule. In the years before the Second World War there were multiple competing powers: Britain, Germany, the United States was rising. As we move into the 21st century, I think we’re looking at a more multipolar world again. The US will certainly be a strong power, but so will China, so will Russia, so will various European powers.
I think as that multipolar world plays out, and as Americans start to understand that, they will want leaders who can help them navigate that. A lot of Americans, of every political viewpoint, are still operating under a Cold War mindset. They are imaging that we will always live in a bipolar world, but we probably won't, and we might already not.
Do you think, politically, on the right and the left, we need to acknowledge US standing internationally?
Yes. I think there's also a space in between that's actually quite larger. It's something that critics on both the right and the left call, "The Washington Consensus," which is a shared bipartisan viewpoint that the United States should be the most powerful force in the world, that it will work through multilateral institutions where it holds a disproportionate power, and that this will keep the United States the force that determines, that sets the rules, of the global game.
That's the most common opinion, the one held in the middle by most of both parties. That idea isn't at the front of people's mindsets right now, in part because it's not the viewpoint of our current president, but it hasn't really gone anywhere. It certainly is part of the day-to-day operation of both civilian and military institutions.
Do you think the politicization of the military is inherently bad?
The politicization of the military is always bad, in the sense that it is bad for democracy in general.
That's part of what makes a democratic military democratic. By design military institutions are hierarchical and insulated from partisan politics and, to some extent, from democratic accountability. We have to trust them, and we trust them most when we feel like they represent us and that they reflect us.
Over the last 40 years or so, there has been a divergence in who serves in the US Armed Forces. This is, in large part, a product of the institution of the all-volunteer force in 1973, the end of the draft, as well as broader trends toward inequality: both inequality in terms of wealth, but also education and job opportunities particularly for young people in the 18-to-30-year-old range. This has basically made it less and less likely that all Americans will serve.
This is something that all Americans should be concerned about, and I'm not sure that there's a clear solution to it. I'm not sure that bringing back the draft is a solution to that. It certainly wouldn't give us the highly-skilled, professional, high-tech Army that we have now. It's not clear we should unmake the Army we have now just to solve social problems that are external to the Army itself.
There's a quote I think of often and will butcher, that is maybe misattributed to Thucydides, that says, "The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.” Do you feel like historically there was a lesser divide because the draft or size of the wars, or is this a reflection of rhetoric over time?
I think it's a reflection. I mean, certainly, the draft was the mechanism, but it wasn't the cause, if that makes sense.
Right.
The service in the US Armed Forced by large swaths of the male population was caused by the draft. But the US Armed Forces have changed, and would have changed even if we kept the draft. We are an incredibly technologically advanced military right now that does best when people join and stay for a long time to learn skills. But as they do stay in the US military, they start to develop its own values, and when those values start to diverge from the values of the population that doesn't serve, then those differences get accentuated.
But I'm not surprised that only 1% of Americans have served in the US Armed Forces. I always compare that statistic to the fact that only 1% of Americans are farmers, but we still eat every day. But you might also say, "Well, we don't live as close to the land today. We don't understand our land. We don't understand our food." I think that same disconnect is sort of happening with the military.
We don't necessarily understand the choices that the military makes, we don't understand the service that they do on a daily basis. I'm not sure we can undo either our food system or our defense system, but we should think about what kinds of indirect effects they're having on our society.
I feel bad asking historians to predict the future, but I’m going to anyway. Where do you think we go from here?
Well, yes, you're right. Historians don't like to predict the future. But when we are asked to, we know one way to get it right every time, which is to say, "This too shall change." I really do think that is the case.
When some sort of demographic shift happens, or, God forbid, some kind of military crisis happens, they could shift rapidly again.
The tasks of the US Armed Forces will also change in the future. We tend to think that large land wars with hundreds of thousands of infantry soldiers are over, but they might not be. There will be other crises, particularly related to global public health, to the global climate emergency, to natural disasters. That may require a different kind of military, and it would probably require different ways of thinking about who serves in it.