Plain English with Derek Thompson - World on Fire, Part 2: Global Conflict Has Surged to an 80-Year High. Why?

Episode Date: January 16, 2024

This is the second episode in "World on Fire," a series on the historic levels of global violence and conflict in the Middle East, the Americas, and beyond. Listen to Part 1 here: "World on Fire, Part 1: The Houthis, Israel's Impossible War, and Worsening Middle East Chaos." You and I are living through an extraordinary period of global conflict. In Europe, Russia, and Ukraine are engaged in one of the continent's deadliest hot wars since 1945. In Africa, the last few years have seen devastating wars in Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Sudan. In the Middle East, of course, there is Israel's record-breaking bombing of Gaza and the unfolding crisis in Yemen. In Central Asia, Azerbaijan launched a brutal attack against Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. In Central and South America, cartel and gang violence has surged. The Jalisco Cartel New Generation and its affiliates in Mexico and Columbia, were responsible for more than 11,000 deaths in 2022. Last week, the state of Ecuador arrested 900 people in a security operation to stop gang violence, following the prison escape of one of the country's most powerful drug lords. According to researchers at Uppsala University, this might be the most violent period of the 21st century, with more total conflicts than any year since World War II. Why is it all happening at once? Paul Poast is a political scientist who studies international relations and conflict history at the University of Chicago. In an essay for The Atlantic, he said we are in the midst of “not a world war, but a world at war.” And in this interview, we consider five theories for why global conflict seems to be surging around the world. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Paul Poast Producer: Devon Baroldi Mentioned in this episode: The Uppsala Conflict Data Program [link] "Not a World War But a World at War," by Paul Poast [link] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Did Don Draper really buy the world of Coke? Did Tony Soprano really die? Or just order more onion rings? The finales of our favorite shows can make us argue, make us cry, and make us crazy. From Spotify and the Ringer, I'm Andy Greenwald, and this is Stick the Landing, a new podcast where we'll be telling the story of modern TV backwards, one fade out at a time. Find Stick the Landing on Wednesdays on the prestige TV feed, on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Today, in our multi-part series, on a world at war, we connect the dots.

You and I are living through an extraordinary period of global violence and conflict. In Europe, you have one of the deadliest hot wars since 1945 between Russia and Ukraine. In Africa, the last few years have seen devastating wars in places like Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Sudan. In the Middle East, of course,

there is Israel's record-breaking bombing of Gaza and the unfolding crisis with the Houthis in Yemen. In Central Asia, Azerbaijan launched a brutal attack against Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. In Central and South America, cartel and gang violence has surged. The Halisco Cartel New Generation, and its affiliates in Mexico and Colombia were responsible for more than 11,000 deaths in 2022 alone. Last week, the state of Ecuador arrested 900 people in a security operation to stop gang violence following the prison escape of one of the country's most powerful drug lords.

You might think, the world is always violent. Wars and conflicts are always happening somewhere. This moment can't be any special. That would be wrong. There is a database run by researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden that takes on the messy work of counting all the hot conflicts in the world between states and involving non-state groups. terrorists, cartels. And in a paper published last week, they made two startling claims.

Number one, if you are 35 years old, you have never lived in a time with so many deaths from global conflicts. If you're younger than 80 years old, listening to the show, and I'm guessing, that's most of you, you've never lived in a world with so many different conflicts, either between countries or among these non-state groups, terrorist cells, drug cartels. So why is chaos and conflict surging all over the world right now? Well, maybe it's just randomness. Maybe it's just 100 different stories

playing out in 100 different countries for 100 different reasons with no global trend or worldwide phenomenon or causal chain to connect them. But consider this. Last week, the U.S. and a Western coalition bombed the Houthis in Yemen. The Houthis are an Iran-based Shia group. They were bombing ships in the Red Sea. They said they were trying to stop Israel's shelling of Gaza.

Of course, Israel's aerial assault of Gaza came after the October 7th attack by Hamas. Hamas officials said the timing of those attacks were inspired in part by the U.S. and Western supporters of Israel being distracted by the way. war in Ukraine. As Russia struggled to defeat Ukraine in that war, Putin shifted his military attention to the Dunbos region of Ukraine, drawing attention away from ongoing conflicts in Central Asia, just like the one between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Azerbaijan took that opportunity to launch a new offensive against the Armenian region of Nagorno-Karabat. So right there, you have something connecting, Nagorno-Karabakh. War in Ukraine.

Hamas attacks Israel. Israel bombs Hamas, the Houthis bomb ships in the Red Sea, America's bomb the Houthis, and who even knows what spills over from that domino cavalcade. These global conflicts may be more connected than we think, or at least more responsibly said, there may be several specific reasons why quantitatively, by the numbers,

this has become one of the most chaotic, moments in global affairs since the end of World War II. Today's guest, return guest, is Paul Post, a political scientist who studies international relations and conflict history at the University of Chicago. In an essay for the Atlantic, he said, we are in the midst of, quote, not a world war, but a world at war. And quote, and in this interview, we consider five theories for why global conflict seems to be surging around the world.

and of course, because it's Paul, who is a student of military history, our analysis of the present pulls in several references to past conflicts, including World War I and his favorite Russian military history. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Paul Post, welcome back to the show. Thank you. It's always a pleasure being on the podcast.

You were just saying it is always a pleasure to have you in the podcast. It is never a pleasure contextually to have you on the podcast. You are our merchant of gloom and doom. I only bring you on to talk about something terrible happening in Ukraine, something terrible happening in Israel. Today is the mother of all depressing context. We're talking about global conflict surging to an 80-year high all over the world. And the goal for this episode is almost, it's seemingly grandiose.

Like, by some measures, this is the most chaos and conflict that the world has experienced in decades, maybe since the end of the last World War. And what I want to talk about with you is whether there are explanations, theories, frames that can help explain why so many different conflicts seem to be breaking out at once. This is the second that we've done in a series that we're calling World on Fire about the global chaos and conflict unfolding around us. And in our first show in the series, which was last week, we did a deep dive on the Middle East conflicts. Israel Gaza, the West Bank, Hezbollah, Yemen, the Houthis, Iran. and listeners, if you want to go deeper into that subject, I strongly encourage you to listen to that show.

Paul, you have appeared on this show several times, principally as an analyst of the Russia-Ukraine war. And what's interesting is that you see a connection between the Russian-Ukraine war and the Israel-Palestine conflict. And I'd like you to get us started by drawing this connection more explicitly. In a recent op-ed, you wrote,

quote, what do the war efforts of Israel and Ukraine have in common? each is highly dependent on material assistance from the United States. Each government sees itself engaged in an existential fight, following a violent military incursion by its enemy. But what is most notable at this moment is that both are engaged in war efforts that despite imposing heavy casualties on their opponents are in danger of strategic defeat, end quote. Strategic defeat.

Paul, what does that phrase mean? from an international relation standpoint, and why are you applying it to the two most famous wars in the world right now? There's different levels of analyzing a war. There's the tactical level. The tactical level is kind of what we think about a lot of times when we're looking at military history.

We're looking at the battle lines. We're seeing where the soldiers are placed and so forth. And honestly, that's oftentimes what gets people's attention, right? then there's all the way at the other level there is the political aspect to it right and this is the callback to clausvitz and his famous phrase from on war that war is just the continuation of politics by other means right and so this is really thinking about what are the aims of the political actors because ultimately war is a political act even though we might be looking a lot of times at things at the tactical level the strategic is what links to two The strategic is about what are the facts on the grounds mean for ultimately the political aims of the war and whether those can be achieved? The reason why I argue that both Ukraine and Israel could be facing strategic defeat is to help differentiate strategic defeat from tactical victory or tactical defeat. You could argue that Ukraine is actually achieving quite a bit on a tactical level. They launched this counteroffensive in 2023.

Now, of course, there was a lot of debate about how successful that was and people even saying it was a flat-out failure. But I wouldn't go as far as to say it was a flat-out failure at all. I mean, to me, a flat-out failure would have been that they actually lost their military and had to retreat and so forth. And that didn't happen. But they also didn't have the huge breakthrough. like what occurred in the fall of 2022, which I was on the podcast and we talked about it at the time,

where it just seemed like Ukrainian forces were moving through so quickly. They were moving through Russian forces so quickly. And it almost seemed like Russia was going to just collapse. The Russian forces were going to collapse. And of course, that didn't happen. But that was what people were expecting to see of that counteroffensive. And that's not what happened. But Ukraine did have some victories. They did gain some land. They did gain back some territory. They did actually impose a lot of punishment on Russian forces. But again, they weren't able to do it at the level that maybe some were hoping for. Same thing with Israel thinking about Gaza. There's no way you could argue that Israel is being

tactically defeated. They are just completely punishing Gaza. But what was brought up a few weeks ago was by the Secretary of Defense, U.S. Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, where he said Israel was on the verge of a strategic defeat. So in the case of Israel, the strategic defeat is the idea that, yes, you might be achieving these aims on the ground, but you're not actually going to achieve the overall objective of wiping out Hamas. You're actually creating more animosity within the Palestinian people. You're creating more animosity throughout the region, you might even be creating more animosity throughout the globe. And that, of course, is going completely against what you might be hoping to achieve politically in terms of actually

creating a secure environment for Israel. Do military scholars associate strategic defeat or fears of strategic defeat with longer wars? Because I could imagine that strategic defeat, combined with tactical victory, would encourage a military or a nation to fight longer, longer, longer, hoping that they might one day achieve a political objective that is never in one particular week realized on the ground? Absolutely it can lead to longer

fighting because of the fact that you hold out hoping for that breakthrough. And indeed, this is one of the factors that led to World War I on the Western Front being of the nature it was. It was pretty clear by the end of 1914

that there was going to be static battle lines. But, both sides are like, maybe we can just hold out longer and push through and eventually we'll get this and eventually this will happen. And the truth is that unless the United States intervened by the time they did, if there's a good chance that it would have just continued to where both sides would have exhausted themselves. But I think you're exactly right that it can lead to if you think that if you just hold out a little bit longer, you can get that strategic victory, then it can lead to these longer conflicts. I'm going to go to be a lot of. I'm going to go to be a little bit longer longer.

I'm going to go beyond Israel, Ukraine, because chaos really does seem to be insurgents around the world. The Uppsala conflict data program, and we're going to put a link to their data in our show notes. They've been tracking global conflicts since 1945 out of Uppsla University in Sweden. And from my look at the most recent data, I see three things that are really significant. Number one, global conflict deaths are at their highest level of the 21st century. Number two, state-based violence. That is violence between states, governments of states, is at its highest level since the end of the Cold War. And number three, the sheer number of conflicts, both state-based and non-state-based,

so that's including terrorist organizations or cartels, the sheer number of total conflicts is at its highest level since 1945, the end of World War II. Most people listening have heard or read a little bit about the Russia-Ukraine war, Israel-Gaze that we've just been talking about. Can you give us an example of what you consider to be maybe the most destabilizing or destructive conflict that people haven't heard as much about or read about on A1 of a major newspaper? Well, first of all, I'm glad that you laid out the numbers that you did because I think those numbers that come from the Uppsala project, I think very well capture why it is that 2023, a lot of

folks might have proceeded as, wow, it seems like there's a lot of war happening in the world. There's a lot of conflict in the world. And indeed, those numbers, as you just described it, make clear that that is indeed the case. But I think a conflict that very much has to have more attention. And actually, I was saying this at the beginning of 2023. And it's still the case, is the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, that this is a war that, again, most people I think listening to it's been like, oh, there's a war happening there? Yes, there is. And the reality is that the war in Congo has been a frozen conflict, then a hot conflict, then a frozen

conflict again, and it's been going through this cycle. And it very much captures a lot of the dynamics of many of these conflicts around the world. It's been going through this cycle for decades, really going back to the end of the Cold War. So much so that in 1998, between 1998 and 2002, the war in Congo reached the point to where folks we're referring to it as Africa's World War, that you had at one point eight to ten countries intervening in the Democratic Republic of Congo. There were forces fighting each other, fighting against rebel groups, to where estimates are that you had anywhere from three to five million people killed because of this conflict during that period. And since then, you have had conflicts kind of,

as I said, they reach a frozen state, then they flare up again. Well, they started to flare up again in the early 2020s. And last year, it was to the point to where Rwanda, Democratic Republic of Congo's neighbor and the DRC were on the verge of direct war. The reason why is because the current fighting that's happening in the DRC is in many ways a proxy war between the government of the DRC's government and Rwanda. It's kind of to the point to where, as in the past, people would refer to the German problem for Europe. How do we address Germany? It's in the heart of Europe. We've got to solve this problem. It can now be referred to as the Congo, the Congo problem, or the Congo question. How do we solve this problem of ongoing conflict in the heart of Africa, given that it has led to so much devastation to this point. The devastation is still going on, and it has this potential to destabilize Africa going to the future.

I want to talk to through several theories of why this seems to be, according to you, according to other. military scholars, according to Uppsala, one of the most violent years, maybe of the last eight decades. We have several theories to run through, explaining this spasm of violence. Theory number one that I want to name check is that this is about the decline of what is sometimes called Pax-Americana. The Pax-Americana theory essentially says, or observes, that in the 20 years after the end of the Cold War, deaths from interstate conflicts fell pretty significantly. And it suggests that maybe there was something special about this unipolar moment where the U.S. was so much stronger than any other major power in the world, we could essentially act as the world's policemen. And clearly, if you look at a place like Iraq and Afghanistan, we didn't always use that police power in virtuous ways.

But nonetheless, there's no arguing with the facts that in this 20 years, after the Civil War ended, the world was relatively peaceful. in fact, maybe as peaceful as it's ever been. What's the best reason to think that all of this mayhem that we're talking about is about the decline of Pax Americana and the unipolar moment? The notion of the unipolar moment was that with the ending of the Cold War, the U.S. was really the only country that was in a position to shape the international security framework or architecture, however you want to refer to it.

And that even led to the point of parity, right? where you had Team America, World Police, you know, being the idea as captured in the early 2000s, that the U.S. is this world police force. They have to go around and solve all the problems, including as was captured in that film, even to the point of actually creating more problems. Well, what's been happening is that over the past, say, 10 to 15 years or 20 years, you have had the eroding of the U.S.'s position, relative position, as the only, major power globally that has its ability and you now have, of course, the rise of China.

And you have a resurgence, resurgence, if you will, of Russia in its sphere of influence. We've gone from the unipolar moment, Pax Americana, to now a system of great power competition. But what that means is you now have countries, you have these major powers competing with each other. And what that can lead to is that great power competition can lead to great power of distraction, right? Which is, we are so focused on each other that we are no longer going around trying to stop every single issue that's springing up. And so maybe in the past, the U.S. would have followed a policy of saying, well, we've got to prevent this crisis. We've got to prevent that crisis. And now they're a position saying, we're focused on China. We're focused

on Russia. We can't go around and try to fix every one of these problems. And by the same token, Russia could be in a situation where they say, well, maybe in the past we would have helped to resolve this conflict here, but we're engaged in a conflict now. We can't deal with that. So this is the reason why this rise of multilarity is so, I think it does play a key role in explaining this, because it's both the U.S. having less ability to be able to solve all these conflicts, but also this notion that great power competition leads to great power distraction. In your view, is the decline of Pax Americana a policy choice or an inevitability? Because I could really see an argument for either side here. On the one hand, you could say the U.S. is sure making a lot of

choices, right? Should we fund Ukraine's war against Russia? Well, Biden says yes. Many Republicans say no. That's a choice. Should we disengage with the United Nations? Trump says, yes, we should disengage. Democrats say no, another choice. But you could also make the argument, I think, that the end of the unipolar moment isn't a choice at all. China is a billion people. The U.S. is 300 million people. convergence was inevitable here. Where do you land on this question? So on the one hand, there is the argument by, say, scholars such as Robert Gilpin, who was a long time an IR scholar, very prominent IR scholar from Princeton University, passed just a few years ago. But he had written a book called War and Change International System. This was published in 1980s. And he put forward the

idea of the law of uneven growth. And basically, the law of uneven growth is getting to the inevitability. that look, countries grow at different rates, and there might be a point of time where one country is growing faster than the others, but eventually other ones catch up, and then, you know, you could start to get into the macroeconomics of that and so on and so forth. But the idea is kind of this inevitability that, look, at some point, it's not possible for one country to just stay the dominant power forever. It's just not possible. And so at some point, there was going to be a return of multipolarity. And I think there's a lot of validity to that argument. the flip side is that, well, maybe Gilpin's right, but that doesn't mean it had to have happened in the 2010s. We could have maybe put off that moment of reckoning or the multipolarity until the 2030s or the 2040s or the 2050s. If the U.S. had pursued better policies, quote, we'll put better in quotation marks, better policy vis-a-vis say China. Now, one extreme is arguments that have

been made that the U.S. should have tried to keep China down. They should not have a lot of China to become part of the WTO. They shouldn't have signed permanent normal trade relations with China in 2001. They could have done what they could to try to constrain the Chinese economy, and therefore that would have prevented or at least dramatically slowed down and complicated their lives. Moreover, there's arguments saying that the U.S. could have done more to accommodate Russia. At the extreme of that is the argument that NATO expansion was a huge mistake and was antagonistic towards Russia. But I think where the debate comes in is could the U.S. have done more in, say, the past 10 years, 20 years ago? Could the U.S. have done more 20 years ago to have put

itself in a position where that multipolar moment hasn't started? Theory two that I want to talk about is a theory that you brought up in your piece in the Atlantic. This is the theory that it's largely about Russia. The chaos that we're seeing in the world is largely about Russia. I want to I have some issues with this theory, but I want to first present the steel man version of the argument. And I will, for our listeners, I want to be clear. At no point did you suggest that this was some kind of, you know, monocausal explanation for everything that's happening in the world.

But let's look at the, it's more, maybe I should call theory too. It's more about Russia than you think. Who invaded Ukraine, Russia. Who failed to keep peace in Nagoro Karabakh, the drone war between Azerbaijan and Armenia? Russia. What did Hamas say? inspired the timing of the October 7 attack, America, Israel's military backer, being distracted by the war that Russia started. Help me fill out the It's Largely about Russia case.

I've been actually researching this argument for a while now, and I've put forward this argument on social media. I've going around and given talks about this, and all of this predates the war in Ukraine, where I make the argument that a lot of the major international security events of the past 200 years could, by and large, be traced back to Russia. That Russia always- We have an anti-Russian conspiracy theorists here in the show. I didn't realize that. It's not necessarily anti-Russia per se. But it's the idea that Russia, as a colleague of mine once said,

Russia always plays the heavy. You know, that if you think back to the 19th century, if you talk about like the great game that was happening in Central Asia, well, who were the British trying to counter? They're trying to counter Russia. You think about the Cold War. What's the Cold War about? It's Russia. Think about Nazi Germany. Hitler was primarily concerned about Russia. It always seems to be that Russia is the heavy. And sometimes that means Russia's on the defensive. Sometimes that means Russia's on the offensive. But it's this idea that a lot of the key events of international security, you can see that Russia is at the center of it.

And part of that could be because of just Russia's geographic position. They're at the center of Eurasia. They're the one country that is both an Asian power and a European power, and that's been the case for over 200 years. So that's kind of the larger context of this. But what's interesting from my standpoint is looking at that theory and looking at that in light of the past year, past two years, and seeing, wow, I mean, obviously the war in Ukraine is straightforward in terms of this theory. But then thinking about the knockoff effects, thinking about the fact that the war in Ukraine, then absorbs the attention of the United States, absorbs the attention of other countries. Those countries are now no longer able to respond in the same way to other crises. As a result, those other crises flare up.

Or Russia itself, who has usually played a role as a peacemaker, mediator with, say, Armenia and Azerbaijan, they're not in a position to do that because of the war in Ukraine. Or thinking about it, you mentioned with Hamas, that they sit there and say, well, look, the U.S. is distracted. We can, we can, now is, the international system is now primed for us to be able to take action because everybody's distracted by what Russia is doing. Or thinking about the United States itself, the U.S., and I think as is pretty well known now, the U.S. is actually having to divert, they're having to make choices about where to send their resources because there's just too many conflicts going on.

They can't send as much weaponry to Ukraine because now they have to send weapons to Israel. and that in turn has these knock-on effects. So it's really about the fact that Russia plays this role both directly but then has the second-order, third-order knock-on effects. And if it just wasn't for Russia's behavior, you wouldn't have seen it start to cascade in the way that it has. I have a dot-connecting question, and I want you to tell me if I'm connecting the dots in the right way here.

There's Russia. There's also China and there's Iran. And I'm starting to see these three countries as being part of what, I don't know, I think Noah Smith called it the New Access. I see it kind of like a dark triad. So no two leaders have met more in the last few years than Xi Jinping and China and Putin in Russia. Since the war in Ukraine started, China's exports of equipment to Russia, transportation equipment, this is cars, trucks, rail, aircraft, ships, has risen 800 percent. there is no bigger supplier to Russia's war machine than China. Where does Russia get the drones that it uses in order to combat Ukrainian drones?

It's Iran-made drones. They're the most important part of Russia's autonomous force. To what extent does it make sense in this second theory that we're playing with? It all goes back to Russia. To what extent sense does it make sense to sort of nest our analysis of Russia inside a broader analysis of Russia's relationship to China and Iran within this kind of dark triad. You could even add to that North Korea, of course, because the most recent rocket attacks that Russia launched against Kiev

were apparently the missiles that they've been purchasing from North Korea, right? And so you can start to see, I think it further emphasizes your point about where you're seeing countries who have not. viewed themselves as part of the, quote, Western-led order, right? And this is, of course, the way, you know, some people use the phrase liberal international order, rules-based order, but this is the order, the international system that the U.S. has been the leader of, right? So it kind of ties back to that Pax Americana. But the truth is that there are these countries, and at one point they were referred to as outlaw states or rogue states, whatever, in Iran,

of course, being most prominent that, North Korea as well. And Russia always being like are they or they not? Well, they're major power. Maybe rogue states are just smaller states. We're not sure. But the point is that there are these countries that have never fully viewed themselves as sitting comfortably within that system have had what we would call revisionist inclinings, meaning that order that you're running doesn't quite work for us. We're not really so keen on being in a system that's dominated by the U.S. dollar, that the U.S. gets to set all the rules, or that we have to make sure that our security interest are in line with the U.S. interests. Why can't the U.S. set theirs in line with ours, right?

That what you're seeing is that the countries that we've been talking about here, the countries you mentioned, of course, China being very prominent in this, are all countries that are like, yeah, we're not so keen on that Western-led order, and we would love to see an alternative to that. Why do you think this relationship between China and Russia seems to have deepened in the last few years. This has been by the, really due to two reasons or a couple reasons we can point to, but one of those being that the sanctions regime that's been placed on Russia, that has done two things. That is, number one, let Russia to look for, look elsewhere. Be like, you know what, we're not

going to have our economy integrated with the West. We're going to disconnect from that. And as a result, as you pointed out, we're going to be buying from China. We're going to be buying from other countries. And you know what? There's also some countries like India who maybe aren't quite comfortable with the Western led order and they're kind of like, you know, we're okay with doing business with Russia too. But the other thing is done is it's led countries like China to say, whoa, we've seen what the West just did to Russia. We don't want to be in a position like that. And so it's led to kind of like these efforts of what we've called decoupling, de-risking. And a lot of people have been saying that in reference to Western economies doing that

vis-a-vis China, but we also have to think about China trying to do that vis-a-vis these other countries. We don't necessarily want to be as dependent on them. So we might need to have another order. And so I think that that's what we're seeing here is kind of what you highlighted was the military aspect of this creation of an alternative non-Western-led order. And I think that we're kind of at the beginning of that process. So I want to tell you what I don't find persuasive about the Russia explanation. And it leads to the third theory to explain. the rising global chaos. You go to the Uppsala data. And one of the clearest trends that they show is that the number of non-state conflicts, so non-state actors like a terrorist group or a drug

cartel, the number of non-state conflicts in the world stands at a record high having basically tripled since 2008, tripled since 2008. We are talking, right, the drug cartels in Mexico, gang violence, paramilitary groups that have bloomed across Central America. We're talking, Boko Haram in Nigeria, Cameroon, al-Shabaab in Somalia. There are so many of these formal groups that have emerged in the last 14 years. And I don't want to be the everything-as-smart phones guy. But this does seem to me like it might be a technology story. Like one thing that Graham Wood, the Atlantic staff writer Graham Wood pointed out about ISIS, was that ISIS proselyzed itself, recruited through social media.

It broadcast its executions. It recruited from around the world. ISIS embraced smartphone technology. And I wonder whether the rise of all of these militant, non-state actors has something to do with the fact that if you're an insurgent who needs resources and people, it is so much easier to coordinate around the state if you can use technology to amass weapons. and recruits. Without making this entirely a everything is the smartphone's revolution thing, how do you feel about this theory that technology is responsible in large part for the rise of non-state actor chaos? I think technology absolutely has to play a role. You have to factor in technology. And this is something that actually is an area of research that has long been of

interest to scholars of international relations and politics is looking at how does technology change the nature of conflict. And I think that the diffusion of information technology capability and the ability to be able to use it at a lower level, meaning the individual, is absolutely essential to explaining this. There's a great saying by the former dictator of the Democratic Republic of Congo when it was still called Zaire, Mobutu, he said that all I need is to, $10,000 and a satellite phone to overthrow any government anywhere. That was his argument. And of course, he's making this statement back in the 80s, 90s.

Well, today, yes, there's lots of people who have a, quote, satellite phone. We don't call it a satellite phone anymore, right? We all have our smartphones. But that was a key part of it is that, and this whole point of saying $10,000 was really to not to say that it's a large amount of money, but to kind of say, oh, yeah, you know, when you're talking about overthrowing a government, all I need is $10,000, you know, just to buy off the right people. So the point is, is that creating chaos, even at that time, from Mabutu's standpoint, didn't require a massive amount of resources. I mean, that was even a big lesson that we drew

from the September 11th attacks back in 2001 was that, it was like for as devastating as those attacks were, the amount of resources and money that was necessary for wasn't all that great. So I do think that there's a role to be played. I think there is a there with your theory that this information technology has made it easier for these groups to be able to organize and to be able to carry at operations. Now, I don't think it's a complete story. I think it's more enabling factor because it doesn't go into the things. It doesn't help explain a couple things.

It doesn't explain, well, why do they want to do this? And also, that technology is available to the governments too, right? So these non-state actors have this technology. But governments also have technology and typically have better weaponry, resources, and et cetera, that if they were in a position to be able to stamp down these conflicts, they would. So I still think that comes back to why aren't the government's in a position to get it? Why aren't they receiving the external assistance that they need to be able to help confront some of these non-state actors? Could it be because the U.S. is too distracted?

Could it be because there's opportunities to use this as a proxy conflict within a greater great power conflict, right? those are still factors that have to be accounted for, though I do think the technology side of it absolutely helps to make it easier for these groups to organize and carry out their operations. If I'm hearing you correctly, you're saying it's not just about strong technology. It's about weak states.

It's about weak institutions that are vulnerable to non-state actors using technology. And if you look at the places where violent non-state groups are forming, Central America, Africa, Mexico. It's in countries where almost by definition government is too weak to maintain a monopoly on power and force.

Absolutely. This is something that has been pointed out as a bit of a dark side, if you will, to the role of conflict mediation by the United Nations or other international organizations, by the role of peacekeeping operations. And I'm not saying, that I fully buy into this argument, but it is an argument that's put out there that the international system post-World War II has gone to a point to where conflicts that

maybe in the past would have been allowed to fully play out to where then there is a single winner who can then consolidate all control and power. This goes back to like, you can go back to like hundreds of years in the state formation within Europe. And, you know, it was very much a product of war, but there would be a winner. They would establish their sovereignty. and then they have control of it. Well, in the current system, we have a desire, understandable desire, to not let these conflicts play out, right? We want to stop these conflicts.

We want to have mediation. We want to come in, put in a peacekeeping force to prevent these conflicts. But what that does, a consequence of that, is that these governments are not as fully consolidated as maybe would have happened in the distant past. And so as a result, they're more dependent on that external support to be able to maintain the security. And there's big parts of the population that don't buy into them because they weren't actually defeated in conflict. Instead, what happened was a major power came in and stopped the conflict.

They didn't get to play it out, right? You could think about this in the case of the U.S. context of play through the counterfactual. If instead of the American Civil War, playing out the way it did was Sherman's March to the Sea, what if the British had stepped in and said, nope, you two are done fighting? for now. You can think about how those dynamics would play out, but that's the argument that's been made about why we do see more of these weaker states in the international system. That's great. It makes me want to revise this theory from the simple, even simplistic, one-word explanation of technology to the idea that communications technology raises the cost

of weak institutions and weak governments, because it makes it easier for non-state groups to form militarized counterpoints to the state. Does that make sense? Like, smartphones obviously don't make war. What smartphones do is empower group formation of all kinds. And violent militant groups who see an opportunity to take power from government are more likely to form where and when governments and state institutions are weak. I make total sense. And again, that to me is fully in line with kind of the understanding of the weak state conditions that lead to these conflicts, and then the fact that technology, information technology can be an enabler for it. I mean, in many ways, information technology is another form of something that scholars of internal conflict have looked at,

which is, for example, there's a lot of papers that looked at mountainous terrain, right? It's like, you know, they say, hey, countries with lots of mountainous terrain tend to have civil wars. And you sit there and you go, why is that? It's not that, you know, the rebel group is sitting there going, oh, look at those mountains over there. Let's have a civil war. They're not saying that. But what it is is that the mountainous terrain makes it enables these groups to hide. It makes it harder for the state to penetrate in and to put them out if there's the other reasons why you would want to have the war.

And I think that the information technology plays a similar role. It's not that, oh, we have a cell phone. Let's start a civil war. It's that given that there are these other conditions that enable the war to happen, the cell phone now makes it easier for these groups to be able to carry out what they want to carry out. This is a good place actually to lift up and remind listeners where we are. Theory number one was that the mayhem we're seeing in the world is, in part, the decline of Pax Americana.

Theory two is that it is disproportionately about Russia and the dark triad or dark quad of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Theory three is that it's this interplay between strong technology and weak states. Let's go to theory four, which is we need to talk about climate change. The UN World Food Program declared last year, 2023, to be a record year for global food insecurity. There are so many examples of famines leading to weak states, leading to problems within states, a world with more famine and more migration, I should say, is going to be a world with more conflicts over borders and resources. to what extent do you think climate change is a subtle force in explaining the global chaos that we've observed? I think it is absolutely on the table and it's something that cannot be dismissed

precisely for the reason that you laid out that 2023, and this was something that, yeah, I've written about recently, 2023 wasn't just a record year for conflict. It was a record year for food insecurity around the world. Famine, droughts, malnutrition. Now, of course, these things are related, right? That a lot of times famine, malnutrition, food insecurity is a product of war, but it's also a cause of war, right? This competition over resources, competition over water, there's been many stuff. studies by scholars of conflict looking at how like spikes in food prices can lead to conflict. So absolutely the fact that climate change leads to these extremes in weather, which can lead to droughts, which can make it more difficult to be able to feed a population, that in turn leads to and can enable these conflicts. What it also means is it suggests that things aren't going to get better soon, right? I mean, if we really want to look at the efforts to try to combat climate change, it has been emphasized by the UN. It's been emphasized by other entities that climate change is a

security issue. It's not just an environmental issue. But if it truly is an issue that is playing a role with this, then it suggests that it's not going to get better anytime soon. Where does this theory play? So, for example, if the Russia theory plays in Azerbaijan, obviously Ukraine, potentially in Israel, what are some countries where famine or hunger seem to lead to conflict? Are we talking about Yemen, South Sudan? I think absolutely. So South Sudan, Yemen, this is a contributor to the ongoing, concerns about conflict in Ethiopia, for example, and that's been something where there's been settlements, then it becomes a frozen conflict, but that has historically been a region where

the hunger and conflict link go together. We've seen this in Syria as well. But it's also important to keep in mind that even in areas where we wouldn't have traditionally thought of as regions that would be prone to food insecurity, but if you have massive refugee flows, you're also going to have concerns about food aid. This is why, even when it comes to, to like Ukrainian refugees. There's concerns about food aid. So this is, so it's something that affects a lot of regions. But yes, a lot of the conflicts that you just laid out, this is an area where this is

very much acute. And it actually brings us back in many ways to Congo, as I talked about, because this is a big concern for the displacement that's been caused by the ongoing conflicts in Congo is the fact that you have many people facing food insecurity due to that conflict. So yes, this is, there's, in many ways, you can see this playing out in all conflicts, but there are certain ones, as we just mentioned, where it seems to be more of a driver of those conflicts. The final theory that I want to talk about, and this is one that you mentioned in your Atlantic

article, is going to sound a little bit like a cop-out, but I don't think it's a cop-out. And that theory is randomness. Not everything can be theorized. The world is an unthinkable number of variables colliding in an unthinkable number of ways. and, you know, well, journalists like me love to name things and love to enumerate categories and reasons and philosophies. It's actually very difficult to name a small number of variables, smartphones, famine, Russia, and pretend like we can explain every single military conflict in a world of 8 billion people. To what extent, how do you find the theory of randomness?

Because, Paul, this is your theory that I'm drawing from. How do you find the theory of randomness to be useful. Is this simply us throwing up our hands and saying, we don't have full explanatory power here? Or is there something useful about the theory of randomness? It's useful, but that doesn't mean that it's comforting, right? I think that's part of the reason why we look for theories. We look for explanation.

It's a part of the reason why we have a conversation like we're having today is because we look at what's happening in the world and say, there's got to be an explanation for this. There's got to be a reason for this. And the reason why the randomness explanation is useful is because sometimes things just happen. And it's just a series of unfortunate events. And maybe any one of those events might be explainable, right? You might look at it and say, well, here's why Azerbaijan and Armenia had another war.

Here's why there's a war in East Congo. So it's not to say that any one of these are not explainable, but the reason why they all cascade together is, just dumb luck. It's just like, you know, there's no, it's not about the end of Pax Americana, U.S. is still very powerful. The Russia thing, what are you even talking about? That's crazy. It's like it has nothing to do with those. It's just that every one of these just happen to flare up. And given that a number of these conflicts were actually previously frozen conflicts, most notably the war in Gaza, right? It's not like the war in Gaza just suddenly came out of nowhere. I mean, this is something that there's been ongoing conflict, there's been ongoing

tension and then it suddenly escalates to the current level. Well, the number of these conflicts are of that nature, right, where they were frozen conflicts or there had been earlier wars. And now it just so happens they were going to flare up again at some point. And it just happened at 2023, a bunch of these flared up at the same time. That's the randomness one. So it's not to say that like conflict is not explainable. It's just to say the cascade of conflicts, the fact that all of them seem to happen at the same time doesn't have a cause in and of itself. Now, my own view is, and hence the reason why I wrote the piece, and hence the reason why we're talking about this, and I have these arguments,

is I don't think it's fully satisfying because I don't think it's right. I don't think it's correct. I don't think all of these conflicts can be explained in the surge of 2023 can be explained solely by a series of unfortunate events. I think some of it can. I mean, anytime you have a spike in a number like that, you always have to say, well, that's a spike. And you kind of want to look at the average trend. But even if you look at the average trend, if you go back to that UCDP data, and again, hopefully, you know, the listeners will go to it.

I mean, it's a great website. They have everything kind of lay down. It's very nice to be able to look at these terms. But you can see that it's like it's not just a one-time spike. There's been this gradual increase throughout the late 20 T's into the 2020s. That to me suggests more of what you would call a mean shift as shift in the average number of conflicts to where even if 2023 is this exceptional spike, in 2022 we come down from that a little bit, we're still going to be at a much higher average level than we were saying 2010.

And that to me suggests that there's more structural factors going on and explaining what's going on. What would those structural factors be the things that we've been talking about? So putting it all together, you know, I hope that listeners recognize that the exercise here is is not to presume that one explanation explains every single state and non-state death in the world, but rather that we need this sort of portfolio of theories in order to make sense of a world that is more chaotic right now by some measures than any other. Paul, final thoughts, is there anything that you think we missed? I mean, we talked about a lot, unipolarity and climate change and technology and state and institutional strength.

Anything that you think we miss that sort of verbal to mind as we were speaking. I really think that we've hit all the main points. And I like that we ended with the randomness one because you could start with the randomness and say, well, you know, just throw up your hands and it's all just due to these things. And, oh, but, you know, maybe we'll entertain that there's at least some systematic explanation. But I think it was good that we ended with this point of just saying that at the end of day, you can look for deeper explanations and deeper causes. And as you said, it's like it's hard to say that it's any one of these. There's likely a little bit of all of these that are playing a role.

But I think that overall we've hit the main points. I mean, obviously when you're dealing with a topic of this scale, you know, you're going to miss something. There's going to be some things we could have talked more about. but overall, I hope that this does give listeners at least a framework for kind of thinking about why is it then when they looked back at 2023? And quite frankly, as they're looking forward in the 24, they're going to continue to see all of these conflicts around the world. Paul Post, thank you very much as always.

Hey, absolutely my pleasure. Thank you for listening. Plain English is produced by Devin Biroldi. We've got new episodes every Tuesday and Friday. If you like what you're hearing, give us five stars and a nice review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcast for feedback and episode suggestions email us at plain English at Spotify.com.