No, Noah, the “Noahopinion” guy, is not always an idiot. Take, for example, this recent post, If this is a bad economy, please tell me what a good economy would look like, expressing a bit of amazement at how well things have worked out under Uncle Joe’s genially geriatric hand. In fact, Noah says he very much doesn’t want to sound like a cheerleader for Uncle Joe, and yet:
And yet when I look at how the U.S. economy is doing right now, I find it difficult to describe it in terms that allow me to avoid sounding like a shill. I know lots of Americans still think the economy is doing poorly, and are upset about that. But when I look at objective measures, I just can’t rationalize that negative viewpoint. Because as far as I can tell from the actual numbers, this economy is doing really, really well.
So that Noah, “good Noah”, one might say, is really, really swell. But bad Noah, who can basically be described as “Let’s kick China in the ass really, really hard” Noah, is, you know, totally gross. Noah’s latest grossity, which is probably his worst, though I can’t say for sure, since I don’t read everything he publishes, bears the extremely stupid title Uh, guys, we should really think about spending more on defense, which we absolutely, motherfuckingly should not.
Here's how Noah starts off his post: “The United States is in big trouble militarily. That’s the upshot of a new RAND publication called Inflection Point”. Noah then quotes from RAND thusly:
[I]t has become increasingly clear that the U.S. defense strategy and posture have become insolvent. The tasks that the nation expects its military forces and other elements of national power to do internationally greatly exceed the means that have become available to accomplish those tasks. Reversing this erosion will call for sustained, coordinated efforts by the United States, its allies, and its key partners[.]
Well, if “RAND” says something, it must be true, right? We all know that, don’t we? Well, no. RAND, Noah, gets most of its money ($206 million out of $356 million) from the Department of Defense, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force, and the Department of Homeland Security.1 Of course they’re going to say we need to spend more money on defense! It’s their job!
If Noah had been paying attention, he might have noticed that RAND has been saying this shit for a long time, because, again, it’s their job! Back in the day, June 20, 2019, to be precise, I made fun of professional alarmist Max Boot for swallowing/retailing RAND’s standard alarmist jive, this time titled U.S. Military Capabilities and Forces for a Dangerous World, which, you will be utterly unsurprised to know, calls for the U.S. to spend oodles more cash on everything military.
Since Noah is, you know, an economist, he might wonder how much bang for our defense buck we are getting—other than, you know, paying people to tell us to spend more money on defense. I get the impression that he hasn’t researched this topic all that much, so I’ll give him a start with these pieces—Another $2 trillion down the rathole, and Old Man War Machine He Jes Keep Rollin’ Along, as well as the oddly titled Fred Kaplan: So sadly so right, to name only a few.
If Noah were just blindly, compulsively swallowing RAND’s self-serving garbage/alarmism, it would be bad enough, but as I continued reading I discovered the real reason for his bizarre enthusiasm for pumping up our already bloated and dysfunctional defense budget beyond all reason: China!
For Noah’s “China Syndrome” truly is beyond all reason: the guy hates China! Just hates it! Now, China hatred is, most sadly, a very serious thing in these United States these days, but Noah, who certainly has the chops to be sensible about these things, is simply frothing at the mouth to get it on with the Boys from Beijing,2 pouring on the alarmist crap sans merci: did you know that China can build ships 200 times faster than the U.S. can? It's true!
If you think I’m exaggerating Noah’s paranoia, well, I’m not, because that would be impossible. Here’s a sample of Noah’s froth:
Of course, we could simply wait until the balloon goes up and Chinese missiles start raining down on our bases in the Pacific. At that point, support for increased defense spending, military transformation, munitions production, and all the rest will shoot through the roof, as support for war production skyrocketed after Pearl Harbor. But by then there’s a good chance it’ll be too late — in the years that it’ll take us to overhaul our sclerotic system, we’ll have run out of munitions and we’ll be up against a smoothly functioning Chinese manufacturing juggernaut.
I hope this never happens, of course; I think there’s a decent chance it never will. But it’s important to be prepared, and right now, the United States is very much not prepared. In 1941 it was OK to not be prepared, because we had the mightiest industrial base in the world by far, and we could — and did — ramp up over time. In 2023, it’s our rival that has the world’s mightiest industrial base by far, and they can ramp up a lot more and a lot faster than we can.
So, there’s a “decent” chance that hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people will die in an all-out nuclear holocaust, eh Noah? Good to know!
Ground zero for Noah’s China obsession is, of course, Taiwan, and here’s what he thinks about that: Why I think an invasion of Taiwan probably means WW3. Here’s a suggestion, Noah: We don’t regard Taiwan as essential to our security, any more than we do Ukraine, which is why President Biden expressly said, and repeated, that U.S. troops would never be sent there.
Noah clearly thinks that we “have” to defend Taiwan as we “had” to defend Ukraine. It doesn’t occur to him how much more threatening Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was to Russia’s neighbors than China’s reclamation of its long (more than a century) rule over Taiwan would be to its neighbors (though such an invasion would be a huge outrage, nonetheless). Like so many Americans, he assumes without even thinking that the basis for American foreign policy must be exclusively moral: since a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be “wrong” (as it most certainly would be) then the U.S. has an utterly binding responsibility to resist it, regardless of the consequences to ourselves, which is utterly ridiculous.3
The only “solution” that Noah has to offer, as far as I can tell—the only way we can prevent World War III—is to massively increase defense spending, which would presumably include increasing our ship building capacity by a factor of 200. Since the Congressional Budget Office estimated back in 2020 that the U.S. Navy’s shipbuilding plan was kicking in at about $34 billion a year, I guess we’re going to have to pick up the pace a little on that one, to about $6.8 trillion. Right now Noah is saying that entitlements are driving our financial woes, but if Noah gets his hand on the fiscal throttle, I guess things will change.
What’s truly disturbing about Noah’s ranting is that it isn’t based so much on Wilsonian idealism, which figures that since we’re good we can do anything we like and anything we want, as simple animal hatred of the Chinese. They’re evil, evil, evil! Seriously, you don’t know how evil they are! I frankly don’t know where it’s coming from, but it’s profoundly depressing.
I am very much not a fan of China. But I do not see the point of getting in a pissing match with a country four times our size. Our disastrous efforts in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya, in Syria, and, yes, in Ukraine,4 all attest to the folly of attempting to impose our will on the world. And yet we never learn. Past failures only make us search for new and bigger venues for disaster. I have moaned about this quite a bit. I often hope that China fanatics like Noah will ultimately fail because other major Asian nations, like India, Japan, and South Korea, will fail to play the paranoia game, but folks like Noah make me fear we might try to run the whole thing by ourselves.
I believe that, for the most part, Biden’s policy towards Ukraine has been “correct”, though I also believe we should have stopped sending them more advanced weapons some time ago. It doesn’t look like either side will be willing to accept a settlement any time soon, but the U.S. should be far more willing to accept—and advocate—a compromise peace than the administration is currently willing to acknowledge. Being aggressively pro-Ukraine plays very well politically with Biden’s base, and, considering his overall political weakness, he’s going to be very reluctant to do anything “controversial”. Shockingly, I believe that the war is ultimately the result of blind American “virtue”
1. Follow the money, Noah! You’re an economist! You should know these things!
2. Noah sportingly collects all his China posts here.
3. Noah tricks out his “analysis” with some “game theory” that strikes me as, well, utterly ridiculous, because the “rules” he invents for his game—that, among other things, China would initiate its invasion by attacking U.S. bases, are utterly ridiculous. Like all game theorists, Noah programs his games to give him the answers he wants, and, when they don’t, he ignores them.
