‘We’re Going to Be in a New World’

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Mutually assured

The general budget for the U.S. Department of Defense has also grown rapidly in recent years. Now, it’s more than $850 billion annually—or nearly 1 trillion if you count all military-related spending. And it seems the trend is set to continue. The speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, promised earlier this year that Republicans will cut spending overall, better to “prioritize the truly essential needs of our nation—and our national security has to be at the top of that list.”

Meanwhile, leaders in both parties have shifted in how they think about the role of national security in the economy. In a high-profile presentation in September, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan outlined his vision of how national security will be key to America’s future economic strategy. And earlier this year, the Pentagon released its first-ever “National Defense Industrial Strategy,” which calls for strengthening America’s industrial base in order to strengthen America’s military might. What’s driving all this?

Adam Tooze is a professor of history and the director of the European Institute at Columbia University. Tooze says the main force behind it is the United States’ evolving great-power rivalries with China and, to a lesser extent, Russia. Which aren’t just increasing military budgets; they’re transforming the way American leaders think about how these conflicts could play out—including with the use of nuclear weapons …

• “The Biden administration has been investing a lot of money in building a constellation of military alliances around the world. They’re tying in regional actors, especially around China, in what they call a ‘latticework’ of arrangements. At the core of that strategy is the ‘Quad’—the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue—made up of the U.S., India, Japan, and Australia. But the U.S. has a whole variety of other alliances and special relationships going, too. And they’re building these alliances and relationships quite deliberately to overlap and mesh with each other—to make them, as Biden people are inclined to say, ‘Trump-proof.’ In other words, to make them so a new Trump administration can’t simply retreat into a bilateral hub-and-spokes model—with America as the hub, the rest of the allies as spokes”
• “Mainstream commentary stopped talking about the nuclear-armament issue sometime in the 1980s, because everyone was just so glad it seemed to have gone away. But now it’s back—in a new form. And the United States’ involvement isn’t happening in a bipolar world but in the middle of a triangular competition with the Russians and the Chinese. The Chinese, meanwhile, are clearly making a big nuclear push. They want to have a secure second-strike capacity—the ability to respond to a nuclear attack with a nuclear retaliation—meaning that soon, there’ll be three countries with this capacity. At that point, we’re going to be in a new world. That’s not somewhere we’ve been before.”
• “There are people in Washington arguing in very aggressive terms for a return to the old ‘mutually assured destruction’ logic, in which, to put it bluntly, you have to convince the other side you’re crazy—that you’re willing to end the world after you’re gone—so they won’t end you first. There are people in Washington lobbying for the U.S. to modify its current position on striking urban centers—which is that they won’t target them; they might hit them, but only collaterally when targeting military facilities. But there are people in Washington now taking the view that this is too weak—that they need to be able to threaten to destroy cities themselves.”

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Another fall in Europe

The cabinet, headed by Michel Barnier of the Conservative Party, will go down as the shortest-lived government in the history of the Fifth Republic, founded in 1958—and no government had been ousted by a no-confidence vote in France since 1962.

Two days earlier, Barnier’s minority government had used a constitutional provision to push a 2025 budget through the legislature without a vote. That angered both the far-right National Rally and the bloc of four left-wing parties called the New Popular Front, which together have a majority in the National Assembly.

French President Emmanuel Macron will appoint the next prime minister—and can choose anyone he likes—but with none of the left, right, or center holding a majority in the legislature, any potential cabinet faces a difficult path to confirmation. How did France wind up here?

In October, Matthias Matthijs looked at the pattern of emerging political crises in Europe the situation in France belongs to. Macron made a grave strategic error by calling snap elections in June, after the National Rally’s victory in the European Parliament election earlier that month, Matthijs says—but the sources of France’s growing political instability go deeper, into the public’s loss of confidence in the traditional parties of the center-right and center-left. Now, the electorate has fragmented among several parties ranging from the far right to the far left, making any governing coalition shaky and weak.

—Michael Bluhm

• On December 3, China banned exports to the U.S. of rare minerals, critical for making semiconductor chips, electric-vehicle batteries, and weapons like bullets and shells. It was one day after the U.S. administration introduced its own new bans on exports of chips and chip-making machines to China—as well as a ban on working with some 140 Chinese semiconductor firms: According to Dylan Loh of Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, “The move is clearly a retaliatory strike at the U.S. It drives home an important point, which is that China is not completely passive, and there are some cards it can play and hit the U.S. with, in regard to chips.”Here in The Signal, Chris Miller recently looked at how increasingly tough measures in the U.S.-China competition over semiconductor chips have been dividing the global industry into increasingly separate U.S. and Chinese spheres—with the U.S. in the lead, for now.
• Retirement-home residents in the Netherlands are protesting a ban on “strong drink” in communal areas, which they call “patronizing and childish.” “People just have a glass of wine or an Advocaat with bingo,” said Ria, a resident in her early seventies. Ids Theepas, an interim manager at the home said, “We have frequently heard from a lot of elderly people in the neighborhood that they are wary of coming to the meeting areas”—but wouldn’t elaborate further.
• A blessing out of the 2019 fire that almost destroyed Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris? An opportunity for archaeologists to dig underneath the cathedral’s structure, where, according to Christophe Besnier of the Institut National de Recherches Archéologiques Préventives (National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research), “The remains turned out to be much richer than expected.” Since the exploration began in February 2022, researchers have found more than a thousand artwork fragments and other historical artifacts.

• The world of business moves fast, technology especially—tech startups even more so. Need to keep up? Join more than 2.5 million pioneers and pacesetters, and read The Hustle.

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