Global Sync #7
Dostoevsky on Gaza. Sand Mafias. Demoralization. Economic Warfare. A New Job. How Englishmen Play Risk.
Welcome to Global Sync, a newsletter on geopolitics made simple. Today we’re talking about Dostoevsky and Gaza, mafia risks in the world’s largest extractive industry - Sand, KGB strategies for demoralizing the West, economic warfare and defense, and a new job for your author. Plus how Englishmen play Risk.
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Global Sync #7
Today is the 2nd of March, 2024. Here are 5 things I think are worth knowing about the world this week.
1/ Dostoevsky on Gaza
“I understand solidarity in sin among men. I understand solidarity in retribution, too; but there can be no such solidarity with children.
If it is really true that they must share responsibility for all their fathers' crimes, such a truth is not of this world and is beyond my comprehension. Some jester will say, perhaps, that the child would have grown up and have sinned, but you see he didn't grow up, he was torn to pieces by the dogs, at eight years old.
I don't want harmony. From love for humanity I don't want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it's beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it.
"That's rebellion," murmured Alyosha, looking down.
This is a passage from “Rebellion,” a chapter in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. In the chapter, protagonist Ivan Karamazov shares stories of children being murdered, abused, and made to suffer, often by those in society deemed cultured and one’s ‘betters.’ The ‘rebellion’ Dostoevsky writes about is not (just) against the perpetrators but against what Ivan calls the ‘invitation to God’s Kingdom.’ Not a rejection of God Himself, but an ultimate and wholesale refusal to participate in His system for as long as He continues to allow the suffering of these children, even if it means going against Reason or self-interest.
I thought of this passage as I considered the war in Gaza. A significant share of the West’s position in the international system is based on faith. Faith in (1) its ability to defeat enemies and project power, and (2) the universal values that it promotes including through the world’s dominant institutions. Fairly or not, the war in Gaza and the West’s endorsement of it is testing that faith and creating ‘rebels’ to the status quo ante at a pace that I don’t think many of our leaders yet fully realize. The geopolitical consequences will be complex but very real.
I recommend spending some time with Dostoevsky’s full chapter, available here.
2/ Sand Mafias
I first was tuned into the problem of sand trafficking several years ago by my wife, who happened upon an illegal sand mining operation while traveling around Kenya with a local friend and environmentalist. Sand mining is the largest extractive industry in the world, a critical raw input for the manufacture of concrete and other construction materials and in rarer and more refined forms, glass, ceramics, and electronics. In fact, after water, sand is the most widely used natural commodity in the global economy.
I don’t think it’s too much of an exaggeration to say that the modern world runs on sand.
The problem is that the world is running out of usable sand. Since desert sands are generally not suitable for human use, the 50 billion tons of sand currently needed per year is sourced from riverbeds, beaches, arable land, and other ecologically sensitive areas. Such sands are not renewable over human timescales, meaning that quality natural sand is becoming rarer and more valuable. This has incentivized an explosion in illegal sand mining in places like Kenya, Liberia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and elsewhere. In Morocco, officials estimate that 50% of the supply chain is illegally sourced. Globally, reliable estimates in fact put the market volume for illegal sand ($200-400 billion) as comparable in size to the legal market and in the ballpark of the global narcotics trade.
The risks of this asymmetry are huge. Ecologically, the illegal sand trade erodes coasts and threatens ecosystems across the globe, with scientists already able to attribute catastrophic declines in some riverine species to illegal sand extraction. Socially, ‘sand mafias’ are bringing violence and criminality to local communities across the planet, similar to illegal gold mining but just at many multiples of frequency and scale. And economically, we are creating a situation where the supply chain for a critical input of the modern global economy is in large part illegal and unsustainable. Certainly an issue for further analysis and discussion.
3/ Demoralization as a Tactic
I came across this obscure gem of an interview with former KGB officer and Cold War defector Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov. He describes in fascinating detail the Soviet strategies of subversion, cognitive and political warfare, ‘active measures,’ and ‘reflexive control.’ Techniques the USSR perfected during the Cold War and are still in use today by their Russian successors. Worth a listen in its entirety.
“A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures; even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him [a] concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it, until he gets a kick in his fat bottom. When a military boot crashes his balls then he will understand. But not before that. That’s the [tragedy] of the situation of demoralization.”
4/ Economic Defenses
I read two RAND publications this week that together present a refreshingly novel approach to national security, one focused on economic warfare and defense. The first was a recent study on “Technical and Economic Threats to the US Financial System,” which detailed how adversaries could wage economic warfare against the US with techniques like attacks on algorithmic trading models, strategic bond dumping, deepfakes used to spread misinformation, and memetic engineering used to manipulate market thinking and behaviors. The second was a report from last year recommending an “Economic Joints Chiefs” to align financial, technology, national security, and strategic decision-making and provide a permanent platform for this type of innovative wargaming and deep thinking against economic threats. Highly relevant to the US as well as democratic allies in Europe and Asia. I recommend reading both.
5/ New Job
I started a new job last week, helping spearhead a global financial institution’s responses to terrorism and proliferation finance. These two issues are at the center of today’s geopolitics, often in more ways than one might realize. I’m personally very excited for this next chapter as it brings together much of my professional work over the last 20 years. I spent the first half of my career working on terrorist finance and counterproliferation - as a field researcher and author and then within the special operations and intelligence communities. (You can read some of my work from this time here). This threat finance experience was the foundation for my later work in nature conservation and sustainability. Finance, for both good and ill, is a critical determinant of global security and the health of our planet and I’m excited to be back on the frontlines.
One final note: I really enjoy writing Global Sync and will continue to do so, just with a new disclaimer that everything I write is done in a strictly personal capacity!
An Englishman Plays Risk
This week I end with a little comedic inspiration from Ireland’s own Foil, Arms, and Hog.
“Oh… I just assumed.”
Have a great week.