RE Reagan, here's a passage from " The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil" by Michael Malice:
"Both Reagan and Gorbachev viewed a nuclear exchange between the two rival superpowers as effectively bringing about the end of the world. To paraphrase the first female Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, “You can no more win a [nuclear] war than you can win an earthquake.” Even before he assumed office as president, Reagan took part in a discussion about what would happen if the Soviet Union struck first. One participant in the meeting argued that, should missiles be fired, that the United States should just launch a response before we were hit. “That would be the wrong thing to do,” Reagan said. His advisers left the meeting “almost certain that he would not retaliate in the event of an attack”. Gorbachev did Reagan one better. After he assumed leadership of the USSR, Gorbachev was walked through a simulated nuclear strike so that he would know what to do should the unimaginable ever happen. As he sat there being told that missiles were flying toward the Soviet Union, Gorbachev refused to take part in a retaliatory strike. “I will not press the button even for training purposes,” he said.[cdlxxxi] The two men with the most powerful nuclear arsenals in the world were thus committed to never using them—though neither could be sure that the other felt the same."
Agree. I have a suspicion that Ukraine would have been invaded earlier, but there was worry the Ukrainians would have a bunch of actresses protest outside the White House, and Trump would have declared war on Russia.
Possibly? I can't recall anything specific McCain said to that effect, but Hillary definitely said during a debate that she wanted to unilaterally implement a no fly zone over Syria, and the stuff flying over Syria at the time were Russian fighter bombers, which means she was stating explicitly she wanted a hot war with Russia.
I don't recall if McCain said anything like that or not. He may have and I might have missed it.
That is a pretty consistent theory across the time frame I have lived. Carter had the Iranian hostage issue and it was solved the minute Reagan took over. Hence the world respects/fears Republicans and it's game on when a Democrat is in office. Interesting to see it actually play out in the numbers.
The minimum deadlift requirement is 40 pounds. The maximum is 110 pounds. A fairly fit grandmother can now be in the airforce. These are deeply unserious people.
State actors feel safe to make moves with Biden in the seat, or at least confident that his flaccid foreign policy stance means they'll be able to get away with stepping out for a good long while before they catch hands, if they get any at all.
Like it or not our Navy is a major player in global security, and they are majorly overextended, and everyone knows it.
I read that Iran does reconnaissance by bayonet. If they encounter steel, they back off. If they encounter soft and squishy, they keep pushing in the bayonet. This theory is very consistent with Iran's observed dealings with the world. Democrats after Kennedy have been very soft and squishy, and the whole world sees it. And that includes LBJ who was incredibly afraid that ANYTHING we might do in Vietnam would start WW3.
That Reagan story brings to mind something I’ve thought. Jimmy Carter was castigated for being careless with his nuclear codes and losing the aide carrying the football a couple of times. This was a scandal in some circles. I’ve always assumed that Carter was so careless about this because he already knew he would never use them.
Similarly, there is a well known story of Brezhnev at a nuclear command post exercise. When it came time for him to “press the button” he was said to be shaky and blanched and required reassurances that the military was certain the codes and hardware were configured for drill.
Not only did Biden surely cause that war, that also means that Ethiopians were in on the stolen election, because Trump still insisted he won for another 2 months.
I think it's relatively unlikely that anything going on in Africa is influenced by US presidents unless it borders the Mediterranean. Clinton pretty much gave carte blanche for Africans to commit genocide and the continent noticed. (as you mentioned in another comment)
I do think it's possible that Ukraine escalation and Hamas provocation may have had a higher probability based on who was in office over here.
I will absolutely yield that any given president might get stuck with bad numbers due to things beyond his control, but I will not yield on three points:
1) Things did not get worse under Trump, they got better, which was exactly opposite the 2016 rhetoric,
2) Things were supposed to get better under Biden because he was "finally the adult in the room" or similar, but absolutely got dramatically worse,
3) The overall trend going back not only to 1980 but all the way to WW2 is global conflict goes down when there's a red (5 of 7 reds oversaw a drop in conflict) and up with blues (5 of 6 blues saw a rise in conflict). That's not coincidence, that's a signal of some sort.
I actually struggle with this question because I've actively voted for the less pro-war candidate multiple times in the past. That was one of the reasons I picked Obama over McCain. I couldn't vote for Hillary because of her support for the war in Iraq (I didn't vote for Trump, either). As I've said, I saw many flaws with Trump, but hawkish foreign policy was not one of them.
I probably should have held Biden to the same standard in 2020, since he also voted for the war in Iraq. But I was just completely done with the Trump admin at that point, and especially with Trump's God awful response to Covid. So... the question for 2024 becomes, is Biden too pro-war in Ukraine? Given that it's already started, would Trump do anything better to end the war, win the war, etc? Is the war even winnable? Those are questions I haven't really worked through, yet.
Incidentally, I know you're pro-lab leak theory, in which case you'd have to fault Trump both for his Covid response and for the creation of Covid, since gain of function was banned under Obama but the ban was lifted under Trump's watch. I only know of one journalist who actually asked Trump about that. He gave a nice evasive answer:
I don't know the answer to that question. It's entirely possible that republican presidents are bad for the economy. It's also possible that money in stocks moves to different avenues during red presidents and moves back to stocks during blue ones. I tend to think personally that the economy (stocks in particular) has more to do with the Fed than the president at any given moment. Not necessarily who's running the Fed but what the Fed's doing. That may be tied to presidential pressure, which may in turn be tied to the philosophies of the presidents. It'd be an interesting topic to pursue.
I agree with your conclusions about Reagan, Trump, and "now there's no fear." I believed this Trump "strategy" from the beginning. I believe that Ukraine would not have been invaded if Trump was still in office. (Remember that Trump sent weapons to Ukraine.) Not as certain about the Gaza/Israel war but it certainly didn't help that Biden and Obama gave lots of money to and weakened sanctions for Iran. Biden still seems incredibly soft on Iran.
Alright, let's try for some more serious thoughts.
First off, isn't your graph missing or undercounting the Rwandan genocide? At somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million deaths, I think should be the biggest spike of any year in the graph.
Second, it looks like the spike under the Biden admin is mostly just 2 conflicts: the war in Ukraine and Ethiopia's civil war. I'm embarassed to admit I didn't have any idea how deadly the war in Ethiopia is, and only noticed that after trying to parse your graph. It looks like those deaths might also be undercounted, one source says 600,000 dead:
That brings me to another question... what is this data even counting? Is it only deaths of soldiers? Is that why these numbers are so much lower than the civilian death counts? And, if so, is that also why the Bush years look so peaceful? Because I've also seen estimates as high as 600,000 for deaths in Iraq:
That's spread out over a number of years, and some estimates are lower, so maybe you can squeeze that total into a small annual value into that bar chart, but I'm not so sure.
Finally, the important question... who's fault is it?
I'd assume you think that Biden is to blame for Ukraine. But do you think the war in Ethiopia was caused by Biden? How did he start that one?
I'm too young to have ever voted for Reagan. I was in college during 9/11. I thought the invasion of Afghanistan was valid, but unlikely to achieve anything -- it seemed clear that they'd always be a tribal wasteland. And 20 years later, we gave up, and it's still a tribal wasteland. I'm glad Biden left, and I'd be equally glad if Trump left. And I think everyone complaining that it "made us look weak" is just a partisan trying to win points against Biden.
I absolutely fail to see how that one is connected to Ukraine. If your theory of foreign policy is that we need to stay in Afghanistan forever, to look strong, but you also think you're "America First" and "Non-interventionist", you should recognize that's a contradiction.
Most conservatives today seem to think we should have stayed in Afghanistan, but also think we should not be helping Ukraine. I fail to see the logic there, other than pure partisanship and a contrarian belief that anything Biden does is wrong.
I thought George W was a terrible president for invading Iraq. I voted for Obama in the hopes that we'd leave Iraq. We sort of did, and then we were sort of back because of ISIS.
The arab spring happened. Obama greenlit the removal of Gaddafi, then Libya probably ended up an even worse place without him. After a few successful uprisings in other countries, there was an uprising in Syria and Assad put that down brutally. Obama waffled and then mostly let that happen.
How would those years have played out differently, if McCain had been president for 8 years? Honest question, I've never thought about it. Do you have an opinion? Like, the arab spring would still happen either way, right? And McCain would gladly take out Gaddafi, McCain never saw a bombing campaign he didn't like. So... is the difference that he'd aggressively bomb Syria? Woud that eventually lead to a conflict with Russia, given their interests?
Or, skip McCain and just flip the 2020 election. Would Russia not have invaded Ukraine if Trump was president? Or would Putin have invaded and won because Trump would not have intervened? Again, honest question.
I guess it's all fairly complicated. Like, the US president probably has almost no influence on wars in Africa. Those are tribal conflicts and people there know that the US won't intervene anyways.
The US president does have an influence on what happens in the Middle East, both because we are often the one starting those wars, and for other reasons.
Ukraine is a big wildcard. As are potential future wars in, say, Korea or Taiwan.
And, to some degree, all these casualty numbers would be insignificant compared to a real war between major powers, and perhaps the ability of a president to avoid that low probability but high severity event matters more than any of the rest. Of course, it's hard to guess who's best for that job, given that we've never had a nuclear war.
For what it's worth, I did not vote for Trump or Hillary in 2016. I saw (and see) many flaws in Trump, but I actually thought Hillary had the bigger record as pro-war, and I thought that Trump sounded like more of an isolationist.
Deaths in ongoing conflicts (best estimate) - Conflict_type: state-based
The best estimate of the number of deaths of combatants and civilians due to fighting in interstate, intrastate, and extrasystemic conflicts that were ongoing that year.
Source
Uppsala Conflict Data Program (2023), Peace Research Institute Oslo (2017) – processed by Our World in Data
Last updated
October 24, 2023
Next expected update
October 2024
Date range
1946–2022
Unit
deaths
What you should know about this data
A state-based conflict is a conflict between two armed groups, at least one of which is a state, that causes at least 25 deaths during a year. This includes combatant and civilian deaths due to fighting.
The data of this indicator is based on the following sources:
Uppsala Conflict Data Program – Georeferenced Event Dataset
This dataset is UCDP's most disaggregated dataset, covering individual events of organized violence (phenomena of lethal violence occurring at a given time and place). These events are sufficiently fine-grained to be geo-coded down to the level of individual villages, with temporal durations disaggregated to single, individual days.
This project has generated a dataset on battle deaths (number of soldiers and civilians killed in combat) in state-based armed conflicts for the period 1946-2008.
The dataset is compatible with the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset for the period 1946–2008.
A longer time series (1900-1997) compatible with the Correlates of War database was included in the first version (v1) of the Battle Deaths Dataset, available from the downloads section.
For academic exchanges on the PRIO data, see the following articles and rebuttals:
Lacina & Gleditsch (2005) 'Monitoring trends in global combat: A new dataset of battle deaths'.
Obermeier et al. (2008) 'Fifty years of violent war deaths from Vietnam to Bosnia'
Spagat et al. (2009) 'Estimating war deaths: An arena of contestation'.
Gohdes & Price (2012) 'First things first: Assessing data quality before model quality'.
Lacina & Gleditsch (2012) 'The waning of war is real: A response to Gohdes and Price'
There are no plans to update the PRIO battle deaths dataset beyond 2008. The Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) maintains a similar dataset from 1989, which is updated annually. For this dataset in different formats, as well as a codebook, go to the UCDP Battle-Related Deaths Dataset.
While the definitions are very similar, the coding practices may differ somewhat, and we generally recommend users of the two datasets to point out that these are two different, although closely related, datasets.
All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.
At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.
It's just, when a data source doesn't match small sanity checks (i.e. missing the Rwandan genocide) you have to wonder how good it is, or whether it's missing some major component (like civilian deaths).
You rarely read such a stupid analysis. The author confuses correlation with causation. I would argue that Putin invaded the Ukrainian has a consequence of Trump's presidency, not Biden's, because Trump as significantly weakened the authority of the US. Also, the disaster in Afghanistan is a direct consequence of Trump's decision to move out, no matter what.
Well, if the Americans want to be reigned by maniac, let it be. Hopefully, this will be the beginning of the end of American dominance in the world. If Trump is elected even the current partners of the US will push to be less dependent on the US, since Trump is not a partner you need to avoid at all costs.
I literally don't care who wins the next election because I literally think Democracy is dead and has been for a while, and even if it isn't dead someone should kill it.
The only reason I write this is to point out how tremendously mathematically false one particular narrative is, not only about Trump but about parties in general. And it doesn't even stop at 1980. If you go all the way back to the beginning of the dataset, which begins at WW2, these are your results. There are 6 Ds, and 5/6ths presided over an increase in deaths in global conflicts. There are 7 Rs, and 5/7ths presided over a reduction in global conflict deaths. This has been the trend since the 1950s. It's not new, and it's not unique to Trump.
What is unique, however, is how things have skyrocketed under Biden. There has never been a rise this quick, and the data set doesn't even include 2023 yet, in which all the Israel-Gaza deaths will be recorded.
" You rarely read such a stupid analysis. The author confuses correlation with causation"
The author repeatedly says things like, "Keep in mind, this all presumes that US presidents have some influence over global conflicts. Maybe they do and maybe they don’t." IOW the author is specifically acknowledging that correlation is not causation.
It sure seems like you didn't read it, and if you did read it you didn't comprehend it.
Looking at that "increase / decrease per year" column, I think it's safe to say that Trump could have managed the #2 slot, edging out GWB, if the 2020 election hadn't been stolen. And obviously, keeping Biden from office would have been a vast improvement. I don't suppose it would quite be justified to grant Trump the inverse of the increase under Biden, but if he takes the 2024 presidency, he might well end up the most peace inducing US president of all time.
I'm not convinced about that because the numbers during Trump had leveled off his last two years, and the drop in his first two years started during Obama. It's very clear, though, that he didn't cause any spikes and it's very clear that Biden's presiding over the worst spike in history post WW2.
Except Trump wouldn't have fumbled the Afghanistan withdrawal, and might well have actually gotten his generals to follow his orders to get the hell out of Syria. If only by actually court martialing the insubordinate bastards who were flat out lying to him about that. Though perhaps they'd have kept it sufficiently hidden from him. At any rate, I think the last four years will have shown him that he needs to be *vastly* more ruthless with his staffing.
He needs someone who can survive his wrath after telling him that he's being lied to by someone. I don't know if his ego would handle that. But it's what he needs for a truly effective second term. Presuming the Deep State doesn't just give him the Kennedy treatment.
If you recall, Obama did a purge of Generals when he came into office. I remember thinking that this would turn out badly, and in my opinion, it has. But of course nobody complained when Obama did it. But Trump would have been crucified if he had done it.
RE Reagan, here's a passage from " The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil" by Michael Malice:
"Both Reagan and Gorbachev viewed a nuclear exchange between the two rival superpowers as effectively bringing about the end of the world. To paraphrase the first female Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, “You can no more win a [nuclear] war than you can win an earthquake.” Even before he assumed office as president, Reagan took part in a discussion about what would happen if the Soviet Union struck first. One participant in the meeting argued that, should missiles be fired, that the United States should just launch a response before we were hit. “That would be the wrong thing to do,” Reagan said. His advisers left the meeting “almost certain that he would not retaliate in the event of an attack”. Gorbachev did Reagan one better. After he assumed leadership of the USSR, Gorbachev was walked through a simulated nuclear strike so that he would know what to do should the unimaginable ever happen. As he sat there being told that missiles were flying toward the Soviet Union, Gorbachev refused to take part in a retaliatory strike. “I will not press the button even for training purposes,” he said.[cdlxxxi] The two men with the most powerful nuclear arsenals in the world were thus committed to never using them—though neither could be sure that the other felt the same."
Well then my dad's story checks out. Interesting - thanks.
Anytime!
The book has footnotes too.
Page 35 of "Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons"
By Paul Lettow, available in Google Books preview.
https://books.google.com/books?id=36pYekyje-kC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&printsec=frontcover&dq=ROnald+Reagan+quest+to+abolish+nuclear+weapons&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false
Gorbechov's "I will not press the button" comes from here:
https://www.bostonreview.net/forum_response/vladislav-m-zubok-gorbachevs-nuclear-learning/
Agree. I have a suspicion that Ukraine would have been invaded earlier, but there was worry the Ukrainians would have a bunch of actresses protest outside the White House, and Trump would have declared war on Russia.
If Hillary had won in 2016 we'd probably already be in a hot war with Russia over Syria.
I asked this in another comment, but wouldn't that also be possible if McCain won in 2008+2012?
Possibly? I can't recall anything specific McCain said to that effect, but Hillary definitely said during a debate that she wanted to unilaterally implement a no fly zone over Syria, and the stuff flying over Syria at the time were Russian fighter bombers, which means she was stating explicitly she wanted a hot war with Russia.
I don't recall if McCain said anything like that or not. He may have and I might have missed it.
McCain never saw a war he didn't like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7s5pT3Rris
🎯
That is a pretty consistent theory across the time frame I have lived. Carter had the Iranian hostage issue and it was solved the minute Reagan took over. Hence the world respects/fears Republicans and it's game on when a Democrat is in office. Interesting to see it actually play out in the numbers.
There's a possibility that part of the Iranian hostage thing was driven by literal electioneering.
I think the world is also figuring out that the US military is a joke. For example --
https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2023/10/09/want-to-join-the-air-force-now-you-have-to-deadlift/
The minimum deadlift requirement is 40 pounds. The maximum is 110 pounds. A fairly fit grandmother can now be in the airforce. These are deeply unserious people.
And the maximum age to join the Space Corps is now 48.
You have my vote for National Security Advisor...
That'd be a hell of a job.
Got it in one.
State actors feel safe to make moves with Biden in the seat, or at least confident that his flaccid foreign policy stance means they'll be able to get away with stepping out for a good long while before they catch hands, if they get any at all.
Like it or not our Navy is a major player in global security, and they are majorly overextended, and everyone knows it.
I read that Iran does reconnaissance by bayonet. If they encounter steel, they back off. If they encounter soft and squishy, they keep pushing in the bayonet. This theory is very consistent with Iran's observed dealings with the world. Democrats after Kennedy have been very soft and squishy, and the whole world sees it. And that includes LBJ who was incredibly afraid that ANYTHING we might do in Vietnam would start WW3.
That's pretty consistent with historical pastoral raidng societies general attitude.
Or, it *was* a major player, back when it still had ships that actually worked.
Thank fuck for the Arliegh Burke Mafia, which is not a phrase I expected to ever utter.
Ouch, my ribs hurt from laughing.
Thank you for teaching me something in such an enjoyable way..
That Reagan story brings to mind something I’ve thought. Jimmy Carter was castigated for being careless with his nuclear codes and losing the aide carrying the football a couple of times. This was a scandal in some circles. I’ve always assumed that Carter was so careless about this because he already knew he would never use them.
Similarly, there is a well known story of Brezhnev at a nuclear command post exercise. When it came time for him to “press the button” he was said to be shaky and blanched and required reassurances that the military was certain the codes and hardware were configured for drill.
Whoa, it looks like the Tigray war in Ethiopia started November 3rd, 2020, the very day that Biden got elected!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Tigray_War
Not only did Biden surely cause that war, that also means that Ethiopians were in on the stolen election, because Trump still insisted he won for another 2 months.
I think it's relatively unlikely that anything going on in Africa is influenced by US presidents unless it borders the Mediterranean. Clinton pretty much gave carte blanche for Africans to commit genocide and the continent noticed. (as you mentioned in another comment)
I do think it's possible that Ukraine escalation and Hamas provocation may have had a higher probability based on who was in office over here.
I will absolutely yield that any given president might get stuck with bad numbers due to things beyond his control, but I will not yield on three points:
1) Things did not get worse under Trump, they got better, which was exactly opposite the 2016 rhetoric,
2) Things were supposed to get better under Biden because he was "finally the adult in the room" or similar, but absolutely got dramatically worse,
3) The overall trend going back not only to 1980 but all the way to WW2 is global conflict goes down when there's a red (5 of 7 reds oversaw a drop in conflict) and up with blues (5 of 6 blues saw a rise in conflict). That's not coincidence, that's a signal of some sort.
I actually struggle with this question because I've actively voted for the less pro-war candidate multiple times in the past. That was one of the reasons I picked Obama over McCain. I couldn't vote for Hillary because of her support for the war in Iraq (I didn't vote for Trump, either). As I've said, I saw many flaws with Trump, but hawkish foreign policy was not one of them.
I probably should have held Biden to the same standard in 2020, since he also voted for the war in Iraq. But I was just completely done with the Trump admin at that point, and especially with Trump's God awful response to Covid. So... the question for 2024 becomes, is Biden too pro-war in Ukraine? Given that it's already started, would Trump do anything better to end the war, win the war, etc? Is the war even winnable? Those are questions I haven't really worked through, yet.
Incidentally, I know you're pro-lab leak theory, in which case you'd have to fault Trump both for his Covid response and for the creation of Covid, since gain of function was banned under Obama but the ban was lifted under Trump's watch. I only know of one journalist who actually asked Trump about that. He gave a nice evasive answer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oh2Sj_QpZOA&t=2820s
I'm halfway through this and already have so many questions...
Before I get to those, I'll mention that this reminds me of all those articles that graph stock market performance by US president:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/07/23/historical-stock-market-returns-under-every-us-president/?sh=51693fbfaaf4
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-economy-and-the-stock-market-tends-to-do-better-under-democrats-11611158787
So, if Republicans are so good for le economy, why do stocks and the economy do better under Democratic presidents?
I don't know the answer to that question. It's entirely possible that republican presidents are bad for the economy. It's also possible that money in stocks moves to different avenues during red presidents and moves back to stocks during blue ones. I tend to think personally that the economy (stocks in particular) has more to do with the Fed than the president at any given moment. Not necessarily who's running the Fed but what the Fed's doing. That may be tied to presidential pressure, which may in turn be tied to the philosophies of the presidents. It'd be an interesting topic to pursue.
You need to also look at who control Congress. A huge part of why both did so well under Clinton was that the GOP controlled Congress from 1994-2000.
And, of course, that Reagan and Volcker broke the back of inflation, setting off a 20 (arguably 40) year boom.
I agree with your conclusions about Reagan, Trump, and "now there's no fear." I believed this Trump "strategy" from the beginning. I believe that Ukraine would not have been invaded if Trump was still in office. (Remember that Trump sent weapons to Ukraine.) Not as certain about the Gaza/Israel war but it certainly didn't help that Biden and Obama gave lots of money to and weakened sanctions for Iran. Biden still seems incredibly soft on Iran.
Alright, let's try for some more serious thoughts.
First off, isn't your graph missing or undercounting the Rwandan genocide? At somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million deaths, I think should be the biggest spike of any year in the graph.
Second, it looks like the spike under the Biden admin is mostly just 2 conflicts: the war in Ukraine and Ethiopia's civil war. I'm embarassed to admit I didn't have any idea how deadly the war in Ethiopia is, and only noticed that after trying to parse your graph. It looks like those deaths might also be undercounted, one source says 600,000 dead:
https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-01-27/ethiopias-forgotten-war-is-the-deadliest-of-the-21st-century-with-around-600000-civilian-deaths.html
That brings me to another question... what is this data even counting? Is it only deaths of soldiers? Is that why these numbers are so much lower than the civilian death counts? And, if so, is that also why the Bush years look so peaceful? Because I've also seen estimates as high as 600,000 for deaths in Iraq:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
That's spread out over a number of years, and some estimates are lower, so maybe you can squeeze that total into a small annual value into that bar chart, but I'm not so sure.
Finally, the important question... who's fault is it?
I'd assume you think that Biden is to blame for Ukraine. But do you think the war in Ethiopia was caused by Biden? How did he start that one?
I'm too young to have ever voted for Reagan. I was in college during 9/11. I thought the invasion of Afghanistan was valid, but unlikely to achieve anything -- it seemed clear that they'd always be a tribal wasteland. And 20 years later, we gave up, and it's still a tribal wasteland. I'm glad Biden left, and I'd be equally glad if Trump left. And I think everyone complaining that it "made us look weak" is just a partisan trying to win points against Biden.
I absolutely fail to see how that one is connected to Ukraine. If your theory of foreign policy is that we need to stay in Afghanistan forever, to look strong, but you also think you're "America First" and "Non-interventionist", you should recognize that's a contradiction.
Most conservatives today seem to think we should have stayed in Afghanistan, but also think we should not be helping Ukraine. I fail to see the logic there, other than pure partisanship and a contrarian belief that anything Biden does is wrong.
I thought George W was a terrible president for invading Iraq. I voted for Obama in the hopes that we'd leave Iraq. We sort of did, and then we were sort of back because of ISIS.
The arab spring happened. Obama greenlit the removal of Gaddafi, then Libya probably ended up an even worse place without him. After a few successful uprisings in other countries, there was an uprising in Syria and Assad put that down brutally. Obama waffled and then mostly let that happen.
How would those years have played out differently, if McCain had been president for 8 years? Honest question, I've never thought about it. Do you have an opinion? Like, the arab spring would still happen either way, right? And McCain would gladly take out Gaddafi, McCain never saw a bombing campaign he didn't like. So... is the difference that he'd aggressively bomb Syria? Woud that eventually lead to a conflict with Russia, given their interests?
Or, skip McCain and just flip the 2020 election. Would Russia not have invaded Ukraine if Trump was president? Or would Putin have invaded and won because Trump would not have intervened? Again, honest question.
I guess it's all fairly complicated. Like, the US president probably has almost no influence on wars in Africa. Those are tribal conflicts and people there know that the US won't intervene anyways.
The US president does have an influence on what happens in the Middle East, both because we are often the one starting those wars, and for other reasons.
Ukraine is a big wildcard. As are potential future wars in, say, Korea or Taiwan.
And, to some degree, all these casualty numbers would be insignificant compared to a real war between major powers, and perhaps the ability of a president to avoid that low probability but high severity event matters more than any of the rest. Of course, it's hard to guess who's best for that job, given that we've never had a nuclear war.
For what it's worth, I did not vote for Trump or Hillary in 2016. I saw (and see) many flaws in Trump, but I actually thought Hillary had the bigger record as pro-war, and I thought that Trump sounded like more of an isolationist.
I linked the data source in the article.
https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace
from there:
*****************************************
Deaths in ongoing conflicts (best estimate) - Conflict_type: state-based
The best estimate of the number of deaths of combatants and civilians due to fighting in interstate, intrastate, and extrasystemic conflicts that were ongoing that year.
Source
Uppsala Conflict Data Program (2023), Peace Research Institute Oslo (2017) – processed by Our World in Data
Last updated
October 24, 2023
Next expected update
October 2024
Date range
1946–2022
Unit
deaths
What you should know about this data
A state-based conflict is a conflict between two armed groups, at least one of which is a state, that causes at least 25 deaths during a year. This includes combatant and civilian deaths due to fighting.
The data of this indicator is based on the following sources:
Uppsala Conflict Data Program – Georeferenced Event Dataset
This dataset is UCDP's most disaggregated dataset, covering individual events of organized violence (phenomena of lethal violence occurring at a given time and place). These events are sufficiently fine-grained to be geo-coded down to the level of individual villages, with temporal durations disaggregated to single, individual days.
You can find more notes at https://web.archive.org/web/20230618115833/https://ucdp.uu.se/downloads/ged/ged231.pdf
Retrieved on
September 21, 2023
Retrieved from
https://ucdp.uu.se/downloads/index.html
Peace Research Institute Oslo – Battle deaths
This project has generated a dataset on battle deaths (number of soldiers and civilians killed in combat) in state-based armed conflicts for the period 1946-2008.
The dataset is compatible with the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset for the period 1946–2008.
A longer time series (1900-1997) compatible with the Correlates of War database was included in the first version (v1) of the Battle Deaths Dataset, available from the downloads section.
For academic exchanges on the PRIO data, see the following articles and rebuttals:
Lacina & Gleditsch (2005) 'Monitoring trends in global combat: A new dataset of battle deaths'.
Obermeier et al. (2008) 'Fifty years of violent war deaths from Vietnam to Bosnia'
Spagat et al. (2009) 'Estimating war deaths: An arena of contestation'.
Gohdes & Price (2012) 'First things first: Assessing data quality before model quality'.
Lacina & Gleditsch (2012) 'The waning of war is real: A response to Gohdes and Price'
There are no plans to update the PRIO battle deaths dataset beyond 2008. The Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) maintains a similar dataset from 1989, which is updated annually. For this dataset in different formats, as well as a codebook, go to the UCDP Battle-Related Deaths Dataset.
While the definitions are very similar, the coding practices may differ somewhat, and we generally recommend users of the two datasets to point out that these are two different, although closely related, datasets.
Retrieved on
September 21, 2023
Retrieved from
https://www.prio.org/data/1
How we process data at Our World in Data:
All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.
At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.
Yeah, I clicked through and read a little.
It's just, when a data source doesn't match small sanity checks (i.e. missing the Rwandan genocide) you have to wonder how good it is, or whether it's missing some major component (like civilian deaths).
You rarely read such a stupid analysis. The author confuses correlation with causation. I would argue that Putin invaded the Ukrainian has a consequence of Trump's presidency, not Biden's, because Trump as significantly weakened the authority of the US. Also, the disaster in Afghanistan is a direct consequence of Trump's decision to move out, no matter what.
Well, if the Americans want to be reigned by maniac, let it be. Hopefully, this will be the beginning of the end of American dominance in the world. If Trump is elected even the current partners of the US will push to be less dependent on the US, since Trump is not a partner you need to avoid at all costs.
I literally don't care who wins the next election because I literally think Democracy is dead and has been for a while, and even if it isn't dead someone should kill it.
more:
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/guns-and-protofascism
The only reason I write this is to point out how tremendously mathematically false one particular narrative is, not only about Trump but about parties in general. And it doesn't even stop at 1980. If you go all the way back to the beginning of the dataset, which begins at WW2, these are your results. There are 6 Ds, and 5/6ths presided over an increase in deaths in global conflicts. There are 7 Rs, and 5/7ths presided over a reduction in global conflict deaths. This has been the trend since the 1950s. It's not new, and it's not unique to Trump.
What is unique, however, is how things have skyrocketed under Biden. There has never been a rise this quick, and the data set doesn't even include 2023 yet, in which all the Israel-Gaza deaths will be recorded.
" You rarely read such a stupid analysis. The author confuses correlation with causation"
The author repeatedly says things like, "Keep in mind, this all presumes that US presidents have some influence over global conflicts. Maybe they do and maybe they don’t." IOW the author is specifically acknowledging that correlation is not causation.
It sure seems like you didn't read it, and if you did read it you didn't comprehend it.
TDS is a hell of a drug. Thanks for providing this sort of rare stupid analysis for us to all read, though.
Yes, it would certainly be naive to think that Trump would fight to defend democracy!
Looking at that "increase / decrease per year" column, I think it's safe to say that Trump could have managed the #2 slot, edging out GWB, if the 2020 election hadn't been stolen. And obviously, keeping Biden from office would have been a vast improvement. I don't suppose it would quite be justified to grant Trump the inverse of the increase under Biden, but if he takes the 2024 presidency, he might well end up the most peace inducing US president of all time.
I'm not convinced about that because the numbers during Trump had leveled off his last two years, and the drop in his first two years started during Obama. It's very clear, though, that he didn't cause any spikes and it's very clear that Biden's presiding over the worst spike in history post WW2.
Except Trump wouldn't have fumbled the Afghanistan withdrawal, and might well have actually gotten his generals to follow his orders to get the hell out of Syria. If only by actually court martialing the insubordinate bastards who were flat out lying to him about that. Though perhaps they'd have kept it sufficiently hidden from him. At any rate, I think the last four years will have shown him that he needs to be *vastly* more ruthless with his staffing.
He needs someone who can survive his wrath after telling him that he's being lied to by someone. I don't know if his ego would handle that. But it's what he needs for a truly effective second term. Presuming the Deep State doesn't just give him the Kennedy treatment.
Can you imagine the reaction if Trump had initiated what would absolutely be called a "purge" of military leadership?
I can, but at this point, what Trump needs to do (IMO, of course) is just do what needs doing and ignore the impotent squawking of the presstitutes.
If you recall, Obama did a purge of Generals when he came into office. I remember thinking that this would turn out badly, and in my opinion, it has. But of course nobody complained when Obama did it. But Trump would have been crucified if he had done it.