DESPITE THE TRUMP KILL-A-THON
The decline and fall of the American death penalty

The number of death sentences and executions in the US has fallen off a cliff since the 1990s. 2020 continued that trend.

By Ian Millhiser Dec 30, 2020, VOX

Staff members dismantle the death row lethal injection facility at San Quentin State Prison on March 13, 2019, Photo by California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation via Getty Images

Fewer people were executed in 2020 than in any year for nearly three decades, and fewer people were sentenced to die than at any point since the Supreme Court created the modern legal framework governing the death penalty in 1976. Those are two of the striking findings in the Death Penalty Information Center’s (DPIC) annual report, which was released on December 16.

One significant reason so few people were executed in 2020 is the Covid-19 pandemic — which has slowed court proceedings and turned gathering prison officials and witnesses for an execution into a dangerous event for everyone involved. But even if 2020 is an outlier year due to the pandemic, DPIC’s data shows a sharp and consistent trend away from the death penalty since the number of capital sentences peaked in the 1990s.

Death Penalty Information Center

In total, only 17 people were executed in 2020, a number that would be much lower if not for the Trump administration resuming federal executions this year for the first time in nearly two decades. 2020 is the first year in American history when the federal government executed more people than all of the states combined: 10 of the 17 people executed in 2020 were killed by the federal government.

Only five states — Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Missouri, and Tennessee — conducted executions in 2020. And of these five states, only one, Texas, killed more than one person on death row.

The trend away from new death sentences and executions has continued despite two recent significant pro-death penalty opinions from the Supreme Court. The Court’s decisions in Glossip v. Gross (2015) and especially in Bucklew v. Precythe (2019) make it much more difficult for death row inmates to claim their executions violate the Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments.

Nevertheless, it remains to be seen whether the longstanding trend away from the death penalty will eventually be reversed by the Court’s new 6-3 Republican majority. For the moment, the trend appears to be robust even in the face of significant doctrinal shifts by the Supreme Court.

Why has the number of death sentences and executions declined so sharply?

There are many factors that likely contribute to the death penalty’s decline. Among other things, crime fell sharply in recent decades — the number of murders and non-negligent manslaughters fell from nearly 25,000 in 1991 to less than 15,000 in 2010. Public support for the death penalty has also fallen sharply, from 80 percent in the mid-90s to just 55 percent in 2020, according to Gallup. And, beginning in the 1980s, many states enacted laws permitting the most serious offenders to be sentenced to life without parole instead of death — thus giving juries a way to remove such offenders from society without killing them.

Yet, as Duke University law professor Brandon Garrett argues in End of Its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice, these and similar factors can only partially explain why the death penalty is in decline. Murders, for example, “have declined modestly since 2000 (by about 10 percent),” Garrett writes. Yet “annual death sentences have fallen by 90 percent since their peak in the 1990s.”

Garrett argues, persuasively, that one of the biggest factors driving the decline in death sentences is the fact that capital defendants typically receive far better legal representation today than they did a generation ago. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in 2001, “People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty.”

The Supreme Court briefly abolished the death penalty in Furman v. Georgia (1972). Though Furman produced a maze of concurring and dissenting opinions and no one opinion explaining the Court’s rationale, many of the justices pointed to the arbitrary manner in which death sentences were doled out. The particular death sentences before the Court in Furman, Justice Potter Stewart wrote, “are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual” because death sentences appeared to be handed down to just a “random handful” of serious offenders.

Four years later, in Gregg v. Georgia (1976), the Court allowed states to resume sentencing serious offenders to death but only with adequate procedural safeguards. Gregg upheld a Georgia statute that allowed prosecutors to claim that a death sentence is warranted because certain “aggravating circumstances” are present, such as if the offender had a history of serious violent crime. Defense attorneys, in turn, could present the jury with “mitigating circumstances” that justified a lesser penalty, such as evidence that the defendant had a mental illness or was abused as a child. A death sentence was only warranted if the aggravating factors outweigh the mitigating factors.

This weighing test is now a centerpiece of capital trials in the United States, which means the primary job of a capital defense lawyer is often to humanize their client in the eyes of a jury. Defense counsel must explain how factors like an abusive upbringing, mental deficiencies, or personal tragedy led their client to commit a terrible crime.

Doing this well, Garrett argues, “takes a team.” It requires investigators who can dig into a client’s background, and it often requires social workers or other professionals who “have the time and the ability to elicit sensitive, embarrassing, and often humiliating evidence (e.g. family sexual abuse) that the defendant may have never disclosed.”

And yet, especially in the years following Gregg, many states didn’t provide even minimally competent legal counsel to capital defendants — much less a team that included a trained investigator and a social worker.

Virginia, for example, has executed more people since the Gregg decision than any state except for Texas. A major reason is that, for quite some time, Virginia only paid capital defense lawyers about $13 an hour, and a lawyer’s total fee was capped at $650 per case.

In 2002, however, the state created four Regional Capital Defender offices. And, when state-employed defense teams couldn’t represent a particular client, the state started paying private lawyers up to $200 an hour for in-court work and up to $150 an hour for out-of-court work. As a result, the number of death row inmates in Virginia fell from 50 in the 1990s to just five in 2017.

Virginia’s experience, moreover, was hardly isolated. As Garrett notes, many states enacted laws in the last four decades that provided at least some defense resources to capital defendants.

Brandon Garrett

And in states that did not provide adequate resources to defendants, several nonprofits emerged to pick up the slack. In Texas, for example, an organization called the Gulf Region Advocacy Center (GRACE) was formed in response to a notorious case where a capital defense lawyer slept through much of his client’s trial.

Some of these nonprofit lawyers have become minor celebrities within the legal profession. At least one, Bryan Stevenson, is arguably a celebrity well beyond the world of attorneys — Stevenson was played by Michael B. Jordan in the movie Just Mercy.

Capital defendants, in other words, are much less likely to be left alone — or practically alone with an incompetent lawyer — during a trial that will decide if they live or die. And that means that they are far more likely to convince a jury that mitigating factors justify a sentence other than death.

The future of the death penalty is now very uncertain thanks to the Supreme Court’s new majority

Cases like Furman and Gregg are rooted in the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments.” This amendment’s use of the word “unusual” suggests that the kinds of punishments forbidden by the Constitution should change over time, as certain punishments fall out of favor in society and thus become more unusual. As Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in Trop v. Dulles (1958), the Eighth Amendment “must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”

Under this framework, there’s a very strong argument that the death penalty is unconstitutional. After all, if a punishment becomes more constitutionally dubious as it becomes less common, what should we make of a punishment that was only carried out 17 times in the last year and that has been used less and less frequently over the last three decades?

The Supreme Court, however, almost certainly cut off any chance that this argument could prevail in its 5-4 decision in Bucklew.

Although Bucklew does not explicitly overrule the long line of Supreme Court decisions applying Warren’s “evolving standards of decency” test, Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion in Bucklew ignores that framework altogether and substitutes a different, much more narrow approach to the Eighth Amendment.

“Death was ‘the standard penalty for all serious crimes’ at the time of the founding,” Gorsuch wrote in Bucklew. And, while his opinion does list some methods of execution — “dragging the prisoner to the place of execution, disemboweling, quartering, public dissection, and burning alive” — that violate the Eighth Amendment, Gorsuch argues that these methods of execution were unconstitutional because “by the time of the founding, these methods had long fallen out of use and so had become ‘unusual.’”

Warren’s framework, in other words, asks whether a particular punishment has fallen out of favor today. Gorsuch’s framework, by contrast, asks whether a particular punishment was out of favor at the time of the founding. That’s a sea change in Eighth Amendment doctrine and one that could have profound implications for the death penalty.

It’s not yet clear how far the Court will take its recent opinion in Bucklew. Bucklew was a case about whether a state could use a particularly agonizing method to execute someone sentenced to death. That makes it distinct from cases like Gregg, which ask whether certain individuals can be given a death sentence in the first place.

It’s possible that the Supreme Court’s current majority will leave in place the Gregg framework, with its mandatory weighing of aggravating and mitigating factors, while also giving states more leeway to decide how to execute someone once a death sentence is handed down.

At the very least, though, Bucklew suggests that many members of the Supreme Court object to some of the foundational principles that guided Eighth Amendment cases for many decades. And that they are eager to make significant doctrinal changes to the constitutional law governing criminal punishments.

The future of the death penalty is highly uncertain. But Bucklew gives capital defense lawyers plenty of reasons to fear that future.

 

Meatless meat is going mainstream. Now Big Food wants in.

Companies are pledging to sell you more plant-based meat and dairy to fight climate change (and cash in on a growing trend).

By Brian Kateman  Dec 29, 2020

Packages of “Impossible Foods” burgers and Beyond Meat

 made from 

plant-based substitutes for meat products sit on a shelf for sale in  

New York City.

 Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images

This story is part of a group of stories called

Finding the best ways to do good.

In a year of splashy news for plant-based meat — skyrocketing sales! the new McPlant! —one of the biggest developments in the field went oddly underreported.

In the last three months of 2020, some of the biggest companies in the world announced major moves into the plant-based meat space.

In September, Tesco — the UK’s largest supermarket chain — announced plans to increase sales of plant-based products 300 percent by 2025. Last month, Unilever — the world’s 19th largest food and beverage manufacturer — set a new annual global sales target of $1.2 billion from plant-based meat and dairy within the next five to seven years, about five times what it forecasts it will make from plant-based sales in 2020. And a few days later, Ikea announced that half its restaurant meals and 80 percent of its packaged food offerings would be plant-based by 2025.

Those announcements were just the latest notable steps some major restaurant chains and food companies took in the last year or so toward plant-based products. This isn’t Big Food’s first foray into plant-based meat and dairy, though. Over the last few years, some food companies have acquired plant-based startups or launched their own meatless meat products. But these latest announcements — pledging to significantly increase plant-based sales by 2025 — represent a much bigger investment in the future of animal-free protein than we’ve seen in the past.

These moves have largely been made in response to growing consumer demand. The last few years have seen the new wave of meatless meat achieve something of mainstream status, and the pandemic has only added to the momentum. Concerns about the spread of the coronavirus at meatpacking facilities and supply-chain troubles at grocery stores early in the pandemic seemed to contribute to greater demand for meatless meat.

Some of these companies are touting their pledges as initiatives to help them meet their broader sustainability goals, which is a good bet. Meat, milk, and egg production accounts for 14.5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, and in numerous reports scientists have called on world leaders to use dietary change as a tool to curb emissions. Despite animal agriculture’s outsized impact on the environment, governments have been slow to enact policies to reduce animal product consumption, so these corporate pledges are meaningful steps in the fight against climate change and our hyper-industrialized farming system.

To be sure, these recent pledges are voluntary, and progress on corporate sustainability has been mixed. A recent Bloomberg analysis found that out of 187 companies that set climate pledges to be achieved by 2020 or earlier, three quarters of the companies met their goals — but some goals were quite modest, and a tenth of companies didn’t even report their progress.

So time will tell if companies make good on their word to significantly increase their plant-based offerings. For now, these moves are worth cautiously celebrating. Plant-based meats account for a tiny portion of US meat sales, but the upside seems obvious to the industry. Big Food isn’t composed of nonprofit organizations, and the largest among them have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to maximize returns. A move to invest more in plant-based food suggests they think there’s a real market here.

Plant-based food enters the mainstream

Once a niche sector reserved for vegetarians, plant-based food has crept into the mainstream over the past few years. The percentage of vegetarians and vegans has remained low — about 5 percent and 3 percent respectively — but the number of “flexitarians,” people who often turn to plant-based foods instead of animal products, seems to be rising. (There is no standard measure of how much or how little meat is included in such diets, however.)

In 2018, more than one in three Brits said in a consumer survey that they had recently reduced their meat consumption, up from 28 percent in 2017. Similar trends have been reported in US consumer research, as 36 percent now say that they follow a part-time carnivorous lifestyle. During those years, the market for plant-based foods in the US grew to $3 billion, and today it’s at $5 billion.

So what happened? How did plant-based food go from niche to mainstream?

According to insiders, health and sustainability are the driving forces.

“We see several trends in plant-based food and beverage driving people to enter and explore the category,” says Domenic Borrelli, who oversees plant-based products for yogurt maker Danone, which in 2018 pledged to triple its worldwide plant-based sales to around $6 billion by 2025. “Some are following the latest wellness trends, incorporating plant-based alternatives into their diets as a step toward their personal health. … Some choose plant-based for dietary reasons, such as lactose intolerance. Consumers also opt for dairy alternatives to be mindful of our planet.”

Earlier this year, Panera Bread announced that it plans to make half of its menu items vegetarian or vegan by 2021, citing sustainability goals and its growing base of flexitarian customers, and Nestlé, the world’s largest food company, announced plans to open its first plant-based food production facility in China.

Sodexo, the third-largest foodservice company in the US, which provides food at hospital and university cafeterias, is also backing plant-based food. Last year, it committed to reduce carbon emissions by 34 percent by 2025, and anticipates that half of its carbon reduction target globally will be achieved through changes in its supply chain, including increasing plant-based purchases.

“In order to achieve this target,” says Lara Seng, who manages sustainability initiatives for Sodexo, “we must address the emissions related to our supply chain, of which 70 percent result from animal-based food purchases in the United States.”

Indeed, industrial animal agriculture is wreaking havoc on our planet. The rearing of livestock is not only a major driver of climate change; it’s also a leading cause of other environmental problems like soil degradation, water and nutrient pollution, and biodiversity loss. Raising animals for food is a resource intensive practice: One-third of the planet’s arable land is used to grow crops as farm animal feed, and those crops are responsible for nearly one-third of all the water used in agriculture.

“Of note, a half-gallon of Silk [the soy milk brand] takes significantly less water to produce than traditional dairy milk,” Borrelli says.

You might think that consumer awareness around the health and sustainability benefits of plant-based foods especially among millennials and Gen Z is the main driver of the trend. But that’s only a small part of the story.

Research suggests that people primarily choose food based on three factors — taste, price, and convenience. And for a long time, vegan food was — to put it kindly — gross, expensive, and hard to find. But that began to change when leveled-up versions of plant-based meat became available.

Startups like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods poured many years and many millions of dollars into research and development, innovating plant-based products that rivaled the taste, texture, and even the smell of their animal-based counterparts. Rather than market them to vegetarians, these startups appealed to flexitarians and meat-eaters, partnering with athletes like Kyrie Irving and Shaquille O’Neal and celebrities like Snoop Dogg, Kevin Hart, and Octavia Spencer to appear in their advertising.

At the same time, according to Julie Emmett of the Plant Based Foods Association, “new data-driven initiatives like placing plant-based meat in the meat department” drove sales even higher. And finally, plant-based burgers on Burger King and White Castle menus turned the plant-based trend into a food industry mainstay.

Then the pandemic hit.

Pandemic boosts plant-based sales

In the early months of the coronavirus crisis, a wave of meatpacking plants shuttered, as workers — who toil shoulder to shoulder — got sick. These closures created temporary meat shortages, which caused Wendy’s to run out of hamburgers and supermarkets like Kroger and Costco to place restrictions on the amount of meat that customers could buy. Where it was available, prices went up.

Amid slaughterhouse closures, plant-based food sales — including everything from vegan cheese to tofu — enjoyed a boost, increasing 90 percent in mid-March compared to sales during the same time last year. In the following month, plant-based food sales grew 27 percent faster than in 2019 and 35 percent faster than the food category in general.

Plant-based meat in particular boomed. Grocery store sales of meatless meat increased 264 percent during the first nine weeks of the pandemic.

“The pandemic disrupted consumer food purchase behavior, as out-of-home consumption in restaurants and non-commercial foodservice plummeted and consumers shifted to more in-home consumption sourced from retail and direct-to-consumer channels,” says Kyle Gaan, a researcher at the Good Food Institute (GFI), a nonprofit that promotes meat alternatives. (Disclosure: I worked at GFI for a year, beginning in 2015.)

“This shift in consumption seems to have led to new consumers trying plant-based meat and integrating it as a regular part of their diet,” Gaan notes.

Gaan cited research that found in the US, 18 percent of alternative protein buyers purchased their first plant-based protein during the pandemic. And in Germany, the UK, and the Netherlands, 80 percent of consumers said they were likely to continue eating plant-based meat alternatives beyond the pandemic.

This tracks with what some Vox readers are saying. Over the summer, Vox staff writer Sigal Samuel surveyed readers about what pandemic habits they want to continue once the pandemic is over, and eating less meat was one of them:

Specifically, people want to cook more vegetarian meals and lean away from meat-eating. The impulse seems to be coming not only from the fact that there are meat shortages in some US grocery stores, but also from the knowledge that a live-animal market in China may have given rise to the coronavirus and that the giant factory farms that supply 99 percent of America’s meat are a pandemic risk, too.

But advocates of flexitarianism should temper their excitement. Even as plant-based meat has surged, the appetite for animal-based meat has proven resilient. Some experts predicted the coronavirus could cause a record drop in meat consumption; now, the USDA predicts Americans will eat just one less pound of meat in 2021 than they did in 2020. US meat production bounced back in the fall.

How Big Food could get plant-based wrong

There is another reason for skepticism about the emergence of the new wave of meatless meat — and specifically the decision by Big Food companies to enter the market.

Despite major food companies betting big on plant-based, the vast majority of their sales will still come from foods they themselves admit are unsustainable. For example, last month Greenpeace and the Bureau for Investigative Journalism documented Tesco and other companies selling meat from chickens that had been fed soy that was grown on deforested land in the Amazon rainforest.

Kari Hamerschlag, deputy director of food and agriculture at Friends of the Earth, an environmental nonprofit, made a similar argument for Vice in September: “I actually think that these large company investments will do very little to cut the massive impact of the world’s largest meat companies,” she said, commenting on the rise of animal-based meat companies like Tyson and Perdue that had developed their own versions of familiar plant-based foods like burgers and chicken nuggets. “Unless these companies actually slash their emissions, then they are not doing what they need to do to address the climate crisis.”

Certainly the early entrants in the space have some mixed feelings. “Because our mission is so urgent we welcome any and all companies to this work,” says Jessica Appelgren, a spokesperson at Impossible Foods. “Issues arise, however, when market entrants create sub-par products that negatively influence a consumer’s experience of meat made from plants. ‘Plant-based anxiety’ is a real barrier to long-term adoption and we can only control the taste of our own products.”

The evidence backs up Appelgren’s concern. Despite enthusiasm for plant-based meat, not everyone has given it a try yet. A survey suggests that among those who have tried it, 18 percent of people associated plant-based meat with poor taste, though whether they didn’t like what they had in the distant past or what is available today is unclear. Mouthfeel — how well faux meat producers can imitate the texture and chewiness of meat — in particular may be lagging behind, as 31 percent of respondents in a separate survey said they found the texture of plant-based meat was not similar to animal-based meat. If the plant-based market is going to continue to grow, it’ll need to win over more customers, and have them come back again and again.

So there is much to be wary about. But there is also much here to be hopeful for. Unlike the young, smaller vegan startups, these titans of industry are swimming in capital and therefore are capable of not just meeting the demand for these plant-based options, but also increasing it. They have huge distribution channels that date back decades, as well as the resources to innovate on these existing products, manufacture large quantities of them at a cost-competitive price, and pay fancy PR and advertising firms to market them.

The reality is that we’re not on the verge of plant-based meat dominating the $1 trillion global meat market. Plant-based meat still makes up less than 1 percent of meat sales in the US — where the market is most developed — and even less globally. In fact, animal-based meat consumption is rapidly rising in much more populous countries like China and India, as people tend to eat more meat as they climb out of poverty. But the fact that big food companies are bullish on plant-based meat is, on the whole, good news in the fight for a more sustainable world.

“Meat is the largest segment of the food category globally, and we’ve just begun to scratch the surface,” a Beyond Meat spokesperson said, echoing an upbeat take on the matter. “It is really exciting to be in such an emerging space where there is a lot of energy and enthusiasm for the category we’ve created.”

If you can’t beat them, why not welcome them when they join you?

Brian Kateman is the co-founder of the Reducetarian Foundation, an organization advocating for the reduction of animal product consumption.

How military superiority made America less safe

America’s dominance wasn’t by happenstance. It was a choice.

By Alex Ward VOX Dec 29, 2020

US Army soldiers during a military exercise in Drawsko Pomorskie, Poland, on August 11, 2020. Maja Hitij/Getty Images


There’s a myth Americans tell themselves: After World War II, the United States had no choice but to be the world’s superpower and preeminent military force. No other countries were strong enough after years of fighting, and it was solely up to the US, by virtue of its position, to rebuild and reorder the world.

The reason that’s not true, says Stephen Wertheim, author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy, is because the US made a conscious decision to seek military dominance before World War II ended. Such a strategy, forged in the heat of battle, would help the US thwart totalitarian regimes — namely the Soviet Union in later years — while pursuing its own interests.

Wertheim argues the plan made some sense in the moment. After all, Nazi Germany was winning in Europe, and the US didn’t want to live in a world full of brutal dictatorships. But the problem is the US hasn’t shifted its strategy since — and it’s backfired greatly.

Instead of focusing on issues like climate change and pandemic disease, for example, the US has prioritized building and deploying a robust force that has made a plethora of unnecessary enemies. And despite some horrific outcomes like the Iraq War, the US refuses to rethink its game plan, even after the Cold War ended and as domestic appetite for adventurism dwindles.

“Far from contributing to American security, the plan of global military superiority has made America — and Americans — less safe,” Wertheim, who is the deputy director of research and policy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington, DC, told me.

To better understand why Wertheim believes the US should focus less on military superiority, not more, I called him and asked him to expand on his argument in an interview. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.

Alex Ward

Your book makes the case that American leadership wasn’t preordained. It was a choice. Explain what that choice actually was.

Stephen Wertheim

I had a really basic question in mind: When was the choice made to install the United States as the dominant military power across the globe?


It is a consensus, an axiomatic view, that the United States, for its national security interests, needs to be the No. 1 military power in the world, and must have troops in bases in foreign countries to secure its own and global interests. That’s meant to nip any potential aggressors in the bud rather than wait for an attack, or to stop others from gaining dominance in their own regions.

It’s widely believed that this idea came about after World War II when the US was the only real global power left standing. But that’s not true. This idea of “primacy” was forged in the wake of the fall of France to Nazi Germany in 1940.

Alex Ward

Wait — US officials decided the country should strive to be the world’s dominant force before World War II ended?

Stephen Wertheim

That’s right.

By October 1940, just months after imagining that the United States might be confined to an area no larger than a “quarter-sphere” partway down Brazil, postwar planners arrived at a startling conclusion: The United States had to hold “unquestioned power” globally, protecting by force as much of the non-German world as possible.

In his instantly famous essay announcing the arrival of the “American Century” in February 1941 — 10 months before Pearl Harbor — the publishing mogul Henry Luce wrote: “The big, important point to be made here is simply that the complete opportunity of leadership is ours.”  

Henry Robinson Luce, editor and publisher Time, Fortune, and Life, lived from 1898 to 1967. Picture Post/Getty Images

Luce urged his fellow Americans to “accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and in consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”

“As we see fit.” The America Firsters were not the only ones who put America first.

Alex Ward

Okay, I wanted to make sure I had that clear since that’s not usually the story Americans tell themselves.

Provocatively, your book is basically a lament of the idea that the US is the world’s foremost power, underwritten by its strong military. In your view, why shouldn’t the US be the world’s preeminent force? After all, it’s helped us get to this place of unprecedented strength.
Stephen Wertheim

Far from contributing to American security, the plan of global military superiority has made America — and Americans — less safe.

I have a great deal of sympathy for the architects of US military dominance. I think they faced difficult circumstances. How could I not sympathize with wanting to rid the Axis powers from the Earth and make sure nothing like that happened again? I have complete sympathy with that goal.

But since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the reason that brought forth US global supremacy has ceased to exist. There was an original argument for the United States shouldering the immense burdens of global military dominance: Without it, totalitarian powers would conquer much of the Earth. That would be terrible for the world, the thinking went, and it could be bad for the United States.

The problem, though, is the pursuit of military dominance since then has created a lot of enemies of the US that didn’t need to be enemies of the US. We’ve engaged in bad behavior ourselves and stimulated it in others.

I worry that — in a world where the foremost threats to the American people are pandemic disease and climate change — America will continue to define its biggest threats in military terms, even if they aren’t.

Alex Ward

Part of what undergirds that sentiment these days, though, was the notion that the US had arrived at a “unipolar moment” — the US was the unquestioned power and global leader with no clear rival. Implicit in what you’re saying is that that moment is truly and forever gone.

Stephen Wertheim

We’re never going to get the unipolar moment back. It was rightly called a moment at the time in the 1990s. But since then, the United States caused a lot of destruction and grief for itself and for others. I really worry about where this goes as the world gets more challenging.

Alex Ward

Some will read this interview or your book and conclude that what you’re really angry about is high defense budgets. But if I understand your argument correctly, you’re saying that the strategy envisioned before World War II ended may have had some logic then, but it has none now, especially since it’s had the unintended effect of weakening US national security.

Stephen Wertheim

Precisely. Look, I am going to make the hardest possible case for my position: World War II. If there was ever a good argument to be made for the best use of American military power, my God, it’s exactly what my book is about. I’m actually trying to focus us on what I think is the best argument in favor of American military hegemony.

Flight of US Army BT-13A Valiant aircraft before World War II in 1939. 

Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

And what I find in that history is that the roots of our current problems are bound up with the best thing we’ve ever done as a nation. I think that’s why we have this problem. I’m trying to understand why military dominance looked attractive to begin with.

But I think if those postwar planners — had they been around today or even in the 1990s — they would say, “Wait a minute.” They would’ve realized how fraught it is to take on a world-ordering role by force, akin to what we understood the British Empire had done in the previous century. After all, they worried to themselves that what they were planning contained a measure of imperialism in it. But at the time, they felt it was better than the alternative, and understandably so.

Alex Ward

You make a case that the focus on military superiority led the US to care less about other elements of power, namely economic well-being. That’s not to say America didn’t care about having lots of money and a strong economy — it did — but your point is that America’s actions have caused widespread harm at home and abroad.

Stephen Wertheim

Since 1991, I think almost everybody has lost out, aside from the major defense firms and some ruling elites. America’s strategy has been incredibly destructive for people throughout the greater Middle East, and of course, the Iraq War resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians.

And I don’t think the American people have won out, either. I think that we have gotten less safe and more fearful as a society as a result of constantly being told by leaders of both parties that the whole world is out to kill us and that that’s why we’ve got to go to war to kill them first.

Look, the argument that US military power contributed to world order was very real. The Bretton Woods system played an important role in stabilizing global capitalism. But since the 1970s, and especially the 1990s, I think it’s hard to argue that US military dominance somehow underpins everything else.

It’s very difficult to see how applying sanctions on dozens of countries and waging continual warfare in the greater Middle East somehow serves the general interest of capitalism. Maybe it serves the interests of particular firms, but not the system of capitalism

.
Alex Ward

The US has clearly made some horrible, deadly mistakes. No one is denying that. How can you say confidently, though, that the world wouldn’t be worse if the US didn’t play such an active role?

Stephen Wertheim

It’s now been three decades since the Soviet Union collapsed. Why haven’t we been able to do everything we want to effectively? It turns out that the enemies are skeptical of working with us to address shared challenges.

Now, it’s true sometimes that the use of hard power can back up diplomacy and make other endeavors more effective. But we have so overshot the mark that it’s more often the case that military dominance gets in the way of the kinds of constructive engagements in the world that I think many people in Washington want to see.

What I’m opposed to, first and foremost, is military dominance as an end in itself. That’s what I think it has become in our own time, and I don’t think it began that way. That doesn’t prohibit the US from being a robust power: It’s going to be a great power and it’s going to have a strong military. We should absolutely be able to defend ourselves. I’m not even closing the door on things like humanitarian intervention, either.

What we have to ask, though, is if the US has used all this power wisely and judiciously. It’s clear that we haven’t, and it’s making all of us in America and around the world less safe. Just think of this: Roughly 80 percent of all US military interventions have occurred after 1991. Can we really say the millions at home and abroad have had their lives improved by that? I don’t think so

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A paratrooper with the US 82nd Airborne Division during Operation Desert Shield in 1991. 

Sgt. Roman/US Army/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images

Alex Ward

So if there’s a President Wertheim in the future, how do you change America’s approach to the world?

Stephen Wertheim

I certainly agree with those who would say you don’t undo things in a hurry. You have to act responsibly, but boldly. We do have to break the perpetual war logic of the war on terror. And strangely enough, we’re kind of coming as a society to that view already.

I’d lead a systematic policy of disentangling the US from regions where its interests are either not vital, as in the Middle East, or not really imperiled, like Europe. I absolutely believe in the capacity of Europeans to manage their own affairs. The United States does not need to be the protector of Europe.

Alex Ward

What about China? Would it be wise to wind down America’s military strength while it rises?

Stephen Wertheim

China is a difficult challenge, but I would try to set priorities and act on them. Climate change and pandemic disease are the issues where Chinese behavior is terribly important to the US. They’re threats the American people face where they live and work, and so I would really prioritize those issues and improve the relationship around tackling them. Those issues are not well served by the United States pursuing perpetual military dominance in the Indo-Pacific.

At the same time, I do think we have to be cautious in observing how China continues to rise and how it behaves. It has not had a record of territorial conquest with anything like the record of past US adversaries, like the Axis powers or the Soviet Union. That’s a good thing, though you wouldn’t know it from all the cries about China’s desire to dominate the world emanating from Washington, DC.

A President Wertheim — and please let your readers know I’m rolling my eyes as I say that — would recognize the US has an opportunity to cautiously retrench its position militarily in certain regions as it ramps up cooperation on the issues that really matter. I’d encourage allies and partners in the region to step up to counterbalance China. We still have time to allow that process to happen, and that’d be a good thing since it takes two great powers to make a great-power war.

Alex Ward

Do you really think retrenchment is likely in the near future?

Stephen Wertheim

No. What I am fearful of right now is that it’s almost impossible for many people in the foreign policy community to envision circumstances in which the United States could ever pull back from a region. I worry about the United States putting itself on the front lines of any potential conflict, which could mean a great-power war. We should avoid being in that situation in the first place if we possibly can.

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More Use of Blockchain Technology 

Could Bring Benefits to Africa

Relatively recent experience in containing outbreaks of Ebola in Africa has allowed its nations to effectively contain the spread of coronavirus. Many African countries have quickly deployed effective track, trace, and quarantine measures of the kind that have been remarkably absent in the US and Europe. However, the economic impact of the virus is hitting parts of Africa in other more indirect ways.

The World Bank projects that the value of remittances to Sub-Saharan Africa will decline by around 9% in 2020 due to the global recession caused by the pandemic. In a region where many families depend on remittances from members abroad, the fall is likely to result in an increase in food insecurity and poverty.

Furthermore, the World Bank has found that the cost of sending $200 worth of remittances to Sub-Saharan Africa is around 8.5% – among the most expensive in the world. However, it also identifies that developing digital technology is an area that can help alleviate the cost of remittances. Reducing the cost would help boost the value of payments from abroad, helping offset some of the negative economic impacts of the COVID-19 crisis. 

Lowering Remittance Fees Using Blockchain

Given the low cost of sending payments via a blockchain, it seems likely that the technology could have a significant role to play in reducing the cost of remittances to Sub-Saharan Africa. It’s one area that blockchain development firm Jelurida has identified where blockchain could make a significant difference in the lives of people living in Africa.

Through its African branch, Jelurida Africa DLT, the company works with local enterprises to help them implement its blockchain-based solutions into their businesses. Jelurida operates the Ardor multichain platform, which has an innovative parent and child chain structure. Anyone can use Ardor to set up their own child chain for any use case.

Bitswift is one such example. It has been operating for the last six years and made the decision to move its blockchain architecture onto Ardor in 2017. Bitswift is a combination of companies and an online community that works together to promote healthy digital lifestyles. Its Bitswift.cash branch allows anyone to participate in the blockchain-based token economy, providing a low-cost means for any two parties to transact value. It’s designed to appeal to even non-technical users who want to reap the benefits of token markets, making it a workable solution to the challenge of high remittance costs. 

Unlocking the Potential of Sustainable Energy

Blockchain also offers significant potential in other areas, beyond pure payments, that could help innovators looking to solve challenges in African nations. For example, many African countries remain heavily dependent on fossil fuels, which may be hampering investment in renewable energy sources, according to the United Nations. Nigeria alone subsidizes the production of fossil fuels by up to $2.5 billion each year.

Therefore, it’s essential to remove barriers to more sustainable means of energy production. Through its Swiss entity, Jelurida has been working with a project collaborating with the Austrian government and aimed at recycling waste heat energy. The project is called “Hot City,” and it uses gamification to crowdsource waste heat that can be recycled back into the energy grid. Citizens can be rewarded for their efforts in identifying these sources using blockchain-based tokens, which are secured using the Ardor platform. Although it’s currently operating in Vienna, such an initiative could be even more valuable in a city like Lagos, which has around seven times the population. It could reduce the dependence on fossil fuels, helping to save costs, and also combat the effects of climate change. 

Supporting New Innovation

Jelurida Africa supports the development of a new generation of blockchain innovators via the Africa Blockchain Institute. The institute offers several industry-leading programs helping would-be developers establish their blockchain credentials.

Jelurida has also recently been a key participant in the Africa Blockchain Developers Call series, showcasing various applications built on the Ardor platform, including a Smart Voting Bot application and GiveSafely, a secure system for charitable donations.

In a continent as vast and diverse as Africa, there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution to any issue. However, blockchain technology is versatile enough to address many of the specific challenges faced by African countries. Jelurida Africa is putting the focus on education and innovation to help businesses and entrepreneurs to unlock the true benefits of blockchain.

More Use of Blockchain Technology Could Bring Benefits to Africa (coingape.com)