Two Estimates and a Musing

Nuclear war, World Order, and Escalation Dominance

I shared some scatter plots on Twitter to illustrate the sort of controlling relationship I found between our status-of-women measure and some outcome variables of interest. Auke Rijpma’s Composite Measure of Well-Being is representative. For most outcome variables, we found a clear gradient in macroregions outside Sub-Saharan Africa. And we documented an intriguing pattern: the gradient somehow vanishes in Africa.

I want to go beyond one-to-one relationships between our feature and life outcomes. I want to demonstrate the plausibility of it being the common cause of the international variation in life outcomes. We do this by decomposing the variation in the responses in terms of a simple model. Our model posits that our response, well being, is a linear function of the status of women. We admit a dummy for Africa. We fit the regression using OLS. We cluster errors by macroregion. We find a very robust and significant elasticity of well being against our feature. As expected, the slope correction for Africa is highly significant; formally documenting the African exceptionalism in this association suggested by the scatter above.

We collect the residuals of our model. We then look at the correlation between well being and residual well being on the one hand, and life outcomes on the other. The absolute difference between (1) the correlation of well being with, say, life expectancy, and (2) the correlation between life expectancy and residual well being (the variation in well being unexplained by our feature). This difference is a goodness-of-fit measure. Roughly speaking, it measures the degree to which the association between well being and any other outcome variable is formally (ie, perhaps not causally) due to variation in the status of women between countries.

We find that the correlation between Rijpma’s composite measure of well being and life expectancy is 0.86, but reduces to 0.22 for the residuals, with 0.64 correlation points (74%) being explained by our simple model. For per capita income, the correlation declines from 0.67 to 0.33; for physicians per capita, it declines from 0.80 to 0.24; for college enrollment rates, from 0.82 to 0.28; and in absolute terms, from 0.81 to 0.18 for fertility rates. On average, the amplitude of the correlation coefficients for all conditioners declines from 0.79 to 0.27; if we exclude urbanization rates, from 0.81 to 0.26. So, our model explains roughly two-thirds to three-fifths of the covariation in these life outcome measures.

What is clear is that the status of women sits is a very privileged place on the underlying causal diagram that governs world order. It explains most of the covariation of a number of life outcome variables. Our feminist hypothesis thus survives the first test. In the future, we want to figure out how much of the influence of family structures on outcome variable “factors through” the status of women.

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The Biden administration has escalated the US confrontation with Russia and China quite dramatically. The decision to the let the Nato nuclear exercise go ahead at this time was unwise. Sixty US nuclear bombers coordinating aerial maneuvers not far from Russian forces cannot but be perceived as an implicit nuclear threat by Moscow; which brings us to the second estimate.

Whither the nuclear balance?

In order to get a handle on the balance of strategic nuclear forces-in-being, we obtain data from Military Balance and FAS. China has 350 nuclear warheads, the US has 5,428 and Russia has 5,977. None of China’s are operationally deployed. The nuclear superpowers deploy roughly an equal number by agreement: US 1,644; Russia 1,588. Recall that launchers are more important than the number of nuclear warheads per se. The US has 400 ICBMs; Russia has 339; China, 116. Importantly for second-strike capabilities, the US has 14 ballistic missile submarines, Russia has 11, while China has 6. However, American and Russian submarines are quiet and hard to track, Chinese submarines are loud and easy to track, and kill. What we have is best described as a bipolar system, with China a distant third to the two nuclear superpowers.

In the confrontation over Ukraine, we’re dealing with an extremely unfavorable balance of resolve in the context of strategic parity. On the Ukraine question, therefore, Russia enjoys escalation dominance over the United States. On the other hand, over Taiwan, and the Western Pacific in general, the United States enjoys escalation dominance over China.

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The chips escalation has been called “a counterforce strike” by Arthur Tellis (Ashley Tellis’s son and one of the sharpest knives in the O.S.D.’s drawer). That’s quite right. It is a major escalation. It is also does not look good in light of the fact that Mercantilism has historically been the strategy of the weak.

The Chinese must respond with an appropriate riposte. We don’t know what that will look like, but it is coming. Perhaps they will kick out Wall St, or resort to grey zone warfare like the Russians. They may escalate their support for Russia, or even begin a protracted coercion campaign against Taiwan. Some of these counters are less unambiguous than others. We just don’t know how the Chinese will respond. But respond they must.

I am less worried about the immediate Chinese response. I am much more worried about a secular deterioration in Sino-US relations. This looks very much like a security spiral. American policymakers are placing the wager that the United States can prevent China from becoming more powerful than the US through clever tricks. But this is probably Anglo-Saxon technophilia. That ship may have already sailed. There’s almost surely no possibility of thwarting China’s rise as a strategic peer.

Meanwhile, Washington has definitely pushed Moscow and Beijing into a tight strategic alliance. When the terrible day arrives, and Washington has to face the awful prospect of great power war, it seems almost certain that the United States, rather than China, will have to watch its back. The United States seems hell-bent on acquiring a desperate need for a two-war capability, without having the wherewithal to meet the challenge.

I am becoming more and more convinced that the closest historical analogy of the Biden White House is the Kennedy administration. Biden’s escalations mirror Kennedy’s, except that the United States does not enjoy nuclear superiority over Russia this time. (See above for the most reliable estimate of the strategic balance.)

Meanwhile, the defense intellectuals seem more concerned with the practically nonexistent threat of a Chinese sea-borne invasion of Taiwan. Both Alex Velex-Green (national security advisor to Senator Hawley) and Austin Dahmer evaded my question — whether China could plausibly launch a sea-borne invasion of Taiwan against US military resistance — with handwaving towards “vast” literatures. The latter, Dahmer, was at least kind enough to share a few links. Of the four links he shared, only one actually dealt in any way with the question of the balance of power in the Strait and China’s ability to prosecute a sea-borne invasion. This was Tom Shugart’s testimony to the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee in March 2021. Here’s what he said about the naval balance between the US Pacific Fleet (just 60% of US naval strength at most) and the Chinese navy:

While the U.S. Pacific Fleet is currently larger than the PLA Navy by tonnage, my rough calculations indicate that, on current trend lines, the PLA Navy will reach near-parity on this basis as well in fifteen to twenty years.

Tom Shugart. Testimony to the Senate, March 2021.

The most serious military analyst of the Western Pacific theater is Owen Cote Jr. Here’s his clear answer to one of the most important military questions of the day.

There are a number of reasons for China to be wary of launching an invasion of Taiwan, but the key military reason is that it cannot safeguard a properly sized, seaborne invasion force and the follow-on shipping necessary to support it during multiple transits across the 100-plus mile-wide Taiwan Straits. Protecting such an invasion force would require complete command of the sea surface of the Straits by China, but China cannot now and most likely will not be able in the future to come close to that level of command. This is because it has little or no capability to prevent extremely quiet American nuclear attack submarines (SSNs) from operating in the Straits, nor can it defend against long range, stealthy, anti-ship missiles (ASMs) launched from well east of Taiwan by long range strategic bombers operating from US bases in the Second Island Chain […].

Owen Cote, Jr. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 2022.