Plum security

Among the institutions being overwhelmed by COVID-19 is the US military. Among the institutions being overwhelmed by COVID-19 is the US military. Received this from a friend? [SUBSCRIBE]( CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. [The World]( [INKSTICK]( If you read just one thing… …read about DoD scrambling on COVID-19. Among the institutions being overwhelmed by COVID-19 is the US military. Internal Pentagon documents[show](that funding shortfalls for managing coronavirus response within the Army alone total nearly $1 billion. That money, which would go to things like more frequent cleaning of base facilities and adding beds in military hospitals, will likely have to come from other Pentagon programs. Some relevant programs, however, have been chronically underfunded. The Defense Department last year withheld $104 million Congress had appropriated to fund the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases and other lab facilities tasked with confronting viral and other biological threats. The money was held back due to safety and financial impropriety concerns at the labs, neither of which appear to have been adequately addressed by the time of the COVID-19 outbreak. Deadly legacies of America’s ongoing war in Korea A major feature of the American policy discourse on landmines is the contention that American landmines in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) are a necessity for keeping the peace on the Korean peninsula. As a recent [op-ed](by Quincy Institute fellow Jessica Lee demonstrates, however, that is hardly an uncontroversial position. Lee and many others argue that the only way for the mines to be a tool of peace is for North and South Korea to collaborate in removing them. The idea of joint North-South demining is not unprecedented. Back in 2018, there was a small joint demining [project](in the DMZ in an effort to reduce tensions between North and South Korea. American landmines, planted to guard military positions that no longer exist, litter South Korea beyond the DMZ. Estimates suggest that around 1,000 South Korean civilians have been killed or injured by those mines since 1953. Some 1.2 million mines remain, and the US has shown little commitment to cleaning them up. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( Maritime flaw The European Union makes a big deal about its support for controlling illegal fishing off the coast of West Africa, but it [turns out](that legal European fishing in those waters may pose at least as much of an environmental and economic threat as illicit catches. As fish stocks off of Europe have been depleted, more and more European fishing boats have headed south to cast their nets. That shift has produced official fishing agreements between European and African countries, but activists argue that the agreements promote overfishing and targeting of endangered species. China is often painted as the worst actor in African fisheries, and Chinese fishing is certainly a problem — including illegal fishing, China only pays 4% of the total value of fish it imports from Africa. Europe, however, isn’t that far off the pace, paying only 8% of the total value of its fish imports. One fishing agreement, between Spain and São Tomé and Príncipe, ostensibly focused on tuna but turned out to provide legal cover for large-scale shark fin harvesting by Spanish fishing vessels. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [ ] DEEP DIVE TALKING TO PEOPLE LIKE PEOPLE: PART I The logical thing to do for this set of Deep Dives would be to do a survey of international relations research on pandemics, but, unfortunately, that literature is fairly [thin.]( Instead, we’ll take the next two Deep Dive editions to look at research on a skill many political scientists have tried to deploy in the face of COVID-19, with varying levels of success: strategic communications about topics on which they are not necessarily experts. Economist Matthew Backus and political scientist Andrew Little have a new [paper]( set to be published in the American Political Science Review that examines why policy experts have such a difficult time saying “I don’t know.” Academics and other policy experts compete in a marketplace of ideas in which reputation is the most important currency. Knowing things isn’t very useful if no one will listen to you, and policymakers are more likely to listen to experts they perceive as competent, so it’s crucial for policy experts to maintain a reputation for competence. Saying “I don’t know” when asked a policy question isn’t a great way to build up a reputation for policy competence. The mystery, though, is why so few policymakers punish experts for claiming knowledge they don’t have. You might expect that the cost would be high — doesn’t it seem more incompetent to guess wrong than to admit you don’t know the right answer? It’s hard to see why policymakers would keep returning to experts who guess, creating incentives for other experts to guess in the future. Backus and Little broke out their 2x2 matrices and did some game theory to solve the mystery. In Backus and Little’s telling, the answer lies in how policymakers evaluate expert performance after the fact. If their primary measure of how an expert performed is whether the expert’s prediction was correct, then it becomes very hard for the policymaker to tell competent experts who had a bad day from incompetent experts. For example, say a policymaker asks two advisers — one who is good at their job and another who doesn’t know what they’re doing — whether she should take an umbrella on a trip to a place where there are no weather forecasts. The policymaker doesn’t know which adviser is competent, but she tells them both that she’ll be angry if she’s stuck without an umbrella in the rain or if she overpacks when it’s sunny. Neither adviser knows what the weather will be, but neither has any incentive to say so. The incompetent adviser is incompetent — he thinks the answer is knowable by some arcane scrying method that actually produces nonsense results. The competent adviser knows that he is guessing, but can’t admit it because saying “I don’t know” doesn’t address the policymaker’s standards. Instead, he has to make a guess because he’s not any more likley to be wrong than the incompetent adviser — they’re both making it up on the spot. Backus and Little offer a solution to this problem — if, instead of evaluating the experts on the policy outcomes, the policymaker could evaluate them on their ability to rate the difficulty of the problem. That changes the incentive structure, and allows for the competent adviser to differentiate himself from the incompetent one without needing knowledge to which neither have access. If the policymaker goes on the trip and it turns out her destination was a well-known rainforest, she should probably be concerned about any adviser who professes ignorance about the weather there. If, however, she’s going to New York City in February in the age of climate change, where weather is truly unknowable, then the competent policymaker can make that case to her and differentiate himself from his colleague who is predicting the weather by reading entrails like an ancient Greek seer. Focus on policymaking process, it turns out, can produce more truthful inputs than a focus on outcomes. [LEARN MORE]( [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [• • •] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS Rebecca Collard [outlined]( the twin crises facing Lebanon: COVID-19 and the precipitous decline of the national currency, the Lebanese lira. There were 77 confirmed COVID-19 cases in Lebanon as of Friday, and that number is expected to grow substantially. Yet the lira’s slide, and the corruption and mismanagement that caused it, are driving up the cost of medicines and other supplies people will require to get through the pandemic. Major protests against the government’s economic record started in October and continue even as COVID-19 concerns send many into isolation. Molly Hurley [examined]( the double standard Americans use to evaluate different countries’ nuclear weapon stockpiles. America and its allies present their nuclear capabilities as being a means to promote peace through deterrence, but that same discourse treats the nuclear stockpiles of countries like India, Pakistan, and North Korea, as tools meant for coercion. The distinction, Hurley argued, comes in the Orientalist frame many American policymakers bring to their work, which paints so-called Eastern countries and cultures as fundamentally less trustworthy than Western ones. Megan Iacobini de Fazio[reported]( from her semi-quarantine in Rome about life in the European epicenter of COVID-19. Since Wednesday, Italians have been largely confined to their homes by government order, only allowed outside for “urgent, demonstrable reasons.” Iacobini de Fazio is used to working at home, so the disruption in her life has been relatively minor, but many young Italians work away from home on short-term contracts and are worried that they will lose their jobs. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [ ] WELL PLAYED Coronavirus is giving us all kinds of examples of non-state actors taking on the trappings of stateness, from [ISIS]( to… [Disneyland](. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like either a nail or, in [this]( case, maybe another hammer. One imagines the word the National Security Agency was looking for[here]( was actually “demystifying” instead of “debunking,” but we can dream! There’s been a rash of notionally inspirational tweets extolling all the groundbreaking projects people completed during quarantines throughout history (as though child care, financial concerns, and crippling anxiety about the state of the world aren’t any obstacle to repeating those feats), but only one of those tweets is [any good](. Aviation [literacy]( among America’s chicken wing restaurateurs is at a worryingly low ebb. With social distancing comes the return of every old Twitter meme. Welcome back, [William Carlos Williams](. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( Follow The World: [fb]( [tw]( [ig]( [www]( [DONATE TO THE WORLD]( Follow Inkstick: [fb]( [tw]( [ig]( [www]( [DONATE TO INKSTICK]( Critical State is written by Sam Ratner and is a collaboration between The World and Inkstick Media. The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX, BBC, and WGBH. With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.” Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. [Preferences]( | [Web Version]( [Unsubscribe](