Hybrid War Update: Food Fight Edition
OK, seriously though, it's pretty dire
OK, seriously though, it's pretty dire.
Hybrid war, for our country, right now, means something approaching total war without direct military involvement.
During the Global War on Terror (GWOT) era, we have not grown fond of war, to borrow Robert E. Lee's aphorism, as we have grown more and more able to encompass it in our daily lives. That kind of separation does not exist anymore.
We are all in the war now, bearing its costs and supporting its combatants and in some cases, enacting those costs and becoming combatants ourselves. Biden said, in a speech about the food crisis:
“Right now, America is fighting on two fronts. At home, it’s inflation and rising prices. Abroad, it’s helping Ukrainians defend their democracy, and feeding those who are left hungry around the world because Russian atrocities exist.”
This is true, but it is a different dynamic than during the GWOT. We are in, at some level, a proxy war with Russia now, as Russia's state-sponsored media is eager to constantly point out.
During the GWOT, you could argue that a perfectly adequate, society-wide defensive strategy for America not to be terrorized involved separating civilians from the evidence of the horrors of war on terrorism at some level, and distracting them.
It verges onto unverifiable, rather large-scale generalization, but you could look at the rise of social media, startup culture, reality television and the increasing popularity of "binge-watching" escapist media as developments of this basic strategy, not necessarily as some grand conspiracy being worked out, but instead as a convergent response across an entire nation of people struggling to absorb the vicarious and direct traumatic experiences of 9/11.
A proxy war with Russia is different. We are applying a maximalist approach across every non-military means of leverage that we have, in an effort to bring the war to a just and peaceful end as rapidly as possible.
The President of the United States literally declared economic war on Russia and announced that our national strategy is to strike at the largest centers of its economy. It is annoyingly difficult to keep track of total number because they keep announcing new ones, but something on the scale of a thousand new names have been added to U.S. sanctions lists in the past six months because of the build-up, then the war, in Ukraine.
We are all in this. Hybrid war is a society-wide national superiority struggle across the shadowy edge between open war and peacetime, a method of solving inter- and intra-state conflicts by other-than-military means; by definition, it involves us.
Getting, finally, to the news that matters, now that you hopefully understand why it matters, this is where the food crisis fits.
It is, as Britons are being warned by their government, "apocalyptic" in Europe in terms of food increases. More than 80% of British people surveyed are worried about it, which is the kind of survey response number you associate with autocratic regimes or basic questions like "is death bad", not "are you worried about feeding yourself and your family".
India was playing a critical role in helping to alleviate the global food crisis, perhaps by default, because it was exporting wheat as well as fertilizer, both of which are nearing critical shortages because of what's happening with the Ukrainian and Russian economies due to the war. Climate crises inside India reportedly sparked the Modi government's decision to cut off wheat exports; given that it's Modi, I'd expect some degree of nationalism playing into that as well.
Here in the U.S., food prices are surging; key economic indices that the Fed uses for its inflation calculations are all at redline, indicating that something very bad is not only happening, but going to continue happening, with food prices. It's not all inflation; but a lot of it is, and it's also feeding back into inflation problems.
This is why the Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, somewhat surprisingly, is pulling an Elizabeth "E-Weezy" Warren trick: she has a plan to alleviate the food crisis.
Really, considering the last secretary was Steven Mnuchin, it's astonishing.
Quoting ABC News:
"In addressing food insecurity, Yellen said she will release an action plan this week by the International Financial Institution.
The U.S. Treasury said the details will focus on how the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, World Bank and the other global financial institutions are “stepping up, surging, and scaling their work on food security and agriculture."
World Bank President David Malpass said last month that his organization will provide $17 billion per year to strengthen food security worldwide.
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development last week committed 1 billion euros this year for the Ukrainian economy, set to be a mix of donor funds and bank funding.
Looking to more funding sources, within U.S. President Joe Biden's supplemental appropriations request for assistance to Ukraine, Treasury wants $500 million for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. That will include money for food security and $150 million for the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program, which channels funding to agricultural projects in impoverished countries."