Search the archive.

THE term orientalism has become a bit controversial in recent times. Some, such as Encyclopaedia Britannica, for instance, define orientalism as 'Western scholarly discipline of the 18th and 19th centuries' that encompasses the study of languages, literatures, histories, arts, cultures and philosophies of the East. But after the publication of Edward Said's book Orientalism (1978), the term began to connote the patronising, rather humiliating, attitude of the West towards the East. Britannica says that in the works of Said, the term orientalism refers 'disparagingly' to 'the alleged simplistic, stereotyped and demeaning conceptions of Arab and Asian cultures'. But, according to Said, orientalism is more than an academic discipline since orientalism 'is a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with 'our' world', (Orientalism, New York, 1979, p.12). In Said's view, orientalism is a cultural and political fact and it cannot exist in 'some archival vacuum', but it is influenced by 'political, institutional and ideological constraints' (ibid. p.13). These constraints decide how Western scholars, or the orientalists, as they are often referred to, are to depict the East. And, Said says, they portray the Eastern societies as essentially static and underdeveloped, implying the superiority of the West. Asian religions, especially Islam, is also viewed from a Western, predominantly Christian and Jewish, perspective. The role and motives of imperialism and colonialism behind the so-called 'scholarly discipline' of orientalism is often ignored. As if it was not enough, some racist Western writers, such as Rudyard Kipling, considered it a duty of the 'white race' to spread the 'civilisation' to the non-white nations. Kipling's poem 'The White Man's Burden' advised the US to conquer Philippine as a 'civilising mission'! And, just to remind you, Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. Edward Said is of the view that 'there is of course a Middle East establishment, a pool of interests, 'old boy' or 'expert' networks linking corporate business, the foundations, the oil companies, the missions, the military, the foreign service, the intelligence community together with the academic world. There are grants and other rewards, there are organisations, there are hierarchies, there are institutes, centres, faculties, departments, all devoted to legitimising and maintaining the authority of a handful of basic, basically unchanging ideas about Islam, the Orient and the Arabs'. ( ibid, p. 301-302) It is often said that Edward W. Said, the Palestinian American critic and philosopher, also furthered the theory of post-colonialism. Post-colonialism - now often referred to as Postcolonial Studies - is a discourse that, among other things, examines the cultural, political and economic effects of colonialism and imperialism on the nations subjugated. The proponents of post-colonialism contest the ways the West is used to see things form its own perspective and challenge the West's view that the peoples colonised were inferior, uncivilised and less intelligent. So a new perspective is created, looking at the other side of the coin, evaluating linguistic, cultural and political realities from the point of view of those colonised and exploited. To mark his 20th death anniversary, in Bunyad's latest issue (volume 14, 2023), a section has been devoted to the works and ideas of Edward Said. Editor Nasir Abbas Nayyar in his editorial note has discussed Edward Said's 'travelling theory', elaborating how theories might change when they travel across places and times. The concept of travelling theory is quite significant in literary criticism. Aside from the editorial, the section on Edward Said proffers three important pieces. The first one is written by Akhter Ali Syed. A clinical psychologist following the tradition of Franz Fanon, Syed is interested in understanding mental and behavioural impact of colonialism on the colonised, says Nayyar. Ambreen Haseeb Amber's article discusses Said's concept of criticism, which is 'modern and secular', something ignored by the right-wing critics in our country who appreciate Said's critical views against the West, adds Nayyar. The third piece is in fact Urdu translation of Said's article on the Irish poet W. B. Yeats and decolonisation. Translated by Sajjad Husain Baloch, the article explores Yeats' role as a nationalist and an anti-colonial thinker. Urdu research journals usually invoke a feeling of dissatisfaction these days. This writer, too, has expressed his concerns over the falling standards of Urdu research, especially as manifested in Urdu's so-called research journals approved by the Higher Education Commission (HEC). But at least there are a few research journals that can be named as HEC's saving grace; Bunyad is one of them. Published by Gurmani Centre for Languages and Literature, LUMS, and edited by Nasir Abbas Nayyar, Bunyad has stringent standards as is evident from the contents. Other articles included in the issue, too, vouch for the hard work and a high standard.

The American post–World War II vision of global order pulled together a set of arguments that had been percolating among pol- icymakers and political elites for the first half of the twentieth century. In this Part, we highlight how with the United States’ emergence onto the global stage, the language of constitutionalism became central to justifying external power and to explaining the presumptive distinctions between American and European imperium. We also emphasize the manner in which constitutionalism creatively married notions of universal inclu- sion and self-government with racial hierarchies about global stewardship—even during the era of decolonization. Finally, we explore perhaps the great paradox of the Cold War: how American constitutionalism embodied a credible global model that was at the same time constitutively linked on the ground to practices of violence and lawlessness. A. Constitutionalism as the Principle of American Power. At the dawn of the twentieth century, elites who favored an aggressive American role abroad had long found themselves fac- ing a basic dilemma. Policies, ranging from participating in World. War I to engaging directly with European power politics to es- tablishing a permanent peacetime security infrastructure, all faced intense internal opposition and seemed to contradict long- standing isolationist and antimilitarist sentiments. In particular, they cut against popular assumptions that foreign entanglements as well as the creation of a large professional military would in- evitably undermine republican institutions and self-government. Indeed, a classic tenet of nineteenth-century American foreign policy held that isolation from Europe and its internecine con- flicts sustained domestic tranquility. None other than Alexander Hamilton had famously argued in Federalist 8 that the barrier of the Atlantic Ocean offered Americans an “insulated situation”18 that did more than anything else to preserve domestic security. These established ideas raised significant popular doubts about the legitimacy of enhanced American interventionism. In response, defenders of greater international authority began— against the backdrop of American militarism in the Philippines, the Americas, and especially during World War I—to intertwine new foreign policy commitments with an account of the federal Constitution in national identity. Such political elites increas- ingly placed the Constitution at the center of American exception- alism and viewed the document and the domestic culture it promoted as an implicit justification for emerging American hegemony. According to this view, the feature that most distinguished the American political project from old-world Europe was the Constitution. Whereas European communities were the product of feudalism as well as political and religious absolutism, the Constitution highlighted the extent to which the American experiment had been built from its founding on an effort to fulfill Enlightenment principles. As David Jayne Hill, Republican Party stalwart, ambassador to Germany, and president of Rochester University, wrote in his 1916 book, Americanism: What It Is, the federal Constitution above all “developed here in America a new estimate of human values, and this has led to a new understanding of life.”19 Contrasting European monarchical despotism with American commitments to liberty and self-government, Hill de- clared that the American colonists sought to “prevent forever the recurrence of absolutism in every form, whether official or popu- lar, whether of dominant individuals or of popular majorities,” thereby producing the “original and distinctive contribution of the American mind to political theory . . . that there should be nothing in government that is not governed by law.”20 In effect, Hill and others mapped out an early twentieth-century variation of what Professor Nikhil Pal Singh has called “American universal- ism”21—namely, the idea that what marks out the United States as exceptional is its status as the place where Enlightenment commitments truly took historical root. At stake in such claims was more than the belief that the Constitution safeguarded liberties at home. It also upheld the view that the Constitution spoke to a special mission abroad. Ac- cording to Hill, European powers sought to divide the world ac- cording to a principle of “imperialism”22 and thus treated other communities as little more than material spoils. Given these facts, a peaceful and stable international order required a strong American presence. This was because the culture of American constitutionalism was “antithetical to Imperialism, whose watch- word is unlimited power”23 and thus offered a necessary counter- balance on the global stage. Supposedly in opposition to empire, the constitutional principle meant that American authority was centrally about creating the conditions in foreign, oftentimes non- European, societies for peaceful self-government. With the world consumed in global conflict and instability, the United States had a responsibility to ensure that the principle of constitution- alism, rather than that of imperialism, dominated the international order.24By the 1940s, the war with Nazi Germany and the growing confrontation with the Soviet Union pushed these arguments linking constitutionalism, tutelage, and American power to the political center. In justifying American involvement in World War II, those in the Roosevelt administration focused on the perceived cultural and political differences between the United States and the country’s collectivist or totalitarian foes. In par- ticular, commentators and policymakers once more rallied around the claim that the United States had been defined from the Founding by neither race nor religion, but rather by a civic faith in fundamental rights, the rule of law, and basic equality Enlightenment principles that they argued made the coun- try the first truly universal nation. As the editors of the nascent liberal journal, Common Ground, declared in the fall of 1940: Never has it been more important that we become intelli- gently aware of the ground Americans of various strains have in common; . . . that we reawaken the old American Dream, a dream which, in its powerful emphasis on the fundamental worth and dignity of every human being, can be a bond of unity no totalitarian attack can break.25The Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal offered perhaps the most seminal popular presentation of these ideas in An American Dilemma, a formative text on race relations and American iden- tity for mid-twentieth-century political elites. Myrdal contended that the Constitution embodied what he called “the American creed”26 and through the text “the nation early laid down as the moral basis for its existence the principles of equality and liberty.”27 Myrdal argued that, although racist and archaic practices may have continued to persist in pockets—or entire regions—of the country, these practices were incompatible with national val- ues. “The main trend” in American history was “the gradual real- ization of the American Creed.”28 So pure were the country’s founding motives that America could be seen, at its core, as noth- ing less than “humanity in miniature.”29 Myrdal, along with many Cold War policymakers influenced by American Dilemma, employed these creedal arguments to then call for a postwar order premised on American preeminence. Precisely because the United States was a nation founded on plural- ism, tolerance, and the rule of law—embodied concretely in the Constitution—American power internationally stood “warm- heartedly against oppression in all the world.”30 Given that the country’s constitutional values expressed the global community’s ideals, pax Americana necessarily involved a defense of liberal goals against illiberal threats. Such creedal constitutionalism thus gave an account of the justness of American security prerog- atives and provided the ideological foundations for the “American Century.” Yet, for all the claims about the opposition between American constitutionalism and European imperialism, it is essential to ap- preciate the extent to which these notions of American exceptionalism rested on background judgments about racial hierarchy and nonwhite dependence. In the early decades of the twentieth cen- tury, the figure that best embodied this interconnection was none other than President Woodrow Wilson, liberal internationalist and domestic segregationist. Wilson viewed the world as divided into distinct ethnocultural “peoples” at different stages in the process of political evolution.31 European Americans, especially of Anglo-Saxon descent, stood at the forefront of this evolution, due to their long-standing acculturation in the practices of republican freedom. While democratic self-government was a universal good and all peoples had the potential eventually to enjoy its benefits, only those who had reached political maturity were ready in the pre- sent. “Only a long apprenticeship of obedience can secure” less de- veloped peoples “the precious possession” of real self-government, Wilson stated, “a thing no more to be bought than given.”32 Precisely because the United States had supposedly reached the end stage of ethnocultural development—and was not stained by the absolutism and internecine violence marking Europe—it had a unique global role to play in shepherding less developed peoples on the path to freedom. In effect, emerging accounts of American universalism, grounded in constitutional experience, reaffirmed rather than undermined white American supervision and interventionism. Indeed, for this very reason, regardless of American self-presentation the new American imperium often echoed the old European variety. This is perhaps best illustrated by publishing magnate Henry Luce’s own famous call in 1941 to “create the first great American Century.”33 For Luce, Americans enjoyed a right to global dominance because they were nothing less than “inheritors of all the great principles of Western civilization.” In this way, even the language of exceptionalism vis-à- vis other empires placed US elites and policymakers in a long line of European officials, officials who too justified their nation’s global power based on special cultural attributes and historic destiny. And perhaps most important for those on the receiving end of American power in the first half of the twentieth century, the new politics of US global authority could seem awfully similar to its European rivals.

Liberalism has traditionally been associated with the quest for peace, not least in IR scholarship (cf. Doyle 1983a, 1983b; Levy 1988)1 . More recently ‘illiberal’ security practices (i.e. torture; indefinite detention) deployed by liberal states as part of post-9/11 wars have called this relationship into question. One common response, on both right and left, has been to decry the liberal claim to use war as a means to end war (cf. Howard 2008) as a hypocritical paradox, and to blame exceptionalist rhetoric or securitization (cf. Aradau and van Munster 2009; Huysmans 2008). Amidst this clamor, Foucauldian Security Studies (FSS) claims to mount a more fundamental critique. For FSS, the paradox of liberal peace “turns out to be not a paradox at all” (Reid 2004, 74). Instead, liberalism is predicated on the model of war, and relations of war suffuse even its domestic and seemingly benign operations (Jabri 2006; Reid 2010). Building on Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, FSS sees the ambitions of liberal war as going beyond the merely territorial (Bell 2011; Bell and Evans 2010; Dillon and Reid 2009; Evans 2011; Howell 2014, 2015; Jabri 2006, 2007a), aiming to transform and improve spaces and populations cast as developmentally backwards (Holmqvist 2016). Contemporary liberal war is therefore a vital force claiming to serve “humanity as species being” (Jabri 2007a, 187). FSS, then, purports to offer new ways of understanding liberalism and war, to “theorize with Foucault beyond Foucault” (Dillon and Reid 2009, 36) in order to understand the biopolitics of security. Unfortunately, despite these ambitions, contemporary FFS largely perpetuates Foucault’s undertheorization of racism. As a result, like the liberal approaches it criticizes, FSS whitewashes the foundational role of colonial and racist violence and exploitation in modernity. FSS overwhelmingly ignores racialized and colonial relations, subjects and spaces subjected primarily or exclusively to punitive sovereign forms of power, and the constitutive role of racial and colonial violence in the genealogy of biopower. As a result, FSS exemplifies “methodological Whiteness” (Bhambra 2017a, 2017b): a way of reflecting on the world that fails to acknowledge the role played by 1 Jack Levy (1988, 661) famously celebrated the liberal peace thesis as "the closest thing we have to empirical law in the study of international relations." 2 race in the very structuring of that world, and of the ways in which knowledge is constructed and legitimated within it. It fails to recognise the dominance of ‘Whiteness’ as anything other than the standard state of affairs and treats a limited perspective – that deriving from White experience – as a universal perspective (Bhambra 2017b, np). This methodological Whiteness gives rise to two core propositions in the FSS literature on the biopolitics of security: First, that the reason for the martial character of liberal politics is that human life cannot ever be secured; Second, that everyone is (potentially) dangerous, and vulnerable to the punitive or lethal dimensions of liberal power. Both claims represent spectacular failures to engage with racism and coloniality. The claim that life cannot be secured, we argue, fails to take account of how – conceptually and materially – the idea of human life is an effect of racism and colonialism. This history has been amply documented in Black studies, Black feminist, and decolonial thought – fields which have challenged Foucault’s Eurocentric account of the rise of biopower. These histories have been widely discussed in IR and security studies (Agathangelou and Ling 2004; Agathangelou 2010a, 2010b, 2013; Barkawi and Laffey 1999, 2006; Biswas 2001; Chowdhry and Nair 2004; Grovogui 1996, 2001; Howell 2018; Inayatullah and Riley 2006; Jabri 2007b; Krishna 2001; Muppidi 1999, 2001; Richter-Montpetit 2007, 2014; Sabaratnam 2013; Shilliam 2008). Despite its claim to internationalize Foucault, FSS scholarship on liberal war and the biopolitics of security has not seriously engaged with questions of racism or coloniality. In order to move beyond methodological Whiteness, FSS needs to inquire into subjects who were never understood to be (fully) human in the first place. Likewise, the claim that everyone is potentially dangerous, potentially a target of violent security practices, we argue, obscures the fundamentally “parasitical nature of white freedom” (Morrison 1997, 57) and White security, which require certain lives to serve as their “literal raw materials” (Agathangelou 2013, 455). If it isto apprehend the raciality and coloniality of contemporary liberal order and war, including the postcolonial and settler colonial present, FSS will have to grapple, not only with the ways subjects are targeted differently for security interventions by virtue of racialization, but, more fundamentally, with the mutually constitutive nature of modernity and colonialism. To be clear, our argument is not that race and racism are ignored in FSS. Both Foucault and FSS ascribe racism a central role in the martial operations of liberal rule. However, because they rely on White humanist notions of Man prior to racialization, the racism they deal with is a kind of racism-without-colonialism, more an unfortunate cultural artifact than a global system of expropriation fundamental to the conditions of possibility for the liberal way of war and biopolitical security assemblages. This minimization of racism results from a lack of sustained engagement with (feminist) critical race, Black studies, or postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, as documented throughout this article. We focus on the debates in FSS on the biopolitics of security because this literature forms a core of the FSS approach as an intellectual space within which theoretical debates about war, security, biopolitics and liberalism have been significantly elaborated. Situated at the intersection of Security Studies and International Political Sociology, the broader FSS field 3 has similarly deployed concepts of biopolitics, liberalism, and war more empirically. Indeed, this journal has been a major hub of research on topics situated at this intersection, including mobility, migration and airports (Salter 2007; Chambers 2011; D'Aoust 2013; Frowd 2017); humanitarianism and the development-security nexus (Reid 2013; Abdelnour & Saeed 2014; Ilcan & Rygiel 2015; Pallister-Wilkins 2015); counter-terrorism (Dillon 2007, Debrix & Barder 2009; Neal 2012 de Goede, & de Graaf 2013); technoscience and security (Lundborg & Vaughan-Williams 2011; Thomas 2014; Busse 2015; Allinson 2015); global health security (Howell 2007, 2012, Elbe 2012) and the political economy of security (LoboGuerrero 2008; Abrahamsen and Williams 2009; Best 2016). In focusing on the biopolitics of liberal war thesis, we equip readers to judge whether the problems we identify in this approach also underwrite the more empirical FSS literature. This article thus provides a tool to challenge the full breadth of the FSS literature as well as the wider use of the concept of biopolitics in International Political Sociology and International Relations (IR). Our argument proceeds in three sections. The first provides a précis of Foucault’s work on biopolitics and biopower and details (feminist) Black studies, postcolonial and decolonial critiques. The second analyzes FSS scholarship on the biopolitics of security and liberal war, arguing that it consistently underestimates, undertheorizes and misconstrues the raciality and coloniality of liberal modernity. The third explores some of the resulting empirical oversights in FSS, including examples relating to state violence, the molecular and digital ‘revolutions’, and labour, capital and enslavement.

This paper argues that research on whiteness and geography is oriented almost exclusively around some notion of the past. While this is perhaps to be expected given that whiteness studies builds off two past-oriented bodies of scholarship – US labour studies (Roediger, 1991) and postcolonial theory (Said, 1994) – the argument is that privileging the past when researching geographies of whiteness risks overlooking the ways in which whiteness and hence various forms of racism are configured in relation to a different temporal horizon: the future. In pressing this claim, the argument is not to suggest that history is irrelevant for understanding the politics of whiteness. Analysing the past remains indispensable for understanding the numerous forms whiteness can take. Instead, the argument is that analysing discourses of ‘the future’ can reveal important insights about the ways in which white geographies are configured that might otherwise be foreclosed if the past is privileged as the exclusive time-space through which such geographies are produced and maintained. As such, any politics seeking to challenge whitenesses and their hold on racist social imaginaries may benefit by analysing how the future is invoked in articulations of white identity and how such future-oriented articulations shape geographies of all kinds.¶ Why the future? By future I refer to an imagined time that is yet-to-come. The future can be understood to follow sequentially from a past-present trajectory, or it can be understood as a form of absent presence. From tropes of uncertainty, Utopia, apocalypse, prophesy, hope, fear, possibility and potentiality, the future shapes the present in all manner of ways. For instance, in politics, rights are often suspended to safeguard against future events of insurrection, catastrophe and terror. In religion, moral judgements in the present are shaped by a concern for one’s safe passage into a future afterlife, and, in finance, the pricing of securities necessarily entails some calculation of future risk. Given the ubiquity of the future in the present, it is perhaps no surprise that the future is an important object of inquiry in contemporary thought (see, for example, Adams and Groves, 2007; Anderson, 2010b; Jameson, 2005; Luhmann, 1993).¶ Ben Anderson (2010a) provides a useful sketch of this research in a recent article in this journal. His point is that the future is rendered knowable through specific practices (i.e. calculation, imagination and performance) and, in turn, intervenes on the present through three anticipatory logics (i.e. pre-caution, pre-emption and preparedness). So, too, others have made the case that pre-empting the future is now a common feature of contemporary political life (Braun, 2007; Cooper, 2006). Futurity is also an important feature of the affective dimensions of daily life. Take, for instance, fear (Pain, 2009) and hope (Anderson, 2006; Anderson and Holden, 2008). Both are simultaneously embodied experiences and atmospheric qualities animated by imagined futures: one fears the yet-to-come and the other hopes for better things to come. In both, the here-and-now of the psyche or of collective mood is shaped by the yet-to-come. Or, as Brian Massumi (2002) argues, affect occurs precisely in the overlap between the actual and the virtual, which I take to mean an overlap between that which is and a very specific form of the virtual – the yet-to-come. By virtual I refer to things that are real but not actual (Shields, 2003); in this way, the future is exemplary of the virtual. It can be known and hence real, as Anderson suggests, but because it can never be fully actualized as the future, the future remains a permanent virtuality. Thus, analysing atmospheres of fear and hope, for instance, may tell us something about the way politics takes shape through the conjugation of the actual and the virtual, or at the threshold of the future event.¶ But the future as an object or orientation of inquiry is not limited to the affective, and nor is it confined to an actual-virtual binary. Hegel, for instance, paid considerable attention to transactions of the actual and the possible. For Hegel, the dialectic is made possible by the actual-possible relation where the dialectical movement of the actual is the possible.1 So, too, Heidegger argued that the future is indispensable to meaning. For instance, the significance that attaches to certain kinds of information would vanish were it not for the anticipated (i.e. future) consequences that lay dormant in information. Currency exchange rates would matter little, for instance, were it not for the anticipated consequences of exchange rate volatility. Although radically different, the Hegelian and Heideggerian traditions share in common the idea not simply that politics take shape through the collision of social forces that gathered pace in the past, but that political contests are shaped by the future as well.¶ This essay argues for a research agenda that situates the future at the centre of analyses of white geographies. It shows how the geographic literature on whiteness is past-oriented and suggests how this literature might benefit by attending to the ways in which white geographies are infused by notions of futurity. I develop this argument more fully below. For now let me offer a few preliminary thoughts about geographies of whiteness. By whiteness I refer to a racialized subject position that is remarkable for its seeming invisibility (Dwyer and Jones, 2000; Dyer, 1997). In this sense, whiteness is only partially about skin. More important, whiteness plays a foundational role in racist epistemology by serving as the norm against which others come to be viewed as different (Dwyer and Jones, 2000; Kobayashi and Peake, 2000). As such, whiteness does not name a set of stereotypes, so much as a set of ‘narrative structural positions, rhetorical tropes and habits of perception’ (Dyer, 1997: 12) that stand in for the normal. This makes defining whiteness almost impossible but then, as Richard Dyer (1997) argues, the power of whiteness lies in its capacity for almost infinite variability (see also Kobayashi, 2003; Vanderbeck, 2006). For myself, the power of racisms rest in their capacity to normalize their corresponding whitenesses (Kobayashi and Peake, 2000).¶ What, then, are geographies of whiteness? For my purposes here, they refer to geographies – spaces, places, landscapes, natures, mobilities, bodies, etc. – that are assumed to be white or are in some way structured, though often implicitly, by some notion of whiteness (Bonnett, 1997; McCarthy and Hague, 2004; Vanderbeck, 2006). The argument put forward in this paper is that research on geographies of whiteness is almost invariably past-oriented (Bonnett, 1997, 2000; Hoelscher, 2003; Pulido, 2000). By ‘past-oriented’ I mean that whiteness, whether understood as a past or present phenomenon, tends to be explained, accounted for and examined as an expression of social relations that took shape in the past (Satzewich, 2007). In the paper, I aim to show how this work is dominated by an orientation that looks to the past as the temporal horizon through which research and learning about past or present white racial identity occurs. By and large, this work assumes that in order to challenge or reconfigure whitenesses and their corresponding racisms whiteness must be diagnosed using some form of past-oriented analysis (Bonnett, 1997). The racist past is, thus, used to explain the racist present. A brief example makes the point. In an essay that many (Baldwin, 2009a; Dwyer and Jones, 2000; Jackson, 1998; McCarthy and Hague, 2004) suggest is a main point of reference for debate about whiteness in geography, Alastair Bonnett (1997) argues that whiteness ought to be understood as a function of historical geography.2 As such, Bonnett privileges a methodological approach that reaches into the past for answers about contemporary race and racism. Elsewhere, Audrey Kobayashi and Linda Peake (2000) make a similar claim that whiteness is a historically constructed position: to understand whiteness requires understanding its multiple genealogies.¶ I do wonder, though, whether a past-oriented approach to the study of white geographies reproduces the teleological assumption that white racism can be modernized away. Such an assumption privileges an ontology of linear causality in which the past is thought to act on the present and the present is said to be an effect of whatever came before. Consequently, efforts to understand racism are thought to proceed from, or be enhanced by, some correct historical analysis of whiteness. According to this kind of temporality, the future is the terrain upon or through which white racism will get resolved. It cleaves the future from the present and, thus, gives the future discrete ontological form. Yet, in so doing, this kind of temporality disregards the ways in which the future is very often already present in the present not as a discrete ontological time-space, but as an absent or virtual presence that constitutes the very meaning of the present (Anderson, 2010a; Massumi, 2007). This is a rather significant oversight when attempting to account for geographies of whiteness because it means that such geographies are not simply a function of the past but of the future as well.¶ So, then, what about the future? To what extent are geographies of whiteness a function not just of the past but of the future? How are white geographies maintained in relation to the future? In what ways is the future already present in various forms of whiteness? It seems that the geographic literature on whiteness is silent on these questions. In pointing this out, I do not mean to indict or discredit the historicist approach that has come to dominate understandings of whiteness. Again, past-oriented analyses of various kinds have been and continue to be critical for understanding whitenesses and the various racisms to which they give rise. I simply wish to acknowledge that by foregrounding the past in the present the geographic study of whiteness risks overlooking how whitenesses are made and maintained in relation to futures both distant and immanent. Here, the task for a future-oriented geographic research on whiteness might be to understand how both contemporary and past forms of whiteness relate to the future (Anderson, 2010a), or how specific geographic expressions of whiteness are contingent on the future. For instance, the task might be to understand how discourses of futurity shape various forms of white supremacy from right-wing xenophobias to left-nationalisms to practices of liberal humanitarianism, and how these shape, for instance, geographies of place, nature, space, mobility, bodies and so on. A worthwhile starting point for this work might be to analyse how discourses of white crisis, such as those found in Great Britain in the early 1900s (Bonnett, 2004) or throughout the West during processes of post-Second World War decolonization (Thobani, 2007), relate to and are shaped by notions of futurity. They do relate to the future. The question is: how and to what effect?¶ Acknowledging how the future is made present in white geographies is important for at least three reasons. First, as many now argue (Grusin, 2010; Massumi, 2007), the future is an important site through which individuals and societies are governed (Anderson, 2010a). A focus on whiteness and futurity provides scope for thinking about the way in which governing through the future might inaugurate new or reconfigure old forms of whiteness. Eugenic science is a useful example here. Eugenics was underwritten by an imagined future eradicated of human imperfections. Thus we might seek to understand how white geographies are reproduced through new future-oriented technologies, like genetic screening and nanotechnology (Rose, 2007). Second, understanding how white geographies articulate with discourses of futurity opens up new terrains for conceptualizing and challenging racism. If white supremacy is, in part, reproduced through shared practices of futurity, what then are these practices? What kinds of futures do such practices seek to expunge or produce, and how can they be resisted? The case of genetic medicine is again illustrative. For instance, individual gene mapping allows ‘genetic citizens’ to witness their ‘future’ health by assessing their genetic predisposition for disease (Rose, 2007). Genetic citizenship is, in turn, shaped by new practices of bodily purification aimed at foreclosing certain ‘unhealthy’ futures. We might ask whether and how these practices are white. Third, a focus on whiteness and futurity points to the idea that affect shapes white racial formation (Hook, 2005). For the future can never exist except as a form of virtual present, and affect can be understood, in part, as a generalized attitude towards the presencing of particular futures. (Important, however, is that affect can also be understood as a generalized attitude towards presencings of the past. Think, for example, affects of nostalgia and loss.) Thus, we might ask: what futures infuse the affective logics of whiteness? How does this future presencing occur? And how, if at all, are these futures constitutive of specific white spatio-temporalities? These reasons together provide a rationale for a research agenda concerned with understanding how the future works as a resource in the geographic expression of whitenesses.

SELF, OTHER, AND THE NEGOTIATION OF DIFFERENCE How do we encounter the Other? How do we experience those who are different? Can we communicate? Can we live in parallel? Can we learn from those who are different? Can we ignore them? How do we manage the inevitable jostling that may arise? These are questions that are simultaneously psychological, sociological, political, and legal and, therefore, should be addressed on many different levels at once. One possible response to the encounter with the Other is to focus on those attributes that make the Other not so different at all. This is the “we’re all fundamentally the same” gambit we hear so often. And, interestingly, this focus on sameness can be adopted both by die-hard nationalists—who use it to insist that “our” norms (whoever the “our” might be) should govern all—and committed universalists, who use it to push for uniform norms operating cross-culturally throughout space and time. In this same vein, some sociological studies of communication start from the idea that interpersonal interaction requires both parties in an encounter to believe (or at least assume) that the other is not truly other at all.17 According to this view, most associated with Alfred Schutz,18 differences in individual perspectives are overcome only if each party tacitly believes that he or she could effectively trade places with the other. As Schutz describes it, “I am able to understand other people’s acts only if I can imagine that I myself would perform analogous acts if I were in the same situation.”19 Thus, differences in perspective are reduced to differences in situation. Any, possibly more fundamental, differences are suppressed to facilitate dialogue. As a result, the deliberate assuming away of the unfamiliar is seen as a constant part of everyday life. The unfamiliar is relegated to the category of “strange,” and “strangeness” necessarily is placed elsewhere, somewhere other than the interaction at hand.20 Moreover, Harold Garfinkel and other ethnomethodologists have argued that individuals do not simply passively maintain these assumptions but are constantly engaged in a joint enterprise aimed at sustaining this familiarity.21 In all of these studies, the emphasis is on “the human production of common worlds of meaning as the only axis on which dialogue rotates.”22 But is that all there is to the experience of the Other? Is it really imperative constantly to assume that our fellow human beings are fundamentally identical to us? After all, “[u]nder this principle, if a dialogue is to take place, strangeness as a phenomenon of everyday interaction must be considered negatively, namely, as that part of an encounter that must be constantly ‘assumed away’ by the participants.”23 Thus, we are left with a world in which people are classified either as familiar or as strangers. Even more problematic, these studies suggest that it will be simply impossible to bridge the communication gap with those deemed strangers. Yet, as Georg Simmel noted long ago, the stranger is never truly distant,24 so there will need to be some way of bridging gaps short of assuming away strangeness altogether. On the other hand, we might respond to such encounters with the Other by retreating to a gated community and trying to lead a hermetically-sealed existence. Here, the Other remains fully Other, and no communication is possible. Both of these responses, when translated to law, are fundamentally jurispathic. They kill off competing interpretations by authoritatively saying that this is the law and that is not. So, either a single nation-state’s norms govern or one universal law governs. Such jurispathic legal assertions may sometimes be effective, necessary, or desirable, but they are not the only ways to structure legal relations among multiple communities. Indeed, they both represent a fundamental retreat from hybridity. Yet, hybridity is difficult to escape in a world of overlapping jurisdictions and normative diversity, where— as the pluralists would say—multiple conflicting legal systems occupy the same social field. The question therefore often becomes: are there other approaches to managing pluralism? Can we come up with a more pluralist constitutional order? What are the constitutional principles we might apply? Unlike the universalist approach, a pluralist vision does not require people to be conceptualized as fundamentally identical in order to be brought within the same normative system. Nor does a pluralist vision render outsiders irrelevant, as sovereignist territorialism does. Instead, pluralism attempts to navigate a different path altogether. A pluralist constitutional frame asks whether we can seek solutions without assuming commonality or seek harmonization while preserving the insistence on difference that contextualists rightly emphasize. In short, pluralism questions whether we are doomed either to require commonality or to essentialize difference. Are those truly the only possible approaches? Think again of how we encounter a stranger. Do we necessarily see that stranger as fundamentally the same as we are or fundamentally different? Might not we see (and celebrate) important differences while seeking ways to bridge those gaps so that we might communicate with each other and live peaceably side by side? Perhaps we might draw from Hannah Arendt, who offers a different way of conceptualizing the encounter with the stranger. Instead of assuming commonality, she seeks, in Understanding and Politics, the quality that “makes it bearable for us to live with other people, strangers forever, in the same world, and makes it possible for them to bear with us.”25 Note that for Arendt, the task is how to “bear with” strangers, even while recognizing that they will forever be strange.26 Arendt’s strategy for bearing with strangers is more than just mutual indifference and more than just toleration as well. It “involves a mental capacity appropriate for an active relation to that which is distant,”27 which Arendt locates in King Solomon’s gift of the “understanding heart.”28 Understanding, according to Arendt, “is the specifically human way of being alive; for every single person needs to be reconciled to a world into which he was born a stranger and in which, to the extent of his distinct uniqueness, he always remains a stranger.”29 What does “understanding” entail for Arendt? This is a bit difficult to pin down, but she makes clear that understanding is not gained through direct experience of the Other, and it is not just knowledge of the other.30 Instead, understanding starts from the individual situated apart from others. Thus, instead of “feeling your pain,” understanding involves determining what aspects of the pain people feel have to do with politics and what politics can do to resolve our common dilemmas. Moreover, “[u]nderstanding can be challenged and is compelled to respond to an alternative argument or interpretation.”31 In short, understanding in Arendt’s formulation looks a lot less like empathy and a lot more like judging.32 While assuming sameness leads to a universalist harmonization approach, Arendt’s more distanced conception of the encounter with the stranger is akin to the pluralist vision I am pursuing as an alternative. Likewise, consider Iris Marion Young’s idea of “unassimilated otherness,” which she posits as the relation among people in the ideal “unoppressive city.”33 Young envisions ideal city life as the “‘being-together’ of strangers.”34 These strangers may remain strangers and continue to “experience each other as other.”35 Indeed, they do not necessarily seek an overall group identification and loyalty. Yet, they are open to “unassimilated otherness.”36 They belong to various distinct groups or cultures and are constantly interacting with other groups. But, they do so without seeking either to assimilate or to reject those others. Such interactions instantiate an alternative kind of community,37 one that is never a hegemonic imposition of sameness but that nevertheless prevents different groups from ever being completely outside one another.38 In a city’s public spaces, Young argues, we see glimpses of this ideal: “The city consists in a great diversity of people and groups, with a multitude of subcultures and differentiated activities and functions, whose lives and movements mingle and overlap in public spaces.”39 In this vision, there can be community without sameness, shifting affiliations without ostracism.

(Kevin, ‘Codename Geronimo: settler memory and the production of American statism,’ Settler Colonial Studies, Special Issue on Globalizing Unsettlement)

In the contemporary era, I would include politics itself as among the facets of existence that settler colonialism colonizes. That is, settler colonial assemblage defines and seeks to bound that which is legitimately subject for debate and contestation as it concerns the distribution and role of power, identity, interest and institutions. Before one can even ask the question of settler colonial violence, dispossession, and appropriation, the question may be rendered moot, outside the bounds of legitimate, or realistic, politics. In this light, my suggestion here is that the response to such appropriations as that of Geronimo's name should not be to ask the White House for an apology, and thus concede the status of this statist institution. Instead, the association should be embraced, in one key respect. To embrace the association is not to stand in alliance with Osama Bin Laden or Al Qaeda at all or the US military, but rather to re-assert the fact that Geronimo was, indeed, an enemy of American statism and settler colonialism. It is to maintain the political posture of friend versus enemy, and to render as important and necessary the status and actions of what political theorist Joel Olson called the zealot or fanatic as an important political category that holds out the possibility for more radical transformation of the political order.27 It is to say that the use of Geronimo's name is not simply the sign of an absence of respect or sensitivity for Indigenous people, but is more evidence of the active presence of settler colonial assemblage in the specific form of US liberal colonialism. In sum, in critiquing the problem with the Codename Geronimo case, we should seek to avoid either reproducing a politics of recognition and multicultural discourse or diagnosing it as a sign of collective amnesia, as if only people knew all the ‘facts’ of history things would be fine, or better. Rather, in this regard, LaDuke and Harjo get it right I believe in emphasizing the persistent posture of American warfare against Indigenous people. While this is a difficult framework to ponder, it is the appropriate one for a decolonizing, unsettling politics which insists on drawing clear lines for and against settler colonialism. In this sense, the unsettling response here is to put settler memory front and center as an active contemporary practice, in which Geronimo's name is utilized by the US military because the invocation of his legend habitually calls forth – possibly unlike any single figure in US-Indigenous history – the appropriative violence of settler colonial conquest that fundamentally shapes, as an active verb in the twenty-first century, the political development and status of American liberal colonialism.

What attracts me to this scenario is the short-circuiting of a whole series of expectations and assumptions, not only about psychoanalysis, but about crisis, time, illness, cure, capitalism, life, death, and politics—the very problems around which this book is organized. The lesson here is that if you really want to understand a system and make significant change (and not just manage symptoms), you must look away from what appears to be the immediate crisis and toward the crisis that is at work even when the system is functioning well. This crisis constitutes the system itself; the system cannot function without its internal crisis. Psychoanalysis is less about digging up buried treasures than about carefully inspecting the ground—a relent- less listening to and intervention with the patient when he or she is most functional and thus symptomatic (or most symp- tomatic and thus functional). Psychoanalysis, therefore, is not a last-ditch effort at disaster relief. It might serve as an object lesson to study why this project of psychoanalysis departs so radically from the vast majority of cultural representations of psychoanalysis, representations in television, film, not to mention many clinical case studies in which the ‘‘aha moments’’ are perfectly cued by close-ups, cloying music, or narrative momentum. Crisis is not what happens when we go wrong; crisis is what happens when we go right. The logic of this last sentence will serve as a sort of mantra throughout this work. Take, for example, capitalism: crisis is not what happens when capitalism goes wrong, but when it goes right. In this light, Alan Greenspan’s mea culpa in October 2008 (when the bankruptcies and bailouts began to flow) is particularly revealing. Greenspan was shocked; he thought he understood how things worked. But what really shocked Greenspan is that today’s capitalism is still capitalism. He believed that we were in some mode of production that could have the productivity and wealth-generation of capitalism without capitalism’s crises, or at least a capitalism in which the crises could be managed by mathematicians and derivative dealers. What a horror it must have been for Greenspan to realize that capitalism is still the system it has always been: one that cannot suspend its fundamental rules of profit creation and expansion under any circumstances (and thus cannot suspend class conflict, gender inequality, imperial violence, brutal dispossessions, ecological destruction, and psychological suffering). The point is that crisis is built right into the system of capitalism—not only when it busts, but when it booms. Exploitation occurs within capitalism, therefore, not only when pen- sions disappear, jobs are slashed, and factories burn down, but it is also present when contracts are obeyed and factories are clean and safe. To prove this point, one should consider the valorization of surplus value and the logic of the commodity. For example, the inequality built into capitalism is due not simply to the pursuit of profit or so many bad capitalists, but to the seemingly natural and benign control a capitalist has over a worker’s labor power. That labor power is reproduced daily with the making, selling, and buying of commodities—especially when the capitalist is kind, com- passionate, and humane. Such an understanding of capitalism, one that emphasizes a larger structural logic over the personalities of the individual actors, is, in fact, the foundation of all economic theories, from neoclassical to Marxist. Moreover, understanding capitalism in such a way compels us not to moralize cheaply about factory layoffs or be incredulous about financial meltdowns. These should be expected by anyone who under- stands capitalism. In other words, these adverse effects are not simply about greedy politicians and corrupt executives. There are plenty of them. But to focus on them is a strategic error. In March 2009, headlines were filled with outrage over the bonuses paid to Wall Street executives. The problem, however, was, and still is, not the bonuses at American International Group, but the radical inequality of income that sustains the larger economic system itself. Yes, outrage should be directed at the executives who received lavish bonuses despite selling the very financial products that exacerbated the meltdown. But a more focused and sustained outrage should be directed at the hard socioeconomic fact that these executives make $15,000 an hour compared to the $8 an hour of the custodial staff. Somehow this legal and even celebrated model of wealth distribution does not deserve our condemnation, but the latest scandal or public humiliation does. The great trauma of the economic meltdown of 2008, I believe, is only now descending upon us. That trauma has to do with the recognition that capitalism is still here, that despite the most significant economic crisis since the Great Depression the very structures in place since capitalism’s inception have not substantially changed. It is brutal enough to lose one’s job or one’s home due to the crisis, but when very little changes in the process then we lose on both fronts. We lose our savings and our exhilaration, if not our joy, at watching the system give way—not to mention our desire, however unconscious, for the the world to be organized differently. This rethinking of crisis returns us to the anecdote about the psycho- analyst and to the problem of time. If crisis is always at work and not a sign that something has gone wrong, then how might we understand the time of crisis? Crisis used to be defined by its short-termness—requiring a decision on the spot, with no possibility of deferral, evasion, or repression. A crisis means we can, perhaps, suspend our usual rules and ethical standards because we must ‘‘act now!’’ But something has happened on the way to the shelter. The bombs have been launched, but they are suspended overhead, allowing us to continue on with our lives under the shadow of destruction. If crisis is always already with us, if it is the rule of the system rather than its exception, then in what cases could we justify suspending our principles? Would we have to live by them all the time? Or would this new temporality of crisis demand the rethinking of our society’s cherished principles altogether? Rethinking the meaning of crisis not only affects our temporal experience of the present, but also colonizes and preempts claims upon the future. Paul Virilio once argued that what defines the post–Cold War moment of accelerated communications and military technologies is a deadly simultaneity, a temporality in which a target is destroyed the mo- ment it becomes visible. “When a missile threatening in ‘real time’ is picked up on a radar or video, the present as mediatised by the display console already contains the future of the missile’s impending arrival at its target.” To see the enemy is to have already killed him. This logic intensifies an older paradigm in which one first scopes a target before trying to kill it. The converse logic holds that one kills the target even though one does not see it. Instead of precision bombs, we have under this converse logic carpet or cluster bombs and casualties, intended and unintended, that are identi- fied after the fact. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the improvised weapons detonated by suicide bombers, also fall into this lethal category. This series of military logics, however, requires one more turn: today one kills the target but it does not die, at least not immediately. The target has been killed but has yet to die. There is a time warp at work, one in which the future has already come and is still to come, a double future. We can think about ecological predictions that forecast the end of natural resources and how it is already too late to reverse this categorical trend, or we can return to the military realm and consider how posttraumatic stress disorder attacks the soldier in the future for acts committed or witnessed in the present. In both cases there is a looping of time in which the future is spelled out in advance, granting to the meantime an impossible location that is heading somewhere and nowhere at once. But this is not a simple fortune telling, a determination already decided and thus eliminating contingency. This is, rather, a radically different experience and operation of time, one in which categories such as determination and contingency are refunctionalized. Or, even more to the point, this is an experience of time that enables the very shifting of how time works. The paradigmatic condition illustrating the already dead is that of the medical patient who has been diagnosed with a terminal disease only to live through medical advances that then turn the terminal illness into a chronic one. The disease remains life threatening, still incurable, even though it is managed and controlled, perhaps indefinitely. The patient is now afforded a meantime that functions like a hole in time, an escape route to somewhere else and a trap door to where he began. Freud could only anticipate this double future in 1937 in a letter to Marie Bonaparte, written two years before his death and while he was in great physical and psycho- logical pain (due to oral cancer and Nazi advances in Austria, respec- tively): ‘‘In order to find all of this bearable, one must remind oneself constantly that one really has no right to be living any longer.’’ Freud’s statement is symptomatic of his moment, while something qualitatively different is at work today. Of course, our present shares much in common with the modernity of Freud’s time, but to tease out the differ- ences we might want to invert Freud’s statement: in order to find the current moment unbearable, we must remind ourselves that we really have the right to die. This is less about euthanasia, masochism, or legalized suicide than a certain relation to time, a relation to the present and the future, as well as the capacity to shape these temporal realities. Whereas Freud’s project was to make the unbearable bearable by way of psychoana- lytical practice, ours is to make the bearable unbearable by any means possible or, and perhaps more important, by any means impossible—un- bearable to the extent that we cannot help but act toward another way of feeling and being, and impossible to the extent that we cannot help but act even even in the face of an unavoidable fate.≥ What is the relation between unbearability and revolution? Or between bearability and the status quo? Or between deadening environments (both social and ecological) and our relationship to death itself? This is where politics, culture, and medicine come together, especially around the con- cept of the already dead and the problem of time. We have entered a new chronic mode, a mode of time that cares little for terminality or acuteness, but more for an undying present that remains forever sick, without the danger of sudden death. The maintenance of the status quo becomes, if not quite our ultimate goal, what we will settle for, and even fight for. If the system cannot be reformed (the cancer eradicated, the ocean cleaned, the corruption expunged), then the new chronic mode insists on maintaining the system and perpetually managing its constitutive crises, rather than confronting even a hint of the terminal, the system’s (the body’s, the planet’s, capitalism’s) own death. In this work, I produce this concept of ‘‘the chronic,’’ place it in the context of late capitalism, and track it in the political-economic, cultural, and medical realms. Departing from how changing medical practices (dominated by a new paradigm of targeted drug therapy and biotechnology) have reconfigured standard notions of ‘‘cure,’’ as well as the meanings of ‘‘acute,’’ ‘‘terminal,’’ ‘‘crisis,’’ and ‘‘mean- time,’’ I explore the radical and reactionary effects of this temporal shift.

The Anthropocene renders visible new architectures of time and matter, both sedimenting existing genealogies of global-world-space and radically reorganizing an imagination of the scope and material duration of what the human is in and through time. The idealized architectures of social formations that have hitherto been thought of as purely “social” structures are now beginning to betray their subtended geologies. Unraveling the fantasies of growth without accumulation, the global effects of climate change and resource depletion suggest that there is no accumulation without dispossession in both social or geological worlds. This new vision of the geologic underpinnings of social formations suggests that the “standing stock” of matter was never a suitable means to theorize how the geo and social hook up, or come to matter, nor does it adequately account for the full reach of those geosocial formations into time and sub-surface matter. Ruination of the future, it seems, is as a much a product of the subtended infrastructures of architectural projects as it is of these interventions themselves. Or, to put it another way, what was once imagined and imaged as extraneous and external to the rational projects of materializing late modernity might now seem to have found it had a missing substratum. The substratum of the technosphere—the output of contemporary enterprise—has a central claim in accounts of the Anthropocene’s material geographies. Waste sites, mining shafts and extraction zones are imagined as the new museums of humanity, alongside the more affectual and accumulative material registers of pollution, toxicity and climate shifts. More than the by-products of social projects and industrial practices, such chemical and atmospheric modes of ruination are producing their own unique traces or architectural fossils in the Earth in the form of coral bleachings, plasticized rocks and carbon dioxide measurements. The accumulation of new mineralogical arrangements and organic-inorganic composites in the flow of geologic matter provides the evidential base for the Anthropocene. This new intemperate science of fossilization is generating the technofossils of the future. Everything from the occurrence of McDonalds, Dairy Queen and Walmart chains to changes in nitrogen and carbon cycles position the geologies of the present into interlocking geosocial architectures. We might imagine the term “architecture” to refer to the organization of the material structures of space and its temporal patterning; or, how the material mediation of space orders a specific temporal indexing. These new empirics of sedimentation, of rapidly destratifying and restratifying social, economic and mineral practices, are rearranging the global dynamics of the bio and geosphere. This suggests that the old artifacts of Earth that constituted the imagination of global-world-space are overly reliant on a stable material foundation and therefore a temporal location. In this sense, the Anthropocene as a new rendering of time, subjectivity and agency announces both a break in and consolidation of modernity’s temporal arc. The city, as an ever-expanding urban fossil, is enacting a temporal buckling in its allegiance to the “now” in the form of its on-going contribution to a hominid geology with a duration far in excess of contemporary visions of disposability, newness and change. The provisionality of the present and its organization of a form of politics, thought to be a contingent social relation, is being fractured through the temporal break of geology. And, it is through the violent infrastructures of geology that new forms of politics are emerging, such as those at Standing Rock around the Dakota Access Pipeline that insist of a different vision of temporal affiliation and material filiation. As Lauren Berlant argues, “An infrastructural analysis helps us see that what we commonly call ‘structure’ is not what we usually call it, an intractable principle of continuity across time and space, but is really a convergence of force and value in patterns of movement that’s only solid when seen from a distance. Objects are always looser than they appear. Objectness is only a semblance, a seeming, a projection effect of interest in a thing we are trying to stabilize.” If infrastructures are also structures of feeling and convergences of force, then the appreciation of those affects need to reach down below the surface into the substratum to see how those forces both maintain and disrupt edifices of intention on the surface. The underground spaces of extraction and the cavernous holes of excavated fossil fuels are now the curatorial spaces that await an anticipatory geology and a future direction beyond human agency. These spaces of extraction are nonetheless tied to the global socio-economic expulsions of late neoliberal subjective life through the invisible labors of subterranean workers and the toxicities that accompany these material mobilizations. The material destratifications of marine, mineral and chemical flows of carbon and nitrogen are returning in various accumulative modalities of pollution, toxicity and anthropogenic climate change, which in turn reconfigure the biopolitical possibilities of life. These affectual material infrastructures are shifting a sense of the planetary by generating new orders of time and a geo-logics of existence, simultaneously hacking and re-syncing the planet and its temporal structures to produce an arrangement of the future that looks decidedly irrational and unthought: infrastructures of geologic mobility that far outstrip, but are a direct consequence of, conventional forms of material communication and transnational infrastructures; geo-logics of social and material expulsions whose visible effects have been hidden in plain sight all along, understood as the waste and excess of normative modes of agency, architectural planning and capital accumulation. The task of geomorphic aesthetics is to think these new duration and material recombinations as an unthought affective infrastructure that subtends the architectures of materiality and resource distribution that themselves inscribe the planetary present of global-world-space. Specifically, geoaesthetics might make sensible how geologic forces move across time and space to disrupt the provisional unity of global-world-space and render new geographical imaginations of intemperate locations in both political and geologic time. This new form of geopolitics would understand the “geo” as a temporal disfigurement of political space rather than as a descriptive mode of spatiality. In locating the temporal rupture of Anthropocenic planetary thought, a brief genealogy of global-image-space is required that situates climate change in its geographical imaginations. In the context of this new epoch, geomorphic aesthetics are a space in which ideas and ideals about the affective qualities of this new sensibility are represented not as a depiction of world-space or globality, but as a sensibility that can define the parameters of those organizations of thought or affective infrastructures (and their critique). The geologic and how it comes to matter beyond representational genres as a sensibility of time as well as a quality of materiality is firstly an archeology of the unthought; an arena of building and accumulation that has been rendered invisible and contractually mute. In this zone of agitation between matter, what comes to matter and that which has seemingly escaped material memory, aesthetics become a crucial space for engaging with geologic force and time and its proposition to stand against the architectures of agency (and reason) that brought the Anthropocene into being. Fractures in the Architectures of Global World-Space Every image, every affective architecture that pertains to a global vision and a spatial imaginary, comes from somewhere, located in specific geopolitical modes of production and technologies of reproduction. This somewhere of feeling that structures perspective and renders orientation is global world image space. It is the persuasion of a globalizing force that encompasses world image space from a certain location and within specific locational media. The material, political and technical geographies of the globe constitute its locative vision within a heterogeneous space of different “worldings,” or meta-ontologies of the world. These meta-ontologies are not just a political but a material ordering of the world. This is why global-world-space is world-making in the sensibility of space rather than simply a descriptive act of spatiality. Global-world-space is the conceit of a global spatiality constructed through uneven geographies of experience and exploitation in order to maintain the privilege of its vision. The Anthropocene is both an addition to and radical departure from these meta-ontologies of the globe. The development of actual geographic infrastructures that deliver a convincing architecture of global world-space began in earnest in the early twentieth century, but the origin of the desire for real-time globality and telepresent communications are already evident in the colonial networks of Empire, the telecommunication and transportation networks powered by coal and before coal by slavery. These architectures of globalizing space came to a point of culmination with the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957-58 and the deployment of a line of weather stations that circled the globe, watching the meteorological shifts in weather patterns for the telling presence of ballistic missiles. That is, the synoptic accumulation of weather that later became the baseline correlative of climate was initially envisaged as a screen for watching incoming rocketry. Alongside these geopolitical experiments in the vertical architectures of aerial and atmospheric control, Sputnik was launched to provide the first geographical “elsewhere” of territory (after the oceans and Antarctica). The new satellite also launched the geographic imagination of an extra-territorial planetary state of sensing and consolidated the Earth as artifactual sphere of operations. The launch of artificial satellites and the landing on the Earth’s own satellite (the moon) initiate the beginnings of what Jennifer Gabrys calls a Program Earth (2016). As Gabrys notes, Sputnik “activated a multitude of new experiences for inhabiting the earth,” first as an audio map of a new orbital environment, and then as a programmable space. Galvanized by the geopolitical context of the prospect of Global War, in the Cold War the earth sciences and their sensing technologies became one of the main recipients of funding for new spatial and visual technologies and thus the architects of its vision. Furthermore, “Satellites were promoted as making an easy transition from military research and development to ecological and social applications. Remote sensing developed into a critical technology and method within environmental science and became a crucial way in which to study environmental change on a global scale.” While the globe appears in the context of the Cold War as the ultimate commodity fetish of the military-industrial complex, how these geographical imaginations of universal spatiality create a homogenizing surface of projection matters in the operationalization of materiality, particularly in how the earth as a global world-space is viewed as infrastructure of intentional propositions rather than a geography undercut by geological processes. We should understand the images of globality from space and the verticality of vision that aimed for an increasingly spectacular encompassing of the globe—a God's-eye view—as an attempt to grapple with the indeterminacy of materiality; to banish an atmospheric optic and still the dynamic of the Earth. At a technical level, the campaign was against the weather, specifically clouds and their powers to disrupt a clear line of sight. Even before the far side of the moon was photographed in 1959 by the Soviet Luna 3 probe, the ability to picture the Earth became coterminous with the desire to operationalize aerial space, crucial to which was the establishment of accurate weather reporting systems. This involved the strategic positioning of bases at the Poles to both detect and measure changes in Cold War atmospheres. Most notably, the US claimed the South Pole and established “Weather Central” at the Antarctic axis. This remote outpost which formed a terminal link in a pole-to-pole chain of sites running along three meridians provided a geopolitical encircling of the whole earth and “ground truthed” its global claim. These bipolar measurements attempted to achieve the first synoptic measurements as a co-present image of the world’s weather, which laid the foundation for climate to be constructed as a globalized space of data exchange. This first global meteorological model of climate circulation served as the baseline data point for anthropogenic climate change and ozone depletion. Climate change (both long term climate shifts and anthropogenic-induced) introduced fractures into universalizing architectures and ruptured the neat enclosure of the whole, both in representational and socio-political terms. Just as global-world-space is nearly mapped from pole to pole, climate change introduces a shock to the imagination of earth systems as independent from social action. Climate change becomes representative—in the double sense of representing practices and ontological arrangements—of the unintended global (side-)effects of these totalizing Western colonial visions of the world and their inability to deal with the material and representative excess of closed world systems. It also demonstrates how world resources have been mobilized for Western growth, while entropy or waste has been exported both into the atmosphere and various colonial and neo-colonial sacrifice zones that constitute the dynamics of global-world-space. Excess is not an outside to these visions of global-world-space but a constituent condition of its infrastructures; a condition that is systematically unthought through those structures. It is a spatio-affective infrastructure in which certain modes of subjectivization are generated to create constitutive outsides to the privileged subjects of global-world-space; marginal subjects that are differentiated in terms of race and territorial autonomy. It is into this scene of representational failure, in which climate change models have struggled to compete with the changes already at work in the world (or, the various nonlinear and erratic material undoings that can’t successfully be modeled into a model, like capitalism), that a “geologic turn” makes its material-temporal intervention. The claim of an epochal shift in the material and ontological ground of knowledge can also be viewed as a claim for a new epoch of thought. Epochal thought needs to re-materialize, re-ontologize, de-anthropomorphize and geologize humanity through the specificities of differentiating mineralogical forces. The Anthropocene is both a claim to inhuman life and the recognition of geologic claims on social life. While climate change modelling enacted a transformation of the representative scale of human-environmental relations into atmospheres, ice and oceans, it did not represent a change in kind in the Modernist drive towards the totality of global-world-image, imagined as an accumulative strategy of denser and more representative data architectures of the world. Thinking with the strata or the “geotrauma” of the Anthropocene as an epochal shift from socio-political to geosocial relations is a provocation to think about how the Earth stratifies thought, bodies and disciplines (in ways that the epistemes of Western knowledge cannot entirely take account of). The inability to comprehend the unthought of thought in the infrastructures of global-world-space and its affective residues in relation to the conceptualization of material agency that constitute and actualize reason might seem like a double erasure in social worlds given the embrace of geologic metaphors and materiality that populate some of the most energetic thinking of the twentieth century. Leibniz’s and Kant’s political philosophy that emerged from the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake; Deleuze and Guattari’s plateaus; Foucault’s archaeologies and social formations; Freud’s unconscious; and more recently, in the realm of feminist materialisms, Elizabeth Grosz’s Geopower, Elizabeth Povinelli’s Geontologies and Angela Last’s Geopoetics all engage the geophilosophy of a dynamic ground in the making of time, space and ontology.

The second goal of this chapter is to reframe Japanese American internment and the concomitant “yellow peril” that traps Asian Americans in a third space between immigrant threat/model minority, within those distortive parallactic effects that have been used to disrupt and deny indigenous sovereignty. By focusing on the internment of Japanese Americans at Poston and the role that John Collier, the father of the Indian Reorganization Act of , played in promoting Japanese American wartime relocation as an experiment in self-governance toward assimilation, I hope to deepen our understandings of how U.S. colonial policies targeting indigenous nations inform the assumptions of multicultural liberal democracy that now exemplify current U.S. preoccupations with race and diaspora and serve to deterritorialize indigenous prior claims. And finally, I will draw upon Gerald Vizenor’s work in Hiroshima Bugi to consider American Indian participation in and disruptions of conviviality within the transits This content downloaded from 45.36.152.108 on Wed, 13 May 2020 08:13:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 190  KILLING STATES of empire. Vizenor’s unmapping of the nineteenth-century voyager and half-Chinook Ranald MacDonald’s travels through the Pacific and into Ainu territory in Japan troublingly parallels, for Vizenor, the consequences of the atomic weaponry that violently ended World War II. Giorgio Agamben links the political power of U.S. sovereignty to a series of states of exception that track how martial law and discourses of emergencies have led to the consolidation of executive power and its subsequent expansion into the legislative sphere. Agamben’s theorization of sovereignty as that which determines and enacts the state of exception— understood as that which breaks the law to enforce the law—demonstrates the degree to which Western democracies exist in a dialectic with totalitarian regimes. Though Agamben typically theorizes sovereignty within Greco-Roman and European contexts, his State of Exception marks a notable shift. In his diagnosis of U.S. sovereignty and its deployment of the state of exception as a “conflict over sovereign decision” arising from a “dialectic between the powers of the president and those of Congress,” the first example Agamben gives of a U.S. president appropriating dictatorial powers is Abraham Lincoln, who violated the law to suspend habeas corpus in  and then, on his sole authority, declared the emancipation of slaves in .¹³ The second president Agamben cites as an example is Woodrow Wilson, who during World War I appropriated even broader powers to the office of the presidency when Congress passed a series of espionage acts between  and . Agamben notes that “because the sovereign power of the president is essentially grounded in the emergency linked to the state of war, over the course of the twentieth century the metaphor of war becomes an integral part of the presidential political vocabulary.”¹⁴ By deploying the linguistic logic of waging war, according to Agamben, Franklin D. Roosevelt was able to appropriate extraordinary powers to deal with the economic crisis of the s, and the New Deal represents Agamben’s third example of the U.S. presidency locating in itself the ability to declare the state of emergency. The final example Agamben gives us is Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order  that Agamben describes as “the most spectacular violation of civil rights (all the more serious because of its solely racial motivation) [,which] occurred on February , .”¹⁵ Roosevelt’s order, which authorized the secretary of war and the military commanders he might designate to “prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the Military Commander may determine, from which any or all perThis content downloaded from 45.36.152.108 on Wed, 13 May 2020 08:13:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms KILLING STATES  191 sons may be excluded,” directed the U.S. war machine to define and enforce “regulations for the conduct and control of alien enemies.”¹⁶ Though it did not name them or any other ethnic communities specifically, and in fact allowed the secretary and those military commanders to exclude “any or all persons,” the order interpellated Japanese American citizens of the United States particularly as “alien enemies” to be evacuated to relocation centers in the name of national defense. Poston, Arizona, functions as a temporal and spatial site within these states of exception not least because it was one of the camps that represented “the most spectacular violation of civil rights.” The state of exception as first theorized by Carl Schmitt and later developed by Agamben depends upon the sovereign’s ability to order space as “not only a ‘taking of land’ (Landesnahme)—the determination of a juridical and a territorial ordering (of an Ordnung and an Ortung)—but above all a ‘taking of the outside,’ an exception (Ausnahme).”¹⁷ This ordering of space begs a question, however: Why doesn’t Agamben theorize the state of exception in relation to American Indians in the first place? It is striking, if not unanticipated, that all three of his presidential examples played a significant role in ordering the historical landscape that stretched beyond the text of Roosevelt’s executive order instituting internment camps that in itself serves as exemplary exception within Agamben’s text. The Colorado River Indian Reservation was created by an act of Congress signed into law by Abraham Lincoln in , and on November , , President Woodrow Wilson issued an executive order remapping the boundaries of the CRIR to steal , acres for miners and cattlemen in the region.¹⁸ In  Roosevelt appointed John Collier to the Office of Indian Affairs to implement the “Indian New Deal” in the form of the Indian Reorganization Act, and on February , , his order set the stage for the Colorado River Indian Reservation to house an internment camp through which Collier planned to wage his war for democracy in the form of the doctrine of self-governance that was the basis for his administration over colonized indigenous nations. Linking Japanese American experiences of the state of exception that was internment to American Indian history allows us to scrutinize the theoretical blind spots within critical philosophy and postcolonial theory and identify the discourses of colonialism that facilitated the violation of Japanese American civil rights. The bare life that the internment camps reveal is the life of U.S. colonialism laid bare in all its settler/native dialectical glory. Such an observation allows for a reordering of the colonial This content downloaded from 45.36.152.108 on Wed, 13 May 2020 08:13:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 192  KILLING STATES logics that underpin the United States’ internment of Japanese Americans and locates its source in the prior colonization of indigenous peoples. As both captives and settlers, interned Japanese Americans are forced to play out in an abridged trajectory the U.S. frontier discourses, in which the only way to become “true” American citizens is to first go native and then carve democracy out of the wilderness. That Japanese American labor is used by Collier to tame the desert and make it productive allows the United States to enforce the frontier as the site of exception that proves the norm for U.S. colonial democracy and at the same time enacts in microcosm the progessivist history that leads civilization out of savagery. But the problem of the sovereign is not necessarily just the state of exception but the project of democracy itself. Agamben hints at this in Homo Sacer, when he implies that “Western politics is a biopolitics from the very beginning, and that every attempt to found political liberties in the rights of the citizens is, therefore, in vain” and that observation supports Wendy Brown’s critique of liberal politics that seek, through injury, recourse from the state and in the process serve to negate the originary violence in Benjamin’s delineation of law-making and law-preserving violence.¹⁹ Collier has come to epitomize the ambivalent colonial administrator whose efforts to reform the government-to-government relationship that provides the basis for the continued U.S. occupation of indigenous lands mark a fundamental shift in U.S. colonial administration. According to Vine Deloria Jr., John Collier was “probably the greatest of all Indian commissioners,” and much of the scholarship about his role as commissioner of the Office of Indian Affairs tends to frame Collier as a liberal prophetic politician who embodied the social welfare vision of Roosevelt’s administration—though in Deloria’s case, that praise may be faint given that most Indian commissioners were devastating to indigenous nations.²⁰ Even Ruth Okimoto came to appreciate Collier and found his decision to use Japanese American internment to realize his plans for the Colorado River Indian Reservation to be a “brilliant organizational move.”²¹ John Collier was ultimately contradictory in his fundamental support of indigenous communities and peoples. On the one hand, he greatly esteemed indigenous cultures, communities, and spiritual traditions, especially in the Southwest; on the other, he thought that there was a vacuum in indigenous governance in most communities that needed to be redressed through the imposition of democratic and bureaucratic structures.²² FunThis content downloaded from 45.36.152.108 on Wed, 13 May 2020 08:13:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms KILLING STATES  193 damentally, Collier, in his own words, believed American Indian democracies to be deeper and thicker democracies than those of the West, that they represented “the long hope” for humanity. “They had what the world has lost,” Collier wrote at the beginning of his  Indians of the Americas, “they have it now. What the world has lost, the world must have again, lest it die.”²³ That lost ingredient for Collier was “the power for living” in the face of bare life, and he advocated that “if the modern world should be able to recapture this power, the earth’s natural resources and web of life would not be irrevocably wasted within the twentieth century, which is the prospect now. True democracy, founded in neighborhoods and reaching over the world, would become the realized heaven on earth. And living peace—not just an interlude between wars—would be born and would last through ages.”²⁴ In many ways, then, this sentiment of “true democracy” that arises out of “the power for living” is what led Collier to address Japanese American internees at Poston Camp on June , , and speak of a “pale promise of democracy” that would spark real Democracy out of the shadows of struggle and endurance. This pale promise resided in Collier’s administrative vision and idea that the U.S. could manage difference best and most benignly by deploying self-management and indirect, bilateral colonialist regimes to construct a permanent security state to manage indigenous peoples, internal minorities, and overseas territorial holdings.²⁵ With only eight years separating the implementation of the Indian Reorganization Act from Roosevelt’s Executive Order , Collier expanded his vision of colonial administration to include indigenous and racial minorities alike as he advocated for reconsideration of self-government as a tool for assimilative incorporation. Collier’s vision for the IRA, which provides the cornerstone for the federal recognition and nation-to-nation status of indigenous nations colonized by the United States, reveals the syllogistic fallacy at the heart of such policies, that because the IRA reestablished the language of self-governance, the act recognized indigenous nations as sovereign entities rather than as racial, ethnic communities who would one day be assimilated into the U.S. body politic. The implications for American Indian studies and our reliance on the Indian Reorganization Act to provide the language of government-to-government sovereignty and self-determination are profoundly eclipsed by the intersection of colonial and racist agendas that collude to oppress on the one hand and offer This content downloaded from 45.36.152.108 on Wed, 13 May 2020 08:13:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 194  KILLING STATES the seductive recognitions that maintain state hegemony on the other. The intersection of Collier’s administrative colonialism with his affirmation of self-government served the larger agenda of furthering liberal democracy that sought to bring the world into U.S. alignment. And as Justice Robert Jackson observed in his dissention to the Korematsu decision that upheld the constitutionality of Japanese American relocation, the loaded weapon in the law created in part by the juridical principle of stare decisis, which Robert A. Williams Jr. defines as “like cases should be decided alike,” facilitates a transit of colonial subjectivities across which “Indianness” becomes a homology emptied of indigenous contexts and content.²⁶ These contexts are then, through the logics of settler colonialism, spatially, physically, and psychically mapped onto other arrivants and trajectories. Such processes lead to what Ruth Okimoto rightly recognizes as “a brief moment in history [in which] the Japanese American detainees experienced what the American Indians have endured for centuries” but absents why that might be.²⁷ And while many scholars locate those intersections in Dillon Myer’s reign first in the War Relocation Authority and then in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, where he implemented policies of relocation and termination in the s, Collier shoulders his own responsibilities for implementing and advocating a process of “democratizing the enemy” that sought to layer the U.S. colonial administration of colonized Indian nations onto first Japanese American citizens and then Pacific Island holdings at the end of the war.²⁸ Next stop, the world. In other words, Collier intended to enact a third space of sovereignty that functioned as a state of exception, the establishing of the outside in order to facilitate its reincorporation, for indigenous nations, recent immigrants, and newly acquired territories at the end of the war that would allow not-quite-citizens to be formally recaptured through the maintenance of the colonialist logics that cohered U.S. territory into the nationstate. When Japanese Americans are forced by Collier into the third space of sovereignty, however, what happens to American Indians nations is an extension of the egalitarian processes that David Kazanjian has termed the colonizing trick, whereby Indians become colonists, Japanese Americans Indians.²⁹ And in the process, the entire territorial conquest that is the basis for U.S. hegemony is elided, and the colonization of indigenous peoples is then abjected outside the dialectics of settler/native and into a now movable and infinitely repeatable state of assimilation through exception.

Federal News Network reporter; partner at Smith, Pachter, McWhorter; A contractor prevailed in court when the government tried to snitch its IP; Federal News Network; https://federalnewsnetwork.com/contracting/2022/07/a-contractor-prevailed-in-court-when-the-government-tried-to-snitch-its-ip/

Longtime defense contractor Raytheon won in court when it sued the government over intellectual property. What the company thought was IP the government assumed was merely technical data it could share with anyone. With what happened and why it’s important, Smith, Pachter, McWhorter Partner Zach Prince joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin. Tom Temin: So tell us about this case, because intellectual property comes up a lot in federal contracts when there is development work. And so what happened here? Zach Prince: This is an interesting case because usually what you’re getting is arguments between the government contractors about what type of license the government gets. This case, you actually are arguing about whether the government gets any license at all, because it’s a question of whether it qualifies as technical data onto the [Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS)] clause. So in this case, Raytheon had a contract to service the Patriot missiles. It was an engineering services contract. Part of that had to provide spare parts. Since 2014, the government’s been insisting that Raytheon provide a vendor list for those parts, which it was doing every quarter. Raytheon marked the list as proprietary. The government demanded Raytheon remove those markings, because under the DFARS, if it is technical data, you’ve got specified types of markings you can provide, none of which are proprietary markings, per se. In the government’s view these lists were technical data. The license the government would get would then be an unlimited license, which means the government could do anything it wants with it, or it would be a government purpose rights license, which is pretty similar. The government can do anything it want short of actually commercializing it. But if you’re a contractor, what that means is that the government can hand your information to your competitors in order to stand up competition. Tom Temin: Government’s motivation, then, was to perhaps take this technical data and then start competing those spare parts? Zach Prince: Yeah, it seems pretty likely that what the government wanted to do was to use this, include it in an RFP and handed it out to Raytheon’s competitors. Tom Temin: So how did it end up in court? Did the government go ahead and just remove those markings arbitrarily, and then Raytheon sued? How do they get to the point of where it was a case? Zach Prince: In the government’s view, it wasn’t arbitrary, but that’s about right. Raytheon included the markings, the government said absolutely not, take these off and resubmit it. And Raytheon did that. And then submitted a dispute under the [Contract Disputes Act]. So that’s how it got here. Tom Temin: Right. And so this dispute would not be like a protest that would go to the [Government Accountability Office], but would go directly to … which court? Zach Prince: It would go either to the Armed Services Board of Contract Appeals, or to the Court of Federal Claims, and there are advantages of each of the forums. But I think Raytheon made the right decision to bring this to the Court of Federal Claims. Tom Temin: All right, and what happened in court? What did the two sides argue? Zach Prince: So Raytheon was arguing that at bottom, this is not technical data. The DFARS defines technical data pretty broadly, kind of a self referential definition, that technical data is any recorded information of a scientific or technical nature. But it specifically is not data incidental to contract administration. Raytheon said that this is not technical data. This wasn’t of a technical nature, it didn’t identify any characteristics of the parts. It didn’t describe the parts, it didn’t have drawings or include any way for anybody to do anything with this information of a technical or scientific nature. It was just the list of its manufacturers. Tom Temin: So how could the government then use that simple list of manufacturers? I had said earlier, maybe they wanted to compete the parts, but the only way they could do that with a simple list of manufacturers is to simply go to those manufacturers directly and avoid the pass-through through Raytheon. Zach Prince: No, I think what the government wanted to do was to allow another party the possibility of standing in Raytheon’s shoes, and already having a identified supply chain. These are the parties you would go to to buy the spares. Tom Temin: And I guess the obvious question is, if the government was so interested in this, why not just buy them directly from those companies and cut out Raytheon? Zach Prince: Well that’s right. Tom Temin: Without making the argument about what type of information they were being given? Zach Prince: I think the government didn’t do that because of the administrative burden. The government often will have a party acting in the primes capacity, and they can go out and do all these procurements the government would have to go through the whole administrative process to set up. Tom Temin: Right, so it almost would become like a sourcing program that they just didn’t want to undertake. Sign up for our daily newsletter so you never miss a beat on all things federal Zach Prince: That’s exactly right. Tom Temin: We’re speaking with Zach Prince. He’s a partner at Smith, Pachter, McWhorter. And so then what did Raytheon argue and how do they prevail here? Zach Prince: Raytheon just pointed to the straightforward technical definition of the DFARS, that this isn’t technical data. And the court agreed. The definition of the DFARS is broad. But based on the plain dictionary definition, this information wasn’t, to quote the court, “inherently or essentially technical.” It just didn’t have any functional physical or performance characteristics of the components. So the DFARS, just like the [Armed Services Procurement Regulations] used to, excludes from the definition of technical data, administration data, stuff that you need in order to perform a contract, but that isn’t actually used to do the technical parts of the contract. And because of that, the court found Raytheon won. It had an interest in protecting this data and the government’s argument that it would somehow hinder competition, the court dismissed as irrelevant. Tom Temin: And just a side question here. Suppose the information that Raytheon provided was the specification; say, a connector — I don’t know, I’m just making this up — that’s a certain diameter, a certain number of pins, certain materials used so that it meets mil specifications and so on. That information, then, the government could have shopped around to manufacturers, and therefore would have been possibly violating the IP of those small manufacturers. Is that a possibility? Zach Prince: It depends on the circumstance. So likely, a lot of this IP, you know, the drawings and specs and stuff the government paid for. And because the government paid for it, it doesn’t own the IP, but it likely has a really broad license right. And then, yeah, it could have gone around and shopped that. If this manufacturer list had part of it — the list of manufacturers — and then next to that it had detailed specs, Raytheon probably could have submitted two different versions of this: one that had unlimited rights to the government, where Raytheon might have redacted the manufacturers names and identities, and then one that was subject to Raytheon’s proprietary rights that was unredacted.

Pillsbury Law Firm; Defense Contractors Have Some Leeway to Mark Noncommercial Technical Data to Restrict Rights of Non-Government Third Parties; Pillsbury; https://www.pillsburylaw.com/en/news-and-insights/defense-contractors-noncommercial-data-third-parties.html

Long-standing U.S. Government regulations prohibit government contractors from placing restrictive legends that deviate from those specifically prescribed in the regulations on non-commercial technical data and software delivered to the Government. The most detailed regulations on this subject are found in the Department of Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS). These regulations, however, do not prescribe how third parties can use technical data and software that contractors deliver to the Government, which is a concern for contractors. This concern is particularly acute where the Government has an “unlimited” rights license to the technical data at issue, because the regulations prescribe that such technical data have no restrictive markings. This license authorizes the Government to give (or sell) the contractor’s technical data to third parties, who can then use the technical data to compete for future government contracts against the company that created the technical data or for other commercial purposes. On December 21, 2020, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, in the case of Boeing Co. v. Secretary of Air Force, reversed a prior ruling by the Armed Services Board of Contract Appeals (ASBCA) and found that DFARS 252.227-7013 does not prohibit government contractors from placing markings on noncommercial technical data that restrict the rights of third parties to use the technical data, provided that the marking do not restrict the rights of the U.S. Government. The ASBCA had previously found that Boeing’s markings were non-conforming under DFARS 252.227-7013. The markings at issue admittedly did not conform to any of the four restrictive markings expressly allowed by DFARS 252.227-7013. Specifically, the contractor’s legend stated: “NON-U.S. GOVERNMENT ENTITIES MAY USE AND DISCLOSE ONLY AS PERMITTED IN WRITING BY BOEING OR BY THE U.S. GOVERNMENT.” Boeing argued that the markings were allowed because DFARS 252.227-7013 did not apply to the restrictive legends at all, and therefore could not be “nonconforming” as long as they did not purport to restrict the government’s rights. The Government’s position was that DFARS 252.227-7013 prohibited contractors from using any restrictive markings except one of the four expressly provided in the regulation. The Federal Circuit agreed with Boeing based on the plain language of DFARS 252.227-7013 and remanded the case to the ASBCA for an initial ruling on whether contractor’s markings limited the Government’s unlimited rights. Based on this decision, defense contractors should now have some leeway in marking noncommercial technical data delivered to the Government to protect the contractor’s proprietary rights against third parties, including use of the data by competitors. Notably, this case addresses only non-commercial technical data, and not computer software, and does not affect the regulations regarding commercial technical data delivered under government contracts, which contractors often may mark according to their commercial practices. Although the Federal Circuit’s decision is favorable to contractors, drafting appropriate markings that do not restrict the Government’s rights in the data will be critical to ensuring that the markings are not rejected by the Government as nonconforming. Under DFARS 252.227-7013, an unlimited rights license allows the Government to use, modify, reproduce, perform, display, release, or disclose technical data or computer software in whole or in part, in any manner, and for any purpose whatsoever, and to have or authorize others to do the same. Thus, on remand the ASBCA may yet conclude that the contractor’s markings impinged on the Government’s broad rights. The ASBCA’s eventual decision on that issue may provide important guidance regarding how contractors may restrict the rights of nongovernment third parties without impinging on the Government’s unlimited rights.

Morgan Lewis provides high-quality litigation, corporate, labor and employment, and intellectual property services to clients across industry sectors and regions around the world.; FEDERAL CIRCUIT RULING REINFORCES TECHNICAL DATA RIGHTS FOR DEFENSE CONTRACTORS; Morgan Lewis; https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2021/01/federal-circuit-ruling-reinforces-technical-data-rights-for-defense-contractors#:~:text=TECHNICAL%20DATA%20RIGHTS%20UNDER%20DEFENSE%20CONTRACTS&text=For%20items%20developed%20exclusively%20with,data%20only%20within%20the%20government.

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit last month reversed a decision by the Armed Services Board of Contract Appeals that rejected a contractor’s proposed document legends prohibiting unauthorized third-party use of technical data delivered to the US government with unlimited rights. On December 21, 2020, the Federal Circuit decided The Boeing Company v. Secretary of the Air Force.[1] The case involved an appeal by Boeing of a denial of summary judgment and final judgment of the Armed Services Board of Contract Appeals (the Board) regarding certain legends that Boeing embedded its documents that contained technical data delivered to the US Department of the Air Force with unlimited rights under government contracts. The Federal Circuit reversed the Board’s denial, finding that defense contract requirements for legends on technical data submitted to the government do not apply to legends that restrict only third-party rights. TECHNICAL DATA RIGHTS UNDER DEFENSE CONTRACTS Defense contracts that require delivery of technical data pertaining to noncommercial items are governed by clause 252.227-7013 of the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS). This clause applies to different scenarios where technical data developed or delivered under the contract is developed exclusively at private expense, exclusively with government funds, or with mixed funding. Depending on the funding source, the government obtains “limited rights,” “unlimited rights,” or “government purpose rights” in the data: <picture omitted> For items developed exclusively with private funds, the government receives only “limited rights,” meaning the right to use, modify, reproduce, release, perform, display, release, or disclose the technical data only within the government. The government also generally may not, without the written permission of the contractor, release or disclose the technical data outside the government, use the technical data for manufacture, or authorize the technical data to be used by another party.[2] For items developed exclusively with federal funds, the contractor retains ownership of the technical data, but the government receives “unlimited rights,” meaning that the government has the right to use, modify, reproduce, perform, display, release, or disclose the technical data in whole or in part, in any manner, and for any purpose whatsoever, and to have or authorize others to do so.[3] For items developed with mixed funding, the government receives “government purpose rights,” meaning the right to use, modify, reproduce, perform, display, release, or disclose the technical data within the government without restriction, and release or disclose the technical data outside the government and authorize persons to whom release or disclosure has been made to use, modify, reproduce, perform, display, release, or disclose the technical data for government purposes.[4] Government purpose rights convert to unlimited rights after a period of five years, unless the government and the contractor negotiate a longer period prior to the conversion of right.[5] The clause requires a contractor that wished to restrict the government’s rights in technical data to limited or government purpose rights to place restrictive markings on the data in the form of certain prescribed legends set forth in the clause.[6] For example, in order to assert that the government only has limited rights in certain data, the contractor must mark the data with “LIMITED RIGHTS,” the contract number, contractor name and address, and the following statement: “The Government's rights to use, modify, reproduce, release, perform, display, or disclose these technical data are restricted by paragraph (b)(3) of the Rights in Technical Data—Noncommercial Items clause contained in the above identified contract. Any reproduction of technical data or portions thereof marked with this legend must also reproduce the markings. Any person, other than the Government, who has been provided access to such data must promptly notify the above named Contractor.” The clause authorizes the government to reject restrictive markings on technical data that do not conform to the format specified in the contract clause.[7] If the government notifies the contractor of a nonconforming marking and the contractor fails to remove or correct the marking within 60 days, then the government may ignore the marking or, remove or correct the marking at the contractor’s expense.[8] At issue in the Boeing case was whether Boeing’s legends, which sought to restrict third parties’ use of technical data furnished to the government with unlimited rights, were nonconforming and therefore could be rejected by the Air Force. THE COURT’S DECISION Boeing had entered into two contracts with the Air Force for work on the F-15 Eagle Passive/Active Warning Survivability System.[9] The contracts required delivery of technical data to the government with unlimited rights, and therefore did not merit a restrictive legend.[10] However, Boeing nonetheless marked its technical data deliverables with a legend asserting Boeing’s rights in the data as they pertain to nongovernment third parties:[11] The Air Force rejected Boeing’s technical data deliverables based on this legend, finding it nonconforming under DFARS 252.227-7013(h)(2).[12] Boeing then proposed an alternative legend, as follows:[13] <picture omitted> The Air Force rejected Boeing’s proposed alternative legend as well.[14] Boeing requested a Contracting Officer’s Final Decision, which the Air Force issued, confirming its rejection of the legend.[15] Boeing then appealed to the Board.[16] In its appeal, Boeing asserted that since its legend does not restrict the government’s rights, it cannot be nonconforming; rather, it claimed that the DFARS is silent on which legends the contractor may or may not mark on its data when a contractor attempts to restrict third party use and does not seek to restrict the government’s rights.[17] The Board, on the other hand, agreed with the Air Force and found that the clause required only the prescribed legends and no others be used.[18] On appeal, the Federal Circuit agreed with Boeing, finding that the plain language of the clause demonstrates that it applies only in situations when a contractor seeks to assert restrictions on the government’s rights.[19] However, the court remanded the case to the Board to resolve the factual issue over whether Boeing’s proprietary legend restricts the government’s rights in any way, since that would be prohibited by the clause.[20] TAKEAWAY Going forward, defense contractors should consider adding protective legends to unlimited rights technical data prohibiting unauthorized third-party use, if not already doing so. Doing so, however, without notification to the contracting officer or clarification regarding the impact of the markings on the US government’s right result in similar questions by other agencies. Although the Federal Circuit’s decision provides guidance in this area, it reflects only one court decision related to one military service, which leaves open the possibility of challenges by other US government agencies. Thus, a careful analysis of the requirements of the contract, the views of the contracting officer, and the impact of any “nonconforming” legends would be helpful assessments to manage any questions by the US government.

Thomas L. Rhodes Fellow at National Review Institute; Why Defense Is Different; National Review; https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/12/why-defense-is-different/

In the January 2024 issue of National Review, Jerry Hendrix wrote an article about the need for a stronger U.S. defense-industrial base. “We need ships. We need aircraft. We need missiles. But more fundamentally, we need to be able to build them in much larger numbers,” he writes. He argues that to do that, the U.S. needs more firms in the defense industry. He writes that the U.S. should “rebuild its own defense-industrial base, even if the cost is high.” He urges the government to play a larger role in intentionally expanding defense-production capacity. Hendrix foresees potential dissent from within the conservative movement. He writes that government’s role in expanding defense production is “a hard thing for conservatives to accept, given their belief in free markets.” Later, he writes, “There is no magic market force, no invisible hand from either Adam Smith or Dwight Eisenhower, that will reignite the defense-industrial base.” Hendrix is correct to note that there will be intra-conservative opposition to his proposals, but it’s not free-market conservatives he should be most worried about. Hendrix is more likely to find opposition from the faction on the right that has been more skeptical of markets. This may sound contradictory given the large role for government planning that Hendrix envisions for defense. Government planning of production is not a free-market value, to say the least. Libertarians often decry the level of defense spending and seek to cut it. In that sense, Hendrix’s identification of free-market proponents as a potential obstacle to his goals is just. But free-market conservatives, in the mold of Ronald Reagan, have long been comfortable with a large defense budget. This apparent inconsistency has long been mocked by libertarians. They’ll say to free-market conservatives, “You agree with us that government is inefficient and spending should be cut in almost every area, but then you want a bigger defense budget. The Pentagon is a wasteful bureaucracy, too!” Hendrix’s article provides the answer to that critique from a conservative perspective. “To be clear, building inefficiency back into the defense marketplace would be a desired feature, not a bug,” he writes. He demonstrates sound economic reasoning by admitting that. He’s not promising the government would plan efficiently. As Hendrix explains, the defense industry can’t pursue efficiency in the same way other industries can. “The defense-industrial base is in most ways a monopsony — a market in which the Department of Defense is the only buyer,” he writes. Efficient markets have competition among buyers. There should not be domestic competition among buyers of missiles, destroyers, and tanks. Adam Smith didn’t expect the invisible hand to bring about stronger national defense. He viewed defense as a proper job for government, and he considered defense separately from other topics in the Wealth of Nations. He wrote that defense is subject to the increasing division of labor that characterizes a commercial society, but that it arises from a different source. “Into other arts the division of labour is naturally introduced by the prudence of individuals, who find that they promote their private interest better by confining themselves to a particular trade, than by exercising a great number,” Smith wrote in Book V of the Wealth of Nations. “But it is the wisdom of the state only which can render the trade of a soldier a particular trade separate and distinct from all others.” Smith also explained how specialized armies are superior to militias, and that when properly run, they are conducive to liberty. One of his intellectual descendants, Milton Friedman, would take that argument further by arguing for the superiority of an all-volunteer force, and he helped end the draft during the Nixon administration. That, too, was a political decision that only the government could make. Setting fiscal policy is also the government’s job, in accordance with the Constitution and statutes governing the budget-making process. The size of the defense budget effectively determines the size of the defense industry. Hendrix recounts how, in the aftermath of the Cold War when the levels of spending to defend against the Soviet Union were no longer needed, the defense industry shrank, and 107 firms consolidated into five. Government budgeting is one of the fundamental purposes of a legislature, which necessarily consists of politicians acting in what they believe to be the interests of their constituents. Some politicians want more defense spending; others want less. They listen to what military leaders request and argue about how much funding is appropriate. They aren’t guided by market prices or consumer demand (except insofar as one considers voters’ preferences as analogous to consumer demand, which is at best a strained comparison and still has nothing to do with market prices). In the absence of reliable price signals and consumer sovereignty, there is lots of inefficiency and waste at the Pentagon. That is perfectly in line with what economic theory predicts. The U.S. already spends $800 billion per year on defense, yet it faces the supply problems that Hendrix writes about. Internationally, the defense market is not a monopsony. The United States is the world’s largest arms exporter by a long shot, and American allies purchase weapons from U.S. manufacturers. Those purchases are, properly, subject to government approval to ensure they do not compromise U.S. national security. It’s still not guided by market prices, as foreign countries have their own military decision-making processes that correspond with their national-security goals. But even in the defense market, foreign trade is a key part of U.S. dominance. Hendrix writes, “Even those who are skeptical of industrial policy in general — most conservatives among them — should be able to recognize that defense manufacturing is different.” Defense manufacturing is indeed different from industrial policy. When free-market conservatives criticize industrial policy, they are criticizing government’s attempts to replace, fine-tune, or augment the results that would otherwise be delivered by markets. Destroyers don’t get built if the government doesn’t buy them. There is no market equilibrium number of tanks. The government needs however many it thinks it needs to accomplish the national-security goals it defines. That truth creates temptations for politicians to say just about everything — especially industries located within their districts — is necessary for national defense and therefore demands government intervention. That typical rent-seeking behavior is where conservatives rightly dissent. Conservatives should never be ashamed to defend taxpayers against cronyism, even if it is supposedly carried out in the name of national defense. Hendrix’s fixes are not to make a free market in defense, and that’s fine. A few libertarians argue that defense isn’t really a public good, but you can gently tell them to put the Rothbard down and return to the real world. The Constitution, along with centuries of political theory and practice, vests the task of national security with the national government. Reaganite conservatives have for decades understood the necessity of a strong national defense for the maintenance of geopolitical stability in a U.S.-led world. That world is a whole lot more friendly to free markets than any plausible alternative. The U.S. Navy’s role in maintaining freedom of navigation throughout the world’s oceans, for example, provides necessary security for trade to flourish. Another difference from other markets is that the consumer is not sovereign in the market for defense. In a constitutional sense, he is sovereign, in that power under the Constitution is ultimately derived from the people, and the military is controlled by the people’s elected leaders. But in the economic sense, he is not. Someone else, the Department of Defense, is buying stuff with his money. That creates all kinds of incentive problems that Congress has tried to craft legislation to mitigate. Those efforts are worthwhile, but reforming military procurement can be a Sisyphean task, largely because it’s very hard to keep costs under control without the discipline of the market. As Samuel Gregg has written, consumer sovereignty “constantly coordinates the self-interest of consumers and the self-interest of producers, without any top-down planning.” Take it away, and you’re left with a bunch of mixed signals and waste.

Since at least the onset of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, accelerated by the resurgence of Iran-backed proxies in the Middle East and shadowed by the prospect of conflict with China over Taiwan, Washington has been consumed by debates over the relative strategic importance of these three theaters—and how to resource U.S. defense posture accordingly.¶ What all positions have in common, however, is that the U.S. defense industrial base is ill-equipped to produce adequate materiel to satisfy mission objectives in any one theater, let alone all three. For example, Ukraine self-reports requiring roughly 360,000 155 mm artillery shells per month to remain operational; even though the United States has doubled ammunition production since December 2022, it could produce only 30,000 rounds per month as of March 2024. The U.S. Army intends to increase this number to 60,000 per month by September 2024 and 100,000 per month by 2025—still falling well short of what’s needed on just the European front. In the event of a conflict in the Taiwan Strait, a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that the United States would run out of key munitions in less than a week.¶ Given these perilous scenarios, substantial investment in defense production ranks as perhaps the most pressing national security priority for the United States. However, despite the increased attention that this issue has recently received in Washington, D.C.—enjoying rare bipartisan focus from legislators, the White House, and the media—Congress has been slow to advance major legislation addressing production deficiencies.¶ The best way to understand this lack of progress is as a form of collective action problem. Given the U.S. federal system’s grounding in a separation of powers, it has historically been very difficult to accomplish significant legislative reforms without a broad coalition that is both geographically distributed and capable of coupling private sector interests with political ones. Unlike software production—a capital-light, high-margin process—designing durable legislative regimes is more like industrial production: capital-intensive, low-margin processes that require symbiotic, long-term partnerships between the federal government and corporate America.¶ Marginal reforms can be achieved without such a coalition, but the same can’t be said of the solutions required to meet the conflicts at hand, nor the relatively minimalist objectives of Washington’s 2018 or 2022 National Defense Strategy documents. Given the depth of the weapons deficits, partial reforms are inadequate at this point. Therefore, identifying a public-private coalition, then constructing a policy architecture to sustain those interests, should be policymakers’ primary objective. If successfully implemented, these kinds of reforms result in what has been described as “quiet politics”—a strong, durable marriage of interests between market forces and bipartisan government imperatives.¶ Policymakers continue to underrate the need to design policy prescriptions that link a critical mass of interests to a reform agenda, undermining their odds of success on Capitol Hill. Such a coalition does not presently exist for several reasons, but one looms largest. As of fiscal year 2022, the latest for which there is public data, just three states—Virginia, Texas, and California—received nearly a third of defense contract awards. The top 10 states received nearly 60 percent. The bottom 25? Just 10 percent.¶ Put in political terms: A full half of the U.S. Senate receives just a 10th of contracts. Acknowledging this makes it less surprising that defense industrial base reform hasn’t been pushed to the top of the congressional agenda.¶ THIS CONCENTRATION OF political interests is a relatively recent phenomenon. Following the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1989, the United States could handle emergent military threats both at a fraction of the relative cost (as a percentage of GDP) and the force level of the Cold War period. That geopolitical reality enabled the so-called “peace dividend” (wherein military spending could go instead to tax cuts or social spending), resulting in defense budget cuts and the famed 1993 “Last Supper,” the dinner meeting at which then-Deputy Defense Secretary William Perry set a course toward a significant consolidation of the Pentagon’s network of prime defense contractors—those that work directly with the government—from 50 primes in the early 1990s down to roughly five at present.¶ Before this point, the defense industrial base represented just one among many business lines for the United States’ powerful, vertically integrated manufacturing sector. Only afterward did the defense sector—companies whose primary revenue source is defense contracts—emerge as a specialized, standalone entity. This had significant implications for what might be called that sector’s “political base.” Where there was once a wide coalition of constituents and their representatives with interest in continued investment, only a fraction remained across an increasingly small number of states.¶ For three decades, these political dynamics could be ignored. During the unipolar moment, interest in defense industrial base policy was a curiosity confined to relatively niche circles within the military and foreign-policy elite. To the degree that consolidation had any noticeable impact on U.S. military readiness, it could be compensated for through ad hoc infusions of defense expenditure and further mitigated by the absence of any great-power threats. Defense spending increased after 9/11, which—combined with the relatively small scale and sequencing of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—did not place acute strain on production.¶ Further minimizing the impact of any supply chain inefficiencies and disruptions, defense planners could rely on strategies of “iron mountains,” the use of massive, gradual logistics and munitions stockpiling behind forward-deployed forces to overwhelm opponents, accommodating longer lead times for suppliers.¶ Beginning in the 2010s, however, these factors inverted: The great-power threats reemerged at the same time that the defense budget flatlined. Anxiety about the U.S. fiscal deficit following the 2008 Great Recession resulted in the 2011 Budget Control Act and its successors, which placed procedural controls around increasing defense spending—resulting in a static budget (even declining, in real terms). This is the situation in which Congress finds itself today: with conflicts on three fronts and with the notional will to act, but without a clear blueprint for how to generate an effective coalition to support overdue investments.¶ The optimal way to generate such a coalition is not by focusing primarily, as many proposals do, on increasing appropriations and procurement efficiencies that affect the production of full weapon systems. Nor should the focus be confined to relatively high-value added commodities, such as semiconductors, which was the underlying rationale of the CHIPS and Science Act passed in 2022. These solutions, while perhaps helpful at margin, do little to alter the underlying political obstacles to systemic reform.¶ Rather, the best way to generate the necessary coalition is to first focus on reforming the defense industrial “sub-base,” or the domestic commodities market for the basic building blocks of weapons production. These include energy, minerals, alloys, plastics, and chemicals. There are numerous, fiscally responsible policy combinations to decrease the prices of these inputs by increasing domestic supply, including tax credits, loan guarantees, and judicious use of executive branch powers—such as the Defense Production Act, which was used during Operation Warp Speed to fast-track vaccine production in 2020, and the Exchange Stabilization Fund, which was also used during the COVID-19 pandemic to support emergency loans to small businesses.¶ The geography of these industries is also key. While lobbies for higher value-added inputs tend to be highly clustered both in terms of market share and distribution among the states (thus limiting their utility in attracting congressional support), it is by comparison much easier to generate an inputs lobby spanning the necessary majorities, if not supermajorities, of legislators by focusing on the sub-base.¶ This pragmatic approach, if successful, would become an enabling mechanism for two key further reforms: one immediate, and one in the longer term. More immediately, it would engineer an immediate increase in the real purchasing power of the current defense budget, allowing for a rapid ramp-up of U.S. weapons production without waiting for further appropriations. In the longer term, this approach would create a sturdy coalitional platform for necessary further reforms.¶ PROPERLY EXECUTED, THIS broadening of the defense industrial base would trigger mandatory, parallel adjustments to the budgeting statistics of the Congressional Budget Office and Defense Department. Lower input prices would increase, in real terms, the purchasing power of the current defense budget. This would grant Congress and Pentagon force planners the immediate leverage to be more ambitious and aggressive in awarding new contracts, which in turn might allow defense contractors to justify new investments to expand production lines.¶ Just as crucially, this kind of reform would generate a strong, enduring coalition with interest-based incentives to pursue a suite of other needed proposals for systemic reform, including new nominal defense spending increases, efficient co-production arrangements with allies, enhanced competition between both new and incumbent defense contractors, better federal support for workforce training, and the more effective use of executive branch powers, such as through providing broader congressional support for funding loan guarantees for defense-related companies.¶ In addressing the increasingly dangerous security situation for the United States, too many approaches presume that abstract political will is a substitute for material interest. Bringing the “arsenal of democracy” roaring back requires first expanding its political base.

The U.S. military has a politics problem It’s a tough time to be a major U.S. institution. Television news? Congress? Big Business? They’re all at major deficits when it comes to Americans’ confidence in them. Historically, the U.S. military has enjoyed much, much better ratings. But a new poll is sounding the alarm. From 2018 to 2022, trust and confidence in the uniformed services plummeted from 70 percent to 48 percent (it was 45% in 2021), according to the Ronald Reagan Foundation and Institute survey. No other public institution has endured as steep and speedy a fall, the foundation warned. Many factors have contributed to this collapse. But none more so than the public’s perception that the military leadership has become overly politicized. A total of 62 percent of Americans said that accounts for a great deal (34%) or some (28%) of the drop. Interestingly, it’s a bipartisan phenomenon. Both Democrats (24%) and Republicans (43%) put it in second place among reasons for decreased trust and confidence. Number one for Republicans was so-called “woke” practices (which the poll did not define) at 47 percent, while for Democrats it was the presence of far-right extremists in the ranks, at 32 percent. Overall, though, the second heaviest public-perception millstone around the military’s neck is the performance and competence of presidents (59%) followed by that of the military’s civilian leadership (55%), then that of uniformed military leaders (52%), the foundation found. A steady decline The general drop in confidence hasn’t just been steep, it’s also been consistent: From 70% in November 2018, to 63% in October 2019, to 56% in February 2021, to 45% in November 2021 (the withdrawal from Afghanistan probably fueled some of that 11-point fall), to 48% this November. Leave aside generals-turned-presidents, a regular feature of the republic since its founding, or troops serving as backdrops to presidential speeches about national security. The military — especially retired officers — have gotten more drawn into partisan fights in recent years. It’s no surprise that the collapse gathered speed when Donald Trump was president. His clashes with generals — of the active kind, and the retired and televised varieties — were frequent headline fodder. That might explain the relatively greater weight of the argument on the GOP side. But even before him there were warning signs. Former generals delivered partisan speeches at the two major conventions in 2016 — retired Marine Gen. John R. Allen fired up the Democrats, retired Army Gen. Michael Flynn galvanized Republicans. More recently, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, has taken fire for a range of actions. Milley, in uniform, joined then-president Trump for a fateful walk from the White House to St. John’s Church after authorities had forcibly cleared Lafayette Square of protesters. He came under fire for thrusting the military into domestic politics. He publicly expressed regret. Later, he reportedly made disparaging behind-the-scenes comments about Trump, who demanded he resign and called him a traitor. (Milley's office disputes this.) And Republicans expressed outrage when Milley publicly defended the teaching of critical race theory in an elective course at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. “While several military leaders chose to involve themselves in partisan politics — Flynn, Allen and Milley — mostly our military are desperate to stay out of this fray,” said Kori Schake, who has held a variety of senior positions at the Pentagon, the State Department, and the National Security Council. In 2020, there were concerns about Americans in uniform at each of the major party conventions. And Trump worried some in the Pentagon with references to “my generals” and “my military.” “The real blame for the public thinking of them in partisan terms is the relentless use of our military by politicians: Uniformed in campaign ads by candidates of both parties, Biden’s Marine backdrop for a speech about democracy failing, Trump castigating ‘the generals,’ Republicans castigating the serving Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a traitor,” said Schake, the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). “It’s terrible for the bond between our military and our society,” she told The Daily 202.

"This year does feel particularly difficult. And election years can play either way. I think it is going to be rough," said Jeanine Womble. While passing the 2024 defense budget was arduous as lawmakers struggled to agree on government funding plans for nearly six months into the fiscal year, negotiating the 2025 defense spending is shaping up to be “particularly difficult.” The Pentagon proposed a fiscal 2025 budget of $849.8 billion, about 1% higher than this year’s budget request. The top line figure aligns with the Fiscal Responsibility Act passed last year, which sets limits on defense and non-defense discretionary spending. Defense officials said the 1% increase would not be enough to cover inflation. “Overall, [fiscal 2024] was a good budget. As we pivot toward this year, I think it’s a much more difficult budget, we’re gonna see some very difficult trade-offs. I’m not sure if we’re going to see as positive outcomes as all communities might want see,” Matt Borron, the Association of Defense Communities executive director, said during the Defense Communities National Summit on Tuesday. 2024 being an election year adds complexity to negotiating and passing the 2025 defense budget. Members of Congress will go back to their districts in July and return sometime in the fall to pass a continuing resolution to temporarily fund the federal government. After that, they won’t be back until after the presidential election. “I think every year we seem to find new ways to make this hard. And yet, we generally still manage to get it across the line. But this year does feel particularly difficult. And election years can play either way. You can have folks willing to make a deal to get things done before they go home and try to keep their jobs. But it doesn’t feel that way right now. So I think it is going to be rough,” Jeanine Womble, the House Armed Services Committee staff lead, said. Passing the 2025 NDAA Borron said while there were some contentious issues during the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act negotiations, they weren’t “as contentious as they might have come across in some of the debates.” “That’s why I think you got a relatively quick passage of the NDAA certainly, as compared to the appropriations bill,” said Borron. The same social issues, such as the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion spending, will most likely come up during this year’s NDAA negotiations. But the resolution of those contentious issues will hinge on the results of this year’s election. “I think you’re gonna see those same social issues come up for discussion. I don’t see necessarily a different outcome this year,” said Borron. “All of that is really dependent on the election. I think they can resolve many of those issues, but the more contentious ones are going to have to wait until we know who’s in charge of the White House, who’s running the Senate, who’s running the House. I think in general, there’s a desire to make members as happy as possible. But I don’t think those contentious issues have really changed. The needle hasn’t shifted. We’ll see a rehash of it. And the outcome will be dependent on the elections.” Womble believes that despite the contentious issues that will come up during this year’s round of debates, the NDAA will ultimately pass. “I can’t give you a certain date when it will pass, but I believe it will,” said Womble. “Maybe not quite before October 1, but in the neighborhood. I truly believe that Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) and the members of [the House Armed Services Committee] very much want to get it done every year. There are contentious issues every year, there are things that go to the very end. In a bipartisan way, the committee finds a way.”

The House bill also contains a provision that would block the Pentagon from requiring prospective contractors to disclose information on their greenhouse gas emissions. Democrats and the White House have already come out in opposition to it, but it may survive the conference committee in some form because the Senate NDAA includes related language thanks to West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin. The provisions are in response to a rule the Biden administration proposed last November that, when finalized, would require large contractors with the Defense Department and certain other agencies to provide emissions inventories as a condition for getting a federal contract. House Oversight and Accountability Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) and Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas), who championed the NDAA language in their chamber and co-sponsored similar legislation with Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), said in a letter to Biden administration officials last month that the rule could place undue burdens on contractors, drive up food prices and compromise military readiness. The White House has stood by its rule. The Office of Management and Budget asserted in a statement of administration policy that the provision would prevent “DoD from exercising due diligence in assessing risks to potential contract awardees, counter to the interests of U.S. taxpayers.” House Democrats mounted resistance to the rider during a markup in June. Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) noted that the proposed contractor rule offers exemptions for national security purposes and urged Republicans to wait until the rule is finalized before attempting to circumvent it. “I’m trying to figure out why in the world we would want to exempt the Department of Defense from paying attention to climate change and greenhouse gas emissions,” Garamendi said at the time. “In fact, this regulation is not yet complete. This apparently deals with a proposed regulation that is not in its final stages.” Rep. John Garamendi Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) is ranking member of the Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness. | Francis Chung/POLITICO Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.) filed an amendment to allow the Pentagon to require prospective contractors to disclose their emissions, but the House Rules Committee did not make the amendment in order for floor debate. Across the Capitol, Senate Armed Services Republicans were able to add their own contractor provision to their bill with Manchin’s help, according to a Democratic aide familiar with negotiations. Committee Republicans indicated during a closed markup in June that they planned to offer a provision similar to the House’s as an amendment, and Manchin, chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, expressed that he would have cast the swing vote in its favor, according to the aide.

The People's Republic of China has used force when measures short of war have proven inadequate to secure its borders or strategic interests (as in Korea, India, and Vietnam), but, by marked contrast with India in Goa or Indonesia in Timor-Leste, it gave diplomacy the decades needed to resolve the Hong Kong and Macau issues without bloodshed. Beijing has shown a similar preference for negotiations rather than the use of force to settle the Taiwan issue. Cross-strait tensions are lessening. It should be encouraging that China has insisted on United Nations authorization for its military activities abroad, which are directed at peacekeeping and against piracy. Still, China is modernizing its military at a peculiar moment of history. The United States inherited worldwide military superiority from the collapse of its Soviet rival. Without much discussion, it has embraced the neo-conservative agenda of sustaining this superiority at all costs. But rising Chinese defense capabilities erode American supremacy. China's new anti-carrier weapons endanger U.S. force projection capabilities in the Western Pacific; its anti-satellite programs imperil U.S. global surveillance and communication capabilities; its growing operations in cyberspace menace U.S. government operations and the economy of the American homeland alike. These are serious challenges not just to American hegemony but to core U.S. interests. They have begun to draw a response. The result is a deeply troubled Sino-American military relationship despite the diminishing prospects for war in the Taiwan Strait. China will persevere in its efforts to build a credible counter to American coercion. The United States will not soon abandon its obsession with the retention of absolute military superiority everywhere. A less hegemonic objective would allow the U.S. to accommodate a more powerful China while retaining the ability to prevail in any conflict with it. As things are, increasingly overt military confrontation between China and the United States is likely. These inherent tensions — along with those arising from the huge bilateral trade imbalance in favor of China — are why the idea of a US-China duopoly like the so-called G-2 is infeasible even if it were desirable, which it is not. Still, the world economy is about to see the displacement of the United States from its 20th Century preeminence. China will join the U.S., the EU, and Japan at the top. India, Brazil, Russia, and others in the G-20 will follow. What is in prospect is not the hegemony of one or two countries but its opposite — a multipolar balance of economic power. China, like Japan, is, of course, a country with a population vastly larger than it can prosperously support on its own resource base, large as that is. And China is late in the search for access to raw materials for its burgeoning industries. (So is India.) China has a vital interest in the perpetuation of a global economic order open to trade and investment. China is now enmeshed in multilateral organizations in which it must daily demonstrate its dedication to the sovereign equality of nations, great and small. All this enforces the respect for comity that is the essence of a "responsible stakeholder." It informed People's Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan's cautious suggestion last spring that it would be better to manage the dollar down to a sustainable international role than to have it collapse. But America is out of practice at dealing with independent power centers. For the past two decades the United States has been the undisputed global hegemon. For 40 years before that, it was the indispensable arbiter of the bloc of nations known as the "free world." American politicians are unaccustomed to formulating policy through multilateral consultations with other nations. Beijing isn't very good at this either, but seems more open to it than Washington. The United States will, as always, do what must be done, after it has exhausted all of the alternatives. But this will take time and cost the United States further prestige and influence. Meanwhile, China's global role will grow, especially if Beijing sustains the modesty and competence for which its diplomats have become known, rather than the arrogance that some of its domestic officials increasingly exemplify. The Chinese Communist Party has delivered prosperity to ordinary Chinese, which is why it enjoys their support. Eighty-six percent of Chinese think their country is on the right track. Chinese see proof of the superiority of their political-economy in the apparent effectiveness of its response to the financial crash and its aftermath. Their government's policies have so far succeeded in sustaining high rates of economic growth through programs that enhance long-term economic and intellectual competitiveness. The contrast with the muddled self-indulgence of Washington's response to the crisis, in particular, is striking. Americans have so far shrunk from the hard decisions necessary to restore fiscal integrity to their government or to reverse serious decay in their nation's human and physical infrastructure. The recession has joined foreign wars and continuing deterioration in relations with the Islamic world as a factor accelerating American decline. China seems certain to emerge from the crisis with a much larger and more competitive economy. The generation born under the single-child policy is coming of age. It is far more inclined to consumption than its frugal predecessors. A faster transition to growth driven by domestic consumption than many have thought possible seems in prospect. China's imports are now rising much more rapidly than its exports. Its balance of payments surplus, huge as it still is, fell by half in 2009. Continuing economic growth, deepened ties with Asian neighbors, the progressive internationalization of a yuan that is rising in value, all promise domestic stability and greater international stature for China in coming years. The current self-congratulatory mood in China is therefore entirely understandable. Yet it masks the underlying weakness of the Chinese political system. Government in contemporary China derives its legitimacy almost entirely from its ability to deliver continued rapid economic growth. It stands for no credible values, neither trusts nor is trusted by those it rules, suffers from a high level of corruption, and has no clear vision for self-improvement. If America's politics are widely viewed as so venal as to be dysfunctional, the Chinese system is seen as cynically manipulative and of questionable legitimacy. Without political reform, China will remain vulnerable to unrest should the economy falter. If there is no rule of law in China, Beijing's word will be doubted abroad. Despite its economic successes and growing defense capabilities, China's international influence will remain limited as long as it fails to evolve an attractive political system. It is not impossible that it may do so but there is no evidence at present to suggest that it will. A Chinese perception that the United States is attempting to leverage its military superiority to keep China down could goad Beijing into efforts to dislodge America from its position of global dominance. Given the continuing disparities in national power, the ensuing struggle would be a long one. The trigger would probably be some incident derived from U.S. military operations offshore China or from the Taiwan issue, to which Sino-American relations remain hostage. This is unlikely, but, unfortunately, it is not impossible to imagine. As I speak, for example, China is actively considering how to put effective pressure on the United States to halt arms sales to Taiwan. China wants Washington to live up to Ronald Reagan's commitment to restrain and reduce such sales in return for credible pursuit by Beijing of a peaceful settlement of its differences with Taipei. Sanctions on selected American companies — modeled on those the U.S. Congress has imposed on Chinese companies selling objectionable items to others — are apparently among the options before China's leaders. In the current economic climate, any such move by China could trigger a nasty confrontation and unleash an orgy of American protectionist retaliation that would likely set off a trade war. I do not consider such a development likely. If nothing else, however, the possible consequences of miscalculation by Beijing or Washington illustrate the global stake in continuing prudent management of the Sino-American relationship by both sides.

Lecturer of Economics, Ulster University, Belfast, Northern, Ireland; The Impact of Military Expenditures on Economic Growth: A New Instrumental Variables Approach; Defence and Peace Economics; https://doi.org/10.1080/10242694.2023.2259651

The regression analysis exploits panel data on 133 countries covering the time period of 1960-2012. The results from IV regressions suggest that a 1 percentage point increase in military expenditures as a percentage of GDP leads to approximately a 1.10 percentage points reduction in economic growth. This estimate of −1.10 is approximately 4 times larger in size than the estimate of −0.281 obtained from a fixed effect model that includes military expenditures as an exogenous variable. The statistically significant negative effect of military expenditures on economic growth is consistently observed in samples of developing, conflict-affected and below than average human rights performers countries.

One of the reasons that Donald Trump gives for slapping new protectionist tariffs on steel and aluminum is that it will create manufacturing jobs, and by extension, greatly enhance income growth and standards of living in the United States. Trump is capitalizing on an enduring myth of American economic history in which it is believed that declines in manufacturing jobs are necessarily accompanied by drops in standards of living as well. What is often forgotten, however, is that manufacturing jobs, in proportion to the population overall, dropped significantly from the end of World War II through the 1950s and 1960s. And yet, during this time, real median incomes in the United States increased. Incomes stagnated somewhat during the 1970s, but then grew substantially again during the 1980s and 1990s. And, of course, during the 1980s and 1990s, manufacturing jobs continued a fast downward slide. In other words, it is not at all clear that falling manufacturing jobs lead to falling incomes or falling standards of living. Now, pointing out some correlations — or lack thereof — in the data doesn't prove that manufacturing jobs have no connection at all to incomes and wealth. To understand that, we need good economic theory. And, on this point sound economics is clear. Higher taxes — i.e., tariffs — are not the way to economic growth, even if they "protect" manufacturing jobs. But, when these economic arguments are made, proponents of higher tariffs say "we don't need your economics because history proves that manufacturing jobs are necessary for solid economic growth!" and then look to specific examples such as the withering of the rust belt, to make their point. But, when we look at a more complete picture, it appears that history "proves" no such thing.