Newsletter: Week 13, 2023
The geopolitics of Formula 1, and why those less obsessed with politics have a better understanding of it.
The Geopolitics of Formula 1
This weekend my secret love, Formula 1, has come to Melbourne. To my friends, my interest in the sport is as “off-brand” as being yet to distance myself from my teenage love of Tool. However, since I was a kid I have obsessively watched every race regardless of the timezone. It is a ritual. One of the advantages of this weekend is I don’t need to stay up to, or get up at, ridiculous hours to watch it.
Despite my fascination with this sport I’m not a car guy. I have no interest in any other motorsport. I don’t own a car and I firmly believe that cities should invest heavily in public transport, walkability and bike infrastructure. The best cities in the world are those where owning a car is not only unnecessary, but a burden. I’m fortunate enough to live in an area of Melbourne where a car is unnecessary, but much of the rest of the city is unfortunately car-dependent.
Because urban-planning over the past century has been car-centric, cars are one of the dominant features of our existence. Due to this, the nature of Formula 1 makes it the most geopolitical sport. Its primary role is to service the auto industry, which globally directly employs around 13.5 million people. There are many towns, cities and regions throughout the world that are still centred around auto manufacturing, and the decisions these companies make as to where and how they manufacture their vehicles is a major national and international strategic concern.
Manufacturers like Mercedes, Ferrari, and Renault invest hundreds of millions of dollars into the sport not only to make their road cars seem cool and attractive, but because they want the technological advancements developed by their Formula 1 teams to filter down to their road cars. In a sport that gauges success in thousandths of seconds it would only be space programmes like NASA and the major defence manufacturers who have greater engineering expertise.
The choice of drivers is also highly political and often influenced by factors beyond talent. Although Zhou Guanyu is an excellent driver, Alfa Romeo is looking to sell a lot of cars in China, and this was a considerable factor in him gaining a seat with the team last year. As there are only 20 drivers in Formula 1 a country having a driver competing in the sport is a big deal capable of attracting a lot of local attention.
In previous seasons this has led to the issue of “pay-drivers” – drivers who are given seats in teams because they bring considerable money to it. Pastor Maldonado came with a lot of Venezuelan oil cash that forced teams to overlook his poor performances. As soon as the Venezuelan economy crashed he was ejected from the sport.
More recently, Russian fertiliser oligarch Dmitry Mazepin invested heavily into the Haas team in order to have his son, Nikita, to drive for them. Mazepin was embarrassingly bad, not worthy of being in the sport, and when Russia invaded Ukraine just before the beginning of last season it gave Haas the perfect excuse to ditch him, as well as keep the money his father had invested in the team. Leading to an excellent meme from the first race of last season as his replacement finished fifth.
The Russian Grand Prix was subsequently also cancelled from last year, and this highlighted how “sportswashing” had become a significant factor in countries wishing to stage a Grand Prix. The sport is seen as a massive soft-power exercise, a way of showcasing a city or country to a huge global audience, and in particular to sell a narrative of a country through what is and isn’t broadcast. There remains significant ethical concerns with Grands Prix being held in countries with serious human rights issues. Saudi Arabia being an obvious example. But due to money these countries inject into the sport it is something Formula 1 chooses to ignore.
For less brutal countries a Grand Prix weekend provides a unique tourist campaign. The sweeping helicopter shots of tracks that are heavily built into the broadcast are not just to give an eagle eye view of the track, they are actively designed to include the surrounding areas as a way of selling a city or region. At this weekend’s Grand Prix the broadcast director included gratuitous shots of the Melbourne skyline – often of no value to what was taking place on the track – most likely a condition of the money the Victorian government invests in its staging.
What may seem like just a bunch of knucklehead bros driving in circles is actually a widely complex intersection of competing global interests and of strategic decision-making from auto manufacturers, the teams themselves, an array of sponsors, cities and states. As with anything that involves enormous sums of money it is a sport filled with its share of nefarious actors and dubious deals – with the Netflix series Drive To Survive highlighting some of this chicanery. Yet Formula 1 is also a sport that is conducted at terrifying speeds by people of enormous skill. Which is also interesting in its own way.
A Keener Sense of Politics
On Friday I wrote a piece for The Diplomat pondering whether Australia’s Liberal Party is in terminal decline. On Saturday a by-election was held in the federal seat of Aston in Melbourne’s outer-eastern suburbs. The seat was held by the Liberal Party, but in an extraordinary result was won by the Labor Party – making it the first time since 1920 that a government had won a seat off an opposition in a by-election. It was another sign that the Liberal Party is failing to connect with the Australian public, and in particular with Melbourne. The party now holds only two seats in the Melbourne metropolitan area, and these two seats are both held by tiny margins. As Melbourne will soon overtake Sydney to become the country’s largest city this is dire terrain for the Liberal Party.
One observation about politics I have is that people who are not obsessed with politics have a more sophisticated understanding of politics than those who are. These are people who don’t care for the team sport of politics, but the have a keen sense of trends and forces. Without an emotional investment in a political party or an ideology it frees them to *feel* in a more genuine way what is taking place in a country. They know what is and isn’t working because they have less of a confirmation bias that blinds people who live and breathe politics.
In a country like Australia that has compulsory voting, understanding what these people feel is essential. Among the historical and philosophical reasons I outlined in my article – something that all conservative parties are currently struggling with – there is an extra layer that the Liberal Party simply doesn’t understand what Australians currently feel. Most people aren’t extremely online like the political class, yet the party often seems preoccupied by extremely online issues. People who are chiefly concerned with stability and kitchen table issues currently don’t see the Liberal Party as a stabilising, capable, or an empathetic party.
This Week’s Reading:
Is Australia’s Liberal Party In Terminal Decline?
Grant Wyeth - The Diplomat
“The Liberal Party has always been a weird party, an amalgamation of ideas and interest groups that were bound together by their opposition to the Labor Party but had little else in common. Its creation in 1944 was an attempt to build a stable non-Labor force in the country that could hold power without buckling under the weight of the internal contractions that bedevilled its predecessors. With this objective, the party’s formation proved serendipitous, as the conclusion of World War II would usher in a new global order that would give it a greater sense of purpose and coherence.
The Cold War meant that liberal and conservative forces had an overarching incentive to cooperate. Western conservative parties became committed to liberal principles in response to the ideological challenge of communism. Yet since the end of that era, the loss of these broader objectives and unifying narrative has seen a great upheaval within conservative parties – most notably the Republican Party in the United States. Australia’s Liberal Party, while less dramatic in its ideological disruption, has nonetheless entered into a period of internal turbulence and a great confusion about what the party’s purpose should be.”
Xi Jinping Says He Is Preparing China for War
John Pomfret and Matt Pottinger – Foreign Affairs
One thing that is clear a decade into Xi’s rule is that it is important to take him seriously—something that many U.S. analysts regrettably do not do. When Xi launched a series of aggressive campaigns against corruption, private enterprise, financial institutions, and the property and tech sectors, many analysts predicted that these campaigns would be short-lived. But they endured. The same was true of Xi’s draconian “zero COVID” policy for three years—until he was uncharacteristically forced to reverse course in late 2022.
Xi is now intensifying a decadelong campaign to break key economic and technological dependencies on the U.S.-led democratic world. He is doing so in anticipation of a new phase of ideological and geostrategic “struggle,” as he puts it. His messaging about war preparation and his equating of national rejuvenation with unification mark a new phase in his political warfare campaign to intimidate Taiwan. He is clearly willing to use force to take the island. What remains unclear is whether he thinks he can do so without risking uncontrolled escalation with the United States.
China, Japan And The Ukraine War
Gideon Rachman - Financial Times
“However, there is an even gloomier historical parallel, which I find more compelling — and that is with the rise in international tensions in the 1930s and 1940s.
Then, as now, two authoritarian powers — one in Europe and one in Asia — were deeply unsatisfied with a world order they regarded as unfairly dominated by the Anglo-American powers. In the 1930s, the dissatisfied nations were Germany and Japan. The Asahi newspaper summarised the official view in Tokyo when it complained, in 1941, that the US and the UK were imposing a “system of world domination on the basis of Anglo-American world views”. Contemporary versions of that complaint are now made regularly on Russian state television or in China’s Global Times.
In his book, Fateful Choices, the historian Ian Kershaw records how Imperial Japan reacted to the outbreak of war in Europe: “It was in the wake of Hitler’s astonishing military triumphs in western Europe that Japan, seeking to exploit the weakness of these countries, took the fateful decisions to expand into south-eastern Asia.” That choice rapidly led Japan into a war — not just with Britain, France and the Netherlands — but also with the US.
Had Putin’s Russia also scored an “astonishing military triumph” and taken Kyiv in three days, Xi might have drawn similar conclusions about the weakness of western power in Asia and decided that the time was ripe for radical change.”
The Opposition Is Being Vanquished By Unfair Means. And There Is No Reaction
Pratap Bhanu Mehta - Indian Express
“In a democracy, a smooth transition of power in a fair election requires several conditions. The ruthless crushing of the Opposition and the squelching of liberty erodes these conditions. The first is that professional politicians treat each other as members of the same profession, not as existential enemies to be vanquished by any means. Once a regime does that to its opponents, it fears the consequences of losing power. It can no longer rest in the comfortable belief that democracy is a game of rotating power; transitions should be routine. Can you now imagine Prime Minister Narendra Modi or Amit Shah or their minions calmly contemplating the prospect that they could ever be in the Opposition, after the hubris they have deployed against opponents and critics? The hallmark of tyrants is impunity in power and therefore an existential fear of losing it.
The issue is not whether the government is popular. It may well be. Tyranny can be a stepchild of democracy, as Plato knew so well. The insatiable show and assertion of power the BJP is engaged in traps them in a logic where they will seek to create the conditions in which a fair and open contest is no longer possible. Their institutional imagination is paranoid — desperately trying to shut out even the slightest opening from which light might appear. What else but a paranoid system would target small think tanks or civil society organisations that do social service? What else but a paranoid system would appear to politically orchestrate a disqualification of an Opposition MP?”
India’s Delicate Dance With The Taliban
Henry Storey – The Interpreter
“The Taliban takeover has not negated the factors that made Afghanistan important to India in the past. In some cases, it has only amplified them. Although India is highly unlikely to officially recognise the Taliban, low-level cooperation will continue.
India clearly sees an opportunity to disrupt Pakistan’s policy of “strategic depth”, which since the Soviet invasion in 1979 has sought to cultivate a pliable regime in Kabul. In its outreach, India has prioritised “nationalist” Taliban factions that it believes support a more autonomous foreign policy.
Already anxious over perceived Chinese encroachment in South Asia, India is loath to see China be the main facilitator of the Taliban’s quest for strategic diversification. Here, China is potentially at a pre-existing disadvantage given its quasi-alliance with Pakistan.
Nonetheless, the Taliban’s hosting of the militant Islamist organisations Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) will continue to make it – at best – a highly awkward bedfellow. Both groups have a long history of perpetrating attacks in Kashmir. The Haqqani network’s prominent role in the current Taliban government is also a particular concern for India given their traditional links to Pakistan’s security establishment.”
The Widodo Family: Indonesia’s Newest Political Dynasty?
Jemma Purdey - East Asia Forum
“The rise of the Jokowi dynasty is a symptom of a political culture in Indonesia that is increasingly open to ‘family’ as another category of political actors alongside oligarchs and parties. It is also a symptom of a society in which corruption, conflicts of interest and nepotism go unchallenged in the absence of judicial checks and balances, which have been dismantled and undermined under Jokowi’s watch.
It remains to be seen if Indonesians have become sufficiently desensitised to a ‘politics as normal’ in which nepotism is unremarkable and endorsed at the ballot box. If they are not, then for the Jokowi family — an emerging political dynasty without its own party vehicle or a secured successor generation — the next 12 months are crucial. But if it is politics as normal, then the Widodo dynasty is well on its way to success in the manner of those that have come before it.”
How Did American’s Weirdest, Most Freedom-Obsessed State Fall For An Authoritarian Governor?
Helen Lewis - The Atlantic
“The central question about DeSantis is this: Is he a corporate tax-cutter or a conspiratorial frother? Is he closer to Mitch McConnell or Marjorie Taylor Greene? The great DeSantis innovation has been to realise how much cover calculated outrage provides for rewarding cronies—and that the more you preach “freedom,” the more you can get away with authoritarianism.
Nothing is more damning of the modern Republican Party than the fact that DeSantis needs to flaunt his authoritarianism, anti-intellectualism, and casual cruelty to court its base. Even then, the routine falls flat. DeSantis lacks the weirdness, effervescence, and recklessness that makes his home state so compelling. A true Florida Man does not master bureaucracy and use his powers of patronage to reshape institutions in his image. A true Florida Man does not make the trains run on time. A true Florida Man tries to soup up his boat with a nitro exhaust and accidentally burns down the illegal tiki bar he built in his backyard. Some are born Florida Men, some achieve Florida Manhood, and some have Florida Manhood thrust upon them by the demands of right-wing politics.”
The Next Stage Of Trumpism Is Here
Luke Hallam - Persuasion
“Revolutions famously devour their own children, and Trump is attempting to foment unrest from a position of political weakness. The “man the barricades” attitude has, at the time of writing, failed to translate into immediate mobilization among the grassroots, who declined to turn out on the streets at the first asking last week. Many of his supporters may be willing to switch their allegiance to a different Republican candidate rather than risk a shootout, punchup, or arrest on Trump’s behalf.
But we shouldn’t count on peace just yet. The biggest danger doesn’t come from the millions of Republican voters willing to support Trump, but from the growing subset of radicals willing to put their bullets and fists where their votes are. As political violence expert Rachel Kleinfeld puts it: “Large percentages of Americans are fantasising about secession and cosplaying at warfare.” Many of them—militiamen, conspiracy theorists, even, to a certain extent, regular middle-class people without obvious links to extreme groups—will buy into the rhetoric of a “final battle” and may engage in isolated acts of violence and unrest over the coming months. They will be the face of Trumpism’s third wave: willing to risk it all in the final showdown they believe will make or break the republic.”
Rediscovering Milan Kundera’s European Tragedy
Stefan Auer - The World Today
“Historically, the ‘small’ nations of Central Europe were threatened by both Germany and Russia. But after the Second World War, the threat was from the Soviet Union, which for Kundera was indistinguishable from Russia (tacitly including Ukraine). In its expansiveness, Russia was the opposite of Central Europe. While the latter was based on the principle of ‘the greatest variety within the smallest space’, the former represented ‘the smallest variety within the greatest space’.
In this sense, authoritarian communism was the fulfilment of Russian history, Kundera argued, writing that ‘Russian communism vigorously reawakened Russia’s old anti-western obsessions and turned it brutally against Europe’. Vladimir Putin’s Russia appears to build on these same pernicious impulses.”
The Jock/Creep Theory Of Fascism
John Ganz - Unpopular Front
“A little while ago, I came up with the idea that that the difference between Italian Fascism and German Nazism was that Fascism essentially had “Jock-Douche” vibes while Nazism had “Creep-Loser” vibes. Now, I’m going to try to develop this fancy into a full-blown (or rather, half-baked) theory.
The Jock-Douche ideal-type proceeds in the world with confidence and the presumption of immediate physical domination, while the Creep-Loser ideal-type has been thwarted some way and is therefore reflective, and is resentful, a plotter, a schemer, and a fantasist dreaming up grand historical vistas of triumph or doom. Again, keep in mind these are purely ideal-types. Rarely does an individual totally embody either one or the other idea. One could speculate that in many cases the superficial confidence of the Jock-Douche type is merely psychological compensation for the feelings of inadequacy of the Creep-Loser. On the converse, the intellectual limitations of the Jock-Douche type leads to an imaginative perspective that cannot escape the relatively crude thought-world of Nerd-dom. Considered from either an existential or psychoanalytic lens, it seems likely that these two are actual facets of single complex or form of being-in-the-world, manifested in different ways under different circumstances. Fascism as its own ideal-type can be understood as a synthesis between the Jock-Douche and the Creep-Loser: a cult of sheer physical of strength and action wedded to a wounded and brooding consciousness of impotence and humiliation.”
Social Media Is Taking A Dangerous Toll On Teenage Girls
Jonathan Haidt - The New Statesman
“There is one giant, obvious, international and gendered cause: social media. Instagram was founded in 2010. The iPhone 4 was released then too – the first smartphone with a front-facing camera. In 2012 Facebook bought Instagram, and that’s the year that its user base exploded. By 2015, it was becoming normal for 12-year-old girls to spend hours each day taking selfies, editing selfies and posting them for friends, enemies and strangers to comment on, while also spending hours each day scrolling through photos of other girls and wealthy female celebrities with (seemingly) superior bodies and lives. The hours girls spent each day on Instagram were taken from sleep, exercise, and time with friends and family. The arrival of smartphones rewired social life for an entire generation. What did we think would happen to them?
Facebook knows what is happening: in one slide from an internal presentation on Instagram’s mental health effects, the presenter notes that “parents can’t understand and don’t know how to help”. The slide explains: “Today’s parents came of age in a time before smartphones and social media, but social media has fundamentally changed the landscape of adolescence.”
This Week’s Playlist Is Theme: Decline