Here are the four drivers cited in the 2020 Foreign Affairs article “How a Great Power Falls Apart: Decline Is Invisible From the Inside”.

Amalrik identified four drivers of this process. One was the “moral weariness” engendered by an expansionist, interventionist foreign policy and the never-ending warfare that ensued. Another was the economic hardship that a prolonged military conflict—in Amalrik’s imagination, a coming Soviet-Chinese war—would produce. A third was the fact that the government would grow increasingly intolerant of public expressions of discontent and violently suppress “sporadic eruptions of popular dissatisfaction, or local riots.” These crackdowns were likely to be especially brutal, he argued, when the suppressors—police or internal security troops—were “of a nationality other than that of the population that is rioting,” which would in turn “sharpen enmities among the nationalities.”

It was a fourth tendency, however, that would spell the real end of the Soviet Union: the calculation, by some significant portion of the political elite, that it could best guarantee its own future by jettisoning its relationship to the national capital. Amalrik supposed that this might occur among Soviet ethnic minorities, “first in the Baltic area, the Caucasus and the Ukraine, then in Central Asia and along the Volga”—a sequence that turned out to be exactly correct. His more general point was that in times of severe crisis, institutional elites face a decision point. Do they cling to the system that gives them power or recast themselves as visionaries who understand that the ship is sinking?

It is hard not to think of this in context of my new book, where I propose a bifurcation of all information systems security into either “easy, routine, minimal judgment” (ERM) or “identify, store, evaluate, adapt” (ISEA).

The TL;DR of the article is really this:

A better way to think about political cleavages was to observe which portions of society are most threatened by change and which ones seek to hasten it—and then to imagine how states might manage the differences between the two.

And so the struggle is what to do with such cleavage as it naturally occurs within big data systems.

Haile Selassie I, born Tafari Makonnen, ruled as Emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974. He was known for modernizing the country through political and social reforms, such as the written constitution and the abolition of slavery.

His power was interrupted by the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, which forced him into exile during Italian occupation. The Allied campaign in East Africa, using pioneering methods of irregular warfare, liberated the country in 1941 and restored Selassie.

He also presided over and became the first chair of the 1963 Organization of African Unity (today known as African Union). A 1974 military coup by the “Derg” removed him from power and he was murdered by them August 27, 1975.

It’s an important history lesson in context of a new Hill article that says the United States unfortunately modeled counter-insurgency in Afghanistan on colonial instead of post-colonial doctrines.

Galula’s objective was perpetuating colonial rule. He, as a French officer, was fighting in France’s name to shore up France’s legitimacy. In contrast, we fight in someone else’s name to shore up someone else’s legitimacy.

At its most concrete, the difference between colonial and post-colonial settings boils down to what one can offer the population, which, per FM 3-24, is the true “center of gravity” in an insurgency. Galula emphasizes in his writing that a key part of the colonial regime’s pitch to the population is that the colonial power is not going anywhere. Therefore, siding with the colonial power and supporting it tacitly or actively is a reasonable choice. One can trust that which will always be there.

This argument undoubtedly helped France recruit large numbers of locals to fight under French colors. In contrast, the post-colonial foreign power that broadcasts its intention to leave from the moment it first arrives faces a far more difficult time rallying and sustaining support.

No one really has figured out how a third-party military intervention shores up the legitimacy of a client state in a post-colonial context.

The Allied liberation of states held by the Axis was all about intervention to shore up legitimacy of a client state, so there’s plenty of evidence to reference. Ethiopia makes for a particularly good case example, bridging into a post-colonial context, because it was never colonized.

Just three years after a code of ethics was drafted in Nuremberg (condemning Nazis for experimenting on humans without consent and with no benefit to test subjects) the US started a massive bioweapons test… violating the code:

Over a period of six days in September 1950, members of the US Navy sprayed clouds of Serratia from giant hoses aboard a Navy minesweeper drifting two miles along the San Francisco coastline, a bacterial fog quickly enveloped and disguised by the region’s own mist. By monitoring the air at 43 scattered sites throughout the region, the Navy found Serratia bacteria blown throughout San Francisco and extending to the adjacent communities of Albany, Berkeley, Daly City, Colma, Oakland, San Leandro, and Sausalito

Eleven fell sick from the experiment, one died.

A week after the spraying, eleven patients were admitted to the now defunct Stanford University Hospital in San Francisco with severe urinary tract infections, resistant to the limited antibiotics available in that era. One gentlemen, recovering from prostate surgery, developed complications of heart infection as Serratia colonized his heart valves. His would be the only death during the aftermath of the experiment.

Such practices are said to have continued all the way to November 25, 1969.

From 1950 to 1966, the military performed open-air testing of potential terrorist weapons at least 239 times in at least eight American cities, including New York City, Key West, and Panama City, FL, exposing still unknown numbers of Americans to Serratia and other microbial organisms.

It all supposedly came to an abrupt end on that single day in 1969 because President Nixon made an offical “Statement on Chemical and Biological Defense Policies and Programs”.

The United States shall renounce the use of lethal biological agents and weapons, and all other methods of biological warfare. The United States will confine its biological research to defensive measures such as immunization and safety measures

Instead, Ronald Reagan with Donald Rumsfeld just fourteen years later did the opposite and shipped bioweapons into Iraq for offensive measures including use against their own population.

After Rumsfeld’s visit to Baghdad in 1983, U.S. intelligence began supplying the Iraqi dictator with satellite photos showing Iranian deployments. Official documents suggest that America may also have secretly arranged for tanks and other military hardware to be shipped to Iraq in a swap deal–American tanks to Egypt, Egyptian tanks to Iraq. Over the protest of some Pentagon skeptics, the Reagan administration began allowing the Iraqis to buy a wide variety of “dual use” equipment and materials from American suppliers. According to confidential Commerce Department export-control documents obtained by NEWSWEEK, the shopping list included a computerized database for Saddam’s Interior Ministry (presumably to help keep track of political opponents); helicopters to transport Iraqi officials; television cameras for “video surveillance applications”; chemical-analysis equipment for the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC), and, most unsettling, numerous shipments of “bacteria/fungi/protozoa” to the IAEC. According to former officials, the bacteria cultures could be used to make biological weapons, including anthrax. The State Department also approved the shipment of 1.5 million atropine injectors, for use against the effects of chemical weapons, but the Pentagon blocked the sale. The helicopters, some American officials later surmised, were used to spray poison gas on the Kurds.

The United States almost certainly knew from its own satellite imagery that Saddam was using chemical weapons against Iranian troops. When Saddam bombed Kurdish rebels and civilians with a lethal cocktail of mustard gas, sarin, tabun and VX in 1988, the Reagan administration first blamed Iran, before acknowledging, under pressure from congressional Democrats, that the culprits were Saddam’s own forces. There was only token official protest at the time. Saddam’s men were unfazed. An Iraqi audiotape, later captured by the Kurds, records Saddam’s cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid (known as Ali Chemical) talking to his fellow officers about gassing the Kurds. “Who is going to say anything?” he asks. “The international community? F– them!”

Read that again: President Reagan almost certainly knew from satellite imagery that Saddam was using chemical weapons on his own population… and offered only token official protest at the time.

Who is going to say anything, indeed.

This perhaps gives insight into the false claims by extreme right-wing groups about vaccination (e.g. claiming it is unsafe or that it does harm). They probably celebrated Reagan’s use of power for thoughtless violations of ethical and moral codes, and now are projecting — find it hard to believe anyone given power would do what’s right.