Newt Gingrich's EMP obsession
Ever since Newt Gingrich began his rise in the polls, I was meaning to dust off his repeated warnings about the dangers of an electro-magnetic pulse weapon and what it says about his foreign policy judgment. However, the New York Times beat me too it. Dan Drezner picks up the story and compares Gingrich's hyperventilation over EMPs to his nonchalance about the potential impacts of climate change:
'This is fascinating. On the one hand, you have a long-term cataclysmic threat to the planet that commands the consensus of an overwhelming majority of experts in the field. On the other hand, you have a long-term cataclysmic threat to the United States that commands nowhere close to the same level of consensus. Based on his rhetoric, Gingrich wants urgent action to be taken on the latter, but not the former. Why?I'm not bringing this up to suggest that Gingrich is a buffoon. He could plausibly argue that a lot of people are harping on climate change while only Gingrich can call attention to the EMP possibility. It's possible that the costs of preventive action on climate change are much greater than dealing with EMP (though if that includes preventive attacks on Iran and North Korea, I'm dubious).
What I'm wondering is whether there is a partisan divide in assessing threats, as there is in assessing economic principles. I wonder if conservatives are far more likely to focus on threats in which there is a clear agent with a malevolent intent, whereas liberals are more likely to focus on threats that lack agency and are more systemic in nature (climate change, pandemics, nuclear accidents, etc.)
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Another way to look at this is that conservatives tend to be more focused on threats which can be addressed with military force, while liberals are more likely to worry themselves about threats that require a lot of international cooperation to address. They pick threats that reinforce political narratives about the role of the military and international cooperation. The judgments are self-serving ones.
That said, we shouldn't lose sight of the buffoonery aspect here.