My long-awaited opinion on US-Uganda international relations

The US recently suspended Uganda from the African Growth and Opportunity Act, a trade program that gives aid and preferential trade privileges to African countries.

It seems to be because Uganda has recently passed a law “calling for life imprisonment for anyone who engages in gay sex”.

I think this is a bad idea by the US. It’s not likely to make Ugandans treat gay people any better. It makes it harder for Uganda to develop economically. And will drive Uganda closer to the US’s geopolitical rivals.

About the only thing the suspension accomplishes is to make some nice people with consciences feel good that the US is standing up to bigotry (which is good politics for Biden, so it makes sense that he did it).

Obviously I think the Ugandan anti-homosexuality bill is bigoted, and awful, and causes tons of pain for LGBT people in Uganda. But it’s not like the US can really do something about this. Because this is not a case of an authoritarian regime doing something against the interest of most of its citizens.

The reality is that the Ugandan public really does not like gay people. 94% of Ugandans say they would “report a family member, close friend, or co-worker to the police if they were involved in a same-sex relationship.” 94% also say they would dislike having a gay person as a neighbor.

Are Ugandan politicians going to change their laws because of what a (important) foreign country says? Or are they going to do what the vast majority of their citizens want?

As I recently read in a book on American foreign policy: “Washington’s ability to force smaller and weaker countries to take steps against the wishes of their leaders is much less extensive than most Americans appreciate.”

So I don’t know how interesting that is to any of you. But at least this lets me feel smug that the history and foreign policy books I’m reading are actually helping me have some concrete opinions on current events.

My conclusions from learning about the Cold War

I’ve read a couple books on the Cold War recently to see what lessons we can learn from this time to apply to the politics of today (1).

Here are my tentative conclusions - if you disagree with these points or think I am missing something important please let me know!

We need to avoid “missionary zeal” in our beliefs about the best way to organize society. Conflict during the Cold War was largely enabled by ideology. Americans thinking that everyone in the world needed to live under American-style democracy with free market capitalism. Soviets thinking that it was their duty to help the rest of the world undergo communist revolution. And then the rise of revolutionary Islam - especially starting with the Iran revolution in 1975 - which aimed at freeing Muslims worldwide from capitalist and communist domination.

I do care about American values and think more countries should have freedom of the type we have in the US. But giving the US government the sacred mandate to spread freedom and the American way across the world - through violence and espionage - leads to more harm than good.

We should avoid zero-sum, us vs. them thinking.

• “We can’t allow Vietnam to become communist because then the Soviets will be stronger” leads to hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Americans, Cambodians dead

• “We have to retain nuclear superiority over the Soviets” leads to the institutionalized insanity of the nuclear arms race

• “We can’t let Middle Eastern governments ally themselves with the other side” leads to Middle Eastern instability and terrorism that makes the world less safe for everyone

Sometimes American politicians are politically rewarded for taking advantage of and inflaming missionary zeal and zero-sum thinking…

• The strong anti-Soviet stances of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Reagan is part of what made all of them very popular presidents

• In Kennedy’s campaign he continuously slammed Eisenhower for letting the USSR build more missiles than the US. This “missle gap” turned out to be untrue, but the narrative helped Kennedy’s campaign

• The US under LBJ supported Indonesian dictator Suharto in purging millions of suspected communists. This resulted in Indonesia being an important US ally in Southeast Asia, and there was little to no resulting domestic backlash against LBJ

…but sometimes sometimes they are not

• LBJ did not seek re-election largely due to the US’s failures in Vietnam

• Aftermath of the Bay of Pigs invasion was disastrous for the Kennedy administration, both domestically and internationally

• Reagan’s popularity took a huge dive after the Iran-Contra affair

• Nixon’s decision to eschew 0-sum thinking and open US relations with communist China was received very well by the American public

So it’s up to us to punish our government officials when they make foreign policy based on missionary zeal and zero-sum thinking.

Sometimes intervening in other countries really does help your security. So it’s not realistic to say “the US should just leave all other countries alone.” But there are lots of different ways to influence the behavior of other countries, and the methods the US used during the Cold War were often both immoral and harmful to US security.

The US and China in 2023 are not in a “new cold war”

• The US and Chinese economies are deeply intertwined in a way that the US and USSR’s were not

• China is not engaged in a mission to manifest communism around the world in the same way the USSR was. And the US public has much less appetite for foreign interventions then they did during the Cold War

• Thinking of the US and China as being engaged in a “New Cold War” tempts us towards the missionary zeal and zero sum thinking that we should be avoiding

—

1. The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad, and The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace by Paul Thomas Chamberlain. I highly recommend both

People in Kenya can now travel to the US in a more reasonable time frame

Visa wait time in the US embassy in Nairobi is down to 63 days from 365+ in July. 63 days is still too long but it’s a great improvement!

The embassy, under the new Ambassador Meg Whitman, has made some significant changes such as getting more people to perform interviews and waiving the interview requirement for people who already had visas in the past 4 years.

I doubt that my annoying emails to the embassy and state department contributed at all to this change.

I wrote an EA forum post sharing what I’ve learned from this, and giving an update on an an earlier post arguing (a bit naively) that it would be relatively easy to badger embassies into doing things.

As I say in the post, I’ve since learned that in this case at least, "not enough advocacy from Americans" was less of a limiting factor on visa interview wait times than "political capital within the embassy".

The US has effectively stopped giving visas to travelers from Kenya

Summary: Currently you have to wait for over 1 year if you want to travel to the US from Kenya. The US has effectively blocked travel (for a large fraction of people) not through any law or policy decision, but seemingly just through lack of staffing in the US embassy in Nairobi.

—

I am generally pro more and easier cross-border movement - into the US and to everywhere in the world more generally. Part of making movement easier is a matter of policy, which is complicated, political, socially contentious, and won’t change quickly.

But there are non-policy barriers to free movement as well, and these seem much easier to fix. One such example is lack of consular interviews at US embassies.

When you try to schedule a consular interview at the US Embassy in Nairobi, you will see that there are no interview slots available for over 1.5 years (674 days at time of writing). No interview means no visa (1), which means the US has blocked people from entering the US from Kenya.

I think this is an important issue, and also one that is potentially pretty tractable.

Why does this matter? Less people visiting the US hurts the US:

• Economically: Tourism is good for the US, and US business benefits from international deals that are facilitated by the ability of foreign businesspeople to visit for meetings

• Intellectually: I have had several friends who wanted to attend a philanthropic conference (EA Global hosted in Boston) but were unable. They may go to a similar conference in Singapore instead, where no visa is required. If the US wants at the forefront of international discussion of world problems, it has to let people in to its conferences. Otherwise people will just start going other places.

• Culturally: We like to think of the US as a melting pot, welcoming to people all over the world. Rejecting people from visiting hurts this important part of US culture.

• International relations-wise: When people visit the US, they form connections to it and think positively of it

The above are all benefits that accrue to the US by letting people visit. There are also of course benefits to the people visiting, and to the people in the US they are visiting.

Is this a tractable issue?

I think yes. The solve seems simple. The embassy just needs to hire more people. It is not a political issue, does not require change in law. I imagine the main reason this is a problem is that the embassy has basically zero accountability to people applying for visas, and not that many US citizens care about this (2). It seems like an area where a few people’s voices could have an outsized impact.

So let me know if you want to add your voice. Or if you have insight into how decisions about consular interviews get made that can help us use our voices more effectively. Comment here, email me at ljeure@gmail.com, or tweet at me at @lukeeure. Americans could also email the US embassy in Nairobi at VisitorVisaNairobi@state.gov to show them that there are Americans who care about this issue (3).

For over a century people have wanted to come to the US because it is a great place to be. We are a better country for it. Let’s not let staffing shortages stop this.

—

1. Required to visit the US for any generic reason - tourism, an academic conference, business meeting, visiting family. This is required both of Kenyans and citizens of most other non-US countries who live in Kenya.

Note that it also seems this is not just Kenya, and is an issue in US embassies around the world.

2. I’ve been advised that people can simply apply for expedited visas in case of urgent matters. But

1. These expedited visas seem very hard to get - I’ve had at least 3 friends try to get them and be rejected

2. More importantly, there is a problem with your system if expedition is required to get a visa within 1 year

2. There could be things that make this more complicated than just a staffing issue, but if there are the embassy has not been willing to explain them to me when I’ve inquired over email.

3. Not that is don’t me much good so far. In addition to being advised that people can get expedited visas, I was told that “To keep both applicants and our staff safe during the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of appointments for all of these categories is much lower than normal.”

I really doubt COVID safety is the issue here, and that they would send this just makes me feel like there is little accountability for having a process that works well.

Debunking claims of electoral fraud by Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai

In this post, I learned that someone on the internet was wrong, and decided to spend a good chunk of my weekend working, in the name of Democracy, to make some graphs proving him so.

I will debunk claims of evidence for electoral fraud made by Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai. I’m not going to dive too deep into details, and want to just make some quick hopefully clear points to show why Dr. Ayyadurai’s graphs aren’t really evidence of anything suspicious happening, for anyone who saw his video.

This is the graph Dr. Ayyadurai shows as evidence that an algorithm is stealing votes from Trump:

Each dot is a precinct in Oakland County Michigan. The x-axis is the % of straight ticket votes for Republicans.  The y-axis is % of votes for Trump - % straight ticket Republican. The claim is that because the lines have a downward trend, this indicates that votes are being stolen from Trump and handed to Biden in the precincts that have a high percentage of straight-ticket Republican voter (1, <— see below if you want details. I’m incompetent and can’t find out how to use superscripts).

I’ve recreated the data using Macomb county, another county given as an example of fraud in his video (2):

According to Dr. Ayyadurai, the fact that this line slopes downwards is evidence that Biden is stealing votes from Trump.

But! Here’s another graph though, using the same county’s data:

Woah! It’s also sloped down. Those points in the bottom right are precincts that are mostly Democrats where it looks like Biden is doing way worse than Dr. Ayyudarai would expect. By his logic, that must mean that Trump is also stealing votes from Biden!

In fact, you can just hold a mirror up to all of Dr. Ayyudarai’s graphs to see a new graph that makes it look like Trump is stealing votes from Biden. Because a downward sloping line on these graphs is nothing suspicious — it’s just an artifact of the way Dr. Ayyudarai’s decided to display the data (3). 

This kind of slope is just not that weird of a slope to see. We see the same trend in the 2016 election, where Trump won Michigan:

And we see the same thing again in 2012, when Obama carried Michigan over Romney:

So at the very least, if you think that Dr. Ayyadurai’s video is evidence of voter fraud, then you’d also have to believe that the same voter fraud happened in both 2012 and 2016 (4). 

But there’s no reason to believe voter fraud of the type Dr. Ayyadurai claims is happening, or that widespread voter fraud is an issue in US national elections. If widespread voter fraud is happening, that would be a huge problem, and it’s not impossible that data would come to light that shows that it is happening. But for now the evidence shows that voter fraud was not a problem in any state this year. If you learn of any evidence making you think that widespread voter fraud is an issue, I’d love to hear it.

I don’t know anything about Dr. Ayyadurai, besides what I’ve seen in this video so can’t really say if he’s being deliberately deceptive here, or just foolish in his use of data. But please don’t believe stuff people post online just because they use graphs and have a degree from MIT (5).

1. As an aside, this is a very confusing way to make a graph. If he really wanted to communicate clearly, he would just show % of votes for Trump on the y-axis. The fact that he subtracts out  % straight ticket Republican is what gives us a downward sloping line that makes it look like something is fishy. He could be less confusing by showing the data like this:

This is the exact same data as shown in my first graph. Now it doesn’t look like much is wrong. More people vote for Trump in the precincts that have more straight ticket Republican votes. Just as we would expect.

2. Note that my y-axis doesn’t exactly match the one used in the video — I’m not sure exactly what the difference is — Dr. Ayyudarai isn’t the most clear with exactly what is plotted on the y-axis. But the overall point is the same.

3. See 1

4. But what about that “flat line” that Dr. Ayyaduri draws in the 0-20% zone? Why don’t we see that in the 80-100% zone? Isn’t that an indication that something different is happening in precincts with tons of Republican straight ticket voters? No. Because we just don’t see that many precincts at all that have 80% or more straight ticket Republican voters. If there were, I’d expect the points to flatten out just as they do in the 0-20% zone.

The reason it slopes downwards is because in every district, the people who don’t vote straight ticket are going to be more moderate than the people who vote straight ticket. So in a super Republican precinct, you will expect that the people who bubble in each candidate themselves are going to vote for Biden more often than the people who vote straight ticket, putting you in the bottom right of Dr. Ayyudarai’s charts. And in a super Democratic district, the people who want to bubble in each candidate probably vote for Trump more often than the straight ticket voters, putting you in the top left of Dr. Ayyudarai’s charts.

5. Macomb data source (and 2016). Oakland data source. I’m happy to share my analysis if anyone in the world is interested. I pick the years and counties I do because those were the countries and years for which data was available that allowed the most direct comparison with Dr. Ayyudarai’s graphs. Thanks to my roommates for your help thinking this through!

If you aren’t convinced by me, or are interested in learning more, this good Medium post, written by Naim Kabir has some more detail on the mistake Dr. Ayyadurai is making. Kabir makes points using simulations rather than election data.

Edit: The original version of this post said that those who didn’t vote straight-party must have voted split ticket. This is not correct, and the text has been updated. Thanks to Jeff Brewster for pointing this out.

What can the US do about Xinjiang?

The US can and should take more steps to curb the human rights abuses being committed by the People’s Republic of China in Xinjiang (up to 1.8 million people being detained and subject to forced labor and torture). This is an opportunity for the US to act as the leader of the free world that we imagine ourselves to be.

This ChinaTalk article has a great overview of what we should do to pressure the PRC into reducing its actions in Xinjiang (see also Vox). In summary:

• The executive branch could instruct Customs and Border Patrol to issue a Withhold Release Orders against products like cotton and tomatoes produced in Xinjiang. This would prevent these products, created using forced labor, from entering the US

• Congress could increase the budget for CBP to give it more capacity to do the above (current budget is only $2M)

• The senate could pass H. R. 6210 which requires companies to disclose ties with Xinjiang. Congress could go further by introducing and passing a bill requiring companies that have ties with Xinjiang to be fined or to be delisted from US stock exchanges

• The US could file a complaint against the PRC in the International Labor Organization (a UN agency), or raise it in the UN general assembly or Security Council

Working with other countries is likely essential to success here, both in leading by example and in coordinated efforts. The point of all of these measures would be both to embarrass the PRC into halting their actions, or else provide economic incentives to do so. If only the US is criticizing and sanctioning you, it’s relatively easy to simply point out the US’s flaws and find other trading partners. You can’t do this if many of the world’s most powerful countries are pointing their fingers at you to hold you accountable.

What can you personally do ? As far as I can tell the best action an individual can take is to spend 5 minutes and call (or email) your senator and/or congressperson, expressing your concern about what’s happening in Xinjiang. For talking points you could say you’d like them to:

• Give more budget to the Customs and Border Patrol so they can increase enforcement on imports from Xinjiang

• Pass H. R. 6210, and introduce a new bill to require sanctions against companies with ties to Xinjiang

• Call for complaints by US representatives to the UN against the PRC’s actions in Xinjiang 

If you have other ideas about effective ways an individual could help on this issue, let me know!

Observations from last night's West Des Moines Black Lives Matter protest

The group met at Valley Junction, and marched for about 2 miles in a loop around town. The gathering and march were in honor of Breonna Taylor’s birthday — she would have turned 27 yesterday.

Before marching there were speakers who gave us instructions:

• We were not to hurt any people or property

• We were to remain calm unless provoked

• If we saw a dangerous situation ahead (shooting, tear gasing, etc.), we were not to run towards it, or to run away. We were to turn, give the signal for retreat, and calmly walk away

• If witnessed anyone being arrested, we were to do everything in our power to “de-arrest them”. It was not clear how exactly we were supposed to go about doing that

• “Friends don’t let friends get arrested”

One speaker expressed irritation at being asked by the media if he advocated for peaceful protests. He stressed that he doesn’t feel that we can afford to be “peaceful” if we want to make a change, be we most certainly should be “non-violent”.

By my estimate the crowd was roughly 90% non-black and roughly 90% under thirty years old. On the order of 1000 people total.

Most people wore masks. Though were instructed to march “shoulder-to-shoulder” the typical distance between people while marching was probably around 3 feet.

The march was lead by people on bikes who cleared traffic out of the way, and a van with the back doors open blasting music and occasionally amplifying speakers hyping us up. Biggest hits music-wise based on crowd reaction were “Rock with You” by Michael Jackson and “Savage” by Megan Thee Stallion.

At ~ 25% of the houses we walked past, people stepped outside to watch us. Of those who stepped out, around 75% were taking videos, and around 40% expressed support in some way (cheering, raising fists, giving thumbs up). Passing cars occasionally honked or raised fists to show support as well.

The most commonly chanted phrases were “Say his name — George Floyd!”, “ Say her name — Breonna Taylor!”, “Black lives matter!”, “Hey hey! Ho ho! These racist cops have got to go!”, “No justice — no peace!”, and “Hands up — don’t shoot!”

Halfway through the march we took a break, and the organizers gave some heartfelt speeches from the back of the van:

• “I expect nothing from the police; I expect everything from all of you. I expect nothing from our politicians; I expect everything from all of you.”

• We were reminded that this day we wanted in particular to honor black women. All black women were asked to stand up and we gave a round of applause (for what it’s worth, the leaders of the march seemed to be exclusively male)

• We were told that while we should feel a sense of purpose and solidarity at this march, we should also be having fun

We saw police a few times during the march, but there were no interactions. Police stayed about a block away, seemingly just keeping an eye on things.

In accordance with the organizers’ wishes, the protest was peaceful, purposeful, and fun.