Qatar, PACOM, and the Absence of US Foreign Policy

So, two things that happened in the past week that were of interest to me.

First, Saudi Arabia issued its official demands that the Qatari government would need to meet for the Saudis and their allies to end their diplomatic, political and economic blockade. With deep conditions ranging from the shuttering of the al Jazeera news service to a complete realignment of the country’s foreign policy from one of independent stances to something more appropriate to a province of Saudi Arabia.

Second, I spoke at PACOM in Hawaii about the changing nature of American power. The subsequent discussion focused heavily on the evolving role of the U.S. military as the country’s geopolitical priorities shift. The two neatly dovetail and highlight one of the deepening challenges the U.S. government faces in the next few years.

Let’s start with the background.

Near the end of World War II at the Bretton Woods conference the United States struck a deal with the allies. In the post-war order, the United States will defend not just your countries, but all your trade. You will no longer need to fight one another to access raw materials or markets. Furthermore, the American market — the only one of size to survive the war — will be open to you. All you have to do is side with America against the Soviets. Put simply, the United States pledged its military and economy to subsidize history’s largest alliance network.

By 1992, however, the Cold War had ended and — caught up in the transition from the Bush Sr administration to Clinton — the Americans neglected to craft a replacement strategy. The world changed, but U.S. strategic overwatch and subsidization of the alliance did not. All the various Cold War allies — ranging from the Germans to the Koreans to the Chinese to the Greeks — continued to benefit economically, but the Americans no longer received the strategic deference that was part of the original Bretton Woods deal.

Twenty-five years later, the economic cost of such an outdated strategy has led to the perception in many Americans’ minds that the world is freeloading on American security commitments. This isn’t intolerance or a fit of pique, it is a reasonable response to Washington’s inability to craft a replacement for a security policy that is a generation out of date. Such perceptions heavily colored the populist nature of the 2016 presidential election, and of course the election of Donald Trump — and now the American retrenchment is in full swing.

Yet it hardly started with Trump. American strategic policy has been on autopilot since 1992. The Clinton, W Bush and Obama administrations were too distracted, disinterested and/or unaware of the intricacies of the international system to meaningfully update the original Bretton Woods deal. In Donald Trump the Americans now have a leader just as distracted, disinterested and/or unaware as his three immediate predecessors. What is different about Trump is that as a populist he feels no attachment to the Bretton Woods system, so there is no natural inclination to just let-it-ride. Consequently, there are a growing number of breaches as the freshmen president, by action and inaction, peels away bits of the old system — but doesn’t replace them with anything new.

Such peeling is on full display with U.S. policy to the Persian Gulf. Trump’s first overseas visit wasn’t to traditional partners like Canada or Mexico or traditional allies like the United Kingdom or Japan, but instead to Saudi Arabia where Trump was quickly sucked into a gilded flattery fest of Trumpian proportions. The Saudis emerged from the visit-glow thinking they had the White House’s stamp of approval to restructure their region in whatever way they saw fit. Their first act wasn’t to move against ISIS or Iran, but Qatar — a tiny country the Saudis have long viewed as unnecessarily close to Iran, unnecessarily promiscuous when it comes to sponsoring political groups opposed to Saudi goals, and in general unnecessarily free-willed.

Qatar, however, didn’t buckle — and that brings us to PACOM.

The U.S. military apparatus is charged with dispensing and enforcing U.S. strategic policy. As part of such duties, the military must constantly interact with allies and rivals around the world. That takes soldiers. Sailors. Marines. Airmen. Bases — and those bases require commitments to local and regional security concerns. That takes engagement, reliability, consistency. Every. Single. Day. By far the Americans’ largest overseas base these days is in Doha…the capital of Qatar. The CENTCOM base there has been the nerve-center for all US operations in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan for some 15 years now.

The Qataris believe — correctly — that the U.S. military has their back and so there is no need for them to back down to the Saudis. The Saudis believe — correctly — that the Trump administration has green-lit their desire to restructure their region more to their liking. The Trump administration believes — correctly — that the U.S. strategic policy it inherited needs an overhaul, but has yet to craft that replacement policy.

The result in the U.S. military and diplomatic community is an overriding sense of confusion and frustration. Their standing orders are clear, but the shifts out of the White House are equally clear. And increasingly, the two contradict. The folks at PACOM can’t figure out, for example, whether they are supposed to treat China as a threat, a partner, a rising power who should be engaged…or given space. And mixed messages aren’t the best things when dealing with multiple aircraft carrier battle groups.

The issue is not so much Trump’s tendency to make policy via Twitter (although that obviously doesn’t help), but instead that ever since the Cold War ended the Americans have not had a goal.

Until the Americans select a new one they cannot have a coherent strategy. Until they have the national conversation required to select that goal, these deepening splits between needs and actions will only widen, leaving allies new and old not just in a lurch, but often acting against one another — as Saudi Arabia and Qatar are now.

There are plenty of places where this disconnect between emerging strategic interests and outdated policy will grind. Some of the louder ones include NATO, where it is no longer clearly in America’s interests to defend Europe against Russia. At the DMZ, where North Korea is far more a threat to South Korea, Japan and even China than it is to the United States. In the South China Sea where Chinese aggression is less a threat to American interests than to Taiwanese and Japanese. In Kuwait where America’s lack of oil import needs staggeringly reduces the Americans’ interest while staggeringly increasing Saudi belligerence. America’s use of Turkey’s Incirlik airbase will likely evaporate for a mix of reasons ranging from disenchantment with the evolution of the Turkish political space to a general feeling that the refugee issue is Europe’s problem, while Syria is Turkey’s problem.

Other places generate a lot less heartburn and — even without some new overarching strategy — are likely to keep their current levels of American involvement regardless. The UK, Canada and Australia have been and will remain America’s closest allies under almost any reasonable scenario. Morocco and Algeria are reliable partners in the struggle against Islamic militancy. Proximity and economic centrality will keep the Americans involved in Panamanian affairs for as long as water transport is a thing. Singapore sits on the world’s most strategically located real estate and is likely to be a valued partner until the end of time itself.

Perhaps the quirkiest aspect of all this are the countries likely to suffer the most from the policy discombobulation.

On the surface the Qatari-Saudi spat seems like it would deliver the Persian Gulf to Iran on a silver platter. But no. Within the first week of the argument, Turkey had deployed troops to its airbase in Qatar. Nothing is easy in the Middle East, even (especially!) for powers inhabiting the region. Turkey’s push to support Qatar is a clear indication to Tehran (and Riyadh) that even if US troops left the region tomorrow, Iran gets to look forward to facing off against yet another superior economic and military power. Unlike the United States, however, Turkey has a bevy of permanent regional interests directly opposed to Iran’s own, and occupies prime real estate in the neighborhood.

Trump’s wobbling on NATO seems like it gives the Russians everything they want — a Europe without the American security umbrella. But no. With the Americans out, the Germans have no choice but to rearm — and every time that has happened, it hasn’t turned out well for Moscow.

Loosening security ties with the East Asian rim seems like a dream come true for the Chinese. But no. Not only does that force Japan, Korea and Taiwan to massively bulk up their defense capacities (and perhaps go nuclear), but China’s extensive international economic position is utterly dependent upon the Americans keeping markets open and sea lanes safe on a global scale. Without America, there is no Chinese economic miracle — and most likely a naval war with Japan that China simply cannot win.

What will the Americans decide they want out of all of this? What will their new goal be? No clue. American politics are loud and messy and amped up with righteous indignation at present. Even if Americans could start the national conversation on finding that elusive goal today, I doubt they’d come up with the final answer in this presidency.

Gathering Strength

Elections are funny things. They are the culmination and distillation of forces economic, political, military, technocratic, social, racial, ethnic, linguistic and cultural. Elections are the small bites that the media loves because they’re easily digestible data points, plus the dates are announced ahead of time. After the Brexit and Trump surprises of last year, election-chasing has become the new sexy. Think of the global cheers when Le Pen lost in France. Or the consternation when Turkey’s constitutional reforms went through. Or the sighs of relief when the Dutch and Austrian elections didn’t result in victories for neo-Nazis.

Drawing conclusions can be difficult. Of the endless minutiae that factor in, voters ultimately have to select from a less than subtle palette of choices. Making sense of it all is as difficult for the outside observer as it is for the voter. Generating predictions in such conditions are, in a word, problematic.

I’ve kicked out three big election calls for 2017, and all are in need of updates.

The Germans

If the polls hold at where they’ve been for the past nine months, Angela Merkel will earn her fourth term as chancellor this autumn. Her primary opposition (which just happens to double as her current coalition partner) has hemorrhaged nearly its entire leadership cadre in recent years and ruling with Merkel’s Christian Democrats has contaminated them in the eyes of most center-left voters. Such disenchantment, however, hasn’t really benefited Germany’s other two leftish parties, leaving Merkel & Co. with a commanding lead. Considering all the crises that continue to batter the European system, having Merkel’s deep expertise and calm demeanor at the heart of all things European remain the Continent’s most positive and reliable feature.

The Brits

Tory leader and Prime Minister Theresa May called snap elections this spring, and to many (me included) it appeared her Conservatives were poised for an epic routing of their opposition.

Didn’t happen. Come election day (June 8) the Conservatives stumbled, losing their majority and only being able to continue ruling because of assistance from the DUP (think: Orange). Many might remember the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), the pro-British Protestant party that dominated Northern Ireland during the Troubles. The DUP are to the right of the UUP, who incidentally lost their two seats in parliament during the snap election. The party’s supporters are among the most pro-Brexit, pro-life, pro-British, anti-gay, anti-immigrant, socially conservative and Eurosceptic parties not only in Northern Ireland but throughout the UK. And these are the people Theresa May (and her more moderate, center-right party) will have to court in order to stay in power.

Two things changed. First, the Conservatives made a series of policy-release gaffs, denting their credibility as the only adults in the British political system. The Tories made deep inroads against the Scottish Nationals, focusing on putting the Scottish independence issue to bed for now, but it cost them against a massively underestimated Labour party.

Second, British Labour is no longer of the center-left. Jeremy Corbyn, often lampooned as the “British Bernie Sanders,” ran a sophisticated and successful campaign that even included a law & order platform heavy on the sort of pro-security spending and rhetoric that are the hallmark of not just the Right, but the hard right. The shift provided Labour its best showing in a decade, especially as younger, urban voters came out in higher numbers than expected.

May’s government’s top task will be to negotiate the country’s exit from the European Union with nothing resembling a mandate. Odds are a hard crash out of the EU that will generate a multi-year recession – and that’s the positive case. The less-positive case involves May’s government falling to its mildly-rebellious front bench or to the whims of a chaotic and hostile Labour opposition.

France

La Republic En Marche! didn’t even exist as a party 14 months ago, and after the June parliamentary polls its coalition now holds a commanding majority of 350 in the French parliament. The hard-right National Front quadrupled its representation, but only to 8. The real story is the absolute gutting of the conservative Republican-led alliance down to 137. The Socialist-led alliance lost the most, dropping to 44, following steady gains that began in 2004.

The question is what does this mean for the Fifth Republic. En Marche! is new. Most of its legislators have never held public office. The same holds for the party’s leader and France’s new president, Emmanuel Macron.

Here’s France’s problem:

The economy has been moribund since the 1970’s and consistently fails to preform to snuff. The primary obstacles are cultural and regulatory: the post-WWII social welfare model has put down remarkably deep roots in France, leading the French to value government services and quality of life over the sort of activity that tends to generate taxes and… well, high quality of life. The result is a combination of ennui and rage that government isn’t doing more (sound familiar?).

The issue has gotten so bad as to contaminate France’s foreign relations with its most important partner: Germany. French governments have consistently demanded that the EU subsidize all things French with German money, as well as to use more German money to pay for whatever ails the broader European system. The Germans have politely, if firmly, declined to do so. Macron realizes and acknowledges that until such time as France can repair its own house, calling upon the Germans to fork out more for Europe just isn’t going to happen.

With a commanding majority, Macron and En Marche! will attempt to force the sort of economic, cultural and social overhaul that the last several French governments have tried and failed to do. Succeed or fail, expect strikes of a scale that France has not seen in decades (which is saying something).

If Macron is successful, then he will carry the case to Berlin that the Germans need to dig deep to pay for the federalization of the European Union. That means a common budget, common government debt, and some sort of sharing of existing liabilities. For Marcon’s case to get any hearing, his reforms at home must be far more painful than anything any French government has enacted since Napoleon.

So what does it all mean?

The common thread here is centralization.

Merkel is slowly, steadily, quietly, drawing power within the German and European system. Politically, it is to marginalize her opponents at home and abroad. Strategically, it is to prepare for a world with a more active Russia and Turkey and a less active America.

May has to wield her minority government as if she had a crushing majority. The only way to do that is to strengthen state institutions so that whoever holds them has an outsized influence in all things British. Somewhat ironically, Jeremy Corbyn’s shift to the hard right will make it easier for the moderate right to do just that.

While Marcon has the best political tools of the three, he is also attempting the most dramatic transformation: attempting nothing less than a complete overhaul of French policies and economic system. That will require the government forcing its will on an often unruly population who has the tendency to vote “No! What was the question?”

The centralization theme isn’t exactly coming out of the blue.

The world has felt more chaotic of late as the problems we face are getting larger and the tools we have used to respond for so long no longer work. Europe has had a migration problem but the tools needed to manage it are overwhelmed. The financial crisis left much of the world scrambling to get back to where they were a decade ago. But most importantly, the organizing principles of the world Order have been flaking at the edges. Governments the world over are starting to feel the cold as the Disorder sets in.

The rapid changes on the horizon require agile, quick decision making and implementation. These are anathema to many of the multiparty, parliamentary systems that dominate Europe. Germany, Italy and Spain in particular are amalgamations of smaller competing statelets that have been cobbled together over centuries – they’re not designed to allow the central government to implement changes easily. It is hardly a problem the Europeans have a monopoly on: Canada functions as ten countries in one – with all the complications that holds for policy. Brazil is confederal, while Japan struggles with a deep state that resists change in all its myriad forms. India is less a country and more a geographic expression akin to the Holy Roman Empire.

So countries are consolidating. Britain is preparing for a bruising Brexit. Japan has built its largest carriers since WWII and their constitution doesn’t even allow them to have a wartime military. The European Commission is desperate for a roadmap to demonstrate the end of the EU is not nigh. The Indian government is hoping to obliterate the opposition Congress Party as a political force so it can rule unfettered. China’s preparing for political lockdown at its autumn party gathering. Russia’s implementing Snowden-stolen social monitoring techniques at the speed of thought. France aims for a root-to-branch consolidation that guts parties and unions (most of us call these pillars of civil society). Turkey, Hungary and Poland are implementing personality cults. Liberal heartthrob Justin Trudeau wants to nearly double Canadian defense spending (yes, that Canada). Angela Merkel – brilliant, measured, and often boring – is openly discussing Germany’s need to secure its own defenses (and if that doesn’t terrify Europe as much as it titillates Putin, I don’t know what will).

As weird as it sounds, the United States is – so far at least – the exception. Donald Trump’s consolidation moves are typical for any freshman leader, not someone eyeing a storm on the horizon. Funny enough, it took Trump’s Twitter account to make the rest of the world look up.

Read The Absent Superpower for more on why each of these countries is – or isn’t – likely to succeed.

Curious About Cuba

Last week President Donald Trump announced a partial revocation of his predecessor’s diplomatic opening to Cuba, reinstating pieces of the decades-long embargo impacting financial transfers, trade and transport.

As a rule, I don’t get too worked up about this or that president’s policies on this or that country. It is a big world. As a massive, domestically-focused economy with immense strategic depth and insulation, the United States has enormous wiggle room to both make mistakes and take the long view. Even presidents as aggressive as FDR during times as tumultuous as World War II can afford to sit back and watch things unfold. The bar for what actually impacts the homeland is pretty high.

Cuba isn’t one of those things – or more to the point, the Caribbean isn’t one of those places.

The reason is movement. Moving things by water is less than one-tenth the cost of moving them by land, making rivers among the most strategic economic assets on the planet. The interconnected rivers of the Greater Mississippi system have more miles of navigable waterway than the rest of the world’s internal waterways combined. That is the core reason the United States is a superpower.

But rivers have one mission-critical downside: they have to end somewhere. If a foe can threaten the river’s mouth, then trade possibilities face a pretty brutal cap. Securing river mouths and keeping them free of foes was a leading topic of much of Europe’s genocidal centuries.

For the Americans, the problematic bit isn’t just New Orleans, the last stop on the Mississippi’s course to the Gulf of Mexico, but also the island of Cuba which truncates access between the Gulf of Mexico and the wider Atlantic. And even if the Americans can get past Cuba, they still need to neutralize all maritime choke points in the Greater Caribbean region.

If anything, it is more serious than it sounds. For the United States has more waterways than “merely” the Mississippi. The Intracoastal Waterway lies behind a series of barrier islands that broadly parallel the East and Gulf Coasts. One of those Cuban-pinch points is the Florida Strait, which could enable a hostile Cuba-based power to not just block American trade in and out of the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi, but also disrupt internal maritime transport from New York, Richmond, Savannah and Miami from reaching New Orleans, St Louis, Louisville and Minneapolis.

Any extra-hemispheric power that is able to partner with any spot in the region could turn the Americans from an outward-projecting superpower to one whose own internal transport systems are in question.

There’s more to the Caribbean than Cuba, more to Panama than cheap shipping, more to Venezuela than cheap oil, more to the Bahamas than beaches, and more to Grenada than cheap medical school. These places and more are the collective garage door to the United States. A hostile Caribbean threatens the United States in a way that a robust China, a war-drum-beating Soviet Union or German-dominated Europe cannot. As such, American strategic policy since roughly 1800 has been borderline neurotic about forcing the Caribbean into a shape that works for the United States. Just how neurotic? What was truly scary about the Cuban Missile Crisis wasn’t just how discombobulated the Americans were, but how logical it was for them to risk nuclear war to keep the Soviets out of Cuba.

At its core, Obama’s sunshine policy was about putting the Cuban bit of the Caribbean puzzle on the path to bed – permanently. It wasn’t like Cuba had been a threat to the Americans since 1992. Left with just its own resources, Cuba is merely an irritant. Yet as a geopolitical strategist I did find it nice to shift the country firmly out of the “watch closely” category with Iran and Ukraine on my wall map, and lump it in with the “meh” column that serves as home to Belgium, Belarus and Bangladesh.

Does this mean Trump’s decision is foolhardy? Not at all. Trump is at least partially right: the Obama administration really didn’t play hardball with Havana – the bilateral warming put next to no pressure on the Castro regime to liberalize, much less stand down. To use the president’s terms, a better deal can certainly be had. Trump holds most of the cards here, and there are plenty of options: everything ranging from a firmer diplomatic stance to economic sanctions that target other investors in Cuba to the threat (or use) of (para)military force. And since at present there is no extra-hemispheric power that seems interested in making Cuba its local military footprint, there is no time pressure either.

But that doesn’t mean that Cuba will remain in its post-Soviet no-man’s-land forever. Trump’s actions must have follow up. For if all this backtrack does is buy time and space for someone else to insert themselves into Cuban affairs, then much of what gives the Americans all that strategic insulation, economic power and room to maneuver – much of what makes the United States a global superpower –could be in doubt.

Qatar Caught in the Disorder

Saudi Arabia is in the midst of a full-court press against the government of Qatar, leading a coalition of countries as varied as Egypt, Bahrain, the UAE, Yemen and the Maldives. All these states and more have severed diplomatic relations, in addition to barring all land, air and maritime transport to and from the tiny Persian Gulf country.

So what’s up?

Think of the relationship between Saudi Arabia and Qatar like the relationship between the United States and France during the Cold War. It was obvious to everyone who was stronger, and France didn’t appreciate playing second fiddle. So, in order to balance relations and maintain some independent standing, France would cut side deals with the Soviets. Little that Paris did was purposefully hostile to Washington, but France was certainly the gap in the Western wall.

Qatar is a Sunni Arab country, just like Saudi Arabia; in fact, Qatar is the only other country claiming Wahhabi Islam as its official state religion. But that doesn’t mean Qatar — with a citizen population less than one-twentieth that of Saudi Arabia — wants Riyadh to be the boss of it. Qatar’s independent streak is borne out of a perception of its options. Qatar is the only Persian Gulf state not utterly dependent upon oil. Instead it exports natural gas in liquid form, making the Qatari economy resistant to any minor Saudi meddling. Doha has weaponized news media in the form of Al Jazeera, routinely blasting out stories critical of its neighbors (read: the Saudi royal family) throughout the Arab speaking world.

Most importantly, Qatar has worked to bring other powers into its side of the Persian Gulf. The most obvious of these powers is Iran — Saudi Arabia’s arch-nemesis (shameless plug: for lots of information on the coming war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, see Chapter 7 of my new book, The Absent Superpower.

But Qatar has hardly stopped there. Qatar has also pursued an aggressive foreign policy that seeks to back Islamist groups — oftentimes militant Islamist groups — throughout the Middle East. Based on your politics, many would agree with the Saudis and classify some of these Qatari-backed groups as being in the terrorism business.

A few things come from this:

First, this points to how emboldened the Saudis must feel after Trump’s visit and sword-dancing bonanza. Riyadh is desperate to position itself in the region before Iran can get back on its feet, however wobbly. An early step is to ensure that all regional states fall in line, and fast. Qatar has long been the most defiant Gulf Arab state. Any concessions Doha grants in upcoming days will be an important message to Oman and Kuwait, who have yet to side with the Saudis in halting trade with Qatar. Also important is the reaction of Turkey — the only other Sunni state in the region that might butt heads with Riyadh over who is really in charge.

Second, the Saudi strategy seems expressly designed to bring about a rupture in Qatari-American relations. One of the balancing powers the Qatari brought in to offset the Saudis is the United States. CENTCOM established a forward headquarters in Qatar to coordinate the Afghan and Iraqi Wars, and now CENTCOM plays a leading role in anti-ISIS operations. So long as the Americans have CENTCOM in Qatar, there is only so much the Saudis can do to counter Qatari ambitions. But should the Trump administration conclude the Qataris are Iranian-loving terrorist-sponsors, CENTCOM would relocate back to the American mainland in a heartbeat. That wouldn’t just leave tiny Qatar utterly alone, it would probably result in its de facto annexation by Saudi Arabia within a few years.

Third, welcome to the new normal. From 1945 until … last month, the world was more or less American-managed. The United States used its control of global markets, global security and the global ocean to build a series of alliances and institutions to hold everything together. In this system, the participants gained global market access, global resource access and physical security in exchange for deference to Washington on defense matters. They also agreed to not do certain things. Near the top of the no-no list was economic warfare: embargoes, for example, were to be relegated to history. The United States would arbitrate disputes to prevent them from spinning out of control, particularly between countries that were on the ally list. Countries like, say, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The United States has been backing away from such active management since the Clinton administration and I’ve long maintained that whoever was elected president in 2016 would be the leader to preside over the formal abandonment of that system. (Lots on that in my first book: The Accidental Superpower.) Trump won. Trump is on deck. Trump is trashing the American-built, -maintained and -brokered global Order. Bereft of American overwatch, regional powers are taking matters into their own hands. The Saudi-led actions against Qatar are a (very small) taste of the Disorder to come.

Fourth, do not allow yourself to get caught up in the Saudi propaganda. While the groups that Qatar (and Iran) back are not nice people, it isn’t as if the Saudis are paragons of pacifism. Saudi foreign and security policy going back to the 1980s is to export Saudi malcontents to conflict zones, as well as to supply fighters within and beyond their region with weapons, intelligence and money so they can bloody Riyadh’s foes. By the very definition that the Saudis are using to condemn Qatari actions, the Saudis are the industry leaders in the terrorism business.

You can easily make a strong case that Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait are all complicit with militant groups of all sorts — and have been for decades. Sometimes they control these groups, sometimes they simply assist them, sometimes they lose control and the groups rebrand, sometimes factions within the sponsoring countries keep supporting the militants even after control is lost. This last is certainly what happened with mujahedeen-turned-al Qaeda 20 years ago and is happening with al Qaeda in Iraq-turned-ISIS today. No one in the Persian Gulf has clean hands.

Fifth, a key characteristic of the emerging Disorder is that while the United States will not feel that it is nailed down to express security guarantees or global structures, it still will intervene from time to time and will still play favorites. While I believe it is high time for the United States to bring CENTCOM home, I also read Saudi actions as an attempt to shape American behavior. Is there room for Saudi-American cooperation on a great many issues? Sure. But as the U.S. lets the global order break down, there will be constant risks of being coopted, bribed, tricked and otherwise manipulated into subconsciously adopting the goals of other countries as America’s own.

Qatar is just test #1.

Some Inconvenient Truths

U.S. President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the 2016 Paris Climate Accord June 1. In the past 24 hours the media has been, in a word, lively. Trump’s decision was an appeal to a base that has hungered for these kinds of dramatic, headline grabbing actions – and the media has not failed in providing the “liberal clamoring” that so energizes Trump’s supporters.

Let’s get my personal politics out of the way. I’m a Green. I’ve got solar panels on my house. I recycle. I drive a Prius. I backpack the Rockies in the summer. I would have handled the Paris Agreement differently, but I certainly agreed with its tenor and thrust. I’m part of the whole “Science is Real” movement because of, you know, the Enlightenment.

I’m not a normal Green, however, because of, you know, the Enlightenment. I can do math. And that means that I’m pretty good at looking into the guts of a topic and sussing out facts and trends that supporters of this or that movement or ideology often find unsettling. Climate change in general and the Paris Agreement in specific are no exception.

As a Green, it might be uncomfortable to admit but the reality is that the market is driving green technology development and application in most economies, especially the United States. If you agree with former President Obama’s statement that cities, states and businesses (i.e. the engines of the US economy) are picking up the mantle of leading on responsible climate action, then the market will ultimately decide how well and how long countries adhere to “green” behaviors.

The real inconvenient truth for those condemning Trump for the Paris withdrawal revolves around fossil fuels. They certainly have problems, but fossil fuels don’t all pollute equally. The new combined cycle natural gas burning power plants that have been going up in recent years have but half of the emissions of coal, and because natural gas is either a waste product out of the shale fields or can now be produced at roughly $2 per 1000 cubic feet (less than half the forty-year average), it is wiping coal from the board. Most Greens hate natural gas because it is cost-competitive with pretty much everything – especially alternatives – but the bottom line is because of shale natural gas the United States is going to meet its Paris commitments regardless of what happens to the agreement itself. With or without Obama, with or without Trump, with or without the EPA, and largely with or without alternative energy sources.

Alternatives just are not ready to take over baseload capacity, and until that happens we are stuck with fossil fuels. Despite the rise in effectiveness in and demand for solar and wind technologies, another inconvenient truth is that peak daily demand for power in most places is just after sunset, while peak seasonal demand in most places is after sunset in the winter. That desperately degrades the solar argument anywhere that has high solar variation between summer and winter (like most developed countries). I, however, live in Texas – a sunny location where peak supply and demand line up almost perfectly.

Between cost and recharge cycle restrictions and safety, battery technology needs at least another decade to work out the kinks before it can really start to square the supply/demand circle. In the meantime, it isn’t as if lithium extraction is the most environmentally sound practice; if you like lithium batteries and electric cars in their current incarnation, you have to love strip mining. And always keep in mind that many of the components of your standard cars are recyclable or reusable, but your Tesla’s fuel cells – or at present any lithium car battery – are definitely not.

Which brings us back to the Paris deal.

It’s unclear what Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris accords will have on climate change, because it’s unclear what a non-binding agreement like Paris could do in the first place. Critics of the U.S. withdrawal who note the U.S. is joining the ranks of Syria and Nicaragua are inadvertently making the point for me: there’s no way a non-binding deal that has members as diverse as Vanuatu, Germany, Brazil, India and Congo is going to be entered into and applied equally across the board. That even the big oil companies – the traditional bugbears of environmentalist nightmares – are on board with the Paris deal shows both how toothless it is but also how much industry has already shifted toward reaching the emissions aims it sets out. And to do so with or without a deal.

I’ve found it particularly entertaining that many seem to be cozying up to China. CNN went so far to publish a story titled “Has Donald Trump Given the World to China on a Silver Platter?” China being the country that has added more soft coal burning capacity than the rest of the world combined during the past decade. Germany is also often feted as the future of Green politics – despite continually moving away from cleaner fuels like natural gas and nuclear in favor of lignite coal. Yes, Germany has installed loads of solar power capacity, but because the sun does not actually shine in Germany all those panels are in essence giant paperweights. U.S. per capita emissions have been collapsing since shale kicked in; China’s have tripled since 1990. Despite Germany’s PR sparkle, their emissions reductions have far more to do with demographic decline than alternative energy. In fact, German emissions reductions have actually slowed since they started their solar buildout.

The booming noise of 10,000 pundits and analysts in what has become standard media covfefe misses the forest for the trees. Trump isn’t just the poster child for an obnoxious new form of politics, but also for a far deeper geopolitical shift that is already past the point of no return. The question is not if China will lead on climate change, or whether France or Germany will pick up the mantle of Leader of the Free World, but the most critical inconvenient truth is that the era of unipolar global leadership is slipping away from us.

Love or hate the United States, love or hate the global order, the United States created and maintained that order to serve its Cold War interests. The Cold War is long gone, and now the U.S. – quite belatedly I might add – is letting the order go. We are no longer living in an age where the U.S. has the will or ability to continue being the lead on everything, everywhere, all the time.

We’re all gaining insight and empathy into the minds of carriage makers in the face of rising automobile production, or whale oil traders at the dawn of the kerosene era. Everything we know for the past 70 years is predicated upon American-instilled international stability. That’s the European Union. That’s the Communist Party of China. That’s Brazilian soy production. That’s Toyota. That’s the iPhone supply chain. That’s even the Paris Accord. None of them can function without the American-maintained Order. We don’t know how to function during such a fundamental paradigm shift.

The end of the Paris Agreement has triggered the ultimate in rear-view-mirror longing. It’s a waste of time to mourn a nostalgic view of what America’s role in the world once was. Our effort would be far better spent preparing for the Disorder to come.