Read the other installments in this series:
 
The American Retreat, Part I: Oil
The American Retreat, Part II: Soldiers of Fortune

Not one to collect moss, Donald Trump shot directly from the G20 summit to South Korea July 1 where he nearly skipped the pro-forma niceties with the South Koreans for a tete-a-tete with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Not only did the meeting happen in the DMZ itself, Trump became the first sitting American leader ever to cross into North Korean territory proper. The bulk of the talking heads in the American foreign policy community had a series of minor strokes at the sort of friendly PR Trump laid out for a guy who remains one of the most violently repressive leaders on the planet. They’ve got a point.

In (partial) contrast, I’m one of the people who was cautiously optimistic when the White House announced Trump would be meeting face-to-face with Kim both last year and this week. My feelings are less because I had high confidence in Trump personally or the new approach of engagement in general, and more because nothing else in the past seventy years had worked so why not try something new?

There were two things about the American-NorK summit that caught my eye.

First, personnel. 

Trump is a bit hard on his staff. He’s impulsive, rude, belittling, and he becomes supremely bored and more than a bit aggroed when folks start presenting him with… information. He particularly loathes the sorts of details that accompany a contextual briefing. (I’m certain he would despise my work, for example.) 

His cabinet, therefore, tends to fall into four general buckets. First, the blindingly incompetent (think HUD Secretary Ben Carson). Second, the sycophants (think Secretary of State Mike Pompeo). Third, those in charge of departments Trump just doesn’t care about (think Education Secretary Betsy DeVos). And fourth, those precious few who know how to say just the right thing to their boss so he gives them real leeway on real issues.

Of this last category only two staffers remain. The first is U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer. This newsletter is about harder security issues than are on Lighthizer’s remit, but if you’d like a bit of refresher you can review my thoughts on the current USTR here and here. 

The second is National Security Advisor John Bolton.

When I read about how many people dislike John Bolton, I’m reminded a bit about Ronald Reagan – even those who hated Reagan’s policies admitted Reagan was pretty damned effective at getting his way. John Bolton is capable and competent in that vein and he lives and breathes all things foreign policy. Which most certainly does not mean he is an easy man to work with. Most who have had the dubious pleasure would never call him a prick because that would insult pricks everywhere. He is brash, aggressive, rude, and has little regard for things like diplomacy, tradition, alliances, institutions, or human rights. (Which come to think of it, is probably why he’s lasted as long on TeamTrump as he has.)  

Two of Bolton’s pet projects are that he believes the Iranian and North Korean governments should be overthrown, preferably by force. And as the National Security Advisor he has the ability to shout that into Trump’s face (Bolton’s not the ear-whispering type) at every opportunity. 

He’s had lots of opportunities of late. 

Relations with Iran have been getting steadily sharper for months, what with the Americans laying on the sanctions thick while the Iranians have once again spun-up their nuclear program. Similarly, relations with North Korea aren’t exactly peachy, what with the North Koreans continuing to proceed with their own nuclear program in violation of clear American preferences. Bolton has repeatedly and forcefully advised Trump that the best counter to the Iranian and NorK positions involves ammunition. 

Bolton has not gotten his way. A few days ago the Iranians shot down a large American surveillance drone. Bolton led the charge within the administration to retaliate with strikes on Iranian military facilities. Trump called off the strikes at the last minute. 

But it is on North Korea that issues are proceeding in a new direction. Trump didn’t even let Bolton tag along to a summit with a foreign leader. Instead Trump sent Bolton off elsewhere. 

It is one thing to overrule an advisor. After all, Trump is the president and it is his prerogative that matters, not Bolton’s. But to banish the only competent foreign policy hand in your administration to literally Mongolia (seriously folks, I cannot make this shit up!) is something entirely different. 

’ve never been worried that Trump would start a war. Despite his trademark fire-breathing rhetoric, Trump has time and time again shown that upon reflection he’d rather de-escalate hostilities. But no matter what I feel about Bolton personally or professionally, I think it is an eminently good idea for at least one person in an administration to be able to locate Canada on a map. It appears Trump may be ushering out that one person.

The second issue is more… wishy washy, but has far grander implications than any mere personnel shift. 

Even if Trump believes and trusts everything Kim says and Kim believes and trusts everything Trump says, the straight-up denuclearization of North Korea was never really on the table. North Korea lives in a tough neighborhood. Prickly (nuclear-armed) Russia to the north, nationalist (nuclear-armed) China to the west. Resurging (nuclear-capable-in-a-long-weekend) Japan to the east. And anxious (nuclear-capable-in-a-month) South Korea to the south. For the North Koreans these days, the American strategic preferences as regards the Korean Peninsula isn’t much more than a supportive footnote further justifying a program already viewed as core to national survival.

That seems to be reflected in Trump’s Korea policy. If the Americans are to step back from the world writ large, it is impossible for them to continue keeping the five-way strategic competition among Taiwan, China, South Korea, North Korea and Japan locked in ice much longer. There is something to be said for establishing a regional balance of power …and then simply leaving. To that end the handshake “deal” struck at the first Trump-Kim summit last year appeared to be that North Korea could keep their nukes so long as they forgo the developing of an intercontinental missile system. Put bluntly, North Korea’s nuclear program was being drop-kicked from being America’s problem to North Korea’s neighbors’. Kind of a dick move, but hey, geopolitics isn’t often about hand-holding. 

The problem with this strategy – and the reason I’m hesitant to put my personal stamp of approval on it – is what happens next? Any Korean Peninsula without active American involvement is one in which the South Koreans have no choice but to go nuclear (just as any East Asia without American involvement is one in which both the Japanese and Taiwanese have no choice but to go nuclear.)

The American retreat will unlock a series of regional grievances that have been on hold for decades, but with the technologies of the now. An Asia without America is going to be a bit of a free-for-all, but that doesn’t mean someone won’t emerge on top.

My bet is entirely on Japan. The Japanese economy is the only one (aside from North Korea) that is not dependent upon international stability for its functioning. Put simply, everyone in Asia faces challenges as the world’s economic and strategic norms disintegrate, but for Northeast Asia, Japan’s challenges are the least extreme and Japan’s capabilities are the most advanced.

Fast forward less than a decade and Japan emerges from the post-Order maelstrom as Asia’s first power.

At that point Japan will not only have broken Chinese power, but will have massively added to what is already the world’s second-most capable expeditionary navy andit will be nuclear armed. A future America-Japanese dust-up is not inevitable, but history (strongly) suggests the future’s two most powerful naval forces will stumble across a few spots in the Greater Pacific where they rub each other the wrong way.

I’m fully willing to admit that the current East Asian balance of power is far from sustainable, but that hardly means I’m looking forward a Japanese-Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere with a nuclear chaser.

Read Part I here

Hong Kong has been one of the most important economic locations on the planet for over a century.

China has always had problems holding together, but it has also always been a land of opportunity for outsiders who held a logistical and technological edge. Few powers in history have held a sharper edge than the British Empire. Hong Kong sits at the mouth of the Pearl River Delta, and in dominating HK the Brits were able to exploit the cheap labor of the lower basin, while also controlling any exports from the broader Pearl. It was a strategy the Brits had used to great success in locations as diverse as Suez, Calais, the Gambia, Durban, Charleston, and New York City.

As Mao’s de facto alliance with the Americans took form in the 1970s, British Hong Kong became internationalized. The Hong Kongers would use foreign tech and capital – repeating a pattern that stretched back literally a millennium – to create products for export.

In the late 1980s then-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher negotiated the transfer of Hong Kong to the Chinese mainland and a new chapter began. Hong Kong shifted from being a manufacturing base to being a financial and logistical hub. The same foreign tech and cash came in, but HK used its already-sophisticated managerial skills to funnel it into the lower Pearl.

That’s the economics. Here’s the politics:

It is not an oversimplification to say the Chinese Communist Party is obsessed with national unity. The “country” of China has historically not held together well, and Hong Kong was no exception. For most of Chinese history, the southern coastal cities from Shanghai south to Hong Kong were integrated more with the wider world than with their own countrymen. But with the Order’s advance in the late 1940s, the imperial age ended and Maoist China was able to establish control over the entire coast… aside from Hong Kong. The handover from London to Beijing in the 1990s brought Hong Kong into the fold as well.

But there was a poison pill.

The British ran Hong Kong like the imperial territory it was. While the Americans forced the Brits to divest nearly all their empire, the Americans made an exception when it came to Hong Kong. It would have been ludicrous to squander the intelligence opportunities of having British control of such a rich and strategically located bit of allied territory. But when it became obvious to Thatcher that handover was inevitable, the Brits started democratizing Hong Kong. In the aftermath of the June 1989 Tiananmen massacre, the effort intensified. When the handover finally occurred in July 1997, Hong Kong was a full-fledged democracy (albeit one who obviously had no say as to which country it would be associated with).

Thatcher hardwired into the handover treaty a looooong political transition period. While Hong Kong would immediately and officially become “Chinese” territory in 1997, its political system would remain largely self-governing for another half-century. An island of democracy in a sea of authoritarianism. The Chinese call it One Nation, Two Systems.

Say what you will about Thatcher, she was very good at monkeywrenches.

So long as the Chinese economy performed well, Two Systems was an annoyance Beijing was willing to tolerate. But things have changed:

First, the Chinese export-led system has peaked. Global demographics have turned negative and global consumption can no longer absorb exports on the scale China can churn out.

Second, the Chinese financial system is in dire straits. Lending in China isn’t like lending in most places where you… well… have to pay back the loan. In China the government banks funnel cheap credit to firms who guarantee high employment, and to hell with profitability. The goal is to keep everyone in a job so they don’t protest. A side effect of this policy generates scads of subpar quality products that no one needs. China then dumps those products on the international market. Not only can the global market no longer absorb all the Chinese stuff, the financial model has pushed to the point that there are so many debt bombs on the foundations of so many sub-sectors that it would make the bad actors of the US financial crisis blush.

Third, Chinese demographics have peaked. Replacing global demand with Chinese demand was never really an option, and in 2019 it became obvious that Chinese demand was plateauing. Automotive sales – typically the purest indicator of customer demand – have dropped more than most countries do during heavy recessions. Blame the One Child policy – China is running out of twentysomethings. That’s driving labor costs up at the same time it is driving consumption down.

Fourth, the friendly geopolitical environment that China has thrived under – that all-important American-led Order – is in its final days. Much of what has brought China rapid economic development – foreign technology and capital, bottomless global markets, endless raw material imports – is ending. With local markets insufficient to replace global markets, the Chinese hold an economy designed for the 1990s that has no place in today’s world.

Fifth, the Americans are formally and directly targeting Chinese industrial and trade policy. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer has already dusted off plans to triple the total American tariff load on China as soon as he gets the go-ahead from his boss. There may be a bit of an American-Chinese trade truce in place, but I doubt it will last much longer than the last two (which each lasted about 75 days).

Sixth, an oil crisis is brewing in the Persian Gulf. Should the Americans do anything to impinge upon Persian Gulf oil flows – and “anything” includes leaving – China faces an energy crisis far worse than what the Americans struggled through in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Some two-thirds of China’s oil is imported, with over half of that coming from the Gulf. China’s navy is utterly incapable of convoying what it needs should convoys become necessary.

The Chinese leadership is fully aware of all these concerns and is fully aware that the Chinese ship of state can no longer sail in its current direction. President Xi Jinping – rightly – fears for the future of the unified Chinese state. To that end Xi spent the bulk of his six years in office to date eliminating anyone in the Communist Party who was willing to defy him under the guise of an anti-corruption purge. The effort was done with more than a bit of side-eye to smashing any sort of regional autonomy. Now’s he’s working on new tech-heavy programs designed to purge dissent throughout wider society. The jury is still out on how successful that will be, but it points to the it’s-not-paranoia-if-they’re-really-out-to-get-you feel of the Party at the moment.

Enter the Hong Kong protests of recent weeks.

Part and parcel to Xi’s efforts to preserve national unity is to lock down Hong Kong. In partial violation of the Two Systems policy, Xi pushed an “extradition law” on the Hong Kong government which would enable any mainland Chinese judicial entity – all of which are arms of the Chinese Communist Party – to issue arrest warrants for any Hong Kong citizen. China’s security services already kidnap Hong Kongers and smuggle them back to the mainland as they need to, but with the new law any local magistrate could force the abduction of anyone in broad daylight. (Such legal authority already exists within mainland China for everyone else.)

The Hong Kongers, realizing the extradition law’s adoption would mean the end of their special status some three decades early, have resisted. And protested.

The timing is far from coincidental. Beijing is ratcheting down on Hong Kong because it fears for the unity of the Chinese state as a whole. Hong Kong is resisting because it doesn’t want to be part of the Chinese state. The primary rationale for Xi’s new law is to keep the country together. The Hong Kongers’ rebellion is largely because of the new law. And now the phrase “Hong Kong is not China” keeps popping up in the protests.

Something’s gotta give, and it isn’t going to be Beijing.

The question, as it seems to be with everything, is timing. Much of the Chinese government’s actions these days – as regards Trump and trade talks, or Japan and territorial disputes, or Iran and oil – seems to be about buying time, but that time may be running out. On July 1, a group of Hong Kong protestors stormed the local legislative assembly with a degree of intensity that was new for the protests. This was less families-with-children-in-strollers and more clubs-and-pipes-of-the-Antifa-type. In the aftermath some of the graffiti caught my attention: “It was you who told me peaceful marches did not work.”

I don’t have the insight to know who spawned this particular action of vandalism.

Was it the leaders of what have so far been a hyper-organized protest movement? Are they testing the waters for a new push?

Was it some imported anarchists who just love a good riot?

Was it a false flag operation launched from the mainland to justify a crackdown?

Was Beijing aware the storming was imminent, and yet did nothing so that the radicals would provide a justification for their own destruction?

I don’t know. And unfortunately, it doesn’t really matter. Whoever thought that ransacking the assembly building was a good idea has crossed the Rubicon. Whether you view the true power in China as President Xi, the government in Beijing, or the Chinese Communist Party, it cannot tolerate this sort of action in Hong Kong – especially at this time. No matter what your view of Chinese history is, no matter what your view on Xi’s personal vindictiveness might be, the Hong Kong protests have become a threat to national unity. A new crackdown is imminent.

The scale of what’s about to happen is difficult to grasp:

At their peak, the Tiananmen protests involved 300,000 people, mostly students. The Chinese government sent in nearly as many troops to crush the movement. Fatality reports varied wildly from zero (the number Beijing proffered) to 10,000 (the estimate of the British embassy).

In Hong Kong, the protestors have regularly managed to get a million people out in the streets, a figure that has swelled to two million on several occasions. They aren’t just young people. They are families. Retirees. Bankers. Lots of people who normally never protest. I’ve not seen anything like this since the broad-spectrum Iranian protests that dislodged the Shah back in 1979. It is a huge proportion of Hong Kong’s total population (less than 7.5 million).

Ending the protests means nothing less than a full military invasion and occupation of the island. And unlike the Tiananmen massacre where reports of the military operation made it out piecemeal, in today’s social media age Hong Kong’s fall will be broadcast live for the world to see. It will be like Japan’s 2001 Sendai earthquake, but with a wall of tanks instead of a wall of water.

This all feels… momentous but I can’t quite put my finger on the implications. I’m a context guy and for this I just don’t have any. I cannot think of a military crackdown in a first-world economy in modern times. In the United States the last one was the Kent State shooting in 1970, but that was only a few hundred students and 67 bullets. Paris in 1968 got pretty messy, but the violence there was…what, threeorders of magnitude less than what’s imminent in Hong Kong. I’ve got to go back to the riots in Europe in the 1930s at the height of the Depression. The norms of our age are breaking apart and we’ve not yet developed the frames of reference to process what’s coming.

For the immediate future, the bottom line is that while Hong Kong lacks the size and reach and means to export its protest movement to the mainland, the CCP certainly has the size and reach and means to export its forces to Hong Kong. China’s information control systems are sufficient – and the grip of the CCP strong enough – to prevent meaningful contamination of the mainland political system. The protests will not only fail, they signal the end of Hong Kong.

Hong Kong is about to become an absolutely horrible place to be. The degree of Chinese… reconstruction of the island will be on par with the cultural genocide already being imposed upon the Uyghurs of China’s western Xinjiang region. It won’t last a week or a month or a year. We’re looking at something that will last at least a decade.

That will have deep implications for anyone doing business in the country.

At a minimum every ongoing reservation about operating in China is about to get a hard underline. Foreign business magnates like Tim Cook have so far been able to ignore the ethical implications of their firms’ China dependency. It is difficult to see that continuing in light of what’s about to occur.

And it isn’t simply about ethics. Many of the financiers that make Hong Kong work are Chinese citizens. Whether Bank of America or whoever is willing to stay in a place where their workers disappear is… questionable. But it doesn’t end there. It’s not just Chinese citizens; the extradition law also applies to foreigners. These companies are used to working in China, so it’s not that the Chinese system is so scary that they can’t stomach the country. It’s that none of these companies have tried to operate in China during an active crackdown.

The coming violence and occupation will utterly remove Hong Kong from the global network of logistical and financial hubs. Hong Kong has been China’s primary entry point, China’s primary export point, and most capable financial center. Its end takes the gem out of the Chinese crown, as it were. For the past thirty years, China has provided foreign investors with scale, cheap labor, security and local expertise. The ending of Hong Kong damages all that and more.

Read Part II here

I recently had the opportunity to be in New Zealand and Australia for a few days. Being on the opposite side of the planet is a bit magical – and I’m not talking about the people, culture, topography, food or alcohol. It’s the fact that the Australasian countries are more than a half-day ahead of the U.S. news cycle. As a forecaster the idea that my day begins fifteen hours earlier in Sydney than back in the States gives me the sort of giddy excitement that I’m sure bubbles up from new companions of Doctor Who.

In part it is because all the inanity of American media’s ongoing obsession with the less important dramas consuming Congress and TeamTrump are (thankfully) muted, while all things Asian are loud and proud. I’d like to think that I would have noticed what’s going on in China regardless, but Down Under it is absolutely unavoidable. Events are pushing rapidly toward the cataclysmic, and how they unfold in the next few weeks will determine much about how China evolves – or devolves – for the decade to come.

There’s quite a bit of backstory for this one. Chinese history is less a straight path from here to there and more a tangle of knotted social, cultural, technological, economic, political and strategic threads. As such this newsletter will read a bit like a mosaic. There’s a lot going on and a lot of long-term trends all coming to a head at the same time. That, and I get a sort of perverse satisfaction writing things that I know will be blocked in other countries. Anywho, buckle up.

In recent decades the primary source of legitimacy for the Chinese Communist Party has been the delivery of steadily improving job security, growing wages and all the things that go along with economic growth… but such wasn’t always the case. Pre-1970 legitimacy flowed from the delivering of beatings. Anyone who challenged state rule could look forward to being beaten into submission, assuming they weren’t summarily imprisoned and/or executed.

But in 1972 that bleeding heart liberal Richard Nixon travelled to China and struck a deal: America would admit China into its global Order of security and trade on the condition that China solidify its recent split with the Soviet Union. The Sino-American rapprochement reworked the Cold War and was one of the phalanx of factors that ultimately crushed the Soviet Union.

For the CCP, the decision was not one to be made lightly, and not simply because the Soviet Union had a lot of nuclear weapons and the Russians tend towards historical umbrage as a leading motivator. Chinese history is not a tale of wealth and unity, but instead of chaos and privation. The Chinese heartland in the north is too big to be easily consolidated, and too exposed to the outside world to be easily defended. While the Brits were able to become British in the relative isolation of their island, and the Russians were able to steadily expand their writ throughout the lightly populated Eurasian steppe, Chinese history is a tale of warlords and collapsed imperial systems that just couldn’t make it stick.

It’s a simple issue of geography. China is mammoth in size, but it lacks the sort of internal riverine transport network that would enable pre-industrial Chinese authority to reliably project power to its own periphery. Combine poor transport options with high population densities and China suffers from a center that cannot impose its will on its outlands on its worst days, and outlands that cannot become strong enough to fully resist central control on their best days. The whole place spins apart and crashes together with regularity – and that even before one considers the predations of outsiders. For the millennia of Chinese history, the “country” of China has really only held together as a unified political entity for about three centuries, and half of that was under Mongol occupation.

Half of what’s left is during the American-led Order since the end of WWII. Part and parcel of the Order’s system was the elimination of empires. For the Chinese who had been under the boot of the Japanese and Europeans during their “century of humiliation,” this was a critical factor. Once the Chinese civil war ended with Chiang Kai-shek’s retreat to Taiwan, Mao Zedong was able to finally consolidate control of all of China under a single government.

While the strategic implications of the CCP’s 1970s decision to formally join the American-led Order were robust, the decision was still beyond risky. It meant purposefully flooding the country with mammoth economic and technological changes. It subjected poor-but-unified Maoist China to nearly everything that had in ages past wrecked China: outside influence, shifting economic norms, new ideas, internal migration.

In the years that followed, the Communist Party fundamentally reworked its economic system to take full advantage of their new global access. It wasn’t exactly swords-to-plowshares, but it certainly included rapid development and industrialization of the Chinese coast.

This transformation required a different sort of educational system. Or more accurately, it required an educational system worthy of the name: less blind ideology and Mao-chants and more math and management skills. The effort of achieving mass literacy had many effects and side effects, but one aspect is something Americans can identify with intimately:

Chinese parents didn’t want their kids eking out a meagre existence on subsistence farms, but instead wanted them to earn advanced degrees, wear suits and work in climate-controlled offices. China’s changing economic life may have required a more educated workforce, but just as American parents’ predilections oversupplied the American job market with white collar workers, so too did the preferences of Chinese parents. By the late 1980s it had become apparent that many of China’s twentysomethings were trained for the wrong things.

So they did what twentysomethings do: they complained about it. At a party. All at once. All in the same place. In Tiananmen Square. In 1989.

The Tiananmen protests were not about democracy, or at least not at first. They were about an entire generation who had known nothing but upwardly rising standards of living for their entire lives, who suddenly discovered the world wasn’t going to be quite as packed with golden eggs as state propaganda had promised.

The economic changes wrought by China’s post-Nixon opening pushed the CCP well out of their comfort zone. The protests, in a manner of speaking, pushed the CCP back into its comfort zone. The club returned, the CCP deployed tanks to Tiananmen, killing thousands of Chinese young people.

It is about to happen all over again.