Biden’s First Air Strike

In the wee hours of February 26, American military forces in the Middle East carried out a handful of air strikes against Iranian paramilitary forces in Syria. To my knowledge it represents the first such public strike against known Iranian forces in the country in a very long time.
 
It is exceedingly dangerous to opine at length about any military action carried out by an administration as newborn as TeamBiden. The almost-overwhelming urge is to read-in grand-plan ambitions such as attempting to reset relations with Iran, or shape the Israeli-Saudi dynamic, or presage greater involvement in the region as a whole as a prelude to a broadscale geopolitical rewiring. (Many of Biden’s current national security team were with then-Vice President Biden during the Obama Administration, and watched helplessly and hopelessly as President Obama failed to do jack at a time when forthright American action could have generated positive results. There very well could be some now-that-I’m-in-charge-ism going on.)
 
The reality is probably much more prosaic, and probably is much closer to what the Biden administration’s official statement claimed: On Feb 15 a local militia carried out rocket attacks against a U.S. facility in the northern Iraqi city of Erbil. That group was a front for Iranian militias in the region. TeamBiden wants to dissuade future attacks while the White House finishes reviewing options for American policy in Iraq.
 
If the official statement holds true, it’d put the U.S. strike very firmly in the Clintonesque bucket. Bill Clinton wasn’t particularly interested by anything that had to with foreign affairs, but he also wasn’t shy about dispensing moderate levels of military force when his advisors so advised. That isn’t meant as either a lauding or condemnation of the Clinton administration’s Middle East policies, but instead simply a recognition that Clinton was willing to use the various levers of American power in ways neither Obama nor Trump ever did. It’s a fairly traditional view of American power.
 
Now, just because there probably is no grand plan here doesn’t mean that there won’t be many reverberations. After all, it has been 20 years since the United States had a commander in chief that did much of anything against Iranian interests in the region by means of military strikes – W Bush required a degree of Iranian cooperation against al Qaeda and in managing Iraq, Obama was (infamous) for wanting nothing to do with it at all, and Trump opted for a nearly complete hands-off approach with a couple notable exceptions. Intentionally or not this is a signal change that will have consequences.
 
A few thoughts:
 
Turkey: The Turks are absolutely thrilled. Any U.S. policy which involves hurling American ordinance into Syria against anyone except Turkish proxies is one that Ankara can set to music. Turkish-American relations under the past three American presidents have gotten steadily worse to the point that today they are somewhere between cold and nonexistent. It isn’t so much that the Turks want the Americans to be in-region in general, but instead the Turks do appreciate it when the Americans shoot up military factions that the Turks oppose but are too gun-shy to directly go after themselves. The Turkish government was furious with the Obama Administration for threatening to go after the Syrian government but then ultimately backing down. In the Turkish mind Biden is no longer synonymous with his old boss. Down the road, that little reclassification will come in handy for both the Turks and Americans.
 
Israel: The Israeli government loved the Trump Administration’s maximum pressure campaign to isolate Iran, just as much as they hated the Obama Administration’s engagement with Iran. With Biden flinging bombs and looking to enact a far harsher version of Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal, there now exists the tantalizing possibility of the best of all worlds. Military and economic containment of Iran. I’m sure folks in Jerusalem are smiling thoughtfully at the possibilities.
 
Russia: According to regional press reports the Biden Administration only alerted the Russians of the actions after the munitions were in-flight. America has long opposed the Russian military presence in Syria, but Obama and Trump were simply not invested enough to do anything about it. Anything that raises a hint of Russian military casualties at American hands is something that would make the Russians extraordinary nervous. After all, the Russian deployments to Syria cannot be maintained in the face of Turkish or American military hostility.
 
Iraq: Baghdad hasn’t had much to be happy about for a good long while, existing as it does in a politically fractured, economically devastated, strategic limbo. They’re not happy with Iranian militias, but they’re equally unhappy with American military actions. That this counterstrike occurred in Syria rather than Iraq deflects attention from the Iraqis. It’s a small favor from TeamBiden, but Baghdad will accurately interpret it as a favor nonetheless.
 
Iran: Strategically, the Iranians are in a box. Trump’s maximum pressure campaign had gutted Tehran’s ability to sell crude – and those sales pay for everything that makes Iran Iran, from subsidies to keep its own citizens quiet to the paramilitary forces that comprise the bulk of Iran’s broader Middle Eastern strategy. Iran has run out of expendable forces to deploy in Syria and is now digging deep into its formal army officers. I’d be surprised if the Iranians did not lose someone fairly high-up the chain in today’s U.S. strike.
 
For some time now, Iran has been attempting to generate some leverage to use against the Americans in upcoming talks, but it isn’t going well. Iran hijacked a South Korean products tanker back around New Years, but neither TeamTrump nor TeamBiden has cared enough to do anything (all hail shale-revolution-induced-American-energy-independence!). Iranian proxies in Iraq regularly lob rockets into American green zones. What was different about the Feb 15 attack is they actually killed a civilian contractor (a Philippine national), which led TeamBiden to underline that consequence-free American blam remains just a button-push away.

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The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.

Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.

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Deep in the Cold of Texas

I moved from Austin to Denver just under two years ago. Austin is a great city. Young, hip, great food, lots of outdoorsy stuff. But most of my free time is in the summer. So, I’d spend the fall, winter and spring flying here and there only getting glimpses of the wonders of Austin. Then when I’d return home for a long stretch – typically mid-June – temperatures would be above 100 degrees and wouldn’t drop back down into something more civilized until it was time for me to head out again in late-September. So, I relocated to Denver where my free time overlapped with weather that is truly glorious.
 
So, imagine my shock – and the shock of my Austinite friends I left behind – when for the four days beginning February 15 it was warmer at my home near Denver at 7500 feet than it was in Austin. A freak storm front – an Alberta Clipper, a bomb cyclone, a polar vortex, whatever name you choose – crashed down into the middle third of the country, plunging everyone into a once-in-a-decade-or-more deep freeze. In my 20 years in Austin, we cumulatively received less than three inches of snow. This past week Austin got over a foot.
 
Texas is the country’s energy capital, both in terms of greentech and conventional power. It’s by far the top U.S. state in terms of wind power generation, it is rapidly moving up the ranks for solar power, and everyone understands’ that it reigns supreme in oil and natural gas.
 
The storm front seized up everything. It coated wind turbines with ice, forcing 7GW—approximately 10% of Texas’s available grid–offline. It turned associated water that often occurs as part of natural gas production to ice, shutting in half of the state’s production. Oil was similarly impacted, stopping some two-thirds of Texas’s output. Between these direct issues and follow-on ones – water coolant at nuclear power plants froze, forcing shutdowns; insufficient natural gas led to fuel shortages shutting down nearly 17GW–approximately 25% of Texas’s available grid; oil and power curtailments necessitated shut-downs of the bulk of Texas’s refineries leading to mass gas station closures – some seven million Texans lost power. Some for days.
 
Anti-Green voices were quick to condemn the wind turbine issues as proof that greentech will never work. Anti-fossil fuel voices were quick to condemn conventional fossil-fuel thermal-power generation as broken beyond repair. Both are wrong. Deliberately, stupidly, hilariously wrong. What happened is a lot more basic.
 
Texas doesn’t normally get winter, and so isn’t winterized.
 
The technologies and equipment required to operate energy systems at temperatures below 20 degrees are not new. They have been used regularly for decades in places as far removed as Ohio, Oregon, West Virginia, Peru, Tajikistan, Chechnya, and Bosnia. They aren’t technically difficult. They aren’t overly expensive. What they are is usually unnecessary in areas that never have winters. You’re just not going to see things like heating elements embedded in the blades of wind turbines or insulation on natural gas pipes in places like Brazil, Sicily, Vietnam…or Texas.
 
And yet as hot as Texas gets, and as mild as Texas’ winters normally are, it is not a tropical location. Its climate zones span the range of desert, steppe, Mediterranean, and subtropical. Cold and snow can and do happen. Just not often. But apparently, it happens often enough that Texas now needs some basic winterizing. I’ve no doubt that Texas can manage this. Oklahoma, after all, does stuff like this as a matter of course.
 
Here’s a link to by far the best article I’ve read on the hows and whys of what went wrong:
Deep in the heart of Texas’ collapsing power grid | Ars Technica

There will be three outcomes here.
 
First, the entire incident has dented Texas’ reputation as a low-regulation, low-risk and above all else low-cost place to do business. Winterizing isn’t difficult or overly expensive, but it cannot be done overnight, and it is not free. Those costs must be passed on to anyone who uses fuel or electricity, which is, well, everyone. I still believe Texas will be the U.S. state that will do the best in this rapidly deglobalizing world we are entering, but some of the shine has undoubtedly come off.
 
Second, a post-mortem of the recovery process will make it very obvious which pieces of infrastructure will recover more quickly. Burst pipes must be repaired or replaced. Homes that require natural gas for heating will have to have everything inspected to prevent catastrophic follow-on fires and explosions. Coal piles that have frozen through all the way to the ground will take several days to fully thaw. But wind turbines? A little sun on the blades and they can start spinning again.
 
We’ve all assumed that the intermittent nature of greentech generation is a negative, necessitating it being backed-up and balanced-out by more reliable conventional electricity sources like natural gas burning power plants. For the most part that remains true, but this coming week Texas will demonstrate that in some circumstances wind is actually more reliable than supposedly rock-solid, non-intermittent, fully-dispatchable fossil-fuel driven power. That unexpected lesson will lodge itself into Texans’ collective subconscious and color infrastructure decisions for years.
 
Third, that lesson will find itself reinforced by the issue of longer-term costs.
 
Safeguarding wind turbines so the events of this past week can never happen again only requires some built-in heating elements or a few drone ports to manually de-ice. Once (or maybe twice) and done. But safeguarding more conventional power generation? Insulating every above-ground oil, natural gas, and water pipe in a state that’s bigger than France? Building out internal storage for coal piles at coal plans? Developing natural gas storage depots rather than relying upon just-in-time fuel deliveries? Insulating the country’s largest concentration of petroleum refineries? Each incremental improvement might be easy, but Texas will need to upgrade everything. The cost will easily run into the tens of billions.
 
Think this is going to be waved away? Think again. I didn’t simply bring up Austin at the beginning of this newsletter because that’s where I lived, it was also the city that faced the biggest electricity disruptions. Hospitals had to be evacuated. Austin is the state capital, which means the bureaucrats who regulate the Texas power structure were the people who got hit hardest. They. Will. Act. So. This. Never. Happens. Again. And they should.
 
I don’t believe for a second that Texas is going to reduce oil and natural gas production. The fuels are simply too central to modern economic life. Greentech is nowhere close to being able to eclipse them. But that doesn’t mean the balance cannot shift as regards electricity. As wind turbines get taller, they can tap stronger and more reliable wind currents. The newly installed towers already top 500 feet and are getting bigger by the year. That means while the cost of winterizing the towers will increase linearly, the power those larger turbines generate goes up exponentially. That doesn’t happen with a coal plant.
 
Texas has massive swathes of great wide windy open land practically custom-made for today’s greentech. After this week Texas’ utilities will have a new appreciation for just how quickly wind power can bounce back after a historically devastating series of storms.
 
Evolving in the direction of a low-to-no-carbon future was never going to be cheap or simple, and for greentech to really catch on it must convince those who require reliable electricity that its output can be trusted. Texas, a place synonymous with oil, is about to turn that cultural corner.

If you enjoy our free newsletters, the team at Zeihan on Geopolitics asks you to consider donating to Feeding America.

The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.

Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.

Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.

The team at Zeihan on Geopolitics thanks you and hopes you continue to enjoy our work.

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Life After Trump, Part VIII: The Crisis List—China

[mk_mini_callout]
Read the other installments in this series:
 
Life after Trump, Part I: Living in the Lightning
Life after Trump, Part II: Searching for Truth in a Flood of Freedom
Life After Trump, Part III: The End of the Republican Alliance
Life After Trump, Part IV: Building a Better Democrat…Maybe
Life After Trump, Part V: The Opening Roster
Life After Trump, Part VI: The Crisis List—Russia
Life After Trump, Part VII: The Crisis List—The Middle East
Life After Trump, Part VIII: The Crisis List—China
[/mk_mini_callout]

I don’t see China the way most do.
 
Where others see a rising naval power, I see a trapped coastal fleet incapable of projecting power, much less patrolling its far-flung economic interests.
 
Where others see the workshop of the world, I see a radically unstable system propped up by Enron-style finance which survives only due to the strategic largesse of increasingly-hostile foreign powers.
 
Where others see 1.4 billion people, I see one of history’s fastest aging and shrinking demographics in a country that will – in the best-case scenario – see its population shrink by half this century.
 
Where others see swarms of exports, I see a system faltering from a lack of domestic consumption that could lead to economic ruin at any time, but most certainly this decade.
 
Where others see the only major economy to grow in 2020, I see a system so broken that most of its “growth” is simply from shoving unsold inventory into warehouses, something I last saw en masse during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis.
 
But above all, where others see a malevolent, conniving government leadership scrupulously implementing a century-long master plan for global domination, I see a terrified cadre that broadly sees China as I do, and so is instituting a North Korea-style political and information lockdown in the desperate hope of preventing China’s inevitable return to its historical mean of civil war, civil collapse, and mass famine.
 
In this newsletter, I’m not going to go down the line of reasons why China is doomed. For those of you familiar with my work, you’re probably getting a bit sick of that. For those of you who are new to my work, the full and detailed hit-list is best addressed in Chapters Two through Four of Disunited Nations, the section that deals with what makes for successful countries and empires.
 
This series is instead about the issues that will be facing the freshman Biden administration, and I’d be remiss if I left China out.
 
The first and perhaps most important takeaway is that the United States public – regardless of political persuasion – has turned broadly sharply anti-Chinese on issues political, economic and strategic. This isn’t a Trump thing or a Biden thing, but instead a broadscale cultural transformation intertwined with a mix of populist and geopolitical factors that have been unfolding for well over a decade.
 
Biden is many things, but first and foremost his personal ideologies tack with the winds. In my personal opinion this doesn’t make him leadership material, but for the Chinese it means that the power of the American executive will lean towards doing what the American political mood demands: confrontation.
 
In Biden’s early days that means not simply leaving in place, but publicly and unapologetically reaffirming, several long-standing Trump-era China policies. Trump’s trade war is now bipartisan. Trump’s anti-China tariffs remain firmly in place. Trump’s anti-China sanctions – most notably ones that include Huawei and the Chinese equivalent of Chevron – aren’t going anywhere. Trump’s ever-tightening sanctions on Iran, once a leading Chinese oil supplier, have been confirmed as the new norm.
 
Even some of Trump’s on-the-way-out-the-door policy grenades have been openly embraced as founding principles of the new administration.
 
In Trump’s last month the administration changed policies to enable any federal government official to visit Taiwan at any time in their official capacity as full representatives of the U.S. government. That’s only a baby step away from full diplomatic recognition of Taiwan as an independent nation (because, well, Taiwan is an independent nation). Biden confirmed his agreement with the shift on his first day.
 
Similarly, in its last days the Trump administration formally recognized the Chinese genocide of Uighurs in the far western Chinese province as an actual genocide (because, well, it is a genocide). Biden put his personal stamp on that recognition as well, also on his first day.
 
What I found to be one of the late-Trump administration’s more notable inactions was when Iran seized a South Korean vessel in the Persian Gulf, ostensibly for the Koreans abiding by American sanctions against Iran. The Persian Gulf is the source of half of the world’s internationally traded oil. As recently as a decade ago such state piracy in the world’s most strategic waterway would have warranted direct and prolonged American presidential and military attention. Trump did nothing. Biden has done nothing. The Americans no longer give any number of pieces of excrement about global oil market stability. And as the world’s largest oil importer and sporting a navy that cannot project power to the Persian Gulf, the Chinese are and should be exceedingly concerned.
 
Biden, of course, has come up with a few thoughts of his own. Crackdowns in Hong Kong and human rights in Tibet, two issues that Trump largely ignored, are back in fashion in Washington. So far TeamBiden has only offered rhetoric on the topics, but state policy is likely to be updated up to and including some degree of sanctions within a few weeks.
 
Trump also tended to play down territorial disputes, particularly as regards the South China Sea – a shallow waterway that Beijing hilariously (and under international law, illegally) claims in its entirety despite nearly all of it being closer to Vietnam, the Philippines or Malaysia than to the Chinese mainland. In his first week Biden ordered nothing less than two aircraft carrier battle groups to sail nice-and-slow through the entire area in mocking defiance of Chinese claims.

But perhaps the bit that has me most interested in the weeks to come is Biden’s new trade negotiator: Katherine Tai. The U.S. Trade Representative typically has few friends. It is his or her job to both enforce and negotiate all trade deals the United States is a party to. Trump’s USTR, Robert Lighthizer, successfully completed deals with the Koreans and Japanese as well as an updating of the NAFTA accords. He is an old trade hand seeped in the fractious world of international negotiations.
 
Tai is…not. She has never managed a large staff. She has never participated in a meaningful large-scale international negotiation, much less led one. She did work for the USTR’s office under the Obama administration, although doing nothing that would be confused with a leadership role. Until a few weeks ago she was simply a high-ranking Congressional staffer. Knowledgeable about the issues? Absolutely and undeniably. Heavily seasoned in the world of international diplomacy? Absolutely and undeniably not.
 
What Tai is is America-focused. Until now her job has been to fine-tune Lighthizer’s deals so that when they are brought to the Congressional floors they enjoy as broad and as bipartisan support as is humanly possible. She successfully rode point on NAFTA2’s ratification with House Ways & Means (by far Congress’ most powerful committee). Unlike Lighthizer who had a reputation for intentionally abrasive and supremely dislikable hypercompetence, everyone in Congress apparently loves Katherine Tai. To my knowledge she is the only person in human history that both Elizabeth Warren and Rand Paul have said (obliquely) kind things about. Heady stuff.
 
Tai is not a negotiator, but instead a trade lawyer. And that tells me everything I need to know about Biden’s developing trade agenda. There isn’t one in the traditional sense. Biden hasn’t been shy about noting that he has no interest in signing any trade deals until the coronavirus crisis is firmly in the rear-view mirror. In the United States, accelerated vaccine development suggests the second half of the year is looking up. But the rest of the advanced world isn’t going to achieve mass vaccination until very close to year’s end, and the developing world will take (at minimum) a year more. Aside from a deal with a post-Brexit and increasingly economically desperate United Kingdom, there aren’t likely to be any meaningful deals negotiated during the Biden administration at all.
 
But, again, Tai is a trade lawyer. She wasn’t brought on to negotiate new deals. She was brought on to sue any country violating the letter or the spirit of U.S. trade law…which is pretty much everyone. If I lived in Europe, I’d be very worried about this (a trade war is imminent), but the foreign power Tai has the most direct experience with is China itself; During Tai’s stint with the USTR, she spent some time as chief council for China trade enforcement. That’s a fancy way of saying she knows how to sue Beijing.
 
Oh yeah, and one more thing: while Tai is a full-blooded American (born in Connecticut), ethnically, she is Taiwanese. It doesn’t really matter whether Biden meant for his new USTR’s background to matter. It will. The Chinese Communist Party perceives the collective actions and omissions out of the new administration as a full-court press against the interests of the CCP. They aren’t wrong.
 
And they’ll be looking for ways to push back.

If you enjoy our free newsletters, the team at Zeihan on Geopolitics asks you to consider donating to Feeding America.

The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.

Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.

Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.

The team at Zeihan on Geopolitics thanks you and hopes you continue to enjoy our work.

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Life After Trump, Part VII: The Crisis List—The Middle East

[mk_mini_callout]
Read the other installments in this series:
 
Life after Trump, Part I: Living in the Lightning
Life after Trump, Part II: Searching for Truth in a Flood of Freedom
Life After Trump, Part III: The End of the Republican Alliance
Life After Trump, Part IV: Building a Better Democrat…Maybe
Life After Trump, Part V: The Opening Roster
Life After Trump, Part VI: The Crisis List—Russia
Life After Trump, Part VII: The Crisis List—The Middle East
Life After Trump, Part VIII: The Crisis List—China
[/mk_mini_callout]

The second major international issue facing the incoming Joe Biden administration is that never-ending joy, the problem that just keeps on giving: the Middle East.
 
If there is one thing most Americans agree on in this age of social media screaming, it is that they want the United States to get out of the Persian Gulf. The challenge is finding a way to do so that also avoids sucking America back in in a few years.
 
There are two general approaches to consider:
 
The first strategy is the one Biden’s immediate predecessor, Donald Trump, attempted: appoint a strategic successor to manage the region. Trump decided the successor should be Israel. That…that was a poor choice.
 
Is Israel very militarily competent and blam-heavy for its size? Undeniably. But it is neck deep in managing its own micro-neighborhood of the Palestinian Territories, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. It cannot execute an American-style policy in the Persian Gulf that keeps the oil flowing while preventing Iraq from collapsing while keeping Iran down.
 
It is clear that at least to a degree TeamTrump grasped that Israel was not up to the task, so the administration worked to rig the game. Trump greatly intensified sanctions on Iran, largely preventing the Iranians from selling…anything internationally. An economic crash resulted. Trump also worked to build a coalition of Arab states to buttress the Israelis. That required Trump convincing the Arabs that they should recognize Israel as something other than the “Zionist entity” and treat it as an actual country that had an actual right to exist.
 
Trump met with some success and deserves some serious diplomatic kudos, but let’s not get crazy. Consider the countries Trump flipped:

  • Morocco – a state that is literally over a continent away from the drama of the Persian Gulf.
  • Bahrain – an island statelet that has run out of oil and has but 1.6 million people.
  • The United Arab Emirates – a confederation of city states who collectively are Iran’s largest (non-oil) trading partner.

A coalition, yes, but not a strategically effective one. Strategically, Trump’s achievements changed little.

The second option for American extraction from the region is the one selected by Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama: establish a regional balance of power so the region’s countries contain one another. Israel aside, consider the other major players:

  • Saudi Arabia, as the world’s largest oil exporter and the keeper of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, asserts that it should lead the entire region. That’s an assertion which aggravates everyone, but in particular aggrieves…
  • Iran, the country with the largest population on the Persian Gulf, and whose dominant religion – Shia Islam – clashes with that of the Wahhabi Sunni Islam of the Saudis. Problematic for the Saudis, Shia Islam is practiced by the majority of people who live within 100 miles of the Persian Gulf’s shores. Even Saudi Arabia itself has a large Shia minority.
  • But neither of these countries are the region’s most powerful. That title goes to Turkey, a country which doesn’t even border the Gulf itself. Turkey has the broader region’s largest and most sophisticated economy, largest and most capable military, and a population slightly larger than even Iran.

The whole point of Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal between the United States and Iran was to bring Iran in from the cold, enable it to economically develop, and re-establish Iran as a formal player in the Middle East space. Then, as the logic goes, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran would all counter one another, leaving the Americans to play an eclectic variety of Middle East-news-driven drinking games.

There was nothing wrong with the idea, but there was plenty wrong with the execution. The nuclear deal was (in)famously light on details of anything beyond the nuclear program itself. It didn’t address Iran’s paramilitary and assassination activities throughout the region, the status of Israel, or the religious splits among the region’s populations the Iranians exploited as a matter of course.

Obama (in)famously found speaking with people – any people – tedious, and so tended to toss out grand ideas and then walk away forever. Establishing a regional balance of power in which you do not plan to actively participate requires a lot of upfront work and a lot of lengthy conversations. Under Obama that just didn’t happen. Far from generating a balance of power, the Obama plan was little more than an unstable deal which made an unstable region even more unstable.

My goal here isn’t to condemn the strategies of both Trump and Obama (that’s more of a side bonus), but instead to highlight that the Middle East is difficult. My point is that for the approaches the pair of American presidents chose, they simply did things wrong.

For the successor strategy to work, Trump should have picked a different country. Israel lacks the military capacity to control its own neighborhood, much less the distant Persian Gulf where the populations are four times as large. Saudi Arabia might look good on paper, but it is broadly militarily incompetent. The only regional power that could even theoretically fill the role would have been Turkey, and America’s relationship with the Turks under Trump (and under Obama) descended into such a deep freeze to the point that the two are no longer even functional allies.

For a balance of power strategy to work in the Persian Gulf, it must be like all the other successful balances of power throughout human history. It cannot be purely military. There must be excessive entanglement on multiple fronts. There must be an economic angle. A political angle. A diplomatic angle. For Obama’s strategy to work, any Iran “deal” was really only the first baby step. He would then have had to build relationships among the regional players. That’d require some seriously uncomfortable diplomacy not simply with Iran and Turkey, but also Saudi Arabia and Israel. That would require a lot of political capital and even more face time. Considering how much Obama loathed speaking to people, especially about uncomfortable issues, it’s a minor miracle he made it as far as he did in the region.

So now we get to try this again with a new president: Joe Biden.

Believe it or not, there may be some room for progress – in part because of the efforts of Biden’s predecessors.

As part of Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign to crush Iran, the Iranian economy has been absolutely devastated. The Iranians cannot even sell pistachios any longer, to say nothing of large-scale oil sales. With Iran proving to be an unreliable oil supplier, traditional customers like Italy, Greece, India, China, Korea, and Japan have all turned elsewhere for crude. Then COVID reduced global oil demand, crushing Iranian finances. No oil income means the Europeans have zero interest in participating in a revised nuclear deal because there is literally nothing in it for them. No oil income also means Iran has proven unable to sustain many of its paramilitary efforts in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. Iran hasn’t been this weak since the rise of the ayatollahs in 1979.

America has changed as well. Politically, there is no longer an American faction pushing for deep regional involvement. While the shale revolution was little more than a glimmer in some oilmen’s eyes when Obama stepped into the White House the first time, twelve years later the United States is functionally energy independent. The energy cord has been cut. The Forever Wars are…over. Both America and Americans can tolerate a far higher degree of chaos in the Persian Gulf than they previously could.

Which means TeamBiden might actually have a third option that hasn’t existed since the early days of American involvement in the region in the 1950s. To simply leave.

America will still play at the margins. Just because the United States doesn’t need a stable global oil market doesn’t mean having a knife to the region’s pulse isn’t useful. So, Biden has already announced it is maintaining every speck of the sanctions Trump enacted. If there is to be a new deal, TeamBiden has made it clear they won’t be following the Obama script because Biden’s negotiating power is already far superior to that of any of his predecessors. Nor is Biden playing favorites like Trump did; the new president has already cancelled advanced weapons sales to both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (two states that were supposed to be at the core of Trump’s Israel-coalition).

Consider what this means: The Israelis are appalled Biden is even talking about talking to the Iranians. The Iranians are appalled that Trump’s exit hasn’t ushered them back into the world. The Saudis are appalled they can’t purchase weapons. Just a couple weeks on the job Biden has done something none of his predecessors would have dared: pissed off everyone in the entire region. It’s unclear if this general pissing-off effort is part of a broader plan, or nothing more than a series of tactical decisions TeamBiden believes are unrelated. It is also unclear whether it matters. And if it does matter, it’s unclear if the administration even cares.

Will that have consequences down the road? Certainly. But not for the United States, or at least not for the United States on anything less than a decade time scale. The global superpower has barely been able to keep the region’s many fires on smolder. No one else has within an order of magnitude the necessary power or reach to step in, suggesting flare ups will be the new norm. Fires in the part of the world responsible for the majority of globally traded crude oil will absolutely reverberate.

And for the world’s most vulnerable country, it just adds one more mortal threat to the cavalcade of crises that were already barreling down.

It’s time to talk about China.

Coming soon:
Life After Trump, Part VIII: The Crisis List – China

If you enjoy our free newsletters, the team at Zeihan on Geopolitics asks you to consider donating to Feeding America.

The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.

Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.

Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.

The team at Zeihan on Geopolitics thanks you and hopes you continue to enjoy our work.

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Life After Trump, Part VI: The Crisis List—Russia

[mk_mini_callout]
Read the other installments in this series:
 
Life after Trump, Part I: Living in the Lightning
Life after Trump, Part II: Searching for Truth in a Flood of Freedom
Life After Trump, Part III: The End of the Republican Alliance
Life After Trump, Part IV: Building a Better Democrat…Maybe
Life After Trump, Part V: The Opening Roster
Life After Trump, Part VI: The Crisis List—Russia
Life After Trump, Part VII: The Crisis List—The Middle East
Life After Trump, Part VIII: The Crisis List—China
[/mk_mini_callout]

After sketching out what was intended to be the final installment of this series, I realized the world was in a lot more trouble than I had thought. So, the “Crisis List” installment is going to be a whole mini-series of its own. Let’s begin with the country that has experienced the greatest surge in influence under former President Trump: Russia.
 
Throughout history the Russians have always held a weak hand. Their geography and climate make the basics of life – food and security – devilishly difficult. Their lack of navigable rivers demands huge rafts of artificial infrastructure, but that costs money that Russia’s brutal winters and vast distances simply don’t generate. Painfully short summers limit food production per acre forcing Russians to spread out to farm the necessary calories. Russia has pretty much always held the record for the fewest people per square mile among the world’s populated zones.
 
Add in wide-open borders that are wretched at blocking marauding Swedes, Germans, Mongols and even Poles, and Russia lives in the worst of pickles. An expensive, low-reward land. Scattered populations who quite reasonably hope that life might be better elsewhere. Looming threats of invasion.
 
Surviving here requires a big army (at a big cost in economic and cultural terms) and a massive intelligence system finely attuned to every whisper of dissent and every footfall at Russia’s edges.
 
The Americans created globalization to bribe up an alliance to contain the Soviets, but it also generated an unexpected boon for Moscow. In banding all of Russia’s traditional foes (and then some) into a single coalition, the Americans removed any strategic initiative from all their new allies. The Russians only needed to worry about the Americans. No one else. From 1946 to the Soviet Union’s very end, no one invaded Russia. Such bliss had never occurred. The Russians may have been contained but they were left alone, giving them 45 years to attempt to make their country work.
 
In the end it wasn’t enough time. While Soviet engineering was indeed impressive compared to what happened under the tsars, there just weren’t enough resources – human, material, or economic – to fund everything. Developing lands as crappy as Russia’s is expensive. Fighting a global Cold War is expensive.
 
After the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia’s leaderships have been forced to make a series of ever-more-damning decisions. What to fund versus what to leave to rot? Food production? The rail lines? The air force? The missile forces? Oil production? The educational system? Everything comes at a cost, and Russia’s resources are limited. With the Russian demography among the world’s fastest aging and arguably the world’s most unhealthy, those resources are shrinking by the year. Everything – and I mean everything – has had its funding cut. Everything but one thing: those mission-critical intelligence services.
 
And so it is primarily through the intelligence services that the Russians engage the world. The Kremlin realizes every other measure of their power from military force to energy exports to high-tech work is living on borrowed time.
 
The Russians have good reason to be worried, but to this point they’ve been able to avoid catastrophe. That’s as much due to luck with the Americans as anything else.
 
The Russians found W Bush intimidating as it was very clear back in 2001 he planned to massively expand the NATO alliance to Russia’s west, and amp up U.S. military tech to prevent any possibility of a Russian revival. But then came 9/11. The Russian transport system became integral to fighting the war in Afghanistan. Bullet dodged. Breath sighed.
 
The Russians found Obama so willfully disinterested and functionally incompetent in foreign affairs that they called him a “p*ssy” in official internal communications. Once Hillary Clinton left TeamObama in February 2013, there was no one remaining the Russians found even a touch worrisome. Russia invaded Ukraine about a year after H Clinton’s departure.
 
The Russians found Trump nearly as easy to dismiss. A completely insincere bit of flattery here, a casual dismissal of his political foes there, and Trump just let any matter that bothered the Russians drop. Trump’s staff were a different matter: Rex Tillerson, HR McMaster, John Kelly, and James Mattis caused problems for the Russians over and over and over. But it became clear to Moscow early on that Trump was Trump’s own worst enemy, and Trump disposed of all of his anti-Russian staffers with nary a nudge from the FSB. From the last of those staffer’s departure – John Kelly in January 2019 – the Russians didn’t have to worry about the Trump administration much at all.

So what about Biden?
 
Biden is not a governor with a record that can be evaluated like W Bush, or a pathologically disengaged figure like Obama, or a simplistic caricature like Trump. Biden is just a fairly normal…guy. An ideologically uncommitted guy; His political views sway with the winds. A guy whose been in politics since the planets first formed, but who has no record of leadership. What in my opinion makes Biden a questionable choice for president makes him precisely what the Russians fear most: an unknown element.
 
Intelligence services hate unknown elements. Finding out about their new adversary from a press release, such as the one from the State Department Feb 4 after Biden gave a speech to the Foreign Service, is not the way they like to learn things.
 
And so the Russians are left to fall back upon their intelligence services once again. They will be searching for weaknesses. In the country. In the government. In the president.
 
They have a fair amount to work with.
 
The Russians are absolutely thrilled with what went down in Washington DC on January 6. In the Russian mind anything that keeps Americans focused on one another is a win. But having a sitting president egg on a mob against his own law enforcement personnel? That’s a platinum standard the Russians didn’t even realize they could aim for.
 
Expect Russian state hacking to double its efforts against the U.S. government. In 2020 the Russians penetrated the Texas tech firm SolarWinds and used its update systems to penetrate dozens of government agencies. From what we know to this point the Russians were not expecting such runaway success, and certainly were not sufficiently staffed to chase down all the opportunities the SolarWinds effort had produced. Luckily for the Russians, Trump – like Obama before him – was utterly unenthused with the topic of cyber-security and so the vast bulk of the Russians’ labor-fruit has remained available. The Russians have had months to train and/or reassign staff to the cornucopia of new hacking options. It will be Biden that has to deal with the aftermath.
 
Nor will the American population get a free pass. The Russians have long been involved in supporting disruptive groups of various ideological backgrounds, from environmentalists to Antifa to peaceniks to white supremacist movements, seeing them as cheap and easy means of keeping American politics off-kilter.
 
This time around the Russian effort will focus on keeping Trumpism alive.
 
Those involved in the January 6 riots have found themselves essentially banned from mainstream social media, up to and including the former president himself. Amazon and Apple removed Parler, a censor-free platform that saw heavy usage by the rioters and other extremists, from their systems completely. Now the Russian firm Ddos-Guard, officially unrelated to the Kremlin *rolls eyes*, is providing Parler with denial-of-service-attack protection and traffic monitoring to help it get back up and running. The goal is pretty straightforward: keep America’s most violent citizens as politically active as possible, and limit America’s ability to reach some sort of resolution in the aftermath of Trump’s final days.
 
It isn’t like Biden lacks tools to strike back. The shale revolution has granted the Americans functional energy independence, while COVID combined with NAFTA2 have concentrated America’s economic interests closer to home. Striking against Russian energy or finances just doesn’t have the propensity for blowback it might have had a decade ago. Since the bulk of Russian state income originates from commodity sales, this is a big problem indeed.
 
(Please don’t write in about how Biden is going to “kill oil” and “change everything”. Biden’s executive orders on limiting shale work on federal land impact less than 1% of US oil and natural gas production. When Biden does something that will appreciably impact America’s energy mix, it’ll have global consequences and I will write about it. We aren’t anywhere close to that at present.)
 
The Russians also love nothing more than imprisoning dissidents, and the Feb 2 conviction of Alexei Navalny on corruption charges is a case in point. (Honestly, the only thing Navalny is guilty of is surviving an FSB assassination attempt.) Expect Biden to spin the Navalny conviction well out of proportion in order to use established sanctions tools to hit Russia everywhere under the guise of human rights policy. That’ll cause the Russians no end of trouble. (That’ll likely cause the Germans no end of trouble too, but that is a topic for another day.)
 
Far worse for the Russians than income losses or sanctions is the fact that Biden has selected someone for the post of CIA Director who knows the Russians very well. William Burns served W Bush as ambassador to Moscow for three years during the Afghan War. There are few Americans alive who know the Russians capacities, foibles, and dark corners better. The Russians respect him…in that special way that you respect a hated rival. Courtesy of Burns, Biden will at a minimum have both forewarning of Russian plots and retaliatory options to choose from.
 
Russia has tools, many tools, at its disposal. Russia can – Russia will – do a great deal of damage. But for the first time in decades the tables are flipped. This time around the Americans know more about the sitting Russian government than vice versa. For a country whose survival is predicated upon accurate intelligence, that must be terrifying.

If you enjoy our free newsletters, the team at Zeihan on Geopolitics asks you to consider donating to Feeding America.

The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.

Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.

Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.

The team at Zeihan on Geopolitics thanks you and hopes you continue to enjoy our work.

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Infographic: SARS-COV-2 and its Noteworthy Variants

Much of current media coverage of the corona virus is focusing on the issue of variants of SARS-COV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Here in the United States, we’re currently in a race against time in our attempts to vaccinate the population and significantly slow—or stop—transmission before one of the nastier variants hits our shores.

Variants are mutations of a virus that changes how the virus interacts with our bodies. Chances are most of us have seen illustrations of the corona virus by now—a ball covered in spikey appendages. The protein spikes are how the corona virus attaches itself to our cells, and where our immune system attaches itself to the virus. In the UK and likely South Africa and Brazil, the local variants have mutations making the virus not only easier to attach to our cells (and making it more infectious), but also harder for our immune systems to combat (making it more resistant to vaccines and natural immunity). In the UK, there is evidence that their particular variant is deadlier, too.

What we know about the UK variant, and what we still don’t understand about variants in Brazil, South Africa, and California boils down to genomic sequencing. The UK has invested heavily in recent months into expanding their already better-than-most genomic sequencing and tracking of viral variants. They’ve put in the yeoman’s work of tracking changes to SARS-COV-2’s protein spike exterior and how changes in these proteins impact our relationship to the virus.

In the rest of the world, the tracking and identification of variants has been hampered by the lack of rigorous, coordinated international sampling and sequencing—an effort such as the US might have spearheaded in the past—and the lack of robust testing in the US itself. Some states are improving sampling and genomic sequencing efforts on their own, such as California, which announced that a local variant was spreading rapidly in January 2021. Anecdotal evidence is starting to come in, but as of this writing we still do not know the full extent of what the California variant will mean for regional populations.

What do these variants mean for the United States and the international community?

What does the vaccine-vs-variant timeline look like for the US, Europe, and beyond?

What impacts can we expect on the American and global economy? 

Please join Zeihan on Geopolitics on February 9 for COVID, Vaccines, and the Road to Recovery, a webinar and Q&A session tackling these questions and more. Registration information and more at the link below.

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COVID, Vaccines, and the Road to Recovery

Let’s begin with the bad news.
 
The United States has not seen any meaningful expansion of coronavirus testing since the November 2020 fall-off (see the stall in the purple graph below). Such suggests the United States is undertesting by at least two-thirds.
 
New testing and new positive results (red) have not been a useful measure of anything for roughly three months now. We are so late in the epidemic at this point that a testing recovery is unlikely. This is very bad. Without sufficient testing and accurate data, it is impossible for any jurisdiction to plan for anything. Instead, the first sign that something is wrong is that hospitals fill up. At that point, the issue is no longer prevention, or even planning, but instead crisis mitigation.

So, sadly and unsurprisingly, the figure to watch has become hospitalizations and only hospitalizations (blue). Hospitalizations have been, in a word, heartbreaking. They have been over double their August peak for some time.

But but but BUT we are very clearly past the peak in hospitalizations caused by the Thanksgiving and Christmas surges. It even appears *fingers crossed* that deaths (grey) have peaked as well. This is the second-best news we have had during the past six months of the epidemic.

The even-better news is there are now three coronavirus vaccines in various stages of dispersal. All three – Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca – are rapidly ramping up manufacturing. And more are coming. Novavax and Johnson & Johnson’s formulas will be added to the mix in the weeks to come.

This all raises a lot of questions:

  • How soon will we be able to start quietly dreaming of herd immunity and a “normal” world?
     
  • What are the differences among the vaccines and how will those differences play out?
     
  • Which countries and economic sectors are likely to recover first, and how quickly?
     
  • How will the new coronavirus variants percolating in the United Kingdom, Brazil and South Africa impact the broader picture?

Please join Zeihan on Geopolitics on February 9 for COVID, Vaccines, and the Road to Recovery, a webinar and Q&A session tackling these questions and more. Registration information and more at the link below.

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