Dutch Politics: What Geert Wilder’s New Coalition Means for Europe

The Netherlands has recently undergone an election of its own, so let’s look at the incoming coalition and how it will impact Dutch politics.

In the Netherlands, voters cast their ballots for a party rather than individuals, giving them a multi-party system with countless coalition possibilities. Geert Wilders will likely lead the incoming coalition, but bringing together at least four parties is no easy task. All that to say, Wilders will have to compromise on some of his more extreme ideas if he wants to build this coalition with any semblance of speed.

The Netherlands has long operated as a broker for Europe. The previous PM, Mark Rutte, played that role perfectly, but I’m not as optimistic about Wilders. The longer it takes to form his coalition, the more the plot will thicken…

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

TranscripT

Morning, everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from a chilly New York City in Central Park. We’ve had a fresh election in the Netherlands, which looks like it’s going to generate a couple of interesting effects. So I thought it was worth talking about it. Specifically, the outgoing government of Margaret Ruther is now giving way to an incoming coalition that will be led most likely by a guy by the name of Gert Viel.

There’s who’s got frizzy hair. He’s oftentimes called the Dutch Trump because of his views on immigration and other countries in general. It’s nothing like that. This is still very Dutch, which is to say center, center right. Fairly calm politics. But a lot of people are worried that this is going to break a lot of European issues, perhaps causing complications for Ukraine policy and the short version is we’re just not there yet.

The Netherlands has a very different electoral system for the United States. So in the United States, we have a first past the post single member district system, which is a fancy way of saying that when you go to the ballot box, you vote for a very specific person who’s going to represent a very specific group of people in a delineated geographic area, whether it’s your state or your district.

That’s not how it works in the Netherlands and the Netherlands, you go and you vote for a party. And if a party gets 30% of the vote, as Wilders party did, they then get 30% of the parliamentary seats. This is an interesting system that allows for maybe a little bit more of a pure democracy system, although you don’t know who you’re going to necessarily get because it’s on a party list.

And if they get 30 seats in the top 30 people on their party list, get the seats. But the Netherlands has a weird way of doing things because they really don’t have a floor. There’s 150 seats in the parliament. And if you get 1/150 of the vote, you get a seat, which means you get a lot of parties.

And I think there’s going to be something like 11 in the new parliament. So Wilders isn’t simply going to be prime minister. He first has to cobble together a coalition of a minimum of four parties in order to then establish a government. This is a lengthy process, even when everybody sees everything from the same point of view. So the outgoing government of Ruth, for example, took them nine months to build their government last time, I think eight months the time before that.

So we are not going to see a new Dutch government this year. And it’s entirely possible, considering how actually I say this personality challenge to builders is that we might not even see it next year. Now, you shouldn’t necessarily expect to see huge shifts in policymaking in the near term because some of the builders more from the Dutch point of view, egregious ideas are going to have to go away if he’s going to build a coalition.

In addition, there’s really not a lot of argument anywhere across the political spectrum in the Netherlands about Netherlands place in the world. The Netherlands is pro-American and pro-British and pro-European for reasons that are different from a lot of other countries. Specifically, they’re pro-European because they don’t really like the Germans or the French that much. And the general idea is if you can get the French and the Germans into an institution where other members can kind of dilute their influence, then everybody wins, especially the Dutch, because they handle the trade between the French and the Germans.

They like to keep the Brits close because it’s, again, a hedge against Germany and France and let’s keep the Americans close for the same reason. Keep in mind that the Netherlands is a small chunk of territory, roughly the size of this state here, and as a result, it has a little problem with the fence because it’s completely flat and it’s its borders are completely exposed to its neighbors.

So it’s never going to be a military power. All it can hope is to entangle as many other military powers into its own interests so that the French or the Germans don’t just run roughshod across them. The problem we’re going to see is not with European policy per say. It’s not like things are going to change in the Netherlands, it’s just that for the next several months, maybe up to a year, we’re not going to have a government in the Netherlands that’s capable of playing what has traditionally been the other big role of the Netherlands in Europe, and that is of broker because the Netherlands is either considered the smallest of the large states or

the largest of the small states. They’ve got their fingers on a lot of pots, and it allows the Netherlands to broker deals with parties across the spectrum on economic size and wealth that you wouldn’t expect a middle power like the Netherlands to be able to pull off. And in this, Mark Rutte, that has been key. There’s been a lot that’s happened under his leadership.

He came in at the tail end of the financial crisis when the Greek bailouts were getting really crazy. He helped participate in the solidification of the expansion to include the new members. And now he’s played a central role in the next wave of expansion that is supposed to include a number of countries in the former Soviet sphere of influence up to including Ukraine.

And he’s been doing this while being a relatively reliable spokesman for American and British interests in Europe, as long as it doesn’t hurt Europe. So this sort of balanced, integrated player has been very, very, very important. Everything that’s gone down in Europe for the last decade because he’s been running the place for almost 15 years now, Villiers, regardless of what he says, does have a lot of experience doing this.

Yes, he’s been in the Parliament for the last quarter century, but he’s never been in a government. He reminds me a little bit of Joe Biden and that he’s never really had a big boy job. And so it’s going to take time for him to build the gravitas. It’s necessary to play that broker role within the European Union.

And until then, the French and the Germans don’t have the marriage counselor, and the rest of Europe doesn’t have their advocate of their handbrake. That’s assuming we get a government tomorrow and we’re not going to get a government for months. So the ability of Europe to manage in this environment just went down a very, very big Dutch shaped notch because the Netherlands at the moment can’t play its traditional role.

Argentina Elects A New President: Javier Milei

The big news out of South America is that Argentina has elected a new “libertarian” president, Javier Milei. So, what will this political shift mean for Argentina?

Since Milei won’t have enough parliamentary support from the Peronists, we should expect some unconventional tactics to bypass Congress. Milei also has a strained relationship with several BRICS countries – with China and Brazil topping that list – so hopefully they have some good translators.

The quick and dirty here is that Argentina will be the center of lots of drama for the foreseeable future. So you may want to hold off on your investments in this region and grab some popcorn while you’re at it.

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

TranscripT

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Central Park in New York City. And on the topic of Skating on Ice, let’s talk about what’s going on in Argentina. They recently had just about a week ago, had a new presidential election and they have a new president by the name of Javier Malay, who bills himself as a libertarian.

Now before you libertarians get too excited, a libertarian in Argentina does not mean the same thing that you’re probably thinking of. In fact, nothing politically in Argentina means the same thing that you’re thinking of. Argentina does things its own damn way and it’s always really weird. So for example, the ruling Peronist are often lumped into the socialist camp.

Leftist camp. But really what they’ve done is they’ve combined the most counterproductive and self-destructive aspects of socialism with some of a really, really sloppy version of fascism. So leftist they are not. They just like to print currency. And don’t let that go to your head. Same holds true for Malaysia’s own thing, and you shouldn’t expect him to fit any pattern.

He’s not the Argentine Trump. He’s not anything. He’s himself. He’s also never been in government. So he may have some grand ideas about what it comes to abolishing the central bank or dollar raising the economy and doing away from the peso. Just keep in mind that he does not have sufficient votes in parliament to get any of this done without cooperation from the Peronist.

So we’re going to see a lot of loud policies, a lot of attempts to do end runs around the Argentine Congress. And whether it goes anywhere, it’s just early days, too soon to know for sure. It’s going to have a much bigger splash when it comes to foreign policy in Argentina, like in most countries, the political leadership has a lot more freedom in dealing with foreign policy than they do with domestic policy.

So in the case of Malaya specifically, he’ll loathes President Lula of Brazil, who is a more classical leftist, if you want to use that category against not perfect, but it’s more it’s more fitting for Brazil than it is for Argentina. And so Lula has already announced that he’s not going to be at the inauguration, getting the relations off to the best possible foot.

And that means a Mercosur, which is the common market, the free trade zone of the Southern Cone that involves Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina is basically dead in the water from both an economic and a diplomatic point of view. Oh, hey, I got a visitor. Anyhow, we’re just going to crop him out. Sorry. Anyway. Or maybe not. New York.

What do you do? Anyway, this was one of the world’s great trade zones, and it’s basically on ice now. Beyond South America, things are also going to get fun because Argentina was just given admission is to the BRICS alignment. Now, BRICS is an association of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa that has well, it’s never punched up to its weight.

It’s always been kind of an odd grouping. And Malaysia has made it very clear that he hates all things Chinese. And since China is Argentina’s largest trading partner and is the dominant power in the BRICS, this is colorful really soon. So the thing you have to keep in mind about all of this is when it comes to Argentina, there can be a lot of smoke without being fire and a lot of noise without anything real happening.

But when you apply Argentina, his own pension for drama to other groups outside the country who have more flavor than substance, things like BRICS, things like Mercosur, things can get really crazy really soon because he’s going to call a spade a spade and he’s going to throw a lot of monkey wrenches into the works. Probably the thing that is going to have the biggest single impact is going to be the Mercosur attempt to have a free trade zone with the EU.

Now, this deal has been under negotiation for how we’re pushing 20 years now, and they believe that they finally have it worked out. Now, Lula decided he wanted to get this all shoved through before Malaya was inaugurated, but then he flat out asked the Europeans for a multibillion dollar bribe to get it done. So pretty much that trade deal is done, too.

So if you’re looking at investment into Argentina or Brazil for the foreseeable future, anything that requires value added work and like manufacturing honestly should just kind of write off for the moment because the entire legal framework is going up in smoke right now.

Dollarizing Argentina: Run-Off Elections Between Massa and Milei

Today, we’re turning our attention to Argentina’s upcoming run-off presidential election between current economic minister Sergio Massa and libertarian candidate Javier Milei. I could do a whole series on the effects of Peronism, but this time, I’ll be focusing on Milei’s proposed dollarization program.

Argentina has defaulted on its national debt nine times, and the government can manipulate events (and people) by hitting the peso printing button. Switching to the American dollar would institute some financial responsibility, but is it feasible?

Milei would need to come up with a metric-shit-ton of US dollars for this to work, but we’re still ignoring the impact on banking stability and the risk of hyperinflation. I’m not quite sold on the idea just yet, but let’s see who gets put in office before we go further down that rabbit hole.

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Boston Harbor. The news over the weekend was that in Argentina, we had our first round presidential contest and the two finalists who will compete in the first weekend of November are a guy from the ruling party, the protest. He’s the economy minister and a guy from the libertarian field, which is Javier Malay.

And apologies if I got that name right. If you win, I’ll learn to pronounce your name. Just ask Birdie Mohammed off of Turkmenistan. Okay, let’s see what to say. Malays. Big thing is that he wants to do away with the Argentinean peso and institute a dollarization program. Three big things for us. Number one, this is more than just some financial chicanery.

This has really real implications for the Argentineans, as well as everybody else in the neighborhood, because the financial strategies of the protests are a little wackadoo. Peronism is a very nonstandard, political and economic ideology, and it combines things the worst aspects of Venezuelan socialism with corporate Nazi ism. So basically under a cult of personality on top of that.

So if you can imagine AOC of the squad and of the American Congress, you know, one of those really, really, really left wing weirdos having a lovechild with Donald Trump. I mean, it would be an ugly, ugly, ugly, hideous child. But that’s basically what Peronism is. And among other things, it’s heavily unionized. But the government represents the unions, and it believes that the government should be able to print currency and any volume to pay for everything so long as you’re a political ally.

Needless to say, this has gotten Argentina into a lot of financial trouble over the last century. They’ve defaulted on their debt, I think nine times, and it should be a very successful country based on their demographics and the geography. But policy keeps getting in the way. So if you’re an American who thinks that you can do no wrong.

Bear in mind that if you wake up every day for decades, just try to wreck everything you can eventually become Argentina. So there is a limit to what we can get away with now with that kind of in your back pocket. Let’s talk about the impacts here. If dollarization worked, it would destroy the ability of the proneness or really any government in Argentina to use their central bank and their currency in order to manipulate events.

And that is honestly the idea here that Melaye has is this if we can wreck their ability to do what they’ve been doing these last 90 years, then that entire political ideology will die on the vine because they’ll actually have to then balance the books and do things like have petitions, responsibility. And in that sort of environment, people who can do math are going to do better than people who cannot do math.

So this is there’s more at stake here than simply having a balanced budget is about eliminating what has been the dominant ideology of the country has been very, very damaging for generations. But to number two, it’s not easy. The first step to erasing the economy is to remove all the pesos from circulation. And that means that the Argentine government under Melaye would have to go out and get a lot of U.S. dollars to buy back all the currency.

And the government is completely broke. One of the reasons why the Peruvians are printing currency like mad. So the first thing they would have to do is come up with billions and billions and billions of dollars in order to buy up all the old currency. Now, doing that is beyond the government’s capacity right now, unless they do a mass devaluation and if they devalue the peso by at least, say, three quarters.

So make it worth at most 20 to 25% of what it’s worth. Now. Then the number of dollars that you need would be significantly less. So in order to stop the budget largesse and the hyper inflation that comes from that, the first step would be to trigger hyperinflation. Needless to say, that would have not just economic but political outcomes.

So not something that could be done easily, lightly or without consequences. Which brings us to the third thing, whether or not it would even work. The whole idea of dollarization in the handful of countries that have done it is they believe that their institutions are not sufficiently responsible to be granted independent monetary policy and control over printing press.

So by doing away with that completely, basically ending the central bank, you then have a system where everyone is beholden to a much more responsible monetary regimen that of the United States. You know, you can cue the laughter for those of you who are gold bugs out there. The issue with this is that there’s more things that the central bank does and just regulate the currency.

There are also the lender of last resort. They’re also the regulator for the banking sector. And if you have a central bank that does not have the capacity to step in and help the banks in a system that is as fiscally wobbly as Argentina, you’re also going to have a bank run, a bank collapse and nothing behind it to stabilize it.

So for this plan to work, not only do a lot of things have to go right that are beyond Argentina’s control, but Argentina would have to enter through a series of banking and fiscal reforms in a matter of days that most countries take a generation to do. There’s a reason why dollarization, as a rule, is not something that states do, and it’s certainly not a quick fix.

It requires years of reforms, and it’s not clear that the political and economic system in Argentina has that sort of durability or attention to detail. So honestly, dollarization, as a rule, reminds me a lot of Boston’s participation in the Revolutionary War or modern sports. They hit hard right out of the gate. They pick a lot of fights, and then they largely sit out for the rest of the season.

Beyond the Election: Part II

Part I of this newsletter published a week ago, before we had enough U.S. states reporting election results to call the race. Now, barring something truly odd, Joe Biden has won a more than sufficient number of states to be considered President-elect.
 
For those who follow my work, it should come as no surprise that I’m not a big fan of either sitting president Donald Trump or the new President-elect. I’m a foreign policy guy and neither man has shown the interest in or competence to build something that will outlast him.
 
This isn’t entirely their fault. The United States is the least involved economy in the global system as measured as a percent of GDP, with the single biggest chunk of that involvement wrapped up with America’s neighboring NAFTA partners. My preferences aside, there is no burning need in the United States for global engagement. No wonder that aside from issues relating to the September 11, 2001 attacks and the Iraq War, Americans haven’t considered foreign policy an above-the-fold issue for the bulk of the post-Cold War era.
 
But this new norm will not last forever. Americans will care about the world again someday. The question is what does the road from here to there look like?
 
There are two ways the Americans might reengage in the future.
 
The first is the internal route. The (always fractious) American political system is, at present, in a state of breakdown. American first-past-the post electoral laws – the winner for each seat need only gain one more vote than whoever comes in second place – forces a two-party system. That induces the parties to behave certain ways. If they focus too much on explicit policies, they tend to alienate large swathes of the electorate. Instead they throw wide nets to include as many different factions as possible: evangelicals, business owners, pro-lifers, national security enthusiasts and fiscal obsessives for the Republicans; pro-choicers, environmentalists, socialists, organized labor, the youth and a rainbow of minorities for the Democrats.
 
But there is nothing hard-and-fast or permanent about these coalitions. As culture and technology and the economy and the world evolve, so too do the factions. Today the factions are shifting furiously. Union voters have all but become Trumpist Republicans (the AFL-CIO chief was in the Oval Office endorsing Trump’s NAFTA renegotiation while the rest of the Democratic coalition was hanging with Nancy Pelosi putting the finishing touches on Trump’s impeachment). National security voters are sniffing about the Democrats (every politically active living former intelligence chief and Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense endorsed Biden rather than Trump). Businesspeople – equally appalled by Trump’s erraticism and Biden’s tax plans – are in the wind.
 
Such reshuffling is normal. Healthy even. Political coalitions reflect strategic, cultural and economic realities, and over time those realities evolve. No political coalition is forever. No party is forever. The War of 1812 did in the Federalists. Westward expansion birthed the Democrats. The Whigs withered away as America geared up for its Civil War. The trauma of the Great Depression saw Black Americans abandon the Republicans for the Democrats while business leaders went the opposite direction. Today’s reshuffling – a reaction to the Cold War’s end and the Digital Revolution – is America’s seventh.
 
The Americans cannot even begin a conversation with one another about what they want out of the world until they’ve sorted out their internal political evolution. Only then can they begin to craft a grand strategy, and only then can they begin to assemble and implement a meaningful foreign policy. But the reordering takes time. The last party restructuring in the 1930s and 1940s took twelve years. This time around the Americans are only in year five. That means the global superpower is out to lunch until a point far closer to 2030 than 2020. What engagement occurs has been reduced to little more than presidential whim.

The second route is externally driven, and far, far more dangerous: Something pops up that scares the Americans, forcing them back into the world.
 
This was the strategy of Osama Bin Laden: attack the Americans in a way they could not ignore to induce them to slam sideways into the Middle East. OBL’s thinking was the Americans would partner with the region’s secular leaders to hunt down al Qaeda, and that partnership would so enrage the ummah that the Islamic masses would rise up and overthrow their rulers, ushering in a new Muslim Empire.
 
It obviously didn’t work out the way he had hoped. Yes, the Americans became embroiled in a pair of decades-long wars, and yes, those wars contributed to the Arab Spring and Arab Winter which in turn shattered the regional order, and yes, those wars and that shattering pushed a half dozen countries – so far – into de facto collapse.
 
But a pan-Islamist empire? The region is further from that now than ever. Of more lasting significance, by 2020 the Americans have largely abandoned the region to its own devices. America now boasts a military that is not only rested, recuperated and rearmed, but battle-hardened.
 
Any new American lash-out would undoubtedly be more violent and holistic than their recently ended Middle Eastern adventures. In part it is the inexorable march of military technology: America’s stealth bombers can now strike any position on Earth from their home bases in Missouri, while American drones can dominate a battlefield without need of a single solider in theater. Americans may be gun-shy about invading and occupying other countries at present, but such weapons systems make them eminently willing and able to devastate anything, anywhere, at any time. After declaring victory, the Americans don’t even need to go home because they will have never left in the first place.
 
But the bigger piece of the picture is economic. In the two decades since the September 11, 2001 attacks, the United States has become economically divorced from the wider world. The shale revolution has severed the thickest, most strategically significant link between the American economy and global norms. Integration with Mexico has reduced American dependence upon global manufactures. The entire American political spectrum now firmly anti-China, Americans are ready and willing – even eager – to cut the remainder of the ties that bind.
 
In the 2000s the Americans were always cautious about where and how they acted in an economic sense. For example, they knew Saudi elements played leading roles in the 9/11 attacks, yet the Americans largely spared Saudi interests for fear of repercussions in the oil market. If provoked today, the Americans truly would not care about what the world would look like the morning after any retaliatory actions, because they are now largely immune to any collateral damage.
 
Consider America’s post-Cold War conflicts: Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq. Sure, none of the places turned out to quite be Wisconsin, but imagine for the moment if the Americans had treated them all like Yemen: liberally applying ammunition to strategic bombing and assassination efforts and never sparing a thought to occupation or reconstruction. Simply wreck all economic and political infrastructure and then … leave.
 
This is the new normal for American policy. Any country stupid enough to provoke the Americans now will get something far harsher than the fate which ultimately befell OBL.
 
Massive capacity. No concern for credibility. No hint of a goal. No care for the aftermath. It’s a volatile, dangerous mix. And until the Americans can find a new internal balance, it’s the world we all live in.


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Beyond the Election: Part I

So…we had an election. It has gone down to the wire. At the time of this writing mid-day November 4 the votes are still being counted. America’s politics have significantly de-matured since the contested election in 2000 between W Bush and Al Gore, so even once a winner is declared I expect significant court challenges by both sides.
 
We’ll get to some of the implications of this election’s outcomes for the United States in Part II, but first I want to close the book on the globalist era. Doing that first requires a look back to the heyday of American globalism.
 
Way back when in a 1994 debate on Iraq at the United Nations Security Council America’s then-Secretary of State Madeline Albright famously noted that Americans “will behave, with others, multilaterally when we can and unilaterally when we must.” At the time pundits, rivals and allies alike took the statement as a one-off from a politician serving an administration famous for its lack of interest in foreign affairs of any type, who simply wished to avoid a debate over what many thought was a questionable security policy. With the benefit of hindsight we recognize Albright’s statement for what it truly is.
 
A tell.
 
The early 1990s were a heady time in America. The Soviet Union had just collapsed. Americans were basking in the glow of a world in which they not only knew no equal, but no challengers. Democracy was on the march. Globalization was an unalloyed positive. History was over. America was forever triumphant. All things were possible. The free family of nations would rule a world safe eternal.
 
Albright was among the most globally-minded personalities within the Bill Clinton administration, an administration that was already by far the most multilateralist in American history. Yet even in 1994, near the height of America’s post-Cold War exceptionalism fever dream, the most globalist of globalists let slip that the Americans really have no problem going it alone.
 
For the half century before Albright’s tenure, the globalized world was an American construct. The United States found itself facing down Joe Stalin’s Red Army and quickly realized it needed allies. Not to back America up or stand shoulder-to-shoulder with it, but to willingly place themselves between the Americans and Soviet forces. Needless to say, that was a big ask. And so the Americans bribed everyone. The American Navy patrolled the oceans for all. The American financial system and consumer market were opened to all. The American nuclear umbrella was extended to all. In exchange, the Americans obtained the right to command a global alliance to confront, contain and beat back the Soviets.
 
What most in today’s ecosystem of political, economic or global affairs forget – whether they predict the rise of China or the centrality of the Middle East or the eternity of Europe – is that the Americans view these Cold War structures as a trade. Guns for butter if you will. And since the Americans no longer see a need for help with the guns, they feel the world can make its own butter. Ever since the time of Albright, American interest in the world has declined steadily, and American voters and have consistently selected presidents who care less and less about the wider world.
 
Until now, when the Americans are at best actively dismissive – and at worst actively hostile – to nearly all things international.
 
The question is not will Americans return to the world in the aftermath of the 2020 general elections. They won’t.
 
In fact, from my point of view, we really aren’t looking at any meaningful changes in America’s global position one way or another.
 
Donald Trump is the known quantity; No one – Trump included – expects constructive international engagement in a second term. But Joe Biden was hardly a better choice if one’s desire is an engaged America. What foreign policy he has discussed focused on a degree of economic nationalism that is positively French. Biden’s anti-Chinese plans are far more adversarial than the Trump administration’s. The region which would have suffered the most under President Biden would have undoubtedly be Europe. The Europeans were largely dismissive of Barack Obama’s call for economic stimulus and military assistance in Afghanistan, leaving a sour taste in the mouth of the entire Obama administration, then-Vice President Joe Biden included. And should Biden be the next president there was never even a hint of a possibility of him reversing what had become a decades-long American withdrawal of military forces from…everywhere. Biden’s talk was one of closing off trade and borders and military commitments but somehow translating that into more American involvement and leadership. Um…no. That’s not how that works.

The question isn’t even will American credibility return in a post-Trump world. Americans do not care about their credibility. If they did they would not have abused their allies (W Bush), ignored their allies (Obama), or insulted their allies (Trump). Instead, what passes for American foreign ambition has declined with each of the past four administrations. Clinton sought gravitas without action. W Bush sought loyalty without reward. Obama sought isolation in all things. Trump simply seeks disengagement. And a President Biden has made it pretty clear he plans to sacrifice foreign connections to deal with domestic issues.

No, Americans care not about their credibility. It is capacity they crave.

Even the least charitable reading of the American system credits it with a massive – and massively insulated – economy. Only about one-ninth of the U.S. economy is dependent upon trade, and nearly half of that is trade within NAFTA, America’s local trade alliance. The shale revolution has not only made the United States net oil independent, it has reduced the costs of oil production in America to levels below that of the Persian Gulf. America’s university systems remain without peer. Add in COVID-related disruptions to global supply chains, and the United States is going through the greatest re-industrialization process in its history.

The United States also has the slowest aging population of the entire developed world save New Zealand, with even “young” countries like Indonesia, Brazil and India aging at least three times as quickly. The Chinese on average became older than the Americans back in 2018. Alone of the significant states, the Americans only need engage with others economically should they choose to.

Militarily, the United States is the only country in the world that maintains a long-reach deployment-capable military force. Each of its ten (soon to be eleven) supercarrier battle groups can outsail and outshoot the rest of the world’s combined navies. Only the United States can maintain open seas access out of reach of their own coastlines. As to boots, only the United States can deploy at a moment’s notice a quarter-million troops anywhere in the world. Any other country would struggle mightily to shift one-tenth as many.

America oozes capacity. That’s not the problem. The problem is America’s goal.

The country doesn’t have one.

I could talk about shoulds. The United States should reforge its alliances to seek new, higher-minded aspirations. It should leverage what’s left of global institutions to promote cooperation among like-minded nations. It should trade access to its consumer and financial markets to promote free enterprise and human rights and democracy in order to expand the roster of those nations. It should use its global reach, economic heft and technical prowess to lead efforts to rein in greenhouse gas emissions, expand education and health, and box in countries who would use access to global markets for ill gains.

But these are shoulds, not wills. People who believe as I do – that the United States ought to play a positive role in making the world a better place – have seen their preferred candidate lose in each of the seven presidential elections leading up to 2020. In the election just concluded, we didn’t even have a horse in the race.

A different sort of thinking now dominates American thought on all things international. The “America First” of the Right is reflexively hostile to the world. The “America First” of the Left is reflexively hostile to American involvement in the world. The “America First” of the middle just finds the world exhausting. Americans have chosen – repeatedly – that they are simply done.

Or at least they are done for now.


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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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Video Dispatch I: Future Crises in the Making

Mountain living can be…challenging. In the first of a series of video dispatches this week, I make lemons from lemonade and discuss the looming international challenges facing the American presidency, no matter who wins in November (and likely, beyond).


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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The 2020 Elections and Beyond

I normally try to stay out of American politics. My work is in the wider world, the American system is remarkably stable and self-regulating, and if I’m to be completely honest, making domestic political forecasts tends to burn bridges no matter how even-handed I attempt to be. Case in point: many responses to my most recent newsletter on the American political system deepened my appreciation for creative expletives. And yet the 2020 general elections are only a few weeks away and their results are among the most hotly anticipated geopolitical events in years. It would be weird for me to not say anything.

Before proceeding, let me dispose of my personal politics. No one who espouses my particular mix of views on economic and social and global issues is on the ballot (and they weren’t last time, or the time before, or the time before that) so this newsletter isn’t so much an assessment of political positions with an endorsement or condemnation, but instead an explainer of where things stand along with a forecast for how both the elections and their aftermath will shake out.

Let’s begin with the incumbent:

In terms of international relations, perhaps Trump’s greatest presidential failing is his preference for personal deal-making as opposed to institutional diplomacy. What made Trump a successful real estate and branding magnate was his willingness and ability to shift responsibility – financial, legal or otherwise – around among different parties as part of his brokering.

In business, Trump’s method worked because the United States has a robust civil society, rule of law and multiple levels of government with investigatory and enforcement power. In essence, in his business negotiations Trump maneuvers the folks on the other side of the table into positions where state and the society do much of his work – and nearly all his enforcement – for him.

But the world is not the United States. There is no global, multi-layered, professionalized, largely-apolitical cadre of institutions to enforce agreements among countries. What few global institutions do exist share three fatal flaws:

First, such structures only have enforcement mechanisms should member countries choose to allow them enforcement mechanisms, often on a case-by-case basis. For example, the International Court of Justice’s rulings are technically binding, but any country can choose to withdraw enforcement power selectively or wholesale at any time for any reason. There aren’t many rules to rely upon. Only unenforceable norms.

Second, pretty much all global institutions were American-crafted as part of America’s anti-Soviet Cold War efforts. They only work if the US forces them to work, and between the gradual disengagement of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W Bush, and faster disengagement of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, they simply no longer function.

Third, in global affairs, the people on the other side of the table – Russia’s Putin and China’s Xi come to mind – have a lot more experience in breaking norms to their advantage. Both to a degree built their systems around such tactics. No wonder Trump often appears outmaneuvered.

Yet even bilateral deals where such squishiness is less common tend to be weak. It too is an institutional issue, although in bilateral agreements it has more to do with tasking and executive leadership. For example, in the final decade of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan negotiated a series of “trust but verify” nuclear disarmament deals with the Soviets. After the deals were signed Reagan didn’t simply leave to watch the Sound of Music, his administration worked out the monitoring details with the Defense Department, the State Department, the CIA, and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Enforcement did not magically happen. TeamReagan had to make it happen, and that required engaging not simply the Soviets, but multiple pieces of the American executive branch as well.

Trump simply ignores such empowering minutiae. After announcing his big deals, he moves on to something else and rarely looks back. That’s a big part of why his pacts with North Korea fizzled within months or why the Phase One deal with China was dead on arrival (in China). About the only exceptions have been TeamTrump’s trade deals, but here institutional involvement not only helped make the deals happen, but helped make them stick. The same institution responsible for negotiating the successful trade deals with South Korea, Japan, Mexico and Canada – the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative – is also responsible for enforcing the deals.

From my point of view, the Trump administration has been a missed opportunity.

Nearly everything about the American strategic position – from military procurement to diplomatic positioning – is a hangover from the Cold War: The prime operating principle guiding America has been that the United States will create a safe, globalized world that empowers weak countries and fosters global trade for all, and in exchange Washington gets to direct everyone’s security policies in order to better combat Moscow. The security-policy aspect stopped working when the Soviet Union collapsed, but the Americans never changed the script on globalization and kept holding up the world’s collective ceiling. American foreign policy became ossified and rudderless.

Trump, as a geopolitical neophyte unburdened by commitments made in the previous century, had the opportunity to come up with something new. He certainly proved eager to sledgehammer previous structures and relationships, but he – like his three immediate predecessors – failed to generate a replacement.

“America First” isn’t a policy, much less a strategy. It’s a motto. It’s just like Obama’s “don’t do stupid stuff”. And so I put Trump into the same basket as Obama: leaders who left the country worse than they found it. And that’s before considering Trump’s preference for playing fast and loose with ethics or institutions.

Now, the challenger:

Biden’s first problem is that he is a black box from a policy point of view. Biden is commensurate political chameleon. His position shifts on every issue based on what he perceives the majority of power brokers within the Democrat Party currently believe. That has put him on both sides of nearly every issue of importance during his long tenure in politics. Such flexibility is particularly problematic on topics where consistency is key, such as national security and trade issues. Such an unfettered lack of convictions is part of what led former Defense Secretary Robert Gates to note that Biden has been on the wrong side of every foreign policy and strategic issue of the past four decades.

Biden’s second issue is his utter lack of leadership experience, which I realize sounds odd considering he has served in Washington since 1973. But aside from two years as a legal clerk and lawyer, he had only been a senator before becoming VP. To be blunt, senators suck at being president. They have little concept of how to manage an organization – such as the federal government with its three million employees.

Nor did Biden’s tenure as Barack Obama’s vice president provide him with many leadership opportunities. This is most definitely not Biden’s fault. Obama was famous for hermetically sealing himself in the White House and only allowing in information that supported his penchant for non-action, and his near-pathological unwillingness to have conversations with…well, anyone. But Obama refused to let policy be made without him, leaving Biden with little to do for eight long years.

(Incidentally, similar issues constrained a far more straightforward and ambitious member of the Obama administration: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Part of why Ms Clinton resigned at the end of Obama’s first term is that Obama melon-balled out of the State Department control of diplomatic relations with the world’s most important countries, transferring their management to the West Wing where…nothing happened.)

The most positive thing I have to say about Biden’s expertise is the odd combination of his lack of convictions combined with having a boss who didn’t like to interact with others meant that whenever the Obama White House needed a mediator in Congress, Biden was the obvious choice. That’s great. That’s essential. I don’t think I’d call that leadership.

But I think, for me personally at least, the issue of mental competence is Biden’s biggest looming issue. Being gaffe-prone doesn’t bother me, especially when a gaffe-prone person owns it as Biden historically did in the Senate. I find it humanizing. Even credibility-building. I’m instead talking about something more concerning: I’ve lost track of the number of times of late that Biden has stumbled over his words or looked confused, even when reading pre-prepared remarks from a teleprompter. I had the opportunity to meet Biden shortly after the Obama administration ended and my first thought was “Wow. He might…he might have dementia. It’s a good thing he didn’t run for president.”

Yet here we are. I want my president to be able to handle a crisis. And foreign leaders. And the press corps. And a phone call. Due to his disposition, Trump has repeatedly demonstrated he cannot do these things well. Biden’s recent track record suggests something potentially even worse.

Despite Biden’s lack of consistency or experience and concerns for his mental capacity, many hopeful for (or resigned to) a Biden administration believe this can still work out. They say that, sure, Biden might be a keg short of a six pack, but so long as he has a strong cabinet everything will be fine. I’ve heard this argument before. Recently. It is what old-school Republicans hoped about Trump back in 2016. It didn’t work out very well. At the end of the day, the president has the power and you need to trust the person in that position, not his unelected handlers.

So we’re left to choose between two seventy-something men who feature different flavors of incompetence. I have no idea who I am going to vote for.

But I’m still, well, me. So I will make a prediction:

President Trump’s seemingly deliberate and always callous mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis has contributed to the death of 200,000 Americans. In per capita terms that’s double the suffering of Europe or Canada. In absolute terms that’s higher than the number killed in any American military conflict save the Civil War and World War II itself. Forget vaccines. Forget ventilators and masks. Forget the CDC and the WHO. Forget the PR war with the Democrats. All Trump needed to do to mitigate the risk was say something like “wear a mask, maintain some distance, and look in on your loved ones”. Paraguay managed it. Bulgaria managed it. This isn’t hard. Most of America’s political middle finds Trump leadership lacking and his behavior disgusting.

Trump also faces danger on the Right. Trump has alienated fiscal conservatives, the military and the business community – all once bedrock Republicans. The Democrats have avoided – albeit narrowly – running an absolute whackjob and instead settled on Milquetoast Biden. To achieve reelection, Trump must capture every swing state as well as a couple decent sized blue states. That’s just not possible. Trump surprised last time because there was a large block of voters – the populists – the pollsters missed. That’s not the case this time around. And so Trump will lose and he will lose big.

Assuming, that is, Biden can prove he still has some marbles.

Biden has been the most closely managed candidate in modern American political history. He has not been without his ring of protectors for two years, giving him the feel of a badly operated marionette. Americans need to know if he can function, and we will all find out together on Sept 29.

Next Tuesday will be the first presidential debate, moderated by Chris Wallace. It will be the first time Biden will need to hold his own in a long-form open forum without his support crew. His performance will determine the election. Biden does not need to best Trump in the debate. All he needs to do is come across as marginally capable.

If Biden can do that, concerns for his mental capacity will ebb and he will win handily.

If the Biden who served in the Senate for three decades shows up – a likeable, master debater who can identify with people with a glance and laugh at his own missteps – he will win in a landslide.

But if Biden just…can’t, then Trump walks away with it all.

It really is that simple.

Now I’m sure that many of you are either cheering my wisdom or burning me in effigy (maybe both for some of you), so let me now say something certain to piss everyone off at once:

As regards global affairs, who wins November 3 really doesn’t matter.

Yes, the U.S. President is the single-most powerful person in the world, but ultimately the United States is fundamentally incapable of moving forward on the world stage.
 
Another four years of Donald Trump would grant us the clarity of a known quantity: continued degradation of the structures of the international system. But that system has been degrading since 1992 so I don’t see this as more than a few additional steps down the same road towards a sort of retrenchment / neo-isolationism. That’s ultimately where I saw the United States heading back when I wrote the Accidental Superpower back in 2014.
 
A Biden administration would be little different except in tone. Resetting American foreign policy in any meaningful way first requires a replacement for the Cold War structures which are now three decades out of date. No one on TeamBiden has so much as blinked in that direction. Nor do I believe for a moment that a President Biden would prioritize such an effort. Ultimately, such a task would require a clear, firm national goal. That would require something Biden simply lacks. Convictions.
 
A grand reset would also require the service of an American institution which no longer functions: the State Department. The past four administrations have alternatively neglected or gutted America’s diplomatic corps. It is largely incapable of being part of any solution without first undergoing a decade-long regeneration.
 
A grand reset would also require an American institution which is likely to be hostile to a Biden administration: the Senate. The Founding Fathers designed the Senate to act as a brake to prevent policy from evolving too quickly. One-third of the Senate faces election races every two years, so full turnover is sooooo sloooow. The Senate regularly reflects American politics as it exists…a decade in the past. In addition, each state gets the same two senators regardless of population – a measure designed to prevent larger states from trampling smaller states. That means more rural, lower-population states are more heavily represented. More rural, lower-population areas tend to prefer Trump over Biden.
 
For Biden to have a working majority in the Senate he needs to flip at least four seats. It is possible of course, but highly unlikely. (Recall that when the 2018 midterms delivered Trump a sound thumping at the national, state and local levels, Trump-aligned Republicans gained seats in the Senate.) The point of this constitutional detour is that the Senate is the institution that ratifies treaties, a classification that includes all the various agreements that underlay America’s Order-era structures: NATO, NAFTA, the United Nations, the WTO, the Japanese alliance, the International Monetary Fund, and so on.
 
A grand reset would also require time, which would also be in short supply. A President Biden would spend the first six months dealing with coronavirus and a series of legal reforms that address issues of accountability designed to Trump-proof future elections. Add in little things like summer breaks and in the most aggressive case scenario a President Biden couldn’t even begin any sort of new global effort until 2022. And don’t forget that the domestic issues Biden wants to prioritize also require the Senate. In the highly likely outcome that Biden’s domestic hopes are dashed on the Senate’s shoals, anything global is likely to be pushed not so much to the back seat, but to be abandoned on the side of the road.
 
For a good time, you too can play with electoral and Senatorial politics at https://www.270towin.com/.


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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France Dodges a Bullet…By Catching a Bullet

The results are in:

Emmanuel Macron defeated Marine Le Pen of the National Front by 66% to 34%, making him the youngest president in French history.

Many were worried about the implications of a Le Pen presidency as the right-wing, pseudo-racist, anti-European populist has called bluntly for an immigration ban, a withdrawal from the euro and EU, the severing of most economic connections with the wider world, and a general break with the whole French system since World War II.

But while there were admittedly a couple of big gulp moments during the campaign, I wasn’t ever really that worried about such an outcome. France’s pro-European instincts are still pretty strong, and the French political center is robust as well. As soon as it became apparent that the center-right wasn’t going to go down the rabbit-hole, I was pretty sure that Le Pen didn’t have a serious chance. The bullet would be dodged.

Which isn’t the same as me saying that all is good in the state of France.

Just because the center remains strong in the French electorate doesn’t mean it remains strong in the French political system. In the first of France’s presidential election’s two rounds, the two parties that have ruled France since the formation of the Fifth Republic only scraped together 26% of the vote between them. And Marine Le Pen increased her father’s share of the vote – when he made the second round a decade ago – by half.

So should the French be congratulated, even celebrated, for their election results? Sure. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. All the trends in play that enabled the National Front to so hugely improve its vote take remain fully in force, and all will push France in a much darker direction in the months and years to come.

Automation at home and abroad continues to erode the earning power and job prospects of French workers. So long as the global trade system and EU survive, the French system’s lack of competitiveness continues to hollow out the French economy. France’s vulnerability to energy shocks continues to deepen.
Europe’s sovereign debt crisis is loads worse than it was in 2007, and continues to sap economic activity in France’s Spanish and Italian neighbors. Inward immigration from France’s colonial legacies continues to flow as those former colonies face issues of systemic collapse. Germany remains shielded from the worst of most of this, and so long as it is the heart of the EU not just geographically, but also economically, financially and politically it will continue to ascend at France’s expense. France is trapped in a system it cannot control and that system is in terminal decline. I’d be scared and angry too.

And let’s not understate the challenge the new president faces. The entirety – yes, the entirety – of the parliament is made up of parties that were just wholly discredited on the national scene. The new president doesn’t have a single legislator in office. The comparison is imperfect, but can you imagine if Donald Trump ran on a third-party ticket to become president? How do you think the Democrats and Republicans would treat his priorities when they hold all the legislative cards?

Sure Macron can try to capture the French imagination (and some seats) in the June parliamentary elections, but so too can Le Pen. And now that one-third of the French electorate has broken the seal and voted for the National Front, it is highly likely that Le Pen’s (massively) more organized and institutionalized party will do just as well as Macron’s neophyte on-a-shoestring En Marche. When we get to the next presidential election, France is likely to have a president with few successes, an ossified and discredited center-left and center-right, and a National Front that has racked up dozens of electoral successes in both national and regional bodies.

Doesn’t take a pessimist to guess how that will turn out.

Part X: Trump Finally Plays a Card

Trump finally played a card with the Syria strike and it was a doozy – whether the messages were intended or not.

The past week saw the rhetoric of President Trump’s campaign messages meet the reality of the office he now holds. Stepping back a little further, April has been a very revealing month — if not somewhat cruel to President Trump’s more isolationist-leaning backers — in terms of what an emerging “Trump Doctrine” looks like.

Attaching the term “doctrine” to various past presidents’ policies is always somewhat of a misnomer as their actions are constrained by a variety of factors, including the unfeeling realm of geopolitics, and are informed by a bevy of inputs most of us could never even imagine.

Voters across the political spectrum were either terrified of, or enraged by, or ecstatic over the idea of a President Trump who would sharply reduce the United States’ global footprint and upend decades of long-standing formal and de facto relationships that have come to define the post-WWII era.

But any ideas of what a Trump foreign policy would or wouldn’t look like blew up earlier this month when nearly five dozen Tomahawk missiles struck the Syrian regime’s Shayrat airbase. So much for all the times candidate Trump decried foolish U.S. military intervention in the Middle East, amirite?Well, not so fast. The missile strike against regime forces in Syria was the very least President Trump could do and still reasonably claim he had done something. And there are zero signals that Washington is preparing to send U.S. ground troops en masse into Syria to fight against both the regime and various jihadi forces.

The reality is that the strike is important because it was the first tangible international action by the new President who has yet to clearly define his strategy and the world is taking notice. Here’s where we stand now:

  • The Syrian regime in Damascus has been warned that any use of nerve agents or chemical warfare in the future risks triggering a U.S. strike. The actual impact the last strike had within Syria is still being debated as details from both the Syrian and US government are fuzzy, but the immediate diplomatic kerfuffle it caused with the Assad regime’s Russian backers was relatively short lived. The U.S.-Russian “deconfliction” line – meant to prevent conflicts from escalating – that the Russians suspended was restored a few days later, with none of the tension so lovingly built up during the previous administration any worse for the wear.
  • On the last point, the Russians suddenly see a cost to their direct actions in Syria that has been palpably absent in recent years. But before you start bursting into renditions of “America, F#%$ yeah!” try and see this from the Russian perspective: your aging, limited military resources are now stretched incredibly thin from Ukraine to the heart of the Levant, and you have a tendency to see enemies across all borders. With the Americans again willing to fling ordinance about, things could get ugly fast.

RIMPAC Exercises

  • Trump’s ordering of the strike in Syria has implications outside of the Middle East as well. For China, the timing could not have been more awkward. As 59 Tomahawk missiles were being launched from U.S. ships in the Mediterranean, Trump was entertaining Chinese President Xi Jinping at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Following intimate conversations over a “big, beautiful” piece of chocolate cake, President Trump has decided that he will not label the Chinese as currency manipulators after all, but the Chinese delegation is said to have left Mar-a-Lago agreeing to help eliminate the U.S. trade deficit and the North Korean nuclear threat.
  • With all the explosions as of late (including the crater the Americans blew into Afghanistan’s Spin Ghar mountains last week via MOAB), the North Koreans are nervous that they’re next. Pyongyang’s decision to not test a suspected planned nuclear device over the weekend to coincide with the 105th anniversary of founder Kim Il-Sung’s birth could be seen in response to the U.S. Navy moving the USS Carl Vinson Carrier Strike Group to the region. But back a desperate, anxious neurotic into a corner and you might not like what happens next…
  • With all this ordinance on display, the U.S. has outlined, highlighted, and made bold what sort of capabilities will not be on the side of its NATO allies should they continue to fail to meet their funding obligations to the alliance. Trump has changed his tune recently regarding how NATO is no longer “obsolete,” but the new administration has made it crystal clear to both NATO and EU leadership that members can no longer expect US protection essentially for “free.”
Whether or not President Trump or members of his administration intended for all of these things to fall into place following the strike in Syria is of course another topic, but the adults in the room (especially Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster) certainly understand how many opportunities the April 6 strike against Syrian forces have opened up. And given the deference Trump has for “his” generals and an increasing tendency to delegate decision-making during these first 100 days, it’s safe to say that the emerging Trump foreign policy is going to be anything but boring.

Part IX: The First International Challenge

Trump has big foreign policy choices to make this week and they both have world changing consequences.

It’s already been a big week for Trump. He just got his first pair of foreign policy crises.

First, the one that he picked.

Chinese President Xi Jinping will arrive tomorrow at Mar-a-Lago for direct talks with President Trump. We will know within a few days just how hostile the Trump administration will be toward all things Chinese. In these talks, The United States — and by extension, Trump — holds most of the cards: a functional anti-Chinse military alliance, absolute naval mastery of the Pacific, a Japan chomping at the bit for a more aggressive anti-Chinese stance, full command over the security of the global trading system upon which China depends, etc.

It isn’t that China cannot cause the Americans pain, just that any method of doing so obviously invites the Americans to counter in-kind at a higher order of magnitude. Xi is flatly coming seeking a “deal” and the talks are in Florida — rather than Washington or Beijing — so that Xi need not worry about American journalists or Chinese politicos hearing the discussions and potentially casting Xi as being as weak in the talks as he fully realizes he is. So either we’ll get a deal or this is the beginning of the end of the Chinese system in its current form. Personally, I’m popping some corn.

Then there’s the crisis that Trump most certainly did not pick.

Earlier this week the Syrians broke out some of their chemical weapons stocks again and used them on one of the more stubborn rebel positions in the country’s northern Idlib province. Russia quickly provided a modicum of diplomatic cover for its Syrian ally, asserting that a Syrian airstrike merely struck a rebel chemical weapons factory, and so scattered someone else’s chemical weapons.

For those of you who like to obsess about technicalities, chemical weapons depend upon being aerosolized for dispersion. It isn’t that the liquid material isn’t toxic — it’s totally toxic! — but a pint of liquid chemical weapon will kill everyone in a room while the same aerosolized amount can kill everyone in several city blocks. Hit a chemical weapons depot with a conventional bomb and you’ll incinerate far more of the material than you’ll disperse, much less aerosolize. The Russians of course know this and fully realize that the statement isn’t just a lie, but a particularly asinine one.

There’s a method to the madness.

The Russian challenge is the same one they used when invading eastern Ukraine: say something so beyond the pale that you are daring the international community to do something. It leaves everyone — Trump included — with needing to follow one of three paths. First, suck it up and do nothing. Second, deploy tens of thousands of troops to engage in a broad scale war against a country backed by a nuclear power that already has combat troops in-theater and risk thermonuclear escalation. Third, start a drone/airstrike campaign with the express purpose of decapitating the Syrian government, up to and including the assassination of Assad himself.

Option 1 makes you look like a wuss, emboldening Russia (not to mention Syria) to use similar tactics in other theaters. Option 2 bogs you down in a winless, bottomless war that makes the Iraq conflict look simple (and that’s assuming that nothing goes horribly wrong). Option 3 gives up on a stable future for Syria and the surrounding region. It would also be public acceptance of assassination, opening up a Pandora’s box of strikes and counter-strikes all over the world by a panoply of powers.

Say what you will about the Russians, they are very good about presenting their rivals with unwinnable choices.

I never expected the alleged Trump-Putin love-fest to amount to anything. Russia’s geopolitical and demographic position is precarious, but Russia’s tool-box is fairly full. Trump has yet to fully familiarize himself with the awesome raft of tools the U.S. president has in foreign affairs, and his demeanor is somewhat… inconsistent. It’s a combustible mix, not to mention that I personally find the idea that the world is big enough for the Trump and Putin egos to co-exist (darkly) amusing.

What really gets my attention is that these two developments happened in the same week. Xi’s trip has been on the docket for awhile now, and timing the use of a chemical munition wouldn’t be all that hard. While I have zero proof, the timing does appear to be trademark Russian: force the White House to pick a crisis — a buffet of unpalatable choices in the Middle East, or a major politico-economic conflict with another power. Either way, it potentially keeps the Trump administration obsessed with conflicts far from Russia’s borders.

Just don’t forget that no matter what Trump picks, the outcomes are going to be far worse for others. An America engaged in a Syrian conflict is one that generates building disasters for Turkey, Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Europe. An America engaged in a head-of-state assassination campaign destabilizes entire continents. An America pursuing a Chinese competition wrecks the entire global supply chain system from raw crude to iPhones.

The only way this doesn’t lead to Disorder is if Trump chooses to look like a whimp.