This Is How the World Ends, Part I

by Peter Zeihan, Melissa Taylor, and Michael N. Nayebi-Oskoui

I like to say that I sell context. It’s all about how seemingly disparate things like age structures and trade patterns and political evolutions and technological advances interact. In any such dynamic system there are winners and losers. My concern is that the global system itself now faces a moment of truth in which the countries of the world, first and foremost the United States, will fail to rise to the occasion. Which is a nice way of saying that what I’m really seeing – what I’m really selling – is the end of the world.

This world system was put into place 70 years ago. The core of the international system during the Cold War was the Americans’ support of the global trade and security order. The Americans agreed to provide global and regional security to their allies in exchange for deference on security matters. When issues of economic import rose to prominence, the Americans tended to give way. When issues of strategic import rose to prominence, the Americans tended to get their way because that was the deal.

This arrangement froze geopolitics as previously independent countries were pulled into a massive, interconnected system because of not only America’s overwhelming economic and military power, but also the power of the alliance structure it controlled. This was sucha powerful force that it even pulled in America’s enemies one-by-one and allowed them to rise, fueled on exports. In the process, the US made the global economy dependent on the relatively free flow of goods, people, and money while also alleviating the need for the large militaries that defined the first half of the 20th Century. In other words, the US and its alliance shifted every global system that mattered for literally every country in the world.

Everyone except the US, which managed throughout this to remain isolated economically. It maintains its own military, largely produces what it needs (though it imports a lot of what it wants) and remains the largest economy in the world. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, just as the world began to truly bet their economies on the American plan, the American’s need for this incredibly expensive system faded. It’s taken the US awhile, but it finally noticed.

There is no replacement for US power, economic or military. “Europe” as a concept, China, and Russia are all in existential struggles and each of them is likely to lose. There is no alternate reserve currency. There is no one who can react to any event anywhere in the world like the US can. The Americans are leaving a power vacuum and we know what happens in power vacuums.

I’ve been speaking and writing about this approaching “end” for the better part of the past decade. One of the fun things – and incidentally, one of the things that helps keep me sane – is that it is all very abstract. I can blithely note that wars will happen, that supply chains will break down, that the lights will go out, that famine is an inevitability, but so long as the timeframes are fuzzy and the locations are over the horizon it is easy to speak and write with a degree of detachment. This doesn’t affect me, and certainly not right now.

I think/fear that I’m about to lose that insulation. The end is pretty god-damn nigh. Exactly how this plays out is still very much up in the air. The blow by blow will matter immensely in the short and even medium term. So I’m going to lay out the most recent big events that seem to be giving shape to the Disorder over the course of several newsletters.

Event 1: The United States withdraws from the Iran nuclear deal (May 8)

The Obama administration did not sign the U.S. up to the nuclear deal because it thought Iran would suddenly become an upstanding member of the international community. After decades of being the region’s arbiter, the American security apparatus in specific and the American public in general wanted to get out of the region. That meant the White House needed to make a choice.

Option one was to appoint a “winner.” This “winner” would patrol the region, keep the local powers in line, and in general do what the Americans had done: keep the region as stable and static as possible.

The Obama team didn’t like the candidates. Iran was out as a matter of principle. Saudi Arabia didn’t field a meaningful army, much less a navy. Israel was potent, but small, and the religious angle meant it could never lead the region. Turkey may have been capable, but it had unrelated interests in Europe and the Caucasus and the Mediterranean, and so could never concentrate its efforts on such a gangly region like the Middle East.

Even then, there was no guarantee that any “winner” would look out for American interests unless a large American military presence remained… which would defeat the point of a sustained withdrawal. And the last thing Washington wanted was to cause the emergence of a new regional hegemon that was not consistently pro-American.

That left option two: establish a regional balance of power so the region would self-regulate. This balance, ultimately, is what the nuclear deal sought to achieve: partially rehabilitate Iran, partially reintroduce it into the international system so that Iran could counter – and be countered by – the other regional players. In doing so – or so the theory goes – the region’s wars will be many, but limited.

The key selling point of the balance-of-power option was that the Middle East has so many competing centers of power that no single country would ever be able to gain a significant, long-term advantage. That would keep any of the (many) expected battles bottled up within the region. It sounds a bit cruel, but the ongoing civil wars in Syria and Yemen are good examples of the balance-of-power strategy working because those conflicts keep the region’s powers at one another’s throats.

Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal does two things. First, it wrecks the balance-of-power strategy by gutting the possibilities of the region’s most active player: Iran. The resurrection of global financial sanctions on Iran will – at a minimum – halve the country’s export earnings by year’s end. This means the Americans will need a new strategy for the region. At present, the Trump administration hasn’t offered anything as to what that might be. But that is an issue for another day.

From my point of view, the second outcome of the withdrawal is far more important. The old/new sanctions on Iran uncaps what has traditionally been the Americans’ most potent economic weapon: secondary sanctions.

Secondary sanctions are not something the Americans have ever used often or liberally. They present would-be sanctions busters with a choice: do business with the sanctioned country (in this case, Iran) or do business with the United States. Since the Iranian market is roughly 1% the size of the American market, there may be a bit of whining but for most firms that’s not all that difficult a decision. And that’s before you consider the long-term demographics of the world’s major economies.

What is truly different this time around is the presence of some institutional infrastructure the Obama administration set up a few years back to force the Iranians to negotiate the nuclear deal in the first place. Via an exhausting series of bilateral negotiations, the Obama team got a good hard grip on something called SWIFT, a system for managing financial transfers between various players in the international space. They used this newfound power to apply secondary sanctions to anything that touched the U.S. dollar. Since the U.S. dollar is the only global currency of exchange (the euro position has been shrinking for years, and even the Chinese yuan has been backpedaling of late) the end result was to cut any sanctions-busters out of pretty much all international trade, even if those sanctions-busters have no direct exposure to the American market.

I think the Trump administration fully understands just how powerful of a tool it just picked up, and that tool is perfect for the job of pretty much everything else on the administration’s international agenda.

Up next: Europe Guts Itself.

The Syrian War, 2.0

The Israeli Air Force announced April 21 that it would scale back participation in the Red Flag exercises in Alaska. The joint Red Flag drills are regular events hosted by the United States, with the upcoming April 26-May 11 exercises allowing the Israelis to train in an environment they rarely experience (non-coincidentally, Alaskan terrain is somewhat similar to the Persian highlands). IDF spokespersons attributed the decision to keep Israeli F-15s at home due to the changing situation assessment of tensions along its northern border that have left everyone holding their breath.

We weren’t kept waiting long. In the early morning hours of April 30, the Israelis launched a series of significant strikes throughout western Syria, targeting infrastructure that supports weapons development and distribution. A rocket factory made for some particularly impressive fireballs.

The Israelis normally hold their cards much closer to their chest than this – particularly when it involves possible actions in their close-in neighborhood. But these are not normal times. The open secret is that the United States sees almost no role for itself in Syria going forward (at least, compared to what American engagement in the Middle East typically looks like). The Americans’ primary goal in Syria has been the eradication of ISIS. With the terror group’s holdings nearly obliterated, so too goes a compelling case for extending American involvement in Syria. This is compounded by the fact that a country as broken as Syria needs the kind of costly, involved, long-term occupation and rebuilding efforts the Americans pursued in Germany and Japan after World War II – a cost the Americans were unwilling to pay in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

The pending American withdrawal evolves the Syrian War in a much fiercer direction. Initially, the primary players in the fight were domestic: the Assad government, ISIS, the Syrian Kurds, and the various collections of anti-regime elements who seemed to occupy every spot on the spectrum from wonky democrats to those who felt ISIS would have been more successful if it had just been a bit more brutal. Foreign powers used these factions as proxies to meet their tactical and strategic needs in the country without committing significant troops. It also created plausible deniability in a very volatile situation with many major actors. In exchange, these factions received intelligence, money, weapons and on-site support far superior to anything they could hope for otherwise, not to mention promises for their role in the future in Syria that may or may not be fulfilled. While those foreign players could certainly make their presence felt, using proxies inherently means the foreigners were rarely present in sufficient strength to dictate events on the ground. (The sole exception might be Iran’s proxy militant group in Lebanon, Hezbollah, which has apparently redirected nearly all its fighters into the Syrian theater to assist the Assad government. More on that exception in a moment.)

The presence of U.S. forces in Syria has limited what all the outside players could do, as well as the sorts of risks they were willing to take. The Americans may have never had more than a couple thousand troops in-country, but their vast array of naval firepower combined with the base at Incirlik, Turkey meant they could at a moment’s notice squeeze off missile and bomb barrages at any target they desired. There was no point in baiting the eagle (as Moscow discovered Feb 7 when the Americans obliterated a Russian probe attempt).

But take the Americans out of the equation, and the lid comes off the pot. And since everyone has different goals, Syria is about to get consistently lively:

Russia was an early participant in the Syrian conflict for a mix of reasons:

  • Syria is one of the few of Russia’s Cold War-era proxies that is still of some use, so propping up Assad holds some slight strategic value all its own.
  • Politically, being involved where the Americans were not helped burnish Russia’s credentials as a player, guaranteed it a seat at any table that discussed Syrian issues, and was an easy propaganda win back home.
  • Being in Syria annoyed the crap out of the Turks, forcing Ankara to rivet its gaze to its south rather than to the north where more core Russian interests were in play.
  • Being able to twist the Syrian fighting this or that way enabled the Russians to generate scads of refugees on demand. A mix of geographic, climatic and infrastructure patterns meant that most of those refugees could only go north to Turkey and Europe, enabling Moscow to scramble European politics with nothing more than a few dozen bombs.
  • More recently, the Russians have turned Syria into a vast testing and training range for its forces. Russia’s military may be huge, but it hasn’t seen 1% of the sort of expeditionary combat American forces have seen since 1992. Syria let’s the Russians play catch up.

What do all these reasons have in common? Russia has a vested interest in seeing the Syrian War never end.

Moscow, Russia

Iran is the closest to a strategic ally that the Assad regime has, and Syria has quite surprisingly – to Iran – become the lynchpin in Iran’s entire regional strategy. The most important tool Iran has is the militant group Hezbollah, which Iran uses not simply as a foothold in the Levant, but to threaten Israel and pressure the United States. When Saddam ran Iraq, the Iranians were able to shuttle support to Hezbollah via Iraq and Syria into Lebanon. Well, the Americans overthrew Saddam and now civil war threatens Syria. The Iranians didn’t just have no choice but to go all-in in Syria, but they are now the power seeking to maintain governments in the region rather than seeking overthrow them. That requires a degree of political, strategic, military and economic commitment that is downright… American.

Assad may have won the civil war, but now Iran has to hold the place together, and as the Americans learned in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, the second phase is far more difficult. But unlike the Americans, the Iranians can’t just go home. An ongoing Assad victory is absolutely critical to maintaining Iran’s current sphere of influence from Mesopotamia to the eastern Mediterranean. In short, the Iranians can never go home.

Directly opposite the Iranians are a series of powers that seem to be somewhat confused about what’s going on in their neighborhood: the Gulf Arab states – Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. Their efforts in Syria are, in a word, messy.

  • Part of this is due to geography: large swathes of desert terrain separate the Gulf Arabs and Syria.
  • Partly it’s a lack of experience: the Gulfies are among the most dependent countries on earth when it comes to relying on the American security blanket.
  • Partly it’s ineptitude: Saudi and Emirati and Qatari-backed groups spend as much time fighting each other in Syria as they do Assad or anyone else.
  • Partly it’s an issue of distraction: these same powers are also fighting a war in Yemen.

It all adds up to a lot of ammunition backed by a lot of money that’s causing a lot of deaths. And that just might be the point. For decades the Americans’ took on the mantle of preserving countries in their current form; If your job is to maintain the global system, then you want stability. But with the Americans leaving, the only power that really wants a stable Syria is… Iran. And if there is one thing the Saudis do not want, it is an Iranian-dominated anything. Better to burn the whole place down than allow the dust to settle in an arrangement that doesn’t suit Saudi preferences.

Which puts Israel and Saudi Arabia more or less on the same side, with Israel in the perfect strategic and political position. The regional powers with which the Israelis have passably good relations – Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Egypt – are fighting against Assad and Iranian influence, which means Israel is free to strike targets according to its own national security prerogatives with little risk of even angry tweets from regional stakeholders.

The Syrian War has quietly ushered in a new era of Israeli security relations with its neighbors: rather than relying on the Americans, Israel is aggressively, proactively and decisively pursuing its national security interests and intervening in Muslim conflicts… and no one except Syria and Iran has anything to say about it. The Israeli Air Force has attacked over 100 targets within Syrian territory since 2012, from suspected missile and arms deliveries en route to southern Lebanon to high value Hezbollah and Iranian targets. With the Iranians now the force for order in the country, the Israelis will gleefully expand their target list to anything that will cost the Iranians lives, equipment or money.

It’ll be a long list.

Tehran, Iran

The role of Turkey in Syria has been… unmoored for a reinforcing pair of reasons.

  • First, Turkey’s World War One defeat was so total and humiliating that Turkey in essence took a vacation from the world that lasted a century. The Turks are out of practice using the political, diplomatic, economic and military tools that are standard for pretty much everyone else. The learning curve is fairly steep, but it is still there and the Turks are starting from almost zero.
  • Second is that the political situation within Turkey is flattening that learning curve. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has largely completed the process of purging the country of, well, everyone who opposes him. That has left this very Trumpian personality with zero competent allies, which means he is running Turkey’s $900 billion economy, 80-million citizens, and 900,000-strong military all by himself. Such concentration of power makes for erratic decision-making, with Erdogan highly vulnerable to bad intelligence, fake news, Russian manipulations, personal mental blocks, and a host of other issues that would routinely be filtered out in a more decentralized system.

At the end of the day the Turks’ primary concern in Syria is the military capacity and de facto independence of the Syrian Kurds. Ankara/Erdogan fear – with significant reason – that a Syrian Kurdish statelet will provide a template that could be reproduced within Turkey’s own Kurdish regions. To that end and despite Erdogan’s best efforts, the Turkish military/intelligence apparatus is steadily constructing effective networks of military groups throughout northern Syria. When the Turks do decide to move in force, they’ll be able to.

And let’s not kid ourselves. Unlike the United States, Russia, Iran or Israel, Turkey can put troops on the ground in Syria in the hundreds of thousands if it wants to and the Turks have the motivation and staying power to see their strategy through in what will be a complex and bloody new stage in the war. It is ultimately Turkey that will decide what Syria will look like, and years from now we’ll all be looking back at the 2018 American withdrawal as the event that unleashed Turkish power in the region.

I’d like to end with one particularly dark thought. The primary reason the Americans were in Syria at all was because a militant group called ISIS was stupid enough to post the beheadings of a few American co-eds on social media. Expunging ISIS is pretty much done and so the Americans are now leaving. But look at what enabled ISIS to exist in the first place: local sectarian divisions, multiple competing power centers, an arid geography that complicates regional consolidation, meddling outside powers, and a metric butt-ton of easily attainable military-grade weapons. None of these factors have gone or are going to go away. Every power playing in the Syrian sandbox is creating, sponsoring and supporting their own constellations of mutually-antagonistic militias. It isn’t so much a petri dish from which will emerge the next ISIS as it is an ISIS factory.

Happy Monday.

Of Walls and Soldiers

I’m going to do something today that I normally try to avoid: commenting on a political statement that may well not turn into policy. It’s a big, busy world with a lot going on on even a slow day, and American President Donald Trump likes to talk and tweet a lot. If I philosophically waxed on the potential geopolitical implications of everything Trump ever said (or was said about him or near him), I’d never have time to shower.

Yet of late Trump has been connecting more of his rhetoric to actual policy (for example, on trade), and his ongoing cabinet overhaul is installing personalities with reputations for boldness and effectiveness (for example, the incoming National Security Adviser John Bolton). Me noting such improvements in delivery is not the same thing as me personally endorsing those policies or persons, but I’m in the job of calling it as I see it and I avoid lobbying for any particular policy.

Which means I’m about to do something else I normally try to avoid: calling a mistake a mistake.

At a gathering of Baltic presidents earlier this week the American president indicated he planned to deploy the U.S. military to the border until such time as Congress appropriates the required funding for a large, meaningful border barrier. On April 4, the Homeland Security Secretary indicated that the Trump White House was already coordinating with several states to send National Guard troops to the border, perhaps immediately.

I’ll leave it to more military-minded folks to parse the differences in significance between a regular military deployment and the Guard, but regardless, from my point of view it would be a colossal mistake on at least two levels.

First, far from reducing illegal migration, any meaningful wall effort will drastically increasethe ability of illegal migrants to cross the border while also criminalizing the entire border region. The Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts that form the bulk of the American-Mexican border regions are among the most dangerous, desolate regions of the planet. That makes it a good border – it is hard to cross. Would-be migrants have to make crossings in the deep desert. Dangerous, desolate areas with no towns also have another defining characteristic: no roads. Anyone who crosses the deep desert largely has to do so on foot, and a great many die trying.

Areas with no roads cannot support other signs of civilization: post offices, schools, hospitals, gas stations…or walls. The first thing that would need to be done to facilitate the construction of a meaningful border wall would be to build service roads across the desert at at least 40 points in order to enable heavy construction vehicles to reach the border in the first place. At least one road would then need to parallel the wall across the entire 2000 miles of would-be border wall. Put simply, the preparatory effort of building a barrier to stop illegal migrants would eliminate the biggest current barriers that hinder illegal migrants: the region’s natural hostility, remoteness and lack of infrastructure.

(Incidentally, narcotics also flow more heavily along routes with good infrastructure, so the wall would likely double down on one of America’s most pressing social/law & order issues in addition to exacerbating the migration question.)

Even that assumes the wall actually stops migrants. It wouldn’t. A great comparison is the world’s second-most hermetically sealed border barrier: the Gaza Wall that keeps the Palestinians bottled up in the Gaza Strip. (The Korean DMZ, with its miles-thick fields of landmines, comes in first.) The Gaza Wall is over 30 feet high, made of solid concrete, and the Israeli Army has standing shoot-on-sight orders for anyone brave enough to try overtopping it. Yet the Gaza Wall is so riddled with tunnels that the Gazans regularly get everything from construction materials to consumer electronics to foodstuffs to live animals to missiles to wedding parties to fast food deliveries on a daily basis.

The point isn’t just that the Gaza Wall is porous, but that Gaza’s under-wall traffic is fairly regular –  items and people go back and forth often. A U.S.-Mexico border wall would need to block irregular traffic because the illegal migrants only need to cross once. That requires a much more intense security regimen than exists in Gaza, which now means so expanding the border infrastructure that the United States has a moderate number of border agents every few miles. Having only 30 people on station every four miles (a woefully inadequate number considering the task’s scale) at any given time adds up to roughly 60,000 security staff – not counting support personnel or the sort of expanded infrastructure required to support such a large number of people along such a long logistical chain in such a remote area.

It’s worse than it sounds by far. Any border defined by an ineffective barrier and large, determined population movements is one in which various elements will conspire to provide clandestine crossing capacity that expressly avoids law enforcement. That not only generates a culture of criminality, but a whole industry based upon circumventing the barrier. Considering the Mexican cartels already have deep pockets courtesy of their narcotics smuggling, and already hold respectable market share in the smuggling of people, adding a wall would provide the cartels with the perfect environment to use cash and guns to criminalize America’s border towns and the border force itself.

My second major objection is that border patrol is the last thing the U.S. military should be involved in. Militaries exist to fight wars, and while the nature of conflict is certainly evolving in an era of irregular conflicts, drones and cyberspace, hunting down illegal migrants remains completely alien to the military’s training and culture. America’s military is awesomely powerful because its Abrams tanks and Nimitz carriers and Longbow helicopters are terrifyingly effective at blowing shit up. In a high labor cost country like the United States, a military’s business is all about using very expensive equipment to blow up other folks’ expensive equipment, preferably from over-the-horizon so that retaliation is never an option.

Interdicting illegal migrants requires not just getting up close and personal, but capturingthe would-be migrants, shipping them somewhere for processing, and then somehow dumping them back across the border… and likely doing it all over again the next day. I have the utmost respect for the American military’s ability to adapt and evolve, but border duty means taking a high-dollar, high-skill asset and using it for low-dollar, low-skill tasks.

Even that assumes the military could do the job well. It could not. If there is something the military has learned after 15 years of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is that it hates interfacing with civilians. The military is trained to, in a nutshell, kill people – not build things. But even during the Iraqi occupation lethality was a useful tool because there was an insurgency afoot, packed with imported radicals. That would not happen on the border. Lethality isn’t useful unless American society takes a hideously dark path and simply shoots everyone in the border region with a tan. Or if you prefer, the Army could separate the illegals from the citizens first and, what? Execute the illegals by firing squad? Any military that does either of those things becomes a force that American citizens would (and should) be afraid of.

Even that assumes meaningful patrols are possible. Were the U.S. Army assigned to this task it would be taking on the greatest geographic reach of any American Army effort everin the most hostile natural environment the Army has ever been deployed in on a mission for which “victory” would never be possible because the border isn’t a war.

There are other reasons barricades and troops are not the right solutions. A meaningful wall’s impact on trade would easily trigger a U.S. recession across the United States with Texas getting hit the hardest. It would cause a multi-year depression in Mexico that would so destabilize the country economically as to guarantee sustained increases of illegal migrants to the United States. Current thoughts of militarizing and attempting to secure Mexico’s northern border would actually cause the problems they purport to address.

It would also cheese off the government that is most critical to actually stemming migrant levels in the first place: Mexico. Keep in mind that net migration from Mexico to the United States has been negative for nearly a decade. Most of the illegals that enter the United States from the south are not from Mexico, but instead from the half dozen Central American countries. If interdiction is the goal, the best place to do so is at Mexico’s southern border which is both far shorter and easier to fortify than its northern border.

That sort of interdiction requires a relationship between Washington and Mexico City characterized by communication, cooperation and a degree of trust – not sending the Army to the border. Instead, the bilateral political relationship is now so poisoned that it will very likely lead to the election of the Mexican equivalent  of Bernie Sanders – one Andres Manuel López Obrador – who has campaigned on a promise to cease all cooperation with the Americans.

America Sells Its Seoul

The United States and South Korea have agreed on an overhaul of their bilateral trade agreement this past week. In it, the Koreans caved on pretty much every issue of contention, most notably agreeing to improve American firms’ access to Korea’s automotive and pharmaceutical markets while restricting their own exports of steel to the United States by nearly one-third. In exchange, the Koreans received the first permanent waiver to the Trump administration’s until-now unrelated issue of steel and aluminum tariffs.

In addition, Trump has personally made it clear he has little intention of formally signing off on the deal until after the North Korean situation is resolved, insuring South Korea must follow the American preferences on any subsequent arrangements with Kim Jung Un, rather than the other way around.

It’s the first formalized, publicly-declared instance of American foreign policy coming full circle. During the Soviet standoff the Americans made the global oceans safe for all and kept the American market open to the alliance, in essence trading some of its economic power in order to purchase a security alliance. But the Cold War is nearly three decades gone now, and until recently the Americans had yet to update their strategic policy. As such, the post-Cold War global economic boom was largely a result of the Americans continuing to pay for a global system without getting anything in return. That disconnect was in part responsible for America’s recoiling from the world and the rise of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

We now have the beginning of a formal re-engineering of the old Cold War system. Linkage between economic and security issues is back – but without the Cold War rubric to shape it, American policy is taking on a somewhat à la carte characteristic.

South Korea was a great spot for the first of a new series of arrangements. Next to the three tiny Baltic states that have no hope of defending themselves against their monster neighbor Russia, there is no country in the world that has a greater defense dependency upon the United States. And since South Korea has a smallish, rapidly aging population (aka low local consumption and so export-dependent) and few domestic resources (aka import-dependent), trade is its lifeblood. No country in the world would be forced to come to terms with the Americans more, and Korea’s position as the world’s fifth-largest exporter means everyone must take notice.

Whether starting with the Koreans was the goal all along, or the well-worn contours of geography and economics guided the administration a bit like a luge course to this destination is really not relevant. (Donald Trump’s general lack of discipline and revulsion in the face of context suggests the latter. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer’s laser attention to detail and dogged persistence suggests the former. National Security Advisor John Bolton hasn’t been on Team Trump long enough to participate in the Korea trade talks, but this sort of thing certainly fits with his style, too).

The biggest question in my mind is, who’s next?

China seems like an interesting bet, but I’m guessing the Trump administration wants to get far more out of the Chinese than merely new understandings on steel, aluminum, intellectual property rights, and North Korea. The White House appears set to link a host of until-now unlinked issues. Issues like agriculture and freedom of navigation, manufacturing and the South China Sea, finance and hacking, market access and policies on Iran, reciprocity and Russian sanctions. It is a heavy list and even if the Chinese were to simply roll over on it all (which is not very likely) it would take quite a bit of time to work out the details.

In my opinion, folks convinced of the Chinese rise aren’t very good at math or reading maps. The Chinese financial system is the most overextended in history and every country that has followed its investment-led model has eventually crashed hard. The one-child policy has destroyed China’s future – it is now the world’s third-fastest aging demography. China’s strategic position is horrid – a line of islands parallels its coast, preventing it from projecting power into the sea lanes upon which its economy depends. It is utterly reliant on global energy imports and global merchandise exports – imports and exports which are under the thumb of the U.S. Navy.

The linkage the Americans are about to impose is the opposite of what the Chinese have become used to the Americans doing. It is precisely what the Chinese do to everyone else whenever the issue of Hong Kong or Taiwan or Tibet comes up. The Chinese are going to hate/fear this sort of strategic thinking in the United States because it cuts to the heart of the Chinese political system and strategic policy. And there’s far more to this than Beijing knowing they lack the leverage on the Americans to win. The Americans are in effect putting a dollar amount on their Korean alliance, and the same thing can now be done to any other aspect of American policy – including the China relationship.

The same general issue holds true for the European Union. Most of the European states are in terminal demographic decline, meaning that not only are they deeply dependent upon exports for their economic well-being, there is absolutely no hope their economic situation can be sustained, much less improved, without either the kindness of outsiders or a fundamental reshaping of how Europe defines the terms “economy” and “government.” Considering the European experimentation with those two terms in generations past, that last sentence should make everyone a bit twitchy.

And of course those are just some of Europe’s problems. There are also ongoing and deepening debt, banking, refugee, and political legitimacy crises. With neighboring powers – primarily Turkey and Russia – becoming more aggressive, the European choice is between once-again submitting themselves to American strategic goals, aggressively rearming in an era of terminal economic decline, or going through a regional…re-invention.

It’s an ugly choice, and one made far worse by a host of until-now unrelated issues.

  • Brexit not only reduces the EU’s overall heft and thus its stature in the world and at the negotiating table, but the UK acting as a free agent can and will provide the Americans with a host of wedge issues to hurt the Europeans where they are most vulnerable.
  • Of the EU’s 28 current members, five – Ireland, Cyprus, Austria, Finland and Sweden – are not in NATO, and so have little history in making formal economics-for-security swaps with the Americans.
  • Full competence for negotiating trade deals is held collectively with the European Commission, the EU’s executive/administrative/bureaucratic authority. But full competence for negotiating defense deals is held individually with the member states.
  • On major issues – for example, economics-for-security swap deals – every EU member has full veto rights. Even a deal that makes sense for France and Germany and Italy and Poland and Spain and the Netherlands and Sweden could be undone by a local election in Belgium (nearly derailed a free trade deal with the Canadians), or a spiteful politician in Greece (did derail Europe’s Russia policy).

That means that either a) the major EU powers find ways outside of EU norms to crush the dissenters, b) the EU gets cut out of American and global markets which throws Europe into a long-lasting depression, or c) the Trump administration breaks the entire EU in order to get its deal with the members that matter. No matter the path, the strategic alignments that have made the EU the vehicle that have made Europe united, at peace, wealthy and free are over.

Zocalo, Mexico City, Mexico

If anything, the NAFTA renegotiation will be even tougher, but here the issues are different. Canada and Mexico are not dependent upon the Americans for strategic overwatch (or, more accurately, the United States has no option but to protect its continental neighbors from extra-continental threats if it is to protect itself). Neither of them trade very much with the rest of the world, with both in essence functioning as de facto extensions of the American economic space.

The Americans can, will and are playing hardball in the talks, but the Canadians and Mexicans are doing the same. They know the tactics the Trump administration is employing to bring the rest of the world to heel just don’t apply in North America. Both Canada and Mexico have been (repeatedly) successful in courting American corporate giants and American state governors to make their cases in Washington for them. Remember that NAFTA is the only trade deal the Americans have signed in the post-WWII era that was not about security. That gives both Canada and Mexico something that neither the Chinese nor Europeans have: leverage.

It also means that the Canadians are playing very dirty, following what has more-or-less become a scorched earth policy. As part of Canada’s NAFTA strategy the Canadians have launched a case at the WTO that would actually hurt them if they won, because if they did win, the case would impose such pain on the Americans it would likely induce the Trump administration to abandon the WTO completely. Additionally, Canada’s hardball tactics might be aiming to wreck NAFTA. If that were to happen, Canada has a separate bilateral trade deal with the United States…but Mexico does not. In a world without the WTO and NAFTA, Canada would become the only country to maintain preferential access to the American economy. Harsh. Brilliant, but harsh.

But all these talks will take time. For the Chinese and Europeans, these are all very messy, complex, interwoven issues that cut to the core of issues of national identity and even national existence. For the Canadians and Mexicans the negotiations will continue to be difficult because with those countries the Americans are actually dealing with a more-or-less level field. The Americans with their stereotypical boorish, freight-train style will plow through it all as quickly as they can – and Lighthizer and Bolton will revel in every minute of it – but unweaving and reweaving the strands of China and Europe will take time, as will hammering out a more sustainable understanding within North America.

Trump isn’t that patient.

My bet is the next two deals will be bilateral and done more or less simultaneously.

Japan will be far easier than most of the other negotiations in front of the Americans because it will be a one-on-one talk as compared the multilateral complications of NAFTA and the EU. Japan – like South Korea – is deeply enmeshed into American defense networks and fully admits and realizes just how important U.S. strategic policy is to its own strategic needs (while most of the Chinese and Europeans remain in deep denial). Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Japan is no longer a massive trading nation. Rather than engage in broad-based economic and financial reform in the 1990s and 2000s to fix their broken economic model, they instead walled themselves off from the world. Consequently, Japan’s share of the international export market has shrunk by four-fifths since the 1980s.

Most importantly, the horror show that is Japan’s aging demography long ago induced the Japanese to forward-position much of their manufacturing capacity in their end-markets both to minimize currency risk and curry political and strategic favors. In essence, Japan has already swallowed some of this economics-for-security medicine in the post-Cold War era. It won’t crush their sense of national identity or their national economy to do it again, so long as the Americans continue to hem in places like North Korea and China.

The other big about-to-be deal is the United Kingdom, and this deal will practically fall into the Trump administration’s lap. Because of Brexit, the Brits are already casting out for alternative systems. The search has not been going particularly well. Political bungling at home, unrealistic expectations from the Leavers, a united EU front, and a resurgent and increasingly economically suicidal Labor opposition have tangled up the UK’s negotiating positions on pretty much everything.

The government of Prime Minister Theresa May now fully realizes that there is going to be no Brexit deal. It took considerable concessions to the EU simply to extend the negotiation period for another year. The new arrangement is that the UK will remain subject to all relevant EU laws and regulations, but will gain no input or votes on them during the “transition.” The one concession London teased out is the one most relevant to this discussion: the EU will allow the UK to negotiate trade deals outside of the EU’s authority. So the Brits now need to and are free to fully recalibrate their national, regional and global security and economic norms just as the Americans are reforging national, regional and global security and economic norms.

If the Trump-Lighthizer-Bolton team can induce (browbeat?) the world’s third- and fifth-largest economies which control the world’s second- and third-largest navies into joining the United States in a refashioned economics-for-security arrangement, then not only will the Trump administration have gotten a couple “big wins,” but the global stage will be set for whatever strategic alignments come next.

This is the bit that worries me, but it is also the bit that I ultimately expected.

The established American foreign policy community, both in the government bureaucracy and distributed throughout Washington, is still living in the past and seems out of ideas. For its part, the Trump administration has no strategic vision; MAGA is a slogan, not a policy. The normal means of debating a new national grand strategy – discussion and debate between the major parties – is not possible because both parties are currently broken.

Trump may be stumbling/groping/learning his way into a common approach, but he is doing so without any guiding principles or goals. The Cold War structure was stable because the Americans paid everyone the same (by creating a global structure) and expected the same behavior in return (membership in the anti-Soviet alliance).

This time around the Americans are customizing the membership fee to match the need. For South Korea the cost is deference on North Korea. For China it will likely be deference on global policy. For Europe it will likely include a demand to follow American regulatory norms. And as the Americans are strategically unmoored, I see no reason why the goal posts won’t move as America’s perceived self-needs evolve. It is less the stuff of a global leader and more the behavior of a mafioso.

There’s a reason I call the next couple of decades the “Coming Disorder.”

Read more about it in my book, The Accidental Superpower.

Here We Go

After a particularly… volatile week in the White House of Donald Trump, the administration announced March 1 trade tariffs of 25% on steel and 10% on aluminum. Countries near and far almost immediately announced plans for counter-tariffs on American goods. Many, most notably the American president himself, are now openly talking about a global trade war. Trump went so far as to tweet “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” Anti-Trump reactions among the media, corporate world and global elite has been – in a word – acidic. Similarly, markets haven’t exactly taken news of a potential trade conflict with a ringing endorsement.

I need to start out by correcting what most commentators have been tossing out there: at the core, Trump isn’t wrong. When your country runs massive trade deficits and is functionally energy and agriculturally independent, you have far more options, flexibility and power when prosecuting trade wars. Not to mention the issue of raw exposure. The United States economy is the least internationally linked of the significant powers. The fractions vary widely based on whose data you’re using, but as a rule the American economy is roughly one-third as dependent upon exports as the major Asian or European economies.

And that’s before you consider the global framework. The United States created the free trade order at the end of World War II in order to contain and crush the Soviets. In essence, it used the currency of providing global security and trade access to purchase cooperation from its allies, so it could battle the Soviets the way it wanted (i.e. the Americans bribed up an alliance to fight the Cold War).

But when the Berlin Wall fell, the Americans never bothered to update the system. They kept granting all the security and trade goodies yet neglected to ask for anything in return. Three decades of paying for that lopsided “deal” after the Soviet collapse has generated sufficient blowback on the American Left and Right to push the American population away from valuing a rules-based international order. One result, among other things, is the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

So even if on pure economics the Americans hold the upper hand in a trade war, that drastically understates how much power and flexibility the Americans actually hold because they still are the only power responsible for a system that makes the majority of other countries’ systems – including the European and Chinese systems – even possible. I might not choose the word “easy” when describing how things could go down, but Trump’s theme is certainly on point.

That said, there are a veritable cavalcade of things to keep in mind.

To start off, this isn’t a normal president. This is Trump. As much as it is detrimental for a leader/negotiator to be as thin-skinned, uninterested in context, and offended by detail at any given moment, the most important personality quirk is Trump’s seeming refusal to either be consistent with his own positions or think about what might happen the next day. He tends to make grand statements (often via Twitter) and then expects Congress, the public, and the world to simply do things his way. It’s very Obama, and it tends to generate the same sort of anger and dismissiveness.

That’s a problem for more than just optics.

Competently prosecuting trade wars requires speed to undercut competitors’ positions faster than they can undercut yours, and that speed requires negotiating skill and coordination. Trump may love his executive orders, but he to date has yet to demonstrate a capacity or interest in using the levers of state in an efficient way.

Trade wars require the marshalling of forces government and corporate to know where to hit where it hurts, while also preparing defensive measures to guard domestic interests from likely counters.

The government entities most important to this sort of operation are the Department of Commerce, the Department of State, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Federal Trade Commission – the institutions with which the Trump administration has the worst working relationships. And Trump’s erratic nature and pathological hostility to immigration has largely sunk his ability to marshal corporate America in any cohesive or reliable manner.

Trade wars – just like real wars – require allies. Most of those allies are at home, but of course some of them are of the more traditional sort: foreign nations.

Donald Trump is not popular, well, anywhere. The Brits think of him as the most uncouth American they’ve ever had to deal with (which after folks like Lyndon Johnson and George W Bush is an exceedingly high bar). The Germans are horrified at Trump’s willing, ongoing and insistent ignorance of European geopolitics. The Russians simply feel he’s a buffoon. The Japanese refer to him as a moronic man-child. (The French actually sort of like him. I think it’s a Jerry Lewis thing.) The average Mexican’s feeling towards the man is sheer hatred. The Chinese, as the ones most dependent upon the American-led order, probably take him the most seriously – but they’ve become increasingly confident of their ability to manipulate him to their ends.

The point is that a trade war isn’t a diktat, it’s a conflict with a lot of moving pieces that must be maneuvered through. How that maneuvering is handled determines how quick and/or “easy” the conflict will be, as well as the economic and strategic collateral damage the United States would need to manage.

  • If you want to target China, the weak points are electronics and finance – not steel and aluminum. But don’t forget to coordinate with the Koreans and Taiwanese who are exposed to Chinese supply chains. You’ll need their help to deflect the blowback.
  • If you want to target Europe, you hit Southern European agriculture and German manufactured exports. (A Trump Twitterstorm over the weekend expressly indicated that European vehicle exports are squarely in his sights.) But you do not levy tariffs against the Europeans in isolation – you make friends of France and Poland and Sweden, leveraging the fact that the European Union is not a single political entity. That way you can pry apart the entire EU negotiating position.
  • Japan has outsourced massive amounts of its manufacturing base during the past generation, making it a powerful ally in any trade war… if you can be sure to not damage the few sectors that are still important at home. Like steel.
  • In any case, it would probably be wise to not pick fights with Eastern Hemispheric powers as well as NAFTA partners simultaneously. After all, the Americans’ North American trade portfolio is nearly as big as everything else put together.
  • But let’s say you want to make Mexico your target anyway: you must go after automotive… but that also means shoring up Texans who are enmeshed into the cross-border supply chains. Otherwise your own political coalition fractures. And don’t forget to deflect Canada so you don’t have a 2-on-1 situation against you within NAFTA.
  • Speaking of Canada, the easiest way to counter America’s northern neighbor is to deliberately and publicly cut direct deals with individual provinces – for example, give concessionary benefits to Albertan energy or Manitoban wheat or Quebecois aerospace. Considering that the Canadian system reserves more power for the provinces than the national government, the result will be a quite undignified screaming match among the provinces that would paralyze the country’s foreign trade policy… as well as be fabulously entertaining. Fun fact: Canada only signed its first comprehensive internal free trade agreement in April 2017.

An “easy” trade war is eminently doable, but without doing the homework or laying the groundwork, the result is a free-for-all of sanctions and countersanctions with should-be allies rapidly degrading into didn’t-have-to-be enemies.

Three specific problems come from this. First, Trump seems pathologically unwilling to even take baby steps in the forging of an international coalition as regards, well, anything. Even low-hanging fruit like Britain and Australia have often been not just ignored, but deliberately repudiated. This whole thing has the feel of a knee-jerk, internal political decision even though most of the outcomes will be felt on the field of global strategic alignments.

Second, because so many people think so little of the American president, when he does act very few take him seriously. Never before in modern history has the most powerful man of the most powerful country with the most global economic and military leverage been thought of as so weak. In part it is because most feel the Americans would never seriously endanger the global order (which is a view as stupid and seeped in wishful thinking as it is widely held). In part it is because Trump never demonstrates follow-through (which is fairly accurate) so no one feels the need to plan for the worst. But all of that ignores the fact that Trump is the most powerful man of the most powerful country with the most global economic and military leverage and if he chooses to use that leverage, however inexpertly, then look out!

Third, considering the global nature of most modern supply chains, any America-First-themed trade war is a trade war with the entire international system: rivals, but also allies, with every action rippling throughout the entire global order. A global recession is absolutely guaranteed and based on how fast and heavy Trump lowers the boom, this could well be the singular action that drops the world into the Disorder that I often speak and write about.

Finally, do not underestimate just how fast this unravelling can happen. One of the few points of Trumpian consistency is his White House’s desire to “get better deals” in trade bodies while systematically undermining those same bodies. For example, the new American steel tariffs will do the most damage to Canada, a country that the Americans are hip-deep in negotiations with on the future of NAFTA. Or there’s the WTO which the Americans are attempting to overhaul, yet they have refused to allow the confirmation of the judges within the body’s appellate courts which hear trade disputes – rendering the entire organization impotent to deal with rising trade tensions.

For those of you who remember, in the Accidental Superpower I expressly noted that the global system was so fragile and counter-intuitive and out-of-date that it was a waste of time to guess what specific action might cause it all to crash apart. An American-initiated trade war is perhaps one of the ways to destroy it most quickly and thoroughly. I believe I referred to it as the “American bad hair scenario.” And so, here we are.

And here we go.

From Tel Aviv to Jerusalem

The administration of US President Donald Trump declared December 6 that from now on the U.S. government would recognize the city of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The result has been quite the political cacophony, with condemnations from Trump’s traditional opponents across the United States, a wide bevy of countries – particularly those in the Middle East with an Islamist bent – and throughout the United Nations system.

So what’s the big deal? Israel has held all its capital business in Jerusalem for decades, but nearly all countries run their embassies out of Tel Aviv. The issue is regional politics. Israel conquered the bulk of the city of Jerusalem in wars that occurred after its modern founding in 1948, and as the city is important for three mainline religions, it is often also considered the capital of the once (and future?) Palestinian state. By claiming Jerusalem, the Israelis are not all that indirectly claiming that the Palestinians cannot have it. Trump’s recognition similarly implies that the United States has given up on any meaningful two-state solution, instead siding wholly with Israel – the Palestinians be damned.

As such, the issue of embassy-placement and capital-recognition has been a hot button topic in all things Middle Eastern ever since Israel declared Jerusalem the united capital of Israel in 1980.

But before we condemn or extol the virtues of the Israeli government or the Trump administration, let’s keep a few things in mind.

First, there is not one Arab government that loves the Palestinians. Though maybe not for the reasons you’d think. Before 1948, the Palestinians were the forward-thinking, secular, economically vibrant jewel of the Levant (and by extension, the Middle East). Geography and ports made them a cosmopolitan capital, and a religiously and ethnically diverse population – reflected by Jerusalem – ran contrary to what we see in Wahabbist-states like Saudi Arabia or Shia-hardliners in Iran. As such, they earned the envy or worse of Arab governments everywhere who considered the Palestinian way of life a threat to the fabric of nepotism that was the regional norm. When the Israelis displaced those Palestinians – first in their Independence War of 1948 and later in the 1967 and 1973 wars, the fervor of the celebrations in some Arab governing institutions was only matched by the hypocrisy of their condemnations. So something happening now that heats up the Palestinian issue isn’t really something that any Arab governments feel is particularly problematic. (That is, outside of those countries who host a large Palestinian diaspora and so see riled Palestinians as less something to be encouraged than to be contained.)

Second, the Israelis have physically – and unilaterally – altered their relationship with the Palestinians during the past fifteen years. There is now a thirty-foot-tall concrete wall with precious few access points separating Israel proper from most Palestinian-controlled territories. Even if every Palestinian could simultaneously grab a gun and charge the nearest Jew all at once, the Palestinians simply lack the access to do much anything more than scream. Palestinian suicide attacks dropped off to almost zero not because the Palestinians had a collective change of heart about all things Israeli, but because they are on the other side of an uncrossable barrier. If there is a third intifada, it will rage in Palestinian lands rather than anywhere that the Israelis (or anyone else) cares about.

Third, there is less than a zero chance of a war erupting because of this. Syria is in civil war. Libya is a farce of a non-state. Lebanon is edging into (another) civil war. Iraq is shattered. Jordan is a satellite. Egypt is folding in upon itself into an isolationist dictatorship. Saudi Arabia and Iran are fighting a not-quite-cold war. Groups like al Qaeda and the Islamic State are at war with other Muslim entities; they cannot and have never been able to get at Israel. Sure, groups like Hamas (based in the West Bank) and Hezbollah (based in Lebanon) will continue to lob rockets into Israel, but no one in the region has the capacity to even obliquely threaten Israel with invasion. Israeli diplomats would never say this on the record, but this is the best strategic situation the Jews have been in since the decades immediately after Moses.

Finally, there isn’t an Israeli-Palestinian peace process to protect. Any possible peace between the two peoples require unified positions on both sides in favor of rapprochement – and an underlying strategic or at least economic reason for that rapprochement. None of that currently exists. The Israeli government sits fairly hard to the right and isn’t about to trade land for peace when the wall gives Israel all the peace the government thinks they’ll ever get. The Palestinian “government” is split between Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which favors taking the fight to Israel, and Fatah in the West Bank, which is indirectly on the Israeli payroll. The wall also eliminated the role of Palestinian labor in the Israeli economy, reducing the Palestinian territories to open-air prisons completely dependent upon Israeli power infrastructure and international handouts for operation. About the only institution keeping the “two state solution” alive is the United Nations, and even UN efforts are little more than going through the motions.

Looking Ahead

I’m in the process of my annual reset.

From time to time it is important to take a step back from the noise and splatter of the news cycle (and oh my has there been a lot of noise and splatter this year!) and take a good deep, hard look at trends old and new to see how they are strengthening, weakening, and weaving themselves into new forms.

The big three megatrends that guide my work – the American withdrawal from global management, the steepening inversion of global age demographics, and the ever-advancing shale revolution – remain my guiding stars. Shale has slowed somewhat but that’s largely irrelevant as the U.S. and Canada combined are only a rounding error away from becoming net oil exporters. The global demographic shift is right on schedule (it is far too late in the game to magic up a fresh batch of Millennials). And the American withdrawal from the global order has obviously accelerated under the ever-thoughtful, always-restrained, humble modesty of President Donald Trump.

Lurking under the rumbling tectonic plates, however, are roughly a score of significant issues that are breaking out into the open. Some of these – like the coming European crisis, the Saudis’ beef with Qatar, the breakdown of the global Left, and all things North Korean – I’ve written about. But others, still on simmer, have yet to reshape the discussion.

They’re coming, and in about a year they will be with us.

To that end I’m putting together a three-part newsletter about what everyone will be worried about next year. These are issues that will have an outsized impact not just for the United States, but the wider world that will impact regional events for a decade to come:

  1. With the Islamic State all but wrapped up, it is time for the Middle East to embark on its next – and far more violent and far reaching – military conflict.
  2. The pause in the violence of the drug war is nearly over and what comes next will have far greater implications for both Mexico and the United States.
  3. The one trade deal that the Americans made for economic, rather than strategic, reasons is in danger. The year 2018 will be when NAFTA’s future is decided one way or another.

We’ll have more, but hopefully this trio is enough to whet everyone’s appetite for what is shaping up to be an extremely active year.

North Korea: Part III—Why I Already Worry About South Korea

In the aftermath of North Korea’s Sept 3 nuclear test, a Donald Trump Twitterstorm delivered its greatest disdain not to North Korea, but instead South Korea. Trump accused Seoul of being overly pacifist in the face of the North’s belligerence, as well as using a wide variety of measures to steal jobs from American workers. Later, piling on his own comments, Trump indicated that he was highly likely to soon withdraw completely from the United States’ free trade pact with South Korea.

Many found themselves head-scratching. The United States seems to be sliding towards a military confrontation with North Korea, and in any war scenario, coordination between the United States and South Korea would be key. As the New York Times editorial board summed it up,

“For Mr. Trump, the crisis lays bare how his trade agenda – the bedrock of his economic populist campaign in 2016 – is increasingly at odds with the security agenda he has pursued as president. It is largely a problem of Mr. Trump’s own making. Unlike several of his predecessors, who were able to press countries on trade issues while cooperating with them on security, Mr. Trump has explicitly linked the two…”

Unpacking all this – North Korea, South Korea, Trump and the relationship between trade and security – requires a few steps back.

American foreign policy since World War II has been based on a simple premise: the United States will create a global security structure for its allies, enabling them to access resources and markets the world over without the need to protect themselves, those resources or those markets. In exchange, those allies would allow the Americans to fight the Cold War their way. In essence the Americans bribed up an alliance via the Bretton Woods system to fight the Soviets, and in doing so not only attracted the allegiance of traditional cultural allies, but also countries with which the Americans had fought long, bitter wars – up to and including the former Axis and the U.S. own former colonial master. The end result was the strongest military alliance in human history, and also history’s longest and greatest period of peace and prosperity because nearly every imperial power of the past was on the same side (with the notable and obvious exception of the Soviet Union).

To put this in the Times‘ lexicon, trade and security were linked – with the Americans sacrificing their position on the former in order to gain deference on the latter.

The Cold War ended in 1989. The Soviet Union dissolved in 1992. And at the moment of truth when then-President George HW Bush stood poised to update America’s strategic policy, he was booted out of office in a federal election. His successor – Bill Clinton – had no time for foreign policy and so let the old system ride without a foe. The next U.S. President – George W Bush – pursued a monochromatic foreign policy completely focused on the Islamic world, and he too let the Cold War trade-for-security rubric continue, just without the trade-off. Then came Barack Obama who, in essence, didn’t have a foreign policy at all. Obama would on occasion go through the motions and say the right things about trade and allies, but actions were but rarely matched with words and the whole system atrophied. After 24 years of autopilot, the world barely resembles the bipolar alignment of 1945-1989. New power centers – think China – have emerged into what feels like a more multi-polar system.

Seoul, South Korea

This is the world the Times sees: trade and security are no longer linked. The United States negotiates on trade as an independent topic, while providing security for the global commons free-of-charge.

Everyone would do well to remember three facts:

First, throughout human history, there has never been a multipolar period in which widespread wars among constantly-shifting alliances were not the norm. If a post-American, multi-polar system really is where the world is headed, the future will be a dark, poor and war-torn place as various regional powers struggling for regional supremacy utterly overturn the global trade system that makes the world’s current safety, wealth and prosperity possible. For example, if the U.S. releases the security reins, Japan and China quickly fall into cutthroat competition over Middle Eastern oil. (Fun fact: there’s a full chapter on this “Tanker War” in The Absent Superpower.)

Second, all the powers that have arisen since 1989 are utterly dependent upon the security and trade systems the Americans created to fight the Cold War, and none of them are capable of taking up that burden from the United States. The U.S. Navy is more powerful than the combined navies of the rest of the world by a factor of ten (and that without nuclear weapons), and even if multiple powers could agree to pool their forces…whose interests would they look out for? It is hard to imagine the Chinese contributing to a force that facilitates French commercial penetration into Southeast Asia or the French navy providing the security environment required for Chinese commercial penetration into Belgium. If there is no American commitment to global order, there is no global order. That pushes every trans-national organization designed around a benevolent global security environment – that’s everything from the European Union to the Chinese Communist Party – over the brink.

Third, for the Americans, trade hasn’t been about economics – it’s been about security. Trade was the bribe to get all the world’s once-imperial powers to cooperate. Not only does an American withdrawal unleash heretofore quiescent powers as varied as Japan, the United Kingdom, and Iran to attempt to reshape their neighborhoods more to their liking, it further means that the Americans never really integrated their economy into the global whole like nearly everyone else did. And since the United States is by far the leastintegrated of the significant countries into the global trade system, it would be the one to suffer the least should that system collapse.

You might not care for Donald Trump very much, but if the United States is getting out of the global management business, you’ve got to admit that a rejiggering of the relationship between trade and security makes a lot of sense. (Whether the specifics of Trump’s preferred rejiggering make sense is, of course, an entirely different topic.)

And what about the raft of countries that did not even exist before 1945 because the various regional powers could easily subjugate them? What about places that in the intervening decades used this historic opportunity to transform themselves from backwaters to advanced economies? What happens to them when the global environment changes?

What happens to South Korea?

South Korea is a country roughly the size of Indiana with a mid-sized population and a gigantic role in global trade, currently ranking in the top ten in terms of total value of trade. Its markets span the world, with the majority not within a thousand miles. It sucks down vast volumes of raw materials – again, almost none of which are from East Asia – including over 2 million barrels of crude a day, almost all of which is sourced from the Persian Gulf. American economic sponsorship has transformed South Korea from being the world’s fifth-poorest country in 1953 to one of the richest. Remove the Americans from the world writ large, and South Korea would experience an economic crash at least twice as bad as the Great Depression.

Then there is South Korea’s military problem. The United States is South Korea’s security policy. U.S. troops not only face off against North Koreans opposite the demilitarized zone, American rapid reaction forces are stationed in Seoul, elsewhere in South Korea, Japan and throughout the Pacific to respond to any military situation the North might trigger. Remove the Americans, and the South Koreans lose air superiority, naval strike capability, ballistic missile reach, cruise missiles, missile defense and all those tough, zippy tanks. In a North-South war I firmly believe the South would emerge victorious – invasion routes through the DMZ are remarkably constrained and the South’s industrial plant and population are much larger than the North’s – but the damage to the south would be immense: North Korea has dug thousands of artillery emplacements into the hills on their side of the DMZ, most of which could target Seoul with withering fire. It isn’t something that anyone is looking forward to.

Finally, there is the overall American strategic angle:

Part and parcel of the Americans maintaining the Bretton Woods system is making the world safe and keeping the American market open for everyone. In the case of South Korea, that has come at immense cost.

As a mid-sized economy, South Korea could only develop with the direct physical and economic sponsorship of the United States. Resource-poor South Korea could have never obtained the raw materials and energy it needs without Bretton Woods. It would have never been independent without the U.S. military’s involvement in the Korean War and the decades since. It could have never grown without the American position in the Persian Gulf to ensure energy flows. It could have never built its infrastructure and industrial plant without American capital. It could have never exported its way to affluence without the American market. And there is meat to Trump’s trade accusations against South Korea: South Korea regularly uses everything from corporate welfare to state-sponsored intellectual property theft to advance corporate Korea’s interests.

The mismatch in the American mind between South Korea’s (lack of) commitment to American actions against North Korea, and the ongoing outlay of American blood and treasure for South Korea’s benefit has been an irritant in relations between Washington and Seoul since the Carter administration. The only thing that’s new about the recent criticism from the White House is that it is public. If the Americans really do back away from maintaining the global system, South Korea – as a country that cannot possibly field a navy capable of securing the markets and resources it needs – faces cataclysmic decline.

Yet while the South Koreans cannot do much about their economic exposure, they can do quite a bit about their military position. The land of Samsung, LG and Hyundai is one of the world’s most technologically advanced economies. Remove the Americans from the equation and the South will arm itself very rapidly. But tanks and planes and missiles all take time.

For a first-world country like South Korea with a lively civilian atomic power program, nukes are much easier. Delivering a ruggedized, miniaturized, thermonuclear weapon halfway around the world is hard stuff. But that’s not what South Korea would need to do. They’d just need a basic device they can lob a couple hundred kilometers. The South Koreans could probably build an explosive nuclear device in a matter of days, and mate it to a bare-bones delivery system shortly thereafter. The North Korean leadership – used to needling a Washington who views Pyongyang as a mere irritant rather than a terrified, angry sibling who knows just where to kick for the biggest effect – probably doesn’t not yet realize just how complicated their lives are about to become.

And keep in mind that North Korea is only South Korea’s danger-of-the-month. Before World War II, what is today’s South Korea tended to alternate between being an unwilling colony of Japan or China. Under most scenarios South Korea may be the runt of the neighborhood, but it will be a runt with a desperate population, a functional nuclear program and a couple million engineering doctorates used to making the impossible a functional reality. Poor, friendless, nuclear-armed, devilishly creative and testy – that is South Korea’s future.

The South Koreans won’t be alone.

Every country that was once either an imperial power or an imperial province is going to have to beef up its military simply to look after its own interests, and South Korea is hardly the only smallish country that lives in a dangerous neighborhood. A partial list of countries about to face drastically different security environments and starkly poorer economic futures while also boasting sufficient technical (and/or financial) skills to acquire a nuke include Sweden, Finland, Poland, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Japan, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. All of which have pressing security concerns now, much less after the global security architecture collapses. For those of you into international relations, you may recall that some of the personalities that have topped some of those countries make Donald Trump seem calm, prudent and patient in comparison.

Each of these countries – indeed, nearly every country likely to go nuclear in the next couple of decades – sees a very specific security threat very close to home, and in no case is that threat the United States. One of the few topics on which I agree with today’s Twitterati is that a nuclear exchange is very likely a part of the not-so-distant future. But that doesn’t mean it’ll be part of America’s.

North Korea: Part II—Why I Might Start Worrying About North Korea

The technical aspects of a fully-functioning nuclear weapons program are daunting. A warhead is useless unless it can reach your target. Intercontinental ballistic missiles must be accurate, durable enough to withstand the considerable pressures of the launch, transit (including a sub-orbital spaceflight), and re-entry. Since the distance between North Korea and its primary targets in the US are so considerable, fueling is key (solid fuels are trickier but offer more distance for a smaller volume), and you need a warhead that is small enough to fit at the tip of an ICBM without weighing it down too much but also powerful enough to pack a wallop (the so-called miniaturization stage, perhaps the trickiest of the lot).

It took the Soviet Union and United States the better part of two decades to master the complex process of physics, chemistry, metallurgy and engineering to construct reliable, intercontinental nuclear weapons arsenal. To think that North Korea can do the same with less than one percent the resources in a shorter timeframe is, to put it bluntly, paranoia. And even that assumes that the politics of North Korea are pushing the country in the direction of a hot war with the United States. In Part I of this series, I laid out just how unlikely that all is and why I’m not all that concerned about North Korea.

But things may be changing.

Recent changes to such outside assessments are why I’ve broken with my normal policy of ignoring North Korea to give my view on where North Korea is today, and what could well be about to happen.

Throughout August there have been rafts of leaks out of U.S. intelligence institutions and a great deal of propaganda out of North Korea on the status of the North Korean nuclear and missile programs. All point to a sharp increase in the speed of technical achievement of said programs: longer range missiles, different materials that enable for stable missile reentry, progress in miniaturizing nuclear devices to make them missile-mountable, indications of changes to the device geometry that would increase both yield and stability, and so on.

Seoul, South Korea

On September 3, North Korea tested what Pyongyang claims to have been a “thermonuclear” device rather than simply a mere “nuclear” device, which serves as a case in point. A run-of-the-mill nuclear device uses conventional explosives to split unstable uranium atoms in a process called fission: as the atoms split they unleash additional energy, magnifying the destructive potential of the initial blast. A more advanced thermonuclear device instead uses a smaller atomic device to combine light elements (typically hydrogen) to make heavier elements in a process called fusion: hydrogen atoms are smooshed together (scientific term), knocking off protons and again unleashing a devastating amount of energy. Both generate a massive amount of energy and will generally ruin your day even if you are blissfully ignorant to the difference between the two, but a fusion device requires less fuel and a smaller assembly and so is easier to mount on a missile making it the more problematic weapons system from the American point of view.

Considering how tightly-closed the North Korean system is – particularly when it comes to weapon specs – I find the near-simultaneous release of all this information a bit… convenient. On the American side, leaks about advances in miniaturization have the feel of a bureau’s carefully-crafted effort to attain more funding. On the NorK side of things, some of the propaganda is just stupid – for example the claim that Pyongyang’s new device is yield-adjustable (that it can be preprogrammed to detonate at variable explosive power levels). Such a technological advance would make North Korean nuke tech equal to current Russian and American nuke tech.

Yet too much has changed too fast for me to simply dismiss the lot. If several of the items leaked and proclaimed the past five weeks are true, then the entire balance of the region and American policy towards it change dramatically. It is one thing to toy around with nukes in your basement, quite another to mount them onto missiles, put them on your lawn and point them at people.

A meaningful, deployed North Korean nuclear weapon would leave the Americans with only two options.

Option one would be a pre-emptive strike – and not the sort of pinpoint conventional strike that gets bandied about on Fox and CNN. Since anyone who can build one nuclear weapon can build more than one, all a conventional strike would do is piss Pyongyang off and force them into a use-it-or-lose-it position. No, any preemptive strike designed to eliminate the North Korea nuclear program would need to be nuclear itself, and would need to hit at least a dozen different targets.

Option two is containment. The Americans would make sure that no weapon launched from North Korea could ever hit any American landmass. That means radically expanded missile-interception assets, on land, in the air and on the water. Putting American hardware at multiple points on every flight path for any conceivable delivery system to any possible American landmass. And backing those assets up with strike capability so that any North Korean asset even tangentially related to any missile launch facility could be eliminated within an hour of any North Korean launch.

The big loser from either option (aside from North Korea) is China. It’s hard to imagine anything that would focus minds in Beijing more on whatever Washington wants to talk about than the American carpet-nuking of China’s only real ally.

Yet if anything, containment is worse for Beijing than even North Korea’s vaporization. Any American missile defense system that can intercept missiles from North Korea to the United States could also intercept missiles from China to the United States. One way or another, North Korea’s recent evolutions make China look weak and hugely shrink China’s strategic room to maneuver.

This all, of course, assumes the Americans continue with their weird obsession with North Korea. The real hilarity of all this is that North Korea is a strategic relic of a time three decades in the past. A much more relevant discussion is about what’s about to happen in South Korea and beyond.

In the immediate aftermath of North Korea’s Sept 1 (thermo)nuclear test, U.S. President Donald Trump reserved his harshest criticism not for Pyongyang or Beijing, but instead Seoul.

From a traditional national security point of view such vitriol seems…unwise. North Korea is a foe. South Korea is an ally. Lambasting an ally you would need to combat a foe is idiotic. Right?

Well, the problem here isn’t with the Trump White House, the Kim family, or either of the Koreas – but instead with the word “traditional”…

Continued in Part III

North Korea: Part I—Why I Don’t Worry About North Korea

I’ve been in the foreign affairs, intelligence, analysis and context business for two decades now, and there are few things that annoy me more than North Korea.

It is a small, perennially poor, backwards and deliberately dysfunctional regime. Its economic heft is below negligible. It could not sustain a hot war for more than a few days as its entire population has lived on insufficient rations for years, its military equipment was antiquated thirty years ago, and all its fuels are imported so its military has little staying power. It couldn’t win a military conflict with any of its neighbors. It is so politically isolated that it simply cannot shape anything in any sphere beyond its immediate region.

North Korea is in such a sad state that its strategic policy has no real tools other than bluff and propaganda, and I don’t have a lot of respect for blowhards – particularly when they never back up their words with action – and North Korea is perhaps the most blowhardy country in the history of language. To give you an idea of just how strongly I feel about North Korea’s lack of strength, my brother is of South Korean descent and I don’t believe he has been in one whit of danger in all these past four years he’s been living in South Korea.

And then there’s the strategic angle. During the Cold War the Americans committed themselves to protecting the territories and economies of all the allies – of which South Korea was one – in order to form a cordon sanitaire around the Soviets. A large military presence in South Korea was part of that process. But the Cold War is long over, the Americans are getting out of the global management business, and the ongoing American military footprint in South Korea is the very definition of policy inertia. The inter-Korean border may still be a flashpoint, but it is no longer a flashpoint that serves any broader strategic purpose for the United States. For the Americans it is exposure and risk without any conceivable benefit, and it is high time for the American military position in the region to shift – and shift sharply.

Seoul, South Korea

And that despite all the nuclear bric-a-brac. Yes, the nuclear question for North Korea is a big one, and honestly it is the only reason that Washington should care about the country at all. But even here, I’m not impressed. My lack of concern falls into two general categories.

First, the technicalities of a nuclear program.

A nuclear weapons program isn’t easy, but the easiest part is building the explosive device itself. Obtaining the uranium, turning it into weapons grade uranium or plutonium, building an implosion device to trigger a runaway atomic explosion – this was all first done in the 1940s and to think a people as inventive as the Koreans (North and South) couldn’t achieve nuclear fission is simply silly. The NorKs did so back in the 1990s and there is no recapturing that genie.

But that’s only the first step. Now you need to deliver it. Back in World War II the Americans delivered the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nukes by high-altitude bomber – something that was possible because of the lack of surface-to-air missile defenses and absolute American mastery of islands near Japan. That option is firmly off the table for the NorKs as the United States is far too distant and far too militarily advanced for a large, slow moving aircraft to penetrate its defenses.

That leaves missiles. The obvious obstacle is range. The NorKs can currently claim accurately to be able to strike in the vicinity of Hawaii and ongoing experiments with missiles are clearly aiming for the American mainland. That is likely some time off still, but in years – not decades. It may (literally) be rocket science – and remain one of the most technically challenging military fields – but the NorKs have been working on this very hard for a very long time.

Yet even a sufficiently-ranged and designed missile isn’t enough, because a missile cannot carry a big, bulky, delicate device. Primitive nuclear devices weigh tons, and rockets can only carry hundreds of pounds. There’s also the massive issue of reentry. Falling from orbit makes everything more than a bit shaky, which is more than enough to break into irrelevance a newbie nuke.

And of course, it would be nice to actually hit your target. Early ballistic missiles were notoriously inaccurate. There’s a reason NASA – not only the world’s best rocket nerds as well as the nerds with the greatest interest in accuracy – aims for the Pacific Ocean when its rockets need to make splashdown. It is sorta hard to miss the world’s biggest body of water. North Korea’s missiles probably can only be relied upon to strike within 15 miles of their targets. As of September 2 high-end estimates for a North Korean nuclear device (not deliverable weapon, device) were “only” 30 kilotons. That’s “only” enough to generate a thermal pulse 3 miles across. For comparison, in the early 1980s American ICBMs had an accuracy of +/- of 2 miles which was a big reason they opted for the big booms provided by the MX program. (If you enjoy day-dreaming of nuclear Armageddon I’m pleased to point you to the Stevens Institute of Technology’s Nukemap where you can dial up and down the kilotons and see the effects on the city of your choice.)

Bottom line: Just as the technologies required to make a missile capable of descending through the atmosphere without shaking itself or its cargo apart are more difficult than getting the missile to its destination, the technologies required to ruggedize and miniaturize a nuke so that it can fit on a missile are more difficult than “simply” making a nuclear device in the first place.

Put it together and, while the NorKs clearly are making progress, I don’t believe they are all that close to having a deliverable weapon, much less a broader deterrent. And even that assumes that the NorKs’ nuclear program is about the United States – something I’m not convinced on. This brings us to the second why-North-Korea-doesn’t-worry-me category: internal North Korean politics.

Kim Jong Un via the Korean Central News Agency

Let’s start with the obvious:

Anyone who claims they have a good picture of what is going on in North Korea is lying to you. The isolationist country has a wickedly effective internal security system and pretty much everyone’s spies are rooted out on a regular basis. Operational intelligence, particularly within the political-military space that is so crucial to informing American decisionmakers, is simply not possible with North Korea. The only thing an intelligence professional can do in such circumstances is infer and induce, something that pretty much all of us hate doing because there is no way to prove any particular theory correct or incorrect. What I’m about to share is little more than a guess, but it is an educated guess guided by some of the smartest thinkers I know.

North Korea’s bombast is not about the United States. It is about a family dinner table squabble.

Kim Il Sung is the guy who founded the modern North Korean state after World War II. He built his legitimacy fighting the Japanese during their generation-long occupation of the peninsula. He created the paranoid, ultra-poor, Stalinist backwater we know as North Korea and ruled it through the end of the Cold War. However, come 1993 the Soviet Union had disintegrated, the Chinese had agreed to join the capitalist world, and North Korea found itself utterly alone. Kim Il Sung was far from inane; he realized that his country in its current form was unsustainable, and the talk of the time was how to open negotiations with South Korea on unification.

And then, unexpectedly, he died. (Insert your favorite conspiracy here.)

The remaining ruling elites of Kim Il Sung’s First generation did the only thing they could. They helped pass the torch to the Second generation, led by Kim Il Sung’s son, Kim Jong Il. But whereas Kim Il Sung was a competent autocrat, a savvy negotiator and had the gravitas that comes from decades of rulership, Kim Jong Il was an arrogant, inept, unfeeling prick shaped by an environment of isolation and paranoia.

Unlike their co-ethnics in South Korea, the North Korean educational system is seeped less in engineering than in ideology – and not even a globally interesting ideology, but instead a homegrown one that preached that a country with no resources or friends or trade or money was somehow magically a world power. Kim Il Jong and his entire generation were raised wholly within North Korea, and they all grew up drinking the proverbial Kool-Aid. Upon becoming the Dear Leader, Kim Il Jong launched a series of economic “reforms” that inadvertently gutted the country’s agricultural capacity, causing a famine that killed between one million and three million people out of a population of roughly 20 million.

The First generation was horrified, and soon took steps to limit the damage. Ditching Kim Il Sung and the Second generation wasn’t perceived as an option, so instead the First generation sent the Third generation abroad so that they could learn how the world really worked. The goal was to, in time, bring the Thirds back to relaunch the country into the modern world. Kim Jong Un, the future North Korean leader, attended studies in Switzerland, far from the less-than-worthless educational system back in North Korea.  (I have it on good authority from the guy who sat next to Kim in class that while the younger Kim certainly has impulse control issues, “insane” is not an accurate descriptor.)

There was a problem with the Firsts’ new plan: Kim Jong Il died before the Thirds’ studies were complete. But rather than risk an unstable transition period in which no one was in control, the Firsts thought it best to recall Kim Jong Un, put him in charge at the tender age of 27, and shove the entire ruling Second generation to the side for being wastes of skin.

Now, put yourself in Kim Jung Un’s shoes.

Your grandfather’s generation – the Firsts – are now in their nineties and are dying out in dribs and drabs. But these are the guys that fought Imperial Japan and resisted the Soviets, Chinese and Americans. They are no slouches. They want you to overhaul the country, but not until they are gone – and they still control much of the sharp end of state power. Your father’s generation – the Seconds – is bat-shit crazy, and the First generation just shunted them from power, prestige and privilege in favor of… you. The Seconds are angry, bitter and want back what was taken from them.

You are trapped between a group that wants you to move, but not too quickly, and one that simply wants you dead. So what do you do? You appear erratic. Unpredictable. You launch the odd missile. Test the odd nuke. Shell the odd South Korean city. You make the Firsts think you are strong but respectful of their position, and the Seconds think you are crazier than you are. And whenever the opportunity presents itself, you purge a few Seconds. Including your relations.

Especially your relations. This is, after all, a dynastic system.

If this is true, then North Korea is a Twitter account in a teapot. All the smoke and sound is simply what domestic politics looks like, and there isn’t much to be concerned about. The biggest argument that this is true is the simple fact that the NorKs haven’t done much of strategic significance since the armistice that ended the Korean War in 1953. Six decades is a looooong time to do absolutely nothing if you really are a country full of nuclear-armed madmen. If this is true, then the Trump administration can totally lean on Pyongyang without risk of a military conflict because at the end of the day the drama is for internal consumption – it is not about the United States. If anything, Trump matching North Korea’s propaganda invective tweet for tweet is actually an effective strategy because it makes it clear that Pyongyang is firmly on the American radar and the North Korea domestic management strategy could have consequences. (Trump’s tweeting has certainly had an impact on Venezuela, but that’s a topic for another day.)

So between technical questions and political insecurity, instability and bombast, I don’t worry all that much.

Or at least I haven’t. That may now be changing.

(to be continued in Part II)