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)

The Turning Point

I’m on a mid-term break in my annual Unplug&Recharge effort, and am taking stock of what’s changed while I was out of cell phone range, and therefore blissfully ignorant of everything from CNN to Fox to Facebook to the Journal. The loudest development in my opinion seems to be what I’ll refer to as the Scaramucci Interregnum. Before I left for backpacking in Wyoming on July 13 Sean Spicer was the White House Communications Director, and Reince Priebus was the Trump administration’s chief of staff. While I was gone, Anthony Scaramucci rode into town, Spicer and Priebus left, and Scaramucci himself was dismissed shortly thereafter. Trump now has a new chief of staff in John Kelly, who served previously as the Secretary of Homeland Security.

Let’s break down what this all means.

First, an in-your-face personality like Anthony Scaramucci (aka “The Mooch”) was a horrible choice for a position that is all about smoothing ruffled feathers and keeping people – including  those hostile to the administration’s views and policies – informed. But his presence did present us with something very useful. His profanity-laden tirades demonstrated that Donald Trump has opinions on how much is too much. Considering the president’s own, shall we say, disinterest in self-censoring, this in and of itself is a notable discovery.

Second, the Interregnum has signposted a sharp change in the administration’s domestic political capacity. The departure of Spicer and Priebus removes two of the three “mainstream” domestically-focused Republican personalities from the administration. The only one remaining is Vice President Mike Pence. While the Veep is hardly a wilting flower, historically the Vice Presidency is only as powerful as the Presidency enables it to be. Trump may be many things, but “enabler” isn’t the word I typically reach for when I try to describe him.

Without any “establishment” personalities left, the leading advisor to Trump on all things domestic is now Steve Bannon, a nationalistic populist who has some rather… eclectic and non-standard views on how everything should be. Many were critical of the “adults” in the Trump administration for their mixed record on guiding the president to a more conventional path. On domestic politics, there are no longer any adults left. Expect things to get lively.

Third, expect them to get chaotic too. John Kelly was a fine Marine general and seemed quite capable and at home in Homeland Security. I have no problem with senior military personnel serving in civilian administrations and have written before about my support of and respect for people like Defense Secretary James Mattis and National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster. In foreign and strategic affairs, the top-down model of management that is typical of military minds works. After all, you don’t want some low-level bureaucrat making strategic policy without supervision, or even with much wiggle room on the specifics of implementation.

But chief of staff is a political job. It is about balancing dozens of competing players, many of whom by design are attempting to manipulate or deceive the president, and yet still must be considered. It is a position that is a combination of gatekeeper, ego juggler, reality-checker, cat-herder, and selective censor. The military isn’t exactly known for cranking out such people. Solid chiefs of staff have broad exposure, deep expertise and/or cut-throat political instincts: Jim Baker, Josh Bolten, Rahm Emanuel. Kelly is smart as a whip and good at what he knows, but this isn’t the job for him. Which leaves Trump both under the influence of Bannon and lacking someone who can capably manage the chief executive’s affairs. Get ready for not just press reports by Twitter, but policy by Twitter.

Speaking of Twitter, a Twitter follower recently asked me for confirmation that despite all the… activity in the White House these days, does a functional plan still exist to promulgate American power in the long run? It’s a reasonable question. I’ve long taken the view that American power will grow in both absolute and relative terms for at least the rest of this century. That, in a nutshell, is the theme of The Accidental Superpower.

Let me be clear: there is no plan. The Americans have hardly ever had a plan. From an international and strategic viewpoint, America’s strengths are not and never have been in its governing system in general or any administration in specific. Instead, America’s strengths come from a balance of factors which exist entirely outside of the political realm:

  • Geography: The United States occupies the world’s best lands interlaced with the world’s best naturally-occurring transport system, the Greater Mississippi system. In addition, any potential invaders are separated from the United States by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. That leaves the Americans free to develop without fear of outside interference, yet gives them the capacity to intervene across the world at times and places of their choosing. And should things get dicey, the Americans can always just head home. For them – and them alone – defeat doesn’t mean someone is parking their tanks in your lawn.
  • Demography: Countries that survive in the long-term have a population balance between mature workers to invest and pay taxes, and young workers to raise children and whose consumption powers the economy. Most of the world’s countries have run out of young workers already: Germany, Japan and Italy are the worst – all are rapidly aging into national oblivion – while Russia, China and Brazil aren’t far behind. The United States is one of the (very) few advanced countries where the balance is even remotely stable and sustainable.
  • Energy: Love it or hate it, energy is a requirement of modern life. For the last several decades, global politics was heavily colored by the need to bring energy from far-flung locations in the Middle East and Siberia to East Asia, Europe and the United States. No more. America’s shale revolution has already transformed the United States into a net energy exporter, and by 2020 it will likely even be an oil exporter in absolute terms. And if you’re of the Green persuasion, the United States is the First World power closest to the equator, making it the only one that can actually harness solar energy in meaningful volumes.

These are things that no president can screw up. The United States survived Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The ride may often be wild, but the United States will survive post-Interregnum Donald Trump as well.

Other countries, not so much.

The three factors of geography, demography and energy enabled the United States to impose a global Order during the Cold War that, in essence, outlawed conflict among the allied powers. Maintaining that Order was difficult – it required constant consultation and coordination. Falling from Order to Disorder, in contrast, is eeeeeasy. The Cold War is over, and the American president no longer has a functional executive staff that is capable of consulting and coordinating. All it requires is not a goddam thing.

Since America’s strengths are natural and apolitical, the United States will broadly be fine. For countries that lack geographic strength and isolation, demographic heft and stability, and energy access or independence, however, life outside of the Order is looking mighty scary.

Which makes it absolutely critical for other countries to have their own plans if they are to survive the Disorder to come. Unfortunately, most of them are slipping into narcissistic populism, bald denial, deer-in-the-headlights panic, or some terrifying combination of the three. There are exceedingly few countries that boast the combination of factors required to even attempt to chart their own destinies in a sustainable manner.

I’m certain that in a few years domestic pundits will (correctly) use the Scaramucci Interregnum to signpost the beginning of a (more) volatile and unpredictable Trump White House, but there’s more at stake than that. The real issue of the day is that the transition from global Order to Disorder just accelerated from a slide into a free-fall.

And now we get to see what happens next: Now we can begin to witness the rise of the New Orders. The – ultimately successful – efforts of four specific countries to reshape their neighborhoods in the wake of the American withdrawal from the world.

As for who those four countries are, how they’ll do it – and above all else – why they’ll be the only four to succeed, you’ll have to wait a bit. You see, the next book isn’t done yet.

But I do have a cover to share…

Qatar, PACOM, and the Absence of US Foreign Policy

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

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

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

Let’s start with the background.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Curious About Cuba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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