Video Dispatch: China’s Demographic Decline

Bit by bit we are getting back to normal. Over half of the American adult population is now vaccinated, and vaccines will soon be available in most locations on a walk-in basis. At current rates, I have little doubt all American adults can be vaccinated by June 1. 

For me personally, that means I am starting to travel again. But the world really doesn’t care where I am. Events happen and I need to get to work. The big news this week is out of China, and it is NOT good.

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

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

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

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

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The Ins and Outs of Vaccine Diplomacy

On March 2 the Biden administration announced a vaccine manufacturing partnership between two of the largest and most successful drug manufacturers in the United States: Johnson & Johnson and Merck. Less than a week previous the U.S. FDA approved J&J’s vaccine for emergency use in combatting the COVID-19 virus; its formula will now be produced both in J&J and Merck facilities. (At present neither firm has announced expansion schedules or delivery volumes.)
 
This is big. Of the five proven anti-COVID vaccine formulas that have been approved for use in the First World, only the J&J formula is refrigerator safe and easy to manufacture and a single-dose formula. As such it can be used for inoculations at any facility worldwide that can handle any other vaccine formula. It is this formula that is capable of vaccinating the majority of the world’s population against COVID, and with the Merck tie-up I’ve little doubt the formula will be able to make good on its potential.
 
Again, this is big. The question now becomes just how big?
 
Some backstory:
 
In his early days, the Biden administration activated an option in the Trump administration’s supply contracts with Pfizer and Moderna. Each will now provide the United States with at least 300 million doses by the end of July, providing enough vaccine for 300 million Americans. That alone is enough to cover 90% of the American population, children included. Johnson & Johnson (by itself) will kick in another 100 million by the end of June, and since the J&J formula is single shot, that’s enough for another 100 million people.
 
Such figures suggest every adult in the United States who wants to get the vaccine will be able to get it by June 1, and that on-demand, walk-in vaccinations will be available by mid-April.
 
In fact, this is now the worst-case scenario for vaccine availability in the United States. The manufacturers continue to find ways to optimize their manufacturing. For example, Pfizer has increased their rate of production by more than 80% in just January and February and has simplified its distribution by proving its formula can be stored in normal freezers as opposed to the dry-ice-ultra-cold set-ups it initially used. Such advances likely shaved 4-6 weeks off American vaccination schedules.
 
There are also two other vaccine formulas – AstraZeneca and Novavax – that will likely contribute millions of doses (maybe tens of millions) to the effort, bringing the American schedule ever forward.
 
Best yet, this new J&J-Merck tie up isn’t included in the above prognostications. Despite what my vaccine optimism might suggest, vaccine manufacture isn’t quick. It requires 2-3 months to grow the vaccine cultures in a vat, and then a few more weeks for testing and bottling. And that assumes the facilities are already ready to go. The primary reason the Pfizer and Moderna formulas are moving along so quickly is that they began production last year before they even applied for FDA approval. The J&J-Merck effort is only beginning now. We shouldn’t expect to see first doses from the collaboration in the hands of medical professionals until June.
 
Which raises some very interesting geopolitical possibilities. June 1 is when the United States will have tens of millions of surplus doses from its existing production contracts. The J&J-Merck partnership will add at least 100 million doses on top of that, with many more to come throughout the summer as everyone’s efforts continue to expand. While the bulk of the rest of the world will be starved of vaccine, the United States will have a glut. Since the U.S. government is the entity that contracted for the doses, it will be up to the Biden administration to decide where those doses go.
 
The term you’re looking for is “vaccine diplomacy”.
 
It comes at a fortuitous time. The United States has backed away from the world. This isn’t a Clinton thing or a W Bush thing or an Obama thing or a Trump thing or a Biden thing, but instead a United States thing. The American people lost interest in playing a constructive role in the world three decades ago, and America’s political leadership has molded itself around that fact. Trump may have been instinctually and publicly hostile to all things international, but Biden is only different in tone. Biden’s Buy-American program is actually more anti-globalization than Trump’s America-First rhetoric as it is an express violation of most of America’s international trade commitments. TeamBiden says it wants to reestablish America’s global leadership…but it plans to do so without any troops or money. Sorry, but that’s not how it works.
 
Which makes the possibilities for vaccine diplomacy wildly interesting. The United States has no responsibility to provide COVID vaccines to the world. It can – it will – distribute them, but it will want something in return.

Let’s begin with the obvious decisions:
 
Canada: Like the United States, the Canadian government contracted for more doses than it needed from multiple vaccine developers, working from the wise theory that not all would pan out. Like the United States, several of the firms Canada chose did work out, suggesting a similar vaccine glut. But unlike the United States, no vaccines are manufactured in Canada, so Canadians have had to wait. Not much longer. Whether it is because the United States finishes its vaccination program and so frees up manufacturing capacity for its northern neighbor, or because the Biden administration chooses to apply vaccine diplomacy to its closest friend, Canada will get all the vaccine it needs in June. Considering the Canadian health system is far superior to America’s, mass vaccination in Canada should be completed by July 1.
 
Mexico: America’s southern neighbor lacks both America’s manufacturing capacity and Canada’s health system. It was never going to be among the first countries to achieve mass vaccination. If left it its own devices, that is. In reality, Mexico will be second in line. Mexico is one of America’s two largest trading partners (based on how you run the math). Mexicans are America’s second- or third-largest ethnic group (depending upon how one defines “Mexican”). The Mexican-American border is the most-crossed (legally) in the world (no matter how you count). Completely ignoring health and ethics and good-neighborliness and focusing purely on self-interest, Mexico is the obvious second choice for American vaccine diplomacy. Vaccination there will take longer than Canada. After all, there are 130 million people in Mexico to Canada’s 35 million, and the health system isn’t nearly as advanced. But I’d be surprised if the Mexican effort wasn’t functionally completed – and with it, the broader North American economy recovered – before August 1.
 
After that, the choices become less obvious.
 
The very nature of the vaccines and coronavirus limits the options:
 
China and Russia are out. In addition to the pair becoming increasingly hostile to all things American, both have their own vaccines and are not interested in any sort of quid pro quo with Washington.
 
Many of the poor portions of the world are out. In part, its an issue of economics and strategy. Its harsh to say but there is only so much that Bolivia or Niger can offer the United States. But just as important, it is about COVID itself. The people the virus tends to kill are over 65. In the world’s poorer countries, not all that many live that long. That hardly means coronavirus is something they can just take in stride, but the mass casualties we’ve seen in the advanced world just don’t occur within the younger-aged populations of the poorer parts of the developing world. And the niggling logistical issues remain; While the J&J formula can be distributed easily, it is the only one that can be – and even J&J needs a refrigerator cold chain.
 
India is probably out as well. Not because an Indo-American tie up wouldn’t be a solid idea, but because India has its own vaccine manufacturing capacity. In fact, India has its own vaccine diplomacy program that already stretches from Mongolia to Myanmar (if you have problems with China, you can probably count on New Delhi to help you out with vaccines).
 
That still leaves us with just under half the global population that are potential American vaccine diplomacy targets. I can’t tell you which countries TeamBiden will pick in which order. That will in part be determined by the new administration’s evolving priorities as well as the broader geopolitical environment in the last half of 2021. What I can do is lay out the options from cleanest to messiest:
 
The Five Eyes: Back in the 1950s the Americans worked with the Brits, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders to build a globe-spanning intelligence collection system. We know that today as the Five Eyes. The five Anglo nations aren’t simply friends and allies, they are family, and it would stretch the mind for all not to be included in some degree of vaccine sharing. It was also be eeeeasy. After all, the UK is taking care of itself, and Canada is already first on America’s list. Combined, there are only 30 million Aussies and Kiwis; Supplying sufficient doses would be child’s play.
 
Japan and South Korea: Allies? Check. First World countries? Check. Major trading partners? Check. Excellent health infrastructure? Check. Wildly insufficient domestic vaccine manufacturing capacity? Check. Both the Japanese and Koreans loathed Donald Trump’s efforts to wring economic and security concessions out of them, but in the end, both had to give in. Biden has indicated zero inclinations to give back anything Trump secured. If anything, the Biden administration will demand more. Vaccine diplomacy is an excellent way to either secure more concessions in specific or salve the relationships in general.
 
Southeast Asia: There’s a brewing competition between China and the United States for influence throughout the region, making a broadscale vaccination program a useful tool. The problems are complexity and scope. There are some 650 million people in the region. It is also politically and strategically messy. A recent military coup in Myanmar and an aging military coup in Thailand suggest diplomatic complications. Singapore is wildly rich and can take care of itself. Indonesia is huge and poor and lacks basic infrastructure for upwards of one-third of its population. Laos and Cambodia are de facto Chinese satellites. Malaysia is…stuffy. The smartest target might prove to be the Philippines. Manila gets petulant from time to time if the United States doesn’t toss the Philippines sufficient financial bones. Vaccines could well scratch the itch for years to come.
 
Colombia and Chile: This pair – courtesy of long-time friendly trade and political relations – are the only South American countries to make the list. Vaccine diplomacy would be a cheap and easy way to firm up ties. It would also underline the broader region that there are indeed benefits to being part of America’s Friends & Family Plan.
 
Taiwan: The Biden administration is doubling down on every anti-China effort the Trump administration started. On the same day of the J&J-Merck announcement, the new U.S. Trade Representative, Katherine Tai, announced a broadscale legal effort to target pretty much everything China does as a matter of course: from genocide in Xinjiang to political repression in Hong Kong to forced labor to unfair state financing. The only thing I can think of that would piss Beijing off more than the United States providing Taiwan with all the vaccine it needs, would be if an American cabinet secretary accompanied the delivery (Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin would be a delightfully inflammatory choice).
 
The European Union: Phbbbt. The EU’s vaccination effort to this point has been a disaster. In part it is bad luck: Unlike the US or Canada or the UK, most of the formulas the Continental Europeans backed didn’t work out. In part it is a bad approach: the EU started its negotiations with would-be manufacturers late and the Euros made price-haggling their top priority, so Europe is at the back of the line when it comes to deliveries. In part it was bad politics: the European Commission briefly – and extraordinarily stupidly – threatened border and trade relations with countries that had better vaccination planning. But mostly it is simply that Europe didn’t have any health capacity at the EU level and so it is literally making up everything as it goes.
 
And so, the rest of the world is pulling ahead. Post-Brexit UK is nearly the best in the world with vaccinations (which is galling enough to the Europeans), but economically devastated and strategically isolated Serbia has already vaccinated 20% of its population. The top-in-class EU country – Denmark – is barely half that far.
 
As a Europhile, I find it disheartening not only how badly the EU is doing, but how quickly EU members of all wealth levels are losing faith. Hungary, Austria and Denmark have opted to stop waiting for the EU to get its act together and so have entered separate agreements with Russia and Israel. The Netherlands, Sweden, Finland and Poland are likely to follow similar paths.
 
These disconnects provide a wealth of options for the Biden administration.

  • It could attempt a straight up vaccines-for-NATO program in an effort to achieve with honey what Trump attempted with vinegar: getting the Europeans to take their security seriously and actually commit financial resources to their own defense.
     
  • It could trade hundreds of millions of doses to the EU in exchange for broadscale trade concessions from the entire bloc. Aerospace and agriculture are two particularly sticky logjams that could benefit from vaccine-related lubrication.
     
  • It could bypass the EU and NATO completely and instead choose to target specific strategic partners in order to lock down long-term security agreements (Italy and Spain come to mind) to the detriment of any European defense planning.
     
  • It could trade vaccines for following the American lead against all things China. Say good-bye to the EU’s recent investment bilateral with Beijing?
     
  • It could provide the doses to the United Kingdom to distribute to Europe as London sees fit, an action which would reduce any bad PR to first derivative effects and give the United States a leg up in post-Brexit trade talks with the Brits.
     
  • It could toss enough vaccine into Germany’s lap to inoculate the German population but allow Berlin to decide how to distribute the doses. If the doses go to Germans, the EU would politically implode; but if the Germans distribute them to Europe, the German government would fall.

Best yet, the United States is likely to have so many doses by the fourth quarter, it could attempt multiple options.

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

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

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

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Infographic: US Causes of Death and Vaccine Safety

The United States approved a third COVID-19 vaccine—the latest from Johnson and Johnson—for use, offering up millions of more doses for Americans. As I stated in my video yesterday, vaccines should be available on demand by mid-April. The speed at which vaccines have been developed is nothing short of miraculous, but so too is the high rate of efficacy and safety afforded by all approved vaccine options. In nearly all cases, serious COVID disease—hospital stays, intubation, and death—from COVID are prevented. And there have been no cases found where receiving the vaccine was directly attributable to death. Not. One. This is an astounding track record against the backdrop of a 12-month period when over 500,000 Americans have died because of COVID-19. In just a few short months, much of the US will have turned the corner, even as other countries struggle to secure vaccine supplies to battle against new and emerging viral variants.

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

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

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

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

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

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Video Dispatch: Vaccines, Variants, and What’s Next

Here’s some good news for a change: the US has approved its third vaccine option–Johnson and Johnson’s single-dose shot–even as total daily vaccinations with the two-shot Moderna and Pfizer vaccines continues to rise. With additional supply and the real strides being made in pharmacies and doctors’ offices across the country, most Americans should be able to get a vaccine on demand by mid-April. 

For the rest of the world, the story is not nearly as rosy. Supply bottlenecks coupled with new and emerging variants mean that  the United States can start easing its lockdowns considerably before summer. In Europe and beyond, the threat of a fourth wave will continue to linger.

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

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

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

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

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

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Biden’s First Air Strike

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

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

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

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

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

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Deep in the Cold of Texas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DONATE TO FEEDING AMERICA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s time to talk about China.

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

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

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

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

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

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

DONATE TO FEEDING AMERICA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DONATE TO FEEDING AMERICA

Life After Trump, Part V: The Opening Roster

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

My original plan (such as it was) for this series was to use Part V to break down the foreign crises the Biden administration will face in his freshman year. We’ll still get to that (stay tuned for Part VI), but after going down Biden’s looooong list of political appointees I figured it’d be best to set the stage with the sorts of folks who will be laboring within the new administration.
 
I think the best way launch into my thoughts about the players is to echo a recent statement by Senator Marco Rubio (R, Fl) who blithely quipped they “will be polite & orderly caretakers of America’s decline.”
 
A bit rude? Sure. Pithy? Certainly. But that doesn’t make Rubio completely off base.
 
Biden’s picks are deliberately banal. I can see why. Biden is attempting to hold together the ungainly, dissatisfied coalition that brought him to power. Biden knows the only thing today’s Democrats agree on is that Trump is bad. As Biden saw up close during the Obama administration, if your entire raison-d’etre is merely to continue campaigning against your predecessor, you’ll never get much done. Biden needs his coalition to hold together if he is to take any action on domestic affairs, and that means he needs his foreign policy team to stay out of the spotlight. The best way to do that? Make sure they’re boring.
 
Even if Biden felt secure enough to spice things up, there’s little to draw upon. In recent decades the Democrats have experienced an utter collapse in foreign policy expertise. The Democrats were in opposition under W and Trump. Clinton was famously disinterested in the world, while Obama did nothing for eight years (going so far as to leave talented folks like John Kerry out to dry when they attempted to take strong stances). There is no one in the Democratic Party’s apparatus who has any meaningful experience doing anything outside of the United States.
 
Most of those who matter have only had professional lives of advising Biden either in the Senate or while he was VP. They’ve never advised someone who actually had decision-making capacity. So while they may know a lot and are generally sane and reasonable, they’ve never done very much.
 
There are exceptions of course. I’d like to call attention to the four who matter.
 
The first is the most straightforward: William Burns, a career diplomat with extensive bipartisan experience including lengthy and disturbing eventful stints in the Middle East and Russia. He’s a diplomats’ diplomat. Polite, yet firm, and known for speaking truth to power without being a jerk about it. He particularly excels at backchannel diplomacy with countries that loathe the United States. Considering the general mess of the world in the aftermath of Trump and Obama, America should count itself lucky that someone like Burns is even interested in government service.
 
I’m especially excited that Burns is not going to be part of the diplomatic core at the State Department, but instead will be leading the freakin’ Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA is responsible for the spooky stuff, and Russia is very active in the world of spookiness; I literally cannot think of an American alive who is more qualified to operate Club Cloak & Dagger at this moment in history.
 
Burns’s personal style also suggests he’ll be able to rebuild that most exotic and fretful of relationships: the one between the Agency and the White House. Clinton (in)famously sidelined the Agency (remember that idiot who tried to land a plane on the White House lawn? The Agency director at the time quipped it was just him trying to get a meeting with his boss). W Bush turned the Agency into a tactical support system for military operations in Iraq, gutting its ability to focus on the long game. Obama…well Obama just hermetically sealed himself in the West Wing and pretended the entire world outside of his personal ideology didn’t exist, government included. Trump screamed at any analyst who dared to refuse manufacturing evidence to support his latest tweet. After 28 years of strained Agency-presidential relations, someone with Burns’ record of bipartisanship, well of patience, topical depth, and easy-going approach is sorely needed.
 
There are only two things about the Burns appointment that bother me. First, Burns wasn’t Biden’s first choice, but instead his third, suggesting Biden’s talent-detector is in need of a tune-up. Second, Burns’ mustache is hideous and I’m hoping for a freak fireplace accident

Next we have Janet Yellen – former Federal Reserve Chairwoman and now Treasury Secretary.
 
Like Burns, Yellen may well be just what the doctor ordered. Let’s start by noting that as former Fed Chair she has loads of foreign policy experience. Yellen helped put the pieces of the world back together in the aftermath of the 2007-2009 financial crisis, and in doing so developed not only experience in diplomacy, but also considerable expertise in thinking outside of the box.
 
Many on the fiscal conservative side not-so-affectionately refer to Yellen in a variety of odious forms, thinking her to be no less than a demonic force seeking to end the modern financial system as we know it. In her term as Fed Chair she greatly expanded a process known as quantitative easing, which is the technical term for expanding the money supply (printing currency) and using that extra cash to buy up government and corporate debt to stabilize bond markets and keep borrowing costs as low as possible. The primary reason for fiscal conservatives’ vitriol is a concern for long-term economic damage, particularly in the form of inflation and warping of the rates of return within bond markets.
 
I don’t find such criticism entirely fair. For one, it wasn’t Yellen who initiated QE, but instead her predecessor; and it was her successor who massively expanded it. No one is calling them the Devil’s henchpersons.
 
For two, our collective understanding of economic norms is evolving. Shifts in global trade patterns, demographic collapses, and a mix of compounding technological improvements are challenging everything we think we know about economic theory. While we won’t know the full effects of QE for years to come, what we do know now is after a decade of ever-increasing volumes of monetization, inflation is lower than ever and America’s debt financing costs have gone down. Yellen was…right. For the moment at least.
 
So let me quote the lady herself: “With interest rates at historic lows, the smartest thing we can do is act big.” She’s probably right about that too. Biden’s out-of-the-gate economic plan is for a $1.9 trillion stimulus program. By far the biggest in US history. The fiscal conservative in me throws up in my mouth a little bit whenever I think about it, but fiscal conservative orthodoxy at the moment is clearly not what the doctor ordered. I’m glad a creative thinker who can still do math like Yellen is on the job.
 
The third appointee of note is to head the office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the bureau responsible for enforcing and negotiating all trade deals: Katherine Tai.
 
Tai is definitely not qualified to be a negotiator. Until mere days ago she was “just” a Congressional staffer. She’s certainly versed in all the relevant trade issues, but she’s never managed a big staff or participated in, much less led, a meaningful negotiation. Normally, I’d say that she – a politically-unwired technocrat – is a horrible choice.
 
You may have noticed, things aren’t normal these days.
 
One of the things Biden has made abundantly clear is he has no plans to even think about free trade negotiations until such time as the coronavirus crisis is firmly in the rear-view mirror. That won’t be until the fourth quarter of 2021.
 
Luckily for Tai, her predecessor – Robert Lighthizer (the same guy who renegotiated NAFTA) – has already done a lot of the heavy lifting for the singular negotiation Tai will be called upon to carry to the finish line: a trade deal with the United Kingdom. Considering the UK’s options for trade with anyone but the United States are so minimal as to be practically nonexistent, Tai shouldn’t face many problems. (Although she will undoubtedly be vilified in the British press for taking the British economy to the cleaners.)
 
But only having one trade deal on her plate does not mean Tai won’t be extremely busy. She might not have trade talks experience, but she is a trade lawyer. Biden picked her not because he wants a raft of new trade deals, but because he wants his USTR to sue the pants off of anyone who might not be adhering to the spirit and letter of US trade law. That’s pretty much everyone.  Tai might be the wrong person for the title, but she is absolutely the right person for the job the new president wants tackled.

Finally, we come to the new National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan.

Sullivan is a super-smart foreign policy generalist who understands the interlinkages of trade and populations and security that bind the world together and threaten to spin it apart. He has also apparently achieved the unthinkable: he is so painfully affable that everyone in DC likes him. He reminds me a lot of…me.

Which is why I’m pretty certain he will fail.

Somewhat contrary to the title, America’s National Security Advisor does a lot more than merely advise the president on foreign policy. He (or she) also has to ride herd on the government’s sprawling foreign policy apparatus. It is ultimately a bureaucratic job akin to riding an angry, rabid octopus.

The quintessential NSA in recent years was John Bolton. Bolton had decades of experience taking charge of this or that aspect of the foreign policy establishment and forcing them to do things his way to achieve his president’s goals. Most of Washington despised him, not because of a lack of competence, but instead because of his I-hate-everyone-because-everyone-is-a-moron personality. Bolton was (in)famous for intimidating and outmaneuvering his way through the entire bureaucracy. In contrast, Sullivan is a congenial brainiac. The very knowledge base that leads Biden to rely upon Sullivan’s thinking is guaranteed to piss off career civil servants convinced that they know more about topics x, y or z. Bottom line? People like Sullivan (and myself) – deep-thinking, purposefully-rounded generalists – tend to do very badly in government.

And even if Sullivan proves me wrong and is indeed the right person for the job, his first task has an Augean Stables stench about it. He’ll need to re-create America’s foreign policy establishment.

Under W, Obama, and Trump the foreign policy apparatus has been badly mismanaged, irresponsibly re-tasked, malignly ignored, intentionally belittled and intellectually castrated. The past 20 years have convinced smart, ambitious, principled people that government work isn’t for them. Sullivan doesn’t have much to draw upon except the clock-punching hangers-on who are holding out for a pension. He’ll need to rebuild many bureaus from scratch and it isn’t clear he has the expertise, mindset or rolodex to even begin. The State Department in particular needs a demo crew more than a superwonk. Sullivan is going to engage in such holistic institutional reconstruction while serving as America’s foreign policy guru? I think not.

I’d be thrilled if Sullivan proves me wrong and instead shines. I’d be thrilled if people like myself could actually be part of the solution. But I’d also be shocked.

Now let’s set the stage for the Biden administration’s opening environment at home.

The coronavirus crisis is epically raging. Daily deaths have exceeded the number of Americans’ killed on September 11, 2001 for a few weeks straight. Total deaths have now exceeded total American deaths in the four years of America’s most deadly war, World War II.

But the numbers are turning. The post-Christmas surge has peaked and new hospitalizations are ebbing. Add in some Biden-related actions such as mask mandates on federal properties, and we should see a very rapid drop off in infections in the month to come. The US already has two vaccines on the market, with another two likely to join them around mid-February, one of which – the Johnson & Johnson formula – can be stored in a normal refrigerator and only requires a single shot. Even better, J&J expects to have 100 million doses distributed by April 1.

Epidemiologically speaking, that puts us in a race between people relaxing their guard as the post-Christmas surge fades, and vaccines getting into arms. If the vaccines win the race, roughly 100,000 fewer people will die and it will appear to the general public that all defeating the vaccine required was Biden in the White House. Before you root for that not to happen, keep in mind the alternate interpretation of Biden failure requires at least another 100,000 deaths.

My point here is not simply that Biden enjoys fortuitous timing, but that coronavirus in general has presented the new president with a very favorable starting conditions. While everyone has different opinions on the specifics, everyone knows we need a new stimulus package to battle the virus and its economic effects. Biden’s singular known skill is that he’s a Senate negotiator. This battle plays directly to his strengths, and he’ll reap the political gains for getting it done.

Between the vaccine rollout, the COVID mitigation package, and some very basic anti-virus measures (that honestly Trump should have done last March), Biden has the opportunity to shine. He has the opportunity to build domestic unity. He has the opportunity to look competent. He has the opportunity to look powerful. And he has the opportunity to look gracious.

These are all very easy carries that will reap mounds of political capital he can use on other projects. But if Biden cannot manage this we will know that he really is incapable, and that the next four years will be just as disconnected as the previous four.

Best of luck to him, because there are already some hefty issues clamoring for presidential attention.

Coming soon:
Life After Trump, Part VI: The Crisis List

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