*This video was recorded in May of 2024.
If you’ve read my book “The End of the World Is Just the Beginning” then you’re well aware of the US stepping away from the Global Order. But what does life look for other countries once that happens?
Places like New Zealand might need to take a page out of Japan’s playbook, forming strategic partnerships with the US by offering trade concessions, security cooperation, or any other ways that help them stay relevant to the US. (I’ll take a vacation home near Milford Sound if the Kiwis are offering).
Some larger powers are going to be stepping up as the US pulls back, think France, Sweden and Turkey. Each of these countries will have to navigate this new reality and find their footholds as regional powers. The dynamics between these big three will shape the future of NATO, the EU and Europe as a whole.
As for places like the Middle East, the US is very, very reluctant to re-engage too deeply. This marks a shift in the broader US strategy of disengagement and signals a move towards acting more independently on the global stage.
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Something we discuss amongst ourselves, Peter, is the shifting, changing global order. What happens to small countries around the world, like New Zealand, as the U.S. strategic relationship with this post-Cold War global order starts to change and the global environment shifts? I don’t think New Zealand is the country to look to. I think Japan is the country to look to because Japan so far is the only country that’s figured it out.
A few governments ago, the Japanese realized that the Americans were losing interest in everything. Japan, like a lot of countries, is dependent on international trade for its economic health, especially for its energy imports. They realized that unless they could get into the American inner circle, give the Americans something that they want, there wasn’t much of a future.
For smaller countries that are less capable than Japan, this is triply true. What Japan did is seek out a deal with the United States on America’s terms. During the Cold War, when we needed everybody to be on our side to face down the Soviets, it was the United States that provided the economic and strategic concessions in order to build the alliance.
That’s not the world we’re in anymore. Now, if you have a more disassociated America, you have to bring the case to them. You have to offer them something in order to keep them involved. In Japan, it was trade concessions and a security partnership. For smaller countries, you have to be a lot more aggressive and a lot more giving in order to keep the Americans interested.
New Zealand, being off the edge of the earth, basically doesn’t face the security concerns that a lot of other people do. For them, their interest is going to be primarily economic because they produce a lot of agricultural products that the rest of the world really needs. That is an easier carry before you even consider the cultural connections between America and New Zealand.
But for most of the rest of the world, that’s a much taller order. The things that you have to offer the United States in order to keep them engaged—there aren’t a lot of things that the U.S. is really interested in, and you’re going to have to get really creative and dig really deep.
With the U.S. reevaluating its position globally and with the emergence of the largest land conflict in Europe since World War II, with the Ukraine-Russia war in place, we’ve seen some regional powers shift how they behave within broader Europe. I’m thinking about France, Sweden, and Turkey. What do we see between these three regional leaders/powers?
When it comes to their political, economic, and military mindset, how they interact with each other, and what that means for the future of the EU, Europe, and NATO overall, you’ve just put your finger on the three countries that are going to matter—not just now, but ten years from now, twenty years from now, and thirty years from now.
But for the remainder of the century, for demographic reasons, we’re going to lose, at some point, Spain, Germany, Italy, and eventually Poland. But these countries have very healthy democracies and a geography that allows them a degree of freedom to act outside of the confines of just Europe. How they get along or don’t is going to determine what is possible for NATO, the EU, and a post-unified Europe.
At the moment, the French are increasingly taking their talking points from the Swedish government. The Swedes have always been very big on energy security, manufacturing self-sufficiency, and partnership with countries immediately around them in opposition to Russia. Now that they’re no longer neutral, the French are sounding a lot like the Swedes. So the room for partnership there is very robust.
So long as ego doesn’t get in the way—I wouldn’t even mention that if it wasn’t for the fact that France is one of the two powers we’re talking about here—it’s going to be very interesting, from my point of view, to see how the two powers coordinate or step on each other’s toes in Ukraine, because that is going to set a really strong pattern for their bilateral relationship moving forward.
At the moment, it looks pretty positive. No, they’re not talking past each other at the moment. Turkey, of course, is from a radically different culture. Turkey has a very different economic structure, even if it’s still very healthy from my point of view, and they’ve got a foot in the Middle East as well, which complicates things. But again, we’re seeing a degree of cooperation that didn’t exist ten, twenty, or thirty years ago.
So I’m pretty hopeful there. But I don’t think that’s going to last for the long term. Turkey is too big of a power, too dominating in its own neighborhood, and if Russia loses the Ukraine war, Turkey is one of the powers that has the opportunity to do a massive geopolitical expansion. That is something that is undoubtedly going to make other powers in the neighborhood a little uneasy, even if the Turks aren’t taking any hostile actions against them.
So we’ve got here a Swedish-German-French axis, with the Germans being the junior partner in the city partner, and Turkey trying to figure out just how much it can grab. This, to me, is starting to sound a lot like the 1500s. You’ve written about and spoken quite a bit about the changing global order and the U.S. sort of stepping back from its near-century of keeping the world safe, managing global shipping, and maintaining this global order.
When we look at the Red Sea and U.S. Navy actions against the Houthi rockets, is there a risk of the U.S. being pulled back into the Middle East from its current actions? Is the U.S.’s attempt to help secure global shipping through the Red Sea—a region in which the U.S. is not a major participant—a sign of the U.S. stepping back into its previous role?
It feels a lot like a placeholder to me. It’s become a testing ground, in an unfortunate manner, for American missile interdiction. We’re discovering that as easy as it is to shoot down an individual shaky drone or a missile, preventing a hostile group from launching any number of weapons systems any number of times is very difficult.
We’re talking about patrolling an area roughly the size of half of Texas, and it’s stretching American naval interdiction capacities to the breaking point because the Navy wasn’t designed for this. It was designed to interdict things shot at the Navy, not going off or through a wide swath of territory. And if a real country—not Yemen, but a real country—were to do this on a broader scale, it’s pretty clear to U.S. naval commanders now that there’s not a lot we can do about it. So, if someone else joined in, we’d have a real problem, and this belief that the United States is still patrolling the global oceans—even if we wanted to—would be pretty clear that we couldn’t, against some of the technologies that have evolved over the last 75 years.
In terms of the idea of the United States getting sucked back into the Middle East, I really don’t think that’s on deck. In fact, if anything, I think the Gaza conflict has underlined to the United States how little we want to do with the region. We’re having a fun little conversation with the Israelis that feels a lot like the conversations we were having with the French and the Germans a few years ago.
We tried to convince them back in the 2010s that, you know, the Russians are going to keep pushing. Look, they just invaded Georgia. They just invaded the Donbas in Ukraine. They just took Crimea. Of course, they’re going to do more. They’re going to push and push and push until they can’t. The Germans and the French were like, “It’s a brave new world.”
In fact, Germany was going to put into place a defense minister whose job was to wind down the entirety of the German military because they didn’t need it anymore, because we’ve entered a new era of peace. Then the Ukraine war happened, and all of a sudden, the French, the Germans, and a lot of other allies in Europe are singing a very different tune.
In the case of the Middle East, we have been saying publicly to everyone who will listen, at home and abroad, that we want out of the Middle East already. The Israelis assumed that what we meant was we wanted to double down on the alliance with Israel and turn against the Middle East. No, no, no—we want out.
So the Gaza war happens, and while we feel badly for what happened, what the Israelis have done in the months since, we also don’t feel all that hot about it, and the idea that the United States would get sucked into another long-range conflict in the Middle East so that Gaza can go exactly the way the Israeli government wants it to—that’s a dumb play.
What Gaza has done is kind of underline to the United States just how distasteful we find the whole thing. The discussions we’re seeing recently between the Israeli government and the American government on arms transfers are really bringing home to Israel that they are not the golden child. They are not the special exception that is going to keep the United States in the region, and that is forcing some soul-searching.
Finally, in Europe, it took a Russian invasion to change minds. Here, it’s taken a one-day-old arms embargo. But there’s a dawning revelation, one country at a time, one day at a time, that the United States is not the same place it was 20 years ago. That eventually is going to seep through many layers of incomprehension in many places. If you’re an American strategist looking at this, you know it’s kind of a little bit like the Nixon strategy of being unpredictable. But it’s not that there’s a master plan backing it all up—it’s just that the United States is looking to get out, become a free agent again. It’s a different world.
