The defining question about global order for this generation is whether China and the United States can escape Thucydides’s Trap. The Greek historian’s metaphor reminds us of the attendant dangers when a rising power rivals a ruling power—as Athens challenged Sparta in ancient Greece, or as Germany did Britain a century ago. Most such contests have ended badly, often for both nations, a team of mine at the Harvard Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs has concluded after analyzing the historical record. In 12 of 16 cases over the past 500 years, the result was war. When the parties avoided war, it required huge, painful adjustments in attitudes and actions on the part not just of the challenger but also the challenged.
– From Graham Allison’s article: The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?
For the past two years, my geopolitical assumption has been that the Trump administration would more or less continue along with the reckless, shortsighted, and disastrous neocon/neoliberal interventionist foreign policy of the past two decades focused on undeclared regime change and proxy wars across the world, especially the Middle East. Given his strange obsession with Iran, I figured he’d start a conflict there and that this conflict would end up a bigger disaster than Iraq.
I assumed this mistake would coincide with continued massive deficits, a unwieldy debt load and most likely a recession. In turn, I believed this would lead to an embarrassing and chaotic unraveling of the U.S. empire. At that point, other nations like China would opportunistically take advantage of the huge power vacuum left over. Based on a variety of events over the past few months, I’m no longer convinced this is how it’s going to unfold.
First, the article published by Bloomberg back in October, The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies, really grabbed my attention. If you haven’t read it, I strongly suggest you go do that, as I was immediately blown away by the implications. To summarize, the story purports that 17 sources in both government and the corporate world claim Chinese spies inserted a malicious microchip into Supermicro servers and that this affected nearly 30 companies, including tech behemoths Amazon and Apple. Equally incendiary, the article reported that Amazon and Apple knew about it, but never let the public know. Apple, Amazon and others vehemently denied the Bloomberg story, and we still don’t know the truth. As I noted at the time:
In other words, we've got a seriously fucked up situation on our hands because one of these things must be true. Someone is lying and lying BIG.
— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) October 4, 2018
Either China really did compromise hardware and U.S. tech giants are actively covering it up, or unnamed sources invented a story to make China look nefarious in order to up the ante in the growing dispute between the two nations. We still can’t be sure which one is true, but the end result is pretty much the same. Greatly increased tensions with China.
While I knew the Bloomberg story had wide-ranging implications, it wasn’t enough to make me seriously consider a distinct geopolitical forecast. Then came the second major event, which was the arrest of Wanzhou Meng, the CFO of China’s telecom giant Huawei earlier this month. Importantly, she’s much more than just an executive at a giant Chinese company, she’s “the daughter of the telecom giant’s founder, Ren Zhengfei. An ex-officer with the People’s Liberation Army, Ren is one of the country’s most revered business figures.”
It’s also worth mentioning that she was arrested while Trump was sitting down to dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the G20 summit. I can’t even imagine the level of anger this must have caused on the part of the Chinese. This made me realize that the “trade war” is just a prelude to a much bigger confrontation.
Moving along, yesterday we learned of a sudden plan to withdraw all U.S. troops from Syria. I want to make it clear we don’t know if this is just talk or will actually happen (for a skeptical take see this), but if it does occur, it will make it increasingly likely that U.S. foreign policy has undergone a massive and monumentally significant shift. A shift away from failed regime change boondoggles in far flung areas of the world Americans don’t care about, to a very major and probably long-lasting confrontation with China itself.
If this is in fact the case, it’s impossible to overstate its significance. In my view, such a shift would signal that the U.S. has acknowledged the unipolar imperial world completely dominated by America is over and unrecoverable, and therefore resources will shift away from the silly dream of full spectrum global dominance into a managed retreat. A managed retreat would be considered preferable since it could be done on U.S. terms as opposed to having the terms forced upon it. In other words, it would be a proactive foreign policy based on reality, rather than a reactive one forced upon it by circumstances.
This isn’t to say any of this will be good or pleasant, but from the realpolitik perspective of those preoccupied with U.S. power in a post unipolar world, it’s the most likely move. A realization that wars in the Middle East achieve no long-term objectives for the U.S. may finally have occurred. They just weaken the country, get the public annoyed and waste enormous amounts of money that could be spent elsewhere. Meanwhile, other countries just sit back and wait for America to fall over so they can pick up the pieces. Finally, it’d be almost impossible to sell the public on another major conflict in the Middle East. Selling the public on China as an adversary will be much easier.
Today we saw further evidence of things heating up, as Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray announced the unsealing of an indictment against two accused Chinese hackers. As Ben Hunt of Epsilon Theory observed.
This is what you do to solidify domestic public opinion before waging a war, trade or otherwise. https://t.co/A47APTd4yD
— Ben Hunt (@EpsilonTheory) December 20, 2018
Then there’s the ongoing crash in financial markets. Many people think this is just the market reacting to interest rate hikes in the midst of an economic slowdown and a realization that corporate profits have peaked. While that’s undoubtably a big part of it, I think there’s more.
I think gold is the real canary in the coal mine, and gold is starting to signal serious problems on the geopolitical front. I’ve noticed for a few weeks that gold had started to trade strong, in sharp contrast to the past seven years. While it reversed and went lower after the hawkish Jay Powell did his thing yesterday, it did something unexpected today. As the stock market continued to plunge, gold reversed all its losses and closed at a new near-term high. Gold is seeing beyond the simple economic issues and into the geopolitical realm in my opinion.
But what is gold telling us? I think it may be confirming the thesis outlined above. Which is that U.S. foreign policy is pivoting away from aimless wars all over the place in order to sustain the impossible dream of unipolar empire, and toward a more singular goal focused on preventing China from dominating the globe in the decades ahead. If successful, the coming multi-polar world may be characterized by a bifurcated global economy, as outlined in a very interesting piece from Strategic Culture, America’s Technology and Sanctions War Will End, by Bifurcating the Global Economy.
Globalization as we have all known it is dead and buried and it isn't coming back. The future global economy will look completely different and will likely be far more balkanized.
— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) December 20, 2018
Of course, there’s no way to know if I’m right about any of this. Just because it looks this way today doesn’t mean it will play out that way in the future. Nevertheless, I’ve now seen enough to seriously consider that we may be entering an entirely new geopolitical environment dominated by vastly increased tensions between the U.S. and China. If so, it will likely last a lot longer than you think as leaders in both China in the U.S. will be looking for a scapegoat as their crony, financialized economies struggle under unpayable debt and unimaginable levels of corruption.
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I stongly recommend to you and your readers Paul Rosenberg’s book “The New Age of Intelligence”. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XD5M2BD
“In the last few decades power has increasingly been organized in networks…
“These constructs are not monolithic hierarchies or temporary expressions of inter-governmental alliances like those set up in the 19th and 20th centuries. Rather, they continue their existence as fluid and often undefined interrelationships between decision makers, media, influencers and profiteers. They have developed a life of their own, independent of their creators in government and any initial legitimization they might have had.
“Networks have become the dominant model because of their efficiency, reliability, and their indirect (often invisible) control. They simply work better than the 20th century’s monolithic governments, and they will undermine them in the years to come.”
“Dominance was once an issue of producing more cannons; now it’s about who knows what about whom… which is the base definition of espionage. We are creating a world that is almost entirely centered on espionage and intelligence services.”
These rulership networks of oligarchs don’t much care whether nodes in the network are nominally government agencies or private corporations. The lines between, e.g., Google, NSA, Facebook, CIA, will just get more blurry over time.
Speaking of global conflicts in terms of ‘countries’ like the US and China will make less sense as time goes by.
(‘Countries’ are nothing more than mental constructs after all.)
Yes, Nelson, I suppose “networks” is as good a word as “Think Tanks”, “Elites”, or other non elected power groups. The snag, I believe, is that these are basically all directed by money interests. If faith in “money” as we know it, is destroyed, I think you will find that countries, territory, and CULTURES other than money, may reveal “MONEY” as nothing more than a mental construct.
@TomKath Good comment Tom, I agree that the legalized money counterfeiting scam is the fountainhead for the nonelected groups of rulers, i.e., money interests.
Money is a mental construct, but a very useful one to the extent that it fairly facilitates indirect exchange and specialization of labor. The current dominant money (fiat, debt-based) is dishonest due to the legalized counterfeiting of the banksters.
A return to honest money is one of the first prerequisites to improve our society.
Kissinger notes, in his book, “On China,” that China, historically viewing itself as the center of the universe, has never seen the need to reach beyond its own borders. This may change, but the essential question is whether America, founded on the premise of self-reliant individualism, but now fully indoctrinated in the false hopes of collectivism, will stomach the fight to save those founding principles.
In the book, “Interview With A Vampire,” the interviewer asks a vampire why, though they could live forever, no vampires ever lasted more than 200 years. The answer was (paraphrasing), “Change is what kills us.
Unable to cope with the rapidly changing world, we lose interest and simply wither away.”
Is that the fate of our present day older generation, to be scorned for their refusal to be assimilated by the collective, to the point that their spiritual fire goes out?
China could, if it wanted, eventually swarm the United States, its citizens and non-citizens being so absorbed with worry and guilt over racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, lgbtq and xyz, that they would barely notice, or care.
> worth mentioning that she was arrested while Trump was sitting down to dinner with Chinese President Xi
And last time Xi dined wth Trump the latter launched bombing of Syria
My first thought when I read that Trump wanted all US military assets (including troops) out of Syria was it’s a set-up move for war with Iran, and I still think that’s the primary initial reason.
It was hard to miss how the bipartisan elitist neocon/neolib war pigs on both sides of the phony aisle immediately condemned Trump’s decision. War with Iran serves the Israeli’s and Saudi’s interests in the ME, and their influence inside the beltway is huge. So no surprises there. Especially since their astroturf “civil war” regime change strategy in Syria has failed.
With that being said, a US led military action against Iran could be the perfect staging area and starting point for a much larger geopolitical conflict involving the US, EU, UK, China, and Russia.
Amidst all the Russiaphobia BS in the MSM it’s been lost that Trump has actually been getting less and less friendly towards Putin’s Russia.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46458604
So the Syria move looks like a classic head fake. No different than a WR running a stop and go pattern on a CB.
There is no way that the real powers that be are going to take the temporary loss in Syria laying down, and give up the acquisition of Assad’s pipelines and ports.
Had they succeeded in Syria, Iran was next on the list anyway. So this was always their backup plan B if the Syrian adventure failed.
This was all telegraphed as soon as Trump took office and made his first official foreign visit as POTUS Saudi Arabia and Israel.
It’s all Kabuki theatre, folks. Russiagate is an act designed to ramp up the us versus them Dialectic (thesis vs anti-thesis) in the US to keep the peons occupied fighting amongst themselves while the money masters look for the right moment to provide the “solution” the majority of the sheep on both sides can agree on.
Which as always will be the most profitable enterprise for them, war.
—
Yes, from what I’ve read Iran is the likely goal here. If that’s the case, all we’ve achieved, in terms of peace, is abandoning a small war for a larger one. Trump’s hatred for Iran has been a constant.
Israel is not in your equation. Most of the reason the US is in the ME is because of Israel and the military indust complex. Israel wants to implement the Greater Israel Plan. But perhaps they are pivoting toward China. We should remember Israel is big on tech too, a lot of which has come from the US. It’d be just like Israel to arrest somebody and essentially kidnap her.
After initially celebrating news of the Syria withdrawal, I was very concerned about not understanding the motivations here. Why do this now? Is Trump desperate to fulfill any campaign promise while markets tank? Unfortunately, I did some reading and the only scenario that makes sense to me is an ominous one.
This looks like an “Art of the Deal” move by Trump. There are only two principals in this deal, Erdogan and Trump. Erdogan was running a power play to weaken and possibly take down the House of Saud, and Trump came to their rescue. Expect the Khashoggi story to die a swift death.
The deal goes something like this- Trump achieves two goals by saving MbS and the Saudis, while more importantly enlisting Turkish support against Iran. This means that with any sanctions or political pressure on Iran, Turkey is now completely on board in their capacity as a regional power. In case we start a hot war with Iran, Turkey probably wouldn’t join in, but they won’t lift a finger to stop us.
What does Turkey get in exchange for these two friendly concessions? Just one thing, but it’s a doozy. They get the Kurds. No more occasional shelling of Kurdish positions pretending to fight ISIS. Now Turkey will be allowed to engage in ethnic cleansing in both Turkey and Syria, the sort of pogrom that isn’t supposed to happen in the world anymore. We (along with the rest of the West) will look the other way while Erdogan does this. Kurdistan is dead. All the Kurds will have left are parts of northern Iraq and Iran, but Iran will be unstable and neither the Shia or Sunni Arabs like them in Iraq. They’re in an untenable position.
It’s funny to think the Kurds have been “all in” on America the last few decades, alienating their neighbors repeatedly in an effort to ingratiate themselves to us, only to be thrown overboard by Trump as trade bait. I always thought the Kurds were a bit bonkers for following that strategy, but it’s a cruel fate for them.
Trump can now step up pressure on Iran in an attempt to topple their government. It may turn into a real war, which would be a bigger boondoggle than Afghanistan and Iraq combined. It would be a total mess, but supposedly Trump wants the fall of Iran to be the signature moment of his presidency. This is also why the neocons in his administration, like Bolton and Pompeo, aren’t apoplectic over the Syria withdrawal. It’s the regular military guys in Trump’s admin that are dropping like flies, not the neocons.
I hope this isn’t true, but again, this is the only hypothesis I’ve seen that makes sense.
Increasingly, we can’t trust the WH narrative or the Pentagon – just look at the fact that U.S. Green Berets are on the ground in the Yemeni conflict, and no one knew, not even in Congress. Only when all U.S. forces in Syria are back in the U.S., should anyone “crow”. Same for Afghanistan.
This administration, the Pentagon, the NSA, and the State Dept, want a war with Iran. They want war, period. It gives their life meaning. Hopefully the solution will be a public dead set against it.
Hi Michael,
To gain some insight in how it will unfold you can look to history. The recent documentary that is especially relevant in this case would be ‘The WWI Conspiracy’ by James Corbett:
https://www.corbettreport.com/wwi/
A real eye-opener in my humble opinion.
An error that a lot of people make in making predictions in geopolitics is that they talk – for example – about the interests of the US vs China or another country. In reality there is no real US (or China), there are only factions or certain groups of people in the US (or China. Meaning that the – perceived – interests that are being served are not the interests of the US but instead are the interests of a faction of people in the US. These two things are totally different. Viewing Corbett’s very recent documentary should make that clear. Even more so because the same factions are very much alive and kicking today.
I’ll just leave this here…
http://www.newmagnacarta.org/
We need change, fast.