The Accidental Superpower

by Peter Zeihan

  The United Kingdom faces the best and worst of all worlds. On the upside, as the European Union’s financial problems deepen, an ever-rising volume of enterprising Europeans are attempting to hide an ever-rising volume of capital from the claws of their governments’ tax collectors. London’s Square Mile—the greatest density of banking activity in the world—has accepted these monies with open arms, building the UK financial world into a global powerhouse and the kingdom’s most dynamic economic sector. As the EU descends into depression and dissolution, that flow of capital—and London’s fortunes—will only fatten.

  Now for the downside. This huge inflow of capital already puts ever stronger upward pressure on the pound versus the euro. As the pound rises, every other economic sector in the United Kingdom—manufacturing, agriculture, shipping, steel, mining, everything—becomes ever less competitive. As the new world unfolds, the United Kingdom will be able to feast on Europe’s bones, but its own nonfinancial economy will shrivel on the vine. Between a strong currency, an aging demography, and an ever more expensive social welfare state that is already well beyond the kingdom’s economic means, the United Kingdom’s very existence as a modern industrial economy is almost over. The entire country is becoming reduced to little more than a (admittedly huge) financial center.

  Yet the Americans are still interested. There is no country in Europe more terrified by the concept of a united Europe than the United Kingdom, and no country with more expertise and experience in preventing a united Europe from coming about. This is something the Brits will apply their substantial energies to regardless of what the Americans do, and those energies now have a characteristic that cannot help but grab American attention: They’re about to launch two supercarriers.

  And never forget that Great Britain is an island. The cost of maintaining the United Kingdom’s independence remains minimal, and London’s ability to throw monkey wrenches of all sorts into Continental affairs remains legion.

  Asia: Free Trade in Miniature

  Thailand is in many ways America’s favorite ally. The Thais occupy an interesting piece of real estate: a coastal bowl valley on a fantastically insulated bay adjacent to an open plateau, all surrounded by jungle mountains so impregnable that even after seventy years of Bretton Woods only coastal rail corridors lead out of the country. That protection has allowed the Thais to develop with a minimum of interference from outside powers regardless of era, enabling them to hold on to their independence even at the height of the European imperial age. Thailand’s mix of geographies grant it a capital-intensive, high-value-added industrial-technocratic society around its Bangkok core, but also a more agrarian highland interior that benefits from a modest amount of raw materials. It isn’t simply mainland Asia’s most secure state and best equipped to protect its own borders and interests, it is also the only one that can interface with the outside world on its own terms. Even better, perennial political discord between the Bangkok core and the inland plateau all but guarantees that Thailand will never pose a military threat to its neighbors. It is the perfect ally: It doesn’t need U.S. troops stationed on its soil, it doesn’t need much economic help, and it doesn’t generate much heartburn. It is also a damnably useful friend due to its strategic position between India, China, and the Southeast Asian trade lanes. Additionally, Bangkok’s extensive experience in dealing with its somewhat squirrelly neighborhood means it can even offer the Americans extensive security cooperation as a sweetener to any alliance deal.

  One surprising potential partner is Myanmar, a country that has been on America’s blacklist for the past generation. Myanmar has three things going for it. First, it has moderate volumes of a wide array of natural resources from oil and natural gas to zinc and copper to hydropower and timber. As it is right next door to Thailand, the synergies are many and obvious. Second, Myanmar’s Irrawaddy River is the only river in the region that is navigable for any reasonable length. If there is a part of the region that cannot just rapidly develop, but start to bootstrap its own economy, it is Myanmar.

  Third, the Myanmarese have a streak of paranoid mistrust of their more powerful neighbors. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, this led to a de facto alliance with China in the face of Western disapproval of Myanmar’s choice of political management system (i.e., military dictatorship). But in the early 2010s, the Chinese started treating Myanmar as a province, and such perceived intrusions into internal Myanmarese business resonated so poorly that as of 2014 the Myanmar-Chinese relationship has imploded. The result is a lurching democratization process in order to facilitate a strategic opening to the very Western countries that the government so distrusted for so long. You can count on the Myanmarese not to trust their larger neighbors. Those larger neighbors—India and China—are precisely the sort of would-be regional hegemons that the Americans would prefer to keep locked down. The mere continuing existence of Myanmar, regardless of the flavor of the local government, achieves that all by itself.

  Taiwan and South Korea are not so clear-cut. Strategically, they are absolutely partners the Americans want. The two countries are smashed between the Japanese and Chinese spheres of influence, incredibly competent in managing their own defense, and could go nuclear over a long weekend if they were particularly stressed.3 But keeping them in America’s circle of allies will not come cheap. Both countries import nearly all of the energy and raw materials they use, and their markets are too small to support the world-class industrial base they have developed under the Bretton Woods regime. Keeping those economies alive and relevant would require the Americans to maintain on-land military footprints in East Asia, and to continue, at least in part, with the ocean-patrolling and trade-protecting activities that they would so like to get out of. For instance, just these two small countries require twenty supertankers of crude per month. That would force the Americans to convoy tankers from at least Southeast Asia, and maybe even the Persian Gulf, as well as maintain transpacific trade access so that Korean and Taiwanese goods can be sold into the American market. These two traditional allies will be the litmus test for just how far the Americans are willing to go to support allies in the new era.

  Which brings us to Singapore. As Singapore sits upon the world’s busiest trade and energy transport artery, it is difficult to imagine a country that gained more from the United States’ forcing of free trade upon the world—or to imagine a country that will suffer more from its removal. Singapore has greater trade and energy throughput than any other location on the planet, the flows it manages form global benchmarks, and its considerable technocratic-industrial base is funded almost entirely from its trade facilitation profits. Simply put, Singapore is free trade in physical form. Without a global trade order, without the Americans protecting trade flows between East Asia and Europe and energy flows between East Asia and the Middle East, Singapore has nothing… except a damnably strategic piece of land. If there is to be any trade between East Asia and Europe, or any East Asian purchases of Middle Eastern energy, then Singapore is the place that would enable the Americans to short-circuit any East Asian rival at any time without firing a shot. But this makes Singapore a strategic ally, not an economic one. Bereft of American commitment to patrol much beyond the Strait of Malacca itself, Singapore’s economic fortunes will need to be recast in a far narrower—and more local—net.

  American involvement with Myanmar, Thailand, and Singapore raises potential solutions to the economic problem raised by America’s possible interest in Taiwan and Korea. Those solutions are Australia and New Zealand. Between them they are low-to mid-cost reliable producers of nearly every significant industrial and agricultural commodity under the sun: oil, natural gas, coal, uranium, aluminum, wheat, fruits, vegetables, dairy, beef, and lamb. There is no more perfect mating to the resource-poor and hungry states of Taiwan and Korea than the Anglos of Australasia.

  While a commitment to keep trade lanes to the Middle East might be more than the Americans are interested in, commitment to keep the far shorter and les
s fraught lines to political and cultural mates in Australia and New Zealand would be comparatively simple. The pair are also so physically removed from the Asian mainland that the defense commitment required to maintain their sovereignty would be minimal. American involvement in Australasia would also solve—at least partly—Singapore’s problem. A web of trade among the United States, Korea, Taiwan, Myanmar, Thailand, Australia, and New Zealand would put Singapore smack in the middle. In fact, in the middle along with Singapore would be its current economic partners: the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam.

  All four of those Southeast Asian countries will never be able to project meaningful amounts of power on the water. The first three are archipelagoes, but so disassociated across distance that they cannot develop into a powerful empire as Japan did, or even maintain a navy that might more than marginally threaten their neighbors. The fourth, Vietnam, has its northern and southern populations so separated by distance and geography that simply solidifying internal integrity is a century-long process that the Vietnamese are not even halfway through. These weaknesses also create a very peculiar demographic geography. All of the countries sport only lightly populated hinterlands, instead being extremely urbanized with very dense population centers packed with people trying to carve out a better life for themselves than is possible in tropical agriculture.

  It is this odd characteristic that will make them so attractive to the Americans. First, all are perennial sources of low-cost, low- to medium-skilled labor. Second, that labor is already concentrated in the region’s urban centers; the concentration of supply both eases recruiting and keeps labor and infrastructure costs down. Third, bracketed as these countries are by a mix of resource and energy providers, financial powers, and mid- to high-tech manufacturers, everything is perfectly positioned for a regional supply-chain network. All they need are sufficient food imports to feed their young, urbanized populations—something the American agricultural sector is eminently capable of doing for everything besides rice (and rice demand can be met from within Southeast Asia). Finally, collectively the Southeast Asian region represents a market for American goods of over a half billion people—that’s one larger than the Chinese coast and far, far less politically complicated.

  Convincing the Americans to treat Southeast Asia as a unit as the above implies may not be a simple sell, but likely American commitments will already ring the entire area, and no power within Southeast Asia could possibly mount a threat to American interests. In fact, a vibrant and interconnected Southeast Asia would help keep China and India apart, while involving the United States with a combined economy bigger than that of its NAFTA/CAFTA partners.

  CHAPTER 10

  Players

  Those countries not fortunate enough to form partnerships with the United States in the stormy years to come will have to navigate the harsh seas of change on their own. Some of them will be forced, whether due to privation or opportunity, to strike out beyond their borders to secure what they need or take what they want. They will be the active—and often aggressive—players in the new age, out to put their stamp on the world.

  Russia: Twilight Approaches

  Populated Eurasia is a vast wedge, anchored in the west by the North European Plain; in the south by the Sea of Marmara region, the city-states of the Middle East, and the vast green of the Indian subcontinent; and in the east by the timeless civilizations of the Chinese. Traditionally, travel among these three great arcs of humanity has been limited. Middle Eastern deserts impede movement between Europe and South Asia, while jungles and mountains limit direct contact between South and East Asia.

  What they all have access to, however—and what they all are threatened by—are the infinite flats of Central Eurasia. The North European Plain funnels open from only two hundred miles wide at the Polish Gap to over fifteen hundred by the time it reaches central Belarus and Ukraine. Moving west from coastal China, the arid interior gives way to a veritable sea of grass. Moving northwest out of the Indian subcontinent requires navigating a couple mountain passes and plateaus that ultimately give way to the steppes of Central Asia. Unlike every portion of the world we have discussed to this point, Central Eurasia has absolutely no meaningful geographical barriers, and from one end to the other it is over three thousand miles long.

  It is a harsh land. Inland continental plains suffer from high winds, brutal winters, broiling summers, and fickle precipitation. Many of the lands are marginal for human habitation.

  It is a place of poverty. The rivers are as hostile as the land, flowing away from the arable portions rather than through them, with the land’s utter flatness and the weather’s unpredictability generating constant challenges of flood and drought. Hunger often reigns. Yet it is a land of many. The central mass of somewhat usable land is over three thousand miles east to west and typically about five hundred miles north to south. It may not be a third as productive per acre as the American Midwest once droughts, floods, locusts, and transport and storage loss are factored in, but it is the greatest stretch of flatland on the planet, and possesses a combined population of a major power.

  It is a place of insecurity. The lack of reliable weather combined with the lack of local barriers to movement make it easy for any piece of civilization to fall to forces natural or man-made. Any people who rise in this harsh landscape crave what bits of security they can find or wrestle out of the earth—or from each other. It is a land where governments are local, and where raiders of every epoch have swept fast and loose across the grasslands.

  Combine that large population with low capital generation and the result is limited funds for infrastructure, education, and market formation, restraining everything from the productivity of the labor force to the effectiveness of the army. It is a land where only numbers matter. It is a land where only the hordes hold sway. And in those rare instances when some power is able to unite the lands under a single government, the civilized bastions on the Hordelands’ periphery shiver in fear. This is the land of Attila the Hun. Of Genghis Khan. Of Tamerlane. Of Joseph Stalin.

  Occupying most of that territory today is the Russian Federation, one of the most insecure countries of the contemporary world. While it is arguable that no Central Eurasian power can ever truly be “secure,” there are two things that a power needs if it is to truly command the Hordelands.

  The first requirement is that the power control all of the Hordelands. While Russia remains one of the largest geographic entities in human history, and holds the title of largest country in the contemporary world, it actually needs nearly 3 million additional square miles of territory if it is to be even reasonably secure. Just as any Hordelands power can push into any of Eurasia’s three major civilized zones, any of Eurasia’s three major civilized zones can push into the Hordelands. The Baltic coast, the Polish Gap, the Bessarabian Gap, the Black Sea, the coastal strips of the Caucasus, the Central Asian corridor, and the Tian-Altay Gap are all points where the Hordelands are vulnerable and where invasions have flowed in both directions. During the Soviet period the Russians commanded every mountain, water, and desert barrier at the Hordelands’ extremes, giving them command over every single access point to their lands. They could anchor in those barriers and concentrate forces on the gaps, making them as secure as a Hordelands power could be. The day after the Soviet collapse the Russians controlled but two. With the capture of the Crimean Peninsula in February 2014, they now control three.

  The second requirement is that a successful Hordelands power must have an actual horde. During the Soviet period, the Russians had 180-odd million Poles, Ukrainians, Romanians, East Germans, and other Central Europeans to use as cannon fodder to guard their western borders. They controlled all three of the Transcaucasian republics—Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan—using them as a 16-million-strong series of highland speed bumps. They reached south across Central Eurasia’s productive lands—the Russian wheat belt—and commanded the 50-million-strong Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, and Taj
iks to caulk up the southern frontier. All of these peoples and more have now broken away. In just a few years, the “Soviet” population was sliced by nearly two-thirds, with many of those peoples now in charge of their own countries that share the Hordelands with the Russians.

  What’s left over is disappearing. The Russian people—the actual ethnic Russians—are dying out. With the Soviet collapse, the bottom fell out of the Russian birth rate. What rebound has occurred can almost wholly be chalked up to the echo of the perestroika baby boom of the mid-1980s. Within five years it will be the far smaller generation of post–Cold War births who will be parents, and there simply are not enough of them to sustain a Russian population at even half its current size.

  And this is the best-case scenario. HIV and multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis run rampant through the Russian population, with most of the cases concentrated in the fifteen-to-thirty-five age group: the age group most likely to have children. Even Russia’s population pyramid is deceptively positive, as it contains the data for the Russian national population as a whole, not the Russian ethnic population. While many of Russia’s conquered populations escaped the Russian yoke with the Soviet collapse, many others remain within contemporary Russia’s borders. In particular Turkic Muslim populations like the Tatars, Bashkirs, and Chechens are young, vibrant, and growing. Their data are blended in with the ethnic Russians, who are rapidly aging, diseased, and not reproducing. By 2040, the Russian national population will almost certainly have shrunk below 120 million, with Russian ethnics but a thin majority within their own country.