The Accidental Superpower

by Peter Zeihan

  This strategy, however, generates its own risks. Arm enough men with weapons, fill them with righteous fury, send them to kill legions of apostates, and sooner or later some of them will start choosing their own targets. The last time the Saudis lost control of such men, the September 11, 2001, attacks occurred and the Saudis ended up fighting a brief civil war against their own militants. Managing a carefully metered flow of violence out of Pandora’s box will prove a constant struggle.

  Japan: Dusting Off Tojo

  Japan is one of the great aggressive maritime empires of the not-so-distant past. Bereft of resources or markets at home, Japan ventured out from its home islands in search of both and in doing so built an imperial commercial empire stretching along all of the East Asian archipelagoes and continental coastline all the way to Myanmar.

  That was then.

  The Japan of today is not the aggressive empire of World War II or even the economically dynamic Japan of the 1980s. Japan today seems a listless, spent force. Demographically it is the world’s oldest and fastest-aging society, and the ranks of its younger population are now so thin that a return to the heady era now past is simply unthinkable. Japan’s role in global export markets has shrunk to one-third of its peak. Between high taxes and an aged demography, industry has steadily relocated out of Japan. Toyota, Honda, and the like now do their best work at facilities close to market, particularly in the United States, and simply ship the profits home to help service an ever more decrepit population. It may not be a cheery model, but in a world of free trade it is one that allows an ever-failing Japan to live out most of the rest of its national life in relative comfort.

  Which means that when the free trade era ends, this approach to life is completely and utterly screwed.

  More than most peoples, the Japanese will have some very rapid-fire decisions to make, but there is reason for optimism. Yes, their best industry is located out of country, and that earns key income. But income isn’t the same as food or energy. It can be replaced or, in a pinch, lived without. In the post–Bretton Woods world, the ongoing functionality of these facilities will be up to bilateral relations, with a very heavy eye toward supply-chain feasibility. In most cases, the Japanese will bow toward inevitability and allow formal ownership to be sold at discounts to entities in the host countries. The key point is that these “export markets” are not actually employing Japanese citizens, so Japan’s social structure would not be overly stressed by their loss.

  Yes, Japan’s remaining home-located industry is utterly dependent upon imported raw materials, but this too is not as bad as it seems. The offshoring of its export industries means that what remains of them at home is actually quite small: only about 15 percent of GDP. And Japan’s refuse reclamation system is among the world’s most efficient, with more than half of their residential and industrial trash being recycled, lowering their materials needs still further.

  Japan would certainly prefer to remain internationally engaged in the Bretton Woods system, but it really doesn’t need access to markets—or even raw materials—to the same degree it used to.

  All this isn’t to say that Japan won’t need to be aggressive—very aggressive—at seizing what it needs, it just means that it can be a bit choosier about targets and tactics. The Japanese certainly won’t need to go all banzai on the entire Pacific, just very specific parts of it. They have flexibility now that they didn’t have in the early decades of the twentieth century.

  Far and away Japan’s biggest concerns will be oil, natural gas, and food, and those specific needs will shape the nature and reach of Japan’s actions. It imports less than 10 percent of its rice needs, but nearly 90 percent of its wheat and all of its corn. All told, Japan imports nearly three-quarters of its basic cereals. Japan’s oil and natural gas needs are even worse. Factoring out the 500,000 bpd of refined products that it exports and the 500,000 bpd of demand that will vanish by 2020 due to demographic aging, Japan will still need nearly 4 million bpd of oil to maintain its current system. It will also need at least 10 billion cubic feet of natural gas imports per day to keep the lights on, and even that figure assumes that the Japanese escape their post-Fukushima shell shock and restart their nuclear electricity system in a very big way.

  In meeting its needs, Japan will become a textbook case of finding the right tools—diplomatic, economic, and military—for the right job.

  North America will emerge as the world’s most reliable source of foodstuffs and energy products, forcing Japan to seek as excellent relations as possible with the Americans. Some Japanese nationalists may call for a direct military approach, but only the inane will have forgotten the lessons of 1945—or that the Americans’ military position in the Pacific would dictate a replay of the Japanese defeat in World War II in a matter of weeks. Japan simply purchasing what they need would actually put U.S. naval power in the indirect service of Japanese needs, a far more pleasant arrangement. This isn’t a one-stop shop, however. North America can easily meet Japan’s caloric needs, but not necessarily its rice needs. Additionally, North America may be able to spare Japan 1 million bpd of crude oil and fuels. Maybe even 2 million. But not 4 million. The Americans may also be able to share a few billion cubic feet a day of natural gas via LNG (liquefied natural gas) exports, but not 10 billion. Cutting a deal with the Americans is a good first step, a required one even. But it is no panacea.

  Unfortunately, Japan’s other current energy suppliers—Australia and the Persian Gulf—will disappear as options, either having been already spoken for, too far away, or both. Which will exhaust the nice side of Japan.

  The first military target is likely to be Russia’s Sakhalin Island. It is just off the coast of Japan’s northernmost Hokkaido Island, putting it well within Japan’s naval and air force power projection range. Its infrastructure was largely built by Japanese firms, that infrastructure terminates on the island’s southern tip, the Japanese have the technical skill to keep all of Sakhalin’s offshore energy production running, the Russians do not, and Japanese nationalists still fume that the Russians seized it from Japan in the wars of the first half of the twentieth century. Securing Sakhalin would place just under 300,000 bpd of crude production and 3 Bcf/d (billion cubic feet per day) of natural gas production into Japan’s output column. Seizing Sakhalin will also permanently sever any chance of having positive relations with Moscow, but to be blunt, Moscow is five thousand miles away, so the consequences of breaking that relationship aren’t very high. Cooperation with Moscow could never really be part of the Japanese solution, since the Russians don’t have the labor or capital to contribute to developing their Far Eastern territories. Besides, Japan and Russia never actually signed an armistice after the end of World War II. Technically, they are already at war.

  The second target will be Chinese Manchuria. Manchuria isn’t known for its rice fields—the region’s cold winters dictate the use of greenhouses to prepare spring plantings—but it has enough to satisfy Japan’s needs. Just as importantly, the Daqing area’s oil complex produces over 1 million bpd of crude. While that volume is likely to halve over the next decade, that gives Japan years to find new supplies elsewhere and/or slim down its consumption profile.

  Angola: Managing Genocide

  Africa is an incredibly difficult continent to live on if your goal is to hack out a piece of civilization. It is blanketed in swamps, jungles, mountains, and deserts, making even basic development an incredibly painful process. But the real deal killer is Africa’s plateaus. At nearly every point of the continent, the interior juts up rapidly from the coast, forming a series of escarpments. Consequently, not one of Sub-Saharan Africa’s many rivers is navigable, and what rail lines exist largely date to colonial-era efforts to extract specific commodities from specific sites rather than to service local economies. Infrastructure development of any sort is at best onerous.

  In the coming disorder Africa’s lot will be a difficult one. Lower materials demand will deny them the income to impr
ove their lot, while lower capital supply will make it nearly impossible to source funding from the wider world. The continent’s future will be one of deindustrialization and even worse infrastructure. Bereft of American trade protection, foreign powers will treat the region as a resource playground, grabbing what they need in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the nineteenth century’s European competitions. The French and British will of course be involved, but so too may the Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese, Singaporeans, and Australians. From time to time even the Americans are likely to realize that Africa holds supplies of this or that hard-to-source material.

  But one country—one geography—stands out, and its story is the wave of Africa’s future. That is not a good thing. Angola is a country born in war—both colonial and civil—that is trading the genocide of war for the genocide of consolidation.

  Angola is one of the few spots on the continent that enjoys a nontropical climate, allowing for its government to extend its writ more effectively than most of its peers. The dominant Angolan ethnicity is the one that emerged victorious after two decades of civil war, the Mbundu. Their homeland lies along the Kwanza River. While the Kwanza isn’t navigable by boats of oceangoing size, it does punch through the escarpment without too many rapids, making it the best transport corridor—and most capital-rich location—within a thousand miles. The Mbundu also had the advantage of possessing the national capital (and former Portuguese colonial capital) of Luanda, allowing them unrestricted access to the global system. In the era of Bretton Woods, that meant that they were not pillaged as the Portuguese had done to them for four centuries, but instead were able to collect Angola’s offshore oil income and tap the international system for the guns, gasoline, and vehicles they needed to fight the war. It would be an overstatement to say that the Mbundu were destined to win the war, but their location meant that they entered the conflict with all of the right tools. After twenty-seven years, 800,000 dead, and 8 million refugees, the Mbundu proclaimed triumph.

  With the war now over, the Mbundu now focus on consolidation: the long grind to destroy the other groups’ identities, either by forcibly assimilating them into the Mbundu themselves or simply eliminating them. Unfortunately for the Mbundu, their targets outnumber them three to one. Angola’s most numerous ethnicity are none other than the Mbundu’s primary foes in the civil war, the Ovimbundu of the Angolan Planalto (plateau). A key tool in the Mbundu’s genocide effort is the thousands-strong paramilitary group called the Ninjas who impose the Mbundu’s will upon the other Angolans via terror and mass murder. It will take at least a century for the Mbundu to grind away the competing identities, and to achieve this they need to avoid outside interference.

  The Mbundu fear—and what has put them on this list of in-play countries—is that they will not be left to their own devices. Angola’s civil war was part and parcel of the Cold War and witnessed participation by groups as varied as the Cubans and Americans. But the Mbundu consider their true foe to be much closer to home, an African country that at times has deployed thousands of troops to fight them directly.

  That country is South Africa.

  Like Angola, South Africa is an exception to African geography. It isn’t so much that the African escarpment is kinder in South Africa—it isn’t—but instead that the tip of Africa is far enough south that the escarpment’s elevation lifts the country out of the tropical zone, mitigating Sub-Saharan Africa’s otherwise omnipresent disease exposures. Simply put, less disease means better health and longer life spans, and that allows for higher levels of worker skill and taxpaying. What truly sets the South Africans apart from their cocontinentals is not their (post)colonial past, but that their geography allows them a demography that enables them to afford to build infrastructure and have the indigenous skill base to build it themselves. South Africa’s mining sector—it is a leading source of diamonds, gold, and platinum—doesn’t hurt either.

  The big chunk of highland that makes South Africa possible doesn’t stop at its borders but extends north as a spine along the middle of the continent, a spine that the South Africans have constructed infrastructure along. This infrastructure is the only meaningful one in the region, and it leads to the only sizable ports in the region—which are of course in South Africa. That allows South Africa to tap a nearly bottomless source of cheap labor, while utterly dominating economic development throughout all of Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and southern Congo. If you want to transport anything in bulk—copper ore, bauxite, and wheat being the largest cargoes—you have to deal with the South Africans.

  It is this network that gives the South Africans outsized influence throughout the region, and so it is this network the Angolans feel that they must disrupt. They are using their oil income to fund an infrastructure build-out for the first time… well, ever, and part of that effort includes the construction of a modern container port at Lobito and a spur rail line from the port into the African interior. Once it is completed, and at the time of this writing the project is already in the T-crossing stage, Angola will start siphoning off traffic that for a century had been destined to South Africa, and South Africa’s chokehold on the region’s economic and political life will end. At that point it will be up to South Africa to respond. It is poorly positioned to do so.

  First, the South Africans are out of practice. South Africa used to have a highly capable special forces branch that efficiently pursued the nation’s interests throughout the southern portion of the continent. With the end of apartheid, however, the military writ large fell into disarray and disrepair. It would take a dedicated multiyear effort to regenerate the country’s expeditionary fortunes, and at present efforts in that direction are middling at best. They certainly will not be completed by 2015. Even maintenance of the infrastructure that ensures South Africa’s current dominance is falling back to more typical African standards.

  The Mbundu, in contrast, didn’t stop at the end of their war. They have used their rising military strength to intimidate and sculpt neighboring countries, complete with engineering a coup to install a friendly government in Namibia and bombing Zambia to warn them off from supporting Ovimbundu insurgents. The Ninjas have been particularly effective at strengthening friendly regimes in Zimbabwe and Congo (Brazzaville) by terrorizing dissident groups there.

  Second, it isn’t clear that South Africa can put up a fight anymore. While their plateau certainly lifted them out of the tropical disease zone, that elevation does nothing for nontropical diseases. Some 80 percent of South Africans carry tuberculosis while 30 percent of pregnant women are HIV-positive. Such diseases have absolutely gutted South Africa’s skilled labor and tax intakes, preventing the government from maintaining its apartheid-era levels of growth, security, and infrastructure—to say nothing of taking a proactive foreign policy. In contrast, Angola’s lack of infrastructure and the horrors of its civil war mean that it is the sole southern African country to have (so far) escaped the ravages of HIV. It has a demographic so young it is literally a throwback to the preindustrial age.

  In short, Angola is clearly coming from (far) behind in the contest, but in the long game it seems almost certain to win.

  Iran: From Enemy to Ally

  Iran is not a typical power. In fact, from the criteria that we’ve been using, there is nothing about Iran that indicates that it should be successful.

  The country certainly has a balance of transport, but it is balanced in the wrong way. Iran enjoys no big piece of flat land from which to generate a large community and food surpluses. It has no navigable river to speak of that could raise capital (and few rivers of any size or reliability). The country lies in the heart of the African-Asian aridity belt, starving it of water. Nearly all of its people live in the hundreds of mountain valleys that are high enough to wring some precipitation out of the air. Moving around within Persia is difficult and expensive at best, and there is no obvious nearby economic node to which Persia might connect to mitigate its poverty.

&
nbsp; In contrast, reaching Iran is devilishly simple. Its entire south and southwest are abutted by the Persian Gulf, the world’s calmest large body of water. To the east is the Indus valley, a dense population core going back to antiquity.

  To the northeast are the steppes of Central Asia. Distance in that direction is a factor, but if one can handle the arid lands of the region, reaching the Persian border is a fairly simple matter. To the north is the Caucasus region. While certainly mountainous in many areas, the portion that borders Iran is actually the region’s most open terrain. The eastern half of contemporary Azerbaijan is an excellent staging point for an attack on Iran. Both the Russians and the Mongols used the northern approaches in their successful conquests of Persia.

  The final approach—from the west—is the one that normally keeps Iranian leaders up at night. Mesopotamia has been home to any number of grand civilizations in the past, and most have at one time or another taken a crack at conquering their Persian neighbors.

  The merits of deepwater navigation are completely lost upon mountain peoples, and Iran is no exception. Very few Iranians live near the Persian Gulf coast and so the country has very few ports. Any naval power can easily prey upon the Iranian coast should it choose, and the Strait of Hormuz is a perfect blocking point to limit whatever vessels the Iranians manage to float. Bandar Abbas, Iran’s largest and best port, is eminently vulnerable to a Hormuz blockade.