The Accidental Superpower

by Peter Zeihan

  If the Americans are to be drawn into Continental European affairs, it will be via the Swedish vector. Sweden is no pocket power. Sweden has a stable economy, a tight circle of capable allies, a top-rate military force, and—uniquely in Europe—a rock-solid financial system. The trick will be to manage and bolster Poland via Sweden so that the Americans can remain one step removed from the NEP. From the American point of view, Sweden makes Poland worth a second look.

  Poland will need that second look because Warsaw dare not adopt a defensive strategy. It has no geographic barriers to hunker behind and, Swedish and American backing or not, it cannot possibly absorb and repel a German or Russian surge. For Poland to be independent, it has to somehow keep the competition away from its borders. The best way to do that is for the Poles to poke Ukraine as mercilessly as possible to keep the Russians off balance. Considering the Russian view of the importance of Ukraine, this is far from a low-risk operation.

  Should the Americans decline, the Swedes and Poles do have a fallback. Sweden nearly did not join the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons when it was negotiated in the 1960s because Stockholm thought it would need nukes to dissuade Soviet expansionism. Its robust nuclear industry is both sophisticated and homegrown and could construct a crude weapon in a long weekend. In this corner of the world, deterrence may not just be for superpowers.

  Scared New World: Life After Europe

  Any of these factors could bring everything that matters in contemporary Europe crashing down. With such a mélange of moving parts, something will have to give. What most of the world, and certainly most of the Europeans, have forgotten is that Europe has never taken a united foreign policy or security stance except under the direct—some would say domineering—leadership of the United States. With American economic and security guarantees on their way out, all options will be on the table and something will give.

  In short, Europe is going to be a mess—and not the slightly amusing, organizationally dysfunctional mess that has been on display at most EU summits this past decade, but more of the seething cauldron of dislocation and war that it was in the five centuries before 1945. What is an existential challenge to one country is barely a passing concern to others. Lithuania, Poland, and Romania are in near panic about Russian activities in Ukraine, while Portugal, Italy, and Ireland insist that the real issue is the financial crisis, and Germany and the Netherlands are primarily focused on forging new trade deals with economies beyond Europe. There is no commonality. No agreement. And from that minimal coordination, Europe is becoming overwhelmed with itself.

  Within that rather dark and murky forecast there is, however, one relatively bright spot. Not everyone in Europe took full economic advantage of Bretton Woods and branched out to become an international economic power. Not everyone handed over all meaningful levers of their defense policy to Washington. Not everyone in Europe is so enmeshed in the European Union that the Union’s end spells utter disaster. And not everyone in Europe forgot how to have kids around 1965. One country has stood somewhat apart, and as such will have less vulnerability and more options than the others.

  Irony of ironies, that country is the one that came up with the very idea of the EU in the first place: France. It shouldn’t be a surprise. Just as Bretton Woods was America’s strategic policy for fighting the Cold War, the EU was France’s strategic policy for taking advantage of Bretton Woods. Alone among the major powers, Washington and Paris never hitched their economic systems to what were ultimately strategic gambits.

  France’s economy is only half as dependent on exports as Germany’s. It is among the world’s foremost agricultural exporters. By European standards it has a fairly healthy demography, still benefiting from a fairly robust birth rate. It is the only country besides the United States that floats an aircraft carrier worthy of the name, even if technical problems limit it to nothing more than brief regional deployments. Its use of nuclear energy keeps it largely independent of petroleum markets. What petroleum it needs it can source from nearby Algeria, a country with which it enjoys reasonably positive relations. Its position on the western end of the NEP—and its Mediterranean shoreline—both reduces its exposure and widens its reach. Unlike Germany where needs are legion and the places that can satisfy those needs are scattered, French needs are limited and solutions to those needs are nearly all local. All of the violent chaos likely to erupt involving Sweden, Germany, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and Turkey is on the far side of Europe. And just in case all else fails, it has nuclear weapons—not can-make-them-in-a-pinch like Sweden or South Korea, but already-has-them like the United States. Unsurprisingly, France is the country that the Germans take most seriously.

  Between its low needs and high leverage, France has not just the greatest capacity to shape Europe, but the greatest wealth of tools with which to do so. If there is to be some remnant of united Europe that will survive Europe’s chaos to come, it will be France at its head. If there is to be some power that rises from the ashes as Europe tears itself apart (again), it too will be France.

  European history has been on hold since the Americans restructured the world in the 1940s. Centuries-old competitions were simply smothered under the happy blanket of American security and global trade. That era is rapidly coming to a close. In its place will be a host of states terrified of a reawakened Germany, a Germany that will have to fight for its economic well-being, a Russia desperate to harden its external boundaries, a justifiably paranoid Poland backed by a no longer neutral Sweden, and a Turkey eager to carve its own sphere of influence out of the EU’s and NATO’s remains.

  Will all of these evolutions result in wars? Probably not. But it truly would be stunning if none of them did.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Alberta Question

  The United States is not very internationalized. At this point in this book that statement should not come as a major surprise. But “not very” is not the same as “not.” The Americans do have—and will continue to have—foreign relations both friendly and unfriendly. With one country those relations have been so friendly for so long that they have largely been lost in the noise of American domestic politics. That country is Canada, and in the not too distant future a crisis will rock that most solid of relationships.

  The Unlikelihood of Canada

  Canada has many of the same features that make the United States such a rich and successful country, they’re just not arranged right. Yes, the Great Lakes are in effect a series of massive waterways. The Saint Lawrence River is world-class. The natural harbors at Halifax and Vancouver are among the world’s best. The Canadian Prairies are remarkably productive. But none of these things are naturally linked together in the way that the United States’ geographic blessings overlap. Canada is full of natural boons, yes, but its geographic blessings are scattered “aboot,” fracturing the country’s economic, cultural, linguistic, and political systems. Daunting physical barriers break Canada into pieces.

  Working from west to east, the first of those barriers is the Rocky Mountains. These peaks are as rugged as their American counterparts, but sufficiently far north that winter closings are common and lacking the broad open spaces of the American Rockies that might host sizable populations.

  The second major internal Canadian barrier is the Canadian Shield, a creation of the many ice ages that advanced and retreated across what is now Canadian territory. When the glaciers slid southward during the waxing ice ages, they scraped the soil from the bedrock, pushing it ahead of them and depositing most of it in what is now the northern United States. Canada’s shorter summers and colder winters greatly retard the process of soil formation, so now, ten millennia later, the soils are still very thin, shallow, of low fertility, and can only support conifer forests. Clearing the region generates few improvements, as the glacial weight also cracked apart the bedrock, heavily peppering the land with rock uplifts and hundreds of thousands of small lakes. The land is wholly unsuitable for agriculture and extrem
ely difficult to build even nominal transport corridors through.

  The third barrier is, somewhat ironically, a waterway. After passing by Quebec City, the Saint Lawrence River in essence becomes an ever-widening bay. While this allows oceanic traffic easy access to Quebec City, it hives off eastern Canada from the mainland.

  These three barriers split Canada into five largely autonomous pieces. For all practical purposes Vancouver is a city-state perched at the westernmost edge of Western civilization. It trades more with East Asia and the American West Coast than it does with the core Canadian population centers of Toronto and Montreal. Despite being in the geographic “middle” of the country, the Prairie provinces are in many ways just as isolated: The Rockies sharply curtail contact to the west and the Canadian Shield contact to the east. Even today, there is but a single transport corridor that snakes through the twelve hundred miles of Canadian Shield between Ontario and Manitoba. As such, Canadian Railways has been forced to invest aggressively into the American railway system in order to ship the agricultural surpluses from the Prairie provinces to market, largely via the Mississippi and New Orleans. Similarly, most Albertan energy is exported south to the United States rather than west over (or around) the Rockies to the Pacific coast, or across the trackless Shield to the Ontarian core. The cost of crossing the shield is so high that very soon U.S. shale will displace Albertan natural gas as Ontario’s fuel of choice.

  And the shield isn’t done. It also hives off Ontario from Quebec. There is only one multilane road connecting the two, the 401, which follows the shore of Lake Ontario and the Saint Lawrence River for nearly its entire length. The shield reaches down all the way to the lake and the river in several places, and dominates the northern suburbs of Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, and Quebec City, complicating significant northward urban expansion. In fact, only Toronto is sufficiently free from the shield in other directions that it can expand in any meaningful way (mostly to the southwest along Lake Ontario). One result is that Ontarian and Quebecois cities sport some of the most expensive real estate in North America, despite being in a climate that is far from balmy. Another is that despite being surrounded by Anglophone Canada, the Quebecois of Quebec have so few practical connections to their neighbors that they have fairly easily been able to maintain their Francophone status.

  East of Francophone Canada lie the Maritime provinces, which are, well, maritime and not linked into the rest of the country much at all. From the bridge crossing at Quebec City, a single road snakes across two hundred miles of the southern extension of the Canadian Shield south of the river to the New Brunswick border. It’s another 450 miles of similarly empty terrain before one finally reaches the container port of St. John’s, New Brunswick, on the Atlantic Coast. Geographically, Canada just isn’t a unified entity, and that’s without even considering its more publicly discussed challenges such as the Anglophone-Francophone divide or the country’s confederal political system, or that because of the cold climate most of the Canadian landmass is simply too inhospitable to support a large population, condemning everyone to live on the country’s extreme southern fringe.

  An oft-asked question in the United States—laced with no small amount of amused derision—is, why does Canada even exist? I hate to say it, but it isn’t a stupid question. At best, Canada is unstable and unwieldy from a geographic and political point of view, and a series of barely connected American satellites from an economic one.

  The answer is because the early Canadians, when they were still British subjects, realized their position and worked assiduously to get the Americans to see them as friends rather than British stooges. This was not a simple task. A large portion of Canadian citizens in 1800 were either of French descent or Loyalist transplants from the former American colonies who held no love for their former associates. In the War of 1812, the Canadians of American extraction were able to vent something fierce. The British used Canadian territories as their main staging ground for battering the Americans, and provided transport for Canadian marines in the (in)famous raid on Washington, D.C., that burned the capital to the ground.

  And then, much to the Canadians’ horror, rather than drive a stake into America’s heart, the British redirected their energies to reshaping Europe in the aftermath of Napoleon’s fall, leaving Canada to stand alone against the seething Americans. The Canadians, still British colonials, had an unsavory choice. They could do nothing and hope against hope that the still-mobilized Americans, who in the absence of the British fleet now held local naval superiority, would forget the enthusiastic role the Canadians had played in the war and leave them be. Or they could offer to negotiate terms. The Canadians wisely chose the latter. In the short term, this deflected American national energies west into the Ohio River valley and beyond, putting the Americans on the road to superpowerhood. In the long run, it started the process of Canada loosening the ties that bound it to the British Empire, putting it on the road first to neutrality, then friendship with the Americans, then alliance with the Americans, and finally in the contemporary period, de facto economic inclusion into the American system.

  Canadian Demography: Slouching Toward Dissolution

  The Canadian demographic picture is only typical in that it is very similar to that of the rest of the developed world. At some point around 1965, Canadians apparently forgot how to have kids, and their demography has been slowly hollowing out ever since. Canada’s natural birth rate fell below replacement levels long ago, and only its sporting one of the highest sustained immigration rates in the world has enabled it to maintain positive population growth. On average some 250,000 people emigrate to Canada annually—nearly 1 percent of the total population. Unfortunately, while this influx certainly improves Canada’s headline population figure of 35 million, it does not help repair the country’s distorted demographic profile.

  Unlike the United States, Canada’s (non-American) would-be migrants cannot walk to Canada. That means that they have to save up for plane or boat passage, unlike Mexicans and Central Americans, who can cross the American border, quite literally, as soon as they are able to waddle. The average immigrant into Canada is thirty-two when he makes the trip, while the average Mexican immigrant into the United States is but eighteen,1 giving would-be Americans ample time to pay into the American system before collecting pensions. In some places—the California-Mexico border outside of San Diego, for example—the concept of walking across borders is so prevalent that there are signs for it.

  As such, Canada is a state in transition. It boasts a huge volume of near retirees, granting it the world’s most capital-rich financial structure, and the highest tax take relative to its population in its history. Like the lopsided finances of much of the developed world, this is unfortunately temporary. Between its atypical immigration patterns and its baseline demographic profile, Canada has one of the world’s fastest-aging demographies, with one of the smallest replacement generations. The average Canadian is already forty-two years old, one of the oldest in the world. By 2025, Canada’s demography will almost be identical to contemporary Japan’s: 30 percent of the population will be sixty and older, and less than 25 percent will be in the critical twenty-to-thirty-nine band.

  Canada is in for the perfect storm. Its capital structure is about to flip from one of the world’s most capital-rich to one of the world’s most capital-poor at the same time that the country shifts from having fairly moderate retiree needs to among the world’s most massive.

  As the next age unfolds, it will bring pros and cons for Canada. First, the pros. They are almost entirely geographic.

  While Canadian nationalists will undoubtedly quibble with this point, far and away Canada’s strongest advantage is its relationship with the United States. The most notable aspect of that is of course physical and cultural proximity. Some 80 percent of the Canadian population lives within a two-hour drive of the American border. Canada’s densest population center—the Hamilton-Toronto-Montreal corridor—is on the country’s o
nly maritime system. This maritime system is not only shared with the United States, granting immediate access to major metropolitan centers like Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Buffalo, but it also empties into the Atlantic just north of America’s megalopolis—the home of America’s densest population centers. Canada’s two-century-old decision to baby-step ever closer to the Americans means that it is attached to the very center of the American trade network, no matter how the Americans choose to define the term.

  Canadian state planning, consciously or not, has also been preparing the country for the new era. Canada’s biggest developmental and political obstacle since the British North America Act has been a lack of physical connections among its various regions. Those connections are still middling, but they’re also beside the point. Canada’s rapid aging means that its consumer base isn’t in Canada but rather in the United States. After 150 years of infrastructure construction, the Canadians are now fully hardwired into the American system, just in time for their own domestic consumption to plunge. Simply put, Canada does not need to sustain a large internal market or even traditional domestic financing, because for all intents and purposes Canada has already become a satellite economy of the United States. As Canadians age—and the Americans age not so much—this relationship will become more lopsided, tighter, and more essential to Canadian well-being.

  There will be more to the new world for Canada than “simply” access to America’s financial resources and domestic markets: On the security front the Canadians look to do very well, too. In the new world, the Americans are highly likely on occasion to waltz over into foreign lands and wreck a few things. That is not only something that the Canadians do not need to worry about affecting them directly, but they do not even have to worry about it affecting them indirectly. Strategically, Canada is among the Americans’ firmest allies, and alone among those allies, it has no independent security threat from a third country. There simply isn’t a possible evolution of international events shy of nuclear war that could potentially threaten Canadian sovereignty, and Canada’s ability to avoid spending scarce resources on defense needs will reflect that. “All” the Canadians have to stomach is their status as an adjunct of the United States.