The Accidental Superpower

by Peter Zeihan

  In the case of Mexico and drugs, these features generate two results. First, they drive up the cost of the cocaine that ultimately reaches the United States. While drug smugglers aren’t exactly sticklers for filing statistical data, the Department of Justice estimates that the Mexican land portion of the cocaine smuggling routes adds about $10,000 to the cost of a kilo of cocaine—about $10 a gram—as compared to 1980s seaborne routes. That is a lot of money being used to employ, corrupt, bribe, and/or heavily arm a great many people across the length and breadth of Mexico’s many smuggling byways. The land-bound nature of the smuggling routes introduces so many increases to the price of cocaine that it is all but inevitable that large, well-funded organizations will arise from the trade. Best guess is that the Mexican portion of the drug supply chain has an annual turnover in excess of $60 billion, roughly 4–5 percent of Mexico’s (legal) GDP. For comparison, the U.S. automotive industry comprises about 1.2 percent of U.S. GDP; the total sales of Walmart—America’s largest corporation—are about 2.5 percent.

  Second, it also guarantees that these well-connected, well-funded organizations have a lot to fight over. We know that competition as the Mexican drug war or the cartel wars. It pits the various cartels against one another, battling for control of key nodes throughout northern and southern Mexico, up to and including the major border crossings to the United States. Not just the drug war, but the very existence of the cartels themselves would have been impossible if American success in blocking maritime drug shipments had not forced the drug flows inland.

  A generation after Miami Vice, the cartels are doing what any major corporation that controls neither the source nor destination of its product would do: diversify. First, diversify horizontally into similar “industries” in which their assets and skill sets are applicable. Things like robberies, cargo theft, and kidnappings are all now in the cartels’ collective portfolio. Most notably, marijuana production and smuggling in Mexico were not part of most of the cartels’ initial prerogatives. Now they are.

  Second, diversify up the supply chain to take over direct control of drug production. As of 2014, the cartels already de facto control most of the cocaine gathering and production networks in Peru and Bolivia, the largest and third largest sources of raw coca in the world. The cartels are even chewing away at the Colombian supply system: In a classic case of who-do-you-cheer-for, the cartels are going head-to-head with many of Colombia’s infamous cocaine-generating entities, up to and including the FARC.

  Third and most relevant to this discussion, the cartels are expanding down the supply chain. Long ago the cartels mastered the craft of border crossings. Now they have taken the next logical steps and are getting into retail distribution in the major American cocaine and marijuana distribution hubs. Obviously, border communities such as San Diego, El Paso, and Brownsville were the first targeted, but the cartels are also painfully active in places as far from the border as New York City. A particularly aggressive effort is even under way in British Columbia to seize control of the Canadian province’s marijuana network from the Hells Angels. The cartels have also been very successful in utilizing American public lands, especially in the California state and national parks system, to grow marijuana in large quantities closer to market (not to mention on the cleared side of American customs).

  Wherever the cartels go, they come into competition with local American crime networks—oftentimes inner-city gangs—for control of the local distribution systems. But while the premeditated violence of America’s local inner-city gangs is no joke, it pales compared to the casual violence of the transnational drug groups that were forged in the culture of the Mexican cartel wars. Add in superior weapons, weapons training, and control over the actual supply of the narcotics, and the Mexicans are rapidly overwhelming—and in some cases co-opting—their former American sales affiliates.

  Finally, there is the illegal immigration nexus. The cartels have found in each major American city one additional—critical—ingredient that has allowed them to put down roots deeper and spread faster than they could in South America or even among their own countrymen: America’s Hispanic ghettos. The American method for “managing” its illegal population has created a large community in each major city that lives outside the protection of local law enforcement and financial monitoring. The cops’ patrols are less effective without the illegals’ active participation. The Fed has no bank data to work from. The illegals speak the same language—and often come from the same country—as the cartels’ front men. It is a community setup that is perfect for the cartels to recruit from and ultimately control. As with the value of drugs, data as to the size of cartel penetration into the United States is somewhat limited. But the Department of Justice estimates that as of 2013, the cartels are already active in over a thousand U.S. municipalities that include multitudes of communities in the greater Los Angeles, Dallas–Fort Worth, Houston, Atlanta, Kansas City, Denver, Chicago, Detroit, and Baltimore metro regions.

  The cartels’ expansion into the United States proper is still in its early stages, so at present their conflicts with American gangs are being swallowed up by the normal noise of gang-on-gang violence. But in the not too distant future, the cartels will have (easily) won those battles. And if the cartels are willing to go to war with each other for transport routes through Mexico, it is difficult to imagine that they’ll pull punches when attempting to secure the cash cow of American demand from each other.

  Scared New World: Something to Be Scared About

  This is the point where I think I’m supposed to say something dramatic, like “the drug war will be with us soon,” only that’s not the point: The Mexican drug war has already expanded north of the border. It is no longer a question of prevention, but mitigation. I normally hesitate to suggest any courses of action. Geopolitical and demographic forces are so rooted in the unchangeable that political action often generates little but noise. But in this case a course of action does present itself, even if that “solution” is politically problematic.

  Border security is at best a (painfully expensive) patch. The answer—I think—lies in legalization. Not of drugs,9 but of immigration. Opening of the border with the issuance of worker and travel permits would with the speed of a printer transform America’s Hispanic ghettos into areas where people have legitimate identification and store their money in banks like everyone else. Cooperation with police would no longer be perceived as a sharp negative, and the Federal Reserve’s anti–money laundering tools would suddenly have data to work with. Most of all, the cartels would lose their fertile rest-and-recruitment grounds north of the border. Legalization wouldn’t solve everything, but it is the single biggest step that the United States could take.

  Should the Americans, however, choose to leave the border and ghettos as is, they face the dawn of the most horrible conflict they have ever fought. Unlike Vietnam or Iraq, the next chapter of the drug war will be fought at home. More than China, more than Russia, more than Iran, it is expansion of the Mexican drug war to all of North America that is emerging as the single greatest geopolitical threat to the American way of life.

  CHAPTER 14

  The China Wars

  Most people in the United States—most everyone, really—see China as the future of the world. The largest country by population, the largest exporter, and according to the conventional wisdom soon to be the largest economy and the most powerful military. The Chinese rise during the past three decades has been nothing but spectacular.

  But what is almost never considered is why now? If China’s rise is so inevitable, why is it that only now—some thirty-five hundred years after the Han Chinese first emerged as an ethnicity—is Chinese dominance so obvious and inevitable? The first warning that not all is as it seems is that the China mythos is ingrained nowhere more deeply than in the American psyche—the same psyche that was recently convinced of the “obvious and inevitable” rise of the Soviet Union and Japan.

  The reality of Chin
a is considerably different from the conventional wisdom. There are many reasons to doubt the strength of the Chinese system, but let’s focus on those relevant to things geographic and demographic. Individually, any of the raft of concerns I’m about to detail would be enough to derail the Chinese rise. Collectively they are more than enough to return China to the fractured, self-containing mess that it has been for most of its history.

  Chinese geography is, if anything, more problematic than European geography.

  The Northern Militarists

  China’s dominant Han ethnic group traces its roots to early cultures along the Yellow River in what is today northern China. But the Yellow is not a friendly river. It is extremely flood-prone. Seasonal rains in multiple parts of the watershed lead to large-scale flooding at various times of the year. The Yellow is also not tightly contained in a narrow valley as the Nile is, but instead flows through an extremely broad and very flat floodplain. When the river overflows its banks, it regularly inundates broad swaths of territory, far in excess of the sorts of floodings that are common—and largely constrained in reach—elsewhere in the world.

  As a result, Chinese society has developed along starkly different lines than Western versions. Chinese political development manifested less out of a need to manage food surpluses and expand populations than out of a need to manage the ravages of the Yellow River. One result among many was a much tighter hold by the government on the populace. Work gangs were regularly formed to construct river levees stretching for miles, not simply to guard populated areas but agricultural fields as well. China may be better known for its Great Wall and Grand Canal, but the Han’s tethering of the Yellow was the first and the greatest of their mass construction works.

  As the years turned into centuries, these levees expanded to contain nearly all of the river’s lower reaches, which actually compounded the problem. While all rivers carry silt, the Yellow’s silt load is particularly heavy. Once the river became in essence a managed canal, it couldn’t dump its silt in the floodplain. The steady accumulation of sediment resulted in the rise of the river bottom over the centuries. Successive Chinese governments had no choice but to build the river levees higher. At some time in the last millennium, the lower Yellow started defying the classification of “river” and became more of a raised aqueduct with its bottom now above the elevation of the surrounding lands. When the Yellow bursts its banks, the entirety of its flow crashes down into the plains that are now beneath it, unleashing heretofore unheard-of floods that dispossess Chinese in hundreds of thousands. A single flood in 1931 killed more than a million people.

  The result is that a successful Chinese government must be very tightly managed. The people must be fashioned in such a way that they can be hurled at engineering problems. Failure to maintain such organizational control at all times means that something as innocuous as a hard rain could literally wash Chinese civilization away.

  But this tendency toward unitary political systems hasn’t granted a history of more unified and coherent governments. On the contrary, China is a land of failed empires and shattered hopes. Again, the reason is geographic. The Yellow River’s lower watershed is the North China Plain, a wide, vast landscape completely empty of internal geographic barriers. Like its Northern European equivalent, the NCP is incredibly fertile and absolutely huge: At 158,000 square miles, it is as large as the prime agricultural lands of the U.S. states of Nebraska, Iowa, and Illinois combined.

  But that is where the similarities end.

  • The long, thin nature of the North European Plain resulted in multiple, competing powers, each arising from and defending its own segment of the plain, often using the NEP’s many transecting rivers as defensive lines. The North China Plain, in contrast, has no “thin” dimension and is instead broad and deep, with only the Yellow River bisecting it. The wide-open space of the NCP encouraged cultural and linguistic unity, but not political unity. There are no local geographies from within which a local power could arise independently of its neighbors, and any local power that does successfully cohere is forced to use a great deal of its labor resources to tame the river. That commitment makes the “successful” power vulnerable, leaving less manpower available for defense. A rival does not even need to defeat it in battle, or even target the river works. It can simply distract the population at a critical time—such as during a hard rain—and let nature wash away the competition.

  • Unlike the NEP’s host of navigable rivers, the Yellow is not navigable—in part due to its heavy engineering. Northern China is as capital-poor as Northern Europe is capital-rich. Since capital has not traditionally been available in China in large volumes, and because high levels of labor concentration and control have been required to hold the river in place (and so are not available for things like technological development), China has not known the high levels of development or fast rates of technological advance that the West enjoyed once the Dark Ages ended.

  • Where the NEP receives ample rainfall year round, the NCP is subject to frequent periods of heavy flooding (even without the Yellow River’s particular problems) or drought. The result has been regular population booms and busts, and a bust that reduces the population is one that risks allowing the river to rage out of control in the next wet season. The only way to endure a drought is to engage in large-scale irrigation, which requires mastering the river… making you a target for everyone else. Strategically, the result is a region shattered by multiple, competing powers perfectly willing to inflict mass civilian casualties upon each other and even hurl their collective civilization down in order to gain a tactical advantage. The Chinese—quite accurately—refer to long stretches of their own history as the “warlord” era. Unifying northern China into an all-Han zone took nothing less than millennia of wars, civil conflict, and ethnic cleansing. And even once that was achieved, maintaining its unity requires a degree of oppression that is onerous by nearly anyone’s standards but Beijing’s own. The Chinese civil war between the forces of Mao Zedong and Chang Kai-shek, complete with its 7 million deaths, was but the most recent incarnation of this eternal pattern.

  Economically, the result is a system with little trade and even less technological innovation. The northern Chinese system is instead dependent upon the application of labor—mass labor—to whatever problems arise. Even the traditional Chinese staple food fits the pattern. Wheat requires sowing, harvesting, and threshing—and the rest of a wheat farmer’s time can be spent on other exploits. Not so for paddy rice. It must be prepared before planting, planted stalk by stalk in specially prepared clay beds that can hold water, flooded, fertilized, emptied, flooded again, emptied and dried, harvested stalk by stalk, threshed, threshed again, followed by a reflooding and refertilizing of the clay bed. It screams for a system in which the average person—that is, the average peasant—has no political voice whatsoever. What little time is not spent on such a labor-heavy food source is claimed by the state to achieve other aims. This can get you a Great Wall or three, but it prevents the sort of labor differentiation and capital accumulation that lets a culture even dream of industrializing.

  Politically, the result is a system in which local authorities exercise autonomy so great that it risks bringing the system down. Even once a Chinese leader succeeds in rising to the top of his local heap—or even commanding the entirety of China—he then must begin the even longer and more painful slog of purging all those who have visions that clash with his own. Considering how fractured China is normally and how many power centers there are, this typically requires all of the leader’s attention. That was as true for the empires of old as it was for Mao Zedong as it is for the current premier, Xi Jinping.

  The good news, such as it is, is that while the wide-open nature of the NCP makes unity very difficult, it is at least possible. As such, almost every attempt to unify China into a single nation has originated in the north. Once the north is mostly on the same page, attention invariably turns to central China.

 
; The Central Traders

  Flowing through central China is the mighty Yangtze, one of the world’s greatest rivers. Indeed, the Yangtze River basin boasts some nine thousand miles of the same sort of interconnected waterways that have made the United States so successful. But this does not make the Yangtze China’s ticket to superpowerhood.

  • The Yangtze is China’s sole navigable river, so while it is impressive, it is a one-shot deal. Central China is the one part of the country that is naturally trade-focused and capital-rich, but it does not naturally link to its conationals elsewhere. The country doesn’t even have a barrier island chain that might help link the Yangtze cities to the rest of the country. But the north does not see this as an argument against integration. The north needs the center’s capital and so traditionally uses its superior military position to drain the center dry.

  • The central Chinese would prefer to not be drained dry. Given the choice, Shanghai and the rest of its riverine region tend to look beyond northern China to more developed parts of the world, whether that means Taipei, Tokyo, London, or San Francisco. As much as union between north and center might make sense for Beijing on economic grounds, the primary reason for the north’s desire to integrate is typically strategic: to keep the foreigners out.

  • The Yangtze River basin isn’t as nice as it seems, because it isn’t actually a basin like its Mississippi or Rhine equivalent. Instead, the Yangtze cuts through a series of mountain chains and ridges on its path to the sea and along many stretches lacks a floodplain even wide enough for a footpath. Such breaks in continuity split identities rather than uniting them. This has pros and cons. On the one hand, it makes it very difficult for the central Chinese to unify themselves into a single political entity. On the other, it makes it far easier for a unified northern China to forcibly assimilate the various pieces of central China one at a time. Historically, the most reliable means of unifying northern and central China has been to alter their geography physically to give them an economic linkage: the Grand Canal. Canals offer the best and worst in terms of infrastructure. Best in that they allow for linkages between various regions that would not otherwise exist, and the operating cost on a canal is quite reasonable. Worst in that crafting and maintaining an artificial river is as difficult and expensive as it sounds. So while a short canal like the Panama or Suez makes a great deal of economic sense, a massive project like the eleven-hundred-mile-long Grand Canal is an exorbitant expense that exists only due to political rationale in a system where labor is, in essence, free.