The Accidental Superpower

by Peter Zeihan

  Put all these geographic features together and you get a very ugly country. To the east is a hostile India that will be more powerful than Pakistan under almost any scenario. To the northwest are people who will always resist central power, but who must be subjugated in order to gain basic security for the core. Throughout the core Indus territories, there is a catastrophically high need for tight management and expensive irrigation to prevent desertification and starvation. Consequently, Pakistan is one of the poorest, most militarized, most corrupt, and least secure states ever created.

  The problems that the Americans discovered in their Afghan adventure are a direct consequence of the Pakistanis’ successful efforts to turn a negative into a positive. With the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the Pakistanis (reasonably) believed that they were next. They couldn’t hope to stand up to the Soviets—much less the Indians combined with the Soviets—alone, and the peoples who lived in the highlands of northwest Pakistan had always been particularly unruly. The solution was to forge a new national identity based on Islam. Aggressive campaigning by the government sought to convince the mountain peoples of the border region that it was the Pakistanis’ common religion that served as the glue to hold the Pakistani state together. The Soviets and Indians were portrayed as apostate foes. Instead of having to be in a state of low-grade war with their own citizens, the Pakistani core smiled as the mountain people started crossing the border to attack Soviet forces in Afghanistan or shifted into Kashmir to attack Indian forces.

  Fast-forward thirty years and it is the Americans who are patrolling Afghanistan. The Pakistani Taliban—as some of the militias of the Pakistani mountain people are now known—attack the Americans just as vociferously as they attacked the Soviets.2 They also see the Pakistani government’s willingness to collaborate with the Americans in Afghanistan as a betrayal of the national “identity” at best, or as a sign of apostasy at worst. The suicide attacks that often mar Afghanistan and Kashmir now also occur within the Indus core with disturbing regularity.

  The primary reason that Pakistan has proven able to survive the past decade is that the Americans needed it to. Afghanistan is landlocked and Pakistan is the route in, so for a decade the Americans bolstered Pakistan with military sales, cheap loans, and outright cash bribes that come out to roughly 8 percent of GDP—not to mention providing Pakistan with strategic cover versus India. Considering Pakistan’s strategic vise, that could well be the difference between success and failure as a modern state.

  The relationship has always been an uncomfortable one for both sides—and it is about to dissolve. The Pakistanis fear that American actions in Afghanistan have stretched their relationship with the Pakistani highlanders to the breaking point, and that when the Americans leave the lowland/highland war will resume. For their part, the Americans are far more than mildly annoyed that they ultimately found al Qaeda kingpin Osama bin Laden not just on Pakistani soil, but a short walk from the Pakistani equivalent of West Point. American largess is about to sharply end, and between the loss of resources and the newly infuriated nature of the highlanders, the Pakistani lowland’s ability to manage its highlands will become sharply circumscribed. Not needing to battle for control of their own territories, the highlanders will have the magic mix of partial security, identity, ability, and incentive to strike across national borders.

  Their primary target will be India, as these people have some serious bones to pick over Kashmir. They see the Indians as occupying a portion of their homeland. As Pakistan would prefer not to actually go to war with a superior India, Islamabad’s efforts to rein in the highlanders make it likely that the highlanders will have on-again, off-again clashes with the Pakistani authorities in Islamabad as well. This is a problem, a big problem, but it is also a regionally contained problem. The Pakistani Taliban and groups like it are tied down by geography. Reaching the wider world would require first negotiating the Pakistani core, not to mention ignoring the local and compelling challenge of Kashmir. These groups certainly have the ability to strike across international borders, but there is really only one border they will care about. That’s awful for India, but great for the Americans and the wider world.

  The Other Russia

  There is only one other location on the planet that meets the requirements for generating Muslim terrorist groups with both the interest and capacity to strike at long range. It is in Russia.

  Even in times of stability, Russia is an unstable country. It isn’t a normal European country, but instead a multiethnic empire. Most of the European ethnicities rose in a zone where they were able to emerge as the dominant and even unitary group. The Hordelands hold no such ethnic uniformity. Their wide-open spaces mean that any secure people is one that has conquered all of their neighbors, and all of their neighbors’ neighbors, until they can anchor themselves in geographic barriers as far removed as the Carpathians and the Altay. Any successful Hordelands government isn’t a nation-state, it is a multiethnic empire. Any successful Hordelands government doesn’t placate its subjects, it intimidates them into obedience.

  Among the dozens of ethnicities the Russians conquered in their bid to achieve security, a people nestled on the northern slopes of the Caucasus Mountains stands out.

  The Chechen Rebellion Continues

  The Chechens in many ways are a relic of the deep past. Their northern lands are reliably well watered by any standard, allowing for quite productive agriculture without irrigation, while their southern lands are heavily forested, riddling their territory with redoubts and defensive positions. This combination has granted them serious staying power, enabling them to resist the multitude of invasions that have boiled out of the Hordelands every generation or three, and their national history can be traced back at least until the sixth century AD.

  Most notably, the Chechens are one of the very few peoples to have survived the Mongol invasions—a period of their history that made them very good at guerrilla warfare. The Russians first crossed swords with them when they started their effort to conquer the Caucasus region in 1803 and did not finish their work with the Chechens until 1889. The war—or, more to the point, the Chechen guerrilla campaign—was so brutal that the Russians were forced to establish a permanent military base in Chechen territory to maintain control. The place came to be called Grozny, which roughly translates to “terrible place.”

  In the years since, there have been more Chechen rebellions against Russian authority than most interested parties bother to count. With the Russian near collapse at the end of the Soviet era, the rebellions turned to outright wars. While the Russians refer to the First and Second Chechen Wars3 as emotional landmarks of the post-Soviet era, the Chechens themselves refer to them as simply the latest campaigns in the Two Hundred Years War against the Russian occupation of their lands. The two most recent conflicts claimed at least one hundred thousand dead, a number similar to the total deaths in the first two years of the Syrian civil war, but among a population that was but one-twentieth the size.

  Simply put, the Chechens have been resisting Hordelands-based forces like the Russians for at least fifteen hundred years. With the Russian decline both advanced and irreversible, it is only a matter of time before the Chechens make their next move.

  Three factors argue that it will be sooner rather than later. First, there is a lack of proximity. The Russians arrived in the Caucasus in a roundabout manner. Much of the Hordelands is marginal if not outright hostile land, and some of it is nearly uninhabitable. While there is ample rainfall in the North Caucasus itself, the flatlands directly to the north are steppe, supporting hardly any population outside the tight confines of the Volga valley. There isn’t a straight shot to the Caucasus from Moscow, so direct exercise of power from there is impossible. The more habitable territory arcs southwest through Ukraine before boomeranging back southeast along the Black Sea coast.

  Due to this bow, the line of military, economic, and cultural projection from Moscow isn’t a thousand miles,
but instead sixteen hundred miles. That might not sound like a huge difference, but that’s probably because you’ve heard the phrase “a thousand miles” so often in this book that it is losing its meaning. The additional six hundred miles is about the same as the distance between Boston and Richmond. Think of how difficult the Civil War was for the Union, and that in an era of railways with the geography of water transport to help. As for the total distance, sixteen hundred miles is a touch over the distance from Boston to Miami.

  Second, because of this bow in the line of approach, Russia’s control of Chechnya is dependent upon its ongoing control of Ukraine, and the powers that wish to knock Russia back all see Ukraine as the weakest point in the Russian system. Romania, Poland, and Turkey in particular are all local powers that would like to loosen Russian influence over the Ukrainian system and will certainly resist any Russian effort to control it directly. Even a modicum of failure in Ukraine would prevent the Russians from dedicating the manpower required to keep Chechnya pacified.

  Third, the Chechens are not passive victims. As you might expect from a people who gave even the Mongols pause, they are phenomenal fighters who have integrated their social structure into their (para)military resistance strategies. In the Russian-Chechen conflicts of the past two decades, they have not hesitated to take the fight to the Russians. Some of these attacks fit the standard feel of insurgent activities, being carried out both within and beyond the confines of Chechen territory.

  But the Chechens have also embraced terror tactics. In 1995, Chechen gunmen attacked the small Russian town of Budyonnovsk, taking approximately 2,000 hostages and holding them in the local hospital in a tense standoff with Russian forces that lasted five days. The Chechens are believed responsible for the infamous apartment block bombings of late 1999 in Moscow, Buynaksk, and Volgodonsk, which resulted in nearly 300 deaths and more than 650 casualties. In October 2002, Chechen gunmen invaded and laid siege to Moscow’s Dubrovka Theater, capturing 850 hostages. In the ensuing raid by Russian forces three days later, all of the militants were killed, in addition to 130 of the civilian hostages. Perhaps most notorious of all was the September 2004 capture of a school in Beslan, which, after three tragic days, left almost 800 people wounded and 334 dead, including 186 schoolchildren. They have also destroyed Russian passenger jets in flight with smuggled explosives and have bombed several Russian passenger trains. The Chechen forces are highly motivated and highly capable, and very soon they will (again) be battling the Russians with every one of the many tools at their command.

  What truly terrifies the Russians, however, is not that the next Chechen rebellion is coming, that it will likely be successful, or that it might even result in the full-scale ejection of Russians from their Caucasus anchor. It is that the rebellion will spread.

  In the grand scheme of things the Chechens are a geographically concentrated people with some 95 percent of them in Chechnya proper and nearly all the rest in the neighboring republics of Dagestan or Ingushetia. Yes, there are small populations—Russian authorities tend to grimly call them “cells”—elsewhere, but their numbers do not raise a risk of mass upheaval. But the Chechens are not Russia’s only minority, its only capable minority, or its only Muslim minority. Russia’s true problem will be where its minorities cross with geographically sensitive points.

  Russia has one internal waterway of note, the Volga. By North American standards it is a bit of a joke—frozen half the year, requiring a great deal of engineering to be forced to navigability, and draining into the landlocked Caspian Sea—but compared to the rest of the Hordelands it is pretty fantastic. The Russians seem to agree. The Volga’s upper tributaries bracket Moscow and are part of a web of rivers and canals the Russians use aggressively in the summer months. Every major piece of infrastructure—road, rail, and pipe—that links Siberia to European Russia crosses the Volga at some point.

  The thing is, the Volga really isn’t traditionally a Russian river—it’s a Tatar river. The Tatars are not what most would expect from a subject peoples living near the very center of the Hordelands. They are riverine—even under the brutality of Stalin, they proved to have a view of wider horizons and an interest in trade greater than nearly all other Soviet citizens, up to and including the Russians themselves. At 5.5 million strong they are the Russian Federation’s largest minority group. Their cities sit on most of the aforementioned critical infrastructure. There is even a community over one hundred thousand strong on Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. They are Muslim, but not the sort of Muslim that most Americans picture when they think of the word. They are highly educated, worldly, secular. The women wear dresses, not hijabs. Their engineers produce oil without foreign help. Their scientists design space stations.4 And unlike the ethnic Russians, who are in a not-so-slow demographic collapse, the Tatar population is young, healthy, and growing.

  Even if the Tatars never aspired to be more than a subject people, even if the Tatars did not resent Moscow, and even if the Russians did not face twilight, the Tatar rise is inevitable. And since they populate the eastern fringe of European Russia, simply a few wisps of autonomy would threaten Moscow’s control over the entirety of Russia’s Siberian lands—including more than three-quarters of the country’s oil production.

  The Tatars have shown no sign of rebelling on the scale—or with the tactics—of the Chechens, but they have always wrested whatever autonomy they can from Moscow. As Russian rule becomes weaker and increasingly plagued by Chechen-style problems, the temptation to actively resist will rise. Moscow is right to be concerned. Because while a renewed Chechen rebellion can hurt Russia, even the mildest of Tatar rebellions would kill it.

  Scared New World: Nasty, Brutish, and Short… or American

  In the not-so-distant future economic dislocations and conflict—whether that conflict be irregular militancy or outright war—will become an unfortunate fact of life for most of the global population. The bright spot—perhaps the only bright spot—is that as trade and transport withers, the ability of this violence to directly impact countries far removed will wither as well. That’s fantastic news if you are part of the inner circle of American friends and allies who will still be able to boast trade and security access sufficient to fully patrol their own territories, and very cold comfort indeed if you are anyone else.

  EPILOGUE

  The American Age

  So that’s… the future. Not some hazy distant future after we’re all dead and gone, but the future we will all be living in for the next fifteen years of our lives.

  The kicker is that this—all of this: the dissolution of the free trade order, the global demographic inversion, the collapse of Europe and China—is all just a fleeting transition. The period of 2015 through 2030 will be about the final washing away of the old Cold War order. It isn’t the end of history. It is simply clearing the decks for what is next.

  Which will be something extraordinary.

  The Hobbesian period of 2015–30 will be the least Amerocentric portion of the twenty-first century, because by 2030 three things will have happened that will solidify the world as America’s oyster.

  First, everyone else in the world will have had fifteen years to rip one another apart going after the scraps of the previous system. Resource wars. Market wars. A return of naval competition. New technologies that allow countries beset by problems—especially demographic problems—to still lash out. Does anyone actually think that drones—a technology that hits hard with a minimum of manpower—will remain purely an American tool? It’ll be new, exciting, terrifying. And a not insignificant portion of the world is likely to get wrecked or simply waste away. All of the powers that the Americans think of as competitors—with Russia, China, and the European Union at the top of the list—will be exposed to have feet of clay and spines of glass.

  Second, most if not all of that chaos and destruction will pass the Americans by. Instead of fifteen years of struggles and pain and want, the Americans will experience fifteen years of
moderate growth with stable markets and reliable energy supplies. As of 2014, the Americans are already far and away the dominant power. By 2030, they will be inordinately stronger in both absolute and relative terms while most of the rest will be struggling just to stay where they are… and most of the rest will fail. The Americans will suffer no invasions (although they might launch a couple), they will watch the shipping wars with casual disinterest (although they might capture bits of it), they’ll puzzle over why everyone suddenly wants their currency again (but won’t hesitate to make it available). The Americans will be able to pick and choose their fights, or not even deign to participate in the wider world.

  Third, America’s demographics will invert a second time. By 2030, the oldest of the Boomers will be eighty-four, but by 2040, the youngest will be seventy-six. The sack of bricks that started descending upon the federal government back in 2007 will be almost completely lifted. Settling daintily into the roomy space the Boomers will be vacating will be the new retiree class, Gen X—aged sixty-one to seventy-five at that point. The Boomers’ children, Gen Y, will be forty to sixty. As a group the Ys’ incomes will make the American system flush with cash once again. After fifteen years of ever tighter budgets, the American government’s fiscal balance will heal. America’s long Boomer night will be over and government finances will step back into the light…

  … to find a world that is a broken wasteland. By 2040, many of the world’s developing states will have aged into the sort of damaged demography that the Europeans had experienced only a generation before and will be starting their own crippling slide into pain and decrepitude. One notable exception to this will be China, because China will already be there. By 2040, the average Chinese will be forty-seven, versus the average American who will only be forty. By that point Americans will think of China as just as much of a has-been as they think of Japan today—assuming that China still exists as a recognizable entity. Bereft of challenges, the Americans will be able to do a lot of navel gazing.