Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

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The Solution to The USA’s Taiwan Dilemma

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On September 11, 2025

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“The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.”

三国演义 ~by Luo Guangzhong

Earlier I promised to post my plan to prevent a war between the United States and China over Taiwan. I’ve traveled and met with Taiwanese diplomats. They are some of the most sophisticated operators I’ve ever encountered. Taiwan is a highly advanced technological country. Very wealthy, with a sophisticated full coverage heath care system and a vibrant democracy. Furthermore, based on the Shanghai Communique issued on February 27, 1972 by Nixon and Mao, both mainland China and the USA formally acknowledged that “all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China”.

The Communique goes on to state the US side does not accept a violent solution to the unification of the two parties and the Chinese side retains the option to violence if Taiwan ever declares independence, paraphrasing here, folks. It’s been a long time since reading my Kissinger.

Conversely, I have traveled seven times to China. Here is an idea most Americans will probably never understand. China’s potential to utilize enormous amounts of soft power is profound. This is based on China’s circular view of history and that China has been invaded and ruled by foreign powers many times in its history. In each and every case China has overcome said invaders very differently than the way the Russians have. Or anyone else for that matter. Where the Russians trade space for time to husband their resources for a great counter attack and push the invader out of the country, China seduces the invader, with its ancient, deep, amazing and incredibly seductive culture. I cannot emphasize enough the depth, breadth, and tantalizing sophistication of its culture, be it material, artistic, political or spiritual. I do, after all, practice Chinese Chan Buddhism in my own life. Every time China has been invaded and completely taken over by a foreign power this strategy works. Even today we’re watching Chinese movies on Netflix. That is the use and export of soft power. And unlike America, that has only 250 years of history to draw upon its soft power, China has almost 4000 years of history to draw upon. The efficacy of Chinese soft power is not to be underestimated. It is indeed seductive.

Now the question moves to goals and intentions. And here an understanding of Chinese history can aid us in a better understanding of the present Chinese leader, Xi Jing Ping.

What are Xi Jing Ping’s true goals? Simple, he seeks membership among the greatest of Chinese emperors. The greatest of Chinese emperors are judged by a single metric: did they unify all of China? As the opening sentence of the great Chinese novel, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, I quoted at the beginning of this essay, unification is the way the Chinese see themselves when in a golden age.

This compulsion to unify all of China is the defining source of Xi’s ambitions. And that means Taiwan. Taiwan is the last remaining province of a fully unified China. China equal to that ruled by the Qin Shih Huang Di, the very first emperor to unify all of China, or the great conqueror Han Wu Di, or Li Shimin of the mighty T’ang or Zhu Yuanzhang of the wall building Ming. It is to this rank of Chinese men that Xi aspires.

What should America do? I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to avoid a war with China that most people are certain is inevitable. They call it the “Thucydides Trap.” But, if the study of history has taught me anything it is that nothing is inevitable, contingencies matter, and human agency means the most. We may live in a complex adaptive system, but nothing, nothing is inevitable. Therefore, America must find a way tone down its arrogance and find a way to peacefully unite Taiwan with China.

Here is how I would do it if I were president.

First, I would engage in a series of CBM’s (Confidence Building Measures in diplospeak) with Xi Jing Ping regarding our naval stance in the Straits of Taiwan. I would make it policy that no American naval ships traverse the Straits of Taiwan any longer. Then I would halt the sale of advanced weapons to Taiwan.

Second, I would begin preparing the Taiwanese to consider peaceful unification with the mainland along the lines of the British handover of Hong Kong to China in the 90s. I would make it clear that we would not consider unification unless Taiwan was allowed to keep its democracy, and democratic traditions for a minimum of 80 years. I would do this to assuage the Taiwanese about a possible authoritarian takeover of the island in the case of unification. China did one nation, two systems successfully once before. They can do it again.

Third, I would secretly engage Xi Jing Ping with the following proposal: the United States of America would fully encourage and accept the unification of Taiwan with the mainland under the following conditions. Number one, Taiwan would have three representatives on the politburo, one of which would be a power ministry, either interior, defense, or foreign affairs. My fallback position, which is my true goal of course, would be the acceptance of two politburo members from Taiwan, but I would not relent on one serving as a power minister in one of the three ministries aforementioned.

I am relatively certain that Xi and the current politburo would agree to this proposal. It would serve to put Xi in the exhalted ranks of Chinese leaders in which he craves to be included. Mos timportantly, it would not harm a single vital national interest of the United States. The Chinese might have a salient in the first island chain, that being the island of Taiwan, but the United States would still have Korea, Japan, Okinawa, and the Philippines. Not to mention the defenses in depth that the second island chain provides us in the Pacific ocean. Much less the great fortress of the third island chain of Midway, Wake and Hawaii. Defenses in depth matter much more than a salient in the first island chain.

Now, I recognize this goes against every national security intellectuals thinking. It is completely contrarian. But the more I’ve thought about it over the last few years the more I believe that is the best way to avoid general warfare between two nuclear great powers from the Straits of Malacca to the South China Sea and into the deep blue waters of the Pacific.

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Follow Up and And Reply On My “How to Lose Allies” Post

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On September 10, 2025

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First, I want to follow up on this: “I am due to have a conversation with a friend that lives in Denmark tomorrow and I’m going to ask him about energy prices.”

His reply, and I paraphrase as I did not record it or take notes: “if we still had to make our house payment, we would be totally screwed. The amount of money that we pay for energy now is about equal to what our house payment used to be. It’s about five times higher than it normally is, but what’s even worse is the high cost of energy filters out into everything in the Danish economy. A simple item like bread is three times higher than it used to be. Specialty items are three or four times higher than they used to be. Fish from fisherman that we go to the docks to buy from because we live on an island is four times more expensive because they’re paying four times more for the energy they’re using to go out and fish. It’s brutal and it’s all because the United States or somebody allied with it blew up the Nord stream pipeline. I try to keep my mouth shut about this because most people have drank the Kool-Aid, but I really hope Russia wins because I’m sick of all this global elite bullshit.”

These words were spoken by a well educated American married to a Dane with two teen-aged Danish children. If the Danish economy is suffering like this Germany must be fucked.

Where does Europe get its energy now? From the US, now exporting LNG (liquid natural gas) to Europe for 4x the price of Russian and Turkmen natural gas. Here is my question as a Texan: why haven’t natural gas prices risen in tandem with the export of the commodity? People I have asked who recieve natural gas royalties are pissed because there is no price increase pass through. So, owners of the wells are getting screwed and so are the buyers of the product. Welcome to Oligarchical America.

Next I want to address a handful of commenters in my post, best reprersented by Mark Level. He writes, in a very gracious and polite comment that he takes issue with my outline of American Grand Strategy. He notes, “This insane hobby-horse (or idee fixe, choose your metaphor) dates back far more than 120 years, probably 3x that long, and originates in British Colonial phobias about Russia and “the East” generally. Halford John Mackinder developed this lunacy & published it almost exactly 120 years ago, but it had a long pre-natal development among arrogant Imperial gits in Asia. (Gits and twits, upper-class British twits, like the Monty Python sketch.) See here, and the delightful childish fantasy of being Alexander Magnus from this Mackinder thought bubble . . . .”

Please note, first and foremost, I used the word hostile power or hostile coalition. Hostile being the primary variable.

I’ve read Mackinder’s works. Anyone who has traveled across the Silk Road pretty much has to read them. His idea is not necessarily original. It’s more a fusion of ideas that came out of the late 18th century and 19th century Western European dominance of the world that began, as I previously mentioned, with the defeat of Venice in 1509,  Portugal’s conquest of a Spice Empire, and its desrtuction of the Ottoman Navy in the Indian Ocean, thus having no rivals, and of course Spain’s rapacious theft of New World gold and silver.

During the 17th and 18th century, a new idea developed with the growth of the British Navy, who outstripped the Dutch and pretty much took over their empire. New York City was, after all, New Amsterdam. What these developments presaged was an idea that centered around the ascendancy of the Littoral powers over the Continental Empires that had ruled Eurasia for millenia. Gunpowder, boats, better firearms, better steel and in the New World, devastating disease leading to genocide in many cases up and down North and South America. The Littoral is defined by strategists “as those land areas (and their adjacent areas and associated air space) that are susceptible to engagement and influence from the sea.” Thus the emphasis on a strong navy by Alfred Thayer Mahan who proved just how dominant Littoral Powers could be. For a time, that is, only for a time, as I see it.

Add to this ascendancy the wars of the Western European powers of the United Kingdom, Spain, France, and the Holy Roman Empire primarily fought during the 18th century for two strategic reasons, primarily by two very different nations with very different vital national interests at stake.

One, was the United Kingdom’s insistence that no power could dominate the Low Lands of the Netherlands and later Belgium because if they could, it would threaten an invasion of the British Isles, plus their massive exports of wool textiles, fueling the nascent industrial revolution. Smart, if ruthless policy.

Second, we must understand France‘s main goal during the wars of this time (and for several centruies prior) was to ensure a divided Germany. So long as the German states were littered into 100 different little principalities France had nothing to worry about. Thus France could go on dominating the continent. The first seismic change to this was the War of the Sixth Coalition which saw for the first time Russia flex its true potential when Russian troops occupied Paris. France’s cataclysm occured not in 1941 but in 1870 with her defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. The result of which was Prussia unifying all of Germany into one empire, adding insult to injury by having the Kaiser crowned in Versailles and taking Alsace Lorraine away as its prize.

Fuse those two strategies together and it is not too far an intellectual leap, considering the Great Game going on at the time between the UK and the Russian Empire, for Mackinder to conjure up his ideas. Were his ideas taken up by the United Kingdom? You bet, but by 1917 when it was clear that the United Kingdom could no longer maintain the balance of power in Europe and the United States had to intervene, (everyone should read AJP Taylor’s magnum opus, The Struggle For Mastery in Europe, to understand the balance of power and its collapse in 1917) US foreign policy intellectuals adopted it. And rightly so.

I think it’s the correct idea. But my reasons for thinking it’s the correct idea are not gonna make many of you happy. You might have to face some hard truths. Oh yeah, I did tell you I was a Realist in the old school manner of the word? In fact there have been a few times when Ian has chastened me pretty seriously for my realism. With that admisssion I will make another one: I don’t mind the criticism from Ian or from others. Ian is probably the smartest person I’ve ever met in my life and I listen to what he has to say. And when I say listen to him, I mean, I consider his words deeply. A man who cannot change his mind will never change anything. Nevertheless, I digress.

Here are my reasons for why I believe the prevention of a single hostile power or coalition of hostile powers from dominating the Eurasian landmass is smart policy. Please, if you take anything away from this sentence, take the meaning hostile. 

Number one: the Monroe Doctrine. Oh, I hear you screaming already. But the fact is that if this were not “our” hemisphere, not a one of us would have the standard of living we do today. Our hegemony of the Western Hemisphere is the primary foundation of our wealth and our power. You might not like it. I grimace frequently at the crimes we comitt to protect it. But, the Westphalian System is not built on justice. It is built on the acceptance of international anarchy. Each nation to its own. There is no single sovereign power governing planet Earth. Thus, violence is the supreme authority from which all other authority is derived. Is this a grim Hobbesian outlook? Yes. I don’t like it and I’m pretty sure you don’t either. But as a realist, I take the world as it is, not as I desire it to be. A hostile power or coalition of hostile powers that dominate Eurasia can take that hegemony away. You might not like it but trust me when I say you don’t want that to happen.

Second, a hostile power or coalition of hostile powers that dominate Eurasia can take more than our hegemony away, it/they can invade us. We don’t want that either. Thus we have a powerful navy that projects power to keep Eurasia divided–for the time being, because I think if we get into a war with China, their indirect way of war–read your Sun Tzu–will probably outwit us on the high seas. I’ve spent a great deal of time in China and have a healthy fear of their capabilities. However, my greatest fear is that in our arrogance we will engender the very hostility we must prevent and by our own devices bring about the doom we should seek to avoid. We have lost our edge, our generosity of spirit and our understanding of power. We have become a mean spirited, two-bit, cheap and vulgar people. And sadly, because so many of us are beaten down economically by rich elites who are delusional, we’re going to lose a big war in a painful way. A war that could be avoided, but probably won’t be. I hope I’m wrong, but don’t think I am.

That said, these very wise words, written by Robert D. Kaplan recently, convey the gravity of our present predicament, “There is no prediction. It is only through coming to terms with the past and vividly, realizing the present that we can have premonitions about the future.” Moreover, as a wise woman wrote about history, “the more I study history, the more I learn the art of prophecy.” Deeply contradictory statements, yet both true in their essence.

Are we any more perceptive now about what awaits our planet than were the Russians of 1917, or all of Europe in 1914, and, for that matter, the Germans of the 1920s and the early 30s?

Do we honestly think we know better than they did? With all of our gadgets and our technological triumphalism I bet you there are a handful of you out there that think we do know better than they did. I hate to disappoint you, but we don’t. History is the story of contingency and human agency, not inevtiablity.

So, there it is. Rip me to shreds if you wish. I’ve suffered enough Shakespearean arrows of outrageous fortune in my 54 years to handle it. In fact, I welcome your ideas and if you got this far I’m grateful for your time.

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Losing Our Asian Allies – And Fast

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On June 25, 2025

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Ian in his last post mentioned that our Asian allies are slipping away from us. While we pretend to strategically re-orient the Japanese are engaging in massive rearmament begun by Abe and being continued by the current government. Japan has lost confidence in the American security umbrella because of the deceit we’ve displayed in foreign relations. The Koreans? I lived in Korea. They’re simply apoplectic. Some are even at the point where they are willing to consider a loose confederation with the north, an entente of sorts so the South has the protection of the North’s nuclear umbrella and the North gains goods and services from the South.

This is simply unheard of. When I talked to one of my former students who now works in the foreign ministry and he told me this I was gobsmacked.

Ian’s correct. For 400 years the balance of payments from the rest of the world went to the Littoral seapower states. For the last 50 years the balance of payments has been reversed.  All that gold is going back home. In one generation the United States has squandered all the goodwill and wealth it received during WWI and WWII. China in the last 50 years has lifted more people out of poverty than the rest of the world did during all of recorded history. Chew on that stat for a moment.

I will be visiting China and South Korea to do a 20 year retrospective tour and a 30 year retrospective tour on the former and the latter. I don’t know what to expect, but I remember China 20 years ago and being blown away.

The USA is in deep strategic shit. For 200+ years our power has been based on our complete hegemony of this hemisphere. For 75 of the last 100 years our main strategic goal has been the prevention of one power or an alliance of powers attaining hegemonic power over the Eurasian landmass. In the last six years we’ve abandoned that VITAL national interest for what? We’ve driven Russia into the arms of China. India lost all confidence in us. Now East Asia has.

If a single power or coalition of powers dominate the Eurasian landmass our two oceans will not protect us.

It appears I might have been wrong about the Israeli-Iran pissing contest being the opening act of WWIII. Good. What it really feels like is the first Balkan War in 1912. The calculus is being made in Beijing. And Tokyo. And Seoul. And Taipei. We lack the ability to protect our allies conventionally. And no one wants nukes.

I don’t have any smart quip to conclude with except a Spanish expletive, “la puebla es jodida.”

You get the idea.

The Next Big One

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On June 19, 2025

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Several months ago, I wrote two essays on Russian grand strategy. (My apologies on never completing the nuclear one, an extremely necessary but far too grim subject for my taste.) In that series of essays, I made a few assertions I want to bring to your attention again in a more contemporary context. First, that wars’ result tends to confirm the strengths of the coalition arrayed against the main combatants before the war has even started. This is, in fact, not an assertion, but an iron law of warfare that still exists in chimpanzee warfare. See Strategy: A History, Chapter One, by Freedman if you disagree.

Second, that big global dustups tend to run in about 100 year cycles these days.

So, take a look around — got a big, hot war in the Ukraine slightly analogous to the Sino-Japanese war of the 1930s. Next, you got weird, unresolved shenanigans in the Middle East that have a weird reverse-appeasement type feel.

We’re quite possibly looking at the two opening battles of WWIII, right now.

Russia Is An Imperial State While America Is A Plutocratic Oligarchy

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On December 11, 2023

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An oligarchy, as we use the word today (the dictionary definition is different) is rule by the rich, because they are rich. (A feudal king may be rich, but his power is not primarily a result of his wealth, but rather his wealth is primarily a result of his power.)

As I have written a number of times before, Russia is NOT a plutocratic oligarchy. America, on the other hand, is. What wealthy American elites want is what they get, and what ordinary people want they don’t get: this was shown clearly by the Princeton Oligarchy Study.

When Putin took control of Russia he broke the oligarchs.

In the summer of 2000, Putin met in the Kremlin with about two dozen of the men regarded as the top oligarchs. The meeting was closed, but reports later said he made them a sternly clear deal: Stay out of politics and your wealth won’t be touched…

…

By then, Berezovsky had already begun criticizing Putin. Within months, he left Russia for the United Kingdom and was granted asylum in 2003. Ten years later, he was found dead in his home; a disputed post-mortem examination said he appeared to have hanged himself.

Gusinsky, whose media holdings were critical of Putin and even satirized him, was hauled into jail amid an investigation of misappropriated funds; within weeks, he agreed to sell his holdings to an arm of Russia’s state natural gas monopoly, and he left the country.

Khodorkovsky, regarded as Russia’s richest man at the time, lasted longer, establishing the Open Society reformist group and showing increased political ambitions. But he was arrested in 2003 when special forces stormed onto his private plane and spent a decade in prison on convictions of tax evasion and embezzlement before Putin pardoned him and he left Russia.

I remember reading an article where one of the oligarchs shut down a factory and there was great protest. Putin not only forced the oligarch to re-open the factory, he was there when the oligarch made the announcement, glaring at him and treating him with contempt.

The oligarchs are not in control of Putin or the Russian government (though they have some influence at the provincial and civic levels.)

Now the AP article points out something very smart: that Putin is creating a new group of oligarchs loyal to him, by giving them resources seized from foreign countries leaving Europe. Smart to notice, and smart of Putin, though his successors may regret it. In a way this is very similar to feudalism, though it involves money and resources not armed men and land.

The new oligarchs will be loyal to Putin and probably this successor. Their children may well not be loyal to Putin’s successor’s successor, however, and that person will have to show the whip hand or cut a deal, or both. If they ever succeed in taking control of the government (and they will eventually if the system continues) then it will be very bad for Russians, same as oligarchic control of the US has been very bad for Americans. A “King” often uses the commons against the nobility and thus supports the commons to some extent, a king who is ruled by the nobles acts with them against the commoners.

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Let’s add another data point: Russia has vastly ramped up its military production. The US could not do so, the companies who make the weapons said they’d do it, but have been very slow about it because they make more money that way. In Russia, however, in 2022, Medvedev, Putin’s lieutenant stated:

“The goal has been set for a scrupulous execution of the government’s defense contracts in all of its key parameters, [and] prevention of disruptions in the supply of equipment,” he wrote on Telegram. “Attention has been drawn to the fact that all contractors could be held to account, including on criminal charges… Supervision over the execution will continue.”

Although I can’t find it, in another case he gathered them together and explained to them what Stalin did to those who didn’t make production quotas.

You can’t get clearer, or more threatening than that.

Russia’s weapon manufacturers serve the state. They make a profit and those who run them are allowed to become rich, but only if they meet their quotas.

Russia is a modern imperial system, similar to the early Roman one. The governors are hand chosen by Putin from his loyalists (he likes ex-bodyguards) and the bourgeoisie serve him. When Wagner rebelled, not one governor supported their rebellion, even in the first 24 hours when they seemed to be doing well.

America is an oligarchy, Russia has an emperor. The emperor is old, and the question is who will be his successor, which is why key lieutenants like Medvedev and Kadyrov (the governor of Chechnya) are competing in loyalty and fervor.

Both countries have elections, in both countries the elections have little effect most of the time, though their existence does allow the possibility of change thru them. In America, the leader changes, but since Reagan, the fundamental policies haven’t. In Russia, well, Putin is always re-elected, though it is also true that he has always been popular in Russia, with his opposition a minority.

Indeed, that opposition, largely urban professional types, are weaker now than ever, with many of them leaving Russia due to the war.

Putin, like the kings we discussed above, uses the commons against the nobility, to help keep them in check. He does care about his popularity.

So, again, the US is a nominal democracy which is actually a plutocratic oligarchy, and Russia is a nominal democracy which is actually an imperial system without family succession.

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From 2010: The Unvarnished Truth About the US

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On June 15, 2022

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Twelve years ago, I wrote this post. I don’t see anything since then has changed to make it wrong, and I think it’s worth reading still — especially for those who weren’t with me 12 years ago.

I’ve been meaning to write this post for some time, and in light of yesterday’s Supreme Court decision allowing unlimited corporate money into the political system, I think it’s time.

Yesterday’s decision makes the US a soft fascist state. Roosevelt’s definition of fascism was control of government by corporate interests. Unlimited money means that private interests can dump billions into elections if they choose. Given that the government can, will, and has rewarded them with trillions, as in the bailouts, or is thinking about doing so in HCR, by forcing millions of Americans to buy their products, the return on investment is so good that I would argue that corporations have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to buy out government – after all, if you pay a million to get a billion, or a billion to get a trillion, that’s far far better returns than are available anywhere else.

And no politician, no political party, can reasonably expect to win when billions of dollars are arrayed against it.

The one faint hope is that politicians in the Senate will panic, know they have ten months to do something, and ram something through. Of course, that will only be a stopgap measure, until the Supremes overthrow it, but in the meantime, maybe Dems will get serious about the Supreme Court and stop rubber-stamping radical right-wingers like Alito and Roberts.

That is, however, a faint hope.

Given the US’s complete inability to manage its economic affairs, and its refusal to fix its profound structural problems, whether in the financial system, the education system, the military, concrete infrastructure, technology, or anything else, I cannot see a likely scenario where the US turns things around. The US’s problems in almost every area amount to “monied interests are making a killing on business as usual, and ologopolistic markets and will do anything they can to make sure the problem isn’t fixed.”

Even before they had the ability to dump unlimited money into the political system, they virtually controlled Washington. This will put their influence on steroids. Any congressperson who goes against their interests can be threatened by what amounts to unlimited money. And any one who does their bidding can be rewarded with so much money their reelection is virtually secure.

This decision makes the US’s recovery from its decline even more unlikely than before — and before it was still very unlikely. Absolute catastrophe will have to occur before people are angry enough and corporations weak enough for there to even be a chance.

So, my advice to my readers is this.

If you can leave the US, do. Most of the world is going to suffer over the next decades, but there are places which will suffer less than the US: places that have not settled for soft fascism and are refusing to fix their economic problems. Fighting to the very end is romantic, and all, but when you’re outnumbered, outgunned, and your odds of winning are miniscule, sometimes the smartest thing to do is book out. Those who immigrated to the US understood this; they left countries which were less free or had less economic hope than the US, and they came to a place where freedom and opportunity reigned.

That place, that time, is coming to an end. For your own sake, and especially for the sake of your children, I tell you now — it is time to get out.

I am not the only person thinking this. Even before the decisions, two of my savviest American friends, people with impeccable records at predicting the US meltdown, told me that within the next few years they would be leaving.

There’s always hope, and those who choose to stay might stop this terminal decline.

But you need to ask yourself, seriously, if you are willing to pay the price of failure, if you are willing to have your children pay the price of failure. Because it will be very, very steep.

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Who Wins and Loses Because of the Ukraine War?

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On May 16, 2022

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I’m basing this on current trends and what I see as the most likely outcome.

Russia will take about 30% to 40% of Ukraine: the East and the coast along the Black Sea, areas that are generally Russian ethnic or speaking. While they were pushed back from Kharkiv, I think they’ll take the Oblast by the end of the war. Basically, see where Russians are the majority and that’s the land that Russia will feel it can keep and not fight an endless guerilla war.

They make have to take more land than that to force a peace on terms they can stand, but they won’t want to keep it because everyone knows the West is trying to draw them into a long term guerilla war. (Such a war could be won in Ukraine because of the terrain, but doing so would require a lot of killing, deportatons and camps and many years. It’s not worth it for Russia.)

The Russians original goals will not be met, and Finland and Sweden will joint NATO (although they were already quite integrated), so in one sense it can be said that Russia has “lost”. In certain other senses it can be said to win.

But let’s look at the major players, one by one.

Ukraine: the big loser. Unless this war goes far different than I expect (possible and I’ll admit it if it does) they’re going to come out of it a smaller country with no coast, who has lost their industrial heartland and even if the gas is turned back on, they will lose most of the transit fees in a couple years max as the EU transitions away. They will find that the “rebuilding” they were promised is IMF style neoliberalism and the average person will wind up worse off.

Verdict: Disastrous Loss.

The EU: In the win column, the EU should have built up a larger military long ago and will now do so. They will be more unified, at least initially, feeling they have all supported a war and with fear of Russia acting as unifying glue.

In the lost column they have firmly moved into the US satrapy column. In order to move out they would have to create their own army that is not dependent on US built military equipment and that’s the opposite of what they’re doing. (Foolish, because the US is losing its ability to build either ships or combat planes. The F-35 was a boondogle, Boeing has lost its engineering chops, and they recently decided to decommission built ships because they are so bad.)

The increase in price of fuel (US gas is about 50% more expensive than Russian), commodities and food as well as the general inflation shock from the Ukraine war will lead to a poorer Europe. Spending more money on the military will make ordinary people feel worse off and so will inflation. Industry will be badly damaged by increased fuel and mineral prices. All of this will lead to increased political instability and is likely to help the fascist right and possible the more radical left (if the left ever gets its act together.)

Joining the US in such huge sanctions and seizing Russia’s reserves (“frozen”) means that they are choosing to join the US side of the new cold war world rather than being a third pole, and this will eventually limit their trade options, as they, like the US, cannot be trusted with money.

The EU is, overall, likely to come out of this war poorer, more isolated and with increased political instability, but with a much larger military and feeling more unified at the elite and country to country level (at least until and if political instability changes that.)

Veridict: Slight Loss.

The US: The US has gotten Europe firmly back as a satrapy. NATO expands, the Europeans will spend more more on US military goods and buy expensive US gas and oil. The possibility of Europe becoming independent and forming a third pole in the upcoming cold war between the US and China is now minimal, and essentially zero for at least a decade or two.

On the negative side, Russia is now firmly in the Chinese sphere. Because the US’s strategy in the case of a war with China would be to strangle China with a military enforced trade embargo, this is a big problem. Russia can supply China with massive amounts of food, fuel and commodities, making the “choke them out” strategy against China unlikely to succeed. Likewise a friendly Russia means China has a relatively secure flank to the Northwest. There are even signs of Chinese-Indian rapprochement, and though I’ll believe it when I see it, India not joining against China would be a huge boon to China.

Since China is the “real” threat, not Russia, the one country that can replace the US as the world’s most powerful nation, strengthening China’s position is a loss.

The US also will suffer due to inflation from knock on effects of the Ukraine war, and that will cause increased domestic instability. Elites continue to funnel massive money to the domestic security apparatus (police of various varieties, spies who target US residents), however, and elites feel fairly secure, though I think they’re wrong as they’re funneling resources to police who stand a good chance of joining a right wing uprising.

The final major effect for the US is that freezing Russian reserves and encouraging the massive level of sanctions, is seen by most of the world as evidence it’s not safe to keep money in the US lead banking system, or even to trade with them. This has accelerated de-dollarization and I suspect will be seen as the precipitating event of losing reserve status for the American dollar. The world will split into two financial blocs, one centered around China-Russia, the other around the US-EU. The US receives huge benefits from reserve status and from being at the center of the world financial system, and as with Britain after WWI, it will suffer mightily when it loses this position.

My evaluation is that what the US will likely gain from the Ukraine war is less than it has or will lose: dollar hegemony and being the financial center of the world are a big deal, and confirming Russia as a junior Chinese ally makes their main geopolitical rival far stronger.

Verdict: Loss

Russia: Russia has weathered the initial economic storm well, but most EU countries will move off Russian gas and oil. Some of that gas and oil cannot be brought to market anywhere else for a few years (probably 3) until new pipelines are built and while there are customers, they will pay less than the Europeans did.

Sanctions will not cripple Russia, but there are goods like advanced semiconductors and, more importantly, some tech needed for gas and oil extraction, that they will be cut off from. China cannot immediately replace those oil and gas related goods, and they are at least ten years behind in semiconductors (and themselves cut off from some key capital equipment they can’t yet build). That said the oil and gas tech is probably within quicker reach, and Russia doesn’t need the most advanced semiconductors in large quantities so far as I know.

In most economic terms Russia will be OK: they have a big food surplus; they have more than enough fuel, of course, and they can buy almost everything they don’t make from China, who is not going to cut them off; indeed, rather the reverse. India is also rushing to cut deals with Russian businesses. Sanctions will force more import substitution and help overcome the “resource curse”, making it cost-effective to make more things in Russia (if they aren’t overwhelmed by cheap Chinese goods.)

Sanctions will not cripple Russia the way they have many other countries, though they will be felt. Nor will they cause a revolution and if there is a coup it will be because Putin is old now and may be ill with Parkinsons or something else.

In territorial terms Russia likely to wind up larger. They get the industrial part of Ukraine and the coast, they can send water to Crimea (which has been cut off from years, and whose agriculture was devastated as a result) and while many will say they didn’t win the war, etc… people who want to stand up to them will not be keen on “winning and losing 30% of our country.” If that’s victory, it looks pretty bad.

A unified Europe with more countries in NATO and a bigger military is a loss for Russia, and one can expect that NATO will move more missiles and ABMS close to the Russian border, including hypersonic missiles as soon as they have them. In that sense the war is a clear loss: Russia wanted those weapons removed from near its border, and there will probably be even more of them.

In the end Russia will be able to credibly claim it won the war as a war: it took territory and kept it and it’s hard to say that a country which took its enemy’s territory lost a war. That said, there will be a case that it is a Pyrrhic victory, in that there is an economic hit, NATO has expanded, Europe will have a bigger military and so on.

The counter-case is simple: Ukraine was talking about getting nukes and had started shelling Donetsk in what looked like a prelude to invasion. Russia didn’t get its maximal goals, but it did gut Ukraine as a threat and did secure Ukrainian land in what is likely to be a semi-permanent fashion absent an all out NATO/Russia war.

The maximal goals didn’t happen, but in a bad situation Russia may reasonably claim it got quite a bit. As for sanctions, every year there had been more of them, none had ever been rescinded and all the war did was move them up.

Verdict: Marginal victory.

China: Yes, strictly speaking China isn’t involved in the war, but the war affects China greatly. China needs about 10 years to get to a reasonable parity with the US in semiconductors and aviation, the golden technologies of US hegemonic rule. The Ukraine war has made it clear they probably have less time than that, and that the world economic order is likely to split sooner because China is stuck between US demands to support sanctions and its own strategic needs, which require Russia as an ally, or at least a reliable supplier. Russia being decisively defeated or economically crushed would be catastrophic for China, so they must keep it alive and viable.

Still, all in all having Russia unable to sell to or buy from the West is unbelievably good for China: there is no alternative for Russia. If they can’t go to the West they must go to China. India may be willing to trade, but India’s economy is tiny compared to China’s and its industry scarce. China can make almost everything Russia needs and everything it can’t make it’s working on learning how to make. And, as previously discussed, Russia as an ally makes it impossible for the US to choke China out in a war.

Verdict: Victory

Concluding Remarks: Of course all of this based on a model of how they war will go which may not be the case. Perhaps the maximalists in the West are right, and the Russian military is fundamentally incompetent, can’t do logistics to a disastrous degree, and is on the verge of collapse. If you think Russia can’t even win the conventional war, all of this is is nonsense because a definite loss is likely to lead to regime change and possibly even collapse.

Likewise if you think that sanctions will have much more effect than I do, or that China will not integrate with Russia economically, then this is all wrong.

But overall, this war looks like a case where Russia gets a marginal victory; the US and the EU get some wins but their victories are effectively Pyrrhic, and China is the big winner.

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Stopping Sinema and Manchin From Electing Donald Trump

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On October 22, 2021

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So, these two Senators, between them, have managed to absolutely gut all of Biden’s signature efforts, from climate change to helping people in need.

It is days like this where one wishes LBJ was President.

Progressives have tried bargaining with them and failed, repeatedly.

Fine.

The way to handle them is simply to find something they care about and kill it. Progressives also have veto power (in the House in particular.) Then find something else and kill that. Then kill something else.

As for Biden, well, Manchin’s family has a coal company, I bet he cares about that and I bet they’ve been doing things that regulators would find illegal if they weren’t off limits. It’s probably time for the EPA, IRS and every other three letter agency to crawl over every piece of business Manchin does. Sinema seems less vulnerable, but you never know.

Then have a little private chat with them about their futures. You need them both to stop obstructing, and to stay in the party, though Sinema is one term Senator who will lose her next primary.

If you aren’t willing or able to do either of these things (and notice that Sinema and Manchin have killed many things progressives care about) then just shut up and go home, because you either have no power or no willingness to use it.

I would guess that Sinema and Manchin, between them, are costing Biden his second term. People will look back on Trump and notice he actually was able to pass larger bills helping them in their time of need.

I imagine Trump is looking forward to his second term, courtesy of Sinema and Manchin, and those who will not oppose them.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

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