É de leitura obrigatória esta análise geopolítica da
conjuntura estratégica do sistema mundial. A quem não conseguia perceber de onde emergia Trump e nem ao que vinha, Peter Zeihan e sua equipa explicam tudo. Mesmo se, no fim, estivermos em desacordo, veremos
que a sua leitura valeu bem o tempo nela investido.
This Is How the World Ends
Peter Zeihan, Melissa Taylor,
and Michael N. Nayebi-Oskoui | May 22, 2018
I like to
say that I sell context. It’s all about how seemingly disparate things like age
structures and trade patterns and political evolutions and technological
advances interact. In any such dynamic system there are winners and losers. My
concern is that the global system itself now faces a moment of truth in which
the countries of the world, first and foremost the United States, will fail to
rise to the occasion. Which is a nice way of saying that what I’m really seeing
– what I’m really selling – is the end of the world.
This
world system was put into place 70 years ago. The core of the international
system during the Cold War was the Americans’ support of the global trade and
security order. The Americans agreed to provide global and regional security to
their allies in exchange for deference on security matters. When issues of
economic import rose to prominence, the Americans tended to give way. When
issues of strategic import rose to prominence, the Americans tended to get
their way because that was the deal.
This
arrangement froze geopolitics as previously independent countries were pulled
into a massive, interconnected system because of not only America’s
overwhelming economic and military power, but also the power of the alliance
structure it controlled. This was such a powerful force that it even pulled in
America’s enemies one-by-one and allowed them to rise, fueled on exports. In
the process, the US made the global economy dependent on the relatively free
flow of goods, people, and money while also alleviating the need for the large
militaries that defined the first half of the 20th Century. In other words, the
US and its alliance shifted every global system that mattered for literally
every country in the world.
Everyone
except the US, which managed throughout this to remain isolated economically.
It maintains its own military, largely produces what it needs (though it
imports a lot of what it wants) and remains the largest economy in the world.
With the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, just as the
world began to truly bet their economies on the American plan, the American’s
need for this incredibly expensive system faded. It’s taken the US awhile, but
it finally noticed.
There
is no replacement for US power, economic or military. “Europe” as a concept,
China, and Russia are all in existential struggles and each of them is likely
to lose. There is no alternate reserve currency. There is no one who can react
to any event anywhere in the world like the US can. The Americans are leaving a
power vacuum and we know what happens in power vacuums.
I’ve
been speaking and writing about this approaching “end” for the better part of
the past decade. One of the fun things – and incidentally, one of the things
that helps keep me sane – is that it is all very abstract. I can blithely note
that wars will happen, that supply chains will break down, that the lights will
go out, that famine is an inevitability, but so long as the timeframes are
fuzzy and the locations are over the horizon it is easy to speak and write with
a degree of detachment. This doesn’t affect me, and certainly not right now.
I
think/fear that I’m about to lose that insulation. The end is pretty god-damn
nigh. Exactly how this plays out is still very much up in the air. The blow by
blow will matter immensely in the short and even medium term. So I’m going to
lay out the most recent big events that seem to be giving shape to the Disorder
over the course of several newsletters.
Event 1: The United States withdraws from the
Iran nuclear deal (May 8)
The Obama
administration did not sign the U.S. up to the nuclear deal because it thought
Iran would suddenly become an upstanding member of the international community.
After decades of being the region’s arbiter, the American security apparatus in
specific and the American public in general wanted to get out of the region.
That meant the White House needed to make a choice.
Option
one was to appoint a “winner.” This “winner” would patrol the region, keep the
local powers in line, and in general do what the Americans had done: keep the
region as stable and static as possible.
The
Obama team didn’t like the candidates. Iran was out as a matter of principle.
Saudi Arabia didn’t field a meaningful army, much less a navy. Israel was
potent, but small, and the religious angle meant it could never lead the
region. Turkey may have been capable, but it had unrelated interests in Europe
and the Caucasus and the Mediterranean, and so could never concentrate its
efforts on such a gangly region like the Middle East.
Even
then, there was no guarantee that any “winner” would look out for American
interests unless a large American military presence remained… which would
defeat the point of a sustained withdrawal. And the last thing Washington
wanted was to cause the emergence of a new regional hegemon that was not
consistently pro-American.
That
left option two: establish a regional balance of power so the region would
self-regulate. This balance, ultimately, is what the nuclear deal sought to
achieve: partially rehabilitate Iran, partially reintroduce it into the
international system so that Iran could counter – and be countered by – the
other regional players. In doing so – or so the theory goes – the region’s wars
will be many, but limited.
The
key selling point of the balance-of-power option was that the Middle East has
so many competing centers of power that no single country would ever be able to
gain a significant, long-term advantage. That would keep any of the (many)
expected battles bottled up within the region. It sounds a bit cruel, but the
ongoing civil wars in Syria and Yemen are good examples of the balance-of-power
strategy working because those conflicts keep the region’s powers at one
another’s throats.
Trump’s
withdrawal from the nuclear deal does two things. First, it wrecks the
balance-of-power strategy by gutting the possibilities of the region’s most
active player: Iran. The resurrection of global financial sanctions on Iran
will – at a minimum – halve the country’s export earnings by year’s end. This
means the Americans will need a new strategy for the region. At present, the
Trump administration hasn’t offered anything as to what that might be. But that
is an issue for another day.
From
my point of view, the second outcome of the withdrawal is far more important.
The old/new sanctions on Iran uncaps what has traditionally been the Americans’
most potent economic weapon: secondary sanctions.
Secondary
sanctions are not something the Americans have ever used often or liberally.
They present would-be sanctions busters with a choice: do business with the
sanctioned country (in this case, Iran) or do business with the United States.
Since the Iranian market is roughly 1% the size of the American market, there
may be a bit of whining but for most firms that’s not all that difficult a
decision. And that’s before you consider the long-term demographics of the
world’s major economies.
What
is truly different this time around is the presence of some institutional
infrastructure the Obama administration set up a few years back to force the
Iranians to negotiate the nuclear deal in the first place. Via an exhausting
series of bilateral negotiations, the Obama team got a good hard grip on
something called SWIFT, a system for managing financial transfers between
various players in the international space. They used this newfound power to
apply secondary sanctions to anything that touched the U.S. dollar. Since the
U.S. dollar is the only global currency of exchange (the euro position has been
shrinking for years, and even the Chinese yuan has been backpedaling of late)
the end result was to cut any sanctions-busters out of pretty much all
international trade, even if those sanctions-busters have no direct exposure to
the American market.
I
think the Trump administration fully understands just how powerful of a tool it
just picked up, and that tool is perfect for the job of pretty much everything
else on the administration’s international agenda.
Up
next: Europe Guts Itself.
Event 2 -
Europe Guts Itself (May 10)
The way the
Trump administration withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal has
consequences, but for the most part I’m less concerned about the local fallout
than I am about the ripple effects beyond the Middle East. Let’s start in Europe.
The
response from the European governing institutions to the American withdrawal
from the nuclear deal can be best summed up as righteous indignation.
In
part this is economic: the Europeans were fast to pour investment into Iran
after the deal was codified and are not looking forward to rolling those
efforts back.
In
part it is political: the Europeans are signatories to the deal, working long
and hard to show Europe could contribute to a strategic normalization beyond
their borders. No one likes it when another country simply informs you that
your efforts don’t matter to them and they are imposing their own reality upon
a situation.
In
part it is personal: French President Emmanuel Macron was sure he had a strong
relationship with Trump, and his personal charm offensive a few weeks back was
intended to sway Trump to keep the Iranian deal. Such a public rebuke has to
sting.
In
part it is institutional: bureaucrats are supposed to ignore politics and
strategy when making policy, and the folks within the European Commission (said
bureaucrats) are the ones most cheesed-off by the Americans’ dictating of
Europe’s economic and security policies. Commission officials have been talking
of counter-sanctions against the United States, as well as offering legal and
financial guarantees to firms who still want to do business in Iran.
But
the politicians are singing different tunes, not just from the bureaucrats, but
from one another. Macron has, as expected, been if anything even more strident
than the Commission. On the other end of the spectrum, a few Central European
countries sabotaged a French effort to condemn the Americans for moving their
Israeli embassy to Jerusalem – in part to stick it to the French, in part
because they plan to move their own embassies.
But
as seems increasingly the case, the person who matters most is German
Chancellor Angela Merkel. While lamenting the end of the Iranian deal, she sees
bigger forces at work than “merely” the future of the Middle East. American
policy evolutions/gyrations under the Trump administration have adversely
affected many, but none more so than the Germans.
Germany
is individually powerful, but anything it does to enhance its national power
tends to spark an alliance among its neighbors to tear it down – typically in a
cataclysmic war. The only way the Germans – and by extension, the Europeans –
have ever found around the problem is to bring in an external security
guarantor who forces everyone to be on the same side. That’s the United States.
And
so Merkel has watched in increasing horror as the Americans stop treating the
Europeans as allies, or even partners, but instead as competitors. The prospect
of American secondary sanctions must terrify the chancellor: Germany is the
world’s third-largest exporter and nearly half of German goods are traded
outside of the EU on markets that are managed by the SWIFT system the Americans
plan to use to box Iran in. Even a minor application of American sanctions
would be catastrophic to German economic and political stability.
To
that end Merkel noted two days after the Americans withdrew from the Iran deal
that “it’s no longer the case that the United States will simply just protect
us. Let’s face it, Europe is still in its infancy with regard to the common
foreign policy.”
But
while her words were a call for Europe to deepen its integration, her actions
indicated something very different. If the Americans cannot be trusted to put
Europe first, then the Germans have no choice but to act to prevent a
broad-scale coalition from containing German interests. That means courting new
allies… from beyond Europe. And so after making the comments that Europe needed
to pull together, Merkel didn’t travel to Brussels. Or Paris.
She
went to Moscow.
Now
don’t overreact. I’m not saying that Molotov-Ribbentrop v2.0 is just around the
corner. What I’m saying is that even with seven decades of the most favorable
strategic environment the European continent could have ever hoped for, that a
meaningful strategic and political merging of the European countries still
hasn’t happened. That forces the individual powers of Europe to chart their own
– individual – destinies. For the United Kingdom that means Brexit. For the
Italians that means a new populist government that will veto any effort to
further federalize the EU. For the French that means some serious globetrotting
to build up an independent strategic position.
And
for Germany it means putting some irons in the fire that have nothing to do
with Europe whatsoever. That means economic and energy connections to Russia.
That means at least giving Russian demands a hearing. That means taking Russian
strategic interests into account as concerns the countries between Germany and
Russia.
OK,
maybe that does sound a bit like a Molotov-Ribbentrop redux.
Never
forget that the founding concept of the EU and NATO were to keep the Americans
in, the Russians out, and the Germans down. All three of those pillars are
gone.
History
is moving on.
Next
up: The Chinese discover they have no clothes.
Event 3 -
The Chinese discover they have no clothes (May 18)
The threat
of American secondary sanctions threatens the stability of more than just Iran
and Europe, it also is a mortal threat to the world’s largest oil importer:
China. And it isn’t like the Chinese were not already under some fairly
stupendous pressure.
Two
weeks ago U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer led an all-star team to
Beijing to list out the Trump administration’s trade demands. Lighthizer is an
old hand when it comes to brutal trade talks. He is the trade lawyer who in
essence wrote the legal backbone of what is now the World Trade Organization, and
during the Reagan administration he (repeatedly) brought the Japanese to heel
on a raft of trade and financial issues that the Japanese blame for many of
their subsequent economic troubles.
Lighthizer
brought a small army of officials with him: Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin,
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, White House Economic Adviser Larry Kudlow, and
America’s ambassador to China Terry Branstad. Of them, the only face that the
Chinese consider even remotely friendly was Branstad – Xi’s first trip to the
United States back in 1985 was to Iowa, and he and Branstad have a warm
personal relationship. It was a classic bad-cop bad-cop bad-cop bad-cop
and-this-guy-will-help-you-to-the-hospital-afterword set up.
Lighthizer
and Co didn’t negotiate. They simply delivered some ultimatums.
China
will unilaterally increase its imports of U.S. goods by at least $100 billion.
China
will immediately cease protections and subsidies for any sectors related to its
Made in China 2025 central economic plan, as well as eliminate tariff and
non-tariff barriers on those sectors.
China
will accept that it is a non-market economy under WTO rules (which would allow
the United States to apply protective tariffs against Chinese exports).
China
will accept American restrictions on Chinese investment-led acquisitions in the
United States.
China
will cease all technological/cyber theft as well as cease any and all policies
which aim to force American firms to share technologies with China.
China
will accept American quarterly reviews on all trade policies, and pre-commit to
cooperation with American findings.
China
will submit rosters of goods shipped to third countries so that China may not
do end-runs around American import restrictions.
China
will abandon all WTO cases it has prosecuted against the United States as
regards any of the above issues and preemptively agree to launch no new ones.
The
items are notable for their unprecedented nature in the post-WWII order, their
depth, how they cut to the core of the Chinese Communists government's
legitimacy, how Beijing hopes to develop the Chinese economic and political
space, how China hopes to project economic power internationally, and above of
all, by their deadline – July 1.
In
"normal" relations such demands would all be non-starters and
rejected out of hand. Instead, the Chinese sent their own delegation to the
United States for talks a few days ago to see just how much wiggle room there
might be with Lighthizer and Co. On May 18 the Chinese discovered that the
Americans were actually serious.
As
in Europe, local media in China is all aghast with how unreasonable the
Americans are being. As in Europe, the real decisionmakers are being far more
circumspect. President Xi has been deathly quiet. He and the politburo may have
nationalist aspirations, but they fully realize the reality of global power
ratios.
· The Americans are China’s single-biggest
end-market and the Americans import more than triple from the Chinese than the
other way around. In any tariff v tariff conflict the Chinese just don’t have
much ammunition.
· The Chinese are the world's largest
exporters. Nearly all that trade is dependent upon the US dollar-denominated
and SWIFT-managed trading system. Should China befall American financial
sanctions the China story would crash pretty quickly.
· The U.S. Navy has ten times the power of
everyone else’s navies combined. Since World War II the Americans have used
that imbalance to create a unified global system. Should that commitment fail –
and it is – anyone dependent upon global trade is more or less screwed. Like,
say, China. Making matters worse, nearly all Chinese trade with the rest of
Asia is water-borne and therefore vulnerable.
European
bureaucrats don't get that. American media doesn't get that. But Merkel does.
So does Xi. He has to. Apparently, the U.S. Treasury Secretary has already
threatened the Chinese with a SWIFT cutoff.
The
biggest outcome of the Lighthizer talks to date? On May 20 the Chinese and
Americans indicated they'd stop publicly threatening each other with tariffs.
My read is that now that the Chinese realize the Trump administration is
serious, there's no point to beating the trade war drum because that's a field of
combat the Chinese cannot hope to win on. Best to try other methods of
persuasion.
(On
a side note I’m quite amused that the media is making much hay about how
competing agendas in the Trump administration’s senior staff are weakening the
team’s negotiating strategy, as if that hasn’t been the norm for American
administrations since time began. The person most in tune with Trump’s vision
is Lighthizer. You can safely ignore the rest when it comes to comprehending
the United States’ bottom line.)
If
the Chinese are not going to have their entire economic and political system
shattered by American (in)action, they have to bring something big to the
table. That something would have to be on the scale of the economic demands the
Lighthizer team made. I have no doubt that the talk back in Beijing today is to
come up with strategic topics than can be exchanged for continuing American
largess. North Korea will certainly make the list. Cooperation with the
Americans against Iran – or maybe even Russia – is undoubtedly under
consideration.
But
time is running short, because the American shifts against Iran and China are
only part of a broader pattern.
Event 4:
The World Trade Organization Loses Its Grip (in progress)
Before we
talk about a life without the WTO, we need to review why it exists in the first
place.
The
core of the international system during the Cold War was the Americans’ support
of the global trade and security order in part by stepping back from the role
of global economic hegemon. In exchange, the Americans wanted strategic control
over the alliance. The economic half of the American understanding was codified
in a series of international negotiations in the late 1940s which created the
General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade. GATT eventually morphed into what we
now know as the World Trade Organization. The basic concept is that the United
States – the most powerful economy and military in history – has no stronger
legal standing than Paraguay or Malawi when it comes to economic matters.
The
Americans’ willingness to sublimate their economic interests in exchange for
security control is what enables the global system to work, and the WTO is the
institution that manages the economic side of the global order. It shouldn’t
come as much of a surprise that pretty much everyone plans to use the WTO to
sue the United States on the issue of secondary sanctions.
No
wonder Donald Trump has the organization in his sights.
The
American ambassador to the WTO has made it clear that so long as the WTO isn’t
furthering America’s direct economic interests – a position diametrically
opposed to the original negotiation – the United States will prevent judges on
the WTO’s appellate bench from being replaced as their terms expire. (The U.S.
enjoys a de facto veto over procedural measures like this.) By year’s end the
WTO’s dispute resolution system will shut down due to lack of judges, and that
spells the organization’s functional end.
Now
consider the context:
· In the United States political and strategic
interest in all things international is at the lowest level since at least the
1930s.
· The United States economy is one of the
least exposed in the world to the global system, but the Americans are the sole
country with the ability to maintain that system.
· The shale revolution has made U.S. oil
production cost competitive OPEC producers, and the United States will be a net
oil exporter by the end of 2020.
· The dominant strains of political thought in
both the Republican and Democratic Parties is staunchly anti-trade. Anti-trade
factions have seized control of the White House in 2016, and are highly likely
to dominate both sides of the Congressional aisle after this year’s mid-terms.
· The U.S. dollar dominates the international
trading system. The American administration has discovered it can use that fact
to selectively punish countries for reasons wholly disconnected from trade.
It
isn’t exactly a big step to say the Trump administration might choose to use
secondary sanctions to selectively punish countries for other reasons.
The
WTO works because the Americans have always deferred to it on economic matters.
Remove that, however, and the entire global structure of anything that involves
a border crossing falls back into a combination of survival-of-the-fittest and
how-big-is-your-gun. For a country like the United States with scant exposure
but global reach, that’s pretty good.
For
anyone else, not so much.
And
that’s before the Trump administration really gets going.
Next,
the final installment of our series: Trump unleashed.
Event 5:
Trump Unleashed (in progress)
The United
States has never made foreign policy by committee.
The
Constitution grants the executive broad authority and autonomy to collect
information, come to conclusions, chart out strategies and implement foreign
and military policy. Congress technically has oversight, but the legislative
branch lost interest in and surrendered meaningful control over foreign policy
over a decade ago. Within the executive branch there are no meaningful checks
on the president's powers, with all senior executive staff serving at the
President's pleasure (or, if you prefer, whim).
Trump
has been pruning his executive staff quite rigorously in recent months, and the
foreign affairs team is no exception.
Think
back to the 2016 campaign. In the early months there were 18 people vying for
the Republican nomination. Everyone assumed Trump's campaign was a marketing
scheme, so Trump got 18th pick for advisors. This landed him with
disasters-in-waiting such as Michael Flynn.
Upon
actually becoming president, a number of individuals from more established
interests either saw an opportunity to shape a man who was obviously a neophyte
and/or felt it was their duty to the country to try and advise the freshman
president. This gave rise to what I've called the "Axis of Adults."
These are the men who wanted to make sure the country didn't go off the rails.
The
chair of the National Republican Committee – Rince Priebus – became Chief of
Staff in an attempt to inject some Republican orthodoxy. Marine General HR
McMaster became National Security Advisor with the intent of speaking truth to
power. ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson took over the State Department to share the
insights of corporate America. Gary Cohn climbed aboard to explain the
ins-and-outs of Wall Street.
All
sought to actively shape President Trump's views. All are now gone.
Another
pair already have one foot out the door. Priebus' replacement as Chief of Staff
– General John Kelly – felt the best thing he could do to help the president
was ensure accurate information delivery. That meant, among other things,
taking away the president's phone so he wouldn't ingest bad information... and
so Trump now plans his life without much consulting his chief of staff. General
James Mattis – the Defense Secretary – now seems to be the only person allowed
in the room with an interest in accuracy, context and consequences. It makes
him a bit of a downer in adrenaline-fueled TrumpWorld, and I'd be shocked if he
wasn't excused by year's end as well.
Bottom
line: All the chaos and disruption of the past 15 months has been the result of
a Donald Trump who has been actively held back. Now the world gets to see what
a Trump unleashed – an America unleashed – can do.
The
pace of… everything is about to pick up considerably. Between the end of the
WTO and the dawning exploitation of secondary sanctions, the US is getting the
free use of its other hand - its natural economic power. The Trump
administration is testing America’s strength just as other major powers are
hitting structural barriers, not least of which are demographic. The Americans
are now only one of the few peoples that are repopulating, within a generation
the average American will be younger than the average Brazilian (the Americans
are already younger than the average German or Chinese). At the same time the
collection of people who have repeatedly talked the president out of some of
his more disruptive policies are now either gone or sufficiently discredited in
the president's eyes that they might as well be.
It
isn't so much that any individual actions taken by the Trump administration
will or won't work. It isn't so much that there is or isn't a grand,
multi-faceted plan in the White House. It isn't even that the president does or
doesn't understand the context or consequences of his policies. And it
certainly isn't that this is not what I would do if I were king for a day.
It
is that global population patterns are dependent upon global manufactures trade
to generate income, and global agricultural trade to pay for food from abroad.
It is that the global transport that enables such sectors to work requires a
global order.
It
is that since World War II the United States has sustained the only true global
order that our world has ever known.
It
is that not only is the United States no longer holding the global order
together, it is actively breaking it down and there is no power or coalition of
powers that can even theoretically take its place. It is that a world without
America is a world in which other countries – whether out of desperation or
opportunity – feel forced to protect their own interests. And most are wildly
out of practice, wildly vulnerable, or – in most cases – both. It's that America’s
only significant geopolitical competitors – Europe and China – have become
irrevocably addicted to that order just in time for it to end.
And
perhaps most worryingly, it is that the Americans’ abdicating global leadership
isn't the same thing as the Americans’ abdicating global power, or global
reach.
It
is that the party is over.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário