My dude Peter Zeihan - a geopolitical strategist out of Stratfor and advisor to the US state department - going IN here. Ouch.
In my opinion, folks convinced of the Chinese rise aren’t very good at math or reading maps. The Chinese financial system is the most overextended in history and every country that has followed its investment-led model has eventually crashed hard. The one-child policy has destroyed China’s future – it is now the world’s third-fastest aging demography. China’s strategic position is horrid – a line of islands parallels its coast, preventing it from projecting power into the sea lanes upon which its economy depends. It is utterly reliant on global energy imports and global merchandise exports – imports and exports which are under the thumb of the U.S. Navy.
The linkage the Americans are about to impose is the opposite of what the Chinese have become used to the Americans doing. It is precisely what the Chinese do to everyone else whenever the issue of Hong Kong or Taiwan or Tibet comes up. The Chinese are going to hate/fear this sort of strategic thinking in the United States because it cuts to the heart of the Chinese political system and strategic policy. And there’s far more to this than Beijing knowing they lack the leverage on the Americans to win. The Americans are in effect putting a dollar amount on their Korean alliance, and the same thing can now be done to any other aspect of American policy – including the China relationship.
The same general issue holds true for the European Union. Most of the European states are in terminal demographic decline, meaning that not only are they deeply dependent upon exports for their economic well-being, there is absolutely no hope their economic situation can be sustained, much less improved, without either the kindness of outsiders or a fundamental reshaping of how Europe defines the terms “economy” and “government.” Considering the European experimentation with those two terms in generations past, that last sentence should make everyone a bit twitchy.
And of course those are just some of Europe’s problem. There are also ongoing and deepening debt, banking, refugee, and political legitimacy crises. With neighboring powers – primarily Turkey and Russia – becoming more aggressive, the European choice is between once-again submitting themselves to American strategic goals, aggressively rearming in an era of terminal economic decline, or going through a regional… re-invention.
That means that either a) the major EU powers find ways outside of EU norms to crush the dissenters, b) the EU gets cut out of American and global markets which throws Europe into a long-lasting depression, or c) the Trump administration breaks the entire EU in order to get its deal with the members that matter. No matter the path, the strategic alignments that have made the EU the vehicle that have made Europe united, at peace, wealthy and free are over.
