Global disorder
The future won’t resemble a Cold War or world war
The world seems to be falling apart. It’s reasonable to ask: “is this all building to something?” At the great risk of making a forecast, I think we’re headed not for world war or another Cold War but global disorder.
The Houthis on Friday offered a clue to where we’re headed. The Houthis, you’ll recall, have been indiscriminately lobbing missiles at passing ships in the Red Sea, causing a supply chain kerfuffle. In response, the US military has been playing million-dollar (billion?) whack-a-mole against the rebels in Yemen, without much success. The Houthis announced, through their official press office, that they will be letting Chinese and Russian ships pass through the crucial Bab el-Mendeb maritime chokepoint freely. All other ships must go around Africa and accumulate millions in extra costs. The world is becoming much “flatter”, with non-nation state actors playing a much larger role and the power of superpowers like the US diminished. Understanding this world requires some brief history.
World War 2
In 1939, the empires of Europe were on the decline and the US was ascendant. After the war, the imperial coffin in Europe was nailed shut and the US was a global superpower. It assembled a global alliance, opened its massive markets, and used its powerful navy to guarantee free trade on the seas to take on the other superpower, the Soviet Union.
Cold War
The US battled the Soviet Union for world domination from after WW2 to 1991. The two sides engaged in many proxy wars, notably Korea and Vietnam. They also battled for economic supremacy, with the Third World being courted by both sides. Then in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. The US had won.
1991
At this point, the US had no peer competitor. With no challenger to sharpen their wits, the US has blundered around the world for the past 30 years playing policeman. There have been highly public calamities, like forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also lesser remembered mishaps like the “Black Hawk down” incident in Somalia and the Benghazi misadventure in Libya.
Age of disorder
That brings us to today with the US pinned down in wars in Israel and Ukraine, concerning rumblings in the Indo Pacific, and rebels with bootstrapped weapons shutting down a major sea lane. In this world, technology like drones, social media, and the internet give power to nonstate actors like the Houthis, Hamas, and ISIS. Exquisite weapons systems like aircraft carriers, advanced fighters, and laser-guided bombs matter less. Great power rivalries between the likes of the US, China, and Russia are still very important, but how the great powers leverage middle powers like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Mexico matter too. The US will compete with Russia and China, but nonstate groups like the Houthis will control their immediate region. If this sounds like the Mafia battling for turf, that’s because it is.
In this world, termed “multipolar” by big brains, what is the US to do? Luckily, your intrepid editor has prepared a series of white papers answering just that question. The following is Ad Astra’s American grand strategy for a multipolar world. Each link below contains a white paper, 2 global policies and 5 country-level strategies.
1. Introduction
2. Global trading alliance network
3. China
4. Russia
5. Middle East
6. Mexico
7. India
News items
1 Mideast regional conflicts in maps
Iranian escalation:
Iran fired long-range missiles targeting what it said were terrorists in Syria, Iraq and Pakistan. Analysts said Iran was demonstrating its weapons’ capabilities to the world, and to the U.S. and Israel in particular. In turn, Pakistan fired back on Iran but was careful to say it didn’t want escalation.
WSJ
2 Candidate deploys AI-chatbot to campaign in New Hampshire
A new super PAC backed by Silicon Valley insiders is mobilizing to spread Dean Phillips’s (D) ideas in an unusual way. This week, they launched Dean.Bot after weighing the implications of using a sophisticated AI tool that can chat like a real person — one of the first known uses of artificial intelligence in a political campaign.
WaPo
https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2024/01/18/ai-tech-biden/
3 Startups boom in the Midwest and Mountain West
Colorado (+115%), North Dakota (+37.7%) and Iowa (+33.7%) saw the biggest jumps in new business applications last year, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
Axios
4 NY budgets billions for migrant crisis
New York state officials said they would direct another $2.4 billion to fund the cost of caring for migrants in New York City, adding to the fiscal toll of a crisis that has overwhelmed the city’s normal network of homeless shelters.
NYT
5 Amazon expands footprint in live sports
Amazon is taking a stake in television networks that broadcast big league sports in some of the US’s biggest media markets, expanding its footprint of live games into regional networks that carry most NBA, NHL and MLB contests.
FT
6 Ecuador prosecutor investigating TV studio siege murdered
Ed. Note: the original story was covered in Issue 26
A prosecutor investigating an on-air attack on a public television station last week has been shot dead in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city.
Al Jazeera
7 In sign of improving US-China relations, giant pandas to return to America in 2024
11/8/2023
the two adult pandas, Mei Xiang and Tian Tian, and their 3-year-old cub, Xiao Qi Ji, were coaxed into individual metal crates on a cloudless autumn morning and driven in trucks to a FedEx Boeing 777 called the Panda Express. Their exit was accorded all the pomp of the presidential motorcades that zip through Washington: police escorts, waving bystanders and trailing journalists. The aircraft, loaded with 220 pounds of bamboo, a veterinarian and two zookeepers, took off for the 19-hour flight from Dulles International Airport to China. There, the bears will join about 150 other pandas in a lush nature preserve in the misty mountains of Sichuan Province.
NYT
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/08/us/politics/panda-zoo-china.html?smid=url-share
1/5/2024
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Friday that the United States and China must insist on peaceful coexistence and transcend their differences like they did when they established diplomatic relations 45 years ago this week. Wang also promised that giant pandas would return to the U.S. — and specifically California — by the end of the year.
AP
