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The Key to Peace in Ukraine Remains What It Has Always Been
Neutrality resolves the root causes of the conflict for all the countries involved, and therefore provides a stable and sustainable solution.
Jan 13, 2025
President-elect Trump said on January 9th that he is planning a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin about the war in Ukraine. He said “Putin wants to meet,” because “we have to get that war over with.” So what are the chances that a new administration in Washington can break the deadlock and finally bring peace to Ukraine?
During both of his election campaigns, Trump said he wanted to end the wars the U.S. was involved in. But in his first term, Trump himself exacerbated all the major crises he is now confronting. He escalated Obama’s military “pivot to Asia” against China, disregarded Obama’s fears that sending “lethal” aid to Ukraine would lead to war with Russia, withdrew from the JCPOA nuclear agreement with Iran, and encouraged Netanyahu’s ambitions to land-grab and massacre his way to a mythical “Greater Israel.”
However, of all these crises, the one that Trump keeps insisting he really wants to resolve is the war in Ukraine, which Russia launched and the U.S. and NATO then chose to prolong, leading to hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian casualties. The Western powers have until now been determined to fight this war of attrition to the last Ukrainian, in the vain hope that they can somehow eventually defeat and weaken Russia without triggering a nuclear war.
Trump rightly blames Biden for blocking the peace agreement negotiated between Russia and Ukraine in March and April 2022, and for the three more years of war that have resulted from that deadly and irresponsible decision.
Neutrality would give Ukraine a chance to transform itself from a New Cold War disaster zone, where greedy foreign oligarchs gobble up its natural resources on the cheap, into a bridge connecting east and west, whose people can reap the benefits of all kinds of commercial, social and cultural relations with all their neighbors.
While Russia should be condemned for its invasion, Trump and his three predecessors all helped to set the stage for war in Ukraine: Clinton launched NATO’s expansion into eastern Europe, against the advice of leading American diplomats; Bush promised Ukraine it could join NATO, ignoring even more urgent diplomatic warnings; and Obama supported the 2014 coup that plunged Ukraine into civil war.
Trump himself began sending weapons to Ukraine to fight the self-declared “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk, even though the Minsk II Accord’s OSCE-monitored ceasefire was largely holding and had greatly reduced the violence of the civil war from its peak in 2014 and 2015.
Trump’s injection of U.S. weapons was bound to reinflame the conflict and provoke Russia, especially as one of the first units trained on new U.S. weapons was the infamous Azov Regiment, which Congress cut off from U.S. arms and training in 2018 due to its central role as a hub for transnational neo-Nazi organizing.
So what will it take to negotiate a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine? The answer has been hidden in plain sight, obscured by the rote repetition of deceptive rhetoric from Ukrainian and Western officials, claiming that Russia has refused to negotiate or that, if not stopped in Ukraine, Russia will invade NATO countries, such as Poland or the Baltic states.
The agreement that had Ukrainian negotiators popping champagne corks when they returned from Turkey at the end of March 2022 was referred to by all sides as a “Neutrality Agreement,” and nothing has changed in the strategic picture to suggest that Ukrainian neutrality is any less central to peace today.
A neutral Ukraine means that it would not join NATO or participate in joint NATO military exercises, nor would it allow foreign military bases on its territory. This would satisfy Russia’s security interests, while Ukraine’s security would be guaranteed by other powerful nations, including NATO members.
The fact that Russia was ready to so quickly end the war on that basis is all the evidence an objective observer should need to recognize that Ukrainian neutrality was always Russia’s most critical war aim. And the celebrations of the Ukrainian negotiators on their return from Turkey confirm that the Ukrainians willingly accepted Ukrainian neutrality as the basis for a peace agreement. "Security guarantees and neutrality, non-nuclear status of our state. We are ready to go for it,” Zelensky declared in March 2022.
Neutrality would give Ukraine a chance to transform itself from a New Cold War disaster zone, where greedy foreign oligarchs gobble up its natural resources on the cheap, into a bridge connecting east and west, whose people can reap the benefits of all kinds of commercial, social and cultural relations with all their neighbors.
While Russia should be condemned for its invasion, Trump and his three predecessors all helped to set the stage for war in Ukraine
Biden justified endlessly prolonging the war by stressing territorial questions and insisting that Ukraine must recover all the territory it has lost since the 2014 coup. By contrast, Russia has generally prioritized the destruction of enemy forces and NATO weapons over occupying more territory.
As Russia inexorably occupies the remainder of Donetsk oblast (province) after three years of war, it has still not moved to occupy Kramatorsk or Sloviansk, the large twin cities in the north of that oblast where 250,000 people live. They were among the first cities to rise up against the post-coup government in 2014, and were besieged and recaptured by Ukrainian government forces in the first major battle of the civil war in July 2014.
Neither has Russia pushed further westward into the neighboring oblasts of Kharkiv or Dnipropetrovsk. Nor has it launched a much-predicted offensive to occupy Odesa in the south-west, despite its strategic location on the Black Sea, its history as a Russian city with a Russian-speaking population, the infamous massacre of 42 anti-coup protesters there by a mob led by Right Sector in May 2014, and its current role as a hotbed of draft resistance in Ukraine.
If Russia’s goal was to annex as much of Ukraine as possible, or to use it as a stepping-stone to invade Poland or other European countries, as Western politicians have regularly claimed, Ukraine’s largest cities would have been prime targets.
But it has done the opposite. It even withdrew from Kherson in November 2022, after occupying it for eight months. NATO leaders had previously decided that the fall of Kherson to Ukrainian government forces would be the chance they were waiting for to reopen peace negotiations from a position of strength, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley argued they should “seize the moment” to do so. Instead, President Biden put the kibosh on yet another chance for peace.
When Congress approved another $60 billion for weapons shipments to Ukraine in April 2024, Senator and now Vice President-elect J.D. Vance voted against the bill. Vance explained his vote in an op-ed in the New York Times, arguing that the war was not winnable and that Biden should start talking to Putin.
In explaining why Ukraine could not win, Vance relied heavily on testimony by NATO’s top military commander, U.S. General Christopher Cavoli, to the House Armed Services Committee. Vance wrote that even the most optimistic projections of the impact of the weapons bill could not make up for the massive imbalance between Russian and Ukrainian armaments and forces. Cavoli told the committee that Russia already outgunned Ukraine by 5-to-1 in artillery shells, and that a European push to produce a million shells in the past year had yielded only 600,000.
While Ukraine was desperate for more Patriot missiles to intercept 4,000 Russian missile and drone strikes per month, the U.S. could only provide 650 in the next year, even with the additional funds, due to the massive amount of weapons being shipped to Israel or already promised to Taiwan.
Both Russia and Ukraine have covered up their casualties with propaganda, underestimating their own casualties and exaggerating their enemies’, to mislead their own people, their allies and their enemies alike. General Cavoli testified under oath that over 315,000 Russian soldiers had been killed and wounded. But he went on to say that, by calling up reserves and conscripting new troops, Russia had not only made up those losses but increased its overall troop strength by 15%, and was well on the way to building a 1.5 million-strong army.
Ukraine, on the other hand, has a recruitment crisis, due to an underlying demographic shortage of young men caused by a very low birth-rate in the 1990s, when living standards and life expectancy plummeted under the impact of Western-backed economic shock treatment. This has now been severely compounded by the impacts of the war.
Ella Libanova, a demographer at Ukraine’s National Academy of Science, estimated to Reuters in July 2023 that, with so many people leaving the country and building new lives in other countries as the war drags on, the total population in government-held areas might already have fallen as low as 28 million, from a total population of 45 million ten years ago. It must surely be even lower now.
Based on huge imbalances in artillery shells and other weapons, Ukrainian and U.S. claims that Ukraine has suffered much lower casualties than Russia are frankly unbelievable, and some analysts believe Ukrainian casualties have been much higher than Russia’s. The declining morale of its troops, increased draft resistance, desertion, and emigration from Ukraine have all combined to shrink the available pool of new conscripts.
Vance concluded, “Ukraine needs more soldiers than it can field, even with draconian conscription policies. And it needs more matériel than the United States can provide. This reality must inform any future Ukraine policy, from further congressional aid to the diplomatic course set by the president.”
In his press conference on January 3rd, President-elect Trump framed the need for peace in Ukraine as a question of basic humanity. “I don’t think it’s appropriate that I meet [Putin] until after the 20th, which I hate because every day people are being—many, many young people are being killed, soldiers,” Trump said.
More and more Ukrainians agree. While opinion polls soon after Russia’s invasion showed 72% wanting to fight until victory, that is now down to 38%. Most Ukrainians want quick negotiations and are open to making territorial concessions as part of a peace deal.
In recent interviews, President Zelensky has been softening his position, suggesting that Ukraine is willing to cede territory to Russia to end the war as long as the rest of the country is protected by a “NATO umbrella.” But NATO membership for Ukraine has always been totally unacceptable to the Russians, and so the 2022 neutrality agreement instead provided for security guarantees by which other countries, including individual NATO members, would guarantee Ukraine’s security.
Trump’s peace plan is rumored to entail freezing the current geographical positions and shelving Ukraine’s accession to NATO for 20 years. But continuing to dangle NATO membership in front of Ukraine, as the U.S. has bullied NATO into doing since 2008, is a root cause of this conflict, not a solution. Neutrality, on the other hand, resolves the root causes of the conflict for all the countries involved, and therefore provides a stable and sustainable solution.
There are many things we both disagree with Donald Trump about. But the need for peace in Ukraine is one thing we agree on. We hope Trump understands that Ukrainian neutrality is the key to peace and the best hope for the future of Ukraine, Russia, the United States and Europe, and, in fact, for the survival of human civilization.
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Trump Adviser Admits Seizing Greenland Is About Fossil Fuels, Raw Imperialism
"It's oil and gas. It's our national security. It's critical minerals," the next national security adviser told a Fox News host.
Jan 09, 2025
Amid mounting fears over U.S. President Donald Trump's interest in purchasing or potentially even invading the Danish territory Greenland, his incoming national security adviser made the reasons why quite clear in a Wednesday interview on Fox News.
Speaking with Fox host Jesse Watters about Trump's recent comments on Greenland, Congressman Mike Waltz (R-Fla.), his incoming national security adviser, expanded on the president-elect's Tuesday declaration that Denmark should give the autonomous island northeast of Canada to the United States "because we need it for national security."
Walz said that "this is not just about Greenland. This is about the Arctic. You have Russia that is trying to become king of the Arctic with 60-plus icebreakers, some of them nuclear-powered. Do you know how many we have, Jesse? We have two, and one just caught on fire. This is about critical minerals. This is about natural resources. This is about, as the polar ice caps pull back, the Chinese are now cranking out icebreakers and pushing up there as well. So, it's oil and gas. It's our national security. It's critical minerals."
"And Denmark can be a great ally, but you can't treat Greenland—which they have operational control over—as some kind of backwater. It's in the Western Hemisphere, multiple presidents have tried to bring it into our sphere," Waltz continued, noting Donald Trump Jr.'s personal trip to the island on Tuesday. "As you just saw from Don Jr. landing up there, that people of Greenland, all 56,000 of them, are excited about the prospect of making the Western Hemisphere great again."
Rather than acknowledging Greenland residents' concerns about and opposition to Trump's recent interest—positions echoed by Danish and other European leaders—Watters expressed that, if he lived there, he would prefer to be "on the American side of things" rather than affiliated with Denmark, then refocused on the discussion of natural resources.
Waltz told him that "you're starting to see shipping lanes and shipping coming across the North side, the famous Northwest Passage. That all has to be secured, Jesse. And right now we don't have a single base in the North side of Alaska and we need the Canadians to step up. They're next to last in NATO defense spending."
The Trump adviser also tied the president-elect's desire to take over Greenland to some of his other proposals, such as designating Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations, reclaiming the Panama Canal—possibly by force—and renaming the Gulf of Mexico. Waltz did not mention Trump's pitch to make Canada, whose prime minister just announced his resignation, the 51st state.
"So this is about reintroducing America in the Western Hemisphere, whether that is taking on the cartels, the Panama Canal, Greenland, the 'Gulf of America'—which I love, I'm waiting to see the maps redrawn," Waltz said. "You can call it Monroe Doctrine 2.0, but this is all part of the America First agenda and it's been ignored for far too long."
"Call It Monroe Doctrine 2.0" - Trump National Security Advisor Mike Waltz on Greenland and Panama Canal
Read his full comments - https://t.co/OURdqs2A3r
"The famous Northwest Passage has to be secured... taking on the Mexican cartels, the Panama Canal, Greenland... You can… pic.twitter.com/y3uyuP23Og
— RCP Video (@rcpvideo) January 9, 2025
While Trump and his allies promote a fresh wave of imperialism ahead of the January 20 inauguration, others are highlighting its connections to U.S. history—including political economist C.J. Polychroniou, who addressed how "Trump's second administration seems set on advancing a new version of Manifest Destiny" in a Thursday opinion piece for Common Dreams.
"Imperialism seems to be Trump's new theme, but his overall vision of power is reminiscent of U.S. imperialist attitudes of the 19th century. He seems to believe that territorial expansion of the boundaries of the United States would make the country safer, stronger, and more prosperous," Polychroniou wrote. "Of course, this could all just be a symptom of Trump's arrogance and ignorance, but there can be no denying that imperialism is embedded in U.S. political culture. The U.S. has been preparing for a future global conflict for quite some time now, first with Russia and then with China."
"The truth is that U.S. imperialism never died," Polychroniou stressed, pointing to the nation's massive military budget and hundreds of bases around the world. "Of course, imperialism has taken new forms in the 21st century and the dynamics of exploitation have changed. But imperialism is still about world hegemony and a struggle for the control of strategic resources."
"The U.S. continues to exercise imperial power by using all its available tools and weapons to make the world conform to its own whims and wants as it tries to shore up its declining economic dominance," he added. "But with Trump's return to the White House, and armed as he appears to be with a new version of Manifest Destiny, U.S. imperialism may become more aggressive and even more dangerous to world peace. If that turns out to be the case, the world is headed for an even more violent future."
In a Thursday piece for The Nation also exploring Greenland's "strategically significant" location and the global superpowers vying for more regional control, national affairs correspondent John Nichols highlighted that Greenland Prime Minister Múte Egede of the democratic socialist Inuit Ataqatigiit party and Erik Jensen, leader of the social democratic Siumut movement, have both responded to Trump's comments by emphasizing that their territory "is not for sale."
As Nichols detailed:
Both Inuit Ataqatigiit and Siumut favor independence for the island, which is now a self-governing territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. Eighty percent of the votes in Greenland's 2021 election were cast for pro-independence parties. And Egede now says: "The history and current conditions have shown that our cooperation with the Kingdom of Denmark has not succeeded in creating full equality. It is now time for our country to take the next step."
The goal, explains the prime minister, is to "remove the shackles of colonialism."
"Work has already begun on creating the framework for Greenland as an independent state," according to Egede, who signaled in his New Year's address that a referendum could be held as soon as this year.
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The World’s 4 Legacy Empires Are in Free Fall—What Comes Next?
If France, Russia, China, and the U.S. now give way in a collective version of collapse, instead of one succeeding another, we may come to know a new world order whose shape is as yet unimaginable.
Dec 26, 2024
Some 2,000 years ago, an itinerant preacher, Saul of Tarsus, was writing to a wayward congregation in Corinth, Greece. Curiously enough, his words still capture the epochal change that may await us just over history’s horizon. “For now we see in a glass, darkly,” he wrote. “Now I know in part, but then shall I know fully.”
Indeed, mesmerized by a present filled with spellbinding events ranging from elections to wars, we, too, gaze into a darkened glass unable to see how the future might soon unfold before our eyes—a future full of signs that the four empires that have long dominated our world are all crumbling.
Since the Cold War ended in 1990, four legacy empires—those of China, France, Russia, and the United States—have exercised an undue influence over almost every aspect of international affairs. From the soft power of fashion, food, and sports to the hard power of arms, trade, and technology, those four powers have, each in its own way, helped to set the global agenda for the past 35 years. By dominating vast foreign territories, both militarily and economically, they have also enjoyed extraordinary wealth and a standard of living that’s been the envy of the rest of the world. If they now give way in a collective version of collapse, instead of one succeeding another, we may come to know a new world order whose shape is as yet unimaginable.
An Empire Once Called Françafrique
Let’s start with the French neocolonial imperium in northern Africa, which can teach us much about the way our world order works and why it’s fading so fast. As a comparatively small state essentially devoid of natural resources, France won its global power through the sort of sheer ruthlessness—cutthroat covert operations, gritty military interventions, and cunning financial manipulations—that the three larger empires are better able to mask with the aura of their awesome power.
For 60 years after its formal decolonization of northern Africa in 1960, France used every possible diplomatic device, overt and covert, fair and foul, to incorporate 14 African nations into a neo-colonial imperium covering a quarter of Africa that critics called Françafrique. The architect of that post-colonial confection was Jacques Foccart, a Parisian “man of the shadows.” From 1960 to 1997, using 150 agents in the Africa section of the state’s secret service, he managed that neocolonial enterprise as France’s “presidential adviser for Africa,” while cultivating a web of personal connections to presidential palaces across the northern part of that continent.
As part of that postcolonial empire, French paratroopers (among the world’s toughest special forces) shuttled in and out of northern Africa, conducting more than 40 interventions from 1960 to 2002. Meanwhile, more than a dozen client states there shared autocratic leaders shrouded in vivid personality cults, systemic corruption, and state terror. In that way, Paris ensured the tenure of compliant dictators like Omar Bongo, president of the oil-rich country of Gabon from 1967 to 2009. Apart from exporting their raw materials almost exclusively to France, the firm economic foundation for Françafrique lay in a common currency, the CFA franc, which gave the French treasury almost complete fiscal control over its former colonies.
Just last month, the foreign minister of Chad announced that it was time for his country “to assert its sovereignty” by expelling French forces from their last foothold in the Sahel, effectively ending Françafrique after 60 years of neocolonial dominion.
From Paris’ perspective, the aim of the game was the procurement of cut-rate commodities—minerals, oil, and uranium—critical for its industrial economy. To that end, Foccart proved a master of the dark arts, dispatching mercenaries and assassins in covert operations meant to eternally maximize French influence.
The exemplary state in Françafrique was undoubtedly Gabon, then a poor country of just a half-million people rich in forestry concessions, uranium mines, and oil fields. When the country’s first president was being treated for fatal cancer in a Paris hospital in 1967, Foccart manipulated its elections to install Omar Bongo, a French intelligence veteran, who was then only 31.
As political opposition to his corrupt rule intensified in 1971, Foccart’s office dispatched notorious assassin and mercenary Bob Denard. When a key opposition leader arrived home from the movies one night, “Mr. Bob” stepped from the shadows and gunned the man down in front of his wife and child. The Foccart network also secured Bongo’s rule by training the presidential guard and forming a security force to protect French oil facilities there.
Through rigged elections in 1993, 1998, and 2005, Bongo clung to power while French officials enabled his graft, facilitating more than $100 million yearly in illicit payments from France’s leading oil company. When he finally died in 2009, his son Ali-Ben Bongo succeeded him, inheriting 33 luxury properties in France worth $190 million and a country a third of whose population lived in misery on the equivalent of two dollars a day. But in August 2023, after one too many rigged elections, Ali Bongo was finally toppled by a military coup, ending a dynasty that had lasted nearly six decades.
As it turned out, his downfall would be a harbinger for the fate of Françafrique. During the preceding decade, France had deployed some 5,000 elite troops to fight Islamic terrorists in six nations in Africa’s Sahel region, an arid strip of territory extending across the continent just south of the Sahara Desert.
By 2020, however, nationalist consciousness against repeated transgressions of their sovereignty was rising in many of those relatively new countries, putting pressure on French forces to withdraw. As its troops were expelled from Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso, Russia’s secretive Wagner Group of mercenaries moved in and, by 2023, had become increasingly active there. Just last month, the foreign minister of Chad announced that it was time for his country “to assert its sovereignty” by expelling French forces from their last foothold in the Sahel, effectively ending Françafrique after 60 years of neocolonial dominion.
In those same months, Chad also expelled a U.S. Special Forces training unit, while nearby Niger cancelled U.S. Air Force access to Air Base 201 (which it had built at a cost of $110 million), leaving Russia the sole foreign power active in the region.
Russia’s Fragile Empire
While France’s African imperium was driven by economic imperatives, the revival of Russia’s empire, starting early in this century, has been all about geopolitics. During the last years of the Cold War, from 1989 to 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, with Moscow losing an empire of seven Eastern European satellite states and 15 “republics” that would become 22 free-market democratic nations.
In 2005, calling the collapse of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” Russian President Vladimir Putin set about reclaiming parts of the old Soviet sphere—invading Georgia in 2008, when it began flirting with NATO membership; deploying troops in 2020-2021 to resolve a conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan; and dispatching thousands of Russian special forces to Kazakhstan in central Asia in 2022 to gun down pro-democracy protesters challenging a loyal Russian ally.
Moscow’s main push, however, was into the old Soviet sphere of Eastern Europe, where, after a rigged election in 2020, Putin backed Belarus strongman Alexander Lukashenko in crushing the democratic opposition, making Minsk a virtual client state. Meanwhile, he pressed relentlessly against Ukraine after the ouster of his loyal surrogate there in the 2014 Maidan “color revolution” — first seizing Crimea, then arming separatist rebels in the eastern Donbas region adjacent to Russia, and finally invading the country with nearly 200,000 troops in 2022.
If Senator John McCain was right when, in 2014, he called Russia “a gas station masquerading as a country,” then the rapid switch to alternative energy across Eurasia could, within a decade, rob Moscow of the finances for further adventures.
But perhaps Putin’s boldest move was a little-understood geopolitical flanking maneuver against NATO, played out across two continents. Starting in 2015, Moscow hopped over the NATO barrier of Turkey by setting up a naval base and an airfield in northern Syria and began a bombing campaign that would soon reduce cities like Aleppo to rubble to keep its ally, President Bashar al-Assad, in power in Damascus. In 2021, Moscow skipped over another U.S. ally, Israel, and began supplying Egypt with two dozen of its advanced Sukhoi-35 jet fighters so its airmen could compete with Israelis flying American F-35s. Completing Russia’s push into the region, Putin built upon shared interests as oil exporters to befriend Saudi Arabia’s uncrowned leader, Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Using his Syrian bases as a springboard, his final geopolitical gambit was a pivot across North Africa from Sudan to Mali conducted covertly by a notorious crew of Russian mercenaries called the Wagner Group.
In recent weeks, however, Putin’s geopolitical construct suffered a serious blow when rebels suddenly swept into Damascus, sending Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad fleeing to Moscow and ending his family’s more than 50 years in power. After suffering a stunning 700,000 casualties and the loss of 5,000 armored vehicles in three years of constant warfare in Ukraine, Russia had simply stretched its geopolitical reach too far and no longer had sufficient aircraft to defend Assad. In fact, there are signs that Russia is pulling out of its Syrian bases and so losing a key pivot for power projection in the Mediterranean and northern Africa.
Meanwhile, as NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte condemned the “escalating campaign of Russia’s hostile actions” and its attempt to “crush our freedom and way of life,” Western Europe began ramping up its defense industries and cutting its economic ties to Russia. If Senator John McCain was right when, in 2014, he called Russia “a gas station masquerading as a country,” then the rapid switch to alternative energy across Eurasia could, within a decade, rob Moscow of the finances for further adventures, reducing Russia, now also harried by economic sanctions, to a distinctly secondary regional power.
The Limits of China’s Power
For the past 30 years, China’s transformation from a poor peasant society into an urban industrial powerhouse has been the single most dramatic development in modern history. Indeed, its relentless rise as the planet’s top industrial power has given it both international economic influence and formidable military power, exemplified by a trillion-dollar global development program and the world’s largest navy. Unlike the other empires of our era that have expanded via overseas bases and military intervention, China has only acted militarily on contiguous territory—invadingTibet in the 1950s, claiming the South China Sea during the past decade, and endlessly maneuvering (ever more militarily) to subdue Taiwan. Had China’s unprecedented annual growth rate continued for another five years, Beijing might well have attained the means to become the globe’s preeminent power.
But there are ample signs that its economic juggernaut may have reached its limits under a Communist command-economy. Indeed, it now appears that, in clamping an ever-tighter grip on Chinese society by pervasive surveillance, the Communist Party may be crippling the creativity of its talented citizenry.
Should Beijing launch a war on Taiwan, whether to fulfill its promise or distract its people from growing economic problems, the result could prove catastrophic.
After a rapid 10-fold expansion in university education that produced 11 million graduates by 2022, China’s youth unemployment suddenly doubled to 20% and continued climbing to 21.3% a year later. In a panic, Beijing manipulated its statistical methods to produce a lower figure and began fabricating numbers to conceal a youth unemployment rate that may already have reached 30% or even 40%. The potential power of youth to break the hold of the communist state was evident in November 2022, when protests against zero-Covid lockdowns erupted in at least 17 cities across China, with countless thousands of youths chanting, “Need human rights, need freedom,” and calling for President Xi Jinping and the Communist Party to “step down.”
The country’s macroeconomic statistics are growing ever grimmer as well. After decades of rip-roaring growth, its gross domestic product, which peaked at 13%, has recently slumped to 4.6%. Adding to its invisible economic crisis, by 2022 the country’s 31 provinces had shouldered crippling public debts that, The New York Times reported, reached an extraordinary “$9.5 trillion, equivalent to half the country’s economy,” and some 20 major cities have since leaped into the abyss by spending wildly to give the economy a pulse. Seeking markets beyond its flagging domestic economy, China, which already accounted for 60% of global electric vehicle purchases, is launching a massive export drive for its cut-rate electric cars which is about to crash headlong into rising tariff walls globally.
Even China’s daunting military may be a bit of a paper tiger. After years of cloning foreign weapons, Beijing’s arms exports have reportedly dropped in recent years after buyers found them technologically inferior and unreliable on the battlefield. And keep in mind that, even as its military technology has continued to advance, China hasn’t fought a war in nearly 50 years.
Nonetheless, President Xi keeps promising the Chinese people that Taiwan’s reunification with “the motherland is a historical inevitability.” However, should Beijing launch a war on Taiwan, whether to fulfill its promise or distract its people from growing economic problems, the result could prove catastrophic. Its inexperience with combined arms—the complex coordination of air, sea, and land forces—could lead to disastrous losses during any attempted amphibious invasion, and even a victory could do profound damage to its export economy.
The End of the American Century
When it comes to that other great imperial force on Planet Earth, let’s face it, Donald Trump’s second term is likely to mark the end of America’s near-century as the world’s preeminent superpower. After 80 years of near-global hegemony, there are arguably five crucial elements necessary for the preservation of U.S. world leadership: robust military alliances in Asia and Europe, healthy capital markets, the dollar’s role as the globe’s reserve currency, a competitive energy infrastructure, and an agile national security apparatus.
However, surrounded by sycophants and suffering the cognitive decline that accompanies aging, Trump seems determined to exercise his untrammeled will above all else. That, in turn, essentially guarantees the infliction of damage in each of those areas, even if in different ways and to varying degrees.
By the time Trump retires (undoubtedly to accolades from his devoted followers), he will have compressed two decades of slow imperial decline into a single presidential term, effectively ending Washington’s world leadership significantly before its time.
America’s unipolar power at the end of the Cold War era has, of course, already given way to a multipolar world. Previous administrations carefully tended the NATO alliance in Europe, as well as six overlapping bilateral and multilateral defense pacts in the sprawling Indo-Pacific region. With his vocal hostility toward NATO, particularly its crucial mutual-defense clause, Trump is likely to leave that alliance significantly damaged, if not eviscerated. In Asia, he prefers to cozy up to autocrats like China’s Xi or North Korea’s Kim Jong-un instead of cultivating democratic allies like Australia or South Korea. Add to that his conviction that such allies are freeloaders who need to pay up and America’s crucial Indo-Pacific alliances are unlikely to prosper, possibly prompting South Korea and Japan to leave the U.S. nuclear umbrella and become thoroughly independent powers.
Convinced above all else of his own “genius,” Trump seems destined to damage the key economic components of U.S. global power. With his inclination to play favorites with tariff exemptions and corporate regulation, his second term could give the term “crony capitalism” new meaning, while degrading capital markets. His planned tax cuts will add significantly to the federal deficit and national debt, while degrading the dollar’s global clout, which has already dropped significantly in the past four years.
In defiance of reality, he remains wedded to those legacy energy sources: coal, oil, and natural gas. In recent years, however, the cost of electricity from solar and wind power has dropped to half that of fossil fuels and is still falling. For the past 500 years, global power has been synonymous with energy efficiency. As Trump tries to stall America’s transition to green energy, he’ll cripple the country’s competitiveness in countless ways, while doing ever more damage to the planet.
Nor do his choices for key national security posts bode well for U.S. global power. If confirmed as defense secretary, Peter Hegseth, a Fox News commentator with a track record of maladministration, lacks the experience to begin to manage the massive Pentagon budget. Similarly, Trump’s choice for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has no experience in that highly technical field and seems prone to the sort of conspiracy theories that will cloud her judgment when it comes to accurate intelligence assessments. Finally, the nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, is already promising to punish the president’s domestic critics rather than pursue foreign agents through counterintelligence, the bureau’s critical responsibility.
By the time Trump retires (undoubtedly to accolades from his devoted followers), he will have compressed two decades of slow imperial decline into a single presidential term, effectively ending Washington’s world leadership significantly before its time.
A New World Order?
So, you might ask, if those four empires do crumble or even collapse, what comes next? The forces of change are so complex that I doubt anyone can offer a realistic vision of the sort of world order (or disorder) that might emerge. But it does seem as if we are indeed approaching a historical watershed akin to the end of World War II or the close of the Cold War, when an old order fails with utter finality and a new order, whether redolent with promise or laden with menace, seems inevitable.
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