Book summary: Disunited Nations

China

Living in a land where a rider on a fast horse can reach any location?from?any location within a couple of weeks has consequences.

On the upside,?cultural?unification is easy: the Han emerged as the region’s dominant ethnicity over two thousand years ago. On the downside,?political?unification is nearly?impossible.

Anyone can “sweep.” A local warlord. A competing dynasty. Outsiders can play too, and they do so often. But they have just as much trouble?holding?that territory as any local authority.

The result is a nearly complete lack of political and economic continuity in the Han core, with the Han themselves being just as disruptive as outside forces.

The Yangtze’s physical remove from the North China Plain enables it to thrive in wealthy isolation while northern China is busy devouring its own tail.

The most important spot lies at the river’s mouth: Shanghai—a city that is China’s equivalent of the financial center of New York, the manufacturing center of Detroit, the entrep?t of St. Louis, the energy center of Houston, and the import/export node of New Orleans all in one.

Which somewhat simplifies northern China’s relationship with the often autonomy-minded Shanghailanders: it’s all about the money.

Every bit of this makes Beijing perennially suspicious of Shanghai, and whenever the north manages to unify, Shanghai tends to be the first target of any wider imperial expansion. The city doesn’t fall easy.

Demographically, urban Shanghai alone boasts a population nearly as large as Texas. Strategically, the region’s plethora of foreign connections come in handy when the arrows start flying.

But Shanghai’s best bargaining chip is its wealth. No matter how concerned the northern Han are about national unity, they don’t want to kill the cow.

Even in 2020 after four?decades?of a stilted financial system to help the rest of China catch up, the Greater Shanghai region?still?generates a quarter of China’s GDP from barely more than a tenth of the country’s population.

Upriver at the Yangtze’s head of navigation is the bowl valley of Sichuan.

The bowl’s floor is warm and fertile enough to easily feed its entire population, while its oil and natural gas fields make it one of only three provinces in contemporary China that can fuel their own needs.

Sichuan’s access to the Yangtze enables it to trade with downriver and oceanic partners, making it nearly as wealthy as mighty Shanghai.

Northern China’s beef with Sichuan is threefold.

First, Sichuan is by far the most culturally distinct of China’s Han-majority regions, sporting its own cuisine and a dialect so dissimilar from Mandarin that anywhere but in centrally controlled, propaganda-heavy China it would be called a language in its own right.

Second, Sichuan is?big. So big that more people speak Sichuan as their first language than speak French or German.?

Third, the Sichuanese realize just how distinct and big and economically viable and remote they are from Beijing—a realization that often curses them with delusions of independence.

Sichuan has played host to this or that rebel leader or force right up until modern times.

In the Chinese Civil War of the twentieth century, Sichuan was one of the last spots on the mainland to stand against Mao.

Periods in which the territories of China are both politically unified?and?under centralized Han control are painfully?thin, amounting to less than three centuries of the Han ethnicity’s multi-millennia history.

It’s no wonder that the contemporary Chinese government—the Communist Party—expends so much effort on nationalist propaganda.*

AGRICULTURAL CAPACITY

China faces a quadruple bind: China’s margin of error?starts?razor thin, and not only because its lands are below subpar.

One downside of China’s massive population is that the country has less farmland per person than?Saudi Arabia.

On the surface, it appears China has sufficient oil and natural gas production to maintain domestic production of its fertilizer and fuel needs for its agricultural sector. Not so fast. In any sort of constrained import environment—such as problems in the explosion-heavy Middle East—the Chinese will have to choose what they will let go of. Electricity? Motor fuels? Fertilizers? There won’t be enough to go around, and that forces choices.

China now isn’t simply the world’s largest importer of rice, barley, dairy, beef, pork, fresh berries, and frozen fish by tonnage. It absorbs more globally traded sorghum, flax, and soy than the rest of the world combined. The ongoing import of those products requires both the American Order?and?the ability of the wider world to produce the products in the first place.

DEMOGRAPHIC STRUCTURE

China—like nearly everyone else—experienced a baby boom after the Second World War. It’s understandable; the Japanese went from having won the mainland war against China one day to being forced to retreat from all their gains by the victorious Americans the next. The Chinese got their homes back. People celebrated. Children were the natural outcome.

Twenty years later, the Chinese population had increased from just over a half billion to over 800 million. While Mao wasn’t willing to allow economic reforms, he?was?willing to apply the power of the state to limit population growth.

After Mao’s death in 1976, a group of technocrats did an audit on Mao’s policies. Only two survived. The first was the Two-Child Policy, which was intensified into the more (in)famous One-Child Policy. The second was the diplomatic warming with the Americans. China joined the Order. Which meant China started to industrialize and participate in global manufacturing. Which meant China started to?.?.?. urbanize.

At the same time that the Chinese government was nearly panic-stricken about out-of-control poverty, unrelated trends were pushing the Chinese off the farm and into urban apartments.

Such powerful forces shifted China from having one of the world’s highest birthrates to one of its lowest.

In a way, this has helped China shine. Between 2010 and 2020, the Chinese demographic sported a bulge of citizens in their mid-twenties—people at the peak of their consumption experience. Everyone came to think of China as a boom state, but this was just a one-off.

In the 2020s this cohort will be in their thirties and forties. A consumption reduction is baked in, as is increased dependency upon the American and global markets.

It’s worse than it sounds. All?new births in China are now to the thin generation born under One-Child, whose median age increases from 37 in 2015 to 45 in 2040. In comparison, the United States ages pretty gracefully: from 37.6 to 40.6.

As soon as 2030, China will have four pensioners for every two taxpayers for every one child. By 2050, one-third of the Chinese population will be over 60.

Four decades of depressed birthrates have swapped the children who’d be the next generation of taxpayers and wage earners for a generation of pensioners who will never again pay into the system. China’s 2010s boom was really just the beginning of the end.

Chinese birthrates are now so low, they resemble those of countries that urbanized a?century?before them. China’s immigrant “needs” are an order of magnitude larger than Germany’s, and of the countries near China, only one—India—has the size and age structure to even theoretically meet China’s needs.

4: ENERGY ACCESS

A combination of local factors largely gut alternative generation capacity, in no place more so than China. Persistent humidity-driven haze and rugged terrain and/or densely farmed landscapes eliminate solar power from China’s coastal zones despite their proximity to the equator. Low air pressure due to high elevation, combined with inclement weather, eliminates wind power from Tibet.

Greentech is no solution to China’s energy problems—and problems they most certainly are. China’s external options are, in a word, subpar. It all comes down to relative dependencies.

China’s primary pipe import source is Russia, a country that, since the Cold War’s end, has repeatedly interrupted shipments to consumers to achieve (geo)political goals. If the Russians ultimately choose not to play the energy card against China, China?would be the?only?Russian customer not to feel the sting of that particular whip.

Then there’s an annoying little geographic detail. Russia and China are neighbors, but being next to each other isn’t the same thing as being close. The vast bulk of Russia’s oil and natural gas deposits lie in northwest Siberia—largely virgin territory that’s a startlingly inconvenient five thousand miles from the densely populated Chinese coast.

The operating cost?alone?for transporting the crude would run at least thirty dollars a barrel. Even?that?assumes total security. Any pipe linking northwest Siberia to eastern China would be impossible to defend. A single bomb or missile could easily puncture the line, putting the entire endeavor on the wrong side of pointless.

Russia

The Failed Superpower

Contemporary Russia is heir to an empire. At its height, the Soviet Union was the largest country of the time and the third-largest empire in history. ?But the most relevant fact about the Soviet Union is this: it is gone.

Within a generation or two, the government that runs the territories of today’s Russia will be vastly different, not in that it will no longer be neofascist, but rather that it will not be run by the people we identify today as Russian. The Russian ethnicity itself is vanishing from the world.

And the size.?Oh, the size!? This territory is fundamentally impossible to develop by any means that would be recognized in Europe or North America. It is as if the dry, erratic climate of the Great Plains of North America—from southern Alberta to southern Texas—also stretched east-to-west the?entire?width of the United States.

Bereft of capital-providing rivers, reliable weather, and high-productivity farmland, most preindustrial Russians scraped out near–subsistence level existences. Subsistence farmers require a lot of space per unit of food produced, so preindustrial Russia had the lowest population density of the European nations.*

AND THEN THERE’S THE?REAL?PROBLEM

Russia’s most severe, most unrelenting problem, however, is strategic. Contemporary Russia’s strategic crisis consists of five interlocking problems:

ALIGNMENTS.?The post-Soviet breakup robbed Moscow of not only its satellite states in Central Europe, but also the constituent republics of the Soviet Union itself.

Within two decades, the entire western swathe of the Soviet Empire had joined the European Union and NATO. Their military assets were now in the wrong column.

BORDERS.?Due to its irregular boundaries, Russia is approximately one-third smaller in land area than and has half the population of the Soviet Union, but its external borders are actually slightly longer.

APPROACHES.?Independent Russia’s borders are also much more difficult to defend, particularly from the west. Russia has lost most of its Baltic frontage to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which are now NATO members, while the Carpathians are now seven hundred miles?beyond?the frontier.

MANPOWER.?In addition to Russia’s shrinking demography and loss of the former Soviet territories, rising disease and drug-addiction rates mean that the number of bodies available for Russia’s defense is already down to less than one-fifth of what it was in 1989.

By 2022 the Russian army will likely have shrunk to half of its 2016 size, making it incapable of defending the old Soviet borders, much less the longer, more vulnerable borders Russia has now.

TECHNOLOGY.?Russia’s labor shortages have already forced it to prioritize the aspects of its system it hopes to maintain. Moscow knows it cannot?both?develop new military technologies?and?produce them in sufficient qualities. Moscow had hoped China would help it square the circle: selling advanced weapons to China and then using the proceeds to fund the manufacture of its own.

Russia’s future is bleak. Demographically the country faces inevitable collapse. While that collapse is in slow motion, it has already progressed far enough that, if Russia faces a large-scale invasion from any quarter, its only viable defense option would be its nuclear arsenal. It gets worse.

ONCE AROUND THE BLOCK: CONTEMPORARY RUSSIA’S BORDERS

Fending off this future isn’t an economic problem. The Russians, reasonably, instead obsess about security. The Russian army is shrinking by the day. Combine demographic growth among Russia’s restive minorities with demographic shrinking of the ethnic Russian population and broadscale national economic degradation, and Russia will need more people for its internal security system.

The region’s?real?threats to Russia are the provinces on the mountains’?northern?slopes, on?Russia’s?side of the international border. All are packed with almost universally hostile Turkic minorities

Chechnya today is not functionally part of the Russian Federation. Instead, it is the personal fiefdom of one of the most pathologically violent men on the planet, Ramzan Kadyrov. The younger Kadyrov fancies himself the leader of all Chechens, including the several hundred thousand who live elsewhere in Russia, most notably their greatest extra-Chechnya concentration in none other than Moscow itself.

Kadyrov’s influence via the Chechen mob extends so deeply into the Russian core territories that Putin has on occasion called upon Kadyrov to rid him of this or that meddlesome person.

The Kremlin has few illusions about this. Russia’s top leadership is fully aware that, should Russian forces ever become heavily distracted—say by a war or uprising elsewhere—Kadyrov’s forces will face few problems ejecting Russian power not simply from Chechnya, but from the entirety of the Northern Caucasus.

This is far more dangerous for Russia than it sounds. While the populations of the Northern Caucasus regions live mostly in a ragged strip of plains just north of the mountains, a combination of rain shadow effect and aridity billowing in from the deserts of Central Asia turns the lands north of this strip into near-desert.

Germany

Superpower, Backfired

Contemporary Germany’s biggest problem is demographic. When Germany industrialized, the entire country did so at once—which?means it also?urbanized?all at once.

Which means the German birthrate started?falling?throughout German lands all at once. And it never stopped.

Birthrates might tick up on occasion during economic booms, but with most Germans living in cramped conditions, there’s a big difference between deciding to try for a second kid and a third one.

That’s why Germany?did?have a baby boomlet during a period they understandably don’t enjoy discussing: the Lebensraum era of the late 1930s, when Germany was busy annexing its neighbors and getting physically?bigger. Actions breed reactions.

Germany’s World War II defeat wasn’t simply economically, culturally, and militarily jarring; it physically reduced the size of postwar Germany by roughly a quarter.

The postwar governments of Germany’s neighbors forcibly ejected the Germans living in the formerly German lands. Postwar German authorities almost universally settled these expellees—who accounted for about 18 percent of the population of the combined West Germany and East Germany—in urban apartments with little space for living, much less procreating.

That was then. This is now. Contemporary German social stability is predicated upon a generous, ironclad, cradle-to-grave system of government services. Germany has been able to afford it because of a triple quirk in its demographic structure:

1.????Both East and West Germany enjoyed a brief baby boom between 1955 and 1965. That generation has been working and paying taxes for decades and in the 2010s is at the height of its earning and tax-paying years.

2.????Germany’s Boomers didn’t have many children, circumscribing expenses for services like primary education and childcare. The state instead directs the savings into value-added items, like higher education and infrastructure.

3.????Some eight million Germans died in the world wars, gutting populations that?would?have been retirees in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.

The unavoidable fact remains that, with the exception of the Lebensraum and early-Order hiccups, German reproductive rates have been edging down for sixteen?decades?and are now far past terminal. Birth-based demographic growth in Germany has been impossible for a quarter century. It is about to get worse. Much worse.

As soon as 2030, the young generation entering the workforce will be less than half the size of the Boomer generation retiring. In any normal country, this would spell economic and social failure.

Such ruin assumes that economic trends in Germany are positive. They are not. The quest for efficiency and quality so central to German identity comes at a cost. Like, literally it costs a lot of money to craft top-notch educational, industrial, and infrastructure systems.

All those local and regional German governments try to capture private savings to fund community goals, leaving little in the way of financial resources for the development of?a consumption-centric culture. Pair high production with low consumption, and the only option is to export the difference.*

HAUS OF CARDS

For the Germans, all this dysfunction is part of contemporary Europe’s beauty. NATO bars security competition among the European powers.

No matter how messy or awkward or myopic the EU might become, keeping the field of competition purely economic enables Germany to be physically intact and?industrially dynamic. For Berlin, that’s what matters. That’s?all?that matters.

With wealth rising, stability assured, and the Germans quiescent, many Europeans have come to believe in a heady dream: that after centuries of living in the world’s most blood-soaked lands, they had finally achieved a sort of historical escape velocity.

But with the American abdication of responsibility, that dream dies. Europe is a region of military pygmies who face pressing military challenges.

As in China, German economic growth has been nothing shy of fantastic. As in China, German economic growth has been possible only due to the changed local security environment and risk-free trade links to the wider world that the Order provided. Like China, Germany will suffer hugely from the Order’s end.

France

Desperately Seeking Dominance

France has been the world’s second power for a very long time. After France’s emergence from the breakup of Charlemagne’s empire, Paris seemingly always found itself on the back foot. With every shift in political and technological trends, France just didn’t quite measure up. When the Americans crafted a global system, freezing geopolitical competitions in place, France could only be a cog in the machine.

For?without?the global Order the?current?French economic model is one of the few systems that will still work. Paris maintains reasonably good working relationships with the Americans, the British, the Dutch, the Spanish, the Italians, the Germans—even the Russians.

The mix of positioning and preparation is half of why so many European treaties are signed in Paris in the first place, and?none?of these factors have anything to do with what the Americans are—or are not—up to.

France is emerging as the only significant European power with a sustainable domestic system and no strategic entanglements, leaving it free to shape Europe in its own image—and perhaps do the same in lands beyond. After a history full of coming in second, France’s hour has?finally?arrived.

France’s unique mix of geographies does more than make it special. The configuration of French lands makes it culturally sophisticated, economically aware, technologically advanced, politically robust, and diplomatically essential.

The country that matters the most to France’s rises and falls will?always?be Germany.

The Germans have the power. German core lands are?six?times as large, while German rivers have approximately twice the capital-generation capacity of French rivers.

The Germans have the proximity: the distance from Paris to the German border is less than 250 miles, roughly the distance from DC to New York City. The Germans have the concentration: France may be able to wield power in many places, but Germany is concerned?only?with the Northern European Plain.

If the Germans can unite their disparate regions, there is little the French can do in a straight-up fight but look for white sheets to cut into easy-to-wave rectangles. Managing the German question?must?be France’s top priority.

No matter the era, no matter what French politics look like, no matter who has been in charge in London, the French have always considered the English to be a pain in the ass.

In the coming era, the British will?not?be in a good mood. The French have gone out of their way to make the Brexit process as painful and punitive as possible, and whoever lives at 10 Downing Street is going to be itching for payback.

Under the Order, the Americans would instinctively tamp down such activity to maintain alliance coherence, but those days are gone. In the Disorder, the Brits can draw upon a long imperial experience, rich with examples of how to bring economic, political, and strategic pressure to bear.

MATTERS OF IDENTITY

France’s demographic problem isn’t with the headline data, but instead a level down, buried in the French national consciousness.

To encourage merger, the First French Republic adopted the motto “liberté, égalité, fraternité,” a declaration similar to the defining American phrase “all men are created equal.”

There are more people in France than just the French, and you cannot just invite yourself to join a family. You must be invited. Outsiders are rarely welcomed. There’s some truly ugly stuff under this overturned rock.

France was one of the old empires, and in some places the French had ruled not for decades but for centuries. The merger of imperial thinking with?liberté, égalité, fraternité?meant that the French saw their overseas territories less as colonies and more as extensions of the homeland.

As years turned into decades, none of the former colonies did particularly well. Trickles of migrants making hay of past imperial commitments followed that first batch to France.

Many French (grudgingly) acknowledge that these imperial imports and their descendants are legal citizens, but they?steadfastly, allergically reject the idea they could ever be?French. Even if they were born in France. Even if their?grandparents?were born in France. Resentment runs hot on both sides of the racial divide.

In many ways, the French system takes the two types of racism most prevalent in the United States and applies the worst of both. In the American South, racism takes the form of, “We will mingle, but we are not equal.” In the American North, it is in the vein of, “We are equal, but we will not mingle.” In France, the targets of racism are out of sight?and?out of mind, consigned to ghettos and at the back of the line as regards government services.

Turkey

The Awakening Superpower

The Turks leveraged that geography to dominate everything within a thousand miles. It was a natural progression: secure a physical barrier, metabolize the land it protects, break past the barrier to the next piece of good land, repeat.

The sprawling empire became the largest on Earth of its time, and if a European coalition had not stopped the Turks at the gates of Vienna during the Ottoman surge of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one power would have dominated?all?of Europe and?all?of the Middle East. History would have looked very different.

But the Turks failed. What went wrong? In a word, technology.

About the same time the Turks were laying the groundwork for their first attack on Vienna, the technical limitations that blocked everyone from sailing the ocean blue evaporated.

For the Turks, this was an unmitigated disaster. All the transport limitations that made the Ottoman territories the most powerful in the world—that granted the Ottomans a de facto monopoly on global trade—bled away in a matter of two centuries. Instead of being empowered by their geography, the Turks found themselves imprisoned by it.

Stripped of what made it special, facing more foes while garnering less income and suffering greater exposure, the end was inevitable. The Ottoman Empire, the greatest empire of its era, slowly collapsed over three painful centuries.

By the early twentieth century, the Turks had lost all their Danubian, African, and Caucasian territories. Their World War I defeat ripped away everything but Anatolia and Marmara.

BACK TO THE FUTURE

The Turks’ post–World War I shattering was just as traumatic for the Turks as any empire’s ruin is to its core citizens. Reformers attempted to overhaul a sclerotic bureaucracy that had little to do but absorb resources.

A truly destroyed empire can rarely dwell on its defeats in privacy, shielded from the world, to map its way forward. However, that’s precisely what happened to the Turks after World War I.

The Soviet rise barred commerce and contact with former imperial possessions to the northwest, north, and northeast.?The hostile, arid geography of the Middle East combined with the rise of mutually hostile and/or totalitarian governments that cared little about economic development or trade walled off the south.

Turkey was sequestered, and in its isolation, it obsessed over what it meant to be a Turk.

After seventy years of culture war, the two factions found themselves intermingling and eventually merging in the personality of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Many of Erdogan’s foes see him as the quintessential Anatolian—wanting to use Islam as a pillar of Turkish identity and policy, and disdainful of connections to the West. That’s true. But what is also true is Erdogan’s embracing of many of the secularists’ traits: a rejection of multiculturalism, a willingness to bash heads when elections don’t go the way they are “supposed to,” the idea that Turkey is a strong and independent power.

The new Turkey combines the cultural grandeur, muscle tone, and arrogance of the Ottoman Empire with the religious leanings, disdain for secularism, and distrust of the Western world of the Islamists, and with the authoritarian, chauvinistic, and ethnic parameters of the secularists.

Most significant of all, the Turks are late to the game of becoming an ethnically defined nation-state. That’s extraordinarily dangerous.

When a group starts defining itself in terms of ethnic purity, sketchy things tend to happen.

The French, who started us?all down the road toward fusing our ethnic identities with state power, also started us down the road of the various consequences: the Terror and the Napoleonic Wars. When the Germans and Japanese followed, we got the World Wars, the Nazis, the Holocaust, the Rape of Nanking, and the Bataan Death March.

Mentally and culturally, Turkey today is in a condition very similar to that of late-1700s and early-1800s France, and early-1900s Germany and Japan—flaunting a brash, bold, unapologetic nationalist identity like a teenager on a meth high.?

The Turks are excited about exploring what it means to be a nation-state just as the world is shifting back into empire mode, and the Turks have the perfect topography to be one of those empires. That all but hardwires in Turkish conflict—strategically, economically, politically, and?racially.

Turkey’s entire periphery is in wild motion, and the Turks are about to leap into the storm. Which begs the question: which way will the Turks jump?

Emerging into the heart of the region is the Turkish Question: No one alive has?any?experience in a world in which the Turks are outward looking. No one knows how Turkey defines its interests, and so no one has a clue as to how Turkey will prioritize. The Turks included.

The United States

The Distant Superpower

From an American point of view, all relationships will fall into one of three categories.

GROUP 1: THE COALITION OF THE WILLING (AKA THE ALLIES)

First, consider where there is a degree of common cause. A disconnected and disengaged America in a disintegrating world won’t have any enemies in the traditional sense.

In a world without China, the links to Japan and Korea fade. In a world in which the Americans don’t care about Russia, relations with Germany and Poland don’t matter much.

In a world of shale, Iran doesn’t generate the same degree of heartburn it once did.

There won’t be any serious strategic foes out there until at least 2030—maybe?even 2045. It will take time for countries like Japan and France and Turkey and Argentina to reshape their regions into something the Americans might find threatening.

Any allies in this “common cause” category, therefore, are not going to be standing shoulder to shoulder in the trenches with the Americans in any sort of mass warfare.

If the Americans are mildly interested in the topic at hand, they’ll let their ally do the heavy lifting and relegate themselves to providing technical, logistical, and matériel support. And if the Americans are fired up and decide to act directly, all they need are some temporary basing rights.

Rather than trying to contain or dissuade the Germans, the American goal will be to keep Germany as integrated into American military systems as humanly possible. Part of the rationale is German and economic. It isn’t so much that the Germans lack the Reich stuff, but more that an economy the size of Germany’s preparing for a conflict with a country as big as Russia is going to need a?lot?of equipment, and it’s an open question just how quickly the Germans can retool Volkswagen, Siemens, and Bosch to make tanks, jets, and drones.

The Americans can help fill the gaps?.?.?. and make a?lot?of money on the side.

The more dependent the Germans are on American systems in the conflicts to come—especially on intelligence systems—the less a Disorder-era Germany (or even a post-Disorder Germany) might pose a threat to the United States. Enabling an independent Germany is the best way to constrain it. For the Americans, that is. Everyone else will think this is a horrible idea.

The goal here—very unofficially—is the end of?Russia?as a state. In the history of the American republic, only three countries have ever endangered any of the continental American territories.

The first, the United Kingdom, has already been strategically neutered and will soon be lashed to the American will. The second, Mexico, ceased being a strategic threat after the Mexican-American war ended, in 1848, and is now a partner. That leaves just Russia.

On the opposite side of Eurasia lies?Japan, with which America has one of its most complicated relationships. A big piece of the complication comes down to the difference in development patterns between the Japanese and the Europeans.

There was never a European-style balance of power in Northeast Asia because the ruggedness of the Korean Peninsula, the disunity of the Chinese core, and the island nature of Taiwan and Japan heavily restricted interaction. Even industrialization wasn’t a common experience, but instead, the Japanese preying on the others.

Even at the Order’s height, the Northeast Asians regularly fumed at one another. The Koreas, along with China and Taiwan, still cling to a military standoff so entrenched they remain technically at war.

Japan’s relations with China are beyond adversarial, while even Japan and South Korea—supposedly core American allies—regularly have deeply personal fallouts over history, trade, tech, textbooks, and uninhabited islets.

Unlike the Europeans, the Asian powers never even tried to put their pasts behind them. They lacked the unifying impact of a common American occupation force after World War II.

Economic integration started later and never penetrated as deeply, leaving the Northeast Asians with fewer and less recent common bonds. They never attempted to meld into something new. Driven by feelings of technological, economic, racial, and historical superiority and grievance, there are powerful factions within?all?these countries itching for a fight. And this time the Americans will not be there to stand in the way.

The way the Americans are departing?increases?the scope and?depth of the coming conflict, for they have unofficially anointed Japan to be their successor as regional hegemon.

They have officially urged the Japanese to reinterpret the constitutional clauses that limit military action—clauses the Americans wrote—so the Japanese can take on the Chinese directly. And the Americans have used a mix of intelligence sharing and military-technology transfer to make the Japanese as formidable as possible.

At some point, the Americans will behold what Japan hath wrought and have some very serious second thoughts. Considering the time it will take the Japanese to consolidate their gains in the face of their demographic decline and the time it will take the Americans to shake themselves out of their internal political narcissism, that beholding is unlikely to happen until late in the 2030s.

There are?plenty?of ways that the next chapter of American-Japanese relations could?not?devolve into conflict, but that doesn’t change the fact that Japan is still the most likely candidate to top future America’s list of concerns.

GROUP 2: WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE?.?.?.

The second group of countries the United States will have broadly productive relationships with are not so much allies as neighbors, fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to be located within the Americans’ sphere of primacy, places where the Americans will automatically perceive foreign intrusion as hostile and will meet it in kind.

The first motivation is all about the guns. The United States has always held proprietary views about the Americas, first laid down in the Monroe Doctrine: Eastern Hemisphere powers are not welcome in the Western Hemisphere, and the United States will not only resist their intrusions, but will take action to dissuade them from intruding in the first place.

The second motivation is all about the money. The Eastern Hemisphere is about to become a nasty place. Security concerns will dissuade most Americans from doing business there. Conversely, the upgrading of Monroe means most Eastern Hemisphere powers—whether neo-imperial or not—won’t be allowed to swim in the Western Hemisphere pond.

While only about 13 percent of the US economy is dependent upon imports and 8 percent on exports, the total trade flow in and out of the United States still amounts to about $4.3?trillion?in commercial involvement. Total Latin American?non-commodity trade is another $2.3 trillion. Most of both will by necessity become concentrated in the Western Hemisphere.

The American attitude toward?Canada?is in the process of shifting. Under the Order, Canada held a special position in global affairs.

No more. The Americans’ Cold War mentality is gone. Washington no longer sees value in engaging the world’s many countries multilaterally, so while the need for an “American whisperer” might be higher, the Americans have become mildly offended that anyone might play that role at all. Any special regard the Canadians once commanded, any leverage they might have wielded, is dust in the wind.

Almost overnight, Canada has shifted from the country most likely to get what it wants out of Washington to one of the least. Canada is being reduced to little more than a passive-aggressive American satellite. Even?that?assumes full Canadian cooperation.

Southeast Asia, Australia,?and?New Zealand?are a bit of a hybrid of the common-cause and friends-like-these categories. Relationships with all will be somewhat awkward.

Nearly every state in the region has a vested interest in ensuring that the Chinese rise is halted, but likewise nearly every state in the region has a vested interest in ensuring that the Japanese do not become all-powerful. These are both goals the Americans broadly share, but neither are goals the Americans feel the need to bleed for. All have some of Argentina’s flexibility vis-à-vis the United States born of distance, while being situated in a strategically useful area gives them some very Mexican-like leverage.

But that’s where the clarity ends. Sharing the same geopolitical space with Japan, China, and India can be a precarious existence. Countries in this region?love?the idea of American security guarantees, and as all of them until the early 2000s counted the United?States as one of their top two trading partners, they equally loved the economic possibilities American partnership provided.

With the Order over, these states will still do well. They all can maintain their own internal security, and none of them have meaningful territorial spats with one another. These states will all still do well in the Disorder, but that doesn’t change the fact that the gravy train is over.

Rebalancing?is their word of the era. Rebalancing their local economies away from servicing the Chinese behemoth and toward internal and inter-regional activity.

Rebalancing in a new security environment defined by Chinese weakness instead of Chinese strength. And above all, finding a way to rebalance their relations with an increasingly distant America and an increasingly present Japan. That it is the Americans who are encouraging Japanese boldness just before they tune out makes this region’s diplomatic acrobatics all the more difficult.

GROUP 3: ALLIES FOR HIRE

While the United States and?Iran?have found themselves on the opposite side of many issues, they have yet to find themselves on opposite sides of a?war.

It makes for America’s most curious bilateral relationship, based on some of the hottest emotions but generating some of the fewest casualties. Much of the bad blood is based upon a series of early miscalculations on both sides.

Early in the Cold War, the Americans supported the coup that brought Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to power, and in 1979 elements of the Iranian Revolution targeted American diplomats. It is far from accurate to call such events water under the bridge, but those events?are?over four decades old.

Even more curious is the United States’ legacy relationship with?Saudi Arabia. Few in the American intelligence community would even pretend to claim that Saudi actions in and beyond the Middle East are responsible for fewer American deaths than Iran.

Al Qaeda is an indirect Saudi creation, and the 9/11 attacks alone killed 3,000 Americans. Al Qaeda in Iraq is a?similar outcome of Saudi policy, and its actions are responsible for at least another 1,500 American deaths during the Iraqi occupation. The Islamic State (ISIS) is the most recent incarnation of Saudi actions, and while few Americans fell prey to the Syrian Civil War, ISIS is credited with killing some 170,000 people.?

Iran is unlikely to be seen as a friend, but a sort of cool disinterest will establish itself. Saudi Arabia is unlikely to be seen as an enemy but instead as the distasteful family who runs the next town over.

All at once, things will crystallize for the Americans: the Persian Gulf is?not?our problem, and life will move on. The transactional nature of American foreign policy will kick in, and American relations with the broader region will transform.

Even before economics, distance, and time suck some of the venom out of American-Iranian relations, Israel’s coming evolution means there is no way forward for Israel in which US-Israeli relations?strengthen.

The increasingly racial and religious diversification of the American political scene will only hasten this evolution in perceptions. The rise of American populism, particularly on the political left, has brought the questioning of the ethics of Israeli security policy into the American political mainstream, and there it will stay.

The only country with the capacity to take military action against a worse-than-Apartheid Israel for?moral?reasons would be the United States, and the Americans need to work from their current attachment to Israel to neutrality before they might even theoretically flip to hostility. That mental evolution would take?at least?a decade or two. Israel may become defined by attributes that are normally associated with pariah states, but without American leadership, international institutions like the United Nations are not likely to continue anyway. Being a pariah doesn’t mean what it used to.