Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel The Castle tells of a palace perched above a Bohemian village. Ineffable emissaries leave and enter in sealed coaches. The townspeople barely glimpse the denizens of the Castle, who govern the town by mysterious means. A telephone connects to the Castle, but the villagers can only speak to whomever might be listening on the other end of the line, without hearing a word of reply. It is interpreted variously as an allegory for the relation of the divine to the human, or as a satire on the Imperial Austrian bureaucracy.
An appropriate ending would be a visit to the Castle, where the inscrutable beings would sit in cavernous offices and complain about their inability to influence events. It would resemble the Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House, where the tyros of the Trump administration are learning how little influence America has in the world after eight years of Barack Obama (not to mention eight years of George W Bush), and how difficult it is to change a game in which America no longer sets the rules.
There is very little the United States can do about the Levant and Mesopotamia, and nothing it can do about the Korean Peninsula – not, in any case, without a long-term effort to change the game.
America has no European partner except for German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the European Union, whether we like it or not. The press chatter about personalities is irrelevant. The problem is not a “Wall Street” group (Gary Cohn, Steven Mnuchin, Jared Kushner) versus the “nationalists” (Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway). The problem is that no matter which adviser has the president’s ear, or whether the president acts on his own impulses, there are no good short-term outcomes.
Among Trump’s inner circle, the one individual whose star has risen fastest belongs to neither the “Wall Street” nor the “nationalist” wing of the administration. That is Wilbur Ross, the most influential Secretary of Commerce since Herbert Hoover and a billionaire investor who rescued Korean and Japanese banks after the 1997 Asian financial crisis. A past president of the Japan Society, Ross is Trump’s key man for Asian trade issues.
Japan is not only an American ally; it is a credible counterweight to China’s rising economic influence in Asia, where the US$100 billion One Belt, One Road infrastructure scheme is winning influence for Beijing among former American allies such as Thailand and the Philippines. There is a great deal of scope for Japanese-American collaboration in Asia, but that is a sole bright spot in an otherwise dismal world picture.
Probing Washington’s resolve
The sarin gas attack in Syria’s Idlib province earlier this month perplexed many America analysts: Why would the Assad regime, and its Russian and Iranian backers, subject itself to global condemnation, just after UN Ambassador Nikki Haley allowed that Washington was not focused on removing Assad? The plain facts, as I understand them, show that the Assad government ordered the attack at the highest level, and that Russia was aware of it beforehand and therefore complicit. US officials believe that they can establish these facts with virtual certainty, which means that the Russians knew that Washington would learn what occurred. I conclude that the Syrian government and its Russian ally used poison gas because they could, and wanted to probe Washington’s resolve.
That required a sharp American response, which came in the form of a cruise missile attack on Syria’s Al Shayrat airfield on April 6. There was no follow-up to the American gesture. Nor could there be.
Iran cannot be forced out of Syria. As I reported on March 14, Iran is arming tens of thousands of South Asian Shi’ites to join Hezbollah in its Levantine International Brigade. It can draw on practically inexhaustible resources of manpower from the oppressed Shia minorities of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and its objective is to replace the Syrian Sunni majority with Shi’ite settlers. It has the backing of Moscow and Beijing, who have to contend with Sunni rather than Shi’ite jihadists in their own territories (and, in the case of China, on its Asian periphery). Saudi-funded madrassas are proliferating through East Asia, as Asia Times warned a year ago.
In Syria itself, the US is caught between its allies in the Kurdish YPG, the most effective force fighting ISIS on the ground, and the Turkish government, which hates the YPG more than ISIS (which it has alternately supported and suppressed depending on circumstances). The “moderate Syrian rebels” supported by the Obama administration are al-Qaeda and al-Nusra front Sunni jihadists with an alternate business card.
If the US hasn’t ceded influence in Europe to Moscow, it is despite, rather than because of, American policy
The meat grinder on the ground is fed by foreign fighters, much like Spain in 1936-1939 when Germany and Russia rehearsed their eventual confrontation in World War II. On the Sunni side, there are Chechens and others from the Russian Caucasus, Chinese Uzbeks, Afghans, some European-born Muslims, and a sprinkling of South and Southeast Asians who take the skills they acquire in Syria back to their home countries. They are fighting the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Lebanese Hezbollah troops, and South Asian Shi’ites armed and organized by Iran. It resembles Europe’s Thirty Years War of 1618-1648, when entire provinces were depopulated by foreign mercenary armies.
To allow the Syrian war to metastasize raises the prospect of a jihad stretching from Birmingham to Borneo and beyond. To stop the war would require an agreement between the US, Russia and China to draw lines between denominational and ethnic zones along the lines of the separation of the former Yugoslavia and to arrange population transfers to stabilize these lines. But Russia is in no mood to talk reasonably to the US about a settlement. It perceives American weakness and irresolution, and wants to see what it can get from stirring the pot a while longer. That is how I read the meaning of the sarin gas attack.
Russia also hopes that the rise of anti-establishment parties in Europe will enhance its influence. Marine Le Pen in France, the Five-Star Movement in Italy, and the anti-Merkel coalition in Germany all promise greater sympathy for Russian interests. President Trump appeared to endorse Le Pen, who polled the second most votes in Sunday’s first round of the French national elections. Fortunately for Washington, the president won’t get what he seems to wish for: Le Pen almost certainly will lose the second round to the pro-European “centrist” candidate Emmanuel Macron.
In Berlin, after an initial surge of support for a Social Democratic candidate allied to the former East German Communist Party, Angela Merkel’s ruling coalition seems likely to remain in power after next September’s national election. If the US hasn’t ceded influence in Europe to Moscow, it is despite, rather than because of, American policy.
Inadequate defenses
America is in what chess players call zugzwang in the Middle East: any move it makes loses. The situation in the Korean Peninsula is even more dismal. The North Korean outlaw regime has thousands of artillery tubes aimed at Seoul, just 35 miles from the border, and could destroy the city in an hour of bombardment without recourse to its nuclear arsenal. The nuclear weapons are there to threaten Japan and perhaps the US after the outbreak of conventional war. America has some missile defense in the region but none reliable enough to reassure the Japanese that one Korean nuclear weapon couldn’t find its way to Tokyo.
There is no way to confront the Norks in the short term, and President Trump’s “armada” sailing toward or away from the Korean Peninsula has only rhetorical significance. Installing anti-missile systems in South Korea also was an empty gesture. They are inadequate to defend against a Chinese attack, and useless against North Korean artillery. The poison toad of Pyongyang can only be boiled slowly. If the US (and perhaps also Japan) introduced a far more reliable missile defense system that neutralized the North Korean nuclear threat, Pyongyang would fear Washington. For the time being it does not. China can help contain it, but only that.
In contrast to his election rhetoric, President Trump is focused on trade negotiations with China with concrete objectives. It is well that the prospect of trade war has receded, but that is cold comfort for the US. China’s burgeoning economic influence has the effect of a virtual tractor beam on a geopolitical death star. From Turkey to Thailand, former American allies are aligning their economies with China, and making strategic concessions as well.
If relative growth rates continue (China at 7% and the US at 2.5%), China’s economy will be double the size of America’s by some time in the late 2020s. The shift in influence will be comparable to the ascendance of America at the expense of Britain between 1900 and 1945, except it will happen in a mere decade.
Japan’s continued influence in Asia can mitigate the problem for a while. Japanese foreign direct investment on the Asian littoral is still larger than China’s, and it is in many ways more effective. Japanese companies emphasize domestic content from countries where they build facilities and generate more good will than the imperious Chinese.
A Reagan-style technology driver comparable to the Strategic Defense Initiative is required to restore American supremacy
China’s ascendancy seems inevitable, minus an internal crisis, and American analysts have grown old and poor waiting for such an internal crisis. But it is far from inevitable. America’s capacity to innovate remains much stronger than China’s. All of the products whose manufacture and trade China now dominates were invented in America, from the microchip to solar cells to flat-panel displays to sensors. China is a giant tortoise creeping past the American hare, which has been asleep for more than 20 years.
America needs a game-changer. In the inaugural issue of the Journal of American Affairs earlier this year, I argued that a Reagan-style technology driver comparable to the Strategic Defense Initiative is required to restore American supremacy in military as well as dual-use technology. Allies such as Israel and Japan might become part of such an effort. China’s elephantine GDP would look less consequential if the content of respective GDPs changed dramatically over the next 10 years. After all, America’s GDP in 1980 contained a lot of rotary-dial telephones, vacuum-tube televisions, manually operated machine tools, mainframe computers, and other soon-to-be constituents of the junkyard. Russia’s enormous GDP vanished into smoke when Communism fell.
Innovation is the most destructive force known to man. If America can restore the parts of its innovation economy that it has neglected during the past 20 years, it will be China’s turn to worry.
The US has over extended their position and is involved in too many expensive ventures. Why? That is the problem. We have no idea why we are fighting the wars? For sure the US cannot afford it. Now the US will try 50-years and 100-years bonds to fund more wars and misery! Kicking the can down the road. The US President should put AMERICA FIRST and try to help Americans, instead of spreading death and misery all around the world.
Europe will gradually pull the plug on their alliance with the US. The migrant crisis and the loss of trade with Russia is taking its tool. Marine LePen might be the first one to leave EU after BREXIT, but also France membership in NATO is dire straits.
Detached from realpolitik……deluded; America is already half-way in the dust bin of history….America has shed too much blood and the bleeding nations will never forgive or forget. Its just a question of time something will give? more violence or it just fades away in history…either way even a blind man can foresee that the west in general and America in particular are in a terminal nose dive.
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LOL. Still talking about the "Sarin gas" when it has already been debunked? It’s a US false flag operation, as usual.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-19/mit-scientist-debunks-false-flag-nerve-agent-attack-did-not-occur
A Reagan style military-R&D surge is very important in the long-term. But, there are steps that must be taken now to push back on and take the initiative from the Iran Axis and others. Three examples of "push-back" would be, 1. Michael "Faster Please" Ledeen’s tactic of supporting Iranian dissidents; US support to opposition forces in Eastern Syria to put pressure on the Iranian line of communication to Assad and Hezbollah; and, designation of the IRGC and related entities as terror groups.
This is analogous to the position of the US in January 1942. It would be a year to 18 months until US conventional forces could be built and fielded to challenge the Axis in decisive campaigns. Nevertheless, the Doolittle Raid, Guadalcanal campaign and Operation Torch, all relatively modest in comparison with later efforts, helped to shift the initiative to the US.
The situation in Syria is nothing more than the effort by the US and its allies to use jihadis to destroy the secular government there. The sarin attack was a false flag.
In Korea, the US could settle this overnight by agreeing to serious negotiations for a treaty guaranteeing peace and denuclearization of the peninsula. It won’t. It needs the tension to create the pretext to encircle China and Russia.
Economically, China is ascendent because the finance capitalists on Wall Street destroyed the domestic economy for short term gain exploiting cheap Chinese labor in a weak China. Well, that labor is no longer so cheap and China is no longer so weak. The US will recover when the US people understand who their domestic enemies are and seriously clean house and socialize finance like China has done.
we are sailing armadas of carriers to korea as hitmen for israel? go drink vodka troll
That’s what Hitler thought. And Hirohito. And Mao. And Kim Il Sung. And bin Laden. And the communists. And… and…. and….
You may mindlessly masturbate to fantasies of America going away, but if you do, you’re in great historical company.
China has aborted its way to a civil war. 100 million males will not react well when they realize the government murdered their wives. To think they are on some sort of ascendant curve is pure quill idiocy.
Rich Kent LOL you sound bruised typical trait of loosers
Ah, Mr. Spengler, I fear your own Agency connections are showing. This column is nothing but an extended apologia for more war, with Korea (new this year), with Russia, with China; all for continued hegemony under the Mackinder theories. Unfortunately Professor Mackinder didn’t appear to know about the national bankruptcy, both financial and moral, to which attempts at world domination inevitably have led in every empire which has attempted them. Oh yes. The intellectual bankruptcy is also total. Adam Walinsky
Danny Ashman Your armada is really going super slow! Why guess they are afraid of the N.Korean subs
Rich Kent America is in decline like any great power it will fade away time will only tell just like Rome
Family is important in China. Maintaining the family name is even more important. With decades of one child policy where the availability of scanning technology enabled families to abort female fetus and select only male child ( to carry on the family name) – the Chinese have planned their own demographic decline.
All these male children- where are they going to find wives for their sons? There have been many instances of abduction of females especially from rural China to be sold to males in other parts of China.
Also consider this: in a nation where it is of paramount import to carry on the family name (thus the centuries of family history) the many millions of Chinese families would be willing to send their only heirs to fight and die in a war against US led alliance? Would the PLA officers and the PLA general staff officers be willing to do that?
I hereby declare that there will never be a shooting war between China and the USA led alliance because every dead PLA soldier (and officer) would mean the end of a family lineage. Thanks to the One Child Policy.
Sarin gas was fake "Moscow demands OPCW explain how White Helmets emerged unharmed in Syrian sarin attack:
http://tass.com/world/942326
25 years ago a coleague characterised America as "a corporation, owned by Jews, managed by Caucasians and staffed with Blacks and Hispanics" At the time, I cringed at the harshness of his description, but it seems now breathtakingly accurate. The "owners" (who by the way are 5 x overrepresented in Congress and 10 x overrepresented in the Senate relative to population) have exported much of the managerial and staff functions to Asia, except for weapons manufacture. That is why in my view Trump got elected. Now he is busy betraying his constituency, with only arms budgets receiving an increase, and he is appealing to Americans with jingoistic war activities overseas. I despair.
How to lead innovation, science, technology … when so much STEM student and worker come from China and other countries ?
Why american prefer to study social or human science ?
Danny Ashman Not to mention; your Armadas were sailing in the opposite direction….Destination – North Korea……ended up in – Darwin Australia….navigation error by a few thousand miles…… LOL
Any global hegemonist or imperialist or colonialist will fail – whether you be Genghiz Khan or Alexander the Great or Napoleon or Queen Victoria. You can fool all the people sometimes, someone all the time but not everyone all the time! Will the Illuminati Cartel wilfully minded to sending the good American people to their doom, please relent and repent and allow the gentle descendants of Pilgrim Fathers to be free in their refuge and sanctuary of stoic bliss again. It was meant to be the Land of Refuge for and of the Free and not a war machine! That is what America First means! Not America No.1 nor America the First among Equals. The Eagle is for flying free not of an Ego!
"Innovation is the most destructive force known to man. If America can restore the parts of its innovation economy that it has neglected during the past 20 years, it will be China’s turn to worry."
I agree, except that China is also starting to innovate, they filed the most patent and copyright last year, they as a society values STEM educaton way more than US students, they graduate more enginners each year, they have send millions of students overseas past 2 decades and most of them have return home to work, China also is on their way to dominate renewable energy and many other sectors.
At same time, Trump is reduce funding to science research and appointed a climate denier to the head of EPA, while cutting budget to all departments except military spending.
First things first, get rid of the cancer has metastasized in US government, aka ignorant politican who has been brought and paid by the special interests, stop this destructive cycle of money influencing politics, stop stupid media that only dumping down the people’s intelligence. Use direct censorship is necessary.
Then only when the people have the correct mindset, you can set the fundation for a US renew, however by the path that we are walking on, US politics is only becaming more polarized, at best Trump loses in 4 years and someone sensible gets elected but he/she still won’t change things around if the core is still rotten from within, but that person might slow down the bleeding. At worse, we are heading towards a full scale civil war in about 20-40 years.
That Marxist commie Obama was a no good president and now we have a strong one. Let’s get to work, and I know America has great Karma compared to the rest of the infantile anemic world. Go USA! Go Trump!
Fear not, trump will still save the day. Assad and Isis are not fighting each other. Think about it. Clean up Syria once and for all, US Bomber Command!
If we review history even from Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt forward we must agree that it was insane for the US to take over the French and British ‘colonies’ in MENA heaping still more millons of corpses on those of the Euro imperialists. There were no crimes that they did not commit in their attempts at occupation. Insane and violently insane are the mildest terms that can be applied as the US now directs an endless slaughter.
Mackinder – still being read closely in Military Industrial Circles I am sure. Empires overstretch and finally implode as the US seems bent to ruins trying to dominate Eurasia from across the Atlantic and Pacific. In Afghanistan the US fights endlessly to controlmineral resources and transportation links it cannot even use but only to deny them from others. Intellectual illness as intellectual bankruptcy is not an adequate erm.
Europe does. Not matter nobody needs influence there. It is now an Islamic caliphate. The only thing that the u.s. needs to do regarding Europe is extort as much money out of them as we can. "Give us 500 billion dollars or the next Islamic invasion is going to be ten times larger and very well armed. The euro weenies will do what they are told because they know that they cannot protect themselves. Sure, the Moslems will kill all of the Europeans soon enough but it is worth a try. Also. Efforts will have to be made to salvage as much art works as possible. As we all know, Moslems don’t like art, especially if represents nudity. European nuclear weapons will have to be disarmed and dismantled.
The F35 , LCS, Zumwalt and Ford carrier are excellent examples of Ameirca’s ability to innovate. Too bad they do not work. LOL!
Your daughter will volunteer!