The Ghost of Richelieu reveals the Red Sea’s secrets

The Cardinal’s invitation was scrawled on the crumbling paper of a 1634 edition of La Gazette de France, so I knew at once that it was genuine: “Midnight on the 31^st of January, below the Pont d’Alma” – the Bridge of Souls, above the entrance to the sewers of Paris, where I first held séance with Richelieu’s Ghost more than a decade ago.

I dug my waders out of an old trunk and bought a magnum of Chateau Petrus. With the Bordeaux under one arm and a spittoon under the other, I picked my way through the sedimentary levels of the Parisian netherworld, past the 19^th-century brickwork to the medieval stonework and the Roman ruins deep underneath, until I reached the secret ossuary of the Carthusian monks, its walls lined with stacked bones topped by grinning skulls. 

I poured the Bordeaux into the spittoon. An ectoplasmic blob of indeterminate shape inserted a gooey proboscis into the brass neck. Presently it took on the red color of a cardinal’s soutane. There stood before me the Ghost of Richelieu, humming the tune of “Thank Heaven for Little Girls.”

“Eminence,” I stammered, “why did you summon me?”

“Oh,” said the scarlet shade. “I wanted some Petrus. Now that you’re here, you may ask one question and then go away.”

I ventured, “What should the United States do about Iran?”

“That,” the Ghost of Richelieu retorted wearily, “is the wrong question.”

“What is the right question, Eminence?”

“You have already used up your question, Spengler. In life, you get only one. But, as I happen to be dead, I will allow you another. The right question, Spengler, is: What should the Americans do about the South China Sea? The United States cannot produce enough weapons to fight the Russians, let alone the Chinese. Its Ukrainian proxy has run out of artillery shells, which is as much an embarrassment as it is an inconvenience when the Russians are firing 6,000 shells a day. But Ukraine has run out of air defense missiles, so even Russia’s cheap plywood drones are hitting their targets.”

“Pardon my impertinence,” I said, “but how do you know so much about what is happening in Ukraine?”

“Stupid question! A couple of hundred Ukrainians arrive here every day.”

“But what does that mean for Iran, Eminence?”

“It means that the US military is running out of the weapons to defend its ships, not to mention commercial vessels, against obsolete anti-ship missiles and primitive Iranian drones. The American warships in the Red Sea have managed to defend themselves but not the freighters they were sent to protect from the weapons of the Houthis. And before long they will run out of munitions and will have to sail away, leaving America’s credibility to sink in their wake.”

“Doesn’t China suffer from an interruption of its trade as well?” I ventured.

“China’s trade! Ça alors!” The ghost chortled violently.

“China thinks that it is in a struggle for survival against an American empire that is determined to suppress its economy and thereby bring down its political system. It believes that America plans to begin the dismemberment of China with the independence of Taiwan. It has built thousands of missiles and hundreds of planes and scores of submarines to prevent this. By bumbling into the Red Sea, the United States has given China a gift from heaven. China can observe the performance of American weapons against the missiles and drones that Iran manufacturers from Chinese components and gives to the Houthis – in actual engagements, not Potemkin Village tests staged by the defense contractors. It won’t send its own ships and give the Americans a similar opportunity to observe their performance. A legion of Chinese spies with access to the specifications of all the weapons systems of the US Navy could not produce intelligence of this quality! A year ago, a Washington think tank conducted a wargame with China in which the United States exhausted its supply of anti-ship missiles in a week.”

“America has stumbled into a dress-rehearsal for war in the South China Sea, if I understand you correctly, Eminence.”

“Bingueaux!” said the shade. “The little maritime farce in the Red Sea has nothing to do with Gaza, or Iran, or any other such nonsense. It has a double purpose, to provide China with intelligence on the American navy, and to humiliate the Americans when they at length abandon their deployment when they run short of munitions. Only then will China notice that its commerce has suffered and quietly tell the Iranians to tell the Houthis to stand down.”

“What happens then, Eminence?”

“Everything happens then!” exulted the ghost. “Washington exacted Nibelungentreue from European leaders, who are hanging onto their jobs by their fingernails. The German Chancellor has an approval rating of 19% and the French President has a rating of 24%. They will not long survive the humiliation in Ukraine, and American influence will go the way of the Spanish after the Treaty of the Pyrenees. Washington repeated the stupidity of the Austrians and Spanish, who began the Thirty Years’ War with twice the population of France and the wealth of a global empire – yet I beat them! They dissipated their strength in piecemeal campaigns against my proxies – Bohemia, Denmark and Sweden – until they were exhausted.”

“But, Eminence,” I pleaded. “Will there be war with China?”

The Ghost of Richelieu only cackled, and my head began to spin. My words echoed through the ossuary, louder with each repetition: “War with China … war with Chin a… war with China…” The pounding between my ears became excruciating. “Stop!” I shouted, but the pounding only got louder until I became faint.

I woke up next to an empty Moutai bottle and a copy of the People’s Daily.