Geopolitics

The reckless adventurism of Trump’s war in Iran

philmullan Changing world order, Geopolitics, Politics, United States

The White House has launched a war with little thought, strategy or rationale.

What do America’s air strikes against the Islamic Republic of Iran tell us about the disposition of this aged global power? Overriding everything else, the war confirms that America retains an extremely powerful military machine, but has a political class that doesn’t know how to act in its country’s interests.

The anxieties of its insular Beltway elite are worsened because it can’t brush off how much its economy’s apparent buoyancy is dependent on foreigners continuing to lend to it. Washington’s under-discussed debt trap is a persistent risk, including for funding its military. America’s objective position in the world, its unprecedented – I employ that overused word with thought – its unprecedented combination of military superiority alongside a hollowed-out industrial and productive base, makes it an erratic and dangerous force in international affairs.

This represents a perilous situation for Americans, as well as for the rest of the world’s population. Another lesson of the war is that in opposing unexplained and arbitrary actions overseas, many voters for Trump show a shrewder grasp of geopolitics and of US national interests than do Trump and his team.

Read the full article here.

The West needs a reckoning with America’s decline

philmullan Changing world order, China, European Union, Geopolitics, Rivalries, United States

Despite Donald Trump proclaiming that a ‘framework of a future deal’ had been agreed on Greenland, it is still unclear how his demands are likely to be resolved. In any case, the fracas over this icy island is about far more than just the unpredictability and narcissism of the White House incumbent.

The Greenland saga has exposed the shortcomings in geopolitical nous of the West’s leaders – Trump included – and just how hazardous this can be for everyone. International flashpoints are more likely to get out of hand when traditional statecraft is replaced by kneejerk, megaphone diplomacy.

This danger is compounded by the fact that world leaders should already be grappling with a perilous situation: a potential Thucydides trap. But they are refusing to do so.

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Could this be the death of the dollar?

philmullan Changing world order, Debt, Geopolitics, Trade

The single most important prop sustaining the US economy today is the global power of the dollar. America’s current relative prosperity (which until recently was dubbed ‘US exceptionalism’) rests far more on the role of its currency than on its tech companies, abundant resources or famed entrepreneurial spirit. Because the dollar is accepted as world money, when the American state and its corporations spend or borrow abroad, foreigners have been willing buyers. This has enabled a seemingly endless flow of cheap money to support the economy at home.

Today, however, this special benefit is looking increasingly vulnerable. And the greatest threat to the dollar’s status doesn’t come from Russia or China or even Europe, but from the US government’s own actions.

Read the full article here.

The death of the West?

philmullan Changing world order, Geopolitics, Politics, Rivalries, Trade

‘There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen’, Vladimir Lenin is supposed to have said. But the globalised world order collapsing within the space of weeks would be momentous even by the Bolshevik leader’s standards. This is certainly what many international politics watchers think is happening.

Bronwen Maddox, director of the Chatham House think-tank, has said that the concept of the West as an alliance of liberal democracies is ‘probably’ over. Michael Clarke, a former director general of the Royal United Services Institute, has been more forthright. ‘The West is dead’, he said. Meanwhile Marc Chandler, chief strategist at Bannockburn Global Forex, has said that Trump’s policies will ‘end globalisation’.

The problem with these obituaries to the West, these valedictions to the world order and to globalisation, is that they assume that a decisive transition has taken place in recent weeks. But this is not what is happening. Rather these declarations express the dawning, and deepening, recognition by the west’s elites of the existing instability of global politics and economics, even though this has been so for some time.

In truth, the geopolitical and economic shifts and fractures that Trump has brought to the fore over the past few weeks have been taking place for years.

Read the full article here.

Trump is hardly the West’s only trade warrior

philmullan Creative destruction, Economic growth, Geopolitics, State intervention, Trade

Enough of the hyperbole about Trump’s tariffs. His tariffs are wrong, but so is the rest of the west’s obsession with Trump-driven trade wars. For a start the hysteria over Trump’s tariffs ignores, and distracts, from just how protectionist most mature economies have become. Protectionism in its many forms impedes the domestic business investments needed for productivity growth. And the parallel fear-mongering about a ‘trade war’ is clouding the bigger geopolitical, as well as the economic issues, at stake today.

Read the full article here.