New World Order

Driving the Chinese and the Russians into each other’s arms might turn out to be the biggest strategic miscalculation of all time.

Halford Mackinder’s World Island

Friday, May 24, 2024 

Bill Bonner, writing today from Dublin, Ireland 

It’s coming... a new world order. 

Politics doesn’t interest us. But mega-politics does. Its deep currents — mostly unseen — carry history along with them. And they guide and drive the Primary Trends in markets, too. 

And this week, something very important happened. We saw the future taking shape. Vladimir Putin went to Beijing. There, he surely received one of the warmest welcomes he has ever gotten. But this was more than just conviviality... it was the signal of a big shift in the power relationships — ‘les rapports de force’ — between the governments of planet earth.  

Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst for 27 years, reports: 

It amounts to a tectonic shift in the world balance of power. The Russia-China entente also sounds the death knell for attempts by U.S. foreign policy neophytes to drive a wedge between the two countries. The triangular relationship has become two-against-one, with serious implications, particularly for the war in Ukraine. If U.S. President Joe Biden’s foreign policy geniuses remain in denial, escalation is almost certain. 

Since the end of WWII, US security experts and geopolitical strategists have taken comfort in what they thought was an eternal animosity between Russia and China. The two titans share a long border and a long history of mutual distrust.  

But now, something has changed. The two old adversaries have embraced.  Now, “it’s two against one,” says McGovern. 

Arnaud Bertrand: 

Wow, China and Russia issued an extraordinary joint statement yesterday, with almost 8,000 words when translated into English, and in many ways more important than the famous "no limits" partnership statement in February 2022.  

Bertrand identifies three important features in the joint Russian/Chinese announcement. First, they openly proclaim a New World Order in which the US is no longer the boss: 

“[T]he status and strength of emerging major countries and regions in the ‘Global South’ [are] continuously increasing” which will lead to greater “multipolarity.”  

The second point is that the statement clearly takes aim at the US, telling it to stop “interfering in the internal affairs of other countries”... and creating “small yards with high fences” among the world’s sovereign powers. 

The third point must send chills of delight and foreboding, both up and down our warmongers’ spines. It calls for much broader, deeper cooperation militarily, as well as commercially: 

... [both sides] will further deepen military mutual trust and cooperation, expand the scale of joint training activities, regularly organize joint maritime and air patrols, strengthen coordination and cooperation within bilateral and multilateral frameworks, and continuously improve the ability and level of jointly responding to risks and challenges. 

Is this just diplomatic blah, blah? It doesn’t sound like it. It sounds more like an alliance between the world’s largest country geographically — Russia — and the world’s most dynamic economy — China. Russia is experienced and capable militarily; it has shown itself able to resist the weapons and tactics of the advanced “West.” But the Russian economy is tiny. The US firepower lobby made full use of ‘bear baiting’ to get more money from Congress. But Russia lacks the commercial strength to pose much of a danger.  

China was a convenient bugaboo, too. It has manufacturing and high-tech capacity up the wazoo. What it lacks is much experience in modern warfare. Since Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan in 1949, China has minded its own business, lately more eager to make money than to make war. And now, with the full cooperation of Russia, it will be able to shore up its defenses and bring its military up to world standards. 

Alfred Thayer Mahan concocted a grand theory in which there were two types of geopolitical force — landpower versus seapower — described in his famous book, The Influence of Seapower on History. The book became required reading, not only at the US Naval War College, but in Japan and Germany too. The Japanese built up their fleet in the 1920s and ‘30s expecting a ‘decisive battle’ with the US. In fact, they got their decisive battle — Midway — and they lost. 

Napoleon Bonaparte seemed to anticipate Mahan by nearly a century. He believed he would beat the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo, because “the English don’t know how to fight on land.” 

He lost too. 

But never before was there a landpower so great, potentially, as the China/Russia partnership.  

For various reasons — mostly venal, partly just stupid — US policymakers made enemies of both Russia and China. The firepower industry needed enemies to justify huge military budgets. Spurred by the neocons, the US rolled out sanctions, tariffs, massive support for the Ukraine, more military spending, threats and sophisticated new weapons.  

In these pages, we’ve focused on how these policies add to US debt and make it impossible to forestall a debt crisis. 

But that may turn out to be the least of the problem. Driving the Chinese and the Russians into each other’s arms might turn out to be the biggest strategic miscalculation of all time. 

Yes, the dreaded Huns, the Han, Tartars, Mongols, Cossacks — all the fierce warriors of the steppes and the Middle Kingdom — are coming together.  Not since Genghis Khan has the Eurasian Heartland been so united.    

And so long, small fry -- Vietnam, Grenada, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan.  Now, the empire of ‘the West’ may have created a worthy opponent.  

Regards, 

Bill Bonner 

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Research Note, by Dan Denning

For paying subscribers, here’s an excerpt from an analysis we published in 2022 about 20th century geopolitical maps. You can read the full analysis here. Look for more on this later today, as we analyze ‘the general laws of the great powers’ and what it might mean for Taiwan, China, and the US in 2024.

Geography shapes history. When we talk about geopolitics, we’re talking about the influence of geography on the evolution and power of regions, Nations, and States. American readers will know this if you’ve read The Significance of the Frontier in American History, by Frederick Jackson Turner. Australian readers familiar with The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes will recognize the observation as well. Napoleon himself once said that, ‘To know a nation’s geography is to know its foreign policy.’

In the 20th century, the point was most memorably made – and has been guiding US and British policy toward Russia ever since – when Mackinder gave a speech to the Royal Geographical Society on January 25, 1904. The speech was called The Geographical Pivot of History.

The speech gave birth to the modern science of geopolitics. Mackinder was one of the first historians to provide a coherent theory on the relationship between geography and power. He argued that geography shapes the destiny of peoples, nations, and empires. The natural seat of power, he claimed, lay in a vast “World Island.”

That World Island is the Eurasian landmass. If you manipulate the map of the world by turning it 90 degrees to the left, as Mackinder did, the World Island comes into focus. It stretches from China at the top, through Siberia, the Steppe, and Russia.