China's Long Game - Waiting for Trump to Bring Down the United States

China's economic prowess is just part of its rivalry with the United States. This is a standard part of an ascending power taking its rightful place alongside a once-dominant power.

According to research analyst, Laban Yu, Trump's trade war won't stop China's long game.

“China can only conclude that the U.S. is in long-term decline as President [Donald] Trump actively undermines the liberal international order with his tariffs on allies as well as adversaries, contempt for multilateral institutions and belligerent tweets … [China is] betting on American political decay … We believe China will test America’s pain threshold with the belief that U.S. politicians are beholden to interest groups (farmers, retail industry, corporations).” 

Mr. Yu sees the economic pain from an extended trade war as more or less evenly distributed, with the two-sided imposition of tariffs “not punches thrown at the other boxer but head butts which hurt both sides equally.” 

Citi economist Willem Buiter described similar concerns about U.S. politics in “How to Think about Political Risk and the Economy,” 

“Policy uncertainty affecting trade, sanctions, regulation, diplomatic norms, and the strength and independence of institutions is the greater risk going forward. The obstacles to appropriate countercyclical [stimulative] policy when global recession threatens are likely to stem from weak political capacity and will, owing to political fragmentation.”

Globe and Mail market strategist, Scott Barlow, concludes:

There were signs of institutional failure ...almost a year ago – political extremism, pathetically low approval ratings for U.S. congress, and an anti-vaccination movement that showed disdain for medical experts – but there was no clear battleground to test the relative strength of western democracies. 

Trade negotiations might be providing the arena that was missing. A deal that cools tensions could, of course, be signed at any point but Mr. Yu believes, “Even if a deal is signed next week, it is now clear to us that the China-U.S. relationship will be fraught for decades to come.”

You May Not Like These Odds

The odds aren't good. Three times out of four, the result is war. Such is the nature of superpower politics. Over the centuries superpowers have come and gone. There have been 16 instances where a dominant power was muscled out by an ascending power. 12 of those ended in war. It's called the "Thucydides Trap."

Today we're on the cusp of America's uni-polar moment being ended by the ascendancy of China giving rise to a multi-polar world in which America is still prominent but not dominant.

This transition would be perilous in ordinary times only we are not in anything remotely ordinary times. On the world stage there are no end of stressors that are in play and building. The circumstances of the key players are in flux and quite uncertain. They may make a peaceful transition much less likely.

There is the economic rivalry between China and America that will reshape access to markets and already scarce resources. China is already muscling into what had been America's sphere of influence from Asia Pacific to the Middle East to Africa and even South America. Russia is likewise moving to extend its influence into former American preserves. India, well India is just getting started but it is not developing its blue water navy to suit narrow parochial aspirations.

If all this sounds a bit much remember that it wasn't much more than 300 years ago that China and India were the world's two largest economies. They don't need our help remembering what once was or imagining what may be again. China is already there. India's GDP is now almost five times greater than America's as recently as 1980.

Economic and geo-political rivalries almost inevitably manifest in military rivalries. This is also underway.  On a daily basis America's unsurpassed military demonstrates its power but it also demonstrates its weakness. The conflicts since 9/11, called by some the "long war" or "perma-war" have revealed how often all the King's Men and all the King's Horses utterly fail to deliver meaningful victories despite costs running to several trillion dollars.

America still outspends the rest of the world on its military but it gets lousy bang for its military buck. Its military adversaries, China and Russia, get a lot more mileage out of their yuan and rubles. Both Russia and China focus their spending on gaining superiority in a few critical technologies such as hyper-velocity weapons that can neutralize America's numerical superiority. They don't waste their money on trying to match, neutralize or counter every American technology in every corner of the globe. China has focused on A2/AD - anti-access/area denial - to defend their sovereignty and their immediate sphere of influence and hegemony over the Chinese mainland and Asia Pacific.

The key adversaries are also well into a renewed nuclear arms race. Russia has deployed two new submarine designs said to be world-leading technology. It has deployed two new missile systems and new warheads to go with them. The Kremlin is known to have developed a nuclear powered, nuclear armed, robotic torpedo/submarine that is said to have a range of thousands of miles and is virtually unstoppable. The United States is rearming with new submarines and a number of new nuclear warheads including some low-yield, "mini-nukes" that risk lowering the "first use" threshold. Most recently China has announced it intends to develop newer, ultra-quiet technology submarines, new missiles and, of course, new warheads.

China still trails the US in "bleeding edge" technology but defence analysts and senior American officers warn they're catching up faster than anyone had imagined.

There are other stressors some global but some which will also impact and potentially destabilize the key adversaries. Climate change, overpopulation and over-consumption of essential resources are the big three but there are others.

China and the United States face serious problems with sea level rise, droughts and floods. Both countries face threats to fresh water resources and food security. China will have to contend with rivals for access to Himalayan headwaters, India and Pakistan, which are also nuclear armed.

Oh, and did I mention that the United States has a lunatic in the White House? That can't help.

At this point, let's turn to Foreign Policy's Graham Allison who offers five lessons the leaders of these key adversaries need to keep foremost in their minds.

Lesson 1: War between nuclear superpowers is MADness. 

The United States and the Soviet Union built nuclear arsenals so substantial that neither could be sure of disarming the other in a first strike. Nuclear strategists described this condition as “mutual assured destruction,” or MAD. Technology, in effect, made the United States and Soviet Union conjoined twins — neither able to kill the other. 

Today, China has developed its own robust nuclear arsenal. From confrontations in the South and East China Sea, to the gathering storm over the Korean Peninsula, leaders must recognize that war would be suicidal. 

Lesson 2: Leaders must be prepared to risk a war they cannot win. 

Although neither nation can win a nuclear war, both, paradoxically, must demonstrate a willingness to risk losing one to compete. 

Consider each clause of this nuclear paradox. On the one hand, if war occurs, both nations lose and millions die — an option no rational leader could choose. But, on the other hand, if a nation is unwilling to risk war, its opponent can win any objective by forcing the more responsible power to yield. To preserve vital interests, therefore, leaders must be willing to select paths that risk destruction. Washington must think the unthinkable to credibly deter potential adversaries such as China.


Lesson 3: Define the new “precarious rules of the status quo.” 

The Cold War rivals wove an intricate web of mutual constraints around their competition that President John F. Kennedy called “precarious rules of the status quo.” These included arms-control treaties and precise rules of the road for air and sea. Such tacit guidelines for the United States and China today might involve limits on cyberattacks or surveillance operations. 

By reaching agreements on contentious issues, the United States and China can create space to cooperate on challenges — such as global terrorism and climate change — in which the national interests the two powers share are much greater than those that divide them. Overall, leaders should understand that survival depends on caution, communication, constraints, compromise, and cooperation.

Lesson 4: Domestic performance is decisive. 

What nations do inside their borders matters at least as much as what they do abroad. Had the Soviet economy overtaken that of the United States by the 1980s, as some economists predicted, Moscow could have consolidated a position of hegemony. Instead, free markets and free societies won out. The vital question for the U.S.-China rivalry today is whether Xi’s Leninist-Mandarin authoritarian government and economy proves superior to American capitalism and democracy. 

Maintaining China’s extraordinary economic growth, which provides legitimacy for sweeping party rule, is a high-wire act that will only get harder. Meanwhile, in the United States, sluggish growth is the new normal. And American democracy is exhibiting worrisome symptoms: declining civic engagement, institutionalized corruption, and widespread lack of trust in politics. Leaders in both nations would do well to prioritize their domestic challenges. 

Lesson 5: Hope is not a strategy. 

Over a four-year period from George Kennan’s famous “Long Telegram,” which identified the Soviet threat, to Paul Nitze’s NSC-68, which provided the road map for countering this threat, U.S. officials developed a winning Cold War strategy: contain Soviet expansion, deter the Soviets from acting against vital American interests, and undermine both the idea and the practice of communism. In contrast, 

America’s China policy today consists of grand, politically appealing aspirations that serious strategists know are unachievable. In attempting to maintain the post-World War II Pax Americana during a fundamental shift in the economic balance of power toward China, the United States’ real strategy, truth be told, is hope. 

In today’s Washington, strategic thinking is often marginalized. Even Barack Obama, one of America’s smartest presidents, told the New Yorker that, given the pace of change today, “I don’t really even need George Kennan.” Coherent strategy does not guarantee success, but its absence is a reliable route to failure.

Thucydides’s Trap teaches us that on the historical record, war is more likely than not. From Trump’s campaign claims that China is “ripping us off” to recent announcements about his “great chemistry” with Xi, he has accelerated the harrowing roller coaster of U.S.-China relations. 

If the president and his national security team hope to avoid catastrophic war with China while protecting and advancing American national interests, they must closely study the lessons of the Cold War.

All good advice, especially the last part, except that Trump doesn't care to study anything - the man doesn't read - and he's surrounded himself with dangerous ideologues, people like Pompeo and Bolton, real freaks who think Dr. Strangelove was a documentary, in fact their favourite.

Enron's Patsy. How Kinder Morgan Played Trudeau and Canada for Suckers.

Steve Kean knows how to play hardball from his days as senior vice president of government affairs with the long defunct Enron corporation. Now, on behalf of the son of Enron, Kinder Morgan, Kean is using those skills to roll Justin Trudeau, Bill Morneau and the people of Canada. The Tyee's Andrew Nikiforuk casts the bones and reads the entrails. It's not a pretty sight.

The Trudeau federal government has made itself a pathetic hostage to a Texas-based pipeline company known for its cheapness and debt. 

The economic sleaziness of the drama, which should upset most Canadians, has been largely ignored by the financial mainstream press. 

But here’s the rub: Kinder Morgan doesn’t have the money it needs to twin a high-risk $7.4 billion pipeline, and has been looking for a way out for some time. 

Meanwhile, it has blamed entirely predictable and expected project delays on the B.C. government as well as First Nations and municipal resistance to the pipeline.

But then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a smiling hostage, walked into the room and declared the construction of the megaproject a matter of “national interest” — without so much as an independent cost-benefit analysis.

On April 8, Kinder Morgan grabbed Trudeau by his bituminous lapels and delivered a Texas-sized ransom note: bail us out or we’ll walk away from your stinking national interest on May 31.

...money and not political uncertainty — a reliable companion of the project from the first day of public hearings — is the central issue here.
Faced with the iron law of megaprojects (“over schedule and over budget and over and over again”), Kinder Morgan simply wants to walk away from an unviable project whose costs have ballooned from $5.4 billion to more than $7.4 billion. 

The con game has been unfolding for several years now. 

In 2011 Kinder Morgan, whose early business mantra was “Cheap, Cheap, Cheap,” finagled with the National Energy Board to get a special fee — paid by oil producers no less — to help cover the costs for regulatory filings on a carbon risky pipeline expansion. 

With other people’s money — about $286 million according to economist Robyn Allan — it then proposed to twin an existing 65-year-old pipeline across the Rocky Mountains to move 500,000 barrels of heavy oil to the coast. 

In 2013 the U.S. company promised the National Energy Board that it would happily finance the project with 100 per cent of its own money.

Kaching, kaching, kaching

At the time the company estimated that the project would cost a modest $5.4 billion. 

Today that figure has now ballooned to $7.4 billion, and economists such as Robyn Allan predict the project can’t be completed for less than $9 billion.

Ottawa's Gross Ineptitude

If the federal government really wanted to act in the national interest it could insist that companies upgrade bitumen into a higher value petroleum product that doesn’t require imported diluent (costly natural gas liquids) to transport it through a pipeline. 

Such a move would create high-paying refining jobs and free up pipeline capacity monopolized by the transport of 600,000 barrels of diluent now needed to move 1.6 million barrels of raw bitumen a day.
But the National Energy Board, a captured regulator, never looked at these alternatives and never questioned Kinder Morgan’s ability to finance the project, even though a sharp Wall Street analyst aptly described the firm in 2013 as “a house of cards.” 

Nor did Canada’s pathetic energy regulator challenge bogus claims made by Kinder Morgan that heavy oil would fetch higher prices in Asian markets — a complete falsehood. 

The federal government, however, did appoint a Kinder Morgan consultant to the NEB board during the scandal-plagued regulatory hearings to highlight their bias.

Dupes and Saps, Making Suckers of Us All

After failing to raise money in U.S. markets — a clear signal that North American investors didn’t regard the project as a smart idea — the Houston firm used its Canadian subsidiary to raise a skimpy $1.7 billion in 2017. 

But those monies didn’t go to the pipeline expansion project. Instead Kinder Morgan used it to pay off more U.S. debt. 

Although Kinder Morgan Canada arranged $5.5 billion in construction facility loans from Canadian banks, that still left the subsidiary with a $2 billion equity hole to fill. 

Rather than admit that it can’t raise the money and face a financial drubbing, Kinder Morgan shrewdly blamed long-standing and predictable public opposition from First Nations, the City of Burnaby and the government of British Columbia as a project stopper. 

But it cleverly waited for the Canadian government, a modern shill for oil lobbyists, to first promise a $1.5 billion ocean spill response subsidy and then declare the project a matter of “national interest.” 

The Trudeau government, which promised the Chinese Communists an energy pipeline to the coast as part of any free trade deal, has now signalled to investors that if the marketplace won’t fund a foolhardy project then Canadian taxpayers will be sacrificed instead.

...Whenever you scratch a megaproject, says the Oxford business professor Bent Flyvbjerg, you’ll likely find a toxic brew of underestimated costs, inflated revenues, discounted environmental impacts and overvalued benefits.  

That description fits Kinder Morgan’s pipeline proposal better than a speedy downhill weld. 

And now a brain-dead federal government with unhealthy commitments to China wants to rescue a truly bad megaproject championed by the bastard child of Enron and a bunch of climate-denying Texans. 

The result will be an unprecedented disaster for Canadian taxpayers.

I've Got an Idea to Rescue Justin From His Slump

Unfair or not, Justin Trudeau has taken a hit in the public's mind over his pretty clumsy trip to India. With JT et famille sporting an elaborate wardrobe of Bollywood's best fashions, the Indian press took the piss out of him pretty relentlessly. The local scribblers piled on.

Now Trudeau's approval numbers have dropped to within spitting distance of Tory leader, Andrew Scheer's. That's Andrew "Chuckles" Scheer people, a guy with all the charisma of a recycled catheter.

Maybe JT should consider upping his game. He could start by reversing himself and honouring a major campaign promise - electoral reform. I would like it even better if he went for electoral reform and pipelines but that's probably too much to ask. 

Trudeau promised that 2015 would be our last first-past-the-post election. In short order he reneged on that committment but his "can't" sounded more like "won't."  His claim that it wouldn't work here, even though it works elsewhere, was utterly unconvincing. We would even accept the preferential ballot option if he insisted. Just do it.

Or maybe Justin can change course. Maybe he should transform himself from just another free trade mule into a Renaissance Man befitting of his legendary father. (full disclosure. what follows is taken from an email I wrote to a fellow blogger this morning)

I have long argued that Canada needs some serious redecorating. Ever since George H.W. Bush started this “coalition of the willing” business, America has treated certain allies, Canada included, as its de facto Foreign Legion.  Desert Storm was, arguably, a good cause – driving Iraq out of Kuwait. Kosovo – meh. Afghanistan, well we all lost our minds at the 9/11 attacks streamed live into our livingrooms. We even bent the rules around Article 5 in that, 1) – the US never attacked by Afghanistan, and 2) – at the time the US invoked Article 5 it was not truly “under attack.” Picky, picky.

Where we lost the plot was when Bush/Cheney decided America should turn to invading Iraq rather than finishing what it had begun in Afghanistan. We knew from Hans Blix and his team of UN inspectors that Saddam wasn’t hiding a mountain of WMDs. It was pretty obvious that Washington thought it could roll in and basically grab the oil for US energy giants. Why was the only Iraqi ministry US forces secured the oil ministry?

The US decided to offload much of the Afghan mission to free up troops for Iraq and wanted a Foreign Legion. Rick “Big Cod” Hillier talked Paul Martin into taking the combat gig in Kandahar with a laughably token force of just 2,000 personnel, no more than half combat ready, to a province whose area and population mandated a combat force of between 20 to 30,000.  Martin didn’t know any better. Hillier probably did know, definitely should have known , but obviously didn’t tell his prime minister. It’s right there in the US Army/Marine Corps field manual, FM-3/24.

We lost our war in Afghanistan, the first military defeat in Canadian history. We lost badly. War is a state of armed conflict used to achieve a political outcome. That sought outcome was defined by Stephen Harper. We were there to stay. We would never cut and run. We would stay until the Taliban had been vanquished, effectively eradicated. We would make Afghanistan safe for democracy and a restoration of human rights (as they had once enjoyed under the country’s last king). We did none of those things. The Talibs are resurgent. The government is a hopelessly corrupt amalgamation of warlords from five main ethnic groups. Little boys’ bums are all the rage again and the struggle for women’s rights languishes. Meanwhile we definitely chose to cut and run.

Then along came Libya, a not so tidy war that Obama basically offloaded on Europe. Harper staged a victory fly past over Parliament Hill for that one even as Libya itself descended into an intractable, second phase civil war, this one substituting Islamist radicals for Gadhafi.

Syria? ISIS has been driven out, more or less, for now. It has been reduced from a rebellion to an insurgency to what is today essentially a terrorist movement. That’s the thing with these guys. They can morph from one state to another, often rather effortlessly, and that enables them to be flexible, mobile. They’ll be back, probably in another guise.

I have gone on at some length on these events because the world has become no safer for all of our post 9/11 misadventures. If anything we’ve demonstrated, repeatedly, that all the King’s Horses and all the King’s Men are no longer a sure path to a meaningful, lasting victory. We have all the watches but the bad guys have all the time.

We are returning to a more challenging era, one akin to the last Cold War, another win that we utterly failed to consolidate as we allowed triumphalism to get the better of us. That Doomsday Clock is now closer to midnight than it has been since the Cuban missile crisis. Around the world but particularly in Europe, Eurasia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the greater Asia Pacific region all the way to Australia, Russia and China, everyone is madly rearming.

America is being overtaken, economically, by China which is fast making inroads into the Middle East, Africa and even South America (whatever happened to the Monroe Doctrine anyway?). We have seen a number of these major power transitions over the centuries. At various times in the modern period the dominant spot belonged alternately to the Spanish, the French, the Dutch, the Brits and now the Americans. Before that came the Greeks, the Romans, the Mongols, etc.

Here’s the thing. History tells us that these transitions tend to be difficult. Two-thirds of them result in war. Is war in the offing between the U.S. and China? From what I’ve read over the past ten years, China’s military leadership is quietly bellicose.  At some level they want to exact revenge for China’s “century of humiliation” at the hands of us white folks – Opium Wars, etc.?  That thought came to mind when I found an essay in the Proceedings of the US Naval Institute wherin an acting service officer complained bitterly that China was overtaking the United States “without a fight” as though that was unthinkable.

It would be tempting to dismiss that view as the work of a hothead only his sentiments go deeper in that, all the way back to the Project for a New American Century, the neo-cons (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, Perle, Wolfowitz, Libby et al)  developed an “over my dead body” policy prescription that was subsequently embodied in the Bush Doctrine. That doctrine provided that America reserved the right to institute pre-emptive war against any nation or group of nations that challenged America’s economic and military domination.  Seriously, look it up.

The backbone of American airpower today and into the future are its stealth warplanes, the F-22 and F-35. Those are not dual purpose aircraft. They’re not defence oriented. There are simply too few F-22s to handle the job and the F-35 has a series of deficiencies that make it marginal in the air defence role. They are primarily offensive weapons designed to “take the fight to the enemy” and not just any garden variety enemy either.  They are purpose built to operate in heavily defended, hostile airspace.  One American general called the F-35 his “kick in the front door” weapon. Do you remember that the Japanese ran a dress rehearsal of their Pearl Harbour attack to test their shallow-draught Long Lance torpedoes in an appropriate anchorage? The USAF staged a similar “proof of concept” exercise called Operation Chimichanga that simulated a stealth first strike attack on China. Do you the Chinese maybe didn’t hear about that?

Whether it’s North Korea or the South China Sea or maybe just two countries getting into each other’s faces, this is not a very placid time. For Canada, however, it may be a time to begin loosening the ties that bind us to American foreign and military policy, perhaps by aligning Canadian  policy more directly with our western European allies. It doesn’t mean we won’t pick up the phone when Washington calls but maybe just not on the first or even the twenty-first ring.

If you follow this global rearmament business as I do you’re drawn to the conclusion that the world has absolutely no shortage of state of the art weaponry. State of the art everything. Hell even the city state of Singapore has six modern and very capable submarines.

How about we zig where everyone else chooses to zag by decoupling ourselves from Washington and restoring our credibility as an honest broker nation? Communications between rival nations (at all levels) are apt to become more strained in this overheated and armed-to-the-teeth milieu that has become our new reality. The need for a trustworthy intermediary may be greater now than ever before in Canadian history. It's a job suitable for the nation that gave the world the concept of peacekeeping, an initiative that earned Mike Pearson the Nobel Peace Prize.

A Blast From the Past. Remember the "Peace Dividend"?

The world but especially the Western alliance breathed a huge sigh of relief at the collapse of the former Soviet Union in late 1991. Over the following years, nation after nation dialed back their military preparedness, declaring what was then called a peace dividend. Defence budgets fell from about 4% of GDP to around 1.5%, in some cases (Canada) even less. The future would be one of fewer guns and ever more butter. The nuclear Sword of Damocles had been sheathed.

Yet, instead of being appropriately grateful for our blessing, we did little to build a lasting peace. What we did was to siphon up the former Warsaw Pact states into our alliance, NATO, and then march our armies literally up to Russia's doorstep. Yeah, that Russia, the nation and people who still had vivid memories of the last time armies from Western Europe massed their tanks along the borders of the Rodina.

Triumphalism was the order of the day, especially in Washington. We, i.e. Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, had crushed the Soviet menace until it collapsed under its own weight. Instead of being grateful for having averted a war we celebrated having won a war.

This is a too common failing of the United States. They're pretty good at winning battles, campaigns, but they've been utterly inept at the next step, the important phase, winning the peace. Once the smoke clears and the barrels cool, they go all ADHD.

There's a price to be paid for this neglect. Ours has been a resumption of that Cold War we talked ourselves into believing had been won. Now the emphasis is on every one reinflating their military budgets, again practicing Armageddon-grade warfare, and feverishly re-arming.

For America, this has taken the form of an additional $300-billion of military funding. That's just to top it off. We're told that money will go to refurbish an American military worn out by its endless wars in the Middle East/South Asia. That doesn't sound especially alarming but maybe that money is earmarked for something less benign.

An op-ed in Aviation Week by US defence analyst Robert Stallard contends that $300-billion is going elsewhere - into preparations for waging war with China and/or Russia. Stallard suggests the big winners will be space warfare (the ability to defend your own space assets while obliterating your adversary's), cyber-warfare (you'll just have to wait to see what the three players have in mind), and black projects, stuff that won't even be showcased to Congress. Some of these programmes such as hyper-velocity and directed-energy (set phasers to "obliterate") are already under development and have been considered in a few published articles of unknown reliability.

I would like to call it Cold War II but it doesn't seem to be a noticeable departure from the thinking of Cold War I. It may be merely a continuation of our incredibly dangerous past following a quarter-century of relative dormancy. One thing is certain. Whatever it is, "it's on."

Shame on us for having so negligently bequeathed this future to our kids and grandkids. This did not have to be.

Trudeau's Trade Fetish

One line from Vice news sums it up perfectly, "Justin Trudeau is one of the few world leaders still trumpeting the pre-2016 dream that everything will be hunky dory in the mad world of global politics if we can strike up a few more free trade deals."

Vice columnist Drew Brown skips the debate over whether Trudeau is wise or an utter fool to think he can or should entangle Canada in a trade pact with China. Instead he focuses on Trudeau's claim that a Canada-China free trade deal with help defuze the reactionary populist politics spreading around the world.

It is a talking point that Trudeau and his neoliberal fellow travellers have invoked before. While there may have been some structural discomfort involved in the opening of domestic markets to foreign capital (and vice versa), overall the outcome of liberal trade is an inevitable win for everyone involved. Goods and services cross borders more easily (and cheaply) and freer migration fosters a deeper appreciation for human diversity. Corporate greed might make things look a little lopsided, but it’s nothing that modest state redistribution of the quintessentially Canadian variety can’t sort out.

It is a very nice story but, as we now know, it leaves out a few loose ends. Whenever newly unfettered capital starts freely crossing borders, it is usually accompanied by a cast of somewhat less savory characters: community dislocation, deindustrialization, declining environmental and labour regulations, degraded national sovereignty, and the occasional financial meltdown. (For what it’s worth, Trudeau deserves credit for making more progressive environmental, labour, and gender regulations a sticking point in negotiations.)

Free trade might be a win-win on paper for the countries involved, but within those countries themselves it’s very often a win-lose arrangement for the rich and the non-rich, respectively. In other words, it tends to create its own problems, one of which appears to be right-wing, nationalist reaction. (It’s a convention to just call this ‘populism’, which is sort of true, but also sort of not true, and something we should probably talk about later.)

In the case of Chinese-Canadian trade in particular, there are reasons to suspect that even a successful bilateral free trade agreement might do more to inflame reactionary populism at home than put it out. Wells observes that Canadian access to the Chinese market also entails China’s further access to the Canadian market. This risks further inflating urban real estate values (particularly on the west coast), as well as hollowing out communities based around agriculture and manufacturing. And as a general rule, people who lose a good job and/or get priced out of their home tend to become rather politically agitated.

It’s not clear whether or not the prime minister and his team genuinely believe more free trade will fix the problems it simultaneously causes, or if this is just a reflexive talking point he threw to the media after a long day of trade talks that amounted to fruitlessly banging his head against a wall in Beijing.

My take is that the school marm is still the school marm, short on both the experience and intellectual depth to tackle a hydra such as free trade with China. He can't even make any serious inroads on climate change, the gravest threat facing the Canadian people. That's something that will take a truly Herculean effort over many years, perhaps decades, and Trudeau won't even get near the starting blocks. In difficult and dangerous times it takes more than posing for selfies and making apologies, no matter how deserved, to lead a country. Going by his track record from his first two years in power, this son of Margaret does not seem to pass muster on leadership.

The Evisceration of a Thug.

Few have done it so well as Roger Cohen's op-ed dissection of Donald Trump in Der Spiegel.

Many of us tend to take Trump's insults to decency as they come, one at a time, but Cohen stitches them all together to paint a picture that's much darker and dangerous than we may perceive. It's a good read.

Meanwhile Foreign Policy's Max Boot writes that, while America may survive Trump, it will never again be the same.

One critical area in which Trump has already inflicted irreparable harm is the State Department where, by some reports, upwards of 60% of America's professional diplomats have already left, taking with them the department's "institutional memory." These are the people who make the place work. They know their counterparts in foreign capitals, who to call and how to reach them. They know what to do when things go wrong, how to fix what's broken, what worked and didn't work in the past, how things get done. Anyone who has ever worked in the management side of a large organization knows the type, the indispensable few.


Scores of senior diplomats, including 60 percent of career ambassadors, have left the department since the beginning of the year, when President Donald Trump took office, according to the letter. There are 74 top posts at State that remain vacant with no announced nominee.

“Were the U.S. military to face such a decapitation of its leadership ranks, I would expect a public outcry,” [Barbara Stephenson, president of the American Foreign Service Association] wrote.

It’s not just top leadership that is fleeing. New recruitment is falling dramatically as well, shrinking the pool for future talent. The number of applicants registering to take the Foreign Service Officer Test this year will be fewer than half the 17,000 who registered just two years ago, she wrote.

What they're seeing on the diplomatic front, as in other areas Trump is abandoning, is the Russians and the Chinese quick to exploit the vacuum.

When you lose that institutional memory it can take years, decades to rebuild and, by then, you may find yourself in a world radically changed. Trump has no grasp of how he's undermining America, now and for future administrations. 

Faint Hope

These days good news on climate change is hard to find.  Yet recent progress by major emitters, specifically China, give hope that the world might just meet the Paris Climate Summit goal of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius by 2100.

Over the past half-century, growth in the global economy and carbon pollution have been tied together. When the global economy has been strong, we’ve consumed more energy, which has translated into burning more fossil fuels and releasing more carbon pollution. But over the past four years, economic growth and carbon dioxide emissions have been decoupled. The global economy has continued to grow, while data from the EU Joint Research Centre shows carbon pollution has held fairly steady.

China’s shift away from coal to clean energy has been largely responsible for this decoupling. Due to its large population (1.4 billion) – more than four times that of the USA (323 million) and nearly triple the EU (510 million) – and rapid growth in its economy and coal power supply, China has become the world’s largest net carbon polluter (though still less than half America’s per-person carbon emissions, and on par with those of Europeans). But as with the global total, China’s carbon pollution has flattened out since 2013.

The good news of a slowing in the growth of man-made carbon dioxide emissions is tempered by the warning that we still face the Herculean chore of rapidly abandoning fossil fuels after 2020. We have a chance, if we're prepared to decarbonize our economies and our societies within the very near future. And the way that can be done isn't easy. It requires what Potsdam Institute's Hans Joachim Schellnhuber told delegates at Paris in 2015 is essential, the "induced implosion" of the fossil fuel industry.  That means governments intervening to force the closure and abandonment of the oil and gas wells and the fossil fuels mines.

We pride ourselves on being a really progressive country that wants only the best for the world. Can you think of a Canadian leader, not only Justin Trudeau but his predecessors and his rivals today, who would padlock Athabasca or force the closure of the gas and oil wells of western Canada?

Let's not kid ourselves. In order to decarbonize we're probably going to have to endure an economic collapse. That's because the fossil energy giants have us by the - cojones. They have an estimated $27 Trillion dollars of proven fossil fuel reserves subscribed on every stock exchange and bourse around the world. 27,000,000,000 dollars from banks, institutional investors, pension funds and ma and pa punters are floating around in today's Carbon Bubble. That's an enormous amount of wealth to simply wipe off the books of the global economy. Bursting that bubble is going to leave lasting scars.

Freedom from fossil energy will take a concerted global effort. We've been lucky so far. Renewable energy costs have been falling to the point where they're sometimes cheaper than fossil fuels. What will fossil fuels cost when that Carbon Bubble bursts?  Cheap, cheap, cheap. Especially if we revert to pre-globalization, slave labour rates in the Third World.

My point is that getting off carbon energy is going to cause enormous economic upheaval of the sort that can readily destabilize vulnerable nations, even entire regions. How do you maintain that concerted global effort to decarbonize in the midst of that sort of dystopian-lite upheaval? Are we prepared for a global sharing economy in which wealth is voluntarily transferred from the haves to the have nots for the sake of global stability? The developed world's record of dealing with growing inequality within their own economies doesn't offer much cause for optimism.

And then there's the real stumbling block, the synergy of climate change, overpopulation and over-consumption of very finite resources. Jared Diamond illustrates in his book, "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," drives home the point that, when you have these interwoven, synergistic, existential threats you either resolve them all or you'll solve none of them.

Am I suggesting we simply throw in the towel, give up, wait to die off? Of course not. We have to resolve our entirely man-made predicaments.  The overpopulated have to slash their populations. The over-consumptive have to slash their consumption. Everyone, but particularly the big emitters, have to slash their emissions and move off carbon energy. We have to build a new, post-carbon economy first nationally, then regionally and finally globally.

We must give up our illusions that carbon taxes and solar panels will solve our problems. That horse left the barn sometime in the early 1970s.

We have to revert to the past when we lived within the bounds of our environment. We're simply too big for our planet, our biosphere, Spaceship Earth. It's time we had a serious discussion about sustainable retreat.

And This Is Where We Need to Worry

China is in the process of ascending to superpowerdom, displacing America from its perch. And the US Navy is worried that they'll get away with it without a fight.

There have been instances where a dominant power, an empire, yields to another peacefully. The transition from the British Empire to American dominance is a fine example. However the experts tell us that nearly two thirds of these events result in warfare at some point in the transition.

Jeebus but it sounds like the Americans want to repeat the Alamo only on a global, possibly nuclear scale.

"PRC is the most pressing threat in the Pacific," one U.S. military official in the region said, using the acronym for the People's Republic of China. While North Korea is a near-term issue, "it's a fight we could win," the official said — but he worries about a fight with China.

Among the U.S. concerns: China's controversial island-building, theft of technology, currency manipulation, cyberattacks, and both military and non-military aggression.

The U.S. military officials in the region warn that China's ultimate goal is to become dominant by slowly making changes to the international order. China will use the laws it likes, ignore the ones it doesn't and eventually other nations will have to adapt, thereby re-setting the rules in China's favor.

"China is on a path to win without a fight," one official said.

No fair, China. Who do you think you are becoming dominant by slowly making changes to the international order, the United States of America? Imagine the nerve, using laws you like, ignoring ones you don't and eventually leaving other nations to adapt, thereby re-setting the rules in China's favour? Hey, rice-munchers, only America gets to do that.

What's that awful stench? Oh yeah, that's American hypocrisy. China, doing much the same as America did in the immediate postwar era when the rest of the world was still in rubble and ashes.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joe Dunford returned from a six-day trip to the Pacific late Monday night. He agreed that while North Korea is the immediate threat to the U.S., China is the enduring threat.

"China's path of capability development," said Dunford, "and their efforts I think to address our power projection capability, our ability to deploy when and where necessary to advance our interests, is very much the long-term challenge in the region."

The official said the U.S. military spends a lot of time making sure they don't forget about the long-term existential problem.

"We are ready" for North Korea, the official said. But the peer-level fight with China "is the real challenge."

The Americans refuse to concede how much they're doing to antagonize China. The latest move is their alliance with India to contain China and, if desired, cut off Beijing's sea access even across its own waters, the East and South China Seas. Would America tolerate that sort of thing along its Pacific coast. Not in a million years. Only subordinate nations have to endure that sort of provocation.

America has no sense of how deeply some Chinese, especially China's military leadership, perceive their "Century of Humiliation" at the hands of Europeans and Americans. And that's what makes this transition so dangerous, so worrisome. There's a reason why China is moving to quickly narrow the weapons technology gap with the United States. In some critical areas, such as hypersonics, it's thought they're already well ahead of the Americans.

The Chinese know that, while America has to squander its national treasure on immensely wasteful spending to maintain a military presence in most every corner of the world, they can bring Goliath down if they can defeat it in one or two core technologies. America's greatest weakness is America.

That said, America might not be able to abide China's ascendancy without going to war over it. Remember the Bush Doctrine? Remember when Bush, on behalf of America, reserved the right to launch pre-emptive war against any nation or group of nations that endangered America dominance, economic or military? I remember.

I Missed This Last April. It Seems Justin Did Too.

This comes directly from the business page of Canada's most oil-friendly newspaper, The Calgary Herald. It's from April 24, 2017 to be exact.

China’s ambassador to Canada tried to allay concerns about a possible free trade pact between the two countries, addressing worries surrounding state-owned enterprises snapping up oilsands assets.

“To be honest, Chinese enterprises buying Canadian oilsands enterprises are actually incurring (a) loss,” Ambassador Lu Shaye told the Canada China Business Council on Wednesday, according to a copy of his speech.

“Canadian oilsands is not competitive given the current international oil price. Even if Canadians did not disapprove of China’s investment in (the) oilsands industry, I do not believe that Chinese enterprises would still be interested in this.”

So, just what is the deal? We're told this Kinder Morgan pipeline, so fiercely opposed in British Columbia, must be pushed through to meet Chinese demand. When Trudeau said he was going to renege on his solemn election promises, that was the line he used to justify his betrayal.

WTF?  Do we have some order from China for a million barrels of bitumen a day? If not, where are we planning to ship this crud?

Living in a Real Life Dystopian State

Chinese leaders may think their biggest enemy is the United States but what's most likely to bring China down is home grown.

Ten years ago it cost him his job but that didn't stop then Deputy Minister of the Environment, Pen Yue, from speaking to Der Spiegel about China's environmental apocalypse.



Many factors are coming together here: Our raw materials are scarce, we don't have enough land, and our population is constantly growing. Currently, there are 1.3 billion people living in China, that's twice as many as 50 years ago. In 2020, there will be 1.5 billion people in China. Cities are growing but desert areas are expanding at the same time; habitable and usable land has been halved over the past 50 years.

This miracle will end soon because the environment can no longer keep pace. Acid rain is falling on one third of the Chinese territory, half of the water in our seven largest rivers is completely useless, while one fourth of our citizens does not have access to clean drinking water. One third of the urban population is breathing polluted air, and less than 20 percent of the trash in cities is treated and processed in an environmentally sustainable manner. Finally, five of the ten most polluted cities worldwide are in China.

Because air and water are polluted, we are losing between 8 and 15 percent of our gross domestic product. And that doesn't include the costs for health. Then there's the human suffering: In Bejing alone, 70 to 80 percent of all deadly cancer cases are related to the environment. Lung cancer has emerged as the No. 1 cause of death.

Even now, the western regions of China and the country's ecologically stressed regions can no longer support the people already living there. In the future, we will need to resettle 186 million residents from 22 provinces and cities. However, the other provinces and cities can only absorb some 33 million people. That means China will have more than 150 million ecological migrants, or, if you like, environmental refugees.

While the figure often varies from week to week, China's central government admits that between 19 and 25% of the country's farmland is so toxic from persistent industrial contamination, arsenic and heavy metals, as to be incapable of growing food fit for human consumption. Outsiders put that figure at closer to 40%. Imagine if your province had to take a quarter of its agricultural land out of production for a couple of generations or more because of irremediable soil contamination? Imagine if the greatest threat to your life was breathing the air? Imagine knowing that you were being set up to contract lung cancer?

The double-whammy, is China's rapacious consumption of the world's resources.

In the result, today, with 20 percent of the world's population, China is now by far the world's largest consumer of marketed primary industrial raw materials (cement, metal ores, industrial minerals, fossil fuels and biomass). China consumes more than 32 percent of the world's total of these resources, nearly four times as much as the United States, the second largest consumer. China consumes just over half the world's coal and a third of the world's oil. China is the leading producer and consumer of steel with 46 percent of world output and now relies on imports for 77 percent of its iron ore. China has become the world's largest consumer of lumber and forest products, leveling forests from Siberia to Southeast Asia, New Guinea, Congo and Madagascar. Greenpeace concluded that on current trends "future generations will be living on a planet without ancient forests."

Of course, China has the world's largest population and is industrializing from a comparatively low level just three decades ago so it's hardly surprising that it would consume lots of resources to build infrastructure and modernize. But the fact is, most of these resources have been squandered on a stupendous scale, and for all the waste and pollution, most Chinese have gotten surprisingly little out of it all.

In 1990, China had just 5.5 million cars, trucks and buses on the road. By 2013, China became the world's largest auto assembler cranking out 18.7 million cars and light vehicles, more than twice the number produced in the United States in that year. By 2013, China had 240 million cars on its roads, almost as many as in the United States, and China could have an estimated 390-532 million cars on the road by 2050.
...In The Wall Street Journal of August 20, 2014, Justin Yifu Lin, an economist and close adviser to senior leaders in Beijing, stated that he's confident China can sustain its recent 8 percent per year growth rate for the foreseeable future. He predicts "20 years of roaring growth" for China. Really? Where does Yifu think the resources are going to come from for this scale of consumption? As it happens, in 2011, the Earth Policy Institute at Columbia University calculated that if China keeps growing by around 8 percent per year, Chinese average per capita consumption will reach the current US level by around 2035. But to provide the natural resources for China's 1.3 billion to consume on a per capita basis like the United States' 330 million consume today, the Chinese - roughly 20 percent of the world's population - will consume as much oil as the entire world consumes today. It would also consume more than 60 percent of other critical resources.

The Madness of Mandarins

Yeah! Beijing has won the 2022 Winter Olympics.  Yeah. The Olympic committee awarded the games to a city of 22-million with a water supply capable of supporting 12-million.  Yeah.  By the time the games open (if they can find/make snow), Beijing should be transformed into a new supercity of 130-million renamed as Jing-Jin-Ji.

The Jing is for Beijing, the part shown in the center. The Jin is for the city of Tianjin which will be amalgamated.  The Ji is the popular name for the region of Habei.  It's a great name, really easy to remember.  You start with Jing and then just keep dropping off the last letter.  You'll notice from the map that it's larger than South Korea with its paltry population of a midge under 50-million.

This was all done, why?  So Beijing won't be eclipsed by the even more prosperous cities to the south, Shanghai and Nanjing.  If this all sounds a little crazy, the New York Times columnist and economist, Paul Krugman, writes that it's a madness that begins at the very top.



Politicians who preside over economic booms often develop delusions of competence. You can see this domestically: Jeb Bush imagines that he knows the secrets of economic growth because he happened to be governor when Florida was experiencing a giant housing bubble, and he had the good luck to leave office just before it burst. We’ve seen it in many countries: I still remember the omniscience and omnipotence ascribed to Japanese bureaucrats in the 1980s, before the long stagnation set in.

This is the context in which you need to understand the strange goings-on in China’s stock market. In and of itself, the price of Chinese equities shouldn’t matter all that much. But the authorities have chosen to put their credibility on the line by trying to control that market — and are in the process of demonstrating that, China’s remarkable success over the past 25 years notwithstanding, the nation’s rulers have no idea what they’re doing.

China’s leaders appear to be terrified — probably for political reasons — by the prospect of even a brief recession. So they’ve been pumping up demand by, in effect, force-feeding the system with credit, including fostering a stock market boom. Such measures can work for a while, and all might have been well if the big reforms were moving fast enough. But they aren’t, and the result is a bubble that wants to burst.

China’s response has been an all-out effort to prop up stock prices. Large shareholders have been blocked from selling; state-run institutions have been told to buy shares; many companies with falling prices have been allowed to suspend trading. These are things you might do for a couple of days to contain an obviously unjustified panic, but they’re being applied on a sustained basis to a market that is still far above its level not long ago.

What do Chinese authorities think they’re doing?

...the Chinese government, having encouraged citizens to buy stocks, now feels that it must defend stock prices to preserve its reputation. And what it’s ending up doing, of course, is shredding that reputation at record speed.

Indeed, every time you think the authorities have done everything possible to destroy their credibility, they top themselves. Lately state-run media have been assigning blame for the stock plunge to, you guessed it, a foreign conspiracy against China, which is even less plausible than you may think: China has long maintained controls that effectively shut foreigners out of its stock market, and it’s hard to sell off assets you were never allowed to own in the first place.

So what have we just learned? China’s incredible growth wasn’t a mirage, and its economy remains a productive powerhouse. The problems of transition to lower growth are obviously major, but we’ve known that for a while. The big news here isn’t about the Chinese economy; it’s about China’s leaders. Forget everything you’ve heard about their brilliance and foresightedness. Judging by their current flailing, they have no clue what they’re doing.

So, to recap, while China's leaders are walking a stock market slack rope with the grenade in one hand and the pin in their teeth, they're going to amalgamate Beijing into a supercity of 130-million and host a winter olympics even as their nation descends into a desperate water crisis while sea level rise begins to imperil their coastal mega-cities.  What could possibly go wrong?  Oh yeah, everything. Stay tuned. 

Wait a second. I know what the Chinese need in this hour of desperation.  Donald Trump.

China's "Century of Humiliation" And Why It Matters.

I'm regularly astonished at the reaction I receive when I mention the militant nationalism flourishing within China's military establishment, stoked by the perceived need to avenge what they call China's "century of humiliation."

Few in the West have the slightest idea of how Britain and her allies suppressed the Chinese and laid low their once powerful nation (along with India).

Eduardo Galeano, who died a few months ago, wrote this very eloquent summation of what China endured at the hands of the West that helps explain the bellicosity of China's military leadership today.  We ignore this at our peril.  The West's (i.e. Washington's) ongoing attempts to contain China and prevent it from establishing a sphere of influence in its own backyard are dangerously provocative in a time of shifting balances of power.

Opium was outlawed in China.

British merchants smuggled it in from India. Their diligent efforts led to a surge in the number of Chinese dependent on the mother of heroin and morphine, who charmed them with false happiness and ruined their lives.

The smugglers were fed up with the hindrances they faced at the hands of Chinese authorities. Developing the market required free trade, and free trade demanded war.

William Jardine, a generous sort, was the most powerful of the drug traffickers and vice president of the Medical Missionary Society, which offered treatment to the victims of the opium he sold.

In London, Jardine hired a few influential writers and journalists, including best-selling author Samuel Warren, to create a favorable environment for war. These communications professionals ran the cause of freedom high up the flagpole. Freedom of expression at the service of free trade: pamphlets and articles rained down upon British public opinion, exalting the sacrifice of the honest citizens who challenged Chinese despotism, risking jail, torture, and death in that kingdom of cruelty.

The proper climate established, the storm was unleashed. The Opium War lasted, with a few interruptions, from 1839 to 1860.

The sale of people had been the juiciest enterprise in the British Empire. But happiness, as everyone knows, does not last. After three prosperous centuries, the Crown had to pull out of the slave trade, and selling drugs came to be the most lucrative source of imperial glory.

Queen Victoria was obliged to break down China’s closed doors. On board the ships of the Royal Navy, Christ’s missionaries joined the warriors of free trade. Behind them came the merchant fleet, boats that once carried black Africans, now filled with poison.

In the first stage of the Opium War, the British Empire took over the island of Hong Kong. The colorful governor, Sir John Bowring, declared:

“Free trade is Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ is free trade.”
Outside its borders the Chinese traded little and were not in the habit of waging war.

Merchants and warriors were looked down upon. “Barbarians” was what they called the English and the few Europeans they met.

And so it was foretold. China had to fall, defeated by the deadliest fleet of warships in the world, and by mortars that perforated a dozen enemy soldiers in formation with a single shell.

In 1860, after razing ports and cities, the British, accompanied by the French, entered Beijing, sacked the Summer Palace, and told their colonial troops recruited in India and Senegal they could help themselves to the leftovers.

The palace, center of the Manchu Dynasty’s power, was in reality many palaces, more than 200 residences and pagodas set among lakes and gardens, not unlike paradise. The victors stole everything, absolutely everything: furniture and drapes, jade sculptures, silk dresses, pearl necklaces, gold clocks, diamond bracelets... All that survived was the library, plus a telescope and a rifle that the king of England had given China 70 years before.

Then they burned the looted buildings. Flames reddened the earth and sky for many days and nights, and all that had been became nothing.

Lord Elgin, who ordered the burning of the imperial palace, arrived in Beijing on a litter carried by eight scarlet-liveried porters and escorted by 400 horsemen. This Lord Elgin, son of the Lord Elgin who sold the sculptures of the Parthenon to the British Museum, donated to that same museum the entire palace library, which had been saved from the looting and fire for that very reason. And soon in another palace, Buckingham, Queen Victoria was presented with the gold and jade scepter of the vanquished king, as well as the first Pekinese in Europe. The little dog was also part of the booty. They named it “Lootie.”

China was obliged to pay an immense sum in reparations to its executioners, since incorporating it into the community of civilized nations had turned out to be so expensive. Quickly, China became the principal market for opium and the largest customer for Lancashire cloth.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Chinese workshops produced one-third of all the world’s manufactures. At the end of the nineteenth century, they produced 6%.

Then China was invaded by Japan. Conquest was not difficult. The country was drugged and humiliated and ruined.

The history of British exploitation and subjugation of India is scarcely better.  At the time of their conquest, China and India were the first and second largest economies in the world.  Britain showed a friendlier face to India and brought the country into its empire.  China received none of that solicitous engagement.  The "humiliation" was very much alive right up until the British finally returned Hong Kong.

I think we're entering perilous waters if we ignore this history or dismiss it, demanding that China let bygones be bygones.  That's the sort of thing you can do or say to small countries with some impunity.  It's a different thing altogether when the country with the scars and profound grievances is the emerging superpower.

About that "One Child" Rule?

China seems poised to breed itself out of a looming demographic problem.  The most populous nation on Earth may scrap its old "one child" rule in favour of a "two child" limit for new families.

Thirty-five years after enacting draconian birth control rules blamed for millions of forced abortions and the creation of a demographic “time bomb”, China could be on the verge of introducing a two-child policy.

The new regulation, under which all Chinese couples would be allowed to have two children, could be implemented “as soon as the end of the year if everything goes well,” a government source was quoted as saying by the China Business News.

Liang Zhongtang, a demographer from the Shanghai Academy of Social Science, said the one-child policy “should have been abolished long ago”.

“The core issue is not about one-child or two-children. It’s about reproductive freedom. It’s about basic human rights. In the past, the government failed to grasp the essence of the issue.”

If there's one thing the world needs right now, it's a baby boom in China.  Yeah, right.

A Seismic Jolt That Most Won't Even Notice

Just consider it the 21st century version of the "Great Game,"  the superpower struggle to wrest control of South Asia.  While it used to be a contest between Russia and Britain, today the players are Washington and Beijing.  The latest round goes to China and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which seems to be evolving into something akin to our side's NATO.

India and Pakistan have began accession to a regional security group led by China and Russia after two days of summits which Russian President Vladimir Putin held up as evidence Moscow is not isolated in the world.

The Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, meeting in the Russian city of Ufa on Friday, a day after the BRICS emerging economies held a summit there, said the invitation to the two Asian nations showed a "multipolar" world was now emerging.

Those words will have pleased Mr Putin, who says the United States has an outdated vision of a "uni-polar" world dominated by Washington and wants to show Russia has not been weakened by Western sanctions over its role in the Ukraine crisis.

The potential ramifications of this are as fascinating as they are worrying.  China is acquiring a land bridge that connects it via Pakistan to Iran and, from Iran, to Iraq.  Iran, at the moment, could really use a powerful benefactor.  Two would be even better.  Look at the map above.  Go from Iran to Pakistan, India and China, then on to Russia and south to the Caspian and the "Stans."  Now do you see what they're locking up?

Then look at the neighbouring waters.  China is already muscling into control of the South China Sea. With India and Pakistan aboard, that could spread to the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean and, if Iran runs for cover, the Persian Gulf.

Next up, take a look at what this new geopolitical reality would mean to Southeast Asia - Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Burma, Bangladesh and Nepal. They're sort of sewn up.  

Then consider what this means in the context of the American position in the arc extending from Japan to Saudi Arabia, an area the US has been struggling to dominate.  This is not good news for Washington although it's not much of a surprise either.  This deal has been in the works for a couple of years.

One other thing.  If I were the Saudis or Israel, I'd be shitting bricks at the prospect of Iran backed by the muscle of Moscow and Beijing and, worse still, the "other side" being able to manipulate oil markets through control of the reserves of Iraq, Iran and the Caspian Basin.

My, my, my.  It's hard to say how much of this is America's own doing from marching NATO to Russia's doorstep to trying to contain China, primarily from contesting Chinese domination of the South China Sea, trying to recruit India to leave China's sea lane access to the Middle East vulnerable in the Indian Ocean and aligning the nations of the Asia Pacific toward Washington and away from Beijing.  None of those gambits seems particularly bright right now.

The Generals are Talking - That's Rarely a Good Thing.

The top brass is getting restive and they're looking for a bit of mass mayhem.

This might be news to you but Russia has an Academy of Geopolitical Problems. The president of the academy, Konstantin Sivkov, wears a uniform with the insignia of a three star general.

Comrade Sivkov thinks he has an answer to NATO's steady encroachment right up to Russia's doorstep - America's backyard - the San Andreas Fault and Yellowstone national park to be specific.  He thinks that all Russia has to do is pop a good size nuke into the fault and another into Yellowstone and America comes to an end.

"Geologists believe that the Yellowstone supervolcano could explode at any moment. There are signs of growing activity there. Therefore it suffices to push the relatively small, for example the impact of the munition megaton class to initiate an eruption. The consequences will be catastrophic for the United States - a country just disappears," he said.

"Another vulnerable area of ​​the United States from the geophysical point of view, is the San Andreas fault - 1300 kilometers between the Pacific and North American plates ... a detonation of a nuclear weapon there can trigger catastrophic events like a coast-scale tsunami which can completely destroy the infrastructure of the United States."

Meanwhile, US Navy Admiral, Harry Harris, is accusing China of building a second "Great Wall" of artificial islands in the South China Sea.  Harris, soon to head America's Pacific Command, says the island chain will threaten major shipping lanes.

"China is creating a great wall of sand with dredges and bulldozers over the course of months," said Admiral Harris, who is currently commander of the US Pacific Fleet.

"When one looks at China's pattern of provocative actions towards smaller claimant states, the lack of clarity on its sweeping nine-dash line claim that is inconsistent with international law, and the deep asymmetry between China's capabilities and those of its smaller neighbours – well, it's no surprise that the scope and pace of building man-made islands raises serious questions about Chinese intentions," he said.

China has repeatedly rejected regional concerns, saying the constructions are "necessarily" and are taking place on Chinese territory.

Just what Admiral Harris proposes to do about China's expansion into the South China Sea is a mystery.  But often these things begin with hard talk and then get a life of their own.

It's Not For the Sake of Science.

China, the People's Republic Whereof, wants to establish an Arctic research station in Tuktoyaktuk or Cambridge Bay, NWT.

John Higginbotham, senior fellow at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs and the Centre for International Governance Innovation and Arctic policy expert, knows that China is eyeing the Arctic's resource wealth, but says that Canada should welcome researchers, as long as they can ensure that Chinese research adds and builds on work already done by Canada.

"I am not at all concerned that we, Canada, cannot well protect our sovereign interest... while at the same time finding important areas of co-operation and common interest with China," says Higginbotham.

Before we go along with this sort of thing it might be prudent if we got some thorny issues clarified first.

One problem arises out of China's position that seabed resources in the Arctic Ocean should not be governed by the standard international conventions.  China is not an Arctic nation and so it fears that the existing protocols could impair its access to these resources.

A second problem is that China has already stated it wants to maintain a permanent military presence in Arctic waters.  Why?  Does it think the Northwest Passage is in peril from Inuit copying Somali pirates?  Does it worry that Russia, the United States, Canada and Norway can't maintain naval security in their shared waters?  

Of course we have a huge problem.  Beijing is currently our prime minister's Head Office and the Nexen deal showed how low Harper will go to keep his masters happy.  

Whacking Iran - Maybe Sooner Than You Think - The Warmonger Digest, vol. 2

It's reported that the Saudis have given Israel a green light to overfly Saudi Arabia should Netanyahu decide to launch an attack on Iran.

Jerusalem and Riyadh do not have diplomatic ties, but unconfirmed reports have swirled for years of coordination between them against the common enemy of Iran, a partnership that may ramp up should the world powers reach a reportedly emerging deal that would allow Tehran to continue enriching some uranium.

There's some suggestion that NATO tacitly approves of an Israeli air war on Iran.

Saudi Arabia and Israel may be given the green light to attack Iran on behalf of NATO powers if NATO feels it could not sell a direct war in Iran to their populations back home. Regime change in Syria is a prerequisite before an overt attack on Iran can take place however, as Damascus is an important Iranian ally in the Middle East. If a military assault on Iran occurs it would be difficult for the arena of conflict to be contained to the Middle East, as it has the potential to rapidly escalate into a wider conflict involving Russia and China.

Western nations have been engaged in attempting to covertly overthrow the present Iranian regime for decades, a country that has been placed under sanctions by an assortment of nations for years. Regime change in Iran has been a dream of Western foreign policy strategists for decades, with Iran pinpointed in a strategic paper written in 2000 by the neoconservative thinktank, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), alongside countries such as Iraq, Libya and Syria. Retired US four star general and former NATO commander, Wesley Clark, also revealed a plan circulating around the Pentagon in 2001 to attack 7 countries in 5 years, with Iran named as one of the seven.

I wonder if Israel will be able to wait until it gets those F-35s.