Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

Share

This past November, I had the pleasure of speaking at another MCC conference in Brussels. The subject of this meet was “the culture war and Europe’s geopolitical future”. I had a good time, and I am certain that I entertained the audience as well.

While there, I had the pleasure of meeting

, author of the excellent Substack The Upheaval. I’ve shared some of this writing with you here in the past, and take great pleasure in doing so again today. Lyons has a laser-like focus on China, but what makes him valuable in comparison to most is that he comes from a position that has, until now, not really been part of the DC establishment. He can be best described as a realist from the populist camp of US politics, one who understands power and who also gets how truly delicate it can be.

Since Barack Obama moved into the White House in 2009, everyone has been waiting for the US to “pivot” to East Asia i.e. making containing China its primary security interest by relocating its attention there and away from the Middle East. Reality got in the way, either by accident or surprise, allowing the Chinese more time to prepare for this inevitable shift in focus. During the second half of Trump’s first term in office, we saw the Americans begin to pressure China on a few fronts: targeted economic sanctions, CIA-backed failed revolution in Hong Kong, attempts to destabilize Xinjiang/East Turkestan by media campaign accusing Beijing of “genocide”, etc. Notably, the media and establishment were on Trump’s side with respect to China, accentuating the bipartisan support for China policy conducted by his administration. However, COVID-19 arrived and gave Beijing a much-needed respite.

Interestingly enough, the defeat of Iran’s 40-year long foreign policy in the Levant in the span of two weeks means that not only has Hezbollah been defeated and Iran and Russia evicted from Syria, it also means that the USA can put more resources in its long-awaited pivot to East Asia (Iran has not yet been tamed even if significantly humbled). Furthermore, the timing coincides with Trump47, a regime with a different attitude towards power and the US role on the global stage. Lastly, the assumption is that a peace deal between Russia and US-sponsored Ukraine is now visible in the horizon. A freer hand to deal with Beijing?

The most important flashpoint between the USA and China is Taiwan, an island that Beijing sees as an integral part of the People’s Republic of China, and a state that the USA does not want Chinese forces to capture. N.S. Lyons lays out what’s at stake over Taiwan:

Xi Jinping has declared in no uncertain terms that the reunification of Taiwan with mainland China is not only essential but the very “essence” of the leader’s epochal vision for the “great rejuvenation” — making China great again by reestablishing it as the world’s number one superpower. For Xi and the Chinese Communist Party, the island democracy of 24 million people is already their territory, separated from them only by Western imperial meddling. Its return to their control is non-negotiable. As Xi thundered in a major speech in 2022, “The wheels of history are rolling on toward China’s reunification and the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. Complete reunification of our country must be realised, and it can, without doubt, be realised.”

Xi has assigned specific dates to this goal. He has declared that reunification must be achieved no later than 2049, the centenary of the People’s Republic of China, but has also named 2035 as the date when China’s rejuvenation should be “basically realised”. Given that in 2035 Xi will likely still be in power, albeit aged 82, and that retaking Taiwan would be the nationalistic triumph to cement his political legacy in China, this appears to be his real deadline. That makes him a man in a hurry, and so he has ordered China’s military to complete its modernisation programme and be ready to “fight and win” a major war over Taiwan with a peer competitor (like the United States) by 2027.

This goes a long way in explaining China’s massive military buildup.

The risk:

Still, Xi would clearly much prefer to take Taiwan without fighting, if at all possible. China faces numerous internal challenges — including a slowing economy, a demographic crisis, widespread corruption, and social instability. And Xi seems to have prioritised these issues over external threats (to limited success). More important, though, is the fact that war is always an inherently unpredictable and risky business, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrated for analysts in Beijing. An invasion of Taiwan would be a risk of far greater magnitude, with the penalty for failure likely to be, at a minimum, the economic devastation of China, the political delegitimisation of the CCP regime, and the end of Xi Jinping.

By making reunification with Taiwan central to his and his party’s stated purpose, Xi Jinping is willing to risk it all.

Trump The Spoiler:

There is another reason for Beijing’s hesitation. It has long believed that the United States and the broader West is in terminal decline, that time is thus on China’s side, and that it can simply wait until American power collapses of its own accord. As a recent Heritage Foundation report details, “observation and assessment of Western civilisational strength or decline helps to shape almost every aspect of China’s policies, both foreign and domestic”. And it has paid close attention to the West’s “culture war” in particular. Viewing progressive “Left-liberal ideas as profoundly corrosive and destabilising”, the CCP has concluded that “the West’s will and ability to put up a fight are degrading over time”, and that “if it remains on its present course, the West could even withdraw from the world stage, collapse, or split apart”. As long as China believes this, it has no logical reason to ever bother fighting the United States over Taiwan at all.

TURBO!

As Turbo America is now the foreign policy prime directive, and as necessary reforms (e.g. dismantling the DEI Industrial Complex at home) are being pushed through to support this directive, Lyons argues that we are entering a truly dangerous period:

Yet this conclusion is precisely why we may now be entering a period of particular danger. Should Beijing assess that, under the Trump administration, America is successfully reversing its decline and entering an era of cultural, economic, technological, and military revitalisation, then its strategic calculus is liable to flip. Like Imperial Japan, which before Pearl Harbor became obsessed by the motto “if the sun is not rising, it is setting”, China might conclude that its window of opportunity could be lost. In that case, China’s incentives would suddenly invert: it would seem advantageous to attack sooner rather than later, before its relative strength vis-à-vis the United States declined.

Chinese industrial superiority, especially in the military realm:

This danger is accentuated by the fact that China currently has a number of significant advantages in a war over Taiwan. In fact, the United States has “had its ass handed to it for years” in most wargames, as David Ochmanek, a senior RAND Corporation analyst and former deputy assistant secretary of defence, memorably put it. In particular, China possesses huge material advantages, including massive stockpiles of anti-ship missiles that can strike US surface ships from long range. Meanwhile America would run out of critical munitions within an estimated three to seven days and be unable to replace them, given that it currently takes its manufacturers nearly two years to produce a single cruise missile.

In general, a lack of domestic manufacturing capacity is the West’s most damning weakness when it comes to modern warfare. Even after three years of war in Ukraine, the United States and Europe combined still cannot match the capacity of Russia to manufacture basic munitions like artillery shells. Russia currently produces some three million shells per year, compared with 1.2 million by the US and EU together.

Unlike during the Second World War, today the United States is no arsenal of democracy. As it stands, were it to find itself in an extended war of attrition with China, an industrial titan which manufacturers a full 29% of the world’s goods, the US appears likely to find itself at a shocking disadvantage. For one thing, China maintains an astonishing 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the US, as a leaked slide from an Office of Naval Intelligence briefing starkly exposed in 2023. China already possesses the world’s largest navy, with more than 370 vessels, compared with the US Navy’s 296.

Note: I have several ex-US Navy readers who have gone at length in emails to me where they highlight the current naval imbalance between the USA and China.

What “should” be done?

The situation is not hopeless, however. The United States and Taiwan don’t need to be able to dominate China militarily to prevent a war; they merely need to make an attack on the island appear so exceptionally costly to China that it never dares pull the trigger. This is what Elbridge Colby, Trump’s nominee for Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, calls a “strategy of denial”, and it can be accomplished by focusing squarely on mass-producing and deploying asymmetric weapons such as drones, missiles, and sea mines to turn Taiwan into a veritable porcupine.

This plan is sensibly straightforward, yet still somehow manages to rankle much of Washington, including people within the conservative coalition. On the one hand, it offends the hawkish neoconservative remnant of the Republican Party, because, as Colby has explained, taking Taiwan’s defence seriously — along with the reality of China’s strength and America’s limits — will necessarily mean prioritising Asia, requiring allies in Europe and the Middle East to provide more for their own defence instead of attempting to police the entire world ourselves.

And now for the million dollar question: Why should the USA make it impossible for China to take control over Taiwan?

On the other hand, the idea of defending Taiwan also causes a portion of the more non-interventionist MAGA base to bristle. Why, they ask, should America ever waste its blood and treasure to fight for an island on the other side of the world? This is a good question, but it has a good answer.

The stakes of a conflict over Taiwan are of an entirely different category than any of the wars of choice the United States has involved itself in this century. Although little Taiwan is a democracy facing down an authoritarian great power, defending an abstract ideal like democracy is not the real reason for the United States to intervene over Taiwan. Rather, the blunt truth is that if the United States fails to protect Taiwan (as it has done since 1949), this would, more than any other geopolitical catastrophe, demolish our credibility as a security provider, conclusively mark the decisive moment China achieved hegemony as the world’s new dominant superpower, and lead to the rapid collapse of the web of alliances and institutions charitably known as the “liberal international order” and less charitably as the American Empire.

It would deal a huge blow to US credibility, but I am not so certain that it would be the death knell of US Empire.

More:

And while many on the populist Right, myself included, are deeply sceptical of America’s sprawling empire and the vast costs of maintaining it, its sudden collapse would have swift and devastating consequences for the American nation at home. For one thing, our economy today is utterly dependent on running both a massive trade deficit of imports and gargantuan federal debts. The former depends on the latter, and both are completely dependent on the US Dollar maintaining its “exorbitant privilege” as the world’s reserve currency — a status it retains essentially only because the United States is the world’s top dog. A clear victory by China over Taiwan would end that privilege, with the world quickly reordering itself for a Chinese century. In the defeated United States, the result would be a simultaneous debt, financial, and economic crisis of a magnitude that would make the Great Depression seem mild. Americans’ standard of living might never recover.

The case for defending Taiwan is, therefore, firmly a matter of America’s national interest, not idealism. And to do so would be to maintain peace through strength — to avoid war through deterrence — not to seek forever wars abroad. The Trump administration should be prepared to make that case. Moreover, in so doing it can point out that all the steps necessary (bringing industry home, disciplining defence procurement, restoring military competence, and pushing allies to do more for their own defence) are fully in line with a broader America First agenda. This rearmament would be a campaign of nation-building at home, not abroad.

You may agree or disagree, you may even hope that China succeeds in its quest to bring Taiwan back into the fold (this is an international Substack, after all). But I will argue that this is THE best argument that I have come across with respect to US denial of Chinese designs on Taiwan.

Leave a comment

Greenland is where Donald Trump best exemplifies the proverbial “bull in a china shop”. To borrow from Shakespeare, there is a method to his madness.

COVID-19 taught us that many countries are too reliant on critical supply chains that are not fully (or mostly) under their own control, with China having an outsized presence in them. Manufacturing capacity is the most obvious example, but another one that is just as important is control over rare earth minerals. Greenland has these in abundance, and that explains have of the reason why Trump has set his sights on buying the island. Even though Greenland is a Danish possession (and therefore part of the US-led NATO alliance), and even if the USA already has a military presence on it, its full integration would allow for the complete denial of any Chinese investment on it.

Just as important from a strategic point of view, Greenland acts as an Arctic buffer from Russia, a country that has expanded its military presence in the freezing waters surrounding the island. The working assumption is that the Arctic will be transformed over time due to “Climate Change”, opening it up for settlement and exploitation of its natural resources.

A large segment of #MAGA has long been decried as “isolationists”, which is an unfair characterization, at least in my opinion. This cohort can be described as “Buchananite” (in honour of Patrick J. Buchanan) in that it wanted to focus on problems at home, and not act as the world’s policeman. They are not interested in empire, as empires bring home a lot of problems from abroad. Interestingly enough, Buchanan wrote about this very subject in 2019, describing Trump’s desire to purchase Greenland as fitting “into a venerable tradition of American expansionism”. Many of them will ask: “How is this America First?”

Most others are pulling out the smelling salts and doing their best Margaret Dumont imitations in protest of Trump’s Greenland Gambit. Here’s a recent example:

Trump is not the first US politician to try to buy Greenland. The earliest documented attempt to acquire the island goes back to 1868.

The last serious pre-Trump effort is that by President Harry S. Truman’s government in 1946. Trump’s renewed interest in Greenland thus stands in a long tradition of American efforts of territorial expansion.

Even without this historical background, Trump’s latest bid is less irrational today than it may have seemed back in 2019. On the one hand, Greenland is exceptionally rich in so-called “critical minerals”. According to a 2024 report in the Economist, the island has known deposits of 43 of 50 of these minerals. According to the US Department of Energy, these minerals are essential for “technologies that produce, transmit, store, and conserve energy” and have “a high risk of supply chain disruption”.

The latter certainly is a valid concern given that China – a key supplier of several critical minerals to global markets – has been increasing restrictions on its exports as part of an ongoing trade war with the US. Access to Greenland’s resources would give Washington more supply chain security and limit any leverage that China could to bring to bear.

Denying your opponent access to important resources explains a large chunk of the reasoning behind the continued US presence in the Middle East.

Greenland’s strategic location also makes it valuable to the US. An existing US base, Pituffik Space Base, is key to US missile early warning and defence and plays a critical role in space surveillance. Future expansion of the base could also enhance US capabilities to monitor Russian naval movements in the Arctic Ocean and the north Atlantic.

US sovereignty over Greenland, if Trump’s deal comes to pass, would also effectively forestall any moves by rivals, especially China, to get a foothold on the island. This may be less of a concern if Greenland remains part of Nato member Denmark which has kept the island economically afloat with an annual grant of around US$500 million (£407 million).

The author explains how Trump’s aims do have credibility:

Greenland’s independence – support for which has been steadily growing – could open the door to more, and less regulated, foreign investment. In this case, China is seen as particularly keen to step in should the opportunity arise.

Add to that growing security cooperation between Russia and China and the fact that Russia has generally become more militarily aggressive, and Trump’s case looks yet more credible. Nor is he the only one to have raised the alarm bells: Canada, Denmark and Norway have all recently pushed back against an increasing Russian and Chinese footprint in the Arctic.

So, the problem with Trump’s proposal is not that it is based on a flawed diagnosis of the underlying issue it tries to address. Growing Russian and Chinese influence in the Arctic region in general is a security problem at a time of rising geopolitical rivalry. In this context, Greenland undeniably poses a particular and significant security vulnerability for the United States.

Where the author thinks that Trump is wrong in his overbearing approach:

Rather than strengthening US security, Trump is arguably effectively weakening it by, yet again, undermining the western alliance. Not only does the irony of doing so in the north Atlantic appear to be lost on Trump. But it also seems that there is an even more fundamental problem at work here in that this kind of 19th century-style territorial expansionism reflects Trump’s isolationist impulses.

“Incorporating” Greenland into the US would likely insulate Washington from the disruption of critical mineral supply chains and keep Russia and China at bay. And signalling that he will do it whatever the cost is an indication that, beyond the kind of bluster and bombast that is normally associated with Trump, his approach to foreign policy will quickly do away with any gloves.

Rather than investing in strengthening security cooperation with Denmark and the rest of its Nato and European allies to face down Russia and China in the Arctic and beyond, Trump and his team may well think that the US can get away with this. Given that what is at stake here are relations with the US’s hitherto closest allies, this is an enormous, and unwarranted, gamble.

No great power in history has been able to go it alone forever – and even taking possession of Greenland, by hook or by crook, is unlikely to change this.

Personally, I believe that this has much to do with Trump putting US allies on notice, demanding that they ramp up military spending as the Americans seek to shift their attention to the Far East in order to contain China.

How much of it is bluster? How much of Trump’s push to purchase Greenland is real?

Share

One of the many themes of this Substack is how NGOs are end-runs around democracy, in that big money (often from the government!) will fund small group to have outsized influence on the political process at home and especially abroad. Think tanks fall within this realm. How many times have you come across names like The German Marshall Fund, The Atlantic Council, RAND, American Enterprise Institute, etc.? Too many times to count. The question that most springs to mind when it comes to think tanks is: “Who funds them?”

The Quincy Institute has done us all a huge favour by publishing a report on leading US think tanks and their funding. They have even created a tracker for researchers such as myself to track who is funding which think tank. What this report tells us is that think tank funding is relatively cheap as it produces a lot of bang for the buck when it comes to influence on US foreign policy. It also tells us that foreign governments are key funders, and that funding is often opaque.

Executive Summary:

This brief provides a detailed analysis of a first-of-its-kind, publicly available repository of U.S. think tank funding — www.thinktankfundingtracker.org. The repository tracks funding from foreign governments, the U.S. government, and Pentagon contractors to the top 50 think tanks in the United States over the past five years. It serves as a vital research guide for anyone wishing to learn more about the funding sources of prominent U.S. think tanks.

The repository gives a five-point transparency score to each of the top 50 think tanks in the U.S., a scale created by the authors based on five binary questions. Based on this criteria, nine of the top 50 think tanks (18 percent) are fully transparent, while 23 think tanks (46 percent) are partially transparent. Most concerning, the remaining 18 think tanks (36 percent) are “dark money” think tanks, entirely opaque in their funding without revealing donors.

In the past five years, foreign governments and foreign government-owned entities donated more than $110 million to the top 50 think tanks in the United States. The most generous donor countries were the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and Qatar, which contributed $16.7 million, $15.5 million, and $9.1 million to U.S. think tanks, respectively. The Atlantic Council, Brookings Institution, and German Marshall Fund received the most money from foreign governments since 2019: $20.8 million, $17.1 million, and $16.1 million, respectively.

In that same period, the top 100 defense companies have contributed more than $34.7 million to the top 50 think tanks. The top donors include Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Mitsubishi, which provided $5.6 million, $2.6 million, and $2.1 million, respectively, to the tracked think tanks between 2019 and 2023. The Atlantic Council, Center for a New American Security, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies were the top recipients of Pentagon contractor money: $10.2 million, $6.6 million, and $4.1 million, respectively.

The U.S. government has directly given at least $1.49 billion to American think tanks since 2019. However, the vast majority of this funding — $1.4 billion — goes to the Rand Corporation, which works directly for the U.S. government.

While think tanks exist to produce independent analysis, the prevalence of special interest funding raises questions of intellectual freedom, self-censorship, and perspective filtering. This is compounded by instances in which individual researchers simultaneously hold positions at a think tank and a given foreign government or corporation, a clear potential conflict of interest.

Independent analysis? Or influence buying?

Some graphics from the report:

The Atlantic Council is the big one:

Foreign Government Donors (from what is publicly available):

I’ll share one more:

Actually, one very last one:

“Why think tank funding matters”:

Think tanks have played, and continue to play, an important role in the creation of U.S. foreign policy. Originally formed in response to a need to overhaul machine politics, think tanks offered analysis and expertise to policymakers. Robert Brookings, the businessman who founded the Brookings Institution, claimed his new policy institute was “the first private organization devoted to the fact-based study of national public policy.”²⁶Others, including the Hoover Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations, followed suit. As historian Stephen Wertheim documents in his book, Tomorrow the World, the Council on Foreign Relations played a crucial role in planning for the United States to lead a new international order after World War II.²⁷Brookings, meanwhile, helped design the Marshall Plan.²⁸Later, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara relied heavily on the RAND Corporation and their “whiz kids” to inform the statistics-based logic and strategy of the Vietnam War. There have always been prevailing incentive structures, but think tank research was more academic and reliant on longer-term funding, often from the U.S. government itself. For many decades, this was the model for how most think tanks operated in the United States.

Today, the landscape is quite different. Starting in the 1970s and 1980s, the number of think tanks ballooned as they became more politically active and their funding models shifted toward short-term sources.²⁹Special interests dominate think tank donor rolls today, and many think tanks even openly advertise the influence that foreign governments and private corporations can gain through sponsorship programs. Kjølv Egeland and Benoît Pelopidas, the authors of a study of think tanks, wrote that “the most generous funders exercise significant influence on the evolution of the foreign policy marketplace of ideas by affecting which questions are asked and which expert milieus are enabled to thrive.”³⁰If think tanks are reliant on Pentagon contractors and there is no counterbalancing voice, it can lead to an entire sector singing in chorus for things that will benefit Pentagon contractors — most notably, ever-increasing defense budgets and foreign conflicts.

As two researchers, Campbell Craig and Jan Ruzicka, put it in a 2022 study on the institutions that support nuclear weapons, those that “support the extant nuclear order enjoy funding, political support, and policy relevance; those who deviate from it do not,” which suppresses the rise of alternative ideas to the status quo.³¹In Egeland and Pelopidas’ follow-up study, all 45 think tanks in their sample acknowledged funding from either nuclear defense contractors or governments with an interest in the continued deployment of nuclear weapons and found that “such stakeholder funding has real effects on intellectual freedom.” Though impossible to quantify exactly, understanding these relationships between think tanks and their donors matters.³²

Egeland and Pelopidas, through interviews with dozens of current and former think tank staff, as well as grant managers, found compelling evidence that funding can lead to self-censorship and donor-directed censorship in some cases.³³“Self-censorship is the greatest threat to our democracies in the West. A lot of think tank experts posture as experts with complete academic freedom — this is absolutely not the case,” one think tank scholar explained to the authors of the study. A grant manager who provides funding to think tanks explained how the process works: “The recipient knows they might not be funded next time around if they’re very disloyal.” A former think tank analyst went even further, telling Egeland and Pelopidas: “what we were producing was not research, it was a kind of propaganda.” Given the scathing commentary from interviewees, the conclusion of this analysis is quite blunt: “Scholars, media organizations, and members of the public should be sensitized to the conflicts of interest shaping foreign policy analysis generally and nuclear policy analysis specifically.”³⁴

If think tanks were doing what they were intended to do in the first place, there would be no issue. The conflicts of interest that have arisen in recent decades make it a very, very important matter today.

Leave a comment

I was halfway through an essay on the LA wildfires before closing the window and discarding the content. I felt that I couldn’t do justice to the subject and that many others would be better suited to expound on the disaster. I personally know three people from Altadena who lost their homes to the inferno. How could I write about it in an effective manner? I decided that I couldn’t.

Instead, I’m sharing this short essay from Irish writer (and LA resident) Colm Tóibín:

On Tuesday evening, houses in Altadena, a more varied community than Pacific Palisades, a place where many artists and writers live, began to burn, including the house of a close friend. For the fire to come down to Highland Park from Altadena, it would have to cross the 134, which leads to the 210. There was no sign on Tuesday night that it was doing so, but the area where the fire was raging was not that far from here. I would think nothing of going to Altadena in the normal course of events. Why should it not come here? The wind was strong enough to take embers a few miles. We went for a walk and saw fires burning in the distance.

What was strange as I was going to bed was that the water in the narrow swimming pool in the backyard was churning, as though the wind had somehow got underneath it. By Wednesday morning, the surface water was fully coated with grit and soot and ashes.

At seven in the morning on Wednesday my phone made an alarming sound. A message came that we were to evacuate now. I had been fast asleep just a second before. Now it was all go. I ran around the house. If only I had pumped up the wheels of the bicycles – if only – we could go zooming down the hill like heroes! The problem was that my boyfriend’s phone was silent on the question of evacuation. Now he checked all the news outlets and saw that the evacuation zone was still about two miles away.

By this time, I was already making plans. One of them included a scenario of me in the middle of the swimming pool, not drowning or waving, just screaming as I fended off the fire and smoke around me. I have no idea why this image involved adding a decade and a half to my age and switching gender, but I was a very old lady in the pool, much like the brave and relentless Barbara Frietchie.

and

As the day went on, we could smell the fire. And the light seemed brighter, as though it was lit for a film. Later, a dense greyness appeared to the north. No further order came to evacuate. We went to the supermarket, where things were normal. The mail came, a little bit late, but it came. A great number of houses lost electricity, but we still had power.

A new fire started in Hollywood. It might have looked as though we were now surrounded on three sides by fires, but it didn’t feel like that. Pacific Palisades and Santa Monica were far away. The worry, however, was that the Altadena fire would spread further or that a little autonomous fire would start around here in some hilly scrubland and, with the help of a new wind, make its way down the dry hill towards us, wooden-framed house by wooden-framed house, shrubs and garden trees, and then everything we own.

Click here to read it in its entirety.

Share

Recommend Fisted by Foucault to your readers

You’ll never think of Foucault the same way again