Great Britain confronted serious colonial crises in India, Iran, and Palestine before plunging headlong into the Suez Canal and imperial collapse in 1956. In the later years of the Cold War, the Soviet Union faced its own challenges in Czechoslovakia, Egypt, and Ethiopia before crashing into a brick wall in its war in Afghanistan.

America’s post-Cold War victory lap suffered its own crisis early in this century with disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, looming just over history’s horizon are three more imperial crises in Gaza, Taiwan, and Ukraine that could cumulatively turn a slow imperial recessional into an all-too-rapid decline, if not collapse.

As a start, let’s put the very idea of an imperial crisis in perspective. The history of every empire, ancient or modern, has always involved a succession of crises — usually mastered in the empire’s earlier years, only to be ever more disastrously mishandled in its era of decline. Right after World War II, when the United States became history’s most powerful empire, Washington’s leaders skillfully handled just such crises in Greece, Berlin, Italy, and France, and somewhat less skillfully but not disastrously in a Korean War that never quite officially ended. Even after the dual disasters of a bungled covert invasion of Cuba in 1961 and a conventional war in Vietnam that went all too disastrously awry in the 1960s and early 1970s, Washington proved capable of recalibrating effectively enough to outlast the Soviet Union, “win” the Cold War, and become the “lone superpower” on this planet.

In both success and failure, crisis management usually entails a delicate balance between domestic politics and global geopolitics. President John F. Kennedy’s White House, manipulated by the CIA into the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, managed to recover its political balance sufficiently to check the Pentagon and achieve a diplomatic resolution of the dangerous 1962 Cuban missile crisis with the Soviet Union.

America’s current plight, however, can be traced at least in part to a growing imbalance between a domestic politics that appears to be coming apart at the seams and a series of challenging global upheavals. Whether in Gaza, Ukraine, or even Taiwan, the Washington of President Joe Biden is clearly failing to align domestic political constituencies with the empire’s international interests. And in each case, crisis mismanagement has only been compounded by errors that have accumulated in the decades since the Cold War’s end, turning each crisis into a conundrum without an easy resolution or perhaps any resolution at all. Both individually and collectively, then, the mishandling of these crises is likely to prove a significant marker of America’s ultimate decline as a global power, both at home and abroad.

Creeping Disaster in Ukraine

Since the closing months of the Cold War, mismanaging relations with Ukraine has been a curiously bipartisan project. As the Soviet Union began breaking up in 1991, Washington focused on ensuring that Moscow’s arsenal of possibly 45,000 nuclear warheads was secure, particularly the 5,000 atomic weapons then stored in Ukraine, which also had the largest Soviet nuclear weapons plant at Dnipropetrovsk.

During an August 1991 visit, President George H.W. Bush told Ukrainian Prime Minister Leonid Kravchuk that he could not support Ukraine’s future independence and gave what became known as his “chicken Kiev” speech, saying: “Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.” He would, however, soon recognize Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia as independent states since they didn’t have nuclear weapons.

When the Soviet Union finally imploded in December 1991, Ukraine instantly became the world’s third-largest nuclear power, though it had no way to actually deliver most of those atomic weapons. To persuade Ukraine to transfer its nuclear warheads to Moscow, Washington launched three years of multilateral negotiations, while giving Kyiv “assurances” (but not “guarantees”) of its future security — the diplomatic equivalent of a personal check drawn on a bank account with a zero balance.

Under the Budapest Memorandum on Security in December 1994, three former Soviet republics — Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine — signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and started transferring their atomic weapons to Russia. Simultaneously, Russia, the U.S., and Great Britain agreed to respect the sovereignty of the three signatories and refrain from using such weaponry against them. Everyone present, however, seemed to understand that the agreement was, at best, tenuous. (One Ukrainian diplomat told the Americans that he had “no illusions that the Russians would live up to the agreements they signed.”)

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Meanwhile — and this should sound familiar today — Russian President Boris Yeltsin raged against Washington’s plans to expand NATO further, accusing President Bill Clinton of moving from a Cold War to a “cold peace.” Right after that conference, Defense Secretary William Perry warned Clinton, point blank, that “a wounded Moscow would lash out in response to NATO expansion.”

Nonetheless, once those former Soviet republics were safely disarmed of their nuclear weapons, Clinton agreed to begin admitting new members to NATO, launching a relentless eastward march toward Russia that continued under his successor George W. Bush. It came to include three former Soviet satellites, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland (1999); three one-time Soviet Republics, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (2004); and three more former satellites, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia (2004). At the Bucharest summit in 2008, moreover, the alliance’s 26 members unanimously agreed that, at some unspecified point, Ukraine and Georgia, too, would “become members of NATO.” In other words, having pushed NATO right up to the Ukrainian border, Washington seemed oblivious to the possibility that Russia might feel in any way threatened and react by annexing that nation to create its own security corridor.

In those years, Washington also came to believe that it could transform Russia into a functioning democracy to be fully integrated into a still-developing American world order. Yet for more than 200 years, Russia’s governance had been autocratic and every ruler from Catherine the Great to Leonid Brezhnev had achieved domestic stability through incessant foreign expansion. So, it should hardly have been surprising when the seemingly endless expansion of NATO led Russia’s latest autocrat, Vladimir Putin, to invade the Crimean Peninsula in March 2014, only weeks after hosting the Winter Olympics.

In an interview soon after Moscow annexed that area of Ukraine, President Obama recognized the geopolitical reality that could yet consign all of that land to Russia’s orbit, saying: “The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.”

Then, in February 2022, after years of low-intensity fighting in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, Putin sent 200,000 mechanized troops to capture the country’s capital, Kyiv, and establish that very “military domination.” At first, as the Ukrainians surprisingly fought off the Russians, Washington and the West reacted with a striking resolve — cutting Europe’s energy imports from Russia, imposing serious sanctions on Moscow, expanding NATO to all of Scandinavia, and dispatching an impressive arsenal of armaments to Ukraine.

After two years of never-ending war, however, cracks have appeared in the anti-Russian coalition, indicating that Washington’s global clout has declined markedly since its Cold War glory days. After 30 years of free-market growth, Russia’s resilient economy has weathered sanctions, its oil exports have found new markets, and its gross domestic product is projected to grow a healthy 2.6% this year. In last spring and summer’s fighting season, a Ukrainian “counteroffensive” failed and the war is, in the view of both Russian and Ukrainian commanders, at least “stalemated,” if not now beginning to turn in Russia’s favor.

Most critically, U.S. support for Ukraine is faltering. After successfully rallying the NATO alliance to stand with Ukraine, the Biden White House opened the American arsenal to provide Kyiv with a stunning array of weaponry, totaling $46 billion, that gave its smaller army a technological edge on the battlefield. But now, in a move with historic implications, part of the Republican (or rather Trumpublican) Party has broken with the bipartisan foreign policy that sustained American global power since the Cold War began. For weeks, the Republican-led House has even repeatedly refused to consider President Biden’s latest $60 billion aid package for Ukraine, contributing to Kyiv’s recent reverses on the battlefield.

The Republican Party’s rupture starts with its leader. In the view of former White House adviser Fiona Hill, Donald Trump was so painfully deferential to Vladimir Putin during “the now legendarily disastrous press conference” at Helsinki in 2018 that critics were convinced “the Kremlin held sway over the American president.” But the problem goes so much deeper. As New York Times columnist David Brooks noted recently, the Republican Party’s historic “isolationism is still on the march.” Indeed, between March 2022 and December 2023, the Pew Research Center found that the percentage of Republicans who think the U.S. gives “too much support” to Ukraine climbed from just 9% to a whopping 48%. Asked to explain the trend, Brooks feels that “Trumpian populism does represent some very legitimate values: the fear of imperial overreach… [and] the need to protect working-class wages from the pressures of globalization.”

Since Trump represents this deeper trend, his hostility toward NATO has taken on an added significance. His recent remarks that he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to a NATO ally that didn’t pay its fair share sent shockwaves across Europe, forcing key allies to consider what such an alliance would be like without the United States (even as Russian President Vladimir Putin, undoubtedly sensing a weakening of U.S. resolve, threatened Europe with nuclear war). All of this is certainly signaling to the world that Washington’s global leadership is now anything but a certainty.

Crisis in Gaza

Just as in Ukraine, decades of diffident American leadership, compounded by increasingly chaotic domestic politics, let the Gaza crisis spin out of control. At the close of the Cold War, when the Middle East was momentarily disentangled from great-power politics, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the 1993 Oslo Accord. In it, they agreed to create the Palestinian Authority as the first step toward a two-state solution. For the next two decades, however, Washington’s ineffectual initiatives failed to break the deadlock between that Authority and successive Israeli governments that prevented any progress toward such a solution.

In 2005, Israel’s hawkish Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to withdraw his defense forces and 25 Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip with the aim of improving “Israel’s security and international status.” Within two years, however, Hamas militants had seized power in Gaza, ousting the Palestinian Authority under President Mahmoud Abbas. In 2009, the controversial Benjamin Netanyahu started his nearly continuous 15-year stretch as Israel’s prime minister and soon discovered the utility of supporting Hamas as a political foil to block the two-state solution he so abhorred.

Not surprisingly then, the day after last year’s tragic October 7th Hamas attack, theTimes of Israel published this headline: “For Years Netanyahu Propped Up Hamas. Now It’s Blown Up in Our Faces.” In her lead piece, senior political correspondent Tal Schneider reported: “For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.”

On October 18th, with the Israeli bombing of Gaza already inflicting severe casualties on Palestinian civilians, President Biden flew to Tel Aviv for a meeting with Netanyahu that would prove eerily reminiscent of Trump’s Helsinki press conference with Putin. After Netanyahu praised the president for drawing “a clear line between the forces of civilization and the forces of barbarism,” Biden endorsed that Manichean view by condemning Hamas for “evils and atrocities that make ISIS look somewhat more rational” and promised to provide the weaponry Israel needed “as they respond to these attacks.” Biden said nothing about Netanyahu’s previous arm’s length alliance with Hamas or the two-state solution. Instead, the Biden White House began vetoing ceasefire proposals at the U.N. while air-freighting, among other weaponry, 15,000 bombs to Israel, including the behemoth 2,000-pound “bunker busters” that were soon flattening Gaza’s high-rise buildings with increasingly heavy civilian casualties.

After five months of arms shipments to Israel, three U.N. ceasefire vetoes, and nothing to stop Netanyahu’s plan for an endless occupation of Gaza instead of a two-state solution, Biden has damaged American diplomatic leadership in the Middle East and much of the world. In November and again in February, massive crowds calling for peace in Gaza marched in Berlin, London, Madrid, Milan, Paris, Istanbul, and Dakar, among other places.

Moreover, the relentless rise in civilian deaths well past 30,000 in Gaza, striking numbers of them children, has already weakened Biden’s domestic support in constituencies that were critical for his win in 2020 — including Arab-Americans in the key swing state of Michigan, African-Americans nationwide, and younger voters more generally. To heal the breach, Biden is now becoming desperate for a negotiated cease-fire. In an inept intertwining of international and domestic politics, the president has given Netanyahu, a natural ally of Donald Trump, the opportunity for an October surprise of more devastation in Gaza that could rip the Democratic coalition apart and thereby increase the chances of a Trump win in November — with fatal consequences for U.S. global power.

Trouble in the Taiwan Straits

While Washington is preoccupied with Gaza and Ukraine, it may also be at the threshold of a serious crisis in the Taiwan Straits. Beijing’s relentless pressure on the island of Taiwan continues unabated. Following the incremental strategy that it’s used since 2014 to secure a half-dozen military bases in the South China Sea, Beijing is moving to slowly strangle Taiwan’s sovereignty. Its breaches of the island’s airspace have increased from 400 in 2020 to 1,700 in 2023. Similarly, Chinese warships have crossed the median line in the Taiwan Straits 300 times since August 2022, effectively erasing it. As commentator Ben Lewis warned, “There soon may be no lines left for China to cross.”

After recognizing Beijing as “the sole legal Government of China” in 1979, Washington agreed to “acknowledge” that Taiwan was part of China. At the same time, however, Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, requiring “that the United States maintain the capacity to resist any resort to force… that would jeopardize the security… of the people on Taiwan.”

Such all-American ambiguity seemed manageable until October 2022 when Chinese President Xi Jinping told the 20th Communist Party Congress that “reunification must be realized” and refused “to renounce the use of force” against Taiwan. In a fateful counterpoint, President Biden stated, as recently as September 2022, that the US would defend Taiwan “if in fact there was an unprecedented attack.”

But Beijing could cripple Taiwan several steps short of that “unprecedented attack” by turning those air and sea transgressions into a customs quarantine that would peacefully divert all Taiwan-bound cargo to mainland China. With the island’s major ports at Taipei and Kaohsiung facing the Taiwan Straits, any American warships trying to break that embargo would face a lethal swarm of nuclear submarines, jet aircraft, and ship-killing missiles.

Given the near-certain loss of two or three aircraft carriers, the U.S. Navy would likely back off and Taiwan would be forced to negotiate the terms of its reunification with Beijing. Such a humiliating reversal would send a clear signal that, after 80 years, American dominion over the Pacific had finally ended, inflicting another major blow to U.S. global hegemony.

The Sum of Three Crises

Washington now finds itself facing three complex global crises, each demanding its undivided attention. Any one of them would challenge the skills of even the most seasoned diplomat. Their simultaneity places the U.S. in the unenviable position of potential reverses in all three at once, even as its politics at home threaten to head into an era of chaos. Playing upon American domestic divisions, the protagonists in Beijing, Moscow, and Tel Aviv are all holding a long hand (or at least a potentially longer one than Washington’s) and hoping to win by default when the U.S. tires of the game. As the incumbent, President Biden must bear the burden of any reversal, with the consequent political damage this November.

Meanwhile, waiting in the wings, Donald Trump may try to escape such foreign entanglements and their political cost by reverting to the Republican Party’s historic isolationism, even as he ensures that the former lone superpower of Planet Earth could come apart at the seams in the wake of election 2024. If so, in such a distinctly quagmire world, American global hegemony would fade with surprising speed, soon becoming little more than a distant memory.

Copyright 2024 Alfred W. McCoy

Via Tomdispatch.com

( Tomdispatch.com) – It’s an ocean of conflict and ecological decline. Despite its vast size — 1.3 million square miles — the South China Sea has become a microcosm of the geopolitical tensions between East and West, where territorial struggles over abundant natural resources may one day lead to environmental collapse.

While the threat of a devastating military conflict between China and the United States in the region still looms, the South China Sea has already experienced irreparable damage. Decades of over-harvesting have, for instance, had a disastrous impact on that sea’s once-flourishing fish. The tuna, mackerel, and shark populations have fallen to 50% of their 1960s levels. Biologically critical coral reef atolls, struggling to survive rising ocean temperatures, are also being buried under sand and silt as the Chinese military lays claim to and builds on the disputed Spratly Islands, an archipelago of 14 small isles and 113 reefs in that sea. Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Vietnam have also laid claim to many of the same islands.

Perhaps no one should be surprised since oil and gas deposits are plentiful in the South China Sea. The U.S. government estimates that 11 billion barrels of oil and 190 trillion cubic feet of natural gas are ready to be extracted from its floor. Such fossil-fuel reserves, some believe, are helping to — yes, how can anyone not use the word? — fuel the turmoil increasingly engulfing the region.

This year, the Washington-based Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative reported that several countries are pursuing new oil and gas development projects in those contested waters, which, the organization notes, could become a “flashpoint in the disputes.” Between 2018 and 2021, there were numerous standoffs between China, Vietnam, and other Southeast Asian countries over drilling operations there, and fears are building that even more severe confrontations lie ahead.

The United States, of course, lays the blame for all of this on China, claiming its aggressive island-reclamation projects violate international law and “militarize an already tense and contested area.” Yet the U.S. is also playing a significant part in raising tensions in the region by agreeing to supply Australia with nuclear-powered submarines as part of its Australia-United Kingdom-United States (AUKUS) security pact. The goal, no doubt, is to restrain Chinese activity with the threat of Western military might. “Next steps could include basing U.S. nuclear-capable platforms — such as strategic bombers — in Australia as well as cooperation on hypersonic missiles, cyber operations, [and] quantum computing,” writes Derek Grossman for the Rand Corporation, the “paramilitary academy” of American defense policy. (And, in fact, the U.S. is evidently preparing to deploy the first nuclear-capable B-52s to that country soon.)

On August 25th, in partnership with Australia and the Philippines (where Washington is getting ready to occupy bases ever closer to China), U.S. Marines practiced retaking an “island” supposedly captured by hostile forces. In that exercise,1,760 Australian and Filipino soldiers and 120 U.S. Marines conducted mock beach landings and air assault maneuvers in Rizal, a small town in western Palawan province in the Philippines, which does indeed face the South China Sea.

“A whole lot of damage can be done to Australia before any potential adversary sets foot on our shores and maintaining the rules-based order in Southeast Asia, maintaining the collective security of Southeast Asia, is fundamental to maintaining the national security of our country,” said Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles of the joint military drills. 

Like AUKUS itself, those war games were intended to send a message: China beware. The resources of the South China Sea aren’t for the taking.

But here’s a question to consider: Is all this international saber-rattling only about fossil fuels? Trade routes through the area are also vital to the Chinese economy, while its fisheries account for 15% of the reported global wild fish catch. Yet neither its well-used shipping routes, necessary as they are to the flow of goods globally, nor those fisheries fully explain the ever-heightening controversy over the region. Having exploited that sea’s wild fisheries for decades, China is now becoming a global leader in fish farming, which already accounts for 72% of the country’s domestic fish production, It’s also increasingly true that fossil fuels have a distinct shelf life. But is it possible that another set of natural resources, arguably more crucial to the economic future of the global superpowers, could be adding to the growing territorial furor over who possesses the goods in the South China Sea?

Mining the Deep Blue Sea

You could call it a race to the bottom, with China leading the charge. In December 2022, that country unveiled its Ocean Drilling Ship, a deep sea mining (DSM) vessel the size of a battle cruiser set to be operational by 2024. Instead of weaponry, however, the ship is equipped with advanced excavation equipment capable of drilling at depths of 32,000 feet. On land, the Chinese already hold a virtual monopoly on metals considered vital to “green” energy development, including cobalt, copper, and lithium. Currently, the Chinese control 60% of the world’s supply of such “green” metals and are now eyeing the abundant resources that exist beneath the ocean’s floor as well. By some estimates, that seabed may contain 1,000 times more rare earth elements than those below dry ground.

It’s difficult to believe that devastating the ocean’s depths in search of minerals for electric batteries and other technologies could offer a sustainable way to fend off climate change. In the process, after all, such undersea mining is likely to have a catastrophic impact, including destroying biodiversity. Right now, it’s impossible to gauge just what sort of damage will be inflicted by such operations, since deep-sea mining is exempt from environmental impact assessments. (How convenient for those who will argue about how crucial they will be to producing a greener, more sustainable future.)

The U.N.’s High Seas Treaty, ratified in March 2023, failed to include environmental rules regulating such practices after China blocked any discussion of a possible moratorium on seabed harvesting. As of 2022, China holds five exploration contracts issued by the U.N.’s International Seabed Authority (ISA), allowing the Chinese to conduct tests and sample contents on the ocean floor. While that U.N. body can divvy up such contracts, they have no power to regulate the industry itself, nor the personnel to do so. This has scientists worried that unfettered deep-sea mining could cause irreparable damage, including killing sea creatures and destroying delicate habitats.

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“We’ve only scratched the surface of understanding the deep ocean,” said Dr. Andrew Chin, a scientific adviser to the Australian-based Save Our Seas Foundation.

“Science is just starting to appreciate that the deep sea is not an empty void but is brimming with wonderful and unique life forms. Deep sea ecosystems form an interconnected realm with mid and surface waters through the movement of species, energy flows, and currents. Not only will the nodule mining result in the loss of these species and damage deep sea beds for thousands of years, it will potentially result in negative consequences for the rest of the ocean and the people who depend on its health.”

Others are concerned that the ISA, even if it had the authority to regulate the budding industry, wouldn’t do it all that well. “Not only does the ISA favor the interests of mining companies over the advice of scientists, but its processes for EIA [environmental impact assessment] approvals are questionable,” says Dr. Helen Rosenbaum of the Deep-Sea Mining Campaign.

This brings us back to the South China Sea, which, according to Chinese researchers, holds large reserves of “strategically important” precious metals. China has already been fervently scouting for deposits of the polymetallic nodules that hold a number of metals used in virtually all green technologies.

“Learning the distribution of polymetallic nodules will help us to choose a site for experimenting with collection, which is one of the main goals of the mission,” said Wu Changbin, general commander of the Jiaolong, a submarine that discovered just such polymetallic nodules in the South China Sea.

Unsurprisingly, the U.S., lagging behind China in acquiring minerals for green technologies, has been keeping close tabs on the competition. In 2017, a Navy P3-Orion spy plane conducted repeated flyovers of a Chinese research vessel near the island of Guam. Scientists on the ship were allegedly mapping the area and planting monitoring devices for future deep-sea exploration.

The story is much the same in the South China Sea, where the U.S. has conducted numerous surveillance operations to follow Chinese activities there. In May, an Air Force RC-135 surveillance plane was intercepted by a Chinese J-16 jet fighter, causing an international uproar. Without providing any justification for why a U.S. spy plane was there in the first place, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken quickly pointed the finger at China’s recklessness. “[The] Chinese pilot took dangerous action in approaching the plane very, very closely,” claimed Blinken. “There have been a series of these actions directed not just at us, but in other countries in recent months.”

While these quarrels no doubt have much to do with control over fossil fuels, oil, and natural gas aren’t the only resources in the region that are vital to the forthcoming exploits of both countries.

Capitalism and the Climate

Across the globe, oil and coal are increasingly becoming things of the past. A report released in June 2023 by the International Energy Agency (IEA) suggested that renewables were “set to soar by 107 gigawatts (GW), the largest absolute increase ever, to more than 440 GW in 2023.” The natural resources supplying this global surge in renewables, like copper and lithium, are becoming the popular new version of fossil fuels. Markets are favoring the phase-out of climate-warming energy sources, which is why China and the United States are forging ahead with mining critical minerals for renewables — not because they care about the future of the planet but because green energy is becoming profitable.

China’s foray into the global capitalist system and the ruins left in its wake are easy enough to track. In the late 1970s, China’s leaders liberalized the country’s markets and opened the floodgates on foreign investment, making it —  at an average clip of 9.5% per year — one of the fastest-growing economies ever. The World Bank described China’s financial boom as “the fastest sustained expansion by a major economy in history.” It’s no surprise, then, that energy consumption exploded along with its economic gains.

Like many of its global competitors, China’s economy still relies heavily on carbon-intensive fossil fuels, especially coal, but an ever-growing portion of its energy portfolio is made up of renewable energy. Steel-making and vehicle manufacturing now account for 66% of China’s energy use, transportation 9%, and residential use 13%. And while coal is still fueling that economic engine in a major way — China uses more coal than the rest of the world combined — the country has also become a (if not the) world leader in renewables, investing an estimated $545 billion in new technologies in 2022 alone.

While China uses more energy than any other country, Americans consume significantly more than two times that of the Chinese on an individual basis (73,677 kilowatts versus 28,072 as of 2023). And while the U.S. uses more energy per person, it also gets less of its energy from renewables.

As of 2022, the U.S. government estimated that only 13.1% of the country’s primary energy was produced through renewable sources.  Even so, the energy transition in the U.S. is happening and, while natural gas has largely replaced coal, renewables are making considerable inroads. In fact, the Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law by President Biden in early 2022, earmarked $430 billion in government investment and tax credits for green-energy development.

The World Economic Forum estimates that three billion tons of metals and fine minerals will be needed for the world’s energy transition if we are to reach zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 — and that number will undoubtedly only grow in the decades ahead. Of course, investors love to cash in and the forthcoming explosion in the mining of green metals on land and in the world’s waters will surely be a windfall for Wall Street and its equivalents globally. BloombergNEF (BNEF), which covers global markets, claims that the demand for key metals and minerals for the energy transition will grow at least fivefold over the next 30 years, which represents something like a $10 trillion opportunity. At stake is the mining of critical minerals like lithium and traditional metals like copper, which will be used in power generation, electrical grids, energy storage, and transportation.

“[T]he energy transition could lead to a super-cycle for the metals and mining industry,” says Yuchen Huo, a mining analyst for BNEF. “This cycle will be driven by massive expansions in clean energy technologies, which would spur demand growth for both critical minerals and traditional metals.”

It should be no surprise, then, that countries like China and the United States are likely to battle (perhaps all too literally) over access to the finite natural resources vital to the world’s energy transition. Capitalism depends on it. From Africa to the South China Sea, nations are scouring the globe for new, profitable energy ventures. In the Pacific Ocean, which covers 30% of the Earth’s surface, the hunt for polymetallic nodules is prompting island governments to open their waters to excavation in a significant way. The Cook Islands has typically issued licenses to explore its nearby ocean’s depths. Kiribati, Nauru, and Tonga have funded missions to investigate deposits in the Clarion Clipperton Zone, a 1.7 million square mile area stretching between the island of Kiribati and Mexico.

“This [deep sea] exploration frenzy is occurring in the absence of regulatory regimes or conservation areas to protect the unique and little-known ecosystems of the deep sea,” contends Dr. Rosenbaum of the Deep-Sea Mining Campaign. “The health and environmental impacts of deep-sea mining will be widespread… The sea is a dynamic and interconnected environment. The impacts of even a single mine will not be contained to the deep sea.”

According to those who want to mine our way out of the climate crisis, such highly sought-after metals and minerals will remain crucial to weaning the world off dirty fossil fuels. Yet, count on one thing: they will come at a grave cost — not only geopolitically but environmentally, too — and perhaps nowhere will such impacts be felt more devastatingly than in the world’s fragile seas, including the South China Sea where major armed powers are already facing off in an unnerving fashion, with the toll on both those waters and the rest of us still to be discovered.

Copyright 2023 Joshua Frank

Tomdispatch.com

(The Conversation) – Saudi Arabia’s cabinet recently approved the decision to join the China-led Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).

This could be a signal that Riyadh, with all its energy reserves, is choosing sides in the Ukraine war. Saudi Arabia, in part stung by US president Joe Biden’s refusal to deal with the Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, is moving closer to Russia and China, particularly since the Chinese brokered a rapprochement between the kingdom and Iran.

The SCO began its life in 1996 as the “Shanghai Five” made up of People’s Republic of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan. In 2001 it admitted additional central Asian states and renamed itself as the SCO, a military, political and economic collaboration organisation. Since then most other central Asian states have joined, plus Mongolia as an observer and critically, in 2017, Pakistan and India.

In 2023 the SCO has nearly 50% of the global population as member states, observers or partners and approximately 30% of the global economy in nominal terms (that is pure dollar terms). It represents just over 40% in purchasing power parity (PPP), a term that measures economic power adjusted for the cost of goods in a country or group of countries.

To put that in perspective, the G7 represents a much smaller population and only about 27% of the global economy in PPP terms.

The SCO already had more economic clout than the G7 and in 2021 held its latest set of combined military exercises. And now resource rich Saudi Arabia is joining. The SCO holds frequent joint military and counter terrorism exercises with the next planned later in 2023. It will be interesting to see how Saudi engages militarily.

This edging closer to Beijing is particularly significant given that China has recently strengthened its diplomatic credibility by negotiating a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

The various Iranian/Arab disputes have been one of the reasons that the Middle East and Iran have remained unstable, fragmented and unable to push a regional approach to their problems.

Part of a wider strategy

The calamitous war in Yemen is but one example. The conflict has been a proxy war between the Saudis and the Iranians for dominance of the region. As Saudi’s cost of oil production is lower than Iran’s, part of the Saudi strategy has been to keep oil prices artificially low, preferably below the US$65 (£52) per barrel figure that some analysts think to be the price Iran needs to balance its budget.

So, it’s not a surprise that almost immediately after the Chinese negotiated the Iran/Saudi deal Opec, the oil cartel, of which both countries are members, announced cuts in production. The resulting oil price rises that will keep inflationary pressures on the west – and the Russian economy afloat.

Many in the west think that the majority of the world is against Putin’s war in Russia and want sanctions on Russia to work. However the Economist Intelligence Unit has just published an analysis showing that support for Russia is growing in the developed world, in part driven by memories of European colonialism.

Chinese influence grows

Meanwhile, China’s president Xi Jinping is using the Ukraine war to test western resolve, use up western war stocks of munitions and assess the effectiveness of the weaponry the west gives the Ukrainians, all while moving closer to Xi’s stated aim of reunifying the mainland and the island of Taiwan.

India, as a member of the SCO and the Quad (the loose alliance of Australia, India, Japan and the US), is doing what India does best – playing both sides of the sword. Prime minister Narendra Modi, when asked recently if India is more drawn towards China’s pole of influence, or America’s, said: “We are creating a third pole.”

And while all this is going on Australia, the UK and US announced their new Aukus security partnership, with one eye on a potential conflict with China over Taiwan.

China’s expansion of the SCO and its recent exercising of its diplomatic muscle is all in support of its objective to be regarded as a world power – and to prepare its alliances for China’s stated strategic aim of reunification with Taiwan.

What it means for Taiwan

Recently Beijing reminded the world that, in 1971, UN resolution 2758 confirmed its position as the lawful government of China.

As tensions rise, the expansion of the SCO, and debate around the meaning of resolution 2758 are likely to become more important.

The day before UN resolution 2758 was passed in 1971, the recognised territory of China included both the mainland and Taiwan. It had to include both because the government of Taiwan was the internationally recognised government of all of China. Resolution 2758 changed the recognised government from Taipei to Beijing, but did not comment on the borders of the territory of China, and therefore the borders haven’t changed.

Taiwan’s constitution still claims the mainland, and still contains “transitional provisions” for elections until reunification. Reunification is a specified aim in Taiwan’s constitution. The two political parties in Taiwan have diverging opinions on integration with, or independence from, China.

China, through the SCO and other tools, is lining up its allies to back its position on Taiwan as it ramps up its rhetoric. It carried out military drills around the island on the weekend of April 8 2023, then announced it would be banning ships from entering an area north of Taiwan on April 16 due to “possible falling rocket wreckage”.

The US is firming up its core allies who could support its position on Taiwan through Nato and Aukus but is leaking support in the developing world.

The world just got a lot more complicated.

Andrew MacLeod, Visiting Professor, War and Security Studies/International Genetics, King’s College London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

But what if the answer is “no,” which seems at least as likely? Wouldn’t that pave the way for the U.S. to work with its friends and allies, no less than with China itself, to reduce tensions in the region and possibly open a space for the launching of peaceful negotiations between Taiwan and the mainland? If nothing else, it would eliminate the need to boost the Pentagon budget by many billions of dollars annually, as now advocated by China hawks in Congress.

How that question is answered has enormous implications for us all. Yet, among policymakers in Washington, it isn’t even up for discussion. Instead, they seem to be competing with each another to identify the year in which the purported Chinese invasion will occur and war will break out between our countries.

Is It 2035, 2027, or 2025?

All high-level predictions of an imminent Chinese invasion of Taiwan rest on the assumption that Chinese leaders will never allow that island to become fully independent and so will respond to any move in that direction with a full-scale military assault. In justifying such claims, American officials regularly point to the ongoing modernization of China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), and warnings by top Chinese officials that they will crush any effort by “separatist elements” in Taiwan to impede unification. In line with that mode of thinking, only one question remains: Exactly when will the Chinese leadership consider the PLA ready to invade Taiwan and overpower any U.S. forces sent to the island’s relief?

Until 2021, U.S. military officials tended to place that pivotal moment far in the future, citing the vast distance the PLA needed to go to duplicate the technological advantages of U.S. forces. Pentagon analysts most often forecast 2035 for this achievement, the date set by President Xi Jinping for China to “basically complete the modernization of national defense and the military.”

This assessment, however, changed dramatically in late 2021 when the Department of Defense published its annual report on the military power of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). That document highlighted a significant alteration in China’s strategic planning: whereas its leaders once viewed 2035 as the year in which the PLA would become a fully modern fighting force, they now sought to reach that key threshold in 2027, by accelerating the “intelligentization” of their forces (that is, their use of artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies). If realized, the Pentagon report suggested, that “new milestone for modernization in 2027… would provide Beijing with more credible military options in a Taiwan contingency.”

Still, some Pentagon officials suggested that the PLA was unlikely to achieve full “intelligentization” by then, casting doubt on its ability to overpower the U.S. in a hypothetical battle for Taiwan. That, however, hasn’t stopped Republicans from using the prediction to generate alarm in Congress and seek additional funds for weaponry geared toward a future war with China.

As Representative Mike Gallagher (R-WI) put it in 2022, when he was still a minority member of the House Armed Services Committee, “China’s just throwing so much money into military modernization and has already sped up its timeline to 2027 for when it wants the PLA to have the capability to seize Taiwan, that we need to act with a sense of urgency to tackle that threat because that is something unlike anything we’ve seen in modern history.” And note that he is now the chairman of the new China-bashing House Select Committee on China.

A potential 2027 invasion remained common wisdom in U.S. policy circles until this January, when the head of the Air Force Mobility Command, General Michael Minihan, told his troops that he suspected the correct date for a future war with China was 2025, setting off another panic attack in Washington. “I hope I am wrong,” he wrote to the 50,000 Air Force personnel under his command. “My gut tells me we will fight in 2025. Xi secured his third term and set his war council in October 2022. Taiwan’s presidential elections are in 2024 and will offer Xi a reason. The United States’ presidential elections are in 2024 and will offer Xi a distracted America. Xi’s team, reason, and opportunity are all aligned for 2025.”

Though his prediction was derided by some analysts who doubted the PRC’s capacity to overpower the U.S. by that date, Minihan received strong backing from China hawks in Congress. “I hope he’s wrong as well, but I think he’s right, though, unfortunately,” said Representative Michael McCaul (R-TX), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in an interview on Fox News Sunday.

At this point, official Washington continues to obsess over the date of the presumptive Chinese invasion, with some figures now suggesting 2024. Strangely enough, however, nowhere in official circles is there a single prominent figure asking the most basic question of all: Does China actually have any serious intention of invading Taiwan or are we manufacturing a crisis over nothing?

China’s Invasion Calculus

To answer that question means investigating Beijing’s calculus when it comes to the relative benefits and perils of mounting such an invasion.

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To start off: China’s top leadership has repeatedly stated that it’s prepared to employ force as a last resort to ensure Taiwan’s unification with the mainland. President Xi and his top lieutenants repeat this mantra in every major address they make. “Taiwan is China’s Taiwan,” Xi characteristically told the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) last October. “We will continue to strive for peaceful reunification with the greatest sincerity and the utmost effort, but we will never promise to renounce the use of force and we reserve the option of taking all measures necessary.”

In addition, vigorous efforts have gone into enhancing the PLA’s capacity to invade that island, located 100 miles across the Taiwan Strait from the Chinese mainland. The PLA has substantially expanded its naval arm, the PLA Navy (PLAN), and especially its amphibious assault component. The PLAN, in turn, has conducted numerous amphibious exercises up and down the Chinese coast, many suggesting practice for a possible invasion of Taiwan. According to the Pentagon’s 2022 report on Chinese military power, such maneuvers have increased in recent years, with 20 of them conducted in 2021 alone.

Exercises like these certainly indicate that Chinese leaders are building the capacity to undertake an invasion, should they deem it necessary. But issuing threats and acquiring military capabilities do not necessarily signify intent to take action. The CCP’s top leaders are survivors of ruthless intraparty struggles and know how to calculate risks and benefits. However strongly they may feel about Taiwan, they are not inclined to order an invasion that could result in China’s defeat and their own disgrace, imprisonment, or death.

Weighing the Risks

Even under the best of circumstances, an amphibious assault on Taiwan would prove exceedingly difficult and dangerous. Transporting tens of thousands of PLA troops across 100 miles of water while under constant attack by Taiwanese and (probably) U.S. forces and depositing them on heavily defended beachheads could easily result in disaster. As Russia discovered in Ukraine, conducting a large-scale assault against spirited resistance can prove extremely difficult — even when invading by land. And keep in mind that the PLA hasn’t engaged in significant armed combat since 1979, when it lost a war with Vietnam (though it has had some border skirmishes with India in recent years). Even if it managed to secure a beachhead in Taiwan, its forces would undoubtedly lose dozens of ships, hundreds of planes, and many thousands of troops — with no assurance of securing control over Taipei or other major cities.

Just such an outcome emerged in multiple war games conducted in 2022 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington-based think tank. Those simulations, performed by figures with “a variety of senior governmental, think tank, and military backgrounds,” always began with a PLA amphibious assault on Taiwan accompanied by air and missile attacks on critical government infrastructure. But “the Chinese invasion quickly founders,” a CSIS summary suggests. “Despite massive Chinese bombardment, Taiwanese ground forces stream to the beachhead, where the invaders struggle to build up supplies and move inland. Meanwhile, U.S. submarines, bombers, and fighter/attack aircraft, often reinforced by Japan Self-Defense Forces, rapidly cripple the Chinese amphibious fleet. China’s strikes on Japanese bases and U.S. surface ships cannot change the result: Taiwan remains autonomous.”

Those like General Minihan who predict an imminent Chinese invasion usually neglect to mention such hardcore assessments, but other military analysts have been less reticent. Buried deep in the Pentagon’s 2022 report on Chinese military power, for example, is the following: “An attempt to invade Taiwan would likely strain PRC’s armed forces and invite international intervention. Combined with inevitable force attrition… these factors make an amphibious invasion of Taiwan a significant political and military risk for Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party.”

Surely Xi’s generals and admirals have conducted similar war games and reached comparable conclusions. Chinese leaders are also painfully aware of the sanctions imposed by the U.S. and its allies on Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine and recognize that an invasion of Taiwan would automatically result in similar penalties. Add in the potential damage to Chinese infrastructure from U.S. bombers and the country’s economic prospects could be crushed for years to come — a likely death sentence for the Chinese Communist Party. Why, then, even think about an invasion?

There’s No Hurry

Add in one other factor. China’s leaders seem to have concluded that time is on their side — that the Taiwanese people will, eventually, voluntarily decide to unite with the mainland. This approach is spelled out in Beijing’s recent white paper, “The Taiwan Question and China’s Reunification in the New Era,” released last August by the Taiwan Affairs Office of the PRC’s State Council. As China grows increasingly prosperous, the paper argues, the Taiwanese — especially young Taiwanese — will see ever greater benefits from unification, diminishing the appeal of independence, or “separatism.”

“China’s development and progress, and in particular the steady increases in its economic power, technological strength, and national defense capabilities, are an effective curb against separatist activities,” the paper states. “As more and more compatriots from Taiwan, especially young people, pursue their studies, start businesses, seek jobs, or go to live on the mainland… the economic ties and personal bonds between the people on both sides run deeper… leading cross-Straits relations towards reunification.”

And keep in mind that this is not a short-term proposition but a strategy that will take years — even decades — to achieve success. Nevertheless, most of that white paper’s content is devoted not to military threats — the only parts of the paper to receive coverage in the West — but to bolstering bilateral trade and increasing China’s economic appeal to young Taiwanese. “Following the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics, the mainland has improved its governance and maintained long-term economic growth,” it asserts. “As a result, the overall strength and international influence of the mainland will continue to increase, and its influence over and appeal to Taiwan society will keep growing.”

In such a take-it-slow approach surely lies a recognition that military action against Taiwan could prove a disaster for China. But whatever the reasoning behind such planning, it appears that Chinese leaders are prepared to invest massive resources in persuading the Taiwanese that reunification is in their best interests. Whether or not such a strategy will succeed is unknown. It’s certainly possible that a Taiwanese preference for political autonomy will outweigh any interest in mainland business opportunities, but with Beijing banking so heavily on the future in this manner, a military assault seems far less likely. And that’s something you won’t hear these days in an ever more belligerent Washington.

Considering the Alternatives

It’s difficult for outsiders — let alone most Chinese — to know what goes on in Beijing’s closed-door CCP leadership councils and, of all state secrets, that leadership’s calculations about a possible invasion of Taiwan are probably the most guarded. It’s certainly possible, in other words, that Xi and his top lieutenants are prepared to invade at the earliest sign of a drive towards independence by Taiwan’s leaders, as many U.S. officials claim. But there’s no evidence in the public realm to sustain such an assessment and all practical military analysis suggests that such an endeavor would prove suicidal. In other words — though you’d never know it in today’s frenzied Washington environment — concluding that an invasion is not likely under current circumstances is all too reasonable.

In the belief that Beijing is prepared to mount an invasion, the United States is already providing Taiwan with billions of dollars‘ worth of advanced weaponry, while bolstering its own capacity to defeat China in any potential conflict. Sadly, such planning for a future Pacific war is likely to consume an ever-increasing share of taxpayer dollars, result in ever more military training and planning in the Pacific, and as Rep. Gallagher and Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy suggested recently, ever more belligerent attitudes toward China. Given the reasonable probability that Chinese leaders have decided against an invasion, at least in the immediate future, doesn’t it make sense to consider alternative policies that will cost all of us less and make all of us safer?  

Imagine, in fact, adopting a less antagonistic stance towards Beijing and seeking negotiated solutions to some of the issues dividing us, including China’s militarization of contested islands in the South China Sea and its provocative air and sea maneuvers around Taiwan. Reduced tensions in the Western Pacific might, in turn, make it possible to avoid massive increases in the Pentagon budget, thereby permitting increased spending on domestic priorities like health, education, and climate action.

If only…

Copyright 2023 Michael T. Klare

Via Tomdispatch.com

In The Guns of August, her magisterial account of another conflict nobody wanted, Barbara Tuchman attributed the start of World War I in 1914 to French and German plans already in place. “Appalled upon the brink,” she wrote, “the chiefs of state who would be ultimately responsible for their country’s fate attempted to back away, but the pull of military schedules dragged them forward.” In a similar fashion, Beijing and Washington have been making military, diplomatic, and semi-secretive moves that could drag us into a calamitous conflict that, once again, nobody wants.

At the apex of power, national leaders in Beijing and Washington have staked out starkly contrasting positions on Taiwan’s future. For nearly a year now, President Joe Biden has been trying to resolve the underlying ambiguity in previous U.S. policy toward that island by stating repeatedly that he would indeed defend it from any mainland attack. In May of last year, in response to a reporter’s question about a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan, he said, “Yes,” the U.S. would intervene militarily. He then added: “We agree with the One China policy. We signed on to it and all the attendant agreements made from there, but the idea that it can be taken by force, just taken by force, is [just not] appropriate.”

As Biden acknowledged, by extending diplomatic recognition to Beijing in 1979, Washington had indeed accepted China’s future sovereignty over Taiwan. For the next 40 years, presidents from both parties made public statements opposing Taiwan’s independence. In effect, they conceded that the island was a Chinese province and its fate a domestic matter (even if they opposed the People’s Republic doing anything about it in the immediate future).

Nonetheless, Biden has persisted in his aggressive rhetoric. He told CBS News last September, for instance, that he would indeed send U.S. troops to defend Taiwan “if, in fact, there was an unprecedented attack.” Then, in a significant break with longstanding U.S. policy, he added: “Taiwan makes their own judgments about their independence… That’s their decision.”

Within weeks, at a Communist Party Congress, Chinese President Xi Jinping responded with a strong personal commitment to the unification of Taiwan — by force if necessary. “We insist on striving for the prospect of peaceful reunification,” he said, “but we will never promise to give up the use of force and reserve the option to take all necessary measures.”

After a long burst of applause from the 2,000 party officials massed in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, he then invoked the inevitability of Marxian dialectical forces that would insure the victory he was promising. “The historical wheels of national reunification and national rejuvenation are rolling forward,” he said, “and the complete reunification of the motherland must be achieved.”

As the political philosopher Hannah Arendt once reminded us, a sense of historical inevitability is a dangerous ideological trigger that can plunge authoritarian states like China into otherwise unthinkable wars or unimaginable mass slaughter.

War Preparations Move Down the Chain of Command

Not surprisingly, the forceful statements of Biden and Xi have been working their way down the chain of command in both countries. In January, a four-star U.S. Air Force general, Mike Minihan, sent a formal memo to his massive Air Mobility Command of 500 aircraft and 50,000 troops, ordering them to ramp up their training for war with China. “My gut tells me,” he concluded, that “we will fight in 2025.” Instead of repudiating the general’s statement, a Pentagon spokesman simply added, “The National Defense Strategy makes clear that China is the pacing challenge for the Department of Defense.”

Nor is General Minihan even the first senior officer to have made such foreboding statements. As early as March 2021, the head of the Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral Philip Davidson, warned Congress that China was planning to invade the island by 2027: “Taiwan is clearly one of their ambitions… And I think the threat is manifest during this decade, in fact, in the next six years.”

Unlike their American opposites, China’s service chiefs have been publicly silent on the subject, but their aircraft have been eloquent indeed. After President Biden signed a defense appropriation bill last December with $10 billion in military aid for Taiwan, an unprecedented armada of 71 Chinese aircraft and many more military drones swarmed that island’s air defenses in a single 24-hour period.

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As such tit-for-tat escalation only increases, Washington has matched China’s aggression with major diplomatic and military initiatives. Indeed, the assistant defense secretary for the Indo-Pacific, Ely Ratner, has promised, ominously enough, that “2023 is likely to stand as the most transformative year in U.S. force posture in the region in a generation.”

During a recent tour of Asian allies, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin claimed some significant strategic gains. On a stopover in Seoul, he and his South Korean counterpart announced that the U.S. would deploy aircraft carriers and additional jets for expanded live-fire exercises — a distinctly escalatory move after the curtailment of such joint operations during the Trump years.

Moving on to Manila, Austin revealed that the Philippines had just granted U.S. troops access to four more military bases, several facing Taiwan across a narrow strait. These were needed, he said, because “the People’s Republic of China continues to advance its illegitimate claims” in the South China Sea.

China’s Foreign Ministry seemed stung by the news. After a successful diplomatic courtship of the previous Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte, that had checked U.S. influence while accepting the Chinese occupation of islands in Philippine waters, Beijing could now do little more than condemn Washington’s access to those bases for “endangering regional peace and stability.” Although some Filipino nationalists objected that an American presence might invite a nuclear attack, according to reliable polling, 84% of Filipinos felt that their country should cooperate with the United States to defend their territorial waters from China.

Both of those announcements were dividends from months of diplomacy and down payments on major military deployments to come. The annual U.S. “defense” bill for 2023 is funding the construction of military installations across the Pacific. And even as Japan is doubling its defense budget, in part to protect its southern Islands from China, U.S. Marines in Okinawa plan to trade their tanks and heavy artillery for agile drones and shoulder-fired missiles as they form “littoral regiments” capable of rapid deployment to the smallest of islands in the region.

Secret Strategies

In contrast to those public statements, semi-secret strategies on both sides of the Pacific have generally escaped much notice. If the U.S. military commitment to Taiwan remains at least somewhat ambiguous, this country’s economic dependence on that island’s computer-chip production is almost absolute. As the epicenter of a global supply chain, Taiwan manufactures 90% of the world’s advanced chips and 65% of all semiconductors. (In comparison, China’s share of chips is 5% and the U.S. slice only 10%.) As the world’s top producer of the most critical component in everything from consumer cell phones to military missiles, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is the leading innovator, supplying Apple and other U.S. tech firms.

Now, American officials are moving to change that. Having overseen the breaking of ground for a $12 billion TSMC chip-production factory in Phoenix in 2020, only two years later, Arizona’s governor announced that “TSMC has completed construction of its main facility.” Last August, just before President Biden signed the $52 billion CHIPS and Science Act, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo insisted that “our dependence on Taiwan for chips is untenable and unsafe.”

Only three months later, TSMC reached for a large slice of those federal funds by investing $28 billion in a second Phoenix factory that, when opened in 2026, will produce what the New York Times has called “more advanced — though not the most advanced — chip-making technology.” At a ceremony featuring President Biden last December, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook proclaimed, “This is an incredibly significant moment.”

That might be true, but the focus on Phoenix obscured equally significant chip factory projects being put in place by Samsung in Texas, Intel in Ohio, and Micron Technology in New York. Add it all up and the U.S. is already about halfway to the “minimum of three years and a $350 billion investment… to replace the Taiwanese [chip] foundries,” according to the Semiconductor Industry Association.

In other words, if Beijing did decide to invade Taiwan after 2026, TSMC’s intellectual capital, in the form of its top computer scientists, would undoubtedly be on outbound flights for Phoenix, leaving little more than a few concrete shells and some sabotaged equipment behind. The global supply chain for silicon chips involving Dutch machines (for extreme ultraviolet lithography), American designs, and Taiwanese production would probably continue without much of a hitch in the United States, Japan, and Europe, leaving the People’s Republic of China with little more than its minimalist 5% of the world’s $570 billion semiconductor industry.

China’s secret calculus over an invasion of Taiwan is undoubtedly more complex. In mid-February at Munich, Secretary of State Antony Blinken charged that Beijing was considering giving Moscow “lethal support” for its war in Ukraine, adding that “we’ve made very clear to them that that would cause a serious problem for… our relationship.”

But China is faced with a far more difficult choice than Blinken’s blithe rhetoric suggests. From its impressive arsenal, Beijing could readily supply Moscow with enough of its Hong Niao cruise missiles to destroy most of Ukraine’s armored vehicles (with plenty left over to demolish Kyiv’s faltering electrical infrastructure).

Bleeding NATO in that way would, however, pay limited dividends for any possible future Chinese plans vis-a-vis Taiwan. In contrast, the types of ground-warfare armaments Washington and its allies continue to pour into Ukraine would do little to strain the U.S. naval capacity in the Western Pacific.

Moreover, the diplomatic and economic price Beijing would pay for a significant involvement in the Ukraine War might well prove prohibitive. As the world’s largest consumer of imported cheap oil and wheat, which Russia exports in abundance, China needs a humbled Putin, desperate for markets and compliant with its designs for greater dominion over Eurasia. A triumphant Putin, bending the will of timorous states in Eastern Europe and Central Asia while negotiating ever-tougher deals for his exports, is hardly in Beijing’s interest.

Ignoring the existential threat Putin’s war poses for the European Union would also cost Beijing decades of diplomacy and billions in infrastructure funds already invested to knit all of Eurasia, from the North Sea to the South China Sea, into an integrated economy. In addition, siding with a distinctly secondary power that has blatantly violated the core principle of the international order — which bars the acquisition of territory by armed conquest — is hardly likely to advance Beijing’s sustained bid for global leadership.

Vladimir Putin might indeed try to equate China’s claim to a breakaway province in Taiwan with his own bid for former Soviet territory in Ukraine, but the analogy is anathema to Beijing. “Taiwan is not Ukraine,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry announced last year, the day before Putin invaded Ukraine. “Taiwan has always been an inalienable part of China. This is an indisputable legal and historical fact.”

The Costs of War

With both Beijing and Washington contemplating a possible future war over Taiwan, it’s important (especially in light of Ukraine) to consider the likely costs of such a conflict. In November 2021, the venerable Reuters News Agency compiled a series of credible scenarios for a China-U.S. war over Taiwan. If the United States decided to fight for the island, said Reuters, “there is no guarantee it would defeat an increasingly powerful PLA [People’s Liberation Army].”

In its least violent scenario, Reuters speculated that Beijing could use its navy to impose a “customs quarantine” around Taiwan, while announcing an Air Defense Identification Zone over the island and warning the world not to violate its sovereignty. Then, to tighten the noose, it could move to a full blockade, laying mines at major ports and cutting underwater cables. Should Washington decide to intervene, its submarines would undoubtedly sink numerous PLA warships, while its surface vessels could launch aircraft and missiles as well. But China’s powerful air-defense system would undoubtedly fire thousands of its own missiles, inflicting “heavy losses” on the U.S. Navy. Rather than attempting a difficult amphibious invasion, Beijing might complete this staged escalation with saturation missile attacks on Taiwan’s cities until its leaders capitulated.

In the Reuters scenario for all-out war, Beijing decides “to mount the biggest and most complex amphibious and airborne landing ever attempted,” seeking to “overwhelm the island before the United States and its allies can respond.” To hold off a U.S. counterattack, the PLA might fire missiles at American bases in Japan and Guam. While Taiwan launched jets and missiles to deter the invasion fleet, U.S. carrier battle groups would steam toward the island and, “within hours, a major war [would be] raging in East Asia.”

In August 2022, the Brookings Institution released more precise estimates of likely losses from various scenarios in such a war. Although China’s “recent and dramatic military modernizations have sharply reduced America’s ability to defend the island,” the complexities of such a clash, wrote the Brookings analyst, make “the outcome… inherently unknowable.” Only one thing would be certain: the losses on both sides (including in Taiwan itself) would be devastating.

In Brookings’ first scenario involving “a maritime fight centered on submarines,” Beijing would impose a blockade and Washington would respond with naval convoys to sustain the island. If the United States were to knock out Beijing’s communications, the U.S. Navy would lose just 12 warships, while sinking all 60 of China’s subs. If, by contrast, China maintained its communications, it could possibly sink 100 vessels, mostly U.S. warships, while losing only 29 subs.  

In Brookings’ second scenario for “a broader subregional war,” both sides would use jets and missiles in a struggle that would engulf southeastern China, Taiwan, and U.S. bases in Japan, Okinawa, and Guam. If China’s attacks proved successful, it might destroy 40 to 80 U.S. and Taiwanese warships at a cost of some 400 Chinese aircraft. If the U.S. got the upper hand, it could destroy “much of China’s military in southeastern China,” while shooting down more than 400 PLA aircraft, even as it suffered heavy losses of its own jets.

By focusing largely on military losses, which are chilling enough, both studies grossly underestimate the real costs and potential devastation to Taiwan and much of East Asia. My own instinct tells me that, should China impose a customs blockade on the island, Washington would blink hard at the thought of losing hundreds of aircraft and dozens of warships, including an aircraft carrier or two, and retreat to its longstanding policy of regarding Taiwan as China’s territory. If the U.S. did challenge that customs interdiction zone, however, it would have to attack the Chinese blockade and might, in the eyes of much of the world, become the aggressor — a real disincentive from Washington’s point of view.

Should China launch an all-out invasion, however, Taiwan would likely succumb within a few days once its air force of just 470 combat aircraft was overwhelmed by the PLA’s 2,900 jet fighters, 2,100 supersonic missiles, and its massive navy, now the world’s largest. Reflecting China’s clear strategic advantage of simple proximity to Taiwan, the island’s occupation might well be a fait accompli before the U.S. Navy ships could arrive from Japan and Hawaii in sufficient numbers to challenge the massive Chinese armada.

If Beijing and Washington somehow let the pull of policy and planning drag them into such an ever-widening war, however, the damage could still prove incalculable — with cities devastated, untold thousands dead, and the global economy, with its epicenter in Asia, left in ruins. Let us only hope that today’s leaders in both Washington and Beijing prove more restrained than did their counterparts in Berlin and Paris in August 1914 when plans for victory unleashed a war that would leave 20 million dead in its wake.

Copyright 2023 Alfred W. McCoy

Via Tomdispatch.com )

(The Conversation) – When 2022 began, there was trepidation about what might happen in at least ten regions. Topping most lists were concerns about tensions in Ukraine, Afghanistan and Ethiopia.

What actually transpired in 2022 were some of the most shocking humanitarian scenes in modern history – with a backdrop of the continuing pandemic and extreme weather events exacerbated by climate change.

This has prompted experts to speak of an era of “polycrisis”, where countries are dealing with cascading and interconnected crises.

The World Bank estimates 23 countries – with a combined population of 850 million people – currently face high or medium intensity conflict. The number of conflict-affected countries has doubled over the past decade.

This has triggered massive refugee flows. As of May 2022, a global record of 100 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide.

With the backdrop of last year’s bitter legacy, what crises are most concerning as we head into 2023?

There are a range of new flashpoints and ongoing deadly conflicts the world has largely ignored due to the focus on Ukraine.

2022’s bitter legacy

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been seared into our memories of 2022. It has been one of the fastest and largest displacement crises in decades.

Also making headlines last year was continuing violence in Afghanistan, where six million people were on the brink of famine by August 2022 according to the UN refugee agency, and the mayhem in Myanmar following the military’s February 2021 coup.

The opening days of 2023 look bleak. Those in Ukraine and Afghanistan are now facing winter without access to food, water, health care and other essential supplies.

The situation in Myanmar is only worsening, especially for ethnic minority regions and in Rohingya refugee camps.

New flashpoint: Iran

In Iran, 22-year-old Mahsa (Jina) Amini was arrested at a metro station by the morality police who enforce the dress code, and she died after being held in their custody on September 16 last year.

Her death set off a sustained uprising in more than 150 cities and 140 universities in all 31 provinces of Iran, according to UN human rights chief Volker Türk.

More than 15,000 people, including children, have been arrested in connection with the protests and are threatened with execution. At least 26 of them currently face the death penalty, and at least four have reportedly already been executed. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps say the average age of arrested protesters is as young as 15.

The prospects of a peaceful resolution of this crisis in 2023 are low and require strong global intervention.

Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong has made firm statements against the death penalty and this “dark chapter” in Iran’s history with her Canadian and New Zealand counterparts, and she should continue this rhetoric.

Tensions in the Asia-Pacific

In our region, Sri Lanka faced economic collapse and a mostly peaceful uprising in mid-2022, and remains in a precarious position.

North Korea remains an aggressive actor. Military tensions on the Korean peninsula have risen sharply this year as Pyongyang has carried out an unprecedented blitz of weapons tests, including the launch of one of its most advanced intercontinental ballistic missiles in November.

From Australia’s perspective, our primary national security risk remains developments in the South China Sea and Taiwan.

More aggressive language on Taiwan emerged from the Chinese Communist Party Congress, and statements by President Joe Biden indicated the United States would not stand by if China invaded Taiwan.

Current Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has pledged to double Japan’s defence spending in response to these tensions.

There’s a high risk of miscalculation on this issue from all sides, and there’s the growing threat of grey zone tactics – coercive measures which don’t qualify as conventional military battle.

We must avoid tunnel vision

What we also witnessed in 2022 was that the world’s gaze and assistance was so firmly focused on events in Ukraine that many other long-running conflicts producing extreme human suffering were ignored or receded into the background.

For example, it’s hard to overstate the severity of the crises in East Africa of food, shelter and health systems – though comparably this has received little media attention.

What’s more, the UN Human Rights Office estimates more than 306,000 civilians were killed over ten years in the Syrian conflict, and any peaceful resolution is still “elusive” according to UN Special Envoy Geir Pedersen.

There are deep structural conflicts in Haiti, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Syria, Yemen, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo threatening people, species and the environment. The global community must pay attention.

Dealing with ‘polycrisis’

Nations, civil society movements and the UN must be nimble enough to deal with the state of “polycrisis” or “permacrisis” the globe is enduring – where armed conflicts combine with and exacerbate issues such as inflation, cyber threats, geo-politics and the energy crisis.

World leaders are dealing with a host of pressing issues:

• the climate emergency

• the socio-economic repercussions of the COVID pandemic, by no means over

• 100 million displaced people

• the increasing global population, now over eight billion

• the rising cost of living.

All this means 2023 is likely to be another turbulent year.

Susan Harris Rimmer, Professor and Director of the Policy Innovation Hub, Griffith Business School, Griffith University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Geopolitics — the relentless struggle for control over foreign lands, ports, cities, mines, railroads, oil fields, and other sources of material and military might — has governed the behavior of major powers for centuries. Think of Gibraltar, Pearl Harbor, the diamond mines of Africa, or the oil fields of the Middle East. Aspiring world powers, from the Roman Empire on, have always proceeded from the assumption that acquiring control over as many such places as possible — by force if necessary — was the surest path to greatness.

During the Cold War, it was considered uncouth in governing circles to openly express such blatantly utilitarian motives. Instead, both sides fabricated lofty ideological explanations for their intense rivalry. Even then, though, geopolitical considerations all too often prevailed. For example, the Truman Doctrine, that early exemplar of Cold War ideological ferocity, was devised to justify Washington’s efforts to resist Soviet incursions in the Middle East, then a major source of oil for Europe (and of revenue for American oil firms).

Today, ideological appeals are still deployed by top officials to justify predatory military moves, but it’s becoming ever more difficult to disguise the geopolitical intent of so much international behavior. Russia’s assault on Ukraine is the most ruthless and conspicuous recent example, but hardly the only one. For years now, Washington has sought to counter China’s rise by bolstering U.S. military strength in the western Pacific, prompting a variety of countermoves by Beijing. Other major powers, including India and Turkey, have also sought to extend their geopolitical reach. Not surprisingly, the risk of wars on such a global chessboard is likely to grow, which means understanding contemporary geopolitics becomes ever more important. Let’s begin with Russia and its quest for military advantage.

Fighting for Position in the European Battlespace

Yes, Russian President Vladimir Putin has justified his invasion in ideological terms by claiming that Ukraine was an artificial state unjustly detached from Russia. He’s also denigrated the Ukrainian government as infiltrated by neo-Nazis still seeking to undo the Soviet Union’s victory in World War II. These considerations seem to have grown more pervasive in Putin’s mind as he assembled forces for an attack on Ukraine. Nevertheless, these should be viewed as an accumulation of grievances overlaying an all too hardcore set of geopolitical calculations.

From Putin’s perspective, the origins of the Ukrainian conflict date back to the immediate post-Cold War years, when NATO, taking advantage of Russia’s weakness at the time, relentlessly expanded eastward. In 1999, three former Soviet-allied states, Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, all previously members of the Warsaw Pact (Moscow’s version of NATO), were incorporated into the alliance; in 2004, Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovakia were added, along with three former actual republics of the Soviet Union (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania). For NATO, this staggering enlargement moved its own front lines of defense ever farther from its industrial heartlands along the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts. Meanwhile, Russia’s front lines shrank hundreds of miles closer to its borders, putting its own heartland at greater risk and generating deep anxiety among senior officials in Moscow, who began speaking out against what they saw as encirclement by hostile forces.

“I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernization of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe,” Putin declared at a Munich Security Conference in 2007. “On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended?”

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It was, however, NATO’s 2008 decision to offer membership to Georgia and Ukraine, two former Soviet republics, that thoroughly inflamed Moscow’s security anxieties. After all, Ukraine shares a 600-mile border with Russia, overlooking a large swath of its industrial heartland. Should it ever actually join NATO, Russian strategists feared, the West could deploy powerful weapons, including ballistic missiles, right on its border.

“The West has explored the territory of Ukraine as a future theater, future battlefield, that is aimed against Russia,” Putin declared in a fire-breathing address on February 21st, just before Russian tanks crossed the Ukrainian border. “If Ukraine was to join NATO it would serve as a direct threat to the security of Russia.”

For Putin and his top security aides, the invasion was primarily intended to preclude such a future possibility, while moving Russia’s front lines farther from its own vulnerable heartland and thereby enhancing its strategic advantage in the European battlespace. As it happens, they seem to have underestimated the strength of the forces arrayed against them — both the determination of ordinary Ukrainians to repel the Russian military and the West’s unity in imposing harsh economic sanctions — and so are likely to emerge from the fighting in a worse position. But any geopolitical foray of this magnitude entails such draconian risks.

Mackinder, Mahan, and U.S. Strategy

Washington, too, has been guided by cold-blooded geopolitical considerations over the past century-plus and, like Russia, has often faced resistance as a result. As a major trading nation with a significant dependence on access to foreign markets and raw materials, the U.S. has long sought control over strategic islands globally, including Cuba, Hawaii, and the Philippines, using force when needed to secure them. That quest continues to this day, with the Biden administration seeking to preserve or expand U.S. access to bases in Okinawa, Singapore, and Australia.

In such endeavors, U.S. strategists have been influenced by two major strands of geopolitical thinking. One, informed by the English geographer Sir Halford Mackinder (1861-1947), held that the combined Eurasian continent possessed such a large share of global wealth, resources, and population that any nation capable of controlling that space would functionally control the world. From that followed the argument that “island states” like Great Britain and, metaphorically speaking, the United States, had to maintain a significant presence on the margins of Eurasia, intervening if necessary to prevent any single Eurasian power from gaining control over all the others.

The American naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914) similarly held that, in a globalizing world where access to international commerce was essential to national survival, “control of the seas” was even more critical than control of Eurasia’s margins. An ardent student of British naval history, Mahan, who served as president of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, from 1886 to 1893, concluded that, like Britain, his country must possess a powerful navy and a range of overseas bases to advance its status as a preeminent global trading power.

From 1900 on, the United States has pursued both geopolitical strategies, though on opposite sides of Eurasia. With respect to Europe, it has largely hewed to Mackinder’s approach. During World War I, despite widespread domestic misgivings, President Woodrow Wilson was persuaded to intervene by the Anglo-French argument that a German victory would lead to a single power capable of dominating the world and so threatening vital American interests. The same line of reasoning led President Franklin Roosevelt to support U.S. entry into World War II in Europe and his successors to deploy substantial forces there to prevent the Soviet Union (today, Russia) from dominating the continent. This, in fact, is NATO’s essential reason for existing.

In the Asia-Pacific theater, however, the United States has largely followed Mahan’s approach, seeking control over island military bases and maintaining the region’s most powerful naval force. When, however, the U.S. has gone to war on the Asian mainland, as in Korea and Vietnam, disaster and ultimate withdrawal followed. As a result, Washington’s geopolitical strategy in our time has focused on maintaining island military bases across the region and ensuring that this country keeps its overwhelming naval superiority there.

Great-Power Competition in the Twenty-First Century

In this century, Washington’s increasingly fraught post-9/11 global war on terror (GWOT), with its costly and futile invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, came to be viewed by many strategists in Washington as a painful and misguided diversion from a long-established focus on global geopolitics. A fear only grew that it was providing China and Russia with opportunities to advance their own geopolitical ambitions, while the U.S. was distracted by terrorism and insurgency. By 2018, America’s senior military leadership, reaching the end of its patience with the endless war on terror, proclaimed a new strategic doctrine of “great-power competition” — a perfect euphemism for geopolitics.

“In this new era of great power competition, our warfighting advantages over strategic competitors are being challenged,” explained Secretary of Defense Mark Esper in 2019. As the Pentagon winds down the GWOT, he noted, “we are working to re-allocate our forces and equipment to priority theaters that enable us to better compete with China and Russia.”

That, he went on to explain, would require concerted action on two fronts: in Europe against an increasingly assertive, well-armed Russia, and in Asia against an ever more powerful China. There, Esper sought an accelerated buildup of air and naval forces along with ever closer military cooperation with Australia, Japan, South Korea, and — increasingly — India.

In the wake of this country’s Afghan War defeat, such an outlook has been embraced by the Biden administration which, at least until the current crisis over Ukraine, saw China, not Russia, as the greatest threat to America’s geopolitical interests. Because of its growing wealth, enhanced technological capacity, and ever-improving military, China alone was viewed as capable of challenging American dominance on the geopolitical chessboard. “China, in particular, has rapidly become more assertive,” the White House stated in its Interim National Security Strategic Guidance of March 2021. “It is the only competitor potentially capable of combining its economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open international system.”

In early February, to provide high-level guidance for a “whole-of-nation” struggle to counter China, the White House issued a new “Indo-Pacific Strategy,” just as Russia was mobilizing its forces along Ukraine’s borders. Describing the Indo-Pacific as the true epicenter of world economic activity, the strategy called for a multifaceted effort to bolster America’s strategic position and — to use a word from another age — contain China’s rise. In a classic expression of geopolitical thinking, it stated:

“Our objective is not to change [China] but to shape the strategic environment in which it operates, building a balance of influence in the world that is maximally favorable to the United States, our allies and partners.”

In implementing this blueprint, Biden’s national security team views key islands and sea passages as vital to its strategy for containing China. Its senior officials have emphasized the importance of defending what they call the “first island chain” — including Japan and the Philippines — that separates China from the open Pacific. Smack in the middle of that chain is, of course, Taiwan, claimed by China as its own and now viewed in Washington (in a typical Mahanian fashion) as essential to U.S. security.

In that context, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Affairs Ely Ratner told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in December:

“I’d like to begin with an overview of why Taiwan’s security is so important to the United States. As you know, Taiwan is located at a critical node within the first island chain, anchoring a network of U.S. allies and partners that is critical to the region’s security and critical to the defense of vital U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific.”

From Beijing’s point of view, however, such efforts to contain its rise and prevent its assertion of authority over Taiwan are intolerable. Its leaders have repeatedly insisted that U.S. interference there could cross a “red line,” leading to war. “The Taiwan issue is the biggest tinderbox between China and the United States,” said Qin Gang, China’s ambassador to the U.S., recently. “If the Taiwanese authorities, emboldened by the United States, keep going down the road for independence, it most likely will involve China and the United States, the two big countries, in the military conflict.”

With Chinese warplanes regularly intruding on Taiwan-claimed airspace and U.S. warships patrolling the Taiwan Strait, many observers expected that Taiwan, not Ukraine, would be the site of the first major military engagement arising from the great-power competition of this era. Some are now suggesting, ominously enough, that a failure to respond effectively to Russian aggression in Ukraine could induce Chinese leaders to begin an invasion of Taiwan, too.

Other Flashpoints

Unfortunately, Ukraine and Taiwan are hardly the only sites of contention on the global chessboard today. As great-power competition has gained momentum, other potential flashpoints have emerged because of their strategic location or access to vital raw materials, or both. Among them:

• The Baltic Sea area containing the three Baltic republics (and former SSRs), Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, all now members of an expanded NATO. Vladimir Putin would ideally like to strip them of their NATO membership and once again place them under some form of Russian hegemony.
• The South China Sea, which borders China as well as Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. China has laid claim to almost this entire maritime expanse and the islands within it, while employing force to prevent other claimants from exercising their developmental rights in the area. Under Presidents Trump and Biden, the U.S. has vowed to help defend those claimants against Chinese “bullying.”
• The East China Sea, its uninhabited islands claimed by both China and Japan. Each of them has sent combat planes and ships into the area to assert their interests. Late last year, Secretary of State Antony Blinken assured Japan’s foreign minister that Washington recognizes its island claims there and would support its forces if China attacked them.
• The border between India and China, which has been the site of periodic clashes between the militaries of those two countries. The U.S. has expressed sympathy for India’s position, while pursuing ever closer military ties with that country.
• The Arctic, claimed in part by Canada, Greenland, Norway, Russia, and the United States, is believed to harbor vast reserves of oil, natural gas, and valuable minerals, some lying in areas claimed by two or more of those countries. It is also seen by Russia as a safe haven for its nuclear-missile submarines and by China as a potential route for trade between Asia and Europe.

In recent years, there have been minor clashes or incidents in all of these locations and their frequency is on the rise. In the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, tensions are only going to increase globally, so keep an eye on these flashpoints. History suggests that global geopolitics rarely ends peacefully. Under the circumstances, a new cold war — with militaries largely frozen in place — might just prove good news and that’s about as depressing as it gets.

Copyright 2022 Michael Klare

Via Tomdispatch.com

The Indo-Pacific region, which includes 24 nations and stretches from Australia to Japan and from India to the U.S. west coast, is home to both the largest concentration of humanity and the greatest source of global emissions. In 2020, the region produced 16.75 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the consumption of oil, gas and coal — more than all other regions worldwide combined.

Success in the global effort to keep global warming below 2 C and stop catastrophic climate change depends on the region to move away from coal and other fossil fuels. Yet at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, China and India proposed countries agree to “phase down” coal instead of “phase out.”

Insufficient financing and the need to increase total energy availability — especially as more sectors become electrified — remain among the structural challenges to energy transitions around the world. China, however, is currently in a better position than the West to assist the Indo-Pacific due to geography, trade dynamics and its own clean tech sector. This could reorient economic networks and shift the balance of power in the region.

As a researcher in the field of green-industrial strategy, I am worried that the democratic world is increasingly losing ground to China in this emerging geo-economic arena. Unless the West provides an alternate network to help the region meet its energy transition needs, it risks ceding the economic alignment of the Indo-Pacific region to China’s government.

Decarbonization

A recent Bloomberg report demonstrated that many Indo-Pacific states can’t meet their 2050 energy transition needs from domestic onshore solar and wind generation. Energy imports have long been a feature of regional politics, but the economics of the energy transition change existing dynamics, favouring fixed-grid integration over more flexible liquid energy imports.

It costs less, in many cases, to build large grids that deliver energy as electrons compared to the added costs of using an energy carrier like hydrogen, which might need to be imported, to meet clean energy needs. Already the Indo-Pacific is moving in the direction of being “wired up,” as demonstrated by the proposed 3,800-kilometre-long “sun cable” to connect Australian solar resources with energy markets in Singapore.

The most efficient course of decarbonization for many East Asian states is to expand their grid connections to their neighbour’s, but this is marred by geo-security risks. Taiwan, South Korea and Vietnam, for example, might be less willing to stand up to Beijing if most of their electricity ran through China. And does Japan really want to meet its renewable energy needs by routing power through Russian grid connections?

In addition, much of the industrial capacity for key green technologies and resources required for Indo-Pacific countries to tap their own renewable resources is based in China. A whopping 70 per cent of global lithium cell manufacturing capacity is found in China, and Chinese firms are responsible for the production of 71 per cent of photovoltaic panels (through a supply chain riddled with the usage of Uyghur slave labour).

Meanwhile, a recent White House report put Chinese firm ownership of global cobalt and lithium processing infrastructure at 72 per cent and 60 per cent, respectively.

Export polluting industries

China’s dominance in the production of clean energy technologies is also bolstered by the success of the nation’s trade networks. China is already the largest source of trade for most countries in the region, and through its Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing is increasingly providing financing for regional infrastructure.

The nature of Chinese infrastructure investments through the initiative has, so far, been damaging to global efforts to combat climate change. China had been the largest financier globally of coal plants, following a development pattern established by wealthier countries (western and non-western), of exporting polluting industries to poorer nations.

However, President Xi Jinping, in keeping with his endorsed vision of ecological civilization, has made improving the sustainability of China’s trade networks a priority. China’s established trade networks within the region provide a foundation for an increasingly Sino-centric economic orbit, and will likely be flipped to distribute clean energy infrastructure in the Indo-Pacific.

Energy transitions

It’s important the West develop its own green foreign investment strategy to provide Indo-Pacific states a choice of infrastructure as they transition their economies. Giving Indo-Pacific countries, especially energy-poor South and East Asian states, the option to purchase low-carbon technology and resources from a variety of sources will alleviate pressure to concede to Chinese foreign-policy.

Over the long term, the West must focus on developing supply chains in solar and and lithium-ion batteries to balance out Chinese capacity in these markets. However, there are a range of energy transition technologies that western states hold a competitive advantage in, and that could be the focus of a development strategy for the region — starting right now. Investments should, for instance, immediately focus on lowering the costs of exporting green hydrogen by maritime routes.

Australia and Canada both have favourable renewable energy resources to produce green hydrogen, with Canada a leader in the development of hydrogen fuel cells.

Many Indo-Pacific countries have opportunities to generate power from sources beyond wind and solar, with Indonesia and the Philippines already market leaders for geothermal. When it comes to wind, U.S. and European wind turbine manufacturers share about 60 per cent of the market.

In June, G7 leaders announced the Build Back Better World (B3W) partnership, which aims to use their financing potential to help low- and middle-income countries meet an estimated US$40 trillion in infrastructure needs.

It is too early to speculate on the success of the B3W, but its visible actions have been limited to scoping tours in Latin America and West Africa, with another planned for South East Asia.

However, the B3W could look to the recent financing deal between the U.S., Germany, France and the United Kingdom to aid South Africa’s transition from coal power for inspiration. The first B3W funded projects are slated to be announced in early 2022.

Decision-makers in China know that in the short term they are uncertain to come out on top in a hard power competition with the U.S., and have identified economic dominance as another front of strategic competition. Subsequently, if the West doesn’t want to further cede the economic orientation of the Indo-Pacific towards China, it must increase its efforts to provide the region’s states with a strategic choice in how they meet their energy transition infrastructure needs.

Jonas Goldman, Reserach Associate, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Bloomberg: “Why China’s Electric Car Lead Has Been a Long Time Coming”