A tilting of the global balance of power
Europe has never been a monolith. It remains the same fractured, dysfunctional family it has been for 600 years.
Despite open borders and tariff-free trade, the EU lacks cohesive overarching leadership. Its current iteration is not a governing body but a bloodless overbearing and unaccountable administrative committee.
Europe is also a paper tiger that relies heavily on U.S largess for its defense while members make token contributions to NATO. For good or ill, Europe’s leadership vacuum is ripe for a unifying strongman should the prospect of war with an increasingly desperate Russia loom large and America proves itself an unreliable ally.
Russia is Europe’s abused stepchild. The 20th Century saw Russian citizens starved, slaughtered and imprisoned. Survivors were horsewhipped and frog marched along the path from feudal peasantry to nuclear power in little more than two generations. The collective psyche remains polluted by deep distrust and cynicism.
After the Soviet Union’s collapse, the country was unable to support a mentored market economy where basic trust is a staple. Russia’s leadership — from the czars through the Revolution and beyond the Soviet collapse — has been reliably tone-deaf and ham-fisted.
And life among the rabble is cheap. To date, President Putin has reportedly lost some 300,000 fighters in Ukraine. He will likely throw another 100,000 men and boys at Ukraine before resorting to some stupendously reckless act. Russia’s oligarchs increasingly pay the price for Putin’s war folly and there is talk they may have him dispatched before he goes too far.
A reckoning 35 years in the making is also playing out with global consequences. The effect is a creeping hegemony by China.
In 1980 China started its one-child policy which drove the country’s fertility rates far below that required to maintain a stable population. The one-child policy was discontinued in 2015; however, 43 years on, the policy has left the country with a workforce insufficient to support its aging population, its economic aspirations and its defense goals. As a result, China is gradually co-opting the workforces (and material resources) of developing nations. The strategy offers China the opportunity to exercise worldwide influence and, if necessary, coercive alternatives to its domestic manufacturing limitations.
Since 2013 China has been inserting itself into the economies of developing nations with its Belt and Road Initiative. It begins with seductive employment and infrastructure enticements – roads, bridges, port facilities, public transportation, communications, etc. It ends with China deeply entrenched in the host nation’s economic and political affairs.
China plays the long game with investment strategies that ensure tangible results for host nations. China’s strategy is superior to that of the U.S. which otherwise involves cash payments to some of the same impoverished and corrupt governments, the benefits of which are not necessarily visible and rarely filter down to those in deepest need.
The West and industrial giants like Japan and South Korea are also well behind the fertility curve. U.S. and European birthrates are 1.7 and 1.5 births per female, respectively. Both are below the 2.1 replacement rate needed to maintain a stable population without immigration. South Korea ranks lowest at 0.9. China’s draconian family policies apparently weren’t the only way to create unsustainable fertility rates, First World prosperity has had the same effect.
Meanwhile, the U.S. economy glides along on the inertia of its petrodollar, the global reserve currency. Iran’s attempt to undermine the dollar’s dominance with a competing oil bourse collapsed in 2020 after 15 years.
But challenges to the petrodollar are rising anew from China, Venezuela and Russia. If successful, they could significantly reduce the stabilizing influence of the U.S. and tilt the global balance of power in directions unfavorable to all citizens of the world.
Stephen Littfin lives in Kalispell.