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January 28 - February 3, 2025
Xi’s consolidation of power at the Communist party congress in October 2022 in Beijing was accomplished with a cruel personal twist. Hu Jintao, Xi’s predecessor as president and the previous boss of China, seated next to Xi, appeared to be forcibly removed from the closing session of the congress by two attendants and perp-walked before the television cameras. Hu was the last in the line of moderate and pragmatic party leaders stemming from Deng. And his involuntary departure from the hall symbolized the end of an era, and signaled that the world would be more dangerous going forward.
Whereas during the Cold War the Soviet Union represented a credible adversary in niche capacities only—nuclear weapons, conventional land warfare, manned space exploration—China competes credibly with America across the board. China is a full-spectrum economic and military power with a vast first-world navy, nuclear weapons, a strengthening NCO corps, and cyber and digital capacities that carry over from the military to the consumer sphere. China is preparing to send a man to the moon.
But China, like the United States and Russia, though in varying degrees, is in decline. As
Xi Jinping has returned China to the die-hard authoritarianism, bordering on totalitarianism, associated with Mao Zedong. As a consequence, China has lost almost all its friends in Washington.
China, too, is in decline, with a population aging at a faster rate than America’s (it is shrinking, actually) and with its complex economy directed by Marxist-Leninist ideologues. Because all three great powers—Russia, China, and the United States—are in decline, though in different ways and at different rates, it may be that the United States, which maintains the capacity for democratic renewal, has a comparative advantage over the two authoritarian powers, despite its soaring deficit.
To use a financial term, we will for the foreseeable future be in a geopolitical bear market.
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Europe’s stability will continue to be undermined by Russia. A post-Putin age in Moscow could be just as dangerous as the current condition. Russia is a weakly institutionalized state, especially compared to China, in which a form of anarchy could easily follow Putin.
NATO could informally divide into a more militant Poland-Ukraine-Romania axis, supported by Great Britain, and replicating the old Intermarium, a 1920s concept meaning “between the seas,” the Baltic and Black seas, that is—a belt of states to guard against Russian expansion westward.
The Middle East will continue in its struggle to create regimes, democratic or not, that avoid tyranny on one hand and anarchy on the other. This will become more rather than less difficult as populations in the Middle East increase in absolute terms, even as the underground water table continues to gradually diminish. This losing battle could lead to environmental hard regimes, Hobbesian in nature, as exist in Egypt, whose autocratic and paranoid style is ultimately the result of it having no answers to the question of people versus natural resources, aggravated by climate change. Pakistan
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at the moment that I write, geopolitics has a very particular tendency. Let me explain. A worldwide, bipolar military conflict has begun. It will progress in stages, feature hot war in certain places for extended periods of time, and cold war in other places and times. It will be the organizing principle of geopolitics for a few years to come. It is not a “clash of civilizations,” as Samuel Huntington put it, but it is a clash: a clash of broad value systems, which, while having their roots in national cultures and age-old traditions, are essentially modern and postmodern in their origins. It
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One pole of this bipolar world features gangster states like Russia and North Korea; totalitarian states like China and, again, North Korea; a revolutionary and terrorist state like clerical Iran, with all of its proxies; and a movement that, as I shall explain, is at once age-old, Industrial, and post-Industrial: anti-Semitism. These are enemies more formidable and in ways more nihilistic than the old Soviet Union and Mao Zedong’s China.
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The current crop of villains constitute a more unstable, harder-to-predict human element than what we were used to dealing with during the Cold War. And these villains are all interlocked.
we should be careful how we label our own side. Our side would be wrongly labeled as the world of democracies, not only because something such as anti-Semitism has rooted itself inside democracies themselves (witness our university campuses), but because our own side also includes conservative autocracies such as the regimes in the Arabian Gulf, Jordan, Egypt, and elsewhere, which stand for the regional status quo, as opposed to the revolutionary chaos that a regime like Iran threatens to bring about. In fact, this is a bipolar struggle between status quo powers like ourselves and leaders and
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The Heartland and Rimland divisions just don’t capture the flavor of what is happening. Anti-Semitism does: since in its latest iteration it has been ignited by the war between Israel and Gaza and has since spread throughout the West, to the Russian Empire, and to China. Witness the pogrom-like riot in the Russian republic of Dagestan in response to the arrival of a flight from Israel, and the attacks on Jews in Chinese social-media circles in the wake of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack.
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Anti-Semitism is a word with deep historical associations. It conjures up hatred of Jews in medieval Europe and pogroms against Jews in Russia’s Pale of Settlement before and around the turn of the 20th century, and, of course, it culminates in the Nazi Holocaust in the mid-20th century. The Holocaust, in particular, gave anti-Semitism an Industrial Age aura, with converging railway tracks as a signature of both the Industrial Age and of trains transporting Jews to death camps. But anti-Semitism can be post-Industrial, too, with its own new associations, even when wrapped around a territorial
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Israel, although its population may be divided on many issues, is absolutely united about the need to militarily defend its territory, to defeat Hamas, and to neutralize Iran and its proxies.
Isolationism is the past: full immersion in a chaotic world is the inevitable future.
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The fundamental change in geopolitics has not been fully realized. Great-power divides, the collapse of empires, the shrinkage of geography through technology, the legacy of Communism, and Shakespearean decline all play monumental roles in the roiling instability of our world. But there is something at once broader and more subtle that affects both world politics and our daily lives.
the primary change in geopolitics is urbanization, and the intensification of politics that it leads to. Over 55 percent of humanity lives in cities, by 2050 over two-thirds of humanity will be urban, and increasingly densely urban. In 1975 there were only three mega-cities with populations in the tens of millions (Tokyo, New York, and Mexico City). By 2014 there were thirty-four such cities.[1]
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Perhaps nobody in the 20th century understood cities on a human level—what made them work, what made them not work, and what they originally were supposed to be—like the late American Canadian journalist Jane Jacobs, author of the masterpiece The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Jacobs says that it is “differences, not duplications” that make for well-functioning and truly aesthetic cities.
with American cities, which “came into being as places where people could make money,” unlike European and Asian ones, which were founded as centers of culture and political power, explain the urbanists Dennis R. Judd and Todd Swanstrom.[3]
Thomas Carlyle saw in the crowds of London a vision of maggots teeming in cheese.[6] That was the London that served as a spiritual backdrop for much of Charles Dickens’s famously harsh fiction about the human condition.
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