Decline of Globalism (Argumentative)

Well, this has been done once or twice on the wiki from what I hear, so I guess it's okay.

In this article, I, Kuro, am going to argue the Inevitable Decline of Globalism, which I describe as the decline of international trade, the internationalist mindset, and the end of the international system that has been built as we understand it.

Index I: The Formation of the Current World Order
The formation of the current international economic system was done largely by accident. I would like to remind everyone that before the Second World War, the British Empire controlled large swathes of the world's land and thus acted as the world's de facto naval superpower. Despite this, the British could not sustain such an advantage without their continued control of Southeast Asia, India and Africa, and by the 1940s had already seen Canada become a Dominion, Australia becoming a Commonwealth, and remained in extreme debt to the United States.

This ended with the Second World War. WWII ended every single empire that remained on Earth because it either disassembled their ability to project power (in the case of the German and Japanese) or provoked independence movements, particularly in Southeast Asia, and thus forced the severely-weakened remaining empires to slowly decolonise. This was a monumental change in the world; leaving a power gap that was thus filled by the Soviet Union and United States.

Here is where we come to geography and the basic idea of how this all works.

Make no mistake, the United States is practically - will remain practically - invincible. If you wish to outline it in simple terms, I'll simply rob Peter Zeihan of his simple premise from The Accidental Superpower. Comparatively, the Soviets could never attest to such power. This is why: So while the Russians were desperately building away from the smouldering ruin that had been the Second World War, the Americans were busy offering up an alliance - a system - never yet seen in the world.
 * 1) The United States has the largest network of navigable rivers in the entire world. Roughly 14 thousand miles, or 22 thousand kilometres of it. This network gives the country some of the lowest transportation and logistics costs in the world, one of the basic barriers to unification and maintenance of any nation. This isn't to mention the fact that the American Midwest is the biggest, most durable, and most productive agricultural region in the entire world - and it lies right on those rivers as well. This makes getting food to almost any part of the United States simple. It also inspires stability and economic confidence, as well as pre-empting the negative demographic effects of industrialisation. It leaves a huge amount of free capital for technological progress, as well - the atomic bomb, the radio, and the car came first from the hands of American citizens.
 * 2) No one can invade the United States. The last time the U.S was ever threatened on a fundamental scale was the War of 1812, where the Americans were invaded through the then-British Dominion of Canada. To put it into perspective; the U.S navy practically didn't exist, three potentially hostile foreign powers sat on its borders, and it was still mostly the Eastern Seaboard. Today, the United States controls the Sea and Land routes into the Northern half of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, Canada and Mexico for all intents are too economically involved with the U.S to ever consider it a foe in any potential war, and the United States navy alone could challenge a hypothetical combined international naval force; although even then, the other two world naval powers are both U.S allies. This gives the country a whole load of free money to use on military expenditure overseas. A 21 trillion dollar debt - over a third of which is thanks to the war in Iraq - does nothing to American military power.
 * 3) You cannot destroy it from within as well. Americans have tried - repeatedly - to make bad enough decisions that would destroy the U.S. A Civil War failed to challenge its economic might, over 60 years of racial violence never destabilised its political atmosphere, and a President today whose tendencies lean narcissistic-authoritarian has failed to deal much lasting damage to the fundamental foundation of the American government. Even with an entire political party in Congress whose sole goal seems to be to undermine the security and economy of U.S citizens, the United States remains - and with the first two parts will continue to remain - the world superpower.
 * 1) Russia lacks anything close to this. At its height the expanded Comintern boasted almost no navigable rivers except for the Volga and Yangtze rivers, and even then the first freezes over half the year and the second got into a pissy fight with the Soviets just 20 years after it joined. (We'll talk about that part later.) Russia also has a nice big Agricultural zone - the only problem is that none of it is close to urban areas, the lack of rivers makes getting that food from place to place expensive, and on top of it all it also freezes over for half the year. Even with maximum output it would still pale in comparison to the Americans.
 * 2) Between Russia and Germany there lies a 320-square-kilometre stretch of practically flat, bare, land (militarily speaking). It means literally any empire in Europe could just walk right into Moscow as it so wished, and the volatility of the region means that a lot of empires have attempted it. The Nazis, the Germans, the French, the Ottomans, and so on. This forces Russia to pour money into self-defence that it can't afford if it wishes to become an empire; and it means that when Russia controlled Eastern Europe, it was not from a point of superpowerhood, but from a point of using Eastern Europe as a fat buffer.
 * 3) The Russians are not especially good at coming up with coherent governments as much as they are authoritarian governments. If you reason using the first two points, you quickly find the reason for why Attila the Hun, Alexander, Stalin, and now Putin come from Russia: it requires authoritarians to keep intact as a single, unitary state. This is common in a certain other power.

Zeihan calls it Bretton Woods. We know it as Free Trade.

While a lot of people on the wiki might treat a free trade deal as normal (especially us map game players), it was never normal in a constantly volatile world. It was a cycle of continuance. If you wanted to be a world power you had to have a navy that protected your trade between you and your colonies. You had to try as little as possible to trade with other nations lest a single issue cause your supply of materials to dry up. It meant progress was slow.

The Americans changed that.

The whole point of the globalist system is simple: You trade with anyone, anywhere, anytime. But that would require a significant amount of force to keep going. A significant amount of currency to keep running. One that only the United States, rich, powerful, paranoid of the Soviets, was able and willing to provide. Since the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki the U.S Navy has patrolled the world's oceans as a guarantee against the Soviets. No one else has to maintain massive armies to keep fighting and protecting trade.

But back then, there was something even more tempting that convinced the world onto the deal. Access to the U.S market.

The U.S trade deficit is true and real. What most people have come to forget is that the Americans incur it primarily as a method of convincing people to remain their allies. In 1945 the United States made up a quarter of international GDP. In 2019 it still makes up that 25%. This market is the biggest in the world, least vulnerable to security or political or economic crisis, and thus the most lucrative. The Chinese were livid thinking of the idea of allying with the Soviets when that huge U.S market on the other end of the Pacific was taking in everything - everything - its allies gave it with almost no tariffs whatsoever. This allowed people to take export economies and actually succeed with them - just send all of your stuff somewhere else. It was and is simple. It was the greatest ever time to be alive because this system would always keep the stuff you were sending elsewhere safe and made trade and consumership easier everywhere.

A win in this Cold War against the Soviets was guaranteed from the very start. By the time 1992 rolled around this international system encompassed the entire world. Progress had skyrocketed. The international standard of living had improved drastically.

There was a catch.

Index II: Tenets and Lack of Needs
Every good economic system has its catches. Either it’s extremely vulnerable to overmonopolisation by certain groups or it restricts value and thus renders the value of products to be less. An ideal economic system straddles both of those problems, and so did the internationalist trade system.

Carefully thinking, most today come to the question of why the US would guarantee this. After all, the United States doesn’t benefit from the free exchange of goods in any discernible way anymore. The Soviets are gone - the American economy is one of the most isolated in the world as compared to its counterparts. It’s one of the most resilient to any loss of trade and one of those that would be least affected by the current system. And right below China on the list of U.S trading partners is... Canada and Mexico, both countries having near-equal monetary value in trade against our Chinese friends. From China, $636 billion worth of goods passed into and out of America. From Mexico and Canada, $557 and $582.4 billion respectively. The next taker on that list is Japan at a far lower $202 billion. American trade is mostly, well, North American. Hell, they could give less of a hoot about what’s going on with the rest of the world outside Coastal East Asia and Western Europe.

Oil is the greatest meme of all political jokes. But it’s also true. America needs oil to run its cars. To run its power stations. And it did not have enough. U.S oil was unattractive compared to the promise of the booming black gold spurting out of the Saudis and the Iraqis. That was the second tenet of the international system. Energy security. Benefited everyone, including the United States. This was the last tenet keeping the U.S Navy patrolling the oceans and scaring the living wiles out of Erdogan and others on a daily basis.

Which brings me to my next part. The Americans no longer need Saudi or Iraqi or West African oil any longer. Alberta throws in a bit. But the shale deposits scattered across the U.S are the real game-changer. In 2012 everyone in the U.S believed Shale was going to fail. That everything was going to remain as it had ever been. In 2019 that industry that everyone believed was going to fail has made American oil prices cheaper and has put the United States at what could be considered literal energy independence. Needs forced Shale to tap bigger and better, and now hundreds of Shale companies pooling their expertise and resources together out of necessity has made it all cheaper.

The final tenet keeping the Americans in the global system has just collapsed.

Index III: The Demographic Disaster
Demography is hard to fix. It's hard to make right. And even your supposed 'making right' might just incur another disaster somewhere down the line. There is no such thing as a 'good demography', only one that might or might not suit what you have.

There's this thing called the 'baby boomers'. The exact years and dates of the generation might change from developed country to developed country, but generally this generation lasts from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. What's special about this generation is in the name: Boomers. In every single developed country on earth Boomers are the largest single generation and they were responsible for the economic boom in the late 20th century. Not because they are necessarily smarter or that they were somehow less racist when they were young, but... they were just huge.

Now, there's this thing called 'retirees'. It happens around your mid-60s. You stop working and as thus you stop investing much capital into the system; you'll pay the rent and the bills, maybe take care of your grandkids, but there's one thing that's for sure: you're not investing much capital anymore.

Combine 'baby boomers' and 'retirees' and you get the biggest demographic disaster ever. When the boomers retire, thousands, then millions of jobs, simply remain unfilled. The economy stagnates - at worst tanks - with it. Why? Because there is no generation that can replace them. Generation X (2000s and onwards) will be too tiny to fill all those jobs, and be prepared to pity them even more as they're forced to work their asses off for higher taxes that will be used to fund the survivability of boomers. The first huge wave of boomer retirees comes next year. This will be followed by roughly ten to twenty years of utter economic stagnation for almost all of the developed world, if not complete economic and thus political incoherence.

This incoming wave of stagnation combined with the current wave of resurgent nationalism is about to hit the developed world hard. And likely not just economically, but militarily. The world's about to go back to before the international system.

It's not going to be a fun ride.

Index IV: A non-American international system?
Now, some will propose that perhaps another country could take the place of the U.S Navy. The most common is China, Germany or Russia. I'll knock them down one by one.

China
China is curious. It's curious to people because most people don't actually understand much about China. People think that it's either a capitalist traitor to those Western saviours or it's actually the saviour of all tradition that's about to return the world to some, god knows what natural state. Either way, people love to say it's about to displace the Americans.

Maybe. If every single growth graph only ever goes up. Let's talk the basics of Chinese history to get up to speed without the BS heroics: When you come to this, China requires two things to become prosperous (by an extremely relative standard): Security from foreign powers and Access to export markets. The only dynasty to fully unite China originated from foreign lands and foreign powers - the Qing(Mongols for a layman) - exploiting the disunited nature of the country to take it over ridiculously easy. And the second part is fundamentally economic. China's horrible, horrible geography prevents any form of proper capital base or market from ever forming under normal circumstances, so it must go elsewhere to sell goods if it wishes to gain affluence (BY AN EXTREMELY RELATIVE STANDARD).
 * Northern China is the political core of China. Or better known as the Militaristic core. This is because of a curious thing called the Yellow River. The Yellow River is ridiculously violent. The 1931 flood (which admittedly was a Nationalist tactic to prevent IJA advance) killed a million people and displaced tens of millions more. This means that it was a requirement for any power there to control the river - historically, using levees. Chinese society developed heavily along these lines of authoritarianism because of a need for control. Work gangs and the like developed the sides of the Yellow in what was the first and probably most consequential Chinese infrastructure project. Unfortunately for Northern China, that meant the Yellow River was less a navigable, logistically useful region than a violent piece of crap that you had to pour tons of resources into. And there was no alternative. It meant that Northern China looked much like the German Confederation minus the rivers. The silver lining is that the Northern Chinese Plain is incredibly fertile and immense in size. Thus, to rise in Northern China meant that you could never look beyond what you had right there and then (that plays immensely importantly into Chinese culture.). You had to learn how to manage the levees and the tons and tons of competitors to your control of the region. You were rewarded for being clever - not really on the innovative side. This meant technology never developed and living standards stayed stagnant because there was no excess capital to put into such things; a single flood being all that was needed to end your control.
 * Central/Inner China is the economic core of China. It boasts of the Yangtze River, technically 14 and a half thousand kilometres of navigable river. Here are its problems: it doesn't connect to Northern China and thus lacks the food it so desparately needs. The Yangtze is impressive, sure, but it also isn't as nice as that description earlier might portray it as; going right through endless mountain chains and on multiple stretches lacks any viable floodplain for any agriculture along its banks. This further prevents political unity, but makes it ridiculously easy to engage in Sinicisation - the process of assimilating others into the Chinese culture - one by one. The method by which both North and Central were united was by building a huge canal that would give them economic linkage and food access - the Grand Canal. Canals are odd things; on one hand, they do offer the logistical benefits of normal rivers - the other, they need to be maintained and it is ridiculously expensive to do so. This was - is - especially true for the 1,100 miles (or as we Commonwealth chaps call it, 1,700 kilometres) Grand Canal. And thanks to those mountains it cuts through, the Yangtze's supposed 14 thousand kilometres of navigable river are mostly seasonal or shallow - reducing the consistently useful amount of navigable river to just about two and half thousand kilometres, far less impressive. To put that into perspective, Germany, with the River Elbe alone, beats this number. This isn't even to mention that a mountain chain between Shanghai and the rest of the region means that its part of the region would very much prefer Tokyo, Taipei or San Francisco to Beijing as business partners.
 * Southern China is where the last Chinese dialects persist and for good reason. All those mountains that kept central China divided give it a huge amount of buffer from its Northern counterparts. In fact, Southern China itself is a complete mess of hills and horrible landscapes without any navigable rivers. No good coherent power has ever risen there. Add that to the fact that unlike the rest of the entire country, Southern China's natural ports are plentiful thanks to a deep and indented coast, and you get a region that enjoys interacting with Southeast Asia, Japan (shudder for the Chinese nationalists), the British and anyone with a boat who can get them food and the resources. The result is cities like Hong Kong, which while officially Chinese would quietly (and sometimes not-so-quietly) trade with foreigners over their own 'countrymen'. This is why only the South gets zero political representatives in Beijing, and Hong Kong's increasing non-usefulness as a port will further make Beijing intent on throwing away its autonomy early.
 * Everyone Else is something that I should be more specific about. It's the Chinese Interior, where away from the ocean everyone else lives. Currently 650 million people populate this part of China and historically it has been the bulk of Chinese population centres. And just like almost everyone else on the list, it is full of mountains and hills and horrible terrain that keep it from ever getting into wars or being important. But due to its population, if one can unite the region around them, they are set on the path to leadership - Mao Zedong being an infamous example.

So, what gave China both? What allowed China to come to affluence recently?

The United States of America.

First, the Cold War and the Internationalist System sucked away any powers interested in taking China in their own conquests. And while it is commonly claimed that the Chinese were the ones to succeed against the Japanese, by 1945 the IJA had held the political and economic centres of China - to little successful resistance. The Americans, with naval bombardments and such, decimated the Japanese navy - and then dropped the only two atomic bombs in existence on Japanese cities. It was not Chinese resistance, but American power that removed foreign interest from China. The communists, with Mao Zedong having taken control of the interior, were quick to win the Civil War.

Then, the Chinese came under threat from the Soviets after a brief skirmish in Vietnam (and spending millions of dollars to finance groups in a war that never benefited it). At this point, the entire communist experiment had failed miserably. Millions of Chinese had died trying to feed themselves, having had to deal with badly-made steel that came from their backyards. China was basically kaput and facing the threat of a possible incoming Soviet invasion. But in 1971, a American ping-pong player at the International Championships in Nagoya, Japan walked onto the Chinese bus because of a mistake. A couple of translator-assisted conversations later, they exchanged gifts - and thanks to this exchange Richard Milhouse Nixon would later visit China and the country would enter the international system. This gave it the second factor.

Following this, China experienced the greatest period of economic growth in history. The Chinese export-led economy drove the country from one of the most impoverished countries in the world to second economy in 40 years. The Chinese standard of living improved for the first time in millenia and the world became enarmoured with supposed Chinese strengths.

But none of this is a surefire linear route to the top either.

To run the international system you need to be willing to subordinate national interests to tiny nations on the other side of the world (which China is not very good at doing). You also need to have a large capital market to attract others (which China doesn't and can never have). Finally, you need to have the biggest, strongest navy in the world. And like those parantheses have shown, China can't replace the international system.

Furthermore, China's about to experience crisis. Due to the conflicting nature that I explained above, the Chinese economic system is fundamentally different from that of the American or European styles in that the primary objective is employment against profit. Hence, most Chinese citizens don't actually get much of a choice in their employment as the only imperative is that they happen to be employed; this eventually resulting in a system that accrues debt. While this would have been fine more than a decade ago, Chinese debt has exploded since the 2008 financial crisis and for all intents and purposes there are actually more Yuan currently in existence than the total number of U.S dollars. Illegal lending skyrocketed after a crackdown in 2013 and there may be as much as 200% of the total Chinese GDP in loans right now. Even if it doesn't break down in the near future, Chinese demography will break very soon - the average Chinese citizen is now older than the average U.S citizen - and keep those empty homes which litter the Chinese landscape empty and abandoned. The Chinese economic system is about to break full-hands regardless of what occurs.

Even if it so wished to, China can never achieve the naval competence required to police the international oceans, in part because its existing military is land-oriented in order to challenge land threats and in part because on the other side of its Eastern seas lies Japan, a naval power actually capable of challenging even the U.S navy to an extent. Should China ever wish to expand its military capabilities beyond the expensive cruise missiles it overhypes, it will have to go naval, and for its part Japan could simply pop over to every Chinese drydock and naval base and eliminate Chinese naval prowess in a long weekend. Even if it defeated Japan, it would then have to attempt to subordinate Southeast Asia, a long chain of unoccupiable islands or a long chain of angry occpuied peoples (take your pick). While some might claim that the Chinese already have erstwhile allies in the region, I'm not referring to the economically convenient relations that have developed in recent years; I'm referring to literal occupation of foreign nations. Considering the Chinese track record in military conflicts, it's all destined to go down poorly.

The problems that it has accrued only heighten when the internationalist system comes to an end. As much as half of total Chinese GDP is related to or in the business of trade with other countries; making it increasingly vulnerable to any breakdown in trade that will occur. For the Chinese economic system, which had to be developed around exports, it requires a semi-colonial relationship with nations in strategic points where it can ensure the continued security of its trade; unfortunately for the Chinese economic system, unless an insane exception happens, none of this is remotely possible.

Case closed on the 'Chinese superpower'.

Russia
Russia. Dictate supreme. Let’s quickly recap: The Russia of today is a shell of its former self. But that’s not necessarily that bad. The international system removed the need for countries to have a major military - including it - and Russian citizens enjoy a surprisingly good life even despite a double-decade long economic stagnation. This is about to end wholesale.
 * Russia lacks navigable rivers for a majority of its entire territory. Its only navigable river, the Volga, is only on this list for the half of the year it isn’t completely frozen. A large portion of it also sits in Ukraine, which more easily benefits from it than Russia ever will. Russia also has a nice big Agricultural zone - the only problem is that none of it is close to urban areas, the lack of rivers makes getting that food from place to place expensive, and on top of it all it also freezes over for half the year. Almost all of it is impossible to get to without massive funding which Russia doesn’t have.
 * Between Russia and Germany there lies a 320-square-kilometre stretch of practically flat, bare, land (militarily speaking). It means literally any empire in Europe could just walk right into Moscow as it so wished, and the volatility of the region means that a lot of empires have attempted it. The Nazis, the Germans, the French, the Ottomans, and so on. This forces Russia to pour money into self-defence that it can't afford if it wishes to become an empire; and it means that when Russia controlled Eastern Europe, it was not from a point of superpowerhood, but from a point of using Eastern Europe as a fat buffer. Massive expense on the military is required to keep Russia’s borderlands under control.
 * Combine these factors and you get a country which could really use some good leadership and innovation, but is unlikely to get any of it. A country whose Eastern reaches are more easily controlled by Tokyo or Beijing than Moscow. And worst of it all, even in the best of circumstances, it means the Russian people need authoritarians, or at least a Chinese-esque technocratic system - giving it Attila, Alexander, Stalin, and Putin. It’s all in its geography.

Russia's reputation of a boogeyman for Americans used to be deserved. At the height of its time as a competitor to the United States the Soviet Union was a threat to American allies and American oil. Today the Russian government engages in covert operations to subvert democracies across Europe and in the U.S. Unfortunately, not only are the Russians not exactly interested, but their interests lie with their incoming problems. Specifically: their demographic one. Russia is less likely to begin an international system than it is to want to end the current one. The current international system, for all good it does for other countries, is the system that will end Russia as a country. Competition from foreign goods and a collapsing economy will force the Russians to take drastic action - not even including the current action they're committing - throughout Europe. Considering a less invested America not exactly in the business of fighting foreign wars after Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and potentially even Iran, all it will take for Russia to lose its greatest boogeyman and set off right to Europe is a single border skirmish with Estonia.
 * Russian demography has essentially collapsed in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and never recovered. And this isn't for the general population of Russia, this is for the actual Russian ethnic group. There are fewer and fewer Russians being born by the day and that's not even to mention the other problems the USSR's collapse created - such as the complete loss of Russia's skilled labour force. Since the early 1990s there has not been a significant skilled labour force or a skilled labour training system in place and that will severely harm Russian productivity; especially in the natural gas it prides itself on so much. Only an intervention by some higher power could stop this slow decline now. And the fact it’s only the Russian ethnic group that’s declining isn’t helping them either. The Chechens, the Kazakhs, and so on- all groups with potential grudges against the Russians.
 * Another problem is that almost every major Russian economic plan in recent years has failed. In 2005 the Russian government outlined a list of 124 possible plans for the next 10 years to implement. In 2019 almost none of them have even gone beyond planning stage and only four are either complete or in the process of being completed. Russian natural gas has also lost the economic potency it once had - while Russia used to be able to get its way in Germany or Ukraine with natural gas, diversification throughout Europe has meant that none of this natural gas is actually as valuable as it used to be. And that isn't going to stop anytime soon. Germany is keeping its nuclear reactors on and France is going to West Africa for its needs. It's a way to completely put Russia into stagnation.
 * Since losing control of the Baltic States, Russia was left with one single legitimate warm-water port: Kaliningrad (or more accurately Koenigsberg). The city is an enclave behind three NATO members. This gave Russia an immense impetus to get another one at all costs: hence the funding of the Ukrainian Civil War and the Seizure of Crimea, which is home to Sevastopol, also a warm-water port. It’s not enough for Russian needs. At a hundred million people and counting, even in decline Russia needs - desperately - ports not already inclined to stay open to NATO and NATO alone. This will exhaust the ’nice’ side of Russia entirely(if its current state can even be considered nice.).

This isn't even to mention the European focus of the Russian Navy or its severe aging. While technically a formidable force, the Russian Navy is almost the same as it was in 1990 with several minor improvements, and with the incoming demographic crunch will find itself struggling to find sailors and the like. Add the fact that the Scandinavians, the Poles, the Germans, French and Brits maintain major fighting forces capable - and most certainly willing - of giving it intense pains in any battle, Russia cannot and will not begin a replacement.