Right Now, It's a Spectator Sport. Before Long It Could Become a Blood Sport.

Trump has people in Canada, Mexico, Japan and Europe a bit worried about how we'll fare in a trade war with the United States. We're told we could be heading toward a recession, a drop in GDP of perhaps 2 per cent.

Trump's abuse of America's traditional allies is small potatoes. The Big Show is the Clash of the Titans, Washington versus Beijing. There's the one to watch because it's possible that could end in fireworks.

It would be much less worrisome if America had a mentally sound president. It doesn't. It has Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is in the White House and the reasonable people, the boys in the long pants, are pretty much gone. Trump has now surrounded himself with some pretty sketchy types like Pompeo, Bolton, Navarro and Haspel. They're the sort who can play on Trump's worst instincts, his deranged sense of grievance, his fears and every base instinct - they are legion. Trump embodies a malignant narcissism. He's extremely sociopathic, utterly lacking in empathy. He's impulsive and more than a little sadistic. These are the foundational attributes that Donald Trump has consistently exhibited his entire life. They're also America's Achilles Heel.

Trump may be attempting to restore America's dominance in the world. He can't. America's days as the world's industrial powerhouse are over. Trump blames that on foreign predators. Not hardly. It was America's industrial giants that, unleashed by globalism, offshored their manufacturing operations to low-wage, minimal-regulation regimes abroad. The United States quite deliberately transitioned to a "fire" economy - finance/insurance/real estate.

A few years ago I read a fascinating analysis by an American labour economist about the state of industrialism in his homeland and why so much of it was gone for good. He pointed out that manufacturing generates stable albeit modest returns on investment. Typically it's something in the range of 3 per cent. At the same time, the fire economy, Wall Street, was generating returns of 9 to 12 per cent. To encourage financial investment the feds began cutting capital gains taxes. The Triumph of the Rentier Class. Trump has no appetite for undoing that.

Do we imagine Chairman-for-Life Xi hasn't taken the measure of Trump and the box he's in? Do we think only Trump will ruthlessly exploit every opportunity, every vulnerability?

Could Trump's trade war be the very opportunity Xi has been looking for? This could be China's opportunity to cement its ascdendancy. History tells us that most of these superpower transitions lead to warfare. That was predictable when ships were made of oak, cannon were cast iron and fired grape shot. This transition will be the first we've seen in the Nuclear Age.

I would bet that Xi has a critical advantage. He can probably weather the domestic reaction to a recessionary trade war much better than Trump. Trump's base will be hit. The Gullibillies are quite vulnerable. But it will be the Kochs, the Coors and the Adelson's who will be gunning for him if they see he's launched a ruinous trade war without much chance of success. They're already incensed with Trump's trade wars. They'll be unforgiving if Trump loses his war with China or winds up groveling for terms. And let's remember who owns America's "bought and paid for" Congress.

Trump is no Simon Bolivar but he may wind up as America's Don Quixote. He cannot endure humiliation and he's now surrounded with people like Bolton, Pompeo, Navarro and Haspel. With those people steering Trump, it's Xi's advantages that I find truly worrisome.

Remember, America is flying solo this time. It has viciously turned on its allies.

Let's hope this doesn't get out of control.

Living With Trump in the Age of Entropy. We Have to Figure This Out and Soon.

The Washington Post carried this message of warning from Steve Bannon in February, 2017:

Bannon dismissed the idea that Trump might moderate his positions or seek consensus with political opponents. Rather, he said, the White House is digging in for a long period of conflict to transform Washington and upend the world order. 

“If you think they’re going to give you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken,” Bannon said in reference to the media and opposition forces. “Every day, it is going to be a fight.” 

Bannon says that the post-World War II political and economic consensus is failing and should be replaced with a system that empowers ordinary people over coastal elites and international institutions.

Bannon's warning came to mind following the fractious G7 meeting in Quebec over the weekend. This too seems to be borne out in an analysis piece in Foreign Policy, "The West Will Die So That Trump Can Win."

...it is not surprising that a U.S. administration no longer sees an overriding political need to restrain itself from pushing allies into making trade concessions. The Soviet Union no longer exists. To the extent that the administration’s detractors argue that its demands are unreasonable, or that the United States has bigger fish to fry — like maintaining solidarity in the face of Russian aggression — Trump’s response would presumably be twofold. First, a better deal is always better — “reasonable” is for chumps. Second, if geopolitics stand in the way of the United States getting better trade deals, then geopolitics should give way. Americans don’t care about Crimea; they don’t care about the abstractions of democracy. They care about winning trade wars. 

To the extent that these two things are true, at least to the average American, Canada and the EU have a bigger problem than they realize. Their strategy at the moment, reflected in tempered responses to Trump, is to wait him out — on the assumption that he will be gone in two and a half years, or less, and that the United States will then go back to normal. But Trump may be the new normal — not in the sense that future presidents will be as crude and loose with the facts, but in the sense that they, reacting to a seismic shift in U.S. public sentiment, will no longer recognize the constraints of solidarity with fellow free-market democracies. Those days are, perhaps, as Bolton would say, “no more.”

In the same issue, Daniel Sargent writes of, "The Slow Rise and Sudden Fall of the G7."

The end times have come and gone for the West over 70-odd years, but it is difficult these days, to escape the sensation that the dusk really is falling.

...After showing up late and interrupting a forum on gender equality, President Donald Trump scowled his way through sessions before departing early for Singapore. And as he headed out, Trump insulted his host and neighbor, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, and retracted his signature from the G-7’s communique, ending a 42-year run of choreographed collegiality. Then, over the past 24 hours, Trump has showcased his preference for the company of a callow despot, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, over engagement with what used to be considered America’s closest allies and peers.

...On the most urgent dilemmas of our times — economic inequality, sustainable development, and the looming peril of ecological catastrophe — the G-7 has been irrelevant. The G-7 has not evolved into a directorate capable of offsetting a historic slippage in U.S. hegemonic capabilities, as political scientists like Robert Keohane once hoped it might. To call Donald Trump’s Canadian temper tantrum an assault on the West’s governing framework is to overstate, by a mile, the G-7’s institutional significance. 

Trump’s assault is no death knell; as a project in global leadership, the G-7 was already dead. Its supersession by the G-20 during the global financial crisis confirmed its obsolescence as a framework for governance. The G20, not the G7, functioned as the forum for the coordination of fiscal stimulus efforts in the nadir of 2009. The same goes for the current GDP data. In 1980, the G-7 countries constituted about 51 percent of global production on a purchasing power parity basis; today, the G-7 claims just over 30 percent. The G-7 can no longer maintain a plausible pretension to run the world — it has become a niche organization. 

And herein lies the real significance — and the real tragedy — of Trump’s petulant behavior. The point of the G-7, as Schmidt, Pompidou, and Ford all grasped, was to foster unity in a historical phase when geopolitical trends were corroding the West. Dialogue on common economic problems, all hoped, would offer an alternative source of cohesion. Or, as Kissinger explained in 1975: “The trick in the world now is to use economics to build a world political structure. 

...Today, it is the sense of unity the G-7 has cultivated that is imperiled. Configurations of power and interest are an insufficient basis for durable order among nations, as diplomatic historians well understand. The West cohered after 1945 not only because of shared enmities but also because its elites cultivated sociability and common values. From the Bilderberg Group to the Trilateral Commission, sociability proved both a source of cohesion and a salve for disagreements. 

Functioning at the most elite level of all, the G-7 nurtured unity among the world’s liberal democracies through economic crises and geopolitical transition. Its debasing by a feckless U.S. president will serve only to tear the West’s fraying bonds of commonality still further asunder. In Beijing and in Moscow, the West’s rivals are cheering.

If Trump is not simply a perverse aberration but the "new normal" of the United States, it seems foolish, even reckless, for Ottawa to imperil Canada by pretending that it's still business as usual.

Maybe there is, finally, a real "Axis of Evil." Maybe there is an emerging alliance of despotism, strongman rule that see lesser, weaker nations as prey for the picking. Look at the leaders Trump is so obviously drawn to - Putin, Xi, Kim, the House of Saud, Erdogan, Orban - just about every murderous thug on the planet.

Don't forget it wasn't that long ago that another gang of thugs sought to carve up the nations of the world among themselves. Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and the government of the Sun God, Emperor Hirohito. Why should today's thugs be much different?

The world today is vastly different than the world of the 1930s. It is a world that is massively overpopulated; rapaciously consumptive and rapidly running out of resources of all descriptions; and just beginning to become battered by the early onset impacts of climate change and environmental degradation. It would not be rash to think of it as pre-dystopian.

Recently Britain's prestigious think tank, Chatham House, warned that Trump is intent on taking down the World Trade Organization, a precursor to creating a world without rules in which the large economies can pillage lesser economies.

In a world where there are no internationally predictable rules, most countries faced with protectionist actions, crudely, have two options – retaliate or concede. If they choose to retaliate, the optimal strategy is to cause enough pain to the political leadership of the protectionist country that they will back down. This is the course of action that the EU and China have so far taken, with the hope that powerful political constituencies in the US will successfully lobby the administration to change course. 

However, this can only be effective for large economies that the US exports to significantly. For smaller countries without significant leverage, the alternative is to concede and try to negotiate a favourable settlement, which will still be asymmetrical.

In 2014, before Trump declared he was running for president, political scientist R. Schweller described how the world had already embarked on an "age of entropy."

It increasingly seems that the world will no longer have a single superpower, or group of superpowers, that brings order to international politics. Instead, it will have a variety of powers -- including nations, multinational corporations, ideological movements, global crime and terror groups, and human rights organizations -- jockeying with each other, mostly unsuccessfully, to achieve their goals. International politics is transforming from a system anchored in predictable, and relatively constant, principles to a system that is, if not inherently unknowable, far more erratic, unsettled, and devoid of behavioral regularities. In terms of geopolitics, we have moved from an age of order to an age of entropy. 

Entropy is a scientific concept that measures disorder: the higher the entropy, the higher the disorder. And disorder is precisely what will characterize the future of international politics. In this leaderless world, threats are much more likely to be cold than hot; danger will come less frequently in the form of shooting wars among great powers than diffuse disagreements over geopolitical, monetary, trade, and environmental issues. Problems and crises will arise more frequently and, when they do, will be resolved less cooperatively.

During the Occupy movement there were many warnings about America falling into class warfare. That prompted billionaire investor, Warren Buffet, that America had already gone through a class war and his class, the wealthiest, had won it. The poor and the working class, by the time they woke up, they had already lost.

Perhaps what we should be focusing now is on whether our government, the Trudeau Liberals, have the measure of these seismic shifts in the world order. Do they understand the uncertainties we face and our vulnerabilities? Why do they keep acting as though we're still in the 80s? Why do they keep dreaming that Donald Trump could ever be our friend?

Taking Democracy for Granted. Are We On This Road Too?

Andrew Sullivan has a thought-provoking essay in New York Magazine about how we're killing off liberal democracy and not just in Poland or Hungary or the United States either.

This elite condescension toward challenges to their power stems, philosopher John Gray recently argued, from a fundamental and demonstrably false assumption that liberal democracy and a transnational world order are the ultimate end points of history. The narrative was set in 1989 and, for elites, it cannot be relinquished now. What we’re witnessing, with Trump, Putin, and Xi, is just a detour, liberal democrats tell themselves, before normal service resumes. 

But “what if we were wrong?” as Obama asked in the wake of Trump’s victory, according to Ben Rhodes’s new memoir of the White House years. “Maybe we pushed too far.” You think? A ruinous war, a devastating recession, trade policies that wiped out so many communities, soaring debt, and wage stagnation: Not a great record for the liberal democratic elites, is it?

And this record is why the most probable future is not about liberal democracy and internationalism, but about populist nationalism, with a distinctly “strongman” flavor.  

...the strongman model is proliferating: Putin in Russia has dropped all pretense of democracy; Xi is now the first president of China for life; Erdogan in Turkey is still not done enlarging his powers; Netanyahu will be Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, governing on the basis of ethno-nationalism, suspicious of his own deep state, including the Mossad, and cementing a Jewish state from the river to the sea. 

And in the U.S., of course, the omens are not good right now. Trump himself is resurgent in the polls — his disapproval-approval gap was -20 points last December; it’s -11 points almost six months later. On the generic ballot, the Democrats’ lead has sunk from 13 points to 6 in the last five months. The party is in shambles in Southern California, one of its key regions for regaining control of the House. Sean Trende now believes that continued GOP control of Congress is perfectly possible, even probable. Since, it seems to me, the midterms are our only real shot at checking our own strongman, this is demoralizing.

...Trump knows that most Americans are not going to read the fact-checks. And his pitch is so relentless, his ballsmanship so huge, that, in the end, the path of least resistance seems the most practical response. Even now, his repeated, unfounded calumnies against the Mueller inquiry, the Justice Department, and the FBI are working. Belief that Mueller is partisan is growing; confidence in the investigation has sunk; Trump has almost succeeded in making Russia’s intervention in the 2016 elections seem as if it were designed to support Hillary. A majority still hasn’t bought this. But, with a GOP “kinda taking a nap somewhere,” when it isn’t echoing every single lie and delusion of the Supreme Leader, the relentless propaganda is having an effect. Unless Mueller has evidence so astounding that even Sean Hannity draws a breath, the special-counsel probe could also be a political winner for Trump. If he’s impeached, barring an economic collapse, he won’t be convicted in a million years, and his reelection, once unthinkable, now has to be seen as likely. 

In the end, most people just give in to the lie completely. It’s easier than constantly resisting a malignant, relentless narcissist. Or you tune out. It’s perfectly understandable. Covering this degeneration for the last year and a half has stressed me beyond any expectation. I may be missing a looming, massive tide for the Democrats this fall, and I hope I am. But it is perfectly possible that we will soon be entering the next phase of Trump: when the lie becomes the truth entirely.

Why the Obama-Xi Emissions Deal is Window Dressing.

The CO2 emissions deal reached this week by the presidents of the US and China is a positive step, no doubt about that.  It's also far too little, much too late, although it's reflective of how inflexible our global society has become even in matters of our very survival.

Even the numbers are squishy.  Obama has pledged that America will reduce CO2 emissions by 25 to 28% from 2005 levels by 2020.  The Chinese pledge is even more obscure.  It commits China to cap its emissions by 2030 and then begin reductions.

What's wrong with this?  Well, for starters, these are political numbers.  Neither commitment is demonstrably tied to a clear objective or purpose.  The numbers can't be shown as relevant in the context of avoiding climate "tipping points" that will trigger natural feedback mechanisms that lead to runaway global warming.

Taking a step toward the "exit" sign when the church hall is afire is a good thing but it'll take a lot more than a step if you're going to have any chance of escaping the flames.

Another troubling aspect of the Obama-Xi deal is the fudging of benchmark dates.  Look at what the Euros are doing.  The EU has pledged 40% reductions from 1990 levels.  1990, not 2005 - big difference.  1990, not 2030.

Slashing emissions is critical.  In its 2011 outlook, the International Energy Agency, warned we had five years to stop building fossil fuel energy plants and get into renewables or "the last chance of combating dangerous climate change will be lost forever."  Fast forward three years to the IEA's 2014 outlook.  Echoing an OPEC forecast released last week, the IEA predicts CO2 emissions to increase another 20% between now and 2040.  And the IEA concludes our fossil fuel habit will lock in at least 3.6 degrees Celsius of warming, "making catastrophic sea level rise, polar ice cap loss, water shortages and other severe effects nearly inevitable."

A meaningful emissions reduction programme doesn't begin with a number pulled out of the air.  It begins by identifying the problem.  Then you have to calculate what's needed to solve it before moving on to the practical questions of how you can achieve that.  Tossing out percentages and dates that aren't coherently linked to the problem is simply disingenuous.  Yet perhaps we're really not capable of much more than that today.

We need to focus intently on tipping points.  At the end of the day there's nothing that matters more.  We need a clear idea of the point at which our man-made greenhouse gas emissions trigger natural feedback mechanisms that will drive uncontrollable global warming.  It's a bloody dangerous game, akin to holding a pistol to your head and trying to guess just how far you can squeeze the trigger before you release the firing pin to strike the round in the chamber.  That, however, is the game that we're in.

Why do we approach climate change as a stand-alone problem?  It's not.  In fact, you have to add climate change, in all its permutations, to overpopulation, in all its permutations, to over consumption, in all its permutations.  We need to see climate change, overpopulation and over consumption for what they are - symptoms of a larger, more intractable threat to our survival.

A few months ago I read a paper on food security written by three top Chinese experts.  What struck me was that these experts saw China, by 2030, growing by another 200-million people while per capita GDP soared from $7,000 today to $16,000.  That's an enormous increase in economic activity that will require commensurate increases in fossil fuel consumption, equally large increases in production and even greater increases in emissions, waste and pollution of all descriptions.  China is already the world's biggest single greenhouse gas emitter. Now imagine that more than doubling in under two decades.  Best not to dwell on what's in store for India, Brazil, etc.

Population.  Just a few years ago we projected our global population would peak around 9-billion.  Now we commonly hear 11-billion by 2100, perhaps more.  At the same time, we're growing a huge "consumer class" within that burgeoning population.  We're racing ahead on raw numbers and on per capita consumption. Can you see where this is heading?

Water.  In the minds of some rather bright people we're in a freshwater predicament potentially as perilous to our civilization as climate change.  The reason we were able to grow from under 3-billion at the end of WWII to 7+ billion today, heading for 9+ billion by 2050, has been our access to cheap fossil energy and abundant freshwater.  It took both.  That was the miracle.  Yet in our post-war growth spurt we came to view our water resources quite differently from the past.

In the post-war era we began to mine groundwater rapaciously.  We didn't give a second thought to just how much or how little water actually existed underground.  We just went at it and it produced some amazing results.  India, that had a history of periodic famine, achieved not only full food security but even ventured into the food export markets.  This same phenomenon allowed both India's and China's populations to treble in the post-war era.  Truly amazing.

Now we're in a real water jam.  NASA's Grace satellites have been mapping global surface subsidence which is used to measure the state of our aquifers.  As Maude Barlow has warned for many years, we're running on empty.

The groundwater at some of the world's largest aquifers - in the US High Plains [Ogallala], California's Central Valley, China, India, and elsewhere - is being pumped out "at far greater rates than it can be naturally replenished."

The most worrisome fact: "nearly all of these underlie the world's great agricultural regions and are primarily responsible for their high productivity."

So dependent are we on ever increasing access to a rapidly diminishing resource that a recent US intelligence estimate foresaw water wars looming within a decade: "As water shortages become more acute beyond the next 10 years, water in shared basins will increasingly be used as leverage; the use of water as a weapon or to further terrorist objectives will become more likely beyond 10 years." 

Where are these "water wars" hot spots?  They're all in areas that are already water stressed, that have critical groundwater issues and shared access to equally critical surface water.  Foremost is Asia where Pakistan, India and China have conflicting dependencies on the Himalayan headwaters.  As local groundwater resources falter, the dependency on this surface water worsens.  Did I mention that all three nations have nuclear arsenals?

Next up are the Tigris and Euphrates and the conflicting dependencies of Turkey, Syria and Iraq.  Of the three it's Iraq, as the downstream nation, that is most at risk from water diversion by the upstream neighbours.

Then there's the Nile where Egypt relies on an old colonial-era British pronouncement for its claim to 70% of the river flows.  Egypt's several upstream neighbours don't think much of the British ruling and seek to divert Nile waters for their own purposes.  Egypt responds by regularly threatening to bomb any installations these smaller countries might dare construct.  Yet as dependencies deepen and approach the threshold of survival itself, countries can become destabilized and threats escalate into armed conflict. 

Climate change compounds all this.  One aspect of our warming atmosphere that's most obvious is our broken, hydrological cycle.  Precipitation patterns are badly skewed.  Rather than receiving the relatively steady, moderate rainfalls that were so essential to the expansion of modern agriculture, we're now experiencing cycles of drought and flood that are also more severe, more sustained and more frequent.  That, in turn, increases the demands on the dwindling remnants of global groundwater reserves.

The global water crisis points to a major part of the solution to what truly ails mankind - fairness.  Only equitable approaches can possibly forestall conflict. Nations - all nations - have to share and that includes sacrifice.  When you have a pie cut into four pieces and you suddenly find it has to feed twelve people, you have to cut each of those pieces into three.  The problem is we're not conditioned to do that.  We want others to do the sharing and the sacrifice, just leave us out of it.  That's practically the mantra of the Tea Party.

Equity is deliberately omitted from the Obama-Xi emissions pact.  Nowhere is there any discussion of whether the relatively modest cuts envisioned are "fair" to the rest of the world, especially the poorest and most vulnerable nations of the Third World.

Emissions quotas are about more than cuts.  They're also a way of defining a claim to some share of the atmosphere's remaining greenhouse gas carrying capacity.  We know how much that is with some pretty specific numbers.  Yet just who 'owns' the atmosphere?  Who holds what right to pump what amount of emissions into it?

The issue is fraught with unwelcome implications.  If we explore the nature of the atmosphere it's clearly a "commons."  It belongs to nobody and, hence, to everybody.  That means a nomadic herder on the Sahel has as valid a claim to it as a bitumen worker in Athabasca.  But if we ever recognized that we'd be in a hell of a fix because our way of life is dependent on keeping the lion's share of the remaining emissions carrying capacity.  We need the atmosphere as our own and we need it free of charge.  That the people whose equitable entitlement to it we're rejecting are also those reeling from the worst impacts of our Industrial Revolution emissions and for whom catastrophic climate change is already a reality is merely the icing on the cake - our cake.  Ours first, ours alone.

During the 19th and 20th centuries the major powers wrestled and periodically fought each other over how to divide the world among them.  The French got this, the Germans that, the Spanish and Portuguese bits here and there, the Brits everything else.  It seems to be an approach we're going to stick with on the environment.

It could be argued that the Obama-Xi deal is an exercise along these same lines. Obama has essentially decreed how big will be America's excessive share of the atmospheric commons in the future.  China says it'll let us know what it's after by 2030.  Other countries, our own Canada for example, are playing coy, jockeying for an even larger share.  It's a ploy that will eventually lead to the failure of whatever efforts we take to deal with climate change.

If we can't find an equitable solution to the atmosphere our chances of finding acceptable solutions to global fisheries or water resources or any of the other threats and challenges now looming are significantly diminished.  You simply have almost no hope of solving these problems when you're constrained by the straight jacket of neoliberalism.

Some, such as renowned intellectual John Raulston Saul, see revolution in our future.

“The collapse started in 1973,” Saul continued. “There were a series of sequential collapses afterwards. The fascinating thing is that between 1850 and 1970 we put in place all sorts of mechanisms to stop collapses which we can call liberalism, social democracy orRed Toryism. It was an understanding that we can’t have boom-and-bust cycles. We can’t have poverty-stricken people. We can’t have starvation. The reason today’s collapses are not leading to what happened in the 18th century and the 19th century is because all these safety nets, although under attack, are still in place. But each time we have a collapse we come out of it stripping more of the protection away. At a certain point we will find ourselves back in the pre-protection period. At that point we will get a collapse that will be incredibly dramatic. I have no idea what it will look like. A revolution from the left? A revolution from the right? Is it violence followed by state violence? Is it the collapse of the last meaningful edges of democracy? Is it a sudden decision by a critical mass of people that they are not going to take it anymore?”

It's best not to get too gushy about the Obama-Xi deal for it speaks more to their limitations and shortcomings than it does of any genuine commitment to address our existential threats.