When the nuke — well, more technically, the radiological dirty bomb — went off, it made the Saudi house of cards fall down. Between Dhahran glowing and the fights over who comes in after the Al Saud family, the world economy’s still reeling from the hub of the global oil industry effectively going offline.
The renewed push toward alternative energy sources has caused more conflict than cooperation:
Technologies like solar and deep-cycle batteries depend on rare-earth materials, rare being the operative word.
The old Chinese Communist Party has been replaced:
When the world economy cratered after Dhahran, the old Chinese Communist Party couldn’t keep things humming. Their big mistake was calling in the military to put down the urban workers’ riots, thinking that the troops would do their dirty work for them, just like back in ’89. They failed to factor in that a new generation of more professional military and business elite saw the problem differently than they did. Turned out the new guard viewed the nepotism and corruption of those ‘little princes’ who had just inherited their power as a bigger threat to China’s stability than the rioters. They booted them out, and instead you’ve got a Directorate regime that’s more popular and more competent than the previous government, and technocratic to the extreme. The business magnates and the military have divided up rule and roles. Capitalism and nationalism working hand in hand, rather than the old contradictions they had back in the Communist days.
The Americans face a classic problem:
How do you police an empire when you’ve got a shrinking economy relative to the world’s and a population no longer so excited to meet those old commitments?
Neither the Chinese nor the Americans have fought a major war since the 1940s. But they wouldn’t go to war with a major trading partner, would they?
Well, who was Britain’s biggest trading partner before World War One? Germany. Or if you prefer World War Two as a comparison, Germany’s biggest trading partners just before the war were the very neighbors it soon invaded, while the U.S. was Japan’s.
A Chinese admiral explains their situation:
Indeed, the Americans had an apt phrase to describe a situation like ours, where your strength grows but your options become ever more limited: Manifest Destiny.
Destiny drives you forward but ties your hands. Indeed, their own great naval thinker Alfred Thayer Mahan foretold how their rise to great power gave them no choice. As their economy and then their military began to grow to world status, he told his people that, whether they liked it or not, “Americans must now begin to look outward. The growing production of the country demands it.”
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America’s rise came first with its ensuring control of its home waters and then extending its global economic presence. And then the country had no choice but to assume its new responsibilities, including protecting the system from the powers of the past that would threaten it. I mentioned their thinker Mahan. Soon after he laid out the new demands upon the United States, war with Spain followed, as you remember, and the Americans reached across the Pacific, thousands of miles beyond their home waters, extending to the Philippines, patrolling not just our ports but even our very rivers.
If you look in the right places you can probably find a whole pile of quotes of Winston Churchill saying quite explicitly that the World Wars was a war (sic) pursued by the British (relatively declining naval power) against the Germans (relatively ascending industrial-manufacturing power).
Whether Japan was America’s biggest trading partner after That Communist seized all Japanese assets and embargoed them is a matter open to some interpretation.
If today the Chinese Communist Party seized all American assets in China would that be considered an act of war? I’m seriously asking.
The Yangtze Patrol started as early as 1854. Mahan was 14.
US emergence as a Great Power was underway by the early 1840s. The first “Pacific President” was John Tyler. He sent Rep. Caleb Cushing to meet with the Manchu in 1843. Cushing negotiated a favorable treaty through an interpreter named Peter Parker. Parker’s presence in Macao was symptomatic of how American presence with accompanying radioactive spiders had grown in the Pacific in the preceding half-century. The US was a Pacific power despite not having any territory facing the Pacific except an uneasy condominium sublet with the UK. US power accelerated after Mr. Polk’s War and the Gold Rush to newly annexed Alta California.
The first sustained era of far overseas intervention was the 1850s. The most prominent of them was our intervention in Japan starting under Matthew Perry in 1853 (Perry was a veteran of the War of 1812. His older brother played a key role in winning that war). After meeting Japan and making them his, his squadron evaluated Formosa, which Perry advised the US government to annex. By the end of the 1850s, the US was engaged in skirmishes all over the world, including gunboat diplomacy with Paraguay, the Prussia of South America.
What short circuited this unfolding pattern of foreign intervention? The answer rhymes with “U.S. Civil War”.