The conventional European framework of Ukraine has blindsided us to its eastern neighbourhood: Chechnya is next door. The Muslims of the Caucasus have been fighting for independence from Moscow for a couple of centuries. They acquiesce when overpowered but transmit the dream of independence through their genes.
Forces hostile to Russia could reactivate them. There is active regional conflict to its south, which borders the Caspian Sea, troubled Iran, partitioned Iraq, and fragmented Syria. Israel, Palestine, and Yemen at the bottom of the Red Sea are a short-range missile away. Aden is within sulfurous distance of Afghanistan, Baluchistan, Pakistan, and thence to India. The Indian Navy is patrolling the Red Sea as the first line of defence.
Donald Trump has lit a flame in Latin America with the reassertion of a doctrine first articulated on December 2, 1823, when the world was ruled by European empires. The Monroe Doctrine affirmed that Latin America was a Washington parish and protectorate. After World War II America, sponsor of the United Nations, announced a world order based on the independence of nation-states guarded by rules. They applied to everyone except America and the Soviet Union, which converted Eastern Europe and Central Asia into a communist empire.
Direct interventions
Since 1952, America has intervened directly in about twenty Latin American countries which flirted with defiance, including Cuba, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Haiti, Brazil, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, and Paraguay.
Fidel Castro got away, thanks to Soviet support in the 1960s and the blessed absence of oil thereafter. Venezuela’s mistake was neither drugs nor incompetent dictatorship. Neither is a criminal offence in the Pentagon or at Langley, the CIA headquarters. All that Maduro needed to do was what his successors have done: send heavy crude to America. When the CIA dust settled in Caracas there was a change of leader, not change of regime. The high flag of democracy remained at half-mast, while Trump’s brief flirtation with direct rule in Venezuela quickly floundered under the weight of quiet advice. No American Chairman of the Board for Venezuela, no Viceroy, no parade. The lords of the drug trade can now exhale a huge sigh of relief in between their cigar puffs. The Pentagon will not chase them anymore. Their role as scapegoats is over.
President Trump should be congratulated for having sacrificed any chance of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize for heavy crude required by Texas refineries. America’s oil reserves are just 33 billion barrels; Venezuela’s ten times that. Oil will make America great again. Oil and chips.
Global dominance
Greenland is about chips, and water. Silicon Valley needs silicon. The nuclear industry needs uranium. The 21st century needs boron, phosphorus, indium phosphide, graphite, gal lium, lithium, germanium in addition to old favourites like cobalt, nickel and copper. Greenland has 30 per cent of the globe’s known quantities of 30 minerals. America wanted to buy Greenland in 1946 for $100 million, or about $7 billion today. A lapse of urgency permitted Denmark to become its colonial ruler by the 1950s. An estimated annual ice melt of 270 billion tonnes into water to Greenland’s south is widening the passage for ships, shortening the trade routes. The seas between Greenland, Iceland and the northern tip of Britain are the Suez Canal of modern commerce. China has offered a $2.5 billion investment to build a deep-sea port and two airports in Greenland.
China is preparing with great care for global predominance in the post-industrial revolution after it absorbs Taiwan, an avowed ambition that has just got much easier after Russia’s strike for claimed geography in Ukraine and America’s reassertion of the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine in Venezuela. Taiwan produces 90 per cent of the world’s advanced chips, which fits nicely into Chinese dreams. Chips require rare earths.
However, Trump’s habitual hyperventilation may have done more damage to America’s friends than the Pentagon has done to America’s enemies. It has reawakened a sentient suspicion of America. The principal beneficiary will be America’s bête noire, China, which has in the last ten years made massive investments in Latin America, Africa and Eurasia without raising its head too far above a placid horizon.
Continual active war
Conflict through proxies eventually evolves into a mug’s game, which is why there has been continual active war even in the nuclear age. The flashpoint between America and China will be Taiwan. Chinese strategy thus far might be encapsulated in one of its proverbs: kill the chicken to scare the monkey. Taiwan has not been cowed into submission, and the only foreseeable option left with Beijing is military action. It began this year with manoeuvres as dress rehearsal for war. The Japanese responded with tough talk, and it will not come as a huge surprise if they have shifted, in secrecy, even closer to becoming a nuclear power. China has to move before that happens.
If America chooses inaction in the battle for Taiwan, the 20th century will finally come to an end. China will become the power of the 21st century.
2026 will be a year of unprecedented instability, rocked by external confrontation or internal flashpoint insurrections. As international institutions flail and national political systems are unable to deliver a better life, the young have entered what can only be described as the Mood of 1968 in the West, when the Brave New World born in 1945 turned into a mess of drugs, violence, hunger, and disappearing hopes. The so-called international rules-based order has disintegrated. Democracy is under threat from free will slipping into chaos; dictatorship is under pressure from its own cruelties and elitist greed. There is no theorist or realist with any evident answers. 2026 will be the Year of the Violent Whirlpool.
All that Maduro needed to do was what his successors have done: send heavy crude to America. When the CIA dust settled in Caracas there was a change of leader, not change of regime