Climb every mountain! Burn every bridge!

Not a smart grand strategy when #1 competitor is in bridge-building business

America threatens to take back the Panama Canal. Scared Panama is convinced to announce it is pulling out of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. China indicates it is still going ahead with its promise to build a fourth bridge over the canal on Atlantic end.

Who “wins” in this dynamic?

Nobody at first.

Who learns a lesson?

Panama does, and it’s not one that favors the US.

America used to be represented by institutions, now by just one man. Institutions evolve, but, just one man? He can change his mind overnight, over a phone call, over a perceived slight.

Elon Musk complains to Trump about how White landowners are being treated by the South African government and voila! America and South Africa have a major beef unfolding — or at least spewing from one side.

If I am Panama, I want to stay out of Trump’s sites in the short run. As for the long run? I’d rather be doing business with China — less fuss, less drama, less everything except actual construction.

Lessons learned, all over the world: America is nuts right now, suffering its own Cultural Revolution late in life. Best to leave it be and get on with globalization’s next iteration, which can only seem roomier now that the US is so effectively self-sidelined.

All the momentum is with the other side today, along with high public trust in institutions — something we were once known for but have voluntarily abandoned for the duration of God only knows what.

I imagined this present two decades ago. I got the story right but the characters wrong. My mistake was in believing that America was already great and determined to stay that way.

Back during the Global War on Terror, during my Pentagon’s New Map days, I proposed that the US military and government admit that it was basically buying one force (big-war Leviathan) while mostly operating another force (small-wars/crisis response/postwar reconstruction System Administrator force). Leviathan is mostly blue (Air Force, Navy), while the SysAdmin is mostly green (Marines, Army, Special Ops). America continued to buy almost exclusively for the Leviathan because that’s how the entire Military Industrial Complex was designed to operate (we are now watching it being recast by Ukraine and the looming Military Singularity). Thus, when the SysAdmin force was used and overused and extended into follow-on deployments ad nauseam (“forever wars”), those stressed-out forces were short on everything they needed (like up-armored humvees).

What I always said about my SysAdmin concept was this:

• The split in the force already exists; the Pentagon just refuses to admit it.

• The future belongs to the SysAdmin force because successful interventions are necessarily characterized by the intervening force (however assembled) leaving the target nation MORE connected to the outside world than before. We are living in a globalization that diminishes the utility of zero-sum defense strategies and rewards the emergence of non-zero-sum security strategies. Omniveillance has its upside.

• My SysAdmin was described as more civilian than military, more USG than DoD, more rest of the world than US, and more private sector than public sector.

The US never recognized — much less built my BEAST, which I imagined in terms of an ambitious, truly global power.

But China, clearly on the up-swing, did put together such a national capability, and it was called the Belt and Road Initiative, and it is remaking the world to a fascinating degree (as much as we deride it here in the “smarter” West).

Imagine: just going around the world preemptively and building connective infrastructure! Who the f&$k does that?

Instead of forever wars, it’s forever construction!

The nerve!

I mean, you know the PLA is involved but they’re always in the background. You know China is winning all sorts of influence and crafting all sorts of backdoors and yet it never seems to ask for anything all that onerous in return (e.g., don’t recognize Taiwan versus the typical US demand for democracy NOW!).

A lot of people hailed the SysAdmin concept back in 2004 as visionary and the future — and it was.

It just wasn’t America’s future amidst what has become the subsequent multi-decade retreat from globalization that began with Obama, sharpened with Trump, persisted with Biden, and now is turbo-charged with Trump 2.0.

Are we getting some signals of having gone too far down this path?

When Trump speaks longingly of Canada, Greenland, and Panama … yes, those are signals of America beginning to realize that this headlong and lengthy retreat is putting our own hemisphere at-risk.

China wants to take over superpower “ownership” of the Persian Gulf? Be our guest. Same with Central Asia. Same, albeit with some showy protests, with East Asia. Same with Africa.

All of them effectively ceded, with the hope that India stands on its own — and with us.

But Latin America? The Arctic? That starts to feel like how the EU and NATO sniffing around Ukraine does for Moscow — scary! Identity-threatening!

For now, our reply is mostly bluster, seeing that we’re combining this possessive talk with trade wars galore and an immense crackdown on immigration, two paths that see this administration determined to — yet again — poison relations across the hemisphere.

Frankly, the Trump talk about new states and territories and “buying” places like Gaza … it’s all defensive — the fear of missing out as the world turns in China’s favor and — over time — India’s favor.

We just want a piece of the action … I mean, transaction. Maybe, naming rights here and there.

So now we have Trump telling Egypt and Jordan that their US aid flows may end … like that! If they don’t take in all those Gazan Palestinians. Amidst the administration’s dismantling of USAID, the threat certainly resonates, but you just know who’s standing on the sideline, ready to step in.

Why, it’s the bridge-building Chinese, of course. The new System Admin large and in-charge of globalization’s continued expansion across the Global South and — more importantly — laying down all the IT networks and the 5G and the Internet of Things and sucking up all that Big Data to feed its AI machinery (also priced to move!).

Meanwhile, we threaten everybody with the only asset of great value that we have left — our immense consumer market.

Is it a diminishing asset? Relative to total global consumption? Yes.

In 2000, America accounted for the single biggest share of consumption in the global economy. By mid-century, China and India will combine to something like three times our consumer heft.

Whatever fantasies you entertain about Trump renegotiating our entire relationship with the world, DO NOT FORGET THAT EMERGING STRATEGIC REALITY, because it speaks to the Correlation of Forces this century.

That is why China is building bridges all over the world, connecting itself to markets.

Meanwhile, the US is trying to figure out what to do with its 800 military facilities around the world — all part of our enduring, decades-old commitment to protecting state sovereignty the world over — lest WWIII be triggered!

Meanwhile meanwhile, as the global economy digitalizes and erases state sovereignty more and more, China leads the way in building those networks, achieving that connectivity and omniveillance, and successfully selling its model of authoritarianism across a Global South that sees the US more and more as this giant pain in the ass that demands all sorts of efforts while making none itself.

That is our brand problem right now: China is the real deal and we are full of shit and everybody knows it.

We have veered so decisively to the selfish market-playing person exemplified by transactional Trump that nobody takes us seriously anymore. Our path is unsustainable, our threats grow more hollow by the day, and our primary instinct is not self-survival but self-destruction.

We are an End Times all to ourselves. Little wonder why our enemies sit back and simply enjoy the show.

Please stand back while we take down nobody but ourselves!

Trump promised The Purge and that’s what we’re getting, but there is no promise of true greatness on the far side of this suffering. There is only diminishment, retreat, purification, and hardening.

That’s what happens when you emulate ethno-religious nationalist demagogues … you shrink.

There is nothing new in this dynamic in relation to globalization’s rise and spread: you either “play up” and “bulk up” or you retreat into your White Christian shell, staying “true” to your culture/civilization/identity.

The retreat from DEI is emblematic beyond words (because, that’s all they really are is words): the global future will be overwhelmingly driven by non-Whites, non-Americans, non-Europeans, non-Westerners, non-Christians and the non-demographically super-aging.

When you disavow DEI, you’re simply saying, That’s not for us! We must remain pure.

Stare hard enough at this picture and you will spot Putin running away from reality. Beyond him in the distance you’ll see Iran’s Ayatollah. And, farthest away from reality you’ll spot Kim Jong Eun’s regime in a full sprint.

The irony of course? We call them the “resistance.” In truth, they’re closer to a siren’s call when it comes to adapting to our world and embracing where technology is talking all of us — Run away!

We have met the enemy and they is us.

I get the irony alright: America the land of mongrels and misfits suddenly needs to purify to remain true to its … what exactly? We’ve always been about the Benjamins and that means taking on and accepting all comers in that very O.G. Dutch/British way.

But not any more. Now, we sacrifice economic opportunity and inclusion so that our bathrooms remain “pure.” [Does it get any more stupidly picayune than that?] This is what we’ve been reduced to, and, yeah, in grand strategic terms it could not get much more pathetic.