Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide

America is built to preserve the 20th-century global order but not the 21st-century version staring us in the face

Jim Nuttle illustration from “America’s New Map”

The old images are hard to resist: we line up our forces, buttressed by our bases, and we show our readiness to take on all comers anywhere on the planet.

That is the Leviathan role I presented in The Pentagon’s New Map: we effectively rule out great-power-on-great-power war in this world through the combination of our Leviathan force, our global footprint (bases), and the strategic top-cover of MAD (mutually assured destruction via nuclear weapons/warfare). Coming up on eight decades without superpower warfare (i.e., the “Big One” we all so diligently prepare for).

That US-created system settled the post-WWII West, to include rehabilitating the entire Axis trio of Germany (West), Italy, and Japan. We got allies and the Soviets got captured nations. Not hard to look back now and see who got the better deal.

FDR didn’t sweat the loss of Eastern Europe to Stalin — and was labeled by many experts a dying, weak fool for his confidence at Yalta. Deep down, Roosevelt’s strategic optimism was profound: our system of economic integration, growth, and development, pioneered within the multinational union called the United States, would — once effectively socialized throughout the free world — make us vastly more economically powerful than the Soviet bloc.

FDR won that bet by 1980, when it was clear that a mere one-quarter of humanity (the West/Free World) was producing two-thirds of its economic wealth. Meanwhile, the Soviet mini-globalization was producing almost nothing of value besides military heft. That became obvious inside the Kremlin, yielding Gorbachev — and ultimately the USSR’s demise. It also became obvious inside the Forbidden City, yielding Deng’s redirection of China toward markets in a very Hamiltonian vision/move.

In short, FDR’s vision won. Took some time, yes. We got distracted/caught up in wars of no real strategic consequence (bloody as they were), but our side won because our model of economic integration turned out to be crazy powerful.

We spread that until-then uniquely internal ruleset (all these states allowing for max free trade among themselves!) across the world and we changed the world by doing so: accelerating climate change, triggering demographic transitions (the price of joining globalization), and birthing a majority global middle class.

Game, set, match … but not the end of history.

With the rise of that global majority middle class, we rerun the European struggle of the early 20th century: Who rules them? The Right (fascism)? The revolutionary Left (single-party rule)? Or does the middle rule itself?

We still call each other all the same names as we fight to see who captures the middle.

Guess where I place Trump/Vance with their White Christian Nationalism?

But I digress …

Given all that history, when we are confronted with this new and renewed superpower brand war over which of us will lead the North-South integration in the works — thanks first and foremost to climate change’s devastation of the Global South (my Middle Earth), we naturally assume that the old military patterns will hold: we will build our Leviathan back up and take on their would-be Leviathans. Taiwan becomes the preferred showdown (and, man, are experts on both sides excited at that prospect!).

Except, a funny thing happened on the way to this imagined showdown in the colosseum, and it goes by the name of the Military Singularity:

Suddenly, per Ukraine, our future military industrial base looks like this?

Who put these people in charge of the (always looming) “revolution in military affairs?”

Which gets me to today’s citation from Axios Future of Defense:

A ballooning number of spying technologies inside and outside Earth's atmosphere are making military maneuvers and materiel nearly impossible to hide.

Why it matters: Concealment and surprise have long been winning tenets of warfare. But these ever-watching eyes complicate the calculus of what gear to buy, how to move and where to dig in.

Now consider this (from the second Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) I am now building for edX (and ultimately Coursera):

In a world full of nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, America is tethered to place all around the world.

And yeah, we’re still distributed in an entirely Cold War pattern (stop Russia in the west, stop China in the east, and sit on the Middle East lest somebody else try and run it).

Our fixed-in-place Leviathan footprint is thus vast: