America’s Century of Humiliation has Begun

1,800 words

China’s “Century of Humiliation” began in 1839 with the First Opium War. The Qing Dynasty was in decline, and foreign powers began stealing territories and extorting trade concessions through wars and military expeditions. It was a long century that only really ended in 1949 with the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.

But even then, there was unfinished business: Macau, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Macau and Hong Kong have now been returned to China. But Taiwan remains unredeemed. Indeed, Taiwan exists to deny victory to the People’s Republic. To this day, Taiwan claims to be the real China, asserting sovereignty over the rest of China under the protective umbrella of the United States.

It is clearly a sore spot for Beijing. Until the Taiwan Question is settled, the rise of the People’s Republic didn’t really end the Century of Humiliation.

We are told that we must risk war over Taiwan because they make chips for AI. We’re in an “AI race.” Just as we are in a “rare earth minerals” race.

I am skeptical of these arguments. If we were in an “existential” race with China over AI, we would simply move the factories out of China’s reach, like Stalin moved whole industries behind the Urals. But then I remember: history is a long record of leaders facing existential threats and doing nothing.

When I hear that “we” need to acquire territories or risk war over resources and technologies, I cynically wonder who this “we” is. We the people always end up paying for stuff. Whenever we hear “geopolitics” invoked, that’s a sign that we are going to pay twice: first in blood, then in money.

Why pay in blood? Is it simply because politically-connected oligarchs don’t want to compete for contracts, so they bribe politicians to deliver them?

All this, of course, was hovering in the background when Donald Trump and a planeload of billionaires landed in Beijing for a summit.

First of all, taking Elon Musk to China smacks of taking a knife to a gunfight. There are issues of sovereignty and identity at stake here that cannot be addressed by dangling business deals. Trump should have learned that already with the miserable failure of his merchant envoys Witkoff and Kushner to end the Ukraine War.

But Trump can’t learn that. He’s an old man. His powers are declining. So he increasingly defaults to what he knows best: selling steaks, selling wars, selling himself. He’s a merchant. All he ever thinks about is money.

Second, Trump never should have made this trip to begin with, because he threw away a lot of the cards he planned to play in Beijing by starting—and losing—a war with Iran. Trump, however, is simply in denial. He is prolonging the war—and thus increasing the negative consequences—apparently hoping for a miracle so that he does not have to admit defeat.

So of course he did not reschedule the China summit. That would be admitting defeat. In fact, there is some speculation that he was hoping to get China’s help in extricating himself from the Iran mess. He also probably hoped for a bump in the polls. Because that’s what he’s been reduced to: grasping at straws, juicing the stock market and opinion polls with lies and stunts.

Naturally, Trump is claiming great things from this summit. But they are all pie in the sky. For instance, China has promised to buy jets from Boeing. But first, it isn’t the job of the President of the United States to be pitching Boeing jets to Communist dictators. Second, it may never happen.

Let’s talk about what actually happened. Trump’s Beijing summit looks to me like the first 36 hours of America’s Century of Humiliation. We saw Donald Trump buttering up Xi Jinping, praising him as a great leader. Trump does this with Putin and Kim as well. Contrast that with the insults he delivers to America’s allies. This is standard operating procedure for a narcissist. He takes his friends for granted while chasing the approval of his enemies.

Xi did not repay Trump’s flattery in kind. Instead, he spoke the truth. He came right out and said that the United States is a declining power. Trump, of course, deftly pivoted, saying that it applied to Joe Biden’s America, not to Trump’s.

In truth, America has been a declining power long before the vegetable Biden’s presidency. Biden was just a symptom of decline. But Donald Trump has dramatically accelerated it.

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I will leave it to future historians to debate the causes and turning points in the decline and fall of the American empire. As Gibbon showed, there’s a lot of decline in an empire. It will probably be declining long after I am dead.

But the Iran War feels like a turning point.

America lost the Iran War on day one, because there was no way that the United States could emerge from this war more powerful than when it went in. I take some grim satisfaction that arch neocon Robert Kagan has declared the obvious: that Trump has been checkmated by Iran.

America’s loss was not contingent on what happened to Iran. Sometimes both sides in a war lose. Iran could have been destroyed utterly. Iran may still be destroyed utterly. But that does not alter the fact that the United States lost more than it gained, because America’s status as World Cop depends largely on bluff, and Iran called it.

Iran demonstrated that the US could not protect its Gulf dependencies. That protection, moreover, was a quid pro quo for the petrodollar system, which is the key to keeping the globe’s biggest debtor government solvent. That system is now unraveling.

The Gulf monarchies are turning to countries like Ukraine to help secure themselves against Iran. Cargoes are now being priced in other currencies than dollars. The United States is now making huge loans to the cash-strapped United Arab Emirates to forestall them selling off US Treasury bonds at a discount. The US Treasury has begun to raise interest rates on new bonds, which means that the US will be paying more to creditors and less to clients to keep the whole system afloat.

The war is now in its eleventh week. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed. Indeed, the United States is now blockading Iranian oil, which the US initially allowed to pass to keep global prices from spiking even higher. The world is facing shortages of oil, natural gas, fertilizer, and other chemicals necessary for modern industry.

That means less of everything good: less light, less warmth, less medicine, less food. For the poor countries of the world, that means famine. And that means more of everything bad: more instability, more violence, more refugees flowing into white countries.

All these consequences were perfectly predictable to me, and I’m not an economist, a geopolitical analyst, or a think-tank Mandarin. I just follow the news with my eyes open. Which means that all these consequences were known to Donald Trump, his cabinet, and the Pentagon brass as well.

But the war went ahead anyway, because this war is not about making America stronger. It isn’t about America at all. This war is Israel hoisting America with chains and bleeding it dry to destroy another of its regional enemies.

Just like the Iraq War, the Iran War was premised on lies about weapons of mass destruction and sold as quick and easy because, of course, the Iranians long for “freedom,” so they “want us to bomb them.”

Bush II was not stupid and disloyal enough to attack Iran. Neither was Obama. Neither were Biden’s minders. Only Trump was a big enough fool and traitor. And his cabinet was too traitorous, too stupid, or too weak to stop him.

I didn’t think the Iran War was possible, because I didn’t think Trump and the people around him were this dumb and evil. I was wrong.

Trump has no cards in the Gulf. If he continues to attack Iran, Iran will continue to retaliate against the Gulf states.

Thus far, Iran has induced a global economic crisis with merely restrained, tit-for-tat retaliations. If Trump goes all in, Iran probably has the capacity not just to destroy the entire economy of the Gulf but to render the region uninhabitable by destroying the desalinization plants. That would trigger a global depression, if we are not already in one.

There is no reason to think that the US could cripple Iran’s retaliatory capacity before the complete destruction of the Gulf—and what remains of America’s global credibility as a superpower.

What’s the best possible outcome with Iran? The United States needs to admit defeat and end the war as quickly as possible, for the longer we wait, the worse the consequences for everyone. The Strait of Hormuz will remain under Iran’s control. The world will be forced to accommodate Iran, beginning with the Gulf States. Some crowned heads may have to roll. America’s regional military bases will probably be abandoned. Iran will emerge as the new regional power.

America didn’t just lose power by attacking Iran. Power does not disappear. It simply moves about. In the Gulf, America’s power will go to Iran.

But America has not been weakened in the Gulf alone. The US has lost so much equipment and materiel in the Gulf that it cannot credibly protect Taiwan and South Korea. That’s China’s back yard. Thus China may be the biggest winner of the Iran War, because she did not actually fight.

Trump lies so much now that the world tends to tune him out. But if you really believe that America is in an existential AI race with China, and Taiwan is a key part of that, then you should be very worried about some statements out of Beijing: Trump’s claim that the plan to sell $14 billion in US defense equipment to Taiwan is a “bargaining chip,” the claim that NVIDIA might be permitted to sell sensitive AI-related technology to China, and the sunny declaration that it would be good for more Chinese money and students to flow into America.

Is Trump signaling his willingness to sell out America to China because he wants Chinese help extricating himself from the Iran War, which we are in because Trump sold out America to Israel?

I just don’t see how patriotic Americans will ever get our country back, Elon Musk will ever go to Mars, and Silicon Valley will ever win its AI race as long as Israel always comes first.