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American militarism has gone off the rails—and this middling career officer should have seen it coming. Earlier in this century, the US military not surprisingly focused on counterinsurgency as it faced various indecisive and seemingly unending wars across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa. Back in 2008, when I was still a captain newly returned from Iraq and studying at Fort Knox, Kentucky, our training scenarios generally focused on urban combat and what were called security-and-stabilization missions. We’d plan to assault some notional city center, destroy the enemy fighters there, and then transition to pacification and “humanitarian” operations. Of course, no one then asked about the dubious efficacy of “regime change” and “nation building,” the two activities in which our country had been so regularly engaged. That would have been frowned upon. Still, however bloody and wasteful those wars were, they now look like relics from a remarkably simpler time. The US Army knew its mission then (even if it couldn’t accomplish it) and could predict what each of us young officers was about to take another crack at: counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq. Fast forward eight years—during which this author fruitlessly toiled away in Afghanistan and taught at West Point—and the US military ground presence has significantly decreased in the Greater Middle East, even if its wars there remain “infinite.” The United States was still bombing, raiding, and “advising” away in several of those old haunts as I entered the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Nonetheless, when I first became involved in the primary staff officer training course for mid-level careerists there in 2016, it soon became apparent to me that something was indeed changing. Our training scenarios were no longer limited to counterinsurgency operations. Now, we were planning for possible deployments to—and high-intensity conventional warfare in—the Caucasus, the Baltic Sea region, and the South China Sea (think: Russia and China). We were also planning for conflicts against an Iranian-style “rogue” regime (think: well, Iran). The missions became all about projecting US Army divisions into distant regions to fight major wars to “liberate” territories and bolster allies. One thing soon became clear to me in my new digs: Much had changed. The US military had, in fact, gone global in a big way. Frustrated by its inability to close the deal on any of the indecisive counterterror wars of this century, Washington had decided it was time to prepare for “real” war with a host of imagined enemies. This process had, in fact, been developing right under our noses for quite a while. You remember in 2013 when President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton began talking about a “pivot” to Asia—an obvious attempt to contain China. Obama also sanctioned Moscow and further militarized Europe in response to Russian aggression in Ukraine and the Crimea. President Trump, whose “instincts,” on the campaign trail, were to pull out of America’s Middle Eastern quagmires, turned out to be ready to escalate tensions with China, Russia, Iran, and even (for a while) North Korea. With Pentagon budgets reaching record levels—some $717 billion for 2019—Washington has stayed the course, while beginning to plan for more expansive future conflicts across the globe. Today, not a single square inch of this ever-warming planet of ours escapes the reach of US militarization. Think of these developments as establishing a potential formula for perpetual conflict that just might lead the United States into a truly cataclysmic war it neither needs nor can meaningfully win. With that in mind, here’s a little tour of Planet Earth as the US military now imagines it. OUR OLD STOMPING GROUNDS: FOREVER WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA Never apt to quit, even after 17 years of failure, Washington’s bipartisan military machine still churns along in the Greater Middle East. Some 14,500 US troops remain in Afghanistan (along with much US air power) though that war is failing by just about any measurable metric you care to choose—and Americans are still dying there, even if in diminished numbers. In Syria, US forces remain trapped between hostile powers, one mistake away from a possible outbreak of hostilities with Russia, Iran, Syrian President Assad, or even NATO ally Turkey. While American troops (and air power) in Iraq helped destroy ISIS’s physical “caliphate,” they remain entangled there in a low-level guerrilla struggle in a country seemingly incapable of forming a stable political consensus. In other words, as yet there’s no end in sight for that now 15-year-old war. Add in the drone strikes, conventional air attacks, and special forces raids that Washington regularly unleashes in Somalia, Libya, Yemen, and Pakistan, and it’s clear that the US military’s hands remain more than full in the region. If anything, the tensions—and potential for escalation—in the Greater Middle East and North Africa are only worsening. President Trump ditched President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal and, despite the recent drama over the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, has gleefully backed the Saudi royals in their arms race and cold war with Iran. While the other major players in that nuclear pact remained on board, President Trump has appointed unreformed Iranophobe neocons like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo to key foreign policy positions and his administration still threatens regime change in Tehran. In Africa, despite talk about downsizing the US presence there, the military advisory mission has only increased its various commitments, backing questionably legitimate governments against local opposition forces and destabilizing further an already unstable continent. You might think that waging war for two decades on two continents would at least keep the Pentagon busy and temper Washington’s desire for further confrontations. As it happens, the opposite is proving to be the case. POKING THE BEAR: ENCIRCLING RUSSIA AND KICKING OFF A NEW COLD WAR Vladimir Putin’s Russia is increasingly autocratic and has shown a propensity for localized aggression in its sphere of influence. Still, it would be better not to exaggerate the threat. Russia did annex the Crimea, but the people of that province were Russians and desired such a reunification. It intervened in a Ukrainian civil war, but Washington was also complicit in the coup that kicked off that drama. Besides, all of this unfolded in Russia’s neighborhood as the US military increasingly deploys its forces up to the very borders of the Russian Federation. Imagine the hysteria in Washington if Russia were deploying troops and advisers in Mexico or the Caribbean. To put all of this in perspective, Washington and its military machine actually prefer facing off against Russia. It’s a fight the armed forces still remain comfortable with. After all, that’s what its top commanders were trained for during the tail end of an almost half-century-long Cold War. Counterinsurgency is frustrating and indecisive. The prospect of preparing for “real war” against the good old Russians with tanks, planes, and artillery—now, that’s what the military was built for! And despite all the over-hyped talk about Donald Trump’s complicity with Russia, under him, the Obama-era military escalation in Europe has only expanded. Back when I was toiling hopelessly in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US Army was actually removing combat brigades from Germany and stationing them back on US soil (when, of course, they weren’t off fighting somewhere in the Greater Middle East). Then, in the late Obama years, the military began returning those forces to Europe and stationing them in the Baltic, Poland, Romania, and other countries increasingly near to Russia. That’s never ended and, this year, the US Air Force has delivered its largest shipment of ordnance to Europe since the Cold War. Make no mistake: War with Russia would be an unnecessary disaster—and it could go nuclear. Is Latvia really worth that risk? From a Russian perspective, of course, it’s Washington and its expansion of the (by definition) anti-Russian NATO alliance into Eastern Europe that constitutes the real aggression in the region—and Putin may have a point there. What’s more, an honest assessment of the situation suggests that Russia, a country whose economy is about the size of Spain’s, has neither the will nor the capacity to invade Central Europe. Even in the bad old days of the Cold War, as we now know from Soviet archives, European conquest was never on Moscow’s agenda. It still isn’t. Nonetheless, the US military goes on preparing for what Marine Corps Commandant General Robert Neller, addressing some of his forces in Norway, claimed was a “big fight” to come. If it isn’t careful, Washington just might get the war it seems to want and the one that no one in Europe or the rest of this planet needs. CHALLENGING THE DRAGON: THE FUTILE QUEST FOR HEGEMONY IN ASIA The United States Navy has long treated the world’s oceans as if they were American lakes. Washington extends no such courtesy to other great powers or nation-states. Only now, the US Navy finally faces some challenges abroad—especially in the Western Pacific. A rising China, with a swiftly growing economy and carrying grievances from a long history of European imperial domination, has had the audacity to assert itself in the South China Sea. In response, Washington has reacted with panic and bellicosity. Never mind that the South China Sea is Beijing’s Caribbean (a place where Washington long felt it had the right to do anything it wanted militarily). Heck, the South China Sea has China in its name! The US military now claims—with just enough truth to convince the uninformed—that China’s growing navy is out for Pacific, if not global, dominance. Sure, at the moment China has only two aircraft carriers, one an old rehab (though it is building more) compared to the US Navy’s 11 full-sized and nine smaller carriers. And yes, China hasn’t actually attacked any of its neighbors yet. Still, the American people are told that their military must prepare for possible future war with the most populous nation on the planet. In that spirit, it has been forward deploying yet more ships, Marines, and troops to the Pacific Rim surrounding China. Thousands of Marines are now stationed in Northern Australia; US warships cruise the South Pacific; and Washington has sent mixed signals regarding its military commitments to Taiwan. Even the Indian Ocean has recently come to be seen as a possible future battleground with China, as the US Navy increases its regional patrols there and Washington negotiates stronger military ties with China’s rising neighbor, India. In a symbolic gesture, the military recently renamed its former Pacific Command (PACOM) the Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM). Unsurprisingly, China’s military high command has escalated accordingly. They’ve advised their South China Sea Command to prepare for war, made their own set of provocative gestures in the South China Sea, and also threatened to invade Taiwan should the Trump administration change America’s longstanding “One China” policy. From the Chinese point of view, all of this couldn’t be more logical, given that President Trump has also unleashed a “trade war” on Beijing’s markets and intensified his anti-China rhetoric. And all of this is, in turn, consistent with the Pentagon’s increasing militarization of the entire globe. NO LAND TOO DISTANT Would that it were only Africa, Asia, and Europe that Washington had chosen to militarize. But as Dr. Seuss might have said: That is not all, oh no, that is not all. In fact, more or less every square inch of our spinning planet not already occupied by a rival state has been deemed a militarized space to be contested. The United States has long been unique in the way it divided the entire surface of the globe into geographical (combatant) commands presided over by generals and admirals who functionally serve as regional Roman-style proconsuls And the Trump years are only accentuating this phenomenon. Take Latin America, which might normally be considered a non-threatening space for the United States, though it is already under the gaze of US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM). Recently, however, having already threatened to “invade” Venezuela, President Trump spent the election campaign rousing his base on the claim that a desperate caravan of Central American refugees—hailing from countries the United States had a significant responsibility for destabilizing in the first place—was a literal “invasion” and so yet another military problem. As such, he ordered more than 5,000 troops (more than currently serve in Syria or Iraq) to the US-Mexico border. Though he is not the first to try to do so, he has also sought to militarize space and so create a possible fifth branch of the US military, tentatively known as the Space Force. It makes sense. War has long been three dimensional, so why not bring US militarism into the stratosphere, even as the US Army is evidently training and preparing for a new cold war (no pun intended) with that ever-ready adversary, Russia, around the Arctic Circle. If the world as we know it is going to end, it will either be thanks to the long-term threat of climate change or an absurd nuclear war. In both cases, Washington has been upping the ante and doubling down. On climate change, of course, the Trump administration seems intent on loading the atmosphere with ever more greenhouse gases. When it comes to nukes, rather than admit that they are unusable and seek to further downsize the bloated US and Russian arsenals, that administration, like Obama’s, has committed itself to the investment of what could, in the end, be at least $1.6 trillion over three decades for the full-scale “modernization” of that arsenal. Any faintly rational set of actors would long ago have accepted that nuclear war is unwinnable and a formula for mass human extinction. As it happens, though, we’re not dealing with rational actors but with a defense establishment that considers it a prudent move to withdraw from the Cold War era Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty with Russia. And that ends our tour of the US military’s version of Planet Earth. It is often said that, in an Orwellian sense, every nation needs an enemy to unite and discipline its population. Still, the United States must stand alone in history as the only country to militarize the whole globe (with space thrown in) in preparation for taking on just about anyone. Now, that’s exceptional.

There have been major shifts towards globalisation over the past two decades, largely fuelled by the advancement of information technology, which has increased the speed and reach of information and opened up new opportunities and markets for corporations.

The most palpable effect of this shift has been its influence in driving a new multipolar world order led by the rise of countries like China and India that are determined to challenge the global power status quo. Fuelled by their extensive resource bases and increasing political stability, most African countries have embraced globalisation. It is within this reality that Africa seeks to advance its agency.

The fourth factor contributing to the perception of a China threat is the fear of political and economic collapse in the PRC, resulting in territorial fragmentation, civil war and waves of refugees pouring into neighbouring countries. Naturally, any or all of these scenarios would have a profoundly negative impact on regional stability. Today the Chinese leadership faces a raft of internal problems, including the increasing political demands of its citizens, a growing population, a shortage of natural resources and a deterioration in the natural environment caused by rapid industrialisation and pollution. These problems are putting a strain on the central government's ability to govern effectively. Political disintegration or a Chinese civil war might result in millions of Chinese refugees seeking asylum in neighbouring countries. Such an unprecedented exodus of refugees from a collapsed PRC would no doubt put a severe strain on the limited resources of China's neighbours. A fragmented China could also result in another nightmare scenario - nuclear weapons falling into the hands of irresponsible local provincial leaders or warlords.2 From this perspective, a disintegrating China would also pose a threat to its neighbours and the world.

The greatest danger both to U.S.-China relations and to American power itself is probably not that China will rise too far, too fast; it is that the current crisis might end China's growth miracle. In the worst-case scenario, the turmoil in the international economy will plunge China into a major economic downturn. The Chinese financial system will implode as loans to both state and private enterprises go bad. Millions or even tens of millions of Chinese will be unemployed in a country without an effective social safety net. The collapse of asset bubbles in the stock and property markets will wipe out the savings of a generation of the Chinese middle class. The political consequences could include dangerous unrest--and a bitter climate of anti-foreign feeling that blames others for China's woes. (Think of Weimar Germany, when both Nazi and communist politicians blamed the West for Germany's economic travails.) Worse, instability could lead to a vicious cycle, as nervous investors moved their money out of the country, further slowing growth and, in turn, fomenting ever-greater bitterness. Thanks to a generation of rapid economic growth, China has so far been able to manage the stresses and conflicts of modernization and change; nobody knows what will happen if the growth stops.

Last week the U.S. Embassy in Beijing upgraded its official reading of the city’s air quality on Twitter from “hazardous” to merely “very unhealthy.” But that was scant comfort to the millions of Chinese workers who don masks for their daily commute through thick smog into “Greyjing.” Recent news that air pollution had reached its highest levels since the American government began monitoring it—roughly 44 times worse than the World Health Organization’s recommended daily levels—had ground the city’s construction industry to a halt, forced schools to cancel outdoor sports activities and even sparked several rare, critical editorials in the state-owned press. “What do we want, breathtaking growth or taking a breath amid choking air?” asked China’s state-run news agency Xinhua. It prompted two Chinese environmental activists to pay for an ad in the New York Times urging new Communist party chief Xi Jinping to pledge his commitment to the environment. China’s ongoing struggles with pollution have been a blight on the country’s international reputation. The world’s image of China is that of an industrial behemoth fuelled by the dirtiest of energies, coal. On the surface, the reputation is well deserved. No country pumps out as much CO2 as China (not even the U.S. comes close). But behind the smog, China’s environmental woes have become an unexpected boon to the global renewable energy industry. Last week’s air quality emergency sent Chinese green energy stocks soaring on the hope that the political fallout will prompt the Communist party to offer up more public money for the country’s burgeoning environmental protection sector. Investors are counting on it. Even as it remains the scourge of environmentalists for being the largest emitter on the planet, China is also emerging as the world’s biggest spender on green energy. Globally, green energy investment fell 11 per cent last year, according to a recent Bloomberg New Energy Finance report. Indebted European countries slashed subsidies, India cut its spending by more than 40 per cent and the U.S. witnessed a string of solar power manufacturer bankruptcies. China’s investment in renewable energy, meanwhile, was a bright spot. It rose 20 per cent to nearly $68 billion, or a full quarter of the $269 billion global total. From having virtually no green energy infrastructure as recently as 2008, China has built 133 gigawatts of renewable energy—mainly wind turbines—enough to power as many as 53 million homes, or every household in Canada four times over. The International Energy Agency predicted that China would overtake Europe as the world’s top renewable energy growth market. It’s a market expected to be worth more than $470 billion by 2015, according to state-owned China Merchants Securities, or almost double what it was in 2009 and equal to about eight per cent of the country’s GDP. That investment has caught the eye of clean-tech companies in Europe and North America, who are flocking to China in hopes of selling their technologies after seeing demand stagnate or collapse in their home markets. “All the key players are going to China these days,” says Changhua Wu, Greater China director of the Climate Group, a London-based agency that promotes green energy investment. “Everyone is trying to figure out what the potential for opportunity is, partly because everyone recognizes that China could potentially be the largest market for clean tech in the world.” As China takes the lead, everyone will benefit from the technology that is developed and exported. China is saving itself, but might also be saving the world in the process. While the Middle Kingdom’s smog problems have earned plenty of headlines, it has also been quietly attracting a host of very unlikely supporters, including praise from the Pew Charitable Trust and the World Wildlife Foundation, which gave its “climate solver” award this year to several Chinese companies that manufacture technology to capture and recycle wasted heat, water and chemical emissions to power everything from factories to refrigerators. Greenpeace predicted the country would be on track to install 400 gigawatts of wind energy by 2030 and could become the largest solar market in the world. The argument that China is the world’s environmental bad guy “is increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to make given China’s recent policies,” wrote the authors of an October report for the Climate Institute, an Australian think tank. The country has closed more coal-fired power plants since 2006 than the entire capacity of Australia’s electrical grid, and exported more than $35-billion worth of renewable energy technology—equal to the total value of shoes exported from China that year. This year, China is rolling out pilot projects that could eventually lead to the world’s largest carbon trading system. “The broad scheme of things is that China believes it wants to become a resource-conserving, environmentally friendly society and that’s the way they describe it, in those exact words,” says Arthur Hanson, one of Canada’s leading experts on sustainable development. The former founding director of Dalhousie University’s School for Resource and Environmental Studies, Hanson is in Beijing this week in his role as international chief adviser to the China Council for International Co-operation on Environment and Development. Granted, China has little choice but to invest in renewables as it seeks out more sources of energy to help power its rapidly developing economy, with GDP growth expected just shy of eight per cent this year and an urban population rising by an estimated 2.3 per cent a year. Green energy is also seen as a political tool for the Chinese government that can quell rising environmental protests and appease political dissent. “The leadership in China is really recognizing that in order to manage and govern the country better you need to find a universal underlying theme to make sure everyone is with you,” says Wu. “Green growth or sustainable development happens to be the only one.” But beyond the obvious political and economic advantages of green energy, China is also pinning its hopes on the belief that global demand for clean technology will enable the country to transform both its domestic economy and its exports. Until now, China’s green energy sector has largely done what the country does best: import technology developed elsewhere, reproduce it for less money and then export it back to the West. That’s changing as China pours billions into research and development and advanced education in hopes that clean tech can help shift China from being merely the low-cost factory of the world to being a global leader in developing innovative technology. China’s current five-year plan, which runs through 2015, includes an economic development blueprint that will see more than $1.5 trillion invested in seven industries, all of them related in some way to environmental protection and renewable energy technology. “Some of my colleagues feel we’ll be receiving an awful lot of technologies that are Chinese born and bred and brought to commercialization in Canada on the environment,” says Hanson. “It may take five to 10 years, but it won’t be a one-way flow of technology from the developed world to China. It will be in partnership or even a reverse flow.” China is moving quickly to incorporate electric vehicle technology into what has become the world’s largest automotive market. Already, Beijing drivers have practically abandoned internal combustion motorcycles for electric ones. “There’s millions of these things buzzing by and with very little noise and limited pollution,” says Hanson. “I don’t know who is going to be the winner in the electric automobile, but I think that everyone should be looking over their shoulders at the Chinese.” Like much of the economic development in China, the green energy industry’s growth has not come without controversy. China’s commitment to sustainable development has garnered its share of skepticism from environmentalists who argue that its investments have less to do with being an environmental role model and more to do with sustaining a green energy bubble it helped create. The Worldwatch Institute noted that as many as half of the wind turbines in northeastern China aren’t connected to any grid, that they are “ghost” projects like the vacant cities and shopping malls that have been built to prop up China’s construction industry. In the desert outside the city of Jiuquan, for instance, as many as 20 companies are in the midst of constructing what could be the world’s largest wind farm. Yet as few as a fifth of the 3,500 massive, 60-m windmills that now dot the landscape are hooked up, according to Worldwatch. What’s more, most of the electricity they might generate is needed on the other side of the country, on the industrialized eastern coast. While China has improved its energy efficiency, it has sometimes done so with a heavy hand, by simply shutting down small factories, or turning off power to entire communities for days. Much of China’s solar industry was developed for export and took a huge blow after the U.S. slapped steep protectionist tariffs on Chinese-made solar panels last year, accusing the country of trying to flood the American market with heavily subsidized components for below cost. The European Union launched its own Chinese anti-dumping probe in September. (China retaliated with an investigation into European imports of polysilicon, the raw material used to make solar panels.) Such trade disputes have had devastating effects on China’s solar industry and prompted the government to shift its focus for solar to its domestic market. In December it announced $2 billion in subsidies for the industry and says it plans to add another 10 gigawatts of solar capacity this year. Its targets for domestic solar growth have quadrupled in the past year, less out of environmental concern and more out of economic necessity. “Companies that were formerly success stories are literally now facing life or death situations,” says the Climate Group’s Wu. “Chinese banks invested a lot of money into those companies and suddenly there’s no market anymore. That’s part of the reason why the government has lately been driving their targets higher and higher in order to create a large enough domestic market.” Stimulating a domestic green energy market has also pushed China toward what is quickly becoming the world’s largest carbon trading market. China has emerged as the biggest user of the UN’s carbon credit program, which gives companies credits for clean energy investments they make to their businesses that they can sell on international carbon exchanges. Chinese companies represent 45 per cent of projects registered under the program and 65 per cent of its total of the emissions reductions. This year, China is rolling out the first of seven of its own carbon exchange pilot projects across both the industrial heartland in the Pearl River Delta and China’s rural regions with plans to create a national exchange system by 2016. It’s a move the Chinese government hopes will spur much-needed private investment in green energy—which until now has subsisted largely on public money—both by encouraging more companies to invest in green energy to earn credits and by establishing a market price for carbon emissions. China’s financial sector lacks the expertise to drive more private investment into emerging clean technology on its own, says Wu. “Banks see the sector as really high-risk,” she says. “But if you continue to rely on command-and-control to [encourage] investment, it costs too much.” The government has already signalled it will allow more consolidation among Chinese solar panel manufacturers, a sign that it won’t continue to prop up the industry forever. If it works, China’s carbon trading market could become a model for the rest of the world and will likely be critical to reducing global pollution, if only because it will help set the Chinese price for carbon emissions. The success or failure of China’s carbon trading system is “one of the most important questions of environmental policy of our time,” wrote researchers from FORES, a Swedish sustainable development think tank. Yet even with its ambitious investment, China’s green energy policies have hardly made a dent in the country’s overall energy consumption. China’s goal is to have 15 per cent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020. It’s already 17 per cent of Canada’s primary energy supply. Nearly 70 per cent of China’s energy still comes from coal and the country’s need for cheap energy is growing. From being a net exporter of coal as recently as 2008, China has become the world’s largest coal importer. Global demand for coal grew 4.3 per cent in 2011, according to the International Energy Agency. Virtually all of the demand came from China. All this means pollution in China will continue to get worse before it gets better. Images of masked commuters aren’t likely to be replaced with images of windmills and solar farms anytime soon. Hanson says the expectation is that it will take China until 2030, another 17 years, to get a handle on its pollution problem. Still, those stresses will bring more opportunities for green energy companies both in China and abroad, adds Hanson. That’s perhaps not too reassuring if you live in “Greyjing” today, but for the rest of the world, a breath of fresh air.

Innovation has been identified in the new five-year plan as a key to boosting China's flagging economy, with the leadership vowing to give greater financial incentives to research and development talent in Chinese institutes. "Innovation will be the No 1 driving force of development. Under the 'new normal', the biggest challenge we face is to escape the middle-income trap, and an ultimate solution is innovation," National Development and Reform Commission head Xu Shaoshi said. Despite tremendous technological advances made over the past years, a "considerable" gap remained between China and other developed countries in terms of innovation capabilities, proprietary technology, well-known brands and commercialisation, Xu said. To tackle this, China would retool its intellectual property system and financing and investing mechanism, set up national laboratories in key fields and launch pilot reforms in some regions, according to a paper detailing proposals for the five-year plan. Steps would be taken to lower internet fees to facilitate the integration of online start-ups and new technologies with traditional sectors. Research and development talents would also receive more financial incentives, allowing them to reap greater rewards from their innovations. "Innovation is the way to go. But the effects are likely to be limited if China relies mainly on just its universities and research institutions," Beijing economist Hu Xingdou said. "Many universities have set up industrial parks, but very few have been successful … Instead of relying on university researchers, China should be counting on its private firms and small- and medium-sized enterprises to innovate." The leadership has stressed the need for innovation since 2013, with Premier Li Keqiang encouraging mass entrepreneurship and urging firms to use the internet and big data to revamp business models and enhance services. Chinese industries spend more than US$200 billion on R&D each year, second only to the United States, official data shows. R&D as a proportion of gross domestic product has increased fourfold in two decades, rising to 2.1 per cent, compared with the US' 2.8 per cent. China leads the world in patent applications, with more than 820,000 filed in 2013. Many Chinese firms had "learned to read the needs of a rapidly urbanising nation and to quickly scale up new products and services to meet those needs", according to a recent report by international research firm McKinsey Global Institute. The report cited smartphone and internet-ready TV maker Xiaomi as one such customer-focused innovator. "The China effect on innovation ... could reshape global competition," MGI director Jonathan Woetzel said. The view of mainland manufacturers as "low-cost industrial suppliers, lacking innovation and R&D prowess" was dated, Citi analysts wrote in a recent research note.

In an effort to stoke nationalism and distract its people from a slowing economy, the Chinese government has been acting particularly aggressively in the South China Sea, engaging in territorial disputes with neighbors including Japan. This is one of the most dangerous games in the world. For over a year China has been diligently building islands on top of reefs in the South China Sea, reclaiming 2,000 acres of land. In April, satellite imagery showed that the Chinese military had built an airstrip big enough for military aircraft. The government has been loud about it, too, declaring its right to reclaim the Spratly Islands, the land around the reefs, on historical grounds. The Global Post, a state tabloid owned by party publication The People's Daily, wrote that any attempt by the US to stop China from building out parts of the South China Sea would inevitably end in war. "If the United States' bottom line is that China has to halt its activities, then a US-China war is inevitable in the South China Sea," the newspaper said. "The intensity of the conflict will be higher than what people usually think of as 'friction.'" This nationalist stance is no doubt a response to China's slowing economy. Growth and China's rise have always been tied to the modern Chinese identity. The government is asking its people to accept a "new normal" as growth slows, debt piles to almost 300% of gross domestic product, construction and property companies default, and credit dries up. But to maintain nationalistic fervor in the country, China has relied on the South China Sea issue. US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter recently called for an end to reclamation and China's violation of "international rules and norms that underscore the Asia-Pacific security architecture, and the regional consensus that favors diplomacy and opposes coercion." This did not sit well with China at all. "China's construction in the South China Sea is within China's sovereign rights, and its activities are lawful, reasonable, and justified," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told Xinhua News after Carter made those comments at a conference in Singapore. Hua continued: "China's construction activities on the Nansha islands and reefs are entirely within China's sovereignty. They are lawful, justified, and reasonable and do not affect or target any particular country." Of course, particular countries may not feel that way — particularly US ally Japan. For several years at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, world leaders have had no trouble pinpointing the greatest threat to global stability. It wasn't Iraq or Islamic State militants. It wasn't Iran. It was the disaster that could result from a conflict between China and Japan over the South China Sea. A conflict that could be sparked by careless action by either party. Now, to save face with its own people in the face of an economic slowdown, the Chinese government is being careless all over the place. Scholars, journalists, and politicians are all turning the area into an issue of historical pride, regardless of whether historical evidence for China's claim exists. Beijing and China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) don't seem to believe the Obama administration will do anything about it, either. "A member of the PLA asked me whether, in 18 months if Hillary Clinton is elected president, will she be much tougher on China than the current administration," Bonnie Glaser, an Asia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Bloomberg's Josh Rogin. "I said, 'The premise of your question is that in the next 18 months you have enough running room to do whatever you want.' He just laughed." It seems, according to Rogin, that the PLA equates American caution with weakness. Indeed, white papers put out by the PLA over the past month indicate that while the government may pay lip service to peace, the actions that feed this conflict will continue at a steady clip. "Some offshore neighbors take provocative actions and reinforce their military presence on China's reefs and islands that they have illegally occupied," a PLA paper published in May said, according to ChinaDaily. "It is thus a long-standing task for China to safeguard its maritime rights and interests." It went on to say that the PLA would soon add "'open seas protection" to its traditional mandate of "offshore waters defense." In other words, this is only going to escalate.

This research, based on an impact-driven view of innovation, concludes that China does have the potential to become a global innovation leader. Although it has not yet seen the payoff, China has made the necessary investments in R&D and education to improve its performance in science- and engineering based industries. China’s success in high-speed rail and telecommunications equipment prove that, under the right circumstances, Chinese companies can be global competitors in engineering-based industries. And, even now, in science-based industries such as biopharmaceuticals, Chinese companies are harnessing the scale and speed of the home market to become more nimble and stronger innovators. With the right policies in place to support entrepreneurism, encourage market-based competition in more industries, and make China more attractive to top science talent, China can succeed in all forms of innovation. Timing will be critical: with slowing GDP growth, an aging population, and declining returns on massive fixed investments, China must find ways to raise productivity. Innovation is key to this sustainable growth path. China’s innovation imperative As we write this, China is in the midst of a challenging transition. A rapidly aging population, increasing debt, and declining returns on fixed asset investment place new burdens on the economy. Because of aging, the labor force is expected to peak this year and begin a long decline that could reduce its size by 16 percent by 2050. By 2030, China’s dependency ratio—the percentage of the population that is not in the labor force (mostly the elderly and children)—will reach 47 percent. This is far sooner, in terms of GDP per capita, than in countries such as Japan or the United States. Even as its population is aging, China’s wages are rising: average wages have risen by 11 percent a year for the past five years and are now more than 1.5 times higher than average wages in India and Vietnam. At the same time, debt-financed investment is approaching a level of diminishing returns. China’s debt-to-GDP ratio reached 282 percent of GDP in mid-2014, up from 158 percent in 2007, a ratio that is higher than that of such advanced economies as the United States and Germany. About a third of this new debt is concentrated in real estate and related industries.2 With real estate markets overbuilt, this ratio is one reason that the return on fixed-asset investment in China is declining. The incremental capital-output ratio (ICOR), which shows how much capital is needed to generate a unit of GDP, was 3.4 on average from 1990 to 2010, but it has since risen to 5.4, meaning that it takes 60 percent more capital to generate a unit of GDP. On that trajectory, by 2030, China’s ICOR could be 17 percent higher than the current ratio for the other BRIC countries (Russia, India, and Brazil) and near the current level of more advanced economies such as the United States and Korea. Given these trends, we believe that innovation is essential to China’s long-term sustainable growth. Over the past 30 years, much of China’s economic growth has come from being an “innovation sponge,” meaning it attempted to catch up with advanced economies by absorbing and adapting technology, best practices, and knowledge from overseas.3 Chinese companies did this with foreign direct investment, purchases of equipment and companies, and joint ventures. As a result, China now ranks second in the world in knowledge-intensive flows—movement of knowledge-intensive goods and services and foreign direct investment.4 Now, innovation must play a larger role across all sectors of the Chinese economy. However, as Exhibit 1 illustrates, the contribution of innovation to growth (as measured by multifactor productivity) has declined in recent years.5 From 1990 to 2010, multifactor productivity contributed between 40 and 48 percent of GDP growth. However, over the past five years, multifactor productivity has contributed just 30 percent of GDP growth, or about 2.4 percentage points of GDP growth per year, the lowest level in 35 years. To maintain GDP growth of 5.5 to 6.5 percent per year through 2025, China will need to generate 35 to 50 percent of GDP growth (two to three percentage points) from multifactor productivity. Innovation will also be critically important to generate higher-value-added and higher-paying jobs. Continued urbanization is expected to bring 100 million more residents to large Chinese cities by 2020, which will create a need for 10 million urban jobs every year, even as manufacturing employment drops. To address these challenges, China will need to accelerate the evolution from innovation sponge to innovation leader, capable of driving more breakthroughs and competing in global markets. Making this transition will require a better understanding of how China innovates today, what its core strengths are, and which policies and business practices can build on the momentum of the past three decades. Policy makers are already acting to address some of these needs. The Internet+ program, for example, is intended to use the Internet as a catalyst for grassroots innovation and innovation in business processes.

The discussion of the decline in US manufacturing during the 2016 presidential election campaign largely focused on job losses. This column examines the effects of Chinese import competition on another metric for the health of the US manufacturing sector – innovation. Firms whose industries were exposed to a greater surge of Chinese import competition from 1991 to 2007 experienced a significant decline in their patent output as well as their R&D expenditures. While politicians’ ‘obsession’ with manufacturing is primarily due to job losses, an accompanying reduction in innovation may well affect economic growth in the longer term. The decline of the US manufacturing sector played such a prominent topic in the 2016 presidential election campaign that New York Times journalist Binyamin Appelbaum wondered in a headline “Why Are Politicians So Obsessed With Manufacturing?” (Appelbaum 2016). Much of the concern about the health of the manufacturing sector derives from the observation that its employment level is near historic lows. Ever since the end of the Great Recession, the sector has employed fewer than 12.5 million workers – the lowest job count in manufacturing since the US entered WWII in 1941. Manufacturing lost almost 6 million jobs during the 2000s alone, and strikingly, most of this decline came before the onset of the Great Recession. Despite the poor employment performance in the 2000s, however, value added in manufacturing has been growing as fast as the overall US economy. Its share of US GDP remained stable, an achievement matched by few other high-income economies over the same period (Moran and Oldenski 2014). While the extraordinary growth of value added in the computer and semiconductor industries masks a more sluggish performance in other manufacturing industries (Houseman et al. 2014), the sector’s output growth clearly exceeds its employment growth. Another metric for the health of the US manufacturing sector, which has been less present in the recent debate, is its production of innovation as measured by patents. Manufacturing is the locus of US innovation and accounts for more than two thirds of US R&D spending (Helper et al. 2012) and for a similarly large share of US patents. Figure 1 shows that the annual number of patents awarded to US-based firms (dated by the year of patent application) doubled from less than 40,000 in 1991 to more than 80,000 in 2001, but subsequently declined through 2007. During the 1990s, and especially the 2000s, the US manufacturing sector was exposed to a rapid surge in import competition from China. Figure 1 shows that imports from China increased more than tenfold between 1991 and 2007. Most of that growth occurred after China’s accession to the WTO in 2001, which coincides with the trend reversal in US patent production. The Chinese export boom was triggered by a series of economic reforms that included the establishment of Special Economic Zones for the production of export goods, and an easing of restrictions that had hindered firms’ access to labour, capital, and technology. The emergence of China as the world’s leading exporter of manufactured goods has been a major competitive shock for manufacturing firms in the US and elsewhere (Autor et al. 2016). Although a now substantial literature evaluates the impact of China’s rise on labour market outcomes such as industry employment (Pierce and Schott 2015, Acemoglu et al. 2016) and workers’ earnings (Autor et al. 2014), far less is known about the impact of trade on innovative activities in US firms and industries. The effect of more intensive product-market competition on innovation is theoretically ambiguous. In standard oligopoly models, greater product market competition lowers profits and reduces incentives to invest in innovation. However, greater competition may also induce more innovation, either if pre-innovation rents fall relative to expected post-innovation rents (Agion et al. 2005), or if firms redeploy slack factors from goods production to innovation activities as competition depresses the demand for the firms’ products (Bloom et al. 2014). Indeed, a European study finds that firms in several European countries innovate more when Chinese imports increase in their industries, even as their employment level falls (Bloom et al. 2016). In a recent paper, we analyse the impact of Chinese import competition on innovation in the US (Autor et al. 2016). Our analysis draws on all US corporate patents with application dates from 1975 to 2007 that are granted by March 2013. To obtain more information about the firms that applied for these patents, we use the firm names indicated on the patents to match them to firm data from Standard & Poor’s Compustat database. One challenge in this matching process is that patent records often contain different versions, abbreviations, and (mis-)spellings of a firm’s name, so that the names on patents do not correspond exactly to those in the firm database. We overcome this problem by constructing a novel matching algorithm that leverages the capabilities of an internet search engine. In a first step, we enter every firm name string that appears in the patent or Compustat data into the bing.com search engine, and we collect the URLs of the top five search results. We assign a patent to a Compustat firm if the corresponding firm name strings lead to at least two common URLs. This fully automated procedure builds on the web search engines’ capability to detect a company homepage or other webpages relating it even if the firm name’s is abbreviated or misspelled. Overall, we match almost three quarters of all corporate patents to Compustat, which covers companies listed on US stock markets. The overall growth in corporate patents shown in Figure 1 masks important heterogeneity in patenting trends for the two sectors that contribute the most to overall US patent output. The computer and electronics sector increased its share in overall US patents from 10% in 1975 to 35% in 2007, and accounted for almost all the growth during the 1990s seen in Figure 1. By contrast, the chemical and petroleum sector’s contribution to US patent output fell from 27% in 1975 to 10% in 2007, as the number of annual patents from this sector declined over time. Both the growth in computer patents and the decline in chemicals patents began well prior to the surge of Chinese exports in the 1990s. This observation is important because import competition from China hit the computer sector much more than the chemical industry, yet it would be erroneous to attribute the superior innovation performance of the computer sector to its greater import exposure, given that the acceleration in patenting in that sector predates the exposure to China trade. The central finding of our regression analysis is that firms whose industries were exposed to a greater surge of Chinese import competition from 1991 to 2007 experienced a significant decline in their patent output. A one standard deviation larger increase in import penetration decreased a firm’s patent output by 15 percentage points. Using data from the 1975 to 1991 period and a regression setup that accounts for the diverging secular innovation trends in computers and chemical, we confirm that firms in China-exposed industries did not already have a weaker patent growth prior to the arrival of the competing imports. The firm data allow us to embed the patent analysis in a wider context of other indicators for the activities of firms. Importantly, we find that import competition not only reduced patenting but also firms’ R&D expenditures. Import-competing firms further experienced declines in global sales, employment, capital stock, and stock market value. They were more likely to suffer a decline in operating profits. The innovation activity of US firms did not merely shift from the US to other countries. We estimate similar negative effects of import competition on patents by US firms’ domestic employees and by their foreign employees. Instead, our results are most consistent with the notion that the rapid and large increase in competition squeezed firms’ profitability and forced them to downsize along many margins, including innovation. Consistent with that interpretation, we find that the adverse impact of import competition on patent output was concentrated in firms that were already initially more indebted and less profitable. The decline of innovation in the face of Chinese import competition suggest that R&D and manufacturing tend to be complements rather than substitutes. That is, when faced with rapidly intensifying rivalry in the manufacturing stage of industry production, firms tend not to substitute effort from production to R&D. While politicians’ ‘obsession’ with manufacturing is primarily due to the sizable employment losses in the sector during recent decades, an accompanying reduction in innovation may well affect economic growth in the longer term.

The US attempts to contain China's sci-tech innovation and development have exposed its deep-rooted hegemony mindset and are doomed to fail.

The White House is increasing technical "cooperation" with its allies in the 6G research and development, with a clear goal to curb China's innovation in the 6G field.

The American proclivity to war (Afghanistan, Iraq) has destabilizing multiplier effects. First, within the United States; an article about "The Iraqi time bomb" notes: "Mix the open-ended costs of war and reconstruction with huge tax cuts, shrinking tax revenues and a stalled economy, and you get a budget deficit bound to explode" (Madrick, 2003). Second, regional and international effects; the IMF's 2003 Global Financial Stability Report warns that "a prolonged war in Iraq could depress financial markets and put global economic recovery into jeopardy" (quoted in Stewart, 2003).

The hegemon makes sacrifices to preserve the system. Hegemony in the Gramscian sense means, substantively, that potentially all stand to benefit and procedurally that the rules of the game are perceived to be fair. But in the present American dispensation "sacrifice is for suckers" (Borosage, 2003) and this applies also internationally. The pattern that increasingly prevails in the United States is political and electoral opportunism; applied to international affairs this approach flaunts the very rules and institutions that the United States has helped to build over many years. American failure to comply with international law, a zigzagging and instrumental attitude to international institutions such as the United Nations, and withdrawal from or nonparticipation in international treaties and covenants, create the impression of an opportunistic hegemony.

Over time the United States' financial position has deteriorated sharply. During the Clinton administration reducing the budget deficit was a priority but the Bush II administration follows the Reagan administration in practicing extreme deficit financing. The United States is now the world's largest borrower, draining the world of liquid capital on an unprecedented scale of over $500 billion per year and $4 billion each trading day (Bergsten, 2004). Now the IMF warns Washington that US budget deficits "pose significant risks' not just for the United States but for the rest of the world." A 2003 IMF report notes: "Higher borrowing costs abroad would mean that the adverse effects of US fiscal deficits would spill over into global investment and output" (quoted in Becker and Andrews, 2003). In a brief period the financial situation has reversed to a condition of hegemonic instability. Taking stock, the hegemon's provision of financial liquidity has come with destabilizing effects all along: IMF enforced liberalization of capital markets exposed developing countries; financialization in the United States affected developing countries in the form of speculative capital ("flash capital"); and finally, the global consequences of financial deficits in the US.

The hegemon is a net source of development capital. The United States has been one of the stingiest foreign aid donors among OECD countries and this function has long changed from minimal to, on balance, negative: "since 1972 the American economy has been a net importer of capital (to the tune of 17 percent of gross national product last year)" (Ferguson, 2001: 127).

A preliminary step should be that of tracing out the main motives lying behind the post-WWII creation of the American led global order (or international liberal order). The American government was pushed by the desire to place order and continuity in three main intertwined issue areas: economics, politics and security. The outbreak of WWII highlighted how a fragmented global political arena in which each actor was concerned with preserving its own privileges and pursuing its own interests at each other expenses was not sustainable. The lack of a political guidance, embodied by the failure of the League of Nations, showed well how such a system could easily break down leading the world towards the brink, and over.

The first issue-area, concerning world economy, was perhaps the most important area of intervention. The American idea for the future of world system was the creation of an open, interconnected world market economy able to prevent the rebirth of imperial aggregation, as it used to be under the British, German and Japanese empires between the second half of the nineteenth century and 1945. The rationale for such a project was twofold: to inhibit imperial temptations and to link the other world powers to the American economic system.

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s book “The Grand Chessboard” was published 25 years ago. His assumptions and strategies for maintaining U.S. global dominance have been hugely influential in US foreign policy. As the conflict in Ukraine evolves, with the potential of escalating into a world war, we can see where this policy leads and how crucial it is to re-evaluate.

Brzezinski sums up the situation: “America is now the only global superpower, and Eurasia is the globe’s central arena”. He adds “It is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of challenging America”.

Enter Ukraine. Ergo, a resurgence of American hegemony standing in the way of tyranny. Certainly, the December 2022 U.S. visit of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy enthralled Washington and an America much in need of a hero. U.S. support for Ukraine appears popular. President Joe Biden’s success in mobilizing European and Asian allies in support of Ukraine has been impressive, a Cold War-like consensus.

The advocates for perpetual U.S. global primacy do have a point. All things considered, U.S. primacy with its enlightened self-interest — in defense of principles — has broadly been a source of stability and prosperity. Nevertheless, it is a specious argument to say that realists conceive national interests only as direct attacks on U.S. soil. Rather, realists argue for balances of power, opposing Russian and Chinese attempts at hegemony over Europe and Asia, and occasional intervention to restore that balance. They are skeptical of foreign meddling for other ends, which can lead to overreach.

The United States has used ‘instability’ in the Middle East to justify its presence in the region. However, parts of the international community are in consensus that a great deal of this instability is owed to the Americans themselves. The Middle East, while it still witnesses conflicts, has come a long way since the 1980s and 1990s, especially in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations. The Middle East remains the biggest source of the world’s oil, and this has shaped the foreign policy in the region.1 While the success of the region is not equal among all the states of the Middle East, the growth of the region through capitalizing on its energy resources must be applauded. The hegemony that the United States had over the Middle East. Neither requires American presence or hegemony in the region. With this knowledge, the nations in the Middle East have embarked on creating strong and robust foreign and economic policies around the globe, causing the decline, but not ye1t fall, of the American hegemony in the region. The Middle East is retaliating after decades of flawed foreign policy which targeted the Middle East as inferior to the Western Bloc. Despite being the most powerful country in the world from an economic and military perspective, the U.S is facing difficulties in maintaining its leadership in the face of internal and external factors.2 The United States government has been semi-successful in convincing the world that China is a threat, whereas China is only a threat to American hegemony.3 This research paper examines the future of the Middle East after it detaches itself from American interference and whether such a future is practical. Chapter I of the research paper examines the history and origins of the Middle East United States Administration, which began with the oil trade and further intensified through American military presence in the region to maintain “stability”. Chapter II explores the challenges and potential cause that contribute to the decline of American Hegemony in the Middle East. Factors such as China’s economic policy for the Middle East, failed diplomatic missions, and the rise of other blocs have impeded the U.S position as a global leader as well as a Middle East mediator. Finally, chapter III concludes with a dive into the future of the Middle East after American hegemony. By examining the current administration’s policies versus the former, one can assess whether the dominance of the United States can be revived. This chapter also looks into whether the Middle East can actually survive without the United States, as neither China, Russia or India has displayed a commitment to the region the U.S has displayed in the Middle East. This chapter also addresses the Trump and Biden Administrations’ policies with regard to the Middle East and its contribution to decline.

Like other revisionist actors, Iran has rejected a U.S.-dominated order and has shared the expectation of a new multipolar global structure with rising regional powers. It has therefore welcomed the relative decline of the United States as a superpower and envisioned the emergence of a post-Western order. For years, Khamenei has claimed that this new order is already in the making, pointing to four main indicators of this transition.5 These include the increasing transfer of political, economic, cultural, and scientific power from the West to Asia; a decline of the United States, Israel, and Europe; the rise of regional and new global powers; and the expansion of the “resistance front.”6 In September 2023, the Supreme Leader reiterated his assessment that the world was “on the verge of a transformation.”7

Here, Iran has greatly benefitted from the Russian war against Ukraine. The war has widened the global rift between East and West, largely decoupling Russia from the Western sphere for the foreseeable future. Thus, long-held Iranian concerns about Moscow have been alleviated, including the latter’s unreliable support at the United Nations (UN) Security Council or being used as a bargaining chip by Moscow vis-à-vis the United States. Additionally, with China entering the Middle East as a political actor after brokering the agreement with Saudi Arabia, Iran’s “Look East” policy now no longer relies on a vague, long-term vision of a post-Western order. Tehran is already seeing the contours of a new, multipolar world along the lines of global blocs that come with greater opportunities for much closer partnerships in the Eastern hemisphere than the country could have hoped for only a few years ago. This assessment is strengthened by Tehran’s assumptions about the diminishing power of the United States and Europe, as they remain engaged in a costly war in Ukraine, as well as of Israel after the Hamas attacks which were labeled by Khamenei as an “irreparable” defeat.

Ever since the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979, Iran’s leaders have believed that the United States seeks regime change to roll back the Islamic revolution and restore US hegemony in Iran. Yet the United States has not pursued this as a policy goal, nor has US policy appeared to include direct interference in Iran’s domestic affairs. Instead, in recent years, US policymakers seem to have assigned Iran—and the Middle East more broadly—a lower priority than other areas like Ukraine, and have pursued a policy of containment toward Iran so that US attention could be focused elsewhere.

This policy has clearly failed. The Islamic Republic has become increasingly confident in its international behavior and domestic repression, bolstered by the belief that the West—especially the United States—is too weak to stop it. The result is that Iran today is a significant threat to stability, peace, and human rights in the Middle East. The October 7, 2023, attack by Iran’s client Hamas on Israel and subsequent attacks on shipping by the Iran-backed Houthi rebels of Yemen underscore two important realities: first, the crucial importance of Middle Eastern stability to global affairs; second, a dire need for the United States to overhaul its Iran policy. If the United States does not change its approach to Iran, the Islamic Republic’s behavior and regional stability will only worsen.

Indeed, this situation has been part and parcel of a broader pattern of American policies globally that has routinely sought to identify enemies in various regions in order to establish and maintain favorable "security arrangements" in any area in question. In the Persian Gulf, Iran has long been designated the “enemy” of choice and Washington’s Gulf policy has been centered around rallying regional military and political opposition against Iran — heavily supported and encouraged by Israel.

Unsurprisingly, Iran has reciprocated in kind by lending support to various groups in the region as counterbalancing instruments against American power, as well as establishing a nuclear project. Never mind that a significant case can be made that the U.S. did not have to maintain on auto-pilot its anti-Iranian hostility for 45 years, but such a policy has served Washington’s regional strategic and military hegemony well. (Readers of history will know that once the United States has identified and declared another state to be on an “enemy list," it is exceedingly difficult to get off.)

Based on the NSS, the United States is actively engaged in a strategic rivalry with Iran, Russia, and China. Such rivalry revolves around the zero-sum nature of power, influence, and resources. “[Further,] pairs of states regard each other as significant threats to goal attainment. There are two main types of dyadic situations at this end of the continuum. Dyads encompass either roughly comparable states or circumstances in which one of the rules is much more potent than the other.”15 The strategic rivalry is intensified by the weakening international system and dominant power. Among the intense conflict zones around the world, perhaps the most intense is where Iran and the United States face off against one another in the Middle East. There is a dyad. One direction is between equal powers (US-Russia and China), and the other is between unequal forces when one is more potent than the other. In the US-Iranian strategic competition, the United States is powerful, Iran less so. Two different events signal the end of a hegemonic era and a return to power politics: (1) the appearance of the new powers that want to ensure their interest within the international system, and (2) the fact hegemonic power is not able to maintain hegemonic stability. (It is essential to mention that some scholars attribute hegemonic stability to nuclear power parity, while others credit stability to the distribution of power among states.16) I use “hegemonic stability” in the context of a power capable of maintaining relative peace by containing challenging forces on the scene that the system of hegemonic stability has weakened. We are facing the fact that there are strategic rivalries erupting all over the world. Some powers are trying to challenge US hegemonic power, such as China, Russia, Iran, and Turkey and to some extent Brazil and India. Haass has described this era as a “trend towards disorder that has been a function of structural changes in the international system.” Further, he described diffusion of capacity that presents challenges such as “the actual and potential spread of nuclear weapons and long-range delivery systems, terrorism, a spike in the numbers of refugees and displaced persons, a chaotic Middle East, a Europe under siege, a precariously balanced Asia-Pacific, mostly ungoverned cyberspace, an inadequate response to climate change, a growing rejection of free trade and immigration, and the potential pandemic that could cost many millions of lives.”17 Ian Bremmer has called this era one of “Geopolitical Creative Destruction.”18 Creative destruction is an economic theory introduced by the famous Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter. He contended that the opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation. . . that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, destroying the old one, and creating a new one.19 Both Haas and Bremmer are conveying the same message. Haas talked about the “difficulties of protecting the unipolar system if the United States cannot impose order. . . . [N]o country can contend with global challenges on its own given the very nature of these challenges.”20 Haas describes the world based on the assumption that the United States will assume the CEO position in close relations with other powers to maintain global law and order while US power goes unchallenged. However, it seems Haas was not concerned about the future institutions of the new order. For his part, Bremmer accepted the idea of a unipolar world while paying closer attention to forming the new order’s institutions. Many people may ask themselves why the US global (unipolar) position has weakened. There are many explanations why we are witnessing the gradual deterioration of the old order: Japan’s economic malaise and crises in Europe including the 2016 Brexit vote; each complicated by the 2008 economic collapse that limited US financial power.21 The question is, what type of world do we intend to build? There are at least two options on the horizon: unipolar versus multipolar global systems. The United States, as the only superpower, is trying to preserve the world order in a manner wherein the United States maintains economic and military hegemony at the global level (unilateral system). However, other forces favor the multipolar system, which allows them to have an equal footing within the international system (multiple centers). For instance, the National Intelligence Council, a US government think tank, projects that “by 2025, China and India will have the world’s second- and fourth-largest economies, respectively. . . . [U]nless rising powers such as China and India are incorporated into this framework, these international regimes’ future will be uncomfortably uncertain.”22 It is crucial to understand Drezner correctly. He sounded alarmed in 2007 regarding incorporating China and India in US-led international organizations as the only way to preserve the status quo and US global superiority. In 2021, 8 China is not fully incorporated within those US-led international organizations. In contrast, China is taking entirely different routes by collaborating with Russia on economic, military, or security issues. India is indecisive at best, which eventually will damage the US position as the sole superpower sooner or later. It is essential to mention that China has agendas as a rising superpower. India’s economy is performing better, but India is not yet the next rival. Both countries have large merchant navies and ocean access, but at the same time they face severe strategic competition on the seas. Both countries’ naval power is not enough to protect them in the long run. Consequently, they have to solve two different problems. First, they have to increase naval power, which is not an easy task, and it will take decades to prepare adequate naval forces. Second, the United States Navy can potentially limit both countries’ economic growth by blocking merchant ships or their navies’ access to the sea. The question does not end at China or India’s unwillingness to be part of US-led international organizations: the United States cannot ignore Iran and its future within the global system. Iran plays a crucial role in providing access to Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and vice versa. Consequently, the future of a unipolar versus multipolar global system will be determined in Iran. The battle is not about capital or resources; the primary struggle is land access to important population centers in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. This land access provides for the free flow of capital and resources into China, Russia, and India. In the Middle East, perhaps one of the most organized countries with some power capabilities is Iran (after Israel). US-Iranian relations have experienced many ups and downs and are mainly based on the center versus periphery problem. However, we see a new reality that has changed the nature of the US-Iranian relations for the foreseeable future. The rise of Iranian power has challenged the US position in the Middle East, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, and therefore both sides have been locked in the strategic rivalry. This rivalry has two aspects: (1) the Iranian geopolitical posture creates a new world order, and (2) growing Iranian power may undermine the interests of the United States and its regional allies. To understand the root of this struggle, we have to consider local and worldwide events that changed Middle East history. At the regional level, we must understand the consequences of the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf Wars, and the Iraqi regime’s collapse in the overall regional balance of power. On the global level, the collapse of the Soviet Union was a significant game-changer in the region. The absence of the Soviet Union as a competing superpower allowed the United States to fill the power vacuum and created a new regional order. However, the United States’ regional foreign policy slights the Caucasus and Central Asia, while Russia, China, Iran, and Turkey have significant influence in the region.