[For a properly polished professional view, I can recommend this article from my friend Parag Khanna on the topic of entropy and world order]
Within the Wikipedia entry for the Three-Body Problem (orbital mechanics) is this little nugget:
“When three bodies orbit each other, the resulting dynamical system is chaotic for most initial conditions…”
Orbital mechanics is a relatively clean area of study – unlike geopolitics, there is no human element – none of the bodies is trying to surpass, eliminate, or pretend to partner with one of the other bodies – their movements are dominated by gravitational equations, which are stable, and even then nearly all of the three-body systems are chaotic in nature.
Superpower history
In the last thousand years, there have only been two long periods of relative world peace – Pax Mongolica (most of the 13th century), and Pax Britannica (1815-1914). Each period of ‘peace’ was brought about by a period of violent wars, and within the ‘peaceful’ periods, they were punctuated by some violent uprisings (usually won by the dominant power). As an American, where our familiarity with history tends to be quite myopic (measured in centuries rather than millenia), I found the major disruptions to Pax Britannica to quite relevant within the present day perspective:
The Opium Wars: The British fought two major wars with China (1839-1842 and 1856-1860) to force them to legalize the opium trade.
The Crimean War (1853-1856): This was a major European conflict fought primarily between Russia and an alliance of Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire, and Sardinia.
In both cases, the British side prevailed, and the defeated parties (Russia, China) marked one of the more humiliating periods of their long history. The flashpoint of the Crimean War was apparently the rights of Christian minorities in Palestine (then part of the Ottoman Empire), which is a haunting thought, because even 120 years later we are fighting about legitimacy in the Gaza Strip.
Between the World Wars, Pax Britannica transitioned to Pax Americana, and since 1945 we have been in a period of relative peace, punctuated by a variety of internal (or proxy) wars (Korea, Vietnam) and some invasions (the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Gulf War, the US invasion of Iraq). One of the hallmarks of a long peaceful period is growing world trade, where for a variety of reasons, we currently appear to be at a local maximum.
One area I find fascinating is the progression of the technology for the projection of power as well as social innovation, from the Mongols (the horse, and the inclusive inter-ethnic decimalized army (arbans to tumens), to the British (the Royal Navy’s ship of the line, the industrial revolution, and equity finance), and the Americans (the aircraft carrier, consumerism, and global trade).
We have been wallowing in Pax Americana (satirized in Pixar’s Wall-E by the Buy-n-Large ecosystem) for almost 80 years, a period in which there were at most two superpowers (I will leave the definition vague on purpose), and a sadly wasted unipolar period from 1991 after the implosion of the Soviet Union, until roughly 2010, when China’s emergence in many dimensions became hard to ignore. The challengers to this period of peace are clearly China and Russia, which both have long serving leaders who appear to be in place indefinitely – Vladimir Putin has been in power since 1999, and President Xi has been in power since 2012, and since both of them apparently pattern themselves off of historical icons (Peter the Great, Mao Tse-Tung), they are likely very familiar with superpower history.
The Balance of Power concept in a MAD world
In the pre-nuclear world, the prevailing doctrine of superpower strategy was ‘balance of power,’ wherein smaller nation-states would gang up on the dominant nation-state in order to check their (often growing) influence. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) ended the Thirty Years War by establishing a nation-state centric equilibrium around the residual of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Congress of Vienna (1814-15) set up a post-Napoleonic balance of power where Europe was carved up in favor of the four primary winners (Britain, Russia, Prussia, and Austria) and defeated France gave up its Napoleonic conquests.
While I had a vague notion that the Thirty Years War was one of religious conflict originally instigated by the Martin Luther and the Reformation, I wasn’t aware that it was a two-body problem between the Catholic and Lutheran churches, until other Protestant forms (notably Calvinism) turned it into a very messy three-body problem (combined with a simple struggle for European dominance). Even now, reading about the driving forces of the conflict, it is difficult to imagine that the forces fighting had any idea what they were really fighting about. My one takeaway was that one positive outcome of the Thirty Years War was the principle of separation of church and nation-state, cleaving a historical mechanism that almost guaranteed international conflict.
Britain, in an obvious self-interested manner, appeared to run a diplomatic algorithm of allying with the weaker powers of continental Europe against any more dominant one, in order to prevent any single power emerging to challenge the Royal Navy’s preeminent position as a global seapower.
In a world where nine* countries have strategic nuclear weapons, and especially one where global trade and most economies are highly integrated, the dynamics of power are multi-dimensional, and simple equations around standing army or fleet size do not adequately characterize global power. That said, most people would agree that in addition to the once lone superpower (the US), China has established itself as a clear #2, and Russia is a distant but very dangerous and actively belligerent #3. And without the consideration of the largest nuclear arsenal capable of reaching nearly anywhere on the globe, it seems probable that Russia would be downgraded to a mere major power (economically, it ranks just above Indonesia and Brazil).
Three-body Comparison
The table, in which the fields were selected subjectively, hopefully characterizes most of the relevant dimensions of the rivalry (I won’t call it a new cold war yet). The US dominates economically and in conventional military space; Russia is at least the equal of the US in nuclear weapons despite having a far smaller economy, and China’s economic rise has stimulated growth in other dimensions of influence. It must be noted that the US has appear to beat back rising #2s before – the USSR during the Cold War, and at some level Japan during the 1980s, when it looked like Japan might buy the rest of the world – having prevailed in both situations has given empirical support for the idea of US exceptionalism in a world where people discuss the inevitability of the Thucydides Trap (see CoV #134).
Current dynamics
Although the unipolar world is a fading memory, it doesn’t feel as if we’re moving towards a post-unipolar equilibrium, so it doesn’t seem like I’m going out on a limb to say that we are moving towards an (inherently unstable) three-body system.
The economic rise of China was on relatively good footing until the momentous 2009 decision to use the Western playbook of torrential liquidity injections, especially at the regional government level – now it is far less clear whether China can wean itself off debt-fueled growth, especially when many of the unproductive projects were growth for growth’s sake (often the result of a top down directive), rather than value accretive projects. So while China’s growth has slowed dramatically, there is no question that it presents the strongest challenge to US economic dominance.
Russia, with an economy a tenth the size (at PPP) of the US, has no such pretensions to global economic rivalry, but within the sphere of greater Europe appears to feel as if it should reassert itself as one of the great regional powers. And with a nuclear arsenal (strategic + tactical) unmatched even by the distant US, the probable key to Putin’s designs lie in disengaging or at least loosening the US from the European bloc, and slowly taking on a nuclear-averse NATO.
Changing the rules
The natural order of power suggests a strategy where the dominant power imposes rules and structures which are likely to benefit the front runner and make it more difficult for challengers to emerge. In the same vein it makes sense for challengers to work around these (arbitrary) impositions to neutralize incumbent benefits.
There are at least two areas where Pax Americana has set arbitrary rules (which largely favor the United States and the Western / NATO Alliance):
The general stability of existing nation-state borders
A taboo on first strike use of nuclear weapons
And since 9/11, the US has been far more aggressive about using the dominant status of the US dollar and its control over the world’s financial systems to prosecute and sanction a variety of entities, initially with terrorist networks but now fully extended to nation-states like Russia, Iran, North Korea, and increasingly China (example).
In addition, the realm of cyberwarfare has historically not been a major part of historical conflicts but is unavoidable in an Internet-enabled age. This domain is critical because it extends nearly everywhere, and has the property of being non-explicit: there is plausible deniability about the responsibility for any offensive action (which means conflicts and incursions are happening all the time, on both sides, and even with allies). On a more comical level, the Chinese “weather balloon” controversy demonstrates the difficulty of analog intelligence gathering, compared to purely digital methods.
The declining sanctity of post-WWII borders
Since the end of WWII, the external borders of the major nation states have been largely unchanged (although some internal borders have changed because of civil wars etc). The German concept of lebensraum, the Italian spazio vitale, and the euphemistic Japanese ‘co-prosperity sphere’ are now viewed as malevolent greedy impulses that led the world to war – true in a sense, but the sweep of human history suggests that long periods of world peace are a rarity (and largely imposed) rather than an organic equilibrium.
Without even debating the pros and cons of extensive European imperialism, or the countless reinterpretations of the Monroe Doctrine, the romantic but essentially greedy American ideas of “Manifest Destiny” and “Go West, young man!” had little respect for the sanctity of existing borders in non-US North America, as the US grew in a combination of purchases (Florida from Spain, Louisiana from France, Alaska from Russia) and more violent methods – the annexation of Texas from Mexico (1845), the invasion and acquisition of California in the Treaty of Cahuenga (1847), and the annexation of Hawaii (1898).
The lesson is clear: dominant powers like the status quo (that they define), while challengers prefer some degree of chaos, volatility, and rule / domain changes, because that helps the reordering process. The case of the UK to the US, where the challenger was (depending on your perspective) a relative or an offshoot of the incumbent, is one of the rare peaceful superpower transitions.
From the Russo-Georgia War (2008), which put the ex-Georgian areas of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in limbo (recognized by Russia as independent states, but disputed by Georgia and others), the invasion and annexation of Crimea (2014), to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russia has shown a disregard for the static border rules of Pax Americana. And since Russia has already endured layers of commercial and financial sanctions, it now stands as a pariah within the international community, which almost incentivizes more bad behavior because there are fewer penalties left to endure.
China has not been as explicitly acquisitive as Russia but is following the similar justification script of “history plus adjacency” with the agreed upon handovers of Hong Kong and Macau, extending to the contentious idea of the unification of Taiwan (as well laying claim to a variety of disputed Pacific islands). The more Russia is successful with its historical reunification efforts, demonstrating that borders can be ‘adjusted,’ China may feel more emboldened in its drive to ‘reassimilate’ Taiwan.
Game Theory: and then what are you prepared to do?
While most of the world prefers the tangibility and false precision of historical analyses, I think game theory and simulations might be more useful because incumbents tend to think the whole world thinks the way they do (and will politely follow their logic and adhere to historical precedents) which is both naive and creates blind spots. To the extent a superpower is dominant and not preoccupied, they may simply enforce their will, but as their power wanes or they become distracted, challengers may use the opportunity to ‘misbehave’ when things fall through the cracks. I have previously discussed the “distracted parents” hypothesis in CoV: #134 which suggests the world may become more chaotic as the US in particular and China deal with challenges on both domestic and international fronts.
Game theory allows for strategies which are either obscure or which haven’t occurred in recent history, and concentrates on the unique set of personalities, incentives, ambitions, and options available. At the beginning of WWII, the Allies sadly embraced the appeasement of Hitler strategy because they couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to repeat the horrors of WWI, while Hitler was essentially using game theory to correctly predict they would keep giving him what he wanted as long as he didn’t bite off too much at any one time. Other than Churchill, the Allies also didn’t understand that Hitler actually did want to go to war, to correct the ‘injustices’ of WWI, including the “stabbed in the back” propaganda myth).
So with that as a backdrop, and my amateur knowledge of superpower game theory, I will make two guesses as far as potential geopolitical surprises over the 12 months, a time frame chosen because it covers the US election and inauguration period.
Hypothesis #1: Russia / China will be focused on fomenting divisiveness and challenges to the results of the upcoming US election, in addition to influencing the outcome itself. A Trump win probably favors Russia more than China, who he tends to view far more adversarially. Even though the Ukraine conflict has strengthened their ties, if a Trump win leads to cooling of US support for Ukraine or even a resolution of the conflict, Russia would ‘win’ that round, and China would be on the back foot in terms of tariffs and supply chain separation. It’s not clear that a Biden win would be positive for China, other than being less bad than Trump.
The 2020 US Presidential election was on November 3, 2020; the incumbent Donald Trump refused to concede and directed his staff not to cooperate in the transition, making for perhaps the most disorderly transition of power in recent memory. The normally uneventful certification of the electoral college results on January 6, 2021 stimulated the protests which shocked the world, and which punched gaping holes in the idea that US power transitions are routine. President Biden was inaugurated two weeks later on January 20th – if the challenge had gone on a little longer, the US would have been in leadership limbo (the President is also Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces), a fact that is probably not lost on Russia and China.
This year, the US election is on November 5, 2024. I believe the focus of the rival superpowers will be to support any effort, from the ‘losing’ side, to put the results of the election in doubt, thereby delaying an orderly and timely transition of power. This could result in the geopolitical equivalent of a power play in hockey, where players spend time in a penalty box, thereby resulting in an asymmetric power balance.
The dimension of divisiveness is aided by the spreading liberal pro-Palestine student protests because it contrasts with the conservative insurrectionists of January 6th – it means both sides of the aisle have some experience and willingness to take to the streets for deeply felt causes, whether real or imagined. Making sure the ‘losing’ party has plenty of ammunition (both actual and ideological) should be the focus of any superpower that wants to see the US in transitional turmoil.
Hypothesis #2: Russia is already using the threat of a tactical nuclear weapon to try to prevent a wider NATO intervention of conventional forces in Ukraine. In recent weeks, both the US and Europe have OKed use of weapons provided by their forces against targets within Russia, this suggests a tendency toward escalation. If NATO decides to continue increasing the pressure, Russia will actually contemplate detonating a tactical weapon in the South Ukraine, perhaps in the Dnipro area, a heavy industrial complex nearly equidistant to the Russian border to the northeast, and Crimea in the south – minimizing nuclear fallout risk in Russia. I won’t go so far as to predict that Russia will detonate one because it would be such a momentous event, but I think it’s better than a coin toss probability if they are backed into a corner against a large conventional NATO force lobbing modern non-nuclear weapons into their territory.
There is considerable debate within the professional community about whether this is a realistic idea or not. The doves believe Putin is just bluffing (even if he wasn’t bluffing about invading Crimea or Ukraine). Some internal voices are more hawkish, casting the war (and NATO encroachment) as an existential issue for Russia and Putin, and arguing that more drastic measures should be considered.
If this unfortunate event came to pass, this would be the first nuclear explosion used since Nagasaki. Going back to my earlier analysis, Russia is only a superpower because of its nuclear arsenal. As an economy, it ranks only #5 (GDP, PPP) and about #10 (nominal GDP). If it is pushed farther into a corner by NATO, Putin will cite existential threats to justify the use of a tactical weapon, thereby showing the world what he is actually prepared to DO rather than just talk or theorize (or “raise awareness”). Although US intelligence warned NATO that an invasion of Ukraine was imminent (from satellite and other sources), the major European countries largely discounted this as paranoid American thinking, until Russian forces crossed the border on February 24, 2022. Putin’s historical actions have skewed towards the predictions of the paranoid rather than the Western pundits, but given his apparent perspective of existential risk, he could reach a place where a mini-nuclear option made sense.
China-Russia relations
The Ukraine war has already resulted in one tactical victory for Russia – greater alignment with China, despite the fact that China is much more closely linked to the West via trade than Russia (and therefore has much more to lose). Since Xi took power in 2012, Putin and Xi have met forty-two times, over 3x annually on average: they are scheduled to meet this month (May 2024) as well. Putin has essentially played the Chinese leadership for his own benefit; perhaps in order to sway China, the Ukraine invasion was delayed until two days after the Beijing Winter Olympics, since then, China has said little, but has generally increased trade with Russia, partly to make up for sanctioned Western goods. Even though Xi has apparently warned Russia not to use nuclear weapons, he has not condemned Russia for the invasion or war.
Henry Kissinger famously drove a wedge though the two leading Communist countries in the early 1970s by arranging a state visit by President Nixon to China in 1972, which led to a gradual normalization of diplomatic and eventually trade relations, highly benefiting both the US and China. Russia now aims to catalyze and capitalize on a widening rift between the US and China in any way it can, presenting the Western Alliance with an unpredictable set of challenges.
Final words
I’m aware of my affinity for left tail risks and long shot odds – they are far more satisfying to get correct than an average consensus call. I’m also well aware that I will be wrong much more than someone who sticks to consensus forecasts.
In that vein, the primary point of this piece is the idea that the dynamics of three-body problems are unstable and hard to control and therefore more likely to result in outcomes which drift considerably from the consensus, and less on the two hypotheses, which I bring up more as thought experiments about why two-body history may underestimate moves made in a three-body world.