If China and Russia were to have a joint slogan for their “strategic partnership,” it could be “MAWA – Make America Weak Again.” And if they had a dream, it would have been that Donald Trump would have been elected president in 2016 – and then re-elected in 2024 – and would act not for his own slogan of Make America Great Again, but for theirs of MAWA. So, they must now be very happy that Trump is fighting Iran.
If he had succeeded in destroying the Iranian regime and increasing American control over world oil supplies, they might have felt worried. But there is no sign of this happening: just the opposite.
If it continues, Trump’s destructive failure in Iran will make America weaker while strengthening both China and Russia in important ways.
China benefits because Trump will now be an even weaker negotiating partner over trade than he was last autumn when President Xi Jinping used the threat of an export embargo on critical minerals to force Trump to retreat from his 145% tariffs on Chinese goods. If he does go to Beijing on May 14-15 for the rescheduled summit between the two leaders, he will go as a supplicant.
China also benefits diplomatically because other countries, both rich and poor, see it as a more predictable and reliable superpower partner than the main alternative, the United States.
Russia benefits because the more than 50% rise in crude oil prices since the Iran war began is rescuing the country’s public finances and enabling it to fight its war in Ukraine for longer. It may also benefit further if divisions over Iran between European governments and Trump lead to further reductions in American weapons sales through Europe for Ukraine, and especially if in a moment of anger Trump decides to cut off all America’s intelligence and communications support for Ukraine.
Another long-held dream of President Vladimir Putin has been the destruction of NATO, so if these Transatlantic divisions over Iran were to encourage Trump to try to carry out his frequent threat to withdraw America from NATO, that would also make him happy.
That happiness might not last long, as a withdrawal from NATO requires approval from Congress which even the supine Republican majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate would surely resist. Nonetheless, the deepening of Transatlantic divisions would itself bring pleasure to the Kremlin.
This sense that one superpower’s loss must inevitably be another superpower’s gain should not be taken too far, however. What an American failure in Iran would truly do is to make the three nuclear superpowers much more equal than seemed to be the case before. They are all weak and all are dangerous. This means that all of us in Europe and elsewhere need to build our own resilience against their actions.
Despite its nuclear arsenal and abundant resources, Russia has had four years of military failure in Ukraine, in which tiny territorial gains have been achieved at the cost of more than one million casualties, counting both dead and wounded.
China, its partner, looks unable to exploit the situation because its economy has become trapped in slow annual growth, a declining and aging population and high public and private debts, trends that will not be eased by an energy-price shock.
And America looks weak because it has reelected a president who is openly corrupt, who has embarked on a military adventure in the Middle East without any clear strategy and who is doing daily harm to his country’s greatest global asset, its network of security alliances in Europe and Asia.
None of this is good for Europe, Japan or South Korea, which form the main components of those security alliances. All are going to be hurt if the short-term energy shock of the past month turns into a long-term one.
Thanks to that economic pressure, all are going to find it even harder to find the money to make their own militaries strong enough to become less dependent on America, at the exact time when that military spending is becoming more crucial to deter attacks or intimidation by China and Russia.
I have spent the past week visiting Japan, asking questions to Japanese business and government about the impact of the war in Iran. Three aspects of the answers were particularly relevant to Europe.
The first was somewhat reassuring: Although the way America has transferred military forces from Asia to fight Iran has led to some worries that this weaker American deterrence might tempt China to attempt an invasion or blockade of Taiwan, the main consensus in Japan is that it will not, thanks to China’s own weakness.
The failures in Ukraine and Iran by Russia and the United States will reinforce Chinese caution about risking its own military disaster, especially at a time when President Xi is continuing to fight corruption among senior generals in the People’s Liberation Army.
The second, however, was more concerning. It is that for the first time since atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 81 years ago some public discussion has begun about whether the country should consider acquiring nuclear weapons of its own.
This may reflect nervousness about whether the Iran war might persuade more countries to go nuclear, so as to protect themselves; it may reflect uncertainty about the reliability of the American nuclear deterrent under which Japan, like Europe, has largely sheltered; it may reflect uncertainty as to whether the Trump administration’s desire that Japan and other allies should do more to protect themselves might extend to nuclear weapons. In the past, US administrations have discouraged, and in the case of South Korea blocked, allies from going nuclear.
The fact that this discussion is happening at all reflects an acceptance that the world has become more dangerous and that old rules and taboos can no longer be relied upon.
The nuclear discussion in Japan is at present more limited than the one going on in Europe, led by France and Germany.
The third aspect matched Europe more closely, however: it is that Japanese business and officials are somewhat paralyzed by the uncertainty over how long and how severe the energy-price shock is going to be. They don’t want to spread panic but they do realize they may need to adjust their energy plans for the next two decades or more, plans in which fossil fuels still played a leading role.
If long-term plans do have to change then the main options being considered are nuclear energy, geothermal power and more wind and solar power. Thanks to resistance from big business, wind and solar account for a far smaller share – roughly 13%, mostly from solar – of electricity supply than in European countries, where wind and solar shares of 40-50% are common.
My Japanese friends, just like us in Europe, are acutely conscious of their vulnerability. However, they are also aware that in a world in which technology is advancing so rapidly and in which sources of potential supply of energy and of other critical commodities are widespread, the chance to reduce that vulnerability and to circumvent the impact of shocks does exist, even if it takes time.
So the time to begin planning for how to defend ourselves and how to make ourselves more resilient to shocks like the one currently emanating from the White House and from Iran is not tomorrow, it is not in the 2030s. It is now.
This article was first published in Italian translation by La Stampa. The English version is available on Bill Emmott’s Global View. It is republished with permission.
