If populism prevails in France, it would have a much more dramatic impact on geopolitical affairs than the victory of populism in the offshore powers.

The immediate geopolitical impact of Brexit is now clear. Britain’s unilateral decision to withdraw has unified the continent against the perfidious Albion. Little England has, in effect, been forced into splendid isolation from the continent. Going forward, Britain will not have a seat at the European table.

Across the pond, Trump pulled off the greatest bait-and-switch in US political history. All promises of economic nationalism and isolationism have been shelved. Instead, the political high tide of the GOP is being mined in the service of plutocratic interests. While the Bannon-Sessions-Miller wing remains committed to constructing an ethnic security state—and is worryingly empowered to do so—the foreign economic and security policies of the United States are back in the hands of the Blob. Despite expectations to the contrary, Liberal Hegemonism is alive and well in the United States. American populism seems to have been tamed at least in so far as US foreign policy is concerned.

The consensus on the impact of a Marine Le Pen victory is that it would spell the demise of the European project. In particular, it would mean the end of the euro. But there is a perfectly feasible alternative scenario that may obtain if she wins. In that scenario, the French withdrawal will leave an even more unified and compact EU; one that would look more and more like a German Delian league.

I will argue that the second scenario is more likely than the first and that it would reconfigure European geopolitics in important and foreseeable ways. But first, how did we get here?

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During the 1950s and 1960s, the core of the world economy was tripolar. Global industrial production was dominated by national champions of the United States, Japan and Germany (more generally, western Europe). Northern labor had a quasi-monopoly on Northern knowhow. More precisely, national labor pools had a quasi-monopoly on the knowhow of national industrial champions. Within this context, domestic bargains between labor and capital along the lines of the Treaty of Detroit enabled broad-based growth in the core of the world economy.

The Western economic miracle of the early postwar era came to an end as a result of the Japanese onslaught. Japan was able to combine its relatively low wages with high productivity growth to dramatically swell its shares of the global product market; helped along by the container revolution of the late 1960s that enhanced the integration of global product markets. Unable to compete with the Japanese, western firms tried in vain to increase the growth rate of their productivity. The western world slid into a deep stagflation crisis during the 1970s that prepared the ground for the neoliberal counterrevolution whose main agenda was to put finance firmly back in the saddle and tear up the Treaty of Detroit. That alone would’ve been sufficient to guarantee the rise of plutocracy, precarity and wage polarization. But even more momentous developments were underfoot that undermined the geoeconomic foundations of broad-based prosperity in the center countries even more thoroughly.

The 1980s witnessed the telecommunication and intermodal transportation revolution whereby transportation and communication costs collapsed enough to split the atom of national champions. The result was what Richard Baldwin calls ‘the second unbundling’ of global production whereby managers in the headquarter economies (US, Germany, Japan) trained cheap foreign labor within a day’s flying distance of headquarters to create Factory North America, Factory Europe and Factory Asia. This unified national labor markets at the regional level even as global product markets integrated further at the global level.

The addition of hundreds of millions of Chinese workers to Factory Asia created a tremendous imbalance between capital and labor. The result was even greater worker insecurity, wage polarization, and intensification of plutocracy. At the same time, the reemergence of global finance unleashed the financial cycle that also whipsawed market society with bubbles and financial crises.

The consequence of these global-macro fluctuations and structural changes was tremendous trauma in western market societies. This trauma manifested itself as the rise of populism and the destruction of the political center.

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Back to geopolitics. A Le Pen victory in France cannot be ruled out with any degree of certainty. I claimed that if she wins, France and England would likely face a virtual German Delian league. The reason is twofold. First, European states are extraordinarily exposed to the risk of a dramatic unraveling of Factory Europe. A breakup of the eurozone would result in the effective repeal of deep integration on the continent and therefore a wholesale disruption of European value chains. In order to forestall such a catastrophic scenario, other states are likely to stick together. Second, while the renationalization of market society might be a viable strategy for medium-weights like the UK and France, it is decidedly not a viable strategy for either the small rich northern nations of the European core or the poorer nations on Europe’s southern and eastern periphery. Niether the Nordics and the Low Countries on the one hand, nor eastern European nations like Poland and the Czech Republic on the other, have any possibility of maintaining their prosperity after renationalization. Basically, the depth and breadth of skill-sets in every country except maybe Germany and perhaps Italy, provide an insufficient basis to compete in global product markets. They can put up tariff walls to protect domestic industry. But then the size of their national markets would sharply limit their firms’ economies of scale. That’s what doomed the import-substitution strategies of countless developing nations.

Le Pen dreams of an independent France that can stand up to Germany. But the reality is far more sobering. The harsh truth is that, after the second unbundling, without combining the knowhow of the North with the cheap labor of the South you can no longer be truly competitive in global product markets. This is even true of the United States. Renationalization is a recipe for geoeconomic irrelevance. Isolationist Britain and France will not become third world states, but they will be marginalized; both in Europe and in the global marketplace.

So what happens if I’m right and the UK and France face a German Delian league on the continent? France and the United Kingdom are independent nuclear powers and the main politico-military actors in Europe. They are essential partners for the United States. If and when they withdraw into isolationism, European security will rest on German shoulders. Le Pen has already declared her intention on a reorientation of Franco-Russian relations—away from deterrence in alliance with the western bloc to bilateral cooperation. But the security of the Baltics, the Nordics, and central and eastern Europe depends on more than US engagement. It requires a European great power partner. What this means is that the German Delian league would have to obtain its own conventional and nuclear deterrent. Pressures in this direction are already building as a result of growing doubts about the US commitment to defend Europe. They will intensify with the French exit, if it obtains.

One can think more systematically about the geopolitical implications of populism in England and France through the theory of regional security complexes (RSCs). Buzan and Wæver described the European great power RSC as a security community (a territorial cluster of states for whom war amongst each other is unthinkable) of great powers protected by one global power and threatened by another. This configuration is unlikely to last. The question is, How will it be transformed?

In the Policy Tensor’s view, the answer is that the British and French exits correspond to a major structural transformation of the European great power RSC. In particular, there is a strong potential for the emergence of a new, dominant security actor on the scene; namely, the German Delian league. Whether or not security competition reemerges in western Europe will then depend on whether the secondary powers (France and the UK) exacerbate the Russian threat to the league’s security. A possible withdrawal of the American pacifier—which is no longer unthinkable either—will make it considerably more likely. But whether or not security competition reemerges, we’re looking at a major transformation of the European RSC.

Despite the consensus in the agenda–setting media, we do not yet know whether the Assad regime was behind the chemical weapons attack in the rebel held town of Khan Sheikhoun of Idlib province on Tuesday. There is ample evidence that nerve agents—probably sarin—caused the death of dozens and injured hundreds. It’s also clear that the Syrian Air Force bombed the town at the same time. What we don’t yet know is whether the chemical agents released were part of the payload dropped by the regime’s bombers as Western powers have alleged, or whether the bombs stuck a rebel weapons depot containing chemical weapons as Russia has claimed. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that Assad would blatantly test the new administration in this manner. What is clear is that it was not in Assad’s interest to be caught red-handed just as the White House was signaling that it was not interested in getting rid of him.

The White House went for the strike because the chemical attack and the media’s reaction to it made it irresistible. After all, what was there to lose? Trump could distinguish himself from the previous occupant of the White House and provide succor both to much of his ‘America: Fuck Yeah!’ support base as well as the liberal hawks who occupy the center of Washington foreign policymaking. Indeed, in elite foreign policy circles, the chemical attack was very much seen as an opportunity that doesn’t come often and must be seized; what the President of the Council on Foreign Relations called “a rare second chance.”

As the story gained traction in the media, it became apparent to the administration that a symbolic action like a barrage of cruise missile strikes would be a big propaganda win for President Trump. Before the attack and even for a short while afterwards, the line from the White House was that ousting Assad was the last thing on the agenda. Whether that’s still the case is unclear. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said in the aftermath of the strike that “steps are underway” to get rid of Assad. So is the administration seeking to oust Assad? No one knows; possibly not even the President himself.

The fundamental challenge of any strategy to oust Assad remains unchanged. There is no viable replacement for Assad. The rebellion is composed largely of Salafi jihadist outfits like al Nusra (since rebranded) and Ahrar al Sham. The United States could try to impose a moderate warlord as the leader of a post-Assad Syria. But that is unlikely to carry water in either rebel-held towns or regime-friendly cities. The only way a foreign power can impose a new regime in Syria is to occupy the country. United States armed forces could certainly pull that off—despite the Russian presence—but, politically, it would be extremely challenging for the administration to sell a large scale pacification campaign both to the foreign policy elite and to its support base.

The about-turn in Syria is part of the taming of Donald Trump by the establishment. The most important news of the week on the US foreign policy front wasn’t about Syria. Rather, it was the ouster of Steve Bannon, along with the reinstatement of the Joint Chiefs chairman and intelligence director, and the addition of the energy secretary, CIA director and UN ambassador, to the National Security Council’s principals committee. That event marks a decisive break from the amateur hour of the early Trump administration. The Bannon-Miller-Sessions wing of the administration seems to have lost a second round (after the Flynn affair) in their battle for the soul of the Trump White House on national security, to the centrist, a.k.a. liberal hegemonist, Tillerson-Mattis-McMaster wing.

Two other developments have been overshadowed by the strikes. The first is President Xi’s visit to Mar-a-Lago. That’s possibly the most important relationship of the Trump administration. If Trump thinks that shooting off some cruise missiles at a defenseless country is going to impress Xi, he is going to be surprised. Xi has more cards to play than any other nation facing the United States on the world stage. He would strongly prefer a United States bogged down in Syria. [I’ll write a full-length post on the balance of power in the Western Pacific soon.]

The second development that was overshadowed was not unrelated to the strikes. It was the reorientation of US Middle East policy in favor of the Sunni Arab autocrats. The strikes themselves are bound to have warmed the heart of Mohammad bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s aggressive, young, de-facto leader. They also cap a remarkable couple of weeks in which Tillerson lifted the ban on fighter jet sales to Bahrain, a Saudi dependency; promised precision weapons to Saudi Arabia for its terror campaign in Yemen; and embraced Sisi, Egypt’s strongman. These developments are, of course, entirely congruent with the new hardline policy on Syria. The Policy Tensor had imagined that Nick Burns would run Clinton’s foreign policy when she became president. Now it seems that Tillerson is implementing Burns’ agenda for him.

What is really striking is that, despite expectations to the contrary, the United States is stumbling into a major confrontation with Russia. Whether this is the result of Trump’s financial ties to the oil monarchies or the lure of an easy win on the home front is not entirely clear. What is clear is that Trump is entangling the United States in a secondary theatre even as he meets with the real challenge to US primacy. Xi could not help but be pleased with the developments of the last few days.

Nothing tells us more about an incoming President’s foreign policy agenda than her pick for Secretary of State. Indeed, even more important than the actual pick is the short list, which gives a sort of overview of the administration’s foreign policy agenda. The shortlist reported by Politico and clearly leaked by the Clinton campaign, is therefore of considerable interest.

The press has focused on Joe Biden. The inclusion of Joe Biden is probably just a publicity stunt. Given the man’s name recognition Biden’s inclusion is aimed at generating positive media coverage. Even if he is seriously being considered that tells us little about Clinton’s agenda beyond the obvious nod to the Obama White House.

First consider who is not on the list. Secretary John Kerry: Despite all the talk about extending Obama’s work, by ruling out Kerry, Clinton is sending a clear signal that the new administration will be turning over a new leaf. Jake Sullivan: The name of the campaign’s unofficial foreign policy lead has not been floated. This doesn’t mean he is not being considered. Clinton may simply not wish to air the name of campaign insiders. Whether in State or in the White House, Sullivan is going to be a foreign policy principal. He is a known liberal interventionist who’s views are entirely congruent with Clinton’s. In the unlikely event that he is appointed SecState, he’ll be no more than a yes man. Tom Donilon: Obama’s former National Security Advisor is now attached to the Clinton camp. But his appointment as SecState is a very unlikely. The man has status issues with his boss.

Who’s actually on the list? Two names are obviously placed there for the sake of appearances. Wendy Sherman, the lead negotiator on the Iranian nuclear talks, is a sop to the doves. She simply doesn’t have the gravitas for the job. Admiral James Stavridis is a bureaucrat who’s vision for the American navy is centered on feel-good talking points and photo-ops. Neither is a serious contender.

So who is actually in the running that’s on the list? There are four serious contenders. Kurt Campbell, a key architect of the “pivot to Asia.” Bill Burns at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, known for his moderate liberal institutionalist views. Strobe Talbott, a personal friend of the Clintons and the president of the Brookings Institution, the think-tank recently criticized by the Times for close ties to foreign governments including gulf states. And most importantly, Nick Burns at Harvard, a foreign policy hawk who has promoted a hard line against Russia and Iran including imposing safe zones in Syria, and who has been a prominent critic of Obama’s foreign policy.

The real short-list reveals the full spectrum of the admittedly narrow liberal hegemonist world view. Campbell’s inclusion says that Clinton is committed to the pivot to Asia. If he is actually appointed that would reflect favorably on Clinton’s priorities. Bill Burns is the resident dove who is least likely to be appointed. But if he is, that would mean that Clinton is backing away from her hitherto hawkish agenda. Talbott would’ve been a front-runner but his appointment would now be quite controversial. Floating his name seems like a personal compliment.

In the Policy Tensor’s view, Nick Burns is the most likely pick. He will, of course, sail through the Senate confirmation process. His appointment would signal a return to a much more muscular US foreign policy.

The central flaw of the Clinton-Burns view is their assumption that the United States has permanent allies (Europe, Japan, Turkey, Sunni Arab states) and permanent adversaries (Russia, China, Iran, Syria). Obama’s biggest foreign policy achievements, Iran and Cuba, came from an outright rejection of this frame of reference. If Clinton appoints Nick Burns, she would be effectively burying Obama’s experiment with foreign policy realism. The United States would get dragged further into the Middle East cauldron and necessarily ignore the much more important arena further east (since there is, after all, limited bandwidth in DC). In light of the loss of the Philippines to China, this would be a grave mistake indeed.

As Turkish tanks rolled across the border into Syria apparently supported by US warplanes, Western newspapers echoed the official line from Turkey that the twin goals of the incursion were to “clear Islamic State militants from their remaining border stronghold, and roll back recent advances by Syrian Kurdish militias.” The White House called the incursion “an indication of important progress” in the campaign against ISIS. Meanwhile, Biden ordered the Syrian Kurds back across the Euphrates and threatened to withdraw American support if they failed to comply. “In return, the United States got something it has pushed for in vain for years, getting Turkey to take a more proactive stance” against ISIS. What is spin and what is reality?

To begin with there was simply no need for US air support. Both because Turkey has plenty of airpower of its own and because Jarabulus was absolutely deserted. ISIS had already fled, as US intelligence was well aware. No shots were fired. The prominence given to close US air support was instead a signal to Putin and Assad. The idea being that this was a joint US-Turkish operation, so don’t even think about resistance. The same concern was behind the timing of the operation which coincided with Kerry’s visit to Turkey, as well as Kerry’s very loud pronouncements of absolute support for the incursion. Forcible alterations of the territorial status quo are never a trivial matter, even if the target state has lost de facto control of the territory in question; especially so because the United States has been staunchly opposed to forcible territorial change in Ukraine, Georgia, the Senkaku islands, Taiwan and the South China Sea.

US warplanes have acted as the Syrian Kurds’ airforce for years; most recently in the recapture of Manbij a week before the Turkish incursion. At that point, Turkish officials said they expected the Kurds to go back east across the Euphrates. Preventing the Kurds from unifying the two Syrian Kurdish statelets into a single contiguous Syrian Kurdish de facto state along the border has been a consistent Turkish policy goal. There are two reasons for this. One is that unifying Rojava, the Syrian Kurdish region along the border, would be big symbolic victory for the Syrian Kurds that is likely to embolden Kurdish separatists inside Turkey. The second, more important reason, is that Kurdish control of the Syro-Turkish border would effectively close the rat line.

The rat line is the principal pipeline through which foreign fighters, money, weapons, ammunition and supplies flow to the Syrian rebels. From the beginning of the Syrian uprising, Turkey has been indiscriminate in regulating this flow. With the evaporation of the moderate opposition, almost all of this flow has ended up in the hands of jihadists. It is what keeps the rebellion against Assad alive. Without the rat line, much of the armed opposition would not survive for very long.

If the Kurds were to gain effective control over the Syrian side of the Syro-Turkish border, they would come to enjoy a veto over the rat line. They would immediately try to shut down the flow to non-allied rebels. That would dramatically alter the balance of power in the Syrian war against Turkish and Saudi proxies. Turkey, of course, cannot tolerate such a scenario.

The Policy Tensor believes that such a scenario is manifestly in the US interest: It goes furthest towards stemming the threat of Salafist Jihadism; the only identifiable US interest in Syria. The Obama administration instead frames the US interest in the context of the US’ geopolitical rivalry with Russia and Iran. Thus, the interests of allies become US interests. So we find the United States providing logistics for Saudi terror bombing of Yemen and diplomatic cover for the Turkish intervention in northern Syria backed by US security guarantees.

It is often claimed that the United States needs access to Turkey’s Incirlik air base, which is portrayed as “a key nexus in the campaign against the Islamic State.” The United States can use air bases in Jordan, Israel, Kuwait, UAE, Qatar, Baghdad-controlled Iraq and Erbil to conduct airstrikes against the Islamic State. Many of these are closer than Incirlik to ISIS territory and all of them are close enough. The US can also use naval platforms in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. The claim doesn’t even pass the laugh test.

In going out of its way to support the Turkish incursion, the US is seeking to gain leverage against Russia as it negotiates a great power settlement in Syria. Ultimately however, the United States will throw the rebels under the bus. And we can expect it to do that with as much spin as it has just deployed to protect their lifeline.