Protesilaos

On the trade-conquest continuum, Western empire, and the political centre

This is my recollection of comments I made at a local gathering on matters of strategy. My commentary incorporates elements of history, geopolitics, economics, and human nature, though it retains a largely theoretical and macroscopic perspective. What I cover herein is a continuation of recent essays on the general direction of European Union politics in relation to Russia, China, and the Middle East, among others:

The trade-conquest continuum

We rely on models to understand the world. A complex reality is reduced to simple elements. By examining the model, we get a sense of the mechanics at play. The model is not reality. It is, at best, an approximation. To understand the laws of supply and demand, for example, does not make you an effective investor. It simply gives you a framework with which to make sense of events in their most basic formulation.

My theory, then, is that trade and conquest exist on a continuum. Their difference is one of degree or emphasis in how they use certain means over others. Yet both work towards the same goal: to gather resources from disparate parts of the planet in order to increase the quantity and/or quality of goods in circulation.

Both the businessperson and the conqueror want power through which to secure access to resources, whence comes enrichment. In practice, the businessperson and the conqueror are the same person or social class.

Consider a simple world of a peace-loving Greek merchant who travels from Athens to Egypt on a boat. He transports olive oil and brings back grain. These are ancient times when boats are relatively small and flimsy. Each vessel can only carry a limited amount of food and water for its crew.

The logistics impose their own realities. If the benevolent Greek merchant does not want to make any stops on the way to Egypt, such as at Crete, Rhodes, and Cyprus, he will have to fill the boat with supplies for sustenance. This is a several-day trip. Not making any stops is bad business because there is no room left for the olive oil and then for the grain.

So our do-gooder merchant must stop along the way. Crete, Rhodes, and Cyprus are three obvious destinations. On each island, the merchant will fill up his stock of food and water. This requisition means that (i) there exists a local economy that can supply those goods and (ii) the people there are positively disposed towards the merchant.

In the ancient world it is impractical to have a thriving settlement close to the seaside. It is exposed to pirate raids. The coast itself is arid land, saturated with sea salt, and thus unsuitable for agriculture. Herding is not an option either as there is insufficient grass. Settlements must be established further inland, while the coast is either abandoned completely or covered with fortifications.

This poses a technical problem for the merchant. Going all the way from the coast to some inaccessible highland is an expensive and time-consuming endeavour. His incentive is to have a commercial centre around the port and source everything he needs from there. The centre of commerce may then handle the logistics with its own hinterlands, so that the highlanders can still live where it is safe for them.

Port towns emerge. They attract businesspeople and artisans. Security forces are there too, to staff the watchtowers, defend the perimeter, keep the burgeoning market in order, and ensure safe passage for boats.

In case where you cannot see where this is going, I am giving you a thumbnail sketch of colonialism. The Greeks founded many such port-towns, else colonies. The modern cities of Marseille, Naples, Odessa, Yalta, Trabzon, Tripoli in Libya, are only a few of many examples. As one ancient Greek comedian put it, the Greeks are frogs around a pond: they just hang around the shores.

Those colonies were, in effect, transit stations. Nothing like the colonies of the Western European powers which divided all of Africa among themselves. So “settlements” is a more accurate term, though those can still evolve into “colonies” in the modern sense once they assume control over their surrounding lands. A relatively small group of settlers was stationed at the coast and was doing business with the lands further in. In some cases, such as in Cyprus, Greeks lived further inland, though the norm was for them to interact with foreign peoples.

The point though is to understand the mechanics, which are a function of the logistics of trade, which itself depends on technology. For someone to do commerce between the Greek mainland and Egypt, they depend on a network of allies along the way. Without those allies, the business endeavour is not viable.

Those alliances have to be stable, such that a futures market—the stock exchange!—can be relied upon. Which means that there is a powerful incentive for those allies to also be involved in the broader business. Bonus points if those allies are of the same cultural background and can more easily reach consensus among themselves.

Much of what I have described here holds true for all trade and all possible transit stations. Imagine wanting to do commerce from the Netherlands to China. Now you understand why the African coastline as well as all the island nations in South-East Asia are essential for a Dutch businessperson.

None of this is specific to seafaring nations. Overland trade follows the same logic. The Silk Road is one obvious example with its numerous commercial centres and empires along the way. The same pattern, albeit now with outright militarist means, is discerned in large migratory waves. The Goths sacked Rome, for example, only to eventually establish themselves as trading partners in the region. We are always observing the trade-conquest continuum. Outright violence is how a group/nation gains a seat at the table and how it is subsequently promoted/relegated in significance.

As you can easily imagine, if the incentives are strong, which they always are when it comes to survival, people will be willing to fight even if they start out as peaceful merchants. War is the continuation of trade, the preparatory phase for the prevailing conditions of a given arrangement of commerce, and the catalyst for the formation of a new order in which trade shall occur anew. It happens because, in its most basic sense, people need to secure resources and have a tendency to demand more than the absolute essentials. The computer is not absolutely essential for me to live nor for you who is reading this on some digital device, yet here we are.

You cannot understand war if you are not willing to think in very practical terms about the logistics of life and then about what exactly you need to conduct trade in a manner that is reliable and sustainable. It is a mistake to think that the affluence you have now is your default condition. As soon as you withdraw into isolationism, you give others the space to move in. Nature does not leave a vacuum behind. This may be what you want, though understand that if you then need to trade with those people, they will be in a stronger bargaining position. More on this point later.

Furthermore, you cannot make sense of imperialism if you decouple it from your everyday spending habits. Concretely, if you need your coffee each morning, bananas on demand, black pepper for your soy bean meal, fertiliser for your crops, plentiful energy for your travels, a ready-made infrastructure for your vacations, and so on, you are already depending on a network of global connections that is underpinned by legal-institutional arrangements which themselves are backed by the potentiality of brute force. You literally cannot live that life in a remote village governed by autarky (self-sufficiency).

To continue with the Greek example. The Greek mainland is mountainous, rocky terrain surrounded by long infertile coastlines. This land makes for hardy, unruly, and sparsely populated communities. As a result, the Greeks were and remain relatively small in terms of population count. Compare their numbers to the vastly richer and far more interconnected neighbouring lands of Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Persia, Egypt… What you see today could not be much different than what was always the case: the baseline of Greece is ruggedness, which compels its people to seek an exit to the sea, hence trade and with it latent conquest.

Business, coercion, and bargaining

Even if we assume well-meaning agents, trade is always volatile because people do not control the weather. In my simple example, there may not be enough olive oil in a single year or a decade. Or it may have rained so much that the taste is not palatable anymore.

Our peace-loving Greek merchant goes to the Egyptians with his meagre produce and the Egyptians are not impressed. He cannot sell anything and so he cannot bring grain back home. What does this actually mean for the poor Greeks? Starvation or malnutrition, of course. Maybe they do not have to go to war with the Egyptians, but they still need to figure out alternatives. Perhaps they can peacefully expand further inland in all of their settlements. But if the hardship persists then war with somebody will be an appealing value proposition.

I say “value proposition” because it is exactly that: a cost-benefit calculation.

Now think practically again about bargaining. In its most basic form, the goods sell themselves. The olive oil is so tasty that the Egyptians are willing to trade half the Nile for it. But they will otherwise drive a hard bargain to push down the price and maximise their profits. They need food just as much as the Greeks do.

War or the threat thereof is advantageous to improve one’s bargaining position in international affairs. If the other side has valid reasons to fear that the threat is actionable, they will be more willing to make business under favourable terms. Welfare and warfare go together.

Take the Strait of Hormuz, for example. You already know how much of an impact it has on the global economy and how it is directly linked to the cost-of-living crisis in Europe. Suppose there is no war. Arabs and Iranians are exporting oil and gas to Europe. For whatever reason, they decide that the price is not fair to them anymore. Maybe they have endured years of drought and they need the extra money to pay for their desalination infrastructure. They have to renegotiate the price, else they will die. How do you gain a seat at the table or promote yourself while there? Well, by coercion of course.

They withhold exports and keep the tankers at bay. The Europeans are feeling the pressure. They have to make a deal with the Iranians and the Arabs, or go to the Russians, or continue to pay the hefty price that the Americans place on their own exports. What does Europe do? The peaceful option is to become permanently poorer—good luck telling that to people who think they are the epicentre of the world! Another is to gear up for war, which is where we are now. This does not mean that Europeans have to fight, but only that the increased activity towards that end changes their bargaining power.

The possibility of coercion is part of deal-making. Same idea for the potentiality of war.

Now you already understand that this applies to international trade more broadly. Think about the average person who lives in the city. They consume fruits every day but have no idea about the seasonality of plants. Oranges do not grow year-round. It is entirely possible for a person to not recognise a raw walnut or to have never seen an almond with its shell before. They are disconnected from the actual work on the ground. Consider every kind of food at home, every interpersonal exchange that involves bargaining, and you can easily imagine what it takes to keep everything running smoothly and, more importantly, what makes it cheap. Unlike what Economics 101 would have you believe, there is an iron fist behind every invisible hand—and it is not gentle at all.

This all explains how pirates and businesspeople are fundamentally the same. The guns you use to fend off aggressors are the guns you rely on to get a better deal. The reason this does not happen as much in the domestic economy is because of what I mentioned earlier: security forces, i.e. the state even in its most primitive form, have assumed monopoly of violence over the area they control. There is a regulated space therein exactly because there is sovereignty, else supreme authority backed by preponderant force.

Europe’s naval and continental powers

Against this largely theoretical backdrop, I want to turn my attention to Europe and then the Western empire at-large. The macroscopic historical view of Western imperialism reveals a constant amid the incessant change: the centre of power shifts but the overall structures remain in place through a process of conflicts and alliances.

In very brief terms, we have the Romans moving their locus of power from Rome to Byzantium, later Constantinople (now Istanbul). They did it to retain control of their holdings in the Middle East. The Eastern Roman Empire persists for a millennium through ups and downs before it falls to the Ottomans while the Western part goes through a process of transformation that involves a lot of back and forth: we have among many others the Goths, the Frankish knights leading up to Charlemagne, the Crusades in the Middle East as well as the Christianisation of the Baltic nations by the Teutons, the integration of the Nordic kingdoms, the eventual emergence of Colonialism with the discovery of the Americas and the creation of new trade routes across all continents. We eventually reach modernity. The Ottomans are gone and the West has retaken most of the territories that once belonged to the Romans. Fast-forward to the 20th century when the naval empires of Europe disintegrate only for America to rise in their stead.

Two European powers that do not fit this trend are Germany and Russia. I consider Russia European in this context even though its reach is far broader. That is because its centre of power was and remains west of the Urals. Plus, the Eurasian Steppe makes it so that even Germany can, in theory, exert control deep into the Caspian Sea.

Germany and Russia are both continental powers. Their imperialistic version is as hegemon of the European continent, especially the wider region stretching from the North Sea to the Black Sea, with access to the Baltic Sea in between. They are natural antagonists though, as they will find themselves competing over the same resources, something that is ongoing in the Ukraine war.

For Germany, most of the natural space for its expansionism is towards its east and north, while for Russia it is towards its west and south. Always keep in mind the trade-conquest continuum. This is not about brute force per se: they can have alliances along the way and mutually beneficial trade arrangements. For example, German capital is invested in Poland.

The natural space for expansionism is governed by geography. Flatlands connect distant areas into easily traversable units. Whereas mountains, deserts, and large bodies of water create separate spaces. This is a matter of logistics, else technology and its attendant economics. Even with primitive means, it is relatively easy to go from Belgium to Germany. Whereas the same distance in absolute terms from Greece to its north across the Balkans is much more demanding because there are mountains in-between. To think of this principle in its most basic formulation, imagine riding a bicycle on flat ground as opposed to steep slopes.

The European integration process formally started in the 1950s. Since the 1990s it has been made manifest as the European Union and since the 2000s it has its own single currency, the euro, which continues to grow in importance. The trajectory is for political union, though the immediate next step is for a supranational military capacity.

With the European integration process, Germany has effectively become part of the West. It no longer is its own pillar the way it was during the time of the Prussians and then with the two World Wars. The EU is not a German empire per se, though it makes sense to think of it as a Franco-German tandem plus friends. A newer Carolignian Empire, if you will. France and Germany practically control the EU in many important ways across all institutions. To put it concretely, no decision is adopted that goes against both France and Germany.

Furthermore, the EU is the de facto political arm of NATO in Eurasia. Even though the Europeans seem to be chasing their tail at times, and continue to promote underwhelming leaders, they still have considerable economic power and military might. Only a fool would underestimate them.

Once we understand the EU as a Franco-German alliance at heart, we know that it is something special in the history of the continent. We also know that it is on a collision course with Russia, competing with it over influence across Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, among others.

As I have explained at greater length before, the EU has an energy problem. To recap very briefly, it can get cheap energy from Russia or the Middle East and thus may improve its bargaining position vis-Ă -vis China. To pressure Russia into a good deal, the EU has expanded eastward and has, for the past decades, been trying to bring Ukraine and the Caucasus nations under its sphere of influence. Russia has the direct opposite drive. It wants to sell to the rest of Europe but only by improving its own bargaining power and thus increasing its profit margins. Holding on to Ukraine and Central Asia, and, further, neutralising the Baltic/Nordic nations is in its long-term interest.

With regard to the Middle East, European elites are strongly in support of Israel, even though electorates are not enthusiastic about it right now. Strategically, this makes perfect sense: Israel is a fortress state that disrupts the Arab world which, depending on how you want to look at it, stretches from North Africa to the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean.

Israel’s location connects it to the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, with relatively easy access to East Africa, the Persian Gulf, and the Arab Peninsula. Europeans have wanted this level of control for millennia: Israel is the latest iteration of a long historical trend.

Israel has hitherto been a destabilising force in the region, which is good business for Europe and the West at-large, as it strengthens its bargaining position towards the Arabs. The war in Iran, albeit frozen as of this writing, fits this same pattern.

The two energy corridors that Europe benefits from are the Eurasian Steppe and the Middle East. They both meet in Central Asia to the west of China, knocking on the door that reads “Xinjiang”, i.e. the Uygur lands. If you think the West actually cares about the human rights of the Chinese Muslims while it so happily bombs Muslims elsewhere, now you have a better sense of how the dots are connecting.

Greater control over this wider region also provides leverage against Turkey. The Turks are part of NATO though have historically carved their own space in international relations as a power broker between superpowers and a regional power in their own right. In other words, the Turks are not strictly Western in terms of allegiance. But if the Europeans achieve what they want, then they are necessarily putting pressure on Turkey to commit fully to the Western empire else risk its territorial integrity. The historical precedent of the Ottomans is not forgotten.

There is a third route, by the way, through water and land, that connects Iberia to the Gulf of Guinea. While critical, it does not have the direct effect of weaking Russia, China, the Arabs, the Iranians, and the Turks, all at once in the same way the aforementioned two corridors do.

Nationalism and the imperialist outlook

A common mistake is to think of nationalists and globalists as opposing camps. I will explain why this is not the case. Nationalism becomes globalist in its outlook through imperialism.

Consider once again the example of the benevolent Greek merchant travelling to Egypt. If most Greeks benefit from this exchange or acquiesce to it, then they have a shared interest in the success of the endeavour or are anyhow not opposed to the government backing the project. The administration will thus take care to remove all impediments to trade. They will be willing to support the merchant with a sturdier ship. The military will want to join along so as to deter pirates and to make bargaining more advantageous, as I explained earlier. Tax breaks will follow and other such interventions to boost the merchant’s competitiveness. In the figure of this merchant, the nation has identified its champion: he promotes the national interest through international dealings.

In this simplistic yet realistic scenario we identify both nationalism and capitalism. In its basic form, nationalism is the ideology of using the national interest as the sole guide to foreign affairs. Capitalism is state intervention in favour of capital owners. They go together, since nationalism that does not favour certain enterprises will not have strong business partners with whom to advance the national interest along the lines of the trade-conquest continuum.

From this we also get social stratification. Anyone who actively promotes the national interest enjoys preferential treatment over those whose labour does not obviously contribute to the stated objective. Even if we assume benevolent actors, we end up in a situation where, say, supporting the merchant is more economically significant than supporting the small game hunter.

The society as a whole is reconstituted to optimise for one class. The beneficiaries of the intervention establish their dominion over the rest of society, branding themselves as aristocrats. From there, everything is in place for the ruling elites to extract more value from the nation than what is strictly necessary for their business. They may even think they deserve as much, since they are the promoters, indeed the embodiment, of the national interest. “Where would the nation be without us?” is a question they will raise.

Consider, further, that imperialism creates the conditions for war. By accumulating riches, the nation/class has made itself a target. Others are keen on getting some of that treasure for themselves. The elites must therefore actively suppress or sabotage any force that might rise against them. This means that they have to deny space and to snuff out any movement whose values and conduct could inspire opposition to the establishment. Theirs is a totalising project: to be everywhere and to act preemptively.

Nationalism easily flows into globalism and produces capitalism. Think of this as a cycle. Ethnicity is not eradicated. Local communities still develop their own sense of identity and eventually define themselves in juxtaposition to others along lines of language, culture, and geography. From anational interconnectedness the ethnically defined peoples may choose to push back to create their own independent communities with which to get a better bargain in terms of trade-conquest. Those will be driven by an ethnic form of nationalism, which itself will turn increasingly globalist through the continuous want for trade-conquest… The cycle invigorates itself.

What breaks the loop is isolationism. It moves away from the trade-conquest paradigm, choosing autarky instead. Though even then, this is not an initiative that can survive unilaterally. For as long as there are parties in the world that do trade-conquest, and for as long as imperialism has a totalising propensity, every isolationist is destined to servitude and/or genocide.

America is not the Western empire

With this big picture view in mind, it is time to factor in the insight about the shifting locus of power. America became the de facto leader of the Western world in the aftermath of World War II, culminating in its unipolar moment after the Cold War. The French and the British were weakened by the two World Wars and eventually lost control of their colonies. Though the imperial influence did not go away. There was a different foreman in town, eager to pick up the project from where the previous management had left it. The rise of America thus represents the shift of the centre from Paris and London to Washington.

Every nation-state is an instituted reality. It represents a constitutional order which itself is an arrangement of converging interests manifesting as a stratified society. National borders are expedient in safeguarding the national champions but are otherwise not central to the logic of capital accumulation. Those who control capital see nations as expendable tools. They use them for as long as they are useful. Then they move on to the next country that is capable of sustaining the trade-conquest agenda.

My sense is that America is rapidly declining as the foreman of the Western empire. They still have money and guns, but they have reached a point where their people think they are entitled to the opulent life without having to rely imperialism. In other words, the Americans do not understand how they are beneficiaries of the trade-conquest continuum.

Their role as effective foreman is hampered by their domestic politics. We see this in how unpopular the war in Iran has turned out to be but also in how Zionism no longer has the sway it once did. It remains the dominant ideology of the military-industrial-financial complex, though the average American is not on board anymore.

The pro-Palestinian camp is gaining ground at the grassroots level, even though it has not yet translated its wants into concrete policy. Should the owners of capital in America reach the conclusion that they can no longer control politics there, they will shift their money elsewhere. A new foreman will thus emerge.

Should that happen, I think everything is pointing towards Israel and, by extension, the European Union with its supranational military capacity. But Israel in particular. They are leading the offensive in the Middle East. They serve as a springboard into East Africa and the Indian Ocean. Their influence is already extending to Cyprus, the Balkans, and the Caucasus via Azerbaijan. With more money the imperialists will do to Jerusalem what the Romans did to ancient Byzantium, shifting the political centre of the empire accordingly. Zionism may be discontinued in the process, as the mood shifts from ethnic nationalism to globalism. Though this is beside my point right now.

I will not be surprised at all if the intimate ties between the Mossad and the Five Eyes (intelligence agencies of USA, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand) evolve into other forms of cooperation, such as the British military bases in Cyprus coming under Israeli control in some kind of agreement that is peddled as the removal of the last vestige of colonialism from the island.

My point here is that Israel cannot be treated in isolation as a generic nation-state. The empire is looking for ways to remain relevant in this century as well.

A lot can change, though the overall structure is this one. In conclusion, we have to understand the world as-is in order to know what kind of interventions are possible. If we want to influence a certain outcome, we have to reason about its nature, identify its contributing factors, figure out how best to disrupt them, and act accordingly. I know it is easier to say “I am against THIS” though I also understand that such sentiment is not enough on its own to create actionable alternatives.

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