Canadian geologist David Brooks estimated that a single average cubic mile of the Earth’s crust contains a billion tons of aluminum (from bauxite), more than 500 million tons of iron, a million tons of zinc and 600,000 tons of copper. There are 57 million such square miles of Earth’s land surface and almost triple that area under the surface of the oceans. Of course, only a tiny fraction of metals in the Earth’s crust is economically recoverable with today’s technology. Nevertheless, the Earth’s supply of raw materials is finite, but vast. But aren’t we running out of hydrocarbon energy? In 1977, President Jimmy Carter told the nation, “World consumption of oil is still going up. If it were possible to keep it rising during the 1970s and 1980s we could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.” Mr. Carter and his advisers were wrong. Petroleum engineers changed the world with the technological advances of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. U.S. daily oil production more than doubled from 5 million barrels in 2008 to more than 12 million barrels today. U.S. natural gas production also doubled over the last decade. From 1980-2017 world petroleum production increased more than 50 percent. But world crude oil reserves increased 150 percent, from 27 years of supply to 46 years of supply at higher production rates. The same doomsayers that continue to forecast resource depletion were certain we had reached peak oil a decade ago. Today, humanity has the greatest abundance of resources in history. Human ingenuity determines resource availability, not the amount of fruit on a tree or the number of rocks on the ground. Driven by advancing human technology, for all practical purposes, the Earth’s resources will never run out.

Global production of industrial metals soared from 1960-2014. Annual production levels were up: aluminum (996 percent), copper (417 percent), iron ore (531 percent), lead (343 percent), nickel (455 percent), tin (66 percent), and zinc (348 percent). At the same time, the World Bank industrial-metal real price index of these seven metals was flat, down a little more than 1 percent by 2015. World reserves of copper, iron ore, lead and zinc stand near all-time highs. Prices are not rising as predicted by resource-depletion pessimists. “Natural resources” is a misleading label. The term “natural resources” conveys the naive idea that food, energy or materials can merely be plucked from a tree or gathered from a field or stream. Raw materials are natural, but resources are created by humans from raw materials. Consider the miracle of copper refining. Rock containing copper is fragmented by explosions and then loaded onto huge trucks with 240-ton capacity. Each ton of rock contains only 13 pounds of copper. The copper ore then goes through a series of milling machines that grind the rock down to a fine powder. Next, the powder goes through a flotation cell, where the copper floats to the top of a solution and is skimmed off, producing 28 percent copper concentrate. Three different furnaces come next, smelting the metal into 98 percent copper. Finally, electrolysis is used in a half-mile-long factory to produce ingots that are 99.99 percent copper. Advancing human technology continues to produce high-quality copper from ores of declining copper concentration. But aren’t we running out of raw materials to make copper metal and other resources? Most people don’t realize the vast quantity of raw materials available on our planet.

The World Wildlife Fund(WWF), the United Nations and universities continue to warn that modern society is rapidly depleting our natural resources. But instead, trends show that for all practical purposes, Earth’s resources will never run out. The WWF proclaimed Aug. 1 this year as Earth Overshoot Day, where society will have used “more natural resources than the planet is able to produce in a 12-month period.” The WWF estimates that Overshoot Day for the United States occurred already in March, warning that the United States is using four times its share of sustainable global resources. Overshoot Day is a continuation of the long-running ideology that humans are consuming too much of Earth’s resources. UK Environment Secretary Margaret Beckett pointed out in 2006, “It is a stark and arresting fact that, since the middle of the 20th century, humankind has consumed more natural resources than in all previous human history.” Price trends are usually a good indicator of resource scarcity. The World Bank maintains a world commodity price database of 41 commodities from 1960 to present. Inflation-adjusted trends show that from 1960-2015, food prices have declined, agricultural raw material and industrial metal prices have been flat, and energy prices, dominated by the price of oil, have increased. Commodity prices fluctuate widely from decade to decade, but we don’t see a rising price trend indicating resource exhaustion. The 1972 international best-selling book “Limits to Growth” predicted humanity would run out of aluminum by 2027, copper by 2020, gold by 2001, lead by 2036, mercury by 2013, silver by 2014, and zinc by 2022. But today, none of these metals is in historically short supply.

It’s a simple question to ask: Do we have a vital national interest in preventing our self-declared enemies from acquiring deliverable nuclear weapons? It’s not been a simple question to answer: President Obama struck a deal that conceded a nuclear weapons capability to Iran’s rulers in exchange for their promise to reach that goal more slowly. Mr. Obama’s policy toward North Korea, known as “strategic patience,” rested on a similar premise: That Pyongyang would not develop the means to annihilate American cities so long as he was in the White House. Such policies are defensible ? if you subscribe to the theory that despots inevitably moderate over time, and that such moderation can be accelerated by showing them respect and addressing their grievances. I am unaware of evidence or experience in support of that theory. President Trump seems to recognize that therapeutic diplomacy, with some attempted bribes mixed in, has proved inadequate. In a major speech last month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo vowed that the U.S. would exert “unprecedented” economic pressure on Tehran’s theocrats. Iran’s “supreme leader” may settle for less ? but only if he is convinced that their regimes are in imminent danger of collapse. Finally, a credible threat of force must be implicit. Such policies, if implemented and enforced with iron determination, can push the regime that rule Iran to the brink. At that point, it may consider making meaningful changes ? not because it want to better the lives of their people, and certainly not because it aspire to become members in good standing of the “international community.” It will change for one reason only: To survive.

Satellites are tracking movement around known enrichment facilities, and diplomats are hanging on every new Iranian official announcement. Meanwhile, while everyone is distracted and watching the wrong cup we may be ignoring some very obvious and very disturbing factors. The Iranians already have a very robust and very advanced ballistic-missile program capable of carrying nuclear weapons. It is operational and tested. All they need is a functioning weapon to pair with it. The North Koreans already have nuclear weapons and are reportedly building more. According to The Wall Street Journal, in fact, the North Koreans may have added a dozen new atomic bombs to their arsenal within the last year. The Iranians and the North Koreans have a long-standing liaison, and there have been reports for years of Iranians in North Korea observing nuclear tests as they took place. As in the case of the Mercedes limousines outlined above, both the Iranians and the North Koreans have the capacity to move items of large size in violation of sanctions and without being detected. What all this means is that while we are all obsessed with Iranian efforts to build from scratch their own nuclear weapons we may completely misunderstand their intentions. They may simply purchase from the North Koreans a handful of nuclear weapons, bring them to Iran, mate them with existing ballistic missile systems and go virtually overnight from wanting nuclear weapons to being a full-fledged nuclear power capable of destroying Tel Aviv, Riyadh and a host of other capitals. Decades ago in that market in Malaysia I watched my father lose the equivalent of $20 in a shell game. We may be on the brink of losing much, much more in this one.

If you want to see the modern-day masters of the shell game you probably should look in Pyongyang and Tehran, and to understand why you should consider for a moment the case of Kim Jong-un’s limousines. A recent report by the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS) and The New York Times indicates that North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un recently took possession of two top of the line Mercedes-Maybach S600 limousines. The vehicles, the world’s finest luxury vehicles, should never have been able to make it through sanctions and find their way to the Hermit Kingdom. “High-end luxury goods share key features with dual-use goods for North Korea’s weapons program: they are scarce, specialized products with high monetary value and great symbolic importance for the Kim regime,” the executive summary for C4ADS’ report explains. The similarity does not end with their value to the Kim regime. These vehicles made it to North Korea via precisely the kind of sanctions busting smuggling networks that both North Korea and Iran use to contain to obtain and sell critical items. It is merely an illustration of the robust, complex, worldwide nature of North Korean smuggling networks. The Iranians maintain their own such networks as well, and they are every bit as intricate and effective. Now let’s consider the shell game. Tehran is making noises about restarting all sorts of aspects of its nuclear program. Everyone from Washington to Tel Aviv is hastening to calculate how quickly the Iranians might be able to enrich sufficient uranium for nuclear weapons and then incorporate that uranium into a functioning device.

For all the talk of America’s decline, the United States offers the world one product that no country seems able to replicate ? universally accepted money. If a multinational needs cash to drill for oil in Nigeria or rich Indians want to import BMWs, the dollar is often the currency contracted for payment. Central banks around the world must hold major foreign currencies ? dollars, euros, yen and so forth ? to back up their fiat money. As New York offers a deep, sophisticated and reliable capital market, and traders can buy virtually anything in America, central banks must hold dollars above all other major currencies to be taken seriously by private investors. The dollar accounts for 63 percent of central bank holdings, followed by the euro at 20, even though the U.S. economy is smaller than Euroland. The dollar has gained an outsized role for the same reason English is increasingly the global language. In trade as on the internet, it is easier to have a common denominator ? America’s currency and mother tongue. Overall, about 40 percent of imports worldwide are invoiced in dollars even though the United States accounts for only about one-tenth of global sales. Foreign multinationals and trading houses store hordes of dollars to conduct business and hedge risk. Foreign banks take dollar deposits, pay interest on those in dollars and offer dollar loans. Foreign governments and businesses issue dollar-denominated bonds and virtually all of this is electronic, much of it unregulated and most importantly, the result of private-sector choice. The fact is no other currency has the global utility and supporting infrastructure of the greenback.

Surprisingly, the president this week put off the levies on about half of those goods until Dec. 15. Unsurprisingly, Mr. Xi has not reciprocated by honoring his pledge to purchase a “tremendous amount” of American farm products. Global markets have shuddered under the impact of the world’s two largest economies facing off for the mother of all trade wars. Adding to international anxiety, Hong Kong is on tenterhooks as the Chinese military dragon is poised to thunder into the city to quell two months of anti-authoritarian protests. Furthermore, the U.S. intends to deploy intermediate-range missiles in the Asia-Pacific region on behalf of China’s nervous neighbors and in disregard of Beijing’s wishes. Trouble begets trouble, it is said, and North Korea’s dictator has chosen just such a time to resume his nuclear missile program with a series of short-range flights. More than tests, Mr. Kim said the launches signified “an occasion to send an adequate warning to the joint military drill now underway by the U.S. and South Korean authorities,” according to North Korean state media. It was hardly more than a month ago when Mr. Trump shared grins with his North Korean counterpart as the two met at the Korea Demilitarized Zone. The stepped-up missile launches may not drive a stake through the heart of hope, but they necessarily temper expectations for success. When China speaks, North Korea listens. After remaining cloistered within the confines of his “hermit kingdom” for the first seven years of his reign, Mr. Kim has traveled to China four times since 2018 for talks with Mr. Xi. It is undeniable that Mr. Trump is encountering stiffening headwinds blowing out of the Far East.

President Trump assures Americans regularly that he has a “great relationship” with an array of world figures, among them Xi Jinping of China and Kim Jong-un of North Korea. It’s comforting to hear. It would be more gratifying, though, to see these relationships bear fruit. Try as he might, the president has been stymied in his efforts to seal crucial deals with his Asian counterparts. Mr. Trump’s rapport with the two Far East rainmakers has evidently ebbed from chummy to chilly. Mr. Xi and Mr. Trump have parried over China’s campaign to use any means possible, including theft of intellectual property estimated to be worth between $225 billion and $600 billion annually, to surpass the U.S. as the world’s top economic power. Behind his kindly countenance, though, Mr. Xi has sharpened his own resolve to resist any U.S. definition of fair trade. Accustomed to special treatment from Washington on issues of trade, Mr. Xi couldn’t have foreseen Mr. Trump’s dogged adherence to an “America first” economic policy. When the United States ended the status quo by announcing 25 percent tariffs on Chinese goods worth $50 billion in June 2018, China’s president naturally retaliated with a similar penalty on $34 billion worth of U.S. imports. Continuing failure this year to reach accommodation has resulted in additional U.S. tariffs on new Chinese products worth $200 billion and Beijing has returned the disfavor with duties on another $60 billion worth of American exports. Then Mr. Trump announced that 10 percent tariffs on a remaining $300 billion worth of Chinese goods, which he had suspended during the G-20 meeting in June, would take effect on Sept. 1 unless a deal was reached.

Only yesterday, Turkey was considered a candidate for membership in the European Union, a reliable friend of the West. Turkey was reasonably modern, forward looking, and Western oriented. Turkey was already a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and membership in the EU would only cement its alliance with the West. Alas, over the past several years Turkey has devolved from something unique to something close to just another depressing redoubt of Middle Eastern despotism. Recep Tayyip Erdogan bears much of the blame and responsibility for such a sorry state of affairs, and for Turkey’s growing estrangement from the Western world that it once looked to for guidance. Turkey only yesterday enjoyed strong relations with Israel. It was the first Muslim-majority country to establish diplomatic relations with the Jewish state, and for decades Turkey and Israel enjoyed not only strong diplomatic ties, but economic and military relations as well. But Mr. Erdogan, as befits his Islamist outlook, has shifted Turkey’s relations with Israel to one of hostility. Attacking Israel is a convenient diversion from pressing problems at home. The Turkish lira hit a record low last week, and its value has declined by about 20 percent so far this year, impoverishing Turks. Both public and private sectors are heavily indebted, which economists blame for the failing currency. Right out of a Middle Eastern strongman’s playbook, Mr. Erdogan has grown increasingly repressive at home. About 40,000 teachers were fired after a failed coup attempt. Nearly 130,000 Turks in the public and private sectors were sacked over accusations of ties to the Gulenist movement, which Mr. Erdogan blames for the failed attempt to remove him. 30