Taiwan has dropped the fiction that its Kuomintang Party will one day return to the mainland and overthrow the Communists. Many Taiwanese no longer consider Taiwan to be Chinese at all; they want to declare independence from China, That is unacceptable to Beijing, which threatens that a declaration of Taiwanese independence will effectively cross a red line requiring military action to bring Taiwan back into the fold. At the present time, a majority of people both on the mainland and on Taiwan favor the status quo. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) views Taiwan as a rogue province that will eventually see the light while the Taiwanese still call themselves the Republic of China; but time marches on. An increasing percentage of young people of all ethnic backgrounds born on Taiwan view themselves as Taiwanese and ague that Taiwan has only been ruled by China for about two centuries in its recorded history. A declaration of Taiwanese independence would put the United States into a quandary. Red China remains an often-repressive autocracy and Taiwan is a free ? if rowdy ? democracy. Any U.S. president who allows Mainland China to overrun Taiwan would be accused of Munich-like appeasement even though we have no formal bilateral defense treaty with Taiwan. The United States has a very real national interest in working toward a peaceful compromise. Without American help, Taiwan would go under through sheer numbers alone; but as previously discussed, sovereignty issues in that region have led to very nasty past conflicts. A U.S.-China war would be disastrous to the world’s economy ? not just ours and China’s. Taiwan will not accept Hong Kong-like status because Hong Kong was forced to accept a Beijing-appointed executive branch.

China and the United States have very few reasons to go to war. The ideological differences of the Cold War are over and the two nations share no common borders to dispute. But both are now superpowers, and each has global interests that have the potential to cause military confrontation. We have economic differences, and China is to blame for most of them due to its predatory trade practices and cavalier attitude toward intellectual property. However, neither of these is likely to result in a shooting war. The primary cause for conflict in East Asia and the Pacific Rim has always been issues of sovereignty, and there are two such problems that could cause a Sino-American conflict: Freedom of navigation (FON) in the South China Sea and Taiwan. China’s claim to territorial sovereignty over areas of the South China Sea blatantly violates international agreements on freedom of the sea, and its claims do not impact the United States alone. The Philippines, Japan and Vietnam all dispute islands and shoals that China claims as its own. Our aggressive maneuvers in the South China Sea to ensure FON against Chinese claims of sovereignty have a very real possibility of causing a shooting incident either by accident or by provocation. If that happens, we will be on the side of the angels and international law. It is unlikely that such an incident will result in a major regional conflict, at least in the near term. Taiwan is another matter entirely. During the Cold War before President Nixon’s opening to China, Taiwan was an easy issue for the United States. The Red Chinese were godless Communists and the Nationalists on Taiwan were the good guys who were still considered to be the legitimate government of China by the United States. Things are different and far more complicated today.

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.