🌐Strategy note #5: Trump presidency 2.0, some geopolitical scenario building with AI

A few hours spent parsing signal out of the noise

Firstly a warm welcome to all new Memia subscribers who have joined this week following Kiwi film critic

Kate Rodger

’s generous recommendation from her new Substack: The Projector with Kate Rodger. I hope the audience crossover between film reviews and frontier-AI-stream-of-consciousness provides some synergy for you… if not, please feel free to unsubscribe at any time, our inboxes are full enough as they are…!

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📣Trump 2.0 - parsing signal from the noise

Like many of us, I’ve been trying to get my head around the potential impacts of the Donald Trump Presidency V2.0 for the world outside the US. The recent election result can be seen mostly as the outcome of zero-sum, polarised, emotionally-charged US domestic politics (and a surreal electoral college voting system) — but which now threatens to warp the global “rules based” international landscape beyond recognition.

And sensemaking is hard. Even more than usual, mainstream media coverage of US politics is just limbic-hijacking babble… (I’m not alone in suspecting this is partly by design…). It’s also completely US-centric in its focus, with only a few nods here and there to international ripple effects.

Personally I’m pretty sanguine about it all. As I wrote in Purple States of America in this week’s newsletter, I think those of us living outside the US (and hence definitely *not* blue-pilled by US exceptionalism…) can afford to take a dispassionate external observer posture for now:

“… remember the first Trump Presidency: US foreign policy was incoherent, chaotic, directionless, impulsive, reactive, attention-seeking… a total and utter mess, ultimately weakening the US’ standing with its allies (and rivals) around the world. And the domestic Covid response was Idiocracy-level disastrous. Right now from the outside the US arguably looks more vulnerable than ever to further political disintegration. And, with the US national debt house of cards perpetually threatening to collapse at the next bank failure …. Trump may well rue the day he won the election. China and Russia must be feeling quite comfortable as they survey their chess boards....

The rest of the world can likely afford four more years to wait this one out while the US turns inward on itself… or hopefully pulls through out the other side to a more internationalist stance. It’s a long game.”

But let me try to back that statement up with some deeper thinking. In this post, I’ll walk through my process for using AI tools to build a working scenario-generation model for near-term geopolitical planning and gameplay.

Cutting to the end: here’s the list of 20 model dimensions (“axes of uncertainty”) my AI co-thinkers came up with:

• U.S.-China Economic Decoupling

• European Strategic Autonomy

• Global Trade Architecture

• Taiwan Strait Dynamics

• AI Governance Regime

• Climate Policy Implementation

• Dollar Dominance

• Russia's Strategic Orientation

• Indo-Pacific Alliance Structure

• Middle East Power Balance

• Global Technology Standards

• Democratic Resilience

• Nuclear Proliferation Trajectory

• Pandemic Preparedness Framework

• Critical Resource Competition

• Global Migration Patterns

• Space Governance

• Digital Currency Adoption

• Food Security Architecture

• Social Media Influence

…and here is an example of a scenario quadrant output juxtaposing two of these…:

2X2 quadrant output of AI scenario generation

…and here are more detailed impact descriptions of each quadrant, scoped into my home country of Aotearoa New Zealand:

“What does this mean for New Zealand?” (click to enlarge). (Note: I thnk it gets the AUKUS and Quad narrative wrong…)

US vs China Economic Decoupling X Global Trade Architecture:

“What does this mean for New Zealand?“

As usual, the power, “intelligence“ and speed of these tools impresses me. This scenario generation exercise literally took less than 3 hours… and helped me to quickly get a grip on the strategic landscape to start thinking beyond it. (When I get another few hours I’ll put this together into an online tool for subscribers to use.)

Let’s dive into the process…

🧠Step 1. Understanding the current context

(For background, this post extends my previous methodology from strategy note #2 earlier this year:)

🌐Strategy note #2: Using Claude 3 Opus to accelerate foresight / geopolitical scenario development

As I said above, mainstream media commentary on the US election is undecipherable babble… screamed out on the internet and cable TV by the gigabyte.

(Thankfully) as of very recently we now have early AI agent tools to parse and summarise the “news” for us. In particular, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini each do a reasonable job. Here’s ChatGPT’s prompt/response to capture the zeitgeist:

Prompt:

Summarise the last 2 weeks' developments in US politics, emphasising the 10 key events and commentary which will have a bearing on US international, trade and strategic defense policy.

ChatGPT said: