Tag: geopolitics

For context, I highlighted so much of the book that Kindle stopped storing my highlights, so I could only share a subset below.

The book – and his other writings, he’s quite prolific – is well worth reading if you’re into geopolitics and global trade. At the very least it’ll challenge some of your assumptions and viewpoints.

A small selection of highlights below:

• Americans are panic-prone. Every country has a series of early experiences that shape the national mindset. For the Americans it was century-long pioneer era: for the cost of a used car in today’s dollars, Americans could Conestoga the family out to the Midwest, break ground, and within six months be exporting grain for hard currency. It was the greatest cultural and economic expansion in human history, and it taught Americans that things will get better every single year.
• Kids […] don’t factor economically in the modern age. They used to serve as free labor on farms, but once most populations relocated into urban environments children essentially transformed into luxury goods. Think of them as more expensive Shih Tzus.
• As the American economy evolves into a dynamic, service-oriented system, as careers give way to jobs, jobs give way to part-time work, and as part-time work gives way to hobbies that happen to generate income, the Yers are actually fairly well-prepared socially, politically, and psychologically for the new era.
• GenX is roughly one-fifth smaller than the Boomers —considering that GenX is younger, they should be one-quarter bigger —an imbalance so extreme that GenX will not outnumber the Boomers until most of the Xers are in their sixties.
• Like most Americans I wasn’t really sure why the Americans had walked away from the Cold War without so much as the memory of a limp while Russia was a dismembered mess. Even today Americans flinch more visibly when they think of Vietnam than they do when they think of Russia, a country that still possesses the nuclear wherewithal to end American existence.
• the vast swathes of internal Chinese territories are physically isolated and thus painfully poor. Adding political complications to the mix, most of China’s minority groups live in the interior and most of them are not exactly thrilled to be living in the People’s Republic. The interior is home to the remaining 600 million Chinese.
• China has a local fuel—brown coal—and has it in abundance. Consequently, in most of the past 20 years, China has added more coal-burning capacity than most of the rest of the world combined despite lip service to international climate goals and rising domestic dissatisfaction with pollution levels.
• NAFTA may have its faults, but its economic success in Mexico has made net Mexican migration to the U.S. negative for a decade because it gives Mexicans jobs. Smash the agreements that employ Mexicans, and two results among many will be vast increases in drug flows and illegal migration as Mexicans find it harder to find a 9-to-5.
• In about a decade, instead of living in a world where the Americans are the most powerful force for global stability, they are likely to be the most powerful force for global instability.
• Canada knows the United States intimately, while the United States barely registers what’s going on north of its border. (The only country that even comes close to studying the United States as intently is Israel)
• Canada’s riven geography means every Canadian province trades more with the United States than with the rest of Canada
• Chinese People universally despise North Korea, and would drop NK in a moment if Beijing would simply give it more than a second thought.   However, the fear China uses again and again is simple;  Let North Korea fall and refugees will flood across.  Ok. Fair enough.  However, the unspoken fear is that American combat divisions will simply race up to the border and dig in
• With their rich cultural history, the Iranians consider themselves not only the natural leaders of the region, but also the peak of the human experience. In contrast, the Saudis are a Bedouin family that just happened to cut a deal with the British at the right time and have yet to celebrate their centenary celebration. Yet they command the world’s largest oil industry, wield power that is global in scope, and are the custodians of the Holy Cities.
• Desert life is hard, and maintaining a social structure in the desert is harder still. One of the many ways in which the Saud clan coped was the adoption of an ultra-strict version of Islam, which glorified combat and tightly regulated personal freedoms. Locals call it Salafist Islam while many outsiders know it as Wahhabism, referring to the movement’s founder, one Sheikh Ibn Abdul Wahhab.
• Unsurprisingly, Japan now suffers under the economic weight of supporting the world’s oldest population: Japanese labor costs—the highest in Asia and among the highest in the world—nudge up a bit higher every year and the country now purchases more diapers for adults than for children. Combined, these intermingled crises have manifested as seven recessions in under 25 years.
• The Indian geography is a complex one, riddled with river valleys, deserts, plains, mountains, hills, swamp, and a mix of coastline styles. But one feature always stands out: the Ganges Basin. Set in the oddity of a temperate zone that knows no true winter, the plain’s outstanding fertility and multiple potential growing seasons generates the largest volume of calories per acre per year of anywhere in the world. However, the Ganges itself is not navigable. The result is fantastically high rates of population growth, but fantastically low capital generation per capita. Massive populations, but crushing poverty.
• The United States is a maritime nation. Its most strategically relevant military arm is its Navy. The core of American strategic doctrine has always been about controlling the oceans and using that control to shape global events to its liking.
• local labor forces are very attractive because they are higher skilled than their price point would suggest—particularly in Vietnam, which boasts that magic mix of modern urban centers like Ho Chi Minh City and rural zones combined with a far-above-global-average educational standards.
• …the American retrenchment is but one of three massive shifts in the global the order. The second is the rapid greying of the entire global population. Fewer people of working age translates directly into anemic, decaying economies — enervating global trade just as the Americans stop guaranteeing it. Third and finally, the American shale revolution has changed the mechanics — if not yet the mood — of how the Americans interact with the energy sector.
• The end of American dependence upon extra-continental energy sources does more than sever the largest of the remaining ties that bind America’s fate to the wider world, it sets into motion a veritable cavalcade of trends: the re-industrialization of the United States, the accelerated breakdown of the global order, and a series of wide-ranging military conflicts that will shape the next two decades.
• Without petroleum there would not be a meaningful agricultural industry — and in that I mean everything from the growing of crops to the harvesting of crops to the transport of foodstuffs from farm to table.
• In 1920 Congress passed the Jones Act, which barred any ship from plying the American waterways that was not American-built, American-owned, American-captained, and American-crewed.
• The American system, with the Greater Midwest and Mississippi network at its core, is not only the richest piece of territory in the world, it also is the single-most secure.
• You can lay most of the financial bubbles (and busts) of the past two decades at the Boomers’ feet — everything from dot-com to Enron to subprime to Brazil, Russia, India, and China — all were only possible because the Boomers were ignoring risk in the quest for that extra 1% of yield.
• The Japanese economic breakdown of 1990 wasn’t demographic in origin, but Japan has since aged past the point that it will again be a consumption-led economy. Ever.
• As soon as 2022, Germany, Belgium, Greece, Austria, and Italy will not be past just the point of not just demographic recovery — they and more have already crossed that threshold — but financial and economic recovery as well.
• Japan, Korea, and Taiwan has never covered more than a tiny percentage (typically less than 1%) of their energy needs.
• Since the 1990s television power demand is down by 35% despite massive increases in quality and size. Dishwashers use 40% less electricity, air conditioners 50% less, refrigerators 60%.
• …it isn’t just the United States that is dipping into nativism. Japan is amending its constitution to make it easier to bomb people. China is crowning a new Mao. Britain voted itself out of the European Union. The Turkish president’s leadership makes Donald Trump seem shy by comparison, Poland’s government exudes the worst characteristics of Pope Innocent III and Kanye.
• Russian security only comes from conquering everyone nearby in order to establish buffers around the Russian core.
• the Russians often have to find ways to motivate their conquered populations — or more to the point, to intimidate their subjects into accepting the role the Russians demand of them. The Russians do this with a deep, intrusive, and cruel intelligence service. Under Lenin it was the Cheka, under Stalin the NVBD, and Brezhnev the KGB, after the Cold War the FSB, and now it’s the FSB backed up with the social-monitoring techniques Edward Snowden brought with him from the American NSA.