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buscoquadnary

This is the basic premise of this talk by Petar Zeihan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi_nFz1CJSI&t=2s

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The narrative of "the NATO closet is bare" has been pretty thoroughly debunked:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CmXz8Qd9yw

(I highly recommend Perun's channel for analysis of the Ukraine war)

Also, it's a bit hard to take seriously someone that says "so no jets, no F-35, no battleships". Sure it's a throwaway line but it seems like someone trying to communicate something serious wouldn't refer to literal battleships, which nobody in the world uses anymore. It's not something that Perun would say.

He has a book out I'm reading. Good so far: https://www.audible.com/pd/The-End-of-the-World-Is-Just-the-...

Great book.

I used to work in the Pentagon, and while we never took Zeihan's talks without a grain of salt, directionally he tends to be very accurate. Nations like China which lack a culture of immigration have extremely predictable demographic booms and busts, and Zeihan is spot on with those. He also hits on the reality of how dependent most nations, especially China, are on imports that pass through oceanic shipping lanes they have no ability to control or secure without the US Navy.

To be fair the us navy hasn't completely detached in the way that he expects... Yet. Shipping harassment hasn't appreciably gone up... Yet. It's also possible that cargo ships will arm themselves against pirates, which will increase the cost of shipping but maybe not as much as the most dire predictions.

I suspect the point of "oceanic shipping lanes they have no ability to control or secure without the US Navy" is "shipping lanes they cannot secure FROM the US Navy".

There is no way for a cargo ship to arm itself against submarines.

I think the outcome of the US navy torpedoing civilian ships of a national adversary is highly unlikely, unless 1) we were actually at war with them or 2) they are doing something generally accepted to be illegal -- like Chinese fishing boats turning off transponders and fishing in us territory. or 3) sanctions running

The only way I see the landscape changing meaningfully in the direction you suggest (cargo ships going up against seafarers they are not able to defend themselves from) is if letters of marque were reinstated. At least one proposal has been floated -- and when we all stop laughing about it I grant that it might become a thing

Given today's low cargo crew counts, it isn't crazy to think about the calculus of sinking cargo ships vs fighting an actual war, in order to prove ones seriousness.

Say, because Taiwan was being invaded?

And in the form of a blockade, of course.

But isn't sinking a civilian vessel itself an express path to war? The RMS Lusitania and the US's entry into WW1 spring to mind.

If the nations involved want it to be one, sure. There have been incidents of militaries shooting down passenger jets, which were all but swept under the rug.

This sounds plausible but can you provide examples/links to wiki pages etc?

Off the top of my head:

Korean air lines flight over Russia, us shooting down Iranian jet in the gulf, Russia shooting down Malaysian air over Ukraine, Iran shooting down a Ukrainian jet over itself.

I presume gp means Not swept under the rug in terms of information suppression, swept under the rug in terms of very little diplomatic fallout

Also, the multiple Iranian/Israeli ships that have mysteriously sunk in the last few years.

Makes sense so far, but do you guys have flight numbers/dates/names of Iranian vessels etc?

@throwawaymaths basically answered the question how I would. Also, just to clarify my use of "swept under the rug", my implication is that when it's not politically convenient for the parties to make a big deal out of an incident, they simply choose not to use it as a media prop to push their agenda.

There's a list here that would be a reasonable starting point for any further digging you might wish to do:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_inc...

I'm a fan but he does get a little too blinded by America patriotism. His predictions about other countries start getting too comically apocalyptic to be taken seriously at times.

Well he does get credence for predicting invasion of Ukraine (which was also thought to be comically apocalyptic). Twice. He's been remarkably consistent in calling bad times for china and it's certainly gotten worse over there in the last year.

I think there are a few other things that have lined up, like Sri Lanka collapse being a bellwether for his forecasts.

Do you have a source for his Ukraine invasion claims?

The last time someone mentioned this, they said he'd predicted they'd invade in 2014, which is after they'd invaded and annexed Crimea.

Well, they did invade Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014. I don't know if that was after his prediction, though.

Invasions were early 2014, book with "prediction" was published November 2014.

After I got turned on to Petar Zeihan the first thing I did was went back and watched his older talks, after all plenty of people can make good sounding predictions, first you want to see what he was saying before to see his track record.

I found a talk form 2018 in which he said there are going to be 3 major bush wars of global import, Ukraine-Russia, Iran-Saudi Arabia, and China-Indian Ocean. So far Ukraine has panned out, he also predicted where the political parties are going right now in the US and why they seem so out of whack.

He predicted the Iran-Saudi Arabia conflict thats been going on for decades?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Saudi_Arabia_pr...

He's claiming it will get hot, and less proxied, so that is distinctly something that has not happened yet.

“While ever-shifting economic, political, and military pressure pries the Ukrainian state apart, the Russians will begin ... Once those areas are pacified the Russians will return to Ukraine, “rescuing” those in the Russified east and…”

Source: https://books.google.com/books?id=vn-BAwAAQBAJ&printsec=fron...

EDIT: I had an incomplete copy paste on the link so I corrected it

Yeah, he has been accurate. But he's also been screaming that China is going to collapse within this year, which seems very far fetched.

Do agree with his broad thesis though. America is in a very good spot.

I also predicted the invasion of Ukraine. So did the US intelligence service last summer. So did the state department when trump was trying to extort zelensky over military aid for a hunter Biden investigation. Not a hard prediction to make at all after no one gave a shit about crimea, especially given putins longstanding goal of Soviet reunification.

Pretty much. I think he's too eager to write off certain things to paint a wholly American picture, but he's generally got it right. The China story is not as clear. But the Europe picture is pretty plain. America is gonna eat it's lunch.

I'm not sure we want to (or intend to) eat Europe's lunch - we'd like a fairly strong Europe. But yeah, for now Europe's lunch will be eaten.

Yes I agree on both points

Europe missed the train and train doesn't reverse when missing the station..

Energy and infrastructure are the venes of Europe which clocked and overstretched to the max. Something will need to give and it already begins by small bakeries closing and more to follow..

It wont end well. I don't believe we will have any growth in Europe for the next 3 years.

Who is going to invest in Europe if energy is literally unpredictable and expensive?

Yeah, bakeries are energy intensive. Methane generation from sewage would be one way to (relatively quickly^) replace some of the natural gas that was coming from Russia. And as a side benefit fertilizer could be produced from the same sewage.

^ even so it would probably take a couple of years to get methane generation going at scale.

On the other hand we’ve managed to have bakeries for 1000s of years before most modern energy sources were discovered.

Wood is an option, but it will require a lot of wood to fire Europe's bakeries.

Unless those bakeries can deliver baked goods at similar cost to bakeries using modern energy sources, the problem still stands of the populace having a downward shift in consumption and expectations of their quality of life , which typically has political ramifications.

Are people blaming environmentalists for attacking nuclear energy all these years? France stuck to it, but Germany seems to have bowed to pressure. The lesson is always to dismiss idealists and ideologues in politics.

Half truth, the green parties wanted a replacement, solar and wind.

They only wanted gas as a switch off / switch on power source, you cant do that with nuclear.

Instead, people protested also against wind and solar and we switched to cheap gas from Russia.

Which the green parties didn't want at all..

How does India do in all this? Their software development salaries in tier 1 cities are close to 100k or more. Lots of friends going back .

Pretty poorly on food security. Energy situation won't be great. I would expect india to supplant China as the bogeyman over the next few decades

Wouldn't that be great? America can't seem to function without a bogeyman. The world would be so much a better place if the bogeyman was a democracy like India instead of China or Russia. Shift that Overton window!

My comment largely comes from India looking more authoritarian by the day, not to mention playing both sides of the Ukraine invasion.

They are behaving as expected since they are beholden to Russia for military equipment.

100K USD? That's wild. If you look at the GDP per capita ratios, that's like a dev in the US making $3.3 million

The post you're replying to mentions huge youth unemployment in China, doesn't Zeihan think China will collapse because there won't be enough workers? I was considering reading Zeihan's recent book but he comes off as kind of a fraud.

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