Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "The Koreans Are Coming to the Ukraine War || Peter Zeihan" video.

AUSTRALIAN HERE - Please do not forget where South Korea gets all of the raw materials they need to make stuff. ALL of their iron ore, coking coal, alumina, nickel, copper comes form other places and the place they get most of it from is Australia. HOWEVER almost all of the raw materials Australia exports to South Korea (and Japan) especially iron ore comes out of Australia's WEST and it goes via the South China Sea. A few things like coking coal and food comes out of Australia's East Coast. So if the Chinese get "upitty" and block access to the South China Sea via their bases in the Spratly's then all that stuff has to get to South Kore via another route and that can get complex because some of the routes that might seem possible by looking at google maps are not viable because the water is too shallow and there's reefs and ships with 80,000tons of iron ores are not that manoeuvrable.
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@elektrotehnik94 I'll pay that.
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@FrikInCasualMode Your 100% right which is why those reefs & islands are of such significance.
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@robertblue3795 SORRY BUT YOU ARE WRONG and I only know because I have worked in the Australian mining industry constructing new mines. Coal is not simply black stuff that comes out of the ground. Like all minerals there are grades. For starters there's thermal and metallurgical coal AND THEN there's grades within those grades. Coking coal is graded on its lack of impurities and calorific value (how hot it burns). Australia's coking coal is not only cleaner than Canadian coal but also has a significantly higher calorific value. The only other coal that is of similar grade comes from New Zealand but they can't match us in volume. There's some high end coking coal available in other places but they are small deposits and none of them come close to Australia's reserves. In terms of just coal as in all types combined. YES there are places like China and Russia with massive reserves but most are lower grades. Indonesia despite being small has massive reserves of coal BUT those reserves are mostly thermal coal. Basically you CANNOT just switch the Japanese and South Koreans over onto Canadian Coking coal as its the wrong grade. We didn't realise this until until the late 90s when the Japanese threatened to switch to Canadian Coking coal which they did at every negotiation. Eventually we told them we'd had had enough of those threats and if they wanted to use Canadian Coal then they could go use and F--CKING use it. When they backed down we found out their steel mills were set up to take advantage of Australian coal and could not use Canadian coal. The South Koreans followed suit. FYI - Most Australians are not aware of any of this. I only know from working in the mining industry.
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Great point and 100% accurate, but the Cubans were not alone. As an Australian I can tell you that the Brits used Australians, Canadians, Scotts, new Zealanders and any other "colonials" they could throw into a fight for that last 100+ years. And lets not forget the Americans did the same in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
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@Crusde Your spot on, and there's a lot of people here who have been warning for years that we had/have become too dependent on exporting raw materials to China. if the Chinese property market crashes and with it the Chinese construction industry then Australia is screwed. But if the CCP put some sort of restriction or blockade at the southern end of the South China sea then it would be major league chaos for Australia, Japan, South Korea and a several others.
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@LRRPFco52 Good point - Peter has explained that numerous times. They just don't have the range. What I am talking about is the ability of the PLN to block the southern part of the South China Sea where there's the sea lane between Vietnam and the Philippines. Go look at where the Spratly Islands are.
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@Darth.Augustus EXACTLY - go have an actual look at where the Spratly's are on a map. They are no where near China but they make blocking the South China Sea a real possibility.
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@mikeryan2802 Thumbs up
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@brianniegemann4788 What trade are you talking about? We trade with SOUTH Korea for raw materials to them and finished goods back. As far as I know we DO NOT trade much at all with North Korea. There was a case a few years ago when a North Korean cargo ship was caught dropping boxes of drugs in our waters for our criminal gangs. We are one of the very nations anywhere with a North Korean embassy. I only know about that because it came up when the drug ship was caught. As far as I know that's about it.
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@brianniegemann4788 No prob - easy mistake.
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@davidbrown8536 Yeah - so what part is confusing to you?
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@TorontoSaurusEx I agree on parts of that. Russia is one of the super rich nations in terms of resources, but you have to look at which resources they have and don't have. Australia is far richer in iron ore and Uranium but Russia is richer in Nickel, Titanium and other things while Chile is the richest in Copper and also has huge amounts of Lithium. The Cheaper energy is dependent on if you can either sell it or use it. I think the mega untapped opportunity is Russia linking its main gas reserves into China. As an engineer I know that every coal fired power station the Chinese have can be switched to Russian Gas. That would be massive for the world because it would dramatically reduce global emissions and it COULD rescue Russia from financial collapse and lower those tensions As far as "poking the bear" I'll agree that the Americans need to stop aggravating people like they do. Everyone who understands what happened knows it was the Americans who blew up Nordstream, but then the Chinese and Russians also do stupid stuff. On AUKUS I'll simply tell you to WAKE UP. The simple fact is that Western technology OVERALL is more advanced that anything the Russians, Chinese and North Koreans have. If it really broke out in the South China Sea MOST of the Chinese Navy would be gone within 48-72 hours. The American Submarines are simply that much better than anything the Chinese have and the Russians (who do have excellent subs) just don't have enough. North Korea is a joke. It has lots of soldiers, lots of guns, lots of cannons but so little food that they can barely feed their people. On the world front the Israelis scare me more than everyone else combined. They are lead by a maniac who started a war so he could avoid facing court and going to jail. The Egyptians and others warned them that Hamas was ready to do something and they either didn't listen or just let it happen. Either way that maniac got his war and now wants to spread it. That's way worse than anything else because the chances it could erupt are so much higher.
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