Comments by "MarcosElMalo2" (@MarcosElMalo2) on "Zeihan on Geopolitics"
channel.
-
215
-
68
-
67
-
59
-
46
-
43
-
36
-
35
-
34
-
31
-
Most places accept the local currency. Perhaps you’ve only been to tourist destinations, where it’s more common that businesses accept dollars. If you want to use dollars, you generally have to exchange them for the local currency. I live in a tourist town, so some but not all businesses accept dollars, usually at a terrible exchange rate. In the next town over, they do not accept dollars, rupees, yuan, rubles, yen, pound sterling, or euros.
You might have a valid point but you’re not making it very well with your poor example. You sound like a person with some limited experiences outside the U.S. extrapolating from that limited experience.
Perhaps what you are saying holds true in countries with very unstable currencies, suffering from inflation, and/or some other need for dollars.
28
-
It’s hard to tell exactly what your understanding is about U.S. economic policy in relation to global geopolitics, but if you’re worried about trade deficits, you’re barking up the wrong tree and you do not understand the economic basis of our policies.
To oversimplify, trade deficits are not owed by the U.S., they are owed by individual companies. These deficits are driven by consumer demand, as Pete points out. That demand is driven by demographics. However, those trade imbalances benefit our country, both in terms of global stability and in terms of powering our economy. The trade imbalances are part of the cement that make the U.S. dollar the base currency of global trade, and this creates a stability that benefits us.
It’s the keystone of U.S. “hegemony” because it’s the keystone of global trade that benefits the greatest number of people worldwide, and those material benefits go towards those countries with internal stability that follow the international rules based order, i.e Western Democracies. This is a powerful motivation for countries to move towards capitalistic democracy. (I put “hegemony” in quotes because it’s a special kind of economic hegemony. It’s not imperialism nor colonialism as the socialists would have you believe, but clear thinking was never their strong suit.)
That said, you are not entirely wrong. You’ve arrived at the right conclusion from faulty reasoning. The re-ordering of the world economic system is because of the change in demographics. The world economic system is based on growth and we’ve reached the limits of that growth.
Pete frames this as the problem but I think that’s the wrong way to think about it. Problems can be solved. Instead it’s better to think about the global changes in demographics as the new conditions, conditions to which we must adapt. And part of that adaptation is global economic retraction and the slow unwinding of U.S. “hegemony”.
We have to think about capitalism/globalism as a vehicle. It’s a vehicle that has served a purpose in our moving forward. Now road conditions have changed and we must adapt that vehicle to a bumpier road. The system of the world must change to meet the new conditions of declining economic growth, stagnation, or even economic decline.
Keyword to the above is “system”. We must think in terms of systems and systems of systems. If we don’t, we will be totally unprepared to meet the future.
25
-
22
-
19
-
18
-
18
-
17
-
16
-
15
-
15
-
14
-
14
-
14
-
13
-
13
-
I grew up with Polish jokes. They were much more common than jokes about other ethnicities when I was very young (I’m talking about those jokes that can be repurposed for any ethnicity). How many Poles does it take to screw in a lightbulb? How do you confuse a Pole? (Put him in a round room and tell him there’s a nickel in the corner.) You know, the really corny kids’ jokes. The odd thing was, I didn’t know any Polacks. Or I didn’t know any kids that were Polish in my multi-ethnic middle class neighborhood, as far as I knew.
My little brother’s best friend had the last name Kalin. Mike was half Mexican, but I never made the connection that his dad was Polish. He was just American. Mike was just American. His dad went on to become a Federal Judge (which doesn’t exactly fit the stereotype of the dumb Pollack).
Fast forward a few years. My own dad’s career had advanced, we were upper middle class and we had moved to a slightly more prosperous neighborhood. Still tract houses, but bigger ones with bigger yards. My family knew another family socially a few years later, the Sobieskis. The dad was also in the legal field. They were quite educated and cultured, more than anyone in my family was. (It turned out they were related to minor Polish aristocracy, but I didn’t learn if this until much later.)
But the point is that, like the Kalins, the Sobieskis were Americans. They were the children and grandchildren of immigrants, as I was. Forty or fifty years ago, when I was a kid, no one needed to point out how hard working an ethnic group was, or whether they were family oriented. It was just assumed that was so. Everyone wanted to get ahead, and everyone wanted to prepare their children to get ahead. It was understood that mostly we would get ahead with slow progress.
Oh, one detail I missed. People did sometimes identify as “hyphenates”. Japanese-American, Irish-American, Afroamerican, Mexican-American, Polish-American. I don’t think anyone on my street got angry about people remembering where they came from, although you might hear from elsewhere, “Why can’t you just be Americans?” I guess this line of thought came from people who came from nowhere and wanted everyone to be like them.
12
-
12
-
11
-
11
-
11
-
10
-
10
-
10
-
10
-
9
-
Pete is getting a bit too far out of his lane when he makes military assessments. It is true that Ukraine faces big challenges throughout the coming year, but it’s not true that Russia can win by grinding down Ukraine forces. This isn’t Russia’s war to lose. Russia has already lost. The question is really how quickly can Ukraine win and recover its sovereign territory. No one expected a Ukraine offensive before the muddy Spring Thaw, no one expects it during the thaw. Pete has a grasp of some basic operational concepts, like the weather, but glosses over others.
It is true that Russia can and is throwing more bodies into the conflict, and it is true that “quantity has a quality of its own” as Stalin is reputed to have said. But it matters how and where those numbers are applied. It matters how motivated they are. It matters how they are supplied.
So far, Russia’s superior numbers have made little progress over the past six months. Kilometers have come at the cost of tens of thousands of Russian soldiers, until entire battalions have been destroyed in offensive operations. At the same time, Ukraine has been rotating its defensive forces and maintaining unit cohesion.
When Pete implies that Russia has an endless supply of soldiers and that the quantity of soldiers alone will determine the outcome, he is quite frankly incorrect. Frankly, it is surprising that he underestimates other important factors, such as logistics, home field advantage, and motivation/morale. Pete is trying to be realistic, but I think his appraisal is overly pessimistic.
9
-
@Robert-uo6qi They have shipping capacity in the Sea of Azov. The Kerch Bridge wasn’t destroyed, only damaged. The constrained supply situation has certainly helped with the siege of Kherson, but the siege of Crimea is going to be different.
Forget for a moment about logistics. The Crimean Peninsula is going to be a very tough nut to crack. I think it will be the last of the Ukrainian territories the Russians will be forced to leave. It is much more defensible than Kherson, and there are a lot more ways to resupply it.
Which brings us back to the logistics. You might have noticed that Kherson has not been completely cut off. However, the supply lines have been CONSTRAINED to a sufficient degree that the Russian units have been slowly starved of supplies. This is what made their position untenable.
Crimea is not only more defensible geographically, it is also more easily suppliable. The supply lines are more difficult to choke. In a nutshell, the Russians can hold out in Crimea for a lot longer than many people seem to think.
The final assault is going to cost a lot of Ukrainian lives. It should be up to the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian government if they want to spend those lives and extend the war another year or two or more to retake Crimea. It might offend our sense of justice if the Ukrainians decide to trade Ukraine for peace, but ultimately it’s their call, not ours. On the other hand, if they decide to go for it, we should continue to offer our support.
9
-
@ipredictariot6371 It’s not so much whether the threat level was overestimated, it was the response to the threat that should be examined and criticized. The 9/11 attacks occurred because we underestimated the threat. After the attack there was a scramble to get a correct assessment. A truly accurate assessment of all possible threats is impossible (or at least very very difficult) because of the asymmetric nature of the conflict. The Bush defense/security/intelligence people took the “safer” course of overestimating the level of threat. Is this a huge error? I don’t know, but it did lead to what was a series of fatal errors involving the response to this overestimated threat.
It was decided that the response to this estimated level of threat should be the occupation of a country in the Middle East. Iraq was selected for reasons of expedience: 1) it was conquerable, 2) Saddam was a mischief maker and a potential sponsor of terrorism, 3) Iraq had in the past tried to acquire WMDs, might be doing so, and might have them, and most importantly, 4) Iraq was politically isolated—it had no friends in the region, no Arab nation that could credibly oppose an invasion or was inclined to do so. Iraq had “accomplished” this alienation ten years before, when it invaded Kuwait. If the U.S. had a hammer, Iraq certainly looked like a nail!
Iraq was the most convenient target. The Bush administration then did two things that I consider to be the fatal errors. 1) it used shortcuts to justify the invasion, including deceiving the public, and 2) it tried to graft the PNAC ideology onto the Iraqi occupation plan. Instead of open and honest debate about whether the invasion was the correct response or even a good idea was suppressed and we instead debated the existence of WMDs in Iraq. Instead of the sensible course of merely setting up military bases and insuring that Iraq’s petroleum industry continued to function, we took on the project of nation building and meddling in Iraq’s internal politics.
The meddling was further complicated because we wanted both a puppet government (or at least a friendly one), but we didn’t want to impose one because we also wanted Iraq to be a democracy. Neither of these contradictory ideas are good ones, but combined they are even worse because of the contradiction.
All these errors were baked into the project before the military even began to plan the invasion. Dissent was suppressed over most questions except for the WMD question, and even there, deception was used to bolster the argument, both within the administration and in the public square.
9
-
9
-
9
-
9
-
9
-
8
-
8
-
8
-
8
-
8
-
8
-
8
-
8