Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "Playing Jenga with Maritime Shipping || Peter Zeihan" video.

Just looking at a map of "good guys" and "pirate-type bad guys", there's a conspicuous lack of "bad guys" between the US and Japan / Korea, US and Australia / NZ, US and England, and really the entire Western Hemisphere. The pockets of pirates and other bad actors seem to be Malacca, Hormuz, and Somalia / Bab el Mendeb, which mostly serves to isolate India. It seems to me that a lot of the impact here only lands if India fails to make the jump from where it is now, to a regional power capable of fielding a navy that can secure those choke points. If Peter ever reports the headline, "Navy of India moves carrier group to secure the Straits of Hormuz", and he does so with the assumption they will actually be effective there, that's the first step to securing all of the choke points around the Indian Ocean.
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"Navigating around" the Red Sea involves the Cape of Good Hope instead of the Suez Canal, a bit more than 200 nautical miles' worth of detour. It's why so many countries (including China) have foreign military bases in Djibouti, to handle piracy at the south end of the Red Sea in the straits called the Bab el Mandeb. These straits are about 15-20 miles wide, of which the middle 5 miles or so are suitable for tanker shipping. On the southwest shore of these straits is Djibouti. On the northeast shore is... Yemen.
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Sounds like we'd be better off onshoring our supply chains. This should be done rapidly, and permanently. If we have to pay workers a decent wage, so that the Master's degree class (not to mention the billionaires) aren't the only ones able to buy houses, so much the better.
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Alfred Thayer Mahan is dead, and arguably the US Navy's one job is to make sure he stays that way. ;) That is to say, when you have more than just one navy protecting world shipping, Mahan pointed out they tend to get into very consequential fights. His observation was taken very much to heart by the Germans and the Japanese in the early 20th century. We really don't want a repeat of all that. The uniqueness of the American perspective was our "open door" trade policy where anyone with money could trade with anyone who had goods, as opposed to the "imperial silo" policy where colonies of each empire could only trade with cores of each empire. We also made a virtue of necessity, by being the only country capable of floating the requisite Navy, all other industrial centers being rubble by late 1945. The problem today is, we aren't in the same financial position we were in nearly 100 years ago. Trump isn't wrong to ask our allies to do their bit to defray the cost burden we have shouldered for generations.
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It's something to do with the international dateline. Weird things happen there. The Julian / Gregorian timerift was even more serious, glad we don't have to deal with that anymore.
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@mountainmanmike1014 Good point, bureaucracy imposes huge useless startup costs. We need to get rid of those too. =)
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@theliato3809 To be fair, the armed camps were looking to the Somalian pirate problem. I have to wonder -- if this system is so fragile, why didn't the Somali pirates shatter it?
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He'd have to face what his Establishment backers have done to America, if he did. Expect him to do just this, once the Trump tariffs start to work, and he decides he needs to change sides.
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You have to wonder why Russia has trouble managing to test out designs at those temperatures. It's not as if the place doesn't get that cold.
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"Incompetence" does sound like a fairly decent way to describe the performance of the European anti-Somali-pirate forces stationed in Djibouti, who are just across the Bab el Mendeb from Yemen.
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It's wild that this is happening, even with all the foreign military bases in Djibouti. If the Europeans are still projecting any kind of controlling power into the world, they're doing an absolutely s**t job of it.
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@peterflohr7827 Not everyone, but it should be possible for just about anyone who's ever had an industrial base. Britain should be cheering this on madly.
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@Alexadria205 Lol, "10x." 10%, tops. We're incredibly productive, and will see even more productivity gains here. Rome stagnated because they over-relied on sl**e labor. We're stagnating because we over-rely on foreign, near-sl**e neighbor. 10% more expensive, with wages rising 100%+, because that's how productivity works.
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I wonder, how fast can SpaceX pump out bandwidth in the form of Starlink satellites?
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Once upon a time the Royal Marines would have gathered in Djibouti, then crossed the Bab el Mandeb to slap the Houthis around until they stopped. Remind me again why this new world order is supposed to work better?
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@Alexadria205 Er, the "Learn to Code" argument has been pretty thoroughly debunked as unworkable. Fortunately the solution is extremely high levels of automation and productivity, which we're perfectly capable of developing. I don't think we "need to include Mexico and South America", in fact exploiting their cheap labor (again, at the expense of American workers) only serves to perpetuate the problem. You're drunk on the Global Systems Theory Kool-Aid. Rehab is going to hurt, but getting y'all dry again is going to be essential for the continued strategic well-being of the United States.
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@Alexadria205 That's still "World Systems Theory", and it destroys the middle class in every country where it's tried. It's why independents broke for Trump decisively. It's on its way out, along with its practitioners.
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@Alexadria205 It's astonishing, how much YouTube H**ES the responses to your comment here. The fact is that you're quoting "World Systems Theory", and puts the US into the category of "Core country" despite the fact that this destroys the middle class in every country it has been tried in.
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