Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "Ask Peter Zeihan: Will Putin "Disappear" and Updates on Russian Demographics?" video.

"Russian raw materials extraction depends on foreigners" According to the research of Thomas Sowell, this was true even under the Soviet system.
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@Whatsupwiththisname I hear you can buy San Francisco's Union Square for cheap these days, although cleaning up after the socialists (and Democrats, but I repeat myself) would be a bit of a job.
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"Demographics mean that Russia will not have the capacity to fight off a future aggressor" I'm baffled. Demographics of their neighbors mean that those neighbors will not have the population to fight, either.
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@ruckin3 Peter seems to be heavily based in the assumptions and worldview of the American strategic set -- the sorts of people who write public documents for the DoD about military readiness of China, and the like. This means he has some serious biases when it comes to interpretation.
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@Silk I'm saying Peter lines up pretty well with the Washington establishment on what a well-structured world looks like. Hint: It benefits the Washington Establishment, and almost no other Americans. This explains the Trump phenomenon, and Peter's reaction to it, among other things.
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And yet, the general population is constantly overruled when we disagree with the views of people in the top 3-10% of wage earners. It's almost as if we have an expert class that is cheating the democratic system to its own enrichment and ideological satisfaction.
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@spinach660 Yeah, I'm inclined to think that the best play America can make at this point, is to give Russia a sphere or influence in Ukraine -- and support one in Greater Mongolia, East Turkmenistan, and Tibet. =) China has already started stabbing Russia in the back, setting up summits with FSR's in Central Asia, without inviting Russia.
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American technical education has been suffering for over a decade, from ideological capture. While parents have awakened to this threat (and others) to their children and are taking over school boards, the corruption of the teachers' colleges reaching back a generation, has probably wrecked our own technical schooling for a generation moving forward.
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Peter, if everyone around Russia (China, Ukraine) is also undergoing demographic collapse too, and obviously war is all about relative advantage, why are the Russians in such trouble militarily speaking vis-a-vis their neighbors?
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It's odd - Germany has gone back to importing something like 80% of its petrochemicals from Russia again, in spite of the Nord Stream 2 sabotage.
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@ruckin3 He tends to hedge a bit, though. "This has always been Russia's war to lose" is not something you would ever hear from someone totally dedicated to Information War. He knows when he stops being credible, he stops being useful to his non-government customers. I don't know if he's crossed that line yet.
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Twenty years of deep dives into various industries who hired him to advise them on trends affecting their near and medium term prospects. Look at his earlier videos -- everyone from Nebraskan soy farmers to South Asian naval strategists hired his outfit to advise them. A lot of knowledge builds up on the darndest topics.
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@davidlemons5650 Yeah, he's really great knowing what kind of a hand countries / regions / etc were dealt geographically, even if I'm not always convinced by his conclusions about how they'll play their cards. I would put him up on the level with Jared Diamond in terms of geographical exposition. I'd still look to Walter Russell Mead, Niall Ferguson, or Thomas Sowell for the cultural factors that make countries what they are, though.
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Hard to get good numbers, for the last year or so. Also harder to get good numbers from before that, considering the Information War.
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What makes you say that?
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I'll feel sorry for the Russians when news of the victories of the Ukrainian counter-offensive starts rolling in.
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Ray Dalio is highly invested in China, giving him a huge incentive to keep up the narrative that China is the future.
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Absolute chaos among squabbling warlords on the North Asian Plain. With nukes. China swallows all of East Asia, possibly up to Novosibirsk, giving it a massive internal source of raw materials, making it a whole lot less vulnerable to sanctions, petrochemical interdiction, etc. Not sure what happens on the European side. It might not even be all that relevant, geopolitically.
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Are you sure the El Nino and volcanic activity isn't sufficient to explain what we're seeing? Weather is notoriously chaotic. Drawing conclusions from it seems more like superstition than science.
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Head north, into the mountains.
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@ZergRadio Is it impossible to just visit for a weekend?
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@Adi-bo5do Yes, democracy isn't quite dead here yet. =) Even better, there is a sense that we are embarking on a new Cold War, led by a country that is legendary for its expert class, (mandarins) and its glorification of groupthink over freedom -- China. I suspect that in the same way the Industrial Revolution posed the question, "What is the best way to produce and distribute the most and the best material goods?" our new Information Revolution is going to pose the question, "What is the best way to produce and distribute expertise?" Freedom is going to be the answer. Bhattacharya was right, Fauci was wrong, and our system is going to have to be reformed into a more distributed model, to take that into account. Currently our legacy institutions have been taken over by ideologues seeking the power of the cultural high ground. This has caused the collapse of their credibility and will soon cause their financial collapse as well. Whether they can be preserved or whether they will be replaced, remains to be seen. Forgive me if I'm misinterpreting you, but you're on the wrong side of history here, it seems. Look into the people who are critiquing climate models. Look into the people who were right all along, about our recent global medical scare. Actual evidence leads interesting places.
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So Peter, what's the good news from the Ukrainian counter-offensive?
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@breadbaskets2772 What's the difference between what you described, and outsourcing? None of those "skilled foreigners" came from the occupied countries.
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@qdav5 I'm not sure it's true, though. The Byzantines sent a much smaller army than anything the Empire had previously fielded, to re-conquer Rome, when populations were declining everywhere. Population decline doesn't imply peace, is all I'm saying. It just implies a recalibration of the scale of war. Russia's population is still more than it was last time it fought the Germans, and will be even at the end of this century.
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@matthewgaudet8001 If it matters so much, then why, in the past, could they fight bigger wars with fewer men? And that still doesn't answer the question of why does any of it matter, if all their opponents are facing the same problem?
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Can anyone here explain to me why the nearest analog we've seen to the collapse of Putin's Russia would not be the collapse of Saddam's Iraq, only this time the regime really does have lots and lots of nukes? Can anyone here explain to me why desiring such a situation is anything other than completely f*cking nuts?
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If the collapse of the Soviet system was bad for the overall security of the North Asian Plain (and is currently driving Russian revanchism), why in the world would security of that region by improved by the further collapse of Russia? You yourself have predicted that most of North Asia would probably fall into warlord-led petty states. With nukes. How in the world could that situation be called an "improvement"?
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If you don't really want to use them, that degrades their deterrent.
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He has to publish something while he waits for the news of glorious victories from the Ukrainian counter-offensive.
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Yeah, I'm baffled by Peter's insistence that Russia is more likely to use nukes if it's winning, than it would be if it's losing. Seriously, that's one of those cases where he's just flat wrong.
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Wasn't Gorbachev basically the ultimate Russian Boy Scout, a symbol of belief in the whole idealized Soviet system?
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Honestly, Peter's convinced me that the North Asian Plain - and adjacent Europe -- won't be at peace until it has some degree of unity. Considering that China will probably chew up all of East Asia if Russia falls, there will be a battle line drawn right across that Plain between hostile powers.
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Well, there's anecdotal evidence of Russian mathematic professors heading to America to drive taxis and similar.
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We'll do a bit of rebalancing in terms of industrial profile, probably. The Rust Belt will get polished up a bit, and workers screwed over by World Systems Theory will have much better opportunities. The people at the top will have to pay $2000 for a cell phone, but considering the fact that we can make them last a lot longer, that won't affect all that many people. Except Apple, which will collapse, but that's been inevitable since they lost the greatest salesman of his generation (Steve Jobs).
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@careylymanjones I'm talking, if all the parts were made in America. Exploiting foreign workers and feeling fine about it just because they're foreign, won't last. Their standard of living (and cost) will simply rise to American levels. If we stay de-industrialized long enough for that to happen, all we'll be doing is losing absolutely all of our manufacturing knowhow. This is something Peter says is happening in Russia today. Why he thinks it's OK for it to happen in America, is one of the ways he's being blinded by his Establishment bias towards World Systems Theory, and the presumption of America always being a "core" region.
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@careylymanjones "China's wages have risen so much, it's starting to price China out of the market" <-- Yes, this. Given time, it will happen everywhere. Wages worldwide will rise to the level of America's. See what I'm talking about? There will be no more taking advantage of "favorable labor cost profiles", as Peter has presented as an obvious, unalloyed good. It's not. If this process of labor cost equalization takes longer than a couple of generations (since offshoring started in the 1990s, we need to reverse de-industrialization NOW, before the last of our skilled workers die) America will totally lose its manufacturing knowhow, which was built up over at least a century.
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@careylymanjones Yeah, that's what I'm afraid of. I'm not someone who works with my hands. I'm seriously considering getting a kit car, for the purposes of giving my sons an opportunity to learn to work on something real instead of just MineCraft resource packs. I wish I were baffled by a strategic mind like Peter's ignoring the existential hazards of losing domestic broad-based industrial knowhow and infrastructure. But, he's clearly bought into the whole "we'll just get foreigners to do it. They'll never turn against us, right?" outlook entirely too common in Washington now.
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@mbak7801 You mean, despite the tens (or hundreds) of billions of dollars of material support the United States has been giving Ukraine, that might not translate to a victorious counter-offensive? Do you mean to say that Ukrainians might be giving their lives for nothing, now? Are you saying that the Zelenskyy presidency is just an act?
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@GSlartibartfast G, you need to read more. See: Twitter fires 90% of its staff without any noticeable degradation in service.
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@gaoxiaen1 I'm curious whether the right-wing Grammar Nazis are going to get ahold of this, and start insisting that instead of just nominative, accusative, and genitive, we must use ablative, dative, vocative, and locative as well.
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Uzbekistan is seeing China muscle in on its territory.
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@markfoth1226 At this point, isn't it underway enough to know whether it could be called a disaster?
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