Comments by "LRRPFco52" (@LRRPFco52) on "Zeihan on Geopolitics"
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@jacarandaization After WWII, Finland was forced to pay $300 million in "reparations" to Russia, and was dictated what kind of military it could have.
Russia seeded Finland full of communists in the government, the Finnish News service YLE, Finnish universities, and military leaders.
Then reprisals were committed on Finnish war veterans and heroes like Lauri Törni, who were trying to prepare for another Russian invasion, throwing them in prison in their own country.
Russia relied on Finland for many things during the Cold War, including imports of processed wood products, paper, machinery, and construction engineering services to name a few.
There's a reason why Russia installed the rail system in Finland in the mid-1800s so Finnish goods could be railed into Russia and Russians could move into Finland more freely.
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@Rid3thetig3r Comanche, Dakota, Iroquois, Cherokee, Algonquin, Hopi, Lumbee, Apache, Cheyenne, Lakota, Kiowa, Pawnee, Shawnee, etc. all came from travelers to North America.
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European politics is slanted to the left because of the make-up of Parliaments and the people after 2 world wars. The real men who normally bear the brunt of societal challenges in leadership never matured to those positions because they died in combat. This left only shopkeepers and women to move into positions of critical national decision-making. While being insulated from the tough decisions for security, which were made by the US for them, they were able to focus on the economies and domestic infrastructure, education, services, and rebuilding with help from manual laborers from elsewhere.
Instead of being held to account for their systemic failures in decision-making on government, economic, education, social, and military matters, they rode the waves of inputs from the US and US-backed security environment, taking credit for the things they never built.
US politics is slanted to the right because of the original pilgrim stock being Puritans who fled out of survival, followed by waves of those who saw opportunity and risk in a new world. These people tended to be individualistic, not expecting for others to solve their problems for them. They believed that hard work and good principles might reward them, expecting no guarantees. After they built the largest economy in the world with the most productive industries, that bailed Europe out of two world wars and left the US as the dominant super power, it didn’t make sense to consider that the losers were ever right about their approaches to government.
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@kevf Zeihan doesn’t declare the US geographic, economic, and military advantages out of a blind sense of patriotism, but dispassionate analysis. That’s what most foreigners get wrong about him, thinking he is pushing a pro-US narrative out of an ideological motive. He’s one of the least ideological figures in this space, who doesn’t really care about policy wishes, but ground truth reality.
Yes, Russia knows how bad their situation is because they’re stuck in it. I’ve lived in Russia and there is a general sense of being condemned to bad geography and bad weather, nothing you can do about it but put your head down, live a life of accepted misery.
If you look at Russian naval force posture on Krim, they have been pulling out due to Unmanned Submersible Vehicles packed with explosives attacking their ships in port.
Russian Air Forces haven’t been able to prosecute an effective strike campaign because they never established air dominance and suppression or destruction of enemy air defenses. As a result, Russia has lost 160+ combat aircraft in the past 8.5 months, including their latest advanced multirole fighters like the Su-30SM and Su-34.
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@kobalos73 Peter Zeihan has been at this for decades, working as a senior analyst for STRATFOR under George Friedman, which has included travels to all sorts of governments, industries, companies, and organizations all around the world.
His favorable assessment of the US/North American position is entirely based on geography, demographics, industrial might, and infrastructure, not ideology.
People who have only heard ideological arguments their whole lives misinterpret Peter's assessments as some sort of 'Murica perspective, because most people don't know anything about geography, demographics, industry, economics, infrastructure, farming, and trade-all the areas Peter has focused on for decades. His books pre-date current trends in social media. It appears he's treating social media how companies used to treat magazines. If you didn't have ads in magazines, you became irrelevant due to consumer perception.
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E V Novorossiysk is well within the range of Ukrainian ballistic missiles, naval commandos, and even still without those, naval mines have been appearing all over the Black Sea already. At a minimum, assuming that no military attacks will ever happen against Novorossiysk (big gamble), any tankers will need mine-sweeper escorts and will have to assume that Turkey will be totally fine with them passing through the Bosphorus.
To counter that, I could argue that Russia will provide the mine-sweeping operations for any oil tankers.
Then those tankers will need to pass through the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, around the Horn of Africa and into ports in India, while others will have to pass through the Strait of Malacca, the South China Sea, and into sea ports in China.
All of those areas have entered the first month of being cut off from Russian and Ukrainian grains on a 90-day cycle of food supplies, and the incentives for piracy or seizing of sanctioned vessels will be high.
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Coal-powered electric grids, yes. Anytime I see transportation infrastructure comparisons between the European and North American continents, I question the basic familiarity with geography and population density possessed by the promoters of the Euro models.
Europe has very high population density with tight geographical constraints, and a transportation infrastructure built on millennia of ancient road networks that never had automobiles in mind.
The US, Canada, and Mexico have vast expanses of open terrain, low population density, and have open spaces where large highway, freeway, and road networks have been built.
The US and Canada also experienced something unique in the post-WWII era where planned suburban developments erupted all over outside of all the major cities, so people could own larger plots of land with homes on them, as opposed to being cooped-up like rats stacked on top of each other in cities.
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@Rjsjrjsjrjsj Zeihan's framework is from the old decorum of White House protocols and cabinet meetings that were last seen in Bush41 and Bush Jr White Houses. Clintons threw that out the window by bringing in criminals and radicals who ran the WH like a frat house, and many of those came back with the Obama WH.
Biden is used to the older decorum from DC culture dating to the 1970s, but has a really young, diversity-hire staff who don't have a clue what they're doing.
This is Zeihan's metric for "managerial experience", while ridiculing Trump's.
Trump is the only President who came from a private sector background totally foreign to WH/DC meetings, where the can is kicked down the road.
In the private sector, you have to demonstrate competency and the ability to manage highly-capable teams of people to produce results, especially in the billionaire sector.
This is why I thoroughly disagree with the managerial assessment of the Trump WH, as chaotic as it was. Look at the results in terms of energy independence, economic growth, trade relations favoring the US, defense, and peace negotiations between Arabs and Israelis, while lighting a fire under NATO to honor their defense spending agreements.
No President has accomplished anywhere near that in 4 years. JFK comes closest in terms of dealing with crises, but only had 2 years and 9 months.
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