peter Zeihan 2020

Terthna

Terthna

Professional Lurker
Prince Ire said:
It also rests on the bizarre assumption that China would just sit there doing nothing while being attacked and completely brushes off the possibility of China launching nuclear weapons which apparently wouldn't affect the US at all.
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It's questionable what China's nuclear capabilities even are at this point, considering all the corruption.
 
Terthna

Terthna

Professional Lurker
Prince Ire said:
This is a "One swift kick will send the whole rotten structure crashing down" level of bad take. Assuming you're enemy is completely incapable of accomplishing anything generally doesn't end well.
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Do you know how many nukes they have? Or how effective their delivery systems are? Because I don't. What I do know is that corruption is rampant in China, to the point where their infrastructure is in shambles due to all the cost-cutting and graft. The CCP cannot even build a building or a bridge without it collapsing within a few years (if not months, or days) due to shoddy construction. Heck, we probably won't even have to bomb the Three Gorges Dam ourselves; the blasted thing is already showing signs that it'll crumble on its own soon.
 
Prince Ire

Prince Ire

Section XIII
Terthna said:
Do you know how many nukes they have? Or how effective their delivery systems are? Because I don't. What I do know is that corruption is rampant in China, to the point where their infrastructure is in shambles due to all the cost-cutting and graft. The CCP cannot even build a building or a bridge without it collapsing within a few years (if not months, or days) due to shoddy construction. Heck, we probably won't even have to bomb the Three Gorges Dam ourselves; the blasted thing is already showing signs that it'll crumble on its own soon.
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The same can be said of much of the US, yet I doubt you're going to be questioning whether the US nuclear arsenal is functional.
 
LordsFire

LordsFire

Internet Wizard
Prince Ire said:
The same can be said of much of the US, yet I doubt you're going to be questioning whether the US nuclear arsenal is functional.
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Oh?

Did I miss the big news article on the Hoover Dam being in serious danger of collapsing?

What's the American equivalent of 'tofu dreg' construction?

Do you have links to entire cities worth of construction thrown together for government jobs programs, that have basically been abandoned since construction?

Anyone with a significant amount of political awareness in the US knows just how corrupt governments can be, especially in deep blue cities and/or states, but I'm curious as to what evidence you have that it even remotely approaches the level of corruption that China is at.
 
bullethead

bullethead

Part-time fanfic writer
Super Moderator
Staff Member
Ask Peter Q&A 2:


-Immigration won't help Germany, need to bring in 2 million a year for 25 years to stabilize things
-Settler states are the only ones who've intergrated immigration into their identity
-Canada is the only one to do it at a large scale without producing massive backlash
-Hamas wasn't being used as a Russian/Chinese/Iran catspaw
-Sudan is one of least productive agriculture centers in world, can't be used to avert Middle East food insecurity
-South Africa's infrastructure is failing, can't even process raw materials, requires political transformation to use its physical and human resources effectively
-Peter doesn't think EU will last, Britain needs to sign a trade deal with US, but need to get over fact deal will be worse than with EU
-Blue collar work will be booming due to industrial build out
-Boomers haven't come back to blue collar en masse after early retirements in COVID
-AI could potentially improve productivity in agriculture, manufacturing, finance, defense/cybersecurity
-AI chips are a problem due to chip fabbing having a global spread out supply chain

Peter Zeihan on Danger Close (Jack Carr podcast 2/22/24):


-Iran used to be big trade hub, then got cut out of global economy, until oil was discovered
-Least advanced relative to the rest of the world compared to 5000 years ago
-The beef with Iran is all over Iran fucking up post-Bretton Woods global alliance network by fucking with the oil supply
-Europeans think very little of Americans culturally/politically
-If America doesn't give a fuck about the global alliance and exports oil, Iran is doomed because they don't have the knowledge to keep up their industry
-Generals worry about Iran because it's a threat to rebuilding Bretton Woods alliance
-Biden admin supposedly edging back towards conversation about what the future foreign policy should be
-Iran fucking around in Middle East might be to our advantage if we shift to just tipping the scales in overseas issues
-Iran's demographics are fucked up due to fall of Shah, now have generation who know bad economy and can compare it to foreign economic progress
-US base in upper right hand corner of Jordan exists to help monitor ISIS and kick its ass, along with other bases
-The Fertile Crescent is nowhere anyone wants to be, has a very thin strip of habitable region surrounded by desert, generates hostile groups that need to be wiped out periodically
-ISIS today is non-function, US forces are holdover trip-wire force
-Iran loves the Houthis taking all the heat from the US/EU, US can't really do anything without killing everyone
-Can't make Middle East a functional area, has been least economically viable part of planet since dawn of human history
-Houthis are high on local drugs, super isolated population
-Iran has 10,000 mullahs, can't decapitate leadership easily
-Hitting oil supply chain that predates the revolution will cripple them economically, won't do that until we're done with global oil network
-Hezbollah is something Iran has been investing and supporting, crown jewel asset
-Hezbollah doesn't give a fuck about Hamas, conflict with Israel is for show at the moment
-Israel is getting close to getting out of Gaza, financial support to Hamas getting screwed
-Israel political situation is a shitshow that might see them start some shit with Hezbollah to avoid incumbents getting kicked out
-China might launch war in attempt to keep CCP alive, even if it fucks up/destroy the country
-Chinese system base scenarios involve deindustrialization and mass starvation, 28th civilizational collapse
-Prepositioning CCP to take over after 50+% population loss, requires a hell of lot of amorality and unique mindet to actually execute successfully
-Food production is massive supply chain problem, most vulnerable to disruption
-2/3 of global agriculture is unreliable, will take more time than it'll take for people to die from mass starvation
-South Asia besides India and Middle East are going to get fucked alongside China
-North America is going to be serving knowledge preservation/advencement role as world backslides, in worst case scenario
-The west is more united than ever, Europe might stay intact and speed up recovery from deindustrialization collapse
 
Lord Sovereign

Lord Sovereign

The resident Britbong
LordsFire said:
Oh?

Did I miss the big news article on the Hoover Dam being in serious danger of collapsing?

What's the American equivalent of 'tofu dreg' construction?

Do you have links to entire cities worth of construction thrown together for government jobs programs, that have basically been abandoned since construction?

Anyone with a significant amount of political awareness in the US knows just how corrupt governments can be, especially in deep blue cities and/or states, but I'm curious as to what evidence you have that it even remotely approaches the level of corruption that China is at.
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That’s the thing, isn’t it? A good chunk of the Right does have a nasty case of the “grass is greener” whereas corruption is oh so very much worse in places like China and Russia. In comparison to those America could be a lot worse.
 
bullethead

bullethead

Part-time fanfic writer
Super Moderator
Staff Member
North Dakota has the best rail system coverage of just about anywhere, can ship its agricultural products to the west coast, so it's taking advantage of all the chaos, but the rail system is also being used by the shale oil companies:
 
C

Cherico

Well-known member


essentially the fact that the houthies are being dicks and that panamas having issues is creating a situation where more stuff has to go by rail and their is only so much rail to use. you could fix this with an oil pipe line but you know....biden.
 
bullethead

bullethead

Part-time fanfic writer
Super Moderator
Staff Member
Peter's opinion on tourism:


-Baby boomers - will spend on tourism
-Millennials - spending money on family events, so looking for cheaper destinations
-Blue collar workers - looking for cheaper and shorter vacations
-International tourism is going to fall apart, international flights will become rarer
 
C

Cherico

Well-known member
bullethead said:
Peter's opinion on tourism:


-Baby boomers - will spend on tourism
-Millennials - spending money on family events, so looking for cheaper destinations
-Blue collar workers - looking for cheaper and shorter vacations
-International tourism is going to fall apart, international flights will become rarer
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Id rather the boomers not spend as much on tourism, their on a fixed income and have to think about supporting themselves for the rest of their lives because every other generation doesn't have as much money as they do.
 
E

edgeworthy

Well-known member
Emperor Tippy said:
Relatively minimal in this case basically means the President issuing orders and various US military platforms doing relatively routine things to carry those orders out.

Fundamentally, a modern nation requires electricity. It requires telecommunications. It requires gasoline and diesel. It requires a whole host of industrial and transport infrastructure.

All of those things are relatively time intensive and expensive to build, are generally not fortified, are fixed targets, and can't be replaced rapidly or easily.

Take France for example, it has less than 90 nuclear power plants. Even if you decide not to target the nuke plants it is fairly trivial to target the high tension power lines that move power from those plants to everywhere else, and just as easy to target the substations and transformers that are needed to get that power to the end users. Seriously, take out a few hundred targets and France goes (generally) dark for weeks to months even if you do nothing else. With sustained effort you can make it effectively impossible to get repairs done basically ever. Most nations have (at best) a handful of ports that are able to accept cargo at scale and a hand full of critical rail lines. Put a bunker buster into a mountain pass, for example, and you can shut down the rail line that goes through that pass for weeks to months. Or take out a few bridges. Hit the major off loading facilities and infrastructure at a port (a relative handful of cranes, for example) and you can cut a nations ability to import anything by at least 90% basically instantly and that will be the case for months.

Drop bunker busters on the right locations and you can cut the water mains into a city and essentially cut off municipal water to an entire metro area for days to weeks.

For most nations, the internet can be taken down with strikes on a few critical nodes. Or at least degraded to an incredible degree.

Now do all of this in coordination with the use of large scale cyberwarfare. What is essentially ransomware hitting basically every connected computer system in the nation, for example.

And in coordination with the US Navy notifying the world that the USN will sink any vessel traveling too or from the targeted nations ports and shooting down any airplane flying in that nations air space.

Simultaneous with all of this are the precision guided munitions targeted on essentially every potential unity figure in the nation. Securing El Presidente might be a bit hard but dropping bombs on the bedrooms of basically every Deputy X, Colonel, Mayor, Police Chief, business leader, etc. at 3 AM local and in coordination with the infrastructure strikes? That's fairly trivial and it destroys any real hope of coordination or unity.

Ending the ability of a government to exercise control over its territory and preventing the ability of any kind of large scale coordination is fairly trivial. And then you just wait while putting up what is effectively a blockade and dropping a bomb on anything that looks like it might be a good target. After that you wait a month or so for civilizational collapse to take care of the problem nation for you.

----
It's like the China problem. The US doesn't need to send a single ground troop into China to destroy its ability to survive. The US already knows the location of basically every power plant, transportation hub, and factory in the entire nation. The USN captures or sinks every ocean going vessel moving too or from China, which basically instantly cuts off essentially all of the raw materials needed to keep China alive. The power in every major city in China goes out. And then the US waits while lobbing cruise missiles at factory after factory in a steady cadence. If China goes nuclear then the US also does and the Chinese population drops to under a hundred or so million in about an hour. If China doesn't go nuclear then the government has to focus all of its bandwidth on internal stabilization and its own survival while China has also ceased to be of any great relevance on the world stage.

Global depression? Sure. For a year or two while the US builds out its industrial plant on a crash priority, wartime, basis and then things are mostly resolved.

Geopolitical consequences? Well yes, the US did just basically end one of the worlds great nations with relatively trivial ease. But then, for the US those consequences are again relatively light.

The US can't properly conquer, occupy, or integrate most any nation in the world and certainly not rapidly. But conquest and occupation are very different from neutralization and destruction.

And if Europe really wants to replace the US it needs that level of capability.
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strunkenwhite said:
Doesn't really sound too routine to me but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'd rather let you have it than try to argue the point within the confines of this thread. Till next time.
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And it is kind of a bit War-Crimey as the Geneva Conventions specifically prohibit the destruction of food and water supplies, and nuclear power plants.
 
Bacle

Bacle

When the effort is no longer profitable...
Founder
Cherico said:
Id rather the boomers not spend as much on tourism, their on a fixed income and have to think about supporting themselves for the rest of their lives because every other generation doesn't have as much money as they do.
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You forget how much of the US and global economy relies on tourism to one degree or another.

If tourism economies in too many places collapse or decline majorly, whole regions and sectors of the economy could effectively evaporate outside of mega-corp owned locations/groups.
 
C

Cherico

Well-known member


Basically Russias really been pissing off Israel who before was kind of trying to stay out of their way, and now they have to deal with the conquences of making yet another enemy.
 
C

Cherico

Well-known member


essentially European farmers are mad at the governments of europe (for very good reasons in my opinion)

But they also need to modernize and get good.
 
bullethead

bullethead

Part-time fanfic writer
Super Moderator
Staff Member
Everybody is going into a recession, China didn't get a post-COVID bump and their population collapse is going on, half of the boomers are retired, consumption led and export growth is basically over, North America still has growth due to demographics and government spending, probably a depression by the end of the decade:
 
LordsFire

LordsFire

Internet Wizard
Lord Sovereign said:
As someone who is technically a historian (got my degree from University), these are interesting times.

Alas that I have to live through them!

Edit: I’m serious. China’s implosion is going to be apocalyptic.
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If we're very, very, very blessed, it may just be miserable.

I'd give it like 1% or worse odds, but they might just quietly implode into a far more miserable nation than they are now.
 
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