peter Zeihan 2020
- Thread starter Cherico
- Start date
both.
If your saving money in the bank like I am you might finally get a intrest rate thats at least at the level of inflation if not beating it. If you borrowed money on a varable intrest rate your fucked. Lock in your intrest rate now by the way if you can. For europe their going to see a lot of capital flight which was going to happen anyways because of shit demographics, over regulation of their economy and stupid decisions.
Its likely that the 20s will greatly humble the people of europe and might just destroy the last bit of their self confidence.
Yinko
Well-known member
"Thanks Obama!"
Couldn't have told you the details, but I could have easily told you that he was unqualified for the role and pretty shit overall. His political career was one term as a junior senator. What is it about ho-bag moms and over-achieving flops?
It looks like the Russians are pretty much out of the game until spring in Ukraine. The Ukraians will enter that spring with a lot more weapons, tanks and other resources and will likely have better trained troops with better stuff.
Its still Russia's war to lose what with their shear fucking numbers but Russia as a global power? Those days are done.
Yinko
Well-known member
I can agree that it's "Russia's war to lose", but everything else?
Everything that is true of the Ukrainians this winter will also be true for the Russians. Winter is a time to rest, dig in and recover, especially in an age of mechanized warfare where your engines turn snow into mud. Neither side has enough air dominance to continue the fight off the ground for the whole winter.
While Russia has been humiliated by this conflict, and that will certainly harm their geopolitical influence, I don't see how that would remove them as a world power. They can always spin this as well, by claiming that they didn't get held back by the Ukrainians but rather by the combined might of NATO aid.
One can argue the russian military will be hampered in its ability to build up by its corruption and backroom dealings. More goods, like tanks, guns, ammo, food, beds, and all that, means more opportunity for the ones administering the storage and delivery to sell them. Unless Putin manages to pull a uncorruptable Commisariat out of his to straight up BLAM anyone who's been dealing in corruptness, he can't bring his forces up to pre-war strength. Also, the soldiers are still hideously untrained, the cooperation between branches is still in the shitter, and the current soldiers are more likely to turn tail and run rather than fight for mother russia.
I mean, I doubt the VDV or whatever they are called will accept going on yet another unsupported airdrop.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
It already is removing them as a world power.
Even the US takes decades to build up an arsenal of advanced military hardware. Those 10 Billion a pop Supercarriers aren't built or paid for all at once, or the hundreds of Generation 4 and Generation 5 fighter craft that cost tens of millions of dollars each.
Russia's economy is a fraction the size of the US's. Their 2020 GDP listing is ~4.65 Trillion. The US's is ~25 Trillion. China's is optimistically 18 trillion, more realistically somewhere between 10-14 Trillion.
Russia has no meaningful diplomatic prestige. What few countries they had okay relations with, have started snubbing them as they've gotten their asses kicked in Ukraine.
They have very little in the way of advanced economy. Their manufacturing capabilities are stalled almost entirely at 80's and 90's tech levels, and everything more modern they produce makes heavy use of imported subcomponents. There are a few exceptional standouts, but they're just that, exceptions.
They've been a resource extraction economy, with the exception of the arms industry, for basically the last 2 decades. They export oil and other raw materials, and sell weapons to the parts of the world that either don't get on with the US, or think US/NATO built is too expensive.
Well, Europe isn't buying their oil now, and after seeing how poorly their military hardware has performed in the field, and how spectactularly US/NATO gear has performed, their arms industry is already taking a big hit in exports. This hurts them particularly hard, because they can't get the cost-effectiveness of economies of scale without the export market, so that makes shit more expensive for their own military to buy as well.
And then there's just the general economic damage from the sanctions. To be fair to Putin and his bros, they prepared pretty well for enduring embargos, for a time, with stockpiles of gold and parts on hand so they could handle supply interruptions. But it's just that, interruptions, not permanent cessations, or at least as permanent as things get in international relations.
Worse, after everything that they've nationalized because of the cut-off from parent companies, no sources of foreign capital are going to be eager to invest in redeveloping the Russian economy after the war ends, not unless there's been a complete change not just of who's in power, but the institutional culture and structures that their government runs on.
...Which is to say that their already anemic economy is going to be seriously degraded, and Russia has burned decades of military hardware on this war.
It's not just their best stuff, that they sent in the first big push against Kyiv. It isn't just their second-line 'good enough' stuff, like updated T-80's and even T-72s. They're also tapping their stockpiles of even older stuff, T-62's, and if rumors they're getting artillery shells from North Korea are true, they're exhausting munitions stockpiles as well.
And it's not just the heavy equipment. Conscripts are being issued rifles that are a hundred years old, uniforms from the soviet era (when they get them at all), etc, etc.
And that's on top of the fact that they're tapping manpower reserves when they're already suffering from a collapsing demography. The casualty rates aren't anywhere near high enough to cause the sort of generational wipe-out that WWI did, but the people fleeing the country to get away from the draft are enough to do noticeable damage to already depleted demographics.
TL;DR, Russia isn't just being hurt in this war, their stockpiles and reserves of war material are being exhausted in the process. Weapons and munitions that they spent decades stockpiling are being run down, and it will take decades to rebuild those stockpiles. Doing this in a war that they are losing, one which is also devastating their economy, means that they won't be able to rebuild that stockpile anywhere near as fast.
Even if they manage to have the war end without a coup or outright civil war breaking out, their conventional military power will be completely gutted, and would require literally generations to recover, if it every manages to at all. Their nukes will keep them from getting invaded and conquered, but they won't make it a 'great power,' any more than Pakistan currently is.
Yinko
Well-known member
Very possible. There are a couple of things that could prevent this scenario. Russia has experienced a lot of western sanctions over the past few decades, not as severe as these ones but enough for their populace to have both built a tolerance and a robust smuggling industry. Certain consumer markets change and get new tastes because old things stopped being available, certain new markets were birthed because competition ceased to exist.
A lot of the stockpile they are exhausting is old stuff. They haven't really had time to build a lot of new equipment. Their next gen equipment never got massively produced, so it could be argued that this saved them from wrongly investing in bad products. Or it could be argued that the reason that they never invested heavily in it in the first place was that they were too poor to, that they invested upto what their hilt was and now they will be too fucked to be able to change production to anything better. Who knows?
The only ones who can pull off a coupe are the military or factions within the Duma. The military have zero interest in doing that since they are tied into this war just as much as Putin. It's harder to tell with the Duma and intel agencies. But Putin did publicly humiliate his head of intelligence a few months back, which is always a dumb idea. If Putin dies or is otherwise unable to rule, then an internal conflict will be inevitable.
The central problem for russia is demographics, and the complete breakdown of their educational system during the 90s.
Quite simply put their most valuable workers are dying of old age, and there isn't a replacement for them. The only way they feel they can secure their country during this crunch is to expand to natural land boarders. This would mean going to war with Nato after they take on Ukraine.
which they can't win conventionally which means nukes are on the table, which is why the west is flooding money, training, and equipment to the Ukraine. If they fight this war and lose then their best case senerio is as a Chinese Vassal state.
UberIguana
Well-known member
There's a big difference between the earlier sanctions and the current 'burn that fucker to the ground' sanctions currently being put in place. Disconnecting a country from SWIFT was unprecedented. Now a price cap on Russian oil is being pushed, further crippling Russia's revenue. Assuming they can ship it as most customers with pipelines aren't buying and all the major insurers are likely to refuse their ships. They could try shipping it anyway but that would leave Russia exposed if there is a leak that costs money to clean up ('if', lol Russian safety standards). They might decide fuck you, the spill is your problem and renege on any compensation agreements, but that opens the way to Russian ships being seized.
Smuggling is no substitute for open trade and having a tolerance for a shitty economy still leaves you with a shitty economy. The DR Congo has a population accustomed to an even shittier economy, but that hardly lets them be a noteworthy power. If they couldn't afford the better next gen equipment when not sanctioned to hell, how are they going to afford it with most of the rest of the world's economy actively trying to strangle them?
They don't care about demographics because they aren't trying to build a functioning, western style economy to begin with. At least not seriously, there is a lot of pretending going on, but it was a wink wink nod nod affair where they pretend to have a real industry, Russians get to feel good about living in a serious country, and the facilitators and western industries supporting this charade get a piece of the money pie. The thing they have going on is Saudi Arabia's dream economy instead. A well functioning resource extraction and export economy plus some arms industry plus occasional processing and light industry. They don't need a whole lot of people to run that stuff. The rest can be camel herders for all they care, like in Saudi Arabia.
The biggest mistake they have made is that the top has forgotten that there is a lot of pretending going on in all the structures, institutions and industries in their country, mostly at their request, at least their request for things that couldn't have been realistically done, but still can be pretend done. As long as no one was poking all the pretend stuff to hard and it was mostly for show it was almost as good as the real thing, but when shit started to happen and things got strained, all the faked stuff has started to collapse.
It's the latter. They sure would like to have the next gen equipment now. And if it sucked, they would at least love to have more of the highly upgraded last gen equipment instead, like T-90's. But the reason for lack of former and low numbers of latter is the same - money.
Russia has found out the hard way that the nice western shit based around advanced electronics costs serious money, they can't make the guts for it themselves, so they have to import them and pay for it with hard currency, slowly moving their arms industry the same way their car industry went - towards being glorified assembly plants for foreign components. And while they can make wartime Ladas with no airbags and ABS, they can't make T-90's without French and Taiwanese electronics. Well they could have made old model T-72's in theory, but they no longer even make the Soviet era parts that the former replaced, they would have to design inferior replacements for all of these based on limited and subpar domestic electronics to put together a true "domestic T-90" that would be somewhere between late USSR T-72 and a normal T-90, so in some ways it would have to be a step backwards, and even that they could only produce on small scale.
History Learner
Well-known member
In a bit of good news, Hungary's population is actually lower by about 400,000 then previously thought. Why is this good news? Because it would mean the Hungarian TFR is actually 1.8 instead of 1.6; this was recently found to be the case with Bulgaria too.
From 1.23 to 1.8 in about a decade is a clear vindication of the Natalist policies of Hungary.
From 1.23 to 1.8 in about a decade is a clear vindication of the Natalist policies of Hungary.