The Most Important Geopolitical Factor
"...and all my advantage is, right now, is knowing of the main thing that will be at the heart of the next global conflict..."
"I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think."
Socrates
With that being said I will not pretend to know every little trend throughout history, the fate of the American Empire, or even if technological advancement will reach (has already reached) its limits. I will persist in pretending I do, for the sake of argument, but we must all know how little we know, and how we must be open to the possibility that we will be surprised. Surprise, or more-so the A-ha Moment, is when the philosopher has reached a point of inspiration that can only be attained from taking in information that, might he had been dumber and therefore more closed off, not taken in such information so liberally that he would be inspired so.
George Friedman’s The Next 100 Years started off great, and while my intent is to not make this into a review of his book, I must also add I did not finish it, because by the second-to-last chapter he had gone in such a boisterously ridiculous direction that I had to shut it off; knowing I had gotten what I needed from the (audio)book.
Before I sound off in a scrutinizing fashion against what I see him getting wrong, and why it all goes back to the global monetary system and finance, I want to laud his fantastic imagination, as well as what he gets extraordinarily right.
You see, he clearly understands geopolitical trends ingeniously. He has perfectly called how Europe will become more reluctantly dependent on Russia, how Russia will once again become the new foe of the United States, how the forever wars in the Middle East will be seen as an underwhelming blip in our history, and how China is extremely overrated as a geopolitical and economic menace (that we’d be better off propping up than clamoring for its downfall).
Most of all however, the major point he gets spot-on, and something that Lacy Hunt (my favorite deflationist thinker other than Jeff Snider) rattles on about is the existential population problem that was started by extraordinary technological advancements, and will end from the lack of extraordinarily underwhelming technological advancement as compared to the last three-hundred years. In short, population exploded (and I will take from Ed Dutton here) due to massive technological advancements that were due to humanity selecting more and more for intelligence over other attributes. Due to the explosion in population of poorer people due to the infant mortality rate being slashed from 50% to 1% in a short time, intelligence has slowly over the last century and a half been selected out in favor of lower intelligence, due to average and higher intelligence people making the safe economic move of either having no kids or less kids than their replacement population counterparts of lower intelligence nationalities.
And also what Friedman gets right, that many paleocons won’t ever admit, is that non-white populations (especially black Americans) are having less and less kids, and by the end of the century, we will be at a point where the global population is probably on the downtrend (I would guess much earlier than 2100, due to many existential factors that I won’t discuss now for the sake of brevity).
However, where Friedman becomes wrong, and even more broadly where geopolitical analysts can be inexplicably wrong quite quickly (sometimes it can happen overnight) is… well…:
It’s the economy, stupid
Friedman, before the book is even halfway through, starts to hone in on nations he sees as almost successors to global hegemony that will be reordered due to Germany’s lack of merit and vigor to look for a place as a great power, Russia conspicuously collapsing (not conspicuous to me, not sure why he is so sure this will happen), and that Eastern Europe, under a Polish hegemony (very creative, I think that could happen) will start pushing back against a new Turkish foe that is allied with Japan.
Now, I am not here to discuss the likelihoods of any of this, because that is better left to smarter geopolitical analysists like the Prudentialist and Planetologist. My place here is to be a thorn in the side of those smarter guys because I have a pet autist fixation that is so relevant and important that it will turn geopolitics on its ass if this economic issue rears its ugly head, which if you have seen my other work, it is pretty clear that we will face this crisis at some point or another in the coming decade.
Because my intent is not to, twelve years after this book was published, come around and say “Myeh heh heh, you were wrong about Turkey!” Hindsight is twenty-twenty, and we are doing the world a complete disservice when we insult our own intelligence and the intelligence of fellow thinkers who are trying to make an honest assessment, from their own well thought out analyses that deserve the respect they are afforded. However, my issue with Friedman obviously isn’t his choice of nations he sees as being great or super powers of the twenty-first century.
Past his fixation on Turkey, which I see becoming the next Venezuela, and how that puts his entire geopolitical prediction in jeopardy, the general gist of his prediction is correct: there will be slower developments in population, life will become more expensive, nations that we thought were great now will be shadows of their former selves, and the hubris of those who think that status-quo is infinite will be knocked on their ass by the unexpectedness of the human experience. Now, all of his neat predictions of us having moonbases and space missiles that will be WMDs is all goofy boomer Star Trek phantasm, and I am not really interested in poking fun at that because that would just be mean.
It is important to preface with all of that, because I am not here to dog on his predictions themselves. However, what he misses, and many other geopolitical analysts always conveniently miss just so happen to be the most important variables and constants in history that blow up in their faces when this stuff comes to a head. We can talk all day about America’s failing hegemony, how it could and is being undermined by foreign powers, how it seems the United States Government is almost a shadow of its former self with all-time high illegitimacy and its de facto modus operandi being anarcho-tyranny, but there is one major, unwarpable constant that will maintain America’s strength over every single nation on this planet, regardless of what regime is in power, and in my opinion, this constant will come to a head as political crises come to a head.
There is a massive dollar debt crisis that, due to the issues with that arose with collateral in the banking system after the 2008 Crash, and how you can’t just magically restore faith in a system that actively wants to bail out of itself, there will be a situation that arises wherein the predictions that George Friedman makes cannot happen, and will not happen, in the way he and his fellow intelligent thinkers think, because this crash in legitimacy throughout global finance will be so catastrophic that global hegemony won’t be the interest of whatever new powers exist. At best, it will be a rush towards regional hegemony because of what lack of faith in currency and trust in the government to maintain a cohesive national identity, road system, basic infrastructure and electric grid, due to the tubes of the system that funds all this being blocked.
You can’t have a nation without faith. You can’t have faith without trust. If we reach the point that it seems we are reaching, where these nations, corporations, banks (especially in China) are defaulting on their loans that they have just been rolling over again and again indefinitely to stay afloat, then it is only a matter of time before the developed world looks a lot like Japan, except without the conservative, homogenous culture, low crime rate, and high savings rate.
This issue seems to be left out of the equation with analysts like Friedman. Again, I will give him credit, he mentioned the Japan situation in depth, and why their nation is in the economic purgatory that it is in, however, I am not sure if a guy like him knows much about the Eurodollar System, the Eurodollar Crisis, the Securitization Problem… ya catch what I’m throwin’ down?
We can ponder ‘till the chickens come home to roost, but nothing matters until we have settled what the world looks like after the monetary problem has fallen apart, so I will help define some terms here, and maybe you guys who are smarter, can think through this very different world coming in the future through this pleated filter I’m about to construct for you:
The Eurodollar System: Don’t shut your brain off. It’s simple. I’ll put it dumb as doornails for you, because I’m dumb as doornails - There’s dollars (about 55% of all dollars in the world) floating outside the regulatory reach of the Fed and the SEC. This money, as well as US bonds too, have become more and more in demand as economies have continued to slowdown.
The Eurodollar Problem: Due to this demand for dollars, development in basically every single nation on the planet has LITERALLY FLATTENED OR HAS BEEN GOING DOWN SINCE 2008. This dollar funding problem is so prominently seen, through the rise of extremism, governments that are ran by midwit PhDs trying to fix problems the only way a midwit PhD knows how to (by sipping a martini and making an esoteric chart), and most prominently in the situation of Greece, where their economy has been in the shitter since time immemorial and yet the idealism of there being a United Europe makes the managerialism of Europeans clash with the reality of this giant economic problem. Square peg, round hole, yet no one seems to be able to figure it out.
Securitization problem: Due to that thing that holds the entire financial economy together being thrown out the window in 2008, there is a giant problem. What was that thing again? Oh yeah. Faith. Without faith in shitty collateral, the system can’t function like it used to. Throw in the unstoppable population decline issue that we are facing, and the neolib response being “well just import foreigners who will end up not having kids after two generations, as well! It fixes the problem for a couple decades! sorta!!” and we are in a situation where the economics will always look terrible, no matter what we do, and the best thing we can hope for, if we are to get our shit together and realize the problem at hand, is maintain what infrastructure we know we can maintain in order to keep some level of a first-world that will quickly disappear if our average IQ continues to go down.
So, with this great filter put between the inlet duct of geopolitical analysis and the discharge duct of reality, we find ourselves in an interesting situation. My populist friends, socialist friends, libertarian friends, to all different extents, will be puzzled, angry, and down right hostile when I bring this problem up, but the inevitability of this problem arising, that will be the decider of the future of every nation on the planet, therefore the future of culture and peoples, is where geopolitics shuts down. It doesn’t matter what we think, who we like or don’t like, what nation has sensible leaders and who is troublesome. All that matters is who the United States Government wants to destroy and who it wants to forgive when this existential issue arise, and I assure you:
It will happen.
You can’t stop it.
I can’t stop it.
Jerome Powell can’t stop it.
Janet Yellen can’t stop it.
Biden’s handlers can’t stop it.
Klaus Schwab can’t stop it.
Xi Jinping can’t stop it.
Jamie Dimon can’t stop it.
There will be a massive demand for dollars as economies continue to slow, trust continues to die, alliances continue to become more-so inconvenient and spoiled than great treaties that stood the test of time, and people individually will prefer to seek meaning, spirituality, and identity over a meaningless career and cookiecutter house in a decaying suburb of a multicultural city that has a crime rate similar to that of a failed state in West Africa.
Maybe I should write a book called The Next 20 Years, going in depth about what this crisis would look like if it arose soon. All that matters is when this happens, and not if, because as you probably have already thought about - this crisis looks a lot different with the globalist monkeys deciding the fate of the world versus if Trump or someone similar got to decide. The US will get to churn out that moneyprinter and forgive who it wants, and do something similar to what Curtis Yarvin described in his Fedcoin Experiment which is a Dollar Milkshake of its own. I think both ideas are quite comorbid, regardless of either of these two brilliant thinkers knowing of each other's existence. There will be a great equalizer crisis, and the hegemon that will decide everyone’s fate will be the one whose currency literally funds everyone’s existence, whose debt is the most trusted asset and collateral in the world, whose military is well-armed enough to at least cause a giant existential issue at worst, and pose a real threat in a war situation at best.
It all comes down to who gets funded. Without a global dollar system where any terrorist, drug dealer, corporation or bank can safely carry their wealth elsewhere, have it be insured by the headnod from the most powerful government in history, and know that it can trade with literally anyone with not even just green paper, but digits on a computer/phone screen, is a matter that is heavily underappreciated. Without this system in place, we do not have global trade, we do not have wealth at the level we have experienced, we do not have alliances or regional unions.
That is what people don’t get, and to print it all away, is something that misses the point that doing so would benefit no one, destroy everyone’s wealth, help out the USG’s enemies, and too, destroy the global monetary system leaving the worst players debt-free. I assure you, the Keynesians are aware of this matter, they just can’t say it, because to say that their system is a failure, well, would probably cause at least a little ruckus in the markets. The MMT bogeyman is just another Klaus Schwab-esque meme there to keep those of y’all who are puzzled by the elusive ghoul of modern economics at bay, and not actually analyzing the real problem of low/no growth in the global economy, minimal inflation that was supposed to be giant inflation (due to the giant growth that was supposed to result from Quantitative Easing and “Globally-Synchronized Growth!”)
Not to say that J Powell and Co aren’t smoking their own supply. They most definitely are, that is why I do not attribute malice to their decisions, because they really are that high. Likewise, they are well-aware that printing money is bad. Do y’all ever wonder why it is literally countries with average IQs so low that they would be considered mentally disabled in the West are the ones who print money?
No yeah, they will keep playing the same games they always play: saying scary phrases, continuing quantitative easing, sucking liquidity from the market, and banks will continue the same games they always do: Skirting rules and regulations as much as possible, and keeping as much risk off of their balance sheet as possible in anticipation of the coming sovereign debt crisis.
To conclude, George Friedman and similar thinkers deserve credit where credit is due, but if you wonder why I die on this hill, please, remember something important:
People thought Japan was going to become the new global hegemon at odds with the US, in the late eighties. Songs like American Made by The Oak Ridge Boys, and Are The Good Times Really Over by Merle Haggard from that era really highlight this collective unconscious understanding that America was losing its place as this manufacturing powerhouse that was self-sufficient. Japan had risen as the new humble, strong nation that acted as an affront to every Western democracy and Eastern soviet state. However, that fear quickly faded, and I guarantee you that that memory of a burgeoning Japanese economic empire would be a weird nostalgic melancholy-ism if brought up to anyone who remembers it.
That’s even what George Friedman really gets at, the unexpected of today, is simply the certainty of tomorrow, and all my advantage is, right now, is knowing of the main thing that will be at the heart of the next global conflict, or whatever it will look like. I am not smart, nor insightful, enough to really know exactly what it will look like. That is for y’all to figure out. I’m just here to point it out.
“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.”
Kurt Vonnegut