No love for becoming an insect person. Your right about Russia needing to survive this. The power struggle after the US falls will be between China and Russia. At the very least we need Russia and India to keep China busy after the fall of the US. If that can happen there is a possibility north America could reorganize and become relevant again in the 30-50 year time frame.
> They are powerless.
They are not powerless. A paper tiger is still a tiger. It can still cut you. And like a drowning man, grasping for an angle to hold onto, the u.s. can still drag down a great number of nations with it. And that is the danger here.
The balance of power must be such that russia *survives* the fall of europe and america. Otherwise china becomes the new hegemon, and you can begin to understand why that would be a mistake: Forgive me for a long-winded aside, but allow me to explain. It is not that the chinese don't have the correct general thrust (meritocracy), it is that the chinese are unfortunately moribund. They're lagging the u.s. by about 20 years, but they'll end up in the same place we are. Their model has begun to adapt-into-failure and short-term solutions. Were that not the case, they wouldn't have even **allowed** a speculative real estate bubble (which is basically a weapon and leverage against them, courtesy of international finance).
I understand *why* they did it, but it was *still* a mistake, no matter what advantage it gave them. And thats the difference between short term and long term viability. Which is **precisely why** I said china can't be allowed to become the new world power. It's plan is more of the same, the chinese model, but for the rest of the world--and the eventual failure of that, I'm not sure we'd recover from.
If I had my druthers, I would continue the "burn flat, hold, and rebuild the ghettos" model of the IMF, combine with chinese infrastructure investment, and a refocus on extended family (rather than the atomic). The ghettos are R selected, and are a net drain on civilization,
the wars-against-third-world-shitholes put destabalizing elements to work, and the chinese infrastructure investment model, means overall existential risk reduction because infrastructure only improves with investment in hard sciences, which *forces* meritocracy, withoutwhich those investments fail, so its a measurable macro. Infrastructure failing -> invest more in infrastructure. Too few gains or progress? -> Not enough merit in hard sciences. Enough merit in hard sciences but no real progress? -> Not enough investment in hard sciences.
Simplifies thinking a lot, same way GDP does, but on the *long term*, and way more reliably.
We can't count on culture to predict or preserve a nation anymore, because culture is by itself ephemeral, and self-reinforcing. And also, culture is now an element of war, to be propagandized and manipulated.
Economics and investments are too, but economics, unlike culture, has measurable quanities related to it, and if it's *not* working, you get to see the effects of very quickly, unlike policies that affect culture.
China is, like all nation states, focused on culture *and* economics. And culture, NOT economics, will be what undoes it (contrary to the opinion that economic failure will be chinas downfall).
And they want to bring that model to the rest of the world.
You might cite the belt and road initiative to argue differently, and that would be entirely missing the big picture. The belt and road initiative actually supports the theory that china will fail due to culture: Their culture is utterly pragmatic. The B&I was 100% **too early**, an absolutely **excellent** idea, way before its time. When was the right time? *Two years from now when the petrodollar fails*.
And thats just it, they let their culture, even if the culture is pragmatic, impact an idea that should have been timed *strategically* and *wholly* on the *economic* picture.
And that single fact, jumping the gun early, tells you china, as a global state, will fail. Imagine the fallout of a global superstate failing culturally and economically, a permanent local maxima in human development. We probably wouldn't recover. We couldn't afford to.
The only other model considered by most people now, is a multipolar world lead by russia *and* china.
And if russia fails to *survive* while completing the task of killing the vampire (u.s. petrodollar), then we end up with china leveraging its neighbor into a primarily chinese-run global order.
No love for becoming an insect person. Your right about Russia needing to survive this. The power struggle after the US falls will be between China and Russia. At the very least we need Russia and India to keep China busy after the fall of the US. If that can happen there is a possibility north America could reorganize and become relevant again in the 30-50 year time frame.
> If that can happen there is a possibility north America could reorganize and become relevant again in the 30-50 year time frame.
What the u.s will try to do, if it doesn't destroy itself when the petrodollar fails, will be a swing either toward socialism (much more severe than what we already have) or reposition for the "great american comeback", where we revert to 1950s style post-war isolationism and industrial manufacturing, while leveraging a new "neutrality", like the cold war, to stay relevant.
Thats how I see it happening, and in that measure I think, given our mineral wealth, and geographic position, we'll stay moderately or significantly relevant going forward into this century, just on the momentum.
But I still think we're gonna stall, and as competition heats up over the next 1-2 decades, I think that'll push the demographic problem to a breaking point.
Basically I think the model will be the high tech equivalent of eastern europe post-soviet collapse, NOT the "afghanistan of the west" some experts predict. When economies fail, either regimes die and are replaced, or they revert to old culture that was suppressed to make room for said regime. Happened in russia, happened in afghanistan, happened in india.
Everything will be shitty, broken, badly maintained, and corrupt, it just won't be very organized at all.
In principle we'll be less free and poorer, but *in practice* we'll be *more free* because the state won't be able to sustain or afford massive bureaucratic edifices or the enforcement of their edicts unlike now.
The federal government may not go away in name, but its going to experience a very significant downsizing to the point where it will be *practically* irrelevant. This will begin to happen gradually, in fits and bursts, and you will know this is the correct scenario when you see the first time the u.s. congress, deadlocked by political division and short-term outrages between their supporters (mostly driven by ideological differences aggravated by worsening economics), fail to pass a budget in time, causing what the news will label a "mere technical default", a "default based on a technicality."
Maybe it'll be a full default proper, or defaulting on some smaller subsection of our debt (like debt to some pensions or other), but nevertheless it will be called "only *technically* a default."
and that is when you will know the federal government has begun the process of dissolving in all but name.
The failure of the u.s. government to hold states TO policy on say, marijuana, should have been the writing on the wall. On *that* basis, looking back, we could have accurately predicted the fedgov's failure to stop constitutional carry, state's refusing the control of the CDC, etc.
That trend is precisely because the fedgov is moribund as the u.s. dollar, and everyone knows it, no one wants to say it (except russia), and the fedgov is out of options to do anything about it.
Being a senator or federal reserve chair, or DoD executive, or boardroom member at blackrock/vanguard/goldman right now must be like being a dying patient in a hospital, almost fully immobilized, while watching your own heart beat fail on the EKG.
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