All nations, if they are to be modern economies, require robust infrastructure that meets the needs of their age and time; during the industrial age, factories needed to be built, and roads to be maintained in cities to be constructed with the necessary infrastructure for manufacturing cities.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, England built sophisticated Riverway networks and locks throughout the country to transport coal, steel and other goods for manufacturing; this process repeated itself around the globe.
The United States has such poor infrastructure due to the period it began industrialisation in the late 19th and early 20th century. New technology was developed, including the internal combustion engine; for example, England and Europe invested their resources in the train, rivers and locks.
America chose to invest in the automobile and not trains, rivers that were predominant in the old world.
To get to the heart of America’s poor infrastructure, we must be aware of the Federal Highway Act of 1956, which aimed to build a country system of Interstate highways throughout the USA.
This highway project is one of the main reasons American infrastructure is poorly designed. The Federal Highway Act cost the United States $571 billion, and this funding primarily went to construct highways and parking spaces.
This means that American cities and suburbs are not designed with alternative public transport in mind; the United States is very much the nation of the automobile; to get to work, get groceries and move around, you must have a vehicle.
With the rise of fear of global warming and governments wanting to cut down emissions, the way American infrastructure is designed is so that it will be costly to redesign the way cities have been built for nearly a hundred years.
The United States, from the creation of the Federal Highway Act of 1956, have added nearly 50,000 miles of road or 80,000 km of road, which had over a million Americans displaced due to road construction; this burden mainly fell upon minorities within the USA.
The United States Housing Association Agency historically has subsidised housing construction, and during the time of discrimination and the United States, new houses being built were only four white families.
During this period, the US government marked African-American areas in red, showing that they were too risky to be insurable for mortgages.
After World War II, the Veteran Association funded housing for ex-white soldiers but not for other ethnic minorities.
In the 21st century, discrimination of the past no longer happens due to the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s and the wins to end discrimination against African Americans.
The old development model left a massive infrastructure problem within the United States. Of the 138 million homes within the US, 68% of these are single-family houses, and due to single-family zoning, many neighbourhoods are primarily made up of urban areas.
Due to this design layout, most US citizens not living in major cities to get groceries and other essentials require an internal combustion engine or an electric vehicle.
America, the national transport is the car United States has 5% of its land mass dedicated to car parking spaces, leaving eight parking spaces for each vehicle within the United States.
The National Car Ownership Statistics states that 278,063,737 personal and commercial vehicles were registered to drivers in the U.S. in 2021. The number of registered vehicles in the United States increased by 3.66% between 2017 and 2021, indicating an upward trend in car ownership.
This means there are 2,224,509.896 car spaces within the United States of America; one positive of this is that 99% of car parking spaces within America are free.
Brazil may have found a new strain of wheat that could revolutionise the global power imbalance between the global North and the global South.
The global North by nations that industrialise, and let’s primarily in the 19th century, with the British Empire being the first nation to go down the road of industrialisation beginning in the 1760s though historians debate the start date.
The nations that make up the global North are primarily nations that were part of the United States alliance to defeat the Soviet Union from 1945 until the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the fall of the Soviet state in 1990.
As for the Global South, these nations tend to be African nations, China, India, Eastern European nations, South American nations and the Russian Federation. However, these definitions will be debated whether China is a developed nation or a developing country.
Nations not part of tropical zones and traditional farming economies have been typically more successful than nations that rely on other food produce and animal husbandry to survive.
The tropics are the regions of Earth surrounding the Equator. They are defined in latitude by the Tropic of Cancer in the Northern Hemisphere at 23°26′10.5″ N and the Tropic of Capricorn in the Southern Hemisphere at 23°26′10.5″ S.
The tropics are also referred to as the tropical zone and the torrid zone. Which, in layperson’s terms, is pretty much the nations within the centre of the earth if you are viewing the tropical area from a map.
With the breakthrough in wheat development, Brazil introduced a new wheat strain that can thrive in tropical climates, paving the way for self-sufficiency in just five years! Discover the incredible breakthrough that could change the game for agriculture.
However, the Geopolitical Analyst Peter Zeihan stated, ‘It will be two years to see if the new wheat works’.
Nations like Brazil may no longer depend on food imports but become self-reliant with food production within their countries.
A lack of dependency on grain imports from places like Ukraine, the United States and its corn belt and Russia are high grain producers.
With nations like Brazil with tropical climates having the possibility of self-sufficiency, this provides the opportunity for these nations to wean themselves off dependency on other states.
Nations don’t have friends; they have interests; each country competes in either hostile or friendly competitive nature to become a dominant power in their region or aspirations like China and India to become regional or global hegemonies.
It will be quite some time to see whether or not the new Brazilian strain of wheat will be successful, but with globalisation breaking down, this will be a godsend to states that are more dependent on global trade for national survival.
If the nation is not food sufficient, then that nation in a deglobalised world will face starvation and governmental collapse nations like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and other desert kingdoms depend on international trade and the continued survival and maintenance of their populations.
European sanctions have been levelled against Russia since they seized parts of eastern Ukraine and the Crimea peninsula in 2014.
They have only increased since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Since then, most European nations have worked to reduce their dependency on Russian natural gas.
They have successfully delivered this and put the German economy, the manufacturing heart of Europe, at risk.
European Sanctions targeting piped natural gas have effectively cut off European supply, and the existing infrastructure cannot be easily redirected.
While Russia has alternative natural gas sources and facilities, the limited workforce and technical challenges make these options difficult to maintain.
The Russian technical education system that actually manages the manufacturing, energy and complicated engineering system collapsed in the mid-1980s, the same time as Russia’s birthrate.
Simply put, the Russian economic system doesn’t have the technical skills to continue manufacturing, nor does it have the population to retrain this particular set of technical skills and the sheer mass to wage the kind of attrition war in Ukraine.
Gerard Dimond, the author of the book Guns, Steel and Germs, argues that societies with large populations succeed because societies that increase in population size will increase the possibilities of generating outliers like Steve Jobs or Nicholas Tesla.
(Nikola Tesla was a Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current electricity supply system.)
(Steven Paul Jobs was an American business magnate, inventor, and investor. He was the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple; Pixar’s chairman and majority shareholder; a member of The Walt Disney Company’s board of directors following its acquisition of Pixar; and the founder, chairman, and CEO of NeXT.)
It is the outliers that push society forward. Without large populations, the chance of having unique individuals driving forward technological advancements means fewer opportunities.
European sanctions are working well, and these efforts may permanently sever ties to Russian natural gas with little impact on their systems. The Russian natural gas industry faces an unprecedented fall from grace, but not all industries have been impacted equally.
With the invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 by the Russian Federation, the Western world has had a massive wake-up call on the nature of mechanised and modern industrial warfare being demonstrated in Ukraine during its conflict with Russia from 2014 until the present day.
What has been demonstrated by the Ukraine War is that Western nations do not have the industrial capacity nor the population levels to wage conflicts typical in the mid-to early 20th century and in previous centuries during mass armies and campaigns in Europe and abroad.
To fight modern wars, nations need industry and a robust supply chain where a nation can access the raw materials of warfare and turn those materials into weaponry.
What happened since 1945 and the end of World War II, which lasted from 1939 until 1945, and in the post-Cold War and post-World War II period, nations in Europe started to deindustrialise due to the end of the perceived Russian threat after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990 and the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Without the threat of a land war in Europe and conflicts in the Pacific with communist China, nations in the West started to deindustrialise and closedown military manufacturing.
This process began much earlier due to the development of industrial capacities in East Asia, particularly China; during the 1980s and 1990s, Japan, South Korea and other industrialising nations were re-industrialisation in the 1950s and 1960s after the devastation of world war two.
The industrialisation of the global South and other developing nations saw nations that had industrialised in the 18th and 19th centuries, like the United Kingdom and its steel industries, being closed due to cheaper manufacturing capacity in industrialising countries.
This process repeated, particularly in the American working class and continental Europe, where steel and traditional working-class jobs moved to foreign nations.
This meant the deindustrialisation of the Western world and that jobs moved into finance, customer service and positions that required high-end thinking and design, with the lower-skilled jobs being moved abroad.
Throughout history, the nation usually possesses the largest population and the most significant resources that win mass conflicts between nation-states.
This can be shown in the Napoleonic wars and the French Revolutionary Wars lasting from 1793 to the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 by Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, at the Battle of Waterloo.
After seizing power in 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte embarked on a campaign of conquest and subjugation of central Europe.
He subdued the powers of the Austrian Empire’s control of the contemporary territories of Austria, Hungary and several modern states in the region.
In the North, there was the Kingdom of Prussia and several independent German states, for example, kingdoms such as Saxony and Bavaria, as well as the elector ship of Hanover controlled by King George III of England, being a descendant of the Hanoverian dynasty.
The House of Hanover inherited the crown of England in the early 18th century after the extinction of the Stuart line, which previously ruled England from 1603 until the death of Queen Anne in 1714.
Throughout the 18th century, the population of England exploded from around 6 million towards the end of the 17th century to 14 ½ million towards the end of the Napoleonic wars in the early 19th century and during the American Revolutionary War in 1775 until 1783, the population of England was over 8 million.
In contrast, France had a population of over 27 million by the time of the French Revolution in 1789, which overthrew the Bourbon monarchy that had ruled France from 1689 until 1789, and the executions of Louis XVI of France in 1793.
During the long conflict between England and France that lasted from 1793 until 1815, both nations engaged in economic warfare to limit the industrial and finances of both countries.
Throughout the conflicts known as the French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars, the British Empire subsidised the other great powers on the continent to fight France.
The British mainly where fighting in the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, India and the high seas never directly engaged the French on the battlefield apart from coalition forces led by Arthur Wellesley, known to history as the Duke of Wellington, during the battle of Waterloo which finally brought an end to the first French Empire which lasted from 1804 until 1815.
This shows that despite having a superior population, the French were defeated through the strategy of exhaustion; this is where the nation loses the ability to fight, not due to attrition but to no longer have the means to fight a war.
The strategy of exhaustion was used by the commander-in-chief of the American military, Winfield Scott, who created the Anaconda Plan, which aimed to blockade the Confederate States of America, which was in rebellion against the United States of America over the issue of slavery, state rights and whether or not it was constitutional for a state to leave the union.
The Anaconda plan, in layperson’s terms, was the goal of defeating the Confederacy by removing their abilities to wage war which requires equipment, food and not just manpower to wage a modern war, with the American Civil War lasting from 1861 until 1865 being viewed as the first modern war by historians.
The strategy of exhaustion was also used by the commander-in-chief of all American armies Ulysses S Grant and the commander of all American forces in the western theatre of the conflict, General William Tecumseh Sherman, who is seen as the world’s first modern general.
What General Grant aimed to do was not to defeat the enemy but defeat their ability to fight; for this, he had two goals destroy the Army of Northern Virginia, commanded by Confederate General Robert E Lee.
This was his objective because if he defeated the Army of Northern Virginia, the Confederacy would no longer have the means to continue the civil war, and the Confederacy didn’t have the numbers or the industrial capacity to keep fighting.
It’s essential to be aware that the British Empire provided the Confederacy with 60,000 modern contemporary rivals and that some divisions of the Confederacy used technology from the American Revolutionary War in the late 18th century.
The Confederate States of America also, throughout the war, did not even possess the capacity to create blankets for its armies when fighting the industrial might of the Union Army.
Furthermore, the population of the northern states was over 22 million; in comparison, the Confederacy was only around 5 million and 6 million souls, with nearly half of that number being enslaved African Americans.
This pattern of nations being defeated due to lack of supplies, lack of industrialisation and lack of manpower is repeated over and over again throughout history.
World War I from 1914 to 1918 and World War II from 1939 until 1945, Germany was defeated twice due to the British Navy’s success in preventing Germany from keeping its population and army well-fed and having the necessary supplies of steel and rubber and other resources required for war.
The Ukrainian conflict has made France prepare for war as part of the reforms that will take place over the next two decades. The war in Ukraine has shown that Western nations, including France, are unprepared to fight an industrial war.
The Russians are using 20,000 rounds of artillery per day during the Ukraine war, with a monthly average of 600,000 rounds of artillery.
With so many artillery shells, it has been found that nations like the United States would only manage 2 to 3 months of sustained combat due to burning through its ammunition stockpiles.
After the Cold War in 1989, throughout the 1990s, France and other Western nations started to sell off their stockpiles of ammunition and other industrial capacities due to the hope of peace after the cold war, which left countries no longer prepared to fight an industrialised war.
Industrial warfare requires the ability to repair and resupply equipment quickly. The Russian Federation has lost over a thousand tanks whilst fighting in Ukraine, and Russia still has over 70 years worth of military supplies they can burn through.
It is estimated that the Russians are losing ten tanks per day. This further demonstrates the need for robust populations with the industrial capacity to ensure that fighting men and women on the front lines have the equipment to wage modern war.
During this conflict, Ukrainians are losing tanks daily, and five out of ten Russian tanks, on average, are being abandoned by the Russian soldiers, with the wreckage being repurposed for the use of Ukrainian divisions.
As long as the Russians keep supplying Ukrainians with equipment, they will be able to continue to wage war in defence of their nation with the backed logistical support and intelligence of the Western world.
When looking at France preparing for war, it currently has just over 500 tanks in its stockpile, and this will not be able to maintain the loss of tanks which is being experienced in the slugging match happening in eastern Ukraine.
With the losses happening in Ukrainian, the French will be losing 20% of their tank forces per month, which would be unsustainable for any current French war effort because it takes years to build up the industrial capacity to replace the loss of equipment.
Ukrainians in the current war should be okay because they’re getting half of their tanks from the Russian Federation, making this war in terms of raw materials sustainably. After all, the Russians are keeping in Ukrainian army well-supplied.
The French preparations for war are part of the 20-year plan called Scorpion should be ending in 2040; though this may change due to the changing nature of warfare in the 21st century, nations trying to plan for the future are looking at present-day developments.
The French adopted from the American military the all-domain command and control, which has all levels of the military on and off the battlefield, and communications sharing information will provide greater coordination and victory for the French military.
American superiority in waging warfare was demonstrated in the first Gulf War from 1990 to 1991, and the second Gulf War during the invasion of Iraq in 2003 showed the superiority of American military doctrine and its use of data which crushed the Iraqi army twice.
An example of American success was its Marine divisions were advancing towards the Iraqi capital Baghdad, but the Marines were engaged with the enemy tank divisions and were pinned down.
The American Marine divisions only had armoured Humvees, but through superior data and communications, they could coordinate an airstrike which destroyed the Iraqi armour and saved American Marines.
This use of intelligence has previously and continues to be seen throughout the war in Ukraine. One of the modernisations of the French military is its mechanised arsenal, and the new tank division is the new BRC Jaguar which is a replacement for the 40 years old AMX 10 RC.
The new tank has a superior gun, and armour is also simpler and meant for mass production, which is perfect for modern industrialised nations and high attrition wars due to losses of materials.
The cost for the new tank, the EBRC Jaguar, is under €1 million, which is an attempt to lower the costs placed upon the French Republic and its taxpayers.
The parts to the tank also are available in commercial markets; therefore, when fighting on the battlefield looking for supplies and replacements for the new French tank, replacement parts will quickly be available.
The overall benefit for the EBRC Jaguar is its cost for one tank being €1 million or below, depending on the financial requirements; it ways 25 tons and has three crew one commander, one driver and one gunner.
The armour is rated to withstand ballistic weapons and mines and able to withstand improvised explosive devices, more commonly known as IEDs which most likely is heavily influenced by America and its ally’s experience during the 20 years Afghanistan war from 2001 until the American withdrawal in 2021with the leadership of USA president Joe Biden.
In contrast to the BRC Jaguar, which costs €1 million and has commercial parts already in use by the public, the Americans have the Striker tank, which costs $5 million per tank.
The French infantry is also upgrading with the new VBMR Griffon, which will have interchangeable parts that are available commercially, and its components can be interchangeable with the EBRC Jaguar.
The new armoured personnel carrier will replace the old French VAB troop carrier transport, which has been used since 1976.
According to BBC Journalism, it has been suspected that 190 drone attacks have occurred in the Russian Federation and the Crimea peninsula, with the attack getting as far as Moscow.
On 30 August 2023, widespread Ukrainian drones in the north-west one of the targets was an airbase in the Russian city of Pskov, which Ukraine’s military intelligence chief says was attacked from inside Russia — although he didn’t say by whom.
The dry is destroyed according to satellite images of Pskov Airport after the incident shows one aircraft destroyed.
Strategic Win for Ukraine
The Ukrainian military can attack Russia internally with drones, which are ironically supplied drones available to the general public and ironically supplied by the Chinese Communist Party and its civilian manufacturing base.
Vladimir Putin comes under more pressure from the Russian civilian public to be more exposed to the conflict happening in Ukraine, which should have been a short war over quickly, for Russia is now chairman into a long conflict that is damaging national cohesion.
The Russian Federation needs this war to be over quickly to achieve its wider strategic objective by securing invasion routes into Russia and re-establishing its old Cold War borders.
Russia is a multi-ethnic empire; it expands and absorbs territories until it reaches defensible natural geographic barriers. This behaviour is part of the Russian political DNA due to Kyiv’s Mongol conquest and destruction in the 13th century and why Russia is still obsessed with securing territory.
The Ukraine War is just another example of this in practice, and success would mean delaying Russia’s demographic collapse. Russia, since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, has been fighting a total of 12 wars.
However, as dissent bubbles amongst these ethnic groups, what happens if Russia can no longer monitor and put the lid on it immediately? How could it possibly project power outside its borders?
The Russians aren’t the only ones feeling the heat after this drone attack.
When a country like Ukraine can practically walk into a Walmart and get what it needs to launch a large-scale assault, that’s one heck of a conversation starter for the Pentagon.
Once the US amasses a flock of drones, they’ll have another way to attack the Chinese navy should they need to.
For the reader unaware of the Ukraine war, it has been taking place since 2014 until the present day. This is a conflict being waged by the Russian Federation led by Vladimir Putin against the free peoples of Ukraine.
The war is being waged for many reasons, such as the expansion of NATO since the end of the Cold War in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union/USSR in 1990.
There are many diverse reasons for this conflict, ranging from geopolitical to national security and from the perspective that this war for Russia may be its last war due to only having 7 million able-bodied men to fight modern industrial warfare.
Fighting a modern war requires not only able-bodied men but also the necessary technological and industrial development that makes modern warfare possible. It is modern warfare, and the mass style Movements of World War II shall be discussed in this article as to why Tanks are not featured heavily in this conflict.
In the popular imagination when it comes to tank warfare, the popular imagination goes back to the blitzkrieg tactics of the Second World War, where the Germans outmanoeuvred the British and French armies winning the battle of France in 1940 and the conquest and subjugation of Poland in 1939.
The tank was developed during World War I from 1914 to 1918 or from 1914 to the Treaty of Versailles signed in 1919. Historically, the war is remembered from 1914 to 1918, but the blockades of Gemernone ports continued until 1919 due to fear that the war may continue.
To understand the Ukraine War and the lack of tank warfare, it is first necessary to look back at tank development and why that technology was created to overcome the fixed and entrenched positions of trench warfare during World War II, which continues to apply to modern fixed defences in the contemporary 21st-century.
For tanks to be effective in combat, they need the support of infantry and a robust supply chain that sends ammunition and fuel to the front lines, which the Russians did not have during their invasion in 2022.
Since the start of the invasion of Ukraine, the Russians have been pushed out of northern Ukraine and are focused on fighting in the defensive frontlines around Donetsk, Lyschanks, Izium and Bakhmut.
Eastern Ukraine and the region are perfect for tank battles due to their flat terrain, and some of the biggest battles in tank mechanised warfarin happened during World War II on the ground, similar to the combat zones in Ukraine.
The reasons why the Russians were unsuccessful can be seen during World War II and the German and Soviet invasions of Poland. During the invasion of Poland in 1939, the Germans had the advantage of the best technologically some of the most advanced tanks on the planet, combined with air superiority and the element of surprise.
In contrast, the Russian Federation does not have this advantage because United States intelligence agencies were able to monitor the Russian military’s movements, ensuring that the Ukrainians would not be surprised by a Russian advance.
In 1940 the Germans invaded Holland and Belgium to bypass the Maginot Line fortification, which stretched along the shared French and German border of the Rhineland.
The Germans chose to bypass the defences because, despite the superior mobility of modern mechanised armies, they still could not destroy entrenched positions that had been heavily fortified.
To be successful on the battlefield, the ability for tanks to manoeuvre and not enter killing fields where fixed artillery positions, minefields and other defences can destroy them.
Tanks work best with infantry support and air superiority so that the Air Force can remove obstacles for tank divisions. Ultimately tanks work best with the power of manoeuvre.
The British expeditionary forces or the French military did not heavily outnumber the Germans in 1940, but the Germans’ ability to use speed won them the battle for France.
In 1941 Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, named after the mediaeval German Emperor Frederick Barbarossa from the 12th century; during this operation, the German invasion of Russia in terms of military equipment was evenly matched.
The Germans were so victorious because they had superior experience, having conducted lightning war or blitzkrieg during the 1939 conquest of Poland and the 1940 battle for France, which saw the defeat of France and the evacuation of the British expeditionary forces at Dunkirk.
The Germans used the flat ground and the fact that the Russians did not prepare adequate defences to stop the German advance having the Germans overrun Kyiv and most of Ukraine and advance until the gates of Moscow through failing to take the city.
The Soviets had more planes and tanks during Operation Barbarossa and repeatedly during the eastern front side of the war between the Allied powers: the United States, the British Empire and the Soviet Union.
The Axis powers were Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy led by Benito Mussolini and the Japanese Empire. During engagements between Nazi tank divisions and Soviet Red Army forces, the Germans were often outnumbered from 5 to 1 or 2 to 1 and, towards the war’s end, 10 to 1.
One of the critical technologies of the time was the radio, and in modern battles and warfare, technology is king.
The ability to have communications with all assets in and out of the combat zone leads to more success on the battlefield because the infantry division can call on air support to destroy the enemy’s tank divisions.
The ability to communicate and coordinate is the ultimate force multiplier and a concentration of force that can lead to an inferior opponent inflicting massive damage on the superior enemy regarding numerical advantages seen repeatedly during the Ukraine war.
One great battle during Operation Barbarossa was the Battle Brody, the biggest tank battle in history, where the Soviet Union destroyed 200 German tanks out of 730 tanks.
In turn, the German tank divisions destroyed 800 Red Army tanks out of the total of 2800 tanks that were in the combat zone. The Red Army learned from these mistakes during the battle of Kursk in 1943, a German counter-attack.
The Russians won the battle due to having prepared defences and numerical superiority.
Statistics from the United States show that tank losses during World War II were caused by anti-tank guns 29%, other tanks 25%, tanks lost due to mins 22%, self-propelled guns 13%, lost to bazookas 6% and 3% due to other causes.
During the fourth Arab-Israeli War of 1973, the Syrian army rushed its tank divisions into Israel, but the Israelis, despite being unprepared fortified the positions on the Golan Heights.
The battle took place over 30 miles. With the ability to prepare their defences, the Syrians lost 260 tanks out of a total force of 750 tanks.
This shows that using fortification and time to prepare and equip defences will mitigate the effectiveness of tanks. In many ways, the tank’s ability has been overstated and overused in the popular imagination tanks are an effective tool of warfare.
Still, the artillery, mines and other warfare methods should never be overlooked. From 1990 to 1991, during the First Gulf War and 2003, the Second Gulf War witnessed the American war machine decimate the Iraqi army twice in both conflicts.
During both wars, American casualties and of its allies were shockingly low compared to the Iraqis, primarily due to the superior technologies of the West, particularly in the art of communications.
The United States expanded resources into what it calls joint all domain command and control, a web of systems that networks all US forces together.
The best example of this doctrine happened during the 2003 Iraq invasion; during the Baghdad push, an Iraqi tank division intercepted a single platoon of American soldiers.
The Marines should have been killed, being only equipped with light machine guns and other light weaponry, including armoured Humvees Marines in communication with neighbouring aircraft, which enabled them to call in an airstrike, which destroyed the advancing Iraqi forces.
This kind of network communication is helping Ukrainians to successfully fight the war in Ukraine due to American expertise, American intelligence, American logistics and American methods of warfare being used to fight the Russian Federation.
The United States is providing everything to the Ukrainian war effort apart from boots on the ground, so we are seeing Ukrainians fighting a war in a predominantly Western style which is only highlighted in a total war in a purely conventional sense without the use of nuclear weapons Western militaries will kick the Russian ass according to the geopolitical analyst Peter Zeilhan.
Innovation and the capital investment environment that we have all known over the past 30 years is now coming to an end, and this is why, over this period, humanity has experienced massive innovation unprecedented in previous human history.
More technological development has happened in the last 200 years than the previous 7 to 5 million years of human history, evolution, and technological innovations.
This innovation and investment of human progress were caused by one creation of true globalisation and a global marketplace at the end of World War II in 1945, which meant that each nation could specialise and invest in new potential markets that would drive innovation and wealth.
Secondly, after World War II, the biggest generation from 1945 to 1964 was the Boomer generation, the largest generation ever in human history.
The next generations were much smaller: Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980; the Millennial Generation, born between 1981 and 1996; and finally, Generation Z or the Instagram generation, born between 1997 and 2010.The Boomer Generation is the largest, and between the 1990s and 2021, they invested heavily in saving for their retirement by investing in pensions, the stock market and other forms of investment, which has funded innovation growth over the preceding three decades.
Now, the Boomer generation is retiring, and by 2040, most of the boomers are most likely dead and no longer effective in any way taking part in the workforce.
This means that the cost of labour will drastically increase, which is also caused by the approaching demographic collapse of most nations around the globe, with China’s population going from 1.4 billion to less than 600 million by the end of the century.
The consequences of fewer people will be fewer brains to develop revolutionary technological ideas and a lack of people to fund the project, leading to a slowdown of innovations.
The geopolitical analyst and writer Peter Zilhen has stated that ‘he cannot imagine what the future will look like and that what is happening in the world there is no current economic theory can explain this and what the economy of the future will look like.’
Innovation requires a fairly specific set of circumstances.
You need enough people in their 20s and 30s imagining a future and developing the tech, along with a capital-rich environment, but you won’t see the results and return on investment until the back end of innovation.
A simple example is that the first smartphone was developed in the early 1990s by Simon Personal Communicator (SPC). In 1992, IBM announced the very first smartphone.
It released the Simon Personal Communicator (SPC) for purchase in 1994. The SPC was the first touchscreen phone. Additionally, it could send and receive both emails and faxes.
However, until the release of the Apple iPhone in 2007, this technology became mainstream and accessible to the public, no longer being a niche market for the well-off.
Our world is changing, and the conditions that enable technological processes over the preceding decades are now going away due to the breakdown of globalisation and the collapse of global demographics.
Anything that hasn’t reached operationalisation…probably won’t make it. Below are a few industries where transformative innovations are still getting much attention.
Let’s look at those from least likely to most likely: modular nuclear reactors, artificial intelligence hardware, space and satellites, biological drugs, shale, and agriculture.
These technologies and industries will make some of the most significant impacts on the world, but it will be no small feat.
There will be hurdles and obstacles along the path to innovation, and every country will have a different outlook, but I would expect the US to be one of the first through the gate on most of this.
The United States will be okay because their Boomer generation, which actually had children, is now called the millennial generation, unlike most countries whose Boomer generation chose not to have children.
The second reason the USA will be okay is due to the access to cheap labour from Mexico, which still has healthy demographics and a young workforce that can ensure America still has access to affordable goods and services to which it has become accustomed.
During the Nissan presentation conference at the Shanghai Auto Exposition in April 2023, Nissan hopes that their vehicle will all be electrified by 2030, have a low carbon footprint, and carry a lower carbon footprint by having a green supply chain.
This means that any carbon emissions into its products will have a low or be without footprint regarding carbon and other materials that negatively inflict environmental damage.
Nissan stated they want a future ‘where you feel safer in your vehicle and feel more peace of mind when your children reach driving age.’
This is all part of Nissan and many other Companies and manufacturers moving away from the classic internal combustion engine to re-brand themselves as companies of the future and embracing the green agenda.
What this means in practical terms for customers is that companies, in this case, Nissan, are trying to rebrand themselves as green and environmentally friendly, hence focusing on the future of the car industry, which in their mind is green.
Furthermore, this is a big part of Nissan’s overall strategy announced in 2021 with its plan for 2030 for their cars to be more environmentally friendly and have a more inclusive organisation.
The first vehicle to be shown by Nissan at the Shanghai Auto Conference 2023 is the Max Out Convertible; from a purely visual point of view, the vehicle is an eyesore and could be compared to a sci-fi movie in the 1980s—alternatively, the vehicle from ghost in the Shell movie released in 2017 starring Scarlett Johansson.
Luckily for this vehicle, it should not be launched for the general public to purchase until 2028, so there are still times for any flaws to be changed regarding its manufacturing and design.
The information on the Max Out Convertible electric vehicle is sadly scarce regarding its battery life.
However, compared to the current Electric vehicles (EV) available on the EV markets, the distance could be 250 to 500 miles travel time without recharging, so depending on certain conditions, it should be around two hours running time.
Nissan is also introducing a new vehicle Arizona, which will be exclusively produced in China and specifically designed and marketed towards the Chinese market. Nissan has been involved in the Chinese car market for over 50 years.
Nissan is taking a page from BMW with a focus on bringing artificial intelligence into their vehicles with the creation of Nissan’s artificial intelligence (AI) called Epro.
One of the advantages of Nissan artificial intelligence is that if you are trying to locate a friend, it will render the person you are looking for in a map in 3D with an artificial avatar created matching their appearance.
This naturally also comes with the standard satnav that will plot the most efficient way to reach their location; what is unique about this new technology is that it renders this information in 3D for easy navigation and helps locate individuals.
With the new vehicles being presented by Nissan during the presentation at the Shanghai Auto Presentation Conference 2023, it can be best described that nothing truly revolutionary can be found in the development of this vehicle—the new artificial intelligence, however, is impressive.
With Nissan, AI is ground-breaking and demonstrates more excellent trends towards artificial intelligence, making the driving experience and how drivers interact with cars and tech in their daily lives more efficient.
The engines of electric vehicles naturally still require many enhancements in technologies announcement. Still, regarding the available travel time and its overall function as a vehicle, there is no actual benefit compared to the internal combustion engine’s efficiency.
However, it is still relevant to highlight that the move towards electric vehicles or hybrid vehicles dominating the Auto Shanghai Presentation Conference 2023 adds to the overall trends towards electric cars and that this market is still very much the future of vehicle optimisation.
Here are the numbers regarding the expansion of the electric vehicle market. In 2011, around 55,000 electric vehicles (EVs) were sold worldwide. Ten years later, that figure had grown close to 7 million vehicles.
Also, EV vehicles now made up 18% of the global car market in 2022, and previously, in 2021, it was only 14%. This only enhances the knowledge that investing money to purchase a Nissan or other electric vehicle is the correct status choice.
What makes this even better is investing money into the electric car market, either in the stock market of these companies or merely being supportive by purchasing electric vehicles.
With the beginning of this year’s Shanghai auto exposition in 2023, the predominant cars and other vehicles on offer have mainly been electric vehicles (EV) and hybrid vehicles, which mainly use cobalt to create electric batteries that run the vehicle.
In the exposition, car companies presenting their new vehicles, such as BMW and Nissan showcasing new vehicles, particularly electric and hybrid ones, claim that EV vehicles will be clean and have low carbon emissions.
Unfortunately, these companies are either being malicious, misinformed or turning blind alleys to the blood and sacrifice that goes into the production of batteries; these are not just batteries in their vehicles, but the batteries maintain modern ways of life.
Mr Siddharth Kara Is an author, journalist and researcher in supply chains and cobalt mining; in his new book Cobalt Red How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, he presents the case against corporations and the exploitations of poorer nations.
His whole argument can be found on the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast, where he breaks down the importance of cobalt and the appalling, inhumane and humanitarian crisis caused by cobalt mining.
On average, people who work in the Congo cobalt mines earn two dollars a day per sack of cobalt they have mine without protective gear. The chemicals from these materials cause infertility, the loss of a child, and a host of other concerns.
Cobalt mining practices are reminiscent of something out of the 19th century, with people using primitive pickaxes and wooden beams to maintain the tunnels where the digging occurs.
Electric Vehicles and Cobalt
Globally there are only a few deposits of cobalt available on this planet which can be Gathered from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia, with final deposits available in Sudbury, Canada and Norilsk.
Increasing demand deposits of cobalt led to a decrease in the conditions of miners working in the Democratic Republic of Congo, conditions which.
According to Siddharth Kara, it can be likened to the state of the Congo when it was controlled by Leopold II of Belgium, who ruled the Congo from 1885 to 1908 as his private property Congo Free State.
During King Leopold’s period of rule, over 15 million people living in the Congo were killed and subject to other travesties that can be likened to the conditions currently happening with the current miners in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The 2023 Shanghai Auto Expedition is targeted at the internal car market within China with the growing number of electric vehicles available and China’s massive population of over a billion souls; however, these numbers can be hotly debated.
Due to China having a large population and, more importantly, China’s number of registered Vehicles at 319,030,000 Units in Dec 2022, It’s essential to factor these numbers into China’s growing electric vehicle market.
The current Sales of gasoline-electric hybrids and all-electric vehicles rose 26.2% over a year ago in the first three months of 2023 to 1.6 million, according to the China Association of Auto Manufacturers.
Sales of purely electric vehicles rose 14.4% to 1.2 million, while hybrids increased 75.1% to 433,000.
The increasing demands globally for COBOL electric vehicles mean a deterioration of conditions for people in the poorest nations due to being at the bottom of the global supply chain.
A supply chain is where goods, services and resources are added to creating and distributing products with processes like mining at the bottom of the supply chain.
As goods move higher up the supply chain, the money paid to the people doing these tasks increases; for example, a web designer gets paid more than a person creating the computer’s keyboards and circuitry.
These principles naturally apply to the minerals required to run electric vehicles; the minerals in an electric vehicle, 8 kg of lithium, 14 kg of cobalt, and 20 kg of magnesium, can be much more for Tesla-run batteries which, for example, contain 62.6 kg/138 pounds of lithium.
Throughout each presentation during the Shanghai Auto Exposition 2023, each company highlighted and continually spoke about how their EV technology will be green and that the supply chain throughout the manufacturing process will be carbon friendly.
Ultimately this is entirely nonsense; the supply chain is not environmentally friendly as the damage caused to the environment throughout the mining process.
As for the people who are mining, they only get paid $2 a day to collect minerals that help run electric vehicle batteries; the process throughout the supply chain is riddled with unethical practices that are likened to the slavery of the 17th and 18th centuries.
The Biden administration has issued its first wave of investment bans on the Chinese tech space — things like AI or tech with military applications.
Venture capital and PE groups, including the likes of Sequoia China, GGV and Coatue, have poured billions into Chinese tech over the past two decades, funding the growth of nearly every large tech company from TikTok-owner ByteDance to drone-maker DJI.
China is a totalitarian government where its people aren’t free to think and be creative because creatives are naturally disruptive to the government in China and every other government.
There is no democratic system and checks and balances that keep its population under control, the main job of government since the 16th century and what made government and all-year-round businesses and due to an educated population, the growth of nationalists and the printing press.
German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg created the first printing press in Europe and is credited with inventing the printing press around 1436. However, he was far from the first to automate the book-printing process.
Woodblock printing in China dates back to the 9th century, and Korean bookmakers were printing with moveable metal type a century before Gutenberg.
First Wave of Capital Restrictions
This is the first wave of capital restrictions on the Chinese, but they will be fine for cash.
For the last 30 years, the Chinese have restricted capital from flowing abroad, ensuring a bottomless supply of money at home.
That’s why China has seen explosive growth over the past few decades.
The one thing they need is ACCESS.
Without the know-how and connections American investment gave them, all those doors will slam shut in their face.
Innovation will be stifled, and economic growth will come to a halt.
This is only the first wave of capital restrictions placed on the Chinese, but the long-term effects will be devastating. And to kick Xi while he’s down, he’ll have to sit back and watch the tech sectors of the countries around him surge to the top.
