The Russian demographics have declined for nearly half a century due to instability in Russia in the 1990s and the collapse of the Russian higher educational system, particularly in technology and engineering fields in the mid-1980s.
Furthermore, in the 1990s, in the aftermath of the Cold War from 1945 to 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union regime in Russia in 1990 gave Russia a decade of instability and internal wars, which reduced the chances of its young people having children.
People don’t have kids if they don’t feel safe or are concerned about the economy.
A great example is Japan, whose population has not been at a replacement level since the late 1970s due to the impact of the 1973 oil crisis.
The 1970s oil crisis was caused primarily due to the October Yon Kippur War in 1973, which was the fourth Arab-Israeli war. In response to this, Arab nations want to hurt Israel and other countries, particularly the United States and its allies that support the world’s only Jewish state.
The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting (Opec) reduced oil output by half by early 1974.
On October 17, OPEC announced rolling monthly 5 per cent reductions in oil production, halving it within six months. The result was a quadrupling of prices within a year and the first oil crisis.
When there is a crisis or the perception of a crisis, people tend not to have children or have much fewer than when times are good.
Why Russia Might Lose the Far East to China
This is all relevant to why Russia has a strong chance of losing the Far East because its current population of around 140 million is in decline, and the bulk of its population is in the West.
In comparison, its far eastern population is around 6.4 million. The Chinese have a population of approximately 1.4 billion and are heavily settling into the Russian region, using its population to break away Russia’s far east from greater Russia.
Furthermore, the Chinese have used this strategy to integrate the Tibetan region and Xinjiang region into greater China by turning the ethnic Han Chinese into the majority within those regions and making the previous majority the minority to ensure that China will rule those regions.
Furthermore, according to the Chinese Communist Party, which has some basis in truth, China suffered 100 years of humiliation from 1839 to 1949, and this is why the Chinese Communist Party’s attempt to reunite Greater China and settle scores from that period.
The Russian Empire conquered parts of greater Manchuria, which the Chinese wanted back there, doing this through their massive population immigrating into the Far East.
America is going through a drastic change in its demographics, which means that ethnic groups and cultural groups that make up the population of the United States are not based on racial lines but purely cultural.
When it comes to race relations, which is purely a human-made concept, it has no jurisdiction in reality; when I discuss different cultures, I’m not talking about a person’s skin colour, merely the cultural and political traditions which they come from.
This can even be purely where their interests lie; for example, the Latin American group of the American population may very well dominate American political and cultural life by the end of the century.
What this means in practical terms depends on how well they assimilated with the United States.
With the USA’s record, it has a fantastic track record of turning people from different nations into Americans no matter where they come from.
The demographics of America, in regards to the white majority, particularly from Western Europe, will become a minority by 2045.
Therefore, the new dominant or rising dominant Latino minorities will have very little interest in supporting the state of Israel as well as the rest of America because the United States no longer need to rely on oil from the Middle East, which increases the United States driven by his domestic politics no longer being interested geopolitically and socially in the region.
The Jewish population within the United States is around 2.4%, around 7.6 million people. This is a minority that continues to get smaller and grow increasingly marginalised as new ethnic groups begin to dominate America’s political culture.
In democracies, policymakers are elected to office by their constituents. Basically, it is the voters who decide the makeup of a democratic nation’s foreign policy and its decision-making.
Greatest Generation: Declining Support for Israel from the United States
America’s Generational Divide
The reason why different generations have different political viewpoints is due to the periods they grew up in and the information and different technologies they were exposed to.
Most people form their political and ideological viewpoints and have seen the world within their first decade of working.
The Silent Generation, also known as Radio Babies or Traditionalists, includes people who were born between 1928 and 1945 and lived through World War II and the Great Depression, according to FamilySearch.
These challenging experiences shaped many of the generation’s attitudes toward the workplace.
Now, we have the generation that built our world political order and kept the peace for over 78 years.
The Greatest Generation, also called the World War II Generation and G.I. Generation, was a generation of Americans born between approximately 1901 and 1924 who came of age during the Great Depression and the 1940s, many of whom fought in World War II.
It is the silent generation and the greatest generation that is responsible for creating internationalism and promoting international organisations such as the European Union and the United Nations to maintain peace in Europe and the rest of the world.
These two generations will mostly be dead by 2040, and the new generations that take their place are not interested in globalisation and securing world piece for future generations.
The United Kingdom’s former Prime Minister John Major, who was in office from 1990 to 1997, marked the passing and retirement of the greatest generation during the 1992 general election.
In a podcast, when he took part in an interview with former Conservative Minister Rory Stewart and ex-Labour fix-it man Alistair Campbell, he said that their passing and retirement marked the turning point of the Conservative Party’s attitude to international and intergovernmental institutions.
Put simply, the older generations favoured internationalism because they lived and groaned up in the aftermath and during World War II and the newer generations born after 1945, I’ve only ever known piece, particularly in western developed nations.
Polls conducted in the United States now show less than half (48%) of Gen Z and millennials believe the U.S. should publicly voice support of Israel compared with 63% of Gen Xers, 83% of baby boomers and 86% of members of the Silent Generation.
Furthermore, the United States has voted into office increasingly isolationist presidential candidates since the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, throwing out of office the one-term Republican president George H Butch Watson (1989 to 1992), who had the experience and credentials to chart America into a new future in the post-Cold War world.
Instead, the United States had the man with the experience to make America’s new international foreign policies voted out of office.
What happened instead? America, for over 30 years, has been living off the glory days of post-World War II and post-Cold War political environments without making anything new.
The American public is not interested in foreign policy or geopolitics and instead reverting to America’s historical norm of isolationism and not getting involved in foreign conflicts; people forget that up until the early 20th century, this was the American normal foreign policy.
Every nation on our planet has limitations dictated to a country due to its geography. Geography informs the political realities and what is possible and not possible for nations located in specific geographical locations; that is why there is the social science of geopolitics.
Geopolitics is the understanding of what nations can and cannot do and why certain nations have different foreign policies due to the weaknesses or strengths of their geographies.
An easy example of this is the flat plane lands in Eastern Europe and in Russia, which makes Russian policymakers very anxious due to the potential threat either imagined or possible from other foreign powers.
From 1812 to 1945, Russia, on average, was invaded once every 32 years, according to the author and writer Tim Marshall of the book Prisoners of Geography.
In this piece of writing, I will be discussing the geopolitics of Spain, which significantly limits the country’s ability to be a significant regional power even though historically, Spain was once called the Empire where the sun never sets, but this was during the rule of Philip II of Spain (1556 to 1588).
The Spanish also had the advantage of being one of the first colonisers of South America, and it was access to gold and silver mines which helped to power up Spain’s ability to be a significant power in Europe.
Modern-day Spain, just like the old Spanish kingdom in terms of the geography of the 16th century, is surrounded by mountains in northern Spain, the Pyrenees mountains that provide natural defences for Spain from France and any other would-be invaded from northern Spain stretching across its northern coastline is predominantly mountainous.
This also means disadvantages because there are not enough seaports to provide shipping ports and trade links in the northern and southern hemispheres and other trade routes with the rest of the world.
This same geographical weakness also stretches across the eastern Spanish borders to Gibraltar again; this provides defensive barriers to Spain, but it keeps the Spanish trapped in the local geography.
Finally, we have southern Spain, which has Gibraltar, which is a natural port for shipping and is a natural waterway and shipping lane for any international shipping going from the Mediterranean and the rest of the world; it is one of the world’s most important shipping lanes.
Geopolitics: Spain
Unfortunately for the Spanish, Gibraltar has been controlled by the British since 1704, during the War of the Spanish Succession, which lasted from 1701 to 1713.
Sir George Rooke captured Gibraltar for the British, and Spain formally ceded it to Britain under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.
The Spanish, until present times, wanted the return of Gibraltar to Spain. Still, as long as the people of Gibraltar wished to be part of Britain in 2002, in a referendum, the territory voted to remain part of Great Britain.
This territorial dispute will continue to be a hot topic between the Spanish and British governments because it is geopolitically highly valuable to Spain and the British due to the importance of its geopolitical positioning.
Furthermore, Spain’s southern and eastern border is also most vulnerable to invasion due to having flatlands and sharing a border with Portugal. The British have maintained a strong relationship with Portugal before even Britain was united in the act of Union with Scotland in 1707.
The political and military alliance with Portugal goes back to the Hundred Years War from 1337 to 1443, starting in 1773 when England was ruled by King Edward III of England, who reigned from 1327 to 1377.
The reason for the alliance was that the French supported the kingdom of Castile, which was fighting against the English in the late Edwardian phase of the Hundred Years War.
The English lacked allies to fight in the Spanish peninsula and allied with the Portuguese to avoid being blocked out of that peninsula.
The British and Portuguese alliance has been ongoing until the present day. The Portuguese played a crucial part in the English liberation of Spain during the Peninsular War (1804 to 1814) during the Napoleonic wars from 1799 to 1815.
Western nations are predominantly nations that are part of the European Union, North America, and other nations linked to liberal democracies and Western European cultures, particularly what constitutes Europe politically and culturally is much larger than Europe itself.
West has been moving in perpetual crisis since the 2008 financial crash due to political leadership and even the general public not being willing to use power in the geopolitical sense due to four main reasons:
· The legacy of colonialism
· Unfounded belief that the West is evil in the United States is an evil empire and finally
· Society and political leaders not accepting the true nature of international politics and geopolitics
· Europe has been in a state of war since the fall of the Western Rome Empire in 476AD
According to Konstantin Kisin, a British and Russian author, writer, and podcaster, it is the application and use of power to serve your citizens.
The United States, the world’s greatest superpower, consumes five times as many resources as any other nation and people on this planet.
This success is caused by the protection and economic security created by the United States post-World War II world order, which has led to prosperity throughout the West until today.
French Empire in Africa: Why the West is in Perpetual Crisis
The Legacy of Colonialism
European nations from the late 15th century until the collapse of the old colonial powers, Spain and Portugal, in the early 19th century and the withdrawal of French and British from their old colonial territories in the mid-20th century.
The British Empire officially disbanded with the handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China in 1997, marking the end of Britain as an empire.
With the European nation’s colonial legacy, there is a robust, ingrained reluctance to interfere in African countries outright to interfere in other nations’ politics, the very least directly.
However, it must be stated the political situation is more complicated. For instance, the French have held a quasi-empire in northern Africa due to influencing government with them using the currency African franc, the French language as a common language and the recent coup d’états in Niger in 2023, marking the end of French influence in that region.
The French, British, German and others are reluctant to handle the European migrant crisis, which has been an ongoing crisis since 2013 due to the Arab Spring from 2010 to 2019, and this year, a net inflow of migrants is at least 1,200,000 people.
There is a misplaced view within European leadership, particularly in Germany, which is responsible for two world wars and the deaths of nearly a hundred million people, including 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, that they need to atone for their sins, and this is why Germany opened its borders to migrants.
Under the leadership of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in 2015, the nation had 1 million migrants, and as of 2022, that figure is now 2.7 million, though this data may not be accurate.
America War of Independence: Why the West is in Perpetual Crisis
The Evil Empire
There is a view pushed by the enemies of democracy, freedom, and the American world system created after the Second World War that the United States is a force for evil in this world.
Furthermore, this viewpoint is being driven by the world becoming geopolitically multipolar.
What this means in politics and international relations terms is that the world is now becoming home to more than one superpower. In practical terms, it is more likely to be regional powers, with each region having one or more great powers dominating the politics within their areas.
This is driven by two factors: the industrialisation and prosperity that the United States created, which enabled nations who did not have access to resources to have the security of global oceans, which enabled free trade and for countries to begin industrialisation and specialisation.
Two great examples of specialisation are the Republic of Taiwan, which creates 90% of global semiconductor chips and the British, which is still the global leader in financial services.
What globalisation did was turn the world into one giant marketplace for goods and services, as well as affordable, which is why poor villages in Africa or People living in the Gaza Strip living in poverty have access to smartphones.
Nations don’t just fight wars with guns and rockets; they fight with war using culture, pushing forward their narrative, rightly or wrongly, that they should influence their regions, such as the Russians, Chinese, Iranians and India, to a lesser extent wanting to be out of the influence of the American system.
What these nations want is to be free of American influence, be free of Western influence and pursue geopolitical policies which they believe rightly or wrongly will be better off without being influenced by the United States of America.
Four people reading this who are curious about what an international world would look like if the United States dismantled its navy and permanently withdrew from geopolitics would see a world reminiscent of the 19th century.
For Europe, due to its declining geographical region, the dominant powers would be the French and English.
In the Far East, it would be China, India and Japan, though to a lesser extent for that nation due to its demographic decline and having more adults in diapers than newborn babies.
As for Africa, my money would be on Nigeria and South Africa. As for North America, that would still be the United States, a continental nation like India and China, and they will most likely have a powerful position in the world.
The Middle East would have to be Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel to a lesser extent because Turkey and Israel are most likely to make arrangements to carve up their interests in the region. However, Turkey and Greece may go to war over influence in the Aegean Sea.
Justin Trudeau: Why the West is in Perpetual Crisis
Western Liberalism
In 2017, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared Canada the first postnational state; this means he does not see a landmass that any people living there have a claim to that land or that national identity is a genuine belief.
What we consider nationhood was created in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789 because the People in France who identified as French were mainly the intelligentsia and people living in cities, so around just 20% of the population.
Therefore, to create unity in the new French Republic and later under the first French Empire was to create a nation-state with one particular ethnic group or people’s belief in similar ideologies, speaking the same languages and believing their nation and its history special.
Nation-states were created and became the predominant method of ruling a land mass area dominated by one or similar ethnic groups due to this being the most straightforward method to govern nations.
With empires typically made of multiple ethnic groups, one ethnic group ruling a nation-state is far easier to manage.
The reason this attitude of not identifying with a nation’s history is making the West have a perpetual crisis is that if you do not believe in your nation, believe in its own right to exist, or believe in its identity, then no political leader or even its people will fight to protect it.
Using the analogy used by the historians David Starkey and Edward Gibbon, the Roman Empire did not fall to armies or farming, but due to its people no longer caring if it existed or if it was destroyed, it did not fall in a cataclysm instead died in a whimper because the Roman people no longer cared.
Suppose the Western people no longer care about their cultural legacy and are unwilling to share their national story with its history and culture. In that case, that too will fall into perpetual crisis, just like what happened to the Roman Empire.
Rome Empire Map: Why the West is in Perpetual Crisis
The End of the Roman Empire
Watson Roman Empire finally collapsed in 476 A.D. From then until 1945, Europe was in a state of perpetual wars either internally or externally with its neighbours with kingdoms fighting for dominance, which lasted 1469 years or just short of 1 ½ millennium.
These wars and people reading this who are of European descent either by culture or by genetics, our grandfathers or even parents lived through two world wars in the 20th century, and they are the descendants of multiple wars stretching back to the fall of the Roman Empire.
This legacy of violence and destruction has traumatised Western European and Western psyches both emotionally and politically, with nations that are part of the West no longer interested in engaging in international politics and geopolitics the way they used before 1945.
The reason why this is leading the West into perpetual crisis is that, collectively, in our national memories, we have had enough of war and violence and are no longer willing to make decisions for our security that have instead outsourced to the United States of America that doesn’t have over millennia worth of trauma to deal with.
However, it must be highlighted that the United States has had enough of foreign wars and conflicts with American presidents since 1992, with the election of Bill Clinton having become increasingly isolationist and reactive, not proactive to a perpetual crisis.
Russian Federation and Russia historically have been a kingdom, Empire and nation that is easy to invade but very hard to defend against the Mongols; the first French Empire and Nazi Germany found this out for themselves and a host of other nations that invaded or have had wars against Russia.
Russia has flatlands perfect for Mongol hordes and organised armies and tank divisions.
Russia has shown that it can defend itself if it controls the invasion points into Russia by controlling the Carpathian Mountains last time the Russians had this control and security was during the Cold War from 1945 into the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Russians could only have security by having control of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia, including parts of Finland which Russia won during the Finnish-Soviet War of 1939 to 1940, more commonly known as the Winter War.
This war also guaranteed that Finland would not join the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the alliance network created by the United States of America to fight Russia.
These geographical areas are essential to Russia because other power must do more than send tanks through these buffer zones. The territory is outside of natural defences, flatlands, and enough native infrastructure and space to ensure the war happens outside Russia’s borders.
Russia’s defence planning mainly involves plugging the invasion gaps with soldiers and fighting along defensive lines. Russians fight their wars by rail, not by roads, due to massive infrastructure projects not being practical due to the natural Russian geography.
It is hard for Westerners and people growing up in a liberal, multicultural and democratic society and worldview to understand the motivations for Russian leaders wishing to conquer and hold vast sway of territory.
It’s not only alien but an antithesis to Western values since 1945.
What needs to be understood is that the Russian leadership and peoples come from entirely different historical and cultural backgrounds. Russians are not just Europeans; they are so Asians.
The Russians are Europeans who meet the Mongol hordes and see what has been created in contemporary Russia due to Western and Eastern cultural influences.
Russia is not a liberal society; it does not favour a liberal worldview that has been hard-won and thought for in the West, where the individual is just as important as the collective.
This is why the Russians can afford to take losses of 5 to 1 or 10 to 1, and Western liberal nations can not afford those kinds of losses because the West favours individuality over collectivism is one of the significant differences between Western civilisations and other civilisations.
There is also the Russian view of international politics when it is the survival of the fittest, where nations rise and fall in their abilities to protect their soil and compete to be the global or regional hegemony.
History before 1945 was when nations thought nations were in an independent self-help system described by international relations scholars like John Mearsheimer, author of, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, and the system where nations fight for survival.
Mearsheimer uses the example of Otto von Bismarck and their policy of destroying the Poles to prevent the recreation of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, which would threaten Germany and the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, respectively.
The reason why this was such a threat to Germany was that in the 19th century, Germany was surrounded by enemies to the West in the forms of the Second French Empire, the East by the Russian Empire, to the south by the Austrian Hungarian Empire and to the north the decaying Scandinavian powers of Denmark and Sweden.
As for the North Sea, this was the territory of the British Empire, the largest empire the world had ever seen, dominating international trade in the 19th century.
So like Russia and its actions in the Ukraine war and Germany in the 19th and early 20th century, these nations perceive themselves as being surrounded by enemies and aggressors who would see their destruction if given a chance but keep in mind their point of view.
They are not protected by natural defences like Great Britain and the United States of America; they are islands onto themselves. Geography plays a massive part in political decisions, what Tim Marshall, a journalist and author, ‘prisoners of geography’.
Russia, since the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, has been trying to regain invasion gaps into Russia since 1992 with the occupation Transnistria region of Moldova.
In 1991 Moldova declared independence from the Soviet Union; shortly after this event, the ethnically identifying region Transnistria situated on the east bank of the Dniester River, unilaterally declared independence with the backing of Russia.
The declaration triggered armed conflicts in the region, ending in a ceasefire on July 22 1992. Transnistria is a largely Russian-speaking population and has remained unofficially part of the Russian Federation since 1992, with Russian soldiers stationed in Transnistria.
Transnistria is home to Russia’s largest arms arsenal from the Second World War.
For people reading this who are fans of history, the collapse of the Soviet Union is very much reminiscent of the partition of the German Empire at the end of World War I in 1918, the Empire was broken up, and independent states like Poland were created.
Unfortunately, the divisions and new states created after World War I caused greater divisions and hatred that contributed to Second World War because ethnic Germans not living within the much reduced German Republic/Weimar Republic in 1918 and 1933 gave Nazi Germany a cause bill to expand its territories.
The World after the Cold War did not effectively deal with the remnants of the Soviet Union and Russia after a Cold War spanning from 1945 until 1989; like the Second World War, the origins of the Ukraine War can be found in the aftermath of the Cold War.
The Allied nations defeated the Russians, like Imperial Germany, after 1918.
However, due to the Russian use and availability of nuclear weaponry, that state could ne be defeated, which, like the First World War, led to the Second World War from 1939 to 1945, the Russians were able to rearm and rebuild their economy to be a recurring threat to the West.
‘Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much’-Oscar Wilde, an Irish poet and playwright.
Russians have repeated this process of occupying territory to fill invasion gaps in Russia, the examples above Transnistria region and during the Georgian Civil War 1992 to 1993. On October 20, around 2,000 Russian troops moved to protect Georgian railroads.
On October 22, 1993, the government forces launched an offensive against pro-Gamsakhurdia rebels led by Colonel Loti Kobalia and, with the help of the Russian military, occupied most of Samegrelo province.
Again in 2008, Russians on the pretext of protecting Russians after Georgia deported four suspected Russian spies in 2006.
Russia began a full-scale diplomatic and economic war against Georgia, followed by the persecution of ethnic Georgians living in Russia.
By 2008, most residents of South Ossetia had obtained Russian passports.
Like the Ukraine War, the Russian Federation created puppet republics since the 2008 war and subsequent Russian military occupation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the Russian government, along with four other UN member states, considers the territories sovereign independent states: the Republic of Abkhazia and the Republic of South Ossetia.
The Russian Federation, People’s Republic of China, South Korea and Japan have some of the world’s worst demographics with Ukraine due to the Ukraine war since 2014 has entered the club of nations with decaying demographics.
This means that nations that do not have replacement generations face the extinction of their cultures and economies because devout people who invest and work in the economy cultures and then nations would fade from human history.
Massive gouges are out of the Russian demographics due to the trauma of the previous century, with World War II killing 22 and 27 million Russians.
The great famine of 1930 to 1933 killed 7 to 8 million Russians and 4 to 5 million Ukrainians.
One of the most significant demographic crunchers in Russian people was the missed decade of the 1990s, were death rates doubled and birth rates halved.
What has been happening recently due to the war in Ukraine is that 1.3 million Russians a 35 and below fled the Russian Federation.
This happened due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and to fear of being drafted into fighting as part of the Russian war machine in the classic throw bodies at the problem until it goes away strategy of Russian warfare.
United States Holocaust Memorial THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC link
TRT World What is the Russian army doing in Transnistria? link
Prisoners of Geography: Read this now to understand the geopolitical context behind Putin’s Russia and the Ukraine crisis: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need To Know About Global Politics by Tim Marshall link
Zeihan on Geopolitics Ask Peter Zeihan: Will Putin “Disappear” and Updates on Russian Demographics? link
People reading this and remember the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre and the destruction of the Twin Towers, especially Americans reading this, will remember the effects of the terror attack and how it led to 20 years of war on Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism.
From this tragedy, the official death toll, including the 19 terrorists, was set at 2,977 people.
At the World Trade Centre in New York City, 2,753 people died, of whom 343 were firefighters.
The death toll at the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., was 184, and 40 individuals died outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
The events along the Gaza Strip and the Hamas terrorist attack on the state of Israel may bring back many bad memories. Still, unfortunately, from the terrorist’s point of view, there is a method to their particular brand of madness.
Israel-Hamas War: Terror Tactics and Osama Bin Laden
Osama Bin Laden, who planned the 9/11 attacks and was a former leader of Al Qaeda, attacked the United States to get them and their allies to invade the Middle East and destroy America’s reputation within the region and globally.
Al Qaeda hoped that the United States invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 would serve as a way to weaken the US; this strategy did not work, but from their point of view, it makes sense as a means to bring the battlefield to a place of their choosing.
There are practical, political and ideological advantages for terrorist organisations to fight wars within their Muslim nations within the Middle East to gather more support against foreign invaders and non-believers from their warped point of view.
Hamas is doing the same thing with the Israelis by attacking them and forcing them to involve themselves in a never-ending conflict along the Gaza Strip.
However, unlike the USA, after 20 years of fighting the war on terror, the Israelis do not have the luxury of just leaving and taking their bags home.
Today, I will write about something very different from what I usually focus my content on: history, geopolitics and other related material. Today, I will discuss the book Foundation, first published in 1951 by Isaac Asimov.
This book is very relevant, and people who enjoy politics, geopolitics, and culture will find it inspirational for its pertinent cultural and political impacts, which affect our modern-day societies around the globe equally in developed nations.
These topics are the decline and fall of empires, the decay of culture, technological advancement and the belief that the best days of civilisation are behind them.
This attitude is very much in ascendancy within the United States of America and other Western nations, particularly amongst the Anglo-Saxon-speaking peoples.
Foundation by Isaac Asimov
Foundation Book Series
Foundation is a novel by Isaac Asimov, first published in 1951. It was the first volume of his famed Foundation trilogy (1951–53), describing the collapse and rebirth of a vast interstellar empire in the future universe.
This original book trilogy takes heavy inspiration from the 18th-century historian, essayist and member of the British Parliament, Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1776.
In turn, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy inspired the creation of the Dune trilogy by Frank Herbert and Star Wars created by George Lucas and set the framework of what we now consider contemporary science fiction.
What is so fascinating about this trilogy is how it depicts the decay of the Galactic Empire in contrast to the new rising Galactic Empire in the form of the Foundation and the planet Terminus; this has many modern-day and ancient themes, such as why societies choose to fail.
Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series also showed that nations and empires declined because the citizenry stopped believing in the Empire. Due to long-term and systemic decisions happening over centuries, nations fail.
We can see contemporary examples of this happening with China, Germany and the British all feeling the effects of not producing replacement generation and the collapse of national confidence.
Roman Empire Map
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
All civilisations, nation-states, and their institutions eventually collapse or are permanently destroyed and reformed again in different iterations by their successor states or dynasties, especially in places such as China, with its long and bloody history of over 4,000 years.
For the Roman Empire its fall began long before Germanic tribes crippled the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century with the final collapse in 476 A.D.
The event that destroyed the Roman Empire happened after its victory against Carthage in the Third Punic War, also called the Third Carthaginian War (149–146 BCE), the third of three wars between the Roman Republic and the Carthaginians.
Empire that resulted in Carthage’s final destruction, its population enslavement, and Roman hegemony over the western Mediterranean.
However, what destroyed the Roman Empire was internal political decay and the inability of its leadership to resolve its problems peacefully and democratically, which started with the murder of Tiberius Gracchus in 133 BCE.
The reason he was killed was due to intending to reform the economic system within the Roman Empire with more and more concentrated within the Roman senatorial classes and also due to Fears of Tiberius’ popularity and his willingness to break political norms led to his death, along with many supporters, in a riot instigated by his enemies.
For people reading this within the United States and many other nations around the globe, you can see clear links between the inability of people to communicate and resolve the issues peacefully and, in the long term, civil wars, murders and the nation’s collapse.
If you are interested in these topics and big ideas, the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov is the book for you; it will leave you pondering many thoughts related to our modern-day society and why Nations fail.
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.
Germany faces three major problems, with two currently out of Germany’s control.
No matter what happens, we will be witnessing the end of Germany as we know it over the next three decades and the end of the German ethnicity and culture within our lifetime.
Either way, Germany grew as a culture and nation, and we know today won’t be here by the end of the century.
The three issues that will cause the end of Germany are its declining demographics, which have been declining for over a hundred years; Germany has been over-reliant on natural resources from the Russian Federation and sending its manufacturing to China.
The final issue affecting Germany is its energy policy; with Germany having had multiple coalition governments with the Green Party of Germany, it has closed down other avenues for energy generation in favour of green energy.
At best, green energy, which is nuclear, solar, wind and other natural sources, only makes up 10% of Germany’s energy consumption.
This doesn’t make green energy bad, but only solar energy works where it’s sunny and wind where it’s windy. If you’ve ever been to Germany, it is not a very sunny place, so solar energy is not viable to replace traditional fossil fuels.
The problem with many European nations and other Western nations is the ideological gap between what works, what the voters want and reality. In this century, the nations that will prosper the most will be those plugged into reality.
The End of Germany as We Know It
Choices Germany Made
The reason Germany is staring down the barrel of a gun and seeing the destruction of its ethnic group within this century is due to choices made by the German government, German manufacturing and the choices of the German people not to reproduce.
These historical and demographic trends have affected Germany for over a century and since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. During the Cold War, Germany chose to maintain positive relations with the Soviet Union and eastern Germany.
The positive outcome of this experience was that Germany was reunited in 1990. From this experience, Germany hoped that the Russians and Chinese would transform from a totalitarian regime committing mass murder and genocide governments.
However, the Germans have chosen its two main trading partners, Russia and China, and cut ties with the United States even though the Americans are not the evil Empire.
With the war in Ukraine since February 2022, trade relations between the Russian Federation and Communist China collapsed immediately after trade sanctions started in Russia; the Germans opted to move predominantly to China as a trading partner.
Unfortunately, the Germans are finding out you cannot guarantee support and cooperation from dictatorships and totalitarian regimes, and now they have to pay for the consequences.
The driving force behind deglobalisation is the decrease in the size of United States destroyers in terms of the available numbers to patrol global shipping lanes and protect international shipping not just for the United States and its allies but also for non-aligned nations, including Russia and China.
As of writing, the United States has 150 destroyers and 11 supercarriers, insufficient to protect the global oceans. Its leading American allies, such as the Japanese, began a rearmament programme to protect their national interests.
As globalisation breaks down because the USA is no longer interested in maintaining a globalised international economy, the US allies will begin rearming themselves and pursuing a more independent foreign policy strategy.
The United States does not need globalisation even though it will lead to higher living costs and inflation as it brings its industries and manufacturing back to America.
Furthermore, the United States is a continental economy, meaning unlike smaller nations that have fewer resources, the United States doesn’t need globalisation.
Deglobalisation and Globalisation: Yalter Conference
Why America Created Globalisation
Unlike the British Empire during the age of the Pax Britannica from 1815 to 1914, the British pursued a free trade policy and the development of the first version of globalisation to enrich the English economy and expand its influence globally.
The British needed its empire to become wealthy by trading in foreign markets within the imperial system that the British and other imperial powers created in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries.
Furthermore, Britain is an island nation much smaller than its neighbouring European rivals and tiny compared to the United States. For the British to be a relevant power and successful, it relied on international trade and shipping.
The United States never needed globalisation and only created globalisation as we know it; the end of World War II in 1945 was to buy an alliance and win the Cold War against the Soviet Union, which lasted from 1945 to 1989 and the final collapse of the Soviet system in 1990.
With the end of the Cold War, the United States’ incentive to maintain globalisation is fading, and the growing disinterest of the United States since 1992 is leading to a deglobalisation of the international world order.
