Nothing to cheer you up quite like a discussion of potential genocide.
Takeaways:
He starts out talking about how Russia plans to add some 500,000 new troops and use them in a late spring offensive when the mud dries up. As I mentioned previously, that plan is only scheduled to produce new troops over several years, and I express grave doubts that Russia can train and equip new troops when it has singularly failed to do so thus far.
He reiterates from previous videos that Russia’s military is heavily dependent on rail, but they’ve had to make do with trucks, and those trucks have been heavily targeted by Ukraine.
“Russians began the war with 3,000 military support trucks they’re probably down to only about 500 now.”
“[Russians] are doing what they can to destroy morale, and destroy the Ukrainian economy, and kill as many Ukrainian civilians as possible. They’re using drones, they’re using fighter launch missiles, they’re using cruise missiles and they’ve started to use ballistic missiles, to target specifically Ukrainian physical infrastructure, most notably electricity generating plant.”
Ukraine is having trouble exporting grain. “Exports have fallen to almost nothing.”
The countries that would normally import from Ukraine, come October, November, December are going to realize it’s just not there. Most of those countries are in Africa, some are in South Asia. And the one I am, by far, the most worried about is Egypt. Egypt is poor and they import over half the grains they need to survive, mostly wheat. The wheat is already off-line, and so we should expect to see significant upheaval—economic, humanitarian, political—across the Arab world and into South Asia and in sub-Saharan Africa.
The mention of a second Holodomor is a reminder that not enough people know about the first Holodomor, when the Soviet Union starved some 5-7 million Ukrainians to death (and some 14.5 million total for the whole collectivization famine/”dekulakization”/suppression of the Kazakhs and Tartars/etc.
I’m not even all that sure that I take him seriously as an economic analyst, or in the political sphere, because the man is basically straight-jacketed by precedence. In Zeihan’s world, nothing new can happen; it’s all precedence-based thinking. If you go back and look at him and his pronouncements before last year, not much of what he’s pontificated on has actually happened.
Plus that, many of his “predictions” are very much along the lines of Nostradumus; very generalized and easily recast in the future to account for things “not turning out”.
The situation in Ukraine vis-a-vis Russia is an interesting one, but there’s a bit of backwards thinking going on with Zeihan; the man does not use all of history to seek his precedents and lessons. True, the Russians were effective during a lot of WWII, but they also managed to lose horribly in the Russo-Japanese War, WWI, and things like Operation Mars in WWII. They aren’t ten feet tall; Putin is not some strategic genius, and the Russians aren’t staffed with a bunch of military wizards. They’re mostly drunken incompetents that have been defrauding the Russian people for generations, and who haven’t faced the real-world tests that would have forced them to fix their issues.
In the end, I think the Russians are going to wind up in a state of collapse and feckless disorder, much as they have for most of their history. It’s not a matter of them having the numbers; the real question is, can they turn those numbers into anything effective on the battlefield. Additionally, what happens when the various ethnic minorities decide they’ve had quite enough of dying for Russky Mir? How many millions vs. millions will there be, then?
The Russian military is a wasting asset, at the moment. I don’t think they’re going to be able to pull out of the controlled flight into ground that they’re currently engaged in… We shall see, though.
The loss of grain is a very interesting issue, and of all the developing nations, Egypt indeed would appear to be the most sensitive.
I note that Germany was supposed to keel over given the loss of Russian natural gas. Yet instead they’ve managed to find other suppliers, and the net loss, while still significant, is much less than the catastrophe that was feared.
Likewise, might Egypt and other developing nations find other sources of grain, sources that the ‘experts’ tell us today can’t happen?
Like I said… Take Zeihan with a bushel of salt. There is truth to a lot of what he says, but the thing is that he’s a guy making money off what he tells people, and the only way to do that is to tell them what they want to hear and are willing to accept.
Right now, ain’t nobody wanting to hear that there’s an oncoming train coming down that tunnel we’re in ‘cos they’d rather make believe that’s the light of dawn coming up… So, Zeihan is telling them a lot of what they want to hear.
The guy who really has a handle on it all is probably buried neck-deep in documentation somewhere in an obscure office of the Pentagon, working for an equally obscure DIA section. He’s probably produced detailed reports over the years detailing all sorts of prescient warnings, only to have them ignored.
That’s the one thing you can count on, with analysts: There will always be at least one or two of them that accurately predict the course of things. The problem is, they’re never the ones anyone bothers to listen to. You only find out that Bob nailed things several years later, when you are going through the files to cull them for out-of-date classified documents, and you find his “low-probability” paper on bin Laden’s threat to the US.
Trust me on this: I’ve seen that in real life. There was a guy who absolutely nailed the whole “asymmetric warfare” thing with al Qaeda, spelled it out, even laid out a bunch of stuff they could be doing. Which got ignored, ‘cos this was the mid-1990s. He pretty much predicted the whole series of things around the attacks on 9/11, right down to the shitty State Department screening of Saudi nationals being a vulnerability. I always wondered what the hell happened to him, career-wise. Probably left the business entirely, in disgust.
Anyone who tells you that either the IED campaign in Iraq after OIF started, or that 9/11 were “unforeseen” is full of shiite. Everything that enabled both “problems” was foreseen; it was just that the bosses and decision-makers didn’t take anything about either situation seriously or actually do anything with the warnings.
Kirk, you’ve beat this drum repeatedly now, so you deserve a response. Zeihan is by his own admission a generalist. Making measurable predictions is intrinsically risky. He gets some wrong. As do specialists. Nevertheless, he began saying that Russia would invade Ukraine in 2014, and mentioned 2022 as the drop dead date for that invasion years ago. Which is impressive enough by itself that you ought to acknowledge his insight.
The reason he has deservedly started getting attention is that he started talking about how much of a cast iron female dog age demographics are and sketching out the implication of those demographics in an easily digestible way years before anyone one else of note was talking about it.
Maybe you’ve got concrete counterpoints to his predictions, not just ad hominins. If so, now would be the time to produce them. Because you sound like someone who just doesn’t like his conclusions. Do better
Go back to the earliest ones he has up there. I’ve been reading his stuff for years, and… Frankly, it’s mostly the sort of half-ass tripe Tony Robbins spouts. He’s got a good shtick going, great presentation, very personable, very relatable… And, he’s telling everyone what they want to hear.
Which is precisely why you don’t take him seriously. Go back and look at all the brilliant things he said about the Iranian situation or what the OPEC coalition was going to do. Doesn’t age all that well, does it? Now, consider how much isn’t up on that site, because I remember some really egregiously wrong prognostications coming out of him from those years, and they’re nowhere to be found.
There’s one way you can always gauge the veracity and value of what an analyst tells you: What’s his track record, and how up front and honest with it is he? Dude lies by omission, and never points out where he went wrong in the past, he’s going to be doing that to you going forward. If he tells you “Hey, I got that whole “Hitler wins WWII thing wrong, and here’s why…” the guy might be worth listening to.
All things considered, I think Zeihan has some value, but it would be insane to ascribe any sort of credence to absolutely everything he has to say.
That tank video he just put up, for example? Is there anywhere in there that he mentions the very real facts that the German SPD party has been so heavily suborned by the Russians that nearly every sitting member of that party has been on Russian-funded junkets to Russia, and are likely compromised because of it? Does he bring up the very real fact that Gerhard Schroder, the former SPD Chancellor of Germany before Merkel has essentially been a wholly-owned subsidiary of Gazprom and various other interests in Russia?
I don’t begrudge Zeihan making a few bucks, but I’d be extremely cautious betting the farm on any of his analysis.
The key to watching/reading P.Z.is to ignore the click-baity headline. Ignore the sweeping hyperbolic statement, i.e. “China will cease to exist in ten years”. Ignore the time-frame predictions.
Like Kirk said, this is how he makes his living. He has a set of data and analysis, and a bunch of conclusions/predictions that he peddles to various audiences. He gets paid to speak to various think-tanks and industry groups, and basically gives a variation of the same presentation, tailored to a particular audience.
For example, the midwest hog farmers association gets the same speech, but with more emphasis on the agricultural stuff and Brazil and its reliance on imported fertilizer…..
To make his presentation more impactful, he exaggerates, and does the classic thing ALL prognosticators do. you can’t see the future, so you have to extrapolate from current trends. Unfortunately, most predictions are straight line extrapolation of current trends. The telling phrase in any future prediction is always …”if present trends continue”, and they never do in a linear fashion.
He also tends to generalize to the point of uselessness. A big impactful statement like the aforementioned “China will cease to exist in ten years” is clearly nonsense. The CCP may be out of power and the latest in a long line of decentralizing revolutions may have occurred, but I think it is likely to be longer than ten years, and even after that, there will be a series of city states in the south, some kind of rump a little further north, and a return to warlordism everywhere else, but there will still be a (many?) Chin(s), and millions of Chinese.
Ignore the predictions and sweeping language, and just listen to his basic premise and data. Demographics and geography DO matter, a huge amount, and he is pretty sound on that….
The thing I find with a lot of “futurist” types is that they extrapolate and utterly fail to consider scale in terms of time, money, or space.
They also fail to recognize when things are applicable. Guys who foresaw moonbases and orbital facilities by 1990 in the 1960s? They failed utterly in seeing that there was no economic need; they also failed to note the “flash-to-bang” time with regards to things like Columbus discovering the New World. In 1492, what Columbus did was a meaningless novelty, the equivalent of the Apollo moon missions. How long did it take before exploitation and colonization really got started…? Decades. And, that was back when it was all by sail in wooden ships.
The other way they got it wrong was looking at the rapid, nearly exponential speed with which aviation developed. They never considered that that was the anomaly; they expected everything else to go that way. Some segments did, but not all the technologies necessary for space exploitation.
Yet something else they missed? Where the hell is the economic incentive? What’s out there, past low earth orbit, that will make someone here on earth money? What’s the return on the investment?
I guarantee you that if every single European voyage to the New World had met with Sentinel Island levels of resistance, then we’d still be sitting in Europe, and the Americas would have gone along on their merry way without the sort of “intervention” that kick-started everything worldwide.
Most of the prognosticators get things wrong because they lack a sense of scale and history. They don’t read enough, they don’t think enough, and they also don’t do their math very well.
Reminds me of a lot of science fiction authors, to be brutally honest.
I first remember reading about him and his career when I was researching some stories I’d heard about FDR having set out to start WWII. Between Billy Mitchell and Ellis, the US Navy and Army both had no excuse at all for not being prepared for Pearl Harbor.
Zeihan is not a “military expert” by any means.
I’m not even all that sure that I take him seriously as an economic analyst, or in the political sphere, because the man is basically straight-jacketed by precedence. In Zeihan’s world, nothing new can happen; it’s all precedence-based thinking. If you go back and look at him and his pronouncements before last year, not much of what he’s pontificated on has actually happened.
Plus that, many of his “predictions” are very much along the lines of Nostradumus; very generalized and easily recast in the future to account for things “not turning out”.
The situation in Ukraine vis-a-vis Russia is an interesting one, but there’s a bit of backwards thinking going on with Zeihan; the man does not use all of history to seek his precedents and lessons. True, the Russians were effective during a lot of WWII, but they also managed to lose horribly in the Russo-Japanese War, WWI, and things like Operation Mars in WWII. They aren’t ten feet tall; Putin is not some strategic genius, and the Russians aren’t staffed with a bunch of military wizards. They’re mostly drunken incompetents that have been defrauding the Russian people for generations, and who haven’t faced the real-world tests that would have forced them to fix their issues.
In the end, I think the Russians are going to wind up in a state of collapse and feckless disorder, much as they have for most of their history. It’s not a matter of them having the numbers; the real question is, can they turn those numbers into anything effective on the battlefield. Additionally, what happens when the various ethnic minorities decide they’ve had quite enough of dying for Russky Mir? How many millions vs. millions will there be, then?
The Russian military is a wasting asset, at the moment. I don’t think they’re going to be able to pull out of the controlled flight into ground that they’re currently engaged in… We shall see, though.
The loss of grain is a very interesting issue, and of all the developing nations, Egypt indeed would appear to be the most sensitive.
I note that Germany was supposed to keel over given the loss of Russian natural gas. Yet instead they’ve managed to find other suppliers, and the net loss, while still significant, is much less than the catastrophe that was feared.
Likewise, might Egypt and other developing nations find other sources of grain, sources that the ‘experts’ tell us today can’t happen?
Like I said… Take Zeihan with a bushel of salt. There is truth to a lot of what he says, but the thing is that he’s a guy making money off what he tells people, and the only way to do that is to tell them what they want to hear and are willing to accept.
Right now, ain’t nobody wanting to hear that there’s an oncoming train coming down that tunnel we’re in ‘cos they’d rather make believe that’s the light of dawn coming up… So, Zeihan is telling them a lot of what they want to hear.
The guy who really has a handle on it all is probably buried neck-deep in documentation somewhere in an obscure office of the Pentagon, working for an equally obscure DIA section. He’s probably produced detailed reports over the years detailing all sorts of prescient warnings, only to have them ignored.
That’s the one thing you can count on, with analysts: There will always be at least one or two of them that accurately predict the course of things. The problem is, they’re never the ones anyone bothers to listen to. You only find out that Bob nailed things several years later, when you are going through the files to cull them for out-of-date classified documents, and you find his “low-probability” paper on bin Laden’s threat to the US.
Trust me on this: I’ve seen that in real life. There was a guy who absolutely nailed the whole “asymmetric warfare” thing with al Qaeda, spelled it out, even laid out a bunch of stuff they could be doing. Which got ignored, ‘cos this was the mid-1990s. He pretty much predicted the whole series of things around the attacks on 9/11, right down to the shitty State Department screening of Saudi nationals being a vulnerability. I always wondered what the hell happened to him, career-wise. Probably left the business entirely, in disgust.
Anyone who tells you that either the IED campaign in Iraq after OIF started, or that 9/11 were “unforeseen” is full of shiite. Everything that enabled both “problems” was foreseen; it was just that the bosses and decision-makers didn’t take anything about either situation seriously or actually do anything with the warnings.
Kirk, you’ve beat this drum repeatedly now, so you deserve a response. Zeihan is by his own admission a generalist. Making measurable predictions is intrinsically risky. He gets some wrong. As do specialists. Nevertheless, he began saying that Russia would invade Ukraine in 2014, and mentioned 2022 as the drop dead date for that invasion years ago. Which is impressive enough by itself that you ought to acknowledge his insight.
The reason he has deservedly started getting attention is that he started talking about how much of a cast iron female dog age demographics are and sketching out the implication of those demographics in an easily digestible way years before anyone one else of note was talking about it.
Maybe you’ve got concrete counterpoints to his predictions, not just ad hominins. If so, now would be the time to produce them. Because you sound like someone who just doesn’t like his conclusions. Do better
Here’s the link:
https://zeihan.com/newsletter/
Go back to the earliest ones he has up there. I’ve been reading his stuff for years, and… Frankly, it’s mostly the sort of half-ass tripe Tony Robbins spouts. He’s got a good shtick going, great presentation, very personable, very relatable… And, he’s telling everyone what they want to hear.
Which is precisely why you don’t take him seriously. Go back and look at all the brilliant things he said about the Iranian situation or what the OPEC coalition was going to do. Doesn’t age all that well, does it? Now, consider how much isn’t up on that site, because I remember some really egregiously wrong prognostications coming out of him from those years, and they’re nowhere to be found.
There’s one way you can always gauge the veracity and value of what an analyst tells you: What’s his track record, and how up front and honest with it is he? Dude lies by omission, and never points out where he went wrong in the past, he’s going to be doing that to you going forward. If he tells you “Hey, I got that whole “Hitler wins WWII thing wrong, and here’s why…” the guy might be worth listening to.
All things considered, I think Zeihan has some value, but it would be insane to ascribe any sort of credence to absolutely everything he has to say.
That tank video he just put up, for example? Is there anywhere in there that he mentions the very real facts that the German SPD party has been so heavily suborned by the Russians that nearly every sitting member of that party has been on Russian-funded junkets to Russia, and are likely compromised because of it? Does he bring up the very real fact that Gerhard Schroder, the former SPD Chancellor of Germany before Merkel has essentially been a wholly-owned subsidiary of Gazprom and various other interests in Russia?
I don’t begrudge Zeihan making a few bucks, but I’d be extremely cautious betting the farm on any of his analysis.
The key to watching/reading P.Z.is to ignore the click-baity headline. Ignore the sweeping hyperbolic statement, i.e. “China will cease to exist in ten years”. Ignore the time-frame predictions.
Like Kirk said, this is how he makes his living. He has a set of data and analysis, and a bunch of conclusions/predictions that he peddles to various audiences. He gets paid to speak to various think-tanks and industry groups, and basically gives a variation of the same presentation, tailored to a particular audience.
For example, the midwest hog farmers association gets the same speech, but with more emphasis on the agricultural stuff and Brazil and its reliance on imported fertilizer…..
To make his presentation more impactful, he exaggerates, and does the classic thing ALL prognosticators do. you can’t see the future, so you have to extrapolate from current trends. Unfortunately, most predictions are straight line extrapolation of current trends. The telling phrase in any future prediction is always …”if present trends continue”, and they never do in a linear fashion.
He also tends to generalize to the point of uselessness. A big impactful statement like the aforementioned “China will cease to exist in ten years” is clearly nonsense. The CCP may be out of power and the latest in a long line of decentralizing revolutions may have occurred, but I think it is likely to be longer than ten years, and even after that, there will be a series of city states in the south, some kind of rump a little further north, and a return to warlordism everywhere else, but there will still be a (many?) Chin(s), and millions of Chinese.
Ignore the predictions and sweeping language, and just listen to his basic premise and data. Demographics and geography DO matter, a huge amount, and he is pretty sound on that….
The thing I find with a lot of “futurist” types is that they extrapolate and utterly fail to consider scale in terms of time, money, or space.
They also fail to recognize when things are applicable. Guys who foresaw moonbases and orbital facilities by 1990 in the 1960s? They failed utterly in seeing that there was no economic need; they also failed to note the “flash-to-bang” time with regards to things like Columbus discovering the New World. In 1492, what Columbus did was a meaningless novelty, the equivalent of the Apollo moon missions. How long did it take before exploitation and colonization really got started…? Decades. And, that was back when it was all by sail in wooden ships.
The other way they got it wrong was looking at the rapid, nearly exponential speed with which aviation developed. They never considered that that was the anomaly; they expected everything else to go that way. Some segments did, but not all the technologies necessary for space exploitation.
Yet something else they missed? Where the hell is the economic incentive? What’s out there, past low earth orbit, that will make someone here on earth money? What’s the return on the investment?
I guarantee you that if every single European voyage to the New World had met with Sentinel Island levels of resistance, then we’d still be sitting in Europe, and the Americas would have gone along on their merry way without the sort of “intervention” that kick-started everything worldwide.
Most of the prognosticators get things wrong because they lack a sense of scale and history. They don’t read enough, they don’t think enough, and they also don’t do their math very well.
Reminds me of a lot of science fiction authors, to be brutally honest.
An example of a true “prophet without honor” that got things right insofar as intelligence analysis goes would be someone I was just reminded of:
Earl Hancock “Pete” Ellis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Hancock_Ellis
I first remember reading about him and his career when I was researching some stories I’d heard about FDR having set out to start WWII. Between Billy Mitchell and Ellis, the US Navy and Army both had no excuse at all for not being prepared for Pearl Harbor.