Are We Prisoners of Geography?

It's geopolitics for the masses or geopolitics for people who don't understand geopolitics and foreign powers. Of course it's extremely simplified but there isn't any indication that people with actual power listen to this.

Also not that what he says is even fundamentally wrong. He's a political commentator like any other, only his focus is global politics while the majority of political commentators work on national news. And his audience is mainly random Twitter accounts anyway.

There isn't an issue with people saying their opinion, that's called free speech. The problem is more that we live in an increasingly globalized world where nevertheless the average person has no idea about how socities outside of their bubble work. That isn't Zeihan's fault, if anything he helps getting people to think about these issues, however provocative or crude his takes may be. The issue lies with those people and groups that want to keep the populace dumb, that want them to look at the past instead of the present and future. Those who do not want you to travel and experience other cultures and political systems for yourself. Those who want the average person to regress to a state where they know nothing about what goes on in other parts of the world - all in their little bubble and isolated as commoners used to be. There are elites working towards this not just in authoritarian states but in democracies too.

I had an instant in a Zeihan lecture where I became convinced of the same thing. He was talking about millennials, and said that the primary millennial piece of fiction is Harry Potter. As a millennial, I had to nod along, that's a true and insightful thing to say about us. Then he described the titular character as, essentially, a special snowflake that doesn't have to work for anything or figure anything out.

Which is just an incredibly bad take. Yes, Harry is a magical character that can do whatever he wants but with a handful of exceptions, so can everyone else in the setting. Harry isn't the protagonist because he can do whatever he wants, he's the protagonist because doing the right thing is scary and he does it anyway. This isn't a take requiring a college level course, that theme is repeated over and over throughout the series, Zeihan's analysis of Harry Potter would only be convincing to someone with the most cursory familiarity with the work. And it's not the kind of bad take one arrives at by skimming the work and not thinking hard enough about it. The likeliest way I see someone coming up with that take is already holding an animosity towards millennials and then coming up with a smart-sounding justification for it.

And if that's Zeihan's understanding of Harry Potter, I can only assume his understanding of the CCP's thirty-year plan is comparable.

> It isn't the Stratfor origin, or the blazenly pro-American optimism per se that concern me

Are you sure about that?

Because all you've written is that Zeihan, who focuses on practical and immediate concerns of demographics, energy and agricultural markets - is obfuscating realities and monopolizing ears.

Eh? As opposed to what or whom?

Here is a three minute snippet from one of his talks from five years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkuhWA9GdCo

What brilliant insights are being crowded out? What specifically is he wrong about?

On the contrary, I'm surprised that geography and climate took so long to take center-stage in understanding and analyzing our world. The previous ignorance of something as fundamental as where we live and what climate we live in seems hubristic, if nothing else.

Land and climate shape our access to food, shelter, clothing, and security. Food, shelter, clothing, security shape everything else.

> It isn't the Stratfor origin

Is there something wrong with Stratfor’s analyses? Are there better intelligence outfits? I have long been disappointed at news organizations and their focus on advertisers over the needs of subscribers/readers. Are there useful paid intelligence services?

I can't think of any nation state that was able to surmount its geography on a long-enough timeline.

Main stream writing on the topic is motivated to focus on the GEO in geopolitics, because talking about geographic features and demographic pyramids is cleaner than wading into politics, especially when intermingled regional foreign politics. But the POLITCS does a lot of heavy lifting, whereby politics influence things like tech innovation/adoption that can tame geography, i.e. restitive frontier regions being incorporated by rail infra, mass public works or inventions like AC/desalination make improving previously inhospital/unpassable geography. Or in defense, gunpowder/mechanization mitigated overwhelming advantage of static geo based defense, and similarly going forward, long range precision strikes (conventional ICBMs / advanced rocketry) will reduce all global favourable geo conditions to extreme vunerability. How will US preeminence fare if she has no impenetrable homeland to operate from etc.

I think the point was that you can't ignore it, not that it doesn't matter. Clickbaity title for sure.

Sam Harris in his Making Sense podcast interviewed Timothy Snyder [1] about this topic, they had a decent dive into the history, relationship between the countries and meaning of the war for both sides.

1. https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/301... the interview starts at about 13:30.

I don't buy the "flatlands to the west" either. I'd sooner buy they want some more coastline with warm water. I imagine Canadians on average will be less pleasant if they're stuck with a hostile U.S. to the south.

As inhabitant of the Netherlands, I certainly don't either...

Firefox Android seems to often crash on the Guardian for me and I have not been able to work out why or find anyone else talking about it.

In general, or just on the Guardian? Anyway, doesn't happen here on FF 107 und Linux with µBo. With always fresh cookies.

(Works for me on firefox, windows 10. Although Firefox is ridiculously unstable for me in general)

> occupying Crimea > the West failed to react appropriately at that time

As someone born in Crimea I always failed to understand why it’s the West’s business.

> a blind eye to Russia occupying Crimea

The Russia military was "occupying Crimea" back when there were British redcoats occupying New York City. The Russian military has been there since that time. The only new development has been the US, UK, with some continental support, demanding the Russians leave in recent times and pouring financial and military supplies into the Ukraine to accomplish this.

Also if we want to go back to the 1700s, then Russia should hand Crimea over to Turkey, not the Ukraine, because Ottoman Turkey is who occupied Crimea before Russia.

> This 'westernization' process started to slowly make Ukraine richer.

I don’t think Ukraine reached even the pre-2014 prosperity levels by February 2022. You need to separate wishful thinking and hard data.

I agree, I also think the failed protests in Belarus were a driving factor. He could see what an uprising might look like and that time was limited.

Not necessarily correct. The reason of the invasion might be because of russian adherence to the heartland theory, creating defensive depth.

Might be Putin's megalomania, need for approval rating back home, maybe the oil prices rose and they took the opportunity, maybe to prevent Ukraine from joining the EU/NATO.

Could be a thousand and one differing things, or all of them at once.

What is correct? No one but Putin (and maybe not even him) knows.

Putin is the byproduct of Russia’s experience with the ‘Westernization’ process

Seems like a classic rule of headlines: If the headline is a question, the answer is most likely "no". If the answer was "yes", the headline would be a click-baiting statement ("We Are Prisoners of Geography!").