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That's FijiAirways.com. From here to happy. Flying direct with Fiji Airways. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua. I'm your host. Today I want to share with you what I expect to be the final commentary on the current violence happening in Russia and Ukraine. Of course, if things change, I'll open up more, but I've done a couple of shows recently on it because of course it's in the news.

You like me have almost certainly been watching the developments, trying to understand what's been happening, where do we go from here, and I think that this is one of those particular situations that deserves our attention. As I shared with you last week with my show on sobering potential, I think this has the potential to touch all of us in many, many ways.

It's a fluid situation and we don't know exactly where things will wind up. What I gave was kind of as best I see as the worst case scenario of things that could happen with increasing levels of violence, but I think it's not particularly likely, at least for most of my audience.

Most of my audience is not located near Russia or Ukraine. Most of my audience is in the West. I think it's unlikely that there will be direct involvement for most of us. I continue to watch very closely the topic of sanctions, some of the workings in the financial space.

I watch what Russia is doing in response to the sanctions because I think they're important lessons for the rest of us in terms of currency controls, bank collapses, central bank currencies, central banks being frozen off, et cetera. It's valuable to learn those lessons and study those particular scenarios. What I thought over the last few days, I have been doing quite a lot of reading, trying to understand a little bit more of the situation.

I want to bring to you some things that I think will be helpful for you to also understand the situation, not written by me, but I was trying to figure out where do you go right now to understand? Where do you go if you're trying to understand what is happening?

You're in an intensely charged moment, very, very politically charged, which makes it difficult to do public conversation on these topics. It makes it difficult to try to figure out what source is right because in the current swing of things, it's hard to know what's propaganda, what's truth, which analysts to look to, which analysts to trust, et cetera.

This week, I went back to a book that I first read about a decade ago. The book is called The Next 100 Years by author George Friedman. This book came out in 2010, January of 2010. The author wanted to share what he thought would be a forecast literally for the 21st century.

I read the book soon after it came out. I don't remember specifically, 2011 perhaps, but I remember reading it soon after it came out and I was very impressed with the book at the time. I've since gone on and over the last couple of years, I've read a couple more of his books.

Last year, I read his book called The Storm Before the Calm, in which author George Friedman predicted why the decade of the 2020s was destined to be a decade of intense conflict in the United States and yet why it's not any kind of permanent conflict or any kind of permanent decline in his forecast.

It's the storm before the calm. I found that book very useful and interesting to me personally in my seeking to understand what's coming in the next decade. I additionally read his book called Flashpoints. I think the subtitle is something like the emerging crisis in Europe or the fault lines in Europe.

I found that book extremely interesting as well to help to understand more of the European context of some of the rifts that exist across Europe. But I hadn't read or thought of this book much since I read it first soon after it came out. What I do know that I gained from this book more than 10 years ago is insight into some topics that you've heard me talk about on the show.

The most important thing I gained at the time was an awareness of the demographic collapse happening in many parts of the world and how that change of demographics was going to be a major shaping force on the 21st century. But I wondered to myself, what did he say about the conflict in Russia?

What did he say about what Russia would do? So I went back to this book and I reread it in the last few days and I found it just really, really powerful because in it he sketches out what his predictions would be. And as part of his predictions, he gives a bit of history.

First he predicts a conflict involving Russia in the year 2020 and he specifically shows why he thinks Russia 2020 will be engaged in active armed conflict. Now he was clearly a couple years wrong. It's rather interesting to think of why he might have been wrong. But he was a couple years off, it's 2022, but I would say not so bad for a guy writing a book in 2010 and before to be able to forecast the events in Russia.

But the most important thing I want to give you is the historical and geographical context and some insight into the Russian mine. And perhaps that will help you to filter a little bit more accurately what you hear happening as the conflict unholds. I want to share with you some extensive excerpts from the book, but I want to begin by reading to you some excerpts from the introduction because I think these excerpts from the introduction will pull you in and will help you to understand even the concept of what geopolitical forecasting is.

And then we'll go specifically to a couple of excerpts discussing Russia. And I feel my hope is that this will help you, especially when you know that somebody is writing this in 2010, 12 years before the violent war that we see in front of us right now. And hopefully that will help to assuage some of the current political hotness of it, just to understand the context.

So we begin with some excerpts from the introduction. An Introduction to the American Age. Imagine that you were alive in the summer of 1900, living in London, then the capital of the world. Europe ruled the Eastern Hemisphere. There was hardly a place that, if not ruled directly, was not indirectly controlled from a European capital.

Europe was at peace and enjoying unprecedented prosperity. Indeed, European interdependence due to trade and investment was so great that serious people were claiming that war had become impossible. And if not impossible, would end within weeks of beginning, because global financial markets couldn't withstand the strain. The future seemed fixed.

A peaceful, prosperous Europe would rule the world. Imagine yourself now in the summer of 1920. Europe had been torn apart by an agonizing war. The continent was in tatters. The Austro-Hungarian, Russian, German, and Ottoman empires were gone, and millions had died in a war that lasted for years. The war ended when an American army of a million men intervened, an army that came and then just as quickly left.

Communism dominated Russia, but it was not clear that it could survive. Countries that had been on the periphery of European power, like the United States and Japan, suddenly emerged as great powers. But one thing was certain. The peace treaty that had been imposed on Germany guaranteed that it would not soon re-emerge.

Imagine the summer of 1940. Germany had not only re-emerged, but conquered France and dominated Europe. Communism had survived, and the Soviet Union now was allied with Nazi Germany. Great Britain alone stood against Germany, and from the point of view of most reasonable people the war was over. If there was not to be a thousand-year Reich, then certainly Europe's fate had been decided for a century.

Germany would dominate Europe and inherit its empire. Imagine now the summer of 1960. Germany had been crushed in the war. Defeated less than five years later, Europe was occupied, split down the middle by the United States and the Soviet Union. The European empires were collapsing, and the United States and Soviet Union were competing over who would be their heir.

The United States had the Soviet Union surrounded, and, with an overwhelming arsenal of nuclear weapons, could annihilate it in hours. The United States had emerged as the global superpower. It dominated all of the world's oceans, and, with its nuclear force, could dictate terms to anyone in the world. Sailmate was the best the Soviets could hope for.

Unless the Soviets invaded Germany and conquered Europe. That was the war everyone was preparing for. And in the back of everyone's mind, the Maoist Chinese, seen as fanatical, were the other danger. Now imagine the summer of 1980. The United States had been defeated in a seven-year war, not by the Soviet Union, but by communist North Vietnam.

The nation was seen, and saw itself, as being in retreat. Expelled from Vietnam, it was then expelled from Iran as well, where the oil fields, which it no longer controlled, seemed about to fall into the hands of the Soviet Union. To contain the Soviet Union, the United States had formed an alliance with Maoist China, the American president and the Chinese chairman holding an amiable meeting in Beijing.

Only this alliance seemed able to contain the powerful Soviet Union, which appeared to be surging. Imagine now the summer of 2000. The Soviet Union had completely collapsed. China was still communist in name, but had become capitalist in practice. NATO had advanced into Eastern Europe and even into the former Soviet Union.

The world was prosperous and peaceful. Everyone knew that geopolitical considerations had become secondary to economic considerations, and the only problems were regional ones, in basket cases like Haiti or Kosovo. Then came September 11, 2001, and the world turned on its head again. At a certain level, when it comes to the future, the only thing one can be sure of is that common sense will be wrong.

There is no magic 20-year cycle, there is no simplistic force governing this pattern. It is simply that the things that appear to be so permanent and dominant at any given moment in history can change with stunning rapidity. Eras come and go. In international relations, the way the world looks right now is not at all how it will look in 20 years, or even less.

The fall of the Soviet Union was hard to imagine, and that is exactly the point. Conventional political analysis suffers from a profound failure of imagination. It imagines passing clouds to be permanent, and is blind to powerful long-term shifts taking place in full view of the world. If we were at the beginning of the 20th century, it would be impossible to forecast the particular events I've just listed.

But there are some things that could have been, and in fact were, forecast. For example, it was obvious that Germany, having united in 1871, was a major power in an insecure position, trapped between Russia and France, and wanted to redefine the European and global systems. Most of the conflicts in the first half of the 20th century were about Germany's status in Europe.

While the times and places of wars couldn't be forecast, the probability that there would be a war could be and was forecast by many Europeans. The harder part of this equation would be forecasting that the wars would be so devastating, and that after the First and Second World Wars were over, Europe would lose its empire.

But there were those, particularly after the invention of dynamite, who predicted that war would now be catastrophic. If the forecasting on technology had been combined with the forecasting on geopolitics, the shattering of Europe might well have been predicted. Certainly the rise of the United States and Russia was predicted in the 19th century.

Both Alexis de Tocqueville and Friedrich Nietzsche forecast the preeminence of these two countries. So standing at the beginning of the 20th century, it would have been possible to forecast its general outlines with discipline and some luck. Standing at the beginning of the 21st century, we need to identify the single pivotal event for this century, the equivalent of German unification for the 20th century.

After the debris of the European empire has cleared away, as well as what's left of the Soviet Union, one power remains standing and overwhelmingly powerful. That power is the United States. Certainly, as is usually the case, the United States currently appears to be making a mess of things around the world, but it's important not to be confused by the passing chaos.

The United States is economically, militarily, and politically the most powerful country in the world, and there is no real challenger to that power. Like the Spanish-American war, a hundred years from now, the war between the United States and the radical Islamists will be little remembered, regardless of the prevailing sentiment of this time.

Ever since the civil war, the United States has been on an extraordinary economic surge. It has turned from a marginal developing nation into an economy bigger than the next four countries combined. Militarily, it has gone from being an insignificant force to dominating the globe. Politically, the United States touches virtually everything, sometimes intentionally and sometimes simply because of its presence.

As you read this book, it will seem that it is American-centric, written from an American point of view. That may be true, but the argument I'm making is that the world does, in fact, pivot around the United States. This is not only due to American power. It also has to do with a fundamental shift in the way the world works.

For the past 500 years, Europe was the center of the international system, its empires creating a single global system for the first time in human history. The main highway to Europe was the North Atlantic. Whoever controlled the North Atlantic controlled access to Europe, and Europe's access to the world.

The basic geography of global politics was locked into place. Then, in the early 1980s, something remarkable happened. For the first time in history, Trans-Pacific trade equaled Trans-Atlantic trade. With Europe reduced to a collection of secondary powers after World War II, and the shift in trade patterns, the North Atlantic was no longer the single key to anything.

Now whatever country controlled both the North Atlantic and the Pacific could control, if it wished, the world's trading system, and therefore the global economy. In the 21st century, any nation located on both oceans has a tremendous advantage. Given the cost of building naval power, and the huge cost of deploying it around the world, the power native to both oceans became the preeminent actor in the international system, for the same reason that Britain dominated the 19th century.

It lived on the sea it had to control. In this way, North America has replaced Europe as the center of gravity in the world, and whoever dominates North America is virtually assured of being the dominant global power. For the 21st century at least, that will be the United States.

The inherent power of the United States coupled with its geographic position makes the United States the pivotal actor of the 21st century. That certainly doesn't make it loved. On the contrary, its power makes it feared. The history of the 21st century, therefore, particularly the first half, will revolve around two opposing struggles.

One will be secondary powers forming coalitions to try to contain and control the United States. The second will be the United States acting preemptively to prevent an effective coalition from forming. If we view the beginning of the 21st century as the dawn of the American age, superseding the European age, we see that it began with a group of Muslims seeking to recreate the Caliphate, the great Islamic empire that once ran from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Inevitably they had to strike at the United States in an attempt to draw the world's primary power into war, trying to demonstrate its weakness in order to trigger an Islamic uprising. The United States responded by invading the Islamic world. But its goal wasn't victory. It wasn't even clear what victory would mean.

Its goal was simply to disrupt the Islamic world and set it against itself, so that an Islamic empire could not emerge. The United States doesn't need to win wars. It needs to simply disrupt things, so the other side can't build up sufficient strength to challenge it. On one level, the 21st century will see a series of confrontations involving lesser powers trying to build coalitions to control American behavior and the United States mounting military operations to disrupt them.

The 21st century will see even more war than the 20th century, but the wars will be much less catastrophic because of both technological changes and the nature of the geopolitical challenge. By the way, I want to pause there for a moment. One thing that I have said many times is that, as I observe some of the decline in the United States, and it's interesting, all of chapter one, which I will not be reading for you or even talking about, talks about the United States.

And it's very interesting how consistent that sense of declinism is across the American public from all walks of political life, etc. But one of the things that I have observed, as I've said frequently to military personnel and others, that the United States hasn't won a war since World War II.

I've decided to stop saying that because after rereading this book this last week, I was impressed with how the author makes the point again and again that the United States doesn't really need or even want to win wars. That disruption is the primary objection. Disruption in the least costly sense.

And so if you go back and you look at the last, certainly the last decade, but you look at the last couple decades in that light, that's what you see. And I think that's what you see right now, what you're likely to see in the coming years when thinking about even the response to, sorry, I meant coming weeks and months, thinking about the response to Russia, at least from the US-American perspective.

That the United States doesn't really need or want to win wars. But what is in its goal, its primary objective is simply to cause disruption, to keep a major power from coming against it, and then to protect its homeland. So if you're interested in that, definitely get the book.

My hope is that with this preview, this taste of the book, you will be motivated to get it and read it if you're interested in these kinds of issues. If we view the beginning of the 21st century as the dawn of the American, oops, excuse me. The United States doesn't need to win wars.

It simply needs to, it needs to simply disrupt things so the other side can't build up sufficient strength to challenge it. On one level, the 21st century will see a series of confrontations involving lesser powers trying to build coalitions to control American behavior, and the United States mounting military operations to disrupt them.

The 21st century will see even more war than the 20th century, but the wars will be much less catastrophic because of both technical changes and the nature of the geopolitical challenge. As we've seen, the changes that lead to the next era are always shockingly unexpected, and the first 20 years of this new century will be no exception.

The US-Islamist war is already ending, and the next conflict is in sight. Russia is recreating its old sphere of influence, and that sphere of influence will inevitably challenge the United States. The Russians will be moving westward on the great northern European plain. As Russia reconstructs its power, it will encounter the US-dominated NATO in the three Baltic countries – Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – as well as in Poland.

There will be other points of friction in the early 21st century, but this new Cold War will supply the flashpoints after the US-Islamist war dies down. The Russians can't avoid trying to reassert power, and the United States can't avoid trying to resist. But in the end, Russia can't win.

Its deep internal problems, massively declining population, and poor infrastructure ultimately make Russia's long-term survival prospects bleak, and the second Cold War – less frightening and much less global than the first – will end, as the first did, with the collapse of Russia. There are many who predict that China is the next challenger to the United States, not Russia.

I don't agree with that view for three reasons. First, when you look at a map of China closely, you see that it is really a very isolated country physically. With Siberia in the north, the Himalayas and jungles to the south, and most of China's population in the eastern part of the country, the Chinese aren't going to easily expand.

Second, China has not been a major naval power for centuries, and building a navy requires a long time not only to build ships, but to create well-trained and experienced sailors. Third, there is a deeper reason for not worrying about China. China is inherently unstable. Whenever it opens its borders to the outside world, the coastal region becomes prosperous, but the vast majority of Chinese in the interior remain impoverished.

This leads to tension, conflict, and instability. It also leads to economic decisions made for political reasons, resulting in inefficiency and corruption. This is not the first time that China has opened itself to foreign trade, and it will not be the last time that it becomes unstable as a result.

Nor will it be the last time that a figure like Mao emerges to close the country off from the outside, equalize the wealth or poverty, and begin the cycle anew. There are some who believe that the trends of the last 30 years will continue indefinitely. I believe the Chinese cycle will move to its next and inevitable phase in the coming decade.

Far from being a challenger, China as a country, the United States will be trying to bolster and hold together as a counterweight to the Russians. Current Chinese economic dynamism does not translate into long-term success. I want to interrupt my reading here and give some commentary. One of the articles that was so interesting over the last week was how the United States was feeding classified intelligence to the Chinese regarding Russian movements, and basically doing exactly what this author predicted, what Friedman predicted, that the United States has been trying to use China against Russia.

Now Russia is trying to create an alliance with China, and trying to use China and strengthen its relationship there as a counterweight to the United States. So we see this playing out, but I think it's very interesting to see that prediction from a decade ago coming true even with the news articles from the last few days.

In the middle of the century, other powers will emerge, countries that aren't thought of as great powers today, but that I expect will become more powerful and assertive over the next few decades. Three stand out in particular. The first is Japan. It's the second largest economy in the world and the most vulnerable, being highly dependent on the importation of raw materials, since it has almost none of its own.

With a history of militarism, Japan will not remain the marginal, pacifistic power it has been. It cannot. Its own deep population problems and abhorrence of large-scale immigration will force it to look for new workers in other countries. Japan's vulnerabilities, which I've written about in the past and which the Japanese have managed better than I've expected up until this point, in the end will force a shift in policy.

Then there is Turkey, currently the 17th largest economy in the world. Historically, when a major Islamic empire has emerged, it has been dominated by the Turks. The Ottomans collapsed at the end of World War I, leaving modern Turkey in its wake. But Turkey is a stable platform in the midst of chaos.

The Balkans, the Caucasus, and the Arab world to the south are all unstable. As Turkey's power grows, and its economy and military are already the most powerful in the region, so will Turkish influence. Finally there is Poland. Poland hasn't been a great power since the 16th century, but it once was, and I think will be again.

Two factors make this possible. First will be the decline of Germany. Its economy is large and still growing, but it has lost the dynamism it has had for two centuries. In addition, its population is going to fall dramatically in the next 50 years, further undermining its economic power. Second, as the Russians press on the Poles from the east, the Germans won't have an appetite for a third war with Russia.

The United States, however, will back Poland, providing it with massive economic and technical support. Wars, when your country isn't destroyed, stimulate economic growth, and Poland will become the leading power in a coalition of states facing the Russians. Japan, Turkey, and Poland will each be facing a United States even more confident than it was after the second fall of the Soviet Union.

That will be an explosive situation. As we will see during the course of this book, the relationships among these four countries will greatly affect the 21st century, leading ultimately to the next global war. This war will be fought differently from any in history, with weapons that are today in the realm of science fiction.

But as I will try to outline, this mid-21st century conflict will grow out of the dynamic forces born in the early part of the new century. Gozan talks significantly about technical advances, some predictions about some of the technical advances. Some of the most interesting comments that he leads goes on to talk about immigration, demographics, the impact of a shrinking world population.

He talks about future conflict between Mexico and the United States, which I find very, very interesting and important with the history of Mexico and the United States. I wanted to take a moment though and read a section on geopolitics, because this will explain the conversations coming regarding Russia. One point I've already made is that reasonable people are incapable of anticipating the future.

The old New Left slogan, "Be practical, demand the impossible," needs to be changed. Be practical, expect the impossible. This idea is at the heart of my method. From another more substantial perspective, this is called geopolitics. Geopolitics is not simply a pretentious way of saying international relations. It is a method for thinking about the world and forecasting what will happen down the road.

Economists talk about an invisible hand in which the self-interested short-term activities of people lead to what Adam Smith called the wealth of nations. Geopolitics applies the concept of the invisible hand to the behavior of nations and other international actors. The pursuit of short-term self-interest by nations and by their leaders leads, if not to the wealth of nations, then at least to predictable behavior and therefore the ability to forecast the shape of the future international system.

Geopolitics and economics both assume that the players are rational, at least in the sense of knowing their own short-term self-interest. As rational actors, reality provides them with limited choices. It is assumed that, on the whole, people and nations will pursue their self-interest, if not flawlessly, then at least not randomly.

Think of a chess game. On the surface, it appears that each player has 20 potential opening moves. In fact, there are many fewer, because most of these moves are so bad that they quickly lead to a defeat. The better you are at chess, the more clearly you see your options and the fewer moves there actually are available.

The better the player, the more predictable the moves. The grandmaster plays with absolute, predictable precision until that one brilliant, unexpected stroke. Nations behave the same way. The millions or hundreds of millions of people who make up a nation are constrained by reality. They generate leaders who would not become leaders if they were irrational.

Climbing to the top of millions of people is not something fools often do. Leaders understand their menu of next moves and execute them, if not flawlessly, then at least pretty well. An occasional master will come along with a stunningly unexpected and successful move, but for the most part, the act of governance is simply executing the necessary and logical next step.

When politicians run a country's foreign policy, they operate the same way. If a leader dies and is replaced, another emerges, and more likely than not continues what the first one was doing. I am not arguing that political leaders are geniuses, scholars, or even gentlemen and ladies. Simply, political leaders know how to be leaders, or they wouldn't have emerged as such.

It is the delight of all societies to belittle their political leaders, and leaders surely do make mistakes. But the mistakes they make, when carefully examined, are rarely stupid. More likely, mistakes are forced on them by circumstance. We would all like to believe that we, or our favorite candidate, would never have acted so stupidly.

It is rarely true. Geopolitics, therefore, does not take the individual leader very seriously, any more than economics takes the individual businessman too seriously. Both are players who know how to manage a process, but are not free to break the very rigid rules of their professions. Politicians are therefore rarely free actors.

Their actions are determined by circumstances and public policy as a response to reality. Within narrow margins, political decisions can matter, but the most brilliant leader of Iceland will never turn it into a world power, while the stupidest leader of Rome at its height could not undermine Rome's fundamental power.

Geopolitics is not about the right and wrong of things, it is not about the virtues or vices of politicians, and it is not about foreign policy debates. Geopolitics is about broad impersonal forces that constrain nations and human beings and compel them to act in certain ways. The key to understanding economics is accepting that there are always unintended consequences.

Actions people take for their own good reasons have results they don't envision or intend. The same is true with geopolitics. It is doubtful that the village of Rome, when it started its expansion in the 7th century BC, had a master plan for conquering the Mediterranean world 500 years later.

But the first action its inhabitants took against neighboring villages set in motion a process that was both constrained by reality and filled with unintended consequences. Rome wasn't planned, and neither did it just happen. Geopolitical forecasting, therefore, doesn't assume that everything is predetermined. It does mean that what people think they are doing, what they hope to achieve, and what the final outcome is are not the same things.

Nations and politicians pursue their immediate ends, as constrained by reality as a grandmaster is constrained by the chessboard, the pieces, and the rules. Sometimes they increase the power of the nation. Sometimes they lead the nation to catastrophe. It is rare that the final outcome will be what they initially intended to achieve.

Geopolitics assumes two things. First it assumes that humans organize themselves into units larger than families, and the by doing this they must engage in politics. It also assumes that humans have a natural loyalty to the things they were born into, the people and the places. Loyalty to a tribe, a city, or a nation is natural to people.

In our time, national identity matters a great deal. Geopolitics teaches that the relationship between these nations is a vital dimension of human life, and that means that war is ubiquitous. Second, geopolitics assumes that the character of a nation is determined to a great extent by geography, as is the relationship between nations.

We use the term "geography" broadly. It includes the physical characteristics of a location, but it goes beyond that to look at the effects of a place on individuals and communities. In antiquity, the difference between Sparta and Athens was the difference between a landlocked city and a maritime empire. Athens was wealthy and cosmopolitan, while Sparta was poor, provincial, and very tough.

A Spartan was very different from an Athenian in both culture and politics. If you understand those assumptions, then it is possible to think about large numbers of human beings, linked together through natural human bonds, constrained by geography acting in certain ways. The United States is the United States, and therefore must behave in a certain way.

The same goes for Japan or Turkey or Mexico. When you drill down and see the forces that are shaping nations, you can see that the menu from which they choose is limited. The 21st century will be like all other centuries. There will be wars, there will be poverty, there will be triumphs and defeats, there will be tragedy and good luck.

People will go to work, make money, have children, fall in love, and come to hate. That is the one thing that is not cyclical. It is the permanent human condition. The 21st century will be extraordinary in two senses. It will be the beginning of a new age, and it will see a new global power astride the world.

That doesn't happen very often. The author goes on and talks about his reason for saying that the 21st century will be an America-centric age, in chapter 1, entitled "The Dawn of the American Age," he gives detailed conversations on the American empire, how it came to be, why it is so powerful, and why it will continue to be powerful.

I think it's quite excellent and important to recognize that. Sometimes it's easy to be hyperbolic about decline, but on every numerical dimension, the United States is extraordinarily powerful and will continue to be extraordinarily powerful. Chapter 2 is entitled "Earthquake," where he talks about the US Jihadist war, and 2010 gives several predictions that, in my estimation, by 2022, they have come true, almost fully.

Chapter 3 is entitled "Population, Computers, and Culture Wars," wherein the author digs deeply into demographics and some of the culture wars in a really excellent way. Chapter 4 is called "The New Fault Lines," and here's where I want to read a couple of excerpts that set the stage for what's happening in Eurasia, and then we'll go specifically to the content related to the predicted war in Russia in 2020.

Chapter 4, "The New Fault Lines." Where will the next earthquake strike, and what will it look like? To answer that question, we need to examine the geopolitical fault lines of the 21st century. As with geology, there are many such fault lines. Without pushing this analogy too far, we have to identify the active fault lines in order to identify areas where friction might build up into conflict.

As the focus on the Islamic world subsides, what will be the most unstable point in the world in the next era? There are five areas of the world right now that are viable candidates. First, there is the all-important Pacific Basin. The United States Navy dominates the Pacific. The Asian rim of the Pacific consists entirely of trading countries dependent on access to the high seas, which are therefore dependent on the United States.

Two of them, China and Japan, are major powers that could potentially challenge U.S. hegemony. From 1941 to 1945, the United States and Japan fought over the Pacific Basin, and control of it remains a potential issue today. Second, we must consider the future of Eurasia after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Since 1991, the region has fragmented and decayed. The successor state to the Soviet Union, Russia, is emerging from this period with renewed self-confidence. Yet, Russia is also in an untenable geopolitical position. Unless Russia exerts itself to create a sphere of influence, the Russian Federation could itself fragment. On the other hand, creating that sphere of influence could generate conflict with the United States and Europe.

That's the key. It goes on. The third is that there's continuing doubt about the ultimate framework of Europe. It talks about what Europe faces. Fourth is the Islamic world. Fifth is the question of Mexican-American relations. But let's talk about Eurasia. Eurasia. For most of the second half of the 20th century, the Soviet Union controlled Eurasia, from central Germany to the Pacific, as far south as the Caucasus and the Hindu Kush.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, its western frontier moved east nearly a thousand miles from the West German border to the Russian border with Belarus. From the Hindu Kush, its border moved northward a thousand miles to the Russian border with Kazakhstan. Eurasia was pushed from the border of Turkey northward to the northern Caucasus, where it is still struggling to keep its foothold in the region.

Russian power has now retreated farther east than it has been in centuries. During the Cold War, it had moved farther west than ever before. In the coming decades, Russian power will settle somewhere between those two lines. After the Soviet Union dissolved at the end of the 20th century, foreign powers moved in to take advantage of Russia's economy, creating an era of chaos and poverty.

They also moved rapidly to integrate as much as they could of the Russian Empire into their own spheres of influence. Eastern Europe was absorbed into NATO and the EU, and the Baltic states were also absorbed into NATO. The United States entered into a close relationship with both Georgia in the Caucasus and with many of the Central Asian "Stans," particularly after September 11, when the Russians allowed U.S.

forces into the area to wage the war in Afghanistan. Most significantly, Ukraine moved into an alignment with the United States and away from Russia. This was a breaking point in Russian history. The Orange Revolution in Ukraine, from December 2004 to January 2005, was the moment when the post-Cold War genuinely ended for Russia.

The Russians saw the events in Ukraine as an attempt by the United States to draw Ukraine into NATO, and thereby set the stage for Russian disintegration. Quite frankly, there was some truth to the Russian perception. If the West had succeeded in dominating Ukraine, Russia would have become indefensible. The southern border with Belarus, as well as the southwestern frontier of Russia, would have been wide open.

In addition, the distance between Ukraine and western Kazakhstan is only about 400 miles, and that is the gap through which Russia has been able to project power toward the Caucasus. We should assume, then, that under these circumstances, Russia would have lost its ability to control the Caucasus, and would have had to retreat farther north from Chechnya.

The Russians would have been abandoning parts of the Russian Federation itself, and Russia's own southern flank would become highly vulnerable. Russia would have continued to fragment until it returned to its medieval frontiers. Had Russia fragmented to this extent, it would have created chaos in Eurasia, to which the United States would not have objected, since the US grand strategy has always aimed for the fragmentation of Eurasia as the first line of defense for US control of the seas, as we have seen.

By the way, in chapter one of the story of the book, the author talks extensively about how US naval power is fundamental to understanding global geopolitics and the strength of the United States' faces. So the United States had every reason to encourage this process. Russia had every reason to block it.

After what Russia regarded as an American attempt to further damage it, Moscow reverted to a strategy of reasserting its sphere of influence in the areas of the former Soviet Union. The great retreat of Russian power ended in Ukraine. Russian influence is now increasing in three directions, toward Central Asia, toward the Caucasus, and inevitably toward the West, the Baltics and Eastern Europe.

For the next generation, until roughly 2020, Russia's primary concern will be reconstructing the Russian state and reasserting Russian power in the region. Interestingly, the geopolitical shift is aligning with an economic shift. Vladimir Putin sees Russia less as an industrial power than as an exporter of raw materials, the most important of which is energy, particularly natural gas.

Moving to bring the energy industry under state supervision, if not direct control, he is forcing out foreign interests and reorienting the industry toward exports, particularly to Europe. High energy prices have helped stabilize Russia's economy internally, but he will not confine his efforts to energy alone. He also is seeking to capitalize on Russian agriculture, timber, gold, diamonds, and other commodities.

He is transforming Russia from an impoverished disaster into a poor but more productive country. Putin also is giving Russia the tool with which to intimidate Europe, the valve on a natural gas pipeline. Russia is pressing back along its frontiers. It is deeply focused on Central Asia and will, over time, find success there, but Russia will have a more difficult time in the even more crucial Caucasus.

The Russians do not intend to allow any part of the Russian Federation to break away. As a result, there will be friction, particularly in the next decade, with the United States and other countries in the region, as Russia reasserts itself. But the real flashpoint, in all likelihood, will be on Russia's western frontier.

Belarus will align itself with Russia. Of all the countries in the former Soviet Union, Belarus has had the fewest economic and political reforms and has been the most interested in recreating some successor to the Soviet Union. Linked in some way to Russia, Belarus will bring Russian power back to the borders of the former Soviet Union.

From the Baltic's south to the Romanian border, there is a region where borders have historically been uncertain and conflict frequent. In the north, there is a long, narrow plain stretching from the Pyrenees to St. Petersburg. This is where Europe's greatest wars were fought. This is the path that Napoleon and Hitler took to invade Russia.

There are few natural barriers. Therefore, the Russians must push their border west as far as possible to create a buffer. After World War II, they drove into the center of Germany on this plain. Today, they have retreated to the east. They have to return and move as far west as possible.

That means the Baltic states and Poland are, as before, problems Russia has to solve. Defining the limits of Russian influence will be controversial. The United States and the countries within the old Soviet sphere will not want Russia to go too far. The last thing the Baltic states want is to fall under Russian domination again.

Consider the states south of the northern European plain in the Carpathians. The former Soviet satellites, particularly Poland, Hungary, and Romania, understand that the return of Russian forces to their frontiers would represent a threat to their security. Since these countries are now part of NATO, their interests necessarily affect the interests of Europe and the United States.

The open question is where the line will be drawn in the west. This has been a historical question and it was a key challenge in Europe over the past hundred years. Russia will not become a global power in the next decade, but it has no choice but to become a major regional power.

That means it will clash with Europe. The Russian-European frontier remains a fault line. The author goes on and talks about some of the other fault lines. Chapter 5 is called China 2020, Paper Tiger, wherein he discusses extensively China. And then chapter 6 is called Russia 2020, Rematch. And here is where we get the most important understanding of what's happening right now.

Again, this is predicted back in 2010. In geopolitics, major conflicts repeat themselves. France and Germany, for example, fought multiple wars, as did Poland and Russia. When a single war does not resolve an underlying geopolitical issue, it is re-fought until the issue is finally settled. At the very least, even without another war, tension and confrontation are ongoing.

Significant conflicts are rooted in underlying realities, and they do not go away easily. Keep in mind how quickly Balkan geopolitics led to a recurrence of wars that had been fought a century earlier. Russia is the eastern portion of Europe and has clashed with the rest of Europe on multiple occasions.

The Napoleonic Wars, the two World Wars, and the Cold War all dealt, at least in part, with the status of Russia and its relationship to the rest of Europe. None of these wars ultimately settled this question, because in the end a united and independent Russia survived or triumphed. The problem is that the very existence of a united Russia poses a significant potential challenge to Europe.

Russia is a vast region with a huge population. It is much poorer than the rest of Europe, but it has two assets – land and natural resources. As such, it is a constant temptation for European powers, which see an opportunity to increase their size and wealth to the east.

Historically, though, Europeans who have invaded Russia have come to a disastrous end. If they are not beaten by the Russians, they are so exhausted from fighting them that someone else defeats them. Russia occasionally pushes its power westward, threatening Europe with the Russian masses. At other times, passive and ignored, Russia is often taken advantage of, but in due course others pay for underestimating it.

The Cold War only appeared to have settled the Russian question. Had the Russian Federation collapsed in the 1990s and the region fragmented into multiple smaller states, Russian power would have disappeared, and with it the challenge Russian power poses to Europe. Had the Americans, Europeans, and Chinese moved in for the kill, the Russian question would have been finally settled.

But the Europeans were too weak and divided at the end of the 20th century, the Chinese too isolated and preoccupied with internal issues, and, after September 11, 2001, the Americans were too distracted by the Islamist war to act decisively. What actions were taken by the United States were insufficient and unfocused.

In fact, these actions only served to alert the Russians to the great potential danger from the United States and ensured they would respond to it. Given the simple fact that Russia did not disintegrate, the Russian geopolitical question will re-emerge. Given the fact that Russia is now re-energizing itself, that question will come sooner rather than later.

The conflict will not be a repeat of the Cold War any more than World War I was a repeat of the Napoleonic Wars, but it will be a restatement of the fundamental Russian question. If Russia is a United Nations state, where will its frontiers lie and what will be the relationship between Russia and its neighbors?

That question will represent the next major phase in world history, in 2020 and in the years leading up to it. Russian Dynamics If we are going to understand Russia's behavior and intentions, we have to begin with Russia's fundamental weakness, its borders, particularly in the Northwest. Even when Ukraine is controlled by Russia, as it has been for centuries, and Belarus and Moldovia are part of the Russian Empire as well, there are still no natural borders in the North.

The center and south are anchored on the Carpathian Mountains, as far north as the Slovakian-Polish border, and to the east of them are the Pripet Marshes, boggy and impassable. But in the north and south, east of the Carpathians, there are no strong barriers to protect Russia, or to protect Russia's neighbors.

On the northern European plain, no matter where Russia's borders are drawn, it is open to attack. There are few significant natural barriers anywhere on this plain. Pushing its western border all the way into Germany, as it did in 1945, still leaves Russia's borders without a physical anchor. The only physical advantage Russia can have is depth.

The farther west into Europe its borders extend, the farther conquerors have to travel to reach Moscow. Therefore, Russia is always pressing westward on the northern European plain, and Europe is always pressing eastward. That is not the case with other borders of Russia, by which we mean to include the former Soviet Union, which has been the rough shape of Russia since the end of the 19th century.

In the south, there was a natural secure boundary. The Black Sea leads to the Caucasus, separating Russia from Turkey and Iran. Iran is further buffered by the Caspian Sea, and by the Karakum Desert in southern Turkmenistan, which runs along the Afghan border, terminating in the Himalayas. The Russians are concerned with the Iranian-Afghan segment, and might push south, as they have done several times.

But they are not going to be invaded on that border. Their frontier with China is long and vulnerable, but only on a map. Invading Siberia is not a practical possibility. It is a vast wilderness. There is a potential weakness along China's western border, but not a significant one. Therefore, the Russian Empire, in any of its incarnations, is fairly secure, except in northern Europe, where it faces its worst dangers, geography, and powerful European nations.

Russia had its guts carved out after the collapse of communism. St. Petersburg, its jewel, was about a thousand miles away from NATO troops in 1989. Now it is less than 100 miles away. In 1989, Moscow was 1,200 miles from the limits of Russian power. Now it is about 200 miles.

In the south, with Ukraine independent, the Russian hold on the Black Sea is tenuous, and it has been forced to the northern extreme of the Caucasus. Afghanistan is occupied, however tentatively, by the Americans, and Russia's anchor on the Himalayas is gone. If there were an army interested in invading, the Russian Federation is virtually indefensible.

Russia's strategic problem is that it is a vast country with relatively poor transportation. If Russia were simultaneously attacked along its entire periphery, in spite of the size of its forces, it would be unable to easily protect itself. It would have difficulty mobilizing forces and deploying them to multiple fronts, so it would have to maintain an extremely large standing army that could be pre-deployed.

This pressure imposes a huge economic burden on Russia, undermines the economy, and causes it to buckle from within. That is what happened to the Soviet state. Of course, this is not the first time Russia has been in peril. Protecting its frontiers is not Russia's only problem today. The Russians are extremely well aware that they are facing a massive demographic crisis.

Russia's current population is about 145 million people, and projections for 2050 are for between 90 million and 125 million. Time is working against it. Russia's problem will soon be its ability to field an army sufficient for its strategic needs. Internally, the number of Russians compared to other ethnic groups is declining, placing intense pressure on Russia to make a move sooner rather than later.

In its current geographical position, it is an accident waiting to happen. Given Russia's demographic trajectory, in 20 years it may be too late to act, and its leaders know this. It does not have to conquer the world, but Russia must regain and hold its buffers, essentially the boundaries of the old Soviet Union.

Between their geopolitical, economic, and demographic problems, the Russians have to make a fundamental shift. For a hundred years, the Russians sought to modernize their country through industrialization, trying to catch up to the rest of Europe. They never managed to pull it off. Around 2000, Russia shifted its strategy. Instead of focusing on industrial development as they had in the past century, the Russians reinvented themselves as exporters of natural resources, particularly energy, but also minerals, agricultural products, lumber, and precious metals.

By deemphasizing industrial development and emphasizing raw materials, the Russians took a very different path, one more common to countries in the developing world. But given the unexpected rise of energy and commodity prices, this move not only saved the Russian economy but also strengthened it to the point where Russia could afford to drive its own selective re-industrialization.

Most important, since natural resource production is less manpower intensive than industrial production, it gave Russia an economic base that could be sustained with a declining population. It also gave Russia leverage in the international system. Europe is hungry for energy. Russia, constructing pipelines to feed natural gas to Europe, takes care of Europe's energy needs and its own economic problems, and puts Europe in a position of dependency on Russia.

In an energy-hungry world, Russia's energy exports are like heroin. It addicts countries once they start using it. Russia has already used its natural gas resources to force neighboring countries to bend to its will. That power reaches into the heart of Europe, where the Germans and the former Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe all depend on Russian natural gas.

Add to this its other resources and Russia can apply significant pressure on Europe. Dependency can be a double-edged sword. A militarily weak Russia cannot pressure its neighbors because its neighbors might decide to make a grab for its wealth. So Russia must recover its military strength. Rich and weak is a bad position for nations to be in.

If Russia is to be rich in natural resources and export them to Europe, it must be in a position to protect what it has and to shape the international environment in which it lives. In the next decade, Russia will become increasingly wealthy, relative to its past at least, but geographically insecure.

It will therefore use some of its wealth to create a military force appropriate to protect its interests, buffer zones to protect it from the rest of the world, and then buffer zones for the buffer zones. Russia's grand strategy involves the creation of deep buffers along the northern European plain while it divides and manipulates its neighbors, creating a new regional balance of power in Europe.

What Russia cannot tolerate are tight borders without buffer zones, and its neighbors united against it. This is why Russia's future actions will appear to be aggressive, but will actually be defensive. Russia's actions will unfold in three phases. In the first phase, Russia will be concerned with recovering influence and effective control in the former Soviet Union, recreating the system of buffers that the Soviet Union provided it.

In the second phase, Russia will seek to create a second tier of buffers beyond the boundaries of the former Soviet Union. It will try to do this without creating a solid wall of opposition, or of the kind that choked it during the Cold War. In the third phase, Russia will try to prevent anti-Russian coalitions from forming.

In referring to the, from here, the author goes on, talks about the history of the Soviet Union and why the Soviet Union was built that way, then talks about the frontiers of Russia, the first one being the Caucasus, the second one being the Central Asia, and then turns attention to, turns attention to Europe.

I want to read an excerpt from the Central Asia section, though, because I think this helps to understand some of the Russian tension with the United States. And then we'll talk about Europe, which is where we come to Ukraine. Central Asia. Central Asia is a vast region running between the Caspian Sea and the Chinese border.

It is primarily Muslim, and therefore, as we have seen, was part of the massive destabilization that took place in the Muslim world after the fall of the Soviet Union. By itself, it has some economic value as a region with energy reserves, but it has little strategic importance to the Russians, unless another great power was to dominate it and use it as a base against them.

If that were to happen, it would become enormously important. Whoever controls Kazakhstan would be a hundred miles from the Volga, a river highway for Russian agriculture. During the 1990s, Western energy companies flocked to the region. Russia had no problem with that. It wasn't in a position to compete, and it wasn't in a position to control the region militarily.

Central Asia was a neutral zone of relative indifference to the Russians. All of that changed on September 11, 2001, which redefined the geopolitics of the region. September 11 made it urgent for the United States to invade Afghanistan. Unable to mount an invasion by itself quickly, the United States asked the Russians for help.

One thing they asked for was Russian help in getting the Northern Alliance, an anti-Taliban group in Afghanistan to play the major role on the ground. The Russians had sponsored the Northern Alliance and effectively controlled it. Another thing the Americans asked for was Russian support in securing bases for the United States in several Central Asian countries.

Technically, these were independent countries, but the United States was asking for help with the Northern Alliance and couldn't afford to anger the Russians. The Central Asian countries did not want to anger the Russians either, and US planes had to fly over the former Soviet Union to get to them.

The Russians agreed to an American military presence in the region, thinking they had an understanding with the United States that this was a temporary situation. But as the war in Afghanistan dragged on, the United States stayed on. And as it stayed on, it became more and more influential with the various republics in the region.

Russia realized that what had been a benign buffer zone was becoming dominated by the main global power, a power that was pressing Russia in Ukraine, the Caucasus, and the Baltics. In addition, as the price of energy rose and Russia adopted its new economic strategy, Central Asia's energy became even more significant.

Russia did not want American forces a hundred miles from the Volga. Russia simply had to react. It didn't act directly, but it began manipulating the political situation in the region, reducing American power. It was a move designed to return Central Asia to the Russian sphere of influence, and the Americans, on the other side of the world, isolated by chaotic Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan, were in no position to resist.

The Russians reasserted their natural position, and tellingly it was one of the few places US naval power couldn't reach. Central Asia is an area where the United States can't remain under Russian pressure. It is a place where the Chinese could potentially cause problems, but as we've seen, that is unlikely to happen.

China has economic influence there, but the Russians in the end have both military and financial capabilities that can out-duel them. The Russians might offer China access to Central Asia, but the arrangements created in the 19th century and maintained by the Soviet Union will reassert themselves. For it is my view that Central Asia will be back in the Russian sphere of influence by the early 2010s, long before the major confrontation begins in the West, in Europe.

The European Theater The European Theater is, of course, the area directly west of Russia. In this region, Russia's western border faces the three Baltic states. By the way, I couldn't comment knowledgeably on the difference between the 2010s, 2015, and 2020, but I do think it's interesting in light of this kind of analysis that it was just last year that the United States fully withdrew from Afghanistan.

So I think this will be an interesting point of analysis for political or geopolitical analysts to try to understand the timing of Russia's moves with regard to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. The European Theater The European Theater is, of course, the area directly west of Russia. In this region, Russia's western border faces the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and the two independent republics of Belarus and Ukraine.

All of these were part of the former Soviet Union and of the Russian Empire. Beyond these countries lies the belt of former Soviet satellites – Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. The Russians must dominate Belarus and Ukraine for their basic national security. The Baltics are secondary but still important.

Eastern Europe is not critical so long as the Russians are anchored in the Carpathian Mountains in the south and have strong forces on the northern European plain. But of course all of this can get complicated. Ukraine and Belarus are everything to the Russians. If they were to fall into an enemy's hands, for example, join NATO, Russia would be in mortal danger.

Moscow is only a bit over 200 miles from the Russian border with Belarus, Ukraine less than 200 miles from Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad. Russia defended against Napoleon and Hitler with depth. Without Belarus and Ukraine there is no depth, no land to trade for an enemy's blood. It is of course absurd to imagine NATO posing a threat to Russia.

But the Russians think in terms of 20-year cycles and they know how quickly the absurd becomes possible. They also know that the United States and NATO have systematically expanded their reach by extending membership in NATO to Eastern Europe and the Baltic states. As soon as the United States began trying to recruit Ukraine into NATO, the Russians changed their view both of American intentions and of Ukraine.

From the Russian point of view, NATO expanding into Ukraine threatens Russian interests in the same way as if the Warsaw Pact had moved into Mexico. When a pro-Western uprising in 2004, the "Orange Revolution", seemed about to sweep Ukraine into NATO, the Russians accused the United States of trying to surround and destroy Russia.

What the Americans were thinking is open to debate. That Ukraine in NATO would be potentially devastating to Russian national security is not. The Russians did not mobilize their army. Rather they mobilized their intelligence service, whose covert connections in Ukraine were superb. The Russians undermined the Orange Revolution, playing on a split between pro-Russian Eastern Ukraine and pro-European Western Ukraine.

It proved not to be difficult at all, and fairly quickly Ukrainian politics became gridlocked. It is only a matter of time before Russian influence will overwhelm Kiev. Belarus is an easier issue. As noted earlier, Belarus is the least reformed member of the former Soviet Republics. It remains a centralized authoritarian state.

More important, its leadership has repeatedly mourned the passing of the Soviet Union and has proposed union of some sort with Russia. Such a union will, of course, have to be on Russian terms, which has led to tension, but there is no possibility of Belarus joining NATO. The reabsorption of Belarus and Ukraine into the Russian sphere of influence is a given in the next five years.

When that happens, Russia will have roughly returned to its borders with Europe between the two world wars. It will be anchored in the Caucasus in the south, with Ukraine protected, and in the north its borders on the northern European plain will abut Poland and the Baltic countries. That will pose the questions of who the most powerful country in the north is and where the precise frontiers will be.

The real flashpoint will be the Baltics. The traditional path to invade Russia is a 300-mile gap between the northern Carpathians and the Baltic Sea. This is flat, easily traversed country with few river barriers. This northern European plain is a smooth ride for invaders. A European invader can move due east to Moscow or to St.

Petersburg in the northwest. During the Cold War, the distance from St. Petersburg to NATO's front line was also more than a thousand miles. Today, the distance is about 70 miles. This explains the strategic nightmare Russia faces in the Baltics, and what it will need to do to fix the problem.

The three Baltic countries were once part of the Soviet Union. Each became independent after it collapsed, and then in that narrow window each became part of NATO. As we have seen, the Europeans are most likely too far into their decadent cycle to have the energy to take advantage of the situation.

However, the Russians are not going to risk their national security on that assumption. They saw Germany go from being a cripple in 1932 to being at the gates of Moscow in 1941. The inclusion of the Baltic countries along with Poland and NATO has moved NATO's frontier extraordinarily close to the Russian heartland.

For a country that was invaded three times in the last 200 years, the comfortable assumption that NATO and its members are no threat is not something it can risk. From the Russian point of view, the major invasion route into their country is not only wide open but also in the hands of countries with a pronounced hostility to Russia.

The Baltic countries have never forgiven the Russians for their occupation. The Poles are equally bitter and deeply distrustful of Russian intentions. Now that they are a part of NATO, these countries form the front line. Behind them is Germany, a country as distrusted by Russia as Russia is by the Poles and Balts.

The Russians are certainly paranoid, but that doesn't mean they don't have enemies or that they are crazy. This would be the point of any confrontation. The Russians can live with a neutral Baltic region. Living with a Baltic region that is part of NATO and close to the Americans, however, is a much more difficult risk to take.

On the other hand, the Americans, having backed down in Central Asia and being cautious in the Caucasus, can't retreat from the Baltics. Any compromise over the three NATO members would send Eastern Europe into a panic. Eastern Europe's behavior would become unpredictable, and the possibility of Russian influence spreading westward would increase.

Russia has the greater interest, but the Americans could bring substantial power to bear if they chose. Russia's next move likely will be an agreement with Belarus for an integrated defense system. Belarus and Russia have been linked for a very long time, so this will be a natural reversion. And that will bring the Russian army to the Baltic frontier.

It will also bring the army to the Polish frontier, and that will start the confrontation in its full intensity. The Poles fear the Russians and the Germans. Trapped between the two, without natural defenses, they fear whichever is stronger at any time. Unlike the rest of Eastern Europe, which at least has the barrier of the Carpathians between them and the Russians, and shares a border with Ukraine, not Russia, the Poles are on the dangerous northern European plane.

When the Russians return to their border and force, in the process of confronting the Baltic states, the Poles will react. Poland has almost 40 million people. It is not a small country, and since it will be backed by the United States, not a trivial one. Polish support will be thrown behind the bolts.

The Russians will pull the Ukrainians into their alliance with Belarus, and will have Russian forces all along the Polish border, and as far south as the Black Sea. At this point, the Russians will begin the process of trying to neutralize the Balts. This I believe will all take place by the mid-2010s.

The Russians will have three tools at their disposal to exert their influence over the Baltic states. First, covert operations. In the same way the United States has financed and energized non-governmental organizations around the world, the Russians will finance and energize Russian minorities in these countries, as well as whatever pro-Russian elements exist or can be bought.

When the Balts suppress these movements, it will give the Russians a pretext for using their second tool, economic sanctions, particularly by cutting the flow of natural gas. Finally, the Russians will bring military pressure to bear through the presence of substantial forces near these borders. Not surprisingly, the Poles and the Balt both remember the unpredictability of the Russians.

The psychological pressure will be enormous. Let's skip a little bit about advanced military technologies. But the point of what is happening is you can see the place the Russians are caught. You can see that even according to this particular prediction, the Russians are behind schedule, meaning what the author was writing about in 2010 didn't wind up happening by 2015.

Now there's more and I'm not going to put my mouth and stick my foot in it by trying to comment on it, but some of the things that happened in Ukraine in 2014, the Russians alleged US involvement, the previous president of Ukraine I think is in prison right now and was replaced by the current president and a bunch of other stuff.

And then I think it's so interesting to think about the Ukrainian connection to the current administration of President Biden with his son, the Burisma affair, etc. It's so fascinating to think about what has been happening. But you can see that what Russia is doing is seeking to secure its borders in the way that is said here.

So that can give a little bit of insight into what Russia is trying to do in Ukraine. Now I've already abused the author's copyright on the book. I'm going to stop there. I'm going to encourage you to get it and read it. It's a great book and I'm glad that I was able to go through it again.

I wish I had remembered more of it. Again the primary thing that I took from it was a little bit of information from 10 years ago as I remembered the commentary on demographics on a global basis and also the commentary on Mexico. And those two things have been influential to me.

But I had forgotten most of the stuff related to Russia and Ukraine and just simply not followed it closely over the years. But I hope you enjoy the book and I hope having a little bit more insight into what's happening from the Russian point of view you can see a little bit more of what's happening.

And then in the days to come as we see an incredibly united front against Russia, watch carefully because it'll be fascinating to see what happens along the way. So I hope that you enjoy that insight from again an author writing 10 years ago, nothing coming back to today. I want to simply close with "Where Does It End?" And I'll just give a couple of things.

So again this book, it hasn't come out exactly as intended. One of the things that's interesting is why didn't it? And I didn't pay much attention to the global geopolitics over the last six or eight years but it's really interesting to go back now and in light of what I've reread over the last couple of days think about what happened, right?

Did, for example, the American president make a difference? There was all the arguments about Russia and President Trump and what Putin would or wouldn't do and all of those things. I don't know. But where does it end? And so again this particular prediction in 2010 didn't come true exactly in the timeline.

It seems to be delayed from what the author originally thought would happen. But I thought it was interesting to focus on the end result as predicted by this author because he talks about it. He talks about how Russia will focus on increasing, developing its internal, solving its economic problems, which Russia has clearly worked hard on doing.

And let's start here. "By 2020 this confrontation will be the dominant global issue and everyone will think of it as a permanent problem. The confrontation will not be as comprehensive as the first Cold War. The Russians will lack the power to seize all of Eurasia and there will not be a true global threat.

They will, however, be a regional threat, and that is the context in which the United States will respond. There will be tension all along the Russian frontier, but the United States will not be able to or need to impose a complete cordon around Russia as it did around the Soviet Union.

Given the confrontation, the European dependence on hydrocarbons, much of it derived from Russia, will become a strategic issue. The American strategy will be to de-emphasize the focus on hydrocarbon energy sources. This will kick into high gear the American interest in developing alternative sources of energy. Russia, as before, will focus on its existing industries rather than on the development of new ones.

That will mean increased oil and natural gas production, rather than new energy sources. As a result, Russia is not going to be in the forefront of the technological developments that will dominate the later portions of the century. Instead, Russia will need to develop its military capabilities. Thus, as it has over the past two centuries, Russia will devote the bulk of its research and development money to applying new technologies toward military ends and expanding existing industries causing it to fall behind the United States and the rest of the world in non-military but valuable technology.

It will be particularly hurt, paradoxically, by its hydrocarbon riches, because it will not be motivated to develop new technologies and will be burdened by military spending. During the first phase of Russia's reassertion of power until about 2010 or so, Russia will be grossly underestimated. It will be perceived as a fractured country with a stagnant economy and a weak military.

In the 2010s, when the confrontation intensifies on its borders and its immediate neighbors become alarmed, the greater powers will continue to be dismissive. The United States, in particular, tends to first underestimate and then overestimate enemies. By the middle of the 2010s, the United States will again be obsessed with Russia.

There is an interesting process to observe here. The United States swings between moods but actually, as we have seen, executes a very consistent and rational foreign policy. In this case, the United States will move to its manic state that will focus on keeping Russia tied in knots without going to war.

It will matter a great deal where the fault line lies. If Russia's resurgence is to be a minimal crisis, the Russians will dominate Central Asia and the Caucasus and possibly absorb Moldova, but they will not be able to absorb the Baltic states or dominate any nations west of the Carpathians.

If the Russians do manage to absorb the Baltics and gain significant allies in the Balkans like Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece, or Central European countries such as Slovakia, the competition between the United States and Russia will be more intense and frightening. In the end though, it won't truly matter. Russian military power will be severely strained, confronting the fraction of American military power that the United States decides to wield in responding to Russia's moves.

Regardless of what the rest of Europe does, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Romania will be committed to resisting Russian advances, and will make any deal the United States wants in order to gain its support. The line, therefore, will be drawn in the Carpathian Mountains this time, rather than in Germany as it was during the Cold War.

The Polish northern plains will be the main line of confrontation, but the Russians will not move militarily. The causes that ignited this confrontation, and the Cold War before it, will impose the same outcome as the Cold War, this time with less effort for the United States. The last confrontation occurred in Central Europe.

This one will take place much farther to the east. In the last confrontation, China was an ally of Russia, at least in the beginning. In this case, China will be out of the game. Last time, Russia was in complete control of the Caucasus, but now it will not be, and it will be facing American and Turkish pressure northward.

In the last confrontation, Russia had a large population, but this time around it has a smaller and declining population. Internal pressure, particularly in the south, will divert Russian attention from the west, and eventually, without war, it will break. Russia broke in 1917, and again in 1991, and the country's military will collapse once more shortly after 2020.

My aim in reading that to you was that you would have the opportunity to hear from a somewhat distant but expert voice a little bit about the context of Russia, so that you would then be able to use that as a filter through watching the events today. Again, that author's predictions have not come true exactly as he said, of course not.

Friedman I still find to be an extremely astute analyst. If you're interested, he has a great newsletter and website called geopoliticalfutures.com. You can subscribe at geopoliticalfutures.com for his posts and consulting work, his analysis, their forecasts, etc. from him and his entire team. I appreciate his content very much, helping me to understand the world a little bit.

I would encourage you to read the whole book. Of course, and he acknowledges right up front, predicting an entire century is a challenging thing, but it'll give you a sense of where we are. I think that what's helpful to me about this kind of analysis, this kind of prediction, is it takes away some of the impact of the day-to-day events and helps me to focus on the big picture.

My hope is that if you're still here, you've been able to take this information, enjoy it, gain a little bit more understanding, and then you'll have a little bit more of a background to follow the news of today as we watch the events happening in that region of the world.

May God bless you. May God bring peace in the region. That is my hope, my prayer. My family and I are praying diligently that God would bring peace, would restrain the evildoers and bring peace and protect loss of life. War is hell. And I think we see that very clearly in front of us.

And so may God be with you and your families, and may God bring peace to the region. Are you ready to make your next pro basketball, football, hockey, concert, or live event unforgettable? Let Sweet Hop take your game to the next level. Sweet Hop is an online marketplace curating the best premium tickets at stadiums, arenas, and amphitheaters nationwide.

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