Recommended: The End of the World is Just the Beginning

Between covid, inflation and the war in the Ukraine the world has changed a great deal in the past few years, but these changes are nothing compared to what is coming. If you want to understand what is coming, and why, Peter Zeihan’s latest book, The End of the World is Just the Beginning,  explains it in exhausting detail. Doom and gloom books are popular in America (peak oil, Y2K, Japan buying up everything, etc), but most have proved to be wrong, based on a misreading of short-term trends. Zeihan works with much more basic stuff – geography, demographics, trade flows, supply chains, etc. There isn’t any disagreement that birth rates worldwide have fallen precipitously, There isn’t any argument about the geography of Europe, or which nations hate which other nations. There isn’t any confusion about what raw materials are needed to make steel, or fertilizer, or microchips, or where these materials can be found around the world.. And these are the basic things on which Zeihan bases his assessments.

At just under 500 pages, this is not a book one reads in an afternoon. Zeihan wanders through history, geography, material science, demographics, and dozens of other fields, tying them together to show how we got to where we are, and where we are going, all in his jocular style, which makes this book quite readable despite the enormous amount of material to be absorbed.

 

Recommended: How the World Really Works

Vaclav Smil. Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, is author of over 40 outstanding books on energy and on the environment. His latest book, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going (2021), is typical of his work – lots of common sense and good historical and technical background supported by hard data. Smil points out that to most people most of what supports their daily lives are mysterious black boxes. Vegetables and meats appear in their markets, but most people have a very dim idea of how they got there. Throwing a switch turns on the lights, but most people have little understanding of the technology or the economics behind the electricity that powers that light.

Smil attempts in this book to remedy that, and in the process to bring some reality to the naïve claims of those who think we can abandon fossil fuels in a decade or two. In fact our world floats on fossil fuels – every tomato grown and delivered to the table has consumed about three tablespoons of fossil fuel in fertilizer, transport, and equipment, and a kilogram of chicken on the plate required about half a wine bottle of fossil fuel to get it there. Eliminate fossil fuel and a majority of the world starves to death.

 

Status of the Russian-Ukrainian war

It is very difficult to tell what is really happening in the Ukraine war, but gathering reports from various sources suggests the following:

Russia is still suffering heavy casualties, (they lost two more generals last week, for example) but despite that is making slow progress in the Donbas region. Russian doctrine is to saturate an area with artillery in preparation for moving troops forward to take ground. It appears they are doing fine with the artillery barrage portion, but often lack sufficient ground troops to exploit the openings their artillery may have produced.

The Ukraine, while yielding ground very slowly, is suffering heavy casualties, apparently on the order of 100-200 killed and 300-500 wounded EACH DAY. This is not a rate they can sustain for very long. In addition, they report that they are running out of ammunition. Part of the problem is that the West has been buying up all the old Soviet ammunition lying around in Eastern Europe NATO nations and shipping it to the Ukraine because it fits their Russian-vintage weapons. But that supply is apparently pretty much exhausted. So going forward the Ukraine depends on NATO ammunition, but that requires NATO weapons to fit it. (Russian artillery, for example, mostly uses 152mm shells, while NATO howitzers use 155mm shells.)

So a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for the Ukraine to continue to oppose Russia is a massive effort to not only supply the Ukraine with Western weapons and ammunition, but to retrain them to use these weapons effectively and to maintain them. My impression, from comments posted by Ukrainian soldiers, is that this is going on, but at a pitifully slow pace. There are reports they are even having to use Goggle translate to translate the maintenance manuals, because we have delivered them only in English.

In fact, measured against normal bureaucratic speed, the US has moved weapons to the Ukraine at an impressive rate. But not at the speed that a modern war requires. We seem to always be a couple of months behind where we should be, with the result that advanced NATO weapons are just beginning to appear here and there on the battlefield, when they were really required at least a month or two ago.

Reports are that Russia is fortifying its lines in the Donbas, sometimes establishing two or three layers of fortifications, preparing to make it much harder for the Ukraine to take back what it has lost. In fact Ukrainian troops have had very limited success in taking back ground they have lost. They took back all the ground near Kyiv not because they counterattacked, but really because the Russians withdrew.

So it seems to me the likeliest prospect is for the war to settle into a protracted battle of attrition, with the Russians holding what they currently control, but not advancing much further. This will be unacceptable to the Ukraine, but there may not be much they can do about it.  From NATO’s point of view, the most important thing is to sap the Russian military enough to deter Putin from attacking a NATO member and forcing us into a full NATO-Russia confrontation.

Meanwhile, the sanctions on Russia are slowly beginning to bite. It hasn’t been too bad for them yet, but soon western-built machines, from oil wells to airplanes to McDonald deep fryers to trucks, will begin to need maintenance expertise and spare parts which will not be available. I expect a fairly gradual crumbling of much of their commerce, but it may take years. Of course sanctions are notoriously leaky, so they will manage to get some sanctioned parts from smuggling, and they will manage to sell some portion of their oil and gas through “black” channels, as both Iran and Venezuela have managed to do despite US sanctions.

From the point of US policy, it seems to me what we need to decide is just how we will handle a de facto divided Ukraine. Can we keep the western coalition against Russia together? Can we convince some of the nations not now participating in the sanctions, like India, to join us, and what incentives have we to encourage that? How vigorously will we support a continuing low-level war in the Ukraine? If the Ukraine is divided, will we undertake to rebuild the free portion?

And perhaps of most importance, will US domestic politics from the midterms on divert us from giving this problem the attention it needs? Russia is a dying empire, but it remains dangerous in its death throes, especially with Putin’s messianic dreams.