[Lunostrelki]

Reminds me of an economic version of this:
http://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/N...iance.html

Quote:

A striking thing about the great existential military conflicts of the industrial age, from Napoleon's wars to the Cold War, is that the principal nations involved were European or East Asian. Let's take a hint from my friend and consider these nations all together: the EuroSinoNippons, or (very loosely speaking) the Arctics.

From the perspective of 2007, the intra-Arctic nature of all 19th- and 20th-century major conflict really is striking. I recently went to look something up in Niall Ferguson's fine book about World War One. I got to browsing in it, and found myself reflecting on how unthinkable such a clash of nations would be today, if the nations were all Europeans. You can even throw Vladimir Putin's glowering Russia into the mix: a great existential war between Europeans is simply not going to happen again. Who thinks it is? Who even talks about it?

Can the same be said more broadly of the Arctics? People do talk about, and I suppose even worry about, a war between China and the U.S.A. I am not one of those people. There is simply no sufficient casus belli. A Chinese blockade of Taiwan, or even an attempted invasion, would outrage Americans, but I very much doubt there would be any real support for going to war. China is not — trust me — going to make a grab for Alaska or Hawaii.

Other possibilities — a Russo-Chinese war for resources in Siberia, a Sino-Japanese war over... what? — seem to me equally remote. The inclination of the modern Chinese is to buy what they need, with at worst some diplomatic browbeating of competitors, and covert support to willing but undemocratic supplier regimes. To the degree that the U.S.A. remains an Arctic nation, I see no prospect of future intra-Arctic conflict.

The Temperates and the Tropicals are a different matter. Taking the Temperates to be the swathe of peoples from North Africa, through the Middle East, across Pakistan, north India, and Bangladesh, we are already in a state of conflict or serious tension with several nations, on account of the fact that this is the primary zone of Islam. Whether the current conflict is an existential one is a matter of opinion. Norman Podhoretz thinks it is, but many of us disagree with him.

Islam is a factor in the Tropicals, too — the nations of sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia — but not such an essential one, even in Indonesia. (I am assuming throughout that the Latin Americans will continue to vegetate in inconsequentiality as they did through the last century.)

The determinants of geopolitics over the next few decades will be:

- The degree of intra-Arctic solidarity, our nations united in a common concern about demographic collapse, and in common anxieties about threats from Temperates.
- The degree to which Europe, the U.S.A., and the old British dominions (Canada, Australia, New Zealand) can maintain their identity as Arctics while their populations of immigrant Temperates and Tropicals swell.
- The ability of Arctic nations to maintain their edge over Temperates and Tropicals in intelligence and creativity. (Lynn and Vanhanen's comprehensive studies suggest a gross mean IQ of over 100 for the Arctics, about 90 for the Temperates, less than 80 for the Tropicals.)

Perhaps it is time that we Arctics resolved to sink our minor differences and address our common problems, beginning with those demographic ones.