when you're the global currency a lot of the rules don't apply and that it's totally not
fair but it is still totally true um most countries most trade use the us dollars the
lubricant of exchange whether in trade or in their own internal systems uh remember the u.s
dollar is the second most used currency in every country in the world except for in the countries
where it's the number one used currency it is the primary store of value and more store of value
is held outside of the united states than within which means we're in this weird little system
happened to be and what people forget about the good old days is they weren't all that good old
you would have one of those that worked in the world because it would attract other
people because they wanted that asset back nature and the more successful it was the more
of the gold or the copper that you needed to back it which meant that every country
that had a successful asset-backed currency had to physically expand and go to war for
more assets and that ultimately undid all of them so fiat is a bad idea for secondary currency
but it's a great idea for a primary one because you no longer face that restriction
so we're now in this weird strange world where the less involved the united states is
the more stable its currency is because it's not involved in the trading matrix
so countries that are even not even trading with the united states now see the us dollar is really
their only option even as the united states kind of melts away from the international scene and
when that's the environment inflating the value of the currency i'm sorry inflating the supply of the
currency by 10 a year most countries in most parts of the world for most of history are very easy
to disrupt they don't have obscure borders they don't have everything they need within their own
borders so they can try to make incremental progress and this that or the other thing but
whenever there's a war or a boycott or a famine it all falls apart what the us fundamentally changed
was because the north american continent has been secure for us for 150 years we never had to worry
about those resets even decades like the great depression we exited the decade stronger than
we entered it and that meant that when the united states did decide to get involved with the world
as a stabilizing force we could kind of export that stability and by making global transport on
the ocean safe and cheap for everyone we could finally have instead of these hundreds of into
hundreds of separate discriminatory economies all kind of merged into a single global hole and that
had never happened before in human history i mean the closest analog would probably be the
roman empire but this is an age before steamship so you know you're not moving too fast uh and
from that everything suddenly changed because that meant that everyone could specialize in whatever
they did best so the koreans went into toys into heavy industry and ultimately the semiconductors
the chinese went into mass manufacturing so did san antonio in terms of energy places that
normally wouldn't be stable enough to support a population because there was no food production
could export crude and import food and that led them to produce more crude and start refining it
so every little bit of the system became fine-tuned for what they did best my home
state of iowa stopped producing wheat and beef that all moved to the drier climate of the great
plains we started doing soy and swine everybody's value-added increase and if you do that for
70 years you get the world that we know what's happening now is that single hole is breaking down
and so we now have to retrace every single economic sector and see what it looked like before
this grand merger started in the 1950s and in most parts of the world it means reverting back to not
just something that existed pre-1945 but something pre-industrial because a lot of the technologies
that are required to do mass agriculture or manufacturing or finance can be imported but that
doesn't mean that they were necessarily mastered and if you can't keep your own supply chain and
input system sustainable within whatever countries you can reach in a post globalized system then
you just can't play and so we're going to see for example a lot of russian crude fall off the market
we're going to see a lot of brazilian soy fall off the market we're going to see chinese
manufacturers fall off the market and we're all going to have to learn to do things differently
or get by without uh it was one thing to subsidize the global system in 1946 there wasn't a global
system right you know we've had 100 odd countries grow explosively in the time since then especially
since 1992 and we've retooled our military then i'm not sure even if we could get by in that we
could still do it so during the cold war you know we had the reagan navy as it uh it was called at
the end where we had hundreds of ships that were patrolling the global oceans and there were no
real counter navies the two largest navies in the world outside of our own were japan
and the uk and they were allies that's not where we are anymore we have retooled our
military to be country smashers so we just floated the ford that's the most powerful military
platform we've ever had all by itself it can take on any but seven of the world's largest air forces
that's if you're fighting fair and the navy does not fight fair carriers move that's the idea you
choose when the fight happens so really just the top three one of which is ours we're gonna have
four of those in addition to the ten nimitz this is how you destroy a country that's not how you
patrol the global oceans you need destroyers for that you need hundreds of them maybe at least 800
we have 70 half of them are defending the carriers so we don't even have the military theoretical
capability of rebuilding things like we did back in the 50s and 60s the navy we have right now
is actually i would argue right size for our economic and strategic needs it's only if you
want to become the global policeman again that we need to change it and i don't think there's a lot
of support for that right now there's two problems number one uh there are a lot of there's a lot of
equipment that we could theoretically give the ukrainians that they've never seen before so
there's a training time frame yeah uh and we are bringing some ukrainian soldiers out of ukraine
for that training so that that's a pipeline though that's not a sudden surge for the stuff that you
can suddenly surge you need things that they know how to use or can use with a minimum of training
the problem we have the complication that is looming over all of this is that failed
run at kiev from the third day of the war that giant convoy it's stalled in a day
because they ran out of fuel and then everyone had to walk back to belarus on the third day
because they ran out of food and you know at one point everyone in the military was like this is
great the russians don't know how to fight a war and then after they thought my reaction yeah
exactly holy crap the russians don't know how to fight a war uh and they see this as an existential
battle for their survival so we know that if nato forces come up against russian forces directly
they can either have a screaming retreat and contemplate the death of their country
over the next 20 years or they can escalate and they probably would so it is critical to keep this
war bottled up in ukraine and it is critical to kill the russian military here now so that
they can never do this again secretary austin was absolutely right with that the trick is how
do you do that with a force that has insufficient equipment insufficient training and poor logistics
uh there is no good solution here and any weapon system that would really turn the tide
like for example the us and the would not be engaged with the russians in an artillery duel
we would use airstrikes but we can't give the ukrainians our jets because they would require
american pilots and service crews and if you have that then you have an american military presence
in ukraine and you can get that direct clash that we have to avoid
right so the weapon systems that could win this for them they can't have because they can't
use them and that leaves us with this this netherworld in between and it's just not clear
how much of the former soviet satellites that are now nato allies how much equipment they have
that they can even give the ukrainians even if we replace everything in czech republic and
poland with f-16s and m1 abrams immediately there's a limit and we're probably going to
hit that limit this year and that counts for us too we're running out of stingers and javelins
rtb linking via septum
you