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Published | 2022/04/13 |
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Beau says:
Russia's invasion of Ukraine exposes military weakness, leading to long-term repercussions and limited future prospects, urging acceptance of a diminished role in the global order to achieve stability.
Global policymakers
The full transcript provides a detailed analysis of Russia's current situation post-invasion, offering insights into its geopolitical challenges and future prospects.
#Russia #Geopolitics #Ukraine #Putin #NATO #China #Invasion
Well, howdy there, internet people, it's Beau again.
So today, we are going to talk about long-term prospects
for Russia when we're talking about the geopolitical
situation.
We've covered Ukraine a lot, and we've talked about how
that's going for them.
And we've referenced how it impacts things in the big game, in that big international
poker game where everybody's cheating.
But we haven't really gone into what it means long term for Russia.
So that's what we're going to talk about today.
There are a number of things that factor into this.
A whole lot of them are directly related to the miscalculation that Russia engaged in
when it decided to invade Ukraine.
That's lost.
On the geopolitical scene, that's lost.
Even if you're somebody who believes that Russia is going to pull a rabbit out of their
hat and take the country and then somehow manage to hold it.
taking and holding aren't the same thing.
Even if you're somebody who believes that's going to happen on the geopolitical scene,
the big game, that war was already lost.
It displayed Russian military weakness.
It made it very clear that Russia's military power is a lot less than what it was perceived
to be. So that has to factor into any assessment of their long term prospects. The goal of
this little stunt was to basically say, I'm back baby, and Eastern Europe is mine. That
was the goal, the large geopolitical goal, was to exert Russian influence and serve as
a warning to other countries.
That didn't work.
In fact, the opposite happened.
Finland and Sweden are entering the first stages of looking into joining NATO, talking
about it openly. Rather than convince nations not to join NATO, it's pushing them to do
so. So that weakens Russia's stance in Europe. Every country that aligns more closely with
NATO undermines Russia in that big game.
It created economic and diplomatic penalties that will last a really, really long time.
Russia's going to be suffering from this decision for a while.
It also undermined Putin's desire to reassert Russia to glory like the USSR.
It really destroyed that dream.
There's not a lot of countries that are going to look to Russia to protect it from NATO
And it's very clear that Russia can't stand up to NATO.
It undermined that idea of Russia having satellites again.
And then the fifth one, somebody's going to say that it's early to call this, and it is,
but I think it's going to happen.
I believe that this is actually hastening Europe's switch away from dirty energy, which
hurts the Russian economy.
It's early for that, I'll admit that, but I think that's going to happen.
Okay, so that is all direct fallout from Putin's decision to invade Ukraine.
And there are issues that existed prior to that.
The first being a lot of income inequality in Russia.
That's always bad for a country.
The West should pay attention to that.
There's a massive amount of corruption, which is in large part what led to what we saw in
Ukraine.
They have bad demographics.
Their population is shrinking.
It's not growing.
population is getting smaller. And then regardless of the switch away from dirty
energy that might have been hastened by the invasion, that was going to
happen. And dirty energy is a huge part of Russia's economy. So that's also, that
was going to happen regardless. I just think it's going to happen faster now. So
So with all of this taken into account, what are Russia's options for the future?
The first thing they need to do is accept that they're not going to be back in the
USSR.
Those days are done.
Those days are done, and Putin, in many ways, made sure they won't come back.
His dream of restoring Russia to world superpower status was cut short by him.
So option one, they could just accept being second fiddle to China and join an alliance
with China at the center rather than Russia.
China being the economic and military superpower, and China protecting Russia.
I don't know that their nationalism is going to allow them to do that.
In the big game, that's actually the smart move.
But Russian nationalism is something else.
There's actually nothing wrong with being the UK in NATO.
That's what they would be.
But Russia feels it has to be the US.
It has to be the military force of the alliance.
That's just not going to be the case anytime soon.
Another option, and when I say this one, I want to be super clear about the
way I say it, I am not talking about the U.S. doing this, or the West doing this.
I am talking about Russians doing this.
The penalties and the fallout associated with Putin's decision would weigh less heavily
on Russia if Russia decided to shake the rat from off its neck and no longer have Putin
and his cronies in charge.
That would put them in a situation where they could start to modernize and start to become
that world power again.
A third option, a little bit of an unconventional one, they could stop looking to Europe and
look south, turn their imperialist ambitions on the former Soviet
republics on the southern side of their borders. I'm not saying that's a good
thing, I'm saying it's an option for them and if they were to do that they might
be able to reassert themselves on the world stage. And then there's the fourth
option, the one that I actually think is most likely, sadly, and that's that they
adopt an isolationist stance and just kind of accept that the people on the
bottom in that country are going to be in worse and worse conditions while the
people at the top, they'll still be alright, but they adopt that isolationist
stance, bide their time, wait for a moment when they can reemerge, and they basically
become North Korea.
Those are the four futures that Russians have to choose from.
I would hope that they realize that their current geopolitical strategy is something
out of the 1900s, the early 1900s, and then it just doesn't fit in today's world, and
they modernize.
But I haven't seen any signs that that's what they're going to do.
But Russia has to accept at this point, for at least the next 20 or 30 years, they're
not going to be the military center of an alliance.
They aren't going to be one of the poles in the multipolar world that gets established.
They will always be overshadowed by China now, and NATO is not going to look at Russia
and consider it a ??? they're certainly not going to consider it a peer.
They're not going to consider it a near-peer.
They're a relatively weak military that happens to have nuclear weapons at this point.
And that's how they're going to be viewed.
The sooner Russia accepts this reality, the better it's going to be for everybody, Russians
included.
The more stable the world will become, the less fighting there will be, the sooner Russia
can attempt to modernize and get back on its feet.
This fight that it picked has set Russia back on the geopolitical stage a lot, and they're
going to end up paying for it for a very, very long time.
And it is 100% Putin's fault.
Anyway, it's just a thought.
y'all have a good day.
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