The American Retreat, Part I: Oil

Diction and statistical issues aside, these tweets comprise the 92 most important words used by anyone in the past three decades. Trump just made clear the days of America protecting global shipping – particularly of oil shipping in the Middle East – are over.

There is an easy argument to be made that the United States’ shale revolution will make the United States a net exporter of crude oil in the current calendar year, but to understand just how critical that is for the Americans we must first pick apart just how horrible that is for everyone else.

Let’s talk importance:

In the pre-Order world if you couldn’t obtain fossil fuels yourself, first coal and later oil, you failed to industrialize. Your manufacturing would at most be a step above cottage industries, so no mass education and no consumer goods (aka peasantry and mass poverty). Lack of fuel condemned you to having an at-best rudimentary transport system meaning your cities were very small, only able to exist in regions that could grow their own food (aka high living costs and low quality of life).

The handful of locations that could secure fossil fuels – either by producing it locally or by seizing it from others – could advance into something we today recognize to broadly mean “civilization,” which includes among other things homes that don’t leak and gadgets and full bellies.

This all changed in the late 1940s. After World War II the Americans created a global Order – a mix of security and trade guarantees which they used as a bribe to induce others to join their side in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. With global security now a thing, oil could be shipped safely and at volume without military escort, meaning that countries that didn’t have a military capable of escorting could now access fossil fuels. BAM! Civilization goes global.

Attached: 5eeea862-af6c-4bf5-a7eb-fcd7fa555137.jpg (586x269, 39K)

Other urls found in this thread:

zeihan.com/newsletter/
us11.campaign-archive.com/home/?u=de2bc41f8324e6955ef65e0c9&id=5654564be1
youtube.com/watch?v=feU7HT0x_qU
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

Remove the Order, remove global oil markets, and civilization itself goes into screaming reverse in any location that lacks either the ability to produce oil locally, or the ability to venture forth and secure someone else’s.

Let’s talk vulnerability:

Crude tankers are huge. A modern supertanker can shuttle around oil weighing more than four Nimitz-class aircraft carriers. They are so big expressly because of the Order.

Pre-Order, merchant shipping used small, fast vessels because they needed to be able to scatter and hopefully outrun predators whether those predators wore eyepatches or naval uniforms. The Order ended such predation under the watchful eye of the U.S. Navy. Instead of commercial advantage coming as a result of speed and distributed risk, it instead came from efficiencies and economies of scale. Ships evolved to became slower to save on fuel costs, and bigger to get more bang for the buck. Today’s oil tankers are the slowest and biggest of them all and are nearly 50 times the size of some of the biggest cargo ships of the WWII era.

A similar logic holds with ports: size generates economies of scale. In addition, as ships have gotten larger, ports had to expand to match – a city with a small dock simply cannot handle a ship that is longer than the Empire State building is tall. Bigger, slower ships forced fewer, larger ports. Disrupt anything within the system and the damage quickly becomes extreme.

Between oil’s criticality to and ubiquitousness in modern life, oil is by far the most commonly traded product on Earth comprising some 18% of all maritime shipping traffic (by volume). About a third of all waterborne crude and product shipments originate in the Persian Gulf.

trump is a zion puppet

Let’s talk stickiness:

There are no shortages of politicians out there who agitate for relocating manufacturing capacity to their countries, provinces or cities. Making a speech is one thing, but actually building industrial plant and infrastructure is another. It costs billions and takes years for large industrial shifts, and even then there is no guarantee that a new industrial park will prove economically viable.

But at least manufacturing can be relocated. Commodity production cannot. Either you have it or you don’t, and the Persian Gulf has the greatest concentrations and volumes of easily-produced conventional crude oil on the planet. It can never not matter.

There’s also the impossibility of substitution.

Simply put, greentech isn’t ready. Most advances in greentech have to do with electricity generation, and since so few countries burn oil for electricity greentech’s impact upon oil markets has been negligible. As a rule greentech is shit for transport. High cost combined with insufficient energy density makes electric cars little more than a niche sector for early adopters, with Tesla’s recent sales figures crash indicating that market may already be saturated.

Even if the medium for most modern batteries – lithium – was sufficiently energy-dense to provide a viable long-term improvement in capacity (it isn’t), the stuff still needs to be mined and processed and fabricated into battery assemblies. Each step along the value-chain is so energy- and transport-intensive that very little of it can even be attempted without fossil-fuel-based energy for processing and transport across the world. As counterintuitive as it sounds, we need more carbon-heavy fuels to get to a lighter-carbon world. And that means coal and oil. A lot of oil.

There’s also the issue of lifespan. Most vehicles put on the roads since 1990 have a long lifespan to the point that even if every passenger vehicle sold from now on was an EV, we’d not see an end to oil in passenger transport for another two decades. Even then, even if every passenger vehicle and light truck were an EV right now, that would only make a dent in global oil demand. About 2/5ths of oil is used for transporting people and heating. The rest is much more difficult to do away with. Another 1/3rd is used for air transport, industry, and other modes that require far more range or power than electric engines can manage. And another 1/5th isn’t going anywhere ever, as it is what makes petrochemicals as varied as paints, plastics and pesticides possible.

(None of which means greentech won’t eventually solve the petroleum problem, but all of which means technology needs another couple decades to give it a go – and even that assumes the capital and educational structures around the world which have made the Digital Revolution possible hold steady at their current historical highs.)

Let’s talk protection:

At the end of World War II every nation of consequence aside from the United Kingdom had lost its navy. The United States in essence inherited the global ocean. America’s creation of the Order gave everyone aside from the Soviets a vested economic interest in not floating a new one. Fast forward to today and the American Navy is over ten times as powerful as the combined blue water fleets of every other country combined. Putting that force disconnect at the service of the global commons is what makes the Order work, and what makes global energy shipments and markets possible.

The world’s second- through sixth-most powerful navies in terms of long-range power projection are (roughly in order) Japan, the United Kingdom, France, China, and Russia. Of these only Russia need not sail forth for oil, as it has plenty of its own. France and the United Kingdom can secure what they need from the North Sea and North and West Africa. China has only 30 combat-capable surface ships of size that can effectively operate over 1000 miles from shore; unfortunately (for the Chinese) Southern China is a cool 5800 or so miles distant from the Persian Gulf. Only India – keeper of the world’s seventh-strongest navy – is even remotely proximate.

End result? Today’s oil markets comprise the greatest concentration of risk in the most critical economic sector at the most vulnerable part of the global system and no one can do anything about it if the Americans leave.

And that’s just the beginning.

tl;dr

Based, America really has been getting played by other nations. Now if only Trump would completely leave the ME and tell Israel to go suck off China for defense.

It's interesting a worth a read, dumb-dumb.
Great trips great post

this has been my wish for all of trumps presidency, all he has to do is recall the American navy and use them to only protect American exports and the rest of the world collapses

Absolutely terrific essay, user. However, this man tweeting these important words has not exactly been known for his consistency on foreign policy issues.

>and the rest of the world collapses
Great. Then they'll all migrate across our southern boarder

> this man tweeting these important words has not exactly been known for his consistency on foreign policy issues.
It's not up to him. He's asserting the American position, not the Trump position. The JCOS made this announcement before he did. Whether he leaves office next year or in 2024, the grand scale result will be the same.

Does this signal a general retreat of the US a a world superpower? Will we finally catch up to the real consequences of the world wars now?

/thread

>Does this signal a general retreat of the US a a world superpower?
The exact opposite.

>Will we finally catch up to the real consequences of the world wars now?
Not sure what you're asking, but if it follows from your first question, no.

Do you have a blog?

>Does this signal a general retreat of the US a a world superpower?
We'll be the ONLY power, user.

zeihan.com/newsletter/

us11.campaign-archive.com/home/?u=de2bc41f8324e6955ef65e0c9&id=5654564be1

Peter Zeihan predicted this

>zeihan
this guy gets it

If you think this means the entire world goes dark you thought wrong. It means that emerging powers make their play and land conquests and they themselves becoming superpowers. Russia being the most obvious. This won’t kill anyone but tiny nations that cannot win wars ya dunce.

Nope pardner we would mearly see the start of new powers.

>russia
>emerging power
l
o
l

Attached: Russia_2015B.jpg (890x698, 205K)

Of the US retreats Russia will gorge itself on Eastern Europe. The US empire is trade without it a vacuum will again be created

56%

are you using or reposting zeihan?

I want to believe.

Attached: 7F021F35-91A0-4B93-A93C-03AF1A3B827D.jpg (431x445, 15K)

>There is an easy argument to be made that the United States’ shale revolution will make the United States a net exporter of crude oil in the current calendar year, but to understand just how critical that is for the Americans we must first pick apart just how horrible that is for everyone else.
And thats all that really matters to me

The US empire is military bases in Poland and Romania. Those arent going anywhere. Russia can have Ukraine. They can have Belarus. They cant have Poland.

>America really has been getting played by other nations.
Hardly. In exchange you possess the official currency of planet Earth. No, not niggers: greenbacks.

Lets talk orange man bad

Oh wow the manages decline of the united states continues.

Attached: B5AC56A2-BAE4-454C-9C5B-7C5B71E428AE.jpg (1024x798, 64K)

No, that's because we have 10x the navy of the rest of the world combined and the largest taxable white population under a single federal system on the planet.

What we got out of it was a containment bloc around the Soviets. They're gone now. Time to reassess.

Give me the tl;dr

Just saying dropping a wall of text at the outset isn't much of a hook. I guess I'm glad to see so many positive responses, but on the other hand it's a disconcerting sign of culture infiltration. I love me a good 400 post thread where you sometimes hit the character limit, but that's after you get in to it.

Drumpf not protec and give up shipping lanes to china

It's not decline, its recalculation of strategic interests. Watch what happens to a china that cant protect its oil supply. That's when you'll see a decline.

Rough math, if we deployed all our active duty personnel across both borders we would have over 180 grunts per mile.
With orders to kill on sight, we would probably only need a quarter of this. Add in a drone surveillance network and we need even less.

trump is a fucking idiot

US state department is up in arms about china building bases in east africa but now this moron is tweeting out that china should deploy it's navy in the gulf

Bump

Attached: 022D0AF1-059E-487F-A282-738BAECA068A.png (412x438, 127K)

If you can't threaten people from leaving the petrodollar with your navy, how do you guys plan to afford your military might?

>America protecting global shipping
World didn't need your protection in the first place.

We should go back to the day of privateers where citizens get to have military ships and BTFO other countries shipping and mercantile.

>Rainbow Dash is my God

You would be worried, since that might protects cucknada too.

This exact point was made by the vice chairman of the joint chiefs of staff days ago. China doesn't have the navy it needs to do what the US does. What's more, they dont even have the navy to protect themselves from Japan, much less the naval tradition.

Like we need a bunch of croat pirates huffing gas across the seven seas.

>its american oil not UAE or Sauds
KYS
its why we are being pushed to handle iran - Israel gets another potential enemy disrupted, UAE and the Sauds get to control the shipping lanes
i spent all fucking night combating shill fags and a few stupid fucks on this. control of the waterway is control of the region

About fucking time.

youtube.com/watch?v=feU7HT0x_qU

Attached: it's the future you chose zeihan.png (423x349, 147K)

Vampires don't have reflections in mirrors.

you just read his

So basically Peter Zeihan was right?

What jewish rag are you copy pasting this from

Not concerned with your ego defence; Your country would be significantly poorer without pax Americana.

high energy reading this thread.
bumping.
expect to see these posts collated in a pdf making the rounds soon.

great work, lad.

we really are initiating a new epoch replete with a New Republic.

Happy 4th, ANONS.

Bump and checked. Nice thread op

Good goy.

Attached: 1550203175997.png (646x580, 549K)

Nice trips, and interesting idea
I’ll wait to see the mainstream reaction, if you’re correct I’d expect
>TRUMP BEGINS TO USHER IN A NEW AGE OF AMERICAN ISOLATIONISM
headlines tomorrow if not tonight.
No more world police, it’s a step in the right direction I think

Attached: 1AA31CCF-B0D1-4AA4-B674-39FEB9A9F918.jpg (367x550, 24K)

I told you, it's not oil that floats the dollar, it's the navy itself. The value of the currency comes from a single promise: that the government issuing it will exist tomorrow. This is all but guaranteed by military supremacy and the ability of the US government to fund itself via taxation of, again, the largest white (productive) population on the planet. Buy your oil in Canadian dollars, we dont care anymore. Besides, we've got our own oil now. More than anyone else. A lot more.

>tl;dr

Other countries can secure their own international shipping lanes for the first time since 1945. Good luck everyone besides the USA and Mexico. Hope you can play nice and share with each other!

Attached: international-shipping-routes.png (602x307, 292K)

By exporting our oil and using our navy to prevent everyone else from buying it anywhere else.

Then, in 30-40 years when SA is broken and weak, we take over again and start from the 1980s all over again.

After all, the Oil isn't going anywhere. The constant wars in the de-stabilized ME will prevent pipelines, and our Navy will prevent anyone from shipping their oil out by sea.

How do they cast shadows?

Attached: vampire.jpg (350x549, 75K)

USMCA (NAFTA) is going to be more important than ever, Trudeau had better start kissing some ass

Attached: 093E4EE4-21D4-4377-B247-15D12AF26CC6.jpg (747x475, 64K)

They don’t go out in the light

By slumping over and dying if they're left out in the sun.

start?

>croat pirates
I wish that was still a thing. We have a historical score to settlw with Venice, that town should be burned to the ground.

Clearly trying to benefit as an "insider" if Hormuz gets fucked. There will be a huge recession. 09 levels or worse. This is great for people such as Trump - especially when he's in a unique situation to benefit.

Good job op

Attached: 1561438189828.jpg (1024x576, 62K)

What's stopping you? Better start saving for a galleon.

Based and Zeihanpilled

We're self sufficient, why the fuck do we have to help anybody?

your loss, dullard

>USMCA (NAFTA) is going to be more important than ever, Trudeau had better start kissing some ass

It will get even more critical as low-cost Mexican labor replaces China as a manufacturing base, with direct access to American consumer demand, access to both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and enormous oil reserves.

Trudeau will never change, even if Alberta secedes, after a half-century of having it's oil wealth stolen by Toronto and Calgary marxists to fund their endless African trafficking pyramid scam.

Attached: trudeau-when-the-terrorist-dies-before-you-could-give-him-10-million-dollars.jpg (510x360, 46K)

Don't mislabel me. I self-identify as a nincompoop.

Attached: CheckemWhore.png (800x965, 339K)

Even the Poles and Czechs alone could tell Russia to fuck off

They’re not the only country modernizing their army

He's baiting, dumbass.

digits check out
/thread

well you're wrong. Every single nation in the world has a USD reserve in order to purchase oil. If the USD stopped being the defacto oil currency due to say Chinese navy taking control of oil shipping lanes and demanding the stop selling in dollars. It would lead to a massive devaluation of the USD globally.

>Venice, that town should be burned to the ground
or at least to the canals

>Disrupt anything within the system and the damage quickly becomes extreme.
Which seems to play into the globalists hands, time and time again. The Romans did thus shit (outsource production and even basic foodstuffs beyond the border) with catastrophic consequences when minor disruptions became a panic , became a famine and then a collapse. It’s a tale so often repeated I wonder if it’s carried in the genes of globalist elites.

Attached: Xgwi2453.jpg (645x729, 64K)

>tl;dr
You have to go back. Honestly there’s nothing here for you

based and... bloodpilled?

You won't be saying that when the world starts dropping the petrodollar.

This is all bullshit from Trump. He knows the petrodollar IS the US empire and he will not let it fall. Do what he's saying and the petrodollar is finished and so is the US.

Petrodollar.
Without that there is no US empire.

Trump just made clear the days of America protecting global shipping – particularly of oil shipping in the Middle East – are over.

I'd like to believe you, but Trump is all over the place on this issue. He also said we would withdraw from Syria.

The petrodollar has been pretty shaky since the neocon embarassment in Iraq, and it's a bit detatched now that fracking (bad as it is) has the US oil independent. I would assert that the main backing for the USD at present is that it's still better than the alternatives, and will remain so as long as the other economies crash more than the US.

However, a substantial interruption to global trade could drag things down. If that happens, another good question is if other countries will let their economies get dragged down through escalations while the US just prints more money to stay on top.

It wouldn't be a sudden dumping of the dollar but it's not the first time countries have considered it.
Saddam found that out the hard way, and Iran has been talking about it too.

Even Saudi Arabia of all people talked about it not long ago (which I consider to be hot air but still).
However, there is an economic collapse coming up soon and it wouldn't surprise me if some countries really did start dropping it then.
In which case Bolton might get his lifelong dream after all.

the petrodollar hasn't been a thing since the us became an energy exporter. no one gives a shit
like he said

Yeah, and SA even tried to punk the US after the US used low oil prices to put pressure on Russia, but it turned out that the US could just open up the taps, stimulate the domestic economy, and then SA couldn't close the taps due to the nature of their oil reserves and got punked pack.

I'm not saying oil doesn't matter, but it's a different game today than back, what, almost 50 years ago when Kissinger closed the gold window.

>drop the Petrodollar
>no US empire

Both of those are good things. I don't give a fuck about all of the savages that leach off of American prosperity. I can't wait to see exactly what the rest of the world would replace the petrodollar with, as if they could come up with something in the warfare and chaos erupting with one another. All of the worthless corporations, banks, and muds can get out of my money and stop devaluing it.

Each year, it's another trillion dollars of US military spending in far flung hellholes, that benefits only crony contractor offshoring corporations and muds, that drives up the national debt, that requires more money printing, that devalues the money I earn and have saved.

Fuck the rest of the parasite world. Go off and kill one another you worthless fucking fucks. Rot in hell memeflag.

Attached: Federal Reserve Act of 1913 Effect on Value and Purchasing Power of the United States Dollar (USD).p (1024x576, 178K)

I agree, the US empire isn't serving its people at all. Which is why Ron Paul wanted to dismantle it.

My point is that Trump isn't going to dismantle the empire and his actions prove it. So it's all just talk.

jewiest post on the first page!
congratz faggot!

The petrodollar is finished. It is a Jewish creation. If you have not noticed what various countries: Russia/China/Japan etc have been doing quietly the past few years, I don't know where you have been. Everything is being maneuvered to end the Federal Reserve.

The US is not an Empire... yet. America is still a late-stage Republic. The Empire comes next.

PETER ZEIHAN
WAS THE RIGHT-HAN-D