Claims

The West is unambiguously winning the struggle between Western open societies with rule of law and closed authoritarian societies.

South Africa and China have shown sympathy for Russia, which Podolsky interprets as indicating their leadership misunderstands what creates wealth and represents a litmus test of geopolitical alignment.

The international maritime order is currently being reorganized away from free trade and open capital markets toward one shaped by national interests, clandestine statecraft, and great power competition operating below the threshold of open military conflict.

If the Iran war was a 5D chess strategy, it doesn't make sense because the industrial base needs Hormuz to stay closed forever to invest in onshoring and production, but the Treasury market is priced on Hormuz reopening someday. These are two fundamentally opposite needs that cannot both be satisfied, which is why Groman believes it was a miscalculation rather than strategic brilliance.

The shift from globalization to nationalism and mercantilism means that countries will now have different strategic priorities than before, affecting everything from trade to investment to corporate strategy in ways that were not relevant in the globalized era.

Sanctions on Russia backfired by design—the Russian economy is currently overheating with inflation concerns rather than collapsing, demonstrating that one reason to avoid wars is that you might lose them

This forecast about Canada is related to analysis of global hegemony and global hedge fund dynamics challenged by rising powers and sovereign debt crises.

The world no longer works the way we all believe it does, and the quicker we figure out how it's changed and what that means for us, the better for all of us.

Tariffs will cause conflict between trading nations (US-Canada-Mexico-China and others), with consequences that may or may not be military but will certainly involve fighting and disputes with material impacts on the global economy.

The rest of the world will not align cohesively with China against the US even if the US is perceived as acting aggressively, because China and other rivals face structural challenges (demographic collapse, balance sheet recession, unsustainable debt) equal to or worse than the US, leaving them weakened rather than strengthened.

The increasing modernization and economic growth of China since 2000 is causing Japan to believe it is slowly losing its position as one of the chief powerbrokers in the Indo-Pacific as China's influence grows.

Immigration problems and political unrest will intensify as people flee troubled regions; protests in India, France, Lebanon, Bolivia, Chile, Peru, South Africa throughout 2019 preceded COVID-19 lockdowns, indicating underlying economic instability

The 21st century is the Chinese century, not the American century; China will replace the United States as global superpower because China's business is business while America's business is war, and China acquired manufacturing, technology, and industrial knowledge through strategic partnerships with Western companies

Countries that are terminal in terms of industrialization lack resources from within their borders and depend on imports from different continents, but lack the military capacity to secure those resources or even the sealanes necessary for civilian shipping, making them vulnerable to supply disruption.

China is far and away the top of the list for industrial terminal countries, and Germany is far and away number two, both lacking resources within their borders while depending on global supply chains and U.S. military protection to secure access.

Korea is one of the countries facing the greatest challenges because it depends on global supply chains for raw materials and has terminal demographic decline, but Koreans have a tendency to completely reinvent their culture every 20-30 years and may follow the European automakers' strategy of massive foreign direct investment in the United States.

The U.S. Navy maintains cheap and safe transport globally, allowing modern manufacturing to leverage labor and input price points across the world; breaking down this system requires moving to shorter supply chains closer to end consumers.

China is the big loser from the Ukraine war, de-globalization, depopulation, and populism shifts because they are farthest from raw materials, lack navy to secure them, and are completely at U.S. mercy for success or failure of their system while Americans are done with this heavy lifting.

The open question is not whether China will be the next global superpower but how soon China will collapse as a nation-state, with the manufacturing model collapsing this year and complete collapse coming within the decade.

The three policy changes the EU needs to make—reconciliation with Russia, massive fossil fuel exploration and production, and nuclear reactor construction—are unlikely to occur, making European economic collapse predictable, though the timeline spans years and decades rather than months.

Political support for continued tens of billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine is difficult to sustain given that the US is not on a wartime economic footing while Russia is, raising questions about whether adequate stockpiles even exist to supply Ukraine.

The Mario Draghi competitiveness report on EU performance misses the fundamental energy issue constraining Europe, instead engaging in 'hoop jumping' that dodges the root cause of competitive disadvantage.

India and South Asia represent a crucially important story geopolitically but are not yet on the level of the China story because they lack the ports and naval capacity that China has—China has 200,000 merchant ships.

China has built a global network of ports where it has significant ownership stake, and these ports form the same geographic pattern as US military bases; some ports are private companies, some are Hong Kong-based, but the overall capacity is already substantially in place.

The rise of China as a new power in the International System and the inability of the US to accommodate it in a mutually stable way represents potentially the end of the world in economic terms—the incineration of all retirement accounts and portfolios, not just deaths in conflicts.

The US possesses unique structural advantages that China lacks: a global system of alliances, deep financial markets, the dollar as reserve currency, the English language as a global lingua franca, and command of the commons.