Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Europe Page 1 of 14

EU Delusion on Sanctions and Europe’s Future

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On April 22, 2024

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While the EU was considering more sanctions against Iran because it attacked Israel in retaliation for Israel bombing its embassy, Russia is sending Iran:

Meanwhile America is threatening China that if they don’t stop sending Russia “dual use” goods, the US will slap on more sanctions.

Boo hoo.

Let us remember the results of chip sanctions. China now owns the legacy part of the industry, and is making progress western “experts” said would take decades in years. Huawei has recovered from the sanctions and created its own OS. It is now a massive electric vehicle manufacturer in addition to everything else. BYD will soon become the largest EV manufacturer in the world, eclipsing Tesla. Something about its cars being cheaper, and Tesla gave up on building a cheap version of their cars. Maybe Tesla will survive because the US keeps all Chinese EVs out, but my guess is that if Musk stays CEO, Tesla’s best possible future is as a luxury EV manufacturer. Their “Cyber Truck” is a disaster.

Iran has built a formidable military with hypersonic missiles while under sanctions, sanctions which started at the same time the Islamic Republic was created. But now, what I’m sure happens, is that China sells Russia goods and Russia trans-ships them to Iran. That hasn’t undone the sanctions completely, but as the world moves away from using the dollar as the medium of trade and routes around US, EU and anglosphere banks, the effects of the sanctions will continue to diminish.

There’s very little that Iran needs (though still some) that China and Russia don’t make. And anything sold to Russia by, say, India, can also make its way to Iran. Cutting Russia off almost entirely gives it no reason to play by Western rules, and it doesn’t.

This is especially true now that America has taken Russian reserves and will be giving them to Ukraine. Anyone who trusts the US with their money who isn’t a complete ally, or satrapy, is a fool. There’s a reason why money used to be frozen before, but not actually taken. There’s a big difference between the two.

But let’s move back to Europe. This article from FT is to the point, German gas prices are two-thirds higher, structurally, than they were before the Ukraine war.

That’s after prices dropped massively. The simple fact is that US natural gas costs a lot more. Russia was selling Europe and Germany oil and gas for bargain prices. Russia’s still willing to sell, but Europe has its head up its ass.

The recent history of European industry is simple. When the Euro came into effect, it raised everyone’s prices except Germany’s, pretty much. Industry in all of Europe except Germany was badly damaged (this was especially bad in Italy which was more of an industrial power than most realized.) Germany, in effect, received a subsidy: the Euro was worth less than the German Mark.

Germany has (had) a lot of heavy industry: a lot of energy intensive industry. To get energy for this, Germany got cheap, below market Russia oil and natural gas. Russia got bulk sales of one of the few things it had to sell and Germany kept its industry competitive.

Those days are over, essentially permanently.

And the problem is that Germany’s dominance was in legacy heavy industry and automobiles. They aren’t creating a lot of new tech and science. They don’t have large new industries developing. They don’t have scale costs like China does. They relied on being very efficient and already dominating industries.

But those industries are leaving. A lot of them are going to America, the actual company facilities, but the production is, effectively, also moving to China and other countries.

I know I’m a bit of a stuck record on this (do youngs understand that simile?) but Europe is walking into its decline with its leaders acting as if it’s no big deal, indeed as if they are, to use my father’s crude insult still “King shit of turd island.” Sanctioning Iran, lecturing Africans and acting as if they are superior in every way: the only truly civilized people in the world.

Even as they do, the foundations of their prosperity, their “garden” are eroding out from under them at the speed of soil blowing away during the Dust Bowl.

They’re insane. Completely detached from reality, and some of the stupidest elites in the world, even exceeding America’s very high bar.

The Sun always sets. European leaders seem determined to make it set as soon as possible.

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The Most Likely “War” With Russia Scenario

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On February 28, 2024

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Russian troops are now advancing across almost the entire front. It’s slow, but steady. There are no defensive lines built to stop them, the best they’re likely to get is the use of rivers.

Ukraine clearly no longer has enough men or ammunition.

Macron and some other European leaders have discussed sending troops, but sending them to fight Russia is insanity, and hopefully they can see that, since WWIII will suck.

But there’s one play they may feel they can get away with.

Send in “Peacekeepers”. Have them advance to the borders of Russian areas, and use them to secure Odessa and say “we are just separating the combatants.” It’s a way to limit Ukrainian geographical losses and avoid it becoming a land-locked country and the Europeans just bet that Putin isn’t willing to risk or start a war with Europe and/or NATO.

How likely is this? I don’t know. But of the various insane options, it seems the most likely.

 

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Macron & Many European Leaders Call For WWIII?

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On February 27, 2024

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So, French leader Macron thinks Europe should send troops to Ukraine to fight Russia. (This is colloquially known as “declaring war on Russia.”)

rench President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday that sending Western troops to Ukraine should not be ruled out, as European leaders concluded a summit on supporting Kyiv.

“There is no consensus today to send ground troops officially but … nothing is ruled out,” Macron said at a press conference in Paris, where the meeting had just wrapped up. “We will do whatever it takes to ensure that Russia cannot win this war.”

“The defeat of Russia is indispensable to the security and stability of Europe,” the French president added.

…

The subject was first raised publicly by Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, who said a “restricted document” ahead of the summit had implied “that a number of NATO and EU member states were considering sending troops to Ukraine on a bilateral basis.”

…

Macron also announced that leaders agreed to set up a ninth capability coalition on deep strikes that will focus on medium- and long-range missiles. Other coalitions include artillery, air defense and de-mining.

This is, in effect, an acknowledgment that Europe knows Ukraine is losing.

So, there are two main possibilities here. First, it’s a negotiating ploy, to get a better deal for Ukraine. Second, they’re serious.

Let’s point out a couple things: Russia is outproducing the entire West in artillery shells and ammunition and Western armories are bare: they’ll run out in two weeks to a month of real war, at most. Second, China is not going to let Russia really lose a war, because they know who’s next and Europe has mostly been very willing to follow the US in anti-Chinese actions.

Iran, obviously, will support Russia as well. They know they’re on the list.

It’s actually not clear that the West would win this war: Russia is out-producing the West in terms of war materials, China is the undisputed largest industrial power in the world and it’s not clear that if other powers step in, China and maybe Iran won’t step in on Russia’s side. They really, really don’t want to: but the defeat of Russia, as already noted, is an existential threat to them.

Next, if either side starts losing, there will be a strong temptation to reach for the nukes.

On a smaller note, if Europe supplies long range missiles and those missiles hit something that matters (say the Kremlin, or the Bolshoi) things could get ugly fast. Seeking to expand the war further into Russia is certainly “legal” but it’s not wise. It won’t change the outcome of the war, it will merely make the war more likely to expand, which is why the German Scholz is correct to oppose it.

All my life, the charge against people outside elite circles has been that we are “un-serious”.

This is extremely un-serious behaviour.

I will note, further, that the reason Europe and the US can’t compete with China and Russia is that they simply refuse to reduce economic rents, lower living costs and make their rich less rich in order to reduce operating costs and oligopolies and monopolies sufficiently to ramp up production, both of war materials and, well, everything else.

They want to live like Kings, our elites, having the South send them materials and the Chinese and other nations send them manufactured goods, while using their populations for rent extraction so they can become richer and richer.

They have confused money with power. Money is only power when it can buy power. And increasingly, in the West, it can only buy power domestically, not internationally.

This is a grave mistake, and the graveyard of Empires.

Fools. And worse than fools.

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Reversing European Decline

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On November 18, 2023

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Europe is in significant decline and has been for some time. The standard chart compares European GDP versus American but I won’t use it, because I don’t believe in GDP at this point, the numbers are both manipulated and unrepresentative of actuall national economic ability which matters. That Russia with its tiny GDP was able to massively ramp up weapon production and the US and the EU with much larger GDPs were not is a good example.

But what is clear is that European innovation has fallen far behind, as measured in patents, and that industry is leaving the EU, especially energy intensive industry. China and the US, both, are eating Europe’s lunch, and they are losing export customers, especially in the third world. Europe is not resource rich, they need imports and they aren’t going to be able to afford them. De-industrialization looms, and service industries aren’t going to carry the load, which will leave them with agricultural exports, which will also start declining.

So we’re going to do a thought exercise about what’s required to reverse the decline. As will quickly become evident, it’s theoretically possibly but politically impossible.

Europe needs to do one thing in order to maintain a high standard of living over the medium to long term: it must manufacture enough of what it needs and, more importantly, enough of what others will buy from it, to pay for the imports it needs of what it doesn’t make and raw resources it doesn’t have.

If it continues to de-industrializes it will inevitably slide down the value add chain, and into second, then perhaps even third world status.

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This means in needs cheap resources, the most important of which is cheap energy for its industries. In the short term, the next twenty years or so, that still means petrochemicals, and there’s only one place the EU can get them from: Russia. The US is willing to sell, oh yes, but at much higher prices. (If Europe was truly going to turbocharge to alternative energy, it’s going to need China, see below.)

Unfortunately, the EU has burnt their bridges and the pipelines have been sabotaged. To get back to Russia being willing to sell at discount prices the EU will have to make its bones: it has to give Russia ironclad security guarantees, and that means leaving NATO and creating its own armed forces. It probably means ditching the incurably anti-Russia eastern block nations like Poland (who are a drain anyway and should never have been let in.)

Forming their own military, with nukes, by the way, is not protection against Russia, it’s protection against the US and its allies.

Now, Russia might cut a deal anyway, without Europe leaving NATO, but the problem is that what Europe needs from China is a cartel deal: it needs China to agree to let it keep some high tech industries. Europe can only keep such industries if it either innovates far faster than China and engages in subsidies to keep prices lower or if China agrees: China is innovating far more quickly than Europe. and it has a lower cost structure. Foolish sanctions have sped up its progress in fields it had previously been willing to leave alone, like the lithography, required for creating chips.

If Europe is a lockstep US ally, China will not be willing to make cartel deals because in that case Europe is an enemy and sanctions can always be used against China in a time of crisis (as opposed to pre-emptively and stupidly) to try and hurt China. But if Europe is neutral or friendly, and a customer, well, smart people to don’t improverish their customers, they let them have some industry.

The last thing is that Europe has to significantly increase its rate of innovation, and the steps involved include bringing a lot more manufacturing back to Europe and some significant changes in law and custom, enough to be an entire other article.

However the point of this exercise is to show why Europe is going to continue its decline. It has a high cost structure and a slow rate of innovation, and it can’t fix either given its politics. (Be clear, innovation is related to the manufacturing floor, it can’t recover if you’re losing that.)

This is similar to climate change, where no major country can fix it, even if it is theoretically possible, because it is politically impossible. A bigger, global problem, but the same dynamic.

Anyway, Europe is in decline and will continue its decline. You can only live on legacy innovation for so long and Europe is running out.

Europe should, above all, avoid war with China at all costs. Germany essentially created the chemical industry in the 19th century. In WWI, when the US entered the war, they broke the German patents, and much of the industry moved to America. After WWI, well, the US didn’t reinstate those patents and the chunk of the industry now in America never moved back.

Do that and Europe might eke out an extra decade or two.

Oh, and now that they are nobodies, with no military and industry that barely matters and which they have sanctioned China on, they should shut their mouths and stop insulting China and interfering. The only major thing they have to offer now is consumers, and that’s going to keep going away.

Essentially, Europe needs to stop thinking they are the Europe that once ruled the world, or even that they are important American satrapies. Both Korea and Japan outproduce them in patents, and it’s not close. They’re just has-beens, and if they want to change that, they need to take radical steps.

They won’t.

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German Dependence On China

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On September 26, 2023

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So, the German central banks noted that 29% of German companies import essential parts and materials from China.

Multiple industries. Germany, much like the US, but even more so, let China pick up, among other things, much of the tool making industry, especially those related to auto manufacture.

 

Ouch.

When you consider this is an absolute terms and not relative, it’s even worse.

This comes on top of anti-Russia sanctions and the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines cutting off Germany’s access to cheap energy.

Germany is a relatively small country without a lot of natural resources. To be wealthy it needs to produce high value goods, and to do that it needs inexpensive inputs for its industries, or it needs to have much higher industrial productivity than everyone else.

Outsourcing so much of the supply chain for its manufacturers was an understandable mistake: it made those inputs cheaper.

But if you’re a small country without a lot of resources, you have to keep your supply chains and trading relationships stable. German leaders at the start of the Ukraine war expressed the most doubts about massive sanctions and they were right.

Germany is, as predicted at the time, in real trouble. Their model had flaws, and was a mean one, impoverishing and de-industrializing other EU nations, so there’s a certain irony to EU consensus Russia policy now screwing them over, but at this point if Germany goes down it’ll take the entire EU’s economy with it.

Germany cannot afford to follow the US into a cold trade war with China.

Moreover, this is a demonstration of something simple: what is good for Western EU countries and what most Eastern EU countries want (anti-Russia policies and NATO expansion) are two different things. Germany needs good relations with cheap resource suppliers and the only practical one was Russia.

It’s all very well to say, as many have, that this is the price of standing up for “freedom”, but if Germany goes down, so does the EU.

Likewise, what is “good” for the US, is not good for most European countries, and especially not good for Germany. (Ironically, Macron is the only major EU leader to be honest about this.)

The EU, if it continues on this course, will be reduced to an even weaker American satrapy than it was is the cold war period, and one with a lot worse living conditions.

China’s moving up the value chain. Sanctions against China, rather than slowing this down are speeding it up. Correct industrial policy would have been to negotiate with China about what industries or segments of industry each country is going to specialize in.

Incorrect policy is to have a cold war against both your cheapest energy supplier and the country that is now the world’s manufacturing floor.

Damn near suicidal policy, in fact.

Europeans need to get thru their heads that the European/American near monopoly on tech and high productivity is broken and that Europe, in particular, is coasting on legacy industry, without a great number of natural advantages. It was a backwater for most of history, and is reverting. The job of European leaders is to keep that reversion from happening for as long as possible and to slow down whatever reversion occurs.

Now, it could be that full commitment to a “US and Europe+Anglo countries” trade block, with full re-shoring would be a viable policy, if aggressively pursued, but that’s not what’s happening, the US is, instead, taking advantage of EU and German weakness to grab up high energy cost industries.

As for Europe’s elites, they should remember that owning overseas resources is dangerous. Britain’s “hidden empire” — its overseas investments, was a huge part of its strength, and essentially liquidated in WWI. Germany’s chemical patents and electrical patents were broken by the Allies in WWI and they didn’t reinstate them after the war was over.

Anything you own in another country doesn’t really belong to you unless you have the troops and willingness to occupy that country and the ability to then administer the country.

Germany in specific, and Europe in general, if they don’t change their policies and their commitment to being American satrapies, are on the path to ruin.

(Oh, and as I said at the time, most of the Eastern European countries should never have been let into either NATO or the EU. They offer little but vulnerability; are economic soaks, and have interests contrary to those of Western European countries. The only way they could have been absorbed effectively was if the EU decided to become a real federal nation with former countries reduced to provinces at most, and in most cases divided into multiple provinces.)

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France Isn’t In A Civil War Yet, But It Is Close

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On July 4, 2023

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So, the main police unions in France put out this rather deranged statement:

Now that’s enough…

Facing these savage hordes, asking for calm is no longer enough, it must be imposed!

Restoring the republican order and putting the apprehended beyond the capacity to harm should be the only political signals to give.

In the face of such exactions, the police family must stand together.

Our colleagues, like the majority of citizens, can no longer bear the tyranny of these violent minorities.

The time is not for union action, but for combat against these “pests”. Surrendering, capitulating, and pleasing them by laying down arms are not the solutions in light of the gravity of the situation.

All means must be put in place to restore the rule of law as quickly as possible.

Once restored, we already know that we will relive this mess that we have been enduring for decades.

For these reasons, Alliance Police Nationale and UNSA Police will take their responsibilities and warn the government from now on that at the end, we will be in action and without concrete measures for the legal protection of the Police, an appropriate penal response, significant means provided, the police will judge the extent of the consideration given.

Today the police are in combat because we are at war. Tomorrow we will be in resistance and the government will have to become aware of it.”

So. The bolded part is important: it’s a declaration that the police unions won’t obey the orders of the government if they don’t agree. This is something I’ve been expecting (and seeing) for a while. During the Trucker Convoy in Canada, the police refused to enforce the law and arrest the protestors. That’s why, in the end, the government froze the bank accounts of protestors, because they couldn’t get the cops to enforce the law against people they liked and agreed with.

The same sort of thing happens over and over in the US, where right wing protestors aren’t arrested, often even when they commit violence, but are protected by the police.

Now the riots in France are largely Muslim, though not entirely. The Muslim immigrants have been pushed into suburbs and left to rot, with no effective way to move up in society, and at the same time social services have been repeatedly cut and money has, in France, as in all neoliberal nations, been funneled to the top. This bleeding ulcer is old, about 50 years old, and everyone has noted that it was bound to cause problems. These aren’t the first riots, they’re just the worst.

France has had a lot of riots and protests over the past few years, notably related to Macron’s increase of the pension age and rules, which means that many people will have to work into their 70s. (Theoretically one can retire before then, but for most people, the pension will not be enough without more years of work.) Those protests and riots were mostly white.

One of the topic categories on this blog is “the age of war and revolution”. I put it up in 2000, to indicate what was to come.

The current riots will be defeated. They’re large, but not serious. The rioters are not marching on the government and government officials, which is what would be required to actually overthrow the government. It isn’t a civil war.

But the police indicating they won’t accept legal orders, not just by passive resistance (as in Canada) but in outright defiance of the government is a very dangerous sign. The usual requirements for a successful revolution are an elite faction in support, a popular protest and the defection of at least some of the enforcer class.

France is very close to meeting those requirements: part of the elite agrees with the cops, there is a right wing primarily white conservative populist movement and the police are now showing clear defiance.

So, France isn’t in a civil war yet, but it could be soon.

As for the left, this is a fulcrum point. They need to strike and strike hard as soon as possible, because France’s Fifth Republic appears to be on its last legs. If the right overthrows it, the left will be in exile for at least two generations. It’s the right or the left, and right now the right seems most likely.

More on this and the general situation soon.

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Bruno Macaes On Putin And The World Order

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On May 31, 2023

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Macaes was a Portuguese minister and is now a member of the European Council of Foreign relations. He’s written a few books and at least two of them, on the Belt and Road and on Eurasia in general are insightful, though Bruno is definitely a Eurocrat who sometimes struggles to see the world without Eurocrat lenses. This is particularly true when it comes to Russia (remembering that these books were written before Ukraine, which he did not predict) but there are some points where Macaes “gets it.”

This is primarily when it comes to Putin’s views of the international order:

Putin doesn’t think along national lines. In thinks in terms of larger blocs, and ultimately, in terms of the world order… You cannot resist the pressures that come from the world order. So either the world order will come to mirror some elements of the contemporary Russian regime or Russia will mirror the liberal, Western political order.

Notice how Russia is called a regime. It’s a small tell, but a tell.

Later, on, the European view (where Macaes is an insider):

The Brussels bureaucracy has a very simple theory of the world. States are captured by special interests, but they may reform if there is pressure from the outside. If they do, they will certainly prosper.

Obviously the Europeans see the “outside” as them, with an assist, perhaps, from the US. They don’t seem to have noticed that Europe has been in economic stagnation for some time, or consider that perhaps they are captured by special interests also. Macaes does later on touch on European subjugation to the US, but never really deals with it squarely.

But bottom line this is “we are the reasonable people with the right laws and regulations and way of doing things and you all should do what we say, and we will pressure you to do so.”

Europe knows best.

Back to Russia (somewhat paraphrased)

1) There are no neutral, universal rules. Neutrality is only a pretnse aimed at deceiving others. The benefits of globalization are unevenly distributed because rules are made by those with power to make them.

2) International politics is an arena of permanent rivalry and conflict.

This is, of course, similar to the first quote. The “rule based” international order is just the set of rules and institutions set up by those who had the most power, and the rules were set up to benefit those who had the power.

I don’t see how any of this could be controversial, though there are limits to it. The US did deliberately offshore its industry, for example, and this started after WWII to build up Europe, Japan and South Korea as strategic allies. When neoliberalism came to power, they then started offshoring it to what more clear-eyed people saw was a potential rival: China, because elites wanted short term profits.

But generally speaking the rules of the world order benefit the US and its satrapies like Japan, the EU nations, Canada, Australia, South Korea and so on. This was intentional and intended and anyone who thinks otherwise is nearly a candidate for an insane asylum their denial of reality is so strong.

It is the Europeans who are living in a fool’s paradise, thinking, forgive the expression, that their shit doesn’t stink and that they are mostly driven by pure motives: that their system works and is a universal model and that they have the right and duty to force it on others.

One could say the same for the Americans, except that more of the smarter ones know they’re hypocrites.

This nonsense was epitomized by Fukuyama’s “The End of History” which anyone with a lick of sense and the most minimal knowledge of history knew was absolute bullshit. But it was the bullshit that Western elites wanted to hear: they had won, their victory was eternal and everyone else would inevitably, in a pseudo-Marxist historical inevitability way, become like them.

So you could give the Chinese your industry and get filthy rich doing so and it wouldn’t matter because they were going to become a liberal capitalist democracy. There would only be one elite, a transnational one, and its enemy was its own population, not other members of the elite, no matter where they lived.

Now to be fair to Macaes he’s clearly anti-Fukuyama and by the time he wrote these books he could clearly see that obviously Capitalism and Democracy were not the same thing.

But this isn’t really about Macaes, it’s about differing views of the world order.

The West thinks, or among the more self-aware elites pretends to think that they have created a neutral world order they just happened to win, or, in more sophisticated terms, in which they had a first mover advantage, but which is basically fair.

Putin, and though it’s not dealt with here, China, plus most of the developing world see this as absolute bullshit: the world order is just the rules made by the strongest and enforced by them with their financial, economic and military might.

This is why Russia has often said that any real negotiations must be with the US. Not the Ukraine, not even with the EU, but with the US, because they are the ones who make the rules and they are the ones who decide on NATO policy. It is why the real negotiations have included the Chinese, because the Chinese are the coming superpower. It’s why China was able to make peace between Iran and Saudi Arabia: again, because China is genuinely powerful.

Putin, at least in relation to international politics, lives in the real world, not in some Fukuyama fairy-land. Seen from that point of view his actions become more understandable: to let the West continue to push NATO towards Russia and to succeed in its color revolutions and coups, is to acquiesce to a world in which Russia must be second rate at best, because none of Russia’s preferences for how the world order is set up are not implemented. Russia doesn’t need almost everything, nor does Putin believe Russia can get everything: if you want that you have to be as powerful as the US after the fall of the USSR or like the British empire at its peak.

But if Russia can’t get even the things that are most important to it, like Ukraine neutral and not in NATO, then the negotiations have to be changed: they have to become kinetic, to use the modern speak. A test of power is necessary: is the West powerful enough to impose its will or not?

And that is what is being determined in the Ukraine: can the US still just force Russia to accept what the US wants or not? Does the US still run the world order? It’s one reason why the Chinese, ultimately, are supporting Russia, because they agree about the shape of the world order. And it’s why the US and the EU have spent so much supporting Ukraine. Because this is a test and neither side feels it can afford to lose, for if it does, its preferences for world order take a huge hit: it shows that it doesn’t actually have enough power to enforce its will to the extent it desires.

For the US that is that Russia be a “gas station with nukes” at most and preferably be broken up, “de-colonized.” For Russia it is that a military alliance aimed at it can’t push further against its borders, and that its allies or satrapies can’t just be taken away (as Libya and Ukraine were) without great cost.

In the real world you get what you have the power to get. It shouldn’t be that way, but that’s how it is, at least for the time being. Perhaps we’ll change that at some point in our history, but it is the way the US and Europe have lived, it is how they rose to power and it is how they have retained their power. To say “no more war now that we’ve won the major wars and made the world in our image” is laughable.

Putin is just playing their game, because it’s the only game.

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China Has A Huge Lead In Patents

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On May 16, 2023

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Larger than I realized:

Now, per capita, it’s actually South Korea, Japan, USA, China and I wouldn’t say that doesn’t matter: it’s why Japan and South Korea stay prosperous (though life in South Korea, I gather, is rather nasty for workers.) Still, the bulk matters more: who’s in the lead.

The common rebuttal is that Chinese patents are low quality. So, let’s say that half of Chinese patents suck. They’d still be slightly in the lead.

It’s also interesting that Japan gets almost as many patents as the US. You don’t hear about Japan much these days (unlike the 80s when everyone was terrified) but they haven’t lost their game.

This chart echoes what I’ve been saying for years: the tech lead moves to where the manufacturing floor is. And that’s in China. Happened when it moved to the US from Britain and the US is not immune to the rule.

TechxManufacturing=Power in the modern world. If the US wants to change this, they have to re-shore industry, not just make half-hearted “friend-shoring” moves.

It’s also interesting how bad Europe does here. Germany+France+Britain=5%, which is half of South Korea. Europe is living off its legacy, and that means its decline is damn near certain if they don’t reverse this. Given the US is now poaching European industry, and Europe is letting it out of fear of Russia, well, the future doesn’t look bright.

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