The Future of the Middle East

I haven’t noticed Donald Trump making noises about bringing peace to the Middle East. Maybe he has the good sense to realize he can’t do it.

Why is there such enmity in that region? It is popular to blame it on the artificial national borders that were arbitrarily drawn through ethnic regions, splitting clans apart and mixing peoples who aren’t comfortable with each other. Maybe that helps to explain ISIS, but it doesn’t explain the Old Man in the Mountain or any of the other pre-1900s struggles there.

Who can bring peace to the Middle East? Only God can do that. Look at the main powers today. The USA has lost interest parallel to oil losing its high price, and has never been able to pull off a peace there.  Russia has some interest, but lacks the economic capacity to do anything significant.

The 5 main regional powers are Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey.  Israel has no interest in empire or in uniting the Islamic world. Iran’s internal troubles are too much for her to do anything; ditto for Egypt. Plus Iran is being watched carefully by the USA. Saudi Arabia has economic trouble and is caught up in its effort to have a real Arabian makeover: new leadership, new industries.  Maybe hard to do for a country where one octogenarian king is succeeded by another octogenarian. The Crown Price is young though.

Turkey is the only power with a chance of bringing the region together. It might not be a peaceful peace, but it would be a peace of a kind ---- the Ottoman kind. Turkey has the biggest economy of any Islamic country except far-away Indonesia. Turkey has a focused and seemingly capable leader.  George Friedman may well be correct when he predicts the resurrection of the Ottoman Empire.

The Future of America

At http://gordon-feil-economics.blogspot.ca/2017/07/the-future-of-asia.html and http://gordon-feil-economics.blogspot.ca/2017/07/the-future-of-europe.html, I looked at trends in the Far East and Europe respectively.

The real geopolitical power in the world today is the USA of course. The United States controls the oceans and also the high atmosphere. In my opinion, this military presence is mainly about protecting international business….maybe not just American business but UK and French as well, seeing as how the UK and France combined control as many large international companies as does the USA.

It isn’t just protection that U.S. forces provide to business. Some of the most innovative technological development occurs inside the U.S. armed forces. It passes into the world of commerce and makes American companies rich.

I don’t foresee the imminent demise of the USA. Many empires lasted longer than the American one.  Some did not.  Nonetheless, projecting offensive power to the periphery of an empire is costly, especially when the cost of defense is so much less than the cost of offense.  This is not the gunboat era. There was a time when a boat with a few dozen men could sail down a river in Africa and breach the defenses much larger forces --- a hundred killing ten thousand.  No, this is the era when a $50,000 anti-aircraft gun can destroy a hundred million dollar airplane. But the USA has a many, many hundreds of millions of those dollars, and some nations do not have many of those fifty thousands.

I think that there will be an increasing variance between the wealth of America’s richer people and the poverty of her poorest. Many workers are slaves by a different name, and I believe that millennials are very vulnerable to that fate.  This has serious implications.

Visa Enters the War on Cash

I wrote previously about the war on cash (http://gordon-feil-economics.blogspot.ca/2017/02/the-cashless-society.html and elsewhere). Note this excerpt from The Wall Street Journal.

“Visa Inc. has a new offer for small merchants: take thousands of dollars from the card giant to upgrade their payment technology. In return, the businesses must stop accepting cash.

“The company unveiled the initiative Wednesday as part of a broader effort to steer Americans away from using old-fashioned paper money. Visa says it is planning to give $10,000 apiece to up to 50 restaurants and food vendors to pay for their technology and marketing costs, as long as the businesses pledge to start what Visa executive Jack Forestell calls a ‘journey to cashless.’”