Yes: geostrategy is a huge defining factor in the organization of the planet, the movement of people and the evolution of society. It is a primary factor, including resource extraction technologies, agricultural capability, and more.
I think rounding that up to "drove the rise of civilizations" is a crude way to put that. For example, the simulation pits "agriculture plus military" against "agriculture". Then they found that including both food security concerns and physical security concerns more closely predicted known outcomes.
Had they put "agriculture plus military" against "military" and found that including both was better than just simulating physical security we would have gotten the title "Computer Simulations Suggest Food Drove the Rise of Civilizations".
I think the takeaway (besides how not to model and report on models) is that geostrategy is an important factor in the development of human and international relations and that broadly laymen are completely ignorant of it.
A layman equipped with some of this knowledge, for example, will be much more able to understand current events in the South China Sea, the infrastructure projects across Eurasia, the proxy war in Syria, the importance of the Crimea to Russia, the crisis in America over its policies toward Cuba, and much more.
Unfortunately the layman instead is fed a steady diet of "good versus evil" narratives, informing him instead about how he should feel about each case to emotionally and financially support his military.
> A layman equipped with some of this knowledge, for example, will be much more able to understand current events in...
Any recommendations on good places to learn / keep abreast of this kind of info? I'd love to read news that was more high-level about what's really going on, but it's hard to find.
Many years ago, Stratfor had a free weekly newsletter that had excellent info along these lines, but after they got hacked that went away (and with all the weird things leaked about them it got a little sketchy trying to understand where their biases lay).
Washington Thinktanks are a good start (though they still tend to 'flourish' things in nationalist language). I prefer their publications to their press events, though the latter is easier to consume.
The press briefings at the State Department are pretty good from a reporting side, but you need to follow for a long time before you see the forest instead of the trees.
A good direct source is the Strategic Studies Institute. They publish primarily academically minded geostrategy reports and assessments, and are mostly centered in the military War Colleges and a couple universities that offer Strategic Studies programs.
Establishments that host pre-PRified documents from strategy organizations are a good source of mostly historic but sometimes current documents. Looking up, for example, the Pentagon Papers or pre-PR version of the Wolfowitz Doctrine are very clear. The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) does a good job documenting some of these documents. Of course Wikileaks and others who have copies of documents (like the Stratfor docs you mentioned) is another.
But let's put that out to Hacker News: what are your sources?
> But let's put that out to Hacker News: what are your sources?
As a German reader, I was surprised about how good "Foreign Policy" is to get a coherent understanding of certain viewpoints in geostrategy. Such publications would be the exception here, because they are not very "journalistic". I think it doesn't necessarily satisfy parents question about "what really is going on", because what's going on is dependent on exactly those viewpoints. That's the nature of political discourse, and I find it more helpful to read about coherent versions rather than a holistic "truth".
I also follow Foreign Policy but despise their editorializing, since it takes the meat out of the reporting and skews it toward PR.
You will get "more important" news on the international front from ForeignPolicy, but it's going to remain in the format of news journalism. They will include cheesy pictures of world leaders “we don’t like” and nice pictures of the ones we do. They occasionally use Buzzfeedlike headlines like “Will Russia drop a nuclear weapon?” and report in a one sided manner on a number of issues (“Russia flew near NATO with a nuclear bomber” but never “US flew near the Caucauses with a nuclear bomber”).
Overall I would rate FP a solid 5 out of 10. But that’s in comparison to venues like CNN that might get a 2 or 3.
I just learned how India's economy seems to be crippled by labour regulations, land acquisition laws, and a crazy localized tax system (one truck ride takes 36 checkpoint stops and takes 10 days to go between New Delhi to Mumbai due to paperwork). Made worse by an impotent polticial system. The fact that India is even growing at 7% a year in that environment is the amazing thing. Imagine their potential if they got their shit together. https://youtu.be/hVwIZzGHxwc
I've heard India's economy works at night while the government sleeps. Indeed...
@CaspianReport: Another gate-keeping operation(see Noam Chomsky for ref). One dimensionality, designed, produced and moderated(either knowingly or unknowingly .. for the "narrator") to keep _you_ - the curios mind - at a safe distance. If you want to get a glimpse of the real world, you will have to take a dive into the mostly paid disinformation so-called alternative media waters. Among the un-educated, intellectually challenged, psychologically uneven freaks, paid "disinformation agents", double-speak conferences(davos, cfr etc) and gate-keeping (not only)academic speakers from across the globe, you'll have to learn how to distill information these shady organizations(across thousands of yt channels and blogs from 100 to several 100k views) have to use to deliver their disinfo. Pick your world axioms(wisely), learn the contexts, follow links to sources, do your own reading - even though presented by a fool, misrepresented or otherwise intellectually mutilated, sources that were given/sent to that fool may still be valid and _very_ eye-opening. Don't be your own censor, there are a lot of large-scale disinformation operations (like "flat earth", "9/11", "homeopathy-*" etc) you may encounter - but keep in mind, they have to use _something_ to sell their disinfo.. Below 2 operations(yes, they are ops I;m sad to say) are worth visiting for start:
Put your self-censorship hat off and watch at least few of these in-full!
In regards to the last one, named after Carroll Quigley's Tragedy and Hope[3] - you can find that book online, jump to site 430+/- for an overview of how it was the UK as the tool behind both WWs (even though there is a lot of self-censorship at best in that book .. and it was written or edited as to be very hard to read)
"The Grand Chessboard" by Zbigniew Brzezinski opened up my eyes to how countries think. It's a bit dry, but offers the kind of perspective that is normally missing from most people's everyday lives.
You might want to look at Cliodynamics: the Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution [1] which attempts to develop scientific theories of history and sociology. Peter Turchin, one of the authors of the study described in TFA, has a brief description of the journal in his blog [2].
>> geostrategy is an important factor in the development of human and international relations and that broadly laymen are completely ignorant of it
Age of Empires taught me that the key to world domination is control of the natural resources plus growing as fast as possible. To win a long game you must control the remote resources as well as those in your immediate area. Try to consume the non-local resources first.
Remote resources are hard to defend but unlikely to be occupied by an enemy early, by conserving resources in a local protected area you have more accessible reserves when the main settlement is under siege later.
> A layman equipped with some of this knowledge, for example, will be much more able to understand current events in the South China Sea, the infrastructure projects across Eurasia, the proxy war in Syria, the importance of the Crimea to Russia, the crisis in America over its policies toward Cuba, and much more.
Wouldn't the "military" only group be able to terrorize the agriculture only as well as the ag plus military ones? Something akin to the Danes at one point? They could just build it up so that they could go pillaging indefinitely, so long as they don't outright destroy their target civs.
I'm not sure the Danes were ever military only, Denmark was also an agricultural society during the viking period. As I understand it, the viking raids were in fact organised around the agricultural calendar, with the two raiding seasons taking place after the harvest and after the sowing. And of course the Vikings were interested in acquiring farming land and often settled and farmed in their places of conquest.
A more apt comparison might be pastoralist raiders as mentioned in Turchin's War and Peace and War, whose nomadic lifestyle led naturally to the development of military skills that could be applied in raids on settled communities. Turchin wrote a lot about the Tatars and the Mongols could also be a good example.
I didn't mean for the imperfect example of the Danes to take it off tangent, it was only to illustrate a people I could think of for whom raiding was integral but your examples or any other is just as well. I think someone (civ) could have taken it further and been sociopathic and only relied on military force for survival. Obviously there are benefits in diversifying, but I think while not ideal, it's possible and could work, in some circumstances.
Until they established city centers, trade routes, spread religious freedom to among their subjects, developed population centers and their agricultural output, standardized exchange rates and quality bars, created systems of news and material delivery, and all that other stuff.
Their empire was, of course, extremely short, as it collapsed with the death of their Great Kahn soon after it established itself and its following leaders abandoned the previous inroads in the West to focus on the prize of capturing China (that ultimately failed).
Our history tends to focus on the expansion of their empire rather than its subsequent administration, I think in part for that reason.
I suppose so, I forgot western civ was one battle loss away from not existing as a continuous entity. So yeah, military only seems to be possible, even if the Mongols were not 100% faithful to this strategy, I think someone could have been successful.
The longer you pillage, the more you raise the interest in being opposed. That's why the Mongol approach was so effective - you had a really short conquest period that happened once, then tribute was paid. The tribute was more than made up for by being on the Mongol trading network.
IMO, all empires are small compared to the Mongols. They had it all.
The Danes just had lousy farmland and good boats, especially during long cold spells. The Northmen in general had more impact as traders than as raiders.
A similar pattern emerges in the Americas - the Apache word for the Comanche is Apache for "those a$$holes" because the Comanche were much more predatory of the Apache than the other way 'round.
Agriculture also comes with structure. Once you get past subsistence farming, you need markets, credit and social order. Once you have those you get specialization. A purely aggressive group eventually loses and vanishes.
Remember the story of the Danes was told by the recipients of their raids, who had an interest from a religious standpoint to portray them as awful pagans.
As production technology improves, producing your own resources becomes cheaper than the military action required to take it from others, which gives producing societies an unbeatable economic advantage.
A tribe of pillagers could destroy a hamlet, but could never compete with the resources of a walled down.
I think rounding that up to "drove the rise of civilizations" is a crude way to put that. For example, the simulation pits "agriculture plus military" against "agriculture". Then they found that including both food security concerns and physical security concerns more closely predicted known outcomes.
Had they put "agriculture plus military" against "military" and found that including both was better than just simulating physical security we would have gotten the title "Computer Simulations Suggest Food Drove the Rise of Civilizations".
I think the takeaway (besides how not to model and report on models) is that geostrategy is an important factor in the development of human and international relations and that broadly laymen are completely ignorant of it.
A layman equipped with some of this knowledge, for example, will be much more able to understand current events in the South China Sea, the infrastructure projects across Eurasia, the proxy war in Syria, the importance of the Crimea to Russia, the crisis in America over its policies toward Cuba, and much more.
Unfortunately the layman instead is fed a steady diet of "good versus evil" narratives, informing him instead about how he should feel about each case to emotionally and financially support his military.