What if it's not the populations getting older, but the borders? If you look at a map, you can see a strange pattern: young borders are violent borders.
Israel is one of a handful of countries partitioned and made independent only after World War 2. Who else is on that list? South Korea, Ukraine, Kosovo, Pakistan, Eritrea, Taiwan -- all countries with a neighbor on the regular edge of war.
Excluding pure no-border-change decolonizations, it seems every single post-1945 state formation has come with at least one "hot" border that regularly flares close to war.
Maybe half of Israel's tensions are simply that neither its citizens or its neighbors have come to take its existence for granted. And maybe that isn't about religion or race or policies, but just the passage of time.
This doesn't excuse Israel or Hamas or the Arab states when they do awful things. But it might mean it's not mysterious why they do those awful things: they still have the embers of a "revolutionary mindset", where the state's rights and extent must continually be asserted in the most idealistic extremes possible. Yet those revolutionary mindsets do decay: everywhere in the world with older borders, war is much rarer. Filter out the world's young borders, and you'd filter out 90% of the interstate war.
If you think Israel is special for having neighbors who regularly threaten to violently wipe it from the map, think about South Korea, or Taiwan. You don't need a special policy or a special religion to have a violent border. To get violence and danger, all you need is to have borders that are young.
Interesting thought. Should definitely be explored. But 1945 was a long time ago, almost 80 years. How recent is recent? Anyway, thanks for thinking out loud.
Those borders used to be much hotter! Think about the Arab-Israeli wars of 1956, 1967 and 1973, or the Korean War in 1950-1953, or the wars between India and Pakistan. All those conflicts today are much less hot.
Conversely, the Ukraine-Russia separation is barely 30 years old, and is, alas, a much hotter border.
So a 30-year-old border is much hotter on average than an 75-year-old border, but even an 75-year-old border is still hotter than the century-plus borders in most of the rest of the world.
It's not an iron law, obviously - China is picking coastal fights with the Philippines, and that's not a post-partition border even if Taiwan is.
But "the younger the independence, the hotter the borders" seems a pretty good rule. And South Korea and Taiwan, not just Israel, show that 75 years isn't quite enough time to reliably cool down border radioactivity.
Yes, I think you are on to something. Definitely an interesting take. And the Ukraine-Russian border - especially Crimea - was disputed even before the final breakup of the USSR. (The USSR's demise was much more slow-motion than people today, including myself, remember). The eastward expansion of NATO and the EU, including EU/NATO negotiations with Ukraine, turned a 'warm' dispute red hot.
Note that NATO (and the EU) expanded eastward because Eastern European countries WANTED to be in NATO and the EU. Why do you think that is? Hint: Look at how Russia has acted.
I'll throw an interesting example into the mix. Post-1989 there was major concern about borders in Eastern Europe, primarily Poland, eastern Germany, Belarus, Lithuania and Ukraine. Lithuania and Ukraine have long had concerns about its historical tendency toward cultural dominance and occasional irredentism. Poland of course was highly concerned about Germany.
Poland worked swiftly and effectively to ensure that Germany would make no claims to eastern lands it had lost after WWII. In securing its western border it also apparently settled its borders with Belarus, Lithuania and Ukraine as they were in let's say 1988. (This comes from The Reconstruction of Nations by the inestimable Timothy Snyder. It's very dense so I hope I'm doing him and these nations justice.) It seems that your theory is supported by the experience noted here offset by the impact of a still-imperialist Russian irredentism. Of course the history of this long-suffering part of Europe undoubtedly plays a very important role.
Alright I'm a conflict geographer and this is an accurate take. However, Ukraine and Russia have the worst birthrates and demographics and they still went to war because this is Russia's last chance to defend itself before it doesn't have an army of young men to fight with. The real question is the conflict brewing in the Sahel and the ensuing refugee Crisis that will overwhelm Europe soon. Happy to do some geospatial modeling with you on this topic!
Hi. I was not very clear at what I meant. Russia invaded Ukraine in a war of aggression. Full Stop. But this is in fulfillment of a medieval geopolitical strategy forged on the plains of Ukraine. Russia has to plug the nine indefensible military passes or gaps on the way to the Russian heartland. Ukraine is on the way to two of them. Crimea and the Iron Gate/the Bessarabian Gap.
If you would read Stratfor, Peter Zeihan, Jacob Shapiro or any of the really good Geopolitical analysts you would understand what I'm getting at.
What do you think the US did when Cuba became communist? What do you think NATO (the US) will do if Ukraine becomes part of NATO? Russia IS defending itself because Ukraine wants to bring NATO to it's doorstep (like Cuba and the US in the 60's).
Russia is not as vulnerable from Finland AND Finland was not part of the USSR. Ukraine was specifically called out after the 1991 dissolution of the USSR to remain as a neutral territory. This was never about Finland or ANY other country that has joined NATO before or after Russia invaded Ukraine.
Russia does not defend itself. It attacked Ukraine in a war of conquest. There was no military threat emanating from Ukraine to Russia in its internationally recognised borders.
I would agree with you but from the Russian perspective according to Tim Marshall, author of Prisoners of Geography and The Power of Geography, Russia has been invaded an average of every 33.3 years by Western Powers, and often such as during WWI and WWII, Ukraine is the soft underbelly.
Russia, despite Ukraine's obviously good intentions cannot rely on Western guarantees that it would never unexpectedly place forces in Ukraine or near St. Petersburg.There's a reason that there is a low trust between both sides -the Russians have offensively established defenses to establish defense in depth over smaller central and eastern European countries so many times that we don't want them anywhere near and they have been invaded so frequently they can't trust but not invade to establish defensible borders which restarts the whole cycle.
Russia has one of the two largest arsenals of nuclear weapons, and the 2010s saw the US slowly pivoting their attention away from Europe to Southeast Asia, while European energy dependency on Russia was stable and even increasing.
I do not doubt that some people in Russia genuinely believed that a military threat would emanate from a Western controlled Ukraine that is not present otherwise, but I do not believe that this concern was in any way 1) realistic and 2) the main driver of the invasion.
More important from my understanding are
1) Economic motives.
2) Domestic policy motives, foreign policy successes and war being a useful distraction and rallying cause.
3) Phantom pain resulting from a dissolved Empire and dwindling global relevance and the fear of falling back even more due to economic stagnation and low birth rates.
4) Fear of a potentially successful, western-oriented Ukraine being destabilizing to the current Russian order for cultural, economic and political (but not military) reasons. Ukraine and Russia share language, family and economic bonds that could transport dangerous ideas across borders. Putin worked in and experienced the fall of the GDR (Eastern Germany), whose legitimacy was constantly undermined by the presence of a culturally very similar, but more economically successful neighbour.
Putin attacked Ukraine based on MRGA (Make Russia Great Again). It is likely he truly believes that Russia should be the Peter/Catherine the Great Empire again. The Soviet Union was effectively that from a territorial standpoint, and that was what he grew up in.
It is likely that he felt that Ukraine was still weak like in 2014 when he took Crimea. But he was probably also concerned that the window of opportunity might close as he saw Ukraine getting closer to the West. The possibility of Ukraine becoming part of EU and/or NATO was something he would not want to allow.
Is there any evidence that the US, Japan, Finland, Sweden, Germany, the UK, Poland, France, Italy, etc, etc, etc, have threatened invasion of Russia since 1941 when madman Hitler went up against equally madman Stalin? The potential aggression has always been from Russia trying to expand its empire and totally disqualified communist form or government, not the west.
The youth bulge in the Sahel is the one we should be watching because it is going to last a long time and cause much of the conflicts in the region
The point I'm trying to make is the Orthodox countries have the worst demographics and are still going to war because of "last gasp" demographics- they know they aren't going to win in the future so they need to win now while they still have enough young men to prosecute a war. See Nagorno Karabakh, Kosovo, Bosnia, Russia, and all other conflicts in the region. The youth bulge is proven- Turchin uses it in his elite overproduction models, but I think we need to work harder on these kinds of conflicts. In the Bosnian War, the average age was 30 now it's 50.
Please do not forget the massive invasion of the prime war demographic single young men from those regions that have invaded Europe, and after being ignored by those being invaded, are now causing serious problems to the point of threatened mass deportations from Sweden, France, the UK, Greece, etc. The demographic may have shifted geographically, but it is not necessarily dying or aging out. The Muslim plan has always been to invade and conquer from the inside out.
Kamil Galeev has a somewhat more detailed take on Russian demography. In short, imperial Russia -- the court cities of Moscow and St. Perrysburg, ethnic Rus in general -- have an ageing population and a desert of domestic resources (including skilled manufacture). However, the continental colonies of the Russian Federation in the far east have a very high birth rate, and the southwest has not only natural resources (the breadbasket of Ukraine) but also industrial production. *That* is why the Tsar has sent ethnic (and impressed males from Donnas) as cannon fodder to secure Ukraine. (It's understood I'm giving just a gloss using his own evocative terminology, of material that he supports w statistics and geodemographic history).
Yes and I meant it in a general way. Ukraine is right, Russia is wrong but went to war can include mobilization, preparing logistics, etc which both sides have done.
“simply having a lot of young men around without much to lose seems like a risk factor in and of itself.”
This is what I thought in a comment to a previous post. Older people have something to lose: family, homes, jobs. If the draft age ceiling was 45 years, people would pile into the streets as protestors. Historically, younger people have been cannon fodder for old men who want power or more power. Demographics as deterrent.
It puts paid to the whole "Great Replacement" narrative that's driven a number of mass murder sprees in the Global North. Sadly it won't stop some people who also believe stuff about 5G cell towers, Jewish space lasers, horse dewormer curing everything, etc.
Immigrants to first world countries pretty much all converge to the native fertility rate in 1-2 generations, though. They also secularize pretty rapidly. The definition of "white" (or at least, who is considered "one of us") also changes to become more expansive. For instance, in the US, a century ago, Jews, Italians and other Southern Europeans certainly weren't regarded as "white" (or WASP, which was what was considered the "in" group back then). Same with plenty of blonde blue-eyed Eastern Europeans (with weird unpronounceable surnames). These days, you don't hear WASPs freaking out about being overrun by Papists even though, as a percentage of the American population, the percentage of WASPs definitely has shrunk over the past century.
Whiteshift is a good book for those of you wondering where you are pulling this from. I think you might like this book – "Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities" by Eric Kaufmann.
Nice sentiment; it's been interestingly mild. I'd wait a bit longer before jumping to conclusions though. I hope to God that this is all the escalation we find, but it's really only been three weeks. And (ignorant) mainstream pop opinion is seamlessly shifting support towards Palestine which can give a scary boost to the surrounding countries...
“youth bulges,” make countries more susceptible to political violence…
I was part of the Baby Boom, that brought the upheaval of the 60s to the United States. The SDA was blowing stuff up. The motto was: “Don't trust anyone over 30."
To what extent was the crime wave and social unrest of the '60s down to the pro-natalist zeitgeist of the immediate post-WWII era, that (together with the US economy booming thanks to the lack of foreign competition) meant that even the worst men got to have kids?
An elegant argument but the logic of steadily aging (a function also of increasing life expectancy and achieving replacement level fertility and lower) equals sedate and peaceful breaks down when applied to a) Israel and Syria and b) countries such as US
And Kathleen, Do you know why every service branch is Falling Short? It's this disease called Obesity, up to 70 percent of applicants fail the Physical. Or don't even make it to the Physical.
Thats not me talking, it's US Commanders , ALL FORCES , Included Coast Guard
It is also the organized effort by the education establishment to dis just about every patriotic and moral rationale to honor and defend one's country, and the panzification and woke policies that turn off potential military candidates. Its not just obesity.
You could be very right , as you can see the absolute contempt and disregard for anything except themselves? Their Ideals. But I will trust the Generals on this one, get 250k recruits , whip them in to shape, in fact , every two years .
Mabey it's past time, to start doing like many European Countries , mandatory service?
This is also demographics. Gen Z is the smallest generation on record. So we're not going to be intervening anytime soon. Proxy wars and hypersonic s are the future for America with maybe an intervention in the Sahel against jihadists to stem refugees.
It is an argument about chances for war, not necessary conditions.
Regarding the US, could it still stomach manpower losses as in Vietnam or Korea nowadays outside of a major attack on the US itself, such as Pearl Harbour?
"When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, its fertility was over 7; now, it’s below 4. (By the way, look at that stat and ask yourself if the U.S. occupation might have accomplished more than you thought.)"
Yes. The U.S. occupation helped modernize Afghanistan in ways that the Taliban are unlikely to completely reverse. Women's education being the most important one.
Ah, got it. I hadn't realized the thesis of the piece was "Women's liberation is awesome".
For some reason I came away thinking the thesis was "Thank goodness the annoying countries will be less annoying going forward, because there won't be as many annoying people in them". I simply can't imagine how I got that impression.
No, it doesn't count as an accomplishment at all. I can't comprehend how someone could even think this, even from the perspective of US foreign policy. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, the country is totally destabilised and after 20 years of invasion way worse off than it was. So how patronising is to even say this?
So after so many casualties, enormous tragedies and a massive US failure to suggest this indicator to be an achievement is ridiculous and deeply saddening.
Also, even though I think it's completely ridiculous to hold a debate on the topic of whether the US invasion helped to decrease fertility rate (like WTF?) I actually think it's wrong to suggest that this "achievement" was thanks to the US military intervention. The sharp decrease in fertility rate started right away after the US invaded Afghanistan so I think it's more a direct result of the war and also the global trend than anything else.
>The sharp decrease in fertility rate started right away after the US invaded Afghanistan so I think it's more a direct result of the war and also the global trend than anything else.
As I said, I think this is a ridiculous debate to hold. If this actually was the result of the removal of the Taliban and subsequent reforms, as you suggest, shouldn't the fertility rate increase rapidly now after the US left Afghanistan and Taliban is back at power?
Also, as is stated in the article, this is an overall trend in the region and just the whole world (with a few exceptions), not just Afghanistan. I think it's just wrong to suggest that this was thanks to the US intervention (causation) and not just correlation since this is a trend that happened to a very similar extent in neighbouring countries where there had been no US occupation, whatsoever.
To sum it up, even if it were true that the US occupation would have lead to this, I think it's a crazy comment, nevertheless. And that was the main point I was trying to make.
First, I cannot agree that it is a ridiculous debate to hold. Given the importance of demographics to all sorts of outcomes -- violence, as Noah mentions, but also environmental and other issues -- we need to understand the causes of changes in fertility rates.
Second, my point was not so much that Noah was right than that you were wrong; there is no reason to think that the decline in fertility rates was a result of the presence of violent conflict, per se. Though note that Noah's argument is consistent with one of the most robust findings of development economics. And, although the decline is similar in most respects than that of other nearby countries, the timing of the decline is not similar. It seems that certain conditions must exist before fertility rates decline, so the question is what caused those conditions to com into being in Afghanistan starting around 2001? Again, it seems clear that it was not the war.
Third, I don't understand why you think "even if it were true that the US occupation would have lead to this, I think it's a crazy comment, nevertheless." Noah was not expressing a judgment that US intervention in Afghanistan was a net positive; he was simply pointing out a potential benefit. As others here have pointed out, there were in fact benefits for women.
Yes, I care about schooling for girls very much. Where did I state the opposite?
I don't consider this to be "an achievement" given the context of things. Things don't happen in a vacuum, things happen in a context. And especially given the current horrifying conditions of Afghan girls/women, it's very frustrating to read these lines.
I also can't comprehend how one can simply state this fact and entirely leave out the cost at which this has been "achieved". That's what I think needs to be addressed and that's what I'm missing.
Thanks Noah for offering a bit optimism. I have always been fearful of the bad impacts to society and growth due to rapid aging and drop in fertility. Hopefully the good balance out the bad a bit.
In addition, I'd like to also point out we have gotten to the point where people would rather fight "wars" with keyboards and computers, using the 'lunatic fringe' as useful idiots and cannon fodder.
Between the aging population and the advance of the internet information age, the combination is definitely ripe for a raising of the threshold for starting a war.
It's a good point. Where are all the protesters taking taking to the street in Muslim nations and provoking their leaders into making bellicose pronouncements which turn up the heat in the Palestinian conflict?
Wars and revolutions are learning opportunities, I guess. The Arab nations probably drew the same conclusion from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars that the West did - i.e. let's try to avoid a repeat of that any time soon. And the Arab Spring was a chastening experience for both parties to the conflict, scaring the life out of Arab political elites (literally in some cases) then dashing the hopes of the Arab 'street'. Maybe there's a connection between the two; an agreement on some level along the lines of, 'we promise not to rise up and threaten your leadership again, as long as you promise not to do reckless and unnecessary things which provoke global superpowers into flattening the place'.
But I think you're right about the demographics. In their 2007 book A Convergence of Civilisations, the demographers Youssef Courbage and Emmanuel Todd argued that though there might be some form of social unrest in the short-term in Arab societies due to the very youthful demographic profile and the shift to near-universal literacy, in the longer term the high literacy rates and sharp declines in fertility across the Muslim world would result in more peaceful, even secular, societies. Here's hoping!
What if it's not the populations getting older, but the borders? If you look at a map, you can see a strange pattern: young borders are violent borders.
Israel is one of a handful of countries partitioned and made independent only after World War 2. Who else is on that list? South Korea, Ukraine, Kosovo, Pakistan, Eritrea, Taiwan -- all countries with a neighbor on the regular edge of war.
Excluding pure no-border-change decolonizations, it seems every single post-1945 state formation has come with at least one "hot" border that regularly flares close to war.
Maybe half of Israel's tensions are simply that neither its citizens or its neighbors have come to take its existence for granted. And maybe that isn't about religion or race or policies, but just the passage of time.
This doesn't excuse Israel or Hamas or the Arab states when they do awful things. But it might mean it's not mysterious why they do those awful things: they still have the embers of a "revolutionary mindset", where the state's rights and extent must continually be asserted in the most idealistic extremes possible. Yet those revolutionary mindsets do decay: everywhere in the world with older borders, war is much rarer. Filter out the world's young borders, and you'd filter out 90% of the interstate war.
If you think Israel is special for having neighbors who regularly threaten to violently wipe it from the map, think about South Korea, or Taiwan. You don't need a special policy or a special religion to have a violent border. To get violence and danger, all you need is to have borders that are young.
Interesting thought. Should definitely be explored. But 1945 was a long time ago, almost 80 years. How recent is recent? Anyway, thanks for thinking out loud.
Those borders used to be much hotter! Think about the Arab-Israeli wars of 1956, 1967 and 1973, or the Korean War in 1950-1953, or the wars between India and Pakistan. All those conflicts today are much less hot.
Conversely, the Ukraine-Russia separation is barely 30 years old, and is, alas, a much hotter border.
So a 30-year-old border is much hotter on average than an 75-year-old border, but even an 75-year-old border is still hotter than the century-plus borders in most of the rest of the world.
It's not an iron law, obviously - China is picking coastal fights with the Philippines, and that's not a post-partition border even if Taiwan is.
But "the younger the independence, the hotter the borders" seems a pretty good rule. And South Korea and Taiwan, not just Israel, show that 75 years isn't quite enough time to reliably cool down border radioactivity.
Yes, I think you are on to something. Definitely an interesting take. And the Ukraine-Russian border - especially Crimea - was disputed even before the final breakup of the USSR. (The USSR's demise was much more slow-motion than people today, including myself, remember). The eastward expansion of NATO and the EU, including EU/NATO negotiations with Ukraine, turned a 'warm' dispute red hot.
Note that NATO (and the EU) expanded eastward because Eastern European countries WANTED to be in NATO and the EU. Why do you think that is? Hint: Look at how Russia has acted.
Welcome aboard!
I wish my beloved USA was as powerful as the tankies imagine. Then there would be no more tankies. Alas..
Israelis would not agree with you that its borders have cooled down since 1948!
I'll throw an interesting example into the mix. Post-1989 there was major concern about borders in Eastern Europe, primarily Poland, eastern Germany, Belarus, Lithuania and Ukraine. Lithuania and Ukraine have long had concerns about its historical tendency toward cultural dominance and occasional irredentism. Poland of course was highly concerned about Germany.
Poland worked swiftly and effectively to ensure that Germany would make no claims to eastern lands it had lost after WWII. In securing its western border it also apparently settled its borders with Belarus, Lithuania and Ukraine as they were in let's say 1988. (This comes from The Reconstruction of Nations by the inestimable Timothy Snyder. It's very dense so I hope I'm doing him and these nations justice.) It seems that your theory is supported by the experience noted here offset by the impact of a still-imperialist Russian irredentism. Of course the history of this long-suffering part of Europe undoubtedly plays a very important role.
Essentially they're getting set in place. You could model that with a GIS system-. Happy to help with that... https://sites.google.com/view/logan-bolan-map-design/contact
Alright I'm a conflict geographer and this is an accurate take. However, Ukraine and Russia have the worst birthrates and demographics and they still went to war because this is Russia's last chance to defend itself before it doesn't have an army of young men to fight with. The real question is the conflict brewing in the Sahel and the ensuing refugee Crisis that will overwhelm Europe soon. Happy to do some geospatial modeling with you on this topic!
Defend itself?? LOLLLLL
Hi. I was not very clear at what I meant. Russia invaded Ukraine in a war of aggression. Full Stop. But this is in fulfillment of a medieval geopolitical strategy forged on the plains of Ukraine. Russia has to plug the nine indefensible military passes or gaps on the way to the Russian heartland. Ukraine is on the way to two of them. Crimea and the Iron Gate/the Bessarabian Gap.
If you would read Stratfor, Peter Zeihan, Jacob Shapiro or any of the really good Geopolitical analysts you would understand what I'm getting at.
Ahh. I see what you mean. Yeah.
What do you think the US did when Cuba became communist? What do you think NATO (the US) will do if Ukraine becomes part of NATO? Russia IS defending itself because Ukraine wants to bring NATO to it's doorstep (like Cuba and the US in the 60's).
Since it caused Finland to join NATO, it clearly hasn't worked, has it?
Russia is not as vulnerable from Finland AND Finland was not part of the USSR. Ukraine was specifically called out after the 1991 dissolution of the USSR to remain as a neutral territory. This was never about Finland or ANY other country that has joined NATO before or after Russia invaded Ukraine.
Russia does not defend itself. It attacked Ukraine in a war of conquest. There was no military threat emanating from Ukraine to Russia in its internationally recognised borders.
I would agree with you but from the Russian perspective according to Tim Marshall, author of Prisoners of Geography and The Power of Geography, Russia has been invaded an average of every 33.3 years by Western Powers, and often such as during WWI and WWII, Ukraine is the soft underbelly.
Russia, despite Ukraine's obviously good intentions cannot rely on Western guarantees that it would never unexpectedly place forces in Ukraine or near St. Petersburg.There's a reason that there is a low trust between both sides -the Russians have offensively established defenses to establish defense in depth over smaller central and eastern European countries so many times that we don't want them anywhere near and they have been invaded so frequently they can't trust but not invade to establish defensible borders which restarts the whole cycle.
Russia has one of the two largest arsenals of nuclear weapons, and the 2010s saw the US slowly pivoting their attention away from Europe to Southeast Asia, while European energy dependency on Russia was stable and even increasing.
I do not doubt that some people in Russia genuinely believed that a military threat would emanate from a Western controlled Ukraine that is not present otherwise, but I do not believe that this concern was in any way 1) realistic and 2) the main driver of the invasion.
More important from my understanding are
1) Economic motives.
2) Domestic policy motives, foreign policy successes and war being a useful distraction and rallying cause.
3) Phantom pain resulting from a dissolved Empire and dwindling global relevance and the fear of falling back even more due to economic stagnation and low birth rates.
4) Fear of a potentially successful, western-oriented Ukraine being destabilizing to the current Russian order for cultural, economic and political (but not military) reasons. Ukraine and Russia share language, family and economic bonds that could transport dangerous ideas across borders. Putin worked in and experienced the fall of the GDR (Eastern Germany), whose legitimacy was constantly undermined by the presence of a culturally very similar, but more economically successful neighbour.
All good points- the GDR example is very valuable Again Peter Zeihan predicted the invasion to the month based on demographics.
Interesting, in which book did he do this? Was his argument solely based on demographics?
Putin attacked Ukraine based on MRGA (Make Russia Great Again). It is likely he truly believes that Russia should be the Peter/Catherine the Great Empire again. The Soviet Union was effectively that from a territorial standpoint, and that was what he grew up in.
It is likely that he felt that Ukraine was still weak like in 2014 when he took Crimea. But he was probably also concerned that the window of opportunity might close as he saw Ukraine getting closer to the West. The possibility of Ukraine becoming part of EU and/or NATO was something he would not want to allow.
Is there any evidence that the US, Japan, Finland, Sweden, Germany, the UK, Poland, France, Italy, etc, etc, etc, have threatened invasion of Russia since 1941 when madman Hitler went up against equally madman Stalin? The potential aggression has always been from Russia trying to expand its empire and totally disqualified communist form or government, not the west.
The youth bulge in the Sahel is the one we should be watching because it is going to last a long time and cause much of the conflicts in the region
The point I'm trying to make is the Orthodox countries have the worst demographics and are still going to war because of "last gasp" demographics- they know they aren't going to win in the future so they need to win now while they still have enough young men to prosecute a war. See Nagorno Karabakh, Kosovo, Bosnia, Russia, and all other conflicts in the region. The youth bulge is proven- Turchin uses it in his elite overproduction models, but I think we need to work harder on these kinds of conflicts. In the Bosnian War, the average age was 30 now it's 50.
https://sites.google.com/view/logan-bolan-map-design/home
Here's my GIS Portfolio! https://sites.google.com/view/logan-bolan-map-design/home
Please do not forget the massive invasion of the prime war demographic single young men from those regions that have invaded Europe, and after being ignored by those being invaded, are now causing serious problems to the point of threatened mass deportations from Sweden, France, the UK, Greece, etc. The demographic may have shifted geographically, but it is not necessarily dying or aging out. The Muslim plan has always been to invade and conquer from the inside out.
Kamil Galeev has a somewhat more detailed take on Russian demography. In short, imperial Russia -- the court cities of Moscow and St. Perrysburg, ethnic Rus in general -- have an ageing population and a desert of domestic resources (including skilled manufacture). However, the continental colonies of the Russian Federation in the far east have a very high birth rate, and the southwest has not only natural resources (the breadbasket of Ukraine) but also industrial production. *That* is why the Tsar has sent ethnic (and impressed males from Donnas) as cannon fodder to secure Ukraine. (It's understood I'm giving just a gloss using his own evocative terminology, of material that he supports w statistics and geodemographic history).
I can't help but imagine that for the Sahel the concept of rigid borders is foreign, Western and inhospitable to nomadic herding.
Yes and I meant it in a general way. Ukraine is right, Russia is wrong but went to war can include mobilization, preparing logistics, etc which both sides have done.
Noah I escaped twitter and went to threads . It would be great to see you there I think you’d find a reasonably quick audience . Best.
Why did you "escape" Twitter?
“simply having a lot of young men around without much to lose seems like a risk factor in and of itself.”
This is what I thought in a comment to a previous post. Older people have something to lose: family, homes, jobs. If the draft age ceiling was 45 years, people would pile into the streets as protestors. Historically, younger people have been cannon fodder for old men who want power or more power. Demographics as deterrent.
Thanks Noah. Could have included to the analysis:
- (i) the place of women (and their education) which is progressing (more women than men at university in Iran!); but also
- (II) religious belief and practice, which I believe are in sharp decline in many of these countries even if it is not apparent.
It puts paid to the whole "Great Replacement" narrative that's driven a number of mass murder sprees in the Global North. Sadly it won't stop some people who also believe stuff about 5G cell towers, Jewish space lasers, horse dewormer curing everything, etc.
If native-born white folks have a replacement rate of .9, and immigrants have a replacement rate of 2.5, that still could look threatening.
Immigrants to first world countries pretty much all converge to the native fertility rate in 1-2 generations, though. They also secularize pretty rapidly. The definition of "white" (or at least, who is considered "one of us") also changes to become more expansive. For instance, in the US, a century ago, Jews, Italians and other Southern Europeans certainly weren't regarded as "white" (or WASP, which was what was considered the "in" group back then). Same with plenty of blonde blue-eyed Eastern Europeans (with weird unpronounceable surnames). These days, you don't hear WASPs freaking out about being overrun by Papists even though, as a percentage of the American population, the percentage of WASPs definitely has shrunk over the past century.
Whiteshift is a good book for those of you wondering where you are pulling this from. I think you might like this book – "Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities" by Eric Kaufmann.
Start reading it for free: https://a.co/83cXrs0
::notsureifserious.gif::
This is my observation too. Thanks for this article.
Nice sentiment; it's been interestingly mild. I'd wait a bit longer before jumping to conclusions though. I hope to God that this is all the escalation we find, but it's really only been three weeks. And (ignorant) mainstream pop opinion is seamlessly shifting support towards Palestine which can give a scary boost to the surrounding countries...
Go back and read Tom Clancey's Red Storm Rising to see how long it can take for wars to develop. It is way too early to tell at this point.
I'm not pro a lot of Israeli policies and actions.
And I don't really mean to get involved in that right now.
Point is it could be noah is right but it could also be that he's talking too early...
If you're right, all the more so
“youth bulges,” make countries more susceptible to political violence…
I was part of the Baby Boom, that brought the upheaval of the 60s to the United States. The SDA was blowing stuff up. The motto was: “Don't trust anyone over 30."
To what extent was the crime wave and social unrest of the '60s down to the pro-natalist zeitgeist of the immediate post-WWII era, that (together with the US economy booming thanks to the lack of foreign competition) meant that even the worst men got to have kids?
In my experience, the worst men always manage to have kids, but they're not around to raise them.
Thanks very much for a really interesting article.
An elegant argument but the logic of steadily aging (a function also of increasing life expectancy and achieving replacement level fertility and lower) equals sedate and peaceful breaks down when applied to a) Israel and Syria and b) countries such as US
The US fights more with technology than grunts. Also, every service branch is falling way short of its recruiting goals.
And Kathleen, Do you know why every service branch is Falling Short? It's this disease called Obesity, up to 70 percent of applicants fail the Physical. Or don't even make it to the Physical.
Thats not me talking, it's US Commanders , ALL FORCES , Included Coast Guard
It is also the organized effort by the education establishment to dis just about every patriotic and moral rationale to honor and defend one's country, and the panzification and woke policies that turn off potential military candidates. Its not just obesity.
You could be very right , as you can see the absolute contempt and disregard for anything except themselves? Their Ideals. But I will trust the Generals on this one, get 250k recruits , whip them in to shape, in fact , every two years .
Mabey it's past time, to start doing like many European Countries , mandatory service?
Wow.
Yes Glenn, as one General called At.
It's. A National Security Issue
This is also demographics. Gen Z is the smallest generation on record. So we're not going to be intervening anytime soon. Proxy wars and hypersonic s are the future for America with maybe an intervention in the Sahel against jihadists to stem refugees.
It is an argument about chances for war, not necessary conditions.
Regarding the US, could it still stomach manpower losses as in Vietnam or Korea nowadays outside of a major attack on the US itself, such as Pearl Harbour?
Has Haiti gotten older?? I know they had a really low Covid death rate because their median age is 22.
"When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, its fertility was over 7; now, it’s below 4. (By the way, look at that stat and ask yourself if the U.S. occupation might have accomplished more than you thought.)"
No. Just no
Yes. The U.S. occupation helped modernize Afghanistan in ways that the Taliban are unlikely to completely reverse. Women's education being the most important one.
This is exactly what happened in Vietnam
That is correct, Noah. Falling TFRs are good because they reflect Afghan women having more autonomy, not because they reduce the number of Afghans.
Afghan women having more autonomy is great. And if the fertility transition makes Afghanistan more peaceful, that is also great.
I don't see the problem.
Yes. Just yes
Ah, got it. I hadn't realized the thesis of the piece was "Women's liberation is awesome".
For some reason I came away thinking the thesis was "Thank goodness the annoying countries will be less annoying going forward, because there won't be as many annoying people in them". I simply can't imagine how I got that impression.
Birth rates AFAIK depend a lot on women's average education. This is probably what Noah was referring to.
I just can't believe this part. What a crazy thing to say.
If I retweeted this my followers would shut down his account. I'm not going to do that, but JFC
Buddy I've tweeted it myself, multiple times.
https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1427557828789604355
Retweet it and see if your followers can "shut down my account". Let me taste your awesome power!
Challenge accepted! Your account will survive but there will be some fairly rude reactions. You were warned.
I should make this a poll 😍
No, it doesn't count as an accomplishment at all. I can't comprehend how someone could even think this, even from the perspective of US foreign policy. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, the country is totally destabilised and after 20 years of invasion way worse off than it was. So how patronising is to even say this?
So after so many casualties, enormous tragedies and a massive US failure to suggest this indicator to be an achievement is ridiculous and deeply saddening.
Also, even though I think it's completely ridiculous to hold a debate on the topic of whether the US invasion helped to decrease fertility rate (like WTF?) I actually think it's wrong to suggest that this "achievement" was thanks to the US military intervention. The sharp decrease in fertility rate started right away after the US invaded Afghanistan so I think it's more a direct result of the war and also the global trend than anything else.
>The sharp decrease in fertility rate started right away after the US invaded Afghanistan so I think it's more a direct result of the war and also the global trend than anything else.
Surely it is more likely to be the result of the removal of the Taliban and subsequent reforms. The fertility rate didn't drop during the Soviet occupation, after all, which was far more destructive. (https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/AFG/afghanistan/fertility-rate). And, a war that kills an average of 12,000 people per year (https://www.voanews.com/a/south-central-asia_afghan-war-has-claimed-241000-lives-report-finds/6204666.html) in a country the size of Afghanistan does not seem to be intense enough to cause that sort of massive change. Moreover, the war was not particularly intense until the Taliban recuperate and began increasing operations several years into the conflict, as evidenced by both Coalition casualties (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_casualties_in_Afghanistan) and civilian casualties (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_war_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80%932021)) Heck, this study (https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/76366/) found that fertility was actually higher in areas of Afghanistan most affected by violence.
As I said, I think this is a ridiculous debate to hold. If this actually was the result of the removal of the Taliban and subsequent reforms, as you suggest, shouldn't the fertility rate increase rapidly now after the US left Afghanistan and Taliban is back at power?
Also, as is stated in the article, this is an overall trend in the region and just the whole world (with a few exceptions), not just Afghanistan. I think it's just wrong to suggest that this was thanks to the US intervention (causation) and not just correlation since this is a trend that happened to a very similar extent in neighbouring countries where there had been no US occupation, whatsoever.
To sum it up, even if it were true that the US occupation would have lead to this, I think it's a crazy comment, nevertheless. And that was the main point I was trying to make.
A couple of things:
First, I cannot agree that it is a ridiculous debate to hold. Given the importance of demographics to all sorts of outcomes -- violence, as Noah mentions, but also environmental and other issues -- we need to understand the causes of changes in fertility rates.
Second, my point was not so much that Noah was right than that you were wrong; there is no reason to think that the decline in fertility rates was a result of the presence of violent conflict, per se. Though note that Noah's argument is consistent with one of the most robust findings of development economics. And, although the decline is similar in most respects than that of other nearby countries, the timing of the decline is not similar. It seems that certain conditions must exist before fertility rates decline, so the question is what caused those conditions to com into being in Afghanistan starting around 2001? Again, it seems clear that it was not the war.
Third, I don't understand why you think "even if it were true that the US occupation would have lead to this, I think it's a crazy comment, nevertheless." Noah was not expressing a judgment that US intervention in Afghanistan was a net positive; he was simply pointing out a potential benefit. As others here have pointed out, there were in fact benefits for women.
Yes, I care about schooling for girls very much. Where did I state the opposite?
I don't consider this to be "an achievement" given the context of things. Things don't happen in a vacuum, things happen in a context. And especially given the current horrifying conditions of Afghan girls/women, it's very frustrating to read these lines.
I also can't comprehend how one can simply state this fact and entirely leave out the cost at which this has been "achieved". That's what I think needs to be addressed and that's what I'm missing.
Thanks Noah for offering a bit optimism. I have always been fearful of the bad impacts to society and growth due to rapid aging and drop in fertility. Hopefully the good balance out the bad a bit.
Interesting to see this dynamic. On the flip side, the Economist argues youthful population drives innovation: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2023/05/30/its-not-just-a-fiscal-fiasco-greying-economies-also-innovate-less
There are no solutions in life, only tradeoffs.
And america has the best demography of the developed nations...
Interesting hypothesis.
In addition, I'd like to also point out we have gotten to the point where people would rather fight "wars" with keyboards and computers, using the 'lunatic fringe' as useful idiots and cannon fodder.
Between the aging population and the advance of the internet information age, the combination is definitely ripe for a raising of the threshold for starting a war.
It's a good point. Where are all the protesters taking taking to the street in Muslim nations and provoking their leaders into making bellicose pronouncements which turn up the heat in the Palestinian conflict?
Wars and revolutions are learning opportunities, I guess. The Arab nations probably drew the same conclusion from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars that the West did - i.e. let's try to avoid a repeat of that any time soon. And the Arab Spring was a chastening experience for both parties to the conflict, scaring the life out of Arab political elites (literally in some cases) then dashing the hopes of the Arab 'street'. Maybe there's a connection between the two; an agreement on some level along the lines of, 'we promise not to rise up and threaten your leadership again, as long as you promise not to do reckless and unnecessary things which provoke global superpowers into flattening the place'.
But I think you're right about the demographics. In their 2007 book A Convergence of Civilisations, the demographers Youssef Courbage and Emmanuel Todd argued that though there might be some form of social unrest in the short-term in Arab societies due to the very youthful demographic profile and the shift to near-universal literacy, in the longer term the high literacy rates and sharp declines in fertility across the Muslim world would result in more peaceful, even secular, societies. Here's hoping!