If you pay much attention to Western whore-media these days – and if that is you, then I certainly hope you have a very strong daily dose of antibiotics at hand – then you will quickly realise that most of the useful idiots among the commentariat are at a loss to understand why the might of the collective West seems totally unable to defeat Russia.

After all, they reason, the total size of the Western economies is on the order of US$60 TRILLION – whereas Russia’s economy is, according to them, barely the size of Italy’s. Their combined financial strength should, in theory, be enough to totally overwhelm Russia. Their weapons, which they claim are the best in the world, should be more than sufficient to wipe out the old Soviet-era relics that they think Russia uses in its wars. And their military doctrine, which emphasises the manoeuvre warfare ideas that emerged out of the Wehrmacht in WWII, should surely be enough to defeat the old, outmoded, bureaucratic, rigid, centralised structures and doctrines of the Russian Army.

To their shock, horror, and outrage, not one of these predictions has panned out as they had anticipated.

Why is that?

There are many potential answers to this question. In my view, one rather good answer to it comes from Dr. Fadi Lama, an engineer who retrained himself as an economist, and who has written a solid book analysing the West’s inability to defeat the rising Eurasian superpowers, called Why the West Can’t Win.

It is important to note that Dr. Lama very clearly has a leftist or socialist bent to his thinking, which is why he is highly in favour of the centralised, government-first approaches used by China and the Asian powers. But his basic thesis is difficult to argue against: the West’s financialised, hollowed-out economies are unable to compete with and overcome the much more broadly-based, energy-rich, manufacturing-heavy economies of Russia and China. His core argument is that the world is reverting to the old order, in which Eurasia was the richest part of the world, and functioned as the primary centre of gravity for economic and political activity.

Fundamentally, Dr. Lama contends that the West’s entire approach to understanding economic power, measures the wrong things, and therefore comes to totally wrong conclusions.

In this, I believe he is absolutely right.

Nor is Dr. Lama the only, or even the first, to draw such a conclusion.

In one of his previous books, The (Real) Revolution in Military Affairs, Grandpa Grumpuss, aka Andrei Martyanov, who features so prominently in the weekly Great Mondaydact Browser Killers, wrote about the usefulness of the Composite Index of National Capability (CINC) as a far better indicator of military potential and economic power, than the standard measure of GDP. This index is not straightforward to calculate – it is a function of six different dimensionless ratios, measured as a fraction of an individual country’s strength in a particular area against that of the entire world. But it is actually easier to calculate and simpler to use than GDP is, which is by definition an incredibly misleading statistic.

GDP is what statisticians would call a “non-robust measure” – change any of its core inputs, and the output changes dramatically. Nor is it actually useful for measuring anything sensible. Consider: if a country spends US$1 billion on welfare handouts to illegal invaders, giving them “free” money from the public purse, that counts as government spending, which according to standard neo-Keynesian economic theory has a long-term multiplier effect, and that in turn shifts GDP upward. Indeed, any economics ministry would gladly count that extra spending as an increase in GDP – but nothing of value whatsoever has been created, no trade has occurred, no exchange has taken place. It is merely a transfer of funds from the productive to the useless.

All of these facts indicate the need for a totally new way of thinking about economic power – which is to say, going back to an old way of thinking about such things, because, when it comes to economics, most of what we think is new, is in fact very old indeed. Economics is not mathematics, no matter how much PhDs in the subject with severe mathematical penis-envy might like to think it is. Economics is in fact the study of human behaviour, and the laws of human nature have not changed throughout the history of our species.

(As I have a double-major in both subjects, and a Master’s degree in something related to financial mathematics, I assure you, I understand the mindset of economists very well. It is one of the reasons why I have such contempt for the field – because, unlike most economists, I actually know what HARD MAFFS is like.)

Observing the events of the past few years, it seems to me that the true determinants of economic power have far more to do with truly fundamental things, than the illusion of having a lot of money. To be precise, economic power appears to derive from the following:

• An abundant supply of fresh water;
• Self-sufficiency, or as close to it as possible, in food;
• Cheap and plentiful energy, convertible into electricity;
• Ready access to the sea;
• Secure interior supply lines – that is to say, a lot of land;

Given these factors, we can see quickly precisely why nations like China, Russia, the United States, Australia, Turkey, and others, have developed into world-spanning powers. They meet most, if not all, of these criteria.

However, that is not the whole story. The possession of such things is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for economic and political power. Consider, by way of counterexample, any number of African or Middle Eastern – or, for that matter, Latin American and Southeast Asian – nations. If having those things were all that is needed for being an economic and political superpower, surely we would have observed Nigeria or Sudan dominating the African continent. Instead, we see that the Wakandans continue to starve and kill each other in vast numbers every single year, despite the best efforts of the rest of the world to bring some semblance of civilisation to Darkest Africa.

In a similar vein, if this is all that is required for power, why, then, did Persia emerge as the dominant power of the Middle East, and not Arabia​?

I believe this is where the human factor comes in.

As stated above, it is NOT sufficient simply to have a lot of natural resources. One must also have people who have the ingenuity, discipline, will, and “mental operating system” needed to do something with them.

That means you need a population with a general average IQ of at least 90, which faces substantial pressures upon it to survive, adapt, and expand.

This now rules out, virtually by definition, all of Africa, India, much of Latin America, and virtually the entire Middle East, for fairly obvious reasons. In an environment with an average IQ of 70 or 80 – that is to say, sub-Saharan Africa or India – you CANNOT expect the emergence of an advanced society capable of mastering nuclear power, software engineering, industrial-scale supply chains, and so on and so forth.

Moreover, you need a population with the “mental software” that encourages inquisitiveness and supports a human need to explore the Universe around us. That “middleware layer” needs to give one the understanding that the Universe is not the arbitrary construct of capricious, whimsical, fallible gods – but is rather an ordered and profound structure that obeys clearly defined, if extremely complex, laws.

The presence of laws must therefore, by definition, mean the presence of a lawgiver. A people that understands its task is to obey those laws, while seeking out their giver, is likely to be much more successful in decoding the mysteries of the Universe, than a people that simply assume things are predetermined according to the whims of the Fates, or the Norns, or dharma.

To this, we might – indeed, should – add a measurement of the homogeneity of a population. It is fairly obvious to anyone paying attention that heterogeneous populations tend to have a very difficult time uniting around the concept of a “nation”, to any great degree. The landmark research of Dr. Robert Putnam – he of the famous “Bowling Alone” study – showed very clearly that the more diverse a place is, the less social trust and cohesion there is. (Being a good liberal, he was so horrified by his own results, that he sat on the data for years, and even when he had to release them, he added what amounted to a finger-wagging lecture on the need for educating people on the virtues of diversity – yet his own data controlled for that variable.)

So, the more homogeneous a population is – or, to put it in a more blunt fashion, the less the native population has been diluted by hordes of barbarians allowed to flood in through the gates – the stronger and more capable it is likely to be, because it can unite and rally behind a leader or a ruling elite with a clear vision and strategy.

If we were to look at things in a heuristic way, pseudo-mathematically, we might craft a function that looks something like this:

where:

• Q = total population size
• P = geopolitical power
• W = percentage of the population with ready access to domestically sourced fresh water
• F = percentage of daily calories consumed in the population that is domestic in origin
• E = percentage of energy production from fossil fuels, nuclear, hydroelectric, or thermal sources that is entirely domestic;
• S = number of potential or actual ports available to the country;
• L = total surface area of land;
• H = potential human capital, a multiplier on resource-based heuristics;
• IQ = mean intelligence of the population, using standard IQ scales;
• IN = level of inquisitiveness of the population – very hard to measure;
• B = belief system, the degree to which the population believes the Universe follows orderly principles which can be understood and explored – again, very hard to measure;
• U = uniformity of the racial and ethnic composition of the population, which is to say, the extent to which the population derives from a single ethnos;

This is, I repeat, a heuristic approach. It is imprecise and subject to considerable interpretation. Nor is it even remotely “scientific”, in the sense that it has not been rigorously tested against available data – I doubt it can be tested at all in such a way, since so much of it is dependent on intangible human qualities.

I would also argue that some of those components have greater weight than others. For instance, I personally regard uniformity of the population as a fundamentally more important determinant of national power and capability, than the belief system. The Han Chinese do not take a monotheistic approach to the world, but they ARE unquestionably a single dominant race in their country. By contrast, the Jews of Israel (supposedly) have a monotheistic world view, yet no one can quite agree on what a Jew actually is, including the Jews themselves, who are at this point composed of several different genetic admixtures.

But, the moment that you start plugging in approximate values to this equation… the scales fall away, and you rapidly begin to understand just why Russia and China are actually so powerful. You also begin to understand why the United States used to be a world-dominating hyperpower, and why it is still so immensely powerful today.

Russia is perhaps the only country in the world that is a genuine autarky. It is completely self-sufficient in food, water, and energy. It has enormous reserves of natural resources of virtually every kind, multiple ports scattered across a landmass that is truly mind-boggling in its size and scale. Despite counting over 190 different nationalities across its population, the Russian state consists of something like 87% ethnic Russian Slavs – many of those 189-odd different nationalities amount to a bare handful of tens of thousands of people, whereas the overwhelming majority of Russia’s people are of ONE kind and type.

The average IQ of Russia is somewhere around 100 to 103, depending on how you measure it – which is higher than the average in the US, especially nowadays. And, of course, Russia’s population is majority Orthodox Christian, which means they believe in a God who gives order and structure to the Universe, and encourages His children to seek Him out.

And, of course, Russia has all of that land, which it can use to secure its supply lines. There is a REASON why 404 – Country Not Found’s drone attacks against Russia’s energy and industrial base have been largely useless. The sheer SIZE of the place is one of Russia’s greatest strategic assets.

The major problem Russia has, is that its population is actually quite small. All of Russia barely comes to 150 million people, and by some estimates that will shrink by 2050. This partly explains why Russia’s economy, for all of its tremendous power, is still limited – though it is far more powerful than that of Europe’s.

You can apply the same thing to China and come up with similar answers, and similar analyses of its weaknesses. China has a gigantic population with a monstrously large economy – the largest in the world, when you look at the things that actually matter, and one that dwarfs the US economy in most respects. Its population has a very high average IQ, and it is a country dominated by a single ethnos, the Han Chinese – who are, in my view, the most racist people in the entire world.

However, China also suffers from some serious deficiencies. It is not self-sufficient in food or raw materials. It has issues with getting enough fresh water. And the inquisitiveness of its population is actually pretty low.

Consider that the Chinese fleets under Admiral Zheng He made seven remarkable voyages all over Asia and Africa, with ships that were much, much bigger than those of the explorers who accompanied Columbus on his voyage to the Americas. (Indeed, Columbus didn’t even discover America first, as we now know – that was probably the Vikings under Leif Eriksson.)

For all of their immense advantages in technology and national capability, the Chinese notably lack an interest in going beyond certain boundaries. This is both good and bad – good, because the Chinese are considerably less inclined to wars of conquest and imperial expansion than Westerners are, and bad, because they tend not to care overmuch about how the world works, beyond a certain point. Anyone who has ever studied with students of Chinese origin, knows damned well that they care deeply about getting the best grades – but they do not actually care about real learning to any great degree.

This approach has numerous flaws, no doubt. But, as a mental model, it provides a far more accurate and useful picture of the world than the standard, deeply stupid, ones that we in the West keep using.

Put another way – we always fail to measure things as they are, because we insist on using a yardstick to measure weight, and then we act surprised when our measurements make no sense.

If, instead, we insist on measuring the things that actually matter, and are strictly relevant to economic and therefore geopolitical power, perhaps we might start making a smart decision or two from time to time.